CHAPTER VII
Mrs Betterton had been
shaken off, his father and Lady Edward distantly waved to and avoided; Walter
was free to continue his search. And at
last he found what he was looking for.
Lucy Tantamount had just emerged from the dining-room and was standing
under the arcades, glancing in indecision this way and that. Against the mourning of her dress the skin
was luminously white. A bunch of
gardenias was pinned to her bodice. She
raised a hand to touch her smooth black hair, and the emerald of her ring shot
a green signal to him across the room.
Critically, with a kind of cold intellectual hatred, Walter looked at
her and wondered why he loved. Why? There was no reason, no justification. All the reasons were against his loving her.
Suddenly
she moved, she walked out of sight. Walter followed. Passing the entrance to the dining-room, he
noticed Burlap, no longer the anchorite, drinking champagne and being talked to
by the Comtesse d'Exergillod. Gosh! thought
Walter, remembering his own experiences with Molly d'Exergillod. 'But Burlap probably adores her. He would ... He ...' But there she was again, talking -
damnation! - with General Knoyle. Walter hung about at a little distance,
waiting impatiently for an opportunity to address her.
'Caught at
last,' said the General, patting her hand.
'Been looking for you the whole evening.'
Half satyr,
half uncle, he had an old man's weakness for Lucy. 'Charming little girl!' he would assure all
those who wanted to hear. 'Charming
little figure! Such
eyes!' For the most part he
preferred them rather younger. 'Nothing
like youth!' he was fond of saying. His
life-long prejudice against
'That will
be fun,' said Lucy with sarcastic politeness.
From his
post of observation Walter looked on.
The General had been handsome once.
Corseted, his tall figure still preserved its military bearing. The gallant and the gentleman, he smiled; he
fingered his white moustache. The next
moment he was the playful, protective and confidential old uncle. Faintly smiling, Lucy looked at him out of
her pale grey eyes with a detached and unmerciful amusement. Walter studied her. She was not even particularly
good-looking. So why, why? He wanted reasons, he wanted
justification. Why? The question persistently reverberated. There was no answer. He had just fallen in love with her - that
was all; insanely, the first time he set eyes on her.
Turning her
head, Lucy caught sight of him. She
beckoned and called his name. He
pretended to be surprised and delightfully astonished.
'I hope
you've not forgotten our appointment,' he said.
'Do I ever
forget? Except occasionally on purpose,'
she qualified with a little laugh. She
turned to the General. 'Walter and I are
going to see your stepson this evening,' she announced in the tone and with the
smile which one employs when one talks to people about those who are dear to
them. But between Spandrell
and his stepfather the quarrel, she knew very well, was mortal. Lucy had inherited all her mother's fondness
for the deliberate social blunder and with it a touch of her father's detached
scientific curiosity. She enjoyed
experimenting, not with frogs and guinea-pigs, but with human beings. You did unexpected things to people, you put them in curious situations and waited to see
what would happen. It was the method of
Darwin and Pasteur.
What
happened in this case was that General Knoyle's face
became extremely red. 'I haven't seen
him for some time,' he said stiffly.
'Good,' she
said to herself. 'He's reacting.'
'But he's such
good company,' she said aloud.
The General
grew redder and frowned. What he hadn't
done for that boy! And how ungratefully
the boy had responded, how abominably he had behaved! Getting himself kicked out of every job the
General had wrangled him into. A waster, an idler; drinking and drabbing;
making his mother miserable, sponging on her, disgracing the family name. And the insolence of the fellow, the things
he had ventured to say the last time they had met and, as usual, had a scene
together! The General was never likely
to forget being called 'an impotent old fumbler.'
'And so
intelligent,' Lucy was saying. With an
inward smile she remembered Spandrell's summary of
his stepfather's career. 'Superannuated
from
'So
intelligent,' Lucy repeated.
'Some
people think so, I know,' said General Knoyle very
stiffly. 'But personally ...' He cleared
his throat with violence. That was his
personal opinion.
A moment
later, still rigid, still angrily dignified, he took his leave. He felt that Lucy had offended him. Even her youth and her bare shoulders did not
compensate him for those laudatory references to Maurice Spandrell. Insolent, bad-blooded young cub! His existence was the General's standing
grievance against his wife. A woman had
no right to have a son like that, no right.
Poor Mrs Knoyle had often atoned to her second
husband for the offences of her son. She
was there, she could be punished, she was too weak to resist. The exasperated General visited the sins of
the child on his parent.
Lucy
glanced after the retreating figure, then turned to
Walter. 'I can't risk that sort of thing
happening again,' she said. 'It would be
bad enough even if it didn't smell so unpleasant. Shall we go away?'
Walter
desired nothing better. 'But what about
your mother and the social duties?' he asked.
She
shrugged her shoulders. 'After all,
mother can look after her own bear garden.'
'Bear
garden's the word,' said Walter, feeling suddenly hopeful. 'Let's sneak away to some place where it's
quiet.'
'My poor Walter!' Her
eyes were derisive. 'I never knew
anybody with such a mania for quietness as you.
But I don't want to be quiet.'
His hope
evaporated, leaving a feeble little bitterness, an ineffective anger. 'Why not stay here then?' he asked with an
attempt at sarcasm. 'Isn't it noisy
enough?'
'Ah, but
noisy with the wrong sort of noise,' she explained. 'There's nothing I hate more than the noise
of cultured, respectable, eminent people, like those creatures.' She waved a hand comprehensively. The words evoked, for Walter, the memory of
hideous evenings passed with Lucy in the company of the disreputable and
uncultured - tipsy after that. Lady
Edward's guests were bad enough. But the
others were surely worse. How could she
tolerate them?
Lucy seemed
to divine his thoughts. Smiling, she
laid a hand reassuringly on his arm.
'Cheer up!' she said. 'I'm not
taking you into low company this time.
There's Spandrell ...'
'Spandrell,' he repeated and made a grimace.
'And if Spandrell isn't classy enough for you, we shall probably
find Mark Rampion and his wife, if we don't arrive
too late.'
At the name
of the painter and writer, Walter nodded approvingly.
'No, I
don't mind listening to Rampion's noise,' he
said. And then, making an effort to
overcome the timidity which always silenced him when the moment came to give
words to his feelings, 'but I'd much rather,' he added jocularly, so as to
temper the boldness of his words, 'I'd much rather listen to your noise,
in private.'
Lucy
smiled, but said nothing. He flinched
away in a kind of terror from her eyes.
They looked at him calmly, coldly, as though they had seen everything
before and were not much interested - only faintly amused, very faintly and
coolly amused.
'All
right,' he said, 'let's go.' His tone
was resigned and wretched.
'We must do
a creep,' she said. 'Furtive's the word.
No good being caught and headed back.'
But they
did not escape entirely unobserved. They
were approaching the door, when there was a rustle and a sound of hurrying
steps behind them. A voice called Lucy's
name. They turned round and saw Mrs Knoyle, the General's wife.
She laid a hand on Lucy's arm.
'I've just
heard that you're going to see Maurice this evening,' she said, but did not
explain that the General had told her so only because he wanted to relieve his
feelings by saying something disagreeable to somebody who couldn't resent the
rudeness. 'Give him a message from me,
will you?' She leaned forward
appealingly. 'Will you?' There was something pathetically young and
helpless about her manner, something very young and soft even about her
middle-aged looks. To Lucy, who might
have been her daughter, she appealed as though to someone older and stronger
than herself. 'Please.'
'But of
course,' said Lucy.
Mrs Knoyle smiled gratefully.
'Tell him I'll come to see him tomorrow afternoon,' she said.
'Tomorrow
afternoon.'
'Between four and half-past.
And don't mention it to anyone else,' she added after a moment of
embarrassed hesitation.
'Of course
I won't.'
'I'm so
grateful to you,' said Mrs Knoyle, and with a sudden
shy impulsiveness she leaned forward and kissed her. 'Good night, my dear.' She slipped away into the crowd.
'One would
think,' said Lucy, as they crossed the vestibule, 'that it was an appointment
with her lover she was making, not her son.'
Two footmen
let them out, obsequiously automatic.
Closing the door, one winked to the other significantly. For an instant, the machines revealed
themselves disquietingly as human beings.
Walter gave
the address of Sbisa's restaurant to the taxi driver
and stepped into the enclosed darkness of the cab. Lucy had already settled into her corner.
Meanwhile,
in the dining-room, Molly d'Exergillod was still
talking. She prided herself on her
conversation. Conversation was in the
family. Her mother had been one of the
celebrated Miss Geoghegans of
To Denis
Burlap she was at this moment serving up the talk that had already been
listened to with such appreciation by Lady Benger's
lunch party, by the weekenders at Gobley, by Tommy Fitton, who was one of her young men, and Vladimir Pavloff, who was another, by the American Ambassador and
Baron Benito Cohen. The talk turned on
Molly's favourite topic.
