A Little Tea, a Little Chat

by Christina Stead

  He frowned. “Would I give my word and not do it? You don’t know me. You get the car, and I’ll see if you’re serious. I don’t want to start to get romantic about a woman who isn’t serious. I don’t even know you’ll divorce your husband. I’ve got something to lose, too.”

  She was amazed, saying, “But you’ve changed completely, Robbie. It’s a complete change of attitude.”

  “It was that blonde cow did it; I wasted too many years and too much money on a cheat like that. You have to save me from myself.”

  “I love you, Robbie. It would break me if you let me down now.”

  He smiled and began to glow, “You’re a dangerous woman: you don’t know what you do to me; if you want me you’ve only got to hold me.”

  All this conversation had been in a quiet bar where Myra felt at ease. She was so moved by him now, though, that she yielded to his fervor and went to his apartment for his “little tea and little chat.” The preluding had taken some time and Grant, while in his flat, suddenly remembered that that night Livy Wright was coming to town again. He dismissed the dark little beauty hastily, muttering, “I hope I haven’t hurt you, I want to be by myself, I want to think things over. I’ve got to adjust myself to this new life.” And so he induced her to leave the place in time. But this evening, cold, very early spring, without snow or wind, Livy telephoned to say that she did not feel well enough to come to town; and he must wait a few days for her.

  Grant decided to “celebrate his birthday” once more. Whenever he felt rebuffed by the world, he celebrated his birthday, when he became automatically the center of life. He called up several people and arranged a meeting in the Little Bar for an hour or two later. Without Livy, Mrs. Lawrence, or Mrs. Kent (now Mrs. Downs), he felt lost. The poor young women of his acquaintance were never invited to his expensive bars nor allowed to meet his better-living company. The Goodwins, of course, would be there with their lawyer Walker, now an intimate of his and with whom he was in on several deals.

  He told them that it was really his birthday and a woman was giving him a car, as a gift, for love: at last he was really loved. She was a rich woman, said he, but he had insisted on a secondhand car. He made sure that this news reached Peter Hoag. In the evening, later, he telephoned Myra Coppelius and honied her, telling her, above all, not to forget the car, that was his pledge, that was the thing that was to bring them together. By that he would see if she was in earnest about remaking his life for him, “You buy one, get me to look it over and I’ll give you a check.”

  The woman promised to do so as soon as she could; and he urged her, “Tomorrow, darling, tomorrow, I can’t wait to take a ride with you.”

  “But you want me to shop around, don’t you?”

  “Oh, yes, but hurry, hurry, I can’t wait to be happy, sweetie.”

  The following morning he received an express letter from the woman, a very small, scented, flowered card, telling him how much she loved him and signed only with her initials, M.C. He put it in his breast-pocket and kept taking it out, when no one was present, to read it again. He called up numerous girls this day, because he felt in bouncing health.

  26

  Grant meanwhile feared for his son Gilbert. The battle of Tunis was now raging and active war in the Pacific had begun. Gilbert himself kept asking for his removal to active service. Grant went often to Washington and made use of some of Peter Hoag’s contacts. Luck favored him, for Gilbert was transferred at about this time to the Signal Corps in Washington Boulevard, in Culver City. Here he worked out continuities for instruction films and for the first time seemed enthusiastic. He saw a “great future” for these films after the war, not only for factories and schools but for teaching American techniques abroad. Grant was perfectly happy and went round celebrating. He now saw friends with the idea of getting Gilbert transferred to Astoria, New York; and in the meantime wrote Gilbert pleasant letters promising to put up money for him in these technical films after the war. For the time being he was himself interested in them.

  Meanwhile, the crowd of parasites were ridiculing the old economical set of rooms he lived in in the hotel and urged him to live in better style. Black market days had begun. He bargained for a suite in the Pickwick Hotel, which he heard of through a friend of Miss Russell. It was a place in the middle Sixties, just off Fifth Avenue, east side, still fairly expensive and with an ornate bar, several approaches, anterooms and lobbies and with a restaurant. He settled for a rent of $245 monthly and reduced the cost to himself by offering the occasional use of room and bath to Walker, now a busy lawyer with the easy-money crowd. The room offered was to be Gilbert’s room when he came to town.

  Grant employed a respectable old English lady, Mrs. MacDonald, who, in return for good quarters and in consideration of his frequent absences and of her frailty, agreed to work for only $30 a month. He then made arrangements for Alfred Goodwin to use one of the spare bedrooms when he wanted to spend the night away from home, at a small rental. The apartment consisted of two sets of bedrooms and bathrooms, joined by a long hall inside the apartment, and separated by a large extravagantly furnished lounge or living room with a dining room across the hall adjoining the kitchen. The place had been taken on a very long lease by a friend of James Alexis, a South American, who had gone to a Madison Avenue decorator and picked out anything that gleamed or was burnished, such as silks, metals, tortoise-shell, porcelain, glass, and put all this together in the apartment. Later, this rich bazaar was sublet to a variety of tenants.

  The place was spacious, and Grant was at first very happy here. He had lost the blonde, he had begun a good life. He sometimes saw himself as living in this luxurious place for years and years, with Gilbert in the room at the end. He did not really intend Gilbert to go into films after the war. Gilbert had studied agriculture at Ohio State College and knew everything from the composition of soils to sowing by aeroplane and beekeeping; he showed a particular aptitude for beekeeping and had turned out six hundred pounds of honey in one month, more than anyone else in the college. Grant was enthusiastic enough about this to his friends, but what he was preserving in the young man was the long investment in his schooling and in his own hopes; he did not intend to have that investment go up in smoke on a battlefield. He had long ago drawn up his will, leaving the greater part to his elder son. He did not admire him, but he despised the younger boy and did not intend to let him touch his money till he, the younger, was about thirty-five. He then had to keep Gilbert by his side, to take hold of the estate when he died. He was obsessed with the idea that he would not live long. At the same time, during the war, he went on acquiring property abroad.

  He had recently acquired a magnificent manor house in England from some British who had fled from that country thinking its day was done; he believed that the destruction of war meant high prices for what houses were left and a rosy future for construction as well as for all other businesses but armaments. The manor house had been worth about ten thousand pounds before the war, or as Grant put it “pre-Dunkirk.” Grant had found out that there were plenty of hundred-pound notes in New York City at this time which could be bought for $175. Notes of this value could not be taken back to England, and said Grant to the “exiles,” This is a long-term bet on England. You say it’s through, I say I’ll take a chance; it will look reasonable if I give you, say, eight thousand pounds post-Dunkirk for a property worth ten thousand pre-Dunkirk and I am going to pay you one dollar seventy-five cents a pound. He paid fourteen thousand dollars thus for the property and figured that as the pound would most likely be inflated during the war, the price of the manor house would run up to thirty thousand pounds sterling. He at once offered the property to the Government for war-service and counted on getting rent and compensation for it during the war and on selling it immediately afterwards during the expected inflation.

  With the same sort of prospects he had acquired a property, half farm, half manor, in the Bordeaux country, bought from some French refugees who despaired
of their country’s future; likewise had an option to the title of a fine set of farm buildings built into a close, and the large farm and orchard, yielding mixed farm produce and fruit and especially cheese, again acquired from French refugees, now largely established in New York. This farm was in Normandy in the rich Vallée d’Auge, a countryside he knew well, being near Le Havre, great cotton port in normal times. He had a house in Baden-Baden, got from a bankrupt friend of Laura’s before the war, and a row of slum cottages in Dublin, having a high yield, and requiring little money spent upon repairs. The last he only mentioned in a roundabout way, in telling a romantic story of his mother’s poverty, some remittance sent by him that arrived in wartime, to save an ousted family; and how a slum roof of his own was heaven to them, and such things; and money that had come to him, from a poor man, dying, because inspired perhaps by Heaven or Fate; he had saved this father’s slum family, and such things; and then came out, the row of tenements in Dublin. He had a brownstone house in 124th Street, in New York, which he had acquired when he first knew the bridge was coming there; it was still little better than a flophouse, but he employed a poor relative there, of anarchist background, a woman spotlessly honest, to run it; and hoped for better. This house was rented out to various kinds of workers, mostly men and women living alone. The only drawback was that his relative the anarchist would often allow the rent to go into arrears for as much as six weeks, having an austere, lackadaisical humanity for these people. Nevertheless, he made a profit even out of this, telling his intimates (not those of pecuniary mind who would think him mad) how he ran a place somewhere in town for free souls and never asked the rent.

  The house in Rome had been claimed entirely by Laura, who had society connections, to escape confiscation. She was Italian, her friendly ex-husband fascist. Laura would probably return it after the war, but might not. He fancied that if she turned out to be a spy or a collaborator of the fascists, through her previous sentimental and marriage connections, the house would be confiscated by the democratic conquerors and on his previous ambiguous title he could claim it. The slum houses always paid. The house in the St. Lawrence, which Edda called Hoot-Owl Hostel, which had caught his eye and upon which he had Spatchwood and others unknown to Spatchwood doing work, he might or might not buy. He had a simple, efficient system. He employed several persons upon each job, writing to each one an exhortation, a vague promise, and a denunciation of the others. Each one at once furiously set to work to do all he asked. One could not call it corruption. It was, in his mind, merely a technique for trying out situations to see if they were to his benefit.

  If he had a financial or even moral loss in one of these small projections, he arranged to recoup it, financial and morally, through one of his other hangers-on. He knew he would have to pay something for the Spatchwood house, for he had written about several of the details himself, for example about the bronze bell which it had been his notion to hang in a small turret in the roof. The turret needed strengthening and the cost of a bronze bell with a bellrope to hang down through the house and into his bed chamber was more than he could have supposed. He had explained this curious bronze bell affair to Livy Wright, in a moment of confidence, when he had been promising to take her to the St. Lawrence house and live with her there, away from the world forever, by saying, “A private house is always dangerous, some crazy man could come around, envy you for your money, you never did him any harm, but go and argue with him; he’ll hide and shoot you when you’re least thinking of it—the middle of the night. He’ll get in somehow. He’s crazy. Their brains work twice as fast. I know it’s all imagination, my dearest girl, but suppose it is my whim to have a bronze bell, then I have a bronze bell with a bellrope hanging near my ear.”

  And Livy had knocked the whole thing on the head by answering, “Like having a noose always hanging at your ear, not for me! But, Jesus, Robbie, you must be afraid of someone, to think of a thing like that.”

  “No, no, my dear girl, just a knowledge of human nature.”

  “I’m not going to any Spatchwood Coney Island, you can kiss me good-bye if that’s your idea.”

  The feelings that had prompted him to think of the St. Lawrence house had passed away too. Now he was quite content in the Pickwick Hotel, and merely told Livy, who was now his closest friend, “Sell your business, my dearest woman, and come and live with me and be my love in the Pickwick: there’s room for you and for me. We’ll get married. I’m tired of gypsying, sweetie, you’ve converted me, I’ll play a tune on my own hearthstone and I want a woman like you to hear it: that’s all I want, a woman to whom my tune is always sweet.”

  What was lost in his nature, the good and tender, appeared when he said these things, his eye and cheek were clear and healthy, his red tender lips were inviting. Even Livy, turbulent and suspicious, believed in him. He was very pleased with this new line and repeated it to all his women, to Myra Coppelius too. He teased Mrs. Coppelius every day to buy her car and even sent her telegrams about it when he went to Philadelphia to visit Livy, or elsewhere, or to see a female correspondent of his in New Orleans. He sent weekly remittances to this woman, a woman of the lowest kind of life, called Nila, and to her mother. In return he received news that interested him about personalities in his old business city.

  Meanwhile, through his long evenings, he briefly considered Livy and Myra Coppelius, in turn, as a new wife or wife-mistress. When he was bored with these brief images he turned to the Goodwins, the Flacks, others, and proposed sharing the place with them—Betty Goodwin, Edda Flack, wives and daughters of others, would live with him, see security and comfort him in return for shelter for their nearest and dearest. To them he said, “Perhaps I’m a born bachelor, a man has a headache, and who is there to give him an aspirin? I need a quiet home and decent friends around the table at night, and to listen, while I play my violin on my own hearth, eh?”

  Then he would laugh magically, the spirit coming to him, stretch out his arms, throw his head around, manage to get an answering smile from his harassed audience. He would at once cry out, “Rejoice with me, we’ll get out of town and breathe clean air. I’ll fiddle a bit on my own hearthstone! We’ll be happy. Let’s be happy. No women. No life in bars, we’ll study. We’ll study agriculture, social construction, something that’s good. I won’t waste the few years left to me.”

  A little later, the same day, the next day, he would sing his gypsy pastoral to others: he never wrote it, but he would gladly invite occasional poor writers and poets introduced to him to write it, either as a play or a novel. Fascinated by his own romancero he imagined that when written it would sweep the country and make a fortune for them all. They all at first ate with wonder the humble bread given by the Maecenas to the poor, and for these he had another story of a glittering salon—in Rome, elsewhere, sometimes even with Laura there.

  Meanwhile, Grant told Myra Coppelius that he had intended the Pickwick Hotel apartment for her, but that his boy would soon be visiting him and he wanted to break the affair to him gradually; the boy was devoted to his mother, an angel, a sweet woman and a perfect mother. Grant added, “In the meantime, the little car will be our guarantee; and as soon as I get the damn fool out of town, he’s all right but the wrong end of a horse, I’ll take to gypsying on my own hearthstone and we’ll take week ends in the country in our little car.”

  Mrs. Coppelius bought the car, and as Grant urgently begged her to buy it in her own name for the moment, as he had momentary difficulty in releasing his funds, owing to his partner’s unfortunate speculations in foreign markets, she managed to borrow the money for a part payment from two friends. It was only for two weeks at the outside, said Grant.

  27

  Gilbert came to town from the West Coast. He had changed, he knew women, and begged his father to take a companion for his lonely life. Gilbert said, “For instance, there was that Mrs. Kent. She was a lovely woman. I don’t expect you to live without a single weakness, Dad.”

  Grant listene
d to all such remarks with an air of embarrassment, later roared with laughter as he repeated it to his friends, always nodding his head at the end and saying, “Good boy, though, good boy! But the wrong half of a horse. Good boy, though. No harm. Ha-ha. Thinks I’m a virgin. Wants to help me out.”

  At other times he wanted to punch the young man and restrained his considerable strength. Before any week was over, Gilbert would say in all companies, “Dad’s trying to get rid of me and I’m not enjoying myself. All I can do is get drunk and all he can do is take a little stretch. I believe Dad stretches five hours a day, not to mention the evenings. Then he invites women for a little chat, he doesn’t understand why he doesn’t get women!”

  And Grant, “Rubbish, thinking things out, lots of correspondence, don’t understand my boy, shocks in business: don’t care for night-life either, Presbyterian upbringing. Mother a millhand, your grandmother a millhand.”

  The intercourse of the two men was one of long desperate tedium broken by sudden quarrels. Grant’s unreal conversation with his son was reduced to wise saws and his own romantic stand-bys, with an occasional jest full of common sense. The young man, of an upright, relentless nature, not yet forced, tried, hardened or corrupted, responded to the covert licentiousness of his father by fits of drunkenness. The older man feared drunkenness as he feared madness, ecstasy, fainting, sickness, solitude, death. At bottom, he dreaded Azrael, sign of a man who has not many years, the body’s sure knowledge. The boy did not know it, yet found out his weakness and began to tease his father with it. When his father made him sit for hours in Manetti’s or the White Bar without reason—for the young fellow still did not know that Grant was looking for women and cronies—he would drink himself into a fierce, hectoring, arrogant mood, in which he lost all shame and began to probe his father’s character, talk about his age and worn-out looks, his friends and empty life.