Friends and Lovers (22 page)

Perhaps it is completely natural that women in love forget everything else.

It is not selfishness, for their thoughts are not on themselves, but on those they love. It is an absorption, all the more complete as love increases, that shuts them away from any other emotional interests. Perhaps every woman has the devotion of the nun in her, whether it finds expression in beliefs or friendship or her children or her lover. This world of their creating is enough: the rest is well lost.

Chapter Sixteen.

WOMEN ONLY.

On this Saturday in February Penny was standing at the window of her small bedroom in Baker House. She was wrapped in her heavy dressing-gown, because the room was cold and the small electric fire only heated an area of three square feet in front of it. She was all ready for Mrs. Fane’s party except for the dress, which lay on the bed until she could press it out. Neri, the Indian student who lived on this floor, was in occupation of the communal ironing-board which stood in the little alcove at the end of the passage, and it took a long time to iron a said.

Penny was thinking that she did not want to go in the least to this party.

And yet she must. Mrs. Fane had been at school with her mother.

Her mother kept writing, “Haven’t you visited Mattie Fane’s new house yet? It is so near you. She will be so disappointed if you don’t.”

That, considered Penny, was rather an exaggeration. There was no evidence of any desire on Mrs. Fane’s part to make a special effort to entertain her old school friend’s daughter. Even this invitation to sherry to-day had come by telephone this morning, and had caught Penny quite unprepared with any feasible excuse, as telephone invitations always did. Still, it would be better to go to Mrs. Fane’s, and then every one—her mother, Mrs. Fane, and herself—could relax and not worry about any more duty.

Penny looked at the glistening pavements, wondered if her stockings would be ruined by ugly black splashes before she arrived at the party, wondered about Mrs. Fane (whom she had seen only once in her life, and that was six or seven years ago), wondered when Neri would have finished with the ironing-board, wondered what she would wear for David’s visit to London tomorrow, wondered if it would be decent weather then. It wouldn’t matter, of course, if it did pour with rain. Nothing could ruin Sunday. Sunday was the most perfect day in all the week.

The door of her room opened, and a tall girl with fair hair, brushed smooth in the current Slade School fashion, entered slowly.

“I did knock,” Lillian Marston said, ‘but you were dreaming.” She was slender as well as tall. Her eyes were large, grey-green, and very direct.

Her wide, slow smile was lazy. Her movements were slow, too, deliberately so: she moved with a grace that did not seem calculated, but gave the appearance of being controlled. Her face was well shaped, and she liked to keep it quite pale without any hint of colour except in the bright lips. All this had considerable effect on the men she met. No one ever guessed that she had even noticed it.

Penny had at first regarded Marston as unapproachable: Marston was in her final year, for one thing. But Marston had started coming in to see her, and a rather curious impersonal friendship was begun. In Baker House the Slade students kept together, as if they were in some tight trade union. They viewed other students who lived there—the scientists, the teachers to be, the future doctors, librarians, private secretaries—with a mixture of alarm and amusement. That they themselves were viewed with much the same attitude would have been a shock to most of them.

Marston was wearing her grey-green suit to-day, with a dark red chiffon scarf folding softly into its neckline. She never wore jewellery except bracelets, but these she liked to clasp in heavy rows round one wrist.

“Fun and games, I see,” she said, as she looked at the black dress on the bed. She settled herself comfortably in the armchair.

“Or haven’t you made up your mind yet whether you are going out?

Hideous day. I’ve been sleeping practically all afternoon.”

“I’m waiting for Neri,” Penny explained.

Marston laughed.

“Every one does. I think she irons one of those saris every day. The joy of living on the top floor: we have one ironing-board and Neri. Those bloated plutocrats downstairs have two ironing-boards to each floor and no Neri or her dresses.”

“They aren’t dresses. They are works of art,” Penny said. “Six yards round the hem. She told me that very proudly the other day. It is the only complete sentence I have managed to get out of her so far.”

Penny sat down on the bed, for her guest had taken the only comfortable chair, and curled up her legs to keep warm.

“Imagine six yards of the thinnest embroidered muslin trailing over city streets in February rain.”

“I wonder why she bothers to wear a said in England? She catches cold so easily. And, in any case, the effect is quite ruined when she adds that brown cloth coat with its piece of fur at the neck. I suggested that one day to Neri, but she looked at me in a very hurt way. Hasn’t spoken to me since.” Marston lit a cigarette and studied her excellent hands. “Grubby,” she announced.

“I’ll have to soak them to get rid of that charcoal.” Then she smiled as her thoughts flickered back to Neri.

“Meanwhile I have the room next door to hers, and I am kept half awake all night by that cough she has developed.”

“Well, she will look charming in June if she doesn’t die of pneumonia before that,” Penny said. She was watching the clock anxiously. She looked down at her dress to see if it really needed pressing. It did.

It was a black one, bought at the expense of a month’s inadequate lunches.

It looked smart in its simplicity (Penny had ripped off a lot of the extra trimming), but it did need constant pressing.

“I am going to the Fanes’,” she explained, ‘and I have got to look presentable. Mother’s friends, you know.”

“A party without David?” Marston asked teasingly.

“Tomorrow is your day, of course. I forgot that,” she added, regarding Penny with a touch of amusement.

“Sunday is the one day on which you get decent food in this place, and you always miss it. Of course, they probably calculated that a lot of girls would be invited out on Sundays, so it was a good day to pick for serving roast beef Never mind, the trustees who pay visits on Sundays must approve of the food we get.”

Penny laughed, opened the door, and looked discreetly into the corridor. She came back to the bed again, shaking her head ruefully, and glanced once more at the clock. “Now, if that were only you outside I could say

“Boyi Let me have that iron for just two minutes.” But I don’t like to say that to Neri. She would probably think I was trying to throw my imperial weight about.”

Marston nodded.

“Makes it difficult,” she agreed, ‘unless you are like me and just don’t give a damn.” She shrugged her shoulders, smiled, and glanced round the room.

She noticed the envelope waiting to be posted, which lay beside Penny’s handbag and gloves. She made no further reference to David, but she let herself wonder what on earth those two could have to say to each other that filled a letter every day. Each morning on the hall table there was a fat envelope from Oxford for Lorrimer. Sometimes registered, too, which aroused amusing ideas. She looked at Penny speculatively. Now was the time, she decided, to approach the question which had brought her here in the first place.

“Lorrimer, I like you,” she said gravely, ‘but sometimes I do think you are certifiable.”

Penny looked up in surprise from adjusting a stocking seam.

“Let me prove it,” Marston said.

“Are you coming with me to the dance tonight?”

“Oh, I have a lot of things to do,” Penny said slowly.

“Always some old excuse,” Marston said.

“That is why you are certifiable. Lorrimer, have a look in your mirror. Go on. Look. Now see what I mean?”

Penny turned away from the mirror above the small bureau. “No,” she said shortly.

“I am only trying to say that there’s no possible harm in going out with at least some of the young men who plague you. They are mostly harmless enough.

David Whatever-his name-is couldn’t object to you going to the college dances at least. Besides, why on earth should you do everything he tells you? That isn’t good for a man—not good at all. Gives him ideas about being indispensable. Sorry, Lorrimer, I know it is none of my business, but frankly I have been aching to say these things for the last few months.” Marston looked at Penny with a sudden warm smile. She’s such a swee innocent, she thought; just the kind to get badly hurt. An< she is much too good value to get badly hurt.

Penny said, “In the first place, I don’t really want to go to this dance as much as all that. In the second place, Davk doesn’t tell me to do anything.” She liked Lillian Marston, o: she would not have bothered explaining. Besides, if Marstoi did not approve of the way Penny was arranging her life Penny did not see any particular wisdom in the way Marstoi arranged her own life. This consisted of frantic bursts of work punctuating weeks of fun. You could always tell when the affair with Tom had ended: she worked for ten days as if sh( were driven by a demon. And then the affair with Dick woulc begin. You could tell when it ended too. She worked. Anc then the affair with Harry.

And then work. But Tom and al the rest of them remained her friends once the quarrel was forgotten, and even the teachers treated Marston to les; sarcasm than might be expected. For one thing, she had i certain good humour, a certain honesty, and such comp let frankness in her actions that, although there were times to b( angry with Marston, there were no moments when yoi despised her.

“I don’t quite follow,” Marston said. (I thought you well acting under orders.”

Penny shook her head.

“I am perfectly free to do what ] want. And I do what I want.”

Marston stared, and then she lit another cigarette.

“Struth. she said.

“I do believe the girl means it.” She spoke with rea seriousness. She looked worriedly at Penny, hesitated, lookec at her cigarette and then back at the younger girl’s face

“Frankly,” she said slowly, choosing her words carefully, tv never known a man who didn’t go out with several girls ever when he thought he was being serious about one. It is rathe] a harsh fact about life, but it is just as well to guard agains it. Men have their own little way of bringing you back to earth. They are realists, you know. They will write poetry t( your eyes, swear eternal devotion, and then sit enthrallec through one of those Hollywood musicals because they like the shape of the legs in the first row.

Penny laughed.

“But I like them too,” she said.

Marston shrugged her shoulders. For a moment she coulc find nothing else to say. She was too busy thinking that the extraordinary thing about people was the way they surprised you.

Penny said, “Have you ever thought, Marston, that if his one girl accepts invitations with other men, then that might be the reason why a man is so ” realistic”?”

“Look, I was the one who was giving out advice,” Marston said sharply. She rose, brushed the cigarette ash off her skirt, pulled its waist-band into the right position round twenty-four inches of firm flesh, and looked critically down at the way the material covered her slender thighs.

“Well,” she said, suddenly businesslike, “I’ll try to grab a place in the queue and get a bath before dinner.

I take it you aren’t going dancing tonight? I thought so somehow.

Poor old Derek will be disappointed. I came here to plead for him, you know.

I’ll tell him you have the va pours And that’s as good a description as any.”

She walked to the door, turned to give one of her slow smiles, raised one eyebrow. She did this unconsciously now, ever since Derek—the Derek of some three months ago, that was—had told her she looked very much like Garbo.

But from the corridor quite another kind of Marston reported on the ironing-board situation: India had declared, and it was now Scotland’s innings. And Penny smiled as she remembered Marston’s usual pretence that she didn’t know one end of a wicket from the other, and thought it quite remarkable how Marston never actually said either “Hello’ or “Goodbye,” and yet one always remembered her coming and going.

Chapter Seventeen.

MRS FANE ENTERTAINS.

When Penny did eventually arrive at Mrs. Fane’s there were already enough people to fill two rooms. The voices and laughter flowed into the hall and surrounded her there. She would have backed right out of the pseudo-Georgian doorway if the stiff-necked servant had not already taken her in supercilious charge, and she found herself in the middle of the party, engulfed in a sea of strange faces and voices. Sh-looked round desperately for a possible Fane.

The small groups of men and women gave her a brie glance as she passed them slowly, and then seemed not ti notice her. Where’s my blasted hostess, she wondered, an’ then saw her, and went forward with a good deal of relief, Mrs. Fane was talking to a group of three men near the fireplace. She was thinner, incredibly so, and her hair had turnei’ quite black, with a harsh outline where it ended and the ver white forehead began. In her tight-fitting black suit she had looked almost young from the distance. But now Penny was horrified by the two appraising eyes which swooped on her by the white mask which cracked round the lips as they weni through the motions of smiling.

She doesn’t remember me at all. Penny thought in desperation, and introduced herself. But at that moment a crescendc of chatter and trilling laughter came from the nearest group of guests. And Mrs. Fane (she was much deafer than she would ever admit) said, “How dye do? So glad you coulc come.” She said it so quickly that Penny’s second attempt al introducing herself was stillborn. Perhaps, Penny thought names don’t matter at cocktail parties, anyway. She glancec towards the door, and wondered if she could pretend sh< was about to leave.

But probably Mrs. Fane’s shrewd eyes had seen her come into the room.

Penny was right about that. There was nothing wrong witt Mrs. Fane’s sight, even if her hearing was becoming hard She had taken in the girl’s appearance with her first glance Yes, pretty enough, Mrs. Fane decided. Very expert at make up, with a complexion like that. Simple dress, too simple to show what price it might have been. No hat—how odd. Gooc gloves, good black suede bag and shoes, though. Probably from of Robert’s young things: he liked red hair. Mrs. Fane lookec swiftly towards her elder son, who was fortunately within eye reaching distance. Really, Robert must look after his owi friends.