I followed up Dorothy’s lead and we talked about ‘artists’ and ‘creators’ with splendid sentimentalism and woolliness. The war, we agreed, was perhaps harder on such people than on anyone else. I did wonder a little bit whether Dorothy considered herself an artist by virtue of her competent magazine stories, but I was not so gauche as to ask, and presently she let drop a rather deprecating reference to her ‘pot-boilers’ and followed it up by a confidence. She was, she said, writing a play into which she was putting “all of herself—not just a little bit.”
“How interesting,” I said. “I’m so glad. I hope you’ll let us see it when it’s finished. We have got a play department, you know.” (It was past two o’clock. We must get down to brass tacks some time.)
“Oh, it’s not nearly finished yet,” said Dorothy, instantly becoming vaguer.
“No? . . . By the way, while we are on the subject of your work, we had a little bit of bother about one of your short stories—Mermaids in Bloomsbury was the name.”
“Oh? Let me see . . . Oh yes, I remember the one.”
I felt quite sure that she remembered it very well.
I proceeded cautiously. “It’s not a very great matter, Miss Harper, but it’s just that naturally it’s our job to be careful that that sort of muddle doesn’t occur. I’ll tell you what happened.” I told her briefly about the letter from the editor. I made fairly light of it, and ended up, “So you see, I’ve been rather held up with your short stories since in consequence. I haven’t liked to send any out just in case one or two of the others have been seen by someone already.” I paused, wondering for a moment whether to make any point about how unfair it was on us to behave like that, and then decided not. She knew now that we might quite possibly find out if she tried the trick on again, and that was the main thing.
“Oh, my dear!” cried Dorothy gaily. “Have I committed a terrible crime? I’m so sorry—all your funny little rules quite perplex me. What was that frightful argument about ‘split commissions’ I heard a bit of one day in your office?”
It was a good red-herring, but I wasn’t to be drawn.
“It’s our job to handle your work so that you shan’t be bothered with all that sort of thing,” I said persuasively. “Only I’m sure you see we can’t do it unless—well, unless we know what’s happening.”
“I’m so sorry, dear. Did I get you into trouble with Mrs. Hitchcock? What a shame! Don’t bother any more about that silly little story. Just tear it up.”
“Oh no! Please! That would be a great pity. It’s a very good story. We can very probably sell it—if you’ll just let me know . . .”
“Really, my dear, it’s not worth bothering about! Just one of my little pot-boilers that I toss off and then forget all about! I’m afraid I take even less interest in their fate than I used to do since I started on my play.”
Damn the woman. It was like arguing with a butterfly! I would not have minded so much if she had really been as foolish as she made out.
“Ah, but we take an interest in their fate,” I countered. “A very great interest. Could you tell me if Mermaids in Bloomsbury has been already seen by anyone else? And the other stories we have on hand too, of course. I have a list here as a matter of fact—”
“Isn’t that John Martindale at that table over there?”
“Yes,” I said briefly.
“Are you sure?” (The butterfly seemed suddenly to have developed a power of concentration.)
“Yes, quite sure. I know him, as a matter of fact. I was talking to him before you arrived.”
“Do you really?” I saw her give me a quick all-over sort of look. I knew exactly what it meant—‘How on earth does this girl out of an office come to know John Martindale? Perhaps there’s more in her than I thought.’
“Yes. Not very intimately now. We used to meet in the Park as children,” I said, kindly relieving her unspoken curiosity.
“I wonder if you’d introduce me?”
She tried to say it lightly, but the effect was rather that of a command. I felt considerably taken aback. If there’s one thing I hate it’s presuming on a chance acquaintanceship with someone well-known.
“You see, I’m on a committee that’s getting up a dance and cabaret in aid of the bombed-out Londoners,” explained Dorothy. “Those poor East-Enders, you know. And it would be such a feather in our caps if we could get John Martindale to come. Funnily enough, we were just wondering how to approach him—the personal approach is so much better, don’t you think? Oddly enough, none of us happens to know him—not even old Lady Mansbridge who knows everyone. Now you understand why this sudden request! It’s not for myself, of course.”
