Charles Snow - The Light and the Dark

“Had I told you that my father was a barrister, Lewis?” said Lady Boscastle.

“No, never,” I said.

“It may have made me more interested in you, my dear boy,” she said.

She told me his name; he had been an eminent chancery lawyer, some of whose cases I had studied for my Bar examinations. It came as a complete surprise to me. Rather oddly — so it seemed to me later — I had never enquired about her history. Somehow I had just assumed that she was born in the Boscastle circle. She had acclimatised herself so completely, she was so much more fine-grained than they, so much more cultivated, so much more sophisticated. No one could be more exquisite and “travelled”; she told me of the sweetness of life which she and her friends had known, and, far more than Lord Boscastle or Lady Muriel, made me feel its graces; she had been famous in Edwardian society, she had been loved in the last days of the old world.

But she had not been born in that society. She had been born in a comfortable place, but not there. When I knew, I could understand how she and Lady Muriel scored off each other. For Lady Boscastle, detached as she was, was enough child of her world not to be able to dismiss Lady Muriel’s one advantage; she knew she was far cleverer than Lady Muriel, more attractive to men, more certain of herself; but still she remembered, with a slight sarcastic grimace, that Lady Muriel was a great aristocrat and she was born middle-class.

It might also explain, I thought, why sometimes she was more rigid than her husband. When, for example, it was a question of inviting Rosalind, and she spoke for the entire Boscastle clan, did the accident of her own birth make her less able to be lax?

We retraced our steps along the terrace, her stick tapping. The curtains had not been drawn, and we could see the whole party in the bright drawing-room. Rosalind was listening to Lord Boscastle with an expression of pathetic, worshipping wonder.

“That young woman,” said Lady Boscastle, “is having a succès fou. Lewis, have you a penchant for extremely stupid women?”

“I am not overfond of intellectual women,” I said. “But I like them to be intelligent.”

“That is very sensible,” Lady Boscastle approved.

“By the way,” I said, “Rosalind is far from stupid.”

“Perhaps you are right,” she said indifferently. “She is a little effusive for my taste. Perhaps I am not fair.” She added, with a hint of sarcastic pleasure: “I shall be surprised if she catches your friend Roy. In spite of the bush telegraph.”

“So shall I.”

She glanced into the drawing-room. She did not need her lorgnette, her long-sighted blue eyes could see a clear tableau of Roy, Joan, and Lady Muriel: Lady Muriel had turned away, as if to hide a smile, Joan was beginning her lusty, delightful laugh, Roy was sitting solemn-faced between them.

“I shall also be surprised,” said Lady Boscastle, “if my niece Joan ever succeeds in catching him.”

“She’s very young,” I said.

“Do you think she realises that she is getting excessively fond of him?” Lady Boscastle asked. “Which is why she quarrels with him at sight. Young women with advanced ideas and strong characters often seem quite remarkably obtuse.”

“Under it all,” I said, “she’s got great capacity for love.”

I felt Lady Boscastle shrug her shoulders as we slowly made our way.

“She will never capture anyone like your friend Roy,” she said coolly. “Our dear Joan is rather — unadorned.”

She began to laugh, and turned up her face in the brilliant twilight. She looked puckish, monkey-like, satirical, enchanting.

“I am sure that her mother will never notice that Joan is getting fond of him,” said Lady Boscastle. “Muriel has never been known to notice anything of the kind in her life. It was sometimes convenient that she didn’t, my dear Lewis. Perhaps it was as well.”

In the small hours of the next morning, I was having my usual game of baccarat. I heard Rosalind’s dying fall behind me.

“I thought I should find you here. Shall I join in?”

But she did not know the rules. Sooner than explain them, it was easier for me to take her across to a roulette table.

“Don’t tell Roy that I’ve been here,” she said. “Or else I shall get into trouble.”

She gambled with the utmost method. She had decided to invest exactly ten pounds. If she made it twenty, she would stop: if she lost it, she would also stop. She sat there, looking modish, plaintive, and open-eyed: in fact, I thought, if it came to a deal she was more than a match for the violet-powdered, predatory faces round her. That night the numbers ran against her, and in half-an-hour she had lost her quota.

“That’s that,” said Rosalind. “Please can I have a drink?”

She liked money, but she threw away sums which to her were not negligible. In presents, in loans, in inventing and paying for treats, she was the most generous of women. The ten pounds had gone, and she did not give it a thought.

We sat in two of the big armchairs by the bar.

“Where’s Roy?” I asked.

“In bed, of course. And fast asleep. He sleeps like a child, bless him.”

“Always?”

“Oh, I’ve known him have a bout of insomnia. You knew that, did you? It was rather a bad one. But as a rule he just goes to sleep as soon as his head touches the pillow.” She smiled. “He’s rather a dear old thing.”

She looked with clear open eyes into mine. “Lewis,” she said, “is there any reason why I shouldn’t do?”

“What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean. Does he want more from a woman than I manage to give him? He seems to like me when we’re alone—” she gave her secret, prudish, reminiscent, amorous smile. “Is there anything more he wants?”

“You ought to know.”

“I don’t know,” she said, almost ill-temperedly. “I haven’t the faintest idea. I give him all the chances to speak I can think of, but he never takes them. He says nice things at the proper time, of course” — again she gave a smile — “but that is neither here nor there. He never tells me his plans. I never know where I am with him. He’s frightfully elusive. Sometimes I think I don’t matter to him a scrap.”

“You do, of course.”

“Do I? Are you sure?”

“You’ve given him some peace.”

“That’s not enough,” she said sharply. “I want something to take hold of. I want to be certain I mean something to him.”

She added: “Do you think he wants to marry me?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you think he ought to marry me?”

I hesitated, for a fraction of time. Very quickly Rosalind cried, not plaintively but with all her force: “Why shouldn’t I make him a passable wife?”

After that talk with Rosalind, I thought again that she was living with a stranger. She knew him with her hands and lips: she knew more than most young women about men in their dressing-gowns; yet she did not know, any more than his dinner partners that January in Monte Carlo, two things about him.

First, he was sometimes removed from her, removed from any human company, by an acute and paralysing fear. It was the fear that, unless he found his rest in time, he might be overcome by melancholy again. In the moment of grace when we walked by the Serpentine, that fear was far away — and so it was during most of the joyful holiday. But once or twice, as he talked, made love, and invented mischievous jokes, he felt what to another man would have been only an hour’s sadness or fatigue. Roy was at once gripped, forced to watch his own mood.

It was like someone who has had an attack of a disease; he feels what may be a first symptom, which another would not notice or would laugh away: he cannot ignore it, he can attend to nothing else, he can only think “ is it beginning again ?”