Kept Page 11

“Would you mind?” she said. “It would be so much cooler I think upstairs.”

  As they passed out into the hall she found herself beside Heritage.

  “Isn’t it nearly time,” he said, “that we had our dance together?”

  She had half promised this dance to Christopher, or it might be the next that she had promised. It was so hard to remember nowadays, when there were no programmes and people just murmured at you, “The one after the next but one”; and anyhow she wanted to talk to Ransom.

  “It must be a long time,” she said, “since we used to dance together. How long is it, Ransom—six years?”

  “Eight, Manon. The summer of ’16.”

  She shrugged her shoulders. “Eight years. Then we’d better get the band to play us something from the Bing Boys.”

  The band was about to start on the Limehouse Blues, but Manon stopped them. “No, no,” she said; “we’re feeling sentimental. We don’t want anything post-war.”

  “Nor war-time either, Manon. Let’s go right back to short frocks and sailor suits. Let’s have tango dream.”

  And though they both made a pretence of mockery, they were feeling more than a little sentimental as they walked out afterwards on to the balcony.

  It was a warm, clear night, cloudless, steeped in star-shine. And they sat in silence for a while looking out over the square and the deserted streets, on the cars that had been driven up along the pavement, and the young couples who were sitting out their dances in two-seaters.

  “How little it’s altered, Manon,” Ransom said. “I wondered sometimes if we should get back to it again. But we have, you know, it’s just the same really. The young people of to-day are just what we were. There’s been a pause during which a number of our friends have been killed, that’s all there is to it.”

  “We’re different, though.”

  “Oh yes, we’re different. It’s rather funny really, you know, Manon; we’re quite young, you and I; in years we’re young, and we look young. But we never think of ourselves as young, as people who have life in front of them.”

  She shook her head.

  “But then, Ransom, we haven’t, have we? We got to the end so soon, or rather perhaps we telescoped those years. We got twelve years’ value out of five.”

  “I think it was worth it, Manon.”

  She turned her face towards him, and through the half light of the balcony he could see the brightness of her eyes.

  “You think that, Ransom, you really think that. I should like to think you really thought it.”

  “I’ve never questioned it, Manon. There was that one wonderful year, and nothing’s really mattered since.”

  She gave a sigh, a long, deep, contented sigh.

  “I too, Ransom, I too.” Then after a pause: “They’re wrong, you know, when they say love passes. It never passes, it changes, that is all. You can’t say it’s passed when the fact that you’ve known it once makes it impossible for you ever to fall whole-heartedly in love again. You can’t say it passes when it can do that. It’s still in one’s life really.”

  There was a movement beside them on the balcony. The music had begun again, and Chris Hammond had come to claim his partner.

  “You did promise me this one, really,” he protested.

  “I daresay, I daresay,” Manon answered him. “But I’ve got a great many guests that I must consider. I’ll dance with you once, I promise you, before the end. Now, don’t be troublesome, my dear. Run along and make yourself useful somewhere.”

  At the other end of the balcony a very different conversation was in progress. Side by side, their shoulders touching almost, Blanch Tristram, and David Merivale were leaning forward, their elbows rested upon the balustrade.

  “Is he a nice man that Major Heritage?” she was asking.

  “I don’t know. I hardly know him. He’s my brother’s friend.”

  “You heard what he was saying about marriage?”

  “It isn’t true, you know.”

  “What isn’t true?”

  “That marriage spoils a man, and that love does not last.”

  “You don’t believe that, David? I’m glad you don’t believe it. Perhaps he doesn’t either.”

  “Perhaps not. One says things like that oneself sometimes.”

  “Yes, I know, to be smart and shock people.”

  “And one doesn’t mean it. All that about divorce and living one’s own life.”

  “No, David, one doesn’t mean it.”

  “One says it to be thought modern, doesn’t one?”

  “Yes, that’s it, I expect.”

  “And it isn’t true all that about love not lasting.”

  “I hope not, David; no, I’m sure it isn’t.”

  “I usedn’t always to think so, though.”

  “No?”

  “At least, Blanch, I wasn’t certain. One can’t be certain, can one, not till one meets someone who makes one feel that one can be certain?”

  “How do you mean, David?”

  “When one likes somebody most awfully, and knows that one will go on liking them, and knows really that it’s more than liking them. Oh, Blanch, Blanch,” he added hurriedly,” I’ve never felt any one of these things before.”

  She made no answer. But the light shingled head was bent a little lower.

  “Isn’t it funny, Blanch, to think that four days ago we didn’t know each other, that I didn’t know you existed even.”

  She nodded her head twice quickly.

  “I wonder if it’s always in this way it happens.”

  “I expect so,” she answered, “more or less.”

  Timidly over the red cloth-covered balustrade his fingers crept towards her hand. He dared not speak, he dared not look at her. His heart thudded against the cool cotton of his shirt. They stood in silence there, their shoulders touching, the little fingers of their hands inlocked.

  “Never before,” he said huskily, “I promise you, Blanch, never before. This is the first time, truly, Blanch.”

  She did not answer. But her little finger was pressed the tighter against his.

