Читать книгу The Willow Cabin - Pamela Frankau - Страница 5

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Caroline decided that she liked the party. She saw it as on a motion-picture screen; she had no sensation that she belonged to it; it was something to be watched. Jay’s harlequin face came near; he was carrying a glass in each hand. He said: “Hullo, puss. Would you like one of these?”

“Thank you kindly. Aren’t they bespoken?”

“One for me; one for you. You were very good to-night,” he said, emphatic, unsmiling, ramming the point home with deadly seriousness. “You looked almost as lovely as you look now and you made that problematic young woman quite dazzlingly clear. But I don’t want you always to play problematic young women.”

It was flattering, she supposed, that he should be standing here, having his drink with her; there was a circle round them now; still he talked to her alone. This would please her mother, she thought, and at once began to sneer at it inside.

“In future, you will come to me before you decide anything at all,” said Jay. “Is that a promise? Even your choice of lovers should be submitted. That reminds me,” he said: “I promised my brother Dennis that he should meet you. He admired your photograph. Where is he?” Jay began to look wildly round the room; somebody else caught him and took him away. Kate Forrest, wearing a Cinquecento gown, darted close to her, saying: “Don’t you want food? I am driving people to the buffet. Where has that squalid Jay got to? I know he’s had nothing to eat since breakfast.” She had a pretty, surprising head, with blue-white hair and a forehead childishly smooth; her black eyes had the amused look that was in Jay’s eyes.

Caroline would have liked to go on talking to her, but Bobby was clutching her arm. “Come along, Caro; there is the most wonderful supper. Have you forgiven me for the hippopotamus?” She allowed herself to be led. “Such a chic party,” said Bobby with his mouth full. “Far above our station.”

“Have you a station? I don’t think I know which mine is.”

She liked Bobby, whom she classified as a comrade-in-arms rather than a chap; but there were moments when she found him naif and thrusting, as now when he said: “I saw you being singled out by the maestro.”

(“ ‘Chic’; ‘Maestro’; why are those words so offensive to me? I suppose this is the way that other people feel when I say ‘——’.”) She said: “Yes, well. It would appear that he wants me for his brother Dennis. Which is Dennis, Bob? Do you know?”

“I’ve no idea. I heard that the brother was rather stuffy and Blimp-ish, and didn’t approve of Jay.”

“You may be right. I can’t care much as long as there is this lobster-salad.”

She did not, she decided, want to waste too much of the party with Bobby; she wanted to prowl and stare. People were her favourite study; although, as her mother complained, she was devoid of social ambition, she had endless curiosity. She wanted to watch the animals, store up their tricks, record their voices in her excellent memory and imitate them all, in front of the looking-glass to-morrow. She passed a happy fifteen minutes while nobody claimed her. She was deflected by the discovery of a plate of small caviar patties all by itself on a table in a corner. She was gobbling these whole-heartedly when the Cinquecento gown swept past and Kate stopped to gobble them with her.

“I starve,” said Kate. “You must hear about my Society for the Protection of Starving Hostesses sometime. Jay says you are the-most-talented-newcomer-to-the-London-stage.” Her rendering of his clipped voice was accurate. Caroline gave it back: “All-I-can-say-is-that-if-he-has-as-much-fun-directing-me-as-I-have-acting-for-him, he-must-have-a-very-good-time-indeed.”

“Cocky little speech I thought,” said Kate. “Curious to have one brother so conceited that he’d give you his autograph if he were dying, and the other so modest that he’s barely audible.”

“Dennis?” said Caroline. “I haven’t met Dennis.”

“Oh, you’d love him. He’s not a bit like Jay. But he isn’t here to-night; he had to go to Paris in a hurry, to sell some tapestry to a Maharajah. I don’t see the point of leaving just three of these, do you? Are you greedy? I am very greedy.”

“What is so nice,” said Caroline. “Is that I am always hungry as well as greedy. It would be so sad to be one without being the other.”

As Kate broke the last patty in halves, showering pastry flakes on to the carpet, a man wearing a dinner-jacket halted beside her. He stood observing their behaviour with apparent distaste.

Kate said, “Oh, Michael ... how very unexpected of you. You haven’t met Caroline? Mr. Michael Knowle; Miss Seward.”

Caroline knew the name. She looked at him thoughtfully. “The bloke who operates on Royalty,” she reminded herself in her vulgar vein. “The Brilliant Young Surgeon. Harley Street’s Boy Wonder. He doesn’t look all that young.” Kate flashed away and he was left staring at her, his expression gentle and mocking.

“You were saying,” said Michael Knowle, “that it was nice to be hungry as well as greedy.” He took a silver case from his pocket. “And now perhaps you are ready for a cigarette?”

“Yes. I have all the appetites,” said Caroline.

“May I get you a drink?”

“I’ve got one, thank you. There is an untouched one here that could be for you.” She gave it to him.

“Thank you. All the appetites,” said Michael Knowle. “Well, well.”

His formal looks and manner were contradicted by the extreme liveliness of his large grey eyes. “Barrymore type,” thought Caroline. “Except for the squareness of the chin. A profile and a manner and a rocklike confidence beneath the manner. He must be at least forty. I wonder why I like middle-aged men.”

“You don’t look greedy,” Knowle continued; he had a caressing voice. “You look as ethereal as a fountain.”

“Now I know all about you,” she decided. “You’re one of these heavy-deliberate charmers—the sort they always say are the best to go to bed with at the beginning. Indubitably and irrevocably married.”

“I was in front to-night,” said Michael Knowle; she wondered what he had been doing between the play and the party, to arrive so late. “Your performance was quite lovely.”

“Thank you. I thought I bitched it.”

“You thought what?” He looked outraged.

“I said I thought I bitched it.”

“You did say it. And I couldn’t believe my ears. To hear a vulgarity spoken in that voice of a—a baritone thrush.”

“Look,” said Caroline. “Please don’t start about my language. Everybody does and it only makes me worse.”

“Do you not care for words?”

“Of course I care,” she said violently.

“Then why don’t you do them more honour?” asked Michael Knowle.

She said, “I don’t know”; she was suddenly miserable.

Somebody greeted him and he turned away. At first she felt snubbed and small; then defiant and out-at-elbows. She was noisy with Kate and Jay and a crowd; she did not expect Knowle to speak to her again. While she was saying good-bye to Kate, she saw him out of the corner of her eye; set in a group and looking absorbed. It surprised her that he should detach himself and follow her to the door.

“Was I horrid to you?” he asked. The adjective, with its old-fashioned or childish overtone, was endearing.

“No. Yes, you were; but you were quite right.”

“May I drive you home?”

“Oh...” She was pleased. “I was going with Bob Hammond.”

“Well, don’t.”

“All right,” she said after a moment.

He had a solid, expensive car and he drove fast. She collected from him, between Knightsbridge and Marble Arch, that his main interests were poetry and crime; that he divided his holidays equally between the English countryside and the French Riviera; that he was only thirty-nine. She said, “You seem older; I mean it as a compliment.”

“It shall be taken as such. May I know your age?”

“I am nearly twenty-three.”

“Oh, dear,” said Michael Knowle. “You are quite improperly young, aren’t you?”

“Yes, well ... I shall grow out of that.”

Once again she brooded upon the adventure of first acquaintance, when you could be so easily and entertainingly yourself; light-hearted and wise for a stranger, as never for those who knew you well. She had discovered this before, on homeward drives; the atmosphere the same; the lighted empty city moving past the window; on your right a profile and a white silk scarf and a black coat; words above the noise of the car’s engine. “Grown-up,” she thought contentedly. He talked to her now as though she were grown-up; as though she were already a person of achievement.

“I should like to see you play Shakespeare,” he said.

“Which?”

“Cleopatra,” said Michael Knowle. “Why do you live in Bayswater, darling?” The lightly-brushing quality of the endearment made it a new word; not the old worn exaggeration that they all used without thinking. She said to herself, “I like that.”

“It isn’t quite Bayswater, is it? I suppose it is. It is my mother’s house.”

He climbed out with her and stood looking up at the pillared portico while she searched for her latch-key. “Heavy; impressively respectable,” he said; there was now a more youthful atmosphere about him; he was standing with his head tilted back, his hands in his pockets; he began to whistle Loch Lomond.

“Would you like to come in and have a drink?”

“I oughtn’t to, but I shall.”

She went ahead of him through the dark-pannelled hall and turned up the lights in the small study at the back; she disliked this room less than any other in the house. It had green walls and the furniture was haphazard, not opulently correct, like the furniture in the other rooms.

Michael Knowle came after her, looking about him with an expression of placid interest. She said, “There is whisky and there is beer.”

“Beer for me. May I help you fetch it?”

“No; stay where you are; I can manage.” She wanted to do a little scouting; a prowl halfway up the stairs assured her that they had gone to bed. She went into the dining-room to collect the bottles and glasses. When she came back, Michael Knowle had pulled a book off one of the shelves and was reading devotedly. Without looking at her, he began to read aloud:

“With a host of furious fancies,

Whereof I am commander,

With a burning spear and a horse of air

To the wilderness I wander——”

“Lovely,” she said. “Read the verse that begins ‘I know more than Apollo’.” She decapitated the beer-bottles with her teeth. He stared at her comically: “Where did you learn that low trick?”

“From my father. When I was eleven.”

Michael Knowle said, “Surely nobody who lives in this house takes the tops off beer-bottles with his teeth.”

She giggled. “How right you are. This is my stepfather’s house. I don’t like it; it is a mixture of a prison and a well, don’t you think? Sometimes I have to walk halfway round Paddington before I can bring myself to open the front door. Do read about ‘the stars at mortal wars in the wounded welkin weeping’.”

He was still staring at her. “Do you have to go on living here, if you dislike it so much, or is that an impertinent question?”

Caroline said, “A bloody astute question, I’d say. Do I have to?” She thought about it. “I suppose the answer’s yes. Because it is generous of my stepfather to keep me; I am a bastard.”

There were other ways of saying this thing; she had tried them all. “ ‘I was born out of wedlock’; ‘I am subject to a bar sinister’; ‘I am illegitimate’.” As Michael Knowle took the glass that she held out to him, she saw that he was not embarrassed by the confession; he continued to look gentle and interested.

“I hope,” he said, “that it isn’t your stepfather who insists that he is being generous.”

“Crumbs, no,” said Caroline. “He’s one of those Etonian, Stock Exchange sorts who wouldn’t dream of mentioning it. That’s my mother’s theme-song. Look, the sofa is the most comfortable thing to sit on.”

Knowle sat on the sofa. Under the lamplight, she saw him in sharp detail; the greyish hair looked white, the delicately-boned face pale as water; he had an exceptionally smooth skin. She summarised the neat lines of the eyebrows above the large, brilliant eyes, the high-bridged nose and the deep curves of the mouth. She saw how the upstanding shadows from the collar sharpened off the square chin. “He is decorative,” she thought. “And I like this stillness, this calm. That is an interesting hand, too,” she added, watching it lift the glass. “He isn’t tall. He has wide shoulders and a narrow waist, but I expect he would have liked to be tall.” She saw him begin to laugh. “Will I do?” he asked.

“I’m sorry; I like to get peoples’ faces by heart.”

“I shall never get yours by heart,” he said. “Or your mind either. I thought that when I was watching you on the stage. You refuse to be labelled. It is rare, by the way, for a very young woman to walk as you do.”

“How do I walk?” she asked, fascinated. She expected a pretty simile; Michael Knowle said, “You keep your body still and move from the hip.”

“I suppose I could say that my father taught me that too. He was always training me for the stage at the time when we used to meet.”

“You don’t meet any more?”

She shook her head. “That was when I was at boarding school; I went to my aunt for the holidays. She’s a kind, silly one and she could never stand up to Caleb; so he always came to see me, but when I left school my mother stopped all that. At the time of the great stipulation,” she said; it was comfortable to talk to Michael Knowle.

“And what was that?”

“Well, it was an edict. I wanted to go on the stage and my father backed me up, but he couldn’t pay for my training. He hasn’t any say in the matter, because my mother adopted me by a deed. But he did get them to agree that I should go to the R.A.D.A., paid for by Leonard. And their pound of flesh was that he shouldn’t come here or try to see me. He drinks and only gets jobs in concert-parties and pantomimes; and he does hang around when he’s out of work, and my mother has become so thunderingly respectable, what with all Leonard’s money and his stuffy chums. In fact she always was respectable; county-snob and quite good family. It was only an error, going to bed with Caleb. In Weston-super-Mare, I understand; what a thing. Where was I?”

“At the time of the great stipulation.”

“Yes, well.... We all agreed and said Here Is Our Hand On It, when what I really wanted to say was ‘Oh stink and drains and nuts and run away’.”

She saw the beginning of the compassionate look, and although she had resented it from others, she did not resent it now.

“Are you fond of your father?”

She tried to answer honestly. “I get on with him better than I do with my mother. He can be sweet. But the drink is tedious; I’m quite happy not to see him. I just despise the principle behind the stipulation. It belongs to the creed of the Spoilers-of-the-Fun.”

“Is that what you call your mother and your stepfather?”

“Not only them. They’re a whole race,” she said. “When I was a child I used to call them No-Glasses-of-Water, because there always seemed to be somebody who said, ‘You don’t want a glass of water now’, when you did. I suppose they’re really Puritans; joyless and correct and suspicious of anything unusual; they persecute. And they all wear mackintoshes, even if it isn’t going to rain; and they think of indigestion before they think of food, and the morning after ahead of the night before; and anything that is highly-coloured or extravagant or luxurious hurts them. And they are always underlining the most boring details; like ‘Don’t forget to turn out the lights in the hall’. And they always perform sterling actions and always have a poor vocabulary; give me a murderer who says the pretty thing at the moment you want to hear it.” She heard her voice beginning to shake. “This house,” she said, “I think of as their headquarters; it gets me so low that I behave much worse here than I do anywhere else. Damn their eyes.”

