The Fabulous Mrs. V.

by H. E. Bates

  One by one Mrs. V. introduced us all. The air was briefly charged with mumbles. It was almost as if Mrs. V. had chosen this dull, dispirited crowd on purpose, simply in order that she alone should shine. And then she said:

  ‘And this is Mr. Varley.’

  A figure wearing a white shirt buttoned at neck and sleeves and cream trousers with a faint black pin-stripe and a green cummerbund creaked to its feet.

  ‘Dee-do.’

  Mr. Varley had the look of an ageing innocent: a pale crinkled babe who grinned emptily. His hands and pale grey eyes quivered like half-set jelly. It suddenly occurred to me that this emasculated figure must surely be her father when she said:

  ‘My husband is dying to make up a really good men’s doubles. Aren’t you, Lamby?’

  ‘Me?’

  Without another word she left him in mid-air and he stood there as if whipped, sitting bleakly in his trousers.

  ‘And this,’ she suddenly said, ‘is Joy.’

  I stared. Tom stared too. Frantically I wondered by what wicked chance, or mischance, Mrs. Varley had named her daughter Joy. I had never in my life seen anything less like Joy than the girl who stood before me.

  It wasn’t merely that she was plain. It wasn’t just that she looked lost and sombre. The straight bobbed brown hair and the turgid brown eyes had nothing to do with it; nor the colourless skin, not unlike the thick inner skin of orange peel; nor the infantile nature of her coffee-coloured tennis frock, with its smocking high at the chest, giving her the air of being utterly flat from neck to toe.

  It was something much more elusive. I know now what it was; but as I stood there that hot afternoon, frantically wondering and searching for something to say, I could only feel that somehow, somewhere, something in her had been remorselessly suppressed. The blood of growing up had been tapped.

  Long afterwards Tom said to me ‘If I’d have had any guts at all I’d have run for my life, but I just stood there.’

  I just stood there too, not knowing what to say. All of a sudden I felt inexpressibly foolish, vain, impudent, contemptible. Our cockatoo-ish blazers were suddenly a mockery. This was the girl, blue-eyed, elegant, vitriolic, enchanting, vivacious, of whom Tom in his gay generosity had made me a present. In our moment of disenchantment I didn’t know who I hated most, myself or Tom.

  Then Mrs. Varley said:

  ‘Joy is dying to play with you, too, aren’t you, Joy?’

  ‘I suppose I am, really. Yes.’

  The voice was joyless too.

  ‘And needless to say I am.’ Mrs. Varley turned on us both a gaze of brilliant, glassy flattery. ‘Of course I’ll be no match for you. I see that. How shall we pair?’

  I knew what Tom was dreading; I was dreading it too. But the trap was open; we were in it; there wasn’t any escaping.

  Finally, as we walked on court, about four o’clock, Tom partnered by Mrs. Varley, myself by Joy, I didn’t hate Tom or myself any longer. I was merely mute of dejection.

  In such circumstances my eyesight, normally microscopically good, starts going to pieces. I knew suddenly, during the knock-up, that I wasn’t really going to see the ball.

  ‘You serve, Tom,’ I said. ‘I’ll give it to you.’

  Normally he would have bantered back at me for that, but he didn’t say a word. He just picked up the balls—he always held three of them in his enormous hands—and got ready to serve at me. I knew what was coming. Tom didn’t see tennis as a tea-party graced with polite discrimination between the sexes. Girls who played against him knew perfectly well they were going to be cannon-balled. If they didn’t like it they could do the other.

  The first service went past me like the customary white stunning bullet I knew so well, but if anything steelier and faster. My eyes wobbled; I couldn’t touch it. It drew a faint involuntary ‘Oh!’ from the girl and nothing but the low flicker of a smile from her mother. Under the elm-tree the fuddy-duddies gave a communal gasp at the impact of the explosion and then chattered among themselves, with a sound like that of gnashing teeth.

  I could only guess what agonies were grinding through Tom as he crossed over and got ready to serve again. It wasn’t really in his nature to compromise; he was too stubborn for that; on the other hand he was too sensitive, as very big powerful men often are, to hurt.

  He served. The ball scorched across the court like a fiery snowball. In some miraculous way the girl got her racquet to it and the sheer force of the blow spun it from her hand like a shuttlecock. Without wasting time Tom got ready to serve again, as if he had already decided that murder was the most merciful way with agony. Even as he did so I saw, to my infinite astonishment, that Mrs. Varley smiled.

  After that I managed to get the next ball back across the net and we had a bit of a rally. In the course of it Mrs. Varley was revealed to be remarkably good. She concentrated, sprinted with elegance, retrieved the impossible and had style. I got the impression that she was on stage, enjoying herself. Her beautiful figure had an irrepressible youthfulness about it and she finished off the rally with a sliced smash that beat me completely and that I was moved to praise aloud when suddenly, once again, I saw her smile.

  From then on, throughout the remaining half hour of agony, a new hatred started smouldering up in me. Anger also affects my sight and as the game went on I saw less and less of the ball. At the same time I took on a sort of protective role, poaching, playing high drop shots, trying to slow the game down. Once, in a pathetic mid-court mix-up, the girl and I clashed racquets and for a second or two she gave me a stare of piteously innocent apology, eyes cowed with anguish.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said and I knew that my crass incompetence had simply doubled her own.

  I won’t go into the rest of that long hot evening except for a single incident. After we had played more sets, had drinks and a shower we finished up with supper on the terrace. It was a buffet affair and you fetched your food from a long main table and then sat about where you liked, on the terrace steps, on the grass, on chairs.

  Some time before supper was ready Mrs. Varley disappeared into the house. The girl had disappeared too and Tom and I were left for some time to the desultory mumblings of the fuddy-duddies. At one point Tom and I were actually sitting on the grass when Mr. Varley came over to us and, with innocent croakings, warned us of the dangers of this awful practice.

  ‘We’re all right, sir,’ Tom said. ‘We’re pretty hardy.’

  ‘Oh! no you’re not. It’s most dangerous.’

  ‘But there’s been no rain for weeks.’

  ‘Even so there’s always damp in the earth. You’ll both catch cold.’

  Reluctantly we got up and Tom said:

  ‘By the way, sir, have you seen anything of Joy? She seems to have disappeared.’

  ‘I fancy I saw her walking down to the lake.’

  ‘Let’s take a stroll and find her,’ Tom said.

  ‘Good idea,’ Mr. Varley said. ‘It will do you a sight more good than sitting on damp grass.’

  We walked across the lawns; the evening was wonderfully embalmed in a soft apricot light. Half way to the lake I started to sense an inner disturbance in Tom. I was still some way from knowing the full measure of his pain about that afternoon but much later he said to me:

  ‘It was like crucifying her there on that court. I tell you it was like a bloody crucification.’

  ‘Look,’ I said suddenly. ‘You go on. You find her.’

  I strolled slowly back to the house. A rising sense of guilt about everything, combined with an intense irritation about the fabulous Mrs. V. had put me into a mood when I felt I hated everything about the place: the ugly terra-cotta, the parochial-looking lawns, the fuddy-duddies, the baby-faced Mr. Varley, the general air of stuffiness.

  ‘Once is enough of this,’ I told myself. ‘We’ll not come here again.’

  I walked up the steps and on to the terrace. Among the waiting guests there was no sign of Mrs. V., but presently I heard a voice say ‘Ah! there sh
e is,’ and I turned towards the door of the house to see a vision in fluffy flax-blue and a pink-and-red chinese wrap worked over in a design of flowers and dragons making her entrance on to the terrace stage.

  Over-dressed but ravishing, the swing of the arms exaggerated but the face as cool as marble, she advanced among us like a queen for whom we, her lackeys, had been waiting. The falsity of the shallow blue eyes filled me with an infuriated desire to commit some ghastly breach of manners, such as giving a laugh of loud sarcastic candour, but as it was I merely stared impotently.

  ‘I’ve been scolding the young men for sitting on the grass,’ Mr. Varley said to her with babyish glee, as if this were his good deed for the day.

  ‘They wouldn’t have to sit on the grass if you’d see there were chairs enough,’ she said. ‘Go and get more chairs.’

  Humbly he fled, not merely across the terrace but beyond the outer fringes of my speculation. I could only guess how long ago she had broken him.

  ‘I see you’re here,’ she said to me, ‘but where’s Tom?’

