The music – all jazz – died behind him and rose again, and he, too, rose. He would just have a squint and go to bed.
The ballroom was somewhat detached, and Soames went down a corridor. At its end he came on a twirl of sound and colour. They were hard at it, ‘dolled up’ to the nines – Mephistopheleses, ladies of Spain, Italian peasants, pierrots. His bewildered eyes with difficulty took in the strutting, wheeling mass; his bewildered ears decided that the tune was trying to be a waltz. He remembered that the waltz was in three-time, remembered the waltz of olden days – too well – that dance at Roger’s, and Irene, his own wife, waltzing in the arms of young Bosinney; to this day remembered the look on her face, the rise and fall of her breast, the scent of the gardenias she was wearing, and that fellow’s face when she raised to his her dark eyes – lost to all but themselves and their guilty enjoyment; remembered the balcony on which he had refuged from that sight, and the policeman down below him on the strip of red carpet from house to street.
‘ “Always!” – good tune!’ said someone behind his ears.
Not bad, certainly – a sort of sweetness in it. His eyes, from behind the neck of a large lady who seemed trying to be a fairy, roved again among the dancers. What! Over there! Fleur! Fleur in her Goya dress, grape-coloured – La Vendimia – the Vintage – floating out from her knees, with her face close to the face of a sheik, and his face close to hers. Fleur ! And that sheik, that Moor in a dress all white and flowing! In Soames a groan was converted to a cough. Those two! So close – so – so lost – it seemed to him! As Irene with Bosinney, so she with that young Jon! They passed, not seeing him behind the fairy’s competent bulk. Soames’s eyes tracked them through the shifting, yawing throng. Round again they came – her eyes so nearly closed that he hardly knew them; and young Jon’s over her fichued shoulder, deep-set and staring. Where was the fellow’s wife? And just then Soames caught sight of her, dancing, too, but looking back at them – a nymph all trailing green, the eyes surprised and jealous. No wonder, since under her very gaze was Fleur’s swinging skirt, the rise and falling of her breast, the languor in her eyes! ‘Always!’ Would they never stop that cursed tune, stop those two, who with every bar seemed to cling closer and closer! And, fearful lest he should be seen, Soames turned away and mounted slowly to his room. He had had his squint. It was enough!
The band had ceased to play on the sea front, people were deserting, lights going out; by the sound out there, the tide must be rising. Soames touched himself where he was sore, beneath his starched shirt, and stood still. ‘Always!’ Incalculable consequences welled in on his consciousness, like the murmuring tide of that sea. Daughter exiled, grandson lost to him; memories deflowered; hopes in the dust! ‘Always!’ Forsooth! Not if he knew it – not for Joe! And all that grim power of self-containment which but twice or three times in his life had failed him, and always with disastrous consequence, again for a moment failed him, so that to any living thing present in the dim and austere hotel bedroom, he would have seemed like one demented. The paroxysm passed. No use to rave! Worse than no use – far; would only make him ill, and he would want his strength. For what? For sitting still; for doing nothing; for waiting to see! Venus! Touch not the goddess – the hot, the jealous one with the lost dark eyes! He had touched her in the past, and she had answered with a blow. Touch her not! Possess his sore and anxious heart! Nothing to do but wait and see!
PART THREE
Chapter One
SOAMES GIVES ADVICE
ON her return to Nettlefold from her night in town, Fleur had continued to ‘eat her heart out’ by ‘the sad sea wave’. For still neither Jon nor his wife came to see her. Clearly she was labelled ‘poison’. Twice she had walked over to Green Hill Farm hoping for another ‘jolly accident’. She had seen there an attractive old house with aged farm buildings flanked by a hill and a wide prospect towards the sea. Calm, broad, and homelike, the place roused hostility in her. It could never be her home, and so was inimical, part of the forces working against her. Loose ends in Jon’s life were all in her favour. In exploitation of those calm acres he would be secured to that girl his wife, out of her reach again, this time for good – the twice-burnt child! And yet, with all her heart-ache, she was still uncertain what, precisely, she wanted. Not having to grapple with actual decision, things seemed possible, which, in her bones, she knew might not be possible. Even to fling her ‘cap over the windmill’ did not seem like rank and staring madness. To retrieve Spain with Jon! Her hands clenched and her lips loosened at the thought of it – an Odyssey together, till in the shifting, tolerant, modern world, all was forgotten, if not forgiven! Every form of companionship with him from decorous and platonic friendship to the world well lost; from guilty and secret liaison to orderly and above-board glimpses of him at not too long intervals. According to the tides in her blood, all seemed possible, if not exactly probable, so long as she did not lose him again altogether.