“You haven’t bored me. I took quite a fancy to her. I’ll see what I can do.”
Eric left the house with relief that he had transferred to other shoulders the responsibility for Ivy’s welfare. From the library window Amy watched his thin figure striding away, with what she chose to construe as rapid purposelessness, until it disappeared round the corner of Clarges Street; for Ivy’s sake it was worth her while to take a little trouble, and, if Eric were truly in love with her, she would take very great trouble indeed; but that, she decided, she would not know until she saw how impatiently he came to enquire what was being done. For all she knew, he was befriending Ivy from vague good nature—as she was befriending him—; Eric was one of the men for whom most women felt a mild and transitory tenderness because he was nearly always too much preoccupied to be aware of it.
When she had put herself in communication with Lady Maitland, Amy waited for another visit from Eric, but for several weeks he was too busy with his play to think about Ivy; and, as she did not avail herself of his general invitation to lunch with him, he could only assume that her position was no more “desperate” than before. A month after his call at Loring House, Amy took the initiative and wrote to say that the judge had gone away on circuit and that his sister-in-law was to take charge of Ivy until her father’s return, when the position could be reconsidered.
“I think she’ll behave sensibly and go back home,” Amy added when they met one night at Lady Poynter’s. “Ivy and I have become great friends; and I’m sure that John Gaymer was at the bottom of the trouble. First of all he flattered her and dared her to break loose; then he neglected her, then he made a fuss of her, then he roused her jealousy. After that he could do what he liked with her. But I’m thankful to say that he’s sheered off now, and you can rely on Connie to give her other things to think about.”
Eric looked thoughtfully across the room to the corner where Mrs. O’Rane and Gaymer were talking in whispers. Throughout dinner Lady Poynter, whose latest intellectual relaxation was in the works of Freud and Jung, had been interpreting all human relationships in terms of psycho-analysis; adopting her language, Eric found that all this remote, whispered discussion of Gaymer had created a fantastic image of a man sinister and dissolute, bearing on his face the stamp of evil passions and the ravages of debauchery. False images, Lady Poynter explained with annihilating sweeps of a massive arm, could only be corrected or dispelled by contact with reality. It was a relief and a disappointment to Eric that he could detect no change in form and features which always seemed to have been cut by a machine; Gaymer was powerfully built with sturdy limbs, broad shoulders and back, a muscular neck and big-boned wrists and hands, the whole so well proportioned and knit together that his true height and breadth were unsuspected. In face, manner and dress he had set himself to be conventional to the verge of commonplace. His hair, black and straight, was cut, oiled and brushed back from the forehead, as though straight black hair could be treated in no other way; his blue Air Force uniform, vividly new and well-fitting, was built and worn unremarkably but with a suggestion that it could not be worn otherwise. He moved, smiled and spoke as if he were trying to suppress all personal characteristics; and everything about him was ready-made except his clothes.
Eric pretended to be judicial when he knew that he was on the look-out for faults; but there was no fault to find, unless a man was to be hanged for impatiently lighting a cigarette while waiting for dinner—and Mrs. O’Rane began to smoke before the fish-plates had been taken away—; these were war-manners. Eric watched and listened; but, like the others of his set, Gaymer talked like a gramophone and thought not at all. Failing to condemn, Eric tried to appreciate; but Gaymer’s exasperating suppression of personality left nothing to admire. The set had agreed to put on humorous Cockney records; Mrs. O’Rane and Gaymer were improvising a duologue to represent one shop-girl bidding another good-bye at a station, and fragments of their speech floated across the room to mingle incongruously with Lady Poynter’s undefeated exposition of psycho-analysis: “I should ’a thought A Certain Person would ’a come and seen you off, dearie...” “Ow, ’e knows, when I want ’im, I’ll send for ’im; and not before. You will write, dearie? I love letters. And you’ll send my washing on; I’m in me old lodgings”... “You won’t be ’ungry, missing tea and all?”... “Thenks, I ’ad a nice bit of cold fish before I started....”
“I don’t see the fascination,” Eric murmured, turning away after a last look at Gaymer. Any other healthy animal in good condition, well washed and groomed, enjoying his food and drink, would be as attractive.
“Perhaps it’s—impersonal,” Amy suggested. “I’ve been trying to make out why so many girls marry in such a hurry. Partly it’s instinct, of course, and partly it’s just recklessness; when your husband might be killed any moment, it didn’t much matter who you married. But far more often, I’m sure, girls marry something symbolical in a man rather than the man himself. They see a man in a top hat, and he’s nothing in particular; they hear of him doing something wonderfully brave, and he’s a very different person to them; he’s a hero, he’s been fighting, while they—with perhaps just as much bravery—can’t use it.”
“They marry the sex and not the individual,” Eric suggested.
Amy nodded and looked across the room as though to contrast Ivy’s youth with her own grave maturity.