by Alec Waugh
He never had. Owing to a mismanipulation of theatre dates, ‘Adolescence’ had been suddenly withdrawn. Within a month of his meeting her, Joan Malcolm was on her way back to America. Never since had he and she been within three thousand miles of one another. He had watched her career, however; he had very often thought of her. He was surprisingly touched to find that she should have remembered him.
‘And she really seemed interested, Mrs James?’ he asked.
‘Interested! As I said to James afterwards, Mr Carruthers, I’ve never seen a young woman so interested in a young man that she’s only met once.’
Four years of travelling had considerably depleted Gordon’s wardrobe: even so, the business of unpacking his trunks, moving his cricket and town clothes from his parents’ house and transferring them to his compactum wardrobe was sufficiently arduous and lengthy to make him at each repetition of the performance vow that he had taken his last long trip. It was while he was engaged upon this task that the telephone bell for the first time since his return to the flat began to ring. It was a feminine voice that asked for him.
‘Why, Gwen,’ he cried.
‘So you haven’t forgotten my voice?’
‘Did you expect me to?’
She laughed, a young and happy laugh.
‘I didn’t know. It’s such a long time. You’re not married or anything?’
‘Neither.’
She laughed again.
‘When I saw in the papers that you were back, I wondered. As I have changed my address I knew you wouldn’t be able to find me, so I thought that I’ld ring up.’
‘When am I going to see you?’
‘We might have lunch one day.’
‘What about tomorrow?’
‘Tomorrow’s fine.’
‘Where would you like to lunch?’
‘I’ll be round your way, I might as well look in.’
‘Then we’ll lunch here?’
‘We might as well.’
‘Till tomorrow then,’
She had rung off, as casually and dramatically as she had rung up; as casually and as dramatically as during the last three years she had made her exits and appearances in his life.
He had met her in the course of a lecture that he was giving at King’s College on the modern novel. There were about two hundred students in the hall. Three quarters of them were girls. Whenever Gordon spoke, he made a point, so as to be certain that his voice was carrying, of picking on some one at the very back of the hall, and talking to that one person in the knowledge that if that one person could hear, the rest of the audience would be able to. Before a lecturer has been speaking for many minutes, he has almost invariably established a current of personal contact with one member of his audience.
While the chairman was making his introductory remarks, Gordon glanced along the smudge of faces in the two back rows. He saw no one with whom he felt particularly in tune. He rose to his feet with the feeling that he was speaking into the void. Before, however, he had spoken for two minutes he had become conscious of a bright smile lifted amiably towards him. They were grey and friendly eyes and they smiled roguishly beneath the brim of a low-drawn hat. He could see little of her face; her chin was buried deep into the high collar of a buttoned coat. He had no more than a glimpse of a rather full, wide and smiling mouth. He had the impression of someone gay, jolly, unexacting. It was to her that every sentence or two he turned his eyes, and turned the pitch of his voice.
It was his invariable technique, but this time he found that he was subtly changing it. It was no longer impersonally that he turned his attention to one of the members of the audience, knowing that if that one person was responsive, the rest would be. He found himself this one time turning his attention and his jokes to the grey and friendly eyes in definite curiosity to see what effect they would produce on her. ‘I wonder if she will get that point. I wonder if shell think that funny.’ By her response he could tell in which of the writers he was discussing she was interested. He noticed that she grew listless when he was talking about James Joyce, though she laughed at the extract he read out of ‘Ulysses.’ She brightened when he began to speak of ‘The Forsyte Saga.’ Into her eyes when he mentioned ‘Jurgen’ there came a quick flash of eagerness. ‘So she’s read that,’ he thought.
