Unclouded Summer (28 page)

But why shouldn't this time be the hundredth?

He came down early to find Judy in the drawing room alone. She was standing beside the fire facing it, one hand on the mantelpiece, one foot rested on the low brass fireguard. She had dressed simply as she always did at her own parties, in plain underrated black. She turned as he came into the room, and smiled. It was a very friendly smile. No onlooker could have guessed from it that there was animosity between them.

“There are cocktails over there,” she said. “You might bring me one too.”

They were champagne cocktails, a long row of them, the lemon peel floating on the top, the pink lump of sugar dissolving as the bubbles mounted. He remembered how he had ordered champagne cocktails at that party of his at Villefranche. He handed one to Judy. Himself he did not feel like one. He needed something stronger. There was a decanter of whiskey behind the cocktails. He poured himself out a measure three fingers high.

“Is it a big party tonight?” he asked.

“Fairly.”

She ran through the list of names. They were nearly all familiar. They were people whom he had met here or at other houses over the last three weeks; people who had all of them in their different ways thought lightly of him. I'll show them tonight, he thought.

“I'm putting you next to Nina,” she said, “naturally.”

Was there, or was it only that he fancied it, a slight sneer in her voice as she added “naturally”? Was there? He did not know. They could no longer talk in shorthand, he and she. There was a barrier, a mist between them. What was it he had said only five weeks ago to Julia, that only one thing mattered to him in the world, the putting of himself right with Judy, yet here he was now excitedly plotting to “get even with her”? How had it happened, what had he done wrong? Whose was the mistake, where had the fault lain? How could they win back to that easy comradeship? How was this mist to be dissolved?

In a last long sip Judy drank off her cocktail.

“Your not having one leaves one spare, be a dear and get it for me, before the others come.”

He had drunk a bare quarter of his highball, but he filled his
glass. He might not have another chance. He had need of it tonight. That mist, if only it could be dissolved. How could it though? Not in an odd five minutes such as this. It needed leisure and peace of mind, an opportunity to expand, a certainty that one would not be disturbed; that or one sudden, one dramatic incident that would act like a blow upon a lock, a splintering and a shattering of the barrier. That way perhaps it might be done. But these short intervals, driving to a neighbor's house, driving from the golf course, no, it could not be done like that.

From the courtyard outside came the sound of a car backing. The first guests already. What chance had he and Judy under these circumstances of getting back in tune?

There were eighteen guests at dinner. He rolled the bite of the clean cold wine upon his tongue. His confidence was mounting, glass by glass. The presence of Nina at his side increased his confidence.

“I've been missing you. It hasn't seemed right going around with Judy and you not here,” he said.

She smiled.

“That's nice of you. I'd heard you'd come. I'd wondered how you were getting on. How have you, by the way?”

She looked at him very straight as she said that. He knew what she had in mind. He wished that he could answer her directly. More than anything during this last month he had missed a confidante, someone with whom he could be open, or at least someone who guessing at his problem, without making reference to it, could have adjusted herself to him. More than once had he thought of Nina, remembering how that night at Eze, they had stood together leaning against the battlements, looking towards the Esterds. She had said nothing direct to him that night, but she had guessed his mood. He wished that tonight he could give her the clue to what had happened here.

“Maybe I'll tell you afterwards,” he said.

Afterwards. But when that time came, there might not be the same need of understanding. He would have re-established himself in his own esteem. He lifted his glass to his lips and emptied it. If only it could all work out the way he'd planned. If it did, maybe he could break down that barrier between himself and Judy.

As Parker had prophesied, the moment the men joined the women after dinner, Richard suggested charades.

“This is the only place in the world where I can be a child. Please don't deny me my puerilities.”

There was no opposition.

Nina and Judy were the captains. Francis was on Judy's side with Marion and Sir Henry. They tossed up as to which side should go out first and Judy won.

It was the moment for which Francis had been waiting. They went into the small “tea” room to decide their plan. There was, as he had known there would be, the invariable uncertain pause, while each waited for someone else to proffer a suggestion. He waited, then proffered his.

“I've an idea,” he said. “Let's fool them. Let's act two words, one of which they'll spot so easily that they won't bother to look for the second one. We did it at home once and it worked well. Suppose, for instance, we were to act a gangster story. Everyone would think the word was “gangster”; we'll be careful to bring in the two words, “gang” and “stir” but if we also act another word, say “surprise,” there won't be one of them that'll guess it.”

There was a murmur of approval. Nobody had any counter-suggestion. They were all relieved that someone had an idea ready-made. A good idea, too. Chicago gangsters had become news in England. The Edgar Wallace boom was in full swing. It was an idea that gave everybody scope.

Haltingly, Francis outlined the plot, as though he were making it up as he went along.

“Suppose,” he said, “you were to have someone bumped off in a night club. We could have a bootlegger decoyed there by a gangster's moll. That could be the first act. In the second we could have the gangster's funeral. That would give us a chance for quite a lot of backchat, burying bouquets and all that. At the end of the scene, we could have the murdered man's friends getting on to the girl and threatening to throw vitriol in her face, if she doesn't give away her man. Then, in the last scene, we could have the plot to trap the murderer; but he could have been warned and instead he'd kidnap the girl and take her for a ride. That's as a kind of rough framework, I mean to say,” he finished lamely.

He was careful not to do more than outline a plot, so that the others could fill in the details, could work up their own parts in the way they wanted.

It was a plot that appealed to all of them. Each began to improvise.

“I could be the rival gangster.”

“I could be his wife or mother.”

Francis was careful not to take too much of the action on himself. He had no wish to be accused of being selfish. He stood more chance of stealing the show were his part a small one. The murderer would be “off” most of the time. He suggested himself for the part. He had his own scheme of how to make the part effective. He could drop into a Bowery accent, use Bowery slang, talk the kind of American that the English seemed to believe was talked by all Americans.

Marion was to be his moll.

“What'll I wear?” she said.

He hesitated. A gangster's girl would probably wear something flask. But that would not suit Marion. Better to make her an apache type.

“Tie your hair up in a handkerchief and knot another one around your throat.”

“Let's see what I've got. Come and help me choose.”

It was the first time that he had seen her room. It was very different from his. It was cool and light. A flowered wallpaper on a cream-white background with light chintz curtains and chair covers. There was a photograph of a school group above the mantelpiece, girls in pigtails and white long-sleeved blouses under dark blue pinafores, with badges on the pocket. There was a crucifix above her writing desk, with a photograph beside it of her mother, in court dress.

“There's a bright-red scarf. What about that?” she said.

“And that canary yellow one for your head.”

She was wearing a light pale-blue frock, short, with a tight fitting bodice and a panier type skirt. She turned slowly, self-approvingly, before her mirror.

“Hadn't I better make up a bit?”

“It wouldn't do any harm.”

“I'll raid Judy's dressing table.”

Three minutes later, she came downstairs, garish with mascara and lipstick, a smile of triumph on her lips. “I really feel the part now,” she said.

She acted it as though she did. Seated beside him, in what was supposed to be the back room of a speakeasy, she half-closed her eyes as she fingered a long cigarette holder, letting the smoke drift across her eyes, speaking in a slow-drawled cockney. “Watcha mean that yer don't trust me? Ain't I bin your gal six weeks?”

She made it easy for him to play his role.

“You're a swell kid, sugar, but if you shoot off that pretty mouth of yours …”

He put his hand under her chin. He tapped his fingers against her cheek. It was part pat, part slap. Her voice became a purr.

“ 'Ow could I be anythink but straight wiv yer?”

In the second scene, after his rival's murder, he threw himself even more wholeheartedly into his part. Swaggering across the stage, he boasted of all that he would do now that his rival was removed.

“I'll hang great swollen pearls about that neck of yours. You'll hardly be able to lift your wrists for rocks.”

Her voice, in response, grew lower and more seductive. “I'll let you make me beautiful for you.”

As he leaned over Marion, he caught Nina's eye. She was smiling. There was approval and there was encouragement in her smile. As he made way for the other members of his team, he had a jubilant sensation that at last he was justified before these Englishers, that part of his account with Judy was being squared. The thought was heady knowledge. He was sustained and excited by the same white heat that he had known sometimes at his easel when his subject caught him; when he was half-drunk with the excitement of creation, yet knew himself to be, at the same time, outside his medium, in complete control.

In the final scene, when he broke in upon the plot to murder him; when he stood with a revolver in his hand facing the group of startled gangsters; when he saw beyond them the audience closely attentive to his talk, amused and held by it, he had the sensation of dominating for the first time this group of foreigners. And when, his wisecracks finished, he caught Marion by the wrist, pulling her to her feet, he had the feeling that this dragging of her from the room was a symbol of his own achievement, that she was the prize of capture.

“Come along now, sugar. You're coming for a long long ride with me.”

He dragged her from the room, entering into his part so completely that he pulled her right down the passage across the hall, into the small alcove where the hats were hung. As he stopped, the impetus of the force he had exerted, brought her breathless laughing against his chest. To steady her, his arms went round her.

“You were marvellous,” he said.

The alcove was lit indirectly from the hall. In the half-light, there was something curiously appealing in the contrast between
the bizarre make-up that Was like a mask, and the pale-blue candor of her eyes.

“You're very sweet,” he said, and bent his head.

He had meant it to be a very gentle kiss, a cousin's kiss, but the excitement of the moment, something, too, in the way in which she moved a half-step closer as his arms went round her, made the kiss a real one. Her lips were very full and smooth and fresh. She sighed and drew away. The lipstick smudged across her cheeks gave her a very youthful look – like a child that had smeared its face with jam, waking in him the need to cherish and protect her.

“Darling,” she said.

It was spoken like a sigh. His arms tightened, and she drew closer into them. She wore no scent, but there was a fragrance of youth and health about her. In her tweeds, and even in her evening clothes, she had looked thin and undeveloped, but now, held close against him, he was conscious through every nerve cell of her firm young curves. The blood pounded along his veins. His heart was thudding. The excitement of the evening, the strain under which he had lived for the last six months, the added strain of the last four weeks, were mingled with the deep and growing fondness that he had come to feel for Marion.

“From the very first moment that I saw you I knew there was something very special between you and me,” he said.

She closed her eyes, her lips half parted; she flung back her head, exposing the long white line of her throat as though she were drinking thirstily.

“If only you knew how I've been longing to hear you say that,” she said.

She lifted her hands, taking his cheeks between them. Her hands were warm; a little damp, but very soft. “Darling,” she said, and raised herself upon her toes.

It was a shock for which nothing he had known had in any way prepared him. It was the very inexperience of the kiss that made it shattering: it had a purity, an intensity of passion of which only complete innocence is capable. “I'm the first person she's ever really kissed,” he thought… and that was the last thing he thought. Another second, and he was past reflection, drowned in a surrender as complete as hers; a surrender so complete that he was unaware of footsteps in the hall; that he was unaware of interruption till a light was flashed above his head and he saw, staring at him, Judy and Sir Henry.

In Judy's eyes, there was the same expression, intensified
and emboldened, that he had seen there on his first night at Charlton when she had found him in the drawing room, showing Marion his pictures. There was a moment's silence. The rescuing of the situation depended entirely on Judy.

She was in no mood to save it.