Christmas Holiday (32 page)

“Thrilling, wasn’t it?” cried Patsy. “Unfortunately the poor boy was only sixteen, so I told him that, bad woman as I was, I hadn’t sunk so low as to snatch a baby from his cradle, and I gave him a chaste kiss on the brow and told him I would be a sister to him.”

Patsy rattled on. Charley, smiling, listened to her, and Mrs. Mason took the opportunity to look at him closely. He was really very good-looking and his pallor suited him. It gave her an odd little feeling in her heart to think how much those women in Paris must have liked him; she supposed he’d gone to one of those horrible houses; what a success he must have had, so young and fresh and charming, after the fat, bald, beastly old men they were used to! She wondered what sort of girl he had been attracted by, she so hoped she was young and pretty, they said men were attracted by the same type as their mother belonged to. She was sure he’d be an enchanting lover; she couldn’t help
feeling proud of him; after all, he was her son and she’d carried him in her womb. The dear; and he looked so white and tired. Mrs. Mason had strange thoughts, thoughts that she wouldn’t have had anybody know for anything in the world; she was sad, and a little envious, yes, envious of the girls he had slept with, but at the same time proud, oh, so proud, because he was strong and handsome and virile.

Leslie interrupted Patsy’s nonsense and her own thoughts.

“Shall we tell him the great secret, Venetia?”

“Of course.”

“But mind, Charley, keep it under your hat. Cousin Wilfred’s worked it. There’s an ex-Indian governor that the party want to find a safe seat for, so Wilfred’s giving up his and in recognition he’s to get a peerage. What d’you think of that?”

“It’s grand.”

“Of course he pretends it means nothing to him, but he’s as pleased as Punch really. And you know, it’s nice for all of us. I mean, having a peer in the family adds to one’s prestige. Well, it gives one a sort of position. And when you think how we started …”

“That’ll do, Leslie,” said Mrs. Mason, with a glance at the servants. “We needn’t go into that.” And when they left the room immediately afterwards, she added: “Your father’s got a mania for telling everyone about his origins. I really think the time has now arrived when we can let bygones be bygones. It’s not so bad when we’re with people of our own class, they think it’s rather chic to have a grandfather who was a gardener
and a grandmother who was a cook, but there’s no need to tell the servants. It only makes them think you’re no better than they are.”

“I’m not ashamed of it. After all the greatest families in England started just as humbly as we did. And we’ve worked the oracle in less than a century.”

Mrs. Mason and Patsy got up from the table and Charley was left with his father to drink a glass of port. Leslie Mason told him of the discussions they had had about the title Cousin Wilfred should assume. It wasn’t so easy as you might think to find a name which didn’t belong to somebody else, which had some kind of connection with you, and which sounded well.

“I suppose we’d better join the ladies,” he said, when he had exhausted the subject. “I expect your mother will want a rubber before we go to bed.”

But as they were at the door and about to go out, he put his hand on his son’s shoulder.

“You look a bit washed out, old boy. I expect you’ve been going the pace a bit in Paris. Well, you’re young and that’s to be expected.” He suddenly felt a trifle embarrassed. “Anyhow, that’s no business of mine, and I think there are things a father and son needn’t go into. But accidents will happen in the best regulated families, and well, what I want to say is, if you find you’ve got anything the matter with you, don’t hesitate but go and see a doctor right away. Old Sinnery brought you into the world and so you needn’t be shy of him. He’s discretion itself and he’ll put you right in no time; the bill will be paid and no questions
asked. That’s all I wanted to tell you; now let’s go and join your poor mother.”

Charley had blushed scarlet when he understood what his father was talking about. He felt he ought to say something, but could think of nothing to say.

When they came into the drawing-room Patsy was playing a waltz of Chopin’s and after she had finished his mother asked Charley to play something.

“I suppose you haven’t played since you left?”

“One afternoon I played a little on the hotel piano, but it was a very poor one.”

He sat down and played again that piece of Scriabin’s that Lydia thought he played so badly, and as he began he had a sudden recollection of that stuffy, smoky cellar to which she had taken him, of those roughs he had made such friends with, and of the Russian woman, gaunt and gipsy-skinned, with her enormous eyes, who had sung those wild, barbaric songs with such a tragic abandon. Through the notes he struck he seemed to hear her raucous, harsh and yet deeply moving voice. Leslie Mason had a sensitive ear.

“You play that thing differently from the way you used,” he said when Charley got up from the piano.

“I don’t think so. Do I?”

