The Forsyte Saga(348)

After dinner she set the electric piano-player going. And he augured the worst when she sat down on a cushion footstool at his knee, and put her hand on his.

‘Darling, be nice to me. I had to see Jon – he wrote to me. He’s going to try what he can do with his mother. But I’ve been thinking. It’s really in your hands, Father. If you’d persuade her that it doesn’t mean renewing the past in any way! That I shall stay yours, and Jon will stay hers; that you need never see him or her, and she need never see you or me! Only you could persuade her, dear, because only you could promise. One can’t promise for other people. Surely it wouldn’t be too awkward for you to see her just this once – now that Jon’s father is dead?’

‘Too awkward?’ Soames repeated. ‘The whole thing’s preposterous.’

‘You know,’ said Fleur, without looking up, ‘you wouldn’t mind seeing her, really.’

Soames was silent. Her words had expressed a truth too deep for him to admit. She slipped her fingers between his own – hot, slim, eager, they clung there. This child of his would corkscrew her way into a brick wall!

‘What am I to do if you won’t, Father?’ she said very softly.

‘I’ll do anything for your happiness,’ said Soames; ‘but this isn’t for your happiness.’

‘Oh! it is; it is!’

‘It’ll only stir things up,’ he said grimly.

‘But they are stirred up. The thing is to quiet them. To make her feel that this is just our lives, and has nothing to do with yours or hers. You can do it, Father, I know you can.’

‘You know a great deal, then,’ was Soames’s glum answer.

‘If you will, Jon and I will wait a year – two years if you like.’

‘It seems to me,’ murmured Soames, ‘that you care nothing about what I feel.’

Fleur pressed his hand against her cheek.

‘I do, darling. But you wouldn’t like me to be awfully miserable.’ How she wheedled to get her ends! And trying with all his might to think she really cared for him – he was not sure – not sure. All she cared for was this boy! Why should he help her get this boy, who was killing her affection for himself? Why should he? By the laws of the Forsytes it was foolish! There was nothing to be had out of it – nothing! To give her to that boy! To pass her into the enemy’s camp, under the influence of the woman who had injured him so deeply! Slowly – inevitably – he would lose this flower of his life. And suddenly he was conscious that his hand was wet. His heart gave a little painful jump. He couldn’t bear her to cry. He put his other hand quickly over hers, and a tear dropped on that, too. He couldn’t go on like this! ‘Well, well,’ he said, ‘I’ll think it over, and do what I can. Come, come!’ If she must have it for her happiness – she must; he couldn’t refuse to help her. And lest she should begin to thank him he got out of his chair and went up to the piano-player – making that noise. It ran down, as he reached it, with a faint buzz. That musical box of his nursery days: ‘The Harmonious Blacksmith’, ‘Glorious Port’ – the thing had always made him miserable when his mother set it going on Sunday afternoons. Here it was again – the same thing, only larger, more expensive, and now it played ‘The Wild, Wild Women’, and ‘The Policeman’s Holiday’, and he was no longer in black velvet with a sky blue collar. ‘Profond’s right,’ he thought, ‘there’s nothing in it! We’re all progressing to the grave!’ And with that surprising mental comment he walked out.

He did not see Fleur again that night. But, at breakfast, her eyes followed him about with an appeal he could not escape – not that he intended to try. No! He had made up his mind to the nerve-racking business. He would go to Robin Hill – to that house of memories. Pleasant memory – the last! Of going down to keep that boy’s father and Irene apart by threatening divorce. He had often thought since, that it had clinched their union  . And, now, he was going to clinch the union   of that boy with his girl. ‘I don’t know what I’ve done,’ he thought, ‘to have such things thrust on me!’ He went up by train and down by train, and from the station walked by the long rising lane, still very much as he remembered it over thirty years ago. Funny – so near London! Someone evidently was holding on to the land there. This speculation soothed him, moving between the high hedges slowly, so as not to get overheated, though the day was chill enough. After all was said and done there was something real about land, it didn’t shift. Land, and good pictures! The values might fluctuate a bit, but on the whole they were always going up – worth holding on to, in a world where there was such a lot of unreality, cheap building, changing fashions, such a ‘Here today and gone tomorrow’ spirit. The French were right, perhaps, with their peasant proprietorship, though he had no opinion of the French. One’s bit of land! Something solid in it! He had heard peasant proprietors described as a pig-headed lot; had heard young Mont call his father a pig-headed Morning Poster – disrespectful young devil. Well, there were worse things than being pig-headed or reading the Morning Post. There was Profond and his tribe, and all these Labour chaps, and loudmouthed politicians, and ‘wild, wild women’! A lot of worse things! And, suddenly, Soames became conscious of feeling weak, and hot, and shaky. Sheer nerves at the meeting before him! As Aunt Juley might have said – quoting ‘Superior Dos-set’ – his nerves were ‘in a proper fantigue’. He could see the house now among its trees, the house he had watched being built, intending it for himself and this woman, who, by such strange fate, had lived in it with another after all! He began to think of Dumetrius, Local Loans, and other forms of investment. He could not afford to meet her with his nerves all shaking; he who represented the Day of Judgement for her on earth as it was in heaven; he, legal ownership, personified, meeting lawless beauty, incarnate. His dignity demanded impassivity during this embassy designed to link their offspring, who, if she had behaved herself, would have been brother and sister. That wretched tune, ‘The Wild, Wild Women’, kept running in his head, perversely, for tunes did not run as a rule. Passing the poplars in front of the house, he thought: ‘How they’ve grown; I had them planted!’