Shirley looked well in black. It made her hair darker, her eyes greyer, and her skin whiter. It enhanced the red of her lips. Only she wasn’t taking any chances about that. If she could keep absolutely at boiling-point she wouldn’t need any more colour—but that was the worst of your own colour, it had a nasty way of going back on you, and when you got home you found you were looking like something that’s run in the wash, which is very embittering. No, she was really going to make up to-night—not much rouge, but very red lips. Her stockings were all light, thank goodness, but her shoes gave her a pang. Once black satin begins to rub you can’t do anything, and if the toe of the right shoe wasn’t rubbed yet, it was going to be the very first time it got a chance. Now if she had a silver dress, and silver shoes, and a lovely silver wrap, all absolutely brand new, it would be a great help in putting Anthony in his place. An odd little surge of pride rose up in Shirley. She didn’t want a silver dress, or new shoes, or a shimmery wrap. That is, she wanted them all right, but she didn’t need them to help her to wipe the floor with Anthony. And a four years old georgette was quite good enough for him to dine with.
She cast a final glance at this sparkling, confident Shirley, and ran downstairs past Jasper’s door, which was open because he always opened it when he heard her come out of her room, and Miss Maltby’s door, which was ajar with Miss Maltby’s eye at the crack, and so to the street door where Mr Leigh waited politely upon the topmost step.
Shirley got into the taxi and settled herself well in the corner. Anthony got in, banged the door, sat down, and remarked with cheerful bonhomie, “And here we are again!”
Shirley said nothing. She was waiting for the taxi to start. It started. Anthony said,
“Aren’t we on speaking terms? It’ll be an awfully dull evening if we’re not.”
A street-lamp shone into Shirley’s corner and showed her sitting up very straight, her lips very red with lipstick, and a bright natural carnation in her cheeks which completely swamped the rouge. The light shone right into her eyes and made them look very bright and very angry. She folded her hands on her knee and said with great distinctness,
“I wonder you had the nerve to come.”
“My nerve is very good.”
“I only came because I wanted to tell you exactly what I thought about you.”
“But not till after dinner. Keep it for dessert. Look here, we’ll have a truce till we’ve fed. We can be polite strangers if you like—just met for the first time. But don’t let’s have a dog-fight over the food.”
“I’m simply boiling with rage,” said Shirley.
“I can’t think why.”
“I suppose you know I’d have lost my job if Mrs Huddleston had looked round when you were playing the fool this afternoon?”
“You drove me to it,” said Anthony.
“I did?”
“With your harshness. You’ve no idea how harsh you were. Besides I had a bet on with myself about making you laugh, so I had to try and win it.”
Shirley looked coldly at him in the light of another lamp.
“Well, you didn’t win it.”
“I didn’t? You mean I did.”
“I didn’t laugh.”
Anthony said “Liar!” and at the same moment the taxi drew up at the Luxe.
The Gold Room was tolerably full. They had a table at one end of it, which pleased Shirley very much. She liked to see everyone who came in, to watch the way they walked, to try and guess what sort of people they were when they weren’t dining at the Luxe. It was like a game, and it was one that amused her very much to play.
They had hors d’œuvres, and she was wondering why anyone liked olives, when Anthony asked her in an interested voice,
“Are you still boiling?”
She decided to leave the olive alone. That was one point about dining at an hotel, it didn’t matter what you left on your plate. She looked severely at Anthony and said,
“I could have murdered you this afternoon.”
He smiled seductively.
“Better not. I couldn’t defend you for my own murder. You’re not going to put strychnine into the soup or anything like that, are you? I’d hate you to go to prison.”
A little shiver went down Shirley’s back. She said, “So should I,” and the waiter changed their plates and brought them fish because neither of them wanted soup.
He said, “Fish isn’t so easily poisoned. But you’re not absolutely at murder point now, are you?”
