“I’m sorry, I’ve a poor memory for people.”
“You met us in the pub, don’t you remember?”
“Are you the girls who asked that question? No, I don’t remember your faces.”
“Why?” asked the girl on his right. “Did we look awfully hard and experienced?”
“Not at all,” said Thaw hurriedly. “Are you at the university?”
“No, the art school.”
“Are you in the first year?”
They laughed.
“No, the fourth.”
The pale girl said to the dark, “It makes you feel terribly ageing,” and then, to Thaw, “Why aren’t you dancing?”
“I’ve no sense of bodily rhythm.”
“Oh, we’ll soon teach you
that
,” said the dark girl, rising to her feet. She led him to a corner and showed him how to move his feet; then she took him onto the floor where he partnered her, feeling clumsy and apologetic and desperately wishing she was the pale girl; then she took him back and gave him to her friend. He felt the difference at once. Her body was firmer, supple without fragility, her hair was pale gold, drawn smoothly back from pale brows to the back of her head. She wore earrings made from small stones hung on thin chains, her dress was black with a square-cut neckline. Sometimes she spoke words directing his steps, sometimes words of congratulation. He looked straight into her eyes, imagined being married to her, thought of Molly Tierney and felt no regret at all. He thought, I’m being ridiculous, and kept looking in her eyes; the dark pupils grew very clear and her face and head became a dim white and gold shape around them. He thought, She’s like marble and honey, and shaped the words with his lips. The music stopped and he had to dance with the smaller girl again. He looked straight across her shoulder and talked about painting and the an school. She said,
“Is your father a minister?”
“No, my father’s a pious atheist. Do I look like a minister’s son?”
“You look like a kid of twelve. But you sound like an old highland minister.”
He danced again with the pale girl in a silence which grew desperate, for he knew it must end. So he said, “You’re like marble and honey.”
“What?”
“You’re like marble and honey.”
“Oh. Am I? Thank you.”
She looked at him without smiling and said, “You should dance more often.”
“No, really, I can’t.”
“If you come to more balls I’ll dance with you.”
He grew more worried, feeling she could not dance with him all evening, wondering when and how she would break from him. When the music stopped he excused himself and hurried from the hall.
He went upstairs thinking, ‘I love her,’ and, ‘You’re daft.’ He wondered if she had a boyfriend and why he wasn’t around. Anyway, she had danced with him from kindness; their connection had no equality in it. He imagined her friends mocking the lost look on his face when he danced with her. She would laugh and say, “He’s just a kid!” He looked for a place to hide. Intimate whispers came from all the dark corridors so he opened a door onto the dance hall balcony, a small place used as a store for chairs. A man was slumped there with arms on the balustrade and head on arms. It was Drummond. Thaw had never seen him alone or depressed before. Drummond smiled faintly and pointed to a chair.
“How are you, Duncan? Why aren’t you dancing?”
“I can’t.”
From up here the dancers seemed blind caps of hair with projecting hands and feet like the limbs of starfish. The linked couples twitched and turned as if the music was a fluid vibrating them. When it stopped they hurried to the side of the hall like corpuscles into a clot. Drummond sighed and said,
“They’re villainous, Duncan, downright villainous, absolutely villainous.”
“Who are?”
“Women.”
Drummond gazed down on the dancers and said, “One kept following me around tonight and looking at me … she went off with someone else ten minutes ago. I think I could have had her if I’d wanted. But I saw Molly dancing, and I’d no heart for anything of that kind. I don’t know why. She’s past her best and engaged to an Irish vet and flirting away….”
“Molly Tierney?”
“I used to go about with her. You must admit she’s good-looking. She avoids me now.”
“Why?”
“I suppose because her parents are nice and mine aren’t. My mother told her she wasn’t fit to sleep with a pig. Which forced me into the unenviable position of declaring she
was
fit to sleep with a pig,”
They were silent again, gazing on the dancers. Then Drummond said, “I tried to cure myself by imagining her pissing and excreting and menstruating, but the connection made these acts beautiful to me.”
“How do women menstruate? At regular times on regular days?”
“When they reach Molly’s age they can do it running for a tram, or standing before an easel, or at dinner or talking quietly to a friend, as we are. She let me watch her sometimes.”
“
What?
”
“We shared many little secrets of that kind,” said Drummond gloomily. This aspect of love had never entered Thaw’s fantasies. He rubbed his face in frustration. Drummond said, “You’ll be happier with women when you’re better known−prestige makes a lot of them randy. Janet Weir used to go around with the president of the students’ representative council, but when Jimmy Macbeth grew famous for drinking himself to death she kept company with him for a day or two. Then the film
Cyrano de Bergerac
popularized long noses and she turned to me. A lot of girls like me because I’m supposed to be a symbol of something. It’s humiliating in some ways but lucky in others. What do you think of Janet?”
“I don’t know her.”
“She looks like the Mona Lisa but has nicer legs. She invited me into her room last night and told me she loved me.”
“Oh,
God
,” said Thaw, beating his brow. It felt like a gate which had been locked and soldered shut. Drummond stretched his arms and yawned. “Yes, I was embarrassed too. Girls who say they love you expect all sorts of irrational things, like sincerity, in exchange. Still, we passed a pleasant night. She’s a virgin, you know. I’d seen her with so many men that I hadn’t expected that. I was careful not to destroy it. I like virginity; it seems a pity to destroy it for fun. But I suppose she’ll get me doing it eventually. Virgins are terribly single-minded.”
“I’m going to the lavatory.”
Two hours later Thaw leaned despondently on the railings by the entrance watching the last dancers leave in ones and twos. He had stowed the mortarboard and gown in a locker. Drummond, still dressed like Dracula, capered on the pavement among laughing friends.
“I must get a woman to take home,” he was saying. “I must take
some
woman home. Lorna, Lorna, Lorna!”
He tried to embrace a girl who slipped under his arm, laughing and saying, “Not tonight, Aitken, not tonight!”
A girl in a blue coat came out and paused, looking vaguely from side to side. Drummond took her hand politely and said, “Let us walk you home, Marjory.”
The girl’s face crinkled in a shy amused smile. She said, “I’m sorry, Aitken. My father is coming for me in the car.”
“Phone him up, he may not even have left yet. Tell him we’re walking you home. I’ll hold one hand and Duncan the other. Two is a perfectly safe escort.”
The girl hesitated.
“It’s only half past eleven. And a warm night,” said Drummond with soft urgency.
“All right,” said the girl. She smiled quickly at Thaw and went indoors to phone.
“Marjory is a nice girl, a really nice girl,” said Drummond musically. “I don’t know why people think I’m incapable of liking nice girls.”
Thaw yawned at the sky. One or two stars were visible. He said, “Goodnight, Aitken.”
“Don’t go,” said Drummond quickly. “Don’t you
like
Marjory?”
“That’s not the point,” said Thaw; yet when Marjory came out Drummond took her right hand and Thaw her left, holding it lightly and carefully. It was small, faintly warm, neither dry nor quite moist, and he was very conscious of it.
They walked, talking about ordinary things, across the arch of the hill and followed the lamp-reflecting steel of the tramlines over the River Kelvin into a district of trees and terraces. Somewhere beyond the university they heard some sharp barks and a black dog ran toward them round a curving pavement.
“It’s Gibbie!” said Marjory, and squatting down on her haunches received the dog’s head in her lap. “How are you, Gibbie? Eh, Gibbie? Good dog, Gibbie,” she whispered, rubbing its cheeks with her hands. The dog panted and lolled its tongue out, grinning up at her with shut ecstatic eyes. She stood up and it shot back the way it had come. They followed until they reached a tall, slightly gawky woman standing by a gate in a hedge. She smiled amiably and gave her hand to the students in turn.
“Oh, I’ve met you before, Aitken, of course. So this is Duncan. How are you, Duncan? Thank you both for seeing our little daughter so safely home. My husband is just bringing the car round to drive you back to the city centre. Neither of you live near here, do you?”
A car drove slowly toward them along the edge of the kerb. It stopped and the back door was pushed open. They said goodbye to Marjory and her mother and climbed in.
Though Marjory had given him no more than some friendly glances and a squeeze of the hand he spent the weekend cleaning paint stains from his clothes and started brushing his teeth before going to bed. On Monday he stood with friends on the staircase of the main building when she went swiftly by. He followed her down to the entrance hall, across the street and into the annexe, where, singing, she turned unexpected corners. Her voice echoed along an unseen corridor until silenced by the remote slam of a door. He stood for a while as if still listening. The song had been tuneful but without definite tune, a line of melodious notes as casual as bird notes. On the staircase he had glimpsed her throat in silhouette, the outline pulsing like a plucked string. He felt baffled and wondered whether to feel insulted. She must have known he was following; why hadn’t she stopped? But then he could have reached her side by walking faster; why hadn’t he walked faster?
At noontime she was several places ahead of him in the refectory queue and smiled and raised her hand in greeting. He nodded, looked casually elsewhere, and three minutes later arrived beside her in a way that seemed accidental. He waited until she noticed him before smiling. She said, “Hullo, Duncan. How are you?”
“Well. How are you?”
“Oh! Well.”
A pleasant little giggle suggested, not that he amused her, but that it was amusing for them to be talking there. He said, “I enjoyed our walk on Friday.”
“I enjoyed it a lot too.”
“Aitken is good company.”
“You were not bad company yourself, Duncan.”
A dangerous silence widened between them. He drew breath and plunged over it.
“Can I … eat at your table?”
“Of course, Duncan.”
She smiled so kindly that he felt he had said nothing difficult or strange. They took their plates to a table and ate beside Janet Weir and a couple of other girls who were attractive and welcoming. He enjoyed the meal for it was easier talking to several girls than one, but when Janet left to get cigarettes he leaned towards Marjory and his face went red.
“Would you… let me take you to the pictures some night?” “Of course, Duncan.”
“Will tomorrow night do?”
“Yes…. yes, I think so.”
“I’ll call about seven, will I?”
She frowned vaguely. “I … think so, Duncan. Yes.”
After tea next evening he took from his wardrobe a blue pin-striped double-breasted suit, a gift of a neighbour whose son had outgrown it. Thaw had enraged his mother by saying he would never wear it because it was the kind of suit businessmen and American gangsters wore. Tonight he put it on, slid a clean white folded handkerchief into the breast pocket and set off for Marjory’s home, buying a box of chocolates on the way. Aboard the bus his heart beat loudly and his knees trembled, but entering the district where she lived he was unable to find the house. It had been at the end of a curving terrace but there were many of these. He searched for a phone box to look up her address in the directory and found one near the docks, but with the book in hand he discovered he didn’t know her second name. He punched his brow violently for a while, then phoned McAlpin who said, “Her father’s Professor Laidlaw, who does biochemistry at Gilmorehill. I’ll look up the address for you. You sound rather … distraught.”
Half an hour later Thaw rang a doorbell and Mrs. Laidlaw opened to him, saying, “Come in, Duncan.”
Having despaired of getting there he felt his arrival was insubstantial. He said, “I’m sorry I’m late. I lost my way.”
“Are you late? Marjory’s still upstairs getting ready.”
The lobby had shining dark furniture and dark landscapes in guilt frames. A golf club and umbrella lay in a huge blue earthenware vase, and on the polished floor nearby a golf ball was tethered by a cord to a rubber mat. Mrs. Laidlaw led him into a room with a bright fire in the hearth and switched on the light. A massive man hoisted himself out of an armchair and said in a gentle voice, “How do you do?”
Thaw said, “How do you do?”
“This is Marjory’s father—oh, but you met last Friday. Now sit down, both of you, and I’ll see if I can hurry up my daughter a little.”
Thaw sat down and tried to seem at ease. The professor had sounded small and clerkly in the car but here the quiet voice emphasized his suave bulk. He was leaning forward and tickling with one finger the ear of the dog, Gibbie, who sprawled on the hearth rug.
“Do you play golf?” he asked gently.
“No. But my father does—did, I mean, during the war. He’s mainly a climber, though.”
“Ah.”
Thaw cleared his throat and said, “I received some golfing lessons at my secondary school, but the game required more care, concentration and precision than I was prepared to bring to it.” The professor said, “Yes. It is an exacting game and requires ….. patience.”
They were silent until a small yellow budgerigar landed with a thump on Thaw’s shoulder and said “Hurry up, Marjory! Good old Mr. Churchill! Hurry up, Marjory!”