Before the Fact (17 page)

Then she discovered that they had been sitting up there for an hour and twenty minutes.

“An hour and twenty minutes!” she repeated, horrified. “We must go down at once.”

“There’s no hurry, dear.”

“Indeed there is. An hour and twenty minutes! Really! What on earth will they be thinking?”

“What does it matter what they think? You hardly know anyone here, and your sister certainly won’t mind. As a matter of fact, I don’t suppose we’ve been missed at all.”

The nervous exasperation seized her which opposition always provoked. “Don’t be so absurd. Of course we’ve been missed. We must go down at once. Please open the door.” Nerves made her voice sharper than she intended or realized.

“Oh, certainly, if you’re so anxious to go.” Kirby spoke stiffly, obviously hurt.

He opened the door.

Oh, dear, now I’ve annoyed him, Lina thought.

What was it that made her use that tone when she didn’t really mean it? She must stop herself. But why couldn’t he see that she didn’t mean it? Why must all men behave just like children?

She was very contrite, because she ought to have realized by this time that men do behave like children and are just as easily hurt.

On the leads she caught his arm. “I’m sorry I spoke like that. It was horrid of me. You’ve been so sweet to me. Thank you, Ronald. But we must go down, really.”

She held up her face to him, wondering at herself as she did so. Was this really she, offering her kiss to a man she had not known for a couple of hours? But the gesture had seemed completely natural.

Kirby’s irritation, responsive as it had been to her own, was soothed at once.

Lina hurried down the passage and into the bedroom where the women had left their things, to repair her face. The sight of her childish frock in the mirror quite startled her, it seemed so ludicrously incongruous with her recent emotions. But that’s how things are, she reflected, as she refixed the bow in her hair with rather unsteady hands; the comic mask so often has a tragic face underneath it; where would the films be if it hadn’t?

Nobody seemed to have missed her and Kirby. Lina’s self-consciousness as she came down the stairs with the feeling that a hundred eyes were glued on her was quite unnecessary. Only Joyce caught her eye as she swung past in the arms of her partner and drooped her own eyelid in knowing salute.

They were dancing in the studio now, and Kirby was waiting for her at the foot of the stairs. He took her without a word, and guided her onto the floor.

“You shouldn’t,” she smiled, as she moved into his arms. “Let me dance with someone else first.”

He looked down into her eyes. “Do you think now I’ve found you I’m going to let you go?”

A thrill raced through Lina from head to foot.

For perhaps the first moment since she had met Kirby, Johnnie was completely forgotten.

“And how did you get on with Ronald Kirby?” Joyce asked, when they got home in the not-so-small hours of the morning.

“I liked him.”

“I thought you did,” Joyce said comfortably.

She asked no more.

The next morning Joyce gave Lina more information about Ronald Kirby. She passed it over very casually, as if it were really of no importance at all.

“I don’t know him well, of course; he’s not in our lot; but I like what I do know of him. He’s one of the few in that feeble artistic crowd who seemed really solid. He’s never taken over anyone else’s wife, or handed one of his own on to another man. And for an artist, he’s intelligent.”

“Aren’t artists intelligent?” Lina asked innocently.

“Of course they’re not. Most of them haven’t got the brains of a mouse. They just have this odd knack of being able to put things on canvas, and that’s all. They’re the dullest of all the creators. Musicians are the nicest: you never hear a creative musician talk about himself at all. Then the really good authors. They don’t thrust their work down one’s throat; they’ve no need to. Then the second-rate authors, who do, and have. And then the painters, a long way bottom.”

“Oh!” said Lina.

“But Kirby has got brains. He might have a future too. He’s beginning to make quite a name with his portraits now. That’s what he’s really interested in, of course. His black-and-white stuff is only pot-boiling.”

“I didn’t know he went in for serious painting at all. He never told me.”

“That’s just what I mean,” Joyce said. “Well, he does. He paints nothing but women’s portraits, and more unflatteringly than anyone else. He really is clever. He can show up his sitters more cruelly on a bit of canvas than Cecil could in a twenty-page description. Cigarette?”

“No, thank you.”

“Oh, of course. I never can remember you don’t smoke.”

“But does he ever get any commissions, then?” Lina wondered.

