Antic Hay (32 page)

Lypiatt looked up. ‘I must be going,' he said abruptly. And he walked towards the door. Like vermouth posters, like vermouth posters! – so that was Myra's piece of mockery! All his anger had sunk like a quenched flame. He was altogether quenched, put out with unhappiness.

Politely Mr Mercaptan hurried across the room and opened the door for him. ‘
Good
-bye, then,' he said airily.

Lypiatt did not speak, but walked out into the hall. The front door banged behind him.

‘Well,
well,'
said Mr Mercaptan, coming back across the room to where Rosie was still irresolutely standing. ‘Talk about the
furor poeticus!
But
do
sit down, I beg you. On Crébillon.' He indicated the vast white satin sofa. ‘I call it Crébillon,' he explained, ‘because the soul of that great writer undoubtedly tenants it,
undoubtedly.
You know his book, of course? You know
Le Sopha
?'

Sinking into Crébillon's soft lap, Rosie had to admit that she didn't know
Le Sopha.
She had begun to recover her self-possession. If this wasn't
the
young poet, it was certainly
a
young poet. And a very peculiar one, too. As a great lady she laughingly accepted the odd situation.

‘Not know
Le Sopha
?' exclaimed Mr Mercaptan. ‘Oh! but, my dear and mysterious young lady, let me lend you a copy of it at once. No education can be called
complete
without a knowledge of that divine book.' He darted to the bookshelf and came back with a small volume bound in white vellum. ‘The hero's soul,' he explained, handing her the volume, ‘passes, by the laws of metempsychosis, into a sofa. He is doomed to remain a sofa until such time as two persons consummate upon his bosom their reciprocal and equal loves. The book is the record of the poor sofa's hopes and disappointments.'

‘Dear me!' said Rosie, looking at the title-page.

‘But now,' said Mr Mercaptan, sitting down beside her on the edge of Crébillon, ‘won't you please explain? To what happy quiproquo do I owe this sudden and altogether delightful invasion of my privacy?'

‘Well,' said Rosie, and hesitated. It was really rather difficult to explain. ‘I was to meet a friend of mine.'

‘Quite so,' said Mr Mercaptan encouragingly.

‘Who sent me a telegram,' Rosie went on.

‘He sent you a telegram!' Mr Mercaptan echoed.

‘Changing the – the place we had fixed and telling me to meet him at this address.'

‘Here?'

Rose nodded. ‘On the s-second floor,' she made it more precise.

‘But
I
live on the second floor,' said Mr Mercaptan. ‘You don't mean to say your friend is also called Mercaptan and lives here too?'

Rosie smiled. ‘I don't know what he's called,' she said with a cool ironical carelessness that was genuinely
grande dame
.

‘You don't know his name?' Mr Mercaptan gave a roar and a squeal of delighted laughter. ‘But that's
too
good,' he said.

‘S-second floor, he wrote in the telegram.' Rosie was now perfectly at her ease. ‘When I saw your name, I thought it was his name. I must say,' she added, looking sideways at Mr Mercaptan and at once dropping the magnolia petals of her eyelids, ‘it seemed to me a very charming name.'

‘You overwhelm me,' said Mr Mercaptan, smiling all over his cheerful, snouty face. ‘As for
your
name – I am too discreet a
galantuomo
to ask. And, in any case, what
does
it matter? A rose by any other name . . .'

‘But, as a matter of fact,' she said, raising and lowering once again her smooth, white lids, ‘my name does happen to be Rose; or, at any rate, Rosie.'

‘So you are sweet by right!' exclaimed Mr Mercaptan, with a pretty gallantry which he was the first to appreciate. ‘Let's order tea on the strength of it.' He jumped up and rang the bell. ‘How I congratulate myself on this astonishing piece of good fortune!'

Rosie said nothing. This Mr Mercaptan, she thought, seemed to be even more a man of the great artistic world than Toto.

‘What puzzles me,' he went on, ‘is why your anonymous friend should have chosen my address out of all the millions of others. He must know me, or, at any rate, know about me.'

‘I should imagine,' said Rosie, ‘that you have a lot of friends.'

Mr Mercaptan laughed – the whole orchestra, from bassoon to piccolo. ‘
Des amis, des amies
– with and without the mute “e”,' he declared.

