The Merciless Ladies

by Winston Graham

  ‘Diana’s been a good friend to me’, he said, ‘but I never got too deeply involved. It doesn’t do with her. Actually I don’t much like the way she’s treating Leo. I know she says she’s in love with him and all that – but hers isn’t the same kind of love. Women are funny that way, I think. You imagine them the most romantic of creatures, but really they’re intensely practical.’

  ‘Speaking from experience’, I said.

  He smiled again. ‘ Speaking from experience. Also from painting them. A good portrait is a kind of wooing. People begin by trying to hide themselves behind the subterfuge of their best behaviour. But after a while it slips. Of course, it’s easier for an artist to see through a woman than it is for a lover.’

  ‘Diana’s having a whale of a time.’

  ‘Well, Diana is intoxicated with her own beauty. She’s no more capable of resisting Leo than a glutton is of taking the biggest and juiciest chocolate. She’s become even more lovely this month – have you noticed? But mark you, she’s perfectly level-headed underneath. Only let her get some danger signal from the Colonel and she’ll drop Leo flat. At least, that’s how I see it. I may be doing her an injustice.’

  ‘All I hope’, I said, ‘is that she sees Marnsett’s danger signal in time.’

  Leo naturally enough was responsible for the sudden termination of the affair. Since talk, argument, deep humourless discussion were the very breath of life to him, could he be expected to keep quiet about the greatest experience of his existence? Not at all. At one time I was afraid he might even write home with details of the whole affair.

  Actually little of the truth reached Newton; though such was their inconsequence that one wonders if this news would have shaken the academic calm.

  And then, true to Paul’s prediction, Diana saw the red light. A concert of Bela Bartok music she had promised to attend found Leo alone and an empty seat beside him. The next day it was known that Colonel and the Hon. Mrs Brian Marnsett had left for a holiday in Scotland.

  … We all thought Leo had taken the matter pretty well. After all, it’s not pleasant to come up to London, an intense and unsophisticated young musician, to be taken up by one of the most beautiful women of her time and the leader of her set, to have a presumably passionate affair with her, to exchange Heaven knows how many protestations of undying devotion, to bask in the glory of being the one chosen above all others, and then to find when it comes to the pinch that she prefers her husband after all. One needs a cool head, a good sense of proportion and, maybe, a sense of irony. Leo was deficient in all three.

  Later I learned that he had written to her every day, having assured himself that her attitude was a manoeuvre to deceive her husband. It kept him going. He even went so far as to deride us secretly for imagining the affair was finished.

  But when she returned she refused to see him, and when they met once in public she turned her back on him. It was hard then not to realize that the only victim of one’s deception was oneself. I think he convinced himself that everybody was now going to laugh uncontrollably at his downfall. And that was insufferable.

  One morning I was sitting at my desk wondering if the League of Nations would be able to prevent war between Italy and Greece over the murder of an Italian general, when I was connected to a professor at the Royal College of Music, who seemed concerned to know whether I was as close a friend of Mr Leo Lynn as he had been told.

  ‘Why? Is anything wrong?’

  ‘Well, we’re not sure. He’s been absent for the last week without explanation or apology. A friend thought you might know where he might be.’

  ‘No … I suppose you’ve sent to his lodgings?’

  ‘They say he’s not been there since Monday. We wired his home but they’ve heard nothing from him.’

  ‘Oh’, I said, frowning my disquiet at the receiver.

  ‘I’m afraid there’s not much left for us to do but inform the police. His attendances, of course, have been irregular for some time, and we’re not anxious to raise an unnecessary scare …’

  ‘Can you give me until this evening? I may or may not be able to help, but I could try. There are one or two places …’

  ‘Of course. But if you could let us know. I think we must do something more positive by tomorrow morning at the latest …’

  When he had hung up I rang Paul and fortunately he was free. He said he’d meet me at Leo’s lodgings in half an hour.

  When we got there a middle-aged woman opened the door. She had enlarged eyes and a thick neck and seemed indisposed to let us in.

  ‘Have you no idea where he might have gone?’ I asked.