'Do you
know what Jean said about me?' she was saying (Jean was her husband). 'Do you?' she repeated insistently, for she
had a curious habit of demanding answers to merely rhetorical questions. She leaned towards Burlap, offering dark
eyes, teeth, a décolleté.
Burlap duly
replied that he didn't know.
'He said
that I wasn't quite human. More like an
elemental than a woman. A sort of fairy. Do
you think it's a compliment or an insult?'
'That's
depends on one's tastes,' said Burlap, making his face look arch and subtle as
though he had said something rather daring, witty and at the same time
profound.
'But I
don't feel that it's even true,' Molly went on.
'I don't strike myself as at all elemental or fairy-like. I've always considered myself a perfectly
simple, straightforward child of nature.
A sort of peasant, really.' At this point in Molly's performance all her
other auditors had burst into laughing protestation. Baron Benito Cohen had vehemently declared
that she was 'one of Nature'th Roman Empreththeth.'
Burlap's
reaction was unexpected different from that of the others. He wagged his head,
he smiled with a far-away, whimsical sort of expression. 'Yes,' he said, 'I think that's true. A child of nature, malgré tout. You wear disguises, but the simple genuine
person shows through.'
Molly was
delighted by what she felt was the highest compliment Burlap could pay
her. She had been equally delighted by
the others' denials of her peasanthood. Denial had been their highest
compliment. The flattering intention, the interest in her personality were the things
that mattered. About the actual opinions
of her admirers she cared little.
Burlap,
meanwhile, was developing Rousseau's antithesis between the Man and the
Citizen. She cut him short and brought
the conversation back to the original theme.
'Human
beings and fairies - I think it's a very good classification, don't you?' She leaned forward with offered face and
bosom, intimately. 'Don't you?' she
repeated the rhetorical question.
'Perhaps.' Burlap was
annoyed at having been interrupted.
'The
ordinary human - yes, let's admit it - all too human being on the one
hand. And the
elemental on the other. The one
so attached and involved and sentimental - I'm terribly sentimental, I may
say.' ('About ath
thentimental ath the Thirenth in the Odyththey,' had
been Baron Benito's classical comment.)
'The other, the elemental, quite free and apart from things, like a cat;
coming and going - and going just as lightheartedly
as it came; charming, but never charmed; making other people feel, but never
really feeling itself. Oh, I envy them
their free airiness.'
'You might
as well envy a balloon,' said Burlap, gravely.
He was always on the side of the heart.
'But they
have such fun.'
'They
haven't got enough feelings to have fun with.
That's what I should have thought.'
'Enough to have fun,' she qualified; 'but perhaps not enough to be
happy. Certainly
not enough to be unhappy. That's
where they're so enviable. Particularly if they're intelligent. Take Philip Quarles, for example. There's a fairy if ever there was one.' She launched into her regular description of
Philip. 'Zoologist of fiction,' 'learnedly elfish,' 'a scientific Puck' were a few of her phrases.
But the best of them had slipped her memory. Desperately she hunted it,,
but it eluded her. Her Theophrastian portrait had to go out into the world robbed
this time of its most brilliantly effective passage, and a little marred as a
whole by Molly's consciousness of the loss and her desperate efforts, as she
poured forth, to make it good. 'Whereas
his wife,' she concluded, rather painfully aware that Burlap had not smiled as
frequently as he should have done, 'is quite the opposite of a fairy. Neither elfish, nor
learned, nor particularly intelligent.'
Molly smiled rather patronizingly.
'A man like Philip must find her a little inadequate sometimes, to say
the least.' The smile persisted, a smile
now of self-satisfaction. Philip had had
a faible for her, still had. He wrote such amusing letters, almost as
amusing as her own.
