The Red And The Green (8 page)

Andrew was not sure how serious she was. He answered lightly. ‘I don't understand much about politics. I'm leaving that for later.'

‘I think we should all be political nowadays. I say, my bottom says it's wet, what does yours say? Let's walk about a bit, take a turn, as your mother would say.'

She jumped up, and as she did so swept her hand along one of the rosemary branches collecting the small narrow leaves in her palm. A delicious musty fragrance arose which almost made Andrew sneeze.

‘I love things with grey leaves, don't you? Well, rosemary hasn't actually got grey leaves, or rather they're only grey underneath, but that was the idea of this garden, and the rue has, and that stuff called trimalchio or whatever it is. There—' As she took his arm she strewed the leaves of the rosemary over his khaki sleeve.

‘That's for remembrance. And rue—what is rue for, I forget?'

‘For sorrow, I suppose,' said Andrew.

‘Such a pretty plant. Well, sorrow we shall all have, especially you as you are so young. I keep thinking I have grown out of sorrow, but it keeps coming back. Don't worry about the tea, Maudie will lay it inside whatever I say, and I declare I think it's going to rain again after all. Come and see my fish.'

She released him, and moved to the other side of the little fish-pool, regarding him across it. The brown surface of the pool quivered a little at their feet, perhaps with some preliminary drops of rain. The sky behind Millie was now a bright hazy yellow.

Andrew stared at his aunt across the pool. The blue earrings glowed in the dark convoluted hair.

She murmured, ‘Yes, you are confoundedly like your da. What are you thinking at this moment?'

Andrew framed in his mind the sentence, How beautiful your earrings are, Aunt Millicent. He said, ‘How beautiful you are, Aunt Millicent.'

There was a second's silence before Millie's loud laugh. ‘Why, you naughty boy, are you flirting? And you engaged to the dearest girl in the world! Well, you must bring her to see me. You must come to tea next Thursday at Rathblane, the pair of you. And next Thursday, but not before, you shall call me Millie.'

She knelt down on the pavement beside the pool. Andrew knelt too, embarrassed at what he had so unaccountably said, but also, unaccountably, feeling rather pleased with himself. He pretended to be investigating the fish.

As he looked down into the dense brown vegetable depths of the pool something suddenly flashed past him. There was a glint of blue and a splash and a receding sinking glimmer. ‘Dear me,' said Millie. ‘One of my earrings has gone west.'

With an exclamation of distress Andrew peered down into the pool where the earring had completely disappeared from view, and his first instinctive idea was that it was lost forever. He looked up at Millie and found her regarding him coolly, her eyebrows slightly raised. She seemed unmoved by the incident and only interested in what he would do.

‘Of course,' said Andrew, as if laboriously working it out, ‘the pool's not very deep, is it? I'll get it for you'. His hand broke the surface of the warm water. He hesitated. Rather awkwardly he removed his watch and put it in his pocket and then began to take off his jacket. Millie stared at him. He folded the jacket and then could not think what to do with it, being unwilling to lay it on the wet pavement, until Millie reached out and took it from him in silence. He rolled up one sleeve of his shirt to the shoulder and loosened his tie and undid the shirt at the neck where it was a little tight. These preparations seemed to take a ludicrously long time. He plunged his arm into the pool up to the elbow, deeper, without touching bottom. A pale oval, the reflection of Millie's face, danced disjointedly on the disturbed surface. Andrew lay down full length upon the pavement. As the water lapped at his shoulder his hand explored the soft sludgy bottom. He touched something hard, and the next moment had fished up the earring. He handed it quickly to his aunt and they both rose.

Andrew felt distressed and discomfited by the incident, chiefly, as he now confusedly felt, because he had paused to take his jacket off; and yet it would have been idiotic to plunge his arm in without doing so. He quickly resumed his jacket. He coughed and began to brush down his breeches to which a greenish slime from the pavement adhered in streaks. He was beginning to feel annoyed and put in the wrong.

‘Andrew,' said Aunt Millicent.

