"Very odd," said June, "when you come to think of it. He’s been here two months now and still hasn’t got himself a steady."
"Perhaps he doesn’t want a steady," said Claudia. "Let’s ask Prescott-Clark. She’s an expert on the Major."
"I haven’t got a clue," I said.
"But he’s an expert on you, Prescott-Clark," said Betty. "Do you know, the other day when you took the half day off he cast round for you and got at Sergeant Parsons. ‘Where is Miss P.? Why isn’t she at work?’ And Parsons said, ‘I let her go home, she wasn’t feeling well.’ And the Major said, ‘This must have been a great relief to her.’ The Sergeant went away blushing, I swear to God. And, Prescott-Clark, now you’ve blushed, too. Golly."
"He’s a beast," I said. "And you know I never make a fuss over my curses. Besides, he’s barking up the wrong tree, what with my blameless life, as you know. Besides, I had such a cold I shouldn’t have come in in the morning, either."
"Keep your shirt on, Prescott-Clark," said Claudia. "You go and tell him how blameless you are. But you’ve got to hand it to him, he’s awfully good at repartee."
"Mostly of the hand-me-down ready-made variety," I said.
We went on speculating as to why the Major had not got a woman friend. I thought it was because he did not wish to be distracted from his studies for the Royal College of Surgeons, but I kept quiet about it, just as I kept quiet about all our talks. When we came to learn the answer, I was as astonished as everyone else.
"Shame on you, Prescott-Clark, you really haven’t got a clue," Claudia a few days later. "Yap-yapping at him, day in, day out, God knows what drivel, and if I hadn’t had a hangover and gone screaming for an Alka-Seltzer, you’d still be in the dark, the lot of you. And all this time, here we were worrying if he really is a man, only because he looks like one. But now we’ve caught him with his pants down."
"Speak for yourself, Carter," I said.
"You pipe down, Prescott-Clark. You’re a washout," said Claudia. "The hat at the gate. That’s her."
For two nights running, upon leaving work, we had seen a young woman outside the wire netting, a few paces away from the guards at the main gate. We had noticed her mainly because of her elegance, which was underscored by her large, soft-brimmed summer hat. During those war years, ladies’ hats had fallen victim to the prevailing fashionable shabbiness, and were replaced, though in cold weather only, by turbans and woollen large-meshed snoods. Glancing from the hat downward, I had seen that the stranger wore a sky blue dress with inset panels of pleating, of the unfashionable and expensive kind favored by elderly and rich clergymen’s wives—a garment belying her youth and her tall, voluptuous figure. And glancing upward once more, I saw that she was a pretty blonde, with a tip-tilted nose in a long oval face. Her prettiness was of the kind that is entirely pleasing and entirely forgettable, and if she had appeared by the gate on the second evening without the hat, I might not have recognized her. Though standing alone, obviously waiting, and looking into space, she was smiling. I suspected that this was not so much due to happy thoughts as to her willingness to display her pretty teeth.
"She’s come down from London," said Claudia. "That’s why he’s been flitting Londonward all this time. And now he’s brought her down here to share his bed and board. He’s left his hotel and moved into a flat. And she’s flung her bonnet over quite an expensive windmill, never you fear; the flat’s in a house in St. James’s Square—superb situation, high living and low thinking. The Merry Widow knows exactly what it cost, too, because she did some of his ordering for him. And the woman in the hat’s a lady, because she called him once over the telephone while he was in the Brigadier General’s office, and, you know how it is, two words are enough and you know where you are. Not like with the Yanks, where you never can tell from the way they speak. And she’s called Constance Ray. Mrs. But then, over that I wouldn’t put my hand into the fire. Altogether, if you ask me, apart from the Mrs., the name is too good to be true."
"Sounds made up to me," said June.
"Rather eccentric of him, bringing her down here. Coals to Newcastle," said Betty.
"She is a Gainsborough type," I said.
"Harken to Prescott-Clark, standing up for the Major," said Claudia.
