A Man Over Forty (19 page)

It soon became clear that nothing unusual or of any great moment had happened to Polly during her American visit, but Balintore listened to her with a pleasure that dispelled the gloom of earlier conversation. Her enjoyment was infectious, he laughed aloud, and interrupted her only to say, ‘But look at the time! I'm going to give you a cocktail, and then we'll have to decide what we're going to do.'

‘I'll have to go and see my sister in Islington.'

‘Oh, surely not!'

‘She's expecting me – though I didn't actually say I'd go.'

‘I thought we might go to a theatre.'

‘Oh, I'd like that!'

‘What do you want to see?'

‘Do you think you can get seats for
Dig the Marquis?'

‘You've chosen the most difficult, haven't you? I know a man who can usually be relied on, but
Dig the Marquis
is booked for months ahead. I'll see what I can do, but you mustn't be disappointed if you've asked for the impossible.'

He went to the telephone in his bedroom and spoke persuasively for several minutes. Then he mixed a dry Martini and said, ‘He's going to do his best, but he didn't give me much hope. What do you know about the Marquis?'

‘The scenery's wonderful, I've heard, and so is the music. And Tex Marlowe – I've seen him on films, but never in the theatre.'

‘I mean the real Marquis.'

‘I didn't know there was one.'

‘There was indeed,' said Balintore. ‘Before your time, of course, but his resurrection seems to have been welcomed by your generation.'

The telephone rang, and he came back to say, ‘Your luck holds good! Two stalls returned within the last few minutes, and I've got them. Now what I suggest is that we have one more drink, then walk down to Wilton's for a dozen oysters – it's almost our last chance till September – and after the play we'll go somewhere for supper.'

‘I'll have to go back to my hotel and put on a proper dress first.'

‘Oh, nonsense! You're looking very pretty —'

‘I'm not going to the theatre dressed like this. Not in the stalls.'

She spoke with the rigour of an ultimatum, and Balintore, not without annoyance, recognized that argument would lead only to his defeat.

‘Then you must take a taxi,' he said, ‘and hurry.'

‘There's plenty of time,' she said, and put down her glass. ‘Perhaps you'd like to finish it, it's too strong for me. Now where did you say I was to meet you?'

‘At Wilton's in King Street.'

‘I won't be long,' she said; and as she turned away, desire renewed at the sight of her taught retreat, so slim and rhythmical. And a girl with a character as firm as her figure, he thought.

At Wilton's she kept him waiting for twenty minutes, but her air of gentle dignity in a short black frock did not encourage remonstrance, and she ate a dozen oysters and brown bread and butter with a hearty appetite. Then they went to see
Dig the Marquis
.

The eponymous nobleman was the Marquis de Sade, and the drama, enacted with hilarity to an atonal music, dealt with – though it did not fully explain – the progressive disappearance of nine of his ten pretty little page-boys. Most of the critics, of the better sort, had praised the profundity of human understanding in its daring theme, and for several months enthusiastic audiences had applauded its witty inventions, the
agility of an epicene
corps de ballet
, and the close dissonance of the chorus. But neither Balintore nor Polly Newton enjoyed the performance – he because it pleased him to retain some old-fashioned prejudices, and she because she couldn't understand what it was all about – and they left the theatre with no appetite for supper. Polly went home – that is, to Brown's Hotel – in a taxi, and Balintore walked back to Albany.

At eleven o'clock on the following morning Mrs Bint was in a mood for conversation. She had been reading about travel in outer space, and some of the personal difficulties that astronauts encountered.

‘You lose weight,' she said. ‘You don't weigh anything, and nothing weighs anything. And very nice too, I thought. I'd go into outer space to get the weight off my feet. But then I turned the page, and what do you think I read next? Why, every time you pull the plug, you sprinkle the ceiling – or words to that effect. Well, there's a topsy-turvy world, I said!'

Balintore listened impatiently. She had finished her work, and nothing prevented her from going but her discovery that he had engaged a new secretary; whom she wanted to see. It was twenty past eleven when Polly Newton arrived, and half-past before Mrs Bint departed with a meaning wink, whose familiarity Balintore found offensive.

