Westwood (14 page)

The gentleman calling himself Marcus walked briskly homewards, the unpleasantness of his journey and the acrid fumes of the fog alike forgotten. The little adventure had awakened all the romance in his nature, without which he found life savourless and dreary. He had not seen so attractive a face and form for many months, and her cool manner only added to her charm for him. He had known one or two with that manner, and it had been a pleasant task to break it down into shyness and then into warmth, and to reach at last the sensitiveness of the youthful soul and heart within. He had every intention of seeing Daphne (he really could not endure to think of her as Hilda) again, and soon, but he would have to think out the safest plan for their meeting; meanwhile it was delightful that she lived near, for he would never go out now without the hope of encountering her by accident. Later on, of course, when the affair was over, it might be awkward, but that moment was not yet.

Here it is time to explain to the more suspicious among our readers that all that this gentleman required from the pretty young girls whom he picked up was romantic and spiritual sustenance; manna, so to speak, from the heaven of their youth which should feed the yearnings of his soul. It was true that they often became tiresomely importunate, and that he had to end the relationship abruptly (with pain to himself, for his was a nature that disliked giving pain to others), but that was never his fault.

There had been Peter, who lived in one room in Hampstead and earned three pounds a week as bookkeeper to a small firm which made meat paste in Islington. Peter’s dark eyes had shone at the music of Bach and John Ireland, and he had met her in a crowd, coming out of the Queen’s Hall. Music had been the bond between them, until Peter grew clamorous and wanted him to leave the wife she was sure that he must have, and he had been forced to end the affair. Iris had been fair and shy, with a job as receptionist in a photographer’s in Baker Street, and had adored modern poetry, but she had gone the same way as Peter, in tears where Peter had stormed. And these were only two of many affairs; so romantic when we read of their like in the pages of Proust (that other admirer of girls seen in the street) and so pathetic and sordid and such a waste of time and energy when viewed in terms of human happiness.

He would have said that as he did not finally possess their persons, no harm was finally done, which was an odd conclusion for such a connoisseur in spiritual values to have reached.

As he walked home he wondered if Hilda were musical or stage-struck or poetry-mad? He
assumed that she must have some aesthetic taste, for he could never have been attracted to a girl who possessed none, and a girl could not look like a nymph and have the soul of a typist. (That was how he put it to himself.)

Yet as he opened the gates of his home he recalled certain words, certain phrases of hers, which jarred upon him in a way to which he was not accustomed, and a doubt passed over his mind. It could not be possible that for the first time in his life he had been attracted by merely a pretty face? No; there is spiritual passion there, he thought, shutting the iron gates behind him and looking up at the long, dim shape of the mansion. That manner is merely defensive. I will see her again, and soon.

‘Darling, would that be you?’ inquired Mrs Gerard Challis, seated that same evening before her mirror. She referred to sounds proceeding from behind the door of the bathroom into which her bedroom opened.

‘Of course,’ answered Mr Challis, after a pause. He was sitting on the bathroom floor with nothing on, doing his yoga exercises. He sat cross-legged, only it was more complicated than that, and he looked beautiful; he was more than fifty years old, but his tall person retained the slenderness and much of the suppleness of youth, and his serious deep-blue eyes had the tranquillity belonging to people who have always done what they wanted to without arguing with their consciences.

‘Whom did you think it was?’ he asked a moment later, almost good-humouredly. The exercises induced calm and well-being.

‘I thought it was probably you. It’s ages since I’ve really seen you. How are you?’

‘My cold has gone, thank you.’

‘So glad, sweetie,’ murmured Mrs Challis. She slipped off her house-coat and stood looking at herself in the glass. She was large and lovely, with the high bosom and long slender waist of a goddess. Twenty years ago such amplitude had been unfashionable and had forced her to adopt a rigid diet, and now her loveliness was a little old, and her neck and hands were beginning to go, but she still had the childlike look that had enslaved people in the Gay Twenties. She had been one of the legendary Bright Young People, and as Seraphina Braddon had appeared upon the front page of the London evening papers more frequently than any of her set. And now in her conversation, in her attitude to life, she was as faintly and charmingly and inexorably dated as a novel by Michael Arlen.

