The Drowning People
Page 4
“I think everyone has a mind,” I said. “It’s a question of whether they choose to use it or not.”
“Well put.” She smiled at me and took a mouthful of cake. There was silence between us. “I suppose I owe you some sort of explanation for such a piece of arrogance,” she said quietly.
“Only if you care to give it.” Relief at my apparent exclusion from her criticism made me magnanimous.
“Oh I’m happy to explain myself. God knows I’ve had enough practice over the years.” She smiled at me. “You see, James, my problem is not the absence of a mind, though sometimes I wish it were. My problem …” She paused.
I waited.
“My problem …”
“Yes?”
Ella hesitated; and as she did so she seemed to think better of her intended confidence.
“My problem is that I talk too much,” she said at last. “I shouldn’t be telling you any of this. We hardly know each other. You’ve no need to listen to my ramblings. I’d better go and find Charlie.” She leaned down to pick up her bag.
“No, don’t,” I said quietly; and the unintended urgency in my tone made her stop. “Don’t go. Tell me.” There was a pause. “I’m interested.”
“Really?”
I nodded, touched by the unexpected vulnerability of the question.
“You can’t honestly be interested in the random ramblings of a girl you hardly know.”
“I am. Tell me.”
There was another pause.
“Well,” she said at last, looking out of the alcove at the streams of guests beyond it, “my problem is that I have a mind but that I choose to use it so bloody infrequently. I’m only ever goaded into self-control when events have long since overtaken me. That’s my trouble. I’m rude about the people out there because, I suppose, I want the comfort of knowing that I’m not alone in my world of fools.”
“You have at least one fellow citizen in me, if that’s any consolation.”
“You’re very kind.” She fumbled in her bag, the same one I had seen a week before. Again I heard the click-click of its clasp; again I watched her take out a packet of cigarettes; again I followed the first silver rings of smoke upwards, though this time they rose to a white ceiling and not to a blue sky streaked with rosy dawn. “My hope,” she continued, “is that the fault doesn’t lie so much with me as with that ocean out there.” She paused. “Society is like an ocean, don’t you think?” she went on, waving her cigarette towards the swirls of people beyond our alcove. “I find myself hoping against hope that it’s not really my fault I’ve washed up where I have. The currents of people’s expectations are strong. Who am I to try to swim against them?”
“You forget that I have no idea what your particular island looks like.”
“No you haven’t, have you?” Her tone was almost tender, I thought. She took another long drag on her cigarette. “And I won’t bore you with its geography. It’s not very interesting.”
I waited, not knowing what to say.
“But you do agree with me, don’t you?” she began again, almost anxiously reverting to her former theme, “that Society is like an ocean?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Look at all the people at this party, for instance. They’re all swimming dutifully with the current; dutifully and easily through their particular sea. They don’t need to plan their direction, they don’t need to give a thought to where they’re going. I wonder how many of them do. Give a thought to where they’re going, I mean. I wonder if any of them try to swim by themselves for long.” Another drag on the cigarette. “People move in schools, like fish. It’s safest that way.”
I listened, fascinated by the holistic insouciance with which Ella could express what I could not.
“But does it make them happy?” I asked.
“What?”
“This moving in schools.”
“After a fashion, I imagine. If they’ve never known anything else, they can’t want much more than what they have. Ignorance is bliss, sometimes. For some people.”
“And for you?” Secluded in the alcove, I was bold and only half surprised by my boldness.
“Unfortunately I possess just the wrong amount of knowledge: enough to know how little freedom I have; not quite enough to know what to do about it. I think that perhaps, just perhaps, I should’ve swum harder, because in the past I have intended to … swim for myself. It’s just so darn difficult. So tiring.” She stubbed out her cigarette with an air of finality.
“Well it’s not too late now, whatever you’ve done. How old are you? Twenty-two, twenty-three?”
“Twenty-three.”
“Well there you go. You have your entire life ahead of you.”
“Don’t say that. The prospect isn’t a particularly appealing one. And in any case …”
Her words were drowned by the arrival of Charlie Stanhope. He put his arm around Ella’s waist and apologized politely to me for snatching her away.
