He was gone. In a few moments the taxi had turned a corner and was out of sight. She touched the parapet where he had been leaning: it was cold. She stood for several minutes, then there was nothing to do but walk on.
13
When Ellie reached Chelsea Bridge Road, she looked down it as though the taxi might still be in sight. She crossed the road and was jerked to consciousness by the noise of brakes. Denis, putting his head out of the car, shouted: ‘Idiot!’ When he saw it was Ellie, he asked:
‘What is the matter with you? You seemed to be sleepwalking.’
She shook her head in apology.
‘Where are you going?’ he asked.
‘Nowhere. Just for a walk.’
‘Get in, then. You’ll be safer inside.’
They drove on eastwards, following the river. As they passed the Tate Gallery, she said suddenly: ‘This has been the most wonderful evening of my life.’
‘Really,’ said Denis without belief or interest.
His tone restored her. Her mistake had been in speaking of herself. She knew what passed for kindness in her chosen world: ‘I will save you if I can, but first I must save myself.’
She asked: ‘Have you a new job, Denis?’
He answered abruptly: ‘Yes. Script-writing. Hack stuff.’
‘Perhaps you’ll write something terrific. The sort of film they have at the Academy.’
‘No living in that stuff. Give the bastards what they want: and damn them to hell.’ Driving the wrong way, at speed, down a one-way street, he said: ‘I hate their guts.’
‘But whose? Whose guts?’
‘How do I know? Whoever it is that’s buggering the world up: whoever it is that wants trash, and whoever it is that gives it to them. Me, in other words.’
They arrived unchallenged on Victoria Embankment. At the first traffic lights the car before them drew up. Without slackening speed, Denis cut round it and crossed as the amber changed to red. Ellie had the unfearing faith of the non-driver. ‘Where are we going?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know.’
He pulled up on Waterloo Bridge without comment. They went across to the balustrade. Ellie gazed with him at the broad river that, pearl-coloured beneath the pearl-pale light of the low sun, looked motionless as a lake. The city was washed in the same pearl pallor. Only the dark church spires reflected the smoke streaks of cloud that rayed from the horizon where the night was.
Ellie, gazing round the great chrysanthemum of sky, noticed above the cross of St Paul’s a gnat-sized plane that, rising, drew across the glassy empyrean a frayed, frost-glittering scratch.
She said: ‘A cherub returning home.’
Denis nodded seriously: ‘Might fit that in.’ He took out a notebook and scribbled something. Content, Ellie let her head fall back and stared into the sky above her. It seemed that a name was written there in a line of light – it flashed an instant, then the blue closed over it like water. There had not been time to read it but she knew whose name it had been.
Denis said: ‘Come on.’ They went back to the car. He turned in the face of traffic, shaved a bus and bolted for the Strand.
‘I suppose at your age,’ said Ellie, ‘you’ve been in love a good many times?’
‘Do you!’ Denis took a short cut northwards and was stopped by a policeman on traffic duty. ‘Oh, Officer!’ he called in the accents of the Deep South, ‘I just can’t get wise to your English traffic laws.’ The officer put him wise. They reached Fleet Street.
‘Love!’ he suddenly spat the word with disgust. ‘A trick to keep the world populated. Working so well that we’re over-populated. Swarming masses of human beings. Love begetting hatred. World famine. People gnawing at each other’s thigh-bones.’
‘No.’
‘Just wait. You’ll probably live to see it.’
That kept her quiet until they reached St Paul’s. She had not been so far east before. From the lifeless, shadowed city the cathedral rose into sunlight as from a depth of water. Denis gave no sign of hearing Ellie’s squeaks and ‘Ohs’. He drew up in Lower Thames Street and jumped from the car in a businesslike way.
‘Now! A shot of that!’ He waved his notebook to where Britannia, in the glow of sunset, bent attentive over Billingsgate. ‘And through here.’ They stood at the gates and peered into the glass halls which, wet, empty and smelling of fish, reflected the pink sky.
‘What is this film about?’ Ellie asked.
