The Eye of Love (2 page)

For three years, in fact, the child Martha was perfectly happy. Whatever her temperament portended, it was being given full play. She had no regrets for the past. She couldn't remember her mother, and her father had never attached her. Dolores didn't interfere. Mr Gibson, as a sort of deity to be placated, fitted neatly into a child's pantheon: that one could placate him so easily, by one's mere absence, was a stroke of pure luck. Martha was lucky all round. Not a half of her solitary pleasures has as yet been described; seeing a tiger turn into a cat was a mere trifle.

She dusted herself down the front and stumped towards the house.

4

“How do you do, Mr Gibson?” asked Martha politely.

She couldn't shake hands because Mr Gibson, who was helping himself to a whisky-and-soda, had his back to her; he replied merely by a chuck of the head. Martha looked enquiringly towards Miss Diver. The latter was obviously feeling specially Spanish, specially Dolores; there was a high tortoiseshell comb in her hair, a shawl embroidered with peonies about her shoulders; that she reclined upon a settee covered in Rexine didn't, at least to Martha, spoil the effect at all. The Rexine was a good solid brown, against which the brilliant colours of the shawl glowed like the best sort of Christmas-cracker; the obtuse shape of the cushions threw into relief the attenuated shapes of Miss Diver's neck and forearms. It wasn't like the picture the thin grass made, but it was equally satisfying …

Miss Diver moved. Martha, once more alert to the moment's social necessities, re-focused an eye of enquiry. She was more than ready to return to the garden. But Dolores' nod wasn't, as usual, dismissive; it enjoined remaining. And Mr Gibson, though he had by now proportioned whisky-and-soda to some ideal of his own, didn't say what he always said.

(“Hey, Martha! Where's Mary?”

“In the Bible,” Martha always said.

“Best place for her,” Mr Gibson always said back.)

But he didn't say it now. Something was different, and therefore wrong.

Instinctively Martha glanced about the room for reassurance. It was mostly Art Nouveau, except for the settee and big arm-chairs. These were there because Mr Gibson needed to be comfortable after working so hard all day in the fur-trade, but Miss Diver had done her best to sophisticate them with black cushions, so that even they were fairly Nouveau. Martha admired the cushions extremely—as she also admired the splendid stained-glass galleon sailing across the upper panes of the bay-window, and the bowl of glass fruit that lit up from inside. Indeed, the whole room was a perfect treasure-house of beauties. Within a black-and-gold cabinet, for instance, frisked a family of stuffed ermines. The little table where Dolores kept cigarettes was inlaid with mother-o'-pearl. Upon it knelt a porcelain pierrot, holding the ash-tray, flanked by his companion-pierrette with the matches. Could the eye be offered more? It could. Best of all was the lady in bronze armour, a figure some eighteen inches high, her face and arms ivory, the bronze here and there gilded, a very ikon of luxury and refinement, from the Burlington Arcade.

She was still there. Everything was there, just as usual. But Mr Gibson hadn't said, “Where's Mary?” Martha looked back at Miss Diver in search of the reassurance the room hadn't given her.

“Mr Gibson has come to say good-bye to us,” said Miss Diver in a low voice.

5

Martha's first thought was that now if ever was a time to shake hands. She admitted it freely: Dolores was right not to let her go before the ceremony had been performed. What annoyed her was Mr Gibson's unco-operativeness. He still stood with his back to her, swallowing noisily—and if he was still swallowing whisky-and-soda he was deliberately, in Martha's opinion, making it last.

“Good-bye,” said Martha pointedly.

Mr Gibson started; and at last turned. (The glass in his hand, as Martha had suspected, empty.) He always affected a certain bluff jocularity with her, and it was now more marked than ever—even lamentably so, in the circumstances, and in a man of fifty, large and going slightly bald.

“Toodle-oo, parlez-vous, good-byee,” declaimed Mr Gibson.

“Harry!” cried Miss Diver.

“As we used to say in the Great War,” added Mr Gibson uncontrollably. “Good-bye, old thing, cheerio, chin-chin—”

“Harry!”

He managed to stop himself. It was like seeing an old car, or an old steam-engine, at last respond to the brakes. He shoved a hand out towards Martha—or he might merely have been gesticulating. In any case, Martha got hold of it.