“Let’s dance,” he said to her. “Sorry to be such a bore,” he murmured vaguely in my direction.
To my surprise, I saw that Ella allowed herself to be led away without protest. But I stayed where I was, content in the afterglow of her frank green eyes. Languidly, leaning against the books, I watched her retreating form with Charlie Stanhope’s arm draped awkwardly over her shoulders. Farther and farther from me she swayed, but through the crowds my eyes remained on the back of her small blond head, fixed there, for I felt the moment ripe for a sign. And sure enough, when she reached the far end of the room I was rewarded for my pains with a brief backward glance. But far from wearing the smile I had expected, the face she turned to me was drawn and pale, and it woke me from my reverie and called to mind the glazed, wakeful eyes I had seen in the park and the shake of her hand as it held its Styrofoam cup.
Before I could move she had been led through the door and was lost in the crush of people who lined the passage beyond it. I heard the thump of the music once more and pictured the grace of her swaying body in the darkness; and as I did so I caught a faint sweet whiff of lemon soap, cigarette smoke, and expensive perfume.
I remember how I felt then; I remember that curious sensation of frustrated pleasure which made me so impatient for her return. Even from a distance of almost fifty years that memory has a certain power over me; even now, in my armchair by the window, the mere recollection of the speed, the grace, the infinite possibility of that moment, is enough to make my breath quicken with excitement. It was like the first kick of a powerful drug, inexpertly and incompletely administered; it broke the boundaries of previous sensation and made me determined for more.
Naturally enough, my immediate impulse was to follow her and to snatch her back from Charles; but I waited, wondering how to effect her recapture more subtly, anxious not to anger her. How was I to know that she would welcome my intrusion? I wondered whether she might feel that she had overstepped some sort of mark; and I thought delightedly as I did so that our conversation had hardly been the talk of strangers, though strangers we were. I wanted to tell her this, to share my excitement; but I lacked a pretext to seek her out and I knew that I must wait for her to find me.
It was then that I saw her bag—square, velvet, compact—lying on the floor at my feet. It had been left, forgotten by its owner; and slowly I leaned down to pick it up, hoping against hope that she had left it on purpose, my thoughts running to all kinds of wild implications. As I straightened with it in my hand I put it quickly, almost furtively, on the shelf by my side in case anyone else should see and rescue it. Deliberately I waited—five minutes, ten, fifteen—relishing the intrigue of it. Then I reached for my prize, and, threading my way through the thinning throng, I went to find her.
A quick tour of the room I was in convinced me that she was not in it. Nor was she in the passage. Nor in the room set aside for dancing, where the DJ and his turntables looked strangely incongruous by the Adam fireplace. I waited for a while outside the most obvi
ously located girls’ loo, thinking that she might emerge from it; but instead I saw Camilla come out, rubbing her nose with self-conscious vigor and smiling. Our eyes met.
“God darling, I haven’t really,” she whispered in my ear, deftly slipping her arm through mine. “But pretense at least is de rigueur nowadays.” And it amused me to see that Camilla’s attitude to cocaine, as to everything else, was acutely proper in its social observance.
My hostess guided me back into the room from which I had come and I saw Charles Stanhope dancing, rather badly, alone in the corner. Quickly I moved on, for I had no wish for him to join me in my search. And it was then, as I heard Camilla tell someone how hysterical something was, that the thought occurred to me that Ella might have left without saying good-bye; and a momentary pang hit me in the throat. Steadying myself, I whispered silently that she couldn’t have gone; that she must be here. And I went again into the passage, now emptying, and checked once more, wading through the first flurries of good-byes and thanks. She was nowhere to be seen. With irrational tears pricking my eyes I looked towards the staircase and began to climb it, for if she had left without saying good-bye, if all my excitement had been founded on nothing, if that was how she spoke to all the men she knew, I wanted a small dark space in which to be alone: Camilla Boardman was not someone to be faced in any but the most expansive of moods. So I climbed the wide slope of the Boardman stairs, up to a dark landing and up again, past another landing and another, the broad sweep of the staircase getting narrower with each flight. By now my ascent was slow, cautious, in a dark so black that I had stood on Ella’s hand before I even noticed she was there. She was sitting on a step, her back to the banister, and her cry was sharp and her alarm real. Apparently she had neither seen nor heard me.
“Who is it?” She spoke shrilly, aware for the first time, perhaps, how it might look to be discovered, so high above the party, by one of the Boardman guests.
“Just me,” I whispered.
“You? James? What on earth are you doing here?”
“I could ask you the same question.”
“You could, but you won’t. You’ll wait for me to tell you, all bound up in that English reserve of yours. But I won’t.” This last was almost petulant. “I don’t see what business you have following me around this Godforsaken party. It’s enough having to deal with Charlie….”
I cut her off by pressing her bag into her hand. “I came to find you and give you this. You left it by the bookcase.”
There was a pause. I heard a click and the rummaging of fingers; then a flame flared up and cast an orange glow briefly over us as the cigarette was lit. I saw, in the short life of its glare, that Ella had been crying; and she saw that I had seen.
“Girls,” she said as the flame went out, by way of explanation. “Don’t take any notice. We all enjoy a few tears occasionally. Me more than most.” There was a pause, as I settled myself two steps below her, my back to the wall. When our eyes grew accustomed to the dark I wanted to be facing her. “I’m sorry for snapping at you back then,” she said at last. “I suppose this is one of those nights. Thank you for bringing this.” She rattled the contents of her bag. “Don’t take any notice of me.”
“That’s the second time you’ve said that,” I said quietly.
“Then you’d be doubly well advised to pay attention.” She took a long drag on her cigarette but was careful to blow the smoke away from me. “I tend to mean what I say.”
“I can imagine.”
There was another pause.
“Why are you doing this?”
“What?”
“Why are you still here? Why haven’t you gone back downstairs? Isn’t it obvious I want to be alone?” Another pause. “Thank you again for bringing the bag. In my very weak way I need cigarettes now more than a world of conversation.”
“So you would have me rejoin the fish?” I felt a thrill, as of fingers touching, in my appropriation of her terms.
She leaned towards me and I could make out the dim line of her nose in the darkness. “No,” she said in a different tone, “I wouldn’t have you rejoin the fish. I’m not sure that a life of swimming with the current would altogether suit you.”
I felt a glow of pride. There was silence again. “I agreed with what you said, incidentally,” I ventured at last.
“With what? My little monograph on oceans and currents?”
“Yes.”
“I’m apt to let my metaphors run away with me a little. Particularly when I’m trying to explain my actions to myself. It was kind of you to have listened.”
“We share many views.”
“Do we?”
“Yes.” I waited, sensing that something more was required of me. “I’ve spent the whole evening despising myself for being so like all the other fish,” I said at last.
“Oh, I don’t think you are, really.”
“I hope I’m not. But I dress like them; I speak like them; perhaps I even think like them. My convictions aren’t very strong or well formed, at least not by comparison with yours.”
“A fat lot of good my convictions are doing me now,” she said dryly. And through the darkness I could sense that she was smiling. “The thing is, James, you just have to accept a certain amount of social pressure. It’s part of what it means to be human, I guess; we’re social animals, after all. The danger comes when you feel yourself giving way to that pressure, when you feel it pulling you under. Control over your own life should rest with you, but in practice it doesn’t. We allow our views on religion, gender, class, sexuality, politics, anything that’s important, to be dictated to us by others, by the particular school we happen to swim with. You think like your friends do; like your family does; like your class or your background tells you to. How many people do you know who act outside the boundaries of their own little set, their own particular group? Very few, I think. And even fewer in the school we happen to be in.”
“Which school is that?” I asked, fascinated, not wishing to disrupt the smooth flow of her words.
“You have to ask me? After spending an evening with those people downstairs, talking inanely about Biarritz and the Berkeley Dress Show, you have to ask me?” She was indignant now. “Money should give you liberty; education should free you. But they don’t. Privilege is a chain which binds us to the world of our great grandparents in a way in which other fish in other schools aren’t bound. You’ve no idea,” she finished wryly, “how high family expectations run if an ancestress happened to seduce Charles II and get a title out of it for her disgruntled husband.”
“Did one of yours?”
