Crazy Pavements

by Beverley Nichols

  ‘I think his lordship is feeling the heat.’ Maurice’s tone was exceedingly acid.

  ‘Only one more minute, sir,’ said the attendant.

  ‘But really. Nothing’s happened yet.’ Maurice felt that he had not nearly got his half-guinea’s worth.

  ‘Nothing that you can feel, perhaps, sir,’ said the attendant, with the omniscient air of all semi-educated persons who possess a little specialized knowledge.

  Silence for another minute. Then the lights were switched off and they emerged into the drab daylight to dress.

  ‘I think,’ said Lord William, ‘that was the most marvellous thing I have ever done. I feel like a sun-god; my lymphatics are singing inside me like young cherubim. They seem to be lifting me up to the skies. There is nothing of which I am not capable. I am . . .’

  Maurice interrupted him. There was a harsh impa­tience in his voice. ‘One would think you’d had some­thing more than mere sunlight,’ he said. ‘What’s that?’ And his fingers stretched out quickly, trying to seize a tiny gold box which Lord William was slipping into his waistcoat pocket.

  There was a sudden silence. The two men’s fingers grappled, interlaced. Maurice retreated with a cry of pain.

  ‘Now you shall pay for your ticket, my young friend,’ muttered Lord William.

  Brian took no notice. These chaps were so very odd.

  The sunlight treatments may, or may not, have done Brian good. It is difficult to say, because he immedi­ately plunged back, with a sort of desperate futility, into the mode of life which had been responsible for his condition. Had Julia been with him always, things might have been different. As it was, now that Walter had gone he felt alone, utterly alone among a crowd of chattering friends.

  And bored! Only those who have lived at top speed, cramming every minute with some engagement, can realize the æons of boredom which a single unoccupied evening can contain. There were nights when he was left alone, and would wander down the roaring streets to dine in Soho. The evening paper would be propped up in front of him, and after he had read it he would sit down and stare gloomily at the opposite wall. What was there to do after dinner? Visit the pubs? That would be deathly without Walter. A theatre? He had seen them all. A cinema? He would go mad, sitting by himself in the dark with loving couples all around him. Walk the streets? There was not much fun in being accosted when one happened to be in love.

  And so, on the top of a bus, through the chill slanting rains, he would return home again. Up the stairs. A peep into the room that had been Walter’s. Whistle a bit of tune to stop one growing morbid. Up again to his room. Strike a match. Pop goes the gas-fire. Draw the curtains. Only ten o’clock. Read a book. And the lines swim before one’s eyes, the characters flag and fall, the vision is blurred. And there is nothing but the gas-fire, and the distant roar of buses, and the gas-fire – and – God! – the utter futility of it all!

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  A generation which knows a great deal about love is usually a generation which produces few great lovers. And to-day we know everything about love. We put Cupid under the microscope. With delicately adjusted instruments we gauge the heat of the divine fire. We have searchlights which lay bare the secrets of the mind, penetrating far into the dim and delicate desires of childhood. In fact, there is nothing about love which we do not know, except how to love.

  Julia was a typical product of her generation. She knew everything about love, and when one knows everything about any particular thing, the thing becomes, ipso facto, slightly ridiculous.

  Yet, here it was, producing a surprise with regard to Brian. Her feeling for him fitted into no recognized niche. Had they been continuous feelings – had she, that is to say, entertained the same feelings during the morning and the afternoon as stirred her in the small hours of the morning the situation would not have been so difficult. But her feelings were not continuous.

  In fact, as she stood in her room on a bright spring morning, reading again the effusions which she had written with such genuine ardour the night before, she felt it difficult to believe that she could possibly have written them at all. Had she discovered letters of this type written by anybody else, she would have presumed that they were the outpourings of an hysterical nursery-governess.

