‘I’m afraid I must go.’ Petta was determined to get away, but politeness forced her to spend a few minutes in conversation with Diana. She said: ‘I am glad to hear Flora has decided to study medicine.’
‘Oh!’ Diana’s laugh was not as light and scoffing as it was intended to be. ‘That’s not decided at all. That’s some silly idea of Henry’s.’
‘It certainly isn’t, Aunt.’ Flora spoke quietly but with a decision that showed Petta that, if need be, the girl could fight her own cause.
Petta pretended to look at her watch. ‘I am late. I must fly,’ she broke in on the argument developing between Flora and Diana, and took herself off before either could detain her.
She wandered through Berkeley Square and stood for a long time gazing into the brilliant windows of a flower shop. She did not know what to do. She had an impulse to go at once to her solicitor and alter her present will that left all her income to Quintin – but what was the hurry? The office would be closing. There was time enough. She might live another fifty years.
Fifty years! Half a century! She was desolated by the thought of so much time. There seemed nothing she could do with it. She thought: ‘If I could sleep through it!’ and then: ‘If I could sleep for ever!’
The air was damp and chilly with winter. In Piccadilly young men and women were crowded at the bus stops, thrusting indifferently against one another in the rush-hour fight. Men, hurrying into the Underground station, dodged irritably about her as though she were an exasperating impediment. She crossed the road and turned down Arlington Street to avoid the crowds. Beside the Ritz, some unfortunate in an old car had failed to start when the lights turned green. As he peered, shame-faced, under the bonnet, the blocked traffic set up a frenzied clamour. She followed the line of cars through to St James’s Street, where it stretched out of sight.
She crossed the road again and escaped from the uproar into King Street. She had once lived near here: then the district had seemed to hold all the delight and fashion of the world. Now she found it repellent; trampled upon, agitated and rowdy as a bank holiday fair.
She did not know where she was going. She walked because she could not face so soon the return to Redcliffe Gardens. She would spend this evening alone. She turned a corner and made her way towards a hotel in Jermyn Street where she and her friends had met before the war. She had a curious hope that someone there might claim her: draw her from the empty and purposeless present, back to the past that in her memory held the flavour of perpetual summer. She was surprised by her own nostalgia. She remembered how, a few evenings before, she had described to Arnold her first weeks with Quintin. She had described them with longing, knowing the past had given her something the future could not give. She told herself: ‘My end is nearer than my beginning.’
She reached the hotel. She had not been inside it for years. During the late ’30s it had become unfashionable: its reputation had fallen. Then she had already broken away from the raffish and extravagant set that had once been the centre of her life. She had fulfilled her mother’s wish. She had married Henry.
The hotel was unchanged. The black and white chequered entrance hall, the polished mahogany pillars, the mahogany panelling, the vast steel engravings, the Turkish carpets – all were as she remembered them. Only, the people sitting in the entrance hall were not the people she had known. She took a seat and ordered gin. When she had lit a cigarette, she glanced about her at the pearl-smooth girls, the brisk young men newly come in from offices. Their behaviour was conventional: none of the outrageous attention-getting that had characterised her friends. These young people probably all earned their livings. When the money spent here had been inherited or begged from father or borrowed from anyone who would lend, then it was correct to assume a languid indifference, an acid wit, the slender and faded air of a dying aristocracy. These young men looked tougher but were armed with good fellowship, good humour, a tendency to ‘look on the bright side’. No one could afford an acid wit these days.
Soon the girls and men were leaving. From outside came the sound of cars starting off. By eight o’clock the hall was empty. Petta looked into the dining-room, but its forlorn show of empty tables and ancient waiters discouraged her. She wondered how the place kept open.
She returned to her seat and ordered sandwiches. For nearly an hour longer she remained there alone, held by inability to take herself elsewhere. In the past, bored with circumstances and feeling the need for change, she would have looked to events to claim her. There was a time when, whenever she went out alone, her personality compelled pursuit: she had so burned with life that everyone who approached her caught fire from her. Not now. Not now.
She thought ‘My time is over,’ and she did not really care. What did it matter if one were page 20 or page 200 in a book? – all the pages would be turned in the end.
Some time after nine o’clock, people came in to drink again. These were not the people who had been here earlier. They looked older and harder: there was no friendliness among them. She decided to go, then saw a man enter whose face was familiar. She watched him and suddenly recognised him – Dinkum James. She made no attempt to attract his attention. He seemed to be looking for someone. As soon as he saw her, he smiled and crossed to her as though it had been she for whom he was looking. He stretched out his hand. She took it affectionately: it collapsed in her fingers like the skeleton of a bird. He did not speak.
After several arrests, he had been forcibly cured of drug addiction. He looked now as though there was nothing left in the world for him. He stood smiling by the table until she patted the chair beside her. He shook his head, but did not move away. His ghostly paper-mask of a face had still the imprint of his once remarkable good looks, but his body jerked about with the angular indecision of a ventriloquist’s doll.
She had been fond of him in the past. He had been a gentle creature if you met him alone, but with the others he had never been able to stand apart from their convention of aggressive bad manners, and that howling persecution of outsiders that made them so formidable. Their confidence – well, anyway, their show of confidence – in themselves and in the rightness of everything they did, said or thought had frightened her and everyone else. Yet, now that they were scattered, moneyless and out-of-fashion, they were as ineffectual as rabbits.
She realised why Dinkum was standing there. She called the waiter, ordered gin for herself and asked Dinkum what he would drink.
He made a noise in his throat, pulled himself together, seeming to creak as he did so, and attempted speech. The waiter, a very old man, stood patiently by until Dinkum had stammered out: ‘Brandy’ and crumpled into the chair.
‘Do any of the others come here now?’ Petta asked.
Dinkum looked at her as though trying to read from her face what she had said: after some moments, he shook his head. When the drinks came, Dinkum had swallowed his before Petta had had time to settle with the waiter. She ordered him another: he smiled pathetically and made a little gesture that said: ‘My dear, how kind! It should be I who . . .’ The movement of his shoulders indicated the helplessness of his poverty. She touched his arm and smiled, then asked: ‘Do you ever see any of the others?’ Dinkum nodded.
‘What’s become of Ba-ba Poulsen?’
Dinkum’s smile broadened: after some effort, he stuttered out: ‘Had D.T.s,’ then to please Petta he managed to say: ‘Fat – like an imbecile baby. Hair dyed yellow. Poor old hay-bag.’
Petta, was not pleased. She and Ba-ba were much the same age. How would Dinkum describe her? She said: ‘Ba-ba used to be lovely. And Eddie – where is he?’
‘S—still s-sponging about Europe.’
‘And Hartley?’
‘D-dead. S-shot in Marrakesh. S-some trouble in a café.’
Remembering Hartley as she had seen him two years before across a restaurant – the plum, plush skin, the white hair, the violently shaking hand that held the whisky glass – she said: ‘Lucky to have made an end of it.’<
br />
Dinkum nodded. They went on through the list. Only one of them had been killed in the war they had all feared so much.
She said: ‘We could not afford to grow old.’ She stretched out her hand and rubbed the wrinkles that formed in the skin over her knuckles. ‘I’m doomed, like the rest of them,’ she said.
Dinkum caught her hand and bent his face towards her: ‘No, no,’ he reassured her. She knew he was rewarding her for the drinks. ‘Y-you have not c-changed. S-still young. S-still beautiful.’
She laughed in spite of herself: ‘I wish I could believe it.’ Yet she believed it and, waving to the waiter, she ordered more drinks and began to talk. ‘The trouble with Eddie and Hartley and all of them was they were vaguely creative. A bit of writing, a bit of painting, playing a bit on the piano – nothing good enough. They came up against their own second-rateness. Mediocrity is an incurable disease. One way or another, it kills you in the end. Now I – I never tried to do anything.’
