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By Root 1216 0

would rather have known nothing. She glanced at George, beaming mildly, fifty yards away, and saw him on the morning she’d confronted him, George in uniform, grieving for his brother, fighting a war. Her own grief must have triggered it, licensed it. And he hadn’t known what to do, any more than she had: he was angry with her as he had never been, they were private letters, she had no right, and at the same time he was haggard with shame and horror at his mother’s knowing what had gone on. “It was all over,” he said—which was obvious, since Cecil was dead—“it had all been over long ago.” And then before the war was out he had proposed to this dreary bluestocking, so that she felt, at her most candid and unhappy moments, that she had condemned him herself to a life of high-minded misery. “Hello! Hello!” said George.

Freda raised her chin and grinned at them.

“Enjoying your walk, Mother?” said Madeleine.

“It’s been rather lovely”—she looked up at them with the raffish twinkle of a parent dwarfed by her children.

“I didn’t know you liked walking,” said Madeleine, suspiciously.

Freda said, “There’s a lot you don’t know, my dear,” and then looked at her own words with a touch of surprise.

“You’ve had your little chat with Sebby,” said George.

“Yes, yes”—she dismissed it.

“All right?”

“Well, I really had nothing to say.”

George gave a little purse-lipped smile, and gazed around at the woods. “No, I suppose not.” And then, “Are you going back to the house?”

“I’m very much ready for a cup of tea.”

“We’ll come with you.”

As they walked they looked at the house, and it seemed to Freda they were each thinking of something they might say about it. Their self-consciousness focused on it, with an air of latent amusement and concern, but for at least a minute none of them spoke. Freda glanced up at George and wondered if the incident that was gnawing at her self-possession was equally present to him. In the nine years since, it had never once been mentioned; bland evasiveness had slowly assumed the appearance of natural forgetfulness.

“Oh, have you looked at the tomb?” said Madeleine, as they went through the white gate and into the garden.

“Well, I’ve seen it before,” said Freda. She disliked the tomb very much—for strong but again not quite explicable reasons.

“Quite splendid, isn’t it.”

“Yes, it is!”

“I was thinking about poor old Huey,” said George, in this at least chasing her own thoughts.

“Oh, I know …”

“We must go, darling,” said George, taking his mother’s arm with what felt to her like extravagant forgiveness.

“To France …?”

“We’ll go this summer, during the long vac.”

“Well, I’d love that,” said Freda, gripping George to her, then glancing almost shyly at Madeleine. It seemed to her a mystery, another of the great evasions whose nothingness filled her life, that they hadn’t been already.

She left them in the hall, and went up to her room, freshly, nearly tearfully, preoccupied with Hubert. Really, his death should have put all these other worries in proportion. The heavy ache of loss was quickened by a touch of indignation. She felt that at some point she must finally and formally talk to Louisa about Hubert, and ask her to acknowledge that the worst possible thing had happened to her as well. That Huey wasn’t clever or beautiful, had never met Lytton Strachey or written a sonnet or climbed anything higher than an apple-tree—all this she was somehow forced to acknowledge at each tentative mention of his name to Cecil’s mother. She took off her hat, sat down, and attended rather violently to her hair.

She knew it was pointless, heartless, to begrudge Louisa the consolation of having been with Cecil at the end, the aristocratic reach across the Channel that had brought him back, when tens of thousands of others were fated to stay there till doomsday. Daphne said it was the reason the old lady resisted moving out of the big house: she wanted to stay where she could visit her son every day. Freda was picturing Huey, back at “Two Acres,” on his last leave—and now the tears welled up and she dropped the comb