To the North (17 page)

For his part, Julian had been surprised to see Emmeline— particularly straight, slight and beautiful in a green dress— sitting down opposite Markie. He had had no idea of all this. With a very solid respect for the young man’s ability, impressed—though he never knew quite how agreeably—by the amount of noise Markie made and his personal vigour, Julian discounted a good deal else that one heard: he was always amused to meet Markie. All the same, he did seem an odd companion for Emmeline. Emmeline had, moreover, told Julian she never lunched out on week-days as this kept her too long away from the office: he could not believe her to be disingenuous. To-day must be an exception—from her look and air, her absorption, the exception was radiant.

“Whom,” said his sister plaintively, “do you keep looking at?”

Julian explained that Markie was one of our coming young men: raising her lorgnettes his sister looked carefully. “He looks to me more dissipated than anything.”

“He lives hard and works hard: I couldn’t do it.”

“I shouldn’t advise you to try; it would not agree with you. Who is the girl?”

“A Miss Summers.”

“Oh, your friend’s daughter?”

“No, Bertha. I told you, she has no daughters of any kind.”

Returning the lorgnette a moment to Markie’s table his sister said with distaste: “They seem very much in love.”

With a shock, Julian realised that this was true.

The shock was startling, an utter exclusion from something, a door slammed in his face. He did not know what he had lost, not Cecilia: there was no question of losing Emmeline. This tete-a-tete with his sister, this mournful association with her in gloom and impotence, as though before birth, by some unkind twist in heredity, they had both been shanghaied together, drove home like a stake through his heart the idea of solitude. Catching a tone of Bertha’s, marking her slow movements, he had a sense of unseemly familiarity with himself, as though chained opposite a mirror… . Had Cecilia appeared in the place opposite, he would have besought her clemency with a kind of fury, sent out for roses, touched her fingers across the table. No living contact seemed ever to have been his own. Those tears of chagrin she shed, last week in the bright sunset, glittered terribly in his memory: her vexation transmuted itself to a kind of terror: from what advance of the cold and dark in him had she stepped back? Less in desire than desperation he clung in thought to her warm and sensuous hand.

“That is not a young man,” Bertha said, “
I
should like to send any girl about with. She looks quite young.”

“Oh really, Bertha, I think you’re a little arbitrary.”

“No doubt times change… .” There descended once more upon her, like more gauze veils, an absolute lack of interest. “What is this?” she said, “turbot?”

“Turbot.”

Bertha liked the turbot, which was not at all rich. Radishes had not impaired her appetite: a brief pause suspended the pricking discomfort of dialogue. Avoiding the corner table, Julian’s eye roved round the room, to find with relief a couple who smoked in silence eyeing each other glumly, a pale girl, downcast, pulling at her lace handkerchief, two short-haired women nonplussed by each other, a flushed man rolling his brandy round in a glass, with eyes for no one, a blonde in a red hat being insistent angrily—then with despair met Markie and Emmeline in a mirror.

The set of Markie’s shoulders, his pose of quiescent vitality, leaning forward on his crossed arms, proclaimed the conqueror. Julian looked no farther: he found he had thought of Emmeline as beyond desire.

At the end of luncheon, Bertha sipped white coffee politely, an eye on her watch. She wondered if it would appear unkind or ungrateful—after the radishes, that nice turbot, a chicken
en chasseur
she had after all refused and the
créme brulée en chasseur
that was her choice—to leave Julian before he had finished his cigarette. Her time in London was limited; at half-past two exactly she wished to go shopping. She wanted a massage after her journey, a fitting at her corsetiere’s, a new silver saucepan to boil milk in her bedroom, a chat with her specialist and one of those mackintosh coats she had just seen advertised for her dog. She desired to visit her hat shop, which concealed itself upstairs in Mayfair with a discretion so sinister one might expect to rap three times on a panel or be regarded narrowly through a grille. The ostensible reason for her departure was that she had arranged to buy Pauline a new party frock. The child, who had outgrown her confirmation dress, wrote that she was to be prominent among the sopranos when, on the speech day, the school choir inaugurated the proceedings with song. So Bertha had promised to seek out a modest and innocent dress and send in the bill to Julian.

“I do not think,” she said finally and with the kindest intentions, “that there is really much more to say.”

Upon this note they parted.

Julian paid the bill and saw Bertha out. He bowed, in passing, to Emmeline, but she did not see him. Outside, watching Bertha’s taxi go off, he remained for a moment hypnotised by the glare and vibration of traffic—long cars nosing like sharks, vans whirring in gear, the high tottering buses. Then, stopping another taxi, he slid off into the stream. He was returned to his quiet room at the office and to the telephone.

“Hullo?” said Cecilia. “Oh, Julian, how nice to hear your voice!”

“I just thought I’d ring up.”

“I’m so glad.” There was a pause.

“I hope I haven’t rung up at a bad time?”

“Oh no: I’ve got people to lunch but they’ll get along nicely. She eats nothing, she’s making her husband diet and they inhibit the other man. There was such a nice lunch, so I’m eating it all. Oh, Julian?”

“Yes?”

She thought he was really bad on the telephone. “I only wondered, what have you been doing?”

“I’ve been giving my sister lunch.”

“Did she enjoy herself?”

“I don’t know.”

“How terrible. I do wish—”

“What did you say?”

“The line’s bad, isn’t it?” said Cecilia, nervous. “Something keeps on buzzing.”

“Does it? I don’t think—”

“I’m so sorry if I said anything—I mean I did mean what I said but I needn’t have said it like that— Are you there?”

“Yes.”

“I do wish you’d come and see me.”

“Do you think it would be a success?”

“Oh yes; that sort of thing always is.”

“Then I’ll—”

“
Oh my God,
” said Cecilia. “I’ve left the door open!”

Silence sent a sharp vibration across the wire. Julian, hanging up, stared a moment more at the dumb black instrument, then touched a bell for his secretary. He resumed the kind of day that was Peter’s ideal: people coming in quietly over carpets, trays of papers put down or taken away, a muted efficiency, telephoning in a tone of governed irritability, interviews of a varying smoothness, and, at one blink from Julian, a dark green blind twitched down by the secretary to forbid the bold afternoon sun that approached his desk.

Cecilia’s lunch party, having heard through the open door the first phrase of the interlude, had exchanged less than a glance and, all raising their voices, maintained a strenuous conversation till she came back. They were not English for nothing.

AFTER LUNCH EMMILINE said good-bye to Markie at the corner of Woburn Place and hurried back to the office. Here the stenographer sat alone; Peter, having in vain awaited his partner’s return, had gone out to keep an appointment. It was, indeed, half-past three: Emmeline’s unpunctuality was without precedent; the clock’s incredulous face confronted her from the mantelpiece. No detail of Emmeline’s entrance, agitated and bright-eyed, escaped the stenographer who, twitching a new sheet of paper into her machine, typed on with emphatic diligence. “Life,” she implied, “is a serious business for
some
of us, still.”

“Mr. Lewis left you a note,” she said.

“Thank you,” said Emmeline, who had already found it.

“He was sorry to miss you: I think there was something he felt he had to decide.”

The stenographer’s estimation of Peter was at times depressingly obvious; towards Emmeline her attitude had remained, so far, cryptic. Watching Emmeline take her hat off and fold back her long green sleeves, she observed: “It does seem a pity to work in that dress.”

Emmeline never came to work in anything but a coat and skirt, or a linen dress as severe: her employee saw no reason why this departure from precedent should be allowed to pass without comment. In fact, the slightly hectoring intimacy of her manner showed that on such an occasion she felt they might well be girls together.

“It won’t hurt it,” said Emmeline frigidly.

“Green suits you rather,” remarked the stenographer.

“I hope I haven’t missed anyone?”

The stenographer, on a note of polite regret, said, well, yes, someone
had
been in just now, asking about Andorra. What had she done? She gave them the folder about mule-tracks and Mr. Lewis’s pamphlet “Espadrilles.”

“I’m afraid that was quite wrong. They should have had ‘Unknown Republics.’”

“I’m sorry,” said the stenographer with dignity. “I’m afraid it did not occur to me that Andorra was unknown.”

“Well, it is,” said Emmeline, searching among her papers.

“My people go there so much.”

“They are unusually fortunate.”

Emmeline seldom encouraged the stenographer; it was Peter who tried this, and Peter, consequently, whom the stenographer despised. Finding the paper she wanted, Emmeline stared at it but could read nothing, as in a dream. Something disturbed her with its insistence, some humming at the back of her mind that was not a mind. She thought: “We mustn’t lunch out again.” She thought of that eager client going away discouraged, reading Peter’s cynical little horror “Espadrilles,” written for lady-artists. She had failed horribly in her charge.

