The Eye of Love (7 page)

The single occasion of his expressing an opinion was the night Miranda produced a sample of curtain-stuff. It was rose-pink brocade. “I don't like the colour,” said Harry Gibson. “But what could be prettier!” protested Joyce. “Blue,” said Harry, at random.

He spent as much time as possible at the shop. There at least he had the illusion of being still his own master, and it was to a certain extent the truth: Gibsons of Kensington (though as to name sunk without trace, even the door-plate had by now been changed) so benefited by having a Gibson on the premises to act as link between old and new, that old man Joyce left his prospective son-in-law pretty well alone. As the days and weeks passed, Harry began to recover confidence in the security of his office; gradually assembled there one or two objects of special value to him. As the mementos of a ten-year-long romance, they weren't much. He had no photograph of Dolores—(She had one of him: in uniform. It used to stand on the ermine-cabinet; now it stood beside her bed.)—and no
gages d'amour
, because for his birthday and at Christmas Dolores always gave him liqueur-chocolates. Since she gave them because he had a passion for them, they were naturally all eaten. Mr Gibson was in fact reduced to a couple of theatre-programmes, a Derby day race-card, marked by Dolores' hand, and a bottle of anti-rheumatism pills Dolores had merely recommended. He also, one morning, on the pretext that it needed cleaning, brought from home a rather loud checked tweed jacket and hung it on the hook behind the door. It was obviously no nest of erotica that Mr Gibson arranged for himself; but in the office above the show-room, beside his still inviolate safe, he passed the few tolerable hours of his life.

At least once a day he took out Dolores' comb, and warmed it back to life between his hands. He had to hang on hard to his Britishness, not to press it to his lips. A sad and ridiculous sight was Harry Gibson—large, stout, fifty years old—holding himself back from mumbling a wafer of tortoiseshell, as a child holds back from sucking a forbidden sweet.

2

Dolores, his Spanish rose, had a good deal more to cherish. She had her King Hal's pyjamas, also his dressing-gown and bedroom slippers. For several weeks she arranged them each Monday and Thursday night appropriately about the divan. But Martha, who helped make beds, directed too enquiring an eye, and presently Miss Diver laid all away together in her wardrobe drawer. (Sprinkled with pot-pourri; it being obviously impossible to sprinkle underwear with liqueur-chocolates. Again the spirit of the absurd like a poltergeist haunted King Hal and his Spanish rose.) Dolores had also her Harry's photograph—splendid with two stars on each shoulder-strap. It was the sole object she had moved from the sitting-room, where nothing else was changed by a hair's-breadth, where in her daily dustings she was careful to replace each object exactly as it stood when Mr Gibson's eye last fell on it. If Mr Gibson had suddenly walked in again, he would have found no more change than in its mistress's heart.

3

On one other point besides that of the curtains Harry Gibson stood firm. He insisted on a six-months' engagement. Considering how smooth was being made his path towards matrimony, the ensuing argument, sustained vicariously, on the bride's side, by Mrs Gibson and Auntie Bee, was only to be expected: Harry Gibson stood firm. Three months he wouldn't hear of. “But so well you children know each other already!” protested Mrs Gibson. “And the paper-hangers need only a week!” cried Auntie Bee. “It is not as though people might think anything!” added Mrs Gibson—at the time a little flown with wine. Harry Gibson stuck to his guns and wouldn't hear of a September wedding.

Appropriately enough, the spring of his intransigence was now economic: the reverse of his suspicion that he'd been diddled was that he now felt the gift of Miranda's hand less inexplicably above his deserts. In fact he felt Joyces were doing pretty nicely out of him. A spouse for the unmarriageable daughter, besides the makings of a very sound little business—Harry Gibson belatedly recognised that there were no flies on old man Joyce; but as well felt himself less of a pauper, less entirely on the receiving end. When Mrs Gibson suggested that Miranda might take offence, Harry Gibson laughed quite coarsely—and stuck to his guns. He would have liked a year, but this he did know to be impossible; six months was the longest grace he could win for himself—accurately he calculated it out, to December the sixteenth—and he succeeded in winning it.