Except that it will be a feather in your cap if you’re the one to get him, I thought. Aloud I said, to gain time: “But he’s not a cabaret artist.”
“Of course not!” She gave a patronizingly indulgent little laugh. “When I say a ‘cabaret,’ I don’t mean quite the usual thing. I mean something rather better . . . more suitable for what the ball’s in aid of. We’d like John Martindale to do a speech from Shakespeare, perhaps, or something of the sort.”
“Oh, of course—how stupid of me! I was getting muddled and thinking for a minute that the bombed-out East-Enders would be coming to the ball themselves and might prefer George Robey,” I said naughtily.
Dorothy Harper flung me another quick look. I could see that, once again, she didn’t know quite where she was with me.
“It could all be managed quite naturally if we happened to go out of the door together,” said Dorothy persuasively. “Look—he’s calling for his bill. We’d better get ours. Waiter!”
Well, really, I thought. The woman’s my guest and for sheer bad manners . . . ! What am I to do now?
“Wouldn’t it be better if I gave you a note of introduction and you wrote to him?” I said. “After all, he’s with a party . . . It’s a little—”
“Oh, nonsense, my dear! It’s the easiest thing in the world. Just do it casually, you know . . .”
At this point the waiter tried to hand our bill to Dorothy, and I think it was only the interruption that stopped her from telling me in a kindly, ‘hints-to-girls’ way how to introduce someone to someone else.
I really felt furious. The most maddening thing of all was that I had by no means yet said all I wanted to say to her. I should have liked to have given her, there and then, a strongly-expressed lecture upon how and how not to behave both professionally and socially. She badly needed it.
“Quick! They’re getting up!” hissed Dorothy. “Just leave the money on the table, and you go out first and I’ll follow.”
I should have liked to have sat tight and called, “Hi! Miss?” to punish her. Instead I found myself bluffed into rising with her.
She had not managed badly, I will say that for her. We did meet in the doorway. John had four or five people with him, all talking. He smiled at me (we had already had our little chat and exchanged such minor news about ourselves as we always did), and stood aside to let me pass out. I did, together with the other women of John’s party. Dorothy Harper, I supposed, was behind me.
She was. Close on my heels, as I found when we were all on the pavement. The other women closed in round John, jabbering again. Dorothy nudged my elbow.
I think it was this final unnecessary nudge that really put my back up. The last thing I wanted was to introduce her to John anyway, but at least if I was going to do it, I was going to do it in my own way.
A taxi, on the lookout for a customer, prowled by John waved to it and sprang in.
“Must fly!” he called cheerily. “Terribly late. Good-bye everyone.”
He was gone.
The others melted away. I was left face to face with Dorothy! I had not, after all, made the slightest move to introduce her.
“I’m sorry,” I said (but I do not think I sounded very sorry), “but, as you see, it wasn’t a good moment. He was in a hurry.”
“You, could easily have s
topped for a minute in the doorway,” retorted Dorothy, now anything but vague in manner.
“There were so many people about.”
“I shouldn’t have kept him a moment. Just a smile and word or two. You didn’t imagine I was going to ask him there and then about the cabaret, did you? It was only just to—to make a contact that I could follow up afterwards.”
I did not see the slightest reason why I should go on apologizing. I had had quite enough of being alternately patronized and bullied by her.
“Shall we go back and have some coffee now?” I said coldly. “We were discussing your work, weren’t we, when we got interrupted?”
I thought that the phrase “got interrupted” was putting it generously. I hoped that, by coffee and perhaps a promise of a letter to John, I could retrieve the situation. I was an optimist.
“I don’t believe you really know him at all!” cried Dorothy; venomously.