"Perhaps she’s an actress," said Betty. "What with that name, and not at all out of the top drawer, and it’s been the good old elocution lessons for her all the time."
"Never you fear, we’ll find out," said Claudia. But they never did find out.
For days, Sergeant Danielevski went about saying, "Have you seen the Major’s mistress? She’s got lovely big blue eyes," and he accompanied these words with a most suggestive mime, holding his cupped hands in front of his body and shaking them up and down as though weighing two outsize oranges. I joined in the laughter, experiencing a kind of relief, as one may feel relief when at last receiving the punishment with which one has been threatened for a long time.
Once more, I could not master myself and made a remark to the Major. He called me to him one day and threw on his desk a stack of snapshots, facedown, with a gesture of contempt, as though after having started on a game of cards he had found himself holding a bad hand. "Look at them," he said. "I just got these, sent from home."
I gathered them up and turned them over. I did not like being shown photographs "from home." I always found myself embarrassed when confronted with pictures of scraggy or sagging wives and overfed, grinning offspring, and I had learned from June and Betty to overcome this embarrassment and to say, "Now, it beats me how a ghastly man like you managed to hook himself such a divine wife and produce such angelic children."
But this time there was no need to brace myself. "What a beautiful woman," I said.
"Part of her profession. She used to be an actress," he said.
In another snapshot, immediately recognizable, like the winged lion on things Venetian, was the baby’s scowling face, stamped with the square jaw and square forehead. "How old is the little girl?" I asked.
"Three," said the Major.
"Really, Major," I said, "with a lovely wife like this, I cannot understand how you can even as much as look at another woman."
"I don’t look. So what the hell are you talking about?"
As I turned away and his laughter followed me, I thought how odious it was of him always to laugh at his own jokes. And yet I always came when he called, "Come here to me," and by now no one took the trouble anymore to remark that "Prescott-Clark and the Major get on like a house on fire." Sometimes it was related to me that he had been at a party with Constance Ray, and that they both had been very animated, and I was given descriptions of her dress. Once, I saw them at a dance, but only from afar; they were leaving as I arrived.
ONE DRIZZLY MORNING in the autumn, I slipped as I got out of the bus in front of the gate, fell on the mud-sodden fallen leaves, and grazed the heel of my hand. It did not bleed when I looked at it, but after I started work I saw that I had stained my coding slips. I went to Sergeant Parsons. "Better than having a torn stocking," I said, "what with clothes rationing being the way it is."
"I’ll clean it up for you," said the Sergeant.
"I thought you’d say you’d give me a pair of nylons," I remarked. "They do exist, don’t they? And is it really true that they last longer than silk?"
The Sergeant said, "The harder you work, the sooner the war will be won and the sooner you’ll find out, ma’am. Come along now and get it over with."
"Get over what?" asked the Major, who had just entered.
"I’m off to the slaughterhouse, euphemistically known as the ladies’ rest room," I said.
"Stop clutching your hand," said the Major. "Come over here to the window and show me."
"I’ll cut off the rough edges, sir," said the Sergeant, who had followed us, "and fix it up with iodine and a bandage."
"No," said the Major. "No iodine. With that skin of yours, you’ll get an eczema and no end of trouble. Iodine is all right
for the sheep and the cows and the horses. But you are too delicate. I won’t have it. Wash it with soap and cold water and let it dry in the air. Let her be, Sergeant."
When I was coming back from luncheon, Sergeant Parsons approached me. "You women are so stupid, you’ll believe anything. I just thought you’d like to know."
"How do you mean?" I asked.
"Telling you you are so delicate. Routine treatment is all right for others but not for you. Because you are so delicate. And you fall for it."
"He’s a surgeon," I said. "He should know."
"He knows, all right. He knows only too well what he is after," said the Sergeant. "And if you don’t, it’s about time you did. He’s broken you down so he’s only got to whistle and you come. And he won’t let you go. If I say a word, it’s always, ‘She’s our most brilliant coder, and even if she weren’t, what the hell, I’ve got to have her around, she does me good.’ But what good is he doing you? If I were you, I’d get myself moved. You needn’t raise a finger. I’ll fix it for you."
