The Penguin Book of Modern British Short Stories
Page 9
We both agreed then that Rodney Galt was quite awful in most ways but that we rather liked him all the same. This is my usual experience with a great number of people that I meet, but Henry found it more surprising.
In the week that followed Henry seemed to see a good deal of Rodney Galt. He put him up for his Club. I was rather surprised that Rodney should have wanted to be a member of Henry’s Club which is rather dull and literary: I had imagined him belonging to a lot of clubs of a much grander kind already. Henry explained that he did in fact belong to a lot of others, but that he had been abroad so much that he had lost touch with those worlds. I thought that was very odd, too, because I imagined that the point of clubs was that no matter how often you went round the world and no matter how long, when you came back the club was there. However, as I only knew about clubs from the novels of Evelyn Waugh, I was prepared to believe that I was mistaken. In any case it also seemed that Rodney wanted particularly to belong to this author’s sort of club, because he believed very strongly that one should do everything one did professionally and as he was now going to write books, he wanted to go to that sort of place.
‘He’s a strange fellow in many ways,’ Henry said, ‘a mass of contradictions.’ This didn’t seem at all strange to me, because such people as I have met have all been a mass of contradictions. Nevertheless Rodney’s particular contradiction in this case did seem odd to me. I had imagined that the whole point of his books would be that they should be thrown off in the midst of other activities – amateur productions that proved to be more brilliant than the professional. However, his new attitude if less romantic was more creditable and certainly more promising for Brodrick Layland. I decided indeed that he had probably only made this gesture to please Henry, which it did.
We dined once or twice with him and Lady Ann. She has rather a nice house in Chester Square and he seemed to be very comfortably installed – more permanently indeed than his earlier talk of buying houses suggested. However, this may well have been only the appearance that Lady Ann gave to things, for she made every effort short of absurdity to underline the nature of their relationship. I really could not blame her for this, for she had made a catch that someone a good deal less battered and ginny might have been proud of; and I had to admire the manner in which she avoided the absurdity for, in fact, looking at him and at her, it was very absurd, apart from the large gap in their ages – fifteen years at least, I decided.
Lady Ann as usual talked most of the time. She has a special way of being funny: she speaks with a drawl and a very slight stutter and she ends her remarks suddenly with a word or expression that isn’t what one expects she is going to lead up to. Well, of course, one does expect it, because she always does it; and like a lot of things it gets less funny when you’ve heard it a few times. For example, she said she didn’t agree with Rodney in not liking Look Back in Anger, she’d been three times, the music was so good. And again, she quite agreed with Henry, she wouldn’t have missed the Braque exhibition for anything, but then she got a peculiar pleasure, almost a sensual one, from being jammed really tight in a crowd. And so on. Henry always laps up Lady Ann. She’s a sort of tarty substitute mother-figure for him, I think; and indeed, if he wanted a tarty mother, he had to find a substitute. I thought, perhaps, that Rodney would be a little bored with her carry on, but if he was, he didn’t show it. This, of course, was very creditable of him, but made me a little disappointed. Occasionally, it is true, he broke into the middle of her chatter; but then she interrupted him sometimes just as rudely. They might really have been a perfectly happy pair which I found even more disappointing.
I can’t help thinking that by this time you may have formed some rather unfavourable views about the kind of woman I am. Well, I’ve already said that often I have very bitchy moods; and it’s true, but at least I know it. But if you ask me why I have bitchy moods it’s more difficult to say. In the first place life is frightfully boring nowadays, isn’t it? And if you say I ought to try doing something with my time, well I have. I did translations from French and German for Brodrick Layland for a time; and I did prison visiting. They’re quite different sorts of things to do and it didn’t take long for me to get very bored with each of them. Not that I should want wars and revolutions – whenever there’s an international crisis I get a ghastly pain in my stomach like everybody else. But, as I said, like England, I want security and I don’t. However, what I was trying to explain about was my bitchy moods. Well, when I get very bored and depressed, I hate everyone and it seems to me everyone hates me. (As a matter of fact most people do like Henry better than me, although they think I’m more amusing.) But when the depressed mood lifts, I can’t help feeling people are rather nice and they seem to like me too. I had these moods very badly when I was sixteen or so; and now in these last two years (since I was twenty-five) they’ve come back and they change much more quickly. When I talked to Henry about it once, he got so depressed and took such a ‘psychological’ view that I’ve never mentioned it again. In any case it’s so easy to take ‘psychological’ views; but I’m by no means sure that it isn’t just as true to say like my old nurse, ‘Well, we all have our ups and downs,’ and certainly that’s a more cosy view of the situation.
But enough about me, because all this is really about Rodney Galt. Well, in those few times I saw him with Lady Ann (it seems more comic always to call her that) I began to have a theory about him; and when I get theories about people I get very interested in them. Especially as, if my theory was right, then Lady Ann and Henry and Mr Brodrick and no doubt lots of other people were liable to be sold all along the line or up the river or whatever the expression is; but on the whole, if my theory was right it only made me feel that he was more fascinating. The best sort of theory to have. One thing I did want to know more about was his family. In such cases I always believe in asking directly, so I said, ‘Where are your family, Rodney?’ He smiled and said, ‘In the Midlothian where they’ve been for a sufficient number of recorded centuries to make them respectable. They’re the best sort of people really,’ he added, ‘the kind of people who’ve always been content to be trout in the local minnow pond. I’m the only one who’s shown the cloven hoof of fame-seeking. There must be a bounderish streak somewhere though not from mother’s family who were all perfectly good dull country gentry. Of course, there was my great-great-great uncle the novelist. But his was a very respectable middling sort of local fame really.’
Well there wasn’t much given away there because after all there are minnows and minnows and even ‘country gentry’ is rather a vague term. It was a bit disingenuous about Galt the novelist, because even I have heard of him and I know nothing of the Midlothian. And that was the chief annoyance. I knew absolutely no one with whom I could check up. But it didn’t shake my theory.
Now we come to the most important point in this story: When Rodney Galt became our lodger. But first I shall have to explain about ‘the lodger battle’ which Henry and I had been then waging for over a year and this means explaining about our finances. Henry had some capital and he put that into Brodrick Layland and really, all things considered, he gets quite a good income back. But the house which we live in is mine; and it was left to me by my Aunt Agnes and it’s rather a big house, situated in that vague area known as behind Harrods. But it isn’t, in fact, Pont Street Dutch. And in this big house there is only me and Henry and one or two foreign girls. They change usually every year and at the time I’m speaking of, about six or seven months ago, there was only one girl, a Swiss called Henriette Vaudoyer. Henry had long been keen that we should have a lodger who could have a bedroom and sitting-room and bathroom of their own. He said it was because he didn’t like my providing the house and getting nothing back from it. He thought, that at least I ought to get pin money out of it. This was an absurd excuse because Daddy left me quite a little income – a great deal more than was required even if I were to set up a factory for sticking pins into wax images.
I
think Henry had, at least, three real reasons for wanting this lodger; one, he thought it was wrong to have so much space when people couldn’t find anywhere to live, and this, if I had thought of it first I would have agreed with, because I have more social conscience really than Henry, when I remember it; two, the empty rooms (empty that is of human beings) reminded him of the tiny feet that might have pattered but did not; three, he had an idea that having a lodger would give me something to do and help with the moods I’ve already told you about. The last two of these reasons annoyed me very much and made me very unwilling to have a lodger. So Henry was rather shy in suggesting that we should let the top floor to Rodney Galt. He only felt able to introduce the subject by way of the brilliant first chapter of Rodney’s new book. Henry, it seemed, was bowled over by this chapter when Rodney had submitted it and even Mr Brodrick, who had his feet pretty firmly planted on the ground, rocked a little. If it had been a feather in Henry’s cap getting Rodney Gait before, it became a whole plumage now. Nothing must get in the way of the book’s completion. Well, it seemed that living at Lady Ann’s did. Henry pointed out that wonderful friend though Lady Ann was, she could be difficult to live with if you wanted to write because she talked so much. I said, yes she did and drank so much too. But I asked about the house that Rodney was going to buy. Henry said that Rodney hadn’t seen the one he really wanted yet and he didn’t want to do too much house hunting while he was writing the book which would require a lot of research. Above all, of course, he did not want to involve himself with what might turn out to be a white elephant. To this I thoroughly agreed. And, to Henry’s surprise and pleasure, I said, yes, Rodney could come as a lodger.
