CHAPTER XXI

 

August 31^st 1933

 

Helen rang the bell, then listened.  In the silence behind the closed door, nothing stirred.  She had come straight from the station after a night in the train; it was not yet ten; her mother would still be asleep.  She rang again; then, after a pause, once more.  Heavily asleep – unless, of course, she had stayed out all night.  Where?  And with whom?  Remembering that horrible Russian she had met at her mother's flat the last time she was in Paris, Helen frowned.  She rang a fourth time, a fifth.  From within the apartment there was suddenly an answering sound of movement.  Helen sighed, partly with relief that her mother had only been asleep, partly in apprehension of what the coming minutes or hours held in store.  The door opened at last, opened on a twilight that smelt of cats and ether and stale food; and there, in dirty pink pyjamas, her dyed orange hair dishevelled, and still blinking, still strangely swollen with sleep, stood her mother.  For a second the face was a mask, bloated and middle-aged, of stupefied incomprehension; then, in a flash, it came back to life, almost back to youth, with a sudden smile of genuine delight.

      'But what fun!' cried Mrs Amberley.  'Darling, I'm so glad.'

      If she hadn't known – by how bitter an experience! - that this mood of gaiety and affectionateness would inevitably be followed by, at the best, a spiteful despondency, at the worst, by a fit of insanely violent anger, Helen would have been touched by the warmth of her mother's greeting.  As it was, she merely suffered herself to be kissed and, her face still set and stony, stepped across the threshold into the horribly familiar nightmare of her mother's life.

      This time, she found, the nightmare had a comic element.

      'It's all because of that beastly old femme de ménage,' Mrs Amberley explained as they stood there in the smelly little lobby.  'She was stealing my stockings.  So I had to lock the bedroom door when I went out.  And then somehow I lost the key.  You know what I am,' she added complacently, boasting by force of habit of that absent-mindedness of which she had always been so proud.  'Hopeless, I'm afraid.'  She shook her head and smiled that crooked little smile of hers, conspiratorially.  'When I got home, I had to smash that panel.'  She pointed to the oblong aperture in the lower half of the door.  'You should have seen me, banging away with the flatiron!'  Her voice was richly vibrant with laughter.  'Luckily it was like matchwood.  Cheap and nasty to a degree.  Like everything in this beastly place.

      'And you crawled through?' Helen asked.

      'Like this,' And going down on her hands and knees, Mrs Amberley pushed her head through the hole, turned sideways so as to admit an arm and shoulder, then, with surprising agility, pulled and pushed with a hand beyond and feet on the hither side of the door, till only her legs remained in the lobby.  First one, then the other, the legs were withdrawn, and an instant later, as though from a dog-kennel, Mrs Amberley's face emerged, a little flushed, through the aperture.

      'You see,' she said.  'It's as easy as winking.  And the beauty of it is that old Madame Roget's much too fat.  No possible chance of her getting through.  I don't have to worry about my stockings any more.'

      'Do you mean to say she never goes into your bedroom?'

      Mrs Amberley shook her head.  'Not since I lost the key; and that was three weeks ago, at least.'  Her tone was one of triumph.

      'But who makes the bed and does the cleaning?'

      'Well …' There was a moment's hesitation.  'Why, I do, of course,' the other replied a little irritably.

      'You?'

      'Why not?'  From her kennel door, Mrs Amberley looked up almost defiantly into her daughter's face.  There was a long silence; then, simultaneously, both of them burst out laughing.

      Still smiling, 'Lets have a look,' said Helen, and went down on all fours.  They stony face had softened into life; she felt an inward warmth.  Her mother had been so absurd, peering up like that out of her kennel, so childishly ridiculous, that suddenly she was able to love her again.  To love her while she laughed at her, just because she could laugh at her.

      Mrs Amberley withdrew her head.  'Of course it is a bit untidy,' she admitted rather anxiously, as Helen wriggled through the hole in the door.  Still kneeling, she pushed some dirty linen and the remains of yesterday's lunch under the bed.

