Encounters (Bowen)/The Confidante
"You are losing your imagination," cried Maurice.
It was a bitter reproach. He stood over her, rumpling up his hair, and the wiry tufts sprung upright, quivering from his scalp.
Penelope gulped, then sat for a moment in a silence full of the consciousness of her brutality. She had never dreamed that her secret preoccupation would be so perceptible to Maurice. Unconsciously she had been drawing her imaginations in upon herself like the petals of a flower, and her emotions buzzed and throbbed within them like a pent-up bee.
The room was dark with rain, and they heard the drip and rustle of leaves in the drinking garden. Through the open window the warm, wet air blew in on them, and a shimmer of rain was visible against the trees beyond.
"I never meant———" began Penelope.
"I beg your pardon," said Maurice stiffly. "I suppose I am becoming quite insufferable. I have been making perfectly unjustifiable demands on your sympathy and patience and—imagination. I am an egotistical brute, I daresay. Of course there is not the slightest reason why you———" His indulgence intimated that there was, on the contrary, every reason why she should. . . . "I felt a bit jarred just now," he excused himself, with simple pathos.
"I never meant, a bit———" resumed Penelope.
"I know, I know," said Maurice, all magnanimity. The sickly sweetness of this reconciliation overpowered her.
"What a pair of fools we are!" she cried hysterically. "Maurice, dear, we're wearing this thing thin. I'm afraid I've been doing gallery to you and Veronica for the last six months, and you've both played up to me magnificently. But———"
"Veronica———" protested Maurice.
"Oh, yes, Veronica comes here too. She comes and sits for hours over there, just where you are now. There's not an aspect of your emotional relationship that we've not discussed. Veronica's coming here this afternoon," she said abruptly. "She's a chilly person. I'd better light the fire."
"God!" said Maurice.
Penelope was on her knees before the fireplace, her head almost inside the grate. Her voice came hollowly from the dark recess.
"I thought you'd be surprised," she said. ("Damn, it will not light!")
"Surprised!" said Maurice. "Penelope,"—his tone had the deadly reasonableness of a driven man's—"I think you hardly realise what you're doing. I know you meant well, my good girl, but really——— It puts us in such an impossible position. Surely you must see."
"I see quite well," she assured him. "You and she both breathe and have your being in an atmosphere of conspiracy; it's your natural element, of course. To force you into the straighter, broader courses of the uncomplex would be as cruel as to upset a bowl with gold-fish in it and leave them gasping on the tablecloth. Ooh!" She sat back on her heels and ruefully beheld her grimy fingers.
Maurice tried his hardest to endure her. She heard him breathing heavily.
"It's really quite unnecessary to have a fire," she soliloquised. "But it makes a point in a room, I always think. Keeps one in countenance. Humanises things a bit. Makes a centre point for———"
She became incoherent. Maurice's irritation audibly increased. They were both conscious of the oppression of the darkening, rain-loud room.
"You're forcing our hands rather," said Maurice.
"Forcing you into the banality of meeting each other sanely and normally in my drawing-room, with no necessity to converse in allusions, insinuations, and doubles-entendres? With me blessing you both and beaming sympathetically on you from afar? Bullying you into that? . . .
"I'm sorry!" she flashed round on him, impenitently.
"You don't understand," he winced, and looked round him for his hat. "I think it would be best for me to go."
"I suppose I mustn't keep you," she conceded with polite reluctance. "But I think you really ought to see Veronica. She has—she will have something of particular importance to say to you. I shall go, of course."
"Oh, don't!"
"But surely———?"
"There's nothing we can keep from you. And it makes it easier for both of us—as things are."
"But do you never want to be alone with her?"
Maurice considered.
"I don't believe," said Penelope, swiftly, "that you two have ever been alone together for a second since your—acquaintanceship—began."
"No," said Maurice, sombrely. "There have always been outsiders."
"Audiences," murmured Penelope.
"I beg your pardon?"
"Oh, nothing. Well, you'll be alone this afternoon. I'm going out," she said with firmness.
"But don't you understand?"
"Oh, I understand the strain will be colossal—would have been. But there've been developments—suddenly. Veronica'll have a great deal to tell you. Has it never occurred to you she might get free after all? There'll be heaps to say," she said, significantly.
"For heaven's sake———!" He threw up his hands again and paced the room in agitation, stumbling over stools.
"That was why I pulled up just now," she continued. "Seemed hard, perhaps, apathetic and unsympathetic when you were talking all that about awfulness, refined irony, frustration, and things. I was thinking how soon you'd—if you only knew——— And then you told me I was losing my imagination."
"For which I have already begged your pardon," said Maurice, patiently.
Penelope rose from the hearthrug and threw herself on to the Chesterfield. Maurice turned to her with a goaded expression, and she regarded him with shining eyes. Then the door opened with a jerk, and Veronica entered stiffly, with a rustle of agitation.
Maurice drew back into the shadow, and Veronica hesitated for a moment in the centre of the room, then groped out her hands towards Penelope, as though she could see little in this sudden gloom.
