“Really,” said Lady Muriel. Her indignation mounted. She was no longer genial to me. “So now she sees herself as a clergyman’s wife, does she? Mr Eliot, I understand that the lower classes are very lax with their children. If that young woman had been my daughter, she would have been thrashed.”
She continued to fume as we made our way back to the site. It was too far from the house for Lady Boscastle to walk; she had been driven as far as the path would take a car, and supported the rest of the way by her maid. Lord Boscastle was sitting there disconsolately, and complaining to Roy. Roy listened politely, his face grave. It was the first time I had seen him that day, and I knew no more than the night before.
Lady Muriel could not contain her disgust. She gave a virulent description of Rosalind’s latest outrage.
“You didn’t know she was coming, Roy, I assume?”
“No. She hasn’t written to me for a year,” said Roy.
“I’m very glad to hear it,” said Lady Muriel, and burst out into fury at the picture of Rosalind walking “insolently” past the walls of Boscastle.
Roy said nothing. I fancied there was a glint — was it admiration? — in his eye.
“I hope this fellow Udal isn’t going to be a nuisance,” said Lord Boscastle. “There’s a great deal to be said for the celibacy of the clergy. But I don’t see why the young woman shouldn’t look him up. I always felt you were hard on her, Muriel.”
“Hard on her?” cried Lady Muriel. “Why, she’s nothing more nor less than a trollop.”
Soon after, Joan came walking by the brook. Her dress was white and flowered, and glimmered in the sunshine. As she called out to us, in an even voice, I was watching her closely. She was very pale. She had schooled herself not to do more than glance at Roy. She made conversation with her uncle. She was carrying herself with a hard control. She had all her mother’s inflexible sense of decorum. In public, one must go on as though nothing had happened. How brave she was, I thought.
A file of servants came down from the house with hampers, looking like the porters on de Saussure’s ascent of Mont Blanc. Cold chickens were brought out, tongues, patties: Lady Muriel jollied us vigorously to get to our lunch. Meanwhile Lady Boscastle’s lorgnette was directed for a moment at Joan, and then at Roy.
“I don’t for the life of me see,” said Lord Boscastle, gazing wistfully at the house, “why I should be dragged out here. When I might be eating in perfect comfort in my house.”
It sounded a reasonable lament. It sounded more reasonable than it was. For in the house we should in fact have been eating a tepid and indifferent lunch, instead of this delectable cold one. Lady Muriel had bludgeoned the kitchen into efficiency, which Lady Boscastle did not exert herself to do. It was the best meal I remembered at Boscastle.
We ended with strawberries and moselle. Lady Boscastle, who was eating less each month, got through her portion.
“It’s a fine taste, my dear Muriel,” she said, “I recall vividly the first time someone gave it me—”
I recognised that tone by now. It meant that she was thinking of some admirer in the past. I did not know how much Joan was listening to her aunt: but she made herself put a decent face on it.
After lunch, Lady Muriel was not ready to let us rest.
“Archery,” she said inexorably. Another file of servants came down with targets, quivers, cases of bows. The targets were set up and we shot through the sleepy afternoon. Lord Boscastle was fairly practised, and it was the kind of game to which Roy and I applied ourselves. I noticed Lady Boscastle watching the play of muscle underneath Roy’s shirt. She kept an interest in masculine grace. I thought she was surprised to see how strong he was.
Joan shot with us for a time. She and Roy spoke to each other only about the game, though once, when he misfired, she said, with a flash of innocence, intimacy, forgetfulness: “It must have bounced off that joint. Didn’t you feel it?” She was speaking of the first finger of his left hand; the top joint had grown askew. She was not looking at his hand. She knew it by heart.
Lady Boscastle was assisted to the car before tea. For the rest of us, tea was brought down from the house, though Lady Muriel maintained the al fresco spirit by boiling our own water over a spirit stove. Lord Boscastle said, as though aggrieved: “You ought to know by now, Muriel, that I’m no good at tea.” He drank a cup, and felt that he had served his sentence for the day. So he too went towards the house, having taken the precaution of booking Joan for bridge that night.
Some time after, the four of us started to follow him. Lady Muriel had uprooted the flag, and was carrying it home; all the paraphernalia of the meals was left for the servants. The site looked overcrowded with crockery: we had left it behind when Roy suddenly challenged me to a last round with the bow.
“Just two more shots, Lady Mu,” he said. “We’ll catch you up.”
Joan hesitated, as if she were pulled back to watch. Then she walked away with her mother.
Roy and I shot our arrows. As we went towards the targets to retrieve them, Roy said: “It’s over with Joan and me.”
“I was afraid so.”
“If she comes to you, try and help. She may not come. She’s dreadfully proud. But if she does, please try and help.” His face was angry, dark and strained. “She has so little confidence. Try everything you know.”
I said that I would.
“Tell her I’m useless,” he said. “Tell her I can’t stand anyone for long unless they’re as useless as I am. Tell her I’m mad.”
He plucked an arrow from the target, and spoke quietly and clearly: “There’s one thing she mustn’t believe. She mustn’t think she’s not attractive. It matters to her — intolerably. Tell her anything you like about me — so long as she doesn’t think that.”
He was torn and overcome. He was unusually reticent about his love affairs: even in our greatest intimacy, he had told me little. But that afternoon, as we walked up the valley, he spoke with a bitter abandon. Physical passion meant much to Joan, more than to any woman he had known. Unless she found it again, she could not stop herself becoming harsh and twisted. We were getting close behind Joan and her mother, and he could not say more. But before we caught them up, he said: “Old boy, there’s not much left.”
It was some days before I spoke to Joan. She was not a woman on whom one could intrude sympathy. The party stretched on through empty days. Roy took long walks with Lady Muriel, and I spent much time by Lady Boscastle’s chair. She had diagnosed the state of her niece’s affair, and had lost interest in it. “My dear boy, the grand climaxes of all love affairs are too much the same. Now the overtures have a little more variety.” At dinner the political quarrels became rougher: we tried to shut them out, but the news would not let us. There was only one improvement as the days dragged by: Roy and I became steadily more accurate with the long bow.
One night towards the end of the week I went for a walk alone after dinner. I climbed out of the grounds and up to the headland, so as to watch the sun set over the sea. It was a cloudless night: the western sky was blazing and the horizon clear as a knife-edge.
As I stood there, I heard steps on the grass. Joan had also come alone. She gazed at me, her expression heavy and yet open in the bright light.
“Lewis,” she said. So much feeling welled up in the one word that I took a chance.
“Joan,” I said, “I’ve wanted to say something to you. Twelve months ago Roy told me I made things harder for him. You ought to know the reason. It was because I understood a little about him.”
“Why are you telling me this?” she cried.
“It is the same with you.”