by Alec Waugh
‘And this is the thing,’ he had sometimes thought, as he had watched her warming her back before the bedroom fire, or rolling herself up with the blankets into a blue cocoon, or lifting her toes above the water as she bathed, ‘this is the thing about which I, and so many others, have written “Modern Girl” articles in the Sunday papers.’ There was so much talk about it, so much shaking of heads and searching of hearts, and yet here it was. And it was neither very important nor particularly dramatic. There was nothing either way very much at stake. But it would have been impossible for him to have told how much of unalloyed happiness and sweetness Gwen had brought to him.
Their partings and their meetings had been unsentimental and undemonstrative. ‘Well, so long,’ she would say, on the eve of one or other of his trips. ‘Don’t write to me. Letters are a bore and I shouldn’t answer them. Just tell me when you get back.’ But he had never seen her trim figure turn round the corner of Tite Street without a little twinge of the heart lest it should be for the last time he should be so watching her.
By next morning the pressure of a return had begun to set its clasp on Gordon. By the time he had finished dressing at nine o’clock, he had, he knew, four very busy hours ahead of him. There was the fitting of a new suit at his tailor. There was the American consul’s witness to his signature to the lecture contract for the following spring. He wanted to go up to Lord’s to see what matches there were for him to sign against. There would be need of a net too, if he wasn’t going to be unbearably stiff after his first game.
‘I’ll leave you to look after everything, Mrs James,’ he said. ‘Put a bottle of Reisling upon ice.’
‘You can trust me, Mr Carruthers.’
So complete was his trust and confidence in her that it was close upon one o’clock before he fitted his key into the Yale lock.
His confidence had not been misplaced. In the minute, cabin-small dining-room with its Lynd Ward woodcuts set out on its cream white walls a glass salad-bowl was a green nest of colour. The long, slim neck of a hock bottle protruded from its steaming ice bucket. A china jar of caviare was set beside a bowl of strawberries. There were some things in pastry. It made an appetizing display. An electric heater had warmed the room. In the drawing-room a fire was burning brightly. On the yellow table by the window was arranged besides the cocktail shaker a dish of radishes, stuffed celery and olives. He had scarcely looked round the room before the bell rang sharply.
It was eight months since he had said good-bye to Gwen. But she came into the hall as though they had only seen each other yesterday. There was a bright, friendly, unconcerned expression on her face.
‘That’s a nice hat,’ he said.
It was felt, with a kind of three-cornered brim, and something feathered on the left-hand side.
‘I made it myself,’ she said. Then with a quick movement of her wrists, pulled it off, flung it on the chesterfield and shook out her hair. ‘I’m thinking of letting my hair grow long,’ she said.
‘I shouldn’t. If you did, you’ld never be able to toss your head like that.’
‘Maybe I won’t then.’
Walking over to the table she carefully scrutinized the plate of hors d’oeuvres.
‘Stuffed celery,’ she said. ‘I adore stuffed celery.’
As he shook her a cocktail she sat on the edge of a chair, swinging her leg and munching at the celery.
‘Now tell me,’ she said. ‘Was it fun?’
‘So much fun,’ he said, ‘that I’ll be able to write a whole book about it.’
‘There’s so much I want to ask you. Which film star did you like the best?’
‘I didn’t meet any film stars.’
‘But the paragraph in the Meteor said you’d been in California.’
‘Yes, but I wasn’t in Hollywood. I was farther north, at Pebble Beach.’
‘Oh, I see, not really in California. Did you meet any gangsters in New York?’
‘Not as far as I know.’
‘You just lived quietly, then. Were the skyscrapers really what they say?’
They were incredible, he told her. But he changed the subject. The traveller, when he returns, has very little to tell his friends. He has been among people they do not know, under conditions they can barely guess at. He can tell them little that would be of interest to them. Besides, he is much more interested to hear their news.
‘Tell me about this new house you’ve taken.’
