Four-Part Setting

by Ann Bridge

  This business of the letter awoke in Lydiard a genuine anxiety. To him, concealment was always ugly in itself, and by Rose, in relation to himself and Anastasia, it was uglier still. In the old days, all Rose’s and Anastasia’s dealings with their young men had been more or less common property between the two of them; even the Charles affair, and the engagement, had been canvassed backwards and forwards up and down—he had been in England then, and more or less a party to it. That Rose should have been reserved about the crash of her marriage was perhaps understandable enough; but that she should go to little subterfuges about a flirtation with a person like Henry, who was primarily their friend, his and Asta’s, could hardly mean anything but one thing—that it wasn’t just a flirtation at all. Fond as he was of Henry Hargreaves, Lydiard had no illusions about him where women were concerned—Henry would at all times take what he could safely and conveniently get. But Rose, he was profoundly convinced, was not that sort of person, however reckless and dangerous a mood that wounded state of hers, at which he had guessed, might have thrown her into. He was convinced, with a curious certainty, of Rose’s fundamental innocence, for all her five years of marriage—it was a quality which threw a sort of bloom over her. But she was not only innocent, she had all sorts of potentialities—Antony’s instinct told him that a full-dress affair with a man like Henry, probably perfect on the physical side, nothing worth mentioning on any other, could only be useless to Rose. Worse than useless, really—she would be détraquée by it, it would put her whole spirit, her whole attitude to life out of gear. It was disintegrating her character, in a small way, already—whoever heard of Rose concealing anything from anyone? Her characteristic attitude—he had seen her do it a hundred times—was to throw up her pretty head, laugh her pealing laugh and say—“Yes, I did—wasn’t I an ass?”

  Antony considered all this with his usual detachment, in spite of his anxiety. But that missionary spirit of his, which has been mentioned, made him feel that something ought to be done about it. Only it was hard to see what. Even with one’s cousin, and she married, it wasn’t so easy to go aboard her and say—“Don’t be that man’s mistress—it isn’t the right thing for you.” And what else was there to say? That after all was what he meant. And for the first time Antony began to blame himself. She had been in his company now for three months, and under his roof for six or seven weeks—he had known that she was in trouble and unhappy; and out of shyness partly, partly out of laziness, and a feeling that it was really Anastasia’s job, he had done nothing whatever about it. If one or other of them had given her a lead, or even rammed her a bit and forced her confidence, it might at least have put the brake on this ludicrous affair. Now, it was a question whether they could; whether—he got up, and jerked away from the thought—it wasn’t already too late. No—he felt pretty sure of that. Anyhow from now on he would try to keep in close touch with her. Twenty-six was pretty young—and Rose was a young twenty-six. But again, for some reason which even his detachment did not analyse, he said nothing about it to his sister.

  During the course of the long hot ten-hours journey to Peking Rose announced, casually, that she was dining with Henry that night. Antony, taken by surprise, was moved to a protest whose futility he recognised even as he uttered it—“Won’t you be rather tired?”

  “Goodness no, I’m never tired,” Rose replied airily. “You don’t mind, do you, Asta?”

  “Of course not,” said Anastasia. “Do do just what you like,”—and she returned to her book, the Love Letters of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning. Anastasia had rather a way of making a vague and gentle agreement sound like a judgement of some sort, and both Rose and Antony were aware of some judgement behind this reply. But neither of them said any more.

  Their train, not unnaturally, was rather late in arriving. The Ch’ien Mên station was the usual screaming jostle and welter of coolies, packing-cases, luggage and distraught Chinese passengers, with a sprinkling of soldiers, but there was no sign among it all of the tall fair head and broad shoulders of Henry Hargreaves, and Lydiard noted his absence with a further touch of disquiet. It would have been the normal thing for Henry to be there, directing operations rather loudly, and pouring out details of exactly how far he had got with his preparations in between. The servants they had left in Peking did meet them, however, and presently they and their hand-luggage were crammed into the car and drove off to the Lung An Hut’ung, through streets whose haphazard mixture of the mediocre and the squalid was enriched now, almost to beauty, by the low evening light in which clouds of dust were held in brilliant suspense. The Lydiards eschewed the neat brick-built dwellings provided for officials in the Posts, preferring to live in a Chinese house out towards the West City.

  “Goodness, it is hot after Pei-’ai-ho,” Anastasia exclaimed, as they lurched along through the deep dust.

  “And smelly!” said Rose, her face at the window. “All the same, I like it. Oh look, there’s the pancake-seller!” she said, as they turned by a dangerous right-angled bend into the narrow hu-t’ung, just wide enough for the car between its high grey tile-topped walls. The pancake-seller was, indeed, in his usual place, a flight of four steps leading up to a pair of high scarlet doors—his little stove stood in the angle formed by the steps and the wall, his wares were spread out neatly on the broad shallow slabs of marble. Rose Pelham was rather seizing on small external things, at that moment, to distract her mind from the evening. Her cool psychological theories were breaking up under the imminence of this particular experience, and things like the pancake-seller, who was a familiar object to them all, belonged to the normal world, the safe place where she felt at home with Tasia and Antony—not to the strange under world in which she now moved, a sort of tropical forest, with huge looming flowers, and heavy scents, and glooms, and uncertain light. It was like a place in a dream, and her own feelings had the exaggerated and unrelated quality of emotions in dreams—now taut, now languid, swaying between passion and something very like fear. But she was in it; she was committed to it; she was not going to give way to nerves now.

  Fortunately there was very little time for thought. Evidences of Henry’s activities were plentiful when they got to the house—piles of tents, with pegs and guy-ropes in neat bundles, lay in one of the courtyards, camp beds, tins of food were heaped in a corner of one of the rooms; but for Rose there was no time to look at them. Dinner was in half-an-hour—there was not a moment to lose, no possibility of happy lingering over details of her appearance. In feverish haste she unpacked, had a bath, did summary things to her face and hair and hands, flew into a frock. No time to think, no time to feel—just trying to keep her head, to do everything and forget no essentials. It was still like a dream, but her haste lent it almost the fevered quality of a nightmare.

  And the dream-like sensation persisted through dinner at Henry’s bungalow. They were a little formal:—he kissed her and gave her a cocktail in the drawing-room, but held open the door rather ceremoniously for her when they went in to eat, and over the excellent food and good wine made conversation to her. Henry set the tone—he knew where he was, perfectly. There was champagne; and some truant part of Rose’s mind noted the fact almost with amusement—probably one always gave them champagne! But the whole thing was completely unreal—she looked round at the rather luxurious room, the gleaming table, the silent white-clad servants, and then across at Henry, unwonted in his evening splendour, after their casual weeks at Pei-t’ai-ho, in amazement. “I am sitting here, in this room, dining with my lover—like the people in the books.” But even that silent statement did not make it any more real. And the happy pride of her siestas at Pei-t’ai-ho had gone—drowned in something more immediate, more immense—something almost menacing.

  After dinner they went on to the Cheng-kwang, the one cinema in Peking then. Henry said that the film was supposed to be good, but he would have taken her whatever it was—he knew how deleterious to the nerves an evening tête-à-tête could be, in these circumstan
ces, and would not have risked it. At the Cheng-kwang, on hot summer nights, the house itself is not used—a screen and seats are arranged on the roof, where the audience can get the benefit of such air as may be moving. Little air was moving that night, and it was heavy with the sweetish sourish smell of the city—as Rose sat beside Henry in the hot darkness, her pulses thudding a little under the pressure of his hand, and watched the violent love-making of the handsome and brutal hero and the feline and unnaturally lovely heroine, she had an odd feeling that she was almost living in a film herself.

  They had arrived late, and saw no one till the lights went up in the interval. Then it became evident that though it was the dead season, a surprising number of people were still in Peking—the audience moved about, greeting one another. A rather thick-set young man, well-built, and with most improbably wavy blond hair, blue eyes, a good forehead and a rather supercilious mouth made a gesture of his head to Hargreaves, and came towards them, picking his way through the chairs. “Here’s Roy Hillier,” Henry said to Rose. “Do you know him?”

  “No—I thought you didn’t, either.”

  “Oh, I met him at the Club the other day—he’s not such a bad chap, to meet.”

  The young man now approached, and drawled out “Good evening, Hargreaves—or rather, infernally hot evening.”

  He was introduced to Mrs. Pelham, and rather competently included her with his eyes in his next observation.

  “The Americans really push ineptitude almost to the point of sublimity in their films, don’t you think? Quite incredible. The dummies in this one—it would be a misuse of language to call them characters—correspond to nothing in nature or art, on either side of the Atlantic.”

  Rose, who took an instantaneous dislike to the young man, said that the photography was good. He looked more carefully at her, and surrendered with a civil agreement.

  “Is Lydiard back?” he next asked Henry.

  “Yes — he came back today — Mrs. Pelham came with them.”

  “Ah, I must see him. What’s his address?” He made a note of it in a very small, thin, and obviously expensive engagement-book with deep blue pages.

  “You’ll have to hurry, because we’re all off again on Monday,” Henry observed cheerfully.

  “On Monday? How maddening! I wanted to see a lot of Antony. Where to?” the young man asked.

  “Oh, we’re going on a trip into the hills—to Por Hua Shan, if we can make it. Tents and donkeys, you know—all that sort of thing. Mrs. Pelham is coming too,” Henry replied, with unnecessary amplitude.

  Again the young man used his eyes to encircle Mrs. Pelham in his answer. “Really! How interesting. Where and what is Por Hua Shan?”

  It was a mountain, Henry explained—about a hundred and thirty miles to the north-west of Peking. “Just inside the inner Great Wall, you know—the old one.”

  “Most interesting,” Hillier said again. He asked a good many more questions, and eventually, with another inclusive bow to Rose, took himself off.

  “Look! There’s Lady Harriet Downham—there, with the white hair,” Henry said.

  Rose looked in the direction indicated. She saw an oldish woman, with beautiful curly white hair, beautifully done—through the crowd she could not see below her shoulders, but even so there was something most striking about the carriage of the head, at once rigid and yet easy. The face—she could only see it in profile—was striking too: rather a hawk-like nose, deep fine lines of humour and sensibility—the whole in a most delicate untouched ivory-white, bleached with age into something of an incredible fineness. The lady was talking with the greatest animation to the Iberian Minister—her hands, fine and decided too, moved up in lively gestures, wielding a small fan.

  “She looks fun,” Rose said. “Who is she?”

  “Old Sir George Downham’s widow—he died ages ago. She was an Ascham,” replied Hargreaves briefly. “She’s got a nephew out here in oil, and she’s come to visit him, and for look-see. She’s a tremendous old sportswoman—but a bit terrifying, you know. Dowagers aren’t really my cup of tea, darling!”

  The lights were lowered again then, and they resumed their seats. In the film which followed, of alleged English “high life”, Rose found herself thinking idly what a pity it was that the producer had not succeeded in retaining the services of Lady Harriet Downham for the part of the Dowager Duchess, who was like nothing ever seen in English society—a harsh, corseted, heavily made-up and overbearing harridan, who didn’t know how to speak to servants, dogs, or her friends, let alone to young men of whom she disapproved. She smiled a little in the darkness, seeing, even after that one glimpse, how perfectly the woman she had watched talking to the Iberian would have done all these things. How safe one would be, if one were like that!—the odd little thought came to her. So sure of the right thing to do in all circumstances; no uncertainty—there could be no uncertainty behind that nose and mouth, in that firmly-carried head; no holding by the views of others. Henry, leaning and whispering to her, drew her thoughts away from Lady Harriet; but they left her almost with reluctance, clung a little to the impression she had formed of the older woman, as earlier in the evening they had clung to the pancake-seller.

  Roy Hillier spoke to them again while they stood waiting for the car outside the Cheng-kwang—he stigmatised the second film as “irremediably banal”. “Goodness, how I dislike that young man!” Rose said, as they drove off.

  “Oh, darling, do you? I don’t think he’s such a mean citizen as all that. Poor chap!” said Henry tolerantly. Then his voice changed a little. “Look, sweetheart, you’ll come back and have a drink now, won’t you?”

  “Yes,” said Rose, a little faintly.

  “You told Asta you’d be late? She won’t be fussing?”

  “No,” said Rose again, rather firmly this time. In the darkness of the car she lifted her chin, with a sort of angry pride—in a few moments now the film, the dream, was going to turn into reality, for which, she realised at last, she was quite unprepared. But she was not going to have cold feet. Almost with the gesture of a nervous child, she reached for Henry’s hand, and took it and held it, as they drove back to his bungalow.

  Chapter Six

  The first concern of those who return from a sojourn at Pei-t’ai-ho to Peking is—in the case of the women, at least—to get their hair set. Accordingly on the morning after her arrival Mrs. Pelham betook herself to the Hotel de Pékin for this purpose. Having one’s hair set in the Hotel de Pékin in old days used to be rather a social, not to say a matey business—there was only one saloon for men and women alike, and while your waves dried under the drum you could observe in the range of mirrors which ran round the walls your male acquaintances of the Latin races having manicures and face massages, as well as shaves, and gossip with anyone within reach. Mrs. Pelham, however, saw no one she knew that morning, and sat with an illustrated paper on her lap, staring at her own face in the glass in front of her, partly with her usual detached approval of it, partly with a sort of painful curiosity. It astonished her that it should look so much the same. She had found, actually, gladness and delight in Henry’s arms the night before; he had been curiously, touchingly perfect—so perfect that the tears came into her eyes at the memory of his tenderness. But she had waked that morning in her room at the Lydiards in an agony of reaction and self-disesteem, from which it had taken her some time to recover. In the peculiar defencelessness of the newly-awakened, when the mind and the will are not yet in full control, instinct and tradition take charge; and Rose Pelham, in those moments, had suffered the blinding illumination which comes at such times, and had seen herself with something like horror. Once up, in the sustaining comfort of everyday things, she had argued her way back to a measure of satisfaction with herself, and of gladness in the thought of Henry. But still it seemed strange to her that her face should bear no mark of any of this.

  When she got back to the Lung An Hut’ung before lunch she found Anastasia rather cross. Antony had
telephoned from the office to say that Mr. Losely, his opposite number in the Posts (who had taken his summer leave before the Lydiards went down to Pei-t’ai-ho) was in bed; and it was of course out of the question for Antony to get away till he recovered. Which meant that their trip to Por Hua Shan must be postponed for the moment.

  “How enraging!” said Rose. “What’s wrong with Losely? Is he likely to be laid up for long?”

  “I hope not,” said Anastasia, with unwonted vigour. “Wretched creature—it’s entirely his own fault—he will go eating salads all over the place. It’s only a tapeworm, but of course he must stay in bed till they get the head.”

  Rose, to whom this aspect of life in China was quite new, laughed, and made further enquiries—she learned for the first time how it is that the state of one’s neighbour’s intestines, in Peking, may be a matter of public discussion and public concern. “Oh yes,” said Anastasia blandly. “Did you never hear about Tu Yu Jen and his worm? That’s the classic case. He got one during one of the Feng-t’ai wars, and the other Tuchun—I forget his name, but he was in with the Japs—wanted him kept quiet, so he bribed his doctor to give him something that wouldn’t bring the head away. So Tu stayed in bed and was dosed and dosed, and nothing happened, till the other one took Lo Tien Tu. But as soon as the city had fallen the doctor gave the right stuff, and Tu got up again. They say the doctor got two thousand taels for that. Have a cocktail?”