Sunflower (17 page)

Having found a place for his glass he started work on her. He flashed his eyes at her and raised the corners of his mouth in an expression of lustfulness, that was evidently, from a certain mechanical quality about it, part of the etiquette he always observed when meeting a lady. ‘And for different reasons I feel as if I knew this charming friend of yours here!’ He did not seem abashed when the introduction he waited for did not come. She gazed at him in amazement and perceived suddenly that he was drunk. The curious, flickering, restless impression he gave was due to a constant succession of fine muscular adjustments he was making to compensate for the waves of unsteadiness that passed over him; all the time he was shifting his weight from one foot to another, or laying a finger ever so lightly on the mantelpiece, or resting his knee against an armchair. With his slim, jockeyish body he was riding his intoxication as if it were a horse. She thought that perhaps his condition was the cause of his indifference to rebuff; but also it seemed to her that there was an adamantine core to him, which would never get drunk no matter how sodden the rest of him might be, which was inaccessible to ordinary notions of honour and dignity as it was to drunkenness, which might not improbably decide after experiment that the most disarming way to take an insult was buffoonery. She felt a flash of pride in Essington. She wished she could get away from this horrid man, but he was standing right in front of her, thrusting out his nutcracker chin under one of his too tightly sprung smiles, and speaking unctuously into her face. ‘I’ve no hesitation in telling you to your face that I’m right pleased to meet the woman who’s known as the most beautiful woman in the world, for I don’t expect that a true woman, and I can see that you are a true woman, will be ashamed of being known that way. ‘Tis not human to be ashamed of your distinction. I’ll not conceal from you that I’m proud of mine. It’s the fashion to laugh at titles nowadays, but I’m proud of mine. Yes, I’m proud of my baronetcy. And, dear lady, will you tell me that I have no right to be? I’m one of the only two baronets in whose patent of nobility it is written that the honour was conferred because of “exceptional services”—“exceptional services”, mark you, “rendered to England in time of war.” What man’s going to be ashamed of that, I ask you, dear lady? Proud I was to serve my country, though I’m Irish. Old Irish, we are, though for a generation or two the family has been settled in Liverpool. Twelve of us there were,’ he said, beaming at her with a face suddenly grown soft in contemplation of the domestic virtues, ‘and all double-jointed.’

He lifted up his hands, which had more character than most hands, since they were exquisitely shaped, dark brown with sunburn, grained and horny like shagreen, and adorned, even over-dressed, with gleaming rose-pink nails; and, awed by his inconsequence as one is bound to be by any quality when carried to an infinite degree, they watched him while he bent back each finger with a loud crack. Fortunately he lost interest at the middle finger of his second hand, and basked again in the sun of sentiment. ‘Yes, twelve of us there were, and I’ve given all of them that grew up, for I lost a dear little sister, sweet little Bridget, when she was twelve years old, God rest the little angel, I was saying I’d given all the others enough to rub along on, yes, enough to rub along on. I’ve not been forgetful. Only the week before last I gave my dear old mother one of the largest hotels in Paris. Nobody can say I haven’t been a good son to my old mother, ever since I struck it lucky in California.’ He turned about and faced Essington, putting on the unnatural ecstasy of a man in an advertisement. ‘There’s where I met our good friend Francis. Ah, he’s a fine fellow, our Francis! I can tell you that. We had our rough times together when we were finding our feet out there, and I saw the worst and the best of him, and let me tell you the worst of him is better than the most of us, and the best is something that brings tears to my eyes. And, by God, he is loyal to his friends.’ Shaking his head tenderly, he lifted his glass from the mantelpiece, found that a drop had collected in the bottom of it, gulped it, and remarked absently, ‘Yes, I’ve always been a good son to my old mother.’ His eyes roved towards Sunflower, his face, which seemed beginning to fall to pieces, pulled itself up into that polite and mechanical look of lustfulness, and he said to Essington in a flattering manner, ‘Ah, I’m like you. I like a woman who looks like a woman …’

Essington’s long hands motioned her to go at once. She turned and went towards the window. Sir John called after her. ‘Yes, go and say a word to my little daughter Billie. Get her to show you the diamond ring her father’s given her for her birthday. I have five beautiful daughters—Billie, Rhoda, Fay, Myrtle, and—ah, I was forgetting—and my little Fay. And I grudge them nothing …’

As her father spoke her name the girl in the chair opened her speedwell blue eyes and lifted her tousled golden hair, so Sunflower had to go to her. She sat down beside her in a higher chair and murmured a greeting. She was all of a tremble. She hadn’t liked Sir John Murphy at all. He might think he was paying compliments, but it was like having your face licked.

The girl did not return her greeting, but looked at her for a minute in a hard, rather hostile way before she spoke. ‘I’ve seen you at the Embassy sometimes with Maxine Tempest at lunch.’

‘Why, yes, we do go sometimes,’ said Sunflower. ‘She’s my best friend. She’s a sweet girl.’

‘Hm,’ said the girl, disagreeably and portentously. Sunflower saw that she too was drunk. Her golden head was nodding, her blue eyes were vacillating, like buttercups and speedwells swung by the stream in a flooded water-meadow.

Sunflower exclaimed, ‘Oh!’ She wished she could have got the girl some coffee. It was difficult in someone else’s house.

The girl said, as if making conversation with a bore: ‘We’ve been out seeing Ted Dawkins training at his quarters at St Albans.’ As Sunflower looked enquiringly she explained irritably, ‘Oh, the heavyweight! He’s fighting Larodier at Olympia on the third of June. I thought everybody knew that!’ She flung herself back into the chair, and shut her eyes again. ‘I’ve got such a head,’ she grumbled. ‘Dawkins’ manager gave us a new long drink of his. The Tired Tart’s Refresher, it’s called. Filthy stuff.’

‘I’ve got an aspirin in my bag,’ said Sunflower.

It didn’t seem right that the poor thing should wash it down with another cocktail from the vast shaker, which her own father must have left at her elbow. Sunflower looked for help towards the two men, but Sir John was describing with gestures how he had once saved someone’s life with a lasso, and Essington was looking at him with the expression of a cat which sees a bird too wet and muddy for its fastidious claws to kill. She looked back at the girl and found her staring shakily at Essington with a tipsy, exaggerated smile of contempt. For a minute she closed her eyes, but opened them again and said, as if she must find a vent for her scorn, ‘I’ve seen you with him too.’ She jerked her head at Essington. ‘At the Berkeley and places. I suppose you think he’s wonderful.’ She laughed bitterly. ‘Well, you should have heard Canterton this afternoon while we were at St Albans. Showing him up. Saying what rot all this business about the League of Nations was. Nature red in tooth and claw. Oh, he was
brilliant
…’

She drained her glass, drew her hand across her mouth, which had become loose, leaned forward, and tapped Sunflower on the knee. ‘Now, there is a really great man, Canterton!’

‘I’m sure,’ said Sunflower.

‘Marvellous memory. Read everything. The other night he sat in the Embassy reciting Keats till three in the morning. Made me cry. Far the best speaker they’ve ever had in Parliament. Making a most marvellous success of his ministry.’ She glared at Sunflower, trying to make her little flower-like face as much like a bulldog’s muzzle as possible. ‘Essington’s a failure.’

‘Well, he is and he isn’t,’ said Sunflower, ‘it all depends on the way you look at it.’

But the girl had dropped back into her chair again and closed her eyes. ‘My head does hurt,’ she grumbled.

‘I’ve another aspirin, if you’d like it.’

‘It’s no use,’ refused the girl crossly. ‘I wish I could be sick, but I never can.’

On the other side of the room Sir John cried, ‘Ah, my dear Francis!’

So she had been right when she had guessed outside that something awful had happened in this house. He had been shocked, shocked right out of that thorough clumsy neatness, which she suddenly perceived, now that she was faced with its absence, to be piteous and lovable, since it was a defence he had built between his odd appearance and the world. His fox-coloured hair was wild about his ears; his shirt-front was bulging so that his queer lion body looked more top-heavy than ever; even his features seemed not so tidy as they had been, for his mouth was gaping in amazement. It was as if a violent emotion had been thrown over him like a jugful of water. There must be something terrible, something terrible. When he tried to give all these people he found in his room a general greeting he could not lift his face into a smile, for the strong anguish in him had moulded it into a heavy mask, a massive symbol. He was uglier than ever, the poor dear, for he was thrusting out his lower lip and stiffening his upper, like a child trying not to cry, and this made the creases between his nose and his mouth prodigiously heavy, like folds in a rhinoceros’s hide. That look he had had of vigilant, missionary mockery, watching life lest it crystallised into seriousness and had to be set moving again with laughter, had gone as completely as his neatness. His defences had failed, he wore instead the astonished look of a captive who right up to the moment of capture had believed in his luck. It had been his intention to have his life lit only by such flames as the azaleas that were set in the four corners of the room, and there had come on him this fire that had burned him till his flesh was ashen. Puck might have looked like this if he had stayed out in open country too long after dawn, been snared by mortals, christened though he kicked, and forcibly acquainted with human grief. At his sorrow something came alive in her. She got up to go across the room and comfort him.

