When they closed, that night, he allowed the blonde to come back with him to the Bisham flat, quite careless of all possible consequences. He had no interest whatever in her person, and in any case was far too fastidious, and at the flat they just sat and drank Bols gin so as to safeguard against a hangover. Then they went vaguely to bed in different rooms.
Nevertheless, standing together at the flat window next morning in their negligée, Ernest was astounded to see Seal in the street below pointing them out to a man in a bowler hat.
When the front door bell rang, a few minutes later, he strode to the door, expecting to confront Seal. But the man in the bowler hat handed him a writ and a fountain-pen, while the flats’ porter stood back a bit, grinning.
The blonde explained she did hope he wasn’t going to get sore with her, but what was the point in going on in this way; she’d always liked old Seal and always would. Looking a trifle scared, she got her red hat with the daisies round it and vanished.
Looking back, Ernest thought it by far the most undignified moment in his life. He remembered, too, being manly enough to decide upon dignity from then onwards at all cost.
He could still picture that younger edition of himself, taking on new dignity in the very face of adversity, and closing the door on that unscrupulous blonde, whose husband would now have to divorce her in the way she wanted.
He went straight to his desk, signed the writ, although he need not have done so, deciding to take his medicine. Seal appeared at the front door, even as he sat drawing cheques to settle her outstanding debts, bringing her mother with her. He soon slammed the door in their faces, whereupon his mother-in-law retired to open a flank attack from the main road—so he slammed the window. Seal banged on the door for a bit, sobbing out a portion of contrition, finally screaming out in a temper, ‘those hateful Kew Gardens’, and that was the last he heard of her.
Well, he’d been a damned fool and he must take the consequences. He packed up all his personal belongings—they went easily into two large suitcases, whereas Seal’s things would have needed eight pantechnicons—and, as a final act of purification, went and had a bath. A label of Seal’s, stuck in the soap, said ‘Fresh Lobster’. It had been an endearing hobby of hers to collect things from snackbar counters in Acton or Piccadilly when she was tight. On an old bit of sponge there was one saying ‘Fresh Caviare’. This hobby, he decided, was the only human thing about her, if you excepted her legs. He left the flat for ever, passing the porter with a great show of courtesy and dignity, and hailed a taxi. There were two things he would never, never do again: he would never talk to strange girls on buses, and he would never visit the Tropical House in Kew Gardens!
He was divorced a few months later, ‘for mental cruelty and misconduct with another woman, or women, and for habitual drunkenness’. It said so in the News of the World one cheerful Sunday morning, the report adding, fragrantly, that the trouble started on their very wedding night, when ‘the petitioner’s husband’s conduct was so extraordinary as to make the petitioner terribly unhappy’.
‘Was he cruel to you on that night?’ wondered Seal’s counsel, sympathetically.
The first Mrs Bisham burst into tears. She made a tragic figure in her black, but looked very brave.
‘He was callously cruel.’
‘Tell his lordship what happened—if it isn’t too painful?’
‘He wouldn’t come to bed. And he went up and down corridors asking people for aspirin.’
‘Was he … drunk, Mrs Bisham?’
‘He was always drunk.’
His lordship seemed to think it an extremely sad case, and a grave one. Moreover, it was undefended, which indicated that the husband’s gross depravities were admitted by him. Mrs Bisham was entitled to her divorce—with all costs against the husband. Very generously indeed, Mrs Bisham was not asking for damages. There were, mercifully, no children of the marriage.
Mr Ernest Bisham, in his new surroundings, kept calm and dignified, gently lowering the News of the World into the wastepaper basket.
