Chapter Two
He was walking so fast that Susan had to run, and even
so she came up with him only under the second lamp-post. She caught his arm and squeezed it
affectionately.
'Sebastian!'
'Let go,'
he commanded angrily, and shook himself free.
He wasn't going to be patronized and condoled with by anyone.
There! She'd done the wrong thing again. But why must he be so horribly touchy? And why on earth did he pay any attention to
an old ass like Pfeiffy?
For a while
they walked along, side by side, in silence.
She spoke at last.
'Did you
write any poetry today?'
'No,'
Sebastian lied. Those incandescent
copulations of gods had been quenched and turned to ashes. The very thought of reciting the lines now,
after what had happened, made him feel sick - like the thought of eating the
cold scraps left over from yesterday's dinner.
There was
another silence. It was a half-holiday,
Susan was thinking, and because it was examination-time, there wasn't any
football. Had he spent the afternoon
with that awful Esdaile creature? She shot a glance at him under the next lamp;
yes, there was no doubt of it, he looked dark under the eyes. The pigs!
She was filled with sudden anger - anger born of a jealousy, all the
more painful for being unavowable. She had no rights; there had never been any
question of their being anything but cousins, almost sister and brother;
besides, it was too painfully obvious that he didn't even dream of thinking
about her in that other way. And
incidentally when he had asked her, that time, two years before, to let
him see her without any clothes on, she had said no, in an absolute panic. Two days later she told Pamela Groves about
what had happened; and Pamela, who went to one of those progressive schools and
whose parents were so much younger than Susan's, had merely roared with laughter. What a fuss about nothing at all! Why, she and her brothers and her cousins -
they were always seeing one another with no clothes on. Yes, and her brothers' friends too. So why on earth shouldn't poor Sebastian do
it, if he wanted to? All this silly
Victorian prudery! Susan was made to
feel ashamed of her own and her mother's old-fashioned views. Next time Sebastian asked, she'd take off her
pyjamas immediately and stand there in front of him in the attitude, she
decided after some reflection, of that Roman matron, or whoever she was, in the
Alma-Tadema engraving in her father's study, smiling
and with her arms up, doing her hair.
For several days she rehearsed the scene in front of her looking-glass,
until finally she had it all absolutely perfect. But unfortunately Sebastian
never renewed his request, and she hadn't the never to take the initiative. With the result that here he was, doing the
most awful things with that Esdaile bitch, and she
didn't have any right or reason even to cry.
Much less to slap his face, as she would have liked to do, and call him
names, and pull his hair, and ... and make him kiss her.
'I suppose
you spent the afternoon with your precious Mrs Esdaile,'
she said at last, trying to sound contemptuous and superior.
Sebastian,
who had been walking with bent head, looked up at her.
'What's
that to you?' he said after a pause.
'Nothing at all.'
Susan shrugged her shoulders and uttered a little laugh. But inwardly she felt angry with herself and
ashamed. How often she had vowed never
to show any further curiosity about his beastly affair, never to listen again
to those horrifying details, which he recounted so vividly and with so manifest
a relish! And yet curiosity always got
the better of her, and she listened greedily every time. Listened just because these
accounts of his love-making with somebody else were so painful to her. Listened, too, because thus to share in his
love-making, even theoretically and in imagination, was obscurely exciting to
her, and itself constituted a kind of sensual bond between them, a mental
embrace, horribly unsatisfying and exasperating, but none the less an embrace.
Sebastian
had looked away; but now suddenly he turned back to her with a strange smile
almost of triumph, as though he had just scored off somebody.
'All right,
then,' he said. 'You've asked for
it. Don't blame me if it shocks your
maiden modesty.'
He broke
off with a rather harsh little laugh, and walked along in silence, meditatively
rubbing the bridge of his nose with the tip of his right forefinger. How well she knew the gesture! It was the infallible sign that he was
composing a poem, or thinking of the best way to tell one of his stories.
Those
stories, those extraordinary stories!
Susan had lived in the fantastic worlds of Sebastian's creation almost
as long and quite as intensely as she had lived in the real world. More intensely perhaps; for in the real world
she had to depend on her own prosaic self, whereas in the story world she found
herself endowed with Sebastian's rich imagination, moved and excited by
Sebastian's flow of words.
The first
of his stories that Susan clearly remembered was the one Sebastian had told her
on the beach at Tenby, that summer (it must have been
the summer of 1917) when there were five candles on their joint birthday
cake. They had found among the seaweed
and old red rubber ball, torn almost in half.
Sebastian took it to a little pool and washed out the sand with which it
was filled. On the wet inner surface of
the ball was a kind of wart-like excrescence.
Why? Only the manufacturers could
say. For a child of five, it was an
inexplicable mystery. Sebastian touched
the wart with a probing forefinger. That
was the tummy-button, he whispered. They
looked around furtively to make sure that they were out of earshot: navels were
things that verged upon the unmentionable.
Everybody's tummy-button grew inwards like that, Sebastian went on. And when she asked him, 'How do you know?' he
launched out into a circumstantial account of what he had seen Dr Carter doing
to a little girl in his consulting-room, the last time Aunt Alice had taken him
there about his earache. Cutting her
open - that was what Dr Carter was doing - cutting her open with a big knife
and fork, to look at her tummy-button from the inside. And when you were too tough for a knife and
fork, they had to use one of those saws that butchers cut bones with. Yes, really and truly, he insisted, when she
expressed her horrified incredulity, really and truly. And to prove his point, he began sawing at
the ball with the side of his hand. The
gashed rubber parted under the pressure; the wound gaped wider and wider as he
saw cut more deeply in what, for Susan, was now no longer a ball, but a little
girl's tummy - for all practical purposes, her own. H-h-h-h, h-h-h-h. h-h-h-h, Sebastian went, trilling the aspirant far back in
the throat. The sound was blood-curdlingly like the noise of a meat saw. And then, he went on, when they'd cut far
enough, they opened you. Like this - and
he pulled the two halves of the wounded ball apart. They opened you, and they turned your top
flap inside out - so; and then they scrubbed the tummy-button with soap and
water to get the dirt off. Furiously he
scratched the mysterious wart, and his nails on the rubber made a small dry
noise that, to Susan, was unspeakably horrifying. She uttered a scream and covered her ears
with her hands. For years afterwards she
had been terrified of Dr Carter, had howled whenever he came near her; and even
now when she knew it was all nonsense about the tummy-button, the sight of his
little black bag, of those cabinets in his consulting-room, full of glass tubes
and bottles and nickel-plated gadgets, filled her with a vague apprehension
which she found it difficult, in spite of all her efforts at reasonableness, to
dispel.
Uncle John Barnack was often away for months at a stretch, travelling
abroad and writing articles for that left-wing paper which Susan's father
wouldn't so much as allow his fire to be lighted with. Sebastian had therefore lived a good part of
his life under the care of his Aunt Alice and at closest quarters with the
youngest of her children, the little girl between whom and himself there was a
difference in age of only a single day. With
the growth of that small body of his, that precocious and feverishly
imaginative mind, the stories that he told her - or rather that he related to
himself in her stimulating presence - became ever more complicated and
circumstantial. Sometimes they would
last for weeks and months, in an interminable series of instalments, composed
as they walked back and forth from school, or ate their supper in front of the
gas fire in the nursery, or sat together on the roofs of wintry buses while
their elders travelled prosaically inside.
For example, there was the epic that ran almost uninterruptedly through
the whole of 1923 - the epic of the Larnimans. Or rather the La-a-arnimans
- for the name was always pronounced in a whisper and with a horribly
significant prolongation of the first syllable.
Those La-a-arnimans was a family of human
ogres, who lived in tunnels that radiated out from a central cavern immediately
under the lion house at the Zoo.
'Listen!'
Sebastian would whisper to her each time they found themselves in front of the
Siberian tiger's cage.
'Listen!' And he would stamp his foot on the pavement.
'It's
hollow. Don't you hear?'
And, sure
enough, Susan did hear and, hearing, shuddered at the thought of the La-a-arnimans sitting there fifty feet below, at the heart of a
whirring complex of machinery, counting the money they had stolen from the
vaults of the Bank of England, roasting the children they had kidnapped through
trapdoors in basements, breeding cobras, to let loose into the drains so that
suddenly, one fine morning, just as one was about to sit down, a hooded head
would pop up out of the w.c. and hiss. Not that she believed any of it, of
course. But even if you didn't believe
in it, it was still frightening. Those
horrible La-a-arnimans with their cat's eyes and
their patent electric guns and their underground switchbacks - they didn't
really live under the lion house (even though the ground did sound
hollow when you stamped on it). But that
didn't mean that they didn't exist. The
proof of their existence was the fact that she dreamed about them, that she
kept a sharp look-out, each morning, for those cobras.