  She was genuinely fond of him, of course – as genuinely fond as she could ever be fond of anybody. She adored the perfect cast of his features, his colouring, his eagerness to please, his rather old-fashioned polite­ness, his happy smile, and the air he gave, whenever she smiled back at him, of longing to turn somersaults out of sheer exhilaration. But these letters! They were crazy. They had no rhyme or reason – or rather, they had a great deal too much rhyme and far too little reason. If anybody should discover them . . . Quickly, as though she were being watched, she shut them away in a drawer.

  She sat down and looked out on to Berkeley Square. It was a glorious day – one of those days in which the English climate apologizes so winningly for its past misbehaviour that it is readily forgiven. The baby leaves on the trees were already a vivid green. A lorry clattered by in the street below, full of daffodils growing and blowing. Next there was a hansom cab, with its horse stepping high and brave, as though it refused to be regarded as a relic. On the other side of the square there was a furniture van, which meant that Max Beitheimer had been forced to sell another set of his Chippendale chairs. Coming round the corner was Mrs. Grindhaven, with her new German dog, which made everybody remember the war so painfully.

  To-day she began to feel almost amused by life. Was it part of Brian’s infectious example? She remembered that when they had last gone out together she had noticed dozens of things to which she had hitherto been blind. They had undertaken a tremendous walk after a very bad lunch which he had given her in Soho. Anything more calculated to send one into acute hys­teria than a bad lunch and a long walk she could not previously have imagined, but she had actually adored it.

  He had shown her a new London. They had wan­dered up Farringdon Street and treasure-hunted among the stalls of fruit, flowers, old books and cheap jewel­lery. They had bought peaches at twopence apiece, and eaten them there and then, so that the juice dripped on to the pavement, and long sticks of pink London ‘rock,’ in which the word London appeared in the centre however many times one bit it through. They had purchased spectacles for sixpence, which broke as soon as they attempted to put them on, and old prints of the Haymarket aflutter with crinolines, and an iso­lated volume of Boswell’s Life of Johnson, which was discovered to contain only the index, so that they had to go back and indignantly demand the return of their shilling.

  And the purchase of Boswell had suggested to Brian that he should take her to see Johnson’s house, so that they continued through narrow streets, up dirty alleys where boys were playing hopscotch, past the blackened offices of obscure papers, into a little cobbled haven where a mellow Georgian house was basking in the sun. Through a swinging gate they had walked, and up the broad uneven stairs. It cost but sixpence to enter the house, and one would have thought that it would have been full of chattering tourists. But no. It was empty. With true British carelessness, old books lay on the shelves in untutored profusion, so that anyone who cared might take them away. But they paid no heed to the books, nor to the old prints, nor the chairs which Johnson had used, nor to the windows from which so many times Boswell must have sat gazing on to the darkening street, while waiting for the Doctor to end one of those silences which must have been so far more terrifying than his keenest thrust of words. They had cared not for these things, for they had been far too interested in themselves.

  Yet, had they? That Brian had been utterly absorbed by her she knew well. But had she been utterly ab­sorbed by him? She knew equally well that she had not. It had been herself that had really absorbed her. She was interested in studying herself in this new position. She was interested in studying the motives which made her behave like – like a housemaid. It was only on those rare occasions, late at night, w
hen she wrote those secret letters – it was only then that she completely forgot herself – only then that she really loved.

  She moved impatiently in her window seat and turned away from the bright picture which the square presented. Mrs. Grindhaven and the German dog had vanished, and a woman strangely like the Countess of Oxford and Asquith was clattering by in heavy boots. But they interested her not at all.

  She thought: ‘Oh! If I could only get away from this ghastly self-consciousness! If I could only say, “This is a moment in itself. This is a day to be lived for itself, without questioning, without thinking of to-morrow, without caring whether the day will come again, without caring whether I am growing older, or whether I look my best, without caring about the transience of things. . . .”’

  She was becoming morbid. She would go and have a cocktail with Don. And after that she would buy a new hat. She took up the receiver. Yes. His lordship was in.

  He was standing there, in the long black room, where the spring sunlight seemed to touch the masks to an unwonted life. In his hand was a new mask to which he was putting the finishing touches. It was a white, sullen face of a girl with twisted eyebrows. He held it out in front of him, not looking at Julia.

