Something Light
Page 9
“D’you mean to say the Bon-Bon’s still going?” cried Louisa nostalgically.
“Yes, but I’m not going to take you there,” repeated Jimmy. “I’m going to take you for a cocktail first, and then dinner at the Theater Club.”
He couldn’t quite keep the pride out of his voice; Louisa looked suitably impressed.—Indeed, she was impressed; there’d been no Theater Club in the old days; there hadn’t even been a theater.
“Broydon Rep,” explained Jimmy casually. “It’s in the Old Assembly Rooms. I believe there’s a rather interesting piece on. If you like, we might go one night. We might go tomorrow.”
Nothing could be more welcome to Louisa than to have a second date already in view; it made her able to relax. She had warned herself most carefully against rushing him—against ducking him, so to speak, too impetuously (so that he came up gasping) into the deeper waters of the sentimental past; now restraint would be almost easy. Che va piano va sicuro! As they walked past the Free Library, Louisa merely inquired how he’d got on with Higgins.
“The Ibsens seemed to like it,” said Jimmy carelessly. “I only wish you’d been there, Louisa, to give an honest opinion. I can’t think now why I didn’t ask you—though of course you’d have found us a terribly amateur bunch.”
“Who read Miss Eynsford Hill?”
“Oh, one of the girls. We don’t only read Shaw either, you know,” added Jimmy. “Last week we read Dylan Thomas. Under Milk Wood. It was a struggle, but I made ’em.”
“Did they enjoy it?” asked Louisa interestedly.
“Not particularly. But someone’s got to take the lead …”
With this same new assurance he propelled her before him into the Theater Club cocktail bar and ordered a couple of dry martinis.—Once again, as outside the Free Library, Louisa could have given sentiment rein: the bar was at one end of the old supper-room; in Louisa’s youth devoted to charity bazaars, of which her Aunt May had been a great supporter; Louisa never got further than washing up teacups—was never given license to rove with lavender bags or buttonhole carnations—but did Jimmy too remember, she wondered, the time she dropped a whole crashing trayful just as the Mayoress began to speak? Single-handed he’d helped her clear the mess—being indeed the only one of her swains steady enough to be present.… “I come here quite a lot,” observed Jimmy (though obviously in a different context). “It’s about the most civilized place in Broydon.”
Louisa had noticed that as the bar began to fill several people recognized him. They also took a good look at herself. She was wearing a rather striking black sheath, bought secondhand, via the Times personal column, from Model Disposing of Wardrobe, and her flaming hair fell naturally into the fashionable chrysanthemum mop. For a moment she felt uneasy, also glad she hadn’t her toreador pants on; more than once had an escort complained of being made to look conspicuous. But Jimmy’s aplomb was unshaken. It even verged on the complacent.
Hardily, Louisa quoted Mrs. Meare.
“I dare say tomorrow everyone will be asking who I am!”
“Oh, I don’t think I’m all as important as that,” said Jimmy seriously. “Though I must say,” he added, “you make me feel as if I were.” He paused. “As you always did, Louisa! Remember?”
He’d taken the header of his own accord.
6
“All the same, from what I remember,” said Louisa honestly—a little later, over dinner, “it was you who were rather grand … I mean compared with the rest of us. Yours was much the grandest house. I still remember the piano, and all those bound volumes of the National Geographic.”
“I had to get the scouts to cart ’em away,” said Jimmy wryly, “at a Bob a Job.—No, I was out of things; you don’t know what it meant, having a popular girl like you take notice of me.”
“Well, we were friends,” said Louisa modestly. (Che va piano va sicuro!)
“Not that I saw much of you,” recalled Jimmy Brown. “You were always larking about with boys on bicycles.”
“You weren’t always there at the Library,” Louisa reminded him.
“I had to be home for supper,” explained Jimmy seriously. “You still made me late once or twice—waiting in case you turned up. Did you ever know, Louisa, how I felt about you?”
Softly-softly catchee monkey!
“I’m not sure what I knew,” murmured Louisa. “Now, I’m just remembering …”
It turned out that they remembered, jointly, a great deal. An hour over dinner insufficient, the long light evening found them strolling across the Common—identifying an oak tree Louisa used to climb, a nook where once bloomed honeysuckle amid a tangle of blackberry bushes. (At least Louisa identified it; with some other swain than Jimmy, it seemed, had she plucked honeysuckle. It didn’t matter; the error merely aroused, or so she hoped, a slight retrospective jealousy.) Both unhesitatingly, fondly, recalled a regulation Sunday walk—as far as the pond, once round and back again—after church, for Jimmy Brown, and chapel for Louisa. They’d neither of them been so fond of that walk at the time—Jimmy Brown flanked by his parents, Louisa tagging in the wake of Aunt May; but distance lent enchantment, and there is nothing so agreeable as sharing old memories.
“How splendid that you’re here for a whole week!” exclaimed Jimmy, as they parted at the Court gate. (Certain Broydon conventions were still strong in him, for all his new sophistication; automatically he left Louisa at the gate. Nor did Louisa, either, ask him in for a drink; certain Broydon conventions reviving in Louisa also.) “You’ll let me see as much of you as you can, Louisa?—Though I don’t suppose I’m very exciting company,” added Jimmy humbly, “for anyone so glamorous as you are now …”
All the way up the drive, Louisa glowed with pleasure. Only once, hitherto, had she glimpsed even the possibility of being glamorous: at Kerseymere Kennels. There Teddy Meare’s fixation on his wife had canceled it out—and heaven knew Louisa wouldn’t have wished anything else; but she was happy indeed, as well as surprised, to appear glamorous to Jimmy Brown.
7
Actually Louisa began to feel pretty glamorous all round. Against the sub-fusc background of Broydon Court, she sometimes felt practically dazzling. A couple of little typists were pretty, one of the men away all day was reputed a successful architect, but Louisa’s dash and savoir-vivre, and what she had no difficulty in presenting as a glitter of worldly success, set her—glamorously—apart. The only sales-resistance came from Mrs. Brent, who tried to boost the architect in opposition; explaining to all who would hear that though at Broydon to supervise a mere block of flats, Mr. McAndrew—“Surely you know the name?” exclaimed Mrs. Brent. “Andrew McAndrew?”—commonly specialized in the restoration of stately homes. “I suppose there’s hardly a stately home in England,” exclaimed Mrs. Brent, “he hasn’t restored at some time or another! I think we should all feel quite honored.” It was no use. Louisa just left lying about that old number of the Tatler in which appeared an Italian film star, plus two poodles, photographed by Datchett Photographer of Dogs. Compared with film stars, stately homes were just so much old rope.
Louisa also slammed down Mr. McAndrew whenever possible.
She might have been less successful, professionally, than she gave her new public to understand; but in the new field of glamour her star undoubtedly ascended.
Chapter Twelve
1
The Saturday morning offering a gleam of sun, Louisa commandeered both Admiral Colley and Mrs. Brent for a session of photography. Between them, under Louisa’s instructions, they carried out an old ping-pong table, draped a dark rug over a clotheshorse behind, and induced first Ivor, then Ivan, to stand firmly in profile. (There is always one peculiar difficulty in photographing any long-nosed dog such as a borzoi: taken head-on, too much nostril. Nostrils like enlarged snail shells fill the lens.) Mrs. Brent hadn’t anything of Mrs. Meare’s knack as a handler, but the Admiral, accustomed to command, was a tower of strength; before the rain came down again, Louisa was
pretty sure of having enough straights on film to make a reasonable showing.
In the afternoon, she went to look at her old home.
2
Even as she entered Telscombe Road her motive was still obscure.—Not from the bosom of any loving family had Louisa lit out for the metropolis. An uncle and aunt merely accepted, on Christian principles, responsibility for a niece, Louisa’s parents having met their deserts (or so the circumstance was presented to her) when the local palais de danse stopped a buzz bomb. Louisa was if anything glad, despite Aunt May’s prognostications, to think they’d been having a good time—and together, Dad back from Africa; but learned to keep her tears, like her opinions, to herself.
No doubt Aunt May and Uncle Thomas believed they were doing their best for her, in apprenticing her to Mr. Hughes for a pound a week, and taking back eighteen shillings of it for her keep.
Louisa halted: there it stood, the small, mean-proportioned, semi-detached prison of her youth. (But be fair!—at the age of fourteen also her refuge.) The narrow front garden however was now neglected, the window curtains less than immaculate; Number 34 had so evidently changed hands, Louisa was able for the first time in her life to walk up the path without a sinking of the heart.
She knocked. The woman who opened was stout as Aunt May had been lean, florid as Aunt May had been pale, also, halfway through the afternoon, still in curling pins.
“Tell me if it’s inconvenient,” said Louisa, “but I used to live here. Would you let me just look round?”
Again, a change! Though it had been Aunt May’s oft-proclaimed boast that her domestic arrangements lay open night or day to inspection by the Queen of England, no one else appearing suddenly on the doorstep had the slightest chance of admittance. Now, after but one shrewd glance—
“So long as you’re not from the hire-purchase,” said the woman warmly, “look anywhere you like. Come in, dear.”
The door closing behind her, Louisa sniffed. It was at this point that she had been used to feel definitely guilty; a feeling associated with a certain smell, of floor-polish combined with wet mackintosh … the mackintosh admittedly her own, thrown down in a heap under the stairs, not even properly hung up, before she dashed out again after school to skylark with boys on bicycles. “I must have been a headache!” thought Louisa—guiltily. But the disquieting moment was brief; all she could smell now was fried fish.
“Can I go upstairs?” asked Louisa.
“Anywhere you like,” repeated the woman. “I won’t come with you on account of my weight, but you go anywhere you like, dear!”
Louisa mounted the familiar stairs. Certain fittings had evidently gone with the house; the stair carpet was familiar too. But the stair rods weren’t bright any more, and Louisa, whose Saturday task it had been to polish them, stepped over each tarnished bar with increasing confidence.
She pushed open the door to what had once been her attic-bedroom. It was still, inevitably, an attic; but now housed chiefly empty beer bottles.
“Found the cellar?” called the woman cheerfully. “A joke, ain’t it? Only we haven’t a cellar, and my hubby never seems to take ’em back, and I can’t abide waste, so there they go, and one day we’ll have to have a lorry.—Don’t tell me that’s what used to be your bedroom, dear?”
Louisa put her head over the banister and nodded.
“Then I’m really sorry,” said the woman. “I truly am. But it’s just that there’s nowhere else to put them.”
“Don’t worry,” said Louisa.
“If you’d like to stay up there a bit—revisiting, like on the telly—just shift a crate off the chair.”
“Thanks, I’ve seen all I wanted,” said Louisa. “And thank you very much for letting me.”
Only when she was out in the road again did she realize why she’d come. She had been laying—and how satisfactorily!—a ghost.
With no black spot to be avoided, no street she couldn’t tread unapprehensive, her happiness in Broydon would be unflawed. Louisa’s last, subconscious doubts had in fact vanished as she looked into her old room; even though she didn’t realize it until she was outside again.
3
That night Jimmy took her to the Rep.
“It’s very advanced,” he warned her. “Some of the Ibsens haven’t been able to make head or tail of it. But I dare say it’s just up your street.”
In fact Louisa, observing the curtain already raised on a gallows, a bicycle, and what looked like a sewing machine wreathed in straw, felt at home at once; it being the type of décor to which contact with Hugo Pym had accustomed her. Three muffled thumps (evidently borrowed from the famous trois coups of the French) heralded an action equally, in a way, familiar; complex, symbolic and gloomy, with a few music-hall jokes thrown in. Louisa didn’t wonder that the Ibsens had been baffled; but she also formed the opinion that the admittedly sparse audience was enjoying itself—partly perhaps from a sense of intellectual daring, and partly, perhaps, because all that took place on the stage was so extremely unlike anything that took place in Broydon. The atmosphere was still one of hard-breathed mental endeavor.