      On her feet again, inside the bedroom, Helen looked round.  It was filthier even than she had expected – much filthier.  She made an effort to go on smiling; but the muscles of her face refused to obey her.

 

      Three days later Helen was on her way back to London.  Opening the English newspaper she had bought at the Gare du Nord, she read, with an equal absence of interest, about the depression, the test match, the Nazis, the New Deal.  Sighing, she turned the page.  Printed very large, the words 'An Exquisite First Novel,' caught her eye.  And below, in small letters, 'The Invisible Lover.  By Hugh Ledwidge.  Reviewed by Catesby Rudge.'  Helen folded back the page to make it more manageable and read with an intense and fixed attention.

 

      'Just another book, I thought, like all the rest.  And I was on the point of throwing it aside, unread.  But luckily something – some mystic intuition, I suppose – made me change my mind.  I opened the book.  I turned over the pages, glancing at a sentence here and there.  And the sentences I found, were gems – jewels of wrought crystal.  I decided to read the book.  That was at nine in the evening.  And at midnight I was still reading, spellbound.  It was nearly two before I got to bed – my mind in a whirl of enthusiasm for this masterpiece I had just read.

      'How shall I describe the book to you?  I might call it a fantasy.  And as far as it goes, that description holds good.  The Invisible Lover is a fantasy.  But a fantasy that is poignant as well as airy; profound as well as intriguing and light; fraught with tears as well as with smiles at once subtly humorous and of a high, Galahad-like spirituality.  It is full of broken-hearted fun, and its laughter is dewy with tears.  And throughout runs a vein of naïve and child-like purity, infinitely refreshing in a world full of Freudians and sex-novelists and all their wearisome ilk.  This fantasy of the invisible but ever present, ever watchful, ever adoring lover and his child-beloved has an almost celestial innocence.  If I wanted to describe the book in a single phrase, I should say that it was the story of Dante and Beatrice told by Hans Andersen …'

 

      Falling into her memories of Hugh's few ignominious attempts to make love to her, the words produced in Helen's mind a kind of violent chemical reaction.  She burst out laughing; and since the ridiculous phrase went echoing on, since the grotesque memories kept renewing themselves with ever heightened intensity and in ever fuller, more painfully squalid detail, the laughter continued, irrepressibly.  The story of Dante and Beatrice told by Hans Andersen!  Tears of hysterical merriment ran down her cheeks; she was breathless, and the muscles of her throat were contracted in a kind of agonizing cramp.  But still she went on laughing – was utterly unable to stop; it was as though she were possessed by a demon.  Luckily, she was alone in the compartment.  People would have taken her for a madwoman.

      In the cab, on the way to Hugh's flat – her flat too, in spite of Dante and Beatrice and Hans Andersen – she wondered whether he'd have gone to bed already, and just how upset he'd be to see her.  She hadn't warned him of her arrival; he would be unprepared to receive her, unbraced against the shock of her grossly physical presence.  Poor old Hugh! she thought with a derisive pity.  Enjoying his private and invisible fun, like Dante with his phantom, and then having to suffer the trampling intrusion of Signora Alighieri!  But tonight, she realized, as she stood at last before the door of the flat, looking in her bag for the latchkey, that invisible solitude of his had already been invaded.  Somebody was playing the piano; there was a sound of laughter and voices.  Hugh must be having a party.  And all at once Helen saw herself making a dramatic entrance, like Banquo's ghost, and was delighted by the vision.  The reading of that article had momentarily transposed her entire being into the key of laughter.  Everything was a vast, extravagant, savage joke – or if it wasn't already, should be made so.  It was with a tingling sense of excited anticipation that she opened the door and silently slipped into the hall.  An assortment of strange hats hung on the pegs, lay on the chairs – a couple of rich hats, she noticed, very new and shapely; and the rest deformed, and ancient; hats, one could see, of the intellectual poor.  There were some letters on the marble-topped table; she bent down by mere force of habit to look at them, and found that one was addressed to her – from Anthony, she recognized; and that too was a joke.  Did he seriously imagine that she would read his letters?  Enormous ass!  She popped the envelope unopened into her bag, then tiptoed across the passage to her room.  How tidy it was!  How dead!  Like a family vault under dust-sheets.  She took off her coat and hat, washed, combed her hair, made up her face, then, as silently as she had come, crept back to the hall and stood at the door of the sitting-room, trying to guess by the sound of their voices who were the guests.  Beppo Bowles, for one; that giggle, those squeaks and fizzlings were unmistakable.  And Mark Staithes.  And then a voice she wasn't sure of, and another, very soft and confidential, that must be old Croyland's.  And who was that ridiculous foreigner who spoke so slowly and ponderously, all on one note?  She stood there at the door for a long minute, then very gently turned the handle, drew the door gradually open, and without a sound edged into the room.  Nobody had noticed her.  Mark Staithes was seated at the piano, and Beppo, a Beppo fatter than ever, she noticed, and balder and more nervously agitated, and – yes, beard and all! - old Croyland, standing one on either side of him, leaning on the instrument and looking down at him while he spoke.  Hugh was on the sofa near the fireplace, with the owner of the voice she hadn't recognized, but who turned out to be Caldwell, the publisher – the publisher, of course, of The Invisible Lover, she reflected, and had a difficulty in checking another uprush of mirth.  With them was a young man she had never seen before – a young man with very pale flaxen hair and a ruddy open face that wore at the moment an expression of almost child-like seriousness.  He, it was evident, had been the foreign accent – German, she supposed.

