Authors: Elizabeth Bowen
‘Oh, you have a house at the sea?’ ‘No.’
‘What a bother for you,’ remarked her new friend, busy unlocking a jewel case.
Jane went on: ‘Yesterday feels like years ago.’
‘Don’t speak of it!’ With a dart like a jackdaw Lady Latterly found an emerald ring, forced it on, made it flash undecidedly, tore it off. She shuddered: ‘Never again!’
‘Oh? Everybody enjoyed it.’
‘Who
are
all these people? What do they think I am?’
‘You don’t hunt yourself?’
‘Not only should I be terrified, but I’ve a thing for foxes.’
‘I wonder what you do in the winter, then?’
‘I don’t; it couldn’t be simpler. I go away.’
Jane introspectively said: ‘I have not been here in winter for ages either.’
‘Oh, so that’s where you’ve always been, is it—not here? Why has nobody told me you existed?’
‘I don’t expect it’s very generally known.’
‘You go
racing, surely? Why have
I
never seen you?’
‘I imagine because I am never there.’
‘You ought to do something about that,’ said Lady Latterly, abstractedly leaning forward to view her make-up foreshortened inside the triple glass. She reapplied mascara—in a wrapper she sat with her back to Jane.
So many hours of the girl’s life had already gone by in women’s bedrooms that Jane, on being shown up here, felt a touch of mutiny. Not for this had she come. She would have liked to wait downstairs in the drawing-room whose theatrical emptiness had been glimpsed through an open door as she was conducted past it. However, with every possible grace she first sat down on the edge of, later reclined across the lustrous oyster quilt of the vibrant low bed, in an attitude of compliant ease.
Here
it was true, the scene was differently set—no smears, no ash, no feathers on the floor; instead, whole areas of undinted satin, no trace of anything having been touched or used. Here and there only, footprints like tracks in dew disturbed the bloom of the silver carpet. Here, supposed Jane, courteously looking round, must be a replica, priceless these days, of a Mayfair
décor
back in the 1930s—apparently still lived in without a tremor. Fancy, to know so little when one could spend so much! The necessity, the fragility and perhaps the pathos of all of this as a carapace did not strike the young girl. The bedroom gained still more unreality by now seeming trapped somewhere between day and night—this marvel of marbling and mirror-topping, mirror-building-in and prismatic whatnots being at the moment a battleground of clashing dazzling reflections and refractions. Crystal the chandelier dripped into the sunset; tense little lit lamps under peach shades were easily floated in upon by the gold of evening. Day had not done with the world yet; trees were in the conspiracy. The outdoors, light-shot, uncannily deepening without darkening, leaned through the too-large windows—a blinding ray presently splintered over the dressing table. With a cry, Lady Latterly downed tools.
‘I can’t see myself, you see! I can’t see a thing!’
‘Oh, I expect it will pass off.’
‘Any moment, these bastards will be arriving!’
Jane asked: ‘Is it a large party?’
‘Eight or ten; it depends if some of them come,’ Lady Latterly rose, cast away her wrapper and, in little else, stood vibrating as though with an engine running.
‘I could help,’ said the girl, ‘if I knew where anything was.’
‘That is so, so sweet of you, but I’ve no idea.’ She set off on a lonely expedition to a hanging closet, and came back dragging a chiffon dress. ‘No notion how to get
into
this: my maid’s gone.’
‘For ever?’
‘Yes, couldn’t stand the country. None of these people have any hearts.’
‘I thought your butler looked kind.’
‘He’s going.’
It was about two years since Lady Latterly had bought this unusually banal Irish castle, long empty owing to disrepair. Rumours which had preceded her into the country had not yet by any means died down, and were unlikely to. She was raven-haired, handsome, haunted—nobody could be certain by quite what. Her trials, since she took up residence here, had been not less interesting than her reputed fortune—the number of baths she had had installed under dry tanks, the lovers said or servants known to have left her, the failure of her house-parties to arrive or, still worse, leave again, the costly fiasco of her herbaceous border, the delays, non-deliveries, breakages, leakages and general exploitation she had endured lost nothing in telling except sympathy for her: one is as rich as that at one’s own risk. She was
nouveau riche;
but, as Antonia said, better late than never.
