LATE AND SOON. E. M. Delafield
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sit down to high tea."
"I don't suppose they'll come."
The telephone bell rang from the inconvenient and draughty corner, exactly outside the door of the downstairs lavatory, where Humphrey's father had installed it.
"I'll go," shouted Jess from the lobby.
They heard her rushing to it, and the puppy barking.
"There's no such tearing hurry," muttered the General. "Come here, Sally!" he shouted. The old dog ambled up and settled down at his feet.
He slowly put on his spectacles and started work on the crossword puzzle in The Times.
Valentine took up her knitting.
She could hear, without distinguishing any words, one side of the telephone conversation. It was evidently someone wanting to talk to Jess. A contemporary, because she was screaming freely and every now and then emitting a shriek of laughter.
Perhaps it was Primrose, speaking from London.
Primrose and Jess often quarrelled when they were together, but they would sometimes hold long, expensive, seemingly friendly talks over the telephone.
Primrose never wrote, unless she wanted something sent from home, and then it was usually on a postcard.
Valentine evaded, as usual, dwelling on the thought of her elder daughter. She reminded herself of the next monthly meeting of the Women's Institute, of which she was President, and she tried to remember what had been planned for the evening's programme.
General Levallois asked her help over an elusive clue in his puzzle: she gave it tentatively and unsuccessfully.
"Isn't it about time to switch on for the news?" he asked suspiciously.
They never missed listening to the Nine O'Clock News, but General Levallois seemed always afraid lest they might do so.
Valentine glanced at the clock, saw that it was only ten minutes to nine, and obediently got up and turned on the wireless.
She shivered as she moved away from the small area of space warmed by the fire. The fringe of her shawl caught in a piece of furniture and she released it.
Jess came plunging back to them, the pup at her heels.
"That was Primrose, and she's got a week's leave from Saturday and we're to expect her when we see her."
"Is she going to spend the whole week here?" cried Valentine, the blood rushing into her face.
For a moment she felt as she had felt long ago when the children were coming home for their holidays and plans for treats and pleasures for them had thronged her mind.
"She says so. She must be frightfully tired," said Jess naïvely.
"Did she say how she was? Is she all right?"
"Everything seemed okay. And mummie—this is a frightfully funny thing—what do you think?"
"What?" asked Valentine apprehensively.
She was nearly always afraid now, at the announcement of any news that concerned Primrose.
"She says she knows this Colonel—the Irish one—and he's a friend of hers. And she's pretty certain he will come here."
"That explains her condescending to spend a week in her own home, then," remarked General Levallois.
"Fancy you thinking of that, uncle Reggie! I wouldn't know. I suppose he's one of her boy friends, though I should have thought he was much too old."
"Did she tell you his name?" asked Valentine. "I mean his Christian name?"
Jess nodded.
"She calls him Rory. Fancy calling a Colonel Rory!"
Valentine was aware that her brother was looking at her, probably with the raised eyebrows of an unspoken question.
It was quite true that he scarcely ever forgot a name, but all the same, he'd want to make certain.
She gave him his answer, but without turning towards him and with her eyes on the fire.
"If his name's Rory Lonergan, he's the man I knew years ago, when we were in Rome. Only of course he wasn't a soldier, then."
"What was he?" asked Jess.
"A painter."
"Gosh! Fancy a painter. He must have done jolly well in the war to have been made a Colonel. I shouldn't have thought a painter would be a scrap of use in the Army, except to paint camouflage or something."
"He went through the last war, and I believe he did rather well."
"Is he nice?"
"I haven't seen him for—let me see—about twenty-eight years."
"Gosh! You won't recognize each other. I suppose he's married and with masses of children."
"I don't know," said Valentine.
"So long as he doesn't bring any of his wives and children here," Jessica said. "Actually, Primrose didn't sound as if he was married. But he must be miles too old for her."
"Damned nonsense you sometimes talk, Jess," the General remarked. "Shut up, now! The news is just coming on."
"It'll be Bruce," said Jess, and she threw herself down on the floor beside the two dogs.
The strokes of Big Ben, followed by the voice of the announcer, filled the room.
Valentine, not listening, continued to gaze into the fire.
It really was Rory Lonergan.
She was not surprised. She had felt certain, on first hearing the name of Colonel Lonergan, that it was Rory and that she was going to see him again.
In all the years that had gone by since the summer of nineteen hundred and fourteen, Valentine had thought of Rory Lonergan often but not, after those first few, long-ago months, with any wish or expectation of seeing him.
It was a most innocent story.
She had met him at a petite soirée in the most Catholic circle in Roman society, ten days before her seventeenth birthday. He had fallen in love with her and she with him, and they had met daily, in secret, under the olive tree in a remote corner of the Pincio Gardens near a broken fountain—and Valentine's mademoiselle had found them out within a fortnight and had told her mother.
Valentine's mother had told her father and both of them had interviewed the young Lonergan—that raffish-looking, beggarly art student of an Irishman, as her father had described him—and Val had been sent for—she had always been Val, in those days.
She saw again the high room with its painted ceiling and formal decorative plaster mouldings, and her father, very stern and handsome, sitting at a big table that had a lot of gilding about it.
Her mother, who was not stern or handsome but of a tense, nervous, neurotic type far more difficult to resist, had been there too. And Rory had gone.
Instantly, she had thought they had sent him away for ever and had felt a rush of wild, uncontrollable horror and despair. And at once the romantic, fairy-tale hope had followed that he would come back for her and they would go away together and belong to one another for ever and ever.
But none of it had followed the fairy-tale tradition.
Val's father and mother had scarcely even been angry with her: her father had spoken with cold, rather amused, contempt of young Lonergan, and her mother had said that silly, underhand schoolgirl ways naturally led inexperienced boys to suppose that they might behave as they chose.
In future, had said Lady Levallois, Mademoiselle would exercise a much closer supervision over a girl so little to be trusted.
Almost at once Val had understood that it was over and that there was no hope—but she had made her stand.
"Where is he?"