Doves of Venus

by Olivia Manning

  Contents

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Olivia Manning

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Part Two

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Part Three

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Pretty, brave and eighteen, Ellie has come to London in search of adventure. She soon finds it in Quintin Bellot, the handsome but tired dilettante who gets her a job in fashionable Chelsea. But Quintin, the seducer of one dove, is also the husband of another. And Petta, his once beautiful wife, is fighting back age as fiercely as Ellie is hurtling towards it.

  About the Author

  Olivia Manning, OBE, was born in Portsmouth, Hampshire, spent much of her youth in Ireland and, as she put it, had ‘the usual Anglo-Irish sense of belonging nowhere.’ The daughter of a naval officer, she produced her first novel, The Wind Changes, in 1937. She married just before the War and went abroad with her husband, R. D. Smith, a British Council lecturer in Bucharest. Her experiences there formed the basis of the work that makes up The Balkan Trilogy. As the Germans approached Athens, she and her husband evacuated to Egypt and ended up in charge of the Palestine Broadcasting Station. They returned to London in 1946 and lived there until her death in 1980.

  Also by Olivia Manning

  Novels

  The Wind Changes

  Artist for the Missing

  School for Love

  A Different Face

  The Play Room

  The Rain Forest

  The Balkan Trilogy

  The Great Fortune

  The Spoilt City

  Friends and Heroes

  The Levant Trilogy

  The Danger Tree

  The Battle Lost and Won

  The Sum of Things

  Short Stories

  Growing Up

  A Romantic Hero

  The Doves of Venus

  Olivia Manning

  To William Gerhardi

  PART ONE

  1

  Walking home one night, taking a round-about route to add to experience, to stay awake a little longer and meet, perhaps, some curiosity of life not met before, Ellie Parsons, aged eighteen, independent, employed person, living in Chelsea, passed, near the Victoria Coach Station, a couple from her home town. She recognised the shape of them. She hurried. She thought herself safely past, when the husband called:

  ‘Why, Ellie Parsons!’

  His tone showed that he was struck by seeing among eight million strangers someone known to him. Ellie had not the courage to ignore him. She paused and faced them, pretending surprise.

  ‘The Ripleys,’ she said.

  The Ripleys, not on their own ground, looked unsure of themselves, but they were, as usual, armed with disapproval. Overcoming his surprise, Mr Ripley asked: ‘How are you getting on?’ He was a lay preacher at the Pratt Hill Baptist Chapel, Eastsea, and publicly held it shameful that Ellie Parsons should have left home against the wish of a widowed mother. His face became stern: ‘You’re going to Eastsea for Christmas, I hope?’

  Ellie, standing two yards away from him, said: ‘Yes,’ then, suddenly defiant, added: ‘I have a job in a studio. I’m doing my own work. It’s wonderful!’ Unable to control her voice, she shouted like a schoolgirl: ‘I’ve never been so happy before in my life.’

  A smile appeared unexpectedly on the young-old face of the wife. She put her hand on her husband’s arm, prompting him to say ‘Good-night,’ then, as they moved off, she whispered: ‘That girl’s in love.’

  Ellie heard her, and did not care. As she turned her back on them, London was about her again and she felt her own freedom.

  It was a mild December night, pretending spring. The sky, lacquer-black and peppered with small stars, looked as though blown clean by a gale, but the breeze that came from the side streets was tender as the breath of a fan. The road before her was empty. At the triangle where it joined Ebury Street, it looked as spacious as a ballroom. Ellie broke into a run. At that moment it seemed to her, were she to leap up, she would rise from the moorings of earth and sail between the stars; and if she called out, her voice would fill the sky.

  On an impulse, she jumped and called: ‘Hey!’ As she landed, the pavement smacked sharply through her thin soles; her cry came out like a mouse-squeak. She looked over her shoulder, but there was no one who might have heard her. She burst out laughing. It was true. She was in love.

  That evening while Quintin Bellot and she had been gazing at one another across the restaurant table, his expression had changed. She had felt between them not merely that sharp-edged, sparking attraction, but tenderness. She had felt it like a supernatural glow in the air about them. She touched his hand with her finger-tips and he gathered her fingers into his hand, then he laughed and gave her hand an impatient shake and said: ‘You must choose something from the menu.’

  She tried to give her attention to the menu. It was a pity she was not hungry in the evenings. She took her main meal at mid-day and the occasional evening meal that Quintin bought her, seemed to her wasted. She wished she could say: ‘Give me the money instead so that I can have a real meal tomorrow.’

  He started explaining the items to her: ‘Langue de Boeuf en Paupiettes – that’s ox-tongue done with a sort of meat stuffing and bacon; in paupiettes, in . . . oh, you know! . . . in slices. Côtes de veau foyot – veal cutlets done in white wine with grated cheese and breadcrumbs. Very nice. Would you like that? Or some sort of chicken?’

  She suddenly became annoyed that he should take her ignorance for granted. She said: ‘But all this is nonsense. These French names don’t mean anything.’

  ‘But of course they do.’ He laughed at her: ‘If they didn’t, how could you tell one dish from another?’

