So Lovers Dream

by Alec Waugh

  Now, as he sat in his deck-chair looking out at the white houses of Tangiers beneath whose shelter he had fancied that he would be himself at that moment and with Faith, the idea returned to him, only in a different shape. It seemed to him that out of that earlier pattern he could devise a story that would be self-expressive; that he could draw a parallel with the material considerations that stood as a barrier between himself and Faith, in the story of a young planter returning from Malaya, falling in love with a girl, who though responsive to his love, knows that she would be an impossible wife in such a setting: that hers would be the case of the square peg in the round hole; that certain seeds were made to grow in certain soils and could not be transplanted; that though they loved each other, by marriage they would ruin one another. It would be much the same story that he had originally planned, but its treatment would be different, since the angle from which he saw his story would be different. He would make the book a letter to Faith that others would read, but she alone would understand. In that first conversation in the Penang Club he would explain what his own views about love had been in the days before he had met her. How he had seen love as an enchantment, impermanent and unpossessive, to be enjoyed but not to be taken over-seriously; not to have on its account the fabric of life disorganized. There would follow his entire change of outlook through the meeting of this girl whom he really came to love. Through loving whom he would come to understand that the only relationship for which he would have any use with such a one would be permanent and deep: that free love was a contradiction in terms.

  The course of the story would explain that change of outlook. And though it would end on the same note of ‘Figurez-vous en plein Sahara,’ the note would be struck uncynically. It would not be boastfully, not out of any desire to draw interest to himself, but because, knowing his own experience to be different, to appear like everybody else would seem the easiest way of avoiding reference to what lay deep. It would be a story into which he could throw himself. When Faith read it, there would be the proof there that he had cared. During the seven days of the journey he mentally sketched out the story.

  It was on a wet October morning that Gordon landed at the Royal Albert Docks. He drove straight down the bleak length of the Commercial Road to Adelphi Terrace. He had not told Stanley when he was coming back; he had just sent him a postcard saying: ‘Please hold my mail.’ But if he had expected Stanley to look surprised, he would have been disappointed. He had not expected it, however. As he came into the room Stanley tossed him across a Western Union cable.

  ‘This time I haven’t opened it,’ he said.

  Gordon tore back the envelope.

  ‘Home seems strange after Villefranche and all it meant. When are you coming over? Hurry, please.’

  It was not signed. There was no need for that.

  ‘Have you got that novel finished?’ Stanley asked.

  ‘I’ve got stuck in the middle of it.’

  ‘That looks as though you were going to be rather poor by Christmas.’

  ‘Ten days ago I nearly cabled for three hundred pounds.’

  ‘I’m glad you didn’t.’

  It was said without a flicker of emotion or even of rueful humour. Gordon had a suspicion that in exactly the same tone of voice and with exactly the same expression, Stanley, had the telegram arrived, would have said to his secretary: ‘Arrange with Osborne to have Gordon Carruthers cabled three hundred pounds.’

  ‘You needn’t worry,’ said Gordon. ‘I’ll be out of the wood all right. I’ve got a plan for another one. I’ll have finished it before November’s through.’

  Stanley raised his eyebrows.

  ‘That’s quick work.’

  ‘It won’t be scamped work.’

  ‘It shouldn’t be. And what are your other plans?’

  ‘To beat you at squash.’

  ‘Apart from that.’

  ‘To stay in the country.’

  ‘At Shenley?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You won’t be up in London?’

  ‘Scarcely at all. I’ll let my flat.’

  He had made up his mind to that upon the boat. He was returning to a London that might just as well be empty. He was going to leave it empty. He had had no feeling of home-coming as the boat swung past the Dover cliffs into the long reaches of the Thames; as he had begun the slow journey up the river, past the long succession of piers and wharves that fill the traveller as much as Whitehall does with a sense of the power and majesty of England; as he had driven from the docks, up the Commercial Road, past the long succession of Jewish clothiers, restaurants, grocers and hardware stores, into the familiar Strand. There was nothing he wanted to do, no one that he wanted to see. In the same way that his life at Villefrance had become a watching for a grey-green Chrysler to swing round into the square, so was it now a waiting for the moment when the bustling little tugs would edge a long liner against a dock. He had no heart for a return to London life; to the picking up of threads; with among them the resumption of Gwen’s picnic parties. He was through with that. He was going to be faithful to Villefranche. But he was not going to hurt the feelings of one to whom his debt of kindness was very great. The only way in which he could avoid hurting her feelings was by not telling her he was in England, by keeping out of London.

  By Mrs James his decision to let the flat was received with philosophic calm.

  ‘Well, Mr Carruthers, I’m sure I’ll do my best. If you want to go away, of course some one has got to live here. And as I’ve said to James, “For Mr Carruthers there’s nothing I wouldn’t do; not even if it means working for someone else, but I do hope it’s not a woman.” ’

  ‘And how is James?’