But the Larnimans were ancient history now. Their place had been taken, first, by a
detective; then (after Sebastian had read his father's book about the Russian
Revolution) by Trotsky; then by Odysseus, whose adventures, during that summer
and autumn of 1926, were wilder than anything that Homer had ever
reported. It was with the coming of
Odysseus that girls first made their appearance in Sebastian's stories. True, they had figured to some extent in the
earlier epics, but only as the victims of doctors, cannibals, cobras and
revolutionaries. (Anything
to make Susan's flesh creep, to elicit that horrified squeal of protest!) But in the new Odyssey they started to play
another kind of part. They were pursued
and kissed, they were looked at through keyholes without their clothes on, they
were discovered bathing at
Forbidden
themes, repulsively fascinating, disgustingly attractive! Sebastian would embark on them with a quiet
casualness - pianissimo, so to speak, and senza
expressione, as though he were hurrying over some
boring transitional passage, some patch of mere five-finger exercises
interpolated into the romantic rhapsody of his Odyssey. Pianissimo, senza
expressione - and then, bang! like
a chord by Scriabin in the middle of a Haydn quartet,
out he'd come with some frightful enormity!
And in spite of all her efforts to take it casually, matter-of-factly,
as Pamela would have taken it, Susan would be startled into an exclamation, a
blush, a covering of the ears, a rushing away, as though she didn't mean to
listen to another word. But always she
did listen; and sometimes, when he broke off his narrative to ask her some
direct and horribly indiscreet question, she would even speak herself about the
impossible subject, muttering with averted eyes, or else in a voice uncontrolledly loud, and modulating, against her will, into
a burst of laughter.
Gradually
the new Odyssey had petered out. Susan
had her music and her School Certificate, and Sebastian spent all his leisure
reading Greek and the English poets, and writing verses of his own. There seemed to be no time for story-telling,
and if ever they did find themselves together for a little, he liked to recite
his latest poems. When she praised them,
as she generally did - for she really did think they were wonderful -
Sebastian's face would light up.
'Oh, it's
not too bad,' he would say deprecatingly; but his smile and the
irrepressible brightness of his eyes betrayed what he really thought. Sometimes, however, there were lines she didn't
understand, or didn't like; and then, if she ventured to say so, he'd flush
with anger and call her a fool and a Philistine; or else sarcastically remark
that it was only to be expected, seeing that women had the minds of hens, or
seeing it was notorious that musicians had no brains, only fingers and a solar
plexus. Sometimes his words hurt her;
but more often they only evoked a smile and made her feel, by comparison with
his transparent childishness, delightfully old, wise and, in spite of his dazzling
gifts, superior. When he behaved like
that, Sebastian proclaimed himself an infant as well as a prodigy, and invited
her to love him in yet another way - protectively and maternally.
And then
suddenly, a few weeks after the beginning of the current term, the stories had
started again - but with a difference; for this time they were not fiction,
they were autobiography; he had begun to tell her about Mrs Esdaile. The child in him was still there, still
urgently in need of mothering, of being preserved from the consequences of his
own childishness; but the grown boy she secretly worshipped with quite another
passion was now the lover of a woman - older than herself and prettier, and a
million times more experienced; rich, too, and with lovely clothes and
manicures and make-up; utterly beyond the possibility of competition and
rivalry. Susan had never let him see how
much she minded; but her diary had been full of bitterness, and in bed at night
she had often cried herself to sleep.
And tonight she would again have reason to be miserable.
Frowning,
Susan glanced sideways at her companion.
Sebastian was still pensively caressing his nose.
'That's
it,' she burst out with a sudden uprush of
resentment; 'rub your beastly little snout till you've got it all pat!'
Sebastian
started and looked round. An expression
of disquiet appeared on his face.
'Got what
all pat?' he asked defensively.
'All your
beautiful speeches and witty repartees,' she answered. 'You think I don't know you, I suppose. Why, I bet you're too shy to say anything,
even when you're ...’ She broke off, unable to give utterance to the words that
would evoke the odious picture of their love-making.
At another
time this taunting reference to his timidity - to the humiliating dumbness and
incoherence with which he was afflicted whenever he found himself in strange or
impressive company - would have roused him to anger. But on this occasion he was merely amused.
'Mayn't I
tell even the tiniest lie?' he said. 'Just for art's sake?'
'You mean
for your sake - to make yourself look like something out of Noel
Coward.'
'Out of
Congreve,' he protested.
'Out of
anybody you like,' said Susan, happy to have this opportunity of venting her accumulated
bitterness without betraying its real nature and cause. 'Any old lie, so long as you don't have to
show yourself as you really are....'
'A Don Juan
without the courage of his conversation,' he put in. It was a phrase he had invented to console
himself for having cut such a lamentable figure at the Boveney's
Christmas party. 'And you're annoyed
because I put the conversation where it ought to have been. Don't be so horribly literal.'
He smiled
at her so enchantingly that Susan had to capitulate.
'All
right,' she grumbled. 'I'll believe you
even when I know it's a lie.'
His smile
broadened; he was the gayest of Della Robbia angels.
'Even when
you know,' he repeated, and laughed aloud. It was the most exquisite of jokes. Poor old Susan! She knew that the accounts of his
conversational prowess were false; but she also knew that he had got
talking with a beautiful dark-haired young woman on the top of a Finchley Road
bus, that this woman had asked him to tea at her flat, had listened to his
poetry, had told him how unhappy she was with her husband, had made an excuse
to leave the drawing-room and then, five minutes later, had called him, 'Mr Barnack, Mr Barnack,' - and he
had walked out after her, and across the landing and through a half-opened door
into a room that was pitch dark, and suddenly had felt her bare arms round him
and her lips on his face. Susan knew all
that, and a great deal more besides; and the beauty of it was that Mrs Esdaile didn't exist, that he had found her name in the
telephone book, her pale oval face in a volume of Victorian steel engravings,
and all the rest in his imagination. And
all that poor Susan objected to was the elegance of
his conversation!
'She was
wearing black lace underclothes today,' he improvised, carried away by his
amusement into an emphatic Beardsleyism that at
ordinary times he would have despised.
'She
would!' said Susan, bitterly thinking of her own stout white cotton.
With his
inward eye Sebastian was contemplating a Callipyge in
needle-point, patterned all over with spidery arabesques. Like one of those ornamental china horses, on
whose flanks the dapplings are leaves and
tendrils. He laughed to himself.
'I told her
she was the latest archaeological discovery - the Dappled Aphrodite of
Hampstead.'
'Liar!'
said Susan emphatically. 'You didn't
tell her anything of the kind.'
'I shall
write a poem about the Dappled Aphrodite,' Sebastian went on, ignoring her.
A fireworks
display of lovely phrases began to blaze and crackle in his mind.
'Stippled
with scrolls her withers, her velvet croup tattooed with
And, by
golly, there was a perfectly good rhyme!
Scrolls and moles - two stout pegs on which one could
hang any amount of lace and goddess-skin.
'Oh, shut
up!' said Susan.
But his
lips continued to move.
'Inked on
those creamy quarters, what artful calligraphy, swelling and shrinking with
each alternate movement.'
Suddenly he
heard his name being shouted and the sound of running feet from behind them.
'Who the
devil ...?'
They
stopped and turned round.
'It's Tom Boveney,' said Susan.
So it
was! Sebastian smiled.
'I'll bet
you five bob he says, "Hullo, Suse, how's the
booze?"'
Sic and a
half feet high, three feet wide, two feet thick, sandy-haired and grinning, Tom
came rushing up like the Cornish Riviera Express.
'Basty Boy,' he shouted, 'you're just the man I was looking
for. Oh, and there's young Suse. - How's the booze, Suse?'
He laughed,
and was delighted when Susan and Sebastian also laughed - laughed with unaccumstomed heartiness.
'Well,' he
went on, turning back to Sebastian, 'it's all settled.'
'What's settled?'
'The dinner problem.
Seeing you're going abroad as soon as term's over, I've arranged to put
it off to the end of the hols.'
He grinned
and patted Sebastian's shoulder affectionately.
He, too, Susan said to herself.
And she went on to reflect that almost everyone felt that way about
Sebastian - and he exploited it. Yes, he
exploited it.
'Pleased?'
Tom questioned.
Basty was his mascot, his child, and at the same time the
exquisite and brilliant object of a love which he was too congenitally
heterosexual to avow, or even to understand and give a name to. He'd do anything to please little Basty.
