Crazy Pavements

by Beverley Nichols

  Lord William leant back, and beamed on the assembled company. After telling what he considered to be a good story he was always as amiable as a cat that has drunk a large saucer of cream. And if, instead of telling his own story he could tell somebody else’s, and tell it better, he felt the same thrill as a certain amiable Persian of my acquaintance who leaves its own cream, makes a hazardous passage over a roof, across a wall, and down a tree, to gobble the plain milk of the infuri­ated cat next door.

  Dinner was nearly over, and Brian was feeling almost happy.

  He was already beginning to understand the tech­nique of these people’s conversation. The chief knack seemed to be in a stupendous exaggeration of everyday statements. If, for instance, the waiter forgot to give one a wooden ‘spinner,’ with which to take the fizz out of one’s champagne, the right phrase was, ‘this is more than I can bear,’ or ‘this is agony.’ ‘Divine,’ ‘amazing,’ ‘shattering,’ ‘monstrous,’ were all employed for the most ordinary feelings and facts. He found himself wondering what language they would have to speak if anything really awful did happen. They would either have to relapse into Russian, or else express themselves in dumb-show.

  However, he had managed to keep his end up in the conversation, wisely deciding that he would leave any intimate discussion on the habits of the aristocracy to the others, devoting himself to more plebeian affairs. He had told them the tale of Mrs. Pleat, and her Tues­day-morning complex, and it had been voted superb.

  Most of all, Julia was invariably gracious. Oh! He could sing with joy.

  ‘Don, darling. We must go.’

  Lord William frowned. ‘Why?’

  ‘We shall miss the first act.’

  ‘Does that matter? It’s one of Evan’s plays. And all his first acts are the same.’

  ‘Darling, don’t be too hideously tiresome.’

  ‘It’s entirely true. His plays are only produced be­cause his uncle happens to be a duke. And he knows it! He was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, and he has been trying to swallow it ever since.’

  ‘I can’t help it. I’m going. Please, Don. We’ll leave Mr. Elme to pay the bill.’

  Oh, angel of tact! Brian had been able to carry off his task up till now, but the idea of paying for dinner with Julia’s money, in front of Julia herself, and in front of Lord William and Maurice, who both knew that it was not he who was really paying, knowing also that he knew that they knew, would have been more than he could bear.

  ‘We’ll meet you outside.’

  They rose to their feet. He was alone, with the waiter bending over him.

  The bill came to nine pounds fifteen shillings. He felt inclined to laugh. Nine pounds fifteen shillings! Still, it seemed to be right. It must be right. He paid it. All that remained was to tip.

  How much should he give? Memories of tuppences furtively pushed under plates in tea-shops. Memories of an occasional generous sixpence after a half-crown dinner. Would five shillings be enough? Or ten. It seemed fantastic. Then he remembered reading that the proper tip was ten per cent of the whole bill. He did a rapid sum in his head. Ten per cent of nine pounds fifteen shillings was nearly a pound. A whole pound. For a tip.

  Madness. Complete madness. The whole world was mad. He placed a pound boldly on the plate and hur­ried outside.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  ‘I cannot think,’ said Lord William, as they settled themselves into the box, some three minutes before the rise of the curtain on ‘The Tragedy of Heloise and Abelard,’ by Evan Spade, ‘who it was who began the extraordinary legend that a first night was a brilliant affair. It always gives me the feeling that I am slum­ming.’

  Brian looked at him in astonishment. He himself was at the acme of his mental, spiritual and social ambition. As soon as they had entered, he had been seized by that acute but pleasurable self-consciousness which assails most persons who sit in a box at a theatre for the first time. He was aware that a great many eyes in the stalls were directed at their party, and he was also aware that from this distance nobody could possibly detect any shortcomings in the set of his waistcoat. As a result he was holding his head very high and glancing almost haughtily at the inferior stalls. But Lord Wil­liam’s remark gave him to pause, especially as he fol­lowed it up by saying:

  ‘The same flea-bitten crowd.’

  Flea-bitten? Those gay, glittering creatures? Flea-bitten? Those stern men with horn-rimmed spectacles who were doubtless the critics? (Well, perhaps one.) But those brightly cloaked, laughing women?

