Thank Heaven Fasting (12 page)

She followed the man-servant into the waiting-room.

A tall man, sitting near the window, rose as she came in. It was Christopher Lane.

Monica's romance lasted exactly a week, from the moment that Christopher, whilst the maid was still paying the cab, suggested that she should be sent to do an errand.

“But what?” gasped Monica.

“To buy a book—anything. Whatever sounds natural.”

It did not seem to Monica that anything could sound natural, but she remembered that she did want a new spongebag and a fine comb, and in an oddly wavering voice she suggested that Mary should “save time” by going in search of these articles.

Mary looked rather surprised, but the rain had stopped, and possibly, although this did not occur to Monica, she was not averse from a walk in the streets by herself.

She obediently went out again.

“You poor little darling,” said Christopher's deep voice, “what have they been doing to you?”

Bliss invaded Monica's whole being. She surrendered in that instant, without knowing that she had done so, her shallow, youthful judgment—that only owed such stability as it possessed to the careful efforts of her parents—in exchange for all the ecstasies of first love, and all the rapturous excitement of conducting an illicit emotional adventure unknown to the authorities that had hitherto governed every moment of her life.

The quarter of an hour in the waiting-room passed like a flash; but before it was over Monica had promised to try and come to the National Gallery on the following morning and meet Christopher there. It was, he said, extremely important that he should speak to her. He had something to say to her.

“Aren't you ever allowed to go anywhere alone?” he demanded.

“No. But I think I could bring another girl who—who wouldn't be in the way: Cecily Marlowe.”

He shook his head.

“Better not. She'd know who I was, quite well, and might easily say something that would get you into trouble afterwards. That,” said Christopher, “is the one thing that I couldn't bear. No, bring your maid again. I could square her if necessary.”

In spite of herself, Monica was shocked, and felt the suggestion to be a vulgar one. To bribe a servant to hold her tongue!

Christopher was quick to see his mistake.

“Don't look so scared, my pretty one, it'll be all right. You can tell her to go and look at the pictures in the other galleries, or something. I'll meet you in No. 1, as near twelve o'clock as you can manage it.”

He pressed her hand, and his touch, disturbing Monica in a way new and enthralling, drove everything else from her mind.

She met him in the National Gallery, exactly as he had suggested. Mary, by what Monica regarded as a piece of phenomenal good fortune, had a bad foot, and it was quite natural to tell her, as considerately as possible, to sit down on one of the seats and rest her foot, whilst Monica went and looked at the pictures.

She had wondered what it was that Christopher had to tell her—but when they were together, she forgot about it, and no special communication was ever made.

She and Christopher talked about themselves, and he told her that she was the most wonderful girl he had ever met, and that he needed an influence like hers in his life. He did not ask her to marry him, and Monica did not really know whether they were engaged or not. Somehow it hardly seemed to matter. In any case she knew now that her parents would not allow her to marry Christopher. Her mother had as good
as said so. They wanted her to marry, of course, but they didn't want her to choose for herself, she thought scornfully.

She was living in a dream, unable to see beyond the ball at the Ritz that was, so far as they could tell, to be their last opportunity of meeting before Monica went away. The ball was to be on Friday, and she was travelling down to Sussex with her father and mother on Saturday afternoon.

She had told Christopher—after resolving not to—exactly what her mother had said to her about him, and the prohibition as to dancing with him.

“People are very unjust, sometimes,” he said quietly. “I know that one or two mothers have taken up the attitude that I'm not a fit person to trust their daughters with, even for a dance.”

“But why?”

“I'll tell you about it some day, Monica, if you'll let me. I'd like to tell you, because I know you'll understand. But about Friday night. …”

He told her that there was a place for sitting-out on the roof at the Ritz, a garden covered in by an awning. Would she meet him up there for the tenth dance, keeping that and two subsequent ones free? Her mother would almost certainly be in the supper-room then.

Monica promised.