I looked at her, frankly surprised. I had always thought her a frightful poseur, and a social climber. I had not realized quite how easily the veneer would crack, nor that her voice could have that fish-wife note. It was now my turn to feel snobbish and aristocratic. I looked at her and thought, and enjoyed thinking, that she looked like a thoroughly ill-bred woman in a thoroughly nasty temper.
Perhaps she saw something of this in my face. In any case the checked herself slightly, glanced at her watch, exclaimed, “I’d no idea it was so late, no, I can’t possibly stay a moment longer, I must fly,” hailed a taxi, leaped into it and was gone in a flash.
I was left on the pavement, ruefully contemplating the vanishing taxi. I had been away from the office a good two hours, had spent a considerable sum of the firm’s money on lunch, and had, in the end, accomplished absolutely nothing. Indeed, to say that matters stood exactly as they had done before was putting it perhaps a trifle optimistically.
* * * * *
“You didn’t even manage to get out of her whether Mermaids in Bloomsbury and all her other stories had been seen by anyone else or not?” said Mrs. Hitchcock.
She had listened to my account with some sympathy. Mrs. Hitchcock, although a hard and unimaginative woman, was by no means, on her own ground, a stupid or brutal employer. In our opinions of Dorothy Harper we were at one, and she made no sort of pretence that she found her easy, herself, to deal with.
I shook my head disgustedly.
“No, I didn’t. I would have got that out of her—I wasn’t doing too badly at that time—if it hadn’t been for this blasted John Martindale interruption.”
Mrs. Hitchcock was silent, apparently wrapped in thought. For no real reason I felt nervous.
“Do you think that I ought to have introduced her to him at any cost?” I said, hopeful, perhaps, of a little reassurance.
“No. No, I really don’t see why you should have. The office really can’t be expected to help her with her blasted charity balls. The only thing is I don’t quite see why you had to part so abruptly immediately after.”
“Well—I’ve explained how she sort of bounced me out of the restaurant—”
“Yes, yes. I understand all that.” (Mrs. Hitchcock sounded impatient. She is far too concise a person herself ever to want to hear anything twice over.) “But couldn’t you have got her back to the subject of her work afterwards—asked her to walk back to the office with you or something? I did ask you to bring her back after, didn’t I?”
“Did you?” I’m afraid I looked a little blank. “This morning?”
“No, no. When we first wrote the letter inviting her.”
I remembered then. Mrs. Hitchcock had. Damn.
“Yes, I’m afraid I had forgotten that,” I said. “But honestly, even if I had remembered it I don’t think she’d have come. She suddenly discovered she was in a tearing hurry. I did suggest going back to have coffee.”
“And what did she say?” said Mrs. Hitchcock.
“Actually she said, ‘I don’t believe you really know him at all.’”
“And what did you answer?”
“I didn’t say anything, as a matter of fact. I think I just looked at her.”
“Angrily?”
“No, not really angrily. Not at all angrily, really. Just rather taken aback, sort of surprised—interested almost. I suddenly sort of saw her for what she was.”
It was a perfectly truthful answer. It was, perhaps, an unfortunate one.
“And it was after this look of yours that she discovered she was in a tearing hurry?” pursued Mrs. Hitchcock remorselessly! “I see.”
I did not like the tone of that cold ‘I see.’
“Anyway, I didn’t lose my temper with her—not apparently, not for an instant,” I said defensively.
I really was not alluding to the time when Mrs. Hitchcock had begun the whole business by more or less losing her temper with Dorothy Harper. But I am afraid Mrs. Hitchcock thought I was. She gave me a quick look and said, “Losing your temper with clients isn’t the only thing that matters—some a them it does good to.”
“Good Lord! You don’t mean I ought to have flared out at her, do you?” I said, bewildered.
“No, no, of course I don’t. I only meant—oh, surely you can see for yourself what I mean, Vicky.”
“No, I can’t. I honestly can’t.”
“Well then—with a touchy snob like Dorothy Harper, better anything than going all superior.”
“Superior?”
