3
“The American” had left her all his money, and Virginia was thus a very rich woman, for her mother, a Colter from Yorkshire, had already left her a considerable income. (Lady Carnal had adored her only child. As Virginia, before her first marriage, would come in late from a party, her mother would dart out at her from her bedroom and peck at her. Virginia hated being pecked at, especially at that time of night, and her face was a mask. “Pouf! you’ve been drinking!” would cry Lady Carnal in desperation, and dart back into her bedroom again.) A year after the American’s death Virginia married George Tarlyon—George Almeric St. George, sixth Viscount Tarlyon. It was commonly admitted that you couldn’t do better than marry George Tarlyon, for he was the perfect thing of his kind. The war lost him nothing, had gained him everything in an extraordinary degree—Major the Viscount Tarlyon, D.S.O., M.C., etc. Foreign countries contributed magnificently to the et ceteras, while Virginia contributed herself and her fortune; for George Tarlyon, at thirty-four, had spent everything he had ever had, except his place in Galway, which was as unsaleable as it was uninhabitable—by him, anyway. It was said to be a love-match. They had been seen together now and then during Hector Sardon’s last year, and after his death they were always together. Natural enough that she should try to forget that unpleasantness in such gay and gallant and clean companionship. But their marriage had not been thought quite inevitable, for nothing was quite inevitable in dealing with people like Virginia and George Almeric St. George—especially George Almeric St. George. Virginia, for all her wits and beauty, might not hold Lord Tarlyon, poor though he was. It was commonly said, and easily believed, that many women had loved him.
They were married in 1916. And there they were, Lord and Lady Tarlyon, a notable couple everywhere. The only thing George Tarlyon had ever lacked was money, and now he had as much as he wanted, for Virginia was indifferent about money, she was generous. They spent magnificently during his “leaves.” And their lives were open for the world to see, a straight pair of English people: a gallant pair of the same colour, the same quality, and the same hazardous blue eyes. Tarlyon’s eyes were of a slightly frozen blue, a little mocking, very charming. He was an extraordinarily fair man: weathered brick-dust face generally smiling, just a little: an easy man to get on with, a very easy man. A remarkably amusing man, Tarlyon. It was said that he and Virginia were very good companions for each other.
And pleasant it was to see them together, fair to fair, height to height, English to English, most perfectly and elegantly paired. A charming sight for foreigners to see, walking together of a morning from their house in Belgrave Square: George Tarlyon in the long gray coat of the Brigade, that extravagant, high-waisted, red-lined gray coat, tall and straight and with a swing in his walk: and Virginia, his lady, enwrapped in furs—not, like so many women, smothered in them, for Virginia was always mistress of what she wore—or better still, on an autumn morning, in a high-collared black coat lined with green, which very gallantly became her tall, slim person and imperious head. They looked what they were, perfectly, people of degree—and how rare that is nowadays, people said.
Yet Virginia did not lose her glamour, nor did her glamour lose that queer rot; it was always there, about her, something musty in something fine. Her father’s friends wondered a little about it. She had always something in reserve, a vague something, and people took vague licence with that vague something. That is a way people have. Virginia seemed not to be quite of the society which she graced so brilliantly; she seemed to despise it, she passed people swiftly. A queer provocative indifference there was about her.... Take a drawing-room full of people at any hour of night, and watch Virginia there, an ornament in the most brilliant company. Watch now! Watch the pretty lady, the lovely, the remote, the queerly ungracious Virginia! Suddenly, swiftly, silently, she leaves the room. She waits for no man. She leaves the house. Just like that, she leaves it. Maybe this departure offends—Virginia doesn’t care! And if she cares, she will be forgiven. Now, whither does this swift and secret passage take her? Sometimes to her house in Belgrave Square, a mausoleum of a house which Virginia bitterly hates: sometimes to meet some one in some place: more often to the Mont Agel.
She would enter the Mont Agel at any hour of night by the hotel entrance, having rung the bell; and she would sit in the deserted and shuttered restaurant, in the light of a candle stuck in its own grease on a saucer—it was war-time then, you understand. There she would sit, with the polite and amiable M. Stutz hovering about, for that urbane gentleman never went to bed, never. Sometimes M. Stutz would be encouraged to sit at the table and discuss a glass of Vichy Water with Lady Tarlyon, for she seldom drank anything but Vichy Water, which just shows how little mothers know about their daughters. But more often he would leave her alone, guessing that it was for solitude she had come hither, this lady of high fashion in all her finery: not hard, nor brazen, but queerly childish and infinitely remote.
She would write letters, sitting there, and every now and then she would sip her Vichy Water. Half a glass of Vichy Water would last Virginia a long time; but cigarettes would fade before her contemplation, a box of ten cigarettes would fade away. Her doctor would have something to say about that soon. She never wrote her letters but in pencil, a scrawling hand. And she would write, maybe, to Mr. Kerrison, in his semi-demi-quasi-social part of Hampstead, telling him in an ironic way of what she had done that night, and of the people she had seen; she would comment on the people she had seen and talked to that evening, ironically. It wasn’t that she liked Mr. Kerrison, in fact she thought of him as a very absurd man indeed, but she had somehow got into this habit of writing letters to him in a particular spirit; and when people protested about Mr. Kerrison, or any other of her friends, saying that some of them were really too awful, she would give her slight, hoarse little laugh, and answer that they were quite inevitable in her life, quite inevitable; and, having said that, she would laugh a little again, and the subject of Mr. Kerrison or any one else would be closed for the time being.... Or she would write letters to a young artist whose work, person, or “mentality” (oh, useful word!) had made some call on her sympathy. Her letters from the Mont Agel, addressed in that pencilled scrawl, would suddenly drop on studios in all parts of London, sometimes on very poor studios indeed, asking them what they were doing and if they were working well these days, and if they would care to come to luncheon with her one day, and naming a day for that luncheon, either at the Mont Agel, the Café Royal, or Belgrave Square. And sometimes, if it was a very poor little artist she was writing to, there would be a cheque tucked away in the letter. But no poor little artist ever received a cheque twice who was tactless enough to thank her, no matter how elegantly.
And then, in the early hours of the morning, she would leave the Mont Agel. Swiftly she would penetrate the black solitudes of Soho in war-time: a rich and fragile figure braving all the dangers of the city by night, an almost fearful figure to arise suddenly in an honest man’s homeward path: so tall and golden and proud of carriage, so marvellously indifferent to his astonished stare! Sometimes she would have to walk a long way before she could find a taxi—through Soho to Shaftesbury Avenue, and up that to Piccadilly Circus. Sometimes men would murmur in passing, sometimes they would say the coarsest things, and once or twice a man caught at her arm as she swiftly passed him; and Virginia looked at him straightly, for a swift second, as though secretly understanding his desire and mocking it; and then she went on her way as though her way had been uninterrupted ... homewards to Belgrave Square.
Virginia often capped the most conventional evenings with this swift and solitary vagabondage of the early hours, homewards from the Mont Agel.