Doves of Venus

by Olivia Manning

  ‘Oh, Denis!’

  Looking over her head, he said to Bertie: ‘For heaven’s sake, give this girl something to do. Don’t let her pester me.’

  This, unlike most of Denis’s shows of annoyance, was not good-humoured. All Ellie’s dash was gone in a moment. Bertie set her to work. He gave his instructions in whispers. A mourning chill hung over the studio.

  After a while Ellie found courage to whisper to Bertie: ‘What is the matter with Denis?’

  Bertie whispered back: ‘He is writing a film script.’

  This made Ellie feel a little better. She had gathered from conversations that Denis had once been employed by a film unit, but the slump in British films had thrown him out of work. It was Bertie’s influence that had found him the studio job, but he could not take it seriously. He was waiting for the film world to need him again.

  That day, and for the rest of the week, Bertie received no better treatment than Ellie had done. He accepted it in the manner of a loyal wife respectful of her husband’s humours. He tip-toed about, doing Denis’s work as well as his own, and it seemed to Ellie he looked rather smug, as though he thought it as well she should have discovered the realities of Denis’s temperament.

  The studio employees were allowed to take off one Saturday morning in three. Denis took his that week. On Monday morning he arrived looking wan and sombre, but with head lifted, again aware there was an outer world. Ellie felt he would now like to be questioned about his script, but she was taking no risks. Bertie also kept silence. In the middle of the morning Denis crossed over to where they were working. There was a long pause, then Bertie asked with casual gentleness: ‘How’s it going?’

  Denis shrugged his shoulders. His face was ghostly, his eyelids pink. He said: ‘I’ve given it up.’

  Bertie clicked his tongue and sighed: ‘But why?’ He looked as though all his efforts had been wasted.

  ‘Unsaleable subject.’

  ‘What was it about?’

  ‘The future; push-button warfare; lots of maniacs shut up in towers madly pushing buttons to destroy each other’s toy cities and aircraft and ships. The ordinary human beings going about their ordinary lives, and the little groups of loonies who want war isolated, and fuming and pissing themselves, and issuing bulletins no one reads, and pretending to one another they’re important.’

  ‘In towers,’ said Bertie, making a mental effort. ‘How did they get there?’

  ‘They’ve been put there: perhaps they’re lunatic asylums – that’s an idea. The normal human beings have realised at last how crazy these power-mad loonies are. They’ve collected the lot of them together, stuck them inside and told them to get on with their wars on their own. The rest of the world simply goes on living a normal life without them.’

  ‘Um.’

  ‘Not saleable, eh?’ Denis suddenly swung on Ellie: ‘You wouldn’t go to a film like that, would you?’

  Ellie blushed with pride that her opinion should be sought, ‘That’s just the sort of film I would go to. I always go to the Classic.’

  ‘Oh, well!’ Denis turned away. ‘I might take another look at it.’

  Bertie said: ‘What you’ve told me is simply an idea. Where’s the story?’

  ‘There’s plenty of story. Think of all the conflicts among the button pushers – the establishment building, the jealousies over promotion, the pretensions, the lies, the vanities, the rows. They imagine they’re the real world, and, of course, they’re no longer anything.’

  Bertie said quietly: ‘Still, that’s not a story.’

  ‘I suppose it isn’t.’ Denis was biting the side of his finger-nail; he paused, wry-faced, as though his nail were bitter: ‘Have to think about it.’ He wandered back to his desk, pulled his newspaper over his manuscript and bent over the crossword puzzle. That, so far as Ellie could tell, was the end of the film script.

  Later that day Mrs Primrose came into the studio and talked to Denis for some time. A communication of importance. Ellie peered anxiously out from her hiding-place. When Mrs Primrose left him, Denis smiled over to the others, recovered, apparently, from his creative attack. ‘A new young woman, my dears. A little playmate for Ellie. A brilliant girl – scholarship to the Slade, and such brilliant flower designs!’

  ‘Did you see them?’ asked Bertie.

  ‘No. I’ll see them soon enough.’

  On the following Monday morning Miss Nancy Claypole started work. She was a tall, thin, bespectacled girl with a prudish appearance. Ellie thought she looked even more discouraging than Rhoda.

