The Drowning People

by Richard Mason

  “Darling, you look fabulous,” she cooed, tweaking the lapel of my dinner jacket and reminding me with the subtlety for which she was famed that I had not yet complimented her on her dress.

  “So do you, Camilla,” I said feelingly, looking with frank pleasure at the swathe of tight white silk, like a second skin, which covered just the polite minimum and offset the gentle glow of her tan so admirably.

  “I bet you say that to all the girls,” she whispered slyly into my ear, but I was spared the inevitable “naughty boy” by our arrival at the center of a group I did not know, all the members of which seemed to be on terms of easy familiarity with each other. Hastily, for streams of guests were arriving, Camilla performed the introductions.

  The faces of the people to whom she introduced me are faded now. Their names have collided, blurred and finally commingled with the names of countless other drinks party guests with whom I have spoken for ten minutes and then never seen again. I remember black dresses and gleaming shirtfronts; curls; hopeful sideburns; occasional laborious attempts at disheveled Bohemian chic; monogrammed cuff links. These were the people my parents had educated me to know and whom it pleased me privately to despise. I have said that my mind at this age was beginning to take its first tentative steps towards independent thought; and these steps, naturally enough, were leading me away from the received ideas on which I had been brought up, away from the unquestioning observance of social form which an education in the 1950s had instilled in my parents. I now viewed such concepts with extreme, and to my mind enlightened, distaste.

  It had not always been thus; indeed even then (for all my superiority) I was conscious of looking much like my fellow guests and of making conversation much like theirs in accents just their own. This made me wonder, as the trill continued its endless tattoo in my head, if perhaps they were judging me as I was judging them. Perhaps this was a charade for us all; perhaps we each, individually, appreciated the absurdity of the ritual we were forced to act out; perhaps it was only collectively and outwardly that we submitted to it in such numbers and with such apparent willingness. In my superiority $$$ was not overly hopeful.

  One has such thoughts at that age. I had not yet learned the advantages of complete conformity, preferably unconscious, to a given code of behavior, or the benefits to be derived from the subjection of self to a social system designed to keep both people and feeling in check, unruffled in the smooth maintenance of social hypocrisy. You don’t kill for good manners. Had I never considered any system of values beyond that of the drawing room, I would certainly never have killed Sarah. But then Sarah deserved to die; and had I never strayed from the confines of polite morality, from the limits set by sermons preached in school chapels to tweed-suited audiences, I would never have been able to punish her as she deserved. Odious word, “punishment.”

  I little knew, as I stood at Camilla’s party that evening, how soon my eyes were to be opened to a truer reality, to an infinitely more varied and correspondingly more dangerous range of moral possibility than that to which I had hitherto been exposed. My mind was too obsessed by its habitual worries about how other people saw me and I saw them to see beyond the confines of its own social rebellion, which (because it was only ever stated privately or, very occasionally, in the ugliest of the scenes with my parents) was hardly rebellion at all. That evening I was preoccupied—as I have said—with the possibility that some amongst my fellow guests might despise me for the same reasons that I despised them; might think that I, too, talked only of holidays in the south of France, or of weekends in the country, or of parties in London that I had been to or pretended to have been to. And all the while I talked animatedly of someone’s villa in Biarritz, lacking the means, the courage, and perhaps even the inclination to give my criticism voice.

  Oh yes, it’s all flooding back now. The bundle of contradictions that passed, in my own mind, for self-knowledge: the desire to break from the mold but to prove to myself how admirably I could fit it if I chose; the formation of social theories I lacked the nerve ever to articulate and used only in the long struggle with my parents over my future; the blend of arrogance and humility which made me by turns delighted and appalled by my hypocrisy. I had, in those days, an ability to think and not to think; to convince myself that I was living when I was not; that I was feeling when I hardly knew what feeling was. I thought I knew everything: my own mind; my own opinions; my own values. I was smug in a way which cried out to be put to the test, though I had no idea that this was so; and because I did not know I was ripe for it, the test (when it came) was unexpected and its results disastrous.

