Fisher grinned.
“It was your generosity which undid you in the end,” he said. “I think I told you that in the fracas in the mews one of my assailants slipped his jacket. That coat had a tailor’s label with his client’s name neatly written inside. Do you give all your old clothes away to your gang?”
Box swore.
The Pioneers
Gina Baring was going to leave her husband. They had discussed the move very carefully and with all the mutual consideration which had characterised every step of their eventful twelve years of married life.
Hitherto they had faced each obstacle in their joint path and bad avoided it or surmounted it together, but now the time had come when it seemed to both that the wisest course lay in the dissolution of their partnership.
Gina Baring sat in her white and gold drawing-room and trembled. She was not aware that she was afraid, but that subconscious, almost physical intelligence which governs the senseless reactions of the body was in a state of panic.
The front part of her brain was busy thinking of Fergus Cappet, the man to whom her husband was so lightheartedly relinquishing her; or rather it was thinking of the uncomfortable armchairs in his dark book-lined living-room and wondering if he would permit her to change them for something less reproving to the flesh.
Over the Florentine mantelpiece her own portrait, painted before Jan Baring had become the fashionable A.R.A. he now was, smiled down at her with wide, confident eyes. Mrs. Baring met the painted gaze and shivered without knowing why.
She and Jan were parting on the morrow. Their simple arrangements had already been made with due attention to the comfort and convenience of all concerned.
Tomorrow, Fergus, who was bohemian in the fine old-fashioned sense of that extraordinarily demoded word, would receive Gina Baring with that lack of formality which his two disastrous past experiences had taught him to prefer.
On her departure from home her husband had arranged to phone his solicitor and instruct the law to take its heavy-footed course. Then, on the day in which the Court should pronounce Jan a free man, he would marry Lynne Agnew.
The Barings had worked out every move together, as they had worked out the other serious steps in their lives, such steps as their rise from the studio in Soho to the flat in St. John’s Wood and afterwards their departure to Kensington, and from Kensington to their present home on the Kentish Downs.
It was a dignified programme, comfortable and eminently practical. Gina Baring knew that it would work admirably.
At the moment she was in a state of enforced calm. She was not considering the future or permitting herself to peer too closely at the immediate past.
When Fergus Cappet had taken her into his arms and his narrow, ugly mouth had trembled as he told her of his insufferable need for her, his appeal had come at a time when Lynne Agnew had already taken a definite place on Jan’s horizon, so that Fergus had been a godsend to Gina Baring, providing as he did a blessed avenue of dignified escape.
Mrs. Baring stirred on the couch. Lynne Agnew was coming to dinner. She had phoned to invite herself that morning and Jan had brought the intimation to his wife apologetically.
“I told her the Perneys were coming,” he had said rather helplessly: “I explained that they were old friends we hadn’t seen for seven or eight years; but she’s made up her mind. It won’t matter, will it?”
Gina Baring had looked into her husband’s dark face and had smiled and reassured him. Privately she considered Lynne’s gesture vulgar, precipitate, and unfortunately typical, but she did not say so. The Barings had always preserved a code of politeness which, while it made their daily relationship particularly comfortable, tended to keep them strangely unaware of each other’s more intimate reactions.
Now, as Gina sat waiting for the Perneys to arrive on the evening train, she considered Lynne Agnew’s attraction once again, and once again gave it up as incomprehensible. The entire cul-de-sac in which her own and Jan’s life had suddenly come to a full stop was incomprehensible to her.
It had begun with the house. The house was the house of their dreams. In the days when they had worked together in the dusty little studio littered with the paraphernalia of Jan Baring’s trade, the miscellaneous belongings of their myriad friends, and their own few possessions, they had conceived just such a dwelling and had furnished it in imagination with just such treasures as it now contained.
That was over ten years ago. Since then they had worked as only the obstinately successful artist knows how to work, and at last, through sweat and the bloodshed of reverses, had realised their sweet ambition.
