Loving, Living, Party Going (65 page)

'Where is Robert?' he said. He could not bear it if anyone in any party of his paid for anything.

'Downstairs in the bar. Why?' she said.

'Can't have that, you know.'

'Oh, Max, you are sweet!' she said, 'but really, after all, it is his own aunt and she was not in our party; really she's got nothing to do with you.'

Amabel asked herself why then come to bother him about this old trout, and then told herself she knew.

'Can't have it,' he said cheerfully, as people do when they are living up to their own characters.

'Darling,' said Amabel, 'don't be so like yourself.'

'I wish you would help,' Julia said and then thought why not put it on to Claire. 'Poor Claire,' she went on, 'she is so worried.'

'What's that crack for?' he said to Amabel.

'What crack?'

'Don't be so like yourself or something?'

'Oh, nothing,' she said and smiled up at him as if he enormously amused her.

'Well, if that's all,' he said still looking at her, 'then I'd better go see what can be done.'

'But I mean,' said Angela, and they all turned surprised for they had forgotten her, 'I mean would Claire like that? I thought she wanted nobody to know,' she said with malice.

'Claire's upset, poor darling, it's horrible for her,' Julia explained and at this moment Alex came back in again.

'There's no one anywhere like your Toddy,' he said to Amabel and looked tremendously pleased. 'The things I've found out about you, you'll never be able to be quite the same to me again with all I've got on you now. Really Am, it's fantastic, you can't imagine, I mean it makes coming and all this waiting worth while. Not of course that it isn't heaven our all being here together and all that, only there is so little to do, but have baths and gossip. Why, what's the matter, it's nothing I've said or done is it? You all look as if you'd been at one of my uncle Joe's board meetings.'

'It's about Claire's aunt, this Miss Fellowes. She's very ill.'

'I know all about it, Julia, you told me ages ago and tried to be frightfully mysterious about it.'

'I'm very worried about her.'

'I'll bet you aren't really,' he said, 'and if she's going to die, even, what difference—'

'Oh, no, Alex,' she said.

'—does it make to you?' he went on, and she said 'Alex, no, no,' again. 'Well,' he said, 'we've all got to come to it some time, though why it should be here of all places I can't imagine.' While he was talking Miss Crevy looked at him with loathing. 'Oh, I know,' he
went on, 'I know she's not so bad as all that but I don't care anyhow and I advise everyone to feel the same. Otherwise I shall go home,' he said, blushing with anger all of a sudden, 'yes, and I shall advise everyone to do the same. We all fuss too much.'

'Really, Alex,' said Julia and was staggered, 'what has come over you? I don't think you are being very polite, are you?'

'When is he ever?' said Miss Crevy.

'Yes,' he said, quickly recovering himself, 'like the cornet player said at the Salvation Army meeting, "I'll, give you one more 'oly 'oly 'oly and then I'm off 'ome."'

They did not know what to make of this so Max said 'Good for you, Alex,' and Amabel said to him, 'Darling, tell me something very nice.' At this Alex smiled, sat on the arm of her chair and turned round to look into her face. She smiled sideways at him and as always when she smiled so far as he was concerned it was so brilliant it made him shy. She then reached out and with one long vermilion finger-nail she began to scratch gently at one of his knuckles, for she liked making him shy, he who was not supposed to care about girls. He thought how much cleaner her wrist was than his hand it lay across and how much stronger it looked than you would expect, but then of course she was probably extremely powerful and he always had thought women were more powerful than men. And so, as she scratched gently she began to gain power over him and he felt himself slipping away she did it so well, just right, so that if he had been her pussy cat he would have purred. He was going to shut down his eyes and give himself over to sleep, it was stretching up over him from his hand when he lazily thought he must look ridiculous and this at once went through him as if he was being rung up so that he hung up on her, drawing away out of reach. For two minutes she went on gently scratching at the chair arm. It was embarrassment on his part, he was afraid he would be made to look foolish and she knew this very well. She went on smiling at him without any change of expression and still sideways, almost as though what she had begun with him she had put over on herself as well.

