Point Counter Point (57 page)

This afternoon she had courage; she ventured to look at the enemy—at as much of him, that is to say, as she could see, peeping sideways through the glass towards the door. A grey trouser-leg and an elbow were all that entered her field of vision. There was yet another knock. Then the trouser-leg moved back, the whole coat came into view, the black hat and, with a turn of the head, Spandrell’s face. She ran to the door and opened.

‘Sspandrell!’ she called, for he had already turned to go. He came back, lifting his hat. They shook hands. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she explained. ‘I was alone. I thought it was at least a murderer. Then I peeped through the window and saw it was you.’

Spandrell gave vent to brief and noiseless laughter. ‘But it might still be a murderer, even though it is me.’ And he shook his knobbed stick at her with a playfulness which was, however, so dramatically like her imaginings of the genuinely homicidal article, that Elinor was made to feel quite uncomfortable.

She covered her emotion with a laugh, but decided not to ask him into the house. Standing on the doorstep she felt safer. ‘All the same,’ she said, ‘it would be better to be murdered by somebody one knows than by a stranger.’

‘Would it?’ He looked at her; the corners of his wide weal-like mouth twitched into a curious smile. ‘It needs a woman to think of those refinements. But if you should ever feel like having your throat cut in a thoroughly friendly fashion…’

‘My dear Spandrell!’ she protested, and felt gladder than ever that she was still on the doorstep and not inside the house.

‘… Don’t hesitate to send for me. No matter what the inconvenience,’ he laid his hand on his heart, ‘ I’d fly to your side. Or rather to your neck.’ He clicked his heels and bowed. ‘But tell me,’ he went on in another tone, ‘is Philip anywhere about? I wanted him to come and dine to-night. At Sbisa’s. I’d ask you too. Only it’s a purely masculine affair.’

She thanked him. ‘But I couldn’t come in any case, And Philip’s gone down into the country to see his mother. And will only be back just in time for Tolley’s concert at the Queen’s Hall. But I know he said he was going round to Sbisa’s afterwards, on the chance of meeting someone. You’ll see him then. Late.’

‘Well, better late than never. Or at least,’ he uttered another of his soundless laughs, ‘so one piously hopes, where one’s friends are concerned. Pious hopes! But to tell you the truth, the proverb needs changing. Better never than early.’

‘Then why go to the trouble of asking people to dine?’

Spandrell shrugged his shoulders. ‘Force of habit,’ he said. ‘And besides, I generally make them pay, when I ask them out.’

They were both laughing, when a loud ringing made them turn. A telegraph boy on a red bicycle was shooting down the mews towards them.

‘Quarles?’ he asked, as he jumped off.

Elinor took the telegram and opened it. The laughter went out of her face as she read. ‘No answer.’ The boy remounted and rode away. Elinor stood staring at the telegram as though its words were written in an unfamiliar language difficult to interpret. She looked at the watch on her wrist, then back at the flimsy paper.

‘Will you do something for me?’ she said at last, turning to Spandrell.

‘But of course.’

‘My baby’s ill,’ she explained. ‘They want me to come. If I hurry ‘ (she looked again at her watch): ‘I can just catch the four-seventeen at Euston. But there’ll be no time for anything else. Will you ring up Everard Webley for me and explain why I can’t dine with him this evening?’ It was a warning, she thought; a prohibition. ‘Before six. At his office.’

‘Before six,’ he repeated slowly. ‘At his office. Very well.’

‘I must rush,’ she said, holding out her hand.

‘But I’ll go and get you a cab, while you put on your hat.’

