Collected Works of E M Delafield

by E M Delafield

  “O.K.,” said Oscar, rushing up to the telephone.

  Mervyn Spenser, slightly dazed, stood up.

  “Old boy,” said Lou van Allen. “I’d like to have you under contract to the Britannia Film Company. Name your own figure, and Oscar’ll fix you up with a three-year contract. What we need in the motion-picture business is guys like you — guys with vision.”

  He shook Mervyn’s hand with the utmost cordiality, and went off with Abe Blomberg, saying that what he needed — what they both needed — was a drink.

  “Then you’ll let us have your stuff by eight o’clock to-morrow morning,” said Oscar to Mervyn grinning. “And if you’ll step into my office, I’ll have that contract ready for you. Old boy, you’re a made man.”

  “It’s more than I deserve,” said Mervyn modestly.

  But in his own mind, as he went out to telegraph to his mother to reserve rooms at the best hotel in Brighton, he did not really think it was more than he deserved.

  On the contrary.

  IT’S ALL TOO DIFFICULT

  “THEY’VE said that I must take you over there to tea,” Horatio Kelly told his cousin, Mrs. Amberley.

  He said it with a mixture of awe and triumph, as though talking of an invitation from the Grand Lama of Tibet. But so far as Mrs. Amberley could make out, he was only talking about two very rich bachelors of middle-age sharing a villa at Santa Margharita.

  “It’s very nice of them,” she said placidly. “Shall we be able to take Jennie?”

  “I’m afraid not. They aren’t very good with children,” said Cousin Horatio firmly.

  “Well, it’s their villa, of course, and if they haven’t asked her — but they wouldn’t have to do anything about her, you know. Just let her sit there quietly, or play in the garden, and drink a cup of tea. Jennie is always quiet.”

  “I know, I know. But they — well, I’m afraid they don’t care about children.”

  “Don’t they? What a pity. Not either of them?”

  “Not either of them.”

  “I only asked because so many elderly bachelors are particularly charming with children.

  But, of course, I quite understand.”

  Horatio Kelly looked as though he scarcely believed this — and indeed it was quite untrue. Mrs. Amberley thought it was both strange and unfortunate that any two people should care so little about children as to be unwilling to let a harmless one of nine years old come and see their beautiful villa, and sit in their shady garden.

  Still, perhaps Cousin Horatio was exaggerating the attitude of his friends. It was evident that he was anxious not to offend their susceptibilities in any way. He made as much fuss, Mrs. Amberley thought privately, about this business of taking her there to tea as if he thought she’d never been out to tea anywhere in her life.

  However, Cousin Horatio had been very kind, both to her and to Jennie, and it was he who had helped Mrs. Amberley with all her arrangements when the doctors had said that Jennie ought to spend the next few months in a hot climate. Horatio knew Italy well, and had recommended the cheap pension on the coast, and now here he was, breaking his journey south all on purpose to see how they were getting on.

  Mrs. Amberley hadn’t known anything about his two friends at Santa Margharita until Horatio had announced that he must go and look them up. He hadn’t suggested that she should go with him, and she hadn’t expected that he would. Mrs. Amberley was not very young, and not at all smart or good-looking, and she had no social ambitions. Nor had she any clothes worth speaking about, or money to buy them. And Jennie’s illness had cost pounds and pounds.

  She had been surprised, rather than gratified, when Horatio had announced that he was taking her to tea at the Santa Margharita villa.

  “Their garden is exquisite,” he said impressively.

  Mrs. Amberley replied that she would very much like to see it.

  “And so is the villa. Every single thing in it is perfect of its kind. Absolutely perfect.”

  “Really?” said Mrs. Amberley.

  “They’ve got the most wonderful collection of white jade.”

  “Oh, have they?” said Mrs. Amberley, trying to put a new inflection into her voice.

  “In a way, I wish we were going there to lunch, because the food is always marvellous. Their chef used to be with the King of the Belgians.”

  “Good gracious,” said Mrs. Amberley mildly.

