Crazy Pavements

by Beverley Nichols

  Brian was now crimson in the face. ‘I killed it,’ he said.

  ‘You killed it?’

  ‘Yes. Or rather, Lady Porthaven’s cat killed it.’

  ‘Mary Porthaven! She hates cats more than anything on earth. Oh, you’re the most thrilling young man that I’ve ever met. . . .’ She lay back on the sofa, and dabbed her eyes with a handkerchief. ‘Please, go on. Have you ever said anything about Anne – about Lady Hardcastle? She’s a great friend of mine.’

  ‘I’m afraid I have,’ said Brian.

  ‘What did you do to her?’

  ‘I gave her a bath.’

  Lady Julia beat a tattoo with her heels on the carpet. ‘Go on. Giving Anne Hardcastle a bath. My God!’

  ‘I mean,’ continued Brian, ‘I said she had a very exotic bathroom.’

  ‘She has. Dozens. How did you guess that?’

  ‘She looked the sort of woman who would.’

  ‘You’re a genius. What sort of bath did you give her?’

  He told her. He told her that, and a great deal more. Tired, over-wrought, feeling that after all he might have saved his job, feeling, above everything, a strange exhilaration in the presence of the most beauti­ful woman whom he had ever seen, Brian made a soul-confession to Lady Julia.

  And the result was forgiveness. She did not in the least care about the paragraph. She did not want any sort of apology. She had been quite terribly amused. And a little – just a little fascinated.

  As she dismissed him, she looked at him closely. His clothes were quite presentable. He was almost too good-looking. He had the most delicious hair. He ap­peared to be absurdly innocent. A sudden whim took her.

  ‘I forgive you absolutely,’ she said, ‘on one condition.’

  Brian gulped. If she had asked him to jump out of the window, he would have done so.

  ‘But anything . . .’ he said.

  ‘You must take me out to dinner the day after to-­morrow.’

  ‘Lady Julia!’

  He went slightly pale. If she had asked him to un­dress in Berkeley Square he could not have been more alarmed. To him she had always been Lady Julia Cressey, a thing to be worshipped at a distance, to be glimpsed through a window, or humbly followed in the street. The suggestion that he should take her out to dinner filled him with unmitigated terror. He could have told her a great many reasons, that he could not afford it (although he would spend his last penny on the thing), that his dress-clothes were shabby, that she would be bored. . . . But these reflections were cut short.

  ‘You’re not engaged for that day are you? Because there’s a first night of a new play I want to see.’

  ‘Oh no.’

  ‘Well, then. A quarter-past seven. You might call for me here. I’ve got tickets.’

  He felt the room reeling round him. ‘Thank you very much indeed.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Where would you like to dine?’

  ‘Oh – anywhere. We’ll see how we feel, shall we?’

  Brian was quite certain how he would feel. He would feel a lump of stolid, hopeless misery, shot through with fires of terror and exaltation. However, he merely said:

  ‘That’s right. Thank you awfully. Good morning.’ And he left the room backwards, as though departing from the presence of royalty.

  Lady Julia, with a smile on her lips, tiptoed to the window, and looked out on the square below. In a moment, she heard a door slam, and saw a figure step­ping quickly across the square. The figure, though young and alert, was walking somewhat unsteadily.

  ‘What a divine young man!’ she said to herself. She lay back on the sofa, closing her eyes, and thinking how amusing it would be to have his untutored lips pressed close to her own (which had been trained in the best European schools).

  CHAPTER THREE

  Once that the Society reporters, professional and amateur, had applied to Lady Julia that nauseating phrase a ‘modern girl,’ they considered that their duty was done. They put a cigarette in one hand, a cocktail in the other, a smart platitude on her lips, and they cried, ‘Here she is!’

  It was, in fact, in this precise attitude that Mr. Ivor Isaacs, the famous artist, who gave up painting sheep in order to paint Society (wisely retaining his former technique), had represented her at the Royal Academy. But we – we cannot dismiss any living, breathing woman with such facility. We must begin a little nearer the beginning.

