To My Wife
This Rendering of Her Idea
The passages in this book which touch on the Civil War in Spain have been based on the accounts of eyewitnesses, supplemented by such narratives as Keith Scott Watson’s Single to Spain; but the actual incidents and characters are, of course, fictitious, as is also all the rest of the book.
“. . . And to do my duty in that state of life unto which it shall please God to call me.”
--- Church of England Catechism“Young barbarians of to-day, revolt against everything because there is nothing good. Revolt against everybody because there is no one just.”
--- Alejandro Lerroux“Resolve to get out of here at all costs. MUST!”
--- Audrey Ritchie in her Diary
Once every month on a fine Sunday---if there ever was a fine Sunday in the month---Grannie took bus from Kensington to Highgate and went to look at Grandfather’s grave. The visit amounted now to little more than a formality; she travelled by the bus and travelled back again, and in between she looked at the grave; and the grave was always the same. Except that she had been performing this ritual now for twenty years Grannie herself could hardly have told you why she still persisted with it so regularly; it was a custom in which her generation had indulged; someone ought to do it, and Robin never had time and Kenneth just wouldn’t and you could hardly expect the grandchildren. Grannie was seventy-six, and it was a weary journey from Kensington to Highgate, and sometimes the buses were crowded and difficult, but resolutely and alone---always alone---she went. Her doctor son Robin would have sent her in his car, her author son Kenneth would have taken her in a taxi (and “borrowed” the money to pay for it); but like so many things in her life this was a task she was under obligation to accomplish by herself. Robin at Frame Square, Kenneth at Cromarty Crescent, knew she went to Highgate now and then; but they never knew when.
Grannie lived in a street called Treherne Gardens, W.8, which was so like every other street thereabouts, and peopled by entities so like everybody else that when you met Grannie wandering along it you stared at her. You saw a witch or a fairy according to your mood---a decorative compact little woman, obviously well-to-do, who didn’t look her age; tripping along with a resolute competence; sweet yet mischievous. You thought: “That one can look after herself all right!” As she passed, she gave you a look, an appraising cynical look; you felt it right down to your toes. Away she went, forgetting you; but you didn’t quite forget her, the picture of her kept recurring at intervals throughout the rest of the day. You felt: “She’d be interesting to talk to; I’d like to know her.”
But you couldn’t have known her; nobody ever had. In all her six and seventy years Grannie had never given herself away to anybody. Nobody knew what Grannie felt; nobody knew if she felt at all.
When the fine Sunday came and something deep inside Grannie said “Highgate!” she would ring for her elderly maid. The maid knew all Grannie’s body, all Grannie’s ways; but she didn’t know Grannie.
“Ellen, do you think it will rain?”
Ellen said “Yes, Mrs. Ritchie” or “No, Mrs. Ritchie,” at random. It was immaterial what she said because whatever the nature of Ellen’s forecast Grannie invariably replied:
“Very well; then I’ll wear my velvet bonnet.”
This October Sunday---October of 1936---was fine. In the velvet bonnet and a black silk cloak, carrying a silver-mounted umbrella in her black-gloved hands, Grannie tripped along to Church Street, Kensington, and boarded a 27 bus. She insisted always on climbing to the top and struggling to the very front seat; if the front seat wasn’t vacant, she waited till it was and then moved forward. The conductor, as usual, said rather anxiously: “Hold tight, ma’am!” and Grannie gave him the contemptuously reassuring smile she kept for Robin when he fidgeted about her attacks of breathlessness. As if she wouldn’t hold tight! She’d held tight all her days---and to much more difficult things than a 27 bus.
The bus roared away up Church Street, Pembridge Road, Eastbourne Terrace, zigzagging maniacally right and right and right again like knights’ moves in chess. In the front seat Grannie sat breathing a little sharply after the stairs and enjoying the pageant of London. But it was terrible how old landmarks had changed since first she came that weary way; the Great Western Hotel (which you might have depended upon) had rebuilt itself, Baker Street Station was unrecognisable, Tussaud’s had altered its façade not once but twice. The only things nobody ever seemed to rebuild were the churches; they loitered in their places, sooty and sulky, dwarfed, pushed aside, forgotten. You expect people to change, thought Grannie, but it’s unfair of places. . . .
There was no good reason why Grannie should not have gone on living at Highgate even after Grandfather’s death; but Grannie believed in closing chapters and starting new ones. She had picked on Treherne Gardens as a suitable place---all in good time, of course---to die in. Robin kept begging her to join them at Frame Square, but Grannie knew a trick worth two of that; keep yourself to yourself, have your own house whatever it is and wherever it is. Besides, Frame Square was suffocating; Robin, two adolescent grandchildren and the stepmother---and the stepmother---it was more than anyone should undertake to endure. Kenneth’s flat, on the other hand, was really uninhabitable and he was never in the position to make an offer of hospitality; if he had been, would he have made it? Grannie doubted it. Nobody got much out of Kenneth; his son René got the benefit of his mixed experience for what that was worth, of his views on life that altered with the hour; Jacqueline, his wife, got a roof over her head, food to eat, a bed to sleep in. Nobody else got as much out of Kenneth as even that.
No---keep yourself to yourself; only so could you assist and control the destinies of others. March breast-forward, see it all through; but---as on these bonebreaking journeys to Highgate---alone.
Grannie walked slowly from the bus to the cemetery gate. And there it was again, the great dismal place; its phalanx of tombstones rushed to meet her like an irregular army charging downhill, arrested suddenly by the Gorgon’s Head. Grannie thought, as she always thought just at this moment: “If the Last Trump went off now, my goodness, what a spectacle there would be!” “What advantageth it me to have fought with beasts at Ephesus if the dead rise not?” Nothing, obviously---unless you enjoyed fighting with beasts; so the dead must rise; amongst them, Grandfather. “Midst others of less note came one pale form. . . . Resolutely Grannie advanced.
Instantly she was amongst old friends. “John Marks . . . “Isabella, Beloved Wife of . . .” “Harris . . .” “Edmunds . . .” “Hill . . .” “Greener . . .” She knew them all; she had seen them a hundred times; they never changed, nobody rebuilt them. Neal . . . Burt . . . Michaelson . . . All these were pre-Grandfather members of this vast club; she had met them once a month for twenty years; they were a reassuring company, a settled lot, permanence. Roberts . . . Craig . . . Macgregor . . . Blunt . . . And now here at last: “Sacred to the Memory of Donald Ritchie, Contractor and Builder. Born at Linlithgow 10th October, 1856. Died at Highgate 25th October, 1917. ‘In the House of the Lord for ever.’” The inscription looked crowded and unfinished, because in the lower half of the stone a space had been left. What for? “For me,” thought Grannie calmly, “For me.” One day soon---no, not too soon; why hurry?---you would read there in newly leaded letters: “And of his Wife Henrietta Graham. Born 27th February, 1860. Died “Ah, well, we don’t know that yet; but not just too soon, please, for I’ve still a great deal to do. “Born . . . Wife . . . Died . . .”; epitome of Henrietta Graham. Well, why not?
Grannie sat down on Grandfather’s granite curb as she always did and stared at that vacant space, seeing her last and final journey to Highgate---not in a bus, her ultimate arrival there, her last public appearance. “Amongst those present?” Robin for one in a beautiful black morning coat; he would take off his silk topper and show his thick stubbly hair with that funny little half-crown of white just above his left ear. Kenneth for another---in shabby tweeds and one of those horrible black soft hats he affected; more than likely he would keep it on. René would not come because René, being a Communist, discouraged religious ceremonial; but Robin would almost certainly bring Graham. Nice boy, handsome boy; wanted smacking sometimes. He might bring Audrey too; she wanted smacking if you liked! Black would suit her; a well-fitting coat and skirt over that trim but developing figure; a good hat on that jaunty head; yes, Audrey must come. Of all that prospective company of mourners Grannie suddenly saw Audrey the most clearly; there she stood by the granite curb---not crying but put-about for once, subdued, not quite so sure of herself. . . . “Dust unto dust . . .” “This our sister . . .” Oh, well---not for a while yet.
Meantime Grandfather had become a stone monument and a granite curb, a square of green grass and a border of little laughing blue flowers. And as Grandfather’s body had disintegrated into dust, so Grandfather’s memory had disintegrated into items. Grannie, sitting on the curb, conjured up not so much any single shade as a series of snapshots, a family album. Grandfather---but now he had suddenly become “Donald”---coming into a darkened bedroom with a pearl necklace in his hands and saying: “Oh, Harry, is that him?” “Him,” had been the squirming red atrocity with patches of black feathers that had grown---now how had that happened?---into Kenneth. Grandfather---but now he became “Mr. Ritchie”---making a speech at the luncheon after they opened the Cornford Children’s Hospital (which Mr. Ritchie had built) and saying: “If I have done anything good I owe it in large measure to the lady sitting on my right hand---where she has always been---to-day.” (And that was the solemn truth. . . .) Grandfather in bed in October, 1917, when he knew he must die in a few days’ time saying: “Isn’t it cruel, Harry, just when I was on the verge of a fortune?” And an air-raid roaring round all the time---the big one that dropped the bomb outside Swan and Edgar’s. . . . And somewhere at the back of all these Grandfathers there roamed an elfin boy, a Pan, a maker of music, who had lived long, long, long ago in Linlithgow, and carried off Henrietta Graham into lifelong captivity and had married, so they all said, above him. And where had he gone? He wasn’t here anyhow; not among Craig and Michaelson and Blunt and all these solid stones; somewhere he still ran in the Lothian woods, by the smiling Forth, piping and calling Henrietta Graham. And Henrietta Graham running after him and crying out: “I’m coming! . . .” The dead rose; but these---these didn’t even die. How could they?
With a slight tightening of her lips Grannie got up, scattered her parcel of Kensington flowers and walked resolutely away. If the collection of snapshots under the tombstone called feebly after her, she did not hear. If the magic boy himself had piped to Henrietta Graham, would she have heard even that? No; not now. Didn’t want to.
Michaelson, Burt, Neal, Greener, Hill, Edmunds. Strings of texts---optimistic, fulsome, curt, prosaic. Few of them so apt as Grandfather’s---but then, thought Grannie, I chose that. “In the House of the Lord for ever.” Grandfather had spent his life building good houses; now he had settled down in a better one that had been made all ready for him. “In my Father’s house are many mansions”---and there would need to be. Harris, Sturt, Mason, Marks---there they all were, waiting. The waiting list was a long one.
There they all were. What for? Why had they and a million million others and Grandfather and Grannie and Kenneth and Robin and so on---why had they all been sent into this stultifying world, this unfathomable interlude called life? The Church had a ready answer to that; “to do my duty in that state of life unto which it shall please God to call me.” And that, thought Grannie for the thousandth time, was all there was to it. “That state of life; that state of life . . . please God to call me.” There you had it. It pleased God to set you in a certain environment, a certain class, condition, setting, function; He had taken trouble over it, arranged it. Then stick to it. That was the secret, thought Grannie, the plain common-sense secret of everything. Don’t go cutting loose, leaping over the side-rails, breaking into other states of life, mixing yourself up with their incongruous denizens. Don’t go struggling to alter things, to “better” things. No good came of it, no good at all. You were put into a State of Life; stick to it.
Grandfather, not always aware of his best interests, had known that. As a very young man he had wanted to be a lawyer, a doctor, even---he once confided to Henrietta Graham---a minister. But he grew to years of sense, and saw the folly of innovations and became a builder and contractor as his father had been before him. And had he done badly? Certainly not. His father had made his money out of embryo Scottish railways; Grandfather had visualised an expanding London, a spreading forest of brick and stone exploding into the surrounding country as the universe is said to be exploding into space; requiring immense hospitals, council houses, offices, churches, hotels. Carrying Henrietta Graham with him, he had made for it, as straight as a leopard making for its prey. How he had dreamed and soared in the next twenty years; holding Grandfather down to it had been no light task. (Lighter, though, than keeping the adolescent Robin up to it, lifting him out of his youthful depressions and inferiorities; lighter a lot than keeping the too adult Kenneth out of it---out of trouble, out of debt, out of damnation.) Long years living at Highgate; little Kenneth, little Robin; incredible---we have become different people. And then in the last year of the war it had all come to an end, for Grandfather had taken ill and died; and that terrible Friday night in October with the air-raid going on outside (but his mind had turned a little queer and probably he didn’t understand about that), he had said to her weeping: “Isn’t it cruel, Harry, just when I was on the verge of a fortune?” It was cruel if he thought so; but then that fortune was in the air, and soaring Grandfather might have lost it, mightn’t he?
Curious how they all called him “Grandfather” when he had actually been a grandfather such a very short time. He had known and delighted in Audrey---for a little over a year; but Graham had been born during that final illness, and it was always doubtful if he had ever understood that Graham had arrived and, if so, how. And, of course, he had never known about René---any more, thought Grannie with a stab of the old fury, than I did---till long afterwards. That fiend Kenneth; that imbecile!
That State of Life. . . . And I couldn’t, thought Grannie bitterly, I couldn’t stick to mine. I married the least thing beneath me, I married a man who was not quite of my class, who with all his excellencies was not bred to be my mate. Am I sorry or am I not? I don’t know.
For the thirty years of Grandfather, Grannie had never openly asked herself that question; for five years after his death she would not allow herself to discuss it. But latterly, now that she was old, now that it was definitely all over, now that there was nothing at all to be done about it, she asked it quite often. I’ve had a good life, thought Grannie, tightening her lips again, a full life, an easy life. But what if I had lived instead with a mind that matched my own, that picked up my own and ran away with it; what if I had lived with a tongue that spoke my own language exactly? Supposing, instead of all these bricks, we had had words, music, pictures, ideas, new created things? Supposing?
I am sorry. I made a mistake. It’s too late now.
Kenneth had said a hundred times, half joking, half not joking: “Mother, you’re a hard old woman.” Like everything else that Kenneth said, it was partly true; and partly, of course, ridiculous. Kenneth just said; he had no meaning, he was without significance.
Yet he was better---in some ways---than Robin.
Grannie, as was her custom, walked down the hill to the tube station, boarded another 27 bus, scrambled upstairs, gasping a little, and secured the front seat. Her mind still speculated on That State of Life. This bus ran according to schedule; so should people. This bus went to Twickenham; what would happen if it suddenly shot away down Holloway Road or Seymour Street and fetched up at Hackney Wick or the Elephant and Castle instead? Chaos, misadventure, misery; complaint and gnashing of teeth. No sense in it. And it was the same with people.
Now look for example at Kenneth.
Kenneth! “Oh, Harry, is that him?” Well might Grandfather have asked that now.
I haven’t been to Kenneth’s flat, thought Grannie, for nearly a year, and I don’t care if it’s another year before I go there again. Kenneth’s was a very small flat at the very top of one of those converted houses between Holborn and the Museum---no lift, of course; it was kept in a condition of glorious mess and muddle. The only tidy thing in it was Jacqueline, smooth and placid in those grey Quakerish dresses she affected, a little sulky, a little scornful. What had she to be scornful about? and she hadn’t always been tidy or Quakerish either if you knew the whole story. But you could never be quite upsides with the French; their life was always a compromise, they balanced their budgets---their private ones anyway---and they made their own values which they didn’t divulge. That, of course, Grannie could respect. But she couldn’t respect Kenneth---sprawling and smoking a pipe, clad in flannel trousers and a thick blue knitted sweater that would better have become a deck-hand or a fisherman---and blethering, blethering. It was only with difficulty that Kenneth could be induced to put on a shirt or a hat; when he did buy a covering for his head, it was one of those frightful wide-brimmed black things like a secret society. He was writing a book about William Blake---and always in the imperfect tense; he always was writing it, he never wrote it. He lived by five-guinea articles and short stories. “And this,” thought Grannie, sitting very erect and primming up her mouth, “this, at forty-eight, is the son Donald meant for the lawyer.”
For Grandfather had decided that as he could not be in his own person a lawyer and a doctor and a minister, he would have a son of each. He had meant Kenneth for the lawyer. He had meant Robin for the doctor, and Robin was a doctor; That State of Life. The prospective minister had never materialised; perhaps just as well, for if he had taken after Kenneth he would probably have finished up as a bookmaker. Of course, he might have taken after Robin, but Kenneth had shaken Grannie’s faith in takings after.
For Kenneth wouldn’t be a lawyer. In a frightful scene, away back somewhere about 1906, he had told Grandfather he refused to prostitute his talents (talking in the best journalistic style even then); God had given him the gift of writing, and he was going in for journalism and there was an end of it. The scene made Grannie’s head ache still. But of course Kenneth had won because he could size up Grandfather, and Grandfather could not size up him. So Kenneth became a journalist and said he made money at it, and only Grannie knew how much she “lent” him from time to time. Then, with a thundering crash, came the war. Robin was house surgeon at St. Mark’s; such were kept back and made to be useful in their own line; and in the later years of the war Robin had “gone out,” and been very useful indeed to very many. Nobody kept back Kenneth or wanted to; away he went with the Artists Rifles, and whether he was useful or not, very little was heard of him for a period of years. He couldn’t get leave when Grandfather died---or he said he couldn’t. And after the war---wherein he had borne the charmed life of the useless; never a scratch and never rose above corporal or tried to---he went on to the Rhine; so that, with one thing and another, it was some time before he was seen again.
And when he was seen again! And then!
Grannie and Robin went to Victoria to meet him; it was coals of fire, no doubt, but they felt it was the right thing to do; besides, he would want to borrow money immediately. Robin’s wife Philippa---then comparatively new---would have come also, but they dissuaded her. And were they glad? For Kenneth got out of the train dressed in unspeakable clothes and smoking a French pipe which he blew into Grannie’s face when he kissed her. And behind Kenneth there got out a little dark woman, ox-eyed, stoutish, perhaps a year or two his senior; and she held by the hand a little dark boy in a sailor suit---a French sailor suit, you never saw such an object. But an engaging little boy with alert eyes and a mouth that would one day trouble women if he wanted it to. And Kenneth had said, airily, through a cloud of foul French tobacco:
“This is Jacqueline.”
“Jacqueline?”
“Yes. And René.”
“Rennie?”
“No; René. French.”
And Grannie had gasped out: “Kenneth, are you---married?” And there, on the platform at Victoria, hatless and grinning and puffing clouds of smoke, Kenneth had said---nay, had shouted, as if it were the best joke in the world, and he its finest comedian:
“No!”
Thank Heaven, thought Grannie, swaying to the 27 bus as it bounded down Fortess Road, thank Heaven life doesn’t deal you out very many shocks quite like that.
So home had come the warrior Kenneth whom Grandfather had meant for a lawyer. He had no money but he had written some inside-knowledge articles about the Rhine Occupation which he was sure he would sell. (He did sell them---and dozens of others.) He had no plans at all, but was sure something would turn up. (Nothing turned up, but Kenneth met the reel of events as it rolled towards him and adjusted himself to it.) He had no hat and he had apparently no overcoat. But he had---mince no words---a mistress and a bastard. And this, thought Grannie, this is a grown man of over thirty years of age and---my son. “Oh, Harry, is that him?”
Kenneth continued to exist without hats, overcoats or umbrellas; but in the matter of his domestic appendages he had yielded after a time to reason. But only after a time; he had gone down fighting; he had argued for a year before he had eventually married Jacqueline---and what a pother there had been over that, with Jacqueline being French and without apparent relatives or guardians. (They did in the end unearth an uncle and aunt called Bossuet in a provincial town of Normandy, but Grannie and Robin consistently believed these to be ad hoc.) Jacqueline herself seemed to have no views about anything, but as in those days she could speak no English and was always interpreted---again ad hoc---by Kenneth, it was difficult to be sure of this. Kenneth was reticent about her; he said: “I met her in Amiens; she’s a good girl really.” Grannie was certain she wasn’t; Robin gave her the benefit of the doubt. Of his son, now happily legitimised, Kenneth said airily: “He’s a nice little shrimp. You’ll like him.”
They did like him---with his bright eyes and his black curly hair and his espièglerie. But Grannie objected to his name.
“Why did you give him a French name?”
“Jacky chose it.”
“That wasn’t any reason.”
“Wasn’t it?”
“No. I shall call him ‘Rennie.’”
“You can call him anything on earth you like. You can’t say the French ‘r’ anyway.”
“Rennie,” Grannie religiously called him. He grew up all wrong, of course---how could he do otherwise? But he remained engaging. Grannie couldn’t help liking him. Robin on the contrary avoided him, and Robin’s Philippa, while she lived, couldn’t bear the sight of him. But then, of course, she had Graham and Audrey to think of. Audrey had been born in 1916 and Graham in 1917; and wasn’t Philippa furious when Kenneth turned up in 1920 with another grandchild, bastard or no bastard, eighteen months older than either of them! She even went so far as to say that Kenneth shouldn’t marry Jacqueline at all; but no attention was paid to this immoral piece of motherhood.
All that was back in 1921; and now, fifteen years later, there were Kenneth and René and Jacqueline at No. 19E, Cromarty Crescent, up four flights and no lift. And Grannie, bowling along in her 27 bus thought: “I won’t go back there in a hurry.” For that last visit had been truly a penance. Jacqueline had made and offered tea, but her tea was as bad as her English; it was beastly. And Kenneth had bought a huge new book about William Blake which he insisted on showing to Grannie---picture after picture alternately frightening, repellent and alluring; squatting and diving gods---or were they gods?---with demented faces. She said: “There seem to be a great many books about William Blake,” and Kenneth replied: “Well, then, one more won’t make any difference.” Yours won’t anyway, had thought Grannie, because it will never be written. . . . And then in had come René, hatless, of course, and slim in a dark blue suit and a sweater like Kenneth’s, only thinner. He was very good-looking, but such a little fellow; beautifully formed but so small. He hadn’t any physique---how could he have in such a menage?---and his hands were as long and as thin and as milky as a professional pianist’s. She had said: “Where have you been, dear?” and he had replied: “F’ame Squa’e.” He spoke English now perfectly, except that he could never quite manage his “r’s”; he made rather lovely Frenchy sounds of his cousins---“G’aham” and “Aud’ey.” Then he and Kenneth had begun to argue over a book about Russia by a man called Duranty; they forgot Grannie altogether. Jacqueline as usual said nothing; she sat waiting for Grannie to go away; and when Grannie did go away they left her to get down all those fearful stairs by herself.
No, thought Grannie, I won’t go back there in a hurry. And that’s what comes of cutting out of That State of Life unto which it has Pleased God to Call You.
On the other hand, look at Robin.
Robin was the son Grandfather had meant for the doctor; and he was a doctor, a gynaecologist and a very successful one. If only he would desist from worrying his heart out because he couldn’t discover the cause of cancer. Nobody could; why, then, should he? But that was Robin all over; he was always inferiorising himself, getting himself down over something. As a gynaecologist he had a reputation and he made a great deal of money---you couldn’t live at No. 5, Frame Square without it. But he sank himself in his researches---that never never found their goal. Grannie told him: “There are some things we are not meant to know”; but Robin wouldn’t have it; the more difficult a problem was, the more we must go on trying. He strode up and down Grannie’s sitting-room sometimes till she was nearly dizzy, stroking the stubbly hair above his long forcible anxious face, and fingering that white half-crown and saying: “If we could only get a clue, if we could only get a clue. If I can make cancer, if I can induce cancer in a rat, surely I ought to know how?” But it eluded him, and at times he became so despondent that he lost his gynaecological manner and scared away his patients. And then Robin groaned and desponded about that . . . .
Keeping Robin up to it; that, all his life, had been one of Grannie’s businesses---and not the easiest. He was so easily discouraged, went so willingly into a despond, so readily said: “I can’t.” He accepted defeat as most people accept food. As a baby he was inclined to be whiney; as a little boy he said his schoolmasters had a down on him, that Smithson was simply too good for him to beat, that he just couldn’t do mathematics and there was an end of it. Adolescent, he was gawky; adult, he remained incurably shy. He loathed the war unspeakably, but it did him good; it hardened him, it gave him that veneer of coarseness which he required. He came back from it with that complex of shyness, kindness, intensity and “damn-you-you-are-going-to-tell-me-the-truth “ that makes the successful gynaecological manner. But as a recreation he set himself to master the more unplayable compositions of Chopin, and as a hobby he set himself to seek out the undiscoverable cause of cancer; and both these got him down. At times he infuriated Grannie so terribly that she almost gave it away. But never quite.
And then he grew up in a night and married Philippa, and his inferiority complexes dissolved into thin air. It was as if he said to the world: “I’ve landed Philippa; I must be a marvel after all.”
Philippa was a direct purposeful young woman of army stock, a woman without compromises, evasions or doubts, who never saw anything except from a single view-point. She was splendid for Robin, and Grannie encouraged her from the first. She pounced on Robin sweepingly, and all the time allowed him to regard himself as the leader of a Sabine rape. She married him in 1915, just before he went out to France, and in her direct purposeful way she had Audrey in 1916 and Graham a year later. Then, having performed all duties in a smart and soldierly manner, she gave herself up to pushing Robin. How she pushed him!
When he came back from the war and set up in Frame Square Robin was no longer Robin; he became “Philippa-and-I.” It was “Philippa and I are going to do this,” “Philippa and I mean to do that.” “Philippa and I——” The household, Grannie saw, was perfect; it was That State of Life at zenith.
But after ten years of marriage, Philippa lay dead in the big bedroom at Frame Square, and Robin was on his knees beside her, his head on the quilt, his arms thrown out anyhow---beaten, knocked out, sandbagged, knowing perfectly well that something had happened he would never get over. As, of course, he never did.
And at Grannie’s at Treherne Gardens little Graham with his fair curly hair and Philippa’s forget-me-not eyes was saying: “When is Mummy coming back?” And Audrey, looking at him through her ringlets with contemptuous patronage---as Grannie would have looked had she been a little girl in those circumstances---was answering him: “She won’t come back, you silly---she’s dead.” Hard, competent, cocksure little creature---“like me,” thought Grannie even at the time, “like me.” Yet on the day of Philippa’s funeral it had been Audrey who had howled while Graham stood gaping in almost imbecile bewilderment. There were things then---as there always would be---that were too big for Graham.
That State of Life; the perfect example; Philippa-and-I. Yes, but there were unaccountable instances where God misdealt or blundered; or tricked one deliberately; or lost grip or didn’t attend. . . . “Or perchance He sleepeth. . . .”
The 27 bus was by now trotting contentedly along Praed Street; the long pilgrimage was nine-tenths over. There again stood Paddington station, starting point for holidays in Devon that now seemed infinitely more remote in time than the diversions of Caligula. Grandfather inclining to fussiness; Kenneth tiresomely demanding something unattainable; Robin, as usual, timid and tending to be sick; herself in a striped dress and crucifying stays. . . . Paddington station, the starting-point of “Philippa-and-I” on their honeymoon; Robin this time erect and confident in that brief but formidable interlude of mastery, Philippa showing him off as she alone amongst God’s creatures could do. . . . There stood Paddington station much as it had been then, much as it had been when Brunel built it; but the passengers, the travellers, where were they?
And out of all these components, thought Grannie, out of Grandfather and Devon holidays and the Artists Rifles and Philippa-and-I has emerged this third generation---René, Audrey and Graham. Ages to-day---twenty-one, twenty, nineteen. All essentially different, yet all alike in one paramount quality---discontent. They were all three dissatisfied, they were rent by ambitions, they clamoured at the doors of the future. René cried: “Change, change!” Audrey: “Destroy, destroy!” Graham: “Give me, give me, give me!” Well, they all three had their solution---That State of Life. God had gone out of his way to make arrangements for them; let them but agree, acquiesce, settle down, accept. That was all they had to do. But it was the last thing any of them would do.
Yet could you blame them? What intelligent creature would settle down in such States of Life as these three saw around them? Kenneth and Jacqueline. Robin and Noelle. And Noelle.
Kenneth had married his mistress which they said was the supreme folly; but after all he had done it only under coercion and after fair trial---he had known what he was getting. Not so Robin. Robin plunging belatedly into second marriage, had seized untried and almost unknown a woman who was no more use to him, thought Grannie, than a sack of potatoes. The briefest period of experiment would have shown him as much; but, of course, with participants such as Robin and Noelle experiment was out of the question.
Noelle! At the thought of Noelle the feather in Grannie’s velvet bonnet began to tremble with her unutterable exasperation. Such a good girl, such a fine woman, so highly principled, so well-intentioned, so chaste, so modest, so---so automatic. So well read; such a lady. . . .
The great waxwork!
Why had Robin married her? Because he wanted her and couldn’t get her without it? Say rather because he saw something---angel, fairy, companion, affinity---in her, and she took jolly good care he didn’t find it wasn’t there till it was too late to go back. She had been an elementary schoolteacher. “Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.” My stars! thought Grannie, shifting her plate about and grinding it a little in her annoyance, my stars! but Bernard Shaw was right.
Noelle!
Grannie went home to tea and scones---toasted because it was Sunday, and they had been baked yesterday. Nibbling them, she forgot for a time those exasperating children and grandchildren---the sessile failure of middle age, the fatuous charging thrust of youth. She remembered that yesterday she had paid twenty guineas for a very good seat for the Coronation next May; nothing like being in good time. And all by herself among total strangers; no Robin fussing and fumbling and constantly being caught in anxious sideways glances to see how she was standing it; no Kenneth sprawling and smoking and turning heads towards them by his loud bawdy inappropriate remarks. Robin and Kenneth didn’t know yet about Grannie’s Coronation seat; they would know in time enough. Or perhaps she wouldn’t tell them at all---just go.
René wouldn’t go because he didn’t approve of monarchy; Audrey wouldn’t go because she despised the privileged classes; Graham wouldn’t go because he was too lazy. So I will be all by myself, thought Grannie, and that is what I like.
She fell into a doze through which a procession of faces wandered and floated. Grandfather---or selections from the Family Album; Jacqueline, full-lipped, full-bosomed, pouring her horrible tea with that balanced-budget resignation; Audrey, so eager, so dissatisfied, so desperate to throw an all-destroying bomb---only she couldn’t find one; Graham, the good-looking fair boy with no guts; René, the good-looking dark boy with far too many guts for his size. And vaguely, vaguely among them, that lost young man at Linlithgow who belonged to some rarer world. Did he come more often in dreams than of yore, that strange young man whom Nature had apparelled in light and music and sent into the world to rape Miss Henrietta Graham, to tear her virginity from her, to turn her into Grannie? Perhaps he did. Did that mean that she was drawing nearer to him again after all these years, that he really was somewhere waiting for her---“in the house of the Lord for ever,” like Blunt and Michaelson and Roberts and all the rest of them? Surely. “What advantageth it me . . . if the dead rise not?” The dead must rise; they couldn’t not rise, could they?
And if that is so, then this life is but an interlude and the players must play it as written.
Ellen, coming for the tray, saw that Grannie smiled grimly in her sleep; she thought: “These Highgate afternoons take more out of her than she knows.” But Grannie woke up and said: “I wasn’t asleep”; and Ellen said placidly: “Yes, you were, Mrs. Ritchie,” and waddled away with the tea-things.
So Grannie stretched out her hand to the little table by her side and picked up Thomas à Kempis. The odd thing about that book was that it was Kenneth who had given it to her, not Robin; the title-page proclaimed this in a scrabbly schoolboy hand with one large blot---“Mother from Kenneth 27th Feby. 1898.” “My thirty-eighth birthday,” mused Grannie, “and I thought I was an old woman then: my goodness! I’ll live to be ninety. Why not?” She turned the battered pages and read:
“My son, now will I teach thee the way of peace and of true liberty.
“Oh Lord, I beseech thee, do as thou sayest, for this is delightful to me to hear.
“Be desirous, my son, to do the will of another rather than thine own.
“Choose always to have less rather than more.
“Seek always the lowest place. . . .”
No, no, thought Grannie, that’s not it---that’s not it at all. The way of peace and of true liberty is sticking to That State of Life. . . . That State of Life. . . . That State of Life. . . .
She fell asleep again.
On New Year’s Day of 1934 Audrey, being still seventeen, wrote in her new diary: “Resolve to get out of here at all costs.” And to make it certain, she added in red ink capitals: “MUST.” But in October of 1936 she was still “here,” still resolving.
Here was No. 5, Frame Square, a flat-faced Georgian London house like a thousand others. The Square, north of Oxford Street and south of Regent’s Park, remained quiet and secluded and---by some miracle---residential; buses had not penetrated into it, and its roadways were mercifully too narrow to admit of its being used as a car park. The sycamore and chestnut trees in the Square garden were sodden and black, but every year they burst into hopeful greenery as if they had been in the depths of Bucks or Surrey. Every year Audrey’s resolutions greened afresh---and fell again with the falling leaves.
No. 5 was a fine old house---as well it might be, for it had cost a deal of Grandfather’s money when first “Philippa-and-I “ had set up in it. Now it carried a vague air of disappointment; unfulfilled promises peeped from its oblong windows, might-have-beens hid on its easy stairs. Its ground floor was official; Dr. Robin Ritchie; a waiting-room, a consulting-room with a screen and an inviting sofa; two inadequate but precious laboratories where Robin’s tantalising battle with the Enemy waxed and waned; a small menagerie of rats, rabbits and guinea pigs, guzzling away their lives in happy nescience. The first-floor front was taken up by a hideous drawing-room---hideous mainly because Noelle managed it so badly. So far as dimensions and proportions went, it might have been a room; but it was furnished---over-furnished---with a profusion of odd bits and pieces which sat glaring at one another in lifelong antipathy. On its walls were sea pictures (Robin), and a Medici print miscellany (Noelle), and Luke Fildes’s inevitable doctor (Noelle again). Bang opposite the middle window was Cadrigua’s oil-painting of Noelle herself; it hung in the worst possible light, which it wouldn’t have done if Noelle had known better because it was the pièce de résistance, the presiding deity of the chamber. Noelle regarded the drawing-room as peculiarly hers; she said always “My” drawing-room. In the drawing-room the household was wont to assemble for tea; served on a vast round table of Indian brass with carved legs never completely steady---a complete incongruity, needless to say, with everything else in the room.
On the first-floor back were Noelle’s conception of a lady’s bedroom and bathroom; and these had to be seen to be believed.
On the second floor were Audrey’s rooms and Graham’s. They had two rooms each---a bedroom and a work-room; Noelle thought this absurd, but she walked too warily in that house to say so. Graham’s bedroom was shockingly untidy because though he was nearly twenty he had a clockwork railway with which he still played a great deal; he was a little ashamed of it, and so kept it hidden away in his bedroom so that his “writing-room” might look really grown-up. He brought fellows in there sometimes---fellows who would have raised their eyebrows at Hornby engines. Even René didn’t know, and mustn’t know, how much Graham still played with his trains. Graham was at London University; he was studying, at his father’s wish, in research chemistry. Robin said wistfully: “We could work together, you know”; and sometimes Graham said “Rather!” with hearty mendacity, and sometimes he said nothing at all. But he had no intention of becoming a research chemist; he was, always had been, always would be, a Writer. Like Kenneth, eh? Good God, no! not like Kenneth. A success.
Audrey’s bedroom was immaculate, but her work-room was a muddle which reflected the muddle of her mind. She had taken a pass degree in economics, she wanted desperately to study comparative sociology in the various Continental countries, and the first element in her discontent was that her father---to no reasonable end---kept her anchored immovably in Frame Square. She made plans to include Russia, Vienna, Nürnberg, Sweden, Poland; but Robin only said: “My dear girl, how could you possibly go wandering about the map of Europe?” “How couldn’t I?” Audrey thought, “there is a map.” René, her cousin, had been to Moscow---and not with Intourist---he had been to Berlin; now, in the autumn of 1936, he talked of going to Spain to see the war there for himself. Kenneth intended him for a reader’s desk in Mansell’s the publishers, but Kenneth would never really force his intentions on anybody because his intentions never achieved stability; they were, like the rest of him, talk. So the probabilities were that if René made up his mind to go to Spain, to Spain he would go. Oh, lucky René!
On the wall of Audrey’s sitting-room, in an oak frame that René had brought her from Germany, hung a translation of Alejandro Lerroux’s astonishing “Rebeldes, Rebeldes” manifesto. “Young barbarians of to-day revolt against everything because there is nothing good. Revolt against everybody because there is no one just. Sack this miserable and decadent civilisation, pull down its temples, destroy its gods.” That, thought Audrey, was the stuff. She called herself a Communist, and the only time she disliked René was when he laughed at her Communism. He called her “Bakhunina,” and said she was really an anarchist---which, so far as a label can ever go, was nearly true. René said that Caballero was right in Spain, and that we wanted a Revolutionary Workers’ Republic everywhere, and that Moscow was far too moderate and slow. But Audrey thought Stalin was a great man; the way he sacrificed those five million peasants---simply starved them!
Sitting at her work-room window on this falsely bright autumn afternoon, Audrey had forgotten Stalin and Caballero; she was sunk in more personal grievances. René wants to go to Spain---and he’ll go there; I only want to go to such harmless places, I want to see a Collective Farm working, I want to hear a speech by Kaganovitch, I want to see the workers’ flats in Vienna; but can I get away? No, no, never. And I’ve no money of my own to go with. Here I sit and sit in this horrible house with Graham and father and Noelle. And Noelle.
On the word “Noelle” the second item in Audrey’s discontents came forward.
For how could father have married Noelle? Once again the astounded question that the years never answered. How could he have put her in mother’s place, in mother’s house, in mother’s room? How could he do things with her he had once done with mother? How could he want to?
Like most eventual anarchists, Audrey had begun life with a blind trust in authority---that is to say, in Robin; the omnipotence her teachers attributed to the Almighty was but a shadow of his. And as with so many anarchists in embryo, authority, it seemed, let her down. Very early, at a party, she had met a little boy who was blind; she said: “My father could cure you.” The child was shaken but contradicted on principle. “No, he couldn’t.” “He could, he could!” She had rushed home, flung herself upon Robin, poured out the story breathlessly and with tears. “You could, Daddy, couldn’t you?” Robin believed in the truth at all costs; he said sorrowfully: “No, dear”---and wondered why she crept away from him so quietly. He did not know that it was because she wanted to cry, or that she wanted to cry because for the first time her faith in authority was shaken, because she was flung henceforth upon a world of flux without ultimate appeal.
That, of course, was childish; one grew out of it and knew better. But the faith, once shaken, faltered and faltered; authority, in the person of Robin, was viewed with a deepening distrust. She had thought he could do anything; whereas, as she grew older and accepted Robin’s estimate of himself, it seemed he could do precious little. He was undependable---there it was; by the time she was twelve, she knew it.
But never, thought Audrey, never in my wildest and worst expectations, could I have bargained for Noelle.
Lovey-dovey, Audrey-darling, swee-eet, goo-ood, dam-bloody-awful Noelle!
“Young barbarians of to-day, there is nothing good, there is no one just. Sack . . . pull down . . . destroy. . . .”
Yes, do! Come on! Let’s!
Tea would be interesting this autumn afternoon because René was coming, and as Noelle would not be there René would talk. Noelle always simply extinguished René with her bromides and her platitudes and her idiotic daily paper opinions; but that afternoon she had gone to improve her mind at some lecture or other---she was fond of lectures; René would have a chance to be something other than a dear funny little boy airing his views to the grown-ups. I will contradict René, thought Audrey, and contradict him, and contradict him, because that way one learns. René knew a lot, he had been places and seen things, he had really studied his subjects, he had facts and facts and facts. But unless you contradicted him, he just smiled and teased; then, however, he got angry and his curls seemed to rise and his “r’s” became very French, and he told you the truth. “Aud’ey, you are an ana’chist.” I’m not, she thought, but I shall be driven into becoming one.
Audrey hoped Graham might perhaps be out too; she had heard him earlier in the afternoon playing with his trains, but for a long time there had been silence. If Graham and René encountered one another, René tried to be superior to Graham, and Graham tried to be superior to René, and they both became tiresome. But Graham wasn’t out; she found him in the drawing-room sprawling on one of Noelle’s less successfully covered settees, reading a recent best-seller by an unreticent young woman. Philippa had bestowed impartially on her children her own fair blue-eyed purposeful insolence; Graham’s features were better than Audrey’s, but he always seemed to have too much hair. Once brother and sister had been inseparable; but of late years Graham had grown languid, patronising, the superior male. He thought he knew everything and had done everything because he had twice been tight and had once gone home with a street woman.
He told Audrey of these accomplishments boastingly and patronisingly, but Audrey knew that he much preferred playing with his trains---and Graham knew that she knew. . . . Seeing her coming into the drawing-room, he threw down the book he was reading with what seemed relief; he said:
“Awful tripe.”
Audrey yawned. “Then why read it?”
“Oh, well---why does anybody read tripe? And in my line one has to see what’s selling.”
“‘In my line!’ Have you started your novel yet?”
“I’ve thought out a bit of it.”
“What’s it called?”
“It’s called London Idyll. Provisionally.”
“And what’s it provisionally about?”
“You mustn’t ask me that. Not yet.”
Because, thought Audrey, you don’t know. But she looked at him keenly. There was something odd about him this afternoon, something rapt and distant, as if he sat with difficulty on some radiant secret. And why London Idyll? He hasn’t a scrap of imagination; he must be writing about himself, his own experiences. On the principle of not encouraging Graham, she changed the subject.
“René’s coming.”
“Damn!”
“Well, you can go out.”
“I am going out. But not just yet.” And again that bottled-up excitement, that smug “you-don’t-know-what-I’ve-got.” What could it be? Don’t ask him anyway.
“Well, don’t show off to René.”
“Show off? Me?” He assumed indignation, but in truth he hardly heard her. For he was thinking deliciously: “Yes, I am going out; I am going out to have cocktails with Iona. Just the two of us. Mrs. Iona Playfair, Mrs. Iona Playfair. Iona.” His heart jumped; to steady it he lit a cigarette and picked up his book again.
“Awful tripe.”
“You said that before.”
“Well, so it is.” But supposing Iona did what the woman in the book was doing; supposing Iona put her arms round one’s neck and murmured and whispered and---asked for it? Supposing Iona took off most of her clothes and said: “Darling, darling Graham?”
And bit one’s shoulder, one’s bare shoulder? . . .
René came in like a wind, striding, head forward; it was only when he stood still that you saw him small; moving, he was a whole body of cavalry. He advanced always as if he were leading a storming party through a breach; alert for ambushed enemies. He should have had a revolver in his hand. His little exquisitely made face was ivory under his black curls. His grey-blue eyes glinted, he looked upwards. If only he were just a little bigger!
He said: “Hullo, folks!” Audrey rang for tea and enquired for Kenneth and Jacqueline.
“They’re just being Kenneth and Jacqueline. What’s Uncle Robin doing?” (For inscrutable reasons Robin was always “Father” or “Uncle”; Kenneth and Jacqueline just Kenneth and Jacqueline.)
“Oh---patients. He’ll be coming up later.”
René said: “God! What a life.” Graham, rousing himself from dreams, said it was a damned fine life---healing people, curing people.
“It wouldn’t suit you. Too much like work.”
“Well, you needn’t talk about work. You won’t go into that job with Mansell’s.”
“That’s not work. Not man’s work.”
“It’s the next best thing to creative work. It’s interpreting. It’s making creative work accessible.”
“C’eative work! The next best thing! My God——”
The old argument was launched again. But mercifully, before it could develop, the tea arrived---a vast tray with silver and china, a cake-stand on wheels. Graham looked self-consciously at his wrist-watch.
“I’ve got to go out almost at once. Just time for a cup.” He glared at the scones and eclairs as if they insulted him; cocktails, he thought; Iona; a married woman! This miserable nursery tea. . . . Standing up to pass the sandwiches, he looked down upon René, he felt immeasurably superior; no sense in silly arguments with the immature. . . . He took a scone and a great deal of jam, forgetting about the cocktails.
René said: “Where’s your stepmother?” (he never called her “Noelle “because the name made him feel sick) and Audrey: “I don’t know and I don’t care,” and René grinned with all his white teeth. “Improving her mind again?” he said; and then, all in a breath: “I say, I think I’ll get to Spain. The army, I mean.”
Audrey cried out: “Oh, René!” Graham said: “You won’t.”
“Yes, I will. Why not?”
“It isn’t legal.”
“It is.”
“It isn’t. There’s an Act.”
“That can’t stop you; not individuals.”
“You won’t get a passport.”
“I’ve got a passport.”
“Well, you won’t get a visa.”
“I don’t need a visa.”
Audrey broke in; René had the facts as usual, Graham hadn’t.
“But, René, you can’t go by yourself.”
“I won’t go by myself. The International Brigade’s official now. I’ll join it.”
“But what’ll you do when you get there?”
“Fight.”
Graham said: “I thought Communists didn’t fight.”
“Then you thought wrong as usual.”
“What does Kenneth say?”
“Oh, he says. He says I’m an ass. But he doesn’t really care.”
“Well, so you are an ass,” said Graham. But he thought: “I don’t really care either. I don’t care if you go to Spain or Singapore or Spitzbergen. In half an hour I’ll be sitting in the Berkeley having cocktails with Iona. We’ll take a taxi from her flat. I’ll see her eyes, her lovely auburn hair. I’ll touch her hands---maybe more. Oh, my God, I see it all coming; it’s got to come; I can’t stop it. Spain! Communists! Pah!” Unable to bear it any longer, he got up and muttered something and went out.
René said to Audrey with his flashing smile:
“What’s the matter with Graham? Love?”
Audrey supposed so; it must be that. “Sometimes I hate Graham.”
“Oh, why? Nice fellow.”
“Ye-s. But he’s just like all the rest of our set---he’s finished, he’s done, he hasn’t any guts. I hate the whole lot of us. . . . René, do you think there’ll ever really be a Revolution in this country?”
René was sure of it. “But not so much a Revolution as a---a Regeneration.”
“After the Fascists have fought the Communists?”
“The Fascists won’t ever fight the Communists, Audrey. They’ll peter out. Capitalism’s last kick. Dying gestures---reflex action. You might as well go back to the feudal system. The other thing’s bound to win because, apart from anything else, it’s modern. It’s international. The world’s becoming a world---not a lot of little bits and pieces.” He jumped up suddenly. “I’ve eaten too much tea. I’ll have to get along.”
Sick with discontent, Audrey watched him---a spirit flaming in a test-tube, enterprise compressed into a pocket-pistol. Dollfuss! We weren’t far wrong when we called him that. Neat, slim, fragile---but oh, he has guts! Graham pretends to be tough; René is tough.
“René, are you really going to Spain?”
“Hope so. One day.”
“Take me with you.”
“Couldn’t.”
“No. I know. But oh, God, I wish you could!”
Dr. Robin Ritchie was in his little private lavatory on the official floor, washing and washing and washing his hands. He allowed two minutes for this function every time he performed it---never less anyway; and he tried to calculate sometimes how much of his life it consumed. He made it about ten days a year. Ten days cut out of every year just washing your hands!
He forgot to calculate this afternoon because he was thinking so deeply of the woman he had just been examining, whom he had just sent away more cheerful than she had probably been for weeks. He had never seen her before---a Mrs. Lemaitre; youngish, well-off (or she wouldn’t have been there), carefully good looking, happily married---and as certainly dead, thought Robin, as if I had taken out a pistol and shot her. For she had it, she had it; he had felt it under his probing fingers. How long, he thought, can I go on with these agonies, these fatal discoveries, these murderous certainties I must cover over with pretence?
If only we could find the clue; the clue; where does it lie . . .? Sex hormones? Perhaps; perhaps not. Meanwhile---defeat.
“But I don’t feel ill, Doctor Ritchie---not ill in myself if you know what I mean.” (Yes, I know what you mean.) “Just a little haemorrhage sometimes. A little sickness.”
No, you don’t feel ill. And you probably won’t, till one day you flame up in pain and die. And I can’t save you.
“You think, doctor, you really think”---and the little nervous giggling laugh he had heard a thousand times---“you really think the operation will put me right?”
“There’s every chance, Mrs. Lemaitre.” But unless his touch and his knowledge and his instincts erred, there was no chance worth speaking about. Unless he knew nothing of his subject, there were secondaries there, hidden away deep under the pretty flesh she took such care of. She would go to the nursing home and they would open her up and go a little way and then they would see it was impossible to go farther and they would sew her up again. And perhaps tell her that they had done it all successfully. And then one day her own doctor would be saying to her husband: “I’ll make it as easy for her as I can; I can’t do anything more. . . .” “I can’t do anything more”; humiliating, infuriating, damnable confession. The hideous thing’s beaten us again, beaten all our science, all our books, all our drugs, all our instruments. We’re licked.
He went slowly upstairs. Audrey, waiting alone in the drawing-room with the remainder of the tea, saw that he was in his blackest mood. Noelle’s little dog Mackay came into the room after him, an Aberdeen terrier looking conscientiously long-faced and ill-used; he sniffed at Graham’s crumbs on the floor and wearily abandoned them as uninteresting. Audrey rang the bell for fresh tea. Robin said:
“I wish you’d keep Mackay out of the consulting-room.”
“But they like him, Daddy. He cheers them up.”
“Perhaps. God knows they need it.”
Audrey sighed; she knew, as Grannie had known long before her, the appalling difficulty of cheering up Robin. A regiment of Mackays, all wagging their tails and dancing reels, would fail with that Herculean task. She gave the little dog a sponge cake which he ate to oblige her.
“Daddy, René says he’s going to Spain.”
“Does he?”
Silence fell; if she had said: “Graham spilt his tea on his trousers,” the statement would have been received with the same polite uninterest; he didn’t care that about Spain or René or Caballero or Franco or Hitler or Mussolini or Stalin. Or me, thought Audrey, or me---and why should he? I’m useless; I ought to be able to buck him up, but I can’t. Conscientiously, however, she tried, telling him this and that; the response was negligible. Once he asked: “Where’s Graham?” but didn’t wait for her answer. She saw Graham’s abandoned bestseller lying on the sofa and clutched at it as a topic; Kenneth had reviewed it for the Daily Something. He did rise a little to that.
“Imagine anybody being guided by Kenneth!”
“They don’t know he’s Kenneth, Daddy.”
“Ignotum pro magnifico? If ever that applied to anything, it’s critics.” But he thought---another charlatan! and on the whole he does less harm than I do. He began to wish that Audrey would go away; then perhaps he could have half an hour with Chopin before Noelle came in. He had wanted a separate music-room, no matter how tiny; but Noelle had said that the drawing-room was the proper place for the piano and there it stood---an immense imposing grand beneath the Cadrigua portrait. Hardly ever did he get peace to play on it, to lose himself in the attempt on those ethereal Chopinesque mazes he could never quite disentangle. Certainly he could not attempt them now; you could not play Chopin in the presence of Audrey. Why? Impossible to say any more than to give a reason why you could not drink port with oranges---they just did not go together. Something much older and simpler perhaps---Bach, Mozart; something much newer and more complex---Debussy, Rimsky-Korsakov. But not Chopin. . . . Mrs. Lemaitre. . . . “But I don’t feel ill, Doctor Ritchie. . . .” “I’ll make it as easy for her as I can; I can’t do anything more. . .” Oh, fool, oh, failure, oh, betrayal!
Audrey, discouraged at last, said after a long silence: “I’ll take Mackay for a walk. Noelle’s sure to come in tired.” Released, she threw herself on the floor beside the dog. “Walkies, Kai? Ta-tas?” Mackay got up and stretched himself, yawning gigantically. “Ee-yaw!” he said, scraping his forefeet on the carpet, “ee-yaw!” Then, excited by her excitement, he began to bound up and down like a ball bouncing. Audrey cried: “You lovely, you lovely! Daddy, isn’t he sweet?”---and saw that her father wasn’t looking at them at all. Flattened, she and Mackay went out together.
When they had really gone, Robin crept over to the piano, lifted the lid, played a chord or two. He pulled a volume of Chopin out of the rack and set it in front of him; it fell open at the A Flat Ballade. He thought: “I’ll try it again; may as well.” He picked up courage, the great soothing chords leapt like horses under his fingers. He had played the Ballade a hundred times and never once had it all come right; sometimes it was the opening that eluded him; sometimes he lost hold in the middle; sometimes he went almost through it only to disappoint himself on the very last page. Never perfection. Well, perhaps this time; perhaps at last. As one day, perhaps in a ray of sunlight, God will allow me that other victory I have pursued so long and so patiently in these laboratories downstairs; or perhaps he will show me a sudden clue in the stuff I have turned over so often under my hand. Perhaps, perhaps. Meanwhile, at last, peace came out of its hiding-place, peace enfolded him; in a garden of sweet sounds he forgot horrors.
Out of the music, out of the afternoon, Philippa came. She had no right to, she was finished and over, she had no place in Noelle’s house---Noelle who was so good and so faithful and so willing and so kind. Philippa had no business there, but she came. Mercifully.
One thing about Iona, thought Graham, she’s never ready, she has no idea of time, she always keeps me waiting. He stood in the little cubical box she called the living-room of her flat, his grey hat in his hand; he hummed to himself a silly little dance tune of the moment---“One! Two! Button your shoe!” He didn’t know all the words of it, but it was about a fellow waiting for a girl to get ready as he himself was waiting now in this queer green-and-white, cigarette-and-scent-smelling room. It wasn’t much of a room---cheap modern furniture, difficult pictures, books, a silver-framed photograph of Clare Kent the film star---all eyelashes and teeth. Iona had written some of the books---silly-naughty they were---and she also wrote for the films; she was going to help Graham to write for the films. Dialogue. Anybody could do it, Iona said, because after you had written it they threw most of it away. But they paid you marvellously; Graham was dying to try.
Somewhere in the inner mysteries of the flat were a bedroom and a bathroom; somewhere in one or other of these Iona was moving about preparing herself. If only I could peep in and have a look at her! Well, one day that would come; one day everything would come; you couldn’t stop love---it seized you up and carried you on like an express train you had got into by mistake. Station after station you had meant to stop at went roaring by. Where’s the terminus? Ah, that one didn’t know. . . . Iona’s husband? Graham quavered a little at the thought of him; he glanced again at what was presumably his photograph on Iona’s writing-table---solid looking chap. But, after all, he was in India and photographs can’t see and they can’t tell tales and they can’t hurt you; we’ll deal with Colonel Playfair when the time comes. “One! Two! Button your shoe!” What a time she took. What would she look like when at last she came? Sometimes she was disappointing, sometimes not; sometimes a stranger, sometimes his own Iona. “One! Two!”
She came swiftly in; a little dark hat on her heavenly hair; fox furs. He wasn’t disappointed this time. No, sir!
“Oh, Iona, you look lovely.”
“Graham, you dear boy.”
The “boy” displeased him but the “dear” was all right if a little casual. He thought dry-mouthed: “Shall I risk it? Shall I plunge? Shall I say: ‘Iona, I’m going to kiss you’?” But the chance passed while he swithered; he’d missed it; she had moved away from him, she was switching off the electric radiator, pulling on her gloves.
“I thought we’d go to the Berkeley, Iona.”
“Extravagant!”
“It’s going to be worth it.”
“Sure?”
“Sure, sure. Shall I ring up a taxi?”
“No. Let’s walk a little. I want some air.”
She always says “I want,” he thought, as if that just settled everything. He would have preferred the intimacy of the taxi; jostling along the crowded streets was no fun. Yet, walking along beside her, skipping this way and that to keep his place, putting a hand on her arm now and then, he felt proud, elated. There weren’t many fellows going to the Berkeley that afternoon with anything half so lovely, half so precious. They must look well together. He was tall, she was just the right height for him; his new suit was a success, her dark blue was a triumph. He wondered people didn’t turn to stare at them.
The Berkeley was crammed as usual, but they squeezed into an uncomfortable table jammed up against a pillar. He ordered Martinis and said in a sudden revulsion of feeling:
“Curse this place; it’s too full.”
“It was your own idea, boy.”
“I know. But I wish we’d gone somewhere quieter. One can’t talk here.”
“Of course one can. Nobody’s paying any attention.”
But Graham, to his annoyance, couldn’t; he was too self-conscious. He said:
“One night, Iona, we’ll go to some little quiet place and have dinner together. Eh?”
“I’d love it.”
“You’d come?”
“Of course. Any time.”
By gosh! that was the way to go ahead. “Of course. Any time.” Any time. Anything. Anything. His mouth went dry again. He had to order two more Martinis.
“I do love coming out with you, Iona. Home’s so flat.”
“Home always is, my dear.”
“I can’t imagine home being anything but lovely---with you.” He took a bold plunge forward---but careful, careful; I’ve only known her a week or two after all. “I can’t imagine how your husband can live away out there without you.”
Her red-brown eyes hardened a little.
“Don’t worry about him. Il s’occupe.”
“Doesn’t he ever come home?”
“He might---one of these days. He won’t hurry himself.”
Graham thought: “The mutt! The poor fish! But I should worry. He’s left her to me, to me, to me!” Round-eyed, adoring, idiotic, he gazed at her over his cocktail. She asked for a cigarette and he gave her one and lit it for her, worshipping. His wonderful Iona.
Iona thought, puffing: “Dear little virgin! I could eat him up. One day I will.”
René took a bus along Oxford Street to Holborn, diverged into Cromarty Crescent, climbed springingly those four flights that so exhausted Grannie. Kenneth and Jacqueline were in---they were rarely anything else. Jacqueline was embroidering silk initials on a handkerchief; she did it beautifully and made quite a little pocket-money out of it---though Kenneth didn’t know about that. Kenneth was smoking and drinking whiskey; he had been smoking and drinking whiskey for some time. A great deal of whiskey made Kenneth silent; a moderate quantity made him expansive; he was in the expansive stage now. René said, as usual: “Hullo, folks?”
Kenneth said: “Hullo, René. Did you go to Mansell’s?”
“No; I didn’t.”
“Oh? And why not?”
René planted himself in front of the fireplace, not much taller than the old-fashioned mantelpiece, his hands in the pockets of his blue suit. He was tiny but he was compact, collected, dangerous.
“You know quite well why I didn’t, father.”
Kenneth took a drink of whiskey. “This Spain stuff again?”
“ Yes. I ought to go. I want to go. The Brigade’s been made official now; you can’t say it’s just playing soldiers any longer.”
Kenneth set down his glass. He didn’t really care whether René went to Spain or not, it didn’t stir him fundamentally---but then nothing did, and that was the secret of a comfortable life. Aequam memento. . . . And Spain made a fine subject for discursive discussion.
“My dear good chap, it’s not in your line.”
“I think it is.”
“Because you don’t know any better. I didn’t when I was your age. Your grandfather said to me: ‘You’ve got to be a lawyer.’ I said: ‘ I’m damned if I do; I want to be a journalist.’ That was my Spain, you see.”
René saw---as he had seen on all the numerous occasions when Kenneth had propounded this analogy. He said as he usually said: “Well, you went to Spain.”
“And what did I get out of it?” said his father with triumphant satisfaction. “This!” He embraced the untidy room, Jacqueline at her handkerchief, the decanter of whiskey. “My dear good René, the pursuit of the ideal is a game for the half-witted. You take the cash and let the credit go. One of the results---perhaps the sole result---of a weary life is that I can wangle you a job with Mansell’s. Take it before the rats get it.”
The ghost of Grannie appeared in the room saying something about That State of Life. René, perhaps, heard it; Kenneth was too busy talking.
“The wise young man,” said Kenneth, settling himself in his chair, “sooner or later arrives at a point where he is faced with a decision. Shall I have a chop and a bottle of wine or shall I chase butterflies? And the wise young man, the wise young man——”
He went on and on; René gazed indifferently above and past him. “He lives by words,” he thought; “he’ll say anything. To-morrow he’ll be telling me that the abandonment of the ideal is death. . . .” Jacqueline folded up her handkerchief and rose; as she got up, her eyes met René’s; they signalled secret understanding. “Go ahead,” they said, “there’s no use paying any attention to him.” She went out.
René said good-humouredly: “All right, Dad, we’ll see.”
Kenneth, pouring himself some more whiskey, said: “You make it Mansell’s. . . . If you didn’t go to Mansell’s this afternoon, where did you go?”
“Frame Square.”
“See anybody?”
“Graham and Audrey.”
“And I suppose Audrey still thinks that the Treaty of Versailles was damned awful and the League of Nations is a washout and all the upper classes everywhere ought to be dumped in a knackery?”
“That’s about it.”
“Audrey!” Kenneth snorted into his tumbler. “It’s time Robin got Audrey married off and settled. And to a man who’d control her, too.”
“You think she ought to be controlled?”