But if she chose to make history out of her vicissitudes, that was really from vauntingness—nothing beat her; she had a way of worsting one. Now she was cunningly finding her way into her own dress; and as the yards upon yards of sun-coloured chiffon perfectly fell into place around the hostess, leaving her only to make negligent play with a few loops, Jane’s spirits mounted: this
was
what one had come for! For the girl tonight was in a mood for the theatre, and for that only—what else, as a finale to her inconceivable day, was to be endured? Here she was, spirited out of Montefort into this foreign dimension of the castle, in which nothing, no one could be unreal enough.
As to that, Lady Latterly finally put together satisfied all requirements. Soaring over the chiffon her neck, arms, shoulders seemed to be made of plastic, pure of humanity. Her face by being worn tilted back brought the more into notice a flawless jawline, which her eyes, turning down under varnished lids, would have contemplated were it but in their view. She had taken on again yesterday afternoon’s air of commanding nonchalance. Satiety was in her attitude as, having billowed back to the dressing table, she used the scent spray; and as she turned her head this way, that way, clipping on earrings, she had to let out a little sigh—she had more even of breath than she could do with. Imperviously, together with Jane, she heard car after car come up the avenue, make a scrunching turn on the gravel, stop. Guests, fresh to the evening, greeted each other in daylight out on the castle steps.
‘Do go down, and say I’ll be down. Amuse them.’
‘They will not know who I am.’
‘That will amuse them.’
Jane entered a drawing-room black-and-white at the door end with standing men. As she advanced towards them the soundtrack stopped. Bowers of flowers cascaded fern mist from the piano top; jaded late green heat came in at the open windows. The room, more quenched, less dazzling than that above by being a minute further towards nightfall, was overcast by the outdoor rise of lawns and encased in walls of transparent blue. Brought to a standstill under all these eyes by the slight shock of the sense of her own beauty, Jane said, ‘Lady Latterly will be late,’ for the first time wondering why. A woman, the apparently only other, diagonal in a black dress on a white sofa, nodded tardily at her over a picture paper, then took a cigarette out of a box—scoffingly, she had lighted it for herself before the group had so far collected its wits as to break ranks. Who knew where they had all come from? The girl, at the advantage of being less surprised by them than they were by her, detachedly heard the silence break up into a clash of experimental, isolated remarks. She had no way of identifying the male speakers, nor did she try to—she looked from face to face, with her lips apart, uncertain as to whom to award the golden apple of her attention.
The fact was not only that she distinguished no one but that, so far, so compact was the group that all these alike, anonymous masks seemed to be attached to the same body, one abstract shirtfront. Yet she was somehow edified, already partly won, for about this composite there was something legendary—here, she was in the presence of a race she did not know yet, yet somehow knew of. Veterans in experience of their own kind, they made her feel an aggregate of maturity, of assimilated well-being, and of a vigour rather the more marked by being a little on the decline. She took them to be men of the world—what world might be left to be of, she did not ask herself. Some, perhaps, she had seen at the Fête, some not. None were young; one or two stood out as older than others—and one now again stood out by strolling away, by proclaiming himself subtly at home in this house, where the rest were nothing more than at ease, by a proprietary move to the tray of drinks. Jane had to suppose this must be in order—from the others’ rather striking lack of expression, evidently it was, but was so for a reason they would have preferred the girl not to comprehend. Perturbed, she could but watch the decanter being so masterfully unstoppered—till, to divert what might be her waking thoughts, someone near her spoke up. So, he said, she was staying here?
‘Oh, no. I live near here.’
‘Is that really so? Far from here?’
‘Everywhere’s far from here,’ she said, elatedly taking in the fictitious room.
‘Round here, you know, that seems to be true of everywhere. All the same, it’s extraordinary how one gets about.’
