“Saxon,” Jenny Fox said.
We all stared accusingly at him. Saxon went on squeezing himself. He looked archly over his glasses.
“I had the Dustman,” he said complacently.
We laughed but Mrs. Selby silenced us and said to Saxon: “Go on. You’re the only one who’s telling the truth.”
“She was always very worried about the Dustman,” he said. “They’re a wretched family. He scarcely ever goes home.”
And at this, the band started again and Saxon got up and asked my wife to dance. We were left with Saxon’s picture of that rich girl alone in the world. Before the evening was out he had danced with each one of our wives. We all grinned and said “Look at old Saxon at the end of term dance.”
If there was one non-dancer on the floor it was he. His feet, rather like the Dustman’s, trudged, in straight, fated lines, deep in sand; enthusiastically deep. He danced, as it were, in committee. Our wives found themselves in the grip of one who pushed them around, all the time looking askance from side to side as if they were sections or sub-sections for which he was trying to find a place in some majority report. They lost their power to dance. The matter had become desperately topographical to them; while he, as he toiled on, was running off the names of people.
“I saw him in Paris on the second day of the conference.” Or “They were in New York when Foreign Relations met the working party.”
Or “They ran into one another in Piccadilly when the delegation met the Trustees. Thompson, Johnson, Hobson, Timson, Richardson, Wilkinson”—our wives returned to us like new editions of Who’s Who.
Except Mrs. Selby. She was much taller than he and on the floor she had the prosecuting look of one who was going to wring what she wanted out of Saxon. She did not look down at him but over his head at the piece of fair hair that stuck up at the back of his head. He soon had to give up his committee style. She got a grip of him, got him into corners, carried him off to the middle, turned savagely near the band and in this spot, she shouted to him:
“What’s all this stuff about Tessa and the Dustman?”
And as she said it, seeing him turn to the right, she swung him round to the left and when the dancers were thinning on the floor she planted him in a quiet spot in the middle.
“Tessa’s slept with all of you, hasn’t she?” she said.
“Shame!” Saxon said, stopping dead. He took off his glasses and there was a sudden change in him. Often since, seeing that naked look on his face, I have thought: “How he must have hated us.” I remember at school how we stuffed sausage down his neck and how he just let us do it. Sausage after sausage went down. Then off came the glasses and he backed to an open window. Now, on the dance floor, with his glasses off, Saxon suddenly began to dance—if that is the word for it—as if he had been stung. Where had he learned these extraordinary steps?— that sudden flinging wide of his short legs and arms, that strange buckling and straightening of the body, the thrusting forward and back of his punch-ball head, those sudden wrenchings of Mrs. Selby back and forth, and spinning her round, that general air of looking for a knockout in the rebound off the ropes. Mrs. Selby’s firm eyes were disordered as she tried to foresee his movements, and amid the disorder, she was magnetised by the fiendish rhythm of his feet and by the austere look of his unforgiving face.
“Hasn’t she?” called Mrs. Selby, in a last piteous attempt. The band stopped and she stood there getting her breath in the middle of the floor. Saxon, without music, dropped back into the goalkeeper stance we knew so well, with his hands on his hips and short legs apart. She was staring at Saxon, he was staring at her. It was a long stare. Selby and his partner passed them and he saw what Mrs. Selby saw: obstinate tears were forming in Saxon’s naked eyes; water filled them; it dropped on his pink cheeks. He took out his glasses and pretended to wipe them with his handkerchief and put them on. He was sternly, silently, crying. Mrs. Selby put out her hand repentantly; no doubt he did not see her hand but walked with her off the floor. We were clapping in the silly way people do and someone called out:
“Where did you learn that one, Saxon?”
He looked with bewilderment at us.
“I’ll be back in a minute,” he said and walked across the room to the outer hall of the hotel.
Mrs. Selby put herself with kind Jenny Fox and whispered to her for a long time and Mrs. Fox said:
“It’s not your fault. How could you know?”