      But now the moment had come.

      'Good-evening,' she called, and stepped forward.

      They were all startled; but as for poor Hugh – he jumped as though someone had fired a cannon in his ear.  And after the first fright, with an expression of appalled dismay!  Irresistibly comic!

      'Well, Hugh,' she said.

      He looked up into her laughing face, unable to speak.  Ever since the first laudatory notices of his book had begun to come in, he had been feeling so strong, so blissfully secure.  And now here was Helen – come to humiliate him, come to bear shameful witness against him.

      'I didn't expect,' he managed to mumble incoherently.  'I mean, why did you …?'

      But Caldwell, who had a reputation for after-dinner speaking to keep up, interrupted him.  Raising the glass he was holding, 'To the Muse,' he called out.  'The Muse and also – I don't think it's an indiscretion if I say so – also the heroine of our masterpiece.'  Charmed by the felicity of his own phrasing, he beamed at Helen; then, turning to Hugh with a gesture of affectionate proprietorship, he patted him on the shoulder.  'You must drink too, old man.  It's not a compliment to you – not this time.'  And he uttered a rich chuckle.

      Hugh did as he was told and, averting his eyes, took a gulp of whisky-and-soda.

      'Thank you, thank you,' cried Helen.  Then laughter was seething within her, like water in a kettle.  She gave one hand to Caldwell and the other to Hugh.  'I can't tell you how thrilled I was,' she went on.  'Dante and Beatrice by Hans Andersen – it sounds too delicious.'

      Blushing, Hugh tried to protest.  'That frightful article …'

      Cutting him short, 'But why did you keep it up your sleeve?' she asked.

      Yes why, why? Hugh was thinking; and that he had been mad to publish the book without first showing it to Helen.  He had always wanted to show it to her – and  always, at the last moment, found the task too difficult, too embarrassing.  But the desire to publish had remained with him, had grown stronger, until at last, senselessly, he had taken the manuscript to Caldwell and, after its acceptance, arranged with him that it should appear while Helen was out of the country.  As though that would prevent her knowing anything about it!  Madness, madness!  And the proof that he had been mad was her presence here tonight, with that strange wild smile on her face, that brightness in her eyes.  An uncalculating recklessness was one of the child-beloved's most characteristic and engaging traits; she was a celestial enfant terrible.  But in the real Helen this recklessness seemed almost fiendish.  She was capable of doing anything, absolutely anything.

      'Why did you?' she insisted.

      He made a vague apologetic noise.

      'You ought to have told me you were Dante Andersen.  I'd have tried to live up to you.  Beatrice and the Little Match Girl rolled into one.  Good-evening, Beppo!  And Mark!'  They had come over from the piano to greet her.  'And, Mr Croyland, how are you?'

