A Coat of Varnish (3 page)

‘Nothing but a tuppenny-ha’penny crook,’ said Lady Ashbrook, on no evidence at all, and not reflecting that, if he were a crook, it certainly wasn’t for tuppence ha’penny.

‘The gairl’s not bad to look at,’ she said. ‘Good enough for a bit of slap and tickle, that’s all.’

After that peculiar denunciation, and almost without a pause, Madge Ashbrook stared across at Humphrey and said: ‘Do you know–’ She had a hesitation which was not quite the usual hiatus in her throat, and then went on: ‘Do you know, I’ve always been frightened of this.’

She hadn’t abdicated her authority, but Humphrey understood. It was as near a confidence as she could reach. She hadn’t abdicated her authority, but the certainty was gone. She wasn’t talking of her grandson’s affairs. She had broken the charade. She was talking of her own body. ‘This’ was cancer. Gallant as she was, she couldn’t speak the word.

‘I know,’ said Humphrey; and added lamely, ‘It may not be true.’

‘It may not. What do you think?’

He shook his head. ‘It’s no use giving false comfort. I’ve no idea. It’s dreadful, but all you can do is wait. You said they’ll tell you next week, didn’t you?’

‘I don’t want to hear.’

She stiffened herself, and broke out in a harsh impatient tone: ‘This is boring. I told you it was boring.’ Tight with angry scorn, she returned to the qualities, or lack of them, of Loseby’s girl.

Soon Humphrey felt that he had done his duty, and could decently leave. No expression of hope, or even good wishes, would please her, but he said that he would see her soon.

Out in the Square, the night was still hot, but the air was free. He felt a kind of cowardly relief and shame, to be in the free air, out of the sight of fear and courage.

On his way home, Humphrey could smell flowers from the window-boxes, tobacco plants, sweet peas, stocks, a refreshment on other summer nights, and on this one, too.

He had not been sitting long in his drawing-room when the bell rang, and just like the old lady an hour before he had to go downstairs and along a hall. The couple he had greeted in passing earlier were waiting outside the door. He took them through a back room down rickety steps into his patio garden.

This was the pair of whom Lady Ashbrook, departing from her general form, had approved. The man was in his late twenties, the woman a couple of years older. They were both tall, and he was as stringy as a distance runner. In the garden, her face was obscured in the half-light; his was long, intelligent, high-cheekboned, with a mouth ready to smile. His name was Paul Mason, and hers Celia Hawthorne. They were polite and at the same time easy-mannered, calling Humphrey by his Christian name as though he were their own age. Paul insisted on going up to the kitchen to fetch the tray of drinks. ‘You two wouldn’t be as safe on those stairs. They must be a rather useful hazard sometimes, mustn’t they, Humphrey?’

Humphrey grinned. Recently he had become used to Paul’s kind of conversation, and thought he caught glimpses of what went on beneath. Celia he had met only casually, and, while Paul had left them, Humphrey was observing her. She was pretty, in an unsensational fashion, so far as he could make out in the twilit garden, good skin, clear eyes. When he asked her a question, there was a pause before she replied, but then the answer was fluent enough. Her voice was high, light, sometimes as though absent from the scene. But once, after another of his questions entirely innocent, she gave a surprisingly, disconcertingly, full-throated laugh.

She was wearing a simple white summer dress. Humphrey found it increasingly mysterious that Lady Ashbrook should have decided, with the force of law, that she had style. Often Lady Ashbrook’s verdicts depended on class, but there could not be anything in that. Celia wasn’t anything like elevated enough to qualify on that platform. Humphrey remembered Paul saying that she was the daughter of a canon, ordinary professional middle-class, less privileged than Paul himself, whose father was an abnormally successful, and an abnormally flamboyant, barrister.

When Paul returned and put the tray on the iron table round which they were sitting, he poured their drinks, gin for Celia, whisky for Humphrey and himself. The garden was quiet; at last the long summer light was fading. Over the roofs to the east, in the direction of Westminster and the river, the moon had risen, clear silver in the unrefracting air. Roses gleamed ghost white at the end of the garden. That wasn’t far away from them, for the garden was very small, about fifteen yards by five. Since the ground had been methodically rationed, that was precisely the same as the size of the gardens visible from Lady Ashbrook’s back windows. But, for them all, the gardens were an amenity, and they felt secure from the clutter and the hubbub when they could take refuge there. Humphrey, not a gardener, had been heard to remark that it was fortunate roses grew anywhere, and bloomed several times a year.

