“You’ve put your finger right on the trouble.” The voice was almost a croak. “This gal certainly paints clear out of her sub-conscious.” She paused.
“I didn’t know you were bringing a deb along with you.”
Nell said nothing.
“Maybe you didn’t know that Ben was bringing me, either?”, Gardis continued.
“Well … as a matter of fact, I didn’t.” The answer was more amiable than Nell felt.
“I see.”
Gardis swung round, and stared at the corner where Benedict and Elizabeth were looking at a small picture hanging high on the wall. The fresh, amused, decided sound of Elizabeth’s voice came distinctly across the twenty feet or so between the two and Gardis, and Benedict was smiling. John had his nose almost touching a painting at some distance away, but Nell thought that the very back of his head looked smug.
She had never before seen Gardis look undecided, but she saw it now. It served her right, of course: the biter bit, tit for tat, and so forth, but the repeating of these smug yet sombre proverbs did not prevent one from feeling sorry for her.
“Don’t you like any of them?” Nell enquired, indicating the nearest pictures; she felt a nervous impulse to say something conventional and forestall a possible outburst.
“Jeez no. Who could? Never saw so much cheesecake in my life. But I’d like a look at the catalogue. There’s a gal here all canned up in armour. … I never saw a painting of a masculine protest before. …”
She turned round again, so vigorously that her hair swung with her. Nell saw that her hands were clenched into fists.
“Ben!” she called, “I want to look at your catalogue.”
He turned, and came slowly over to her, holding it out, and there was no mistaking the reluctance with which he came. She stood still, not advancing an inch to meet him. It was the pose of the master awaiting the crawling return of the penitent dog, and although the mere sight of her was painful to him as a touch on an open wound, he had not emerged far enough out of his stupor of suffering to draw the comparison, for which John had hoped, with the face into which he had just been looking.
“Thanks loads.”
She took the catalogue without glancing at him, and was going across to the picture which she wanted to identify, when Elizabeth, who saw quite well what was going on and was rather amused than otherwise, apart from much sympathy for ‘Ben’, came up to her saying: “Do come and look at this little picture of ‘Poor Maria’; the others are pretty awful but this one really is rather sweet.” However peculiarly other people might behave, Elizabeth at least was not going to forget her manners.
Gardis smiled at her.
It was the smile that she had given Nell when they were alone before the mirror in the house by the olive-coloured canal, when she had asked what Nell thought of Benedict and John. We are women, aren’t we, said the smile, and men are fools and beasts and rather rough, don’t you agree? It was a false smile, yet it was like a distorting mirror in that it reflected something that was not false.
The smile which Elizabeth gave in return would have graced that Garden Party which she was shortly to grace herself; she was wondering how Gardis would look if she were properly dressed.
Gardis turned away. A wretched expression replaced the smile; this girl could not be more than nineteen at the most, and every month of Gardis’s twenty-four years seemed hanging heavily upon her, and in Elizabeth’s answering smile there had been no kindness or mercy at all. Gardis was in fact unaware that she had asked for any, but she stared up at the small painting in its unimportant corner without seeing it.
It was that son-of-a-something, John, who had planned the whole set-up, of course.
“‘Poor Maria’, who’s she?” Her voice sounded rough and dull.
“She comes in ‘Tristram Shandy’,” Elizabeth was consulting the catalogue, “she was crossed in love, and she used to wander about the country with a pet dog or a kid on a string. It’s a little dog in this picture. It was a favourite subject for painting on cups and tea-trays and things in the late eighteenth century, it says here.”
“She looks singularly dotty,” observed John, “but you’re right, Elizabeth; it is a charming picture. She’s being broken-hearted so comfortably.”
(So it was Elizabeth already. Well, you didn’t expect him to call her Miss Prideaux, did you?
I don’t know what I expected. Damn.)
“I love those idyllic blue mountains. I shall see some Blue Mountains in the autumn. In Jamaica, where I’m going to stay with an uncle,” Elizabeth said.
“How love-lee.” Gardis’s coo might have been the usual American enthusiasm or it might have been mockery; no-one cared to decide. “I’ve got relations down there too. Where exactly are you staying?”
They moved on, talking as they went, and now finding the unspoken thoughts and passions and pains animating their own group so much more absorbing than the graceful classic scenes and figures on the canvases, that they gave the latter only perfunctory attention.
Nell had been wondering if she were crossed in love?
Oh no; to be that, you had to be first wooed and then deceived, and, except for his sneakiness about getting the key of the flat on that first evening, he had made no attempt to deceive her at all, while as for wooing … well, admittedly there had been a certain amount of what some people might call wooing, except that it had not seemed to have any object in view … she thought that it was no wonder Maria never got any better, wandering all over the place in those uncomfortable clothes with her hair down and a goat on a string and sitting down at intervals to lament … she should have done a day’s work at The Primula, that would have soon set her on the road to recovery. …
Recovery from what? Of course I am not crossed in love.
“I think we’ve seen enough of this, haven’t we?” It was his voice. “How about some tea? You can get tea here, in what used to be the stables when it was a private house.”
When they were seated at two tables, pulled together under his supervision and arranged in the pleasantest part of the colonnade outside the stables, and he and Benedict had returned from the cafeteria with two laden trays, he drank some milk, and then observed to Nell that it must make a nice change to be waited on.
“It does. But actually the service isn’t awfully good; you’ve spilt tea in my saucer,” his cousin answered, aware of spite beneath his remark.
“I’m so sorry,” he said, amidst laughter from some of the party, “but I haven’t a waiter’s temperament … one has to be born to waiting, I suppose.”
“I probably was. I like it, anyway.”
“Do you? Really?” Benedict roused himself to look at her. “God, I didn’t. I loathed every minute of it. What in heaven’s name do you like about it?”
“Well, there’s always something happening. And I like seeing people cheer up when they get their food.”
“Nice Nell,” John said, with an acidly affectionate smile which set yet another black mark on his sadly ebon page in Elizabeth’s private register.
“Well, I do. I’m going to have a tea-shop of my own. I’ve got forty pounds towards it already.”
“Sely, what a perfectly extraordinary thing?” Elizabeth leant forward across the table, fixing the attention of the entire party upon herself and even arousing Gardis from her unseeing, jerky casting of cake crumbs towards a hopping horde of sparrows, “so have I! I’m going to have one, too.”
“I don’t think it’s so extraordinary. Hundreds of people must have the same idea.”
“But not two—” Elizabeth tucked in her chin and swallowed the word virgins, which had been coming out in the bell-like and uninhibited voice already attracting attention from the few weekday visitors at other tables—“two people educated at the same appalling school and having precisely the same amount saved. Now that is odd, you must admit. We ought to have one together.”
“So we ought.” Nell’s eye gleamed.
“Only mi
ne’s going to be a coffee-bar.”
“Ben, I want some more tea.” Gardis thrust out her cup. But he was looking at Elizabeth, who was leaning forward across the table and laughing at Nell. The yellow rose pinned on her shoulder was drooping a little, from the double warmth of the day and of its resting-place.
“Did you say Prideaux?” Benedict asked her.
“Yes. Why? Do you know any of us?” She was still leaning forward and smiling, as if in gay retort to a compliment.
“That’s it,” he said, with a note of enlightenment and satisfaction. “It’s the portrait, of course. I couldn’t think where I had seen you before.”
“Great-great-great Aunt Georgiana? Yes, we are alike, aren’t we? I went to that worthless girl Prue Cunningham’s coming-out dance as her, in an exact copy of her dress (everybody had to go as an ancestor and poor Billy hadn’t any) … by the way, this,” touching the rose, “is a descendant of the one in the portrait; we still have some bushes grown from the cuttings of the first one, at Prideaux.” She smiled into his eyes. “I thought you might like that, you know … being a poet. A box came up this morning; Daddy won a First with them at the Morley show … isn’t it amusing, our both being descendants?”