“Suppose Mr Joyce changes his mind?” asked old Mrs Gibson, at last coming down to brass tacks.

“He won't,” said Harry.

He knew Joyces too committed to their new enterprise to draw back. The little strips of woven silk, at first so hateful, now gave him courage.

“I consider six months a proper time,” said Harry Gibson, “and I am surprised Miranda doesn't think so also.”

Once again, his masterfulness did the trick. This last exchange with his mother took place at breakfast; that evening before dinner, in the Knightsbridge drawing-room, Miranda fluttered gratefully into his arms.

“It was only your mother and Auntie Bee,” whispered Miranda, “who wanted to hurry things so!
I
need six months at least, to get used to my big, fierce lover!”

What Mr Gibson gained by this delay he knew only too well: simply delay. For what was there could happen in even six months, to restore King Hal to his Spanish rose? There was nothing; he was simply postponing the nightmare moment when he would indeed be shut up alone with Miranda Joyce. It was still, as his mother would have said, a something …

All that evening Miranda behaved even more vivaciously than usual—a pretty upsurge of spirits natural to a maiden reprieved from the Minotaur. She played and sang, and sang and played, and teased Harry for his indifference to wallpapers, then relented and showed him the new curtain-stuff, blue because it was his favourite colour. “To match his eyes!” cried Miranda—swiftly the little tease again. “I truly believe that the reason! Oh, how vain my Harry is!” Nothing could have been less like sulks; with some complacency, Mr Gibson sought his mother's eye—and was astonished to surprise her in the act of directing a soothing glance upon Auntie Bee. They were always exchanging glances of some kind, however, far too complex for any male to interpret, so he paid no attention. He asked Miranda to play another piece on the piano, and she played one. He didn't ask for an encore, and she stopped playing. It was altogether one of the least disagreeable evenings he'd ever spent, at Knightsbridge; and as a further proof of independence, the evening after that he didn't dine there at all.

Miranda took the opportunity to have a little talk with her father.

4

“Dadda,” said Miranda Joyce.

As a rule she followed Auntie Bee to the drawing-room, and Mr Joyce would have preferred her to do so now; for once unencumbered by guests he'd meant to have a good go at the port. But his look of surprise was ineffectual as Auntie Bee's beckonings; Miranda stayed.

“Dadda, there's something I want to talk to you about.”

Mr Joyce pulled out an evening paper. Again, she didn't take the hint.

“Because I do sometimes feel, Dadda, that before we're married, I ought to know more about Harry's past.”

“Has he got a past?” enquired Mr Joyce uncooperatively.

“He admitted it to me, Dadda, the night he proposed.”

“Then that should be enough,” said Mr Joyce. “He hasn't got a present, has he?”

“No, I'm sure not,” said Miranda positively. “From his mother I know how he spends every minute.”

“Poor devil,” said Mr Joyce. After knowing Harry Gibson off and on for years, on closer acquaintance he'd taken quite a liking to him. (He'd enjoyed, at the family engagement-party, hearing Harry tell unsuitable stories to old Beatrice, and looked forward to hearing him tell her a few more.) Miranda's probings into Harry's past, and even more the rapidly-organised supervision-system now revealed, had the effect of putting him on Harry's side. “You leave well alone,” Mr Joyce adjured his daughter. “I consider six months a very proper time myself. You leave well alone—and let sleeping dogs lie.”

Miranda hesitated a moment, then jumped up and kissed him affectionately.

“Wise old Dadda, who always knows best!”

“And don't go hiring detectives,” added old man Joyce.

5

It will thus be seen that Miranda too had her anxieties. She didn't exactly think her big fierce lover would get away—she trusted Dadda too well for that; but what she did fear was the additional three months' strain on Mr Gibson's moral character. Such a passionate man as he was—a man who'd had a mistress! When he told her that was all washed up, Miranda believed him; but would it
stay
washed up, for half a year? Wasn't some interim backsliding at least possible? Without, she assured herself, the least jealousy or curiosity, Miranda couldn't help feeling she ought to know more of the facts—just in case Harry ever needed her help.