CHAPTER VIII
DIGNITY had, of course, a danger of its own; it led towards pomposity if a man wasn’t careful. It was important always to keep within bounds, and to be human and broadminded in proper proportions. There was nothing more awful than narrowness and smugness. In the new phase of life which greeted his return to the bachelor state, Ernest Bisham elected to study himself and to try and find some solution for the future. There was not so much of his five thousand pounds as he would have liked to have felt was still left, particularly by the time that odious blonde had brought her case to a successful conclusion, which conclusion provided for handsome damages against Mr Bisham for the injured husband. He paid up like a man and went for a walk in St James’s Park. When he got back, there was a letter from his sister. Through Bess, he suddenly got an unusual job. He had appreciated the radio since the radio’s crystal-set days at Savoy Hill, and had spent hours at home with headphones on; but it had never occurred to him that he might one day be, so to speak, at the other end of the line. Now, after a series of Boards, he suddenly found himself taking an even greater interest in music and the proper ways of pronouncing their composers’ names. And he started to go on strange journeys. Sometimes he would only go to buildings in London, or to Broadcasting House itself; it would be painted white and the lights from the windows at night did all conspire to make it look rather like a lighthouse. But sometimes he would go to the Midlands, or to Scotland. He lived in a pleasant bachelor suite near the Westminster Theatre and had a somewhat erratic circle of men friends, droppers-in, not necessarily literary or musical, he might just have got talking to them somewhere. Ernest Bisham was now over forty and he had grown large and full like his father. Photographs of Ernest Bisham sitting at the microphone always made his sister say: ‘Yes, distinguished—but getting bloated,’ which always made him wince slightly. He spoke a little ponderously, at the microphone or away from it, and was not the impulsive, casual person he had been as a young man. He dressed extremely well and spent a lot of money on his hairdresser. His hair was already slightly tinged with silver. He often felt there was something whimsical about going all the way to Manchester to announce: ‘You are now going to hear a special performance of …’, or to say: ‘You have just been listening to a special performance of …’ He felt glad that nobody knew who was announcing such things. He felt, frankly, rather feeble. But Bess said: ‘You must earn something. And it will lead to something.’ She also said that all jobs depended on what you brought to them. So, as well as considerable dignity, Ernest Bisham brought the art of being perfectly sincere at the microphone, whilst at the same time being amused at himself. Perhaps it was this that made his voice so real in the room. And then, with the declaration of yet another war, he discovered two things: he liked announcing, and he’d got a weak heart. He was announcing, from a building in London, for the Overseas Service soon afterwards, knowing that he was no good for the war. And suddenly, again due to Bess, he was to meet Marjorie.
Bess Bisham turned up at his Westminster flat and said: ‘A friend of mine wants to meet you. She’s fallen in love with your voice.’
He had heard of this sort of thing before, so he just smiled. Bess was already in the ATS and she flung her overcoat over his best armchair.
She said she and her friend were ‘listening in’; she preferred this expression, where others liked ‘tuned in’ or ‘switched on’, ‘and you announced something or other, and Marjorie said, “Oh, I wish I knew that man; he was the first person who spoke to me when I bought this old house, he’s more than a friend.”’ Bess sank down on the sofa. ‘I said, you can meet him, and he is more than a friend—if you know what I mean. He’s my brother!’ She rushed on with the news that it was most romantic, say what you liked, and that although Marjorie Bud was no longer exactly young, she wasn’t as old as he was, and there was just time. ‘Just time?’ He was always amused at Bess. Bess blushed and said there was no point i
n a woman marrying unless she had a family, surely.
Ernest sat thinking. His manservant—an old fellow with one arm, but astonishingly dexterous with it—brought them some tea. He knew Bess wanted him to marry. And quite as much as she had once implored him not to marry. And she quite rightly suspected that he wanted to marry again. It was the only solution for him. Yet he was wondering if he had enough nerve for it. Also, it needed a good deal of energy, emotional and intellectual. There was a danger of his becoming lazy about it and absorbed by his work.
After tea she showed no signs of going so he gave her some sherry. She put on the electric fire with her toe and said she had first got to know Marjorie Bud at her club. She spoke diplomatically about Marjorie, ‘j, not g’, and took care not to put him off her by overdoing it. She said that as well as being neither young nor old, she wasn’t beautiful and she wasn’t ugly. She had breeding, and she said who her family were and where she lived, ‘in that house, charming, but much too big for her on her own like that, and she’s lonely’. Then she cleverly dropped the whole subject like a hot potato and wouldn’t say another word about her. She chattered about the war.
