Ankle Deep

by Angela Thirkell

  One of the great drawbacks to living in London, Aurea and Valentine discovered, was that there were so few places where one could court in comfort. The streets were abominably well-lighted. Taxis were repellent to her taste. Gone were the days of happy silent movies, where one sat in warm emotion drenched silence, whispering, under cover of a gentle orchestra, the more idiotic phrases of love. No restaurant, however cheap, appeared to cater for people who wanted to hold hands unseen — for she had found herself forced to abandon her intransigent attitude about holding hands (though further she conceded nothing), and appeared to Valentine to find great comfort in clinging to one of his fingers. It felt safer like that, she said, than if he held her whole hand. That would be one of the small things to remember her by, later, and would send a pang to Valentine’s heart — till he forgot it.

  Their first outing together was only a sample of the trials that beset middle class London lovers who are being very honorable. Valentine fetched Aurea in a taxi as he had promised, and took her to dinner at a pothouse in Soho. This is always rather a test of a cavalier, because to be taken out by a man who boggles over the dinner and doesn’t command the affection and awe of the waiter, is a horrid disillusion. Aurea was pleased to find that Valentine took the whole matter in hand without hesitation, ordered food and wine without consulting her, and immediately became the lifelong patron and esteemed friend of the waiter. Aurea was deeply impressed with Valentine’s fluent Italian, though he hastily explained that it was really only of the hotel railway variety.

  “I wish I could take you to Italy, Aurea,” he said, not wasting any time on preliminaries. “There people really understand love. Here they marry and have children and live and die, and never know what love means.”

  “Oh,” said Aurea, feeling inferior to people in Italy.

  “You, of all women,” said her adorer, warming to his subject, “ought to know what love can be. Probably you have been hurt and mauled — I don’t know and I don’t ask — but I could make you forget all that if you were my wife.”

  Seeing that Aurea looked a little frightened, he obligingly stopped. She wasn’t quite sure what Valentine meant, and was wrestling with a vision of him and a bevy of Italian mistresses, all in bright colored aprons and striped scarves, like Masetto’s wedding festivities in Don Giovanni. And however little one may wish to be a gentleman’s mistress oneself, it is mortifying to imagine him with forty or fifty of them, both sopranos and contraltos. And she wasn’t quite sure if she approved of Valentine’s calm assumption that she would be his wife. Even if Ned were comfortably dead, she mightn’t want to marry again. Besides, being in love with another man’s wife was one thing, and actually asking her to marry you if she were a widow, was another. And then two stepchildren. No, it was all too complicated.

  The waiter had taken the fish away, and there was a gap in the dinner. Aurea looked up carefully at her host. His whole countenance was suffused with that dusky hue of passion which besets gentlemen who are violently in love and have to control themselves in public places, and his eyes were fixed on her. She looked steadily at him with equal passion, and practically nothing but the arrival of the waiter with the bird saved them from some kind of explosion. “Oh, hell! Oh, hell!” she said in her plaintive voice. “Yes, hell,” responded Valentine earnestly, adding as an afterthought, “my own lovely darling.”

  “But I’m not,” said Aurea, making valiant efforts to get her food down her singularly dry and constricted throat.

  “Well; missing out the first two words,” said Valentine, in a businesslike voice, and eating very fast.

  “Darling,” said Aurea for the first time, and the waiter was so entranced by the signore and signora — for he always looked at a lady’s left hand to avoid tactless mistakes — that he hovered solicitously over them hoping to hear more, which forced Aurea to talk about a party she had been at the night before, and Valentine to give her a lot of really valuable information about banking. It was, she was to remember afterwards, as something foolish and lovable, his habit to bridge over moments of intense emotion by dissertations on the ramifications of international banking, with special reference to the law of averages. On this last subject he maundered about so long that even his loving Aurea at last said, “For God’s sake do stop talking.”

  The waiter, disappointed, entirely through his own fault, in the love scene, hopefully anticipated a row, but again the strange English let him down. The signore only smiled amiably and asked the signora where they should go and she said anywhere where there were comfortable seats. So these two fools walked up and down London Town till they found a good cinema, and got into the last row of the stalls and sat there in blessed semi-darkness, though alas! not in silence, for a gentleman with a brazen voice was conducting them through Burma, taking advantage of the journey to let off an incredibly large number of very hoary wisecracks.

  “The best place in a cinema,” said Aurea in a whisper, “is to get behind an enamored couple, because they lay their heads close together, and you can look around either side, with a good wide gap.”

  “It is a pity we are in the last row, then, with no one behind us who wants to see,” said Valentine, and took Aurea’s hand. One cannot make a row or struggle in the three-and-sixpenny seats, so this was the moment at which Aurea had to reconsider her decision about handholding. Valentine, rapid as ever in his methods, was amusing himself by unbuttoning her long glove and pulling it off.

  At this moment the wisecracker ceased and the lights went up. Aurea nervously pulled her hand away and sat bolt upright, as did nine-tenths of the female members of the audience, so leveling is the tender passion.

