Love in these Days

by Alec Waugh

  They were going to it simply because it was new, so that they would be able to say to their friends, “But surely you’ve been to the Sixty-nine, my dear? Everyone goes there now.” But it wouldn’t be new at all really. It would be like all the other night clubs. A small floor, a deafening noise, exorbitant because illegitimate champagne. And the dinner at the Mitre would be like all the other dinners she had eaten there.

  It had been true enough, what she had said to Graham of how long ago her life had ceased to hold any real interest, It was as monotonous as billiards became when you had manœuvred the red into the centre of the table: when nothing but carelessness could break down your sequence of hazards.

  “Shall I turn on your bath?” May Julian was asking.

  Oh yes, let her turn it on. And what would she wear? That new flame-coloured georgette and an orange satin slip? Yes, that would do. And the gold shoes? What other shoes, good heaven help her! Through the half-open door came the sound of splashing water. Wearily she lifted herself out of her chair, resting the back of her hand against her forehead.

  Heavens, but how tired she was of it all! This endless parade of men, their parties and their, dances, and with one object at the back of it. Perhaps, after all, Graham Moreton was a little different. Perhaps she had been right that first time. All these weeks and not a word of love to her. Although he was with three-quarters of himself in love with her already, and most men were ready with their protestations before they had gone half as far. Not one word of love. Not a single action or gesture of it.

  And he cared, she knew he cared. One could always tell if a man cared. Weeks usually before he knew himself. And all the time Graham had not said a word. Perhaps he knew it, though. Perhaps that was why he had wanted her to sell the shares. Because he was frightened of her. Because he did not want irrevocably to commit himself. Because—because what? Because he was different from the rest.

  It might be that. And again it might not be that. Anyhow the weeks would show.

  The water was splashing into the bath, and in forty minutes Guy would be calling for her and she would have to be fresh and bright-eyed and entertaining. Because? Oh, because one had to live, and in every profession one must keep on good terms with one’s employer.

  • • • • • • • •

  It was in a not dissimilar mood that Graham drove back his car that evening through the sounding sunlit streets: a mood of dissatisfaction and regret. What was it she had said of the things one would not wish repeated, but that one would not wish to have been without? The emotions without which one would hold life to have been half lived?

  Had he known any such moments in his life? And if he had not known them yet: if he were not knowing them now: was it likely that he would ever know them?

  What of adventure indeed did life hold in store for him? In a few months’ time now he would be married. The gates of potentiality would be closed on him. If he did not win through Joan to that fullness of sensation that Gwen had spoken of, what chance did he ever stand of realizing it?

  And was he reaching it through Joan: through this relationship so ordered, so composed, so conventional in its expression and direction? What was there exceptional in their courtship, in their acceptance of each other, in their decision to live the residue of their years together? Were they to be found here, those emotions that one would not repeat, but without which one would consider life half lived?

  Torturingly, as he guided his car past the complexities of the Marble Arch into the still passages of the park, torturingly these thoughts beat themselves upon his brain. It was unworthy, he told himself, unworthy and disloyal. One had no right to think like that, one had no right to feel like that. One must accept the obligations one invited.

  It was a quarter-past seven by the clock at the corner of Park Lane. If he were to be changed in time for dinner he would have to be back within another twenty minutes. One tour of the park and then back through Queen’s Gate to Onslow Gardens. Just time for it and no more.

  He could not, though, on such a night, in such a mood. To sit at a long polished table between his parents, to listen to their discussion of the evening paper, their analysis of some parliamentarian or other’s motives.

  Another night, perhaps, but not on this. Viciously he stamped on the accelerator. Viciously beneath his touch the car leapt forward to bound westwards along the flat of the Bayswater Road.

  At forty miles an hour he swung out into the open road, curved southwards down Campden Hill: at thirty miles an hour the car turned to the right, through Hammersmith; another five minutes and he would be on the Great West road; the long gleaming stretch of metal towards Newbury and Bath: along which, as the car raced southwards, one would feel the back wheels lifting as an aeroplane’s as it rises from the ground.

  Between forty and fifty miles an hour he would thunder down that gleaming roadway, to let himself be drugged by speed as other men would let themselves be drugged by alcohol, to send his discontent asleep with the effort of keeping the car straight in the roadway’s centre.

  • • • • • • • •

  Had Graham Moreton been in a less self-centred state of mind, and had he been driving his car at ten instead of twenty miles an hour he would have observed as he turned his car westwards into the Bayswater Road, the neat figure of Mildred Atkinson walkng in the opposite direction.

  It had not been a particularly cheerful day for her. In the first place she had been piqued by Humphrey’s refusal to spend the day with her, in the second she had been unable to find, after he had gone away, anything at all to do. She could think of no one whom she could ring up. She had never had many friends of her own sex, and such as she had had she had lost in her change of setting. During the morning, after wasting an unprofitable hour in an attempt at needlework, she had walked for a few moments in the park, but the sight of the lovers slowly pacing the paths together had made her feel lonely and had driven her to return; so lonely in fact, that after lunch she had made the laborious pilgrimage to her mother’s house in Highbury, from which she was now returning.

  Slowly she walked down Oxford Street, gazing without much animation into the shop windows as she passed. There was no need to hurry. There was a whole evening to be killed. In front of Selfridge’s she loitered a little. There was an oval mirror in the bedroom suite that was on exhibition, but her reflection in it failed to please her. A reluctance to incur the consequences of the parental curiosity that a display of her newest clothes would certainly invite, had led her to put on a dark blue coat and skirt which she had bought ready made two seasons back. She wrinkled her nose disdainfully.

  “Did I really look like that?” she thought, and moved out of range of the reflection. She lingered though for a few moments before the window.

  What a pity that one couldn’t have the furnishing of one’s flat over again. One had to decide things in such a rush, and so many things. Then one got ideas afterwards. Walnut was much jollier than mahogany; shone less, and she liked the curving spirals of the bed-posts. If only she had seen that suite first!

  Regretfully she turned away. As she did so a hand clutched heavily at her elbow and an excited uncouth voice was calling her by name.

  She turned, irritated and surprised. Then:

  “My, but it’s Henry!” she exclaimed. “What ages since we met.”

  And indeed it seemed to her that the Mildred for whom this shabby figure had waited evening after evening outside the Balkan Tea Rooms, was a creature of another century.

  “What luck!” he was saying. “I was afraid I’d never be seeing you again. It must be quite five months. You haven’t been ill, have you?” he added anxiously.

  She shook her head.

  “Oh, no, I’ve taken another job,” and she thanked heaven that she was wearing her shabby clothes.

  “You might’ve told me.”

  “I wanted to, but it happened suddenly.”

  “You might’ve come back one evening.”

&nbs
p; “From the other end of London!”

  “I waited,” was his reproachful comment, “every evening for five weeks.”

  “My dear.”

  “Every evening for five weeks,” he repeated, “and then one day I went down there. I was frightened I can tell you, with all those nobs sitting about there. I was so frightened that I didn’t dare to ask for you.”

  She laughed at that, but her eyes were tender. There was always something curiously appealing about Harry’s grubby ardour.

  “Look here,” he was saying. “I’m not going to lose you now I’ve found you. We’re going to make an evening of it.”

  She hesitated; then nodded her head. They were unlikely to be going to a place where Humphrey or any of his friends could see them.

  “We might go to some pictures,” she suggested.

  He extracted from his waistcoat pocket a heavy half-hunter watch.

  “Twenty to six,” he said. “Not too early, is it, for a bite?”

  To be dining before six: at the hour of the first cocktail, before one went home to change. She could picture the gesture of horror with which Humphrey would contemplate such a solecism. Still, it was rather jolly to return to one’s old world and one’s old habits.

  “Where are you taking me?” she asked.

  He paused: then with the air of one who is doing something intensely dashing:

  “Look here,” he said, “it’s ages since we met. Let’s do it well. Let’s go to a Corner House.”

  And so within three hours of the completion of a heavy lunch, she found herself confronted in a noisy and overheated room with an immense mixed grill, set about with triangles of cabbage; “Stuff to give ’em,” said Henry, and spreading his elbows sideways, embarked on his assault. He ate noisily, with his mouth half open, and before he was half-way through the dish a dew of sweat had broken out upon his forehead. “Gawd,” he said, “I’d like to take my waistcoat off,” and drew the back of his hand across his face.

  She watched him with a mingling of attraction and repulsion. She had forgotten how thick the joints of his fingers were and how square the nails. And yet for all that she could not help contrasting his roughness with Humphrey’s elegance; she felt curiously at ease with him. She was no longer disturbed by that exciting breathlessness that made her among her new friends always a little conscious that she was still uncertain of her social forks. It was restful, to be back where one belonged. He made the sort of jokes she understood. And afterwards when they walked out into the cooling air, she did not draw away when he put his arm through hers.

  “Suppose you’ve been out with a lot of fellows since we were together last?”

  “No more fellows than you with girls.”

  “Then you can’t have had much kissing. Time you began again.” And he pinched the soft flesh of her arm expectantly.

  Without any pretences, the moment they has been shown into their seats he pulled her face round to his. And the very roughness of his approach was a relief after the suave wooings to which she was accustomed. It was good after those slow gradations of skilled caresses to have one’s hair ruffled and one’s lips bruised against one’s teeth. In a thrilled surrender she rested her cheek against his shoulder.

  His voice was blurred as they stood saying goodbye at the corner of Piccadilly.

  “I must see you again,” he said. “I must, I must. I can’t lose sight again of you.”

  It was on the tip of her tongue to invite him to her flat. But it would be better for the present, at any rate, for him to be ignorant of her address. It would be wiser really to let him go out of her life altogether. Nothing could come of this. It would only mean complications for them both. But as always when she was with him, she found the blood beating quicker through her veins. And it was good to hear the huskiness of his voice witness to the extent of her power over him.

  “Please, please,” he said, and the hand that held hers was crushing upon her fingers. “On Sunday, let’s go into the country somewhere. Let’s take a bus to Epping.”

