“Yes … has she a lovely complexion?”
“She’s very fair; yes, I suppose she has.”
“And not what you, no doubt, would call ‘bright’?”
“I don’t know … she wasn’t, at school … but she likes ballet and she reads a lot of French authors. … I shouldn’t call her at all lowbrow.”
“I see.”
Nell was here impelled by a feeling of mingled irritation and pain—was she going to have to worry now about his meeting Elizabeth, as well as about his feelings for Nerina?—to add rather crisply:
“Why?”
“Oh, I was just imagining her … she sounds a managing sort of puss.”
“Yes, she is, I think. At any rate, she always managed everybody and got what she wanted at school. But I don’t think you’d ever suspect that she was. She has such beautiful manners. And she’s a dear.”
“H’m. Thank you for the warning. You know how I detest attempts to manage me.”
The conversation then idled off on to other matters, and as Nell bore her part in it, keeping at the same time an eye open for a cake which should supplement John’s peculiar and irregular diet with something nourishing and also satisfy his finicking taste in food, she was feeling slightly better about him and Nerina.
The story he had told undoubtedly made Nerina and Chris sound completely devoted and absorbed—although that did not count for as much among semi-Coffee-Dishers as it would have in more conventional circles, for the Dishers were always dropping their heart’s love without a moment’s warning—and, furthermore, he seemed to have no feeling towards the young lovers but admiration for their story; as if, as he had said, it were a romance by George Sand. There had been no hint in his voice or manner of jealousy.
And neither am I jealous, thought Nell with sudden stoutness which suggested that she was pulling herself together, as they paused in front of a cake-shop window. Good heavens. And I’m sure Elizabeth wouldn’t be able to stand him. She’d think he was only a little boy.
“Would that one do?” She pointed.
“The one with the Brazil nuts? Oh yes. Exotic, and gloriously expensive. Is it the most expensive one in the window? Yes. … Then let’s have it.”
Later that evening, John was drifting up the High Street in the twilight, acknowledging and exchanging greetings with the painters and sculptors in their ragged and brilliant clothes who were loitering up and down the length of The Cowshed; gossiping, arguing, scandalizing (in both senses) and pointing out the place where, later on, they would like to see their own particular work displayed. He paused at last by Chris, who was squatting in front of a section of the canvas with which The Cowshed was covered, and silently placing and replacing against it a painstaking landscape; the colour was almost, but some way below quite, brilliantly original.
“Hullo.”
“Hullo.” Chris glanced up, with his usual apple-smile and hoarse mutter.
“That’s nice.” John’s eyes dwelt respectfully on the landscape. A young Romantic of the eighteen-thirties in Paris, a dandy with the loftiest sentiments hidden beneath his superbly-fitting coat, would see nothing but genius and unbounded promise in the work of his friends. “Is it recent?”
“Just finished. Rekkernize it?”
“It’s the Canal, of course.”
“That’s right. I painted it through his window; he leant me his room for three days. Good old Benedict; I like him; and that’s the truth.”
“Do you happen to know where he is this evening?”
“At the caff, same as usual … like Nerina.” Chris smiled. “Only another hour to go, and I’ll be meeting her.”
“Oh yes, the caff, of course. Give her my love.”
“You bet I won’t,” Chris ducked his shaggy head with a Bœotian laugh.
“Er—do you know if they make a horrible fuss if one telephones him there?”
“Depends if it’s after ten, John. They pack up, then, see, and they’re all clearing up, and they don’t mind if you ’phone. Got through last week to him without no bother when we was fixing up about me borrowing his room.”
“I see. Thank you. I do like that painting, Chris, it’s … I must be getting along; I’ve got to meet someone in London who may be giving me a job. Good night.”
Chris said bye-bye, John, and John went on down the High Street.
He possessed sevenpence; he was wondering whether to spend most of it on telephoning his friend, but decided to walk to Kingsway, where the restaurant in which Benedict worked was situated, and hang about until he came out. He had a plan; it had come to him earlier in the evening and now he could not wait to begin setting it in movement.
