The Weather in the Streets (The Olivia Curtis Novels)

by Rosamond Lehmann

  Adrian bowed over me with a tumbler of whisky, portentously­ solemn, saying, “My dear, I’d very much like to have a word with you about Miles and Rachel. I hear they’re separating­. My God, how trying these couples are! Having at last found a real out-and-out bullying devilish character like Rachel, why can’t he be content with her? After all, she does know how to spend his money …”

  “Yes,” I said, “we shall miss her …”

  “My dear, yes,” he said. “None more than I …” He saw me laughing and went away in a huff, saying, “You’re a beast to laugh, Olivia.” I heard him complain to a group with Colin in it: “My dear, Olivia laughed at me.” And Colin cried out, “Olivia laughs at us all!” and he turned and fairly hissed at me. I moved away, feeling depressed and lonely, there seemed so much hostility about, and suspicion. There was a young man from Cambridge standing against the wall, looking aloof and self-conscious, he reminded me of Ivor, who wasn’t there; he looked grateful when I went up to him, thinking I seemed one of the respectable ones, I suppose.

  “How are you getting on?” I said. “Are you amused?”

  “It seems to me desolating,” he said, clipping his words, precise, soft and haughty.

  “Perhaps,” I said, “we should drink more. Then we’d stop watching and blend.”

  “Not necessarily,” he said stiffly.

  “Do you feel isolated?” I said.

  “Don’t we all?” he said with a slavic shrug. He looked suddenly amused and youthful, and said, watching Colin’s antics, “Perhaps not Mr. Radford …”

  Colin was shouting, “Lights! More lights!”

  “Perhaps not,” I said, thinking: You fool! Colin most of all.

  Gil Severn came up and began talking about hotels in Spain. The young man knew all about them and after a few minutes I slipped away and left them talking, thinking: The lad won’t feel his evening wasted, he’ll have talked to the eminent critic, Gil Severn … Desmond Fellowes was sitting on a sofa with an artistic-looking girl on his lap. She had ear-rings and a string of huge coloured beads round her short neck, and a little jacket with emerald and orange chenille flowers on it; she was plump and dark and springy and she had a kitten on her shoulder. He’s always discovered sitting like that at parties, where does he get these girls, what do they talk about; they look so incongruous against his spare, fastidious, unrelaxingly intellectual-looking form, his beard and glasses. The kitten was the crowning touch … Peter Jenkin turned up, of course, he’s a hardy perennial, under a pile of sub-revellers, teeny actors and things, he didn’t see me or wouldn’t—more green-faced, spiteful, wizened than ever. To think of Oxford and the way he poisoned my first year—that note I got: “It’s a pity you didn’t think fit to save me, good-bye,” in a shaky hand—and when I rushed round trembling faint to his rooms a cocktail party in full swing, and him drunk and perky, calling out, “Sorry you’ve been troubled, dearie …” Billy was making odd noises dancing with voluptuous contortions by himself and snapping his fingers, he’d almost passed out, the wet white gone streaky, the vine leaf gone. Anna was wandering entwined with Mrs. Cunningham’s beautiful son Peter, they were having long kisses. She’s always adored him for his beauty, so I was delighted to see she’d got him for the evening, she looked quite pretty, flushed and sparkling … Then suddenly Marigold was there again, with David Cooke. She was going round the room saying with earnest formal politeness, “Excuse me, have you seen half my bracelet? You haven’t? … Thank you so much.” David came up, sleek, black and flashing, and said:

  “Olivia, my dear, if a section of old paste and ruby bracelet turns up it belongs to Lady Britton …” How he did relish saying Lady Britton. “Can I rely on you to take charge of it? It’s an heirloom, she so values it. I must take her home now.”

  “Yes, it’s about time,” I said.

  He went away, and I looked down and round, and there it was just by my foot, under the piano. I picked it up and followed her into the passage; she was leaning up against the banisters, very pale, her eyes fixed.

  “There you are, Livia,” she said, looking cornered, evasive. “Why didn’t you come and talk to me before?”

  “You disappeared,” I said.

  “Oh, well …” she said. “There was such a noise and crowd …”

  “Here’s your bit of bracelet.” I put it in her bag.

