So Lovers Dream

by Alec Waugh

  The flat, of which three years earlier in the belief that he was going to make a permanent home in London he had taken a seven years’ lease, was on the first floor of a new building half-way down the Royal Hospital Road. It had been called Cheyne Place presumably because such an address would sound better and consequently would command a better rent than a number in Royal Hospital Road. Two months after he had taken it he had decided that the signing of that lease was the most foolish of the several quite foolish things that he had done. He had never been able to work in London. He had always maintained that three months in any place was just three weeks too much. By making himself a leaseholder he had rendered himself liable to English income tax on American royalties that had been already taxed for him in New York. To let a flat was as difficult as to rent one. He saw himself saddled for seven years with a white elephant. It was with the most acute annoyance that he received, for the quarterly discovery that his bank balance was considerably smaller than he had expected, the explanation of the drain of rent. At the same time it was never without a feeling of very genuine pleasure that he came back to it.

  His sitting-room was cosy, familiar, and self-contained. Green-curtained and green-chaired, with green-painted bookshelves running the height of the two walls that flanked the fireplace, it had a lived-in feeling. And he enjoyed waking in the morning in his wide, low, deep-sprung bed, lazily opening his eyes into blue and gold brocaded curtains, on to the blue fireplace and shelves, on to the walnut wardrobe, whose long mirror reflected the cream pink curtain that fell on either side of the yellow pillow from the high tester that was suspended above the bed. His flat was a considerable and steady drain upon an inconsiderable and fluctuating income, but it was always a relief to find it there on his return; it was nice after weeks of boats and trains and hotel bedrooms to be among one’s own things again. And it was particularly nice to be welcomed back to them by the broad and beaming smile of Mrs James.

  Mrs James was, had been for three years, and it was Gordon’s hope would continue to be for the remainder of her life, his housekeeper. She was the kind of servant that is found only in London and by bachelors. She was plump, little and short of breath. When she was in a bad temper, when the grocer’s boy had been fresh, or Gordon’s guests had disturbed her kitchen, she could assume the martyred look of one who toils under inhuman burdens. When life was going well there would be a roguish twinkle in her eye that reminded you how pretty a girl she must have been. Her own sex she disliked intensely. The worst man was, in her eyes, preferable to the best woman. Gordon’s friends had laughingly told him that it was fear of losing Mrs James that had kept him a bachelor. ‘No woman that you would want to marry could possibly fail to quarrel with Mrs James.’ One of the conditions on which Gordon let his flat was the retention of Mrs James. As long as she was there his possessions and interest were safe. On the occasions when the flat was sublet to a married couple or to a single woman, Mrs James would shake her head sorrowfully on his return.

  ‘That girl, Mr Carruthers,’ she would begin, ‘well, as I said to James, if it wasn’t for Mr Carruthers, I wouldn’t stay here another minute. The hours that girl kept, and the way she scattered her powder everywhere; never could I get into that room to make the bed; with her always running back and forwards from the bathroom. And then that telephone. Would you believe it, Mr Carruthers? If it went once it went fifteen times an hour? And there I’d be preparing a lunch for her and having to rush in there and answer that there telephone every minute. So careful I had to be too to get the messages right. First thing she’ld ask when she’d come in, “Mrs James, who’s rung me up?” she’ld say. “It’s all wrote down there on the pad,” I’ld say. And straight she’ld go to it, and then in two minutes she’ld be fussing in. “What’s this name, Mrs James?” she’ld say. “I’m sorry, Miss Williams,” I’ld say, “that’s what it sounded like.” Then she’ld frown and stamp her foot. “It’s most annoying,” she’ld say, “most annoying. It’s probably quite important.” And there she’ld have in her hand the sheet of paper with all the other numbers down there on it and I’ld think, what had she got to worry about just one of them, when there were all those others to choose out of. Half a dozen at least there’ld be, and me that doesn’t get one a week. And I’ld say, “Now, now, Miss Williams, you go and ring up one of those other gentlemen.” Then she’ld look angrier still; “Don’t call them gentlemen,” she’ld say; “they’re not.” Oh, Mr Carruthers, you can’t think of the time I had with that Miss Williams. As I said to James. . . .’

