Free When Blackbirds Sing by Martin Boyd Page B

walk in silence develops the inner life’,” said Dominic, which was a quotation used as a joke in his family.
    “What is the inner life?” she asked.
    “Do you mean mine, or inner life generally?”
    “Yours at the moment.”
    “I don’t know. We have to discover our inner lives.”
    “When shall we do that?” She was amused at a conversation so akin to her usual style.
    He looked at her and said impudently: “Tonight perhaps.”
    She almost stopped, and she could not speak for a minute. But she still thought it possible that he only meant in a conversation over the dinner table.
    In the afternoon they went to the little Mayfair Hotel to collect his luggage, and took it to Victoria Station. From there, Dominic carrying a small case, they walked the few hundred yards to Catherine Street, and did not go out again. At seven o’clock there was a break in their propinquity while Sylvia went to change. During dinner she talked about food in war-time, which for her was no problem. She had chickens, game, butter and cream sent up from Dilton. There was a pheasant for dinner.
    They were not like lovers, neither excited nor particularly tender. They were more like two people filling in time before a pleasant appointment. After dinner she told himsome of the criminal slanders on the Prime Minister, which were circulating in Tory society and which he had already heard from Colonel Rodgers. She believed them herself, and Dominic accepted them as curious information about a sphere outside his knowledge or interest.
    The parlourmaid who waited on them saw no reason to question Sylvia’s statement: “My cousin Mr Langton will stay tonight, as he must catch the boat-train early in the morning.” There was a tenuous connection between the Langtons and the Tunstalls which excused her mentioning a relationship. Her brothers and one or two other relatives had stayed there to catch the early train.
    At ten o’clock they went to bed. There was nowhere for Dominic to sleep, except in Maurice’s dressing-room. The drawing-room took up the floor below and the servants occupied the attic above. Sylvia, in a loose garment edged with swansdown, put her head round the door and said: “You can have the bathroom now.”
    When he came back from the bath, the door into her room was open, and from it shone a dim rosy light. He went in to her. She was lying on the bed, looking as he had imagined her when he lay in the bath on that first night at Dilton.
    The uncertainties which had irritated Sylvia during the day, giving her, as in the Brompton Road, a sense of frustration, during the evening had evaporated. Dominic’s “inner life”, the dynamo which she imagined as purring in him, had been accumulating power. They were both aware of its vibrations, and if she had not left her door ajar, confident in his power, he would have opened it.
    As he lay beside her she put out her hand to switch off the light, but he caught it and the rosy glow remained. He wanted to see this rare and delicate beauty, his former right restored to him. He felt that at last he possessed all that he rightly owned, the other part of his double world, making it complete.
    Sylvia, her mind stimulated, lay awake beside him. She thought about him, wondering about the uncertainties she had felt, now obliterated by this certainty. She was sure that she would never feel them again. She thought that at last she understood him. He performed most of his actions without reasoning about them. He did not, having recognized the inconsistencies of life, keep them in separate watertight compartments, but left the doors open between them. This was what made him so unpredictable, but also so attractive. It gave him the integrity of something untamed, the kind of savage innocence of a creature still observing the laws of the natural world.
    She put out the light, and as he breathed softly and deeply beside her, she felt almost as if she were in some indefinable natural lair. He was like