The Road from the Monument

by Storm Jameson

  He was beginning to fall asleep again, and he heard the light tapping. The anguish returned with it. He pulled himself up in bed — and realised that the sound was in the room with him: before he lay down he had opened a window, and a breeze had sprung up which came in gusts and when it came sent the cord of the blind knocking sharply against the glass. For a second, relief held him rigid. He reflected that if he made a move of some sort he would shake his dream off for good: he got up, went to the window and dealt with the cord, knotting it out of reach of the draught.

  He looked out. The young negress had gone.

  He was astonished to see that the Grosvenor pent-houses were still lit up, floating on the darkness. As he watched they vanished, snuffed out; the light at the top of the crane was left alone in the dark sky. This meant that it was exactly midnight.

  Did all that happen in a few minutes? he thought. My God, how many more hours of this night are there?

  Chapter Eight

  At this same moment, unable to sleep, Lambert Corry began cautiously to push sheet and blanket from him: taking infinite care not to disturb his wife lying with an arm in his half of the bed, he got up. He stood for a moment, holding his breath. Penny’s gentle snoring went placidly on: he crept across the room, opened and closed the door with the same stealthy patience, and went into the room he spoke of as his study, and more often used as a dressing-room. It was at the front of the house and faced the canal. Pulling back a curtain, he stared at the water, gleaming like a blacker vein running parallel to the black road.

  As he stood there the restlessness that had kept him from sleeping clawed him. He did not understand it, he did not understand himself, and he had a confused feeling that he must take steps to shore up in him something that was giving way, before it could crush him. But what was it? What had happened? Nothing. Nothing out of the ordinary.

  The evening that lay behind him had been much like other Thursdays — indeed, in some ways an unusually successful evening. Arbor had not come, he was out of town, but they had had, together with three guests from what Penny called ‘our usuals’, young Spanton, and a man who had never been to the house before. His name — when Penny said, ‘ ‘I met Cecil Cowley this afternoon and asked him to dine on Thursday’ — had given Lambert what his mother used to call a turn, reminding him of the existence, hidden away in a dark corner of his memory and dying there, of a young man able to suffer scalding agonies of shame when he was forced to show himself in company with a Mrs. Marjorie Benham-Smith. Would Cowley remember that long-ago evening?… Apparently he didn’t. He himself, in twenty-eight — was it? — years, had buried a young lively bully in a gross weight of flesh and become part of the literary establishment, lifting his feet with the grace of a circus elephant on a stool. Lambert watched him with a half amused, half excited satisfaction. Sitting on Penny’s right, he ate for four, scarcely opening his mouth except to push into it enormous mouthfuls of the smoked salmon and canard en daube she had chosen, to impress him. But if he were at all impressed he took care not to give her pleasure by showing it: he drank a great deal, signalling to the butler hired for these dinners to refill his glass the moment he emptied it. Has he gone deaf? Lambert wondered. When Penny asked him a direct question he grunted a monosyllable or two, but that was all. She covered her failure to make him talk by talking herself, with a heightened vivacity, to the whole table.

  ‘Were any of you boys at Rutley House on Monday, at the party for that Frenchman? You didn’t miss anything — except the spectacle of our friend Gregory en grand seigneur, if I may say so, with hair hanging over his collar and a beatified smile, talking to the French ambassador and condescending a little to the rest of us commoners. I may say that Beatrice didn’t give herself even that much trouble — she was in gold brocade, macaw’s beak in the air, and trailing clouds of mauve powder. Master Tony Young was in attendance. By the way, have any of you read his latest offering in Vogue? Called, if you believe it, Work in Progress. There was a moment when Beatrice lifted her claws off him, and I snatched my chance to tell him that I’d read his little Work in Regress. The poor fellow had nothing to say! It’s a sad business, but every man, let’s face it, has his price, and Tony Young’s is not very high. I daresay the Motts took him home with them to dinner — they took the guest of honour and the ambassador — an ordeal I’m thankful to be let off.’

  She threw up her hands in a gesture of mischievous contempt. Her guests, except Cowley, laughed. Looking at her, at her flushed face and rather small bright eyes, Lambert realised suddenly that she was lying. The only reason she had given up accepting Beatrice’s invitations was that she felt socially out of her depth in the Motts’ house: it was not contempt, it was uncertainty; it was a clever self-educated woman’s fear of appearing less well-bred, less at her ease than she wanted to seem. The truth, he thought, is that she would give anything to belong to Beatrice’s world, anything. He felt sorry for her — sorry, and very slightly ashamed. He had got over that same fear only by the skin of his teeth, and even now…. Vexed, he pushed the thought away.

  Glancing round the table, he saw that Spanton was making his face of an ingenuous girl. It meant that he was going to be impudent.

  ‘Do you know,’ he said, wriggling a little, ‘I really found Young’s last book very moving and original.’

  ‘No, no, my little man,’ said Penny, ‘of all things not original. And all it moved me to was embarrassment, as if the poor boy had disgraced himself in public, as of course he has.’

  Cowley looked up, wiping his mouth. ‘I don’t agree with a word you say, but this is the best claret I’ve drunk for a long time. Where d’y’get it?’

