I am fairly sure that neither of us believed in the possibility of ultimate separation. We just made Roman holiday together about life and people.
CHAPTER IX
I
AND because we were to each other as we were, and it was evidently a part of living and being an adult person, I was not too badly shaken on the night that James parted with what is inaccurately called innocence and came home drunk into the bargain.
I had gone to bed early, mother and Lalage earlier still, for I often stayed up or kept awake to talk with him and pull the evening to pieces, generally speaking. That night I had fallen asleep over Dodo, my last waking thought concerned with pessimistic speculation as to whether there existed such universal providers of feminine charm, and I woke very suddenly.
It was nearly three o’clock and there was something wrong – with me. It was frightening because not definitely physical. I don’t know if a vague recital of symptoms will be particularly helpful, especially if I say that the leading one was a sensation that part of my own personality was dimmed while my actual body remained normal. I felt that were any decision called for, that part of me which made it would fail me. There was a feeling of what can best be described as a suspension of character – I ceased to be able to count on myself and became merely potential. A development, an eccentric sideline, of this I inadvertently tested when trying to throw off whatever had come upon me.
I began to force myself to think of books, and my mind could fasten upon nothing but two greasy novelettes I had once incredulously dipped into when the servants had gone to bed. Here, I found complete failure to recapture contempt. When I belaboured my brain to Dickens and Thackeray, there was a blank wall. I couldn’t even recall the titles, let alone places and people, or any admiration, love or kinship – I had to remember that Dickens was my oldest love. And there followed a brainfag and a despair that almost drove me to mother’s room. I fought that down with what was left of me, and some time later James came in, and I missed the rhythm of his routine movements and dragged myself out of bed and down to the hall.
He was trying to make the stairs, handing himself about as a parrot does in its cage.
For all one’s clever reading and glib printed fact, one isn’t very adroit, at nineteen.
I got him up to my room and I was shaking with fright. I made no attempt to undress him, because those slick disrobements are, I discovered, easier described in books than accomplished single-handed in real life by the inexperienced and distraught; but I got his shoes off and his socks and managed to rid him of overcoat and scarf, and by giving him an open-hander with my fist, get half his body on to the bed, and the rest of him by lifting his feet. I re-lit the fire and sat by him, and presently – books aren’t always wrong and I’d used my eyes in the side streets on Saturday nights – the expected occurred and he was sick. Later, he opened his eyes while I clutched his poor little basin, and saw me, and I suddenly remembered the Dickens titles and love – and even Miss Pinkerton’s Select Academy, The Mall, Chiswick; remembered with joyful loathing cook’s novelette, and almost giggled at one sentence which ran, ‘She gurgled with happy laughter and melted into those strong arms’.
I said, ‘Glad to see you, Jamesey. Been on the tiles?’
‘Tiles …’ he lay back very white and chilly, considering this. ‘I’ve been … everywhere.’
I made myself let it go at that; James shouldn’t tell me anything through a mere inability to stop talking. I wasn’t out for confidences that would be regretted later, and prepared myself to lose those hours in his life for ever.
But by ten-thirty next night he was in my armchair, in that mood in which all three of us had hurried to our mother, as children. To us, admission was synonymous with an absolution it would never have occurred to us to look for in the church, or, having received, would have so entirely believed.
I said the first part of it for him, sitting propped against his knees on the rug.
‘Well, that needn’t be done again, Jamesey, unless, of course, you feel any hankerings that way.’
‘It was that chap who wouldn’t let me pay the bill.’
‘Oh. Ah … I thought perhaps it might be.’
‘I meant to meet him on his own ground … and after all, I am nearly twenty.’
‘So am I, Jamesey!’
His hand tightened on my shoulder. ‘You mean, you’re just sick with me?’
‘Fool! My dear, the only thing that keeps most of us from it is the fear of consequences. It gets called chastity.’
He stirred. ‘But … we are different. Mrs. Gummidge, y’know, feeling it most.’