“I only said it,” Mrs. Selby said wretchedly, looking at the swing door that let cold air in from the outer hall when it flashed round and where Saxon had gone.
“What was the matter with Saxon?” Selby accused.
“He’s upset—nothing,” said Mrs. Fox turning to Selby as she patted Mrs. Selby’s hand. And then, arguing for herself, Mrs. Selby told us.
Presently the swing door flashed and Saxon came back and three of us got up to offer him a chair. We gave him the best one, beside a low table which had a brilliant lamp on it. Instantly it threw his shadow on the white wall—a shadow that caricatured his face—the long nose, the chin that receded, the glasses tilted as he looked askance at us, the sprig of schoolboy hair.
“They haven’t turned up yet,” he said.
We looked at our Saxon with awe. It was obvious he was in love with that rich, beautiful woman. He must always have been in love with her. We had pulled her to pieces in front of him. What he must have been feeling as he pretended and as he submitted to our joke. And, after all this, she had not come. Where was she? One or two of us wanted to get up and find her. Where would she be? We could not guess. We had to admit that Tessa merely slummed with us. She would never think of coming to a second-rate hotel like this or to an old Asaphians’ reunion. She’d be at some smart dinner party, something very grand—she certainly had “oldest friends” in very grand circles. One could imagine her long neck creeping up close to the conscience of an Archbishop. Or disturbing the shirt of an Ambassador, or her boding voice creeping up the sleeve of a banker who would be saying: “Young lady, what are all your hippie friends up to nowadays?” at one of old Ma Dustman’s dinner parties. She would be stripping the jewellery off the women and telling Sir Somebody Something that one would be a fool to sell one’s Matisses yet. The Dustman would not be there. We tried not to look at the unmarriageable silhouette of Saxon’s head on the wall.
“Where did you pick up that wonderful step, Saxon?” Mrs. Selby said gaily, to make amends.
Saxon gave a forgiving glance. He had recovered.
“At the Cool It,” he said.
“What’s the Cool It?” Thomas said.
“A club,” said Saxon.
“Never heard of it.”
“In the docks,” said Saxon.
“The docks?”
Saxon in the docks! The liaison committees in the docks! Saxon in low life! Saxon a libertine!
“What on earth takes you to the docks? Research? Come clean. Having fun?”
In our repentance, we made a hero of him. The old sly Saxon, pleased and pink, was with us again.
“In principle, yes,” said Saxon. “I sometimes go with the Dustman.”
We could not speak. Saxon and the Dustman in the docks!
“What is it—a cellar?”
“It’s a sewer,” said Saxon complacently. “Tessa goes there with her father.”
“The Dustman takes his daughter to a place like that!”
“He says it will loosen her up,” said Saxon, looking for hope in our eyes. “You see he wants her to get married.”
Saxon settled back, impudently, comfortably, in the chair. The brocade enriched him and he maliciously considered us one by one.
“To a stoker?” said Selby.
“No,” said Saxon. “To me—in principle. That’s why I go down there. You see, she’s worried about him. We go down to see he doesn’t get into trouble. I had to pull him out of a nasty fight last week. We got him out. We got him home. To her place. He hates going to his.”
The notion of Saxon fighting was as startling as his dance.
“She must be very grateful to you,” we said politely.
“Why do you say ‘marry in principle?’ ” said Selby.
“He means,” Mrs. Selby explained sharply to her husband, disliking the mockery, “the Dustman is her oldest friend, older even than Saxon is. Isn’t that so, Saxon?”
“In practice, yes,” said Saxon, entirely forgiving her. “I’ll go and have another look for them. They promised to come. The Dustman said it would be awfully nice to see us all again. I’ll just go and see.”
And he got up and trotted across the yards of hotel carpet that had a pattern of enormous roses. It seemed that their petals were caressing him on his way to the door. The door spun round and Saxon vanished.