Michael Knowle set down his glass. “Well, why don’t you go?” he said mildly.

“Because I’m a coward. I can’t face the fight. It would be a fight. Unless I got married. There is a chap who wants to marry me.”

“Which isn’t the answer,” said Knowle.

“No, I think I know it isn’t.”

“Marriage for that reason, and marriage at the beginning of a career, can be the most fatal mistake. I made it and I know.”

“Are you still married?”

“Unfortunately, yes; I have to be.”

“Can’t you have a divorce?”

“Not as the position is at the moment.”

Caroline drank some more beer. “I can’t imagine your being intimidated,” she said.

“Intimidated?”

“If you want a divorce and your wife doesn’t, you must be intimidated.”

He smiled, “It isn’t quite like that. My wife is a woman of whims.”

“Do you live under the same roof?”

“No; she spends most of her time abroad. She is half American, and she was brought up in France. She hasn’t much use for England nowadays.”

“What is her name?”

He said, “Why do you want to know?”

“I just do.”

“Her name is Mercedes. Next question.”

“Do you think I ought to run away?”

“Heavens!” said Michael Knowle. “You say that as though you would act on my advice. I talk too much; I always did. And there you sit, on a low stool, hugging your knees, looking so lovely that I want to embrace you. It wouldn’t be a tiger’s embrace. I should like you to put your head on my shoulder and I would hug you gently and say ‘It’s all right’.”

“Well, that would be very nice,” said Caroline primly. She thought, “I am enjoying this more than anything that has ever happened to me.” She stared at him and saw the reassuring quality in the smile. “It is all right, you know,” he said. “You will do what you want to do. I’m not worried about you. I should like to be there to hold your hand from time to time, that is all.”

“Please do be.”

He leaned forward and touched her cheek.

She said, “Did you escape from your family?”

“Oh lud, yes.” The word “lud” was not unexpected; she was beginning to see him as an eighteenth-century character. “In my case,” he said, “it was a tougher proposition. I owed mine something. My father was a country doctor. He wanted me to take on his practice. I wanted to be a surgeon. And the poor darlings had spent every penny they possessed on my training, so I did feel obligated. But I got away. I married and got away.”

“Hence the Cassandra-like warning about my taking marriage as a way out.”

“Yes; don’t do that. You don’t need to. What do you owe to——” he looked about him—“to these people anyway? I am sure they’re very nice, but——”

“They’re not,” said Caroline, “they’re hell.”

“Once you have got away, you will establish quite a new relationship with them. Then they will seem infinitely less hellish; that is the way it goes.” He looked at his watch. “Do you realise that it is after three o’clock?”

“Have you got to operate on somebody highly distinguished at seven?”

“No, my child. I shouldn’t be sitting here if I had.”

She said, “Do you get jitters before you operate? I should.”

He stood up, shaking his shoulders: “No; I never get jitters about anything. But I have a nightmare that comes when I’m tired. I don’t sleep well at the best of times, and when I’m really tired I dream that I am on a complex job and that my hand won’t stop shaking.” He laughed: “Why do I tell you these things?”

“Well, I told you things.”

He bent forward and touched her forehead with his lips. “Thank you. God keep you,” he said.

“I’ve no use at all for God,” said Caroline. “You might as well know it first as last. I’m an atheist.”

“Rubbish,” said Michael Knowle.

“I tell you I am. I had enough of God from my aunt and my school. I abandoned Him as soon as I grew up.”

“Could you spit in His face?” Knowle asked negligently.

She winced. “What a hideous thing to say; and you’ve complained of my language.”

He was laughing. “As I thought. You are no more an atheist than I am. No artist worth twopence can be an atheist; and you’re an artist worth considerably more than twopence.”

She said, “Yes, well ...” sulking now because he had won again. She helped him to put on his coat. In the gloomy, ponderous hall, she felt that their acquaintance was suddenly spoiled, cut short; that she would not see him after this. She opened the front door and he paused on the steps. She expected to be kissed now, but it did not happen. He said, “What is your telephone-number?”

“It is in the book. The name is Radcliffe-Preston.”

“Is that what you always say when you don’t want gentlemen to ring you up?”

“No. I’d love you to ring me up.”

“Would you?”

She nodded vigorously. He touched her cheek again. “Good night, darling,” he said and ran down the steps to his car. It was a youthful speed; he looked like a young man leaving in a hurry. The engine made a roar and the car shot away into the dark. She stood looking at the place where it had been.