Mary Amberley took Mrs Foxe’s hand. ‘Such luck,’ she exclaimed breathlessly. Mrs Foxe was surprised by so much cordiality. Mary’s mother was her friend; but Mary had always held aloof. And anyhow, since her marriage she had moved in a world that Mrs Foxe did not know, and of which, on principle, she disapproved. ‘Such marvellous luck!’ the other repeated as she turned to Mr Beavis.
‘The luck is ours,’ he said gallantly. ‘You know my wife, don’t you? And the young stalwart?’ His eyes twinkled; the corners of his mouth, under the moustache, humorously twitched. He laid a hand on Anthony’s arm. ‘The young foundation-worthy?’
She smiled at Anthony. A strange smile, he noticed; a crooked smile of unparted lips that seemed as though secretly significant. ‘I haven’t seen you for years,’ she said. ‘Not since . . .’ Not since the first Mrs Beavis’s funeral, as a matter of fact. But one could hardly say so. ‘Not since you were so high!’ And lifting a gloved hand to the level of her eye, she measured, between the thumb and forefinger, a space of about an inch.
Anthony laughed nervously, intimidated, even while he admired, by so much prettiness and ease and smartness.
Mrs Amberley shook hands with Joan and Brian; then, turning back to Mrs Foxe, ‘I was feeling like Robinson Crusoe,’ she said, explaining that abnormal cordiality. ‘Marooned.’ She lingered with a comical insistence over the long syllable. ‘Absolutely marooooned. Monarch of all I surveyed.’ And while they slowly walked on across St Giles’s, she launched out into a complicated story about a stay in the Cotswolds; about an appointment to meet some friends on the way home, at Oxford, on the eighteenth; about her journey from Chipping Campden; about her punctual arrival at the meeting-place, her waiting, her growing impatience, her rage, and finally her discovery that she had come a day too early: it was the seventeenth. ‘Too typical of me.’
Everybody laughed a great deal. For the story was full of unexpected fantasies and extravagances; and it was told in a voice that modulated itself with an extraordinary subtlety to fit the words – a voice that knew when to hurry breathlessly and when to drawl, when to fade out into an inaudibility rich with unspoken implications.
Even Mrs Foxe, who didn’t particularly want to be amused – because of that divorce – found herself unable to resist the story.
For Mary Amberley, their laughter was like champagne; it warmed her, it sent a tingling exhilaration through her body. They were bores, of course; they were philistines. But the applause even of bores and philistines is still applause and intoxicating. Her eyes shone, her cheeks flushed. ‘Too hopelessly typical of me!’ she wailed, when their laughter had subsided; but the gesture of despairing self-disparagement was a caricature; she was really proud of her incompetence, regarded it as part of her feminine charm. ‘Well, anyhow,’ she concluded, ‘there I was – shipwrecked. All alone on a desert island.’
They walked for a moment in silence. The thought that she would have to be asked to lunch was in all their minds – a thought tinged in Mrs Foxe’s case with vexation, in Anthony’s with embarrassed desire. The lunch was being given in his rooms; as the host, he ought to ask her. And he wanted to ask her – violently wanted it. But what would the others say? Oughtn’t he somehow to consult them first? Mr Beavis solved the problem for him by making the suggestion on his own account.
‘I think’ – he hesitated; then, twinkling, ‘I think our festal “spread,”’ he went on, ‘will run to another guest, won’t it, Anthony?’
‘But I can’t impose myself,’ she protested, turning from the father to the son. He seemed a nice boy, she thought, sensitive and intelligent. Pleasant-looking too.
‘But I assure you . . .’ Anthony was earnestly and incoherently repeating, ‘I assure you . . .’
‘Well, if it’s really all right . . .’ She thanked him with a smile of sudden intimacy, almost of complicity – as though there were some bond between them, as though, of all the party, they two were the only ones who understood what was what.
After lunch, Joan had to be shown the sights of Oxford; and Mr Beavis had an appointment with a philological colleague in the Woodstock Road; and Pauline thought she would like to take things quietly till tea-time. Anthony was left to entertain Mary Amberley. The responsibility was deliciously alarming.
In the hansom that was taking them to Magdalen Bridge Mrs Amberley turned to him a face that was bright with sudden mischief.
