The Eye of Love (11 page)

“Well, anyone been treating you rough?” persisted Mr Punshon.

Martha shook her head again.

“Myself, I'd as soon try getting rough with a young Pachyderm,” said Mr Punshon reflectively. “All right, I can take a hint.”

He pushed across a paper of fish-and-chips, as he always did if Martha dropped in while he was eating fish-and-chips, and Martha took the largest chip. It was delicious—so soused in vinegar that even licking the fingers afterwards made one cough. “Thank you very much,” said Martha. Then Mr Punshon got on with his work, and she got on with hers.

…“You bin robbin' a till and got the dicks after you?” enquired Mr Johnson.

“No,” said Martha.

“You might as well 'ave. You ain't bin back to that Chapel an' got a sense o' sin, I hope?”

“No,” said Martha, walking round on the pavement to look at Mr Johnson's face from the other side. It was part of his charm for her that he had two quite different profiles; yet somewhere in the middle they obviously joined …

“Any time you want, come and take my likeness,” offered Mr Johnson generously.

“Thank you very much,” said Martha.

Not even to these two friends could she unburden herself. To say she didn't like the new lodger would have been an over-simplification: and the true root of her malaise lay so deeply entwined with her inmost feelings, she couldn't bring it to light. Put briefly, while Martha didn't mind carrying up Mr Phillips' tray, to have to look at him and say Good morning represented the imposition of an alien will.

When Mr Gibson desired Martha to cease threading beads, Martha co-operated gladly—because she didn't want to thread beads. Mr Gibson preferring her out of sight, that suited Martha too. To a most unusual degree she had escaped the common fate of childhood, which is subjection. Now, however triflingly, she was subject to Mr Phillips.

It was unexpected. When Mr Punshon called Martha a young Pachyderm, the phrase was as apt as picturesque. Her thick-skinned stolidity impressed even acquaintances. (The kind Librarian called it unmistakable force of character.) Mr Phillips was by comparison a nonentity. Even his virtues were negative—he didn't rob the gas meter, et cetera. He had of course economics on his side, the economy of the little house in Alcock Road was now based on his weekly payments; but no one, seeing Mr Phillips tread so doucely in and out, would have guessed him the victor in any brush with a really strong, pachydermous character.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

1

The day of the missed chance, when Martha failed to see Mr Gibson, and Mr Gibson failed to see Martha, in Almaviva Place, happened also to be the date of the big official party to celebrate, and publicise, Mr Gibson's engagement to Miranda Joyce. There had been several smaller affairs before—little dinners for Harry to get to know people—but this was the gala. It was an evening entertainment of the highest class.

All the guests were very nice people indeed, many of them quite big names in the fur-trade. No poor relations of any sort had been invited. All the men were in evening-dress, and their ladies décolletées. Miranda sparkled in pale blue (her fiancé's favourite colour), pink carnations at the shoulder. There was a buffet-supper, with champagne.

Among all this splendour and festivity Harry Gibson moved, as his mother pointed out, like a man in a dream. His eye was a little glazed, his smile fixed like that of a man who has died smiling in the snow; he did not seem always to take in what was being said to him. When one of the biggest names of all, a man connected with the Hudson Bay Company, told him he remembered Mr Gibson senior, Harry said something quite obscure about Grand Duchesses; as to a lady who complimented Miranda's dress he said something about sea-horses; in each case however with such glazed politeness—matching his glazed eye—as to cause surprise rather than offence. It was still wise of old Mrs Gibson to keep close on his heels. “Like a man in a dream!” she repeated gaily. “My boy Harry is like a man in a dream! Do you know what he said to me, Mrs Conrad, Madame Grandjean, as he was dressing? When I brought him his white waistcoat, he said, ‘In Japan and India they too wear white!' My boy Harry, and why not, is completely in a dream!”

Fortunately neither Mrs Conrad nor Madame Grandjean had any more knowledge of the East than Mrs Gibson. A Mr Demetrios who had, and who knew white there to be the colour of mourning, fortunately didn't overhear. With his mother at his heels Harry Gibson circulated acceptably—a man in a dream.

Every now and again he found himself standing arm-in-arm with Miranda. They were generally in a circle of her unaffianced girl-friends. “You make my big Harry shy!” cried Miranda—adroit as his mother. “See how he loses his tongue! But Marion and Rachel and Denise I went to school with, Harry—there is no need to be frightened of them!”

They all gazed at him, Denise and Marion and Rachel, envyingly. Only a plump brunette with a bigger engagement-ring than Miranda's enquired, a trifle maliciously, why shouldn't he be frightened of them? Her Bobby was. Her Bobby had made her promise on a wet finger never to let a school-friend into their house … Mr Gibson shot this unknown sympathiser a grateful look; but it was his only indiscretion of the evening.

Admittedly he kept Miranda, after supper, rather long at the piano. (“So what?” demanded Harry Gibson of his mother, when she suggested a pause. “Are we to have musical evenings or aren't we?”) Old Mrs Gibson and Auntie Bee, swinging into their well-rehearsed routine, handled this too acceptably. (It was music first brought the children together, et cetera.) In short, the evening, like the evening two months earlier, might have passed off far worse. In the circles frequented by Miranda Joyce, it was generally agreed that she'd got hold of a bit of a stick-in-the-mud; she was also, generally, envied.

Old Mrs Gibson wore at this party a brand-new French grey velvet; draped skirt, passementerie about the bodice. It came from the dressmaker entrusted with Miranda's trousseau. So did Auntie Bee's charmeuse.

PART II

CHAPTER TWELVE

1

The first time Mr Phillips saw the sitting-room was on a Thursday night five weeks after his arrival in Alcock Road.

Dolores had never invited him in before. Why should she have? She had every reason not to: apart from her policy of keeping him at arm's length, the sitting-room was sacred ground, which even Martha was now discouraged from frequenting. Dolores spent every evening there alone, sipping tea, looking through old
Tatlers
, and thinking long rambling thoughts about Mr Gibson. Whatever object her eyes rested on set her off; every object was precious for that reason; and that Mr Gibson's eye had once so rested too, lent to each an added patina of almost unendurable beauty.

No wonder Mr Phillips had never seen the sitting-room. It was no ground to be profaned by a lodger's foot.

Dolores didn't precisely invite him, that Thursday. The whole episode was an accident. Mr Phillips notifying himself out to supper (also for the first time), to so excellent a tenant how could his landlady refuse the key? She could not; and upon his return at the moderate hour of ten Mr Phillips notified himself in again by tapping at the sitting-room door.

Dolores, on the settee, had kicked her shoes off. Before she could recover them, Mr Phillips tapped again. Sooner than pad to encounter him in her stockings—“Come in!” called Dolores; and so Mr Phillips entered.

2

He had not only never seen the sitting-room before, he had never seen anything like it.

A penurious youth in Manchester, a wide experience of third-rate London lodgings hadn't prepared him for the bowl of glass fruit lit up from inside. The social evening he'd just spent, with a married friend in a two-room flat, hadn't prepared him for the black cushions on the settee, or for the china pierrot with matches; still less for the bronze-and-ivory statuette. Wherever he looked, his eye rested on evidences of a luxury as astonishing as unexpected. If he'd found himself in the Throne Room of Buckingham Palace, Mr Phillips couldn't have been more startled.

“Is that the key? Thank you,” said Dolores—sitting up straighter, but otherwise without moving.

“I've slipped the latch,” muttered Mr Phillips.

His dazzled eye took in more and more: the high-class Rexine upholstery, the stuffed ermines in the gilt cabinet, the pierrette to match the pierrot … He still held the key in his hand.

“Thank you, you may put it down,” said Dolores.

Mr Phillips advanced an awkward pace towards the mother-o'-pearl table. Upon it stood Dolores' tea-things. But she didn't offer a cup to Mr Phillips—as an ordinary landlady might have done; she simply waited for him to go.

Mr Phillips took a last look round. His eye, as it catalogued each treasure, wasn't Martha's, still less Dolores'; it was nonetheless avid. He'd have particularly liked a closer look at the statuette …

“Good night,” said Dolores, dismissively.

