Crazy Pavements

by Beverley Nichols

  Poor candlesticks! Walter had possessed them for years. They had been in many pawnshops, had held the light to many sordid rooms. Finally they had been given to Brian, and the threat of the pawnshop removed from them, a threat which should never have been levelled, for, as Walter had said, those candlesticks were ‘gentlemen.’ And indeed they were gentlemen, with their sober, Georgian frames and their solid workmanship. He decided that he would never put them out of sight again, however painful might be the memories which they suggested.

  However, he must get busy. There were only two candlesticks, and he needed four. A distracted search revealed nothing that could, even with the best will in the world, be said to resemble a candlestick. Wait a minute though. There were four blue coffee cups. They would do. And indeed, when the candles were in them, with their shades duly placed, and the handles of the cups deftly concealed behind photograph frames, they did not look so bad.

  He postponed the lighting of the candles and con­fined his attention to the carpet. If he put a newspaper down carelessly, as though it had dropped, it would cover the hole in the corner. But there was also the hole by the door and the hole near the fireplace. And one could not scatter newspapers all over the room, or it would look as if the ceiling were leaking. He there­fore took the mat from his bedroom and put it over the hole near the door. As for the fireplace hole, it would have to remain. If it became too offensive he would sit on it.

  Thank the Lord, he possessed some flowers. It had been a blessed influence which prompted him that very afternoon to purchase six yellow roses. Very gracious and fragrant they were, too, and now that he placed them against the mirror on the mantelpiece they were no longer six, but twelve. Twelve yellow roses! There was nothing to be ashamed of there.

  Concerning the fire, there was nothing to be done. It was the same old fire, and that was an end of the matter. If allowed to burn too fiercely it emitted a curious odour, so that he turned it very low, and propitiated it by placing a small bowl of water in front – a hint he had learned from Mrs. Pleat, who assured him that a bowl of water ‘took away the fooms.’ He wished he had done something about the beastly fire before, because, after the manner of its kind, one of the white clay things had fallen out, so that one received the impression of a row of grinning, irregular teeth. Still, it was too late to alter.

  Everything seemed to be done now. He went into the bedroom to see if that was presentable. A pair of dumb-bells caught his eye. He seized those and secreted them under the bed. It would be ghastly if Julia perceived this secret sign of ‘heartiness.’ He also took his pyjamas, which were very plain and unpreten­tious, and stuffed them under the pillow. He then sponged his face, combed his hair, took out a clean handkerchief, lit the candles, and waited.

  ‘She is coming, my own, my sweet,

  Were it ever so airy a tread,

  My heart would hear her and beat,

  Were it earth in an earthy bed. . . .’

  Shamelessly he spoke the words aloud. Shamelessly, for were Maurice or Lord William aware of his affec­tion for Tennyson they would be provided with enough epigrams to last them for an entire season. Had not Lord William composed, for the benefit of an American motor merchant, an acid parody of this very poem, which began:

  ‘Come into the garden, Ford,

  For the great Rolls-Royce has flown’?

  But Lord William knew nothing of the affairs of the heart. Nothing. He did not know anything about passion. Well, did Brian himself?

  He caught sight of himself in the glass. His eyes were unnaturally bright; his face had a flush which was more than the flush of youth; his lips were parted.

  Did he not?

  Certain things must be left to the imagination of the reader. When two hearts are beating high, it seems almost cruel to linger over the sound of a car drawing up to a door, to chronicle the shedding of a satin cloak, to trace that long relentless crescendo by which the words of a lover’s pleading begin to glow more and more brightly, until they seemed to be ringed with fire. One must hurry, plunging straight into the dialogue which echoed in that room an hour later.

  ‘Why don’t you say you love me?’ he pleaded.

  ‘I’ve never said it to anybody.’

  ‘Can’t you say it now?’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Please, please. Can’t you?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Say it. Say it. Even if it doesn’t mean for ever, even if it’s only just for a minute or a second. Can’t you?’

