‘So-so.’
‘I think you were having a great success.’
‘Don’t be silly,’ I said, with an ungracious fretfulness.
Iris eddied down upon us. ‘Christie, you sly old thing! Quite the most attractive man positively chasing you round the room! I believe it’s a plot.’
‘A plot to do what?’ Keith enquired.
‘Oh, a plot to do—to do anything! You don’t know Christie. She’s deep.’
‘Does anyone know who he is?’ I asked.
‘I could find out,’ said Victor. ‘I know Mrs. Patton a bit. He seems to be with her.’
‘And he asked you for the supper-dance! I heard him! Christie, you are having a triumph.’ Iris spoke with the wonderment she might have displayed had all the women taken a fancy simultaneously to Cyrano de Bergerac.
‘Well, I couldn’t,’ I said quickly.
‘Oh, you coot!’ she exclaimed. Entirely generous in some ways, she really hated me to miss any chance that came my way, provided it was not a chance which she felt to be hers by rights. ‘Why ever not?’
‘I promised it to Keith.’
He looked at me sharply. For a moment I thought he would tell me that there had been no promise; but instead he said gently, ‘It would have been all right.’
‘But I wanted the supper-dance with you,’ I told him.
It was easy then almost to mean what I said; it was easy to be kind. Yet during that long, over-creamed, over-sweetened supper, sitting in his quiet company while Iris and Victor flirted more and more noisily as time went on, paddling their hands upon each other, sibilantly whispering, going into fountain-jets of that peculiar, tinkling laughter which one always suspects is directed against oneself, I grew more and more irritable, found it harder to take comfort in the mere fact of behaving well. Seated, his stunted legs concealed by the table, Keith seemed less of an object of pity. I tried to concentrate upon the beauty of his face and the stillness suffering had at last brought to it. Surely he had found his own kind of happiness? Hadn’t I been too sensitive on his account? Mightn’t I have thrown away a lifetime (again that lifetime, that nut of crystal) for the sake of offering him a reassurance he did not need? These thoughts were itching at me, driving me into a new frenzy of resentment, when he said suddenly, ‘Don’t think I don’t notice how good you are. I shan’t forget that supper-dance, Christine.’
I told him I was not in the least good, meaning exactly what I said, but giving my words a self-flattering inflection of insincerity.
He paid no attention. ‘I shan’t try to make another date with you; I never do, with people. But if you would ever like to have lunch with me in London, or dinner, perhaps you could just let Victor know. And I would arrange it.’
I saw Mrs. Patton coming across the room to us in response to Victor’s wave. The man walked perchingly behind her, aloof, hands in his pockets. Victor introduced us to her.
‘I’m so glad you’ve come! It’s quite a jolly little function, isn’t it? Everybody’s so friendly with each other. This is my cousin, Ned Skelton.’ She drew him forward. He nodded to each of us. ‘Ned has to be dragged off to these frivolities,’ she added, with a twinkling glance and a tap on his shoulder. ‘He’s a man’s man—brrr! Poona and all that. Ha-ha-ha?’ She had an odd laugh, shaped like a rhetorical question.
‘Not really Poona!’ Iris exclaimed, leaning forward across the table, so that her blue bodice was rucked up like petals about the tender small line of her breasts. ‘How too awfully “What-what”!’
Only Iris could be so silly and appear so charming; but he did not show much interest.
He told us he had been for a short time in the regular army and had spent a few months in India.
‘Oh, you could have brought me a baby elephant to add to my collection! If only I’d known!’
He observed that there was a heavy customs duty on elephants. He looked at his watch, turned to Mrs. Patton and told her he must be going if he were going to catch the last tube.
‘Now you just sit down with us, both of you,’ Iris ordered, ‘and Keith shall run you home in his car—you wouldn’t mind, would you, Keith? The night’s still young.’
‘Nevertheless, I have to go to work in the morning,’ Ned replied. All this time he had not looked at me once. I felt desperate and bitterly cold. ‘If you’ll excuse me—’
He said good night to us all, then, as if it were an afterthought, turned to me. ‘I’ll be seeing you again, I hope. In fact, I’m sure of it.’