The others went on talking, Max was quite forthcoming now, and as no one paid them any attention he thought what a pity, and this was what she meant him to feel, why if he was left on a desert island with this girl he would only count what nuts there might be on those spreading awkward palms for fear monkeys should see him. Not
looking at her he put his hand out again and having won she laughed and only patted it once and then turned to those others again. He laughed and said:

'I missed my chance.'

She turned back to him for an instant and he saw from her eyes she was not bothering any more about him. When she did not smile her eyes were not so blue but now she smiled, patted him once again, and finally left him though he had only to stretch out to take hold of her dressing-gown and she was wearing nothing underneath.

'I always do,' he said, but she did not come back so he tried one last time, 'miss my chance,' he said, but it was no good and he gave up trying. He did not see that she had kept him with them, not knowing whether he really meant to go home. Her purpose was to keep them round her to show herself off in front of Max.

'No,' Max was saying, 'particularly now that Claire has her aunt down with something I don't see how we can go home. No need for you others to stay, of course; and for the matter of that there's nothing to be done about her, is there? But I ought to stay.'

'But, Max,' said Julia, 'as Evelyn said while we were outside, it's all very well talking of going home, but they won't keep the train waiting when they do send it off just for us to come and catch it. If anyone goes they'll miss it.'

'I'm sorry, everybody, it was my idea about waiting at home,' Alex said, 'but I was in a filthy mood. I didn't mean it.'

'What I mean is,' said Max, 'I could have you rung up if you all went back to my flat. They would let me know when they were going to send our train off in time to get you here.' And as he said this he was well aware that Julia's uncle was a director of this line but he liked better to make out they would do all this for him. However, Julia agreed with Evelyn, and felt so strongly about it she almost made a scene. She said if they once left they would never get back again and she described how much thicker it was the way she had come than it really had been and made so much fuss they had to give in largely out of a loyalty all felt to her moods, all that is except Miss Crevy. When she had had her way she said why didn't they get Claire and Evelyn to leave Miss Fellowes and come along to join them, surely they could risk that, she could not be so bad those old nannies could not see to her. Max approved of this and went to fetch them.

'Will anyone have a drink?' said Alex, 'I fancy it would do us all some good,' but no one answered and now that Max was no longer with them Angela and Julia had nothing to say, nor had Amabel. He wondered how often this had happened to him before and marvelled again that anyone should be so run after as Max, though never so run after in such an awful room before. Places alter circumstances, he thought, and there was little amusing in being ignored in these surroundings, armchairs that were too deep with too narrow backs and covered in modified plush, that is plush with the pile shaved off so that those chairs were to him like so many clean-shaven port drinkers.

Clean-shaven port drinkers enough, he went on, mixing his drink, one for each girl, that is three chairs but only Amabel sitting on those gouty knees, that sodden lap; and then public house lace curtains to guard them in from fog and how many naked bodies on sentry go underneath adequately, inadequately dressed. Here he pointed his moral. That is what it is to be rich, he thought, if you are held up, if you have to wait then you can do it after a bath in your dressing-gown and if you have to die then not as any bird tumbling dead from its branch down for the foxes, light and stiff, but here in bed, here inside, with doctors to tell you it is all right and with relations to ask if it hurts. Again no standing, no being pressed together, no worry since it did not matter if one went or stayed, no fellow feeling, true, and once more sounds came up from outside to make him think they were singing, no community singing he said to himself, not that even if it did mean fellow feeling. And in this room, as always, it seemed to him there was a sort of bond between the sexes and with these people no more than that, only dull antagonism otherwise. But not in this room he said to himself again, not with that awful central light, that desk at which no one had ever done more than pay bills or write their dentist, no, no, not here, not thus. Never again, he swore, but not aloud, never again in this world because it was too boring and he had done it so many times before.

