Sir!' She Said

by Alec Waugh

  “A screen?” asked Julia. “What kind of a screen?”

  The shop was empty at the time and they had both come forward.

  “Would you like a modern screen,” asked Jean, “or a Chinese one? Or one of these imitation eighteenth century ones?”

  “Perhaps you might show me one or two,” he said.

  There were one or two of each type in the actual foreroom of the shop. In the basement there were a good many more. The young man looked pensively at the showroom samples.

  “It’s difficult to tell, you see. Now, which would you choose if you were me?”

  “It depends on your flat,” Jean told him.

  “Yes, of course it would, wouldn’t it?”

  “Is it a large flat?”

  “Not really, no.”

  “How’s it done up?”

  “Well, it’s rather hard to say; it’s got some old stuff and some modern; the walls are brown, a rather yellowy brown. And the pictures, well, they’re rather miscellaneous. What do you think?”

  Jean burst out laughing.

  “How can we choose furniture for a flat we haven’t seen?”

  The pensive look returned to his face.

  “No, I suppose you can’t. But. . . well. . . I wonder. Look here. There’re some people coming in to cocktails at my place to-night. Couldn’t you come and then you’ld tell me?”

  Julia raised her eyebrows. “So it’s you, then,” that look said to Jean. A feeling of pride, of conquest, sent the blood quickly through Jean’s cheeks. She hesitated, however.

  “I’m not quite sure,” she said.

  The young man looked disappointed in the way that a child does when it has been denied a toy.

  “Oh, do!” he said. “Please! Look here, let me write my address down for you, then if you feel like it you can; any time, after six.”

  He took out his note-case, took a card from it, scrawled the address below it, held it out to Jean. She took the card, glanced at the writing; a firm, sound handwriting; at the address, St. James’s, Georgina House—152a. Then at the name. She gave a start as she read the name. Read it again, then looked up at him anxiously.

  “Are you the Gavin Todd?” she asked.

  He blushed.

  “I don’t know about the the. But I don’t know anybody else who’s got that name.”

  “You’re the golfer, I mean?”

  “Yes, oh, yes.”

  Jean stared at him in amazement.

  “If that isn’t the funniest thing,” she said. “We’d wondered who you were. We thought you must be a lounge lizard.”

  “Well, so I am for half the day.”

  Jean shook her head. “The other half’s good enough.” But though she spoke lightly, a sensation of embarrassment had taken the place of the former easy comradeship. And afterwards when he had gone, having extorted a promise from her that she would come to his cocktail party, it was with a puzzled look upon her face that she turned to Julia.

  Now that she knew who it was it seemed to her incredible that she should not have recognised him earlier. He was, after Wethered and Tolley, the best known English amateur of his day. He was a less fine player than Tolley, though he had on occasions beaten him. But in a way they had run for ten years, side by side in friendly rivalry. Todd was the complete opposite of Tolley. He had been at Cambridge when Tolley had been at Oxford. He was a precise, rather than a powerful hitter. Where Tolley was large, expansive, genial, he was reserved, slight, dapper. Tom Webster had caricatured him as playing a championship match in evening dress. He was the cartoonist’s foil to Tolley. He was as familiar a figure in Webster’s almanac as Inman and Percy Fender and Joe Beckett. Jean Ryland could not realise why she had not recognised him.

  “We ought to have spotted him at once,” she said. “Only when you’re not on the look-out for its being anyone. . . I’m glad he’s not a lounge lizard, anyhow. But——” she paused.

  “I don’t know if I ought to have said I’ld go to his cocktail party,” she added.

  “Silly one, why not?”

  “I don’t know him.”

  “You know him very well, I should have thought.”

  “Yes, but. . .” Jean Ryland hesitated. “It’s so difficult,” she said. “He doesn’t know anything about me: who I am, what I am. He does not see me against a background. I don’t know what he’s thinking about me. To him I’m probably just any independent modern girl. At least, I suppose that’s what he’s thinking. One never knows where one is with a man, nowadays.”

