So Lovers Dream

by Alec Waugh

  He was woken next morning by the bell of his telephone. He glanced at his watch. Nine-thirty. He had slept that long. It was his agent speaking. There was a cable from London for him. As early as that! Then he remembered. London time was four hours ahead of New York time.

  ‘You’d better read it out,’ he said.

  There was a pause. Then a puzzled voice saying:

  ‘There must be something wrong here. I can’t make head or tail of this.’

  ‘Perhaps I shall.’

  ‘It’s from Stanley. It says: Three hundred pounds maximum stop good idea if stop if not not.’

  Gordon chuckled. It was typical of Stanley, in its wit, its appositeness, its generosity. He could have a clear month, probably more, in Hollywood. But in the clear grey dawn of his return to sanity he knew very well the folly of such a trip. Because they were lonely and unhappy he and Joan had turned to one another. With their hearts and minds full of another person they had clung together. But they could only make trouble for each other in California. They would spoil whatever it might be that they might one day mean to one another. There might one day come a time when they would make such a flight together, but it would not be now; it would not be this way. He rang up Joan.

  ‘I’ve a cable from Stanley,’ he said. ‘I’ll read it you.’

  She laughed. ‘It’s like him, that.’ Then, after a pause: ‘I had a letter today from London.’

  ‘How many pages long was it?’

  ‘Fifteen.’

  ‘Are you happy?’

  ‘Indescribably.’

  He laughed. ‘You’d better have dinner with me the night before you start.’

  ‘You’re not coming with us?’

  ‘I don’t think so, Joan.’

  There was a pause.

  ‘On Friday, anyhow,’ she said.

  They dined very quietly in the speakeasy they had gone to their first morning, the speakeasy which was so like a restaurant that you would have thought it was one. And they drank wine that might quite possibly have come from Germany, as though they were in a restaurant. And they talked eagerly, intimately: as though on this last night they needed to get said all that would have to wait so long for saying.

  ‘It’s strange to think,’ he said, ‘that in ten days’ time we shall be six thousand miles apart.’

  ‘I wonder when we’ll meet again.’

  ‘I wonder what we’ll be when we meet again.’

  ‘We met at the wrong time.’

  ‘People usually do.’

  ‘That first time wasn’t.’

  ‘Wasn’t it?’

  ‘I was lonely then. I was looking for somebody. I met you. I thought you were that someone. I was so mad at having to leave the game before you came back.’

  ‘And I was so anxious to impress you by making lots of runs.’

  ‘I so wanted you to get out.’

  ‘Usually I do so easily.’

  ‘And I was so sure you’ld come and see me. I couldn’t think why you didn’t. I kept saying to myself, “This evening he’s bound to come.” ’

  ‘I went to see you act.’

  ‘And you didn’t come round?’

  ‘I thought your life would be so full.’

  ‘It wasn’t. There wasn’t anyone.’

  ‘I wonder what would have happened if I had gone round?’

  ‘I wonder.’

  It would have altered his whole life, he supposed, if he had. They had both been heart-free then. They had both had a certain virginity of emotion to give. Would they have made life or ruined it for one another? Or would it have worked out in any case to some such compromise as the present was. He looked at her. He had never had such a comrade as she had been; who was so easy, who was such fun to be with, who followed his thoughts so quickly, to whom he could talk in shorthand. She was the finest person he had ever met. Beauty and brains and breeding. Where else could he find those three so well allied? Yet sooner or later they might have found themselves pulling in opposite directions.

  ‘All the men who’ve been in my life,’ she had once said, ‘have resented my work: have been angry with my work for coming between them and me. You understand that.’

  And just because he did understand that he knew how hard any permanent alliance on whatever basis could have been for them. An actress had to be near capitals: New York, or London. He would have had to make his life where her work was. He would have had to cut himself off from all that varied experience of travel from which his talent had been nourished. Either he would have stood in her way or she in his. Or else they would have gone separate ways with the inevitable result. Although they understood each other better than anyone else in the world understood them, it might be that it was better for them this way: with these occasional meetings: these occasional signals waved across time and miles. It might be that they could mean more to one another this way: that ambitious people, people with work to do, were not meant to have the solid domestic peace that curbed adventure: that their private lives must always be a strain so that they might throw themselves into their work the more completely. It might be. ‘I don’t think there’ll ever come a time,’ said Gordon, ‘when we shan’t mean something to one another.’

  ‘Oh, darling, I so hope not.’

  Of all the life that had surged for him during the last year their friendship alone seemed likely to be with him at the next year’s end.