That night, however, he had dropped out of the conversation having swallowed one drink and asked Paul for another. The other two were talking cheerfully, but Paul looked at Humphrey as he sat silent. After a while, Paul asked, quietly: ‘Anything happened?’

‘I was going to see old Lady Ashbrook when I met you.’

‘How is she? Is there anything the matter?’

‘I think she might say that.’ With Paul, Humphrey couldn’t avoid dropping into the same kind of sub-sarcasm; but the young man was too perceptive to brush off, and it was an easement to explain.

‘God Almighty.’ Paul’s expression had gone dark. ‘Is there anything we can do?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Would it be any good to see her?’

‘Whatever can be any good?’ Humphrey added: ‘You might try.’

‘Of course,’ said Celia, in her light detached voice, ‘she’s over eighty. It’s a good age.’

‘Born in 1894.’ Paul had a computer-like memory.

‘She must have come out before the first war,’ Celia went on reflecting.

‘Do you think that’s any consolation to her now?’

Celia’s responses were too cool for Humphrey and his tone was roughening.

Celia seemed to be speaking to herself: ‘It wouldn’t be a nice way to die.’

Paul began to talk of the old lady. Finding neutral ground, he said: ‘She is rather a period figure.’

‘I suppose she is to you.’ Humphrey gave a half-smile.

‘Come on. She must have been talked about as long as you can remember.’

Once more Humphrey echoed the young man’s tone: ‘I’ll give you that. One sometimes heard the name.’

‘Were there many men?’ By now Celia had ceased to be remote.

‘What have you heard?’

‘Well, she can’t help being a bit of history, can she?’

‘History can get things wrong, you know.’

‘But there were some men?’

‘Of course.’

‘You’re not on duty now. Don’t mind us,’ Paul said, looking at him with affection. ‘You’ve given that up, remember.’

‘Yes, please,’ said Celia, also with affection.

‘If you don’t take this for gospel…,’ Humphrey told them. ‘I don’t know all that much, anyway not for sure. I do know that she skipped from her first husband – bolted, she called it – after she had been married a couple of years. She had the one son. She was only a girl then. But she told me herself she was old enough to know better than marry Max. She hated him. Max was a stinker, she said. Madge has sometimes a simple eloquence of her own.’

A little earlier, Celia had been indulging in her full uninhibited sensual laugh.

‘What about the son?’ Paul said.

‘She hated him, too. And has gone on doing so. That being her only child.’

‘It sounds like the sort of thing that happens in dynasties. Too ferocious for the likes of us.’ Paul bent towards Celia, and then apologised for breaking into the story.

‘That’s all I’ve ever had from Madge herself. It’s on record, she married again pretty soon after Max divorced her. Ashbrook. You may have heard, everyone has always said that that was an idyllic marriage. One of the wonderful marriages of the twenties. Made for each other, everyone said. She was heartbroken when he dropped dead, they said. I may be too suspicious, but I have my doubts. I do know one other certain thing. Just by chance. While the perfect marriage was in the public view, she had an affair, quite a long one, with Hal Hillmorton. Well hidden, like most of that old operator’s goings-on. You couldn’t have known him. He died not so long ago. He’d have amused you, though. He’d have liked you,’ he said to Celia paying her a compliment, but one, he thought, which might have been true.

They had become comfortable in the dusk, with stories of Lady Ashbrook in her prime. The shades of mortal illness had receded. Emotions were not continuous, even for Humphrey and Paul, in whom they persevered more than was common.

What about Madge after her second husband’s death? Oh, there had been other lovers, up to old age. At least Humphrey had heard legends, not just of minor affairs, but of two or three, each of which different authorities, confident and contradictory, claimed to be the great love of her life. A phrase, Humphrey said, which had been used of Madge Ashbrook quite often during her career, but which wouldn’t be used of anyone nowadays.