Our wives said: “What a sad story!” and “What a bitch that girl is.” But we thought: “Good old Saxon.” And “He’s suffering for us.” Selby put it crudely saying: “That lets us off the hooks.” And then our feelings changed. There was Saxon sitting like a committee on his own feelings, delegating them incurably to sub-committees, and sitting back doing nothing, relying on an amendment. He must have been doing this for the last eight years. But this led us to another feeling. We would never have behaved as Saxon behaved. Each of us saw that beautiful girl in our minds and thought we would have soon pulled her out of this ridiculous obsession with the Dustman and his low life. And how often we had heard of coquettes like Tessa settling down at last in their thirties with faithful bores like Saxon, men they had snubbed over and over again before that alarming age caught them out.
We kept our eyes on the main door of the hotel and were so fixed on it that we did not notice, at once, a figure crossing the dance floor at our side and looking in at us.
“Well!” we heard Tessa’s slow, only too well-known voice, dwelling raffishly on the word so that it meant “What are you up to? You didn’t think you could keep me out of this.” Her large solemn eyes, as forcefully short-sighted as Saxon’s were, put their warning innuendo to each of us in turn and the mouth of a beautiful Persian cat possessed us one by one. The spell was on us. A comfortable mew to each of our wives indicated that she had known us years before they had.
We were nearly screaming for help. It was for Thomas, the rescuer, to save us.
“Saxon has just gone out looking for your father.”
She was up from her chair at once and making for the main door. She had fine legs, a fast passionate step, and Mrs. Selby said of her dress:
“It’s expensive, but pink is hopeless if you’re putting on weight.”
But Selby, over-eager for any hope that could be got out of the situation, said:
“Did you see her when she came in? It was exactly like Saxon. Hunting. You know—in principle yes, but in practice—well. She’s a liaison too. I think the Dustman’s loosened her up and found the man for her.”
But no one paid much attention to Selby for the swing doors flashed and across the hall came the Dustman, Saxon and Tessa together.
“Look, daddy,” she said to the old man. He had not, of course, changed into a dinner-jacket and his tweed jacket was done up on the wrong button. His trudging step, I now thought, was not so much a trudge as a scraping caused by the probability that he was swinging by an invisible rope hooked to the seat of his learned trousers.
“Look,” she said, “all my oldest friends!”
And Saxon stood apart with his hands on his hips, watching, his legs apart, keeping goal, wistful, admiring, triumphant.
“Who’s dancing?” piped the old man. And soon all of us were on the floor, the Dustman shoving Mrs. Selby along as if to her doom, and Tessa following him with her eyes all the time, as Saxon leapt into his passionate, dreadful and unavailing antics all round her. Once in a while she would note where he was, open her mouth to say something pleasant, and then coldly change her mind.
ON THE EDGE OF THE CLIFF
The sea fog began to lift towards noon. It had been blowing in, thin and loose for two days, smudging the tops of the trees up the ravine where the house stood. “Like the cold breath of old men,” Rowena wrote in an attempt at a poem, but changed the line, out of kindness, to “the breath of ghosts,” because Harry might take it personally. The truth was that his breath was not foggy at all, but smelt of the dozens of cigarettes he smoked all day. He would walk about, taking little steps, with his hand outstretched, tapping the ash off as he talked. This gave an abstracted searching elegance which his heavy face and long sentences needed. In her dressing gown Rowena went to his room. His glasses were off and he had finished shaving and he turned a face savaged to the point of saintliness by age, but with a heavy underlip that made him look helplessly brutal. She laughed at the soap in his ears.
“The ghosts have gone,” she said poetically. “We can go to Withy Hole! I’ll drive by the Guilleth road, there’s a fair there. They’ll tell our fortunes.”
“Dull place,” he said. “It used to be full of witches in the sixteenth century.”
“I’m a witch,” she said. “I want to go to the fair. I saw the poster. It starts today.”
“We’ll go,” he said, suspicious, but giving in.
He was seventyish, and with a young girl of twenty-five one had, of course, to pretend to be suspicious. There are rules for old men who are in love with young girls, all the stricter when the young girls are in love with them. It has to be played as a game.
