A Coat of Varnish (9 page)

There was another woman lying sleepless in bed that night. This was Susan, the girl about whom Humphrey hadn’t given much thought, in that evening stroll. To him, and to most of those who met her, it might have been a surprise to realise the state in which she was seething. She seemed too gentle, inoffensive, almost mouselike; intelligent, so Kate said, but lazy. Most of that was true; but she was lying in a passion of sorrow and even more of violent disappointment and rage. As Humphrey and Kate had inferred, Loseby, amiably and sweetly, had evaded her on Sunday night: he couldn’t make promises, except of course that he would see her soon; his compassionate leave was over, and he would be obliged to fly back to Germany next day.

Susan longed for him, for his body. She existed to be married to him. He was slipping away. She wanted to see him dead. She had beaten round for any surcease. She got to the point of calling his regiment’s number in Germany, and then slammed the telephone down. She wanted to go into the streets and offer herself to the first man she saw, anyone would do who would be kind to her, that friendly American professor, Paul Mason, anyone. She trusted no one. She didn’t trust Loseby – no one could. She didn’t trust her father. She was loyal about him with everyone, she would go on being loyal, but she didn’t trust him. After Loseby, she trusted no one. She had never trusted Loseby. Perhaps she had never trusted her father. In secret perhaps she believed that her father was a crook. In her rage that night, she was certain of it. She wanted them all dead. She would have welcomed death herself. She couldn’t keep still in bed. She kicked, fidgeted, turned. No kind of sex would help for more than moments. Into the scented bedroom air, she howled. She thought about accidents, air crashes, bombs. They talked about nuclear war. She imagined that it might come annihilating all of them, most of all herself, her shame, grief, passion, longing. She wanted the end of it all.

About ten in the morning on Thursday, 19 July, the telephone rang in Humphrey’s sitting-room. He had been sitting by the windows reading a newspaper and it took him a dozen steps to get across the long room. He heard his own name, in a strained jerky voice which he didn’t recognise. Then: ‘This is Dr Perryman speaking.’

‘Well?’

‘I have Lady Ashbrook’s permission to tell you.’ Tone still strained: Humphrey was ready for fatality. ‘Go on.’

‘She’s in the clear. They can’t find anything. No sign at all.’

‘Good God Almighty.’ On the instant, Humphrey was astonished, nothing but astonished. ‘Wonderful,’ he said. Simple visceral relief was taking over. ‘I must say I’m surprised. Are you surprised?’

‘You can never tell,’ came the doctor’s voice, flat, non-committal. He sounded as though he was sternly keeping any excitement down – but Humphrey would have liked to see his face.

Humphrey congratulated him. Perryman said that he had done nothing. Humphrey asked how she was. She was alone, so far as Perryman knew, and obviously there was no reason why Humphrey shouldn’t pay a call.

It was some time before Humphrey set out along the Square. First he telephoned Kate at her hospital. No, she hadn’t heard, but her response was more immediate than his own had been. ‘Heavens, I am so glad. What a bit of news.’ When Kate was happy, Humphrey thought, she was happy from the soles of her feet to the top of her head. Maybe when she was unhappy, the same. She said that she would send some flowers at once, and told him that he must take flowers himself. When she was happy, he also thought, she took charge. He duly went into Elizabeth Street, bought a large assembly of peonies and lupins, and carried them on his way to Lady Ashbrook’s.

This time the door was opened by Maria, the daily woman. She was small, sturdy, bright-eyed, smiling. She tried to speak English, but had very little. She radiated pleasure. Humphrey talked to her slowly in Portuguese. This wasn’t one of his languages, but his Portuguese was better than her English. Yes, the lady was well. Nothing bad. Nothing to trouble her. All anxiety had gone away, dismissed, it was a beautiful day, like the sun outside. Maria would be more than usually eloquent, he was sure, if there weren’t a linguistic barrier. One might have thought that Lady Ashbrook wasn’t easy to work for, but Maria seemed to like her.

In the drawing-room, Lady Ashbrook was sitting bolt upright in her usual chair.

‘Oh, Humphrey,’ she said. ‘You shouldn’t have taken the trouble to come.’ He went and kissed her cheek.

‘Do you really think I would keep away? We don’t get anything like this every day, now do we?’