It was all the fault of these girls. It had been such fun in old days when they had just gone and no one had minded what happened. They had been there to enjoy themselves and they had been friends but if you were girls and went on a party then it seemed to him you thought only of how you were doing, of how much it looked to others you were enjoying yourself and worse than that of how much
whoever might be with you could give you reasons for enjoying it. Or, in other words, you competed with each other in how well you were doing well and doing well was getting off with the rich man in the party. Whoever he might be such treatment was bad for him. Max was not what he had been. No one could have people fighting over him and stay himself. It was not Amabel's fault, she was all right even if she did use him, it was these desperate inexperienced bitches, he thought, who never banded together but fought everyone and themselves and were like camels, they could go on for days without one sup of encouragement. Under their humps they had tanks of self-confidence so that they could cross any desert area of arid prickly pear without one compliment, or dewdrop as they called it in his family, to uphold them. So bad for the desert, he said to himself, developing his argument and this made him laugh aloud.

'What are you laughing about?' said Julia, who felt out of whatever Max was doing with himself outside.

'Oh, nothing,' he said.

'I do hate people who go away, darling,' she said to Amabel, 'not physically I mean,' she said, catching herself up, 'but when they are in a room and then they go and leave one.' But while Amabel had been ready to take this up where Max was concerned, Alex did not exist for her any more and her answer was to send him for her nail things with another smile just as brilliantly blue as when she had been thinking of him. And now, when for the moment he was gone, silence fell over them with lifeless wings.

While he was away, which was not for long, no one spoke. Amabel looked at her nails from which she was going to take one coloured varnish to put on another. Julia fidgeted with the cuff of what she was wearing and Miss Crevy examined her face in a mirror out of her bag like any jeweller with a precious stone, and it was indeed without price, but it had its ticket and this had Marriage written on it.

When he came back and gave Amabel what she wanted he was struck again by how glum they seemed. He said into their silence, 'and to think this is supposed to be the happiest time of our lives.' Julia did not understand. 'Why now exactly?' she said from far away. 'Well, we're young,' he said, 'we'll never be young again you see.' 'Why aren't you happy then?' she said, as though she was on an ivory tower. 'That's not the point,' said he, his eyes on Amabel,
'but I'm so bored.' 'Aren't we all?' she said and because she thought this sort of conversation silly Miss Crevy broke in by asking Amabel what kind of nail polish she used. Already the acetone she had filled this room with its smell of peardrops like a terrible desert blossom. He coughed, it stifled him.

'I was wondering if I wouldn't make them darker,' she said, 'like the sloe gin Max gives me out shooting.'

'What's that?' said Angela.

'It's more like port, isn't it?' Julia said to show she had been out with him too. 'Oh, do you remember?' she asked, though as she did it now it was almost automatic as though it was her part she had to play to evoke good times, alone, on top of this ivory tower with his dreaming world beneath, sleeping beauty, all of them folded so she imagined into their thoughts of him. 'Amabel,' she said, 'd'you remember that time it was corked?' But she said it so low, so quietly this time that no one followed her. Memory is a winding lane and as she went up it, waving them to follow, the first bend in it hid her from them and she was left to pick her flowers alone.

Memory is a winding lane with high banks on which flowers grow and here she wandered in a nostalgic summer evening in deep soundlessness.

Angela went back to her mirror and began touching the tips of her eyelashes with her fingers' ends. Alex picked up a newspaper and behind it picked his nose.

Night was coming up and it came out of the sea. Over harbours, up the river, by factories, bringing lights in windows and lamps \on the streets until it met this fog where it lay and poured more darkness in.

Fog burdened with night began to roll into this station striking cold through thin leather up into their feet where in thousands they stood and waited. Coils of it reached down like women's long hair reached down and caught their throats and veiled here and there what they could see, like lovers' glances. A hundred cold suns switched on above found out these coils where, before the night joined in, they had been smudges and looking up at two of them above was like she was looking down at you from under long strands hanging down from her forehead only that light was cold and these curls tore at your lungs.