  She drew him very close to her. Something seemed to be battering at a thick wall in her brain. She did not know whether to fight or surrender.

  ‘Darling,’ he repeated, ‘can’t you say it? Only once? If you said it, I’d feel I hadn’t come into this damnable world for nothing. I’d feel that I’d been made com­plete. I might be broken up again, smashed to pieces; I might be destroyed utterly – anything might happen – the end of the world even – but if I’d heard you just once whispering that to me, I’d feel that nothing else would matter afterwards. You’d have given me something that you could never take away again. I’d have that till I died. . . .’

  Oh, that hard wall of her brain! Batter, batter, batter! Each of his words was like a blow against the barrier that for so long had stood unassailed between her heart and her head. Not once had the words ‘I love you’ echoed across that barrier. Something had always stopped her from making the ultimate declara­tion. Perhaps a sense of the ridiculous, or a too keen knowledge of the mechanics of desire, or an inability to escape from the perpetual domination of self. She had never climbed over that wall into the limbo of folly, where self and sense are forgotten, where all the past and all the future are swept into a breathless present.

  And then something seemed to snap. She said, ‘I love you.’ And as she said it, for the first time she escaped from her fortress of self, jumping over the wall. Lying there with half-closed eyes, she seemed to hear a burst of music, to dip her hands in a riot of flowers. She was young, young, young. The air was rapturous with bird song. She wanted to dance. She drew Brian to her, laughing and crying.

  Nothing in the world now but love.

  It is an hour after midnight and Julia is back in her own room. She lies on her own bed, very still, looking at the ceiling. Her face is contorted into an expression which, had one seen her by chance, one might think almost ridiculous. Yet, in reality, the ex­pression is a little terrifying. The eyes are half-closed, as though they no longer wished to see the world; the face is very pale; her upper lip is curved over her teeth, as are sometimes the lips of the dead. The result is a hideous parody of a smile – a still, sneering smile.

  And, indeed, she was smiling. She was smiling at the lunacy of which she had shown herself capable. She had known her hour of love – (oh yes, it had been love) – and it had gone. It had left her in no way changed. She was precisely the same. She had clambered back over her wall, waving good-bye to the aforesaid limbo of folly, and here she was again, as she had always been, as she knew she would always be.

  The only change which had taken place was in her attitude to Brian. For a moment after she had left him she had felt nothing but an acute disgust – not for any conventional reason, either moral or physical, but because, for him, she had descended from the pinnacle which she had always occupied in the past. For a moment she had ceased to dominate. She had surrendered. And with Julia there was no question of the ‘sweet surrender’ beloved by lyric poets. It was a bitter surrender, in spite of herself, in spite of her inherited traditions and the acquired code of life which had guided her ever since she had seen the world as it was.

  Well, her disgust had been short-lived. Now it had turned to indifference. He had ceased to have any interest for her. In two brief hours he had become just – ‘an affair.’ He was a dear child, of course, but after this he would be a bore. Oh, such a bore. A crashing bore. Still, she would let him down lightly. Delicately, so that there would not be any disagreeable fuss.


  She sighed, and slowly rose to her feet. Well, that had been an experience. Decidedly an experience. She would never forget it – no, never. And for that reason she would still be quite charming to the young man who had provided her with it. But there must be no more scenes such as had occurred to-night. To-morrow she would go to Paris for a few weeks.

  Meanwhile, she went over to the telephone.

  ‘Is Miss Guest in?’ A pause. She tapped her fingers impatiently on the receiver.

  ‘Tanagra. Yes, it’s Julia. I’m so bored. What? It isn’t, it’s only half-past one. The Ambassadors goes on till three. Do be an angel. Will you? Oh, my dear! How marvellously sweet of you. And will you be terribly amusing? I’ve been so – so . . .’ She did not finish the sentence, but jerked the receiver down.