That was the worst of Anthony, he got round you. She was finding it very difficult to go on being as angry as she had meant to be.
“I’m not very far off it.”
“But why? What made you go off the deep end like you did? Have you joined an anti-kissing league? Because if you have, I think you ought to have given me fair warning. You might have it on your cards—‘Miss Shirley Dale. A.A.K.L.’ And then in brackets, ‘Associate Anti-kissing League.’ Or simply, ‘A.K.A.—Anti Kissing Association.’ I think that’s snappier on the whole. If you’d handed me something of that sort, I should have known just where I was, instead of which you struck me with unwomanly violence, and if you’d had on a diamond ring I might have had a split lip for life, and then I’d have had to address a jury like this—” He proceeded to address an imaginary jury in a speech without any consonants.
The little freckles at the corners of Shirley’s lips trembled dangerously. She tried to stop her eyes dancing, but without any marked success.
“The people at the next table will think you’re mad,” she said in rather a shaky voice.
“Not mad—only afflicted,” said Anthony, still without consonants. Then, returning to ordinary speech, “That’s what you might have done to me. I hope remorse is gnawing at your vitals.”
Shirley shook her head. Then the corners of her mouth gave way.
“Anthony, you’re a devil, and some day you’ll get paid out. Mrs Huddleston will look round and see you, or you’ll slip up and call her the Blessed Damozel to her face, and then you’ll be in the soup.”
Anthony looked up with a gleam in his eye.
“What’ll you bet I don’t call her the Blessed Damozel and get away with it?”
Shirley met the gleam with a very dancing one of her own.
“You wouldn’t dare.”
“Bet on it?”
“You wouldn’t dare.”
“What’ll you bet?”
“Tuppence,” said Shirley.
“My good girl, I don’t take my life in my hand for tuppence!” He leaned across the table, gazed at her tenderly, and said in his softest voice, “Resign from the A.K.A. and make it a kiss.”
To her intense annoyance Shirley blushed. She felt the colour run hot and quick to the very roots of her hair. She felt it at her temples, and even round at the back of her neck. She could have stamped with rage, and the angrier she felt, the more she blushed.
Anthony leaned back in his chair and surveyed her with pleasure. It amused him very much to make her angry, and to see how easily she blushed. Under the amusement there was something else.
“Well?” he said. “What about it? Is it a bet?”
“No, it isn’t.”
“Well, I won’t do it for tuppence. Have you ever been in for a blushing prize? I should think you would win hands down. But of course there wouldn’t be many entries. It’s almost a lost art—girls don’t do it now.”
“Village maidens do. I was brought up in a village, so I blush frightfully easily, and it’s absolutely pig-mean of you to make me do it in front of hundreds of people.”
“I shouldn’t worry—you looked very nice.”
“I couldn’t have! It’s all very well to get pink in the right place, but it’s frightful to turn puce all over.”
“I shouldn’t have called it exactly puce,” said Anthony kindly.
The couple at the next table had observed Shirley’s change of colour with interest. They did not stare, but anyone watching them might ha
ve thought them a little too consciously discreet. The man wore his evening clothes rather as if he did not wear them very often. He might have been an old thirty-five or a young forty. He had a long pale nose in a long pale face. The nose was sharp at the tip, and the face was sharp at the chin. The eyes were sharp all over. They never rested long on anyone. When they had looked they looked away again. There was too much pomade on the rather sparse reddish hair. The woman was younger, taller, plumper. She filled a shiny red sequined dress. She had more bust than is the fashion. She had a trick of wriggling her shoulders and using her hands that was not quite English. She had fine dark eyes and fine dark hair, a sallow skin, and a very good conceit of herself. She used scarlet lipstick. Her name was Ettie Miller. She was a typist in a private inquiry agency, and she was dining, not by any means for the first time, with Alfred Phillips, clerk in the firm of Schuyler and Van Leiten of New York. English by birth, American by choice, he was at present in London on his firm’s business, and Miss Ettie Miller was part of that business. Shirley Dale was part of it too, but neither she nor Anthony Leigh were to know that. They went on talking nonsense in a cheerful, light-hearted manner.