  I told her. Her face froze. The fact that she too now looked impotent with irritation filled me with my own particular sort of glee.

  ‘They’ve no right to go off like that when they know it’s supper time.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘They’re old enough to look after themselves.’

  The look she gave me was so savagely resentful that I might have discovered her naked. To my infinite surprise it made her look maddeningly attractive. The cold eyes were suddenly filled with fire.

  A moment later she simply turned her back on me with a shrug of furious frigidity, hitching her wrap higher about her shoulders. As she did so all my nerves tingled. The pink and scarlet dragons mocked me. Across the terrace one of the Varley housemaids dropped a fork and it clattered ringingly on to the stone flags like a challenging sword.

  I had never been in the position of hating an attractive woman before and it coloured all my thoughts and emotions as, two hours later, Tom and I drove home in the summer darkness.

  ‘I’ll be damned if I ever go there again,’ I said. ‘What a crowd. That bumbling snob Aitcheson. That self-opinionated beetle—the dark chap, stockbroker, what’s his name? And the women—by God, the women, Tom, the women.’

  Tom remained thoughtful. When he spoke at last it was with a level and quite unintentional air of reproach that maddened me afresh.

  ‘You do what you like, of course,’ he said. ‘But I shall be going again. As often as they’ll have me.’

  For the remaining two months of that summer we went over to Vane Court two or three or sometimes even four evenings a week and always on Sundays. For the most part we went together, but just occasionally Tom was there alone. I myself went alone just once, but that was much later.

  Tom’s atonement for that first Sunday crucifixion took the form of deepening gentleness. He was normally a buoyant, laughing man, exuberant of health, quick-witted, full of boundless athletic charm. Girls, very naturally, adored him and between us we knew some beautiful ones.

  But now he turned to Joy. At first I thought it merely a matter of pity. He was sorry for her; I was sorry for her myself. Then I began to notice little things, infinitesimal gestures and intonations, small covert acts, that put it in a different light for me.

  The strange thing was—or perhaps it wasn’t very strange—that the fabulous Mrs. V. didn’t appear to notice these things. It was exactly as if she was emotionally colour-blind. To me, as the summer went on, Joy Varley appeared like a long-darkened window with a sudden light in it. It was equally impossible to miss the flowering of devotion in Tom as he brought cups of tea to her, moved chairs, fetched wraps, carried racquets and gradually, with great patience, even taught her to play tennis well.

  The very nature of all this was quite unobtrusive. Young love so often erupts with violent physical enthusiasm that it perhaps wasn’t so very surprising that Mrs. Varley mistook it all for a purely platonic sort of all-play-games-together affair. It was pure all right; but the fires were burning darkly.

  Nevertheless it still astonishes me that she didn’t notice other things, subtle though they were. Exactly as she had broken Lamby—I once called him Baby Lamb, but Tom took it coldly—so she had successfully barred Joy behind the door of childhood. The girl of nearly twenty-four had looked, on that first Sunday afternoon, in the agony of her crucifixion, not much more than sixteen: infinitely gauche, clumsy as a fledgling pushed from a nest, piteously unawoken.

  Now she began to grow up. The neck line of her dresses gradually lowered a little; the hems of her dresses rose. The flatness went out of her. While you still couldn’t call her radiant she sometimes brought cries of astonishment from onlookers when she suddenly rose, gazelle-like, for a smash across the nets or did a swift double roll, laughing, if she fell. But these spirited and agile manifestations of love were not, it seemed, for Mrs. V.

  In point of fact I had something to do with that curious blindness of hers myself. As the weeks of the summer went by and August eventually showered thunder-rain on the surrounding fields of corn I found that the fabulous Mrs. V. angered and attracted me so much that my only defence was to flirt with her.

  To have been serious with her could only have been hell; to flirt with her gave sparkle to summer evenings, especially after darkness fell, and she seemed to like it very much.

  One evening, after tennis was over, the two of us were sitting in deck chairs at the foot of the terrace; the day had finally faded; the air was still warm but full of the threat of rain and somewhere at the back of the house Tom and Joy were stowing away the tennis net.

