A Coat of Varnish (25 page)

On the Friday night immediately before that day, Humphrey was again reminded that forms lasted longer than substance. He was invited to a stag party (described as such) in White’s to say goodbye to Loseby’s bachelor days. That was an old custom, which Humphrey thought had been dispensed with, an old and to his mind disagreeable custom. In his youth, it meant an indeterminate number of young men wanting to get drunk, and duly getting paralytically drunk. The occasions he remembered had been brutish, like an initiation ceremony in some not highly developed Papuan tribe.

Things hadn’t changed so much. In a room at White’s – a club which Humphrey, though his own was just across the street, did not often enter – a table was laid for fourteen. Young men were standing about holding glasses of whisky, or gin, or vodka. Spirits before dinner were not so much a fashion when Humphrey was young, but that was a change of which he approved. Only one man, apart from Humphrey himself, looked over thirty, a major – in the hum, buzz and clinking, Humphrey did not catch the name. Three or four of the others seemed to have been school-friends of Loseby’s, one of them a rising Conservative Member. Paul Mason was there, which Humphrey hadn’t expected: perhaps he and Loseby had been drawn closer together by the events of the summer. Humphrey noticed them having quick words together, away from the crowd round the dinner table. The rest of the party were officers in the regiment, Loseby’s age or younger, captains, subalterns. As Humphrey was being introduced, a name tapped at his memory. Douglas Gimson. That was the name – Briers had let it drop – of the man with whom Loseby was now supposed to have spent the night of 24/25 July. Interest sharpened, Humphrey contrived to have a few moments’ talk. True to form, the central figure of an amorous episode did not immediately catch the eye (would Héloïse, Humphrey had occasionally speculated, have looked like a squat earnest Paris student?).

This young man had a thin, pallid face and a beaky nose, nothing striking except an air of subdued intelligence. As they talked, Humphrey had the impression that he was much brighter than Loseby. Loseby had often attracted people more intelligent than himself, and they were unlucky, as perhaps this young man had been.

On the table, as at Tom Thirkill’s, the napery gleamed, silver shone, glass glistened. They sat down to dinner, one of Loseby’s contemporaries, not the senior officer, at the head. It was all like the privileged messes Humphrey had once known, Christian names without distinction everywhere; though, as usual, Loseby answered to several different ones. School-friends called him Lance; brother officers something like Logo, or even, as voices thickened, Yoyo. The food was good – whitebait, grouse, devils on horseback. But not many of them paid attention to the food. They had come to drink, and they drank. The wine was cheap and rough, which Humphrey thought well judged, since most of them wouldn’t be able to taste it before long.

All that could have happened forty years before. Humphrey recalled parties like this in the first years of the war. The randy gibes were flaring out. That was, as it had always been, the object of the exercise. These young men, however, were easier about women than their predecessors had been. They had learned, most of them, that women weren’t a different species. They hadn’t had to pick up tarts. It might have made them less chivalrous, but a good deal more friendly, or at least understanding. Most of the bawdy was directed at Loseby’s virility and sexual powers – which, as he had tested those to his own satisfaction, and that of a good many others, since he was sixteen, didn’t ruffle him and gave simple pleasure to most of the company.

‘If you get soused, Logo, you won’t be able to get it up.’

‘No,’ another intervened, ‘you’ll get it up. But you won’t be able to finish it.’

‘Unfinished business,’ came from someone else, approaching incoherence. ‘Inconclusive.’

‘What a pity that would be.’ Loseby gave his sweetest, most innocent smile.

‘What a pity for Susan.’

‘Poor girl.’

‘Still,’ one of the youngest said, ‘she knows what to expect, doesn’t she?’

‘Just possibly.’ Loseby was bland. Humphrey caught a glance between him and Paul Mason.

‘Perhaps she knows what a man looks like.’ The boy was overcome by his own brilliance.

So it went on. To the company sex jeers became more extraordinarily funny the more often they were repeated, as in Shakespearian backchat. Humphrey was getting bored. Among his neighbours, there was a little sensible conversation. A couple of young men, either soberer or harder headed, were talking about their future. Did one stay in the Army? Would there be an army in ten years’ time? They asked Loseby what he intended.

Loseby hadn’t been drinking heavily. That wasn’t because of the advice he had been receiving. Humphrey had never seen him do so. He enjoyed a drink, but he enjoyed sex much more. Paul Mason had been drinking considerably more steadily, but according to his habit without any discernible effect, totally against all the physical laws, as Humphrey had often thought. A scholarly, fine-drawn man shouldn’t be so immune: it must be a metabolic freak.

Loseby didn’t answer direct questions about his future, but he was practised in evading them. He began to talk coolly, plans well calculated, about the family estate. No, he wasn’t even going to try to maintain it.

‘It’s a nonsense,’ Loseby said amiably. ‘My father won’t come back. Anyway, he’s incapable. I’m not going to scrape money together for the rest of my life, just to pretend to be a feudal magnate. It may have been nice while it lasted. The Richesons have had a fairly long run. They did better than they deserved. I’m not going to be a kind of custodian, just to have busloads of people walking through the house. It’s not even a specially pretty house. That’s all gone. Gone for ever.’

‘I dare say you’re right,’ said one of the others.

‘I just saw the end of it.’ Loseby spoke like a man enjoying himself. ‘It had its points. Serfs touching their caps to the future seigneur. I expect they hated me. Never mind, when I was about twelve I basked in it. What you’ve never had you don’t miss, I’ve heard people say. What you have had, you don’t miss, either. It was rather fun to have had it. It still is. If I finish up as a taxi driver in New York, I’m sure it still will be.’

It wasn’t what was being said that surprised Humphrey – he had heard the same from others born to riches or privilege, not repining when they were torn away – but who was saying it. He hadn’t heard Loseby in a speculative mood before, nor imagined that he had any.

One man’s head had gradually sunk down to the table, and was now resting peacefully in a plate which contained a half-eaten savoury. Two others had gone out, presumably to be sick. Someone said it was time to break up. A loud cry: ‘Let’s go and have a spot of chemmy.’

That seemed a spectacularly good idea to some who had drunk enough to want to drink more. That they could do at a gambling club.

‘Come on, Yoyo, finish off the night. Never mind about tomorrow. This doesn’t happen every day.’

‘Lucky for men that it doesn’t,’ a voice said darkly.

‘No,’ said Loseby, sweet but firm, ‘I don’t care for gambling, you know.’

So far as Loseby had a prudish spot, they had touched it. It was pleasant to find something he was inhibited about, Humphrey thought.

Long drunken logistic arguments about transport. Who was sober enough to drive. Many claimed, few were chosen. Paul, to all appearances cold sober, said that he couldn’t risk a police test. Further, he wouldn’t risk Humphrey driving him back to Aylestone Square, either. Douglas Gimson, who had drunk almost nothing, offered to drive anyone. Loseby, who was spending the night in his best man’s apartment, not in Douglas’, accepted for the two of them.

That might have been callous, or the reverse, Humphrey couldn’t guess. He had an inkling that Douglas loved Loseby, loved him in earnest. Perhaps Douglas was a real homosexual, who loved men who were not, and so suffered like Vautrin from the
tristesse de l’Olimpio
. That was only another guess, as likely to be right.

They went outside the club. Some of the young officers were weaving up St James’s Street towards Piccadilly as their predecessors had done before them, making that gentle incline look like the north face of the Eiger. Paul Mason insisted once more to Humphrey that they were going home in a taxi, and, in a more decorous fashion, the two of them followed the young men up the street.

At two-fifteen next day, people were coming into St Margaret’s, Westminster, kneeling dutifully on their hassocks, sitting up, looking round to see someone they recognised or to spot a well-known face. It was something like an occasion in the theatre. In fact, someone in front of Humphrey, who was sitting in the inconspicuous dark of the back row, said in a firm knowledgeable voice, ‘I must say, I don’t think this is much of a house.’

The church was about half-full, nothing like so well attended, Humphrey thought, as it would once have been for a fashionable wedding. It was Saturday, and maybe Tom Thirkill’s tactics had been successful; it was also, after a lull the day before, raining steadily again outside. Not many men that Humphrey could see had put on morning dress, though there were a number of women in smart frocks. Celia Hawthorne, whom Humphrey hadn’t cast eyes on since the Thirkill dinner, was there, alone, clothes a model of how to achieve simplicity.

Nearly all of those who visited Lady Ashbrook had come, and Frank Briers, at Humphrey’s side, was noticing them. It was because Briers and Humphrey had met outside the church that they were sitting in obscurity. Briers had said that he didn’t want to be too obviously in attendance. He didn’t resist adding: ‘After all, I’m not one of the family, am I?’

