She saw far too much of Freddie. Although Rodney discouraged and hindered the affair, Mrs Stretton encouraged it with the cynical glee of a procuress and made it easy for them to meet. She welcomed the opportunity of thwarting Rodney, who, she told Jo, gave her the creeping meemies.
She gave the same to Rodney. The sight and sound of her affected his sensibilities like a cinema organ. She was as broad as she was long, wore magenta or emerald green or both together and fur coats like hearth rugs. Her hair was dyed and tonged into rusty sausages, and old paint lay thick in the folds of her cheerful face. She had a whisky voice and a smoker’s cough and the monstrous coarse humanity of the good old music-hall sport.
She came to Victoria to see Joy off, and Freddie Rigby came too, bringing a crowd of the kind of young people Rodney did not care for. When he saw Mrs Stretton charging down the platform like a highly-coloured effigy of the wind Boreas, he got quickly into his carriage with Sheena who, draped in chiaroscuro wimples, had come to see him off. At least, she had come to see the train off, for it did not matter who was in it as long as she could be left on the platform gently waving an elbow length glove, her Burne-Jones neck drooping in the exquisite melancholy of farewell.
The Queen Anne called at Malta on the way out, and before she had dropped anchor, a steward brought Rodney a telegram summoning him to a cocktail party at the Sliema club.
Archie Drake! Of all people on earth, just the one he wanted Joy to meet. Archie had been out of circulation for the last six months on a world cruise with his father who, like the family mansion, was crumbling a little. The two ships were going in opposite directions, but Joy and Archie could both be titillated with a small dose of each other and would be all agog to meet again in England.
She was just ripe for someone like Archie Drake. Distance seemed to have weaned her from Freddie. (The wireless operator, who was on Joy’s side, lied to Rodney when he asked if she had sent or received any cables.) She did not seem to be attracted to any of the young men with whom she danced and played deck games in the Queen Anne. (Rodney was in bed, and thought Joy was too, while she and a mildly dissolute tennis champion were in the stern of the ship, watching the changeless-ness of the silvered wake.)
Rodney began his propaganda at once. ‘Nice party on to-night, poppet,’ he said, finding her leaning on the rail, dazzling hep self with the yellow blaze of Valletta Harbour in the midday sun.
‘Oh, Uncle Roddie, no. Aren’t we going ashore? There’s plenty of time for parties when we’re at sea.’
‘Not on board, silly child, at the Sliema Club, the best place on the island. It’s Archie Drake, quite one of my dearest friends. He’s a good bit younger than me, of course – one of the most eligible young men in England as a matter of fact; all the girls are after him – but I’ve known his family all my life.’
‘What makes him so eligible?’ Joy asked glumly.
‘Oh, well, don’t you know, he’s charming, good-looking, amusing. Got his Blue at golf and squash, and rides like an angel, they tell me. He’s the heir to a nice little bit of money and a staggering old place in the Cotswolds, mostly sixteenth century and quite unspoilt. The old banqueting hall has been preserved in statu quo; they have a quartet in the musicians’ gallery at dinner.’
‘God,’ said Joy, ‘I’d rather be Scotch and have bagpipes going round with the porridge.’
‘Scots, child.’ He still had to correct her occasionally. ‘Or Scottish. I’ve cabled back to Archie that he must dine with us when he can get away from his guests. The Governor will be there, I expect; Archie always knows everyone wherever he goes. We’ll go ashore when I’ve had my siesta. I can’t face this heat before sundown. I don’t know how you can stand there in that crude glare, and I know you shouldn’t. Your skin will be like tooled leather before you’re thirty, Joy, do you know that? I deprecate the passing of the parasol.’
‘Don’t forget I hardly had any sun for twenty years in the slot of the Porto,’ Joy said, and saw him frown. He never liked to talk about it. ‘Can’t we go ashore as soon as we anchor? I want to see everything.’