“Yes. Superior. You told me yourself you looked at her and saw her for what she was. I imagined you knew that already, Anyway, you didn’t take her out to lunch for that purpose.”
“I think you’re taking up my words and using them against me,” I said, a little stiffly. “I only told you what I thought. I didn’t say anything at all.”
“Quite. You just looked at her,” retorted Mrs. Hitchcock meaningly. “She won’t forgive you very easily for putting her so thoroughly in the wrong.”
There was a nasty silence. Indignant as I was at the accusation of ‘going superior,’ I could not help feeling that Mrs. Hitchcock had unerringly jumped on my one false move. Dorothy Harper was a slightly taller woman than myself, and yet, as I cast my mind back to visualize us standing together on the pavement after John’s taxi had driven off, I saw myself mentally as towering momentarily over her. That was certainly a clue to my state of mind at the moment—and, if it had shown in my face or even by implication in the fact that I looked at her without speaking, it was no state of mind for Dorothy Harper to appreciate as from me. Just for a second or two I had ‘forgotten myself’—by which I mean I had forgotten to keep the office foremost in my thoughts. Mrs. Hitchcock, in whose mind the office always came first, had scented this out instantly. The fact that she shared my opinion of Dorothy Harper’s behaviour was irrelevant.
Our luncheon was doubly a failure. Dorothy had built up a fine façade of gracious airy patronage and then given herself away badly. I had first played up to her well and then by a single contemptuous look, allowed her to suspect that I was merely acting a part. No, certainly she would not forgive me readily.
I sighed.
“I’m sorry,” I said drearily. “I’ve wasted time and money and done no good at all.”
“Yes,” agreed Mrs. Hitchcock coolly.
So reduced was I by this time that I was almost grateful to her for leaving it at that estimate.
I turned to go. As I reached the door, Mrs. Hitchcock spoke.
“You might let me have all the short stories of hers you’ve got on hand, will you, Vicky? I’d better look through them, and think what to do next.”
“Yes.” I swallowed. “I gather you don’t want me to take any further action myself about her?”
“No, certainly not. Don’t do anything at all.”
She did not actually say: ‘I can’t trust you any more’; but that was what I felt her meaning was.
“I’ll get them right away,” I said in a small voice. That, at least, would get me out of the room.
It did, since Mrs. Hitchcock merely nodded.
I went and collected the short stories, every one of which struck me now as bearing a particularly nauseating title, and carried them drearily down to Mrs. Hitchcock’s office.
I could not help being strongly reminded of a painful episode in my childhood, when an aunt had given me an embroidery set, from the contents of which I had with much preliminary glee and subsequent feverish exasperation tried to make a very small table-mat. Not only had the mat been an utter failure, even in my own prejudiced eyes, but kind but firm adults had removed the rather mangled remains of the set. I should have it again, they said, when I was older and cleverer and wouldn’t spoil it all.
My sensations as I delivered up the box to authority on that occasion were extraordinarily similar to the feelings I now endured on handing the Dorothy Harper stories over to Mrs. Hitchcock—hurt pride, an outraged sense of possession, angry disappointment and, underneath, a faint substratum of relief.
Oddly enough, it was no help to reflect that I could now merely laugh over the embroidery episode and that undoubtedly in years, or even months to come, I would certainly be able to raise a smile over Dorothy Harper. At the moment I felt far too tired and battered even to raise the energy to believe in future laughter.
Chapter 13
*
“How’s Antonia?” I enquired instantly of Blakey, as I entered my house that evening.
“Quite all right. No temperature again to-night, and is getting back her appetite nicely. She’s a bit cross, on and off, but I suppose that’s only to be expected. She’s bored with bed, now she’s so much better.”
“Good,” I said, relieved. In the train on the way home, I had had a recrudescence of worrying about Antonia, and would not have been altogether surprised to hear she was worse again. Now I could at least feel exhausted in peace.
Company in the Evening Page 19
