Chapter Thirteen
FIRES
BUT Fleur came down again. And there began for Soames the most confused evening he had ever spent. For in his heart were great gladness and great pity, and he must not show a sign of either. He wished now that he had stopped to look at Fleur’s portrait; it would have given him something to talk of. He fell back feebly on her Dorking house.
‘It seems a useful place,’ he said; ‘the girls –’
‘I always feel they hate me. And why not? They have nothing, and I have everything.’
Her laugh cut Soames to the quick.
She was only pretending to eat, too. But he was afraid to ask if she had taken her temperature. She would only laugh again. He began, instead, an account of how he had found a field by the sea where the Forsytes came from, and how he had visited Winchester Cathedral; and, while he went on and on, he thought: ‘She hasn’t heard a word.’
The idea that she would go up to bed consumed by this smouldering fire at which he could not get, distressed and alarmed him greatly. She looked as if – as if she might do something to herself! She had no veronal, or anything of that sort, he hoped. And all the time he was wondering what had happened. If the issue were still doubtful – if she were still waiting, she might be restless, feverish, but surely she would not look like this! No! It was defeat. But how? And was it final, and he freed for ever from the carking anxiety of these last months? His eyes kept questioning her face, where her fevered mood had crept throught the coating of powder, so that she looked theatrical and unlike herself. Its expression, hard and hopeless, went to his heart. If only she would cry, and blurt everything out! But he recognized that in coming down at all, and facing him, she was practically saying: ‘Nothing has happened!’ And he compressed his lips. A dumb thing, affection – one couldn’t put it into words! The more deeply he felt the more dumb he had always been. Those glib people who poured themselves out and got rid of the feelings they had in their chests, he didn’t know how they could do it!
Dinner dragged to its end, with little bursts of talk from Fleur, and more of that laughter which hurt him, and afterwards they went to the drawing-room.
‘It’s hot to-night,’ she said, and opened the french window. The moon was just rising, low and far behind the river bushes; and a waft of light was already floating down the water.
‘Yes, it’s warm,’ said Soames, ‘but you oughtn’t to be in the air if you’ve got a chill.’
And, taking her arm, he led her within. He had a dread of her wandering outside to-night, so near the water.
She went over to the piano.
‘Do you mind if I strum, Dad?’
‘Not at all. Your mother’s got some French songs there.’ He didn’t mind what she did, if only she could get that look off her face. But music was emotional stuff, and French songs always about love! It was to be hoped she wouldn’t light on the one Annette was for ever singing:
‘Auprès de ma blonde, il fait bon – fait bon – fait bon,
Auprès de ma blonde, il fait bon dormir.’
The young man’s hair! In the old days, beside his mother! What hair she’d had! What bright hair and what dark eyes! And for a moment it was as if, not Fleur, but Irene, sat there at the piano. Music! Mysterious how it could mean to anyone what it had meant to her. Yes! More than men and more than money – music! A thing that had never moved him, that he didn’t understand! What a mischance! There she was, above the piano, as he used to see her in the little drawing-room in Montpelier Square; there, as he had seen her last in that Washington hotel. There she would sit until she died, he supposed, beautiful, he shouldn’t wonder, even then. Music!
He came to himself.
Fleur’s thin, staccato voice tickled his ears, where he sat in the fume of his cigar. Painful! She was making a brave fight. He wanted her to break down, and he didn’t want her to. For if she broke down he didn’t know what he would do!
She stopped in the middle of a song and closed the piano. She looked almost old – so she would look, perhaps, when she was forty. Then she came and sat down on the other side of the hearth. She was in red, and he wished she wasn’t – the colour increased his feeling that she was on fire beneath that mask of powder on her face and neck. She sat there very still, pretending to read. And he who had The Times in his hand, tried not to notice her. Was there nothing he could do to divert her attention? What about his pictures? Which – he asked – was her favourite? The Constable, the Stevens, the Corot, or the Daumier?
‘I’m leaving the lot to the nation,’ he said. ‘But I shall want you to take your pick of four or so; and, of course, that copy of Goya’s “Vendimia” belongs to you.’ Then, remembering she had worn the ‘Vendimia’ dress at the dance in the Nettlefold hotel, he hurried on: