She Came Back

CHAPTER 15

Pelham Trent was, as Mr. Codrington had called him, a very pleasant fellow. Lyndall Armitage certainly found him so. He dropped in as often as he could at Lilla Jocelyn’s flat, and Lilla was delighted to see him come. As she said to Milly Armitage, “They are just friends. At least, that’s all it is with her-I’m not so sure about him. But it’s exactly what she wants just now-someone to take her out and make her feel she matters.”

Lyn went out with Pelham Trent. She found him a most agreeable companion and the best of hosts. It was better than sitting at home and feeling as if your world had come to an end. When you felt like that, the thing to do was to get into somebody else’s world as quickly as you could. It was her world which had crashed-hers and Philip’s. Perhaps Anne’s too. But Pelham Trent’s world kept its steady orbit. It was a safe, cheerful world in which you could laugh and have a good time-dance, see a film, a play, or a cabaret, and put off for as long as possible the return to the cold, shattered place where your own warm world had been.

They did not always go out. Sometimes they stayed in Lilla’s charming drawing-room and talked. Sometimes he played to them. Those rather square hands of his with the strong, blunt fingers were quite extraordinarily agile on the keys of the Steinway baby grand. He would sit there playing one thing after another whilst the two girls listened. When the time came to say good-night he would hold Lyndall’s hand for a moment and say, “Did you like it?” Sometimes she would say, “Yes,” and sometimes she would only look, because when she felt deeply she never found it at all easy to translate her feelings into words. Except with Philip, who nearly always knew what she was thinking, and so, because no words were needed, they came quite easily.

Music let her into a world which was neither hers nor Pelham Trent’s, though his playing was the gate through which she entered it. It was a world where feeling and emotion were sublimated until they possessed nothing except beauty, where sorrow spent itself in music and loss was solaced. She came back from this world rested and refreshed.

After all Milly Armitage did not stay on at Jocelyn’s Holt. It was not in her to refuse what Philip asked, but she had never responded to any of her sister-in-law Cotty Armitage’s not infrequent appeals with more alacrity. Cotty enjoyed poor health. For twenty-five years or so she had had recurring attacks to which no doctor had ever been able to give a name. They involved the maximum of trouble to her family with the minimum of discomfort to herself. She had worn a husband into his grave, two daughters into matrimony, and the third to the brink of a breakdown. It was when Olive appeared likely to go over this brink that Cotty took up pen and paper and invited her dearest Milly to visit them. And Milly, incurably soft-hearted, invariably went.

“Of course what she really wants is for someone to pour a hogshead of cold water over her.”

“Then why don’t you?” said Lilla, with whom she was lunching on her way through London.

“Couldn’t lift it, my dear. But someone ought to. Every time I go there I make up my mind to tell her she’s a selfish slave-driver, and that Olive is simply going down the drain, but I don’t do it.”

“Why don’t you?”

“Olive wouldn’t thank me, for one thing. That’s the awful part of that kind of slave-driving-in the worst cases the victim doesn’t even want to be free. Olive’s like that. You know, Lyndall only just got away in time. She was two years with Cotty after her father and mother died. They were killed together in a motor accident when she was nine and it nearly did her in. She’s sensitive, you know-no armour-plating. Things aren’t awfully easy for people like that. You’re an angel to have her, Lilla.”

“I love having her, Aunt Milly.”

Milly Armitage crumbled her bread in a wasteful manner. Lord Woolton would not have approved, nor would Milly herself if she had noticed what she was doing, but she did not. She wanted to say something to Lilla, but she didn’t know how to set about it. She could be warm, generous, and endlessly kind, but she couldn’t be tactful. She sat there in her baggy mustard tweeds with her hair rather wild and her hat at a rollicking angle and crumbled her bread.

Lilla, in a yellow jumper and a short brown skirt, had that air of having just come out of a bandbox which seems to be the birthright of American women. Her dark curls shone. Everything about her was just right both for herself and the occasion. There was a perfect ordered elegance which appeared as natural as it is in a hummingbird or a flower. Through it all, like the scent of the flower and the song of the bird, there came that friendly warmth which was all her own. She laughed a little now.

