Hangover Square (16 page)

He finished
David Copperfield
, and did not take it back to the library and followed it up with
Martin Chuzzlewit
as he had planned. The David
Copperfield
period was over.

Then the big day came when he bumped into Johnnie Little-john – a very big day. He didn’t exactly know why he was so happy after meeting Johnnie again – but he was lighter in heart than he had been for years. It wasn’t just because he was fond of Johnnie, or because Johnnie reminded him of the old days: it was something more than that. It was the feeling that perhaps
he
had a friend now – a real friend – that
he
had a background.

It was always Netta who had had the background before, and he who had been isolated – an interloper in her alien and scornful mob. It was always he who had been utterly alone against many, he who had been made the errand-boy, the man to get the sandwiches, the dumb butt of their unfriendly wit. But what if
he
had had a friend of his own all the time, a background to rival and hold its own against Netta’s? What if, after all, he had sources of intimacy and entertainment elsewhere – a
circle from which she possibly was excluded and in which he was accorded full human dignity and respect? It was a healing thought, and he very soon made up his mind that Netta and Johnnie must meet.

And what a clever, impressive, prosperous friend, too. He got the shock of his life when he learned that Johnnie was up at Fitzgerald, Carstairs & Scott’s. He knew the secret awe in which Netta – the seldom-awed Netta – held his firm. He knew that she was to a certain extent chasing the famous Eddie Carstairs (who, God be praised, didn’t seem to be having any). He remembered that scene in Perrier’s. That was why she haunted Perrier’s – just to try and accidentally meet Eddie Carstairs. And here he had a friend who was in the firm! – a friend who was a personal friend of Eddie Carstairs, who must meet and talk to Eddie Carstairs every day of his life! He would show her! He would show her he had some friends – and some pretty useful and high-up ones, too.

Why, he might be the means, through Johnnie, of getting her in with the firm, of getting her a job. That would be too funny, after all that had passed. How would Peter like that? He must keep Johnnie up his sleeve. There were astonishing possibilities if he only kept his head. It seemed that fate, for once, had perpetrated a kindly instead of a dirty trick, and, out of the blue, had put a weapon into his hands.

Weren’t things taking a turn for the better? Hadn’t she said ‘On the contrary, my dear Bone, you’re very much more presentable these days’, and hadn’t he got this new weapon, this new resource and dignity in Johnnie?

Then, last night, the thing had happened – Johnnie and Netta had met – and he had of course spoiled everything by getting drunk. Just at the time when he wanted to keep sober, he had got drunk. He had been so mad with joy, having Netta and Johnnie together, drinking and apparently liking each other: it had been so exquisitely novel and pleasurable a sensation to have a presentable and by no means unimpressive friend to show to Netta, to be, as it were, alongside of him as two to one against Netta – that he simply couldn’t stop himself getting drunk. And then, when Brighton was suggested, and Netta had
said she would go, he had gone crazy. He had thought, last night in drink, that all his troubles were as good as over, that Netta, by consenting to come away, had opened a new heavenly era of some sort.

He must have made an awful fool of himself; and he hoped to God he hadn’t shocked or disgusted Johnnie: it would be a nice thing if he lost his best friend now he had found him.

And what did it all amount to? Nothing, of course. It was all drunken blah, and it would probably be in bad taste, bad drinker’s etiquette even to mention Brighton to either of them again. It just wasn’t done to take such things seriously the next day.

Or were they serious? He would have to phone Johnnie to find out. Netta, of course, would never come, but he might have a night by the sea with Johnnie. Not that he felt like it. With a head like his he didn’t know how he was going to get out of bed, let alone go to the sea.

He wished he wasn’t such a miserable man. He drew closer to the white cat and stroked its fur. It would soon be time to get up, if he wanted any breakfast, and he had to make himself eat.

He heard the chambermaid creaking and clanking about outside on the landing, and, from dim distances all over the hotel, the hissing of taps turned on, mysterious gurglings in pipes, the running of h. & c. in the bedrooms of his sober, God-fearing fellow-guests. The dynamo in the white cat, again receiving electrical power from the motion of his hand, again began to purr. It was day.

Chapter Four

When George Harvey Bone telephoned her at eleven o’clock, Netta Longdon was still asleep.

After a night of drinking, she would invariably wake up about half past five in the morning, put on the light and read magazines or newspapers for about two hours, and then fall into a second sleep until eleven or twelve.

She lifted the receiver and hazily heard George saying something about Brighton. She heard him saving that it seemed to be off, because Johnnie (that, she remembered, was the name of the little man they were out with last night) had just phoned him to say he couldn’t make it after all. She had, of course, a ‘head’, and she couldn’t be bothered to listen to him.

‘All right,’ she said, ‘I’m asleep now. Come round and talk about it when I’m awake.’

George then said he would come round some time after twelve, and she put down the receiver and went to sleep again. She woke again about half an hour later, and, brooding dully about various things, remembered that she had invited George to come round to her flat in about half an hour’s time. She did not usually let George into her flat in the morning, and she wondered why she had made an exception this time. Her mind then went back to the night before, and she realized, dimly, that she had obeyed a correct instinct in allowing him to come round and see her.

Netta Longdon thought of everything in a curiously dull, brutish way, and for the most part acted upon instinct. She was completely, indeed sinisterly, devoid of all those qualities which her face and body externally proclaimed her to have – pensiveness, grace, warmth, agility, beauty. Externally this Earl’s Court sleeper-on, this frequenter of film agents’ offices was of the type depicted by the poet Byron.

She walks in beauty, like the night

Of cloudless climes and starry skies
,

And all that’s best of dark and bright

Meets in her aspect and her eyes
…

One shade the more, one ray the less

Had halt impaired the nameless grace

Which waves in every raven tress

Or softly lightens o’er her face
,

Where thoughts serenely sweet express

How pure, how dear their dwelling-place
.