  With some such tale of woe Mrs James usually welcomed Gordon on his return. He was expecting a recital on this occasion since the flat during the first part of his absence had been let to an American violinist. It would be a story of gin and late hours and ‘double-pillowed morns.’ But no, on the whole, Mrs James had been very satisfied with Hilda Westermann.

  ‘A very nice, quiet young lady, Mr Carruthers; quietly dressed, nice tailor-made coats and skirts; collars just like yours. And such lovely links. No men ever came here, either. When they rang up she’ld just ring off. “Too busy to be bothered with men,” she’ld say. She’ld always be back early and up early. Went riding in the Park, she told me. Very nice to me she was. A friend of hers came to stay here once; such a nice young lady. I’d begun to make the bed up for her in the little room. But no, they said, they wouldn’t put me to that trouble. They’ld sleep in the big bed, together. Now that was kind of them, Mr Carruthers, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Very considerate.’

  ‘And they only had one party. I was afraid Mrs Fitz upstairs would be complaining. They weren’t going to start till twelve. So I said why didn’t they ask her down and they said, yes, they would. And she enjoyed herself so much meeting all those actresses and actors. Very smart people they had here, Mr Carruthers. All the Americans who were acting here, and quite a few English, too. They had James to help. There was quite thirty people. I did them some savoury sandwiches that were better, they said, than anything that could be found in America. But it was so funny. Mr Carruthers, I thought they’ld dance and sing, being actresses; but they didn’t. And James came in laughing himself silly. “You should see them,” he said. “They’re kneeling on the floor and there’s a lot of money about, and they throw dice, in turn, and whoever throws them keeps whispering, “Roll on Seven.” Now, wasn’t that curious, Mr Carruthers? Oh yes, and I know what there was. There was such a nice young lady; black hair she had, and such a lovely voice. She was so excited when she heard that it was your flat. She came into the kitchen to ask me all about you. Met you once, she said. Now, what was her name? Sweetly pretty, she was. Quite girlish-looking, with her hair long and looped up the back, just like my Mary’s; parted down the middle, too, it was. One wouldn’t’ve thought she was an actress. What was her name? I shall forget my own name next. Oh, yes, that’s it, Joan Malcolm.’

  At the sound of the name Gordon started. It was three years since he had met Joan Malcolm. It was only once and for a few minutes that he had seen her, but the weeks were few in which he had not at least once thought of her.

  It was at a cricket match that he had met her. And Mrs James’ description of her as some one who did not look like an actress was as accurate as it would be for the majority of serious modern actresses. In Mrs James’s imagination the word ‘actress’ evoked a picture of guardsmen sitting in the stalls, of champagne suppers, of weekends at the Metropole; of debts and indiscretions; with bailiffs removing the furniture as a final curtain. Such a picture may have been true of the old Gaiety days when an actor was a vagabond and an actress was a trollop. It is certainly not true today in England and in America, where the stage presents as legitimate a career to a woman as does the law, medicine, commerce, politics or education, when an actress is just as likely as any other woman to be leading an orderly, domestic life, whether as a wife or mother, a daughter or a fiancée. On the whole, perhaps, she is more likely, since the successful pursuit of a career does not le
ave much surplus time or energy for extravagances and eccentricities of behaviour. Certainly, no one could have looked less like the mid-Victorian idea of an actress than Joan Malcolm.

  So little, indeed, did one connect her mentally with the stage that Gordon did not at first recognize her. It was, too, in a vaguely theatrical setting, at a cricket match at Wimbledon Park between the Household Brigade and the Thespids, a side nominally composed of actors but to which laymen such as Gordon were periodically elected, that they had met. She had been brought down by one of the members of the company, and after tea she had been sitting in the deck-chair next to his. They had not been introduced, but they had exchanged the few casual sentences that people do at cricket matches. She was a New Englander, from Maine, and her voice, although she had lived recently in New York, had retained a suggestion of a drawl.