  One night, when she was but ten years old, her mother had dressed her in a frock of silver, put a sheaf of lilies in her arms, and stood her at the top of a long, winding staircase. Slowly she had walked down to the great hall, wondering a little what it was all about, yet not displeased by the sensation she was evidently creat-ing. For the chatter in the hall was hushed, and they were saying that never had they seen a lovelier sight. And then they crowded round her, old men with strange ribbons across their shirt-fronts, old women with bare bosoms, in the crevices of whose wrinkled necks the powder lay like snow in a creek, young men with laughing eyes and medals tinkling on their breasts, girls with red lips, smelling of sweet, faded carnations. . . .

  They had crowded round this silver child, with flutter and fanfare, telling her that she was beautiful, kiss­ing her hands. And one young man with a flushed face had kissed her lips. But he had left the party in a hurry, and they say it was the last time he ever entered Thane House. However, he was soon forgotten, for the Am­bassador of a great and friendly country (slightly too friendly, some had thought) had led her to his table, and had given her a glass of something which was cold, and sweet, and ran through the veins like fire, turning the lily to a rose. (The phrase is the Ambassador’s, not mine.)

  The memory of that evening – that ten-years-old evening – had never left her. For, in a sense, the whole of the rest of her life had been merely a series of repeti­tions of it. She seemed always to have been walking down staircases, in some way or another. In fact, life itself was like a staircase that wound on and on – to where? She did not ask herself that question. The chief thing had been that there was always a crowd to applaud her, always a sensation to be experienced, and later on, always a lover to reject. Or if not to reject . . . Anyway, the whole game had been played at top speed. If life was a staircase, then she had slid down the banisters.

  And she was still wondering what it was all about. There were, of course, a great many people to tell her, but they none of them seemed to provide the right answer. The psycho-analysts had discovered in her mind strange and unnatural passions for her relations, male and female, but as she hated all her relations, that did not get one much further. The lovers had told her that life was meant only for sighs, and passions, and the linked sweetness of long-drawn-out embraces. But frankly, although she loved being loved, craved for adoration as a child craves for sugar, she had never ex­perienced the grand passion herself. The spiritualists had merely made her laugh, because she could not see the point of sitting in a dark room while somebody played a record of Clara Butt singing ‘Abide with me.’ It had never been one of her favourite tunes, and the idea of abiding with Clara Butt held no fascination for her. As for the scientists, she did not understand them, and their fingers were usually dirty. It was all very puzzling.

  Yet she was still hungry for the glittering colours of life. Her taste in colours was typical of her whole men­tality. She loved colour indiscriminately, with a blunted sense. The splash of a pink coat against the grey fields of – let us call it Glebeshire – the vermilion of a cherry in a cocktail glass, the lazy drip of purple from bougain­villæa over a Venetian wall, the tenuous, ghostly blue of cigarette smoke as it drifted in front of a lighted win­dow, the cruel whites of snow, the greeny-black of her own hair, the multitudinous soft tints of a pearl, the coarse, stringy yellow of limelight. It was a form of fever, a nervous reaction caused by a life at perpetually high tension.

  What does that sort of life do for you? Well, it had done at least one thing for Lady Julia. It had given her, beneath the cold, polished surface of her mind, a series o
f minor phobias which had in them all the germs of immense Fears. It is an unpleasantly medical way of describing the mind, but we cannot help that. She had:

  A fear of being alone, that made her see a single gap in her engagement-book, a single unoccupied week-end as something sinister and horrible.

  A fear of being poor (a ridiculous fear, one would have thought) that made her cling feverishly to acquaint­ances she disliked, merely because they were richer than she, and even, in wild moments, gave her nightmares of Revolution, when she and her class would be tramping the streets, cold and starved.

  A fear, above all, of growing old (common, one sup­poses, to all women, but morbidly developed in herself).

  All these fears, if you analyse them, were ridiculous, except the fear of growing old. (Yet, were the young women of 1827 haunted in their so early youth by the phantoms of this still-distant spectre?) For it was obvious that she would grow old. It was equally obvious that it would alter everything, deprive her of conquests, shift the life-giving limelight to others. And that, she had to face.

  Well, she was facing it already. It was the day of her dinner with Brian, and she was making up. In front of her was a jar of cold cream, a dead white powder, a rose-coloured powder, a powder of palest mauve, a bottle of astringent, two lip-sticks, crimson and vermilion, and an eyebrow pencil. She sat down before a triple mirror, and began.

  Cold cream all over – forehead, eyes, nose, cheeks, chin, neck. How cool it felt! Delicious. Then she took a towel and wiped it off, carefully and methodically.

  God! how awful she looked. Hardly a touch of colour. She stretched out her hand for the astringent, dabbed some on a piece of cotton wool, and patted her face with it. That was better. One could feel the skin tightening. It had an effect that exhilarated mentally as well as physically. And so it should, at three guineas a bottle.

  The groundwork was now prepared. She took the vermilion lip-stick and turned her right cheek to the glass. (If a male reader imagines that lip-sticks are only made for lips he is much mistaken.) She then drew a series of tiny lines, thick near the cheek-bone, very faint lower down. When it was finished, her face looked like a human chess board. Putting down the lip-stick, she proceeded to smooth these lines, gently and impercep­tibly, into each other. When they were all merged her right cheek had an appearance of glowing health. The same process was repeated with the left.

  She stretched out her hand for the pale mauve pow­der, covering with it her eyelids, and the space immedi­ately beneath her eyes, removing all traces from the lashes with an eyebrow pencil. For her cheeks and her chin the rose-coloured powder was employed. For her forehead, nose, neck and shoulders, she used the dead white. And when her mouth had been carved out in crimson, she dabbed her whole face with a clean puff, tapping it afterwards with her finger-tips.

  If that reads like an advertisement of a beauty specialist, it cannot be helped. For if Julia is late for dinner in subsequent chapters, or is irritable, or fails to look her best, you may know the reason why.

  Just before she switched out the light, she caught sight of her untasted cocktail gleaming on the mantel­piece. She hurried over, and before she drank it, held it up to the light. Here, she thought, is an obvious emo­tion. The-tired-little-rich-girl-destroying-her-digestion-but-stimulating-her-conversation-by-drinking-martini’s. She gulped it down. And in a moment she ceased to be the prey of obvious emotions. She became eager, uncaring – she felt an inward sparkle.

  She swept out of the room, humming a song. To-night would be such fun. That delicious boy. . . .

  ‘Then come kiss me, sweet and twenty,

  Youth’s a stuff will not endure,

  Not endure . . .’

  The notes faded away, echoing in the darkness of the hall. There was the sound of a closing door.

  And Grist, her maid, came in, surveying the debris with tired eyes. She noticed with regret that the cock­tail, which she had placed on the mantelpiece in the hopes that it would be forgotten, had been drunk. For Grist felt the need of a cocktail, now and then.

  Meanwhile, Brian, in his way, was also making up. The process, if of a different nature, was equally com­plicated.

  He stared somewhat disconsolately at the array of objects on his bed. Taken as a whole, they certainly constituted an evening-dress. But if each object were viewed coldly and with calculation, the result was de­pressing. However, they were all he had, and he must make the best of them. He took up the ‘patent’ shoes. Their patent had evidently long ago expired, but they were not quite beyond redemption. A new pair of laces gave them an almost challenging appearance, especially when the laces were fluffed out slightly at the ends in the manner of a bow. And after he had spat on each toe-cap, and polished and polished, a dreary sparkle appeared which slightly heartened him.

  He paused, thinking of Lord William. He did not have to spit on his toe-caps to make them shine. To put it quite vulgarly, he would not have the guts to do so. This cheerful thought carried Brian on the socks.

  They were quite all right. They were not silk, but if he let down his braces a little nobody would notice their humble material. The trousers were another matter.

  He held up the trousers at arm’s length. The light shone pitilessly on the well-worn seat, which was so burnished that Brian could almost see his face in it. How could he possibly get rid of that shine? A wild idea came to him. Perhaps he could shave the trousers, thereby roughening the surface? Impetuously he darted to the cupboard, and produced his safety-razor.

  As he laid the trousers on the bed, preparatory to submitting them to this strange rite, he again thought of Lord William. He certainly did not have to shave his trousers. Of that there could be no possible doubt. Damn Lord William. He gripped the razor. Scrape, scrape, scrape. Examining the blade, he saw that a little fluff had come off. He held up the trousers once more.

  Distinctly better. The shine had gone from the places where he had shaved. Scrape, scrape, scrape. Most of it was done now. Another scrape, scrape . . .

  What was that? Had he . . . don’t say that. . . . The razor dropped from his hand, and his underlip trembled. He had cut the cloth.

  He sat down on the bed. What was the use of it all? What was the use of life? He wouldn’t go. He didn’t belong among such people. He was poor and shabby and dull. He ran his hands through his hair and tried to smile. It was damned funny. Oh, damned funny. He thought of other occasions when poverty had stung him – that awful time when he had visited his old school, and had been discovered wearing a shirt of which the sleeves were cut short at the elbow because the cuffs had long ago been worn out. He thought, too, of one of his first days in Fleet Street when, with lordly pride, he had invited three of his fellow-journalists to have a drink, and since they all chose double-whiskies and soda, he had been forced to humiliate himself by borrowing the money from them. But those occasions, and many others, were nothing to this. Here he was, standing before the gateway of Romance. And the door was barred by a pair of trousers. It was enough to make a chap give up.

  The door opened. It was Walter.

  ‘Hullo! B.’

  ‘Hullo!’

  ‘What are you looking so mouldy about?’

  ‘Am I?’ He glanced at Walter. He hardly saw him.

  ‘I say.’ Walter had observed the preparations for the festive occasion. ‘Dressing up already?’

  ‘I’m not going.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m not going.’ Brian knew perfectly well that he was going, but he had to allow himself this little moment of self-pity.

  ‘Why the devil not?’

  For answer Brian held up the ravished trousers, put­ting his finger through the cut, and wagging it about.

  ‘That looks so awfully aristocratic, doesn’t it?’

  ‘How d’you do it?’

  ‘I was shaving the beastly things.’

  ‘Oh, B.’

  They looked at each other. And then they laughed. Loud and long.

  ‘
Give me a cigarette.’

  Walter gave him one.

  ‘I’ll fix that,’ said Walter. ‘It only wants half a dozen stitches.’

  ‘Could you honestly?’ The furrows on Brian’s fore­head were slightly smoothed.

  ‘Of course. I wasn’t in the navy for nothing.’

  ‘Thank God we’ve got a navy!’

  The rest of the preparations, now that this great difficulty was met, went without a hitch. His bow, after a certain amount of coaxing, was induced to remain straight, and his two nine-carat gold studs, which had been polished in the morning by Mrs. Pleat, looked bright, if not exactly rich. His white waistcoat was spotless, and his white shirt, having been rubbed with bread by Walter, to remove a shady patch, would ‘look all right in the light.’ He had been inclined to darken some of the faded threads of his coat with Indian ink, but Walter had advised against this.

  ‘You may have to dance,’ he said, ‘and if Lady Julia leant on your coat, she’d have a face like a nigger.’

  ‘Shut up,’ Brian had replied. Thinking of Lady Julia looking like a nigger! However, he had taken Walter’s advice.

  There now remained nothing but the question of funds. However, it was a very urgent question indeed.

  ‘You see,’ said Brian, sitting on the end of the bed, holding himself very still because of his waistcoat, ‘we’ll have to go to the Savoy or somewhere, shan’t we?’

  ‘Why not take her to Lockhart’s and give her a cut off the joint?’

  ‘I wish you’d stop talking rot.’

  ‘It isn’t rot. She’d probably much rather. It’d be a new sensation.’

  ‘It certainly would,’ said Brian grimly.

  ‘Besides it isn’t as if she were after you for your money, is it? She doesn’t want that. Whatever else she does want,’ he added. (It may be guessed that Walter was slightly jealous.)

  ‘Why do you hate her so?’ said Brian, with a sudden flash of intuition.

  Walter flushed and put his hand on Brian’s knee. ‘Don’t be an ass. I don’t hate her. But I think it’s rather hard luck on you to have to spend a week’s wages on taking a woman like that . . .’