The Complete Short Stories (37 page)

Now, she did not drink.
I saw her sipping barley water while her guests drank her gin. But Daisy had
danced the Charleston in her youth with a royal prince, and of this she assured
me several times, speaking with swift greed while an alcoholic look came over
her.

‘Those times were
divine,’ she boozily concluded, ‘they were ripping.’ And I realized she was
quite drunk with the idea. Normally as precise as a bird, she reached out
blunderingly for the cigarettes, knocking the whole lot over. Literature and
politics failed to affect her in this way, though she sat on many committees.
Therefore she had taken — it is her expression — two lovers: one an expert, as
she put it, on politics, and the other a poet.

The political expert,
Lotti, was a fair Central European, an exiled man. The skin of his upper lip
was drawn taut across his top jaw; this gave Lotti the appearance, together
with his high cheekbones, of having had his face lifted. But it was not so; it
was a natural defect which made his smile look like a baring of the teeth. He
was perhaps the best of the lot that I met at Daisy Overend’s.

Lotti could name each
member of every Western Cabinet which had sat since the Treaty of Versailles.
Daisy found this invaluable for her monthly column. Never did Lotti speak of
these men but with contempt. He was a member of three shadow cabinets.

On the Sunday which, as it turned out, was
my last day with Daisy, she laid aside her library book and said to Lotti:

‘I’m bored with Cronin.

Lotti, to whom all
statesmen were as the ash he was just then flicking to the floor, looked at her
all amazed.

‘Daisy, mei gurl, you
crazy?’ he said.

‘A Cronin!’ he said,
handing me an armful of air to convey the full extent of his derision. ‘She is
bored with a Cronin.’

At that moment, Daisy’s
vexed misunderstood expression reminded me that her other lover, the poet Tom
Pfeffer, had brought the same look to her face two days before. When, rushing
into the flat as was her wont, she said, gasping, to Tom, ‘Things have been
happening in the House.’ — Tom, who was reading the
Notebooks of Malte
Laurids Brigge,
looked up. ‘Nothing’s been happening in the house,’ he
assured her.

Tom Pfeffer is dead now.
Mrs Overend told me the story of how she rescued him from lunacy, and I think
Tom believed this. It is true she had prevented his being taken to a mental
home for treatment.

The time came when Tom
wanted, on an autumn morning, a ticket to Burton-on-Trent to visit a friend,
and he wanted this more than he wanted a room in Mrs Overend’s flat and regular
meals. In his own interests she refused, obliterating the last traces of
insurrection by giving Lotti six pound notes, clean from the bank, in front of
Tom.

How jealous Tom Pfeffer
was of Lotti, how indifferent was Lotti to him! But on this last day that I
spent with Mrs Overend, the poet was fairly calm, although there were signs of
the awful neurotic dance of his facial muscles which were later to distort him
utterly before he died insane.

Daisy was preparing for a party, the reason
for my presence on a Sunday, and for the arrival at five o’clock of her
secretary Miss Rilke, a displaced European, got cheap. When anyone said to
Daisy ‘Is she related to the poet Rilke?’ Daisy replied, ‘Oh, I should
think
so,’ indignant almost, that it should be doubted.

‘Be an angel,’ said
Daisy to Miss Rilke when she arrived, ‘run down to the cafe and get me two
packets of twenty. Is it still raining? How priceless the weather is. Take my
awning.’

‘Awning?’

‘Umbrella, umbrella,
umbrella,’
said Daisy, jabbing her finger at it fractiously.

Like ping-pong, Miss
Rilke’s glance met Lotti’s, and Lotti’s hers. She took the umbrella and went.

‘What are you looking
at?’ Daisy said quickly to Lotti.

‘Nothing,’ said Tom
Pfeffer, thinking he was being addressed and looking up from his book.

‘Not you,’ said Daisy.

‘Do you mean me?’ I
said.

‘No,’ she said, and kept
her peace.

Miss Rilke returned to
say that the shop would give Mrs Overend no more credit.

‘This is the end,’ said
Daisy as she shook out the money from her purse. ‘Tell them I’m livid.’

‘Yes,’ said Miss Rilke,
looking at Lotti.

‘What are you looking
at?’ Daisy demanded of her.

‘Looking at?’

‘Have you got the right
money?’ Daisy said.

‘Yes.’

‘Well, go.’

‘I think,’ said Daisy
when she had gone, ‘she’s a bit dotty owing to her awful experiences.’

Nobody replied.

‘Don’t you think so?’
she said to Lotti.

‘Could be,’ said Lotti.

Tom looked up suddenly. ‘She’s
bats,’ he hastened to say, ‘the silly bitch is bats.’

As soon as Miss Rilke
returned Daisy started becking and calling in preparation for her party. Her
papers, which lay on every plane surface in the room, were moved into her
bedroom in several piles.

The drawing-room was
furnished in a style which in many ways anticipated the members’ room at the
Institute of Contemporary Arts. Mrs Overend had recently got rid of her
black-and-orange striped divans, cushions and sofas. In their place were
curiously cut slabs, polygons, and three-legged manifestations of Daisy Overend’s
personality, done in El Greco’s colours. As Daisy kept on saying, no two pieces
were alike, and each was a contemporary version of a traditional design.

In her attempt to create
a Contemporary interior she was, I felt, successful, and I was quite dazzled by
its period charm. ‘A rare old Contemporary piece,’ some curio dealer, not yet
born, might one day aver of Daisy’s citrine settle or her blue glass-topped
telephone table, adding in the same breath and pointing elsewhere, ‘A genuine
brass-bracket gas-jet, nineteenth century…’ But I was dreaming, and Daisy was
working, shifting things, blowing the powdery dust off things. She trotted and
tripped amid the pretty jigsaw puzzle of her furniture, making a clean sweep of
letters, bills, pamphlets, and all that suggested a past or a future, with one
exception. This was the photograph of Daisy Overend, haughty and beplumed in
presentation dress, queening it over the Contemporary prospect of the
light-grey grand piano.

Sometimes, while placing
glasses and plates now here, now there, Daisy stopped short to take in the
effect; and at this sign we all of us did the same. I realized then how
silently and well did Daisy induce people to humour her. I discovered that the
place was charged on a high voltage with the constant menace of a scene.

‘I’ve put the papers on
your bed,’ said Miss Rilke from the bedroom.

‘Is
she
saying
something?’ said Daisy, as if it were the last straw.

‘Yes,’ said Miss Rilke
in a loud voice.

‘They are not to go on
my bed,’ replied Daisy, having heard her in the first place.

‘She’s off her head, my
dear,’ said the poet to his mistress, ‘putting your papers on your bed.’

‘Go and see what she’s
doing,’ said Daisy to me.

I went, and there found Miss Rilke moving
the papers off the bed on to the floor. I was impressed by the pinkness of
Daisy’s bedroom. Where on earth did she get her taste in pink? Now this was not
in the Contemporary style, nor was it in the manner of Daisy’s heyday, the 1920s.
The kidney-shaped dressing-table was tricked out with tulle, unhappy spoiled
stuff which cold cream had long ago stained, cigarettes burned, and various
jagged objects ripped. In among the folds the original colour had survived here
and there, and this fervid pink reminded me of a colour I had seen before, a
pink much loved and worn by the women of the Malay colony at Cape Town.

No, this was not a
bedroom of the twenties; it belonged, surely, to the first ten years of the
century: an Edwardian bedroom. But then, even then, it was hardly the sort of
room Daisy would have inherited, since neither her mother nor her grandmother
had kicked her height at the Gaiety. No, it was Daisy’s own inarticulate
exacting instinct which had bestowed on this room its frilly bed, its frilly
curtains, the silken and sorry roses on its mantelpiece, and its
all-but-perished powder-puffs. And all in pink, and all in pink. I did not
solve the mystery of Daisy’s taste in bedrooms, not then nor at any time. For,
whenever I provide a category of time and place for her, the evidence is in
default. A plant of the twenties, she is also the perpetrator of that vintage
bedroom. A lingering limb of the old leisured class, she is also the author of
that pink room.

I devoted the rest of
the evening to the destruction of Daisy’s party, I regret to say, and the
subversion of her purpose in giving it.

