Receiving Fleur’s telephonic inquiry about Gurdon Minho, she had rung up the novelist. She knew him, if not well. Nobody seemed to know him well; amiable, polite, silent, rather dull and austere; but with a disconcerting smile, sometimes ironical, sometimes friendly. His books were now caustic, now sentimental. On both counts it was rather the fashion to run him down, though he still seemed to exist.
She rang him up. Would he come to a dinner tomorrow at her young nephew, Michael Mont’s, and meet the younger generation? His answer came, rather high-pitched:
‘Rather! Full fig, or dinner jacket?’
‘How awfully nice of you I they’ll be ever so pleased. Full fig, I believe. It’s the second anniversary of their wedding.’ She hung up the receiver with the thought: ‘He must be writing a book about them!’
Conscious of responsibility, she arrived early.
It was a grand night at her husband’s Inn, so that she brought nothing with her but the feeling of adventure, pleasant after a day spent in fluttering over the decision at ‘Snooks’. She was received only by Ting-a-ling, who had his back to the fire, and took no notice beyond a stare. Sitting down on the jade green settee, she said:
‘Well, you funny little creature, don’t you know me after all this time?’
Ting-a-ling’s black shiny gaze seemed saying: ‘You recur here, I know; most things recur. There is nothing new about the future.’
Lady Alison fell into a train of thought: The new generation! Did she want her own girls to be of it! She would like to talk to Mr Minho about that – they had had a very nice talk down at Beechgroves before the war. Nine years ago – Sybil only six, Joan only four then! Time went, things changed! A new generation! And what was the difference! ‘I think we had more tradition!’ she said to herself softly.
A slight sound drew her eyes up from contemplation of her feet Ting-a-ling was moving his tail from side to side on the hearth-rug, as if applauding. Fleur’s voice, behind her, said:
‘Well, darling, I’m awfully late. It was good of you to get me Mr Minho. I do hope they’ll all behave. He’ll be between you and me, anyway; I’m sticking him at the top, and Michael at the bottom, between Pauline Upshire and Amabel Nazing. You’ll have Sibley on your left, and I’ll have Aubrey on my right, then Nesta Gorse and Walter Nazing; opposite them Linda Frewe and Charles Upshire. Twelve. You know them all. Oh! and you mustn’t mind if the Nazings and Nesta smoke between the courses. Amabel will do it. She comes from Virginia – it’s the reaction. I do hope she’ll have some clothes on; Michael always says it’s a mistake when she has; but having Mr Minho makes one a little nervous. Did you see Nesta’s skit in The Bouquet? Oh, too frightfully amusing – clearly meant for L.S.D.! Ting, my Ting, are you going to stay and see all these people? Well, then, get up here or you’ll be trodden on. Isn’t he Chinese? He does so round off the room.’
Ting-a-ling laid his nose on his paws, in the centre of a jade green cushion.
‘Mr Gurding Minner!’
The well-known novelist looked pale and composed. Shaking the two extended hands, he gazed at Ting-a-ling, and said:
‘How nice! How are you, my little man?’
Ting-a-ling did not stir. ‘You take me for a common English dog, sir!’ his silence seemed to say.
‘Mr and Mrs Walter Nazon, Miss Lenda Frow.’
Amabel Nazing came first, clear alabaster from her fair hair down to the six inches of gleaming back above her waistline, shrouded alabaster from four inches below the knee to the gleaming toes of her shoes; the eminent novelist mechanically ceased to commune with Ting-a-ling.
Walter Nazing, who followed a long way up above his wife, had a tiny line of collar emergent from swathes of black, and a face, cut a hundred years ago, that slightly resembled Shelley’s. His literary productions were sometimes felt to be like the poetry of that bard, and sometimes like the prose of Marcel Proust. ‘What oh!’ as Michael said.
Linda Frewe, whom Fleur at once introduced to Gurdon Minho, was one about whose work no two people in her drawing-room ever agreed. Her works Trifles and The Furious Don had quite divided all opinion. Genius according to some, drivel according to others, those books always roused an interesting debate whether a slight madness enhanced or diminished the value of art. She herself paid little attention to criticism – she produced.
‘The Mr Minho? How interesting! I’ve never read anything of yours.’
Fleur gave a little gasp.