  Then she went to her dressing-table and slashed her lip-stick savagely across her mouth. Her underlip was trembling in the strangest way, and it was some time before she managed to make it look presentable.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Had not Brian been walking on air, in an unreal opalescent city where the men and women moved like ghosts, and had not Julia departed so suddenly to Paris, it is improbable that he would ever have accepted an invitation to lunch with the très connue Lady Hardcastle. As it was, when her phantom voice glided over the telephone a few days later, he murmured that he would be delighted. He did not visualize her as the grotesque figure who had caused him so proper a horror at Tanagra’s party. She, like all other humans, had become an abstraction.

  But if, after the supreme experience with Julia, his fellow-creatures faded into a grey obscurity, he himself became far more vivid and significant than ever before. With a single breath, the mists of adolescence (which still cling to some men, though they know it not, long into the twenties) had been scattered. He was a MAN. In his own eyes, at least, his figure was taller, his voice deeper, his bearing more authoritative.

  And, like an ancient picture which has been cleaned by patient hands, the world itself, as distinct from the people in it, became brighter and more clamorous. A sharper green painted the leaves of the plane tree out­side his window. Higher and more shrill sang the sparrows that spluttered in its branches. The uniform greys of London split and dissolved into multitudinous tints – from the silver pavements of St. James’ Street to the faded cedar hues of Bloomsbury, and the rusty blacks of the city. He had a sense of inanimate things reviving. Nelson from his column almost waved his hat as he sped through Trafalgar Square, and even Mr. Landseer’s painful lions were endowed with a dormant life, as though they might begin, if not to yawn and stretch, at least to emit a subterranean purr.

  But his lunch with Anne – as one really must call Lady Hardcastle – was poignantly to remind him that there were other people in the world besides Julia, people with whom one must reckon, and, if necessary, fight. Let us skim through the lunch, with its fat hors d’œuvres, its sleek sole, its immoral mousse of chicken, and faintly rude angels-on-horseback, until the time when:

  ‘The great thing in life,’ said Anne Hardcastle, pow­dering her nose in that generous post-prandial fashion to which we have latterly become accustomed, ‘is never to miss an experience.’

  Brian, as he surveyed her face, with its hunting eyes, its loose mouth, and its cheeks drawn tight by the manipulations of many surgeons, thought the number of ‘experiences’ which she must have missed could be counted on the fingers of one hand. However, he agreed with her.

  ‘That’s why I asked you to lunch,’ continued Anne. ‘I saw that we might be friends. And I think that’s the greatest thing of all in life – making friends, don’t you?’

  She had enunciated so many ‘Greatest Things About Life’ during their sumptuous meal that he was losing his sense of proportion. He felt that he had already sufficient material to compose an Anne Hardcastle Calendar with one ‘Greatest Thing About Life’ for every day of the year. Yet, again he agreed.

  He was wondering how he could decently escape. Luncheon had been like a dance of the seven veils, in which, with each course, his hostess had thrown aside one of the normal conventions – I had almost said decencies – which exist between men and women. She had begun by asking if he had ever been in love, gone rapidly through courtship, passion and divorce, and had ended up by asking, in a loud whisper, if he did not think the head-waiter had delicious eyes – a matter upon which he had not felt qualified to express an opinion.

  In fact, it will already be evident that no medical examination was necessary to convince even the most casual observer that Anne Hardcastle was one hundred per cent WOMAN. And as far as the domain of the Spirit was concerned, her mind was situated somewhere between Elinor Glyn and the Marble Arch.

  Perhaps her friends, after the modern habit, were a little prone to exaggerate the amatory qualities of her disposition, but she certainly afforded them ample excuse for doing so. She liked lying on sofas, waving handkerchiefs that were saturated with ‘Fleurs du Harem’ (at 500 francs the litre). She kept in her bed­room a row of little handbooks in French and American on the enticement of men, rather in the manner of a keen fisherman who cherishes a well-thumbed collec­tion of essays on flies and baits and tackle. And in every room of her many houses there were cupids. Cupids were painted on the ceiling. Cupids were inextricably woven into the carpets. Cupids pranced on the stair­cases. Even her bells, in Grosvenor Street, were formed from two cupids who kissed each other when one desired to summon the footman for a cocktail.

