‘It was years ago at a party over an antique shop,’ he insisted, ‘given by an old queen who died soon after. Mark Members introduced us.’
‘Oh, yes,’ she said, indifferently, ‘I haven’t seen Mark for ages.’
‘Deacon, he was called.’
‘I believe I remember.’
‘Off Charlotte Street.’
‘There were a lot of parties round there,’ she agreed.
Then I knew that something other than the toothpaste advertisements had caused Mona’s face to seem so familiar. I, too, had seen her at Mr. Deacon’s birthday party. Since then she had applied peroxide to her naturally dark hair. When Templer had spoken of his wife’s former profession I had not connected her with ‘Mona’, the artist’s model of whom Barnby, and others, used sometimes to speak. Barnby had not mentioned her for a long time.
In due course I found that Mona had abandoned that ‘artist’s’ world for commercial employments that were more lucrative. The people she met in these less pretentious circles were also no doubt on the whole more sympathetic to her, although she would never have admitted that. Certainly the impact of her earlier career as a model for painters and sculptors was never erased from her own mind. With the extraordinary adaptability of women, she had managed to alter considerably the lines of her figure, formerly a striking synthesis of projections and concavities that certainly seemed to demand immediate expression in bronze or stone. Now her body had been disciplined into a fashionable, comparatively commonplace mould. She smiled in a friendly way at Quiggin, but made no effort to help him out in his efforts to suggest that they really already knew each other.
Quiggin himself continued to stand for a time resentfully beside us, giving the impression not so much that he wished to join the Templer party, as that he hoped for an invitation to do so, which would at once be curtly refused; though whether, had the chance arisen, he would in fact have withheld his company was, of course, speculative. Mona threw him another smile, her regular rows of teeth neatly displayed between pink lips parted in a cupid’s bow: an ensemble invoking more than ever her career on the hoardings. For some reason this glance confirmed Quiggin’s intention to depart. After a final word with me to the effect that he would ring up early the following week and arrange a meeting, he nodded in an offended manner to the world in general, and tramped away across the room and down the steps. He held himself tautly upright, as if determined to avoid for ever in future such haunts of luxury and those who frequent them.
Just as he was making this move, Lady Ardglass, followed by her spruce, grey-haired admirers, at heel like a brace of well-groomed, well-bred, obedient sporting dogs, passed us on the way out. A natural blonde, Bijou Ardglass possessed a fleeting facial resemblance to Mona. She was said to have been a mannequin before her marriage. My attention had been caught momentarily by Quiggin’s words, but, even while he was speaking, I was aware of this resemblance as Lady Ardglass approached; although her smooth hair and mink made a strong contrast with Mona’s camel-hair coat and rather wild appearance. All the same there could be no doubt that the two of them possessed something in common. As the Ardglass cortege came level with us, I saw exchanged between the two of them one of those glances so characteristic of a woman catching sight of another woman who reminds her of herself: glances in which deep hatred and also a kind of passionate love seem to mingle voluptuously together for an instant of time.
Templer, at the same moment, shot out an all-embracing look, which seemed in an equally brief space to absorb Bijou Ardglass in her entirety. He appeared to do this more from force of habit than because she greatly interested him. It was a memorandum for some future date, should the need ever arise, recording qualities and defects, charms and blemishes, certainties and potentialities, both moral and physical. Jean saw Lady Ardglass too. Just as Quiggin was making his final remark to me, I was conscious that she touched her brother’s arm and muttered something to him that sounded like ‘Bob’s girl’: words at which Templer raised his eyebrows.