('Quand je veux briller dans
le monde,' Molly was fond of quoting her
husband's compliments, 'je cite des phrases de tes lettres.') Poor Elinor! 'A little bit of a bore sometimes,' Molly
went on. 'But mind you, a most charming
creature. I've known her since we were
children together. Charming,
but not exactly a Hypatia.' Too much of a fool even to realize that
Philip was bound to be attracted by a woman of his own mental stature, a woman
he could talk to on equal terms. Too much of a fool to notice, when she had brought them together,
how thrilled he had been. Too much of a fool to be jealous. Molly had felt the absence of jealousy as a
bit of an insult. Not that she ever gave
real cause for jealousy. She
didn't sleep with husbands; she only talked to them. Still, they did do a lot of talking;
there was no doubt of that. And wives had
been jealous. Elinor's
ingenuous confidingness had piqued her into being more than ordinarily gracious
to Philip. But he had started to go
round the world before much conversation had taken place. The talk, she anticipated, would be agreeably
renewed by his return. Poor Elinor, she thought pityingly. Her feelings might have been a little less
Christian, if she had realized that poor Elinor had
noticed the admiring look in Philip's eye even before Molly had noticed it
herself, and, noticing, had conscientiously proceeded to act the part of
dragoman and go-between. Not that she
had much hope or fear that Molly would achieve the transforming miracle. One does not fall very desperately in love
with a loud speaker, however pretty, however firmly plump (for Philip's tastes
were rather old-fashioned), however attractively callipygous. Her only hope was that the passions aroused
by the plumpness and prettiness would be so very inadequately satisfied by the
talking (for talk was all, according to report, that Molly ever conceded) that
poor Philip would be reduced to a state of rage and misery most conducive to
good writing.
'But of
course,' Molly went on, 'intelligence ought never to marry intelligence. That's why Jean is always threatening to
divorce me. He says I'm too
stimulating. "Tu ne m'ennuies
pas assez," he says; and that what he needs
is une femme sédative. And I believe he's really right. Philip Quarles has been wise. Imagine an intelligent fairy of a man like
Philip married to an equally fairyish intelligent
woman - Lucy Tantamount, for example. It
would be a disaster, don't you think?'
'Lucy'd be rather a disaster for any man, wouldn't she,
fairy or no fairy?'
'No, I must
say, I like Lucy.' Molly turned to her
inner storehouse of Theophrastian phrases. 'I like the way she floats through life
instead of trudging. I like the way she
flits from flower to flower - which is perhaps a rather too botanical and
poetical description of Bentley and Jim Conklin and poor Reggie Tantamount and
Maurice Spandrell and Tom Trivet and Poniatovsky and that young Frenchman who writes plays, what
is his name? and the various others one has
forgotten or never heard about.' Burlap
smiled; they all smiled at this passage.
'Anyhow, she flits. Doing a good
deal of damage to the flowers, I must admit.'
Burlap smiled again. 'But getting nothing but fun out of it herself. I must say, I rather envy her. I wish I were a fairy and could float.'
'She has
much more reason to envy you,' said Burlap, looking deep, subtle and Christian
once more, and wagging his head.
'Envy me
for being unhappy?'
'Who's
unhappy?' asked Lady Edward breaking in on them at this moment. 'Good evening, Mr
Burlap,' she went on without waiting for an answer. Burlap told her how much he had enjoyed the
music.
'We were
just talking about Lucy,' said Molly d'Exergillod,
interrupting him. 'Agreeing that she was
like a fairy. So light
and detached.'
'Fairy!'
repeated Lady Edward, emphatically rolling the 'r' far back in her throat. 'She's like a leprechaun. You've no idea, Mr Burlap, how hard it is to
bring up a leprechaun.' Lady Edward
shook her head. 'She used really to
frighten me sometimes.'
'Did she?'
said Molly. 'But I should have thought
you were a bit of a fairy yourself, Lady Edward.'
'A bit,'
Lady Edward admitted. 'But never to the
point of being a leprechaun.'
*
* * *
'Well?'
said Lucy, as Walter sat down beside her in the cab. She seemed to be uttering a kind of
challenge. 'Well?'
The cab
started. He lifted her hand and kissed
it. It was his answer to her
challenge. 'I love you. That's all.'
'Do you,
Walter?' She turned towards him and,
taking his face between her two hands, looked at him intently in the
half-darkness. 'Do you?' she repeated;
and as she spoke, she shook her head slowly and smiled. Then, leaning forward, she kissed him on the
mouth. Walter put his arms round her;
but she disengaged herself from the embrace.
'No, no,' she protested and dropped back into her corner. 'No.'
He obeyed
her and drew away. There was a
silence. Her perfume was of gardenias;
sweet and tropical, the perfumed symbol of her being enveloped him. 'I ought to have insisted,' he was
thinking. 'Brutally. Kissed her again and again. Compelled her to love me. Why didn't I?
Why?' He didn't know. Nor why she had kissed him, unless it was
just provocatively, to make him desire her more violently, to make him more
hopelessly her slave. Nor why, knowing
this, he still loved her. Why, why? he kept repeating to himself. And echoing his thoughts out loud her voice
suddenly spoke.
'Why do you
love me?' she asked from her corner.