‘Well, it’s like this—’
Her brother had found employment at ten pounds a week, a rise which had decided him to take a flat in London with two other men. The Stock market collapse having had its effect on such a luxury commodity as furniture, and her own stay at home in view of the ring on her left hand’s fourth finger being assumed to be brief, her parents had decided to accept the offer a land agent had made them for their house, and move into a smaller one.
‘It’s nice,’ she said. ‘Now we’ll be able to afford a car.’
They were going to get a Ford to start with, she said. They were cheap to run, and you wouldn’t damage their works too much as you were learning to change gears. Gordon listened attentively. After his months in the South Seas and in America this talk of leases and economics, and strict planning of tomorrows, seemed as foreign as the French patois he had listened to in Martinique. He had moved so fast and far during the last five years that he had lost touch with a world in which people knew what they would be doing in five years’ time. In the tropics one year was so like another, one day so like another, that no one planned far ahead. In the New World, where everything was building and destruction, when you took short leases of apartments, when you were planning the sale of your car before you had completed your purchase of it, when the tall skyscrapers of one day were the rubbish heap of the next, no one knew where, or cared where, they would be tomorrow. To move quickly was all they asked. He was out of touch with a world of steady, calculated growth.
‘What have you been reading lately?’ she asked. ‘Did you like the new G. B. Stern?’
‘Debonair’ was very good, he thought.
‘But that’s not her latest. “Petrucchio’s” her latest.’
‘Is it? They can’t have published it over there then, yet.’
Nor had he read the latest Delafield, nor the latest Wells. Books were very often published in England before they were published in New York, he explained to her.
‘And I’d always thought America was ahead of the times in everything. But I’ve just read something that you’ll be certain to have read: “Spider Boy.” Did you meet Carl van Vechten?’
‘Quite a lot.’
‘Do tell me what he’s like.’
Gordon hesitated. Directly and indirectly, a great deal of his amusement in New York had come to him through Fania and Carl van Vechten. Cosmopolitans with links in most of the capitals of Europe, they touched life at innumerable amusing points. And yet to explain that life, even to talk of it, to the English girl who sat on his green arm-chair, sipping her bronx and munching her stuffed celery, who pictured New York in terms of gangsters, of skyscrapers, of lavish entertainments at Long Island, of speakeasies where you might be blinded by wood alcohol at any moment, would be as hard as the attempt he had once made to explain what snow was like to a Tahitian. It was like seeing a stained-glass window from the outside.
On the bottom shelf of his cocktail table was a copy of ‘Peter Arno’s Parade.’ He handed it to her.
‘That’s what the half of New York is. Arno’s drawings and Ogden Nash’s verse.’
She turned the pages. A puzzled look came into her face.
‘I don’t know what a quarter of this is about,’ she said. It was the answer he had expected.
And the very fact that he knew three-quarters of what it was about marked the extent to which he had lost touch with her. He had been away so long that he had become a part of other lives: that other countries had become as real to him as his own. He suddenly had a lost feeling of belonging n
owhere as he stood looking down at this so friendly, so pretty, so attractive girl, between himself and whom life seemed to have placed a barrier.
Slowly she turned the last page and then closed the book, laid it down behind her, finished her cocktail with a gulp, then rose to her feet with her eyes smiling.
‘Gordon,’ she said, ‘you haven’t kissed me yet.’
In novels he had read—in his own novels he had told—of how love dies between two people. Other things might come to take its place: respect, affection, comradeship, the sense of things shared and faced, but the impulse that in the face of reason, duty, loyalty, of the practical ordering of life drove two people into each other’s arms: that went, inevitably. So he had read, so he had written. But in his own life he had not found it so. The other things had gone: affection, respect, faith, belief in another’s truthfulness and courage; so that he had wondered whether the woman he had come to know and the woman he remembered were not foreign visitants of one face. They went; but that first need that had drawn him to her, that physical need for the touch and closeness of her: that remained. Whatever else went, that remained. That need went deeper, was rooted in something firmer than superimposed mental attributes. Fastidious, with an almost feminine reluctance to take the final step, Gordon had never known the death of physical attraction between himself and a once desired woman. As his arms went once again round Gwen’s young body, all his old need for her, all his old delight in her, returned.
