Here Be Dragons

by Stella Gibbons

  “Do you mind?” She ventured to rub her cheek against his, and learned that the thrice-weekly shave of which she had once heard him boast was overdue.

  “Of course not, Nello. If there were any slight inconvenience—but there isn’t—I should be proud to put up with it in the service of Benedict’s exquisite technique. And you know I like being here, almost best of all my … did you like those poems of his that I pushed under your bedroom door, by the way?”

  “Oh, was that you? It wasn’t my door; it was Daddy’s. (He didn’t like them.) Yes, I did, rather. I thought they were awfully original, anyway.”

  “That’s quite discerning of you, Nello,” with an approving glance. “They’re extraordinarily original. That expression of burning passion in delicate metres and light, precise words has never been carried so far in English before. Reading them is like having an icicle of blood go through you, isn’t it?”

  “Don’t be so horrible,” and she disengaged herself, from caution rather than from any wish to leave the circle of his arm. One of the parents might appear.

  “Hadn’t you better go and get out of that terrible coat?” beginning to follow her up the stairs. “Can I come and talk to you while you change?”

  “No you can not,” colouring, as she paused outside the door of her room. “I’m going to have a bath and all sorts of things … oh all right, then. Just while I brush my hair.”

  “I shall like that very much. (I adore watching people brushing their hair.) I won’t stay long but may I just lie on the bed? I’ve been hunting all day for a man who’s promised me a job and I’m exhausted … I can always bury my face in the pillow—if you insist … There are going to be a lot of B.B.C. creatures there tonight. (That’s why Benedict’s coming. He heard me say they were expected and he asked to come. I didn’t like to refuse, but they’ll do him no good; he ought to write like mad for three years and then die.) I hope my papa won’t make another gaffe with them and get himself thrown out on his little ear again.”

  “What was it he actually did? I’ve never really heard.” Nell turned her head to look at him through a raying fountain of silky hair.

  “Haven’t you?” He propped himself on one elbow, beginning to laugh. “Oh, it was wonderful. You know he built up his radio reputation on being The Housewife’s Champion; buttering them up and verbally kissing their horrible little red hands and all that sort of bull; well, one day he got fearfully worked up about the price of mince or something and he said—he said—” rolling over and choking into the pillow—“the housewife, staggering under her heavy burden, darting this way and that like some maddened animal”—and of course billions of letters poured in from all over the country from horrible little housewives complaining that he’d called them animals. It completely finished him. It was like the fall of Lucifer. We all laughed like drains. Of course,” he added, “it wasn’t scripted or the B.B.C. would never have passed it. He lost his head and said it in an interview.”

  “You must go now,” she said, when they had stopped laughing. “I want my bath. And I’ve got to see if my mother wants any help with supper.”

  “Oh, must I? What are you going to wear? Not some horrible pink thing? I loathe pink.” He continued to lie where he was, with arms behind his head and dusty shoes on the coverlet, looking at her.

  “No. Will you go away?”

  “I suppose so. But how suburban you are. Don’t expect much in the way of guests. There will be these B.B.C. types and some of Margie’s advertising set … the women will all be very painted. (How vulgar paint is.) All right, I’m going. Thank you for letting me see you brush your hair,” and he slid off the bed and wandered from the room.

  As Nell went upstairs half an hour later towards the distant roar of voices, the dark yellow skirt rustled about her ankles as satisfactorily as if it had been real silk, and she only knew that the sleeveless jersey, of paler yellow, showed arms that were smooth and pale; their touching, childish fragility escaped her—on the whole—un-anxious eye. She wore her usual pink lipstick. (How vulgar paint is. But why should she always do what he approved?)

