The Daffodil Sky (6 page)

‘That suit of course! You're never coming down in that suit!'

Mr Clavering, who could see nothing wrong with his suit, began to go upstairs whistling. Mrs Clavering rushed suddenly past him, remembering she had turned on the bath water. This gave him an opportunity of saying that on second thoughts he would have a quick snifter before the herd arrived, but Mrs Clavering leaned swiftly over the banisters and called:

‘No! Absolutely and utterly not. No snifters. If you want to do something useful see that the lights are switched on in the drive——' She was bullying him with affection, and he succumbed.

Some minutes later, as he switched the lights on in the long paved drive that led under canopies of frosted beech boughs up to the front door of the house, he saw that darkness had fallen completely. The lamps set all the low weeping boughs glistening delicately under cold blue air. He stood for a moment watching the sparkling wintry lace of frosted twigs. He thought how cold and dark and isolated the garden beyond them seemed, and he thought of the billiard room of the Invicta Club, where light was coned above green warm tables in a soft silence broken only by men's voices and the clock
of snooker balls. He did not really care much for country life. The house was really too big and too expensive and too difficult to keep up; there was always the tiresome problem of servants who did not want to stay. It was only for his wife's sake that he kept it up. He was easygoing. She was fond of it all; she liked the country society.

‘Isn't there any gin?' he said to the caterers' men in the sitting-room.

‘Only the white wine, Sir,' they told him, and he said ‘Good God! Wine?' and then recognised that it was another idea of his wife's designed to make the party different, to elevate and keep up its tone. He was amused by this, and decided to try a glass of the wine. It was a delicate light green in colour, and he thought it seemed insipid, all taste frozen out of it, and after drinking half a single frosted glass he went off to grope in the dining-room cellarette for the gin, but the usual bottle was not there, and with tolerant amusement he realised his wife had probably hidden it away.

By soon after six o'clock a dozen people were standing about in stiff cold groups in the too large hall, grasping chilled glasses of wine with chilly fingers. The owl-like eyes of the dropsical, spectacled Miss Hemshawe and her mother prowled to and fro, searching all newcomers. The Reverend Perks and his elder brother arrived, looking like two pieces of scraped shin-bone with a little beef left on, red and fierce at the edges of their ears and noses. Mrs Clavering fluttered. Some conversation went on in subdued tones, and the caterers' men advanced with trays of wine-glasses and coloured fish-bright snippets of food, eagerly seized upon by the
Reverend Perks and then earnestly recommended by his brother to Miss Graves and Miss Ireton, who were clad in sheep's wool in the form of large net-like scarves of an indeterminate shade of pink, like faded blotting paper.

Soon there was a clucking everywhere, as Mr Clavering said, of busy hens. There was even, in the clink of glasses, a sound of pecking in the air. Presently the hall began to be very full; people overflowed into the dining-room; and Mr Clavering found he could not see everybody, or keep track of everybody, at once. The wine seemed to him horribly cold and insipid and he hid his glass behind a vase of lilac without noticing what the sprays of naked blossom were.

Then his wife came to whisper with despair that it was nearly seven o'clock and that neither the Paul Vaulkhards nor the Perigos nor the Blairs had arrived.

‘All the best people arrive last,' he said, and then looked across bubbling mole-hills of hats and heads to see Mrs Battersby standing on the threshold.

Mrs Battersby looked outraged and stunned. Her eye sockets seemed to have lost their pupils and looked like two dark empty key-holes. Mr Clavering saw that this sightless stare of dark outrage was directed at Freda O'Connor. Until that moment he had not noticed her. Now he saw that her slender skimmed figure, looking taller than ever, was bound tightly in a long skirt of black silk, with a brief bodice of white from which her bust protruded with enforced and enlarged distinction. She was talking to Colonel Arber, who was not very tall and had the advantage of not needing to alter the
level of his protuberant watery eyes in order to appraise the parts of her that interested him most. Freda O'Connor looked casual and hungry and languidly, glamorously indifferent. Her body lacked the cohesive charm of Mrs Battersby's, but it seemed instead to flame. Mrs Battersby melted away somewhere into another room. Colonel Arber took another glass of wine, holding it at the trembling level of Freda O'Connor's bosom, and seemed as if about to speak with husky passion of something. He guffawed instead, and the conversation was of horses.