  He examined them more closely. Certainly, they were not quite the same as he had been given to under­stand by his perusal of novels. A great many of the women, with their cropped hair, their eyeglasses and their rough cloaks, appeared to desire to be mistaken for young men, whereas many of the young men had a positively maternal look on their smooth features. Several individuals impressed themselves upon his notice. There was a Scottish peer, carefully folding up his free programme in order to take it home in case his wife should desire to come to a later performance. There were quantities of young women in cloaks so spangled and glistening that one had a momentary impression of quantities of monstrous fishes. There was a bucolic-looking dramatic critic in a tweed coat, wrinkling his nose because the manager, who had a high sartorial standard, had placed him behind a pillar. There were heavily rouged leading-ladies, ‘at liberty,’ or, as Lord William expressed it, ‘at large,’ and thin and precious young men, holding their fingers in front of their faces, as though in prayer. The orchestra, with a charming disregard for Abelard and Heloise, was endeavouring to master the rhythm of a George Gersh­win ragtime, with about as much ease as a British bull­dog that had picked up a lump of chewing-gum in mis­take for a bone. Everybody looked very tired and excited. But ‘flea-bitten’? Surely not that?

  He turned to Julia. ‘They all look all right to me,’ he said, a note of challenge in his voice.

  ‘That’s because you haven’t got a liver.’

  ‘No. It’s because he reads female novelists. Every female novelist for the last forty years has been keeping up the illusion. They fill their stalls with duchesses who nudge each other at the entrance of Mr. Hannen Swaffer. They put a thinly disguised Bernard Shaw in one box, and a Prince Peculiar in another, and they scatter a lot of popular actresses about the house, who are always greeted by the gallery with uproarious applause. And yet, look what has just happened!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Dear Sylvia has just come in. She is a very popular actress. And the only person who took any notice of her was a young man near the gangway, who mistook her for his mother, and is now burying his head in his programme.’

  ‘I shall do the same,’ said Julia. ‘I see that the hero is a great friend of Maurice.’

  ‘Darling – he isn’t!’

  ‘Oh yes, he is. You left Eton under the same cloud.’

  Brian pricked up his ears. But Maurice stopped the conversation. ‘I want to tell him all about the play,’ he said quickly.

  ‘Why – have you seen it?’

  ‘No. But I know Evan. He’s a terrible sentiment­alist, and is so afraid of showing it that he makes all his characters positively inhuman. Mothers eat their young in all his families, and serpents are nourished in every bosom. As a result, Heloise and Abelard will not be allowed to kiss each other. They may have some form of sterilized connection, but otherwise they will say acid things about life, and drink a lot of twelfth-century cocktails. And Abelard will be given a sporting father, and Heloise a religious mother, and it will all be very nervy and brilliant and delicious. You’ll see.’

  The curtain went up. And in a few minutes Brian saw to his relief that Maurice was wrong.

  The reader is now to be treated to a brief sentimental excursion, for a reason which will shortly become apparent.

  The play, as we know, concerned Abelard and Heloise – those two lovers whose passion has been for seven hundred years the mirror in which successive genera­tions have measure
d and reflected the colour of their own desires. It is also true, as Maurice had fore­shadowed, that the drama was composed in a modern idiom. Yet the realities were there, the realities which had no relation to time or space, which spoke in the accounts of 1926 as truly as of 1192.

  Heloise and Abelard! Brian and Julia! The coup­ling of the names is not my own. It is Brian’s. In the present state of his mind it was inevitable that he should so join them. And when the curtain fell on the first act and the theatre was aglitter, and a babel of tongues was unloosed, none of the pleasantries of Lord William could break the spell in which he now found himself held.

  And yet, Lord William was talking all the time, as though nothing wonderful were happening.

  ‘Poor Bock,’ he was saying, ‘is still in the throes of his lighting apparatus. I hear he bought it in Ger­many, and certainly the sky in that act was terribly Prussian. There were things being done on the back­cloth which looked exactly like the more rapid retreats from Mons in the Daily Mail war maps. How clever of him! We are all so anxious to see what shape the cloud is going to assume that we don’t listen to any­thing that is being said on the stage. If only nature were as accommodating! If only one could arrange for thunderbolts just after one’s best remarks, and a rain­storm when one was talking about Tchekov, or a Scotch mist whenever one condescended to remember the modern dramatists!’

  Quickly over the interval and the second act, and the second interval as well. For in the third act, there came a moment which cut through Brian’s life like a sword, killing his past with a single blow, propelling him into a strange and dangerous future.

  The scene was laid in the study of Canon Fulbert in Paris. Darkness was spreading swiftly over the stage, and swiftly over the lives of the lovers, for it was at that blank hour before they were drawn apart, to be for ever alone. Tall windows gave on to the Seine, and outside one had the sense of a bitter, hostile sky.

  Brian was lost – utterly lost. He was in Paris eight hundred years ago. He knew that just outside those windows there would soon flit the shadows of wolves from the neighbouring forests. He knew that in the new Cathedral of Notre Dame the incense was rising in a cold blue cloud, sweeter and more sharp from the icy air. He saw the men and women stumbling home over the rocky roads, and heard them whisper that there was snow in those sullen clouds, and that if the fall was heavy there would be more wolves from the east, and perhaps, for whole days, Paris might be cut off, as had been known some twenty years ago.

  He moved, too, with the shivering students in the cloisters, hearing scraps of nominalism or the fierce phrases of some white-faced disciple of Roscelin, followed by the smooth and acid Latin of an orthodox priest. For no cold could daunt the controversialists. Paris was a city of theories. The very streets were thick with them. Theories were haunting men like ghosts, troubling the serene airs of morning, hanging like mists over the cheerless nights, following men to bed, stretch­ing thin and tenuous fingers into their dreams.

  And here was Abelard, the greatest theorist of them all, who had thrown aside these ghosts for the one reality in life, whose gay and brilliant brain had been clouded, who had willingly surrendered himself – he who had faced unscathed the intellectual arrows of the entire world – to a schoolgirl. No wonder that the faces in the cloisters were grey at the thought of this apostacy. No wonder that coarse and callous words hung on the dusk, seeming to linger like a damp and poisonous spell in the courts where he had held sway.

  Yes – Brian was in Paris – he was in Paris now – he was Abelard and Julia was his Heloise. Through the streets he walked, gathering his coarse cloak firmly to him against the chill. Here he was at the door of the Canon’s house, and here was the scared little maid who ushered him into the firelit hall. Memories – memories everywhere. How often from those book-shelves had he taken a Seneca or a Homer and how often, in that window-seat, had his head been close to hers while they studied, until, in the intoxication of sense, the words had seemed to swim before him, the book had been pushed aside, and all learning, all culture forgotten in the ecstasy of a kiss? There had been summer days when they had built their dream cities from Plato’s mind, and when the clear light of Aristotle had shone more brightly in the golden, dusty beams which drifted through the windows. And days of spring when all was brilliant and alert, when the mind of Heloise was so keen for sudden, biting comment, or slow in plastic surrender that he had almost forgotten that she was a woman, and had argued with her as keenly as any man. But always learning had drifted to love. All the roads of controversy had led to that. All the sages and the pro­phets had pointed thither. All the seasons, the green and the golden, the leafy and the dark, had sped them along that enchanted way. It was as it had to be, or­dained and irrevocable.

  A sudden stir behind him, a flash of light, the silhou­ette of Lord William’s figure (destined for the Bar), recalled him for an instant to the present. He was only one of the audience in the theatre. But the chilling shock of that realization was quickly clouded over. Once more he span through centuries. Once more he was in medieval Paris.

  And now he was standing by the side of Heloise, looking out with her over the steel-grey waters. How bare and forlorn were the trees on the distant river-bank! And the guttering lamps that ancient hands were placing in the windows were only brave signals against the onrushing dusk.

  ‘Like those lamps,’ he thought, ‘are Abelard’s own words. He speaks and a light is lit in her heart. They will help her through part of the night which she has to face. But long before dawn, the bright words will have flickered out, and she will be in darkness.’

