Читать книгу Gay Life - Edmée Elizabeth Monica Dashwood - Страница 15

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A painful situation prevailed at the table to which Mr. Bolham, day by day, and almost meal by meal, arrived later and later to confront his secretary.

Conversation between them, since the decrees of civilisation forbade that it should be dispensed with altogether, was becoming increasingly difficult. It had always lacked spontaneity, even at the very beginning of their association, for Denis was too self-conscious, and Mr. Bolham too critical, for the successful manufacture of small-talk.

Each had made efforts, especially at first.

Denis had offered small and platitudinous observations on subjects that he held to be relevant to Mr. Bolham's work, until his intuition had warned him that he was losing ground rather than gaining it.

Mr. Bolham had—at the very beginning—mentioned books and authors, and Denis had followed his customary methods and had claimed, brightly and enthusiastically, to know something about almost all of them. Again, and very swiftly, an inner certainty gripped him unpleasantly somewhere in the midriff, and he knew that his employer had seen through his small pretences, and was probably despising him for them.

The most unsuccessful phase of all had been that in which Mr. Bolham had tried to show an interest in the life and circumstances of his secretary, to the terror and horror of Denis, whose private life was even more complicated than are most private lives, being hedged about by a number of small, sordid, makeshift arrangements, of which he was intensely ashamed, and punctuated by the jobs that he had obtained through personal interest, and lost through incompetence.

In addition, the varied aspects of himself that he was in the habit of presenting to the world would, Denis felt certain, lay him open to a charge of insincerity if any of his employers, friends, or acquaintances should ever meet and compare notes. He was therefore at continual pains to conceal the identity of these one from another. All these fears—added to his original fear of the penetrating and cynical eye of Mr. Bolham, which was increasing daily—combined to turn their tęte-ŕ-tęte meals into an ordeal that Denis found little short of purgatorial, nor was it much more endurable to Mr. Bolham.

"I hope you have some work for me this evening, sir," Denis said uncertainly, after a protracted silence.

"Nothing this evening, thank you. Go out—go down to the Casino—swim by moonlight. Anything you like."

"I dare say I shall take a walk. I'm used to a great deal of exercise," replied Denis. He made such statements entirely at random, scarcely stopping to reflect whether they were true or untrue, driven only by his anxiety to impress, and—in this case—by a nagging suspicion that Mr. Bolham thought him deficient in manliness.

"Walk by all means," replied his employer. "Will you have coffee?"

"Thank you so much—if you're having some."

"Un café," said Mr. Bolham to the waiter.

He knew that Denis knew that he never took coffee, and Denis was aware that he knew it. Nevertheless, Denis was compelled to utter his little meaningless formula of conditional acceptance. He wanted coffee because he was naturally greedy, and because he had often been so poor that it was almost impossible to him to refuse anything that would be paid for by somebody else.

In the condition of inward conflict that was his usual state of mind, Denis followed Mr. Bolham from the dining-room.

As he went, he was alert to catch the eye of anyone who might possibly be looking at him. It gave him self-confidence to be recognised, and it also, subconsciously, made him feel safer. If he was looking at the people whom he passed, then they could not, themselves, be watching him unobserved.

"Waller, are you doing anything after dinner?" asked Buckland, as he went past.

"Nothing very special. Not in the early part of the evening, at any rate."

People might think that he wasn't any good at his job if he had too much free time. He had hinted once or twice before that much of his work was done in the silence of the night. And indeed, he would willingly have worked at so suitable and dramatic an hour had Mr. Bolham suggested it. But Mr. Bolham never did.

"Come along with us, and pay a call on a celebrated lady-novelist. We'll make a party of it, won't we?" Buckland appealed to Mrs. Romayne.

"That's right. The new people are coming along—their name's Moon. They've got a letter of introduction or something. We'll make a night of it. Can't you get Mr. Bolham to come too, Mr. Waller?"

"I think he has some reading he wants to do. But I should be very pleased indeed—that is to say, if it isn't an intrusion——"

"We'll go in the car," said Mrs. Romayne, powdering her nose.

"Thank you so much. I should be delighted to come. Thank you."

With a little bow, he moved on.

"Ass!" said Mrs. Romayne, audibly.

