After Julius (23 page)

‘I think she’s a bit lonely,’ said Emma after some thought. ‘And she’s so keen on us marrying people, she must think it the best thing to be.’

‘Not necessarily,’ said Cressy darkly. ‘Try this.’

‘I’ll have to make a new hole.’

‘Your waist’s indecently small: you’re always lifting belts off me! I can’t wear them after you’ve punctured them all over the place. Why don’t you ever have
any of your own?’

‘They get left on the backs of chairs in restaurants whenever I’m having an expensive meal. What’s his favourite river?’

‘
What
is it? I don’t know.’

‘Mississippi,’ said Emma crossly: ‘you’re not trying. Can I go through these things quickly, before you cast them on the WVS?’

‘Help yourself.’ Cressy lit a cigarette and sat down to brush her hair.

‘What’s Felix like?’ Emma asked some minutes later.

‘All right. Better than I thought.’

‘How does Ma know him?’

‘Met him before the war, I think.’

‘He’s much younger than she is.’

‘Yes,’ said Cressy, ‘he is, isn’t he?’

When Emma had taken away her loot, and Cressy had back-combed her hair a bit for her and had a final inspection, Emma went away. She really looked very nice; the skirt was straight to her ankles
and a beautiful blue: the cashmere fitted surprisingly well and anybody with a twenty-two-inch waist looks good in a belt. ‘I don’t think she’s ever been in love before,’
she thought, with a twinge of protective anxiety. But she couldn’t be sure: Em was very secretive sometimes, and one reason why they got on was never trying to find things out about each
other.

Now
she
must dress. Her earlier, and distinctly lofty, feeling about her appearance from now on, was mitigated by the news of Jennifer Hammond coming to dinner. She wasn’t going to
look as though she’d tried very hard, but she wasn’t going to look a frump, either. She set about it. It was seven o’clock when she started (drinks were always at seven-thirty)
and of course she was bound to be late.

When she got downstairs her mother, Felix, Dan and Emma were all drinking, and Major Hawkes was most rashly being given a whisky and soda. Felix poured her a martini, and she asked where was
Jennifer Hammond?

‘There they are now,’ said her mother, and they all heard the car in the drive.

‘They?’

‘The Hammonds, dear. Richard could come after all, as the fog was too bad for him to go abroad.’

Oh God! It only needed that. The last person she wanted to see, now, in this company, was Dick. She put her glass down, then picked it up again and drank a lot of martini.

‘Cigarette?’ said Felix.

She stared at him feeling trapped and furious, Why hadn’t her mother
said
? She heard the front door – Jennifer’s maddening high-pitched voice. She took a cigarette
without speaking: it was too late to get out now – why on earth hadn’t he told her? He
couldn’t
love her if he simply turned up to dinner in her own home
with
his
wife . . . where was Em?
She’d
understand: she did. Their eyes met for an instant, just before the Hammonds, ushered by Esme who had gone out to meet them, came in.

‘Had a frightful time persuading him to come at all . . .’ Jennifer was saying.

‘Finish it, so I can fill you up,’ said Felix’s voice.

She focused on him: he gave her a small, cool, but friendly smile. If she didn’t know he couldn’t know, she would have thought he knew. She finished her drink and he refilled her
glass. She knew Dick had seen her, and didn’t look at him. Instead she turned to Major Hawkes who had been amazing Dan for some minutes. Major Hawkes said something lengthy which she
couldn’t hear, and Dan retired thoughtfully rubbing his face.

Esme was introducing people, ending with ‘And there, of course, are Cressy and Emma.’ Why of course?

Jennifer, who had been given a martini by Felix, was coming up to her.

‘I suppose you’ve been frightfully busy on your concert tours, and that’s why we never see you.’ She was wearing a low-necked beaded sweater and a terrifically hairy
skirt.

She smiled. It felt like a smile – and offered Jennifer a cigarette.

‘How
super
! I’m not in the least musical, but honestly, I should adore to hear you play. I’m so stuck with the children these days, that nothing ever improves my
mind.’

‘Be good sweet maid, and let who will be clever,’ said Major Hawkes audibly and unexpectedly.

‘There you are!’ cried Jennifer. ‘Oh darling, could you lend me your hanky?’ She looked round wildly for her husband and he came over and handed her one. Dick.

‘Good evening,’ he said to her.

‘Good evening,’ she said back.

‘Darling, why on earth are you drinking martini if you think you are getting a cold? Why don’t you have a whisky?’

‘I’m quite happy with martini.’

‘You may be, but I’m not for you.
Could
Dick have a wee drop of whisky?’ she pleaded to the room in general. ‘I’ll drink your martini, darling,’ and
she whipped it away from him in one expert swoop.

Felix got Dick some whisky. Major Hawkes muttered something about whisky making the heart grow fonder, and then, most distressingly, laughed. Jennifer laughed too, and started talking to him
about ear canker: they both kept dogs.

She looked at Dick, trying to pretend that she’d never seen him before. A handsome man with a dull face. But handsome. How could you be both, she thought irritably.

‘Better?’ It was Felix. He was offering her another cigarette.

‘Than what?’ she said as rudely as she could.

‘Than ever, of course,’ he said smoothly.

Her mother was wandering about filling up people’s glasses. She watched Jennifer have her third martini and knew, from the expression on Dick’s face when he looked at his wife, that
Jennifer was drinking herself out of a row. She realized then, that apart from hating to be Jennifer, she did not want to be in Jennifer’s position. One of Dick’s tricks was to make out
that his relationship with his wife was a much more formidable business than, obviously, she could now see that it was. To Cressy he had always maintained a married position composed of his
protective, manly compassion for a good, sweet, dull little woman who had given him the best weeks of her life and to whom therefore he owned his painful loyalty. Now she could see, and hoped that
he knew it, that he was just comfortably bored enough with a woman whose notion of marriage was to preserve external possession at any small price of tact or dignity. She suddenly remembered
René in the middle of her affair with him. She had asked him why he had chosen her, and he had answered: ‘Well, you see – my wife
understands
me; and that, my dear, you
may discover, is a piece of French realism.’ Dick’s boredom was exactly of the kind that enabled him to justify his infidelities. Jennifer was not a disappointment to him: she was just
what he had expected, and this made it possible for him to have affairs with a smooth romantic conscience. You couldn’t love somebody who wanted so little. She felt so good, that when she saw
Jennifer spilling some of her drink on to her beaded sweater, she offered
her
handkerchief for mopping up. Jennifer took it with cries of gratitude, mopped, then smelled the handkerchief.
‘What a marvellous scent! What is it? Don’t tell me – I know I know it somehow.’ But she couldn’t think of its name, and eventually, Cressy had to tell her.

Mrs Hanwell came in to say that she couldn’t hold back the goose any longer than it would take them to eat their melon, so everybody finished their drinks and started to go in to dinner.
Her mother, who had Major Hawkes explaining the differences between the Industrial and French Revolutions to her, asked her to make up the fire: Felix seemed to have taken charge of an even more
high-pitched and unsteady Mrs Hammond, and Dan and Emma had gone ahead to light the candles on the dining-room table. Thus Dick was able to hang back, and as she straightened herself up from the
fireplace, he made a quizzical face – helpless and conspiratorial dismay. She met it with an expression of impassive good humour. He tried harder.

‘You look so wonderful, darling: God, I’m sorry about this: she insisted on my coming . . .’

She brushed the lichen off her hands and said: ‘Don’t let it worry you,’ as she started to move for the door. He tried attack.

‘You shouldn’t have told her what your scent is. She suspects me anyway, and if she found out, the fat would be in the fire.’

‘You’ve got to keep your home fires burning somehow,’ she said and went ahead of him through the door. She felt about ten feet high and fifty miles away. Good heavens, it was
easy
.