  Professor Prokoff and his Twenty Musical Hussars were then announced on the screen. They all came up from the basement on a moving platform with pink limelight on them, and tripped lightly on to the stage where, in a bower of cardboard trellis and paper wisteria, a large white grand piano was awaiting them, together with a quantity of musical instruments of all kinds. The Hussars turned out to be of the female persuasion. They wore rather dirty white tunics, most of which were misfits, obviously passed on from one member of the troupe to the next, lancers’ helmets and leatherette top-boots. They all looked good, respectable, tired, conscientious, and — as far as their union would allow it — underpaid. The professor himself wore a velvet smoking coat and a loose, flowing tie. His long hair was shining with grease and fell repellently upon his shoulders, but was not sufficiently brushed over the large bald spot on the top of his head. Aurea was indignant. “I think with all those wives,” she said to Valentine under cover of A Pot Pourri of Old Favorites with the professor conducting on his violin and the Head Musical Hussar at the piano, “one of them might see that his hair is properly brushed.”

  “But they aren’t all his wives,” said Valentine, rather shocked.

  “Oh, yes, they are. Look at them. They couldn’t possibly be anything else. Respectable wives, I mean; and they all live together in the boardinghouse and look after each other’s babies and do a little washing and a little practicing, and the professor works frightfully hard at getting engagements for them and leaves the rest to luck.”

  It was at this moment that Valentine, filled with admiration for his idol’s insight into human nature, tried to take her hand again. Aurea, thinking attack wiser than defense, took tight hold of one of his fingers and held it through the rest of the performance. Valentine was so amused and touched by this piece of childishness that he submitted cheerfully to it, and indeed came later to expect it.

  The Hussars having played the Old Favorites, now obliged with New Favorites in which the solo part was played by each of the Twenty in turn. After giving an entirely unwanted encore, they all got back onto the platform again, and were carried away to their dressing rooms and the tube and the boardinghouse and, let us hope, a good supper. For they had worked hard, and if they had given little or no pleasure, why, it is difficult to give what you have not got.

  The lights
died down again and an enchanting film began. It was about Benvenuto Cellini, sometimes pronounced with a hard “C” and sometimes with a soft, the Great Italian Medieval Lover and Craftsman of All Time. First came a silent prologue in which the Tower of Babel, the Pyramids and the Parthenon figured prominently. “But,” said the caption, “the Master Craftsman had not yet come.” There followed short and unconvincing scenes from the loves of Solomon, Helen and Cleopatra. “But,” said the caption, “the Master Lover had not yet come.” This led by easy degrees to a cabaret scene in the Coliseum under The Popes (unspecified), where Cellino made his first appearance as a gay prentice lad with a maiden on his arm. “And here,” said Doge with a strong American accent, who had come over to Rome for the party, “is Kelleeney, master of those who ply the silversmith’s noble craft.”

  “Nay, sire,” said Kelleeney, who spoke refined English, “not master yet, but soon to be.”

  “How so, Selleeney?” asked a real hunchback, who had been put into the crowd for local color.

  Selleeney made no answer, but seizing a mug from the hunchback and drawing a small hammer from his pouch, transformed the vessel in a few moments to a goblet of exquisite art design. Upon this the crowd all shouted “The master, the master,” and the picture faded out.

  Valentine looked down at Aurea to see how she was enjoying it.

  “Valentine,” she said, “I oughtn’t to be holding your hand.”

  Valentine, instead of telling her affectionately to attend to the film and not be a morbid little silly, entirely lost his own sense of humor, never perhaps very marked.

  “Aurea,” he said tensely, “you are wronging no one, you are depriving no one of anything by letting me have your hand.”

  Aurea felt very grateful at having her mind made up for her. The film waxed and waned to its appointed close. Selleeney fell in love with, or was fallen in love by, several historical though hardly contemporary ladies. He defied the Popes and the Kings and from time to time threw off some little triumph of the silversmith’s art to show who he was. His final exploit — a midnight ride on a white carthorse from Rome to Paris, through hordes of condottieri, lazzaroni, sbirri, algua-zils and freemasons, all thirsting for his blood — ended in his marriage with a lady called La Belle Duchesse, and the picture faded out on him with one arm around the duchess, and the other lovingly fingering his latest work, a gigantic candelabrum, cunningly fitted for electric light.

  Aurea and Valentine went out blinkingly into the street. What were they to do now? Apparently one must eat all the time if one wants to make love, and supper seemed to be the only possible way of seeing more of each other. So Valentine took her to another pothouse. It was incredible, she thought fondly, that anyone who was in love as much as he was could enjoy his meals to that extent. As for herself, between excitement and exhaustion, it was all she could do to drink black coffee, and even then, her hand shook so that she could hardly hold the cup steady. There seemed to be nothing to talk about either. When you care for a person as much as that, you naturally want to talk to them about nothing else, but partly you are rather shy, and partly there are other people so near at other tables, and waiters show far too much attention.

  But she couldn’t help saying what simply has to be said, “How much do you love me, Valentine?”