As soon as she had gone, Polly took off her coat with a freedom that suddenly proclaimed her at home in her new surroundings, and said, with a smile of engaging friendliness, ‘I never thanked you for taking me to the theatre last night. I didn't enjoy it – well, not much – but thank you all the same.'

So amicable was her expression that Balintore – moved by her morning prettiness – put two fingertips under her chin – a slightly avuncular gesture – tilted it, and lightly kissed her.

‘And I let you go home without giving you any supper,' he said.

‘Oh, I made up for that at breakfast. I had stewed pears, and kedgeree,
and
bacon and eggs. It's a very good hotel, Brown's Hotel, but I'm glad I haven't got to pay the bill.'

‘Have you heard from Evershrub?'

‘Not a word.'

‘Well, there's plenty to do here, if only I could make up my
mind how to go about it. To a certain extent, the problems confronting you – if you're going to write an autobiography – are precisely the same as those confronting a novelist.'

‘You mean, it isn't going to be true?'

‘No, no! But if I'm going to tell the story of my life, truth isn't the only object. I've got to tell it in a way that will interest people.'

‘It's bound to do that.'

‘Are you sure?'

‘Well, you're such an interesting man.'

‘Do you really think so?'

‘If you knew the number of times you've made us laugh —'

Surprised, and a little hurt, Balintore asked sharply, ‘Is that all I've done?'

‘It's more than most people can do – in the way I mean. I'm thinking of the way you contradict people when they're talking nonsense – but the rest of us hadn't realized it was nonsense till you said so – and then you tell us the truth of the matter as you see it, and it all seems so easy that you're bound to laugh – especially when someone who thinks himself important is sitting there like a fish out of water, and can't answer you back.'

Gratified by this ingenuous tribute, Balintore went to the window to hide a pleasure which might look foolish. He deepened his voice, and said, ‘Well, yes. Yes, in certain circumstances that's what I hope to do – what I try to do – and I think you've put it very well. There's such a phenomenal amount of nonsense spoken nowadays —'

‘And you've made us laugh at it. Well, that's a good thing to do.'

She recalled, in detail, several occasions on which his explosive temper, combined with a rational intelligence and a ready memory, had discomfited redoubtable opponents, and Balintore listened to her light-hearted talk with a pleasure that deepened and spread until he seemed to be floating in it, buoyant on admiration. He was not unaccustomed to praise, but the measured praise of a professional critic meant little in comparison with the homage of this tender prattle. Here, in the warmth of pretty Polly's voice, in the dancing light of her
eyes – here was his true reward. Though more sensitive, more intelligent than the majority, she was a daughter of the people, and to one who was no demagogue, who had never flattered the rude majority, it was gratifying indeed to find he had served its interests so well. And doubly gratifying to see that his image was stamped so firmly on its charming spokesman. How pretty she was!

It was not until half-past one that he interrupted her to say, ‘I think it's time we had some lunch. There's nothing much in the larder – a Melton Mowbray pie and a lettuce, I think – but let's have a picnic meal here instead of going out. I went over to my grocer's this morning and bought a little pot of caviare, so we ought to make some toast and start with that.'

Polly Newton did not much like the caviare – ‘It's too fishy,' she said – but she had enjoyed laying the table for their meal, ate with relish Melton Mowbray pie, and drank Vin Rosé in a tall triangular glass. In a moment of childish fun, appropriate to a picnic meal, she laughed aloud when a translucent fragment of jelly from the pie escaped her fork and tumbled to her lap; and Balintore, coming to the rescue with a napkin, took advantage of proximity to kiss the back of her neck, the angle of her jaw, and then her slightly sticky but not unwilling mouth.

She laughed again, and said ingenuously, ‘But this is just like a real picnic!'

‘There's not much more to eat,' said Balintore, ‘except some yellow plums – out of a bottle, I'm afraid – and very thick cream. But with that we're going to share half a bottle of Château Yquem, and if you don't like it, you'll have to go back and work for Mr Evershrub.'