“Aren't you going to say you're sorry?” prompted Miss Diver reproachfully.

Actually Martha did feel quite sorry. Nor was it from any apprehension as to the future, though this would have been justified. She felt sorry, saying good-bye to Mr Gibson, simply because she was used to him. But what she chiefly felt was embarrassment. For the first time she sensed, between these two elders, an emotion as strong as her own for the bronze lady (or for the ermines, or the pierrot). Dolores' head drooped against the Rexine like a nasturtium with its neck snapped. The ponderous frame of Mr Gibson was held erect only as a tomato-plant tied to a stick is held erect.

Looking from one to the other of them, Martha recognised, however obscurely, a distress she didn't want to be drawn into. She felt a more than usually urgent impulse to disappear—and further than the garden.

“I'm sorry. Can I go and look at the shops?” asked Martha.

“Go anywhere you like,” sniffed Dolores, beginning to cry.

Martha was out of the house before you could say knife.

CHAPTER TWO

1

As soon as they were alone again Mr Gibson sat heavily down beside Miss Diver and took her in his arms. Through the Spanish shawl he felt her sharp collar-bones; she, through his tweed jacket, A.S.C. tie and solid chest, the beating of his heart. Her tortoiseshell comb scraped him uncomfortably under the chin, but he would not ask her to remove it. He knew why it was worn—like the shawl.

“Remember the chappie who fell into the drum?” asked Mr Gibson tenderly.

They had met for the first time at a Chelsea Arts Ball—Dolores dressed as a Spanish Dancer, Mr Gibson as a brown paper parcel. He could thus hardly, even if he'd thought of it, have matched her gesture, but he appreciated it nonetheless.

“Of course I remember,” whispered Dolores.

“Remember those young devils who started to unwrap me?”

“It didn't matter. You'd pyjamas underneath …”

“I shall never forget how wonderful you looked, pulling me out of the cardboard …”

“I couldn't bear to see you laughed at,” murmured Dolores. “You were too big …”

They had revived the moment many times before, but never so tenderly.

“Then we danced together all the rest of the evening.”

“Of the night,” corrected Dolores.

“And then I lost you.”

“I got held up in the Cloaks.”

“And then I found you again. What a chance that was!—Just popping in to buy a tie, and there you were!”

“I'm sorry, Harry, but I can't bear it,” said Dolores.

She huddled closer against his solid chest. It was his solidness she'd always loved, as he her exotic frailty. For ten years they'd given each other what each most wanted from life: romance. Now both were middle-aged, and if they looked and sounded ridiculous, it was the fault less of themselves than of time.

To be fair to Time, each had been pretty ridiculous even at the Chelsea Ball. Miss Diver, in her second or third year as a Spanish Dancer, was already known to aficionados as Old Madrid. Mr Gibson, who had never attended before, found the advertised bohemianism more bohemian than he'd bargained for. To the young devils from the Slade, unwrapping him, his humiliated cries promised bare buff rather than pyjamas. Naked, indeed, he might have made headlines by being arrested; in neat Vyella, he was merely absurd …

Dolores, Old Madrid, not only pitied his condition but also lacked a partner. She'd have been glad to dance with anyone, all the rest of the night. But though rooted in such unlikely soil their love had proved a true plant of Eden, flourishing and flowering, and shading from the heat of the day—not Old Madrid and Harry Gibson, but King Hal and his Spanish rose.

So they had rapidly identified each other—he so big and bluff, she so dark and fragile: as King Hal and his Spanish rose. Of all the couples who danced that night in the Albert Hall, they were probably the happiest.

“I can't help it,” sobbed Dolores. “I mean remembering, now …”

“Poor old girl,” said Mr Gibson.

He didn't even eye the whisky. It was an effort, but he didn't. Instead he arranged Miss Diver more comfortably against his shoulder, and got out his handkerchief.—He could have used it himself, but for the strong-man rôle it was necessary for him to play.

Dolores didn't use the handkerchief either. She used, to Mr Gibson most touchingly, the fringe of her Spanish shawl.

“Harry …”

“Yes, old girl?”

