Bond Street Story (33 page)

Mrs. Preece had been really quite delighted with the result. But she had been reckoning without Julia's highly developed open-air talents. It had rained that same afternoon. And Julia had gone out without a hat. There was now nothing left but dense dark fuzz. Miss Preece looked like a princess from one of the Solomon Islands. She carried with her a strong hint of hibiscus and roasted missionary.

In consequence, Mr. Preece who hadn't been late for anything in years, kept walking up and down the hall. He went from the front door to the wall-bracket barometer and back again, click-clicking with his tongue as he went, and reminding his wife that they had missed the 8.2 already, and the way things were going looked like missing the 8.17 as well. But Mr. Preece was not thinking of himself. He was thinking of Mr. Rammell. “Can't turn up after Mr. Rammell,” he was saying. “Look very bad.”

And at that moment Mr. Rammell was thinking of Mr. Preece. Thinking of Mr. Preece and talking to Mrs. Rammell. “Wear whatever you like,” he had just said to her. “Nobody'll notice. Only hurry. There's Preece coming right up from Woking or somewhere. Look all wrong if the Preeces get there first.”

Things were bad, too, in Sloane Square where Marcia lived. She was tired already. She had been on her feet all day showing off what was left of the Rammell Autumn Collection. The one thing that she wanted was to be left alone. In any case, she hated these staff dances more than anything else in the whole world. Unless you were careful, you found yourself becoming familiar with all the wrong people. Awful young men from Hardware or Provisions cut in during the Excuse-me dances, and moved off jubilantly, leaving a wake of violet haircream and cheap shaving soap behind them.

Of course, if Mr. Bulping had been available there would have been no problem. Any girl can relax if she has arrived in a
Bentley. But Mr. Bulping was not available. Very much the reverse, in fact. It was his son's twenty-first birthday. And he had explained—rather callously, Marcia thought—that he had to be present for appearance's sake.

That was why Marcia had accepted Mr. Preece's invitation to sit at his table. It would scarcely be exciting. But it would at least be respectable. And remembering the company, Marcia decided on her beige dress. The beige dress. And her moonstones. It promised to be a pretty pale colourless kind of evening. And Marcia decided to fit in perfectly.

She had just finished dressing when the telephone rang. It was Mr. Bulping. He sounded large. Male. And uninhibited.

“How's my little girlie?” he asked.

“I ... I thought you were in Wolverhampton,” she told him.

“Not me when my little girlie's in London,” he answered.

“But ... but what about your son?” Marcia said.

She could have bitten out her tongue as soon as she said it. The last thing on earth she wanted was to remind Mr. Bulping of his first marriage. It was the sort of unfeeling remark that she had always been very careful to avoid.

Mr. Bulping, however, did not seem to be put out.

“Didn't need me,” he told her. “Takes his mother's side in all this. That's why I'm here. Let's make a night of it. Coming round straightaway.”

And before Marcia could explain, Mr. Bulping had rung off.

There was, however, one person who was thoroughly looking forward to the whole evening. That was Hetty. She didn't mind what dance it was so long as the floor was all right and the band leader really knew his stuff. There was, indeed, in Hetty a quality of enthusiasm, a sheer appetite for enjoyment, that Mr. Bloot found vaguely disquieting. He had never known anyone get so much pleasure out of life. And he kept telling himself that he must not disappoint her. Nevertheless, the prospect sometimes scared him. Because the more he saw of it the more he realized that being engaged to Hetty looked like being a very expensive business.

The ring alone had nearly ruined him. Eighteen pounds ten it had cost. The one disappointing thing was that the diamond solitaire still looked small on Hetty's hand. That was because she had a large hand. And because she couldn't bring herself to discard the other rings that she always wore. These were enormous. Not necessarily valuable. Just enormous. The new engagement ring could do no more than peep coyly through the great
panes of amethyst, garnet, topaz and sheer ordinary coloured glass.

And it wasn't the ring alone that made him uneasy. This evening itself was going to set him back quite a bit. The tickets alone were twelve-and-six each. And that would be only the beginning of things. Because somehow or other he couldn't see Hetty keeping up her magnificent high spirits for the whole evening on the tall jugs full of orangeade and lemon that the management provided. Before he was through there would be Graves or Sauterne as well. Not to mention gins and tonic and probably whiskies and Baby Pollies, too.