But instead
of beaming delightedly, Sebastian looked almost dismayed.
'But, Tom,'
he stammered, 'you mustn't ... I mean, you shouldn't put yourself out for me.'
Tom laughed
and gave his shoulder a reassuring squeeze.
'I'm not
putting myself out.'
'But the
other fellows,' said Sebastian, clutching at every straw.
Tom pointed
out that the other fellows didn't care whether his farewell party was at the
beginning of the hols or at the end.
'A binge is
always a binge,' he was saying philosophically, when Sebastian cut him short
with a vehemence altogether unjustified by considerations of mere politeness.
'No, I
wouldn't dream of it,' he cried in a tone of finality.
There was a
silence. Tom Boveney
looked down at him wonderingly.
'You almost
sound as if you didn't want to come,' he began in bewilderment.
Sebastian
realized his mistake and made haste to protest that of course there was nothing
he'd have liked better. Which was true.
Dinner at the
'But if you
want to come,' Tom insisted with exasperating common sense, 'what on earth are
you saying no for?' He turned to
Susan. 'Can you throw any light
on the mystery?'
Susan
hesitated. She knew, of course, all
about Uncle John's refusal to get Sebastian a suit of evening clothes. It was mean of him. But after all there wasn't anything for
Sebastian to be ashamed of. Why didn't
he frankly come out with it?
'Well,' she
said slowly, 'I suppose it's because ...'
'Shut
up. Shut up, I tell you.' In his fury, Sebastian gave her arm such a pinch
that she cried out in pain.
'Serves you
right,' he whispered savagely, and turned again to Tom. Susan was astonished to hear him saying that
of course he'd come, and it was really terribly nice
of Tom to have taken all that trouble to change the date. Terribly nice - and he actually managed to
give Tom one of his angelic smiles.
'You don't
think I'd have a party without you, Basty?' Once more Tome Boveney
squeezed the shoulder of his mascot, his only child, his infant prodigy and
exquisite beloved.
'Now of all times, when I'm going to
'And now
I've got to fly. Oughtn't to have
stopped to talk to you by rights, but it was such a stroke of luck running into
you. So long, Suse. So long, Basty.' He turned and started to run, elegantly in
spite of his size and weight, like a professional half-miler, into the darkness
out of which he had come. The others
resumed their walk.
'What I
can't understand,' said Susan, after a long silence, 'is why you don't just
tell the truth. It isn't your fault that
you don't have a dinner jacket. And it's
not as if there was a law against wearing your blue serge suit. They won't turn you out of the restaurant,
you know.'
'Oh, for God's
sake!' cried Sebastian, driven almost to frenzy by the maddening reasonableness
of what she was saying.
'But if
you'd only explain to me why you don't tell him,' she persisted.
'I don't
wish to explain,' he said with a dignified finality.
Susan glanced
at him, thought how ridiculous he looked, and shrugged her shoulders.
'You mean,
you can't explain.'
In the
silence that ensued, Sebastian chewed on the bitter cud of his abasement. He didn't wish to explain because, as Susan
had said, he couldn't explain. And he
couldn't explain, not because he lacked reasons, but because the reasons he had
were so excruciatingly intimate. First that old cow in the library; even that dead son was no excuse
for her slobbering over him as though he were still in diapers. The Pfeiffer and his
stinking cigars. And now this last humiliation. It was not only that he looked like a child,
when he knew himself to be a hundred times abler than the oldest of them. It was also that he lacked the outward
accoutrement and paraphernalia belonging to his real age. If he'd had decent clothes and enough pocket
money, the other humiliations would have been tolerable. By his easy spendings
and the cut of his coats he could have refuted the specious evidence of his
face and stature. But his father gave
him only a shilling a week, made him wear his shoddy reach-me-downs till they
were threadbare and short in the sleeves, and absolutely refused to get him a
dinner jacket. His garments confirmed
the testimony of the body they so shabbily covered; he was a child in child's
clothing. And here was that fool, Susan,
asking him why he didn't tell Tom Boveney the truth!
'Amor Fati,' she quoted. 'Didn't you say that was your motto
now?' Sebastian did not deign to make a
reply.
Looking at
him, as he walked beside her, his face set, his body curiously rigid and
constrained, Susan felt her irritation melting away into a maternal
tenderness. Poor darling! How miserable he managed to make
himself! And for such idiotic
reasons! Worrying about a dinner
jacket! But she'd be prepared to bet
that Tom Boveney didn't have an affair with a
beautiful married woman. And,
remembering how he had cheered up just now at the mention of Mrs Esdaile, Susan charitably tried again.
'You didn't
finish telling me about those black lace underclothes,' she said at last,
breaking the dismal silence.
But this
time there was no response; Sebastian merely shook his head without even
looking in her direction.
'Please,'
she cajoled.
'I don't
want to.' And when Susan tried to
insist, 'I tell you, I don't want to,' he repeated more emphatically.
There was
nothing funny any longer about Susan's gullibility. Seen soberly, in its proper light, this Esdaile business was just another of his humiliations.
His mind harked
back to that hideous evening two months before.
Outside the
In the
beginning she wouldn't even take him seriously.
'A kid like you! I'd be ashamed of myself!' He had to show her the inscription in his
copy of the Oxford Book of Greek Verse, which he happened to be carrying
in his pocket. 'For
Sebastian, on his seventeenth birthday, from his uncle, Eustace Barnack. 1928.' The girl in blue read the words aloud,
glanced dubiously into his face, then back at the book. From the flyleaf she turned to a page chosen
at random in the middle of the volume. 'Why,
it's Yiddish!' She looked curiously into
his face. 'I'd never have guessed it,'
she said. Sebastian set her right. 'And you mean to tell me you can read
it?' He demonstrated his ability on a
chorus line from the Agamemnon.
That convinced her; anybody who could do that must be more than just a
kid. But did he have any money? He produced his wallet and showed her the
pound-note that still remained to him from Uncle Eustace's Christmas
present. 'All right,' said the
girl. But she had no place of her own;
where did he mean to go?
Aunt Alice
and Susan and Uncle Fred had all gone away for the weekend, and there was
nobody left in the house except old Ellen - and Ellen always went to bed sharp
at nine, as was as deaf as a post anyway.
They could go to his place, he suggested; and he hailed a taxi.
Of that
nightmare that followed Sebastian could not think without a shudder. That rubber corset and, when they were in his
room, her body, as unresponsive as its carapace. The bored perfunctory kisses,
and the breath that stank of beer and caries and onions. His own excitement, so frenzied as to be
almost instantly self-stultifying; and then, irremediable, the hideously sober
coldness that brought with it a disgust for what lay there beside him, a horror
as though for a corpse - and the corpse laughed and offered him its derisive
condolences.
On the way
down to the front door, the girl asked to look at the drawing-room. Her eyes opened wide as the light revealed
its modest splendours. 'Hand painted!'
she said admiringly, crossing over to the fireplace and running her fingers
over the varnish of the presentation portrait of Sebastian's grandfather. That seemed to settle it for her. She turned to Sebastian and announced that
she wanted another quid. But he hadn't
got another quid. The girl in blue sat
down emphatically on the sofa. Very
well, then; she'd stay there until he found one. Sebastian emptied his pockets of small
change. Three and elevenpence.
No, she insisted, nothing less than a quid; and in a hoarse contralto
she started to chant the words, 'A quid, a quid, a quid-o,' to the tune of
'When Irish Eyes ...'
'Don't do
that,' he begged. The chant swelled to
full-throated song. 'A quid, a quid, a
quid-o, a lovely, lovely quid ...’ Almost in tears,
Sebastian interrupted her: there was a servant sleeping upstairs, and even the
neighbours might hear. 'Well, let them
all come,' said the girl in blue.
'They're welcome.' 'But what
would they say?' Sebastian's voice
quavered as he spoke, his lips were trembling.
The girl looked at him contemptuously, and broke out into her loud, ugly
laugh. 'Serve you right, cry-baby:
that's what they'd say. Wanting to go with girls, when he ought to be staying at 'ome and letting 'is mother blow 'is nose for him.' She started to beat time. 'Now, one, two, three. All together, boys. "When Irish quids are quidding ..."'
On the
little table by the sofa Sebastian caught sight of that gold-mounted,
tortoiseshell paperknife which had been presented to Uncle Fred on the twenty-fifth
anniversary of his association with the City and Far Eastern Investment
Company. Worth much
more than a pound. He picked it
up and tried to press it into her hands.
'Take this,' he implored. 'Yes,
and 'ave them call up the p'lice the moment I try to sell it.' She pushed it aside. In another key and more loudly than ever, she
began again. 'When Irish quids ...' 'Stop,' he cried
despairingly, 'stop! I'll get you the money.