The aged and forbidding servant appeared at the door.

‘Tea for two, Mrs Goldie.'

Mrs Goldie looked round the room suspiciously. ‘The other gentleman's gone, has he?' she asked. And having assured herself of his absence, she renewed her complaint. ‘Shoving in like that,' she said. ‘Bolshevism, that's what I –'

‘All right, all right, Mrs Goldie. Let's have our tea as quickly as possible.' Mr Mercaptan held up his hand, authoritatively, with the gesture of a policeman controlling the traffic.

‘Very well, Master Paster.' Mrs Goldie spoke with resignation and departed.

‘But tell me,' Mr Mercaptan went on, ‘if it
isn't
indiscreet – what does your friend look like?'

‘W-well,' Rosie answered, ‘he's fair, and though he's quite young he wears a beard.' With her two hands she indicated on her own unemphatic bosom the contours of Toto's broad blond fan.

‘A beard! But, good heavens,' Mr Mercaptan slapped his thigh, ‘it's Coleman, it's obviously and undoubtedly Coleman!'

‘Well, whoever it was,' said Rosie severely, ‘he played a very stupid sort of joke.'

‘For which I thank him.
De tout mon coeur
.'

Rosie smiled and looked sideways. ‘All the same,' she said, ‘I shall give him a piece of my mind.'

Poor Aunt Aggie! Oh, poor Aunt Aggie, indeed! In the light of Mr Mercaptan's boudoir her hammered copper and her leadless gaze certainly did look a bit comical.

After tea Mr Mercaptan played cicerone in a tour of inspection round the room. They visited the papier mâché writing-desk, the Condor fans, the Marie Laurencin, the 1914 edition of
Du Côté de chez Swann,
the Madonna that probably was a fake, the nigger mask, the Chelsea figures, the Chinese object of art in sculptured crystal, the scale model of Queen Victoria in wax under a glass bell. Toto, it became clear, had been no more than a forerunner; the definitive revelation was Mr Mercaptan's. Yes, poor Aunt Aggie! And indeed, when Mr Mercaptan began to read her his little middle on the ‘Droit du Seigneur', it was poor everybody. Poor mother, with her absurd, old-fashioned, prudish views; poor, earnest father, with his Unitarianism, his
Hibbert Journal,
his letters to the papers about the necessity for a spiritual regeneration.

‘Bravo!' she cried from the depths of Crébillon. She was leaning back in one corner, languid, serpentine, and at ease, her feet in their mottled snake's leather tucked up under her. ‘Bravo!' she cried as Mr Mercaptan finished his reading, and looked up for his applause.

Mr Mercaptan bowed.

‘You express so exquisitely what we –' and waving her hand in a comprehensive gesture, she pictured to herself all the other fastidious ladies, all the marchionesses of fable, reclining, as she herself at this moment reclined, on upholstery of white satin, ‘what we all only feel and aren't clever enough to say.'

Mr Mercaptan was charmed. He got up from before his writing-desk, crossed the room and sat down beside her on Crébillon. ‘Feeling,' he said, ‘is the important thing.'

Rosie remembered that her father had once remarked in blank verse: ‘The things that matter happen in the heart.'

‘I quite agree,' she said.

Like movable raisins in the suet of his snouty face, Mr Mercaptan's brown little eyes rolled amorous avowals. He took Rosie's hand and kissed it. Crébillon creaked discreetly as he moved a little nearer.

It was on the evening of the same day. Rosie lay on her sofa – a poor, hire-purchase thing indeed, compared with Mr Mercaptan's grand affair in white satin and carved and gilded wood, but still a sofa – lay with her feet on the arm of it and her long suave legs exposed, by the slipping of the kimono, to the top of her stretched stockings. She was reading the little vellum-jacketed volume of Crébillon, which Mr Mercaptan had given her when he said ‘good-bye' (or rather, ‘
À bientôt, mon amie
'); given, not lent, as he had less generously offered at the beginning of their afternoon; given with the most graceful of allusive dedications inscribed on the fly-leaf:

T
O

BY-NO-OTHER-NAME-AS-SWEET,

W
ITH
G
RATITUDE
,

FROM

CRÉBILLON DELIVERED.

