by Rosie Thomas
‘Oh God,’ Grace was whispering, ‘Oh God, I thought it would never end. I told myself, if one more young man praises the band or asks me how I’m enjoying it all I shall scream until they send for the fire brigade.’
‘You looked as if you were enjoying yourself well enough,’ Clio said reasonably. ‘You were laughing so much with Anthony Brock I thought you might be on the point of creating a frisson of interest.’
Grace sighed. ‘Oh, Anthony Brock.’ She flung herself down on Clio’s bed and patted the pocket of her robe. Then she extracted a flat cigarette case and a small gold lighter. She selected a cigarette and snapped her lighter. The flame lit one side of her face with a brief coppery glow, transforming her instantly into a woman of the world.
‘Grace.’ Clio was shocked.
Grace held out the case. ‘Want one? No?’ She breathed out a long, efficient plume of smoke and leant back against Clio’s pillows. ‘It’s so bloody cold in here. Get in under the covers, for God’s sake.’
Clio did as she was told. They pulled the heavy blankets up around their shoulders. The cigarette smoke wreathed their heads.
‘Anthony Brock said he’s going to marry me. Didn’t ask me, told me.’
‘I know.’
Grace’s eyebrows went up. ‘How?’
‘He said so. At supper. We also agreed to be friends, and shook hands on it.’
‘Cosy.’
‘It was, rather. And so what did you say in response to this news?’
‘Told him I wasn’t going to marry anyone.’ She sighed again, tilting her chin to stare up at the plaster fruit and flowers wreathing the cornice. ‘Oh, Clio. Darling Clio. Why is it always marriage? Is that all there is for us?’
‘Not for me,’ Clio said, with a touch of smugness.
Grace turned on one side then, so that she could see her cousin’s face. ‘You’re right. Not for you. How lucky you are, how very lucky. All there is for me is an extension of tonight. Politeness, and good form, and utter tedium.’
Clio was surprised by her vehemence. ‘You always look happy. I thought you were. Tonight, for instance.’
Grace shrugged. ‘I try to. One has to do that much.’
‘You are very good at it. Much better than I’ll ever be. Listen, Grace. You don’t have to be conventional and do the right thing and marry whoever it is Blanche and John single out for you. Anthony Brock or anyone else.’
There was a voice within Clio whispering that Grace was lucky, as always, and that she would not reject Anthony as readily herself. But she ignored it and went on, ‘Five years ago you might have had to, but the war has changed all that. Women can live their own lives now. They have proved it, by doing men’s work. Look at all the women in shops and factories. I’m going to get my degree and then work as a translator. Live abroad.’ She began to be fired by her own fantasy. ‘Be what I want to be, not just a wife and mother. It was right for Eleanor and Blanche, Victorian ladies. But it’s not right for me. Not for us, Grace.’
Grace stabbed out her cigarette and sat upright, wrapping her arms around her knees. ‘Yes. You’re right, of course you are.’ She looked down at Clio with shining eyes. ‘Have you forgiven me?’
There was a moment’s silence. No, the voice whispered within Clio’s head.
She said, ‘Yes.’
A year seemed a long time.
Grace laughed, a little wildly. ‘Good. That’s very good. Let’s make a pact, Clio. Let’s promise each other that we won’t submit to the yoke. Let’s do what we do only because we want to do it, not because we think we ought to. We must be determined to enjoy ourselves. We must be free.’
Clio thought that Grace’s resolution was grandiose, but typically vague. She wasn’t quite sure what freedom from the yoke would mean in detail, and she didn’t think Grace did either. But she was beguiled by the passion of her declaration.
‘Modern women,’ she said, and Grace echoed her fiercely.
‘Modern women.’
If they had had wine they would have drunk a toast. Instead Grace proffered her cigarette case again. Clio took one now, and inexpertly lit it with the gold briquet. She inhaled, and coughed out a puff of swirling smoke.
Jake and Julius walked out into Belgrave Square together. The June night air was sweet and cool and they lingered under the trees opposite the house.
‘Duty done,’ Julius said, with some satisfaction. ‘It was an adequate evening, I think, as such evenings go.’
It had even been more enjoyable than he had expected. Armstrong and the others had apparently met his mother’s requirements, and his friends in their turn seemed to have had plenty to eat and drink. They had gone off a little earlier in Zuckerman’s car. And for Julius himself, there had been the bonus of two dances with Grace. He put his hands in his pockets and looked up through the black fretwork of leaves over his head, into the sky where he could see a dusting of stars. He let himself remember the scent of her skin and hair, and the way that she reached up, putting her mouth close to his ear, so that he could hear what she said over the dance music. He found that he was smiling.
Jake was moody and restless. He had undone his white tie and the ends hung unevenly over his shirt studs. He wanted some more to drink, something stronger than hock or his uncle’s third-best claret. He had not wished to penetrate the card room where whisky, brandy and port were on offer to John Leominster’s friends.
‘Adequate is a compliment,’ he grumbled. ‘Did you ever see such insipid girls? Were you introduced to the lisping Miss Beauchamp? Complexion like orange crêpe-paper?’
‘I can’t remember,’ Julius said cheerfully. His Grace-induced good humour was unshakeable.
Jake put a heavy arm around his shoulder. ‘Well then, we’ve done our filial duty. Where shall we go to finish the evening off? Nightclub, d’you think?’
‘Not me,’ Julius answered without hesitation. ‘I’ve got work to do tomorrow.’
‘Come on.’
‘No thanks. I’m going to walk quietly home up Park Lane.’ Julius’s rented rooms were behind Marble Arch. It was late enough, he was thinking, for his neighbour to have been in bed for hours. There was no chance that she would be lying in wait for him as he came up the stairs.
Jake scowled at him. He was on the point of protesting when he saw the door of the house open and close behind Hugo and Farmiloe. Hugo walked stiffly now, on a wooden leg, with the aid of a stick.
‘All right, Julius. I shall have to fling myself on the mercy of Hugo and his brother officer. They will certainly have a plan of action.’
Julius knew that Jake was half drunk. ‘Don’t do anything reckless.’
Jake shouted, ‘If you would just do something reckless, for once. Something other than play the violin and moon after Grace.’
Julius glanced sharply across the road at Hugo. ‘That’s enough, Jake. Go on to your nightclub, if that’s what you enjoy. No doubt Hugo will be Culmington and keep an eye on you.’ He wrapped his white silk scarf around his neck and strolled away towards Park Lane.
Jake swore under his breath, and then called after him, ‘Wait, Julius, can’t you?’
But a taxi was noisily drawing up on Hugo’s side of the street, and Julius seemed not to hear him.
‘Want a cab, gents?’ the driver asked.
Hugo waved his arm. ‘Come on, Jake, come with us. We’re going somewhere lively.’
The inside of the cab smelt of gardenias and stale cigars. Farmiloe leant forward between Jake and Hugo. ‘Dalton’s, Leicester Square,’ he told the driver.
The nightclub was entirely underground. Past the huge doorman who took Hugo’s money and waved them inside without another word, there was a narrow flight of steps leading down to a long, stale-smelling corridor. Farmiloe tried to take Hugo’s arm to help him, but Hugo impatiently shook him off and climbed down sideways, like a crab. Through the double doors at the distant end of the corridor they came to an enormous low-ceilinged room packed with people. A band was pl
aying on a platform at the far side, and everyone was dancing.
Jake stared at the jostling crowd and at the naked powdered back of the woman closest to him, and then he smiled. Here, it seemed, was everything that had been missing at his sister’s dance. The thick air itself seemed to taste of sin.
They found a table against the wall, and Farmiloe beckoned to a waiter. ‘A bottle of brandy.’ There were bottles on every table, as far into the distance as they could see.
‘I’m very sorry, sir. It’s after ten o’clock.’ Ten o’clock was closing time, according to DORA. It was so much after ten that the three of them laughed uproariously. Farmiloe took out a five-pound note and smoothed it on the tabletop. A moment later the note was gone, and brandy and three glasses had materialized in its place.
Jake drank, and felt benign anticipation replacing his earlier restlessness. Hugo and Farmiloe were good fellows, and good company. They knew what they liked, and where to find it. This was where he wanted to be, listening to Farmiloe’s stories through the throb of the music, and watching Hugo lean back to squint past his cigar smoke at the women on the dance floor.
The bottle emptied itself and they called for another. The room was pounding with noise, making even their rudimentary conversation difficult to sustain. Jake had been watching a black-haired girl at the next table. Their eyes met, and a moment later she stood up, sinuous in a slip of satin dress, and came to lean over the back of his chair. Her mouth brushed his ear. ‘Won’t you ask me to dance?’
Jake rose to his feet. Hugo and Farmiloe didn’t appear to notice as he steered the girl away into the hot mass of dancers.
It was too noisy to talk, too crowded to perform more than a shuffle. Jake saw that the girl’s eyes were closed and she was dreamily smiling. Tentatively he drew her closer, and then closer so that she bent against him, pliant and slippery under the thin satin. When he looked down at her face he saw that her powder was creased with sweat and caked at the corners of her eyes, and that she was no longer young, not a girl at all, nor even pretty. He didn’t care in the least. He felt that he loved her, and everyone else in the nightclub. Jake bent his head, and kissed her lipsticked mouth. He heard her give a small, sweet sigh.
The woman looked up at him, a coquettish glance under her thin eyelashes. ‘Do you want to come home with me, dear?’ Jake had seen enough death. He had seen more men dead and dying than there were people packed into this room, but he had survived and he had brought home from the field hospital the discovery that he was not after all a coward, whatever the men who had fought more conventionally might think of him. He had seen the terrible things, and he had worked to alleviate some fraction of the suffering. Somehow he managed to contain the memory and the dreams of the war within himself, without letting anyone else know how they shadowed him. But it did seem that even now he could not escape from death. He had spent today hunched over a corpse, teasing out the strands of dead muscle tissue under their flaps of grey skin. He could smell decay as if it were embedded in his own nasal cavities, and now he wanted the scents of life. He wanted warm, living flesh under his hands and to taste the complicated flavours of skin and sweat.
Jake left Hugo and his friend at their table. He didn’t care if they wondered why he had disappeared, or if they were too far gone even to remember he had been there. He followed the black-haired woman out into Leicester Square, and into the warren of streets around Shaftesbury Avenue. They came to an upstairs room with a brass bedstead and a jug and basin on the table behind a painted screen.
There was a brief financial transaction. It didn’t worry Jake. He had enough money on him for her requirements, that was all that mattered. When she had folded it away the woman smiled at him.
‘How old are you, dear?’
He told her the truth. ‘Twenty-one. My name is Jake.’
She undid his waistcoat and took out his shirt studs. ‘Well then, Jake. Are you going to make me happy? A big, tall, beautiful boy like you?’
He said, ‘As happy as you will make me.’
He loved the deft, businesslike way she undressed him and herself, as if nakedness was normal and natural. He loved this room, with its bare walls and minimal furniture, the big bed. She settled back on it now, one arm behind her head, so that he could look at her. Her breasts rolled apart to expose the ridges of her breastbone.
She had heavy thighs, dimpled and very white. They were scented and powdery, reminding Jake of some childhood sweet. Turkish Delight, he thought. He remembered how the sweets came tightly packed in frills of paper, jelly ridges pressed close together to yield under his fingers. He lowered himself on top of her. Her skin seemed to give off little puffs of her sugary scent mixed with a salty, alluvial smell much closer to the earth.
She was very soft, soft everywhere, deliciously so. He wanted to bury himself in the rolls of melting flesh, deeper and deeper, until he silenced the endless commentary within his own head.
She spread her legs for him, exposing liver-coloured lips lapped with fur. Jake’s breath whistled in his throat. Without any preliminaries he pushed himself up inside her, as far as he could reach, amazed by the slippery heat. He forgot that he was supposed to be making her happy, but that did not seem to matter particularly. He forgot everything except his own scalding pleasure.
When he ejaculated a minute later he knew that what he had guessed was right, that none of his dreams or fantasies or masturbatory experiments could ever be as good as this reality. They gave only the faintest intimation of the heat and pressure and urgency of real love-making with a real woman.
The sensation was so intense he thought that his heart might stop, or that he would faint, or that the blood vessels within his skull would burst. For a moment he would have been happy to die there on the brass bedstead.
He didn’t die, or even faint. He lay with his face against the woman’s neck until his gasping breaths subsided. Then he opened his eyes. She seemed hardly to have moved; her head was still resting against her arm. There was a bluish patch of close-shaved stubble in the exposed armpit, where the salty smell was particularly strong.
Living and breathing, Jake thought. Full of life. Her various emanations mixed with his own seemed to affirm the vitality he longed for. He nuzzled his face into the cup of blue-white flesh.
The woman extracted her arm from beneath him and nudged him aside, not unkindly. She sat up and swung her legs over the side of the bed, sitting slumped for a moment with her back to him.
‘Can I see you again? Can I meet you?’ Jake asked, understanding that their present encounter was at an end.
‘If you like, dear. You know where to find me.’ She stood up and went behind the screen in the corner. He heard water splashing and the faint squeak of wet rubber.
‘I know,’ he said happily.
He parted with her at the street door downstairs. She was back in her satin dress, in a hurry to be off. He wanted to kiss her goodbye, like a lover, but the gesture seemed inappropriate. He let her go, with regret, and walked back through the empty streets to his student digs in Bloomsbury.
Quintus Prynne woke up late, with a headache that made him feel as if he had been clubbed. He opened his eyes and saw that he had fallen asleep on the divan of his studio, instead of in his bed at home. The litter of empty bottles and dirty glasses scattered between the paints and canvases and jars of brushes reminded him of some of the events of the night before.
He tried closing his eyes again in order to dodge back into sleep, but it was too late. He was awake, with a mouth that felt full of sand and a vague sense of some obligation waiting to be fulfilled. Groaning softly in sympathy with himself he crawled out of bed and picked his black and white tweed suit out of a heap on the floor. After a careful search he found his pocket watch, and examined its accusing face.
It was eleven-twenty in the morning, and he remembered what he was supposed to be doing. Calling on Lady Leominster in Belgrave Square, to discuss a portrait of her damned dough-faced daughte
rs, that was it. He staggered across the room, groaning still. At the sink he splashed cold water over his head and face and then, in the absence of a towel, rubbed himself dry with yesterday’s shirt.
The lack of a dry shirt, let alone a clean one, presented the next problem. The painter rummaged behind a curtain where he kept a small stock of old clothes in which to dress up his models. He found a grubby white cambric smock, and pulled his tweed trousers and coat on top of it. The addition of a piece of black silk foulard, extravagantly knotted around his neck, hid most of the smock front. He crammed his big black hat on his head and picked up a piece of stale bread and cheese left over from the night before for his breakfast.
Quintus Prynne was humming as he sauntered down Charlotte Street, his headache almost forgotten.
In the first-floor drawing room at Belgrave Square, Blanche was working at her embroidery and Eleanor had been reading the morning paper. She put it aside and looked over the top of her spectacles at the little gilt and porcelain clock on the mantelpiece.
‘This young man is very late, Blanche. I don’t believe he can be coming.’
‘Perhaps artists are less fettered by notions of punctuality than ordinary people? I think we should wait. Mary Twickenham was saying that Pilgrim is the most admired painter of the young generation, and that we will be lucky to get him. His designs for the ballet were the most beautiful, Eleanor, I wish you had been with us. I’m not even sure why he agreed to come this morning. Perhaps John’s name impressed him?’
Eleanor smiled. ‘Perhaps. But I think your Pilgrim is much more likely to have been impressed by the size of the fee.’