  ‘He’s only in for breakfast usually and I see nought of him besides, except when I goes up to clean his room. And a regular mess it is too. There he sits strumming on ‘ is piano while I pushes the carpet-sweeper round ‘ is feet.’

  ‘Does he – did he ever bring a lady back with him?’

  ‘Not if I knew anythink about it he didn’t! I don’t have no loose behaviour in this ’ouse. But last Sunday Gertie, that’s the maid, did see ’im leaving with a young woman, and told me. I was going to tackle ’im with it but I’ve not ’ad the chance.’

  Under pressure she summoned Gertie, who confirmed this information. She had not seen the visitor’s face but had heard her speak with a foreign accent.

  Nebulous ideas of Diana using broken English to disguise her identity moved through my mind and were expelled. Diana surely would not come to such a place under any guise.

  ‘May we go up to his room?’ I asked.

  ‘I suppose so. You won’t find much there.’

  She was right in that the ancient grand piano dominated the rest of the shabby furniture and left little space for manoeuvre. I wondered what her other lodgers said about the noise. Easier to be a painter.

  While the landlady was shouting something down the stairs I said: ‘Another girl? Surely to heaven he’s not been keeping two going.’

  Paul shook his head. ‘The Diana affair has been over for all practical purposes for five weeks. He may have been seeking consolation.’

  ‘The same consolation so soon?’

  Paul rubbed his chin. ‘We had a dog at home that used to sit up and beg to Father for his supper every night. When Father was laid up with a broken leg we used to find the dog sitting up and begging to a broomstick that stood in the corner behind Father’s chair.’

  ‘You’ve got a nasty mind’, I said.

  Paul wandered aimlessly round the room, staring at himself in the mildewed mirror, smearing a finger with the dust of the mantelpiece, taking in the battered gas fire, the unemptied ash-trays.

  He said: ‘Suppose I go down and get Mrs What’s-it to let me phone Diana. After all, she might have some knowledge of his movements.’

  ‘There are some letters here’, I said. ‘ D’you think it would be all right to read them?’

  ‘Please yourself.’

  While he was gone I picked up the letters and glanced through them. Presently he came back.

  ‘Sometimes’, he said, ‘ I don’t think Diana is a very nice character. I mean is she really prepared to give herself to a man and then drop him like a discarded toffee paper?’

  ‘You prophesied that.’

  ‘But there are ways and ways. I hold no brief for Leo; I know he’s made a fool of himself. What I implied was that when you scratched a woman’s security you found underneath a cool common sense, an eye to the main chance, which is not altogether admirable but is certainly excusable. But when you scratch Diana you get granite – or maybe it’s cheap flint.’

  ‘There’s nothing in the letters. There’s this card: ‘‘Mlle Jacqueline Dupaix, Teacher of Ballroom Dancing, 4 Markham Mansions, Paddington.’’ I wonder …’

  ‘Near my old haunts’, said Paul. ‘It’s not the sort of district Diana would approve of. Bring that card along and let’s try Miss Dupaix.’

  We bade goodbye to the landlady, who was waiting suspiciously on the steps, a
nd took a tube.

  Markham Mansions was even poorer than Leo’s address, and we climbed four flights and pressed the bell without much hope of finding the lady at home at this hour. But a girl came to the door and answered to the name we inquired for.

  I let Paul do the talking. By this time experience had done far more than tuition or cultivation to give him an easy manner.

  Mlle Dupaix was very young, with dark eyes and a sulky mouth and a habit of flinging back a lock of black hair from her brow. She would not admit us, even when our mission was made known, and kept a hand up to the neck of her dressing-gown as if she suspected our intentions.

  She made no secret of the fact that Leo had been there, but said he had left that morning. Leo had been sharing her room since Sunday night. She gave dancing lessons both here and in Greek Street, where she had met Leo. She had known him a month. He was very unwell, very upset, suffering from a malaise. He had said he was coming and had come. He had stayed and not gone out. They had cooked their meals together. This morning he had said he was going and had gone. No, she did not know where. Possibly home; who could tell? Now, please, she was busy.

  We stared together at the door where a moment before her dark, sulphurous but attractive face had been.