Gina Baring’s glance rested on the porcelain bowl they had brought from Marseilles, the candelabra they had picked up in Rome, the table that had come from the castle in Wales, and the puzzled expression in her round, grey eyes grew stronger.
Lynne Agnew had arrived on the scene with the house. She was a member of the country social set whose card of membership was the possession of reasonably-sized property in the district, and the blonde widow had annexed Jan in a fashion so blatant and forthright that Mrs. Baring had sat spellbound, scarcely believing her senses.
It had happened so suddenly. Jan had slipped into a vacant niche as the affluent celebrity of the neighbourhood and Gina had found herself without a place.
The little dinners at which one met the same people, heard the same gossip and exchanged the same half-digested views bored and bewildered her. She became aloof and unfriendly, while Jan, on the other hand, took to the life with unexpected enthusiasm.
He played bridge, he danced, he bought an expensive car and drove Mrs. Agnew about in it and listened with apparent satisfaction to her secondhand sophistries.
At the moment when Gina Baring’s astonishment had turned to bitterness and her discomfort become identified with shame, Fergus Cappet had appeared with his romantic and tragic appeal.
Tonight the Perneys were coming down from town for a snatched week-end, and tomorrow, when they had gone again, the Barings’ marriage was ending as quietly and unobtrusively as it was possible to ensure.
Gina rose. It was nearly fifteen minutes past seven. In a moment now Jan would swing the car in at the drive gates and the Perneys would climb out to greet her.
She was not very clear in her mind about the Perneys. Victor had been a friend of Jan’s in the early days. He had come to the gatherings, and towards the end of the time had often brought with him the little thing who was now his wife.
Gina Baring feared they might be a dull couple. She remembered those first years as a period of drudgery, only made possible by a youthful exuberance now as inexplicable as it was irrecoverable.
It was nearly eight years since she or Jan had seen either of them, and Victor’s letter announcing his marriage and his intention of descending upon them had seemed very much of an irritating voice from the remote past.
Neither of the Barings had ever any desire to be rude, however, and since it was easier to put up with their old friends for a night than to go through the laborious business of an explanation, they had fixed an early date and fitted in their own arrangements accordingly.
Gina Baring saw the forthcoming evening as a last dull prelude to her new adventure, and did not look forward to it particularly. She heard the car drive up and, after glancing at herself in the round mirror, went out to greet her guests in Jan’s house for the last time.
Her first glimpse of them interested her. The man was much as she remembered him. He was thicker, perhaps, and less untidy, but he had the same feckless, typically artistic face and the same youthful expression.
The girl had grown up. She was more assured but still vulnerable, and Gina felt vaguely maternal towards them both.
She noticed that Jan was nervous. He hustled in with the suitcases and was inclined to talk loudly about trivialities. For the first time it occurred to her that the evening might have its embarrassing moments.
It was at this instant that Victor P
erney caught sight of Gina, and her formal smile of welcome vanished before his whoop of delight.
“God!” he said. “Darling! Oh, my lovely woman, what a corker of a house!”
She was in his arms and hugged and kissed like a long-lost mother before she could draw breath.
“Gina!” cried the girl behind him. “Oh, Gina, you’ve grown lovely. I knew you would. We always said you would and you have. Oh, darlings, isn’t this marvellous?”
Gina Baring was kissed again, and with a boisterous guest on either arm and followed by Jan, she was swept, startled and breathless, into the breakfast-room, out into the garden and back through the french windows again.
Sally Perney paused on the threshold and stood hesitating, looking like some plump and delighted robin in her fashionable suit and bright sweater. Her quick turn of the head towards her husband was birdlike, too.
“Vic,” she said joyfully. “Oh, Vic, they’ve done it. Look!”
Following her ecstatic gaze, Gina Baring had the odd experience of seeing her own room for the first time. The discovery that it really was lovely, as lovely as she and Jan could conceive a room, came to her with a sudden sense of comfort which was rudely dispelled immediately afterwards by her next thought, which was of the morrow.