“All women ought to be controlled. They like it, and it saves trouble.”
“Oh?”
“It’s rudimentary. No girl should marry a man who can’t master her. By corollary a man shouldn’t marry a girl he can’t master. My God, boy, just look round you and see the trouble that’s caused in this world by men who can’t manage their wives. Generally because they’ve aimed too high---chose the wrong one, went whoring after Spain when they should have grabbed Mansell’s. And spend the rest of their lives cringing and conciliating. Conjugal bliss on a basis of funk; perfect hell. . . . Little Pipsqueak Simson marries Gloriana Magnifica who’s turned down a dozen worth ten of him——”
“But would she?”
“They do, they do. Women are like birds---they all have an impulse to go out and catch worms. Anyway, Little Pipsqueak Simson marries her. For a while---O.K. He grovels before her in the mud and she thinks he’s Sir Walter Raleigh. But the time comes, the time comes——”
René thought, smiling: “Old idiot; how he does lay it down. He ought to have been a lawyer.”
“The time comes when she suddenly sees he isn’t Sir Walter Raleigh at all---he’s Little Pipsqueak Simson. Then, of course, it’s all over. All bust-up. Or it isn’t and that’s worse.”
René stood staring at the floor; he was thinking, struck by a new idea. “Audrey; that’s Audrey; she’ll marry a Pipsqueak Simson---just what she’d do. Only when she found him out she’d never admit it; never. And that would be hell---for Audrey of all people.” He recalled himself from Audrey to Kenneth who was still going on.
“All,” Kenneth was saying, “because Little Pipsqueak Simson would go chasing after Spain instead of Mansell’s. It’s no use marrying a woman you can’t master. You remember that.”
René said, yawning: “It doesn’t seem much to the point. I’m not going to marry anybody.”
“Don’t,” said Kenneth, “and don’t you go to Spain either.”
In the grey mirror above the mantelpiece René saw Jacqueline coming back into the room; in it he saw her give a sudden unguarded look at Kenneth. And to René’s surprise---or perhaps not---it said, as plainly as look could say: “Little Pipsqueak Simson!”
Noelle came home late; she had been to a lecture on the new Indian Constitution. Why the new Indian Constitution? Well, why not? She had understood very little of it, but she had come away vaguely instructed and with a feeling that the story-writers about India had deceived her a good deal as to the sort of place it was.
Noelle was a big woman; she was as tall as Graham and heavier. Kenneth had once called her a statue in clothes; it was unkind but not inept. She was not in the least fat; her fine proportions carried her off; only her solid ankles gave evidence of the weight they had to bear. “Statuesque”---in its complimentary sense, if it has one---described her. If you sought a word for her face you were obliged faute de mieux to call it “beautiful,” but it wasn’t quite that either; it was too carven and moulded, like---again one has to resort to an inanimate image---a waxwork. It was one of those faces---supposedly of an Italian or Spanish type---which young English ladies were taught to draw in the middle of the nineteenth century. The lids of her great round dark eyes were too white and too heavy, and there was a curiously deep vertical runnel between her nose and her upper lip that suggested the chisel. Her nose was too big, and it had a distinct bump on the bridge; but her dark brown hair was lovely---rich and silky in big natural waves. She came irritatingly near beauty---and just missed it; too waxy, like an arum lily slightly overblown. Her lips---which again, to an unkind observer, seemed moulded out of raspberry-coloured plasticine---were always slightly parted, and this, together with her big staring eyes, gave her a misleading expression of vacancy. She was in fact slow, but far from vacant. She wore bangles and ear-rings and unnecessary garters---all because she loved ornaments, trinkets, trappings, “nice things round me.” She was almost thirty.
She let herself into No. 5, Frame Square with her latch-key and as she crossed the threshold she heard a sound that always indefinitely annoyed her---Robin at the piano. She thought for the thousandth time: “His old Chopin; he never asks me to play.” But because she was entirely honest she had instantly to correct this or at least modify it. The fact was, he asked her to play every time he remembered---but he had to remember. And in point of fact, every time he asked her, she played. She played him “Rendez-vous,” “La Paloma,” the “Blue Danube,” “Traumerei,” Tschaikowsky’s “Chanson Triste,” Liszt’s “Liebestraum”; she could play all sorts of things. And he always said punctiliously how nice it had been. Yes, but---punctiliously.
Noelle went up to her room, took off her furs and her outdoor shoes and came down again. The piano had stopped because Robin had heard her coming in (and in any case the A-Flat Ballade had been an even more egregious failure than usual, a complete debacle). When she reached the drawing-room, he was sitting again by the fire and she thought at once: “Oh dear! He’s in the dumps again.” She could never understand his depressions; he did so much good, didn’t he? And he couldn’t cure everybody; if people didn’t die, what would happen to the world? It seemed to Noelle he ought to be serenely content; it disconcerted her terribly when she found he was miserable.
He got up when she came in---Philippa had trained him to do that, but it always pleased Noelle who thought it so “nice” and contrasted it favourably with the abominable slouching manners of Kenneth. He asked if she had enjoyed her lecture, and she told him, very much indeed.
“It was about Abyssinia, wasn’t it?”
“No. India.”
“Oh, India!” She saw he was merely being polite; must shake him up a little. Looking round the room, she said: “Did anybody take out Mackay?” Mackay was nominally Noelle’s dog but she did very little for him; it was Audrey---or Graham, when he had something to expiate---who brought him his toys---a hard rubber ball, a clockwork rat from a street hawker---or took him for a walk at Hampstead or a last run round the Square at nights. To Noelle Mackay was not much more than a “nice thing round me.”
“Audrey took him.” Robin looked at his watch. “It was quite a while ago. She’s been away a long time.”
Noelle expected it was all right.
“Oh, yes. Audrey probably went a long way. She seemed---restless.”
“She always is. If she’d give up this idea of rushing about all over Europe and settle down with some nice friends in her own set——”
Robin sighed; applied to Audrey, the words were without meaning. He said again:
“She ought to have been back by now.”
“Oh, she’ll turn up all right.” Noelle’s world was full of all-rightness; a bright comfortable place into which apprehension, panic, foreboding never entered. “And nothing could happen to Mackay because I’ve told her always to keep him on the lead.”
Robin knew that Audrey never kept Mackay on the lead, but he had more sense than to say so. He made an acquiescent, uninterested murmur and Noelle gave him a hardish look.
“You seem pretty glum, Robbie. Tired?”
Robin pulled himself together; five years of marriage and she could never learn to leave him alone.
“No, no. Oh, no.”
“Let’s have the wireless then. Cheer us up.”
Robin set his teeth; through his set teeth he muttered: “Yes, dear; certainly,” and waited for the horror that would burst forth. Noelle switched on; the set, humming gently, warmed up to its work; and then a waterfall of uproar came cascading into the room.
It was a cinema organ.
Noelle loved them.
Something had happened to Audrey---though none of the things Robin and Noelle were thinking; something nobody---least of all herself---could have expected.
Going out originally to escape from Robin’s unconquerable depressions, she walked on and on to escape from herself; Mackay, barking and scurrying and generally misbehaving himself, bounded on ahead. As usual, Audrey made for Regent’s Park---it was near and there was only one bad crossing for Mackay---her thoughts revolving once again round the “Resolve to get out of here. MUST” of her diary. But escape seemed no nearer. Now René was going to Spain---to be in things, to take part in things; he shouldn’t be going alone. Spain isn’t any of your business, Audrey? Oh, nonsense! Of course it is; it’s everybody’s business; it’s part of the great problem; something must be done about it, there must be something we can do. The world’s crashing; there’s still time to stop it if only we could think of the right thing. But what is it---what?
Go and see anyway in the first place. Like René---lucky René.
She turned homeward at last sick with discontent and no better for a cold and disagreeable walk. Mackay, disappointed, began to misbehave more and more tiresomely; his antics made connected thought impossible; she was obliged to halt every few yards calling “Kai! Kai! Come on, will you?”---looking a perfect idiot. And did he come on? On the contrary he lagged and lagged, he investigated every lamp-post with the minutest care, he tried to quarrel with an Alsatian, he turned back effusively with a spaniel who didn’t in the least want his company. Maddening little dog! Noelle again, thought Audrey, she owns him and won’t look after him; she takes him out and makes no attempt to control him; all part of that doting sloppiness she mistakes for kindness and love. Noelle still said “Dearie” to Mackay quite often; she had said it very often to Graham and Audrey till they had taught her not to. “Dearie!” It epitomised Noelle somehow; sappy, floppy.
Exasperated at last beyond bearing, Audrey put Mackay on the lead; he crouched idiotically at her feet, his belly on the ground, his eyes rolled up, saying: “All right, all right; kill me and get it over.” But he had no intention of behaving any better. For at the George Street corner he was attracted by an unusually savoury pillar-box; he dived for it, stretching the lead full length; and a young man, coming hurriedly round the corner, fell over this man-trap most magnificently. It was a real fall; the young man went sprawling on his hands and knees on the wet and dirty pavement, and he said loudly a very severe word. It was one of those words of whose existence Audrey was well aware, but which she would never in any circumstances have uttered.
She said aghast: “Oh, I’m sorry! This tiresome dog——”
The young man got up and stood wiping his hands on his handkerchief; she noticed that they were neat hands and were---or had been---particularly white and clean. He was a nice-looking young man, commonish but with an interesting, pretty, epicene, black-and-white face. Dark eyes, curly brown hair, no hat. He didn’t look well; he had a shrivelled anaemic look. To Audrey’s repeated assurances of her sorrow he said crossly:
“You’re not. You don’t care.”
Audrey said with great dignity: “I beg your pardon! I think you might learn to accept an apology.”
He had apparently no intention of learning.
“People like you. . . . Your precious dogs. . . .”
“Well, I don’t see how I could help it. You came charging round—— If you would look where you’re going——”
He was making an ineffectual attempt to clean his knees; he said bitterly:
“Oh, you don’t care. It’s a lark to you. But look at my trousers!”
Audrey said: “Are they torn?”
“They’re not torn. But they’re a case for the cleaners all right. And you’ll go home and give your damn’ dog a dinner that’d pay for cleaning them twice over.”
“If you feel like that, you’d better let me pay you now.”
He looked at her. Audrey realised that he was admiring her. Suddenly, for no reason, she liked him. Mackay stood droopingly immobile, the complete imbecile.
“No, and I won’t do that either. People like you---you think you can put anything right by just paying. Give him half a crown. That’s your panacea for all ills.”
“Well, there are worse, aren’t there?” She thought: “This is ridiculous; here I am standing at the corner of George Street talking to a bank clerk or a shop-assistant or something; I ought to be off---even if his trousers are ruined.” But she lingered, insanely anxious to justify herself. After all, it wasn’t her fault and she was sorry for his wretched trousers. And she wanted to tell him somehow that she was a Communist. She said:
“You keep on saying ‘You people’; how do you know what kind of person I am?”
“I’ve got eyes, haven’t I? I know well enough. Idle rich---that’s what you are.”
She was furious. “Then let me pay for your trousers.”
“No, I won’t. That was only a joke about the idle rich. Can’t you take a joke?”
His face flowered into a smile---singularly sweet and disarming. She liked him more and more. Why? God only knew; but she did. Something vibrated between them; something mutual; something with power.
“It’s just as well, perhaps. Because, as a matter of fact, I haven’t any money.”
He laughed; not very pleasantly.
“Nice to be able to say that and not mean it.”
“But I do mean it. It’s true.”
“It’s true---for the moment. You haven’t any money ---till you ask Pa for some more. How’d you like to have no money, really?”
“You don’t look as hard up as all that?”
“Who said I was?” He was offended. “We’re not speaking about me. I’ve got a good job. I work. I earn what I get.”
“What sort of job?” (Oh, this is preposterous; pick up Mackay, terminate this senseless conversation, go home. But again she lingered.) “What do you do?”
“I’m a librarian.”
“A librarian?”
“Yes. The Red Rose Libraries; Baker Street branch. I’ll give you my card.”
She was on the verge of saying hurriedly: “Oh, no thank you,” when she realised with a flash of insight that he hadn’t very long owned a card to give. He was proud of his “card,” poor dear---let him show it; one must do something to make up for those trousers. He pulled it out from a cheap imitation leather pocket-book and thrust it towards her. “That’s me.” She read: “Mr. Lionel Peach,” and in the bottom corner: “Red Rose Libraries, Ltd.” Lionel Peach; mercy, what a name!
He was gazing at her, still admiringly; that spark essence, emanation between them still oscillated.
“Well, how d’you like it?”
“Like what?”
“My name, of course.”
“Well, I don’t like it very much.”
“Oh. . . . Well, tell me yours and we’ll see if I like it any better.”
She thought: “This gets stupider every minute”; but she said: “My name’s Ritchie.”
“Silly! I meant the first one.”
“Oh. Audrey.”
“Little Audrey, eh? Fancy meeting Little Audrey.” He began to laugh---this time quite unpleasantly. Audrey thought: “This has gone far enough; he’s terrible.” Frigidly she said: “I must be getting home.”
He stopped laughing and became instantly anxious.
“Oh, no! Tell me your address first anyway.”
“Why on earth should I?”
“Well---I might want to send you in a bill for these trousers.”
“I shan’t do anything of the kind.”
“O.K., sister.” He bent down, patted Mackay’s head and twisted his collar round to the light. “I suppose No. 5, Frame Square will find you?”
Annoyed, she pulled Mackay away from him and turned swiftly to go. He stepped suddenly closer.
“I say, don’t take it like that. It was only a joke about the trousers. Can’t you ever see a joke?” He fell into step beside her. “I say! I think it was a chance our meeting like that---one of those Providential chances, sort of accidental-done-a-purpose. . . . I’m glad about it. . . . Aren’t you? . . . I say! Audrey! . . . Couldn’t we meet again?”
The impudence of him took her breath away.
“Of course not. Good-bye!”
“But I’d like to. I’d like to know you. You might let me know you a little. Now we’ve met. Why not?”
Audrey quickened her pace but Mackay anchored limpet-like on a lamp-post; he dragged her back. She said furiously: “Don’t be ridiculous.”
“I’m not good enough, eh? I knew you were that sort.”
“What sort?”
“S.N.O.B.”
“Well, I am that sort. Good-bye!”
“Let me walk with you a bit anyway.”
“No!”
She escaped from him at last, tugging savagely at the unhelpful Mackay. Lionel made no attempt to follow but stood rather woebegone where she had left him; stealing a glance over her shoulder, she saw he was once more trying helplessly to clean his clothes. “S.N.O.B.”: that rankled; because, of course, of all the things I’m not . . . Should I go back and help him? No. For a moment she felt tender and soft towards him; then, thinking “Of all the lunatic incidents,” she hurried away. Within a minute he was out of view; yet his face kept her company all the way home---that rather sweet mouth and those curls above the dark appealing eyes. A flower sort of face---with everything you liked about a flower in it and everything you didn’t. Yet somehow---God knew why---he was exciting. She felt warm, heated, a trifle intoxicated. . . . Oh, too silly!
She was late in reaching Frame Square; the dinner-gong---a vast Burmese horror, a Noelle acquisition---bellowed at her as she ran upstairs. Across the silver on the shining tablecloth Noelle looked the disapproval she dared not put into words. Anyway, thought Audrey, she doesn’t dare---that’s something I’ve effected; once I should have heard all about it. . . . Robin said:
“You were out a long time.”
“Mackay ran away from me.”
Noelle’s deep sloppy contralto: “The swee-eet!”
“It’s your fault, Noelle. You don’t train the dog at all.”
“The lo-ovely! Who could?”
“If you had to take him for walks——” She gave it up; their eyes met across the table---deep, hostile, evasive.
Robin said: “Isn’t Graham coming in?”
Noelle said “Yes,” and Audrey instantly “No.” Noelle’s heavy eyebrows went up, her huge eyes opened to a stare.
“Oh?”
“No. He’s not. I know he’s not.”
Noelle wanted to ask how she knew and where Graham was and why, but she had experienced in that house too many shattering rebuffs; she funked it. And Audrey sat praying: “Oh, God, keep her quiet, keep her quiet; otherwise I’ll have to admit that I don’t know anything at all. And she’d score then, blast her, she’d score.”
Graham had intended to come home to dinner; for one thing, four rounds of the Berkeley cocktails had nearly cleaned him out. But when he had left Iona at her flat, he felt as usual that he must go away somewhere and gloat over her. It was impossible to face the Frame Square dinner-table with Robin gloomily crumbling bread and Noelle airing her new knowledge of the Indian Constitution---probably all wrong too---and the analysis of Audrey’s eyes. To-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow; but not to-night.
He walked along instead to the Trocadero grill-room, and after carefully counting his money ordered himself a steak and potatoes and a pint of Pilsener. He’d have got a better dinner at home, but there it was---the Secret Life, it drove you into things, you couldn’t have it both ways. The Secret Life; lovely warm golden bath into which to subside. Slowly, slowly, an inch at a time. Ay, but how deep? Oh, fathoms yet---miles; we’re only beginning.
Iona had promised to come and dine with him one night---quietly, alone. Oh, words that lovers cherish!---quietly, alone. Would this place do? No, too noisy. Perhaps one of those little restaurants in Soho, if you could be quite, quite sure of the food; it wouldn’t be much catch if the evening ended in a tummy upset next day. Or there was that new place in Jermyn Street---but it was sure to be hellishly expensive. Pruniers?---but if she didn’t like fish? What about Kettner’s, eh? Yes, Kettner’s might do. . . . The best wasn’t good enough.
The band burst suddenly into a familiar rattling little tune. “One! Two! Button your shoe!” Oh, damn; why must they play that; that was Iona’s tune---or one of Iona’s tunes, for she now owned by association half the melodies of the world. “One! Two!” But wait a bit---how did it go on? “Seven! Eight! You’re at the gate. And you walk in-to my arms!” Yes, that would come too; for Iona had promised, had promised. “Nine! Ten! Kiss me again!” Ah-h!
Colonel Playfair, M.C.---he would have an M.C., blast him. Biggish decent-looking chap in the photo---at least, I suppose that’s him. She hasn’t got my photograph; perhaps I could get a new one taken and then if she always saw it. . . perhaps she would put it in her bedroom. . . . But Colonel Playfair, the husband. . . . Oh, well, the hell with Colonel Playfair anyway. It’s a far cry to India; and the man must be a mutt.
The steak and the Pilsener arrived together. Suddenly they seemed magnificently desirable. The band struck into a new tune, the golden bath dried up; for God’s sake let’s have something to eat. . . .
Puzzling and puzzling over it, Noelle could never understand why Audrey and Graham didn’t like her. The fact was indisputable, the reason beyond her reach. For a long time she couldn’t believe in their antipathy; latterly acceptance of the disagreeable thing had been forced upon her. The plain fact was---they hated her. Why?
It isn’t, she thought, as if I’d in any way supplanted their mother; it isn’t even as if Robin had married me immediately after her death. Philippa died in 1922; Robin didn’t marry me for ten years after that. It isn’t as if they were impressionable children when I came into the house---full of fairy-tale stepmothers and all that. Audrey was sixteen when I saw her first; Graham was fifteen; and they were both quite oldish for their ages. No, the plain fact is that they disliked me for myself---and they always have, ever since. Again---why?
After all, I’m only nine years older than Audrey. I ought to have been a sort of elder sister to her---Heaven knows she needs one. I would have been---so gladly. And Graham; a good-looking woman only ten years his senior coming into the house---he ought to have loved me. It wouldn’t have been surprising if I’d been his first love-affair. Whereas he’s been almost as bad as Audrey---cruder, stupider, the bludgeon to Audrey’s rapier. Oh! how rude he’s been to me sometimes.
They just made up their minds to make my life here hell; and if they haven’t quite succeeded it’s because I’m a strong-minded woman, and not for any fault of their own.
And it isn’t as if I’d tried to rush them at the outset. I didn’t---I swear I didn’t. I was most careful; I went as slow as slow. I came back from our honeymoon and I said---or words to that effect---“Now, my dears, we’re all going to be jolly good pals and get on splendidly together and not get in each other’s way at all.” What could have been franker or fairer? But they just stared at me; they didn’t say one single word. Even Robin noticed it. He said: “Haven’t you two anything to say to your stepmother?” And the little beasts said, in chorus: “Oh, thank you, stepmother!” Pity he used the word “stepmother,” of course, but he meant well. We all meant well---except them.
I said: “Do call me Noelle.” And they looked at each other and Graham said: “I suppose we’ll have to.” And Audrey said: “After all, it’s her name.” As if there was something wrong with the name. It’s a pretty name; a lot of people have thought so. (And a lot of people haven’t, but never mind that now---that’s another story. . . .)
After such a start, of course, nothing had been easy. But conscientiously Noelle had tried. She had striven to dissolve---surely with the gentlest and softest re-agents---the acid bitterness that soured Audrey; to restrain---surely with the lightest wrist and the easiest snaffle---the hobbledehoy slapdashery of Graham. For nearly a year she had wrestled with both these tasks; only to be frozen out by the chilling contempts of the one and the murderous surliness of the other. Audrey’s unspoken: “What could you know about anything?” Graham’s almost spoken; “Oh, shut up!”; they defeated her.
And then she had found The Poem. She had found it one day when she was tidying out a bureau in the drawing-room; and one of the most awful things about The Poem was the doubt as to whether she had been meant to find it or not. On the whole, she concluded, not; even they could hardly be savage enough and ill-willed enough for the alternative. But she was never quite sure; they almost could be.
“We hate N . . ll.
Like hell.
We hate the bump on her nose
And all her clothes.
Her horrible undies
Are like Mrs. Grundy’s.
We hate her fat legs
And her eyes are like eggs
And we hate her chest
And all the rest.
We just couldn’t tell
How we hate N . . ll.”
There it was; she had kept it; she knew it by heart. It was a murder-intented thing, a stiletto stab, a sandbag over the skull; documentary evidence of Robin’s infidelity could hardly have distressed her more.
Written line about, obviously; first one taking it up and then the other; screams of self-applause, no doubt. The bump and the legs and the chest would be Graham; the clothes and the undies---which somehow hurt more bitterly than all the other indictments---would be Audrey. (Now what in the world is wrong with silk-and-wool combinations in winter-time?---and I’ll swear that was the only time she ever saw me undressed---the first month or so after the honeymoon; I didn’t attempt intimacies after that. . . .) Well, there The Poem was---hate in black and white. Not to be taken too seriously? The effusion of two rather nasty little adolescents at the Fifth Form stage of wit? Perhaps; but it had finished Noelle; she gave up her stepchildren; from the day of the discovery of The Poem the forces had relapsed into the existing tacit truce. “I could help you so much, my dears, if only you’d let me.” “What could Noelle know about anything?” “Oh, shut up!”
And had they meant her to find The Poem? No; because it was too beastly altogether; they had passed a wet morning writing it and had forgotten to destroy it, had poked it away somewhere in their untidy fashion. Yes; because if not, why those cautious dots in “N . . ll.”?
Noelle, thinking over Audrey and Graham, re-reading The Poem which she kept in a very secret place, ended always in tears. If only Robin weren’t so despondent, if only these two weren’t so horrid to me, how happy I could be. I’ve this lovely house, I’ve made it so nice---the drawing-room’s a dream---I’ve all the things I ever wished for, I could be so happy. As it is, I’m content---not more.
It’s true that I’m not quite the same as they are, not quite the same class. But I’m all right, I know I am. I’m a good woman, a nice woman; Robin thinks I am; Robin knows I’m all right . . . if only he’d say so sometimes. Graham would think so if Audrey didn’t tell him differently. It’s only Audrey really---the silly little thing with her Communists and her Spain and her pose that to be a lady or gentleman is to be a washed-out nincompoop. . . . I wish she would go to Spain and never come back! No, I mustn’t wish that; that’s wicked. I must bear Audrey, I must go on trying, I’ve so much to be thankful for.
Out of the eyes like eggs her big tears would soak into her scented handkerchief. Robin so---dull, Audrey and Graham so beastly, nobody loving Noelle---not really loving her as she ought to be loved. Because I’m a good woman, I know I am. And if it’s true I wasn’t just their class---Robin’s class---to begin with, I’ve made myself into it---I have, I have, I have.
Tears with Noelle always achieved a catharsis; she would emerge from her weeping comforted, purged resolute for further good, ready to be cheered by her wonderful bedroom and all the “nice things round me.” The next step was to bathe her face and powder, to read a little---she was very religious---in a leather-bound book called Towards the Throne (“Ducks from Mums 25th December, 1922”), and then to look round for someone to benefit. Her choice was limited; it fell almost inevitably upon one person. “I know; I’ll go round and see mother.”
Noelle’s own mother, Mrs. Philbrick, had been dead for three years; by “Mother” Noelle now meant Grannie. When she felt impelled to do good as a corrective to too much happiness or merely as a reviver, Noelle made for Treherne Gardens. Carrying her mood before her as obvious as a ton of coals, she would invade that cold citadel of self-reliance. Too big for Grannie’s room, quite painfully the District Visitor, she would sit there eating Grannie’s scones and making polite conversation for the regulation ninety minutes. From time to time she conscientiously called Grannie “Mother,” and every time she did it Grannie would spark and crackle with fury like an agitated dynamo and her loosening upper plate would rasp to and fro upon the lower till you could almost hear it. But not quite---because Grannie never gave herself away. She poured tea, pressed the scones, made polite conversation and endured.
Noelle, now purged completely and happy with goodness would leave Treherne Gardens thinking: “Poor old thing---she does so love my visits!” And Grannie, anything but purged, would sit rasping her plate and thinking: “The waxwork! The dairymaid! The cow!” But Grannie of all people should have known better than to be hard on poor Noelle, who was really a good woman but bewildered because she had wandered a little out of her State of Life.
Iona certainly knew how to keep people waiting; she kept Graham waiting for his quiet alone dinner for nearly a fortnight. Perhaps she had other fish to fry, other dinners. But in the end---because Graham importuned her without ceasing---it did come off; and it was at Kettner’s.
Graham’s idea of that dinner was straightforward magnificence. Hors d’oeuvres, soup, fish, entree, game---the entire gamut of Epicurus. Iona laughed at him in mock dismay.
“But, dear boy---I’m slimming.”
“You don’t want to slim, Iona. You don’t want to do anything. You’re perfect.” His eyes were on her little round breasts which showed just as much as she wanted them to. “And your hair’s brighter than ever to-night---lovelier——”
Iona sighed. She had had a henna shampoo that afternoon and one of those lotions that tint---ever so slightly, of course---and no doubt it showed. No doubt it showed all too clearly; and there were moments when ingenuousness palled. Her sigh was a blend of pity and discontent. She yearned suddenly for Roxy who would give her what he called the “once-over” and then say:
“That woman hasn’t done you justice, my dear; let me stand you an afternoon at Phelma’s in Bond Street.” Such men---grown men---were godsends; they knew that art was superior to nature; they recognised pretence when they saw it, and were prepared to welcome it so long as it was decently and credibly done. But Graham, poor little Graham---he wanted everything to be not only beautiful but true; he asked too much. Yet Graham was sweet---and the most perfect change. Man of the world---ingenu; calf love---something you could hardly call love at all, so near did it approach to business. (Well, Roxy was a business man, wasn’t he?---a stockbroker and, thank Heaven, a money-maker.) Yet because it had once been both beautiful and true with Iona, and because Graham thought it both beautiful and true still, her heart turned over towards him. . . . And he was so good-looking in his white waistcoat and his tails; overdressed for Kettner’s, of course, but---well, compliments are compliments anywhere and always. It wasn’t Kettner’s he dressed for, it was her; if he could have apparelled himself in cloth-of-gold and Saracen rubies, he would have done it. Ah me! thought Iona, the wholehearted fatuity of boys; that blend of self-love, calf-love, first-love. . . .
Graham ordered champagne---magnificently; he talked about his film dialogues, which Iona half hoped he had forgotten, because she had rather exaggerated her own ability for pulling strings in that respect.
“Do you really think I could do it, Iona?”
“Of course you could; if I can, you can.”
“Oh, I say; oh, come! But I did think . . . I did think——”
“Yes, boy?”
“I did think we might perhaps work a bit together. I thought perhaps I could come round to your flat in the mornings and we could work together till lunch.”
Iona shuddered. She hated forenoons; at that untidy hour the only person she wanted to see in her flat was the “daily”---a permed and overalled young woman, with a marvellous fund of the current bawdry fresh every day. “And Little Audrey laffed and laffed and laffed because she knew——” (Graham had a sister called Audrey, hadn’t he; must be an irritating name to carry at the moment.) She said firmly:
“No, that wouldn’t do; I’m never in in the mornings. Besides, I don’t believe in collaborators. But I’ll give you a note to a man in Film Talk Limited in the Strand.”
Graham was successfully delighted. “You’re an angel, Iona.” Iona smiled---angelically?
Graham was disappointed over the dinner; she wouldn’t eat, she wouldn’t drink; this that was to have been a banquet of Lucullus became almost a Hay Diet exposition. But in the taxi Iona made up for it---ah, how she made up for it! Iona, of course, knew it for a planned moment, the climax of long strategy; and oh, these tedious planned moments when the man fell silent and fidgety and then gave a characteristic and typical cough---and then grabbed! So many, so many; in taxis, in first-class compartments, in sitting-out places---and all, all the same. Yet because there had once been a man who had been Iona’s first grab and had really taken her by surprise with it, she let Graham get his grab in now. He got a hand rather fumblingly to her breast, pushing his fingers down inside her frock; he couldn’t get very far that way, poor silly---she wished he could get farther. She wanted to say: “Tear the damned thing, tear it off, go ahead.” But his mouth came down on hers; she opened her lips to him, sucking him in. She felt him shaking all over; she was shaking herself with the contagion of his wild excitement. Little virgin!
He drew back at last and said: “Oh, God! Iona!” She thought: “I’ve given him something anyway.” His face in the glare of a passing electric standard was white as death. His hands were like stones.
At the door of her flat she said: “Coming in?” But he shook his head.
“Not to-night. I want to---to think this over.”
She put up her face. “Well, give me a kiss.”
But he wouldn’t do even that; so greatly do the standards of our desires advance with achievement. “Not to-night. Not again to-night. I want to keep the one I’ve got. Meantime.”
“Meantime, boy?”
“It---it is meantime, isn’t it, Iona? Only meantime?”
She smiled at him mischievously without speech and shut her door. Inside, she looked at her post: bills, advertisements, Press cuttings, an air-mail letter in Roxy’s handwriting, posted in Paris. Coming back to London. Bother Roxy. Oh, well---one had to live.
Graham walked home on air, living again those moments he would never quite unlive. His triumph was a little damped by the discovery, just short of Frame Square, that he had come out without his latch-key; he kept it on his key-ring, and he had left the key-ring on his dressing-table in order that the set of his dress trousers might be just as perfect for Iona as must be everything else in his power to command. Oh, well, it wasn’t all that late, and on a night like this---of victory and triumph, of pealing trumpets and showers of golden rain---who cared? It was a relief, however, to see a light upstairs in Audrey’s work-room window. He whistled “Of that there is no possible doubt”---an ancient pre-arranged signal; her window was slightly open, she heard him and came down. She was looking, he thought, rather grim; she said, with needless asperity:
“Tight?”
He said: “Don’t be a fool, Audrey!” And then---for what use is magnificence if man cannot boast of it?---“We did have champagne at dinner all the same.”
“Who were you dining with?” But she came forward and sniffed at his coat for all the world like a suspicious wife. “Oh, Graham, you’ve been at that again.”
He had meant to reply nobly: “I have been dining with the most wonderful person in the world.” Instead he said crossly: “At what again?”
“Women.”
Graham said, as one talking to a child: “Not women. A woman.” But magnificence seized him again. “And she was a married woman too.”
Audrey was not impressed; she said disgustedly:
“Oh, Graham, that kind of person?”
“What d’you mean that kind of person? She’s our own class. Absolutely. Better.”
“What’s that got to do with it? If she’s a married woman, she’ll only land you in a mess.”
For an instant Graham saw with a mental quiver the sizable photograph of Colonel Victor Playfair, M.C. Yes, by God, there would be a mess now. But not tonight, not this golden night of success and rapture. He rose to it, the conqueror.
“Well, and if she does? I can face it, can’t I? If you think I’m going to give her up!”
Audrey wrinkled her nose, sniffing again. “I don’t like her scent.”
“What’s scent got to do with it?”
“More’n you’d think.”
“Well, I like it.”
“O.K. It’s your funeral.”
“. . . What’s wrong with her scent?”
“I just don’t like it. If she’s all like that——”
Graham longed to be snubbing, crushing, devastating. But these lower keys were out of his reach to-night; praise, rapture, success, magnificence burst out of him like an anthem.
“Don’t be silly; you’d like her. Oh, Audrey, she’s---she’s——” He went off at score, idiot as all lovers, lovable as all lovers. She couldn’t stop him; she didn’t want to. At any rate, she thought, Graham’s got something out of life, he’s landed a fish; oh, lucky Graham. She said, at last, to break the flow of ecstasy:
“What’s her husband?”
“He’s a Colonel. Didn’t I tell you?”
“Oh gosh! Is he here?”
“No; he’s in India.”
“In India? Oh, then, Graham, aren’t you being rather a cad?”
But Graham was delighted to be a cad; the more cad the better. “I’m a super-cad, I’m the ace of cads. But do you suppose I can help it? If God chooses to give me anything so wonderful and precious and---and lovely as this, am I going to turn it down? Good Lord, Audrey, it just came to us, it just happened. Of course I’ll go through with it now. . . .”
But Audrey thought: “Will you? And will she?” And suddenly she had a vision of René, the little pocket revolver, charged, dangerous, ready to go off. And there stood Graham half as tall again, talking about going through with things. Would Graham ever really go through with anything? Now if it had been René. . . .
“Or me,” thought Audrey, “or me.”
Graham had been so inflated with exuberance, so very full of himself, that he had failed to notice; but all through that talk about Iona, Audrey had been just a little unresponsive and distraite. This was because of a curious experience that had befallen her that afternoon.
The house had been quiet---Robin down in his laboratories, Noelle gone out shopping, Audrey herself in her work-room making some laborious notes from Stalin’s Leninism. Suddenly the maid, Nixon, had tapped at her door.
“There’s a young gentleman to see you, miss?”
“A young gentleman?” Young gentlemen did not frequently assail Frame Square; such as did were habitués whose names were known to all the staff. Who could this be?
“Yes. A Mr. Peach, Miss Audrey. I showed him in the drawing-room.”
Audrey went downstairs in a mist of mingled excitement and anger. It was a fortnight since that ridiculous affair at the corner of George Street and no more had been heard of Lionel in the interval; why this sudden attack? In any case he had some impudence; she’d make him sorry for it. And yet---“S.N.O.B.”; don’t let’s be that.
She swept into the drawing-room and saw him standing under the Cadrigua, staring up at a Noelle more voluptuous even than Nature’s. He was neat and delicate and fragile, and---damn him!---disarming.
“Mr. Peach! You’ve some nerve.”
He smiled his pretty opening-flower smile.
“Always had, Audrey.”
“So it seems. I suppose you’ve come about your trousers.”
“Well, you suppose wrong. I came to make sure.”
“Sure? Sure of what?”
“That you lived here.”
“D’you imagine I tell lies?”
“You didn’t tell me anything. And the dog mightn’t have been yours after all. So I thought I’d better come. I hoped for a bit you’d come to me.”
“I come to you! Upon my word——”
“At the Red Rose Libraries, you know. Baker Street. I told you. Lots of people come there. Twopence a time. The books are O.K.”
Audrey wanted to say: “What do I care for you or your books?” Instead she asked:
“What would you have done if I hadn’t been in?”
“Come back till you were.”
“You must be a very determined person.”
“I am. My middle name’s Sticker. Lionel S. Go-get-it Peach.” Audrey thought: “If only you looked it!”
“So you didn’t come just to make sure?”
“’Course I didn’t. I came to see little Audrey. Now, don’t get het-up. It’s only a joke.”
“You’re very fond of jokes, aren’t you?”
“Sure.” He pointed suddenly to the picture. “Who’s that?”
“My stepmother.”
“I see. That’s your mother, isn’t it?” He pointed to an old neglected photograph of Philippa on a side table. “She’s like you.”
“I’m glad you think so; she was supposed to be very pretty.” (Did that sound rather like fishing? Or encouragement? Perhaps; but I must break the ice a little.) He said, quite simply:
“Well, so are you---very pretty.”
“Oh! Thank you. . . . Well, now you’ve found out what you wanted. . . .”
“I haven’t found out all I wanted. I wanted to know if you remembered me.”
“Could I forget?”
“I couldn’t. . . .”
Audrey thought, this is becoming silly; a little briskness to clear the air. “Well, what about pushing off now? Or will you stay and have tea with my stepmother when she comes in. I’m going out.”
“I didn’t come here to see your stepmother. And I’ll push off the moment you say so. Want me to go now?”
She relented. “When you feel you can.”
“O.K. . . . Tell me, what were you doing when I came?”
“Do you really want to know?”
“Yes, Audrey.”
“Then as a matter of fact I was taking some notes from Stalin’s Leninism.”
His dark eyes suddenly took fire. “Leninism? What do you know about Leninism?”
“As much as you do, maybe.”
“And maybe not, as the girl told the soldier. Why do you want to takes notes on Leninism?”
“Because I believe in it.”
He gave a happy sigh. “I knew you were all right. Knew it the first time I saw you. Oh, sister!” He gave an exaggerated Red Front salute. “And yet you’re what I said you were.”
“What was that?”
“S.N.O.B.”
“I’m not!” She was angry this time, because of all the unjust accusations! “If I were, d’you suppose I’d be talking to you now?”
He was hurt at once. “ Oh, well, I’m all right if it comes to that. There’s nothing wrong with the Red Rose Libraries. Lots of girls——”
“Then hadn’t you better go back to them?” (But wasn’t that worse than encouragement? Badinage?)
He turned away rather wistfully, and again she liked him and again better than ever. He said:
“You haven’t a chance, that’s what it is---not with all this round you. Smothers you, sort of.”
“Of course it doesn’t.”
“Yes, it does. That stepmother of yours---you can see she’s as proud as proud. Like a queen, she is.”
The suggestion that Noelle, looking like a queen, directed Audrey’s outlooks and attitudes was more than Audrey could bear. She said very sharply that he was talking nonsense.
“I’m not. I bet you couldn’t come out and spend an evening like I spend an evening---a cheap evening.”
“I could if I wanted to.”
Triumphantly he sprung his trap. “Well, show you can. Come out one evening with me. High tea and the first house somewhere. What about it?”
There was only one reply to make to that---firmly, politely and with obvious insincerity.
“I should be delighted.”
“Honour bright?” He was puzzled, the wind a little taken from his sails.
“Honour bright.”
He moistened his lips. “Saturday’s the best night for me.”
“Well, then, Saturday. Saturday first?”
“No. I’ve a date Saturday now I come to think of it. Make it Saturday week. Or, no, wait a minute---look here, I’ll write you about it.”
She said smiling in malicious triumph (but aren’t I really just a little disappointed?): “Do. I’ll look forward to it so much. . . . And now, if you really don’t want to meet my stepmother——”
“I don’t.”
“Then I think I’d better ring for Nixon to show you out.”
“Can’t I show out myself?”
“I don’t doubt you could do anything. But---it’s usual. Among snobs.”
He said, rather apprehensively: “O.K.” But when Nixon came he perked up and said good-bye very correctly. “It’s been so nice to see you, Miss Ritchie.”
Audrey said maliciously: “Don’t mention it, Mr. Peach.” But the refinement was lost on both Lionel and Nixon, and instantly she hated herself. She hated herself more as she watched his crestfallen back going out. I needn’t have been quite so short with him, I might have asked him to stay a bit, talked a little. . . . I expect he’s lonely. . . .
Presently the hall door shut; she ran to the window and there he was, crossing the Square---droopingly, miserably, like Mackay on a wet day. She thought: “Lionel S. Go-get-it Peach? You didn’t stick very far this time. High tea and the first house somewhere. I called your bluff, Lionel Go-get-it, I called your bluff all right.” And then with a sudden revulsion of feeling she threw herself on the sofa. S.N.O.B.? Yes, I am. And a pig and a beast as well. Oh, what a pig I am!
If in the concert of discontents Noelle’s was less bitter than Audrey’s, then Audrey’s was still less bitter than René’s. For with René discontent translated itself into terms of action; academic discontents were not in his line. He had to do something with it, something about it. Moreover, in his case, discontent spelt a practical alternative; either I take this job as a reader with Mansell’s or else I don’t take it. And if I don’t, then what? Some sort of office in the Communist Party organisation? Spain?
And René’s discontent was different from and more urgent than Audrey’s because of the difference in their Communisms. Audrey thought she believed in Communism; René did believe in it. He saw it as a salvation; he did honestly consider that the only way to arrest the downfall of the world was to establish universal Republics of Workers on the approved Soviet lines. And quickly---Trotsky rather than Stalin. But then---just how?
Kenneth, of course, gave no help. Incapable of real interest, he relapsed into rigmarole about the Wise Young Man. He had no belief in Communism, but then he knew nothing about it and had no intention of learning. René said:
“Come down with me to the Left Book Club meeting at Conway Hall and hear McArdle. You’d hear something.”
“I know already what I’d hear.”
“You don’t.”
“I do perfectly. I’d hear an utterly unassailable case for an utterly unattainable ideal. I can do without that.”
“You admit it’s unassailable.”
“I admit it would be as MacThingummy would put it. What’s the good of that? I could make out an unassailable case for giving everyone five hundred a year.”
René shifted his ground. “ But it’s not unattainable.”
“No?”
“Not if we go the right way to work. We’ve---we’ve got to do something to save things.”
“They’ll save themselves. You leave the future to the next generation. My dear good René——”
(“Oh, Lord!”)
“---things work themselves out. Everything in this best of all possible worlds works itself out in time. Bee-yewti-fully. X plus Y minus X minus Y equals zero; that’s the sum of any life or any individual or any effort or any series of events. It all cancels out. So why worry?”
“That’s not what everybody thinks. It isn’t what I think.”
“It’s what you’ll end by thinking. When you’ve lived long enough.”
In the nights cold terrors seized René that indeed perhaps he might. And that would be death, Kenneth was dead. Did he know it? Perhaps; but if so, it didn’t seem to displease him---and that was even more terrible still. One mustn’t die, one mustn’t die---not yet; or if one must, let it be explosively, by a quick spending, not this lamentable attrition. A life poured out upon the ground may fertilise; a life dried up can only perish.
Jacqueline was equally unhelpful. Half French himself, René understood better than his father the calculated French life, the calm balance of values it implied. If Jacqueline’s life (about which, thought René, I know next to nothing) made a sum like X plus Y minus Y minus X, the answer was not zero but equilibrium---the state of perfect balance. In this state Jacqueline oscillated gently, perhaps satisfied, certainly immovable. She had balanced her budget, and if she did not choose to publish her accounts that was her own affair. But she could not help René.
Tramping the Embankment at nights, walking as fast as he could go, René struggled with his problem. If what Kenneth said was true, if the world was run by a mathematician whose ideal was an unlimited series of terms all cancelling out to zero, then, of course, all effort was but predestined failure. If that were so, one might as well go into Mansell’s and spend one’s days putting up remarks on their authors’ manuscripts. But Kenneth’s mathematical God was incredible. Because of the fraction of God that is in me, myself, I know that God is not like that. . . . Eager, purposeful, formidable, thrusting along the dark Embankment, René convinced himself that the God of Kenneth was a lie.
South across the light-reflecting Thames---a long way south but perfectly real for all that---was Spain. There the forces had come to grips, there at least something was happening, you stood there on a battlefield. Armed with his hammer and sickle, young Hope stood there in the path of the Beast. “René!” he called, “SOS! I want you, René; come.” How to answer his call? There was this newborn International Brigade---officially organised now, no more of your irregulars. Join it? Was that the solution? Or would that prove just another futility?
Kenneth said: “You don’t want to go to Spain. You won’t even get decently shot---you’ll die of dysentery. The sanitation’s nil. If you scratch yourself, it’ll go septic.”
“Well?”
“Well, aren’t you too good for that?”
René could only say lamely that if everyone took that view nothing would ever be done. Yes, but there was something in it too. Humanity was divided into cannon-fodder and better-than-cannon-fodder. If you were above the cannon-fodder class in equipment, you must make proper use of what had been given you; you had no right to throw it away being shot by a Franco Fascist or bombed by a Hitler airman or dying of diarrhoea or gangrene. “That one talent which is death to hide. . . .” So what to do once more; what was one called upon to do?
People told you quite calmly---they went about saying it as if they were talking about the weather---that civilisation was heading for ruin. They accepted it, as if---like the weather---it was a thing they couldn’t help. Every time they said it, shrugging their helpless shoulders, they brought the ruin a little nearer. But we can help it, we must. We must stop the idiocy of wars, the stupidity of watertight nations, the injustice of class. There must be something we can do; there must be something I can do.
If Communism was right, and if there were Communists somewhere in the world fighting for their lives, then it was one’s plain duty to fight with them, to thrust one’s body between them and the onslaught of their enemies. Provided there was nothing better that one could do.
Men talked and talked. “It looks like rain tomorrow.” “Civilisation will be ruined to-morrow.” Talk, talk, talk. Oh intolerable! One must do.
And there must be something one could do. . . . This new International Brigade? . . . Spain? . . . Russia? . . .
But not Mansell’s; certainly not Mansell’s.
Never had Audrey been so surprised as when Lionel’s letter arrived. But was it merely astonishment or a blend of astonishment, indignation, and---yes, delight? Astonishment because she had given up all idea of him; indignation because he did have a nerve; delight because he hadn’t run away. He had guts after all; his bluff had not been called. Delight, scraping home from astonishment and indignation, just won.
The letter was written on the business paper of Red Rose Libraries, Ltd., and she thought at once: “He lives in some awful place he doesn’t want me to know.”
Dear Audrey,
I am O.K. for Saturday next if you are. What about Lyons’ Corner House, five o’clock, the Oxford Street one, the Tottenham Court Road entrance not Oxford Street. Can do?
Audrey’s tussle with alternatives was brief. It’s perfect stupidity of course; nothing can come of this but absurdities; he’s not your class in any way; he’s impossible. But you call yourself a Communist, don’t you? You don’t like your own class; you say they’re effete. He said you were an S.N.O.B; show him you’re not. You’re always clamouring for adventure, aren’t you? Well. . . . Anyway, thought Audrey, I want to go and that settles it. She replied briefly: “Can do.”
On Saturday she was punctual, but he was there before her, dressed in a nice brown fifty-shillingish suit, a striped shirt, a dark tie. His delicate pretty face broke into its girlish smile at sight of her; he said: “You’re a sport; I knew you were.” He led her upstairs to a vast crowded tea-room where they found a table with some difficulty. Picking up what seemed to be an interminable menu, he said:
“Do you like fish or eggs?”
Audrey thought: “If this is to go on at all, I must be frank at the outset.” She said:
“I don’t think I could manage either at this hour. Could I have a toasted tea-cake?”
He gave her a hard enquiring look.
“I see. Not done. Well, let’s be genteel.”
“Let’s be sensible. You have what you like.”
“No, no. I won’t disgrace you.” Very grandly, he ordered buttered toast.
From this rather unpromising beginning the tea progressed wonderfully well. The evening paper prophesied that Franco would be in Madrid in three weeks; Lionel said he wouldn’t be in Madrid in three years. He gave reasons. He had thought about Spain, he had thought impartially about Spain---which is more, reflected Audrey, than I have. She said: “Do you want Franco to win?” and he replied: “I don’t know. It isn’t any business of mine.”
“Oh, yes, it is. It’s the business of all of us.” She set out to show him how, drawing largely upon René and the International Press Correspondence. “Don’t you think it’s everybody’s business to help the Spanish people not to be bullied?”
He said very sensibly: “I don’t know; I don’t really know enough about it. I’d like to meet someone who could explain.”
“You can read the books.”
“Oh, books!”
The word “books” brought them back to the Red Rose Libraries and modern literature. Lionel didn’t approve of modern fiction---or indeed of any fiction; fiction was a waste of time, a lot of silly lies.
“When I was small I used to believe all the stories I read. I mean, I thought they really happened.”
“And when you found out they didn’t, you had no further interest?”
“That’s about it. I’ve no time for stories.”
“Well, what have you time for?”
“All I can get so long as it’s good stuff.” He read histories, social economics, the sounder biographies. He didn’t care for travel books; “you can’t believe all that.” Novelists and playwrights were just trash; “dope-merchants, that’s what they are.”
“So everything’s got to be true? . . . You think this is true?”
He was quick to take her meaning. “What? You and me? Of course it’s true.”
Astonished, Audrey thought: “I believe it is. There’s something between us; God knows what, but there’s something. Bio-chemistry? Cell tissue recognising kindred cell tissue? I don’t know.”
He paid for the tea, led her out into Oxford Street and pushed her into a bus. She said: “Where are we going?” and thought: “I hope it won’t be too highbrow.”
He surprised her---pleasantly. “Palladium,” he said. “First house. I got seats . . . I don’t like the flicks; do you?”
“I like Mickey Mouse. But they give me a headache.”
“I knew you were that kind.” Audrey was left speculating as to whether he had chosen the Palladium because he wanted to go there himself, or whether it was a concession to her supposed frivolity. She decided on the former---it was part of the side of him that “liked jokes.” . . . But I’m “that kind,” am I? What kind?
Audrey had never been inside the Palladium in her life; expecting to be bored stiff, she found herself on the contrary very well entertained. It was huge, warm, voluptuous, gregarious---a cave of good-humour; everything on the stage was abundant with an open-handed gorgeousness where gorgeousness was required; a tribe of very funny little men ran about ragging one another amusingly. They had some good jokes. “What happens to girls who wear woollen stockings?” “ What happens to—— Well, what does happen to girls who wear woollen stockings?” “Why---nothing.” The audience who filled every seat in the house (“And yet,” thought Audrey, “they talk of trade depression!”) smoked cigarettes and put arms round their girls and roared with delight. They were on the most friendly terms with the little men on the stage; they knew them all, it appeared, intimately. It was all very matey---indeed, too matey; and out of this an unfortunate incident developed for Lionel.
It was shortly after the commencement of the second half of the programme. Audrey and Lionel were in the third row of the dress circle (Audrey secretly worrying over the amount Lionel must have spent.) In the front row, immediately before them, sat three young men of the type one imagines to have come up from South Wales or Derbyshire for a football match. They had been noisy all along; now they became very noisy. One of them, with a voice like a foghorn, kept interrupting the funny little men, anticipating their jokes, making a general nuisance of himself. Audrey, intent only upon seeing life, took this as merely another phase of the Palladium’s lavish entertainment, but Lionel was very angry. He said “Sh-sh!” several times and then, very loudly: “Chuck him out!”
The young man with the foghorn voice half rose in his seat and slewed round towards them. He wore a dark-blue suit with an aster or some other immense flower in his buttonhole; he had a face carved out of Derbyshire---or South Welsh---rock.
“Who said that?”
Audrey looked at Lionel, but Lionel was taking a very intense interest in the stage.
“Who said that? Who said: ‘Chuck ’im out’?”
Audrey nudged Lionel. “Go on. Tell him. Say ‘I did.’” But Lionel, his face a shade paler than usual, his neat lips very tightly compressed, shook his head crossly and said nothing.
The young man with the rock face started a third attempt, raising himself a little farther in his seat.
“I’m askin’, who said?”
But down the middle gangway came two of the Palladium’s uniformed attendants; behind them lurked vaguely the enormous form of a commissionaire. Thrilled and delighted, Audrey thought: “Now for it!” But to her disappointment the Derbyshire rock collapsed instantly. A uniformed attendant beckoned; he went out like a lamb; after a brief whispered colloquy his two friends went sheepishly after him. Lionel perked up promptly as the massive backs receded: he said, as if he had done something: “We’ll get some peace now.” But Audrey did not reply; she was sorry for the Derbyshire rock whose fun had all ended---and all through Lionel; her evening was vaguely spoiled.
The show came to a close and they struggled out through a seething mob into the golden blaze of the street. Audrey said: “Look here, come and have a drink somewhere.”
She saw him surreptitiously fingering the coins in his pocket. He said hesitatingly: “I don’t know——”
“Oh, don’t be silly; this is on me. You’ve paid far too much already.”
“But there’s no place here.”
“There’s a pub just along Oxford Street.”
“But you can’t go into a pub.”
“Can’t I? D’you suppose I’ve never been in a saloon bar before?” As a matter of fact she never had, but something had to be done to encourage Lionel. In a side street they found a nice quiet little pub; it was called the Cat in Boots, and was less noisily crowded than most.
She pushed Lionel through the swing doors, found a sofa and a table in a corner, ordered two pints and some beef sandwiches. It was quite easy. “Now you eat something; I spoiled your tea.”
He accepted her invitation; but presently he looked up at her with his over-sensitive eyes.
“You’re disappointed in me.”
“Of course I’m not.” (But she thought again: “Frankness, frankness; if anything is to come of this, it’s no use pretending.”)
“Yes, you are. You’re disappointed with me because I wouldn’t have a row with that bounder in the Palladium.”
She decided to admit it. Frankness.
“He called your bluff; you shouldn’t have let him.”
“I didn’t want a row.”
“Then you shouldn’t have started it.”
“I didn’t start it. I only said: ‘Chuck him out.’ It was what everybody was thinking.”
“Then you should have said it again. But”---she fixed him with Philippa’s uncompromising eyes---“when he got up, you funked him.”
His eyes fell to his plate. Sorry for him, she said more kindly:
“You shouldn’t start things if you don’t mean to go on with them.”
He broke out almost hysterically.
“I hate rows. I’m a Pacifist really. That’s really why I’m a Communist. Communism stands for international peace. It’s the only way to stop wars.”
“You can’t stop wars yet. People aren’t ready for peace.”
“They would be if we had the Red International. It’s all these rotten little countries---this country, for instance. You start with schools and towns; my school’s better’n yours, my town’s better’n yours. And and football teams. That chap in the Palladium was fighting mad because he’d been working himself up all the afternoon over some rotten football side. Then it goes on to countries. . . . All this patriotism; we ought to have outgrown patriotism. You can fly across Europe in a day; you ought to be flying across one country---the country of Europe.”
“So you don’t like patriotism? You don’t feel anything about countries? You don’t feel that England, for instance, is a better country than any other?”
“No, I don’t. Because it isn’t.”
“I suppose it isn’t if you don’t feel that it is. I do.”
“Then you’ve no right to call yourself a Communist. Communism’s peace, union, brotherhood. Patriotism’s disunion, rows, fighting. It’s just a damn’ nuisance---like that chap in the Palladium.”
Audrey smiled at a recollection. “You remind me of that old joke in Punch; the recruiting sergeant saying: ‘Look ’ere, me lad, this is the British Army; we don’t want any o’ your patriotism ’ere.’ “
“Oh---Punch!” he said disgustedly. “All shootin’ an’ fishin’. It’s a snob’s paper, that.”
“It was a damn’ good joke anyway. I thought you liked jokes.”
“So I do. But---oh, dash it all, Audrey, you must see. We’ve got to stop wars, we’ve got to get together, we’ve got to ginger up all the fellows---all the young fellows---so that they’ll say: ‘I will not fight.’ The Red International——” He discoursed on the Communistic Peace till Audrey, finding the saloon-bar atmosphere a little heavy and beginning to regret that beef sandwich, suddenly yawned. Instantly he was offended; he said with great dignity:
“Sorry I bore you.”
She was contrite. “You don’t, you don’t. Only---I’ll have to be getting along.”
He looked at his watch. “Good Lord, so must I! My auntie——” He bit his lip.
“So you’ve an auntie, have you?”
“Yes.” But he would communicate nothing further about the auntie; clearly he had never meant to mention her. Audrey said smiling:
“All right, comrade---I don’t want to pry into your secret life. Now, come on! I’m going to walk. What about you?”
She had half expected, half hoped, that he would offer to walk with her; but he said only: “I’ll get the Tube from Oxford Circus.” They strolled together to the Tube station; outside it, quite astonishingly, he suddenly put an arm round her waist and kissed her cheek. He did it so naturally that it seemed no more than a courtesy, a polite gesture, as another man might have raised his hat. You could not make a fuss about it.
“Night-night, Audrey. . . . You have enjoyed it, haven’t you?”
“I have---Lionel.” And she had.
“You like me a little, don’t you?”
“Oh, a lot.”
“You’re going to like me a lot more yet.”
He dived down into the Tube station; Audrey, turning to cross the street, thought: “Well, isn’t life amazing? I’ve lived to be kissed in Oxford Street by a young man called Lionel Peach. . . . And I like him. . . . So what?”
Graham chose Audrey’s Palladium evening for the momentous talk with Robin he had long been putting off; he pursued his father into his study after dinner. (The study because Noelle had what she believed to be a ladylike prejudice against cigars in “my” drawing-room.) Graham had thought of all sorts of gambits, but when it came to the point he could do no better than: “Dad, do you mind if I take up writing for the films?”
Robin sighed. He had had a bad day---another of those gruelling defeats masked over by pretence. (“Operation . . . oh, yes, a good chance.” But the woman was dead.) It seemed to him a wrong moment, an impossible moment, for Graham’s question. He knew nothing at all about the films; and as for writing, he had seen enough of that in the case of Kenneth. “Lent Kenneth,” “Lent Kenneth”---the items recurred with monotonous regularity in his carefully kept cash-book. He said at last---aware of Graham waiting bright and eager, outwardly deferential, but inwardly, no doubt, irrevocably determined:
“It might be a good hobby.”
“I don’t mean as a hobby.”
“As a profession?”
“Yes.”
“Giving up your chemistry?”
“Yes.”
Robin could only sigh again. Graham as a research chemist---perhaps working with him now and then, perhaps firing a round or two in that endless battle---was one of his oldest and dearest dreams. It dated back to the days of Philippa-and-I, fabulous days when he could still look forward. Of late he had seen it fading; now, not altogether unexpectedly, it was gone. He sat thinking, if Philippa had lived I might have saved it; Noelle never had much influence with the children; perhaps I waited too long before marrying again. But then it was largely on their account that I waited; I thought they would hate a stepmother---and apparently I wasn’t far wrong. . . . No, I can’t ask Noelle to help here. With the modern youth, is it any use my trying to help? Doubtful; but I must give Graham an answer. He said slowly:
“I suppose I should tell you not to be a fool. But then, what is a fool? Are you one or am I?”
Graham thought: “Dad’s cracking up a bit; he’s beginning to talk like Kenneth.”
Robin said, as if talking to himself: “When I was your age I wanted to go in for music. Your grandfather wouldn’t have it. He had made up his mind---Heaven alone knows why---that I should be a doctor. Your grandmother thought so too. You know---she has ideas——”
Graham suppressed a smile. “I know. That State of Life and so on.” He had imbibed at the fountain-head in his time.
“Yes. That State of Life unto which it has pleased God to call us. . . . She thought music was out of class, out of type, out of the State of Life. And she would certainly have said so a fortiori about films. So——”
Graham said encouragingly: “Grannie wasn’t necessarily right. Anyway, you became a doctor.”
“I did---Heaven help me.”
“But you’re a dashed fine doctor. Think of all the good you do.”
“Well---I suppose I do some. But if you think that I’m a dashed happy doctor——”
Graham waited uncomfortably; things seemed to be coming his way, but you couldn’t be sure.
“You see, I might have been a dashed bad, happy musician. . . . If so, I did the wrong thing by sticking to the State of Life. So what am I to say to you? . . . Why do you want to write for the films?”
Graham could hardly say: “Because Iona does.” He expatiated instead on the marvels of the remuneration. “They give some people a hundred quid a week. And then throw half their stuff away. But they pay them just the same, of course.”
Robin thought---it’s quite likely; this crazy world; poverty, misery and this lunatic prodigality all jumbled up. Yet---an evening at the pictures, it’s the poor man’s only consolation now that drink has gone beyond his means. So I suppose in a way the money comes back to him in the end. It can’t all be waste. Yet why shouldn’t it? Waste’s in the universe, man’s wastage is nothing to Nature’s. Out of every fifteen million cod’s eggs . . . Recovering himself, he said:
“Do you think you could do this work?”
“I’m sure I could. And people who know about it think I could too.”
“Who thinks so?”
Graham flushed despite himself; but Robin was staring at the fire.
“Well---Iona Playfair the novelist; she writes a lot of film dialogue. And there’s a fellow Speller in Film Talk Limited——” The fellow Speller in Film Talk Limited hadn’t actually said anything---in fact he had been pretty casual and had talked most of the time under the impression that Graham was someone else; but Iona couldn’t be left to stand alone. Her name, which seemed to Graham to explode in the room with the effect of a many-coloured firework, soared past Robin unnoticed; Robin had never heard of her. He said, throwing away his cigar:
“I’m damned if I know what’s right. Perhaps you ought to follow your own bent even if it seems idiotic to ~me. I wouldn’t like you at my age to feel as futile as I do. Well, do what you like.”
Graham hardly took time to thank him; he was rushing to the telephone to tell Iona the news. Someone else answered first and seemed rather stupid, but eventually Iona came.
“Oh, Iona, my father’s agreed!”
“Darling boy! What about?”
“The films, of course.” But she should have known that.
“Oh, yes. . . . I’m so glad.”
“Can I come round and tell you about it?”
“Oh, you must.”
“Right now?”
“N-no. Not now.”
“Oh, why? You---you’re all right, aren’t you?”
“Yes, of course.” (But oh, bother his innocence! Roxy, on similar occasions, said smoothly: “Get rid of him and ring me when he’s gone.” You couldn’t expect that from a boy, of course; but oh, these first-love fiends, they thought they owned you!) “Of course I’m all right. But I’ve some tiresome people coming. . . . Clare Kent; you know you don’t like her——”
Graham didn’t---a mistake perhaps in one who aspired to write dialogue for a gallery of identical Clare Kents. He said disappointedly:
“Well, to-morrow?”
“Yes.”
“Forenoon?”
“If you like.”
Graham hung up the receiver, not too well pleased. He had expected more of rapture, congratulation, more sharing. That final “if you like” was so non-committal as to be almost a douche. It was precious near “if you must” . . . Turning away from the telephone, he almos’t ran into Noelle, very regal in mauve velvet. Noelle said affably:
“Telephoning, dear? It wasn’t Audrey, was it? I wonder where she’s got to.”
Graham thought savagely: “Can’t a person dine out without you fussing?” Aloud he said: “Oh, she’s somewhere.”
The casualness in his tone and the fact that she wanted to ask---but dared not---just who he was telephoning to made Noelle suddenly cross. Straws and straws and straws; but they piled up in this house, they piled up. She said with a smile falsely bright:
“I don’t believe you know any more than I do.”
Graham, hating her because Iona had said: “If you like——” instead of “Oh, darling---yes!” riposted bitterly.
“I do. But I’m not going to tell you.”
He pushed past her and left her shivering a little, the false smile slaughtered. “You.” Those savage italics. . . .
Graham went away upstairs to his work-room (or more probably to his clockwork trains); Audrey remained out; Noelle turned into “my” drawing-room. Robin sat there now, and to Robin, as to a rock, one must cling in these tempests of dislike. If only he were a sunnier and warmer rock, less covered with sharp-edged barnacles, less subject to the inroads of sudden drenching waves that washed over him out of remote seas of doubt and dissatisfaction, leaving him a clammy refuge, a cold slippery mooring. To-night, however, his responses at least were correct. He got up “like a gentleman” when she came in; he said:
“Come along, dear, and play me something.”
“What would you like me to play, Robbie?”
“Whatever you feel like.” But she thought sulkily, because her mood was sulky: “He only says that to save himself the trouble of thinking; he doesn’t care what I play; he doesn’t care if I play.” She sat down, however, at the piano, with an upward glance at the Cadrigua portrait. Grand; but my nose isn’t like that.
She “felt like” Rubinstein’s Melody in F; then like “Liebestraum”; then like the “Chanson Triste”; she finished brightly with the “Blue Danube.” She played them all perfectly, every note correct---except perhaps the “Blue Danube,” which was very tough in parts. The thing was only a waltz, too---what right had it to be so difficult? A little yearningly she looked at her music-cupboard where two really modern gems were tucked away; one was called “When Did You Leave Heaven?” and the other “The Way You Look To-night.” She itched to play them, but she never nowadays attempted that sort of thing in the presence of Robin. One night, away back in 1932, just after the honeymoon, she had played---and sung---to him a composition entitled “Time On My Hands”---and it wasn’t an easy piece either, in fact it was most troublesome. But lovely---oh, lovely! Unfortunately in the middle of it she had glanced up and seen Robin’s unmasked face in a wall mirror; she had managed to finish “Time on My Hands,” but that was the end of popular music---which she really loved---when Robin was in the room. So “When Did You Leave Heaven?” must wait till to-morrow. . . . She slipped off the stool.
“Now you play, Robbie.”
He came forward reluctantly but as if drawn to a magnet; he pushed the “Blue Danube” off the piano and set up Chopin in its place. Always, always, Chopin thought Noelle; he’s just perverse about Chopin---it’s only because he is persuaded he can’t play the stuff. And really he plays it ever so nicely if he would just think so. He opened the book at the Nocturne in C Sharp Minor---an impossible thing, Noelle thought, you couldn’t make sense of it. But Robin could; and away he went from her on the waves of it; her rock went slipping out to sea. She had a sudden sense of panic; suppose I lose him, suppose he doesn’t come back; I shall be left alone here with those two who hate me so. . . . She did something she seldom dared---interrupted him.
“Don’t play that, dear, it’s so sad.”
He stopped at once. “Then what shall I play?”
“Play---oh---a mazurka.”
Obediently he switched over to the bright emphatic Polish melodies---feet stamping, girls with bell skirts swinging outwards and high, roast chestnuts sizzling, slivovitz. But even into the mazurkas his thoughts came thrusting, saddening their jollity as a cloud saddens the sun; because Graham had turned him down, because Graham was receding away into his own life and preferred it, because Robin himself had stayed in That State and didn’t prefer it, because the Enemy lurking in his ambush still eluded him, because he lived by telling lies to frightened women, because he was forty-six and he had been thinking of Philippa. . . .
And Noelle, listening to those rarefied mazurkas, thought: “This is a dull house; this is a cold house; I find it foreign.”
Mrs. Philbrick, Noelle’s mother, said time and again to her eighteen-year-old daughter: “Ducks, I wish you wouldn’t take up so much with the Falklands.” And Noelle always replied: “Oh, Mums, why not? We’re as good as they are.”
“In some ways.”
“Well, as far as class goes——”
“Oh, yes. Class. . . .”
“And Mrs. Falkland was your greatest friend when you were a girl.”
“Yes, I know.”
“Well, why shouldn’t Fairy be mine?”
Mrs. Philbrick, feeling she had a case, knowing she had a case, but not quite clearly seeing just what it was, fell back on the old objection.
“They’ve too much money, Ducks. Money makes everything different. . . . They put ideas in your head.”
Noelle thought: “And why shouldn’t they?”
Mrs. Philbrick and Noelle lived in Mickleham Road while the Falklands lived on Blackmore Hill---addresses which exhibit one of the minor but arresting contrasts to be found under the heading of “Hampstead.” There is nothing wrong with Mickleham Road; it is quiet, salubrious, respectable; in the half of a red-brick semi-detached there human life can achieve all the necessary standards of comfort. (The necessary standards, the standards of resignation---yes; but the desirable standards---the standards of ambition?) Blackmore Hill, on the other hand, is Blackmore Hill.
The late Mr. Philbrick had been an auctioneer. For most of his days his house had been in Kilburn where most of Mr. Philbrick’s business was done; but when Mr Philbrick had retired---which he did very early, being both a lucky and a lazy man---he had crossed Finchley Road in search of what he vaguely described as a “better address.” The occasion of his move had been his winning a prize in the Calcutta Sweep---a windfall so staggering that he never quite recovered from it. With the proceeds he bought the semi-detached house at No. 28, Mickleham Road and a complete new outfit of furniture---period, late Edward Seventh. He said: “We’ve got the house, anyway.” He said this with recurring frequency in the years that followed; it was one of the last things he said, dying of influenza in the black post-war winter of 1919, when Noelle, his only child, was twelve. And when he had gone to the Hampstead Cemetery, Mrs. Philbrick discovered that while she undoubtedly had the house and the Edward Seventh furniture, she had precious little else.
But Mr. Falkland was a partner in a firm dealing in wholesale furs. He made money during the war. From co-Philbrick beginnings (of which he was not too anxious to be reminded) he had soared to remarkable heights, and he had no intention of going to the Hampstead Cemetery for a long time to come.
Between the bare adequacy of Mickleham Road on the one hand and the resplendence of Blackmore Hill on the other there should have been no point of contact. Nor would there have been but for the fact that in the late ’nineties there had existed in West Hampstead two virgins, Mary Lester and Joanne Briggs. They were close friends, they went to school together, they were equals---almost identicals. But they were so constituted that their virginities were tempted into surrender in the one case by Mr. Philbrick and in the other by Mr. Falkland, and these diverging predilections led respectively to Mickleham Road and Blackmore Hill. They remained---in a diminishing degree---friends; they remained---in theory---equals; but it was mutually felt, as the years went on, that the old intimacy could express itself better in their daughters than in themselves. And even then, Mrs. Philbrick kept saying to the adolescent Noelle: “I wish you wouldn’t take up so much with the Falklands, they put ideas in your head.”
They certainly did.
Mums, Mrs. Philbrick, had been nurtured in that school of femininity whose favourite adjective is “dainty”; she brought up her daughter to be “dainty” too---finicky over her food, tiptoeing round the smallest patch of mud, turning up her nose (metaphorically; physically it was, of course, an impossibility) at the faintest suspicion of coarseness, dirt, smell, vulgarity. Noelle washed and washed and washed; her laundry bills for clean underthings were frightening, but---one had to be “dainty,” hadn’t one? Mums liked “nice things round me”; Noelle liked them, too.
But the niceties of Mickleham Road were only, it appeared, the disgusts of Blackmore Hill. One of Noelle’s earliest and most inspiring discoveries was that Fairy Falkland never wore the same underclothes twice; in the corner of her vast bedroom she had a wicker basket the size of a tea-chest half full by every Wednesday of green and blue and lemon silks. Seeing it, and conscious that she herself changed underneath only twice a week---conscious, too, that the laundry bills had reached the absolute ceiling---Noelle took to washing her own garments nightly in the bathroom basin---a labour she kept up till she passed her examinations and became a teacher in the Bridge Road School. Thereafter she was generally too tired; besides, it wore things out so---the kind of things anyway you bought in Oxford Street for three-eleven-three. Besides, Fairy Falkland was by that time in eclipse.
Fairy was a plump young woman, generally---but not very reliably---good-tempered; she was of the blonde type, now florid, now flaccid, that runs to spots. The spots distressed her terribly, but they were a malicious comfort to Noelle. It wasn’t dainty to have spots and she herself had none. It was the one way in which she could feel superior to Fairy.
“Oh, Noey, I’ve got another spot coming. On my chin.”
“I can’t see it, dear.”
“I can’t see anything else. Oh, Noey, what can I do about them?”
Nothing, thought Noelle---thank God!
In her heart she believed she had yet another score over Fairy---her name. Fairy had been so called because her mother was secretly persuaded that she had been made on a night after Mr. and Mrs. Falkland had witnessed a juvenile performance of Snow-white and Rose-red; Noelle, of course, because she had been born on Christmas Day. Their unusual names were a bond between the two girls; but each secretly thought her own superior.
“Noelle! I think your name’s just lovely.”
“Oh, no! Not like yours. Yours is sweet.”
“Mine? I hate it.”
“But it suits you so.” (It didn’t, for Fairy was almost buxom.)
“Oh, ye-es, I suppose it does. But it’s ordinary. Not like yours. Yours is so unusual.” (And just an intangible intonation suggesting “ for ‘so’ read ‘too.’”)
Yes, Noelle was an unusual name. Then and afterwards Noelle’s world was divided into people who (like herself) thought it lovely and those who (from some unfathomable prejudice) didn’t seem to care for it. Among the former was Mr. Farringay; among the latter were Graham and Audrey. But all these came later.
The conspicuous difference between Mickleham Road and Blackmore Hill focused and centred on their bathrooms. That at Mickleham Road---though large, no doubt, by the standards of a modern flat---was a shoddy, shabby place, and it contained in one corner an objectionable necessity which should have had a room to itself. The décor was white---or whitish---but it looked white-washed; there was a long sepia-coloured crack in the basin; the bath was an ugly old-fashioned shape, and all round the waste (which sometimes didn’t work very well), and also where the taps had dripped, the enamel had flaked off leaving mud-coloured, rust-coloured stains. The bath taps and the basin taps had been sloshed over with white paint to avoid the labour of cleaning brass; the mirror was spotted and decaying along the edges. The whole place was essentially a utility, a place of business; you rushed in, got it over and rushed out. . . . But the bathroom at Blackmore Hill was a place in which you could have spent a week; it was the very shrine and altar of daintiness; and it was, of course, a bathroom only. It was pink---the Falklands were a pink family---and of that peculiar finish, like roseate mother-of-pearl, you see in the windows of the most exclusive plumbers; the bath was rectangular and half-sunk in the floor, it had glass screens and chromium taps, and as many wheels, levers and gadgets as the fascia-board of an express locomotive. The bathroom floor was of some delicious spongy, absorbent rubber, and on chromium rails warmed by electricity hung such towels as might have received the blushing forms of peris. And was the same towel ever used twice, did you ever on Thursday see the smudge of Tuesday’s lipstick? Good heavens, no; what an idea!
And there were powder-puffs and loofahs and bath-salts and sponges and cold-cream and skin-food and lotions and eau-de-cologne, and a complete battery of manicure. Whereas, at Mickleham Road---Mums’ sorbo, and Mums’ tooth-brush (red), my sorbo and my tooth-brush (green). A tube of Colgate’s and a tube of Pepsodent. Oh dear, oh dear!
The first time Noelle ever used the bathroom at Blackmore Hill, she felt she could never leave it. She was eighteen, she had been invited to accompany Fairy to a dance and she was, by special concession, to dress and sleep at the palace. She had gone to her bath a little mortified because she had been beaten by Fairy’s maid in the race to unpack her suit-case, and the black-haired soignée supercilious young woman had strewn her meagre possessions over a bedroom about the size of a church, till it looked like the flagged map of an unsuccessful company establishing sales stations throughout a continent. The possessions individually passed---but that was about all; frock, good within limits; new underclothes for the dance, really swish; pyjamas, so-so; sponge-bag and accoutrements, poor; toilet accessories---draw a veil. Mortified, Noelle had proceeded to the bathroom, and it had soothed her as religion had never done. In that temple of daintiness she felt exquisite, in that shrine of nudity she felt beautiful. She got into the bath (very hot) and stewed in a trance of delight; this is the place for you, Noelle, this is the sort of place for you. Dance? Who wanted to dance, who wanted to push and jostle about a floor clasped to some hard-shirted male when they could lie in the soft embrace of hot water in this---cathedral? Let’s stay here for ever and ever. . . .
But Fairy had come rattling at the door.
“Darling, do hurry. I want your advice. I’ve got the most frightful spot coming---right between my shoulders. I don’t think the pink satin’ll do after all.”
Sighing, but with one last absorbing look (I haven’t any spots), Noelle dragged herself out of her Venus’s shell. She dried herself with a Turkish carpet---it positively covered the whole of you at once---pulled on her dance underthings (sweet), and a Japanese silk dressing-gown (C3), and went to Fairy’s bedroom. A rose-red city, half as large as Lyons’; a litter of silk and lace, a profusion of everything---warmed, scented, curtained in brocade. And poor Fairy, nearly naked, striving to see her back.
“Do tell me, Noey, is it going to get worse or isn’t it?”
“Darling, I can’t see it at all.”
No, I can’t see it---or anyway I mustn’t. But I do see this room, and I did see that bathroom, and I know this much---these are the sort of rooms I must one day have for my own. I must, I must. Tea on a silver tray in the drawing-room with a spirit-lamp kettle, pink varnish for my nails and leisure to do them, an ivory manicure set, one of these French pin-cushion dolls, silk pyjamas, Narcisse Noir. Nice things round me; those are what I must have; short of dishonour, I don’t care how I get them. And servants. A black-haired maid on her knees holding out my step-ins; a fair-haired maid carrying away the tea; never, never, never any washing-up. These are the things I must have, that is the state of life in which I must live. Must, must, must.
“You shouldn’t take up so much with the Falklands Ducks. They put ideas in your head.”
They did indeed.
The intimacy with Blackmore Hill went on over a period of years; but it came to a sad and sudden end. Its catastrophe was connected with a young man called Rex Bradnett, the son of a Frognal tobacco-king. The young man, Rex, it was understood, was violently in love with Fairy; but one evening Fairy made the mistake of appearing in a flame-coloured frock too short for her robust legs, and too tight for her exuberant bust; and Rex was indiscreet enough to show interest in a Noelle resembling a waxwork Venus de Milo in close-fitting black lace. She felt little interest in Rex; he was a good-natured cheerful fellow and very rich, but he spluttered when he talked. He had an enormous mouth like a frog’s and in the corners of it there lurked always a tiny froth of saliva; Noelle, having once seen this, could see nothing else, and it offended and disgusted her sensibilities. It wasn’t dainty. When Rex said, spluttering “I s-say, do come for a drive one day in my Bentley,” she with difficulty refrained from replying: “Ugh!”
After dinner they went to the Everyman’s Theatre---which was still a theatre and not a picture-house. Fairy led the way into the innermost of the three seats, Rex hung back and Noelle, who was thinking of something else, absent-mindedly preceded him. Too late she realised that her far from negligible person had split the lovers. Too late indeed.
For, back at Blackmore Hill, where Noelle was once more staying the night and indulging in that heavenly bathroom, Fairy said with blonde acidity:
“You do stick, Noelle, don’t you!”
“Stick?”
“Yes. To me and Rex. I thought you knew. . . You did know.”
“I can’t think what you’re talking about.”
“I’m hurt, Noelle. I didn’t think you would have done that sort of thing. I thought we were friends.”
Noelle had had a miserable day. She had been slaving for her examinations---mathematics and French; she had washed up after two indifferent but astonishingly messy meals; she had answered the door at Mickleham Road sixteen times. She was sick and tired and disgusted with Mickleham Road and the economies of living there, with That State of Life unto Which it Had Pleased God to Call Her. She was conscious that there was a stain on her day dress---Fairy’s maid had made her conscious of that, and that it wasn’t even a very new stain---and her evening stocking had laddered. If Fairy saw a snake in the grass, Noelle saw in front of her the Ugly Sister gloating over Cinderella. An accumulation of miseries and grievances burst within her like the sudden cleavage of a dam.
The scene was long and vituperative. There were tears, gibes, insults. Hideous truths somersaulted through the over-charged atmosphere; something was even said about the spots. . . . And that was the end of Noelle’s association with Blackmore Hill.
A year or so later she read in the paper that Fairy had married the young man Rex. She derived no pleasure from this---nor any special degree of chagrin; not even to secure “nice things all round me “ could she have married a frog-faced splutterer who dribbled. Later she made the casual discovery that Fairy now called herself Frances; well, if she was going to be as fat as she showed signs of becoming, “ Fairy” was no name to perpetuate. (Now I’m not fat; I’m bigly made; I’ve got a bust and my legs are sensible, but I’m not fat---I never will be.) She wondered if Fairy still retained her spots, and drew some consolation from the thought that she almost certainly did. Can the leopard? But on the other hand Fairy retained the bathroom too---or another even grander, for Rex’s resources were unlimited. Too bad!
But Blackmore Hill had done its work; expelled from Paradise, the Peri found Mickleham Road more intolerable than ever. Mums said anxiously: “One day you’ll be marrying, Ducks?” but Ducks shook a determined head. Marry? Marry into another Mickleham Road; drudgery; washing up twice a week when the maid was out; emptying slops, making one’s own bed; rushing hastily in and out of another Micklehamian bathroom with rough white enamel fouled by stains, with a fly-blown mirror and squeezed disreputable tubes of toothpaste and pools on the uneven lino and a cracked washhand basin and a geyser? And towels that had to last a week? And sheets that had to last a fortnight? That? No. Never.
I will get out of all this. I will get into a different state of life altogether, a different kind of life. I will rise.
I can appreciate nice things, can’t I? Then I ought to have them. And I will.
For a time Mr. Farringay changed all that. For a time Mr. Farringay made love in Mickleham Road appear desirable.
By this time Noelle had secured her diploma, had taken a brief course in “teaching” and had obtained a nebulous appointment as junior mistress in the Bridge Road School. The Bridge Road School straddled the borders of Cricklewood and Kilburn; and if ever there existed anywhere on earth the antithesis of daintiness, the materialisation of the non-dainty, it was here. The Bridge Road School was an old building, already under notice of condemnation, which by a process of periodical extensions seemed now almost to overlap a site originally far too small. It was hideous without and ill-designed within, and it stank---of blotting-paper and dry-rot and long-worn worsted and wet shoes and back-street humanity. It had outside conveniences for the pupils, which on a hot day signified themselves to heaven---or at any rate to Noelle in her classroom. It was no place for the fastidious.
Noelle, of course, hated it. She hated the dusty classrooms with their scrubbed uneven floors, their greasy blackboards and their indelible messes of ink. She hated the shoal of faces in front of her---fish faces, rabbit faces, bird faces, blank or smug or sullen or uppish. She hated her fellow teachers; the young women tawdrily overdressed, slangy, tattling scandal about the staff; the older men wearied and fusty, the younger men cocky and tasteless and patronising. The mistresses’ room was a pig-sty, their “cloak-room” as far below Mickleham Road as Mickleham Road had been below Blackmore Hill. The headmaster was a cold man, red-nosed with indigestion, sick of himself, and everybody. . . . Noelle went about the Bridge Road School tiptoeing as if for mud, holding her nose as if against drains.
Mr. Farringay taught Latin. He was a year or two older than Noelle, but because her style was adult and his was boyish he looked her junior. He had a flat, white quizzical face, shaped like a broadening spade, and surmounted by thin black hair which, springing straight and short and bristly from the scalp, yet contrived somehow to glisten with oil. He had two suits, a brown and a blue, both a little shiny; but his ties and his socks were well-chosen, which was more than could be said for those of most of his colleagues. He was the only person in the school who wore decent shoes. His father had been a veterinary surgeon, so he was Noelle’s “class.” His Christian name was Clive.
For a time---perhaps for three months---he appeared to be in love with Noelle, and for the like time Noelle seemed to be in love with him.
Why this should be so will be known when it is known why the carbon atom possesses six electrons while that of uranium has ninety-two. Meantime, there can only be conjecture. Perhaps it was the one-eyed King amongst the blind; perhaps it was because Noelle had reached the stage when her virginities could no longer remain untroubled; perhaps it was because, among a company who had few pretensions, Mr. Farringay did appear a gentleman---though in truth he was at most gentlemanly. And Noelle, trained by Mums and fortified by her own inmost convictions and ideals, was ladylike or nothing. Grannie, gnashing her plate, was one day to proclaim of her bitterly: “Such a lady!”; Kenneth was to say, more coarsely, that if Noelle were in need and found herself in a street where the only places were labelled “Women” she would die---it would have to be a “Ladies.” At all events the fact remained; except for charwomen, airwomen and fallen women, there were no women in Noelle’s world; she wasn’t a woman herself, she was a lady. Noelle was fastidious, dainty, ladylike; Mr. Farringay was fastidious, refined, gentlemanly. Naturally, they fused.
They came together first over one of Noelle’s humiliations. The small boys of her class, whom Noelle thought the ultimate horror of creation till she came to contemplate the small girls, had discovered her Christian name. The more obtuse infuriated her---as had others in her life---by thinking it was “Nellie”; those capable of finer distinction apparently belonged to the school of thought which disliked it, for they took to humming it as a Christmas carol behind her back and sotto voce in her class. They introduced undesirable variations; they accented the last syllable and conjoined it with obvious---and disagreeable---rhymes. They wrote up on walls: “Miss Noelly has a pain in her belly.” They devised elaborations also of her surname, elaborations and perversions; a revolting little boy with bat ears and a perpetually running nose stood up in class and said: “Please, Miss Halfbrick” “My name is Miss Philbrick, Thomas.” “Please, Miss Lip-stick “ Noelle had no notion of how to deal with this sort of thing; should one ignore it---but you couldn’t stand silent and be called “Miss Halfbrick,” could you? Should one go to the Head (who disapproved of punishments) and face that red nose and those exhausted dead-fish eyes---and be told to manage better, and have a black mark set against one in that dread Confidential Register which theoretically, but only theoretically, did not exist? On days when she was not feeling very well, on hot days when the odours of the Bridge Road School contended in the close air like raging savages, on cold mornings when draughts howled down the corridors like wolves and doors slammed crashingly and every other child was snivelling and blowing and reeking of eucalyptus---on such days the life of a preceptress got Noelle down.
(And somewhere Fairy Bradnett---no, Frances Bradnett---is living in a house with brocade silk curtains and fathomless carpets and a pink bathroom; somewhere she is having her hair waved and her hands manicured and her nails stained the very latest shade, all that. Why not me?)
Mr. Farringay caught her one desperate morning in the corridor, a handkerchief to her eyes; he said: “Excuse me---I beg your pardon——” Noelle said: “Oh please, Mr. Farringay——” And then somehow it all came out. Mr. Farringay laughed at her.
“You mustn’t worry about things like that, Miss Philbrick. It isn’t as bad as you think. The children like you really.”
“They can’t!”
“Yes, they do; I happen to know they do. The young just have to be funny; they don’t mean to hurt. . . . They call me Herring-guts, you know.”
“Oh, how disgusting!”
“Well, it is and it isn’t. If they really meant that I had---er---a fish’s insides or was in any way suggestive of a fish’s insides, then it would be different. But it’s purely literary. Farring-gay; Herring-guts. Just the jingle---purely literary. I’m using ‘literary’ in the Latin sense. Litterae; letters. You can do anything with letters, you know, so long as you don’t demand meaning. I’ll show you some time.”
He came into her classroom that afternoon while she was correcting exercises after dismissal and did show her what you could do with letters; puns, word-squares, words that read the same backwards and forwards, whole reversible sentences. “There’s a long Persian poem that means one thing read from right to left and another read from left to right---amazingly clever.” Noelle was absorbed. “Can that be all just chance, Mr. Farringay?” He was struck. “I never thought of that idea.” They considered it closely together.
From the Persian poem they came to Omar Khayyam and discovered there a joint treasure. But he was horrified to find she did not know Tagore. He must lend her Tagore at once.
She found that he had a lovely mind. He lent her not only Tagore but Bain’s Indian books---In the Great God’s Hair and another; he gave her The Roadmender at Christmas and he introduced her to Alpha of the Plough. Most ladylike books, all of them. He opened a new world for her, or if he did not quite do that, he made a metamorphosis in the Bridge Road School. They exchanged confidences about their fellow teachers.
“They don’t read books like these. They don’t know of their existence. They read The Sheik.”
Noelle said archly---alas! yes, archly: “How do you know I don’t?” His response was gratifying.
“Oh, anybody can see with half an eye that you’re different. You’re a different class.”
“Well, so are you.”
“Perhaps, perhaps.” But he was undeniably pleased. “It’s all very well to sneer at the old-fashioned words ‘ladies’ and ‘gentlemen,’ but nobody’s invented any better. There are ladies-and-gentlemen and there are---others. We just happen to be the right thing, and our friends here just happen not to be. There it is. I hate snobbery, but you and I can say it——”
Noelle thought it was very well put. And “you and I”---there was comfort in that.
Clive---Mr. Farringay had become Clive now---took her to a literary evening at his Circle in a high flat off Belsize Gardens. But that was rather disappointing. It was very highbrow and above Noelle’s head. It was all about Paul Verlaine---himself a figure about whom Noelle’s impressions were of the haziest; and both the lecturer and those who took part in the “discussion” kept mentioning, as if they were commonplaces of everyday knowledge, all sorts of people of whom she had barely heard—— Catulle Mendes, François Coppée, Jean Arthur Rimbaud. She noticed that Clive himself did not join in the arguments---perhaps he also was at sea. She was glad when it was over and she could say to him, taking his arm in a ladylike way: “I felt terribly ignorant.”
Clive was reassuring; he was up to the ropes in these affairs.
“Oh, ne sutor ultra crepidam. D’you know what that means?”
It happened that she did know---somewhat, as she saw too late, to his disappointment. He would have liked to enlighten her.
“You’re good in your own subject,” he said, “I’m good in mine. As a matter of fact, most of these fellows had only mugged up Verlaine for the evening. You or I could have done it---if we’d had the time.”
Noelle was not so far gone as to believe that, but it was comforting---especially the charming way Clive included her always as his equal. And after she got home---it was a summer night---she sat at the back window of Mickleham Road and gazed out at the dim back “garden,” and listened to the prowling London cats and thought very sweetly and kindly of Clive Farringay. And at the thought of him something deep and vital within her turned over; austerities hitherto unapproachable were rent; virginities hitherto impregnable melted away. At the thought of Clive Farringay with his white boyish face and his strong supporting arm, her inside turned to milk; Noelle was---almost---in love. . . . And Mr. Farringay, over in Belsize Park, creasing his blue trousers very carefully and placing them longways under his mattress, thought too in the summer night; thought how handsome Noelle was, how companionable, how he liked contralto voices and how, if he got that Assistant’s post at Walthamstow——
But Mr. Farringay too was doomed to perish.
It began at the Everyman’s Theatre, which seemed the setting designed by Providence for the catastrophes of Noelle’s life. They went together to see a new play, and the play so excited and charmed Mr. Farringay that he forgot himself. He did not forget that he was a Christian or a Protestant or a good-liver; he did something worse than any of these---from Noelle’s point of view; he forgot he was a gentleman.
Since he had become Clive, since he had gone out walking or dancing or tennis playing with Noelle, he had been inclining towards this fatal lapse. He had said one or two jarring things, he had slipped up a little in his behaviour---nothing at all verging on the coarse, but he had forgotten once or twice to be refined. And now to-night, in the excitement of this absorbing new play---it really was a fine play and all London said so later---he forgot still further. Glancing sideways at him, half-way through the second act, Noelle saw that he was leaning forward with his mouth half open breathing heavily, and---yes, he was picking his nose. He was doing it in a businesslike way, as if it were a thing which, when he wasn’t minding his P’s and Q’s, he did quite often. He caught her glance and instantly snatched out his handkerchief but it was too late. The thing was done.
There was worse to come. It was a wet night and Mr. Farringay, with unusual magnificence, decided to take Noelle home in a taxi. What a world is this wherein our noblest and most generous actions are those which spell our doom! For in the taxi Clive began to talk again, excitedly and enthusiastically, forgetting himself once more. In the taxi, with its windows closed, he was brought closer to Noelle than he had ever been before; and suddenly Noelle’s daintiness told her a most terrible thing. He smelt a little. Just a little, a very little, but he did. It was nothing dreadful---just the least taint on that laden air, just a stale smoky stuffiness, just the suspicion of a shirt that had been worn just twenty-four hours too long. But if he had suddenly revealed himself as a rake and a libertine, if he had suddenly brandished Jack the Ripper’s very knife, Noelle could not have shrunk more desperately into her corner.
But there was worse to come even yet. The taxi dropped them at the end of Mickleham Road “because not to wake Mums,” and he paid it off and set out to walk with her to the door of No. 28. It was a short distance, but it was long enough to be fatal. For Mr. Farringay began to continue what he had been saying in the taxi---eagerly, self-forgetfully, off his guard. And as he began to speak, his voice choked on a little phlegm; and suddenly he half-turned, cleared his throat roundly and spat upon the pavement. He did half-turn, she didn’t actually see it, but she heard the little slap on the wet pavement like a very heavy raindrop. London, the vast night, God and all His angels, waited and held their breaths in silence; and patt! Mr. Farringay had expectorated on the pavement of Mickleham Road. The knell of doom, the last trump of disillusion, could have sounded no louder.
So that was the end of Mr. Farringay.
So life at Mickleham Road went on as before, and indeed became but worse with the passage of time; for Mrs. Philbrick went in for a serious illness, and Noelle’s share of the housework proportionately increased. It was such a horrid little house to work for too---all stains and chips and cracks and peelings; and the Edward Seventh furniture was failing to stand the test of time any better than itself. Servants, the great British domestic, became more and more difficult; you tried dailies who came or did not come according as they thought fit and without preliminary intimation of their intent; you tried young girls who stole cosmetics and sneaked out at night; you tried an Austrian who had fits at every full moon. The struggle seemed endless---and for what? Merely to keep alive; merely to consume time till it all killed you.
Noelle remained at the Bridge Road School, though she rose in it a little. She was promoted to teach older children, but found this little gain; it involved merely the substitution of subtle insults for blunt, skilled torments for crude. The cheek was of a different order, but it remained cheek. Their cinema, wireless and Sunday paper minds were completely beyond her comprehension or grasp; naturally, she remained the enemy. Like the domestics of Mickleham Road, her pupils were there to do as little as possible, to cheat, dodge, thwart, snub and score off those set over them. And now there wasn’t even Mr. Farringay.
And I’m here for life. Unless I’m lucky---and I won’t be---I’m here for the rest of my days. I’m young still and strong; what will it be like when I’m old? . . .
But Noelle grew handsomer and handsomer, waxier and waxier; she approximated more and more closely to that description “beautiful” she would never quite attain. She was mature, she burgeoned, she was in full bloom; how long would it last? She got very little exercise, she read more and more, she went to lectures more and more, she went to Church more and more. Mums’ religion amounted to a vague conviction that “there must surely be Somebody Somewhere”; Noelle’s was hardly better defined: yet Church with its surrenders and its speculations, its odd moments of ecstasy, its occasional glimpses of consoling peace did seem to fill a certain need. Even its crudities, its blood and virgins they took you out of yourself.
There were, of course, other Mr. Farringays, better Mr. Farringays; from time to time they pursued her. But none of them was quite good enough and none of them came near touching that secret spring Mr. Farringay---now in Walthamstow---had pressed so surely. They had no power to make Noelle feel milky inside, to set some persistent gland, some strong-intentioned entrail, throbbing in the night. Mums said now a little speculatively: “You’ll be marrying one of these days, Ducks?”; and Ducks shook her head more determinedly than ever and with an increased tightening of the lips. Marry? Not till I can find someone who will give me all the things I want, who will lift me right out of this life of mending ladders and lathering underclothes in a bathroom basin and wondering is the daily coming to-day or is she going to bilk us again? And it must be someone not merely rich but fine as well, a “gentleman.” But who among such will make offer to me? Where will I even meet him?
Mums would have said: “Trust in God, darling.” And, astonishingly, it seemed that Mums would have been right.
On a cold Saturday forenoon at the end of September 1931 Noelle went to Oxford Street to shop. The newspapers were depressing that day; incomprehensibly Britain had “come off the gold standard,” and whatever that might mean it seemed to mean at least that we were all ruined. The newspapers talked of slumps and there was slump in the air; the Oxford Street shops were dreary, anxious to close for the week-end lest worse befall; the nit-wit girl who served Noelle with stockings seemed too sunk in carelessness to distinguish even between beige and nigger. In the cold depression of the street, hostile as ocean with its endless passing uninterested waves, Noelle drought vaguely of lunch; coffee and a poached egg somewhere---it didn’t matter where. Tired and dispirited, she wandered into a tea-shop in a side street she had never seen before---a dark-green place, cold that day as an unfriendly cave of the sea. There was something funny about it, Noelle didn’t at first know what; it was not till the waitress was staring at her that she realised she was the only unescorted female present. All the rest were coupled with men, and instead of the usual marble-topped table you sat in a little cubicle that smelt of frangipani. Noelle thought of walking out again, but she was too tired to make the effort; she gave her order---coffee, poached egg. The waitress took it, looked at her, hesitated and went away. Noelle had her own idea of what was in the waitress’s mind, but she was wrong; what the waitress was really thinking was: “Police?”
It was a queer cafe. From where Noelle sat she could see slantingly into the opposite cubicle; in it sat an elderly gentleman with a grey moustache and hot protuberant red-brown eyes; his companion was a blonde child---in her late teens at most, a stony creature with a mask of make-up, a shiny black hat and pouting orange-scarlet lips. The elderly gentleman was pleading, pleading; the blonde effigy looked petulantly away. As Noelle watched, the elderly gentleman got his hand under the table; it pushed up the blonde child’s short skirt and began stroking her silk-covered knee. The blonde child suffered it as a cat suffers the petting of a stranger---with a half-watchful indifference. Noelle, hardly thinking, watched the white pudgy fingers pinching and petting the shiny little knee, the elderly gentleman leaning farther and farther across the table, his red-brown eyes assuming more and more the expression of an imploring dog. The girl turned round and looked at him in speechless disdain; he began begging, begging, begging---Noelle could hear the frantic rumble of his voice. It was a dreadful sight---the old man’s hungry beseeching eyes, the steely indifferent hateful child. He said something inaudible and she replied in a voice hard as the nether millstone: “Aw, cut it out; let’s go home.” They went out together, the old man grovelling, the platinum child remote in some stereotyped disdain.
Noelle’s egg came. She ate it with mechanical attention, but she kept thinking of the old gentleman and his guest, and her thought surprised her: “How dared she treat him like that, the little pig!” He might be an old satyr, but she was worse. . . . And what, she wondered, was home? Probably a little two-roomed flat, all neat and new and modern; chromium and glass; silks, cushions; a pink bathroom no doubt---or whatever colour that little beast wanted. That was not a girl to let any possible gift slip by her; that girl could get anything on earth she liked; up to the limit of that poor old Silenus’s solvency, she had only to demand. “ Nice things round me?” Well, that was one way of getting them; what they called gold-digging. And he really wasn’t such a bad old boy; he wouldn’t ask very much. . . .
One way of getting them? Besides the Mr. Farringays there had been old gentlemen in Hampstead and elsewhere who had looked at Noelle as if they would like to give her all sorts of things. She was not so ladylike as not to know what old gentlemen meant when their old gentlemenly eyes took on a certain expression. Once one of them had actually spoken to her while she was looking into the window of a hand-bag shop in Finchley Road; he had said in the pleasantest voice: “Which one would you like?” She had leapt like a startled deer and had said with absurd over-violence: “I---I’ll call the police”; and even now she smiled at the almost disconcerting completeness of her victory. He had been instantly terrified, he had burst into frightened apologies and shambled off ludicrously. She could still see his poor old back hurrying crab-wise round the nearest corner. To-day for the first time, under the influence of the steel-blonde child, she felt sorry for him. He was probably in torment; he was old and and he wanted to be young; quite possibly he hired some little platinum beast somewhere who took and took and took and was as vile to him as she could be. . . .
One way of getting things. Could I——?
No; not that way. Almost I could; but not quite “But I feel nearer it to-day,” thought Noelle, hastily drinking her cold coffee, “than ever I did in my life. I wonder. . . . No. . . .”
But the queer cafe had completed the work begun by the gloomily prophetic newspapers, the frightening air of uncertainty and slump; it left Noelle in a very odd mood. Sick and depressed, she headed for home; I’ll walk a bit through Regent’s Park; I don’t get enough exercise; and these salts I take in the morning don’t do half the advertisements say they do. Wrapped in her thoughts---old gentlemen who gave you everything you wanted and perhaps didn’t ask so very much in return; platinum gold-diggers, the little beasts, the lucky little beasts---she struck diagonally across a gloomy square. It was Frame Square, though Noelle was not aware of that. Still thinking, thinking---it mightn’t be so bad, men didn’t ask so very much, you got your comforts anyway---she stepped out diagonally from the curb and instantly the world exploded into amazing activity. Something struck her---not so much a blow as a frightfully violent push, a push that threw her down, yes actually threw her down in the street. Her hat flew off, her head cracked on the hard asphalt; she distinctly heard the smack of it. Smack! it went, on her right temple. She rolled indecently in the road like a bundle of washing fallen from a laundry van. There was a tremendous noise---hammers, steam-whistles, a note like a huge organ. Then blackness.
A voice said: “Bring her in here; I’m a doctor.” And hatless, her skirt twisted back to front, one arm round the neck of a taxi-driver, the other embracing a street loafer, for all the world like a female drunk going into custody, Noelle crossed the threshold of No. 5, Frame Square for the first time. She didn’t know that, however, because of the surging blackness, the whirlpools, brass bands, bells, the certainty that she was going to be sick in one minute. She was sick; the blackness thinned, opened out fanwise; she was on a sort of couch. The same voice said: “Lie quite still, please. Now try to tell me. Does that hurt? That?” They both hurt, but not very much, not unbearably. Looking up, Noelle saw bending over her a most gentlemanly-looking man with a grave pale face, with a dark blue tie and a pearl tiepin, with brushy sort of hair marred by a queer little half-crown of white above one ear. She thought: “He looks kind; he looks tired.” But she did not know that she would ever call him “Robin.”
What was it in Noelle that captured Robin? Why, out of the innumerable women he had seen---all kinds of women, every grade of desirability and charm---why did this big handsome girl recovering in his consulting-room (for it was only bruises, of course, and an abrasion on the temple) say to him suddenly: “You need me.” And with such instant persuasion that he immediately and irrevocably believed it? Why did she of all people say suddenly: “I could be Philippa?” What did Robin see lying there on his sofa? What did he think he saw? . . . Ah, if one knew the answer to simple riddles such as these!
If one even knew how to describe the processes. Did Robin “fall in love” with Noelle? For want of any more exact description, we must say that he did. Did Noelle “fall in love” with Robin? Quite certainly not; there was no falling about it. Did she then, by an act of conscious volition, decide to be in love with him? Again, for want of appropriate terminology, we must answer---yes.
Had the queer cafe anything to do with that? Yes. Much? No. But a little? Yes---probably. It framed a mood; and when you are hit on a head that is full of a certain mood, that mood is apt to be perpetuated.
And when you are in Mickleham Road and desire above all things to get out of it; when someone from another world takes advantage of a chance accident, follows it up, won’t let it go, sends flowers, fruit, cards of enquiry, books, theatre tickets, gramophone records, wine; when it becomes impossible longer to believe that all this is just disinterested kindness; when it becomes obvious that all this giving must translate itself presently into terms of a corresponding demand; when at long last you begin to dream that an inconceivable miracle is about to occur; when you realise that escape, freedom, release, salvation will depend shortly on your personal yea or nay . . . in these circumstances it is easy to work up quite enough “love” to go on with. “Love” comes.
Noelle, sitting up on Robin’s sofa, had said: “You’ve been most terribly kind,” and Robin, smiling like a tired angel, had said: “It was very clever of you to get knocked down just outside a doctor’s house. You should always arrange it like that.”
“Did I?” She looked around her. “Oh, there’s a policeman.”
The gentlemanly-looking man with the pearl tiepin smiled like God.
“Yes. But he’s a nice fellow really. He just wants to say a word to you.”
The policeman said, very seriously but also smiling: “You know, miss, the Minister of Transport’ll be vexed with you. What’s the use of him putting up all these notices everywhere when you go and do like that?” She said: “I’m sorry, Sergeant,” and he said, “I’ll bet you are, miss,” and he took her name and address and that was all.
The taxi-driver---one of the older school---was much less conciliatory. “Walkin’ right off the kerb like that! Give me a proper scare, yew did. All roight this time, but the next chap mayn’t ’ave such good brakes as wot I ’ave an’ ’e mayn’t be as good a driver neither. So don’t yew do it again.”
Then he too went away and Noelle said: “Oh, I must be getting home. . . . Why, my head’s bandaged!” And the kind doctor said: “Yes, it is; and so you won’t go home for a half-hour or so---you’ll just rest here and then I’ll send you along in my car.” And then he in turn went away and remained away except for about ten minutes before the car took her home to Mums. But, like the policeman, he took her name and address.
An hour, an hour and a half, two hours at the very outside, for the whole affair from start to finish. But within that time---indeed within the fraction of it when he wasn’t examining or bandaging or questioning or out of the room altogether---Robin must have made his resolve. In that brief time the arrow must have been launched, the shot fired, the victim struck down. For thereafter began that torrent of letters of enquiry, that crescendo of delivery vans and parcel posts and messenger boys at Mickleham Road that climaxed in the afternoon when Robin---by arrangement---came to tea to see Mums. By that afternoon Noelle had no doubt about anything; she had begun to believe in miracles.
Results of an Accident? There was a new book called that; Vicki Baum. But were there any such things in this world as accidents? Was it not rather the God moving at last, in His own slow time, the Father God coming down at last with a Present for a Good Girl? Mums said that God knew what was right for you---and Mums seemed to have been in the confidence of the Almighty throughout. Accidents? No, no; it was meant.
On the afternoon when Robin was coming to tea to meet Mums, Noelle retained no illusions as to the will of God, the nature of accidents or anything else. She dressed herself as becomingly as she knew; as “beautiful” as she would ever become, she waited behind the front room curtains, putting her trust implicitly in the Deity and His goodness. She saw now how it would all be; she foresaw everything.
There were two things, however---two things at least Noelle did not foresee.
The first of these was the constant hostility, the unremitting opposition of Graham and Audrey. It puzzled her beyond solution (Why? Why? What is it about me they don’t like?) and like all enemies leaping from an unsuspected hiding, it frightened her. Coldness from Grannie she had reckoned upon and bargained for, but surely Graham and Audrey must love her? Their ages made the relationship so potentially perfect; Noelle brought to them the stability of a young beautiful mother, the comradeship of an elder sister. Yet in point of fact, Grannie had turned out to be an old dear; whereas Graham and Audrey—— (Clever Grannie! Or perhaps stupid Noelle not to see through her, but then so few people ever had.)
Noelle had not, of course, witnessed that painful moment of disclosure when Robin had told his children his plans. He had turned it over in his mind long and anxiously, framing the difficult announcement this way and that. “You’re to have a new mother, my dears” (but at fifteen and sixteen they were surely far too old for that line, and in any case it was straining language beyond bearing.) “How would you like a stepmother, Audrey?” (But one shied, right or wrong, at the word.) In the end he could do no better than the blunt statement: “I’ve made up my mind to marry again.”
Graham goggled like an imbecile; as usual, it was too big for him. But the sixteen-year-old Audrey said sharply:
“Not the Hampstead girl?”
Robin was taken aback; like many of us, he had imagined that he had kept his movements secret.
“What do you know about it?”
Audrey said: “I don’t know. . . . I didn’t think. . . .
I never thought. . . Her eyes were starry with tears.
There was an awkward silence; then Graham said helpfully: “What’s she like?” Robin burst gratefully into a eulogy, a rhapsody, a glowing forecast of how splendid it was all going to be. He was half-way through it before he realised that Audrey, without further speech, had walked out of the room.
Noelle had no knowledge of that uncomfortable interview between Robin and his young; the first douche came therefore on that cold morning after the honeymoon. The house at Frame Square had seemed gigantic, gloomy, repellent; and there stood these two little beasts, staring in silence. Robin himself was chilled and nervy or he would not have given them the chance he did. . . . “Haven’t you anything to say to your stepmother?” And then the two little beasts in triumphant chorus: “ Oh thank-you, stepmother!” The little---unspeakables!
A pity, of course, thought Noelle, that dear Robin chose that unfortunate word; at the time she had supposed that it was this and nothing else that had upset them. But now she knew better. If it was unfortunate for her, it was fortunate for them; it gave them the chance of an immediate declaration of war. And didn’t they take it! Didn’t they just!
War, war---implacable unrelenting war. And why?
Because they’re jealous? But they’ve nothing to be jealous about. I haven’t taken Robin away from them; so far as I can gather he has left them very much to themselves all their lives; unless I’m much mistaken, they don’t feel deeply for him one way or another. . . . Then because I’ve supplanted their own mother? But that’s nonsense; she’s been dead for ten years, when she left them Graham was only five and Audrey six; any ideas of her they can retain must be the merest fairy-tales; there was nothing to supplant. . . . Then because they’re piqued at their father’s marrying again? But that’s worse nonsense still; who are they to judge; what can they know of a man’s needs in life; any number of the best and noblest of men have married a second time and been much the better for it; is tragedy to be final, is there to be no appeal, no second chance---all to please a pair of selfish brats? . . . I haven’t interfered with their ways of life, not one---silly though some of them are; so it can’t be that. . . . Is it just because they think I’m not good enough? Ah, that! The little pigs; the set-up, impudent, purse-proud, class-proud---oh stop, stop! I mustn’t.
Mums had seen them once; twice; thereafter she had excused herself. You couldn’t say they had been openly rude; you certainly couldn’t say they had been nice either. Mums had come away with a hurt look, puzzled. And if they didn’t like Mums---Mums at her gayest and sweetest---well, what could anybody do?
I mustn’t be too hard on them, thought Noelle; perhaps it’s pathological---a sort of disease, frigidity. There’s something wrong with them, the cold little creatures. There’s something wrong with the whole of this cheerless house. . . .
Mums’ house had always been a warm house---that was the word for it, warm. It was a home. Father when he had been alive had been warm and kindly; he hadn’t been a brilliant genius perhaps; apart from that stroke of luck over the Calcutta Sweep, he didn’t make much money; but---who cared? Noelle remembered him chiefly for a game of his invention called---for no known reason---“Codgers”; it consisted in his laying little Noelle over his extended forearm and turning her round and round on it like one of those mechanical toys that circle a bar. In the finale she was pulled over his shoulder and slid head-first down his front. She could still see herself having “Codgers”---scarlet, tousled, her clothes all anyhow, shrieking with hysterical delight. . . . Warm and kindly. Father had quite often called Mums “Sweetheart,” and it seemed perfectly natural and right, just as it was perfectly natural and right for Mums to call her daughter “Ducks.” But who could think of these pretty endearments in No. 5, Frame Square? Mums called Father “Ferdie” and “Old Lad,” and sometimes “Chum”; anything wrong with that? They had been warmly, properly in love with each other---as decent married people should be: Mums had said once to a grown-up Noelle: “I miss his loving arm, Ducks, at nights.” And why not? (But Robin’s loving arm at nights was purposeful, ad hoc and temporary; but of course that’s partly the twin beds and anyway I’m not sure I’d really want it to be otherwise.) . . . A warm house, a happy house where people had feelings and didn’t mind showing them. Here, at Frame Square, the motto seemed to be “Show nothing.”
And the truth is, thought Noelle bitterly, the plain truth is that they’ve nothing to show. Nothing I can understand anyway.
For look at this Audrey, for example. There she was---a grown girl, clever, educated and very good-looking if you cared for that blue-and-silver, raised-eyebrows, chatter-chatter type. But she had no girl friends and she took no apparent interest in boys. Instead, the girl talked about Soviets of Workers and yearned after Collective Farms and knew who Kaganovitch was. It wasn’t human! . . . Or, take Graham---a well set-up, presentable young man, physically sound; but did he ever play rugger or hockey, did he take any interest in county cricket, did he ride, skate, row, box, cycle, fence? Not one of them. He was human enough to play with a clockwork railway, and there was hope in that, though surely it was a trifle childish at his age? . . . In the very earliest days Noelle, banking on the railway, had tried to join in; but the only time he let her play---and she had, to be frank, rather forced herself upon him---she had made a mistake with the points and the little whirring slithering train had crashed. Well, that should have been funny, shouldn’t it? Long ago when her own toy train went off the rails she had laughed and Mums had laughed and Father had laughed. One should laugh. But Graham, had been simply stuffy. And afterwards when she tried to talk about the railway and to make up passengers and stories about them and so on, he fobbed her off with technicalities about loads and rests and curves and schedules till she felt---as he evidently meant her to feel---a fool. As if one couldn’t just play trains and have fun without all that!
“But”---humouring him, the silly boy---“couldn’t you try to explain to me?”
“It’s a bit complicated.”
“But couldn’t I learn?”
“Oh, well, then!” “If you must,” she understood, “if you must waste my time and bore me stiff and spoil my game.” But by that time the heart had gone out of her.
Audrey scored her points most frequently by interrogatives: “Do you think so?” or “Did you?” or just “Oh?” Those and her eyebrows and her stare.
“That’s a sweet frock, Audrey.” “Do you think so?” (And never, to Noelle’s knowledge, wore it again.)
“But surely, dear, we must believe in some Supernatural Being somewhere.” “Do you think so?”
“When I was your age I didn’t bother my head about politics.” “Didn’t you?”
“I shouldn’t do that, Audrey dear.” “Oh?”
Noelle, milky with love, strove tirelessly to infuse a little warmth, a little emotion, a little feeling. Beaten, she was driven to the extraordinary conclusion that they didn’t want it.
Then there was the trouble about names. Noelle was sensitive about her name; the Bridge Road School (“Miss Noelly has a pain in her belly”) had made it a very sore subject. But Mums had chosen it, it was a pretty name, a Christmassy name. (But then, in this perverted Frame Square household, it was the fashion to “detest” Christmas.) That rebuff when she had said: “Do call me Noelle” and Graham: “I suppose we’ll have to,” and Audrey: “After all, it’s her name”---that rebuff lingered long in “Stepmother’s” heart. But in the end they did call her Noelle because there was no possible alternative. It was much more difficult to find names for them. Noelle, still striving after warmth and a “home,” thought “Graham” and “Audrey” chilly and formal; surely within the family one should have family names? Surely their own mother had thought out something?
Once, probing hopefully in that early get-together period, she had gone so far as to ask Graham---ever a slightly more hopeful subject than his sister:
“Hadn’t you ever a pet name, dearie?” (Those were the days when there were still “dearie’s.”) “What did your mother call you?”
For once he was fairly responsive. “I don’t think so. . . . She just called me Graham, I think.”
“My Mummy used always to call me Ducks.”
She knew it a mistake as soon as it had slipped out, but if she had not she would have been brought to earth by Graham’s petrified face. He said, after a moment: “Good Lord!” in the awkward hasty tone in which one covers up a fellow-being’s indecency. It was not so much his words, however, as his aghast and stricken look as of one who, watching the revolting antics of some degraded tribe, wonders: “Can such things really be?”
It struck Noelle like a blow in the face; it was perhaps the first real douche upon her overflowing lovingness.
But even when love had cooled or been abandoned there remained duty. They were so wrong, so wrong, and she could help them so---if they would only let her.
Graham, now; he ought to be made to lead a healthier life, a more boyish life, a more English life. When Noelle spoke of a “clean manly English boy” she did so quite seriously, and could by no means have been convinced that the words were susceptible of mockery. (Young England had yet to embark upon its extraordinary career, and when it did, Noelle thought it beautiful, and those who laughed at it cads.) She yearned to Englishise, to manlify Graham. . . . And Audrey, so very unladylike, at times the very quintessence of the un-lady. She sprawled open-legged in low chairs---yes, and before René too; she swore, she said “Bloody” and “Christ”; she talked with forthright blatancy about Mackay’s sexual adventures, she invented and cried aloud pet names for portions of his anatomy which Noelle considered were only fit to be glossed over. For, after all, if the Almighty made us in the image of the angels, he made us in the image of the animals too, didn’t he; and to talk about such things openly and in the drawing-room . . . well, I mean. . . .
If Audrey had only guessed at her power to shock Noelle by what seemed to herself the most straightforward of statements, the fairest of comment, what a weapon she would have had! But she never realised it because though Noelle, blushing a little, nerved herself once or twice to speak, she never actually advanced beyond openings. “When I get to know her better,” thought Noelle; but she never got to know her better.
For all this was in the earliest period, in the first six months of Noelle’s marriage. And somewhere about the end of the first year, Noelle found The Poem.
“We hate N . . ll.
Like hell.
We hate the bump on her nose
And all her clothes.
Her horrible undies
Are like Mrs. Grundy’s.
We hate her fat legs
And her eyes are like eggs
And we hate her chest
And all the rest.
We just couldn’t tell
How we hate N . . ll.”
After that, there wasn’t much to be said, was there? Or done.
The other thing Noelle did not foresee, for which she hadn’t bargained, was her increasing restlessness, discontent, boredom---yes, boredom---with Robin. One did not look, of course, for the hot and golden romance of youth in a man of forty-two marrying for the second time. Bien entendu; but even at that there was something missing. In its place came disappointment. Noelle was eager and ready to be awakened, to be stirred, to be enlightened. But he didn’t awaken her, he didn’t enlighten her. He didn’t reach her.
Could this be all there was to it? But Mums had said. . .
Noelle had her “nice things round me” all right. She had recast the vast and antiquated Frame Square bathroom so that it now included everything---sprays, douches, glass screens, heated rails, weighing-machines---that had ever glorified Blackmore Hill. Noelle’s bedroom---it was Robin’s, too, of course, but he had a dressing-room, so it was particularly hers---was as luscious as embracing, as dense a jungle of comforts as ever was Fairy Falkland’s. Close by was “my” drawing-room, the most beautiful room, Noelle thought, in London---in Europe, in the world. Taste everywhere, “my” taste. Vast and arresting on its walls hung the Cadrigua portrait, which secretly she didn’t like, though it was a grand and suitable ornament to have. (There is a bump on my nose, I know, but not such a bump.) It made her look like a gypsy; a queen, but a gypsy queen; it gave her the expression of one about to tell her own fortune. And Cadrigua had made her hands too big. Noelle was proud of her hands now; once a difficulty and a humiliation, they bore no longer any reminiscence of washing-up or of the cheaper kind of fountain-pen that invariably leaks into its cap after being carried to school. Her nails were long and the latest shape and tinted---yet another ambition realised---in just the correct shade. (“I like varnished nails, Audrey---not too red, of course.” “Do you?”) As for clothes, she had just what she liked; her furs had cost a hundred and twenty guineas. (“Her horrible undies are like Mrs. Grundy’s.” Are they, you little idiot---not all of them!) She had jewellery, silver, exquisite house linen, all the books she could read, all the pictures she liked best . . .
Yes, she had “nice things round me”; it was a far cry from Mickleham Road, and Rex Bradnett could have done no better. But Robin was a disappointment. And when Mums died suddenly in the third year of her marriage, there came a terrible frightening thought in the midst of her torrent of tears: “I could have spared Robin better.” He wouldn’t cheer up; he wouldn’t believe in himself; he would count his failures and not his successes.
When they were sitting (very comfortably) on opposite sides of the drawing-room fire, Robin would sometimes put his hands under his chin in the way he had and would gaze at her over them; and suddenly she would become aware that he was not seeing her at all but Mrs. X who had come to him that day with her trouble and was incurable and was going to die. He had told Mrs. X lies and that worried him; but if the silly woman hadn’t told herself lies for years and put off and put off till it was ages too late, he might have helped her as he had helped Mrs. Y and Mrs. Z and Mrs. Half-the-alphabet---all of whom he had saved as if he had been God himself. But he forgot all about these---saw only Mrs. X going out of his room cheered up by his lies and arm in arm with Death. . . .
He shouldn’t have been a doctor. Man is mortal; doctors, therefore, must face defeats. He should have been a professional musician as he had wanted. But would that have been any better? Always he would have been confronted---as now---by the one unattainable piece he couldn’t master; and that, of course, would have been---as now---the one piece he cared to play. . . . He should have been a---but what profession is there, what occupation, what State of Life, that has not its moments of failure?
“Oh, cheer up, Robbie!”
“I’m quite cheerful, my dear.”
“You’re not; you’re worrying.”
And then he would pull himself together and talk with the utmost politeness, the utmost indifference, the utmost boringness, of the day’s general news. Or if he simply couldn’t pull himself together he would suggest turning on the wireless; in which event, whatever the programme one of them enjoyed and the other endured.
Hot golden romance of the young and overcharged---one didn’t expect that. But one did expect something---was entitled to something---one wasn’t getting. What was it? Robin was an infrequent, but at the times and seasons of his choosing a ponderous lover; he desired, satisfied himself and forgot all about it. It took him most frequently between two and three in the morning, and it would be all over before Noelle was more than half awake. Then Robin would sleep peacefully again, and she would lie and lie and listen till the City of Westminster’s lorries came round to clean the Square and the milk-bottles began and the earliest papers. Lie and lie in discomfort; bothered, wondering.
Mums had promised, Mums had hinted. . . . But . . .
There were no children; it didn’t seem as if there ever would be. Because, thought Noelle, he hasn’t touched me, he hasn’t reached me. It’s not my fault that we remain strangers, I’ve tried all I know. But I can’t work miracles. I’ll meet anybody half-way---three-quarters; but they must do the rest. Mums herself couldn’t do more.
Robin hasn’t touched me, he hasn’t given me what I thought he would, there’s something missing. Something should happen that hasn’t happened. It’s not my fault.