‘How d’you know? How can men be honestly sure what we feel? D’you know what a girl told me once?’
‘What?’
‘It was, of all places, at that New Year party at the Palace Greeners. This girl … can’t remember her name, but I’ll call her Harriett because she was so senselessly plain, not ugly, which is always a chance, and exciting, but plain. When I saw her sitting there and trying to look happy while the Verdunes sported all round her among the men, it struck me for the first time in my life that we should never know what plain people suffered. It must be like going about without a sense … like being born blind or deaf. To go to parties knowing that a man’s eyes will never look at you for one instant … it’s unimaginable. …
‘These girls don’t commit suicide; they go to parties. The pluck of it! Hundreds and thousands of ’em all over. England all taking it for granted … and don’t talk to me about “inner beauty” or “the soul shining through the eyes”. To begin with, it doesn’t most of the time, and in the second place there’s only about one man in a hundred who’s up to that, if it did. And he won’t be at the party. …
‘This Harriett I noticed at once, and I went and cultivated her … which, incidentally, damned most of my chances that evening. And … well, I imagine she unloaded something on me that would have made Aunt Emmeline cut her off her list. She said, “Every time I read in the papers of some servant girl who has had a baby through being assaulted, I am consumed with envy”.’
‘My good Lord!’
‘Mine, too. And that’s a woman who’s never been even offered any temptations, Jamesey.’
‘I see where you’re heading.’
‘The fact is, we shall never get straight on this sex business, Jamesey, because you men are brought up to acquire escapades as you do your first shave and dinner jacket; escapades become a test of virility instead of a natural impulse, so that I don’t suppose even you know where your original fastidiousness ends and rockbottom desire begins. That’s what I resent.’
‘Well … I’ve found out where fastidiousness begins, all right.’
‘Do I hear?’
He stirred in the creaking chair and took his hands from my shoulders. None of us three seems able to endure small personal contacts when anything of importance has to be said or done. I’d noticed it so often in myself, from the days when as a tearful penitent I’d evaded laps until the business was cleared up.
‘What put me off was that she expected me to kiss her.’
I sprang to that. Sisters must snatch understanding where they can, and this was a thing which instantly jarred me too, on principle. I said, ‘I suppose the idea is that you aren’t getting your money’s worth without’.
‘I couldn’t kiss her, and didn’t. And she was offended.’
‘Well … yes, I can just grasp that. I suppose when all’s said a woman never quite loses her idea of charming, you know. If you do her out of that, you’re showing her up for the only thing she stands for. Most people need some sort of illusion to help ’em along … but that knocks one pretty hard, doesn’t it?’ I settled again and put my arm on his knees. ‘You were a trump not to, Jamesey.’
‘And … the rest of it?’
‘Oh, that! Blow that!’ I faced him. ‘You know, I’m not sorry it’s happened at last. If it’s the correct thing to do’ – here we laughed toget
her – ‘far be it from me to prevent you from joining the procession. I should writhe if I saw you turning into a pale young curate because of me, or Lalage or mother’.
He had a handful of my long plait in his hands, and his face was at peace, and because the thought of sentiment would have flayed us both, I Roman-holiday’d with that useful, dreadful facility of mine which, all my life, has prompted me for better for worse, to concealment.
‘What would Aunt Sophia say! “Oh-h, you promiscuous puss!”’
And we were ourselves again, ready to toothcomb the universe.
II
Sometimes I was able to be of use to him. Any good looking man who is unattached, attractive and a dancer becomes a target, where to be unattached was enough heaven knows, without those makeweights nature had thrown in for James.
Of course he lost his head occasionally, and, more often his judgment, and it was here that I intervened, sometimes as Judas to my sex, sometimes as Chiffinch to his Charles when the girl was vulnerable and unhappy. The difficulty was that his absence of personal vanity together with his one-time inability to understand the importance which most women attach to trifles was apt to let him in for situations that an older, more complacent hand could have foreseen and countered. Once or twice in those days he would come home entertainingly at a loss to know if he might be considered to be engaged or not. He’d certainly never proposed, and yet …
‘Wait for the breakfast post,’ mother would say, kindly patting him on the head, ‘perhaps that will throw some light.’
She chaffed him but she was anxious, more anxious still to give him his head. His affairs at least I could share with her, and she refused to take a hand. ‘Mothers are only once removed from mothers-in-law in the scale of ridiculousness, darling.’ But sisters are not commonly guarded against or allowed for, and, armed at times with some stray and infinitely illuminating hint from her, I took up my position. ‘The chucker-out,’ mother called me.
James’s girls could be tiresome and sometimes very gadflies, but it was the older women who were the real menaces. They could be as unscrupulous, as unmaternal as men could be to me … The parental streak, grossly exaggerated as a desideratum for women, is somehow never expected of the male. Personally I wouldn’t give a snap of the fingers for a man who was without it, for me, and the adorable quality of fatherliness I began to take for granted was a non-existent and impossible thing.
But James’s older cliéntele – the Houris, as we called them – were minus the larger bowel of compassion, and the fact that James was too young to marry, too poor and didn’t even want to, merely seemed to amuse them. Also, they were cads and obtuse in failing to recognize that his kindness and warm, basic soundness of heart and nature were to be respected. They merely traded on it. Body-snatchers. If he had a mind they left it assumed, unvalued, unexplored, and they were clever in ways that I can never rise to. The man’s woman who offers an effusive jawbone to women friends and keeps an eye swivelling round for attractive males commonly is. How many a time have I found myself willed out of the room by these harpies, there impotently to fume in speculative rage and confusion as to how it was done!
Some of them were worthless without being in any way pathetic. They had homes, looks, money and sometimes husbands as well. The prospect of James being kicked downstairs by their life partners was only flattering. It was these I cultivated, to these I was Judas. I would sit in their over-ornamented, under-ventilated, evasively-lit bedrooms while they harried their maids, and followed every move of their toilette – that type, I discovered, has few reticences, and would lounge in a pair of silk stockings, feathered slippers and nothing else while she chatted to me, patronized me, unloosed on me her affairs financial or amorous and asked amused and impertinent questions about my own.
I would deliberately accentuate young girlery whenever it could be safely assumed, would arrive with my hair in a plait and a large black bow; I would look shy and wide eyed and admiring as I sat there letting off lie after lie and hating her, I who like, admire and love my own sex. But some hates are blessed and cleanly things.
To some of them I said that James was secretly engaged and I once was reduced to throwing mother to the lion and hinting that if my brother ever married she should share his home. And, trailing wearily downstairs, I was sometimes waylaid myself by husbands, and – if I could lay tongue to a vulgarer word I would use it – spooned with and pawed on the landing.
‘Has anyone ever told you you’ve got rather nice eyes?
‘How do you do? Yes, plenty of people. Good-bye.’
And (sotto voce because of the maid), ‘What a pity we can’t see each other oftener.’
‘Oh, I hardly think so (forte), good night.’
At home, I would throw the spoils to mother, keeping them from James against emergency.
Some of the women took presents from him; to that type he was a man, made to be mulcted, not a hard-up boy earning his keep. When it suited them they forgot the lovable youngness that had begun the whole business originally, and for the evening he was the eternal prosperous payee. It gave me a mistrust of the prerogatives of battening, wiles and coaxing that I was to find painfully hard to abandon, even temporarily, and even with the right man.
III
It gave me an understanding of young male things might have missed entirely, and because of James, I don’t think they were ever the losers by knowing me. Like Scarpia, ‘half Confessor and half devil’, I listened to their addled views on life as seen from a window in Balliol; I let them sharpen their little claws on me and kept a lynx eye on their disbursements. Because I had met them chiefly through James, either from his office or club, they paraded before me their new-found code of ethics on the subject of the sacred immunity of ‘the sister of My Friend’. It had its humorous side, and it broke down at least once.