  With Miss Claypole on his hands, Denis gazed vaguely round the studio, then led her over to a notorious chest-of-drawers, a large Edwardian piece on which Bertie had refused to waste his talent.

  ‘There, darling,’ said Denis, ‘This delightful commode has been specially reserved for you. It is a genuine Bête Blanche and when in the possession of Madame de Montespan was one of the sensations de Paris – or so we’ve been told. It is mentioned in the works of Kirchenbaum and is believed to be the very commode in which Napoleon kept his socks.’

  ‘What am I to do with it?’

  ‘Oh, just pretty it up. Sprinkle it with forget-me-nots.’

  Ellie, who had watched Miss Claypole’s entry with a certain sulky envy, glanced out now to see how she was facing up to Denis’s humour. Denis, seeing Ellie, seized her arm – ‘Here’s our junior, our odd-job girl. She’ll show you where everything is,’ and made his escape.

  Ellie grew red at Denis’s description of her. She could not be more than three years junior to this young woman. Ellie looked at her, smiling grudgingly, and met the eyes of an ally.

  ‘What am I to do with this thing?’ Miss Claypole asked as though she believed Ellie could advise her, ‘I bet the bête was an elephant.’

  Ellie’s eyes widened in admiration at Miss Claypole’s wit, and Miss Claypole, conscious of having made an impression, started to giggle. Her small, ginger-brown eyes, pinpointed behind spectacles, jigged about, giving her so mischievous a look that Ellie giggled, too. Ellie did not know why Miss Claypole was laughing so much, but the extraordinary naughtiness of Miss Claypole’s expression, compared with the propriety of her staid body, her severe features, seemed to Ellie unbearably funny. She almost wept as she laughed. Suddenly the two girls were caught up in a madness of giggling. Each time each caught the other’s eye, their giggles were renewed: they became convulsive, wild, almost sick with laughter.

  ‘Really, girls!’ said Bertie.

  Bertie, pained and unamused, seemed to them funnier than anything else. Miss Claypole said pleadingly: ‘Oh, no!’ and Ellie sank to the floor and leant helplessly against the chest-of-drawers. Denis raised his head and watched them with a mild smile.

  ‘What is the joke?’ Bertie asked with patient impatience.

  Neither could answer, but, looking affectionately at each other, they felt the alliance of their femininity, their girlhood and their understanding of each other. They had fallen into friendship, immediate and complete. This friendship started fully grown; later it was confirmed by the similarity of their circumstances.

  Nancy came from Bleckworth, a small Midland town, where her father was a bank manager. She had overridden her parents’ plan to make her a shorthand-typist and talked them into sending her each day, by bus, to a Birmingham art school. From there she had taken a scholarship to the Slade. The grant that went with it had been so small that she had, during her first year in London, to sleep in a hostel cubicle. After that an uncle had made her an allowance and she could afford a room of her own.

  Ellie was impressed by Nancy’s scholarship to the Slade. Nancy, too, was a unique and remarkable person. Ellie asked: ‘Were you miserable at home?’

  ‘Not miserable, exactly; just bored. Bleckworth wasn’t my world.’

  ‘Nor Eastsea mine.’

  ‘How lucky we’ve been to escape.’

  ‘And how did you get into the studio?’

  ‘My uncle told me
to ring Mrs Primrose. He’d met her somewhere. I think she was quite glad to get me. It’s not everyone who can manage on her idea of a salary.’

  Nancy’s salary was higher than Ellie’s: she still had the allowance from her uncle, but most of her money went on the large bed-sitting-room she rented near South Kensington station. It left her as poor as Ellie. This fact drew them closer. They shared the triumphs of economy.

  Nancy went to the canteen on her first day and said: ‘Thank God for it.’

  When they had eaten, she asked: ‘Do you ever lick your plate?’

  ‘Good heavens, no!’

  ‘I do. When I’m hungry.’ Her eyes danced at this victory over respectability, a victory that went further than any of Ellie’s victories.

  Dumbfounded, Ellie asked: ‘Here? Would you do it here?’

  ‘Perhaps not here. The plates don’t look too clean.’

  Faced with the queues, the heaped dishes, the dirty tables, the food; entertained by tales of black-beetles and cord in cabbage, Nancy said: ‘Who cares! It’s cheap.’

