The Road from the Monument

by Storm Jameson

  ‘Why not?’

  He hesitated, struggling against the excitement that had seized him. It was too strong for him. ‘Because,’ he said, grinning, ’as it happens, I can decide. This time Gregory won’t insist on getting his own way. I happen to know that.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Pretty sure.’

  His wife clapped her small rather fat hands. ‘Then it’s settled. You’ll give Frank the job and —’

  ‘Wait a minute. I haven’t decided. Frank is all right, but he hasn’t much, what do I mean?, style. Like it or not, Harriet Ellis has. You can tell one of her things a mile off, without looking at the signature. For what she’d be doing for us, that means something.’

  ‘It means,’ Penny said viciously, ’that she shows off.’

  ‘Such sharp teeth you have, old girl,’ he teased her.

  She frowned at him. ‘Listen. I’m serious. There are two very good reasons why you should give the job to Frank. The first is that he’s a friend. He’s devoted — to both of us. Why, when you have to choose between helping two people, help the one who isn’t your friend — and disappoint the one who is? It’s absurd — and perfectly unreasonable. What use are friends if they can’t give one another a leg up? We haven’t the right to pass Frank over for someone who never did anything for us and never will….’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Lambert said pleasantly, ’that Frank has done much for us — except eat and drink here, and get you to read his manuscripts and pull them into shape.’

  ‘He’s one of our set,’ Penny repeated. On her tongue the phrase had a terrible brassy finality. Her small mouth closed over it like a purse. ‘He’s a friend of ours, he ought to be able to count on us. And in fact, if our friends can’t count on us….’

  She left the sentence unfinished. Lambert said,

  ‘I agree that friendship is a reason. What’s the other.’

  She put her hand up and stroked his lined flabby cheeks. ‘Why, you silly boy, the fact that Frank will be your man, he’ll be working for you in the Institute — where Harriet Ellis will be all for Gregory, flattering him, backing him up, in her smiling back-stairs way. Oh, I know you can look after yourself — when all’s said and done it’s you who run the Institute — but it never does any harm to have a subordinate who is devoted to you, even behind your back.’ She made the same pinching movement with her mouth. ‘What Harriet Ellis, that hanger-on of the Motts, says about us behind our backs I can guess. No, no, my darling — you’d find her unmanageable. Sly, snobbish, unreliable, smiling to your face and sneering afterwards.’ She patted his cheek again and repeated, ‘An arrogant unmanageable beast.’

  For a moment Lambert saw that what she resented in the other woman was a strength unconscious of itself, effortless, exercised almost in spite of its possessor with her fears, insincerity, and involuntary last-minute courage. Behind poor Harriet’s anxious bouche fleuri, under her awkwardness and heaviness, she really was unmanageable, not fit to make one of a group. A vice for which she ought to be mercilessly eliminated. Poor Harriet, he thought lightly.

  He smiled. ‘You don’t seem very fond of her.’

  ‘I detest the animal,’ she said, showing her small teeth. ‘But it’s not that — I want to do our good Frank a kindness, and I want you to have one of our friends with you. You know I’m talking sense, don’t you?’

  What he knew was that she was savagely loyal to him. And the knowledge gave him a feeling almost of weakness, a delicious melting warmth in the centre of his body. My dear clever practical kind wife, he thought. I may not deserve her, but by God I know what’s good for me.

  ‘I don’t feel that I need Beasley’s devotion,’ he said. ‘But what you say about doing one’s friends a good turn is right enough. He’d better come and see me.

  His wife’s eyes sparkled. ‘I’ll ring him up tomorrow. He’ll be so grateful, the dear boy.’

  ‘So he damn well should.’

  ‘And there’s a third reason, my darling — the Institute, let’s face it, is really what I call a key position, and it would be wicked, yes, wicked to miss a chance to put one of our own people in it. Don’t you think?’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  We’ll let Gregory look out something else for his ex-mistress, he thought easily. No need for me to shed tears over her…. Penny had got up off the floor: he pulled her on to his knee and nuzzled at her throat with his lips and nose, sniffing and licking. He had a brief, infinitely brief, image of the room in Brixton and of the young woman’s shapeless body in a not very clean cotton smock; it sharpened the pleasure he felt, sitting here, in comfort, in the airy room, and in the warmth and light fresh scent rising from his wife’s clothes and well-cared-for skin. All’s well, he thought, very much all well. Good old Lambert, always bobbing along, the clever fellow…. ‘What about making us a cup of tea, old girl? And then bed, eh?’