I’ve no idea what it ought to feel like; I only know I’m not feeling it.
Nobody, in all probability, could have foreseen the music difficulty.
Nobody could have foreseen it because, but for the other two unforeseen dissatisfactions, it would not have existed in any serious form. If Noelle had been quite perfectly sure of herself, if Audrey and Graham would have sometimes asked her advice, if she could have cheered up Robin and made Frame Square as “warm” as Mickleham Road, then the music affair would hardly have created a ripple. It might indeed have been passed off as a sort of joke. But as the contraries of all these suppositions were the fact, they produced in Noelle that frame of mind that seeks a grievance. And in the music question she found one.
Nobody at Frame Square appreciated Noelle’s music. Nobody. There it was.
Father and Mums at Mickleham Road had believed that it was inherent and instinctive in the female to be “musical.” Mums even “played” a little herself, though it rarely got beyond hymns on Sunday afternoons; and Father thought she played beautifully. He didn’t just say so; he really-and-truly thought it---because he loved her. Noelle began music lessons at the age of nine, and for three years she hated it. Father and Mums could not afford individual teaching, so Noelle had to take what was going from the communal music mistress at the girls’ school---and that wasn’t very much. Scales, arpeggios and the interminable “studies” of a German called Hoegler, the first syllable of whose name seemed to Noelle to contain one letter too many. As a lamp to ambition was held up a volume of Easy Pieces by the same master; the height of achievement was the possibility of playing, one distant day, such gems as “Abendrot” or “Geburetag.” As a treat the music mistress sometimes played them through to you, just to show you what life might be.
Noelle hated it, shirked her practices, flew into rages, kicked the piano, vexed Mums and wept. She plodded loathingly at Herr Hoegler’s synthetic trebles and mechanical bass, she made the same mistakes time after time, she didn’t try. One dreadful day she spat at “Abendrot” and stamped on “Geburtstag.” For the truth was of course, that Noelle was not “musical” at all---any more than Mums had been before her.
Then came the remarkable, world-opening day. She was twelve and she was out with Mums in Finchley Road and they met one of the last of the good old unmuffled street organs. Noelle had heard street organs, of course many times before---they were no strangers to Mickleham Road---but about this experience there was something quite special and distinct. For one thing, it was a lovely frosty high-heavened day, for another it was the novel melody the street organ played. It was a popular favourite of the day called “Avalon,” but it was new to both Noelle and Mums. Noelle said, suddenly entranced:
“Oh, Mums, I wish I could play that.”
“Perhaps you could, Ducks.”
“But we don’t know what it is. Oh, Mums, do ask him.”
Mums asked him at once; she was always splendid over things like that. She would have asked the conductor of the Grenadier Guards Band in mid-performance; she never minded anybody because she had a theory that most people really wanted to be kind and were grateful to you for giving them a chance. Darling Mums! But the man had gone on to another tune and he was rather stupid; though they tried to hum the tune he couldn’t pick it up, and of course he kept grinding away, and it is rather difficult to hum one tune while a street organ is playing another---even if you are “musical.” So there they had to stand in Finchley Road while he went through the whole set of tunes again till at last it came. And Noelle jumped up and down crying: “That’s it! That’s it!” and the man scratched his head and said: “Ow, that! That’s Havlon, that is.” And they bought it almost at once in a music shop; “Avalon” by Al Jolson and Vincent Rose, B. Feldman and Co., two shillings and well worth it.
So music for Noelle became a bright frosty day in Finchley Road, and darling Mums being kind, and “Havlon”---they always called it “Havlon”---difficult but rewarding in F major. And presently it became something else, for just as she was mastering “Havlon,” Father took that influenza and became very ill and died. It was all very quick, but there was one terrible week when she would creep to his bedroom door and say: “Dads, would you like to hear Havlon?” And a husky voice would say as if it breathed with difficulty: “Yes, Noey.” Again and again she played it, concentrating frantically. But a day came when he didn’t care any longer to hear “Havlon”; and then a day came when he couldn’t hear it. . . .
So now music became Father dying, and the gentle chords of “Havlon” playing him away and all the emotionalism and the ecstasy and the tears and the remorse and the resolves that come with death in the house. “I left my love at Avalon, Beside the Bay.” . . . There was no Bay and it was Mickleham Road, not Avalon, but it was somehow appropriate, wasn’t it? Noelle looked up “Avalon” in an encyclopaedia and the encyclopaedia, mercifully knowing nothing of the New World, gave her the old Arthurian Avalon and not that resort where the popular songster left his love. And lo! Avalon was the kingdom of the dead and the earthly Paradise of the West and the abode of heroes where Arthur “went” himself. So it was more appropriate than ever, and even now that Father was gone Noelle could play “Havlon” to him again and again. The encyclopaedia said it meant the Isle of Apples; Father was fond of apples. . . .
So out of emotions and sentimentalities and misunderstandings music for Noelle became “Havlon,” and this is the important point---tunes like “Havlon”; sentimental tunes, sad tunes, sticky tunes, sloppy tunes, sob-stuff, slush. And long after she had grown out of “Havlon” this predilection remained fixed. For the bright and the brilliant in music, for the humorous and the delicate, for the abstruse and the significant and the thoughtful, she had no manner of use; but a street organ could at any time seize her heart, a popular tune could run away with it. When progress brought on the Cinema Organ she was delighted; when crooners came, she loved them.
And this in Robin’s house in No. 5, Frame Square, where Mozart’s cherubim spiralled to heaven, and Debussy’s fauns capered, and Rimsky-Korsakoff buzzed bright and playful, and Chopin, dying of his lungs, made a business of misery. This in No. 5, Frame Square where “cheap” was an epithet and “popular” almost an oath!
Among the things Robin in turn had not foreseen was that Noelle would play the piano. Or that the piano would be in “my” drawing-room.
Secretly and in her heart of hearts Noelle knew she couldn’t play; she had no insight, no interpretation, no talent. With practice she could assimilate the notes so long as these were not too difficult, but there was an end of it. She would have admitted this and perhaps given up music altogether if the general atmosphere at Frame Square had been different. If Graham would have said smiling: “Come on in, Noelle, and let’s play with the railway.” If Audrey: “Do you think I should have the new frock in voile or georgette?” If Robin: “You do put heart in me, my dear!” If, if, if; but none of these people would ever say any of these things. So the music became a grievance; nobody here appreciates my playing; and I can play; classical music too; I’ll show them. Out of Masters of Melody---twenty-four fortnightly parts at one-and-six; easy arrangements; “You can have the World’s Masterpieces at your Finger-ends”; “Play in Your Own Home the World’s Immortal Melodies”---out of this treasury Noelle showed them. “Traumerei” and “Liebestraum” and the “Spring Song”; the “Minuet in G,” and Handel’s “Largo” and Schubert’s “Serenade.” She showed them.
Kenneth, coming in one evening in the very early days, seemed at first as if he might be a ray of light in the darkness. He picked up the offending “Time on My Hands”---it was just after that unfortunate experiment---and said:
“Well, we’ve all got plenty of that. Play it.”
Noelle said sulkily, yet half-eager: “You wouldn’t care to listen to stuff like that.”
“Stuff like what?” Kenneth had his key. “Vox populi, my dear Noelle, vox Dei. Only fools run down the popular song. To those with experience they strike chord upon chord.”
“You don’t really think so.”
“I do indeed. What are the themes of the epidemic melody? Love parted, love lost, the hope of love regained. What else is life?”
She played him “Time On My Hands,” and Kenneth, unlike Robin, asked for it again. “Sing it too, this time.” She played and sang---one eye on Robin. Kenneth, sprawling over the piano, said:
“Where do you find life? In the streets. Where do you find its reflection? In the songs of the streets. That song has life in it. It may be designed to work up the feelings of a little mill-girl at Blackpool saying good-bye to her holiday lover, but the feelings of that little mill-girl are your feelings and mine. And everybody’s. All life, all emotion, are wrapped up in these ballads of the people. It’s a poor heart in which they can’t strike a chord---a poor, starved, barren, neglected heart. Play more.”
Noelle thought---as innocent people did quite often think about Kenneth: “This is a man who understands.” But presently Kenneth burlesqued himself; he overdid it; she came to the conclusion that he was laughing at her. In all probability---as René could have told her---he wasn’t; he was simply pouring out, as hard as he could mint it into syllables, the abundant shifting bullion of his mind. But Noelle didn’t realise that; she left the piano in a huff, vowing tacitly never to play to Kenneth again. In point of fact, the next time he came he had forgotten the vox populi and didn’t ask her.
So nobody at Frame Square appreciated Noelle’s music. Robin listened politely, asked for it when he remembered and---fled to Chopin. René, like his father, made fun of her. Audrey and Graham, with the easy brutality of their generation, simply switched on the wireless. Loud, brassy and slaughtering. You were humming once more against a street organ in Finchley Road. . . . “Havlon.” . . . Ducks. . . . Oh, Mums, Mums, come back and comfort me; I’m tired of it here; it’s all gone wrong. . . .
Grannie, toiling up the four flights at Kenneth’s Cromarty Crescent, thought crossly: “They’re all going off the rails, all going off the rails. All except Noelle---and she was never on them.”
The stairs were as frightful as ever; gasping a little, Grannie gripped the iron railing. . . . Take Graham, for instance. All this writing nonsense, as if we hadn’t a perpetual reminder of what writing leads to in this same Kenneth still two long flights to skyward. Writing led to a top flat in Cromarty Crescent and endless talking about yourself and dispensing with hats and shirts and umbrellas. “A good staff but a bad crutch,” said Sir Walter; and Sir Walter knew. What Graham wants, thought Grannie, pulling herself together for the further ascent, is a good settled job under Government; there must be plenty of them going. We pay enough in taxes, Heaven knows, we put in enough; couldn’t we draw something out? That’s what Graham should do. Films!
Then take Audrey. Noelle had visited Treherne Gardens two days ago, sloppy as usual and “Mother”ing and inclined to be tearful. What had she got to cry over, the great waxwork? That hadn’t emerged, but there had been talk of Audrey. Audrey, according to Noelle, was interested in a young man; but instead of being grateful because this normal incident had at last happened, Noelle was working herself up because she had seen the young man and thought him “common.” That from Noelle! thought Grannie, viciously rasping her plate; pot and kettle with a vengeance. With a vengeance. And surely any young man, be he common as clay, would be preferable to poring over books by demented Russians, planning voyages to fantastic European capitals, attending East End meetings in unventilated halls reeking with germs and infection. And if the young man were really very common, Audrey wouldn’t really have him; she has high standards, thought Grannie, I will say that for her; she takes after me there. Now Graham on the other hand---a coarse feeder.
On the last landing but one Grannie paused for a final summoning of breath. Bother Graham and Audrey; it was not about Graham and Audrey that she had come to-day; not for either of these would she have assailed this destroying Everest of staircases. No, it was René. Audrey and Graham were perfectly safe; they would go so far and no further---the little Canutes, thought Grannie, with some mixture of ideas. But René carried within himself the seeds of disaster and destruction; he was charged with an explosive mixture which might blow him right off the earth and into the cold vacancies of space. And amongst her unexplained tearfulness and her strictures on Audrey, Noelle had let slip that René was determined to go to the Spanish War. Now the difference between that and Audrey’s determination to go to Russia was that René would go to the Spanish War. Noelle, of course, could not understand why he should want to do anything of the kind; she only thought vaguely that he shouldn’t and that Kenneth should stop him. But Grannie realised quite clearly why he wanted to go and also that Kenneth, left to himself, would fail to stop him. And whenever she thought of “Rennie” she saw only that little round-eyed long-ago oddity in the French sailor suit on Victoria platform with his questioning engaging smile; a fright, but a sweet. She cared what happened to that oddity, she really did---even if nobody else seemed to.
She rang Kenneth’s bell at last. Kenneth and Jacqueline were in, of course---they were indeed expecting her; but though she had announced the precise hour and minute of her visit and had kept both to the tick, had Kenneth come down a yard of these horrible stairs to help her? Not he. He said, as he always said: “Sorry, Mother, I meant to come down and give you a hand”---but he didn’t even get out of his chair. Jacqueline said punctiliously: “Meesis Reeshie,” as if she were identifying an animal at the Zoo or a character in a guessing competition. Grannie said: “Well, I suppose you’re both all right?” No fear of you! she thought. Sitting bolt upright on the edge of an uncomfortable chair and drinking Jacqueline’s atrocious tea, Grannie led the conversation, as usual, to Frame Square. Kenneth loved talking about Frame Square; in almost all its aspects it offered him a wide field for general dissertation. Grannie said: “Noelle seems to be very unhappy.” (But the Waxwork had seemed something more than unhappy; her manner had been quite unusual---a little furtive, a little guilty, a little desperate. Now why was that?) Kenneth said, yawning, that Noelle was always unhappy. “The introverted inertia of the ascidian——”
“It is most ridiculous. She ought to be perfectly content.” Kenneth tried again. “The negative vice of content——” Jacqueline said, with fine irrelevance: “’Ave eh leetle mor tay.” Shuddering, Grannie declined. She said: “Noelle is a very stupid woman.”
Kenneth was in a judicial mood. He said:
“Oh, Noelle’s awful; we all know that. But it isn’t all her fault that she doesn’t fit in. Noelle’s protoplasm; but I can’t stand these two cold little neuters either.”
Grannie gazed at him. Neuters? The ass.
“You mean you can’t understand them.”
“Possibly, possibly. Man flinches from the great uncomprehended. And I must admit that Graham with his toy trains and Audrey with her toy Socialists——”
Grannie, sitting up on her chair, said suddenly and very sharply:
“What’s all this I hear about Rennie going to Spain?”
“Who says he’s going to Spain?”
“Noelle for one.”
“Oh, Noelle says so; he says so. That doesn’t mean he’s going.”
“Doesn’t it?” (“You idiot! You ostrich!”) “He should not go. You know that perfectly well. It would be very bad for him.”
Kenneth lit his pipe. “The young of to-day——” he began. But Grannie was not Jacqueline.
“I know as much about the young of to-day,” said Grannie, “as you do, and they are in no way different from the young of yesterday or any other day. They will do foolish things if they are not restrained. And it is the business of those in authority to stop them. In the case of Rennie, your business.”
Kenneth blew smoke and made that shrugging spreading Frenchified gesture she so much detested.
“I can’t stop him. The young of to-day——”
“Then,” said Grannie severely, “you ought to be black ashamed of yourself.” Kenneth, sprawling in his chair, enunciated one of his stock half-truths. “You’re a hard woman, Mother.” And Jacqueline, behind Grannie’s back, gave him a look that René could have recognised. “Little Pipsqueak Simson!” it said.
Noelle and the gentleman who was selling music met on the doorstep of Frame Square one morning just after twelve. Noelle was coming in from her shopping with Mackay; Nixon was evidently in process of getting rid of the gentleman who was selling music. She was pushing the door shut on him with firm “No thank you’s”; he was edging reluctantly away. The first Noelle saw of him was his back and she thought subconsciously: “That’s a splendid back.” It was a splendid back---long and straight in a grey herring-bone overcoat rather too desperately waisted, rather too squarely epauletted. He wore no hat and he had most attractive dead-leaf auburn hair. Noelle’s impulse was to stroll along a little till his ejection was completed; she herself “collected” sometimes for Church purposes and she was gently disposed towards all who had to go about ringing bells, saying “Will you please?” receiving the round shot of gruff “No thank you’s,” the shrapnel of bitter aggrieved and contemptuous looks. She would have avoided the music-selling gentleman if she could. But Mackay settled that for her. He rushed up the steps roaring and barking, snapping at the gentleman’s dark blue trousers, making such a detestable fool of himself that one simply had to apologise. “Macky! Come here! . . . I’m sorry. . . . My stupid dog . . .”
The young man---for he was now clearly a young man; her own age anyway and that is always young---turned to her with a fresh gleam of hope. He smiled brilliantly; he had what is called a winning smile; his own teeth---none of your dentures; a little crisp reddish moustache; freckles; a cross between ex-officer and the stage; a little like one of these modern handsome-yet-true-to-life tailors’ advertisements. “Or, for a Morning in Town, there’s This One.” He said smiling.
“He’s only doing his job. I like dogs. They like me.” He bent to pat Mackay who suffered it grudgingly.
Noelle thought: “He speaks almost like a gentleman; he didn’t say ‘Madam’; independent.” Aloud she said briskly: “He doesn’t mean anything——” and moved towards the door. But the young man saw his advantage and seized it.
“I was hoping I might interest you in this.”
He flourished it in front of her---what is known as a “shilling sheet.” It was mainly blue in colour---a Cambridge ground with Oxford lettering. “YESTERDAY AND YOU” ran across it like a bandolier. In the top left was a little calendar of the month of January, the first fourteen days crossed out in black, the fifteenth in red---“Yesterday” no doubt. In the bottom right was “You”---a snub-nosed young female with a chin, silhouetted in black against a white disc of moon. Noelle read: “Written and Composed by Chick Merry. Featured by Chick Merry and the Speckled Band.” She looked at it gravely, as she always looked at anything she was shown. He said anxiously:
“Would you care to have a copy? I’m Chick Merry.”
Noelle began: “Oh, I don’t think——” But she was no good at this sort of thing; that universal loving-kindness, that possessing desire for “niceness” all round her which Graham and Audrey called “slop,” laid hold of her. She spoke irresolutely and, in the face of resolution, was lost as usual.
“It’s a waltz number; a waltz-song.”
“Is it?” Noelle loved waltzes. “They---they’re very popular just now, aren’t they?”
“So you’d think.” And the winning smile---but it was something better than winning. “So you’d think. But you try and sell one in Tin Pan Alley and see what the publishers say. That’s why I had to bring out this one myself. I printed a thousand---fourpence ha’penny a time it cost me. If I sell the lot I won’t make a fortune; but I wanted it to be known. . . .” Suddenly, looking at the eager face under that attractive hair, the brown eyes with sparks in them, she too wanted it to be known. It seemed so hard . . . but if one bought all the rubbish that came round to one’s door—— She said:
“I should hardly think it was worth while.”
“You never know.” He saw himself making headway. “You know ‘The Long Long Trail’?”
“The war-time song? Of course.” She hummed a bar or two. Mackay stood dejectedly saying: “When are we to get in out of this draught?”
“Yes, that’s it. Well, the fellow who wrote that had to publish it himself and they say he made thirty thousand out of it. Pounds, not dollars. So you never know. . . . Look, I think you’d like this little number.” He pushed “Yesterday and You “ in front of her again. Staring at it, Noelle said slowly and extraordinarily: “Why did you make ‘Yesterday’ the fifteenth of January?”
“I don’t know. No reason. Why?”
“Because the sixteenth of January was my wedding-day.”
“We’ll alter that in the second edition.” He smiled with increasing confidence; the conversation was entering more intimate planes. “But---I’d like you to hear the little tune. Have you the time---could I possibly run it over for you on your piano?”
Noelle had not the time; it was an absurd proposal; if once you started letting in street salesmen They told each other, didn’t they? They left chalk marks on the house like tramps; he might even be a housebreaker’s scout. (Oh, don’t be silly, Noelle! You know he isn’t like that; he---he’s a gentleman.) Yet how terrible it must be hawking one’s own work from door to door---work you’d slaved at, work you believed in; and always “No thank you, no thank you,” as if you offered them dirt---servants turning up their smutty noses, savage houseowners cursing you, telling you perhaps to go to hell, threatening you with dogs. Oh, it must be terrible! Something in Noelle, responding to the freckles and the auburn hair, began to stir---sloppily; it would be nice to see those long white hands with the little burnt-sienna flecks all over them playing her piano. . . .
Somehow they were going upstairs.
He sat down at the piano without taking off his overcoat and his back, sitting there, was very splendid indeed. He ran his fingers gently over the keys, saying: “It’s a nice instrument, this. Yours?” Noelle said: “Well, mine and my husband’s. We both play.” (And that’s the truth, isn’t it?) Without further remark he launched into “Yesterday and You.” It was neither very good nor very bad; mechanical E Flat harmonies, a diversion into G Minor and home again through the sub and the dominant. Glancing over his shoulder, she read the first words of the refrain: “Days may be long, Nights may be blue, I’ll live in Yesterday and You, darling”; might have been worse. She said:
“I like it. But it’s very like something else.”
He was indignant---the artist eclipsing the salesman. “It isn’t!”
“Yes, it is.” She forgot he was a street salesman---she too became an artist; they were artists together, musicians. “And I do know about tunes. It’s like an old American tune called ‘That’s You, Baby’ or something. But you’ve changed the time.”
He said stiffly: “I never heard that number.”
“No. But wait---I’ll show you. I’ve got it somewhere here in an old selection.” She began to rummage amongst her untidy music, flinging it about; she had forgotten about housebreaker’s scouts and chalk marks on the lintel; this was a friend, a fellow artist---and his hands on the keyboard looked even nicer than she had expected. And he was warm, he was alive; he believed in his work even though it was only a silly little song, he had hope. Warmth, life, belief, hope; how I long for people with these! . . . His brown eyes were smoky now, he was offended; but she must show him, prove herself in the right. She couldn’t find that old selection---one of Campbell and Connelly’s; yellow cover; where was it? . . He began to play again, his hands sliding over the keys. To Noelle, bent double and grubbing in her music chest, chords came floating down, floating as if from a remote distance of space and time. She straightened abruptly.
“That’s ‘Dreamy Melody’.”
He nodded, playing a little louder. And suddenly, in a moment, Noelle was back at Blackmore Hill going to a dance with Fairy Falkland---plump pink-and-gold Fairy with a spot coming on her chin and no word yet of the fatal Rex Bradnett. “Dreamy Melody”. . . and it was almost as if Noelle lay again in that wonderful pink bathroom lapped in the scented water, so warm, so safe. . . . He said, watching her face: “That’s an old tune.”
Noelle laughed happily. “My tunes are all old tunes. Do you remember ‘Always’?”
“Sure. It’s had a bit of a come-back just lately, that one. Like this——”
He played it; carelessly at first as if only for a bar or two; then suddenly throwing himself into it. He played it. And once again he played Noelle back to Hampstead but this time it was to a dance at the Arcadia and to Clive Farringay. Clive; dancing at the Hampstead Arcadia; and what a business Mums and her Ducks had had over the dance frock but what a triumph it had been in the end. Clive Farringay and Noelle dancing at the Hampstead Arcadia and forgetting the Bridge Road School and Herring-guts and Miss-Noelly-has-a-pain-in-her-belly. “Always.” Lovely old tune; “When the things you’ve planned Need a helping hand, I will understand---Always.” Lovely old sentiment! She had thought at the Arcadia: “It is so with Clive and me”; much later she had thought: “It will be so with me and Robin.” But it hadn’t been so in either case. “Always?” Never.
It came to an end; Clive and the Arcadia faded away with Fairy and the pink bathroom. She said, still dreaming: “You play most beautifully.”
He didn’t deny it. “It’s my job. We play that number quite a lot just now. It’s had a come-back.”
“‘We’?” she thought; but her mind had wandered on. Tunes, like flowers in a garden, lured her down the paths of memory. “Do you remember ‘Missouri’?”
He remembered it.
“‘Oh Wonderful One’?” He remembered it. (That was Blackmore Hill again?” “‘What’ll I Do?’” That too.
He looked up with his smile that was now not only winning but conquering. “Fond of waltzes, aren’t you?” (Oh, and wasn’t she? Couldn’t she just waltz now with a good floor and a good band and---ah, yes, with a lover! Not with poor Robin; Robin danced---if he had to; and he made sure that he didn’t have to very often. And even then it was a self-conscious walk down the four sides and a scamped chassez at the corners. Poor Robin!) Suddenly, as if he too had come to a decision, the pianist made an effort, he set out to please her, to show his tricks. As if he had been the Pied Piper he led her on and away; as if she had been the doomed children of Hamelin, she gazed at him and after him. Forgetting lunch, forgetting Robin, Graham, Audrey, Mackay, she called the tunes; he played and played. He had guessed her period now; he knew where to throw his net. “Sleep.” “Tell Her at Twilight,” “I’ll See You in My Dreams”---up they all came like nymphs out of a moonlit pool, out of the moonlit pool of happiness and gaiety and---youth. Noelle said, her hands clasped: “You do play most beautifully. . . . I wonder if you know another old tune I’m very fond of. ‘Good Night’?”
“‘Good Night, my Love’? That isn’t old.”
“No, no. Just ‘Good Night? I think it goes, ‘Good night, Good night, I’ll see you in the morning?”
“Oh, that.” He smiled and set himself to play it, talking as he played. “I should know that one. It’s our signature tune. The tune the boys close down with.”
“The boys?”
“Yes. The band. Our dance band.”
“Are you in a band, then?”
“Yeh. I thought you’d tumbled to that. Four evenings a week. . . . We’re the Speckled Band.”
She remembered now: “Featured by Chick Merry and the Speckled Band.” Poor little Speckled Band! She saw them suddenly in a wave of Noellish sentiment playing away four evenings a week. The Speckled Band; Chick Merry; the poor pathetic things.
“And you’re Chick Merry?”
“Well, I am and I’m not. That’s one of my names.”
“Oh? How many have you got?”
“Just two---that and the real one. In the band I’m Chick Merry. But really I’m Chris Milroy.”
She was immensely relieved; she been trying to like “Chick Merry” as a name and failing; now it was gone.
“Why on earth did you choose a name like Chick Merry when your own——”
“When my own’s much nicer? I didn’t choose it. It was wished on me. You’ve got to be Chicks and Joes and Harry’s in our line. The public expects it. . . . Ever heard of us---the band, I mean?”
“N-no.” How she wished she could say she had. “You don’t broadcast, do you?”
“Lord, no! We play in a place called the Marina out Highbury way. Can’t get better. Wish we could. And that’s only the four nights a week; doesn’t pay them to open Wednesdays and Thursday---early closings. But it pays us to keep on playing together; we might get a better job that way. Most of us do something else in the day-time. One chap gives violin lessons. Another demonstrates new music at Woolworth’s. So on. You know for yourself what I do.”
She was acutely interested, absurdly interested; what could his Speckled Band matter to Mrs. Robin Ritchie, No. 5, Frame Square?
“How many are there of you?”
“Nine. I’m the piano. Trumpet and trombone; guitar, string bass, three saxes, drums. First alto sax doubles on the violin for the waltz refrains.”
“I see. And are you Speckled?” (It should be “freckled,” she thought, not “speckled.”) “ Speckled? Oh, the name. We had originally a sort of get-up---white jacket and trousers with polka dots. Real idea was, the kit didn’t dirty so quick as all-white. Then we thought the name was smart. Simmy---that’s the first alto sax, it’s his band really, I’m the librarian---thought of it. But it doesn’t go; poor old Sherlock Holmes is a back number now. Nothing lasts nowadays. Look at the film stars; here to-day, gone to-morrow as you might say.”
He had risen and closed the piano; standing, he was again a splendid figure; he was as tall as she was---half an inch taller. He spoke nicely, like an educated man---even if that “as you might say” did give him away a little. What matter . . .? Yes, she thought, look at the film stars; nothing lasts. Youth doesn’t last, and I’m letting mine slip away; I’ll be thirty at Christmas; I haven’t had any fun for I don’t know how long. . . . But I could have a come-back---like “Always.” Fun; I could like it yet all right.
He said, as to an equal---and why not? “You fond of dancing?”
“I was.”
“Meaning you’re not now.”
“I haven’t done any for a long time. I haven’t had much opportunity.” His eyes (brown with sparks in them, very quick, very clear) appraised her; moved from her all round the room and back. It seemed to Noelle that in that flying journey they picked up everything, they ferreted out her whole story. She’s married to a man older than herself, the eyes told him; she’s given up being young and she’s sorry; she’s married above herself---out of her class to get this drawing-room and this piano and that portrait and all and all. All this, it seemed to Noelle, his quick eyes told him while she took three deep breaths; and in those three breaths she realised---amazingly---that she didn’t mind his knowing it.
“Pity,” he said at last. “You look as if you’d be very good.”
“Too big.” (But was I? Don’t be absurd!)
“Don’t you believe it. Good-sized women are the only ones that can really move. If they’ve balance. Now you . . .”---his eyes appraised her again and more boldly---“you’ve got balance. Perfect. I should think you’d dance very well.”
“I did, I think.”
“Yeh. Pity. . . . Why don’t you come out to the Marina one evening and have a try?”
Noelle was staggered, staggered and frightened, frightened and allured. “Oh, I couldn’t. . . . I don’t think I could. . . . My husband doesn’t care for that sort of thing. . . .”
The brown eyes watched her. With tact and sense he said nothing at all, but somehow she overheard his thoughts. “You aren’t tied to your husband, are you?” “We’re not asking your husband.” “Need he know anything about it?” A little fun again, a little youth?
“Pity,” he said again at last. “Well, think it over. The Marina won’t run away. It’s a respectable place really---you needn’t be afraid of coming there. Light refreshments only, of course---ices and coffee and so on. No licence, those sort of places never have. You wouldn’t find it too bad. Trouble is, it’s not grand enough to get the bookers out to hear us. Still---you never know.”
Noelle heard herself saying: “I’ll remember it. The Marina.”
“The Marina. Rydal Avenue. It’s not very far from Clissold Park really if you know where that is. You’ll see the neon lights from the bus stop. . . . Do come; we’ll play all your favourites. The boys’ll be glad of a change.”
“But who’s going to dance with me?”
He was chagrined for an instant; he had forgotten about the dancing, his mind occupied with showing off his band. He said with constrained gentility:
“If you’d favour me with one or two——”
“But---the piano?”
“Joe can take a turn once in a way. He often does. I do the same for him. See?”
That “See?” wasn’t right; but she wanted him to say “See?”; whatever he said suited him. Recollecting herself, she said with sudden dignity: “I’m afraid the whole thing’s impossible.” And so it was, of course; this has been a crazy half-hour; moonshine; the Pied Piper indeed. “Well no harm in keeping it in mind. Come if you can. When you can. ‘Speaking on behalf of myself and the boys,’ as they say——”
The drawing-room door opened suddenly; Robin’s head came round it; the white half-crown above his ear flashed like a policeman’s lamp.
“Noelle! Aren’t you ever coming to lunch?”
Noelle blushed suddenly scarlet; saw that Chris saw it; saw that he liked seeing it. Mortified, she muttered something: “This gentleman is just playing me some of his music. . . .” Robin said, almost crossly: “Well, come along, dear, come along.” Noelle said quickly, her heart jumping about under her blouse: “Six copies of ‘Yesterday,’ please; please don’t bother about change.” She put a ten-shilling note on the piano, muttered something more about finding his own way out. Then she came along---with just one backward look at those bright challenging eyes. They had seen a little more, it appeared, for one of them---there was no doubt or question about it---winked at her.
Running upstairs to wash her hands and take off her hat, Noelle was amazed to experience a familiar but forgotten feeling. A difficult feeling to describe but she described it to herself in the old familiar and forgotten terms. She had gone all milky inside. And for the first time---for the very first time---since Mr. Farringay.
Audrey was not lunching at home that day, so she missed a possible glimpse of Chris Milroy; as a set-off she had her lunch with René in a little Italian restaurant not very far from Bow Street. There was no reason why they should not have gone to the Holborn Restaurant or Lyons Corner House; but there was a conspiratorial quality about Salvati’s that pleased them. And the minestrone was good---if terribly filling.
Perhaps it was the minestrone, perhaps the rather sickly Lacrima Christi they drank, but a gentle melancholy descended upon Audrey, a prophetic haze. She saw René exalted by an exciting future, haloed in adventure to come. He was looking specially alert and intriguing that day; for once he had put on a collar and tie in the place of his polo sweaters, and under his curls his bright little eyes shone and sparkled. Very Dollfuss to-day. When he talked about Spain it was as if he were already there.
“René, do you think things will ever come right?”
“What things?”
“Oh, the world. People. Everything. Will people ever stop hating each other and having wars and slums and terrors and strikes?”
“Yes. One day.”
“Oh---one day! But what can we do to make it now?”
“We can do what we can. Every time people like you and I talk about it, it brings it a little nearer. Every time anyone has a real try. Every time anyone really wants to. It all helps. It’s just a question of getting together. Hardly anyone can hate individuals; we all hate classes because classes are just an idea. If people could see each other face to face-----” Audrey stubbed her cigarette into the little china ashtray with its picture of Sorrento. Yes, indeed; you talked about cads, bounders, outsiders, artisans, shopboys; but when you met them face to face . . . “René, I want to tell you something. I---I’ve made a friend.”
“That’s always a good thing to do.” Sweet René! He never deluged you with “who’s” and “where’s”; he waited for you to tell.
“He---he isn’t a gentleman.”
“Isn’t he?”
“No. He works in a lending library in Baker Street. Well---it’s a shop really, let’s face it. We meet once a week in a pub off Oxford Street called the Cat in Boots.”
“Why a pub?”
“Because there isn’t anywhere else we can meet.”
“Why don’t you ask him to the house?”
“I do. He won’t come.”
“Then he’s a fool.”
“Oh, no, he isn’t!” She rushed into a spirited defence of Lionel, his sweetness, his softness, his clear hopeful little mind. “There’s nothing nasty in him, René, not one single thing. You don’t meet so many people like that. . . . He’ll come to Frame Square one day, but he feels awkward about it. And, of course, they wouldn’t stand for him if they knew.”
“If they knew what?”
Audrey wondered if she was blushing; not much, she thought, if at all. “If they knew I liked him. I do like him, René.”
“So I see.”
“Well, why shouldn’t I?”
“There isn’t any reason. If he’s up to you. Is he?”
“Yes.” She repeated it more firmly. “Oh, yes.” (But was he?) “Anyway, I’ll bring him up---that’s what I’ve got to do. You see, René——”
She began to describe Lionel, as Lionel had emerged after half a dozen meetings in the saloon bar of the Cat in Boots. (The Cat in Boots was not specially attractive, and Lionel disliked beer almost as much as did Audrey; but it had become a sort of ritual; they had gone there on that first outing together---that Palladium outing---and for want of any better place they had gone back to it and back. Somehow, in this atmosphere of Bitter-and-Burton and three-thirty-winners, intimacy---and a rather delicate intimacy---had developed.) A Lionel had emerged who was something more than sweet and soft and nice-looking and a bio-chemical affinity with Audrey; Lionel’s ambitions had emerged and they were not meagre. He wanted to “go in for” politics; he wanted to write a book that would be a survey of modern youth---“what people are thinking, Audrey, what young people are thinking, people like you and me, because they’re the people who matter.” Unfortunately he had no idea how to set about either task. “I’ll show him,” thought Audrey. He had thought tremendously, and all his thoughts were noble and good. He had worked in the slums---or he had tried to, till the sights and the smells made him sick; also his not being a Christian made it awkward for him with the curates. He was not very much, perhaps, but oh! he wanted so splendidly.
“Just because God’s given him a rather feeble body, René. . . . It’s hard for him. He’s timid——”
“Well, you ought to be able to cure that.”
“That’s what I’m trying. You---you don’t think I’m a fool, René?”
“Good Lord, no! . . . I’ll tell you what I do think, Aud’ey. I think you’re falling in love.”
“Oh, René, am I?”
“Looks like it.” His sweet intrepid little smile flashed across the table; it seemed to flash back from the brightness of Audrey’s Philippa-blue eyes.
“Well, I don’t care if I am. He’s worth it.” (Or was he? And again she thought to herself: “I’ll make him worth it.”) She began to tell more about her Lionel. “He’s got lovely things in him, René, big things. I don’t deny there’s a sort of streak. . . . I’m going to get rid of that.” The eager voice ran on; René sat smiling. “I’m going to drive all that out of him, the commonness, the timidness “
“Well, you can.”
“Oh, René, do you think so?”
“Of course you can.”
“Oh, René, you’re a darling. You’re the only person I could have told this to. You---you’re grown-up. Like me. And you’ve never once asked where I met him or who his people are——”
“Does that matter?”
“I know, I know. But it’s the first question they’d ask. As a matter of fact”---she hesitated for an instant but only because it made such a silly story---“I’ll tell you how I met him. You needn’t go shouting it about; but I was out with Mackay and he fell over the lead——”
René burst out laughing; Audrey herself laughed in sympathy---you could with René. “But about his people——” The laughter died suddenly away. “Well I don’t know anything about his people. He doesn’t tell me. I can see he doesn’t want to tell me---he sort of evades. Do you think that matters?”
“Depends. I should say, not.”
“I mean, I like him for keeping himself to himself up to a point. But I do wish he’d open out sometimes. There can’t be any need for secrets——”
“He’ll come on. Give him time.”
“Yes, I know. Time. . . . And you think it’s all right; you think I ought to——”
“Yes. I do. Good luck.”
“Oh, René, you’re a darling; there isn’t another soul I could have talked to like this. I do like you! . . . René, I wish sometimes we hadn’t been cousins.”
“Cousins? Why not?”
“Oh---the usual reason.”
“Isn’t that rather an odd thing to say when you’re just telling me you’re in love with Lionel?”
“Y-yes. I suppose it is. Yet it’s true, too.” (Mothering; I have to mother Lionel; it wouldn’t be so with René; René’s grown-up.) “Perhaps there’s two me’s. Perhaps. . . . I don’t know.”
“You never know, do you?” He stood up; he was laughing at her. “ Well, good luck with Lionel. If anybody can make him work out right, you will.”
Dear René! She gazed at him, adoring. But a thought struck her.
“I never told you I was in love with Lionel.”
“Didn’t you?”
“No. I don’t even know if I am.”
“Sez you, Aud’ey!”
Noelle was certain, of course, that she would never go to the Marina or whatever the ridiculous place was called; then she was certain she would. She would, she wouldn’t, she would. If Robin had not gone out one night to one of his Faculty dinners she might never have summoned up the courage; she had few friends; it was difficult to find evening excuses. But Robin did go to his dinner, and it chanced that in the forenoon of that day there had been particular trouble with Audrey. Frame Square seemed at its coldest, its bleakest, its most unrewardingly exacting. Towards six in the evening Noelle crept guiltily to the telephone. The place was in the telephone book all right; and it answered. “Is---is the Speckled Band playing to-night, please?”
“Yes, it’s playing.” A flat cash-desk voice, unastonished, matter of course.
“What time?”
“Dancing seven-thirty to eleven. Extension Fridays. Light refreshments only.” Like repeating a lesson. “Gala nights Saturdays till twelve.”
So it was real; they were real, he was real. Noelle said hastily: “Oh, thank you!” and put down the receiver. It would be wrong to go, it would be absurd to go. But I do want a little fun again; I want to see---Chris---again; I want to be played to, played with, appreciated. . . .
The bus conductor said “Rydal Avenue.” You could certainly see the neon lights from the bus stop; it was difficult to see anything else. In flaming amber and blue scrolls they proclaimed The Marina. Dancing. Skating. But once inside, the Marina hardly lived up to its lights. It was a makeshift, matchboard, behind-the-scenes sort of place---bare woodwork, worn carpets, unfinished, crude. The heliotrope uniform of the girl who took Noelle’s cloak at a long zinc counter was well-worn and not over clean; the girl’s manner was friendly, she chattered and goggled, chewing some kind of sweet the while. The patrons however, evidently acquiesced in these familiarities, for a blonde girl in a clinging green frock came in and said: “That’s my ’at over there, love.” The attendant said: “Wot, dear, the green one?” and they exchanged jests and reminiscences. Noelle handed in her handbag, but that was wrong; “you can’t leave that ’ere, dear---you pay another penny and leave it at the office.” There was a long bench in front of a tremendously brilliant mirror; there were odd little penny-in-the-slot machines for various scents. Nothing alarming; but just different. . . Shaking a little, Noelle gave her face a hasty glance and struggled into the ballroom through a mob of nondescript young men clustered densely round the door.
Here the Marina certainly expanded; the floor was big with little tables all round it, fenced off from it by a balustrade; most of these, though apparently empty, proved on closer inspection to have been reserved by a motley collection of handbags. Noelle found a free one at last and sat down at it feeling a complete fool; at once a waitress, clad for some obscure reason in Cossack dress, came and asked her what she would have. Noelle said: “Nothing, thank you,” but the waitress said: “Oh, come on---’ave a coffee, do,” and out of mingled kindness and funk, Noelle agreed. At the next table a brace of female wallflowers were consoling themselves with a plate of rather watery and unmanageable poached eggs; in the intervals when they could allow their attention to wander from these delicacies they told each other instalments of what seemed to be an interminable story. “So then we went on to . . .” “So then, after that. . . .” Presently the inevitable happened; a spoonful of egg went astray; there was an outcry; the waitress came hurrying with a napkin; much laughter. Noelle thought: “How could I have come!”
The band was playing a slow fox-trot; the announcer said through his megaphone: “The next dance will be an excuse-me.” In an excuse-me, it seemed, you went up to the youth or maiden of your choice, tapped the current partner elegantly on the shoulder and took your prize away. What would happen, thought Noelle, if somebody refused to surrender? Would they be thrown out? But nobody did refuse. The discards mounted up in a mass in the middle of the floor; immediately Noelle was sorry for them---though they were not, in truth, a very attractive lot. But then neither were some of the survivors. Some of the dancing was very good and some of it was very, very bad, but it was all eager and vigorous. No crawling down the sides and pretending a chassez at the corners here. . . . Poor Robin! . . . The men were all in suits, but a great many of the girls were in evening dress. Noelle thought: They carry it off much better than their boy friends. The influence of various film favourites could be clearly seen; you noticed Crawfords, Dietrichs, Garbos, Colberts. Nothing much, any of them, but weren’t they happy!
At her table Noelle sat and sipped her coffee; she thought people stared at her, but perhaps they didn’t. I must look so old, she thought; except myself there’s hardly a soul in this room over twenty-five. Will Chris think me old when he sees me here? But will he ever see me here? She began to hate the Marina; the lighting was bad, the decor was bad, the coffee was bad. The Speckled Band was bad too; it thumped and battered; it kept good time, but it made no music. The clerks and clerkesses, the mechanics and shop-girls, swung round and round, sliding, spinning, laughing, bumping. There was a reek of setting-lotion and cigarettes---and some other things. A little man with sandy hair and glasses began yelling into the microphone; his high notes were like the whistle of a locomotive; you wondered how such physical insignificance could produce them. . . . Nocturne in fustian; bacchanal in coffee-essence; depressing.
Almost at once she saw Chris, but here, of course, he was Chick Merry; she only saw his head and shoulders at intervals as the moon glimpses out through gale-driven clouds. He was thumping away at the piano, jogging gently up and down, and somehow as an item in the band his playing lost all its merit. It was like the playing of any other fourth-rate dance-band pianist. She thought he wasn’t trying very hard. Why should he after all---for the benefit of these moon-faced children who came here to meet, start a courtship, get married and never see the Marina again? Why should he---with saxophones drowning him in insane cacophony, with the drums rattling like a pneumatic drill, with that terrible little man howling into the microphone? Noelle thought: “I wish I’d never come; I wish I’d never come; I’ll go quick before he sees me.”
But in that instant the rushing clouds opened for a longer interval and by a miracle he did see her; his smile broke, his head tossed a little, he waved to her. He began---or was it her imagination---to play better, more carefully. He leaned forward to the saxophones and said something; presently they launched into a sickly version of “Always.” In the middle of it they all died away and left Chris alone at the piano except for a muffled drum and a very soft violin. Chris played “Always” to Noelle---oh, yes, to Noelle. He ran through a waltz medley---“Oh Wonderful One,” “What’ll I Do?” “Dreamy Melody.” All her tunes. The little shopgirls, shuffling round with the “steps” they had patiently learnt at their one-and-sixpenny lessons, were pleased; they applauded Chris; Noelle began to like them better---all the little Garbos and Dietrichs and Oberons. To them, poor children, Chris played only the accompaniment to their own slaveries; but to Noelle he played back out of the tawdry Marina (which seemed, however, less tawdry now) that wonderful mood of awakening. To have fun again, be young, be liked, like in return; to recapture warmth, kindness, emotion, sentiment---all the old Mickleham Road possessions. . . . She went all milky again.
At the end of the waltz another young man took the piano; upright and magnificent, Chris came sailing across the room to her table. He wore---like the other members of the band---an ordinary dinner-jacket; Noelle was glad to see that the “Speckled” outfit had been discarded. He bent over her, smiling; Noelle suddenly clutched the edges of her chair.
“So you did come. I hoped you would.”
Noelle thought of airy evasions. “I happened to be put this way. . . .” But what was the good of that? She had come here to see him---and he knew it.
“Would you give me the pleasure of a turn?”
Instantly Noelle became rigid with terror; I haven’t danced for years; suppose I make a fool of myself; suppose I fall over his feet---annoy him, disgust him? For the first six terrible steps she thought just that was going to happen; then suddenly they fitted into one another, they swam away. Big and splendid, he handsome, she beautiful---oh, thought Noelle, we must look like gods Circe among her swine---but dancing with Apollo. The lights glared, the music pounded; anxiously correct young men, anxiously incorrect young women pushed and milled and shuffled around them; they sailed through them as the moon sails through the stars. Ten years fell off Noelle and crashed upon the white floor and broke into splinters of laughing coloured light. Ten years of worry and disappointment were wiped away; Audrey and Graham were wiped away; The Poem; Robin. Again she swam in that warm sea of tenderness that was her birthright---tenderness, warmth, loving-kindness---oh, sweet and comforting words!
He said: “You’re even better than I expected. . . . Another later?”
She nodded. Another? Another hundred! Because this is a man I could feel for as I never felt for anybody yet, this is a man who could reach something in me that nobody has ever touched. . . . Oh, what am I thinking, what am I saying! Stop!
They danced again---twice; both waltzes: “Yesterday and You” came into them both; its unpretentious little modulations were fortified here by the band parts---it sounded richer and better. . . . Chris brought her up to Simmy the band leader and introduced him; a disappointing little bounder with a waxy face and plastered black hair. His “girl” was there too---a flaunting Bacchanal creature defiantly unsure of herself; but he had a wife too, it seemed, and children---in Cricklewood. The locomotive-whistle vocalist introduced himself; “You’ve heard Bing Crosby, baby; now hear me.” Noelle, light-hearted and happy, felt inclined to tell him they could hear him in Hampstead. The band did a “comic” number; they put on bowler hats, and like a row of little Charlie Chaplins sang a song which, for no obvious reason, was in Lancashire dialect. It went very well; but Noelle was glad that Chris’s business as accompanist kept him aloof from this buffoonery. He was much too good for clowning to housemaids; he was much too good to be here at all. . . . But it didn’t really matter; Simmy didn’t matter; the vocalist didn’t matter; nothing mattered but Chris, the awakener, Chris, the rescuer, Perseus-Chris swooping from heaven upon Noelle-Andromeda. Nothing mattered but this, and the fact that now she must say good-bye and go back to Frame Square and see bright Perseus and his year-slashing sword and his shining sandals no more. No more at all. It would be wicked, wicked——
“You’ll come another night, won’t you?”
“Oh, I don’t think so. . . .”
“You’ve been disappointed, then?”
“No, no; don’t think that.”
“It isn’t much of a joint, I know. Not what you’re accustomed to. . . .”
“Oh, no! It isn’t that at all.”
“Then come again. Give us another chance.”
“It’s very difficult. . . . I’ll see. . . . Perhaps——”
“I want you to.”
“Oh, but. . . . Oh, but. . . . What nonsense!”
“But I do. Terribly.”
The Speckled Band played her out with its signature tune, “Good night, Good night!” The Marina closed early---most of its patrons had to be at work betimes; even so, Noelle had never meant to stay so late. Just to look in for an hour---and I’ve been here for more than three! She had been caught in a dream, a trance, a witchery like those of the old fairy stories Mums read at Mickleham Road. The Blue Fairy Book, the Green, the Pink. . . . Mums. . . . Ducks.. . . Mickleham Road.
“Good night, good night---I’ll see you in the morning.” . . . . But I won’t See You in the Morning---nor ever again, nor ever again. There is a man there who said: “I want you to come again. Terribly.” And he meant it; and would anybody else in the world say that---anybody? But I mustn’t see him again because that would be wickedness and the wages of sin is death and thou shalt not commit adultery and---oh, stop, stop! I’m going too fast, too far. . . . Yes, a taxi, please.
In the taxi, spinning down some black and shining thoroughfare she had never seen before, she thought: “And this forenoon I had a row with Audrey because I said she was taking up with a boy who wasn’t in her class. What would Audrey think of Chris?”
What does it matter what anyone thinks? He’s there.
Audrey’s first reaction to the row about Lionel was, “that Noelle should dare!” With more mature reflection came a second thought: “She wouldn’t have dared at one time; she wouldn’t have dared even a little while ago. What’s come over her?”
She put this question to Graham. Graham was feeling knightly and protective towards all women at the moment---because of Iona. He was going home one night with Iona and to stay for a while---one night soon. Iona herself said so. Women! All right if you took them the right way; something in all of them---perhaps even in Noelle. He said:
“We’ve been pretty average beasts to her just lately. She’s stood a lot. Maybe she’s about through.”
Audrey was not deceived; she saw the Iona veil that for the time being glorified all her sex. She said crossly: “Oh, you’re in love!”
“Well, what about you? At least I’ve the sense to keep quiet about my affairs; I don’t bring them to the house.”
Infuriated for a moment, Audrey began: “If you suggest there’s any comparison——” Then good sense came to her aid and she broke into laughter.
“Well, never mind that. . . . But Noelle, Graham! Being tackled by Noelle. . . .”
“Didn’t she like your Lionel?”
“Oh, she liked him all right. But after he’d gone she’d the nerve to start in upon me about getting mixed up with people not in our own class. Our class——”
“Well, he isn’t.”
“You didn’t see him for more than a minute.”
“I saw him long enough.”
“As a matter of fact I thought you were damned rude. Even if you did want to go and play with your trains——”
“Oh, shut up. Anyway what I said’s true and he isn’t our class or anywhere near it, and if Noelle said so too, it just shows that Noelle had some sense for once.”
“But who said he was? I didn’t. And I don’t care if he isn’t; I don’t want him to be; I want him not to be. I told you long ago that if I liked a person I wouldn’t mind what he was. In that way, I mean. And our class---a lot of washed-out blah-blah——”
“Audrey, are you---well, in love with this chap?”
“Yes and no.”
“Then it’s no.”
“You don’t know anything about it.”
“You don’t!” thought Graham. No, indeed; little round apple breasts, upward waves of warm scent that knocked you blind drunk in an instant, hands that set you on fire, lips that drew you in and in and in. No, Audrey didn’t know, poor child. He said patronisingly:
“He’ll let you down. Sooner or later.”
“He won’t!”
“Yes, he will; that kind always do.” But he saw that she was genuinely worried; dammit, he thought, we’ll have to look into this bounder. “How much do you know about him---about his people, I mean? And so on? “
She said huffily: “Quite enough”---so huffily that even Graham saw she must know nothing.
“Have you seen him a lot?”
“About twice a week on the average since——” she screwed up her eyes——“the fifteenth of October. That was the day he fell over Mackay. I told you.”
Graham guffawed. “Oh God, I wish I’d seen that!” Audrey told him not to be a yahoo.
“All right, all right. . . . Look here, Audrey, if he asked you to marry him, what would you say?”
“I’d probably say ‘yes’.”
“Good God!” thought Graham, but he said only: “Probably?”
“Yes. Because he can’t and he won’t. It isn’t like that really; not yet anyway. We---we’re more friends than anything. I daresay it’ll come to that one day; we’ll see when it does.”
“But you would then?”
“Of course.”
“Ye gods! . . . Has he any money?”
“No. But I have. Or I will have. And if there’s anything in Communism——”
“There isn’t anything in Communism. Not when you get down to brass tacks and concrete cases and honest-to-God divvying up.”
“Shows all you know about it. You don’t understand that this is the real thing---not like you and that Mrs. Thingummy.”
“Funny!” said Graham, grinning, “I was just thinking that the other way round.” But when Graham had gone, Audrey went up to her work-room and sat a long time at her desk with Leninism open before her, not reading it. “Rebeldes, Rebeldes!” said señor Lerroux on the wall above her head, “sack, pull down, destroy.” Sack prejudices, pull down barriers, destroy inhibitions. Yes, but---how much do I really like Lionel? Quite apart from any other feeling---very, very much. I like him so much that I want to raise him up, to make him right, to make him sure of himself, so that the bits of him he hasn’t had a chance with may be equal to the bits of him he’s made so splendid for himself, so that we could be one and together, and on the level, and fine. . . . I don’t know that he wants to take the trouble. . . . How much does Lionel like me? Well, he’s in love with me; that answers that. But he’s still a little afraid of me; I must bring him on till he isn’t afraid any longer. Because I’m quite sure he’s the person I want; quite absolutely sure. “He’ll let you down sooner or later?” Of course he won’t; how ridiculous; really, at times, Graham is almost imbecile. . . .
All the same, the tea-party for Lionel hadn’t been quite a success. Not just altogether. Audrey had insisted on the tea-party; disconcertingly, as it seemed to her, a good deal of insistence had been required---and not with the hosts but with the guest. Lionel should have been eager; in point of fact, he took a lot of bringing to the scratch. Twice he had backed out at the last moment through nothing but sheer funk, ringing up once to say that he had a headache and once that he had been kept at the---well, at the shop; both palpable and puerile lies. Audrey had said firmly: “My dear, you must meet people. The proper sort of people.”
“The S.N.O.B.S.?”
“Oh, now you’re just tiresome! Anyway, you’ve got to meet my people. I’m not going to have a clandestine affair in the streets.” (She very nearly said: “I’m not ashamed of you,” but just stopped it in time.) “If I’m to go out with you, you’ve got to come in with me.”
He said, looking sulky and pretty and girlish: “They won’t like me.”
“Of course they’ll like you. Anyway, that’s not the point. They’ve got to see you. You’ve got to see them.”
A little peaky in the face, a little pouting, he agreed to come. As for Frame Square, they played up pretty well over the invitation. Noelle, of course, said: “But who is he, dear?” and was, of course, snubbed---unfairly, considering she had to arrange the tea. Robin was merely told a young friend of Audrey’s was coming; he displayed no interest. Graham, learning the prospective guest’s identity, said “Christ!” and began to make jokes about the Red Nose Libraries; he was really rather revolting---but negligible, of course, negligible. Lionel, brought to the scratch at last, actually and positively appeared.
The tea-party passed off without visible hitch. Mackay---did he remember?---took a dislike to the guest, worked himself up into a muttering and trouser-nipping state, and had to be put out of the room. But that, of course, was negligible, too. There was no serious awkwardness, no defined faux pas, no incident. A successful première. Lionel enjoyed himself; but on Audrey the tea-party left a queer impression of vague yet solid dissatisfaction. Noelle, after one glance at Lionel, decided to be motherly; instantly, she was in her element; instantly they got on together very well. To her suppressed annoyance, Audrey saw that Noelle, giving a splendid rendering of Mums at her best, understood Lionel better in five minutes than she herself had learned to understand him in as many weeks. “Well, of course,” she thought bitterly, “like to like”; but it made her cross and uncomfortable. . . . Graham came in and as unmistakably clashed; he stared, made several inappropriate remarks, groaned, lit a cigarette before the others were ready, said prematurely but with manifest relief: “Well, I must git,” and went. . . . Lionel himself talked away---began in fact to talk rather too much, to lay down the law about this and that. Noelle led him by lucky chance to the subject of books and here again he fitted in with her---his ability to be shocked by almost anything, to begin with, and his preference for any sort of truth---history, politics, economics---to any sort of fiction. When you might as well say, thought Audrey, that roast mutton is intrinsically preferable to an aeroplane! Noelle told him about her lectures and he told her about his. They both thought Sir Oswald Mosley preposterous but for different reasons---Lionel because he was a Fascist and Noelle because he was always getting himself hurt. They got on famously, they were like old friends; and the better they got on the more Audrey became involved in complicated dissatisfactions not easy to express. After half an hour in the forcing-house of Noelle, Lionel was sprawling back in his chair waving his cigarette and laying down the one and only law about the Abdication. He was shining; and somehow that wasn’t satisfactory either. But the wrecker of the tea-party---unexpectedly and indeed unconsciously---was Robin. He had come in half-way through tea, and Audrey saw at once, from the way he was fingering his white half-crown, that he had had another bad day downstairs. But tired and worried and broken-hearted as he was, he shook hands with Lionel and spoke to him so nicely; and if he found Lionel something of a shock, he didn’t show it; he sat down and took his tea and talked so pleasantly and courteously and was just so absolutely and unmistakably right. He made Noelle look a fuss-pot and Audrey a peevish child, and Lionel an opinionated gas-bag. Without in the least meaning it, he wrecked the tea-party, and when he went out a cloud hung in the room---a cloud of question. Lionel didn’t see it---nor Noelle; but Audrey could see nothing else. That is what people should be like; that is what I must make Lionel like. Can I ever? The answer---let’s face it---is: No. So that when, the next forenoon, Noelle, greatly daring and trembling a little but determined upon duty, began her questions about Lionel, the elements of trouble were prepared. And duly burst into flame. “I don’t know what you mean!”
“I mean what I say, Audrey. What does he do? For a living, I mean.”
“He’s a librarian.”
“Oh. Do you mean at the University?”
(No, I don’t mean at the University, you idiot!) “No, at a circulating library. In Baker Street.”
“But where did you meet him?”
(“He fell over Mackay one night.” I could say that to René; I can’t possibly to Noelle.) “Oh---I met him.”
“Do you know anything about his people?”
“He lives with his aunt.”
“Where?”
“Hampstead.” (Quite likely it is.)
“Have you met her?”
“No. . . . Really, Noelle, I don’t see---all these questions——”
“I’m sorry, my dear. It’s very difficult. . . . But we thought---your father and I thought---he was rather a queer person for you to bring here. Not like any of the others.”
“He isn’t like any of the others. Why should he be? Why should he be like anybody? He’s himself.”
“Yes, I know. But you see, my dear——” Noelle began to flounder. “There’s such a thing as class——”
“There’s such a thing as snobbery.”
Noelle flushed. “I don’t think I’m a snob.”
“You quite evidently are.”
Noelle’s flush deepened; but she was sticking to it wonderfully well. “It’s not that, dear. But I---perhaps I know more about that sort of thing than you do.”
“Do you think so?”
“I mean---as I said, there’s such a thing as class distinctions——”
Audrey thought: “You ought to know; in another minute I’ll tell you so.” She said dangerously: “Are you trying to tell me that Lionel isn’t a gentleman?” And Noelle, with relief: “Yes, I was.”
“D’you think I don’t know that? D’you think I care? If I like a man for himself, d’you think I care who his miserable father was?”
“No, but---Audrey, don’t be angry with me; but I really don’t think it’s suitable. And your father doesn’t either——”
The row burst; it soared to a crescendo of unprofitable recriminations, it sank, it swelled again, it climaxed with the slamming of a door. But Noelle had kept her end up wonderfully well---and that strategically retiring slam had been Audrey’s, not hers. Audrey thought furiously; “All the time I was seeing father so different from Lionel, he was seeing Lionel so different from me.” And it was bitterly true; that was what hurt; bitterly and unalterably true. . . . And Noelle had kept her end up; firing from safe cover and a prepared position, she shot down Audrey’s headlong undisciplined attack. If anybody won, it was Noelle rather than Audrey.
How dared Noelle! And---here came the second thought---why dared Noelle! A little while ago, she would never have dreamt of interference; she would have said to Robin: “You must tell her yourself,” and Robin would have done nothing. What’s coming to Noelle these days?
And what, thought Audrey, is coming to me? I lost my temper; I gave it all away; I was just a little fool. Why?
To that at least she knew the answer. It was because Lionel, putting the coping-stone on irritation, had said that maddening thing the night before. Seeing him out after the tea-party and in none too good a temper, she had said bitterly: “Well, what did you think of them?”---a thing, of course, she should never have said and never had meant to say. But she wasn’t herself. And Lionel in reply had said the wrong thing.
“I liked your stepmother.”
Audrey had said, in a choking fury: “Oh---Noelle.”
“Yes. I don’t think she’s a bit like what you said she was. I don’t think you’ve understood her.”
“Oh? Don’t you?”
“No, I don’t. I think she’s a jolly good sort. Kind and---and---well, sensible.”
Audrey was so angry with him that she almost slapped his face there in the hall of Frame Square. And when he moved to take his usual good-bye kiss, she pushed him away with such force that he reeled through the front door and almost fell down the steps.