‘Archie will take you round to-morrow, I daresay. He’ll know all the places worth seeing. Now to-night, I should wear your white sharkskin dress if I were you, and do your hair á la Tudor page, there’s a good girl, simple and smooth.’ Archie and his father preferred their women, like their horses, sleek and clean-cut. ‘And don’t let me see you in that pearl choker effect. Heaven knows where you – ’
‘Oh look, Uncle Roddie!’ interrupted Joy, with a little shriek that made him wince. ‘There’s a battleship – a cruiser, isn’t it? – and two, no three destroyers!’
‘You’ll see plenty of those,’ he said dryly. ‘Malta being a Naval base.’ He moved, as the ship swung round and moved his patch of shade.
‘There’s lots of them,’ Joy babbled on, ‘and look at all those little boats skittering among them. Oh, I’d like to be in one of those. Uncle Roddie, couldn’t we get one and go and see one of the ships? I’ll go and ask the wireless Johnny which they are. You must know a Captain or an Admiral or someone we could go and see; you always know someone.’
He was flattered, as she meant him to be, but he said: ‘I doubt it. Anyway, we’re not traipsing round the Fleet this afternoon. It’s much too hot, and you’ll look a wreck by this evening. No, don’t go off now, there’s the lunch gong.’
‘Can’t you wait five minutes while I just go to the wireless cabin? Go and have a drink.’
‘I don’t want one. It’s Saturday and there’ll be caviare, had you forgotten? We’ll have Vodka with it.’
Joy followed him obediently to the saloon, where they were among the first, as usual. No one but Rodney bothered to be punctual for meals at sea, where time had no significance. She was glad to get his lunch over early, and him packed off to his shaded, fan-cooled cabin. She had her own ideas about the afternoon.
When Rodney, wanting an aspirin, sent a steward to find Joy and learned that she had gone ashore an hour ago with the tennis champion, he was as livid as he would allow himself to be in this heat. The girl was getting out of hand; she would have to be pulled up. He had never, in all their association, stooped to reminding her of what she had been and what he had made her. He sometimes felt like it, but he had his code, the same code that let him make a second loan without reminding the borrower of a first still unpaid. These scruples were wasted on Joy, who had lived for too long under the jungle law of the underprivileged, which could not afford such codes. With her, no weapons were barred; it was just a question of what you could get away with.
He could not rest any longer. He put on buckskin shoes and a Panama hat and went ashore to look for her. Malta in a windless June was unbearably hot. Rodney went round in a pungent taxi to all the best hotels and bars and shops, but of course he did not find Joy, who was nowhere near any of them.
When Rodney got back to the Queen Anne, Joy was sitting by herself in the bar, with a drink waiting for him. ‘I thought you’d like one before you change,’ she said seraphically. ‘You don’t deserve it though. You are mean, going ashore without me when you said you weren’t going to.’
‘I’ve been looking for you, you hypocrite, and you know it.’ Rodney lowered himself into a chair in a solid lump of sticky flesh. He hated the feel of himself when he was hot. He was not flushed, because his face never reddened; he was simply melting like a pale candle.
‘I?’ The deep blue of Joy’s eyes was startling when she opened them wide. ‘I haven’t been ashore. You said not to.’
‘A steward told me he’d seen you go off with John Marlow. You know I don’t like his reputation. They say he was disqualified at Aix for getting mixed up in some unsavoury business.’
‘Johnny? My darling uncle, he’s the most innocent thing, far more so than some of your society wolves. I wasn’t with him. Those stewards would say anything sooner than nothing, because they think you’re good for a fat tip. I’ve been browning myself on the sun de
ck.’
‘I looked for you there.’
I was the other side of a lifeboat, because I hadn’t much on.’ Glibly she lied, not so much because it mattered if Rodney knew she had been round the back streets and cafés with the Casanova of the courts, but because she quite enjoyed lying, and Rodney was temptingly easy to deceive.
On the way to the party, he campaigned a little more for Archie Drake. When she saw him, Joy was surprised to find that the most eligible young man in England really was quite eligible after all.
Archie was tall and muscular with blunt features that had no quirks or oddities. He had a pleasant mellow voice with no maddening catch phrases, and he neither hummed-and-hawed nor prattled. He was quite natural because he was quite sure of himself. His father was a spatter-veined, hook-nosed old soldier with skin that hung in wattles and one glass eye set slightly crooked, so that you were not sure if he were looking at you or not.