I did not speak.
"Look at it this way," said the Sergeant. "You are only twenty-four, aren’t you, and you are married?"
"Not fearfully, not frightfully," I said.
"I know," said the Sergeant, "but you want to think ahead. Maybe when the war is over you’ll want to go back to your husband."
"What’s all this got to do with the Major?" I said. "You go drown yourself in your iodine. You are barking up the wrong tree. He doesn’t . . . You know quite well he’s never even asked me out. He’s got other fish to fry. He’s got his mistress, with the big blue eyes. And a wife and child in God’s own country."
"He’s been after you from the very first minute he set foot in this office," said the Sergeant. "First, I thought it would blow over, but it hasn’t. Now you are in it up to your neck, and before long you’ll burn your boats. If I were in your shoes, I’d run for dear life."
I did not speak.
"Don’t say I didn’t warn you," he said.
"Charmed, I’m sure. Much obliged, Sergeant," I said.
It was after this—only a few days after, it must have been, because the blood crust on my hand had not yet fallen off— when the Major said to me, "I’d be very pleased if you’d come to dinner with us tonight. Constance—what the hell, you know my setup—she’ll be delighted to have you, and there’s a friend of mine, a colleague, just come over from the States, and he’s staying with us. I told her you are such good company."
"Thank you, Major, I’d love to come," I said.
"Then why do you look so sad about it?" he asked.
"I didn’t know it showed," I said.
"It does," he said. "It doesn’t matter what you say, I can always read you in your large brown eyes. Now, what is it?"
"It’s only—," I said. "Only that it makes me feel so ghastly respectable. Promoted to the position of the trusted family friend, like the maiden aunt. But I feel greatly honored, of course."
It was agreed that he would fetch me from my place at half past seven that evening, and when I started to explain how to find the house where I lived he cut me short, saying that he knew it anyway.
I did not tell anyone of the invitation, but my first thought was of Sergeant Parsons, and how ridiculously wrong he had been with his warning. To me, the invitation had been like a slap in the face.
It is not often in life that things turn out as one has expected them, but when I saw the Major’s flat it was exactly as I had pictured it beforehand; this was not remarkable, because I knew the square, and I knew that Bathdale, apart from its colleges, is famous as a retiring place for colonial servants. It was situated on the first floor, in the corner of the house of one of those Regency terraces whose pilasters counterfeiting Doric columns and gables give the town its make-believe air of Greek temples. Above these, incongruously, the Chinese-style green copper roofs curving upward over the narrow iron-railed balconies draw an ever-recurring pattern of Oriental fantasy across the eggshell white façades. The big drawing room had the customary three tall windows and stuccowork ceiling, and was furnished, as I had visualized, with easy chairs and settees whose ill-fitting loose covers of faded flowered cretonne partly concealed sagging springs and lumpy stuffing. There were banal ivory carvings, the cloisonné plaques, the brass Benares tray tables, and the dancing Krishna in bronze with which the army officers, the tea and rubber planters, and the civil servants who had once lived here recalled their former life in the Far East.
Whenever I enter a room, I can tell at a glance whether I am attractive to the men who are there, and when I saw the Captain, who stood by the fire, glass in hand, I was glad to feel that I pleased him. It would, I thought, provide me with a measure of consolation for being made to witness the Major’s loving ménage. The guest looked clever, restless, and dissatisfied—an uncomfortable person to be with. In his early thirties, about the same age as the Major, he was thin and narrow-faced, with black curling hair, small eyes, and a strongly jutting nose and chin. His deeply sunburned color proclaimed his recent arrival in England and gave him a perhaps spurious air of vigorous health.
"How do you do it? Where did you get this peach of a girl from?" he asked as soon as he had been presented to me. "Say, what kind of an office is this where she comes from?"
