by Alec Waugh
‘You don’t remember me, I see,’ a languid Balliolized voice was fluting. ‘But we’ve danced together a great many times!’
Olivia looked up incuriously. Had she? She might well have done. So many dances, so many men.
‘Of course,’ she responded affably, ‘of course.’
The young man sighed.
‘I thought you’d say that,’ he said. ‘I’ve been experimenting lately. I go up to people I’ve never met and they all pretend to recognize me. They think they may have and they don’t want to be rude.’
‘And what’s the point?’
‘Social research. I wanted to satisfy myself that I am not an individual, but a type. If I were an individual, people would know quite well they hadn’t met me. Can you imagine, for example, anybody making that sort of mistake about Augustus John? But as for me, there are so many articles turned out to the same pattern that people can’t be sure. A dismal business.’
Olivia smiled commiseratingly. ‘Others,’ she quoted, ‘are in your plight.’
‘And what, dearies,’ June was saying, ‘about a little lunch? Come along, Olivia.’
Her waist encircled by the be-bangled arm, Olivia wound her way into the dining-room.
‘And let me see now, where is dear Olivia to sit? Ah yes, down there, next to Gerald Palmer. You know Gerald Palmer don’t you?’
‘My dear,’ laughed Olivia, ‘who doesn’t?’
And that was a question to which as a matter of fact it would have been extremely interesting to obtain an answer. For Gerald Palmer was one of those people whom it is extremely difficult to place. He was tall and sparse with light brown hair that crinkled backwards from his forehead. There were a few grey hairs above his ears; about his eyes there were innumerable little lines; a deep groove ran from mouth to nostril. ‘Forty-one’ you would say at a first glance. ‘And a pretty hard-lived forty-one at that’ would be your comment at a second. And you would go on thinking that till suddenly in the middle of a conversation he would become interested and his eyes would flash and his face would be lit with an enthusiasm so boyish and unpremeditated that you would mutter, ‘Twenty five: he can’t be a day older than twenty-five.’
Difficult to place.
Everyone knew about him, but nobody knew much. You kept on seeing him at this and the other place. But it was hard to recall where you had seen him first. He had no intimate friends apparently, nor any family. He seemed to be well off. It was said of him vaguely that he did something remuneratively in the City. ‘Gerald Palmer, who doesn’t know him?’ It would have been interesting to know where the ramifications of his interests ended.
‘I suppose that I shall be seeing you,’ said Olivia, ‘at the Cranberrys’ on the twentieth?’ For Gerald Palmer was the sort of person with whom you opened a conversation in that way.
Gerald Palmer shook his head.
‘The twentieth? Ah no, on the twentieth, where shall I be? Why yes, in a world of minarets.’
‘Egypt?’
‘Constantinople.’
Olivia sighed. ‘I would rather see Constantinople than any city in the world,’ she said.
‘Then why don’t you come with me? I shall be alone.’
And that was how it started. For although Olivia had been deciding twenty minutes earlier that she knew such few different ways as there were of doing such few different things as existed beneath the sun; although she was familiar with the opening gambits of that for which flirtation is a kindly label; although she knew that while some will protest wildly that flight to China is the only alternative to suicide upon a doorstep, others will remark casually that February is a miserable month in London, and that there are worse things than the sunlight of the Côte d’Azur; and knowing it, had learnt that between that ardour and that torpor is a difference only of technique, that each amounted in the end to precisely the same thing; although she was convinced that life had not left a single surprise in store for her, there was in his off-hand invitation a quality of such indifference, that it would be a pity, she thought, to leave its true nature unexplored.
‘Oh, well,’ she mused, ‘why shouldn’t I?’
Three days later a rolling, rattling P.L.M. express was sweeping them out of a frost-held country.
‘And did you sleep well?’ Gerald was inquiring.
‘I had the place to myself, and I don’t think I turned over twice the whole night through.’
‘I was less fortunate. I shared my sleeper with a Bavarian, and we found it impossible to reach any compromise on questions of ventilation. At the present moment, however, life might be a good deal worse.’
It was a little hard indeed, Olivia reflected, to see how it could have been much better. Bright and gay across the breakfast-car a warm Mediterranean sun was streaming; through the open window stretched on all sides of them the ochre-brown, green-studded Provençal fields. It was good in that sun-soaked atmosphere to recall the winter-bound rain-swept Paris of yesternight.
With a clatter of brakes and a series of diminishingly excruciating jolts the train drew up beside a platform.
‘Avignon,’ said Gerald Palmer. ‘What a pity we haven’t time to stop.’
And in his slow, musically modulated voice he began to speak of the ruined relics, the pomp and pageantry of that medieval city.
With an amused, interested smile, Olivia listened.
Really, but he was a curious man. As a prelude to a honeymoon—and experience of life had not suggested to her any other reason for which men invite women to accompany them on Mediterranean cruises—this in a not uncrowded life was the most astounding episode. It was twenty-four hours now since his car had called for her in Pitt Street, and in the course of those twenty-four hours in not one word or gesture or intonation had there been offered the slightest hint that there were attached any romantic possibilities to the expedition. That the preliminaries to such possibilities could be scarcely easy she would have been the readiest to admit. A circumstance which had indeed more than a little peppered the flavour of her anticipation. She had come prepared, during the early stages at any rate, for a nervous and diffident companion. Nothing, however, had been further from Gerald’s behaviour than embarrassment. There he sat, chattering happily away about papal history as though it were the most normal thing to squire unchaperoned girls you scarcely knew about the Orient.
‘So you’ve never seen Athens,’ he was continuing. ‘I regard it as the greatest of privileges to be allowed to show you the Acropolis for the first time.’
And as she sat there listening patiently: ‘I wonder when he’ll lift the mask,’ she thought.
The boat was due to sail at noon, and the train did not reach Marseilles till shortly before eleven. ‘Straight to the ship,’ he said, proceeding with such efficiency to grapple with porters, cab-drivers and douaniers, that it seemed only two minutes later that he was saying, ‘And now I expect you’d like to unpack your things’; that a maître d’hôtel was being requisitioned; that there was a consulting of yellow charts; that half the stewards on the ship, it seemed to Olivia, were competing to conduct her to the most spacious stateroom on that not unspacious steamship, the Paul Verlaine. She opened her eyes wide as she came into it. ‘At any rate,’ she thought, ‘he knows how to do one well.’
For it was in truth, that stateroom, as complete an experiment in luxury as the company of the Messageries Maritimes has undertaken. There were thick pile carpets on the floor and brocaded curtains across the porthole, and the beds were wide and the lights silk-shaded. There was a little gleaming walnut writing-desk, and an agreeable maid to unpack her trunks and arrange her frocks on the endless series of hangers in the inlaid wardrobe, and turn on the shining taps in the white-tiled bathroom, and scatter Houbigant bath-salts into the churned and steaming water, so that by the time Olivia came on deck to feel cool on her cheeks a breeze that blew softly over the palest of pale blue waters, the world seemed to her a singularly well-ordered place; and when Gerald came up to ask he
r about the cabin, ‘It’s a dream,’ she murmured gratefully, ‘a dream.’
‘Splendid,’ he said. ‘Mine’s quite decent, too.’
‘What!’ she gasped. ‘Yours?’
‘Yes, quite a jolly one. On the port side. Nice fellow sharing it with me, too. James Wellaway. I’ve arranged for him to sit at our table. He’s just gone into the saloon to order cocktails. Let’s join him.’
For the next five minutes, till she had recovered from her astonishment, Olivia talked with incredible rapidity, not so much at James Wellaway as through him. As well, indeed, she might, for her first impression of the tall, fair-haired, clean-shaven, modishly unkempt young man whom Gerald introduced to her, was one of complete transparence. ‘Don’t tell me anything,’ she felt like shouting. ‘I know all that there is to be known about you: your upbringing, your school, your college, your ideas on every subject, your attitude to every situation. Not a word, I beg of you.’ And so her chatter rattled on till she had recovered her composure, and could look steadily again at Gerald Palmer.
When she did, there was that in her eyes which not many men had seen before. For Gerald Palmer had done that for her which very few people, least of all herself, had bothered to do of late: he had respected her reputation. And she felt for him the same sort of pathetic gratitude that a child feels when it is presented with an elaborate toy for which it is several years too old. ‘He’s a perfect dear,’ she thought, ‘if a rather silly one’
That night Olivia tried on many frocks before she decided on the one which best became her, and she spent long minutes before her mirror, smoothing the cool, creamed surface of her cheeks, pencilling the darkened eyelashes, heightening the gloss and shimmer of her nails, and afterwards when she danced with Gerald Palmer, she drew close to him, and her eyes were dilated and very tender.
‘I’m so happy here,’ she sighed, ‘so very happy’.
A confession that drew from her companion the liveliest expression of delight. ‘I so hoped,’ he said, ‘you would. The Mediterranean is incomparable in the variety of its associations.’ And when she suggested later that it would be cool and quiet on the upper deck, he told her all about the early Phoenician traders till ten o’clock when he apologized for feeling sleepy.
‘That Bavarian fellow,’ he explained, ‘kept me awake practically all night.’
Explained in a voice so incontestably assured that she realized with a surprise, that luckily the darkness hid from him, that here was no opening move of any gambit but the quite genuine resolve to sleep.
‘Like anything to drink before I go?’ he asked.
She shook her head.
‘No thanks,’ she replied briefly. ‘I’m tired too.’
‘Ah well, till tomorrow then.’
Tomorrow. It was one of those days whose memory, if one were to live for a thousand years, would remain unblurred. The sea was blue, as blue as turquoise and as clear; and calm, so calm that you expected to hear the sound of tearing silk as the ship slid through it. And like a tent the mantle of the rich sun’s gold was over you. And across the sky’s pale blue here and there small dove-coloured clouds were drifting. On the horizon faint and shadowy was the outline of the coast: of the coast or perhaps of islands; you could not tell, they were so dim and distant; and as the slow hours passed you came to think of them, those vague shapes, not as real places that one day you might chance to visit; they seemed to belong rather to those unmapped kingdoms for which the spirit always is a little homesick, those countries of the imagination where life is as one would will it, where are the people, the things, the places, one will never see.
And all through that long day’s enchantment Gerald and Olivia sat side by side in long wicker chairs while Gerald talked in his slow, musical voice of the history that had been mirrored in those calm waters, the peoples that had settled, the civilizations that had flowered there; all that long conflict of ideas and arms; a history to which, to her intense surprise, Olivia found herself listening with absorbed attention. ‘This is,’ she thought, ‘the most interesting as well as the most odd creature I have ever met.’
And sometimes as he talked his eyes would glow and his face would light with that eager boyish expression that made him seem a young man in the early twenties, breaking his first lance with life.
‘It would be rather marvellous,’ thought Olivia, ‘to make him look like that about one!’
Early next morning they arrived at Naples. And in an ill-sprung car along a road which sets a standard of irregularity unapproached in Europe, they drove out with a band of other tourists to survey Pompeii, under the direction of a melancholy Ethiopian whose nature seemed to have found a congenial setting in that site of abandoned pleasures. ‘Two thousand years ago.’ With those words he began and ended every comment. He swung like a censer, their valedictory refrain about him.
‘What about that secret museum?’ murmured someone.
It was quite clearly the chief object of curiosity among the more sincerely self-confessed members of the party and there was a fine to-do when it was announced on their arrival that entrance was only accessible to men.
‘But art,’ protested a fierce-eyed Scandinavian, ‘is above morals.’
‘I know, I know,’ murmured the lugubrious Ethiopian. ‘We live in an age of prudes. They were more honest people two thousand years ago.’
To Olivia, however, the faces of the men as they came out were far more entertaining than anything there could have been for her to see inside. James Wellaway, as she had anticipated, emerged into the daylight with a sheepish smirk: a large, thick-shouldered, much-whiskered Parisian smiled roguishly. ‘Not calculated,’ he muttered, ‘to increase one’s self-esteem.’ But on Gerald Palmer’s face there was no sign of consciousness that the incident might have been the occasioning of the least embarrassment.
‘Most interesting,’ he told Olivia, ‘most interesting. I wish you could have come. I’m not sure that it isn’t the most significant clue to the period one has. It reveals their attitude to those things so completely; that they should have been able to fresco their rooms like that.’
Olivia blinked twice quickly. Surely an astounding man. ‘I wonder,’ she thought, ‘if he’s the sort of man for whom women simply don’t exist. Somehow I don’t think it’s that.’
She was more than certain that it wasn’t three hours later, when he stopped suddenly before a shop in Naples.
‘By Jove,’ he said, ‘your dress!’ It was a very elaborate affair that he was pointing at: a background of gold tissue, draped opulently with brocade and velvet.
‘Ah, no,’ she said. ‘You’d want a big-featured woman to carry off a thing like that. I’d be submerged by it.’
‘I’m not so sure, we’ll see.’
Olivia was certain, though. She was small-boned, and she dressed always so that her frocks might be a setting and no more. She was not striking enough to wear striking dresses. ‘It’ll never do,’ she said.
The girl in the shop was inclined to agree with her.
‘But I am sure, Madam,’ she said, ‘that we shall be able to find something else that will. I will show Madam afterwards. This is, of course, a very lovely frock, but as François said when he designed it, it is not everybody’s dress. If Madam will just lift it so. Yes, like that. Yes, oh, but … after all, Madam, I am not certain.’
Not certain! Ah, but Olivia was. With a little gasp she realized that this dress which never under any circumstances would she have looked at twice, was the one flamboyant dress in the whole world that it would be possible for her to wear without loss of personality.
And Gerald had been the one to spot it.
‘You’re right,’ she said, as she walked out of the dressing-room, and for the first time in connexion with anything that directly concerned herself she saw the boyish glint of enthusiasm in Gerald’s eyes.
‘I thought I wasn’t wrong. And this dress,’ he added to the assistant, ‘has got to be on the Paul Verlaine without fail i
n two hours’ time.’
As Olivia sat that evening before her glass, the fingers that were pencilling her eyebrows nearly trembled. For the first time for seven years she was badly floundering. She was out of her depth and knew it. She did not understand this man. She did not begin to understand him. And the situation was getting on her nerves. ‘He’s got,’ she decided, ‘to lift that mask.’ But though she devoted more attention that evening to her complexion than she could remember ever to have done before, though fifty heads were turned breathlessly in her direction as she strode resplendent in her new frock into the dining-room, though rarely as she danced had the light in her eyes been softer or more languishing, it was of Attic culture that they talked, she and Gerald, in the cool quiet of the upper deck, and punctually at ten o’clock he remarked that it was extraordinary how sleepy the sea air made one.
‘This,’ thought Olivia, ‘is getting desperate.’
It had grown more than desperate by the time the Paul Verlaine had sailed out from the Piraeus and the Acropolis had grown indistinguishable against the red-brown background of its hills. Twelve hours of Doric columns had left Olivia’s nerves a rag of tatters. The situation had grown too much for her. There was something more than exasperating about a man whose face would be filled with the most thrilling rapture by a piece of masonry, and who would desert the company of an admittedly attractive girl every evening at ten o’clock.
‘I can’t stand it,’ Olivia muttered, ‘I can’t stand it.’ Her chin was firm and her fists clenched resolutely. ‘Somehow or other, I don’t care how, and I don’t care upon what terms, but somehow or other I’m going to make this man make love to me.’
There is a wind blowing in your face as you draw near the Bosporus, a wind that has been chilled and whetted by the Russian snows, and as Olivia leant shivering against the taffrail of the Paul Verlaine looking out at the white line of coast that was Stamboul, ‘I wonder,’ she asked, ‘if it’s worthwhile staying up on deck for.’