by Alec Waugh
“We will decide how we are to manage things,” she had said. If only though, things could have been a little otherwise. If only the prelude to their love had not to be the treacherous betrayal of an old one.
For he still loved Joan, from that certainty there was no appeal. Though this passion of his for Gwen was stronger than anything he had ever felt before, was stronger than anything he had imagined himself to be capable of feeling, there was, he knew, a certain side of himself that no one but Joan could touch, and that no one but Joan would ever touch again. There are certain things that can only be said once. Certain things that can only be believed in once, certain dreams that are not for renewal, and there were some things that he had given Joan that he could never give to anyone else. They would have been happy enough together if Gwen Lawrence had never come into their lives. He was not in the position of one who turns with relief from a love that has begun to irk him, that is glad of any excuse to be rid of an embarrassing situation. He was not like that. He would miss Joan profoundly all through the years. He knew that well enough.
She must be at home by now. As she had not been on the same boat as himself she must have followed and caught the earlier train from Paris. As soon as possible she must be seen, and what had to be said between themselves, said.
Without waiting to take off his coat he went straight to the library to telephone. Impatiently he waited for the number. There was a long pause before the maid’s voice answered him.
“Yes, this is Mr. Eric Faversham’s house.”
“I want to speak to. Miss Joan Faversham.”
“She is not back yet, sir, I am afraid.”
“What?”
“She is catching the late boat. We have just had a wire through from Paris. She won’t arrive till midnight.”
“Oh ! Well tell her, anyhow, that Mr. Graham Moreton rang up and that he will be ringing up again to-morrow.”
“Very good, sir.”
Not back till midnight; for another twenty-four hours he would have to carry the weight of his confession. He would have to go to the office in the morning, he could not possibly see her before the evening, and by four o’clock Gwen would be again in London.
He would go and see Joan, he decided, after dinner. It would be easier; he would feel braver if he had seen Gwen Lawrence first.
Twenty-four hours, though, twenty-four hours of strain and turmoil, and restless, unsleeping agitation.
In the hall below came the loud boom of the first dinner bell. In half an hour he would be seated between his parents. The evening’s placid interchange of comment and information and opinions would have begun. Slowly the interminable hours would pursue their course. Three hours from eight o’clock till eleven. Three hours of it, with twenty-one hours at the end of it to be lived through still.
He could not. No, quite frankly he could not face it. Better go out. Better a party, better anything than that. A party at Christopher’s; he had not been there since that Sunday, six months back, when the first tangles of his complication had been made, and perhaps it was fitting now that the ravelling and unravelling were complete, for him to make this second and last visit there.
Twenty-four hours: well, and he might kill four of them that way.
The party had been in progress some forty minutes when he arrived, and the studio was crowded with noise and animation. On the long buffet table which spanned the extremity of the room, bottle after bottle of champagne, like a row of soldiers on parade, was cooling in its bucket of crushed ice. About them and between them on cut glass dishes were high piled banks of cakes and sandwiches. In the corner that was remotest, an ancient white-aproned servitor was churning with a swizzle stick, the contents of a wide-necked jug, into a pale pink foam.
In the centre of the room Christopher was welcoming his guests.
“Ah, here’s Sybyl Marchant,” he was saying as Graham waited beside the butler to be announced. “I was half afraid,” he added, “that after our last meeting—” and his eyelids flickered interrogatvely.
“I decided,” said Sybyl. Marchant, “to allow you an opportunity to apologize.”
“And I shall be delighted to have an opportunity to explain.”
With a smile she turned to Geoffrey Brackenridge.
“I wonder,” she said, “if that’s enough.”
“From Christopher, I think.”
“And it will be a good explanation.”
There was a slightly sinister intonation in his voice which made Sybyl Marchant look quickly, and a little anxiously at him. At her side Robinson was hesitating.
“Miss Mildred Atkinson,” he announced.
“Humphrey has got a headache,” she was saying, “so I have come by myself. “You don’t mind, I hope?”
“Had you not come,” said Christopher, “this party so far as I am concerned would have been a failure. Let’s see now who we can find to entertain you. Graham Moreton, perhaps?”
She shook her head. He was young and unestablished, with a fiancée somewhere. Moreover, she had detected across the crowded room Lord Heresy’s ponderous figure.
“Don’t you bother about me,” she said. “This person can look after number one,” and walking across towards the buffet table, she leant there waiting for Lord Heresy to recognize her.
She had not long to wait, and a swift reassuring glow of triumph warmed her, as she noticed the shock of surprised delight that illumined suddenly those massive features.
She smiled to herself as she watched his laboured effort to extricate himself from the group to which he had become attached. Slowly he manoeuvred his way towards her. Her arms stretched sideways along the table, the white curve of her throat flung back, her brown eyes smiled up at him.
“Well,” she said.
His face was flushed with an inarticulate eagerness.
“Good to see you again.”
“It was a nice surprise for me, too, Lord Heresy.” “Always seem to run up against you when you are in a crowd.”
“I am not in a crowd now.”
Cool and calm and self-assured, she watched the flush of excitement deepen on his face. Humphrey could ignore her if he chose, but there were other men who did not. A headache indeed. As though she did not know that excuse. She knew those headaches. It might be another woman, or it might not, anyhow there was something that he would rather do than take her to a party; and the moment one found oneself not coming first with a man, it was high time to begin looking round.
The dark pupils in Lord Heresy’s eyes widened and grew more tense. Never had she felt more certain of herself, of her power to imperil and enslave.
“All these people though,” he said.
She shrugged her shoulders enigmatically.
“Suppose,” he said, “there is no chance ever of seeing you by yourself?”
“There are twenty-four hours to every day.”
“If I were to come round one morning in my car, I might persuade you to come out for lunch?”
“If you give me sufficient warning.”
“If I were to come on Monday, say?”
“I expect you would find me in.”
He hesitated; his eyes were bright and the blue vein was throbbing in his temple.
“And you would not be in too much of a hurry afterwards to run away?”
“Not.” she laughed, “if you made yourself sufficiently amusing.”
Brightly, stridently, the swell of innumerable contacts and conversations ebbed and swayed. As the number of empty bottles gathered behind the stretch of table-cloth, and the high pile of sandwiches diminished, the volume of sound increased. The air was growing heated and smoke-ladened. The longhaired Italian was strumming upon a banjo, a few couples were attempting, not too successfully, to dance; someone was suggesting an organization of an impromptu glee party.
It was a successful party. One of the fifty-and-nine such other parties as were being staged every night of the week and year, in the large cities of our contemporary C
osmopolis. Paris, Vienna, London, New York, Berlin, they all look the same, they all are the same. The same people, wearing the same clothes, drinking the same champagne, eating the same highly-spiced savoury sandwiches, saying the same things, thinking the same things, living the same lives, the expressions every one of them from their different continents and different countries of similar conditions.
There was nothing to distinguish this party of Christopher’s from those other fifty-and-nine such parties. On the surface, that is to say. For beneath the surface, to certain individuals of that party, were certain associations and ideas inseparable from it, making it for a time separate and distinct.
As Graham Moreton leant back against the wall listening with half of his attention to an animated discussion on the probable composition of the Welsh three-quarter line, there rose vividly before his eyes a picture of this studio as he had last seen it, on that morning in early March when the faint apricot sunlight had been spread so caressingly on a world stirring with new life.
How happy he had been as be had driven through the park with Joan. How little he had suspected the chain of circumstances to which he was to see that drive subsequently as a prelude; how simply, how inevitably one thing had followed on another. The meeting with Gwen, his visit to her flat, the purchase of the shares, the reiterated opportunities of meeting her. One thing led so simply to another. He had not meant to behave shabbily, he had done his best to get clear of things; he had applied to be sent abroad. He had sold the shares on his own responsibility. He had done his best to get Gwen Lawrence out of his life completely. He had not meant to behave shabbily, not that he supposed anyone ever did. Things happened, and one had got to make the best of them. If he had met Gwen first, or if Joan had not . . . how was he to have known at the start that it would have been possible for him to love anyone more than Joan, or rather that it would have been possible for him to love anyone differently, for it was differently no more. It was in a different way that he loved Gwen, it was not that he did not love Joan any longer, it was that . . . Ah! but what was the good of going over it? Things had happened and there it was. Standing here at the end he could do no more than see how the long path had curved down from that quiet opening.
In much the same way that Mildred Atkinson, seated beside Lord Heresy on the vast, low, many-cushioned divan, for all that she was practical and unsentimental, could not help remembering the first time that she had sat there. Then, as now, she had been on the brink of a decision. A decision as profoundly significant as that other one had been.
This time she was managing things better, though. In her inexperience she had made a number of extremely elementary mistakes. To have taken a flat, for instance, with no maid’s bedroom. It had been an incredible inconvenience. She had known so little, and she had imagined that a charwoman in the mornings was to be sufficient. She had never conceived what innumerable difficulties would be caused by people calling at times when she was not in a condition to receive them. Either she had to be dressed twenty minutes before she expected to be called for, or receive her guests in her dressing-gown.
Humphrey should have known. But when she had explained things to him, he had merely shrugged his shoulders and said that he was sorry but that there was no spare room there for a maid. She had not cared to make the suggestion of another flat. By the time she had realized how much she needed one, a new flat, three times as large, with a dining-room as well as a drawing-room, and a largish hall, a flat that she would be able to furnish in the light of her new ideas, she had realized it was useless to ask Humphrey for one. Five months back she might, but she had been only too conscious, during the last few weeks, that her hold on him was less strong than it had been. He had come less frequently to see her; he made love to her not only less ardently, but rather casually, in the spirit of: “Well, as I’m here, we might as well.” And then there had been Henry. She had been a fool to go with him that Sunday to Epping Forest, a worse fool still to give him her address. Sooner or later he and Humphrey would have been bound to meet, and though Humphrey had said nothing she had known he was suspicious.
That mistake, anyhow, she would not make again; as she had learnt from this first experiment how to arrange the furniture of a flat, so she had learnt to arrange the furniture of her life.
There would be no Henrys another time, and if she could not keep an old man as long as it pleased her to . . .
That earlier party of Christopher’s was in the mind also of Sybyl Marchant, as she pondered the exact significance of Christopher’s promise to explain, not to apologize, tor his behaviour the previous week. From the very first she had felt slightly suspicious of Christopher, not in any way because she disliked him, but because she felt he understood her far too well. From the very first he had guessed the manner of game she was playing, and she had yet to discover whether he was to be her enemy or her friend; a state of ignorance in which she felt she could afford to remain no longer.
As soon as was possible, without a breach of manners or diplomacy, she disembarrassed herself of Geoffrey’s company to seek out her host.
“I have come,” she said, “for my explanation.”
“You want it, really?”
“If you please.”
For answer he drew a letter from his pocket and handed it to her.
“I received that yesterday,” he said.
It was from a firm of typewriting and shorthand agents.
“DEAR SIR” (it ran), “A few weeks ago you were asking whether it would be possible for us to send out occasional stenographers, and we had regretfully to inform you that the size of our business did not permit of such facilities. We have, however, in the course of the last week, taken over the Marchant Agency, of whose activities you may perhaps have heard. This agency controls a number of highly-trained and efficient stenographers, and should you ever again find yourself in need of one, we are happy to be in the position to state that we shall be able to accommodate you at the shortest notice.
“Faithfully yours,
“JONES & CUMBAFORLD, LTD.”
“The Marchant Agency,” he said, “was, I believe, yourself?”
She nodded her head.
“I called on them to-day,” he told her.
“That must have been nice for you,” she replied. “They’re pleasant people.”
“They told me that you had been their most dangerous competitor.”
“That was generous of them.”
“They paid, they told me, three thousand for the Marchant Agency.”
The smile did not leave her lips.
“You were correctly informed,” she said, “they did.”
“They wondered why, when the business was in so flourishing a condition, you had sold it.”
“You wondered less, however.”
“I was sufficiently curious to pay a visit to your former rooms and have a talk with your old landlady, Mrs. Smith.”
“A good woman. I liked her.”
“She liked you. She told me that she liked having a person like yourself, who was always going to parties and amusements,” Chris answered. “A bit of sunshine about the place was the phrase, I think. She seemed to have no objections to late hours. She said she was very sorry when you went.”
“That was nice of her. And how nice of you to come and tell me. One’s friends usually only tell one the unpleasant things. And is that all?”
Her calm after the hysteria of the earlier meeting was slightly a surprise to him.
“Not entirely,” he answered.
“No?”
“There are one or two things I would rather like to ask you.”
She bent her head forward graciously, in acquiescence.
“If I can answer them,” she said, “I will.”
“I wanted to ask you how many of the times that you told Geoffrey that you were going to theatres and dances, you really did go out.”
She smiled at that.
“Not so very often,” she replied.
“And those evenings when he used to ring you up, to find out the exact moment you got back?”
“Ah, those evenings!” and she raised her hands with a gesture of recollective horror. “I think, my dear, those were the most awful evenings of my life.”
“You were in the flat then, the whole time?”
“The whole time, trying to read with that appalling bell going every fifteen minutes. You can’t think what it was like. But I wasn’t going to answer it. I wasn’t going to give way. The sleepier I got and the more my head began to ache, the more pleasant it was to think of Geoffrey fretting himself into a fury of jealousy. I’ve felt so angry sometimes that I’ve kept him waiting as late as five o’clock. For six consecutive hours I have sat there, with my eyelids growing heavier and heavier, and my headache getting worse, and that bell going all the time. And then, at last, when I thought that I could decently sound, cease fire,’ I would run round and round the table so as to get myself out of breath, so that when at last I should answer the telephone my voice would be breathless and exhausted and excited, as it is when one comes back after a long night’s dancing, and I would chatter away about the wonderful evening I had had. Wonderful food; wonderful music; wonderful partners. And he would always make the same answer. ‘I’ve been out, too,’ he’d say. ‘I’ve just got back. I thought you’d be getting in at about this time, and that I’d ring you up to say good-night.’
“And I’d always make the same reply: ‘And suppose,’ I’d say, ‘that I had got back at three and you’d woken me up after two hours’ sleep?’ And he would laugh and, ‘Wait till I’ve done it,’ he would say.
“Oh, yes, Christopher,” she concluded, “there’s been a good deal of dramatic irony in my life during the last few months.”
“And it was only just to frighten him?” he asked. She nodded.
“To frighten him, and in a way, too, I suppose, to punish him.”