Jan tried to take the situation in hand. His intelligent face was blank as he busied himself with drinks. He talked incessantly, asking questions without waiting for answers to them, and firing off little scraps of random information whenever there seemed to be the least fear of a lull in the conversation.
The Perneys were not in the least disconcerted by him. They were as unselfconscious as a pair of savages and as happy as children newly home from school. The extraordinary delight which they seemed to take, both in the house and in the Barings themselves, was bewildering to Gina at first, and afterwards, when she grew used to it, oddly stimulating in spite of the heartbreaking irony of the situation.
The Perneys examined the furniture, expressing frank approval and demanding the history of each piece, until at length even Jan unbent and condescended to honour them with one of his famous impersonations of old Cordigliani, the antique dealer in the Hampstead Road.
Gina found herself laughing, and Victor Perney threw an arm round her shoulders.
“Hell, it’s good to see you two again,” he said with deep satisfaction. “When we saw old Jan in the station we had an awful fear that you might have changed, but you haven’t, you know. You’re just the same. Just as you were ten years ago.”
Gina Baring shot a guilty glance at her husband, but he was not looking at her. He and Sally Perney were exploring the depths of the china cabinet and he had his back to the rest of the room. Presently he turned and spoke with studied casualness.
“By the way, you two. I hope you don’t mind, we’ve got another guest for dinner. Mrs. Lynne Agnew is coming along. We did our best to put her off, but she’s a determined soul.”
The Perneys looked disappointed, but were disposed to be obliging.
“One of the local ladies?” inquired Victor, perching himself on the arm of a sofa. “I suppose you can’t get away from neighbours even here. What’s she like?”
Jan refilled his glass carefully before speaking.
“Charming,” he said at last. “I’ve got a portrait of her in this year” s Academy.”
Sally looked up.
“A rather big thing with a blue background?” she demanded. “I saw it. You did too, Vic. I pointed it out to you.”
‘That’s right. A nice thing. Rather more conventional than your usual stuff, but very pleasant. A grim-faced wench with flowers in her hair.”
Jan’s dark face grew a shade more dusky.
That’s the one.”
Perney raised his glass.
“If she’s a client, God bless her!” he said piously. “God bless all sleek, yellow-haired, hard-mouthed women who want their portraits painted.”
He set down his glass and threw himself on the leopard-skin rug before the fireplace and buried his face in it like a child.
“I was at your wedding.” His smothered voice continued the conversation affably. “Chianti and cake in Jan’s studio. I was fifteen and got drunk as an owl on it. Now you’re successful and I’m married and damn nearly successful myself. Isn’t it miraculous? I say, have you ever done this, Jan? The fur on a leopard’s head is the softest thing in the world. You try.”
In the end they all sampled it, one after the other, even Gina. It was remarkably soft. The short hair caressed their cheeks deliriously.
“A simple pleasure,” remarked Sally Perney, sitting back on her heels and laughing. “I shouldn’t like to do it on our dirty old hearthrug. We’ve got a real genuine Sheraton table though and a lovely Napoleon mirror with eagles. Next month, if all goes well, we’ll buy a corner cupboard.”
Gina blinked. The girl’s enthusiasm contained the genuine note. It echoed faintly down the years, as familiar and astonishing as the call of the first cuckoo in spring. Through the gush, the parrot-talk, the second-rate, the second-hand chatter of their new-won world, it trembled bugle-clear.
She glanced at Jan and he met her eyes and smiled with an amused tolerance which was just a little insincere.
Gina Baring turned away from him and tried to think of Fergus, Fergus who at any rate did want her, Fergus whose hungry, unhappy eyes were forever searching for that key to peace which must always lie hidden irrevocably beneath his own insufficiency. But her lips were unsteady.
It was very fortunate that Lynne Agnew should have chosen that precise moment to arrive. Her appearance caused a diversion which came only just in time. She swept into the room on a wave of faint perfume, her pastel silk striking a conventional note.
Lynne was charming, graceful and glaringly insincere. Beside Salley Perney’s twinkling contentment her very flesh appeared synthetic. She nodded to them all in a correct, distant way, touched Jan’s hand for a moment, and was smilingly infuriating to Gina.
Her coming brought the whole gathering to heel. The question of changing for the meal became a problem. Lynne was both gracious and amused, yet managed to convey that the omission was entirely due to Gina’s incompetence as a hostess though of course Gina was notoriously incompetent and was to be forgiven.
Jan glanced at his wife reproachfully, and for a giddy moment Gina even felt incompetent. Perney grinned.
“I can’t change, anyway,” he said. “I didn’t bring any clothes. I’m also starving.”
Mrs. Agnew regarded him with interest for the first time. Her polite astonishment was devastating and he coloured.
Five minutes later they went in to the meal, a chastened company.
Mrs. Agnew did her earnest best to put everyone at their ease, undeterred by the single vital objection that she was not the hostess. In spite of Jan’s determined efforts to ward off the Perneys, she insisted on bringing them into the brittle clatter of malicious gossip about her own acquaintances by pumping them tentatively about their own home and circle.
The Perneys were only too anxious to talk about themselves. After the discomfiture of the first ten minutes, they had evidently decided on Mrs. Agnew’s place in their universe and were anxious to dispose of her quietly and get back to Jan and Gina. Mrs. Agnew, therefore, got a little more than that for which she had bargained.
Sally Perney’s domestic problems proved to be of that sensational nature which sometimes characterises the lives of the employers of the cheaper London help. Her amusements were simple, not to say plebeian.
A well-directed snub, horrid in its cruelty, brought a blush to her cheek and Victor Perney to her defence. He regarded Mrs. Agnew with lazy, friendly eyes and began to scoff at her with that misleadingly ingenuous questioning which is the savagest weapon in the world.
Lynne did not perceive the attack for a long time, and Gina sat helpless, her heart bleeding for Jan and her sense of humour titillated, while Mrs. Agnew was led gently to convey that she thought herself t
he most beautiful woman in the district, that in her opinion one did not mix socially with people whose income was less than five thousand a year, and that good taste was largely a matter of patronising the most expensive shops.
Perney was delighted with his success and glanced at Jan for approbation. Gina saw the look and writhed in sympathetic discomfort.
After dinner they sat round in the sitting-room. The Perneys did not play bridge and said so cheerfully. They were anxious to do their best to make the enforced hour or so with the difficult guest as bearable as possible, however, and set themselves out to be entertaining.
They were, indeed, extremely amusing. Their chatter about their recent wedding, their parties, the picturesque characters they met, all helped to bring the old familiar gaiety of the early days of their own marriage back to the Barings with a vividness which Gina found stifling.
Lynne Agnew kept her head and stuck to her own rigid code of behaviour with a determination which was at times a little grim. She was a slow-witted woman, but not entirely without perception. She had become aware of her treatment at Perney’s merciless hands quite within half an hour of the moment when he finished with her, and she was wary of him now. But he had grown used to her amused and tolerant expression and was no longer subdued by it.
Gina watched her husband with covert anxiety. She thought only of him. Her tragic part in the comedy was too poignant to be savoured, but she could appreciate his acute embarrassment and sympathise with it.
Jan did his best, but the cards were against him. The Perneys amused and stimulated him in spite of himself. Inevitably the talk turned to old times. Victor Perney lay back in a great armchair and with a few deft brush strokes sketched in a picture of the Barings’ Soho studio. He did this for Mrs. Agnew’s sole benefit, in a spirit of pure forgiveness. He was preparing to talk and wanted her to enjoy the performance, and his word-picture was in the nature of a stage set.
“They were the first of the gang to marry,” he said, his bright round eyes fixed earnestly on the fair, painted face in front of him. “We were all more or less starving, you know. Not a bean between us. One decent suit between a dozen of us, and a good meal for everybody as soon as someone sold a drawing or a relation took pity. You know the sort of thing.”
Mr. Campion's Lucky Day & Other Stories Page 21