  ‘Well, Mr Carruthers, I’m not complaining.’

  ‘And did you enjoy your holiday?’

  ‘It was well enough, but you know what it is, Mr Carruthers. The seaside isn’t the place for people who aren’t quite young.’ She explained to him why it wasn’t. ‘But, Mr Carruthers, this I must tell you. While we were down there, there was a theatrical company giving a week’s performance before they went to London, a try-out, as they call it. It was lovely, and suddenly in the middle of the first act there comes on to the stage such a beautiful young lady with dark hair down over her ears in circles. I turned straight to James. “I know that young lady,” I said to him. So when the lights went up we got a programme and there it was, Miss Joan Malcolm. Oh, my, Mr Carruthers, she did look lovely!’

  ‘She’s acting in London now?’

  ‘In “Ganymede”. Mr Carruthers, you really must go and see it.’

  ‘I shan’t miss that.’ He would like to see her act again, to learn how technique had worked upon that natural instinct. How much time, though, he would have in London he didn’t know.

  His mother received the news of his decision to let his flat with pleasure.

  ‘And you’ll stay with us when you’re in London. That will be nice for us.’

  His father shook his head. He did not believe that children ever came to live with their parents when they could afford to live elsewhere.

  ‘I suppose you spent a great deal of money at Monte Carlo?’

  He still maintained the Victorian picture of the Poisoned Paradise.

  To Julia he sent a brief note. ‘I am back, but not back. I don’t want anyone to know I’m here. So will you motor down to Shenley one day and lunch with me there?’

  ‘Darling,’ she replied, ‘of course, and I do try and say to myself, “I expect Gordon knows what’s best for himself really.”’

  On the following day he went to Shenley.

  Shenley is a small village fourteen miles out of London, and off the road in so far as the modern definition of a main road is a thoroughfare down which buses pass, midway between Radlett and St Albans. It is extremely ugly, but it has retained intact a village life for the very reason that its richer inhabitants are not strictly speaking members of it at all. They are extensions of London: their off
ices and interests are in the city. There is nothing to bring them into touch with the farmers, farriers, grooms, butchers, who have drawn their sustenance from the soil for generations.

  Very much of that village life centred round the inn in which Gordon had made a practice of taking a room whenever he was in London working. He had heard the inn described as the poor man’s club, but he had never realized it till he had actually made a home long enough in one to be accepted into its atmosphere. Every evening the same men came into the tap-room. They would spend two or three hours there, throwing darts, or playing at dominoes, or shove ha’penny. Across the road there was the village club to which the police sergeants and some of the richer men belonged. But it was round the Black Furnace that the main life of the community centred. The publican conducted his inn as though he were the manager of a club. He served drinks, marked up the scores upon a blackboard, and whenever custom was slack, went into the taproom to take a turn at darts. It was always lively there but never more than lively. During the many weeks that Gordon had spent there, he never saw a single man who was anything approaching drunk. On each hand of darts there was a side stake of half a pint of mild. There was little other drinking. There was an atmosphere of geniality and friendship. It was with very much the same feeling of relief that he had walked from the octroi into Villefranche after a day in Nice, that Gordon, after a week-end in London had at the end of a two-mile walk uphill from Radlett seen the lights of the Black Furnace, and swinging open the door had heard the encouraging voice from the tap-room. ‘Eleven to rag. Three and double four.’

  It was in the winter that Gordon usually went to Shenley, and it was in the winter that Shenley was most satisfactorily itself. Summer through, the gardens laid back from the road behind pergolas of roses, were crowded with summer motorists. It was not till the roses were blown, the paths leaf-strewn, the tables stacked within the tin pavilion, when the only visitors to the inn were commercial travellers or hardy pedestrians for lunch, or occasional wind-blown motorists in the late afternoon whose womenfolk ordered port and lemonade over the coffee-room fire that the village life really became self-contained.

  On the night that Gordon arrived, the first of the inter-village competitions was being played against South Mimms. Every week there was a match. A match consisted of six separate games, with three separate sets to each game. There were billiards, darts, whist, rings, dominoes, shove ha’penny. No man could represent his village in more than one game. Victory went to the greater number of sets won. It was invariably the biggest men who played the least athletic games. A diminutive groom would manipulate a billiard cue. A huge-shouldered blacksmith would flick a ha’penny three inches along a polished board with the base of his vast thumb. The dullest witted would be pondering a revoke.

  The actual matches were played in the village club, but the drama of the contest would be staged in the Black Furnace. There would be a constant running backward and forward between the tap-room and the club. The latest scores would be announced. South Mimms had just won a set of rings; that made Shenley seven and South Mimms five. Sergeant Mcfinis had made a break of twenty-five and was leading the South Mimms fireman by eighty-nine to fifty-seven. There was a buzz of talk about the bar.