"Tell me," she cried, without preliminaries, "you, you heard from Victor?"
Penelope, who had risen, glanced across at Maurice. He took his cue.
"Veronica!" he quavered huskily.
Veronica's shoulders twitched. She turned on him in the dusk like a wild thing, with an expression that was almost baleful.
"You!" she said.
"Er—yes," admitted Maurice. "I'd simply no idea that I should . . . I just came in. By chance, you know."
"It's just as well, isn't it?" interposed Penelope. "We've—you've simply got to talk things out, Veronica; tell him. Show him Victor's letter." She moved towards the door.
"Don't go!" shrieked Veronica. "You've got to explain to him. I can't," she said, with the finality of helplessness.
The rain had stopped, and through a sudden break in the clouds the watery sunshine streamed across the garden. Veronica sat down on an ottoman facing the window, and Penelope knelt beside her, looking at her pitifully.
The long, pale oval of her face was marred and puckered by emotion, fair hair lay in streaks across her forehead, her clothes were glistening from the rain. Many tears had worn their mournful rivulets through the lavish powder on her nose. Her gloved hands lay across her lap, in one was clutched a sheet of blue-grey notepaper. She would not look at Maurice, but turned pathetic eyes on Penelope and made appeal with soundless moving lips.
"Veronica has had a letter from Victor," said Penelope, slowly and distinctly. "He releases her from her engagement. He says . . . he explains . . . He is not so blind as you both seem to have thought, and he has seen for some time that Veronica was not happy. He has noticed that she has been listless and preoccupied, and has interpreted her unhappiness—rightly! He is convinced, he says, that Veronica has ceased to care for him, but that she is too scrupulous, or not quite brave enough perhaps, to speak out and make an end of things herself. He knows that her affections are elsewhere, and he believes that he is doing the best thing he can for her by setting her free."
Veronica had turned a little, and sat facing Maurice. Penelope saw the golden flicker of her lashes; the blue letter fluttered to the ground from between her writhing fingers.
"The trousseau was all bought," she faltered. "The going-away dress came from Pam's this morning, just before I got that letter."
Penelope could not speak; she felt utterly inadequate. Maurice shifted his position; and stood leaning up against the window-frame; with intensity of interest he turned his head and looked into the garden.
"It's stopped raining," he observed. Veronica did not move; but Penelope saw her eyes slide sideways; following his movements under drooping lids.
"How do you know all this," Maurice asked abruptly, "what Victor says and that, when you've had no time to read his letter?"
"He wrote to me, too," said Penelope. She heard her own voice, self-conscious and defiant.
"To you! Why you?"
"But we know each other—rather well. Since much longer than he's known Veronica. And, well, you see I'm her cousin. He thought I'd make things easier for her. Do the explaining as far as possible. Probably he thought I'd speak to you."
She stealthily touched her pocket and smiled to feel the crisp thick letter-paper crackle beneath her hand. Then she wondered if the sound were audible to the others, and glanced guiltily from one to the other of them. But they sat there silent, embarrassed, heavily preoccupied, one on either side of her.
"So now———," she said with bright aggressiveness. She could have shaken them.
"I do not think," said Veronica, in a small determined voice, "that I am justified in accepting Victor's sacrifice."
"He is extraordinarily generous," said Maurice, without enthusiasm.
"The loneliness," went on Veronica, gazing wide-eyed down some terrible vista. "Picture it, Penelope, the disappointment and the blankness for him. I could never have loved him, but I would have been a good wife to him." (Her voice rose in a crescendo of surprise. She thought "How genuine I am!") "We—we had made so many plans," she faltered; fumbled, found no handkerchief, and spread her hands before her face.
Penelope gave a little gasp, half sympathetic. She was praying hard for tact.
"Veronica," she said, "I don't think you should let that stand between you and Maurice. You mustn't be too soft-hearted, dear. I don't think Victor's altogether unhappy. He's relieved, I know. You see, the last few weeks have been an awful strain for him, as well as—other people."
"How do you know?"
"He told me."
"You've been discussing me. Oh, Penelope, this is intolerable!"
"He had been talking to me; he had no one else. For a long time, I suppose, he put me in the position of a sister-in-law."
"That was going too far!" cried Maurice. "Had you neither of you the slightest idea of loyalty to Veronica?"
Penelope ignored him. She leant suddenly forward, crimson-cheeked, and kissed Veronica.
"Oh, my dear," she said, "did you think that because you couldn't care about Victor nobody else could? Do you expect him to go on giving you everything when you've got nothing to give him?"
They looked at her, dazzled by a flash of comprehension. When she rose from between them she left a gap, a gap she knew to be unbridgeable for both. They were face to face with the hideous simplicity of life. She had upset their bowl and left the two poor gold-fish gasping in an inclement air.
"Now at last you two have got each other," she cried, smiling at them from the threshold. "Nothing more to bother or disturb you. Just be as happy and as thankful as you can!"
They sat in silence till the last ironical echo died away. Then "Don't go!" they cried in unison.
But she was gone.