by Alec Waugh
“Didn’t someone fall in love with you?”
“You seem to think that people have only to look at me to fall in love.”
“Well, darling, a good many . . . oh, but there was someone, wasn’t there?”
Gwen Lawrence laughed.
There was, she admitted, a boy. A boy who had been rather charmingly importunate.
“I knew there was. Oh, darling, do tell me, tell me everything.”
May Julian’s eyes were bright and her lips parted, and her voice husky with a breathless eagerness.
“So you’re going to lunch with him to-morrow,” she said, as Gwen Lawrence finished her account of the evening’s episode. “Do you think that you’ll fall in love with him?”
The answer was contemptuously assured.
“My dear child, is it likely!”
And, indeed, from what May Julian knew of her, there were few things unlikelier. A cold woman, men had called her: so lovely seeming and so cold actually. Lovely and cold as alabaster. That was what all men said of her. And, indeed, superficially that was what she was; with all these men about her, and herself so unmoved by any of them. All day long the telephone bell was ringing; at all hours of the day and evening people were calling for her in cars and taxis to take her to this dance or to that party; a continual flow of lunches and dances and theatres.
“It’s a curious sort of life I lead,” she had once said. “From the places I go to you’d think I had over three thousand a year, instead of just three hundred. It must be months since I’ve spent a penny on myself. And as long as men think my company’s worth it, I’ll go on leading it.”
“What’s happened to old Holdenstein?” May asked. “I’ve not seen him here for weeks.”
Gwen shrugged her shoulders.
“Holden? I’ve got rid of him.”
“For good?”
“I hope so. He was getting difficult. Besides, I wanted to pawn some of the things he’d given me.”
“What a confession!”
“Well, it’s true. Men are like the boxes you put chocolates in. When you’ve eaten the last chocolate you fling away the box.”
Which was, in a phrase, Gwen’s attitude.
She let men take her out and spend money on her, and give her presents, but in the men themselves she was utterly uninterested. It was always “I went to Ciro’s yesterday,” or “the Comedy.” Never “I went out yesterday with John.” It was the place she went to, not the man who took her there that mattered. And because the men in themselves mattered so little, she had found it always easy enough to rid herself of any man who had become tiresome.
“I wonder,” said May Julian, “where it’s going to end. It can’t, you know, go on like this for ever.”
“Where what’s going to end? What can’t go on like this?”
She spoke quickly and irritably. And May Julian’s fingers fretted nervously at the blue flannel of her dressing-gown.
“All this,” she said. “It isn’t much of a game really.”
“Who ever pretended that it was?” Gwen Lawrence snapped. “It’s the only one, anyhow, that I’ve got the will to play wholeheartedly. And it’s got its points; when one’s been treated as badly by a man as I was by Eric, it isn’t unamusing to get one’s own back on other men. I married him with my eyes open, I suppose. I was twenty-two. And a modern girl of twenty-two can’t plead a Victorian innocence. But what’s the good of a theoretical knowledge when one’s in love? I loved him and I trusted him. And within three months he’d begun to be unfaithful—on my money, too—and the moment a woman came who wasn’t content to share him with me, he went; heaven knows where. Undivorceably, anyhow, because beyond the reach of evidence. It would cost me a fortune to track him down. Not that I should want to. I’m better as I am.”
She had spoken quietly at first, quietly and calmly, but the pace and heat of her language increased as she continued, so that by the time she had come to finish her eyes were bright and the pallor of her cheeks was flushed. She had risen to her feet, and was standing with her back against the table, her hands resting on its polished surface, the small pulse in her white throat throbbing. Such beauty, thought May Julian, and such a waste of it.
“It’s a dangerous game, my dear,” she murmured. “You can’t play about with hearts for ever and remain untouched. In the long run you’re bound to hurt yourself. Someone will come, someone always does come, who’ll seem different from the rest. And you won’t know what to do. It’s a game that you can only play while your heart’s untouched. And it won’t remain untouched for ever. It can’t; in the nature of things, it can’t. You’re not a cold woman, Gwen.”
