by C. P. Snow
I laughed.
“But these things are important,” said Lady Boscastle. “You can’t imagine your friend Roy not attending to them.”
“He’s a good-looking and elegant man,” I said.
“That’s no reason for your being too humble. You can do many things that he can’t. Believe me, Lewis. If you took care, you could look quite impressive.”
Then she focused her lorgnette on me. Her porcelain eyes were glittering with indulgence and satire. “Perhaps Roy is really much more humble than you are. I think you are very arrogant at heart. You just don’t care. You have the sort of carelessness, my dear boy, that I have heard people call ‘aristocratic’. I do not remember knowing any aristocrats who possessed it.”
Just as the car drew up outside to take Roy and me back to Monte Carlo, the Boscastles’ son returned from a dinner party. He was only eighteen and still at school; he had been born to them when Lady Boscastle was nearly forty and they had given up hope of a child. I had not met him before, and caught just a glimpse before we left. He was slender, asthenic, with a wild, feminine face.
It was after midnight when our car dropped us at the hotel, and, like other pairs of friends in sight of the casino, we had a disagreement. One of us was addicted to gambling, and the other hated it. Some might have expected Roy to play lavishly the night through: but the facts were otherwise. It was I who spent the next two hours at baccarat; it was Roy who stood behind me, smoking cigarette after cigarette, who walked irritably round the square, who entered again hoping that I should have finished.
“Excellent,” he said, when at last I had had enough.
“Why didn’t you come in?” I said, as we took a walk in the casino gardens.
“I’ve something better to do with my money,” said Roy, as though he were the guardian of all the prudent virtues.
I had won forty pounds, but that did not placate him.
“It’ll only lead you on,” he said. “I wish you’d lost.”
“It will pay for my holiday,” I said.
“You’ll lose it all tomorrow. And a lot more.”
It was a brilliant frosty night, utterly calm on the sea. The two lights of the harbour shone, one green, one red, and their reflection lay still upon the water. The stars were bright in the moonless sky, and below the lights of the coast road blazed out.
“Extremely serene,” said Roy. “Now I shall go and sleep.”
We were tired and contented. A few moments later, the porter at the hotel said that there was a telegram for Mr Calvert. As he read it, Roy made a grimace.
“Not quite so serene,” he said, and gave it to me. It was from Rosalind, the English words curiously distorted on the way. It must have been written as something like:
ARRIVE IN CANNES TOMORROW TWENTY-NINTH PROPOSE STAY MONTE CARLO UNLESS INCONVENIENT FOR YOU SHALL APPEAR THIRTY-FIRST UNLESS YOU SEND MESSAGE TO AMBASSADEURS SAYING NO.
12: Some Women
We discovered that, several days before, Rosalind had reserved a room, not at the Hermitage but at the Hotel de Paris. Whether this was to save Roy’s face or simply to show off, no one could be sure. Rosalind’s origins were similar to mine, though less poverty-stricken: she still lived in our native town, where she earned a large income for a young woman: she had a flair for bold dramatic design and, applying her usual blend of childish plaintiveness and businesslike determination, took £600 a year from an advertising company. She lived simply at home and spent her money on extravagant presents and holidays at the most expensive hotels, which she examined with shrewd businesslike eyes and basked in with a hearty provincial gusto.
When he realised that she was coming not on a sudden caprice but by plan, Roy was amused, irritated, pleased, hunted, and somewhat at a loss. He knew he could not keep her unobserved while the Boscastle party spent its days in Monte Carlo; he knew that Rosalind would see that did not happen. But he was too fond of her, too clearsightedly, intimately, physically fond of her, to forbid her to come.
He decided that he must brazen it out. Lady Muriel and Joan lunched with us at the hotel, and half-way through Roy said, less unselfconsciously than usual: “By the way, Lady Mu, a friend of mine is coming down on Thursday.”
“Who may that be, Roy?”
“A girl called Rosalind Wykes. I brought her in for tea one day, do you remember? I only knew she was coming this morning.”
“Indeed.” Lady Muriel looked at him. “Roy, is this young woman staying here alone?”
“I should think so.”
“Indeed.”
Lady Muriel said no more. But when I arrived at the Café de Paris for tea, I found the four women of the Boscastle party engrossed in a meeting of disapproval and indignation. There were shades of difference about their disapproval, but even Lady Boscastle, the fastidious and detached, agreed on the two main issues: Roy was to be pitied, and Rosalind was not fit for human company.
“Good afternoon, Mr Eliot. I am glad you were able to join us,” said Lady Muriel, and got back to the topic in hand. “I cannot understand how any woman has the shamelessness to throw herself at a man’s head.”
“I can’t help admiring her courage,” said Joan. “But–”
“Joan! I will not listen to anything you say in her favour. She is a mercenary and designing woman.”
“I’ve said already,” said Joan, fierce, sulky, angry with both her mother and Rosalind, “that I think she’s absolutely unsuitable for him. And if she thinks this is the way to get him, she’s even stupider than I thought. Of course, she’s appallingly stupid.”
“I should have called her rather – uninformed,” said Lady Boscastle. “I think our mothers would have thought her a little forward.”
“I don’t know how any man ever allows himself to get married,” said Mrs Seymour, “the way some women behave.”
“She’s a Clytemnestra,” said Lady Muriel surprisingly. We all looked puzzled, until Lady Boscastle observed gently: “I think you mean Messalina, Muriel.”
“She’s a Messalina,” said Lady Muriel with passion and violence. “Of course, she’s not a lady. She’s not even gently bred. No lady could do what this woman is doing.”
Lady Boscastle raised her lorgnette.
“I’m not quite sure, Muriel. I think this girl’s behaviour is rather unbecoming – but haven’t you and I known cases–?”
“It was not the same,” said Lady Muriel grandly. “If a lady did it, she would do it in a different way.”
Soon afterwards Roy came in. When he apologised for being late, Lady Muriel was banteringly, clumsily affectionate, as though she wanted to say that he was still in favour. Then Lady Boscastle began to talk about her party on New Year’s Eve.
“I have at last succeeded in persuading my husband to enter the Sporting Club. It has taken some time,” she said with her delicate, sarcastic smile. “We are dining at ten o’clock. I am counting on you two to make up the party. Will you come, Lewis?”
I said that I should love to.
Roy hesitated.
“I don’t know whether Lady Muriel has told you, Lady Boscastle,” he said, “but a friend of mine is arriving that day.”
“I had heard,” said Lady Boscastle.
“I think I need to look after her.”
His tone was light but firm. He looked at Lady Boscastle. For a second her eyes wavered to Lady Muriel, and then came back to him. In a few moments, I knew that she would not invite Rosalind, and that he would not give way.
“I’m so sorry,” said Roy, as though there had been no challenge. “It’s a shame to miss you all on New Year’s Eve. I should have enjoyed it so much.”
I was shocked that Lady Boscastle could be rude in this fashion. She was acting, so it seemed to me that afternoon, not as herself but as part of the clan. These were not her manners, but the manners of the whole Boscastle circle. Which were often, under their formal politeness, not designed to give pleasure. For instance, it was not politeness of the heart when Lad
y Muriel, seeing Roy and me constantly together, called him by his Christian name and me “Mr Eliot”, year in, year out, without softening or change. She was intensely fond of him, of course, and neutral to me, but some codes of manners would have concealed those feelings.
On the afternoon of the thirty-first, I was told that Rosalind had come, but I did not see her. Roy and she were together, I assumed, but they avoided the normal meetingplaces of the Boscastle party. So I had tea with the Master and Lady Muriel, dressed early, and put in some hours at the tables before dinner. Mrs Seymour, who was becoming an insatiable gambler, was also in the casino, but I managed to pass her undetected. That was too good to last; and at dinner at the Sporting Club her place was inevitably on my right. Full of excitement, she described to me how she had been invited to a French house at five o’clock that afternoon and offered an aperitif.
“I don’t like wine for tea,” said Mrs Seymour. For once her vagueness, even her enthusiasm vanished, and she felt like the voice of England.
