Parade's End (15 page)

‘Yer mother’s ’owlin’ after yer.’ But Miss Wannop had answered that it didn’t matter. She was confident that she had arranged for everything. She was to be back to get lunch; her mother was to give an occasional look at Gertie Wilson in the garret; Hannah, the daily help, was to be told she could go for the day. It was of the highest importance that Hannah should not know that a completely strange young woman was asleep in the garret at eleven in the morning. If she did, the news would be all over the neighbourhood at once, and the police instantly down on them.

But Mrs. Wannop was a woman of business. If she heard of a reviewer within driving distance she called on him with eggs as a present. The moment the daily help had arrived, she had set out and walked to the rectory. No consideration of danger from the police would have stopped her; besides, she had forgotten all about the police.

Her arrival worried Mrs. Duchemin a good deal, because she wished all her guests to be seated and the breakfast well begun before the entrance of her husband. And this was not easy. Mrs. Wannop, who was uninvited, refused to be separated from Mr. Macmaster. Mr. Macmaster had told her that he never wrote reviews in the daily papers, only articles for the heavy quarterlies, and it had occurred to Mrs. Wannop that an article on her new book in one of the quarterlies was just what was needed. She was, therefore, engaged in telling Mr. Macmaster how
to
write about herself, and twice after Mrs. Duchemin had succeeded in shepherding Mr. Macmaster nearly to his seat, Mrs. Wannop had conducted him back to the embrasure of the window. It was only by sitting herself firmly in her chair next to Macmaster that Mrs. Duchemin was able to retain for herself this all-essential, strategic position. And it was only by calling out:

‘Mr. Horsley,
do
take Mrs. Wannop to the seat beside you and feed her,’ that Mrs. Duchemin got Mrs. Wannop out of Mr. Duchemin’s own seat at the head of the table, for Mrs. Wannop, having perceived this seat to be vacant and next to Mr. Macmaster, had pulled out the Chippendale arm-chair and had prepared to sit down in it. This could only have spelt disaster, for it would have meant turning Mrs. Duchemin’s husband loose amongst the other guests.

Mr. Horsley, however, accomplished his duty of leading away this lady with such firmness that Mrs. Wannop conceived of him as a very disagreeable and awkward person. Mr. Horsley’s seat was next to Miss Fox, a grey spinster, who sat, as it were, within the fortification of silver urns and deftly occupied herself with the ivory taps of these machines. This seat, too, Mrs. Wannop tried to occupy, imagining that, by moving the silver vases that upheld the tall delphiniums, she would be able to get a diagonal view of Macmaster and so to shout to him. She found, however, that she couldn’t, and so resigned herself to taking the chair that had been reserved for Miss Gertie Wilson, who was to have been the eighth guest. Once there she sat in distracted gloom, occasionally saying to her daughter:

‘I think it’s very bad management. I think this party’s very badly arranged.’ Mr. Horsley she hardly thanked for the sole that he placed before her; Tietjens she did not even look at.

Sitting beside Macmaster, her eyes fixed on a small door in the corner of a panelled wall, Mrs. Duchemin became a prey to a sudden and overwhelming fit of apprehension. It forced her to say to her guest, though she had resolved to chance it and say nothing:

‘It wasn’t perhaps fair to ask you to come all this way. You may get nothing out of my husband. He’s apt … especially on Saturdays… .’

She trailed off into indecision. It was possible that nothing might occur. On two Saturdays out of seven nothing
did
occur. Then an admission would be wasted; this sympathetic being would go out of her life with a knowledge that he needn’t have had – to be a slur on her memory in his mind… . But then, overwhelmingly, there came over her the feeling that, if he knew of her sufferings, he might feel impelled to remain and comfort her. She cast about for words with which to finish her sentence. But Macmaster said:

‘Oh, dear lady!’ (And it seemed to her to be charming to be addressed thus!) ‘One understands … one is surely trained and adapted to understand … that these great scholars, these abstracted cognoscenti …’

Mrs. Duchemin breathed a great ‘Ah!’ of relief. Macmaster had used the exactly right words.

‘And,’ Macmaster was going on, ‘merely to spend a short hour; a shallow flight … “As when the swallow gliding from lofty portal to lofty portal” … You know the lines … in these, your perfect surroundings… .’