“Oh yes. You may think I’m American because I sound it. But that’s education. I’m English to the core. Family tradition is so tangled up with who I really am that sometimes I wonder how much of me is real. How much of me can I really claim as my own?” She took a last draw on her cigarette. “Sometimes I think that most of my psyche belongs to the generations who have gone before me. They’re the ones who really control my life.”
She finished this speech with her cigarette, and I heard the rustle of cardboard as she put the butt in an empty box.
“Filthy habit,” I remarked.
“Isn’t it?”
We sat in silence.
“Do you think me very odd, James?” she said at last.
“I think you remarkable.”
“Thank you.”
I almost felt for her hand; but I hesitated too long and the moment passed.
“What does your island look like?”
“My island?”
“The one the tide’s washed you up on.”
“Oh one of my metaphors again. I see what you’re talking about.”
“Then tell me what it looks like. So far you’ve only said it’s uninteresting, though it hardly seems so.”
There was a pause. I could now see the faint outline of Ella’s nose and jaw opposite me. When she opened her mouth to speak I saw a tiny flash of white teeth.
“Go on.”
“I’ve allowed events to overtake me, I suppose. And I don’t know what to do about it.” She waited, lulled by the darkness, and then moved abruptly. “I should be going down now,” she said quietly and I heard the rustle of her dress as she got up to leave.
“Aren’t you going to tell me what you’ve done?”
“If you really want to know, you haven’t got long to wait.” And I heard the creak of the banister as she felt for it and began her slow descent of the narrow staircase.
I didn’t hold her back; I didn’t think it right to do so. Instead I sat in the dark, completely still, listening to her cautious retreating footsteps, smelling the smoke from her cigarette, giving her time. I heard the door of a bathroom two flights down open and close and open again after a few moments; and I imagined her, radiant once more, walking down the final broad sweep of the staircase into the Boardmans’ hall, tranquil above the chaos of dancing and farewells.
I myself was not tranquil. The incomplete feeling of curiosity almost but not quite satisfied burned in me. But I waited, as I had waited earlier in the alcove; I waited until I was certain that she had had time to lose herself in the crush of guests and then I got up and made my own way gingerly downwards. Ella had told me that I didn’t have long to wait, that I would find out soon enough; and I was content with that, content and interested in the precise way she would choose to tell me.
Remembering it now, I see myself on some kind of vantage point, presumably the stairs. In front of me is a narrow hall, black and white marble, highly polished. Through a set of double doors, jammed open, I can see the drawing room and the groups of tired, laughing people ranged on its chairs, drinking the last of the champagne cocktails. It is past two. The younger sisters have disappeared with their friends to the basement, where their own slumber party is presumably in progress. The door to the dancing room is closed, but the music is clearly audible nevertheless—loud, frenetic, insistent. It dies suddenly and I hear a raised voice I recognize, cheerful, excited, asking everyone if they wouldn’t mind moving into the drawing room, for it has an important announcement to make. The closed doors open soon after this and I watch a stream of people, flushed with exertion, flood the hall and then the drawing room. Among them I see Ella, with Charlie Stanhope still in attendance. Excited ripples of exclamation spread outwards from Camilla Boardman, and I see her tapping her nose with her finger in a gesture of complicity. She is beaming; the party is going fabulously; it is past two and almost nobody who matters has left. She is delighted by the forthcoming announcement: delighted because she has been told all it is to contain in advance. She looks forward tomorrow to telling everyone that she could barely control herself last night but that she knows when a secret is a secret. I read all these thoughts clearly in her unwrinkled brow and in the victorious gleam of her brown eyes. I see the girl with the villa in Biarritz smiling vacantly, a little drunk, her champagne cocktail in one hand, the other anxiously touching the back of her hair to make sure that a vital clip is still in place. She sees someone she knows, forgets the hair, and throws an arm around him. It is only when I hear the same loud, excited voice that spoke before asking everyone for a moment’s attention that I realize that it belongs to Charlie Stanhope. It surprises me momentarily that he should have something to say, but then I remember that his engagement has not yet been announced and instead of going into the drawing room I stay where I am on the stairs in order to get a good view of the proceedings. I scan the women near him as I hear him tell the crowd that as a collection of his greatest friends he wants it to be the first to share his happy news.