The Fabulous Mrs. V. Page 4

  ‘Good for you, Tom,’ I said. ‘I’m damned glad. Good for you! It’ll make her terribly happy. Joy, I mean.’

  ‘It all started with that first ghastly afternoon,’ he said. ‘It wouldn’t have happened if it hadn’t been for that. I don’t know which of us suffered most. It was torture.’

  ‘Good for you, Tom, good for you.’

  We drove on and finally Tom stopped the car by a small larch copse about three hundred yards from the house. It wasn’t anything like dark yet but the sky was overcast and you could feel the sultry threat of thunder.

  ‘Listen. It’s like this,’ Tom said. ‘There’ll only be Joy and Mrs. V. there. It seems her father goes off to play billiards every Wednesday night with Colonel Parkinson. Say you walked over. Then say something like “I saw Tom this morning. He’s working late tonight. He said you said you’d lend him that book by Conrad and I said I’d walk over and fetch it. I’d got nothing else to do.” God, I’m as nervous as hell.’

  The elaborate nature of this plot seemed almost childish until Tom said:

  ‘I know it sounds damned involved and all that. But you see she’s never even allowed to go and post a letter alone. One of the maids always goes with her.’

  We parted a few moments later. He promised several times to write. In turn I said again, several times also, how rich it was and how happy I was and I gripped his hand.

  At the house it was exactly as Tom had said it would be. Joy and the fabulous Mrs. V. were sitting in the drawing-room: Mrs. V. all band-box in a dress of mauve silk with a deep purple belt and a row of heavy amethysts round her neck, Joy more or less in sackcloth by contrast.

  As I went into the drawing-room the sun, in one of those fickle bursts so common with August thunder, suddenly came out and lit up the room. The strange brilliance of the light gave everything, especially the two women, a sudden air of unreality that almost made me nervous too.

  ‘Well, well, well,’ Mrs. V. said. Richly the amethysts flashed in the sun. ‘What a surprise. Tom with you?’

  With what I hoped was a casual air I spoke my piece. The very act of speaking it and at the same time of looking at Joy made me far tenser that I had expected and I was enormously relieved when she said, exactly as if she too had learned it off by heart:

  ‘Oh! yes, I know the one. Youth. The one he particularly wants to read is Heart of Darkness. I was telling him last Sunday how much I liked it. I’ll run upstairs and get it now.’

  She turned with brittle and what seemed to me frightened suddenness and left the room.

  Alone with Mrs. V. I said:

  ‘What marvellous amethysts. They looked like great big violets when the sun shone on them just now.’

  ‘You’re very poetical tonight.’

  ‘That’s because I’m in the presence of the right sort of inspiration.’

  ‘I’m very glad you think so.’

  I fingered the amethysts, touching her bare soft neck at the same time. I then stooped to kiss her but she drew away with a sort of solemn coquettishness and said:

  ‘I don’t think so. I don’t want my daughter to come in and find her mother in an awkward situation, thank you.’

  ‘Then let’s go where she won’t see us.’

  ‘And where do you propose that should be?’

  I invited her to look at the evening. It was utterly beautiful now. The dark sky had split completely apart in the west. A great virginal sea of blue lay between smouldering orange dunes of cloud and I said:

  ‘Let’s stroll as far as the lake. I’d like to see the sun set across that water.’

  ‘All right. I suppose Joy will be hours with the book anyway. She’s always mislaying things.’

  ‘Oh! probably hours and hours.’

  All the way to the lake, across the lush acid lawns, I kept thinking over and over again how rich it was. Marvellously rich. So rich in fact did I find it that I was emotionally very excited and as we sat on the steps of the wooden boat-house on the lake-edge, staring at the sky’s blue and burning reflections in the still water, I suddenly turned and took her fully in my arms and kissed her for a long time.

  ‘You shouldn’t kiss me like that.’

  She was trembling and breathing hard and there was a deep flush in her neck.

  ‘You’re a very beautiful woman. You know that.’

  ‘A little flirting is one thing, but—’

  ‘There’s something about the evening too,’ I said. ‘You can feel a sort of pulse in it. Beating all the time. Can’t you feel it?’

  ‘Don’t. You make me think things I shouldn’t—’

  ‘Don’t think. Just feel. Feel it in the air.’

  I kept her there for nearly an hour, kissing and fondling her, exciting her and giving her in full measure the kind of flattery she always wanted. The sun went down across the little lake with sulphurous and splendid fire. Even the stalks of the distant reeds were backed with wonderful sparks of light. In the heart of one shadowy embrace a fish jumped from the water with the loud noise of a pulled cork and presently she broke from me and said:

  ‘We must go back. We absolutely must. Joy will wonder what on earth—Goodness, my hair. And you’ve pulled two buttons off my dress. Goodness what have you done to me?’

  ‘I hope I’ve paid you back for all the pleasure you’ve given me.’

  We walked slowly back across the already dewy lawns in the smouldering half-light. It’s really very rich, Tom, my mind kept saying. Really damn rich. It’s been a pleasure to have been of service, old boy.

  When we finally reached the house there were lights in the hall but the drawing-room was still in darkness. We went in and the fabulous Mrs. V. switched on the lights and said:

  ‘That’s strange. I thought Joy would still be here. It’s very rude of her if she’s gone to bed.’

  ‘She’s probably really mislaid that book.’

  ‘I’ll look in her room when I go upstairs. I’ve got to repair some of the damage you’ve inflicted. You’re incorrigible. You’re very naughty—’

  ‘Good,’ I said.

  I suppose it must have been fully a quarter of an hour before I heard her voice in the hall outside, talking to one of the maids, and the maid’s voice saying in reply:

  ‘No, ma’am, I haven’t seen her. I’ve been in my room for the last hour, turning up the hem of a dress.’

  ‘It’s very odd. She can’t have gone out. She never goes out in the evenings.’

  A few moments later she came into the drawing-room. She had tidied her hair and thrown a light chiffon scarf of petunia pink round her neck so that it discreetly covered the gaps made by the missing buttons.

  ‘It’s very strange,’ she said. ‘Joy’s nowhere to be seen. She just seems to have vanished. It isn’t like her—’

  ‘Probably gone out to post a letter.’

  ‘Oh! she never goes to the post alone.’

  I longed to delay and savour the ultimate moment a little longer. It was a moment of great relish to me.

  ‘She’s probably run away,’ I said.

  ‘Oh! don’t be preposterous.’

  ‘It has been known to happen to girls.’

  She looked at me quickly, mouth hard. The look wasn’t quite one of suspicion. It was rather restlessly intuitive; and for a moment it threw me off my guard.

  ‘What made you say that?’

  ‘Oh! nothing.’

  She looked at me again. This time the corners of her mouth flickered in a sudden tremble, rather as they had done when we first met her in the train.

  ‘You don’t think by any chance she has run away, do you?’

  The ultimate moment had come. I seemed to see her once again, laughing at the Sunday crucifixion, and I remembered once again how much I had hated her that day. I remembered too the long weeks of light flirtation. It’s very rich, Tom, I found my mind saying again, very rich.

  ‘Oh! no, it’s too preposterous. She’d never do a thing like that. She hasn’t the—the—’


  ‘There’s always the chance that she’s run away with Tom.’

  ‘Good Heavens, whatever makes you think that?’

  This was the great moment of relish. I spoke deliberately.

  ‘Because,’ I said, ‘that’s exactly what she has done.’

  She stood there completely dumb. The vivid shallow eyes merely widened into pained blue gaps.

  ‘That’s why I took you to the lake. They’re going to be married tomorrow.’

  She stood there staring, mute and stricken. She didn’t look very fabulous at that moment and there ran through me the dry echoes of an old emotion. Once again I felt I was the vain, impudent, contemptible cockatoo. I had nothing to say either as she stared at me. I had never before seen anyone broken and dead in spirit. Nor had I even remotely suspected that I should one day match her in vanity and I could only stare mutely in return, watching her nurse, in shattered silence, her own private heart of darkness.

  I never understood her then and I doubt very much if I shall ever understand her now.

  Only time can tell.

  A Couple of Fools

  ‘Take hats for instance,’ Minksie said. ‘The mad, stupid things they do with hats.’

  Bright yellow fingers of sunlight falling through Venetian blinds lay across the bed where the two girls sat, still in nightdresses, each holding a pale green coffee cup in her hands. From a far distance, through dead calm summer air, floated the rolling sound of Sunday bells.

  ‘Every blessed hat they try to sell you nowadays makes you look all mewed-up and daft and prehistoric,’ Minksie said. At twenty-six she was a year older than Connie; she worked as a secretary for a manufacturer of plastic papers who greeted her every morning by slightly ruffling her abundant, fluffy, light golden hair. It was he who had first called her Minksie and it suited her coolly elegant, slightly flamboyant style. ‘You’d think they were designed for dinosaurs.’

  ‘Mewed-up?’

  ‘Richard III. I remember it from the film. Haven’t the vaguest notion what it means but it fits what hats do to you. Take that thing I bought last week. That purple bucket affair.’

  A recollection of the purple bucket, fifteen inches high, in heavy velvet, suddenly make Minksie roll her large friendly grey eyes in mock affliction.

  ‘“It will make you look taller, Modom.” Dammit, modom doesn’t want to look taller. She’s the right height now. Men hate tall women anyway. They hate looking up at you.’

  Connie laughed and in a slow, rather lazy contralto voice said the trouble was that hats put a spell on you. They got you mesmerised.

  ‘That’s a true word. And if they’re not buckets they’re flower pots, or waste-paper baskets or something, or they look as if they’re made out of old sheepdogs—’

  ‘And mangy ones at that.’

  Again Minksie rolled her large pellucid grey eyes in mock irritation, this time rather comically, at the same time running her fingers through the sleep-tangled mass of her abundant light fair hair, so that suddenly she had the look of a restless, playful fox-cub.

  ‘Oh! I’m all of an itch,’ she said. ‘I feel I’d like to go out in the sun and wear a hat that made me feel like a duchess and do something mad and marvellous.’

  Impulsively she swung her feet to the floor and started to pull up the Venetian blinds. In the window-box outside a crowded mass of marigolds lifted faces of purest orange to the hot morning sun. On the lime trees in the street below the flowers of full summer drooped motionless, full of bees, in the heavy July air.

  ‘Do something? Such as what?’

  ‘Oh! something simple and marvellous and exciting. Like bathing in the nude.’

  Connie laughed spontaneously and then drained the last of her coffee.

  ‘I thought you were the one who never went out on Sundays? Sloppy day you always call it. Slack-about and sloppy day.’

  ‘Not today.’ Minksie ran restlessly ecstatic fingers through her hair again, lifted her breasts to the sun and drank deep breaths of air. ‘Bells are funny, aren’t they?’ For a few moments she listened, fair head to one side. ‘There’s something about the sound of bells that always seems to call you.’

  ‘Wonderful how you found out. They’re supposed to call you to church in case you didn’t know.’

  ‘You know what I wish? I wish I was an Edwardian girl, all parasol and flounce and a big high hat with a million flowers on it. And a man with a mind for oysters and pink wine by a river somewhere.’

  ‘Hark at the millionairess.’

  Minksie, laughing too now, started to search for under-clothes in a chest of drawers.

  ‘Some hopes. All I’ve got is that. The Thing. The purple bucket.’ A hat of velvet that might have been designed for a bishop in a rural pageant went pitching across the bedroom, landing on a dressing table, narrowly missing a vase of yellow roses. ‘You could never be gay in a hat like that. It sinks you before you start.’

  ‘You’re in a mad mood.’

  ‘Just restless. Just the itch. I feel I’d like a bit of swing-high, that’s all.’ Unfolding a white nylon slip, she suddenly paused and looked with a long glance of envious affection at Connie. ‘How do you do it, Connie? You always wake up like a beautiful band-box, just like you went to bed. Never a ruffle. Not like me. I have a fight with sleep all night.’

  ‘If you’re getting up I suppose I ought to get up too?’

  ‘And did you know that freckles actually suit you? Your face looks just like a lovely brown bird’s egg. New laid at that.’

  The two girls began dressing and once Minksie paused, half-naked, again held in a brief spell of bell-listening at the half-open windows, breasts exposed to the sun.

  ‘I tell you what. We’ll go to that pub at Aylesbridge. The one on the river. The Fisherman’s Arms. I went there once with a man and the publican was telling us how in the old days big shoals of smelts used to come up the river. He said you could tell when they were coming because there was a smell like fresh cucumber in the air.’

  ‘Man? I never heard of this.’

  ‘It was before I knew you. You couldn’t eat at The Fisherman’s Arms in those days. But you can now. It’s rather good, they say.’

  Minksie, hooking on her brassiere, did a short wriggling dance under her white slip. It fell about her like a butterfly. Her long arms made graceful movements in the air, swaying like ivory antennae, and she said:

  ‘We could have oysters and vin rosé and then chicken afterwards and something else to drink.’

  ‘Hark at the millionairess again.’

  ‘I’ll pay. I’ll make it a treat for you. I feel like that today.’ She was sitting on the bed now, rolling on her stockings, one slim leg held straight out, smooth and graceful. ‘Of course if we had men they would pay. An Edwardian girl with a gorgeous big hat with a million flowers on it would have a man.’

  ‘If you must have a hat,’ Connie said, ‘you could have my big blue straw. It’s two years old now and looks as if it came out of the ark but if it will keep you quiet—’

  ‘I don’t want to be kept quiet. Didn’t I have one something like that too? Wasn’t it yellow?’

  ‘White, I think—’

  ‘I remember now. I threw it away.’

  ‘You may have done, but I didn’t. I’m the squirrel in the family. It’s still there at the top of the bathroom cupboard. I saw it only the other day.’

  While Connie, dressed now, went away to find the hats Minksie stood by the window, still in her slip, slowly brushing her hair with a tortoise-shell brush that glowed gold-brown in the sun. The sound of bells had ceased. In the noon quietness she could actually hear the level murmur of bees in the nearest lime tree and somehow, she thought, it was like the deep sound of flowing water.

  Bees were on the marigolds too, flanks heavy with golden pollen, and one flew suddenly into the room and swiftly out again as Connie came back, carrying the two wide straw hats, one pure white, the other chicory blue with a darker ribbon drawn i
nto a big back bow.

  ‘Slightly soiled, you might say,’ Connie said, ‘but otherwise not unenchanting.’

  Minksie plopped the white straw flat on the top of her head, struck another mocking attitude and bent to look at herself in the dressing table mirror.

  ‘At least you don’t look all mewed-up and dinosaurish in it,’ she said. ‘At least you can’t be mistaken for some crabby old out-of-work bishop at the time of Henry the Second.’

  ‘Going to wear it?’

  ‘I might. It needs a bit of swing-high to it, that’s all—’

  ‘Ribbon?’

  ‘Oh! not ribbon. Never ribbon. Flowers. It needs flowers on it. Oodles of flowers. Fields and fields of flowers.’

  ‘Connie will run down into the town,’ Connie said, ‘and knock up a shop that isn’t open and buy acres of trimmings so that Minksie can go all Edwardian and have swing-high and oysters. You’d better wear a scarf.’

  ‘I’ll be seen dead first.’

  Minksie, standing at the window again, with the white straw now slightly sideways on her head, seemed for a moment or two to have become quite suddenly part of the morning’s deep embalmment. She was not really listening: not even to the sound of bees. But presently little waves of gayest mischief began to dance across her wide grey eyes, seeming to make them dance under the smooth golden fringe of hair. Her hands began to pluck at each other in quick excitement and she said:

  ‘We’ve got the marigolds and the yellow roses and the cornflowers we bought for the kitchen on Friday, haven’t we? Anything else? Well, if we haven’t we can always pick honeysuckle and dog roses on the way to the river—’

  ‘Oh! Minksie, not real flowers. Don’t be a fool. In this heat—’

  ‘Why not? We’ll stop and sprinkle them with water occasionally—or something. We’ll give them aspirin. They’ll revive. Don’t be so Sundayish.’