‘Hebe’s got her ration book back,’ she said, beginning to get into a dark-blue dinner-dress with gold sequins encrusted upon the bosom.

‘I did not know that she had lost it,’ said Mr Challis, appearing at the bathroom door in a dressing-gown of yellow and purple Persian silk, and brushing his thick silver hair.

‘Darling, I told you. Weeks ago. We decided Alex must have dropped it when you and he were charging over the Heath that afternoon.’

‘I seem to remember now.’

‘Grantey was
hopping
. She said it was your fault – just when Hebe needs all her extra milk and stuff.’

‘Absurd. How could it be my fault when Alex dropped it?’

‘I expect you were talking.’

‘I dare say. How unpleasant this hair-tonic smells.’

‘I know; too lousy. It’s the war as usual.’

‘I wish you would not use that expression, Seraphina. If only you had imagination –’

‘Too sorry, darling.’

There was silence for a moment, then he said, ‘How did
she get it back?’

‘Someone picked it up. A schoolmistress, Grantey said. She took it back to the cottage.’

Mr Challis yawned and stepped into his trousers.

‘Nice of her.’

‘She spent the afternoon there, looking after the children. The schoolmarm, I mean.’

Mr Challis was silent. The subject of his grandchildren was distasteful to him.

‘Blast, there goes my stocking,’ murmured Seraphina.

‘Haven’t you any more of those things, points, whatever they’re called?’

‘No, my angel, I have not. Hebe has had most of mine. I shall have to pinch some more of Barnabas’s.’

‘Who are these Americans who are coming to-night?’ demanded Mr Challis, reclining on his wife’s bed and opening a typed manuscript with corrections in a dashing female hand.

‘Earl and Lev, darling.’

‘That tells me nothing. They do not sound like the names of human beings.’

‘You remember. Alex picked them up in a milk bar. He’s painting Lev.’

‘Do you mean that portrait of a Jew?’

‘Alex says he’s amusing. I hope he’ll make me laugh,’ said Mrs Challis, who enjoyed laughing.

Mr Challis, who had been married for twenty-five years, was again silent. He was fond of his wife, though he had long ago decided that her nymph’s face had led him up a garden path where the flowers were not spiritual enough for his taste, and he deplored her frivolity. Her grandfather had made a large fortune out of beer, and something of the delicate yet sturdy open-air grace of the hops seemed to cling about Seraphina: she was not a complex woman.

‘How’s the new play going, sweetie?’ she asked, beginning to brush her hair.

Mr Challis frowned. Her tone was even lighter than usual.

‘There are certain difficulties which refuse to resolve themselves,’ he answered reservedly, turning over the pages of the typescript. Mrs Challis felt the disapproval in his voice and, being a woman who liked life to run easily, she tried to put matters right.

‘You did tell me about it, didn’t you, darling? Isn’t it about an Austrian tart?’

‘I suppose it might be described in those words,’ said Mr Challis, with a smile like an east wind. ‘It does concern a Viennese woman who is compelled by her conscience to become a whore.’

‘Gerard, darling, you know I
never
butt in, but honestly –
no one
calls them that nowadays; it’s
too
tatty.’

‘I do not clothe my conceptions in the language of the cocktail bar.’

‘I know, sweetie, but everybody will –’

She stopped, just in time. Everybody
had
laughed at one scene in Mr Challis’s last play. Hermione and Marriott are alone in the laboratory of the tsetse-fly research station in the middle of the Uganda jungle, and he has rolled up her sleeve in order to inject her with the serum, when he stops and says (harshly), ‘
There is a shadow in the crook of your elbow
.’ The feeling of the audience had expressed itself in an amiable and audible mutter from the stalls, where sat a man in the Tank Corps. ‘Oh, for God’s sake get on with it,’ he had remarked, and then the scene had been held up while the house laughed.