She thanked him. Spandrell hurried away along the mews. A prohibition, Elinor repeated to herself, as she adjusted her hat in front of the Venetian mirror in the living-room. The choice had been made for her. It was at once a relief and a disappointment. But made, she went on to reflect, at poor little Phil’s expense. She wondered what was the matter with him. Her mother’s telegram—such a characteristic one, that she could not help smiling now that she thought of it again—said nothing. ‘PHILIP RATHER SOUFFRANT AND THOUGH UNALARMINGLY SHOULD ADVISE PROMPT HOMECOMING MOTHER.’ She remembered how nervous and difficult the child had been of late, how easily fatigued. She reproached herself for not having realized that he was working up for an illness. Now it had come. A touch of influenza, perhaps. ‘I ought to have taken more care,’ she kept repeating. She scribbled a note for her husband. ‘The accompanying telegram explains my sudden departure. Join me at Gattenden to-morrow morning.’ Where should she put it so that Philip should be sure to see it when he came in? Leaning against the clock on the mantelpiece? But would he necessarily want to know the time? Or on the table? No; pin it to the screen; that was the thing! He couldn’t miss it. She ran upstairs in search of a pin. On Philip’s dressing-table she saw a bunch of keys. She picked them up and looked at them, frowning. ‘The idiot’s forgotten his latchkey. How will he get in to-night?’ The noise of a taxi under the window suggested a solution. She hurried down, pinned the note and the telegram conspicuously to the screen that shut off the drawing-room part of the living-room from the door and let herself out into the mews. Spandrell was standing at the door of the cab.

‘That
is
kind of you,’ she said. ‘But I haven’t finished exploiting you even now.’ She held up the keys. ‘When you see Philip this evening, give him these and tell him with my love that he’s an imbecile. He wouldn’t have been able to get in without them.’ Spandrell took the keys in silence. ‘And tell him why I’ve gone and that I’m expecting him to-morrow.’ She got into the cab. ‘And don’t forget to ring up Webley. Before six. Because he was supposed to be meeting me here at six.’

‘Here?’ he asked with an expression of sudden interest and curiosity which Elinor found rather offensive and embarrassing. Was he imagining something, was he daring to suppose…?

‘Yes, here,’ she nodded curtly.

‘I won’t forget,’ he assured her emphatically, and there was still something about his expression which made her suspect a private significance behind the obvious words.

‘Thank you,’ said Elinor, without cordiality. ‘And now I must fly.’ She gave the word to the driver. The taxi backed up the mews, under the archway, turned and was gone.

Spandrell walked slowly up to Hyde Park Corner. From the public call-box in the station he telephoned to Illidge.

Everard Webley was striding about the room, dictating. Sedentary composition he found impossible. ‘How do people write when they’re grafted to chairs all day long, year in year out?’ He found it incomprehensible. ‘When I’m sitting in a chair, or lying on a bed, I become like the furniture I’ve combined myself with—mere wood and stuffing. My mind doesn’t move unless my muscles move.’ On days when his correspondence was large, when there were articles to dictate, speeches to compose, Everard’s working day was an eight-hour walking tour. ‘Doing the lion,’ was how his secretaries described his methods of dictation. He was doing the lion now—the restless lion, a little before feeding time—pacing from wall to wall of his big bare office.

‘Remember,’ he was saying, frowning, as he spoke, at the grey carpet; under his secretary’s pencil the shorthand scurried across the page, ‘remember that the final authority is in all cases mine and that, so long as I remain at the head of the B. B. F., every attempt at insubordination will be promptly and ruthlessly suppressed. Yours etcetera.’ He was silent and, walking back to his desk from the spot where the conclusion of his thoughtful and leonine pacing had left him, he turned over the scattered papers. ‘That seems to be all,’ he said and looked at his watch. It was just after a quarter to six. ‘Have these last letters ready for me in the morning,’ he went on. ‘I’ll sign them then.’ He took his hat from the peg. ‘Good evening.’ And slamming the door, he descended the stairs two at a time. Outside the house he found his chauffeur waiting with the car. It was a powerful machine (for Everard was a lover of furious driving) and, since he also enjoyed the sensation of battling with the weather and the wind of his own speed, open. A tightly-stretched waterproof sheet covered the whole of the back part of the touring body like a deck, leaving only the two front seats available for passengers. ‘I shan’t need you anv more this evening,’ he said to the chauffeur, as he settled into the driver’s seat. ‘You can go.’

He touched the self-starter, threw the car into gear and shot off with a violent impetuosity. Several dozens of horses were bottled in the three litres of Everard’s cylinders; he liked to make them work their hardest. Full speed ahead and then, a yard from the impending accident, jam on the brakes, that was his method. Driving with Everard in town was almost too exciting. Elinor had protested the last time he took her out. ‘I don’t so much mind dying,’ she had said. ‘But I really should object to passing the rest of my life with two wooden legs and a broken nose.’ He had laughed. ‘You’re quite safe with me. I don’t have accidents.’

‘You’re above such things are you?’ she had mocked. ‘Well, if you like to put it like that’ The brakes were applied with such violence that Elinor had had to clutch at the arms of her seat to prevent herself from being thrown against the wind-screen. ‘Imbecile,’ he had shouted at the bewildered old gentleman whose hen-like indecisions in the roadway had so nearly landed him under Everard’s Dunlops. ‘If you like to put it like that—’ and the car had shot forward again with a jerk that flattened Elinor against the back of her seat—’ you may. I don’t have accidents. I manufacture my own luck.’

Remembering the incident, Everard smiled to himself as he drove along Oxford Street. A railway delivery van held up his progress. Horses oughtn’t to be allowed in the streets. ‘Either you take me,’ he would say to her, ‘and in the end that means you’ll have to make the thing public—leave Philip and come to me’—(for he intended to be entirely honest with her; there were to be no false pretences of any kind); ‘either that, or else…’ There was an opportunity to pass the delivery van; he pressed the accelerator and darted forward with a swerve to the right and another, past the nose of the old and patiently trotting horse, to the left again. ‘Or else we don’t see one another again.’ It was to be an ultimatum. Brutal. But Everard hated situations that were neither one thing nor the other. He preferred definite knowledge, however unpleasant, to even the most hopefully blissful of uncertainties. And in this case the uncertainty wasn’t at all blissful. At the entry to Oxford Circus a policeman lifted his hand. It was seven minutes to six. She was too squeamish, he thought, looking round, too sensitive about these new buildings. Everard found nothing displeasing in the massively florid baroque of modern commerce. It was vigorous and dramatic; it was large, it was expensive, it symbolized progress. ‘But it’s so revoltingly vulgar!’ she had protested. ‘But it’s difficult,’ he had answered, ‘not to be vulgar, when one isn’t dead. You object to these people doing things. And I agree: doing things
is
rather vulgar.’ She had the typical consumer’s point of view, not the producer’s. The policeman dropped his hand. Slowly at first, but with gathering impetus, the pent-up flood of traffic rumbled forward. A luxury mind—that was what she had; not a necessity mind. A mind that thought of the world only in terms of beauty and enjoyment, not of use; a mind preoccupied with sensations and shades of feeling, and preoccupied with them for their own sake, not because sharp eyes and intuition are necessary in the struggle for life. Indeed, she hardly knew that there was a struggle. He ought to have disapproved of her; and he would have disapproved (Everard smiled to himself as he made the reflection) if he hadn’t been in love with her. He would have…Flop! from the roof of a passing ‘bus a banana skin fell like a draggled star-fish on to the bonnet in front of him. A whoop of laughter sounded through the roaring. Lifting his eyes he saw two young girls looking down at him over the rail, open-mouthed, like a pair of pretty little gargoyles, and laughing, laughing as though there had never been a joke in the world before that moment. Everard shook his fist at them and laughed too. How much Elinor would have enjoyed that! he thought. She who so loved the streets and their comedies. What an eye she had for the odd, the amusing, the significant! Where he perceived only a mass of undifferentiated humanity, she distinguished individuals. And her talent for inventing life histories for her onceglimpsed oddities was no less remarkable than her detecting eye. She would have known all about those young girls—their class, the sort of homes they came from, where they bought their clothes and how much they paid for them, whether they were still virtuous, what books they read, and which were their favourite cinema actors. Imagining to himself what Elinor would have said, remembering her laughter and the look in her eyes and her tricks of speech, he was suddenly filled with so much tenderness, such a violent yet delicately affectionate longing to be with her, that he could hardly bear to be separated from her for even a moment longer. He hooted at the taxi in front of him, he tried to thrust past on the right. An obstructing street island compelled him to fall back, but not before the taxi-driver had had time to throw doubts on his legitimacy, his heterosexuality and his prospects of happiness in another world. With as much gusto and incomparably more originality, Everard swore back. He felt himself overflowing with life, extraordinarily vigorous and strong, inexplicably and (but for the fact that it would be at least five minutes before he saw Elinor) perfectly happy. Yes, perfectly happy; for he knew (with what calm conviction!) that she would say yes, that she loved him. And his happiness became more intense, more poignant and at the same time more serene, as he swung round past the Marble Arch into the Park. His prophetic conviction deepened into something like remembered certainty, as though the future were already history. The sun was low and wherever its rosily golden light touched earth, it was as if a premature and more luminous autumn had fired the leaves and grass. Great shafts of powdery radiance leaned down from the west between the trees and in the shadows the twilight was a mist of lavender, a mist of blue and darkening indigo, plane after plane into the hazy London distance. And the couples strolling across the grass, the children playing were alternately eclipsed and transfigured as they passed from shade to sunlight, were alternately insignificant and brilliantly miraculous. It was as though a capricious god, now bored and now enchanted by his creatures, had turned upon them at one moment an eye of withering indifference and at the next, with his love, had bestowed upon them some of his own divinity. The road stretched clear and polished before him; but Everard hardly exceeded the speed limit—in spite of his longing; in a sense because he loved her so much. For it was all so beautiful; and where beauty was, there too, for Everard, by some private logic, some personal necessity, was Elinor. She was with him now, because she would have enjoyed this loveliness so much. And because she would have wanted to prolong the pleasure, he crept along. The engine was turning at a bare fifteen hundred revolutions a minute; the dynamo was hardly charging. A Baby Austin passed him as though he were standing still. Let them pass! Everard was thinking of the phrases in which he would describe to her this marvel. Through the railings, the ‘buses in Park Lane blazed scarlet and glittered like triumphal cars in a pageant. Faintly, through the noise of the traffic, a clock struck six; and before it had finished, another chimed in, melodious, sweet and with a touch of melancholy—the very voice of the bright evening and of his happiness. And now, for all his creeping, the marble gateways of Hyde Park Corner were before him. Offered, in spite of the nakedness and the more than Swedish development of his abdominal muscles, by the Ladies of England to the Victor of Waterloo, the bronze Achilles, whose flesh had once been Napoleon’s cannons, stood with shield raised, sword brandished, menacing and defending himself against the pale and empty sky. It was almost regretfully, though he longed to be at his journey’s end, that Everard left the Park. Once more the towering ‘buses roared before him and behind. Rounding the archipelago of islands he vowed that to-morrow, if Elinor said Yes, he would send five pounds to St. George’s Hospital. He knew she would. The money was as good as given already. He turned out of Grosvenor Place; the roaring faded behind him. Belgrave Square was an oasis of trees; the starlings chattered in a rural silence. Everard turned once, twice and yet again. On the left, between the houses was an archway. He passed it by a yard or two, stopped and, pulling the wheel over, backed under it into the mews, back, back to the very end of the blind alley. He stopped the car and got out. How charming the yellow curtains looked! His heart was beating very fast. He felt as he had felt when he made his first speech, halffrightened, half-exultant. Mounting the doorstep, he knocked and waited twenty heart-beats; the house gave forth no answering sound. He knocked again and, remembering what Elinor had told him of her terrors, accompanied the rap with a whistle and, as though in answer to the unspoken challenge of her fears, a call of ‘Friend!’ And then, suddenly, he noticed that the door was not latched, but only ajar. He pushed; it swung open. Everard stepped over the threshold.