She looked for agreement at Dinkum, but, of course, he could not listen for so long. He had swallowed his third brandy down and now was rising, with an air of secretiveness and urgency. He whispered: ‘Must steal away,’ and with a smile of extraordinary sweetness, stammering some unintelligible apology for his departure, he made out as though he feared everyone in the bar would note and impede him.
She sat looking after him. The door opened and a man entered who looked like Quintin. It was not Quintin, but in the instant of her agitation she upset her glass. The gin spread and dripped on to the floor. She did not right the glass but sat for a long time as though she had lost the power to move: then, dragging a finger through the pool of gin, she wrote on the table-top:
‘Shall I abide
In this dull world, which in thy absence is
No better than a sty?’
When she could make the effort she left the hotel. It was nearly closing time. She felt a deep unwillingness to return to Arnold’s flat. In the bar she had thought she might go to some small hotel and live on hope of Quintin’s return, but the outer darkness, the indifference of the passers-by, the cold, the strangeness she must meet and overcome in strange rooms, defeated her. Perhaps if it had been summer! – but the air was bleak with the coming winter. Like a domestic animal, she needed more than shelter.
She walked up to Piccadilly. As she sauntered in a purposeless way beneath the colonnades of the Ritz, she was accosted by a man a few years younger than herself. She stopped and watched him as he mumbled at her in the shadows. Perhaps she should expect no more than this. On an impulse she caught his arm and drew him into the light. His face was neither brutal nor vicious, it was merely paltry. She pushed him aside. When she saw a cruising taxi, she caught it and drove to Redcliffe Gardens.
Entering the sitting-room, she saw the bedroom light shining beneath the door. Arnold, as he usually did when alone, had gone to bed to read. She sat down and waited for the light to be turned out. She had no wish to talk to him. When, at last, the light went out and she judged he was asleep, she entered the bedroom silently, undressed and slid into bed. He rose towards the surface of consciousness and, moving towards her as though from long habit, wrapped her in his arms.
9
The labour exchange had nothing to offer Ellie. Even during the year she had been in London, prices had risen, jobs for the unqualified had become fewer and more people were seeking them. Ellie said she was willing to wash dishes in a hotel. The labour exchange official was unimpressed. Students and out-of-work actors were queuing up to wash dishes in hotels. The work called for stamina. The official, eyeing Ellie, seemed to imply that stamina was just what she lacked. She was advised to wait for more suitable employment.
That evening she was telephoned by Nancy. This was a restored and exultant Nancy who had come to London to see Terry, reclaim her room and prepare everyone for her speedy return. She had rung Tom on her arrival and been invited to Clopals for the week-end.
‘It was lovely. Clopals is lovely in the autumn.’
‘Did Tom speak of me?’ Ellie asked.
‘Didn’t even mention your name. And what do you think? Terry has taken the room above mine. I’ll be able to hear him walking about. Isn’t that marvellous? I’m so excited, I could cry. Now I must rush for my train.’
Ellie did not try to tell her own story. Nancy could do nothing for her. She believed she would soon find work. There was no need to worry anyone about it.
The next afternoon, envious of Clopals, knowing she was unlikely ever to go there again, she took herself to Battersea Park, where the haze from the river hung like dust in the tepid sunlight. The grass was brilliant, but spongy with rain. The mower had pulled it bare in patches. There were flowers – clumps of Michaelmas daisies, some ragged chrysanthemums, some ostentatious dahlias, their heads hanging heavily from their stems, even a few imperfect roses – but they were all like late-comers at a party. The festivities were over, the room trampled upon, everyone else had left.
Wandering about as evening came down, she suffered the memory of her first autumnal evenings with Quintin. Then, as now, the air was full of the smell of autumn: the sugar-pink light from the streaky sunset turned the smoky distances to violet. Then, it seemed, she had had everything she could want in the world. She did not believe, now, she could ever be so happy again. She had lost the trick of it.
When she left the park, the lamps were coming on along the Embankment. They shone among the thinning leaves. This was the teasing, disturbing season when rooms were lighted early and those who passed outside could look into the lives of others. Ellie took a roundabout route to Oakley Street. In Flood Street she stood a long time watching a woman dressing her hair before a gilt looking-glass. The walls of the room were red, rubbed and shabby, yet seeming to enclose the elements of ardour, as though love had lived itself out there a thousand times. The woman put down her comb and started to rouge her lips. A few heavy, fallen leaves moved on the pavement. The woman glanced towards the window: Ellie hurried away.
At the end of the week she was given some unemployment pay. Having reached an abandonment of hunger, she spent a quarter of her money on a meal: then, in the relief of feeling well-fed, her spirits rose and, with new confidence, she went to a telephone box and rang the Slanskis’ to ask if the countess had returned. Désirée had left. The new maid behaved as though the information for which Ellie asked was valuable and not to be given away.
‘Can I speak to the count, then?’ Ellie boldly enquired, knowing the count would not be there.
The girl’s front was shaken: ‘The count’s not in.’
‘And the countess is still away?’
‘Yes.’
‘When will she be back?’
‘Nobody knows.’
In the weeks that followed, Ellie could eat irregularly so long as she did not pay her rent. As she had paid so scrupulously in the past, Mrs Mackie was lenient with her at the end of the first week. At the end of the second week she said: ‘You know, Miss Parsons, this can’t go on,’ and Ellie took to avoiding her on the stairs.
At the end of three weeks Ellie had no more hope of paying than at the beginning. She had never been in debt in her life before. She was filled with fear and guilt. Added to that, she had broken a rule of the house. Tenants were permitted to make tea in their rooms, but not to eat in them. Ellie had hidden on her wardrobe shelf a loaf of sliced bread, a piece of margarine and a pot of jam. Often she brought in half-a-pint of milk and made her own midday meal. She had to keep her wardrobe locked and pick up every crumb.
On Sunday, imprisoned by an autumnal downpour, she reviewed her position and decided it could not be worse. She owed rent. She was unemployed. She had lost weight. Her clothes were worn out. She had cut herself off from her home.
One thing remained to her: she could appeal to Tom Claypole. He had said he could find her half-a-dozen jobs. For fear of being snubbed, she had put this possibility from her mind. Now she started composing a letter: ‘. . .
I know I have disappointed you, but I badly need your help. I have lost my job and . . .’
Suddenly there flamed up in her the hope of success. Tom had been kind to her once. Surely he could not now be so cruel as to refuse her the help he could easily give! In her excitement, she determined not to write but to telephone. She sped down the stairs, asked for the Clopals number, put one and sixpence into the machine and, in return, was connected to the voice of Maxine.
Ellie asked if she might speak to Tom. Maxine, with cold dignity, said she feared not. Tom had had a second stroke, more serious than the first. He was too ill to speak to anyone.
‘Oh, please,’ Ellie begged. ‘Just for a moment.’
‘It is out of the question.’
Fearing Maxine would put down her receiver, Ellie rushed on to ask, desperately, knowing she asked without hope: Could Maxine not help her? She had lost her job and Maxine worked for a large firm . . .
Maxine interrupted to say that the firm for which she worked employed artists only with the highest qualifications. Ellie would not stand a chance.
‘Tom said if I lost my job, he would find me another.’
‘He talks like that. Anyway, he’s too ill to do anything now. The doctor says he won’t be himself again for months.’
At that, the telephone exchange broke in to demand another one and sixpence. Ellie said a rapid good-bye.
Ringing Clopals had been a desperate measure enough, but now an even more desperate and frightening intention possessed her. She would telephone Count Slanski. She did so before she had time to think again. She was prepared to fight past the obstructing parlour-maid, and was brought to a pause when it was the count himself who answered the telephone. She put her request for payment with such diffidence, and, from dryness of throat, her voice died in so futile a fashion, she was surprised to find she had convinced him of her need and right. He asked what was the sum owing. She replied: ‘Eight pounds.’ He said: ‘If you come round this evening, I will give it to you straight away.’
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