The first time that Gordon gave a lecture he was taut, a little nervous, and completely concentrated on his audience. He would be uncertain of the length his talk would run; of the parts that would hold the attention of his audience closest; whether the proportions between his serious and flippant passages were spaced properly. He had to adapt himself to suit his audience. But when he had given the same talk once or twice, when he had learnt which portions to shorten, which to lengthen, when lightness was needed and when a return to seriousness, the giving of a lecture was rather like the turning of a gramophone record. It was something done with one’s left hand. There was no taut-ness, no suspense. You knew exactly what was coming; what effect was to be produced. You could think of other things. But on this occasion the very foreknowledge of what was coming gave Gordon a sense of excitement and suspense. He found himself looking forward to the better passages with which he ended the lecture. ‘She’ll like that bit,’ he thought, ‘I’ll be surprised if that doesn’t make her laugh.’ And mixed with that, there was the curiosity of watching the particular point of each reaction. It was like a voyage of discovery: this slow probing of her mind.
It was an evening lecture. Coffee and cakes were being served afterwards. For Gordon, lecturing and the sense of an audience had an intoxicating effect very similar to that of alcohol. He was tired, but elated; ready to enjoy the informal discussions that arose out of his talk. But this time there was only one person that he wished to meet. He looked for her the moment that his first talk with the president of the Society was over. He hoped that some engagement or other had not taken her away. It hadn’t. Across the room the grey and friendly eyes met his. She was prettier than he had expected, with the robust, healthy grace of youth. Her eyes smiled as they met his. As he extricated himself from the group he was attached to, she welcomed him as though he were a familiar friend whom she had seen two days back, and would be seeing again in two days’ time. He dropped quite easily into talk with her.
‘You’ve read no Joyce,’ he said.
She shook her head.
‘How did you know that?’
‘From the way you looked when I began to talk about him.’
‘How did I look?’
‘As though you were ready to be interested, but weren’t going to be till I had made you.’
‘Perhaps that’s how I felt.’ She had an easy, pleasant voice, unstandardized into a fashionable drawl. Her interests were eager, spontaneous, uncalculated. She did not seem to be considering at all the effect that she was making upon him. She was interested only in their exchange of impressions and ideas. They had been talking for several minutes before he mentioned ‘Jurgen.’
‘I suppose I was one of the first people in England that read the book,’ he said. ‘I don’t think any book I’ve ever read has excited me quite so much.’
She agreed. ‘Me too,’ she said. ‘That, and “Poems and Ballads”; oh, and this’ll surprise you probably—Stacy Aumonier’s short stories.’
‘That’s a real writer.’
They talked for a moment about Aumonier. Then they returned again to ‘Jurgen.’
‘When I heard that it was going to be illustrated,’ Gordon said, ‘I thought: “Oh, heavens, that’ll spoil it. No one’s going to illustrate it in the temper of the text.” Then, when I saw it, it was like a miracle.’
‘My edition hasn’t got illustrations.’
‘You oughtn’t to miss seeing them.’
‘I suppose I could get them out of any library?’ ‘You could always come and see them in mine.’
‘I’ld like to do that.’
He hesitated. It was half-past nine. It would be too late for him to go to the p
ictures. There was no party for him to go to. His nerves were too worked upon by his lecture for the quiet concentration of bridge.
‘If you’re not doing anything now, why not come back and have a look at them? My flat’s in Chelsea.’
‘I think that would be nice,’ she said.
As soon as they could manage, they extricated themselves from the hall. As they came into the Strand a group of sailors passed, arm in arm, and singing. One of them knocked into Gordon.
‘Oh, hell!’ he said. The girl at his side looked up quickly. ‘I’m sorry,’ he apologized. ‘Let’s get into a taxi quickly and out of this.’
It was a summer evening: warm and tranquil. The green curtains of Gordon’s sitting-room were stirring faintly behind open windows. The grate was banked high with flowers, the small Omega painted lamp pattered the wall with shadows.
‘It’s nice here,’ said the girl. She pulled off her hat and shook her hair out. It was short, but scarcely shingled. It bunched pleasantly about her ears.
‘What would you like to drink?’ he asked. ‘I really believe I can almost literally say I can offer anything.’