“And so resembling each other,” Benedict said.
Her little bow and her laugh were as if the portrait had completed the gesture whose first stage the painter had caught upon the canvas, and the fascination with which Benedict was staring at her was plain enough to cause strong and varied emotions in those who were watching.
“John, Gardis wants some more tea. You’d never last a day at The Primula, you know.” Nell’s sharpness of tone was due to an increase in the cat-and-cream expression; he was positively gloating.
“I would not want to.” He took the cup and twisted his way deftly between the tables, then paused. Occupants of the nearest one leaned stiffly away to escape a possible shower of tea-dregs as he gestured. “I know that nowadays educated people can earn large incomes by working with their hands; there are too many white-collar workers, you see, both here and in India … (you’re only a social symbol, really, you know, Nell; a kind of pointer). … Irish dockers over here can earn fifteen pounds a week and in Australia they get thirty (pounds Australian, of course), you see, while the masses are waiting for atomic energy to set them free altogether. …”
“Do I get my tea?” called Gardis, and amidst advice from Benedict to confine himself to discussing subjects about which he knew something, John made off.
He was so anxious both not to miss any detail of the battle which was beginning, and not to betray his interest in it, that he returned with the full cup at a kind of leisurely lope which caused more rearrangements of posture at the tables as he passed.
He set the tea down in front of Gardis in a general silence which was eloquent. Something had been done, or said. And he had missed it. Damn Gardis; it was her fault; he hoped that whatever it was had been a reverse for her.
Elizabeth was now throwing crumbs to the sparrows. Nell was pink. Gardis was whiter than usual, Benedict was again pale green. No-one was looking at anyone else.
“How are we going to spend this evening?” John began, sitting down and beginning to sip the remains of his milk. “Elizabeth, I somehow feel sure that you have never heard Humphrey Lyttleton play, and I think that you ought to, and you would like to. It’s a club, but I daresay I could find someone who could get us in.”
“I’m playing tennis,” said Nell firmly.
“I’ve got a life-class,” mumbled Gardis, not looking up.
“That would be wonderful. Will you all come back to the flat for supper before we go?” Elizabeth said. She turned to Gardis. “Do come. Can’t you cut your class for once?”
Gardis’s lips were always painted the red of a pomegranate-seed. Now Nell, before she looked quickly away again, saw them set.
“All right. I suppose I can, for once.” Gardis looked up, and at Elizabeth. “But I’ll go home and change first, I think.”
“Those clothes are perfectly all right for jiving, Gardis.” This piece of information came from John, who did not want to see Gardis reappear in yellow silk and ropes of coral.
“Oh … well, guess I won’t then. All right; thanks loads.” She nodded and smiled at Elizabeth; nevertheless, everyone knew that a weapon had been most skilfully knocked from her hand. The effect upon the ringside seats was again varied; in the case of one it was not what might have been expected.
John now turned his attention to the cousin for whose observant and non-co-operative presence that evening he had no wish.
“I suppose you can’t disappoint R. Lyddington?”
“It isn’t Robert,” Nell said, unmoved by this dig. “It’s a girl I met at The Primula.”
“Then put her off,” Elizabeth said. “Or bring her along. Is she nice?”
“Yes. I don’t know. She’s Hungarian.”
“Then you mustn’t stand her up, Nello. She will get a bad impression of English manners.”
“Who is R. Lyddington?” Elizabeth asked idly. “Do come, Nell.”
John turned to her. “He is a worthy young man whom I call R. Lyddington because it’s the kind of name you see under photographs of cricket teams, and that’s what he’s like.”
“He might like to come with us.” Nell stood up. “You don’t mind, do you?” to Elizabeth. “I’ll go and do some telephoning.”
She marched off before he could speak, leaving John with his mouth open.