I was a little puzzled about Lady Ann. I made some enquiries and, as I suspected, Rodney had thrown her over and was said to have taken up with Susan Mullins, a very young girl but almost as rich as Lady Ann. However, Lady Ann was putting a good face on it before the world. I was glad to hear this because the face she usually put on before the world, although once good, was now rather a mess. But I didn’t say anything to Henry about all this, because he was so fond of Lady Ann and I was feeling very friendly towards him for making such a sensible suggestion about a lodger.
Hardly had the lodger idea taken shape and Rodney was about to take up residence, when it almost lost its shape again. All because of Mr Brodrick. I should tell you that Henry’s senior partner was again one of the many people about whom my mood varied. He was a rather handsome, grey-templed, port-flushed old man of sixty-five or so – more like a barrister than a publisher, one would think. Anyway what would one think a publisher looked like? He was a determinedly old-fashioned man – but not like Rodney, except that both of them talked a bit too much about wine and food. No, Mr Brodrick was an old world mannered, ‘dear lady’ sort of man – a widower who was gallant to the fair sex, is how he saw himself, I think. He had a single eyeglass on a black ribbon and ate mostly at his Club. Sometimes I thought he was rather a sweet old thing and sometimes I thought he was a ghastly old bore and a bit common to boot.
At first, it seemed, he’d been delighted at Henry’s capturing Rodney for their list, mainly because he was rather an old snob and Rodney seemed to know well a lot of people whom he himself had only met once or twice but talked about a good deal. He patted Henry on the back once or twice – literally I imagine though not heartily – and saw him even more as ‘a son, my dear boy, since I have not been blessed with any offspring myself’. (I often wondered whether Mr Brodrick didn’t say to Henry, ‘When’s the baby coming along?’ He was so keen on heirs for Brodrick Layland.)
But suddenly it seemed that one day Mr Brodrick was talking to Mr Harkness of Harkness & Co., and Mr Harkness said that why they hadn’t gone on with Rodney as an author was because they’d had a lot of financial trouble with him – loans not repaid and so on. Mr Brodrick didn’t care for the sound of that at all and he thought that they should do what he called ‘Keeping a very firm rein on Master Galt’s activities’. And as he saw Henry as a son and perhaps me as a daughter-in-law (who knows?) he was very much against our having Rodney as a lodger. The more strictly commercial the relations with authors the better, he said.
Henry was upset by all this and a good deal surprised at what Mr Harkness had said. I was not at all surprised but I did not say so. I said that Harkness had no right to say such things and Mr Brodrick to listen to them. In any case, I said, how did we know that Mr Harkness had not just made them up out of sour grapes. And as to commercial relations I pointed out that Rodney’s being a lodger was commercial and anyway the rent was being paid to me. So Mr Brodrick knew what he could do. But Henry still seemed a little unhappy and then he told me that he had himself lent Rodney various sums. So then I saw there was nothing for it but the brilliant first chapter – and I played that for all I was worth. Did Henry, I said, expect that anyone capable of that brilliant first chapter was going to fit in with every bourgeois maxim of life that people like Harkness and Mr Brodrick laid down in their narrow scheme of things? I was surprised, I said, that Henry who had a real flair for publishing because he cared about books should be led into this sort of ‘business is business’ attitude that, if persevered in, would mean confining one’s list to all the dullest books produced. Anyway I made it clear I was determined that Rodney Galt should come if only as a matter of principle. When Henry saw that I was determined, he decided to stand on principle too and on the great coup he had made for Brodrick Layland as forecast by that brilliant first chapter. So Rodney moved in.