Gradually Mr Clavering felt that he had seen everybody. The rooms were impossibly, clamorously full. The Perigos, the Blairs, the Luffingtons had all arrived. A sound of cracked trumpets came from the turn of the baronial staircase, echoing into wall displays of copper cooking-pans, where Dr Pritchard was telling what Mr Clavering thought were probably obstetric stories to Miss Ireton and Miss Graves, who gazed at him with a kind of rough fondness, half-masculine. Dr Pritchard had an inexhaustible fund of stories drawn from the fountains of illegitimacy and the shallows of infidelity that he liked to tell for the purpose, most often, of cheering women patients waiting in labour. But maiden ladies liked them too, and sometimes pressed him to tell one rather more
risqué
than they had heard before. In consequence something infectious seemed to float from the foot of the staircase, filling the room with light and progressive laughter.

‘I want you, I want you!' Mrs Clavering whispered. ‘The Paul Vaulkhards are here!'

He found himself joined to her by the string of a single forefinger that led him through the crowd of
guests to where, in a corner, the Paul Vaulkhards and their niece were waiting.

Mr Vaulkhard was tall and white, and, as Mrs Clavering had hoped, as distinguished as a statue. Mrs Clavering fluttered about him, making excited note of his subdued dove-blue waistcoat, so much more elite than red or yellow, and thought that Mr Clavering must have one too. Mrs Vaulkhard had the loose baggy charm of a polite pelican covered in an Indian shawl of white and gold.

‘Let me introduce my niece,' she said. ‘Miss Dufresne. Olivia.'

Charming, distinguished name, Mrs Clavering thought; and almost before Mr Clavering had time to shake hands she said:

‘Would you look after Miss Dufresne? I'm going to positively drag Mr and Mrs Paul Vaulkhard away—that is if they don't mind being dragged. Do you mind being dragged?' She gave a spirited giggle of excuse and excitement and then dragged the Vaulkhards away.

A young dark face looked out from, as it seemed to Mr Clavering, a crowd of swollen, solid cabbages. It had something of the detachment of a petal that did not belong there. He took from a passing tray a glass of wine and held it out to her, conscious of curious feelings of elevated lightness, of simplification. Out of the constricted clamour of voices he was aware of a core of silence about her that was absorbing and tranquil.

‘Are you here for long?' he said. ‘Do you like the country?'

‘No to one,' she said. ‘Yes to the other.'

He said something about being glad about one thing
and not the other, but a small cloudburst of conversational laughter split the room, drowning what he had to say, and she said:

‘I'm terribly sorry, but I couldn't hear what you were saying.'

‘Let's move a little,' he said.

He steered her away through the crowd, watching her light figure. She leaned by the wall at last, sipping her wine and looking at him.

‘I don't know that it's any quieter,' he said. ‘Perhaps we should lip-read?'

She laughed, and he said:

‘Really instead of standing here I ought to take you round and introduce you. Is there anyone you know?'

‘No.'

‘Is there anyone you'd like to know?'

‘What do you think?' she said.

She gave him an engaging delicate smile, brief, almost nervous, and he felt that it was possibly because she was young and not sure of herself. He looked about the room, at the groups of cabbage heads. And suddenly he decided that he did not want to introduce her. He wanted instead to keep her, to isolate her for a little while, letting her remain a stranger.

‘Haven't you ever been here before?' he said.

‘No.'

‘And you really like the country?'

‘I love it. I think it's beautiful.'

Mr Clavering felt himself appraise the tender, uplifted quality of her voice.

‘I think everything's beautiful,' the girl said.

‘Everything?'

‘The lilac,' she said, ‘for instance. That's marvellously beautiful.'

‘Lilac?'

Absurd of him, he thought, not to have noticed the lilac.

‘I noticed it as soon as I came in,' she said. ‘I love white things. Don't you? White flowers. I love snow and frost on the boughs and everything like that.'

At this moment Mr Clavering noticed for the first time that her dress was white too. Frilled about the neck, simply and tastefully, it too had a frosty appearance. It seemed almost to embalm her young body in a cloud of rime.