I swear I will.' The girl in blue
broke off and looked at her wristwatch.
'I'll give you five minutes,' she said.
Sebastian hurried out of the room and up the stairs. A minute later he was hammering on one of the
doors that gave on to the fourth-floor landing.
'Ellen, Ellen!' There was no
answer. Deaf as a
post. Damn the woman, damn
her! He knocked again and shouted. Suddenly, and without any warning, the door
opened and there was Ellen in a grey flannelette dressing-gown, with her grey
hair done up into two little pigtails tied with tape, and no false teeth, so that
her round, apple-like face seemed to have caved in and, when she asked him if
the house was on fire, he could hardly understand what she said. Making a great effort, he turned on his most
angelic smile - the smile with which he had always managed to get round her,
all his life. 'Sorry,
Ellen. I wouldn't have done it if
it weren't so urgent.' 'So what?'
she asked, turning her better ear towards him.
'Do you think you could lend me a pound?' She looked blank, and he had to yell at
her. 'A pound.' 'A pound?' she echoed in amazement. 'I borrowed it from a friend of mine, and
he's waiting at the door.' Toothlessly,
but still with her north-country intonation, Ellen enquired why he couldn't pay
it back tomorrow. 'Because he's going
away,' Sebastian explained. 'Going to
It was when
they came back from that weekend - on the Monday afternoon, to be precise,
while he was walking home with her from old Pfeiffer's - that
he had first told Susan about Mrs Esdaile. Exquisite, cultured, wildly voluptuous Esdaile in the arms of her triumphant young lover - the
reverse of the medal whose other, real face bore the
image of the girl in blue and a nauseated child, abject and blubbering.
At the
corner of
'You go
straight home,' said Sebastian, breaking the long silence. 'I'm going to see if Father's in.' And without
waiting for Susan's comments, he turned and quickly walked away.
Susan stood
there looking after him as he hurried down the street, so frail and helpless,
but marching with such desperate resolution towards inevitable failure. For, of course, if the poor boy imagined he
could get the better of Uncle John, he was just asking to be hurt again.
Under the
street lamp at the corner, the pale hair came to life like an aureole of
tousled flame; then he turned and was lost to sight. And that was life, Susan reflected as she
walked on - a succession of street corners.
You met with something - something strange, something beautiful and
desirable; and the next moment you were at another corner; it had turned and
was gone. And even when it didn't turn,
it was in love with Mrs Esdaile.
She mounted
the steps of number eighteen, and rang the bell. Ellen opened the door, and, before admitting
her, made her wipe her feet again on the mat.
'Can't have
you muddying my carpets,' she said in her ordinary tone of grumbling affection.
On her way upstairs,
Susan looked in to say good-evening to her mother. Mrs Poulshot seemed
preoccupied, and her kiss was perfunctory.
'Try not to
do anything to annoy your father,' she recommended. 'He's feeling a bit out of sorts this
evening.'
Oh God,
thought Susan, who had suffered ever since she could remember from those moods
of his.
'And change
into your pale blue,' Mrs Poulshot added. 'I want Uncle Eustace to see you at your
prettiest.'
A fat lot she
cared if Uncle Eustace thought her pretty!
And anyhow, she went on to reflect, as she climbed the stairs, what hope
was there of competing with someone who had been married, who had money, who
bought her clothes in Paris and was probably drenched - though oddly enough
Sebastian had never mentioned the fact - in the most indecent kind of scent.
She lit the
gas fire in her room, undressed and walked down half a flight to the bathroom.
The
pleasure of soaking in hot water was unpleasantly tempered by Mr Poulshot's insistence that none but carbolic soap should
ever be used in his household. The
result was that one came out of one's bath smelling, not like Mrs Esdaile, but like a newly washed dog. Susan sniffed at herself as she reached for
the towel, and made a wry face of disgust at the stink of her own cleanliness.
Sebastian's
room was on the opposite side of the landing to hers, and, knowing him absent,
she went boldly in, opened the top drawer of his dressing-table and took out
the safety-razor which he had bought two months before to keep down a still hypothetical
beard.
Meticulously,
as though preparing for an evening in a sleeveless gown and a night of passion,
she shaved her armpits, then picked out the telltale hairs and replaced the
razor in its box.