Friendly Young Ladies (20 page)

Her head ached a little; stars of green and red light, printed by the sun’s bright reflection, swam under her eyelids. She wondered when Peter would answer her letter, and what he would say. The little jiggy tune that Leo was playing (it was
Auprès de ma Blonde
) ran through her head like a beating pulse and mixed itself with her thoughts. She was almost asleep. Helen, with her smooth cheek on the description of a lynching-bee and her silky hair entangled with Lefty’s smoking guns, slumbered outright, relaxed like a cat in a sunny shop window. Leo, propped with her back against the flagpole, played verse after verse of
Auprès de ma Blonde
, accompanying the words as they ran through her mind; it was an easy tune and she lacked the energy to change it. She was the only one of the three sufficiently awake to have heard the door-bell tinkle below, and the sound of her own piping masked it in her careless ear.

Elsie’s reverie was disintegrating into dream. She was standing on the lower deck, hot and flushed from the party; the people in the room behind were whistling a song, whistling on her account because she had not liked the words; it embarrassed her and made her feel hotter than ever. Suddenly the music stopped, in the middle of a phrase. The reality of the silence woke her. She turned, trying to focus her sun-dazzled eyes. Leo still sat against the flagpole, her long bare legs curled under her, a lock of dark hair curling damply on her forehead, her penny whistle suspended half-way to her mouth. The sun had given her arms and shoulders a polish like bronze. Her long throat, and her slanting brows, were lifted in a kind of detached enquiry. Elsie, collecting herself, looked in the same direction. Standing at the head of the ladder, in the act of mounting its final rung, was Peter. He too had stopped, and was meeting Leo’s eyes with a boyish, charming, tentative smile.

In the first few seconds, Elsie experienced practically no emotion at all. Similarly, people feel very little in the early stages of being knocked down by a car.

“I do hope you don’t mind my coming upstairs. You sent me a sort of invitation to call.” He transferred his smile, briefly, to Elsie; she blinked dazedly, feeling, as she struggled to respond, a blush stinging her face like fire where the sun had caught it. It did not occur to her that he was waiting for her to introduce him. When nothing happened, he added, quite unperturbed, “My name’s Peter Bracknell.”

Helen’s eyes opened. The sound of a young, male, attractive voice reacted on her slumber like morning sun on a daisy’s. She awoke charmingly, like the unfolding of rosy petals, and smiled like the golden eye of a flower. The exchange of approval that followed was as pretty as a pastoral. Leo watched it for a moment amusedly, then, as she remembered, her eyes slid round to Elsie. Good heavens, she thought, poor little wretch. I must get her in quickly, while there’s time.

“How do you do?” she said aloud. “I guessed who you were. So glad you were able to get over. You’re just in time for tea.”

“I guessed who you were, too.” It would have been difficult to charge a short sentence more highly with subtle and flattering implication. He followed it with a long, speculative, intimate look; the kind of look appropriate between people who, in a wilderness of mediocrity, are going to understand one another. Then, “Hullo, Elsie,” he said. “Lord, you do look fit.”

“I’m awfully well, now,” said Elsie, blushing again. If only, she thought, the sun had not given her this dazed, blurred feeling, which made everything seem a little unreal. She sat up on her cushion, trying to arrange herself becomingly; the movement sent a throb of pain across her forehead. She felt, suddenly, sticky and dirty, and was aware of the smallness of her shorts. While Peter was settling himself on a spare cushion which Helen threw him, she tried inconspicuously to pull them lower, and, this failing, to copy the composure of the others. Leo, after all, was practically naked, but betrayed no consciousness of it at all. What a terrible thing it was, thought Elsie, to be in love; what a hopeless, insurmountable disadvantage.

It would be helpful, Leo was thinking, to know just what Elsie has been telling this man about me. There seems no conceivable reason why he should look at me as if he were putting my latch-key in his pocket, prettily as he does it. It isn’t so much what he suggests, as what he takes for granted. He can’t even light one a cigarette without somehow implying that you and he have just got out of bed together. (It was a fact that she felt even a little shy, a sensation which she always resented and generally avenged.)Where did the unfortunate child manage to catch this tartar? “—Yes, we live here in the winter as well; we’re used to it, I suppose.” I wonder if she’s ever seen him with other people before.

Elsie never had. She sat silent on her cushion, taking no part in the exchange of amenities, and wishing for none. She would have enjoyed an equal, perhaps a greater rapture during these moments if she had been invisible. There he sat, the truth, the reality which had been fading, the image which had worn almost threadbare in the constant trafficking of dreams. “In the flesh”—it was an ugly phrase, suggesting parts of the Bible which one wished afterwards one had not read. There ought to be other words for the miracle of substance. She stored it as a desert plant stores rain, seizing on small details which would help afterwards to re-create it, for it must bear the weight of reverie again; a smooth concavity in the temple, an irregularity in the line of the eyebrow, the dark worn strap of his wrist-watch and the figures on the dial. On the back of his right hand was a little scar, a very old one; it must have been there since he was a boy. Some day perhaps she would ask him how it happened, and he would tell her that he had fallen off a bicycle, or slipped climbing a tree. But now for a little while, until one was acclimatized to felicity, it was better to watch silently, to see him for the first time with sophisticated, critical people, as brilliantly self-assured as he had been with her alone, and making the impression which anywhere in the world, thought Elsie, he would be bound to make. To know him, to have brought him here, was in itself success beyond triumph. Presently the others would go to get the tea, and they would be left alone. Her hands grew cold at the thought, her heart beat till it shook her diaphragm, her legs felt like lead. She remembered the kiss he had given her on the cliffs; and put away the thought because, though he was talking to Helen, it seemed that he would know.

Helen was thinking very little. It was not her habit to think about new people at first, particularly about new men. She allowed them, passively, to seep into her subconscious, making in the meantime such responses as called for the minimum of effort. People were apt to be misled by the outward part of this process, and to receive surprises when, at a suitable moment, the silent commission within presented its findings. Peter offered little disturbance to this routine; to be gazed at like chocolate cake in a tuckshop window was for her a social commonplace, interesting only in its slight variations, like the custom of shaking hands. She absorbed it along with the sunshine, making as little effort over the one as the other; a course which had always answered so well that she had never had occasion to examine it.

Leo threw her cigarette over into the river, and stood up.

“We’ll give you a call,” she said, “when tea’s ready. Come on, Elsie.”

“I cut beautiful bread and butter,” said Peter winningly. “I’m very domesticated.”

“It’s cut already. You stay and talk to Helen. We shan’t belong.”

Elsie got to her feet, turning on Leo eyes of incredulous reproach. She knew that tea had not been started yet. Leo’s lack of perception almost stunned her. As she went indoors, the shade seemed darkness after the sun’s glare. She felt her throat grow hot with angry tears and a burning in her eyes. She hardly noticed that she was being propelled, not into the kitchen, but into Leo’s room, until she found herself pushed down on the stool before the little walnut dressing-chest.

“Here,” said Leo. She thrust under Elsie’s nose a pad of cotton-wool, soaked with something cool and scented. “Do your face over with that. Don’t wash it, whatever you do. Then put some of this cream on, and I’ll come back in a minute and do the top layer for you. Don’t worry. I’ll fix you up all right.”

She was gone. Elsie sat, with the pad of lotion in her hand, confronted by the small oval mirror which always made so perfect a frame for Helen’s fair head. Perhaps it had grown spoiled and hard to please. It showed her a pink, boiled face, glazed with fresh sunburn; a mouth which, without make-up, looked almost the same colour as the surrounding skin; a beef-red V, shaped to the opening of her shirt, between her collar-bones; tousled hair, from which every trace of gloss had been baked away. The eyes, round and tragic with realization, turned the total effect from comedy to grotesque. Memory presented her suddenly with the image of Helen, smiling and golden, leaning on a dark-blue cushion in her fresh flowered print. She put her hand up to her eyes; the touch hurt her forehead as if it were raw, and she saw that her nails were grubby round the edges.

A chink of crockery sounded downstairs. Leo despatched domestic jobs very quickly, because they bored her. In a moment she would be back again. Desperately, without hope but only to escape more trouble, Elsie drew the wet pad over her face. It was cool and soothing; after wiping her hands too, she reached for the cream and smoothed it on. She felt more comfortable, but looked no better than before. At least, she thought forlornly, Leo would be changing; she looked, when she took the trouble, quite interesting and distinguished, a relative to do one credit and show that one amounted to something after all. An author too. Perhaps Peter wouldn’t ask, just this first time, what it was she wrote.