      Mr Croyland gave a perfect performance of an old gentleman greeting a lovely young woman – benevolently, yet with a touch of playfulness, an attenuated echo of gallantry.

      'Such an unexpected enchantment,' he breathed in the soft, deliberately ecstatic voice he ordinarily reserved for describing quattrocento paintings or for addressing the celebrated or the very rich.  Then, with a gesture that beautifully expressed an impulsive outburst of affection, Mr Croyland sandwiched her hand between both of his.  They were very pale, soft hands, almost gruesomely small and dainty.  By comparison, it seemed to Helen that her own brown hand was like a peasant's.  Mr Croyland's silvery and prophetic beard parted in a smile that ought to have been the gracious confirmation of his words and gestures, but which, with its incongruous width and the sudden ferocity of all its large and yellowing teeth, seemed instead to deny all reality to the old gentleman's exquisite refinement of manner.  That smile belonged to the Mr Croyland who had traded so profitably in the Old Masters; the little white hands and their affectionate gestures, the soft, ecstatic voice and its heartfelt words, were the property of that other, that ethereal Croyland who only cared about Art.

      Helen disengaged her hand.  'Did you ever see those china mugs, Mr Croyland?' she asked, 'you who know Italy so well?  The ones they sell at Montecatini for drinking the purgative waters out of?  White, with an inscription in golden letters: Io son Beatrice che ti faccio andare.'

      'But what an outrage!' Mr Croyland exclaimed, and lifted his small hands in horror.

      'But it's the sort of joke I really enjoy.  Particularly now that Beatrice is really me …' Becoming aware that the flaxen-haired young man was standing at attention about a yard to the west of her, evidently trying to attract her notice, Helen interrupted herself and turned towards him, holding out her hand.

      The young man took it, bowed stiffly from the waist and, saying 'Giesebrecht,' firmly squeezed it.

      Laughing (it was another joke), Helen answered, 'Ledwidge'; then, as an afterthought, 'geboren Amberley.'

      Nonplussed by this unexpected gambit, the young man bowed again in silence.

      Staithes intervened to explain that Ekki Giesebrecht was his discovery.  A refugee from Germany.  Not because of his nose, he added as (taking pity on poor old Hugh) he drew her confidentially out of the group assembled round the sofa; not because of his nose – because of his politics.  Aryan – but communist – ardently and all along the line.

      'He believes that as soon as all incomes are equalized, men will stop being cruel.  Also that all power will automatically find itself in the hands of the best people.  And he's absolutely convinced that nobody who obtains power will be capable of even wishing to abuse it.'  Staithes shook his head.  'One doesn't know whether to admire and envy, or to thank God for not having made one such an ass.  And to complicate matters, he's such a thoroughly good ass.  An ass with the mortal qualities of a saint.  Which is why he's such an admirable propagandist.  Saintliness is almost as good as sex-appeal.'  He pulled up a chair for Helen, and himself sat down again at the piano and began to play the first few bars of Beethoven's Für Elise; then broke off and, turning back to her, 'The trouble,' he resumed, 'is that nothing works.  Not faith, not intelligence, not saintliness, not even villainy – nothing.  Faith's just organized and directed stupidity.  It may remove a mountain or two by dint of mere obstinate butting; but it's blinkered, it can't see that if you move mountains, you don't destroy them, you merely shove them from one place to another.  You need intelligence to see that; but intelligence isn't much good because people can't feel enthusiastic about it; it's at the mercy of the first Hitler or Mussolini that comes along – of anyone who can rouse enthusiasm; and one can rouse enthusiasm for any cause however idiotic and criminal.'

      Helen was looking across the room.  'I suppose his hair's naturally that colour?' she said, more to herself than to her companion.  Then, turning back to Staithes, 'And what about saintliness?' she asked.

      'Well, look at history,' he answered.

      'I don't know any.'

      'Of course not.  But I take it that you've heard of someone called Jesus?  And occasionally, no doubt, you read the papers?  Well, put two and two together, the morning's news and the saint, and draw your own conclusions.'

      Helen nodded.  'I've drawn them.'

      'If saintliness were enough to save the world,' he went on, 'then obviously the world would have been saved long ago.  Dozens of times.  But saintliness can exist without intelligence.  And though it's attractive, it isn't more attractive than lots of other things – good food, for example, comfort, going to bed with people, bullying, feeling superior.'

      Laughing (for this also was laughable), 'It looks,' said Helen, 'as if there were nothing to do but throw up everything and become an invisible lover.'  She helped herself to a sandwich and a tumbler of white wine from the tray.

      The group at the other end of the room had disintegrated, and Beppo and Mr Croyland were drifting back towards the piano.  Staithes smiled at them and, picking up the thread of the argument that Helen's arrival had interrupted, 'Alternatively,' he said, 'one might become an aesthete.'

      'You use the word as though it were an insult,' Beppo protested with the emphatic peevishness that had grown upon him with age.  Life was treating him badly – making him balder, making him stouter, making young men more and more reluctant to treat him as their contemporary, making sexual successes increasingly difficult of achievement, making that young German of Staithes's behave almost rudely to him.  'Why should one be ashamed of living for beauty.'

      The thought of Beppo living for beauty – living for it with his bulging waistcoat and the tight seat of his check trousers and his bald crown and Florentine page's curls – almost made Helen choke over her wine.

      From the depths of his armchair, ' “Glory be to God for dappled things,” ' murmured Mr Croyland.  'I've been re-reading Father Hopkins lately.  So poignant!  Like a dagger.  “What lovely behaviour of silk-sack clouds!” '  He sighed, he pensively shook his head.  'They're among the things that wound one with their loveliness.  Wound and yet sustain, make life liveable.'

      There was a cathedral silence.

      Then, making an effort to keep the laughter out of her voice, 'Be an angel, Beppo,' said Helen, 'and give me some more of that hock.'

      Mr Croyland sat remote, behind half-closed eyelids, the inhabitant of a higher universe.

      When the clinking of the glasses had subsided, ' “Ripeness is all,” ' he quoted.  ' “That sober certainty of waking bliss.”  Waking,' he insisted.  'Piercing conscious.  And then, of course, there are pictures – the Watteaus at Dresden, and Bellini's Transfiguration, and those Raphael portraits at the Pitti.  Buttresses to shore up the soul.  And certain philosophies too.  Zarathustra, the Symposium.'  He waved his little hand.  'One would be lost without them – lost!'

      'And, with them, I take it, you're saved?' said Mark from his seat at the piano; and, without waiting for an answer, 'I wish I were,' he went on.  'But there seems to be so little substance in it all.  Even in the little that intrinsically substantial. For of course most thinking has never been anything but silly.  And as for art, as for literature – well, look at the museums and the libraries.  Look at them!  Ninety-nine per cent. of nonsense and mere rubbish.'

      'But the Greeks,' Mr Croyland protested, 'the Florentines, the Chinese …'  He sketched in the air an exquisitely graceful gesture, as though he were running his fingers over the flanks of a Sung jar, round the cup-shaped navel of a High Renaissance water-nymph.  Subtly, with what was meant to be the expression of a Luini madonna, he smiled; but always, through the opening fur, his large yellow teeth showed ferociously, rapaciously – even when he talked about the Schifanoia frescoes, even when he whispered, as though it were an Orphic secret, the name of Vermeer of Delft.

      But nonsense, Staithes insisted, almost invariably nonsense and rubbish.  And most of what wasn't nonsense or rubbish was only just ordinarily good.  'Like what you or I could do with a little practice,' he explained.  'And if one knows oneself – the miserable inept little self that can yet accomplish such feats – well, really, one can't be bothered to take the feats very seriously.'

      Mr Croyland, it was evident from his frown, didn't think of his own self in quite this spirit.

      'Not but what one can enjoy the stuff for all kinds of irrelevant reasons,' Staithes admitted.  'For its ingenuity, for example, if one's in any way a technician or an interpreter.  Steady progressions in the bass, for example, while the right hand is modulating apparently at random.  Invariably delightful!  But then, so's carpentry.  No; ultimately it isn't interesting, that ordinarily good stuff.  However great the accomplishment or the talent.  Ultimately it's without value; it differs from the bad only in degree.  Composing like Brahms, for example – what is it, after all, but a vastly more elaborate and intellectual way of composing like Meyerbeer?  Whereas the best Beethoven is as far beyond the best Brahms as it's beyond the worst Meyerbeer.  There's a difference in kind.  One's in another world.'

      'Another world,' echoed Mr Croyland in a religious whisper.  'But that's just what I've been trying to get you to admit.  With the highest art one enters another world.'

      Beppo fizzled with emphatic agreement.

      'A world,' Mr Croyland insisted, 'of gods and angels.'

      'Don't forget the invisible lovers,' said Helen, who was finding, as she drank her white wine, that everything was becoming more and more uproariously amusing.

      Mr Croyland ignored the interruption.  'A next world,' he went on.  'The great artists carry you up to heaven.'

      'But they never allow you to stay there,' Mark Staithes objected.  'They give you just a taste of the next world, then let you fall back, flop, into the mud.  Marvellous while it lasts.  But the time's so short.  And even while they've actually got me in heaven, I catch myself asking: Is that all?  Isn't there anything more, anything further?  The other world isn't other enough.  Even Macbeth, even the Mass in D, even the El Greco Assumption.'  He shook his head.  'They used to satisfy me.  They used to be an escape and a support.  But now … now I find myself wanting something more, something heavenlier, something less human.  Yes, less human,' he repeated.  Then the flayed face twisted itself up into an agonized smile.  'I feel rather like Nurse Cavell about it,' he added.  'Painting, music, literature, thought – they're not enough.'

      'What is enough, then?' asked Beppo.  'Politics?  Science?  Money-making?'  Staithes shook his head after every suggestion.

      'But what else is there?' asked Beppo.

      Still anatomically smiling, Mark looked at him for a moment in silence, then said, 'Nothing – absolutely nothing.'

      'Speak for yourself,' said Mr Croyland.  'They're enough for me.'  He dropped his eyelids once more and retired into spiritual fastnesses.

      Looking at him, Staithes was moved by a sudden angry desire to puncture the old gentleman's balloon-like complacency – to rip a hole in that great bag of cultural gas, by means of which Mr Croyland contrived to hoist his squalid traffickings sky-high into the rarefied air of pure aesthetics.  'And what about death?  You find them adequate against death?' he insisted in a tone that had suddenly become brutally inquisitorial.  He paused, and for a moment the old man was enveloped in a horribly significant silence – the silence of those who in the presence of a victim or an incurable tactfully ignore the impending doom.  'Adequate against life, for that matter,' Mark Staithes went on, relenting; 'against life in any of its more unpleasant or dangerous aspects.'

      'Such as dogs falling on one out of aeroplanes!' Helen burst out laughing.

      'But what are you talking about?' cried Beppo.

      'Father Hopkins won't keep dogs off,' she went on breathlessly.  'I agree with you, Mark.  A good umbrella, any day …'

      Mr Croyland rose to his feet.  'I must go to bed,' he said.  'And so should you, my dear.'  The little white hand upon her shoulder was benevolent, almost apostolic.  'You're tired after your journey.'

      'You mean, you think I'm drunk,' Helen answered, wiping her eyes.  'Well, perhaps you're right.  Gosh,' she added, 'how nice it is to laugh for a change!'

      When Mr Croyland was gone, and Beppo with him, Staithes turned towards her.  'You're in a queer state, Helen.'

      'I'm amused,' she explained.

      'What by?'

      'By everything.  But it began with Dante; Dante and Hans Andersen.  If you'd been married to Hugh, you'd know why that was so extraordinarily funny.  Image Europa if the bull had turned out after all to be Narcissus!'

      'I don't think you'd better talk so loud,' said Staithes, looking across the room to where, with an expression on his face of hopeless misery, Hugh was pretending to listen to an animated discussion between Caldwell and the young German.