  But that belongs to a later part of this story.

  I stood, that evening, as I say, talking of someone’s villa in Biarritz. I smiled, I drank the champagne cocktails, I discovered that I had been at school with someone’s brother and told an amusing (and not altogether kind) anecdote about his time there. Occasionally the high notes of Camilla’s conversation drifted towards me: the string of superlatives with which she greeted the arrival of each guest and gift; hasty introductions; loud exclamations over dresses. I was nearing the end of anything useful I could say (or invent to say) about villas in Biarritz when I felt her nudge my arm and push into the centre of the group a lean, rather pale young man, tall with floppy blond hair and small hands which belied his great height.

  “James, darling,” she said, addressing the entire group, “this is an old friend of yours.”

  I had never seen the man before in my life. But the complete assurance with which Camilla made this pronouncement encouraged me to think that I must have done and I racked my brains for his name.

  “Hello,” I said, shaking his hand warmly. It was moist.

  “Hello,” he said, a searching look in his eyes too. It occurred to me that neither of us knew the other. I said so to Camilla.

  “But you must, darling. You were at Oxford together. At the same college. Charlie’s also an Oriel man.”

  “I don’t think we were there at the same time,” I said.

  “No we weren’t,” said the increasingly uncomfortable Charlie.

  “Well then I see I’m going to have to introduce you,” groaned our hostess, as though the weight of the world had been placed on her shoulders while Atlas went to find himself a champagne cocktail. “James Farrell, Charlie Stanhope. Charlie Stanhope, James Farrell.” This was said very quickly, with much waving of her well-manicured hands. The rest of the group seemed to know Charlie well, and I had plenty of time to examine him while he submitted to the kisses of the women and the handshakes of the men.

  A week had passed since my meeting with Ella Harcourt in the park, and I had resigned myself to the fact that I would never see her again. Yet here, completely unexpectedly, was a link which might take me to her. She had recognized my socks because they were the socks that Charlie Stanhope wore, so she must know him; and if she knew him, he must know her and might, if prevailed upon, tell me how I could contact her. The thought that this might be a different Charlie Stanhope from the one she knew crossed my mind, but I was unwilling to think so ill of Fate and I dismissed the possibility of such a trick. Watching Charlie’s small hands grasping the shoulders of the women he bent to kiss, I felt a rush of barely containable excitement.

  When he was completely upright once more, I saw how very tall he was. Taller than I and if possible even more gangly, with hair the color and consistency of straw and pale, watery blue eyes. A large, aquiline nose sat awkwardly on his gentle face; and I could tell by the strangled movements of his Adam’s apple that his collar was too tight. I considered my options deliberately, methodically, delighted by this unexpected opportunity but cautious of it too. I decided to establish the groundwork of acquaintance before probing him for details of his friends; and so I did not renew my conversation about French villas but turned instead to Charlie and began the conversation which Camilla had doubtless intended that we should have.

  “How did you find Oxford?” I asked, p
olitely.

  And Charlie, with equal politeness, began a tried-and-tested response to a tried-and-tested question, thinking no doubt of something else as he spoke to me. His replies to my questions suggested a familiarity born of repeated practice; and in an understood progression we moved from college to course to general university life, his elegant narrative punctuated occasionally by well-mannered promptings from me. But his anecdotes belied the smooth delivery of their accounts and were, I noticed with something like relief, unremarkable. Charlie Stanhope had done all the things expected of an undergraduate enjoying the best days of his life: conscientiously he had jumped into the river on May Morning; conscientiously he had made the Survivors’ photograph at his last Oriel Ball; conscientiously he had come away with a 2:1. Conscientiously, with the faintly bored good manners of someone overused to such conversations, he described each incident to me. Now he was working at the family bank and living in Fulham. He played tennis at the Hurlingham Club; he went to Ascot on Ladies’ Day with his grandmother; he had recently become engaged. He nodded his thanks at my congratulations. “A splendid girl,” he said absently. “Splendid. But don’t say a word to anyone. We haven’t made it official yet.”

