Saturn Over the Water

by J. B. Priestley

  ‘I know I’ve disappointed you, Mr Bedford. No – don’t bother being polite about it – I know I have.’ She was nearly plastered by this time, her face slipping and goggle-eyed, but her mind was working. ‘But I’ll tell you something. If I don’t know what you’d like me to know, that’s because I can’t look where I ought to look. I was a good physicist’s wife – and once I taught physics myself – but what do we all do? We experiment with smaller and smaller bits of matter until there isn’t any and the laws don’t work any more and we don’t know where we are, except that we’re all living in terrible danger of annihilation. And then when something important happens to one of us, as it did to Frank, we find we’ve been looking the wrong way, but don’t know where else to look. We don’t know what’s happening to us and who’s doing it.’

  She’d let go of my hand and we were near the door now, ready to say good-bye. I mean the door of her room, not the one downstairs; she wasn’t risking that trip. But now she caught me mentally off-balance, and I did something that afterwards I thought very silly, though I must admit that I don’t know of any harm that came of it. ‘Now then,’ she said, ‘just before you go, tell me something. What about Joe Farne?’

  ‘He’s disappeared. At least, he’s no longer at the Institute but probably somewhere in Chile.’

  ‘So what happens now?’

  ‘I’m going to look for him.’ It slipped out before I’d time to check myself.

  ‘Don’t go to Chile first. Start at the Institute. And try to look the other way.’

  ‘What other way?’

  ‘I’ve just told you I don’t know,’ she said, angry with me, with herself, with everything. ‘Good luck – and good night!’

  So there I left her, a woman half-lost and half-angry, going to pieces in that horrible purple-madder and mauve room with all its sour still lifes, a woman who in another place and time might have had a husband and children and friends calling in the evening. She doesn’t come into this story again, so I might as well say now that when I finally came back, when the winter dark and rain had also returned to Belsize Park, I called at that house again. But she’d sold it to a Pakistani, and nobody knew where she’d gone.

  3

  Next morning, just after I’d heard that my B.O.A.C. passage to New York had been booked, a man called Sir Reginald Merlan-Smith rang me up to ask me to a dinner-party that very night. I didn’t know him but I’d heard about him because he collected pictures and had bought two of mine from the gallery that handles most of my work. This was his excuse for inviting me to dinner at such short notice. My pictures, he said, were about to be shipped overseas, together with a lot of his possessions, and he thought I’d like to see them again. This was clever, because in fact most painters like to take a look at old work, especially when it’s hanging on walls that have good pictures. But I didn’t believe him, though I pretended to when I accepted his invitation. I’d had a few invitations of this sort, from rich collectors, usually without much notice, and every time I’d felt that some man had dropped out and that I, a single man with a reputation of a sort, had been rushed in to fill the vacant place. This smooth invitation from Sir Reginald, who sounded a smooth type, was simply another of them; but I’d nothing fixed for this night, I could take some rich food and drink and perhaps a few fine bare shoulders if I hadn’t to pay for them; so I agreed to arrive in Hill Street, Mayfair, wearing a black tie, round about eight o’clock.

  So there I went, after another wearing day of running around, and though I felt a bit worn and this wasn’t my sort of company, I soon cheered up. This was partly because my pictures, a low-key interior and a Midland landscape that looked abstract and wasn’t, stood up to some very high-priced competition, Impressionists and Post-Impressionists and Mondrian, Klee, Ben Nicholson and so forth; and also because before the later guests arrived and dinner was finally announced, I’d downed three hefty martinis. Sir Reginald looked as smooth as he’d sounded on the telephone. He was about fifty and one of the new Top types, neither rugged nor fat but just the right size, weight, and finish, a fine job of massaging, barbering, tailoring, sandpapering and varnishing, with every new grey hair another touch of distinction; so that talking to him was like finding yourself in one of those liqueur whisky advertisements. He gave me the impression – and I’ve had it before from this type – that he kept a kind of pleasant emptiness, for you to play around in, well in front of what he really was, the hard place. He could buy my pictures but I wouldn’t have worked for him even if he’d offered me twenty thousand a year. He must have been claiming something like that off tax for expenses, if this dinner-party was any evidence. The long dining-room was Sheraton with some discreet modern additions; there were at least half-a-dozen minor masterpieces on the walls, including a Renoir you could have eaten with the caviare and smoked salmon; twelve of us sat down to dinner, and as I couldn’t see myself, I thought that in that candlelight and the subdued glow above the pictures we looked like the affluent society in full flower. We ate and drank the spoils of the world.