No, the tea-party to introduce Lionel was not an unqualified success. Noelle had scored out of it all round; and I’ve nothing, thought Audrey, with which I can retaliate. . . . If only she could have seen, a few short hours later, Noelle creeping guiltily to the telephone and dialling a number and saying: “Is---is the Speckled Band playing to-night?” Ah, if Audrey could have seen that!
But Audrey didn’t see it and was left puzzling as to what new thing, what new and inspiriting thing, had come to Noelle.
Audrey shut Leninism with a slam and threw it on the floor; she, too, in turn picked up her work-room telephone and rang up Cromarty Crescent. Jacqueline answered: “’Allo! ’Allo!” Very Continental.
“Is anybody in?”
“Eet ees Aud’ey? Oh, yess---zey are oil een.” (“Why,” thought Audrey for the thousandth time, “can she never learn to speak English?”)
“Kenneth? . . . And René?”
“Oh, yess. Boze.”
“Then tell them not to go out for a bit. I’m coming round for a talk.”
It was a long journey by bus to Cromarty Crescent; traffic jam after traffic jam; one could have walked quicker. But they hadn’t gone out. Kenneth was sprawling in his chair; René---the complete Dollfuss---erect against the fireplace. Audrey said: “What are you talking about?”
Kenneth yawned. “Oh---Communism and Suffering Spain. Nobody ever talks about anything else in this house.”
René had evidently reached the stage when his hair rose and he lost his “r’s.” He said: “Suffe’ing Spain? It isn’t a joke, you know.”
Kenneth said: “By God it isn’t.” He lit his pipe. “ You know, children, I’ve found out what’s wrong with the world to-day.”
Audrey said: “Have you? Do tell us.” René forbore.
“It’s the lack of belief. Or rather the desire to believe, but the lack of anything to believe in. Look round you---what do you see? Everybody longing to be told that everything’s all right, gasping for the promise that something nice is going to happen. Look at the financial columns of the papers; their editors keep on telling the mugs who read them that everything’s fine and their stocks are all going to rise; the more the stocks fall, the more they keep on telling them. Turn over the page and what’s this? Our Astrological Column; Let the Stars Help You. This week you should be careful about embarking upon fresh enterprise---faith, most of them’ll be careful about that all right. Danger threatens from dark strangers, open drains and cheap champagne. Lucky to-day---blue, sixteen and double-headed donkeys. Twenty years ago anybody would have called that lunacy; to-day it’s at least half serious.”
“It can’t be.”
“Yes, it is---or it wouldn’t be there. But that’s the reason of all your political ferment, all your Führers and Duces, all your New Messiahs and Second Christs. Promise, credible promise---that’s what people are craving for——”
Audrey and René said together: “But Communism——”
“My poor dears, Communism won’t fill the bill any more than the City Editor or Uncle Cagliostro. Neither Communism nor Fascism nor My-elbow-ism. And why? Because they’re all symptoms, not remedies. It isn’t Communism or Fascism we want. What we want---what everybody wants---is a new religion. A credible religion. None of your Godheads and parthenogenesis and miracles——”
René shook his head. “Oh, come! You can’t do without miracles. They’re the only thing anybody will believe in.”
“Oh, well——” Kenneth sighed, his interest as usual beginning to flag. “Have your miracles. It doesn’t alter what I say. A new religion’s what we want. Not Hitler and Anthony Eden and Beaverbrook, but Christ and Mohammed and Buddha. Men with promises. The wilder the better, because then the sceptic can come in by saying he doesn’t really take them seriously---though he does all the time. Like Uncle Cagliostro’s readers in the Daily Bunk. . . . Well”---he looked at his watch and forgot religion---“I’ve got to go out. Tell Jacqueline to give you some tea.”
But Jacqueline, it appeared, had gone out silently some time ago. René said: “It’s all right---I’ll make the tea,” and Audrey: “No; let me.” In the end they made it together; it was fun. René was deft and amusing, like a little elf, with his long white hands and his curls and his stimulating smile. Audrey said:
“D’you think it was true, what Kenneth said just now? About people wanting to believe?”
“I think it was truer than most of the things he says.”
“You don’t believe in religion, do you, René?”
“Not in Christianity, I don’t.”
“Nor I. I wish I did.”
“So do I. Well, of course. Every sensible person must wish that. Everyone would believe in it if they could---obviously. It would make things so much easier and happier---even if it were all a lie.”
“D’you think that’s why a lot of people do believe in it---or try to? I mean, they know in their hearts that it can’t be true, but they want to think it is?”
“I don’t know. I can’t, anyway. There it is.”
“I know. Some can, some can’t. We can’t.”
“No. Worse luck.”
“René. . . . Don’t go to Spain.”
He paused, teapot in hand. “Why not?”
“When would you be going?”
“Soon. Any time now.”
“The International Brigade?” He nodded. “Have you joined it?”
“No; but I’m going to.”
“Oh, René, I wish we liked each other more. Or less. Or something. . . . René, don’t go to Spain.”
“But why not?”
“Because I want you here. You’re the only person like myself---you’re the only adult person I’ve got to talk to. If I wanted any help——”
“You don’t want any help, Audrey.”
“No-o. But I might.”
“Then you’ll have to wait till I come back.”
“And when’ll that be?”
“This year, next year, some time, never.” But looking at Audrey, René saw what very few people ever saw---that her blue eyes were bright and shining with half-spilt tears. He thought they were for himself, and because he was going to Spain and might never return---and so in part they were; he could not know that the other part was still vexation because Lionel, harking maddeningly to type, had liked Noelle and so could never be asked inside Frame Square again.
As the clock on her green mantelpiece struck six, Iona said, biting her nails and throwing away a half-smoked cigarette:
“Now, Roxy, it’s no use being cross with me. I tell you, it’s no use.”
Roxy said: “I’m not cross.” He was a square man with a steel cap of thick shiny hair---silver-grey, though he was still under fifty---limpid brown eyes, a smooth face, the expression of a very sophisticated hound. “I’m not in the least cross.”
“Well, you’re going to be. You’re going to lecture me. It isn’t any use. It’s I who should lecture you. To see a man of your age jealous of a mere boy——”
“I’m not jealous.”
“Oh, aren’t you?”
“No. Why should I be? But I’m sorry for him. I don’t think you’re playing the game.”
“Oh---playing the game! Don’t be so English.”
“There are worse people than the English. . . . You see, silly, I rather like you, and so when you go and let yourself down——”
“Roxy, if you say another word——”
“I’ll say a lot of other words. You can’t really care for him. Why can’t you leave him alone? Why can’t you grow out of him?”
Iona thought: “Why can’t I? He’s a child, he’s a bore, he’s tiresome. Yet I want him; I want to eat him up; I will, too. As for Roxy, standing there like a great idiot——” Her voice rose, it grated, she began to screech a little.
“Roxy, if you think you can stand there and lecture me I won’t have it, I tell you; I won’t have it. So just shut up and chup raho and take me out to dinner. If you say another word, I won’t come at all.”
It would have terrified Graham; but Roxy knew how to deal with it. He said, lighting a cigarette:
“It’s time you had your hair done again.”
Iona knew it was true, knew also that there was no use denying it to Roxy. (Now, Graham would never have seen it, and that in its way would have been more irritating still.) She said snappishly: “I can’t afford it.”
“Oh, yes, you can.” He bent forward and gave her a kiss---a very proprietary kiss---on the forehead. The sleek steel cap of his hair shone for a moment against her copper. “Now, to-morrow you’re going to have a Turkish bath and then you’ll have an afternoon at Phelma’s and then we’ll go down to the Ace of Spades. Eh?”
She said ungraciously: “So long as you don’t lecture me. I won’t be lectured.”
“You don’t need to be. You know it all yourself really. Think it over when you get to bed to-night.”
“Oh, shut up!”
Roxy said unmoved: “I’m going to write you a cheque. Where’s your fountain pen?” He wrote it at her little table where his photograph stood staring; ten pounds. Mollified, she said: “You’re good to me, Roxy.”
“I like you, you see, Ona. That’s why——”
“All right. I understand. Cut it out.”
Graham had just missed Roxy at Iona’s; he was walking now along Wigmore Street, heading for Frame Square and in deep depression. He had passed a very unpleasant hour with Iona; she was in what he called her fobbing-off mood---she wouldn’t be kissed, she wouldn’t warm up with him; now, why? Had she perhaps heard from her husband, that colonel fellow? Some kind of worry, anyway; I wish, thought poor Graham, she would share it with me. But instead of sharing she had sat smoking cigarettes and biting her lip, as distant as the Sahara; at last she had said: “Graham, I want you out of this by six.” That had angered him; that wasn’t the way one’s---one’s mistress ought to speak; as if one were a workman doing a job in the flat. He had said with sudden daring: “But suppose I don’t want to go?” and instantly she had flared up---savage, unfamiliar, hostile. The rasp came into her voice that made it sound so vulgar and fish wifey; he hated that. “You little silly, don’t you understand that when a woman says she wants to be left alone she has to be left alone?” “But why, Iona? What’s wrong?” “Oh---why, why, what! Don’t worry me. Go away when I ask you.” Gloomily he had gone, and before he was a hundred yards from her flat his anger had evaporated. “I’ve been clumsy,” he thought. “Must have said the wrong thing somehow.” Perhaps she wasn’t very well or something; women had their flat times, their privacies, their retirements---one didn’t always understand. He thought: I’ll go back and apologise---but perhaps that would only make things worse; I can ring her up when I get home. . . . So he missed Roxy, as Iona had intended.
Sinking deeper and deeper into misery, Graham realised that he had reached Frame Square; No. 5 reared itself above him. It stood up like a prison; it was a prison. House of disappointments, of frustrated ambitions, of misfits, square pegs trying to struggle out of round holes; the only person, thought Graham, who’s really happy here is Noelle. With unconscious irony he reflected on Noelle’s serenity; what it must be to be born with a brain not above “nice things round me”; what peace and comfort to be absorbingly satisfied with china and chintz and Medici prints and books by Beverley Nicholls. But the artistic temperament---ah, God help us, the artistic temperament! Sighing deeply, he let himself into the gaol.
To his surprise he found René in the drawing-room; instantly he envied, for the thousandth time, his cousin’s competent assurance, his air of knowing what he wanted and being likely to get it. Charged, explosive little devil; when he blew up what would happen? Yet René just at this moment was a bore; in misery one wanted solitude, the lonely pool in which deeper and deeper to drown. René now was like an officious rescue-attendant appearing to a suicide who is on the point of accomplishment. Thinking: “I might have had an hour with the railway,” Graham said unpromisingly, “Hallo!”
René said: “I came to see Aud’ey.” (He did not say: “I came to say good-bye to Audrey,” though that would have been the truth.) “D’you think she’ll be in soon?”
Graham replied that God knew. “Am I my sister’s keeper? Probably she’s sitting in some pub with that bounder.”
“He’s a bounder, is he?”
“Hopeless. I forgot you hadn’t seen him. She brought him here the other day.”
“Funny of Aud’ey to pick out a chap like that.”
“Oh, it’s all this Communistic tosh. Sorry, René; you know what I mean. . . . Anyway, what can you expect from a fellow called Lionel Peach? And that’s the sort of brute we writers have to depend upon. ‘Have you a nace book to-day, Mr. Peach?’ ‘Oh, yes, Mrs. Nitwit, this is quate nace.’ Peach! What a name!”
René let the “we writers” go unchallenged. He said: “It might be worse.”
“Not much. Well, I suppose she gets some kick out of it. . . . I wish I could get a kick out of anything.”
“Poor old G’aham. Isn’t the ‘iting going well?”
Graham shook his head. But he was interested in this topic, he could talk about it.
“Rotten. I shall have to chuck this film dialogue business. It’s too stupid. I write reams of good dialogue and then either they decide to cut the scene altogether or they want it all done differently. If they ever read my stuff at all---I’m not even sure about that. I mean---it’s stultifying.”
“But they pay you.”
“Oh, pay! One doesn’t write for pay.” As a matter of fact, he had written very little dialogue and they had not paid him at all; looking up too quickly, he caught the twitch of René’s neat little mouth. “You needn’t sneer!”
“I wasn’t sneering. But pay’s a compensation; it’s a plus.”
“Oh, the hell with pluses!”
Noelle drifted in suddenly and said---it seemed with unnecessary eagerness “Graham, dear, dinner’s half an hour earlier to-night: I’m going out to a lecture.” Graham said sulkily, “O.K.,” and René asked about Audrey. Noelle said she was out to dinner, fidgeted uneasily for an instant and drifted out again.
René got up. “Well, it’s no use waiting for Aud’ey. . . . Noelle’s looking well.”
“D’you think so?”
“Yes. Sort of alive. I---I thought she looked almost beautiful just now.”
Graham shuddered; that was the French in René---he would say, from time to time, those unsayable things. Noelle “beautiful”; what a word! He said:
“I hadn’t noticed it. But now you come to mention it she does look a bit lit-up lately. She’s been going out a lot after dinner to some lectures or other; psychoanalysis or some tripe. I suppose she gets her kick out of that. I wish to God I could get a kick out of anything.” (But his heart said, with sudden comfort: “Iona; you’re forgetting Iona; you aren’t telling the truth.”) “René, are you really going to Spain?”
“Yes. Right now.”
“Now? This very minute?”
“Well, twenty-four hours or so. I’m joining.”
“Gosh! I say, do you think I ought to go?”
René burst out laughing.
“You? Good God, no. Why on earth should you?”
“Oh, well, it would be something to do. Perhaps it’s the right thing to do. D’you think it is?”
“Not for you, old boy. You have to believe in it after all.”
“If I did go, I’d fight for Franco.”
“Then don’t go. You might have to shoot me. F’anco doesn’t want you anyway; he’s got his Moo’s. You stick to ’espectability---that’s your line.”
Graham was nettled. “I don’t know why you say that!”
“Because it is your line. You’re ’espectable, that’s all.”
Graham gave a bitter laugh---or he hoped it was bitter. Respectable, eh, the cocksure little Bolshie? He said, not without pride:
“You wouldn’t say that if you knew where I’d spent the afternoon. In a married woman’s flat.” It sounded good, put like that---and the fact was true if all the implications weren’t. But René was not impressed.
“Well, you’ll be all the more ‘espectable after it’s all over.”
“It won’t be all over. What the hell d’you mean?”
“Then it’ll become ‘espectable itself. It’s no good, G’aham, you can’t get away from it.”
Graham made a sound expressive of disgust. Respectability forsooth! Those apple breasts and a fire-eating colonel in India, and that night of love that was coming---coming soon now. What an ass René was! Or rather a child---just like Audrey, a child playing with ideas. Poor children; happy children; innocence. . . .
René said imperturbably: “Ce que vous voulez. . . . All right; mo’iturus te saluto.” He shook a clenched fist; Graham countered with a violent Fascist salute; they both burst out laughing.
Graham thought: “Now perhaps I can have a while with the railway.” Then he remembered that dinner was early on account of Noelle’s lecture; odd, this passion for lectures she had developed these days. What about ringing up Iona---asking her what I did that was wrong? But Graham had no private telephone in his work-room, and on the landing and in the hall there was constant coming and going; the maids; the post; Noelle hovering about as if she couldn’t sit down. . . .
Robin came upstairs from his laboratory looking an old man, Mackay trotting gloomily at his heels. (I am inured, Mackay’s attitude said, to neglect, starvation, imprisonment, but I do think someone might see that I haven’t my collar on. No one saw it, so Mackay scored off the universe by leaping on to one of the forbidden drawing-room chairs. Now you’ll have to notice me; but only Nixon came, switching on lights and shooing officiously.) On Tuesday Robin was going to Manchester for a two-day conference; he wanted to go and he didn’t. Foulke-Langways was to lecture on synthetic carcinogenic compounds and Cribbe would describe his experiments with radio-activated salt as a possible substitute in radium treatments. It should be interesting. But neither Foulke-Langways nor Cribbe was at the root of the tiring any more than Robin Ritchie. We played away with radium treatments that hurt more than the disease; we messed about testing the effects of tars and hydrocarbons on rats and guinea-pigs; but---the secret remained hid. We didn’t get at the cause, the cause, the cause; what made it, where did the enemy lurk, where were his young born, from whence did he recruit his forces? Not cure---prevention; ah, then you would be talking . . .! He became aware that Noelle was offering him sherry; he refused it, not noticing that she had a new frock. . . . I know all that Foulke-Langways can tell me or Cribbe either and it doesn’t amount to much; and it’s a long journey on Tuesday and Manchester’s a damnable place. Still, better go; better hear what is said; try everything.
Dinner went forward, mostly in silence. Graham thought: “Some time to-night I must ring up Iona, I must find out what was the matter with her. Could I ask her right out if it was---er---physical? Why not; it’s 1937 after all . . .” He glanced at Noelle, who was staring fixedly at the table-centre. He thought: “René was wrong; she’s pale really.”
Robin thought: “Two days at Manchester. Foulke-Langways, Cribbe, carcinogenic compounds. But the cause, the root, the hiding-place . . .?”
Noelle thought: “This is January 1937. The sixteenth of January was my wedding-day; Robin has forgotten it this year again. But the fifteenth was Yesterday; he wouldn’t forget. . . .” She ate very little and kept looking at her watch. Nobody noticed.
René, walking quickly towards the Party Headquarters, thought:
“What I really want is someone to tell me I needn’t go, I shouldn’t go. I mean, someone who really knows---not like my father who just says the first thing that comes into his head. Someone who would care enough to explain to me properly just why I needn’t go, just how I’m not the person they want; above all, just how I could do something better. I’m going to Spain because I can’t see anything better; yet I feel there must be something better if I could only find out what it is. I want someone who would tell me. If only one could meet a person like that nowadays, walking along this street; a sort of Christ. . . . “Follow Me.” Wouldn’t I!
“Someone must go, someone must act, someone must have a try to bring the better things nearer before it’s all too late. I’m ready to try; I will try. But is this the way? Is this the best thing I can do? Am I the fellow they want? Could I do something better, more hopeful, more difficult?
“This seems too easy. It’s as easy as falling down a hill, as losing your way, as making a blunder. It’s speciously easy.
“Or is all this just funk; because, after all, it’s a place that people sometimes don’t come back from . . .? I don’t think it’s that.
“But I do wish someone would tell me how I can not go, why I can not go. I don’t see how to avoid it. I feel there’s a reason why I shouldn’t go, I feel the proper thing for me is not to go, I feel I could do better. But I can’t prove it; I can’t believe it. . . .”
He pushed open a swing door, marched up to a desk, revolver-in-hand, over-the-top, head-of-the-forlorn-hope.
“I want to join the International Brigade. How do I do it?”
The day Robin went to Manchester was an extraordinary day, an ominous day. January by the calendar, it had the false mildness of September, the high lights of April, the bronzed quietude of October. There was absurd spring in it, it was a stolen day, there had never been another like it. Sitting in the early train that raced him through England, Robin gazed out at it; it was flat and bemused and still; but here and there the sun shot arrows of gold at little patches of country that burst into flame at their touch. The day held promise; to watch it ripening cheered Robin up. He thought: “As this wholly unexpected day dawns suddenly in a procession of winter winds and rains, so perhaps, suddenly, in a procession of vexations, enlightenment may break through; we may discover, solve, be justified of our pretensions.” Who knew? Even Manchester, even Foulke-Langways? Robin went into the dining-car a little uplifted.
Audrey had made her plans for that day ahead. Robin’s absence made no real difference to her movements, but it gave a sense of freedom which, she had felt, must not be wasted. She had planned, for the first time, a whole day with Lionel---a cinema or theatre if the weather was too bad, perhaps a walk on the Heath or even in the country if it proved unexpectedly merciful. But the quality of this astonishing day disturbed these programmes; as soon as she saw it she knew it marked out for something entirely special. Waking early, she looked out into an air free from fog or smoke yet not altogether clear; it glowed with a sort of subfusc radiance from some unplaceable source. It was as if the earth had stopped rotating and hung for a moment poised or as if during the night it had become encased in cellophane like an expensive cigar. Audrey thought: “We’re not going to waste this.”
In her dressing-gown she went into her work-room where she had her private telephone and rang up Lionel. She knew a telephone number which represented him---Primrose something or other; but he still gave her no address; whenever she hinted tentatively at a visit to his aunt or whoever it was he lived with, he shied away from it. Easily led in many ways, he was intractable in others, and this was one of them. The telephone number could find him in home hours; it must, therefore, be where he slept anyway; but she could not trace it in the Directory. It wasn’t, of course, under “Peach.” No doubt the Exchange could have told her, but to ask the Exchange seemed rather like spying. Some day he would tell her---“Give him time”---and meanwhile the mystery was not unagreeable.
Lionel answered---rather sleepily. She said:
“You’ve remembered?”
“Remembered what?”
“That to-day’s to-day. You’ve fixed up about getting the whole day off?”
“Yes. Of course.”
“Well, look here, Lionel---it’s a lovely day, it’s a wonderful day. I’m not going to stick about London on a day like this. Let’s go to the seaside.”
“The seaside?”
“Yes, darling, where the shrimps come from.” (But evidently Lionel was at his timidest, cowering as usual before a new idea.)
“But---how will we get there?”
“In our car, of course. I’ll have it for the day. I’ll drive.” (Suppose Noelle wants it? She’d better not.)
“Oh. . . There was a pause; she could almost see his face lengthening. “It’ll be pretty cold.”
“Cold? It’s roasting. Oh, Lionel, do be a bit enthusiastic. It’ll be simply lovely.”
Evidently he doubted it; there was another silence. Then——
“It’s a very short day just now.”
“In that case we’ve the less time to waste. Come down here as soon as you possibly can. I’ll be ready.”
She rang off before he could raise any further objection. On her way to the bathroom she met Noelle; she said shortly: “I’m going out for the day.”
Noelle said---and as she said it there was something queer about her, a diffuse glow that resembled the day itself, a sort of concealed lighting——
“I won’t be in much myself. . . . Where did you think of going, dear?”
“Oh---somewhere.” The usual answer to Noelle.
But Noelle this time didn’t accept it; she said:
“I asked because if you thought of going out of town——”
“I am going out of town.”
“Then could you possibly take Mackay?”
Audrey saw her chance. “If I’m to have the car I can.”
Noelle radiated that queerness again. “Of course you can have the car. I shan’t want it. You know I can’t drive.”
“But Collins is here.”
“Oh, I shan’t want Collins. . . . You’ll be careful of the car, dear, won’t you?”
Noelle! thought Audrey; fussing about the old car as if I hadn’t driven it thousands of miles. . . . It was only when she was in her bath that it struck her that there had been something odd about Noelle’s words. They didn’t make sense. “Oh, I shan’t want Collins,” she had said. Now, shouldn’t one have noticed something about that? Noelle couldn’t drive herself; then shouldn’t she have wanted Collins? She generally wanted Collins. “I won’t be in much myself. . . . Oh, I shan’t want Collins.” As if the statements were corollaries, whereas they were really contradictions. “I won’t be in, but I shan’t want Collins” would have been all right; but what Noelle said was “I won’t be in, so I shan’t want Collins.” Something there if you could put two and two together. . . . Oh, bother Noelle; I’ve got the car anyway; it’s going to be lovely, lovely.
Audrey had never driven Lionel before; they were not across Oxford Street before she realised that he was a nervous passenger. At first this discovery pleased her rather than otherwise; it intensified that protective drawing-out feeling she liked to have for Lionel, and it made a good opportunity to get rid of at least one of his terrors. But presently his nerves became too much of a good thing altogether; every time she came close up behind a lorry or squeezed neatly past a bus she saw his face whiten and his poor hands clutch at the seat. Mackay yelped and barked at passing dogs; above the din Audrey shouted: “Enjoy yourself, Lionel, do!” And he replied---he always had the courage to say these difficult things: “I wish you wouldn’t drive so fast.” Fast! They were crawling ; if they were to see the Kent coast before lunch-time—— But his nervousness communicated itself to her; and as usual her feeling of unease translated itself into daring. She stepped on it, she speeded and swooped, hounding the poor old Austin up to sixty-five. Just beyond Maidstone she overtook against an oncoming car, but the oncoming car wouldn’t give way; there was a grinding and shrieking of brakes, a minor skid, quite a narrow shave. The driver of the oncoming car---it was a tradesman’s van---shook his fist and swore at her; Audrey made a face at him; Mackay barked. But Lionel, she saw, was looking as if he were about to be sick; he was really a little disheartening. Deflated, she slowed down, the insolence went out of her; she couldn’t cope with him, and, after all, if he did feel like that about it, it wasn’t fair to torment the poor darling. Instantly she felt protective again, motherly. My Lionel.
They reached the coast between twelve and one. Audrey, knowing exactly where she wanted to go, ran the car through grey farm fields and down a steep little lane wet and muddy with the overflow of its stream. At the bottom was a ruined cottage with turning space for the car. Audrey cried “There!” triumphantly, and jumped out of the car, throwing her hat into the back. Mackay, released, rushed out like a whirlwind and threw himself, barking, after a flock of sheep; they ran round and round their field with imbecile antics, Mackay roaring at their heels; he couldn’t catch them. Audrey laughed, but Lionel, who was looking anything but released, said solemnly:
“We’ll get into a row if he does that.”
“Well, let’s. Don’t you like this, Lionel?” The fields were yellow-grey, with rain-blackened stone walls; the sea was like grey glass; there was no wind at all; over everything spread the hidden radiation of the day. It was a fairy place; he must like it. But he only said:
“It’s jolly cold.”
“You’ve too many clothes on. Take off that great coat.”
“Take it off?”
“Yes. When you’re cold, take something off, don’t put something on. That’s the secret.”
“It’s not my secret. I’d like a plate of nice warm soup. Or a cup of cocoa.”
“Well, you won’t get either. I’ve only brought sandwiches and fruit. Oh, and hard-boiled eggs. But I’ve got a little bottle of sherry. . . . Oh, come on, Lionel, like it!”
He ate the sandwiches and the eggs, and drank some of the sherry, but she could not persuade herself that he was greatly liking it. He did look terribly cold and shivery; contrite, she thought: “He’s delicate; I shouldn’t have done this; we should have gone to some hotel.” A town-bred creature, the country cowed him; the sea was vast and uncharted, the fields unmade and rough; no directions---“Follow the blue light for Waterloo, follow the amber light for Paddington.” He sat nibbling his sandwiches and looking scared, for all the world like a feeding rabbit---and his nose twitched a little like a rabbit’s too. Mackay came back, tiring of the sheep, who now stood in a group staring at him with fatuous hostility; his tongue hanging out, he sat up and begged for food. Audrey, feeling the need of outlet, kissed and praised him extravagantly: “Beau’ful, beau’ful Kai; beau’ful!” Lionel looked on glumly; he thought people shouldn’t keep dogs while other people were starving, and anyway they were unhygienic; did Mackay know that, Audrey wondered, and if so was that why he always snapped at Lionel’s trousers? . . . Lionel threw his sandwich papers about and was rather cross when she told him to gather them all up and stuff them down a rabbit-hole. She teased him; “I suppose you think a man’ll come along and pick them all up with a spiked stick. You’re a Towny, that’s what you are.” He replied, quite seriously: “If this is country, give me town.” He was really rather disappointing.
They lit cigarettes and went down to the beach. The tide was far out, they walked on shiny, sky-reflecting sand, clear of the white broken cliffs and the fallen debris. Mackay, roused to excitement once more, dug and scrabbled at half-buried stones, snouting them up with yells of ecstasy and pushing them along in front of him, almost standing on his head to propel them better. A little distance away the sea broke softly as a lake; wish-wash, it said, wish-wash; crunch! There was no wind at all, only light reflected, as it seemed, from steel-coloured mirrors. It was quiet and lonely. Lionel, whose idea of the Kent coast was Margate, expressed dutiful delight at the pervading stillness, but Audrey had a sneaking feeling that he would have liked Margate better. However, he was bucking up---but was that only because they were getting through with it, because the day was turned? She was feeling almost as bored with him as she now was with the hysterical Mackay, when quite suddenly he took her hand---lightly, lovingly---and said:
“You know, Audrey, when I’m with you, I’m just completely and utterly happy.”
She forgot her boredom at once.
“Oh, Lionel, I’m so glad! I’m so glad you like me! . . . Lionel, you’re going to be the most wonderful person.”
“Who? Me?”
“Yes, you. First of all, you’re going to become boss of the Red Rose Libraries; then head of all the libraries in Britain. Then you’re going into Parliament and perhaps you’ll be Minister of Education. Or perhaps by then they’ll have made a Minister of Literature---there should be a Minister of Literature---and you’ll be that.”
He said rather sheepishly: “You’ve got it all fixed, haven’t you?”
“Of course I have.”
“And what makes you think I could do all that?”
A cold little inner voice asked Audrey: “Yes, what?” But she said resolutely, giving herself away: “I’ll make you do it.”
She was rewarded; his eyes lit suddenly. “You know, Audrey, I believe you almost could!” He kissed her. They walked on hand in hand. Presently they found a cave and sat down in it; Lionel put his arm round her; they began to tell each other things. In front of them Mackay, his behind grotesquely elevated, routed whimpering for stones. It was quiet, peaceful, safe, settled, a dream.
But the time passed; the early dusk began to come down on the sea like a dew; outlines faded; inside the cave it was nearly dark. Audrey thought: “It must end; it’s been a success after all, but it must end.” She jumped to her feet and pulled up Lionel. “Come on, Lionel; tea.” Mackay, of course, was lost; after five minutes he came panting back plastered with white mud from head to foot. They laughed at him. But they did not laugh when they saw the waves leaping and splashing at the base of the rock headland between them and the car. They said: “The tide!” And Lionel, whitening again: “Oh, God!”
Protective, Audrey reassured him. “It’s fun, Lionel; it’s like the books. We’ll have to climb up the cliffs.”
Mutely they looked at the cliffs which were suddenly formidable. Perhaps two hundred feet high; rock here, slopes there; white spills of mud between their buttresses where the drainage of the fields above seeped down. They weren’t dangerous cliffs; but when you came to think of climbing them, they weren’t child’s play either. The dusk seemed to swoop. Lionel said:
“Couldn’t we wade round the point?”
“No. We’d be up to our waists. We’d perish of cold.”
“I could carry you.”
“I can see you doing it. No, come on, Lionel; excelsior. I think we could get up there.”
He shuddered. “Oh, we couldn’t.”
“Yes, we can. We’ve got to. Come on!”
The chosen cliff slanted well back from the perpendicular; the first fifty feet was good solid rock, knobbed and pitted---it was easy, like going up a stair. Then came fifty feet of chalky stuff, slimy and cold to the touch and slippery underfoot, but still reliable. Then they were on the southern verge of one of the spills of white mud; it was nasty there, soggy and treacherous with tussocks of rotten grass-soil; there were no handholds and your feet went away beneath you. Yet to the left the chalk cliff bulged outwards; the spill was the only possible route. Audrey made Lionel go first because it gave him confidence to feel he had someone beneath him; she thought “literally I am putting my hand beneath his foot”---and literally she did. But she felt his fear coming down to her---from his heart, down his leg, into her hand. Several times he said: “I can’t go any farther,” and as often she replied: “Yes, you can,” and he did. Once he slipped and came down on her, crushing her fingers under his shoe; and it was minutes before she could make him advance again. Yet the whole thing was annoying rather than frightening, messy rather than dangerous. She began to dislike Lionel. The dusk fell swiftly as if a malign god drew a dark net over the cliff face. Suddenly Audrey said:
“Where’s Mackay?”
Lionel said: “Isn’t he just behind you?” But he wasn’t. Audrey called: “Kai! Kai! Kai!” but no answer. Peering down into the gathering gloom, they saw him at last; he had got himself somehow to the other side of the spill; he was perched on a pinnacle like a little black image. As they saw him, he gave a heart-searing little bark---half-jaunty, half-afraid. “SOS!” it said, “SOS. I’m stuck. I’m frightened.”
Audrey said desperately: “Oh, Kai! . . . Lionel, I’m afraid you’ll have to go down for him.” But Lionel said, his teeth chattering so that she could hear them: “I can’t, Audrey, I can’t. I simply can’t.”
It was getting really dark; the dog, petrified, was stuck where he was; he could move neither up nor down. Audrey said bitterly: “Oh, Lionel, you coward!” but it didn’t move him. She strove with him---urging, coaxing, threatening; because it was essential that he should conquer himself and go down; there was nothing to be afraid of really. But he remained fixed as fast as Mackay; he said only: “I can’t; I can’t.” Audrey said at last: “Then I must”; but he wouldn’t have that either.
“You can’t leave me here, Audrey. You mustn’t.”
“Well, I can’t leave Mackay, can I?”
“He’s only a dog.”
In that moment Audrey hated him desperately and bitterly hated him. “Only a dog!” He said, as if he felt her hatred creeping up to him: “We could get help.”
“Where?”
“Those coastguard cottages.”
“Oh, nonsense; that’s miles. He’d be terrified out of his wits, poor darling. He’d think we’d gone away and left him. He might fall into the sea. Go on down, Lionel---it’s nothing.” She was determined that he would do it, that he would redeem himself. “Hurry up before is gets dark. Oh, Lionel, buck up!”
But he couldn’t buck up; he could only cling spread-eagled to the damp face and say: “Don’t leave me, Audrey; you’re not to.” In the end she said bitterly: “Stay where you are then; I’m going down.” At that he gave a little animal squeal of sheer terror and Audrey thought: “That’s one of the sounds I’ll hear to the very end of my life.”
The descent wasn’t really difficult, but it wasn’t nothing either. She had to launch herself out across the face of the mud-spill, scrabbling and groping; looking down, in the dusk, the cliff seemed much steeper and higher than before. She slipped and slipped---heart-stopping slips till she realised that after a few inches the squelch of mud churned up by her feet acted as a brake and stopped her. Diagonally, in slips, she went across the spill. The other side was bad, but not too bad; she reached Mackay pretty easily; there he sat with his ears cocked and his head on one side, contentedly wagging his tail. “You do make me laugh,” he said. He struggled when she picked him up, but she pushed him along in front of her, up the chalky stuff, up the far side of the spill. On the whole he was easier to get along than Lionel. Audrey felt her hands and knees plastered with cold mud; but never mind, it was an adventure. Pushing Mackay ahead, a yard at a time, she came level with Lionel, still sprawling crucified at the other side of the spill. She called across to him, “O.K. Carry on. You go up your side, I’ll go up mine.”
But back came his miserable wail. “I can’t; I can’t; I’m stuck.”
“Oh, don’t be such a funk, Lionel. Come on!”
“I can’t. I can’t. Help me, Audrey, help me.”
“I’ve got Mackay.”
“Never mind Mackay. Help me.”
“Get yourself up to the top. It’s nothing. You’re past all the worst bits.”
“I can’t. I can’t. I’ll fall.”
Fall! thought Audrey---and you glued there like a postage-stamp! Gritting her teeth, she began to propel Mackay up her side of the spill. It was sloppy and horrible, cold and wet and beastly; but once you realised that the slips meant nothing, it wasn’t frightening. There was a nasty bit at the very top where the lip of the cliff hung over in a sort of spout; she leant back and heaved Mackay over it one-handed, then struggled over after him, muddying herself to the waist. But it was done. There was a fence close by; she tied Mackay to it by his lead. Done, done, accomplished! Except for Lionel. Damn Lionel!
She lay flat, peering over the top of the cliff; it was so dark now that she could hardly see him, but there he was, spreadeagled on the side of the spill like a moth on a wall.
“Lionel! I’m up. It’s easy. Come along.”
“I can’t. Help me, Audrey.”
“I’ll help you over the last bit. Come half-way.”
But he couldn’t come any way at all; in the end she had to go slithering down to him, glissading in the loathsome mush, ruining her clothes, scratching and tearing the backs of her knees where her knickers rucked up. Six feet above him, she threw him the belt of her coat; it was useless, of course, to hold him if he really fell, but he couldn’t really fall, and it gave him the necessary confidence for the first essential yards. Slowly, gaspingly, he came up behind her, clinging to the useless belt. Once he dislodged a big stone and slipped down a couple of feet; again he gave that little animal squeak and again Audrey thought: “I shall never forget that sound.” Up he came and up; at the final lip he boggled badly---and with more excuse this time---but she lay down and put her arms under his armpits and somehow, like a great wet walloping fish, over he came. There he lay upon the grass face down, gently blubbering.
She said: “You funk! You miserable funk! I hate you.”
Blubbering still, he said: “Oh, Audrey, don’t do that. Oh, Audrey, I love you so terribly. . . . You’re the only thing I’ve got. . . . You’ve made everything so different. . . . I love you, I want you, I have to have you. . . .”
It was quite dark now and so silent that the only sound was Mackay shaking himself. His ears rattled on his collar, his lead flicked against the fence-post. Audrey, pulling up her skirt, looked ruefully at her plastered legs; stockings in shreds, mud everywhere. Even in that moment she thought: “If Noelle says anything, I’ll murder her.” Lionel, still lying on his face, said:
“I’m sorry, Audrey. I---I’m not accustomed to this sort of thing. I---I got frightened. Forgive me, Audrey, please.”
Suddenly and completely Audrey melted to him; if she had been Noelle she would have said she had gone all milky inside. She knelt swiftly by her recumbent lover.
“Never mind, my dear, never mind. Sit up, do, and let me get the mud off your face. Here, take my hankie.”
He sat up; his white face shone in the dark.
“You believe what I said, Audrey?”
“Believe what, Lionel?”
“That I love you.”
“Y-yes. Yes; yes.”
“Then love me back again. Can you? Can you? You’re everything I’ve got; you’ve changed my world; I never thought, I never imagined—— Oh, Audrey, say you love me a little.”
She said, suddenly nervous and stammering: “I---I think——”
“Don’t think. I want you to be sure.”
She couldn’t say anything; she couldn’t be sure.
“Audrey, I know I’m not good enough. I know I’m not your class. I could never be good enough for you never. But I’ll try, Audrey, I’ll try so hard “
She could bear no more; she threw her arms round his neck, pressing his face against hers.
“Oh, don’t, darling; don’t talk like that. Of course I love you; of course, of course, of course . . .!” He unbalanced under her weight and together they fell ridiculously sideways, locked in each other’s arms. . . .
There was a sudden hideous outburst of roaring from Mackay who had discerned a sheep in the gloom beyond his fence. The lovers---rather hastily---disentangled.
Spoilt. Oh, Mackay, you pest!
Noelle and Chris spent that astonishing day in Richmond Park. Or at least they designed to spend it there, and they did in fact spend part of it; but because the Hand of Providence was suddenly shown, not all of it.
They travelled down by bus, inconspicuously and without the watchful eye of any Collins; though, of course thought Noelle, it’s absurd to apply the word “inconspicuous” to so striking a pair as we are. She said: “Do you know, it’s the first time I’ve ever seen you out of doors.” It was true; that strange initial morning at Frame Square under the Cadrigua portrait; the many stolen evenings at the Marina---she dared not now remember how many or how sweet: but never the test of the full air and sunshine. But Chris looked little different on the bus or walking up Priory Lane, because he wore no overcoat or hat. His gallant hair took the morning without shame; he was Chris Milroy, no stranger. But he was Chris Milroy; not Chick Merry.
In the concealed lighting of that extraordinary day Richmond Park was as immense as Asia, vast as that sea towards which Audrey and her Lionel were even now heading. It was indeed not unlike the sea with its huge undulations, its islands and promontories of black leafless trees motionless as rock masses. Noelle thought: “I hope he won’t ask me why I chose Richmond Park because it would be difficult---oh, impossible---to explain.” She had chosen it in fact because it was in Richmond Park that Irene Forsyte and Bosinney had “gone to extremes”; she even thought she knew the very place, though it might have been one of several; that “cool bracken grove with the oak boughs for roof where the pigeons were raising an endless wedding hymn . . . the bracken grove of irretrievable delights, of golden minutes in the long marriage of heaven and earth. . . .” Oh, stop, stop! that wasn’t going to happen of course---anyway not in January, a too cool bracken grove altogether. (But “It’s June in January Because I’m in Love”; oh these dance tunes with their inane applicable words . . .!) But poor Irene and her Bosinney had done it there, and Mrs. MacAnder had seen them coming away. Well, no Mrs. MacAnder was likely to spy out Noelle and her Chris; because, thought Noelle, I don’t know any Mrs. MacAnder and Mrs. MacAnders don’t come to Richmond Park nowadays anyway. Besides, they would be careful, careful, careful. If nobody knows, you’re not doing wrong, you’re not hurting anyone, are you? Mums wouldn’t have said that: what would Mums have said?
Irene Forsyte; poor Irene Forsyte! Always interesting even in the days when The Man of Property had come to Mickleham Road from Mudie’s, Irene---that shadow of tormented loveliness---was now enthralling. For wasn’t she Noelle; and wasn’t Chris Bosinney---young, gallant, the artist; and wasn’t Robin the Man of Property himself? Anyhow, here were Noelle and Chris---no, Irene and Bosinney---walking together in Richmond Park at last. . . . Which was that bracken grove?
The forenoon was waning; this day of days was already past its meridian; twelve had struck. Walking and walking, they found in an alley of the woods the fallen bole of a tree. They sat on it a while; Noelle laid her fur-gloved hand on his.
“Chris, tell me about yourself.”
“There isn’t anything to tell.”
“There’s everything. Start at the beginning. When were you born?”
“That’s easy. June nineteen-nine.” (She thought with a stab: “Then he’s nearly two years younger than me; only twenty-eight. And time’s passing, passing.) “My dad had the orchestra in the old Cricklewood Palace. Don’t suppose you ever heard of it. There’s a cinema there now---Odeon or Regal or something. In those days there were a lot of little variety halls all over the place; artistes went from one to another doing the same turn. Things looked pretty well set for the poor old dad. But then of course the war came; he had to go——”
There was a long pause that drowsed into the stillness of the day. Noelle said gently:
“Killed?”
“Well, he was and he wasn’t. He got a bullet through the thigh---touched the sciatic nerve; it used to give him hell---he couldn’t stick the conductor’s seat for more than half an hour at a time. Then, of course, after the war, everything was in a mess; jazz was coming in---he didn’t understand jazz, and---oh, well, I’d better tell you. It was veronal and they said it was an accidental overdose, but I know damn’ well it wasn’t. What with the pain and the worry and feeling himself a back number I don’t blame him.”
“Oh, Chris, how awful for you! Were you there?”
“Yes. I remember trying to waken him for about half an hour. But of course it was napoo. He looked so damn’ content; I thought: ‘Needn’t feel sorry for you anyway---you’re all right.’ I’ve never been afraid of dying since---nor living either, seeing you can end it all so easy. . . . I was eleven.”
“Oh, Chris! Poor little Chris! Funny; I was twelve when my father died. But it wasn’t like that, of course.” (No; “Havlon” and frost in Finchley Road and tears and great resolves.)
“You don’t need to be sorry for the dead; they’re all right. . . . But my mother took it badly.”
“Tell me about your mother. . . . Chris, did you call her Mums?”
“Yes, generally. As far as I can remember. Why?”
“Because I did mine.” But Noelle warmed secretly all over; of course he did, of course! And if Chris’s mother had a daughter, she must have called her “Ducks.” Of course. The right people did. . . . But Chris was going on about his mother; listen.
“She was a corker. You’d have liked her. Fay Emerald she was. You almost must have heard the name.”
But Noelle, mortified, hadn’t heard it; truthful, she was obliged to say so.
“Before your time, of course. But she was well remembered. She used to go round all the One and Two Towns in the country. She had some great numbers. ‘There’s a Boy on Every Beach for Me.’ Ever hear that one? And ‘Saturday night’s All Right, All Right, All Right.’ Father used to orchestrate her tunes---did the band parts. Even wrote one or two---under different names. But when jazz came in he was sunk there again. . . . Oh, well, I suppose they all died with her. But, by gosh, she made them go. You don’t get numbers like those nowadays. Or singers.”
“She’s dead, Chris?”
“Oh, Lord, yes---ages ago. Eight years to be exact. There’s only me and my sister left now. But mother was a corker! She made a lot of money on the halls and what’s more, she kept it. Dad sold out his copyrights, of course---you more or less had to in those days; he never made very much. But that’s how I had a good education, and that’s how I’ve got a little bit of my own now.”
Noelle sighed. “Lucky you. I’ve only a very little I got from my Mums. Two hundred a year or so.”
“Two hundred a year? I don’t call that so very little. Put together with mine——”
“What!”
He was instantly confused; he muttered something to his feet about a decent little income. But his thought---and it wasn’t the first time he had thought it; quite clearly it wasn’t---burned in his cheeks, set his hands jumping. Noelle herself went cold, then warm. “put together with mine”; oh, no, no---I mustn’t. She said quickly:
“Go on about your mother.”
He went on---with relief. He told of just the home she would have designed for him; a jolly, happy, family little place, with love in it and fun. His mother used to sing them her songs: “A Boy on Every Beach”; “Saturday Night’s All Right, All Right, All Right.” They were all right, all right, all right. “People said my dad made a fool of himself marrying a variety artist like that; did he hell! Only wish I could make as lucky a fool of myself.” She thought excitingly: “You can; you could; you can.” “You know the popular notion of variety artists; people said: ‘She’ll run you up debts, she’ll carry on with other men.’ Did she ever! They were in love with each other, you see; all the time. It made me believe in love, seeing them like that---kid as I was. When I play these croony tunes nowadays I think of Mums and Dad. It’s true even if it sounds tripe; it can be true anyway——”
She thought ecstatically: “Yes, yes, yes! True. Real. Yes.”
“I suppose they were tragic-like. Lots o’ people would tell you so. But don’t you believe it.”
He had forgotten Noelle; he was back in that jolly little “home” where Dad had played “There’s a Boy on Every Beach” on the piano, sciatica or no sciatica; and Fay Emerald---not so young, but who cared?---sang and danced to her children. And Noelle was back in it with him, loving it. She said, round-eyed and with parted lips---Noelle at her most Noelle-ish:
“Chris, how lovely! Chris, were you a little red-haired boy?”
He was temporarily checked.
“I was a little boy anyway. I suppose I had red hair then.”
“Chris, did they call you ‘Carrots’?”
He said, rather shortly, “Yes; they did, sometimes.” He hadn’t liked “Carrots.” But Noelle was transplanted; of course they did, of course. That was how it should be---warmth, love, nicknames, pet names.
But she had pulled him up in mid-gallop; he couldn’t, it seemed, remember any more about Fay Emerald. Throwing away his cigarette, he said instead:
“Now, what about you? You tell your story now.”
“Oh, I haven’t any story.”
“Everybody’s got a story. Come on.”
She thought: Story? What sort of a story can I make for him?---A good little girl, shy, ambitious, worried about things not being “nice”; swotting, swotting---at school, at training colleges---always swotting because she was not really very clever; shoving herself on somehow, doing her duty in That State of Life. Yes, and longing to get out of it; getting out of it. There didn’t seem to be any story when she began it; yet somehow a story emerged and it went on and on. Mums; the Bridge Road School; Clive Farringay; she thought: “Now I’ve never told anyone about Clive.” Blackmore Hill and Fairy Falkland and her wonderful rich house; “you see, Chris, these were very wealthy people---I shouldn’t have been with them at all; they filled my head with ideas.” He nodded; he understood that; he said: “Good thing they did.” But it hadn’t been a good thing really. And then the years of drudgery, the conviction that it wasn’t good enough, the resolve——
“So you married Doctor Ritchie to get out of it?”
She was startled. “Oh, no, not quite like that.”
“Pretty much like that if you ask me. . . . You’re not happy at home.”
“Oh, it’s all right.”
“It isn’t. Why aren’t you happy?”
“Oh, I don’t know——” Then somehow she did
know; out it all came like a pouring flood. Graham; Audrey; years and years and years of snubbing and suppression. “They wrote a poem about me once---rather horrid; I found it; I wasn’t meant to” (“Or was I?”); it---it hurt me——”
He said: “They must be a precious little pair of swine.”
“Yes, I think they are. Oh, well, no; I can’t really say that. Perhaps it’s me. Perhaps it’s just that we’re all unsuited to each other, we don’t fit in——”
“All? Husband too?”
“Yes. I mean, no. No. That’s my fault. I can’t cheer him up somehow——”
“If you can’t cheer him up nobody could.” Oh, the delight of hearing that actually said. Because it was true, you know, really; I’m a nice sort of creature, lots of men would like me. And I am cheerful, good-humoured, easy to get on with——
“Noelle!”
“Yes, Chris?”
“It isn’t too late to mend.”
The shell exploded in front of her; crash! She stepped back from the reek and the flame, the flying fragments of steel. Stunned, not hit. Because, of course, one had been prepared for it---saw it coming. And now, as one had so carefully, so often resolved, now for the rehearsed moment of supreme sensibleness. God has given you a chance to set this relationship on a firm and stable basis now henceforward and for ever more; take it. She took it---with prepared, odd-sounding speech.
“Yes, it is, my dear. Oceans too late. And there’s nothing to mend. If there was, we couldn’t mend it.”
He looked up. “You said ‘My dear.’”
“Yes. Well.”
“Well, doesn’t that contradict you?”
“Oh, no. ‘My dear’s’ nothing nowadays.”
“From you? Noelle!”
She gave a laugh which she knew to be at once silly and constrained and no part of the resolve. She said nervously, playing for time:
“You’re using my name a lot to-day. You like it, don’t you!”
“It’s like you---lovely. It’s the loveliest name any girl ever had.”
“Oh! Oh!” She was overcome, imbecile; my name too! “You mustn’t say——”
“On the contrairy——” he had some engaging mispronunciations, and this was one of them---“On the contrairy, I must say——”
She sprang up from the log on which they were sitting; danger suddenly flamed in the still day; enemies---a host of little loveable enemies---rushed at her from the black leafless bushes waving their sharp spears. “Noelle, Noelle, you’re for it; we are going to destroy you!” They mustn’t, they mustn’t; fight them off; do something; move. Looking at Chris, she saw he was going to kiss her. “That bracken grove of irretrievable delights, of golden minutes. . . .” No; move. Move, you fool, move! She took three long striding separating steps away from him---away miles from him. Back ran the enemies into their black bushes; the day breathed again.
“No, Chris; please, no.”
He stared at her for a moment; it was touch and go still; a step, a step and a half, two steps. . . .
“Chris, we’ve sat too long. Let’s go and get lunch.” And another stride---another mile---away from him. “Lunch”; a grand word; a soothing word; a nostrum for madness.
He stared at her still as if he would suddenly leap the gap and destroy everything; then his mind changed, he shrugged his shoulders.
“All right. I’ll wait.”
It was after that salvation lunch---eaten in a little restaurant near the Kingston Gate; not much of a lunch---it was after lunch that Providence showed his hand. Mums used to say: “God never forgets good girls”; to-day God didn’t forget a girl who had at least tried.
They had sat with cigarettes and coffee till nearly three; the day, the wonderful day, was closing in already, settling itself to a long dark January night. Audrey and Lionel were already half-way up their cliff; Robin at Manchester was taking part in an after-lecture discussion---on his feet, saying some hesitating words. “I do not wish to seem to minimise the evidence brought forward, but I feel——” Doctors shouldn’t feel. . . . But the day, as if knowing itself unique and unrepeatable, died slowly. Noelle said sorrowfully:
“I suppose we’ll have to get home. . . . Chris, where do you live?”
He had been depressed through lunch, rather silent, downed. She had thought: “I’ve been a fool; I have been unkind, hot-and-cold, shilly-shally, back-and-fill; I have lost a golden chance. One kiss wouldn’t have hurt---it wouldn’t. But then would it have stopped at one kiss? Once you touched. . . . Nobody has ever touched me; but I could have been touched then. Irene and Bosinney .. . that bracken grove . . . gone to extremes. . . . Perhaps I could make up to him by going some of the way home in a taxi. You can kiss in a taxi. But not much more; it’s pretty safe. I would let him. . . . Irretrievable delights . . . the golden marriage of heaven and earth. . . . But where does he live, where will he be going now? Idiotically I don’t know.”
“Chris, where do you live?”
He said gloomily: “Hampstead way. I don’t suppose you’d know the place. It’s a side street called Mickleham Road.”
She sat up with a gasp. “Mickle——! Not off Mill Lane?”
“Yes. How did you know?”
“Because---because---oh, Chris it’s too absurd, it’s simply lunatic! Because that’s where we lived; that’s the place I’ve been telling you about all the morning.” He said, “Well, I’m damned. That settles it. The hand of God!” And if it wasn’t the hand of God, what was, what could be?
“Settles what, Chris?”
“Settles something I was thinking about. I was wondering if I should ask you to come home to tea and meet my sister.” (But was that all it settled?) “Then I thought I wouldn’t. Now---well, of course you’re coming.”
“But, Chris——”
“There’s no but about it. Don’t you want to see the place again?”
“Y-yes. But---oh, tell me first; how do you come to be there?”
“We’ve been there for ages. Mother bought a house there after the war. It was handy for Dad at the Palace. It’s a nice little street.”
Oh, it was; and once, great idiot, I thought it wasn’t!
“After the war. Chris! Do you mean to say we were living in the same street?”
“Well, I wasn’t there much. I was studying. But Dad was there for a bit. And then Mother.”
“Chris! What number?”
“Sixty-five.”
“We were twenty-eight. You were a good bit up the other side---beyond that little side-road. But---oh! It’s too amazing.”
They sat looking at it---the Hand of God spread out there in front of them. Whom the Hand of God hath joined. . . .
He sprang up; he was laughing again.
“Well, come on. We know where to go now. Thai\’s settled.” It seemed for a wild moment that everything was settled---settled by direct Providential intervention; settled. “ I’m going to ring up my sister; I want to make sure she’ll stay in. You’ll like Madge; she’s the clever one. Works in a furniture store---advertising manageress. Engaged to an architect. You’ll like Madge all right.” He went off, happy again, cheered again, to telephone.
The Hand of God!
They took no taxi; it seemed somehow that they had got beyond taxis. When a first-class miracle has been worked right in front of your eyes---worked for you, a miracle---a snatched kiss more or less becomes hardly worth trying for. And it was a miracle. Instead of a stranger whom I have known only for a matter of weeks, Chris has become someone I have known, in a manner of speaking, all my life; someone who has seen Mums and even Father (though, of course, he didn’t know they were Mums and Father), who may even have seen me and thought: “That’s a nice-looking little girl.” It makes everything quite different at once. . . .
Instead of the taxi they took a slow bus and walked from Finchley Road. And Mickleham Road was the same as ever; a procession of little red-brick houses lived in mostly by people who didn’t own them; shabby, short of paint, dull, ugly, inadequate. But there they were, the double row of them, with the little “gardens” in front and the railings set in the low stone walls. They had to pass Clive’s fatal corner, they had to pass No. 28 itself in order to reach No. 65. The people in No. 28 now had very ugly curtains and something that looked suspiciously like an aspidistra; but the ghost of Mums leaned out smiling from her bedroom window and it seemed to Noelle that the ghost said: “Is that you, Ducks? You’re doing the right thing, darling, you’re doing the right thing.” She felt the ghost nodding and smiling behind her all the way up the street. . . . But from that window where the aspidistra thing is now I once stood watching for Robin, and he was coming to ask me to marry him. And he said: “You will think it strange perhaps, Noelle, but I want you to be my wife”; and I said---I was a silly: “Oh, no,” meaning Oh, no, I didn’t think it strange, and he thought I meant Oh, no, I wouldn’t be his wife. But we soon got it straight. But I did wrong; I wronged him, I wronged myself. “The long marriage of heaven and earth”; but this is the long marriage of something quite different. . . . I did wrong, I must pay, I can’t come here ever again. Oh, God, who hast promised to accept the offer of a contrite heart. . . .
They were at No. 65; Chris was introducing his sister “This is Madge. You’ll like my old Magic. Everybody does.”
His Madge laughed---a deep chesty laugh hinting somehow at inscrutable wisdom. She said: “Go on with you Criss-Cross! Come in, Mrs. Ritchie, please.” (“Crisscross”; “Magic”; nicknames; right!) Madge was a big woman, handsome in the black silk of her office dress resolutely magnificent. She took Noelle upstairs to a bedroom that might have been Twenty-eight’s; she said: “You’ll want to tidy. I’m so glad you were able to come.”
“But I had to come. Do you know, Miss---Miss Milroy, we used to live in this very street. I only found out this afternoon that Chris——”
The large laugh again, slightly mechanical.
“We’ve lived here for years and years. It was my mother’s house.”
“So Chris has just told me.” She gazed happily at Madge. “Oh, I’m so glad you’re big. Like me.”
“Well, we all have to be as God made us.” And the laugh.
“But they won’t be nowadays.” Noelle thought of Audrey---straight, sharp, slim, controlled in body as in mind, as in heart, as in feelings; yet the child didn’t corset, didn’t bant; how did they manage it? “I’m big because I just have to be. I don’t believe in all this slimming and shrinking——”
“Chris wouldn’t have liked you if you hadn’t been well-made.”
Comforting creature! And “well-made”---what a good word! But she said hesitatingly:
“Has he spoken of me, then?”
“Lots.” And once more the laugh---a knowing laugh, a nurse-with-a-child laugh. Noelle thought this time: “I could come to dislike that sound. . . . And she knows too much about Chris, things I’ll never know; she’s had Chris all these years; even that little boy---‘Carrots’. . .”
Downstairs they had high tea. It was “high” only to the extent of boiled eggs; but even at that it was the highest tea Noelle had eaten since---oh, dear, since when? The ghost of Mums came back, nodding and smiling and saying: “You’re doing right, Ducks; I’m glad.” Noelle was in heaven. They looked at photographs; they had just the right photographs---Chris as a baby with nothing on but a well-placed wisp of chiffon; Madge dressed to go to a fancy-dress as Wendy; Father, a little slip of a man with a whimsical smile; the Great Fay Emerald, looking up to the gallery and showing all her teeth---rather a picture-postcard that one, but you saw where they got their looks. Just the right photographs. In fact it was all just right altogether; Madge’s manner to “Criss-cross”; Chris’s manner to “Magic”; the manners of Criss-cross and Magic to Noelle. It was all perfect---warm, cosy, homely, snug---a hundred darling words you could never think of applying to Frame Square. The bathroom had been a Mickleham Road bathroom; but---“nice things round me”? You could buy them too dear. “We hate N . . ll; we hate her fat legs; we hate her chest”---oh, forget it! Forget it all. Big handsome people, big in every way---hearts too; not cold and clever and knowing about Kaganovitch and Alejandro Lerroux and Magnitogorsk. Chris liked “well-made” women; I am a “well-made” woman; Chris said so. . . . Oh, heavenly evening! It flew.
“Oh, it’s half-past six. I must go.” Like a child at a party.
“Oh, don’t hurry.”
“I must. I must give my family dinner.” Trying to say it as if it were a great joke but not quite succeeding.
“Oh, they won’t starve for half an hour yet.” And the sibyl laugh.
But it ended, of course. It ended with Chris escorting her to Finchley Road to get a taxi. He could have telephoned for one from the nearest rank but they all knew why he didn’t; a walk together is a walk together, even if it is only as far as Finchley Road. Noelle kissed Madge; it was nice to be with people again who wanted, who expected, to be kissed on short acquaintance; and who kissed properly, coming close up to you and putting an arm round and curving to meet you. From woman’s bosom to woman’s bosom went a rush of scent, warmth, sympathy, sentiment; given another minute and they would have been crying happily together, communicating to each other all the unsaids, all the unsayables. Big people, well-made people. But that minute wasn’t given; you couldn’t have everything. Not the first time.
The first time? The last time. Chris stood outside the door of the taxi in Finchley Road while the meter ticked and the driver pursed up his lips and looked patient.
“You’ve not forgotten what I said? It isn’t too late to mend.”
“Mend what, Chris?” Safe in a taxi this time---and oh! how I wish I wasn’t.
“Mend you.”
“I’m not broken.”
“Not broken, perhaps. But---breaking. . . . You’ll come to the Marina this week?”
“I can’t promise. I’ll try.”
“You liked old Madge, didn’t you?”
“Oh, very much. Very much.”
“She liked you. I could see it. . . . Well, you’ll come back and see us another day.”
“Perhaps. Perhaps I will.”
He shook his head, smiling. “No perhapses. Say yes.”
“All right. Yes.”
“Darling!”
