The Daffodil Sky Page 5

  Gradually Mr Clavering felt that he had seen everybody. The rooms were impossibly, clamorously full. The Perigos, the Blairs, the Luffingtons had all arrived. A sound of cracked trumpets came from the turn of the baronial staircase, echoing into wall displays of copper cooking-pans, where Dr Pritchard was telling what Mr Clavering thought were probably obstetric stories to Miss Ireton and Miss Graves, who gazed at him with a kind of rough fondness, half-masculine. Dr Pritchard had an inexhaustible fund of stories drawn from the fountains of illegitimacy and the shallows of infidelity that he liked to tell for the purpose, most often, of cheering women patients waiting in labour. But maiden ladies liked them too, and sometimes pressed him to tell one rather more risqué than they had heard before. In consequence something infectious seemed to float from the foot of the staircase, filling the room with light and progressive laughter.

  ‘I want you, I want you!’ Mrs Clavering whispered. ‘The Paul Vaulkhards are here!’

  He found himself joined to her by the string of a single forefinger that led him through the crowd of guests to where, in a corner, the Paul Vaulkhards and their niece were waiting.

  Mr Vaulkhard was tall and white, and, as Mrs Clavering had hoped, as distinguished as a statue. Mrs Clavering fluttered about him, making excited note of his subdued dove-blue waistcoat, so much more elite than red or yellow, and thought that Mr Clavering must have one too. Mrs Vaulkhard had the loose baggy charm of a polite pelican covered in an Indian shawl of white and gold.

  ‘Let me introduce my niece,’ she said. ‘Miss Dufresne. Olivia.’

  Charming, distinguished name, Mrs Clavering thought; and almost before Mr Clavering had time to shake hands she said:

  ‘Would you look after Miss Dufresne? I’m going to positively drag Mr and Mrs Paul Vaulkhard away—that is if they don’t mind being dragged. Do you mind being dragged?’ She gave a spirited giggle of excuse and excitement and then dragged the Vaulkhards away.

  A young dark face looked out from, as it seemed to Mr Clavering, a crowd of swollen, solid cabbages. It had something of the detachment of a petal that did not belong there. He took from a passing tray a glass of wine and held it out to her, conscious of curious feelings of elevated lightness, of simplification. Out of the constricted clamour of voices he was aware of a core of silence about her that was absorbing and tranquil.

  ‘Are you here for long?’ he said. ‘Do you like the country?’

  ‘No to one,’ she said. ‘Yes to the other.’

  He said something about being glad about one thing and not the other, but a small cloudburst of conversational laughter split the room, drowning what he had to say, and she said:

  ‘I’m terribly sorry, but I couldn’t hear what you were saying.’

  ‘Let’s move a little,’ he said.

  He steered her away through the crowd, watching her light figure. She leaned by the wall at last, sipping her wine and looking at him.

  ‘I don’t know that it’s any quieter,’ he said. ‘Perhaps we should lip-read?’

  She laughed, and he said:

  ‘Really instead of standing here I ought to take you round and introduce you. Is there anyone you know?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Is there anyone you’d like to know?’

  ‘What do you think?’ she said.

  She gave him an engaging delicate smile, brief, almost nervous, and he felt that it was possibly because she was young and not sure of herself. He looked about the room, at the groups of cabbage heads. And suddenly he decided that he did not want to introduce her. He wanted instead to keep her, to isolate her for a little while, letting her remain a stranger.

  ‘Haven’t you ever been here before?’ he said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘And you really like the country?’

  ‘I love it. I think it’s beautiful.’

  Mr Clavering felt himself appraise the tender, uplifted quality of her voice.

  ‘I think everything’s beautiful,’ the girl said.

  ‘Everything?’

  ‘The lilac,’ she said, ‘for instance. That’s marvellously beautiful.’

  ‘Lilac?’

  Absurd of him, he thought, not to have noticed the lilac.

  ‘I noticed it as soon as I came in,’ she said. ‘I love white things. Don’t you? White flowers. I love snow and frost on the boughs and everything like that.’