He straightened up to look at her. At once with a quick gesture she dropped the earring down inside the front of his shirt. A second later Hilda and Christopher appeared through the gap in the hedge. The terrace rang with Millie's unexplained laughter. It began to pour with rain.

Chapter Five

‘I
THOUGHT they'd never go,' said Christopher.

‘How did you give them the slip?'

‘I said I was going into town.'

‘You don't think Aunt Hilda suspects?'

‘Darling, Hilda knows nothing.'

‘Did she say anything special?'

‘Only that it was just like you to want to have tea in the garden. I must say I agree!'

‘But that was on purpose,' said Millie. ‘I thought if we were all shivering out on the terrace they'd go all the sooner!'

‘So you're not as feckless as I thought. A shrewd calculating person lives inside you.'

‘Well, not really. I only invented the reason afterwards.'

‘Whatever did you do to young Andrew, by the way? You must have bewitched him. He said practically nothing all through tea and just fumbled with the neck of his shirt.'

Millie laughed. ‘Oh, I did something to embarrass him. Never mind what. He is so touchingly like his father, one can't help teasing him. Do you fancy him as a son-in-law?'

‘He's all right. He's not as intelligent as Frances, but he's got sense and a very sweet nature. And they know each other very well and love each other.'

‘Love—ah well—'

‘Ah well, indeed.'

This conversation was taking place in a long upper room, originally a billiard room, which Millie used as a combination of personal boudoir and shooting gallery. The combination of these two atmospheres unnerved, and doubtless was intended to unnerve, Millie's friends. The room was thickly carpeted and at the near end, by the door, looking obscurely ecclesiastical, stood a low white dressing-table with a tall mirror surmounted by a large lace canopy not unlike those which are held above the Host in religious processions. A plump pink stool, gathered in to a waist-line of silken roses, was placed before the mirror which was flanked by a pair of gilded candlesticks containing candles, unlit at the moment. All round about was a cluster of extremely comfortable satin-covered armchairs, all facing the mirror, placed as if for some ceremony at which Millie would adorn herself or possibly undress before an admiring audience. This ceremony, as far as Christopher knew, never took place, nor did he suppose, though he had never investigated, that the jars of Waterford glass on the dressing-table actually contained cosmetics. They were more likely to contain liqueurs. As far as he knew: for sometimes for a fleeting moment he had the suspicion that Millie led some secret life where, with other recondite suitors, she proceeded to lengths of which he never dreamed. But in fact that was impossible; he knew all about Millie: and even if he lacked, certainly no one else enjoyed, the ultimate privileges.

The wall at the far end of the room, faced with wood and pitted with revolver fire, was bare except for the row of targets at which, standing among the satiny chairs, Millie took aim with her small nickel-plated revolver. The side walls, lined with a furry green vegetational wallpaper, were thickly covered with tolerably good oil paintings of members of the Kinnard family. At these, with suitably pugnacious exclamations, Millie often pointed her weapon, but had only once loosed off a bullet in their direction, which happily lodged in a frame. Christopher disliked these sports. He hated the noise and the horrible sensation of the impact. Millie, armed, cut a pretty figure. But he took the menace of it painfully to himself.

Although it was still light outside, Millie had pulled the curtains and lit the gas, and the fierce bright mantles purred along the room under their red tasselled shades. During the time in which Christopher had been engaged in ‘giving the slip' to Andrew and Hilda, she had changed out of the tight grey dress into a looser shorter dress of purple crepe-de-chine, rather oriental in appearance. She kept nudging the skirt of it against her leg as she stood, as if unused to the length, while she played absently with the revolver, spinning the barrel fast and then stopping it abruptly with her finger. Christopher, outstretched in one of the armchairs, watched her with exasperation, fascination, adoration and fear.

‘You know, Christopher, when you play Russian roulette it isn't really dangerous because the weight of the bullet always pulls the loaded chamber down to the bottom.'

‘I have no intention of playing Russian roulette. You are quite breath-taking enough as a pastime. Don't change the subject, my darling.'