Her thoughts, however, resembled those of a fish – something seen floating in a tank, brooding, self-absorbed, frigid, moving
solemnly forward to its object or veering slowly sideways without fully conscious motivation. She had been born, apparently, without any natural predilection towards thought or action, and the circumstances of her early life had seemed to render both unnecessary. ‘spoiled’ from the earliest days because of her physical beauty: made a fuss of, given in to, beset with favours, the fulfilment of her desires going ahead at roughly the same pace as their conception, she had become totally impassive: thought and action were atrophied. Having no inherent generosity (as George perceived), having no instinct to ‘spoil’ or make a fuss of anything in return, she had become like a fish.

Alternatively, she had become like a criminal. Lacking generosity she lacked imagination, and in her impassivity had developed a state of mind which does not look forward and does not look back, does not compare, reason or synthesize, and therefore goes for what it wants, in the immediate present, without taking into account those considerations, moral or material, which are taken into account by non-criminal or normally provident members of the community.

When Netta awoke this morning she was aware that she was feeling decidedly sick and giddy, that she had a ‘head’: but she did not relate her ‘head’ to the night before – to the fact that she had got drunk. Nor was she capable of connecting her present feeling of illness with the future: she had no idea of preventing a recurrence of such a feeling by making an attempt not to get so drunk again. She simply suffered it in a vacuum – as a habitual crook, who spends his entire life in and out of jail, suffers prison bars.

Not that Netta, half atrophied as she was in regard to conscious thought and action, was incapable of living her life or fulfilling the greater part of her desires efficiently. She might get her way more or less unconsciously, but it would be with considerable precision, in much the same way as a somnambulist will step over obstacles and have regard for his own vital interests generally. When she had told George to come round this morning, she had not at the time known why she had done so. There was, however, an excellent reason. The time had come when she had to get some money out of him, and because of all
that Brighton chatter last night, when he had talked himself into a money throwing mood, the time was ripe.

The same dull, fish-like style of thought which she brought to bear on the local exigencies of-life characterized her attitude to her existence generally. She was not without ambitions; she was steering a course of a sort; but dimly, without any fervour or coherence. She had at one time hoped to make good at films: she still vaguely hoped to do so: but she was unable to relate this ambition with the labour requisite for its maturing. She expected it to come to her as all things had come to her hitherto, by virtue of the stationary magnetism of her physical beauty. That was how she had got whatever jobs she had in the past, and that was how her frigid, inelastic mind conceived of getting them in the future.

Again, she was not without passions. She was, for instance, intensely dissatisfied with her present mode of life – and that might be said to constitute a sort of passion in itself. But also she was not without physical passions: she liked rich and comfortable surroundings, she liked drink, she even liked men. But even here she was without any driving force or power of coordination. She went on suffering sordid surroundings, she got drunk and went with men as it were accidentally, without plan, as opportunity or inclination offered.

George imagined that she had a permanent relationship with Peter, something with a past and a future, but he was mistaken. She gave herself to him only occasionally, when she had drunk to excess and he forced it upon her – spasmodically and lovelessly. On the whole she disliked and despised Peter if only as part of her disliked and despised surroundings.

If she had any strong feeling for any man at the moment, it was, oddly enough, for Eddie Carstairs, of Fitzgerald, Carstairs & Scott, with whom she was unable to make any sort of satisfactory contact.

She had met him at one or two parties a year or so ago, and she had been attracted towards him for a variety of reasons. She had been attracted by him physically, by his sophistication, his clothes, his personality; she had been attracted by his aloof, offhand air, which was friendly in a slightly mocking way: and
above all, of course, she had been attracted by his prosperity and power, the people he mixed with, the places he frequented, the firm of which he was a partner. To go about with Eddie Carstairs was to go about with the high-ups: infinite possibilities were open to you: dispensing with all tiresome preliminaries you might crash straight from Earl’s Court into success, opulence or stardom. He had made no advances to her whatever, but on the few brief occasions when she had been alone with him, or when she had been at his flat and only a few other people were there, he had, she fancied, more than once given her a curious, humorous, fleeting look. She had been unable to interpret the exact meaning of that look, but it had at once suggested to her mind the possibility of becoming his mistress, and no sooner had that idea arisen, with its enormous potentialities, than it had been formulated as a secret practical ambition. From then on, whenever Eddie Carstairs’ name was mentioned by her gang, a little light, a faintly absentminded look denoting an interruption in thought, could be seen on Netta Longdon’s face, and she would be inclined to change the subject, as though her personal affairs were being discussed.

That she had made no headway in this matter, that since she had been out of a job she had had no practical means of making any further contact with this man, had not failed to add to her general dissatisfaction with her life, and it was for this reason that George, as he himself had surmised, was occasionally given the privilege of taking her to Perrier’s (the upstairs room), which she knew he frequented and where she hoped to meet him by accident.

But Mr Carstairs did not respond, it seemed, to accidental meetings, and in the absence of any advance in this direction Netta, on the whole, was drifting more and more to Peter. Wanting no other man save the one she could not get, any other man, the nearest at hand, served her purpose. And although she disliked and despised Peter, he yet had certain qualities which appealed subtly and more or less unconsciously to something in her own nature – a coldness, cruelty and strength, perhaps, which matched her own.

She liked Peter, for instance, because of her knowledge, possessed
by few others, of his past – the fact that he had twice been in jail. He had been in jail on one occasion for assaulting and wounding a man at a political meeting, and on another for killing a pedestrian with his car while drunk, and this she liked, this stimulated her. She liked the whole atmosphere: she liked the deeds themselves, and she liked the jail. Both provided something bloody, brutal, and unusual which gave him a halo of originality.