  Crescendo! Crescendo!

  He leant forward. Abelard was kneeling at her feet. ‘I know,’ said Brian to himself, ‘what you are feeling. I know it all. You ought not to be here before these star­ing crowds. It is wrong that we should be watching you, wrong that we should be sitting in judgment on your grief – wrong – all wrong.’ So deeply was he moved that he lowered his eyes, gripping his hands together in pain.

  And now, he saw an extraordinary thing. He saw a white hand – Julia’s hand steal towards him. He saw, and felt, that hand settle on his own. He felt, too, the hand press his – not only press, but remain.

  His heart was thumping so furiously that he was conscious of a sharp pain in his temples. He was also conscious – (it is my painful duty to record this un­romantic sensation) – of feeling exceedingly sick. His mouth seemed to dry, his brain became thick and hot. Heloise and Abelard were blown away, two ghostly figures, far, far away, forgotten and unwanted.

  Timidly he looked up. Julia had turned her head towards him. He thought he saw a reflected tender­ness in her eyes. She was smiling, a little gravely, at him, at him. And still her hand was pressing his.

  He then did an outrageous thing. In fact, to say that he did is almost a libel on so excellent a young man. Something outside him did it. Something outside him made him lift her hand with a swift gesture to his lips, and kiss it.

  The hand was quickly drawn away. The smile faded from her face. In agony he could detect, on the profile that was now turned towards him, a frown.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Lord William linked his arm in that of Maurice Cheyne and walked through the frost-bound square, up the sinister little sweep of Hay Hill, and so down the corridors, brightly lit and silver-floored, of Dover Street, into the queer and ragged thoroughfare of Bond Street. He was feeling well pleased with the world.

  Firstly, he was about to eat oysters, and he had the curious faculty, common to most sensualists, of savour­ing in advance the flavour of any dish he had deter­mined to consume. At the very moment ghostly oysters were, so to speak, rolling round his tongue, and the sparkle of untasted champagne began already to fill his veins with an imagined fire.

  Secondly, he had Maurice by his side, so that he would be able to talk at his rather flashy best. That was the secret of his friendship with Maurice. He was a perfect audience. He could be snubbed, and insulted, and ignore
d, but he never, as long as one paid his bills, took offence.

  Arrived at the Gaga Club, the two men made their way discreetly to the corner table which had been reserved for them, bowing simultaneously to various acquaintances who were scattered round the room. The Gaga Club was ‘quite the most divine’ of all London’s night clubs. Its lights were the kindest, its bends the weirdest. And it had a terribly tactful head-waiter, who knew precisely the respective publicity values of dukes, divorcés, authors, and Mr. Michael Arlen. Yet, in spite of these delights, a slight frown suddenly obscured Lord William’s countenance.

  ‘Mrs. Grindhaven is here,’ he said, ‘and she will ask me to dance. She dances with one foot in Vienna and the other in New York, being unable to distinguish between a waltz and a jazz. Will you remember, Maurice, that I have a swollen ankle?’

  ‘But she saw you walk in, Don.’

  ‘Then you must have accidentally kicked me under the table. Here are our oysters.’

  They ate their oysters. Lord William finished his first, and observed that Maurice had still two left. He stretched out a podgy hand and seized the largest.

  ‘Don. You are incredible. I had been saving that one.’

  But Lord William only smiled, his eyes glittering with the added pleasure of eating an extra oyster and annoying Maurice at the same time.

  The champagne was excellent, and Lord William began to feel in the mood for delivering a diatribe against some of the recognized virtues of the British people. Unfortunately, as he was beginning to realize, there were so few virtues left to be recognized. Now that the works of Mr. Noel Coward were obtainable in cheap editions, now that even the universities were set swift on the road to decay, there was little about which one could justifiably complain. He put his thoughts into words.

  ‘Over there,’ he said, indicating the dramatist of the evening, ‘is Evan. He informed me this morning that he is writing a play about a girl who is persecuted by narrow-minded, Puritan parents. I asked him where he discovered such people. And he confessed that they were only to be found in America.’