by Nina Bawden
I said, “Venetia, what are you doing with Brigid? “
She came to me, a glass in her hand. Her eyes shone at me.
“You’ll see, Paul,” she said. Then, “Life is such fun, Paul.”
She sat on the sofa and leant her head against a dark cushion. Her face looked like an ivory cameo against it.
“But to have Brigid here,” I insisted. “And not only Brigid, but Sebastian.”
“Times change,” she said. “And even Brigid has an unwieldy charm. She has considerable character, Paul, really. I don’t think we have ever appreciated Brigid.”
She was smiling at me; her eyes were bright, unclouded and happy, and I knew that there was something that she wasn’t going to tell me. I said uneasily, “And how is Henry?”
She folded her hands in her lap and gave me a bright, mocking look.
“Henry,” she said primly, “is very well.” She didn’t sound bitter about him, and that surprised me. She was looking down at her lap as though there was something in her face that she wanted to hide.
I told her about my latest job, all I could tell her about it, and she listened to me quietly with a half smile on her lips that I didn’t like. She made no comment when I had finished talking, but she went on smiling.
I said, “Who was the girl who left as I came in? Henry took her home.”
She said, “Oh, Rella. She’s a new neighbour. She and her father are living in the village. She’s Austrian; I hope you’ll like her, Paul.”
“I did like her,” I said, although I couldn’t remember, now, what she looked like. Being with Venetia made me feel like that about other women. When I was with her, they all seemed trivial and unexciting.
“Her father,” said Venetia gently, “is charming.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Is he in love with you?” I asked.
She laughed and got up from the sofa. She walked across the room with the careful grace that looked so easy, and leant against the window, playing with the window cord.
“I think he is, Paul,” she said. “He’s the ‘peculiar’kind.”
“Not like Henry,” I said, and she laughed again without any emotion. Unless, perhaps, there was a trace of contempt.
“Not at all like Henry,” she said. “Not in any way.”
“Not kind to animals,” I said. “Without hundreds of photographs of his football team and his rowing eight and the officers in his unit. Not liking stag parties, and dens, and old slippers and comfortable jackets.”
“No,” she said, but she didn’t laugh as I had expected her to do, but looked troubled and almost unhappy.
I got up and went over to her. She was looking out at the night. The falling snow was lit up by the lights from the house. Away from the fire it was cold, and I felt Venetia shiver.
“This Austrian,” I said. “Are you in love with him?”
“Yes,” she said, curiously flatly, and I was sure that she spoke the truth.
“And Henry?” I asked. She made a motion with her hand that brushed Henry aside. I said, “You don’t hate him now?”
“Hate him?” she said. “No, not any longer. There never was anything to hate, not really.”
She blew on to the window pane and scratched a little mannikin in the misted part. She drew a wide, fantastic moustache across the balloon-like face, and then rubbed the whole thing out with the palm of her hand.
She walked back across the room to the sofa, did something to her knee, and sat down.
“Henry doesn’t count,” she said. “He never did count. You know, Paul, I’ve never got used to finding out how unimportant things can be after they’ve ceased to touch you. How completely everything … love and hate … can disappear and not even leave an ache. People have such short memories for emotion, I suppose.”
“Are you sure?” I asked, watching her.
“I think so,” she said, and then she looked at me. “You know how I used to feel about Henry. Well, it’s gone now. I’m even sorry for him. He’s pathetic, somehow, with his farm and his horses and his dogs, and the den where he keeps the motto of his school hanging over the fireplace. And then he’s so happy, being what he is. Don’t you think that’s pathetic, Paul?”
I wondered if she believed what she was saying, and I decided that she did, and wondered why. I knew what she meant, and yet she had gone wrong somewhere. Henry was unimaginative, he loved tradition in the sense that he loved the things and ideas that he had been brought up with, but he was clever in his own line, and tolerant. Perhaps it was because he was tolerant that Venetia was so busy despising him.
I said, “Who is this Austrian?”
Her eyelids nickered, and I thought that she went a little white.
She said, “His name Adlesburg. Tom Adlesburg. He’s American, at least, he’s always lived in America. Rella only came to live with him after the war; she and her mother lived in Austria until her mother died.”
I had to look at her. Her eyes were shining, and her hands were trembling in her lap.
“Do you know about him?” I asked, hoping that I sounded casual. She nodded, and then her eyes went past me to the door. A man had come in, and I turned to face him.
There wasn’t any possibility of doubt. I would have known him anywhere. Anyone in Europe would have known him, if Europe hadn’t so short a memory. I could have imitated the perky nasal voice before I heard him speak. He was not unlike his photographs; short and thin with a narrow face and a symmetrical jaw, a high forehead and a balding head. But in his photographs he had looked a nonentity, now I saw that he was not. The dark eyes were restless and vivid, his fingernails were badly bitten. A tremendous sense of vitality radiated from him.
“Glad to know you,” he said, and grasped my hand.
Venetia had got up from the sofa and stood between us. She looked up at him and her whole face lit up as if with an inward glow. I remembered what Brigid had said as we had driven to the house. “She seems all lit up inside, like a church.”
Adlesburg searched my face for a moment and then he turned to Venetia.
“Sit down, honey,” he said. “There’s no call to jump up and down as if you were bitten. You’ll wear out the mechanism.”
No one had ever spoken to Venetia like that. No man, anyway, except myself, had ever mentioned her leg to her like that. But she loved it; her eyes snapped at him and her lips parted a little. I knew they didn’t want me, and I wanted to think things out, so I said I had to go and change for dinner, and I left them alone together.
I heard Brigid’s voice in the dining-room; she must be laying dinner, so I went upstairs to my room where I thought I should be alone. I was wrong. Sitting on the end of my bed was Sebastian, and lying at his feet was the oldest and smelliest sheepdog I had ever seen.
“Hallo,” I said, and wondered why Brigid didn’t see that her beloved child washed his face. His nose was running and there were streaks across his cheeks where he had wiped it on his sleeve.
“Hallo,” said Sebastian, and was then covered with confusion and hung his head, squeezing his skinny knees together and tucking his hands under them.
I guessed he had come to say something special, and I wanted him to say it and go away, so I turned my back on him and opened the drawer where I had packed away my things.
“Like some chocolate?” I asked.
There was a little thud, and when I looked round, Sebastian had jumped off the bed and was looking as scared as I have ever seen anyone look.
“What’s the matter?” I asked. “Don’t you like chocolate?”
“No,” he said, and he bent down and tugged at the mass of greasy fur that lay at his feet.
“Come along, Childe Roland,” he said. Childe Roland got wearily to his feet, and stood, blinking his half-blind eyes.
“Why do you call him Childe Roland?” I asked. “It’s an odd name for a dog, isn’t it?”
Sebastian stopped looking frightened. “It isn’t his real name,” he said. “That’s Rufus. I call
him Childe Roland. Because of the Dark Tower, you know.”
I didn’t laugh. “This is rather a Dark Tower, isn’t it?” I said, and Sebastian smiled. Or rather, he parted his rabbity teeth and exposed a great deal of metal band and pink gum.
“I don’t like it,” he said. “I want Mummy to come away, but she won’t. I say, I think I’ll have some of that chocolate after all.”
I gave him the whole bar, and he wolfed it in a couple of bites.
I hoped I didn’t sound amused and said, “Why don’t you like it here? Don’t you get enough to eat?”
He was watching me; he had dark eyes that looked, behind the strong lenses, slightly out of focus. I must have passed some kind of test, because he said in a rasping whisper:
“You won’t tell?”
I shook my head.
“They’re trying to poison me,” he said, and then, in a normal, high voice, “so I don’t eat my supper. Dorry lets me have things in the kitchen. She’s a wizard cook. I’m going to marry her when I grow up.”
Then I made a mistake. I said:
“That’s a good game. But don’t you get bothered by your mother? About not eating, I mean.”
He didn’t say anything. He put the paper that had been round the chocolate down on the dressing-table, and went to the door. Childe Roland, swaying uncertainly on his tired old legs, snuffled faithfully at his heels. There wasn’t anything I could say to put it right at the moment, so I let him go, and he closed the door behind him politely and quietly.
