Good Behaviour (27 page)

I arranged myself near the fire. The day’s papers and a racing calendar lay on a low table. I thought it might be nice to
be found reading the calendar; it would give me something to talk about: ‘So-and-so’s nicely in the such-and-such with ten-seven.’
But I couldn’t concentrate. I just held the paper in my hand while I drank my champagne and looked round the room. I couldn’t
observe that properly either.

I have a wonderful head for drink – champagne or orangeade, it’s all the same to me – and I was just deciding to refill my
glass when the door opened and an old man came in.
He was tall and fat, and he wore patent leather shoes with bows on their toes. His huge grubby white tie looked as though
he had been fumbling at it for days. Now it drooped, broken-winged; he was like a bird – not a very well bird either.

When he said, ‘I live in the pigeon house,’ it seemed more than likely. ‘They put in some very good plumbing and all that
sort of thing, but the water hasn’t got to me yet. Do you have a good supply?’

‘Yes, very,’ I lied.

‘You
are
blessed. You don’t know how lucky you are. All the same I would rather live in my pavilion than in this sad Gothic building,
wouldn’t you? I’m all for the
dix-huitième
. May I give you a glass of champagne?’ He poured out a glass and drank it himself. ‘Not very nice; I can’t say I recommend
it.’ He poured himself out another. If I had had the courage I should have got up and filled my own glass, while he sat humming
to himself and drinking as much as he could, as fast as he was able.

‘You’re an uncle,’ I said at last.

‘I’m rather deaf.’

‘You are Uncle Ulick,’ I shouted.

‘They call me “Uncle”; rather unfortunate I always think. I haven’t the remotest connection with them, or any interest if
it comes to that – still less since I’m writing a history of the family. I’ve never been so bored. I’ve got so far, and now
I can’t think what to put. Actually, there’s nothing to say. Pedigrees are what I like and they don’t have a proper one.’

Thinking of the assurance and beauty I had seen so often, but so distantly, and the wealth of glamour that surrounded me as
I sat with an empty glass in my hand, I could only goggle helplessly at his disloyalty.

‘Do you know the Crowhurst girls?’ For once in my life I was glad to say that I did. ‘That’s an interesting family. Three
lines go back to my own lot and we go back directly to Cahulahoun, the Hound of Ulster. I could call myself Prince Drumnasole
if it wasn’t for this rotten union baronetcy tied round my neck.’

‘Sir,’ I said, and it was the bravest and most successful word I had spoken yet, ‘may I have another glass of wine?’

‘I like that “sir,”’ he said approvingly. ‘Obviously you know how to talk to princes. You must come to luncheon in my pavilion.
I make very good mayonnaise.’ He filled his glass again. ‘Not much left in this,’ he said, tipping the bottle into mine. ‘Too
bad.’ He put the bottle on a table beside my chair. I was in agony, thinking someone would come back and suppose I had drunk
the lot.

‘You’re Beleek’s daughter?’ He looked at me in a hooded, private way.

‘Granddaughter,’ I said.

‘Ugly Tom we used to call him, but I understood his girl was very good-looking.’

‘That was my mother,’ I shouted.

‘Extraordinary.’ He was talking intimately to himself. ‘And all the girls here are wonderful lookers. Superb quality. I don’t
know where it comes from. Not in the book. Good vicarage stuff at the best. Lawyers, lawyers.’ He shuddered. He got himself
onto his feet as the kind pretty girl came back. She was followed by a quite splendid man – splendid, but distant to a degree
that paralysed the air around him. His refuge from speaking was the state of the fire. He rang the bell. He went away. He
came back with a frightened boy and a great load of logs. He directed their placement on the bed of ash. Then he
sat down to turn the wheel of the fan that blew air below the flat hearth.

‘I like doing this.’ He settled happily to his work.

Again I was in a vacuum. At a distant table, loaded with bottles, Uncle Ulick was standing as close as possible to the one
whose name was still unknown to me. I heard her say: ‘Oh, Uncle Ulick, you are looking filthy.’ ‘It’s my tie. You do it for
me, my darling.’ How different his voice sounded now from the tone of denigration I had heard in it before. He was imploring
her youth to do something for him, to lean towards him, to be kind. Her arms were so long that she kept an airy distance between
them as she retied his tie and murmured to him. ‘Can’t hear a word. Come closer,’ he shouted.

I heard her say: ‘… do be kind. You do promise? Oh, you
are
kind.’ The same words she had used to me, and in the same tone of voice.