(“I imagine that chap in the diving helmet’s Fate?” muttered Jimmy. “Just let it flow over you,” advised Louisa …)
No curtain descended at the interval; the house lights simply went up again as a couple of black-costumed handymen (probably borrowed from the Chinese) appeared to reset the stage. Some of the audience kept their seats, under the impression that the play was going straight on, but to the waverers Louisa gave a useful lead.
“Interesting, isn’t it?” said Jimmy, as they emerged. “Of course you’re perfectly right; one must let it flow over one … Would you like a lemonade?”
The foyer bar was unlicensed, but nonetheless thronged; as after a stiff examination paper, everyone was thirsty. Watching Jimmy’s progress, how fortunate Louisa felt herself! He was not only game for symbolic drama, he was also the tallest man in sight.—The next moment her thoughts were violently diverted, as she beheld purposefully forging towards her Hugo Pym.
4
“Dear Louisa, what a friend you are!” cried Hugo. “Is that him?”
Louisa had to think rapidly back over the past fortnight, before she picked up the allusion, now so outdated, to F. Pennon. She had to think even before putting two and two together and realizing that this must be Hugo’s Outer London rep. (Though she might have guessed it, from the performance just witnessed.) The situation was still too complex to be immediately disentangled.—Indeed, Louisa had no intention of disentangling it; she merely smiled consciously and asked after Hugo’s bronchitis.
“Better,” coughed Hugo.—“Would he like to come backstage? They do, you know; the chaps who put up money. Why not bring him round?”
Louisa glanced towards Jimmy Brown still patiently in line for lemonade. She thought he might indeed enjoy going backstage; but the situation held too many awkward possibilities.
“Just leave it to me,” said Louisa.
“Probably you know best,” admitted Hugo. “Though it does seem an opportunity … I must say he looks younger than I expected,” observed Hugo Pym. “In fact he looks very nice. A bit de province, perhaps—”
Just as she’d resented his tone on behalf of F. Pennon, so Louisa resented it now on Jimmy Brown’s.
“Don’t be so damned superior,” said Louisa sharply.
“Darling, you must be in love!” noted Hugo Pym. “What a lucky girl you are! All that cash as well! But thank you very much, dear, for bringing him; and I’ll hope to see you both very soon.”
To Louisa’s extreme relief he cocked an eye at the foyer clock—was it he who thumped those three thumps?—and slid away just before Jimmy returned.
“Who was that you were talking to?” asked Jimmy interestedly.
“Hugo Pym,” said Louisa. “He’s the stage manager.”
“What fascinating people you know!” marveled Jimmy. “I say, could he take us round backstage?”
The encounter did her no harm, however; far from it. It made her in Jimmy’s eyes all the more glamourous.
Chapter Thirteen
1
Full of confidence for the future, also living free, these were happy days for Louisa. Materially, indeed, she had been better off at Bournemouth, especially as regards food, but at Broydon Court there were more men about, and Louisa, though thoroughly determined to stop being fond of them, was far happier in the company of an admiral than in that of Mrs. Anstruther. Actually the Admiral was a slight chink in her new armor; his situation struck Louisa as truly tragic, and she so much admired the rakish spirit in which he faced it, it was impossible not to grow slightly fond of him; but Mr. Wright and Mr. Wray she just liked seeing around in trousers, and otherwise remained quite indifferent to. Louisa had at least become fond of only one man out of a possible three—while with Mr. McAndrew she was practically at daggers drawn.
It lent an interest, even though the engagement was rather onesided; Mr. McAndrew simply came up for punishment. He was a large, quiet-spoken, entirely personable Scot, and Louisa indeed would have had nothing against him if Mrs. Brent hadn’t so persisted in building him up. Jealous for her own position as center of interest, however, Louisa slammed him down whenever possible. Thus—
“Working up and down the country as I do,” suggested Mr. McAndrew mildly, “I run into quite a few hounds myself. Maybe you’ve photographed some of them?”
“Actually no,” returned Louisa, willfully misunderstanding. “Meets are rather local-talent stuff, don’t you think? I’m a professional …”