‘I gave it to Lianne. She wanted something funny to read when that poisoned finger was getting her down.’
‘A pity. It would help you to understand these things.’
‘If I did all the things it told you to I might as well be dead. It says you must always wear a hat and gloves when you go visiting, and that you must never sit down at a party when the Admiral’s wife is standing up. Old Ma Hamer never sits down -I don’t think she can bend in the middle – so why have any chairs at all when she’s around? That book – do you know what it says? I learned this bit by heart. It says: “Do not engage in long clinches on the dock when a peck on the cheek would do. There is a certain dignity attached to the wearing of uniform, and nothing looks sillier than two people trying to show how much in love they are.”’
‘I know who we’ll ask,’ said Vinson, changing the subject, because he thought the book was right. ‘We’ll have Captain and Mrs Decker from downstairs. I’d like to get to know them better.’
‘I wouldn’t. I don’t like them. She looks as if her corsets pinched, and he just opens his mouth and words pour out of it whether you want to hear them or not. It would be much more fun to have Lianne and Dick.’
‘We’ve been into that.’ Vinson wrote down the names of the Captain and his wife who lived in the apartment below. ‘There, that makes a nice little party.’
Christine thought it sounded like a deadly little party.
It was. Nancy Lee could not come because one of her children was ill, and Art had a cold and might as well not have come either, for his cold depressed him and he hardly spoke all the evening.
Captain Fleischman from the chintzy bungalow was even duller than he had been at home. The drunken Commander turned out to be even less attractive sober than he was drunk, Captain Decker from downstairs was as prolix as Christine had feared he would be, and their three wives sat in a row on the sofa and made no effort, as much as to say: ‘All right. You asked us, and here we are. Now entertain us.’
Even the drinks did not get the party going. Vinson was an attentive host, but he was too stiff and formal with people he did not know well, especially when they were senior to him. Captain Fleischman, who was the head of his department, almost paralysed him with etiquette, although the Captain was an owl-eyed nervous little man, who you would not have thought could paralyse a rabbit.
Christine made a great effort to talk to the women. Captain Fleischman’s wife did not want to talk. She wore a dress that looked as if it had been made up of pieces left over from loose covers at the bungalow and was quite content to sit and watch the proceedings, like an old lady at a village concert. When pressed into conversation, she would say: ‘Oh, surely’, or: ‘I guess that’s so’, which was amiable enough, but not inducive to sparkling dialogue.
The Commander’s wife was too smartly dressed, as if she had expected a large party. She put a wet glass down on a polished table and some cigarette ash on the carpet, and sent raised eyebrow messages of boredom to her husband. Mrs Decker from downstairs thought as little of Christine as Christine did of her, and showed it. Her flat crustacean face was all downward curving lines as her shoe-button eyes travelled round the room, taking a disparaging inventory of the curtains and furniture.
It did not help much when Mrs Preedy skipped across the hall to borrow a jelly mould. Vinson answered the door; but although he tried to block the opening, Mrs Preedy was larger than he, and everyone could see that she had her hair in curlers and an orange chiffon scarf tied in a flowing bow round her goitrous throat.
‘That extraordinary woman,’ murmured Mrs Decker. ‘What a neighbour to have! But I suppose you have made friends with her.’
‘Of course,’ said Christine defiantly, while Vinson frowned at her and Mrs Decker told the company with an acid laugh: ‘It’s so charming the way British people will make friends with anyone.’
When Christine went into the kitchen to add the finishing touches to the supper none of the women came out to help her. Art Lee came out and found her furiously banging plates and knives and forks on to a tray.
‘Can I help?’ he asked. ‘What’s the matter, Christine? You look all burned up.’
‘I am. Those damn women just sit there like the three witches and none of them offers to help.’
‘I’ll bet you hate their guts. Why do you and Vin invite such crummy people to a party?’
‘Vin wanted them. He wouldn’t let me have my friends because Dick’s only a reserve lieutenant. I wonder he even invited you. You haven’t been a commander long enough to mix with such exalted rank.’