  At this moment Mr Clavering noticed for the first time that her dress was white too. Frilled about the neck, simply and tastefully, it too had a frosty appearance. It seemed almost to embalm her young body in a cloud of rime.

  ‘What masses of people,’ she said. ‘What a marvellous party.’

  ‘Are you at school?’ he said.

  ‘Me? School?’ She gave, he thought, a little petulant toss of the wine glass as she lifted it to her mouth and sipped at it swiftly. ‘Oh! don’t say that. Don’t say I still look like a schoolgirl. Do I?’

  ‘No,’ he said.

  Across the room Major Battersby laughed, for the fourth or fifth consecutive time, like a buffalo.

  ‘Who is the man who laughs so much?’ she said.

  He told her. Battersby was with Freda O’Connor and Mrs Bonnington and Colonel Arber. The factions had begun to split up. He felt he would not have been surprised to hear from the Battersby group a succession of whinnies instead of laughter. Occasionally Colonel Arber bared his teeth and Freda O’Connor tossed her hair back from her neck and throat like a mane.

  ‘Have you a nice garden?’ she said.

  Yes, he supposed the garden was nice. He supposed it was pleasant. He thought if anything there were too many trees. It was a bore getting people to work in it nowadays and sometimes he would have preferred a house with a good solid courtyard of concrete all round.

  ‘I love gardens,’ she said. ‘Especially gardens like yours with big old trees. I love it at night when you see the car lights on the boughs and then on the very dark trees. It looks so mysterious and wonderfully like old legends and that sort of thing. Don’t you think so?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. He had never given the slightest thought to the fact that his garden was mysterious with old legends. ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘Oh! It’s lovely just to watch people,’ she said. ‘Marvellous to wonder who they are——’

  Her remark coincided with a thought of his own that his house was full of jibbering monkeys. The rooms were strident with people clamouring with jibberish, sucking at glasses, trying to shout each other down. There was nothing but jibberish everywhere.

  ‘I just love to stand here,’ she said. ‘I just love to wonder what’s in their minds.’

  Great God, he thought. Minds? As if hoping for an answer to it all he stared into the glittering, mocking confusion of faces and smoke and glassiness. Minds? He saw that Mrs Battersby had got together her own faction, joining herself with the Perigos and a woman named Mrs Peele, who smoked cigarettes from a long ivory holder, and a man named George Carter, who managed kennels for her at which you could buy expensive breeds of dachshunds. There was something of the piquant dachshund broodiness in the face of Mrs Peele. She was short in the body, with eyes darkly encased in coils of premature wrinkles, and the long cigarette holder gave her a grotesque touch of being top-heavy. There was no doubt that Mrs Peele and George Carter lived together, just as there was no doubt that the dachshunds were much too expensive for anybody to buy.

  ‘Oh! it’s fascinating to watch,’ the girl said. ‘Don’t you think so?’

  A waiter tried to push his way past with a tray of snippets. With guilt Mr Clavering remembered that he had offered her nothing to eat.

  ‘Please take something,’ he said.

  ‘Oh! yes, may I? I’m famished. Do you think wine makes you hungry?’ She took several fish-filled cases while the waiter stood by, and then a moon-like round of egg. ‘I adore egg,’ she said. ‘Don’t you?’ and when he did not answer simply because he felt there could be no answer:

  ‘Am I talk
ing too much? I’m not, am I? But the wine gives me a feeling of being gay.’

  Through smoke-haze he saw his wife, pride-borne and fussy with anxiety, steering the Paul Vaulkhards from, as it were, customer to customer, as if they were sample goods for which you could place an order.

  I ought to circulate too, he thought, and then found himself grasping the mild limp dropsical hand of a slightly flushed Miss Hemshawe, who with her mother had come to say good-bye. They must be toddling, Miss Hemshawe said, and under a guise of passiveness gave him a look of unresolved curiosity, because he had been talking for so long a time, alone, to so young a girl.

  ‘Good-bye, Mr Clavering,’ they fussed. ‘Good-bye. Good-bye.’

  ‘Sweet,’ the girl said. She grinned as if the facial distortions of Miss Hemshawe and her mother, toothsome and expansive in farewell, were a secret only she and himself could share.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, and he knew that now he had only to be seen touching her hand, placing himself an inch or so nearer the frothy delicate rime of her dress, for someone like Miss Hemshawe to begin to build about him too a legend to which he had never given a thought.

  Presently he was surrounded by other people coming to say good-bye; every few moments he heard somebody say what a wonderful party it was. His wife, they told him, was so good at these things. He was assailed by shrill voices ejected piercingly from the roar of a dynamo.

  The girl pressed herself back against the wall, regarding the scene through eyes limpid with fascination, over the rim of her glass. He was aware of a fear that she would move away and that he did not want her to move away.

  ‘Don’t go,’ he said, and touched her hand.

  Before she had time to speak he was involved in the business of saying good-bye to a Mrs Borden and a Mr Joyce. He remembered in time that Mrs Borden was really Mrs Woodley and that she had changed her name by deed-poll in order to run away with Borden, who had then rejected her in favour of Mrs Joyce. The complications of this were often beyond him, but now he remembered in time to address her and the consolatory Mr Joyce correctly.

  ‘Nice party, old boy,’ Mrs Borden said. ‘Nice.’

  He felt that Mrs Borden had a face like a bruised swede-turnip and that Joyce, red and crusted and staggering, was a little drunk.

  ‘I ought to go too,’ the girl said. ‘I think I see them signalling me.’

  He began to steer her gently through the maze of groups and factions like a man steering a boat through a series of crowded reefs and islands. As he did so he was aware of a minute exultation because, until the last, he had kept her a stranger, apart from them all.

  ‘Oh! Clavering, must say good-bye.’

  He found himself halted by a clergyman named Chalfont-Beverley, from a parish over the hill. Chalfont-Beverley was tall and young, with a taste for flamboyance that took the form of dressing-up. He was now dressed in a hacking jacket of magnified black-and-white check, with a waistcoat of magenta and a purple tie. His chest had something of the appearance of a decorated altar above which the face was a glow of rose and blue.

  ‘Damn good party, Clavering,’ he said. His hands were silky. Clavering remembered that he was given to Anglo-Catholicism and occasional appearances at afternoon services dressed in pink-cord riding breeches and spurs below sweeping robes of white and scarlet. ‘Damn good. Must bear away.’ There was an odour of powder in the air.

  By the time Clavering was free again he saw the girl being taken away, in the hall, by the Paul Vaulkhards. He reached them just in time to be able to hold her coat.

  ‘It isn’t far,’ she said. ‘I’ll just slip it over my shoulders.’

  She held the collar of the coat close about her neck, so that he felt the young delicacy of her face to be startlingly heightened.

  ‘Good-bye,’ everyone said. The Paul Vaulkhards said they thought it had been enchanting. Mr Paul Vaulkhard gave a bow of courteous dignity, holding Mrs Clavering’s hand. Mrs Paul Vaulkhard said that the Claverings must come to see them too, and not to leave it too long; and he saw his wife exalted.

  ‘Good-bye, Miss Dufresne,’ he said and again, for the second time, held her hand. ‘I will see you all out. It’s a little tricky. There are steps——’

  The Paul Vaulkhards went ahead with Mrs Clavering, and as he followed through the outer hall he said:

  ‘Did you enjoy it? Would you care to come and see us again before you go away?’

  ‘Oh! it was a marvellous, wonderful exquisite party,’ she said. ‘It was beautiful. It was vivid.’

  The word lit up for him, like an unexpected flash of centralised light, all her eagerness, touching him into his own moment of reserved exultation. He walked with her for a few yards into the frosty drive, where the Paul Vaulkhards were waiting. A chain of light frozen boughs, glistening in the lamplight, seemed to obscure all the upper sky, but she lifted her face in a last gesture of excitement to say:

  ‘Oh! All the stars are out! Look at all the stars!’

  ‘Now remember,’ he said. ‘Don’t forget to come and see us before you go.’

  ‘Oh! I will, I will,’ she said. She laughed with light confusion. ‘I mean I will come—I mean I won’t forget. I will remember.’

  He watched her run into the frosty night, down the drive.

  Later, in a house deserted except for the caterers’ men and shabby everywhere with dirty glasses and still burning cigarettes and a mess of half-gnawed food, his wife said:

  ‘Honestly, did you think it went well? Did you? You didn’t think everybody was awfully stiff and bored?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ he said.

  ‘Oh! Somehow I thought it never got going. It never jelled. People just stood about in groups and glared and somehow I thought it never worked up. You know how I mean.’

  ‘I thought it was nice,’ he said.

  ‘What about the wine? I knew as soon as we started it was a mistake. People didn’t know what to make of it, did they? It was too cold. Didn’t you feel they didn’t know what to make of it—it’s funny how a little thing like that can go through a party.’

  Disconsolately, agitatedly picking up glasses and putting them down again, she wandered about the empty rooms. The caterers’ men, in their shirt-sleeves, were packing up. In the hall a spray of lilac had become dislodged from its green guard of pittosporum leaves and as Clavering passed through the hall he picked it up and put it back again.

  ‘What do you suppose the Paul Vaulkhards made of it?’ his wife called. ‘Didn’t you have an awful feeling they felt they were a bit above it? Not quite their class?’

  Opening the front door, he was too far away to answer. He walked for a few paces down the still-lighted drive, looking up at the stars. The night in its rimy frostiness was without wind. With a tenderness he did not want to pursue into anything deeper he remembered how much the girl had liked all things that were white. He remembered how she had thought everything was beautiful.

  From the frozen meadows behind the house there was a call of owls and from farther away, from dark coverts, a barking of foxes.

  Across the Bay

  ‘How many langoustines today, Monsieur Harris?’ the boy said.

  Almost every day that summer there were big blue dishes of cream pink langoustine, a sort of small spidery lobster, for lunch, and all through the sunny dining-room of the hotel there was a hungry cracking of claws. A fine bristling Atlantic air blew in hot from the bay.

  The small boy Jean-Pierre had eyes like glistening blobs of bright brown sea-weed. ‘English! English!—in English, please!’

  ‘Nine.’

  ‘One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight—noine!’

  ‘Nine:

  ‘Noine.’

  ‘Nine:

  ‘Please say nine!’ Madame Dupont said. ‘Nine, Jean-Pierre—now! No more of that noine!’

  ‘Noine.’

  ‘Ten now,’ Harris said and even Madame Dupont, the governess, who with small beady dark eyes and neat pink jaws d
elicately champing had something of the look of a refined langoustine herself, laughed gaily.

  ‘I have to laugh,’ Madame Dupont said. ‘It’s very wrong, but I can’t help it. The boy is very happy.’

  Harris had begun to share a table under the window with Madame Dupont and the boy because now, in July, towards the height of the season, the hotel was quickly filling up. There were no longer any single tables for single men. Every day new French mammas and papas arrived with shrieking families and dour matriarchal grandmothers and small yapping dogs, and every day Madame Dupont, who had chosen the table in the corner because it was secluded and strategic, squinted finely through small gold spectacles so that she could see them better.

  ‘That’s a family named Le Brun who were here last year. They are from Lyons. He is in the Sûrete.’

  ‘How many langoustines now, Monsieur Harris?’

  ‘One dozen.’

  ‘Dozen, dozen, dozen? How many is that?’

  ‘Douzaine,’ Harris said. ‘Dozen, douzaine. Douze, douze.’

  ‘It is the same,’ Madame Dupont said. ‘Isn’t that so often the case? They are so alike, French and English. Sometimes there is hardly any difference at all, really.’

  ‘French is more beautiful——’

  ‘Oh! no. English is very beautiful too.’ Sea-light from the wide hot bay sparkled on Madame Dupont’s spectacles as she lifted her face. ‘The family Bayard has gone, I see. They have rearranged the tables.’