The process of falling in love with Millie had, for Christopher, taken place over quite a long period. Yet there had never been any moment when he had both understood clearly what he was doing and been still able to control it. At moments of control he had not understood, and at moments of understanding he had been helpless. He sometimes told himself that if he could have prevented this thing from happening he would have done so. He knew, now, what Millie did, but he did not know what Millie thought, and he feared, coming upon them suddenly, certain blank moments of ruthlessness in her. Yet even the process of coveting Millie, at first as it had seemed so vainly, had renewed the world for him, and in her light he had seen every flower, every leaf, every bird designed with a wiry clarity and plumped out with a celestial untainted colour.

When Christopher had first met Millie, at a time when he himself was courting Heather Kinnard, she was already married to Arthur. He had disliked her, chiefly, as it seemed in retrospect, because she had tended to put Heather in the shade. Yet Heather had adored her dominating sister-in-law and defended her heartily against Christopher's criticisms. He had thought Millie loud, vulgar and thoroughly selfish. He still thought her loud, vulgar and thoroughly selfish, only now these things were meat and drink to him; or rather, he saw her faults with a difference, touched by romance into gaiety and by charity into innocence. Kathleen, whose conceptual armoury did not include the idea of vulgarity, disliked and indeed feared in Millie a merciless rapacity upon which she blamed Arthur's early death. Kathleen once said of Millie, ‘She respects no one. She does not see where another person begins.' But Heather enjoyed Millie's flamboyance, her noise. This paler, frailer quieter soul took from her boisterous sister-in-law the reflection of a more abundant life. Perhaps, Christopher had often felt, Arthur's attitude to Millie was of this kind too. He had enjoyed being digested by this larger organism. And it also occurred to Christopher to wonder: had he himself similarly engulfed Heather? Was he able to ‘see where another person begins'? No one had seemed to blame him for the way in which Heather had faded from life. Yet perhaps something in himself, less noisy, less overtly colourful, but just as ruthlessly and largely egotistic, had thrust aside that gentler, weaker spirit. But of course these were strictly irrational speculations. Heather had died from a disease of the liver and Arthur from cancer of the stomach. Science proclaimed their deaths normal, unavoidable.

Perhaps, in the long run, it was some deep sense of identification with his sister-in-law, some feeling of the similarity of their temperaments, of a profound likeness underneath a superficial unlikeness, which had made Christopher so interested. Arthur's demise had preceded Heather's by some eighteen months, and at the time of these deaths Christopher's dislike of Millie had been at a maximum: possibly because he felt himself associated with her in some kind of guilty pact. All the same, she had by now become an object of speculation, irritation, fascination. Perhaps too he had in a way learnt from Heather to regard Millie as one of the world's more significant objects. When her name came up in conversation he would jump and listen nervously, and when she was present he was always unusually argumentative. Then one day she asked him to lend her some money.

That was now about eight years ago. It had been a significant moment and Christopher had felt it to be such at the time. It had been, for him, the first indication that all was not well with Millie's finances. She lived extremely lavishly and it had been and still was confidently assumed by the world at large that Millie Kinnard was ‘pretty well heeled'. Christopher was surprised, interested, and in a prophetic way curiously pleased to find that this was not so. He lent her the money at once, without comment, happy to be, and happy to be tacitly expected to be, supremely discreet. She was grateful, he was politely, reticently dignified; and at once their relationship was altered. Christopher's money had come to him from his father, who had been a teacher of mathematics at Trinity, an amateur economist and an expert gambler on the Stock Exchange; which expertize had augmented an already comfortable family fortune. Christopher himself was neither rapacious nor mean and had not inherited his father's taste for playing with money. Yet money was important to him, its presence was a deep source of security, and it was somehow a stuff through which he was vitally connected with the world. A part of his life-blood ran through it. And when he became financially connected with Millie some warmth passed from him to her with the connection. It was this primitive touching, more even perhaps than the more obvious sense of a power over her, which made him begin to fall in love.