  “Blanch,” he said, and his voice was huskier. “Never before in my life, Blanch. I’ve never wanted to, and it’s going to be two months before we shall meet again. Blanch, please Blanch, please.”

  He could not bring himself to pronounce the actual word, and she was grateful to him that he could not. It proved to her more clearly than all his protestations had that he had never in the past kissed lightly. Her eyes through the dusk were wide and very tender, misted with the mischief drowned in them.

  “Very well then, David,” and turning her head quickly, for one abrupt and heady instant her lips rested against his.

  For three-quarters of an hour after supper a dance is at its noisiest and gayest; then the effect of the champagne begins to dissipate, people discover that they are tired and remember that the morrow is already some two hours old. Slowly the ballroom empties, the dances grow shorter, the intervals become the longer. Gently, tenderly, the music softens, the dancers sit apart in couples whispering.

  Once again Eric danced with Mrs Fairfield, and as they sat afterwards in the dusk of the balcony he found the courage to ask whether one day she would not come and dance with him.

  “I shall love to,” she answered him.

  “You will! “he said, and try as he could he only half succeeded in suppressing in his voice the note of eagerness. “When? One day next week?”

  “I shall be out of town next week.”

  “Then the week after?”

  “I shall be delighted.”

  “What day then?”

  She half smiled at his impatience. “Don’t you think,” she said, “it would be best if you were to ring me up when I get back. It’s such a long way ahead, the week after next.”

  Eric did not stay more than a few minutes afterwards. It would be an anti-climax he felt to dance again; let him keep untouched that last impression of her. For a while Ransom an
d Merivale stayed on to chat together till Sybyl came, demanding to be taken home.

  It was not until half-past three, when the rooms were almost empty, that Lady Manon kept her promise to Chris Hammond.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, “I’ve been rather a beast to you this evening, Chris.”

  “It’s all right now,” he said.

  His face was emptied of resentment. All the evening he had been cursing at himself and her, but now that once again his hand was upon her shoulder, and he could feel the luxuriant sway against him of her body, he was incapable of any sensation but content, a supreme profound content, a physical content, like the flinging of oneself when tired after a day’s walk into a deep armchair. “Poor Chris,” she thought, “I have been a pig, I must make it up to him.”

  “Chris,” she whispered. “the nineteenth, in the afternoon, I’ll be paying you a visit.” And from the sudden involuntary tightening of his fingers on her back she knew to what extent she had made him happy.

  It was after four, and the dawn was already breaking when Eric Somerset carefully, so as not to wake the house, tip-toed upstairs to bed. He was tired, but happily tired. July the eleventh—as long as he lived he would remember it. July the eleventh, or the twelfth rather. For it was on the twelfth that she had promised to dance with him. It was on the twelfth that this new life of his had really started.

  For the first time since he had been demobilised he went unwashed to bed. His hand where it had rested against hers retained still faintly the scent of Quelques Fleurs. He would sleep with that hand bent under him so that its palm should lie against his face, so that he should breathe in his last waking moments the powdered fragrance that all the night had so enchanted him.

  Chapter IX

  Idyll in the Hampstead Road

  “And what will your ladyship wear this afternoon?” “That must depend, Hudson,” said Manon Granta, on the afternoon of the nineteenth, “on what there is for me to wear. My brown coat and skirt is, I presume, being cleaned?”

  “I’m afraid it is, milady.”

  “It always seems to be on the few occasions when I need it. What about my grey silk affair?”

  “That is quite all right, milady.”

  “But it’s a cold day.” She rose from a chair before the dressing-table and walked across the room towards the window. The square was empty. The trees were swaying slightly and drearily in the wind, the sky was grey. It had been raining during the night and the gutters were damp and muddy. Had there been ever such a summer. It would be too cold for that grey dress. it was a day for furs—a tea gown with furs over it.

  “Bring me that chiffon velvet—the orange one, you know—and a yellow satin slip.”

  Hudson returned with the dress across her arm. “You might hold it up. Straight up, will you, thanks.”

  She had called it orange. But it was flame-coloured really, a flame-coloured chiffon velvet raised on flame georgette, that fell loosely from the shoulders to be scarcely more than held by two large buttons at the hips. The colour as Hudson swayed it slightly varied from gold to marigold. That was the dress to wear. Christopher would like her in that dress.

  “I wonder,” she thought, “if the poor boy’s as excited as I am?”

  She would have been amply reassured could she at that moment have seen Christopher as he stood in the centre of his small bed-sitting room off the Hampstead Road, wondering as he had not ceased to wonder ever since he had returned two hours earlier from the office, whether it was not possible to effect some improvement in the arrangement of his room. There was not a single article of furniture that stood in the same place that it had occupied that morning. The divan had been manoeuvred into every possible angle that the room contained. On the position of the divan depended, he knew, the success or failure of the afternoon. It was most important that the divan, when she came into the room, should be so placed that it would be impossible for her not to sit on it. If she once sat in the wicker armchair things were going to be very difficult. It was not easy to make love to a person sitting in a wicker chair that creaked every time one moved in it. She must sit on the divan, that was very clear. In the same way that a conjurer would force a card on a member of the audience, so must he force that divan on Manon Granta.