Not that there was anything that he could do about it. He had invited her. And it was up to him to make a go of it. Vital, in fact. For yesterday evening, all because of one thoughtless remark, he had very nearly lost her.

It was over at her flat that it had all happened. She had been showing him her new evening-dress. Quite a striking looking model in orange-coloured satin, with a big feather flower on one hip. And Mr. Bloot knew at once that she would look magnificent in it. Even a little too magnificent. Opulent. Also a shade on the undemure side. Even though she hadn't actually got it on he could guess how much bosom would be left showing. And he very diffidently suggested that she should wear a little lace hankie or something, in front.

That was what had upset her. She had simply flung the dress down and told him that, so far as she was concerned, he needn't bother his head about her any longer because her mind was quite made up, thank you. To prove it, she had wrenched off the diamond solitaire that he had given her.

It may have been that the ring was tighter than she had realized. Or possibly she was a little overtired. Whatever it was, her reserve went completely. The niceties just left her. Instead of merely thrusting the ring into Mr. Bloot's open palm, she added that he knew what he could do with it.

In consequence, it had been a day of phone calls. And it had been nearly teatime before he got Hetty to listen to reason. She softened suddenly. “Silly Boy,” she said to him in the old purry-purry voice that he had always found so affecting. “What's the matter with him?” she asked. “Can't he even stand a little tiff without getting all worked up about it? Hetty's going to be cross with her Gussie if he starts behaving like a great big cry baby. Hetty wants her Gussie to be a big strong man ...”

There had been a great deal more in the same vein. Including some pretty remarkable baby talk. It was a staff line on which he
was speaking. And the baby talk was so remarkable that the switchboard operator simply threw up all the other keys, and sat back to listen. All telephone operators have an uncanny ear for voices. This one recognized Mr. Bloot immediately. But, when the call was over, she had begun disbelieving herself.

It was not, in fact, until nearly five-thirty that she had the final proof. The call was an incoming one. A woman's voice, the same, deep, unmistakably husky voice, was there. And it was asking for Mr. Bloot. The operator put the call through to Main Foyer, and waited. It was worth waiting for. Because the caller didn't indulge in any silly baby talk this time. She got down to business straight away.

“Where's my ring anyway?” she asked. “I'm catching cold in my finger.”

 

The Medina Rooms certainly did their dances very well. That was something you had to hand them.

Admittedly, the entrance hall with the brass rails and the mosaic flooring and the sign-poster's fingers pointing in the direction of the separate cloakrooms were a little on the formal side. And there was a strange hot stuffiness peculiar to all entrance halls. The queer thing was that once you were actually inside the hall this smell vanished completely and was replaced by quite different ones. The thick, varnishy aroma of beeswax floor polish. Very efficient central heating. And the faintest possible trace of gas escaping somewhere.

But by the time you were in the hall itself it wasn't the smells you were thinking about. It was the decorations. And in them was displayed a streak of lavishness that had remained carefully concealed outside the big swing doors. Gold and silver were the two colours. The walls, which were dimpled all over in the very latest neo-cinema style, must have been sprayed from a variety of paint tanks. They started off near the floor with an opulent sunset lushness and finished up at the ceiling, pale and gleaming like winter moonlight. Alternate banners of gold and silver, some thirty or forty of them at least, hung down from the high roof. And the big chandeliers, apparently suspended from nothing, appeared at intervals between the banners like something that had drifted in through the air from old Versailles. The professional lighting—the coloured spots and the snowstorm reflectors—were up in the balcony along with the strings for releasing the balloons. It was gold and silver everywhere like the budget of a mad Chancellor.

Amid the gold and silver gaiety, the Preeces' table presented a sad, rather forlorn appearance that even the two bottles of South African hock did nothing to dispel.