It seemed to her that this was to be the culminating point of her existence. Her imagination refused to envisage anything at all beyond it.

On the day before the ball Frederica and Cecily came round to Eaton Square to say good-bye. They were going with their mother to Oxfordshire.

“Monica,” said Frederica, “what about Claude Ashe?”

Monica started before she could control herself. She had forgotten all about Claude Ashe.

“Nothing,” she said, in confusion.

“Alice Ashe says that you wouldn't have anything to do with him, the night you went to the White City. She says he's frightfully hurt about it.”

“It shows how much he likes you,” Cecily put in. “Perhaps he's really in earnest, Monica.”

“He couldn't be,” Frederica interposed quickly. “He can't afford to marry—at least, not for years and years.”

“Oh, Monica,” Cecily entreated, “do tell us if he's proposed and you've refused him.”

Monica was very much tempted to reply that she had. She was practically certain that neither of the Marlowes had ever received a proposal, and she knew that if she said that she had, it would fill Frederica's heart with envy and Cecily's with wistful admiration.

But the risk of discovery was much too great, if she perpetrated so obvious a fraud. She contented herself with a reply implying that only her own tact and determination had averted an offer of marriage from Claude.

“I don't think it's fair,” said Monica grandly, “to let a man actually come to the point, if one doesn't mean to accept him in the end.”

“Of course not,” said Frederica. But she said it without conviction, and Monica knew very well that, to Cecily and her sister, she had now become one of that mysterious and fortunate band of “girls who were attractive to men.”

What would they have said if they could have known about Christopher? At the mere thought of him, a soft glow seemed to diffuse itself all over Monica.

She could not resist talking round the subject of the ball on Friday, to which the Marlowes were not going; but they were not interested. They were scarcely interested in anything excepting themselves, their mother's moods, and the difficulty of ever getting married.

When they got up to leave, Frederica said that it would be nice to have Monica to stay, and the girls exchanged their customary meaningless embrace. Frederica's kiss was as limp and flaccid as her hand-shake, given with half-open mouth, like a child's. Cecily, rigid with her distaste for physical contact, never kissed one at all, but touched one's face with her own, forcing herself to do it because it was
expected of her. Monica had often wanted to tell her not to—that it didn't matter—but, in point of fact, she thought it did matter, because both her own mother and Cecily's would have required an explanation, if either had perceived any omission in the conventional signs of affection.

“Good-bye, Fricky. I'm awfully looking forward to coming to stay. Shall I bring tennis things?”

“Oh yes. I should. Have you got a racquet?”

“I think I have.”

“Well, if not, we can lend you one. Good-bye, Monica.”

“Good-bye,” repeated Cecily. “I hope your house-parties will be fun.”

“I'll write and tell you about them.”

They were gone, and Monica viewed their departure, as she did everything else, as one more landmark left behind on the way to Friday night and the roof-garden.

It came at last.

“I shan't stay late to-night,” said Mrs. Ingram, adjusting her black velvet shoulder-straps, and then smartly tucking a lace handkerchief out of sight down the front of her
décolletage.

“How late, mother?”

“Well—certainly not after one. So don't book too many dances, my child.”

How little she knows, thought Monica sentimentally, treasuring the anticipation of the tenth dance and the two following ones, already promised to Christopher.

In the ball-room, she found that she did not know many people, and that her programme did not fill up.

Mrs. Ingram began to look anxious.

“Stand forward, Monica. No one can see you there. Get right in front of me, at once.”

Monica, feeling extremely self-conscious, stood forward, and pretended absorption in the buttoning of her long white kid gloves.

“Don't bend your head down like that!” came, in a sharp whisper, from her mother behind her. “Be ready to catch the eye of anyone you know.”

Suddenly Monica saw Claude Ashe. He bowed, hesitated, and then came up and asked her for a dance.

“May I have number seven with you?”

“Yes, certainly,” said Monica, handing him her programme. He put down his initials.