      Helen also looked round for a moment; then turned back with a careless shrug of her shoulders.  'If he says he's invisible, why shouldn't I  say I'm inaudible?'  Her eyes brightened again with laughter.  'I shall write a book called The Invisible Mistress.  A woman who says exactly what she thinks about her lovers while they're making love to her.  But they can't hear her.  Not a word.'  She emptied her glass and refilled it.

      'And what does she say about them?'

      'The truth, of course.  Nothing but the truth.  That the romantic Don Juan is just a crook.  Only I'm afraid that in reality she wouldn't find that out till afterwards.  Still, one might be allowed a bit of poetic licence – make the esprit d'escalier happen at the same time as the romantic affair.  The moonlight, and “My darling,” and “I adore you,” and those extraordinary sensations – and at the same moment “You're nothing but a sneak-thief, nothing but a low black-guardly swindler.”  And then there'd be the spiritual lover – Hans Dante, in fact.'  She shook her head.  'Talk of Kraft Ebbing!'

      'But what does she say to him?'

      'What indeed!'  Helen took a gulp of wine.  'Luckily she's inaudible.  We'd better skip that chapter and come straight to the epicurean sage.  With a sage, she doesn't have to be quite so obscure.  “You think you're a man, because you happen not to be impotent.”  That's what she says to him.  “But in fact you're not a man.  You're sub-human.  In spite of your sageness – because of it even.  Worse than the crook in some ways.”  And then, bang, like a sign from heaven, down comes the dog!'

      'But what dog?'

      'Why, the dog Father Hopkins can't protect you from.  The sort of dog that bursts like a bomb when you drop it out of an aeroplane.  Bang!'  The laughing excitement seethed and bubbled within her, seeking expression, seeking an outlet; and the only possible assuagement was through some kind of outrage, some violence publicly done to her own and other people's feelings.  'It almost fell on Anthony and me,' she went on, finding a strange relief in speaking thus openly and hilariously about the unmentionable event.  'On the roof of his house it was.  And we had no clothes on.  Like the Garden of Eden.  And then, out of the blue, down came that dog – and exploded, I tell you, literally exploded.'  She threw out her hands in a violent gesture.  'Dog's blood from head to foot.  We were drenched – but drenched!  In spite of which the imbecile goes and writes me a letter.'  She opened her bag and produced it.  'Imagining I'd read it, I suppose.  As though nothing had happened, as though we were still in the Garden of Eden.  I always told him he was a fool.  There!'  She handed the letter to Staithes.  'You open it and see what the idiot has to say.  Something witty, no doubt; something airy and casual; humorously wondering why I took it into my funny little head to go away.'  Then noticing that Mark was still holding the letter unopened, 'But why don't you read it?' she asked.

      'Do you really want me to?'

      'Of course.  Read it aloud.  Read it with expression.'  She rolled the r derisively.

      'Very well, then.'  He tore open the envelope and unfolded the thin sheets. ' “I went to look for you at the hotel,” ' he read out slowly, frowning over the small and hurried script.  ' “You were gone – and it was like a kind of death.” '

      'Ass!' commented Helen.

      ' “It's probably too late, probably useless; but I feel I must try to tell you in this letter some of the things I meant to say to you, yesterday evening, in words.  In one way it's easier – for I'm inept when it comes to establishing a purely personal contact with another human being.  But in another way, it's much more difficult; for these written words will just be words and no more, will come to you, floating in a void, unsupported, without the life of my physical presence.” '

      Helen gave a snort of contemptuous laughter.  'As though that would have been a recommendation!'  She drank some more wine.

      ' “Well, what I wanted to tell you,” ' Staithes read on, ' “was this: that suddenly (it was like a conversion, like an inspiration) while you were kneeling there yesterday on the roof, after that horrible thing had happened ...” '

      'He means the dog,' said Helen.  'Why can't he say so?'

      ' “... suddenly I realized ...” '  Mark Staithes broke off.  'Look here,' he said, 'I really can't go on.'