‘What masses of people,' she said. ‘What a marvellous party.'

‘Are you at school?' he said.

‘Me? School?' She gave, he thought, a little petulant toss of the wine glass as she lifted it to her mouth and sipped at it swiftly. ‘Oh! don't say that. Don't say I still look like a schoolgirl. Do I?'

‘No,' he said.

Across the room Major Battersby laughed, for the fourth or fifth consecutive time, like a buffalo.

‘Who is the man who laughs so much?' she said.

He told her. Battersby was with Freda O'Connor and Mrs Bonnington and Colonel Arber. The factions had begun to split up. He felt he would not have been surprised to hear from the Battersby group a succession of whinnies instead of laughter. Occasionally Colonel Arber bared his teeth and Freda O'Connor tossed her hair back from her neck and throat like a mane.

‘Have you a nice garden?' she said.

Yes, he supposed the garden was nice. He supposed it was pleasant. He thought if anything there were too many trees. It was a bore getting people to work in it nowadays and sometimes he would have preferred a house with a good solid courtyard of concrete all round.

‘I love gardens,' she said. ‘Especially gardens like yours with big old trees. I love it at night when you see the car lights on the boughs and then on the very dark trees. It looks so mysterious and wonderfully like old legends and that sort of thing. Don't you think so?'

‘Yes,' he said. He had never given the slightest thought to the fact that his garden was mysterious with old legends. ‘I suppose so.'

‘Oh! It's lovely just to watch people,' she said. ‘Marvellous to wonder who they are——'

Her remark coincided with a thought of his own that his house was full of jibbering monkeys. The rooms were strident with people clamouring with jibberish, sucking at glasses, trying to shout each other down. There was nothing but jibberish everywhere.

‘I just love to stand here,' she said. ‘I just love to wonder what's in their minds.'

Great God, he thought. Minds? As if hoping for an answer to it all he stared into the glittering, mocking confusion of faces and smoke and glassiness. Minds? He saw that Mrs Battersby had got together her own faction, joining herself with the Perigos and a woman named Mrs Peele, who smoked cigarettes from a long ivory holder, and a man named George Carter, who managed kennels for her at which you could buy expensive breeds of dachshunds. There was something of the piquant dachshund broodiness in the face of Mrs
Peele. She was short in the body, with eyes darkly encased in coils of premature wrinkles, and the long cigarette holder gave her a grotesque touch of being top-heavy. There was no doubt that Mrs Peele and George Carter lived together, just as there was no doubt that the dachshunds were much too expensive for anybody to buy.

‘Oh! it's fascinating to watch,' the girl said. ‘Don't you think so?'

A waiter tried to push his way past with a tray of snippets. With guilt Mr Clavering remembered that he had offered her nothing to eat.

‘Please take something,' he said.

‘Oh! yes, may I? I'm famished. Do you think wine makes you hungry?' She took several fish-filled cases while the waiter stood by, and then a moon-like round of egg. ‘I adore egg,' she said. ‘Don't you?' and when he did not answer simply because he felt there could be no answer:

‘Am I talking too much? I'm not, am I? But the wine gives me a feeling of being gay.'

Through smoke-haze he saw his wife, pride-borne and fussy with anxiety, steering the Paul Vaulkhards from, as it were, customer to customer, as if they were sample goods for which you could place an order.

I ought to circulate too, he thought, and then found himself grasping the mild limp dropsical hand of a slightly flushed Miss Hemshawe, who with her mother had come to say good-bye. They must be toddling, Miss Hemshawe said, and under a guise of passiveness gave him a look of unresolved curiosity, because he had been talking for so long a time, alone, to so young a girl.

‘Good-bye, Mr Clavering,' they fussed. ‘Good-bye. Good-bye.'

‘Sweet,' the girl said. She grinned as if the facial distortions of Miss Hemshawe and her mother, toothsome and expansive in farewell, were a secret only she and himself could share.

‘Yes,' he said, and he knew that now he had only to be seen touching her hand, placing himself an inch or so nearer the frothy delicate rime of her dress, for someone like Miss Hemshawe to begin to build about him too a legend to which he had never given a thought.