  Chapter Twenty-five

  ‘The clever fellow’ delayed a week before going back to call on the young woman in her basement. He had calculated that a week — so near her time — with no one to talk to about her problem, nothing but uncertainty, loneliness, and the heaviness of her body, would have reduced her to being — his word — sensible.

  This time the front door was shut; he had to ring. The big slovenly woman he had seen before opened it. He asked her in an affable voice for Miss Verity. ‘She’s not in,’ the woman said, closing the door. He stopped her by resting his weight on it.

  ‘Just a moment,’ he said, still affable, but releasing into his voice that jet of frigid off-hand contempt which freezes the blood in the veins of the timid nobody on the other side of the bureaucrat’s desk or counter. ‘I’m Miss Verity’s uncle; if she’s not at home I must leave a note for her, and I’ll be obliged if you’ll let me go to her room and write it there.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know about that,’ the woman mumbled.

  ‘You know me, my good woman,’ said Lambert. ‘I shall be two minutes. I know my way.’

  He had pushed open the door, and was in the passage. A flicker of dislike and rebellion moved in the woman’s eyes, but she had heard this voice too often during her adult life; she stood submissively aside, watching him as he walked, with his long unhurried step, to the basement stairs and down them out of her sight.

  He was obeying an instinct, one that his half peasant, half provincial lawyer forbears would have recognised…. Never neglect a chance to look round, whether your opponent (or client) is present or not, or sick or dying or laid out for burial…. He stood for a moment in the empty room, handkerchief to his nose, staring round it. Apart from the bed with its fringed cotton quilt, there was a basket-chair, two wooden kitchen chairs, a stained rickety table, a chest of drawers and a cupboard. He opened the cupboard first. A few cups and plates, scraps of food, a pair of sandals with high heels. The chest had three drawers: the top one was crammed with odds and ends of garments, a hat, gloves, handkerchiefs, a jar of face cream: he turned the heap over for a minute, gingerly, then pulled out the drawer below. Here, tidily folded, were underclothes, of the cheapest flimsiest sort. Exactly what she would wear, he thought. He poked among them with a casual finger. It touched an object that he pulled out to look at.

  His eyes narrowed to the points of a pair of gimlets, and a muscle at the side of his throat jerked so wildly that he pressed a hand on it. For a second he could only stare at the notecase of fine crocodile skin he was holding in the other hand. ‘Who’d have thought it?’ he said aloud. He peered inside. The great man’s letter was still there; he took it out and unfolded it, to make sure.

  That’s how she got his name, he thought.

  Shutting the drawer, he pushed the case in his pocket, and went. The light qualm he felt about robbing her of it died at once, before he had reached the street. She has no damn right to have it, he thought calmly.

  An aeroplane passed over London as he was standing outside the door of his own house, fumbling for his keys. He tilted his head back t
o look at it: one of the large passenger planes. It could, he thought, be the very one in which Gregory was flying to Paris this afternoon — to give four lectures, three of them for the British Council and another at the Sorbonne. These lectures he gave here and there in Europe were a cherished part of his persona: in Paris and in certain other capital cities, his reputation — except with the irreverent young and the Left — was higher than that of any English writer since Byron. He was going to stay in Paris twelve days this time, and be entertained.

  Lambert followed the aeroplane with a derisively bright glance. The ambassador of English letters, he thought: the liar, the sexual hypocrite, the almighty humbug.

  He touched the case in his pocket, and went into the house.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  On Monday, when Beatrice Mott rang him up at Rutley House to ask him to lunch with her, he already had an engagement. Without hesitation he decided to cancel it — it was with a man of no importance. ‘Yes, of course,’ he said. ‘That’s very kind of you.’