  “Thank God,” she said. “I thought I’d left it upstairs, far, far up among all those twanging springs … The day springs from on high … Whose room was it, I wonder? Too extraordinary …” She giggled suddenly and drew in a sharp breath, her eyes flew. “David’s pocketed the other bit. I s’pose he’s honest. Isn’t he sweet, I adore him, don’t you? Though he’s been a bit of a broken sepulchre to-night. He’s taking me home, that’s a meretricious act, anyway … He’s just gone to fetch my coat. I really could not fetch it … Livia, what an awful party, isn’t it? Or isn’t it? I don’t know how I got here. David brought me. Why do they wear such dirty clothes? Have you seen Rollo at all? You ought to ring him up. I know he’d love it. Nicky’s in Switzerland, breathing the bracing mountain air.”

  “I thought you were too,” I said, forgetting myself.

  “So I was, but I came back,” she said. “Sam’s still there.”

  “I saw your photograph in the Tatler,” I added hastily, but she didn’t notice.

  David came back with her mink coat, surprised, I saw, to find me talking to Lady Britton, specially when she said, “Good-night, darlin’,” and gave me a lingering kiss with her arms round my neck, saying, “David, isn’t Olivia sweet?” Then she said rather frantically, “For God’s sake come on now, if you don’t get me home soon I won’t answer for me.” He enveloped and surrounded her, soothing, important, and they started down the stairs. Half-way down she began to whimper, saying, “Oh … Oh, David … Oh …” I wondered whether to go to her, but I thought better not; I heard him say: “It’s all right, my dear, you’ll be all right … I’ve a taxi waiting …” I think he’d got more than he bargained for taking Lady Britton out. He fairly swooped her out of the door and into the taxi. It was one o’clock. I went back to the party. The more repressed people were beginning to go, the pot was boiling over nicely; people leaning and lying about, and dancing in heavy stumbling groups, looking intent. Dick had snitched that blonde called Muffet, Jasper’s property—he was glowering and glaring at Dick, his face working like the villain in an old-fashioned film, it looked so faked I wanted to laugh. Someone had been sick in the grate and someone else said, “Rum on top of whisky. Fatal …” Simon was dealing with it, looking patient as Christ on the Cross. Fat old Cora Maxwell had fallen down and cut her head open somehow, there was a crowd round her bandaging and mopping. Simon came with a glass of water and put his arm beneath her shoulders, holding her up to sip … Her red, congested face, the handkerchief tied crooked over one eye, the knot sticking askew on her peroxide mop, her fat hips and little legs prone on the floor, stumpy toes turned up, and Simon stooping above her, pale and clear, his beautiful mouth folded so gently, blinking a little, holding the glass to her lips … I found Jocelyn, he’d only just turned up from writing late, we sat in a corner on top of a table and had a quiet talk. He made a cool island in the room. He wrote down his address in the Tyrol for me, he was just off for six months to write his book; he said why didn’t I come out and join him, and do some writing too. He always thinks I could write, since those sketches I showed him. He said too I could have his room to work in after he’d gone, he wasn’t letting it, he’d post me the keys … Dear Jocelyn, you’re my friend, you make me sit quiet and consider ideas—that injustice matters and unemployment, and the power and hypocrisy of rulers, and revolutions, and Beethoven and Shakespeare and what poets think and write … Things like that, not individual relationships and other people’s copulations and clothes and motor-cars, and things … Not that it lasts … But Jasper came prowling up and put h
is paw on my wrist, and drew me away reluctant to dance. “The virgin,” he announced, meaning my white frock. After a bit of his usual style, clamped against him, dancing around with deep swoops and squeezes, and sharp stops, my frock clutched up at the back like when I was sixteen and always got those hard-breathing, hot-handed partners who showed the backs of one’s knees, he looked at me under his brows like a seer, more like a lecherous old bison and announced, “You’ve got a lover …”

  “Have I?” I said. How I loathe him—all that mystic intuitive prophetic bunk and sententious blood-wisdom about Women; fancy his parents calling him Jasper of all suitably bogus names … The worst is he does hit the nail on the head by accident sometimes … “Have I?” I said, raising my eyebrows, innocently surprised; but suddenly I couldn’t bear it any longer, I must go to Rollo, there were cigarette stumps and ash everywhere, and empty bottles and marks of dirty shoes, and a pool of something on the oilcoth by the lavatory door, and everybody still going through their dreary old paces. I thought: I don’t want them, I’m superior, I’ve got someone of my own, I haven’t got to stay. I sent Jasper for a drink and ran for my cloak. The last I saw was Billy with a broom sweeping the rubbish, pulling down the paper decorations and making a heap of them in the middle of the floor and putting a match to them, and Colin with an efficient levelheaded expression squirting at them with an empty soda-water siphon. I suppose Simon saw to it … Jasper loomed up behind me as I went down the stairs, he started to follow me, muttering—but I escaped and was in the street. It was two. Would he have gone to bed? If I couldn’t see him what was I to do? I told the taxi to put me down at the corner of the street where it led into the square. I’d only once been there before, when I walked past his house out of curiosity … That part of residential London behind Bryanston Square is unknown country. There was a cold wind blowing. I shivered. There it was, Rollo’s house, number two on the corner, the hall light showing through the fan, lights in a room on the right of the door, the curtains parted a bit so that I could see in, and I saw him. Standing up by the mantelpiece, smoking a pipe. From outside the room looked warm, rich and snug—a first-class comfortable home. I saw that … I leaned over the railings from the step and just managed to knock on the bulging Regency window. The taxi I’d left went past and stared at me … Rollo, my darling, you opened the door and drew me in and shut the door again, and there we stood clasped in the hall of your house … murmuring: “Oh … I did so want to get to you …” And, “I nearly gave you up. I couldn’t have borne it if you hadn’t come …” And, “Forgive me. I’m sorry …” “It’s all right now …” Loving each other very much and both comforted. He took me into the room and I sat on his lap in the arm-chair by the fire to get warm.

  “I mustn’t stay here,” I said.

  “Well, I’m not going out into the streets with you at this time of night,” he said. “What’s there to worry about? Everybody’s gone to bed hours ago. I’m all alone.”

  So I hid myself against him, hiding from his home. It wasn’t a personal room we were in—more like a comfortable office with a big, manly desk with a telephone on it and an ABC and Debrett and Who’s Who in a case and a high bookcase with a glass front and smart editions of the classics bound in calf behind it, and a dark-red and brown colour scheme. Over the mantelpiece was a shockingly bad pastel portrait of Nicola with a smirking bow mouth and an elongated goitrous neck—the kind they always seem to have of their wives in these houses: too meaningless to be upsetting. The first thing he asked was about Marigold; it had been such a shock to see her, thinking she was in Switzerland. I said I’d spoken to her for a minute, she was all right, only a little drunk, she’d left early.

  “She told me to be sure and ring you up,” I said. We laughed. “She seems to think it’s time you had a fling.”

  “The fiend,” he said. “It’s not safe to tell her a thing. She’s had this hunch you’d only got to persevere to compass my ruin ever since we met in the train.”

  “You don’t think she knows about it, really, and isn’t letting on?” I said.

  “No,” he said emphatically, after a second. “She can’t possibly. Nobody knows. We’ve been so careful.” And I saw him give a quick look round, as if thinking: This isn’t careful. He asked if I’d enjoyed myself, and I said:

  “Oh no, I hated it all. They all seemed so futile and drunk and squawky. …”

  “I don’t expect they were really,” he said in that tranquil way he does when I make sweeping generalisations about people, putting me right without snubbing—although it always makes me feel accused of pettiness … “They looked very cheerful. Fancy-dress party, wasn’t it? I expect you weren’t in a party mood.”

  “The fact is,” I said, “one shouldn’t go to parties when one’s in love … It makes one act aloof and superior and they distrust you.”

  “I dare say that’s it,” he agreed softly, stroking my shoulder …

  It was like a reunion after danger, a reconciliation without the soreness and recriminations of an actual word-quarrel to get over … After a bit I said:

  “She was wonderful, wasn’t she?”

  “Who?” he said.

  “That girl, Thalassa—the dancer,” I said. “I can’t get her out of my head.”

