The Expensive Halo

by Josephine Tey

  Gareth stared a little. “No one would publish it,” he said. “It isn’t dance music.”

  “But it’s good!”

  “You don’t know music publishers!” he said grimly.

  “No, but they don’t know me. You let me have the manuscript, and I’ll talk to them. You haven’t enough impudence, that’s what is wrong with you. I have lots. There are such a lot of things I am going to do for you, Gareth!”

  “I don’t like you to say that,” he said abruptly.

  “Why not?”

  “There is so little I can do for you.”

  “But it makes me so happy to do things for you. Don’t you like that?”

  “Not when I can’t do anything in return.

  “But you repay me by just being alive.”

  “That’s no credit to me!”

  “Silly!” She skated away from the thin place.

  “Then let’s say there are such a lot of things we are going to do together. Have you ever seen the sun rise on the South Downs?”

  He shook his head.

  “Well, I’ll show you that. What will you show me?”

  “We could go to Boulogne for the day and eat snails.”

  “Oh, lovely! What else?”

  “I shall take you to the hardest seat at Covent Garden and teach you to like opera.”

  “Even opera would be bearable with you, but don’t expect me to be solemn about it. I wish it were spring.”

  “Why?”

  “I have the most insane desire to sit hand in hand on a bank of daisies.”

  “Oh, Ursula, how I love you!”

  “I think I’m a little mad, but you have no idea how wonderful it is to think you know all there is to know about life, and then to come across something glorious that you never imagined existed.”

  “What amazes me is that I went about London all those years and didn’t know you were there,” Gareth said. “I feel I ought to have known you were there, somehow.”

  “My difficulty is to believe you are here now. It’s all much too good to be true, Gareth. Aren’t you afraid that something will happen, and we’ll find that—that we’ve only been having an anaesthetic or something?”

  “And you know,” Gareth said, still following his own train of thought, “I’ve seen your photograph in the papers often, and just turned the page over. That’s funny, isn’t it?”

  “It’s more than funny. It’s incredible. I shall have to change my photographer.”

  “You laugh at everything. I think that’s why I love you. It isn’t what photographers like in you that makes me love you, Ursula. It isn’t the way your hair grows, or the shape of your mouth, or anything like that. It’s just you. I never met anyone like you.”

  “My dear!”

  “I suppose I’ve got to go. It’s late, isn’t it?”

  “I expect it is, but I feel so young that I think time must be just beginning.”

  “You look about six when you smile like that.”

  “Six! My dear man! I am exactly—How long is it since you said you loved me? I am exactly as old as that.”

  “If I go now, promise that you won’t be any older when I see you at tea-time to-morrow.

  “I won’t be a minute older. I’m only alive when you’re there.”

  Chapter XII

  Gareth went home by bus, although it took much longer than the Underground, because he felt that he wanted the lights and the traffic as an obbligato to the things which were singing in his head. He had a vague feeling that if he had to endure the sepulchral atmosphere and mummified figures of the Underground to-night he would burst. All the way home the exultation in him span itself into music; mad, lovely music, as triumphant as the buses which charged past within a foot of his nose, as dancing as the lights, as full of power and radiance as the tall buildings, flood-lit against the sky. So that it was not until he stepped off the bus at the corner of Sark Street that he remembered Molly.

  Ursula had never forgotten her for one moment; from the time that Gareth’s little careless sentence had hit her with the force of a bullet, Molly had never ceased to be somewhere in her mind. But Gareth had been so carried away that the world he knew had ceased to exist for him; he had almost forgotten his own identity. Now he remembered it with a shock. He was Gareth Ellis, and he had been unfaithful to Molly. Not unfaithful in the modern sense, but unfaithful nevertheless.

