Love
Copyright© 2024 by Elizabeth Von Arnim
Chapter 4
That evening, sentimentally, they went to The Immortal Hour. In this very place, only two months back, they had been sitting apart hardly aware of each other, hardly more than looking at each other out of the corners of their eyes.
‘Do you remember the night I first moved up next to you?’ Christopher whispered.
‘Don’t I,’ she murmured.
‘Oh, Catherine—isn’t it wonderful to think we’re married!’ he whispered.
‘Sh-sh-,’ hissed the audience, still sparse and still ferocious.
She was in bliss again. He loved her so. He had been so utterly charming in Hertford Street, boyishly delighted with everything, filling the dull little flat with youth, and all that youth trails with it of clouds of glory—laughter, happiness, radiant confidence. Amazing to have this there after George, after the quiet years since George.
By the evening she was tired, horribly tired, and knew she looked like a ghost; but she didn’t mind as long as it was dark and he couldn’t see her silly white face and smudged, haggard eyes. There was only one interval, and her hat would hide her then. The Immortal Hour was such a nice dark opera: pitch dark for ages in the first act, —so restful, so soothing.
She went sound asleep, her head against his arm. He didn’t know she was asleep, and was thinking all the time of how they were both thinking and feeling the same things exactly, he and she who owed each other to the for-ever-to-be-adored Immortal Hour.
‘Darling, darling,’ he murmured, stooping and trying to kiss her at the darkest moment. This bliss of unity with the perfect love, this end of loneliness, this enveloping joy...
She slept profoundly.
However, she woke when the curtain went down before the second part of the act, and those of the audience who were new to it clapped in spite of the music going on, and those who weren’t new indignantly hissed at them, and sat up and pulled her hat straight. It was the same funny little extinguishing hat she used to wear at the beginning; he had specially asked her to put it on.
‘Yes, we must be proper now,’ said Christopher, smiling at her.
‘Sh-sh-,’ hissed the outraged audience.
How familiar it all was; how happy they were. She was glad he didn’t know she had been asleep. It was awful to have gone to sleep on such an occasion, but then she was so appallingly tired. Never in her life had she been tired like this. Ah, here was the love scene beginning ... she wouldn’t go to sleep now...
Her hand slid into his; his shut tight over it; they sat close, close, thrilled by memories, by all that the music meant to them; and in the most beautiful part Catherine felt her thrills grow fainter and fade away and go out, and again her head drooped against his shoulder and again she went sound asleep.
‘Oh, I love you, love you,’ whispered Christopher, putting his arm round her, sure her drooping head was the gesture of abandonment to irresistible emotion.
‘Sh-sh-,’ hissed the audience.
Afterwards he wanted to take her somewhere to supper.
‘Supper?’ echoed Catherine faintly, who was dying with fatigue.
‘Yes. We must celebrate—drink the health of our home-coming,’ said Christopher, drawing her hand through his arm and proudly walking her off to a taxi. His wife. Marvellous. No more slipping away in the crowd and escaping him now, thank you. ‘Let’s go somewhere where we can dance. I shall blow up if I don’t let off steam somehow.’
‘Dance?’ echoed Catherine again, still more faintly, as she was swept up into the taxi.
‘Do you realise we’ve never danced together once yet?’
‘But we can’t go anywhere like that in these clothes.’
That was true. He hadn’t thought of that. Well then, they would dress properly the next night and go and dance and dance.
Catherine sat back in the seat. Dance? She hadn’t danced for years, not since before her marriage with George—never since.
She told Christopher this, and he only laughed and said it was high time she did dance; he adored dancing; he longed to dance with her; they would often go.
‘Oh, Christopher,’ said Catherine, sliding close up to him, ‘the best thing of all will be being alone together at home, you and I, in your precious evenings. Won’t we go there now? Do we really want supper?’
‘Tired, darling?’ he asked, instantly anxious, stooping to look under her hat.
‘Oh no—not a bit. Not in the least. Really not,’ said Catherine quickly. ‘But—our first evening—it’s so lovely at home——’
He hung out of the window and redirected the driver. ‘Yes. Of course,’ he said, taking her in his arms. ‘That’s far and away the best of all——’
And they began to whisper.
Next day he went back to work. When he left at ten o’clock Catherine was still in bed.
‘Do you mind my not being at breakfast?’ she had asked him when Mrs. Mitcham very gingerly beat, or, more accurately, delicately patted the gong.
Mrs. Mitcham had had some moments of painful indecision before doing anything with the gong. It was altogether a most awkward morning for her. She had never yet been placed in such a position. Husband and wife, of course, and all that—she knew all that; but still it did feel awkward, and she had a queer reluctance to rousing them—almost as if they were dangerous, as well as embarrassing, to have loose about the flat. Yet it was breakfast time. Orders were for nine sharp. She did finally get herself to the gong and timidly tapped it, divided between duty and her odd reluctance to see her mistress and the young gentleman come out of that room, to have to face them...
‘Stay there, my darling love,’ said Christopher, smoothing the pillows and tucking Catherine up as tenderly as if she were a baby. ‘I’ll bring you your breakfast.’
‘I—never do get up to breakfast,’ she said, after a moment’s hesitation, smiling at him as he bent over her—she, who had not once during the whole of George’s time missed being down on the stroke of half-past eight to pour out his coffee for him and kiss him good-bye on the door-mat. ‘Good-bye, little woman,’ George used to say, waving to her before the lift engulfed him. In those days good husbands of good wives frequently called them little women.
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