by Francis King
As Peter fumbled with the rose and clip, she looked up through his raised arms and her eyes met Thomas’s. Then both of them looked away. ‘ We’re going to a dance. That’s why I’m dressed up like this.’
‘It’s two, three years since I last saw girls in evening clothes.’ He gave the words what seemed to be an accusatory emphasis. Peter, having by now finished with the rose, swung round and stared at him.
‘I’ll go now.’ Thomas hurried to the door.
‘Oh, why not wait for us?’ Christine protested. ‘ We’re almost ready. We might even be able to give you a lift.’
He opened the door and turned. He shook his head. ‘Thank you.’ He gave a small bow first to her and then to Peter. ‘I’m happy that you have let me see you – and will let me play.’
They listened to him, boots thunderous, racing down the stairs.
Peter looked at Christine, his eyebrows raised. ‘Well! I didn’t much like the tone in which he spoke to you. Are you really sure it’s wise –?’
‘Oh, don’t be silly!’’
‘Well, I suppose you know your own business. But do be careful!’
‘Where did you meet him?’ Noisily Peter changed into top gear as the MG lurched round a corner and then began to race up the Banbury Road.
‘Aren’t you going too fast? This isn’t the sort of weather for speeding.’
‘Where did you meet him?’
‘Meet who?’
‘That POW.’
‘I’ve told you. Michael knows him.’
‘Oh, yes, of course. He’s always been something of a Nazi-lover, hasn’t he?’
‘Michael? Certainly not. What on earth made you think that?’
‘Didn’t he help Hogg in the election against Lindsay?’
‘So what? A lot of people then believed that the war could be averted. That doesn’t mean that they were pro-German.’
‘I wonder how he’s been graded? Your POW.’
‘Graded?’
‘Well, they all have to be graded – A, B or C. Didn’t you know that? A for the ‘good’ ones, if such people really exist. B for the indeterminates. C for the confirmed Nazis. Surely you knew that?’
‘No. I’m afraid not.’ After a moment she added: ‘I doubt if Thomas is a confirmed Nazi.’
‘That dreadful German self-pity! No pity for others of course but so much for themselves. I kept coming across it when I was posted to Hamburg. Don’t you remember?’ He produced a crude parody of Thomas’s accent as he quoted: ‘It is two, three years since I last saw a girl in evening clothes.’
‘What’s wrong with that?’
He did not answer, smiling to himself as he peered through the windshield into the darkness. ‘Are you really going to let him use your piano?’
‘You heard me say he could. Any objections?’
‘None at all. But I just hope he doesn’t start making himself a nuisance. Some of them do, you know. You ask them in once and they start turning up every evening. You do one favour for them and they expect a dozen.’
‘Let’s stop talking about these Germans. Its becoming a bore.’
‘That’s fine by me.’ There was a long silence. ‘Tell me what exactly is the relationship between you and our hostess.’
‘My mother was her cousin.’
‘Then old Lord St Nesbitt must have been your mother’s uncle?’
‘No. Her father. My grandfather.’
‘Your grandfather! Oh, I hadn’t realised that. I met Dulcie St Nesbitt at the Crowboroughs last weekend. I wish I’d mentioned you to her.’ He pondered for a moment. ‘Then where do the Maxdales come in?’
‘They don’t. As far as I know. You really ought to buy yourself a copy of Debrett’s. Why all this interest in genealogy?’
‘Oh, I – I just wanted to get it all straight.’
‘You mean you just wanted to get me all straight. We do seem to have picked on the most tedious topics during this drive.’
‘Sorry?’
There was another long silence. Then, having turned his head to glance at her, he put a hand over hers. ‘You’re shivering. Aren’t you? The trouble with this car is that the wind gets into it as soon as one picks up any speed.’
‘I don’t feel all that cold.’
‘Not far to go now. Let me put my coat around you.’ With his left hand he reached back into the car for his overcoat. Tenderly, he then helped to wrap it around her, even though she had cried out ‘Oh, do keep your eyes on the road!’
‘You look marvellous, you know. No wonder that German stared and stared at you, his mouth agape.’
‘Rubbish!’
Of the ball, her first since the war had ended, Christine could afterwards remember little. Hands clasped her hand, cheeks were pressed against her cheek; voices shrieked or bellowed their welcomes or whispered their brief confidences; the room swung in a wide, glittering arc as Peter, an ostentatiously accomplished dancer, swept her around it. She was buoyant on no more than a single glass of champagne and her own excitement. ‘Oh, Peter, you dance beautifully! Wonderful! Wonderful! Oh, if only I could match you!’ The chandeliers bobbed and swayed, skirts swished and billowed out, and a passing earring caught the fight and became a momentary spark of fire. ‘Wonderful, wonderful,’ Christine repeated, as though to herself. The lights dimmed, the music from the little band changed, and innumerable couples glided and rustled over the vast octagonal floor, pausing, hesitating, melding and separating, while the music of the tango drifted out into the frosty night. ‘When I’m dancing with you, I can do things I can do with no one else.’
Eventually they were eating cold chicken and an old woman who had long ago been Lady Lavrington’s governess was saying to Christine: ‘It’s just as it all used to be in the days before the war. Miraculous.’ From a reticule made of jet beads that made it look as if it was encrusted with ants, she pulled out a handkerchief and held it to the tip of her nose. She sniffed and sniffed again. Was she about to cry or did she have a cold? ‘Things always seem to right themselves in the end,’ she continued. ‘I’m no longer the dreadful pessimist I was. I remember how after the Great War – ‘‘our war” as I like to call it – I thought that things at Branksome would never be the same again. But they were! And now look at this. And lovely Mark is engaged and …’ Her voice trailed off. Perhaps she had suddenly realised that it might be in bad taste to mention the tall, stiff Texan heiress with the wide mouth and suddenly dazzling smile, who had made possible the whole lavish occasion. Isn’t Lady Lavrington the most wonderful person?’ she substituted.
‘Yes. Wonderful.’ But Christine had always found her cousin bossy and self-centred.
Back in the ballroom, she realised that, for some unaccountable reason, the enchantment of that first hour had all at once dissipated for her. Involuntarily she yawned, a gloved hand to her mouth.
‘Tired already?’
She almost said, ‘No – bored.’ But instead she replied: ‘ Just a little. I’ve been slaving away all day at some …’ She broke off. It would be pointless to tell Peter about the Latin elegiacs for Mrs Dunne.
‘We’ll sit out the next one.’
‘I wonder what time it is.’
He looked at his watch. ‘Ten past twelve. One should never ask the time at a ball. Even if one’s Cinderella.’
When the music stopped, they walked in silence to the empty drawing room. Peter chose a dilapidated sofa, one of its arms heavily darned, in the shadow of a corner. But almost as soon as they had seated themselves he leapt up to examine a Reynolds portrait of a former Lady Lavrington.
‘I thought they’d sold her.’
‘That was the idea. Death duties.’
‘But now she’s had her reprieve? Trust Mark to make a good match. Or his mother to push him into one. They’re shrewd, those two.’
‘I think Mark’s very much in love with Karen. What man wouldn’t be?’
‘Oh, of course! That goes without saying!’ He gave a braying laugh.
‘Why do people so often judge other people’s motives by their own?’
Christine turned away from him, picking with a forenail at the darn on the sofa cover. All the things that had first attracted her to him – his sleek hair, his engaging smile, his well-shaped, well-fed body in its expensively tailored clothes, his air of relaxed self-confidence – now repelled her.
‘Something’s worrying you.’
‘Nothing’s worrying me.’
‘Tell me.’ He slipped an arm round her waist and placed his cheek, smelling faintly of Caron Pour Un Homme, against hers.
At the contact, she jumped up. ‘I’ve told you. Nothing’s worrying me. But I must go and powder my nose. I’ll only be a moment.’
In the heavily pocked glass in the bathroom, Christine saw that her rose had already begun to droop and threw it into a corner. Then for many seconds she stared at her own reflection, her hands resting on the marble sides of the huge, shallow basin. ‘Is that me? Is that really me?’ she silently asked herself, as so often when inspecting her face in a glass. She seemed to be staring at a stranger casually passed in a crowded street. Suddenly she could hear Thomas’s voice giving that dragging emphasis to his words: ‘It is two, three years since I last saw girls in evening clothes.’ She shuddered, but whether at the recollection or at the cold in the vast, high-ceilinged room, heated by no more than a rusty oil-stove in a distant corner, she could not have said.
‘Oh, Christine darling, I’m so glad to find you here! I wonder if you would be an angel and help me pin this shoulder-strap.’
It was one of Christine’s cousins, a girl of sixteen, in a pale pink dress with a blue sash, her coarse, fair hair held on either side with ribbons of a darker blue. Her eyes were brilliant; she could not stop laughing. ‘Oh, what a wonderful, wonderful dance! It’s like a celebration for having been lucky enough to be still alive after that ghastly war. There can’t have been anything like it since it started. Christine, have you ever seen such frocks? And such food! One would think rationing had ended. Not that I’ve been able to touch a scrap, I’ve felt far too excited for eating … Oh, hurry, hurry hurry!’ She began to shift impatiently under Christine’s hands. ‘Do you know Marcus Philipson?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Oh, I thought every undergrad knew him. He’s celebrated – or is it notorious? He’s President of the Bullingdon or one of those clubs. He dances like a dream. I wish I could dance as well. Lessons don’t seem to help much when I get on the floor.’
‘You were managing very well when last I saw you.’
‘Was I? Was I really? Marcus is such a perfectionist.’
‘There! I think that’s all right.’
‘Bless you!’ She hugged Christine, pressing her immature, trembling body against hers. Then she stood back for a moment, to gaze at her. ‘ Oh, you are beautiful! That’s what Marcus said. He said there were lots and lots of pretty girls around but you were one of the few really beautiful ones.’ She laughed. ‘He didn’t say I was a beautiful one too. The beast! For a while I was horribly jealous.’ She grabbed Christine’s hand, held it to her lips and kissed it. Then she was gone.
When Christine began to make her way back to the drawing room, a young man with a round, red, perspiring face and the kind of luxuriant moustache, looking as though it had been stuck on with glue, worn by RAF men during the war, emerged out of the shadows. ‘I wonder if you remember me?’
She smiled uncertainly.
‘No, you don’t. Why should you? I was in the same squadron as Ben Carey. The three of us once had a drink together in an Andover pub when you visited him.’
‘Oh, yes, of course! Of course I remember you! It’s confusing to see you out of uniform.’ But she had totally forgotten him, just as she had totally forgotten so much else of the flotsam and jetsam of those few last weeks before Ben’s death. ‘Your name is …?’
‘Bill. Maxwell.’
‘Yes, of course, of course! Hello, Bill.’
Laughing, he held out his hand, and she took it briefly in hers.
‘How about giving me a dance?’
The abrupt, breathless manner in which he put the invitation touched her. She thought of Peter, no doubt still awaiting her, and then impulsively put him out of her mind. ‘ I’d love that.’
‘I’m afraid I can’t dance all that well. One problem is my tin leg. But the other, greater problem is that I have no sense of rhythm. That’s what my teachers have always told me. And my partners too! I’m best in a slow foxtrot.
‘And I think that we’re – you’re – lucky. It is a slow foxtrot, isn’t it?’
He held her stiffly, at some distance from himself, as if concerned to have as little physical contact as possible. After they had shuffled back and forth for a while, he sighed: ‘This isn’t really my sport, I’m afraid. I’m far better at bridge or billiards.’
‘I think you’re doing really rather well.’ She smiled up at him, deciding that she liked his plain, irregular face bisected by that ludicrous moustache. ‘What became of you after those Andover days?’
‘Oh, I was shot down in the same show that poor old Ben got his chips.’ His body became even more stiff and awkward and then he trod on her foot. ‘Sorry! This must be absolute hell for you.’ He went on: ‘And then I was a prisoner for two years. And now I’m up at Wadham.’ He laughed. ‘An absolute ramp! I managed to wangle a grant out of the government to sit pretty for two years, pretending to read Eng Lit. So far I haven’t done a bally stroke. The truth is, I find it almost impossible to settle to anything. Having been a gentleman of leisure for all that time in Germany … Oh, sorry, sorry!’ Once again he had stepped on her foot.
‘Would you rather give this up and sit down?’
‘I’m sure you would. Yes, please.’ Releasing her, he pulled a handkerchief out of his trouser pocket and dabbed vigorously at his face, as though he were staunching blood. ‘Phew! I feel as if I’d run a mile.’
‘Let’s get away from all this noise and crush. It’ll be easier to talk.’
‘How about the terrace? It’s such a wonderful night. Yes?’
‘Wonderful? Are you crazy? We’ll freeze to death.’
‘I thought that if we got your wrap and my coat as well …’
‘Oh, all right then. But just for a short time.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘I think so. Yes, I am.’
Once they were outside the French windows, he fumbled in a pocket and produced a packet of Woodbines. ‘ How about a fag?’
‘I rarely smoke. And certainly not Woodbines.’
‘Mind if I do?’
‘Of course not. Someone once wrote a little poem – don’t ask me who. ‘‘Come into the garden, Maud, The black bat night is flown, And the scent of the woodbine is wafted abroad – But you’ll damn well smoke your own!”’
He gave a momentary, snorting laugh, clearly puzzled.
‘A take on Tennyson.’
‘Yes. Yes, of course.’ Clearly, he remained puzzled.
Christine slipped an arm through his. It seemed a perfectly natural thing to do, an act of comradeship, no more. The sky was clear, the stars hard and bright. The snow gave off an extravagant gleam in the forks of trees, in neat piles along the newly swept paths, and on the hooped rose-trellises.
‘What a change from in there. You know, I must confess, I wasn’t much enjoying things until I met you. I don’t really belong here, that’s the problem. Mark and I were in the same POW camp – otherwise he’d never have asked someone like me. There’s not a soul here I know. Except two other men from the camp – as much out of things as I am. When I tried out this DJ I thought it fitted me pretty well. Well, I know better now. It belongs to my scout.’
‘It looks fine.’ But she had already noticed that the sleeves and trouser legs were too long and the lapels dog-eared.
They continued their desultory chatter as they wandered about the neatly intersecting paths of the formal gard
en. Then suddenly he blurted out, apropos of nothing: ‘ I’m sorry about Ben. I can’t get him out of my mind.’
‘Well, neither can I.’
‘Of all that gang – he was the best for me. Oh, Christ, what a stupid, stupid business it was!’
All at once a leaden weight descended on them. They became silent. Then, as though by unspoken agreement, they began to hurry back to the house.
He helped her off with her wrap. ‘I’m afraid you’ve been chilled to the bone.’ Her teeth were chattering.
‘Oh, but I loved it. It was so beautiful – that whiteness everywhere, the glitter, the emptiness. But I’ve been very naughty. I had someone waiting for me.’
She looked around her. ‘Oh, there he is!’ She pointed.
With a hard, set face, Peter was dancing with one of Lady Lavrington’s many sisters, a gaunt spinster of over sixty, whose presence, even in a black lace evening dress, suggested a life of dogs, horses, Girl Guides and the Women’s Institute. Peter made it his business to dance well with even the most unwelcome of partners, so much surprising the old woman with the unaccustomed ease with which she was being waltzed round the floor that there was an expression of girlishly naïve pleasure on her weather-beaten face.
As the couple whirled past, Christine waved to him, but pique made him respond with a brief, blank stare followed by a turning away of his head. However, the dance over, he relented enough to come over and enquire: ‘What on earth became of you? I waited and waited …’
‘Sorry, sorry. I ran into one of Ben’s old chums. They were at Andover together – the same squadron. Let me introduce …’
‘You might at least have come to tell me. You knew I’d be waiting and looking.’
‘I’m afraid it was my fault,’ Bill interrupted. ‘ I’m sorry.’
‘Oh, it doesn’t matter.’ But the tone made it clear that it did. He turned to Christine. ‘Shall we dance?’
‘Yes, but first let me just introduce –’
But Bill was already moving off, with an embarrassed smile and a brief raising of his left hand in farewell.
Not a word passed between Peter and Christine during the dance. She felt slack and heavy as automatically she followed him. At the end they faced each other on the emptying dance floor. ‘Well, that’s that,’ he said.