Here Be Dragons

by Stella Gibbons

  “I’ll get you some orange juice.” He began to walk rather carefully towards the direction where he thought the bar might be: you did not drink whisky out of the bottle in your pocket in front of a deb, but there was no reason in hell—or was there?—why you should not drink it behind her back.

  But someone said decidedly, “I’ll come with you,” and the next moment he felt a firm warm hand slipped into his. His “Oh, but …” was effectively silenced with a pressure by no means experimental, which he returned with violence, feeling Gardis’s eyes locked on the two locked hands, and they went off.

  “Dear me, what warm work jiving is.”

  John had sat down, apparently absently, in Benedict’s vacant place. He now gently pressed his forehead with an exceedingly grimy handkerchief and surveyed Gardis, who was sitting upright with hands clasped on her trousered knees, staring stonily at the floor. What he saw almost satisfied him, and he said genially:

  “Poor dear, I’m afraid you’re having rather a dull time. We ought to have got you an extra man. (Don’t growl like that—I only mean that one provides men for you as automatically as one does meat for a lion … but your growl was quite natural, I suppose, in the circumstances … long past feeding-time) … really, Gardis!” as her head jerked up and she said something.

  He glanced quickly at Robert and Nell; their cheerful conversation appeared undisturbed, but he was amused to notice that the small ear he could just see on Nell’s averted face was deep crimson. She had heard. She had also understood, which was more than she would have done four months ago. His education of her had been in some ways very successful.

  But only in some ways. He had to admit that. She still did not hesitate to show disapproval. One day soon he would have to test her and cure her of that.

  The silence that now lay between Gardis and himself was something more than the stillness lying over the entire room, but the room was very still, because Humphrey Lyttleton was playing a solo.

  He stood with the familiar sideways stance, blowing and warbling like some leviathan riding in its own element, and the powerful noise bewitched the room. Benedict stood with Elizabeth near the wall, unable to resume progress with their drinks, but held there, both by the attentive hush and by the force of the figure and its playing.

  When they got back to their table, and the soft drinks were being consumed, it did not occur to anyone, even those suffering most, to suggest in the midst of the discussion about where they should go next—that they might break up the party and go home. Nell and Robert could have offered the excuse of having to keep early hours in order to keep regular jobs, but never once thought of doing so.

  Elizabeth was telling herself that she had now got her back up and her teeth in, and meant to be in at the death, although the pearly face which became calmer and gayer as the evening wore on did not permit these sporting resolutions to appear thereon in changes of expression.

  John was quietly gloating; Benedict had begun to wish that he were dead; Gardis was in the state of one who bites on the aching tooth.

  Nevertheless, the discussion as to whether Bunjie’s was ‘better’ than The Nucleus, or The Rosa di Lima could offer more than The Schubert Lounge, went on; while the dancers dipped and bumped in a ragtime number, and when the jam session broke up, at eleven o’clock, and the audience drifted out into the street, the party was still undecided.

  They stood about, arguing. The young crowd eddied round them on pavements dim with summer dust: a girl stood on one leg, while she inspected a foot that had got a splinter during the bare-footed dancing; the glow and murmur and red darkness of the West End at night gave to the advertisements and the traffic, and the avid, lost, or empty faces wandering past, the quality of a scene on the stage.

  At last John said decidedly that if they all went back to Hampstead to the flat, they could eat a large haddock that he had seen there in the refrigerator and drink some of the hock given to his father by a wine firm; one should drink hock with fish: and although this was regarded as an anti-climax to the evening’s pleasures by everybody except Benedict, who had some whisky at home, that was what they did.

  All the way in the taxi up the long hill leading to the sweeter-smelling, darker air of the village, Gardis was quiet. Nell would have thought her asleep, but that sometimes a passing light gleamed in the black depth of her eyes. Her expression was very sad, and for the first time Nell wondered at how old she could look for someone aged nineteen. Elizabeth kept her stubby, distinguished profile turned to the passing roads with a rather resolutely serene expression; and Benedict was humming a silly little Swiss tune over and over again in a manner undeniably suggesting drunkenness rather than gaiety.