  “Now you’ve overdone it, of course,” he muttered, emerging unhurriedly from the mass of people packed tightly together in the small hot room, shouting their heads off in the radiance of the April afterglow, and approaching her where she stood by the door, “those things are more suitable for going to the ballet … but it was weirdly clever of you to choose yellow. It’s most original. I expect you’ve never been to this terrible kind of party before, have you? You must come and say how-do-you do to Margie first,” and he began to steer her deftly through the crowd, “she’s so busy working off all the spiteful things she’s thought out for the past few days that I don’t suppose she’ll even remember who you are … she’s in a permanent state of nervous tension, poor little beast … but she shouldn’t have married my papa if she wanted to be nice and quiet … Margie, you know my cousin, Nell Sely, don’t you?”

  “Oh, John!” Margie, who was very small and very dark and very pretty, made a sparkling face behind the devilish sparkle of her glasses, whisking round from the people she was shouting at, “isn’t he absurd?” to Nell, “of course we know each other. We meet on the stairs, don’t we? Is he looking after you? Have you had something to drink? Sherry? Gin? Vermouth? …”

  “Nell drinks tomato-juice,” John said austerely, even as Nell accepted an enormous glass from a man who was struggling by (“If you drink that, Nello, you will be drunk. I am not trying to stop you. I am only telling you”).

  “Oh, let her have it.” Margie turned back to her gabbling guests. “God knows she’ll need something to make her enjoy this party (at her age I suppose one still does enjoy parties) and I’m sure you put on that pretty jersey expecting to meet a lot of glamorous people, didn’t you?” to Nell, with a screwing-up of the eyes and a special smile. “Susan! Angel! When did you get back!” and she launched herself at a large woman in a cock’s-feather cap.

  As her cheek pressed the hot painted one of the angel, she was feeling remorseful at having said that to the poor kid; why shouldn’t she put on something pretty and want to meet glamorous people (God help her); she was young and it was only natural; she couldn’t have much fun living with that pathetic old father and her bossy snob of a mother … For an instant, as Margie plunged into an exchange of ecstatic interruptions with Susan, she clearly heard, and impatiently dismissed, her own mother’s voice saying, “Marjorie dear, that wasn’t kind.”

  “She is a bitch, of course,” John was saying judicially to Nell a little later, as they stood in a corner near the improvised bar, so wedged about with people that they could hardly lift their glasses, “but not a natural one. People say that some years ago she used to be rather boringly sweet. But what I think happened was this: when she met my papa first, he was terribly down on witty career-girls because he’d had such a dose of my mamma. But after he married his sweet little Margie, he not only found her a bit dull, after my mamma, but also found that her nice, natural manner bored other people, and wasn’t helping him with his career. So he told her she had got to turn herself into a witty bitch, and she has. That’s all. (Don’t say ‘is it?’)”

  “I see,” said Nell, who had drunk half the gin (with some effort) and who was liking its effect. But she had prudently put the glass down on a side table and was now watching, with some surprise, a large man stealthily pick it up, smell it, and shoot it down his throat.

  “She was so much in love with him, you see. She made herself a doormat for him. (I don’t know that she’s so much in love now. How could she be, after two years of him?) But people absolutely go to their parties hoping Margie will say something outrageously catty, and of course she always does. But she never says those things to famous or clever or useful people; she just goes for stupid people and people who are beginning to slip up and young people, like you. She does it rather well, I think. But it’s a frightful strain, keeping up a reputation as an amusing cat when you
feel guilty all the time.”

  “Does she feel guilty?”

  “Of course.”

  “How do you know? She … just looks as if she were … having a nice time and looking after her guests, to me.”

  “That, Nello darling, is because you’re still rather green. But you soon won’t be: I think you have a gift for seeing things and people as they are; rather soberly. I like that. Only you mustn’t start trying it on me. I’m the exception, remember. You must always see me as I want you to see me.”

  He smiled, and through the delightful haze of gin Nell smiled back. Beautiful little boy …

  “Besides, it’s my business to know about people … I’m a writer, a novelist … now I suppose you had better meet some of these terrible types. It will be good for you. I’ll just …”

  “Oh, there’s Benedict. Could I speak to him, do you think?”

