POST 11

She was still not helping Sarah to sing the orchestral parts. Wordless at Constance's interruption, Sarah had started again, doing it all, the whole thing including the singing, for herself. All save that acute appreciation which Constance, now watching her from a position lying on the old sofa, was giving to every nuance of the performance. How did she do it? The piano's first taking that plunge of the right hand, throwing up birds, water, splashes of joy, and desperation, the left hand driving up on the right a strong, warning, independent story. The strength of hands reminds the orchestral singing voice of things other than its joy and glory; hands, voice, music; Sarah in claim and counter-claim. Constance thought she would cry, she was in love with this enchantingly pretty, pink and silver sister of hers. Unbearably pathetic, Constance found it - the glissandos and trills and Sarah's voice deeply baying the brass statement. In the music she heard Frances and Philip and Matthew, her mother and father. She heard all their hidden lives; they were brave and sad. At last the door opened. Frances, intent on interruption, looked at Sarah, who at once stopped playing. In the silence Constance watched them. She experienced the gradually accumulating assemblage, the triangular being, absolutely still, of herself and her sisters. Pale, brown, pink. Watching. Waiting. Time expanding.

"Please don't stop," Matthew said.

(Why come in then?)

Sarah got up.

"At her spiritual exercise again," Aunt Molly said in a congratulatory manner. "Amusing herself. Practising her music; not eating. The child doesn't eat, you know. Celibacy, fasting and toil. That's Sarah's motto. She seems to be training Constance in the same economic habits."

Sarah had never borne piffle gladly. She had been too old for that from birth. Constance looked at her anxiously.

"Sarah doesn't play anything seriously," Frances smiled.

Constance in a flash saw Frances's stupidity. Her actual standing there, as monumental stupidity. A large immovable block of stone hewn to celebrate some socially-acceptable platitude.

"Absolutely unmoved by her own talents. She'll do nothing with them," Aunt Molly added.

Every time! All her life. This stupidity about Sarah. Sarah was glacial.

"But she plays all her life has been I mean all the time," Constance burst out.

"Aha! Speech restored!" Matthew looked at her. He should be looking at Sarah.

"But only to you, and at School, and at St. Anne's. And there are scholarships and competitions going begging for her."

"St. Botolph's, not St. Anne's" Constance put in, outraged. All this concern and Aunt Molly couldn't even get that right!

"I play. And I just let that be enough." They were aware even without looking at her of her huge sullen resistance to all of them.

"Goodbye." Matthew kissed Sarah.

"Goodbye."

"She is very gifted, Molly," Matthew said thoughtfully, quietly, politely, in the hall; and then he stopped. "But I'd let her go her own way." He put his hand to his head, over his eyes and straight back over his hair. "My God, she is so much like her mother." Then they all moved on.

After a moment he said, "Philip seems to be bent on staying in the Army another four years. I wonder what his mother would have made of that? Ah, Lisette! He's like his mother, too. Put Sarah and Philip together and you have those two formidable young women again!"

"Four years?"

"We've been to Grodust to see what he can do. He might do something for Tom when he's called up, too."

"Grodust? Which Grodust?" Molly Absecond's attention was quite fully worked up.

Constance herself was quietly astonished. Grodust. Her own private word. One she had annexed. Along with some others. The Silver Street Baths bomb-site had a notice set up with a word or two on it. Grodust. Site Developers.

"General Grodust. General Gerald Christie-Grodust, the brother of the shipowner," Matthew said. "Barbara's uncle."

"Why in God's name should Philip want to stay in the Army?"

"I don't suppose he would thank you to ask him. But he's a thoughtful chap. The Army seems to have opened his eyes. One or two of his latest poems are very good indeed."

"He sent me one from Wales," Frances said, sulkily, joining them. "The Man Who Fell Off Snowdon."

"Addressed to some unfortunate female writer who said that Nature was passé," Molly said. "What has poetry got to do with the Army?"

"It was addressed to me," Frances said. "It was brutal. Let the sun set on Frances, it said. Morbid. Nothing to do with the Army. I hate the Army. Everything out of the rule book. I hated his horrible mountains. I threw it away."

"A collection of his poems is going to be published. Barbara's behind that."

"What?" Constance thought Frances would choke with disbelief and fury.

"Who's Barbara?" Constance whispered to her, but there was no answer.

Barbara? Some old lady Grodust?

"I'm very glad to hear that. I've got quite a collection of his poems myself. He's always flattered me," Aunt Molly said.

Fallen behind, Constance smiled. No. Aunt Molly would not miss all those poems she had been so flattered to receive and not careful enough to retrieve from the letter cupboard on the landing. Constance now had quite a collection.

