I did not, of course, care if Iris were perverse enough to go to the lengths of attracting Keith from me; I was far more annoyed and humiliated by the behaviour of Victor, who, forced to sit with me in the back, spent part of the time in sulky silence and the other part jerking himself forward to kiss Iris’s neck. He did this once just as Keith braked to avoid a pedestrian, banged his face on the back of the seat in front, and made his nose bleed. We arrived at the dance in a somewhat uncertain mood: Keith stiff and silent, Victor holding a handkerchief to his face, and Iris and I displaying the kind of automatic, rather aggressive gaiety that young girls display at parties when the prelude has somehow gone wrong.
Chapter Seven
The ballroom was in the semi-basement of a large restaurant on the Broadway. As we went in I saw at once that when we had left our coats we should have to make our entry down a broad flight of half a dozen stairs, designed to display the charms of confident and pretty girls, but not, I thought, to display me; and at once the uncontrollable, vertiginous fury returned as I pictured myself, uncomely in the pink nightdress, walking down these steps at the side of a cripple whose head did not reach to my ear. My eyes filled. Iris said something to me, but I could not answer her.
In those days I was given to imagining myself (it is a habit that passed without note as I grew up) not in heroic or splendid rôles but in disgraced and shameful ones. It was one of the bizarreries of adolescence, a thing I only allowed to come to the front of my mind when I was actually driven to indulge it. It seemed to me, that March night, as if these disagreeable dreams had suddenly hardened into reality; that upon this reality every eye was turned, and every ray from the clustered lamps, lemon, rose and gold, garlanded for festivity, was converging upon it. Wildly I considered pretending to feel sick, even to faint; wondered if I might force myself to an attitude of non-participation so emphatic and strange that it could only command respect and endow me with some of that mystery for which I had so idiotically hoped when I set aside the pearl beads, the crystals and the silver rose. (But I had the courage for none of these things.) Choked with tears and anger, I followed Iris into the cloakroom, pulled off my coat and threw it to the attendant, accepted the ticket, passed my hands over my hair and went to wait for her by the door, without so much as a side glance in the mirror. This I could not face.
In a few moments she came and stood by me. She muttered, ‘Oh, what’s the matter? You aren’t going to spoil things, are you? I swear I didn’t know. Oh, Christie, you can’t still be oofy!’ I pushed her away. I was afraid the tears would fall. The desperate thought crossed my mind that if only they would stay within the confines of my lids they might give me sufficient of an illusion of beauty to help me carry this horrible affair through. I did not give a thought to Keith, though I knew I ought to be thinking of him and for him. I was utterly selfish in my own distress, and stimulated by the pride of being wicked enough to accept my own selfishness.
We went out.
This was a larger, more elaborate dance than most of those to which I was accustomed. The sports club, Iris had told me, was for people with pretty good jobs: professional people, businessmen of executive standard, and master tradesmen who owned shops but did not serve in them. Many of the men were wearing tail-coats; the dresses of the women were less fussy than those of the girls at the Rosebud Hall, and a little scantier; but I saw no countesses in black velvet without adornment.
Victor and Keith were waiting at the head of the stairs, Victor wearing his confident, meaningless smile, Keith squat and unsmiling in his shadow. Iris moved towards Victor arms outstretched, as if she were greeting him at the end of a voyage, the blue dress taking a faint rosiness from the lights overhead. ‘Darling, have we been ages and ages?’
‘Ladies’ privilege,’ said Victor, with what seemed to me a sickening little bow. My heart tightened. I walked towards the young men.
And then something happened. Keith stepped forward. He said to Iris in a loud, expressionless voice, ‘You look magnificent. May I congratulate you?’ With a movement so deft that I could hardly follow it, he slipped between her and Victor and placed his hand on her arm, drawing her forward with him. It was with Keith that Iris descended the terrifying stairs and I who followed with Victor, who looked like a thundercloud behind a shocked, bright smile.
My charged heart seemed to burst like an ulcer, infinitely easing, but infinitely weakening. I was filled with such wonder and such gratitude that when Keith asked me for the first dance I could not find words to answer him. I was so sorry now for my callousness towards him (thank God I had not shown it, but had merely let it consume itself within me) that I sought as wildly for means to please him as I had sought for means to desert him. Curiously enough he danced well, better than I (who had never been a fit partner for Leslie), and the pleasure of his competence was soothing. We danced for a little in silence. At last he said, ‘It is not gentlemanly to say so, I know, but I do not find Iris particularly pleasing.’
‘She’s sweet really,’ I said, feebly torn between affection for him and the old loyalty to her.
‘She wants to take everything from you. Why on earth do you let her?’
‘I can’t,’ I replied, repeating myself, ‘compete.’
‘Oh, nonsense. Iris is for very young men only.’
This lifted me to a seventh heaven. ‘She seems to be for all of them.’
‘Again I say, nonsense.’ Keith spoke very much as if his lines had been written for him; I had already noticed his aloof trick of substituting ‘I cannot’, ‘I do not’, ‘I would not’, for the more natural I can’t’, ‘I don’t’, ‘I wouldn’t’. ‘She is for very young men, or for men who will always be very young. Would you consider Victor up to your own intellectual weight?’
‘I haven’t really thought of my intellectual weight,’ I answered, deeply flattered.
‘You must have done so. You write; you read. Victor says you have already had a poem published.’
‘One. But not in anything important.’
‘You would always need an intellectual response,’ said Keith, looking suddenly weary, ‘but that, of course, is all I’m fitted to offer you, and all by itself it will not do.’
The music came to an end. He did not swing me round, as many men swung their partners (Victor, I noticed, had made Iris into an iridescent top), but brought me gently and precisely to a full stop. We returned to our table.
Then Victor danced grudgingly with me, I sat out a dance with Keith, and danced once with some young man who appeared to be the club secretary. We had ices. Keith said, ‘Will you excuse me? I’ve left my cigarettes in the car,’ and went away. Victor and Iris took the floor again and I was left alone.
All at once I saw standing at the foot of the stairs a middle-aged, high-coloured woman talking to a young man. Though I glanced at them only casually at first, I felt impelled to look again at the man. At that moment his eye caught mine; he stared at me for a second, looked away.
My heart moved, sending me without warning into such an anxiety, restlessness and desire that I was scared by my own emotion. In a stroke, I was in love.
Chapter Eight
I know through this experience that love at first sight is possible—I have proved it empirically. What I see no reason for claiming is that love of this kind is the best, for the most enduring love in my life, which is no part of this story, did not at all begin in such a fashion. It was upon me suddenly in joy, bewilderment and something like fear, when, after years of knowing, and of complex but unanalysed friendship, I had looked upon the object of it with new eyes.
But this love of my eighteenth year was heedless, irrational and storming. I could not believe in it; it seemed not part of myself, like bone, flesh and fibre, but a hard and alien thing which had lodged itself within me.
He was a slight, fair man, perhaps twenty-seven to thirty years of
age, a little below medium height, but with a kind of perching, flexible grace. He had a small face, the forehead high, the nose sharply aquiline, the mouth full and a little surly. His chin was small but jutting. It was a bird-like face except for the eyes, full, blue and analytic under heavy and curious-coloured lids.
His posture, his way of replying to what the woman was saying, simulated a kind of contemptuous impatience; he did not seem, as it were, part of the party. He might have been some kind of inspector, called in to pass an opinion upon the organisation, the band, the structure of the building itself.
There was another girl sitting next to me, like myself unsought; a plain girl, who, I had observed, seemed familiar with many people there. Driven as I could never have been by any lesser curiosity, I said to her, ‘I have a feeling I know those two by the stairs. Can you tell me who they are?’
‘Well, she’s Mrs. Patton; she’s one of our vice-presidents. She’s awfully rich and helps out a bit if we have a deficit. I don’t know who he is.’
‘I think she’s rather attractive,’ I said falsely.
‘Oh, do you?’ the girl answered with pardonable surprise.
Keith came back with the cigarettes, Victor and Iris from the floor. The dance went on.
In those days the young men had a certain bad habit that may or may not, for all I know, be current today. This was to feel the necessity, at any dance on unlicensed premises, to go out for a drink whether they wanted one or not. It was merely a custom; it established their manliness, emphasised the reality of their trade-union. Victor, I knew, would make a move shortly; I was rather surprised when Keith moved simultaneously, as I had somehow thought he would have grown out of this convention.
‘Interval,’ said Victor, and time for a very quick one. ‘Will you girls excuse us?’
‘I shan’t let him be long,’ added Keith, whose eyes had brightened a little as though even he, this evening, had discovered some kind of enjoyment.
‘Aren’t they sickening!’ Iris complained when they had gone, dutifully leaving us with lemonade. ‘Men simply can’t keep off the drink. I think they’re revolting.’
They were still absent when the band returned to the dais.
‘They don’t deserve us, darling,’ Iris fumed. ‘Honestly, I think the world would be far better without men.’
The floor was empty at first. Then one couple took to it, and then another, and the efflorescence grew till it bloomed like a garden.
I saw him picking his way towards us—to me?—walking gracefully, but looking graceless. I was standing against the wall, and I dared not look at him. Instead, I examined my pink dress, discovering that though it was shiny to the eye of anybody else, the pattern of the weaving made it seem mat to anyone wearing it. Shining thread passed beneath dull one, a cross-hatching infinitely small and delicate, giving a low tone to the whole surface. Staring downwards, I could see his legs, two black chimneys fastened to earth.
‘Shall we dance this?’
The voice seemed not to come in my direction or Iris’s, but to be launched into space, awaiting a response from anybody who cared to make one.
I looked up, jerking myself out of a hot and apprehensive dream.
Iris was smiling like an angel or a child. ‘No, no; I’m tired. You dance this with my friend. She’s far better than I am.’
He looked at me.
‘I’m not dancing this one,’ I said, sounding airy, though I was blazing with pride and disappointment; ‘I’ve laddered my stocking.’ I explained rather elaborately that it was necessary for me to go to the cloakroom before it went any further.
He did not seem to be listening. He was looking at Iris now, his eyes frankly inspecting her; he looked all over her face in a circular inspection, and she flushed. Then she gave a little shrug, placed a hand upon his upper arm—she had a trick of avoiding a man’s shoulder—and a hand lightly on the top of his own. He smiled then, and half lifted her across the strip of carpet on to the sprung floor. She was a blueness among flowers. Her smile sprinkled them like a garden spray.
During my self-imposed retreat to the cloakroom I thought: Keith was wrong. This is not a very young man. She will take everything away from me, all my life. (For the whole of life seemed at that time a crystallisation of years small enough to be held in the hand, a thing for immediate disposal, to be snatched by another, to be thrown away.) Yet (I defended her even then) was it her fault? He had wanted her, not me. Of course he had wanted her. Would not anyone else on earth?
My face feeling stiff as my tightened throat, I went back to the ballroom.
Keith and Victor came back—Keith impenetrable as usual, Victor with a masculine, ingratiating smile, part guilt, part self-satisfaction.
‘So sorry! We had to fight our way to the bar.’ His smell of beer reminded me a little of Leslie’s smell of jam, and aroused in me a pang of quite irrelevant remorse. ‘Where’s Iris?’
‘Someone asked her to dance.’
The music stopped. She came shining down on us, like Marie Antoinette entering the Oeil de Boef, her partner behind her. He bowed to her quickly and went away as if he had a pressing appointment.
‘Oh, Vic, I’m afraid I was naughty! But you were late, and Christie and I couldn’t be wallflowers!’
‘I was a wallflower,’ I said, and was surprised to find that I could say it easily and without rancour. I did not believe Iris had been a success this time.
Keith smiled at me. ‘Only from choice,’ he said. The band struck up a Paul Jones.
‘All in!’ Iris cried, standing on tiptoe, stretching her arms above her head and waggling her fingertips. ‘And may the best girl win.’
I looked at Keith.
‘This is not my dance,’ he said, still with the same approving smile, ‘though I did hear a chap say once that no Paul Jones was any fun without a booby-prize. However, I shall leave that rôle to Victor.’
Iris clasped me by the hand and pulled me after her into the ring of girls. Sliding, sidling, gliding, bumping one another, eyes bright and shifty, we all revolved. Victor, in the outer ring, was trying to put a space between himself and his neighbours by stretching out his arms, in order that if Iris came his way he should not miss her; but was repeatedly forced forward by the pressure, his arms pinned to his side, his smile protruding as his body protruded.
‘—Te-tum te tiddle-y, ta, ta!’ the band chorused, and stopped. I looked up. In front of me, having separated himself from the men on his left and his right, as Victor had failed to do, was the man with whom I had fallen in love.
We moved off to one of those slow, somnambulistic waltzes which made the calves ache.
‘That was neat, I think,’ he said to me, looking over my head.
I saw at close quarters that he was rather lined, as if he had been much in the sun. From below, his nose looked not only imperious but rather utilitarian, like a cutting-edge. His eyes were small-pupilled, the iris curiously composed as if by a mosaic of blues and greys, each infinitesimal section faintly pencilled around.
He said, ‘When I ask you to dance, why does your friend take it upon herself to accept the invitation?’
I was much too young to be clever. ‘But you were looking at her!’
‘I was probably looking,’ he replied, ‘somewhere between you. This is the first dance I’ve been to in three years and I’m a trifle gauche. However, I thought my meaning was clear.’
‘It wasn’t!’ I cried, and began to laugh as he laughed. Happiness filled me, and wonder. ‘Why did you come tonight?’ I asked him.
‘One of the big pots of this club is a cousin of mine. She dragged me along.’
‘Are you glad you came?’
‘Yes. But next time I ask you to dance I hope you’ll answer for yourself.’
It was brusque, it was arrogant, and,
because he must have known how much younger I was than he, it was a little unkind. But I did not care. His voice had a certain leisurely harshness that enchanted me. Beside him, young men like Victor were miserable little boys. I was sorry for Iris. Really sorry. Poor Iris.
‘Damn,’ he said.
We were off in the rings again. This time I tried as hard to stop before him as he before me. Iris, on the far side of the room, raised her eyebrows, put a finger to her lips in mock rebuke. But we did not succeed in our manoeuvres until the final round, which, because the band was weary, was a perfunctory gallop. As we stopped, breathless, he said, ‘Supper-dance next. Will you save it for me?’
At that moment I caught sight of Keith, at our table, alone. He was reading through a programme of the club’s future activities, reading it with a kind of concentration which filled me with compassion and strength.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said; ‘I’m booked for that.’
‘Break it.’
‘I can’t.’
‘Who’s it with? That treacly chap?’
‘No.’ I nodded towards the table.
He hesitated for a moment, then said, ‘Have it your own way, my dear,’ and walked away as abruptly as he had walked away from Iris.
I felt desolate.
Keith looked up to greet me. ‘Was it fun?’
An Impossible Marriage Page 5