“Why don’t you just say it, Aunt Milly, without bothering how?”

Milly Armitage’s frown relaxed. A wide rueful smile showed her excellent teeth.

“I might as well, mightn’t I? I can’t see any good in beating about the bush myself, but people seem to expect it somehow. My mother always said I just blurted things out, and so I do. If they’re pleasant, what’s the good of wrapping them up? And if they’re not, well, it’s a good thing to get them off your chest and out of the way. So there it is-Philip and Anne are coming up to town. It’s too much for him going up and down every day. He said so at dinner one evening, and Anne went up to town next day and took a flat. If you ask me, that wasn’t at all what he meant, but he couldn’t very well say anything. She did it in the most tactful way of course. Not being built that way myself, I don’t awfully admire people being tactful-there’s something soapy about it. You know- voice well kept down-gentle-hesitating. She hoped he’d be pleased. She’d been thinking what a bore that going up and down would be in the winter, and when she heard of this flat it seemed too good a chance to lose. They wouldn’t hold it open-someone else was after it-all that kind of thing.” She screwed up her face in an apologetic way. “There-I’ve no business to talk about her like that, have I? But I never did like her, and I never shall.”

Lilla sat with her chin in her hand looking across the table, her puzzled brown eyes just touched with a smile.

“Why don’t you like her, Aunt Milly?”

“I don’t know-I just don’t. She’s a disaster for Philip- she always was-but they might have shaken down together if there hadn’t been this break. But when a man has just begun to realize that he’s made the wrong marriage, and then for three and a half years he thinks he’s got free of it, what do you imagine he’s going to feel like when he finds he’s up to his neck in it again. Even without his having got so fond of Lyn.”

“Is he fond of Lyn?” The brown eyes were very deeply troubled.

Milly Armitage nodded.

“I suppose that’s one of the things I oughtn’t to say. But it’s true. And there wasn’t anything wrong about it until Anne turned up. Lyn is just right for him, and he is just right for her. What do you suppose he is feeling like? I tell you I’m glad to be getting away to Cotty, and I can’t put it stronger than that. You see, the worst part of it is that they’re both trying quite desperately hard-I’ve never seen people trying harder. Anne is trying to get him back by being all the things she was never meant to be. It gives me pins and needles all over to watch her being gentle, and considerate, and tactful, and Philip being controlled and polite. He feels he’s got to make up for not having recognized her at first, but it’s all against the grain. If they’d snap at each other, or have a good red-hot, tearing row, it would be a relief-but they just go on trying.”

“It sounds horrid,” said Lilla in a distressed voice.

Milly Armitage made the face which she had been forbidden to make when she was ten years old. It made her look quite extraordinarily like a frog, and conveyed better than any number of words the discomfort of the Jocelyn ménage. Then she said,

“It’s going to be very hard on Lyn having them in town. She is devoted to Anne-at least she was. I don’t know how much of it’s left now, but she’ll think she ought to be, and it will tear her to pieces. They’re bound to meet. I don’t think Anne knows anything-I don’t think it would occur to her. She thinks about Lyn as she was before the war-just a little school-girl who had a crush on her. And Lyn won’t give anything away. She’ll make herself go and see Anne and be friends with her because she’ll think that’s the right thing to do, and if she feels a thing is right she’ll do it. She’s got no armour-she’ll get horribly hurt. And I can’t bear her to be hurt-that’s why I’m saying all this.”

“Yes?”

Milly Armitage put out her hand impulsively.

“That’s why I was so glad to hear about Pelham Trent. I don’t mean that I want anything serious to come of it-he’s a bit old for her.”

“He doesn’t seem old.”

“About thirty-seven, I should say. But that doesn’t matter. It’s a perfect godsend to have someone to admire her, to take her about, to take up her time. I don’t suppose anything will come of it, but she likes him, and he’ll help to tide her over a bit of bad going.”

The conversation ended as it had begun, with Pelham Trent.