  For the fifteenth time he re-enacted the scene of her arrival. There would be three knocks upon the door. He would run downstairs, open the door for her. He would say nothing, but his eyes would thank her. “Shall I lead the way?” he would say. And she would follow him up the steep, narrow stairwav. At the head of the third flight he would stop. “It’s here,” he would say, and opening the door, would stand back on the threshold to let her pass him. The first thing that she would notice would be the fire: it was a cold day and she would be grateful for it. Besides, a fire—even a gas fire—would make his room look brighter and prettier. The heat would force her to remove her cloak, and that would be a help. She would walk straight over to the fire and kneel down before it, draw off her long gauntlet gloves and stretch her hands forward to the blaze. And she would look over her shoulder to him and smile. As the fire was in the centre of the wall opposite the door, and the door was in the left-hand corner of the room, it would be over her left shoulder that she would turn to him. And if it was down the left-hand side of the room that he walked to welcome her, it would be on to something behind her on the right-hand side of the wall that she would look to sit. The divan would have to be, that is to say, on the right-hand side of the wall beside the fire. It was less easy, though, to see how he was to arrange the chairs and tables so that they would be neither in her way nor in his as they moved towards the fire, and yet would not destroy such symmetry as the room possessed.

  And afterwards—what then, when he had manoeuvred her into the divan? First of all he should make tea for her, he supposed. That would provide conversation at any rate for the first few minutes. For they were not going to be easy those first few minutes. He would give her tea, then he would push back the table against the wall and draw his chair close up against the divan. Then he would prepare the atmosphere. He would create by talking of love an atmosphere of love. He would speak softly, wooingly, cunningly. He would take her hand in his, and as he talked he would caress her fingers, would lift her hand to his mouth and press very softly a long kiss against the smooth soft palm. He would draw closer to her and pass his hand gently along the soft skin of her arm, stroking it gently upwards from the wrist; he would draw her little finger gently between his lips. And then once again he would talk to her of love, of how till he had met her he had not believed that it were possible to find mingled in one person both love’s reverence and love’s hunger. And he would move himself, so gently that she would scarcely notice that he was doing so, from the footstool to the couch itself, and he would stretch out an arm behind her, an arm that would be rested against her back, rest but no more than rest, an arm that would gradually press closely, that would become gradually more insistent till it had been passed about her waist.

  There must be nothing abrupt or unexpected. His wooing of her must follow a course of skilful and masterly gradation. He tried to remember all that he had read in manuals of enlightenment on the correct conduct of a courtship. That you must pass imperceptibly from one stage to another, that had been the gist; that the loved one must not be startled or subdued, but wooed into compliance. However eager or impatient he might be, not one trace of that eagerness or impatience must be apparent. He must hold himself in check; he must subdue his ardour to the technique of courtship.

  For the fifteenth time he enacted the scene of her arrival, and for the fifteenth time he passed his fingers hopelessly through his hair. Why on earth was he being so stupid? Why on earth was he behaving like a silly child on the brink of its first love affair? Why was he trying to reduce to a formula a thing that depended for its value on its spontaneity? Why should he be behaving like this now, when he was genuinely in love, when there should be no need of artifice? Perhaps that was the
answer though, that with her he was in love, that he was too desperately in love to risk the least chance of losing her.

  He looked at the clock upon the mantelpiece. Four o’clock. Within half-an-hour’s time she would be with him, and within three hours’ time she would have left him. Three hours from now one way or another it would be settled. And all the while that clock would tick away the minutes, as though they were ordinary minutes. Such minutes as it had ticked away yesterday and it would tick away to-morrow. As indifferent to the immense happenings within that room as the traffic that growled and rolled and thundered in the street below them, the clock would be marking, tick, tick, tick, tick, the passage of the intensest moments he was ever likely in his life to know. “You fool, you blind, impersonal, unromantic fool. If only though I could tell,” he added, “how I’ll be feeling by the time you’ve ticked away another of your myriad afternoons.”

  Suddenly he checked himself and went still and white and rigid. There was a sound of knocking in the hall below: one, two, three. It was she, Manon. The door was flung open. He was precipitated into the passage and down the stairs. He went down the three flights as though they had been one. He had drawn back the catch of the front door, she had passed swiftly into the hall beside him. “Quickly,” she had whispered to him. “You first.” His heart thudded against his side as he reclimbed the stairs, thudded so that she must, he thought, hear the beating of it. “I must remember,” he was saying to himself, “I must remember. The left-hand side of the room, the left-hand side. She will be on the right.”

  The door of his room had been pushed open. She had knelt as he had expected she would before the fire. He had taken a step into the room. Her cloak had fallen from her shoulders. She had turned and risen to her feet, and had stood facing him. Her dress, half seen through dazzled eyes, was a flame-coloured film of stuff from which rose scathless the white loveliness of her face and shoulders. For that one dazzled moment he so saw her, then on a flood of feeling, forgetful of technique and strategy and tactics, he had stumbled across the room towards her, had wrapped round with his arms that leaping fur of flames. “Manon,” he had whispered, “Manon,” speech stifled against her lips.