  They went to a picture after dinner, and afterwards they went back armed with sandwiches to Gordon’s flat. It was the last time they would be alone for many months. It was a sentimental moment. He imagined that Joan was as responsive as he was, in the right setting, to the moment and the mood. But they both knew without need of parley, that they meant much more to one another that one night. So they talked quietly, hand in hand. It was after one that Gordon said: ‘I’d better be seeing you home now.’

  Next day there was the clatter of the station, the start of the 20th Century, the flowers, the crowds, the presents, the good lucks, and the good-byes, with Joan for one moment held close against him, her lips on his. Then there was the scream of the whistle. And with slow, inexorable increase of haste, the car was passing into the dark tunnel. The silver lights of the 20th Century were being lost in the murk and darkness. Ten days and an ocean and a continent would be between them. ‘That’s that,’ he thought. There remained only his good-bye party. Then it would all be over.

  Chapter Seven

  It was a picnickish party that he was giving on his last night; the kind of party that would be unamusing, or at any rate hard to stage-manage outside New York. He had asked a dozen or so people. They would arrive between six and seven. There would be cocktails and savoury sandwiches. At half-past seven or so there would begin the buffet dinner on which Josephine in her kitchenette would have been hard at work. Josephine was full of ideas. She wanted to serve soup; she wanted to serve a goulash. She had a new recipe for salad. She had schemes for a strawberry shortcake and was prepared to consider a coupe jack. Josephine had a very wholesale attitude to food. Her idea of a light lunch was grape-fruit, followed by an omelette, with an asparagus salad to precede a sweet. Gordon had long since ceased trying to check her estimate of his appetite. As this was his last party he felt that she should be allowed this one time a free hand. He managed to discourage her enterprise, as regards the soup and the coupe jack. By the time the strawberry shortcake arrived no one, he knew, would have the least appetite for it. He had asked the dozen or so that he was fondest of, out of the thirty or so people with whom he had grown intimate in New York. Of the last fifteen months he had spent six in New York, which was a greater length of time than he had spent in any city during the last six years. He had become in a way identified with the city’s life. They had been the unhappiest, the most strained months that he had ever known. But he had received during them more disinterested affection and kindness than he had ever had before. He had had on the whole more good times than he had had anywhere else: there
were more people that he would be sorry to say good-bye to, that he would miss more often, than in any other place. He would be missing a whole way of life, of living and of thinking, of playing and of working. It was strange to think that in eighteen hours he would be out of it.

  He had no idea when he would come back. ‘I’ll be back soon,’ he would say to his friends when he said good-bye to them, and of course sooner or later he would be. For a traveller such as himself, New York could scarcely help lying on the road. He doubted if ever again he would be returning in the same spirit, though; for so long and intimate a visit.

  Tomorrow he would have gone. He would have ceased to mean anything in the lives of any of these people. He would be a face to be remembered occasionally, a name to be mentioned occasionally, a link between certain people, so that when they met, the first question they would ask would be, ‘Have you heard anything of Gordon Carruthers?’ For he had been that. Coming as he had a foreigner into a strange city, a city composed of sets and cliques, with letters of introduction to the separate members of those cliques; finding in each set certain people sympathetic to himself, inviting those people to parties at his apartment, he had brought together people who had not known each other before, who had through him come to know each other quite well, but who since they belonged to separate sets would cease to see each other when he had gone. It was not only he that was leaving New York; but the small communal centre of life that had grown about him. It was a good-bye to that, this party. Not only would he never see those friends of his again in quite this way, but neither would they see each other. A section of harmonious life would be disrupted.

  It was an easy party to stage-manage. There was no need for introductions, as his friends in couples or one by one arrived. Most of them were on Christian names terms with each other. As a host Gordon had none of the host’s usual sense of responsibility as to whether the right people were sitting next to the people they could be expected to like. The party arranged itself. New York was a city to picnic in. He had faith in Josephine’s ability to produce a very tolerable dish out of the various condiments for which she had drawn him up the day before an elaborate shopping list.

  Afterwards they would go and dance somewhere; at the County Fair, probably. And they would try and ride huge bicycles and play table football and amuse the hens; it should be intimate and cosy. But in spite of that Gordon was nervous with anticipation.

  In a few moments Faith would be arriving. It was a fortnight since he had seen her. It would be so innumerable an amount of months before he would be seeing her again. He knew how often during those months he would relive these next few hours, how he would re-phrase and register these last moments: thinking of all he had not said: of all he had not done. He was so anxious to leave behind the exact impression that he wanted. But he did not know what impression it was he wished to leave. Did he want to be cold, disdainful, cruel? Did he want to be indifferent: to pretend that he had not been hurt, that it had not mattered? To say: ‘Well, let’s be good friends now’? to wonder what it had all been about. Or would he be tender and devoted; in a last desperate attempt to explain to her how much he had loved her; how still, in spite of everything, he loved her; to leave her with a tender memory. He did not know what impression he wanted to make, to leave behind, to carry with him.