  There is a legend, that a young engaged couple who had been asked down to Hardcastle for a week-end, found themselves after dinner alone in a room that was full of cupids. They decided that they would pass the time by counting the cupids. And after they had counted sixty-nine they grew tired, and did something which they regretted for the rest of their lives. But why do people say such nasty things?

  The point of importance in this narrative, however, is that Anne Hardcastle at Tanagra’s party had fallen in love with Brian Elme. The whole thing is so fan­tastic that I tell it to you more from a sense of duty than from any hope of being believed. This erotic, sensual woman was ‘received’ everywhere. In a single season she was accustomed to traverse at least three miles of red carpet, and her curtsies to royalty, if measured en masse, would have probably been found equivalent to the deepest coal mine. And she fell in love, after her fashion, with a comparatively unknown, rather shabby, excessively decorative young journalist.

  Nothing new in that, you would say. One under­stands that all Argentine widows, for example, do the same thing. And one has read of many a pretty page who has drifted his long legs into the keen vision of many a naughty lady, of many a smiling knight who has thrown his trusted spear clattering into the limbo of past poverty to bask in the smiles of many hundred-percent women of the past. No. There is nothing new in the fact. The only thing that is new is the attitude. Anne’s attitude in her amours was regarded as quite normal, and really rather amusing. All of which arouses the gloomiest thoughts about that district of Mayfair in which we all have our habitation.

  ‘That’s what I think is so wonderful about life,’ she went on. ‘One can make so many friends. I never know when I am going to make a new one.’

  And, indeed, she never did. She might even make a new friend if her butcher happened to have a good taste in errand boys. But, of course, Brian did not know that.

  Anne drew on her gloves, and said, ‘Now we’ll go and do a little shopping.’ Brian had no desire to shop with her, but he failed to see a way out of the difficulty, because he was a polite young man.

  And so, once more, he said that he would be de­lighted.

  Now, Bond Street, whither Anne was whirling him, was in some senses sacred to Brian. Its shops seemed to him like theatres in each of which a different scene was set for his delectation. On winter evenings, when the curving thoroughfare was glittering with lights, he would stand before window after window, peopling these miniature stages with many and various puppets. Against a ba
ckcloth of flaming silks he brought from his mind black figures who gesticulated with the pas­sion of unearthly creatures. He caused dim and tiny sprites to dance over trays of diamonds, to balance the great emeralds in their frail fingers, to roll helter-skelter in a bowl of pearls. Out of ancient Chinese vases he evoked the ghostly heads of mandarins, and, so acute were his senses, that he seemed to see rising from a burner of twisted brass the tenuous snaky coils of smoke long-forgotten, to savour the scent of an incense which had drifted, an infinity ago, over the borders of the world.

  Thus, when Anne Hardcastle proposed a visit to Bond Street, instinctively he rebelled against the idea. Bond Street was his own street. He could share it with nobody. But it was too late to protest now. They were already in it.

  Anne’s plans were perfectly clear. There was, in fact, no reason why they should not be, for she had successfully operated them on many previous occasions. She would give him a gold cigarette-case, and then she would ask him down to Hardcastle. That usually worked, but occasionally she had to add a visit to the tailors as well. Most young men were content with the cigarette-case, but since the increased popularity of London with the Argentine brotherhood, or rather sisterhood, her visits to the tailors were becoming rather more frequent. Still, she did not mind. She was a nice, generous woman.

  They stopped outside a jeweller’s. Brian knew the shop well. It contained all those stones which have been used with such effect to brighten the pages of Dorian Gray, and the later work of Mr. Carl van Vechten. Round those stones he had sketched many delicate fancies. In dreams he had hung pearls about the necks of ideal maidens, and, if truth be told, had decked him­self in the crown of an Indian rajah (made in Amster­dam). To enter the shop was therefore an adventure.