  Some confusion was added to the situation by the encountering, as Nell cautiously unlocked the front door, of Anna and Martin on their slippered and pottering way up to bed; unprecedentedly late, surely, and so absorbed in some discussion about vergers and a Mr. Mollison and a letter which had apparently just been posted, that they gave the party crowding in through the front door not much more than absent smiles and wavings ahead up the stairs.

  “You’re awfully late, Mother; is everything all right?” Nell paused a moment half-way up the flight, looking down at the two reddish, sleepy faces. Four months ago she would naturally have said: “Is anything wrong?”

  “No, dear. Daddy has accepted a job, that’s all.”

  “Oh, not with Aunt Peggy?” It was the first thought.

  “Of course not: that was a very silly idea of your aunt’s. He is going to be verger at Saint Saviour’s in Kentish Town.”

  “Verger?”

  “Yes. We heard from the Vicar by the four o’clock post. It’s going to be great fun.”

  Anna’s face showed not the faintest shade of warning and her tone was the usual brusque calm one, yet Nell took the cue so quickly that her father’s half-irritable, half-jocular, “Have you any objections?” was lost in the hearty “I am glad! Tell me all about it tomorrow,” which she sent back over her shoulder as she darted up the stairs.

  But she was sufficiently disturbed by the news to forget prudence and announce it to John, whom she found lingering half-way up to the top flat; he was only inquisitive, she knew, to hear if ‘everything’ was ‘all right’, but she had to tell someone.

  “Well, I suppose you’re very pleased,” was his comment.

  “Why should I be?”

  “Because you’re always wanting people to have regular jobs and pull themselves together and that sort of bull, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, I am.” Nell saw no reason for sounding apologetic. “But I’m not sure that Daddy will like this. It may upset him again, just as he was getting better.”

  “Such a poor, creeping, humble little job … yes,” musingly. “I can understand why you feel worried. Poor Nello. There’s always something, isn’t there? But you should be like me: I never worry.”

  “Never?” Nell said.

  They were talking almost in whispers, standing close to one another on the landing in the dim light reflected from a street-lamp outside, and suddenly, with a furious change of expression that distorted his face with grief and pride, he snatched at her and began violently to kiss her. Nell struggled silently: there had never been anything quite like this before and she did not like it, and in a moment he released her.

  “What on earth’s the matter with you?” she whispered angrily, straightening her hair and coat, “do let’s go in to the others, they’ll be—”

  She did not quite know what she was saying: she was trembling.

  He turned away; she thought that she heard a mutter about something being ‘a bloody nuisance’, but what he meant, whether he was apologizing for being one himself or whether he meant her own behaviour, she had no idea, and the next moment he had opened the door of the flat and gone in, shutting it behind him.

  Nell thought that she owed it to herself to go down to her bedroom and repair her face. The small amount of paint which she habitu
ally used upon it had been rubbed off by his onslaught. When she got there, she found that she could prevent herself from sitting down on the bed and indulging her own trembling only by thinking about her father’s news, so that was what she did, and learnt that her dismay was largely selfish. She did not want to come home, later on, to long discussions and longer faces. What would Aunt Peggy say? Would her father become silent and glum again?

  She scolded herself, painting her lips upon which John’s kisses were still stinging, while the trembling subsided. Her father had made surprisingly little fuss when she had become a waitress, and now it was ‘up to her’ (an Edwardian girl would have said it was her duty) to make no fuss now that he proposed to be a verger. Suddenly she saw the red, sad, empty face; so vividly that she no longer saw her own reflection in the mirror. Poor Daddy; he had had such a miserable time; she ought to be pleased that he had found a way to creep back into the Church. …

  “Nell?” It was Benedict’s voice coming down the stairs. “Can you come and deal with this blasted haddock? No-one knows what bits to cut off.”