At the same time, she could not help wondering if it would be nice in Paris. She had spoken to-day to Markie of Peter’s project that she should fly to Paris to get into personal touch with two young Serbs who had started a sister agency. Much new ground might be opened up, on both sides, by an association: what Peter suggested was not (she must make this perfectly clear) partnership, but what he called “interplay.” The terms of such interplay being so nebulous that they were hard to write down, a personal interview had become desirable: Emmeline’s French was better than Peter’s, also she liked flying. If all went well, if Emmeline liked the Serbs and they liked Emmeline, Peter and she would be free to speak of “our Paris office,” while the Serbs could refer in similar terms to Woburn Place. Both sides of the Channel, this ought to broaden the base of a client’s confidence.

Markie, hearing of Emmeline’s project with indulgence, had suddenly said he thought he should like to come too. He was very busy, but they could go at a weekend.

“But the Serbs mightn’t be there on a Sunday.”

“They’ll be there,” said Markie, “if I know anything about Serbs.”

“But do you?”

“Naturally.”

She had said, wrinkling her forehead: “But we don’t know that they’re keen: just dropping in on Sunday might seem a bad start, rather unbusinesslike. You see, we may have to woo them.”

“You’ll be all right: tell them you’re far too busy to come any other day and that they must take you when they can get you. Throw your weight about like anything, Emmeline.”

“Yes,” said Emmeline. “I mean to.”

So Markie said they would fly to Paris together: that should be very nice. Emmeline had not thought of the enterprise quite that way. There was no doubt, however, that Markie’s company would be pleasant: she could, anyhow, do nothing if he elected to book by the same plane. “I hope,” she said gently, “you won’t distract me.”

“I swear not,” said Markie, blinking.

There was no doubt that her green sleeve rubbing against the desk distracted Emmeline at the moment. The silk was still warm from the sun; she still saw Markie’s square-tipped fingers where the silk creased a little inside the elbow. She read and re-read that involved, complimentary letter in Spanish: one would think from its tone she had been proposing to the hotel-keeper in
Malaga
a visit from fifteen earls, though it was in fact fifteen art-students from Macclesfield who were wishing to make a walking tour in Andalusia. At the inclusive price she had quoted she must obtain for them everything: occasional chars-a-bancs, wine, the aesthetic amenities, accommodation in accordance with the proprieties—for, as they had intimated with an indescribable archness, their party was to be mixed. At the thought of these fifteen enthusiasts Emmeline’s heart, on a better day, had gone up: just now she could only think of the ten toads, terribly tired, trying to trot to Tetbury—she was appalled. Her roll-top in its solemn surround of silence was a monument to the pretence of industry: in vain her stenographer’s pointed tapping, in vain the clock: place and time, shivered to radiant atoms, were in disorder. There was no afternoon; the sun, forgetting decline, irresponsibly spun like a coin at the height of noonday. Emmeline, as though threatened with levitation, gripped the edge of her roll-top. “Miss Tripp,” she said, “I think I will dictate.”

The stenographer—unaware, naturally, that the call was to Emmeline’s faculties—looked up willingly. Bored, she had been patching up her mistakes with a purple pencil. The mistakes were many, but machine-like efficiency is not, she had been given to understand, compatible with high intelligence. Though discouraged by Peter and Emmeline, she took their dictation in shorthand, which involved heavy breathing, took rather longer than long-hand, and was at times impossible to re-read correctly. She looked up smiling, as though at an invitation to dance: Emmeline should have been warned.

“Those Macclesfield students …”

“I’ve got them all filed.”

“Well, you haven’t at present: they’re here. I want you to take a translation down as I go along; I’ve got a letter from Malaga here and I can’t think in Spanish.”

“One feels like that, sometimes,” said Miss Tripp.

“Ready?” said Emmeline, slightly raising her voice. Omitting the compliments, she dictated slowly a translation of the long letter. It was finished; they paused and looked at each other. “Just read it through,” said Emmeline. Miss Tripp, with the air of walking a tight-rope, read the translation aloud. Emmeline heard it out with misgivings: this was not what she had dictated, it did not even make sense.