  ‘My ideal woman.’

  ‘Put it down.’

  ‘One day, Julia darling, you will realize that there are degrees of rudeness.’

  She made no reply.

  ‘I am going to design a set of masks for the Cabinet,’ he continued. ‘The Prime Minister will have a face which looks both ways at once. The Lord Chancellor will be given a green wig. The Home Secretary will have a little house on top of his head. And the Chan­cellor of the Exchequer will be given a permanent and highly irritating smile.’

  She threw her cigarette into the fireplace and lay back, looking at the ceiling.

  ‘You know why I’ve come to see you.’

  ‘Brian?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’re terribly éprise, of course.’

  ‘He’s so different from all these wrecks.’

  He laughed. ‘I thought the-tired-lady-of-quality-and-the-lusty-boy combination was a little overdone. Look at Anne Hardcastle.’

  ‘The last thing I want to do.’

  ‘Of course, she’s not particularly a lady of quality, and I always think her boys look quite washed out after their first week-end at Hardcastle. Still, it’s the same thing.’

  ‘Can’t you be serious?’

  With a sigh he laid down his mask. ‘I see. We are to have one of those boring discussions about love. You will say to me that your affection for Brian is quite different, and that you want to keep it fresh and frag­rant. You will expect me to sympathize and buy you a cottage in the country. I shall do nothing of the sort.’

  ‘It’s curious how I suddenly hate talking to you about him.’ She spoke more to herself than to him. ‘Quite curious. I suppose it’s because he seems almost sacred.’

  Lord William heaved a sigh of relief. ‘Excellent. All sacred topics are barred in this house. Now . . .’

  ‘Do let me go on.’

  ‘Oh, Julia. You’re impossible.’

  ‘We’re all impossible. I’m sick of this damned London. I want to take him away from it all.’

  He sat down.

  ‘You have obviously been reading the articles of Mr. –,6 who has been selling his virtue at the rate of eight guineas a column for the last twenty years. He discovered, after the war, that London was an immoral city. He was publicly pained. I made the same dis­covery. I was privately pleased. I should have hated to have to live in New York.’

  She gave a vicious tug to her hat. ‘I don’t know why I talk to you.’

  ‘You talk to me because I am sane. Now let us con­sider the position. Take Brian first. As we are being so charmingly frank, we may admit that your love for him is entirely physical.’

  She stirred wearily. ‘That’s a lie.’

  ‘Nobody’s blaming you. Audrey Forster almost had a seizure when she met him at Tanagra’s last party. He’s an exceedingly attractive young man. And infinitely more so now that he knows it.’

  She forced a smile. ‘We’ll consider this discussion closed.’

  ‘No.’ He held out a glittering finger. ‘There are several things yet. You say that Brian is spoiled. I fail to see why.’

  ‘Anybody who got to know our friends with the rapidity with which he has got to know them . . .’

  ‘Really.’ He moved impatiently. ‘Brian’s merely had a social success. You seem to regard it as a tragedy.’

  ‘It is a tragedy.’

  ‘I’ve no patience with you. Listen. The subject under discussion is London. Nobody pretends that it’s a particularly edifying subject.’

  Her lips tightened. ‘You appear to have been reading – yourself.’

  ‘I certainly have. I read him because he makes me feel that my friends are, in some way or other, an adventure. He makes me feel, by the naïve way in which he is shocked, that I am living in a really exciting age. He titillates my vices. He makes me imagine that I am almost original in doing . . .’ he paused . . . ‘whatever I do.’

  Her face was shadowed in melancholy. She seemed hardly to be listening to what he was saying.

  ‘The fact remains that it is all very amusing.’

  ‘Amusing!’

  ‘Terribly so. Nothing gives me greater pleasure than to see one of those lovely large American women weaving a new-world halo round the head of an English peeress whose jewels are paid for by a Jewish Company promoter and who spends her week-ends learning about the sorrows of the male chorus at the Gaiety.’

