‘Don’t take Tom’s so-called troubles too seriously,’ he said, smiling.
‘Oh, dear me,’ Penny said, ‘I wasn’t. I just thought——’
‘A pity you let him come this evening.’
She made a gesture of indifference. ‘It’s just one of those things, isn’t it? He can’t make a scene.’
‘He’d better not, by God.’
Penelope and the suitors, he thought, looking down the table. It was an old joke, one he was not allowed to make any more. But she looked so pretty in her pale green dress — tight little bodice, no sleeves, full skirt — at the head of a table as handsomely set as anything you might see in Vogue, that he wished he could shove the whole scene up the noses of a few people who had written him off as of no importance when he first came to London. I may have got nowhere as a writer, he thought, but by God I’ve done better than any of them.
Penny very seldom invited a woman. That made seating easy. You could judge the importance at any given moment of her guests by noting who was on her right and left. Tonight she had Arbor on her left and Tony Young on her right.
Dear old Arbor — how old? sixty? — with his delicate pussy-soft features and neatly supercilious smile. It struck Lambert that he was growing more and more womanly in appearance. Even as a writer he had a great many feminine qualities: he was spiteful and sensitive and so good that you wondered why he was not better. And you had to be as careful with him as with a fractious elderly woman, he was on the lookout for slights — he never forgave one, real or imagined — but to those in favour with him he was as affectionate as a woman, even coquettishly so. At the moment he was coquetting across Penny with Tony Young, who paid scant attention to his fluttering smiles. Too pleased with himself, thought Lambert — and why not? Young was far and away the most brilliant of Penny’s moderns, and the one from whom she expected most. He was shrewd, too, with a sound head for business and a splendid sense of timing: the sour critic who had called him the Dior among young novelists was not so far out: he kept his handsome nose in the wind.
The other three at the table — there were never more than five guests on any Thursday — were less of a catch. Both Corrys were fond of young Beasley, and no one could have worked more faithfully for him than Penny did, but — she had not admitted it yet — the truth was he hadn’t Tony Young’s brilliance. Watching his peevish intelligent face, Lambert thought: He knows it and is chewing on his jealousy. But he knows better, too, than to misbehave himself here. A dear boy really…. And Jack Dinham, dear good dull Dinham, gross sagging hunk of flesh, prematurely old-middleaged, decent, wise, nothing much in himself — but as editor of the London Letter extremely useful. The only blot was Elder. Whenever Lambert glanced at him across the table, at his lined unhealthy cheeks and untidy clothes, he felt a natural impatience. Why come out if you can’t enjoy yourself? He was turning over with his fork the quite admirable saddle of veal Orloff on his plate, scarcely tasting it, in a way that infuriated Lambert. Swallowing his annoyance, he said smilingly,
‘Don’t pick at your food, Tom: I’m sure you need it.’
Elder gave him a very strange glance, almost of dislike — certainly unfriendly. Really, if he can’t take a joke, thought Lambert. He felt less annoyed than satisfied, his mind at rest: a little more of Elder’s sullenness and he would feel amply justified in telling Penny not to ask him again. He thought drily: The fellow’s cutting his own throat.
The very slight awkwardness caused by Elder’s silence was covered by Arbor’s charming almost wheedling voice. ‘I was in Rutley House today, looking at the Picassos. A splendid show, and Mott’s foreword to the catalogue is a little masterpiece.’ He smiled. ‘I say Mott’s, but I’ve no doubt it was you who wrote it.’
Penny said eagerly, ‘Of course he did, he does everything, everything — and lets the credit go to dear Gregory. It makes me furious.’
‘Penny, that’s very indiscreet of you,’ Lambert said. ‘You ought to know better than to give away our little secrets.’ He looked round the table, warmed by the smiling complicity on every face except Elder’s. ‘I hope our friends will hold their tongues.’
‘But why shouldn’t they know the truth?’ Penny said, pouting.
‘Yes, why not indeed?’ Arbor smiled finely. ‘You know, my dear Lambert, you should write more — and under your own name.’
Lambert’s three youthful novels stirred a little in their graves, but he laughed and said, ‘I’ve no time for writing, and if I had I’d know better than to compete with our young spadassins.’ He winked at Tony Young. ‘When’s your new book out? Any minute, I suppose?’