“The sea pinks will be out on the cliffs,” he said.
“You old botanist!” she said.
He was about to say “I know that” and go on to say that girls were like flowers with voices and that he had spent a lot of his life collecting both, but he had said these things to her often before and at his age one had to avoid repeating oneself, if possible. Anyway, it was more effective as a compliment when other people were there and they would turn to look at her. When young girls turned into women they lost his interest: he had always lived for reverie.
“So it’s settled,” she said.
Now he looked tragic as he gazed at her. Waving his razor, he began his nervous trick of taking a few dance-like steps and she gave him one of her light hugs and ran out of the room.
What with his organising fusses and her habit of vanishing to do something to a drawing she was working on, the start was late.
“We’ll have to eat something,” she said, giving an order.
But it was his house, not hers. He’d lived alone long enough not to be able to stand a woman in his kitchen, could not bear to see her cut a loaf or muddle the knives and forks or choke the sink with tea leaves.
“Rowena and I,” he said to people who came to see them, in his military voice, “eat very little. We see no one.”
This was not true, but like a general with a literary turn, he organised his imagination. He was much guided by literature. His wife had gone mad and had killed herself. So in the house he saw himself as a Mr. Rochester, or in the car as Count Mosca with the young duchess in La Chartreuse de Parme; if they met people, as Tolstoy’s worldly aunt. This was another game: it educated the girl.
While he fussed between the kitchen and the room they ate in, she came down late and idled, throwing back her long black hair, lassoing him with smiles and side glances thrown out and rushed at him while he had a butter plate in his hand and gave him another of her light engulfing hugs and laughed at the plate he waved in the air.
“Rowena!” he shouted, for she had gone off again. “Get the car out.”
The house was halfway up the long ravine, backed and faced by an army of ash trees and beeches. There was the terrace and the ingenious steep garden and the plants that occupied him most of the day, and down from the terrace he had had to cut the twenty or thirty steps himself, heaving his pickaxe. Rowena had watched his thick stack of coarse grey hair and his really rather brutal face and his pushed-out lips, as he hacked and the pick hit the stones. He worked with such anger and pride, but he
looked up at her sometimes with appealing, brilliant eyes. His furious ancient’s face contained pain naturally.
She knew he hated to be told to be careful when he came down the steps. She knew the ceremony of getting him into the car, for he was a tall, angular man and had to fold himself in, his knees nearly touching his chin, to which the long deep despondent lines of his face ran heavily down. It was exciting for her to drive the old man dangerously fast down the long circling lane through the trees, to show how dangerous she could be, while he talked. He would talk nonstop for the next hour, beginning, of course, with the country fair.
“It’s no good. Plastic, like cheap food. Not worth seeing. The twentieth century has packaged everything.”
And he was on to the pre-Roman times, the ancient spirit of carnival, Celtic gods and devils, as they drove out of the ravine into deep lanes, where he could name the ferns in the stone walls, and the twisting hills and corners that shook the teeth and the spine. Historical instances poured out of him. He was, she said, Old Father Time himself, but he did not take that as a joke, though he humoured her with a small laugh. It was part of the game. He was not Father Time, for in one’s seventies, one is a miser of time, putting it by, hiding the minutes, while she spent fast, not knowing she was living in time at all.
Guilleth was a dull, dusty, Methodistical little town with geraniums in the windows of the houses. Sammy’s Fair was in a rough field just outside it, where dogs and children ran about. There was only one shooting gallery; they were still putting up the back canvas of the coconut shy. There were hoopla stalls, a lot of shouting and few customers. But the small roundabout gave out its engine whistle and the children packed the vulgar circle of spotted cows with huge pink udders, the rocking horses, the pigs, the tigers and a pair of giraffes.
The professor regarded it as a cultural pathos. He feared Rowena. She was quite childishly cruel to him. With a beautiful arrogance that mocked him, she got out of the car and headed for ice cream. He had to head her off the goldfish in their bowls. She’d probably want to bring one home.
Essential Stories Page 25