  If anyone else had spoken to her in that tone she would have rapped him. She smiled and said, ‘I’m so glad you like it. You must thank my husband for it.’

  Cowley did not give himself that trouble. Nor did he speak again during dinner. Afterwards, in the other room, he drew Spanton into a corner and talked to him in a low voice, his back turned to the room. Lambert watched them, annoyed, and impressed in spite of himself by such uncompromising rudeness. Flattered by the attentions Cowley was paying him, the young man opened his eyes to their widest and talked with an engaging boyish eagerness, his body quivering on the edge of a chair. Cowley lolled back in his, one plump leg crossed over the other, showing a length of bare flesh, the colour of tripe, but hairy. The two of them were breaking Penny’s strict rule against what she called selfish behaviour. Marching up to them with Beasley, she tapped Cowley on the arm.

  ‘I can’t allow Spanton to monopolise you. I want you and Frank to have a heart-to-heart, I’m sure you read his last novel — so good, so deliciously witty and Balzacian.’

  Beasley’s small clever face peered over her shoulder: on its natural look of old-maidish rancour he had imposed a sharp smile: he appeared to be dragging at his leash. Without turning his head, Cowley said,

  ‘I never read novels. Unless — ‘ he looked at Spanton — ‘they are written by friends of mine.’

  ‘My dear man,’ said Penny, ‘we’re all friends here.’

  Was this the moment when Lambert realised that their friend Beasley — on whose future she was now placing all her hopes, talking about him to every useful person she could lay hands on, working with cunning and devotion for him — was a very inferior writer, and would never be anything else? He even imagined that he had always known it That’s what we do, he thought: we cram and push our young geese and if one of them miraculously turns out to be a swan, nine times out of ten he soars away from us: the rest, for all my clever wife does for them, remain what they were born, loyal third-rate geese…. And in the same moment he realised something even more demoralising. Under her extravagant cries of belief in her dear Beasley as she praised him to Cowley and to his own peevishly smiling face, she was smothering her disappointment in him, refusing to know what in fact she was much too intelligent not to have known for a long time.

  As for Cowley, he yawned in
her face. ‘What on earth has your friendship to do with it? I make my friends among people who interest me. I can conceive being interested in a bus conductor or a policeman, but not, not in a bad writer.’

  How, wondered Lambert, did he know, the first time he set eyes on me, that I wasn’t worth bothering with, and how does he know now that Spanton, an over-grown puppy who has written nothing but a few thin-skinned poems about himself, is? Do certain human beings secrete a smell of success which a trained nose can detect?

  ‘How many bus conductors do you know well?’ he asked, grinning.

  His wife frowned at him. ‘Neither am I interested in bad writers,’ she said with energy. ‘The band of friends you’ll meet here, if you care to come often, are all people worth knowing — and very much worth helping. Believe me, my husband and I are stern critics. I hope you’re not one of those sentimental idiots who pretend there is something indecent or indelicate about using your intelligence to see that you get properly rewarded for your labours. To refuse to do your utmost to get on — and then whine if you don’t — is, let’s face it, sheer laziness or frivolity or downright incompetence. Getting on is an art like any other.’

  ‘Alas, writing as an industry bores me,’ Cowley said smoothly. ‘But how fortunate for your little band that you don’t feel that.’

  Lambert felt the blood move in his cheeks. All the sour resentment that had turned in its grave when he saw Cowley coming in behind his gross belly rose to the surface, choking him. Why, he wondered, did the fellow come here? In the flash of rage that sprang in his mind, he saw that it wasn’t, as she thought it was, a triumph for Penny. Cowley had come because he no longer felt safe on his greasy eminence: he had begun to grope for footholds among the clever heartless young…. Far from softening him towards Cowley, this made him speechless with irritation. He felt exactly as his father would have felt if he had entertained some man for years and the wretch turned out to have no money, no connections, nothing. Why the dickens, he thought, should I waste expensive food and drink on a man who is slipping, knows it — and doesn’t even pay for his supper by being civil?… He felt, too, an older shame. Like the first, it was inherited. These dinner-parties cost too much. Sensible decent people did not pour so much money into their stomachs. It was wrong — immoral — as well as wasteful.

  A really atrocious sense of dissatisfaction and disorder seized him. He thought: They’re all third-rate — every man jack of them. Why are they here? Only for what they can shark. Only because, in these days, if you want to survive it isn’t enough simply to write well; you must attend a little chapel of co-religionists ready to run about chanting that you write well — in return for the same service done them. Not Arbor, he thought. Arbor doesn’t need any help — but he likes a good dinner for which he hasn’t had to pay a penny: what’s more, he prefers meeting his inferiors — oh, not just to patronise them, but because they give him a delicious sense of superiority and safety…. Horrified by himself, he thought: I must be ill. Influenza starting, perhaps.

  He plunged back into talk, smiled, filled glasses, took pains to feed his wife the cues she needed and expected from him. After a time he noticed what he took to be glances of collusion between Spanton and Cecil Cowley. In a minute or two Spanton stood up and, stammering a little in his guileless way, said,

  ‘I’m afraid I must go now, Mrs. Corry.’