The quick pad of bare feet sounded on the steps.

“I’ve brought you your frock. Good Lord, haven’t you done your hair yet? Here’s a pair of silk stockings you can wear if you like; it’ll save having to do your legs, anyway. Now keep still and I’ll see to you.” She pulled open one of the drawers, and rummaged in the back of it. “I’m sure we kept it. Yes, here it is.” The powder in the box was a delicate shade of green. Elsie stared at it in horror, but dared no protest while Leo patted it on. She expected to look like a corpse, but only found, when she screwed up her courage to see, the pink polish miraculously toned down. Leo dusted it with a soft brush like a baby’s, and covered it with powder of a more normal shade. “Now grin, and hold it while I do your mouth. No idiot, not a face like that. Oh, hell—smile! That’ll do. Now stop wriggling and shut up.”

The lipstick—a kindly, non-committal shade—went on; the shirt came off; Leo brushed brilliantine into her hair, and stroked a film of liquid powder thinly over her arms and chest. She held out the Viennese dress. Elsie beheld a miracle. There was no painted look, only fresh smoothness and vitality. She murmured incoherent thanks, and drank it in, turning this way and that, till she remembered that Leo would be needing the mirror too.

“What are
you
changing into?” she asked, eager to please by showing interest. She still found it hard to tear her eyes from the new face in the oval frame.

“I’ve changed,” said Leo briefly.

Elsie turned round. Leo’s handful of bathing-suit lay tossed in a corner. She had on her old fawn corduroy slacks and a faded blue cotton shirt. As she spoke, she gave the waist a perfunctory twitch and, picking up a comb, ran it without looking through her hair. A packet of cigarettes must have been in the pocket already; she lit one, and, pulling at it, glanced over her shoulder.

“Right,” she said. “Let’s get going.”

Elsie did not move. She sat on the dressing-stool, gazing at the slim shabby boy whose appearance in the last few weeks she had grown to take for granted; but not today. Disappointment choked her. Descriptive phrases from the letter she had written to Peter rose up, tauntingly, mixed with memories of Leo at the party in the scarlet dress. Now, when it mattered so much more, surely she could have taken the trouble! Elsie felt that she was being made, deliberately, to look ridiculous.

“Come on,” said Leo. “You look all right now. I’m going to make the tea.”

“That isn’t what you’re really going to wear,” said Elsie at last, “is it?”

“Yes, of course. Do get a move on.”

“Aren’t you going to wear your red dress?”

“What, in the middle of the afternoon? Don’t be daft.”

“You’ve got lots of others. You showed me.”

“I can’t be bothered; it’s too hot.”

“I think you might.” Elsie stared at her toe, which she was digging into a rough place in the matting. “I told Peter about you. He was looking forward to meeting you. It wouldn’t be much bother.”

Leo stood back on her flat heels, staring at her sister. She opened her mouth to say something, and drew at her cigarette instead. At length she said, with unexpected gentleness, “What does it matter? It’s you, isn’t it, he’s come to see?”

Elsie looked at the floor. Even to herself her feelings were obscure. Mixed with the indignation whose cause she knew were hostilities more universal; the enmity of enforced humility for pride; of those whom convention comforts, for those who threaten it; strongest of all perhaps, and suspected least, of the unmixed female for the unfair, unaccountable sitter-on-the-fence.

“I think it’s a bit mean of you,” she said in a shaking voice. “When you had people coming I took ever so much trouble to look nice.”

“You almighty little fool.”

Elsie looked up. It was a voice she had never heard Leo use before, and it frightened her. It was like being roughly handled by someone whose strength one had not guessed. Leo stood with her hands deep in her trouser pockets, her cigarette in the corner of her mouth, looking down at her; her dark narrowed eyes, for an unguarded moment, loaded with the whole withering retort of the other side. Elsie did not recognize the answer which her vague, ill-digested resentment had called forth; she did not understand it; but what it contained of angry, half-compassionate, hopeless disdain crumpled her flat. The headache shot across her eyes, mixed with the pricking of tears. Leo saw, and, collecting herself quickly, laughed and put an arm round her shoulders, roughly, like the boy she looked.