When Blackbirds Sing by Martin Boyd Page B

so improbable, and it was new ground for them. At no time had they been together away from Dilton or Waterpark. They had a sense of new freedom, that in some way they were redeeming a failure. When they had drunk a little wine they took up again that allusive bickering kind of conversation they had begun when he dined at Dilton, and which was a new thing between them. Before, when they had been engaged, their love was adolescent, alternately blissful and angry. There was nothing amusing about it. They were like a man who has lost some money which later is not only returned to him, but returned with interest.
    They were the last to leave the restaurant. In Piccadilly she asked him: “What are you doing now?”
    “I have to buy some kit,” he said.
    “Shall I come and help you?”
    “Yes, please do,” he exclaimed eagerly. He had the idea that everything to do with Sylvia was related to sophisticated pleasure. That she was willing to do anything so humdrum as to choose army kit made her appear more simply human, and also more accessible. They went along to those stores which provided everything necessary for a Mayfair boudoir or a Flanders dugout; and even linked the two in special hampers of
foie gras
and French plums to send to young officers in the trenches.
    She made him, as a matter of course, buy the most expensive things possible, and asked the shopman: “Are you sure this is the very best?” She really believed that by making him pay the highest price for every article, she was doing him a service, and later, when she had led him up to tea at Claridges, she said: “I don’t believe you would have chosen nearly such good things if I had not come with you,” which was true.
    Dominic justified himself by thinking that all the things he had bought were for the trenches, and that Helena would not want him to economize on them. But this was only a passing thought. He, too, had Sylvia’s taste for and expectation of the very best, though with him it reached beyond material things. The atmosphere that surrounded her was one most agreeable to himself. When he found himself in rich houses, both dignified and comfortable, where the best is normal, he felt that he was in his natural surroundings; though at home with Helena the idea of living in a palace like Dilton would have seemed absurd to him. Perhaps people of mixed blood have more varied nostalgias than those whose forebears were all of the same kind, living in the same place.From long generations of farming squires at Waterpark he found his deepest satisfactions on his own farm; from the Bynghams he inherited the impulse towards full-blooded bouts of extravagance; while from the Tebas he took his looks and his arrogance and his sombre passions, a taste for magnificence and the houses of the great. This is not romanticizing Dominic; he was already romantic, just as stark fact may often be. Sometimes stark facts made him act with the extreme of romanticism, as happened within a year.
    He walked back with Sylvia to her house behind Buck-ingham Gate. Its drawing-room was no bigger than the green bath-room at Dilton, but it was furnished from the more magnificent rooms of that house, with a kingwood and ormolu commode and Italian mirrors. He had only come in to see the house, but he stayed until seven, when Sylvia had to change to dine out.
    “I wish I could put it off,” she said, “but it’s impossible. Don’t you know anyone under eighty with whom you can spend the evening?”
    “I don’t want to see anybody else,” said Dominic. “It would spoil this afternoon.”
    They arranged to lunch again the next day, but at a different restaurant. Sylvia liked to be seen in public with Dominic, knowing that they were an arresting couple, but she was always discreet, and did not want to be seen with him twice in the same place. He said diffidently: “Am I taking up too much of your time?”
    “Oh, no,” she replied. “You mustn’t waste your embarkation leave. I