‘Vin’s an ambitious boy,’ said Art dryly. ‘He will go far, without a doubt.’
‘I hate the Navy,’ Christine said. She did not mind what she said to Art. She could say things to him that she would not say to Vinson.
‘So do I,’ said Art. ‘Let me help you. Gee, I wish I didn’t feel so lousy. I feel the way those goldfish look.’ He stuck out a pallid tongue at the fish, then leaned against the wall and nursed his drink and his cold and forgot about helping.
Vinson came round the partition into the kitchen to get more ice, and asked Christine why she was not in the living-room entertaining her guests.
‘Well, my goodness,’ she said, exasperated. ‘I’ve got to feed them, I suppose, since I presume they only came here to get a free meal. I can’t be out there and in here getting things ready at the same time.’ She straightened up to look at him, passing the back of her hand across her hot forehead. He was still wearing the polite face he was using in the drawing-room. He made her feel cross.
‘You should have gotten things better organized before. You shouldn’t have to spend so long in the kitchen.’
‘Well, for God’s sake!’ she exploded. ‘As if it wasn’t bad enough having to spend all day preparing food for these morons without you coming in here and criticizing me.’ Art did not feel strong enough to stand a quarrel. He slipped his long body diplomatically past them and went out of the kitchen.
‘I have to criticize you,’ Vinson said, ‘when you neglect your guests and spend hours out here fooling around with Art. You might at least consider what your guests will think, even if you don’t mind how I feel about that.’
‘Oh, if you’re going to be jealous of Art –’ Christine shrugged her shoulders and turned back to the salad bowls.
Vinson grabbed her arm and twisted hep round to stand close to him. His face was not polite any more. It was dark and almost frightening, like that evening at ‘Roselawn’ when she had stood stirring the dogs’ meat on the stove and told him that she could not marry him after all. ‘Of course I’m jealous,’ he said roughly. ‘I’m jealous of every man who speaks to you. Don’t you know that, you little fool?’
When he spoke to her like that and kissed her so fiercely, she did not mind him being jealous, even of poor Art. Her passion leaped up to meet his, and for a moment the kitchen was the only place in the world, and the stupid people in the living-room could starve or go home for all Christine cared, but Vinson controlled himself almost immediately, wiped a hand across his lips, picked up the bowl of ice and went back among the company, with his face already polite again.
He would not serve drinks with the supper. Christine had wanted him to, but he said it was not the thing to do. Christine did not like the American habit of drinking solidly before the food and drinking only iced water or coffee with it. You either drank too much before the meal or not enough to carry you through it. Her guests had not drunk too much. They had drunk too little. Vinson had not been stingy with the drinks, but they were the kind of people who did not expect to be entertaining, so did not bother about drinking enough to make them so.
The evening came to an end at last. When the last guest had gone Christine fell back on the sofa and wanted to cry. A dull party at someone else’s house can make you laugh when it is over, but a dull party in your own house can only make you weep.
Vinson came back from seeing the Deckers downstairs t
o their apartment. ‘And now,’ he said, ‘perhaps you’ll tell me what you said to Captain Decker that made him say to me: “Your wife is certainly outspoken. How does she get on over here?’”
Christine had been afraid he was going to ask that. ‘I couldn’t help it,’ she said. ‘He’s such a know-all. I was trying to be polite and talk to him, but he was being so pompous and laying down the law about everything. He’s got that disgusting wart on his nose too. It wiggles when he talks. You can’t help looking at it.’
‘Go on,’ said Vinson, folding his arms.
‘Well, he was being so silly. You know what he said? He said that England was undefendable, and in the next war it would only be an advanced target, so the only thing to do would be to evacuate all the people over here and let Russia waste her ammunition blowing England to bits. So I said: “That shows you don’t know much about England. Most people would rather die there than be made to come over here.”’
‘Christine! That wasn’t very polite.’
