The Complete Stories (58 page)

  Life in the country palled when food rationing ceased. Angela made over the house they had called "Cedric's Folly" and its grottoes to her son Nigel on his twenty-first birthday, and took a large, unobtrusive house in Hill Street. She had other places to live, a panelled seventeenth-century apartment in Paris, a villa on Cap Ferrat, a beach and bungalow quite lately acquired in Bermuda, a little palace in Venice which she had once bought for Cedric Lyne but never visited in his lifetime—and among them they moved with their daughter Barbara. Basil settled into the orderly round of the rich. He became a creature of habit and of set opinions. In London finding Bratt's and Bellamy's disturbingly raffish, he joined that sombre club in Pall Mall that had been the scene of so many painful interviews with his self-appointed guardian, Sir Joseph Mannering, and there often sat in the chair which had belonged prescriptively to Sir Joseph and, as Sir Joseph had done, pronounced his verdict on the day's news to any who would listen.

  Basil turned, crossed to the looking glasses and straightened his tie. He brushed up the copious grey hair. He looked at himself with the blue eyes which had seen so much and now saw only the round, rosy face in which they were set, the fine clothes of English make which had replaced the American improvisations, the starched shirt which he was almost alone in wearing, the black pearl studs, the buttonhole.

  A week or two ago he had had a disconcerting experience in this very hotel. It was a place he had frequented all his life, particularly in the latter years, and he was on cordial terms with the man who took the men's hats in a den by the Piccadilly entrance. Basil was never given a numbered ticket and assumed he was known by name. Then a day came when he sat longer than usual over luncheon and found the man off duty. Lifting the counter he had penetrated to the rows of pegs and retrieved his bowler and umbrella. In the ribbon of the hat he found a label, put there for identification. It bore the single pencilled word "Florid." He had told his daughter, Barbara, who said: "I wouldn't have you any different. Don't for heaven's sake go taking one of those cures. You'd go mad."

  Basil was not a vain man; neither in rags nor in riches had he cared much about the impression he made. But the epithet recurred to him now as he surveyed himself in the glass.

  Peter?"

  "Would you say Ambrose was ‘florid,'

  "Not a word I use."

  "It simply means flowery."

  "Well, I suppose he is."

  "Not fat and red?"

  "Not Ambrose."

  "Exactly."

  "I've been called ‘florid.'"

  "You're fat and red."

  "So are you."

  "Yes, why not? Almost everyone is."

  "Except Ambrose."

  "Well, he's a pansy. I expect he takes trouble."

  "We don't."

  "Why the hell should we?"

  "We don't."

  "Exactly."

  The two old friends had exhausted the subject.

  Basil said: "About those shirts. How did your girl ever meet a fellow like that?"

  "At Oxford. She insisted on going up to read History. She picked up some awfully rum friends."

  "I suppose there were girls there in my time. We never met them."

  "Nor in mine."

  "Stands to reason the sort of fellow who takes up with undergraduettes has something wrong with him."

  "Albright certainly has."

  "What does he look like?"

  "I've never set an eye. My daughter asked him to King's Thursday when I was abroad. She found he had no shirts and she gave him mine."

  "Was he hard up?"

  "So she said."

  "Clarence Albright never had any money. Sally can't have brought him much."

  "There may be no connection."

  "Must be. Two fellows without money both called Albright. Stands to reason they're the same fellow."

  Peter looked at his watch.

  "Half past eleven. I don't feel like going back to hear those speeches. We showed up. Ambrose must have been pleased."

  "He was. But he can't expect us to listen to all that rot."

  "What did he mean about Ambrose's ‘silence'? Never knew a fellow who talked so much."

  "All a lot of rot. Where to now?"

  "Come to think of it, my mother lives upstairs. We might see if she's at home."

  They rose to the floor where Margot Metroland had lived ever since the destruction of Pastmaster House. The door on the corridor was not locked. As they stood in the little vestibule loud, low-bred voices came to them.

  "She seems to have a party."

  Peter opened the door of the sitting room. It was in darkness save for the ghastly light of a television set. Margot crouched over it, her old taut face livid in the reflection.

  "Can we come in?"

  "Who are you? What d'you want? I can't see you."

  Peter turned on the light at the door.