She didn't hire detectives. It was a course she had indeed envisaged—actually half-way through Chopin's
Nocturne in G Major
; at the very moment when Harry surprised a glance between the mater and Aunt Beatrice—but only with her father acting as principal, to bear if need be the brunt of Harry's wrath; and wise old Dadda had made his position lamentably clear. What other courses lay open? Pumping old Mrs Gibson was no use, the latter, with excellent sense, having contrived to know exactly as little about her son's private life as Harry hoped she did. “Two nights from home every week? In Leeds,” said Mrs Gibson firmly. “How glad he is too, now no more tiresome railway-travel!” Miranda was left anxious; her happiness in the possession of a big fierce lover was by no means unflawed.

Upon Dolores this postponement—for such she instinctively felt it to be—of the Gibson-Joyce nuptials worked almost as disquietingly. Dolores, daily searching the social columns of her newspaper, and finding at last the announcement she dreaded, read of a mid-December wedding with something like terror. For next month or in six months, what difference?—while to know her beloved for six months more still not irretrievably another's prolonged the worst of her anguish, which was to hope. There was nothing that could happen, in six months, to restore him to her; yet until those six months were run out, how could she find the graveyard-peace of hopelessness?

The one person completely happy at this time was old Mrs Gibson. Old Mrs Gibson was rejuvenated. Wearing her best dress so continually that she would soon need another—continually popping round to Knightsbridge, even though she dined there most evenings, for coffee and cakes with Auntie Bee—old Mrs Gibson bloomed. Her berry-brown eye gleamed bright; her small spare frame eagerly braced itself to meet every demand. It was she who tirelessly accompanied Miranda on shopping-expeditions, when fat old Beatrice flagged. Miranda's trousseau, promised Mrs Gibson, would be something in the old style—three dozen of each, also monogrammed! “In the depression, does it look so good?” objected Harry censoriously. “All is British, even to the brassieres!” swore his mater. “It is praised already, at all the stores, how we buy only British!”

From the smaller shops, especially where she knew the management, she often came away with a little something for herself. A pair of gloves, a pair of stockings, once a nice embroidered blouse—there was no refusing them, when the shop-people were so kind! Even a box of handkerchiefs she didn't turn up her nose at, but added complacently to the growing pile of loot. “One would think I was starting a trousseau for myself!” cried old Mrs Gibson happily. “One would think it was I going to be a bride!”

CHAPTER SEVEN

1

The child Martha also was happy, but she wasn't being much comfort to Dolores.

It was a failure of sympathy. June passed into July, July wore on to August, and never once did Martha forget Miss Diver's early cup of tea. She could easily fit in any piece of routine. But whereas to Dolores the little house, though still a refuge, without Mr Gibson's daily visits was also a desert, if anyone had asked Martha what difference his absence made, she would have replied, in the food.

More precisely—and food was one of the only two subjects Martha ever was precise about—kippers instead of chops. On bread and margarine and kippers, and other such low-priced comestibles, she and Dolores now largely subsisted. Martha didn't particularly mind. She liked kippers. She would simply have been giving a straight answer to a straight question—and arguing
post hoc ergo propter hoc
. Mr Gibson's rôle had never been clear to her economically, otherwise she would have missed him more.

“I don't believe you miss him at all!” cried Dolores bitterly.

“Miss who?” asked Martha. Another failure of sympathy. To Dolores the masculine pronoun had only one reference; to Martha it might mean anyone from Mr Punshon to the milkman.

She was also, at the moment of Miss Diver's outburst, occupied in trying to draw a saucepan hanging on the kitchen wall. It was unexpectedly difficult. Martha had never tried to draw anything, before her encounter with Indian ink; now every old envelope bore her blots. She didn't draw landscapes. The hard outline Indian ink so satisfyingly produced had alerted her eye instead to small, hard-outlined objects—like saucepans. The trouble with Indian ink was that it was too final. Martha had in fact started off in the wrong medium. This naturally had to dawn on her at some point, and it happened to dawn on her then. “Can I have the laundry-book pencil?” asked Martha. “Miss who?”

If Dolores didn't tell her, how could she guess? But Miss Diver didn't even answer about the pencil, but instead, with extraordinary irrelevance, cried that Martha hadn't even been able to thread beads.