  “The last time I was there both of them were dieting.”

  “What a pity. Tell me, Cousin Horatio, are they always together? You speak as though they were. Haven’t they any relations, or do they just prefer not to live with them, and to share this villa?”

  “Claude never speaks about his family — I don’t think he ever sees any of them. I don’t know where his people came from originally. Carol — he’s the younger of the two by a good many years — Carol sees his father and mother from time to time, I believe. They don’t get on.

  His mother is a South American, but quite anglicized. Enormously rich.”

  “And the other one — Claude — he’s rich too?”

  “Oh, very rich. Immensely rich. In fact, much richer than Carol. They have everything in the world they want.”

  “How very delightful,” said Mrs. Amberley, with a sigh. “And what do they do with all this money?”

  “They have a flat in Paris — quite perfect — and a place somewhere in the Rockies, and then this villa at Santa Margharita. And of course they travel a good deal. I believe they pay a sort of retaining fee at the Carlton or the Savoy — I forget which — for a suite that they can use whenever they happen to be in London.”

  “That must be very expensive,” Mrs. Amberley found herself saying automatically, unable to credit anybody in the world with a financial stability so impregnable.

  “It doesn’t matter to Claude. Not even to Carol, probably.”

  Mrs. Amberley thought to herself, not for the first time, that the ways of Providence were very strange.

  Here was she, a widow with an only child threatened by tuberculosis, scarcely able to afford their pension in the cheap boarding-house where they were to spend the next six months, and there were two men who were apparently quite unattached, each one possessed of an enormous fortune.

  “I’m looking forward to meeting them,” she said politely. “But I wish we were taking Jennie.”

  She wished it even more as Cousin Horatio’s hired car turned in at a stone gateway smothered in crimson roses, and began to climb a winding path bordered with shady ilex-trees and flowering shrubs.

  “Lovely,” she echoed the admiring comments of Cousin Horatio.

  The villa, dazzling white, showing through curtains of Bougainvillaea, roses and climbing geraniums, stood high on the hill overlooking the sea.

  “Oh, what a view!” cried Mrs. Amberley almost involuntarily.

  “Isn’t it? But it’s ruined for them, Claude says. You see that little church spire?”

  Mrs. Amberley craned her neck.

  “I think I do. Very tiny, over there to the left?”

  “That’s it. They can’t bear it. The spire is out of the true. It isn’t quite straight. Claude says it ruins the whole view for them. So they’ve had another view cut, through the trees, on the other side — looking east. I expect they’ll show it to you.”

  Mrs. Amberley, appalled, made no rejoinder.

  There was a terrace in front of the villa, and she caught a glimpse of silver water, gleaming marble, and a riot of flowering shrubs, before her attention was claimed by her hosts.

  They stood in the tessellated marble hall of word. Instead, she timidly admired a slender spinet of exquisite workmanship.

  “We got that in Paris. We thought it was sympathetic,” Claude explained.

  They wandered into another room, filled with equally numerous and beautiful treasures, and to the uninformed and nervous comments of Mrs. Amberley, her hosts responded wearily, telling her where their treasures had been garnered, usually
from spots immensely distant. Most things they called “sympathetic” or “amusing.” A huge, and rather grotesque, china poodle on the landing — for the villa was two-storied — Claude labelled as “sincere.”

  On the opposite corner of the same landing hung a carved ivory crucifix, and from that Mrs. Amberley averted her startled eyes.

  There were four or five upstairs rooms, each one with a bathroom of its own, and here at least Mrs. Amberley could cry aloud freely her uncritical delight in rose-coloured or jade-green marble, crystal bowls, and chromium taps....

  “We’ve only got four guest-rooms,” said Carol. “That door leads to our room, and there are no more.”

  “Our room,” thought Mrs. Amberley.

  It was not shown to her.

  They went downstairs again, and into the dining-room. An old silver-gilt tea-equipage stood on the marquetry table. Claude took his seat behind it, and Carol sat at the other end.

  Cousin Horatio praised the China tea. It was wonderful tea, Mrs. Amberley realized, although she would have preferred old-fashioned milk and sugar with it to lemon.

  Conversation was not at all easy. She could think of nothing whatever to say, and Carol, handing her a small dish of scones, looked so terribly unhappy that she could hardly refrain from asking him what was the matter.

  Suddenly a queer conviction came over her, Heaven knew why or from whence, that Carol was unhappy because of Claude. Something was dreadfully wrong.

  She stole an agitated glance towards the head of the table.

  Claude was handing a pale porcelain cup to his friend, and he did so without looking at him — with his head, indeed, ostentatiously turned away. And on Carol’s sallow, long-nosed face was that air of sick misery that may sometimes be seen on the face of a dog that has been brutally kicked.

  For a second the room seemed to reel round Mrs. Amberley and the surrounding air to buzz with implications that were gone before her unwilling mind could grasp them.

  “... the films,” Claude was saying in his cold, carefully modulated voice, “the films don’t enter into our life at all.”

  Had he said life or lives?

  “You don’t care about them?” said Cousin Horatio — who loved them, himself, as Mrs. Amberley knew. “But you have so many other interests, and after all, the screen is still in its infancy, artistically speaking.”

  And as Claude answered vaguely with a faint smile and a gesture that lightly brushed away the whole world of films, another silence fell.

  Mrs. Amberley, whose social conscience was of the sterner school of the late Victorian age, felt obliged to break it.

  “How lovely your roses are. The crimson ones over the gateway, I mean. Though these are very beautiful too,” she added, looking at the white roses that stood in a wide crystal bowl on the table.

  “We only have the white ones indoors,” Carol explained, “never the crimson.”

  “They’re beautiful,” repeated Mrs. Amberley, “but I like the crimson ones, personally.”

  Carol shook his head.

  “It’s such a brutal shade,” he murmured, half closing his eyes. “We find them quite horrible.”

  In that case, thought Mrs. Amberley, they might just as well let her take back some of their crimson roses to Jennie. But she felt no inclination to ask. In fact, she felt but little inclination to say anything at all.

  Presently the other three began to talk about people, or — to be accurate — the possessions of other people. The amusing Paul Lamerie that the Princess had acquired, and the divine bit of jade belonging to Mrs. James P. van Allen of which her horrible Californian house was so wholly unworthy.

  Carol referred once to his mother — she had, he said, paid fabulous sums for a rather engaging soapstone horse — so he had been told.

  “Haven’t you seen it?” Cousin Horatio enquired.

  “No,” said Carol. “No.”

  He turned to Mrs. Amberley.

  “My mother and I seldom meet. I have avoided her for over two years now.”

  “But why?” said Mrs. Amberley blankly.

  Carol shuddered, and then emitted a faint, vixenish titter.

  “She talks only about herself,” he explained. “Too boring. One shouldn’t ever be bored, don’t you feel?”

  The only reply of Mrs. Amberley, who was feeling deeply shocked, was to ask if she might have another cup of tea. (She would have liked a scone, but no one else was eating anything.)

  “But indeed!” said Claude.

  He turned his head aside, as though looking at something on the floor, and uttered, on a high unnatural note, the single word, “Ring.”

  Carol rang the bell, and when the servant appeared, Claude gave the order for more hot water.

  Mrs. Amberley received and drank her second cup of tea in great discomfort.

  The conversation, to which she was scarcely able to attend, was carried on mainly between Cousin Horatio and Claude.

  Carol sat, hunched and sallow, fiddling with a magnificent carved amethyst seal ring that he wore on his left hand.

  After tea Cousin Horatio asked whether they might not go round the garden.

  Mrs. Amberley was shown the fountain, and the special view cut to the east, and a graceful marble pavilion that Claude had had built the previous summer, and the loggia, and the roses — she noticed that the obnoxious “brutal” colour was absent — and all the other flowers.

  “It is beautiful,” she repeated a great many times.