What with all the research Rodney needed to do for his book and what with Susan Mullins you may think that I was getting unduly excited about nothing. But if you have jumped to that conclusion, well then I think you can’t have a very interesting mind and you certainly don’t understand me. When I say that I had become interested in Rodney that’s exactly what I mean and ‘being interested’ with me comes to this – that I don’t know really what I want or indeed if I want anything at all, but I know for certain that I don’t want to leave go. So for the first week or so Rodney went to the British Museum and read books about civility and honour of which they have lots there – intended when they were published in the seventeenth and eighteenth century for people who were on the social make, I think. I rather used to like to think that after all this time they were being read again by Rodney. When he was not at the British Museum, he was with Susan Mullins or on the telephone talking to her.
The British Museum fell out of Rodney’s life before Susan Mullins. After only a fortnight it was replaced by books from the London Library which as Rodney had a sitting-room seemed only sensible. Then came a period when Susan did not telephone so often and once or twice Rodney telephoned to her and spoke instead to her mother (who was not called Mullins but Lady Newnham because she had been divorced and married again to a very rich Conservative industrialist peer) and then high words were exchanged. And finally one day when he rang he spoke to Lord Newnham and very high words were exchanged and that was the end of that. It became difficult then for Rodney to keep his mind even on the books from the London Library let alone going to the British Museum. It seemed somehow that his mind was diverted more by financial schemes than by study. None of this surprised me much either, but I thought I would not worry Henry by telling him in case he began to be afraid that there would only be a brilliant first chapter and no more. In any case it might have only been temporary, though I was not inclined to think that.
So Rodney and I used to go out in his MG (and perhaps it would have been more in keeping if he had refused to use any kind of motor-car later than a De Dionne but I was glad that he didn’t). We went here, there and everywhere and all over the place. We saw a great number of lovely houses – a lot in London, but gradually more and more outside London. Rodney came very near to taking some of them, he said. And then since he proposed to turn some of the houses when he bought them into furnished rooms or flats, we looked at a great number of antiques. The antiques we looked at were
rather expensive for this purpose, but Rodney said that only good things interested him and what was the good of his expertise if he never used it. But it was quite true – that he had expertise, I mean. We also had a lot of very good luncheons. On my theory Rodney would pay for these during the first phase, but later I expected I would have to pay. But I was determined to make the first phase last as long as possible and I succeeded. We took to going suddenly too to places like Hampton Court and Cambridge and Hatfield House and Wilton. We did not go to see any friends, though, partly because it wouldn’t have done, but mostly because we really were very content to be alone together. However, often when we passed great parks or distant large houses, Rodney told me to which of his friends they belonged; and this was nice for him.
In fact we both had a wonderful time, although Rodney’s time would have been more wonderful, he said, if I’d agreed to go to bed with him. Sometimes he cajoled; or at least he made himself as attractive and sweet as he could which was a lot; and this, I imagine, is what ‘cajole’ means. But often he took a very high-handed line, because in Rodney’s theory of seducing there was a lot about women wanting to be mastered which fitted into his general social views. Then he would tell me that unless I let myself go and accepted his mastery which was what I really wanted, I would soon become a tight little bitch. I had, he said, all the makings of one already at twenty-six. ‘You think,’ he cried, ‘that because you have attractive eyes and a good figure that you can go on having sex appeal just by cock-teasing every man you meet. But let me tell you it won’t last, you’ll quickly become a hard little bitch that no one will be interested in. It’s happening already with your bitter humour and your whimsy and your melancholy moods. You’re ceasing to be “civilized”.’ Civilization seemed to be his key to seduction, because he made light of my married position on the same grounds. ‘In any civilized century,’ he said, ‘the situation would be sensibly accepted,’ and then he talked of Congreve and Vanbrugh and Italian society. But I didn’t care to decide too easily, because Vanbrugh and Congreve are no longer alive and this is not Italy of the Cicisbei and affairs of this kind aren’t easy to control and even if life was often boring it was secure. Also I quite enjoyed things as they were, even the violent things he said about my becoming a bitch, but I wasn’t sure that I would like all that masterfulness on a physical plane.