Cousin Rosamund (19 page)

He read them from a crimson leather notebook, and I could tell him at once that we would be able to go to the London party and no other. At that he took out from a foolscap envelope four quarto envelopes, bound together by a rubber band and with the air of doing a card-trick gave me the one on the top. It contained a very thick card printed in silver with an invitation to go at ten o’clock one night in June to a house near the Albert Hall. Mr Ramponetti watched me while I read it, as if there were some interesting feature about the card which would presently astonish me, as if the lettering would change from silver to gold and from gold to bronze. But it was the address on which he wished to comment. ‘A marquis lived there who won the Derby, but it is nothing to what we have in Paris, we have a palace in the Avenue Foch, and in Rome we have a palace by the Pincio, and in Brussels we have a palace built by a millionaire, very mad. Pity you cannot come to Paris and to Rome and to Brussels.’ He indicated by a smiling nod that it would always be so for Mary and me, the second-rate would be our portion.

I asked him if the London house were lent them by a friend, or if they were leasing it and staying in it for some time. ‘Na, na,’ he said, ‘we take it for three days only. We get in, we get out.’ His hands performed a meaningless but proud pantomime, showing such delight in mobility for its own sake as an ape might feel. ‘I make all the arrangements. Nestor is too far away. They went from South America to Australia, they go now to China. You should see the fares they pay. It hurts. And Nestor has told you, like me he was once a very poor boy.’ To my alarm he transferred his curious delight in instability and loss to the room in which he found himself. ‘Nice place you got here,’ he said, looking round the room, as old-fashioned actors do on the stage when they are supposed to be visiting a house they have never seen before, running his eyes round a line very high up on the walls. ‘Have you been here long?’ he asked, meaning, ‘I suppose you think you can stay here for ever, my poor girl, but it doesn’t last, it never lasts.’

When he rose to go he said, ‘Now I go to engage the wild animals for the party. Nestor will have wild animals, to be different.’

‘What wild animals?’

‘All that are tame enough for a party. Elephants, camels, dromedaries, for certain. Giraffes and zebras, lions and tigers, if they will come. A whole zoological garden they tell me to get. I tell them that some day they may be pleased if they have a canary in a cage.’ His smile disclosed large yellow teeth that seemed to confirm his pessimism. ‘Look’, he might have been intimating, ‘I am a man now, but my teeth tell you I was once a horse, and I shall be a horse again.’

We hoped at first that Rosamund would stay in London for some days before and after the party, but she was to fly over from Berlin that day and to leave the next morning for Paris, as the parties were to be given on four successive nights. This she told us on a picture postcard from Ceylon, and did not write again. But we were to read in the newspapers much more about the peripatetic court which was going to be constructed for these unknown royalties without title, in paragraphs written in envenomed doubt. There had emerged since the war a new kind of journalist who wrote on social events, in the most restricted sense of that term, and were employed because they had been born into families of social importance. They were the children of people who had been hosts and could be so no longer, and they themselves were exclusively guests, and were not gracious in their new role. Uncle Len had told us compassionately of fly-by-nights, as he called them, who had sunk so low that they could only hope to sell to those who had sunk too low to buy, and therefore always asked to be paid in advance and bit the coin to see that it was not counterfeit. The gossip-writers too suspected the credit of those who promised to entertain their kind. They wanted another house to be open where they could drink champagne, they were inflamed by rumours that the English guests who found the date of the London party impossible were to be given their plane tickets and hotel reservations to Paris or Rome or Brussels. But since they saw the world growing mean about them, they feared that this might not be true, and for all their greed would not have been disappointed if it had been false. As Mr Ramponetti half hoped that the Ganymedios fortune would not last, the gossip-writers half hoped that it did not exist, and probably for the same reason. Mr Ramponetti had almost no ideas, and not enough to help him to perceive a pattern in life; so it gave him a certain degree of philosophical satisfaction to recognise instability; and there was something in many people now that liked the thought of loss. Indeed they liked the thought of every kind of ugliness. At a luncheon-party Mary heard a man say, They have asked Lady Bentham to bring thirty people, they know nobody.’ Lady Bentham was a friend of ours, we had often played for her, we rang her up and asked her if it were true, and it was not. We had wondered many times why certain women who liked to entertain were hated almost as much as if they had brought people together for the purpose of hurting and insulting them rather than to give them good food and wine and hear their talk. We were to see Rosamund and Nestor, the targets of hatred more vicious still because absolutely nothing was known about them except their intention to ask people to a party; and those who aimed the arrows would not have found Nestor questionable as we did.