How he enjoyed this preliminary interlocking of words and actions, this cautious and cunning scattering of the first grains of the powder-trail that should lead to some desired explosion, great or small. (All his analogies were drawn from the boys’ books—Wolf on the Trail, The Path of The King, Child of Storm—that he had devoured in the house at Marlow to which he had been evacuated during the war.) This moving about of human beings and influencing, if only in small ways, the pattern of their lives, was what he liked doing best next to wandering, in a dream, yet observing and hearing all that was going on about him, through London’s streets: while he was making the first telephone call, in a box at one of the Underground stations whose walls, of some diggable plaster substance, were gouged with holes and scribbed over with numbers and names; or uttering the first seemingly casual sentence while leaning back in his chair at a table whose blotched surface was scattered with crumbs and ash in some hot café reeking of fried food, he saw the people whose lives he was thus gently fingering not as living beings but as characters, even as he was a character, in a story: and they were linked and mingled, too, in a kind of strongly pleasurable confusion, with the manuscript, growing ever more stained and inter-and-over corrected and crossed, which he carried in the portfolio that hardly ever left its place against his side.
Now, while he sauntered down through the soft grey streets towards the deep canyons filled with dark and glowing air in the heart, he was already savouring the pleasure with which he would, in a short while, be saying unimportantly to Benedict: I want to look at the Steyne Collection in that beautiful house in Castlereagh Square; will you come along some time?
She was so full of malice, so dirty and cruel. He hated her; he wanted to see her made angry and helpless. Perhaps she might have feelings that could be hurt, under that manner of hers, and that would be best of all, but if he could only make her really furious, he would be content. She was in the place that he ought to be in, having the attention and company which belonged naturally to him, and he hated her.
It was going to be delightful, planning to disturb her life and carrying the plan through.
Now he was lounging against the wall, in an alley of brown shadows that ran alongside the restaurant, concealed in a doorway under a dusty laurel bush, with the portfolio lying warm and worn against his side. He was completely happy, waiting there for Benedict, and mulling over his plan, and so vividly imagining the scarf of spotted silk about his neck into a stock, and his loose jacket into a fitted redingote, that if he had glanced down at them he would, perhaps, have seen what he imagined. And there was the loitering, staring, bright foreign crowd drifting past, down Kingsway on the track to the West End, and the passing faces pouring their images copiously and unendingly, with attendant fancies, into the mirror within him. At this period in his short span of time here, John Gaunt was delighting in the cries and movements of the living creatures in the world around him, and had not yet begun the agonizing struggle to crystallize them and to fix the moment, to which all that he was and had, and finally his life, were to be sacrificed.
So he was happy, and it was as well that someone should be, because none of the people who had loved him from childhood, or had learned to love him since, were ever going to be happy about him again.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
ELIZAB
ETH HERE
A FEW DAYS later, at precisely one minute to four by the rather tortured-looking clock in the Rosa di Lima Espresso bar, Nell saw, from the bench where she had with difficulty been keeping a seat, a plump form in a bright blue linen suit leisurely making its way down the room between the pots of grey foliage and red flowers and blown-up photographs and all the rest of it. … She also saw, with some dismay, two debbish forms unmistakably following.
“Sely darling!” said Elizabeth, sliding into the empty seat and pushing four good-sized parcels into the side of a darkish type inoffensively reading Le Matin who at once whirled himself politely away to the extreme end of the bench (“Oh, how nice of you, thank you so much,” to the type) “… lovely to see you again. These are Penny Carleton and Cam Seton” indicating the debbish forms, “I knew you wouldn’t mind my bringing them: they won’t be with us for long because they have to get back to their jobs. Now where can they sit?” gazing consideringly about her. “That woman in the white hat with the man in grey has nearly finished. You had better go over there and wait … oh, have you? Well, thank you, then,” as the darkish type thrust Le Matin into his pocket and smilingly indicated the seat he had vacated, “you can both squeeze in here. What a good thing it is you are slim.”
