by Alec Waugh
“I suppose I’m rather a futile person,” she said once, in rather pathetic contrast to the confident exterior she presented to the world. The last thing she would have asked of anyone was pity. Pity was the last thing that ordinarily one would have thought of offering. But it was pity that I felt for her then. She, like so many others of her age and class, had been set a task for which they had not been fitted.
It was not only the problem of work that fretted her. There were all those young men round her; none of whom meant much to her. And in the air were the new bachelor girl ideas that allowed a girl as much freedom as her brothers.
“If one doesn’t run around having affairs they say you’re dumb,” she complained once. “And if you do, they say you’re rotten. Life was a good deal easier for a girl fifty years ago.”
The props that had sustained women for centuries had been removed and no props had been supplied in their place. Loyalty, chastity, modesty were at a discount. Marriage was decried as Victorian: at its best, as a temporary makeshift.
“Though everyone’s pretty hard on you if you take them at their word,” she said. “I don’t know what’s going to happen to us.”
§
It was in the third year of our friendship that I returned one afternoon to find a telephone message from Gavin Herriott. If I saw Olivia Sergeant, would I ask her to ring him up at once?
I whistled. I had known that she and Herriott were friends: that Herriott was supposed to be in love with her. But I had not thought it was as serious as that: that he had got as far as leaving messages for her with mutual friends. I felt sorry for Herriott. He was a nice fellow; young, ambitious, a stockbroker, with his way to make; with the need, I suspected, of a woman in his life. Olivia did not seem at all the right person for him. Embarrassment and strain were all that she could bring to anyone who was not the right man for her.
I was more than convinced of that a couple of hours later when I listened to their conversation on my telephone. She was on her way to a dance, and had looked in for a moment’s rest. She refused a cocktail.
“I’m tired,” she said. “I just want to sit here quietly for a little.”
She pouted when I gave her Gavin Herriott’s message.
“Again!” she said. “Oh well, I suppose I’ll have to. Be an angel and hand me across the telephone.”
It was a conversation that can have given Gavin Herriott little pleasure. Her voice was friendly; in a way, affectionate; but it had the tired accent of indifference.
“Yes,” she said, “this is me, Olivia. What’s that you say? That I’d promised to lunch with you? Surely no. When did I? At the Playfair’s dance? But that’s eight days ago. You can’t expect me to remember engagements as far ahead as that. You should have wired. Yes, of course I’m sorry; and when will I lunch instead?… Oh, but really, my dear, I’m in such a hurry now, and my diary’s somewhere else. Be an angel and ring me in the morning. Oh, and by the bye, did you get any of those shares I told you about? Put your shirt on them? That was very wise of you. I must rush now. À bientot.”
With a histrionic sigh of mock exhaustion she clamped back the receiver of the telephone.
“What a life they lead me,” she laughed.
“I’m glad I’m not in love with you,” I said.
Olivia shrugged her shoulders.
“It’s all they’re worth.”
“I don’t know that Gavin is.”
“Gavin? I think I’m rather nice to Gavin.”
“Nice?”
“I’ve just put him in a fair way to earning a vast wad of wealth.”
“How?”
“Through Uncle Jack’s going to buy up a shipping concern that would have gone ‘phut’ in another month. You can get the shares now for practically nothing. In a day or so they’ll be worth many pennies; I put Gavin on to that. Very nice of me, I think.”
“I daresay that Gavin Herriott would have preferred you to remember your engagements.”
Again Olivia shrugged her shoulders.
“You might, you know, do very much worse than Gavin Herriott,” I said.
She laughed at that.
“I might; if there were many worse things than marriage, nowadays, for a girl who’s got plenty of friends and a comfortable-sized allowance. Marriage may have been all very fine sixty years ago when girls were put into glass cases till a suitable young man thought fit to ask for them. But to-day…”
She rose from her chair and slowly, with a glint of triumph in the smile that lit her eyes and mouth, she turned looking over her shoulder at her reflection in the narrow mirror that ran the length of a wall beside a bookcase.
“I think,” she said, “that I shall do this frock credit.”
§
At about the same time, in another London house, another new frock was being worn for the first time.
“It is charming, charming,” a maid was murmuring.
Muriel Jamieson pouted. Yes, it was nice enough, the pale lilac beneath its network of silver gauze. But she was in one of those moods of intangible dissatisfaction that had grown increasingly frequent of late. What was the use of a new frock, she asked herself, when there was no one in particular to wear it for? Edward would notice it, of course. She had not, she thanked heaven, one of those husbands whose wives, for all they knew, might just as well wear odd stockings. His plump, fresh-coloured face would smile genially as she came into the dining-room.
“What, another!” he would say in his laboured, clumsy way. “How lucky it is that I should have happened to put through a pleasantly large deal this morning.”
And he would pass an arm about her shoulder, brush the back of her head softly with his cheek, murmur into her ear, “How pleased the man who designed this must have been to know that it was to be worn by someone really worthy of it.”
Yes, he would be sweet enough. Edward was always that. He was never fractious about money, he let her do what she liked, live the life she chose, have her own friends, her own tastes, never force his upon her. Edward in his way was perfect. In his way. But there, well, there it stopped. The smile, the kiss, the heavily shod compliment. That’s all there was to a new frock. Whereas once.…
Once! That sudden startled look, the indrawn breath, the voice that tried vainly to conceal its trembling, the eyes that kept turning, half guiltily, an evening through, to hers. That was what once a new frock had meant. And of course they’d been married four years now; you couldn’t expect people to feel after four years of marriage as they had during the first month of an engagement. But all the same, when one was twenty-seven, when one knew oneself prettier than one had ever been.… Edward might have got used to her, but there were plenty of men in the world who hadn’t, plenty of men for whom if she chose, a new frock would mean the quick quivering eyelids, that unsteadied voice, the fingers that fluttered nervously at a collar. Plenty of men, if she were to choose.…
Gavin Herriott, for instance. There was a look of pleased surprise for her in those deep grey eyes, whenever they happened, she and he, to find themselves at the same party. Always as soon as possible he would disengage himself from whomsoever he might happen to be talking to and come across to her. She liked Gavin Herriott. He was the sort of man that, had she not been married, that were she free.… Young, handsome, prosperous, with easy and agreeable manners.
She wondered if he was going to the Galloway’s that night. It was the sort of show he would probably have been invited to. Perhaps he hadn’t made his mind up about it yet. If he were to know that she was going… certainly, she’d enjoy herself more if he were there. It was worth, anyhow, finding out.
§
Could she have seen Gavin Herriott at that moment she might have hesitated before lifting the receiver of her telephone. Since his brief talk with Olivia Sergeant, he had not stirred from the deep armchair into which he had flung himself. He had sat there, thinking savagely, throwing cigarette after half-smoked cigarette into the grate. What was the use, he asked
himself, of the wretched business, the folly of loving where one was not loved? It could be nothing less than folly to imagine that Olivia cared for him. Would she cancel so many appointments if she did, and for those she did keep, would she, if she really cared, arrive invariably late, to rush away the moment the lunch, dinner or theatre were over, to some other party, to some other man? All the time she was with him she would be glancing at her watch, thinking of somebody or something else. And to forget utterly, as she had that day, an appointment. It was all very well to say that eight days was too far back to be remembered, but surely, some time during those eight days if he had meant anything to her she would have thought of him, and thinking of him would have wondered when she was to see him next; and wondering, would have remembered that some time, somewhere, there had been some talk about a lunch? Had she forgotten the date and time and place, good manners, if nothing else, would have made her ring up or write to him. The forgetting of that lunch could mean only one thing: that she had not once in the course of those eight days found time to think of him. She did not care.
It was madness of him to go on letting himself be hurt; madness to have let it last so long; for two years nearly. Two years, during which countless times he had been on the brink of writing that farewell letter whose sentences he had rehearsed so often in his imagination. Countless times, but with always something happening at the last moment to make him feel that even if she did not love him he at least occupied a unique position in her life and thoughts: the evening, for example, when she had been fretfully jealous at finding him at Ciro’s alone with another woman: the postscript to the note she had sent him from Monte Carlo telling him that she would be returning in the following week. “Tuesday, and will it be minutes or only hours that you’ll be counting to it?” The day, too, when she had turned up thirty-five minutes late for lunch, untidy, worried, and exhausted, to pour out, without a word of apology or greeting, the story of a proposal she had received that morning from an elderly, rich, by no means undistinguished man, which she was wondering whether she would be wise or foolish to refuse. He had sat listening glumly. Could she possibly talk like this, he had thought, if he existed for her as a man at all?
Then suddenly she had paused, had stretched out her hand impulsively to him, and with one of those rare smiles that came seemingly from the heart but might be for all one knew no more than a part of a woman’s hereditary armour in the war of sex like the protective colouring of animals. “Darling, don’t be cross with me,” she had said. “It’s only that I feel I can be myself with you, as I can’t be with anybody else.”
Little incidents, that like this recent advice to take up shares in the Hardware Shipping Company had shown a turning to him first, a suggestion that even if she did not love, she was on the brink of love. For that, he knew, was what had held him to her all these months, the hope that one day she might come to love; with as a corollary to that hope, the knowledge that when a girl as armoured against love as Olivia Sergeant should finally love, she would give with an abundance, a generosity, denied to easier conquests. For months that hope, that knowledge had sustained him. But it was useless, he saw that now. She did not care. She would never care. She was one of those typical, unsexed, post-war girls with nothing in their heads but frocks and motor cars and parties, who only asked of life that it should pass swiftly in a succession of new effects; who valued men in proportion to their capacity to provide these novelties, who married not a man but the things he brought them. That was all she was. The sooner he realised it the better.
It was just, indeed, as he had arrived at this conclusion and was glowering darkly at a grate littered with cigarette ends, that the telephone bell began to ring. He snorted angrily. Why on earth couldn’t people let one be?
“Yes, what is it?” he cried impatiently.
From the other end came a little laugh, and a voice soft and mocking.
“How fierce you sound. I don’t think I shall have the courage to stay here. I’ll ring off.”
“Ah, but now that I know who’s speaking.”
The pitch of his voice had changed completely. Muriel Jamieson laughed happily.
“That’s very sweet of you. I was only just wondering whether you were going to the Galloway’s to-night?”
“I’ve accepted for it.”
“Are you going?”
“I don’t know. Are you?”
“Probably.”
“That makes a difference.”
“I should have thought you might have found a less obvious compliment.”
“Only at the expense of truth.”
And indeed her going did make a difference. He had decided that morning not to go. One couldn’t stay up all night and be fit for work next day. If it was a question of going somewhere with Olivia, that was different. She could drag him from cabaret to night club, and he would never think about the passing hours. Two extra hours of her company were worth a ruined day. But no one else’s was. He had, indeed, made it a rule never to stay out after midnight except when he was with Olivia or was going to a place where there was a likelihood of finding her. And he knew that he would not be meeting her at the Galloway’s. That morning he had decided definitely not to go. But now that the time had come, he felt that a lonely evening in his flat was more than he could endure. He wanted noise and light and colour; possibly, too, a little kindliness. It would be nice to sit beside Muriel Jamieson on a star-lit balcony. She was kind and sweet and gentle.
“It makes all the difference in the world,” he said. “And if you’ll promise to keep your supper dance for me I don’t mind if I have to stand against a wall the rest of the evening.”
§
He did not, however, need to sit in a corner all the evening. Friends saw to that. Nor was it by any means once only that he danced with Muriel Jamieson. So that when the time came for the dance which they had chosen to be their supper one, they were both tired of bright lights and noise and animation.
“What about just a quail,” he said, “then a tranquil minute or so upon the balcony?”
She nodded her head. It would be far pleasanter on such a night, warm and star-drenched, to sit on the balcony with music at the back of her. As they made their way out through the heat of the thronged ballroom, into the cool twilight, she sighed. It was so lovely; the peace and harmony of a London square; plane trees against the sky; and cars drawn round the Garden with couples sitting out in them. Young people, in love maybe, with their lives in front of them, this hour a dreaming prelude. So lovely that for a tranced moment she caught her breath and lifted her hands across her throat; and turning towards Gavin, her eyes soft and wide, shining through the twilight, half swayed to him so that the perfumed fragrance of her body rose about him; swayed to him, with parted lips. And then…
It is not love only that flings men and women into each other’s arms. There are more things than love that are said and sought for in a kiss. And in that kiss was expressed for Muriel all the dissatisfaction that had been fretting her for weeks, the hunger for romance, adventure, the thrill of a man’s need and homage. While for Gavin Herriott that close-locked moment was an attempt to heal the wounds that Olivia’s indifference and neglect had inflicted on him. Never actually had they been so far apart. As his arms went round her and his lips met hers, Gavin Herriott closed his eyes.
He opened them on the spectacle of Edward Jamieson gaping at him in unhappily embarrassed astonishment. With a half cry he stepped away, to stand, his hand still in Muriel’s, returning the stupid stare with an equally stupid solemnity.
For a full minute not one of the three could find a word to say. Then, very slowly, very ponderously:
“Does this mean that you two are in love with one another?” said Edward Jamieson.
There was no reply. Had the kiss been preceded by any incident of avowal, had it been in itself the sealing and acknowledgment of a pact, then it was the man’s job, Gavin reflected, to take full responsibility. But in such a case as thi
s, where a kiss that was little more than a light-hearted tribute to an evening’s happiness had been exchanged, surely it was the woman’s place to laugh the incident away. But Muriel at his side said nothing.
“Because, of course, if you do love one another, I’m not going to be the sort of Victorian husband that makes things difficult,” Edward Jamieson was saying.
Gavin started. Difficulties, and Victorian husbands, because his wife was kissed by another man! It was ridiculous. Such a mountain out of such a molehill.
“If you want a divorce,” Jamieson was continuing.
Herriott rubbed his eyes. Was this true: was this real life: was this actually happening? Surely Muriel would break this absurd nightmare. He looked quickly at her. Her head was averted, her eyes lowered, she was standing motionless, her fingers hanging limply within his. What was she thinking, what thoughts were passing behind the cool, soft-scented mask?
What thoughts? It would have been hard indeed to say, such a confusion was there. The excitement of the moment; the dull weeks that had preceded it; the uncertain future; life had been drab so long; it had been such fun being kissed like that; Gavin was nice; it would be thrilling to be married to him; it would be stupid going back home with Edward; as though nothing at all had happened. As far as one could tell, that was to say. For wouldn’t there be a change of some sort? Would Edward value her kisses quite so highly if he thought they were given casually? It would be terrible to have a husband who didn’t appreciate you.
Anyhow, it wasn’t her business. It was not the woman’s part to force and arrange circumstances: it was her job to make the best she could out of each separate situation, as it came along. This was a man’s business. Let them arrange it as they chose. They would only have themselves to blame then if it turned out wrong. And on the whole, yes, quite emphatically, she hoped…