Charles Snow - The Light and the Dark

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.”

“Are you trying to comfort me?”

She burst out: “I wonder if it’s true. I don’t know. I don’t know anything now. I’ve given up trying to understand.”

I put my arm round her, and at the touch she began to speak with intense emotion.

“I can’t give him up,” she said. “Sometimes I think I only exist so far as I exist in his mind. If he doesn’t think of me, then I fall to pieces. There’s nothing of me any more.”

“Would it be better,” I said, “if he went away?”

“No,” she cried, in an access of fear. “You’re to tell him nothing. You’re not to tell him to go. He must stay here. My mother needs him. You know how much she needs him.”

It was true, but it was a pretext by which Joan saved her pride. For still she could not bear to let him out of her sight.

Perhaps she knew that she had given herself away, for suddenly her tone changed. She became angry with a violence that I could feel shaking her body.

“He’ll stay because she needs him,” she said with ferocity. “He’ll consider anything she wants. He’s nice and considerate with her. So he is with everyone — except me. He’s treated me abominably. He’s behaved like a cad. He’s treated me worse than anyone I could have picked up off the streets. He’s wonderful with everyone — and he’s treated me like a cad.”

She was trembling, and her voice shook.

“I don’t know how I stood it,” she cried. “I asked less than anyone in the world would have asked. And all I get is this.”

Then she caught my hand. The anger left her as quickly as it had risen. She had flared from hunger into ferocity, and now both fell away from her, and her tone was deep, tender and strong.

“You know, Lewis,” she said, “I can’t think of him like that. It’s perfectly true, he’s treated me abominably, yet I can’t help thinking that he’s really good. I see him with other people, and I think I am right to love him. I know he’s done wicked things. I know he’s done wicked things to me. But they seem someone else’s fault.”

The sun had dipped now to the edge of the sea. Her eyes glistened in the radiance; for the first time that night, they were filmed with tears. Her voice was even.

“I wish I could believe,” she said, “that he’ll be better off without me. I might be able to console myself if I believed it. But I don’t. How does he expect to manage? I’m sure he’s unhappier than any human soul. I can look after him. How does he expect to manage, if he throws it away?”

She cried out: “I don’t think he knows what will become of him.”

After Boscastle I saw little of Roy for months. He altered his plans, and returned to Germany for the summer and autumn; I heard rumours that he was behaving more wildly than ever in his life, but the difference between us was at its deepest. We met one day in September, when he flew back at the time of Munich. It was a strange and painful afternoon. We knew each other so well; at a glance we knew what the other was feeling; though we were on opposite sides, we were incomparably closer than with an ally. Yet our words were limp, and once or twice a harsh note sounded.