‘If you will pardon my saying so, young man—you’re an idiot! I shall speak to Mr Grayson!’
‘I’ve spoken to him already, sir,’ Ernest said.
‘When your money’s spent, you’ll soon wish you were back,’ he warned conventionally.
But he never did wish it.
He continued trying to puzzle out what he should do with his life, and he went back to Mrs Clarkson, who wisely said, over her teapot, and in a house smelling of new paint, which she was not long to enjoy, why worry, why force things, let things happen by themselves, you could sometimes safely do that. She said he should take stock of his rosier position, financially, and not be pushed feebly into unsuitable careers. So he took stock of his rosier position. He first of all tried very hard to decide why he had become a cat-burglar, and in such an exotic, superior way—he realized what the profession would think of his attitude towards the gems he got away with, typical old school tie, no doubt they would call it—and he decided that whatever had caused such a lapse, the thieving days were over, whether they were highbrow or not. It didn’t occur to him that in the same way that it was hard to give up drugs, or drink, or even smoking Churchman Number One, it might be hard to give up any other exotic habits. And one night in Richmond he saw the top window of a large house slightly open. He shinned up a drain pipe and went systematically through the house while the owners were at dinner. He didn’t take anything, because they hadn’t anything worth while, and because he liked the sound of a girl’s laughter. He went on home, via a second drain pipe, and resumed taking stock of his position. He pondered his case all night, feeling a little depressed, and continued taking stock all next day.
Most unfortunately, he took stock of it on top of a bus going to Kew Gardens. There was a girl sitting next to him with glossy fair hair. She was utterly unlike Violet, who had, however, taught him something, and before they entered the high gates of Kew Gardens he knew that her name was Celia. When they entered the Tropical House, she wanted to climb the green spiral stairs and she said all the boys she really liked called her Seal. Ernest forgot to take special note of her use of the plural in her reference to men, and could think of nothing but her glossy hair done up in a green net, and her long legs as they went up the spiral stairs. They were lovely legs. She was a long, lovely creature and only twenty-one, which was another thing he forgot to ponder upon. But he knew he was at the age which loved ‘youth’, even when it was sometimes ugly. He was getting on for thirty, and he now felt he knew all there was to know about what the pictures called ‘dames’. At the top of the iron stairs she stood looking marvellous under a huge palm leaf, and he said he imagined himself with her in the jungle, protecting her from tigers, and coming back to their tent at dusk. They lit fags up there; she’d been brought up on Players, and she said she hoped he didn’t think she was the kind who let boys take liberties with her, she’d been educated at great expense at Cheltenham. He knew already, in his subconscious, that she was what was called ‘a little beneath him’, despite her alleged visit to Cheltenham (which turned out to be untrue), but these were modern times and all that sort of thing belonged to the really dead past. He didn’t even yet know he was a person who did things he only thought he wanted to do. As long as a girl didn’t actually drop her aitches, it was all right; even if she did, it was still all right, because you could teach her the most attractive way to pronounce things. (One did not include Violet.) They blew smoke at an old spider that had come out to examine the day’s prospects, and he noticed she had an attractive giggle. It was young. She said:
‘I don’t know why I talked to you on the bus. I don’t know why I went for a ride on a bus. But they drive me balmy at home sometimes.’
He laughed.
She said it was a funny thing that hardly any families seemed to get on, and she said, rather cleverly, that family quarrels were so bitter because the parties knew so much about each other.
‘Yes,’ he said he supposed.
She seemed to know her subject.
He wondered about her, apart from her legs. His love adventures had not been very glamorous, so much as experimental, usually involving cash, which was sordid but gentlemanly. He had grown cynical about it.
She enquired even then about his ambitions, but he was dark about them, merely saying he wasn’t a chap who was bursting to be a famous explorer or some other thing. ‘Perhaps I ought to have been born with money!’ he commented.
‘What would you have done with it?’
‘Nothing. Till I died. Then I’d have left it to somebody else.’
She stared at him curiously. He decided she was the homely sort, and he decided that her eyes were honest and her chin firm. He was hopelessly wrong in all three guesses. He would so like to have at least been good at judging character, if he wasn’t good at anything else. (Well, except being a cat-burglar, which seemed terribly freakish in her presence, yet still darkly attractive.) They met a number of times, both declaring that their first meeting had been romantic. They hadn’t ‘got off’ with each other. That was unthinkable. They frequently returned to Kew Gardens and the green stairs and their affair grew apace. Indeed, it grew at a tremendous pace. Without quite admitting it, he grew a little alarmed by it, and he was pledged to marry her almost without realizing it. She’d told her mother he had money. Somehow or other it seemed that the moment he slipped the engagement ring on her long finger her good points started to recede in an astonishing manner. Kew Gardens receded at once, they never went there at all. He had moved into a small flat she liked in Acton, of all peculiar places. In spite of her alleged taste for Cheltenham, and his for Hammersmith Broadway, she seemed to adore Acton, which was vaguely near Shepherd’s Bush and was noted chiefly for its police-station and its road accidents. It was nothing, of a Saturday night, to hear blood-curdling screams in the main road, and to dash out and find bodies sprawling around with torn thighs, and the news, ‘the beggars just drove on without stoppin’, they ought to be ’orsewhipped!’ Seal, however, thought it was ‘life’, and she loved rushing out with blankets, bringing them back soaked in blood. ‘Take the plates out of the sink, Ernest. Fractured base of skull.’ As for Acton police-station, she caustically thought it was ‘a beautiful piece of work, and so does Mother’.
Mr Ernest Bisham’s first mother-in-law had been an enchanting piece of work. She was early resolved to be every possible help to her daughter’s marriage, if not her son-in-law’s, and it could hardly be denied that she made every effort saying, when they got married, where the furniture ought to be put, and saying, when the crash arrived, where it emphatically ought not to be put. ‘On no account let him have it,’ she bawled at Seal from out in the road—she had a most positive voice, he remembered so well, none of the neighbours ever missing anything. ‘What’s he done to deserve our consideration, that’s what I should like to know?’
Retiring, at that stage, to a pub called the ‘Bull and Dragon’, situated as far as possible from Acton, somewhere near Tower Bridge, Ernest had contemplated the situation at his leisure, wondering how on earth sensible human beings could get themselves into such a sorry mess with both eyes wide open from the start. But, looking back, he supposed both his eyes had been full of her legs on the green stairs at Kew. And then, at the same time, there was the crass stupidity of dear old Bess.
The unexpected appearance of Bess in his life was one more example of life’s freakishness. He had never heard of her and it was a considerable shock to learn that he had a sister ten years older than himself. His father had never breathed so much as a word, and old Mrs Clarkson, who knew all about the family affairs, had never told him anything. She certainly knew because when the letter came for him, from Bess herself, announcing her existence, ‘You weren’t at Father’s funeral, why not? Hatred I suppose—but write me a letter,’ he shoved it under Mrs Clarkson’s nose and cried: ‘What on earth does this mean? She signs herself “Your Loving Sister, Bess”!’
Mrs Clarkson peeked guiltily
under her spectacles and said, well, dear, as a matter of fact she’d sworn a sacred oath never to speak of Miss Bess.
‘Why on earth not?’
‘Because I’m a devout Catholic. And a sacred promise is a sacred promise. It isn’t like C of E. Have I ever said a word about your dear, dead mother?’
‘No. But you might have said a word about my dear, live sister. My father has been dead some little time, after all!’
But Mrs Clarkson said it was different if you were a Catholic. And she said it didn’t matter now anyhow, because he could meet his sister that night in the Cromwell Road.
It was an unusual sensation telling Seal he couldn’t meet her that night because he had to go and meet a sister he had never heard of. He went along to the Vanderbilt Hotel in the Cromwell Road. There, he was astonished to meet not only his sister but various members of his family who had been in hiding for years. They appeared to have taken refuge in or near The Wash, for most of the embarrassed conversation seemed to include The Wash. Bess was the only person who interested him in the little gathering, chiefly because she was so uncannily like his father, and it fascinated him. There was a pull between them, and, from the moment he admitted he was contemplating matrimony, she never let go. She took one look at Seal—over tea at Harrod’s—and closed down like a clam. Two hours later she telephoned him feverishly and said: ‘Ernest, don’t be such a fool!’ After that she said every day for a month that he ought to remember he was a Bisham. ‘Surely breeding counts for something, Ernest, even in these days?’ If there was one way, thought Ernest, to irritate a man into a silly marriage, Bess took it.
CHAPTER VII
NOT that it was any excuse. Ernest went into his first marriage with reasonable enthusiasm and optimism. Any doubts he may have had—and he did have several—he cast to the winds the moment they got clear of the registry office at Hammersmith. Wedding guests were a curious motley, with people like Mrs Clarkson mixed up with people like Bess, who had carefully brought the most appalling atmosphere with her, adding it to the equally careful one brought by the bride’s mother. After the ceremony, the bride and bridegroom vanished with all speed, having earlier on declined any form of communal celebration, and drove at a great pace in Mr Bisham’s new Citröen to Brighton. Seal had been as determined on Brighton as Acton; Brighton was the only possible place for a honeymoon, and you had to go to the Ship Hotel. And Ernest was so pleased to have money and a wife, even if his plan of life was vague, that he agreed gladly to anything she said. The first night went with a swing until midnight, when it was unromantically marred by the bridegroom having the most chronic toothache. The light was still on and he sat up and exclaimed: ‘You’ve broken one of my teeth and it hurts like anything.’ He started to pace up and down the bedroom holding his lower jaw. Almost at once, Seal showed her true colours. She said, well, of all things, to go and have toothache at such a time, what sort of a man was he, and blaming her, too, in that feeble way? She sat up in her very loose peach pyjamas and frowned unhelpfully. Ernest was beyond argument, due to the pain, and after a bit of a row he cried, ‘All right, all right, but the point is we must at once find a dentist. Please ring the bell.’
She flounced out of the double bed and crossly rang the bell. ‘Nobody will come at this time of night,’ she said, cross.
Mr Bisham continued prancing up and down the room with his hands tightly about his jaw.
‘We’ve got to do something,’ he cried. ‘I can’t stick this—’
‘I can’t think why you didn’t have your teeth seen to before our honeymoon,’ she said, interrupting him. ‘Instead of during it. You must have known they were faulty.’
Through the cloud of pain he managed to see her expression, and the expression of his marriage prospects. When he asked her if she had any iodine, she said he could hardly expect a bride to have thought of iodine, any more than expecting her to tour a dentist with them. He had the feeling she wasn’t awfully kind in character, but he said in a muffled voice: ‘Look, ring the bell again, will you? I shall go out of my mind!’ She again crossed the room sharply and nearly pulled the bell out of its socket. As she did so, a waiter knocked and put his head in and said politely that he was afraid intoxicating liquor could not be served to customers after midnight.
So then Mr and Mrs Ernest Bisham started looking for aspirin. Two consequential-looking gentlemen in the next bedroom answered their knock by opening their door two inches and saying was it the police? ‘No, aspirin,’ said Mr and Mrs Bisham.
They were obliged with aspirin, but by morning the bridegroom was completely exhausted, physically and spiritually. Even after seeing a dentist, on whose doorstep the pain ceased instantly in the usual infuriating way, he was exhausted by the decision that Seal was the very last girl in the world he ought to have married, just as Bess had said. As Bess said, he needed the homely type, if possible with a spot of beauty thrown in, but it wouldn’t have mattered much. Celia had just an artificial and sexual beauty of face and body, but even this faded the moment anything went wrong. For the rest, she smoked like a furnace, liked expensive clothes, adored neat gin and thought going to church was ‘just balmy, nowadays’. Every room she entered became immediately littered with things she had just bought, many of which she forgot to use at all or even undo. She just liked spending. She didn’t like the necklace he gave her, despite its beauty, simply and solely because it only cost two-and-six. He tried repeatedly to discover why she so adored Acton, but never arrived at any conclusion. It was just one of those things. We all had some little weaknesses. Ernest Bisham had always recognized that; and he recognized it as he sat thinking about his latest escapade and how much he would like to present Marjorie with the pearl necklace in his drawer. He thought again, in self defence: ‘And why should famous announcers be exempt from human frailty? The risk is their own and it is they who face the consequences—if there are any.’ Even announcers were human beings and had lived before ever being announcers. Would the public really object if it knew the double life he led? Going downstairs, he gave a little knock on the door of the little room Marjorie liked to consider her own. He thought: ‘Poor old Seal simply hated it if I knocked on her door! She thought it was indecent!’ What cards would she have played, he wondered, if she’d ever guessed he would make a name for himself? What did she think now, when she listened in? It was quite amusing! Did she switch off—or switch on?
Well, she never had guessed. She had been much too busy in her own fashion to guess anything. They returned to Acton to live the kind of life which those peace years made so inevitable to rich and poor alike, with the difference that the rich were bored and the poor desperate for work. There was no work, and anybody who said there was, if only a man took the trouble to look for it, just wanted kicking. Ernest was fortunate in having some capital on which to subsist, and he fought Celia hard in order to keep the bulk of it intact. Her mother said he was mean and the whole affair drove him frantic, though he regaled himself from time to time with his secret hobby, sometimes going to the country for it, and more often in London districts. His greatest thrill was in thinking what his mother-in-law would say to him if he did get caught; the excitement was worth it, if only for that! He only took gems of rare beauty and he never robbed from the poor-rich or the nice-rich. He could always tell from the feel of a place what the people were like. When the papers tended to indicate that he had made an error of judgment, he returned the property through the post, taking meticulous care about such delicate points as finger-prints, paper clues and postmarks. He amused himself by a continual study of diamonds and stones, as well as safes and locks. He did this because it fascinated him. He also took lessons in revolver shooting, not because he would ever shoot anybody, but because it seemed a proper part of his hobby. You might as well do a thing properly if at all. Seal thought him just queer. ‘You and that gun,’ she would mutter. Or, ‘You and those gems’; she meant illustrations of gems. ‘Fat lot I ever see of any!’ She thought him extraor
dinary over shoes, having so many different pairs, with what she called ‘stupidly different rubber patterns’. Seal’s hobby was to run up debts, which she did with greatest of ease, unless the shop owner was a woman. Men fell for her like flies; it wasn’t even a hobby. Women gave her dirty looks automatically, but men’s faces broke out like May blossoms the moment her quick footsteps were heard in the distance. The pink block of Acton flats, where they lived on the seventh floor, was being constantly rung up by the flats’ porter to know if Mrs Bisham was in. The porter had long since fallen for Seal, so he liked to protect her from approaching tradesmen. But if Mr Bisham was in, he sent the tradesmen right up. The porter often came up to see if the piano was tinkling, and it meant Mr Bisham was in. Ernest never knew what he had done to offend, but he felt sure Seal had double-crossed him somewhere. The porter looked at him as if he was a pimp.
As sordid weeks grew into sordid months, he started to do a bit of serious thinking. He did his thinking at the piano. He had a natural aptitude for the piano and had learnt a good deal at school. But he was not ambitious about it. He often wished: ‘Why haven’t I got a career like the piano?’ Yet, surely, everybody wasn’t born with a terrific careerist-complex?
Then it suddenly dawned on him that Seal had been unfaithful to him for ages.
A day or two later, in what he thought was a fit of pique, he brought a blonde to the flat. She was apparently an amateur, but he got talking to her in a local pub and she seemed mildly amusing in the conversational way. When she suddenly informed him who Celia was sleeping with during the daytime, as a change from sleeping with her husband at night, he started to prick up his ears. It seemed that this woman was a friend of Celia’s, and also of the man’s, because, as a matter of fact, the man was her own husband. Staggered, yet not really as surprised as he thought he felt, Ernest ordered two more double Haigs.
A Voice Like Velvet Page 7