Books Do Furnish a Room (13 page)

The Flores’s drawing-room
presented a contrast with the generally austere appearance almost prescriptive
to apartments given over to official entertaining; not least on account of the
profusion of flowers set about, appropriate to the host’s surname, but at that
period formidably expensive. This rare display, together with the abundance and
variety of drinks on offer – as Mona had remarked, still hard to obtain – suggested
that Colonel Flores was fairly rich himself, or his Government determined to
make a splash. It struck me all at once, confronted with this luxuriance, that,
although never behaving as if that were so, money was after all what Jean
really liked. In fact Duport, even apart from his other failings, had not
really been rich enough. It looked as if that problem were now resolved, Jean
married to a rich man.

Almost every country which had
not been at war with us was represented among the guests round about, ‘Allies’
and ‘Neutrals’ alike. The ‘Iron Curtain’ states (a new phrase), from time to
time irascible about hospitality offered or accepted, had on this occasion
turned up in force. Looking round the room, one noted an increase in darker
skins. Aiguillettes were more abundant, their gold lace thicker. Here was
gathered together again an order of men with whom I should always feel an odd
sense of fellowship, though now, among this crowd of uniformed figures,
chattering, laughing, downing their drinks, not one of their forerunners
remained with whom I had formerly transacted military business. Only two or
three of those present were even familiar by sight.

Jean, rather superb in what was
called ‘The New Look’ (another recent phrase), was dressed in a manner to which
hardly any woman in this country, unless she possessed unusually powerful
tentacles, could at that time aspire. She greeted us at the door. That she had
become so fashionable had to be attributed, one supposed, to her husband. In
the old days much of her charm – so it had seemed – had been to look like a
well-turned-out schoolgirl, rather than an enchantress on the cover of a
fashion magazine. The slight, inexpressibly slight, foreign intonation she had
now acquired, or affected, went well with the splendours of
haute couture
.

‘How
very
kind of you both to come.’

Colonel Flores had his CBE
ribbon up, a decoration complimenting his country rather than rewarding any
very tangible achievement of his own since taking up his appointment in London;
indeed presented to him on arrival like a gift at a children’s party to animate
a cosy atmosphere. There was no doubt – as his predecessor and less triumphant
husband, Bob Duport, had remarked – Flores did possess a distinct look of
Rudolph Valentino. I thought how that comparison dated Duport and myself.
Handsome, spruce, genial, the Colonel’s English was almost more fluent than his
wife’s, at least in the sense that his language had that faintly old-world
tinge that one associated with someone like Alfred Tolland – though naturally
far more coherent in delivery – or multilingual royalties of Prince Theodoric’s
stamp.

‘My dear fellow – don’t mind if
I call you Nick, just as Jean does when she speaks of you – how marvellous it
must be to have left the army behind. I am always meaning to send in my papers,
as you call it, get to hell out of it. Then I give the old show another chance
– but you must have a drink. Pink gin? My tipple too. Contigo me entierren. But
the army? How should I occupy myself if there was no one to order me about?
That’s what I ask. Jean always tells me also that I should be getting into
trouble if I had too little to do. Our wives, our wives, what slaves they make
of us. She thinks I should turn to politics. Well, I might one day, but how
much I envy you to be free. My time will come at last. I shall then at least be
able to look after my horses properly … Ah, my dear General … but of
course … pernod, bourbon – I must tell you I have even got a bottle of tequila
hidden away … Hasta mañana, su Excelencia… a bientôt, cher Colonel …

I wondered whether Jean trompé’d
him with the gauchos, or whatever was of the most tempting to ladies in that
country. Probably she did; her husband, having plenty of interests of his own,
quite indifferent. The fact was Flores showed signs of being a great man. That
had to be admitted. They were quite right to give him a CBE as soon as he
arrived. His manner of handling his party suggested he well deserved it.