Something like confidences of their own – no, not confidences, but something like the first desire for them – were emerging in the dark. Paul hadn’t been married, but Celia had, and in law still was.

‘He left me. A couple of years ago,’ she said.

‘Did you arrange that between you?’ Humphrey asked.

‘No, he left me,’ she said, in a clear firm tone. ‘I didn’t skip like Lady Ashbrook. It might have been better for my morale if I had.’ She added: ‘By the by, he wasn’t a stinker. Unless I was, too.’

Humphrey told her that his first marriage had been a disaster. Children? Two by his second wife, son a doctor in a mission hospital, daughter doing social work.

Had she had children? One, a son, she told him – copying Lady Ashbrook. In fact, she must drive home to him soon. He was six years old, but she had someone reliable looking after him.

Humphrey stood at his front door and watched them walking towards Paul’s house, hand in hand, as he had seen them earlier that evening. Beneath the high lamp, they had a long and practised kiss, and she drove off. Until he had heard more of the circumstances, Humphrey had assumed that she would be spending the night with Paul. But he guessed, with some confidence, that they had been to bed before they called on him. They had the sheen of recently satisfied sex. He would also have guessed, with slightly less confidence, that this relation had started in bed, without much in the way of acquaintanceship, or anything like old-fashioned courting, and that now they were having to make discoveries and learn about each other. He had an idea that their wills had begun to cross.

Humphrey would have liked Paul to come back. It would have been pleasant to go on talking. As it was, Humphrey went down to the garden again. The truth was – he didn’t pretend to himself, though it was mildly dislikeable – that he was feeling some envy for Paul. Not because of Celia, not at all. He wasn’t envious, either – or not much – of Paul’s youth. It was agreeable that those two took care not to make him feel old; but, if they had been less considerate, he still wouldn’t have done so.

In the living existent moments, people of sixty felt exactly as those two felt thirty years younger by chronological time. By a conscious effort of mind, Humphrey knew that he wasn’t likely to live, by chronological time, more than another twenty years at most. But that was curiously unreal. So far as he had observed in others of his own age, it was – if they were in good health – the same with all of them. It was one of the respects in which existence was merciful. Everyone, including the young, lived with the certain prospect of death, and no one believed it.

For an instant Humphrey thought of Lady Ashbrook. That might have been so with her a few months before. And, moment by moment, even now?

Humphrey was thinking, not with much connection, or with any purpose, about himself. If he had been asked to explain what he envied about Paul, he would have been at something of a loss. Not his intelligence; Lady Ashbrook had pronounced that he was brilliant, using another of her period words, one Humphrey recalled hearing from talent-spotting ladies round smart dinner-tables years before. Paul himself wouldn’t have accepted the praise. Oh yes, he had had an impeccable academic record, he had been what they now called a ‘flyer’. That wasn’t difficult, if one had a decent intellectual machine and worked. Yes, he was a pretty good economist, knew more about international affairs than some, and was worth his money to his employers at the merchant bank.

The curious thing was, Humphrey had recalled, that Paul was genuinely modest. Much more so than nearly all the successful people Humphrey had come across, and it might be a disadvantage. Humphrey had never heard him bluff, and in the future that might be a disadvantage, too. Humphrey suspected, however, that in his secret heart Paul did believe that he had a quality which others didn’t have. Humphrey believed something similar about him, though they might not have agreed on which quality they meant.

Humphrey believed that the young man had passion. Underneath the precise and balanced mind, the ironic humour, the kindness when he was not himself involved, there was something urgent and untamed. He would try to do difficult things. He would play for high stakes, probably creditable ones, not just money or commonplace credit. He might fail, and it was likely in the world of his time he would fail. But the passion would drive him. Such a passion was very rare so far as Humphrey’s experience went.

It was why Humphrey was interested, and why he couldn’t help being envious. For he had had nothing of the kind himself, as little as most men. Sitting in the garden, flickers of the past, hopes or expectations of the future (the secret planner, secretly but burrowingly at work, didn’t die at Humphrey’s age or any other), drifting now and then into consciousness, he wasn’t constructing his own biography. No one could do so. When someone tried, as Humphrey had seen often enough, it was to pick and choose, justify or excuse oneself, sometimes to take too much blame, never to tell the cool and random truth.