by Alec Waugh
Kept
BY
ALEC WAUGH
Contents
CHAPTER
1. THE GILDED CAGE
2. TRIMALCHIO IN PICCADILLY
3. NIGHT AND A NIGHT CLUB
4. RANSOM DELIBERATES
5. MANON DELIBERATES
6. YOUNG LOVE DELIBERATES
7. LORD’S
8. “NOW CHANGE YOUR PARTNERS ALL”
9. IDYLL IN THE HAMPSTEAD ROAD
10. MARJORIE ALONE
11. NEW LOVES AND OLD
12. RANSOM IN PARIS
13. MANON IN DEBT
14. A QUARREL ON THE TELEPHONE
15. FATHER AND SON
16. YOUNG LOVE PERPLEXED
17. IN A TURKISH BATH
18. ERIC LEARNS HALF THE TRUTH
19. SHUFFLING THE PACK
20. ERIC LEARNS THE REST
21. THE FACE OF THE GORGON
22. CHARLES GRANTA GROWS SUSPICIOUS
23. IN THE JERMYN GALLERIES
24. REDEAL
Chapter I
The Gilded Cage
Western five—three—two—six—two.” There was a pause, then the regularly spaced buzzing of an engaged number. “Again,” she said, and, jumping down from the sofa across which she had been kneeling, Marjorie Fairfield walked over to the gramophone. For a moment she hesitated between “What’ll I do? ”and “Horsey,” then decided on the valse, and, as she swayed backwards to its rhythm across the room, a smile crept slowly upwards across her face from the slight tremor at the corner of the small babyish mouth, upwards to where the freckled tip-tilted nose wrinkled itself beneath the wide-set, wide-lashed hazel eyes: a smile of drowsy indolence and content. The sun was shining: the sky was blue: the air that drifted through the open window was warm with a sense of summer. Never, she thought, had the flat looked prettier. The faint primrose ceiling seemed to catch the sunlight and fling it back on to the fawn-grey carpet and pale sky-blue walls. Who could fail to be happy on such a day. “I feel seventeen,” she thought, “and I am not certain that I don’t look it.”
She paused for confirmation in front of the Chippendale mirror that hung between the fireplace and the door. Seventeen? Well, hardly seventeen. Twenty perhaps; twenty or twenty-one. Not at any rate the twenty-eight that she really was. And anyhow who would want to be seventeen again? Seventeen, when you were half a child and half a woman. A stranger in the twilight between two worlds. Oh no; she wouldn’t be seventeen again, with all that still in front of her. Better be what she was, with the worst behind her. Nothing could ever come to hurt her more than that telegram three days after Neuve Chapelle. Widowed at nineteen and after six weeks of marriage. She had weathered that. The worst had gone, taking probably the best along with it. The one was the complement of the other. You couldn’t have the one without the other. Well! she didn’t care. She was happier now, letting the days drift past. And she smiled back at the warm-coloured reflected oval face, clasped round below the neck by its helmet of warm brown hair, smiled back and slowly, lazily drew her hand downwards to smooth out the fringe upon her forehead.
From the gramophone came suddenly the crunch of a completed record. “Good for the sound-box that,” she thought. But she made no attempt to rescue it. Let the thing run down. She had had enough music for the afternoon, and all the evening she would be dancing. She remained before the glass, smoothing the hair where it was drawn away tightly from the fringe, fondling at the plaited circles about her ears, turning her head to see them from a different angle. Then lazily she stretched her arms above her head and turned slowly back towards the sofa.
“He should have finished that talk by now,” she murmured. “It’s a good ten minutes since I rang up last.” And lifting the receiver of the telephone—” Western, five—three—two—six—two,” she repeated.
But again there came after a pause the regular intermittent buzzing.