He looked a lot at Joy, however, and seemed to like what he saw. Archie agreed with him on this in a quiet, casual way, and Joy did not discourage him, although she knew quite well what Rodney was planning. One might do worse.
When the party was thinning and Archie had seen the Governor safely away, he and Joy sat in a corner and talked a lot. She liked him, but the trouble with this kind of man was that there would never be anything you could do for him. He could do a lot for you, of course, but Joy had had more than a year of that and knew the tedium of dependency. It would be nice to have someone dependent on her for a change. But Archie would never need encouraging or comforting or backing up in some life-long ambition, to jubilate together when he achieved it. Everything he was going to be he was already.
On the other hand, you would run no risks with a man like this. You could find a secure niche, a solid background for the rest of your life, and never have to worry any more about who you really were.
Archie took it for granted that they would spend to-morrow morning together before his ship sailed. Because he wanted it, he scarcely bothered to ask Joy, but she fell in quite readily with his capable, pleasant plans.
‘We’ll see a lot of each other in England, of course,’ he was saying. ‘You’ll have to come and stay at Astwick. You’ll love my mother, and it’s rather fun, the old place. You ride, don’t you?’
‘Yes,’ lied Joy. Rodney had failed her there, because he hated horses himself. He would have to have her taught before she went to stay with the Drakes. She looked across the room to see whether he were appreciating her progress.
‘I’d love to come,’ she was telling Archie. ‘I’ve heard so much about the Hall. It sounds – ’ She suddenly stood up, and her heart gave a great bounce. Before she could stop herself, she was moving towards the door with the beatific smile of a sleepwalker, for there, coming in with a crowd of other naval officers, was Billy Moore.
Rodney and Archie and his father had dinner together at the Club and tried to pretend that nothing had gone wrong.
Joy and Billy had dinner in an Italian restaurant five miles along the coast where no one could possibly find them. Joy could never be glad enough that she had said it. If she had waited, and given herself time to wonder and doubt whether Billy wanted it too, she might not have whispered, when they had been talking for barely two minutes: ‘Take me away, Bill. Let’s go somewhere by ourselves.’
‘Honestly?’ His grin was all over his face, and embraced the whole of life, just as in the old days, when something made him feel that life was good. ‘I was afraid you were all buttoned up here.’
‘It doesn’t matter.’ Archie was over by the bar getting drinks for the other officers. When Rodney saw joy going towards the cloakroom, he said: ‘Yes, go and preen your hair, there’s a lamb. It’s parting itself at the back.’
Joy got her coat and Billy borrowed someone’s car, and everything was perfect, from the time when the vast signora said naturalmente they could have fritto misto, to the moment when Billy stopped the car on the road home by the sea and said exaggerated things that Joy let herself believe. When he kissed her, it didn’t matter whether it were true or not that for years he had thought of her and wanted her and longed for an evening like this.
This evening was true, and there would be to-morrow with the whole day together, and when the sun went down, another evening like this. He was coming to England in the autumn. She would see him often. She could ask him to the flat; she could ask the whole Moore family to the flat if she wanted to. At last she had her chance. It must have been for this that she had listened and learned and swallowed her pride, and worked and been bored with Rodney; so that she could at last meet Billy as an equal, and hear him say that he loved her.
He took her back to the Queen Anne, and a sailor told her as she came up the steps: ‘Sir Rodney left a message that you were to see him in his cabin as soon as you came aboard.’
‘Thank you,’ said Joy, and turned to wave at Billy, saluting her from the picket boat below. Would his sailors think it funny if she blew him a kiss? Before she could make up her mind, the little boat had turned like a taxi, dug in its heels with a churning of phosphorescence and shot away towards the lights of the Fleet.
‘You didn’t get my message then?’ Rodney asked at breakfast with studied calm.
Joy had avoided his eye up to now and she still kept hers on her grapefruit. ‘What message?’
‘To come and see me when you got back.’
‘Oh that. Well, look, honestly, Uncle Rodney, why should I? I mean, anyone would think you were a headmaster, with all this “See me in my study” business.’ His silence made her nervous. ‘Anyway, you were snoring,’ she blustered, ‘and I wasn’t so late. Why shouldn’t I go out with my own friends sometimes? I looked for you to tell you where I was going, but you were in the Gents. I couldn’t help it; I don’t see what harm I’ve done.’
She protested too much. Roddy let her finish and then said mildly: ‘I never said you had done harm. I haven’t said a word about it yet. What’s all the bluster about?’
‘Well … well, I thought perhaps you might be annoyed, because we’d fixed dinner with the Drakes.’
‘Then why did you go? I’ll have some of the bran crispbread, Steward, if you please.’
Joy said no more. As she finished her breakfast, she thought of what she was going to say next. In an hour’s time she would see Billy; nothing and nobody else mattered. She had twenty-four hours, unless by some miracle she could persuade Uncle Rodney to stay in Malta and pick up the Queen Anne on her way home. She was moonstruck enough to think even this possible.
Rodney took another piece of bran crispbread, and Joy pushed back her chair. ‘I’ve finished,’ she said. ‘Do you mind if I go? Someone’s fetching me at ten, for a picnic’
‘I thought Archie Drake was taking you round the harbour in a speedboat?’
‘Oh, we hadn’t fixed anything definite; he won’t mind. You don’t either, do you, if I’m not back till late? Think, you’ll be able to rest here all day in the cool. I know you don’t want to drag round Malta with me.’ She got it all out quickly.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Rodney, ‘you won’t be able to go.’
‘Why not?’ said Joy, ‘why shouldn’t I?’
‘If you’d come to my cabin last night as I asked, I’d have told you then. As it is, you’ll have to pack this morning. The Dominican sails at midday.’
‘I know it does. The Drakes are going on it.’
‘So are we.’ He raised a hand againt her gasp of protest. ‘The heat here has quite decided me not to go on with the trip. I’ve never known the Mediterranean in June so fulminating. I had quite a peculiar little turn last night after you’d left the Club. I wasn’t going to worry you with that,’ he smiled bravely, ‘but a doctor who was there said he thought it madness to go on to the Adriatic. So Archie, like the good chap he is, has wangled us a couple of state rooms in the Dominican. He’s got some pull with the chairman of the line. I told you he knew everyone, didn’t I?’
> It was like Seacombe all over again. Joy, crying in her cabin, felt as despairing as when she had cried in the train going home with her mother and father, snatched away from Billy, unable to explain to him. He would never understand this. He could never see why other people could not sweep aside obstacles with the same careless ease as he did himself.
When Rodney thought she was packing, she had waited at the top of the gangway to tell Billy when he came in the picket boat, but someone came to tell her that he had signalled from his ship that he would be an hour late. She would be on board the Dominican by then. She asked them to signal back, but how could one explain with winking lights?
When she tried to send a cable from the Dominican, the wireless officer was an unfriendly stranger, who said that he had a pile to send already and hers must wait. So it was a long time before she got Billy’s answer, a silly, joking answer, which was worse than an angry one. It did not even show whether he minded.
A steward knocked, and she hid her blotched face as he brought in carnations from Archie. ‘Hope the headache is better,’ said his note. ‘Shall wait for you in the bar at seven.’
She really had got a headache by now. She usually gave herself one if she cried. She tore up Archie’s note and put herself to bed. Wait for her in the bar indeed! This was all his fault for sucking up to Uncle Rodney by encouraging him to be neurotic and then getting him the cabins. He need not think he was going to get her that way.
She stayed in bed for three days. ‘Clever puss, aren’t you?’ said Rodney. ‘You’ve struck just the right line. Archie is so used to getting any girl he wants that he’s intrigued by the unattainable. He’s getting almost anxious enough to spoil his bridge. Give it one more day, then emerge deliciously pale and recline somewhere swaddled in rugs. You’ll see, he’ll dance round you with drinks and delicate morsels and gusty sighs.’
‘He needn’t bother,’ said Joy. ‘I don’t want him. The hungry English spinsters are welcome to him. Don’t be an ass, Uncle Roddie; my head really is bad. It throbs all over the place.’ I sometimes wonder if that picture did more damage than they thought.
Joy and Josephine Page 32