  Valentine looked around in case anyone was listening.

  Aurea laughed. “Coward,” she said, “did you think I hadn’t looked around myself before I spoke? Tell me, how much?”

  “As much as the new Argentine loan,” said Valentine in a very besotted way. How much was the loan, Aurea asked. It turned out to be such an extremely large sum of money, even allowing for a country which counts in pesos, that Aurea felt he really must love her very much indeed.

  Then the wireless began, that curse of modern society, part of the great democratic movement for helping people not to think. It broadcast a jazz band. People began to get up and dance.

  “Would you like to dance?” said Valentine. Seeing Aurea look undecided, he added, “You needn’t be afraid that our steps won’t suit or anything.”

  “No, thank you, I’m rather tired,” said she. How could you explain to a gentleman in a public place, with the wireless blaring away so that it hurt the back of your throat to talk, that the reason you wouldn’t dance was that you couldn’t trust yourself to keep your senses so near your heart’s love; that you would probably disgrace him by fainting, or near enough to make no odds?

  “I’m a brute,” said Valentine with melancholy satisfaction, “keeping you up like this. Come home at once.”

  Once more they found themselves in a taxi. “Put your dear head on my shoulder,” said Valentine, “and rest.”

  “No, thank you. Not that I wouldn’t like to, but one must draw the line somewhere.” Also, as she well remembered from old days with Ned, the position was far from restful. The taxi jolted about, and instead of one’s dear head resting, it banged about on what was after all a very bony part of a gentleman’s body. And if there were an unusually bad jolt it might hit the gentleman’s chin, causing him an agony so acute that even affection could barely control his blasphemy. Besides which one was always sliding away from him on the shiny seat and having to be hitched up again. No; decidedly an overrated form of entertainment.

  Like conspirators they stopped the taxi at the corner of the street where the Howards lived. “I can’t very well ask you in,” said Aurea. “Mother always keeps awake for me, and she would wonder why we were so long downstairs.”

  “Angel!” said Valentine. “Am I to go then?”

  “Couldn’t we go for a little walk,” said Aurea, though she was dropping with fatigue.

  Luckily the Howards lived just around the corner from a large leafy square with a church in it. So Aurea and Valentine walked around and around the square which, like the rest of London, was abominably well lighted, even in the part that hadn’t any houses overlooking it, but only a high wall. Valentine put his arm around Aurea’s shoulders, but as she had on a tweed coat with a fur collar, it didn’t seem so wrong to her. Of course it made walking rather uncomfortable for them both, because they were so very close together and impeded each other’s progress; but it appeared to give satisfaction.

  “I suppose I couldn’t kiss you,” said Valentine hopefully.

  “No, no. And the policeman would see you if you did.”

  The policeman, in fact, was taking very little notice of them. Nocturnal couples were a natural accompaniment of his night’s work, and this couple were evidently good class, not the kind who stood inexpressively glued together under a lamppost for half an hour at a time.

  Aurea would probably have gone on walking all night if not discouraged. She was so tired that she walked mechanically and had quite stopped thinking. Valentine, on the other hand, began to feel that something must be done. He couldn’t walk around a square all night with this heavenly lunatic, and the recurring meetings with the policeman began to embarrass him. It had been a perfect evening, of course, but very unsatisfactory. Dinner with a hovering waiter; a cinema where the lights were always coming on; supper with more waiters and people; the drive home with Aurea always keeping him at arm’s length; then this walk where he could put an arm around a coat, but no more. Always restless, unsatisfying, exhausting. Were things always to be like this? Something ought to be done about it. Longer and darker cinema performances, where only silent films should be shown, with a real orchestra playing, not too loud. Much more comfortable seats. Perhaps seats for couples without that annoying arm in between them, and rather larger arms to separate them from the next couple. Or even little partitions like old-fashioned pews. One would willingly pay extra. Then probably the censor would object. Oh, damn, why couldn’t the poor court in comfort? He felt a vague surge of kindness towards the democracy, and Serpentine bathing, and hiking, and chaste Polytechnic weekend outings.

  Aurea’s pace was gradually slackening till as they reached the high wall she stopped. “I
think I’m too tired,” said a small voice. Valentine stopped, looked down at a small tired face, took it in both his hands and kissed it. But because he was in a hurry, and Aurea was an unpracticed kisser, it really hardly counted. Indeed Aurea’s chief impression was of her hat being pushed backwards.

  “Let me kiss you again,” said Valentine, thoroughly annoyed by the bungling job he had made of it.

  “Oh, no,” said Aurea and put her hat straight. Then she started determinedly homewards. Neither of them spoke till they got to the front door, which was unfortunately in the full glare of a street lamp. Here these two idiots lingered for nearly half-an-hour, saying first one thing and then another, and every time Aurea tried to shut the front door Valentine remembered something else to say, and every time Valentine said he really must go Aurea found another valuable remark to make. But at last the front door somehow got shut, and she heard Valentine run down the front steps and walk away down the street.