Gwen laughed, a scornful, bitter laugh.
“I’m safe enough,” she said. “I’ve inoculated myself against that poison.”
Chapter III
A Half Lie and its Sequel
Before nine o’clock on the following morning, and before his breakfast was a quarter finished, Graham had been summoned to the telephone. “I’m so sorry, dear,” a soft, uncertain, rather tearful voice was saying. “I’m afraid I’ve disturbed you in the middle of your breakfast. But I know you hate being rung up at your office, and I couldn’t bear the idea of the whole day passing without our speaking to each other. I was such a pig to you last night.”
“But you weren’t, Jonakin,” he protested.
“Oh, yes, I was. I was horrid, perfectly horrid. Everything went wrong. I was tired, and then that dress not turning up. But we needn’t go over it. I just want you to forget everything I said, because I do know, believe me, I do know how hard you’re working, and it would be silly of us, for the sake of a month or two, to upset the whole working of our lives. I do realize how necessary it is for you to be free just now; but, oh, Graham, it seems such a long time waiting sometimes, and”—after a pause that was a catch almost in her breath—” I love you so awfully much!” she added.
“Don’t I?”
“And you’ll forget, won’t you,” she pleaded, “all about our silly quarrel and the horrid things I said, and you’ll come soon and see me——”
“And tell you,” he caught her up, “how ever so much more I love you now than I did two years ago, when you said you’d marry me.”
“Darling!” she said, and laughed—a rich, happy, contented little laugh—and he could tell how at that moment the light would sparkle in the pale blue eyes, and the freckled skin on the bridge of her nose would wrinkle.
“And when will it be?” she asked. “I can’t this evening. What about to-morrow?”
But though he was free that night, on the following day he would be engaged.
“Then we shan’t be seeing each other till Friday evening! Unless-” she added, after a pause.
“Unless what, Jonakin?”
“Unless I were to come down to the city to-day and have lunch with you.”
“I’m sorry, darling—”
“Engaged? But you could put it off, surely?” she persisted.
“No, really, I’m afraid I couldn’t.”
And from the tone in which she said: “Oh, well!” he knew how the small mouth would be pouted.
“I do wish I could, dearest,” he began.
She sighed.
“These business lunches. Poor darling, even having to work at lunch time. And I mustn’t keep you now. Till Friday, and ever so much love. You are a pet to me.”
Thoughtfully Graham replaced the receiver on its clamp. Why, in heaven’s name, had he done that? It would have been so easy to have said: “As a matter of fact I’m lunching with a woman I met at the dance last night.” He could have told her how it happened. And they would have laughed together over the incident. Jealousy was not one of Joan’s characteristics. It would have been so easy for him to have said that.
But the opportunity for saying it had been so brief. He had let it pass out of laziness, out of a reluctance to embark on a long explanation. And now were Joan to discover that he had been lunching not with
a business acquaintance but with another woman, she would assume naturally that he had had some other reason for concealing it.
“If there was nothing in it,” she would say, “why didn’t you tell me about it at the beginning? Why did you let me imagine that you were talking business?” And he would have no answer ready. She would be bound to think that there was something in it. He would, i her place, certainly.
Which, of course, there wasn’t. That was the ridiculous, the maddeningly ridiculous part about it all. This woman, whoever she might be, meant nothing to him at all. He didn’t want to lunch with her. She was a jolly enough person, with whom, because he had been in the mood to flirt, he had flirted for an odd half-hour. But that was all there was to it. The incident would have ended there if the creature she had been with had not exasperated him into action.
It was the type of ridiculous, idiotic mistake into which at times he blundered, with the result that he had got to lunch with a woman whose name he did not even know, and had contrived to place himself in a false position with his fiancée.