Blissful waves seemed to pass from him to her. It was in this way that men should speak; in that way – steel-blue tie, true-looking gold ring, steel-blue eyes beneath black brows! – that men should look. She was half-conscious of warmth; this suggested the bliss of falling asleep, truly, in perfect surroundings. The roses on the table were lovely; their scent came to her.

A voice came to her:

‘You
do
do the thing in style, I must say.’

The large, clumsy, but otherwise unnoticeable being that this fascinating man had brought in his train was setting up pretensions to her notice. He had just placed before her a small blue china plate that contained a little black caviare and a round of lemon; a small Sèvres, pinkish, delicate plate that held the pinkest peach in the room. She had said to him: ‘Oh … a little caviare! A peach!’ a long time before, with the vague under-feeling that the names of such comestibles must convey to her person a charm in the eyes of Caliban.

She buckled about her her armour of charm; Tietjens was gazing with large, fishish eyes at the caviare before her.

‘How do you get
that
, for instance?’ he asked.

‘Oh!’ she answered: ‘If it wasn’t my husband’s doing it would look like ostentation. I’d find it ostentatious for myself.’ She found a smile, radiant, yet muted. ‘He’s trained Simpkins of New Bond Street. For a telephone message overnight special messengers go to Billingsgate at dawn for salmon, and red mullet, this, in ice, and great blocks of ice too. It’s such pretty stuff … and then by seven the car goes to Ashford Junction… . All the same, it’s difficult to give a breakfast before ten.’

She didn’t want to waste her careful sentences on this grey fellow; she couldn’t, however, turn back, as she yearned to do, to the kindredly running phrases – as if out of books she had read! – of the smaller man.

‘Ah, but it isn’t,’ Tietjens said, ‘ostentation. It’s the great Tradition. You mustn’t ever forget that your husband’s Breakfast Duchemin of Magdalen.’

He seemed to be gazing, inscrutably, deep into her eyes. But no doubt he meant to be agreeable.

‘Sometimes I wish I could,’ she said. ‘He doesn’t get anything out of it himself. He’s ascetic to unreasonableness. On Fridays he eats nothing at all. It makes me quite anxious … for Saturdays.’

Tietjens said:

‘I know.’

She exclaimed – and almost with sharpness:

‘You
know
!’

He continued to gaze straight into her eyes:

‘Oh, of course one knows all about Breakfast Duchemin!’ he said. ‘He was one of Ruskin’s road-builders. He was said to be the most Ruskin-like of them all!’

Mrs. Duchemin cried out: ‘Oh!’ Fragments of the worst stories that in his worst moods her husband had told her of his old preceptor went through her mind. She imagined that the shameful parts of her intimate life must be known to this nebulous monster. For Tietjens, turned sideways and facing her, had seemed to grow monstrous, with undefined outlines. He was the male, threatening, clumsily odious and external! She felt herself say to herself: ‘I will do you an injury, if ever …’ For already she had felt herself swaying the preferences, the thoughts and the future of the man on her other side. He was the male, tender, in-fitting; the complement of the harmony, the meat for consumption, like the sweet pulp of figs… . It
was
inevitable; it was essential to the nature of her relationship with her husband that Mrs. Duchemin should have these feelings… .

She heard, almost without emotion, so great was her disturbance, from behind her back the dreaded, high, rasping tones:

‘
Post coitum tristis!
Ha! Ha! That’s what it is?’ The voice repeated the words and added sardonically: ‘You know what
that
means?’ But the problem of her husband had become secondary; the real problem was: ‘What was this monstrous and hateful man going to say of her to his friend, when, for long hours, they were away?’

He was still gazing into her eyes. He said nonchalantly, rather low:

‘I wouldn’t look round if I were you. Vincent Macmaster is quite up to dealing with the situation.’

His voice had the familiarity of an elder brother’s. And at once Mrs. Duchemin knew – that
he
knew that already close ties were developing between herself and Macmaster. He was speaking as a man speaks in emergencies to the mistress of his dearest friend. He was then one of those formidable and to be feared males who possess the gift of right intuitions… .

Tietjens said: ‘You heard!’

To the gloating, cruel tones that had asked:

‘You know what that means?’ Macmaster had answered clearly, but with the snappy intonation of a reproving Don:

‘Of course I know what it means. It’s no discovery!’ That was exactly the right note. Tietjens – and Mrs. Duchemin too – could hear Mr. Duchemin, invisible behind his rampart of blue spikes and silver, give the answering snuffle of a reproved schoolboy. A hard-faced, small man, in grey tweed that buttoned, collar-like, tight round his throat, standing behind the invisible chair, gazed straight forward into infinity.

