‘This is good,’ she said at last. ‘You’re letting yours get cold. I found them through the headmistress of her school. I am on the Education Committee. She said Christine was the cleverest girl they had ever had.’
It was a principle of Chatty’s to believe everything he was told, but now the very fish on his plate seemed opposed to him. It had been served on the bone and he hesitated to put his knife to it for fear of what he would find inside. He moved his mind to Paris. He saw a heavy black sweater, a pair of twisted stockings, a student’s notebook on a café table.
‘I can’t believe it,’ said Chatty. ‘Hundreds of girls leave home, I know … They turn up in this place …’
‘The London house is sold, the bailiffs have the pictures. Ronnie is at home with us. He has left her—thank God.’ ‘Oh dear,’ said Chatty.
‘The film,’ said Rhoda, ‘was her last throw. In the last ten years she has run through more than £100,000 of Ronnie’s money,’ said Rhoda. ‘One hundred thousand.’
Rhoda changed before Chatty’s eyes. The twined leafy branches that had seemed to frame the pensive face of the rural botanist, dissolved. He saw instead the representative of a huge family trust.
‘Where is she now?’ he said.
‘In a nursing home,’ she snapped at him. ‘I know where I’d put her!’
Chatty put down his knife and fork. He could not bear the sad colour of the fish.
‘Poor Christine,’ he said looking at it.
‘Poor Christine!’ said Rhoda loudly, indeed addressing the club. The quiet oval face became square and the country skin flushed to a dark red. ‘Poor Ronnie, you mean. She has ruined him.’
‘They were rather going it, of course,’ said Chatty. ‘I suppose Ronnie knew what he was doing. What does he say?’
‘He knew nothing until ten days ago. Nothing at all about her. Lies from the beginning to the end.’
And when she said, ‘Lies,’ Rhoda shouted.
The customers of The Spangle looked up and glanced at one another with joy. A row! That shout was in the genuine tradition of the club. Everyone was at home. At such moments the quarrelling parties usually called for more drink. Les stepped behind the bar ready to get it. Rhoda corrected herself.
‘Lies,’ she said quietly. ‘Pure invention.’
‘Ronnie must have known,’ Chatty said. ‘How did he find out?’
‘He didn’t. I did. Ronnie knew nothing, absolutely nothing. I had had my suspicions when he brought her down to stay before they were married; I couldn’t stand her delivery.’
Chatty raised the bottle to Rhoda’s glass and he filled his own.
‘It took time,’ said Rhoda. ‘You’ve known her longer than any of us,’ she said, ‘did she ever say or do …’
She stopped. She saw Chatty’s face, so rakishly marked by the lines of his illnesses, smooth out and another face set very hard upon it. She was going to accuse him next. The pursuit of truth was going too far. Rhoda’s voice had lost its note of moral beauty. He was thinking of the postscripts to her note: ‘The name of the Professor is Ducros.’ She had been hunting then.
‘Mr. Chatterton,’ she said. ‘I love my brother. He is everything to me. He always will be. We have always been close all our lives since we were children. He is something very rare-a good man. I would die for him. I knew I was right about that girl. He is easily deceived. It isn’t the money. I hate what she has done to him. I love my brother more than anything in the world.’
How many times Chatty had heard the word ‘love’ spoken at The Spangle by girls with globes of tears hanging in their eyes, by girls with their teeth set, by girls with their mouths twisted by rage. He patted their hands, told their fortunes, made up love affairs of his own-generally the most successful way of soothing them. He had the sad story of the girl who was in a Swiss sanatorium with him; they had both lost a lung. Such affectionate creatures all these girls were! They forgot their rages when they heard this and, looking at him with contented superstition, as if he were a talisman, their eyes cleared, glanced around the room and began their eternal quest once more.
But Rhoda was not in their case. She gazed at him, not asking for help, but with the self-possession of one born for a single passion. In twenty years’ time that look would be unalterably there. She not only loved; she was avenged. She had not given up until she had got her brother back. Chatty wished that victory in love would look more becoming.
‘It is extraordinary, I agree, and I am sure if you say so, it is true,’ said Chatty.
‘Every word,’ said Rhoda.
‘And a hundred thousand pounds is a lot of money.’
‘It’s not only the money,’ she said.
‘Well, I don’t see really, if you think about it, what harm has been done. Ronnie was having the time of his life. He obviously adored her …’
‘He was tricked.’
‘… buying her houses, taking her round, enjoying a splash, showering her with Renoirs and hats. With a brain like hers she might still be sitting on the steps of the British Museum eating a sandwich out of a paper bag. He must have liked it. Quite frankly she isn’t a beauty. Ronnie created her.’
‘She deceived him.’
‘I think he knew,’ said Chatty. ‘I expect he’d been bored up to then. Boredom makes you close your eyes and take the plunge.’
‘She’s such a snob. That accent!’ said Rhoda.
‘Pedantic,’ he said. ‘Scholars often are. Anyway one gets used to accents in the theatre.’
He saw he was annoying her.
‘It’s really a fairy tale isn’t it?’ he said. ‘Ronnie waved a wand.’
For a moment he thought she was going to lean across the table and hit him. He sat back and recited:
‘The Owl and the Pussy Cat went to sea
In a beautiful sea-green boat.
They took some honey and plenty of money
Wrapped up in a five pound note.’
The poem was too much for her. A tear dropped down her cheek.
‘You’ve got the line wrong,’ she said, struggling against the pain. ‘It was a pea-green boat.’
‘It was all those scholarships that gave her away. I traced them back,’ she said bitterly.
The situation became too clear for Chatty. He did not wish to see, too distinctly, the good woman who in a passion of jealousy had hunted her sister-in-law down. He was disturbed by a wish that Christine and not Rhoda were sitting before him. He gave a number of dry coughs, but he could not cough the wish away.
‘Diana,’ Chatty called the waitress, an overworked girl who had the habit of keeping a cigarette burning on a saucer by the kitchen hatch, ‘if you’ll bring me a packet of cigarettes I’ll marry you.’
‘You, Mr. Chatterton!’ said the girl. ‘That’ll be the day.’
‘It’s desperate.’
The girl saw Rhoda’s tears and pulled a face. The Spangle liked tears. She fetched the cigarettes. Chatty stood the packet on end considering it, not with passion but with lust. Rhoda saw the packet through her tears.
‘You can’t! You mustn’t,’ she said strictly. Chatty picked up the packet and held it to his nose.
‘Lovely temptation,’ he said, touching the packet with his lips and putting it down again. Rhoda’s tears had stopped. In none of Chatty’s experiences at The Spangle had he ever known that a packet of cigarettes could bring tears to a sudden end.
‘Did they have any children?’ Chatty asked.
‘No-that is one blessing.’
‘Perhaps that was the trouble?’ said Chatty.
The expression on the good woman’s face was one of horror so deep that she was silent.
And now Les came to their table, ignoring Rhoda.
‘How’s Karvo?’ he asked. ‘Maggy was asking for him.’
‘Oh God!’ said Chatty.
‘Who is Maggy?’ asked Rhoda when Les walked off.
‘It’s a long story. Too personal. Some other time. I’m thinking
about Christine. What a performance-one has to admit.’
‘I don’t think that remark is appropriate,’ said Rhoda. ‘There’s a time when sympathy stops. I think of her sometimes. What a hell she must have lived in knowing every day for years that she might be found out.’
The satisfaction of Rhoda’s voice shocked Chatty. He gave up trying to charm her.
‘Oh I don’t think conscience troubled her at all,’ he said gaily. ‘I don’t think she was in hell. That is what I mean by performance. She knew her part in every detail. It must have thrilled her to act it, adding a little touch every day. Only an academic could do that! It’s a pretty commonplace everyday story really, but to her-what a triumph! What documentation! Imagine her memory! And making Ronnie love it.’
‘Not now,’ said Rhoda. ‘She has lost him for good.’
‘That is true,’ said Chatty. ‘The really sad thing is that she has lost Paul.’
‘You are infuriating,’ said Rhoda. ‘He never existed, I tell you.’
‘I know. She invented him. That is what makes it worse. She has lost her only real friend.’
Chatty was glad to see that the perfect Rhoda looked troubled.
‘What you are saying is that I did wrong,’ she said.
‘I think you did what you wanted to do,’ said Chatty.
‘I can see,’ she said, ‘that you don’t like me. Hasn’t anyone any moral sense nowadays? You knew her. I thought it was my duty to tell you. That was my only motive.’
Rhoda picked up her handbag.
‘Diana, my sweetheart,’ Chatty called to the waitress. ‘I seem to want my bill.’
They sat silently until the bill came and then Rhoda said:
‘Thank you for a lovely evening. You must drive over and see us some time. Ronnie would like that.’
Karvo said to Chatty:
‘A hundred thousand pounds? Who told you?’
‘Clothilde,’ said Chatty. ‘She was on the pope’s side. You remember the Albigensians …’
‘We didn’t make it,’ said Karvo.
‘I know,’ said Chatty. ‘I mean the escape of the lovers over the Pyrenees, but Clothilde is with them. She has tracked down the incest story and she betrays them to the Inquisition out of Jealousy. Rhoda Johnson. Another tragedy in my life. I’ve seen into the heart of a good woman. Never do that.’
Karvo ignored this.
‘It was a Swedish story really,’ said Karvo furtively. ‘The Swedes could do it.’
‘No, not Swedish, not even Albigensian – very English, West Country. The brother’s name was Paul, purely imaginary. Still his estate was useful as capital security, especially when he died.’
‘Who are we talking about?’ said Karvo.
‘Christine’s brother Paul,’ said Chatty.
‘But he’s dead.’
‘You don’t listen,’ Chatty said. ‘Think of what he was going to leave her. Did she ever mention it to you?’
‘Yes,’ said Karvo, surprised. ‘She did. Why?’
‘Historians go mad. All that research and detail work gets them down. They crack up. Get delusions of grandeur and, in two minutes, they are popping in their personal story. They’re badly paid, too. She needed the money. You can’t blame them,’ said Chatty.
‘When did the Johnsons leave?’ said Karvo.
‘They didn’t leave. She’s had a breakdown. She is in a nursing home.’
‘Yes, you told me – when was that?’
‘Weeks and weeks ago,’ Chatty took out his diary, ‘October fourth.’
Then Chatty saw Karvo do an extraordinary thing. The man who couldn’t remember his wife’s birthday, the martyr who was always in trouble because he could not remember the dates of his several wedding anniversaries, the man for whom everything was done by secretaries, the man who was entirely public, surprised Chatty by the secretive way in which he now performed a private action. He took out a pocket diary. Chatty had seen Karvo do this only once before when he was ill; indeed Karvo had shown him a page with an X and a figure written against it. The first Tuesday in every month he recorded his weight. He opened the diary now and said:
‘October fourth-that’s what I’ ve got. Why did you make a note of it?’
‘A sense of loss,’ said Chatty. ‘She’d gone.’
‘I didn’t know she meant anything to you,’ said Karvo bashfully.
‘There it is,’ said Chatty. ‘Nor did I. One thinks of it at night.’
‘Chatty …’ Karvo began. ‘Well, no-I don’t want to pry into your private affairs.’
‘Oh no, there was nothing like that in it. I liked her best when she was dirty and fat. I asked them both down to the farm but she wouldn’t come. It rather hurt at the time, but I see it now. It might have saved them, even both of them.’
Karvo pressed the button and asked for his chauffeur to be sent round.
‘A hundred thousand pounds,’ said Karvo, but in the fond, impersonal, admiring manner of one who sees yet one more piece of financial history pass down the Thames, under the bridges and out to sea.
‘Tell the chauffeur to wait,’ said Chatty. ‘Karvo, I don’t want to pry into your private affairs. I want to ask you about ours—yours and mine.’
Karvo saw no escape from Chatty when the lines of his face smoothed out.
‘All right, if that is what you want to know, she’s as frigid as stone,’ said Karvo. ‘I tried-well, not actually tried-at the Holinsheds.’
‘Oh I know that,’ said Chatty. ‘I discovered that in Paris years ago. I was just finding out when Ronnie Johnson knocked at my door. A very innocent fellow—he didn’t realize what was going on. Or perhaps he did. I remember he nodded. Don’t let’s talk about it. What I want to know is how much she touched you for on October fourth? She got £50 out of me. I made a note of it.’
‘You fool,’ boasted Karvo. ‘She got £750 out of me, guaranteed by the estate.’
‘Paul’s,’ said Chatty.
Karvo had a special way of falling into speechlessness. He would lean back in his chair, then would seem to be making a quick inventory of everything in the office, then close his eyes. It was as if he was under an anaesthetic at the dentist’s. His inner life would become brilliant with ridiculous dramas and when he came round, panting, he would see what he must do. He came round now.
‘I can get it off expenses,’ he said. ‘Why did you do it, Chatty?’
‘Oh, you know-the pathos of the rich.’
Karvo grunted and got up.
‘Can I drop you anywhere?’
‘No,’ said Chatty. ‘I’m going to try and see Christine.’
‘Don’t be a fool,’ said Karvo. ‘You’ll never get it back.’
‘That is not what I’m going for,’ said Chatty. ‘She’s alone.’
The Lady from Guatemala
Friday afternoon about four o’clock, the week’s work done, time to kill; the editor disliked this characterless hour when everyone except his secretary had left the building. Into his briefcase he had slipped some notes for a short talk he was going to give in a cheap London hall, worn by two generations of protest against this injustice or that, before he left by the night plane for Copenhagen. There his real lecture tour would begin and turn into a short holiday. Like a bored card player he sat shuffling his papers and resented that there was no one except his rude, hard-working secretary to give him a game.
The only company he had in his room-and it was a moody friend – was his portrait hanging behind him on the wall. He liked cunningly to draw people to say something reassuring about the picture. It was ‘terribly good’, as the saying is; he wanted to hear them say it lived up to him. There was a strange air of rivalry in it. It rather overdid the handsome mixture of sunburned satyrlike pagan and shady jealous Christian saint under the happy storm of white hair. His hair had been grey at thirty; at forty-seven, by a stroke of luck, it was silken white. His face was an actor’s, the nose carved for dramatic occasions, the lips for the public platf
orm. It was a face both elated and ravaged by the highest beliefs and doubts. He was energized by meeting this image in the morning and, enviously, he said goodbye to it at night. Its nights would be less tormented than his own. Now he was leaving it to run the paper in his absence.
‘Here are your tickets,’ his secretary breezed into the room. ‘Copenhagen, Stockholm, Oslo, Berlin, Hamburg, Munich–the lot,’ she said. She was mannerless to the point of being a curiosity.
She stepped away and wobbled her tongue in her cheek. She understood his restless state. She adored him; he drove her mad and she longed for him to go.
‘Would you like to know what I’ve got outside?’ she said. She had a malicious streak. ‘A lady. A lady from Guatemala. Miss Mendoza. She has got a present for you. She worships you. I said you were busy. Shall I tell her to buzz off?’
The editor was proud of his tolerance in employing a girl so sportive and so familiar; her fair hair was thin and looked harassed, her spotty face set off the knowledge of his own handsomeness in face and behaviour.
‘Guatemala! Of course I must see her!’ he exclaimed. ‘What are you thinking about? We ran three articles on Guatemala. Show her in.’
‘It’s your funeral,’ said the girl and gave a vulgar click with her tongue. The editor was, in her words, ‘a sucker for foreigners’ she was reminding him that the world was packed with native girls like herself as well.
All kinds of men and women came to see Julian Drood; politicians who spoke to him as if he were a meeting, quarrelling writers, people with causes, cranks and accusers, even criminals and the mad. They were opinions to him and he did not often notice what they were like. He knew they studied him and that they would go away boasting: ‘I saw Julian Drood today and he said …’ Still he had never seen any person quite like the one who now walked in. At first, because of her tweed hat, he thought she was a man and would have said she had a moustache. She was a stump, as square as a box, with tarry chopped off hair, heavy eyebrows and yellow eyes set in her sallow skin like cut glass. She looked like some unsexed and obdurate statement about the future-or was it the beginning?-of the human race, long in the body, short in the legs and made of wood. She was wearing on this hot day a thick, bottle-green velvet dress. Indian blood obviously; he had seen such women in Mexico. She put out a wide hand to him; it could have held a shovel; in fact she was carrying a crumpled brown-paper bag.
The Camberwell Beauty Page 16