‘And did you enjoy your visit to the pictures this afternoon?’ said the German girl, when they were settled again and were lighting cigarettes. She said this with a certain arch, suggestive, and old-fashioned air which was characteristic of her.
Thirty-eight years of age, with blonde hair, a fair complexion, a reasonably good figure, and a face which, with its large blue eyes, pinched nose, and fullish mouth, would not be noticed in the street as attractive or otherwise, or as indicating any age more or less than her own, Vicki Kugelmann gave forth a faintly old-fashioned, or rather out-of-date, atmosphere, which Miss Roach had never been able fully to analyse. It might have been caused by her hair, which was actually ‘shingled’ in the manner of 1925: it might have been her clothes, which, though neat and becoming enough, had an off-fashionable and rather second-hand air: it might have been her manner, her quick facial expressions, the too industrious use of her eyes and mouth to express surprise, sympathy, or resignation – her habit of making moues. It might have been her way of powdering her nose in a hand-mirror or smoking a cigarette with a cigarette-holder, both of which she would do with more fuss, precision, and ceremony than was usual, as if these things were novelties to which she had been lately introduced and by which she was still fascinated. In all these ways she impressed Miss Roach as being slightly, and somewhat naively, behind the times; though Miss Roach often thought that it might be less that she was behind the times than that she was behind the customs and idiom of the country in which she was residing, that these mannerisms arose from the fact that she was to a certain extent a fish out of water – in a word, a ‘foreigner’S.
‘And how did you know I was at the pictures?’ asked Miss Roach.
‘Ah. I know. I know everything,’ said Vicki, in the same mocking and suggestive way, and taking a puff at her cigarette she threw her head back and puffed the smoke out in a thin, premeditated stream, as though aiming at some precise target in the air. She then neatly tapped at her cigarette over an ash-tray – doing this simply for the sake of neatly doing so, for there was as yet hardly any ash upon her cigarette.
Her English accent was curiously in keeping with her cigarette smoking – a little too excellently polished, a little too much at ease, and conscious of being so. Her skill here, however, was remarkable, and could only have been acquired by one who had spent, as she had, the greater part of her adult years in England. It was, when first meeting her, only in the consciousness that she was speaking English extraordinarily well that the listener realised that she was not English.
‘No – how did you know?’ asked Miss Roach, genuinely puzzled and interested, for she had not as yet said a word to the German girl about the Lieutenant, and could not conceive how this last meeting with him had become public property already.
‘Ah – I have my spies,’ said Vicki, and then added, ‘As a matter of fact, I was the other side of the street and saw you going in.’
‘Oh – really?’ said Miss Roach. ‘I didn’t see you.’
‘No – I know you didn’t. But I saw you.’ And at this Vicki again needlessly tapped at her cigarette over the ash-tray, and then looked at her cigarette in an amused and mysterious way.
It was now quite clear to Miss Roach that Vicki was deliberately making a ‘thing’ of her visit to the pictures with an American, and she thought this rather absurd and characteristic of the other’s slightly old-fashioned, ‘foreign’ psychology. On the other hand, was she not in reality fully justified? Was there not, if all was told, a very positive and mature ‘thing’ already in being? But how could Vicki know this?
‘As a matter of fact,’ Vicki went on, ‘I have seen you with him before. I have seen you sitting in here.’
This was a double surprise to Miss Roach; firstly because, quite unknown to herself, she had been seen in here with the Lieutenant by someone who knew her; and secondly because of the rather strange item of news accidentally furnished, that the German girl had been in here apart from her. She would hardly have come in here alone, so who had brought her in? A man? It flashed across Miss Roach’s mind that she had, conceivably, created a false mental picture of her new friend, that the lonely ‘German spy’ she had taken under her protection might, conceivably, lead a life of her own, with other protectors. But the thought passed, and she said, ‘Oh – so you’ve seen me in here, have you?’
‘Oh yes,’ said Vicki, ‘I have seen you in here. It seems you have adopted your pet American already, my dear . . . No?’