“Oh hush, Chris! Not to.”
The taxi started at last---apparently of its own volition. Finchley Road fell behind, Mickleham Road, warmth, kindness, lovingness. We are headed now for the Arctic, for ice and snow and the spears of their moon-frozen crystals; steel yourself, Noelle my girl, put on your furs, stoke up that fire that is burning so fiercely in your heart; you’ll need it. “We just couldn’t tell How we hate N . . ll.” Oh, cold and cruel; cold and clever and cruel. And Robin away at Manchester depressing himself over the unattainable. When he came back he would be worse; everything would be worse.
A little house in Mickleham Road. . . . A little warm house. . . .
Audrey, sitting upon sodden and clammy knickers and striving to enliven a Lionel who seemed to be a frozen corpse that might yet be sick at any moment, was wrestling with the Brixton traffic; never had it seemed so obdurately impermeable. If she could have seen in television her stepmother’s day, she would have said: “Noelle’s excelled herself.” And indeed that was just about what Noelle had done.
Towards the end of January Grannie went to Highgate to look at Grandfather’s grave, and she looked at it and there it was, the same as usual. It was a very cold day and the cemetery had a frozen look; this day the dead seemed very distant, they were giving nothing away “In the house of the Lord for ever”; a mouth-filling text that, if the last two words did have rather the clash of a door closing. Did it close? When you were in the house of the Lord for ever, were you finally freed from worry about your responsibilities on earth or were you obliged as some of these spiritualists made out, to go on watching all your friends and relatives making the most fatal errors which you could do nothing at all to avert? A fairly unattractive sort of hell, that; a refinement on the old fire-and-brimstone. We progress, thought Grannie, even in our hells. As for the house of the Lord, what was it like? Only the dead knew. Some days---on bright high-heavened days of spring, on hushed lustrous October afternoons---the dead seemed ready to tell you quite a lot; to-day, nothing.
Marks, Edmunds, Michaelson, Neal---there they all were. Fifty per cent of these people, thought Grannie, fifty per cent at a conservative estimate, had died dissatisfied or worse; and eighty per cent of their dissatisfaction---again at a conservative estimate---was of their own seeking. They would go striving after absurdities, casting free from their appointed lines, breaking the tapes, jumping and falling and bruising themselves. Whereas if they had just retained the elementary sense to stick to That State of Life . . . Experiment. Change. The fools.
And look at my own grandchildren, thought Grannie; they are all going off the rails worse and worse, wilder and wilder. Graham is going to become another ineffective scribbler and a burden on the finances of others. Audrey is going to commit a mésalliance whose consequences---all bad---may be incalculable; she has far too many brains and far too little cleverness to make a success of that sort of thing. And René’s going to—— But at René Grannie stopped suddenly, because René wasn’t going---he was gone. He was in Spain now---or he must be, although he had sent no word; he had flung his little body in the path of the Beast, and it was advancing upon him with its dripping talons and its eyes of flame. “Rennie”; a French sailor suit, and he could never learn to say his “r’s.” . . . For the moment her poise, her self-command, deserted Grannie; she stood droopingly, a frightened little old woman. The dead---Marks, Edmunds, Michaelson, Neal---moved a step nearer.
Catastrophe, thought Grannie recovering, there is catastrophe ahead of them all three. Must I stand by just like that spiritualist hell---and see it? She glanced---this time a little longingly---at that blank space on Grandfather’s stone. “And of his wife, Henrietta Graham.” In the House of the Lord for ever. Time, too, perhaps.
And there was something queer about Noelle too, these days.
Yesterday Noelle had come to Treherne Gardens, lowing and mooing and “Mother”ing. It seemed Robin had been to some conference at Manchester and had come back all the worse for it, more depressed than ever. What else could you expect? Anyone would be the worse of going to Manchester. And Noelle “couldn’t cheer him up.” Again---how could she, the great gaby? She sent him off alone to a couple of days of train-and-hotel meals, and quite likely she didn’t even take the trouble to see that he packed his Analax and his Eno’s. Grannie had said sharply:
“Why didn’t you go with him?”
At that simple question the great cow had looked quite extraordinary---greenish, startled, alarmed. Why?
“Oh, he didn’t want me.”
“You thought he didn’t. He thought he didn’t. But men---men like Robin at any rate---always want their wives with them. He would have been the better of you.” It was as if she said: “He would have been the better of even you.”
“He didn’t say——”
“Of course he didn’t say, you great owl. What you should have done was to pack and go, to bustle him along, take him to the Repertory Theatre, keep him from sitting mooning at the ugly pictures in the smoking-room of the Midland Hotel. But of course, you couldn’t see that unless he actually said.
“It’s a pity you didn’t go. Robin is very difficult to live with---nobody knows that better than I do——”
Noelle had burst suddenly into incomprehensible tears.
Grannie had been annoyed as usual by Noelle’s visit, but this time she had been something more than annoyed; she had been perturbed as well. There was something very queer about the Waxwork this time, something womanishly fundamental. Could it be possible that she was at long last about to have a child? Yet surely---aye, certainly---she would have mooed and lowed about that; she would have been full of hints and delicacies and “little strangers”; so probably not. Then what could it be? Grannie, seeing her own Noelle, not Noelle’s Noelle, certainly not Chris Milroy’s Noelle, couldn’t guess.
But she had a desperate look about her anyway. An Irene Forsyte look if Grannie could have seen it, a Twelve Pound Look.
Graham woke up suddenly. He had an idea that he had been very deeply asleep, perhaps for a very long time; but a glance at his watch showed him that it was only half-past one. So---deep perhaps but not long; because Iona and he had only come in at half-past eleven after the film at the Curzon. He was still half-asleep, he was enveloped in some sort of mist, a dark purple mist, strongly scented. Was it beautiful or was it not beautiful? There had been some kind of heavenly experience---heavenly and yet in some queer way a little shameful too; which survived---the heaven or the shame . . .? Ah, yes; of course. . . .
He woke up completely, remembered where he was, put out a hand and touched Iona. Sound asleep.
“Darling! Wake up.”
She wriggled and said very crossly: “Oh, do lie still.”
“I can’t. I’ll have to dress and go home.”
“Oh, lie still.”
A silence, not a comfortable silence, a fool-making silence. Iona wormed more deeply into the pillow.
“I can’t, Iona. I’ll have to get up.”
She wakened at that, really cross. “Oh, do he still for God’s sake and don’t keep fidgeting about. I hate people who can’t he still in bed.” That didn’t sound well, did it?---sounded as if she had all sorts of different people in bed with her? Oh well, this wasn’t the hour or the place for precision.
He got up stiffly, remembering the last hour quite clearly now. It had been heavenly, the ultimate expression of terrestrial bliss. Or had it? There was a queer doubt somewhere, a sort of hang-over. He began to pull on his clothes, groping for them in the dark, he couldn’t find his stud, but when he switched on the light Iona shrieked in protest.
“Put out that light!”
“But I can’t dress in the dark.”
“Then don’t dress. Get back into bed and go to sleep and don’t be such a silly.”
Oh, she was impossible!
Dressed after a fashion, very uncomfortable, he staggered into the living-room. My God, he thought, I feel tired; he poured himself a whiskey-and-soda and drank it gratefully, yawning hugely the while. The flat was as cold as Greenland; the silly old joke came into his head about the fellow who caught his death getting up out of a warm bed to go home. Just the sort of idiocy that would intrude itself at a moment like this when one wanted to feel exalted, purified, the knight magnificent, the conqueror. He caught sight of his face in the mirror; some conqueror!
He took another whiskey and soda; if she hadn’t the decency to get up and help him out, she could at least stand him a drink. It was a strong whiskey and soda and it pulled him together. In the middle of it he caught sight of Playfair’s photograph---or what he had always taken to be Playfair’s photograph---standing on Iona’s desk; he examined it more closely. A square face, shiny sort of hair---probably grey---that stuck very close to the head, almost like a cap; big open eyes, a sort of doglike look. Sound-looking chap really when you came to look at him. Oh, well, he was now---what was the comic word?---a “cuckold”; the world’s oldest joke, the butt of mankind ever since wives became things worth having a row over. The Elizabethans thought it damn’ funny; the Restoration thought it damn’ funny; Shakespeare. There was something about ninefold-cuckolded Jupiter catching her in the house of stinking Capricorn---or was that a mix-up of Gow’s Watch and something else? Pretty horrid-sounding words the whole thing seemed to let you in for altogether. . . . The world’s oldest joke; but somehow at this moment it didn’t seem very funny. Even if you supposed old Playfair to be going to bed at this instant with a dusky beauty---Iona had hinted at habits of this kind---it still wasn’t much of a score. And anyway he wouldn’t be doing that because in India it was already morning. . . . Another frightful jaw-breaking yawn. Iona; darling Iona. No, I’m cold and tired; oh, God, I’m cold and tired! Another drink? One more A.B.F. spot? No.
He called into the next room: “Iona, I’m going.” There was no answer at all. Selfish little beast, hogging it there, leaving me all alone. Soulless, women were---mindless; just body. All she could say was: “Lie still. Lie still.” Pah!
He let himself out and stumbled downstairs. Not a taxi in sight; probably wouldn’t be one for miles. Walk to Frame Square. . . . Oh, God, I’m tired.
Graham walked so far before he saw a taxi that when one at last appeared, it wasn’t worth taking; so he walked the whole way home. Where was that earlier mood of radiant happiness, of conquest, of a satisfaction that was not relative but absolute? He couldn’t recapture it. Another time, maybe; he would go home with Iona again, of course, and then, of course, it would come back. Meantime he couldn’t feel as he ought to feel, as he would have wished to feel. The successful lover, loosed from his mistress’s arms, treading on rose-leaves and air? Say rather a poor dead-beat devil treading on a damn’ hard pavement. Something wrong somewhere; something had been taken out of him and nothing put in its place. “Lie still for God’s sake.” “Put out that light.” Selfish little cat!
“It is better to travel hopefully than to arrive.” “The pleasures of anticipation are greater——” All the old copy-book headings coming up as usual; and as usual; curse them!---true. . . . It shouldn’t have been like this. Whose fault is it---mine or Iona’s?
Again; of course I will go there again. But there is something gone from me that I will not recover. It will go on, my love with Iona will go on; but it will be an adventure hereafter, not an idyll.
An adventure? An---an amour. . . .
At the Cat in Boots.
“Oh, do stop talking about it, Lionel. Do stop tormenting yourself.”
“Audrey, you’re an angel!”
“I’m nothing of the kind. But I’ve told you I’m going to forget all that cliff business——”
“That’s why you’re an angel. To be able to. Most girls would never forget a show like that.”
“Well, I will. In fact, I have.” (But have I? That little animal squeak of pure funk; will I ever forget that? No. And “He’s only a dog?” No.)
“You see, Audrey, you’ve got courage. You can’t understand——”
“I’ve got no more courage than anybody else.”
“You’ve got more courage than me. I wasn’t brought up to be brave. I was told never to fight other boys. I wasn’t even allowed to play games; my people thought they weren’t good for me. I can’t help it.”
(My people? Shall I seize on that word, ask a few questions? No. René said, give him time. Better not.)
“Well, you’re going to help it now. You’re going to fight down all that. You’ve promised.”
“I know, Audrey; and I will. You can make me do things. When I’m with you, I could---my God, I could conquer! If you told me to go out into Oxford Street this moment and throw myself under a bus, I could do it.”
“What good would that do, silly?”
“Well, of course, you’d never ask me to do a thing like that. I---I just meant it for an illustration. What I mean to say is, you’re wonderful, Audrey. I believe you could make me into a great man.”
“That’s the way I want you to talk. . . . And people who can conquer cowardice are really braver than people who just aren’t afraid. Everybody knows that.”
“Yes, but then they haven’t all got Audreys.”
“No.” (He overdoes it a little; really he does. It’s as if he was blarneying me; and I’ve a nasty sort of feeling that he thinks he’s being rather clever about it. I wish he wasn’t always so secretive. . . .) “Lionel, if I asked you to go to Spain, would you go?” (Now what on earth made me say that?)
“Spain? What for?”
“To fight, of course. To beat Franco.”
“No, I wouldn’t.” And his face had become sulky again, baby-boy again. “I’ve told you a hundred times I don’t believe in all this fighting.”
“It’s a way of showing courage.”
“It’s a darned silly way. What’s the good of wars? We want to stop wars.”
“Yes, but you can’t stop wars just by sitting saying so. . . . I’ve got a cousin who’s gone to Spain.” (And why did I say that?)
“To the war?”
“Yes, he’s in the International Brigade.”
“Then he’s a B.F.”
“He just isn’t!” Blazing eyes, blue fire, sparks, lightning.
“Well, I mean---I’m sorry, Audrey, I didn’t mean to insult your cousin. But I don’t think there’s anything to be said for chaps who go starting wars or chaps who go joining them either.”
Or for chaps who go blitheroh with funk on a simple bit of cliff. No, no; I mustn’t say that; that’s all to be forgotten. Oh, dear; the evening’s going wrong again. Why did I think about René? Why isn’t René here instead of Lionel? Why should I want him? All so difficult; two me’s---contending, contending. Lionel’s right about war, of course; but so’s René. I admit Lionel’s right; I know René’s right. Oh, damn!
“Never mind, Lionel; have some more beer.”
“I don’t like beer very much, Audrey.”
“Have some anyway. It’ll do you good. It’ll buck you up. You’ll feel braver. . . . Oh, come on, Lionel!”
At the Marina.
“Nellie, you’re crying!”
Could love’s doting indulgence further go?” Nellie!” The most hated of all the perversions of her lovely name, a misrendering which ere now had cost fools her friendship. But he had asked if he might call her that; for some reason he was attracted by the name Nellie; and now whatever he asked he must forthwith have. The giving was no effort; it was heaven. Even “Nellie.”
“Nellie, you’re crying!”
“I’m not, Chris; really I’m not.”
“Yes, you are---and I know why. It’s this rotten signature tune. I’ll make Simmy change it.”
“No, no; don’t do that.” But idiotically, absurdly, it was the signature tune. “Good night, good night; I’ll see you in the morning.” And suddenly, in the fast emptying salon of the Marina, Noelle broke down and wept outright.
“It---it’s just that I always have to s-say good night and I never s-see you in the morning.”
Climax of Noelle! In the saccharine fountains of slop and sentiment was there, after this, any drop left? What would Audrey have said, how would she have looked, at such an utterance? But Chris seemed to think it quite natural; he said:
“You could see me any morning. Every morning.”
She wept speechlessly, heavy echoing sobs; Simmy’s brassy little “girl,” inured no doubt to scenes, looked across at her with calm curiosity. Chris said:
“Nellie!”
“Yes, my dear?”
“You know I love you.”
“Y-yes.”
“And you love me.”
“Yes!”
“And you’re not happy at home.”
Silence. Sobs.
“They don’t value you there. They don’t like you. They wouldn’t even miss you. Nellie——”
“Oh, Chris, stop, stop!”
“I won’t stop. I’ve stopped too long. Seeing you made miserable by a crowd that isn’t fit to black your shoes. . . . Nellie, come back to Mickleham Road. Madge’ll look after you till we can get married. I’ll get a room out somewhere. Don’t ever go back to that rotten lot---don’t ever see one of them again. Come to me and Madge. Come to-night.”
The Marina was empty; its huddled tables with their derelict ice-plates and coffee-cups, its vacant shining floor, spun round Noelle in a mist of colours and shapes. In the whirlpool, upside down, she saw Frame Square; standing on their heads as if mirrored she saw Audrey and Graham and Robin. As if she were drowning, the whole of her five years at Frame Square went racing past her in a furious tumbling cavalcade; they flew away from her like the tail-light of a receding express. The Cadrigua portrait; “my” drawing-room; Mackay barking; a dressing-table covered with trinkets; away they went like debris going down a cyclone. “Do you think so?” “Oh, thank you, stepmother.” “After all, it’s her name.” As the lights of the Marina were switched off cluster by cluster, so these too glimmered, flared, vanished. The Poem burst and faded in a final firework of dazzling blue. “And her horrible undies Are like Mrs. Grundy’s.” It burst and faded. Through the shuddering Marina there swept a great roaring gale---or was it the water in the drowning woman’s ears? The Marina whirled and dissolved; Simmy’s “girl” with her speculative stare shot upwards through the roof; only the face of Chris---strong, freckled, honest, kind---kept its place in the vortex. She bent towards it, and the roaring gale tore them away together, away from every landmark and every anchor and all the navigating lights, away for ever and ever, away into outer space.
“Take me, Chris, take me. I can’t go back. Not ever. Not even to-night. . . .”
Once you had made up your mind, it was not, René found, very difficult to get to Spain. Once the first step was taken, things moved of their own momentum.
“I want to join the International Brigade. How do I do it?”
A grey tired man with a Welsh accent asked him a string of questions; Party credentials, age, married or single, next of kin. “Do you realise what you’re in for?”
“I realise all right.”
“Well, go downstairs and ask for Mr. Laidlaw. You’ll be given a week-end ticket to Paris. We’re taking you over in batches of fives. Find your own food and act like tourists.”
“Why the week-end?” asked René. “Oh, I see---the passport.”
“Just that.”
“But how about getting back again?”
The Welshman gave him a sour look.
“We’ll see to that when the time comes. Get forward first.”
“Of course. I’m sorry. But look here——” he gave the Welshman the engaging smile that had captivated Grannie long ago on the platform at Victoria---“I’ve got a passport. And I’ve enough to pay my own fare.”
“Then why to goodness didn’t you say so sooner? In that case, better you get yourself to Paris and join there. Report at the International Recruiting Rooms. Rue Saint Michel.”
Progress continued smooth; even the Channel was calm and unhindering. At the International Recruiting Rooms there was an immense long counter like the Douane; it was divided into sections marked by placards---“Anglais,” “Allemands,” “Italiens,” “Belges.” All kinds of men were coming and going---alike only in one respect, that their ages were between seventeen and thirty. The place was a babel of tongues; there were Bulgarians, Poles, Chileans, Mexicans. It is an International Brigade, thought René impressed, it is, really. A waxy little Frenchman asked him all the same questions over again: “Do you know what you are going to Spain for?” “Do you understand you will have to fight?” René signed a paper swearing to serve the Spanish Government. “Do you know any French?”
“I am half French. My mother——”
“Très bien. Ça marche. Alors——.” He handed out a little bundle of notes---forty-five francs. “You can have two hours’ leave now to enjoy yourself. You can have dinner at the T.U. Club. But keep with some of the other comrades.”
A rosy-faced, black-haired young man who had just signed his declaration of allegiance looked up; he said in very broad Scots:
“Ma name’s Douglas Poustie.” (Rhyming with “frowsty.”) “Whit’s yours?”
René told him. Poustie said, adopting Grannie’s pronunciation at once: “Rennie Ritchie? That’s a guid Scots name. Whit part are you frae?”
René said he had lived almost entirely in London.
Lucky you! I’m frae Lochgelly if ye ken whaur that is. West Fife an’ three cheers for Gallacher. Let’s get oot-bye.”
They wandered out together into the street, Poustie quite evidently at a loss, his resolute rosy face comically bewildered.
“Did ye get yer forty-five francs, comrade? How much is that?”
“About nine bob.”
“Nine bob, eh? An’ we’ve two hours for fun. What d’ye say to a couple o’ tarts? They say the French tarts is fine.”
René shook his head.
“I don’t fancy tarts much. Anyway we wouldn’t get anything worth having for forty-five francs.”
“Maybe no. Nine bob’s no’ great. Well, onyway, let’s hae a drink.”
They found a café close by and sat down at a little table. René thought: “Curious how everything in this world resolves itself into having drinks.” Poustie, anxious to be hospitable, said:
“What’s it t’be? Wud they hae whiskey?”
“They would, but it would be very dear. Try cognac instead.”
“Connyack?”
“Brandy.”
“Christ! Brandy’s med’cine.” However, he tried it and liked it. “An’ whit was your job at home, comrade?”
“I’m afraid I wasn’t doing anything very much.”
“Goad! An’ they call this a Workers’ Party. Aweel, no more wis I. I’d ha’ been a miner---they’re a’ miners where I come frae---but they didna want me. Unem-bloody-ployment. . . . There’s a big crood o’ Scots lads in this push. Half o’ them’s miners like me. . .
René thought: “This is real; we really have started. In a day or two this chap and I will be holding rifles shooting at people, killing people. We’re the International Brigade. Arriba! . . .” In Poustie the unaccustomed brandy, which he religiously alternated with beer, produced a rosy amiability; he thought France was bloody fine, he thought “connyack” bloody fine, he thought René bloody fine. When at last René proposed that they should go and get something to eat, he rose a little unsteadily, suddenly bewildered and at sea.
“Aye, Rennie, but whaur?”
René took his arm. “Come along with me. I’ll show you. I know a little French——”
Poustie said that was grand. He leaned against René, breathing ambrosia.
“Ach, Rennie, I like ye fine! Ye’re a wee man but the wee yins is whiles the best. You an’ me’ll be chums like, eh?”
They gave each other the Red Front salute; then they shook hands solemnly in the street.
Progress continued so smooth, so uneventful, that it dulled all sense of adventure; presently one was whipping oneself up to return the compliments of the Perpignan sentries. One had to say to oneself, Perpignan! Port Bou! Spain! One had to rouse oneself for another rendering of the “Internationale.” “Debout! les damnés de la terre: Debout! les forçats de la faim.” Stimulating words, no doubt, though not very apt: one was no sort of convict of starvation---one had or could have had a perfectly good job as a publisher’s reader at Mansell’s; one wasn’t the condemned of the earth either---one was a hero marching to save Spain; well, anyway, one was a clear-headed supporter of the better cause, doing the right and sensible thing. . . . Yes, one was; stop swithering . . . “Salud! Salud!” “No pasaran!” “Alto! Documentacion!” “Comrad Ingles!” Well, this is Spain anyway. “U.G.T.” “P.S.U.” “J.S.U.” Lentil soup; vino rojo; the red-and-black Anarchist flag. Spain all right.
Poustie looked sleepily out of red eyes at an immense slogan painted in white on a blank wall. “Viva F.A.I.” “Whit’s F.A.I., Rennie?”
“It’s the Anarchists; they’re top dog here.”
“An’ whaur’s the red flag?”
“That’s it---the red-and-black one. Anarchists.”
Poustie said, disgruntled and uncomprehending: “Ach, t’hell!”
René had imagined that once across the Spanish frontier they would move forthwith at least as far as Valencia; instead, they were side-tracked into billets at Figueras. The billets varied; some of them were very bad, but René and Poustie, sticking together, were lucky enough to get into a convent. The convent church had been burnt down---ostensibly as the repository of concealed Fascist arms; the statue of the Madonna in the grounds had had its eyes gouged out and obscenities scrawled over its white marble robes. René thought with a little shock that was the first of many: “We did that. Our side did that.”
Poustie, who had been brought up on Maria Monk, was intrigued by the convent; he poked about the deserted rooms but found little to gratify his curiosity. As the days went by, he grumbled vociferously. “Are we expeckit t’fight this war wi’ wur han’s?” And it was true that the Centuria remained weaponless and in the clothes in which it had crossed from England; no uniform yet, no rifles. This was the more galling when an American contingent of the Brigade arrived spick and span, every man in khaki and every man with full equipment. A little local American Jew who had been on the Jarama front---or said he had---went into transports at the sight.
“Jeez, they got guns! Say, they got guns! Oh, boy! What d’ya know!”
Poustie said sourly: “We’ll a’ hae guns in guid time.”
“Sez you! Down there they got one gun to four men. An’ no one ain’ told ‘em about diggin’ trenches; that’s why most of ’em gets it through deir fat heads. Say, y’aren’t gonna win wars that-a-way. But our boys got guns. Say! Can ya beat it!”
Undoubtedly there were serious shortages. Grim stories came drifting north of wounded rotting for want of antiseptics, of solitary ambulances trying to cope with fifty times their complement of casualties, of doctors who worked till they dropped or threw down their blunted knives in despair. “No pasaran! No pasaran!” The spirit was splendid, the Spanish people were magnificent, but---“Y’aren’t gonna win wars that-a-way.”
The armed and equipped Americans were hurried away and were seen no more, but no rifles or uniforms arrived for the Scottish contingent. Instead, there were endless lectures---mostly political; it seemed more important to know the exact refinements of Communist doctrine than the barest A B C of military science. Command was by choice of the whole body---or this at least was the theory, but there were means of side-tracking theories. An ex-soldier was elected after a show of hands, but he was not a member of the Communist Party, and somehow or other he never assumed his duties. At a second election a good Communist---who had never seen a rifle fired---was chosen. Higher authority was divided; there was a military commander and a political commander, and the latter seemed to be the more important of the two. This “Political Commissar” took René aside one morning; he was an ex-newspaper man from Glasgow.
“See here, comrade, you’re one of the men here I trust. I know you’re sound. But there’s too many stinkin’ Trotskyites knockin’ about this little push. Don’t say I told you, but keep your eyes open, and if you see anything funny-like, tell me quick. I’m trusting you, mind.”
The joke being, thought René, that if I’m anything I’m a stinkin’ Trotskyite. He was not altogether surprised, however, when he learned that Poustie and others had enjoyed the same confidential treatment. Poustie was furious.
“Whit’s the sense in settin’ us up yin against the ither? Can we no’ agree till the bloody war’s by wi’?”
There was no sense, obviously; but the process went on. As if the inextricable welter of Spanish Labour politics were not confusing enough, there arose also personal animosities, party animosities, splits, hates, schisms. Greig, the Political Commissar, laboured it day after day.
“Ye see, comrades, there’s first of all the Say-Nay-Tay, that’s the National Confederation o’ Workers. But hereabouts they’re under the F.A.I.---that’s the Anarchists like---an’ ye never know when they’ll start settin’ about the U.G.T.---that’s like our T.U.C. Then there’s the P.O.U.M.---that’s a kind o’ I.L.P. Steer clear o’ them---they’re Trotskyite. And I’m none too sure o’ some o’ the Say-Nay-Tay either. . . .”
Someone said amid laughter: “An’ this is whit they ca’ the United Front!” René felt inclined to echo Poustie’s more laconic comment---“Ach, t’hell!”
Meanwhile it was clear that the political command and the military command didn’t hit it off. A farcically incompetent “field exercise” ended in Gilbertian confusion in which the two attacking parties furiously attacked each other while the defenders, smoking cigarettes and admiring the view from their hill-top, did nothing. This fiasco was followed by even more tedious rows and recriminations. Some were for deposing the Political Commissar, but had no idea how to set about it; another section clamoured for the removal of the military commander and the substitution of the ex-warrior originally elected. Greig went round and round trusting everybody, and warning them against stinkin’ Trotskyites. In the end, of course, nothing at all was done.
René felt shockingly depressed. Soon, he thought, relatively soon at any rate, these men will have to be thrown into action against armed disciplined troops---against Franco’s terrible Moors with their machine-guns and their hand-grenades. Hardly a soul amongst us knows how to aim a rifle or dig himself in or assemble a machine-gun. I don’t. And I’m in this, I’m one of them. I don’t think I’m funking it but there it is---it’s me after all, my life. More than half of this Brigade is going to be killed like sheep; me too? If it was going to do the slightest good I’d face it, but what sort of good is ever going to come from a push run as this push is run? In fact, have I been a fool to come?
He confided this to Poustie who said: “Ach, niwer heed, Rennie. We’re no’ conscripts. We came here as volunteers like an’ if we dinna like it we can quit.” But René felt that would be definitely worse; I didn’t come here to run away. But there were many already who thought with Poustie.
To cheer themselves against this dismal outlook, René and Poustie went into the town for an evening---without leave, but the discipline was so slack that they were unlikely to be missed. There was little to do in the town, however, except sit in the Café Moidor, mechanically answering Red salutes and drinking thin Spanish wine. In the street a Spanish street organ played---a powerful, deafening thing, caparisoned with bells, drums and “canary” effects, more like the steam-organ of an English merry-go-round. In the middle of its performance a Red funeral came down the street---the hearse piled high with red wreaths, a squad of blue-overalled militia tramping behind it; its appearance was the signal for a demonstration; everyone in the café rushed into the street singing and shouting as the hearse lumbered past. “Debout! Les damnes de la terre!” “No pasaran!” “Salud! Salud!” “Viva Communismo!” “Viva F.A.I.!” All over, it appeared, bar shouting: street organs and salutes and cheers---and no rifles.
The sour wine had disagreed with Poustie; he said gloweringly: “Why is a’ they chaps no’ at the Front?” And when René made no reply: “I’ll tell ye why, Rennie---it’s because me an’ you has been sent out here t’ do’t for them. An’ I’m no’ that sure that I’m on.”
René said: “Oh, cheer up, Dougal. We’ll get out of this soon now, we’ll get on with it. Things’ll get better.”
Poustie said morosely: “Will they hell!” And René, watching the pile of red flowers staggering down the road, listening to the effusive uproar of the organ, thought again: “Fool! Fool! I shouldn’t have come.”
They returned safely to the convent; the sentries were playing cards. On the way through the battered garden past that desecrated Madonna, Poustie, who was slightly drunk, drew René’s attention to a small gateway in the wall.
“D’ye ken whit yon is?”
René was yawning. “Of course I do. It’s the nuns’ cemetery.”
“Ay. They pit them in yon wee closet-things in the wa’. Bit, man Rennie, d’ye ken whit they found in one o’ them? A pickle wee shrivelled-up bit thingies like dried monkeys. An’ d’ye ken whit they wis? Weans.”
“What? Babies?”
“Ay. Bairns---weans---babies.” He hiccuped triumphantly. “Yon’s yer nuns!”
Suddenly and mysteriously and for no obvious reason, Figueras, which had looked like being everlasting, came to an end. They were piled into buses one morning after breakfast and moved off. “Whaur are we for?” The word ran round, “Albacete.” “Whaur’s yon?” But when told, most of them were little the wiser; the majority, seeing the name written down, pronounced the last four letters of it like “seat.” “Alby-seat”---to the Scots contingent at least---the place became.
The next few days turned out to be a sort of triumphal progress by way of Barcelona and Valencia to this new abode. The Brigade was received with universal tumult; brass bands routed and roared, banners flapped and fluttered, girls threw red flowers, hands---generally grimy---pressed forward with bunches of little brown cigarettes. “Hombre! Cigarillos!” A stranger might have supposed himself participating in the celebration of a tremendous victory; whereas Madrid was commonly supposed at the moment to be in grave danger of falling. Poustie was cross and disgruntled; when René told him they meant it all kindly, he retorted: “I didna come here t’ be a bloody circus.” René thought of asking him: “Why did you come?” but decided that the moment was unpropitious.
Poustie cheered up again at Valencia which seemed a happy place with the oranges shining like golden lamps upon the trees and the cafés full, and much better food to eat than was purveyed in Barcelona. A huge notice in the city square said: “Spaniards! Your front is only 110 kilos away”; this frightened even Poustie for a time till he learned that it referred to the Teruel front; the Madrid front, the Jarama front, their front, was at twice that distance. In the centre of the square a vast hand grasped a rifle and was labelled “Your Spain is in danger,” but the armed and uniformed throngs in the streets seemed quite content to stay where they were and defend it from there. Poustie said again: “All these b . . . s ought t’ be at the Front,” and was inclined to become quarrelsome with well-intentioned admirers. To keep him quiet, René took him to the Hotel Internacional and gave him arroz a la Valenciana; but he didn’t like that either.
Albacete, after Valencia or even Barcelona, was a sad come-down---a sprawling ill-kept place that had grown up round a railway junction. Rain poured and the ill-paved---or unpaved---streets were deep in whitish mud. There was but one tolerable café. This natural dreariness of “Alby-seat “ was augmented by three days of intensive political lectures in the bull-ring---Greig in his element---and a series of kit inspections of the new uniform which had at last arrived and was apparently so precious to the command that they could not bear to lose sight of it for more than an hour at a time. There were still no rifles or substantial hope of any, but at least in one’s brown corduroy jacket, loose brown trousers strapped at the ankles and jaunty little khaki beret one felt more like a soldier and less like a Venezuelan rebel.
The actual camp was in a village some distance from the town; it had been a good deal knocked about by aerial bombardments, and its accommodation, never luxurious, now verged on the primitive. For the first few days the only lavatory equipment in René’s---and Poustie’s---billet was a heap of chaff and earth in one corner of the living-room. At first this was difficult, but presently they found that the scavenging of this utility could usually be accomplished by bribing some less fastidious comrade with drink. Mercifully it was cold weather. The accommodation apart, it seemed, however, as if relenting Providence were now showering blessings wholesale; on the top of the sudden outburst of uniforms there now arrived about a dozen doubtful rifles and half that number of machine-guns. Unfortunately these last were of four different makes so that their assemblage and dismantling required four separate courses of instruction. It was at this stage that René realised that a large percentage of the Continental comrades could neither read nor write; this he discovered when distribution was made of a little instructively rhymed pamphlet about the militiaman Canuto who was tan bruto that he couldn’t do anything right. This metrical gem was wasted on a large company of Canutes---who couldn’t read a word of it.
Discipline continued doubtful; schism and difference still rent the camp; rows, blunders, enquiries, recriminations followed hard on each other’s heels. There was a bright moment when a temporary adjutant was put under arrest by his own men for being drunk and disorderly; he was released, however, by the C.O. As Poustie said: “Yon’s yer democracy!” Greig, the Political Commissar, was becoming more and more disliked; dissatisfaction with the impossible double-headed command more and more acute. There were many Gilbertian moments; René felt that he could have laughed at them if only the whole business had been less deadly serious. It was given out that in a week or two the battalion would go to the Front---and there wasn’t even any ammunition yet for target-practice. Half of the men had never handled a rifle; practically none of them had ever attempted any military evolution under fire. It was ten to one on massacre.
Surprisingly, the enemy aircraft held off. Two or three planes did appear one day flying very high, but they were pronounced to be Russian. In fact, it was difficult to tell; the only obvious distinction between hostile and friendly planes was the black or red paint on their wings and tails---though there were self-constituted experts who professed to be able to recognise the engine-beat of a Junker or Caproni, a Heinckel or a Marchetti. At lecture-time---the lectures went on interminably---the battalion was told that this immunity from air attack was due to the coruscating successes of the Government troops on the Madrid front; but there were those who questioned.
On a wetter afternoon than usual René surprised himself by sitting down and writing a long letter to Audrey. He began it by saying that, between postal and censor hindrances, she would probably never receive it (but in point of fact she did receive it very promptly and quite intact). He told her about Paris and Poustie, about Figueras and Barcelona and Albacete; and all the time he felt as if he were writing from another world. Once or twice he thought: “This is silly; there can’t be any such person as Audrey”; once or twice he was on the point of tearing it up; but the rain continued to pour, and for want of anything better to do he wrote on and on.
“And you’ll ask me, Audrey, am I glad now or sorry I came? I’m damned if I know. It’s all so wrong---wrong in principle, wrong in detail. Whose cause is just? I don’t know. Is one side worse than the other? I don’t know. The Fascists have done horrible things, but then you hear of the Russian Air Force people in Malaga. And our own side in Madrid itself. The only conclusion seems to be that all men are beasts; but perhaps if we down the worse beast of the two, the surviving beast may have a chance to humanise itself. And the Fascist is the worse beast of the two---I’m still clear about that.
“In some ways the whole thing becomes more obscure the nearer you get to it. I’ve managed to keep my ideas in fairly good order; I still know what I’m fighting for. But do they all? I very much doubt it. Take this little man Poustie I’ve mentioned once or twice. I don’t feel happy about him, Audrey. I feel like a father to him---though as a matter of fact he’s three years older than me. He’s so bewildered and muddled and upset. They took him when he was a child and shoved him into a school and stuffed him with tinned education; and then when he grew a bit older they lured him into meeting-halls and stuffed him with tinned politics. He’s never thought for himself---he’s thought schoolmaster, newspaper, agitator; they’ve made thinking for himself impossible for him from birth. If he could, would he be here? That’s what I keep asking.
“Of course, the only consolation is that when Communism fairly gets going and the World Republic gets to work, lives like Poustie’s simply won’t happen.
“I never thought to say any good thing about war but there is one good thing---comradeship. Take this same little chap Poustie; I like him better than anybody I ever knew. He’s rough and he speaks the broadest Scots and he spits and he snores; but I absolutely like him. I do. And he likes me. Queer?
“Well, Audrey, I’ll have to stop. Don’t know when I’ll ‘get writing,’ as Poustie would say, again. We must move up to the Front pretty soon now and what will happen then God knows. The Brigade are lions, they’d eat the earth; but they haven’t been trained together, they don’t know their officers (they haven’t got real officers) and they don’t know their rifles. They can tell you the 39 Articles of Communism and what was Mrs. Lenin’s maiden name, but they couldn’t dig themselves in under fire. Or could they? You never know till you try. Well, we’ll know soon. I don’t much like the look of it so I’d better say moriturus te saluto. (Joke, silly, joke only! But touch wood.)
“Tell Graham to pull himself together. He’d better stick to his chemistry. The Life of Escape doesn’t pay, and that’s a fact.”
René wrote his long letter to Audrey but he did not tell her the thing that was in his mind. It was partly to drive that thing out of his mind that he wrote; and the attempt was a failure.
René could have told Graham a thing or two about women; on the other hand he was not one of those unfortunate males to whom a woman of some sort becomes an occasional necessity so urgent that a woman of any sort will serve. It was not so with the majority of the Brigade; it was not so with the elemental Poustie. On the day of the first disbursement of pay---the handsome sum of sixty-six pesetas a head---he came to René and said:
“Whit aboot a turn inty Albyseat this afternoon t’see the señorities?”
René felt less than no desire for the “señorities” of “Albyseat,” but anything was better than sitting in the camp enduring a political lecture. He said:
“Can we get?”
“Can we hell! Man, Rennie, have ye no’ tummelt t’ that yet? Ye jist say yer teeth needs seein’ to an’ they send ye in on a bus. Ye give the girls fifteen pesetas. I ken the place when we get there. Man, half the Brigade’s doin’ it.”
There proved indeed to be no difficulty; “tooth-sickness” was becoming a standing battalion joke; a bus-load of assorted nationals clattered expectantly into Albacete. It was pouring rain and the muddy streets of that unpleasant town were almost unusually disagreeable; even if there had been any difficulty in finding the “place” the activities of half a dozen objectionable touts would have removed it, but there was in fact none---the “place” advertised itself. It consisted of a row of drab buildings appropriately grouped round the slaughter-house. The “señorities,” hard-faced and speculative---but you could see starvation under their flaming makeup---leaned over their half-doors, sometimes welcoming, sometimes abusive, and free with the bawdy talk of half a dozen languages. The Brigade accepted it all with grinning good-humour; it wasn’t to talk that they had come.
Poustie was readily accommodated, and René, thankful to have given him the slip so easily, wandered away from this depressing Venusberg. He was automatically returning Red Front salutes and saying “Viva la Columna!” and wondering how to pass two hours in the Café Real when he saw leaning over another half-door quite a different sort of señorita. She was a little creature, dark as a gypsy, but with a snub nose, freckles and tousled discoloured hair that had once been permed. She was dressed as a miliciana in blue overalls and a belt with a pouch; somewhere about her was probably a revolver---no doubt loaded. She looked unspeakably forlorn.
René gave her the salute, which she returned---not too briskly. She said sulkily: “You don’ com’ ’ere.” But René gave her his best smile and said: “Vous ne parlez pas français, Mademoiselle?” For some reason she changed her mind and was pleased with him; with a little cry of “Si jeparle français!” she threw open the half-doors and pulled him inside.
“Entrez, entrez. Nous causerons un petit peu. Pas plus. C’est entendu?”
René tried to bow. “Bien entendu.”
“Bien! J’ai du café---pas mal. Si vous avez des cigarettes?”
René had cigarettes. Wondering a little what he had struck---for the girl’s French had the accent of birth and breeding---he followed her indoors. There was a single room, hardly furnished at all---a straw mattress on the floor, an unblushing chamber-pot, a broken chair, a packing-case table. It was cold and damp, and the girl shivered in her thin overalls. She pushed René into the chair and sat down on the floor.
“Fait froid! Fumons donc; ça donne un peu de chaleur. Mieux que rien.”
For a couple of hours she sat on the floor and René hitched about uneasily on the broken chair; they smoked all his cigarettes and she made the coffee---which was very bad indeed. She was a Spaniard, it seemed; her French was explained by the fact that she had passed some years at a school at Compiegne. She had visited London for a week-end, but her English was unintelligible. It was a blameless afternoon; René never touched her---or thought of it; but it was horrible, horrible. Because during those two hours she told him her story.
She was a Madrileña. Her father was---had been---a retired banker; a Freemason; a personal friend of Indelacio Prieto; a “socialist” in Prieto’s “Fascist of the Left” school. He stood well with the authorities. They were living in Madrid in a big house---the Palazzo Jantacelli---when the Civil War broke out.
“It was exciting, that, for a time. For a day or two. All the cinema programmes being suddenly interrupted for Caballero’s broadcasts; cars flying about everywhere with rifles poking out of their windows; all the militia in blue uniforms. Imagine that in London. . . .”
Then the house was confiscated---for a hospital for the transfusion of blood; there was a tremendous amount of blood-transfusion going on. “So we moved to my aunt’s flat in the Calle Juan Solero; we stayed there some days---my father, my mother, my aunt and myself.
“My father thought it was not safe. We heard stories. One night the flat below was raided and smashed up. We heard shots and screams. We didn’t know what would happen. My father said ‘We will all go to the British Embassy; you will have to sleep there three on a mattress, but you will be safe---so long as you don’t fall off it.’ He was laughing, because my aunt was very stout. The next day we started to go there, all four of us, by tram across the city.”
René said: “Hadn’t you a car?”
“No. It had been taken. All cars were confiscated by the workers in the very first days; my father gave ours voluntarily to save trouble. In any case we would have taken the tram. Nothing can happen to you in a tram---or so my father thought.
“We had gone about half-way. The tram was very full and it was terribly hot. My aunt felt the heat because of her stoutness; she began to be sick; she said: ‘Sebastian, let us get down and walk a little.’ We were just pushing our way out when two militiamen came on board the tram. They had rifles, revolvers---everything. We didn’t worry; they were always doing that---they liked to show off. They went round the tram demanding to see people’s papers---just to show off. They came to my father and one of them said: ‘Comrade, your carnet?’ He meant, you know, his Union membership card---the U.G.T. My father, of course, had not this; but he had with him his cedula personal. You know what that is? No? It is a sort of little carte d’identité; it tells who you are and also it shows what tax you have to pay. My father said: ‘Claro, señor,’ and gave it up. The other militiaman came up and they looked at it together. One said: ‘What is this? You pay a thousand pesetas per cedula?’ The other said: ‘You fool, you can’t read; it is ten thousand pesetas; this is a very rich man; this is a capitalist.’ They took my father by the arms and they said: ‘You get out here with us.’ He said: ‘I am a good friend of the Government.’ They said: ‘We’ll see about that; you get out.’ My mother began to scream; nobody in the tram took any notice; I did not dare to speak. They took my father away out of the tram; he was still laughing to us over his shoulder. He said: ‘Don’t fall off your nice mattress; put Tita in the middle.’ Tita was my aunt. They took him away through the crowd; he was a tall man and I could see him a long time.”
René put a fresh cigarette between her lips and lit it. He was thinking: “That was our people, our side; not Franco; not the Moors.” He said: “Continuez.”
The three women went back, it appeared, to the aunt’s flat; they had lost heart and it seemed the only thing to do. They telephoned to certain authorities, they were given assurances. But the fat aunt became frightened “My aunt said: ‘They will come here; they will come here for us.’ I said: ‘Why should they do that?’ My aunt said: ‘Because we have seen them, we would know them again. Knowing that, we cannot be allowed to live.’ My mother was crying; I said: ‘They will not kill my father.’ Tita said: ‘They have killed your father.’ I said: ‘Oh, no; they would not do that; he is not a Falangist; he is a good Government man.’ She said: ‘He is rich, he has property; that is enough for those wolves.’ But I would not believe it. Naturellement, hein?”
René nodded. “Go on.”
“We thought we would try again that night to get to the British Embassy. But we had left it too late. For they did come for us too---early that evening, just after dark; about a dozen of them all in blue uniforms with rifles and revolvers. They shot my mother and my aunt at once; they did not even have time to cry out. Me---well, you know what they did to me.”
The hideous little room darkened and chilled round René sitting in the broken chair. Suddenly the war became a real thing; all that had gone before---Poustie, the Political Commissar, the lectures, the buses, the salutes---became talk, talk, talk. All stories; this was the truth. All a joke; this was reality. A Madrid flat, stuffily luxurious; two grey-haired women---one of them fat and comfortable and kindly---bleeding on the floor; mess and litter; and this thoroughbred girl with her snub nose and her freckles, flung on a disordered bed. . . . And we did that; the people I am fighting for did that.
He said, almost inaudibly: “Continuez---si vous voulez.”
She nodded. “I thought they would kill me too---when they were finished. Some of them wanted to. But one young man said: ‘No-no-no, she will do no harm now.’ He took me up and kissed me and said: ‘Come and live with me, little one; we’ll get on together.’ I thanked him and let him take me outside, but in the street I ran away from him. He shouted and fired a shot at me but he missed. I got away.”
She tried then to find out about her father, though she was quite sure by now that he was dead. “I thought he would be in the Casa del Campo---that is where they shot a lot of people.” It was very difficult to get a permit to go there and search, but she managed it in the end. “We searched at night---with electric torches; when we heard anyone coming we switched off the torch and lay down among the dead.” After a time she found him---one among two hundred. “He was shot in five places. You know how it was; they took people out to the Casa del Campo---it is a big place like a park---in motor-cars, and then they said to them: ‘Run like rabbits,’ and as they ran they shot at them. They had taken his clothes and everything that he had, and put on him only a suit of overalls. But I found him. I knew I should find him.”
The room chilled again before another gruesome picture; corpses laid out or sprawling as they fell; “run like rabbits”; women creeping about in the night with electric torches; shots going off; the women wincing, crying, hiding; frightened, dishevelled women looking for the dead. And we did that; my “comrades” did that. René said, dry-lipped: “Et après?”
“Oh---après? I don’t know. I lived somehow. I came here.”
“Why didn’t you go to the British Embassy?”
“I don’t know; I had no wish to go there. If you do not do a thing in time, what is the use of doing it at all? My mother and my aunt were dead and I was destroyed. What was the good of the British Embassy?”
“You would have been looked after. What did you do?”
She had wandered about Madrid for a while, becoming a miliciana for the sake of the clothes and the rations. But when the air raids started she was frightened; they always made her sick. One day in a Refugio while a raid was going on a man spoke to her---an American; he told her he was a lorry-driver. “He said: ‘Come with me to Alicante.’ I said I would; I don’t know why; I didn’t care.
“I stayed with him that night and in the morning, very early, we started in his lorry. He hid me under some boxes, but he said: ‘Remember, I don’t know you’re here; I know nothing about you.’ We got along for many miles---I don’t know where---but about three in the afternoon we were stopped and searched. This was always happening; we had been stopped twenty times but they never searched very carefully. This time it was different. They poked about under the tarpaulin and found me---two silly little boys with black smocks and berets. The American pretended to be angry; he shouted and swore and said: ‘You dirty little harlot, how did you get in there?’ They believed him.”
René said: “The swine!”
“Oh, no; it was part of our bargain. If they had suspected him he would have been shot. It was just my bad luck that these little boys had nothing better to do. It didn’t matter anyway. How could it?”
The American drove away with his lorry and left her in strange country; she had no idea where she was. “But a woman gave me soup and some wine; she said: ‘You can’t stay here, we are all starving here. But you look strong; walk over the hills to Albacete. The International Brigade is there; the International Brigade is good to girls.’ So I came here, walking. It was quite easy. I found this house; they let me live here. They think I am a prostitute but I’m not; there are plenty of these in Albacete without me. I wear this uniform and draw rations. What will happen? Who knows? Who cares . . .? Give me another cigarette.”
René thought: “This is the sort of thing that happens. This girl was a girl once like---like Audrey. And now? This is what happens. This is what comes of patriotism and parties and politics and ideals. . . . And the awful thing is she doesn’t seem to mind; she’s been shocked and battered beyond caring. ‘J’ai du café---pas mat. Si vous avez des cigarettes. . . .’”
And we did this. Our side. The liberators. The heroes. Did anybody ever do anything worse? By coming here to fight, I did it. I didn’t know. . . .
He took out all the money he had---his sixty-six pesetas of pay---and pushed it into her hand. He put an arm round her and kissed her; her cheek felt hard and rough as if mud had dried on it. She relapsed suddenly into sulkiness and bad English; she said: “You don’ wan’.” René said solemnly: “No, I don’t want,” and almost ran out of the dreadful little room.
In the Café Real he found a last duro in another pocket and bought himself cognac; he drank it waiting for Poustie. Presently Poustie came, very pleased with himself. René said:
“Had a good time?”
“No’ bad. But I’m cleaned out. Stand us a drink, Rennie.”
“Can’t. I’m cleaned out too.”
Poustie burst into a roar of delighted laughter. “An’ you’re the lad that wisna for ony señorities. Eh, Rennie ye’ll no’ tell me that anither time!”
But René sat thinking: “A girl like---Audrey. Communism. Ideals. This . . .”
But the very next day it was all driven out of mind. Like Figueras, Albacete came suddenly and miraculously to a close. Poustie came shouting into the little upstairs room of the café where he and René and two others were billeted. “Chaps, we’re for the Front. All aboard for Madrid. We’re for the Front!” Miraculously, they were. More miraculously still, there were new rifles at last for everybody, and two long trains waiting to take them to Chinchon.
“Jeez, they got guns!” It seemed too good to be true, and at first it was too good to be true, for the packed trains dallied for some hours before starting and then crawled interminably. Chinchon, when reached, presented itself as a rather more miserable Figueras---a pile of houses on a hillside surmounted by a pink church under a flaming Red Flag. The streets were full of beggars; but there were also a pair of camouflaged tanks and a bevy of motor-cycle despatch-riders roaring about. There had been a muddle over billets with the result that René and Poustie and some others spent the nights on the vats of an aniseed distillery. They slept splendidly, but woke feeling terribly unwell. But, despite all drawbacks, there was action in the air at last; something---perhaps that miraculous draft of rifles---promised that very shortly there would be events.
In the end these events arrived with unexpected violence. René could never decide whether their suddenness was due to deliberate deception by the command or to another muddle; perhaps Franco’s assault on the Valencia road came down faster than the leaders had bargained for, perhaps the command acted on the principle of throwing a child into deep water to make it swim. Thrown in at all events they all were.
It began with a midnight bus ride terminating in dimly seen groves of orange and olive; it was given out that the front line was still distant---and perhaps it then was---and that the Battalion was merely in support of the Spanish militia. But there was a considerable uproar of mixed firing not very far away and perhaps coming nearer; this intensified unpleasantly when half a score of enemy aircraft came roaring over with the first morning light. For the first time René realised the terrifying din made by an aeroplane which is bent on killing you; for the first time he saw the long black shape of a 200-kilo bomb come sliding down to burst with a detonating crash and a blast of black smoke and flying earth. In point of fact nobody was hit and no damage was done; the planes went bellowing away eastward---perhaps to Chinchon, perhaps farther; but it was a grim two minutes.
The astonishing day developed at speed. About ten the order came to fall in without coats or packs; it was given out that the Battalion was to be led on a sort of route march to give it some idea of the confusing hillocky country all round. Poustie, grumbling as usual, said to René: “We’ll no’ see muckle; the cooks has been told t’ have wur dinners ready at two; we’ll be back afore we’re started.” He was wrong; and if the cooks ever made ready that dinner---if they were ever told to---it remained uneaten. For as the Battalion, coatless and packless, advanced through a cold grey drizzle, the sound of firing grew rapidly louder; it came towards them fast as a train and then with the suddenness of a thunder-plump it was all round them; a crashing barrage came down exactly where they were. The word went round: “Dig yourselves in”; the Fife miner on René’s left shouted out: “What wi’---wur soup spoons!”---and next moment fell in a heap. The suddenness was shattering; it was impossible to believe that realities had begun, impossible to believe that Mitchell from Kelty was dead---till you looked at his stove-in face. Then came realisation; this isn’t pretence, it’s true; you took such cover as there was, and scraped as best you could where there was none, and fired and fired and fired. Fired and fired and fired---at nothing; and hoped the firing would drown those terrible sounds that were breaking out all round you; and hoped with a chill of sweat and a mounting sickness that in some incredible manner this all-penetrating blast of destruction would continue to miss yourself.
But René felt absurdly like a child left at the post in a race, who turns to the starter and says pathetically: “I wasn’t ready.”
Twenty-four hours of this, of course, and the Battalion should have ceased to exist; half of it should have been casualties and the other half should have run away. But in fact it was otherwise; that odd incalculable thing, the personal element, triumphed after all. The Battalion were lions. A great many of them were also casualties, but the rest did not run away. Four days later they were in fact a little farther forward; reinforced now by two other battalions, they had actually reached---and were holding ---that salubrious spot justly called the Wall of Death.
Poustie was intact, though he was an appalling object---sodden and mud-plastered and blackly unshaven. René was less fortunate. On the forenoon of the fourth day a flying triangle of red-hot metal came slashing into his left arm; it came glancingly, slicing upwards and away. At first it was a shock and a numbness; then pain; then very great pain; then a sort of faint.
He heard Poustie calling: “Rennie! Rennie! Are ye hit?” He did not reply, but Poustie---at great personal risk---must have crawled across to him, for presently through a red mist came the intenser pain of his sleeve being cut away and the sudden excruciating sting of the field dressing. The mist cleared off a little; he felt better, the clean reek of the antiseptic seemed to check his sickness. Poustie said:
“Tak’ a suppie o’ watter, Rennie. I wish t’ Goad I had a dram.”
René said: “There’s no water.” And indeed there had been no food, no water, no sort of help for a day or so.
“I’ve a drappie here; I was savin’ it.” René swallowed something lukewarm and wet and tasting of tin; but he felt better still. Poustie said:
“Crawl back, Rennie, an’ get it dressed.”
“No; I’ll carry on.”
“Ye canna; no’ wi’ that airm.”
“Yes, I can; it’s my left.” And to show what he could do, he picked up his rifle and began firing again. The man who hit me, he thought, doesn’t know he did it; maybe I’m hitting somebody too. Poustie watched him for a minute or two and then apparently gave him up; he said, with vague encouragement: “Sco’land for ever; come awa’ the He’rts!” and crept back to his position.
The day went on hellishly; no food came or water; in spite of repeated messages sent back to Headquarters, no reinforcements appeared. Two officers were said to be dead, another to have gone mad; where the rest were nobody knew. The Dimitrov Battalion on the right and the Garibaldis on the left went on firing steadily; the Saklatvalas went on firing steadily; presumably it produced some effect somewhere. Time became of no moment. For René the day developed into successive waves of red mist and sickness and pain, each worse than the last, each moderating just when the unendurable moment seemed to have been reached; he felt faint and feverish; sometimes he fired his rifle, sometimes just lay holding it. To his right Poustie kept up an intermittent fire, but the man on his left was dead; in agonising torment René crawled to him and took his water-bottle, but of course it was empty.
In the evening, as dark came on, the hell intensified. The barrage became thicker---light and heavy guns, rifle bullets. Franco was going all out to cut the Valencia Road, but---though none of them knew this---Franco was failing. A mixed flight of Junkers and Gapronis came thundering over, crashing down bombs and battering away with machine-gun fire. There was no one to give orders, no one to help; you lay in the shallow scrape you had been able to make, your head behind a miserable heap of divots; it was more than humanity---untrained, unblooded humanity---could endure. . . . René must have fallen into semi-consciousness, for he was roused by Poustie shaking him into agony.
“Come on, man Rennie, we’re goin’ back.”
René said---or thought he said: “We bloody well aren’t. I’m not.”
“Aye are ye. The whole jing-bang’s goin’ back. No’ far; jist a wee bittie. Come on, Rennie; ye canna fight Franco all by yersel’.”
They crawled a little, rose erect and walked, Poustie’s arm round René’s waist. René thought angrily: “Dougal’s carrying me”; but when he tried to step out, the earth came up to meet him. He felt a curious detachment; he could not be sure whether he loved Poustie for helping him so kindly or hated him for making him run away. He could not be sure of anything till he saw in front of him, in the light of a torch, Greig the Political Commissar and an officer of the Brigade command. And where had they been all this while?
Greig said: “Get back to the line, you two; there’s nothing wrong wi’ you.” Poustie said: “Ritchie’s wounded”; and René thought: “Ritchie? That’s me.” He tried to say: “I ought to go back, Dougal; I’m O.K. really,” but his mouth was full of sickness, and he couldn’t make words. He heard the Political Commissar saying: “Be British! Come on, boys, be British and stick it out”; and Poustie replying truculently: “You’re a bloody fine Briton, eh?” The Brigade officer said: “Get back to the line at once,” and Poustie: “Get back yersel’---it’ll be a change for ye.” The officer drew his revolver; Poustie unslung his rifle. Then Poustie said: “Ach, awa’ t’hell!” and pushed the two of them aside. Nothing happened; somehow Poustie and René went on.
René became angry again---hot waves of mingled anger and pain. He said: “You shouldn’t have done that, Dougal.” Running away, assaulting your officer; what kind of conduct—— But his arm suddenly hurt him most frightfully, worse than ever. Poustie said only: “Ach, t’hell!” They stumbled ahead into a thicker darkness, shot with noises and flame. René thought dreamily: “It can’t be all over? This can’t be the end? Four days; a wound in the arm; and nothing done---nothing. . . . This can’t be all. . . . I wasn’t ready. . . .”
The lightly-wounded were housed in a small farm about half-way to Chinchon. It was a hovel of a place---whitewashed mud and thatch; but it possessed an arriba and an abajo. In the arriba, which consisted of a single attic running the length of the house and roofed with its rafters the wounded were kept. In the abajo there was a coven of loud-tongued women, bare-legged and in dirty black dresses; they were indistinguishable apart except for one dew-lapped crone and a fat girl with an appalling squint. They attempted no nursing, but clattered pots, wrangled, and made endless basins of lentil soup.
In the upper room René lay and thought. His arm had been dressed, a doctor came and looked at it sometimes, but he was convinced himself that it was very bad. He felt sure it was septic; he would end by losing it; and that would be the finish of the war in Spain. Here endeth the First Lesson. Then I go back---if I don’t die of it all---a one-armed man. Well, Mansell’s wouldn’t particularly mind that; you don’t read manuscripts with your arms. Hero of the Spanish War. And what did you do in the Spanish War, René? Mucked about for six weeks; spent four days in the line; fired off some hundreds of rifle cartridges; don’t know if I hit anybody. Some war!
Downstairs the women cackled and shrieked; in the yard cocks crew and goats bleated; at nights a lone dog howled somewhere. Against this background was always the sound of firing---now loud, now low, now fierce, now intermittent; and the nearer sounds of the room---the groaning of Rosetti in the corner, whose leg was broken in two places, the muttering laughter of Rachau who was feverishly delirious because half his scalp had been torn away. I suppose, thought René, that they hear me making noises like that; I must try not to. A rat used to come out and sit on the rafter above him and stare at him and René would stare back and wonder which of them had the brighter eyes. Occasionally someone in the room, boldly defiant or merely craving the sound of human speech, would shout: “Wie gehts, Kamarade?” or “ Com’esta, Campañeros?” to which the correct reply, from all sides was, “No pasaran!” No pasaran, eh? It was agreed that the Brigade had performed a prodigy, had held up Franco and saved the Valencia Road---perhaps for ever; but the only news from the Front came through the doctor, according to whom everything was splendid, successes everywhere, Franco on his last legs. “No pasaran!” René didn’t believe the doctor, but he thought: “At least we haven’t fallen back or I wouldn’t be kept here.” Or was even that a safe assumption in this army of muddle and forgetfulness?” Well, at any rate,” he thought, “I haven’t seen a Moor yet; they say they get after the wounded pretty quick.”
He had no idea what time it was or what day or month. He lay thinking and thinking and thinking. “My arm’s septic; it’ll have to come off. . . . That rat’s eyes are brighter than mine. . . . There’s that girl with the squint again. . . . . Damn that cock! . . . Hero of the Spanish War.”