  "Don't do that. Oh, it's you Peter. And Basil."

  "We've been dining downstairs."

  "Well, I'm sorry; I'm busy, as you can see. Turn the light out and come and sit down if you want to, but don't disturb me."

  "We'd better go."

  "Yes. Come and see me when I'm not so busy."

  Outside Peter said: "She's always looking at that thing nowadays. It's a great pleasure to her."

  "Where to now?"

  "I thought of dropping in at Bellamy's."

  "I'll go home. I left Angela on her own. Barbara's at a party of Robin Trumpington's."

  "Well, good-night."

  "I say, those places where they starve you,—you know what I mean—do they do any good?"

  "Molly swears by one."

  "She's not fat and red."

  "No. She goes to those starving places."

  "Well, good-night."

  Peter turned east, Basil north, into the mild, misty October night. The streets at this hour were empty. Basil stumped across Piccadilly and up through Mayfair, where Angela's house was almost the sole survivor of the private houses of his youth. How many doors had been closed against him then that were now open to all comers as shops and offices!

  The lights were on. He left his hat and coat on a marble table and began the ascent to the drawing-room floor, pausing on the half-landing to recuperate.

  "Oh, Pobble, you toeless wonder. You always turn up just when you're wanted."

  Florid he might be, but there were compensations. It was not thus that Basil had often been greeted in limber youth. Two arms embraced his neck and drew him down, an agile figure inclined over the protuberance of his starched shirt, a cheek was pressed to his and teeth tenderly nibbled the lobe of his ear.

  "Babs, I thought you were at a party. Why on earth are you dressed like that?"

  His daughter wore very tight, very short trousers, slippers and a thin jersey. He disengaged himself and slapped her loudly on the behind.

  "Sadist. It's that sort of party. It's a ‘happening.'

  "You speak in riddles, child."

  "It's a new sort of party the Americans have invented. Nothing is arranged beforehand. Things just happen. Tonight they cut off a girl's clothes with nail scissors and then painted her green. She had a mask on so I don't know who it was. She might just be someone hired. Then what happened was Robin ran out of drink so we've all gone scouring for it. Mummy's in bed and doesn't know where Old Nudge keeps the key and we can't wake him up."

  "You and your mother have been into Nudge's bedroom?"

  "Me and Charles. He's the chap I'm scouring with. He's downstairs now trying to pick the lock. I think Nudge must be sedated, he just rolled over snoring when we shook him."

  At the foot of the staircase a door led to the servants' quarters. It opened and someone very strange appeared with an armful of bottles. Basil saw below him a slender youth, perhaps a man of twenty-one, who had a mop of dishevelled black hair and a meagre black fringe of beard and whiskers; formidable, contemptuous blue eyes above grey pouches; a proud, rather childish mouth. He wore a pleated white silk shirt, open at the neck, flannel trousers, a green cummerbund and sandals. The appearance, though grotesque, was not specifically plebeian and when he spoke his tone was pure and true without a taint of accent.

  "The lock was easy," he said, "but I can't find anything except wine. Where d'you keep the whisky?"

  "Heavens, I don't know," said Barbara.

  "Good evening," said Basil.

  "Oh, good evening. Where do you keep the whisky?"

  "It is a fancy dress party?" Basil asked.

  "Not particularly," said the young man.

  "What have you got there?"

  "Champagne of some kind. I didn't notice the label."

  "He's got the Cliquot rosé," said Basil.

  "How clever of him," said Barbara.

  "It will probably do," said the young man. "Though most people prefer whisky."

  Basil attempted to speak but found no words.

  Barbara quoted:

  "‘His Aunt Jobiska made him drink

  Lavender water tinged with pink,

  For the world in general knows

  There's nothing so good for a Pobble's toes.'

  "Come along, Charles, I think we've got all we're going to get here. I sense a grudging hospitality."

  She skipped downstairs, waved from the hall and was out of the front door, while Basil still stood dumbfounded.

  At length, even more laboriously than he was wont, he continued upward. Angela was in bed reading.

  "You're home early."

  "Peter was there. No one else I knew except old Ambrose. Some booby made a speech. So I came away."

  "Very wise."

  Basil stood before Angela's long looking glass. He could see her behind him. She put on her spectacles and picked up her book.

  "Angela, I don't drink much nowadays, do I?"

  "Not as much as you used."

  "Or eat?"

  "More."

  "But you'd say I led a temperate life?"

  "Yes, on the whole."

  "It's just age," said Basil. "And dammit, I'm not sixty yet."

  "What's worrying you, darling?"

  "It's when I meet young men. A choking feeling—as if I was going to have an apoplectic seizure. I once saw a fellow in a seizure, must have been about the age I am now—the Lieutenant Colonel of the Bombardiers. It was a most unpleasant spectacle. I've been feeling lately something like that might strike me any day. I believe I ought to take a cure."

  "I'll come too."

  "Will you really, Angela? You are a saint."

  "Might as well be there as anywhere. They're supposed to be good for insomnia too. The servants would like a holiday. They've been wearing awfully overworked expressions lately."

  "No sense taking Babs. We could send her to Malfrey."

  "Yes."

  "Angela, I saw the most awful-looking fellow tonight with a sort of beard—here, in the house, a friend of Babs. She called him ‘Charles.'"

  "Yes, he's someone new."

  "What's his name?"

  "I did hear. It sounded like a pack of fox hounds I once went out with. I know—Albrighton."

  "Albright," cried Basil, the invisible noose tightening. "Albright, by God."

  Angela looked at him with real concern. "You know," she said, "you really do look rather rum. I think we'd better go to one of those starving places at once."

  And then what had seemed a death-rattle turned into a laugh.

  "It was one of Peter's shirts," he said, unintelligibly to Angela.

  II

  It may one day occur to a pioneer of therapeutics that most of those who are willing to pay fifty pounds a week to be deprived of food and wine, seek only suffering and that they could be cheaply accommodated in rat-ridden dungeons. At present the profits of the many thriving institutions which cater for the ascetic are depleted by the maintenance of neat lawns and shrubberies and, inside, of the furniture of a private house and apparatus resembling that of a hospital.

  Basil and Angela could not immediately secure rooms at the sanatorium recommended by Molly Pastmaster. There was a waiting list of people suffering from every variety of infirmity. Finally they frankly outbid rival sufferers. A man whose obesity threatened the collapse of his ankles, and a woman raging with hallucinations were informed that their bookings were defective, and on a warm afternoon Basil and Angela drove down to take possession of their rooms.

  There was a resident physician at this most accommodating house. He interviewed each patient on arrival and ostensibly considered individual needs.

  He saw Angela first. Basil sat stolidly in an outer room, his hands on the head of his cane, gazing blankly before him.

  When at length he was admitted, he stated his needs. The doctor did not attempt any physical investigation. It was a plain case.

  "To refrain from technical language you complain of speechlessness, a sense of heat and strangulation, dizziness and subsequent trembling?" said this man of science.

  "I feel I'm going to burst," said Basil.

  "Exactly. And these symptoms only occur when you meet young men?"

  "Hairy young men especially."

  "Ah."

  "Young puppies."

  "And with puppies too? That is very significant. How do you react to kittens?"

  "I mean the young men are puppies."

  "Ah. And are you fond of puppies, Mr. Seal?"

  "Reasonably."

  "Ah." The man of science studied the paper on his desk. "Have you always been conscious of this preference for your own sex?"

  "I'm not conscious of it now."

  "You are fifty-eight years and ten months. That is often a crucial age, one of change, when repressed and unsuspected inclinations emerge and take control. I should strongly recommend your putting yourself under a psychoanalyst. We do not give treatment of that kind here."

  "I just want to be cured of feeling I'm going to burst."

  "I've no doubt our régime will relieve the symptoms. You will not find many young men here to disturb you. Our patients are mostly mature women. There is a markedly virile young physical training instructor. His hair is quite short but you had better keep away from the gym. Ah, I see from your paper that you are handicapped by war-wounds. I will take out all physical exercise from your timetable and substitute extra periods of manipulation by one of the female staff. Here is your diet sheet. You will notice that for the first forty-eight hours you are restricted to turnip juice. At the end of that period you embark on the carrots. At the end of the fortnight, if all goes well, we will have you on raw eggs and barley. Don't hesitate to come and see me again if you have any problem to discuss."