That evening Gordon was giving a dinner party. It was his first party since his return. Stanley and his wife were coming. His sister and brother-in-law, and Vera Marsden. It was a very informal party. But as Gordon took his last look at the dining-room table to see that everything was in order: the flowers arranged; the glasses set out; the champagne on ice; the port decanted; he could not help comparing the actual formality that accompanied such an evening in London, and the lack of it that would have attended a far more stage-managed evening in New York. In New York, had he been giving a dinner party for six people, he would have invited them to the Chatham at any time after seven. We might as well change, he’ld say. We may want to dance afterwards. He would ring up room service and order a dish of savoury canapés; he would look into the frigidaire to see if there was a store of ginger ale, white rock and orange juice. His bootlegger would have seen to his supply of gin and bourbon. He would not worry about anything more. If one of his guests was a girl, for whom he had invited no particular beau, in all probability he would go and fetch her: that is, if he could rely on her punctuality. He would expect, anyhow, to be back by five minutes to seven to mix his cocktails, a combination probably of grapefruit juice and gin; and to see that the canapés savouries had arrived.
His guests would arrive at any time between seven and half-past. They would not apologize for being late. They would know that there would be no thought of moving towards dinner till after eight. There would be an hour or so of canapés and cocktails before Gordon would suggest that it was time to move out to dinner, and in his suggestion would be implied a discussion of where they should go to dine. In London, where the majority of entertaining takes place in private houses, Gordon himself had, during the last four years, not dined in more than a dozen restaurants. But in New York, where speakeasies rose, flowered, and moved on, everyone would have some suggestion about a swell place that’s just opened on Forty-third Street. They would discuss the various alternatives for several minutes, and then when ultimately they had arrived, when the various formalities of door-tapping, of peerings behind grated windows, of card presentations, had been accomplished, there was the informal atmosphere of everyone having a menu handed to them; of everyone choosing a different dish; of every dish arriving at different times; with a discussion breaking out before the coffee was finished as to where they should go on afterwards.
That was the kind of party that Gordon would have given in New York. In London everything was at the same time much simpler and more elaborate. There would be no question of going anywhere afterwards; not, anyhow, before eleven. His guests would be invited for eight. He did not expect the latest to arrive after a quarter past. At a speakeasy one dined usually off a tomato-juice cocktail and one main dish. In his flat Gordon had arranged a four-course dinner. In a bachelor New York apartment the door was opened, if not by the host, by a coloured maid from Harlem. In Cheyne Place he had arranged that James, who had once worked as a butler with Mrs James, should attend to his guests’ needs. There was nothing impromptu about the evening. The only equivalent for his New York habit of calling for an unattended girl would be Vera Marsden’s habit of instructing James to pay her taxi. It was a habit that had from the first impressed Mrs James considerably. She respected it as an Edwardian survival. ‘You can tell that Miss Marsden is a real lady,’ had been her comment.
Vera was the first of Gordon’s guests to arrive.
‘Darling,’ she said, ‘I’ve told James to pay the taxi. You don’t mind, do you? I’ve no change.’