  “I imagine so, if we can get him away from dear little Gardis for five minutes … yes, I know he isn’t actually talking to her now, but do look at him; chained to where she is, like Andromeda, or perhaps Prometheus would be a better comparison … an absorbing but horrifying sight. What an affliction to be so undetached. Yes, you go over and talk to him.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “AND ALL MY DAYS ARE TRANCES”

  BENEDICT, WITH NO guard upon the expression of a face which, in any case, seldom concealed its owner’s feelings, was standing silently on the edge of the circle which had gathered about Gardis.

  She was entertaining it less by what she said, than by that effect of wise-cracking which a display of American teeth, and the sound of an American accent, creates rather easily today in England. The group looked gayer than it was. He, who felt even less gay than he looked, was recalling throughout all his senses, with a numbing pain, every detail and incident of the afternoon they had passed together on the Heath—together! yet for all she had comprehended of his feelings, he might have been accompanied by a little animal, running beside him in its black silken fell across the fresh grass of spring.

  At their first meeting, two months ago, he had been instantly enslaved by her air of being a bad, lost, impudent little girl who had run away from home to busy herself with her own affairs, and who cared nothing for the grown-ups she had left behind; and as he had come, by the painful way of passion exchanged without kindness, to know her better, he had learned that this deliberately-straying child was her true self and that her paintings were her beloved toys and her only pleasure and treasure.

  She was hopelessly—yes, she had told him, the analyst had informed her parents that nothing could be done—immature, unintegrated, inharmonious, schizo—helplessly, in short, split. She had grinned, and said that she did not care if she were; you got more fun that way. In the early days of their affair, he had not cared either; telling himself that surely psychoanalysis was the greatest kill-joy of the delicious pangs of love since the Church had ceased to thunder, and congratulating the creators of such characters as Dolly Varden and the whole tribe of imperious, childish, irresistible charmers that their books were written, and they themselves safely dead, before the new ‘dismal science’ had spoiled the fun.

  Then he had learned accidentally, that his particular child was not nineteen, as he had supposed, but almost twenty-four—no age if a girl were maturing nicely, but disturbingly old if she were not maturing at all; and he had seen her when she was in one of her helpless hysterical fits of crying at the prospect of growing older; seen her hurrying frantically away to have almost-invisible wrinkles massaged, and firm young neck muscles rubbed with astringent creams; seen the change in her expression when conversation turned upon age. He had been made to swear that he would tell everybody that she was nineteen; just nineteen; and he had kept his promise.

  Her terror and her weakness had increased his pity for her, and his love. Yet there was in his passion at the same time a strong resentment. This was linked in some way with ‘his’ poetry, his own power to write it. His passion never prevented him, of course, from doing so; pain, sleeplessness, jealousy, longing, despair, never dried up the true springs of creation yet; but often he felt that something ugly was going on; some negative force was at work between Gardis and himself, which added anger to his pain.

  It was indeed a negative force; it was the absence of joy. But he did not yet suspect it.

  Someone was addressing him for the third time, he realized, when he came slowly out of the trance of suffering, memory and longing in which he was dreaming while he watched Gardis’s face.

  “I’m sorry? I beg your pardon,” he said, when he had looked for a moment unseeingly into the eyes looking up into his own, “oh—hullo.” He saw with relief that it was John’s cousin Nell, and she was neither grinning at him nor shouting.

  “I hope you don’t mind, but I want to ask you something. It’s about,” and here, with a glance round, she lowered her voice so that the quick light tones reached him clearly under the uproar, “about what you said the other night about being a waitress. I’m fed up with my job and I’m going to try to be one. How do I start?”

  “Well …” He hesitated, reluctantly rousing himself, “it’s quite simple, you just—I say, can’t we get out of this noise? Let’s go and sit on the stairs.”

  So they went; with much difficulty, across the crowded room and out on to the draughty and more-or-less silent landing, and when they were seated on the pale-blue, chipped paint of the top-stair, with two glasses which he had snatched up in passing, he drank off half his, and, sighing, said without animation.