“I do understand, truly I do. I'm not going to make a fuss. But just because you're marrying to save the business—”

“To amalgamate it,” corrected Mr Gibson.

“To amalgamate it, then—need we, must we—?”

He pressed her closer, but she knew what the answer was. Indeed, she almost at once felt ashamed of her question. Mr Gibson's principles, or some of them, were high: certain of them rose like peaks from a low range—or rather like the mesas of a Mexican desert, that astonish travellers by their abruptness. He had never, for example, invited Dolores to assume his name, or even the married title, because he had such a respect for legal matrimony. “We'll keep everything above-board,” said Mr Gibson. This did not prevent his concealing Miss Diver's existence from, for example again, his mother, under whose roof he continued to sleep five nights out of seven. Dolores was the romance in his life, its wonder and beauty for which he never ceased to be grateful; but the domestic gods still governed half his soul.

“I'm sorry,” apologised Dolores. “I shouldn't have said that. I'm upset.”

Mr Gibson pressed her closer still. How wonderfully she understood! Just as wonderfully as she'd understood ten years earlier, when he brought her the lease of the little house. “I don't like to think of you in the shop,” Mr Gibson explained, “at any chappie's beck and call. I want you all to myself …” Dolores hadn't even hinted that there was another way of having her all to himself; she understood at once that important fur-merchants didn't marry girls from behind the counter. But though glad to get out of the shop on any terms (already troubled by fallen arches), basically she accepted the situation because she loved Mr Gibson. Romantically. Unlike her King Hal, who had lived unawakened to romance until he was forty, Miss Diver had been in search of it all her life. Why else had she rejected the pensionable post as telephonist, engineered for her by her brother, to become an assistant in a West End haberdasher's? Why else (her heart and virtue, even in Piccadilly, so disappointingly unattacked) had she gone year after year to the Chelsea Arts Ball, until she was known as Old Madrid? She sought romance; and that she was thirty before she found it made it all the more wonderful when it came. To bloom in secret, the Spanish rose in King Hal's secret garden (actually number 5, Alcock Road, Paddington), had for ten years completely satisfied her.

Now all was over. She could exercise only one last right.

“You've told me so little, Harry, only about the business. Amalgamation—”

“It happens to be necessary,” said Mr Gibson heavily. “I've never wanted to bother my little woman, but the fact is we're in a poor way. Amalgamating with Joyces' gets us out of the consommé.”

“Couldn't you amalgamate without marrying Miss Joyce?”

“It seems not,” said Mr Gibson—heavily.

There was a long pause. The declining sun, between the pink curtains, cast a sudden beam of brilliant light, making the stained-glass galleon sail in splendour. It was a moment the child Martha knew well.

“What's she like, Harry?”

“Cultured,” said Mr Gibson.

“How old?”

Mr Gibson hesitated. Miss Joyce's exact age was in fact unknown to him, and to say “ripe” would have given a wrong impression. He answered obliquely.

“I'm not exactly a boy myself.”

“You are to me,” said Dolores. “Will she make you happy?”

Again Mr Gibson hesitated.

“My mother says she will. Actually the mater is a cousin by marriage of her aunt.”

“So she must know all about her,” agreed Dolores, in a shaking voice. “Or at least that she's cultured … Oh, Harry!”

It was no use, it was too soon to talk rationally, they had to break off and comfort each other.

“Dolores!” cried Mr Gibson—his voice shaking too.

“My Big Harry! My King Hal!” cried Miss Diver.

“My Spanish rose!” cried Mr Gibson.

They clung in genuine and ridiculous grief, collapsed together on the Rexine settee.

2

Martha was meanwhile out enjoying life.

She had been accorded periods of liberty before, but never so absolutely. She was used to getting her own supper, but always before seven. Now she simply made a mental note of cold sausages in the larder. (Martha never neglected her stomach. Though no longer fat, she was no more, at nine, the conventional skinny orphan. She was consolidating fat into muscle.) The cold sausages as it were an iron ration at base, Martha gently closed first the front door, then the front gate, on all adult embarrassingness.

She was wearing a navy-blue serge kilt, a navy-blue jersey, a brown straw hat and napper gloves. These last two items, picked up en
passant
in the hall, made her look very respectable. The time was about five o'clock.