Adrienne Toner: A Novel

by Anne Douglas Sedgwick

And now Lydia. There was no use in thinking about it. The plunge must be taken.

“My dear Lydia,” he wrote,—“I have fallen in love with Adrienne Toner. I feel that with such a friend as you it’s better to begin with the bomb-shell. She doesn’t know it, and if we are here in this Lyons hotel together, it’s only, she imagines, because she wishes to set Barney free and that I’ve undertaken, for her sake and for Barney’s, a repugnant task. It is a repugnant task, in spite of what it may mean to me of happiness. I hate it for her, and for Barney and for myself. But since she was determined on it and since, if it wasn’t I it was to be another friend, and since I have fallen in love with her, I saw that it was only decent that the co-respondent in the case should be the man who married her afterwards. For I hope to become her husband, and I haven’t one jot of ground for my hope. We are studying Dante together, and she shows me the sights of Lyons. She is just the same. Yet completely altered.

“I don’t know whether you’ll feel you can ever see me again, with or without her. I don’t want to cast myself too heavily on your compassion, so I’ll only remind you that even if I return to England alone I shall probably have to lose Nancy and Barney and that you will be my only refuge. It will be the culmination of my misfortunes if I have to lose you.

“Dear Lydia, I am always your devoted

“Roger”

But he hadn’t lost her. He knew he hadn’t lost her; in any case. And the taste of what he did was sharp and bitter to him, for she was generous and loyal and he had cut off her very limbs. When he had addressed and stamped the letters he went downstairs, and, for the sense of greater finality, carried them to the post instead of dropping them into the hotel-box.

He had almost the sense of disembodiment as he returned to the empty and dismantled room. He seemed to have become a mere consciousness suspended between two states of being. The past was gone. He had dropped it into the post-box. And he saw no future. He felt, for the moment, no hopes. At the moment it seemed absurd to think that Adrienne could ever love him. He tried to picture Coldbrooks and Somer’s Place when the bomb-shell struck them. Would Barney show Nancy the letter? Nancy would be pale, aghast, silent. Barney would have to wait for days, perhaps, before saying to her: “But, after all, it’s for their sakes, too, Nancy dear. See what Roger says.” Mrs. Averil would cast up her hands and cry “That woman!”—but, perhaps, with as much admiration as repudiation, and Meg, if she were summoned to the scene of confusion, would say, “So she’s got hold of Roger, too.” Funnily enough it was the dear March Hare, he felt sure, who would be the first one to stretch out a hand towards the tarnished freedom. “After all, you know,” he could hear her murmuring, “it would be much nicer for Barney and Nancy to be married, wouldn’t it? And Adrienne wasn’t a Christian, you know, so probably the first marriage doesn’t really count. We mustn’t be conventional, Monica.” Yes, perhaps it would go like that at Coldbrooks. But at Somer’s Place Lydia would sit among her fans and glass and wish that they had never seen Adrienne Toner.

He paced up and down before the windows and he had never been so lonely in his life. He was so lonely that he became aware at last that his mere negative state was passing into a positive and that grief at the severance of old ties had become fear of losing Adrienne. The fear and the loneliness seemed actualized when, at five, the waiter appeared bearing the tea-tray on his shoulder. He had never had tea alone before in this strange, foreign room. Adrienne always made a complicated and charming ritual of the occasion, boiling the water on their own little spirit-kettle and measuring the tea from her own caddy—the very same kettle and caddy, she told him, that had accompanied herself and her mother on all their travels. And to see the cups and bread and butter and not to have her there, added a poignant taste of abandonment to his loneliness.

She kept the kettle in her room and when the boy was gone he softly opened the door and went in. It would keep his heart up to have the water boiling in readiness for her arrival. He recognized, as he stood, then, and looked about him, that his instinct had also been that of taking refuge. In her room he could more closely recover the sense of her presence.