Joyce laughed. “My dear, you really are refreshing. They love it.”

At tea-time Kirby rang Lina up and asked her to dine with him that evening. She refused at first, and then accepted.

“Where shall I meet you?”

“Well, what sort of place do you like?” Kirby asked.

“I don’t mind a bit.”

“A nice place full of chattering women, with little pink lamps on the tables?”

“I don’t mind, really. Where do you usually go?”

“I shall plump for a grill room, if you leave it to me.”

“I do,” Lina laughed. “So which grill room?”

They arranged to meet at the Monico, at seven.

Lina was ten minutes late.

Kirby jumped up from his chair in the vestibule. “Hullo, I was just getting quite certain that you’d been run over on the way.”

“I am so sorry,” Lina said penitently. “My bus got held up at every crossroads on the way.”

“Oh,” said Kirby, “you came by bus?”

“Yes.”

Lina noticed that he looked a little surprised. She knew why, and blushed faintly. His voice had held the same note as Joyce’s did when Lina mentioned buses to her. Joyce never went in buses. Lina, who had not got the taxi-mind, always did.

“Well, let’s go and have a cocktail,” Kirby said magnanimously.

They went into the lounge.

Lina was not sure that she wanted anything to drink at all, after last night; what did Ronald think would be best for her? Ronald prescribed side-cars.

“Well, you extraordinarily nice person,” he smiled at her, as soon as the waiter had gone, “how are you?”

“I felt a little morning-afterish this morning, but I’m better now,” Lina smiled back, rather nervously.

She felt a little nervous. Ronald Kirby, in a correct blue suit, might be the same inside it as Ronald Kirby dressed as a sailor boy, but the atmosphere which it produced was not. Lina had difficulty in believing that she had wept on this man’s shoulder last night – and kissed him as eagerly as he had kissed her. It had been an hour’s natural madness, snatched out of the drab sanity of everyday life. What was he going to do about it? What was she going to do about it? She felt too unsophisticated, too provincial, too self-conscious. If he felt self-conscious too, their dinner was bound to be a failure.

Ronald, however, very evidently felt nothing of the sort. He began to chatter at once about the party and the people who had been at it, about other parties, about anything rather than Lina and her affairs. After a few minutes Lina realized that he had perceived her lack of ease, guessed its cause, and was engaged in remedying it. She smiled at him gratefully. He really was a most understanding person.

Ronald’s tact, and two side-cars, restored her confidence. By the time he rose to lead the way to the grill room Lina knew that she was going to enjoy her evening enormously.

When he asked her after the oysters what she would eat next, she chose a fillet steak, very underdone. “I’m so hungry,” she explained.

Ronald was delighted. “A woman who chooses an underdone steak in a restaurant when she might have
foie de volaille en brochette
must be sound at heart,” he told her.

Gradually their intimacy returned.

Ronald, as if to show that he was not going to take advantage of any confidences which Lina might now regret having made, did not refer at all to Johnnie. Their conversation roamed over a large field. They discovered that they both liked travelling, René Clair’s films, looking at cathedrals, chop-suey, and the novels of Mr. P. G. Wodehouse. Ronald told the inside story of a recent murder of an artist’s model, and Lina told him how to cook little plums in red wine.

She tried to make him talk about his own work, but on that topic only he was shy. “I live among people who are always yapping about their work,” he explained, “and I pray the good gods that I shall never get like them. It may be pharisaical, but it’s a good deal less boring for one’s friends.”

“But I shouldn’t be bored. I want to hear about your work.”

“I expect when I know you better I shall bore you with it all right,” Ronald assured her.

“So you’re going to know me better, are you?” said Lina, quite archly.

The conversation took a different turn.

It appeared that Ronald was going to know her very much better. He had decided that almost before they had gone off to hide last night. And now ...

“Yes?” said Lina provocatively.

“Now,” said Ronald with a rush, “I know you’re the nicest woman I’ve ever met in my life.”

“Nonsense!” Lina said; but the words had made her heart give an odd little jump.

“It isn’t nonsense,” Ronald declared fervently. “I tell you, I
know.
You’re just exactly what I’ve always thought a woman ought to be and no woman ever has been.”

Lina tried to keep her head. “It’s sweet of you to say so, Ronald, but, after all, you don’t know me, do you? You really don’t know the first thing about me.”

“If you’re trying to persuade me that you’re not the sweetest woman in London at this moment ...”

Lina laughed skeptically, but an insane wish flashed through her mind that Johnnie could be there to hear.

She put her elbows on the table and leaned her chin on her interlaced fingers. “And what exactly have you always thought a woman ought to be, my poor Ronald?”

Ronald was not in the least nonplussed. He promptly rattled out a string of adjectives embracing, Lina thought, all the possible varieties of feminine perfection.

“Well, I’m afraid I’m hardly any of those,” she laughed. “I’ll tell you what I am. You might as well know now as later. Irritable, conceited, intolerant, bad-tempered—”

“You’re not conceited!” Ronald interposed hotly. “I never saw a less conceited woman.”

“ – weak, lazy (
very
lazy), provincial, unpunctual (you saw for yourself!)—”

“That wasn’t your fault. Your bus was held up.”

“I ought to have come by taxi. Parsimonious too, you see. Well, anyhow, I don’t come very near that catalogue of yours.”

Ronald smiled at her. “
I
think you’re perfect.”

Lina laughed with happiness. Ronald was absurd, of course; but it was delicious to be discussed like this.

There was no getting away from it: Johnnie never had appreciated her.

“And everything about you is perfect,” Ronald added. “Except one. Your hat.”

“My hat?” Lina knew only too well that hats were her weak point, but she had been sure that this was a success. She had bought it with Joyce last week, and Joyce, whose hats were certainly not a weak point, had very much approved. It was a little black Glengarry worn very much on one side. Lina had secretly thought that she looked quite dashing in it. “What’s the matter with my hat?”

“It needs a feather over your left ear.”

“My poor boy, don’t you know feathers have gone out?”

“I don’t care. It needs it. Besides, you’d look adorable with a naughty little feather over your left ear, Lina.”

“Ronald,
really.
Anyone would think you were talking to a young girl of seventeen, instead of a matron of thirty-six.”

“Are you really thirty-six, Lina? My goodness, you don’t look it.”

“Well, I am. How old are you?”

“Thirty-three.”

Lina sighed. It was a pity that any man in whom she was interested must always be younger than herself.

Ronald took her back to Hamilton Terrace in a taxi. As soon as the more brilliant lights were left behind, he put his arm round her and kissed her.

“I’ve never been kissed in a taxi before,” Lina said conversationally. “Isn’t it supposed to be terribly vulgar?”

“That depends who’s doing it,” said Ronald, kissing her again.

“Well, certainly I don’t feel vulgar,” Lina remarked, rather wonderingly.

Ronald would not come in for a drink.

Joyce was reading in the drawing room. She looked up from her book. “You’re back early.”

“We sat on till the waiters nearly threw us out.” Lina stood abstractedly in the middle of the room, pulling off her gloves. “Joyce.”

“Yes?”

“Can you come down to Marshall’s with me to-morrow morning?”

“Yes, I think so. What for?”

“I want to get a feather for this hat.”

“My dear girl, feathers have gone out.”

“I can’t help that. It needs one.”

“But nobody’s wearing them now.”

“It needs one,” Lina said firmly. “Over the left ear. And what’s more, I shall look adorable in it,” she added: but not aloud.

Of course Lina visualized herself as Ronald’s mistress.

She spent most of that same night in doing so.

Here was the lover that Joyce had been counselling her so earnestly to take, for the raising of her little finger. She saw herself in his arms, under his kisses, in bed with him. The result both surprised and horrified her. That he attracted her strongly, and that he was the only man besides Johnnie who had ever attracted her physically, she knew already: what she had not realized before was that she actively desired him.

To desire a man whom one has known only for a bare, twenty-four hours! In spite of life with Johnnie, Lina was still old-fashioned enough to find that disturbing.

She wondered whether Johnnie’s moral example had coarsened her. Lying alone in bed, with no man to touch by her side, she felt it rather depraved that she should want to have one there; and a man at that whom she had known such a preposterously short time – whom, in fact, she did not know at all. And when, too, she certainly did not love him.