  I never really took in some of them. They were Brazilians and Argentinians, I think: ochre-faced men, women with faces like powdered buns and wearing too many diamonds. I sat between one of these women, whose French was as bad as mine, and Lady Something, who had come with her husband, Lord Something, and might have been his twin sister, both being tall and thin and underdone and having long sad noses. Lady Something only talked about a horse called Gipsy Lad, as far as I could gather. I was more interested in the two people sitting opposite us. I hadn’t met the man, because he’d been one of the last arrivals, but I couldn’t help looking at him. He had dead white hair, a beaky face, almost indian-yellow in that light, and eyes that didn’t seem to squint and yet weren’t in proper focus. He looked very important, but for what, I couldn’t guess.

  The woman sitting next to him I’d met before dinner, when those powerful martinis were circulating. She was Countess Nadia Slatina – from God knows where, but here in Hill Street, I thought, very much the girl friend. Perhaps she arrived to top off Sir Reginald’s perfection-package deal with the world. I know it’s out of fashion to describe anybody, so that we have whole long novels crowded with faceless people, but I can’t let Countess Nadia Slatina come into this story just with a couple of adjectives thrown at her. She was a dream puss, this one. She was the old original strange wicked lady from a far countree. She wasn’t at all lusciously sexy, the pêche Melba type; that would have been too easy. It wasn’t the flesh in sex but the devil in it that she suggested, one ruined spirit to another. Everything necessary was there, assisted by a dress of a toned-down aureolin shade, and a strange bronze necklace and ear-rings probably given to her by her great-aunt, a Roumanian sorceress; but the over-all appeal was to the imagination. She had soft grey hair, just for the hell of it, eyes of grey-green velvet, hollows below her nicely padded cheek-bones, a thin-lipped but wide and wicked mouth. She spoke rather slowly in a low seductive voice, and could ask for a match as if she was about to give you the key of her turret in the castle. Her face looked younger, even if her hair looked older, but I guessed her to be about thirty-five, that is, if she hadn’t lived on potions and philtres for about a thousand shameless years. Occasionally she looked across and gave me a little smile, taking my mind even further away from Lady Something’s Gipsy Lad. I’m not so susceptible, otherwise I wouldn’t have been still single at the age of thirty-seven, but after all the magnificent wine we’d been having too, I think if she’d beckoned me into the nearest empty room, and had offered herself as an alternative to this search for Joe Farne, I’d have broken all my promises. But she didn’t, of course – at least, not that night.

  Well, the women went, the brandy and cigars arrived, and Lord Something (I never did catch his name) talked to me about beef cattle prices. It was just after that, when we were all in the drawing-room, which had too many hot browns in it for my taste, that the not-coincidences began. The man who’d been sitting opposite
to me, beaky-face, white hair, eyes out of focus, came up and edged me into a corner. ‘We have not been introduced,’ he said, talking in a careful English-is-one-of-my-six-languages style, ‘but Nadia tells me you are an artist, Mr Bedford. I am Dr Magorious.’

  ‘Oh yes, I’ve heard about you,’ I said. I was babbling a bit after all that drink. ‘I know a man called Semple – and I think his brother was a patient of yours, wasn’t he?’

