The curtains were of the richest satin and they were so voluminous that
even when they were drawn right across the windows they fell in close
corrugation to the velvet pile of the carpet which covered the floor.
But carpet and curtains were plain and of a very soft, dull,
rose-colour, and there was not an inch of fringe or an attempt at a
true-lover’s knot to be seen on them. And the room, though large, was
not very high, and there were no mirrors on the plain cream walls nor in
the doors of the plain walnut cupboard that ran along the wall opposite
the fireplace. And the only picture in the room was a large
uncompromising water-colour of a race-horse in a flat, wooden frame
which hung over the fireplace. A huge photograph of Old Winona, framed
in silver, stood on a writing-table between the windows, but the frame
was quite plain, and the bed in which Gillian lay, though it was
deliciously comfortable with sheets of heavy, cool linen, smooth as silk
and blankets as light as the down quilt above them, was narrow, with
plain head- and foot-boards, to match the wardrobe.
She was in Toby’s room on the top-floor at Knightsbridge, which was for
the moment, so Lilac had explained to her, the only spare room in the
house, Toby having moved down to the room with a dressing-room on the
floor below next door to Lilac’s temporary quarters.
“When we get into Norfolk Street you shall have a whole floor to
yourself,” said Lilac.
But Gillian had refused the installation saying she would rather go back
to the Club if Mrs. Barraclough would tolerate William there after all.
“It would be awkward for you to have a wage-earning sister in the
house,” said Gillian, “and wages I intend to earn after Christmas.”
And Lilac had not argued with Gillian, though she had tried to make Jane
Bird do so when Jane had come to tea that afternoon. Jane, however,
sided with Gillian.
“She’s quite right. She’d ruin herself, living up to your standard in
hats and gloves alone, in Norfolk Street,” said Jane, “even if she did
live rent- and food-free. Whereas at the Club with me and Larry as
social outlets she’ll be affluent, and you can provide her with the
right kind of trimmings when you feel she won’t quite do as she is for
special occasions.”
Gillian, from her pillows, expressed her gratitude to Jane, and when
Lilac left them alone together Jane said more.
“You wouldn’t be happy with them anyhow,” she said; “they don’t want the
same things as you do. Toby may have wanted some of them once, but he’s
forgetting. You’d better let Lilac go. She’ll be a Leader of London
Society in three years and Toby’ll be in the House of Lords before she’s
done with him. You’d come quite as bad a cropper there as you did with
your Vanderleyden. It’s no use being intimate out of your own class.”
“But I haven’t got a class,” protested Gillian.
“Oh yes, you have. But it isn’t a very large one. I’m in it. That’s why
I’ll never be rich, though my figures are getting quite degradingly
fashionable. And Larry’s really in it. I think I shall keep him there.
We’re married, you know.”
“Goodness!” said Gillian, “has this been going on for long?”
“Since he came back from Dinkelsbühl. It was the white porcelain stove
that made me see I could not allow him, with it, to pass out of my life.
And we were afraid Heinrich was gone beyond recall to the Vanderleyden.”
“Oh, Jane!”
“Yes. I know. She’s gone off to Ostend with someone called Mick or Nick.
A female. Mrs. Barraclough has let her rooms to a real missionary this
time: false teeth and no mean moustache. She tilled the Chinese vineyard
in her day, I’m told.”
“I don’t believe you till vineyards,” said Gillian. “Where are you and
Larry going to live?”
“In a converted mews, behind Brompton Oratory. It looks out on the
greenest of green gardens and we’re painting it Reckitt’s blue and
orange in our spare time.”
“What do you do with the rest of your time?”
“Gillian,” said Jane firmly, “we kiss each other.”
* * * * *
Jane had gone. She had left a single Christmas rose behind her. It stood
on a table by the fire, in a toothbrush-glass full of water which Jane
had fetched for it from the dressing-room before she left, and it was
unfolding its pinky-yellow petals so quickly in the heat that Gillian
could already see the pollen-soft stamens at its heart. Presently the
petals would fall on the polished wood, just as the petals of the gloire
de Dijon roses had fallen on the table in V.V.’s room last July on the
day when the idea of their living together in the same flat had first
been suggested.
Gillian did not remember that she had assented to it even then, but that
did not lessen her sense of guilt. What was it Aunt Elizabeth had said?
Love must blossom in the spirit. There had been no spiritual blossoming
in all her infatuation for V.V. She had known that all the time. She had
gone on taking all the pleasure, breathing the heady incense, yielding
to the senseless spell of that haunting, physical charm that never once
fulfilled the promise it always half suggested. What it was that had so
lured her mind and stirred her senses Gillian had never known. She had
followed blindly, but her blindness had been wilful. Always she might
have opened her eyes.
And now the waking dream was over. Heinrich was dead. Larry might have
gone after him if it had not been for Jane who had seen and known all
the time.
* * * * *
It was Jane who had made many dark things clear to Gillian a few days
earlier. Lilac had sent for Jane, not understanding the confused and
shaken trouble of Gillian’s state.
“She says you are angry with her,” said Lilac.
“So I was,” said Jane, “but, I admit, she can’t have known what she was
really in for. But now this dreadful thing has happened she ought to be
told.”
And Jane had told Gillian. And in telling her Jane had lost the
bitterness of her anger against Gillian and found her love there still.
And Gillian had seen the morning of her ignorance melt into a hard,
bleak, unenchanted day.
The only person who had escaped unhurt was V.V. But she was unhurt
because, and this Gillian knew now, because long ago V.V. had been so
maimed, her soul had been so warped and stunted by some influence she
could still recall though she was too vitiated to resent it, that
nothing that happened to her now would make very much difference. You
cannot shipwreck a derelict.
V.V. had gone her own way, and Gillian could not follow her. She had
taken the first steps on the road down which V.V. was disappearing, and
had come back again to the place where it started.
And now that road was closed.