She turned to Nell, who wore a broad silent smile. “How fetching you look, Sely. I love green and white stripes. You don’t have to diet, I expect. (I suppose I should, but I won’t. It would be nice to swan around the town like Fiona C.-W., with a waist like a sigh, but I cannot get through my first Season on black coffee and lettuce leaves.) Now let us all have coffee, and four of those things with apricots … yes, those are the ones,” as a quiet and beautiful girl with red hair wheeled a trolley laden with delicious cakes to a standstill before them.
“I’ve only been home just over a fortnight, but already Espresso bars are one of my things,” Elizabeth went on, when they had been served, “I’ve been to twelve, some of them two or three times. My other thing is tarts. So it is Penny’s and Cam’s, isn’t it?” Four gentle eyes turned to Nell, sparkling with amusement. “Are you mad about tarts, Sely?”
Nell had to admit that she was not.
“Oh, all my girl friends are … heavens, this coffee is good. (I’ve bought four pairs of shoes this afternoon and I am exhausted, but completely exhausted.) And Penny is also mad about Hump Lyttleton, but she gets hardly any time to hear him play because she’s a student-nurse, poor martyr. But she seems to like it.”
“Daddy made me do it. You see, my sister is one, and that gave him a taste for having us all do it,” Penny bleated softly.
“And Cam helps a great girl named Joanna Ponsonby run a riding school at Richmond (but she won’t be there for ever, because the clever girl has just got herself engaged; Cam has, that is. Not Joanna. Oh no! Joanna is the kind that has a bath in her jods).”
“She’s very nice,” Camilla said suddenly.
“She’s terrible,” Elizabeth said firmly, “Penny and Cam both make me feel a frivolous and worthless bubble, like Gaby Deslys or Polaire (did you read that book of Cecil Beaton’s, The Glass of Fashion? I loved it. It’s all about pre-1914 tarts, with drawings of them in saucy hats). I’m not going to have a job. There was a suggestion that I should suffer at Mrs. Delawarre’s Secretarial hell, but we soon disposed of that. … No. I shall swan around the town for a year or so, and then marry, I think. And how about you?” (to Nell). “Are you engaged? Walking out? Not? Me neither. I cannot get ready to be presented and be in love … though of course I’m absolutely man-man. Think about nothing else,” nodding joyfully.
But here she gave her chin a little pull inwards, so slight a gesture that only someone knowing her as Nell did would have noticed it, and went easily on—“but as most of the young men who were my childhood friends are away, doing mysterious courses in Cornwall or the Highlands, I haven’t managed to see many people … and of course I’ve been so busy getting ready. … Penny was done last year, weren’t you? and Camilla won’t be done until next year, so we are rather like The Three Bears … but I have managed to see some plays … have you seen ‘The Boy Friend’?” (to Nell).
Penny here put in that Mummy kept on seeing it; she and Daddy had been about ten times; and, with Camilla blurting that her’s were just the same, the conversation became one which Elizabeth deliberately did not dominate, although Nell could see her steering it, tacking it to and fro, portioning it out nicely between the four of them, and plainly enjoying doing so, while her gay blue eyes laughed out of her round pearly face, and the thick fair hair surrounding it, which was the kind the Edwardians used to call ‘fluffy’ and which she refused to have styled, glittered faintly in the pink light.
They had to hear about Nell’s job, which they commented upon by sighs of envy; and when she had made Penny and Camilla laugh softly and Elizabeth utter the kind of snort, well known at Claregates, as indicating satisfaction as well as amusement, by her descriptions of Tansy and the begging-bowl, the other two announced reluctantly that they must go because they had to be back at their posts. So they prettily made their farewells and went.
“Does Cam have to work in the evenings?” Nell was watching Penny’s rather drooping progress down the room between the vaguely South American women and their dapper men, and thinking that all the girls there, except these three, looked over-excited and over-tired.