  ‘Semple?’ He gave it a little thought. ‘Yes, now I remember. Though I prefer not to remember patients, if possible, at this time of night, Mr Bedford.’ His right eye looked at me rather reproachfully while his left eye, just as pale but sterner, seemed to look round me or through me or into next week. The effect was anything but ridiculous, and I could imagine these eyes holding restless patients absolutely rigid. ‘Let us talk about your work, a much more agreeable topic. Do you travel a great deal in search of promising subjects?’

  I was about to start babbling again but managed somehow to stop myself. ‘No, I don’t. Very few painters do, these days. They find a place, a district, that suits them, then tend to stay there. A lot of travel is a hindrance rather than a help to a serious painter.’

  ‘I cannot imagine why,’ he said. This sounded snooty, and was meant to. He didn’t like me. I’m inclined to look too hot and bursting at the seams towards the end of this kind of evening, so any neat cool type like Dr Magorious might easily turn against me.

  ‘Too many new impressions,’ I said. Much too soon after all that wine and brandy, I accepted from the butler a whisky that would have been a generous quadruple in any pub. ‘No depth of relation between you and any particular bit of the world.’

  ‘You are not modern, then,’ said Dr Magorious, without any interest whatever. ‘You do not paint out of your inner life.’

  I nearly waved the hand that was holding the whisky. ‘Yes, I do. At least I try to do. I try to suggest the relation between it and the outer world, which provides the common ground with the spectator, a sign language, a bridge – ’

  But he interrupted me. ‘You do not look as if you would wish to discuss these problems. You have surprised me. Which is good for me, of course. Tell me something about this Semple who is the brother of my late patient.’

  ‘Oh – he’s just a fellow I know at the Arts Club – ’

  ‘And he told you I had treated his brother?’

  ‘I thought you preferred more agreeable topics,’ I said. It was a bit raw, but I didn’t want to answer his question, and anyhow he’d interrupted me. It made him fix me with his left eye, while his right, just missing me, glittered and danced with sudden anger. Fortunately for either his manners or mine, we were joined then by Nadia, the witch of Prague, the sorceress of Cracow. Dr Magorious gave her something between a large nod and a small bow, and marched off.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said to her. ‘We weren’t getting on very well, the doctor and I.’

  ‘He is a strange man, but very clever,’ she said. Then she rested a hand on my arm. ‘I bring a message to you from your host. Everyone will be going soon – it is one of those parties, not intimate, mostly for business – and he wishes to talk to you. But first there may be a man he has to see, do you understand?’

  ‘Yes, I do. I’ve had to see men sometimes, though not often.’

  ‘You are being satirical with me, you bad man. So. When everyone is going, please slip through that door over there – it leads into the library – and I will join you there, to talk to you until Sir Reginald has done with this stupid man. You will do this, Mr Bedford? You will not be kept long.’ Her enormous eyes shone like green lamps through a grey veil, and she pulled her lips in and forward to make a sketch of a cheeky face at me. I felt like kissing her there and then, and to hell with the usages of good society, but I got myself under control.

  ‘My dear Countess,’ I said, ‘it will be a pleasure.’ I might have been in a musical of Old Vienna.

  ‘I think so.’ She smiled at me. ‘But you must call me Nadia – everyone does.’ And she glided away, either to move the South Americans nearer the door or to stick dainty pins into wax images of Eleanor Roosevelt and Albert Schweitzer.

  All this is fairly important, though of course I didn’t know it was at the time, and that’s why I’m telling it in this funny-man style. No doubt I’m forcing and pressing a bit, trying to recapture the mood, which isn’t easy, not after all that happened afterwards. This is perhaps where I ought to make the point that, apart from that brief talk with my cousin Isabel, I wasn’t really taking this business seriously, even though poor Mrs Semple’s state of mind hadn’t been any joke. All the sudden preparations for distant travel were making me feel almost light-headed, and of course this evening’s sumptuous dining and wining, plus the Central European witchery, weren’t as yet making my head any heavier.