He opened
his eyes. They were passing a street lamp. Through the window of the moving cab the
light of it fell on her face. It stood
out for a moment palely against the darkness, then dropped back into
invisibility - a pale mask that had seen everything before and whose expression
was one of amused detachment and a hard, rather weary languor. 'I was just wondering,' Walter answered. 'And wishing I didn't.'
'I might
say that same, you know. You're not
particularly amusing when you're like this.'
How
tiresome, she reflected, these men who imagined that nobody had ever been in
love before! All the same, she liked
him. He was attractive. No, 'attractive' wasn't the word. Attractive, as a possible lover, was just
what he wasn't. 'Appealing' was more
like it. An appealing
lover? It wasn't exactly her
style. But she liked him. There was something very nice about
him. Besides, he was clever, he could be
a pleasant companion. And tiresome as it
was, his love-sickness did at least make him very faithful. That, for Lucy, was important. She was afraid of loneliness and needed her
cavalier servants in constant attendance.
Walter attended with a dog-like fidelity. But why did he look so like a whipped
dog sometimes? So
abject. What a fool! She felt suddenly annoyed by his abjection.
'Well,
Walter,' she said mockingly, laying her hand on his, 'why don't you talk to
me?'
He did not
reply.
'Or is mum
the word?' Her fingers brushed
electrically along the back of his hand and closed round his wrist. 'Where's your pulse?' she asked after a
moment. 'I can't feel it anywhere.' She groped over the soft skin for the
throbbing of the artery. He felt the
touch of her fingertips, light and thrilling and rather cold against his wrist. 'I don't believe you've got a pulse,' she
said. 'I believe your blood
stagnates.' The tone of her voice was
contemptuous. What a fool! she was thinking.
What an abject fool! 'Just
stagnates!' she repeated and suddenly, with sudden malice, she drove her sharp
file-pointed nails into his flesh.
Walter cried out in surprise and pain.
'You deserved it,' she said and laughed in his face.
He seized
her by the shoulders and began to kiss her, savagely. Anger had quickened his desire; his kisses
were a vengeance. Lucy shut her eyes and
abandoned herself unresistingly, limply.
Little premonitions of pleasure shot with a kind of panic flutter, like
fluttering moths, through her skin. And
suddenly sharp fingers seemed to pluck, pizzicato, at the fiddle-strings
of her nerves; Walter could feel her whole body starting involuntarily within
his arms, starting as though it had been suddenly hurt. Kissing her, he found himself wondering if
she had expected him to react in this way to her provocation, if she had hoped
he would. He took her slender neck in
his two hands. His thumbs were on her
windpipe. He pressed gently. 'One day,' he said between his clenched
teeth, 'I shall strangle you.'
Lucy only
laughed. He bent forward and kissed her
laughing mouth. The touch of his lips
against her own sent a thin, sharp sensation that was almost pain running
unbearably through her. The panic
moth-wings fluttered over her body. She
hadn't expected such fierce and savage ardours from
Walter. She was agreeably surprised.
The taxi
turned into
She opened
her eyes and looked at him. 'Well?' she
asked challengingly, for the second time that evening. There was a moment's silence.
'Lucy,' he
said, 'let's go somewhere else. Not here; not this horrible place. Somewhere where we can be
alone.' His voice trembled, his
eyes were imploring. The fierceness had
gone out of his desire; it had become abject again, dog-like. 'Let's tell the man to drive on,' he begged.
She smiled
and shook her head. Why did he implore,
like that? Why was he so abject? The fool, the whipped dog!
'Please, please!'
he begged. But he should have
commanded. He should simply have ordered
the man to drive on, and taken her in his arms again.
'Impossible,'
said Lucy and stepped out of the cab. If
he behaved like a whipped dog, he could be treated like one.
Walter
followed her, abject and miserable.
Sbisa himself received them on the threshold. He bowed, he waved his fat white hands, and
his expanding smile raised a succession of waves in the flesh of his enormous
cheeks. When Lucy arrived, the
consumption of champagne tended to rise.
She was an honoured guest.
'Mr Spandrell here?' she asked.
'And Mr and Mrs Rampion?'
'Oo yez, oo
yez,' old Sbisa repeated
with Neapolitan, almost oriental emphasis.
The implication was that they were not only there, but that if it had
been in his power, he would have provided two of each of them for her benefit. 'And you? Quaite
well, quaite well, I hope? Sooch lobster we
have tonight, sooch lobster ...' Still talking, he ushered them into
the restaurant.