That was because there were too many men. Too many men. And too few women. It was like a dance table in a monastery. But what else could Mrs. Preece have done but invite young men? she kept asking herself. It wasn't as though there had been only Marcia to be considered. There was her own darling Julia as well. And the young man whom Mrs. Preece had rounded up for Julia was really a very nice young man. A bit on the silent side, perhaps. And slightly under average height. But extremely personable and
well turned out. A kind of pocket prospective son-in-law, in fact. And how was she to know that her darling Julia, without saying a word about it, was going to invite someone on her own account?

What made it so peculiarly maddening was that Julia's young man might have been the twin brother of the young man whom Mrs. Preece herself had cornered. Same size. Same colour hair. Same silence. When they were not dancing—which was most of the time—they just sat there, quietly sipping their hock, saying nothing.

Mrs. Preece realized now what a mistake it had been to add their new family doctor to the party. He was young. He was handsome. He was a Scot. Every time he had swept into Two Gables she had been impressed. Even rather excited by him. He was always so vigorous. So quick. So incisive about everything. But it was extraordinary how much he seemed to have changed now that she saw him against the background of the dance hall. Rugged, rather than handsome, was the word that she would now have applied to him. Like a great block of Aberdeenshire granite. If a fine drizzle had sprung up on his side of the table it would not have surprised her in the least. And, compared with the other two young men, he might have taken a vow of silence just as he was leaving the surgery. He was mute.

Not that Mr. Preece himself was being any help. He was sitting with his back to the company and keeping his neck screwed round so that he could see towards the door. That was because Marcia had most mysteriously failed to arrive. Mr. Preece could not understand it. Simply could not understand it at all. The last thing that he had done before leaving was to ring down to Model Gowns. And he had spoken to Marcia personally. Nine o'clock was when she had said that she would be there. And it was now after ten, getting on for five past in fact.

But Mr. Preece was never really at his best on this kind of occasion. The heat. The noise. The lights. The people. They were all rather too much for him. Secretly, he wished that he had not come. Then he could have been sitting in his comfortable chair in Carshalton, his beaker of Ovaltine within arm's reach on the table beside him, and that week's issue of
Popular Gardening
open upon his knee.

As it happened, Mrs. Preece too wished that she were back home. But for quite a different reason. A nervous woman at all times, she was convinced that at the last moment, just as they were ready to leave, she had gone back and turned on the gas fire in the bedroom. Turned it on. But not actually lit it. She could
remember everything else. The bending down. The stiffness of the key. The hiss. Even the smell of the gas itself. But nothing, absolutely nothing, about the scraping of the match box on the match. In consequence, she was certain that the whole room, practically the whole house, must by now be full of gas. Simply one vast lethal chamber. With her loved ones, her cherubs, all peacefully asphyxiated in their beds. Or worse. For all she knew, the maid—deficient anyway—might already have struck a match somewhere in the kitchen or the scullery ... As Mrs. Preece sat there, gripping the sides of her small gilt chair, she could almost hear the whoosh, see the blinding sheet of scarlet flame, as Two Gables, Thirsk Avenue, Carshalton, disappeared for ever.

That was why she kept leaving the table to go out to one of the telephone boxes in the hall. And every time she came back she wondered whether it was merely the charred ends of a telephone cable that kept giving her the engaged tone, or whether the deficient maid was really talking to someone.

It was when she returned from the fifth attempt that she found that Marcia had arrived. And more than arrived, she had brought another man with her. That meant that there were now four sets of hungry male eyes all fixed on Marcia. And no one was paying even the slightest attention to her darling Julia. Marcia's friend seemed such a dreadfully coarse, vulgar sort of man, too, Mrs. Preece thought. Compared with Marcia, who was wearing her new, slightly corpse-like make-up this evening and looked too spiritual to be in a dance hall at all, her companion might have spent his whole life at race meetings and the wrong sort of hotels.

At the offer of a glass of hock, he gave Mrs. Preece a wink and explained that he never drank anything stronger than whisky. What's more, he was going to do something about it, he said. While Mr. Preece was still trying to attract his own waiter's attention, Mr. Bulping managed somehow to get hold of another one. There was the distinctive rustle of a note, and the waiter went off towards the service door while Mr. Preece was still futilely snapping his fingers and beckoning.