CHAPTER 12

FIREWORKS

E
VERYBODY
had drunk more before dinner than he or she usually did. Jennifer Hammond had perhaps gone further than anybody
else in this direction; Dick had been simply awful about coming out to dinner, and considering how little fun she got nowadays she thought this very mean. They had had a sort of a row; not really
one, but she had told him that he never did anything
she
wanted, and he had sulked and said all
he
wanted was a quiet evening at home – nothing wrong with that, was there? She
had thought one martini would pick her up and it hadn’t, so she’d had another, and then she felt so marvellous she couldn’t resist a third. Felix had given Dick two enormous
whiskies to make up for him being made to drink it. Felix himself had drunk rather a lot to keep his mind off Cressy, who was wearing a black sheath dress which made it impossible for him to keep
his mind off her. Cressy had drunk a lot out of shock, and Felix giving her drinks all the time. Emma had drunk more than she usually did because she felt indefinably excited. Dan had drunk a lot
because he couldn’t find a drink which he actually liked. Esme had had two martinis which she never usually drank, because she had felt so anxious about Cressy being rude to the Hammonds
and/or Felix. Major Hawkes drank a lot for him, because his pension wouldn’t run to more than one bottle of whisky a month at home, and a splendid doctor he knew had said that alcohol was
good for his arteries.

Conversation at dinner was therefore gay and general, in Major Hawkes’s case so general as to be downright confusing. ‘So you see, my dear Esme,’ he had gone on and on,
‘the French Revolution lost France a whole class of their society, and the Industrial Revolution
instigated
a whole class of our society, and my view of French being a diplomatic
language has always been based on the theory that the fellers talked French
in order
that nobody should understand what they were saying. Diplomacy’s always been a shifty business, it
wouldn’t be the slightest use a general issuing his orders in French – his officers wouldn’t understand him. Unless they were French in the first place, poor fellers,’ he
added kindly. He lived alone and was rather short of people to talk to. Esme was carving the goose and listening to him. Felix was pouring burgundy, and Jennifer was telling Emma how marvellous it
must be to work among books – she never got time to read a thing nowadays. The others were willy nilly listening to Major Hawkes who was dealing with French painting and the oversight of the
Allies in not bombing Japanese spectacle factories – a cinch! Every little Nip has his specs although you need dark glasses for some of this abstract stuff the French keep knocking up –
beauty wasn’t in the eye of the beholder
there –
he’d found better things to look at in his time – American legs were better than French ones at that – Esme
headed him off here by offering him a whole tray of sauce boats. His eyes glistened: he was very fond of food, too, but his dog ate so much that he spent a lot of his time making do. He looked up
at her. ‘Thank you m’dear. Having the time of my life,’ he said, with the unusually succinct and simple gratitude which made Esme go on asking him to dinner. ‘Where were
we?’ he asked daringly. ‘Roving camera reports,’ muttered Felix to Cressy, but Esme, who felt that all was not well in the Hammond direction, began asking Dick about his foreign
trips, and Jennifer began cross-examining Daniel on his life. ‘But what do you
do
?’ she was practically screaming. Daniel said he walked about, and had meals, and played with
things . . . ‘
What
things? How do you mean – play with things?’ Emma, in an agony of furious protection, said that Mr Brick was one of their authors – a poet.

‘Poetry’s gone to the dogs,’ remarked Major Hawkes through his apple sauce. ‘Fellers can’t write anything but bibs and bobs. I like a poem you can sink your teeth
into. Patriotism’s a good subject, or
was
– I read a lot so naturally I bump up against the odd poem now and then: a cracking battle with everything going wrong’s another
good subject. But who cares what some young feller thinks about dandelions or what it was like when he was a child? Nothing epic about that. That’s what we’re short of today: the
epic
.’ A cranberry bounced straight out of a gap between his teeth and landed on Emma’s plate. This had the unexpected effect of making Emma choke, which reminded Major Hawkes of
a time when his dog got a chicken bone in her throat. ‘Treated her just like a woman. Gave her an awful fright. Bone came straight up on to the lino and everything was hunky-dory.’

More goose was offered. ‘Dick – you’re off your
food
,’ cried his wife. ‘Normally he adores goose – there must be
something
wrong with you! I
wonder what it is?’ And Dick answered, with the minimum of good humour:

‘Shut up, darling, there’s a good girl.’

The trouble was that every time he said anything like that to her she looked as though she was going to burst into tears, and then had a drink instead. Esme battled for the rest of dinner with
the almost impossible task of talking to, or with, Major Hawkes and Dick at the same time. Major Hawkes, delighted at the attention, won hands down, and Dick sat looking at him with an air of
faintly weary indulgence that made Felix, Cressy and Emma all separately despise him. He never found anything just funny and nice, thought Cressy, as she doled out Mrs Hanwell’s lemon snow
– one crystallized cherry each and two pieces of angelica.