I circulated among the ‘Allies’,
polite majors, affable colonels, the occasional urbane general, all the people
who had once made up so much of daily life. Now, for some reason, there seemed
little or nothing to talk about. It was no use broaching to these officers the
subject of the newly founded publishing house of Quiggin & Craggs, the
magazine
Fission
that was to embody the latest literary approach. At the same time the most
superficial military topics once mutually exchanged seemed to have altered utterly
overnight, everything revised, reorganized, reassembled; while – an awkward
point – to approach, as a civilian, even the exterior trimmings of the military
machine, when making conversation with the professional who controlled some
part of it, was to risk, if not a snub, conveying an impression of curiosity
either impertinent, or stemming from personal connexion with the Secret
Service. While I wrestled with this problem, Jean reappeared.

‘Your wife has so kindly asked
us to dine with you. It’s very hospitable, because I know how absolutely
impossible it is to give dinner parties these days, not only rationing, but all
sorts of other things. They are difficult enough even if you have official
supplies and staff to draw on like ourselves. Carlos and I would so much have
loved to come, but there has been a surprise. We have just received news from
our Defence Ministry that we must go home.’

‘Already?’

‘We have to leave London almost
at once. There has been a change of Government and a big reorganization.’

‘Promotion, I hope?’

‘Carlos has been given a
military area in the Northern Province. It is quite unexpected and might lead
to big things. There are, well, political implications. It is not just the same
as being in the army here. So we have to make immediate arrangements to pack
up, you see.’

She smiled.

‘I should offer congratulations
as well as regrets?’

‘Of course Carlos is delighted,
though he pretends not to be. He is quite ambitious. He makes very good
speeches. We are both pleased really. It shows the new Government is being
sensible. To tell the truth we were sent here partly to get Carlos out of the
country. Now all that is changed – but the move must be done in such a hurry.’

‘How foolish of them not to
have wanted such a nice man about the place.’

She laughed at that.

‘I was hoping to take Polly
round a little in London. However, she is going to stay in England for a time
in any case. She has ambitions to go on the stage.’

‘I haven’t seen her at your
party?’

‘She’s with her father at the
moment – I think you’ve met my first husband, Bob Duport?’

‘Several times – during the war
among others. He’d been ill in the Middle East, and we ran across each other in
Brussels.’

‘Gyppy tummy and other things
left poor Bob rather a wreck. He ought to marry somebody who’d look after him
properly, keep him in order too, which I never managed to do. He’s rather a
weak man in some ways.’

‘Yes, poor Bob. No good being
weak.’

She laughed again at this
endorsement of her own estimate of Duport’s character, but at the same time
without giving anything away, or to the smallest degree abandoning the
determined formality of her manner. That particular laugh, the way she had of
showing she entirely grasped the point of what one had said, once carried with
it powerful intoxications; now – a relief to ascertain even after so long – not
a split second of emotional tremor.

‘What’s he doing now?’

‘Bob? Oil. Something new for
him – produced by an old friend of his called Jimmy Brent. You may have met him
with my brother Peter. How I miss Peter, although we never saw much of each
other.’

‘I came across Jimmy Brent in
the war too.’

‘Jimmy’s a little bit awful
really. He’s got very fat, and is to marry a widow with two grown-up sons.
Still, he’s fixed up Bob, which is the great thing.’

To make some comment that
showed I knew she had slept with Brent – by his own account, been in love with
him – was tempting, but restraint prevailed. Nevertheless, recollecting that
sudden hug watching a film, her whisper, ‘You make me feel so randy,’ I saw no
reason why she should go scot free, escape entirely unteased.

‘How well you speak English,
Madame Flores.’

‘People are always asking if I
was brought up in this country.’

She laughed again in that
formerly intoxicating manner. A small dark woman, wearing an enormous spray of
diamonds set in the shape of rose petals trembling on a stalk, came through the
crowd.

‘Rosie, how lovely to see you
again. Do you know each other? Of course you do. I see Carlos is making signs
that I must attend to the Moroccan colonel.’

Jean left us together. Rosie
Manasch took a handful of stuffed olives from a plate, and offered one.

‘I saw you once at a meeting
about Polish military hospitals. You were much occupied at the other end of the
room, and I had to move on to the Titian halfway through. Besides, I didn’t
know whether you’d remember me.’

