‘Fleur!’
‘Jon! Where are you going?’
‘To Wansdon.’
‘Oh! And I’m going to Nettlefold, to see a cottage at Loving for my baby. Here’s my bag, in here – quick! We’re off!’
The door was banged to, and she held out both her hands.
‘Isn’t this queer, and jolly?’
Jon held the hands, and dropped them rather suddenly.
‘I’ve just been to see June. She’s just the same – bless her!’
‘Yes, she came round to me the other day; wants me to be painted by her present pet.’
‘You might do worse. I said he should paint Anne.’
‘Really? Is he good enough for her?’
And she was sorry; she hadn’t meant to begin like that ! Still – must begin somehow – must employ lips which might otherwise go lighting on his eyes, his hair, his lips! And she rushed into words: Kit’s measles, Michael’s committee, Violin Obbligato, and the Proustian School; Val’s horses, Jon’s poetry, the smell of England – so important to a poet – anything, everything, in a sort of madcap medley.
‘You see, Jon, I must talk; I’ve been in prison for a month.’ And all the time she felt that she was wasting minutes that might have been spent with lips silent and heart against his, if the heart, as they said, really extended to the centre of the body. And all the time, too, the proboscis of her spirit was scenting, searching for the honey and the saffron of his spirit. Was there any for her, or was it all kept for that wretched American girl he had left behind him, and to whom – alas! – he was returning? But Jon gave her no sign. Unlike the old impulsive Jon, he had learned secrecy. By a whim of memory, whose ways are so inscrutable, she remembered being taken, as a very little girl, to Timothy’s on the Bayswater Road to her great-aunt Hester – an old still figure, in black Victorian lace and jet and a Victorian chair, saying in a stilly languid voice to her father: ‘Oh, yes, my dear: your Uncle Jolyon, before he married, was very much in love with our great friend Alice Read; but she was consumptive, you know, and of course he felt he couldn’t marry her – it wouldn’t have been prudent, he felt, because of children. And then she died, and he married Edith Moor.’ Funny how that had stuck in her ten-year-old mind! And she stared at Jon. Old Jolyon – as they called him in the family – had been his grandfather. She had seen his photograph in Holly’s album – a domed head, a white moustache, eyes deep-set under the brows, like Jon’s. ‘It wouldn’t have been prudent!’ How Victorian! Was Jon, too, Victorian? She felt as if she would never know what Jon was. And she became suddenly cautious. A single step too far, or too soon, and he might be gone from her again for good! He was not – no, he was not modern! For all she knew, there might be something absolute, not relative, in his ‘makeup’, and to Fleur the absolute was strange, almost terrifying. But she had not spent six years in social servitude without learning to adjust herself swiftly to the playing of a new part. She spoke in a calmer tone, almost a drawl; her eyes became cool and quizzical. What did Jon think about the education of boys – before he knew where he was, of course, he would be having one himself? It hurt her to say that, and, while saying it, she searched his face; but it told her nothing.
‘We’ve put Kit down for Winchester. Do you believe in the Public Schools, Jon? Or do you think they’re out of date?’
‘Yes; and a good thing, too.’
‘How?’
‘I mean I should send him there.’
‘I see,’ said Fleur. ‘Do you know, Jon, you really have changed. You wouldn’t have said that, I believe, six years ago.’
‘Perhaps not. Being out of England makes you believe in dams. Ideas can’t be left to swop around in the blue. In England they’re not, and that’s the beauty of it.’
‘I don’t care what happens to ideas,’ said Fleur, ‘but I don’t like stupidity. The Public Schools –’
‘Oh, no; not really. Certain things get cut and dried there, of course, but then, they ought to.’
Fleur leaned forward, and with faint malice said: ‘Have you become a moralist, my dear?’
Jon answered glumly:
‘Why, no – no more than reason!’
‘Do you remember our walk by the river?’
‘I told you before – I remember everything.’
Fleur restrained her hand from a heart which had given a jump.
‘We nearly quarrelled because I said I hated people for their stupid cruelties, and wanted them to stew in their own juice.’