‘Well, it’s true, anyway. And it goes for me too. He needn’t have been so huffy. I hope his wart turns to cancer,’ she said bitterly. ‘It’s going a bit blue. It looks as if it might.’
‘What do you mean, that goes for you too?’ Vinson asked.
‘If England was being bombed I wouldn’t want to be sitting safely over here, rolling bandages for the Red Cross, with great care not to break my nails, and being hostess at clubs for officers who were spending the war in the Pentagon. An English friend of mine got stuck over here in the last war, and she nearly died of envy because she hadn’t been through the Blitz.’
‘Don’t be so childish,’ Vinson said. ‘What good could you do? You’d only be a nuisance. Of course your place would be here. You’re an American wife now, and by that time you’ll probably be an American citizen.’
‘Yes, dear,’ said Christine, and began to collect dirty glasses and ashtrays.
She thought afterwards that if she had made her rude remark to a lieutenant instead of a captain, Vinson would not have minded, but she was glad she had not thought of telling him that at the time. It was bad enough even to find yourself thinking of remarks with which you might score off your husband.
They gave other parties, and went to many more naval parties themselves, and she was careful never to be rude to a captain. She was trying to be a good wife, and if that included sharing Vinson’s unwholesome respect for rank – well, she would have to learn that.
But you could not enjoy parties if you had to think all the time about what rank people were, and could not enjoy talking to them as if they were just ordinary people. She discovered that not all admirals and their wives were like the Hamers, and not all captains and their wives were like the Deckers. Some of them were worse, but many of them were revealed, to Christine’s surprise, to be quite human.
Going home after one party where she had spent a pleasant ten minutes talking to a slight, grey-haired man in a baggy suit, who looked more like a skilled carpenter than anything else, Vinson said in awe: ‘Admiral Briggs talked to you for a long time, didn’t he? I think that was wonderful of him.’
‘Why shouldn’t he? I’m not a leper.’
‘But darling, he’s a three-star admiral. And he talked to you for ten minutes.’
‘Perhaps you’ll be made a captain tomorrow,’ Christine said pertly.
There were too many naval cocktail parties. You could not remember one from another, because they were all exactly the same. You met mostly the same people, and got to know the women’s repertoire of dresses and hats as well as your own. If it was a high-grade party, with admirals present, the men kept their coats on, but if it was a lower-grade party, with no one higher than a captain, the men took their coats off if it was hot, and you got to know whose husband had a paunch and whose husband had retained his figure in spite of the Washington desk-sitting.
The drinks were always the same: martinis, or bourbon or scotch whisky with so much ice in the glass that it bumped against the end of your nose and you could hardly drink it. The food was always the same too. As well as the usual elaborate canapés, prepared with diabolical care by a hostess determined to outdo other naval wives, there was always a large cold ham at one end of the table and a large cold turkey at the other, from which you were supposed to cut slices and make a sandwich, which was a difficult thing to do when you had a glass in one hand and were trying to talk politely to an admiral’s wife.
At the first party where she saw ham and turkey Christine was greatly impressed at such lavishness, although the hostess herself seemed to be more proud of the fact that she had provided English mustard. ‘You make it by mixing the powder with water,’ she boasted, which, to people accustomed to buying their mustard ready mixed in jars or tubes, seemed to be the most exciting and progressive thing.
As she went to other parties and saw other turkeys and hams, invitingly sliced, but almost untasted by the guests who had come to drink, rather than eat, Christine was no longer impressed, but rather depressed by the waste of food and money. She was more depressed still when they gave a cocktail party themselves and Vinson insisted that they must have a turkey at one end of the table and a ham at the other. However, she had been obstructive about the fried chicken and the pot roast, so she let him have his way, and they were eating turkey and ham every day for a week afterwards until Christine finally gave the remainder to Maxwell. However, they had conformed to the quaint old naval custom. They had not lost caste.