  ‘You know, I’m quite certain I’ve seen you somewhere,’ he had said, at length.

  ‘You may have done. I’m acting over here, in “Adolescence.” ‘

  ‘But why, of course.’

  It was a night-club, cocktail kind of play built on the ‘Our Betters,’ ‘Spring Cleaning,’ ‘Vortex’ model. Joan Malcolm had been brought over to play the part of an American heroine. The play itself, Gordon thought, was a manufactured, shoddy thing. But of Joan Malcolm’s acting in it he had taken away a vivid and permanent impression. She had played the part of a young American brought face to face in a superficial setting with the facts of faithlessness, disloyalty, evasion. Her presentation was simple, dignified, and moving. It had the quality of truth. It did not depend on obvious tricks of technique. It had youth, and it had character in its presentation of the clash between two civilizations; which was perhaps a parallel of the problem by which she herself was faced: the clash between the restrained New England in which her family had been reared, and the New York in which she had to earn her livelihood. In her final scene, resolutely she avoided histrionics. With her life in apparent ruins at her feet, she stood in the centre of the stage looking very young, very beautiful, very desperately tired, but with the suggestion of an interior strength that would carry her to safety. The other characters, her friends and relatives were busy with suggestions that she should do this, that she should do that; that she should go to this and to the other place. Would not it be wise if she went back to America? ‘I suppose so,’ she said. They made more suggestions. ‘I suppose so,’ she said. They argue again for a minute. ‘I suppose so,’ she replied. In the growing weariness and indifference of those three ‘I suppose so’s’ were laid bare the recoil from that experience, and the strength of character that would aid her to overcome it. It was the most implicit piece of acting that Gordon had seen.

  Joan Malcolm smiled when he told her that.

  ‘It’s curious you should have noticed that,’ she said. ‘That’s not the way the play was written. The author had said “I suppose so,” the first time; then, “You’re very kind.” The last time, “Thank you.” I never even knew I’d altered them till he told me. I’m bad about my lines. I’ve never got them word perfect till the dress rehearsal. I guess that by living the part, I’d just come to realize that that’s what the girl would have said.’

  ‘It would have sounded wrong his way.’

  ‘It certainly would that.’

  They talked for a little of the stage, of recent plays, of acquaintances they shared. It was easy, friendly, unexacting talk. Then he asked her about the cricket.

  ‘Does this game seem pretty strange to you?’ he said.

  ‘It seems very slow.’

  ‘Slower than six-day bicycle-racing?’

  She laughed at that.

  ‘Maybe it’s a fair parallel.’ She tried to explain to him the spell of six-day racing: that going on day and night; the little tent they live in, and the resting between sprints; then the excitement when one of them tries to make a lap. ‘There’s the danger of it, too,’ she said. ‘And the feeling that it’s working to something: that everything’s going to culminate in the last hour; rather like the ‘Ring’ with thirty years of work rising to that last hour when the Rhine drowns everything. It’s got a timelessness,’ she said.

  ‘So’s cricket.’

  Sitting there in the late afternoon, tired with fielding out three hundred runs with the concentrated tension of his own innings ahead of him; with the shadows lengthening, with the green of the trees misted in the declining sunlight; with the scent of summer rising from the sun-soaked ground; with the sounds and roofs of London seemingly a century of miles away; with the white flannels moving against green grass; with the talk of friendly voices round him, and this new friend at his side; with the exquisite leisured grace of this hard-learnt game deployed before him; surely there was here that sense of timelessness on which alone can repose lastingly any peace of spirit. It was difficult to explain all that cricket could mean, and meant. ‘It’s an escape too,’ he had said. ‘For a certain number of hours you’re islanded and safe. It’s an atmosphere you can relax to.’

  ‘Ah. So you, too, you’ve felt the need for that.’

