‘Whose money is it, then?’ asked Young. ‘Hers or his?’
‘Oh, partly hers. But he’s made a great deal — and he draws a large salary from the Institute.’
Its inquisitive smile made Young’s alert handsome face curiously unpleasant. ‘Who was she? I mean, before she married.’
‘The daughter of some fifth baron or other,’ Lambert said. ‘Ellerton, I think. I’m not up in these things, y’know. Why?’
Young moved his fingers airily. ‘No reason.’
‘If futilities of that sort interest you, my dear Tony, you can look her up in Debrett,’ Penny said coldly. ‘Let’s move into the drawing-room, shall we?’
Elder’s attempts to corner him in the other room were so clumsy that Lambert evaded them easily. He felt that he had every right to be exasperated. He resented — on Penny’s behalf — the fellow’s turning one of her parties into a begging errand. Really abominable manners. If he wanted to talk business, why didn’t he come to the office instead of taking advantage of their friendship with him to come scrounging and pestering here? What’s more, he thought, tomorrow he’ll regret it and feel ashamed of himself. It’s a kindness to save him from his own clumsiness and stupidity…. When finally Elder succeeded in pinning him against a window with a hurried, ‘I want to talk to you a minute,’ he tried to rally the other out of his tiresome mood.
‘Is it business?’ he asked kindly. ‘Come and see me at the Institute. Give me a ring tomorrow and come in one day this week.’
‘If you’d listen a minute now,’ Elder said in a lowered voice. ‘It’s fairly urgent. It won’t take a minute.’
‘Oh, come, come, nothing is so serious as that,’ Lambert said, smiling at him. ‘Have some more brandy.’
‘The fact is, Lambert, I want a job. I must have a job. I don’t know whether Penny has said anything to you, but my girl Janey has come home, she’s not well, and there are the children and…’
He was well away now. Lambert couldn’t silence him: he listened to the thick rather harsh voice with half an ear, knowing already what Elder wanted to tell him, and vexed with him for spouting it all now. He noticed, with distaste, the line of grease round Elder’s collar. He could have paid us the compliment of changing his shirt to come here, he thought. Obviously, too, he’s making far too much of his difficulties. It doesn’t do the silly fellow any good.
‘Listen, Tom,’ he said calmly, ’you don’t want a job, you want money——’
‘But that’s why——’
‘Now, now, just a minute. You’re a writer, a good writer — that’s half your trouble, you’ve refused to turn your brains to proper use. For years you’ve sat on your fanny like a monk — without even the excuse of religion. It’s time you got down to living in the real world. Why don’t you start to write for the radio? They’re crying aloud for more writers.’
The exaggerated despair in Elder’s glance irritated him afresh. ‘I’m too old to learn new tricks.’
‘Oh, nonsense,’ Lambert said lightly.
‘In any case, I need money now. At once. And I’m — ’ his short swollen lips trembled in a very disagreeable way — ‘tired of scrambling from one ten guineas to the next, never sure that I can pay next week’s bills. What I want is a salary — even a small one. If —’ he paused and gave Lambert another of those ludicrous glances — ‘you hear of anything I could do, for God’s sake let me know. Anything — I’ll take anything.’
Lambert made another attempt to rally him. ‘Come now. Tom, things aren’t as bad as that with you.’
‘I wondered,’ Elder said, with an effort, ‘if the Institute…’
For less than a minute Lambert saw himself approaching Gregory with this shabby object in his hand. He thought: No, I can’t do it…. Even if he had not disapproved as strongly as he did of using personal connections to help his less powerful friends, he couldn’t risk taking a possibly incompetent fellow into Rutley, it would damage him too much. This was all quite apart from his conviction that Elder was exaggerating his need, and he detested exaggeration as much as he contemned whining in public. Would anyone, he thought, have come to my help if I’d been reckless enough to try to exist on what I could make by writing?… Elder had made his bed and was afraid to lie on it. He had had all the fun, and the honour and glory, of living for his writing, and now in a panic he was squealing to be given as well the security he must have disdained when he was a young man. Wants it without paying for it, Lambert thought bitterly. Why the devil should I take trouble for him? Does it for one moment occur to him that I’ve earned, yes, earned my security? Sacrificed to it the writer I might have been if… Pulling himself up, he thought quietly: It would be no kindness to Tom to turn him, at his age, into a clerk. In a voice that he hoped would steady the querulous fellow, he said,
‘No, we’ve nothing. We might, some time, need someone, but if you take my advice, my dear Tom, you’ll stick to your last. It’s the sensible thing to do.’ He had an impulse of something not quite liking, and said kindly, ‘You’ll feel better about things in the morning, after a night’s sleep, y’know. We all do. I suppose you’re writing something now? Well, get on with it, my boy. It will probably turn out to be the best thing you’ve done. You’ll see!’
Elder said nothing for a moment. Then turning away, he mumbled, ‘Forgive me for bothering you about it.’
‘No bother at all, my dear chap — don’t speak of it.’ Lambert clapped him on the shoulder. ‘I’ll keep my ears open, and if I hear of anything… As for bothering me, don’t give it a second thought. I shan’t, I promise you.’
After all their guests had gone, he stayed downstairs a short time, collecting glasses and seeing that nothing had been spilled on a table that might damage the polished surface. When he went upstairs, his wife was half undressed, and spreading cold cream over her face. Yawning, she asked,
‘Was it a success, d’you think?’
‘Of course. Why in heaven’s name wouldn’t it be? Good food, plenty to drink — what more can they want? You were very good tonight, my darling — in splendid form. A little rough on old Gregory, too rough for my taste. After all, y’know, he’s a great man, and I admire him.’
‘Oh, Gregory!’ She examined herself in the glass. ‘You bore me with your precious Gregory. What you don’t realise is that he’s only important as Director of Rutley — and if it weren’t for you he wouldn’t keep even that position. You do the work…. You don’t expect me to take him seriously as a writer, do you?’
‘Something like a million people do,’ Lambert said, smiling.
She swung round, fingers in a jar of face cream. ‘Let’s talk of something serious. This party I want to give for Tony — it’s very important. For us, for the Thursdays. It puts a sort of seal on them, you know; it will be a triumph for us, as well as for dear Tony.’
‘It’s going to cost a deal of money,’ her husband said. ‘Are you certain he’s worth it?’
Penny looked at him in bewilderment, half angry. ‘What do you mean?’
He hesitated. In the depths of his prudent heart he felt a certain jealousy of the trouble she took for her flock, even though he shared her ambition and admired the ferocious energy with which she marched and manœuvred and worked for it. ‘Isn’t it possible, if he makes a terrific success of himself, that Master Tony will begin to think he’s too grand for us?’
‘Tony?’ she cried. ‘After all we’ve done for him? My dear, you must be mad. He’s devoted to both of us. I’m as sure of his loyalty as I am of my own.’
She had so much sound sense that Lambert decided she was almost certainly right about the young man. He felt remorse for having tried to cloud her happiness. ‘I’m sorry, my dear. You’re right — you’re always right.’
‘Tomorrow we’ll make a list of people who must be invited,’ she said, frowning. ‘And you know, I think we may have to drop one or two people from the Thursdays now. We can’t afford to feed bores.’
‘You
mean Elder?’
‘Oh, Elder, yes — after tonight’s display. But I was really thinking of Frank Beasley. If he’s going to be tiresomely jealous, as he was this evening, he’ll ruin the friendly tolerant atmosphere I try to keep. I won’t have sulks. I’ll give him another chance but, let’s face it, he isn’t important enough to be forgiven bad manners.’
‘You won’t drop old Dinham, will you?’
‘Our dear faithful Jack? No, of course not. He’s much too useful and serviable, dull as he is…. Tell me, did Elder speak to you about a job? I saw him buttonhole you after dinner.’
‘Yes. And I was quite right about him, he’s making a ridiculous fuss. The whole thing is pumped-up. He’d be impossible in any job, and what’s more he doesn’t need one. No need to worry yourself about him, my dear. He’s well enough off, nothing seriously wrong with him at all.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Dead sure. It was obvious, as soon as I began to talk to him, that his misfortunes are entirely imaginary.’
‘Well, I’m very glad——’
Lambert interrupted her. ‘Hush. Do you hear Timothy?’
Hurrying to the door, he opened it and listened. Yes, it was the boy. He slept with his door ajar, so that he could call out if he needed either of them. He was calling now, not as though he were frightened, repeating in a sing-song voice,
‘Daddy, daddy, I want you.’
His father ran along the corridor. ‘I’m coming, I’m coming.’
Timothy was sitting up in bed, watching the door. ‘Lie down, my baby,’ Lambert said gently, ’you’ll catch cold.’ He was not a baby any longer, he was nine, but he was very small for his age, and alarmingly frail: in bed especially, he terrified Lambert by his lightness and thinness; he seemed little bigger or heavier than one of his father’s arms.
‘You didn’t come in to say goodnight to me,’ he said.
‘Your mother said you were asleep.’
‘Well, I wasn’t. I heard you come in.’
Lambert was overwhelmed by regret, as though something irreparable had happened. And so it had, of course: never, he could never arrange that the boy had not waited vainly through a whole evening for his father to come to him: Lambert imagined him lying awake, waiting, listening. ‘Did you call?’
‘Yes.’
‘I didn’t hear you.’
‘I called twice.’
Stroking the fine soft hair, Lambert said, ‘Your mother was sure you were asleep. I didn’t want to wake you.’
‘Women don’t always know everything, do they?’ Timothy said, with a teasing smile.
Lambert’s heart lightened. ‘No,’ he said, ‘we men know that. You must go to sleep now. Do you want anything, my darling?’
‘Yes, a drink.’
Lambert brought him a glass of water, and held his head up so that he could drink easily, feeling on his arm the terrible fragility, like a thin stalk, of his neck. He wondered whether the child were too hot. Feverish? Timothy lay back on the pillow and closed his eyes. Lambert touched his forehead. It was cool and he drew the blanket up round the narrow shoulders. ‘Are you sleepy?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good night, my darling.’
‘Good night,’ Timothy said, without opening his eyes.
Lambert stood for a moment in the doorway, scarcely breathing, half suffocated by the meeting, somewhere in the nerves of his chest, of a wave of anxiety running head on into a wave of tenderness, a swollen tide of love and responsibility. The love of the big ugly slack-bodied man for his frail little boy was a passion, his only passion, his one experience of that felicity, in its purest and most torturing form, bearing no resemblance at all to his decent hard-wearing affection for the boy’s mother.
‘Good night,’ he said again.
No answer. He crept out.
Chapter Five
The telephone ringing in her room disturbed Harriet Ellis unreasonably, as she was disturbed by all sudden irruptions of the outside world: as though she were always in fear of a test and of failing it. When she heard Gregory Mott’s voice her unconscious fear became a conscious anxiety to speak in an easy voice; it was a social anxiety, a dread of boring him which usually vanished when he came and for the hundredth time she realised that all he wanted was an attentive audience. He was, after all, an old friend, and attentiveness was one of her talents.
‘Harriet? May I come in this afternoon?’
‘Ah, do.’
‘You’re sure you have time for me?’
The perfunctory question made her smile. How astounded he would be if she said: No. I’m working: you know I work all day. ‘Of course.’
‘About five then.’