‘What – don’t you know Mr Minho’s cats? But they’re wonderful. Mr Minho, I do want Mrs Walter Nazing to know you. Amabel – Mr Gurdon Minho.’
‘Oh! Mr Minho – how perfectly lovely! I’ve wanted to know you ever since my cradle.’
Fleur heard the novelist say quietly:
‘I could wish it had been longer;’ and passed on in doubt to greet Nesta Gorse and Sibley Swan, who came in, as if they lived together, quarrelling over L.S.D., Nesta upholding him because of his ‘panache’, Sibley maintaining that wit had died with the Restoration; this fellow was alive!
Michael followed with the Upshires and Aubrey Greene, whom he had encountered in the hall. The party was complete.
Fleur loved perfection, and that evening was something of a nightmare. Was it a success? Minho was so clearly the least brilliant person there; even Alison talked better. And yet he had such a fine skull. She did hope he would not go away early. Someone would be almost sure to say ‘Dug up!’ or ‘Thick and bald!’ before the door closed behind him. He was pathetically agreeable, as if trying to be liked, or, at least, not despised too much. And there must, of course, be more in him than met the sense of hearing. After the crab soufflé he did seem to be talking to Alison, and all about youth. Fleur listened with one ear.
‘Youth feels… main stream of life… not giving it what it wants. Past and future getting haloes… Quite! Contemporary life no earthly just now… No… Only comfort for us – we’ll be antiquated, some day, like Congreve, Sterne, Defoe… have our chance again… Why? What is driving them out of the main current? Oh! Probably surfeit… newspapers… photographs. Don’t see life itself, only reports… reproductions of it; all seems shoddy, lurid, commercial… Youth says: “Away with it, let’s have the past or the future!”’
He took some salted almonds, and Fleur saw his eyes stray to the upper part of Amabel Nazing. Down there the conversation was like Association football – no one kept the ball for more than one kick. It shot from head to head. And after every set of passes someone would reach out and take a cigarette, and blow a blue cloud across the unclothed refectory table. Fleur enjoyed the glow of her Spanish room – its tiled floor, richly coloured fruits in porcelain, its tooled leather, copper articles, and Soames’s Goya above a Moorish divan. She headed the ball promptly when it came her way, but initiated nothing. Her gift was to be aware of everything at once. ‘Mrs Michael Mont presented’ the brilliant irrelevances of Linda Frewe, the pricks and stimulations of Nesta Gorse, the moonlit sliding innuendoes of Aubrey Greene, the upturning strokes of Sibley Swan, Amabel Nazing’s little cool American audacities, Charles Upshire’s curious bits of lore, Walter Nazing’s subversive contradictions, the critical intricacies of Pauline Upshire; Michael’s happy-go-lucky slings and arrows, even Alison’s knowledgeable quickness, and Gurdon Minho’s silences – she presented them all, showed them off, keeping her eyes and ears on the ball of talk lest it should touch earth and rest. Brilliant evening; but – a success?
On the jade green settee, when the last of them had gone and Michael was seeing Alison home, she thought of Minho’s ‘Youth – not getting what it wants.’ No! Things didn’t fit. ‘They don’t fit, do they, Ting!’ But Ting-a-ling was tired, only the tip of one ear quivered. Fleur leaned back and sighed. Ting-a-ling uncurled himself, and putting his forepaws on her thigh, looked up in her face. ‘Look at me,’ he seemed to say, ‘I’m all right. I get what I want, and I want what I get. At present I want to go to bed.’
‘But I don’t,’ said Fleur, withou
t moving.
‘Just take me up!’ said Ting-a-ling.
‘Well,’ said Fleur, ‘I suppose – It’s a nice person, but not the right person, Ting.’
Ting-a-ling settled himself on her bare arms.
‘It’s all right,’ he seemed to say. ‘There’s a great deal too much sentiment and all that, out of China. Come on!’
Chapter Five
EVE
THE Honourable Wilfrid Desert’s rooms were opposite a picture gallery off Cork Street. The only male member of the aristocracy writing verse that anyone would print, he had chosen them for seclusion rather than for comfort. His ‘junk’, however, was not devoid of the taste and luxury which overflows from the greater houses of England. Furniture from the Hampshire seat of the Cornish nobleman, Lord Mullyon, had oozed into two vans, when Wilfrid settled in. He was seldom to be found, however, in his nest, and was felt to be a rare bird, owing his rather unique position among the younger writers partly to his migratory reputation. He himself hardly, perhaps, knew where he spent his time, or did his work, having a sort of mental claustrophobia, a dread of being hemmed in by people. When the war broke out he had just left Eton; when the war was over he was twenty-three, as old a young man as ever turned a stave. His friendship with Michael, begun in hospital, had languished and renewed itself suddenly, when in 1920 Michael joined Danby and Winter, publishers, of Blake Street, Covent Garden. The scattery enthusiasm of the sucking publisher had been roused by Wilfrid’s verse. Hob-nobbing lunches over the poems of one in need of literary anchorage, had been capped by the firm’s surrender to Michael’s insistence. The mutual intoxication of the first book Wilfrid had written and the first book Michael had sponsored was crowned at Michael’s wedding. Best man! Since then, so far as Desert could be tied to anything, he had been tied to those two; nor, to do him justice, had he realized till a month ago that the attraction was not Michael, but Fleur. Desert never spoke of the war, it was not possible to learn from his own mouth an effect which he might have summed up thus: ‘I lived so long with horror and death; I saw men so in the raw; I put hope of anything out of my mind so utterly, that I can never more have the faintest respect for theories, promises, conventions, moralities, and principles. I have hated too much the men who wallowed in them while I was wallowing in mud and blood. Illusion is off. No religion and no philosophy will satisfy me – words, all words. I have still my senses – no thanks to them; am still capable – I find – of passion; can still grit my teeth and grin; have still some feeling of trench loyalty, but whether real or just a complex, I don’t yet know. I am dangerous, but not so dangerous as those who trade in words, principles, theories, and all manner of fanatical idiocy to be worked out in the blood and sweat of other men. The war’s done one thing for me – converted life to comedy. Laugh at it – there’s nothing else to do!’
Leaving the concert hall on the Friday night, he had walked straight home to his rooms. And lying down full length on a monk’s seat of the fifteenth century, restored with down cushions and silk of the twentieth, he crossed his hands behind his head and delivered himself to these thoughts: ‘I am not going on like this. She has bewitched me. It doesn’t mean anything to her. But it means hell to me. I’ll finish with it on Sunday – Persia’s a good place. Arabia’s a good place – plenty of blood and sand! She’s incapable of giving anything up. How has she hooked herself into me! By trick of eyes, and hair, by her walk, by the sound of her voice – by trick of warmth, scent, colour. Fling her cap over the windmill – not she! What then? Am I to hang about her Chinese fireside and her little Chinese dog; and have this ache and this fever because I can’t be kissing her? I’d rather be flying again in the middle of Boche whizbangs! Sunday! How women like to drag out agonies! It’ll be just this afternoon all over again. “How unkind of you to go, when your friendship is so precious to me! Stay, and be my tame cat, Wilfrid!” No, my dear, for once you’re up against it! And – so am I, by the Lord!…’
When in that gallery which extends asylum to British art, those two young people met so accidentally on Sunday morning in front of Eve smelling at the flowers of the Garden of Eden, there were present also six mechanics in various stages of decomposition, a custodian and a couple from the provinces, none of whom seemed capable of observing anything whatever. And, indeed, that meeting was inexpressive. Two young people, of the disillusioned class, exchanging condemnations of the past. Desert with his off-hand speech, his smile, his well-tailored informality, suggested no aching heart. Of the two Fleur was the paler and more interesting. Desert kept saying to himself: ‘No melodrama – that’s all it would be!’ And Fleur was thinking: ‘If I can keep him ordinary like this, I shan’t lose him, because he’ll never go away without a proper outburst.’
It was not until they found themselves a second time before the Eve, that he said:
‘I don’t know why you asked me to come, Fleur. It’s playing the goat for no earthly reason. I quite understand your feeling. I’m a bit of “Ming” that you don’t want to lose. But it’s not good enough, my dear; and that’s all about it.’
‘How horrible of you, Wilfrid!’
‘Well! Here we part! Give us your flipper.’
His eyes – rather beautiful – looked dark and tragic above the smile on his lips, and she said stammering:
‘Wilfrid – I – I don’t know. I want time. I can’t bear you to be unhappy. Don’t go away! Perhaps I – I shall be unhappy, too; I – I don’t know.’
Through Desert passed the bitter thought: ‘She can’t let go – she doesn’t know how.’ But he said quite softly: ‘Cheer up, my child; you’ll be over all that in a fortnight. I’ll send you something to make up. Why shouldn’t I make it China – one place is as good as another? I’ll send you a bit of real “Ming”, of a better period than this.’
Fleur said passionately:
‘You’re insulting! Don’t!’
‘I beg your pardon. I don’t want to leave you angry.’
‘What is it you want of me?’
‘Oh! no – come! This is going over it twice. Besides, since Friday I’ve been thinking. I want nothing, Fleur, except a blessing and your hand. Give it me! Come on!’
Fleur put her hand behind her back. It was too mortifying! He took her for a cold-blooded, collecting little cat – clutching and playing with mice that she didn’t want to eat!
‘You think I’m made of ice,’ she said, and her teeth caught her upper lip: ‘Well, I’m not!’
Desert looked at her; his eyes were very wretched. ‘I didn’t mean to play up your pride,’ he said. ‘Let’s drop it, Fleur. It isn’t any good.’
Fleur turned and fixed her eyes on the Eve – rumbustious-looking female, care-free, avid, taking her fill of flower perfume! Why not be care-free, take anything that came along? Not so much love in the world that one could afford to pass, leaving it unsmelled, unplucked. Run away! Go to the East! Of course, she couldn’t do anything extravagant like that! But, perhaps – What did it matter? one man or another, when neither did you really love!
From under her drooped, white, dark-lashed eyelids she saw the expression on his face, and that he was standing stiller than the statues. And suddenly she said: ‘You will be a fool to go. Wait!’ And without another word or look, she walked away, leaving Desert breathless before the avid Eve.
Chapter Six
‘OLD FORSYTE’ AND ‘OLD MONT’
MOVING away, in the confusion of her mood, Fleur almost trod on the toes of a too-familiar figure standing before an Alma Tadema with a sort of grey anxiety, as if lost in the mutability of market values.
‘Father! You up in town? Come along to lunch, I have to get home quick.’
Hooking his arm and keeping between him and Eve, she guided him away, thinking: ‘Did he see us? Could he have seen us?’
‘Have you got enough on?’ muttered Soames.
‘Heaps!’
‘That’s what you women always say. East wind, and your neck like that! Well, I do
n’t know.’
‘No, dear, but I do.’
The grey eyes appraised her from head to foot.
‘What are you doing here?’ he said. And Fleur thought: ‘Thank God he didn’t see. He’d never have asked if he had.’ And she answered:
‘I take an interest in art, darling, as well as you.’
‘Well, I’m staying with your aunt in Green Street. This east wind has touched my liver. How’s your – how’s Michael?’
‘Oh, he’s all right – a little cheap. We had a dinner last night.’
Anniversary! The realism of a Forsyte stirred in him, and he looked under her eyes. Thrusting his hand into his overcoat pocket, he said:
‘I was bringing you this.’
Fleur saw a flat substance wrapped in pink tissue paper.
‘Darling, what is it?’
Soames put it back into his pocket.
‘We’ll see later. Anybody to lunch?’
‘Only Bart.’
‘Old Mont! Oh, Lord!’
‘Don’t you like Bart, dear?’
‘Like him? He and I have nothing in common.’
‘I thought you fraternized rather over the state of things.’
‘He’s a reactionary,’ said Soames.
‘And what are you, ducky?’
‘I? What should I be?’ With these words he affirmed that policy of non-commitment which, the older he grew, the more he perceived to be the only attitude for a sensible man.
‘How is Mother?’
‘Looks well. I see nothing of her – she’s got her own mother down – they go gadding about.’
He never alluded to Madame Lamotte as Fleur’s grandmother – the less his daughter had to do with her French side, the better.
‘Oh!’ said Fleur. ‘There’s Ting and a cat!’ Ting-a-ling, out for a breath of air, and tethered by a lead in the hands of a maid, was snuffling horribly and trying to climb a railing whereon was perched a black cat, all hunch and eyes.
The Forsyte Saga, Volume 2 Page 4