He had replenished only a week before the cupboard that served him as a cellar. She stood beside him for a moment running her eye along the thick-stacked shelves. Then she tapped her finger against a gold-foiled cork.
‘I think that,’ she said.
He liked her for the unselfconscious way that she had chosen it. Only a very natural or a very sophisticated person could have done it. The wine bubbled pleasantly in the tall-stemmed glasses. He showed her the Papé ‘Jurgen.’ And his Straus’s ‘Petronius.’ And the autographed copy of Squire’s poems with the censor’s stamp on it that had been sent to him when he was a prisoner of war. They chatted easily.
‘Aren’t you feeling hungry after your lecture?’ she said at length.
‘A little.’
‘If you’ve any eggs I’ll make an omelette.’
They ransacked the larder and found a bowl full of eggs, some tomatoes, and a pat of butter.
‘This’ll do,’ she said.
Perched on the table at her side, Gordon reflected how mad Mrs James would be when she arrived next morning. It was a very admirable omelette. She sat on the chair, beside the stove. It was like a picnic. They began to talk of books again. She had never read George Moore, she said. He had, he told her, the white vellum limited edition. He kept it in his bedroom. He would show it to her, he said. She followed him across the passage. The reading lamp flung a soft light on to the yellow pillow-cases, the blue blankets, the cream pink hangings. She took out ‘The Brook Kerith’ and kneeling on the floor began to read. Leaning over to see what she was reading, he rested his hand upon her shoulder. She looked up. Her eyes were bright, her lips a little parted. There was a glow upon her cheeks. Before he had realized that anything was happening, it had happened. Scarcely a moment later, it seemed, cream-white against the rumpled blue and yellow, she was stretching her arms lazily and contentedly above her head. ‘Well, that was nice,’ she said.
Three years later Gordon was to wonder whether he knew anything more about her than he had at that first meeting. Endless facts he learnt; that her father was the sales manager of a firm of furniture manufacturers: there were three of them in the family: that they lived in the same house in Boston Manor: that her brother, fifteen years her senior, had been at school at Ardingley, had had a commission in the Sussex, and was now one of the innumerable ex-officers who found their talents precariously valued at seven pounds a week: that her elder sister was a typist in a stockbroker’s office: she played tennis and was an indefatigable organizer of subscription dances. It was her example that had decided Gwen against the adoption of a career.
‘There’s nothing to it,’ she had said. ‘You keep out of work some girl who really needs a job. It’s only a marking time till one gets married. As soon as I was able to wave an engagement ring in their faces they gave way.’
She was engaged to a rubber planter in the F.M.S. She would marry him some time, she supposed. But it would be four years before he would be coming home on leave. He was in the late twenties, Gordon gathered, and was ‘quite a pet.’ In the meantime, as a result of the formality of an engagement. Gwen was allowed to remain a student at King’s College.
‘I’m doing myself much more good there, than I should tapping a typewriter.’ So she had remained a rather casual member of London University.
Those facts Gordon had obtained. But of herself, of her life, of the background against which she moved, he had learnt extremely little. In his own life she was a casual and dramatic visitant. She was always friendly, affectionate, unconcerned. She came to see him when she felt in the mood. If he rang her up and said, ‘What about having dinner together on Friday?’ She would as likely as not answer, ‘Oh, that’s too far ahead.’ She liked to see people, she explained, when she felt like them. She would ring him up now and again and say, ‘Are you doing anything for lunch today?’ More often than not, he would be. If he were, she would say, ‘Well, that’s too bad. Some other day perhaps you won’t be.’ If he were himself to make a suggestion, proposing the day after or the day following that, she would invariably make some excuse. But should he be disengaged, she would arrive smiling, friendly and affectionate.
Her love-making was happy, fresh and pagan, something to be accepted and enjoyed. He did not fancy she was promiscuous, though he might well have thought her so. One evening they had come back together after a theatre. It was late and cold and wet. There was no taxi on the rank. ‘Why don’t you stay the night here?’ he had asked.