I did not fully take in Jean’s appearance until that moment. She was wearing a red dress with a black coat, and some kind of a scarf, folded over like a stock, emphasised the long, graceful curve of her neck. Mona’s strident personality occupied the centre of the stage, and, besides, I felt for some reason a desire to postpone our meeting. Now, as she spoke to her brother, her face assumed an expression at once mocking and resigned, which had a sweetness about it that reminded me of the days when I had thought myself in love with her. I could still feel the tension her presence always brought, but without any of that hopeless romantic longing, so characteristic of love’s very early encounters: perhaps always imperfectly recaptured in the more realistic love-making of later life. Now, I experienced a kind of resentment at the reserve which enclosed her. It suggested a form of self- love, not altogether attractive. Yet the look of irony and amusement that had come into her face when she whispered the phrase about ‘Bob’s girl’ seemed to add something unexpected and charming to her still mysterious personality.
She was taller than I remembered, and carried herself well. Her face, like her brother’s, had become a shade fuller, a change that had coarsened his appearance, while in her the sharp, almost animal look I remembered was now softened. She had not entirely lost her air of being a schoolgirl; though certainly, it had to be admitted, a very smartly dressed school-girl. I thought to myself, not without complacence, that I was able to appreciate her without in any way losing my head, as I might once have done. There was still a curious fascination about her grey-blue eyes, slanting a little, as it were caught tightly between soft, lazy lids and dark, luxurious lashes. Once she had reminded me of Rubens’s Chapeau de Paille. Now for some reason—though there was not much physical likeness between them—I thought of the woman smoking the hookah in Delacroix’s Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement. Perhaps there was something of the odalisque about Jean, too. She looked pale and rather tired. Any girl might excusably have appeared pale beside Mona, whose naturally high colouring had been increased by her own hand, almost as if for the stage or a cabaret performance.
‘Do you remember where we last met?’ she said, when Quiggin was gone.
‘At Stourwater.’
‘What a party.’
‘Was it awful?’
‘Some of it wasn’t very nice. Terrible rows between Baby and our host.’
‘But I thought they never had rows in public.’
‘They didn’t. That was what was so awful. Sir Magnus tremendously bland all the time and Baby absolutely bursting with bad temper.’
‘Do you ever hear from Baby Wentworth now?’
‘I had a card at Christmas. She is cloudlessly happy with her Italian.’
‘What is his profession?’
‘I don’t think I know you well enough to tell you. Perhaps after dinner.’
This, I remembered, was the way things had been at Stourwater: brisk conversation that led in the end to acres of silence. I made up my mind that this time I would not feel put out by her behaviour, whatever form it took.
‘Let’s have some food,’ said Templer, ‘I’m famished. So must you girls be, after your intellectual film.’
Afterwards, I could never recall much about that dinner in the Grill, except that the meal conveyed an atmosphere of powerful forces at work beneath the conversation. The sight of her husband’s mistress had no doubt been disturbing to Jean, who as usual spoke little. It soon became clear that the Templers’ mutual relationship was not an easy one. Different couples approach with varied technique the matrimonial vehicle’s infinitely complicated machinery. In the case of the Templers, their method made it hard to believe that they were really married at all. Clearly each of them was accustomed to a more temporary arrangement. Their conduct was normal enough, but they remained two entirely separate individuals, giving no indication of a life in common. This was certainly not because Templer showed any lack of interest in his wife. On the contrary, he seemed extravaga
ntly, almost obsessively fond of her, although he teased her from time to time. In the past he had sometimes spoken of his love affairs to me, but I had never before seen him, as it were, in action. I wondered whether he habitually showed this same tremendous outward enthusiasm when pursuing more casual inclinations; or whether Mona had touched off some hitherto unkindled spark.
How far Mona herself reciprocated these feelings was less easy to guess. Possibly she was already rather bored with being a wife, and her surfeit in this respect might explain her husband’s conciliatory attitude. She spoke and acted in a manner so affected and absurd that there was something appealing about the artificiality of her gestures and conversation. She was like some savage creature, anxious to keep up appearances before members of a more highly civilised species, although at the same time keenly aware of her own superiority in cunning. There was something hard and untamed about her, probably the force that had attracted Templer and others. She seemed on good terms with Jean, who may have found her sister-in-law’s crude, violent presence emphasised to advantage her own quieter, though still undisclosed nature.