‘I don’t know. Haven’t written it yet. Hitchcock stuff, I suppose. Criminal or political. Ending with a chase. Through here, over the river. What else could we use around here?’
‘Oh, that.’
Denis looked critically at the Monument and after a pause conceded: ‘We might pan past it.’
They were driving towards Tower Bridge when suddenly its delectable oddity was rapt from Ellie’s sight by the turn of the car. ‘An Underground station!’ said Denis, speeding inland: ‘a good one. Not one tarted up with strip lighting. And how about a gin palace! Teddy boys, chromium, pin-tables. Might make something of this after all.’ He took tickets and hurried Ellie down a moving staircase. ‘We want a very long staircase – shoot it so it looks longer. Dropping down, down, down. Passages: more passages. A figure disappearing round a corner: run after him – no one there. Dead end.’
‘Where has he gone?’
‘God knows. Look at that!’ Denis caught Ellie’s arm and stared across the line to where the daylight, a silver verdigris, struck through a vent on to a clotted mass of cables bloomed by a decade’s dust. ‘Magnificent.’
‘Will it be a colour film?’
‘May be.’
As twilight came down in a greenish fog, they crossed the sleek, green river and drove about among the riverside lanes. A bridge rose above them. ‘Out again,’ ordered Denis. ‘Now, up here.’
To reach the bridge road they climbed a circular staircase enclosed in iron. He shouted ‘Hello’ and his voice spiralled round the walls. With satisfaction he said: ‘What do you think of that? Hitchcock? More like Eisenstein. Imagine footsteps coming up there; only footsteps – flagging. Flagging’s the word. That ringing echo. A figure stumbles at the top: falls: a hand spread on the pavement. Picks himself up; pretty well had it. The lights coming on along the river bank . . . This is where it ends, of course. Drops into the river. The white face going down . . . What do you think of it?’
‘Wonderful!’ said Ellie. ‘Most wonderful film I’ve ever seen.’
Denis laughed: ‘Where’s your Wullie Shakespeare now?’
Ellie looked up at his face that, pale as a drowning face, gazed down the river with a look of satisfaction.
Had he been Quintin she would have said: ‘Who is Hitchcock? Who is Eisenstein? Why Wullie Shakespeare? Tell me what it all means,’ heightening with her youth and ignorance the sensual excitement of their relationship. She knew better than to play that game with Denis. She had flirted with him, but it was an odd sort of sexless flirtation. It was not to be relied upon: his exasperation might break through the spell to say: ‘My dear girl, don’t you know anything?’
Now, because she hid her ignorance, the spell held. He said: ‘Let’s drink to it – a great film.’
He drove back to Chelsea. They entered a crowded public-house in the King’s Road.
‘What will you drink?’
‘A cocktail.’
‘What! My dear girl, no one further in than Pinner even speaks of cocktails these days. Besides, you don’t get them in pubs. Have a gin?’
‘I’d love a gin.’
When Denis had brought the drinks he said: ‘Over there,’ and led Ellie to a corner where there were three men, two seated at a table, the third standing. He knew them all, it seemed, but he did not bother to introduce Ellie. She felt that, so far as Denis was concerned, she had now dropped out of sight. One of the men seated on the bench moved up so that there was room for her. She sat down, effacing herself, watching but saying nothing. She noticed that
Denis’s manner had changed. He was no longer authoritive and clipped of speech but had returned to his studio manner of languor and endearments. He sat on the edge of the table and gave his attention to the man standing up. This was a very large man who, swaying slightly, held a small round glass in his hand. Denis sniffed the glass.
‘Brandy, darling,’ he said. ‘In the money at last?’
The large man gave a deep titter, then grunted and said: ‘Yes . . . um . . . yes. Got an advance. Ghosting a book of memoirs. Chap knew all the right people, all the best times. Last days of Oscar: Ronnie under the table at the Eiffel Tower – “Look at my white hands” etc. Then South of France stuff. Scott Fitzgerald, Paris and so on.’
‘Those were the days, darling. The conscience-stricken ’30s. They did themselves well.’