  It occurred to Nell to reply that surely their know-all host was not being baffled by such a small point? but she suppressed the retort and, after a final glance at herself, darted back to the Gaunts’ flat.

  The company was sitting rather languidly all over the kitchen.

  “Oh there you are, Nell. Where on earth have you been? Do come and deal with this horrible haddock while I do the hock.”

  Not a glance; not the shade of a shade of a conspiratory look, thank goodness. But this was something new; she had not felt conscious in this way with him before; and she disliked it exceedingly. If … that … ever happened again, very firm steps would be taken.

  “I’ll make a haddock soufflé,” she said.

  “Competent Nello. But won’t that take ages?”

  “About three quarters of an hour. Are there any eggs? (Robert, look in the cupboard, will you—oh, good.) And I shall want milk and butter and pepper and salt and a whisk.”

  “Competent Nello. But I thought that was a sort of card game.”

  “No you didn’t; you know perfectly well what a whisk is; don’t pose,” in an undertone, while the others were darting about finding things, “now you can cut off the ears.”

  “Cut off the ears? How perfectly horrible. Indeed I shan’t.”

  “It’s those flat pieces at the side. Hurry up; and I want a piedish and a basin.”

  “I hate touching damp things. I hate your hands when you’ve been washing up.”

  He went to the table and sulkily began to trim the fish. Nell was so angry and hurt that she could not trust herself to look up, although it was a little comfort, if only a bitter one, to know that he was furious because of what had happened on the landing.

  “Now put it in water—just enough to cover it,” she said.

  Gardis had somewhere found time to coil up her hair, and her expression was now lively and gay as that of a very young cat, and Elizabeth’s eyes darted commandingly here and there while she organized everything. The slight touch of resolution in her serene expression had vanished; perhaps because the familiar prospect of a breakfast dish eaten in the small hours had made her feel upon her home ground: or perhaps she was recalling the scene of a little while ago.

  The window had been opened, letting in the soft black summer night and its wandering moths, and Benedict and she stood side by side, looking down at the quiet lamplit road and unmoving trees and ignoring the silent figure crouching before a bookshelf with its back to them. Their voices were soft; they did not look at one another as they spoke, and Elizabeth was smiling.

  “Oh … in my bag. I hate wearing dead flowers.”

  “It can’t be quite dead. Just tired at the end of a long day. It must still smell sweet.”

  “They do have a delicious smell—that kind.”

  “What is its name? The Honourable Georgiana Prideaux?”

  Elizabeth laughed, “We’ve never bothered to give it a name. It’s just that-big-bush-on-the-right-by-the-door-into-the-kitchen-garden.”

  “Well, you must give it to me.”

  “Wouldn’t that be rather corny?”

  “Only by the standards of this painfully impoverished generation. Please.”

  She hesitated. “I’ll get it presently. But won’t everyone …?”

  He only shook his head, which he had slowly turned towards her, and they smiled at one another.

  Now the rose hung limp and sweet in his button-hole, the object of much careful avoidance of glances on the part of everyone, and Gardis’s manner was gayer than ever; so gay that the meal which followed quickly grew rowdy as the others became affected by her loud laughter and her chuckling voice; the talk sparkled and was quick and it included everybody and touched on all kinds of subjects, but usually ended in threatening an angry argument, which Elizabeth again and again deftly and unobtrusively averted.

  Benedict was amused to notice this and fascinated by it: he could fancy that the blood of her ancestors was constantly showing itself in her actions, not least in her impatience with any lack of urbanity threatening the smoothness of the social surface. She seemed to him quite enchanting.

  He could now look at Gardis with the memory of pain rather than pain itself, so far had his cure advanced since the first moment of his seeing Elizabeth early that afternoon, but he thought, even while his eyes rested on Gardis’s face, that he must already have been well on towards his release from enslavement without realizing it, and what struck him now was the fact of her gaiety being unmistakably that of an older girl. He wondered that the others did not perceive this. Elizabeth’s poise came from training and tradition. Gardis’s came, when she chose to display it, from having been ‘in circulation’, or knocking about, for some six years longer than Elizabeth, and, when she dropped her baby girl-goblin manner, this was clear to see.