We were invited to dine with them before the party, but both of us had to play earlier in the evening. When Rosamund heard she wired to us that it did not matter, there were forty other people coming, we would not have been able to talk. But she did not say anything about seeing us privately at any other time; and of course she could not, if she was to fly in the morning of the party and fly out the next morning. We were not to see her except at the party, and we went there knowing that. We found ourselves approaching the hired house in a queue of cars so slow that we got out and walked; and from the porch of another house a woman whom we knew, though we could not remember her name, called out to us. She was saying goodbye to a man, and as soon as he had gone she explained that the hired house was blocked with guests, and that as the party was being held in the communal garden behind the houses we could go to it through her back door. We followed her through her hall, which was hung with watercolours of the kind that ambassadors’ wives used to paint in the nineteenth century, studies of the Parthenon and the temple at Luxor, and the Kremlin, all looking as if they were in Surrey, while she lamented the excessiveness of the party and blamed the committee in charge of the communal garden for having given their consent to it, even though the sum would, she said, pay the bulb and plant bill for years. Crying, ‘It’s like a fair,’ she led us into her garden, which someone had remade in the Italian fashion, leaving it all stone. It was a terrace, decorated with amphorae, from which some flowers of creeping habit, pale in the night, fell to the flags.

‘If you do not want to go into the party at once, you can watch it from here,’ said our unknown friend. ‘Look, I have laid a rug over the balustrade here, you can lean on it without spoiling your gloves and your lovely dresses. Ah, I remember you both when you were so young you did not wear proper evening dresses, you wore little muslin frocks. You were so charming, so simple, you must have been brought up in a very sheltered home, you would have been overcome had you known you were going to grow up into such a world as this.’ Wondering where adults situate the alternate universe, virgin and secure, where they imagine children live, I thanked her.

We looked from the darkness into a bright theatre. On the ground underneath the terrace were great squat lamps, part of a pioneer effort at floodlighting. Their harsh brilliance turned the many trees in the communal garden the prodigious green of vegetables I had sometimes eaten in my childhood, which had been boiled with pennies by cooks who knew nothing of metallic poisoning; and it made the solid Victorian houses insubstantial and colourless, like stage sets awaiting their last coat of paint. Many houses seemed to have pale thick window-boxes, with blurred edges, in their upper storeys; these were the heads of the curious who had thrown up the sashes and leaned out to see better. All over the lawn there had been erected tall gold and silver masts, to which were attached metal streamers painted with heraldic devices and curling horizontally, so that they looked like pennants blown by the wind. It was as if there had been a battle or a tournament here, and the tents had been dismantled, leaving only the tent-poles. These tents might have been set up within a greater tent, for the intemperate lights annulled the sky above, though it was a clear night, and substituted a discoloured haze, which might have been the ceiling of a vast marquee. This glare made monochrome of the crowd of human beings walking about among the masts, to the sound of music played by an unseen band, and the animals which here and there towered above them. If Mr Ramponetti had not found the variety of wild animals he had hoped, he had at least found quite a number of elephants and camels and dromedaries, all of excellent behaviour, who were moving with the cautious, humanitarian gait of the circus-trained beast, to the peril of no one.