  I warmed to Charlie as he spoke, with the warmth that comes from dissipated hostility; for if Ella Harcourt’s troubles involved another man, as I suspected they did, they did not involve him. Though I knew nothing of Ella beyond what she had said in the park, and though I had no way of knowing whether I would ever see her again, I knew enough to know that someone as blandly unobjectionable as Charlie Stanhope could have no hold over her. He was not a potential rival; and as I decided this with increasing certainty I began to warm towards the innocuous, obviously bored young man who spoke with such practiced ease at my side.

  With dismissive nonchalance I asked him, once the topics of university and career were exhausted, whether he happened to know anyone by the name of Ella Harcourt.

  “I know her well,” he said, looking down at me through white, almost invisible lashes. And since he did not seem disposed to say anything else, I asked him how long he had known her.

  “Oh, years,” he said.

  “Really?” I paused, wondering how to phrase my next question.

  “Yes.” His small hand reached towards a passing tray for another champagne cocktail.

  “You wouldn’t happen to know how I could contact her, would you?” I decided eventually that the direct approach would be the least awkward one.

  He raised a quizzical eyebrow at me.

  “You see,” I continued, feeling myself about to lie and not quite sure why, “I have something of hers. She left it at a party we were at together last week. A bag. I wanted to return it.”

  “How kind of you,” he said. “But why don’t you arrange its return now?” And I followed his glance to the door, through which Ella was just entering.

  I can see her quite clearly: standing under the heavy gaze of a patrician Boardman ancestor, smiling at Camilla but not looking at her. She is wearing the dress I first saw her in; or no, it can’t be quite the same one, because I can see her knees and the other dress was long. It is, at any rate, black with tiny straps. There is a gauzy scarf tied tight around her throat and knotted at the nape of her neck, from where it falls in two thin strands down her back. The scarf is cream, and makes her look pale although her cheeks are glowing. She is shorter than Camilla and not as immediately pretty. I wonder suddenly what the hollow under her collarbone would feel like to touch. I can see Camilla taking her present and deliberating for a moment over where to put it on the table already over-heaped with gifts. She eventually elects the uppermost summit, where Ella’s package balances because it is so small. Its wrapping paper is brown; it is tied with a gold, gauzy bow; I wonder what it is.

  “I’ll tell her about it, if you like.” Charlie’s voice, insistent in a way I had not yet heard it, broke through the delicious chill of my excitement. Already he was moving through the crowd in Ella’s direction. “The bag I mean,” he called out as he disappeared.

  “It’s all right,” I muttered, hoping that my lie, my unnecessary lie, would not be discovered; but other thoughts crowded my head and before I could say anything further he was gone. Through the crush of people I walked slowly towards Ella, brushing against elbows and shoulders, smiling my apologies; I watched Charlie tap her on the back and saw her turn, smile and kiss him; I watched them both move out of the flow of arriving guests and altered my course accordingly.

  “Hello Ella,” I said when I was finally standing behind her. Hearing her name she turned and seeing me, smiled. It was an awkward smile, its awkwardness expertly concealed; clearly she was surprised.

  “Hello James. How unexpected.”

  “Isn’t it?” I said.

  “Absolutely.”

  “For me too.”

  For a moment we looked at each other, she trying to remember precisely what she had said to the stranger she had never thought to see again, I taking in every detail of her delicately boned face: the straight parting of her short, rather boyish blond hair; the blue rings still under her eyes; the glow of her cheeks; the vividness of her green eyes. It was she who remembered her manners first.

  “You remember we talked of Charles Stanhope,” she said.

  I nodded, enjoying Charlie’s slightly mystified look. He was standing slightly behind her as she faced me.

  “Well here he is.” She turned half round to him so that she was standing between us. “Charlie, I want you to meet a friend of mine, James Farrell. He was at Oriel, too, though a little after your time I think.” The lilt of her voice was music to my ears.

  Charles smiled at me, slightly uncertain. “We know each other already,” he said. “We’ve been talking for the last hour, while Your Ladyship has been frizzing her hair to make sure she’s fashionably late for the party.” He gave Ella’s shoulders an affectionate tweak. “James here has something to return to you.”

  Ella looked at me as Charles continued.

  “A bag,” he said, “which that pretty little head of yours forgot to take home from some party last week.”

  I met the look of her unflinching eyes, trying not to blush. I saw her expression change from surprise to comprehension, from comprehension to—I thought—a slight mischievousness. “Yes,” she said eventually, eyes sparkling, “how silly of me. But you know how forgetful I can be.”

  “Don’t I just,” said Charlie, smiling.

  Ella turned to him. “Would you be a dear and get me some champagne? No brandy in it, please. I can’t bear the stuff.” Charlie nodded and disappeared obligingly. Together we followed his blond head bobbing through the crowds, a good half foot over everyone else’s.

  “So, James. We meet again.”

  I nodded. “Thank you for sparing me just then.”

  “That’s all right. I’m rather flattered, as a matter of fact. And I’m glad to see that you have more audacity than you showed the first time we met.”

  “Is lying so audacious?”

  “Lying to Charlie for information about me is. I applaud you.”

  We smiled at each other.

  “How are you?” I asked eventually.

  “Oh, much the same as when I saw you last. Nothing has changed. A different dress, new makeup, new shoes. Unfortunately problems are more difficult to solve than questions of wardrobe or lipstick.”

  “So the problem remains, does it? The one you wouldn’t tell me about?”

  “You are forthright tonight, aren’t you?”

  But before I could answer, Charlie had returned with a glass of champagne for Ella and a tumbler of orange juice for himself. “Driving,” he said to me as he raised it. Beaming, he surveyed the room and we heard a voice begin to sing “Happy Birthday.” Soon everyone had joined in a spirited chorus, and the lights dimmed as a large, white birthday cake with twenty-one candles was rolled in on a tray.

  Camilla, in the middle of the room, blushed becomingly.


  “Isn’t she miraculous?” whispered Ella in my ear.

  CHAPTER 3

  THE ARRIVAL AND DISTRIBUTION of the birthday cake took up the next half hour or so, and I lost sight of Ella while the guests separated into those who intended to make a night of it and those (very much in the minority) who would use this as their opportunity to leave. She had disappeared from my side before the end of the singing; Charles I could see in the distance, actively procuring a slice of creamy sponge cake. I found myself talking once more to the girl with the villa in Biarritz, whom I suspected of toying with me in the hope that I would make a play for an invitation. I took a perverse pleasure in doing nothing of the kind.

  It was not until I had a slice of birthday cake in my hand and was telling Camilla what a lovely party it was that I saw Ella, standing alone, looking out over the sea of bodies. At whom? For whom? For me perhaps. It was small encouragement, but it was enough; and I disengaged myself and made my way to the small recess in which she was standing. It was lined with books, never read, whose rich red spines made her pale in the half-light of the alcove.

  “Hi, James,” she said at my approach.

  “Hello.”

  In another room music had started, loud and monotonous. We stood together for a moment watching people move off in search of the sound. I saw the girl with the villa in Biarritz talking distractedly into her mobile phone.

  “I would give a lot to know what’s going on in all those minds out there,” Ella said suddenly, not facing me but continuing to stare out at the room, dense with dinner jackets and skimpy dresses. “If, of course, there are any. A possibility which the behavior of their owners makes me doubt.”

  This so closely mirrored the spirit of my own thoughts earlier that I was taken aback. It also confirmed what I had spent this and other evenings worrying about: that I was not alone in my criticism of this world of heavy social ritual and display, and that I myself was not immune from the censure I so liberally dealt out to others in the privacy of my own mind. It was not a comforting thought.