The Penguin Book of Modern British Short Stories

by The Penguin Book of Modern British Short Stories (retail) (epub)

‘I’ve done that in The Chelsea Set. I don’t want to repeat myself.’

  The bill had been lying beside them for some time now. He took out his wallet to pay, but she snatched the paper out of his reach. She said, ‘This is my celebration.’

  ‘What of?’

  ‘The Chelsea Set, of course. Darling, you’re awfully decorative, but sometimes – well, you simply don’t connect.’

  ‘I’d rather… if you don’t mind…’

  ‘No, darling, this is on me. And Mr Dwight, of course.’

  He submitted just as two of the Japanese gentleman gave tongue simultaneously, then stopped abruptly and bowed to each other, as though they were blocked in a doorway.

  I had thought the two young people matching miniatures, but what a contrast in fact there was. The same type of prettiness could contain weakness and strength. Her Regency counterpart, I suppose, would have borne a dozen children without the aid of anaesthetics, while he would have fallen an easy victim to the first dark eyes in Naples. Would there one day be a dozen books on her shelf? They have to be born without an anaesthetic too. I found myself hoping that The Chelsea Set would prove to be a disaster and that eventually she would take up photographic modelling while he established himself solidly in the wine-trade in St James’s. I didn’t like to think of her as the Mrs Humphrey Ward of her generation – not that I would live so long. Old age saves us from the realization of a great many fears. I wondered to which publishing firm Dwight belonged. I could imagine the blurb he would have already written about her abrasive powers of observation. There would be a photo, if he was wise, on the back of the jacket, for reviewers, as well as publishers, are human, and she didn’t look like Mrs Humphrey Ward.

  I could hear them talking while they found their coats at the back of the restaurant. He said, ‘I wonder what all those Japanese are doing here?’

  ‘Japanese?’ she said. ‘What Japanese, darling? Sometimes you are so evasive I think you don’t want to marry me at all.’

  * * *

  ANGUS WILSON

  * * *

  MORE FRIEND THAN LODGER

  As soon as Henry spoke of their new author Rodney Galt I knew that I should dislike him. ‘It’s rather a feather in my cap to have got him for our list,’ he said. The publishing firm of which Henry is a junior partner is called Brodrick Layland which as a name is surely a feather in no one’s cap, but that by the way. ‘I think Harkness were crazy to let him go,’ Henry said, ‘because although Cuckoo wasn’t a great money-spinner, it was very well thought of indeed. But that’s typical of Harkness, they think of nothing but sales.’

  I may say for those who don’t know him that this speech was very typical of Henry: because, first, I should imagine most publishers think a lot about sales and, if Brodrick Layland don’t, then I’m sorry to hear it; and, secondly, Henry would never naturally use expressions like ‘a great money-spinner’, but since he’s gone into publishing he thinks he ought to sound a bit like a business man and doesn’t really know how. The kind of thing that comes natural to Henry to say is that somebody or something is ‘very well thought of indeed’, which doesn’t sound like a business man to anyone, I imagine. But what Henry is like ought to emerge from my story if I’m able to write it at all. And I must in fairness add that my comments about him probably tell quite a lot about me – for example he isn’t by any means mostly interested in the money in publishing but much more in ‘building up a good list’, so that his comment on Harkness wasn’t hypocritical. And, as his wife, I know this perfectly well, but I’ve got into the habit of talking like that about him.

  Henry went on to tell me about Cuckoo. It was not either a novel, which one might have thought, or a book about birds or lunatics, which was less likely, although it’s the kind of thing I might have pretended to think in order to annoy him. No, Cuckoo was an anthology and a history of famous cuckolds. Rodney Galt, it seemed, had a great reputation, not as a cuckold, for he was single, but as a seducer; although his victories were not only or even mainly among married women. He was particularly successful as a matter of fact at seducing younger daughters and debs. Henry told me all this in a special offhand sort of voice intended to suggest to me that at Brodrick Layland’s they took that sort of thing for granted. Once again I’m being bitchy, because, of course, if I had said ‘Come off it, Henry’ or words to that effect, he would have changed his tone immediately. But I did not see why I should, because among our acquaintances we do number a few though not many seducers of virgins; and if I made Henry change his tone it would suggest that he was quite unfamiliar with such a phenomenon which would be equally false. Fairness and truth are my greatest difficulties in life.