  “He doesn’t any more know where he is with you.”

  “I daresay, but that doesn’t matter quite so much.” She paused. “Fancy it being him,” she said. “For a person as shy and lost-looking as that to be about the best amateur golfer in the country. I’d always heard he was absurdly modest, but for him to be as modest as all that! He’s really rather a pet, you know.”

  They were still discussing him when the street door was flung open, and radiant, buoyant and laughing, Melanie burst into the shop. Nobody looking at her could have believed that she had seen that day’s dawn break over Soho. Her cheeks were glowing, her body vibrant with vitality. “What it is to be nineteen,” thought Julia.

  “Darling,” said Melanie: “I want a frock. A dream of a frock. And it’s got to be ready by tomorrow morning.”

  Julia laughed. “From what I remember of your other raids on us, you won’t have decided what you want by tomorrow evening!”

  “Ah, but not this time, darling. I’m in a hurry: a real hurry. And besides, this time I’m going to take your advice. As I should have done, of course, the other time. You were quite right about that frock. The gold tissue one. I saw it at the Vienna last night on another woman. It was so utterly my frock, that it spoilt my whole evening for me.”

  “No fun at all?”

  “Oh, a bit afterwards, at least. The Green Grotto’s fun, and there’s a reasonable cabaret at the Heliotrope.”

  “And the lad?”

  “Dumb, my dear, so dumb, or at least, if he only were dumb. But don’t let’s talk about the lad. Let’s rummage.”

  They rummaged.

  Frock after frock was taken from box and hanger, was examined, discarded, or set aside. With a keen, concentrated intensity she eliminated from that large stock the dresses she would not need.

  “Who’s going to get the benefit of all this?” asked Julia.

  “The Derby.”

  “I didn’t know you were going there.”

  “I only decided to last night.”

  “Who are you going with?”

  “The lad.”

  “He’ld be flattered if he knew all this trouble were being taken over him.”

  “It’s not for him. I’m going with a party.”

  “Whose party?”

  “Now, what was the name, let me think now. A sallow, interesting-looking man, what was his name? Ah, that’s it. Yes, Druce Mander.”

  Julia started at the name.

  “Druce Mander,” she said. “I didn’t know you knew him!”

  “I don’t. He’s Arthur’s friend.”

  “Then, how. . .”

  With an arm flung round her waist, and a kiss dropped lightly on her cheek, Melanie cut her sister short. “Silliest, so inquisitive,” she said. “I haven’t met the man at all; he was at the Vienna last night. And he saw Arthur and sent a note over asking him if he’ld join his party at the Derby, and telling him to bring a friend; a girl friend. And as I was with him, the poor pet had to ask me. Though I’m sure there’s some poppet he’ld have rather taken So that’s all there is to it. And you mustn’t start worrying about me and playing the heavy sister or I’ll get cross, and, darling, I couldn’t bear that, because I’m oh, so fond of you.”

  Julia made no reply. It probably was all right. And she was a fool to worry. You only exasperated people by asking questions. Melanie hadn’t met Mander. Probably Melanie wouldn’t say more than “Good morning,” and “Good-bye” to
him during the whole picnic. It was absurd for her to worry. Yet she couldn’t help worrying.

  Four years ago, after all, she had been so completely in the position in which Melanie was now: young, untried, confident: with not a doubt of her own future; nor of her capacity to direct that future.

  “If anything were to happen to that child. . .” she thought.

  Chapter IV

  A Fortune Teller

  It was a quarter to twelve when Melanie walked out into the sunlit length of Brooke Street. A quarter of an hour to get to Bayswater. Ample, surely she thought, as she paused in the doorway of a taxi, searching in her bag for the sheet of paper across which had been scrawled in purple lipstick “Armantine, 56d, Severn Street.” She had been given the address a week back at a dance. “Darling, you must go to her—the perfect fortune teller,” she had been told. “She’s an absolute marvel. She told me. . . but I can’t tell you that. It would be telling you too much. But it was simply uncanny: the things she knew about my past. And most of what she told me about the future’s come true. You simply must go there.”