  Then she came into the room. She was wearing green, a dark sage-green skirt, and a lighter jumper. A willow-leaf-green felt hat was tugged backwards off her forehead. Round her neck was knotted loosely a white silk scarf with a green patterning. She held out her hand. Its fingers closed round his knuckles. The slow green gaze rested steadily upon him.

  ‘It was nice of you to ask me, Gordon.’ In her voice there was the golden tone that he had so loved and missed. And with the sound of it in his ears he knew that the impression that he left would be a question not of his choice, but of hers: that it would be instinctive and automatic: that he was in her hands, an instrument that she played on: that however competent he might be with others, however capable of deciding the direction of his life, with her he would be always what she made him. And in that instant all feeling of worry left him. He knew that the situation would decide itself, that it was out of his hands. He was in tune with her once again. He could relax again, as he had not been able to since that first afternoon in the apartment three months back. There was no need to plan and plot. At the right moment the right words would say themselves: the words that would explain and clear away.

  To the same extent that she had the power of tearing and torturing every nerve, so had she the capacity with a smile, with a word, to soothe every jangled nerve, to give a contrasted peace.

  And the evening went its way. It was a good goulash; and Josephine was right in thinking she had invented an admirable recipe for a salad: and Gordon had been right in imagining that no one would want, after all that, to eat strawberry shortcake; with the coffee there was a liqueur that may or may not have been crème de cacao. The room grew heavy with smoke and food. It was time to move. Bottles of rye were opened and hip flasks filled. A fleet of taxis commandeered, and the County Fair was so empty that they had the feeling of being at a private party.

  They requisitioned a long single table at the highest level; a Woolworth flask was handed to the orchestra; the music started. White Rock and Canada Dry were set out along the table; half of the party began to dance; and half to play the absurd game of table football; the hens clustered at the entrance; Gordon’s eyes as he danced kept turning towards Faith. There was the slow fond smile in them he had not seen for many haggard months.

  He did not worry because she was dancing with someone else; because there was more often than not a table’s length between them, because in fifteen hours water would be widening round the Lafayette. He was living in a timeless peace.

  It was late in the evening before they found themselves at far ends of the table, but alone. He came across to her. They sat silent: He waited for her to speak. He had always, it seemed, waited for her to make the first move. It was a minute or so before she spoke.

  ‘Are you going to sleep with me tonight?’

  It was said so naturally, so undramatically, that it wiped away all the confusion there had been between them since that last night at Villefranche at the Welcome, when they had sat looking across the moonlit water to the humped outline of Cap Ferrat.

  He answered her as naturally.

  ‘Please,’ he said.

  They sat still in silence.

  ‘Roger’s away,’ she said.

  They said no more. There would be time during the long night to say all they had to say.

  ‘Let’s dance,’ he said.

  It would never be again like this, he told himself.

  The music stopped. At the table there was a reassortment. Half the party began to feel that they were getting hungry. Some sandwiches were ordered, others began to feel that it was getting late. The party diminished gradually till there were left only half a dozen of them.

  ‘I’ll see you all home,’ Gordon said.

  They were scattered along the length of New York’s hundred streets. Faith was the second to be dropped. There was an amusing quality of irony about the farewell they took: about their promise to write, their hopes that they would meet again quite soon, here or in London or in the South of France; when in ten minutes time they would be again together. He chatted eagerly and happily as the yellow cab raced northwards with the green lights flashing. It was in Ninety-third Street that he deposited his last friend. As the car raced back down the length of Park, he contrasted the mood in which he was making this drive with the mood in which he had expected that he would make it. He had so often thought of that last lonely drive between the flashing lights towards the glittering crown of the Grand Central building; with his final farewell of Faith behind him. In many moods had he thought of that last drive. But it was quite different from what he had expected. As everything as it had come had seemed unexpected: though in retrospect ever
ything fell into its place; becoming inevitable and in character. He knew perfectly that in twelve hours’ time he would be wondering how anything that could have happened that night could have surprised him. He found her waiting in the hall of her apartment building.

  ‘We might get hungry. Let’s get some sandwiches,’ she said.

  ‘There’s a sandwich shop on the corner of Thirty-eighth Street,’ Gordon said.

  On the way there in the cab they talked just as a husband and wife might talk, returning at the evening’s end from an evening party; comparing this with that. Their talk had a curious quality of intimacy. ‘That must be one of the nice things about marriage,’ Gordon thought. ‘A cosy talking about things afterwards.’