  To return to Rodney Galt – the book he was going to write for Brodrick Layland was to be called Honour and Civility. Once again it was not to be a novel, however, like Sense and Sensibility or The Naked and the Dead. Rodney Galt used the words ‘Honour’ and ‘Civility’ in a special sense; some would say an archaic sense, but he did not see it that way because he preferred not to recognize the changes that had taken place in the English language in the last hundred years or so. ‘Honour’ for him meant ‘the thing that is most precious to a man’, but not in the sense that the Victorians meant that it was most precious to a woman. Rodney Galt from what I could gather would have liked to see men still killing each other in duels for their honour and offering civilities to one another in the shape of snuff and suchlike before they did so. He believed in ‘living dangerously’ and in what is called ‘high courage’, but exemplified preferably in sports and combats of long standing. He was, therefore, against motor racing and even more against ‘track’ but in favour of bullfighting and perhaps pelota; he was also against dog racing but in favour of baccarat for high stakes.

  The book, however, was not to be just one of those books that used to be popular with my uncle Charles called Twelve Rakes or Twenty Famous Dandies. It was to be more philosophical than that, involving all the author’s view of society; for example, that we could not be civilized or great again unless we accepted cruelty as a part of living dangerously, and that without prejudice man could have no opinion, and, indeed, altogether what in Mr Galt’s view constituted the patrician life.

  I told Henry that I did not care for the sound of him. Henry only smiled, however, and said, ‘I warn you that he’s a snob, but on such a colossal scale and with such panache that one can’t take exception to it.’ I told Henry firmly that I was not the kind of woman who could see things on such a large scale as that, and also, that if, as I suspected from his saying ‘I warn you’, he intended to invite Rodney Galt to the house, only the strictest business necessity would reconcile me to it.

  ‘There is the strictest business necessity,’ Henry said, and added, ‘Don’t be put off by his matinee idol looks. He’s indecently good-looking.’ He giggled when he said this, for he knew that he had turned the tables on me. Henry used to believe – his mother taught him the idea – that no woman liked men to be extremely good-looking. He knows different now because I have told him again and again that I would not have married him if he had not been very handsome himself. His mother’s code, however, dies hard with him and even now, I suspect, he thinks that if his nose had not been broken at school, I should have found him too perfect. He is quite wrong. I would willingly pay for him to have it straightened if I thought he would accept the offer.

  Reading over what I have written, I see that it must appear as though Henry and I live on very whimsical terms – gilding the pill of our daily disagreements with a lot of private jokes and ‘sparring’ and generally rather ghastly arch behaviour. Thinking over our life together, perhaps it is true. It is with no conscious intent, however; although I have read again and again in the women’s papers to which I’m addicted that a sense of humour is the cement of marriage. Henry and I have a reasonable proportion of sense of humour, but no more. He gets his, which is dry, from his mother who, as you will see in this story of Rodney Galt, is like a characte
r from the novels of Miss Compton Burnett, or, at least, when I read those novels I people them entirely with characters like Henry’s mother. My parents had no vestige of humour; my father was too busy getting rich and my mother was too busy unsuccessfully trying to crash county society.

  But it is true that Henry and I in our five years of marriage have built up a lot of private joking and whimsical talking and I can offer what seem to be some good reasons for it, but who am I to say? First, there is what anyone would pick on – that our marriage is childless, which, I think, is really the least of the possible reasons. It certainly is with me, although it may count with Henry more than he can say. The second is that everything counts with Henry more than he can say. ‘Discerning’ people who know Henry and his mother and, indeed, all the Ravens, usually say that they are shy beneath their sharp manner. I don’t quite believe this; I think it’s just because they find it easier to be like this so that other people can’t overstep the mark of intimacy and intrude too far on their personal lives. You can tell from the way Henry’s mother shuts her eyes when she meets people that she has an interior life and actually she is a devout Anglican. And Henry has an interior life which he has somehow or other put into his publishing. Well, anyhow, Henry’s manner shy or not makes me shy, and I’ve got much more whimsical since I knew him.

