by Alec Waugh
With a gay smile she replaced the receiver on its clamp. It would make an amusing interlude. She had needed some such excitement as the daily examination of the market would give her, and it had been clever of her, too, to think of entrusting the negotiation to this boy, who had needed a punishment so badly. There were few worse punishments for a man than the finding himself in love with a woman who despised him. She was killing two birds really with one stone. She would teach Graham Moreton a lesson, and into her own life she would bring variety. It would make the summer pass quite amusingly. Never had she felt more sure, more confident of herself. Never had she trusted more completely in her cold-blooded mastery of her emotions. It was so easy to make a man fall in love with you when you were not yourself in love with him, when you could stand outside watching the effect upon him of each word and tone and gesture. And he could not run away. He would have to continue seeing her.
It might mean a loss of two hundred pounds, but that was not a great matter, after all. There were a number of things that she could sell. She had several more rings than she really needed. She had never cared for rings. You did not need rings if you had hands like hers. There was that opal ring and the circlet of diamonds and rubies. She had quarrelled with both of the men who had given her those.
It would be easy enough to find two hundred pounds’ worth of stuff she had no use for. But then, wasn’t it rather foolish to sell anything when she had Guy Fortescue there?
At lunch that afternoon at the Ritz laughingly she put her proposition to him.
“You’re a betting man, Guy, aren’t you? Well, I’m going to put you up a thoroughly sporting offer. I’ve just bought some shares, a dead cert. Florida Asiatics, bound to go up. I’ve gone in up to two hundred. Well, I’ll give you ten per cent of any winnings if you’ll promise to take over my losings, not that there’ll be any, of course. Almost a gift, Guy, really!”
“Ten to one on their going up, in fact.”
“To you, yes, twenty to one to anybody else. It’s a dead cert.”
And on her lips and in her eyes flashed that rare, impelling smile in the glow of whose radiance he could deny her nothing.
“All right, my dear,” he said, “only not more than two hundred, mind.”
A gleam of triumph glinted in her eyes. Ah, but how easy it was, this making of money out of love. Love was the most advertised commodity in the world and the most expensive. The money that was spent on it, the industries and the interests that were supported by it, directly and indirectly.
This room, for instance, with its elaborate upholstery, its delicate manipulations of light and shade, its softly blended colours, its liveried attendants, what was it after all but a setting where the preliminaries of love were staged—a place where men and women could speak softly to one another, where all violent sensation was subdued into a quiet harmony, where nothing could seem desirable but love?
The long row of shops down the length of Regent Street, window after window stocked with lingerie and jewellery, by what were they supported but the desire of woman to be desired; the ceaseless effort of man to decorate and refine an instinct that the beasts of the field share with us?
The books, the plays, films and music, what were they but excitants to love, or commentaries on love? Authors and novelists and musicians, merchants and jewellers, the proprietors of restaurants, one way or another they were all making profit out of love, all turning to gold this desire to decorate an instinct, this desire to be desired, and she along with them.
“We are all part,” she told herself, “of the same profession.”
Part II
Chapter XI
Varieties of Love
Business, reflected Madge Gillett, was for the second week in June unquestionably poor. Half-past five; and since two o’clock with five girls chattering their heads off in the drawing-room annexe, only one man had climbed the three winding stairs of the stern-faced house in Clarges Street whose two upper stories contained her discreet and spacious maisonette. Not that business at the best of times was to be compared with what it had been once. What with there being less money about and with men’s tastes changing, and the women of their own class proving so infinitely more accommodating, there was scarcely a living left for such women as herself. It was the war that had started it. But for the war it would never have occurred to the majority of men that love might be made more cheaply, more safely and as easily within the boundaries of their own acquaintance. She had been told that there were two thousand houses such as hers in London. If there were, all she could say was that there must be one thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine remarkably clever women in it.
Raucously the front door bell began to ring.
“At last!” she murmured, and hopefully hurried out into the passage.
It was only a girl, however. A rather timid and, as far as could be seen in the half-light of the hall, rather insignificant-looking girl; well-dressed, however, in the way that maids are when they wear their mistress’s discarded clothes.
Madge Gillett eyed her suspiciously.
“Well?” she asked.
“I’m from Dulcie Cartwright’s,” the girl explained.
For a moment the suspicion deepened in Madge’s eye; then she nodded her head.
“All right,” she said, “come in.”
Nervously the girl followed her into the warm, scented, heavily-curtained drawing-room.
“Well,” Madge asked abruptly, “what about it?”
“I’m not happy there. May I come here?”
Slowly, critically, Mrs. Gillett noted and appraised the immediate characteristics of the girl who stood shuffling opposite her. A frail, dark-haired, sallow little thing, and it was a blonde really that she needed: if she needed anyone; a thing she was prepared to doubt. There was scarcely enough work to go round as it was. But you had to have fresh faces. It was in search of variety after all that men came to this sort of place. A fact that the girls themselves would never realize. They were so vain, so self-assured. They did not know how hard she had to work for them: how often at first a man would shake his head, how she would have to offer him a drink and talk to him for ten or twenty minutes making him feel at home and then saying, confidentially, as one friend to another, “You were rather silly, you know, not to see Gladys. She’s very nice.”
She’d have trouble, probably, with this girl in time. If Dulcie had quarrelled with her, she would. But then one expected that. And there was about her a faint suggestion of demureness, of reluctant yielding that some men would find attractive. At the same time . . .
The girl noticed her hesitation.
“If you’d take me,” she said, “I could promise to bring a good number of men along with me.”
That was a consideration: even if she had to pay this girl a commission of a third on everyone she brought, one man brought other men. It was not a thing she particularly cared to do, especially with Dulcie Cartwright. They had been good friends once. They had been young together, and poor together. And she was not sure that the happiest days of her life had not been those when they had dined night after night in the Strand at Oddie’s, and Dulcie had planked down her shilling on the table. “That’s all I’ve got, waiter. Twopence for you. What can I have for tenpence?” But Dulcie had gone one way and she’d gone hers, and business was bad and if she didn’t take this girl on somebody else would, and commercial consciences were out of place in post-war London.
“All right,” she said, “when will you begin?”
“Thursday week. It’ll take me ten days to make arrangements.”
“Very well then. I’ll be expecting you on Thursday.”
But it was regretfully, for all that she had made a genuinely profitable arrangement, that she walked back from the front door into the drawing-room. She could wish that she had not come from Dulcie’s.
She had hardly sat down before the bell began to ring again. “When I get sent to prison,” Madge murmured as she lifted herself
out of her chair, “it’ll be the first holiday I’ve had for a dozen years.”
But it was with a bright welcome that she walked out into the hall to open the door upon the tall, well-groomed figure of Christopher Stirling.
In his hand he was carrying a silk hat. Against wide lapels were pressed the stiff white petals of a gardenia. Above a fawn-grey double-breasted waistcoat a silver grey Ascot tie was held in place by a small pearl pin. Smooth and creaseless the short skirted morning coat fell away over the pleated sponge bag trousers.
“Are you busy?” he asked, “or may I come and talk to you for a moment?”
Christopher’s association with the house was entirely unprofessional. He had been brought there during the war by a number of fellow officers after a large and jovial lunch. They were to go to a theatre in the evening and there were two hours to be spent before the long bar opened at the Troc. They had arrived there in a noisy and laughing bunch, had made their choices and left him eventually alone with Madge.
There had been the slightest trace only of embarrassment in the smile with which he had turned to her.
“This isn’t, really, you know,” he said, “my game. Do you mind if we just sit quietly and talk?”
And as they had sat talking there, he had found himself genuinely attracted by what, for want of any more explicit term, he had described to himself as her reality. For some reason, which at the time he had been unable to discover, this place of counterfeit passion and calculated hospitality had seemed genuine where so much else was false. And he had returned to find again there a sensation of release, that he had come finally to recognize as a kinship between the conditions that governed his life and this woman’s. In Madge Gillett’s attitude to life, there was the same conflict to reconcile the demands of livelihood and impulse, that harassed so constantly the artist in himself. The question that had been set to Madge had been set to him. For each of them the one chance of self-establishment, of lifting themselves out of obscurity, lay through an exploitation of their capacity to please. They were entertainers, faced with the same problem. The creative impulse which is an urge primarily to give, had to become in their hands a medium through which to take: a contest that had left impulse for Madge Gillett if not dead actually, coarsened certainly and enfeebled; and in his own life a rarer and rarer visitant.
He was greeted with a smile.
“There’s no one here,” she said. “A whisky?”
He shook his head. He had just come from a wedding, he told her, and the champagne had been as sugary as it had been plentiful.
“I can’t think,” he said, “why one goes to weddings. With divorce as fashionable as adultery, you can’t nowadays believe that marriage is an irrevocable step; it has ceased long ago to be dramatic. Perhaps it’s good to be seen about; and it’s the way, I suppose, one gets commissions. But it’s years since I’ve seen you, Madge, tell me about yourself.”
She proceeded to. One by one the battalions of her mischances were marshalled and addressed. Things were not what they were. Tastes changed and people’s views of things. Before the war if people were married they stayed married, and if a man got bored with marriage he came to her. Now if he got tired of his wife he found a new one. And with women as casual as they were, the bachelors didn’t need to come any longer to her sort of place. Things were in a bad way.
There was a tap upon the door.
“Can I come in?” a cultured and listless voice requested. “We’ve run out of cigarettes,” the girl explained.
She was a lovely creature, blue-eyed and golden-haired, with a pale clear skin, and a figure exquisite as a piece of Tuscan statuary. The artist in Christopher watched her admiringly, as she moved across the floor, and stretched out a languid, slim-fingered hand towards the silver cigarette box.
“Has she been here long?” he asked, as she left the room.
“Only a few weeks.”
“She’s about the loveliest thing I’ve ever seen.”
Madge Gillett shrugged her shoulders.
“She isn’t much good here,” she answered. “Men never ask twice for her. She won’t play up to them. You’ve got to be a good actress at this job.”
Chris nodded his head. How clearly the picture rose; how vividly he could see her, cool and white, faultless as marble and as cold, indifferent and contemptuous; refusing to cheat men into a favourable impression of themselves by placing herself upon a level with them, refusing to admit equality, to share their ardour. The artist who was incapable of hackwork, who couldn’t paint to order. And it was what one had to do, three-quarters of the time, unless one was going to the wall; it was by hackwork that one bought the leisure to do the things one really wanted.
“The trouble is,” Madge Gillett said, “she’s too much in love with one man she can’t get, to bother over the ones she can.”
She believed in love too much to make money out of it. And as Christopher Stirling drove back through the goldening streets, he wondered whether the analogy held true of art; that it was not till one had ceased to believe in art that one started to be successful. He remembered the days when he and his contemporaries had spoken contemptuously of money. “We will do,” they had said, “the things we want to do. If we attract the public well and good, if not, it can’t be helped. Success is accidental.” That was how he had spoken twenty years ago. And what had come of it? The only ones out of his crowd to speak in that tone now were those who had remained obscure: the others one and all had come in their different ways to compromise; to paint portraits instead of landscapes, to compose songs instead of opera, to write their stories the length that suited the editors of magazines. They had abandoned their old belief that the subject selected its own treatment: they saw their subjects in terms of the hour’s commercial needs. And did that mean that they had ceased to believe in art, or was it that their former whole-hearted enthusiasm was ignorance, and that the artist when he had learnt his craft could work to order, retaining his independence by the surrender of what was inessential?
You had to compromise to be free; to be above, so that you might be outside the battle; so that you could reach the platform of detachment from which you could watch without belonging; which it would be impossible to reach without surrender; you had to compromise unless. . . .
Unless what? Unless, he supposed, one could be content with simpler things. If one could do without the noise and the publicity and praise, if one could work as Cézanne worked, quietly a long life through; if . . . but that was to postulate a particular type of temperament: and he was not one of those deep placid natures that can take root where they are planted. You might as well talk of “Love in a cottage” to Gwen Lawrence. Even in the early days when there had been no hackwork for him to do, the days which in retrospect he was inclined to idealize, it was always the coloured prospect of success that had stayed him in the hours of doubt. One’s life must fit one’s nature. One did the thing one could, and complaint was idle, but as he turned his car into the garage, he thought a little ruefully of all the painters and poets and musicians symbolized for him in the blue-eyed, gold-headed girl who could create only in inspired moments, and who in their incapacity for other work, had only the white sheath of their talent to surrender with indifference or disgust to the conditions that livelihood imposed on them.
• • • • • • • •
“A young lady, sir,” announced Robinson on Christopher’s arrival, “who could not give me her name, but who professed acquaintance, and whom I have, I believe, seen here before, insisted upon waiting till you returned.”
Christopher pursed up his lips. He was giving a dinner party that evening at the Berkeley, and he had several letters that he would like to have written first.
“You seem less efficient, Robinson, than once, in protecting us from interlopers. However, what manner of young lady is it?”
“I think, sir, you will consider her to be an extremely attractive young person.”
Surprise was one of
the sensations that Christopher had claimed, not wholly with injustice, to have removed from his emotional repertoire. “If I could be surprised,” he maintained, “I should be incomplete. For there would be things I had not experienced.” And even if now and again his blood would move a little quicker, even if he was forced occasionally to murmur, “This is hardly what I had anticipated,” he had acquired a composure that masked very adequately such inner tumults. And so for all that his heart as he walked into the room had given a leap of astonished curiosity, he was able to greet his unexpected guest as though it were the most natural thing in the world to see her there.
“Joan Faversham!” he exclaimed. “And how nice of you to come and see me! I was only wondering this morning whether you had forgotten me completely.”
Her answering smile was not particularly convincing. She stood in the centre of the room, very straight and stiff; her fingers picking nervously at the pale pink tassel of her parasol. Her forehead was lined with worry.
“I’ve come,” she said, “to ask you about Mrs. Lawrence.”
She spoke in the quick, brusque tone of one who has something so hard to say that it must be said at once, if it is to be said at all.
Christopher Stirling raised his eyebrows.
“Why, of course,” he said. “Mrs. Lawrence is an old friend of mine. Do you prefer Egyptian cigarettes or Virginian? I’m afraid I haven’t any Turkish.”
She shook her head. She didn’t want to smoke, she said.
“You won’t mind, though,” he asked, “if I do. You won’t? Thank you very much. It will be my last cigarette before dinner, and there is a sentiment attaching to last moments. Though, of course,” he added, “in your company I would willingly be deprived of it.” And the quick, disarming, attractive smile flickered for an instant in his eyes. “But you’ve come,” he continued, “to ask me about Gwen Lawrence. Now what about her?”
Less ill at ease now, but still unhappy and perplexed, Joan Faversham leant forward.