  Julia turned her head. ‘You’re pathetically obscene.’

  ‘I am equally thrilled,’ continued Lord William, ‘by the sight of a number of English gentlemen accepting the hospitality of a very dirty Argentine, whom they would hesitate to employ as an under-gardener, simply because he pays their tailor’s bills with such delicate discretion. That is really amusing to me. Nothing is so interesting as decay. I am watching the final and utter decay of a large section of the British aristocracy. Soon the only respectable people left will be impover­ished Scottish families, who live surrounded by dogs in Inverness and eventually become almost indistin­guishable from their pets. And even they will be forced to capitulate before long. The whole spectacle gives me great satisfaction, especially as I believe I may claim to be regarded as one of the plague-spots myself.’

  He took up the mask of a girl and carelessly painted a large moustache across the lips.

  ‘There,’ he said blandly, ‘that was a sensation I’ve been longing to have for days. And now I’ve had it. It was quite divine. Whenever I’m bored in future I shall go to the Underground railway and paint mous­taches on the faces of all the pretty ladies on the posters. What fun it will be, Julia. Will you join me? If we were found out, we could always say that we were working for a wholesale firm of depilatory merchants who had bought up all the spaces on the walls.’

  She beat an angry tattoo on the floor with her feet.

  He looked at her anxiously. ‘In fact,’ he continued, ‘I think we ought almost to go at once. You are obvi­ously in need of a very strong sensation.’

  She sprang to her feet. ‘Yes, Don, I am. But who am I? Where am I? I’ve got a brain and a body and a will, but I can’t feel anything. I can’t. I can’t. I don’t believe you can, either. We aren’t either of us here. We’re never here. We’re over the border some­where. We can’t catch ourselves. We . . .’

  She stopped suddenly, breathlessly. The black face of Rastus was peering through the door.

  ‘Cocktails, Rastus,’ said his lordship with a yawn.

  Julia turned her back.

  6 Author’s note. The name of this famous journalist, on second thoughts, had better be omitted.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  The evening of the same day.

  Brian was rushing round his flat in a state approaching panic. For Julia had just rung him
up to say that she was coming to pay him a visit – ‘after dinner, for a cigarette’ – and it was already nearly ten.

  What ought to be done first? The lights, obviously. Julia could never bear to sit under these glaring globes with their china shades. But how could he improve them? He had an inspiration, and hurried to a drawer in his bedroom, from which he produced two handker­chiefs, one red and one blue. Then, standing on a chair, he fastened these round the offending bulbs.

  The effect was singular. Half of the room was bathed in a lurid blood-colour, the other half plunged in a depressing shadow. Moreover, bright chinks of white light escaped and mercilessly illuminated the cracked ceiling. Besides, even if the radiance had been uniform, the things themselves looked so odd. Like trippers on the beach with handkerchiefs tied round their heads to keep off the sun. No. It wouldn’t do.

  With fingers that trembled he removed the handker­chiefs, and the room was once more flooded with bril­liant rays. What the devil could be done? He had once, as an experiment, painted a bulb with crimson lake, but it had only filled the room with a foul smell of burnt feathers and then exploded, deluging him with red-hot glass and fusing the lights. That would be a pretty way to welcome his lover, wouldn’t it?

  Candles! What a fool he had been not to think of them before. He knew that there were some candles somewhere, and some shades too. A few minutes routing in a cupboard produced them. The candles were suspiciously nibbled in parts, but they were unmistakably candles. The shades were not so good. They were all smeared with black patches where they had been allowed to burn. Still, the patches were so numerous that they might almost be said to constitute a design. Well, that was the only way to look at it.

  Now for the candlesticks. He paused, and bit his lip. For he remembered a pair, fashioned from old brass, which Walter had given him on his last birth­day. After Walter had gone he had put them away, swearing never to take them out again. However, it was a question of necessity. He went to the cupboard, and from the lowest shelf he produced them, tarnished and covered with dust.