“Not really work. But there are always things to be done to the horses, and she lives in. … I was surprised to see her out of her jods; she hardly ever is; and as Robin, her young man, doesn’t like horses (if you please), and much prefers her in skirts, I don’t know what will happen there. But I fear me, I fear me very much. …” She leant forward across the table “… now that those worthless girls have gone, Nell, you must tell me really all about you. You’ve been having a nasty time. I can see it in your little face.”
Nell had not realized how much she needed to talk to a listener as excellent as Elizabeth could be when inspired by affection as well as by her good manners, until she began to relate, though very briefly, the events of the past eighteen months.
But she was a little saddened by the flicking dismissal of Camilla and Penny.
She had to remind herself that, even if Elizabeth did refer to her ‘behind her back’ as a worthy type, name of Sely, she also did so ‘to her face’, and that her friend’s slighting comments upon other types at Claregates had been accompanied by a steady and unfailing kindness in action, which Nell never remembered having seen departed from. She could not recall one spiteful or petty act, and countless ones of rather impatient chivalry.
Nell was thinking—while she quickly related the growing concern which she had felt about the health and welfare of her parents, and gratefully saw the understanding nod given by Elizabeth, a girl who also felt properly about her family—how much she hoped that her friend and John would never meet. Elizabeth, she felt certain, would have the lowest possible opinion—
“Hullo, Nell. May I come and sit with you?”
She stopped talking. She looked up. And there, wearing that outrageous striped blazer, and smiling down at her with his hair rather smoother than usual, was he.
“Oh … John,” she stammered. “Yes … well, we were … oh yes, there is a seat, isn’t there? … yes, do. You don’t mind?” turning to Elizabeth, whose expression had suddenly become very polite, and who smiled and said, “Of course not.”
“This is my cousin, John Gaunt … Elizabeth Prideaux. We were at school together.”
“So I have heard you say,” he said pleasantly.
He was hardly looking at Elizabeth, and Nell, amidst her confusion and annoyance—her cheeks were crimson—wondered why; he usually turned all his attention and charm upon a new acquaintance, but he was now fully engaged in trying to catch the eye of a waitress.
She did not look at Elizabeth, who was serenely surveying the room. He must have come here deliberately, she thought; he overheard me arranging things that day at hom
e on the telephone; he can’t bear to be left out of anything; really, he is a trial. …
He turned, smiling. He had now given his order.
“I expect you have already eaten quite a lot, haven’t you? But do have another cake … and won’t Elizabeth, too?” Now he slowly, deliberately almost, turned to her.
So he has some money today, has he? Nell thought grimly. What is all this? Showing-off in front of my deb-friend?
“Oh we couldn’t possibly, thank you so much,” said Elizabeth, with an effect as if someone had slammed a door made of sugar, “we were just going. We have to do some vital shopping.”
“But I have ordered them. I can’t possibly eat three great rhum babas.”
“I thought you were going to,” said Nell. The circumstances, and her feelings, had really aroused her temper.
“Oh no, Nell. You know that I eat almost nothing. But I am rather exhausted this afternoon, because … here come the babas. Yes, please …” to the waitress. He superintended the placing of them in front of the girls, who had waited a moment too long, and who now, without appearing ruder than Elizabeth cared to, or Nell dared to, could not get up and go.
“That looks awfully gooey and good,” Elizabeth said, not even giving the impression that she was giving in gracefully. She took up the clean fork, and Nell, seething, did the same.
“They are good, aren’t they? Yes … I’m rather exhausted, Nell, because I’ve been having a long talk with Benedict.”
He turned to Elizabeth.
“This is a friend of mine who’s a poet; I think he’s a great poet; the coming great poet of the age.” He turned again to Nell. “He’s having a play in verse, called Prometheus In Nevada, broadcast on the Third Programme soon, and they’ve bought some of his shorter poems too, and he’s very pleased because on the strength of it he can give up that appalling job. We’ve been working it all out … I think I can persuade my papa to let him have a room at home, for next to nothing, of course, and then he can work in peace and comfort. (That room overlooking the Canal was having a most unfortunate effect on him, I think.) He expects the B.B.C. will offer him a job at any time now.”
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