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 lifelong prejudice against America and Americans had been transformed into enthusiastic admiration ever since, at the age of sixty-five, he had visited California and seen the flappers of Hollywood and the bathing beauties on the Pacific beaches. Lucy was nearly thirty; but the General had known her for years; he continued to regard her as hardly more than the young girl of his first memories. For him, she was still about seventeen. He patted her hand again. ‘We’ll have a good talk,’ he said.
‘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 guardsman, 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 wangled him into. A waster, an idler; drinking and drabbing; making his mother miserable, sponging on her, disgracing the family name. Anid 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 Genleral 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 Harrow,’ it began, ‘passed out from Sandhurst at the bottom of the list, he had a most distinguished career in the Army, rising durng the War to a high post in the Military Intelligence Department.’ The way he rolled out this anticipated obituary was really magnificent. He was thne Times made audible. And then his remarks on Military Intelligence in general! ‘If you look up “Intelligence” in the new volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica,’ he had said, ‘you’ll find it classified under the following three heads: Intelligence, Human; Intelligence, Animal; Intelligence, Military. My stepfather’s a perfect specimen of Intelligence, Military.’
‘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 he 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 these creatures.’ She waved her hand comprehensively. The words evoked, for Walter, the memory of hideous evenings passed with Lucy in the company of the disreputable and uncultured—tipsy at 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 smi
led, 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 middleaged 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 ‘1 come to see him to-morrow afternoon,’ she said.
‘Tomorrow afternoon.’
‘Between four and halfpast. 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 Dublin. Her father was that Mr. Justice Brabant, so well known for his table talk and his witticisms from the bench. Moreover she had married into conversation. D’Exergillod had been a disciple of Robert de Montesquiou and had won the distinction of being mentioned in Sodome et Gomorrhe by Marcel Proust. Molly would have had to be a talker by marriage, if she had not already been one by birth. Nature and environment had conspired to make her a professional athlete of the tongue. Like all conscientious professionals, she was not content to be merely talented. She was industrious, she worked hard to develop her native powers. Malicious friends said that she could be heard practising her paradoxes in bed, before she got up in the morning. She herself admitted that she kept diaries in which she recorded, as well as the complicated history of her own feelings and sensations, every trope and anecdote and witticism that caught her fancy. Did she refresh her memory with a glance at these chronicles each time she dressed to go out to dinner? The same friends who had heard her practising in bed had also found her, like an examinee the night before his ordeal, laboriously mugging up Jean Cocteau’s epigrams about art and Mr. Birrell’s after-dinner stories and W. B. Yeats’s anecdotes about George Moore and what Charlie Chaplin had said to and of her last time she was in Hollywood. Like all professional talkers Molly was very economical with her wit and wisdom. There are not enough bons mots in existence to provide any industrious conversationalist with a new stock for every social occasion. Though extensive, Molly’s repertory was, like that of other more celebrated talkers, limited. A good housewife, she knew how to hash up the conversational remains of last night’s dinner to furnish out this morning’s lunch. Monday’s funeral baked meats did service for Tuesday’s wedding.
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 week-enders 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 decollete.
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 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 unexpectedly 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, malgre 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 the ntimental 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 an
d 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 selfsatisfaction. 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 on 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.
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