The Red Cross, Allied
charities, wartime activities of that sort, explained why she was at this
party. It was unlikely that she had known Jean before the war, when Rosie had
been married to her first husband, Jock Udall, heir apparent to the newspaper
proprietor of that name, arch-enemy of Sir Magnus Donners. Rosie Manasch’s
parents, inveterate givers of musical parties and buyers of modern pictures,
had been patrons of both Moreland and Barnby in the past. Mark Members had made
a bid to involve them in literature too, but without much success, enjoying a
certain amount of their hospitality, but never bringing off anything
spectacular in the way of plunder. It had been rumoured in those days that
Barnby had attempted to start up some sort of a love affair with Rosie. If so,
the chances were that nothing came of it. Possessing that agreeable gift of
making men feel pleased with themselves by the way she talked, she was in
general held to own a less sensual temperament than her appearance suggested.
Quite how she accomplished this investiture of male self-satisfaction was hard
to analyse, perhaps simply because, unlike some women, she preferred men that
way.

Udall was shot by the SS, on
recapture, after a mass escape from a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany. The
marriage – in the estimation of those always prepared to appraise explicitly
other people’s intimate relationships – was judged to have been only moderately
happy. There were no children. There was also, even the most inquisitorial
conceded, no gossip about infidelities on either side, although Udall was
always reported to be ‘difficult’. Quite soon after her husband’s death, Rosie
married a Pole called Andreszlwsiski, a second-lieutenant, though not at all young. I
never came across him at the Titian during my period of liaison duty, but his
appointment there, Polish GHQ in London, sounded fairly inconsiderable even
within terms of the rank. Andreszlwsiski, as it turned out, was suffering from
an incurable disease. He died only a few months after the wedding. Rosie
resumed her maiden name.

‘I’ve just been talking to your
wife. We’d never met before, though I knew her sister Susan Tolland before she
married. I hear you didn’t guess that I was the mysterious lady in the
background of
Fission
.’

‘Was this arranged by
Widmerpool?’

‘The Frog Footman? Yes,
indirectly. He used to do business when he was at Donners-Brebner with my
cousin James Klein. Talking of Donners-Brebner, did you go to the Donners
picture sale? I can’t think why Lady Donners did not keep more of them herself.
There must be quite a lot of money left in spite of death duties – though one
never knows how a man like Sir Magnus Donners may have left everything.’

‘If I’d been Matilda, I’d have
kept the Toulouse-Lautrec.’

‘Of course you must have known
Matilda Donners when she was married to Hugh Moreland. Matilda and I don’t much
like each other, though we pretend to. Do you realize that a relation of mine –
Isadore Manasch – was painted by Lautrec? Isn’t that smart? A café scene, in
the gallery at Albi. Isadore’s slumped on a chair in the background. The
Lautrec picture’s the only thing that keeps his slim volume of Symbolist verse
from complete oblivion. Isadore’s branch of the family are still embarrassed if
you talk about him. He was very disreputable.’

To emphasize the awful depths
of Isadore’s habits, Rosie stood on tiptoe, clasping together plump little
hands that seemed subtly moulded out of pink icing sugar, then tightly caught
in by invisible bands at the wrist. At forty or so, she herself was not
unthinkable in terms of Lautrec’s brush, more alluring certainly than the
ladies awaiting custom on the banquettes of the Rue de Moulins, though with
something of their resignation. A hint of the seraglio, and its secrets, that
attached to her suggested oriental costume in one of the masked ball scenes.

‘Do you ever see Hugh Moreland
now? Matilda told me he’s still living with that strange woman called
Maclintick. They’ve never married. Matilda says Mrs Maclintick makes him work
hard.’

‘I don’t even know his address.’

That was one of the many
disruptions caused by the war. Rosie returned to
Fission
.

‘What do you think of the Frog
Footman’s beautiful wife? Did you hear what she said to that horrid girl Peggy
Klein – who’s a sort of connexion, as she was once married to Charles
Stringham? James had adored Peggy for years when he married her – I’ll tell you
some other time. There’s the Frog Footman himself making towards us.’