Her purpose was the usual thing. She had
joined a new international guild, and wanted to sit on the committee. Several
Members of Parliament, a director of a mineral-water factory, a
Brigadier-General who was also an Earl, a retired Admiral, some wives, a few
women journalists, were expected. In addition, she had asked some of her older
friends, those who were summoned to all her parties and whom she called her ‘basics’;
they were the walkers-on or the chorus of Daisy’s social drama. There was also
a Mr Jamieson, who was not invited but who played an unseen part as the
chairman of the committee. He did not want Mrs Overend to sit on his committee.
We were therefore assembled, though few guessed it, to inaugurate a campaign to
remove from office this Mr Jamieson, whose colleagues and acquaintances
presently began to arrive.

Parted from the
drawing-room by folding doors was an ante-room leading out of the flat. I was
put in charge of this room where a buffet had been laid. Here Daisy had
repaired, when dressing for the party, to change her stockings. It was her
habit to dress in every room in the house, anxiously moving from place to
place. Miss Rilke had been sent on a tour of the premises to collect the
discarded clothes, the comb, the lipstick from the various stations of Daisy’s
journey; but the secretary had overlooked, on a table in the centre of this
ante-room, a pair of black satin garters a quarter of a century old, each
bearing a very large grimy pink disintegrating rosette.

Just before the first
guests began to arrive, Daisy Overend saw her garters lying there.

‘Put those away,’ she
commanded Miss Rilke.

The Admiral came first.
I opened the door, while with swift and practised skill Daisy and Lotti began a
lively conversation, in the midst of which the Admiral was intended to come
upon them. Behind the Admiral came a Member of Parliament. They had never been
to the house before, not being among Daisy’s ‘basics.

‘Do come in,’ said Miss
Rilke, holding open the folding doors.

‘This way,’ said Tom
Pfeffer from the drawing-room.

The two guests stared at
the table. Daisy’s garters were still there. The Admiral, I could see, was
puzzled. Not knowing Daisy very well, he thought, no doubt, she was eccentric.
He tried to smile. The political man took rather longer to decide on an
attitude. He must have concluded that the garters were not Daisy’s, for next I
saw him looking curiously at me.

‘They are not mine,’ I
rapidly said, ‘those garters.’

‘Whose are they?’ said
the Admiral, drawing near.

‘They are Mrs Overend’s
garters,’ I said, ‘she changed her stockings in here.’

Now the garters had
never really been serviceable; even now, with the help of safety pins, they did
not so much keep Daisy’s stockings, as her spirits up, for she liked them. They
were historic in the sense that they had at first, I suppose, looked merely
naughty. In about five years they had entered their most interesting, their
old-fashioned, their lewd period. A little while, and the rosettes had begun to
fray: the decadence. And now, with the impurity of those to whom all things
pertaining to themselves are pure, Daisy did not see them as junk, but as part
of herself, as she had cause to tell me later.

The Admiral walked warily into the
drawing-room, but the Member of Parliament lingered to examine a picture on the
wall, one eye on the garters. I was, I must say, tempted to hide them somewhere
out of sight. More people were arriving, and the garters were causing them to
think. If only for this reason, it was perhaps inhospitable to leave them so
prominently on the table.

I resisted the
temptation. Miss Rilke had suddenly become very excited. She flew to open the
door to each guest, and, copying my tone, exclaimed:

‘Please to excuse the
garters. They are the garters of Mrs Overend. She changed her stockings in
here.’

Daisy, Daisy Overend! I
hope you have forgotten me. The party got out of hand. Lotti was not long in
leaving the relatively sedative drawing-room in favour of the little room where
Daisy’s old basics were foregathered. These erstwhile adherents to the Young
Idea, arriving in twos and threes, were filled with a great joy on hearing Miss
Rilke’s speech:

‘Please to excuse those
garters which you see. They are the garters of Mrs Overend…’

But there was none more
delighted than Lotti.

It was some minutes
before the commotion was heard by Daisy in the drawing-room, where she was
soliciting the bad will of a journalist against Mr Jamieson. Meanwhile, the
ante-room party joined hands, clinked glasses and danced round Lotti who held
the garters aloft with a pair of sugar tongs. Tom Pfeffer so far forgot himself
as to curl up with mirth on a sofa.

I remember Daisy as she
stood between the folding doors in her black party dress, like an infolded
undernourished tulip. Behind her clustered her new friends, slightly offended,
though prepared to join in the spirit of the thing, whatever it should be.
Before her pranced the old, led by Lotti in a primitive mountain jig. The sugar
tongs with the garters in their jaws Lotti held high in one hand, and with the
other he plucked the knee of his trouser-leg as if it were a skirt.