The Complete Stories (32 page)

  "Yes, of course. How stupid of me. I always forget. There's probably some in the dining room."

  He went out and I stayed with Lucy in her hired drawing room. She sat quite still listening to the announcer's voice. She was five months gone with child—"Even Roger has to admit that it's proletarian action," she said later—but as yet scarcely showed it in body; but she was pale, paler, I guessed, than normal, and she wore that incurious, self-regarding expression which sometimes goes with a first pregnancy. Above the sound of the wireless I heard Basil outside, calling upstairs, "Roger. Where do you keep the cork-screw?" When they got to the stock prices, Lucy switched off. "Nothing from Madras," she said. "But perhaps you aren't interested in politics."

  "Not much," I said.

  "Very few of Roger's friends seem to be."

  "It's rather a new thing with him," I said.

  "I expect he doesn't talk about it unless he thinks people are interested."

  That was outrageous, first because it amounted to the claim to know Roger better than I did and, secondly, because I was still smarting from the ruthless boredom of my last two or three meetings with him.

  "You'd be doing us all a great service if you could keep him to that," I said.

  It is a most painful experience to find, when one has been rude, that one has caused no surprise. That is how Lucy received my remark. She merely said, "We've got to go out almost at once. We're going to the theatre in Finsbury and it starts at seven."

  "Very inconvenient."

  "It suits the workers," she said. "They have to get up earlier than we do, you see."

  Then Roger and Basil came in with the drinks. Roger said, "We're just going out. They're doing the Tractor Trilogy at Finsbury. Why don't you come too. We could probably get another seat, couldn't we, Lucy?"

  "I doubt it," said Lucy. "They're tremendously booked up."

  "I don't think I will," I said.

  "Anyway join us afterwards at the Café Royal."

  "I might," I said.

  "What have you and Lucy been talking about?"

  "We listened to the news," said Lucy. "Nothing from Madras."

  "They've probably got orders to shut down on it. I.D.C. have got the BBC in their pocket."

  "I.D.C.?" I asked.

  "Imperial Defence College. They're the new hush-hush crypto-fascist department. They're in up to the neck with I.C.I. and the oil companies."

  "I.C.I.?"

  "Imperial Chemicals."

  "Roger," said Lucy, "we really must go if we're to get anything to eat."

  "All right," he said. "See you later at the Café."

  I waited for Lucy to say something encouraging. She said, "We shall be there by eleven," and began looking for her bag among the chintz cushions.

  I said, "I doubt if I can manage it."

  "Are we taking the car?" Roger asked.

  "No, I sent it away. I've had him out all day."

  "I'll order some taxis."

  "We could drop Basil and John somewhere," said Lucy.

  "No," I said, "get two."

  "We're going by way of Appenrodts," said Lucy.

  "No good for me," I said, although, in fact, they would pass the corner of St. James's where I was bound.

  "I'll come and watch you eat your sandwiches," said Basil.

  That was the end of our first meeting. I came away feeling badly about it, particularly the way in which she had used my Christian name and acquiesced in my joining them later. A commonplace girl who wanted to be snubbing, would have been conspicuously aloof and have said "Mr. Plant," and I should have recovered some of the lost ground. But Lucy was faultless.

  I have seen so many young wives go wrong on this point. They have either tried to force an intimacy with their husbands' friends, claiming, as it were, continuity and identity with the powers of the invaded territory or they have cancelled the passports of the old régime and proclaimed that fresh application must be made to the new authorities and applicants be treated strictly on their merits. Lucy seemed serenely unaware of either danger. I had come inopportunely and been rather rude, but I was one of Roger's friends; they were like his family to her, or hers to him; we had manifest defects which it was none of her business to reform; we had the right to come to her house unexpectedly, to shout upstairs for the corkscrew, to join her table at supper. The question of intrusion did not arise. It was simply that as far as she was concerned we had no separate or individual existence. It was, as I say, a faultless and highly provocative attitude. I found that in the next few days a surprising amount of my time, which, anyway, was lying heavy on me, was occupied in considering how this attitude, with regard to myself, could be altered.

  My first move was to ask her and Roger to luncheon. I was confident that none of their other friends—none of those, that is to say, from whom I wished to dissociate myself—would have done such a thing. I did it formally, some days ahead, by letter to Lucy. All this, I knew, would come as a surprise to Roger. He telephoned me to ask, "What's all this Lucy tells me about your asking us to luncheon?"

  "Can you come?"

  "Yes, I suppose so. But what's it all about?"

  "It's not ‘about' anything. I just want you to lunch with me."

  "Why?"

  "It's quite usual, you know, when one's friends marry. Just politeness."

  "You haven't got some ghastly foreigners you stayed with abroad?"

  "No, nothing like that."

  "Well, it all seems very odd to me. Writing a letter, I mean, and everything ..."

  I rang off.

  Lucy answered with a formal acceptance. I studied her writing. I had expected, I do not know why, a round girlish hand of the post-copper-plate era. Instead she wrote like a man. She used a fountain pen, I noticed; that was unusual in a girl.

  Dear John,

  Roger and I shall be delighted to lunch with you at the Ritz on Thursday week at 1.30.

  Yours sincerely,

  Lucy Simmonds.

  Should it not have been "Yours ever" after the "Dear John"? I wondered whether she had wondered what to put. Another girl might have written "Yours" with a noncommittal squiggle, but her writing did not lend itself to that kind of evasion. I had ended my note, "Love to Roger."

  Was she not a little over-formal in repeating the place and time? Had she written straight off, without thinking, or had she sucked the top of her pen a little?

  The paper was presumably the choice of their landlord, in unobtrusive good taste. I smelled it and thought I detected a whiff of soap.

  At this point I lost patience with myself; it was ludicrous to sit brooding over a note of this kind. I began, instead, to wonder whom I should ask to meet her—certainly none of the gang she had learned to look on as "Roger's friends." On the other hand it must be clear that the party was for her. Roger would be the first to impute that they were being made use of. In the end, after due thought and one or two failures, I secured a middle-aged, highly reputable woman-novelist and Andrew Desert and his wife—an eminently sociable couple. When Roger saw his fellow guests he was more puzzled than ever. I could see him all through luncheon trying to work it out, why I should have spent five pounds in this peculiar fashion.

  I enjoyed my party. Lucy began by talking about my father's painting.

  "Yes," I said, "it's very fashionable at the moment."

  "Oh, I don't mean that," she said in frank surprise, and went on to tell me how she had stopped before a shop window in Duke Street where a battle picture of my father's was on view; there had been two private soldiers construing it together, point by point. "I think that's worth a dozen columns of praise in the weekly papers," she said.

  "Just like Kipling's Light that Failed," said the woman-novelist.

  "Is it? I didn't know." She told us she had never read any Kipling.

  "That shows the ten years between us," I said, and so the conversation became a little more personal as we discussed the differences between those who were born before the Great War and those born after it; in fact, so far as it could be worked, the differences between Lucy and myself.

  Roger always showed signs of persecution-mania in the Ritz. He did not like it when we knew people at other tables whom he didn't know and, when the waiter brought him the wrong dish by mistake, he began on a set-piece which I had heard him use before in this same place. "Fashionable restaurants are the same all over the world," he said. "There are always exactly twenty per cent more tables than the waiters can manage. It's a very good thing for the workers' cause that no one except the rich know the deficiencies of the luxury world. Think of the idea Hollywood gives of a place like this," he said, warming to his subject. "A maître d'hôtel like an ambassador, bowing famous beauties across acres of unencumbered carpet—and look at poor Lorenzo there, sweating under his collar, jostling a way through for dowdy Middle West Americans ..." But it was not a success. Lucy, I could see, thought it odd of him to complain when he was a guest. I pointed out that the couple whom Roger condemned as Middle West Americans were in fact called Lord and Lady Settringham, and Andrew led the conversation, where Roger could not follow it, to the topic of which ambassadors looked like maîtres d'hôtel. The woman-novelist began a eulogy of the Middle West which she knew and Roger did not. So he was left with his theme undeveloped. All this was worth five pounds to me, and more.

  I thought it typical of the way Lucy had been brought up that she returned my invitation in a day or two.

  Roger got in first on the telephone. "I say, are you free on Wednesday evening?"

  "I'm not sure. Why?"

  "I wondered if you'd dine with us."

  "Not at half past six for the Finsbury Theatre?"

  "No. I work late these days at the Red China Supply Committee."

  "What time then?"

  "Oh, any time after eight. Dress or not, just as you feel like it."

  "What will you and Lucy be doing?"

  "Well, I suppose we shall dress. In case anyone wants to go on anywhere."

  "In fact, it's a dinner party?"

  "Well, yes, in a kind of way."

  It was plain that poor Roger was dismayed at this social mushroom which had sprung up under his nose. As a face-saver the telephone call was misconceived, for a little note from Lucy was already in the post for me. It was not for me to mock these little notes; I had begun it. But an end had to be made to them, so I decided to answer this by telephone, choosing the early afternoon when I assumed Roger would be out. He was in, and answered me. "I wanted to speak to Lucy."

  "Yes?"

  "Just to accept her invitation to dinner."

  "But you've already accepted."

  "Yes, but I thought I'd better just tell her."

  "I told her. What d'you think?"

  "Ah, good, I was afraid you might have forgotten."

  I had come badly out of that.

  From first to last the whole episode of the dinner was calamitous. It was a party of ten, and one glance round the room showed me that this was an occasion of what Lucy had been brought up to call "duty." That is to say, we were all people whom for one reason or another she had felt obliged to ask. She was offering us all up together in a single propitiatory holocaust to the gods of the schoolroom. Even Mr. Benwell was there. He did not realize that Lucy had taken the house furnished and was congratulating her upon the decorations; "I like a London house to look like a London house," he was saying.

  Roger was carrying things off rather splendidly with a kind of sardonic gusto which he could often assume in times of stress. I knew him in that mood and respected it. I knew, too, that my presence added a particular zest to his performance. Throughout the evening I caught him in constant enquiry of me; was I attending to this parody of himself? I was his audience, not Lucy.

  The fate in store for myself was manifest as soon as I came into the room. It was Lucy's cousin Julia, the younger of the two girls Basil had told me of, the one whose début had been so disturbed by Lucy's marriage. It would not, I felt, be a grave setback. Julia had that particular kind of succulent charm—bright, dotty, soft, eager, acquiescent, flattering, impudent—that is specially, it seems, produced for the delight of Anglo-Saxon manhood. She had no need of a London season to find a happy future. "Julia is staying with us. She is a great fan of yours," said Lucy in her Pont Street manner; a manner which, like Roger's, but much more subtly, had an element of dumb crambo in it. What she said turned out to be true.

  "My word, this is exciting," said Julia, and settled down to enjoy me as though I were a box of chocolates open on her knees.

  "What a lot of people Lucy's got here tonight."

  "Yes, it's her first real dinner party, and she says it will be her last. She says she doesn't like parties any more."

  "Did she ever?" I was ready to talk about Lucy at length, but this was not Julia's plan.

  "Everyone does at first," she said briefly, and then began the conversation as she had rehearsed it, I am sure, in her bath. "I knew you the moment you came into the room. Guess how."

  "You heard my name announced."

  "Oh, no. Guess again."

  An American hero would have said, "For Christ's sake," but I said, "Really I've no idea, unless perhaps you knew everyone else already."

  "Oh, no. Shall I tell you? I saw you in the Ritz the day Lucy lunched with you."

  "Why didn't you come and talk to us?"

  "Lucy wouldn't let me. She said she'd ask you to dinner instead."

  "Ah."

  "You see, for years and years the one thing in the world I've wanted most—or nearly most—was to meet you and when Lucy calmly said she was going to lunch with you I cried with envy—literally so I had to put a cold sponge on my eyes before going out."

  Talking to this delicious girl about Lucy, I thought, was like sitting in the dentist's chair with one's mouth full of instruments and the certainty that, all in good time, he would begin to hurt.