‘Christie,’ Iris exploded when he had gone, ‘I told you it was a conquest! I never saw anything like it. Now I’ll bet you’ve made Keith jealous!’
In a second even she realised what she had said. She coloured very slightly and briefly, no more than if she had passed by a pane of pink-stained glass when the sun was piercing it. ‘Oh well,’ she added, with no meaning but to bring the conversation to an end.
Keith said, ‘Of course I’m jealous; who would not be?’ and we went into the ballroom to dance again in a world that was a desert. Keith made only one more remark that evening which was not a social commonplace. He said, not even mentioning a name, ‘He is what one might call a graceful boor; don’t you think so?’
At midnight he drove us home. He took Iris to her door first, where she bestowed upon Victor the customary goodnight kiss, shrinking and laughing as she gave it, as if it were an unusual experience to her. Then she kissed me fondly, flowerily, her lips open upon my cheek; moved them up to my ear and murmured, ‘So it did turn out all right after all, didn’t it?’
‘Don’t be silly. It didn’t mean anything.’
‘Ned Skelton I’m talking about!’
‘So am I.’
‘But you’ve forgiven me—?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘For the other thing? It wasn’t my fault?’
‘What are you two conspiring about?’ Victor demanded with false joviality. ‘We’re the world’s workers. Our beds are calling us.’ He had had his kiss, and the interest of the evening had departed for him.
With a shout and a wave to Iris, we drove away again. When we came to my home, where, of course, Aunt Emilie’s light was still burning and cocoa awaiting me, Keith got out of the car and went with me up the steps. He thanked me for the evening. ‘It was a happy one for me.’
If he had been anyone else he would have kissed me, this kiss being considered as part of such an evening’s routine; he simply shook hands. So I leaned forward and kissed him, without embarrassment and without the blemish of self-approval—because he was kind, and I liked him, and I wanted to kiss him as a friend.
I never saw him again.
Chapter Nine
The succeeding weeks remain in my memory not as a string of pictured moments run together like a film strip but as a faint-coloured atmosphere; a greyness cocooning all manner of hopes, desires, desperations and preposterous fantasies. I ran to the hall in search of a letter I never expected to receive; even a knock at the door would shock me into a new expectation. Every day I dressed with the care of a girl awaiting her bridegroom. If he came he should find me as perfect as I was able to be. Every night I lay down in the belief and unbelief that something might happen tomorrow.
I was genuinely in love.
But the very young cannot love for long with no sort of stimulus. Any kind of stimulus will do—a glimpse of the one who is loved from the top of a bus, the mention of his name by a casual friend, even his surname displayed by chance on a billboard, a shop front. Had I ever heard at that time of Henry VIII’s Poet Laureate I should have read his poems with subjective passion, but I had not. For me there was nothing at all. I had not seen Iris; was, in fact, avoiding her. I met Victor once in Piccadilly and mentioned Ned Skelton to him; but he had seen and heard nothing of him, he said, nor even of Mrs
. Patton, who had gone to Switzerland for the spring.
So, imperceptibly, the agony lessened into an ache, and suddenly even the ache was gone. I was lonely; I even caught myself regretting Leslie; but I was well again, and my father and Emilie showed obvious relief in seeing me look less peaky.
I ceased to regret Leslie, however, one Saturday evening in May when he called upon me without warning. When I opened the door I found him posed nonchalantly on the step, wearing a new grey suit of cardboard stiffness, a peculiarly small bowler hat and, to my repelled amazement, his brown and white shoes.
I recognised them at once for what they were: a badge of emancipation from my thrall. When we were sweethearts I had flatly refused to be seen in his company until he abandoned them, and reluctantly he had given way. He had loved those shoes. They had seemed to him the essence of careless chic. Now he was flaunting them again, and the sight of them quite distracted my attention even from the remarkable hat.
‘I won’t come in, my dear,’ said Leslie at once, though I had not yet had time to invite him. ‘I just thought I’d look in on passing for old times’ sake. How is the world with you?’