He sipped sherry through her chatter. Marjorie. Not one of his favourite names. Not old, not young, not pretty, not ugly. It sounded ideal! How Bess loved men to get married—so long as they let her arrange it!
The flat was attractive in the firelight. There was something about this safe, masculine condition. It would be an effort, and it would be a wrench.
Yet—it was dull, wasn’t it? Things could be as important to us as people; but only for a time. They receded and became the background they were meant to be. Then, you wanted people; a person. And, for him, it still had to be a woman.
He got up and wandered about with his glass. When he was alone, it was a habit of his to wander restlessly from room to room; there would be a glass in his hand, or a cup; a cigar, perhaps. He would see the mute furniture sitting waiting there. How furniture waited! Time ticked away, wars raged; sofas and chairs just sat there, not dead, yet not alive. His furniture had style, but it had grown very masculine. It was colourless and ‘unwarm’. His flat suddenly seemed to be ash trays and bottles and dusty records and dusty books. A row of his books, lit by two bars of electric firelight, said Evolution of Mind, Wild Flowers, The Forsyte Saga, Chopin and Schubert, Edgar Wallace (a biography), The Dance of Life.
There was a glass-topped cellarette full of glasses and bottles, and in a glass cupboard along one green wall stood his collection of brandy glasses, a peculiar hobby he had started a year before, a sort of sub-hobby. There they all stood, rather foolishly, and very masculine, with the reddish firelight showing up in shadow their differing sizes, all waiting to see if they were going to be blasted in the blitz.
He didn’t care for pictures very much, and the only thing on the wall above the fireplace was a strangely illustrated verse from ‘The Hound of Heaven’. Interwoven with the contortions of a young man were the familiar words: ‘In the rash lustihead of my young powers, I shook the pillaring hours, And pulled my life upon me.’ Then there were a few more strange drawings and splashes of colour, and there was only room for:
grimed with smears,
I stand amid the dust of the mounded years—
My mangled youth lies dead beneath the heap.
An old French clock was ticking. Outside, London tumbled past, and there was the thought of the black-out beginning.
This repetitive business of war was excessively trying.
Many people liked to say—and many more hoped in secret, without saying it—that one day we might achieve a condition whereby wars would be impossible and unthinkable. But, he thought, these people were not students of the Bible or the stock markets.
For most of us, the present time was always the urgency, with but an anxious eye to the future time. The future stretched out only as far as the life of our grandchildren, and it seemed difficult to guarantee them even a hope of any permanent peace.
We could but be cheerful and do our best. We would fight tooth and nail, if we could; and if we couldn’t, we would be buried alive in Notting Hill Gate, or bored to distraction in the Ambulance Service in Fulham.
Failing that, we would sew and knit, or wrap up parcels for people, formerly most respectable, but now called—prisoners.
Mr Bisham viewed it all with an uneasy sense of guilt.
He wasn’t satisfied.
It was coming to him increasingly that he wasn’t satisfied with himself.
And that was the first impression Marjorie had of him.
She wasn’t sure whether he felt he wasn’t doing enough in the war; or whether he felt that reading aloud to millions of people, or announcing plays, features, talks and symphony concerts—or just plain gramophone records—wasn’t a very satisfying thing to do with his life. She felt at once that he had character above the ordinary, and yet he was a problem still unsolved. He looked cut out for great things, and how great was ‘announcing’, when it was coldly analysed? Was it as great as being Noël Coward, or the Lord Chief Justice, or the Poet Laureate?
Whatever the answer, when she saw him in the curtained anteroom of that little French restaurant in Soho, she felt instantly stimulated—and ridiculously excited. And he had not been, then, Ernest Bisham, the announcer. He was just a voice that had filled her empty house. An attractive voice, to be sure, and the whole thing savoured strongly of the romantic, but she was allowing for that.
