Half a Crown (18 page)

“There’s nothing at all like this in Lancaster as far as I know,” Carmichael said. “There’s a pub where men are supposed to meet, it’s called the Ring O’ Bells. Even the communists have their meetings there, can you believe? It’s a funny place. Good beer, and a nice garden outside, but if men do meet there, I didn’t meet any when I was there. But I was young.” It had only been one illicit visit, after he had heard the rumors about it, and the whole time he had been terrified his father or his brother would come in and read his purpose on his face. He had hardly dared look at the other customers in
case they were, or were not, interested in him. He had been eighteen and had just left school, where the rules had been different and everyone had been more or less queer.

“You didn’t understand how it was done, I don’t suppose,” the barman said. “But there, I shouldn’t be talking to you about this. Your friend will be getting jealous.”

Carmichael turned to Jack. He had become the center of a group of enthusiastic talkers, all telling jokes and keeping each other in stitches. Carmichael took his place in the circle, tried to listen, tried to smile in the right places. He sipped his beer slowly and tried not to look at his watch too often.

When he was ready to scream with the sheer tedium, he waited for a pause and leaned over and asked Jack if he wanted to dance again. They were playing a lively tune, one Carmichael didn’t know for once. He took Jack in his arms and led—he was better at leading than following—and even though the dance floor was quite crowded they managed to revolve several times before the song came to an end.

“Shall we dance again?” Jack asked.

“If you want to,” Carmichael said. All the curtains across the alcoves were drawn, and couples waited at some of them for those inside to be finished so they could go on. The Oriental gentleman came out with a sailor, or perhaps a man half-dressed as a sailor, and they made their way to the bar. The room was filled with more smoke than air, and the red drapes on the walls seemed to pulse in time to the music.

Jack put his hand on Carmichael’s cheek, then kissed him.

“Happy anniversary,” he said.

“Really,” Sir Alan said, looking at me in a considering way.

Now this bit is going to be hard to explain and I hope I don’t make too much of a hash of it. Before this I’d been aware that he had a certain interest in me, and one that was different from the interest he had in Betsy. There were girls you married and girls you didn’t, and he’d always looked at me as one of the girls you didn’t. There was a sexual element in his attitude that simultaneously attracted and repelled me—that beard!—but now his whole expression changed. He looked very assessing and calculating, and he didn’t say anything after that “Really” for what felt like quite a long time, while we carried on dancing quite automatically. Of course, I didn’t realize all this entirely at once, on the dance floor. In fact I didn’t work half of it out until afterwards when I was talking to Betsy about it. He held me a little bit tighter and said very quietly, “Do you like brandy, Cinderella?”

Of course, I thought he was suggesting we sneak away to a nightclub. “Sir Alan! I can’t possibly leave the ball!” I said, in a shocked tone, but not too shocked because I was still trying to draw him off.

“Not before midnight,” he said, playfully. “But we wouldn’t have to leave the ball. I happen to know there’s a bar set up in the card
room, where Sir John Mitchell is sitting, and where most of the gentlemen, and more than a few of the young ladies, have been withdrawing for a few moments for a little liquid refreshment. I saw you drinking champagne downstairs, so I know you’re not a teetotaler.”

“Certainly not,” I said. Nobody had ever suggested that I was a prude. “I suppose I could drink brandy, though I never have.” I’d had it with lemon in tea when I had colds and thought it very nasty, but I didn’t think that should count. At least it wasn’t beer.

“Come along then,” he said, and steered me off the dance floor and through an archway into another room, which had lovely eighteenth-century white molding but was empty. The Mitchells certainly had a lovely house. We went on through a heavy paneled door into another room. There were four green baize tables set up for bridge, three of them occupied. The players were all men—all fathers, I would have thought from their ages. Lord Malcolm was among them, and I gave him a smile as we went by. There was a proper bar, on wheels, with a servant standing behind it, bartending. A handful of younger men, the kind who were my usual dance partners, were gathered around it. It might have been true what Sir Alan had said about most of the young ladies coming in from time to time, but at that moment there was only one other female in the room, Christine ffoulkes, who I knew only slightly. She was a hag—not literally! I mean she was a debutante who has been out for two seasons without getting married. Sir John Mitchell, who was dummy in one of the bridge games, looked up at us and smiled as we walked over to the bar together.

