Starlight (17 page)

‘I – don’t like being touched. That’s all,’ she muttered, turning round.

‘All right. I said I’m sorry and I said I’m a bit high. It is Christmas Eve. And I’d appreciate it if you don’t go running to my mother. She wouldn’t approve.’

‘I shan’t run to anyone. But just remember; I don’t like being touched.’

‘All right, Peggy. I – really am sorry. Get awfully lonely sometimes … silly, isn’t it?’

‘Too bad,’ she said, turning away.

‘I wish you’d be a bit nice to me – oh all right. As you were. How about a drink on it? Oh blast,’ as the bell of the front door sounded melodiously. ‘Press on regardless.’ He turned, straightening himself, to face the arrivals.

In a moment the first guests were in the room, ushered warmly by Mrs Corbett; a stout old woman tightly packaged in turquoise lamé, and her stout old husband.

Peggy was known to all the elderly pairs who followed; she had passed sandwiches to the wives at bridge parties and listened to desultory chat from the heavy old husbands. This evening everyone was slightly livelier than usual, because of married children and grandchildren flying in on their way to holidays abroad, visiting the old people for a few hours; letters were arriving from all over the world, sending love and photographs and news, even if the senders could not be there in person.

It was a sober, noticeably respectable group, offering little chance of adventure or change; the men were heads of companies, directors of wealthy firms or financiers who had retired from active speculation; and their wives were satisfied with lives padded at every angle by expensive comforts.

Peggy stopped for a minute’s chat with Gwen Palmer (usually referred to by Mrs Corbett as ‘poor Gwen Palmer’), who ‘must have been’ driving her little car round the broad shady local roads for some fifteen years, now, and with whom Peggy associated the idea that she would not mind marrying Arnold.

She had not heard anyone say so, and nothing in Miss Palmer’s manner contributed to the theory, it was merely in the air, like a scent, and clung to everyone who entered its orbit; it was part of the general boredom, to Peggy.

Self-possessed and graceful, her dark eyes and their stars looking out between the short curtains of her black hair, she moved between these elderly people, seldom adding the low note of her voice to the babble.

Taking a drink for herself – Peggy was fond of drink – she stood in a corner, close to the window through which, in spite of heavy curtains, a whisper of cold air was blowing.

Her pleasures were not those of most girls.

Her long walks in the loneliest places that could be reached and returned from in one day, her solitary visits to films about war or exploration or savages; her occasional descents upon the Zoo, where she would stand, looking, before the cage of some wolf or puma that had paused in its terrible pacing to stare, unseeingly, out across the passive, affectionate crowd; her swift homeward walks across crammed and desperate London – these were her own. She had lied about them to Mrs Corbett, until she found that her employer did not find such recreations eccentric, merely dismissing her as ‘a funny girl’.

‘But I would never go to the Zoo,’ Mrs Corbett would add. ‘I could never bear it. Those poor creatures. How they must miss their freedom.’

Peggy was still too young to know that the true tragedy was their no longer missing their freedom.

Some weeks before Christmas, she had gone to the Royal Smithfield Show: making her solitary way along with crowds of red-faced, solid men and their wives; crowds that she had hoped to avoid by paying the pound entrance fee of the first day’s showing.

She had come to look at the Highland cattle.

The hall was so enormous, and the crowds so dense, the cacophony of voices and the brilliant lights were so complicated and overwhelming, in effect, that she climbed to the gallery which runs around the main hall, hoping to see from above the stalls where the cattle were kept, and then make her way there.

She leant on the rail and looked out over the scene, much as the puma or ceaselessly pacing wolf would look out across the heads of a crowd.

It was spread below; vast; extraordinary; frightening; a colossal pattern of the angular bright shapes of agricultural machinery, painted red or blue or yellow, and lifted slightly into the air, quivering with light and noise, on stand after stand. Peggy looked down at it inimically. What had this to do with cows wandering homeward through dewy fields?

She stood there for some time. Then her brooding stare caught, at the far end of the Brobdingnagian view, miniature reddish blurs that, in contrast to the immobility of the gaudily painted ones, were
moving
; something beside men and women was alive down there. She took her arms off the rail, and went slowly down into the organized confusion.

Presently, after a considerable walk, she found herself outside a square enclosure surrounded by tiers of seats, where the Highland steers were being judged, and went in.

She sat down, among people whose faces were not London faces and heard, just behind her, two men talking in Welsh. The few women seated near her had soft, alive faces; gently alight as they chatted, or watched in considering silence. Many in this crowd were laughing, but quietly, as if in the pleasure of a holiday that was too natural to create excitement. And then – drifting casually, moving along the heated air, as if it had nothing to do with the scene and had its own power and could ignore everything else – she caught the scent of hay.

She sat forward, watching, as the stubborn steers were pushed and tugged into line by the stockmen in their white coats.

There was one that attracted her attention, as he did everyone’s.

His wild, stupid eye looked out through fringes of orange hair and his massive body resisted every step forward. Occasionally he moved sideways or backwards in a movement pettish yet charged with the strength never fully exerted. The audience, with none of the amused anticipation of trouble that would have been shown by a London one, observed him with a critical, yet detached interest: it was a steer that did not want to do what it was told, no more and no less, and the men and women from the Highlands and Cumberland and Denbighshire took in every point that the judges would consider in deciding their awards, commenting occasionally on some outstanding example; assessing the bulks of flesh paraded before them.

Peggy had no sentimental love for the row of thick bodies veiled in amber hair, but she
felt
for and with them; hers was the wild eye turning in useless rage, the horn helplessly slanted in a half-threat towards the stockman’s white-coated breast, the hoofs spurning the sawdust, and she drew something from them too; strength from their thews and their thick fat, and their tufted sides and horns like dim, yellowy mother-of-pearl.