This incident had wounded Mr Challis more deeply than he cared to admit even to himself. He was proud of the pontifical influence which his beautiful, careful, serious plays exercised over the taste of educated England and America. He had wrought for himself a strikingly distinguished style. It was difficult to describe, but he himself had not demurred when one admirer had coined
for it the phrase ‘a style of iron and shadows.’ He was still puzzling as to why the tension had failed at that particular moment in his play. There was nothing in the dialogue to explain the failure. He always wrote obliquely of people’s personal charms, making a man say to a woman, ‘
Your throat is a taut chord
,’ or ‘
Your ankle bone is softly modelled
.’ Why should Marriott’s remark, which was indicative of the struggle between duty and passion within him, have caused boredom in the stalls and then inane laughter? The only explanation, to which he returned again and again, was that it was the Mean Sensual Man who had laughed; the eater and drinker of husks amid the swine, who saw only the coarse side of sex. Well, there should be even fewer concessions made to
him
in the new play, Mr Challis promised.

‘But I expect you know best,’ ended his wife amiably.

‘I think we may take it that I do,’ he said courteously.

Unfortunately, Seraphina was not in a prudent mood that evening. She returned to the subject, against her wiser judgment, because she was curious.

‘Darling,’ she began carefully, smoothing her waves of hair back into the shingle which she had worn since she was seventeen and which was now a little too youthful for her, ‘you said her
conscience
forced her into being a you-know-what. It sounds awfully funny-peculiar.’

Mr Challis affected not to hear, but his wife, feeling the silent thunderbolt poised, drew back in time.

‘Oh well, I shall see it all on the first night, shan’t I?’ she said smilingly, and murmuring, ‘I’m going to see if everything’s all right,’ she made her escape.

Outside the door she gave a little giggle and thought that she would tell Hebe Dadda’s latest. Oh, what a comfort was a daughter! Husbands took up with dreary hags, and sons were angels, only girls took them away from you (as of course was natural, but hard). But a daughter, and two angelic grandchildren, and a third coming! When you had those, you could take
anything
on the chin.

Left alone with the typescript, Mr Challis’s expression gradually became softer. It was not the pages of the very bad novel before him which caused this thawing, for he had come across several would-be humorous scenes in it and Mr Challis had no use for humour; he had more than once publicly and severely put it in its place (where, with Shakespeare and Jane Austen, it stayed) and it was not to be found in his own works. No, it was the memory of the writer, who had hurried up to him as he was leaving the Ministry on the previous evening and thrust her manuscript at him, saying with a break in her ardent voice, ‘I don’t care
what
you think of me, you’ve
got
to read it!’ Then she had darted away, leaving him with an impression of a young pink face and brown eyes. Pleasing, distinctly pleasing, and touching too. Her name and address was on more than one part of the manuscript.

Here was this gifted and fortunate man, the writer of plays admired by the cultured few and yet financially successful, married to a delightful woman, father of three satisfactory children, living in an ancient and beautiful mansion, handsome in his person, and possessing ample means derived from his personal salary in the higher ranks of the Civil Service and his private income. And was he happy? He thought that he was not.

Spiritual hunger was what he suffered from; yearnings, lookings before and after, and pinings for what was not. He thought of it as a divine thirst which no religion could satisfy, and no woman (as he flung one after another impatiently aside like used matches) could assuage.

Mr Challis must be given credit for a virtue: he did work hard at his plays. Sustained by a sense of their excellence and importance and of his own unusual gifts, he laboured over their plots and their characters and their dialogue (which was full of references to mathematics and
Saint Augustine) and succeeded in creating an atmosphere upon the stage as if no one had a stitch on, though nothing ever happened which justified this effect.