Here Be Dragons

by Stella Gibbons

  “What is R. Lyddington like?” Elizabeth glanced at her. “Nice?”

  “Very.”

  Nell did think of Robert, amidst all this plotting and planning and suffering, as being very nice, and wished that he had suggested playing tennis that evening with herself and her Hungarian friend, instead of agreeing rather eagerly over the telephone to go to Elizabeth’s flat for supper and then on to Hump Lyttleton’s.

  Perhaps John was right, and Robert did find his life rather dull.

  She ventured a glance across the crowded bus, where her cousin sat beside an old woman whose superior proportions had not prevented him from typically securing most of the seat … she knew quite well that he thought Robert dull: he had often hinted as much: and as it was an attitude he never assumed towards anyone but his parents, saying that a writer should be capable of finding interest in anyone, she could only assume that he was, after all, just a very little jealous.

  It hardly gratified her: there was never any comfort; the situation between them was irritating and degrading and yet necessary; like smoking too much. Perhaps when he went into the Army …

  The pang was quite alarming.

  She was pleased to see Robert waiting in the hall of the new blocks of flats where the Prideaux’s apartment was situated, hatless and wearing a waterproof which contrived, like all his clothes, to look vaguely Naval.

  The short walk from the bus stop had been embarrassed because of something John had said; and although Elizabeth’s gift for controlling situations was successfully preventing the party from sinking into a failure, and although Benedict was now out of his earlier black mood and chattering and laughing with his hostess, Nell was always aware of Gardis slouching along with a white and sulky face. Nell’s pity for her was now modified, however, by contempt; really, she was behaving like someone aged about eight who had had a toy, which in any case she did not much like, taken away from her and given to a nicer child.

  “I’m so sorry you were here first, we got into a traffic jam,” Elizabeth said to Robert, when the introductions had been made and they were all sailing upwards in the lift which he, mistrusting the capabilities of Benedict and John, had casually taken over, and was now operating, “but I am going to give you my wonderful spaghetti, to make up. My family are still in the country and so I can get at all Mummy’s emergency stores … we have a kitchen so full of gadgets that you can hardly get into it; you must see it.” She turned to Benedict; the lift was small, but that was not altogether why she did not have to turn far. “Can you cook? I expect you can.”

  “Artists can always cook,” John said grandly.

  “I can’t,” said Gardis. “I don’t have to. At home we’ve got a Philippino couple, as well as a waitress and a man, and the woman cooks.”

  “It must be wonderful to have regular domestic help. We have to rely on Manley, who’s seventy-eight, and people from the village who don’t always come,” Elizabeth said.

  “There’s a lot of space to be covered back home. Fifteen bedrooms take some keeping tidy, and when you entertain as much as my mother does. … The house is always full—and the swimming pool.”

  Elizabeth’s bright silence, with eyes fixed upon the door of the lift, was beautifully timed. She let Gardis’s words linger just long enough for everyone to digest them, then said something graceful about the delights of having a swimming-pool, serene in the assurance that the thirty bedrooms at Prideaux would still be there, as they had been for four hundred years, if she ever should want to show them to someone. …

  “Robert’s getting his tennis after all,” John said innocently to Nell, when they had all been made free of the flat and inspected its devices for ameliorating the misery of life in a great city. Robert was seated, on the cordial suggestion of his hostess, in front of the television set with his eyes fixed upon the last match of that day on the Centre Court at Wimbledon, and the living-room was almost in darkness. Nell had been sitting down to rest her feet, which ached even on her day off, but the almost complete silence from the kitchen, where the other three were now cooking supper, had convinced her that she could be useful there.

  “What are you getting at now?” she said very quietly, stopping by John’s chair.

  “Well … he is, isn’t he? Two kinds: Wimbledon Centre Court and another kind ‘right here’. Whang! and into the net. Whang! Missed it again. Whang! Love, game and set, or however the jargon goes.”