But of course these explanations, upon which he himself later meditated, were in a way otiose. Millie was a gorgeous desirable object. He wondered why all men were not in love with her, and soon began to suspect that they were. She was an overflowing vessel, a plump, gay, generous woman. There was some coldness, some shivering, shrewd thinness in Christopher which needed her desperately, which clung to her as to a source of warmth and life. He only half concealed his need, watching her with a large affectation of detachment, and enraptured by the cool amused gaze which, in the formality of their new relationship, she with equal affectation adopted. He remembered how, in the old quarrelling days, Millie would sometimes shout out, ‘But I adore Christopher!' Now, as their poker-faced relation gradually broke down into tenderness and laughter, he realized that Millie was not only grateful, she was prepared in effect to adore him. This made Christopher very happy indeed.

Time passed, and Millie's affairs became more involved and difficult. Christopher lent her more money. He gave her advice too, but he was a prudent rather than an original capitalist and an ineffective helper. Millie took advice in other quarters, without revealing the seriousness of the situation, and merely increased the muddle she was in. She was incapable of economies. Christopher watched these developments with mixed feelings, and gradually an idea which seemed to him both sinister and delightful formulated itself in his mind. Millie's difficulty would be Christopher's opportunity.

That he might ever ask Millie to marry him was a notion which, after he had fallen in love with her, he had early dismissed. He wanted to be happy, to enjoy the deliciousness of her company, not to ask too much; and it seemed clear that she could not possibly want to marry him. She was a spoilt girl, he was not by any means her only admirer, and she ostentatiously enjoyed her freedom. She ‘adored' him, but she was not in the least in love with him. ‘Adoration' was something different. Millie skipped about, bounded like a dog, shouted more than usual when Christopher arrived. But she let him depart without repining. She liked the intermittent character of their converse. He would have wished to be with her day and night. He coveted her body with a passion which his shrewd hedonism constantly quieted and checked. He did not care, at his age, to suffer the sleepless nights of unsatisfied desire, and he did not in fact suffer them. But he wanted Millie; and he knew that she did not, in that way, want him.

Discretion about money had somehow cast a veil of secrecy over their whole relationship. It was not generally known that they were fond of each other or that they met so often; and Christopher kept up for the benefit of some of his relations the fiction that he found Millie ‘trying'. He did this partly out of an innate taste for the clandestine, partly because of the money question, and partly because Millie wanted it that way. Christopher was realistic and resigned about Millie's desire for secrecy. A popular woman who enjoys her admirers and is also kind-hearted will naturally want to keep her friendships strictly sealed off from each other. To each man Millie seemed available with an undivided attention and a full heart. Christopher was consoled by being more in her confidence than most. He at least knew about the others; and he was fairly certain that, at present at any rate, these ‘relationships' which Millie cultivated remained at a level of innocuous flirtation, although hearts other than hers were sometimes cracked in the process.

There was, however, yet another and graver reason for Christopher's secrecy, and that was the attitude of Frances. Frances disliked Millie, perhaps because, although Christopher had always, and quite automatically, concealed it from her, she sensed her father's interest and was jealous, or perhaps out of a strong temperamental disparity. ‘I don't like being bounced at,' Frances had once said coldly after some demonstration of Millie's. And Millie indeed, who was always made nervous by the presence of Frances, whom she felt as a critic, had made various effusive but vain attempts to win the girl round. Christopher loved Frances dearly, though he had always treated her, even as a child, in the cool ironical manner which he used to the world at large. In this respect, he and his daughter, early left to each other's company by the vanishing of Heather, perfectly understood one another, and made no display of a strong affection which passed freely between them under a guise of such calmness that not everyone realized that they loved each other at all.

Before Christopher had formulated the idea of asking Millie to marry him he had not too much troubled about the hostility of Frances. It had merely provided another motive for a total discretion. But when the notion of such a marriage had appeared in the background the view which Frances might take of it became an appalling source of anxiety. That Frances disliked Millie was of course in itself a serious impediment; and there was also the possibility that a projected match between her father and ‘that woman' might produce in Frances some unprecedented reaction of violence. Christopher was aware that in some respects which were relevant to this problem he did not know his daughter very well. Their relations had been, in a sense, too perfectly organized. Being so much in each other's company they had early developed an adult language of understatement, and their feelings, just because they were so harmonious, had been tacit. But Christopher divined in his daughter the presence of an as yet unpractised stubbornness, the presence of ferocious will.