  Suddenly a light went on in an upstairs window—it might have been Baby Lamb going up to bed—and a long golden shaft fell brightly down to the lawns. For a few seconds before the light went out again the fabulous Mrs. V. sat so fabulously illuminated, all elegantly gold, that as soon as it was dark again I suddenly reached over and kissed her lightly behind the ear, one hand at the same time on her left breast.

  ‘I don’t know what you intended by that but it was very, very naughty.’

  ‘Pretend you don’t like it.’

  ‘It isn’t whether I like it or not. It just isn’t done.’

  ‘It is done. I’ve done it.’

  ‘Do you know where your hand is?’

  ‘I should know. I put it there.’

  ‘Take it away.’

  ‘If you insist. Do you insist?’

  She showed no sign of insisting but said instead:

  ‘Do you go round taking liberties of this sort with all married women?’

  ‘Only the most beautiful ones.’

  ‘You’re very young to have experience of this sort of thing.’

  ‘That’s where you’re wrong. It’s experience I’m trying to gain.’

  ‘You flatter yourself if you think you’re going to gain it here.’

  ‘I’ve gained it already. I learn very quickly.’

  Suddenly for some reason I remembered how much I had hated her that first Sunday. A sudden combined fire of dislike and attraction went bounding through me and I suddenly ran my hand full across her breasts and kissed her full on the mouth. Everything about her at that moment might have belonged to a young girl. Her lips were unresistant and softly moist. She breathed excitedly and her breasts were taut and unrelaxed in my hands.

  ‘I don’t think you’d better come here any more,’ she said at last, ‘if this sort of thing is to go on.’

  ‘You like it. Isn’t it what you wanted?’

  ‘I didn’t say I liked it—’

  ‘You look so young,’ I said, ‘so marvellously young.’

  After I had kissed her again she said:

  ‘Did experience teach you to say that or merely instinct?’

  ‘My eyes,’ I said. ‘I don’t need more than my eyes.’

  A moment later I was quick to hear footsteps on the terrace and I broke away.

  ‘Why this sudden rush
of discretion?’

  ‘I think I hear Tom and Joy coming back.’

  She laughed.

  ‘Thank Heaven it’s not you she’s with,’ she said. ‘At least she’s safe with Tom.’

  Heavy August rain began to spoil the summer. The lawns grew lush and acid greed. Corn lay beaten to matting in the fields and we played less and less tennis as the month drew on.

  I was surprised therefore on a thundery but rainless evening to hear Tom’s car draw up outside our house and to hear Tom say as I went out to him:

  ‘I’m going over to Vane Court. I thought you’d like to come along.’

  ‘But there’ll be no tennis, surely.’

  ‘I know. Hop in all the same. I want to talk to you.’

  As I got into the car I noticed a pig-skin suitcase lying on the back seat of the car with Tom’s mackintosh thrown down beside it.

  ‘What’s the idea of the suitcase?’

  I suppose we drove for fully a quarter of a mile before Tom answered the question.

  ‘I’m going away.’

  ‘Sudden. You might tell a bloke.’

  ‘We didn’t arrange it till last night.’

  ‘We?’

  Again he drove for a considerable distance before answering.

  ‘I’m going away with Joy,’ he said at last. ‘We’re going to be married tomorrow.’

  ‘Good God.’

  It was now my turn to have nothing to say but after another quarter of a mile or so I recovered my senses enough to ask:

  ‘Does the fabulous Mrs. V. know about all this?’

  Tom laughed in a curious tense way in answer to my question and asked me if I thought you’d tell a man if you were going to steal his best silver? I laughed too, at the same time apologising for being a trifle stupid, and said:

  ‘But where do I come in? What am I supposed to do? Come along and chaperon you?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘You’ve got to keep the fabulous Mrs. V. occupied while I smuggle Joy away somehow. She’ll never be able to do it otherwise. I thought you could put on your flirting act for a while. You’ve been getting plenty of practice lately.’

  I struck my knee with the palm of my hand and laughed loudly. This, I said, was rich. Really rich. Doubly rich. With one stroke we could release Joy from that long and awful bondage of hers and at the same time teach the fabulous Mrs. V. a lesson she wouldn’t forget in a month of Sundays. This, I kept repeating, was magnificent. Absolutely magnificent. This would be the sweet, ultimate revenge for that first crucifixional afternoon.