  She had turned quickly as she spoke, and in her voice there had been a keener note. From beneath the brim of her wide, flowered hat she looked steadily at him. He had not realized before how beautiful her eyes were: wide and long-lashed and dark and luminous. But it was more than that that he had realized. In that sudden ‘Ah, so you too, you’ve felt the need for that,’ there was the admission of a kinship in two lives that had followed similar courses; they were entertainers, both of them, with the strain of having to carry at all times with them the responsibility of a public; with the need overwhelmingly to relax; and the granting so rarely of that need’s fulfilment; especially from people. They talked the same language, he and she. Each knew what the other was about. I’ve made a friend, he thought. But before he could say anything there had come from the field a suddenly roared ‘How’s that?’ There had been the raising of the umpire’s finger, a burst of clapping, a murmur of ‘Well held!’

  ‘That means I’ve got to go and bat,’ said Gordon. ‘Keep my place. I’ll be back soon.’

  He was very resolutely resolved, however, not to be. Ordinarily he probably would have been. A quick-wristed but slow-footed batsman, he was far more at ease against quick than against spin bowling. And from the sunny end a leg-break bowler was flighting the ball high against the sun. As the likelihood of the game resulting in anything but a draw was slight, on most occasions Gordon would have chanced his arm, hitting at the ball’s flight. There would have been a couple of streaky fours, and then in all probability a skier to extra cover. But today with Joan Malcolm watching what was certainly her first and might be her last cricket match, he was determined to make a creditable display. And so when he was facing the sun he bent low over his bat, curtailed the backlift and with his left elbow well up, watched the ball right on to a dead-hung bat; while at the other end, against the fast bowler, with his bat held straight and his left leg flung across the wicket, he swept through from his shoulder down the line of flight. When the ball had crashed its way along the carpet to the fence, he held himself in like a reined steed as the bowler ran up for his next delivery. ‘I won’t try and score off the ball. I won’t, I won’t!’ he repeated to himself, as he went forward to play his shot. It was the most concentrated innings he had played for many seasons. It was late in the day and with his own score in the sixties that his control gave way and a skied shot went soaring to extra cover. As he returned to the burst of clapping in front of the pavilion, he turned his eyes towards the deck-chair in which Joan Malcolm had been sitting. She was not there, however. Nor could he see her in any of the other chairs. He looked quickly at the row of cars for the blue bonnet of a Chrysler. Neither was that there. And the pleasure that his innings had given him evaporated.

  Two evenings later he had gone to see her act. The first time he had gone there his interest in the plot’s development had prevented him from realizing more than the finished fact
of Joan Malcolm’s performance. But now, uninterested in the plot, his attention entirely focused upon Joan, and upon his examination of her effects, he was struck by the effortlessness of her acting. Was the unquestioned skill of her performance, he wondered, the outcome of a technique, laboriously mastered, or was it a happy chance that had cast her for the one part in which she could be herself? Was her very unstudiedness the result of study? The control of the hands, that invariably betrays the amateur, was achieved, for instance, with a complete simplicity. In her big scene she let her arms hang motionless at her sides. Was that a studied simplicity or what Lawrence had called ‘the hot blood’s blindfold art?’ She was so young, at the outside, twenty-three. This was her first big part. Her experience both of life and the stage, must necessarily be small. Probably her success, like all success, was the outcome of a happy mixing of the mood and moment. But he could not believe so composed, so exquisite a talent had not a big future set for it.

  His impulse to go behind the scenes afterwards was very great. A cautionary impulse had stayed him. He did not believe that between himself and her there could be such a thing as casual friendship. It would have to be real, one way or the other. Why complicate things he had thought. As likely as not she would be busy, her mind full of plans for the supper party she was on her way to. Or even if she weren’t, there was as likely as not to be some man or other in her life. Just because at the moment his life happened to be empty, there was no reason to suppose that hers would be. It was better to let things take their course. He was bound to be seeing her one day soon again.