  “What!” said his other self. “Unfaithful because you happen to have kissed another woman! Don’t be silly!” But he knew it wasn’t that. He was unfaithful because Ursula filled his whole being to the exclusion of everyone and everything else. Molly, kind pleasant little Molly, was a pale shadow in the background. He might have kissed many women without disturbing by a hair’s breadth the small throne that was Molly’s; but if he had never kissed Ursula at all he would still have been hopelessly unfaithful to Molly. He had never felt for Molly, never felt for anyone, what he felt for Ursula. In those first days after he met her, when to let his thoughts dwell on her had been an exquisite joy, he had stilled the vague pricks of conscience by telling himself that he could worship Ursula with impunity both to himself and to Molly, since she was a star so far from his orbit that his admiration of her was no more harmful (and much more helpful) than going to church and praying to God. He had taken to walking through the square in the mornings on the way to rehearsal, not so that he might see her but because it gave him a heady satisfaction to tread the same pavement which she trod. He would remind himself as he came nearer to the magic fifty yards in front of her house how quiet the square was and how few people walked on that piece of pavement, so that his feet might be resting exactly where hers had been the last to tread. He did not glance at the house. He felt nearer to her without that. The sight of the actual stones of her habitation, forbidding and palatial, emphasised the barriers between them, and so he went past with his eyes on the pavement, feeling her nearness as a sort of charm, walking in her footsteps with a lifting of the heart.

  His adoration of her had, up to that point, been bearable; it had been merely a something which gave life a radiance it had never before possessed. There had been no hunger in it, no sense of frustration, no pain; it had been an iridescent happiness to him, waking and sleeping. Then he had had supper with her again, in company with Regan and Tim Grierson, and they had talked about Jan Vek, and she had asked him to go with her to the Wigmore Hall next afternoon to hear him play. He had sat beside her and tried to keep his thoughts on the music, but it had been hopeless. Why listen to Jan Vek indulging in mere virtuosity when he himself was taking part in a miracle? When Ursula Deane was here beside him, his sole companion for a whole afternoon, his companion by her own choice. It had made him a little light-headed. He was ruder about Jan Vek than he meant to be, partly because he felt so superior to Jan Vek, partly because he was still nervous and a little shy with Ursula. But she had laughed and seemed to like his lack of reverence for Jan Vek. She herself was irreverent by nature; most of her opinions, he noticed, were barbed. “I like rebels,” she said, apropos of something; and he thought that she looked a rebel herself He could see her in one of those red caps they wore in the French Revolution, leading an army to storm something. At least, that is what she was like when she was animated; when she was still she might equally be an aristo, contemptuous of the guillotine. She was aristo first, really; she was contemptuous before she was rebellious.

  When they were parting after the concert to keep their separate appointments, she had said: “When will you come and play for me? To-morrow?” and with his heart thumping furiously he had said that he would. “Come about six, then,” she had said. “I shall get rid of the crowd by that time, and we can have the place to ourselves.” That “we” had stayed with him for the next twenty-four hours as a talisman.

  And now, walking down Sark Street, he was facing the truth. He was in love with Ursula Deane, and (incredible, oh! incredible) she was in love with him. She had said so. And what was he going t
o do about Molly? He had no idea. What did one do in a situation like that?

  What worried him most was that he wanted so dreadfully to tell Molly about Ursula. Not because he was feeling guilty, but because he had always told Molly everything, and it was strange and disconcerting not to be able to tell her this.

  Downstairs at Number Seventeen he found Sara still at table although it was after half-past seven.

  “Is this early breakfast or late tea?” he asked. Sara said that she had been working late in Brook Street.

  “Keep that for your husband,” he said, and noticed, with the perception which his own happiness had wakened in him, that Sara looked happy too.

  Their mother came in with Gareth’s tea.

  “What on earth kept you, Gareth! I thought you were never coming,” she said with the testiness of a person who has been anxious without cause.

  “Oh, Regan’s a slave driver,” Gareth said, and reached for the salt.

  “Keep that for your wife,” Sara said.