Alfred Phillips and Ettie Miller did not talk nonsense. They leaned to one another across the table and kept their voices low. The tables were rather close together. If Miss Miller had pushed back her chair six inches, her arm would have touched Shirley’s shoulder. She had brought with her into the dining-room a large white fox fur which kept slipping from her shoulders as she shrugged them. The waiter picked it up twice, and she herself made constant play with it, hitching it up, pushing it back, letting it slip down upon the floor, and snatching it again, all these movements being made more noticeable by the flashing of the small diamanté bag which she wore suspended from her right wrist. Anthony was rather amused by her antics. He guessed the fur and the horrible little shiny bag to be new acquisitions—gifts, perhaps, of the foxy gentleman. The lady was obviously throwing her weight about. The Luxe was new ground to her. He wondered if they would get through the evening without Shirley coming in for a swish from the white fox tail or a bang from the little gleaming purse. Then the lady seemed to quieten down. The fox subsided between her and the back of her chair, and the diamanté bag worried his eyes no more.
He and Shirley were going to dance presently. He stopped teasing her, and they talked about everything and nothing, with the little thrill running through it all which comes when talk is just a way of exploring another mind. You never know what you are going to find—you’ve never been that way before, so you have to walk warily and look where you are going. There is danger, adventure, charm. There may be anything round the next corner from Bluebeard’s Chamber to the Garden of Eden. At any moment a cavern may open at your feet or a river come rushing out of nowhere to carry you away. The air is quick with possibilities.
They had coffee at the table, and when they had drunk it Shirley pushed back her chair and stood up. Her bag had slipped from her lap. She stooped to pick it up. It was an old-fashioned bag with a cut steel handle, inherited from Miss Emily Dale. The black velvet of which it was made was probably as old as the frame, and appeared to be as indestructible. It had such a good hasp that it surprised Shirley very much to find that it had opened with the fall.
Anthony came round the table and said, with the teasing note back in his voice,
“Do you always drop your bag?”
She said, “Nearly always,” and put her hand on the clasp to fasten it.
And then an odd thing happened. It was just as if something ran tingling up her arm from the fingers which were touching the clasp. She moved a step nearer Anthony, and felt her shoulder brushed by the white fur wrap of the queer-looking woman at the next table. The tables were really too close together. A funny breathless feeling came up in her throat, and all at once her fingers moved with a jerk and the bag was open again. She didn’t know why she had opened it, but as soon as it was open she saw a bright twist of silver cord sticking up against the black satin lining.
She said, “What’s that?” in a quick uneven voice. Then she jerked at the silver cord, and up came the little shiny diamanté bag which had hung from the wrist of Miss Ettie Miller until half way through dinner. Shirley held it out to Anthony Leigh. “That’s not mine,” she said. “How did it get into my bag?” And with that Ettie Miller jumped to her feet, pushing her chair aside and crowding into the narrow space between the tables.
“I’m sorry, but that belongs to me,” she said. Her voice was loud enough to attract attention. Heads were turned. A couple of waiters stood by uneasily.
Shirley looked towards the voice. She was rather pale, her eyes were wide and puzzled. The little shiny purse dangled from her outstretched hand.
“Is it yours? How did it get into my bag?” she said.
And then Anthony was at her shoulder with his hand slipped just inside her arm. He said,
“Yes, it’s hers.” And then, to the woman in red, “Miss Dale’s bag was on the floor. Perhaps you picked it up by mistake.”
Ettie Miller made no movement to take her bag. She said, still in that unmodulated voice,
“Well, it’s a funny sort of mistake that gets your purse with the best part of five shillings or so inside it into someone else’s bag.”