  Nell was seeking for a reply which should convey both bewilderment and disapproval when Robert, without turning his head, said quickly, “Nell, you mustn’t miss this, it’s the most marvellous men’s double—oh, wizard serve!” and she changed her mind about going to the kitchen and went to sit beside him.

  In a moment she was a little surprised to find her hand being firmly held. If there had not been the long silent figure lying back in the chair behind her in the half darkness, no doubt sarcastically taking everything in, her sensations would have been all pleasant: and even as it was, satisfaction predominated. Let him see; it would show him that other people could like her. And there was a great deal going on this evening in which Nell herself was not actively engaged, but drearhood certainly had been left definitely behind; drears did not get their hand held in the dark.

  Robert, with Nell’s hand in his and first-class tennis going on before his eyes, had at the moment nothing left to wish for.

  He had been considerably cheered, after a hard and dull day, to see someone like Elizabeth, and he was rather amused than otherwise by the three crazy Bohemian types, but for him Nell was, already, Nell; not like anyone else, sensible as a man, yet never suggesting any qualities but the desirable feminine ones.

  He summed her up by the thought that she would never let you down.

  In the kitchen, the spaghetti was drained and waiting for the sauce which Benedict was making, while Elizabeth flitted about in a blue apron and Gardis leant with folded arms against the wall, watching.

  Her darkness of hair and clothes and eye, and much more her savage air, looked exceedingly out of place there. She belonged to the nation which had invented the white bulky devices for mechanizing housework by which she now stood surrounded, and she looked like a squaw from the forests who cooked in woodsmoke and ashes.

  Benedict was scarcely conscious any more of her presence, for Elizabeth, when serving drinks, had given him the freedom of a bottle of General Prideaux’s excellent whisky—not without pleasurable qualms as to what might happen—and he had had enough of it to blunt his pains. He felt warm and blissful; the mere absence of pain was blissful, and gone too was the sick pain in the pit of his stomach which had afflicted him since that moment earlier in the afternoon when he had called her the original slum-child sailing its paper boat in the gutter.

  It was the first time that one of the insults with which in private he relieved upon her his sufferings had been uttered in public, and how she was going to make him suffer! He had absolutely quailed when he imagined it. But now, while the warmth of the whisky glowed within, and he was drawn into the warm sunny ambiance of the personality of Elizabeth without, he was not any more afraid or suffering, and if she were suffering he neither knew nor cared; he had come to the stage when he hardly believed that she could suffer. All he wanted was to go on feeling warm; and to hear his own voice saying silly, pretty things to Elizabeth.

  “Your voice is delicious,” he said suddenly, and the effortlessness with which the last word came out would have told a more experienced girl that he was used to saying difficult words while rather drunk, “it’s like a syllabub.”

  He did not have to explain to her what that was; there was an ancient book of recipes at Prideaux … wine and cream … creamy roses … at Prideaux … Prideaux … and how many bedrooms are there at Prideaux, Elizabeth? Thirty. Four-and-twenty bathrooms, a ghost on every floor … that’s from Tantivy Towers. Written before you were born. And have you a ghost at Prideaux, Elizabeth? Two? Tell me about them … the White Lady and the dog tha
t barks, when no dog is there, to herald a disaster … but we do have dogs there, two darling ones, Rosa and Useless. … Tell me about them, Elizabeth.

  Gardis stood with bent head and folded arms, listening. What were she and Ben doing here? with these kids; who didn’t know anything about anything; virgins, starry-eyed; dumb.

  The bitter inward colloquy becomes obscene.

  She was very conscious of her dirty and ragged clothes, cursing the little son-of-a——, John, who had cut in with that crack about their being all right for jive, and stopped her going home to put on the new yellow number. She saw herself in it, with her hair coiled and smooth, patronizing the smug child who was taking Ben away from her.

  “I’m so hungry—” she said suddenly and hoarsely.

  “It’s done, I think,” Elizabeth said gaily. She looked at Gardis. “Shall we go and powder our noses? Robert can help dish up, if the tennis is over.”