‘Free at last,’ she said.
Anthony nodded at her and smiled back, understandingly, conspiratorially. ‘They were rather heavy,’ he said. ‘Perhaps I ought to apologize.’
‘I’ve often thought of founding a league for the abolition of families,’ she went on. ‘Parents ought never to be allowed to come near their children.’
‘Plato thought so too,’ he said, rather pedantically.
‘Yes, but he wanted children to be bullied by the state instead of by their fathers and mothers. I don’t want them to be bullied by anyone.’
He ventured a personal question. ‘Were you bullied?’ he asked.
Mary Amberley nodded. ‘Horribly. Few children have been more loved than I was. They fairly bludgeoned me with affection. Made me a mental cripple. It took me years to get over the deformity.’ There was a silence. Then, looking at him with an embarrassingly appraising glance, as though he were for sale, ‘Do you know,’ she said, ‘the last time I saw you was at your mother’s funeral.’
The subterranean association between this remark and what had gone before made him blush guiltily, as though at an impropriety in mixed company. ‘Yes, I remember,’ he mumbled, and was annoyed with himself for feeling so uncomfortably embarrassed, was at the same time rather ashamed that he had allowed even this remotely implied comment upon his mother to pass without some kind of protest, that he had felt so little desire to make a protest.
‘You were a horrible, squalid little boy then,’ she went on, still looking at him judicially. ‘How awful little boys always are! It seems incredible that they should ever turn into presentable human beings. And of course,’ she added, ‘a great many of them don’t. Dismal, don’t you find? – the way most people are so hideous and stupid, so utterly and abysmally boring!’
Making a violent effort of will, Anthony emerged from his embarrassment with a creditable dash. ‘I hope I’m not one of the majority?’ he said, lifting his eyes to hers.
Mrs Amberley shook her head, and with a serious matter-of-factness, ‘No,’ she answered. ‘I was thinking how successfully you’d escaped from the horrors of boyhood.’
He blushed again, this time with pleasure.
‘Let’s see, how old are you now?’ she asked.
‘Twenty – nearly twenty-one.’
‘And I shall be thirty this winter. Queer,’ she added, ‘how these things change their significance. When I saw you last, those nine years were a great gulf between us. Uncrossable, it seemed then. We belonged to different species. And yet here we are, sitting on the same side of the gulf as though it were the most natural thing in the world. Which indeed it is, now.’ She turned and smiled at him that secret and significant smile of unparted lips. Her dark eyes were full of dancing brightness. ‘Ah, there’s Magdalen,’ she went on, leaving him (to his great relief; for in his excited embarrassment he would not have known what to say) no time to comment on her words. ‘How dreary that late Gothic can be! So mean!
No wonder Gibbon didn’t think much of the Middle Ages!’ She was suddenly silent, remembering the occasion when her husband had made that remark about Gibbon. Only a month or two after their marriage. She had been shocked and astonished by his airy criticisms of things she had been brought up to regard as sacredly beyond judgment – shocked, but also thrilled, also delighted. For what fun to see the sacred things knocked about! And in those days Roger was still adorable. She sighed; then, with a touch of irritation, shook off the sentimental mood and went on talking about that odious architecture.
The cab drew up at the bridge; they dismounted and walked down to the boat-house. Lying back on the cushions of the punt, Mary Amberley was silent. Very slowly, Anthony poled his way upstream. The green world slid past her half-shut eyes. Green darkness of trees overarching the olive shadows and tawny-glaucous lights of water; and between the twilight stretches of green vaulting, the wide gold-green meadows, islanded with elms. And always the faint weedy smell of the river; and the air so soft and warm against the face that one was hardly aware any longer of the frontiers between self and not-self, but lay there, separated by no dividing surfaces, melting, drowsily melting into the circumambient summer.
Standing at the stern, Anthony could look down on her, as from a post of vantage. She lay there at his feet, limp and abandoned. Handling his long pole with an easy mastery of which he was proud, he felt, as he watched her, exultantly strong and superior. There was no gulf between them now. She was a woman, he a man. He lifted his trailing punt pole and swung it forward with a movement of easy grace, of unhurried and accomplished power. Thrust it