      'Why not?  I insist on your going on,' she cried excitedly.

      He shook his head.  'I've got no right!'

      'But I've given you the right.'

      'Yes, I know.  But he hasn't.'

      'What has he got to do with it?  Now that I've received the letter …'

      'But it's a love-letter.'

      'A love-letter?' Helen repeated incredulously, then burst out laughing. 'That's too good! she cried.  'That's really sublime!  Here, give it to me.'  She snatched the letter out of his hand.  'Where are we?  Ah, here! “... kneeling on the roof after that horrible thing had happened, suddenly I realized that I'd been living a kind of outrageous lie towards you!” '  She declaimed the words rhetorically and to the accompaniment of florid gesticulations.  ' “I realized that in spite of all the elaborate pretence that it was just a kind of detached irresponsible amusement, I really loved you.”  He really lo-o-oved me,' she repeated, drawing the word into a grotesque caricature of itself.  'Isn't that wonderful?  He really lo-o-oved me.'  Then, turning round in her chair, 'Hugh!' she called across the room.

      'Helen, be quiet!'

      But the desire, the need to consummate the outrage was urgent within her.

      She shook off the restraining hand that Staithes had laid on her arm, shouted Hugh's name again and, when they all turned towards her, 'I just wanted to tell you he really lo-o-oved me,' she said, waving the letter.

      'Oh, for God's sake shut up!'

      'I most certainly won't shut up,' she retorted, turning back to Mark.  'Why shouldn't I tell Hugh the good news?  He'll be delighted, seeing how much he lo-o-oves me himself.  Don't you Hughie?'  She swung back again, and her face was flushed and brilliant with excitement.  'Don't you?'  Hugh made no answer, but sat there pale and speechless, looking at the floor.

      'Of course you do,' she answered for him.  'In spite of all appearances to the contrary.  Or rather,' she emended, uttering a little laugh, 'in spite of all disappearances – seeing that it was always invisible, that love of yours.  Oh yes, Hughie darling, definitely invisible.  But still … still, in spite of all disappearances to the contrary, you do lo-o-ove me, don't you?  Don't you?' she insisted, trying to force him to answer her, 'don't you?'

      Huge rose to his feet and, without speaking a word, almost ran out of the room.

      'Hugh!' Caldwell shouted after him, 'Hugh!'  There was no answer.  Caldwell looked round at the others.  'I think perhaps one ought to see that he's all right,' he said, with the maternal solicitude of a publisher who sees a first-rate literary property rushing perhaps towards suicide.  'One never knows.'  And jumping up he hurried after Hugh.  The door slammed.

      There was a moment's silence.  Then, startlingly, Helen broke into laughter.  'Don't be alarmed, Herr Giesebrecht,' she said, turning to the young German.  'It's just a little bit of English family life.  Die Familie in Wohnzimmer, as we used to learn at school.  Was tut die Mutter?  Die Mutter spielt Klavier.  Und was tut der Vater?  Der Vater sitzt in einem Lehnstuhl und raucht seine Pfeife.  Just that, Herr Giesebrecht, no more.  Just a typical bourgeois family.'

      'Bourgeois,' the young man repeated, and nodded gravely.  'You say better than you know.'

      'Do I?'

      'You are a victim,' he went on, very slowly, and separating word from word, 'a victim of capitalist society.  It is full of vices …'

      Helen threw back her head and laughed again more loudly than before; then, controlling herself with an effort, 'You mustn't think I'm laughing at you,' she gasped.  'I think you're being sweet to me – extraordinarily decent.  And probably you're quite right about capitalist society.  Only somehow at this particular moment – I don't know why – it seemed rather … rather …' The laughter broke out once more.  'I'm sorry.'

      'We must be going,' said Mark, and rose from his chair.  The young German also got up and came across the room towards them.  'Goodnight, Helen.'

      'Goodnight, Mark.  Goodnight, Mr Giesebrecht.  Come and see me again, will you?'  I'll behave better next time.'

      He returned her smile and bowed.  'I will come whenever you wish,' he said.