Tietjens said to himself:

‘By God! Parry! the Bermondsey light middle-weight! He’s there to carry Duchemin off if he becomes violent!’

During the quick look that Tietjens took round the table Mrs. Duchemin gave, sinking lower in her chair, a short gasp of utter relief. Whatever Macmaster was going to think of her, he thought now. He knew the worst! It
was
settled, for good or ill. In a minute she would look round at him.

Tietjens said:

‘It’s all right, Macmaster will be splendid. We had a friend up at Cambridge with your husband’s tendencies, and Macmaster could get him through
any
social occasion… . Besides, we’re all gentlefolk here!’

He had seen the Rev. Horsley and Mrs. Wannop both interested in their plates. Of Miss Wannop he was not so certain. He had caught, bent obviously on himself, from large, blue eyes, an appealing glance. He said to himself: ‘She must be in the secret. She’s appealing to me not to show emotion and upset the apple-cart! It is a shame that she should be here: a girl!’ and into his answering glance he threw the message: ‘It’s all right as far as this end of the table is concerned.’

But Mrs. Duchemin had felt come into herself a little stiffening of morale. Macmaster by now knew the worst; Duchemin was quoting snuffingly to him the hot licentiousness of the
Trimalchion
of Petronius; snuffling into Macmaster’s ear. She caught the phrase:
Festinans, puer calide
… . Duchemin, holding her wrist with the painful force of the maniac, had translated it to her over and over again… . No doubt, that too, this hateful man beside her would have guessed!

She said: ‘Of course we should be all gentlefolk here. One naturally arranges that… .’

Tietjens began to say:

‘Ah! But it isn’t so easy to arrange nowadays. All sorts of bounders get into all sorts of holies of holies!’

Mrs. Duchemin turned her back on him right in the middle of his sentence. She devoured Macmaster’s face with her eyes, in an infinite sense of calm.

Macmaster four minutes before had been the only one to see the entrance, from a small panelled door that had behind it another of green baize, of the Rev. Mr. Duchemin, and following him a man whom Macmaster, too, recognised at once as Parry, the ex-prize-fighter. It flashed through his mind at once that this was an extraordinary conjunction. It flashed through his mind, too, that it was extraordinary that anyone so ecstatically handsome as Mrs. Duchemin’s husband should not have earned high
preferment
in a church always hungry for male beauty. Mr. Duchemin was extremely tall, with a slight stoop of the proper clerical type. His face was of alabaster; his grey hair, parted in the middle, fell brilliantly on his high brows; his glance was quick, penetrating, austere; his nose very hooked and chiselled. He was the exact man to adorn a lofty and gorgeous fane, as Mrs. Duchemin was the exact woman to consecrate an episcopal drawing-room. With his great wealth, scholarship and tradition… . ‘Why then?’ went through Macmaster’s mind in a swift pinprick of suspicion, ‘isn’t he at least a dean?’

Mr. Duchemin had walked swiftly to his chair which Parry, as swiftly walking behind him, drew out. His master slipped into it with a graceful, sideways motion. He shook his head at grey Miss Fox who had moved a hand towards an ivory urn-tap. There was a glass of water beside his plate, and round it his long, very white fingers closed. He stole a quick glance at Macmaster, and then looked at him steadily with glittering eyes. He said: ‘Good-morning, doctor,’ and then, drowning Macmaster’s quiet protest: ‘Yes! Yes! The stethoscope meticulously packed into the top-hat and the shining hat left in the hall.’

The prize-fighter, in tight box-cloth leggings, tight whipcord breeches, and a short tight jacket that buttoned up at the collar to his chin – the exact stud-groom of a man of property, gave a quick glance of recognition to Macmaster and then to Mr. Duchemin’s back another quick look, raising his eyebrows. Macmaster, who knew him very well because he had given Tietjens boxing lessons at Cambridge, could almost hear him say: ‘A queer change this, sir! Keep your eyes on him a second!’ and, with the quick, light, tip-toe of the pugilist he slipped away to the sideboard. Macmaster stole a quick glance on his own account at Mrs. Duchemin. She had her back to him, being deep in conversation with Tietjens. His heart jumped a little when, looking back again, he saw Mr. Duchemin half raised to his feet, peering round the fortifications of silver. But he sank down again in his chair, and surveying Macmaster with an expression of cunning singular on his ascetic features, exclaimed: