Love in these Days

by Alec Waugh

  “I’ve come to ask you,” she said, “what sort of a woman Mrs. Lawrence is.”

  “What sort of a woman? Rather a nice sort of woman, I should say.”

  “That she’s attractive, you mean. I could see that, of course. But is she-” For a second or so Joan hesitated. “Is she straight?”

  “It depends,” Christopher Stirling answered, “on your definition of the word straight.”

  “You know what I mean; please.”

  It was Christopher’s turn now to hesitate. When finally he spoke it was to answer her obliquely.

  “Wouldn’t it be better, don’t you think, if you were to tell me what’s worrying you? It would be so much easier for me to help you then.”

  “I don’t want to be helped: nothing’s worrying me,” she spoke stubbornly, rudely almost; as one who is prepared to defend her secret at any cost. “I’ve come to ask you a question, that’s all.”

  “Which you would not be asking,” he said quickly, “if something wasn’t worrying you. What reason have you for thinking,” he asked quietly, “that there’s anything between Graham and Mrs. Lawrence?”

  She gave a little start at that.

  “I haven’t said—” she began.

  But Christopher cut her short.

  “You wouldn’t be asking me about Gwen Lawrence unless you were afraid that something was happening between her and Graham.”

  Steadily she looked him in the face. For a moment he thought that she was going to resist him. Her lips had begun to frame indeed the opening syllables of a denial; then suddenly, before the need, the overpowering need of sympathy, the strength went out of her.

  “No,” she said wretchedly. “And I’m terrified.”

  Her defences were down, and with them had gone that embarrassing sensation of constraint that had made her behave as though Christopher was an adversary, and not a friend. They were in sympathy and could speak freely now.

  “You’d better tell me,” he said, “hadn’t you. Terrified? Why should you be?”

  “Because he hasn’t mentioned her to me for six weeks.”

  “And he used to, once.”

  She nodded her head.

  “Not much; occasionally. She would come up into the conversation as one’s friends and the people that one’s seeing do. He would repeat things that she had said. Casually, as matters of general interest, but of no importance. Then suddenly he ceased to speak of her: and I began to wonder; not very much, but just a little. I supposed that that business he had been arranging with her was at an end. Two days ago I mentioned it.

  “‘You’ve finished, haven’t you,’ I said, ’ that business of yours with Mrs. Lawrence? ’ He flushed a little. ‘Not quite,’ he answered, rather abruptly, and brought out his next sentence quickly.”

  “But I don’t,” said Christopher, “see anything particularly suspicious in that.”

  “Perhaps not, but taken with other things.”

  “What other things?”

  She hesitated.

  “It’s hard to explain. But he’s not quite the same as he used to be with me.”

  “No?”

  He left her to explain, and as before, at the cocktail party, she had a curious sensation of speaking into a confessional. To Christopher, because he was distant and apart, she could speak as she could not have spoken to her closest friend. It would have seemed the rankest treachery to speak in this way of Graham to her brother or her mother. But it was different with Christopher.

  “How is he different?” Christopher was asking her. “Is he unkind?”

  “Oh no; not unkind,” she answered hastily; “he’s never that, and at times he seems to be more in love with me than he’s ever been; wildly, hectically in love. At other times he does not seem to notice me at all; he seems to be thinking of something or someone completely other.”

  “But—”

  “Oh, I know,” she interrupted, “that it sounds fearfully ridiculous. But that isn’t all. He’s started gambling. Not very much, I imagine, on the Stock Exchange. And he never told me. I should never have found out if your brother hadn’t spoken about his shares to him one day when I was there. I forget exactly what he said—nothing important, anyhow. Something about it being a good time to sell, I think. But it was a surprise to me. I knew Graham had only got a very little money saved, and I shouldn’t have thought that he’d have gambled with it without telling me, and I couldn’t see any particular reason why he should gamble. There’s nothing he could have wanted money very desperately for. Unless—”

  “Unless what?”

  “Oh, I don’t know, Christopher; you’ll think me ridiculously foolish, I expect, and jealous. But it wasn’t unnatural, was it, to put two and two together? When one cares as I care, that’s to say. It wasn’t too unnatural to wonder whether he wasn’t behaving differently to me because he was in love with another woman; whether he didn’t want money so that he might make love to her; and since he had ceased suddenly to speak of Mrs. Lawrence, although he was still seeing her, well, is it surprising, that I’m here to ask you what sort of a woman this Mrs. Lawrence is?”

  Christopher had listened intently to her as she spoke.

  “It’s not in the least surprising,” he said, “but you haven’t, I’m very certain, the slightest reason to be alarmed.”

  He spoke in a firm, confident, cheerful tone; the very tone in which to allay and to remove suspicion. It would have been so easy to have over-emphasized that note of confidence; so easy, and where there was so much room for doubt, so fatal.

  “How can you be certain?” she pleaded.

  “Because I happen to know Gwen Lawrence extremely well.”

  “But she’s the sort of woman, I’d imagined—”

  “The sort of woman,” he caught her up, “who profits by her association with men? I don’t deny it. She’s got to live. But Graham isn’t the sort of man she profits by. To begin with, he hasn’t nearly enough money for her. She’s not content with being taken to dinners and to dances. She expects presents, and expensive ones. She’d have no use for Graham unless she happened to be in love with him herself, which isn’t likely.”

  “And why not?” the retort came quickly, hotly almost.

  “For one thing, because she hates men as a whole very much too much. But chiefly because if she had fallen in love with Graham, and Graham had fallen in love with her, you wouldn’t be wearing that ring upon your finger now. She’d have seen to that. Besides, Gwen Lawrence plays pretty straight.”

  “Straight!” She flung the word at him scornfully. “You call her life straight, taking all that and giving nothing in return! She’d be honester, far honester if she gave value for what she took.”

  Christopher shrugged his shoulders.

  “I don’t know,” he said; “it’s a large question: an affair of demand and supply, I suppose. If men didn’t think her worth it, they wouldn’t spend all that on her. She’s worth, like the rest of us, what she can get. There’s a case for her. And, anyhow, being what she is, you may consider yourself pretty safe.”

  Joan Faversham was only half convinced.

  “The other things, though,” she insisted, “the shares.”

  “Is there any time when a man won’t be prepared to gamble on what someone assured him is a dead safe thing?”

  “And his difference to me.”

  “Ah, there,” and again that quick smile lit the dark iris of his eyes. “Surely there is a rather obvious explanation for that. A long engagement’s a strain, you know. Where one loves, at least. You must be patient with him.”

  A slow flush spread across her face, and a smile, the first real smile that day, dimpled the smooth surface of her cheek.

  “That, oh that! Do you think that’s all it is? Ah, but if it were-”

  “What else, my dear, could it be?”

  She stayed for only a few moments longer. A few minutes of happy, contented conversation: then, with a little smile, she rose to go.

&nb
sp; “You’ve made me so happy,” she said.

  “Ah, no,” he said. “It’s not I that have made you happy. Graham has. As he always will, I think. You can’t imagine, you know, how jolly it is to see two such nice people going to make each other happy.”

  She laughed outright at that.

  “I wonder,” she said.

  “I know,” was his reply.

  And they laughed together.

  “But I mustn’t keep you,” she said, “any longer from your bath. Thank you so much. You’ve been very kind to me.”

  For a moment in the doorway she hesitated.

  “I can’t help wondering,” she said, “why anyone so charming as you has managed to remain for so long unmarried.”

  He smiled.

  “We aren’t all so fortunate as Graham.”

  She did not simper as would at such a remark so many girls, but the colour of her cheeks was slightly heightened.

  “Surely though, some time, somebody—?”

  “But the right person at the right time, oh, so rare, Joan Faversham ! It’s not too often that we fall in love for the first time with marriageable folk, or when we happen to be marriageable folk ourselves. And after the first time”—he paused and shrugged his shoulders—“the second time, you see, one suspects that there will be a fourth time, and is pretty sure there’ll be a third. One’s not so anxious to run risks. You’re very lucky,” he concluded. “Make the most of it.”

  Chapter XII

  Dinner for Five

  “How many people, by the way, has my brother ordered dinner for to-night?”

  “Mr. Christopher Stirling, let me see,” and the head waiter ran his pencil down the list of tables. “Mr. Christopher Stirling. No. 41. Eight-thirty. Five.”

  “Five. Thank you very much. And what sort of cocktail has he ordered?”

  “Sidecars.”

  “Very good, then as we’re a little early, we’ll have a couple of extra ones over there.”

  And turning back into the lounge, Humphrey Stirling walked over to the table where Mildred Atkinson was sitting.

  “There are only five of us,” he said. “Ourselves, Christopher, Geoffrey Brackenridge, and Mrs. Marchant.”

  A dinner party, in fact, not unlike that of Lob’s. An experimental party, with Christopher as the grand inquisitor. It was several weeks since he had seen Mildred Atkinson, a good three months since he had heard anything of Geoffrey Brackenridge, and he was anxious to discover how fate was handling their destinies. Informal relations if only because the period of their action is more compressed, are usually more dramatic than formal ones. And in Geoffrey’s case particularly, he was anxious to see what effect had been made on him by the change in the relations between himself and Sybyl Marchant that would scarcely have failed during that interval to have taken place. That there would be some change seemed to Christopher inevitable; inevitable if only because by expecting change, we create change, so that although those favours that are spoken of as “last” are not in any sense of the word “ultimate” at all, but are stages merely in a process of becoming that has for its aim the complete fusion of one being with another, we loan to them, by our repeated and sustained insistence on their importance, a significance that makes them in a world of appearances no more distant than any other illusion from reality. Some change or other Christopher was convinced there would be. And he was curious to see how far Geoffrey would have succeeded in his attempt to pigeon-hole love as he had pigeon-holed such other employments of his leisure hours as golf, racing, and first editions.

  He could remember so well the evening they had discussed their futures after the armistice in the ridiculously overcrowded estaminet behind the Lille Theatre, and Geoffrey had explained his scheme for arranging the material setting of his life.

  Even then in those light-hearted days there had seemed a snag in it, so that Christopher had been forced to ask him: “And is that all?”

  “All? Isn’t that enough?” Geoffrey retaliated.

  Christopher did not answer, not directly at least.

  “Isn’t there going to be an Eve,” he said, “within that Eden?”

  Thoughtfully Geoffrey had rubbed his chin.

  “Perhaps,” he said. “I don’t know. There would be room for one. But that sort of thing, you know, is only the flavouring of life. Most people make the mistake of taking it for the entire dish.”

  “It’s what it usually results in,” one of the party remarked.

  “Not with me,” he had answered shortly. “J’en ai soupé.”

  But it was not so easy to fit human beings into pigeon-holes, and Sybyl Marchant from what little Christopher had seen of her did not appear the sort of person who is to become the symbol of any system. He was anxious to see how the wheel was turning.

  • • • • • • • •

  His interview with Joan Faversham brought him to the Berkeley seven minutes late, but Geoffrey Brackenridge had not yet arrived. “So she’s unpunctual,” he told himself, “that doesn’t make for the smooth working of a scheme.”

  A defect for which on this occasion he was not particularly concerned. That was the great advantage of dining in restaurants. Food was not spoilt there as it was at one’s own home by unpunctuality. And he was not sorry for an opportunity of exchanging a few words quietly with his brother. He was anxious to find out how much cause for alarm Joan Faversham really had.

  “I’m so sorry, Miss Atkinson,” he said. “It’s bad enough when guests are late but when hosts are too——” And he spread his hands sideways in a histrionic gesture of contrition.

  Mildred Atkinson smiled up at him prettily over the edge of her glass. In this new atmosphere into which she had been transplanted, where she still felt a little like the girl who does not know which forks to use, she had found that the best repartee was often silence and a smile.

  “And I’m afraid,” Christopher continued, “that I’m not yet done with my apologies. For I’m going to ask you to allow me for three minutes to talk business with my brother. I was thinking, Humphrey, of selling out some of those Transylvanian railroads.”

  Humphrey displayed neither enthusiasm nor concern.

  “You might do worse.”

  “As I felt. Excellent. And with what am I to fill their place? That young lad, Moreton, was telling me of some little concern or other that you had put him on to.”

  “Florida Asiatics.”

  “Yes, that was it. Florida Asiatics. Would you recommend it?”

  Humphrey hesitated.

  “It depends,” he said at length. “Do you want to gamble?”

  “Not more, probably, than Graham does.”

  “But then Graham’s getting these shares for a friend.”

  Christopher lifted his eyebrows. Joan had had apparently more cause than he had suspected for alarm.

  “For a friend? I thought it was his own gamble.”

  “He took the shares in his own name,” Humphrey explained, “but they were taken for someone else. At least, so he told me.”

  “You don’t know for whom?”

  “I did not ask.”

  “You’re an incurious creature.”

  “Incurious? Am I? I hardly think so, Chris. Economical, I should say. There’s so much that I should like to know that I shall never know, that I’m not going to waste my time finding out things that don’t really matter to me. Why go into them, I say. One’s got to economize somewhere. So I economize in time. It’s not of the least interest to me to hear who Graham Moreton buys his shares for. The great thing is that they should be bought, and there should be a signature to stand the racket. Then I can get busy with the next thing.”

  Christopher laughed.

  “You’re an odd creature, Humphrey, and you can buy me some Florida Asiatics if you like. I’d better be in the swim with all the rest.”

  “And who the rest may be,” he added to himself, “is my job, I imagine, to discover.”

  Not that anything he mi
ght do would be likely to be of any use. People had to work out their own troubles for themselves. They made them, after all. But it was as well to know. You could say the right word then at the right moment. You couldn’t prevent people being hurt. But you could do something, perhaps, to ease the bruises.

  “I’d better,” he thought, “go round one day soon and have a little chat with Gwen.”

  • • • • • • • •

  With pontifical solemnity the machinery for crêpes suzette was wheeled across the floor to Chris’s table. On either side of it in tranced obedience hovered two junior waiters; in the centre above the aluminium dish with its bravely spluttering flame, the master and dispenser of its mysteries watched the thick yellow lump of curaçao sauce melt on the heated metal.

  “Just like a Mass,” murmured Humphrey, “the high priest officiating at the altar. The two servers on either side of him.”

  The floor of the dish was a bowl of steaming amber. With infinite care the head waiter spread over it the smooth soft pancake, that lay clear and quiescent for a moment, to heave and harden and change colour as the boiling liquid worked on it. As the priests of old time watched the victim writhe at the stake, calm and inscrutable, the head waiter looked down upon his quivering subject, judging the exact moment at which the oblation of brandy should be shed upon it, and the dish be turned to a fury of leaping flame.

  With wide and ecstatic eyes, Mildred Atkinson observed the ceremony. How happy she was; a little breathlessly, perhaps, as though she were breathing too keen an air. But no less thrillingly for that. It was the first time that she had dined here, and how often in the past, as she had ridden past on the tops of buses, had she not looked down enviously into the crowded room, with its flowered tables, and flowerlike dresses. She had felt herself to be turning the pages of a book of travel, pausing before the pictures of a place lovely beyond imagining, distant beyond visitation. In the same way that that picture would represent to her a country she would never tread, a climate she would never know, a beauty that must be for all time foreign to her, so had that brief glimpse of ornament and display represented for her a world remoter than Tahiti and Cotopaxi; a world from which she was excluded by the impalpable and therefore more ponderable barriers of upbringing and class. And yet into these regions that had appeared so inaccessible she had marched in a single stride. She wished that the arched windows were not curtained so that the women who looked down from the tops of buses might have been the witnesses of her triumph.