Читать книгу Gay Life - Edmée Elizabeth Monica Dashwood - Страница 16

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It was one o'clock in the morning when the Buick stopped in front of the Hôtel d'Azur. A single light was burning in the hall, over the desk of the concierge. Madame, sallow-faced and with eyelids puffy from fatigue, sat there making entries in her ledgers. She raised her head and smiled at the noisy entry of Coral Romayne and the Moons, but there was a gleam of hatred in her black eyes.

"Vous avez passé une bonne soirée, messieurs-dames?" she said in an amiable voice, and glanced meaningly up at the clock. "Tout le monde est couché depuis longtemps."

No one answered. Angie said: "I don't know what she's talking about," and walked, with her swaying gait, to the lift.

Buckland was following her, but Mrs. Romayne called out sharply: "It won't take more than two people. It sticks. You can just walk up, Buck."

She went into the tiny lift and slammed the gate. It ascended weakly and jerkily, bearing her and Angie Moon out of sight.

"No hope of a drink, I suppose," grumbled Hilary. He had had a disappointing evening, no one had taken any particular notice of him, and Chrissie Challoner, after all, wasn't his type at all. He suspected her of being a Lesbian, as he did all intelligent women to whom his own masculinity obviously made no immediate appeal. Sulkily he went upstairs.

Denis found himself in his own room, on the third floor, without the slightest recollection of how he had got there. In a trance, he undressed himself, and switched off the light. Then he knelt down by the bedside, as he did every night of his life, and hid his face in his hands. Happiness surged over him, until he felt as though his spirit must drown in bliss.

Chrissie ...

Incoherent words of thankfulness formed themselves on his lips—he was praying half aloud.

Denis's belief in a personal God had grown up with him. Often and often it had been his only defence against despair, and self-condemnation, and the overwhelming inward certainty of his own inability ever to rise above circumstances. He clung ardently to his conviction that God understood him, and would help him when things became unendurable, and not allow him to remain for ever unfriended, and lonely, and obscure. This faith in God was on a par with Denis's secret dramatisation of himself as a reincarnated soul, sent to help others less evolved. He had neither the mentality nor the temperament that analyses before accepting, and his passionate adherence to a God who cared profoundly and individually for Denis Hannaford Waller was in proportion to his supreme need of reassurance, his deadly and corroding fear of being somehow inferior to the rest of humanity.

It was still natural to Denis, as natural as it had been in childhood, to translate his emotions into terms of prayer. He knelt for a long time by the side of the bed, unconscious of the slightly absurd conjunction of this traditional attitude of supplication with his neat, blue-striped pyjama suit, his carefully brushed little narrow head clasped in his long, skinny fingers, and the upturned soles of his slipperless feet.

When at last he climbed into bed, it was heaven to lie in the stillness, the window wide open to the breathless, starlit night, and relive, over and over again, every instant of the evening spent with Chrissie Challoner. He could remember everything that she had said, and that he had answered, and every intonation of her softly spoken phrases. He could feel again the close, steady pressure of her small hand as they said good-night.

He did not allow himself fully to realise that he had fallen violently in love. He thought of the strong compulsion that had drawn Chrissie and himself towards one another as an irresistible spiritual affinity, a mutual recognition. And indeed it was true that physical desire, in Denis, was almost as undeveloped as in a young child, deeply inhibited as he was by obscure terrors, sham idealism, and the intense shyness of the eternally self-conscious. His day-dreams were still those of an unawakened adolescent.

Far too profoundly excited to sleep, he lay with open eyes until dawn flooded the sky with an exquisite, clear, pale green.

Denis turned over, placing one hand beneath his cheek like a child, and his eyelids closed. Imperceptibly he drifted, on a tide of radiant happiness, into sleep.