Shirley held out the silver cord. Her eyes never wavered from Miss Miller’s face.
“Won’t you take it if it’s yours? I don’t know how it got into my bag.”
The whole thing had only lasted half a minute, but it was half a minute too long. Alfred Phillips came round the table with a decided “That’s enough, Ettie!” Whereupon Miss Miller said, “Oh, I’ll take it all right,” and did so with a very pronounced shrug of her shoulders. After which the pressure of Anthony’s hand became insistent, and Shirley, obeying it, turned and walked away.
She had half the length of the Gold Room to walk, and some curious glances followed her and Anthony. She kept her head high, but the cornets of the room were full of a mist that stung her eyes. What a horrible thing to happen. But she mustn’t let herself think about it yet—not whilst all these people were looking at her. She felt a terrified longing for some dark place to hide in. The lights were very bright. The room was full of people. She and Anthony were walking, but they didn’t seem to be getting to the door. Anthony—Don’t think about Anthony. Don’t think about anything.
They came to the door at last, and through an archway lined with mirrors to an empty corridor. Shirley looked straight ahead of her as they passed the arch, but she could just see herself and Anthony reflected endlessly from either side of it—a hundred Anthonys and a hundred Shirleys. No, far more than a hundred, only it made you giddy to think how many there were. And every one of the Shirleys feeling as if someone had struck her a blow in the dark. And every one of the Anthonys wishing that he had never set eyes on her, because he hated scenes worse than anything else in the world, and there certainly had been a scene—
And then Anthony said, “You all right, Shirley?” and his voice was kind.
She said, “Yes.” The answer was only just audible.
Anthony did not find it at all a convincing sort of answer. He pushed open a door inscribed “Residents only”, and took her into a smallish room with some very comfortable chairs in it.
“But we’re not residents,” said Shirley, still only just above a whisper.
Anthony put her into the most comfortable chair. Her knees were shaking so much that she stopped bothering about not being a resident. The chair wasn’t big, but it was very soft and comforting. He sat down facing her and said in a cheerful matter of fact voice,
“And now what’s all this about?”
Shirley felt so grateful that she could have kissed him then and there. He wasn’t going to treat her with stony politeness as if nothing had happened, or believe the simply frightful things which that horrible woman had hinted. He was going to be just ordinary, and friendly, and kind. She said, “Oh, Anthony!” and
he patted her knee and told her to pull herself together.
“It was that woman’s bag all right, because she had it dangling on her wrist all the time she was fidgetting with that beastly white fur thing, and then about half way through dinner she settled down and I didn’t see it any more. But how on earth did het bag get inside yours?”
Shirley’s right hand held her left hand very tight. She sat up stiffly and looked him straight in the face.
“Anthony—do you think I put it there?”
“Of course you didn’t.”
Her eyes held his with a strained, insistent look.
“I don’t want you to be polite.”
“I’m not being polite.”
She did not move her eyes, but she lifted her right hand and brought it down upon her knee with a sort of despairing effort.
“It’s no good saying the sort of things you think I want you to say. I want what you really think, because you see, it’s happened twice in a few days, and I don’t know how that woman’s bag got on to my arm when I was waiting for the bus, and I don’t know how this woman’s bag got inside mine.” She repeated the gesture with her hand. “Anthony, I don’t know.”
“What do you think?” said Anthony Leigh.
She drew in her breath sharply before she answered him. There was a look in her face as if she were trying not to wince away from a blow.
“It’s not what I think. It’s what you think, or what anyone would think.”
He said, “Well?”
She was still looking at him. She was very pale.
“Anthony—either someone put that bag on my wrist and put this one into my bag, or else I’m a thief and took them deliberately, or else I’ve got a screw loose and I took them without knowing what I was doing. You don’t think I’m a thief—but do you think I’m a kleptomaniac? Because why should anyone try and plant bags on me like that? It’s too utterly balmy.”
Hole and Corner Page 4
