Authors: Monica Dickens
When the party was thinning and Archie had seen the Governor safely away, he and Joy sat in a corner and talked a lot. She liked him, but the trouble with this kind of man was that there would never be anything you could
do
for him. He could do a
lot for you, of course, but Joy had had more than a year of that and knew the tedium of dependency. It would be nice to have someone dependent on her for a change. But Archie would never need encouraging or comforting or backing up in some life-long ambition, to jubilate together when he achieved it. Everything he was going to be he was already.
On the other hand, you would run no risks with a man like this. You could find a secure niche, a solid background for the rest of your life, and never have to worry any more about who you really were.
Archie took it for granted that they would spend to-morrow morning together before his ship sailed. Because he wanted it, he scarcely bothered to ask Joy, but she fell in quite readily with his capable, pleasant plans.
‘We’ll see a lot of each other in England, of course,’ he was saying. ‘You’ll have to come and stay at Astwick. You’ll love my mother, and it’s rather fun, the old place. You ride, don’t you?’
‘Yes,’ lied Joy. Rodney had failed her there, because he hated horses himself. He would have to have her taught before she went to stay with the Drakes. She looked across the room to see whether he were appreciating her progress.
‘I’d love to come,’ she was telling Archie. ‘I’ve heard so much about the Hall. It sounds – ’ She suddenly stood up, and her heart gave a great bounce. Before she could stop herself, she was moving towards the door with the beatific smile of a sleepwalker, for there, coming in with a crowd of other naval officers, was Billy Moore.
Rodney and Archie and his father had dinner together at the Club and tried to pretend that nothing had gone wrong.
Joy and Billy had dinner in an Italian restaurant five miles along the coast where no one could possibly find them. Joy could never be glad enough that she had said it. If she had waited, and given herself time to wonder and doubt whether Billy wanted it too, she might not have whispered, when they had been talking for barely two minutes: ‘Take me away, Bill. Let’s go somewhere by ourselves.’
‘Honestly?’ His grin was all over his face, and embraced the whole of life, just as in the old days, when something made him feel that life was good. ‘I was afraid you were all buttoned up here.’
‘It doesn’t matter.’ Archie was over by the bar getting drinks for the other officers. When Rodney saw joy going towards the cloakroom, he said: ‘Yes, go and preen your hair, there’s a lamb. It’s parting itself at the back.’
Joy got her coat and Billy borrowed someone’s car, and everything was perfect, from the time when the vast signora said
naturalmente
they could have
fritto misto,
to the moment when Billy stopped the car on the road home by the sea and said exaggerated things that Joy let herself believe. When he kissed her, it didn’t matter whether it were true or not that for years he had thought of her and wanted her and longed for an evening like this.
This evening was true, and there would be to-morrow with the whole day together, and when the sun went down, another evening like this. He was coming to England in the autumn. She would see him often. She could ask him to the flat; she could ask the whole Moore family to the flat if she wanted to. At last she had her chance. It must have been for this that she had listened and learned and swallowed her pride, and worked and been bored with Rodney; so that she could at last meet Billy as an equal, and hear him say that he loved her.
He took her back to the
Queen Anne,
and a sailor told her as she came up the steps: ‘Sir Rodney left a message that you were to see him in his cabin as soon as you came aboard.’
‘Thank you,’ said Joy, and turned to wave at Billy, saluting her from the picket boat below. Would his sailors think it funny if she blew him a kiss? Before she could make up her mind, the little boat had turned like a taxi, dug in its heels with a churning of phosphorescence and shot away towards the lights of the Fleet.
‘You didn’t get my message then?’ Rodney asked at breakfast with studied calm.
Joy had avoided his eye up to now and she still kept hers on her grapefruit. ‘What message?’
‘To come and see me when you got back.’
‘Oh that. Well, look, honestly, Uncle Rodney, why should I? I mean, anyone would think you were a headmaster, with all this “See me in my study” business.’ His silence made her nervous. ‘Anyway, you were snoring,’ she blustered, ‘and I wasn’t so late. Why shouldn’t I go out with my own friends sometimes? I looked for you to tell you where I was going, but you were in the Gents. I couldn’t help it; I don’t see what harm I’ve done.’
She protested too much. Roddy let her finish and then said mildly: ‘I never said you had done harm. I haven’t said a word about it yet. What’s all the bluster about?’