  She nodded her head slowly. She could always if she wanted get out of it.

  “Very well,” she said. “Eleven o’clock here.”

  • • • • • • •

  “You’re wanted on the telephone, Miss Joan.”

  Joan Faversham lifted her eyes from the novel whose pages she had been turning drowsily since dinner. Her parents were dining out, and she had sat alone in the drawing-room window-seat while the room about her darkened. In a few moments it would have become too dark to read, but she was not certain that she would bother to turn the switch of the electric lamp. She would be content enough in the half-light with her thoughts.

  Since her conversation with Christopher Stirling she had been, if not happy, at least not unhappy for the first time for seven weeks. There might, after all, be no need for her to worry. It could only be a few weeks and she and Graham would be married, with their anxieties at the back of them.

  “I think it’s Mr. Moreton,” the maid was telling her.

  Eagerly Joan leapt up from the window-seat and ran downstairs into the hall.

  “Yes, it’s Joan Faversham speaking. Who is that?”

  It was a breathless, excited voice that answered her.

  “It’s me, Graham; can I come round and see you?”

  “Of course. When?”

  “I’m at Hammersmith Broadway. I’ve got the car. Not more than eleven minutes. I’ll push straight on.”

  Thoughtfully Joan Faversham hung up the receiver. Something unforeseen had happened. It was unlike Graham to ring her up like that. Unlike him too, that hurried, agitated voice.

  For a moment her blood pulsed tempestuously through her veins. Could it be that he had come to tell her the news for which she had so long waited: his permanent transference to the London office? On knees that trembled a little she climbed upstairs towards the drawing-room.

  Not to read, though. She could not at such a moment have relaxed to the portrayal of another’s life; now when her own had become of such intense excitement. She sat huddled in the corner of the window-seat, her hands clasped round her knees, waiting for Graham’s car to swing round the corner into sight. Could it be such news that he had come to tell her: the news she had waited for so long?

  It was not that. The moment he came into the room she realized that it was not that. His hair was ruffled; under his eyes there was a rim of dust. His collar and his tie were disarranged. He was breathless and he was agitated, but not through such excited happiness as would, had that been the case, have been written across every feature of his face.

  “I’m in an awful mess, I’m afraid,” he excused himself. “I’ve been driving rather fast.” And he laughed nervously.

  Anxiously, intently, her eyes were fixed on him.

  “What have you come to see me for?” she asked.

  “See you for, but . . . what should I come to see you for? What in particular, I mean?” And again he laughed, embarrassed by the puzzled scrutiny of her glance.

  “I see,” she said quietly. Then: “I expect you’d like a whisky-and-soda, wouldn’t you? I’ll ring.”

  But he shook his head.

  “No, no,” he said, “I don’t want anything.”

  “The cigarettes,” she told him, “are on that small table to your left.”

  “Thanks,” he said, lifted the lid of the silver box, took out a cigarette, and tapped the tip of it against the table. His hand shook a little as he did so. “I went as far as Staines and back,” he said, “in fifty minutes.”

  She made no reply, and, to cover his embarrassment, he spoke rapidly in short, jerked-out sentences of other distances covered at an equal speed. But all the while he was conscious of her intent, puzzled scrutiny; all the while he was conscious of her sitting huddled in the window-seat waiting for him to say the thing that he had come to say.

  He did not look at her as he was speaking, but her eyes all the time had not, he knew, shifted from his face. S
lowly the spate of words subsided, and there was silence between them—a tense, nerve-charged silence.

  “Look here,” he said at length, “that wasn’t true.”

  She nodded her head. There was no need to ask him what.

  “There was something,” he continued, “that I came to ask you.”

  He was leaning forward now, his elbow rested upon his knees; the cigarette that he was smoking crushed between his fingers. Some struggle or other, she could see, was going on within him, and sickeningly, as she waited for him to speak, the feet of fear walked round her.

  Had she been right and Christopher wrong, then, after all? Was there some other woman that Graham loved, and was it this that he had come to tell her? Well, and if it was, if it was to be freed from his engagement that he had come to her, there would be nothing for her but to keep her voice level, and her eyes dry, and to prevent her fingers from fluttering at her side.

  “I understand, Graham,” she would say, “I’m glad you’ve told me, and I’m very glad that you’ve found out your mistake in time. It’s saved us both a great deal of pain. Don’t feel unhappy about it. Don’t think you’ve treated me unfairly. You’d have treated me far more unfairly if you hadn’t told me.”

  And she would stretch out her hand to him, and they would part as friends, and he would never know how much had died in her that evening.

  “I’ve come to tell you——” he was saying. “I’ve come to say——” He hesitated, then finished the sentence in a rush: “It can’t,” he said, “go on any longer.”

  So it had been that, then. He no longer loved her; or, at least, loved some other woman more: he no longer wanted her, and their engagement must be at an end. As she waited for the next sentence she closed her eyes as will prisoners sometimes at an execution, so as not to know the exact moment at which the blow will fall.

  “It can’t go on any longer,” he repeated. “We’ve got to get married, Joan, at once.”