Jane had, rather naturally, not thought of that: she was wondering how to be candid but not aloof when Lady Latterly, having come swishing in at the door behind her with no warning other than displaced air, swept an arm round her waist. The embrace, though intended chiefly to strike a note, was at first startling: the girl, inside the tightening arm, found herself being pivoted this way, that way, while the hostess waved round the company with her other hand. Greeting was thus very cleverly sunk in showmanship—Lady Latterly was either defying them to have seen enough of Jane, or inviting them to look at the girl again in the new entrancing relationship she had with her. Loathing of the beginning of a party caused her, each time, to hit upon some device—and tonight, her triumphing air asked, what could one have hit upon that was better? ‘Tommy, Mamie, Tipps, Fitz, Terence!’ she called, ‘isn’t
this
lovely?’ And she beat a tattoo upon Jane’s ribs, more to keep the girl silent than make her speak. ‘Where did I find her?
Ahl’
Then: ‘Have you told them yet who you are?’ she asked, just not entangling an earring in Jane’s hair. ‘I expect not.’
Lastly, she swung the girl and herself right round, to face upon the man who was acting host. The tray was some way away down the room: in step, in Siamese closeness, they paced towards it. Ice was being made to rattle in her shaker: he paused, but only in order to say nothing, which he did with what might or might not be considered enough eloquence. An indecisive engagement between two pairs of eyes took place, and took up enough time to make Jane, held like a ventriloquist’s doll, wonder whether she could indeed be expected to be a mouthpiece—if so, Lady Latterly was let down. Lady Latterly finally said, ‘Why, hullo,’ in a voice of modulated surprise at having come upon him, of all people, here, or indeed anywhere in the world at all. She then told Jane: ‘This is my barman.’ His experienced wrist went back to work: they looked on—yellow chiffon falling against the yellowed muslin. (Jane wore the morning’s dress, skirts pressed, top hastily cut out and sleeves away, for she had nothing better with her at Montefort.) Lady Latterly, braced against the fortification of Jane’s body, was able to be at her most impervious—airily stretching her whipcord throat up, she brought the whole of the fearlessness with which she could be forty into display next this young country beauty. He, meanwhile, unscrewed the top of the shaker.
‘Peregrine, you think those
are
dry enough?’
‘They’re the same as last time.’
‘They never have been, darling. Oh, well. For me, then; and one for Jane.’
‘And there’ll be Mamie,’ he said, with a glance at the sofa.
‘Why, yes, the poor thirsty thing! You must make a whole lot more, then. Once again, do you notice, no one has brought Priscilla?’
‘Unless you hate a martini?’ he interposed, handing Jane a glass.
‘They are the end to her, really,’ mused Lady Latterly. She released Jane in order to take a cocktail, with which she started to walk away. ‘If she wants to know,’ she said back over her shoulder, ‘you might tell Jane who everyone is.’
If this
were
behaviour, one had yet to learn how to deal with it. Radiant foolhardiness was not going to carry one all the way—for one thing, gone was the magical aid of sunset: impassive electric candelabra sprang into brilliance round all the eggshell walls, and by their light Jane, instinctively looking down, saw those indelible ancient grass-stains betraying the embroidered hems of her muslin; which, till now not more than gracefully long for her, lapped on the parquet limply in an exposed way. Top to toe she was being speculated upon, however abstractedly or politely, by Peregrine with whom she’d been left alone—momentarily, the misery of being thought artistic (for he would be sure to arrive at that) made Jane flush. She saw what it could be to lose nerve, and at the same time heard Antonia laughing. ‘You’re nothing,’ she thought of the company, ‘but a pack of cards!’—but the cards were stacked, and against her. The evening reeked of expense: everything cost, nothing was for nothing - Lady Laterly calculated the pretty penny, and everybody was being kept hard at it paying up. Nor did ‘everybody’ exclude Jane, who was paying by being the lovely nobody, exhibited but not introduced. Seeing this—in fact, on the whole stimulated because she saw it—she still was not sorry she had come. Let them take the consequences.