She still had several dances left unclaimed.

Mrs. Ingram, talking to a dowager, presented Monica, and explained that her daughter was “only just out” and knew very few men in the room.

“Let me introduce one or two of my party,” said the old lady good-naturedly.

She captured two partners for Monica, and then Mr. Pelham appeared and asked her for a two-step. She thought him very dull, but accepted eagerly, anxious to escape the humiliation and tedium of having to stand out a dance.

“Show me your programme,” said her mother. “How's it getting on? Oh, that's better.”

Monica had left everything blank after the ninth number.

“You'd better not book any more after supper.”

Monica's partner claimed her, and saved her from the necessity of replying.

“And how do you enjoy being grown-up?” said Mr. Pelham, exactly as he had said every time that he had had any conversation with Monica ever since their first meeting.

“I like it very much.”

“I suppose you've been having a very gay time?”

“Yes, I've had great fun. Of course, the season is really over now, isn't it?”

Monica was speaking quite mechanically. She had caught sight of Christopher, and a delicious turmoil had invaded her. He was dancing with a girl in white—not pretty, Monica decided with relief—and in another moment or two it seemed certain that the two couples would pass one another. Mr. Pelham, gripping Monica rather too firmly, was steering her round and round in a determined, uninspiring dance.

They were close to Christopher and his partner.

“… any amount of tennis,” said the voice of Mr. Pelham, seeming very far away.

“Yes—oh, yes.”

Monica's eyes and Christopher's had met, had held one another's gaze for a breath-taking instant.

“Then, if I accept Lady Marlowe's very kind invitation for the last week-end in the month, I hope to have the pleasure of meeting you.”

“That will be delightful,” Monica replied, with only a dim understanding of what it was that would be delightful.

The dance came to an end.

“Shall we find somewhere to sit down?”

They wandered, rather vaguely, in the wake of other couples. Some men always found one a comfortable seat in an interesting sitting-out place at once—and others never did. Monica knew already that Mr. Pelham belonged to the latter category. Sure enough, every alcove, every sofa and arm-chair, was already occupied, and they were obliged to content themselves with two upright gilt chairs in a rather draughty corridor. Then Mr. Pelham, painstakingly, produced remarks about the band, the state of the floor, the number of people present, and the superiority of the country to the town in the months of July and August.

Monica offered perfunctory assents.

“The other day,” remarked Mr. Pelham, “I heard of a fellow who was sitting out a dance with a girl. They'd talked about all the usual things and didn't seem to have anything more to say, and whatever he asked her she only seemed to answer Yes or No—so what do you think he suddenly said?”

“What?”

“He suddenly asked her: ‘
Do you like string?'
Without any preliminary, you know,” said Mr. Pelham, with a joyless appreciation of his own anecdote. “Just '
Do you like string?'
he suddenly said.”

Monica, startled into attention, laughed uncertainly.

“It was so absolutely pointless, you see,” Mr. Pelham explained. “They'd talked about all the usual things and didn't
seem to have anything more to say, and so he just asked her, quite suddenly, ‘Do you like string?'”

“What did she answer?”

“I don't know.”

There was a silence, until Monica, afraid lest he might guess that she was bewildered rather than amused, repeated: “Do you like string?” and then laughed again, and said: “Yes, that's rather nice.”

“I don't know what made me think of it just now,” her partner said. “But it struck me as being rather good. So absolutely silly, you know.
Do you like string?”

He paid a further tribute of reflective laughter to his
mot,
in which Monica politely joined.

Then the interval was over, and Claude Ashe, standing in front of Monica, was saying formally:

“This is our dance, Miss Ingram, I believe.”

“Well, thank you very much,” said Mr. Pelham, and bowed as he turned away.

In the relief of finding herself with someone of her own age again, Monica sprang up, glad to let Claude take her back into the ball-room and begin dancing with her. She even spoke to him quite naturally, and without the self-consciousness usually inseparable from conversation with a man.