‘Before the war,’ said the large man, ‘you’d only to publish a book and they kept you in drinks and parties for the rest of your life. Nowadays it’s like dropping a stone into mud.’
‘Lot of stones dropped, nevertheless,’ said the young man who had made room for Ellie. She realised he was speaking to her rather than to the others, his tone implying some sort of confederacy. She turned to observe him: his square, fair, good-humoured face seemed to her pleasing, but it did not mean much. He said something quickly, seeming to snatch at her attention – but already she had returned it to the large man, dazzled by his cross-talk with Denis. His appearance seemed to her spectacular. She had never before tried to embody the word ‘intellectual’ and now here it was embodied for her – a man with a large, pale, aquiline face, seeming at once aloof and piteous. A black Homburg hat was pushed to the back of his head. Under his arm, at a dangerous angle, he held a broken-down, black cotton umbrella. He swayed a little as though he were unsubstantial, an inflated skin, huge but tender, that was stirred by every current of air. Occasionally, it seemed, he doubted his power to stand alone, for he would glance round for support and depress on to the table-top the fingers of one hand. It was only in the heat of talk he took the risk of lifting them.
He said: ‘Even the artist these days is being cut down to the common man. The local’s good enough for us. No one wants to applaud. No one records on shirt cuffs. Why, in this very pub I heard Dylan talk his head off, night after night, and no one remembers a word of it.’
‘Too much talk, darling, too much drink . . .’
‘How else can we forget our enemies?’
‘Enemies, darling? Have you enemies?’
‘Indeed, yes. Three. The psychiatrist, the mad-house and the grave.’
‘Oh, my dear Arnold.’ Denis caught his arm affectionately. ‘Let me buy you a drink – a beer, I mean. I’m not standing for brandy.’
Ellie watched Denis go to the bar. How wonderful to be Denis and on such terms with such a man! In this interval of silence, the young man at her elbow tried to distract her again. What was her name? What did she do? His was Simon Lessing. He was an architect, but painted in his spare time.
Simon? ‘Simple Simon’ was the unfortunate correlation in her mind.
‘I’ve often seen you in the King’s Road,’ he said.
‘Have you?’ She was surprised that anyone, even this young man, had noticed her in the King’s Road. During the months of her loneliness it had seemed she must be invisible.
She looked into his face and, recognising in his intensely watching eyes the reflection of her uncommon attraction for him, she could only pity him. He had made himself known to her just too late. Before this evening she might have been glad of him, but what hope for him now that she was restored to Quintin?
She smiled briefly. Discouraging him, she looked away to where Denis was returned to converse with the writer. Simon started to say something, but Ellie shook her head and kept her face from him as though he were interrupting a performance upon the stage.
The large man, Arnold, was saying: ‘The ’30s, of course, were pretty well taken up with their own doom. The poetry was in the self-pity. The young today are different. They haven’t grown up blaming everyone but themselves. They don’t see themselves as the helpless victims.’
‘No, they’ve simply gone underground. Every man his own deep shelter. They’re just not interested. Here—’ he turned on Ellie – ‘what do you believe in?’
She was too startled to answer at first: she blushed and asked miserably: ‘Do you mean God?’
‘Not necessarily. What about politics?’
‘I don’t know. I can’t be a Conservative because my mother was. I suppose I’m a Socialist – but I can’t see how they differ.’
‘There you are,’ said Denis. ‘And when I was her age I wanted to fight in Spain.’
‘But then we knew how they differed. Since then there’s been a clash. Black and white have mixed. Everything looks grey.’
At that moment Bertie came in and gazed feverishly about him. Ellie caught his eye, but he seemed not to notice her. When he saw Denis he cried out accusingly: ‘So here you are! What became of you? I wasn’t more than a second late.’
‘Late?’ Denis looked coldly at him. ‘Late for what?’
‘Weren’t we meeting this evening? At the “Passport to Fortune”?’
‘Were we?’ Denis turned away and asked Arnold what he had been saying.
