The Forsyte Saga(333)

Annette put down the cake she was fingering, and, looking up through darkened lashes, said:

‘Shall I give Maman any message?’

‘My regards.’

Annette stretched herself, her hands on her waist, and said in French:

‘What luck that you have never loved me, Soames!’ Then rising, she too left the room. Soames was glad she had spoken it in French – it seemed to require no dealing with. Again that other face – pale, dark-eyed, beautiful still! And there stirred far down within him the ghost of warmth, as from sparks lingering beneath a mound of flaky ash. And Fleur infatuated with her boy! Queer chance! Yet, was there such a thing as chance? A man went down a street, a brick fell on his head. Ah! that was chance, no doubt. But this! ‘Inherited,’ his girl had said. She – she was ‘holding on’!





PART THREE





Chapter One



OLD JOLYON WALKS





TWOFOLD impulse had made Jolyon say to his wife at breakfast: ‘Let’s go up to Lord’s!’

‘Wanted’ – something to abate the anxiety in which those two had lived during the sixty hours since Jon had brought Fleur down. ‘Wanted’ – too, that which might assuage the pangs of memory in one who knew he might lose them any day!

Fifty-eight years ago Jolyon had become an Eton boy, for old Jolyon’s whim had been that he should be canonized at the greatest possible expense. Year after year he had gone to Lord’s from Stanhope Gate with a father whose youth in the eighteen-twenties had been passed without polish in the game of cricket. Old Jolyon would speak quite openly of swipes, full tosses, half and three-quarter balls; and young Jolyon with the guileless snobbery of youth had trembled lest his sire should be overheard. Only in this supreme matter of cricket he had been nervous, for his father – in Crimean whiskers then – had ever impressed him as the beau idéal. Though never canonized himself, old Jolyon’s natural fastidiousness and balance had saved him from the errors of the vulgar. How delicious, after howling in a top hat and a sweltering heat, to go home with his father in a hansom cab, bathe, dress, and forth to the ‘Disunion  ’ Club, to dine off whitebait, cutlets, and a tart, and go – two ‘swells’, old and young, in lavender kid gloves – to the opera or play. And on Sunday, when the match was over, and his top hat duly broken, down with his father in a special hansom to the ‘Crown and Sceptre’, and the terrace above the river – the golden sixties when the world was simple, dandies glamorous, Democracy not born, and the books of Whyte Melville coming thick and fast.

A generation later, with his own boy, Jolly, Harrow-button-holed with cornflowers – by old Jolyon’s whim his grandson had been canonized at a trifle less expense – again Jolyon had experienced the heat and counter-passions of the day, and come back to the cool and the strawberry beds of Robin Hill, and billiards after dinner, his boy making the most heart-breaking flukes and trying to seem languid and grown-up. Those two days each year he and his son had been alone together in the world, one on each side – and Democracy just born!

And so, he had unearthed a grey top hat, borrowed a tiny bit of light-blue ribbon from Irene, and gingerly, keeping cool, by car and train and taxi had reached Lord’s Ground. There, beside her in a lawn-coloured frock with narrow black edges, he had watched the game, and felt the old thrill stir within him.

When Soames passed, the day was spoiled. Irene’s face was distorted by compression of the lips. No good to go on sitting here with Soames or perhaps his daughter recurring in front of them, like decimals. And he said:

‘Well, dear, if you’ve had enough – let’s go!’

That evening Jolyon felt exhausted. Not wanting her to see him thus, he waited till she had begun to play, and stole off to the little study. He opened the long window for air, and the door, that he might still hear her music drifting in; and, settled in his father’s old armchair, closed his eyes, with his head against the worn brown leather. Like that passage of the César Franck sonata – so had been his life with her, a divine third movement. And now this business of Jon’s – this bad business!. Drifted to the edge of consciousness, he hardly knew if it were in sleep that he smelled the scent of a cigar, and seemed to see his father in the blackness before his closed eyes. That shape formed, went, and formed again; as if in the very chair where he himself was sitting, he saw his father, black-coated, with knees crossed, glasses balanced betwen thumb and finger; saw the big white moustaches, and the deep eyes looking up below a dome of forehead and seeming to search his own, seeming to speak. ‘Are you facing it, Jo? It’s for you to decide. She’s only a woman!’ Ah! how well he knew his father in that phrase; how all the Victorian Age came up with it! And his answer ‘No, I’ve funked it – funked hurting her and Jon and myself. I’ve got a heart; I’ve funked it.’ But the old eyes, so much older, so much younger than his own, kept at it: ‘It’s your wife, your son; your past. Tackle it, my boy!’ Was it a message from a walking spirit; or but the instinct of his sire living on within him? And again came that scent of cigar smoke – from the old saturated leather. Well! he would tackle it, write to Jon, and put the whole thing down in black and white! And suddenly he breathed with difficulty, with a sense of suffocation, as if his heart were swollen. He got up and went out into the air. The stars were very bright. He passed along the terrace round the corner of the house, till, through the window of the music-room, he could see Irene at the piano, with lamp-light falling on her powdery hair; withdrawn into herself she seemed, her dark eyes staring straight before her, her hands idle. Jolyon saw her raise those hands and clasp them over her breast. ‘It’s Jon, with her,’ he thought; ‘all Jon! I’m dying out of her – it’s natural!’