“What happened?” he murmured to her, while the five were waiting for the bus outside Kenwood House when the arrangements had all been made; in a group of two and a carefully animated three, separated by a safe distance.
It was typical of their relationship that he should forget all his annoyance with her, and his digs, and his spite, and assume that she would immediately tell him what he longed to know.
“What are you up to?”
“Shut up. They’ll hear.”
“What’s it all about?”
“‘Just trust me’.”
“That’s the last thing I feel like doing. … I suppose you’re trying to push B. on to … someone else.”
“He won’t take much pushing. I say, isn’t it exciting? I’m having buzzles down my back, aren’t you?”
Nell turned that neat quarter upon him in pretence of looking up the road for the bus, but he gently swung her round again.
“Don’t force me to lay hands on you, Nello. What happened?”
“Liz really started it. It was naughty of her. We were talking about having our tea-shop—and I really think she means it, that is exciting, now—suddenly she asked G., who was looking awfully sick, if she wrote poetry too, and G. said she didn’t, and poetry stank, and he said that she didn’t have to write it because (let’s walk a little way on, shall we?) she practically was a poem herself. By—Rimbaud—I think—”
“Now perhaps you wish you weren’t such a Philistine, Nello. Go on.”
“I have heard of Rimbaud, John. It was something about G. being the original ‘slum-child sailing its paper boat in the gutter’. S’sh!” as he uttered a low delighted whistle.
“G. went a most peculiar colour and stared at the table, and soon after that you came back.”
“Thank you, Nello. In spite of being livid with me for being ‘up to’ something, I notice that you seem to have kept your beady eye pretty closely on the proceedings. You must admit that it’s exciting.”
Yes, but in a horrid way, Nell was thinking, as the bus bounced them back to Hampstead between the masses of July foliage arising from the valleys on either side of The Spaniard’s Walk. She sat beside Elizabeth, aware, in spite of the absorbing nature of their conversation, of Gardis silent somewhere at the rear and Benedict silent somewhere up at the front.
Elizabeth suddenly interrupted herself in her speculations about the respective attractiveness of spotted or striped aprons for waitresses in Espresso bars.
“S
ely. Am I being a cad?”
The tone, though subdued, was judicial rather than emotional, and her blue eyes looking straight ahead were calm.
“Say so, if you think so,” as Nell said nothing.
“Not really, I think, Liz,” at last.
“But not quite cricket, no?”
“Well, I never see why things can’t go on as they are; unless of course they happen naturally.”
“Not go out to get something if you want it?”
“Oh yes, of course. If it’s a thing. But not a person.”
“Then you’ve never wanted a person.”
Haven’t I? The reply which Nell suppressed suggested a more abject state than she believed herself to be in, and she dismissed it with a frown.
“I’m sorry for … someone, you know … but then I’m sorry for someone else too,” she said.
Elizabeth’s shake of the head was quite untouched by any shade of doubt. The chivalrous tradition in her family had imperceptibly, throughout the passing of four hundred years, assumed the shape of fair play, but it was significant that its definition still included the ancient fair, one of the master-words of the past.
However, at nineteen she was more of a woman than many a woman among her mother’s contemporaries: and she did not extend the chivalrous family tradition to snakes, a category in which her observations during the afternoon had convinced her that Miss Randolph belonged.
“Do you want someone?” Nell asked, smiling.
“A little. It’s very cuddley and so clever! (It’s read simply masses.) And of course I like the way it fancies me. Someone else will just have to take its chance; it really deserves it, for wearing those clothes; and although I don’t mind men being dirty, I really do dislike girls being; men hate it, you know.”
Nell made no comment; she already knew that some men did not mind it at all but rather liked it. This dolorous information she had picked up, as usual, from her own particular Virgil who was guiding her through London; he might have said with another Latin poet: Nothing human is disgusting to me. She did not think that Elizabeth would learn the fact; if it ever confronted her, she would deny it.
Here Be Dragons Page 24