Bertie, ignored and wretched, stared at Denis’s back. After he had stood for some time, Ellie tried to distract him. ‘Hello, Bertie,’ she said. ‘I do think your writingdesk design is terribly good.’
‘What?’ Bertie looked at her as though he had seen her before somewhere but could not place her in this setting. He shook his head slightly.
She repeated her remark.
‘Oh!’ he said blankly, then returned his gaze to Denis.
‘Have a drink?’ Simon Lessing invited him.
He looked round again with a pained frown as though these attempts to console him were agony to him. When he realised what had been said, he replied: ‘Don’t bother. I’ll get one myself.’ When he came back he sat on the edge of the form beside Ellie and watched Denis as a dog, trained to patience, watches its master.
Now that this interruption was over, Ellie could hear the author again.
‘. . . isolated and done for,’ he was saying. ‘Life has us surrounded. I’ve done my best to identify myself with it, but I know I can’t.’
‘Retreat into literature,’ Denis advised him. ‘Write a great book.’
‘Literature’s down the drain. As for great books – there’s one published every minute.’
Denis, on his third drink, was losing his languor; he was becoming dictatorial and fast-speaking, his white, tensed hands swinging about. ‘Not that sort of “great book” – give your time to it, give ten years: write Bovary or War and Peace.’
The large man shook his head in a defeated way. ‘When Tolstoy spent ten years, or whatever it was, on War and Peace, he believed when it was finished society would still be there to read it. I don’t know where we’ll all be ten months from now.’
‘Why did you ever write at all?’
‘I started young. When we lived at the peak of civilisation. Remember those times? A few years later we went to war. We had not, after all, inherited a world of light.’
‘Six bloody wasted years,’ said Denis.
The large man laughed. He made a movement, deprecating Denis’s vehemence. As he talked, his manner implied that nothing he said was to be taken very seriously. Occasionally he glanced about, observing his neighbours and the people at the bar. When the newcomer was a woman his eyes, shy and enquiring, would rest on her until she looked at him, then he turned away.
Denis said: ‘We grew up believing in progress and civilisation, then found they didn’t exist.’
Arnold nodded: ‘That’s our trouble. We live in an age to which we do not belong.’
Ellie had heard something like this from Tom Claypole. She was bewildered by the dissatisfaction of her elders. Did she, she wondered, live in an age to which she did not
belong? She thought not – but then, she had no clear memory of growing up in a belief in civilisation and progress. When the war broke out she was an infant. Mrs Parsons had gone with her young children to a cousin in Staffordshire. She still spoke with wrath of the years of squabbles and hatred that came next. Ellie did not remember much of them, but she remembered their desolate return to an Eastsea restrained by barbed wire; bombed, silent and shut. Her father had been invalided from the Army. He lived for three more years. During that time her education had been sketchy. When they moved into the restaurant, Mrs Parsons had been too busy to worry much about the girls. What Ellie had learnt, she learnt in spite of circumstances. Perhaps she had missed something.
‘Man,’ said Denis, giving an imitation of a famous political figure, ‘set in a world rich and beautiful, expends his infinite resources upon means to exterminate himself. What is this instinct that forces him to destroy his own happiness? Is it the Divine Will that, having ordained a hell upon this planet, economises by setting the silly bastards to make it for themselves?’
Arnold started to laugh, then stopped to watch the woman who had just entered the bar. She let the door bang behind her and crossed the floor, frowning, looking about her in a distraught way. The others watched her, too. There was a stir as she sighted someone in their group and smiled with relief. She had singled out a man who, sitting next to Simon, had had nothing to say. He saw her, but neither moved nor smiled. He still said nothing. The woman was driven to whisper to him: ‘Theo, I must speak to you.’
He gave a sigh of annoyance, then, looking about and finding himself observed, he rose and went with the woman to an isolated table.
Arnold Valance watched them go.
14
There were two chairs. Petta sat on one of them. Her companion stood some moments, then dropped impatiently into the other. He looked away from her with an expression of long-suffering, waiting for the interview to come to an end.
Doves of Venus Page 19
