Phyllis Bottome: The Dark Tower

The dinner was a great success. Both men were absurdly gay. Winn told good stories, laughed at Lionel, and rallied his young wife. She had never seen him like this before, and she put it down to the way one man sets off another.

Estelle felt that she was being a great success, and it warmed her heart. The two men talked for her and listened to her; she had a moment when she thought that perhaps, after all, she needn’t relegate Winn to a lower world.

They accepted with enthusiasm her offer to sing to them after dinner and then they kept her waiting in the drawing-room for an hour and a half.

She sat there opposite a tall Italian mirror, quivering with her power, her beauty, her ability to charm, and with nothing before her but the empty coffee-cups.

She played a little, she even sang a little (the house was small) to recall them to a sense of her presence, but inexplicably they clung to their talk. Winn who at ordinary times seemed incapable of more than disconnected fragments of speech was (she could hear him now and then quite distinctly) talking like a cataract; and Lionel was, if anything, worse. Her impatience turned into suspicion. Probably Winn was poisoning his friend’s mind against her. Perhaps he was drinking too much, Sir Peter did, and people often took after their fathers. That would have to be another point for Lionel and her to tackle. At last they came in, and Lionel said without any attempt at an apology:

“We should love some music, Mrs. Winn.”

Winn said nothing. He stuck his hands into his pockets, and stood in front of the fireplace in a horribly British manner while she turned over her songs. Estelle sang rather prettily. She preferred songs of a type that dealt with bitter regret over unexplained partings. She sang them with a great deal of expression and a slight difficulty in letting go of the top notes. After she had sung two or three, Lionel said:

“Now, Winn, you sing.”

Estelle started. She had never before heard of this accomplishment of her husband’s. It occurred to her now that Lionel would think it very strange she hadn’t, but he need never know unless Winn gave her away. She need not have been afraid. Winn said quietly, as if he said it to her every evening, “D’you mind playing for me, Estelle?” Then he dragged out from under her music a big black book in which he had painstakingly copied and collected his selection of songs.

He had a high, clear baritone, very true and strangely impressive; it filled the little room. When he had finished, Lionel forgot to ask Estelle to sing again. Winn excused himself; he said he had a letter or two to write and left them.

“It’s jolly, your both singing,” Lionel said, looking at her with the same admiring friendliness he had shown her before. She guessed then that Winn had said nothing against her. After all, at the bottom of her heart she had known he wouldn’t. You can’t live with a man for five months and not know where you are safe.

Estelle smiled prettily.

“Yes,” she said gently, “music is a great bond,” and then she began to talk to Lionel about himself.

She had a theory that all men liked to talk exclusively about themselves, and it is certain that most men enjoyed their conversation with her; but in this particular instance she made a mistake. Lionel did not like talking about himself, and above all he disliked sympathetic admiration. He was not a conceited man, and it had not occurred to him that he was a suitable subject for admiration. Nor did he see why he should receive sympathy. He had had an admirably free and happy life with parents who were his dearest friends, and with a friend who was to him a hero beyond the need of definition.

Still, he wouldn’t have shrunk from talking about Winn with Estelle. It was her right to talk about him, her splendid, perfect privilege. He supposed that she was a little shy, because she seemed to slip away from their obvious great topic; but he wished, if she wasn’t going to talk about Winn, she would leave his people alone.

She tried to sympathize with him about his home difficulties, and when she discovered that he hadn’t any, her sympathy veered to the horrible distance he had to be away from it.

“Oh, well,” said Lionel, “it’s my father’s old regiment, you know; that makes it awfully different. They know as much about my life as I do myself, and when I don’t get leave, they often come out to me for a month or two. They’re good travelers.”

“They must be simply wonderful!” Estelle said ecstatically. Lionel said nothing. He looked slightly amazed. It seemed so funny that Winn, who hadn’t much use for ecstasy, should have married a so easily ecstatic wife.

“I do envy you,” she said pathetically, “all that background of home companionship. We were brought up so differently. It was not my parents’ fault of course – ” she added rather quickly. Something in Lionel’s expression warned her that he would be unsympathetic to confidences against parents.

“Well, you’ve got Winn,” he said, looking at her with his steadfast encouraging eyes, “you’ve got your background now.” He was prepared to put up with a little ecstasy on this subject, but Estelle looked away from him, her great eyes strangely wistful and absorbed. She was an extraordinary exquisite and pretty little person, like a fairy on a Christmas tree, or a Dresden china shepherdess, not a bit, somehow, like a wife.

“Yes,” she said, twisting her wedding ring round her tiny manicured finger. “But sometimes I am a little anxious about him – I know it’s silly of me.”

Lionel’s shyness fell away from him with disconcerting suddenness. “Why are you anxious?” he demanded. “What do you mean, Mrs. Winn?”

Estelle hesitated, she hadn’t meant to say exactly what her fear was, she only wanted to arouse the young man’s chivalry and to talk in some way that approached intimacy.

Everything must have a beginning, even Petrarch and Laura.

She found Lionel’s eyes fixed upon her with a piercing quality difficult to meet. He obviously wouldn’t understand if she didn’t mean anything – and she hardly knew him well enough to touch on her real difficulties with Winn, those would have to come later.

But she must be anxious about something – she was forced into the rather meager track of her husband’s state of health.

“I don’t quite know,” she mused, “of course he seems perfectly strong – but I sometimes wonder if he is as strong as he looks.”

Lionel brushed her wonder aside. “Please tell me exactly what you’ve noticed,” he said, as if he were a police sergeant and she were some reluctant and slightly prevaricating witness.

She hadn’t, as a matter of fact, noticed anything. “He sometimes looks terribly tired,” she said a little uncertainly, “but I dare say it’s all my foolishness, Mr. Drummond. I am afraid I am inclined to be nervous about other people’s health – ” Estelle sighed softly. She often accused herself of faults which no one had discovered in her. “Winn, I am sure, would be the first to laugh at me.”

“Yes, I dare say he would,” said Lionel quietly. “But I never will, Mrs. Winn.” She raised her eyes gratefully to him – at last she had succeeded in touching him.

“You see,” Lionel explained, “I care too much for him myself.”

Her eyes dropped. She had a feeling that Petrarch and Laura had hardly begun like that.

The next few days were very puzzling to Estelle; nobody behaved as she expected them to behave, including herself. She found Lionel always ready to accept her advances with open-hearted cordiality, but she had to make the advances. She had not meant to do this. Her idea had been to be a magnet, and magnets keep quite still; needles do all the moving. But this particular needle (except that it didn’t appear at all soft) might have been made of cotton wool.