He had half a mind to ring Joan up and tell her everything, but decided, on second thoughts, that it would be better to leave things as they were. She would be bound to feel, were he to do so, that he was making a special occasion of what, he was so anxious for her to believe, was completely inessential.
After their quarrel on the previous evening, such an incident would only give her fresh grounds for wondering whether he was not less in love with her. Better to leave things as they were. It was extremely unlikely that Joan would ever learn of that lunch party: it was even unlikelier that he would ever see this woman after it. He had been an ass, and he had made a mess of things. But there was no need for him to complicate the consequences. In six hours’ time it would be all over; the chapter closed. “Never, though, again,” he told himself. “Never, under any circumstances, again.”
On his way to his office, in tribute to this resolution, he dispatched to Joan a generously proportioned box of chocolates.
• • • • • • • •
“A woman that I don’t really want to see again.” That was how he had spoken of Gwen Lawrence as he sat angry and impatient before the telephone: but it was, nevertheless, with an agreeable sense of anticipation that he sat some hours later on the red plush sofa of the Romano’s lounge. It really was rather exciting after all. And as he sat waiting, he wondered casually in what spirit, were he not an engaged man, he would be sitting there.
“I should, I suppose, be asking myself,” he said, “whether this were to be the beginning of a big adventure. It has had a romantic enough opening.”
And for a moment the thought came regretfully that such adventures could never move into his life again. That side of life was ended. Never again, as he paused before the length of a cheval glass to reassure himself of the proud perfection of an evening tie, would he wonder whether before he again stood there a new and enchanting chapter of life might not have opened for him. Never again, as he hesitated on the threshold of a drawing-room, would he ask himself whether on the other side of the door might not be waiting the romance that had for so long eluded him. Never again in the meeting of eyes across a crowded ballroom would he read the unworded recognition of an age-long intimacy. Never again would he know the intoxicating preludes of an avowal; the dawning confidence, the shy foreknowledge of attraction. Never again would his hand seek a hand that trembled. Finished, and at twenty-eight.
Idly and for a moment only the thread of thought entangled him; for a moment, to be snapped abruptly.
“I’m engaged to Joan,” he said. “I love her and she loves me. And to get one big thing one’s got to give up a lot of little things.”
In the Strand outside a long, low-bodied car drew up beside the pavement. A door was opened. A clear-toned and familiar voice said, “Thank you, Guy.” A slim white hand was waved, and with a gasp of surprised delight Graham Moreton was realizing that she was even lovelier than he had thought.
The long claret-coloured coat clasped just below the hips by a studded circlet of dull metal, marked even more clearly than the blue-black sheath of marocain the swaying grace of the tall body’s movements.
“So you’re here,” she said, and as she laughed the golden lights sparkled in her eyes.
“What did you expect? I’ve been counting the hours all the morning.”
She shrugged her shoulders.
“One never knows,” she said, and followed him upstairs.
“I’ve ordered you a martini,” he informed her. “The waiter wanted it to be a bronx, but I felt certain that you liked cocktails dry.”
“If you’d ordered me a clover club,” she said, and again the amber-coloured lights were shot with laughter, “I should have screamed. Well, here’s to everything,” and lifting the glass she smiled over its rim towards him.
He was a jolly boy. So fresh and clean and healthy, so different from the type of man that it had been her fate during the last few months to see so much of. There had been a quality of charming recklessness about his absurd flirtation and his high-handed treatment of Guy Fortescue.
“I’ve told them to do a sole,” he said, “bonne femme.”
“Of many excellent ways of doing sole the best.”
“And a Mersault to accompany it.”
“I should never have forgiven you champagne.”
“And afterwards I was thinking—”
But his sentence was not destined for completion. Between them on the table-cloth had been laid a slim, long-fingered hand, the polish of whose nails proved it to spend at least one hour a week in the parlour of the manicurist, and above their heads a languid and soft-toned voice was saying:
“So you know each other. But how charming for you both.”