She stopped because he had seen her. He had seen her and he had been enormously interested. His interest ran through him like an electric shock, jerking his chin up from his shirt-front, lifting his loose eyelids. He looked straight at her, and it was as if he had shoved in front of her for her signature a printed statement that she had risen to come and comfort, because he wanted to keep forever a record of her kindness to him. Helplessly she looked back at him, and it was as if she had signed that statement, and would never be able to go back on it now. Well, she was not ashamed. If a person was in trouble you wanted to do what you could for them. Nevertheless she began to blush. It was the second time that she had blushed in his company, one of her awful blushes which could be seen a mile off, which ended by travelling right down over her shoulders. She drooped her head and felt a fool, lifted it again and smiled as foolishly at the top of the walls, at the bowls of roses on the bookshelves. But of course he did something kind about it and stopped looking at her immediately, and busied himself with greeting Essington and Sir John. Of course she had been wrong in her moment of resentful feeling that though it was subtlety he had been displaying he had forced her to take notice of the display with a compulsive gesture that was the very opposite of subtle, that was bullying and detective. Really he was the soul of protectiveness. He gave her quite a lot of time to get right before he ranged the men one on each side of him with an authoritative gesture of his pawlike hands and crossed the room towards the women.

To her he said heavily, ‘I
am
very glad you have not disappointed me,’ and then looked down on the girl who was stirring stupidly in the deep armchair, wanting to get up but having so much trouble shifting her glass from her right hand to her left that she could not give her mind to it. His eyebrows drew together and his lips tightened. He was evidently surprised and grieved to see that she was drunk. But he said kindly, as if to a child, ‘And how are you, Billie?’ Probably he did not know these horrid people at all well, but was just nice to them when they pushed in on him. She knew what it was. Often enough people she hardly knew pretended to be great friends of hers and rushed at her when they met, and really it was very hard to know what to do.

‘Me dear Francis!’ answered Sir John. ‘How goes it?’

‘Badly, Jack,’ answered Francis, shaking his head, ‘badly.’

‘Now isn’t that truly tragic, truly tragic!’ continued Sir John, happily and expansively. ‘I just had to come up and see how you were. I said to Billie, “I shan’t be able to eat my dinner till I know how Frank is,” and she believed me, for she knows her dad. It’s you I’m feeling for, my lad, more than him. Ah you’ve a great gift for friendship, Francis Pitt! And I always say so too. For I myself can stick up for my friends.’

‘That I know well!’ said Francis Pitt.

The girl blurted out, “S’pose it’s hopeless?’

There was sweat on his forehead. He moistened his lips before he answered patiently, ‘Why, yes, Billie, that’s what they say. It’s hopeless.’ He was evidently schooling himself to speak without expression, lest he should seem to be rebuking this poor tipsy child for the tactlessness that was caused by her condition.

‘Well, me dear boy,’ rattled on Sir John, his iron will keeping him to the matter of condolence, though his drunkenness was dissolving him into a confusion of glittering, unaimed smiles and springy, happy, wavering movements. ‘I’m sure nobody in God’s own world could be doing more for him than you are. Well I do know it. I was telling Thurston and Laidlaw so at lunch at the Savoy today, I was saying to them, “If there’s a way of saving him depend on it my old friend Francis Pitt will find it.” Yes, that’s what I said to them. I said, “I have known Francis Pitt since the old days in San Francisco, and let me tell you …” ’

There seemed no reason why conversation based on this formula should ever come to an end. Not knowing what had happened to him was making her feel faint. She would have turned aside from the group had she not been anxious to prove to him that though she had been so silly and impulsive the first time they met she was really as calm and collected as anybody who wasn’t on the stage, who wasn’t living with somebody they weren’t married to. So she stood smiling politely, though every moment made it less easy. It struck her that now Francis Pitt was speaking to Murphy his American accent became much more marked than it had been when he talked with her and Essington, and that made her realise sharply how little she knew of his past, and that lots of people, some of them quite horrid people like Murphy, had shared in it and would know more than she ever would even if she got to know him quite well and he told her everything. She was annoyed to notice that Murphy also was speaking with a stronger American accent than he had used before Francis Pitt had come. These two wrought upon each other, they gave each other responses, there was a real comradeship. That was dreadful, because Murphy was a really bad man. It was loathsome the way that as he was talking to Francis Pitt he kept on patting and pawing him with insincere gestures of affection which distressed the eye with their falsity as a note sung out of tune distresses the ear. They were exactly the kind of gestures that she had made when she first went on the stage, that Essington was always saying she still made, that she would perhaps make as often as he had pretended had she not remembered what old Frederick Turner had taught her. He had always said that no gesture was valid unless when it was exaggerated it led straight to the climax of the emotion it was meant to illustrate. If a gesture of hate were really appropriate it should, performed with violence, become the motion of a blow or a dagger-thrust or a strangle-hold, and a gesture of love should bring friends side by side or man and woman breast to breast. But if these movements of false goodfellowship had been exaggerated absolutely nothing would happen. The two men would simply have toppled to and fro like those Russian skittle-shaped dolls that are weighted with lead in their feet, if Sir John had put all his force into clapping his left hand on Francis Pitt’s shoulder and Francis Pitt had put all his into clapping his right hand on Sir John’s upper arm …