The bridegroom and best man, in dress uniform, walked up the aisle. Loseby’s hair shone, fair, what was called golden, though not accurately, burnished, under the central chandeliers. Male beauty usually passed Humphrey by, but this man seemed to have it. He looked rather like a saccharine nineteenth-century picture of Sir Galahad, or of one of the Frankish knights who fought at Roncesvalles.

As Susan and her party arrived a punctilious ten minutes late, the organ was playing the chorale, ‘Sheep May Safely Graze’. That sounded like a nice piece of irony, Humphrey thought, but it couldn’t have been. Tom Thirkill, stately, too much of an actor not to be dressed for the part, walking with an actor’s command of his body, watched his daughter as a public figure should watch his daughter at her wedding. She was veiled, face so far as it could be observed solemn, demure and pretty, dress all in immaculate white, virginal white.

Briers muttered something out of the side of his mouth, Humphrey didn’t catch it; it might have been ‘What a nerve’ or ‘What a girl’. Four tiny children were carrying her train. Either her will had turned out stronger than her father’s, or else he had accepted that there was nothing for it, to hell with the enemy, they might as well do it in style.

Humphrey settled down to enjoy the service. Like other unbelievers of his period, he had a fondness for the liturgy in which he had been brought up.

However, the marriage service was not one of his favourites. Cranmer was a great master of sixteenth-century English. On the other hand, he was not a great master of suspense. In Briers’ company, or in Humphrey’s own mind, there was enough suspense around; but still, as the reverberating words rolled on, in this marriage service the deed was done much too soon. Within ten minutes, Loseby, in a tone emollient, subdued but audible, was saying his I Will, and Susan, in a tone meek and almost inaudible, hers. Then the vicar pronounced them man and wife. That was it. The rest was anticlimax. Not too long, for fashionable weddings were not drawn out. Nevertheless, another half-hour, spirited short address, English not so lingering as Cranmer’s, hymns, prayers, Vidor’s Toccata: all over, all out.

Outside the church, the rain descended, not stormily, not in torrents, but with persistence. The ushers, who all seemed to be officers from Loseby’s regiment, some present at White’s the night before, rushed about with enormous part-coloured umbrellas, getting guests into a fleet of cars, ready to take them to Thirkill’s reception in Eaton Square.

Humphrey and Briers retreated into the porch out of the way.

‘They didn’t ask me to the reception,’ said Briers, with his policeman’s grin. ‘I’ve got a girl keeping her eyes open there. If there’s anything to pick up.’

Briers was being confidential. He said: ‘Look here, I don’t think you and I ought to be seen too much together. One or two may clam up when they talk to you, and we don’t want that. So I shan’t come to your house so much. Are you free tomorrow night?’

Humphrey said yes.

‘Come and have supper at home. Out in the sticks. My car and driver will pick you up.’

With staccato abruptness, Briers walked off through the rain up Victoria Street in the direction of New Scotland Yard.

In the drawing-room at Eaton Square, guests jostling around when Humphrey arrived, waiters carrying trays with glasses of champagne, he had an impression which excluded all the rest. This was the sight of Susan. She had changed from her wedding dress, but Humphrey couldn’t see anything but her face. It was transformed. It had become more than pretty, as though lit up from inside, seraphic. At first sight he responded to sheer joy. Then he was wondering. He had seen girls after their wedding night – innocent girls maybe, and certainly lucky ones, who had been transformed something like this. But Susan hadn’t had her wedding night, and it wouldn’t have come as a revelation if she had. How long was it since she had first been taken by the Adamic surprise? Why did one say Adamic, as though only men were totally astonished by their first knowledge of sex? Was it assumed that Adam was more innocent than Eve, before either knew anything?

Here Susan was, joyous and triumphant. It was startling. Humphrey didn’t understand and soon knew that he didn’t like it. Perhaps this was what Kate’s ear had detected over the telephone. This wasn’t the girl he had once thought easy to understand. He would have been more at ease if he hadn’t come to the reception, seeing people whom he had heard talked about with suspicion and of whom he would hear again next day. Less easy-mannered than usual, he said no to champagne. He didn’t like it, but at any other time he would have drunk out of politeness. He felt, as he had scarcely felt since he was a boy, like an intruder, an outsider, or even more like someone with agoraphobia.