  Her mother shook her head at her and went away again to the kitchen, where she was cooking Ratan Dastur’s supper. Brother and sister ate in silence for a little, until Gareth, catching sight of his sister’s face in an unguarded moment, said abruptly: “What are you hugging to yourself?”

  “Me?” Sara looked up in exaggerated surprise. “Nothing.”

  “That extra work in Brook Street seems to have had a queerly refreshing effect!”

  “I really was detained in Brook Street, you know. Only it was an argument that kept me, not work.”

  “The inadvisability of tariffs, I suppose,” Gareth said, still unbelieving.

  “No, just where we should go to-morrow.”

  “And where are you going? Epping?”

  Sara hesitated a moment. “Secret?” she asked, in the formula of their childhood.

  “Cross my heart,” Gareth said, taking the oath.

  “Kempton Park.”

  Gareth stopped chewing and stared at her. “Who with?” he said at length.

  “A man I met at the shop. If you ever let it come out here that I was at Kempton, I’ll never forgive you, Gareth.”

  “I don’t think you need have said that! Have I ever squeaked?”

  “No, I know you haven’t. But this is awfully important.”

  “I say, Sara, you’ll watch your step, won’t you?”

  “Oh, yes, I can take care of myself.”

  “Is he—is he all right?”

  “One of the best.”

  He grinned at her. “Well, you’re critical enough to be a connoisseur, so I suppose you must be fairly safe. Going to see the Duke of York’s?”

  “Yes. How did you know it was the Duke of York’s to-morrow?”

  “You don’t have to live with your head in sheet music because you play the fiddle,” Gareth said. “I’m glad you’re having some fun at last. Happier now?”

  “Yes, awfully happy.”

  There was something in the sound of her voice as she said that which caused his smile to fade. “I say, Sara, it isn’t serious, is it?”

  “Not a bit. Neither marriage nor the other thing, so keep calm. I’m only having a good time for once in my life. It will probably never happen again, so I’m taking it while it’s there. He happens to be decent and that makes it possible, see? Just an enormous piece of luck, that’s all.”

  Her words touched an echoing chord somewhere in Gareth. That was bow he was feeling. Strange that the same thing should have happened to Sara. He wondered whether Sara was in love with her man the way he was in love with Ursula. It didn’t seem possible, somehow. Sara was always cold to men. And no one could love anyone as he loved Ursula.

  “Well, good luck!” he said. “Don’t get kicked by a horse and taken to hospital. That would give the game away!”

  Chapter XIII

  Sara remembered her brother’s warning as she leaned against the rail and watched in a sort of dream the horses go by; so near that she could touch them, so beautiful that they made a sore place round her heart, so satisfying that she felt that all her life she had been waiting for this. It would be an anti-climax if a pair of those dainty heels flashed into the sunlight and half-killed her.

  “What are you amused about?” asked Chitterne who never missed any expression on Sara’s face.

  Sara told him.

  “I’m a little jealous of Gareth,” Chitterne said.

  “Of Gareth!” she said, amazed, turning to look at him.

  “Yes; your voice changes completely when you talk about him.”

  “But what nonsense! We’re a very ordinary brother and sister. We used to be a lot together, because I was the only girl in the family and he was the baby, but since we grew up we don’t see very much of each other. We’re an unrelated family, if you know what I mean.”

  “Most families are nowadays. I think they probably always were, only until now they didn’t have the freedom to make it obvious. No one imagines nowadays that you have to like your family just because they happen to be your family. That is why I noticed the way you speak of your brother, I suppose. I say, I want to go and see my bookie. Would you like to come along, or will you wait here?”