I dressed quickly, thinking that he was an odd sort of boy for Brigid to have produced. I wondered whether it was true that it was his father’s brutality that had given him fits, and I found myself feeling sorry for the child, which was odd, because I so seldom felt sorry for anyone.
When I was dressed, I went downstairs again. They were all in the sitting-room now. Henry, looking beefy in his dinner jacket that must have been made for him when he was a good deal slimmer, welcomed me boisterously.
“Come along in, old chap. Haven’t had time to get a good look at you yet. Home is the hunter and all that. What’ll you have?”
Venetia sat by the fire talking to Tom Adlesburg. The fire glinted on the silk of her dress, and she was holding out a hand to keep the heat from her face. She looked very beautiful, and I didn’t blame Adlesburg for looking at her in the way that he did. She beckoned to me to join them, but I pretended not to see, because I didn’t want particularly to join a three-cornered tête-à-tête. Brigid, and the girl Rella, were sitting on the window seat looking out at the weather. It was almost eight o’clock, but the snow had stopped and the sky was curiously light, and yellow with storm. Brigid was wearing a blue dress which didn’t suit her, but she had always worn blue because it was a “nice” colour, and she would go on doing so. She welcomed me gaily.
“This is a surprise, isn’t it, Paul? A dinner party. You’ve met Rella before, haven’t you?”
“You’ve come back,” I said to Rella.
She smiled. She was small and brown, with a colourless, triangular face. She had a warm, curving mouth. She said:
“The pipes had burst when we got back. There is no one to mend them to-night. So we have come here until tomorrow.”
“Henry had to force them,” said Brigid eagerly. “They were going to stay in the cottage without any water. It was too silly, of course. There is plenty of room here.”
“It would have been very foolish,” I said, and smiled at Rella. I wondered just how much she knew about her father and what she thought about him. Just then she looked past me at the two by the fire, and I thought that her mouth tightened a little. Venetia was laughing, a high, taut laugh, with her head tossed back and her eyes lit up. Adlesburg was watching her, smiling, but with a thoughtful look on his face. Then he touched her arm and said something in a low voice and she stopped laughing and looked at him attentively. His hand was small and brown and it looked very dark against her bare arm. I felt suddenly very jealous.
Rella said, “She is very beautiful, isn’t she? She looks … I am not sure how to say it … as though she could be tragic.”
“Go on,” I said, and sat on the seat beside her.
She said, “Some people have troubles, but they are not tragic. Only stupid and dull. You have to be different from other people if your troubles are going to make you tragic and not just someone people are sorry for. Venetia is different from other people, and I do not mean because she has only one leg. I don’t know why she is different.”
“I do,” I said. “She is completely amoral.” I spoke rather viciously and much too loudly, so that Venetia heard me and looked across at us. She smiled, but there was a trace of anger in her eyes.
“A … moral?” said Rella. “What is that, please?”
I said, although I was sure she knew, “Someone who has no moral sense at all, no feeling for good or evil. Someone who might be a genius or a criminal, you see.”
Henry was looking at me with puzzled eyes.
“I say, old chap,” he said, “surely there’s a distinction? You talk as if there was no difference between Beethoven and Crippen.”
There wasn’t much point in explaining things to Henry, but I could feel Rella looking at me and so I tried.
“It’s this way,” I said. “Neither of them fit in with society, neither of them can conform to its laws. Only one of them adjusts himself, so to speak, and the other doesn’t. The criminal ignores society except in that he preys on it. The genius rises above it; you might say he was looking for a new and better one.”
“Like Lenin,” said Venetia unexpectedly.
I nodded. “You see, Henry? You would call Lenin a criminal, perhaps.”
“It’s all a matter of life force,” said Adlesburg. He had come towards us, and he stood looking down at me, his dark eyes mocking. “Pure Nietzsche. He didn’t care how good or bad a man was. The important thing was the strength in him.”