  Ellie glowed as she looked at Nancy’s plain, long-featured face. Here was a friend and comrade; an equal in daring; a girl who had appetite to lick a plate.

  Nancy said: ‘Even if we’re not paid much, we’re doing our own work. I’ve heard of art students washing dishes in hotels, cleaning windows, acting as waiters, scrubbing stairs in blocks of flats. Some have even had to go into advertising. We can’t complain, really.’

  The girls took to meeting on Saturday evenings. Usually they went to the Classic Cinema, but if one or other was saving for some necessity of life, they would walk to Knightsbridge and look in the lighted windows of shops. Sometimes they went as far as Regent Street. Then they would visit an Espresso bar for coffee, talking long after the coffee was drunk, aware that they were grown-up, responsible and independent persons who stayed up as late as they thought fit.

  On Sundays they would meet in the afternoons and visit the Victoria and Albert Museum. When that became over-familiar, they went, at the cost of a weekday meal, the long bus ride to the British Museum. After that a desire for discovery came down on them. They would walk, quite late at night, through Tottenham Court Road, Charing Cross Road, Shaftesbury Avenue and Soho, defensively, but, when the danger was past, congratulating themselves on having no such fears as their mothers would have had.

  ‘The truth is,’ said Nancy, ‘we are natural Londoners.’

  Their evenings together had a quality of recklessness that kept them in continuous, giggling excitement. At the sight of a dark and narrow street, they would say: ‘Let’s explore,’ hoping they were taking a risk. There was no knowing what they might do, or see, or discover: or, when they later talked, their spirits heightened by adventure, how their thought might be revolutionised by speech.

  It seemed to Ellie that Nancy surprised her more often than she surprised Nancy. Nancy, after all, looked so unlikely to surprise. Despite the jigging mischief of her eyes, she surprised Ellie most by her continual interest in the male sex. At the smallest blink from a young man in a café or a cinema queue, Nancy would flush and grin in delight of the chase.

  Ellie supposed herself aged by experience. How could she, who awaited Quintin’s return, be conscious of ordinary young men in queues? She longed to tell Nancy she had touched the ultimate of experience in such matters, but she doubted the wisdom of doing so. Nancy might disapprove of the ultimate: or, if she approved, she might be envious and their friendship suffer from an inequality.

  Here, again, it was Nancy who was to surprise Ellie. It was a Saturday night. They had seen at the cinema an old film called ‘Mayerling’, then gone to a snack bar for coffee. Ellie, wrapped still in the fogs of romantic tragedy, of illicit but enduring love, of snow-bound palaces, of luxury and death, forgot Nancy’s presence and let her head droop and her eyes swim with tears.

  ‘Who was he?’ Nancy asked. She allowed herself four cigarettes a day and had just lit the last of them.

  Ellie gulped. After a moment of snuffling into her handkerchief and pretending to blow her nose, she said, husky but defiant: ‘Who was who?’

  ‘Whoever you’re mooning over.’

  Ellie, able to look up at last, caught the glint of Nancy’s mocking eye. ‘Come on, now,’ said Nancy. ‘Did you go the whole hog?’

  Ellie’s lips parted: she blushed more in astonishment than guilt. ‘Why? Did you? Ever?’

  ‘Of course. Lots of times.’ While Nancy’s thin, soft mouth stretched complacently, her eyes showed their triumph at Ellie’s surprise. ‘What did you think?’

  ‘I didn’t think,’ Ellie untruthfully murmured. She looked down again, ashamed that her own experience had been so slight. After a long silence, having swallowed back her tears, she said: ‘There was someone, but I’m afraid it’s all over now. He said he wouldn’t be able to see me for some time.’

  ‘And you haven’t heard from him since?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Hah! Trying out some new female. Trying to keep you in reserve.’

  ‘Oh no!’ Ellie grew pale at the thought. ‘It couldn’t be that.’ And yet, what else could it be?

  ‘Forget about him,’ said Nancy.

  ‘I am forgetting about him,’ Ellie said meekly. When she could, she smiled and said: ‘Tell me about yours.’

  ‘Oh, I could never be bothered mooning after just one. I like lots.’

  ‘Goodness! And have you someone now?’