You heard enemy aircraft wandering about quite often in the sky. They might of course have been Russians---sometimes they must have been; but somehow, lying in the arriba of the farmhouse, you were invariably certain that they were hostile. There they were wandering round---and you could do nothing about it. Once or twice they came down low and you heard again that fearful menacing roar; “Ha, ha, my lad, here comes Death; I see you!” Then all the farm became very still except the idiot dog which first rushed out and barked itself silly and then ran under a bed howling; the women did not clatter or cackle, the goats and the cocks were dumb, Rosetti ceased to groan, even Rachau’s shocked subconsciousness comprehended enough to keep him suddenly quiet. Zoom, zoom, roar! Up there above your head was a man sailing about in the sky; he was looking about him, working his controls. All he had to do was to pull a little lever at the right moment. . . . Crescendo, crescendo; now, now . . . past! And a breaking sigh all over the farm as of a hundred breaths released. . . .
René would go back to his thoughts. Why did I come here? What have I achieved? Anything? Nothing? Franco did not get the Valencia Road. Does that really matter? Was it worth while? Should I have come? Have I been a fool? A hero? A neuter? A dupe?
Have I done the slightest good to anything or anybody by this wild adventure? Was there any point in it? I thought I had an ideal; was it what I thought it was? Was it worth fighting for? Is anything what one thinks it is? Is anything worth fighting for? Now that one has seen fighting?
He thought and thought; while Rosetti groaned, and Rachau chuckled and tittered, and the women downstairs clashed pots and wrangled.
. . . Well, there’s this anyway. The world is all wrong. There is something better ahead. I have had a shot at bringing it nearer. Several hundred shots if you come to that. . . . Did I hit anything? Never mind that; I aimed; I fired the shots; I tried.
Came at last the afternoon when Poustie reappeared like a visitant from the dead; he was thinner and dirtier but otherwise intact still. He sat down on the edge of René’s bed; they had to speak in whispers because some of the others were sleeping.
“How’s Rennie?”
“How’s Dougal? How’s the war?”
“Goin’ on. Kind o’.”
“Are we winning?”
“Dinna ask me.” There was serious trouble, it seemed, in the Battalion. The feeding was a little better---they got rice and coffee now pretty regularly, but it rained and rained, and there were lice everywhere. “I’m a walkin’ menagerie masel’, Rennie.” And there was no relief in spite of all the promises. “We’re aye in the bit---jist scutterin’ awa’.” To-day Poustie had been sent down to Headquarters with another request; he was on his way back with another refusal. Some of the Americans had quit; they had simply said: “We’re going out for a rest,” and they had simply gone; now the British in the Battalion were discussing whether or not they should do the same. “We’re Voalunteers; they canna stop us.” They were disgusted, fed up, through.
“An’ they do the dirty on us, Rennie. Two days ago yon Greig comes up inty the line; he says: ‘Comrades, ye’re to attack. Our aircraft’s blown up the Argona Bridge,’ he says, ‘an’ the Fascists canna get either food or ammunition through. They’re eatin’ grass,’ he says, ‘ye’ll tear them in bits.’ Well, we attacked right enough---an’ how far d’ye think we got? Five yairds. Then these bloody grass-eatin’ Fascists started t’knock hell out o’s wi’ half the ammunition in Spain. We had t’come back in a hurry an’ leave half the lads lyin’ woundit an’ callin’ tae’s. How wud ye hae liked that? Christ, Rennie, yon Greig!”
They had got the bodies in next day---fifty of them.
“Ye mind o’ Stevison, Rennie? An’ Leckie? An’ Forbes? Ay, an’ a lot mair. An’ d’ye think Greig cam’ up for the funeral? Did he hell! But up he comes that night, after it was dark, an’ he says, says he: ‘Gran’ lads; haud on for anither twa-three days an’ ye’ll get relief.’ Nicky Campbell---ye’ll mind o’ Nicky Campbell, Rennie?---yells oot: ‘Whit aboot wur pay?’ ‘Oh,’ says Greig, ‘I’m real sorry aboot that, but yon damned fellie Gullick the Brigade paymaster’s done a bunk wi’ the lot an’ there’ll no’ be ony for a whilie.’ Fancy that, Rennie, after fifteen days in the bloody line——”
René despite himself burst out laughing.
“Ay, ye can laugh. But we didna laugh. We had a meetin’ that night. Yon fellie Evans frae Swansea---ye mind o’ him, Rennie?---he took the leadin’ part——”
The meeting apparently decided that it had endured enough; the loss of the Brigade pay was the last straw. Nobody would accept Greig’s promises any longer. “‘They brocht us here,’ says Evans, ‘t’ be killt an’ killt we’ll be unless we do something t’ stop it.’” But nobody---as usual---knew what to do, till Campbell made the bright suggestion of appealing to friends at home. “‘There’s fowks at hame,’ says Campbell, ‘that disna ken a’ that’s happenin’ here an’ they bloody well ought t’ be tellt.’ So we decided——”
Poustie moved up closer on René’s bed; his voice sank still further.
“There was a round robin drawn up. Ye ken whit a round robin is, Rennie? Weel, one o’ yon. Three of us is t’ try t’ get through wi’t t’ London. We’ve been tellt we cannae, but I’ll bet we do. I’m to be one o’ the three. An’ see here, Rennie, will you be anither?”
René shook his head. “How can I? Like this?”
“Ay, but we want a woundit man. We thocht o’ pinchin’ a ambulance---ye can dae onything in Spain if ye’ve a ambulance---so a woundit man, no’ ower bad-like, wud dae us fine. Whit aboot it, Rennie?”
For a moment René was tempted. No more lying in this horrible room, speculating upon the rat’s eyes or waiting for aircraft. No more listening to Rosetti and Rachau, and thinking and thinking. Then suddenly he saw the absurdity, the absurd generosity of Poustie. Dear old stupid bone-headed Dougal, as transparent as light.
“You old fool, Dougal, it’s all a damned lie.”
Poustie was affronted. “It’s the Goad’s truth, Rennie; we’re t’ start the morn.”
“Maybe. But you don’t want any wounded men with you.”
“We do that. It’s the Goad’s——”
“It isn’t. You go, and good luck to you. And now shut up about it. Have a cigarette instead.”
Poustie’s eyes lit up despite himself.
“Hae ye ony?”
“I haven’t, but Luiz over there always has. He’ll give us two. I’ll pay him back.”
Luiz, half asleep, smiled and pushed over two tiny brown cigars. Poustie lit René’s and then his own. They sat for a moment sucking in the smoke and puffing it out in each other’s faces. Poustie thought: “Rennie looks bloody bad.” René thought: “Good old Dougal. . . . Comradeship. . . . That’s something I’d have missed. . . .”
All the afternoon aircraft had been droning round, now high, now low, sometimes distant, sometimes nearer. Now one of them---perhaps a Junker---suddenly stooped. Perhaps the pilot saw something suspicious, perhaps it was only that he had a bomb left he wanted to use up or that he fancied a bit of target-practice. At all events he stooped; down he came roaring. At the exact moment---crescendo, crescendo; now, now!---he pulled his lever. The 200-kilo bomb fell slanting and screaming. It struck directly upon the farmhouse and exploded; the miserable building flew upwards and outwards like the splash when a heavy stone falls into deep water. Neither René Ritchie nor Douglas Poustie nor Rosetti nor Rachau nor the clattering women downstairs had the ghost or possibility of a chance. They were destroyed, demolished, disintegrated, done for, dead.
In Frame Square the mid-February drizzle fell silently through a night of windless gloom. The façade of No. 5 was black with rain, the discoloured trees in the Square “garden” shivered like out-of-work loafers huddling with their jackets over their heads. Audrey, hounding out Mackay for his final constitutional, shivered in sympathy; it was a horrid night. Mackay, very sensibly from his point of view, didn’t want to go; he knew a much better place in the dark corner at the foot of the stairs; it had served him before and he thought it might serve him again. Remorselessly, however, Audrey pushed him down the steps of No. 5 with the toe of her shoe, saying: “Get on with it, Kai”; he had to go. With an air of resigned misery he accomplished the desired object; then, immediately recovering his spirits, went yelping after a cat. It was five minutes before Audrey, with the help of her torch, found him sitting sodden but hopeful at the foot of a tree where a cat might once have been.
And at that moment, as the last lights of the Marina went out, Noelle was saying: “I can’t go back. Not ever. Not even to-night.” And Chris: “You shan’t, Nellie, you shan’t; you’re coming with me.”
Audrey drove Mackay back to the house, dried him with an old towel and took him up to her work-room. There the electric radiator blazed fiercely; they both snuggled down to it, both thinking: “Thank God that’s over.” The house was comfortably quiet; Robin had gone to bed, Graham was out presumably pursuing his Iona, Noelle also was out attending---also presumably---one of those psycho-analysis lectures that coloured her cheeks and set her eyes shining. I wish, thought Audrey I could believe in stuff like that. But then I have realities. . . . From a locked drawer in her writing-table she took René’s “Albyseat” letter, received that morning; she read it through again twice with a feeling, first of tenderness and then---curiously---of foreboding. “Moriturus te saluto---joke, silly, joke!” But it mightn’t be a joke. Whatever happened, René would never be the same again; for he was unhappy and puzzled and unsure; at close quarters and in practical detail, the Ideal had let him down---as he might have known it would, thought Audrey---as the Ideal always does. Look at my Ideal of Lionel! . . . Lionel; René. Queer it all is. I admire René and yet we’re apart; I see Lionel full of faults, and yet I can’t keep away from him. Why wasn’t René Lionel? Why wasn’t Lionel René? Oh, well. . . She put the letter away again.
But if René has lost his Ideal, I mustn’t lose mine. Lionel; I must concentrate on Lionel; he must do great things, cut out all this cowardice, all this inferiority complex. He wants psycho-analysis, if you like; perhaps I ought to go with Noelle to her lectures and find out about it. There’s something lovely in him, there’s something mean; it’s easy to say we’re all like that, but in Lionel it goes to extremes. Well, I must strengthen him, I must bring out the fine part, the sincere part, the adult part; I must kill that little underbred boy in him who wants to run away, who’s been brought up by common ignorant people, who cries out in one and the same breath: “I’m as good as you are” and “That’s not for the likes of me.” I can and I will.
What I like least about him is when he sort of tries to put me off. When he thinks I’m going to ask him questions about himself or his home or his people. Usually he does it by starting in to flatter me, to tell me what a lot of good I’m doing him---because he knows that’s what I want to hear. As if, the silly, he had some secret he didn’t want me to get on to. I expect his people are awful; but what about it? If only he’d bring his trouble out into the open and let us have a look at it. But instead I see him being clever and leading poor Audrey off the scent by buttering her up. I hate that. Yes, I do hate that. . . .
The electric radiator grew hotter; Mackay snored, Audrey’s dreams for Lionel expanded. Lionel controlling the Red Rose Libraries Limited which by that time has absorbed Boots and Smiths and the Times Book Club; the British Library Trust, perhaps? Lionel M.P; Minister for Education; Minister for Literature---that hadn’t been a bad idea. Oh, “I’ll make your fortune, Rawdon!” . . . Lionel. . . . René. . . .
She must have dozed off; the telephone, ringing with the shattering fury of telephones towards midnight, awakened her. She picked up her receiver and automatically looked at the clock. Twenty to twelve; Noelle must surely have sneaked in very quietly. Graham? Still out, no doubt; I’d have heard him.
“This is Audrey Ritchie speaking. Who is it, please?”
A quite unknown male voice but a good one---deep, resonant, determined.
“Can I speak to Doctor Ritchie?”
“Doctor Ritchie’s gone to bed, I’m afraid. Is it a case? Could I take a message?”
Pause; then the voice again, more determined than ever.
“No. I must speak to Doctor Ritchie himself.”
Audrey was beginning: “Very well, I’ll call him——” when she heard Robin’s slippers coming slap-slap across the lower landing, heard him take up the lower landing receiver. She put down her own because it was one of her rules that listening in wasn’t done except in cases of life-and-death interest---which this didn’t seem to be. At the same time that deep determined voice had piqued her curiosity sufficiently to make her listen rather intently to the sounds from the lower landing. She could hear no words, but Robin’s tone conveyed a good deal; first brisk, then puzzled, then flat. The voice at the other end made long speeches, for there were long silences on the landing; then Robin again---querulous, doubtful, excited. So now what?
The conversation ended at last, and almost instantly, as it seemed, Robin came into her room---a thing he hadn’t done for months. He was in a dressing-gown and slippers, and his face, sunken and ghostly, shocked her into complete wakefulness. The white patch in his hair seemed enormous and brilliant---like snow on a hillside. He said:
“Not gone to bed, Audrey?”
She said, as if it were a reason: “Graham’s still out,” and as if it were a reason, he accepted it. Leaning against her writing-table for support, he said:
“Audrey, did you ever hear of anyone called Milroy?” Audrey hadn’t. “Noelle never spoke of anyone of that name?”
“No, never.”
He whitened suddenly; he looked as if he would faint.
“Because I’ve just had a most extraordinary experience. A man calling himself Milroy has just rung up to say that Noelle---that Noelle has---er---gone to him and that she’s not coming back.”
In a flash Audrey thought: “So that’s where the colour came from; that’s the bright eyes! Psycho-analysis! Why didn’t I guess?” Aloud she said something that was more an exclamation than sense.
Robin said piteously, helplessly: “I can’t understand it. It’s the most incomprehensible thing that ever happened. It must be a joke. . . . It can’t be a joke.”
Audrey said: “I don’t think it’s a joke, Daddy; but perhaps it’s not as serious as you think either.” But she knew that it was.
“He said he was in Hampstead. Did Noelle know anybody in Hampstead?”
“She came from Hampstead, Daddy.”
He whitened again; he had forgotten that.
“Yes, but---Milroy? I never heard the name. . . . She was all right this evening. . . . It’s preposterous; it’s insane.”
Audrey pushed him into her armchair, or perhaps he fell into it.
“It mayn’t be so bad as you think.” Beyond that repetition it seemed impossible to go. “What did he say exactly?”
“He said---he said they were in love with each other and she had gone to stay with him. He said something about a sister. He said she wasn’t coming back. Something about divorce——” He sat up, shaking like a frightened animal.
Audrey said, to say something: “Oh, darling, I’m sure it isn’t as bad as you think. I expect it’s hysterics of some kind. She gets that way, you know.”
It was a libel on Noelle’s tranquillity, but he grabbed at it.
“Perhaps you’re right. But---but it’s so extraordinary.”
“Did you ask to speak to Noelle herself?”
“Of course. But this man, this Milroy, said she couldn’t. She didn’t, anyway.”
Audrey thought: “The coward---the beast!” Aloud she said: “Well, I wouldn’t stand for that. Let’s ring them. Let me try.”
“But I don’t know their address.”
“They’re bound to be in the book---unless he rang up from a call-box. Anyway, let’s try. There aren’t so many Milroys.” She whipped over the pages. “‘Milroy, C., 65, Mick’h’m R’d.’ Would that be him?”
But the words “ Mick’h’m R’d” had struck Robin like a sudden stab; his terror stabbed back at Audrey. Remembering, they sat staring into each other’s eyes.
“That was where she came from, Daddy.”
“That was where she came from.”
“And she’s gone back,” thought Audrey, “reverted to type, relapsed, slumped, wallowed. The great lump!” But she picked up the receiver. Robin said hastily: “Oh, no; no,” and stretched out a hand, but he didn’t seriously stop her. She dialled the number. After an interval the same voice answered, deep, assured, sitting tight there in its fortress. “Hallo?”
“Can I speak to Mrs. Ritchie, please?”
“Not to-night.”
“Oh, but---please.”
A pause; then---still the same voice---“Is that Audrey?”
“Yes; Audrey.”
“I thought it sounded like Audrey. Well, you can’t speak to Noelle to-night or to-morrow either. You’ve spoken to her once too often, my girl, and once too nasty. You go to bed.”
The receiver at the other end went down; Audrey, flushing, replaced hers. Robin said, hardly looking up:
“No good?”
“No good. Just rudeness.”
He got up brokenly, repeating, “Just rudeness.” He passed a hand over his hair. “I suppose I’ll have to go out there in the morning. . . . It’s---it’s incredible. Mickleham Road; I remember it so well; horrid little street; sort of middle-class slum. I didn’t think she’d have gone back there. . . . Do you suppose, Audrey, it’s some old story?”
“I think it must be, Daddy.”
“Then in that case——” He looked as if he were about to cry; Audrey thought: “What can I say? What can I say?”
“Oh, Daddy, it can’t be as bad as all that.” (But it is.) “I expect it’s just some kind of hysterics. You’ll find it’ll be all right when you go in the morning---if she hasn’t come back herself before then.” Words, silly words, poured out in the hope of comfort; manifestly conveying none. “Didn’t he say he had a sister?”
“Yes. He said she was looking after Noelle.”
“Then she must be all right as far as to-night goes. It’s quite proper really; I mean---you know what I mean. And you’ll find it’ll all come straight in the morning. She’s had a fit of some kind; she’ll come back all right.” With idiot insistence she repeated that it would be all right in the morning, and thought to herself: “What a hope!” . . . “Daddy, darling, you look awfully tired. Do go back to bed. We can’t do another thing to-night.”
“Couldn’t I go out in a taxi——?”
“I wouldn’t, darling; no. There’d only be a horrible scene. He probably wouldn’t let you in. He needn’t, you know. You’d have the police coming round and---and neighbours and all that. You’d probably spoil everything. Wait till the morning. . . . After breakfast. . . . Darling Daddy, I’m so sorry. . . .” Somehow she cajoled him back to his room; she heard him lock his door on the inside. Biting her finger, she thought: “Have I been utterly useless? Anyway, he did come to me, he did turn to me. He thought I could help.”
Back in her room, she decided to give Graham till half-past twelve. But Graham didn’t come in at half-past twelve; or at one either. Audrey thought: “His beastly Iona; so that’s happened; another mess.” At half-past one, utterly weary, she went at last to bed.
Frantically Audrey had promised that it would be all right in the morning; but it wasn’t all right in the morning. At nine-thirty of another grey day of nondescript drizzle No. 5, Frame Square was still a darkened, an accursed house. Graham slept in his room still unaware of disasters; Robin prowled the landings like a caged tiger. There was speculation growing in the eyes of the servants---those consciences and censors so quick to detect the “queer.” And it was “queer,” of course, to find the mistress’s bed unslept in, her pyjamas neatly on the pillow in their case, her toothbrush and sponge and all the rest of it in the bathroom, no luggage of any sort missing. Accident? Illness? But the master and Miss Audrey were saying nothing; something “queer” behind that. Mister Graham had had a thick night again; would that be connected? Probably not. . . . Speculate, speculate; peering watchful eyes and sidewise glances; something “queer,” let’s have it, let’s get at it. . . .
The telephone did not ring; no taxi debarked at the door a repentant Noelle recovered from hysteria; that remote fortress in the north wrapped itself in austere silence, it made no move. On the contrary, it was Robin who assailed it by telephone, saying he was coming out. The fortress said, Come along. Audrey, hearing this, said doubtfully:
“Are you sure?”
“Sure? What about?”
“About going out there.”
“Of course I’m sure. I must go out and see these people, mustn’t I? I must fetch Noelle back. The whole thing’s a piece of most utter nonsense——”
The night had brought Robin encouragement; none to Audrey.
“Would you like me to come too, Daddy?”
“Oh, no; I think not. I don’t think it’s the sort of thing for you to be mixed up in at all.”
Audrey thought: “I’d make a much better show of it than you will, my poor dear.” But she said only: “I wouldn’t say anything. I’d just be there.”
But he didn’t want her to just be there. “No, no---not for you at all.” He went off, whipped up into a sort of confidence. He went in the car, so it was Collins who got in first on the secret of that “queer”-ness---and hadn’t Collins something to tell them downstairs when he got back! Collins had seen only the two of a second-rate street in Hampstead, and the two of a good-looking sort of a bloke with red hair who came to the door; but he could make five out of these all right.
Left to herself, Audrey went to have a look at Graham; he slept like death, his face crushed into the pillow, his mouth a little open, a sort of cloud on his brow. Audrey thought: “I suppose he enjoyed himself frightfully; he doesn’t look like it. Oh, well, let him sleep; he hasn’t anything very nice to come back to. Downstairs and the servants again; “what about lunch, miss?” What should we do without our servants; they keep us from having our lovers into our bedrooms; they keep us from coming to blows with our relatives in the drawing-room; in crises and despairs they salvage us by asking us what about lunch. Somebody must do the shopping anyway; Audrey took Mackay and his lead and set out on a round of Oxford Street. As she had hoped, Mackay was such a trial and behaved so disgustingly that he drove all other considerations out of her head. Our servants and our pets---each with a different sort of demand---they hold our houses together.
On the way back Audrey thought suddenly: “Will Noelle want Kai sent to her?” Most probably she had forgotten all about him; in that case, thought Audrey, he’s mine now; and in that case he must learn to stop biting Lionel’s trousers whenever he sees them. Lionel! There’s something to hold on to---a rock if a somewhat unsteady one, a sheet anchor if a little inclined to drag. If Noelle has made a mess of it and if Graham has made a mess of it, then Lionel and I mustn’t. But, of course, we won’t; Lionel’s Lionel, and even if he wasn’t, I’m me. . . . But Noelle; whoever would have thought it! The statue, the waxwork, the vegetable---suddenly to take wings and fly like a freed bird into space. Audrey had peeped into her room that morning and there it lay so still, so empty, like a shell on the beach that its creature has for ever abandoned. For ever abandoned; yes, there had been a finality about that room. “I do like to have nice things round me, Audrey.” If Noelle could drop all her “nice things” like throwing an empty match-box in the fire, then it was pretty fatal, pretty hopeless. There must have been a force at work there that was disintegrating and cataclysmal; what has poor father, what have any of us, to put against it? The strange murderous explosive thing, passion; could I ever be like that? If Lionel? If René?
Graham had gone out to lunch---he hadn’t said where. Robin came up from his consulting-room or his laboratory; he looked grey, weary, miserable.
“Any luck, Daddy?”
He shook his head. “I didn’t see Noelle this morning. The woman said she didn’t sleep well. . . . God knows I didn’t.”
“The woman?”
“This Milroy’s sister. She was just going out to work when I called. I’m to go back in the evening.”
“Will you see Noelle then?”
“Yes, of course. Quite likely I shall bring her back with me.”
Audrey thought: “And quite likely not!” She asked what the sister was like.
“A big woman, rather putting-off. Formidable. The sort of woman who laughs instead of speaking.”
“What about---him?”
“He was good looking in a stagy sort of way. But the whole thing’s quite crazy. The man isn’t even a gentleman.”
“And you think, my poor dear,” thought Audrey, “that that’s a point in your favour. But I know better.” Noelle wouldn’t have run away with another gentleman; Noelle’s had enough of gentlemen. No, no---relapsed, reverted, sunk.
The day dragged on, tedious, insufferable. Graham came in and had to be caught and told about it; he was obtuse, uncomprehending. “I tell you Noelle’s bolted; she’s gone.” He said, “Gone?” and goggled; once again it was too big for Graham. Robin was busy; he had tea sent down to him in the official regions. Audrey sickening of the waiting house and the watchful servants, dragged Mackay into Regent’s Park to think again of Lionel. I must think more and more of Lionel, build more and more on Lionel. It is becoming increasingly clear that Noelle will not come back; soon even Daddy will have to recognise it. Colonel Playfair, on the other hand, will come back and then there will be a nice mess for Graham. So it is to me and Lionel---to Lionel and me---that the house must look for its restoration. And it shall not look in vain; we will do great things together; He hath raised up a mighty salvation for us in the house of His servant Lionel. . . . I suppose one day I shall marry Lionel; I suppose one day we shall be Mr. and Mrs. Peach; we can hardly do anything much without that. It will mean a lot of things I don’t very much want to think of, but then no sensible person does think very much of them nowadays. Conjugal rights and so on---just something to take in one’s stride, not the Victorian be-all and end-all. . . . If I had been Noelle and Lionel had been this Milroy, would I have thrown down everything and gone to him? Well, no; I wouldn’t. If René had been Milroy? No. N-no. Anyway that isn’t happening. Pull yourself together, Audrey.
But suddenly she saw them both on the path in front of her---quite clearly she saw them; Lionel in his brown suit and René in his blue. They were both smiling, but while Lionel’s smile was babyish, René’s was sophisticated. René’s curls were on end; you could see he was having difficulty with his “r’s”; perhaps Lionel was telling him he had been a B.F. to go to Spain. They were there only for a second; then Lionel, smiling to the very last, faded like the Cheshire Cat; René, his hands in his pockets, his little chin jutting---over-the-top, no pasaran---flashed momentarily into vivider presence, then faded too. In the silence of the park Audrey quite suddenly and distinctly heard two sounds; one was a little animal squeak or squeal of terror against a background of waves; the other was guns---guns in Spain. . . . But the squeak was a bird, and the guns were the St. John’s Wood traffic, and the whole thing was an illusion and---where the devil had Mackay got to now?
At dinner Robin was greyer than ever; clearly the evening session at Mickleham Road had done him no good. In the middle of the joint, when Nixon had left the room, he said suddenly:
“You’d better know. I can’t understand it. But for the present Noelle’s left us.”
Audrey and Graham looked at their plates. Robin, whipping himself up, said:
“I say ‘for the present.’ It is for the present, of course. . . . I don’t pretend to understand it. . . .”
Audrey looked up, studiously childish. “She’ll come back, Daddy?” (Oh, I hope she doesn’t; not now.)
“Of course she’ll come back. I hope quite soon. The whole thing’s preposterous. I don’t think she can be well. Yet she looks well enough.”
“You saw her then this time?”
“Yes, I saw her.” But he didn’t seem disposed to go further with that.
“Did you see the---man---again?”
“Yes, I saw him. We had a long talk. . . . You know, that’s to me the most incomprehensible part of the whole lunacy. The man isn’t a gentleman. He doesn’t even seem to have any money. He’s a dance-band leader or some extraordinary thing——”
Audrey said, with malice: “Noelle was always musical.” Graham, who had an unfortunately associative mind, could only think of the jingle “She was a Good Girl, And I could never understand---Why did she fall for the Leader of the Band?” It seemed apt. Tempted to giggle, he caught sight of his father’s face and was stricken silent.
Audrey’s sarcasm had missed Robin completely; he said:
“If she was musical I should have thought it all the less likely——”
Graham began some interruption, but was brushed aside.
“What I want to tell you both is this. We must all help Noelle through this. We can’t any of us pretend to understand what’s happened to her; I don’t think, as I say, she can be well, but that’s neither here nor there. What we must do is to stand by her. When she comes back we must all show her that it hasn’t made any difference, that it’s all forgotten---didn’t happen in fact. That’s what I want to tell you.”
Graham began again: “But I say——” and again failed.
“Meantime we must just be patient and keep on trying. . . . I’ve asked Kenneth to come in after dinner. I think he might see her. He had some influence——”
Audrey thought: “My poor angel, you must be far gone if you expect any good from Kenneth!” She would have said it, but at that moment Nixon came back and bright general conversation was again required.
After dinner Audrey sought out Graham in his room. He was in the throes of one of his spells of “work”; the typescript of London Idyll lay scattered about his desk; but however widely he strewed it, it never seemed to increase very materially in bulk. Audrey said, picking up the title-page:
“London Idyll. I suppose that’s you and Iona?”
“And if it is?”
“Oke. Your funeral. What are you going to do when this Colonel bloke comes home?”
“That’ll be my funeral, too.” Very dignified, but she could see that he had no idea what he would do and was really rather frightened.
“Graham, you ass!”
“We’ve had this before, haven’t we?” He changed the subject. “This is a rum start about Noelle.”
“I’ll say!”
“It’ll be pretty hellish here when she comes back.”
Audrey gazed at him with pity; curious how the male was born blind and believed what other males told him. But perhaps the male, being a compromiser, could himself come back from anywhere; whereas there were some steps a woman simply could not retrace. Women knew Rubicons when they saw them; that didn’t prevent their crossing them, however.
“You mutt! She won’t ever come back.”
“Won’t she? That’ll be pretty gory, too. The old man’ll feel it.”
“He’ll have to get used to it.”
“Oh, I dunno. What price Kenneth?”
“Oh, Kenneth! I should think Kenneth will about put the lid on it. Prosing ass. I hate him.”
“You didn’t use to.”
“Well, I do now. Kenneth!”
But outside Graham’s room again Audrey thought: “Why do I feel so strongly about Kenneth these days? Why do I hate him so? He used to amuse me.” And then she half-answered herself. “Because he could have stopped René going to Spain; and he didn’t, damn him he didn’t. . . . And René’s in Spain now, wet and cold, perhaps wounded and hungry. Oh, why amn’t I with him!”
Kenneth fancied himself as an ambassador, and he laid his plans with some care. Robin’s idea had been that he should ring up Noelle and make an appointment with her in privacy and in the forenoon; Kenneth thought he knew a trick worth two of that. Noelle caught by herself would refuse to talk, would refer him to Milroy, would even perhaps slam the door in his face. If he gave her warning, she would simply be out. No, the scheme was to catch them all together and by surprise. There was a sister who went out to work somewhere; the most likely time to catch them therefore was just after she came in. They probably indulged, about that hour, in some dreadful meal comprising inter alia tea; they would all be there and in a mood to talk---the Milroy pair, no doubt, with their mouths full. To talk? Yes, but what about? We’ll see about that, thought Kenneth, when we get there. Robin’s idiotic notion had been to get hold of Noelle and expound to her the impossibility of Milroy; but that, of course, was not the line at all; the line---curiously enough---was rather to expound the impossibility of Robin. “I know he’s a miserable devil, but he’s yours. He depends on you utterly. If you desert him——”
Kenneth thought it might work.
Kenneth disliked buses and gave himself a difficult underground journey from Holborn to Finchley Road. He emerged there into the wet of Hampstead which always seems so much wetter than the wet of Oxford Street; it was really a very nasty evening. He had some little difficulty in finding Mickleham Road---as usual, it seemed to be the one place of which the local inhabitants had never heard; and when he did find it, he felt his confidence for the first time appreciably shaken. If the place had been called Noelle Road it would have been well named, for the essence of Noelle clothed it; it was nothing very much, it was trying to be better than it was, it was prudish, it was regulated, it was conventionally virtuous. In rather heavy rain Kenneth found No. 65; he rang the electric bell and a lioness of a woman came to the door. The sister who worked, no doubt. Kenneth said with his horse-faced smile, which could be pleasant enough on occasion:
“I’m Robin Ritchie’s brother. I wonder---is Mrs. Ritchie in?”
Madge gave him a hard look. “We’re all in. . . . Does Noelle know you’re coming?”
“Well---no.”
“I see. . . . Well, come in, Mr. Ritchie, do.”
Kenneth advanced with a sense of having captured the first trench. Without invitation he took off his coat and hung it with his hat on a fearsome contraption whose hat-pegs were made of inverted deers’ feet. The electric light blazed on a ruby stair carpet and a rose du Barry wallpaper; the whole place was scarlet as the mouth of hell. Kenneth said agreeably that it was a horrible night; his hostess made no reply, but Kenneth had an uncomfortable feeling that he had been swiftly summed up and passed as harmless. She waited patiently while he hung up his things and then pushed open a door on the right.
“Here’s Mr. Ritchie to see you, dears.”
Kenneth, preceding her into the interior, received another confidence-destroying shock. The room was a small sitting-room; and with every article of its furniture, with every picture on its walls, with every molecule in its atmosphere it said to Kenneth: “Mr. and Mrs. Milroy ---at home.” There were easy chairs on either side of a gas-fire; in one of them sat the good-looking Milroy---and he was good-looking---smoking a cigarette; in the other sat Noelle. And looking at her, Kenneth had the strange thought: “I never saw Noelle before; this is Noelle.” She was dressed in something darkish red which was not very becoming---a ready-made, no doubt picked up quickly at one of the stores; but if she had been attired in cloth of gold and seated on the throne of Sheba she could not have more completely commanded her surroundings. I am of this place, she said, and it is mine; my foot is on my native heath and my name is Ducks. There was a radiance about her, too, a life. It was as if, all these years, one had been watching an understudy, a stand-in; now suddenly the real actress took the boards.
Milroy got up, putting down the Evening Standard; he said calmly: “ Good evening, Mr. Ritchie.” Noelle, at the sound of the name, had given a startled little cry and the eyes like eggs had dilated, but at sight of Kenneth she smiled. She said with flattering---or was it flattering?---relief, “Why---Kenneth!” Madge hovered for a minute immense in the background, scrutinising Kenneth’s back with interest, and then went out slowly, closing the door.
Kenneth said: “You’re looking very well, Noelle,” and Noelle politely thanked him. Milroy offered a packet of Players; Kenneth took one and sat down on a hard uncomfortable chair.
“Well. . . . I suppose you know why I’m here?”
Milroy said unexpectedly: “Well, no---unless you came to see what we look like.”
Kenneth smiled his smile. “That was partly it, of course. And you look very comfortable. But---well, now, look here---let’s get down to it. You’ll understand that I feel rather awkward---it’s a little difficult——” He launched into his prepared gambits. But already the room had daunted him with its convincing presentation of Mr. and Mrs. Milroy; his words stumbled, he wasn’t at his fluent best.
Almost at the outset, Chris interrupted him. “It really isn’t any good, you know; we’ve told Doctor Ritchie himself; we’ve told him twenty times——” But Noelle, from her deep chair, gave him a silencing look, and thereafter they heard Kenneth. The ambassador went on with his case; but in that “cosy”---yes, “cosy”---little room it seemed thinner even than he had thought. Already there was an atmosphere against which the suavest words beat only as against an iron curtain; they clanged on it and fell back broken on the floor. “Mr. and Mrs. Milroy at home”; and this new Noelle, this real Noelle, this waxwork come to life, this Pygmalion’s statue. What use were words? But he went on struggling. “My brother is most terribly upset . . . he can’t believe, he can’t suppose . . . trust to the good sense of both of you before it’s too late. . . .” Words, words; they emerged from Kenneth like flaming arrows, but whang! they went against the iron curtain and fell sputtering feebly to the ground. Noelle said at last, rather wearily:
“I don’t think you understand, Kenneth. I’m happy. I’ve never been happy before in my life. You ask me to leave it——”
Kenneth said: “If you could see Robin——”
“I have seen him.”
“But if you could see him at Frame Square. He’s just broken to bits.”
She winced at that; tears came into her eyes.
“I know, I know. But I can’t help it. It’s done it’s over. Kenneth, if you want to do Robin a kindness, try to make him believe that.”
Milroy, staring into the scorching gas-fire, said: “Yes try. Because he’ll have to sooner or later.”
“It’ll kill him.”
“He’s got his children.”
That was a sound move of Milroy’s; the recollection of Graham and Audrey, Kenneth saw, stiffened Noelle, reinforced her. Thinking of “We hate N . . ll. Like hell,” she said eagerly:
“Yes, Kenneth, Audrey and Graham. And they never cared for me, you know.”
As an example of meiosis, thought Kenneth, that will take some beating. He contented himself, however, with pointing out that Audrey and Graham were growing up. “They won’t be there very long. Anyway, you know what children are nowadays---any number of Audreys and Grahams couldn’t take your place.” He pulled from behind his back a fresh quiver of words. “You speak about your happiness; but you know, my dear, you’ve taken on certain obligations in regard to Robin; d’you think you’re quite justified in throwing them all down just to be what you call happy? Robin’s doing great work, vital work, work that means a lot to the world. Do you think you’re justified in wrecking all that?”
“I wouldn’t wreck it?” But a little uneasily; am I getting at her at last?
“Wouldn’t you? Robin needs you beside him to keep him going, he depends on you.” Out flew the soaring words, but whang! whang! fizz! splutter! back they came to earth. “He’s a self-despising sort of devil, Noelle; he needs to be cheered up and bucked up from time to time; he depends on you for that. I know he’s difficult; that’s just why you mustn’t let him down.”
Noelle said slowly: “If I thought that——” By gosh, thought Kenneth, I’m doing it after all. And Milroy thought so too, for he raised his head and gave Noelle an anxious look.
“But I don’t think that.” Chris’s head sank again. “In fact I know perfectly well it’s not like that. . . . Kenneth, I’ve tried---oh, do believe me, I’ve tried. I’ve tried and tried for years. It hasn’t been the slightest good, not the slightest. I couldn’t make him happy, he couldn’t make me happy “
“Oh, come, Noelle!”
“He was kind, he gave me things---he gave me everything. But I wasn’t happy---I couldn’t be. I didn’t know what happiness was. Now I’ve found out---and you come and ask me to give it all up. If it was only my own happiness that was at stake, I might. But---there’s Chris.”
Kenneth tried hard to put a case for noble renunciation. “There’s a sort of duty, my dear. Chris has it too——”
But the iron curtain was still there; she hardly heard him.
“You’re asking me to hurt Chris far more than I could ever possibly hurt Robin. Put it like this---I’ve got to hurt somebody; one a lot, one a little. Leaving myself out of it, which am I to choose? Oh, Kenneth, can’t you see?”
Across the red-hot hell of that gas-fire her eyes met Milroy’s. He said gently: “That’s right, Nellie.” “Nellie!” thought Kenneth aghast. “If she’ll swallow that——” She swallowed it, he saw, with a contented smile. And as if timed to an instant---as no doubt it was---the door opened, the large bright bustling figure of Madge came hurrying in. “Wouldn’t any of you people
like a nice cup of tea?” And a merry let’s-stop-all-this-silliness laugh.
Closure applied, thought Kenneth; the referee blowing the whistle for no-side. Well, play to the whistle---as losers must. He said, getting up: “No tea for me thank you; I must be getting along.” They pressed him to stay---almost as if they meant it. The fact is, he thought, they don’t care whether I stay or go; they’re so sunk in themselves, so settled in accomplishment, that I simply don’t count. If I stayed and had tea they’d talk about the weather and Mussolini and they wouldn’t even feel awkward. They’re married already in the sight of God, in the sight of Madge; upon my soul, they’re almost married in the sight of me!
He said, for the sake of saying it: “Think over what I’ve said, won’t you? Please do that.” They made no reply. Noelle shook hands, Madge bowed with condescension, Milroy came with him to the door. He said, on the door-step:
“It was decent of you to come. I’m sorry about all this. But---you see how it is.”
Kenneth said: “I see how it is.” And putting up his umbrella and striding away down that road of incubating love-nests---or so it seemed now to his distorted imagination---he thought: “Yes, indeed---I see how it is. For I see that Noelle has become Noelle; she has been clasped in her setting; she has found the bed that was made for her; she has reverted to her State of Life. . .
Back at Cromarty Crescent, where Jacqueline sat working at one of her handkerchiefs, Kenneth took a whiskey or two and became expansive. The job was done, one way or another, and it was a load off his shoulders. It had been a foolish job, an impossible job, the age-old stupidity of opposing emotion with reason. He told Jacqueline as much, standing in front of the mantelpiece and waving a cigarette.
“What is the use of arguing against physiological processes? Noelle is a woman in the grip of her reproductive organs; nothing can be done with such women till Nature herself releases them---and in a case like this it’s then, of course, too late. When there’s a little Milroy in the world she’ll see sense; till then——”
Jacqueline’s round head remained bent over her handkerchief; one by one she put in the minute delicate stitches. She thought: “Where is my son? Where is René? You deserve everything that could come to you. But nothing could ever come to you; it could not get near you for words. You are hedged round with an impenetrable rampart of words. . . .” Incapable of expressing the hundredth part of this in English, she said inadequately:
“Bot zhe ees ’appy.”
Kenneth said, nodding: “You have set your finger on the truth. She is happy and she is absolutely happy, and with the happy nothing can be done.” He saw again Mr. and Mrs. Milroy at home, in a scarlet cosy room, on either side of a torrid gas-fire; he saw the real genuine living-at-last Noelle. And in the same vision he saw Frame Square, a cold solidity whose disappointed inmates chased the butterflies of their discontents and forgot kindness. So what was the use, what on earth was the use——?” Sending me to Noelle was like sending a man out with a lettuce to a rabbit that’s spent the night in a turnip-field. You can’t tempt the happy. The devil had no chance with Christ. If only everybody were happy, if the nations of Europe could be made just happy——” He went off at score, Kennething.
Jacqueline said; in the wonderful individual tongue she believed to be English: “Baiter yo tell ’Obeen, no?” Kenneth, having for the moment talked himself dry thought that he might. Over the telephone he said to Robin the one word:
“Napoo!”
“You couldn’t do anything?”
“Not a damned thing. Nobody could. If you’ve seen those two together you must know why.”
“I’d hoped——”
“I know. I did my best, old boy.”
“I’m sure of it, Kenneth, I’m sure of it. . . . Well, I must go back again and have another try myself.”
Kenneth said heartily: “Do!” But putting down the receiver, he thought: “Mr. and Mrs. Milroy. Mickleham Road. They’ve fitted, they’ve fitted. You won’t dislodge them now.”
On that wet evening when Kenneth the Ambassador was fruitlessly traversing Hampstead, Audrey sat with Lionel in the Cat in Boots trying to tell him something of her Regent’s Park experiences, trying to elucidate for him---to convey to him---that prescience of adventure, that triumphant mood of salvation. He wasn’t very receptive. Wriggling on his seat, as he did when he felt he couldn’t face things, he said, as he had said once before:
“What makes you think I could do all that?”
“You can if you want to. Don’t you want to, Lionel?” Lionel S. Go-get-it Peach; a cruel joke that!
“Oh, I want to.” But he wriggled more uncomfortably still; that glorious mood when he could have gone out and thrown himself under the Oxford Street buses seemed to have passed beyond recapture. Or had that just been a bit of blague? To keep herself off questions?
“You can get anything you want in this world if you only want it enough. If you don’t funk it.”
He coloured. “It isn’t fair of you to say that. Just because of that rotten cliff business. I wasn’t accustomed——”
“Oh, Lionel!” She was instantly contrite; the rotten cliff business had been banished from mind; one of those things which never can be forgotten and therefore must be. “I didn’t mean to remind you of that. But don’t you see---it’s you and me who have to do things. My---my stepmother’s let our family down badly——”
He said, maddeningly: “I was surprised when you told me that. I thought a lot of her.”
Audrey bit her lip. “I know you did. You didn’t know her, you see. Anyway, she’s crashed. Graham---well, Graham’s pretty young still; he’s young for his age. So it’s you and me, Lionel——”
“But what do you want us to do?”
“Oh, do . . .? Just rise instead of sinking, go up instead of down; be ourselves. Be the best bits of ourselves.”
He wasn’t following her; it was almost as if he had something on his mind. Or perhaps he thought she was talking rubbish; perhaps she was. At all events, he only said, with disconcerting irrelevance:
“Audrey, I can’t drink any more of this beer.”
Audrey gave it up. “Well, have a sherry, then.”
“I don’t like sherry. I’ve been told it’s bad for me.”
“Who told you that?”
“Oh---lots of people. I don’t see the sense in all this drinking——”
They had been over this before---and with unfortunate results; Audrey hastened away from it now.
“Well, don’t have anything; we’ll go in a few minutes Oh, Lionel, do buck up!”
He shifted uneasily. “I’m bucked up all right. But you go so fast. All this about British Libraries Limited and so on; why, I haven’t even got my rise at the Red Rose yet, and I mayn’t get it either, what’s more.”
“Why not?”
He came to life at last. “There’s another chap at Baker Street; a nasty bit of work he is; he’s been soft-soaping the boss and playing up to the head librarian. He’s one of those flashy everything-in-the-shop-window sort of chaps; they think he’s efficient. But as a matter of fact——” Interested at last, he began to regale her with the scandal of the Red Rose Libraries; she sat thinking: “Oh, Lord, how dull! It shouldn’t be dull to me, I suppose, but oh! it is.” I don’t know him, she thought, I don’t know him at all; this is like a servant girl out with her young man and abusing her employer. “And then she says, says she——” Oh, dear! Suddenly she interrupted his interminable narrative of sneakings and favouritisms---which simply meant after all that there was another young man at Baker Street who worked better than he did.
“Lionel, I wish you’d tell me more about yourself.”
He stopped in surprise. “I am telling you, aren’t I?”
“Yes; but not that. I mean about your real self; your home and your people and all.”
A queer expression---yet so familiar---came over his face; you would almost have called it crafty.
“I’ve told you.”
“Precious little. You live with an aunt, don’t you?” (And you never really meant to tell me even that.)
“Yes.”
“Is she nice to you?”
He said smugly: “We mean a great deal to one another. I think she sets us all a very beautiful example.”
“Us all?” thought Audrey, and resolved to take the bull by the horns. “Who’s ‘us all’? Have you any brothers and sisters?”
“I’ve a sister. I don’t like her very much.”
That was understandable; the sister was probably a ninny. “What about your parents? Aren’t they alive?”
“Yes; but they’re not here.”
“Where are they?” It was like drawing teeth:
“Manchester. But they’re not anything very much.”
She thought: “If that’s all.” But his smugness had given place to the old wriggling discomfort, the old suspicion of craftiness. There’s something he keeps hiding; I’m sure of it. She said, half idly:
“I expect you’ve lots of friends, anyway.”
Instantly he was eager. He said---and it was almost fawningly---“I haven’t, Audrey. I haven’t really. I’ve nobody but you. You’re the only person on earth that matters.”
Audrey sickened at him; she knew that if she looked, she would see him eyeing her over his tumbler; very sly, very defensive; in another moment he would start telling lies. Suddenly angry with him, angry with herself for failing with him, she jumped to her feet.
“This evening isn’t going very well somehow. Let’s quit.”
He came readily---almost thankfully. Outside the Tube station he gave her the ritual kiss; she submitted to it coldly. The Tube swallowed him up; he dived down into the labyrinth and was lost in a moment so easily. And I don’t even know where he goes. I don’t know anything about him at all. I don’t know and he doesn’t want to tell me, he doesn’t want to tell me. How can we get forrader on these terms?
His kiss was still faintly warm upon her cheek. She thought: “That’s the nearest we’ve ever got---and he really does it only because in his walk of life the young lady expects it; the nearest we’ve ever got---except that idiotic time after the cliff business when we did put our arms round one another just for a moment. It was rather lovely, that---and it might have been lovelier still if that fool Mackay hadn’t started off with the sheep. Too ridiculous; God must surely laugh a lot sometimes. . . . Oh, Lionel, if you’d only let go, throw off your inhibitions, be what I want you to be---what I mean you to be. And stop putting me off and being timid and secretive, and---and Lionelish. Lionel S. Go-get-it---oh, damn!”
At dinner Robin had a stunned look; he moved as a man moves who has been struck heavily over the head. Audrey asked---but she already knew the answer——
“Any news from Kenneth?”
“Yes. . . . He failed.” And while she was still thinking of something to say, he dismissed Kenneth. “Isn’t Graham coming in?”
“No. He’s dining out.” (She had foreseen this; she had said: “Do be in to-night, Graham,” and shuffling his feet, he had said: “I can’t; I’m dining out.” She had said: “Iona?” and he, sulkily: “Yes.” Damn all Ionas.)
“I think he might have arranged to be in. To-night.”
She lied in Graham’s defence. “He’s feeling this, darling. And he feels he can’t be much help. Neither he can, you know.”
“He might show some interest . . . I thought Kenneth would have done better. It means I shall have to tackle it again myself.”
Audrey said doubtfully: “You’re quite, quite sure about taking her back, Daddy?”
“Sure? Of course I am.” And---all honour to him ---he manifestly was. “What other course is there?”
“Well---she’s been pretty insulting to you——”
“My dear Audrey, don’t talk nonsense. If Noelle had been ill I would have taken her back, as you call it, wouldn’t I? Well, that’s how we must regard this. You said yourself it was hysterics.”
“Yes, but——”
“We must just regard it as an illness, an aberration. And when she comes back we must all behave as if it had never happened. Meantime we must just have patience and give her time to come to her senses.”
Audrey gave it up; she said, “Yes, darling,” as a mother to a babbling child. Upstairs in her room with Mackay and her electric fire again, she thought over and over: “Is there anything I can do?” But the ghosts of Lionel and René came rushing in to disturb her; they fluttered about in the air, refusing to come down to earth and be disposed of. In the end she dug out the “Alby-seat” letter and read it for the twentieth time; it wasn’t consoling but it did, for the time being, dispose of Lionel. Lionel who wouldn’t rise, Lionel who sat nursing his silly secrets, thinking out some crafty trick to stop her silly questions.
The clock struck eleven; Audrey’s thoughts turned vaguely to the errant Graham. Is it going to be one in the morning again---or worse? I wish he wouldn’t; I wish he’d give up this wretched female; I wish he’d never seen her. . . . And I do so want someone to talk to; I wish he’d come in. . . . As if in answer to her wish, there was a distant rattling downstairs---Graham at the front door and rather noisy. Mackay, as if he scented something unusual, sprang up barking and making a fool of himself; Audrey ran to the stair-head.
“Sh-sh! Father’s gone to bed.”
But Graham didn’t sh-sh; instead, he switched on the hall light and in it she suddenly saw his upturned face. It frightened her; it was terrible; it was a white expressionless round like a dinner-plate, the lips dropping apart the eyes staring. She thought wildly: “Oh, God, now something’s happened to Graham!” Kicking off her slippers, she ran downstairs and seized him by the arm.
“Graham! What is it?”
He said, in a dead sort of voice, that he was all right.
“You’re not. What’s happened?”
“I’ve---had---a---pretty---bloody---evening.” Word by word, as if he spoke through chloroform.
“What’s happened?”
“Something---pretty---bloody.”
“Tell me.”
But he only shook his head, staring.
“Oh, Graham, do tell me.”
“No.” He shook her hand from his arm. “I’m---going---to---bed”---as if he were drunk; but the terrible thing was that he wasn’t drunk---not in the least.
“Graham——”
But he pushed past her and up the stairs; step by step as if he pulled his feet after him. He went into his room; she heard the key turn in the lock. But he didn’t go to bed. For, by peeping through the keyhole---a thing she had done before now---Audrey saw that he was sitting in his chair, not undressing at all, gazing at the litter of his clockwork trains. She called to him as loudly as she dared, but he made no answer. Defeated, she went back to her own room and got into her pyjamas and sat there shivering and frightened in the lurid light from the electric radiator.
What’s happened this time? What?
At two Graham’s light had not gone out; at three it had not gone out; but at four at last it had.
For in truth Graham had had a pretty bloody evening---a frightful, a really frightful experience.
Before dinner, over the cocktails, Iona had been rather holding-offish; when he said: “Is it going to be to-night again, Iona?” she replied in her irritating way: “Oh, don’t worry me!” and would come no further. But at dinner she seemed to change, she became kinder, she began to gaze at him in that drawing-in absorbing way that so delighted him. If you leant far forward across the table, you could see yourself in her eyes---a little white face swimming. She softened; with nothing more said, there began to be no doubt about what would happen after dinner. “She’s getting fonder of me,” thought Graham, “she is really”; and then, assailed by a sardonic doubt: “Or is it the champagne?” She always said “No, no, no!” about the champagne, but she lapped it up when it came. “Women!” thought Graham morosely, “always refusing, refusing---and then grabbing all they can get. . . .”
In the taxi there was no doubt about what would happen; no doubt at all.
They reached Iona’s flat a little after ten o’clock; a drink then and some love-making. Iona was delicious and sweet; she went away and took off her evening frock and put on a silk dressing-gown embroidered with long-tongued dragons. Graham, sipping his whiskey, thought: “This night is going to be perfect.” He began to wonder if he need go back to Frame Square before morning; if one sneaked in somewhere about seven——? It would still be darkish; but---evening dress? Awkward. Perhaps better follow the routine, cold wet three-in-the-morning walk or no. Routine? Well, it was hardly routine---yet; but like the other times, like the two other times. . . Iona came back in her green silk. . . .
At half-past ten they were in Iona’s bedroom; but Graham was still almost fully dressed. And it was a merciful thing that it was so; for when frightful events begin to happen, a man who is dressed has at least a species of armour against them, whereas a man without his clothes is like a man in a nightmare, a poor naked spear-throwing savage in front of machine-gun fire.
And frightful events did begin to happen. For about a quarter to eleven, when Iona, sitting on the bed, was just squeezing out a last cigarette and Graham was taking off his tie, there came sounds so incredibly horrible that at first it seemed that they could not possibly be real. But they were real enough. The outer door of the flat was opened---opened by someone with a key and gently closed again; someone who knew his way about came into the living-room and switched on the light; someone who was much at his ease called softly: “Ona! Ona! You in bed?”
For a space of seconds Graham stood in his white shirt and black trousers, his tie dangling round his collar, thinking: “This can’t be real, this can’t be happening. It cannot be true that I, Graham Ritchie, am in Mrs. Iona Playfair’s bedroom and her husband---it can’t be anybody but her husband---has suddenly and unexpectedly come home, and is now in the next room. These things don’t happen; they’re melodrama---out of a book.” Then he looked at Iona, and she was hardly real either; she was sitting upright, completely taut, completely rigid, her left hand still stubbing the cigarette-end into its ash-tray; her little face was tilted upwards, he saw it outlined against the coloured wall; her lower lip was drawn in between her teeth, her small forehead was contracted into a frown. Yet she wasn’t stricken, she wasn’t horrified as she ought to have been; she was more like a person struggling with a cross-word puzzle. She was---annoyed. And all she did, at the end of those tense seconds, was to release her lip and say very softly “Damn!”
It was inadequate; the sheer inadequacy of it roused Graham from his trance; he was almost shocked. “Damn!” she said and sat there like an image while heaven and earth came crashing down, and the angel with the flaming sword——
From the sitting-room the voice called, a little louder:
“O-na!” Iona said in a whisper:
“I knew this would happen.” And again, softly, “Damn!”
Graham thought: “If you knew, you might have told me; I didn’t.” He said, white-faced: “Iona!”
The voice from the sitting-room called again with a hint of impatience. “Ona! Ona!” There was the sound of a match striking; lighting a cigarette, eh? He, too, seemed to be taking it pretty calmly, but, of course, he had the night before him. For a frantic moment Graham saw himself in a terrible trap; Iona on one side in green silk dragons; real flesh-and-blood dragons on the other. Raging red-hot Colonels arriving secretly from India; staging a surprise for Iona; the old, old story. There was a door between them meantime, but that couldn’t last. He lost nerve suddenly.
“Iona! What on earth am I to do?”
She motioned with her head towards the sitting-room door.
“Go on. You’ll have to clear out.”
Again she was incredible, again Graham was shocked. “You’ll have to clear out!” As if that were all. As if one simply pushed past the outraged husband saying airily: “Sorry I was in your wife’s room, old chap; so long!” As if it were a mere inconvenience. As if Iona’s hand fell upon his shoulder; it propelled him towards the door.
“Get a move on. Or he’ll come in here.”
Anything, of course, better than that. Forgetting his dangling tie, Graham dragged on his dress coat and waistcoat. My overcoat? Hanging behind the front door; he hasn’t seen that yet. And now what? For a moment Graham’s knees turned to water underneath him. Will he shoot at sight? Do we fight here and now? What happens? For the moment the situation was too big for Graham once again. Then, looking suddenly at Iona, he took courage. She was biting her finger and staring at him, and she had never---no, never---looked so lovely. Mine, mine; I’ll keep her! To hell with husbands! To hell with husbands! . . . He flung open the sitting-room door and marched in to confront the enemy. Not René himself could have done it better.
The photograph man was standing on the other side of the table, smoking a cigarette and idly turning over the Tatler. He was in a dinner-jacket; a big fellow, but not so very big. There was, of course, no mistaking him; there was that close-fitting cap of steel-grey hair; those dark limpid eyes looking up into Graham’s through the cigarette smoke; that wise-old-dog expression regarding him without fury or amazement, hardly even with surprise. The photograph man beyond question; and beyond question saying urbanely:
“Oh! Good evening.”
Graham was taken aback once more; you advanced, baring your breast for the ball, and were met by a commonplace civility; it wasn’t fair. He was so taken aback that he replied “Good evening!” before he could stop himself.
The photograph man closed the Tatler. He said, always politely:
“The front door’s still where it was.”
Graham stood staring, infuriated, insulted. So this is to be the line, eh; ignore me, get me outside, treat me like a child and then probably start a row in the morning. Oh, is it? Not if I know it. We go on with this here and now. Flushed and looking suddenly handsome---as Philippa had once looked in her occasional tempers---he said boldly:
“And so am I, Colonel Playfair, so am I.”
The photograph man raised his eyebrows. “Quite!” he said. “You’ve forgotten your tie.”
Despite himself, Graham’s hands went up to his collar---and so he had; his tie hung loose making him look, doubtless, half tight. The discovery abased him; and in that moment of confusion he heard the softest of sounds behind him; it should have been Iona, coming out in her silk dressing-gown to lay her hand in his and say---oh, something noble and big and magnanimous. “We love each other”; something like that. But in plain truth the sound was the sound of the bedroom door being stealthily closed behind him---and bolted. So that was to be her line, eh? Ratted. Well, perhaps better so. And now to end this farce. . . . Moistening his lips, he said:
“I’m sorry about this, Colonel Playfair——”
The photograph man smiled.
“So am I. . . . But I don’t know why you keep on calling me Playfair. My name’s Roxburgh.”
For a moment, when the magnesium flare is fired in darkness, there is nothing but a flash, a concussion, a stunning dispersal of the senses; then slowly, slowly the realities return---weirdly fit, incomprehensible, not quite themselves. For more than a moment it was so with Graham. . . . His name is Roxburgh. He is not Playfair. He is not Iona’s husband at all. His name is Roxburgh. He has a key to this flat and comes in at eleven. That is his photograph; but his name is Roxburgh. “Get a move on. Or he’ll come in here.” He could do that, too. But his name is Roxburgh. . . . Bang! Fizz! went the magnesium flare---hideously illuminative; so piercingly brilliant, so mercilessly revealing that you could not fail to see. In that dreadful split second you saw everything. You saw a pleasant-faced knowledgeable man whose name was Roxburgh; you saw God’s fool with his tie hanging loose whose name was Graham. You saw---oh, God, how you saw! And you said---all you could say was——
“Is---is that your photograph?”
The man who was Roxburgh glanced casually at Iona’s writing-table.
“Now you mention it, it is.”
“I---I thought it was Playfair.”
“Well, no; I’m afraid it’s me.”
There was the deadest silence; into it broke small surreptitious noises from the bedroom---a rustling, the creak of a spring, the snap of a switch. Getting into bed, is she---leaving me to it? Lying there listening, biting her finger and saying “Damn.” That’s all she’s doing, that’s all Iona is doing, while I stand here crucified, while I Stand here going mad, God’s fool, God’s own particular fool. . . . His name is Roxburgh; and he’s laughing at me; and I don’t blame him either; who wouldn’t? . . . But I must know, I must put the question to him point-blank. Stuttering, thick-voiced, he put it.
“Are you---are you---Iona’s——”
The photograph man smiled again---a not unkind smile, amused perhaps but comprehending.
“Iona’s what?” And somehow when he asked that, smiling, one couldn’t go on. One was defeated and, like the defeated, one turned hopelessly to flight. “The front door’s still where it was.” Well, thank God for that. Out! Out! No more!
So instead it was the photograph man, whose name was Roxburgh, who went on. He said, quite kindly:
“I think there’s been a sort of mix-up here. It’s a bit late to go into it now, but what d’you say to coming to lunch with me one day at my club? Say Wednesday. I’ll give you my card.”
He gave Graham the card and there it was in black and white: “Mr. Craig Roxburgh, The Shropshire Club, Pall Mall.”
Bewildered, his world reeling, Graham said:
“I---I don’t know.”
“Well, let’s leave it like that. I’ll expect you. I think we’ll have something to say to each other.” He was shepherding Graham to the door---politely, firmly. To the door of Iona’s flat. I am outside, he is inside; his name is Roxburgh. . . . Melodrama; great scene of the play; “We love each other”; “Colonel Playfair, I must tell you the truth”; a fight, revolvers blazing; tremendous moments. . . . And here, instead, is a polite host escorting to the door a guest who has lingered rather long; helping him into his overcoat with urbane relief; not shaking hands; saying, “Good night; I’ll expect you on Wednesday”; shutting the front door---making no mistake about that. Snick! went the Yale lock; and Roxburgh is inside and Graham Ritchie is on the mat. Finis!
Finis! And oh, God, have mercy on Your fool. Or strike him dead---I don’t care which.