  ‘Not kind at all,’ she said. On the telephone, her voice penetrated the ear like a dentist’s drill: he had to hold the receiver inches away. ‘I’m not asking anyone else. D’you mind?’

  ‘Mind? Good heavens, no. On the contrary.’

  ‘I want to talk to you.’

  ‘Good. Splendid.’

  He put the receiver down and smiled, a smile of pure almost innocent self-satisfaction. He was filled with goodwill, a little swollen with it, indeed. She knows, he thought. And she wants my advice. She shall have it, bless her, to the best of my wits.

  His goodwill lasted through the morning, and carried him lightly the short distance from Rutley House to hers. Park Lane on a June morning — it was June 3rd — glittered like a bubble: scarlet buses, the dense green of the trees, women’s light dresses, a fine pervasive breath of gaiety and excitement. As he walked, he embraced it, all of it. His goodwill almost stretched to embrace the surly William — who was not responsive, but flattered him without meaning to.

  ‘You know your way,’ he said. ‘Madam’s in the drawing-room.’

  Beatrice greeted him as though he had done her an immense service by coming. This gave him acute pleasure — which would have shrivelled at once had he had the wit to guess that she used the same words to thank her masseuse or her hairdresser if either came at short notice to attend to her. He noticed that she had dressed as if for a grand luncheon-party, and this, although it gratified him, made him think less of her. Poor old girl, she isn’t half nervous, he thought. One of his habits in this house was to think in the vulgar idiom: it gave him confidence. Today an excess of pleasure rose in him when he looked round the great room, at cabinets filled with valuable porcelain — the one nearest him held Meissen tea-caddies and coffee cups — at elaborate eighteenth-century gilt mirrors, at Italian marquetry commodes and Regency sofa-tables tolerating each other with the greatest civility and good-humour, and reflected that all this life of wealth and elegance (an elegance so carelessly assembled and used that nothing, no conceivable increase in his income and in Penny’s magnificent capacity for absorbing and imitating polite tastes and tones would allow her to achieve it) was undermined. If he chose, he could bring it all down about its possessors’ ears. He would never do it, of course, but to know that he could excited him in a curious way, delicate but distinctly lustful. Beatrice herself, her blue eyes and parakeet nose, and fine, very fine skin with its mauvish tinge, attracted him more than she had done at any other time. To keep himself in countenance, he thought: A grand old girl, yes, a grand old girl, but under all that fine linen what’s she like?

  The luncheon was fairly elaborate, which again pleased him: for Penny’s benefit he took pains to memorise the courses: iced Polish soup, chicken prepared with sherry and mushrooms: strawberries Romanoff, and two wines, of which he drank the greater share. Beatrice talked to him about himself, about Paris…. ‘Doesn’t it make you smile to think of Gregory surrounded by his flock of adoring duchesses, lecturing to them about books they’ll never open — since most of them, I swear it, are all but illiterate. You know, I was brought up in Paris myself, in a convent, and I know them.’

  Not until they were in the drawing-room again, and she had poured his coffee, did she come to the point.

  She had seated herself on a sofa. She put her feet up, settled herself comfortably against the end, and fixed on him a glance so piercingly blue that it made him momentarily uneasy. He recovered at once when she began,

  ‘My dear Lambert, I wanted to talk to you about our poor Gregory’s little accident.’ She laughed, a short cruel sound. ‘Poor Gregory is really a child — naive to the point of idiocy in his personal life. Why, if he wanted amusement, didn’t he go to one of his duchesses, or the young woman whose name I can never remember — the one who married well? Or even dear clumsy Harriet.’ She lifted her hands. ‘So foolish. But the poor boy is, don’t you think, being punished a little too harshly? After all — an indiscretion. At the worst! Don’t you agree?’

  Lambert was enjoying himself far too much to agree yet. ‘Not entirely,’ he said.

  ‘My dear boy, there is no reason — and no evidence — that it went very far. They had dinner together, I know, but —’

  ‘It went farther than dinner,’ said Lambert. ‘And there is evidence. I know. I’ve had my hands on it.’