Young’s fine aquiline face — like an actor’s, it was never dull or off guard — responded with a look of modest confusion. Penny said gaily, ‘In three weeks. And I’m giving a party for the launching — not here, we haven’t room here for all the people we simply must ask. At Claridge’s.’ She glanced at Jack Dinham. ‘You are, aren’t you, seeing that the book gets into the right hands?… No, no, Tony my dear child, don’t protest. Let’s face it, a good book doesn’t push itself. There’s too much competition now — what with television and every Tom, Dick, and Doris trying to get on, salesmanship is as necessary to writers as to soap-makers. It’s simply not enough to write well, there’s a technique of selling yourself, and a writer who isn’t willing to learn it deserves to fail as much as a manufacturer who doesn’t bother to advertise his good soap. Quite as much. Aren’t I right, Dinham?’
Dinham’s body heaved sluggishly. ‘More or less,’ he murmured.
‘No, no, I’m absolutely right,’ Penny said, with energy. ‘Absolutely and definitely. You do agree with me. You must.’
‘The trouble is to strike a line,’ said Dinham. ‘I mean — your soap-seller can use the same slogan over and over again, until it becomes axiomatic that Bland’s soap is as pure and smooth as a baby’s bottom, and everyone knows it. But a writer——’
‘But that’s exactly what I mean,’ cried Penny. ‘We must find the slogan. And I know exactly the right one for Tony. I knew it as soon as I began to read the proofs of this new book, I said: Proust! Didn’t I, Lambert?’
‘You did, my dear,’ her husband said.
‘This is our very own Proust, I said. And there you have it, your line. The English Proust.’ She smiled radiantly at Dinham. ‘Now, admit that I’m sensible.’
‘It’s clever, but — with all respect to Young — aren’t you going a bit far?’
Penny struck her hands together. ‘My dear boy, it’s the safest line imaginable. Nobody, but nobody — or at the worst, nobody who will ever be heard from — reads Proust now. I do know what I’m talking about, you know.’
Dinham looked at her with quizzical admiration. ‘I’m sure you do. You’re horribly clever.’ He wagged his plump hand in salute. ‘I’ll start it off in my own article on Tony.’
Good, Lambert thought warmly. He’s a good loyal chap, no meanness; you can count on him.
Elder lifted his twitching face. ‘This way, moddum. You want the best Proust. We have it.’
Before anyone else could deal with him, Penny jumped down his throat. ‘Now, what do you mean by that, Tom?’
Her anger made him wince slightly, but he said, ‘I mean that if the only writers we hand on to the future are those cunning enough to push themselves, the future will get a queer idea of us. It wasn’t always like that.’
‘You’re being silly,’ Penny said. ‘If the soap isn’t good, you can’t sell it.’
‘You mean that if you don’t sell it, it’s bad?’
Arbor drew one of his fine pointed nails across poor clumsy blundering Elder. ‘One can always console oneself with the thought of one’s unrecognised genius, my dear fellow.’
Her husband turned to Penny. ‘What is it you always say, my dear, about that?’
She took her cue, smiling at him. ‘What I say is that nobody is so arrogant as a failed genius.’
Elder had turned a greyish
red. In a low voice he said, ‘I didn’t say that self-advertisers are not or can’t be also good writers. All I said was that no one gets a hand now but the most adroit and pushing, and it’s… it’s scandalous.’
‘Poor Tom,’ Penny mocked him prettily. ‘Poor Tom’s a-cold, eh?’
Elder — very foolish of him, thought Lambert — lost his temper. ‘What you’re doing for our friend Young, and advising us all to do for ourselves, is — if you’ll forgive me, Penny — indecently cheap——’
He was interrupted by Beasley’s harsh whinnying laugh. ‘What’s your idea of cheapness? Making enough money to pay your bills?’
Elder said furiously, ‘Don’t speak to me like that, you conceited little sod.’