Grey, wet and monotonous, another day that nobody wanted came hurrying on. It hurried so fast that some hours of it rushed past Audrey while she still slept, tired out by her vigil. It was half-past nine before she ran downstairs to meet a delayed breakfast and Nixon’s bright---but still slightly speculative---“Good morning, miss.”
Audrey reciprocated the greeting. “I suppose Mr. Graham isn’t down yet?”
“Oh, yes, miss---Mr. Graham had come down at half-past eight and eaten his breakfast and gone right out. And a sidelong glance to see how Miss Audrey took that---for it wasn’t like Mr. Graham, not at all like him. Outwardly Miss Audrey took it calmly; inwardly she thought in a spasm of terror: “Oh, what has he done? Where has he gone? If only I knew what happened last night. . . .”
Instead of Graham came Robin---with dragging feet and that sandbagged look. He thought he would go to Mickleham Road and then he thought he wouldn’t. Drinking his coffee, he explained to Audrey once more the merits of delay. “We must give her time to think things out. Time is the essence of these affairs. They won’t run away. Give her time and she must see.” Oh, surely she must.
Audrey said: “Yes; yes.” And thought: “Give him time; that’s what René said about Lionel. Is it ever any good?”
Graham did not appear for lunch and Audrey, working herself into a panic, could eat nothing. This house is accursed, she thought, it has been marked out for destruction, one by one we shall be stricken down. She decided, however, to give Graham till tea-time; if he’d done anything dreadful, we’d have heard by now. At tea-time there was still no Graham and the expression of her terrors trembled upon Audrey’s lips; but Robin, all through that pretence of a meal, was so remote and so shattered that it was impossible to broach any news---no announcement short of the Last Trump would have penetrated his abandoned gloom. She thought: “I’ll give Graham a last chance till six and then I must do something; if not Father, then the police.” She was rewarded, for just before six she heard Graham coming in and plodding away upstairs. Presently there was the familiar roaring of the bathroom taps; he was going to have a hot bath. Stealing downstairs, she looked at the mackintosh he had flung on a chair; it was soaking wet, black with water. Hot bath? Best thing he could do.
She gave him a full hour for his bath and its effects and then crept up to his bedroom; listening outside his door, where she had spent so much of that terrifying night, she heard a reassuring sound---the shirring and tinkling of the clockwork trains. At that she went boldly in, and there sat a wretched little boy she hadn’t seen in years---a little boy who had got himself into trouble and was trying to pretend he didn’t care, trying pitiably to soothe himself with trains. The sight, sweeping away the years, drew out of her a childhood’s name, long forgotten.
“Oh, Gamey!” She knelt beside him on the floor, put an arm round his neck; he didn’t reject her.
“Gamey, what did happen last night?”
He tried dignity. “It wouldn’t interest you.”
“Yes, it would; you know it would. Don’t be a pig. Tell me.”
The clockwork locomotive ran itself to a standstill and stopped, looking foolish and forlorn, in mid-circle.
“I---I got rather let down, that’s all.”
“Iona?”
“Yes; Iona.”
“Tell me, Gamey.”
“No.” But he sat back on his heels. “It was pretty bloody, Audrey——” He couldn’t really keep it to himself; bit by bit, out the story came. “I’d got to the length of taking off my tie. . . . I thought, of course, it was her husband---who else could it be? . . . I was prepared to stand up to him . . . but when I found it was this other chap . . . for all I know there may be a dozen other chaps . . . I simply couldn’t go on.” The tears came into his eyes. “It shook me, Audrey, it shook me.”
“Of course it did. The beast!”
“Oh, you can’t blame her. I was the mug. I see that now. People like her---bitches like her——”
Audrey put her arm round his neck again.
“She was a mistake, darling. Not even a very nice mistake.”
He sighed deeply. “I see that now, of course. But it hurt, it hurt; my God, it hurt! I thought last night——”
She said: “I know; I know,” and petted him. He said: “You’re not a bad old sort, Audrey.” He was better. He said shamefacedly:
“I kept you up last night; I heard you poking about.”
“I was frightened. And oh, Graham, you might have told me you were going out this morning. I thought---all sorts of things.”
“I meant to tell you. I did look in, but you were asleep.”
“Where did you go to-day?”
“The Chilterns.”
“The Chilterns? What on earth were you doing there?”
“Oh, just walking about---thinking it over.”
“In the wet?”
“Yes; why not? The wet didn’t worry me. I didn’t even notice it much. I was thinking. . . . I got things straight anyway. . . . I’ve torn up the Idyll.”
“What! London Idyll?”
“Yes. That’s all over, too; it goes with the other thing. And look here . . .”
He jumped up and fished something out of a locked drawer in his desk.
“I’ve written this. Tell me what you think.” Audrey read:
“Dear Mr. Roxburgh,
“I have been thinking over your kind invitation to lunch and have decided that it would be better on the whole if we did not meet again. I don’t think you will mind this very much.
“Yours sincerely,
“Graham Ritchie.”
“O.K., Audrey?”
“Yes, I think so. I’d cut out ‘on the whole’; it’s better never to qualify. And would you say ‘kind’ invitation?”
“Well, he was kind. That’s the odd part of it. I suppose I should have hated him, but somehow he seemed rather decent.”
“I wonder he didn’t go for you.”
“I wish he had. But---I can’t explain it---it wasn’t like that at all. He just sort of laughed at me and put me outside. Like---like a Saint Bernard with Mackay. Not bothering. I couldn’t stand up to him.”
“No. . . . Have you done anything about Iona?”
“Nothing at all.”
“Going to?”
“No.” (Not now that I’ve fought down the insane desire to rush round and see her, to ring her up, to say; “Iona, for God’s sake tell me it was all some rotten mistake.” Not now that I’ve fought down the hope that she’d ring me up or write to me. Or wire or something. How would I have replied if she had? Scathingly? Forgivingly? Noble resignation? Or just like a damn’ fool? Anyway, that hasn’t arisen; she didn’t write and she didn’t ring up and she won’t. Not now. So what am I going to do about Iona? That’s easy---nothing.)
“That’s all over, Audrey.”
“Won’t she do something?”
“Not she. She’ll take the line of least resistance. Like when she locked that bedroom door and got into bed. She’ll do nothing now---because that’s easiest. . . . I suppose that fellow Roxburgh’s her lover; well, he must be. I suppose they’ll just go on together. I don’t care.”
You do, thought Audrey, going back to her own room; you do care and you will care, but you’re better out of Iona---and on the whole you’ve been lucky. (Suppose it had been Colonel Playfair? . . .) Well, that leaves me and Lionel. But what are we? Goodness knows; it’s most unsatisfactory; we must get down to brass tacks, regularise ourselves somehow. A long engagement? I suppose it will have to come to that. . . .
But we must get fixed up somehow---settled, engaged, committed, whatever it is.
Anyway, there is Lionel; thank Heaven for that. Salvation; Lionel.
When Audrey had gone, Graham rewound his clockwork engine and sent it spinning round its little track. It started with an enthusiastic rush; but presently, too light and too swift and on too sharp a curve, it leapt the rails and rolled over on its side where it lay whirring and buzzing like a bee on his back. “Or,” thought Graham, conscious of posing, conscious of a conceit but enjoying it, “like me. From first to last like me.”
Graham had had an extraordinary day in the Chilterns---a day of delightful misery. He had taken a Green Line bus to somewhere near Great Missenden and then had struck west into the fields and woods through the Hampdens and Longdown and Whiteleaf. He had been lost a dozen times and---never realising it---had found himself again as often. It rained incessantly---a sweeping, billowing ocean of drizzle; the woods were black and sodden, mud sloshed and squelched everywhere. The countryside was lost in that dead interlude when winter’s grip is failing and spring is not yet even an intimation; it was dark and lifeless and miserable. But you got it to yourself; in bogs and brakes and founderous ploughlands you were free of company; and you saw yourself. By God, you did! You saw yourself as Roxburgh the photograph man saw you, as the Saint Bernard saw Mackay---a little puppy yapping and capering and making a nuisance of itself. As Roxburgh saw you last night; and---oh, how this stung you up!---as Iona, it was now evident, must have seen you a thousand times. Just a young yapping thing making a B.F. of itself. Because if Iona was Roxburgh’s sort, if she was up to Roxburgh, if she had Roxburgh for a lover---and all these “if’s” were so---then she was obviously quite beyond you. And you thought you were conquering, you were all set up about your “married woman,” you talked---thought anyway---of “cuckolds.” You! You unspeakable!
Well, all that being granted, what do we do next? When your engine goes off the rails what do you do with it? Pick it up and set it on to them again. If God, thought Graham, ploughing through mud up to his ankles, thrusting into wet branches that soused cold steely water in his face---if God will deign to do as much with you, you be thankful. Get back to where you were. . . . Well, I’ve started; I tore up London Idyll last night; it went with Iona and I’ve torn up Iona too. Out, damned spot! You wanted to be a writer? Forget it. You had a career as a writer? Cut it out. You don’t want to go back to mugging up chemistry? And what if? Your wants? . . . You ape!
He felt better for his hot bath, better that he had told Audrey, better still that he had written that letter which Roxy at the Shropshire Club was to read with one of his sardonic hound-faced smiles. There was just one moment of temptation; shall I, after all, write just one line to Iona---just a dignified word of farewell, a full stop to a sentence of folly? Something cutting, something final, or something whimsically resigned. “Sweet, thou hast trod on a heart.” Oh, hell, no; nothing of that sort! No, no; tear up Iona as you have torn up London Idyll; they go together. Post your letter to Roxburgh and let that be an end of it.
He went out and posted his letter at the Mallam Street corner; Mackay, following him, gave a conscious exhibition of good-dog---as he usually did with Graham, who carried a whip and sometimes used it. The letter fell into the empty pillar-box with a little clang like the toot of some derisive elfin trumpet; love’s last word; and that is that. Mackay made his customary gesture at the pillar-box---and very appropriate, too. . . .
Back in the house Graham hesitated, then pushed Mackay into the drawing-room (where he immediately leapt unchecked on one of Noelle’s best chairs), squared his shoulders and marched into his father’s study. Robin, disconsolate in his armchair, looked up.
“Is that you, Graham?”
“It’s me. Any news?”
“No; nothing more; we must just wait.”
Graham thought morosely: “Poor old boy, he won’t see it. These bloody women; why did God ever make them?” Aloud he said, shuffling nervously with his rather large feet:
“I say, Dad——”
“Yes?”
“I’m chucking that film dialogue business. Too childish altogether.”
It was a great announcement; it cost Graham a lot; for the moment he felt torn in two. But it seemed to pass over Robin’s head. He didn’t even say “I told you so.”
“Well, you can try something else. I thought you were writing a novel?”
“I was. But I’m chucking writing altogether.”
Another bombshell; to Graham its explosion seemed to shake the house, but Robin met it with no more than a mild polite astonishment.
“Altogether?”
“Well---as a job, I mean. I thought, I thought——” The shuffle became a dance of discomfort. I thought I might carry on with the old chemistry again.”
(It is the moment of renunciation; I am saying---I have said---good-bye to my career; I have said good-bye to hope and ambition; I have unhitched my wagon from its star. . . . And he doesn’t even see it.)
“Chemistry?”
“Yes. Where I left off.”
Interest---but still hardly more than polite; no leap of joy; no fire kindling in the eye; interest---polite interest.
“You could certainly do that. You’ve lost a term, of course.” Not “Come to my arms, my beamish boy”; only “You could certainly do that; you’ve lost a term.”
“I could make that up.”
“Yes. Oh, yes.”
“I’d try anyway. . . .” Well, if you won’t say it, I must. . . . “ We---we could perhaps work together a bit, like---like you used to say——”
It is out; I have said it; the climax of the day has been reached. To this moment all those hours in the wet black woods of Wendover were labouring. I have said my piece; the great renunciation and the great offer have been made. Now it is for him to meet me half-way, to realise what I have done for him, to see that I, Graham, am making up to him for Noelle. Now——
But Robin sat in his chair. He made no move; he did not meet Graham half-way---scarcely even a quarterway. He said slowly---and he said only:
“Yes. Oh, yes. . . . Yes.” And then, as if by an afterthought: “That would be splendid.”
That was all. He said it would be splendid; but it sounded as if it would be a crashing bore. It sounded like a man humouring a persistent child, fobbing off some tiresome admiration-craving brat. “That would be splendid,” he said---and it sounded like “That would be bloody.”
Graham felt defeated. Muttering vaguely: “Oh well, then, that’s oke,” too shy and uncomfortable for further speech, he went clumsily out. In the drawing-room Mackay, scenting a change in the temperature, nipped hastily off his chair---but just too late. Graham’s flying slipper caught him; yelping with offended dignity, he fled. And Graham, sitting down under the Cadrigua portrait, bump-on-the-nose and all, thought:
“It was a sacrifice, it was a good offer. He might have bucked up a bit, he might have said something. But I suppose he can’t. I suppose he’s all in over Noelle. Like me and Iona. . . . These bloody women! . . .”
But for the first time Graham realised---or would have realised if he had applied analogies---what poor Noelle had sometimes to contend with.
The days, unaltering in themselves, hideously similar, ran on to make a week, a week and a day; it was difficult to believe the evidence of the calendar. In Noelle’s room her “nice things” still lay unclaimed---her silk pyjamas in their embroidered case on the silk bedcover, her clothes and furs in the wardrobes, her trinketry arranged with Noelle-ish precision on the dressing-table. There lay the shell, but where was the creature? To Audrey and Graham, wondering constantly, the situation was obscure; Robin was thought to be in some sort of touch with Mickleham Road; perhaps he wrote letters at nights; perhaps he telephoned sometimes; perhaps he even made a visit or two. I wish he would wake up, Audrey thought, I wish he would see. Perhaps he did nothing at all; perhaps he was merely waiting, putting his trust in that time which was slipping smoothly away from him. He said nothing; one didn’t like to question. Oh, Lord thought Audrey, I wish this would come to an end!
Graham came to her, grumbling. Robin’s reception of the Great Renunciation, the Great Offer, still rankled; disgruntled, he told Audrey all about it.
“I thought he’d be bucked.”
“And wasn’t he?”
“Not so’s you’d notice. He didn’t say so.”
“I expect he felt it all right.”
“Well, couldn’t he have said something? You can’t divine feelings.”
Audrey lost her patience; I live among ostriches, self=deceivers, the blind who won’t see. I can show this one, anyway.
“Look here, Graham, the fact is you weren’t really thinking about Daddy at all. You wanted to work up a grand scene---noble Graham giving up his won-der-ful career and so on and so on. And you expected him to forget all his own troubles instantly and think what a grand chap you were. And when he didn’t——”
“It wasn’t like that at all.”
“Yes, it was.” And what’s more, she thought, it was the wonderful career that gave up you. Relenting a little---for he still looked precious miserable---she said: “I’m just as bad myself. I want to think only of Daddy and how to help him out of this mess, and all the time I keep worrying and worrying about my own wretched affairs——”
“Lionel?”
“Ye-es, Lionel. And René.”
“Why worry about René?”
“I don’t know. I hate to think of him away there in Spain. I’ve got a horrid feeling that something’s happened to him.”
“Well, he asked for it, didn’t he?”
Audrey stamped her foot, half surprised at her own violence. “Oh, how can you talk like that!”
“Well, he didn’t have to go.”
“Yes he did---the way he saw things. And I’m glad he went, yes I am---even if anything happens. He’s had a try anyway. We’ve just sat here mucking about and---and Kennething; he’s done something——” Conscious of sudden tears burning hotly at the back of her eyes, she fled to her room.
The miserable weary days dragged on. Lunches were an intolerable solemnity; teas, with their closer contacts, their mocking cosiness of lights and fires, were ordeals of exhausted tact. The vacant chair was so expressly vacant; if she’d been dead, Audrey thought, we could at least have talked about her and relieved things a bit. Graham was busy restarting his chemistry classes; Robin repeatedly assailed the A-Flat Ballade, disappointed himself as usual and went down to his laboratory to disappoint himself still further. The house seemed very silent; it began to assume the awful composure that steals over the dying. “I am passing away,” it said; “I am a good enough house, but there is nothing left to sustain me. My inhabitants have never nourished me; they have quarrelled and disliked each other, they have passed their days pursuing miseries and discontents. I perished with Philippa. How can I survive?” How can I? thought Audrey. She tried to work, tried to read---something solid and absorbing like Fisher’s History of Europe or Mathematics for the Million---tried the wireless; all were powerless to divert that grim sensation of impending doom. She read and re-read René’s Albyseat letter till she came to dislike it; too much about this Poustie, too little about himself; what there was showed an unfamiliar frightening René---a lost creature, his foothold sliding under him, darkness ahead. “If I could have been there!” thought Audrey. “If he could have been here! . . . Well, anyway, there’s Lionel.”
There was Lionel; and in Lionel’s curls and his girly face and his imploring eyes, in Lionel’s eagerness and his good thoughts and his splendid intentions there now centred hope and prospect. Apart from all those attractions which still defied analysis or definition, Lionel was so much material; he was that of which something might yet be made. He was possibility, the future. Thank God for that.
But of course, thought Audrey, I’ve been sensible, I picked the right person. Our minds work together, our bodies like each other---there you are. We can fuse, we can unite, we can go forward together. I was sensible, I haven’t gone blundering into idiotic misfits. Graham and his Iona; poor Daddy and Noelle; too stupid. Well, after all, why should I? After all, I’m Audrey.
Now this is a faithful saying and worthy of all acceptation---that pride goeth before a fall.
“There are two young ladies to see you, miss.”
Nixon breaking in upon Fisher or Professor Hogben; Nixon with that lamp of speculation rekindled in her eye.
“Young ladies, Nixon?”
“Yes, miss. Miss Peach and Miss Lavender. I showed them into the drawing-room.”
Audrey said: “All right; I’ll come.” And then stood for a moment irresolute. The dark forebodings of the days suddenly formed themselves into a cloud; they came rushing downwards enveloping her in black. Miss Peach and Miss Lavender? One knew the name Peach; certainly one knew the name Peach; but---Lavender? Miss Peach and Miss Lavender; they sounded like a music-hall turn, but something said to Audrey: “These are no music-hall turn, these are Furies.” Miss Peach and Miss Lavender? Say rather the Misses Eumenides, daughters of Earth or Night. . . .
Or was Miss Peach perhaps the Aunt?
Audrey went downstairs to the drawing-room, shaking a little; and instantly it was clear at any rate that Miss Peach was not the aunt. Two quite young women---girls, in fact---rose from the sofa at her entry; they got up together in one movement as if pulled by a common string. One was a little dark thing, rather mousy, sharp nose, globular eyes, an unsuitable red hat, a lace hankie crushed in a hot hand. The other was---Lionel. Lionel in a ready-made grey coat-and-skirt and a shiny black hat; Lionel’s soft brown hair longer and more carefully curled; Lionel’s white face, tilted nose, antelope eyes. Yet the girl was Lionel and she was most terribly not Lionel; she was Lionel shorn of everything that exalted him, everything that differentiated him from a million young men in shops and offices, and---yes, lending libraries. She was Lionel reduced to the lowest denominator; she was Lionel’s commonness, Lionel’s cheapness, Lionel’s deficit, all of Lionel that was minus. And yet---and here was the dreadful thing---she was absolutely Lionel too. It was as if an evil imp flicked a veil from a portrait and said: “There’s your Lionel; that’s what Lionel’s like.”
Audrey, missing none of this, advanced with what she hoped was a smile. She said with painful brightness:
“I don’t need to ask which is which, anyway. You are Miss Peach.”
She held out her hand but Miss Peach looked over it; the mousy little dark girl silently devoured Audrey with her round eyes---her clothes, her hair, her shoes. There were carved wooden buttons on Audrey’s coat; Miss Lavender seemed fascinated by them as the rabbit is fascinated by the snake. She stared at them wrinkling her pointed nose. Audrey said, nonplussed:
“Won’t you sit down?”
They relapsed on to the sofa in another simultaneous movement as if jerked. Miss Peach said---apparently in answer to Audrey’s identification---“That is quite right.” She didn’t say “quate rate,” but she was not far off it. “And this is Miss Lavender.”
Audrey nodded and smiled; the dark girl stared at her like a sheep---as yokels stare, as slum children. She appeared to be labouring under some acute discomfort; Audrey tried to ease it.
“It was nice of you to come to see me.”
It was said merely to say something, but Miss Peach seemed to perceive an inner meaning; she hardened. She said: “Well——” and gazed round her, gathering her forces. “I don’t know so much about nice,” she said. Miss Lavender stared and stared in unhelpful silence; but horrid as she was, she was less horrid than Miss Peach, that caricature of Lionel, that commentary upon Lionel. As they seemed to be stuck, Audrey said helpfully:
“Perhaps you wanted to see me about something?” Collecting? Job-hunting?
Miss Peach cleared her throat with an irritating gentility and said: “Excuse me.” But the action seemed to release her, she was able to make a start. Outraged virtues assembled in her face, reverberated in her voice.
“I think you know who Miss Lavender is.”
Audrey thought for a moment desperately; is there some extraordinary mistake; do they take me for somebody else? Ought I to have heard of Miss Lavender; has Lionel spoken of her and have I carelessly forgotten? Someone at the Red Rose Libraries? But she could make nothing of Miss Lavender; she said so.
“I’m awfully sorry, but I’m afraid I don’t.”
“You never heard of her before?”
“I don’t think so.”
Miss Lavender said suddenly and viciously: “That’s a lie!” It was startling---as if a sheep had burst into song or a rabbit drawn a revolver. The contribution, thought Audrey, was helpful rather than otherwise, but it offended Miss Peach’s gentility. She said: “Now, Ella, now!” and then, turning on Audrey, unmasked her batteries.
“Miss Lavender is my brother Lionel’s fiancée.”
For the fraction of a second Audrey suffered Graham’s experience when another voice---as calm, as assured, as lethal---had said: “My name’s Roxburgh.” There was the same blinding flash, the same stunning darkness in which images reeled in disorder. But whereas Graham had instantly recognised the truth, Audrey saw only a fantastic indecency. Thus maniacs speak, confounding fact with the impossible, yet clothing it at the same time with a strange conviction. She said---or thought she said:
“Your brother’s——”
“What I said.” Miss Peach it was who was staring now, staring over tightened lips plastered with lip-salve; they were a bright vermilion red, a clown’s daub in her white-paper face. She used the wrong shade of face powder. Her eyebrows had been plucked; she had stuck in artificial lashes---so unnecessarily when she had Lionel’s. Her teeth were Lionel’s---the same pearly texture, but smaller and sharper; the better to bite you with, my dear. Oh, she was hateful! She was cheap and common and vulgar and pretentious; and she was Lionel’s sister, and she was saying that this other little oddity was Lionel’s fiancée. She said it again, quite clearly. “Miss Lavender and Lionel are engaged.”
Twenty years of training stood behind Audrey; one didn’t shriek; one didn’t strike. Instead one said: “Indeed?” And at one’s tone Miss Peach---because she was Miss Peach---was caught by fury, and leant forward and said---the vermilion lips writhing and twisting in Lionel’s face:
“Yes, indeed, Miss Audrey Ritchie. And it isn’t the first time you’ve heard it. And what we’ve come here for this evening is to tell you to let Lionel alone.”
The twenty years of training shook under Audrey’s feet; but one wasn’t sick in one’s own drawing-room either. Not even when one looked into these two street faces---the one snarling, the other sulky---and heard them utter the most shattering abominations. Not even when one knew now with the hideous conviction that accompanies all bad news that the abominations were true. On the contrary, one took oneself in hand, one held oneself together, striving for one of those suitable phrases which do not exist. And the effort was rewarded; one was delivered. Miss Peach broke into unrestrained speech at last; one had only to listen.
“I suppose you thought we didn’t know what was going on? But we did---oh, yes, Miss Ritchie, we did. Miss Lavender was too much of a lady to say anything.” (“But she wasn’t too much of a lady to call me a liar; now why?”) “Miss Lavender was for letting it all go and trusting Lionel to come to his senses. But I said I wouldn’t have it. I said ‘It isn’t fair,’ I said, ‘taking advantage of Lionel because he’s poor and because he’s clever’---and no more it is, Miss Ritchie, just because you’ve a lot of money and a fine house and---and all that. It isn’t fair to come trespassing on other girls’ property---girls that have to work hard to earn their living and can’t always be sitting about to tempt a working boy like what you can. And so I said to Ella---to Miss Lavender: ‘We’ll go round and have this out,’ I said, and so---and so——”
The torrent ended; she petered out as suddenly as she had started. From the sofa the little sheep stared and stared at those carved wood buttons. Poor little sheep; and it was a terrible hat---couldn’t somebody have told her? . . . And her poor little perm---such care, such a result! . . . “And so---and so——” . . . Audrey said, still with that complete detachment and calm:
“It seems to be a very good thing that you came.” She swallowed something---the mortification of a lifetime, a nauseating disgust, despair, hate, fury. I must face this; Graham had to face his; Graham was a fool and I’ve been a fool, and I must face it. “But---there’s one thing——”
Miss Peach said: “What’s that?”
“I never knew a word of all this. I never heard of Miss Lavender in my life.”
Staring, staring over her sharp little beak, Miss Lavender spoke again. Like a doll fashioned only for repetitions.
“That’s a lie.”
Audrey turned to her gently.
“That’s the second time you’ve said that. Would you mind telling me why?”
Defiance crept into the globular eyes, colour into the pin-cushion cheeks. Audrey suddenly liked her; she isn’t such a bad little thing really and she’s frightened and worried---sick with worry about her Lionel. And she thinks---like they always do---that I’m getting at her.
“’Cos I know.”
“Yes, yes; but how do you know? What makes you think——?”
“’Cos Lionel told me.”
“Lionel told you?”
“Yes, Lionel.”
Miss Peach broke in vindictively: “And that’s Gospel because I was there and heard him.” But Audrey and Miss Lavender had forgotten Miss Peach; their eyes were searching each other and Miss Lavender was thinking; “Is she a harpy, is she a snatcher, is she going to take Lionel from me?” And Audrey: “Can this possibly be true? And if it’s true---and it is true---can there be any possible explanation?”
“But Lionel couldn’t possibly have told you that.”
“Lionel did.” Corroborated again by Miss Peach.
“But---what did he say?”
“He said he told you we were engaged. And you said that didn’t matter.”
“I said?”
“He said you said ‘Forget about that.’”
“Forget—— He couldn’t have said I said that.”
Miss Peach snarled again. “Lionel said it all right. I was there.” But Audrey hardly heard Miss Peach; her mind was a race of questions that fell over each other, demanding. Could Lionel possibly have behaved like this---even Lionel? Could he have been afraid to tell about Miss Lavender; was this the reason of all his careful secrecy about his auntie and his address and his affairs? He was such a funk, it could be. All his Pacifist talk; “I hate rows”; the Derbyshire Rock at the Palladium; that cliff business; yes, it could be. That crafty look in the Cat in Boots---thinking out a question-stopper; it could be. . . . And then, when these two ferreted out the story, traced him to Frame Square, confronted him, could he again, to save his own bacon?
It was possible; it was worse than possible---it was true. Desperately Audrey surveyed Miss Ella Lavender---Lionel’s love, Lionel’s fiancée. This is what he liked; this is what he meant to marry; this! . . . And I, Audrey Ritchie; oh! . . . Hardly hearing herself, she said:
“Will you believe me when I tell you that I knew nothing about this at all? Absolutely nothing.”
“He never told you?”
“Never. Upon my word of honour. And, of course, I never said what he said I said——” (Oh, dear: “’e says, says ’e “; “wot ’e said I said”; oh, dear!)
Doubt struggled in the round unintelligent eyes; if she’s speaking the truth, then Lionel’s lied to me; I don’t think Lionel would lie to me, yet I think she’s speaking the truth too. Stare, stare. Audrey got up and walked round her chair and came back.
“Will you believe that, Miss Lavender?”
With pitiable suddenness the round eyes blurred and overflowed; all in a second Miss Lavender broke down into tears.
“I---I don’t care what I believe so long as you let Lionel alone.”
Audrey said grimly: “I’ll let Lionel alone. You needn’t worry about that.”
But the flood-gates were opened; Miss Lavender wept solidly into her crumpled handkerchief. (And this is what he really liked, this is his sort really. Lionel S. Go-get-it; Lionel M.P; Minister for Literature; Lionel the Saviour of the house of Ritchie; this!) Miss Peach leant forward and said reprovingly: “Now, Ella, now!” but Ella was beyond reproofs. Whether it was relief or the lack of relief or just pure housemaid, she could do nothin? but howl; she would do nothing but howl for the next half-hour. Miss Peach apparently saw as much; she said once more the model of outraged virtue:
“She’s very much upset. And naturally. Perhaps I’d better take her away now.”
Audrey said, steadying herself against a chair-back:
“Yes, I think perhaps you’d better . . . I---I’m glad you came.”
Miss Peach gave her a look of concentrated venom; it was quite clear that Miss Peach’s belief of the worst had suffered no diminution.
“Yes, I’m glad we came. And I think it was about time too.”
Miss Peach and Miss Lavender went out, Miss Peach protective, Miss Lavender---Lionel’s Miss Lavender---blubbering like a housemaid because she knew no better. But---the Misses Eumenides indeed!
In the empty room Audrey sank back into a chair. If ever life has anything more horrible or more difficult than that last half-hour, I’ll like to see it. I’ll like to see it. . . . And now . . . oh! . . . oh! . . . Oh!
With the opening of a fresh week Robin apparently assembled his failing forces and made up his mind. At Monday morning’s breakfast he said to Graham with startling suddenness:
“I’m going to Hampstead this evening. I’ve written them to expect me. Would you come along?”
Graham was touched and alarmed. The prospect of a frontal attack on Mickleham Road---Noelle and her lover (ugh!) in some horrid little stuffy room---filled him with distaste and he had little confidence in his own powers to help. He could see himself only shy and uneasy, shuffling about and looking a fool; or else blustering and savage, being rude to both Noelle and---what was his awful name?---Chris; and that’s not going to do much good, is it? On the other hand it was rather wonderful of the Old Man to ask him; and it showed that the Great Renunciation hadn’t been so much of a washout after all. He wouldn’t have asked me this a week ago. Doubtful, distrusting himself, but amiably disposed, he said:
“D’you think I’d do any good?”
“I think it would help if you were there. For one thing, someone besides myself should hear what is said. Someone from this house, I mean. And I think if Noelle saw you——”
“She didn’t like me much, you know.”
“That’s not the point. If she saw you I think it would help her to get back her sense of responsibility. I thought of taking Audrey; but---well, Audrey’s not quite in sympathy——”
Graham suppressed a grin.
“That’s the solemn truth. . . . All right, Dad, if there’s anything you think I can do. . . .”
Robin said “Thanks,” and the little word gave Graham the queerest thrill. There was companionship in it, we’re equals, he thought, we’re doing this on the square two men together. Blast all women!
He sought out Audrey in her work-room and told her these developments. Audrey said:
“Better you than me.”
“That’s what he seemed to think. . . . I say, what do you suppose will happen?”
“At Mickleham Road? Nothing.”
“Not even a bit of a row?”
“No. There’ll be a lot of blethers and you’ll come away with your tails between your legs. She won’t come back; get that into your head; won’t.”
“I don’t want her to. But the Old Man——”
“You’ll have to stand by him to-night. He’s going to get a knock. I think he’ll have to see it at last. That’s really why you’re going. Hold his hand nicely.”
Graham saw with pleasure that she was slightly jealous; he swelled with importance.
“I’ll see him through all right. It’s---it’s like a second going to a duel, isn’t it?” He studied his sister, who made no response. “You’re looking pretty peaky to-day.”
“I’m not feeling too good.”
“What’s up now?” But sometimes Graham had an intuition. “Lionel?”
“Well, yes.”
“Let you down, eh?”
Audrey thought: He’ll have to be told some time and then, perhaps, I’ll be released from this hateful, hateful business, this horrible mistake. The escape I’ve had! She said:
“I’m giving him up. He---he disappointed me.”
“What did I tell you?. I said he would, sooner or later.”
The male! thought Audrey, the blind cocksure male, so proud of seeing things long after we’ve forgotten them. He needn’t have said that; I didn’t say it to him about his miserable Iona. Yet I suppose he had to. But Graham was going on. “You’re well out of him anyway,” he said; and Audrey thought: “Just what I’ve said to others, and of course that was how it appeared to them all along. Audrey’s mistake; she’ll grow out of it. Lionel was my Noelle, my Iona.” Wrestling with that nauseating bitterness of mortification that constricted the throat like an emetic, struggling with urgent tears, she said: “Trot off now, Graham, like a darling.” He said, persistent: “Have you told him yet?” and she replied: “No, but I’m going to. To-night, I think. Now for God’s sake beat it.” Somewhat huffily he went. Audrey laid her head on her desk; her hands, hanging at her sides, clasped and unclasped. I hate myself, I hate myself. How could I!
The Mickleham Road expedition left Frame Square in the car a little before six that evening. Collins received his directions with some pursing of his superior lips; he didn’t approve of all this coming and going; if it came to a divorce, he saw himself being roped in to give evidence in court maybe, and that didn’t do you no good when it came to looking for another place. He drove with laborious dignity; to Graham, fidgeting in a corner of the saloon, it seemed as if the journey would never end. He made some efforts at conversation, but his father received these so gloomily and with so little response that presently he gave it up. He felt increasingly uncomfortable; this was going to be a hell of an evening; no getting out of it now, of course, even if one wanted to, but it was rather a disconcerting first-fruit of the Great Renunciation. It made the G.R. a glorious and successful reality, but---oh, Lord, I wish we were through with it! Why on earth does the Old Man want to bother about Noelle; I suppose I can’t ask him, but---why?
Suddenly Graham saw Noelle as he had seen and disliked her so often; a great big statue of a woman uttering heavy-weight banalities about religion and loving each other; butting into any conversation with the most unintelligent ineptitudes. That “Thank God I’m pure” expression she had; the way she gaped when you told her a joke; the way she turned up her nose, bump or no bump, and was shocked and soured; the way she disgorged upon you everything she had read in the daily paper; her thick ankles splaying out the big feet that kicked the clockwork railway she would gatecrash. “We hate her chest And all the rest,” and oh, Lord! her eternal poking and meddling and wanting us to be all lovey-dovey together. Who in God’s name could want that back? Yet the Old Man does, thought Graham, and if you want a thing enough in this world you get it. I’ve a fearful conviction that this expedition is going to be successful. God forbid! God forbid! Let us pray. . . .
The car stopped, sliding along a kerb; well---here we were. Collins got out and opened the door.
“Don’t seem to be anyone at home, sir.”
Robin and Graham advanced on to the wet pavement of Mickleham Road. A cold wind swept it with spitting rain, a sodden newspaper in the gutter flapped dismally, far up the street a threadbare vocalist quavered in the wet. To the right and left of No. 65 warmly-lit windows threw squares of red on to the shining concrete; from one of them a pontifical wireless voice was enunciating the tail end of the six o’clock news---so that interminable drive could not really have taken so very long after all. But No. 65 presented to the street a façade blank and silent as the tomb. There is nobody here, it said, there never was anybody, there never will be; go away. All hope abandon——
Graham said, feeling chilled to the bone:
“Better ring, anyway.”
The little white electric button by the door-post invited them to “Press”; they pressed it again and again. Collins, standing by his bonnet, squinted at them with malicious contempt; bolted, eh; he knew. Robin said at last: “I don’t think it’s ringing.” Graham said: “No; I don’t think it is”---and thought: “Because the electricity’s been cut off, that’s why.” Robin stupidly pressed the bell again; not a sound. He said pathetically: “But I wrote; but I wrote.” Graham, stepping back from the doorway, saw that a huddle of dead leaves and bits of paper had collected in the angle of the jamb; this was not a house from which its occupants had just gone and whither they might return at any moment. He peered at the windows of that scarlet cosy little room where Mr. and Mrs. Milroy had confronted the ambassador Kenneth; it was difficult to say in the dark, but they seemed to be shuttered. Robin, reduced to a single idea, was pressing the bell once more, to see if even now it would relent and ring; Collins was tap-dancing on the pavement. Thinking: “We can’t stay here all night,” Graham said:
“I believe they’ve quit.”
Robin turned to him; in the warm light from No. 63’s window his face was sunken in despair; he looked as if he were going to cry.
“Oh, no, I don’t think they would do that.”
Graham said: “We can find out, anyway; let’s ask next door.” But Robin shied away from that, terrified. “Don’t bring them into it. Couldn’t we find out somewhere else?”
Collins thought it was time to intervene; as if anyone couldn’t have seen five minutes ago that the house was shut up and left and had been for days. Bolted, that’s what they had. “The newsagent could tell us, sir. Or the milk.”
“Well, try,” said Robin. Graham put a hand under his elbow to help him into the car; it felt like helping a very old man.
The milk was closed, but the newsagent was open and informative; Graham, conducting the enquiry, learned that 65, Mick. Road had gone away; went Saturday back some time; not much weather for ’olidays, was it? Graham said it wasn’t and trudged back to the car and reported to Robin. Robin, sitting inert in his corner said: “I see. Tell Collins to drive home.” Graham thought: “He’s copped it at last.” To Collins he said; “Hop along!”
If Collins hopped along, the results were not apparent; slow as the drive north had been, the drive south was slower still. Houses, shops, blocks of flats, world without end, amen. You thought you were at the St. John’s Wood roundabout and lo! you were only at Swiss Cottage. Graham said soon after the start: “Hadn’t you better tell the police or something?” and Robin: “No, I’ll see my solicitors to-morrow”; and that was his only speech throughout the journey. It was enough, of course; all the lamentations of disaster, all the tirades of despair, could have said no more. “I’ll see my solicitors tomorrow”; surrender, defeat, all hope abandon. But thank the Lord, thought Graham, he’s realised it at last, he’s realised that she isn’t ever coming back---and am I sorry?---that there won’t be any more Noelle. He’s taken the knock, as Audrey said, at last.
And now it’s up to me; and what can I say? I wish Audrey were here; you want a woman for this sort of job; no, you don’t---blast all women! Oh, God, suggest something to my mind that will bring him some comfort, inspire me to say something that will help. Don’t let him just go on sitting there smashed and broken and finished. Let me help. . . . I must say something, anyway. . . . Perhaps if I told him about Iona; I never meant to---I never meant to tell anyone. . . . Still, let’s try it.
“It doesn’t do to worry too much about women, you know.”
Silence.
“They’re not worth worrying about. That’s what I think, anyway. They’re not.”
Silence and a cold stone profile immobile against a passing blaze of light.
“I---I had a sort of a show like this the other day, myself. I didn’t tell you. I---I got sort of mixed up with a dame; you know that Iona Playfair I told you about. About the films, you know. Well, I thought we were---I thought we were sort of in love with each other “
In another passing illumination the profile turned away---wearily, disgustedly; it emitted a little sigh of repulsion, of rejection. It didn’t want to speak; it didn’t want to hear. It wasn’t interested. Graham’s voice, half eager, half stumbling, petered out into silence; it hadn’t been easy to start that confidential story, it was quite impossible to go on with it. Shrugging, Graham sank back into his corner and into disappointment. I suppose he’s beyond reach; I suppose he’s all in. Well---I tried.
So thought Graham, rebuffed and silenced, driving home to No. 5, Frame Square. As Noelle had thought a dozen, a score, a century of times in Frame Square and around it. “I suppose he’s beyond reach. I suppose he’s all in. Well---I tried.”
That forenoon Audrey had rung up Lionel at the Red Rose Libraries. She had tried the Primrose number thrice and at different hours, but he was always conveniently “out.” So he knew about the Misses Eumenides, thought Audrey, and he would be “out” at the Primrose number now henceforward and for evermore. But at the Red Rose Libraries he answered the telephone unsuspectingly; this time she got him. His voice---startled trapped---answered her.
“Oh, it’s you!”
“Yes, it’s me. And---don’t put down that receiver Lionel---you’d better listen.”
“Well?”
“I want you to meet me to-night---Cat in Boots.”
“I’m not coming.”
“Yes, you are.”
“I promised my sister I wouldn’t see you again. You know why.”
“I know why. And you won’t see me again---after to-night. Now that you know that, are you coming?”
“No.”
“Very well, then, I’ll come round and make a scene at the Red Rose Libraries.”
He was silly enough to take that seriously; he cringed instantly. “Oh, don’t do that, Audrey; please don’t do that. Please.”
“I won’t if you’ll promise to be at the Cat in Boots at half-past six to-night.”
Sulkily he promised.
Even so, she quite expected him to fail---or worse still, to appear fortified by his sister and his Ella. But when he did arrive---a few minutes late---he was alone. Without speech she marshalled him to the usual corner sofa; of necessity she ordered two half-pints---which neither of them touched.
There was a silence---Lionel warily waiting and Audrey hardly knowing how to begin. Studying him carefully, she saw him in a new light; was it her imagination or had virtue departed from him during the week-end? His face seemed sullen, it had shrunk, there was a meanness about it, if it was a flower now it was some flabby weedy sort of flower that one jerked up with a prong and burnt on the rubbish heap. How could I ever have liked him? And why did I make him come here to-night? I could have written. Yet I wanted to see him; perhaps I wanted to see if he was really as nasty as he seemed. And I believe he is; I’m glad of that; if he’d seemed nice---the good bits of himself, my Lionel---I would have felt miserable and that would have been all wrong. What an escape I’ve had!
“Now I’ve got you here, Lionel, I don’t really know what I want to say.”
Silence.
“Lionel, how could you?”
“How could I what?”
“Treat that nice girl”---he must think her a nice girl---“so badly.”
He flushed. “You needn’t worry about her. She can look after herself.”
“A good thing for her she can. Are you still engaged?”
“As much as we ever were. It was her doing, most of it.”
“Don’t make yourself out a worse cad than need be. If you’re still engaged she must be pretty forgiving. You ought to be thankful.”
“Who says I’m not?”
“Nobody. . . . Lionel, aren’t you any of the things I thought you were---the better things, I mean? Why didn’t you tell me about---Ella?”
“Her name’s Miss Lavender.”
“Very well; Miss Lavender, if you prefer it. Why didn’t you?”
“How could I?” His sulkiness intensified, a hard dislike crept into his eyes. “How could I tell you anything about her? You’d have told me to give her up.”
“I would!” (But---wouldn’t I?)
“Yes. All that tripe you used to talk about the British Libraries Trust and the Minister of Literature and all that; you can’t see Ella Lavender fitting in there, can you? You’d have talked and talked; you’d have lectured me to death.”
She looked at him more closely; the dislike in his eyes was very deep; perhaps it wasn’t entirely new. And it had all been “tripe,” had it?
“Did I lecture you, Lionel?”
“Lecture? You never did anything else. You’d have talked the tail off a brass elephant.” The dislike suddenly flamed and exploded. “You bullied and bullied and bullied me. Hectoring me about this and hectoring me about that. And look at that awful day you dragged me down to the seaside and got me on to that cliff. Might have killed me, that’s what it might.”
Audrey said: “I see. . . . Well, leaving all that out of it, leaving out that you funked telling me about Miss Lavender——”
“You always say I funk everything.”
“You always do funk everything. You always will---now. Leaving that out, why were you such a beastly little cad as to tell the girl that I knew all about her and told you to forget it?”
“I never told her that.”
“Oh, yes, you did. I’d believe her sooner than you. I think it was the most utterly caddish thing I ever heard of. And that’s what I brought you here to tell you.” (At least I suppose it was.)
He said nothing, staring at the untouched tumblers of beer.
“And one other thing. I shan’t ever see you again. I don’t want ever to hear your name again.”
He looked up, defiant. “I should worry.”
“That’s for you to say; it’s your loss. I just want to make it clear. (But—— “You’ve made everything so different.” “Oh, Audrey, say you love me a little.” “Audrey, I believe you could make me a great man.” “They haven’t all got Audreys. . . .”) “Lionel, didn’t you mean any of the things you said?”
“I never said them. It was you said them.” He flamed again. “You used to sit there and nag at me and---and bully me. I never knew what you were going to say next. I’d got to do this and I’d got to do that, and you and I were going to do such wonders---I don’t think. I got sick of it, see? If that’s only stopped to-night, it’s stopped a lot too late.”
Audrey drew on her gloves. I don’t want a slanging- match; that’s not what I came for. What did I come for? To soothe my vanity by punching his head? If so, I’ve done it; I’ll go.
“So it was all me.”
“Of course it was all you. I just had to do what you said. I never wanted half the things we did. That loony day at the seaside——”
“So you funked even me?”
“I didn’t funk you. But I could never get a word in edgeways. You were always shouting me down and bossing me about. All that tripe about Members of Parliament and being the best bits of ourselves and saving your old family. If you ask me, that stepmother of yours was worth the lot of you---and then some. . . . I got sick of it.”
She felt her temper going; all right---let it go.
“Well, now I’m sick of you. You’re a nasty little coward and you’re a caddish coward at that. I’m sorry I tried to make anything of you and I’m glad it’s all over. And when next you see your sister and your Ella you can thank them both from me for doing me a damned good turn. . . . Oh, and you can tell Ella I’m sorry for her. . . . Good-bye, Lionel!”
Her face flaming, she marched out of the Cat in Boots; he made no attempt to follow. . . . A lucky escape, that’s what I’ve had. And I’ve told him what I thought of him; that’s the end; finis. And am I glad!
But it had been rather a slanging-match after all.
No. 65 Mickleham Road was dark and deserted, and the Cat in Boots was drab and dull; but the Alcazar at Brighton was lit with colour and gay with carefree humanity. First one band played and then the other; and on the waves of their melody Noelle and Chris swam together as the moon, divine and negligent, swims through the rabble of the stars. It was a waltz---not one of the old favourites but partaking somewhat of their sweeping cadences; it was called “When You Say the Words ‘I Love You’ It’s a Sin to Tell a Lie.” Noelle was ready to Say the Words endlessly and no Lie about it; she wanted to swim on and away with Chris, away into the melody, away into the coloured lights, till reality ended and they became not two persons but one, till they became the lights, till they became the melody itself. But conscientious as ever, she said:
“Oh, Chris, it’s wicked of me to be here.”
“It’s not wicked to be happy, Nellie. You’re happy?”
“Oh---yes!”
“Then you can’t be wicked. You can’t be wicked and happy.”
“But---him, Chris. I think of him sitting away back there in that house all alone; he always got so depressed---I told you——”
“He didn’t value you when he had you. Let him do without you now.”
“He’ll have to.” But a languor descended upon her, a melancholy born of the wailing saxophones and the reaction after effort, and the peace after storm with other storms ahead. Nastiness ahead. Chris saw the cloud darken in her face and thought: “Poor Nellie; and there’s a lot to go through yet.” He waltzed her round; they swam and glided like a god and goddess---like a hermaphrodite divinity that had fused sex and forgotten it.
“It’s such a long time to wait, Chris.”
“Not so long, dearie.”
“Too long. How long does a divorce take?”
“Divorce”---horrid word, like “adultery” and “homosexual”; a word full of nastiness; what would Mums have said to her Ducks being divorced? Being divorced, mark you, not divorcing. But Mums, or the ghost of Mums, had said: “You’re doing right, Noelle”; if Mums saw her now---and of course Mums did see her now from somewhere---she would say the same thing again, wouldn’t she? But---” How long does a divorce take?”
“Not much, Nellie; few months.”
Months! It was long as life, long as the cry of the saxophones, long as death. “Oh, Chris!”
“It won’t be anything, dearie. It’ll pass before you know.”
“But I won’t see you.”
“That’s your own fault.” But they had been through this time and again, and he said it without hope.
“I know. But I---I couldn’t, Chris. Not till it’s all over. Not till I’m free.”
“They’ll say we did it anyway, Nellie.”
“Let them. We’ll know we didn’t. I’m sorry Chris——”
He said gently: “It’s whatever you like. . . . Anyway, I won’t be far away---up there in London.”
She said: “Oh, yes,” and “It’ll pass all right.” But it was going to be dreadful. It was so kind of Madge to take rooms down here and go up to Town every morning by train and be here every week-end; so kind of Madge, and Madge was so cheery and bright. But she was also watchful; she had the most extraordinary power of domination---she suggested you should do things and you found yourself doing them. If she disapproved, you knew it immediately---like the way you knew if there was a cat in the room. And that laugh---so wise, so hearty, yet at times so belittling---like the jolly artificial laugh of the nurse with a fractious patient. . . . I will be here, a fractious patient, for a long long time, and Madge will come and give the nurse-laugh and make me do things whether I want to or not. I shall be Madge’s toy, Madge’s dolly, Madge’s patient. Months. . . .
The band, taking fresh breath, began to play “Always.” Chris, who had “requested” it half an hour before, thought: “Thank the Lord, this’ll cheer her up.” It did---instantly. She said, beaming with her huge eyes and smiling with her moulded lips:
“Oh, Chris---our tune!”
“Our tune, Nellie.”
“Remember the day you first played it to me?”
He remembered it; she remembered it; remembering it, they swam away together. “When the things you’ve planned, Need a helping hand, I will understand---Always. . . .” So! There were a lot of things ahead that would need a helping hand---dark things, cruel things; Madge and her laugh (and one must remember always to love Madge); “divorce,” the ugly word as if a hooligan spat at you; months; the long slow grinding passage of time---and he’s younger than me, two years younger than me, and I’m getting older every day, every hour, every minute. But somewhere, far on the horizon’s rim, there is a blaze of gold that will widen, that will widen; hand in hand (oh, Noelle, Noelle, what would Audrey have thought of you!) we’ll march towards it, we’ll enter it and then---happy ever after. “Not for just a day, Not for just a year, But---Always.” Always. This time. . . . She nestled into Chris’s shoulder.
“Oh, Chris, darling, I feel so happy with you. I feel so right with you. So happy . . . happy . . . happy. . . .”
For a few more grey and miserable days Frame Square lay dull and listless amid the wreckage of its loves; for a few more days Graham and Audrey contemplated their private dishonours. And then, suddenly, like a sword ripping through canvas, like the shriek of a trumpet, like a burst of lightning in the night, came the black news from Spain. Death, looking in with his cold face, made trumpery stuff of Ionas and Roxburghs, of Lionels and Lavenders.
The news came in a letter from a semi-literate who signed himself “Jas. Campbell” and of whom nobody, of course, had ever heard. (There was a confirmation later in official stereotype from the Party Headquarters, but Jas. Campbell outran it by nearly a fortnight.) His letter was written on the back of what appeared to be some sort of trench bulletin, duplicated or cyclostyled in alternate languages; the bulletin extolled the prowess of an unspecified advance guard, claiming a holocaust of Franco casualties; a bridge had been blown up, the enemy could receive neither ammunition nor supplies. Against this, in the margin, a hand---not, apparently, Campbell’s---had scrawled in blue pencil: “I don’t think.” On the back of the bulletin---thumbed and smudged and dirty---was Campbell’s letter. It began: “I have regretfully to tell you,” and stated baldly the facts about the farmhouse. It went on, without punctuation: “Please excuse this liberty but there is a lot of good boys getting killed out here and their folks at home is not being told anything about it.” It said that “the boys” had “liked Rennie fine,” and concluded on a further note of propaganda which read as if designed for a wider circle of readers. “Quite likely you will not be told about this event as the wounded should not have been left in that farmhouse at all as the command knew quite well but what I am writing is the truth so I am sorry to say Rennie will not be getting back home to you and there is a lot of good boys out here still what will not be getting home either and their folks is not being told what things is like out here because they are afraid to tell them. Hoping you get this O.K. Yours truly Jas. Campbell.”
The letter came to Kenneth who kept it to himself for the best part of a day, hardly even speculating as to how Jas. Campbell had discovered his name and address in the first place and dodged the censors in the second. Perhaps Kenneth looked in the mirror and saw the face of Little Pipsqueak Simson looking back at him; perhaps not. We shall not know. Kenneth had inherited this much from Grannie---that he did not give himself away; nobody knew Grannie, nobody knew Kenneth. But late in the evening he rang up Robin.
“I’ve had bad news, Robbie. René’s lost.”
There was a pause, then Robin’s voice, sad and tired.
“I’m terribly sorry, Kenneth. That’s very bad.”
“It can’t be helped. . . . The boy just got the idea. . . . I thought I’d tell you——”
Abruptly he put down the receiver. Robin heard it and thought: “Poor René. Surely that was needless.” Kenneth was left to Jacqueline and Little Pipsqueak Simson; neither of them had very much to say, one way or another.
But Audrey was shattered.
You knew in your heart that a thing was going to happen, almost you knew that it had happened; yet when it came to you in black and white, the irrefutable stated fact, it struck you down. For that day all Frame Square was no more than the background for René; the little Dollfuss; his curls and his sweet smile and his silly “r’s” and the sham he made of Graham and Audrey. They pretended to have guts; René had guts. He ran about Frame Square that day in his dark blue suit---eager, leading the advance, dependable. I never knew, thought Audrey, crying in her work-room, I never knew till this minute how much I wanted him to come back to me. I needed him, I needed him desperately. While he was here I was making a fool of myself---oh, what a fool!---with Lionel; I didn’t know, I didn’t understand; and now I’ve lost him, just when I needed him most. He won’t come back; I won’t see him again. He was my State of Life, as Grannie talks about. And I’ve missed it, I’ve missed it, I won’t get it back.
. . . And it’s no good saying his life wasn’t wasted.
They used to console themselves with that in the old war; it was on a par with all that rubbish they talked about wars to end war and Lands Fit for Heroes. We’ve grown out of that. And so---let’s face it---it was waste, pure senseless idiotic waste. . . . Yet I don’t see how any of us could have stopped him; I don’t see that any of us had the right. He had to try out his own ideas, hadn’t he? It was his life, wasn’t it?
Leninism was lying open on her table---Leninism that reminded her of Lionel, who had no guts at all, who had been a liar and a cheat and a sham, and who was now far far deader than René. She snatched it up and threw it into the waste-paper basket; book and basket went rolling into a corner of the room. Above her on the wall hung the framed “Rebeldes! Rebeldes!” manifesto. “Bakhunina” . . . “Aud’ey, you’re an Ana’chist. . . .” She tore the thing down so violently that its nail came flying out, she flung it on the floor and stamped on it. Its flimsy glass crunched and crackled under her heel. “Revolt against everything, because there is nothing good; revolt against everybody, because there is no one just.” Good! Just! What words! Her shoe crashed through the cardboard, the printed words became distorted into a grin or a snarl; she stamped and stamped till the thing was destroyed. . . . I lost him, I let him go, I missed it. Capering, fooling, mucking about; if Graham was being a cad with his beastly Iona I was being a fool---a fool, a fool. And does God have mercy upon fools? What a hope! Why should he?
She kicked the ruin of “Rebeldes, Rebeldes” into a corner. And then, falling into her chair, Audrey wept and wept for René those tears that clear the heart and wash all the debris away and leave it fresh and open---if God be kind enough---for a newcomer.
In the evening, after dinner, she sought out Robin. Robin had seen his solicitors and the grim stupidities of the law of divorce as unfolded to him by these experts had left him sunk in further misery. They talked about evidences of actual adultery”---and there weren’t any, and Noelle wouldn’t make them. Her muddled mind would allow her to live for long enough in Milroy’s house, but not, till the law had bestowed its blessing, would it allow her into Milroy’s bed. On the other hand, as it was a practical certainty that there would be no defence, Noelle’s moralities were no great matter. Anyway, he had started the thing, pulled the first lever, set the unsavoury mass in motion; it would go on slowly of its own momentum, revolving through a thousand flat formalities in order that Noelle might one day call herself Mrs. Milroy. It didn’t do to think about it, and he thought about nothing else.
Audrey came in quietly, soft-footed in a grey evening frock. She said:
“Worrying, Daddy?”
He stared at her. These bright, hard, distant creatures, Philippa had made out of herself and given him---hard, bright, competent creatures; what could they understand? I do not know them; they do not know me. He said:
“You can hardly expect me to be cheerful.”
Audrey thought, with a wry smile: “No; nobody could expect that.” Aloud she said:
“No; but---Daddy, you’ll want someone to keep house for you. Would I do?”
He stared at her again; he had been drearily contemplating housekeepers---fat women, touchy women, managing women, liars, thieves. “I thought you wanted to go to Russia.”
She shook her head. “I don’t want to go to Russia now.”
“Well, if it’s not Russia it’ll be somewhere else.”
“No, Daddy, no. I shan’t want to go anywhere.”
“Why not?”
“I can’t quite explain. I shan’t, anyway. So if I can be any use to you——”
He said something not very gracious, unintentionally rebuffing her as he had rebuffed Graham and his confidences, Noelle and her encouragements. “We’ll see, we’ll see”---or something equally uninspired. In her grey frock Audrey crept silently away. We’ll see.
But when she had gone, Robin sat, forgetting actual evidences of adultery and thinking for once of Kenneth and his philosophy of plus and minus. I have lost a wife; but I seem to have gained thereby a son and a daughter. They are not so hard as I thought, they have rallied to me, they seek to help; what more, poor little creatures, can they do? Wife, minus; son and daughter, plus. Crazily like Kenneth’s mathematician---balancing, balancing.
And then the ghost of a smile invaded his mind. I must be far gone if I begin to believe in Kenneth---far gone indeed!
Upstairs in her room again, Audrey---less dashed than Graham because she had known better than to expect so much---was resolutely turning her mind away from René, turning it back upon itself, upon Graham and Audrey, upon Lionel and Iona. It will be years, she thought, before we live down all this in our hearts; for years and years to come I’ll know that every time Graham looks at me in a certain way he’s thinking: “Lionel! Good God!” and he’ll know, when he suddenly catches me watching him round a newspaper or something, that I’m thinking, “Iona!” As for Grannie and her State of Life toshery, she won’t need to say anything either; we’ll hear it every time she clicks her teeth. And won’t she click them; my God, won’t she!
No doubt she’s quite right. But I’m sorry she’s right. I still think there was something I could have done; I still think there’s something we could all do. The world’s in a mess; no good just sitting still and saying: “This is my bit of mess; j’y suis, j’y reste.” One ought to do something. “Rebeldes, Rebeldes?” No, not that. But something. Maybe one day yet. . . .
But suddenly, looking back, she saw the precipice edge on which they had all stood. Suppose Roxburgh had been Playfair that night? Suppose I had married Lionel and then he had let me down. (“He’ll let you down one day---sooner or later.”) Suppose these things had happened? . . . Oh, terrible precipice edge, fog-shrouded and lipped with treacherous turf. Back, stand back from it; quick!
But René could not stand back from it; he had gone over the precipice, once for all.
The second Sunday in March was fine. Grannie said to Ellen: “Do you think it will rain?” and Ellen replied that she thought there would be showers, and Grannie said: “Then I’ll wear my velvet bonnet.” She always had a velvet bonnet, buying one after another; when you had found a thing that became you and was comfortable, why change?
The 27 bus trundled along Church Street, Praed Street, Kentish Town Road; securely established in its State of Life, it did not deviate, it did not bolt off towards the Marble Arch or the Angel. It carried Grannie to Highgate, and again the stone army came marching down its hill, greeting her with triumphant calm.
Grannie thought, sitting on Grandfather’s curb: “The last time I was here, everything seemed to be going wrong; now it has all righted itself. It is always so if people will but wait; the pendulum swings back, the counter-current sets in; what an image of all life is to be seen in the tides! But the young cannot wait. . . . Rennie could not wait . . . poor Rennie!”
And Noelle could not wait either. . . . At the thought of Noelle, Grannie’s plate still rasped a little, but less vindictively than of yore; for the Waxwork had done for herself all right---as undesirables always did if, once again, you gave them time. Robin was well out of her if he could only think so. It will be my business, thought Grannie, rasping more grimly, to help him to think so. At the moment, sunk in the squalors of the law, he could see nothing but staring eyes and pointing fingers: “That’s the man whose wife ran away with a dance-band leader or others something.” That absurd illusion would pass and with it. I will help them to pass, thought Grannie; I.
And I will have to take Audrey in hand too---now that she is become takeable.
I have a lot to do yet, thought Grannie, a lot to do yet.
A flash of broken sunlight fell on the vacant space upon Grandfather’s stone. “And of his Wife Henrietta Graham.” “Yes,” thought Grannie contentedly, “but not yet, not nearly yet. I’ve a lot to do. I’ll live to be ninety. Why wouldn’t I?”