À bientôt
– she had promised to come again very soon. She thought of the essay on the ‘Jus primae Noctis' – ah! what we've all been feeling and none of us clever enough to say. We on the sofas, ruthless, lovely and fastidious . . .

‘I am proud to constitute myself' – Mr Mercaptan had said of it – ‘
l'esprit d'escalier des dames galantes
.'

Rosie was not quite sure what he meant; but it certainly sounded very witty indeed.

She read the book slowly. Her French, indeed, wasn't good enough to permit her to read it anyhow else. She wished it were better. Perhaps if it were better she wouldn't be yawning like this. It was disgraceful: she pulled herself together. Mr Mercaptan had said that it was a masterpiece.

In his study, Shearwater was trying to write his paper on the regulative functions of the kidneys. He was not succeeding.

Why wouldn't she see me yesterday? he kept wondering. With anguish he suspected other lovers; desired her, in consequence, the more. Gumbril had said something, he remembered, that night they had met her by the coffee-stall. What was it? He wished now that he had listened more attentively.

She's bored with me. Already. It was obvious.

Perhaps he was too rustic for her. Shearwater looked at his hands. Yes, the nails
were
dirty. He took an orange stick out of his waistcoat pocket and began to clean them. He had bought a whole packet of orange sticks that morning.

Determinedly he took up his pen. ‘The hydrogen ion concentration in the blood . . .' he began a new paragraph. But he got no further than the first seven words.

If, he began thinking with a frightful confusion, if – if – if – Past conditionals, hopelessly past. He might have been brought up more elegantly; his father, for example, might have been a barrister instead of a barrister's clerk. He mightn't have had to work so hard when he was young; might have been about more, danced more, seen more young women. If he had met her years ago – during the war, should one say, dressed in the uniform of a lieutenant in the Guards . . .

He had pretended that he wasn't interested in women; that they had no effect on him; that, in fact, he was above that sort of thing. Imbecile! He might as well have said that he was above having a pair of kidneys. He had only consented to admit, graciously, that they were a physiological necessity.

O God, what a fool he had been!

And then, what about Rosie? What sort of a life had she been having while he was being above that sort of thing? Now he came to think of it, he really knew nothing about her, except that she had been quite incapable of learning correctly, even by heart, the simplest facts about the physiology of frogs. Having found that out, he had really given up exploring further. How could he have been so stupid?

Rosie had been in love with him, he supposed. Had he been in love with her? No. He had taken care not to be. On principle. He had married her as a measure of intimate hygiene; out of protective affection, too, certainly out of affection; and a little for amusement, as one might buy a puppy.

Mrs Viveash had opened his eyes; seeing her, he had also begun to notice Rosie. It seemed to him that he had been a loutish cad as well as an imbecile.

What should he do about it? He sat for a long time wondering.

In the end he decided that the best thing would be to go and tell Rosie all about it, all about everything.

About Mrs Viveash too? Yes, about Mrs Viveash too. He would get over Mrs Viveash more easily and more rapidly if he did. And he would begin to try and find out about Rosie. He would explore her. He would discover all the other things besides an incapacity to learn physiology that were in her. He would discover her, he would quicken his affection for her into something livelier and more urgent. And they would begin again; more satisfactorily this time; with knowledge and understanding; wise from their experience.

Shearwater got up from his chair before the writing-table, lurched pensively towards the door, bumping into the revolving bookcase and the arm-chair as he went, and walked down the passage to the drawing-room. Rosie did not turn her head as he came in, but went on reading without changing her position, her slippered feet still higher than her head, her legs still charmingly avowing themselves.

Shearwater came to a halt in front of the empty fireplace. He stood there with his back to it, as though warming himself before an imaginary flame. It was, he felt, the safest, the most strategic point from which to talk.

‘What are you reading?' he asked.

‘
Le Sopha
,' said Rosie.

‘What's that?'

‘What's that?' Rosie scornfully echoed. ‘Why, it's one of the great French classics.'

‘Who by?'

‘Crébillon the younger.'

‘Never heard of him,' said Shearwater.

There was a silence. Rosie went on reading.

‘It just occurred to me,' Shearwater began again in his rather ponderous, infelicitous way, ‘that you mightn't be very happy Rosie.'