‘It would be nice,’ she had said, ‘but it’s such a bore waking up in the morning where one’s things aren’t.’
He had no idea out of how general an experience that remark had sprung. One afternoon they had gone to a cinema together.
‘You noticed that aide-de-camp to the Emperor?’ she said. ‘He was exactly like the first man I had an affair with. I’ve often wondered,’ she added, ‘whether he ever realized that he was the first.’
He had no idea how much she cared for her fiancé in Malaya. They had not been lovers, he discovered. ‘You should begin a marriage as a marriage,’ she had said. He had no idea what he himself meant to her. He had remarked that to her once. ‘As long as you don’t start wondering that,’ she had said, ‘we’ll get along very happily together.’
Once they had been discussing the slight incident that can start a love-affair. ‘I liked you,’ she had said, ‘from the way you said “Hell! ” when that sailor trod on you.’
He had tried to visualize the background to her life; the large, semi-detached house in Boston Manor; with the daily flurry over the breakfast table; trains to be caught; newspapers to be glanced through; letters to be read; then the rushings to the station: the father to his office with the glass door and his name painted on the glass: the brother to his stool before a ledger: the sister to her typewriter and pad: Gwen to her lectures and her courses. Then in the evening round about half-past six there would be the return. In the summer there would be the hurried changing into flannels, the rushing off to this or the other tennis club. In the winter the huddling round a fire with the radio or the gramophone playing. Usually for at least one of the three there would be a changing into evening clothes and a return to London for a theatre or dance or dinner. Probably one at least would stay at home with the parents; perhaps a friend would drop in after dinner for a talk. There would be the week-ends with the probable visit in winter to a theatre or a local dance. In the afternoon the watching from the touchline of some football field the gallant exploits of a muddied friend. In the summer there would be picnics, punts on the river, tennis. That was the background of her life. But apart from that there were for all three the separate lives that made up their real lives. The lives kept, if not secret from their parents, at least apart from them: the separate lives to which latchkeys and the weekly wage had entitled them. A girl like Gwen would have t
he formal framework of her life, her home, her occupation, her parents, her relatives. But on that framework would be hung all manner of odd articles. Gordon was one of those articles. There were many others. There were the boys and young men who took her to watch football and dirt-track racing, who took her for drives in two-seaters and on the backs of motor-bicycles. There were the girls with whom she went to remnant sales, and after a lunch of two macaroons, a cup of chocolate and an ice, would go and watch Maurice Chevalier at the Plaza. Her life was full and varied.
She was a subscriber to Harrod’s library and read voraciously. She would read three novels a week, she said; less out of an interest in literature than a desire to be informed about the facts of life. Invariably she was interested to know about writers. She would say, ‘I’ve just been reading a novel by Rebecca West. Do you know her?’ She would listen attentively to his recital of such facts as he possessed about his contemporaries. ‘What a great number of people you seem to have met once,’ she said. Considerable though her interest in writers was, she had no wish to meet them. ‘I’m having a cocktail party,’ he told her once. ‘Do come. There’ll be some amusing people there.’ But she had shaken her head. ‘What should I find to say to them?’ she answered. No one that Gordon had ever met made fewer demands on him. She did not want to be taken out to places; she did not want to meet people. Such few presents as he made her she would have just as soon, he felt, not had. She was perfectly content, it seemed, to picnic light-heartedly in his flat, taking his books down from the shelves, turning the pages, borrowing them occasionally, asking questions, cooking an omelette, pattering about the flat in the Chinese pyjamas that were kept for her in a special section of his compactum wardrobe. ‘The only thing that would really annoy me,’ she said, ‘would be not to find them there.’
For three years now, during Gordon’s brief and periodic stays in London, the weeks had been few when he and Gwen had not had at least one picnic meal together. It was simple, and fresh and pagan, and lighthearted.
