‘Will you do this for the sake of our old friendship? Will you even promise to do it?
‘I know how busy you are, but perhaps you would send me a line to say yes or no.
‘Yours ever, Christopher.’
Christopher was right. I was busy and though I didn’t happen to have any engagement for the week-end he suggested, I didn’t want to travel all the way down to the New Forest to spend a lonely Sunday. And I didn’t want to get drawn again into what I felt to be the unreality of Christopher’s life, of which this proposal was such an excellent example. He had never out-grown his adolescence or improved his adolescent gift for painting. He had allowed himself to become a back number. A private income had enabled him to indulge a certain contempt for the world where men strove, but he was jealous of it really; hence the digs and scratches in his letter. I had got on at the Bar, whereas he had not been even a successful dilettante. I imagine that he did now know the way that people talked about him, but perhaps he guessed. At Oxford he had been a leading figure in a group of which I was an inconspicuous member; we looked up to him then, and foretold a future for him, but I doubt if he would have achieved it, even without the handicap of his silver spoon. Except in what pertained to hospitality he was out of touch, à côté de la vie. He was good at pouring out drinks, and his friends, myself among them, appreciated this talent long after it was clear to most of us that his other talents would come to nothing. And though a drink is a drink, the satisfaction it gives one varies with whom one takes it with. At one time Christopher could afford drinks when we couldn’t. Later, we would buy our own drinks and consume them in circumstances and in company which he couldn’t attain to. There is a freemasonry of the successful which we shared and he did not. This he must have realized, for mine was not the only defection from his circle. I didn’t dislike him—one couldn’t dislike him—but equally one couldn’t take him quite seriously as a human being.
So my first impulse was to say no, for I hate prolonging any relationship that the meaning has gone out of. But then I remembered Constantia and I thought again. I hadn’t forgotten her but I had pushed her out of my mind while reading Christopher’s letter.
Christopher hadn’t mentioned Constantia in his letter but she was there all the same, in the wistful tone of it and the scarcely concealed bitterness. Yet he had no right to feel bitter; she told me that at one time she would have married him gladly if he had asked her. She was thirty-two and wanted to get married. But he didn’t ask her. She hadn’t told me, but I am sure that their relationship was never more than an amitié amoureuse. It was a sentimental attachment with the same unreality about it that there was in everything he did, and I felt no qualms about taking her from him. It is true that I met her through him—at Crossways, as a matter of fact, at a week-end party—and to that extent I owed her to him. But that is an unreal way of looking at things, and I did not think I was betraying his hospitality or anything of that sort, when I persuaded her that I could give her more than he could. He had no right to keep her indefinitely paddling in the shallows in which his own life was passing. But though we were lovers she hadn’t said that she would marry me and I guessed it was some scruple about Christopher that stopped her.
I suppose some of her tenderness for him must have entered into me for when I read the letter again I felt that I ought to humour him, as much for her sake as for his. After all, she was the last, the only person who cared for him in the way he wanted to be cared for—whatever that was. I should get through the week-end somehow. I wrote to Christopher and I wrote to the Hancocks, Christopher’s married couple, telling them the train that I should come by.
What surprised me, when I got there, was the familiarity of it all. I had forgotten what a frequent visitor I used to be.
‘Why, Mr. Gretton,’ Hancock said, ‘you’ve deserted us, you’re quite a stranger!’ But I didn’t feel one; I could have found my way about the house blindfolded.
‘It’s over a year since you came to us,’ he reproached me. ‘We often used to ask Mr. Fenton what had become of you.’
‘And what did he say?’ I asked.
‘Oh, he said you were too busy, but as I said, you couldn’t be too busy to get away at the week-end.’
‘Oh, but I expect you have plenty of visitors without me,’ I said.
‘No, sir, we don’t, not like we used to have. Of course it’s a nuisance, food being what it is, but Mr. Fenton likes having them, and it’s always a real treat to see you, sir. The new faces aren’t the same by any means, not the same class of people either.’ I took up the Visitors’ Book and saw several names that were strange to me. Christopher had been trying out some new friends. But there weren’t many names at all; to turn back a page was to turn back a year, and I soon found my own.
‘It does seem too bad that you should be here when Mr. Fenton isn’t,’ Hancock prattled on. ‘He always looks forward particularly to you coming, sir. Though now, of course, he’s a good deal taken up with his garden. Often he works in it quite late. He’s got to be terrible fond of flowers. Those rhododendrons he’s so set on, sir, of course they looks after themselves, as you might say. But gardeners are all alike, sir, you can’t get them to weed the flower-beds. Now this herbaceous border, sir, you can see it from the window——’ His glance invited me to go to the window, but for some reason I didn’t want to go. ‘Often of an evening I go to the window and see him stooping and call out to him that dinner’s ready. Would you like to see the garden, sir? He was ever so anxious you should see it.’
‘Well, not just now,’ I said. ‘Of course I shall go and see it to-morrow. Now I think I shall have a bath. Dinner’s at eight, I suppose?’
‘Yes, sir, that’s Mr. Fenton’s hour, though there’s many in these times has put it earlier. The wife she sometimes has a moan about it, but of course we have to respect Mr. Fenton’s wishes.’
A question that had absurdly been nagging me all day now demanded utterance. ‘I’ve brought my dinner-jacket, Hancock,’ I said, ‘because I know Mr. Fenton likes one to change for dinner. But as I’m going to be alone, do you suppose he would mind?’
‘Well, sir, it’s just as you like, of course, but you won’t be alone because there’s a lady coming.’
‘A lady?’
‘Yes, sir, didn’t you know? But perhaps Mr. Fenton forgot to tell you. He’s been very forgetful lately, we’ve both remarked on it. Yes, sir, Miss Constantia Corwen, you know her, don’t you, you’ve stayed with her here several times. A tall lady.’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I know her quite well. I wonder if Mr. Fenton told her I was going to be here.’
‘Oh yes, sir, I expect so. He wouldn’t forget the same thing twice.’
It was six o’clock. I went to my room, meaning to stay there till dinnertime, but when I heard the crunch of wheels curiosity overcame me and I tiptoed out on to the landing above the hall and listened.
‘Yes, Miss,’ I heard Hancock say, ‘the master was dreadfully cut up about missing the flowers and all on account of spring being so late.’
I could understand Constantia making sympathetic noises, but there were tears in her voice as she said, ‘Yes, it was terribly bad luck. I am so sorry. Is there time to go out and see the garden now?’
‘Well, Miss, it’s just as you like but dinner’s at eight and there’s a soufflé.’
‘I shall only be a moment and I think I won’t change for dinner as I shall be alone.’
There was quite a long pause and then Hancock said, in a puzzled, different voice, ‘You won’t be altogether alone, Miss, because you see Mr. Gretton’s here.’
‘Mr. Gretton?’
‘Yes, Miss. Didn’t Mr. Fenton tell you?’
‘No, he must have forgotten. I think I’ll go up to my room now.’