  Gardis shook her head, then changed her mind.

  She had intended to linger behind, and say something to him, but now thought that she must leave him alone for a while; she had never seen him like this before, and she had a sensation as if he were a thousand miles away from her.

  She smiled, or her face did, and she followed Elizabeth.

  Her raging nerves had set her heart hammering at the prospect of being alone with the rival whom she hated with a neurotic’s intensity. She was swearing to herself that she would say nothing; nothing. Or no … she would spit something vile at her. …

  “Robert, will you be sweet and help them dish up?” Elizabeth said, as they went through the living-room, “oh, the tennis is over; good. Keep an eye on them, will you? They don’t seem awfully able to cope, although Benedict is a wonderful cook,” smiling as he scrambled up from the floor.

  To the relief of Elizabeth, and perhaps to that of Gardis also, Nell was in the bedroom soberly powdering her own rather longish nose before the mirror.

  “I hope you didn’t mind, Liz?” indicating an open box on the dressing table.

  “Don’t be a formal ass, my girl. (There’s some rather glam scent there; do try it, it’s just called Ruby. Very telling, no?) Well, I suppose I must change. (Do take anything you want”; to Gardis, “I think everything is there.) How about you, Sely? The loo? No? Well, well, things have changed since the Old Claregates Days, haven’t they?”

  They explained to Gardis, laughing and talking both at once, that their schooldays had been brightened by a booklet about the past years of the school called Old Claregates Days, with wonderful photographs of former staff in boaters and collars and ties.

  “We were all given a copy of it the day we arrived, and told to read it, but there was a sort of tradition that you only read it in the loo. You kept it in your desk and whenever you saw someone with it you knew they were bound for there,” said Elizabeth.

  Very funny. Gardis, smiling, capped the story with one that made them both smile bravely too, with scarlet faces.

  Then, her suffering slightly relieved, she sat down at the mirror and took out her lipstick of pale pomegranate pink. In the room there was now silence.

  But they came brightly enough back into the living-room where John and Robert were putting the large platter of spaghetti on the table, and Benedict was lying back in an armchair nursing a glass of whisky with his eyes shut.

  It was just seven o’clock.

  It seemed to at least two members of the party that the day had already lasted some fifty-six hours.

  Conversation for the next half-hour skated successfully along, only once avoiding a nasty corner when Elizabeth was telling how the Mrs. MacBridemont from whom her parents had rented the flat had come down on a short visit to Prideaux—which she had loved, dogs and Manley-who-used-to-be-odd-job-boy and everything; except that when she heard that Daddy sometimes read the lessons in church she talked about the Christian Myth—but then of course she was American.

  In a breath-holding pause, Gardis asked dryly if that meant she just didn’t know any better, and everyone was relieved to laugh.

  Gardis felt drearily that for once she had almost been her age; it had been better to take it like that; and now the smug kid was red in the face; not because she’d been scored off, but because she’d been rude. Christ, the British. But undoubtedly it had been Gardis’s point.

  It was the only one she scored throughout the rest of the endless evening. In the taxi into which they crowded to be taken to Humphrey Lyttleton’s club-room in Oxford Street, Benedict sat beside Elizabeth, and when they stepped out into the street almost empty of traffic and filled with crowds drifting slowly along in the ruddy glare of the chemical-burning lamps, he and she wandered, together, ignoring everyone else, down the unimpressive stairs leading to the basement. Gardis saw the backs of their heads, disappearing in the groups hurrying downwards, and it was one thing to know that he must sometimes go about with other women and quite another to see him doing it. For a moment she thought that she would go off and leave them; she couldn’t stand it; it wasn’t, she told herself, that she cared about him so much but there was this … again her thought became obscene … feeling … of having something taken away, and being lost, and let down, and drowning because it was going …

  She ground her teeth together, hurting herself, and decided to stick it out. The evening could not last for ever; she would get him away after it was over; they would go off somewhere and she could give him the works; he and she could look into one another’s eyes and smile then, as they sometimes did, not caring for anything in the whole bloody set-up. It was the thing that she liked best, of all the things they did. And that was crazy, too. Considering the things they did.

