XIV
Hugo asked me to be kind to Sophia. It had not occurred to me that I was not.
He said:
‘She likes you so much, and you used to like her.’
He had come to dinner at Campden Hill. I could see that he was excited and happy, he talked so much at dinner, and his eyes shone. Grandmother noticed it too, for I saw her watching him, and she asked him, when the coffee came, what he had been doing that day.
He said:
‘I went for a walk with Sophia Watson in Richmond Park.’
Grandmother said:
‘Her father’s name was Lane Watson.’
‘Yes, I know, but she thinks that sounds pretentious. She says their name was really only Watson to begin with. She hates fuss.’
‘It is generally simpler to have the same name as one’s parents until one is married,’
‘I don’t think Sophia’s parents can be very nice people. They have not been kind to her.’
‘Ah,’ said Grandmother slowly. ‘That is a different matter.’
‘The trees were beautiful in Richmond Park, so bright and red and gold. I suppose they have more colour when the summer has been hot. The leaves were coming down all round us, like rain, in the wind. It was very windy.’
Grandmother said:
‘Oh.’
She looked at Hugo over her spectacles, and Hugo flushed.
‘I wish you could have been there,’ he said rather lamely. ‘It was awfully nice.’
Grandmother laughed; she said:
‘You had better bring the young woman to see me, Hugo, I liked her much better than the other one—Miss . . . Connell, wasn’t it, with the fair hair, but—take your time.’
Hugo murmured something inarticulate; he was peeling a pear and I could not see his face, but I knew he was saying it wasn’t like that at all.
Coffee came in, and after the coffee grandmother went upstairs. She had not looked at me at all, and I was glad.
We went into the drawing-room, Hugo and I, and sat down by the fire. At least I sat down and Hugo stood up with his back to the fire. He took a cigarette from the jade box on the chimney-piece, and then he began to talk. The room was rather dark, for Grandmother would not have electric light, and there was only one lamp on the table behind.
He said:
‘Aunt Gerry is a dear, I am awfully fond of her. But she does get the wrong end of the stick sometimes. I suppose in her generation it would have been like that.’
I said:
‘Yes, I suppose so.’
Hugo looked down at me and then away.
‘It isn’t a question of “taking time” at all, and of course Sophia is quite different from Paulina. One couldn’t think of them in the same sort of way at all.’
I said:
‘No, they aren’t at all alike.’
My cigarette had gone out. I asked Hugo for the matches. He gave them to me and went on:
He said:
‘I liked just looking at Paulina. Didn’t you? She was beautiful to look at, and she did speak her lines awfully well too, but of course—well, she hadn’t got a mind like Sophia. Sophia is so frightfully interesting. It is like exploring in an unknown sea. . . .’ He laughed, a little apologetically. ‘You never know what Sophia will think or feel about a thing, but it is always real, what she thinks or feels.’
I said:
‘Yes, I think it is,’ and he looked pleased, ‘Of course you were interested in her at school,’ he said. ‘I remember that—you used to talk to me about her a lot, and I think you really described her rather well. But I don’t know how it was—she didn’t interest me a bit that first time I saw her, when you brought her to Yearsly.’
I said:
‘No, I was disappointed then that neither you nor Guy seemed to care for her much.’
‘Guy doesn’t appreciate her now, and I can understand that. She is not at her best with him. She is shy, and he doesn’t get any further.’
I said nothing, and he went on.
‘I don’t think people realize how shy she is. They think she is disagreeable and ungracious sometimes, and they don’t understand that she is just frightened of them. Do you know, Helen,’ he looked straight at me, and gave a little laugh, ‘she is even afraid of you! She admires you awfully, and would like you to like her, but she thinks you don’t. I told her, of course, that that was nonsense—that I was sure you liked her, and I told her that you used to talk a lot about her when you were at school.’
‘What did she say?’
‘Oh, she said that that was quite different. “People change and outgrow each other,” she said, and then she said that even then she had cared for you much more than you cared for her. She thinks you find her dull and dowdy. You do like her, don’t you, Helen?’
He asked it almost wistfully, and suddenly I wanted to cry. If I could have spoken quite frankly about Sophia, as though she did not affect me personally at all, it would have been all different; if I could have asked him straight out what he felt about her; if we could have talked to each other simply and without reserves, as we used to once, I think our lives might have been very different afterwards; but we couldn’t. He was trying to, I think, but I couldn’t respond. I was fighting against something in myself, and it was almost as though I was fighting against him. I did not want him to know my thoughts and my feelings as he used to know them; and I could not talk to him about Sophia.
I said:
‘Yes, I do like her, quite, but we haven’t an awful lot in common. I don’t think I am intellectual enough for her.’
Hugo ignored that. He said:
‘I should like you to be kind to her, Mollie is awfully kind to her, and she is very grateful to Mollie, but’—and he paused a moment—‘Mollie isn’t you.’
‘I don’t see what I can do for her that you and Mollie can’t do much better. What do you want me to do?’ Hugo fidgeted with the jade box on the chimney-piece.
‘Oh, I don’t know exactly—anything just to show her you like her. She minds about her clothes. Couldn’t you advise her about her clothes? She admires yours so much.’
And then I was angry. I wanted to say, ‘I am damned if I will.’ But I only did say, ‘I tried once to teach her to dance. It was no good.’ That was all I said, but Hugo knew I was angry. I could see that from the way he looked at me, and when he looked at me like that it was harder still not to cry. He looked hurt and puzzled, like a child who is spoken to crossly and doesn’t know what it has done wrong.
I was ashamed of myself again, and very unhappy.