I did not pay much attention to their chaffing. It was along the same lines as, "How can a ghastly man like you get himself such a divine wife?" and as I sipped my drink of gin and lemon I thought what a pity it was that it was night and that the blackout boards had been fitted over the panes; I would have liked to stand by the window on a fair evening, looking at the sunset sky from perhaps the very spot that Beau Nash had done the same.
Constance came in. It was not her easy, beautiful smile that I saw first of all, nor the kind of dress she had on. It was her figure. She was certainly six months pregnant.
"How nice of you to have come, Eve, and at such short notice, too," she said, and I noticed that she, the stranger, called me Eve, when the Major had never done so, and I fell to wondering what he had told her about me. I also gave full praise to the Merry Widow’s judgment; she was genuinely well bred.
"It was awfully good of you to ask me," I said. "Simply thrilling nowadays to be asked to dinner, the cheese ration being what it is."
"I’m so glad, Eve, you didn’t say, ‘I hope you aren’t going to make anything special,’ " she cried. "Because when people say that, they expect you to do something special, and to trouble like mad."
The Major several times made hearty allusions to her state, laughing loudly. Addressing her, he would say, "Now, what will you have to drink, the two of you?" and, "Sit yourselves down, the two of you," and, "Let’s get up—shall I hoist you up with a crane?" Each time, she would first seek my eye, as though waiting for my approval, before joining in the laughter, and then say, radiantly, "Isn’t Calvin silly?" And while I forced myself to smile, too, my heart tightened each time I heard her pronounce his Christian name; I had never heard it spoken before.
We went into the dining room—narrow, ill lit, and chilly, despite two burning electric stoves. This, too, was furnished as expected, with the usual shield-back imitation Hepplewhite chairs and bowfront sideboards. It was hung with dilettante oils depicting Asian women in their native costume, and these provided the Major with further jokes about Constance’s condition, and the danger of her "taking fright."
The meal was lavish, by wartime standards. The fish was cooked with mushrooms and shrimps, both unrationed and expensive, and there was cold tinned turkey, which was a present from the Captain, and the American tinned fruit was served with those little domed cakes smothered in chocolate shavings that were the hallmark of Kunz on the Promenade, the best pastry cook in town.
After the meal, Constance went out to make the coffee. The Captain rose and, despite my offers to help, began to stack up the plates. "I’ll clear away," he said, "and you two go back to the fire. I’ll cough three times before I come into
the room."
We went to the drawing room, and the Major, after having put more coals on the fire, came and sat on the arm of my chair. "Sad again?" he asked.
"Not exactly," I said.
"Because of that remark?" he asked.
"Oh, rot," I said. "That was just silly and mauvais genre."
"Then what is on your mind?" he asked.
"Wondering what’s going to happen," I said.
"There are two possibilities," he remarked. "Either it’s going to be a boy or a girl. It isn’t twins."
"And what then?" I asked.
"Nothing," he said. "I suppose she’ll get herself a pram. What the hell, she’s got money of her own."
I did not speak.
He said, "What the hell, I didn’t want it to happen. But she was all set for it. And besides, what was done could have been undone. I offered it to her ten times over. It would have been child’s play, I have so many friends among my colleagues. But she wouldn’t hear of it. She wants to have it and she is going to have it, and I’ll leave her to it. She knows it. She knew it from the beginning."
"Dreadful," I said.
"No. It’s what she really wants."
"It’s dreadful just the same," I said, "and she is really and truly a sweet girl."
"Oh, what the hell. She’s sweet. All right, sure, she’s sweet," he said in a weary voice.
"She isn’t married?" I asked.
"There’s a husband floating about. English. He’s a major in India now. She’ll never go back to him. She was off him already before I met her, so I didn’t grab her and break up a happy home, if that’s what’s worrying you."
I remained silent.
"Have a drink," he said.
"Not just now."
"Come on, behave like a guest. You didn’t come here for the pleasure. Just a tiny drop. Do you know what the old lady said to the bishop when she went bathing in the sea? ‘Every little drop helps.’ "
I forced myself to laugh.
The Darts of Cupid: Stories Page 3