  Her mother, who kept a restaurant in Eastsea, was always telling her customers that the French on menus was meaningless, invented to impress simpletons. ‘We write in English,’ she would say. ‘We’ve nothing to hide.’

  Quintin said: ‘Or would you like some kebabs – they’re pieces of meat put on a skewer and cooked over a charcoal fire.’

  Disconcerted, Ellie asked stupidly: ‘But how do you know?’

  He pushed her hand away. Still laughing at her, he said: ‘Don’t be silly.’

  Suddenly she said so loudly that people turned their heads: ‘How marvellous everything is!’

  He raised an eyebrow: ‘I believe you’re the first person I’ve heard say that since 1939.’

  ‘Why 1939?’

  ‘That was when the war started.’

  ‘Oh, the war!’ – she had almost forgotten it ‘I was evacuated.’

  ‘Evacuated! I thought you girls were all conscripted.’

  ‘I was too young.’

  ‘So you were. So you were.’ Quintin let his
eyelids droop with a look of melancholy, rather comical: ‘And I? Even then, I was middle-aged.’

  It was for that reason, among other reasons, when later in the evening he had roused himself and said with a yawn: ‘Well, I suppose I must dress and see you home,’ that she pushed him back against the pillows and said: ‘No, stay there. You look so comfortable.’

  Not moving, he protested: ‘But I must put you into a taxi.’

  ‘Oh no.’ Anything but that. Once before he had put her into a taxi and the fare had beggared her for a week. ‘You just stay there,’ she said.

  He sighed and said weakly: ‘This is disgraceful. I’m being spoilt.’

  Ahead of her, traffic lights changed in an empty world. When she reached them, she gazed down Chelsea Bridge Road to observe the infernal splendour of the Battersea Power Station. It was flood-lit. The rosy cameo of chimneys, seeming incandescent against the black sky, billowed smoke wreaths, glowing, massive, majestical as the smoke of hell. She loved them. They were a landmark of home. They remained at hand as she passed the cemetery. An icy dampness came from the earth where the old soldiers lay buried. She knew these old soldiers. On her Saturday afternoon walks she came here and read the inscriptions to the Master Builder, the surgeon and the mysterious Sixpennyman; to the cook who had died aged twenty-nine and the officers who had died of their wounds. She had sketched into a notebook the tomb that bore so lavish a collection of trophies of war, and had written beneath her sketch ‘Decoration for a bed-head’, hoping that one day at the studio she would be required to decorate a bed-head. It was familiar ground, yet now, in the darkness, she was unnerved by the glimmer of the headstones. At the thought of the dead who lay there in the cold of winter, the darkness of night, she was touched by mortality. Life was wonderful, but men died.

  She looked up at the sky and was reminded of a night – she thought of it as some hour near midnight but it must have been early on a winter evening – when she had walked with her father along the Eastsea promenade. The invisible sea had scratched on the pebbles below. Her father had pointed out stars to her – Orion’s Belt, the Plough, the Bear, the Dog. He had said: ‘They are worlds, like ours.’

  ‘With people?’

  ‘Perhaps. Why not?’

  For the first time in her life she had realised the sky was not a solid, light-pricked canopy, but infinite space.

  The night before he was taken to the sanatorium they had walked by the sea for a little way, very slowly. He had said: ‘You know, I may not come back.’

  Hoping to seem courageous in her fear, she had asked: ‘Do you mean you may die?’

  He said: ‘Yes, but it does not matter. Our destiny is not here.’

  She had remembered that as she had remembered nothing spoken at the Pratt Hill Baptist Chapel.

  That was ten years ago. Already she could look back ten years! How quickly one aged! She saw time stretching like a shadow behind her, like the long, dark, empty promenade on which the two figures, very small in her memory, pressed against the wind. Her father had known that he was dying. Perhaps it was death that had drawn his glance up to the stars.

  The Embankment meant she was nearly home. When she neared Oakley Street, she crossed the road at a run. She lived here in this impressive street where the houses stood in the street-lights like façades cut upon solid rock. She had found her room advertised on a postcard in a sweet-shop. Who could otherwise have guessed that such houses were boarding-houses? The long, glossy, upcurve of tarmac road was deserted. Ellie began to imagine herself a spirit, perhaps isolated in some dimension of her own – but, no, there was someone else in the world. Round the corner, in Upper Cheyne Row, a door-knocker was being furiously banged against a door. The knocking stopped. There was the squeak of a window going up. A woman’s voice called out: ‘The bell is working, dear.’ There was silence, then suddenly, into Oakley Street, walking on tall, thread-fine heels, a woman came as though in flight. She passed Ellie without noticing her. She was a delicately-shaped woman in a coat of expensive fur. A startling beauty.

  Ellie thought: ‘She must be somebody. Perhaps she’s famous.’

  The woman, stumbling at times on her high heels, began to run and wave and shout: ‘Taxi! Taxi!’ A taxi was coming up from the Embankment. It stopped beside her: she entered it: it turned in the road. Ellie watched it until it was out of sight.

  Well, that was London. Profoundly satisfied by her adopted city, Ellie found her key, entered her house and climbed to her room on the top floor. When she reached it, she opened her window and gazed down on the windows of Margaretta Terrace. She was wide awake again and excited as though, even at this last minute of the day, life might extend some new experience. What lay ahead for her? Would she ever rap on door-knockers with the urgency of important emotions? and run round a corner wearing a fur coat? and, lifting a hand to an approaching taxi, impress some other girl named Ellie and fill her with envy and ambition?

  Forced by the cold to close the window, Ellie embraced her own shoulders and turned round and round. The room’s size did not permit a real dance but she moved as wildly as she could to celebrate the end of her virginity.

  2

  Half-an-hour later, when Ellie was about to fall asleep, Quintin was awake, still propped up on pillows as she had left him. The circle of light from his prune-coloured lampshade lit only his hand that held open the second volume of The Princess Casamassima. He was not reading.

  He was not, as Ellie had been, disturbed by rapture, but by an irritation of the senses that exhausted him and kept him awake. He had involved himself with Ellie from habit, and it was a habit he would soon have to break. The very young, flinging their energy into the transports of love, were becoming too much for him.

  When the telephone rang, he supposed it was Ellie again. He was tempted to switch off the bell, but, remembering the eagerness of that childish, peach-bloom face, he smiled compassionately and lifted the receiver. He spoke into it a gentle and encouraging ‘Hello’.

  He was answered by an unfamiliar male voice asking him if he were Quintin Bellot. He roused himself without enthusiasm. He put down his book and flexed his aching arm while the voice at the other end of the line called him urgently to a milk bar in Bridge Street. His wife, Petta, had been found balancing on the parapet of Westminster Bridge. No spark was roused in him by the emergency.

  ‘Are you the police?’ he asked, delaying the moment of getting out of bed.

  ‘No. I was just passing. I said to her: “Don’t be silly. Come down,” I said, and she came down. When I found she couldn’t hardly stand, I brought her here for a coffee. She won’t let me leave her alone. I’d be obliged if you’d look slippy. I’ve got to get home tonight.’ The voice was becoming exasperated as nobility of action met with so little response.

  ‘All right. I’ll be about fifteen minutes.’

  ‘You get a move on,’ the receiver suddenly shouted as Quintin put it down.

  He rose and dressed, saying to himself: ‘Blast Petta, and blast this busybody who’s picked her up,’ yet he could not blame the man for wanting someone to take her off his hands. She had no luck. Her shows of helplessness merely produced, sooner or later, a panic to escape her.

  Of course, she had deliberately chosen Westminster Bridge. His flat was off Birdcage Walk. As he set out for Bridge Street, a damp, warm wind swept at him from the park. It smelt of decayed leaves, the breath of a false spring. This was the sort of night that in his youth had exhilarated him, forcing him out at all hours in search of experience – and here he was now, tramping across Parliament Square towards some tiresome situation with Petta.

  The square seemed deserted. The gates to the Underground were shut. The only sign of life came from the milk bar windows that gave off a light like the glare from molten metal. Petta was sitting inside with her rescuer. Both had a gloomy look of waiting. Both, it seemed, had sunk into silence long ago. There were sandwiches and coffee on the table between them. Under the ghastly violet-white
of the fluorescent strips, Petta had the pallor of the unliving. The young man got to his feet as Quintin opened the door. His look of painful impatience, painfully repressed, changed to affable relief. He was a tall, very thin young man in a shrunken raincoat. He looked at his wrist-watch and said: ‘The lady’ll be all right now. I’d best be getting along. I’ll just catch the 12.10.’

  Quintin said: ‘Thank you. We’ve wasted a lot of your time.’

  He would have left it at that, but Petta murmured something; he recoiled, saying: ‘Oh, no, I’m sure he wouldn’t . . .’ but the young man, though he seemed on the point of going, was still there. Quintin handed over a ten-shilling note. The young man took it and went in silence as though he had been expecting more.

  The food on the table was untouched. The coffee was a livid shade of yellow-green: the sandwiches looked like cement. ‘Do you want this stuff?’ Quintin asked.

  ‘No. I had to buy something, sitting here so long.’ She gave him a quick, uncertain glance, then, making a movement coquettish and pathetic, turned away. She had been crying. Looking down on her head, he noticed among the filmy fairness of her hair a sort of dust of grey hairs. Her whole appearance had taken on a kind of lifeless dryness as though, during the months she had been away, she had been pressed colourless like a flower in a book. Her lipstick had come off. In this light, her lips were mauve.

  ‘Where is Theo?’ he asked.

  She said contemptuously: ‘Oh, Theo!’

  ‘I’d better ring him up.’

  ‘No, Quintin, please. I’ve left him.’

  He wondered what he was going to do with her. He was determined not to take her back to his flat.

  ‘We must find a hotel. Where are your clothes and things?’

  ‘Still at Theo’s. I have my dressing-case.’ Her voice was plaintive and barely audible. ‘We had a row. I threw my latch-key at him and said I was going. When I came back he wouldn’t open the door. I kept knocking, then the woman in that flat upstairs shouted at me—’ she felt blindly for her handkerchief – ‘I did’nt know what to do.’ She started to weep and he was aware again of her old aura of desperate misfortune. He longed to leave her.