‘But do you know exactly what you do like?’ asked Mr. Cardan.
Calamy shrugged his shoulders. ‘Not exactly,’ he said. ‘I suppose I should say reading, and satisfying my curiosity about things, and thinking. But about what, I don’t feel perfectly certain. I don’t like running after women, I don’t like wasting my time in futile social intercourse, or in the pursuit of what is technically known as pleasure. And yet for some reason and quite against my will I find myself passing the greater part of my time immersed in precisely these occupations. It’s an obscure kind of insanity.’
Young Lord Hovenden, who knew that he liked dancing and desired Irene Aldwinkle more than anything in the world, found all this a little incomprehensible. ‘I can’t see what vere is to prevent a man from doing what he wants to do. Except,’ he qualified, remembering the teaching of Mr. Falx, ‘economic necessity.’
‘And himself,’ added Mr. Cardan.
‘And what’s the most depressing of all,’ Calamy went on, without paying attention to the interruption, ‘is the feeling that one will go on like this for ever, in the teeth of every effort to stop. I sometimes wish I weren’t externally free. For then at any rate I should have something to curse at, for getting in my way, other than my own self. Yes, positively, I sometimes wish I were a navvy.’
‘You wouldn’t if you had ever been one,’ said Lord Hovenden, gravely and with a knowing air of speaking from personal experience.
Calamy laughed. ‘You’re perfectly right,’ he said, and drained his glass. ‘Shouldn’t we think of going to bed?’
CHAPTER VIII
To Irene fell the privilege every evening of brushing her aunt’s hair. For her these midnight moments were the most precious in the day. True, it was sometimes an agony for her to keep awake and the suppression of yawns was always painful; three years of incessant practice had not yet accustomed her to her Aunt Lilian’s late hours. Aunt Lilian used to twit her sometimes on her childish longing for sleep; at other times she used to insist, very solicitously, that Irene should rest after lunch and go to bed at ten. The teasing made Irene feel ashamed of her babyishness; the solicitude made her protest that she wasn’t a baby, that she was never tired and could easily do with five or six hours’ sleep a night. The important thing, she had found, was not to be seen yawning by Aunt Lilian and always to look fresh and lively. If Aunt Lilian noticed nothing there was neither teasing nor solicitude.
But in any case, every inconvenience was paid for a thousand times by the delights of these confidential conversations in front of the dressing-table mirror. While the young girl brushed and brushed away at the long tresses of pale golden-brown hair, Mrs. Aldwinkle, her eyes shut, and with an expression of beatitude on her face—for she took a cat’s pleasure in the brushing—would talk, spasmodically, in broken sentences, of the events of the day, of her guests, of the people they had met; or of her own past, of plans for the future—hers or Irene’s—of love. On all these subjects Mrs. Aldwinkle spoke intimately, confidentially, without reserve. Feeling that she was being treated by her Aunt Lilian as entirely grown-up and almost as an equal, Irene was proud and grateful. Without deliberately setting out to complete the subjugation of her niece, Mrs. Aldwinkle had discovered, in those midnight conversations, the most perfect means for achieving this end. If she talked like this to Irene, it was merely because she felt the need of talking intimately to some one, and because there was nobody else to talk to. Incidentally, however, she had contrived in the process to make the girl her slave. Made her Aunt Lilian’s confidante, invested, so to speak, with a title of honour, Irene felt a gratitude which strengthened her original childish attachment to her aunt.
Meanwhile, she had learned to talk with an airy familiarity of many things concerning which young girls are supposed to be ignorant, and of which, indeed, she herself knew, except intellectually and at second hand, nothing. She had learned to be knowing and worldly wise, in the void, so to speak, and with no personal knowledge of the world. Gravely, ingenuously, she would say things that could only be uttered out of the depths of the profoundest innocence, amplifying and making embarrassingly explicit in public things that Mrs. Aldwinkle had only fragmentarily hinted at in the confidential small hours. She regarded herself as immensely mature.
To-night Mrs. Aldwinkle was in a rather gloomy, complaining mood.
‘I’m getting old,’ she said, sighing, and opening her eyes for a moment to look at her image in the glass that confronted her. The image did not deny the statement. ‘And yet I always feel so young.’
‘That’s what really matters,’ Irene declared. ‘And besides, it’s nonsense; you’re not old; you don’t look old.’ In Irene’s eyes, moreover, she really didn’t look old.
‘People don’t like one any more when one gets old,’ Mrs. Aldwinkle continued. ‘Friends are terribly faithless. They fall away.’ She sighed. ‘When I think of all the friends . . .’ She left the sentence unfinished.
All her life long Mrs. Aldwinkle had had a peculiar genius for breaking with her friends and lovers. Mr. Cardan was almost the sole survivor from an earlier generation of friends. From all the rest she had parted, and she had parted with a light heart. It had seemed easy to her, when she was younger, to make new friends in place of the old. Potential friends, she thought, were to be found everywhere, every day. But now she was beginning to doubt whether the supply was, after all, so inexhaustible as she had once supposed. People of her own age, she found, were already set fast in the little social worlds they had made for themselves. And people of the younger generation seemed to find it hard to believe that she felt, in her heart, just as young as they did. They mostly treated her with the rather distant politeness which one accords to a stranger and an elder person.
‘I think people are horrid,’ said Irene, giving a particularly violent sweep with the hair-brush to emphasize her indignation.
‘You won’t be faithless?’ asked Mrs. Aldwinkle.
Irene bent over and, for all answer, kissed her on the forehead. Mrs. Aldwinkle opened her glittering blue eyes and looked up at her, smiling, as she did so, that siren smile that, for Irene, was still as fascinating as it had ever been.
‘If only everybody were like my little Irene!’ Mrs. Aldwinkle let her head fall forward and once more closed her eyes. There was a silence. ‘What are you sighing about in that heart-breaking way?’ she suddenly asked.
Irene’s blush ran tingling up into her temples and disappeared under the copper-coloured fringe. ‘Oh, nothing,’ she said, with an off-handedness that expressed the depth of her guilty embarrassment. That deep intake of breath, that brief and passionate expiry were not the components of a sigh. She had been yawning with her mouth shut.
But Mrs. Aldwinkle, with her bias towards the romantic, did not suspect the truth. ‘Nothing, indeed!’ she echoed incredulously. ‘Why, it was the noise of the wind blowing through the cracks of a broken heart. I never heard such a sigh.’ She looked at the reflection of Irene’s face in the mirror. ‘And you’re blushing like a peony. What is it?’
‘But it’s nothing, I tell you,’ Irene declared, speaking almost in a tone of irritation. She was annoyed with herself for having yawned so ineptly and blushed so pointlessly, rather than with her aunt. She immersed herself more than ever deeply in her brushing, hoping and praying that Mrs. Aldwinkle would drop the subject.
But Mrs. Aldwinkle was implacable in her tactlessness. ‘I never heard anything that sounded so love-sick,’ she said, smiling archly into the looking-glass. Mrs. Aldwinkle’s humorous sallies had a way of falling ponderously, like bludgeon strokes, on the objects of her raillery. One never knew, when she was being sprightly, whether to feel sorrier for the victim or for Mrs. Aldwinkle herself. For though the victim might get hard knocks, the spectacle of Mrs. Aldwinkle laboriously exerting herself to deliver them