Quiggin had made an impression upon Mona, because, almost immediately after we sat down to dinner, she began to make enquiries about him. Possibly, on thinking it over, she felt that his obvious interest in her had deserved greater notice. In answer to her questions, I explained that he was J. G. Quiggin, the literary critic. She at once asserted that she was familiar with his reviews in one of the ‘weeklies’, mentioning, as it happened, a periodical for which, so far as I knew, he had never written.
‘He was a splendid fellow in his old leather overcoat,’ said Templer. ‘Did you notice his shirt, too? I expect you know lots of people like that, Nick. To think I was rather worried at not having struggled into a dinner-jacket tonight, and he just breezed in wearing the flannel trousers he had been sleeping in for a fortnight, and not caring a damn. I admire that.’
‘I couldn’t remember a thing about meeting him before,’ said Mona. ‘I expect I must have been a bit tight that night, otherwise I should have known his name. He said Mark Members introduced us. Have you heard of him? He is a well-known poet.’
She said this with an ineffable silliness that was irresistible.
‘I was going to meet him here, as a matter of fact, but he never turned up.’
‘Oh, were you?’
She was astonished at this; and impressed. I wondered what on earth Members had told her about himself to have won such respect in her eyes. Afterwards, I found that it was his status as ‘a poet’, rather than his private personality, that made him of such interest to her.
‘I never knew Mark well,’ she said, rather apologetic at having suggested such ambitious claims.
‘He and Quiggin are usually very thick together.’
‘I didn’t realise Nick was waiting for an old friend of yours, sweetie,’ said Templer. ‘Is he one of those fascinating people you sometimes tell me about, who wear beards and sandals and have such curious sexual habits?’
Mona began to protest, but Jean interrupted her by saying: ‘He’s not a bad poet, is he?’
‘I think rather good,’ I said, feeling a sudden unaccountable desire to encourage in her an interest in poetry. ‘He is St. John Clarke’s secretary—or, at least, he was.’
I remembered then that, if Quiggin was to be believed, the situation between Members and St. John Clarke was a delicate one.
‘I used to like St. John Clarke’s novels,’ said Jean. ‘Now I think they are rather awful. Mona adores them.’
‘Oh, but they are too wonderful.’
Mona began to detail some of St. John Clarke’s plots, a formidable undertaking at the best of times. This expression of Jean’s views—that Members was a goodish poet, St. John Clarke a bad novelist—seemed to me to indicate an impressive foothold in literary criticism. I felt now that I wanted to discuss all kind of things with her, but hardly knew where to begin on account of the barrier she seemed to have set up between herself and the rest of the world. I suspected that she might merely be trying to veer away conversation from a period of Mona’s life that would carry too many painful implications for Templer as a husband. It could be design, rather than literary interest. However, Mona herself was unwilling to be deflected from the subject.
‘Do you run round with all those people?’ she went on. ‘I used to myself. Then—oh, I don’t know—I lost touch with them. Of course Peter doesn’t much care for that sort of person, do you, sweetie?’
‘Rubbish,’ said Templer. ‘I’ve just said how much I liked Mr. J. G. Quiggin. In fact I wish I could meet him again, and find out the name of his tailor.’
Mona frowned at this refusal to take her remark seriously. She turned to me and said: ‘You know, you are not much like most of Peter’s usual friends yourself.’
That particular matter was all too complicated to explain, even if amenable to explanation, which I was inclined to doubt. I knew, of course, what she meant. Probably there was something to be said for accepting that opinion. The fact that I was not specially like the general run of Templer’s friends had certainly been emphasised by the appearance of Quiggin. I was rather displeased that the Templers had seen Quiggin. To deal collectively with them on their own plane would have been preferable to that to which Quiggin had somehow steered us all.
‘What was the flick like?’ Templer enquired.
‘Marvellous,’ said Mona. ‘The sweetest—no, really—but the sweetest little girl you ever saw.’
‘She was awfully good,’ said Jean.
‘But what happened?’
‘Well, this little girl—who was called Manuela—was sent to a very posh German school.’
‘Posh?’ said Templer. ‘Sweetie, what an awful word. Please never use it in my presence again.’
Rather to my surprise, Mona accepted this rebuke meekly: even blushing slightly.
‘Well, Manuela went to this school, and fell passionately in love with one of the mistresses.’
‘What did I tell you?’ said Templer. ‘Nick insisted the film wasn’t about lesbians. You see he just poses as a man of the world, and hasn’t really the smallest idea what is going on round him.’
‘It isn’t a bit what you mean,’ said Mona, now bursting with indignation. ‘It was a really beautiful story. Manuela tried to kill herself. I cried and cried and cried.’
‘It really was good,’ said Jean to me. ‘Have you seen it?’
‘Yes. I liked it.’
‘He’s lying,’ said Templer. ‘If he had seen the film, he would have known it was about lesbians. Look here, Nick, why not come home with us for the week-end? We can run you back to your flat and get a toothbrush. I should like you to see our house, uncomfortable as staying there will be.’
‘Yes, do come, darling,’ said Mona, drawing out the words with her absurd articulation. ‘You will find everything quite mad, I’m afraid.’
She had by then drunk rather a lot of champagne.
‘You must come,’ said Jean, speaking in her matter-of- fact tone, almost as if she were giving an order. ‘There are all sorts of things I want to talk about.’
‘Of course he’ll come,’ said Templer. ‘But we might have the smallest spot of armagnac first.’
Afterwards, that dinner in the Grill seemed to partake of the nature of a ritual feast, a rite from which the four of us emerged to take up new positions in the formal dance with which human life is concerned. At the time, its charm seemed to reside in a difference from the usual run of things. Certainly the chief attraction of the projected visit would be absence of all previous plan. But, in a sense, nothing in life is planned—or everything is—because in the dance every step is ultimately the corollary of the step before; the consequence of being the kind of person one chances to be.
While we were at dinner heavy snow was descending outside. This downfall had ceased by the time my things were collected, though a few flakes were still blowing about in the clear winter air when we
set out at last for the Templers’ house. The wind had suddenly dropped. The night was very cold.
‘Had to sell the Buick,’ Templer said. ‘I’m afraid you won’t find much room at the back of this miserable vehicle.’
Mona, now comatose after the wine at dinner, rolled herself up in a rug and took the seat in front. Almost immediately she went to sleep. Jean and I sat at the back of the car. We passed through Hammersmith, and the neighbourhood of Chiswick: then out on to the Great West Road. For a time I made desultory conversation. At last she scarcely answered, and I gave it up. Templer, smoking a cigar in the front, also seemed disinclined to talk now that he was at the wheel. We drove along at a good rate.
On either side of the highway, grotesque buildings, which in daytime resembled the temples of some shoddy, utterly unsympathetic Atlantis, now assumed the appearance of an Arctic city’s frontier forts. Veiled in snow, these hideous monuments of a lost world bordered a broad river of black, foaming slush, across the surface of which the car skimmed and jolted with a harsh crackling sound, as if the liquid beneath were scalding hot.
Although not always simultaneous in taking effect, nor necessarily at all equal in voltage, the process of love is rarely unilateral. When the moment comes, a secret attachment is often returned with interest. Some know this by instinct; others learn in a hard school.
The exact spot must have been a few hundred yards beyond the point where the electrically illuminated young lady in a bathing dress dives eternally through the petrol- tainted air; night and day, winter and summer, never reaching the water of the pool to which she endlessly glides. Like some image of arrested development, she returns for ever, voluntarily, to the springboard from which she started her leap. A few seconds after I had seen this bathing belle journeying, as usual, imperturbably through the frozen air, I took Jean in my arms.
The Acceptance World Page 6