Towards four o’clock when she gave up struggling with the chapter she could not possibly finish before he came, she remembered with foolish pleasure that yesterday she had bought a bottle of face lotion of a kind she had never used. She would try it now. Standing in front of the glass, she unscrewed the top and tilted a few drops on to her fingers. A thin bitter scent of almonds came from it, and with a light shock she thought: But, you fool, you were using it years ago, heaven knows how many years — when you met Gregory…. Light as it was, the shock reached into the depths of her mind and of her body; she sat down, feeling weak. Nothing of that life remained, she was no longer in love with Gregory, it was years since he had had the power to disturb her except on the surface, years since she ceased completely to feel anything for him but a habit of liking, and yet she was shaking — in the old wives’ phrase, as though she had seen a ghost. Which is precisely what it was. The ghost of a clumsy undisciplined life-hungry young woman, called up by the smell of bitter almonds and bringing with her not only the forgotten pains and intoxication of falling in love but the humiliation endured before she ever met Gregory. A humiliation so impure, so blistering, that it had hardened her against any forced on her since. When she met him, they were both twenty-three, but she had been married — a marriage that was a disaster from the start, not even a dramatic disaster, but a lesson, driven into her nerves and flesh, of mean squalid shames and deprivation: it had lasted seven months and her son was born six months after it ended. Deeply as she had loved Gregory — deeply, wholly, with a passion she had never felt for anyone else, before or since — the girl trembling now in her middle-aged body was not his, not his at all, but that other one, still younger, who cried tears bitter as aloes and night after night beat her foolish head on the wall: the girl whom Gregory comforted but could not heal…. Without a trace of resentment she thought: I suppose I was always the one who loved and pursued…. He had let himself be loved, had depended on her for the ease she knew how to give his body; and even at that time he had been surer of himself than, for all her harsher experience, she was, and better-looking as a man, with a young fresh grace and the fineness of a head on a coin, than she as a woman. What she felt for him then was a consuming devotion, an abandoned self-dedication, humble and — it had been her error — possessive. She had not known she was possessive: she realised it later, and realised that he must always have felt it. For his sake, to be with him, she left her infant son — her mother had him in the country near London — unvisited month after month, on the excuse that she could not get leave from her newspaper office: and this, she came to think, was the worst thing she had ever done in her life, her blackest sin, and the one for which, though she had mercifully not been much punished for it, there was no forgiveness…. Don’t think about it, she cried silently, don’t think. Think about Gregory instead. Did he, after we stopped being lovers and before he married his Beatrice, have other mistresses? I don’t know…. Stubbornly set on hiding from him the shameful fact that his dismissal of her had made her suffer, she had not tried to find out…. It was not his fault, she thought, it was mine, wholly mine: I made demands I shouldn’t have made, I disappointed him, often, by my… slovenliness. I’m not a slut — or not more of one than any woman who isn’t a saint or a nun — but no talented young woman,
as greedily ambitious as I was to be someone, to make a mark on the world, has time or energy to be elegant…. Gregory craved — no kinder word for it — elegance, and the first time she set eyes on Beatrice she saw that she wouldn’t have had a chance against her. She had dressed carefully for this meeting, but she felt ill-groomed. Beatrice had the perfection, the fine finish, a rich woman can always give herself — clothes, white smooth hands, pointed nails, a face and body so continuously looked after that she seemed much younger than her thirty-six years…. With a hint of malice she thought: But nowadays she looks older than fifty-three. Why? What, that she hasn’t been given, can Gregory’s wife possibly lack?
Enough, she thought fiercely, that’s enough…. She stood up and hurriedly began again on her face. It’s over, done with, she thought. But what queer little animals we are. Happiness, ecstasy, despair, tears, the cold agony of loss — sunk — with no other trace than this weak tremor, the dying twitch of a nerve…. She smiled. If I only knew what it was all for….
Just as, with a superb involuntary generosity, she had absolved Gregory from any blame for the defeat he had inflicted on her, she let him take all the credit for their long close friendship. It never struck her that it might be a virtue in herself that kept an ex-lover attached to her. That he relied on her in a great many ways she knew. And despises me in others, she thought. She corrected herself at once. No, he’s too kind, too upright, to despise. What he does is to ignore half of what I am and do as worth very little.
And my God, she thought drily, he may be right. I’ve had so little success. How much longer can I go on, disciplining my mind, as savagely as any Spartan athlete ever trained his body, to write as honestly, as lucidly, with as lucid an energy, as I can manage — only to be dismissed, condescended to, grudged the praise given easily to writers I know to be my inferiors? How much longer? And when I’m old, when my mind loses its resilience and boldness?
She swayed on the edge of panic. Gripping the edge, she thought, suddenly: Why shouldn’t I ask Gregory for help? There must be something I could do. A job in Rutley House — why not?
The Road from the Monument Page 10