  But also there’s my own attitude to our marriage. I can only sum it up by saying that it’s like the attitude of almost everyone in England today to almost everything. I worked desperately hard to get out of the insecurity of my family – which in this case was not economic because they’re fairly rich and left me quite a little money of my own, but social – and when I married Henry I loved every minute of it because the Ravens are quite secure in their own way – which Henry’s mother calls ‘good country middle class, June dear, and no more’. And if that security is threatened for a moment I rush back to it for safety. But most of the time when it’s not in danger, I keep longing for more adventure in life and a wider scope and more variety and even greater risks and perils. Well, all that you’ll see in this story, I think. But anyhow this feeling about our marriage makes me uneasy with Henry and I keep him at a humorous distance. And he, knowing it, does so all the more too. All this, I hope, will explain our private jokes and so on, of which you will meet many. By the way, about security and risk, I don’t really believe that one can’t have one’s cake and eat it – which also you’ll see.

  To return to Rodney Galt; Henry did, in fact, invite him to dinner a week later. He was not, of course, as bad as Henry made out, that is to say, as I have sketched above, because that description was part of Henry’s ironical teasing of me. In fact, however, he was pretty bad. He said ghastly things in an Olympian way – not with humour like Henry and me, but with ‘wit’ which is always rather awful. However, I must admit that even at that first dinner I didn’t mind Rodney’s wit as much as all that, partly because he had the most lovely speaking voice (I don’t know why one says speaking voice as though most of one’s friends used recitative), very deep and resonant which always ‘sends’ me; and partly because he introduced his ghastly views in a way that made them seem better than they were. For example:

  Henry said, ‘I imagine that a good number of your best friends are Jews, Galt.’

  And Rodney raised his eyebrows and said, ‘Good heavens, why?’

  And Henry answered, ‘Most anti-Semitic people make that claim.’

  And Rodney said, ‘I suppose that’s why I’m not anti-Semitic. I can’t imagine knowing any Jews. When would it arise? Oh, I suppose when one’s buying pictures or objects, but then that’s hardly knowing. It’s simply one of the necessities. Or, of course, if one went to Palestine, but then that’s hardly a necessity.’

  And I said, ‘What about Disraeli? He made the Tory party of today.’ I said this with a side glance at Henry because he used then to describe himself as a Tory Democrat, although since Suez he has said that he had not realized how deeply Liberalism ran in his veins.

  Rodney said, ‘What makes you speak of such unpleasant things?’

  And I asked, ‘Aren’t you a Tory then?’

  And he answered, ‘I support the principles of Lord Eldon and respect the courage of Lord Sidmouth, if that’s what you mean.’

  Henry said, ‘Oh! but what about the Suez Canal and the British Empire? Disraeli made those.’

  And Rodney looked distant and remarked, ‘The British Empire even at its height was never more than a convenient outlet for the middle-class high-mindedness of Winchester and Rugby. The plantations and the penal colonies of course,’ he added, ‘were a different matter.’

  Henry, who makes more of his Charterhouse education than he admits, said, ‘Oh, come, Winchester and Rugby are hardly the same thing.’

  Rodney smiled and said in a special hearty voice, ‘No, I suppose not, old man.’ This was rude to Henry, of course, but slightly gratifying to me. Anyhow he went straight on and said, ‘The thing that pleases me most about coming to Brodrick Layland is your book production, Raven. I do like to feel that what I have written, if it is worth publishing at all, deserves a comely presentation.’ This, of course, was very gratifying to Henry. They talked about books or rather the appearance of books for some time and I made little comment as I like the inside of books almost exclusively. It appeared, however, that Rodney was a great collector of books, as he was of so many other things: porcelain, enamels, Byzantine ivories and Central American carvings. He was quick to tell us, that, of course, with his modest income he had to leave the big things alone and that, again with his modest income, it was increasingly difficult to pick up anything worth having, but that it could be done. He left us somehow with the impression that he would not really have cared for the big things anyway, and that his income could not be as modest as all that.