‘Well … well, I thought perhaps you might be annoyed, because we’d fixed dinner with the Drakes.’
‘Then why did you go? I’ll have some of the bran crispbread, Steward, if you please.’
Joy said no more. As she finished her breakfast, she thought of what she was going to say next. In an hour’s time she would see Billy; nothing and nobody else mattered. She had twenty-four hours, unless by some miracle she could persuade Uncle Rodney to stay in Malta and pick up the
Queen Anne
on her way home. She was moonstruck enough to think even this possible.
Rodney took another piece of bran crispbread, and Joy pushed back her chair. ‘I’ve finished,’ she said. ‘Do you mind if I go? Someone’s fetching me at ten, for a picnic’
‘I thought Archie Drake was taking you round the harbour in a speedboat?’
‘Oh, we hadn’t fixed anything definite; he won’t mind. You don’t either, do you, if I’m not back till late? Think, you’ll be able to rest here all day in the cool. I know you don’t want to drag round Malta with me.’ She got it all out quickly.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Rodney, ‘you won’t be able to go.’
‘Why not?’ said Joy, ‘why shouldn’t I?’
‘If you’d come to my cabin last night as I asked, I’d have told
you then. As it is, you’ll have to pack this morning. The
Dominican
sails at midday.’
‘I know it does. The Drakes are going on it.’
‘So are we.’ He raised a hand againt her gasp of protest. ‘The heat here has quite decided me not to go on with the trip. I’ve never known the Mediterranean in June so fulminating. I had quite a peculiar little turn last night after you’d left the Club. I wasn’t going to worry you with that,’ he smiled bravely, ‘but a doctor who was there said he thought it madness to go on to the Adriatic. So Archie, like the good chap he is, has wangled us a couple of state rooms in the
Dominican.
He’s got some pull with the chairman of the line. I told you he knew everyone, didn’t I?’
It was like Seacombe all over again. Joy, crying in her cabin, felt as despairing as when she had cried in the train going home with her mother and father, snatched away from Billy, unable to explain to him. He would never understand this. He could never see why other people could not sweep aside obstacles with the same careless ease as he did himself.
When Rodney thought she was packing, she had waited at the top of the gangway to tell Billy when he came in the picket boat, but someone came to tell her that he had signalled from his ship that he would be an hour late. She would be on board the
Dominican
by then. She asked them to signal back, but how could one explain with winking lights?
When she tried to send a cable from the
Dominican,
the wireless officer was an unfriendly stranger, who said that he had a pile to send already and hers must wait. So it was a long time before she got Billy’s answer, a silly, joking answer, which was worse than an angry one. It did not even show whether he minded.
A steward knocked, and she hid her blotched face as he brought in carnations from Archie. ‘Hope the headache is better,’ said his note. ‘Shall wait for you in the bar at seven.’
She really had got a headache by now. She usually gave herself one if she cried. She tore up Archie’s note and put herself to bed. Wait for her in the bar indeed! This was all his fault for
sucking up to Uncle Rodney by encouraging him to be neurotic and then getting him the cabins. He need not think he was going to get her that way.
She stayed in bed for three days. ‘Clever puss, aren’t you?’ said Rodney. ‘You’ve struck just the right line. Archie is so used to getting any girl he wants that he’s intrigued by the unattainable. He’s getting almost anxious enough to spoil his bridge. Give it one more day, then emerge deliciously pale and recline somewhere swaddled in rugs. You’ll see, he’ll dance round you with drinks and delicate morsels and gusty sighs.’
‘He needn’t bother,’ said Joy. ‘
I
don’t want him. The hungry English spinsters are welcome to him. Don’t be an ass, Uncle Roddie; my head really is bad. It throbs all over the place.’ I sometimes wonder if that picture did more damage than they thought.
‘Don’t be neurotic,’ said Rodney who did not allow hypochon dria in anyone but himself, ‘and don’t delay your appearance too long. There are some quite seductive girls in this floating hotel. One in particular, a certain Marguerite Schomberg, of Carson, Nevada, has her eye, I think, on Astwick Hall, which she no doubts plans to dismantle stone by stone and re-erect on the other side of the Atlantic’
‘She can have it,’ said Joy, and turned her face to the wall. ‘Must you smoke that cigar in here? It makes me feel sick.’
She had to get up eventually, because the sun streamed through her porthole, and she was young and could hear a band playing somewhere. She was hungry too, and had not the face to ask for a chop on a tray, since she was supposed to be ill.
Before she had been half an hour in the fresh air, her headache had gone. The relief of this made her quite civil to Archie when he came, as Uncle Rodney had said he would, with smoked salmon canapés and a long iced drink. He sat beside her, and presently Marguerite Schomberg, in tiny white shorts flaring at the top of endless brown legs, came to try and make him play shuffleboard.
‘Why how come?’ she asked, when he declined. ‘I thought we had a date for blood sports. I’ve been keeping the court. Oh, well, looks like I’ll have to get me another man.’ She smiled
without rancour, and studied Joy intelligently, filing the knowledge of what appealed to the top-register Englishman.
It was perhaps because Joy did not care whether she appealed to Archie or not, that he lost as much of his heart to her as he could spare. His mother had recently announced that Archie must soon take a wife, to allow himself plenty of time for ensuring an heir, so before she could choose for him, he must find one himself.
His courtship was formal and well disciplined. Joy deliberately dallied alone with him in romantic corners, to see what he would do, and perhaps to slap his face if he dared to desecrate the memory of Billy’s last kiss. But he didn’t. He must mean business, since he was going about her in such a respectful way.
Joy did not mind his gentlemanly pursuit. Archie danced well and was useful for fetching things. She liked him well enough, although she could raise no interest in him and would hardly have missed him if he had gone overboard during the night.
She could not raise much interest in anything, to Rodney’s annoyance. He thought it did not suit her to be listless. She did not tell him that she would be listless until September, when Billy came to England. Then one day, Archie’s father started a conversation in the bar, which jerked Joy suddenly out of her apathy.
General Drake had fixed his swivel eye, or swivelled his fixed eye, on a well-favoured widow called Mrs Beaucourt, who had been staying with a married daughter in Malta.
‘So many
charming
young officers in and out of the flat all day,’ she was saying. ‘There’s something about the Navy I could never resist.’
The General fluffed out his wattles. ‘Pity the poor old Army,’ he said. ‘Always getting cut out. It was just the same at our farewell party. I was getting on like a house on fire with this little lady here – ’ the eye directed at Joy must have been the real one, for the other was fixed on a brass statue of Ceres, pouring electric light out of her cornucopia – ‘when in gallop some of my boy’s Naval pals, and hang it, you couldn’t see her for dust.’
Joy glanced nervously at Rodney, hoping that he had not heard.
‘The young Moore boy,’ said Mrs Beaucourt, and Joy’s spine pricked like a ratting terrier, ‘he was there wasn’t he? Charming boy. His father used to be a flame of mine.’
‘Moore?’ said General Drake. ‘Short, stout chap with a red beard?’
‘Oh
no,
my dear man.’ If Mrs Beaucourt had had a fan, she would have rapped him. ‘No no, a gay young spark with blue, blue eyes and a lot of bounce.’ Glancing again at Rodney, Joy saw him studying his flawless nails and knew that he was listening. She looked at Archie. He had never spoken to her of Billy, and he did not seem to be listening now. He was talking to Marguerite Schomberg, but Archie’s manners were skilled enough to be able to withdraw one car from a
tête-à-tête
without the other
tête
noticing.
Joy wanted to get up and go away, but was suddenly rooted to her chair by what Mrs Beaucourt was saying: ‘My daughter knows Billy Moore well, because he’s engaged to a great friend of hers. Lisa Shaw, the daughter of the psychiatrist, you know, that man who’s always called in when people say something clicked in their brains and they never knew they’d done it. A fair girl with a gorgeous figure. They’re to be married when he comes home in the autumn, so I told him he must ask me, because I so enjoy that arch of swords. Just like Oranges and Lemons.’
‘You look pale, poppet,’ Rodney said to Joy quite kindly. ‘Is it that migraine of yours again?’ He had elevated Joy’s headaches to this as snobbishly as Mrs Abinger had elevated them to Nerves.
Joy put up a hand. ‘Yes – I don’t know,’ she said rather stupidly. ‘If you don’t mind, I think I’ll – ’ Archie got up at once and escorted her to the lift. She hardly knew that he was there.