Lambert signed to the man they got in to wait on Thursdays to fill Elder’s empty glass. They’ve baited the poor fellow enough, he thought. The one person who had said nothing was Tony Young himself. Glancing at him, Lambert saw that he was watching Elder intently, with a slight curiously feline smile at the corners of his supple mouth. For some reason, this smile made him briefly sorry for Elder. Not, he thought swiftly, that it does Tom any harm to be teased. On the contrary. It’ll do him good, take him out of himself, y’know. The fact is he takes himself a sight too seriously: after all, if he can’t swallow a few jokes pleasantly he’s no damn good. And if he doesn’t like it he has his remedy. He needn’t bring himself and his thin skin and conceit here again…. He spoke in a friendly soothing voice,
‘As my wife always says, you’ve got to live. Who’ll take a little more veal? No one? You, Tom?’
‘Thanks, no,’ Elder muttered. He gave Beasley a hangdog look. ‘I’m sorry, Frank, I didn’t mean that.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Beasley said drily. Puckering his little face so that he looked like a clever envious ape, he added, ‘We should all benefit by the treatment Young is going to get.’
‘My dear boy,’ Penny said to him, ’if you’ll write half as good a book — indeed, if you’ll kindly finish the masterpiece you’ve been mulling over for the past three years, we’ll all do our best for you.’
Young laughed. ‘Three years?’ he said gaily. ‘Long enough to make it deliciously unreadable.’
Penny looked at him with a frown. He had broken one of the unwritten rules of her Thursdays. No guest, unless she had given the signal for it by herself attacking the victim, was allowed to criticise another. To punish him, she said,
‘My good Tony, your own book isn’t flawless. Your young woman is terrible. What does a clever young man know about women? Only what he hears from rather far down in his body. If you’d let me read it in manuscript I’d have saved you from one or two really ludicrous mistakes.’
‘She’s right,’ her husband said genially, ’you won’t find anyone in our circle who knows so much about women as Penny. I can tell you she’s merciless.’
A small fine hand raised, Arbor said, ‘Devilish, I’d call her! She’s so acute she frightens poor weak me. I’m sure she’s quite right about your women, my poor Tony.’
‘Why not wait,’ said Young petulantly, ’until you’ve read the book?’
‘Fair enough,’ Lambert said. ‘You’ve got us there. As my wife always says, the proof of the pudding is in the eating.’
Arbor had listened to him with his head on one side, on his lips that curious smile of his, at once sweet and condescending, so that it was impossible to guess whether he were a kind man whose mouth fell into a supercilious curve in spite of him, or a man so conscious of his superiority that he could afford to be kind to duller souls. ‘Something I’ve always wanted to ask you, my dear Lambert. How do you get on with Mott? Does he, I mean, always sit perched on his Church and State hobby-horse, or is he, when you’re seeing him every day, a normal human being — if there is such a thing?’
Penny gave her husband no chance to answer. With a contemptuous smile she said,
‘Surely you don’t imagine that Gregory Mott can afford to behave like a human being! After he has taken such trouble to make himself over as a gentleman jockey among writers! It’s all nonsense, of course; he’s no more an aristocrat than you or me, he’s bogus, like those inflated meretricious books of his. It’s no use frowning at me, Lambert. They are meretricious. How could they be anything else when you think of the people he sees, all that crowd of snobs and frivolous old women. I don’t suppose he ever meets anyone like us, or would know what to say to one of us if he did. He’s extinct and doesn’t know it!’
Arbor clapped his hands. ‘Bravo! Dear me, I hope I never offend you, you’d gobble me up before I could lift a paw. Do you — ’ his smile sharpened — ‘condemn all aristocrats, or only those who dare to write?’
Lambert remembered at this moment that Arbor himself had pretensions to coming of a good family: his mother was something or other, and he spoke now and then of ’my cousin who is in the Embassy in Rome’ and ‘my aunt who used to be lady-in-waiting, you know’. His wife’s outburst embarrassed him for other reasons. The dear girl was wrong and entirely unfair to Gregory, and she put him in the awkward position of having to defend him on weak grounds: he did not really care for Gregory’s writing, he found it too elaborate, too mannered. Smiling at her, he said,
‘I’m so used to him, y’know, that I don’t see any of these faults you find in him. He’s simple enough with me…. And don’t forget, my girl, when you first knew him, you fell for him as flat as other women.’
‘That was a long time ago,’ Penny said. ‘More than twenty years. He’s deteriorated.’
‘Ah, you meet him socially, of course, you and Lambert,’ said Arbor.
Penny made a shocked face. ‘Not I! My husband has to go to their dinner-parties, of course, but I’ve refused so many times that dear Beatrice has ceased to invite me. Thank God. I have to attend official parties, of course, at Rutley House, but I don’t drag myself to see them in their own house any longer. ‘I’m sorry if it makes difficulties for Lambert, but there really are some things it offends one too much to have to sink to.’
‘I don’t blame you,’ said Beasley very gravely. ‘Life is too short to waste any of it on bores.’
Arbor made one of his light girlish gestures. ‘Neither you nor I, my friend,’ he said maliciously, ’is likely to be invited to bore ourselves at one of Beatrice Mott’s dinner-parties. Has she ever asked you to one?’
Young, who had been sulking for the last five minutes, went off into one of his fits of laughter, charming, the gayest sound in the world. ‘Why are you all so hard on the Motts and their friends? After all, they’re civilised, they have manners and traditions. Surely, that’s worth something in a world where no one has any manners, public or private, and we’re all being flattened to a level of cheap promiscuity and violence? These fragments I have shored against my ruin, what?’
Beasley spluttered with disgust. ‘Must you quote T. S. Eliot? For pity’s sake. I shall vomit.’
‘You’re proving my point,’ Young said, smiling. ‘It’s becoming indecent to know the classics.’
‘You’ll be quoting Mott himself next!’
‘Not in this house,’ Penny said with energy, ’not if he wants me to take him seriously.’
This jerk at the reins did not have the curbing effect she expected. Still smiling, Young said, ‘What I like about Gregory Mott is that he makes no pretence of being on the side of the poor dear proletariat, damn them, no kowtowing to equality and all that dreary nonsense.’
Turning his heavy face towards Young, Elder said, ‘You’ve no time to spare for anything but yourself and your ambitions, is that it?’
Young ignored him. ‘My dear pretty Penny,’ he said, with affectionate impudence, ’do you consider that there is no difference between you and, let’s say, your housemaid?’
He was not allowed to ride off so lightly. Looking him in the face, Penny said, ‘If we’re going to talk of differences, I’d rather you compared me and Beatrice Mott. I’m going to ask you a straight questio
n, and I expect an answer. Is Gregory Mott a fake, a humbug, or is he not? What do you say?’
Young threw his head back, laughed, and without hesitation said, ‘Oh, of course he is.’
Something in his laugh or his manner struck Lambert as cynical. He thought: He doesn’t mean it. For the first time since he had known Young he found a trace of hard-heartedness, even cruelty, in his long upper lip and fine deep-set asymmetrical eyes. He wished angrily that his wife would not give away her jealousy of the Motts so openly. In the bosom of the family it did no harm, it even touched him by its anxious loyalty, but in front of sharp-witted friends…. He gave her a warning look and said,
‘A humbug? Nonsense. A man doesn’t get where Gregory is by humbugging people.’ Almost without meaning to, he went on, ‘He’s cleverer than a cartload of monkeys.’
A smile ran round the table, as though they thought he had made a joke, and his wife said gaily,
‘Even if you’re going to be perverse enough to admire him, you won’t deny that that house of theirs is in the most appalling taste. You can’t.’
‘My dear, is it really?’ asked Arbor.
‘Frightful. It has to be seen to be believed. Once, before I shook myself free of them, I was taken up to Beatrice’s bedroom and, I tell you, you never saw anything like the collection of ugly Victorian junk, rubbish I wouldn’t give house-room to — frilly knickers round the chairs, ornaments, and photographs in silver frames everywhere, hundreds and hundreds of them on all the tables, the whole room reeking of cosiness, yes, reeking, and Beatrice embedded in it like a large stuffed bird, a cockatoo.’
They all laughed — even Tom Elder. ‘Penny, you’re being naughty,’ her husband said admiringly. ‘The other rooms in the house aren’t like that, they’re full of valuable pieces of furniture, and paintings. Worth a large fortune.’
The Road from the Monument Page 9