  ‘Heaven defend me,’ he said, ‘from having the money to buy those tedious delights of the pedants – incunables. No, the little Elzeviers are my particular favourites, the decent classical authors charmingly produced. I have a delightful little Tully and the only erotica worth possessing, Ovid’s Amores.’

  It was talking of Ovid that he said something which gave me a clue to my feelings about him.

  ‘I know of no more moving thing in literature than Ovid’s exiled lament for Rome. It’s just how any civilized Englishman today must feel when, chained to his native land, he thinks of the Mediterranean or almost anywhere else outside England for that matter. “Breathes there a Soul”, you know.’ He smiled as he said it. Of course, it was the most awful pretentious way of talking, but so often I do feel that I would rather be almost anywhere than in England that he made me feel guilty for not being as honest as he was.

  It seemed, however, that after a great deal of travel in a great many places, he was now for some time to be chained to his native land. He had, he said, a lot of family business to do. He was looking out for a house something like ours. He even hinted – it was the only hint of his commercially venturing side that he gave that evening – at the possibility of his buying a number of houses as an investment. Meanwhile he was staying with Lady Ann Denton. I ventured to suggest that this might be a little too much of a good thing, but he smiled and said that she was a very old friend, which, although it rather put me in my place, gave him a good mark for loyalty. (Henry scolded me afterwards and told me that Rodney was having an affair with Lady Ann. This surprised and disconcerted me. It didn’t sound at all like ‘debs’. Lady Ann is old – over forty – and very knocked about and ginny. She has an amusing malicious tongue and a heart of gold. Sometimes I accept her tongue because of her heart, and sometimes I put up with her heart because of her tongue. Sometimes I can’t stand either. But, as you will have already seen, my attitude to people is rather ambiguous. However, Henry is very fond of her. She makes him feel broadminded which he likes very much.)

  We had it out a little about snobbery that evening. ‘Heavens, I should hope so,’ Rodney said, when I accused him of being a soci
al snob, ‘it’s one of the few furies worth having that are left to us – little opportunity though the modern world allows of finding anyone worth cultivating. There still do exist a few families, however, even in this country. It lends shape to my life as it did to Proust’s.’ I said that though it had lent shape to Proust’s work, I wasn’t so sure about his life. ‘In any case,’ he said with a purposeful parody of a self-satisfied smile, ‘art and life are one.’ Then he burst out laughing and said, ‘Really, I’ve excelled myself this evening. It’s your excellent food.’

  Looking back at what I have written I see that I said that he wasn’t as bad as Henry made out and then everything that I have reported him as saying is quite pretentious and awful. The truth is that it was his smile and his good looks that made it seem all right. Henry had said that he was like a matinee idol, but this is a ridiculous expression for nowadays (whatever it may have been in the days of Henry’s mother and Owen Nares) because no one could go to a matinee with all those grey-haired old ladies up from the Country rattling tea-trays and feel sexy about anything. But Rodney was like all the best film stars rolled into one and yet the kind of person it wasn’t surprising to meet; and, these taken together surely make a very sexy combination.

  It was clear that evening that Henry liked him very much too. Not for that reason, of course. Henry hasn’t ever even thought about having feelings of that kind I’m glad to say. As a matter of fact, Henry doesn’t have sexy feelings much anyway. No, that’s quite unfair and bitchy of me again. Of course, he has sexy feelings, but he has them at definite times and the rest of the time such things don’t come into his head. Whereas I don’t ever have such strong sexy feelings as he has, but I have some of them all the time. This is a contrast that tends to make things difficult.

  No, the reason Henry liked him I could see at once, and I said as soon as he had left, ‘Well, he’s quite your cup of tea, isn’t he? He’s been everywhere and knows a lot about everything.’ I said the last sentence in inverted commas, because it’s one of Henry’s favourite expressions of admiration and I often tease him about it. It isn’t very surprising because Henry went to Charterhouse and then in the last two years of the War he went with the F S P to Italy, and then he went to the Queen’s College, Oxford, and then he went into Brodrick Layland. So he hasn’t been everywhere. In fact, however, he does know quite a lot about quite a number of things, but as soon as he knows something he doesn’t think it can be very important.