  ‘Is she telling the truth?’

  ‘Yes’, said Paul.

  ‘I got that impression too.’

  We went down the stairs.

  ‘Well’, I said, ‘Leo’s particular broomstick isn’t a common prostitute.’

  ‘No, indeed’, said Paul. ‘A distinctly uncommon one. I’d like to paint her as Madame de Montespan. I’ve always wanted to paint Madame de Montespan.’

  I glanced at him. ‘Yes, what is this idea you’ve got?’

  ‘What idea?’

  ‘Someone told me you were thinking of painting a series – famous courtesans, they said. Using, I presume, present day models.’

  ‘That’s the idea.’

  ‘With what end in view?’

  ‘What end could there be except the usual? To exhibit. Probably to sell. It seems to me an interesting notion.’

  I kicked some mud off my heel. ‘It isn’t exactly a forward step, is it?’

  ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘Well … it’s illustration, isn’t it? It’s not quite the – the creative art I thought you were aiming at.’

  ‘You’ll sound like old Becker soon, Bill. Serving God and Mammon etc. Anyway that objection is rubbish. Plain rubbish. What about Rubens and his ‘‘Rebecca’’ and his ‘‘Sarah’’, and five hundred other people out of the Bible? What about ‘‘The Last Supper’’? Is that illustration? What about Vermeer’s ‘‘ Diana at her Toilette’’? Or ‘‘Christ in the House of Martha and Mary’’? Illustrations? Or Rembrandt’s allegorical paintings? Or just a few thousand others?’

  ‘You out-gun me’, I said. ‘Sorry I spoke.’

  ‘No need to be. But don’t join the crap-brigade. There are one or two critics have got me in their sights – I was too good too young. The fact that I’m going to paint a series of high-class prostitutes doesn’t accord with accepted ideas quite as well as if I was painting the twelve thousandth allegorical portrait of the Virgin Mary. That’s all.’

  We had been walking back towards the tube.

  I said pacifically: ‘So what’s the next move about Leo?’

  ‘I suppose we could telephone again, see if by any chance we’ve crossed in the post. Though my general feeling is to let it drop.’

  ‘We’ll telephone’, I said.

  We entered a nearby call-box and I rang Leo’s lodgings. The now familiar voice of Leo’s landlady came crackling through the wire.

  Who? Mr Who? Never heard of him. Oh, Mr Lynn. Yes, he’d just come in, just after we’d left. See him? No, she hadn’t seen him. She knew his footsteps. Speak to him?

  The line faded out, became clear again. Speak to him? Hold on: she’d see.

  A long wait. Hullo. Were we still there? She’d been up to his room but he wouldn’t come down. Yes, she’d given the name. Well, there it was; it wasn’t her business if we’d fallen out over something …

  Contact ended, and I hung up and explained the position to Paul.

  He gave a shrug of impatience. ‘ Oh, blast the fellow; if he wants to nurse his grievance, let him. Anyway, you can phone the school. I’m going home to do some work.’

  I didn’t move. ‘ I’ve got a hunch, Paul.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘I’d like to see him.’

  ‘Well, go and hold his hand if you want to; I’ve done with the fellow, leading us all over London.’

  ‘Can you spare another half-hour?’

  ‘On a good purpose, yes. Not on consoling a sulky idiot.’

  ‘Come on’, I said. ‘One sulky idiot is enough.’

  I don’t know if I had any inkling of the truth at this stage, but certainly some very strong impulse persuaded me to go.

  Leo’s goitrous landlady stood exasperated, knuckles on hips, as we mounted the stairs. I went to Leo’s door and knocked. There was no answer, so I tried the door. It was locked. I knocked again. Paul suddenly wrinkled his nose. ‘ Out of the way, Bill.’

  He went back, took a run, butted into the door. It creaked and complained, but held firm.

  He raised a foot and kicked violently at the panel just below the handle. After a few kicks it began to splinter, and he was able to get a hand in and upwards and turn the key. Amid shouts of protest from the mounting landlady we opened the door and entered a room full of gas.

