he was not sure that the unexpectedness had not struck herself as well as him.
"And I remember your face," he answered, and for an instant they seemed to stare at one another.
"Hallo, mummie," said Primrose. She stood by the fire without moving, and her mother, after a tiny hesitation, went to her, and putting an arm round her shoulders, kissed her in greeting.
IV
The house, the large front bedroom assigned to Lonergan, even the water in the chipped white enamel water-can standing in the flowered china basin on the old-fashioned washstand, were all as cold as Primrose had foretold. He was glad to hurry downstairs but he felt that the evening was likely to prove a strange one.
That past and present should so overlap was disconcerting enough, but Rory Lonergan, who had regretfully and at the same time competently, deceived a great many people had never yet seriously deceived himself and he was already aware of a sense of tension, almost of foreboding, that came from within himself and threatened others as much as himself.
He was oddly relieved to find no one downstairs except Jessica, still playing with her dog.
It was easy to make friends with Jess, and for her, as for the elderly ladies in the cocktail-bar, he deliberately accentuated Irish tone and idiom, in order to amuse her.
He took notice of the puppy, and listened to the explanation of why she had been so oddly named.
"Ah, the little poor dog! Isn't that a shame, now!"
"What a frightfully good point of view. Most people think it's awful for old aunt Sophy—or would be, if she knew about it. Nobody has ever said it's a shame for a poor darling little puppy to be called after a cross old lady."
"Have they not?"
"Not they," said Jess. "Actually, I shall probably change her name later on or perhaps just call her Sophy. Otherwise it's a bit like those dim parents who give their children idiotic pet-names and will keep on with them for ever. I knew a person whose life at school was practically ruined because her mother came to see her and called her Tiddles. I ask you—Tiddles."
Lonergan expressed appropriate disapproval. He thought of asking her about her school but decided that she had too recently ceased to be a schoolgirl and said instead:
"I hear you're waiting to be called up for the WAAF?"
"That is correct. Did Primrose tell you?"
"She did."
"I wouldn't have thought she'd be enough interested. It's funny, you knowing her first, and then coming down here."
"Well, I was down here first, you know, for a few days and then I had to go to London for a special job and met her again," said Lonergan, adding the last word as he remembered that Primrose had decided to credit them with an acquaintanceship of some months.
"And it's much odder," said Jess, "that you should have met mummie all those thousands of years ago. She said she wondered if you were the same person when Buster—Lieutenant Banks—told us your name. And that reminds me, where's the other one?"
In spite of his preoccupation with the earlier part of her speech, Lonergan found that he understood to what she was so elliptically referring.
"Captain Sedgewick? He'll arrive after dinner, I expect. He had to go to Plymouth. Did he not let you know?"
"Oh, I expect so. I just hadn't heard, that's all. What's he like?"
"About twenty-three, with red hair, comes from somewhere outside London. He's said to be a very good dancer."
"Gosh, that's wizard," thoughtfully returned Jess.
She gazed up at him with ingenuous admiration.
"You're frightfully good at describing people, aren't you?"
Lonergan laughed and was aware that her childlike praise had pleased his vanity.
Extraordinary, he reflected dispassionately, how he had never outgrown the desire to be liked. Sometimes he thought that this pressing need was so urgent within him that, on a final analysis, it provided the motive spring for his whole conduct of life.
Jess chattered on, cheerful and at ease.
The tap of the General's crutches and his shuffling step sounded from behind Lonergan and he rose, and Jess reared herself to her feet in what seemed to be one supple, unbroken movement.
Valentine was with her brother.
She was in black and Lonergan noticed that the long fringes of the embroidered Chinese shawl round her shoulders became continually entangled in pieces of furniture as she moved. He saw the unhurried gestures with which she patiently disentangled them, again and again.
General Levallois, in whom Lonergan had immediately detected an emphatic but quite fundamental hostility directed against his nationality rather than against himself, made stilted conversation.
Jess said:
"Gosh, I'd better wash. Fancy, that makes poetry. Fancy me being a poet!"
As she dashed her way upstairs, the eyes of Rory Lonergan and Valentine Arbell met, and they both laughed.
He told himself that he had never seen any woman's face alter so completely as hers did when she was really amused. Already, he felt, he knew that her pretty, not infrequent smile had nothing to do with amusement and was one of her many unconscious concessions to the traditions of her upbringing.
"I know that much about her," thought Lonergan, assenting aloud to a proposition of the General's. And immediately another thought followed.
"I know that, and how much more!"
The watcher in him, that was never off guard and could never be silenced, added the note that carried to him a familiar, never-to-be-mistaken warning, terrifying in its very brevity.
"I'm sunk."
"... though mind you, I'm not denying that the feller had some reason on his side, up to a point," said the General.
And Lonergan, unaware of having heard the beginning of the phrase, found that he knew it was de Valera of whom the General was talking.
He had heard far too many Englishmen launch themselves, with an ignorance almost sublime in its unconsciousness, upon the subject of Irish politics to feel any dismay.
He was quite prepared to let General Levallois have his head.
But Valentine, it seemed, was not.
"Where is your home, in Ireland?" she enquired, shelving de Valera and the General alike, by the directness of the enquiry and of the look that she turned on her guest.
"My home, for a good many years past, has been in Paris. I came over here two years before the war and lived in a flat in