  ‘Not exactly now. At the moment, as a matter of fact, I’m bored with men. I was thinking only tonight how much nicer it is to have a woman friend. Don’t you think we have much more fun together, enjoying things, saying what we think, being free, instead of each trailing around pandering to the vanity of some stupid man who expects you to be grateful because he buys you sardines on toast?’

  Ellie’s eyes widened and shone: her cheeks glowed as she considered how they were constantly amazing each other with the originality of their ideas, the breadth of their concepts. She said: ‘You’re absolutely right.’

  Nancy gazed at Ellie. From pleasurable emotion, she glistened pink as a peony, her eyes were no more than intense sparks behind their spectacles, and at last, as though her heart were breaking open with a fact she could no longer suppress, she said: ‘I have a rich uncle in the country. Not far from London.’

  ‘Have you?’ Ellie was not certain what was expected of her.

  ‘Next time he asks me for a week-end, would you like to come with me?’

  ‘But I’d love to.’

  Ellie was surprised Nancy could have any doubt about it, but later she began to suspect Nancy’s doubt was of her own wisdom in inviting her. As time passed and the invitation was not repeated Ellie began to fear that, like the hot buttered scones, it would disappear altogether. She kept it in view by asking, whenever there was an opening, questions about Nancy’s rich uncle.

  She learnt he was called Tom Claypole; his house called Clopals. The eldest of a large family of brothers and sisters, he alone had been sent to a university. When he had taken a degree at Oxford, he went to London, wrote occasionally to his mother, but came home only once, to attend her funeral.

  ‘He just despised the lot of them,’ said Nancy, ‘and I’m not surprised. Sometimes my aunts would go to London to shop or see a matinée. At first they used to ring him up and get invited to lunch, but he always had other people at the same time so that he wouldn’t have to talk to them. They got awfully offended and stopped seeing him, but they found out all they could about him. They were always telling their friends how he’d made money and married into a county family. I can’t tell you how ghastly my relatives are.’

  ‘Mine would be, too, if I had any.’

  ‘I made up my mind that when I came to London I would look him up and let him see how different I am.’

  ‘And what happened?’

  ‘It took me ages to track him down. He’d retired and gone to live in the country. He lives alone. His wi
fe is dead.’

  ‘And you went to Clopals? – the place you thought we might visit?’

  ‘Yes.’

  They were walking in Kensington Gardens. They walked two hundred yards in silence before Nancy said impetuously: ‘Look here! If I take you down there you must promise you won’t vamp him.’

  ‘Vamp him!’ Ellie was astounded. ‘Vamp him, for goodness sake! Why, you said he’s nearly a hundred.’

  ‘Yes, but he’s rich as well.’

  ‘Nancy!’

  Nancy glanced sideways at Ellie, then said contritely: ‘Well, I’ve suffered . . .’ She glanced again and said: ‘I’m sorry. I should have known you were different. But he’s susceptible.’

  ‘Do you mean he’s a menace?’

  ‘Goodness, no. He’s terribly old-fashioned. You even have to go carefully with lipstick. As for . . . well, if you ever let him know you’d . . .’

  ‘As though I would!’

  ‘Well, don’t! And the next time he invites me, I’ll ring him and ask if I can take you there with me.’

  5

  Tom Claypole’s invitation to Nancy came in early March when winter was breaking and the cool brilliance of spring was lighting the evening streets. Tom was willing that Nancy should bring her new friend. He asked for Ellie’s address and sent her a separate invitation. To Nancy he sent their railway tickets.

  Denis agreed they could take their free Saturday together. They left on Friday evening. Passing from the clutter of London to the country horizon, they saw, among the placid and spacious curves of the Chilterns, bursting tree buds and hawthorns sprayed with white. Primroses opened in safety on the railway banks and the sunset still lingered at six o’clock.

  Ellie said: ‘What will happen to us this year? What will we do? Who will we meet?’

  ‘We may get married.’

  ‘I don’t suppose I’ll ever marry. Quintin is married already and his wife won’t divorce him.’

  ‘That’s an old story.’

  This was no time to argue with Nancy. Ellie, alight with spring and the visit ahead, put Quintin from her and so concentrated on her good fortune at meeting Nancy that she said: ‘How lucky it was you who came to the studio!’ and she might have flung her arms round her friend had the lights not come on suddenly and made her self-conscious.