  Beatrice was silent. For all her social training and worldliness, she was simple, with a very simple code of behaviour. It did not occur to her that he might be bluffing. Her face did not give her away, but she was bitterly mortified: she believed that Gregory had not told her the whole story, and had allowed her to expose herself to this rather common friend of his as knowing less about her husband than he did. This she found unforgiveable.

  ‘I was wrong to make light of it,’ she said calmly. ‘But… since you know as much as I do. What is your advice?’

  Ah, now we’re off, thought Lambert complacently. He had not been taken in by her, but he was prepared to let her think he had. He leaned forward, a kind wise inquisitive smile on his thin lips, agog to probe and console: the kindness was as genuine as the curiosity.

  ‘My poor Beatrice,’ he said gently, ’tell me what you feel about it.’

  He so obviously meant to be kind that she ignored what seemed to her a very indiscreet and graceless question. But in spite of herself her strong voice rose a tone and became noticeably rougher. ‘There’s only one thing to do. We must find a respectable solicitor — respectable and competent. I would suggest a youngish man — he’d be keener and more biddable. You must explain to him exactly what we want — some way of protecting Gregory from any trouble, and any fear of blackmail. A reasonable not extravagant sum of money — on conditions — with proper safeguards.’

  Her authoritative manner chilled Lambert. He reassured himself by thinking: The poor woman is afraid of breaking down, of course. ‘Have you talked to Gregory about it?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, certainly I have.’

  ‘My dear, that must have been very painful for you.’

  Beatrice gave him a cold glance. ‘As for the young woman… we can only hope she’s not the sort to give trouble.’

  Lambert was surprised to feel himself growing indignant on behalf of the possible troublemaker — so indignant that he scarcely noticed he had been snubbed. They have a cheek the way they speak about us, he said to himself. He included in that us his own younger self and a whole plebeian world of tough-minded hard-edged Lambert Corrys whose little fingers knew more about life than Beatrice and her precious brother would ever know.

  ‘She’s not that sort,’ he said shortly. ‘You can take that as a fact. I’ve seen her.’

  In all innocence Beatrice cried, ‘Then it’s quite simple, and I depend on you to arrange it. Find the right lawyer, explain to him, settle the whole tiresome business for us. That’s splendid. It couldn’t be better.’

  Lambert did not speak. It shocked him to the heart to have h
is pliability and usefulness taken for granted like this. I’m to wash the whole thing out, he thought, for all the world as if I were a servant told off to clean the room up after young master has been giving a wild party: Gregory gets off with a caution, and we go on as if nothing had ever happened…. He reddened with anger. In the same moment he felt a twinge of admiration for her. By God, she’s superb, he thought.

  ‘I’m not so sure that it’s only a little matter of paying out money,’ he said sententiously. ‘It struck me, when I was talking to him about it, that our Gregory is in a very strange, not to say hysterical state of mind.’

  For the first time, he had broken her self-control. She stared, her eyelids twitched suddenly, and she made the ugly face of a middle-aged woman determined not to cry.

  ‘I don’t understand him,’ she said. ‘He can’t care about her — not in any serious sense. Yet he talks in the most exaggerated way —’ her look of grief was overlaid by one of nervous distaste —’ absurd and really very unpleasant. It worries me, very much.’

  Her weakness soothed and excited Lambert in the same moment. He said warmly, ‘You mustn’t allow it to worry you, it’s not worth fretting yourself. Leave it to me, I’ll see to it for you. Leave it all in my hands.’

  She smiled at him. ‘My dear good Lambert, I’m so fond of you.’

  She might have been speaking to a pet animal or an old nurse, but as so often happened to him with her he missed entirely the note of condescension in her voice. His confidence swelled. He had never felt himself so intimate with her. One of the cushions at her back had fallen to the floor; he picked it up and as he stooped over her to push it into place he ran his hand over her neck, and kissed it.

  Looking at him with icy astonishment, she said, ‘Never do that again.’

  Her involuntary astonishment was infinitely more humiliating to Lambert than anger would have been. He pulled himself together quickly and said, ‘Sorry, sorry. I was feeling sorry for you, you know.’