‘All right,’ he answered with a sort of massive petulance, ‘but first I must put some brandy in this.’

I was suspended in doubt, in a suspicion that soon grew to certainty. The man blowing up the fire stopped his work and pointed
to the bottle beside my chair before he spoke to me, directly and for the first time: ‘I bet Uncle Ulick emptied that one.’

‘Well, yes.’ I met his eyes, and thanked God for any link of complicity.

‘Mary Ann asked him. We’re short one man tonight.’

He had been asked for me – I was to be kind to him; he was to be kind to me. I felt a little sick. I wished I knew how to
be rude. When she came back to me with a dish of nuts and a great champagne cocktail, my resentment forced tears up to the
backs of my eyes.

At least I could honestly think her dress was quite horrid. I could pity her for that. A short white chemise, straight as
a pinafore, not even a sequin to liven things up, it was high to the collar-bone, where a six-inch diamond bar held one minimal
orchid. At the back it was open to a long U of brown flesh – an unfortunate garment for a girl as big (if in different places)
as myself.

‘Do drink. You must eat up.’ She forced biscuits and nuts on me as if I were an ailing pet. ‘Dinner won’t be for years. Oo,
you twit, you twerp, you oaf, you
person
, what a degrading fire.’ She was talking to her husband now. I supposed he was her husband as he didn’t answer. Uncle Ulick
came and perched dangerously on the arm of my chair: ‘You seemed interested in my family, so, as I was telling you, we go
back to the Hound of Ulster … ’

I faked absorbed attention and tried out a few ‘Oos’ as he went back through the Crusades, where his forebears had been such
career boys.

‘Oh you are kind,’ Mary Ann murmured to me as we all stood, uncertain as to who went in to dinner first. ‘Uncle Ulick loves
you and I’ve put him beside you, do you mind? You have Kenny Norton too; be nice, don’t let him drop off. Last time he broke
a plate and covered his face in raspberry mousse. Too miserable. He’s never been just the same since he hit the open ditch
halfway up at Kempton.’

That was when I knew I was going to be near enough to touch the most famous gentleman rider of the day. It would be something
to put in my letter to Richard. I wouldn’t stress it, of course, but when I wrote again I was going to let him know that Kenny
(I would write ‘Kenny’) had spoken to me. He didn’t speak while we drank our soup, clear as a mountain
stream, and just about as tasteless. Uncle Ulick poured a whole glass of sherry into his soup plate, on the bottom of which
I could see a tortoise sprawling among weeds and water-flowers. He put down his spoon and sighed out his disgust. Then he
brightened up.

‘Rather a funny incident – I’m a terrible shot you know – it was when Ethelred the Unready was shooting with the Drumnasole
of that day, and one of my ancestors’ arrows … ’ on it went. He was too deaf for comment or interruption.

An inch of sole, in a rather delicious sauce; then terrible venison – Uncle Ulick ate his red-currant jelly with his pudding
spoon, which I thought rather grand, and still I had no word from Kenny Norton. He didn’t seem to be saying much to the girl
on his other side either, but there was a kind of familiar happy distance between them, not the gulf of worshipping unfamiliarity
that separated him and me. At last he spoke. And what he said stunned me: ‘Saw Richard at Newbury.’ A chasm of distance closed
between us. He knew about Richard and me.

‘Are you sure?’ I said. ‘He’s in Africa.’

‘Large as life at Newbury. Losing money too.’ He went back to his dreadful venison and his silence. My heart raced. My hands
gripped the edge of the table. He was grotesquely mistaken. I had to confirm this.

‘Have you known Richard long?’ It sounded so baldly conversational.

‘On and off. We’re some sort of cousins.’

So he must know. All the same, Richard was in Africa. ‘When did he get back?’

‘Long enough … ’ He stopped. ‘Just back, I suppose. He was very brown.’

Just back. After weeks on the sea. That made sense of his silence. Tomorrow could bring me a letter. The next day could bring
me Richard. Everything in my mind was rhapsody, Fear left me. I turned easily from Uncle Ulick. All that I had practised in
the car flowed smoothly back into my head.

‘What about Seamonster for the Gold Cup?’ And I could remember every one of the other entries without effort.

‘Funny little horse … funny temperament … ’ We were off and away. I had all his attention. Now I looked with confidence towards
a happy evening and a tomorrow of weightless certainty.

Dinner was over. Some of the early arrivals were dancing in the ballroom.

