Crazy Pavements

by Beverley Nichols

  ‘Sorry. I’m an idiot.’

  ‘Brian. Come back.’

  There was a note of real entreaty in her voice.

  He came back and sat by her again.

  She put her hand on his, and looked in his face. He could not read her expression.

  ‘I wish I knew. I wish I could feel sure.’ She paused. ‘I wish I could feel anything. But I can’t. Or if I can, I don’t know. But go on loving me, please. Please don’t stop that.’

  He kissed her hand, and the knuckles glistened as he raised his head.

  CHAPTER TEN

  As the weeks shivered themselves away, and the fogs of December melted into the fogs of January, Walter began to grow more and more anxious about his friend. He was changing more rapidly than he could have believed possible.

  It was a pale Brian now who greeted him every morning – a Brian with dark rings under his eyes and a bored listless voice. It was a Brian who seemed totally uninterested in his old life, who did not care for the peculiarities of Mrs. Pleat, who was no longer amused by family jokes. Only in the evenings, when he rushed home to dress for dinner after calling at the house of one of his new friends for a cocktail, did a flush come back to his cheeks – a hectic flush which had more of fever than of health.

  He seemed utterly to have lost his head. The tele­phone was ringing all day long. He never came in before the small hours. And every penny of his tiny capital had been invested in new clothes, while he had ordered more for which he would never be able to pay. Walter himself would not have been in the least worried by such a predicament, because as long as he had half a crown in his pocket he was perfectly content. But it was quite unlike Brian, who had always prided himself on never owing a penny, and had never cared what sort of clothes he wore provided that they were a fair fit.

  However, one frosty night towards the end of January, when he had at last pinned Brian down to a date for dinner – (Brian, who used to dine with him night after night!) – he determined to put these gloomy thoughts away from him, and behave as though nothing had happened.

  They dined, as usual, at a small restaurant in Soho, at which the chef had a genius for making plaice taste like sole, and rabbit like chicken. Violently futuristic designs adorned the ill-lit walls, contrasting strangely with the meek and battered foreigners – mostly Spani­ards – who huddled beneath them.

  As soon as they had sat down, Brian called the waiter – an old friend of his. ‘This cloth is filthy,’ he said. ‘Get another one, please.’

  The waiter looked at him rather in the manner of a dog that had been unjustly kicked. But he removed the cloth.

  Walter studied Brian from under lowered lids. He looked tired and sulky. This episode of the cloth was typical of his new attitude. He had never complained of the place before. He sighed. He was puzzled and worried, not for himself, but for B. He hated to see him unhappy. However . . .

  ‘A bottle of the usual?’ he said.

  Now this remark was usually followed by a nod from Brian, the production of half a crown, which was joined to Walter’s own half a crown, and pressed into the hand of a beaming waitress, who would dart into the street to return with a bottle of good, coarse Spanish wine. But the thought of such wine to-night revolted Brian. So he frowned and said:

  ‘I’ll have a brandy.’

  Walter did not comment on this revolutionary statement. He merely ordered half a bottle of the usual and a brandy.

  The waiter then approached. The two friends knew all about this waiter. They knew that he was saving up to go back to Spain, and that in ten years’ time, if all went well, he would have enough to do so. They knew him as a consummate liar and a staunch friend, who would allow them to owe the price of many dinners, without security, confident that eventually they would pay him.

  But to-night, Brian dismissed him briefly, for he seemed shabby and shameful. He resented Walter’s cheerful ragging of him. He little knew the effort it cost Walter, nor guessed that it was all done for his benefit, in the hope that sooner or later he would freeze out of his isolation, and become the old ‘B’ again. He was thinking of Walter not at all, whereas Walter was thinking very acutely of him. He took out his hand­kerchief. A faint smell of sandal-wood – an echo of ‘Hayseed’ – floated over the table.

  ‘Somebody seems to have stepped in something,’ said Walter cheerfully, helping himself to some sweet corn, and looking fixedly at an innocent woman sitting opposite.

  Brian blushed guiltily, and stuffed his handkerchief back again. ‘What do you mean?’ he said.

  ‘Only that foul stink. But it’s gone again now.’