  So the address had been scrawled on the back of an envelope in lipstick. And the next morning she had rung up, giving her friend’s name as a reference, to be told that Madame Armantine could not possibly see her for a week. She had pleaded, she had cajoled, she had threatened. But the voice had remained suavely unaccommodating. It was useless to argue. Madame Armantine, the voice maintained, was extremely busy; it was impossible to arrange anything for a week. So an appointment had been made, and here she was, eight days later, being rushed through London, a little thrilled, a little nervous.

  It was the first time she had ever been to a fortune teller. The prelude to it was disappointing. She had expected that it would be more dramatic: more melodramatic. She had pictured fortune-telling in terms of crystals and darkened rooms and mirrors. She had not expected to arrive at an ordinary block of flats; to be transported by an ordinary lift to an ordinary fourth floor; to have an ordinary door opened for her by an ordinary servant: to be shown into a large clean bare-walled sparsely furnished room that gave the impression of never having been lived in and would have looked like a dentist’s waiting-room had there been copies of the Sketch and Bystander on the central table. And the slim dark-skinned woman who rose to greet her was conventionally clothed in a fawn-coloured coat and skirt.

  It was not until Madame Armantine began to speak that Melanie became conscious of drama. Madame Armantine spoke in a quick precise voice, sitting forward on the extreme edge of an arm-chair, her back to the light, drawing with the third finger of her right hand straight lines along the blue upholstery.

  “You were born in October 1911, but you are an old soul,” she said. “You are an old soul, seeing new things. You want excitement, you want movement; you want new things, new faces. You are so anxious for these new things, that you are selfish. Excuse me. You will grow out of that selfishness. You are generous. You hurt people, but you do not mean to hurt them.”

  That’s true, thought Melanie. I am selfish, I suppose. Life’s so full of so many things, I don’t want to miss any of them. And when people seem to be standing in my way. . . but I don’t mean to hurt them. When they are hurt it’s usually their own fault. How could one help hurting people like the lad? They hurt themselves. She didn’t ask them to fall in love with her. I’m not a flirt, she thought. I like them, I like going about with them. Why can’t they be content with that? Why must they spoil things? This woman understands that. She’s marvellous. I am glad I came.

  “You must be careful, my child,” the voice continued. “You are experimenting. You don’t know what you want, you are asking life to teach you. But that is dangerous. You must be on your guard. You might make mistakes that cannot be remedied.”

  The voice for all that it was precise and quick, had a numbing, hypnotic quality. It was lovely sitting there, listening. She was marvellous, this woman; she understood you, was kind to you. There was nothing you could not say to her, nothing you could not tell her.

  “You are going to have difficulties, my child,” the voice was saying, “with one of your relations, a parent, no not a parent, with a cousin, an aunt, a sister. With a sister, yes, an elder sister. And you must be patient because there are things in your sister’s life which you do not know about that are making her behave like that.”

  Melanie had started at the word sister; Julia; her outburst last night and her anxiety that morning. How incredible that this woman should have known that; that she should even have known she had a sister. If only she would tell her more like that, more of what was to happen to her: when she would marry: when she would fall in love: whether she had already met the person she was to fall in love with. There was so much she would like to know: about that man Druce Mander whom she had seen last in the Vienna. What was he going to mean to her, was he going to mean anything? She wished she could ask the woman. But that would be scarcely fair. Anyone could tell fortunes if you gave them the facts to guess from. Those things had to be ferreted out for themselves. That was the marvellous thing about this woman, she did ferret them out.

  “There are people in love with you; several people in love with you. There will be more.

  Quickly the flow of words continued, pausing only after the occasional “Excuse me,” with which Madame Armantine would follow a piece of criticism. In a kind of doze Melanie listened. She scarcely heard what was being said to her.