When she had learnt a bit about him later, she decided she would never have guessed that any such past could have been his. But we were so often deceived about people. It was because we formed an idea about them before we knew them. Naturally the two could rarely be identical. She would never have dreamed of him having been married before, least of all that it was such a marriage! He must have stooped to conquer, then? Perhaps he had changed since then. Did people really change at all? Except their skin? Had she changed, herself? Nobody ever answered these things. You were left for ever with the theory that you were always the child you had been, but were now merely tired and cautious; you’d make the identical mistakes a second time—if you dozed off for a couple of seconds.
It did make it rather intriguing. It was like a succession of duels. This time, you would not be caught off your guard.
Ernest, when they came to discuss it, called it ‘sporting’.
When he came forward that day in the French restaurant and said: ‘Bess is late. But I know who you are,’ she knew at once that she liked him and that he thrilled her in an inexplicable manner. She dropped her guard even as she thought: ‘Are you really just what you seem?’ She remembered this, much later.
She could have killed Bess for her painfully obvious absence, and at the same time blessed her for it. She blushed stupidly, taking his hand.
Mr Bisham shook hands. ‘I’ve booked a table for two,’ he said. He dropped his guard and smiled. She decided he was as cool as a cucumber. Secretly, however, he was shaking like a leaf. He asked her if she liked Soho now there were no Italian restaurants and he took her in to lunch.
He was aware of an odd sense of panic. It wasn’t because Bess had refused to come too. It was because the moment he saw Marjorie he knew that Destiny had some serious game to try on between the two of them. It was Destiny’s idea of fun. He’d been left alone lately. Absorbed by his microphone, he hadn’t even slithered down any drain pipes. Perhaps he never would again. At lunch, he looked at his new acquaintance, imagined them both married to each other, and silently considered the question of drain pipes. She had a perfectly beautiful throat. It was made for diamonds. Yet what was the good of that if the diamonds he could get her were too dangerous to wear? It was tiresome. He felt excited and ate his soup too quickly. She was miles behind. He had to pretend he hadn’t finished after all.
They sat in the far corner.
They sat side by side. She said she hated sitting bang opposite people, it was formal.
The place was ver
y elegant and everyone looked very highbrow. He noticed several delightful pearl necklaces about. He knew the restaurant well. All the waiters he had known had vanished. Most of the familiar food had vanished. There was still some good wine, at a price. And there was Algerian wine.
Conversation was a bit sticky at first. They both behaved rather as if they were conscious of being no longer young. They were somewhat formal, but with a sort of affectionate politeness caused by Bess having told each of them nice things about the other. This gave them something to start with.
She was larger than he had imagined and it was easy to imagine her as a singer. It was more than a popular notion that singers got fat. Singing did make you get fat. And you had to sing on a full stomach. But she was not actually fat. She had height and grace and she dressed elegantly. Her sense of colour seemed unusual, for she had light green eyes yet wore brown and carried about a large, mauve handbag. On both large wrists she had red bracelets. It was quaint. Her hair was light brown and he supposed she did something to it, for its shading seemed uncertain. He could imagine her dressing rather dreamily, perhaps while she looked out of the window at her pretty garden. Her garden would be sure to be pretty. He admired her petal-like skin and her mouth most. They were ideal. She had that schoolgirl complexion with which to set them off. Her tone of voice was unhurried and young, and the tune of it made her seem the motherly sort. She fused a shy youngness with this, a childish, polite gravity with a background expression of the eyes ready to smile at will. Here was no shrew, no cactus. Here was an elegant and very sensitive plant. It was tall, so if you let it get cold it would bend at the top and wilt into prideful tears. It flooded upon him that if marriage was meant for them he must never hurt her; she had been hurt already. The responsibility of this unnerved him afresh. He had no right to go any further with this. His guard was up again. When she elbowed her glass over, she looked worried to death by it and she blushed. How easily she blushed, didn’t she? It was quaint too. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I’m terribly sorry, Mr Bisham!’
A Voice Like Velvet Page 8
