“
Late
. . . ?”
“I’ve been waiting up there nearly five minutes.”
“
Up
there?”
“
Oh
, but you are too impossible!” she cried. “You do waste my
time. You know it was
ages
ago you were to meet me, up at the top
of the Scala. We might have been half-way to the what’s-his-name
by now!”
Indeed, they might have been further than half-way. How cool
the church would be, how black and dusky-pale the arches. How
reverently would he observe the wrist-bones and the sinews of the
Moses, and sense the gathered imminence of thunder by that altar
of the quiet church!
She descended a step and stooped to peer under the brim of his
hat.
“Hot? But you
must
try, darling, you must try and remember.”
He mopped his neck all the way round.
She looked round her. “It doesn’t matter really,” she said quickly.
“But I would love some irises . . . I
could
do without carnations,
though they’re not very expensive. Then we’ll have an ice. Waiting
about has made me hot, you see. I’m sorry I was cross,” she added,
leading him towards the flower-stall. “You are nice, and one can’t
expect you to be perfect.”
The flower-woman charged exorbitantly for the irises and
carnations. Compound interest, thought Mr. Thomson, for the time
he had made her wait. They had been, in fact, these three, for the
last five minutes, an angry and attentive triangle. “Who’s going to
carry all these things?”
“Oh,” she said, generously, “I will. You need only carry the guidebooks.”
2
When their spoons were beginning to tinkle at the bottoms of
their second ices, she said, licking her lips, “Now then. Come on.
What about the what’s-his-name – the Moses?”
He sucked the ends of his moustache. “Those flowers look
awfully nice against your dress,” he said absently. “Topping. The
Moses? Oh, confound the Moses! Let’s sit here a little longer. It’s so
hot
.”
“Just Imagine . . .”
N
oel and Nancy had a childhood in common, at
Wimbledon, in the midst of the most frightful dangers and
insecurity. Noel read too much and Nancy was too credulous; there
came, successively, as their capacity for fear sophisticated, to be
tigers under the back stairs, Indians down in the shrubbery that
gathered together with tomahawks and crept out punctually at the
approach of dusk, and, at last, a clammy-faced Thing on the top
landing that reached out for them through the banisters as they
went up. Imagination can build palaces, too, and there were
excursions into a high-pitched happiness, but these occurred less
regularly and were less memorable. Nancy came from South
America, where she had been born, Noel assured her, under some
kind of curse. “It mayn’t get you here,” he said comfortingly, “but if
you ever go back . . . ”
Nancy was a rather curd-faced child, with hair skinned back so
tightly into a pigtail that her eyes seemed stretched open wider than
ever. She was prettily mannered, slyish but deeply affectionate, and
she loved Noel embarrassingly, with an attention to detail gratifying
to his elderly parents. Her aunt and uncle had given Nancy a home;
she had been asked over to be a companion to Noel and they played
and did lessons together and later on were sent to a little dayschool. Nancy was lazy and not clever at all; she cribbed whenever
possible and kept what brains she had for the service of Noel. She
was tactless, yet deeply responsive; she interrupted Noel perpetually
when he was reading and bored him so much by her tenderness
and her habit of drinking him in that he could hardly be blamed
for beginning to frighten her. Having begun he continued, and the
more her terror reflected back on himself and was split into rays
against the facets of his personality, the sharper his pleasure became.
He was a fair, gentle, rather “unmanly” boy and was not ever
tempted to twist her wrist round, kick her shins or tweak the
heavy plait that walloped so teasingly between her shoulders.
The absorbed companionship of Noel and Nancy, never romping
together, never quarrelling, flitting round the garden and the
comfortable sedate house, was a matter of self-congratulation and
delight to the parents of Noel. When little Nancy cried at night,
they would recount, as she sometimes did unreasonably and loudly,
Noel would be the first to creep in to her and whisper into her ear
something that made her curl up without a sound, draw up the
sheets round her ears, and lie thus for the rest of the night, scarcely
seeming to breathe, she was so still.
When she was sixteen Nancy did go back to South America, but
long before this she and Noel had lost sight of one another. Noel
was sent to a preparatory and Nancy to a school abroad; she spent
her holidays with other relations because Noel was growing into
quite a man now and could not be expected to play with girls any
longer. When they did meet their interests were apart and they had
little to say to each other; Nancy had left Wimbledon behind for
ever. Yet for years Noel did not feel comfortable about the top
landing and would make a detour after dark to avoid the shrubbery;
the fears sloughed by Nancy’s freer spirit still lay in wait for him.
News came from time to time of Nancy in the Argentine. While
Noel was at Oxford his father died; later his mother sold the
London house and moved to Kent. Noel, who had made up his
mind to be an architect and was already articled, beautifully
decorated and furnished a small flat and established himself in
Bloomsbury. About this time he heard from his mother of Nancy’s
engagement. “An Englishman after all, I am relieved to hear, and
so well off. It sounds ideal; dear little Nancy. Yet it seems like
yesterday, doesn’t it, one can hardly believe . . . Do remember to
write, Noel. And do try to think of some wedding present.”
Noel put the letter down with a sense of distinct surprise that
anybody should think of marrying his cousin Nancy. The child of
nine had elongated in his imagination but not matured. He was in
love himself in a pictorial, rather unprogressive way with a beautiful
fair girl called Daphne. Noel had grown up into a whimsical vague
young man, kindly disposed to the world in a general way but with
a charming touch of the feline. He was noted for doing strange
things by himself, such as going alone to the Zoo,
1
walking all
night, or exploring the bus-routes of London. He was considered
rare, and admired and loved as such by his friends in Bloomsbury.
He was affectionate, naïve and a little lonely, and though most of
the things he did were done for effect he often speculated as to the
nature of true happiness. He did not think that he would ever be
much of an architect.
A dutiful cousin, he spent some bewildered afternoons among
prints and lacquer, and finally selected for Nancy the sort of present
his Daphne would have appreciated, and had it sent off. “Funny,
skinny, little pop-eyed thing!” he said thoughtfully, sitting down to
indite his congratulatory letter. He glanced towards Daphne’s
photograph for inspiration, bit his pen and had soon begun writing
in his own inimitable way.
“Dear little Noel,” wrote back Nancy – Really! – “Charming of
you to write such a letter. Yes, isn’t this absurd? I am quite
too
much
in love with Ripon – whom you must certainly meet. I hope we shall
be home for a bit in a year or two. Did you ever get a photograph
I sent you two years ago? Perhaps you hated it, you passed it over
in silence. I have improved since then; your Nancy is now rather
beautiful. It would be absurd of me, wouldn’t it, to contradict Ripon,
not to speak of various other authorities? I should love to know what
you look like – as young as you sound? Twenty-three sounds an age,
but as a matter of fact we are rather children, aren’t we? I feel a babe
beside Ripon and I glory in it. Ripon . . . ” and so on for two or three
pages more.
Noel destroyed the letter at once with a feeling of shame on
Nancy’s behalf and of outrage on his own. What had he done to
incur it, this forced letter, impossible for the child he knew to have
written? In revulsion he felt pity for Nancy; whatever she’d grown
into, she couldn’t have grown into
this
. “Confidences . . . ” thought
Noel, “they’re not
decent
. And, anyway, they’re over-sophisticated.”
He had a good many girl friends and thus a fairish standard for
judging women. “Perhaps she’s unhappy,” he thought, and it cheered
him wonderfully. “After all, a rich middle-aged Argentine, probably
fat . . . Poor
child
! He softened and felt some emotion. For Nancy
was part of his childhood, that was what made her letter a sacrilege;
she was woven in preciously among the Wimbledon memories with
nightly terrors (delightful in retrospect), nursery firelight, his father’s
leather armchair, the smell of toast from the kitchen. Noel had never
ceased to feel home-sick; the feeling was increased with the dis
appearance of home. He leant his head on his arms a minute or two
over the scraps of Nancy’s letter and felt wretched. He thought of
the nursery fire for ever put out, and of how one went on through
the world growing colder and colder.
For some time after he thought of Nancy now and again. She
would reappear in his thoughts like a little ghost when he was
melancholy; but when two years later he came home one night to
find her telephone message, he had once more forgotten her. Affairs
with Daphne had meanwhile come to a crisis; after an interval of
distraction they had, he believed both unwillingly, become engaged.
An uneasy, rather constrained feeling wore off or became familiar;
he was in love with Daphne more than ever, quite intoxicated by
being so much in love. He lived intensely but fluidly, futurelessly, in
a kind of dream. When he picked up Nancy’s telephone message it
was as though something snapped. Nancy and her husband were
back in England; they had taken a flat in Knightsbridge. She asked
him to come round and see her the next afternoon. Noel felt really
angry at being thus interrupted; his instinct was to ring up, or better
still write, and tell Nancy that this was impossible, would be
impossible for weeks ahead. He wondered what she and Daphne
would think of each other. Falling asleep, he became the prey of a
dream that Daphne had married an Argentine and was keeping
Nancy, a kind of unhappy monkey, shut up in a cage. He put a
finger between the bars and Nancy bit him; this made him angry
with Daphne, who sat looking on ironically and coldly.
At half-past four Noel entered a lift, still doubtfully, was shot up
a floor and shown through a chain of apartments into a drawingroom overhanging the Park.
2
In an air blue and semi-opaque with
cigarette smoke, and sharp with geranium scent, two clocks
followed each other, a taffeta curtain rustled. A synthetic fire sent
out a crimson pulse; beyond the window-draperies and clouded pane
dusk crept like smoke from under the trees of the Park. A handsome
Spanish woman, uncrossing her legs, sprang up with an exclamation;
dark, poised, imperious, she looked at him piercingly.
“Noel!” cried Nancy.
The light sprang up.
“My dear Nancy!” said Noel in a tone of expostulation, taking the
hands held out to him. He felt deceived and a little angry, and still
half believed he had come to the wrong flat. A pair of barbaric
earrings swung from his cousin’s small ears; they fascinated him by
their glitter. Her cropped hair rippled against her head with a
familiar smoothness. Supple and dark, independent of lines he knew,
her frock said Paris.
“Aren’t you
too
picturesque?” said Nancy, holding him at arm’s
length. “Aren’t you lovely?” She had a deep voice and pronounced
every syllable distinctly. Her dark, rather wild boy’s eyes travelled
over him. Noel glanced at himself in a mirror behind her shoulder
to reassure himself that he
had
that indefinable something. Diffident,
anxious to please, he sat down in a black velvet chair and stared at
the fire. “Awfully cute, these electric fires . . . ” said Noel.
Nancy, taking him in, said nothing. She seemed unaware of a
tension. “Now begin and tell me everything,” said she, with most
fearful directness.
This was not Noel’s way. He began to look round the room
obliquely but deliberately; he always began with a room. Nancy, as
he had expected, did not speak his language at all; on the other
hand, everything he had prepared to say to her had rather lost point.
He was used to converse in allusions, to what the other person had
read, or had once said, or must obviously feel; he lived in an
intimate circle, a clique, and too seldom emerged. He longed to talk
speculatively about South America (without reference to Nancy) or
epigrammatically about London (without reference to himself) or
best of all, about clothes. He felt nervous, as though he were shut in
a room with a panther.
Nancy offered him a cigarette of a kind he did not care for, and
lighting one of her own in a long holder, leant sideways among her
cushions. “So I hear you are engaged,” said she. “You are fearfully
happy?”
Noel nodded whimsically.
“I do so hope,” Nancy said maternally, “she’s a really nice girl.”
“Ra-ather a dear.”
“What an extraordinary way to describe her,” said Nancy with
some contempt, and Noel felt furious with himself for not having
done Daphne justice.
“As a matter of fact, she’s so lovely one hardly likes to mention
it.”
Nancy turned up a lamp at her elbow, a lamp in a painted shade
that cast arabesques and eyes over the wall. Leaning back she
watched her smoke drift up to the ceiling. “Marriage,” she said, “is
wonderful.” Her tone was Latin and sophisticated; very much a
woman of the world’s.