Three times running; and with Everard due at any moment now, she could hardly ask the Exchange to ring her; it was just the sort of thing that would make him jealous. And besides what of all that she wanted to say to Ransom could be said with Everard Tristram sitting beside her on the sofa, his fingers fondling at her arm? Three times running though. Whom had he been speaking to, she wondered? She was so ignorant really of his life. That he was thirty-three years old; that he was unmarried; that his parents were dead; that he had resigned at the end of the War his commission in the Coldstream Guards; that he lived in a three-room flat in Upper Sloane Street with his old batman as his cook and valet. That was the merest skeleton of his life; a collection of facts that were in the possession of ninety-nine per cent, of his acquaintances. Of the things he did, the people he saw, the houses he went to, she knew nothing; absolutely nothing. “You never talk about yourself,” she had once complained. But he had only smiled, one of those long slow smiles of his that seemed to linger in his eyes long after his lips were still.
“Perhaps,” he had said, “I’m not very interested in myself.”
In the beginning she had not been sufficiently interested to care, had not been more than amused mildly by this rather listless, supercilious, but entertaining and, in his guardsman’s way, quite good-looking man who had driven round two or three times a week between tea and dinner to lounge back in an armchair and chatter about what he had called “the life of this gay world of yours.” He had been then little more than a sounding-board for her own emotions: a lay figure: someone to listen to her and amuse her and be sympathetic; but she could wish now that she had been less self-absorbed in those days when she had first begun to grow accustomed to the sound over the telephone of that slightly bored, slightly caressing, self-depreciatory voice: “I wonder, Mrs Fairfield, if you’d care, unless something more amusing comes your way, to sup with me next Saturday? ”
They had met in Cannes two years ago in the spring of 1922 at the Casino, on a day that Everard had been forced to spend on business in Antibes. It was early in the afternoon, the boule room was rather empty, and there had been a vacant chair beside him.
He had just staked successfully a couple of louis upon the five, and was gathering to himself a number of red counters in the manner of one to whom the loss or acquisition of six pounds is an affair of equal triviality.
“That’s luck,” she had said.
He had turned and smiled at her. A pleasant, good-natured, kindly smile, a smile that seemed to say: “Really though, but what an engagingly absurd world it is, and how clever of us it is to know it, and how much cleverer still not to let other people know we know it.” A smile that had made her feel she had known him all her life. “Yes,” he said, “I have had quite tolerable luck. In the last half hour I have contrived to amass three thousand, five hundred, and forty-seven francs. Were I a Scotsman I should leave this place immediately. But my father was English and my mother Welsh, a most dangerous mixture, and I shall remain here till I have either won ten thousand or lost five.”
Half an hour later he had lost the five.
“I have now,” he said, “only thirty-seven francs left, and from what I remember of the profits that the Café des Ambassadeurs expects to make, we shall need every franc of it for our tea. So I think that although it is now only four o’clock we had better go at once and have it. You will? Now that is charming of you.”
All through tea, even while they danced—and he danced, she was relieved to discover, extremely well—he maintained an unbroken flow of talk; in the first person most of it, but in that particularly detached manner that may make completely impersonal the most personal admissions. He employed the word “I” as a novelist will who makes of the teller of the story a spectator simply, one who is there to record, not to participate.
“And now,” he had said at last, “it is a quarter
to six, and at half-past six I must catch my train for Finse. Winter sports are, I always think, the only possible retort to the Riviera. One comes south in search of sunshine and it rains all day. One goes north to Norway with a pair of skis and returns home sunburnt. Perhaps when I get back to London you will be so kind as to let me call on you.”
She had smiled and said she would be delighted, and had never expected to see the man again. But the day after her return he had rung her up, and the next afternoon had come to see her. She had been surprised, and she had been pleased: less pleased though at seeing him than at his wish to see her. And there had begun that long succession of visits and dances and theatres.