  When the Shenley team went away to play at South or North Mimms or Radlett, Gordon usually accompanied the team. There were the victors to be congratulated, the vanquished to be consoled, the future combatants to be encouraged. He took control of that side of the contest. ‘A very important rôle,’ it was, too, he assured the publican. Our trainer, he was called.

  He was given a warm welcome on his arrival. ‘We’ll be sure to win now,’ they said.

  It was the first sensation of real home-coming he had had. And later, when the games were over, with Shenley the victor by eleven sets to seven; with the South Mimms men driven off in their charabanc promising to extort vengeance when the men of Shenley came over for the return; with the bar closed and the shutters fastened across the window, he went through with the family into the private room to exchange casual chat about the personalities of the village, to ask after this person and that: to tease the daughter of the house about her two heroes, Sutcliffe and Clive Brook; to recount an anecdote or two of his travels.

  It was a happy evening. But later, in the chill bedroom, in the dark, Faith and the sunlight seemed very far away. He could understand what novelists meant when they talked about people crying themselves to sleep.

  It was a sequestered period that ensued for Gordon. He was in the world but not in the world. In his morning paper he would read of parties, of books published or to be published. Every third afternoon he would come up to Lord’s to play squash with Stanley. Once a week he would go up to spend the evening with his parents. They were tranquil evenings that he spent at St John’s Wood Park. He often wondered what life would be like when the day came when there would no longer be any place in the world where he could be certain of a welcome; where he could be himself, where he could relax, where he could be accepted for what he was, to which he could turn if he was ill or in trouble. On the surface it might have seemed that he at this time was as far apart from his parents as a son could be. Most of his life was outside London. His main problem he could not discuss with them. The greater part of his talk with them was superficial, since he was not really interested in the subjects they were discussing; since they were a façade behind which he was thinking: ‘None of this really matters. I don’t care whether Western Australia succeeds; whether Gandhi represents or doesn’t represent the Indian people; whether Prohibition would be a good thing in England; whether the dole is an unmixed evil; whether the Five-Year-plan will work; whether young women will be chaperoned next season. Those things are very important. I know very well. But I do not care really whether revolution comes or doesn’t come. My mind has only room in it for a counting of hours till the moment when I shall see again a tall, slim woman with buttercup hair and a slow voice and eyes that turn slowly with a slow green gaze.’ But though he never spoke of the things that lay close against his heart, never had his home meant more to him. In the whole of London the only people that he really cared to see were his parents. They and Stanley.

  With Stanley neither did he make any reference to what had happened in Villefranche. Stanley guessed something, probably. He had read that first telegram, and he had the sixth sense of people who watch, who are unconcerned with the impression they were themselves making. Probably in a dozen years or so he would remark casually: ‘It was about the time you were worried about that American woman down in Villefranche.’

  But he made no reference to it. They would meet twice a week or so for squash at Lord’s, and as they were changing for their game, they would in their former fashion in the intervals of discussing quite other problems arrange such business as they had.

  ‘You remember that article you did for the New Review while you were in New York, about picnic meals and New York being a picnic city? I think I’m going to have rather a job of selling it over here.’

  ‘I was afraid you would.’

  ‘Would you care to take a sporting risk and sell it to me personally for fifteen guineas?’

  ‘If I can have them now.’

  ‘That’s settled then.’ At the end of the game Stanley would remark:

  ‘I’ld really have been more successful as a crook than as an agent.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You’ld have been perfectly happy with that fifteen guineas for that article. And I could have pocketed quite calmly the extra fifteen guineas I’ve got for you from Holiday.’

  * * *

  Sometimes after their game they would go to the Granville Club for tea.

  There is a quality of sufficed impersonality about a man’s club in London that you do not find in New York. London is a man’s city, and its clubs, far more than its tailors and its hosiers, are a proof of its masculinity. At any hour of the day a man can go to his club and within five minutes of crossing its thres
hold will have had his good opinion of himself restored. The porters treat him as a person of consequence. His fellow members are deferential. Nobody argues with him. Nobody contradicts him. In New York a club is a place where men forget their troubles in conviviality. In London a club is a place where a man is made to feel he is too powerful to have troubles. In the hour when a man’s self-esteem is at its lowest he has no surer refuge than his club. To dine alone in one’s club is an impressive experience. Men who dine alone are either permanent misogynists and therefore entitled to respect from those they can dispense with, or else they are men under the shadow of a temporary reverse and entitled to consideration. The host of a large party at the Ritz knows no such consideration as is deployed before the solitary diner at his club. The wine-waiter who decants his claret, the junior who presents his bird, the senior who removes the cloth before setting out the dessert, pay him a respect which is independent of any prospect of a tip. The entire staff of the club is at his disposal.

  In the drawing-room, tired after their game, Gordon and Stanley sat together talking desultorily across their papers. The immemorial club atmosphere of the large, silent room with its two aged members dozing before the fire and its assiduous correspondent at work in a far corner was an assurance that life would continue to exist after its temporary disturbances had subsided. They would sit lazily for an hour or so, then: