‘I can’t say the firm’s idea of decor for secretaries charms me,’ Jean said. She spoke quickly, and he realised that she was making out, with all the tact of a princess, that that flicker hadn’t been on account of him talking like a young proletarian. ‘I’d call it studied – and pretty vulgar.’
‘I wouldn’t know,’ he said. He knew that he had to defend himself with a bit of irony when it was needed.
‘It’s all under contract – and they send a smooth little man who says he creates arrangements to harmonise with my personality. I suppose he does the same with Uncle Arthur, for there are masses of flowers in his room too. A large-scale business like this is enormous fun in some ways. But one wouldn’t call it precisely refined. If you’re going to impress the million – and that’s our job – you must develop a flair for being pretty brassy.’
‘Ah,’ said Phil, ‘public means that public manners breeds.’
‘What’s that?’ She was puzzled.
‘Just Shakespeare,’ Phil explained with cheerful offhandedness. ‘Do you mean you’d like to be out of all this?’
‘It’s often vastly entertaining, as I say. But sometimes—’ Jean paused and looked at Phil with an apparent seriousness behind which he sensed an enigmatic flicker of mischief—‘yes, I’d do almost anything to be shut of it.’
He almost leapt at this, although the turn of phrase was something he didn’t quite take to. But an inner prompting made him tread cautiously.
‘Did you say Uncle Arthur?’ he asked. ‘Is that Mr. Prendick?’
‘Yes. He gives me a job. I’m a poor relation – one of quite a crowd of poor relations.’ Jean paused for a moment. ‘Have you a crowd of poor relations, Mr. Tombs?’
‘Only my aunt—her you saw on Friday. She’s poor all right. Only she doesn’t know she is. Lots are like that.’
‘You have no parents – no brothers or sisters?’ Jean’s marvellously changing voice asked this almost tenderly. But at the same time it struck Phil that she had a businesslike turn for checking up. It was almost – some toughly rational part of his mind whispered to him – as if she were deciding that at least there would be no harm in having all the facts.
‘No. I haven’t got none of them.’ And from some quite unfathomable impulse he added: ‘But I got a girl.’
‘How very nice.’ She was looking at him with the largest candour, and when she framed another question he expected it to be something like, ‘Is she dark or fair?’
‘That you sleep with?’ she asked in a clear tranquil tone.
Phil was dumbfounded. He felt himself flush hotly. He had a wild notion that he’d imagined the words or grotesquely distorted them, and that if he replied to them at all he would be fatally betraying himself.
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘Ought I not to have asked?’ She was all easy contrition. ‘Different people have different ideas of what one does ask. My friends are all terribly frank.’
‘I wouldn’t ask you,’ Phil said.
Now it was Jean who flushed – and glanced at him as if for the first time he’d really said something. At the same time there was a look about her that he’d have called brilliant – just as if she’d confirmed a sense of having wonderfully brought something off. Him, perhaps. After all, she’d be a fool if she didn’t know by this time just where she had him.
‘No,’ she said. ‘You haven’t got that sort of frankness, thank God. So it wasn’t fair. You see, it sometimes comes over me to behave like people in books. And say things like them. Sorry.’ She was entirely gay over this queer confession. ‘But I’m sure your girl is charming. And now, let’s go. Just give me a minute to tidy up. Cigarettes in that box.’
She vanished from the room – floating like an angel, he thought, past the piled-up roses that he now knew to be vulgar. He sat down and lit a cigarette, although he hardly knew he was doing it. It was a new world, all right, where a girl could ask you that. And talk about a mistress the way the word was used in the Decameron! But it hadn’t cheapened her, as it often cheapens a girl to use some words men use, thinking to be smart and daring. It had only made her a little more he didn’t quite know what. Teasing, certainly – but she wouldn’t be her intoxicating self if she wasn’t that. Virginal, perhaps – like the hunting one among the goddesses.
And she was coming out with him. He’d had a nerve – and it had paid off. Of course it needn’t mean much with her, for she lived in a world that was all parties and casual sociabilities and nothing serious intended. She might just be curious about how he’d behave, and be feeling she’d have something amusing to tell those terrible frank friends. Or she might be thinking of him as a bit of market research for Prendick, and finish off by briskly filling him in on a form like a social worker’s. Still, he’d got where he’d never thought, hadn’t he? It was up to him now, it was.
Phil stubbed out his cigarette, straightened his homespun tie, and then found that she was in the room again. She’d put on a hat and was carrying gloves, but she still had the same dazzling simplicity. He came across the room to her like she was a magnet, and he knew she was noticing how he walked. It was something, surely that a social worker wouldn’t bother to get round to. He felt exultant as they dropped down in the lift.
The porter was in his glass box. Phil had an odd impression that he didn’t look too pleased when he saw the girl step out of the lift along with her visitor. And he had a further odd impression of seeing somebody in a bowler hat who quite suddenly wasn’t there after all – rather as if he’d ducked abruptly out of sight. But naturally he wasn’t thinking of much except Jean. In a minute they were climbing into a taxi.
‘Tell him where to go,’ he said. He still just didn’t, he noted with satisfaction, feel the least awkward about not knowing things. Poor old Kipps.
Chapter Eleven
Yet at first he wondered how they could possibly talk. Again it wasn’t that he felt awkward. The restaurant Jean chose wasn’t, he saw at once, an out-and-out grand one, in spite of what she’d said. He was realising now that she wasn’t just the simplest lover’s dream, not by a long way. There was a lot of devil to her, and she wouldn’t be one to settle down, as good as gold, on the other side of the fireplace. But that was all right by him. He had enough gold, hadn’t he? And he didn’t want a life spent counting his blessings. He’d rather be kept guessing by this girl – who was like quicksilver, he thought, or a landscape perpetually transforming itself under sunshine and scudding cloud.
They drank Chianti and ate risotto – and he noticed that Jean ate as much as he did, as if divinely confident that that figure had been given her for keeps and from heaven. So it went fine, their eating together.
But talking didn’t seem to prove a difficulty after all, and his mind as stiff as the table napkin it had taken him some research to get unfolded. He imagined her mind like that too. He imagined her searching round among all the things she usually talked about to find something about which she could talk to him. She’d have to reject a lot of them as being above his head – or his station as the old books had it. And others, it seemed, as being too frank – which was certainly a queer one. Like if you went to some very strange country, and did somehow know the bare language, but everything was so different from your own country that you didn’t know what to turn the language to.
But talking didn’t seem to prove a difficulty after all, and his spirits rose steadily all through the risotto.
‘Do you feel,’ she’d asked as soon as their meal was ordered, ‘that you could do ever so much more if only it were double?’
‘Double?’ He’d taken a moment to get it. But even before he’d understood her he was rejoicing at the way warmth mingled with a faint mockery in her voice. The voices he was accustomed to, he thought, just didn’t have this power of blending shades. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I haven’t been feeling that way, I haven’t. Perhaps I haven’t got what they call wide horizons. A quarter of a million seems just the job to me. Mind you, I’d li
ke to have earned it – earned it by an invention or something. There would be more salt to it then, you might say. As it is, I’ve got to get the salt later, like. Use what’s come tumbling at me some way a man can take satisfaction in. But I’m not quarrelling with the amount. Enough for one, anyhow.’ Phil hesitated. Then, made bold by that warmth he’d heard in her question, he went on. ‘Might even be enough for two.’
‘Yes, of course,’ she said – now sweet and candid. ‘You’ll be able to get married, won’t you? How very nice.’
This came at him so sudden it was like the flick of a whip. He managed to take it smiling.
‘Would you want double?’ he asked.
‘Certainly. And I think you will one day. When you start using your fortune on that man-sized job you’ll think it isn’t half enough.’
‘Does everybody who wins the pools come home and feel like that?’
‘Gracious, no. They buy a villa – semi-detached, so as not to be awkwardly conspicuous. They have a holiday on the Continent – in a coach, so that they’re with their own kind. Then a lot go on working. If they’re middle-aged, the whole business usually passes off harmlessly enough. The chief sufferers are the children. Whatever their age, the parents assume the absolute advantageousness of buying them the most expensive sort of upper-class education at once. Oddly enough, it can’t always just be bought—or not in a hurry. So a great deal of bewilderment and frustration may result. But the idea is wholesome enough, and one’s general conclusion is that ordinary people are entirely sane – although in the way of enterprise their bolt’s soon shot. But it’s the extraordinary and insane ones that are interesting.’
‘Who are they?’ Phil was lost in admiration that even a divinity could talk with this unfaltering ease.
‘You, me, and anybody, we’d find it fun to go around with.’ She looked straight into his eyes, and then held out her glass to be filled. And there was something in her doing these two things together that sent him almost crazy.
‘Do you think that the two of us …’ he began.
‘You see,’ she said, laughing and not letting him go on, ‘you’re an inordinate person, Mr. Tombs. Don’t you want the moon?’
‘I’ve had thoughts of it,’ Phil said. He was remembering the startling suggestion of George Pratley.
‘I’m sure you have. You’re prepared to make a bold bid for the inconceivable, aren’t you? It’s the way to get it … sometimes.’
‘And you?’ he asked. He wondered if the way he felt he was going was what they called swooning.
‘Oh, yes – I’m inordinate. I want everything double and twice over. Two lives, for instance.’
‘Kind of a double life?’ Soon, he realised, his mind would stop working. Already he wasn’t being too bright. He’d had a confused notion she was proposing bigamy.
‘Good heavens, no!’ Jean shook her head with a vigour that set her mouth – her adorable mouth – swaying hazardously behind her uplifted fork. She could behave just anyhow, he saw, and remain triumphantly elegant. ‘I want only one me. I hate books that credit us with multiple lives lived at sundry levels. You know? Part One, Amaryllis as for years I believed her to be. Part Two, Amaryllis as Jasper knew her. Part Three, Amaryllis’s spiritual journal. Part Four …’
‘I get the idea,’ Phil said. She did seem to have books in her head.
‘I want just one life at a time – and a great deal of it. Everything love can give and everything money can buy.’ She put back her head, and what he thought he saw was a flash of real mockery. ‘Then another lifetime to follow on. And probably a third. After that, I’d perhaps be willing to call it a day. What do you think—’ her voice dropped, lingered—‘Mr. Tombs?’
‘I think,’ he said, ‘what won’t happen isn’t worth wishing for, it isn’t. It’s one life and then curtains, so we got to fill it up all we know how. Without hankering after any reincarnation stuff. Being alive just once is a bloody miracle. Why, you must be missing things! You must be feeling life slipping past you, like, if you talk morbid about what’s given us real and solid not being enough.’
He saw her eyes rounding on him. He supposed it was because, being excited, he’d used words that weren’t proper. But he was excited now – so why conceal it?
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘But isn’t it all here to take – if we just will? We’re young. We’re healthy. We’re eager. We could get absolutely everything in.’
She was faintly flushed. He had a wild thought she was breathing quicker.
‘Into one ball?’ she said. ‘All our strength and all our sweetness?’
He nodded, thinking again how she could talk, and how her voice could make things sound almost like they were poetry.
There was a pause. Jean had put down her empty glass and was gazing into it.
‘And tear our pleasures with rough strife,’ she murmured, ‘Through the iron gates of life … It’s a terrifying image.’ She glanced up, saw him looking puzzled, and smiled mischievously. ‘Mr. Philip Tombs,’ she said, ‘hauling a quarter of a million pounds, fortuitously acquired, through the iron gates of life. With one hand. And hauling along a protesting virgin with the other.’
He saw that she had what you might call pulled back sharply. That was the explanation of this mysterious mockery.
‘Don’t think,’ he said, ‘I don’t see my quarter million as pretty funny.’
‘Funny? It would at least run to another flask of Chianti. Or, alternatively, to brandy with the coffee.’
‘Then it’s brandy with the coffee.’ Phil felt he’d scored by not saying, ‘It will run to both.’ And, remembering Saturday, he’d felt it was brandy would best lengthen out this incredible meal. ‘And don’t think,’ he went on, ‘I can’t see that it may turn out too funny by half. What would you say – honest-like? Is a great pile of money coming like this to a chap like me just a curse?’
‘Well, that’s not what I’m paid to think, is it?’ She was cool and ironical now, and he asked himself if it could really be true that, only minutes ago, he’d got right under her guard. ‘My instructions are that your consistent enterprise in pursuing a sound investment policy has met with well-merited …’
‘Yes, I know. And it’s bleeding comic, it is, the way us suckers can be taken in. But what are you really thinking? That the poor lad won’t be able to save himself from drowning in the gravy? Lots think that.’
‘You really want an opinion?’ She was looking her coolest now. ‘I think you will put up quite a fight. But your wealth is more likely to change you for the worse, Mr. Tombs, than for the better.’
‘Well, thanks,’ he said. ‘It’s a straight answer at least.’
‘Does it seem a terribly chilly one? I think I mean it rather warmly.’
‘Warmly?’ He stared at her.
‘It wouldn’t be terribly easy to change you for the better. As human beings go, my guess is that you’re very tolerably satisfactory as you are. One might have a shot at improving you – in rather superficial ways – and the results could be entirely lamentable. Do you mind my talking like this? You asked for it.’
‘Go on,’ Phil said. He believed that she was now being quite serious.
‘Well, then, how permanent are we as people? What won’t change inside us, if enough changes outside? Or put it this way: do you believe that there’s anything at all that you could never conceivably bring yourself to do in any circumstances whatever?’
‘Yes. A lot of things.’ Phil felt that at any minute he’d get confused. He was as far as ever from a glimpse of how she felt about him. But he didn’t find the question she’d fired at him difficult.
‘Even,’ she asked, ‘if you became utterly cut off from your own past – utterly anonymous?’
‘I don’t get that.’ He said this out of caution. Obscurely, he felt he did.
‘Well, listen.’ Jean leaned forward, so that across the little table her head was suddenly intoxicatingly close to him. He was aware, for the first time, of s
ome ghost of a perfume that she carried. ‘Last night,’ she said, ‘I was reading a novel – a novel about Alexandria.’
‘That a queen?’
‘No, no – it’s a town in Egypt.’ She didn’t stop to be amused. ‘And once a year they have a carnival, and they all dress up in absolutely obliterating disguises. Identity, age, sex – all utterly vanish beneath enveloping cowls and cloaks. And so, of course, conduct and action become a little irresponsible. But the point is that it’s a state of affairs posing a philosophical problem. What do we shed when we put on anonymity? What’s left? You say “I can imagine myself doing this” or “I can’t imagine myself doing that”. But what do you mean by “yourself”?’
‘I’ve sometimes asked myself that,’ Phil said. ‘And it’s a tough one, any road.’
‘I can tell you part of the answer. What you mean by “yourself” is something perpetually being recruited from your own familiar and habitual world, and perpetually being defined and controlled by other people’s notions and expectations of you. So you see what I mean. Your conscience, your personality, mightn’t be and work quite the same when inside a cowl and cloak. And any radical change of circumstances and environment and so on is a cowl and cloak. Mr. Tombs stops making motor cars, or whatever it is he’s been doing, and becomes one of the wealthiest young men in England. Can he conceivably be sure of anything he’d do or not do in six months’ time?’
He had a queer feeling this was working up to a challenge and that he’d better fling in a challenge of his own first. He gave a jerk to his neck so that the curl came down over his forehead.
‘So what?’ he said.
‘Well—several things.’ She was checked for a moment. ‘Think of yourself as a proposition, Mr. Tombs. Here you are with your money in your pocket, and your wits about you, and your hair tumbling ravishingly into your eyes. Do you see what an unknown you are—say to a business man thinking of going into partnership with you? Not just an ordinary unknown, but a colossal one. You’re nice, you’re reliable – but you’re adrift. What’s your attraction? Just that a successful gamble – for the pools are that – has made you the biggest gamble in England.’
The Man Who Won the Pools Page 11
