Читать книгу The Willow Cabin - Pamela Frankau - Страница 12

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He felt smaller when he came a second time to the door with the star’s name on it. There were a few visitors ahead of him and she was calling to them from behind the screen. Among them he saw the frizzy-headed, pink-cheeked girl who was a surprising friend for Caroline to have, the plump, hockey-playing type called Joan Bridges. She was talking in a breathy voice about First Folios.

Dennis loitered outside the group, reviewing Rokov’s speech. Rokov had said, “I’ll see her to-morrow,” and then, cramming his black felt hat over one eye, had added lightly, “If it weren’t for her reputation.” “Reputation? How?” “Unreliable,” Leopold had grunted, steering his short, bulky shape across the foyer, trailing words over his shoulder, “Tricky; can’t be found at the end of a telephone; cuts rehearsals; that’s the snag. Still, I’ll see her; grateful to you. Good night.”

“Now where,” Dennis wondered, “did he pick that up? He said he knew nothing of her.” Caroline came round the screen, wearing a narrow dark suit and a lime-green shirt. She greeted the others and said to him demurely across the drinks, “It’s all right; I can come to supper.”

He thought that she was about to ask what had happened to Rokov; then he saw her being embarrassed on his behalf because she had been right and he wrong. His mind went on searching: “Did somebody talk about her in the bar? Is that why he went there? To spy; to get reactions?”

Caroline was talking about Orsino. “You know, when I see people doing their own job really well, I fall in love with them. It’s true. I fall in love with ski-instructors and jockeys and dressmakers.” “And surgeons,” thought Dennis bitterly; although he doubted whether Caroline had yet put on a mask and a white coat to stand by the table while Michael did one of his brilliant performances on a cleft palate. Perhaps she had watched him operate. She was always talking about it: “I want to, but I know I might be sick. I must do it sometime; not because it is Michael, but because it frightens me. You must always do the thing that frightens you; no, I don’t mean that everybody must; I mean that I must. It is one of the rules.”

Against that violence, this chatter, he still caught the current of the magic wind:

“Oh, you should not rest

Between the elements of air and earth,

But you should pity me.”

Only when they were free and walking out of the dingy little doorway together did she say, “Rokov not coming?”

“No; he wants to see you to-morrow. I gave him your telephone number.”

He saw that the autograph-seekers let her pass unmolested. The cold night air of early spring made her shiver; he glanced at her ironically as she stood by the car. “For how long,” he asked, “may I count upon your company?”

“Till twelve-thirty.” She was seldom so definite. “He left a message for me. There was an emergency job at the Clinic.”

“And do you propose,” Dennis asked pontifically, as he turned the car towards the Strand, “to have a second supper at twelve-thirty?”

“Oh, don’t be cross.” He saw that she was now in the mood of relaxed good-humour when she could afford to be kind to everybody in the world.

“I’m not. I am only wondering how you’ll feel if Rokov wants to see you at twenty-seven-and-a-half minutes past nine to-morrow morning.”

“Terrible,” said Caroline comfortably, “and look worse. Gosh, I’m hungry. Haddock Monte Carlo. No, corned beef hash; only that takes so long. In America—it would be ready, wouldn’t it? Quite an ordinary thing on a menu?”

He glanced sideways at her. “What is this about America?”

“Nothing,” she said innocently, “except in terms of corned beef hash.”

He wondered; he knew that Michael was on the edge of departure for the United States. “But that is a professional journey; a medical conference. He couldn’t take her along.”

She was staring out of the window.

“I’ve told you a dozen times,” he said, “I’ll take you to America and you can eat corned beef hash all day.”

She said, “Lovely” in a far-away voice.

“Nice place to be, for the war,” he added.

“Oh, don’t; ‘the war’.”

Yes, he thought; better to look away; we shiver in our little lighted tent, with the dark piling up outside.

They were caught in the fussy jam of cars and taxis packing into the Savoy courtyard. “Silly to come in by this entrance; I wasn’t thinking. Hop out here, Caro; I’ll drive round and park on the hill. Order us some drinks.” He had to wait, though angry horns screamed behind him, for the pleasure of seeing her walk. When he came into the lobby of the grill-room she was seated at a small table by the door, with Leopold Rokov bending over her. Rokov turned, said “Hullo” off-handedly to Dennis and went to join his august chums.

“It isn’t twenty-seven-and-a-half minutes past nine,” Caroline said, “it is twelve-o’clock-say-ten-minutes-to. What a funny creature; an animal; what sort of animal? A bear? Smaller than a bear. A badger? I ordered you a whisky-sour, was that right?”

He said, “Well, you appear to have brought your pigs to market. Pleased?”

“Of course I am pleased. Thank you, Dennis, very, very much.”

“I don’t want to be thanked. I want you to be a good girl.”

“Well, I will be——” she said, sounding hurt. He debated whether he should tell her now of Rokov’s reservation. Not yet, he thought, but it must be told before we part. He swallowed his drink rapidly. “We’d better go in if you’re hungry. You haven’t much time.”

As he followed her to the table, he looked possessively to left and right. They were all here; they always were; the celebrated faces, the known alliances; he watched the waiters placing them, driving the smaller fry to the outer circles behind the pillars and inwards to the back wall; while the tables from the aisle to the plate-glass windows received the people with names. There was a hierarchy of waiters, just as there was a hierarchy of names. It was the maître-d’hotel who guided Dennis and Caroline. “In my case,” Dennis thought without rancour, “it is a matter of being Jay’s brother; of having the money to keep up that position.” But he thought that he had been humble long enough; that anybody other than Caroline might well be content with his company.

He looked at her while she read the menu with the kind of devotion more naturally inspired by a breviary. The bent curly head wrung his heart again and so, when she looked up, did the blue hollows of fatigue under her eyes.

He did not raise the subject of Michael; she gave it him just as he was beginning to be soothed by her gentle, inconsequent mood. She had said, “I saw a monk getting on a bus in Oxford Street; what a thing,” and when he replied, “Nothing odd about that. Last year I saw five nuns driving along the Croisette at Cannes in a Bentley,” she giggled and wrinkled her nose and said, “You are nice when you are like this; when you don’t go on so about Michael.” Then the rainbow round them broke and he said heavily, “Even if I didn’t love you, I should still go on about Michael.”

The skin seemed to tighten across the bones of her face. She said, “It has nothing to do with anybody but us.”

“My dear Caroline, nobody lives in vacuo.”

“Who are we hurting?”

“Whom. He is hurting you. You are hurting yourself; and your family; your mother.”

It was a feeble thrust. She said, “Don’t be an ass. My mother and I would have declared war anyway.”

“All your friends——”

“How I hate that expression. It suggests a circle of bright-eyed vultures murmuring, ‘Isn’t it a pity about Caroline’.”

“Well, it is a pity about Caroline.”

“——,” she said. “And in any case there are only two friends I care about besides you. One is your sister Kate and the other is Joan Bridges and they have both settled for it. Why are you like this, Dennis? Is it because you used to be a friend of Mercedes?”

“She is another person whom you might be hurting.” This, he admitted, was worse than feeble; it was thoroughly reprehensible; another cliché coming true; love, like war, packed up all obligations to play fair.

“Well, why won’t she let him go? Silly rich bitch,” said Caroline. She repeated. “Rich bitch” and giggled. “And a French name into the bargain,” she said with her mouth full; “I think I could put up with anything but that. And both their names beginning with ‘M’ is stupid. Mercedes. How it minces.”

“I think it is a pretty name.”

“Look—” said Caroline. “This isn’t one of my evenings for wanting to talk about Mercedes. I admit I have them, but I’m not having one now.”

“All right. I withdraw that anyway, Caro. You couldn’t hurt her if you tried.” He saw the flash of authentic anger and said, “I’m thinking of you; only of you. Even if my feelings toward you were those of brotherly indifference, you couldn’t expect me to approve.”

“I haven’t asked you to approve.”

“If you weren’t a genius,” he said, “I wouldn’t mind. Or perhaps I would. Even if you were just a nice bright girl, I’d think it a pity.”

“But why?”

“Darling, you know why. If you could live with him, under the same roof, all right. You’d be one of the mistresses; what an old-fashioned word that is.”

“Well, better than one of the whores,” said Caroline, peeling a peach.

“And nobody in our neighbourhood would care. But this situation is just plain silly. It isn’t a love-affair; it’s an obstacle race. Lunch; supper at midnight; week-ends at hotels; you waiting outside in a car while he completes his public obligations. Sham respectability; keeping up appearances.”

“But surgeons have to be slightly respectable,” said Caroline. She added mournfully, “At the beginning, you were on our side.”

He pushed that away and went on, letting the savoury grow cold on his plate. “It is an endless strain on you. What is the fun of being always tired, always worried, always looking over your shoulder, listening for the telephone?”

“That,” said Caroline, “is my business, not yours.”

“You have nothing of your own; and you never will have, at this rate. No home; no money; no background.”

“I don’t want them. I’d hate to have them. No, I lie,” she said. “I should love to have money. But only for peace of mind. I shouldn’t buy anything with it, except taxis and drinks and railway-fares and just enough clothes not to have to think about them. Never solid things; houses or silver tea-sets or furniture. If I were rich I’d go on living at the Rufford; the only difference would be that I’d pay the week’s bill regularly.”

He stared at her. The words were hers, but something of the philosophy belonged to Mercedes. He had heard Mercedes curse the tyranny of things, confess to finding property tedious, declare that she wished to live always as a traveller. He had seen the plaint as a protest against her manifold possessions; a protest that Caroline, in her poverty, had no need to make. No two people could be less alike; it was curious to find them in agreement.

“What are you thinking? Something odd and abstruse, that you don’t care for.”

Her mind-reading trick always disquieted him; he said, “I was thinking it was time that you grew up.”

“Look——”

“I wish you’d get out of that maddening habit of saying ‘Look’ with every third sentence——”

“Your manners——” said Caroline. He was silent, seeing the way that it would go now, as it always did. Better, he thought wearily, to be done with this and not see her any more. He clutched at the thought of Rokov and tried to build on that foundation a future wherein Caroline redeemed her past failings, crashed the gates of West End triumph overnight, became solvent and arrogant and threw Michael away. Now it seemed the wrong moment to warn her of Rokov’s private information. He looked at his watch.

“It is twenty minutes past twelve,” he said.

“I’ll finish my coffee and then I’ll telephone. Give me a cigarette, would you, please?” she asked wistfully.

She was adept at this sad, bewildered attitude, making him feel in the wrong and liable to apologise humbly.

He called for the bill. “Would you like to be dropped?” he asked when she came back from the telephone.

“Dropped?”

“I meant at Michael’s.”

“Oh, no; thank you. It would be out of your way. I asked the porter to call me a taxi.”

“Very clever of you.” Yet it was not done, he knew, in a desire to avoid further lecturing. She had never, in the length of their acquaintance, allowed him to leave her at Michael’s door. It was a delicate scruple and he did not know why he respected it.

At most of the tables, people with leisure were still eating their supper. When he stood beside the taxi, she leaned out at him and thanked him again and said “I really am excited about Rokov,” in the way that she always over-played her gratitude for any present that he gave her.

“Will you call me at the office after you have seen him?”

“Yes, of course.”

“And we might lunch.”

“That would be lovely.”

He waited on the pavement until the taxi was out of sight.