The Forsyte Saga Volume 2(237)
‘The weather looks settled,’ he said. ‘You want some sun after that canteen. They talk about these ultra-violet rays. Plain sunshine used to be good enough. The doctors’ll be finding something extra-pink before long. If they’d only let things alone!’
‘Darling, it amuses them.’
‘Re-discovering what our grandmothers knew so well that we’ve forgotten ’em, and calling ’em by fresh names! A thing isn’t any more wholesome to eat for instance, because they’ve invented the word “vitamin”. Why, your grandfather ate an orange every day of his life, because his old doctor told him to, at the beginning of the last century. Vitamins! Don’t you let Kit get faddy about his food. It’s a long time before he’ll go to school – that’s one comfort. School feeding!’
‘Did they feed you so badly, Dad?’
‘Badly! How we grew up, I don’t know. We ate our principal meal in twenty minutes, and were playing football ten minutes after. But nobody thought about digestion, then.’
‘Isn’t that an argument for thinking of it now?’
‘A good digestion,’ said Soames, ‘is the whole secret of life.’ And he looked at his daughter. Thank God! She wasn’t peaky. So far as he knew, her digestion was excellent. She might fancy herself in love, or out of it; but so long as she was unconscious of her digestion, she would come through. ‘The thing is to walk as much as you can, in these days of cars,’ he added.
‘Yes,’ said Fleur, ‘I had a nice walk this morning.’
Was she challenging him over her apple charlotte? If so, he wasn’t going to rise.
‘So did I,’ he said. ‘I went all about. We’ll have some golf down there.’
She looked at him for a second, then said a surprising thing:
‘Yes, I believe I’m getting middle-aged enough for golf.’
Now what did she mean by that?
Chapter Twelve
PRIVATE FEELINGS
ON the day of the lunch party and the drive to Robin Hill, Michael really had a Committee, but he also had his private feelings and wanted to get on terms with them. There are natures in which discovery of what threatens happiness perverts to prejudice all judgement of the disturbing object. Michael’s was not such. He had taken a fancy to the young Englishman met at the home of that old American George Washington, partly, indeed, because he was English; and, seeing him now seated next to Fleur, second cousin and first love – he was unable to revise the verdict. The boy had a nice face, and was better-looking than himself; he had attractive hair, a strong chin, straight eyes, and a modest bearing; there was no sense in blinking facts like those. The Free Trade in love, which obtained amongst pleasant people, forbade Michael to apply the cruder principles of Protection even in thoughts. Fortunately, the boy was married to this slim and attractive girl, who looked at one – as Mrs Val had put it to him – like a guaranteed-pure water-nymph! Michael’s private feelings were therefore more concerned with Fleur than with the young man himself. But hers was a difficult face to read, a twisting brain to follow, a heart hard to get at; and – was Jon Forsyte the reason why? He remembered how in Cork Street this boy’s elderly half-sister – that fly-away little lady, June Forsyte – had blurted out to him that Fleur ought to have married her young brother – first he had ever heard of it. How painfully it had affected him with its intimation that he played but second fiddle in the life of his beloved! He remembered, too, some cautious and cautionary allusions by ‘old Forsyte’. Coming from that model of secrecy and suppressed feelings, they, too, had made on Michael a deep and lasting impression reinforced by his own failure to get at the bottom of Fleur’s heart. He went to his Committee with but half his mind on public matters. What had nipped that early love affair in the bud and given him his chance? Not sudden dislike, lack of health, or lack of money – not relationship, for Mrs Val Dartie had married her second cousin apparently with everyone’s consent. Michael, it will be seen, had remained quite ignorant of the skeleton in Soames’s cupboard. Such Forsytes as he had met, reticent about family affairs, had never mentioned it; and Fleur had never spoken of her first love, much less of the reason why it had come to naught Yet, there must have been some reason; and it was idle to try and understand her present feelings without knowing what it was!
His Committee was on birth control in connexion with the Ministry of Health; and, while listening to arguments why he should not support for other people what he practised himself, he was visited by an idea. Why not go and ask June Forsyte? He could find her in the telephone book – there could be but one with such a name.