The conspicuous steer was in charge of a man nearer seventy than sixty, with a face long-nosed and deep-coloured; and stubborn as the beast’s on which he was compelled to fix all his attention. At the end of the judging, this steer, as if maddened by four minutes of enforced stillness, suddenly jerked loose from the rope round its neck and made for the exit, followed by the man.

One or two people scattered. No woman screamed. A quiet grin played over the faces in the seats and those outside the exit, and there were some quick sideways jumps for safety as the beast and man swayed straining together from side to side, along the plank barrier. A thud sounded, unmistakable in origin to this crowd; it was a horn landing on wood; then two more stockmen came round the side of the pen and began to hustle the rebel into his quarters.

The stockman in charge growled out something in an unintelligible dialect, and they sheered off, grinning; Bob was as bad as Bhaddain for having his own way; best leave him to it.

Peggy sat on, looking broodingly at the re-formed line of thick bodies and glinting eyes and coarse fringes of hair, before which the judge, silent and grave in bowler hat and a dark suit suggesting an earlier day, walked with his notebook.

She was thinking, now, about her own situation: wondering, for the first time, why her strong pride was keeping her from the thing, the only thing, that she wanted to do in the world?

The thought recurred to her in the midst of the party this evening; the people were fools, and the room stifling, and she wanted only to be in the meadows with her lover, where she could never be again.

Glancing over the chattering groups, replenishing empty glasses, observing whose conversation was distracted by glances at a distant plate of
canapés
, drawing the servants’ attention to lack of alcohol – so the time wore towards eight o’clock. She found herself near Arnold Corbett, who was standing by the Christmas tree, looking out heavily across the crowded room. As she passed, he made to catch at her arm, then checked himself.

‘You’re the one who doesn’t like being touched, that’s the drill, isn’t it? Am I forgiven?’

Peggy moved her head in a way that meant nothing. She did not answer, and looked stony; she began to move away.

‘I say – don’t go. Stay and … you look simply lovely in that … you look simply lovely.’ He was drunker than he had been earlier, but not embarrassingly so; she had to admit that he carried liquor well. ‘Stay and talk to me, Peggy.’

‘I hate talking.’

‘Just a few minutes.’

‘All right. Only keep it short.’

‘You can be damned rude.’

‘Can I?’

‘What have I done? It’s Christmas Eve, isn’t it? Time for jollity and kissing under the blasted mistletoe and all that, isn’t it?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘You know, you’re a mystery girl. You puzzle me. You bother and bewilder me (I won’t say bewitch – early days yet). What’s your background? Why aren’t you married or going to be? You don’t look English. Remember I said so, that first evening you came?’

‘I do remember, and I told you, I am English. My father has a chain of shops and property in London, and my mother’s an invalid … I met your mother on the front at Hove and we got into conversation about the dogs and she took a fancy to me because they did, and here I am … any more you want to know?’

‘Yes, a damn sight more … I want to know about
you
. Come for a run in the car to-morrow afternoon?’

‘On Christmas Day? Be your age … I’m wanted here – and I hate motoring.’

‘You hate a lot of things, don’t you? … be a sport.’

‘With twelve for dinner in the evening? … I’ll have to ask your mother.’

‘Why? We’re both over sixteen.’

She turned and looked full at him.

‘Look here. It suits me, being here. It’s quiet, and no-one bothers me … so far. I’m not going to do anything that might get me sacked.’

He shrugged. ‘Oh … all right. Have it your way. Fair enough.’

But as she walked off she turned her little head over her shoulder to say mockingly:

‘I’m going to see my mother to-morrow. You can drive me over and bring me back, if you like.’

‘I don’t know that I particularly want to,’ he said, looking sadly at her, yet sullenly too, out of his protuberant eyes.

‘All right. As you’d say, fair enough,’ she answered indifferently.

‘But how will you manage about getting back, dear?’ asked Mrs Corbett, sitting after lunch on Christmas Day in the warmth of the drawing-room, with the Christmas tree glittering and occasionally tinkling gently, in the background, and the dogs dozing around her feet. ‘There are no buses or trains, and I doubt if you’ll get a taxi.’ She looked at Peggy with a trace of the annoyance that only came to her when her plans for entertaining were threatened. ‘I shall want you here quite by six, you know. I’d forgotten the buses.’

Peggy ventured to smile. ‘Mr Corbett has very kindly offered to bring me back … and to take me, too. I hope … is that all right?’

‘Oh quite all right, dear – so long as you’re both here by six, and it will do him good,’ Mrs Corbett said. ‘He’s been stuck in that room of his all day smoking himself like a kipper and …’ she checked herself; there was a bottle of whisky up there, too, but she was too old, and too tired, to think about the whisky … ‘it’ll do him good,’ she ended.

They drove away about three. Peggy, who was wearing a black jacket and cap, carried a bunch of Christmas roses. He had not seen her clothes before, and commented on them.

‘I like your fur.’

‘It’s new. I just bought it. It isn’t fur, it’s nylon.’

‘Well it looks like fur … most of the girls I know wouldn’t be seen dead in imitation fur. But I must say that looks all right.’

‘Most of the girls you know aren’t interested in what happens to wild animals, I suppose.’

‘I’m damned sure they aren’t … are you a crank, as well as a lot of other things, Peggy?’

‘Probably.’

She turned aside and watched the empty grey roads going by. The cap she wore was shaped like a silky black bag and sloped away from her olive brow, giving her an Egyptian look. A scarf of Indian silk, purple and orange, was tucked into the neck of her jacket. The roses looked stiff and very white against the black coat. She smelt sweet.

Hers was not a charm of warmth or kindness. But it was a strong charm; he could think of, and feel, nothing else.