  ‘Oh, but not so early. It’s not ten yet.’

  ‘I’m s-sorry, but I simply m-must. It’s been divine, so good of you. Such a good evening.’

  Cowley had dragged himself up. Glancing carelessly at Spanton, he asked, ‘Can I give you a lift?’

  ‘Oh, not you, too?’ Penny cried.

  ‘I must. Thanks.’ He waved his hand at Lambert, and moved off.

  Spanton hurried after him, stumbling over his own feet, and taking the time to shake Lambert’s hand eagerly and thank him, with effusive politeness. He knows better than to offend me, Lambert thought sharply. As Deputy-Director of Rutley I’m potentially too useful to him. Not in any other way…. For a second he wished savagely that he had Gregory’s position, his power, his aristocratic friends, his reputation, his absolute security, all that Gregory had and he had not. He felt just as savage and wounding a conviction that ‘the band of friends’ did not even like him. They ate his food, they sometimes flattered him a little, they listened to his advice and his stories, but they did not like him. And why should they? he thought bitterly. They must know that their only function here is to reflect glory on us.

  He glanced round. Beasley at this moment was looking upward, in the pose he had taken in his newest photographs, a slight and resolutely urbane smile on his thin lips: the effect was of an affable stoat. The other two were listening, attentively, to one of Penny’s amusing monologues. When in God’s name will they go? he asked himself…. Making a great effort, he behaved with such geniality that he overdid it; his guests became a little uneasy, and first one, then another left. The last to go was Beasley. Lambert walked with him to the front door, and reflected that if he tumbled the bilious little face and neat body into the canal no one would be seriously grieved.

  He patted him on the shoulder instead. ‘Good night, my dear fellow, it’s always good to see you.’

  In the drawing-room his wife looked at him with the expression, stubborn and tight-lipped, that meant she had something, a little tiresome, on her mind. Not now, he thought wearily, not tonight. Bed — bed and sleep.

  ‘Thank heaven they’ve gone early,’ he said with an attempt at a smile. ‘Let’s go upstairs at once, I’m dropping on my feet.’

  ‘Very well. In a minute. But there’s something I wanted to talk to you about——’

  ‘Not tonight, not now.’

  ‘Why not now? It’s quite a simple thing.’ She took hold of his arm, and went on in a light voice, ‘Lambert, we must do something for Frank.’

  ‘For Beasley? What do you mean, do something for him? Don’t we do enough? We’ve just given him the sort of dinner he’s never eaten in his life before, we’ve introduced him to Cowley — it’s not our fault if the only person who managed to make his number with that tun of conceit and lard is young Spanton, good luck to him!’

  The grossness of what he was saying gave him acute pleasure — he felt that he had spat in all their faces. Penny seemed not to notice that he was talking with heartless vulgarity, nor that he was depressed.

  ‘What I want to do for him is to find him a job that will give him enough to live on without taking up too much of his time and strength.’

  Why on earth should Beasley be treated like a rare orchid? he thought. Let him work. ‘Did he ask you to do it?’

  ‘No.’ A look of reserve crossed his wife’s face, so that he knew she was not being entirely truthful, and this hardened the revulsion he felt against doing anything for Beasley — or any of them. ‘But, let’s face it, he’ll make very little money out of this new novel. Sooner or later he’ll need help to live.

  Lambert caught himself wishing that she would stop saying; Let’s face it. Or: It’s just one of those things. Phrases that recurred again and again in her talk, as though her brain were starting to hiccup. He said calmly,

  ‘Let’s wait till it happens. There’s no opening in Rutley House now.’

  This was not true. He had just had Easterby’s resignation: he wanted to leave in two month’s time, in June. But Penny could not know that, and he decided not to tell her until he had had time to reflect whether or not he wanted to help Master Beasley to a soft place in the Institute.

  ‘Well, please keep it in mind, I’m really anxious—’

  The front door bell rang. She broke off, and stared.

  ‘Who on earth?’ said Lambert. ‘At this time of night. It’s on eleven.’

  ‘Well, go and see.’

  It was Arbor. Hiding astonishment and boredom, Lambert cut short his apologies. ‘Come in, come in. No, you’re not too late, my dear man. Come in.’

  Arbor w
as all smiles, fluttering his small hands like a cat trying out its paws in the sun. ‘Do forgive me. I’ve only just got back, the train was late and that idiot Herbert forgot to meet it —’ Herbert, his manservant and chauffeur, did exactly as he pleased —’ and I couldn’t find a taxi. But I haven’t come, you know! Not seriously. I promised to call for Spanton, I have a letter of introduction he wants.’ By this time, they had reached the door of the sitting-room, where Penny waited with a composed smile. He looked past her, and said, ‘But — my dears — you’re alone!’

  ‘Does that matter?’ said Penny. ‘Do sit down.’

  Arbor’s face appeared to be coming apart; his mouth worked in a very disagreeable way. ‘Spanton —’ he began.

  ‘He left early,’ Lambert said.

  ‘Oh, but it was all arranged! We arranged that he would wait here for me. He must have had some very urgent reason. Did he tell you? A message… did he leave a message?’