She was in the middle twenties, fair-haired, blue-eyed, pretty, expensively and untidily produced. For four years between her and Gordon had existed an affectionate brother and sister camaraderie, which left Gordon at the end of it, in spite of the exchange of many confidences, as much in the dark as he had been in the beginning as to what exactly constituted her life. She was, he supposed, ‘the modern girl’ of the Sunday press; though anything less like Gwen, who was also the modern girl of the Sunday press, it would be hard to picture. Her parents were vaguely county and lived in Warwickshire. She herself had for six years been a periodic member of London’s social Bohemia. She had done most things, been to most places, seen most things. She had been a mannequin at Poiret’s; a paragraphist on the Express. She had written short stories for the Tatler. She had taken a minor part in a Lonsdale comedy. She was in no place nor in any job for any length of time. When she was in funds, which might mean the arrangement of a reversion, a legacy from an aunt, the sale of a short story, or a sequence of dress shows, she would be giving cocktail parties in a furnished flat in Hanover Square. When things were going less well, she would be forlornly inhabiting a dingy women’s club in Grafton Street. For long periods she would disappear altogether. Postcards would arrive from Berlin or Cannes, or Budapest. It was assumed during her periods of hibernation that she was being, in her phrase, ‘cherished’ by relatives or friends. Gordon never understood how she arranged her life; where her money came from; what her ambitions were; what her future was. She had a number of men friends. She was never in one place for any length of time. If she had love affairs, she was discreet about them. She had brains, she had charm, and she was popular. But she made no attempt to exploit her charm and talent. She was as likely to ignore a profitable friendship as encourage a worthless one. She would dress with more care for the ‘Blue Lantern’ than for Ascot.
She arrived in a fluster of words and welcome.
‘Gordon darling; how lovely to have you back! And how thin they’ve made you. I’m thin, too, don’t you think? I’ve been down to that place near Tring where they feed you on nothing but orange juice. I was so afraid it would bring me out in spots. It did Tony Merchan. He explained that it was working the poison out. I said that in that case I’ld prefer to keep it in. I do look well, don’t I? Now I’m going to the Cap to get myself burnt a lovely brown. Who’s coming this evening? Your sister? Oh, I am so glad. I adore Julia. The Stanleys, too? I sent Mr Stanley a short story of mine the other day. He told me he thought I could sell it more easily myself. Which I did. To the Tatler. For twenty guineas. Wasn’t that silly of Mr Stanley? If he’d sent it there himself, he could have given me a lunch with the commission.’
She was still talking when the Stanleys arrived. Stanley, very composed and elegant in an evening suit that gave you the impression that though it had been ordered that season, its owner was in the habit of wearing it every other night; and his wife, light-haired, grey-eyed, in a grey-black frock.
The monologue
was still in progress when Gordon’s sister and his brother-in-law arrived. It was the first time he had seen his sister since his return.
‘Dear Gordon,’ she said, ‘I’m so happy. Now I do hope we’re going to be able to persuade you to make a really long stay over here this time.’
There was a maternal note in her voice. Although she was by eighteen months Gordon’s junior, she always gave him the impression of being his senior. She always seemed to be in the position, which she was, in fact, so anxious to fill, of being able to arrange his life for him. Indeed, in spite of her prettiness, her slimness, the lightness of her movements, she looked older than Gordon did. Although her life was a constant rushing from one flat to another, from one country to another, she had a settled feeling: as though in her marriage she was self-fulfilled: as though she had ceased to be potential: as though that were the achievement she had been born for.
Her husband was some eight years older. Where most people nowadays suffer from an inferiority complex, he possessed—it could not be said that he suffered from—a superiority complex. Where so many aristocrats feel constrained to apologize for titles and possessions they have not personally acquired, Lord Haystack accepted unconditionally the inherent prerogatives of the feudal system. It did not occur to him that any commoner or owner of a recently acquired title would question his superiority to them. In consequence, he enjoyed a complete absence of self-consciousness. He treated all men as his equals, because he did not recognize the various degrees of inferiority that classified his inferiors. He met them on the same terms of equality with which a master will accept his valet. He accepted everyone for what they were intrinsically worth. As a result, his judgments of men were sound. He was urbane, generous, open-hearted. His relations with Gordon were affectionate. He respected Gordon’s talent and enjoyed his society. He would have been horrified if a sister of his had betrayed an inclination to marry Gordon, for while a man may marry beneath him, a woman can’t. But luckily, both his sisters being married, there was no likelihood of such an eventuality. Tall, athletic, with a long cavalry moustache, and a tendency to adenoids that made his conversation slightly inaudible, he was a man who was invariably liked instinctively and lastingly.