  After Lord and Lady Something had led the way out – perhaps Gipsy Lad was waiting up for them – I did what I’d been asked to do and slipped into the library. It was lined with books right up to the ceiling. The carpet and the leather in the chairs were a deep carmine. It was very quiet in there, and the lighting was restful. On a table were whisky, soda, lemonade, sandwiches. I didn’t really want another whisky and I certainly didn’t need any sandwiches, but I have never spent enough time with the rich to take arrangements of this kind for granted; I feel somebody’s gone to the trouble of putting the stuff out for me, so I can’t ignore it. I gave myself a whisky and ate a ham sandwich. Nothing happened. I drank half the whisky, then began on another sandwich.

  The wall opposite the door I’d used looked as if it was all books, but it wasn’t. A man came in that way. He was wearing a wide smile that vanished as soon as he took me in. He was a chunky man in his fifties, and I knew at once he was a Russian. When you see photographs of Russian leaders reviewing a thousand tanks, you catch sight of this man, or somebody exactly like him, towards the edge of the picture.

  ‘Hello,’ I said. ‘Have a sandwich.’

  ‘No, thank you,’ he said, looking more puzzled than annoyed.

  ‘My name’s Bedford.’

  That didn’t pull his name out of him. ‘You wait here for Sir Reginald Merlan-Smith?’

  ‘Not exactly.’ I finished my sandwich.

  He was still frowning over that when Nadia came in, through the wall of books as he had done. They talked hurriedly for a minute in what I took to be German, then he left the same way. She took a deep breath and turned to me. For a moment, half plastered though I was, I knew she saw me as just another irritating little problem, and it flashed into my mind then that I hadn’t had the right idea about her. By this time of course she had the witchery turned on again.

  ‘I’m not curious about him,’ I said. ‘But I’d like to know if I guessed right. He’s a Russian, isn’t he?’

  ‘Yes.’ She gave an impatient shrug. ‘You have a drink? Good! I think I will have some lemonade.’

  ‘Sorry!’ I poured some out for her. ‘Again, I’m not really curious. But what about those South Americans?’

  She shrugged them away too. ‘Sir Reginald has business interests in Argentina. He is going there quite soon, perhaps to live. Already he has a house there.’

  ‘Are you going too?’ I tried to make it sound casual.

  She looked at me for a moment, sorcery at work. ‘I may go for a little time. But you must not misunderstand. You think I am his mistress, don’t you?’

  ‘Well, I’ll tell you, Nadia. I did think so, but then when you got rid of that Russian and then looked at me, before you’d time to turn on your charm, you suddenly made me feel you were working and not being the girl friend.’

  ‘There are no girl friends here.’ She made a face. ‘He has other tastes – like so many of them.’

  That wasn’t deliberate but a slip, and, as I realised afterwards, a very careless bad slip. But even if I’d known then what advantage to take of it, I don’t think she’d have given me the chance.

  ‘Yes, I have
work to do,’ she said. She put her glass down and came over to me. ‘You are a man, I think – a real man.’

  ‘I hope so. But then there are plenty of us about, Nadia.’

  ‘No, not so many. Oh yes – where there is real work to do – but not in the London I know. You are not married – we found that out – but perhaps you have a mistress – girl friend – yes?’

  ‘Not at the moment.’

  ‘How sad for you!’

  And that is when I did what she intended me to do, I think now, right from the moment she made that slip. And if she wanted to make me feel giddy and forgetful, she couldn’t have made a better move. It was a long kiss, with everything there is to know about sex implied in it, and if we’d had the place to ourselves I’d have carried her off at once to the nearest bedroom. Even so, and even in the woozy state I was in, I knew it was just a sexual performance on a very high level, and not what that kind of kiss ought to be, something between persons. Thighs, arms, lips and tongues may have been there but Nadia, Countess Slatina, whoever she was, wasn’t really there, and, to do him justice, neither was Tim Bedford.

  ‘So. I was right about you.’ She had stepped back now, and had sent fingers flashing up to her hair and down her dress, putting everything in order like lightning. She was pretending to be more out of breath than she actually was. There was a glint of irony in the grey-green depths of her eyes. ‘You are staying in London?’