I replied that it was quite all right.
‘I’m starting a new job in the City on Monday,’ he informed me. ‘In linoleum.’ I had a pleasing vision of Leslie clad in this product. ‘Actually, Lucette—that’s a girl I know—suggested it. I merely applied, and tout va bien.’
He had also, I noticed, resumed his French phrases, which I had also deprecated on the grounds that he always used them wrongly.
I congratulated him.
‘I thought, on the threshold of a new career, as it were’— he smiled, to show me the phrase was merely a mock pomposity—‘that I’d like to be sure there were no hard feelings. You mustn’t think too badly of me,’ he added surprisingly.
‘But I don’t. Why should I?’
‘It was grand while it lasted. But I shouldn’t have been the right man for you. I’m a bit of a philanderer, my dear; you need a steadier chap.’
I felt happier, my last trace of guilt vanishing away. Leslie had convinced himself that it was he who had brought our affair to an end, and I was content that he should have it so.
‘Perhaps I do,’ I agreed.
‘Lucette isn’t like you; she’s a little flighty. My mater thinks she’s a bit of a butterfly. But pour le moment . . .’ His gaze wandered away to the spire of St. Barnabas’ Church, grey as clay against a sky of Italian blue, a sky burnished by the promise of a hot day tomorrow. It seemed to exalt his thoughts, for he added, ‘And there are other things in life but love. Serious things.’
I agreed, and again wished him luck.
‘Well-p!’ said Leslie—the monosyllable of people who think they ought to go and are reluctant to do so, or of people who wish to speed the departure of others. He held out his hand and I shook it. ‘Vaya con Dios,’ he added, with considerable effect, and, raising the little bowler, which in the stress of emotion he had forgotten to raise on greeting me, bolted down the steps in the direction of Battersea Rise and had soon disappeared into the sunset that blazed behind the minarets of St. Mark’s and the Masonic School.
I went back into the house, free and cheerful, to find my Aunt Emilie engaged in one of her anniversary hypotheses.
‘Just think,’ she said to my father, as she stood knife in hand over an ox-tongue, like an abstracted Judith unable to keep her mind on Holofernes, ‘if your father had lived he would have been a hundred and two today.’ As always, we accepted this in silence as respectful, as marvelling, as if my grandfather had actually performed the feat.
‘And your mother,’ she added, ‘would have been ninety-three.’ This, however, seemed an anticlimax even to Emilie, and she summoned us both to supper.
‘Who were you talking to just now?’ my father asked me.
‘Leslie. He just looked in on his way somewhere else.’
‘I hope that’s not starting again.’
‘Certainly not.’
‘North Country people would call your Leslie gormless, I believe.’
‘He was always gentlemanly,’ Emilie put in timidly; Leslie had been nice to her, had even teased her a little.
‘What an atrocious phrase!’ my father exclaimed. ‘If anyone called me gentlemanly I should cut my bloody throat.’ He was in one of his racy moods; they seized him whenever his mind wandered back to a brief spell in Central Africa, where his government job had once taken him, but which poor health had forced him to quit. They had been great days of whisky and poker. Some of the men (not he) had kept native girls. They called them, he had told me in a moment of forgetting his audience, ‘black velvet’. I was sorry for him, guessing that the unusual heat of the day had made him restless and reminiscent.
I said, knowing occasional cheekiness amused him, ‘I don’t think anyone would, if they heard you say that.’
‘Now, now, Christine,’ protested Emilie, shocked to the marrow herself but unswervingly loyal to him, ‘your father’s a man.’
‘Am I?’ he said sadly. He added, an apparent non sequitur, ‘I wish I’d brought back a parrot.’
And indeed there seemed to be a becalming of our days, of my father’s as well as mine. Emilie’s, of course, were permanently becalmed, and she was happy. We lived together through that hot summer, at peace and utterly disinterested in one another. The boys and girls came in to dance and to eat bread-pudding. There were the usual mild flirtations. Forgiving Iris, I invited her round again, though she could only come on Sunday nights, as she was ‘working’—she was one of six dancers in a cabaret. She took a young man away from my friend Caroline Farmer and Caroline, in pique, married at the age of eighteen someone she did not love and who was to desert her a few years later. Otherwise there was no incident until, in September, my training came to an end and I started out to earn my own living.