The tangle of cable which ran from the lamps just below us kept a segment of the ground quite clear, so that we looked straight across at a spotlit group of these animals. There were three camels and an elephant, who was shifting from foot to foot, perhaps because he was accustomed to perform his act to music and heard the band as a call to duty. White-clad attendants were standing by but the men in charge of the lamps were alarmed, and shifted cables further from the animals, leaving a fairway along which there then streamed innumerable people, some of whom we knew or at least recognised, so strongly illumined that the expressions on their faces and the essential character of their bodies and movements were emphasised to the point of caricature. Lady Tredinnick strode between us and the light, her arms swinging and her head bowed; she had brought her melancholy solitude with her, she might have been a castaway walking on a lonely beach. Then came Lord Catterock, the little millionaire with the Texan accent, strutting along with his hands in his pockets and his habitual look of devil-may-care roguishness, which as always promised that he was about to blow up the whole of the elaborate occasion by some gay and imprudent act, although the woodenness of his face and body betrayed that he had no fancy, it was beyond his power to think in the mode of gaiety and impudence. Behind him spread out in a fan the young people he always took with him wherever he went, beautiful young women of good family and their husbands, who were suspected of mercenary participation in orgies of vice. In this cruel light it could be seen that this was not true, and that what they were paid for was to endure boredom.

Two men came along with a girl whose dress was almost fancy dress, whose movements spoke of a desire to attract attention. She came to a halt at the sight of the elephant, as a housewife might pause in her cleaning of the larder shelves because she had seen some left-over that could be used for soup. She had bethought herself that the contrast between her fragility and the elephant’s huge mass might be amusing and exciting, if it were dramatised. She coquetted in front of the great beast, and when it bent its knee she made a court curtsy, and when it raised its trunk she raised her lovely arm in salute. She was exquisitely made, an almond of a girl. Lord Catterock came back and watched her. His flock stood behind him and watched her with some concern, wondering whether their number was to be increased by one, and wondering too what was considered to be their full strength, whether this meant that one of them would be dropped. But the elephant could only lift its trunk and bend its knee, and other young women tried to prove the same point as the initial exhibitionist, which was however not susceptible to proof by larger numbers. They proved the more general and not interesting point that women are smaller than elephants. Lord Catterock moved away. There was a blare of trumpets somewhere among the gold and silver masts. Everybody moved away. There were left only the camels, the dromedaries, the elephant, the white-clad attendants. A soprano rose in the distant night, hideous in the deformity imposed on the voice of any singer fool enough to sing in the open air. An old man and a young woman came slowly along the fairway and came to a halt in front of the animals. The woman wore a sari, the old man’s skin was nearly black against his white suit, they and the animals had travelled a long way to this place. The attendants stepped forward and bowed deeply.

There was an outburst of woe close to us, about the level of our waists. An ape was standing on the flagstone just behind us, rocking itself from side to side, and holding its head between its hands and moaning. It had broken free from leading-strings, a crimson tinsel ribbon was looped round its neck. It was very tame. It came for comfort to us and gripped our skirts round the knee, exuding that strong smell which is not altogether physical, which makes a wail through the pores, a complaint. We sang softly to it, an air by Ladmirault. It liked that and stayed quietly by us, and we were able to turn our eyes back to the party. The old man in the white suit and the woman in the sari were still standing beside the animals. They had impressed one of the attendants to act as a messenger and sent him in search of the host and hostess. He had now returned, followed by Nestor, who stepped into this spot of special brightness as if the lit ground were an elastic substance on which he could bounce, but turned back to give an encouraging arm to Rosamund, who was walking slowly and heavily. Now it could be seen that the old man was a great king among his own people, for his greatness was reflected in Nestor’s excessive obeisance as in a distorting mirror. His little body stretched voluptuously while he chattered greetings; he was thinking, ‘We both have money, you have more money, but I have much. We both have power, you have more, but I have much. We have houses and gardens, automobiles and yachts and planes, you have more, but I have much.’ But a delicious tremor ran through him. He had, of course, a unique treasure this man could not possess. His short strong arm drew Rosamund forward with a competitive pride. She wore the diamond necklace and a dress, white or nearly so, of chiffon draped in the Greek fashion; there was at that time a dressmaker in Paris called Alix who made clothes of this sculptural kind. Rosamund’s hesitation, her anxiety, her distress, were like a mist about her under the strong light.