# After Noon (Ertz)/Chapter 9

CHARLES watched with a great interest and a little alarm—although he was so sure of his own mind—the quiet and effortless way in which Mrs. Chalmers became one of their small circle. This was due, to a very great extent, to Venetia's appropriation of her. She admired the older woman extravagantly, saw her whenever she had a free afternoon, and urged her to come and dine as often as she found herself with a lonely evening in prospect. It presently became a regular thing for Lydia to dine in Eaton Gardens once a week—an event to which Charles looked forward with a pleasure that was all the keener for having in it a little spice of danger.
She conquered, Charles decided, by comprehending. He never found it necessary to explain anything to her, although sometimes, for the sake of a little argument, she pretended obtuseness. She seemed to know him from the first, as she knew Caroline and Venetia, and Phil Robinson and Captain Cary.
This agreeable faculty came, Charles knew, ​from her lonely and contemplative life, and from her sadness. She had suffered, she had felt herself imprisoned, and she had found escape in her own mind. And to Charles this fluidity of thought and of comprehension was her greatest charm, greater, even, than the charm of her person, which was undeniable.
There was no aspect of human life that he considered unfit for or unworthy of contemplation, and he began to contemplate that side of Lydia's existence that was not for the public gaze.
Once, for instance, when he was calling on her with Venetia, the door into her bedroom had been left open and he had been given a glimpse of her toilet table, with a bowl of mauve violas on it, and a row of shining bottles and neatly-placed brushes. The sight released his imagination, and he speculated about her habits and ways and about her private life. He imagined she was the sort of woman who put everything away in tissue paper; that she took great care of her clothes; that she was very fastidious about her underclothes; that she detested disorder; that she slept quietly and lightly and woke a little tired and languid; that she preferred to be alone, if possible, until ten, or perhaps eleven, but that she could smile and talk—she had had twelve years of that—over the morning coffee-pot if she must. He thought she kept some choice book of poems ​by her bed, and perhaps learnt one by heart occasionally; and he felt sure that servants invariably liked her.
He hoped he put a proper value on these things. If she took exquisite care of her person and of her clothes it was because she lacked neither the necessary time nor the money. He did not need Caroline to point this out to him. But there was something in her own attitude toward them that pleased him. She, too, put a proper value on them. And she could not quite rid herself of the idea that they were temporary and transient. Edward's success had been long in coming. It had come, in fact, only a year or two before his death.
"I'm really living for almost nothing," she told Charles. "I've let my flat in New York, and I'm getting such a good rent for it that I can well afford to have these rooms here. So I don't feel I'm being extravagant."
Also it was the first time in her life—since she had been grown up—that she hadn't kept house.
"I did the housekeeping at home before I married," she explained, "because my mother had so many other things to do—club meetings and committees. And after I married I never did anything else. Even in the summer we always took furnished houses in the country. So you can imagine what a treat this is to me."
​Charles, Venetia, and Captain Carey dined with her more than once. One night she asked Caroline and Phil Robinson too, but Caroline said that such places as the Berkeley were not for them, and as it was a warm evening in the beginning of May, she and Phil dined in Soho instead and took the bus and rode to Kew and back.
Charles noticed that Venetia was very unlike herself that evening. The stings she darted at Clive had no compliments in their tails. Nor would she dance very much with him. He danced less with her than with Lydia, who was a little diffident about it, but frankly enjoyed it when she found herself in such capable hands. Venetia, when she did dance, was lovely to watch. Her thin, fluttering skirts drifted about her long legs in the most delightful way. She kept her small dark head close to Clive's, about an inch away, but she seemed to take little pleasure in being with him. There was no light in her eyes, no animation in her face.
"They don't seem very happy to-night," Lydia remarked to Charles.
"Venetia's in one of her moods," he answered. "She's probably preferring Frank Stoddard at the moment. She saw him yesterday, I know."
"I think they're both very unhappy," said Lydia.
​"Do you know of any reason why they should be?" Charles asked her quickly.
She shook her head. "Venetia doesn't confide in me." She added: "Look, she's smiling at him now. That's better."
She was. She was looking up at him and smiling, but it was a smile that was infinitely sad. It was for a moment only, but as it passed both Charles and Lydia saw his arm tighten round her suddenly. At that moment there was a sort of ferocity in his face, and a sort of anguish. It looked harder and more mature. Whatever emotions were possessing them, their dancing remained unchanged and uninterrupted. The floor was not crowded, and they moved among the other dancers with smooth and even rhythm.
"If I were ten years younger," said Lydia, "and thought she didn't want him . . ."
"Come, come," said Charles, "this is a shameful exhibition of weakness on your part. You're succumbing to his physical charms in a way that astounds and shocks me."
"I said if I were ten years younger," she repeated. "Besides, it isn't only his physical charms. He's such a darling, and he has a brain." She leaned toward him. "You would let Venetia marry him if she wanted to, wouldn't you?"
"No," answered Charles definitely. "I'm hanged if I would. I've been too weak about ​Caroline. I'm going to make a stand now. If he comes to me with any such preposterous suggestion, I shall tell him to come back in ten years. I imagine he's only got his pay, and besides he's going out to India soon, thank God. It's the place for all presumptuous young men who wish to marry my daughters." He added: "Is it my mission in life to supply young men with wives? It is not."
"Life's too extraordinary," she said suddenly. "If it hadn't been for that train journey down to Devonshire, there wouldn't have been a Venetia."
"How do you know all this?" he demanded.
"Venetia told me, of course."
"I'll thank her not to discuss my private affairs," he said, but his indignation made no impression on Lydia. She didn't believe in it.
"It's her private affair too," she said. "Why shouldn't she talk about her mother?"
"She wasn't her mother then."
She laughed. "How absurd! Besides, I was very much interested."
"Other people's matrimonial troubles are always diverting," he said. "But I would have told you myself if I thought you'd care to hear."
"Please don't think I've been prying," she said quietly. "Venetia came here to tea, and she told me of her own accord."
"My dear Mrs. Chalmers . . ." cried Charles.
​"I feel," she said, "a little as I felt that first day when I rang you up and found you'd never heard of me."
"Well, you were quite wrong, both times. Don't let us have any nonsense of that sort. My only grievance is that you didn't feel enough interest in me to ask me yourself."
"But I did want to ask," she said, meeting his eyes. "Mr. Hinkson told me almost nothing, and you seem to dislike talking about yourself. Of course I wanted to ask. Or rather I wanted you to tell me without my asking."
It was at such moments as this, he thought, that a man said more than he intended to say. He had just said rather more. He had tried to keep their friendship on a purely friendly footing, and now something else was obtruding itself as he had feared it might.
He had no vanity. He didn't suppose for an instant that Lydia was falling in love with him, but he feared that they might, if they continued in this pleasantly intimate way, find themselves in a position that demanded the consideration, at least, of that thing he hated and dreaded—marriage. He wanted to avoid even so much as a breath of it if he could. What was passing in her mind he had, of course, no idea. At times he thought he merely amused her; at other times he imagined that in her thoughts she had already ​married him. He understood the treacherous and volatile nature of thought, and this did not alarm him. What was important was that he should give that thought no basis for existing. Likewise in his own mind he had frequently married Mrs. Chalmers, and while he found certain aspects of this not unpleasing, he recoiled at the idea of tying, once again, that dreaded knot. He had a nightmare horror of it. The noose dangled before him. He was under no obligation whatever to put his head into it, and it occupied, in space, an infinitesimal place. And yet it fascinated him. He found his eyes straying toward it. He had to remind himself that his feet were free to take him from it in any direction that he pleased at any moment.
He saw that he might never have a better opportunity for explaining his position and his point of view.
"Well, now that you've heard," he said, "what my marriage was like and how it ended, you'll understand, perhaps, why I feel as I do about matrimony, and why I'm determined that it shall never happen to me again."
She was looking down, playing with the fastening of her beaded bag, but she raised her eyes as he finished speaking, and smiled, and her little arched eyebrows, more darkly coloured than her ​hair, moved upward as she looked at him, giving her face a look of amused incredulity.
"At least I can understand," she answered, "what a frightful shock the ending of that marriage must have been to you. You were so ridiculously young. You were only a boy."
"I was a man," he said, "by the time I'd finished paying the lawyers' fees. The divorce cost me four hundred pounds, and it took me eight years to pay it off. The wedding—we were married in a little Devonshire church—took about eight minutes. Eight minutes," he repeated.
"Oh, well," she returned, "it takes a whole lifetime to live, remember, and sometimes only one little minute to die."
Then she laid her hand, her long, well-cared-for fingers extended, on the table near him, and she looked directly into his eyes with a look that was purposeful and steady.
"Let's be quite frank with each other," she said. "You and I both know that between two people like ourselves, situated as we are, there are always thoughts about love—speculative thoughts—and probably about marriage. If we examine ourselves at all we must be conscious of them. They will come whether we want them to or not. So I want to say this. I should like to be able to talk quite freely with you without thinking that you're wondering, as you probably are wonder​ing, if I'm speaking with an ulterior motive. Once and for all, I'm not speaking with an ulterior motive. If I disagree with you on the subject of your marriage, and about marriage in general, it's not because I'm hoping to marry you myself. Let's be quite clear about that. I like you, and I simply adore Venetia, and I'm interested in Caroline. There aren't an awful lot of people who do interest me very much, though I try to make myself believe there are, because I feel I ought to. But with you and your little family, it's different. I just am interested. I'm putting my cards on the table, you see. I feel, all the time, that you're thinking you ought to be careful and wary, men and women—especially women—being what they mostly are. But I assure you, I promise you, that with me you need never be."
"Lydia!" cried Charles, instantaneously flattered, moved and piqued, "I thought you an adorable creature when I first met you. Now I'm certain that you are." He put his hand over hers quickly and pressed it. "You've made things a thousand times easier and pleasanter—well, easier, anyhow—by your frankness."
"Thank goodness for that," she said.
"After this, please understand that any remarks I make about women do not include you. You're not women, any more than Venetia and Caroline are. As for marriage, we'll fight it to​gether to the last ditch. You probably think exactly as I do, only you won't admit it because you don't think such views becoming in one so lovely, and I dare say you're right."
"I don't think as you do at all," she protested.
"Well, so much the better. I shall have the fun of convincing you. By the way, it may not have escaped your notice that I called you Lydia a minute ago."
"I always have the greatest difficulty in calling you Mr. Lester," she said, smiling.
"Charles to you, then," he said, with that backward movement of the head she found so amusing. Then he turned on her an intense and inquiring gaze. "But look here. You said just now"—he hesitated—"you said you had no desire to marry me yourself. That I can and do believe absolutely. The contrary would lead me to doubt your sanity. Well, perhaps it's only that I have a morbid desire to see myself in someone else's eyes for once, but I'd like immensely to know why? Let's hear your reasons. You're a woman who has reasons, thank God. It would interest me enormously to hear them."
She said, laughing and colouring a little, "It's quite true that I have reasons, but you'd only try to prove to me that they were wrong ones."
"Now there you're very much mistaken," he ​answered. "I'm asking you because I really want to know."
"Well, then, it's just morbid curiosity," she said. "You can't possibly really want to know. The truth would only hurt you, and you'll get nothing else from me, I warn you."
Charles was silent for a moment.
"I don't really want to know, then," he said finally. "Anyhow," he added, with exaggerated indifference, "I don't believe in your reasons. Man has reached his quintessence in me. I don't have to prove it. I admit it. Here come the others."
The music had stopped, and Venetia and Clive returned to the table. Venetia looked pale and tired.
"Father," she said, putting her arm through his as she sat down, "I think we ought to go home. It's after twelve."
Lydia protested that it was early to talk of going.
"You've been an angel to give us such a delightful evening," Venetia told her, "and I've loved it, but I really am very tired."
"Bed," said Charles firmly.
Captain Cary turned to Lydia.
"Are you tired, too, Mrs. Chalmers? Or would you stay and dance a little longer? We'll have some supper if you will."
​"Yes, do stay with Clive," Venetia said. "I don't see why everyone should go home because I'm sleepy."
She tried to persuade Charles to stay too, but he wouldn't. He said good-night, thanked Lydia, and put Venetia into a taxi. She pretended to go to sleep with her face against his coat-sleeve, but he wasn't deceived. He could almost feel her thinking. He knew that she was not in her usual spirits, but concluded she had had some little difference with Clive. He thought it best not to question her. As they neared the house she raised her head and spoke.
"Has Caroline settled on a day yet?"
"Yes. May the eighteenth," he answered.
"It's like her to get married in May. She wants to show she takes no interest in pagan superstitions. Quite right, too. Can you bear the thought of living alone with just me, father?"
"My darling," he exclaimed, "what I can't bear is the thought of living without you."
She pressed his arm with sudden violence. "You'll never have to."
"I distrust the word 'never,'" he said.
"Well, anyhow, not for ages and years. You needn't think about it."
"I won't think about it until I'm obliged to," he said. "That would be worse than morbid. It would be ghoulish."