And yet in all that time, in those twenty-four months of friendship, she had not once been to see him in his own flat. To begin with she had been incurious. And Knightsbridge was a long way from Regent’s Park. Later, when she had begun to care, when she had wanted to be able to picture him in the hours when they were not together, she had been too proud to ask. Twice she had walked down the length of Sloane Street, to pause beneath his house and look up wonderingly; but she had not rung the bell. She was not going to be a nuisance. She was not going to force herself where she was not wanted. But it had hurt her, more than a little, that he should not have asked her. She had so little part, she felt, really in his life. Or to be more accurate she knew so little what part she filled there. He was not a person who did any work. He had all the spare time there was. He must have an immense amount of friends. There must be so many other things, so many other people in his life. Occasionally she would get odd glimpses of that other life of his, as when she would mention some person whose photograph had attracted her in a paper and he would say: “Yes, an amusing fellow. I was sitting opposite him the other night at dinner.” Or again, as now, when three times running she would find his telephone engaged. “All that time,” she would tell herself, “he has been talking to someone whom I do not know, of whom I never shall know, and yet who, as likely as not, matters as much to him as I do.” It was at such moments that she would ask herself whether she was anything more than an incident in his life, a habit which he had assumed casually and would find easy to supplant.
There was a knock outside upon the door.
“Everard,” she thought, “at last,” and ran out into the hall to meet him.
“Well,” she said. “And you’re rather late, my dear.”
“I know, I know. And I can’t stay more than a few minutes.”
He was one of those middle-aged city men who might on their good days pass for a youthful forty, and on their bad days might be anything over fifty-five. This was one of his bad days. He was in a preoccupied, worried mood, and hesitated as though uncertain whether to take off his overcoat or not. “Important board meeting,” he continued. “Lot of things to attend to. And my wife’s got a tea fight on. I ought to be getting back to it. Still, I don’t know. Oh well!” And with a sudden spurt of resolution he flung off his coat and sank exhausted into an armchair.
“A whisky?” she suggested.
He nodded. “Thank you. Not too strong. That’ll do. Only a splash of soda: that’s it. Now tell me what have you been doing all the day.”
A latish breakfast, she told him. She had been dancing up to two.
“Dancing,” he asked quickly, “where, who with?”
She laughed at that. “Jealous, Everard?”
“Oh no, no, no,” he said. “Of course not, of course not. I mean I trust you. I trust you implicitly. But still—” After a pause, “Your friends after all, they are my friends too, I suppose.”
She walked over from the sideboard, perched herself on the armchair and dropped a quick light kiss on the bald and gleaming surface of his head. “You’re rather a poppet,” she said, “aren’t you? It was Gerry, as a matter of fact, Gerry Cranston. You remember him: he was in that crowd we ran into last year at Ascot.”
He smiled, comforted and reassured. He knew all about Gerry Cranston. Gerry was safe enough. He had as much as he could tackle in that French girl he had brought over in the spring from Nice. Poor old Gerry. She would be leading him a nice dance before she had finished.
“Yes,” he said. “And then—”
“And then—well let me see. Ah yes. In the morning I went and bought a frock—a beauty, Everard. You’ll love me in it. A pale grey mauvy thing. And then, of course, I had to get some shoes to match it and some stockings. And after that I began to wonder about hats. So I went all the way back to Reville’s and had another look at the dress, and thought that on the whole that pale blue thing of mine, the one that you like, with the silk tassels, would go with it. But by the time I was quarter way up Bond Street I had decided that it wouldn’t. So I went off to Helen Barrie’s and got the perfect love of a hat. A model they said it was. A little brown thing that fitted not too low down, and was quartered with gold piping and had a gold feather across the brim. And then by that time it was one o’clock. But after that late breakfast I didn’t feel hungry, so I just drifted up to Selfridge’s and had a sundæ. And then—well—I don’t think—no, I just came straight back here, and I’ve been playing the gramophone, and trying to read, and mending a stocking, and oh—well, just letting the time slip by.”
“And the bill?” he asked.
“What bill?”
“For all those things, the frock, the hat, the stockings.”
“That? Oh, I just told them to whisk it along to you.”
“And how much was it?”
“How should I know. I didn’t ask. You ought to know me well enough to know that by now. Somewhere between twenty and twenty-five I should imagine.”
There was a pause. She jumped down from the arm of his chair, and moved across the room towards the window. Another row, she supposed. Not that she cared. He’d come whining back to her all right, sooner or later, as he had all the other times. She turned to look at him. There he sat with the weight of his fifty years about him, the weak man trying to be strong. His lips had tightened, but his eyes were weak. He might bluster for a few seconds, but within quarter of an hour he would be at her feet, appealing to her pity, protesting the immensity of his love for her, and it would be all rather ridiculous and in its way disgusting. One should have more dignity at fifty.
But the storm did not come.
Instead he rose from his chair, walked over to her and laid his hand upon her arm.
“You’re very extravagant you know, my dear. We’ll have to be more economical when we’re married.”
“Married.” She laughed, scornfully rather, and shook her arm free from him.
“Really though,” he protested. “I had another long talk yesterday with my wife. I’m sure in time I shall get her round. She’s becoming ever so much more reasonable. She does see now that things will never be right again between us, between her and me, I mean. She thought, I know, that she had only to wait long enough to break it, this love of ours. But she can’t, can she, Marjorie. It’s too big a thing for that. It is, isn’t it?”
She nodded her head. “I suppose so, Everard.”
“And we’ll be wonderfully happy, won’t we, when it’s all over and we’re married? We will, won’t we, Marjorie?”
“I suppose so.”
Again there was a silence. Timidly, diffidently, to break it, he stretched out a hand to her.
“I don’t believe you care now whether we ever do get married.”
So it had come then after all, another of those long exhausting interludes of protestation.
“Oh yes, I do, Everard. It’s such a long time though, four years nearly.”
“But what are four years to all the time we’ve got in front of us. I know—do believe me that I know how difficult all this is for you. I never dreamt in the beginning that it would take so long, that my wife would be so unreasonable. A couple of years at the most I’d thought of. I’d never, if I could have known, have imposed this on you. Not for one moment would I have considered it. But I loved you s
o, Marjorie. I know that you don’t, that you never did care for me, not as I care for you. At my age how could I expect it. A generation’s length between us. But I can make you happy. I know I can. There’s nothing I won’t give you, nothing I won’t do for you. If only you’ll be kind to me, Marjorie: just a little bit more kind to me. Just so kind as to allow me to do things for you: to make you happy. For that is my happiness, my only happiness, to see you happy.”
She listened, her head turned from him, while the wind of words flowed over her. Oh, but it so bored her, this eternal reiteration of devotion. And yet this, that so wearied her in him now, had been the very quality that had in the beginning moved her to him. She had been tired and she had been lonely, had needed to be flung round and enveloped in the warmth of a love that demanded nothing of her, to which she need make no response, that she could accept as it accepted her. To be loved again after those lonely months, to have soft words said to her, to be cared for, and caressed and petted. That was all then that she had asked for.
But now it did not move her, it did not anger her: it merely wearied her, this torrent of uneasy words. She stood silent and submissive, her head averted, her eyes half closed, waiting for the moment when he would be gone, when she could again lift the receiver of the telephone.
It was twenty-five past six before he left her. And for a moment Marjorie wondered whether it was not too late now to ring Ransom up. He might be in his bath, and she knew that nothing exasperated him more than to be disturbed when he was changing for the evening.
“There are certain hours of the day,” he had once said, “that are the private and sacred property of the individual. Breakfast is one. To ring a man up before ten is an act of barbarism. It is equally criminal to disturb between half-past six and half-past seven the man who is struggling against nature to make himself a social ornament.”
Still it was not the half-hour yet, and in her case surely it would be different.
This time the number was disengaged. “Major Heritage, madam,” came the respectful answer of the discharged guardsman. “I’ll go and tell him, madam.” And a moment later came Ransom’s soft, good-natured drawling voice, “Well, Marjorie, well?”