Denis supposed that she was addressing Buckland. He thought her a dreadful woman, but he wanted to meet young Mrs. Moon, whose looks he had admired very much on the terrace that afternoon, and he was excited at the idea of going to see a celebrated novelist. He wished that he had ever read any of her books.

In the hall, Mr. Bolham was talking to Mrs. Morgan. He had taken a chair, and the coffee—Denis's coffee—was on a little table in front of him.

Denis nervously poured some out into the cup. Then he saw Gwennie Morgan, and instinctively he smiled at her, and for a moment forgot Denis Waller.

"I'm sorry to say I've got to go to bed," announced Gwennie resentfully. "I suppose you're going to have a marvellous time."

"Not specially, Gwennie. I'm going to be taken by Mrs. Romayne to call on a lady who writes books."

"That's much more exciting than just going to bed. Is Patrick Romayne going with you?"

"I don't know. I hope he is."

"Why?"

"Well, I think he's a very nice boy, don't you?" Denis enquired mildly.

He remembered with genuine compassion that Patrick was in need of help. Denis had meant—and still meant—to try and gain an influence over him. Service, thought Denis vaguely and splendidly .... Service and brotherhood....

"Oh, Mr. Waller," said the breathless voice of Dulcie Courteney. "Oh, I must tell you,—what do you think?—Pops is arriving to-morrow! Isn't it lovely?"

"How exciting," said Denis sympathetically. "You didn't think he'd be coming so soon, did you?"

"No, Mr. Waller, I didn't. It's lovely, isn't it? I must tell Mrs. Morgan."

She told Mrs. Morgan, who made suitable reply, and was backed up by an indeterminate murmur from Mr. Bolham, and then Dulcie looked all round the hall.

"I feel I simply must tell everyone," she announced in her lisping treble. "You see, it's so lovely for me. I do love my Pops. You see, I haven't got a mummie, like Gwennie and Olwen have, and so Pops means just everything to me."

She flitted off, and Denis, who was really rather touched, observed: "Poor little thing!"

"Poor little thing nothing," harshly and unexpectedly exclaimed Mrs. Romayne at his elbow. "That kid makes me perfectly sick, with her Pops this and Pops the other. No wonder she hasn't got a mother! Any woman would leave a child like that."

"If you had a child like that, would you leave her?" enquired Gwennie with assumed artlessness.

Her mother said: "Good-night, Gwennie. Go now," and Mrs. Romayne laughed.

"I like Gwennie," she said good-temperedly. "She's so downright. Well, boys and girls, what about it? The car's outside."

She swept out, with the air of one making an exit.

Denis, following with Buckland, heard Mrs. Morgan's low, clear voice addressing Mr. Bolham.

"I don't think I should exactly call Gwennie downright, myself. She's much too Welsh."

"Personally, I should say she was abominably and precociously subtle-minded," said Mr. Bolham, and they both laughed.

Denis was quite startled at the sound of a laugh from his employer.

The Buick was outside.

"Who's driving, Coral?" enquired Buckland, speaking rather too loudly. It was the first time he had called her Coral in public.

"I'll drive myself, for a change. Get in, everyone."

"Isn't Patrick coming?" asked Buckland uneasily.

"No, he says he's got a book he wants to finish. Get in, Mr. What-is-it—oh, hell, can't we all use Christian names and have done with it? I'm Coral."

"I'm Hilary, and she's Angie."

Denis said nothing. He was divided between his anxiety to please the people with whom he found himself, and prove himself at home in their group, and his nervous, middle-class anxiety as to the conventionalities. He felt sure that the Morgans, for instance, wouldn't exchange Christian names with hotel acquaintances. Mrs. Romayne, unaware of these conflicting points of view, settled the matter for him.

"You're Denis, I know. You're not Irish, are you?"

"No—no, I'm not. My grandfather, as a matter of fact, was Scotch—my mother's father. I believe I'm entitled to wear the plaid of the——"

"Hop in," said Buckland. "You can't wear kilts here, if that's what you're after."

The laughter that followed seemed to Denis unnecessary. He felt rather disappointed in Mrs. Moon, but she looked lovely in a pale moonlight-blue pyjama suit, cut very low, with her thick, fair curls of hair brushed back behind her ears.

Almost like Esther Ralston, or someone, thought Denis. He sat next to Buckland, who, with his accustomed lack of manners, had climbed first into the car and taken his place next to Angie Moon. The car was a wide one, but Denis could feel the hard, swelling thews and sinews of Buckland's substantial thigh, pressing against his own, and the contact displeased and offended him.

He was glad when the Buick, after flying dangerously round the steep curves of the road, presently drew up with grinding brakes at the entrance to a little white villa, standing in the midst of pines and olives, by the side of the coast.

"I spotted the name on the gate, just as I was going to pass it," said Mrs. Romayne.

They got out. Denis stood politely at the door of the car, extending a hand to assist Angie Moon, but she did not seem to see it, and again Denis felt snubbed.

It was the first time that he had been to a French house that was neither a shop nor a hotel, and he thought the tiny garden, with a small, romantic fountain splashing in a stone basin, very pretty.

A woman in a black dress and white apron came to the door, smiled at them and said:

"Par ici, messieurs-dames. Sur la terrasse."

They followed her in single file across a little circular room, evidently a living-room, and then through a side door, to a kind of pavilion, an oblong of white pavement set between white pillars, overlooking the sea and roofed in with thick, twisted vines. Wicker chairs with bright cretonne cushions stood about, and a round marble-topped table held a tray and coffee-cups. Sitting upright in front of it was a rather monumental lady in a black evening dress, talking to a small group of people. She broke off—well she might, thought Denis—at the sight of five visitors coming in, one after another, and there was a good deal of noise, some laughter from Mrs. Romayne, and a few—but not enough—introductions.

An acute attack of self-consciousness invaded Denis. He was amongst those—they were in the majority—who had neither been introduced themselves, nor had anyone else introduced to them, and the absence of these formalities left him uncertain, and afraid of doing the wrong thing.

Moreover there were not nearly enough chairs to go round. This was pointed out by the lady in black. She looked exactly as Denis had imagined that a successful lady-novelist—for so he designated her in his thoughts—would look—dark, and massive, and rather imperious. She might have been any age between forty-eight and sixty. Her voice was deep, and rather commanding.

"Some of you must take cushions, and sit on the edge of the cliff. Don't fall over."

Mrs. Romayne threw herself into one of the wicker armchairs. Denis hesitated, looked round for Angie Moon, and saw with disgust that she and Buckland, carrying cushions, had already disappeared into the shadow of the olive trees that fringed the little terrace on the cliffs.

"It's much nicer outside. Let's go," said, in a very soft voice, one of the girls who had stood up when first they came in, and had shaken hands rather indiscriminately.

She picked up some more coloured cushions.

"Allow me."

Denis became more at ease with the utterance of one of his favourite formulas. It made him feel chivalrous to take the cushions from the girl and carry them out, and she was so tiny that he unconsciously had the illusion of being himself tall, and strong, and protective.

He glanced at her once or twice, as they settled themselves in an angle of wall and tree-trunk, very close to the edge of the rocks, and she lit a cigarette.

She was so small and slight that she could almost have been mistaken for a child, and there was something childish also in her little round head, with the fine, straight dark hair, hanging in a fringe almost to her eyebrows. Her narrow little olive face was striking rather than pretty, but her eyes—enormous and brilliant—shone like dancing amber flames above the glow of her cigarette.

"Won't you smoke too?"

"Thank you, I think I will."

He took a cigarette from the black enamel case she held out to him, noting from force of habit, as the indigent do, that it, as well as the cigarettes inside it, was of an expensive variety.

He prepared himself to begin the conversation with the enquiry: "Do you know the South of France well?"

He thought this was a very good opening, and had made use of it several times already.

The girl, however, spoke just as he was going to do so.

"What's your name?"

Denis was startled.

"I beg your pardon—I'm so sorry. Of course, I ought to have introduced myself. My name is Waller. I came with Mrs. Romayne, from the Hôtel d'Azur. I—I happen to be staying there."

She ignored the last part of his speech.

"What else besides Waller?"

"What else?"

"What other name, I mean?"

"Oh. Denis. My full name is Denis Hannaford Waller."

"Mine's Chrissie Challoner."

"Are you——"

In the extremity of his astonishment, Denis faced round at her in the moonlight.

"You're not the—the lady who writes books?"

She nodded, looking oddly like a small child confessing to a misdeed.

"I'd no idea," said Denis confusedly. "I never thought you'd be so young, for one thing."

"I'm twenty-eight, but I know I look much younger than that. It's rather luck for me, isn't it? You see, I've been writing ever since I was nineteen."

"To tell you the truth, I thought the lady in black—the tall one—must be Miss Challoner."

"That's Mrs. Wolverton-Gush—Gushie. She's doing secretary for me for the time being—only it's mostly housekeeping."

"Are you—are you writing a book just now?" asked Denis reverently. He had a tremendous and indiscriminate admiration for any form of creative work.

"I'm correcting the proofs of my last one. It'll be out in October."

"May I—am I allowed to ask what it's called?"

She laughed.

"You may ask anything you like—I don't mind. But you're not obliged to pretend you're interested, you know. It's not as if I was a celebrity. I don't suppose you'd ever heard of me, before this evening."

"Indeed I had," said Denis quickly. "I know some of your work, in fact."

Instantly, he wished he had not said it. He didn't want to tell lies to Chrissie Challoner—he had only done so from habit.

"Do you really?" she said wistfully.

To Denis's incredulous astonishment, he heard himself replying: "No. That wasn't true. I haven't really read any of your books. I don't know why I said I had, just now, except, I suppose, that I wanted you to like me. But I can't say what isn't true, to you."

Almost as the words left his lips, he would have given anything to recall them. She'd think him mad—loathe and despise him. His whole body was invaded by a burning heat, and then an icy cold.

He had barely time to know it before she answered, in a quick, warm rush of words.

"I think it's wonderful of you to tell me that. The biggest compliment that anyone has ever paid me."

A gratitude so intense that it almost choked him, caught Denis by the throat. He had scarcely known, until then, that generosity could exist, for weaknesses such as his.

"I didn't know—I didn't think you'd understand," he stammered, the sense of exquisite relief bringing him perilously near to the tears that he always dreaded, because they came to him with such terrible readiness.

"But of course I do," she said softly. "I know why you wanted to—fib—it's so easy, isn't it?—and then how you wished you hadn't. Lots of people are like that. But not one in a thousand ever does what you did, afterwards."

"Oh—" said Denis, and to his horror, his voice broke slightly. "I didn't know there was anybody like you—anybody who'd understand."

"You poor boy!" she said under her breath, and without surprise, with only an upwelling sense of unspeakable comfort and reassurance, he felt her hand seeking for his, and clasping it.

"You're marvellous," said Denis, under his breath.

"Hasn't anyone ever given you any sort of understanding before?"

He shook his head dumbly.

"Have you been terribly lonely, always?"

"Always. My mother died when I was six. They sent me to a boarding-school where I wasn't happy—I was bullied, rather—" He shuddered, and hurried on quickly, warding off memories that he had avoided for years. "I wasn't ever very strong, physically, and I suppose I was sensitive. I was always unhappy, I know."

"Your father wasn't any good to you?"

"He married again. My stepmother didn't like me. She said I was deceitful, and told lies. I dare say it was true—in fact I know it was. You see, I was frightened."

"I know."

The passionate pity in her voice entranced him. He could scarcely believe it was really for him.

"You were frightened because you knew they wouldn't understand, and you thought they'd laugh at you, or despise you," she added softly. "And sometimes, those fears come to life again now, and make you say and do things you don't really mean—poor Denis!"

She called him by his name so naturally that it was not until afterwards that he realised she had done so.

"Hasn't there ever been anybody with whom you've dared to be really yourself?"

"No. Never really. Sometimes, for a little while, and in patches—but not always and about everything—oh no."

There was a sudden burst of noisy laughter from the group round the table, and a scuffle that overturned a wicker stool.... Denis, involuntarily, half stood up. Chrissie's small fingers, shifting to his wrist, gently forced him down again.

"It's all right, dear—don't go."

He sat down again, but the spell was broken. His terrible self-consciousness invaded him, he asked himself in an agony what all this meant—why he was giving himself away like this to a girl whom he didn't know, whom he had met for the first time half an hour ago?

"It's all right," repeated Chrissie urgently.

She seemed instantly to have sensed his change of mood.