“Yes, the feeling’s quite different. You get a sort of tremor in it that’s rather effective.”

“I like the old way better, Charley. You made it sound rather morbid,” said Mrs. Mason.

They sat down to bridge.

“This is like old times,” said Leslie. “We’ve missed our family bridge since you’ve been away.”

Leslie Mason had a theory that the way a man played bridge was an indication of his character, and since he looked upon himself as a dashing, open-handed, free-and-easy fellow, he consistently overcalled his hand and recklessly doubled. He looked upon a finesse as un-English. Mrs. Mason on the other hand played strictly according to the rules of Culbertson and laboriously counted up the pips before she ventured on a call. She never took a risk. Patsy was the only member of the family who by some freak of nature had a card sense. She was a bold, clever player and seemed to know by intuition how the cards were placed. She made no secret of her disdain for the respective methods of play of her parents. She was domineering at the card table. The game proceeded in just the same way as on how many evenings it had done. Leslie, after overcalling, was doubled by his daughter, redoubled, and with triumph went down fourteen hundred; Mrs. Mason, with her hand full of picture cards, refused to listen to her partner’s insistent demand for a slam; Charley was careless.

“Why didn’t you return me a diamond, you fool?” cried Patsy.

“Why should I return you a diamond?”

“Didn’t you see me play a nine and then a six?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Gosh, that I should be condemned to play all my life with people who don’t know the ace of spades from a cow’s tail.”

“It only made the difference of a trick.”

“A trick? A trick? A trick can make all the difference in the world.”

None of them paid any attention to Patsy’s indignation. They only laughed and she, giving them up as a bad job, laughed with them. Leslie carefully added up the scores and entered them in a book. They only played for a penny a hundred, but they pretended to play for a pound, because it looked better and was more thrilling. Sometimes Leslie would have marked up against him in the book sums like fifteen hundred pounds and would say with seeming seriousness that if things went on like that he’d have to put down the car and go to his office by bus.

The clock struck twelve and they bade one another good-night. Charley went to his warm and comfortable room and began to undress, but suddenly he felt very tired and sank into an armchair. He thought he would have one more pipe before he went to bed. The evening that had just gone by was like innumerable others that he had passed, and none had ever seemed to him more cosy and more intimate; it was all charmingly familiar, in every particular it was exactly as he would have wished it to be; nothing could be, as it were, more stable and substantial; and yet, he could not for the life of him tell why, he had all the time been fretted by an insinuating notion that it was nothing but make-believe. It was like a pleasant parlour-game that grown-ups played to amuse children. And that nightmare from which he thought he had happily awakened—at this hour Lydia, her eyelids stained and her nipples painted, in her blue Turkish trousers and her blue turban, would
be dancing at the Sérail or, naked, lying mortified and cruelly exulting in her mortification, in the arms of a man she abhorred; at this hour Simon, his work at the office finished, would be walking about the emptying streets of the Left Bank, turning over in his morbid and tortured mind his monstrous schemes; at this hour Alexey and Evgenia, whom Charley had never seen but whom through Lydia he seemed to know so well that he was sure he would have recognized them if he met them in the street; Alexey, drunk, would be inveighing with maudlin tears against the depravity of his son, and Evgenia, sewing, sewing for dear life, would cry softly because life was so bitter; at this hour the two released convicts, with those staring eyes of theirs that seemed to be set in a gaze of horror at what they had seen, would be sitting, each with his glass of beer, in the smoky, dim cellar and there hidden amid the crowd feel themselves for a moment safe from the ever-present fear that someone watched them; and at this hour Robert Berger, over there, far away on the coast of South America, in the pink-and-white stripes of the prison garb, with the ugly straw hat on his shaven head, walking from the hospital on some errand, would cast his eyes across the wide expanse of sea and, weighing the chances of escape, think for a moment of Lydia with tolerant affection—and that nightmare from which he thought he had happily awakened had a fearful reality which rendered all else illusory. It was absurd, it was irrational, but that, all that, seemed to have a force, a dark significance, which made the life he shared with those three, his father, his mother, his sister, who were
so near his heart, and the larger, decent yet humdrum life of the environment in which some blind chance had comfortably ensconced him, of no more moment than a shadow play. Patsy had asked him if he had had adventures in Paris and he had truthfully answered no. It was a fact that he had done nothing; his father thought he had had a devil of a time and was afraid he had contracted a venereal disease, and he hadn’t even had a woman; only one thing had happened to him, it was rather curious when you came to think of it, and he didn’t just then quite know what to do about it: the bottom had fallen out of his world.

THE END