“A pair of burning brandies,” Sir Alan said to the barman.

The barman, who was probably a footman or something in everyday life, raised an eyebrow slightly. He took down two little straight glasses, set them on the bar before us, and filled them to the brim with pale brown brandy. Then he flicked a cigarette lighter and lit them both. Little blue flames danced over them. “It’s just like Christmas pudding,” I said. “Of course, that’s brandy too!”

“You are so charming. Now, you mustn’t hesitate, you have to down it all at once, or you burn your mouth,” Sir Alan said. He picked up his glass and demonstrated, tipping it straight down his throat.

I was afraid, actually, if you want to know, but I didn’t hesitate. “Cheers,” I said, picked up mine, and tossed it down the same way. It did burn, going down, but I think that was the alcohol more than the flame. I spluttered a little, I couldn’t help it. Christine laughed. She sounded drunk, and I noticed that one of the young men had his arm around her waist.

“Well done!” Sir Alan said, encouragingly.

“I’m eighteen, you know, I’m not a child,” I said.

“Are you indeed? Well, how about a glass of champagne to cool your throat now,” Sir Alan said.

“Are you trying to get me drunk?” I asked.

“Certainly not; nobody could get drunk on one brandy and two glasses of champagne,” he said, sounding so surprised that I absolved him, though most boys who were interested did their best to ply the debs with alcohol, as one of them was doing with Christine right now. That had been Betsy’s downfall with Kurt, so I’d always been very careful about it. “I just gave you the brandy because I wanted to confirm what I thought about how you felt about taking risks.”

The barman poured two glasses of champagne, in flutes, not in the wide flat glasses they were using in the supper room. “Let’s sit on the windowsill,” Sir Alan said, leading the way across the room.

It wasn’t a windowsill but a proper padded window seat, in a deep paneled recess. The window was open at the top, letting in some valuable cool air, but the faded velvet curtains were closed, so I couldn’t see out. There was plenty of room for both of us to sit. We were perfectly well chaperoned by the card players and by Christine and her friends at the bar, but nobody could overhear us.

“Now, it seems I should have been listening to my mother for once,” Sir Alan said. “You won’t mind if I speak frankly, will you, Cinderella? There isn’t any other way to say this, and I know you’re brave and sensible.”

“Certainly, say whatever you like,” I said. I might have been a little affected by the alcohol, because I felt friendly and expansive. I liked him calling me brave and sensible, though I knew I wasn’t really either of them.

“Mrs. Maynard told my mother that you were a nobody, and I’m afraid I’ve been treating you rather as if that were true, as if you were, well, a very attractive nobody.”

“She said I was
not quite
…,” I said. “I overheard. That’s what I was doing when you caught me on the stairs with my shoes off.”

“Not quite…,” Sir Alan echoed. “How vile of her. That’s much worse than saying you’re of no family, which is true. But you’re certainly a lady.”

I was pleased that he understood so quickly and felt as I did, though I wasn’t really sure he had thought I was a lady before that moment in the ballroom.

“Very well,” he went on. “But it seems your uncle is Watch Commander Carmichael, which means she’s entirely wrong, you are quite suitable, you’re not a nobody after all, whoever your parents were. Now, Mrs. Maynard and my mother would like me to marry Miss Maynard, because they’re friends, and because, frankly, she’s not going to be that easy to marry off. I have some money, and she has the right sort of background, and I’ve been letting them go ahead with thinking that, because I do want to marry somebody. I’m twenty-nine, and there is the title to think of, and Rossingham. It is time to think about settling down, and while he
is
having money problems, Maynard still looked as if he could be useful to me. I wasn’t at all attracted to Miss Maynard, I think you know that.”

He paused and waited for a response, looking directly into my
eyes. “Betsy and I are both quite aware of that,” I said, drawing myself up and a little away from him.

His eyes widened a little, but he went on. “Now it seems to me that you and I could perhaps help each other out.”

I thought he was about to suggest the same thing to me that Betsy had, that I should appear to draw him off so that they could disentangle themselves.

I nodded for him to go on. He leaned a little closer and spoke very quietly so that I had to strain to hear. “This is an awkward thing to say. But it seems I may have slightly overstepped with this British Power thing. I wasn’t expecting everything to blow up. I don’t expect to be in any real difficulty over it, but you never know. Your uncle’s friendship could make a great difference. And as time goes on, who knows, his friendship could be a very valuable thing to a man like myself.”

“I’d be happy to introduce you,” I said.

He smiled. “You little innocent, you don’t have the first idea what I’m talking about, do you?”

I sipped my champagne and tried to look grown-up. He laughed.

“I am under no obligation to Miss Maynard, I have made her no offer, nor has she led me to believe one would be welcome. In so far as her parents think chivalry demands that I propose because to some degree I endangered her at the rally, exactly the same applies to you.”

Now I understood him, and he saw immediately that I did.

“How would you like not just to introduce me to your uncle, but to make him one of the family?” he asked. “I want a wife, and you’ll suit me personally a great deal better than Betsy Maynard ever would. Would you care to be Lady Bellingham, Cinderella? Would you do me the honor of accepting my hand in marriage?”

“I can’t possibly get engaged before I’m presented,” I said. Even as I was saying it I knew I didn’t want to be engaged to him, or married
to him, or to anyone. The thought of being married in my first season and one of the first of the year to be engaged was enticing, and the thought of being Lady Bellingham and taking precedence of Mrs. Maynard was tempting, but none of it would have been compensation for being married to Sir Alan instead of going to Oxford. Oxford lay before me like a vision of punts and green willows and dreaming spires—and more importantly books, and talk about books, and young men who were interested in the same things I was and really liked me. Every girl is supposed to be swept off her feet at her first proposal. We’d even been taught how to deal with it, in Switzerland. But like a lot of Leni’s teaching, it wasn’t as much practical use as it might have been. There hadn’t been anything about how to deal with a man laying things out and making as baldly self-interested an offer as this.

“We could certainly wait a week to make the announcement,” Sir Alan said, encouragingly.

“Sir Alan, I’m quite taken aback. I must have time to think,” I said. I almost said “This is so sudden,” the way girls are always supposed to. It really was sudden, and I really was taken aback. “I don’t think I can agree to this. No. I really must decline your very kind offer.”

That last sentence was what Leni had told us to say.

“I’ll certainly give you time to consider,” Sir Alan said. “You don’t know what you’re saying now, that’s clear. Talk to your uncle about it—talk to Miss Maynard if you like, though I’d prefer for obvious reasons that you didn’t talk to Mrs. Maynard.”

“I wouldn’t give her the time of day,” I said, without thinking. It was a Cockney expression, and it made him laugh.

“Oh, Cinderella, we could suit each other very well, you know,” he said, coaxingly.

“Why do you always call me Cinderella?” I asked. “I don’t believe you know my actual name.”

“Miss Royston,” he said, but I could see from his rueful look that I’d caught him out.

“What’s the rest of it?” I pressed. “Good gracious, Sir Alan, do you often propose to girls whose names you don’t even know?”

“Ellen? Elspeth?” he ventured. “No. What is it? I always think of you as Cinderella. And you call me Sir Alan, so formal.”

“Elvira,” I said. I wasn’t actually cross about that at all, I thought it was funny, but I was further from agreeing to marry him than I ever had been.

“Elvira, of course. How could I forget something so uncommon?”

“I can’t marry you,” I said.

“We’ll talk about it next week, after you’ve been presented, and when you’ve spoken to your uncle,” he said. “I hope to take you up on your promise to introduce me to him, whether you accept or not.”

“I think you ought to take me back to the ballroom,” I said.

“Before midnight, of course, when your carriage turns back into a pumpkin,” he said, smoothly.

“Thank you,” I said.

“I won’t kiss you, as you haven’t agreed,” he said. “But let me do this.” He took a piece of string out of his pocket and before I had any idea what he intended, he took hold of my left hand and used it to measure the circumference of my ring finger. Then he kissed the back of my hand, like d’Artagnan. I’m afraid I just stared at him. My hand tingled when he let it go. Everyone in the room was looking, which I’m sure was what he intended.