‘I suppose that’s fair enough,’ she said, control complete, giving no indication of joy. She was regarding the mass of lupins.

‘Thank you very much, my dear. You had better tell Maria to look after them. I’ve had quite a few flowers already.’ She spoke as though flowers were the least likely objects to be sent to her, and as though she had no conceivable affection for them.

‘Do sit down, Humphrey. Forgive me for not getting up. To tell you the truth, I’ve found all this – just a trifle wearing.’

‘Most people would have found it worse than that.’

‘Would they?’ she said. She showed a flicker of cool, remote interest. ‘I take it, it’s rather too early for you to have a drink?’

That, Humphrey decided, was a question, requiring the answer yes. With the same coolness the old lady asked him for one favour. She wasn’t much good at managing calls to the Continent. Could she trouble him to get the news to Loseby? ‘I think he might be a little gratified, perhaps.’ Had Humphrey seen Paul and Celia recently? They must have been in touch with someone. ‘If you ask Maria, you’ll find that they have sent me some more of those flowers.’ She uttered the word as though it were in italics. ‘Very kind of them, I must say, very well meant.’

There was a pause. She appeared to be musing. She gave a hard smile, sarcastic but confiding.

‘Humphrey,’ she said, ‘I suppose this is rather a turn-up for the book.’

That struck him as a peculiar remark, coming from her – or in the circumstances coming from anyone else. It was as near an expression of emotion as she could make: somehow it conveyed emotion, both the fatigue of extreme, almost apathetic relief, and also so much joy that she wanted to pretend it didn’t exist, to go on propitiating all the fates. Recovering herself from this display, she commanded: ‘Tell everyone that I won’t have any fuss. They can get back to normal as far as I am concerned.’

Her way of getting back to normal was to talk with approval of Loseby’s visit.

‘He’s a good boy,’ she said. ‘He’s not as soft as he looks.’ She looked with bleak interrogation at Humphrey. ‘Don’t you agree that he’s a good boy?’

‘He’s very good fun,’ said Humphrey.

‘More than that. He’s got his head screwed on.’

‘I dare say that’s true.’

‘Of course it’s true. He knows a few things. He knows when a passade has to end.’

That was a word from her youth, already out of use when Humphrey was a boy.

‘He is
travelled
,’ she went on. ‘He gave me a hint all very discreet. He sent that little Thirkill girl about her business.’

At which Lady Ashbrook remembered that she had asked Humphrey to get a message through to Loseby. ‘Perhaps you wouldn’t mind doing it at once? There’s no reason to keep the boy in suspense. If he is in suspense, that is.’

‘He’s very fond of you,’ said Humphrey.

‘That would be most unusual in my family,’ she replied, emitting a harsh but not unappealing laugh. Then she had another thought. Would Humphrey mind making just one other telephone call? She would like to see her solicitor. She felt that it would be a suitable time to make a new will.

‘My family might be interested if they knew that I was doing that,’ she remarked. ‘Not that there’s much money to be interested in, my dear. When I go, everyone will be astonished at how little I cut up for.’ She laughed again.

‘Are you telling the truth?’

‘What do you think, my dear?’

At this piece of mystification, she seemed obscurely triumphant.

Some of her acquaintances did ‘get back to normal’ without effort. It was just the end of a minor excitement. There was a certain let-down, a drop in the emotional temperature, and they went back to more direct concerns – how much the stock market and the pound were falling, how good it was to feel excited by a man again, or whether there was a chance of more briefs next session. With a group of them, however, it was no use Lady Ashbrook saying that she wouldn’t have any fuss. They were determined that she should have it, whether she wanted it or not; and they didn’t trust instructions of that kind, in which they were right.

They made their plans later that day in Paul Mason’s house. Meanwhile Lady Ashbrook had gone through the routine, from which, in the days of anxiety, she had not once departed. She performed her afternoon promenade in the garden, waving her parasol at Humphrey, on his afternoon walk to buy a paper, and to other passers-by. She walked for a somewhat longer time and sat for a somewhat shorter than on recent afternoons, and held her parasol more firmly above her head. Otherwise, the routine was unchanged, though in the early evening her solicitor appeared, duly summoned by Humphrey.

It was half-past six, Kate back from her hospital, Paul from his office, Celia from her young son, when the meeting took place in Paul’s sitting-room. This, as in Kate’s house, was in the old-fashioned manner partitioned off from another room, which he used as a study. The sitting-room had a bareness austere and masculine, or perhaps more exactly the bareness of a man with no instinct and no special desire for comfort. There was an expensive-looking writing-desk, which some woman might have coerced him into buying. Humphrey, who had joined the other three in that room, was curious about a number of pictures in a manner vaguely neo-expressionist. Whoever painted them might be an amateur, but had talent. He asked Paul who it was. Celia. Humphrey gazed at Celia, and said that he hoped she would go on painting.

‘Why not?’ she said undisturbed. Then she enquired, in the same equable tone: ‘Do you know about pictures?’

Humphrey said: ‘I’ve looked at a good few in my time.’

That was an understatement, and Kate’s eyes flashed at him with confidential gibing. Just once, she had told him that he slipped into anonymity as if it were an overcoat. Humphrey didn’t mind. He wouldn’t try to change his style, and, as soon as they all talked of Lady Ashbrook, he was infected, and warmed, by the feeling in the room. They were healthy people, and, apart from himself, they were young and active with the pride of life. Healthy people took a visceral pleasure in others getting better. Often they had to accept the sight of the sick, but they felt part of the trade union of humans when one recovered. It was a bit of a triumph when someone came out of death’s shadow. Humphrey didn’t pretend that people, healthy or not, were afflicted by the news of another’s death; but sometimes they did get a modest comradely pleasure at the news that someone was going to survive. That was not all, however, in Paul’s sitting-room that evening. Their pleasure wasn’t only comradely and modest, but as though the old lady were very close to them, like a relative whom they had loved in childhood.

Strange, Humphrey was thinking. They had more affection, as well as regard, for the old lady than he had. Perhaps not so strange. Often it was the cold and ungiving who attracted most loyalty. There was a certain kind of chill, such as Lady Ashbrook possessed, which somehow others revered, were afraid of, and which against any reasonable judgment made them put the owner on a pedestal. So far as moral worth meant anything, in Humphrey’s view Kate here had a hundred times more of it than Lady Ashbrook; but he was sure that, if Kate were in extremity, she wouldn’t receive a fraction of the devotion which that self-bound old woman was getting now. It was an absurd disposition of providence; but, then, providence had a knack of being absurd. And Kate was as joyous and enthusiastic about their plans that night as anyone present, and the most spontaneous.

What should they do? Lady Ashbrook was too old to stand much of a celebration. She wasn’t strong enough to be taken out. Anyway, Humphrey said that he was certain she wouldn’t play. A few people to meet her?

‘Not like that bridge party on Sunday,’ Kate said. ‘Awful as I hear.’ She was smiling at Humphrey, the only source from whom she could have heard.

‘That wasn’t exactly well timed,’ Paul added. ‘Lancelot Loseby seemed to think that no one had any nerves.’

‘He had reasons of his own.’ Celia spoke in her cool, gnomic fashion and as one totally immune from Loseby’s arts.

Nerves were stable now. There was no more need for touching wood, they all agreed. She might be pleased to see that others were pleased. Where should it happen? Her own house? No, that wouldn’t wash, she wouldn’t do it.

‘I can lay it on,’ Kate said with hesitation. ‘Would that be too far for her?’

No, she walked to the end of the garden most days, that was opposite Kate’s house – or someone could drive her round.

‘Of course,’ said Kate without any hesitation this time, but giving the clue to her first, ‘I’m not her favourite woman.’

‘I don’t think that would trouble her.’ Humphrey felt that they were all over-concerned with Lady Ashbrook’s sensibilities. ‘She’s never had any manners. Not manners of the heart, I mean. You might have noticed that.’

‘She seems to have put up with me.’ Celia said it without vanity, with mild surprise. ‘I never have been able to see why.’

Humphrey said to Kate: ‘It would mean extra work for you. You’ve got enough.’

‘Nonsense. I can manage this on my head.’

There was some argument, but both this house of Paul’s and also Humphrey’s were only equipped as bachelor rooms, and Celia’s was too far away.

‘It’ll cost something. You mustn’t spend a penny.’ Humphrey was, for once, giving an instruction to Kate.

‘Oh, I can manage all right.’

This she was not allowed to do. Paul said that he would pay. They knew he had more disposable money than anyone there, a large salary from his bank, private means.