  As for Nell—and he looked across the table for a moment at that longish-nosed face which was certainly not plain, yet which instantly suggested the word and for which it was difficult to find the precise adjective—her poise, and she had plenty, came from character, and she would be all right.

  When men decide that a woman has character and will be all right, they usually also decide that there is no need to worry about her feelings; Benedict, without knowing it, felt grateful to Nell (who this evening was full of feelings and all of them disagreeable) for not demanding from him pity or love or admiration or anything else.

  After they had finished poor Charles-for-god’s-sake’s three bottles of hock (John was dissuaded from leaving a note saying ‘Not too bad; thank you’, with the empties) they sat on the floor and drank those quarts of tea which everyone since the war drinks as avidly as the pre-Revolutionary Russians did. Time was wearing on towards half-past two. All was hushed and still, yet mild, and gentle, in the road outside under its full summer foliage, and in all the roads leading, winding, and falling down the broad hillsides of Hampstead into the city. John was leaning out of his bedroom window at the back of the house into the soft dark: he had been there for some time, with the doors open so that he could hear what was going on in the living-room, and he suddenly called out that there were now only a few stars shining in the hair of his old love.

  “What are you talking about?” Elizabeth turned round from her place near Benedict on the floor, “Who is your old love?”

  The silence which suddenly fell upon the company was not entirely due to a wish not to miss the answer; in the circumstances the words old love suggested the heartless proverb.

  The answer came in a dreamy, absent tone.

  “London. She is my old love—in the sense of being ancient, I mean, not in the sense of my having loved her once and now loving something else—I don’t want anything else—and the lights down there are the stars in her hair. What a whimsy idea,” he added, as if surprised rather than pained at his own lapse, “but all kinds of people who were first-raters began by being whimsy. …
Keats was actually vulgar, with his ‘slippery blisses’, and so was Coleridge.”

  “Those were poets. Feet off my territory, please,” from Benedict.

  “I thought it was robins who had territory, not poets.” John strolled back into the room, glancing from face to face to learn if any fresh moves had taken place during his absence. “And talking of territory, isn’t it time that you all went home? I’m horribly tired and so is Nell.”

  Nell said indignantly that she was not; she did not add that he wasn’t either, but she knew it; he could stay up all night, as she also knew to her cost, without consciously feeling fatigue, and must have some other reason for saying what he had.

  “And Robert, I am sure, wants to be on time for work in the morning,” he went on, ignoring her.

  “It would be as well.” Robert was unmoved: he did not like Nell’s cousin, whom he looked upon as an unwholesome ass, but neither did he respond to small digs.

  “So we had better see about taxis.” John glanced again round the circle of tea-flushed faces. “Now: where does everybody live?” and he crossed to the telephone.

  If the tone was a shade too innocently businesslike, it was only a shade. Nevertheless, there absolutely sprang into everybody’s mind the question: Who will be seen home by Benedict? Benedict said irritably:

  “You know where everybody lives, except Robert. You’ll have to lend me some money; I’m seeing Elizabeth home. Robert can share Gardis’s taxi as far as Swiss Cottage, if he goes on beyond that; if not, she can drop him.”

  John was already at the telephone, dialling the nearest radio-taxi rank. Elizabeth, for once, had nothing to say. Into her mind had sprung the possibility of being kissed by this thin, charming, haunted-looking man—she did not think of him as a young man—who smelt of whisky, on the way home in the taxi. Gardis too was quiet, looking at the floor. Benedict said again, with increased irritation:

  “John, you’ll have to lend me some money.”

  Nell saw Elizabeth make a tiny movement; then tuck in her chin and relax. Clever Elizabeth; she knew that she was inclined to be bossy and that men hated it. Gardis looked up suddenly.