3

That was all. Mr Phillips was in the sitting-room perhaps two minutes. It took him however nearly two hours to get to sleep. He heard eleven strike, and twelve; and even so shortly before dawn woke again and lit a cigarette.

It was his first lodgerly misdemeanour. All landladies hate their lodgers to smoke in bed, because of the risk to sheets, also a lodger frizzled alive (should the whole bed catch) means an inquest. Mr Phillips, hitherto of all lodgers the pearl, now reached for matches and cigarettes without a second thought, so confused in mind was he still.

The luxury of Miss Diver's private apartment had more than startled, it had staggered him. For all his wide experience of lodgings, he'd never before lodged in a house with such a room as that in it. In a house that let lodgings, it seemed … unnatural. To take the ornaments alone—what was that statue doing there? A bunch of dried grass would have been more the mark. Searching his memory, Mr Phillips recalled a couple of stuffed bullfinches: never a whole pack of stuffed ermines. (Ermine, good lord! The most expensive animal there was!) As for the bowl of glass fruit casting its multicoloured glow, it struck Mr Phillips as almost improper.

In fact the whole room struck him as a bit improper.

But this wasn't what struck him most. Summing his whole impression, he returned to his first thought of all, the thought that crossed his mind actually as he first contemplated (not with Martha's eye, not with Dolores') the sitting-room's astounding contents.

“There's been money spent,” thought Mr Phillips.

As he lay smoking and thinking this over, another point occurred to him, of which he'd been hitherto aware only subconsciously. All the curtains, in the house in Alcock Road, matched. They were all (he checked them over in his mind) pink. They were pink, he was pretty sure, even at the back. To an experienced lodger, this again was very striking.

“There's been money spent,” thought Mr Phillips.

His cigarette was only two-thirds smoked; but realising that at the moment he couldn't get much further, he economically cut off the end with his nail-scissors, blew down the butt, and once again composed himself for sleep.

4

The first time Mr Phillips assisted with the garbage-pail was on the Sunday morning following. Dolores, caught beside the dust-bin, wasn't altogether pleased. She knew her apron soiled and her makeup rudimentary; as a Spanish rose, she felt taken at a disadvantage. “Aren't you down very early?” she asked sharply. “By chance, I felt like a walk before dinner. That's too heavy for you,” returned Mr Phillips, seizing the pail with one hand and the dust-bin lid with the other. “Allow me!” Dolores recovered her poise—it was obviously impossible to start a tug-of-war—replied more affably that he was very kind. To her relief, he didn't appear to notice her undress …

Soon he was emptying the garbage quite regularly. Dolores left it outside the back door for him last thing at night, and he disposed of it before leaving each morning; and was allowed to wash his hands afterwards at the kitchen sink.

The only immediate result of this was that Martha, who was usually laying her own and Dolores' breakfast, at last noticed something about Mr Phillips' appearance. The back of his neck was grooved by two extraordinarily long, deep hollows, beginning behind the ears and disappearing into his collar: which by throwing his spinal column into unnatural prominence, made his head from behind look like a can stuck on a pole.

Dolores didn't mind Mr Phillips in the kitchen. It wasn't sacred ground; she had no feeling for it. She cooked and ate meals there, but never lingered—preferring her bed-chamber in the afternoon and at evening the sitting-room; and this suited Martha very well, because it gave her the kitchen-table to draw on undisturbed.

5

She drew regularly every afternoon, from about two till half-past five. She found she drew better, regularly. She got on.

This happy spell of intensive work nonetheless brought its problems. Martha was now using up a great deal of paper, and even had the supply of old envelopes been unlimited, which it was not, they were inconveniently small. No sort of paper abounded, in the house in Alcock Road, and she knew better than to ask Dolores to buy any specially. Martha would soon have been in serious straits, had she not fortunately discovered an important, and free, source of supply.

There was half-way along Praed Street a large and popular drapery establishment, whither Miss Diver occasionally sent her for a reel of cotton or a packet of needles. A more interesting department than the haberdashery offered nets, veilings and lace, which came wrapped around large sheets of thin white cardboard; and as these were emptied, they were thrown away.

Martha saw them being thrown away—a whole heap, kicked together on the floor behind a counter by a sales-lady's foot. It seemed impossible, but so it was.