Again Miss Roach was slightly taken aback – partly because Vicki had unexpectedly called her ‘my dear’ for the first time in their acquaintanceship, and partly because of the boldness and outspokenness of the remark itself – her direct allusion to a sexual aspect of life, and her jaunty assumption of its normality, not only for men and women in general, but for Miss Roach in particular. Hitherto Vicki had never opened her mouth with her save shyly and reticently to speak of purely impersonal or sorrowful matters.
‘Well,’ she said, not quite knowing what to say, ‘I don’t know about adopted . . .’
‘Kidnapped, then, perhaps?’ said Vicki. ‘You are a fast worker, my dear.’
This time Miss Roach could hardly believe her ears. To be called, at her age, with her physical equipment, in Thames Lockdon of all places, and by Vicki Kugelmann of all people, a ‘fast worker’! As if she were a young, attractive girl, who went about with and was neither incapable nor guiltless of enticing men! And that ‘my dear’ again. And ‘kidnapped’ – what an extraordinary expression! This indeed was a new Vicki Kugelmann. She also realised that Vicki was deliberately airing her fearfully outmoded idiomatic virtuosity. ‘Kidnapped’, and ‘fast worker’, along with ‘my dear’, all bore that faintly grotesque stamp of 1925 which she had so often observed in her.
She was not quite sure whether she altogether liked and approved of this new Vicki Kugelmann, or whether she did not. It then occurred to her that Vicki’s sole object in all this was that of pleasing, encouraging, and flattering her friend, and that she was partially succeeding in her object, inasmuch as she (Miss Roach) was already, and in spite of a warning voice inside telling her to do otherwise, feeling slightly pleased, encouraged, and flattered.
‘Well, as a matter of fact,’ she said, ‘he’s just staying in the same boarding-house, that’s all. Or rather, he comes in for meals.’
‘Oh well,’ said Vicki, ‘one has to meet a person somewhere, doesn’t one?’
Finding Vicki thus relentless in attack, Miss Roach now decided to counter-attack.
‘And who were you in here with,’ she said, her tone and looks adding a sort of humorous ‘pray’ to her words, ‘when you saw me?’
Thus, in addition to going over to the attack, she was able directly to seek the answer to a question which actually filled her with some curiosity.
‘Me? . . .’ said Vicki. ‘Oh – only Mr. Jordan . . .’
And by the use of the word ‘only’, it seemed to Miss Roach that Vicki intended to convey that Mr. Jordan – being the middle-aged vet in the town by whom she was employed – was not by any means an American, or anything like one, was not really, in the strict sense of the word, a ‘man’ at all.
At this, a slightly disturbing thing happened to Miss Roach: she experienced a definite sense of relief and pleasure. She was disturbed because of the apparent implications of this feeling. Was it within the bounds of possibility that she was jealous – that she was pleased because Vicki did not, like herself, have an American, did not, after all, come in here with ‘men’? For the moment she could think of no other explanation. Then she realised that this was not jealousy of the common sort: that it arose only from the thought that her budding friendship with Vicki might go awry or not materialise as she had hoped. It was not that she grudged, or could in her nature ever grudge, anyone having men friends: it was simply that if Vicki was the sort of person who attracted and whose secret main interest in life was men, then there would not be, after all, any basis for a
genuine companionship with Miss Roach, whose main interest it was not and could not, for obvious reasons, ever be. It was not a question of envy: it was a question of fear of having been mistaken in a specific type of person.
Miss Roach, glad thus to have explained this feeling to her entire satisfaction, was destined, however, to receive something of a shock in Vicki’s next remark.
‘At least,’ said Vicki, ‘I think it was Mr. Jordan . . . the time I saw you.’
Which quite clearly meant, of course, that instead of having come in here on one occasion only, and on that occasion with her employer, she had come in here several times, presumably with several people, for she could not remember the individual she had been with when she had seen Miss Roach. Something slightly mischievous in her tone struck Miss Roach, also, that she was deliberately trying to convey this impression, and desired to be further questioned. It looked, indeed, almost as if she were fishing for some sort of return of the subtle flattery she had been dispensing to Miss Roach. Though she was not really enjoying this conversation, and would have preferred to lead it into other channels, she could not but oblige.
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘So you’ve been in here with a lot of people, have you?’
‘Oh – I don’t know about a lot,’ said Vicki. ‘A few . . .’
And again her tone and faintly smiling look suggested that she would not object to having further secrets extracted from her.
‘You know,’ said Miss Roach, ‘I’ve got an idea that it’s probably you who’re the fast worker – not me.’
There was a slight pause before Vicki answered.
‘Me? A fast worker?’ she then said, twirling the stem of her glass in her hand, and looking amusedly at it. ‘Oh no . . . Not fast . . . Slow but sure . . . That is your Vicki . . . Slow but sure.’
If one multiplied her immediate reaction to this remark a hundred times or so, one might say that Miss Roach’s hair stood on end. Her feeling was one of shame as much as shock – shame at the awful complacency of the ‘Slow but sure’ and at the atrocious narcissistic use of ‘your Vicki’.
What, in the name of heaven, did this mean? She had been prepared to visualise and accept Vicki as one in whom certain men might well be or become interested – but what was this? She was, it seemed, setting herself up as a sort of seductress. Miss Roach looked at her. Was she, perhaps, a seductress? She might be, but for the life of her Miss Roach couldn’t see it. She saw nothing but an ordinary, rather badly dressed, foreign-looking woman in her late thirties, with rather nice blue eyes, and a pinched nose, and rather nice-coloured hair – the sort of woman who might, indeed, seduce some odd, elderly man who knew her (in rather the same way as Miss Roach had seduced the accountant in her firm), but whose immediate impact upon anyone, man or woman, seeing her in public or meeting her in private, would amount to zero. And now this femme fatale had appeared upon the scene, whose self-confessed deadly methods were slow but sure! The thought occurred to Miss Roach that she was, perhaps, a little sex-mad. Or had she been drinking before she came in here, and was she slightly drunk? She had arrived unaccountably (and unapologetically) late, and this might well be the explanation.
Whatever the answer, Miss Roach now had a definite feeling that this new Vicki Kugelmann was not quite the one she had bargained for, and that the friendship was not likely to develop on quite the lines she had hoped. In fact, she was not quite sure, if conversations of this sort were going to be the order of the day, that she would be absolutely happy in having Miss Kugelmann staying in the same boarding-house with her. This, in its turn, reminded her that she had promised to speak to Mrs. Payne about this very matter. She had failed to do so, and sooner or later she had to make some excuse for her failure. She decided that there was no time like the present, and that this would also serve to change the subject.
‘Oh – by the way,’ she said, ‘you know I was going to talk to Mrs. Payne – round at my place . . .’
‘Ah yes? Mrs. Payne?’ said Vicki, suddenly sitting up, and looking at Miss Roach with the utmost interest.
‘Well, I was going—’
‘No. Don’t go on. I have a surprise!’ Vicki put forth an admonishing finger with one hand, and finished off her drink with the other. ‘I have a surprise! . . . Now. What are you going to have? The same again?’
‘A surprise? . . . What?’ said Miss Roach. ‘Go on. Tell me.’
‘No,’ said Vicki gleefully, as she rose and collected the glasses. ‘First we have a drink and then I tell you. A great surprise, but first we have a drink. The same?’
Miss Roach said she would have the same, and Vicki went to the bar. Miss Roach wondered what was coming, and guessed that, as is so often the case on these occasions between friends, the person surprised was not going to take anything like the same amount of pleasure in the surprise as the surpriser. Trying to anticipate this one, she had a feeling that Vicki was engaged to be married, and was either going to leave the town altogether, or was going to settle down in it comfortably elsewhere. She did not know why she had this feeling, but it somehow fitted in with Vicki’s conversation and manner in the last five minutes.
Vicki returned with the drinks, sat down, said, ‘Well – here’s to you,’ and drank.
‘Well. Go on,’ said Miss Roach, masking a faint feeling of exhaustion behind a show of delighted interest. ‘Tell me. What is it?’
‘Your Mrs. Payne . . .’ said Vicki, and took another sip.
‘Yes?’
‘I have seen your Mrs. Payne,’ said Vicki. ‘I have had a long talk with her!. . .’
‘No! . . . Really? . . .’
‘Uh-huh. . . .’ (Vicki had a rather irritating habit, which Miss Roach had noticed before, of saying ‘Uh-huh’ instead of ‘Yes’.) ‘And what do you think?’
‘What?’
‘I am coming to stay with you, my dear. You have a new lodger at the Rosamund Tea Rooms!’
‘No!’
‘Yes indeed. It is all fixed up. What do you think of that?
‘But, my dear, this is marvellous!’ said Miss Roach, that slight film coming over her eyes which comes over the eyes of those who, while proclaiming intense pleasure, are actually thinking fast.
‘Yes. It is marvellous, isn’t it?’ said Vicki. ‘Now we shall be together.’
‘But you don’t mean,’ said Miss Roach, finally managing completely to dispel the slight film, ‘staying in the house? It’s full up in the house, isn’t it?’
‘Yes. In the house. Your Mrs. – what is her name – Bart?’
‘Barratt?’
‘Yes. Mrs. Barratt. She is not sleeping well because of the noise of the traffic in front of the house, so she is moving over to a quiet room over the way, and I am coming into hers.’
‘What – next door to me?’
‘Yes. That’s what Mrs. Payne said. Next door to you. What do you think of that?’
‘But this is marvellous!’ said Miss Roach. ‘What made you go and see her?’
‘Oh – I don’t know. You told me she might do something, so I plucked up my courage and went round and saw her yesterday. She knows Mr. Jordan too. I’m coming in the week after next.’
‘Well,’ said Miss Roach, ‘I think that’s marvellous!’ And as further details were given her, she kept on saying well, and kept on saying that it was marvellous. But her heart, instead of fully seconding what she was saying, was feeling, for some reason, slightly hurt, and her brain was busily looking into the future to see what cause there was, if any, for misgiving.
She could not fully explain to herself this slightly hurt feeling. Snubbed was the word, perhaps, rather than hurt. She felt snubbed because it was she who, as the fairy-godmother of the lonely German girl in the town, had originated what had at the time seemed the audacious and adventurous suggestion of Vicki coming to stay at the Rosamund Tea Rooms – and now it had all happened without any bother, had been coolly and calmly fixed up, apart from her. You might almost say it had happened behind her back
! The worst part about this feeling was that she not only had to grin and bear it: she had to grin and make a pretence of absolutely adoring it!
‘Well,’ she said, a little later, ‘I think this calls for another drink.’ And she went to the bar with the empty glasses.
No sooner had Miss Roach got to the bar, which was now crowded, and at which she had to wait some time to get served, than she saw how peculiarly vile, petty, and absurd she was being all along the line. What was the matter with her? What business was it all of hers? Why shouldn’t the wretched woman act upon a recommendation of a friend and make arrangements on her own behalf to enter a boarding-house? And why shouldn’t she be attractive to men (if she was)? And why shouldn’t men take her out (if they did)? And why shouldn’t she talk in a rather absurd, old-fashioned, ‘foreign’, kittenish way about men? Was she (Miss Roach) becoming spinsterish, possessive, jealous, jaundiced, or what? She must really take herself in hand.
Feeling the force of all these arguments in a sudden wave, the hurt feeling in her heart was as suddenly dispelled, and she returned in an entirely different mood to the table with the drinks.
They talked cheerfully for about ten minutes, then went out into the darkness, walked a little way together, and parted at a corner.
‘We will be going the same way home soon!’ said Vicki.
‘Yes. Rather!’ said Miss Roach, and noticed that this time her heart was responding to her voice, and that she was completely restored to a state of tranquillity and happiness over the whole matter.
The Slaves of Solitude Page 8