Chapter Ten
The training college found me a post as assistant secretary (an agreeable title, borrowing a degree of grandeur from association with the Civil Service) in the West End office of a travel agency, at a salary of two pounds a week. This was as near as I could have hoped to get to my mother’s dream of me as a ‘social secretary’ or ‘receptionist’; for the only purely commercial business that we did was cashing letters of credit. Most of the work was concerned with making travel arrangements for our customers, showing them around London and executing any small commissions they might have for us.
Mr. Fawcett, the manager, was a large, gentle, sloe-eyed, shambling man with distinguished social connections in Europe and America and a family of four shiftless sons, who were all doing badly in some professional capacity or another. This gave him an air of desperate conscientiousness which impressed clients, for they could not know that it sprang simply from personal worry.
The assistant manager, Mr. Baynard, was one of those young men who wear the promise of age seamed into their cheeks; he was small, brisk and seemed permanently contemptuous. I disliked him at once, for on my very first day in Waterloo Place he robbed me of my fine title and labelled me, conclusively, the ‘Junior’. Mr. Fawcett’s secretary, Miss Rosoman, was a beautiful Jewess in her full flowering; she had the ephemeral, perilous wonder of a rose only just bearing the weight of its petals; a rose which, at any moment, at the freak of a cold wind, will be merely a bald and dusty fruit on a dry stem. She was a shrewd, efficient girl, generous-minded under an apparent aloofness and ‘devil-may-care’. She had been with Mr. Fawcett during his years with an English agency, and he had retained her for this job only after an oblique and bitter tussle with our office in America which had been uneasy about the anti-Semitism of some of its clients.
For the rest there was an office girl, Miss Cleek, hard-working, timid and peaky, and Hatton the messenger, a big man with an ugly face and beautiful taut body, who dashed around in peaked
cap and braided coat and followed like a private detective upon the tail of Miss Rosoman and myself if ever we went to the rooms of a male client to deal with his private correspondence.
‘For,’ said Mr. Fawcett, with his look of intense anxiety, ‘I am responsible for you both to your parents. People are, for the most part,’ he gasped, ‘—ah, more or less gentlemen; but there is always the bad type. The—ah—throw-out of the litter. Your parents need have no fear.’
This conscientious policing seemed to us both rather unnecessary. Miss Rosoman had no parents, and my father would never have wasted on me a moment’s worry; but the Fawcett Plan, as we called it, was rigorously carried out, and we never emerged from a private suite in Claridge’s, the Berkeley or Brown’s without seeing, at the end of the corridor, a guardsmanlike shadow we recognised as Hatton.
I settled down quickly and agreeably enough, realised sensibly that I must resign myself to detesting Mr. Baynard with the same unemphatic and incurable detestation I should always have for spiders and east winds, and had no particular trouble with anything but the calculating machine. As a general rule, dollars were converted into pounds, and letters of credit cashed, by Mr. Baynard or Miss Rosoman; but on the occasions when they both happened to be out the duty fell to me. The calculating machine was bought mainly for my benefit, as everyone else, including Hatton, could do the sums as rapidly on the edge of a date pad. I, however, had the singular gift of making the machine provide me with wrong solutions. For I had no mathematical sense whatsoever. The numbers the machine turned up were usually correct enough. The snag was that it was my duty to put the decimal point in the right place; and I had not the sort of mind which perceives at once that $750 converted at a rate of $4.35 to the pound is more likely to yield a three-figure than a two or four-figure result. Time after time I handed out preposterous and meaningless sums to clients; time after time they smilingly corrected me, and one or two, seeing my despairing flurry, would work out the sum for themselves or lean across the counter and run it up (almost like a piece of sewing) on the little machine.
An Impossible Marriage Page 6
