Ex-wifePart 31
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Part 31
A silly inappropriate tag from Virgil came into my head: “Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.”—“And perhaps some day even this will be pleasant to remember.” He had taken my hand, and was holding it so tightly that an old emerald ring—a ring I wore because Noel had admired it—hurt my finger. I tried to remember where the emerald ring came from.
Noel said: “I must go, now, Patricia. . . . Could you manage a smile in the face of a transcontinental express?” I smiled; he smiled at me.
Someone was shouting “all aboard.” Noel’s lips were brushing against my face, he had let go of my hand, he had gone, I couldn’t see him, inside the train. I ran along, looking for him. He was there, smiling, with his face close to the train window, and his hand against the windowpane. I put my hand, on the outside of the pane against his on the inside.
He was looking unhappy, but he was smiling. He was saying something to me, but there was a noise—I could not hear. The train made too much noise starting . . . and the windowpane pulled from under my hand, and was gone and Noel’s face was gone. There were other faces, all blurred together, passing, behind train windows. There was the noise of a train gathering speed. Then there was an empty track where a train had been.
It seemed very quiet.
I walked back along the platform, and upstairs, through the station, and out onto the street. There were crowds of people hurrying about as if they had somewhere important to go. I wished that I had somewhere important to go.
I had the day to myself—I might go call on Helena, and the blue-eyed child who had just discovered Broadway first nights. The child had told me, in a pleased way, last time I had seen her that she had to hurry home to dress for an “important” first night.
I did not want to go see Helena, or her. I wanted to think of somewhere important to go myself. I began to laugh at all the people running around.
I passed a newsstand, and remembered that from the day I had first met Noel, I had read every single one of his stories.
Then I was pleased with myself, because I had thought of somewhere important, to go. . . . I walked across town, to the “Times,” and bought a five-year subscription.
XVII
There remained no reason now for me to breakfast at eleven, instead of eight o’clock. I gave up my noon-to-seven o’clock job, and found one from nine to five, at a better salary.
Before beginning at the new place, I went to Bermuda for a fortnight. Bermuda—because a letter from Bill came along, while I was trying to think of somewhere that I wanted to go.
The letter read:
“MY DEAR PATRICIA,
“Over brandy flips in the morning and champagne cup at night, I wish you were here. The climate and the scenery and the absence of automobiles make me able to believe that the last twenty years haven’t happened. Except when I look at the women’s clothes.
“Can’t you take a vacation? If you turn up, I’ll take you to the damn fool race-track that reminds me of county fairs in Maryland when I was young. All your generation should go to the tropics for ten years anyway, and watch roses blooming under palm trees. You’d all come back languid enough to be ladylike.
“I don’t suppose you’ll leave your silly job, but if you would I’d take you driving in a carriage, and you could pretend you were one of your own aunts, exhibiting gentle alarm at my recklessness if I went around a corner at a gallop.”
I thought it might be pleasant to contemplate Bill’s contented old age for a couple of weeks, so I cabled him and sailed. But I stayed at a hotel about a mile from Bill’s, lest contemplation of contented old age through all my waking hours, should grow monotonous.
In the mornings I swam before breakfast, and dressed and had breakfast, and sat about languidly on the hotel terrace, looking at the palm trees and thinking about nothing, until Bill’s wide sturdy figure rose over the brow of the hill.
“Well, well, let’s do a bit of pub-crawling before luncheon. Cheer you up. You look as if you needed a bit of cheering up. . . . God knows why . . . you’re young.” Something like that was his invariable greeting. Then we walked down to the landing and took a launch for Hamilton, while Bill told me I wore white, or blue, or yellow, or whatever I was wearing, well.
In the Bermudiana bar, Bill sat with a brandy flip in front of him, his wide red kind face beaming, explaining that all I needed was a husband, and considering, in his strong loud voice, those of his contemporaries who might qualify.
“We’re all too damn old for you, Pat, though. Wish I knew some younger men; wish I’d had sons.” And he sighed briefly for the sons whose non-existence was the only apparent regret of his life.
Then he trotted me about Hamilton, every day, muttering, “Women like trinkets; always cheers a woman up to buy her trinkets.” At intervals he vanished, briefly, into some little shop, to reappear with coral necklaces or earrings or brooches, that were not suitable for wear with anything I owned, but that I wore, with everything.
In the afternoons he played golf with men of his age.
I went alone and sat on unbelievably pink sands, and watched incredibly blue and white waves come curling in to shore, and read “The World of William Clissold.”
Through long afternoons, while the shadows of the palm trees lengthened across the sands, and a small breeze fragrant of sea and palms and roses, blew gaily along the shore, I read and re-read that section of the second volume where Mr. Wells considers the relationship of men and women.
I found therein solace for my resentment against the stupid jest I had long called secretly this damn freedom for women. There were sentences by Mr. Wells:
“We live sexually in a world of mixed and broken codes, and irregular and extravagant experiments and defiances. . . . Our ways of living are more provisional now than our governments. . . .
“One finds the companion-mate as a dream in the hearts of a few people here and there, as an experiment, an almost hopeless experiment, like a match lit in a high wind, or a swimmer borne away by a stream.”