  “Well, what do you want to know? I didn’t say it was easy work, you know, and you don’t always earn sixteen pounds a week.”

  “Yes, but that’s all right. I know it won’t be easy and it will be enough if I can earn about eight. But how do I start?”

  “Just walk into any café or restaurant that doesn’t look too low (you’d better begin at a respectable place—you don’t want to get put off the whole thing right away) and ask if they need a waitress.”

  “Will it matter never having done it before?”

  “Shouldn’t think so. It doesn’t for men, and you’ve got to start sometime.”

  “Where shall I try?”

  “Well, not in Camden Town, or Aldgate or anywhere like that.”

  “I hardly know London at all, except round Tottenham Court Road, and of course Hampstead.”

  “Tottenham Court Road is definitely out. Hampstead’s all right. Why not try one of those places in the High Street? Not a coffee-bar; one of those teashops that’s always full of elderly ladies. That would do to start on. You don’t want anywhere tough; you aren’t a tough type and your parents might object,” and he looked at her with slightly more interest, and smiled.

  “They’ll object anyway,” said Nell, swallowing. “I was looking at those places on the way home this evening, as a matter of fact. What about The Primula? Do you think that would do?”

  “Very well, I should think. Gardis and I had tea there this afternoon.”

  Every detail of its furnishings, and the very light that filled its low, wide, white room came before Benedict as he spoke, steeped in an irresistible soft enchantment and interest. “Yes, try there.” His eyes had strayed to the open doorway, and were searching among the crowd.

  “Thank you very much.”

  “Oh, that’s all right. Good luck.” He got up, and so did Nell. “And don’t worry too much about what your parents say. Parents never understand, but some of them do try to. I realize now how good my father was about my not wanting to take over his practice (he’s a doctor in Cornwall) and chucking medicine half-way through my training. It must have been terribly hard on him. But he was so decent about it, and we’re still on good terms.” He smiled.

  “Wasn’t it difficult, making up your mind?” They had paused at the door, before re-entering the packed, shrieking, grimacing crowd, as if willing to postpone the effort for a moment. His gleam of better temper had vanished and he looke
d crosser than ever.

  “What the hell else could I do? I say, there’s someone I must … I’ve got to talk to these B.B.C. people, that’s really what I came for … I’ll see you some time, I expect; good luck.”

  He began to shoulder his way towards two elegant personages dressed in palest grey and wearing horn-rims, and Nell remained in the doorway.

  What he had said about parents, of course, was rot. It was true that they never understood, but she was very sure that hers would not even try to. They would only be horrified and shocked. She suddenly felt inexperienced and lonely, and wished that Elizabeth were there to help and amuse her, but Châteaux d’Oex was six hundred miles away, and perhaps if ever Elizabeth heard that that ‘worthy type, name of Sely’, as she had called Nell, had become a waitress she might drop her. The prospect added to the immediate lack of cheerfulness.

  “Is there anything to eat?” demanded an old, musical voice at her elbow, “you are taller than I am, perhaps you can see … I’ve had four drinks, there’s plenty to drink, but what I like at this kind of party, where you have to talk a great deal, is something to eat as well, because after a time it takes it out of you so, talking … now could you get me a sandwich? although I haven’t seen any; there seem to be only those pieces of pastry with things balancing on them … I’m sure you won’t mind …”

  The earrings worn by the wonderfully elegant tiny creature who murmured all this barely reached to Nell’s shoulder, and Nell had almost to peer under a mass of curling grey feathers and blue hair to distinguish a mignonne monkey face, whose ageless prettiness was uncertainly covered with orange, red and black paint. Out of this contemporary mask smiled, also uncertainly, two splendid faded eyes.

  “Of course I don’t. But I haven’t seen any sandwiches … will you wait here?” The eyes continued to smile vaguely, and Nell rushed away, returning in ten minutes with an exiguous square of pastry covered in greenish cheese to find the lady gone.