  ‘I didn’t notice anything,’ remarked Brian, and began to pick at his ‘steak Barcelona.’

  ‘I expect the steak’s jolly good at “Hayseed,” isn’t it?’ said Walter without the flicker of an eyelid.

  ‘I expect it is,’ replied Brian, without the flicker of an eyelid. ‘I didn’t ask the butler.’

  ‘Oh – good for you.’ Walter’s eyes sparkled. ‘But,’ he added, ‘I expect the butler lives on ortolans and caviare. In fact, I believe I read it somewhere in the paper.’

  Brian munched on solemnly. He was in that ghastly mood where one wants to laugh, but has, in a moment of pique, jumped on to a pedestal of dignity from which descent is impossible.

  ‘What sort of bitter does his lordship drink?’ asked Walter, who felt like continuing in this strain indefi­nitely.

  ‘Oh, all of them. Mixed up.’

  ‘I thought so. That’s where he gets his complexion.’

  ‘You can’t talk about complexion. You’ve got a face like a beetroot.’ (An unkind way of describing Walter’s healthy flush.)

  ‘Thank God! That means more credit.’ He looked at Brian with excessive gravity. ‘I expect his lordship can get any amount of credit, can’t he?’

  ‘How should I know?’

  ‘I mean’ – and here Walter gulped down another glass of red wine – ‘he could probably go down to the village pub and order a whole case of Guinness on tick?’

  ‘You’re not in the least funny.’

  Walter ignored him. ‘My word, that’s a man!’ he went on. ‘That’s a friend. I don’t wonder you like him so much.’

  ‘Oh – for God’s sake shut up!’

  And there was a tone of harsh irritation in Brian’s voice which plunged the rest of the meal in silence.

  The dinner, this terrible, silent dinner came to an end. Brian felt ashamed, Walter miserable. The streets of Piccadilly – those dark, rumbling thorough­fares of adventure – seemed void of promise, even of interest. Of old, the two friends had found those streets a sort of poor man’s theatre. Together they would set out, warmed with wine, when the lamp-posts were flickering like footlights along an endless stage, knowing that they could choose their scene as they willed, that the curtain could be raised or lowered at their disposition, and that the cast which they could call to play for their delight was numberless. The sound of a barrel-organ down a wind-swept street was as thrilling as any orchestra, the garish lights against the ware­house would glitter with a subtler beauty than the shimmer and sparkle of the most luxuriant beauty-chorus. And the occasional human contacts, when they drifted, unprepared but welcoming, into the lives of strange men and stranger women – these were laden with a drama more moving than any in a dramatist’s brain.

  But to-night – no. The curtain would not go up. The drama would not begin. The streets were only streets. Life was not a stage, nor were the men and women in it players. Life was life, and men were men, and as soon as one comes to that horrible and unreal conclusion, something is very wrong indeed.

  There was only one thing to do, thought Walter, in order to drag Brian out of the depression in which he found himself, and that was to take him forcibly into a public-house and make him drink. It sounds a dan­gerous remedy, but there are worse ones.

  They were just passing a little bar that stands at the corner of Bryanston Street and New Quebec Street. A
cheerful glow came from the inside, and the place was crowded with soldiers in scarlet coats, taxi-men with blue noses, Hogarthian women, an occasional thin prostitute with patched stockings, and various loungers.

  ‘Come on, B. We’ll go and have one in here.’

  Brian took Walter’s hand from his arm. ‘That filthy place,’ he said bitterly. ‘Have you come to that?’

  And as soon as he had said it he could have bitten off his tongue. For apart from the essential priggish­ness of his question, its true vulgarity, he knew that he was hitting at something which Walter held sacred. A dirty public-house may seem a curious thing to hold sacred, and in America, where such places are called ‘saloons,’ and where beer is parodied under the name of ‘liquor,’ such a veneration would be merely regarded as part of the essential madness and perversity of the conventional Englishman. But to Walter a public-house meant England. It meant the England of Chau­cer and Johnson and Dickens. He knew the whole lore and custom of these places, their rich humanity, their little tragedies, the riotous humour of their patrons. He knew where the beer was good and where it was bad, and the temperamental peculiarities of barmaids held no mysteries for him. He knew, too, of many strange and furtive bars in the by-ways, where one could drink long after closing hours, and speak with strange companions till the early hours of morning. In dealing with a ‘drunk’ he was superb. But he was very seldom drunk himself.

  It had been a long time before he had been able to persuade Brian to come into a bar with him, for to Brian, in the first days of their friendship, a bar had been merely a rather dirty place, its counter wet and dripping with stale drinks, a sawdusted floor, and highly unsavoury people. He felt ill at ease in these surroundings.

  But gradually he had allowed himself to be persuaded, learning little by little to appreciate, from an outside point of view, the qualities which appealed to Walter. Even the smell of them, as warm and racy as the smell of a stable and the colour of them – the scarlet coats of the guardsmen, the blonde hair of the barmaids, the rich browns of the woods, the variegated labels on the bottles – even to these things he eventually responded.

  But he had never admitted this capitulation to Walter. He still pretended to enter a ‘pub’ with re­luctance, still feigned an ignorance of its customs and traditions. And this pretence was indeed one of the charms of friendship. It was part of that ‘technique of opposites’ which is the true basis of companion­ship.

  Thus, if Walter said, ‘Shall we go and have one?’ – Brian would reply, ‘Have what?’ At which, one of them kicked the other – it did not matter which. Or if Walter said, ‘When do they open?’ Brian answered, ‘They? What do you mean by they?’ In reality he was charmed by these expressions, which are the inter­national language of the drinking fraternity.

  And there were many country inns where together they had passed glorious hours. Never would he forget an evening on the South Coast late in May, when they were tramping down a lonely road towards the sea. There was a savour of salt in the air, mingling with the creamy scent of blackthorn, and a mist hung over the meadows in which a few cows were crunching the lush grass. Suddenly, round a bend in the road, they came upon a little white inn, with an open door, and a lamp spilling golden shadows on to the gravel road. And there had been long, long drinks at that inn, cool and translucent and dark, first in the low-ceilinged bar, with its solemn rows of pewter, and then in the garden, where lavender stood stiff and prim against the broken walls. Through the still air, stabbing it with sweetness, had drifted the song of nightingales, rapturous and unending. No, my friends, they were not drunk. One does not get drunk in such surroundings.

  But to-night – everything seemed changed. He did not want to drink beer. He wanted champagne. He did not want to stand in an atmosphere of coarse tobacco. Poverty, which had before seemed so natural and so lovable, appeared suddenly hateful and strange.

  ‘Come on,’ said Walter. ‘They’ll be closing in another quarter of an hour.’

  Brian stood on the pavement, undetermined. From inside came the clink of glasses and the shouting of a song:

  ‘The Lord Mayor of London,

  The Lord Mayor of London.’

  Roughly Brian shook his arm free from Walter. ‘You’d better go in by yourself,’ he said. And he was off down the street like one pursued.

  He could have cried aloud at his own beastliness. He could have gone down on his knees and apologized. He longed to go back and say, ‘I’m sorry – I’ve been a brute – an utter brute.’ But he could not. His feet would not turn. They carried him, almost against his will, down the deserted street, up the silent staircase, into his flat, and across to his desk where there lay the little photograph of Julia, which he had cut out of a paper. And something apart from himself seemed to force his fingers to lift the picture to his lips, and kiss it hungrily, with the loneliness that only those can know who have betrayed a friend for a lover.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  No ‘gossip’ writer should ever meet his victims in the flesh.

  Brian was beginning to find life more and more complicated as he was introduced into a widening circle of the aristocracy. When, for example, he met Lady Monk, whom he had so often characterized as ‘viva­cious’ in The Lady’s Mail, it was acutely embarrassing to discover that, in reality, she was crippled with rheu­matoid arthritis, and of so jaundiced a mentality that her favourite topic of conversation was the imminent downfall of the British Empire – a subject upon which for hours at a time she would intone with lugubrious relish.

  Even more embarrassing was it to meet Lady Monk’s son, about whose prowess at baseball in the University of Yale he had not failed to keep his readers well informed. For Patrick Monk proved to be so short­sighted that his large and clumsy feet were constantly tripping over the edges of the pavements. Indeed, Brian very quickly decided that as soon as this young man had returned to his University, The Lady’s Mail would be forced to chronicle his desertion from baseball to Science.

  As for the Dowager Lady Macrael, whom he had credited with the enterprise of turning old Scottish tunes into modern jazz – that was a brick, if you like. For this tiresome woman proved not only to be almost deaf, but to possess so violent a distaste for modern fashions, that life at Macrael Castle was carried on in almost medieval state. Even when she dined alone, the bagpipes must parade her in to dinner. Even on the bitterest of winter mornings, family prayers must be celebrated in the ice-bound chapel. And if the humblest and obscurest kitchen-maid were to vary the monotony of existence by shingling her hair, out of Macrael Castle she would go, by the first ferry-boat that crossed the forbidding lake. Brian thanked the Lord that this alarming woman would have considered it beneath her dignity to subscribe to a Press-cutting agency.

  One would have thought that the more people he knew, the easier would be his task. The very reverse proved to be the case. For as soon as he met anybody he had to cease writing about them, unless he wished to be detected. When, for instance, he was the sole witness of the complete intoxication of old Lady Gaveston at one of Lord William’s parties, he could not even refer to her ladyship’s connoisseurship in the matter of wines without grave risk. The accounts of Lord William’s activities had long ago ceased, and as for Lady Julia – no money would have persuaded him to write a word about her, unless it were in the form of a sonnet to an anonymous goddess.

  He was, therefore, forced to carry his investigations much farther afield, until the gossip columns of The Lady’s Mail eventually presented the appearance of a page from the Wide World Magazine. For some weeks he contented himself with chronicling the peculiarities of Colonial Governors’ wives, attributing to them favourite flowers, noting how they longed for the sight of English roses, telling of parties which they had never given and excursions which they had never made. If, for instance, he said that the wife of the Governor of Australia had shot a kangaroo, he was perfectly safe for, at any rate, three months, even if the wife of the Governor of Australia should desire t
o deny so singular an honour.

  Having exhausted the Colonies, he turned to the big-game expeditions. Some members of the aristocracy were always obligingly departing to the wilds in order to shoot harmless animals, and as soon as they had left London, Brian would get to work describing their voyage. He discovered the shop where Lady Still-haven had purchased her outfit, and wrote quite a pretty little paragraph about her, headed ‘Crêpe de Chine to catch Caribou.’ He also imagined that so delicately complexioned a lady would not altogether dispense with the articles of the toilet, and spent an enjoyable morning on a leader entitled ‘Powder and Peril.’ It began in this manner:

  ‘All British women will be interested to learn that Lady Stillhaven (whose expedition to Central Africa is so intrigu­ing Society) has not omitted to include in her travelling-kit a selection of Coty’s perfumes, with powders to match. The stern male may scoff at such an item in so grimly practical an undertaking, but to many women Lady Stillhaven’s action will appeal as a gesture at once fine and significant. For a woman, even if she is to face danger, sees no reason why she should not face it looking her best.

  ‘Is not that as it should be? Is there not in it something calculated to arouse a thrill in the breast of every woman (worthy of the name) – this prospect of a gallant little lady powdering her nose in the presence of panthers?’ etc., etc.

  Meanwhile, Mrs. Gossett was beginning to give more and more trouble. Her eagle eye had not failed to detect the change in him, his faintly dissipated air in the early morning, his new clothes, his casual references to the distinguished people he had encountered. And Mrs. Gossett was quite determined not to be left out of the fun.

  She was actuated by several motives. Firstly, she was more deeply than ever attracted by his appearance. She would make excuses for coming into his room, and would dart furtive glances at him as he worked, mar­velling at the fresh gold of his hair, drawing unholy deductions from the boyish pallor of his cheeks. Secondly, he was her only male acquaintance who, somehow or other, provided her with a constant stream of remarks by which she could be shocked. To be shocked was Mrs. Gossett’s constant ambition, and Brian, by his turn of phrase, or the rather tired droop of his eyelids, somehow or other gave her that sensation. At the back of her mind she was perfectly aware that his remarks were entirely innocent, but she refused to admit so depressing a conclusion to herself.