I read that, and looked at the shadows of the palm trees on the sand, and thought: “Noel, Noel . . . a dream made real, an experiment achieved—and a dream lost, an experiment ended for ever. But it did not end in shabbiness and recriminations—so there remains, something. . . . Something . . . perhaps very much . . . a fire to warm my hands at all the days of my life.”
And I was able even to make a jest to myself, about Noel and me. It was not a very gay jest. It was, “Well, we both were destined to see palm trees, but not in the same country.”
I went back from these solitary afternoons to dine and drink champagne cup with Bill, and to listen to Bill’s stories of the early nineteen hundreds, feeling as serene as I used to feel, on coming home from afternoons of sailing in a breeze that was strong and exciting, when I was a very young girl.
And if sometimes, I waked at night, and listened to the warm steady wind sweeping through the palm trees outside, and ached, rather horribly, for Noel whom I would not ever see again—still, I knew that ache would pass, and was quite sure, this time, that remembrance of lovely things we had shared, would long outlast the ache that they were ended.
I went back to New York, feeling that I had been away a long time.
Lucia met me at the dock. It was a great comfort to see her. I said “Thank heaven, darling, you aren’t likely to dash off to Asia or South America or elsewhere, permanently, ever. I look forward to spending week-ends with you in Westchester when we’re both doddering.”
“Thanks,” she said. “You are looking all beautifully rested. But tell me, are you convalescing?”
“I think so.”
I got my baggage through the customs, and we started uptown in Lucia’s car. I hauled a bottle of Crême Yvette out of my blouse, for Lucia, and said: “I’ve been wearing corsets all day for your sake, to keep this from falling through. I hope you are appreciative.”
“Oh darling, my favourite liqueur,” she said. “But I don’t know whether I can drink it. I’m going to have a baby . . . I think I’m very pleased and Sam is of course radiant . . . I’m dieting like mad, though, so that I shan’t permanently ruin what figure I have . . . they give you a funny diet.”
“That’s grand about the baby if you want it,” I said.
Lucia’s conversation was noticeably circuitous; her usual method of approaching some news that might be distressing in effect.
She looked out of the car window. “It always seems to rain in New York when people come back from cruises, I’ve noticed,” she said. “Peter and Judith have a daughter, I hear.”
I was not glad or sorry or especially interested. I said: “Everyone seems to be doing something about the next generation, except me.”
“You’re young yet, Patricia. . . . Listen, Nathaniel’s staying with us. His father finally died, and left Nat all his money, with a note, saying that he appreciated the years Nat gave up to looking after him. Nat is taking it very hard . . . the note seems to have made him feel that he never was nice to his father . . . was impatient with him and so on. All that sort of thing is so dreadfully futile. . . . But Nat is in something of a state.”
“I know,” I said, “Nathaniel is such a dear.”
Lucia looked at me for an instant, speculatively.
“No, darling,” I said, “All I want is peace. I feel as old as Time, no matter how perennial I look.”
“I know,” said Lucia, “A comfortable fact about all of us, though, is that we have got through so much, so fast, there can’t be much left. I doubt if this will be a long-lived generation. We shall reach sedateness via emotional exhaustion, by forty—and die of senility at forty-eight. . . . I was afraid that the news about Nathaniel would disturb you.”
“Or was it the news about Pete you were afraid of?” I asked. “Nothing is ever going to disturb me much, again.”
“That’s grand,” said Lucia. She looked very preoccupied. Then: “Pat, would you think me a horribly greedy woman, if I got the chauffeur to open this bottle somehow, and stop for glasses somewhere, and we drank some of the Crême Yvette, now? I do adore it . . . and I’m so afraid the doctor will forbid it. If I had a little, before I asked him, it couldn’t hurt me, much.”
We drank Crême Yvette all the way to Lucia’s house, and were unable to eat dinner, but the Crême Yvette had tasted so good that we did not care.
Nathaniel seemed very glad to see me. He was looking unhappy. “He’s lost his occupation in life,” Lucia said, later. “He has been devoted to his father for the eight or nine years since he was twenty, and feels lost with no responsibility, now. I am going to suggest that he adopt an orphan, poor darling.”
Nevertheless, Sam and Lucia and Nat and I had a pleasant enough week-end, and then I went to work.
January went by slushily and drearily, so did February. I worked very hard, and missed Noel very badly, and hunted through the “Times” for his stories as they appeared. They were not signed, and I was never quite sure whether they were his, or someone else’s. They were written from so very far away.
One rainy March day, I found Nathaniel waiting for me in my hallway, when I came home from work. He was looking more cheerful than I had seen him, all Winter. When I brought him upstairs, he began flinging bright-coloured booklets, from an envelope he carried, all across a couch. They were travel booklets.
His voice was jubilant. “Pat, the doctor says I should leave the business in the hands of the office-manager—he knows more about it than I do, anyway—and go on a trip. Do you know, I haven’t been anywhere for so many years, I didn’t realize that I could go, now.”
I took off my hat, and laid it on a table, and smoothed my hair. I should miss Nat, too, but it was nice that he should go places . . . he had wanted to, for so long.
“Where are you going, Nat?”
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