‘Promise to enjoy yourself,’ Mary Ann implored me as we stood together in the respectable gloom of the hall. Through an archway
Uncle Ulick came towards me. Mary Ann smiled kindly, covertly, on each of us in turn: ‘I want you to have a beautiful time.’
Uncle Ulick had two dance programmes dangling on their pencil strings from his white-gloved hand. ‘I’ve put myself down for
one, three, seven, nine, and eleven,’ he said virtuously. ‘After that I shall go home to bed. I don’t know about you, I’m
not very good at these modern dances, but Mary Ann will be disappointed if we don’t try. Shall we?’

‘What do they call this tune?’ he asked me after we had made three circuits of the ballroom, our feet moving in a different
world from the music.

‘“The Birth of the Blues,”’ I told him.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘fortunately that seems to be the death of them. Shall we have a drink? Oh, not in the bar.’ He impelled
me towards the room where we had had our drinks before
dinner. If Uncle Ulick had bought a drink at the champagne bar, I might have become involved and heard the magic words: May
I have a dance? But no. He hurried me on to the further door, where a manservant was waiting. ‘Good idea,’ Uncle Ulick said.
‘None of the hoi-polloi in here. Just the family. Now, can I offer you what some people call A Brandy?’

Back in the first salon, that anteroom to life and dancing, I met a girl I knew – someone to speak to. She chatted in a pleased,
easy way till a man touched her arm: ‘Ours,’ he said, and they went off to dance, leaving me monstrously alone. A kind old
man with a gammy leg advanced with gentle enquiries about Papa.

‘I’m not much of a performer,’ he said, ‘but would you care to … ’ Halfway round the ballroom, we came to a merciful halt
on two gold chairs. ‘Don’t really get the course,’ he gasped apologetically. Later I saw Kenny Norton immersed in talk with
two other men. He must see me. He never looked up. Nor did Uncle Ulick appear for his next dance.

I smiled, and hummed, and stood carelessly as the hall emptied into the ballroom and I waited, only for Uncle Ulick. Presently
I took myself to the ladies’ cloakroom, the classic refuge of the unwanted. I hurried downstairs again, hoping that I looked
as if I were keeping a partner waiting. I stood about, smiling, compressed, submerged in politeness; aching in my isolation;
longing to be alone; to be away; to be tomorrow’s person; reading Richard’s letter perhaps; waiting for him in reality. But
there was no respite from the party that flowed round me. Beautiful creatures, men’s hands guiding, just not touching, their
backs passed by as they went in to dance and came back to drink. Lucky creatures, unknowing as a herd of antelope. I saw them
as cherished and set apart. I saw Kenny
put his arm round a girl, small and ugly as a child’s pony. I turned my eyes away. A kind middle-aged couple gave me a drink
and sighed about Papa with real regret before they went off to play bridge and left me almost longing for Uncle Ulick.

He came back punctually for number seven, and as we struggled in the dance his hand crept resolutely about my backbone. My
backbone crept too. ‘Shall we sit the next out, little girl?’ We didn’t get as far as the free drink. In the second salon
he left me on a Knole sofa near the fire. ‘Be back,’ he said. There was sweat on his forehead, and he walked away as though
he were sailing with great care above his feet. I wondered if he could be rather drunk.

Alone, but with a man, ardent if old, coming back to me, I felt more natural, looser somehow in my joints than I had felt
for hours. I have a greedy feeling for total luxury, and waiting here alone I was immersed in its deepest textures. I took
note of some ideas that I should perhaps adopt in a house that would be my own; the pale slimy satin cushions on the rougher
brocade I liked, and the great basins full of white hyacinths, all their cones of bells evenly grown together, not one mature
beyond another. There was a second scent behind the rich penetration of the hyacinths. I prowled the room. I found it. In
a long shallow glass box stephanotis lay among its leather leaves. I smelt it, and it breathed out at me like an animal. A
turmoil seized on me: the vigour that comes with the full moon.

I stopped prowling about and went back to the chair near the fire. I was safe here while the music was playing – safe to be
alone and unpitied. Soon Uncle Ulick would be back. Soon I might rebuff him. I leaned across the table near me, covered in
Tatler
s
, Country Life
s,
Bystander
s,
Punch
; I would
make my choice among them. I would be reading contentedly; should any couple pass I need not see them. I chose the
Tatler
and turned to the doings of the great unknown who hunted with the Quorn and the Belvoir, who danced at hunt balls in historic
English houses.