"Denis, listen. I knew directly I saw you that we had something to do with one another. I can't tell you why, or what it means exactly. I expect after you've gone away to-night, you'll be frightened again, and wonder how we could ever have talked like this—two people who've only just met. But I want you to trust me. Do you think you could?"

"Chrissie——"

He didn't know what to say, unable to believe in what had befallen him, and fearful of alienating her sympathy either by word or silence.

The other people—he thought of them in a sort of collective confusion—were moving about, talking and laughing, and making a lot of noise. Somebody started a gramophone, and the catchy refrain of a new dance-record blared out into the night.

The cheap appeal of it acted as a direct stimulus to Denis's already quivering emotionalism.

"Do you really mean it? Do you really want us to be friends?" he asked, still half incredulous.

"Really, really, Denis. I'm lonely, too—not like you've been, but quite enough. I'll tell you, some day. I know it sounds absurd, but I think you and I have been looking for one another, all this time."

"I used to think there must be someone like you in the world, and that some day we'd meet," he murmured. "But I'd given up any hope of it—even now, I don't feel it can really be true."

"Anyone want a drink?" shouted a man's voice.

"You don't, do you?" whispered Chrissie.

Denis shook his head, still dazed.

The gramophone record came to an end, and the sound of voices surged up again, interspersed with loud laughter and the chink of glass.

"Chrissie!" someone cried.

She gripped Denis's hand tighter, and did not stir.

"Where's Chrissie?"

"Fallen over the cliff, perhaps. I thought I heard a splash."

"No, she's had an idea and rushed away to put it on paper."

"Gone for a moonlight bathe."

"Who with?"

"Why not by herself? We're not all like you, Coral, trotting about with boy-friends all the time."

"Damn it, I think someone ought to find Chrissie," objected a voice—masculine, and not entirely sober. "She's our hostess, after all. Why, she may be drowned for all we know."

"She was here when we arrived. I saw her."

"I shall have to go in a minute," Chrissie said, speaking low and quickly. "Tell me—how long are you staying at the Hôtel d'Azur?"

"I don't know—about a fortnight or three weeks, I expect. I'm with a Mr. Bolham—" Denis gulped. "I—I'm his temporary secretary, you know."

He minded saying it. He would have liked to pretend that he was staying at the Hôtel d'Azur independently, for a holiday. But Chrissie did not seem to notice the admission of his subordinate position.

"Do you have a certain amount of free time—in the afternoons, for instance, or after dinner?"

"I can usually get off in the afternoons. He works in the mornings, and sometimes between tea and dinner. I could get most of my stuff done in the evenings, if I wanted to."

"If you don't mind the heat——"

"I love it," put in Denis eagerly.

"—Then come down here—no, you haven't got a car. I'll pick you up at the bottom of the Hôtel d'Azur drive, at two o'clock to-morrow. Bring your bathing-things. We'll go to a place I know along the coast. There's never anybody there. We can talk."

"Chrissie, how wonderful! Do you really mean that you want to talk to me?"

Her great dark eyes looking full at him, she answered softly and deliberately:

"Much more than I want anything else in the world."

His head was reeling. It couldn't really be true—presently he would wake up, and life would be what it had always been—a nerve-racking, anxious, unsatisfying affair, shot through with continual shafts of fear—the fear of poverty, of failure, of disgrace—above all, the continual fear of being found out in one way or another.

"Denis, are you happier than when you came here to-night?"

He drew a long breath.

"Oh, my dear. It's like being in another world altogether. Everything's changed."

They looked at one another with enchanted eyes. In hers Denis saw the reflection of his own newborn sincerity. A glowing exaltation seemed to envelop him, persisting all through the riotous hour that followed, when he and Chrissie Challoner were drawn into the vortex of noisy talk and laughter that raged up and down the little dark garden and the stone pavilion.

Angie Moon, dancing languorously with Buckland to the strains of the cheap and raucous gramophone, Coral Romayne screaming gynćcological confidences at Mrs. Wolverton-Gush, Hilary withdrawn in sulky superiority behind the pages of a French novel, other people unknown to him, talking interminably to Chrissie about literary scandals and rumours of scandals—Denis saw and heard them through a haze.

For the first time in his life, he was utterly happy.