The poor child, tipsy with freedom, his own profile, his quarterly allowance and a bottle of moulin a vent – all of which he was eager to mistake for me – had marshalled me upstairs and quaked at the waiter, who flourished napkin and wine-list, and finally left us. My host, folding his arms, said, with an equal mixture of tentativeness, defiance, apology, and pride:
‘This is a private room.’
I looked round. The Italian restaurant with a French cook in a London street had staged the orgy with a bamboo chiffonier, a grocer’s calendar, an oil painting of the kind that the Lupino family would not hesitate to dive through in a pantomime, and two vases filled with paper apple-blossom. I looked respectful. Inwardly I was doing worried mental arithmetic and wondering how much less time his money would last out, and if his family was finding it rather a struggle, and whether he’d told his mother where he was going, and if his father would be unintelligent and make him a scene, or whether he was of that infinitely more repellent and hopeless type, the Ha-ha-my-boy parent who can still enjoy a borrowed feed of wild oats, and says ‘Cherchez La femme’ in the accents of Dover-at-Calais.
To laugh at Peter would be brutality; to feign alarmed distress and so give him a run for his father’s money was probably beyond my powers as an actress. I was pretty sure I was his first night on the tiles. It is not an unresponsible post if you choose to make it so. He was my age, which is to say ten years younger; he betrayed it; reviling the menu to me and hastily acquiescent to the waiter; plucking his tie askew until my hands itched to adjust it (how often I’d done it for James!), and knew I must keep them to myself because all the boy’s social values were still topsy-turvy, while I offhandedly refused liqueurs because I was determined to send him home sober. And I wondered what sort of a man this was going to turn into, and who he’d marry, and why, and when and where, and drifted off into one of my speculations about the oddness of the fact that, somewhere in England, the church was waiting in which he would be married, and that somewhere in the country (or the Channel Islands or Holland) were growing the grandparents of those bulbs whose descendants would provide cut flowers for the ceremony. And suddenly
I thought that somewhere in the world, possibly quite near me in London, the man that Lalage would marry must be inevitably having his dinner too (and hoped he was behaving himself!). And James … his future wife might have been christened that morning, if he married late in life … or sleeping off a birthday party in her little crib, her face flushed with recent excitement, tears and cake. …
Through the mists, Peter’s voice came back to me.
‘You do look stunning this evening.’
Goodness only knew what had gone before, but I was glad he was pleased with me; my small black velvet hat I had made myself and adapted from that worn by one of the Houris. They have their uses. Her hat had probably cost twelve and a half guineas, my own cost as many shillings and made me look quite twenty-eight.
I looked about and saw that dinner was over. Peter was already very pink with wine and embarrassment, and it came to me that the poor boy didn’t even know the by-ways of verbal invitation (and indeed they have to be well done), and quite maddeningly, because to laugh was unthinkable, a phrase heard by me and subconsciously recorded at some afternoon of ‘progressive whist’ when the final competitor appeared, returned punctually, like a facetious pat on the head.
‘Shall we make a start?’ Even the hostess’s face came back to me, and her hair, pompadour’d under an invisible net, and the table on which were the silver match-box and photograph frame prizes.
I should have liked to have said, ‘What’s the good of this nonsense, Peter? We don’t care for each other and, that being the case, you don’t know it, but you’re being merely impertinent.’ As it was I pulled on my gloves, smiled at him and said, ‘Let’s go to the Hippodrome, I want to see that Under The Sea thing’.
It took him unprepared, and he looked at once pilloried and immensely relieved, and he took me home at eleven-forty-five and went back to his own with illusions, I hope, intact, because untested, or with disillusions postponed, and with half his little posturing accomplished, or sufficiently so to give scope for the experienced shake of the head or the patronizing smile and an elaborately-honourable withholding of ‘names’ for his contemporaries who were ripe for trouble as well.
A Harp in Lowndes Square Page 9