  II

  We dragged Leo out on the landing. He was breathing still but was a very bad colour. We knelt there on the ragged linoleum trying to apply what resuscitation we could think of while the landlady moaned complaints about the damage done to her door and, when she could spare the time, offered useless advice on getting a doctor. In the end Paul shouted her down with a demand for water. I think it was his furious face more than anything that sent her scurrying.

  I’ve seldom seen anyone so angry as Paul was that afternoon at Leo’s action. In spite of his humble origin and the apparent ease with which he was at present adapting himself to a sophisticated way of living, he had certain ingrained values that his social behaviour didn’t touch. Even a sense of form. This incident to him was bad form. He couldn’t stand the hysterical in any guise. That anyone should try to put an end to himself for the inadequate reasons, that moved Leo; that anyone should take himself so seriously; particularly that it was Leo – and over a woman he had introduced him to …

  We worked on Leo for a few minutes, but as soon as it became clear that the suicide attempt was going to be as much of a failure as the love affair that had provoked it, Paul got up, dusted his hands and left the rest to me. Then he limped off – having bruised his foot in breaking the door – before Leo had properly come round.

  Later, at Leo’s request, I went to Newton and told the Lynns a faked story to explain his absence from the Royal College of Music. They swallowed it without question. But Leo was so down I was a bit afraid that, despite promises to the contrary, he might give a repeat performance with greater success. It was with relief that I saw him begin to take an interest in his music again, and at the end of the year he left for Paris to continue his studies there.

  Paul never afterwards mentioned the matter to me in any way. It was as if it was something indecent he had witnessed. Nevertheless I believe this was very much a motivating force – and one which has never been mentioned before – in the notorious quarrel in which he was to become involved.

  But before that he married.

  Chapter Four

  This is not meant to be a biography of Paul Stafford. It is the story of my relationship with him and those nearest to him. It is not meant to be the story of my life; yet inevitably something of my life must come in. That is what I mean by lack of perspective. Although often the observer, it was impossible for me to be the detached observer.

  Thus with Olive Craya
m. She’d been a student of M. Becker’s at the Grasse School, and Paul had known her there. I had met her through Paul, and we had taken a fancy to each other. We’d been out together a number of times; twice I’d gone back to her apartment which she shared with two girls; the other girls were out; but little happened to match the lurid fancies of today. With Olive I think nothing would have happened, even if it had got that far. She was careful that nothing should occur before marriage. To some girls that is a matter of principle, and then in my out-dated view it is admirable. Olive’s carefulness was more a matter of calculation.

  Paul had been commissioned to do the designs for A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Old Vic – another feather in his cap – and although all this work was initially figurative, he extended his commission to paint a half-dozen of the main characters personally. Little Mark Alderson, who was playing Puck, was unavailable, so Paul asked Olive to sit for him.

  She was right for it: very small, with small bones, lovely rounded limbs, unnoticeable breasts, a mischievous, gay expression. Auburn gold hair cut short – it was the day of the shingle – large and very beautiful ice-green eyes, a milky skin, small delicate ears.

  So she sat for him, and the next thing they were engaged. Knowing him very well as I did and her better than most, it never seemed to me to be ‘on’ as a likely match. Others of course have pointed out the advantage to them both. Paul was a rising man in the profession in which she had a fair talent: although of working-class origin he was quickly becoming one of London’s most successful portraitists; he might become another Sargent; certainly he had an entry into the sort of society she would seek and enjoy. For his part, aside from her looks which probably suggested a dozen different poses, she came of a county family which traced its ancestry back to the Wars of the Roses, and in her turn she could bring him a society, and commissions in that society, which otherwise he wouldn’t attain to.

  If one had been able to overlook a mere matter of temperament it might indeed have been the perfect match.

  Her father, Sir Alexander Crayam, was a tall, thin, desiccated man high in the Civil Service, with an absent manner, glazed eyes and a habit of moving his lips when he was not talking, as if dictating everlasting memos. Her mother was dark and neurasthenic, hated enclosed spaces, and complained of blinding headaches and lassitude. There had been three children, and the two eldest, both boys, had been drowned in a boating accident in Scotland.