  John was fussing authoritatively with tickets, and then they all made their way into one of those long, low and dimly lit rooms in which contemporary youth takes its austere pleasures; austere in the sense that no concession is made to the minor senses, but satisfaction is direct between audience and performer. The drab, worn colours, the dusty, smoky air and dim light and the sweet yet stinging flavour of soft drinks, the only beverages sold there, would have seemed dreary indeed to, say, Herrick, could he have compared them with the ravishing smells and heady root-brews and sweet sounds and clear air of a day spent pleasuring with his girls and hinds in the fields.

  All around the walls people were already leaning. The rows of tables beyond these loungers were filling up. The two small bars were serving out lime-green and orange fluids as fast as they could get them over the counter, and every moment more and more young people came crowding in.

  The party of pleasure which included Gardis and Benedict had seated itself at two tables near the band, which now, in jeans and shirtsleeves and with cigarettes hanging from lip, began to saunter onto the low platform at one end of the room; their instruments gleamed softly in the smoky dimness. They sat, blowing shortly and casually into their horns or tapping desultorily on their drums; pale, youngish men. They were a type, yet it was difficult to say in what the typicalness lay. Presently, when the room was almost full, one of them began to beat softly with a foot on the floor, and soon there was a deliberately hesitant yet decided theme wavering up into the air. No-one was dancing. The young men, greatly outnumbering the girls, stood watching, with a serious, listening expression. John turned from a conversation with Robert, to Elizabeth at the next table.

  “Liz, will you dance?”

  (Liz, now. Oh well. He is sure to get snubbed presently; he can’t have any idea how crushing she can be when she likes.) Nell watched while he led her friend out on to the floor and began to jive with her in not too striking a manner, and giving her occasional advice (ha! she won’t like that! nor will she like his making allowances for her not being very good at it in that condescending way. …)

  She was surprised to have her reflections interrupted by a request from Robert that he might lead her out; she had not even known that he could jive. John, so that she should not disgrace him, had given her some instruction in the s
tyle before he had brought her here some weeks previously, but Robert jived much better than John, putting into his movements all the energy bottled up during the day by costing accountancy, and giving his full attention to what he was doing, while John always, amidst his wildest and most graceful gyrations, kept in mind a possible audience.

  As soon as they were all four well out on the floor, bumping and swinging between the flying forms and soon becoming indistinguishable amidst them, Gardis said to Benedict as if nothing had happened:

  “Haven’t we had enough of this? Let’s go.”

  Without turning round, he shook his head.

  “Oh, come on.”

  There was a pause. He kept his eyes, that burned and stung, fixed on the down-gazing face of a very young boy sitting at a nearby table; it was a thin and strangely pathetic face, lost in a dream.

  “Let’s go back to the flat,” Gardis said.

  This time Benedict heard the sound of the words: and their sound was ugly.

  Retire we then, my may, to a greene bowre …

  Away, the moors are dark beneath the moon,

  We’ll go together to my house in Padua …

  Let’s go to the flat.

  To the flat no more; we’ll to the flat no more; the laurels are not only cut down but their dying scent is unendurably stale; yet, no more than three weeks ago, the most ordinary words spoken by Gardis had sounded with the romantic chime, and the ugliest places in which he and she had made love had shone in the romantic light. And he knew that if he were unwise enough to turn round now, and see her face, there would instantly rise up to hover between them the false cruel ghost, crueller than any torture inspired by true love, who haunts lovers when love is dying: the ghost born of memory and regret and the longing to be once more enslaved.

  “Ben.” The voice was a croak.

  But the number was concluded, and amidst the whistling and applause the dancers were wandering off the floor and taking their seats once more at the tables, and he was rising to make room for Elizabeth. She was saying that she was terribly thirsty.