I thought the conversation more pointless than most, and I didn’t like Adlesburg looking down at me, so I got up and said to Henry:
“What about another drink?”
“Certainly, old man,” said Henry, relieved, I thought. “What’ll you have?”
I had a strong one, and I drank it quickly. I hate dinner parties, and this one promised to be less pleasant than a lot of them. The rest of the party seemed to feel that too, except perhaps Brigid, who was a little drunk. She and Henry were being sociable and filling up everyone’s glass. Almost, I thought, as though Brigid was the mistress of the house and not Venetia. And Venetia didn’t seem to mind. She sat on the sofa, unmoving, watching Brigid and Henry as though they amused her. At last Brigid got up and said she must go and see if Dorry had finished cooking and take Sebastian up his supper.
“He’s probably had it already in the kitchen,” I said.
Brigid looked at me uncertainly. “Dorry spoils him,” she said, rather lamely, I thought.
Henry gave one of his sudden, loud laughs. “Well, run along,” he said. “Don’t hold dinner up. Remember an army marches on its stomach, you know.”
Brigid went out. I had another strong one, and was beginning to feel pretty pugilistic. I walked over to Venetia who was by herself.
“I don’t like your boyfriend,” I said to her softly, bending over her so that I could smell the perfume she used.
“Don’t you?” she said sweetly. “What a very vulgar thing to say, Paul.”
I caught hold of her wrist; the others were at the far side of the room, but just then I didn’t mind if they saw me.
“You’re being a fool, Venetia,” I said. “Henry’s not as stupid as he looks.”
I was hurting her, I knew, but she made no sign. She looked straight at me and said, “I know he’s not stupid, Paul. But you’re acting as if you were.”
I let go her wrist and her eyes looked softly at me.
“Paul, Paul darling,” she said. “Don’t quarrel. Please. Not your first night. And don’t wor
ry about me. I know what I’m doing. Nor about Henry. He’s quite happy, you know.”
She took my hand and stroked it, pulling apart the fingers in the way she knew I liked. I felt a cad and a fool. But I also felt scared. I didn’t know why.
Brigid came into the room and said that dinner was ready.
“The soup’s on the table,” she said. “I helped Dorry carry it in. It’ll get cold if we don’t go in now.”
We went in. I sat next to Brigid, and she told me, in a rapid, breathless voice, that Sebastian had said that he didn’t want any supper, but that she’d put him to bed and taken it up to him.
“He will have that dreadful old dog with him,” she said. “And I’m sure that it’s dreadfully unhygienic. I don’t want to upset him … Sebastian, I mean, but he cries if I say that he shouldn’t have the dog in his room. And I’m sure it’s dirty, Paul.”
“Give it a bath,” I said.
“I didn’t mean like that,” said Brigid. “I mean he carries things.”
Dinner went on; it was a dreary meal. I talked to Brigid, or rather she talked to me, and though I tried not to listen it was difficult not to hear some of what she said. Brigid, after a few drinks, was unsnubbable. The others were rather silent; I didn’t hear Henry speak at all, and Venetia and Rella carried on a patchy and uninformed conversation about German poetry. From time to time I looked up and found Venetia looking at me.
We had coffee in the sitting-room and it was cold. I was longing for the party to break up so that I could go to bed and, perhaps, get warm, when I heard Sebastian screaming. For a moment we all sat still; I heard Dorry calling to him. Then there was silence. Brigid went to the door, but before she reached it Sebastian came in. He was in pyjamas, and his face was streaked with tears. Brigid went on her knees beside him and tried to take him in her arms but he pushed her away frantically.
“He’s dead,” he said in a frightened, incredulous voice. “Childe Roland’s dead. He ate some of my supper and he died. Someone’s poisoned him.”
Chapter Two
It was a small, muffled sound, but it woke me. It was a low, continuous crying. I wondered where it was coming from; my room was by itself at the end of a corridor, and next to a bathroom. I pulled the bedclothes over my head and tried to go back to sleep, but it wasn’t any use. At last I swore, swung my legs over the side of the bed, and reached for the switch of the lamp. The travelling clock on the bed-table pointed to five-thirty.