  When she came out again into the sunlight she shook herself. It had been marvellous. It had been worth much more than the guinea she had paid for it. She would go again. Certainly she would go again; never had she felt herself so understood before. All that had been said to her had been so true. And there was so much of it that she had forgotten. So little, when it came to that, that she could remember. What was it that she had said, that dark-skinned, quick-voiced woman? Something about hurting people and about not meaning to. Something about Julia: a quarrel with her: and having to be patient with her, dear silly Julia, because there were things in Julia’s life that she knew nothing of; though what could there be to worry Julia she did not see: Julia who had her own flat and could do what she liked, when she liked. And what else was it she had said? About her not knowing what she wanted. Melanie laughed at that. Not know what she wanted. Why, surely that was the one thing she did know. It was life she wanted—life. And as for her future, wouldn’t it just be a turning to where life was keenest.

  Lightheartedly she waved her hand towards a taxi. It was nearly lunch time. She was feeling hungry.

  “Albemarle Street—the Six Hundred Club,” she said.

  Chapter V

  Jean Ryland

  In the Victorian era a single visit to a man’s house or flat left you with a fairly accurate idea of that man’s material position. In those days economists laid it down that the rent of a house should represent a tenth of a complete income. To-day you can form no such estimate.

  In this era of soaring income tax, when every other family has a motor car: when servants are hard to get: when restaurants are plentiful: when home life is disintegrating: when people cannot be troubled with the responsibilities of family life: when they prefer to spend their money outside their homes, on cars and in restaurants and night clubs: when for many a home or flat is no more than a headquarters where they sleep and eat their breakfasts and keep their clothes: when mobility is in itself a goal: when no one will be bothered with anything that cannot be shut up and left at a moment’s notice; in such an era you may easily be misled by the standard of comfort that people maintain in their home lives. You cannot judge the extent of a person’s income by the number of his spare bedrooms and the spruceness of his domestic staff. Even so and even now a flat will tell you a good deal. Nobody could spend ten minutes, for instance, in Gavin Todd’s without realising that however he might choose to apportion his income, that income was comfortably proportioned.

  It was in St. James’s, where rents and premiums are
high. It was on the first floor. Its rooms were high and wide and airy: facing, the half of them a rambling mews, the others a network of swaying boughs. “He’s rich,” thought Jean Ryland, “richer than I thought,” as she looked up at the red brick façade from the street below. And again a cautionary instinct made her hesitate. The same cautionary instinct that all that afternoon had been counselling her against the acceptance of that invitation. What was the point of it, she asked herself. She was only putting herself in a false position, classing herself with all those other girls whom experience had taught him to despise. He had met her in a shop, and she had resolved that in her case none of the cynical masculine prophecies about feminine emancipation were going to be justified.

  Before she had been in the shop a week she had decided that. There was much that during that week had come to her as a shock. She had wanted to work. She had wanted the feeling of independence that work would give her. But she had not enjoyed the position in which that work had placed her. She had not liked being in a position where people could be cross and irritable with her; where they could find fault with her and blame her because this and that had not been done exactly to their liking; where she would have to listen to abuse without retorting. It annoyed her that because she was in a shop, because she was paid to be in a shop, people could speak to her in a way that had they met her anywhere else they would not have dared to do. “Would they speak to me like that,” she had said to Julia, “if we had been on some picnic and I’d made some mistake about the hamper; brought no corkscrew, or the wrong kind of milk? Of course they wouldn’t. Because I’m working in a shop they think nothing of me. They’ve no respect for me. They think I’m something they can wipe their feet on.”

  Julia had laughed at her. “Don’t be silly,” she had said. “They aren’t thinking of you at all. They’re just spoilt discontented women who get hysterical when the least thing goes wrong with them. It’s life they’re railing at, not you.”

  Jean refused to be convinced. “That may be or that may not be,” she had said. “I’ve got to put up with it, of course, but I don’t like it. I don’t like being spoken to in that way.”