Lord Boscastle’s table was in an alcove which commanded the whole room. Lights shone, shoulders gleamed, jewellery flashed, expensive dresses rustled, expensive perfume touched the air: champagne buckets were being carried everywhere: there were at least a dozen people in the room whom I recognised from photographs. Lord Boscastle viewed the spectacle with disfavour.
“I don’t know any of these people,” he said. He looked at his sister who, despite his approval of scholarly pursuits, he sometimes affected to think moved in a different circle of existence.
“Muriel!” he called out. “I suppose you know who these people are?”
“Certainly I do not,” said Lady Muriel indignantly.
To her profound annoyance, an elderly man bowed to her.
“Who is that fellow?” asked Lord Boscastle.
“Lord Craycombe,” said Mrs Seymour.
“That family are nothing but nineteenth-century arrivistes,” said Lord Boscastle. “Not a very distinguished acquaintance, my dear Muriel, I should have thought–?”
He was on the rampage. This was his revenge for being dragged into society.
“Talking of arrivistes,” he said, “I noticed one or two over-luxurious yachts in the harbour. I didn’t think they were in specially good taste. But it’s obvious that people whom one simply wouldn’t have known some time ago have managed to do remarkably well for themselves.”
Which noble families was he disposing of now? I wished that Roy had been there.
The party contained eight people. Houston Eggar had been asked to fill Roy’s place; his wife (“Tom Seymour’s girl”) had already left for Rome, where they had been posted for a year past. Lord Boscastle proceeded to interrogate Eggar upon the Abyssinian war. The Boscastles had lived years in Italy; he had a passion for the country; though he called himself a whig, the squabble about a colonial war seemed to him hypocritical nonsense. Eggar tried hard to be both familiar and discreet, but I got the impression that in his heart he agreed. With one criticism of Lord Boscastle’s he did not agree, however; and I could not help feeling that this particular criticism would have seemed unfamiliar to my left wing friends. For Lord Boscastle appeared to regard the mishandling of British policy towards Italy as due to the increasingly middle-class constitution of the Foreign Office.
Joan argued stormily with her uncle. She thought he was clever but misguided, and never gave up hope of converting him. Eggar she dismissed as set in his ways. Actually, Eggar put on a tough assertive manner, as though he were anxious to talk to Lord Boscastle as man to man. Underneath the assertiveness he was deferential and eager to please. He was determined never to say anything foolish, never to let slip a confidence, never to be indiscreet. He was powerfully built, dark, young-looking for a man in early middle age; he was kindly, vulgar, inordinately ambitious, and not at all subtle.
It was eleven, and the room was full. Suddenly Joan said: “There’s Roy.”
Our table fell into silence as we watched. Across the floor, up an aisle between the tables, Roy walked, quite slowly, with Rosalind on his arm. They attracted many glances. Roy looked more than ever spruce, with a white gardenia in his buttonhole; but Rosalind took attention away from him. She was not a beauty, in the sense that several women in this room were beauties; she had none of the remoteness that beauty needs. But her face was mobile, pathetic, humorous and living, and she had dressed to make sure that she would not be overlooked.
The aisle ran only one row of tables away from ours. As they came near, Rosalind, who was on the far side, kept talking to Roy; but he turned half round and gave us a brilliant smile. It did not look a smile of defiance or triumph; it was fresh, cheerful, alight with high spirits.
I caught Lady Boscastle’s eye. She must have seen a glint of satisfaction in mine, for she shrugged her shoulders and her mouth twitched. She had too much humour, too much sense of style, not to be amused. Yet she was stubborn in the arguments which followed.
“She’s a very personable young woman,” said Lord Boscastle, approvingly. “We’d better have them over here, Helen.”
“I don’t think that would be at all suitable,” said Lady Muriel.
“Why not? I remember meeting her. Young Calvert’s got an eye for a pretty woman.”
“She is rather untravelled perhaps for tonight, my dear Hugh,” said Lady Boscastle.
“Have you just discovered that? I got on perfectly well with her,” said Lord Boscastle. He was annoyed. “And I regard Calvert as someone I know.”