  Sara said that she would go and powder her nose, on which the excitement of the first race had produced something which was nearly a shine. He escorted her to the cloakroom in the stand, and promised to be waiting for her there in ten minutes’ time. Sara spent five minutes repairing the ravages of emotion and fresh air, and another five watching the women who came and went across the drawing-room, preening themselves in the large mirrors with a lack of self-consciousness and a pitilessness of self-criticism which no mere man could ever equal. Sara separated the social sheep from the goats with the unerringness of a West End dress-maker. The great majority were the regular racing crowd to be seen in any Club stand clean cut, well mannered, confident, expensively and quietly tailored; but there was a liberal sprinkling of fussily dressed females, much befurred, with fancy shoes and an air of benevolent opulence. “I never op anywhere without a spare pair of garters, dearie,” one was confiding to her companion. Another in a rich Glasgow voice with gaps where the T’s should have been was discussing the fitness of a colt: “He looks fa’ to me, bu’ Sco’s runnin.’ him an’ Sco’ shud know.” Wondering a little at such touching faith in the unknown Scott, Sara went out again to the landing. On one hand the stairs descended to the back of the stand; on the other was the balcony. There was no sign of Chitterne at the bottom of the stairs yet, so she moved into the balcony. A few women who were not sufficiently interested in selling races to appear in the paddock before the handicap sat about on chairs, and before them, in the October sunlight, spread a little bit of the England one remembers with affection in distant places; a bit of England which not wars, nor the ridicule of the intellectual, nor the fanaticism of the reformer can destroy. Just over the horizon somewhere was London, but here in the Thames valley it was as quiet and clear as though London had never existed. The noise of the Ring was flung into the shining afternoon with no more disturbance than the cawing of rooks would have made. The green of field and course and the smudgy browns of the distant trees were painted in flat washes like a hunting print; the white rails floated in brightness. In the distance, two horses shrouded in clothing were being led back to their quarters after the first race; their movements were leisured and fastidious; they passed into the trees and disappeared. The first of the horses for the second race began to canter down the course from the paddock to the starting-gate; flashes of colour and flurry of hoofs. The crowd on the lawn began to thicken.

  Everything that was England was down there between the stands and the far trees; and every type of man that made her was down there in the crowd: saint and scallywag; and all the courage, optimism, and philosophy which are common to both. Dip into the crowd blindfold and you could pick out anything from a botanist to a pavement-artist.

  Kempton Park. But it might have been any English racecourse on a
Saturday afternoon.

  Sara turned to the stairs again. Chit was there this time, but he was talking to someone: a little rosy-cheeked man with tightish trousers and grey hair. She supposed that he was giving instructions to his trainer or to the head lad. She paused half-way down, and stood watching the procession of people who passed her on their way into the stand. Chitterne had his back to her and was unaware that she was waiting, but she caught the eye of the rosy man several times; his eyes had the childish clearness which the eyes of sailors and horsemen have. Chit was evidently bringing the conversation to an end, and as they moved apart she went down the remaining steps to meet him. But before the farewell was concluded Chit had hailed a man who was hurrying past and, running a few steps after him, pulled out a Racing-up-to-Date and engaged him in talk. This left Sara awkwardly facing the trainer man, high and dry; it was difficult to turn back up the steps and still more impossible to walk past Chit and his acquaintance.

  The little man lifted his hat in an abrupt, grumpy way. “Are you with Chitterne?” he asked. “He won’t be a minute. He always gets a little heated when he has a horse running. Very silly, of course; but natural. Natural.”

  “Do you think that Double Bass is going to win?”

  “Probably. Very probably. Have you had a good bet?”

  “Lord Chitterne put a pound on for me at five to one.”

  The little man pursed his lips in an amused fashion. “A pound! Chitterne must be saving.”

  “That is all I would allow him put on for me,” Sara said, a little stiffly. Chitterne might be good friends with his trainer, but it was rather impossible of the man to criticise him to a stranger. “Have you seen the horse? No? Let me take you over now. Nice colt. Very. That is where Chitterne is going when he has finished the little argument. He’ll follow.”

  A little surprised, but without words for polite refusal, she was led past the arguing couple. “We’re going over to the boxes,” the little man said to Chitterne as they passed, and Chitterne, after gaping for a moment, grinned broadly, said “Right-ho” and went on talking.