  “Oh, yes …” he said in an ordinary, almost vague voice. “Was that what she was called? … Yes, she was good at her stuff …”

  That’s all we said about her. I didn’t let on … Seeing him in this new setting, which was his own, made him in a way a stranger again—undiscovered, terribly significant, as he seemed at Meldon; and wearing the white frock again—and the lateness, the silence, the keyed-up mood we were both in … it was like being back at the beginning again …

  “This is a damned uncomfortable room,” he said. “Come upstairs.”

  We went up to the next floor—the stair carpet’s chestnutty brown and the paint deep tawny yellow, nice—and opened a door, and switched some lights on.

  “It’s a lovely room of its kind, it really is …” I exclaimed, and he said:

  “Yes, it’s nice, isn’t it? We knocked two rooms into one to make it.” That “we” was rather painful. I saw them planning it, doing it together, to be a background for Nicola, pleased with it together, showing it off to their friends—never thinking I’d come and look at it … I told myself rooms made by a couple, joint possessions, don’t matter, they’re not a real tie, not important … But they are, they’re powerful … The light came indirectly from three long shallow-scooped niches in the walls, and these had tall white glazed pots in them, elaborate Italian shapes, filled with artificial flowers—brilliant, bright-coloured arrangements, formal but not stiff, seeming to have a kind of rhythm in them. I thought: If Nicola did these she can do something … But I expect somebody in Fortnum’s or somewhere did them … The room was long and empty and simple with cool luminous colours like the insides of shells—the low, straight-lined, broad chairs and sofas covered in white brocade, and the woodwork pinkish grey. It really was a good modern room. There was only one picture, a long, horizontal panel in the end wall, contemporary, though I can’t be sure who did it—two seated monumental figures of women on the seashore playing on guitars, a group in the foreground lying with stretched listening limbs, the colours rather pale, blues, browns and greys. It surprised me, worried me rather. I liked it. But I can’t remember it clearly—or anything else; only the first pang it all gave me, and a general impression of whiteness and space … We were there a long time. I lay on the sofa with my eyes shut, sunk into the cushions, and heard the white clock ticking …

  “What’s that?” I whispered suddenly.

  He listened. “What?” he said.

  “I thought I heard a creak … as if someone was outside? …”

  “Couldn’t be,” he said. He got up and smoothed his hair and went softly over to the door and opened it. Nothing of course. The landing w
as empty, and I saw the empty staircase winding up. “Why are you so nervous?” he said, coming back. I sat up on the sofa with my feet tucked under me and saw Rollo walking about in his drawing-room, looking for a cigarette. Something was changed—far down, below all conscious layers. Yes, something began to change then … It was that I began to lose my feeling of security … Rollo had a nice house and a life of his own in it, and dependents, responsibilities … I knew it after that. It’s hard to face facts when they go against you.

  I said, “I must go now.”

  “Next floor, darling, if you want to,” he said. “Up two little steps and straight in front of you. I’ll be downstairs.” He gave me a kiss and I went up … thinking: the first door will be her bedroom … I stood and waited by the first door on the right … I remember the glass door-knob. The silence was dark, rigid … I got a crazy feeling eyes were looking at me from above, looking over the banisters out of darkness. I opened the door of Nicola’s bedroom, switched on a light, looked in … came out and shut the door again. Dust sheets over the quilt on the broad, low, silver-headed double bed, the mirror laid flat on the dressing-table under sheets of newspaper, pale-blue walls, blue curtains with a magnolia pattern, a drawing of Rollo, young, over the mantelpiece, two flower pictures, irises and pink lilies, pretty, a door leading into what must be Rollo’s dressing-room. Shrouded, deserted … The mistress of the house is away … I went on into the bathroom and washed and dried my hands on her pale-pink towel, as soft as silk, and saw her blue glass jars for bath salts and powder and stuff, and saw Rollo’s big bath-towel on the hot rail. The farther door must lead into his dressing-room too … A married couple’s suite … perfectly charming, extremely well appointed, every convenience … What have I done? Why did I? How could I? … I didn’t dream it would burn on, on, hot and sullen … as if a dull gong had been struck that will go on echoing for ever.

  I ran down. Rollo was standing at the foot of the stairs, a glass of beer in his hand, looking up. The light was on in the dining-­room, to the left of him—where he and she have their meals together and have well-dressed dinner-parties.