Lady Boscastle, with heavy support from Lady Muriel, maintained her opposition. Lord Boscastle became nettled. One could feel the crystalline strength of Lady Boscastle’s will. In that marriage, I thought, she had had the upper hand all the way through. He had been jealous, she had gone her own way, she had never sacrificed that unscratchable diamond-hard will. Yet Lord Boscastle was accustomed to being the social arbiter. In the long run, even Lady Muriel deferred to his judgment on what could and could not be done. That night he was unusually persistent. Mainly because he did not mean to be deprived of a pretty girl’s company – but also he had a masculine sympathy with Roy’s enjoyments.
In the end, they agreed on a compromise rather in his favour. Roy and Rosalind were to be left to have dinner alone, but were to be invited to visit our table afterwards. Lady Boscastle wrote a note: it was like her that it should be delicately phrased. “My dear Roy, It is so nice, and such a pleasant surprise, to see you here tonight. Will you give us the pleasure of bringing your friend Miss Wykes to this table when you have finished your dinner? We are all anxious to wish you a happy new year.”
They came. Rosalind was overawed until she was monopolised for half-an-hour by Lord Boscastle. Afterwards I heard her talking clothes with Mrs Seymour. As the night went on, her eyes became brighter, more victorious, more resolved. She talked to everyone but Lady Muriel. She did not want the glorious night to end.
Roy did not show, perhaps he did not feel, a glimmer of triumph. He exerted himself to be his most gentle, teasing and affectionate with the other women, particularly with Lady Muriel.
Within a few hours of the party, I heard the rumour that Roy and Rosalind were engaged. It came first from Mrs Seymour, who had been driven in alone and marked me down across the square.
“I think it’s perfectly certain,” she said.
“Why do you think so?”
“I seem to remember something,” she said vaguely. “I seem to remember that young woman giving me to understand–”
Joan came in with her father later that morning, and asked me point-blank if I knew anything.
“Nothing at all,” I said.
“Are you being honest?” she said. She was suspicious, and yet as soon as I answered her face was lightened with relief.
“Yes.”
“Do you think it’s likely?”
“I should have thought not.”
She looked at me with a troubled and hopeful smile.
Another member of
the New Year’s party found it necessary to talk to me that morning, but on quite a different subject. Houston Eggar took me for a walk in the gardens, and there in the bright sunlight told me of an embarrassment about that day’s honours list. “You won’t have seen it yet, of course,” he said. “But they happen to have given me a little recognition. If these things come, they come.” But what had come, he felt, needed some knowledgeable explanation. Before he was appointed to Rome, he had been seconded for two years to another ministry. He considered, as an aside, that this had temporarily slowed down his promotion in the Foreign Office, but he assured me that it ought to pay in the long run. As a reward for this work, he was now being given a CBE: whereas anyone of his seniority in the Foreign Office would expect, in the ordinary course of things, to be getting near a CMG – “which has more cachet, needless to say,” said Houston Eggar. “You see, Eliot,” he went on earnestly, “to anyone who doesn’t know the background, this C of mine might seem like a slap in the face. Instead of being a nice little compliment. I’d be very much obliged if you’d explain the situation to the Boscastles. Don’t go out of your way, but if you get a chance you might just remove any misconceptions. I’ll do the same for you some day.”
Several more rumours about the engagement reached me during the next twenty-four hours, and I knew that Roy had heard what was bubbling round him. But I scarcely saw him; he did not eat a meal in our hotel; it was from someone else I learned that Rosalind had been invited out to the villa on January 3rd – but only for tea, apparently as another compromise between Lord and Lady Boscastle.
It was the day before, January 2nd, when Lady Muriel announced that she would make “tactful enquiries” of Roy himself. “I shall not embarrass him,” she said. “I shall merely use a little finesse.”
Lady Boscastle raised her lorgnette, but said nothing. We had met for tea at our usual place in the window of the Café de Paris; we were a little early, and Roy was expected. The Times of the day before had been delivered after lunch; Lady Muriel had studied it and made comments on the honours list, which Mrs Seymour was now reading through.