As she lifted her face towards the elegant and graceful figure that was bending across the table, Gwen Lawrence smiled.
“Christopher Stirling,” she said, “and after all these years.”
“After all these years, Gwen Cameron.”
“So many years,” she laughed, “that you didn’t even know that I was married.”
He raised his eyebrows.
“And you are now?”
“I’m Mrs. Lawrence now.”
“A charming name for you; Gwen Lawrence, a charming name. But I can’t stay. I see,” he whispered, “my host piloting my brother down the gallery. An affluent if prospective client. But I had just to come over to you. Do come and see me some time. There are always cocktails going on Sunday mornings.”
“The old place, Christopher?”
“I’m as faithful to places as to friends. À bientôt. As for Graham I always feel it’s useless asking him. He’s never out of training for one game or another. Besides, I know what engaged folk are. Still, you ought to come and see the portrait I’m doing of your girl. It’s rather jolly.”
Lightly, casually the words were spoken. Lightly and casually as are so often spoken the words that are to turn comedy to drama. At the sound of them Gwen stiffened. So he was engaged, this boy, who had made love to her under the colours of a free man without entanglements. He was like, then, all the rest. And her resentment because she had thought him for a moment different, bit the deeper into her.
Resentment was, however, one of the emotions that the conditions governing her life had taught her to conceal.
“Do you know Christopher Stirling well?” she asked.
“Not very. I’ve only met him recently.”
“Since he began painting your fiancée’s portrait?”
The question was asked in a casually off-hand tone, but she looked very straight at him as she put it. And Giaham found to his embarrassment that he was blushing.
“They tell me,” she said, “that he’s enormously successful now.”
“He’s one of the six most fashionable portrait painters, and of those six he’s not the cheapest.”
“When I knew him ten years ago, hardly anyone had heard of him. It
was before he had exhibited the picture of that woman he was supposed to be in love with; you must know it: the one he made his name with, but that he’s refused to sell.”
“I’ve seen reproductions of it.”
“It’s a marvellous thing. For five years he refused to show it. He kept it in his studio till he had outgrown the mood in which he had painted it. It meant too much to him, he said. And the moment he showed it, commissions came in by every post. It was about that time that I lost sight of him. I wonder if success has spoilt him. It shouldn’t have.”
“He’d have had to have been very pleasant once,” laughed Graham, “if he’s deteriorated now.”
She nodded her head slowly. It was what she had expected. Christopher was of those whom neither success nor failure can alter much. The foreground of his life might change but not the backcloth.
“Do you ever,” she asked, “go to any of his parties?”
“I’ve been to one or two.”
“They used,” she said, “to be rather marvellous affairs.”
“They still are. The oddest crowd you’d be likely to find in London. Peers and prize-fighters jumbled up together.”
Again Gwen Lawrence nodded her head.
“Just as they used to be. Christopher has no sense of caste. People either interest him or they don’t. That’s all there is to it.”
“And the odd thing about those parties is,” Graham continued, “that the people mix—you never have ‘moments’ there.”
“You wouldn’t. If a person has consistently good taste there must be a homogeneity about the things he likes. There is bound to be something in common between them, however dissimilar the various examples of that taste may be.”
At their elbow a waiter was hovering to divide into its two sections the steaming surface of a sole bonne femme.
“And afterwards?” he asked.
Graham turned interrogatively to his companion.
“I would prefer to leave it to you,” she said.
“You are proving yourself such a perfect host.”
She had smiled gaily enough at him as they talked, but her eyes clouded as he bent forward across the menu. He was like all the rest: ready as all the others to treat woman shabbily, to make love to one woman while he was promised to another. And the fact not only that she had for a moment thought him different, but that even now in the light of this real knowledge of him she was conscious while they talked of being irritatingly intimate and at ease with him, made her lips close tightly upon her teeth. “That boy,” she thought, “needs a lesson really badly.”