Another quaint old naval custom was the paying of social calls, which Vinson swore was a necessity, but which seemed to Christine an archaic irrelevance. She had protested at first, and said that in England all that nonsense had gone out with Queen Victoria, hoping that the American respect for the English social code would deter him, but to no avail. In the United States Navy one paid calls, and so she had to waste many a week-end afternoon putting on hat and gloves to go and visit someone she did not want to see, and she had to try and look pleased when she was fetched away from washing underclothes in the bathroom to open the door to somebody who had come to call on her in gloves and a hat.
They had not yet called on Admiral and Mrs Hamer. Having seen them at her wedding Christine dreaded this, and kept making excuses not to go, until it was too late and the Hamers had gone away. Their default had preyed on Vinson, and now that the Hamers were back in Washington it was now preying more strongly, and Christine knew that they would have to get it over some time.
All calls made her nervous. The conversation was apt to be strained, because the people you had disturbed at their gardening or woken from their Sunday afternoon sleep wanted to see you as little as you wanted to see them. With the Admiral and his wife it would be even worse. The Admiral would grunt at them and blink his eyes, which were set in folds of rusty skin, like a tortoise, and Mrs Hamer would pass her eye up and down Christine, give her a mental percentage of acceptability and then sit back and expect homage.
She said all this to Vinson, but he was adamant. They must call on Admiral Hamer.
‘All right, dear. Some day soon.’ Christine was suddenly acquiescent, because she had thought of a good idea. For several days she kept telephoning the Hamers’ number. If anyone answered she put down the receiver without saying anything until on a Sunday afternoon she telephoned and there was no answer.
She ran out to the porch, where Vinson was playing solitaire with his shirt off. His chest always attracted her. It was not broad, but it stood out well like a box above his flat stomach.
‘Let’s go and call on the Hamers now,’ she urged him. ‘I’ve finished what I was doing, and if we go now straightway we’ll be back in time for you to hear that “Stop the Music” programme.’
He was pleased that she had suggested it herself. They drove out to the Hamer’s house, which had fake beams and a fake antique porch lantern and a self-conscious white fence round the tiny garden. No one answered their ring at the coy set of sleigh bells which hung outside the door, s
o they pushed their cards through the letter-box – and they had made their call. It was as easy as that.
It was a wonderful idea. Christine wished she had thought of it before. Some day she would write a book on naval etiquette to rival the one Vinson had given her, and earn the undying gratitude of naval wives for telling them her invention for painless call-paying.
She had not escaped as easily as she thought, however. Two days later the Admiral’s wife telephoned to thank Christine for having left cards and to say how sorry she was that she and the Admiral – she always called him The Admiral – had not been at home. She did not sound as if she meant it, but no doubt she meant well.
No doubt she meant well, too, when she went on to say that she would expect to see Christine at the next luncheon given by the Officers’ Wives’ Club. It was not an invitation. It was an order.
‘I shan’t go,’ Christine told Vinson. She had heard about these lunches from Nancy Lee.
‘You must go,’ he said. ‘When the Admiral’s wife herself invites you –’
‘She didn’t invite me to go. She told me to go,’ Christine muttered.
‘When Mrs Hamer herself invites you,’ he continued, ‘it’s obvious that you must go. You may even enjoy yourself,’ he added without much hope. ‘I’ll give you some money and you can buy a new dress for it. You will go, won’t you, honey?’ he said, suddenly nervous and almost boyish, like a child trying to persuade his mother to go to the school Speech Day.
‘Yes, dear,’ Christine said. She had taken to saying ‘Yes, dear’ lately. When she said it she felt that she sounded like a thousand middle-aged wives, but it made Vinson happy, and so she said it.
When she went into the lounge of the club where the luncheon was held, all she could see was women. Women everywhere, holding thick little glasses, and all talking. Women in white hats, women in black cartwheel hats, women in little pink hats with flowers on them. No women without hats, except Christine. She patted down her hair nervously and approached the table by the door, where three women in red, baby-blue and natural straw hats respectively sat with some notebooks and cardboard boxes and one of those little black tin money-boxes so beloved of treasurers of women’s clubs.
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