  She was relieved when the inspection was over and they were back at the villa again, preparing to take their leave.

  Horatio was asking if they were staying long at the villa.

  “We take the plane to Paris the day after to-morrow,” Claude replied. “There’s a divine concert that we must hear. We shall be back next day.”

  “Their flat in Paris — Place de l’Etoile—” began Cousin Horatio.

  “We shall go to the Meurice,” Carol interrupted. “It would be too fearfully difficult to organize the servants, and the food, and the flowers, at the flat just for two nights.”

  “You don’t keep it ready, then?” hazarded Mrs. Amberley.

  “There’s a caretaker there, of course,” Carol said, “but she wouldn’t know exactly how we like things. We always bring everything from here, for Paris — but for two nights, it really is all too difficult.” His face twisted, in a grimace of utter misery.

  As they drove down the hill, Mrs. Amberley remarked thoughtfully that Cousin Horatio’s friends did not seem to be very happy.

  “No. They never do. I think Carol especially—” Cousin Horatio appeared to check himself in what he was about to say. He repeated instead:

  “He seems to find everything so difficult.”

  Mrs. Amberley, thinking of doctors’ bills, and Jennie’s education, and her overdraft at the bank in London, marvelled silently.

  THE YOUNG ARE IN EARNEST

  1

  FOR years and years, Oliver Innes had belonged to Mrs. Bannister. Their friends asked them to dinner together, and to stay in country houses for the same week-ends. It was an accepted thing that when Mrs. Bannister entertained friends at her small house in Chelsea, Oliver Innes should act as informal host. In the same way, when Innes gave a dinner-party at his flat in Jermyn Street, it was always Lorna Bannister who sat opposite to him.

  There had never been any scandal talked about them, although people wondered sometimes why they had not married, since Lorna had been ten years a widow, and Innes was unmarried.

  Each was discreet and cautious, and neither was given to making confidences.

  It was generally supposed that Innes had been refused by Mrs. Bannister, but that he had not given up hope.

  Only two people in the world knew that Oliver Innes had never asked Lorna Bannister to marry him — and those were the two most nearly concerned. And of those two, only one knew what Mrs. Bannister would have replied, had so momentous a question ever been put to her.

 
Lorna was thirty-nine, and usually managed to look a great deal less, for she was intelligent about her clothes, her hair, and complexion, and had a lovely figure, very slim and upright. She played no active games, aware that to do so would display the very slight absence of suppleness, the all but imperceptible rigidity, of which she only was now conscious in herself.

  Her charm lay in her good looks, her good breeding, and her powers of conversation.

  Innes had often told her that she was the most stimulating person that he had ever known.

  Their relationship, intellectually and emotionally satisfying, was a central factor in the life of each, but Lorna was aware that to Oliver Innes his career at the Bar came before anything else. Sometimes she was able to help him with a useful introduction, for she had lived in London all her life and had a very wide and varied circle of acquaintances.

  Her preference, she smilingly admitted, was for literary and artistic people, and Innes, knowing them through her, followed her lead and accepted many invitations to the houses of successful writers, dramatists, and artists. He was sufficiently cultivated in mind to enjoy much that he found there, and, in any case, the presence of Lorna herself acted as a very sufficient magnet.

  Innes had been in Scotland, and Lorna paying visits in the West of England, for nearly six weeks, when they met again in London, in the hottest week of an unusually hot September.

  She was lunching with him at his club.

  His eyes rested with evident approval on her small, silvery hat, with a tiny diamond bow in front, her plain, slim grey tailor-made, and pale grey shoes and stockings.

  Innes leant across the small table, smiling at her.

  “How do you manage always to make every other woman look untidy, by comparison? You’re the coolest-looking and most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen in London.”

  It was speeches such as these, made at rare intervals, that caused Lorna to feel that the possession of such a lover was worth more to her than even the security of marriage, a home, and children.

  “There are some occasions,” she murmured, “for which it’s worth while taking quite a lot of trouble to look one’s best. This is one of them.”