‘No, no. I won’t have it,’ said Irma. ‘I won’t, Mr Bellgrove. Age and time are what you make them. Let us not speak of them again.’
Bellgrove sat forward on his old buttocks. ‘Lady!’ he said suddenly, ‘I have thought of something that I think you will agree is more than comic.’
‘Have you, Mr Bellgrove?’
‘Pertaining to what you said about Age and Time. Are you listening, my dear?’
‘Yes, Mr Bellgrove … eagerly … eagerly!’
‘What I think would be rather droll would be to say, in a gathering, when the moment became opportune – perhaps during some conversation about clocks – one could work round to it – to say, quite airily … “Time is what you make it.”’
He turned his head to her in the darkness. He waited.
There was no response from Irma. She was thinking feverishly. She began to panic. Her face was prickling with anxiety. She could make no sound. Then she had an idea. She pressed herself against him a little more closely.
‘How delicious!’ she said at last, but her voice was very strained.
The silence that followed was no more than a few seconds, but to Irma it was as long as that ghastly hush that awaits all sinners when, at the judgement seat, they wait the Verdict. Her body trembled, for there was so much at stake. Had she said something so stupid, that no headmaster, worthy of his office, could ever consider accepting her? Had she unwittingly lifted some hatchway of her brain and revealed to this brilliant man how cold, black, humourless and sterile was the region that lay within?
No. Ah no! For his voice, rolling from the gloom, had, if possible, even more tenderness in it than she would have dared to hope for in a man.
‘You are cold, my love. You are chilly. The night is not for delicate skins. By hell, it isn’t. And I? And what of me? Your suitor? Is he cold also, my dear? Your old gallant? He is. He is indeed. And what is more he is becoming sick of darkness. Darkness that shrouds. That clogs the living lineaments of beauty. That swathes you, Irma. By hell it’s maddening and pointless stuff …’ Bellgrove began to rise … ‘it’s damnable, I tell you, my own, this arbour’s damnable.’
He felt the pressure of fingers on his forearm.
‘Ah no … no … I will not have you swear. I will not have strong language in our arbour … our sacred arbour.’
For a moment Bellgrove was tempted to play the gay dog. His moods flitted across the basic excitement of the wooing. It was so delicious to be chided by a woman. He wondered whether to shock her – to shock her out of the surplus of his love, would be worth the candle. To taste again the sweetness of being reprimanded, the never-before-experienced gushes of sham remorse – would this be worth the lowering of his moral status. No! He would stick to his pinnacle.
‘This arbour,’ he said, ‘is forever ours. It is the darkness it holds captive; this pitchy stuff that hides your face from me – it is this darkness that I called damnable – and damnable it is. It is your face, Irma, your proud face that I am thirsting for. Can you not understand? By the great moonlight! my love; by the tremendous moonlight! Is it not natural that a man should wish to brood upon his darling’s brow?’
The word ‘darling’ affected Irma as might a bullet wound. She clasped her hands at her breast and pressing them inwards the tepid water in her false bosom gurgled in the darkness.
For a moment Bellgrove, thinking she was laughing at what he had said, stiffened at her side. But the terrible blush of humiliation that was about to climb his neck was quenched by Irma’s voice. The gurgle must have been a sign of love, of some strange and aqueous love that was beyond his sounding, for ‘O master,’ she said, ‘take me to where the moon can show you me.’
‘Show-you-me?’ for a short while Bellgrove was quite unable to decipher what sounded to him like a foreign language. But he did not stand still, as lesser men would have done while pondering, but answering the first part of her command he escorted her from the arbour. Instantaneously, they were floodlit – and at the same instant Irma’s syntax clarified in the headmaster’s mind.
They moved together, like spectres, like mobile carvings casting their long inky shadows across the little paths, down the slopes of rockeries, up the sides of trellises.
At last they stopped for a little while where a stone cherub squatted upon the rim of a granite bird-bath. To their left they could see the lighted windows of the long reception room. But they could not see that in the midst of a rapt audience the Doctor was raising his silver hammer as though to put all to the test. They could not know that by a supernatural effort of the will, and the martialling of all his deductive faculties, and the freeing of an irrational flair, the Doctor had come to the kind of decision more usually associated with composers than with scientists – and was now on the brink of success or failure.