"My opinion is that Philip is hoping to see some service. Action abroad," Matthew said, coming to the heart of a preoccupying thought.

"But he can go abroad any day he chooses, and for as long as he likes! What a very extraordinary thing..."

Frances stood by. She came slowly to what was clearly a fresh shock. "He's said nothing to me about even staying in the Army. At least, nothing one could possibly take seriously." She had almost recovered her poise, but her tone suggested, and quite blatantly, that Matthew had got his information wrong.

"I know you take ideas seriously. Perhaps you should try taking people seriously," Matthew said, but pleasantly.

Beethoven's Fourth with vocal accompaniment had started up once more after several small rehearsals and experiments. Frances went to her room.

Molly and Matthew, followed by Constance because Philip Harisonn had now been thoroughly mentioned, made a slow procession down into the hall. Philip was her hero. She did not presume to be in love with him. In any case, Frances had chosen Philip early in life. And even if she had not Constance still would not have presumed to be in love with him because he was real and formidable to her in a way that Matthew was not.

"One must speak to Philip. Matthew, you must give my love to Patricia. I think she is a very brave girl to marry you especially as you have both had such disconcerting previous experiences. You were a sad case of rebound the first time. It mustn't happen again. We have of course been kept very faithfully informed by Tom, you know; we are not surprised. Goodbye, my dear." Molly kissed Matthew, and it was as if he had not heard a word she had said.

As he bent to kiss Constance, she felt the nervous tightness in him again. "As for you," he said, "you have hardly said a word to me. Are your thoughts taboo, or something?"

She put her arms round his neck, for she had no words. She kissed him very fervently, disarranging the red silk handkerchief as she turned her head on his breast. But the precautionary tightness in his arms did not want that. She stood back. He put on his coat. She was not ready for him to go.

"You mean Philip wants to fight? In this new war?" Curiously difficult sentence to make; and not only because it was made to inhibit the tears of Matthew's going for ever.

He looked at her for the first time fully-present. The light in his eyes said that she had keenly interested him. She had exclusively engaged his mind.

"Exactly!" he said, admiringly almost, and as if that told all. He even put his hand, carelessly it is true, but relaxedly, on the back of her neck. "He's coming home for a night to see his father soon. Geoffrey's going to be terribly disappointed, I think. Whether Philip's going to the war or not, and it won't be easy to get him there, that's why I've been in touch with Grodust, he's certainly enamoured of the Army and means to stay in it."

The fact of having all this addressed to one, personally, by Matthew was a heady experience that instantly added years to one's age, and pounds squared horsepower to one's sense of importance. The accommodating of this flattering notion cost her an advantage, however, in the presence of such as Aunt Molly to whom Matthew's attention now passed again.

"You don't mean this outrage in Korea?" Molly was outraged. "I do not believe you can be serious."

Matthew at this point took his hand off Constance's neck and put it fair and square on Molly's shoulder, speaking to her quietly as if she were a child. "Molly, I have to go. It's now going to be a United Nations effort and the Foreign Office and the government has been taking it all absolutely seriously I assure you. I've hardly been home, or seen Patricia, since it started. There will certainly be a British or Commonwealth Brigade, if not two."

"The United Nations. What a farce! No wonder you've been so quiet this evening."

"It's my night off," he smiled.

He kissed Molly, and after arranging his silk handkerchief more to his liking went down the front steps and was helped ceremoniously into his waiting car. Molly departed, but Constance lingered.

"Goodnight," he called and waved.

Trustee or not, Foreign Office or not, another's lover or not, godfather or not, unfaithful to the Yokehams or not, Constance pined. She should have said "please, please don't go." And he should have said, Would you like to meet me for dinner one evening? Ring me at the office. Or, better, he should have taken her hand and they would have run into the summer breeze that was pushing and teasing a newspaper along the pavement in a most accusatory manner. That they did not, she realised at that moment in a striking revelation, was a pure waste of her life, and all it might hold for him. Accustomed to such revelations having repercussions in the physical world she nevertheless held her breath as Matthew's car came to a sudden halt. A small white sports car had come head-on to it round the corner. Yes. He might just have been killed; but he's not he's still alive. Curses were properly exchanged between drivers then both cars passed on into the fine early evening.

As Constance closed the door, Frances was shouting from her room: "If Sarah doesn't stop that noise I shall die." Constance picked up the pineapple bag, screwed it up and flung it up high, higher than the second bend in the staircase. As high as the top of the great stained window. He is still alive. It was almost enough. But it was an impermanent moment of celebration. She looked at the bag returned swiftly to her feet, all screwed up and rocking gently in one of the hall's permanent draughts. She went into her dead uncle Absecond's old office, shut the door, and turned the key in the lock.