In these circumstances they found it easy to maintain a conversation which touched peripherally on the subject of autobiography, and about four o'clock in the afternoon their topic was unashamedly the emotion which now united them; and on the long, broad, comfortable sofa in Balintore's sitting-room they lay in a relatively intimate and overlapping conjunction.

But then he made an untoward movement, and Polly at once withdrew and said in a shocked tone, ‘No, no! Oh, no. Not here. Not in Albany.'

Balintore, releasing her, sat up and said, ‘My dear, what delicacy!'

‘It wouldn't be right,' she said. ‘When I walked past that porter, in his top-hat – oh, I wouldn't know where to look!'

‘My dear!' he repeated, and noted, with some surprise, that his voice was a little tremulous when he said, ‘I love you.'

Softly, but quite calmly, she replied, ‘I love you too.'

‘Where shall we go?' he asked.

‘Nowhere tonight,' she said. ‘I promised to go and see my sister in Islington.'

‘Can't you put her off?'

‘No, not again.'

‘Well, tomorrow.'

‘Mr Evershrub may ring up and say he wants me.'

‘Write and say your engagement with him is concluded. You're mine now.'

‘What does that mean?'

‘We'll go somewhere for a long holiday. Have you ever been abroad?'

‘I've been to Dieppe. Just for a day.'

‘We'll go farther than that. Where would you like to go?'

For half an hour they discussed geography, and Polly cried a little, and said, ‘Perhaps I shouldn't go anywhere. Not with you.'

He comforted her and said, ‘Come tomorrow and we'll make our plans.'

‘Not here,' she said. ‘I'd feel a sense of guilt if I came here. Mrs Bint would look at me as if I was keeping an assignation.'

‘Then where shall we meet?'

‘That restaurant you took me to —'

‘The Caprice?'

‘I liked that.'

Their luncheon at the Caprice was again interrupted by many of Balintore's friends who came to inquire after his health and stayed to estimate the attractions of his new companion; but in the intervals between interrogation and idle response they were able to debate the claims of Spain, Madeira, and Tangier; and decide on Italy.

‘I can't promise sunshine and warm weather all the way,'
said Balintore, ‘but if we go, first of all, to Florence, we can see something of Florence and Pisa and Siena, before the tourists come swarming in; and then across to Arezzo, down to Perugia, over to Orvieto, a week or two in Rome —'

‘Oh, wonderful!' she said. ‘I've always wanted to see Rome.'

‘When we've had our coffee,' said Balintore, ‘we'll walk down to Charles II Street, I know a very good travel agent there —'

‘I'm not going to walk anywhere in this weather,' she said. ‘Look at that window! It's pouring with rain.'

‘All the more reason for going to Italy as soon as we can. “April is the cruellest month” – but I apologize. That's another quotation.'

‘It doesn't sound like one.'

‘No,' he said, beckoning to a waiter. ‘Quotations from modern poetry often don't.'

Some Five or six weeks later, in the last days of May, Guy Palladis was fishing a large and viewless lough in the west of Ireland under a vast coverlet of dull, discoloured cloud from which, at intervals, came a wind-slanted drift of rain. A boatman of melancholy aspect rowed him with slow and lackadaisical strokes of the oars: a man with mournful eyes and a long red nose, clad sombrely in a black sou-wester, a ragged black oilskin coat, and cracked Wellington boots.

On their leeward side was a small island, rock-fringed and decorated with thorn trees and tall heather wreathed in mist. Between them and the shore the water lapped in grey, succeeding waves, and suddenly from its depths a trout rose, head and tail, to an unseen fly. Palladis struck on the instant, but touched nothing.

‘You nearly had him that time,' said his gillie consolingly.

‘It came nowhere near me,' said Palladis, and for another half-hour fished steadily without response.

Then, as if some remote and arbitrary stage-manager had
decreed a change of scene, the sky broke and a watery sun glistened on the dull lough and burnished the white blossom of the dripping may trees, while the spreading light steadily exposed a far, romantic shore-line and the silhouette of desolate brown hills. Palladis looked at his watch and said, ‘It's time for lunch.'