Kind Are Her Answers (31 page)

After he was left alone, the thought of seeing Christie every day for a fortnight left no room for anything else. It was only when he arrived outside the Abbey—in time for tea, as the leaflet suggested—and saw the other members of the School being welcomed by Florizelle Fuller, that panic seized him. He decided he had better see about a garage for the car before he went in, and took as long over it as was humanly possible. This re-resulted in his making an impressive appearance in the drawing room after every one else had arrived.

Anna Sable—whom he had never met in all his visits, for she kept mostly to her own room—was sufficiently unnerving. He was late enough to get her reception to himself. She was over seventy, leaned on an ebony stick, and looked like a French aristocrat in Act I of a play about the Revolution. She put him at his ease—like Royalty, he thought, about to decorate him with something—in a voice that was latent with the rich emotions of the Edwardian stage. She spoke of the decadence of modern drama, and he felt as if she were enlisting him with some noble and tragic emblem, such as a white cockade. You could see her on the point of drawing herself up, as the sans-culottes with the tumbril uttered their first howl off-stage. She used her free hand for small, economical gestures of exquisite precision, while she told him that nowadays people imagined it possible to act without having learned to breathe. By the time she handed him on to Florizelle to be put into circulation, every vestige of his ordinary social confidence had ebbed away, and each looked more terrifying than the last. This was chiefly because the women seemed to outnumber the men by about five to one. They were what he called to himself alarming women; being, in fact, women who spent their lives mostly among their own sex, English mistresses of schools, organizers of girls’ clubs and the like, whose virginal self-consciousness he mistook for intellectual superiority. When they engaged each other in conversation as he passed, lest their pleasant excitement and hope should appear, he felt like a gate-crasher who has been found out. They all looked the same age, as if a 1905 class had been called up.

Suddenly he saw Christie standing in a group in a far corner of the room. At the same time he perceived that he was not, after all, the junior member present. He had forgotten how late he was; the younger set had already had time to coagulate. There were eight or ten of them, sitting on the back, seat and arms, of a large sofa, the overflow standing about it with cigarettes. A businesslike hum of conversation was going on, broken with laughter. Christie caught his eye as he looked; and Florizelle, relieved to see his face register at last some kind of recognition, piloted him over.

Christie smiled, said, “Hullo, you’ve come,” and at once began to introduce him to every one. He had never been with her in a crowd of her own friends before, and the subcutaneous irritation and jealousy normal on such occasions prevented him from catching any one’s name. The men wore undergraduate tweeds with finished carelessness, the girls had on vivid woollens, against which lips and fingernails correctly held their own. Nearly every one, he realized in less than a couple of minutes, had been to at least one previous School at the Abbey, and those who had not all seemed to be friends of the others. Their ages would have averaged about twenty-three. He realized quite quickly that he had broken in on a small self-contained club, which had come not because it expected any unique cultural advantage from being there, but because it had found the place a good setting for collective fun in other years. It was evident that Christie was a respected honorary member.
“Do
you remember that day we—” they asked her, one after the other.

Christie, whose work called her almost immediately elsewhere, laboured hard for him before she went. When they asked if he had been before, she forestalled his blank negative just in time. No, he hadn’t actually been to one of the Schools, but he’d been in and out of the place for months and knew all the ropes. Carried along on the wave of her popularity, he quite believed this himself, till after she had gone. On the strength of one intelligent remark about Rollo he passed muster for a minute or two; then they began asking him which of the shows he had acted in, and, when that failed, what he thought of this or that play at one of the Sunday theatres. After he turned out not to have seen any of these, they included him in the conversation politely, when they remembered.

Tea rescued him, since men were needed to carry plates about. He fed, assiduously, the 1905 class, which the last ten minutes had rendered less formidable by contrast. Once Christie passed him, carrying cakes.

“Liking it?” she asked anxiously.

“Fine, so far.” She smiled and began to move away. In sudden panic he hissed after her, “What do we do for the rest of the day?”

“Oh, nothing much to-day. Just get settled in.” She hurried off.

After tea, Kit found, as this remark had led him to expect, that every one seemed to have something to do except himself. When Rollo had showed him his room (dispelling a lingering hope that Christie might do so), and he had unpacked, which took about five minutes, Kit wandered out and went to a cinema.

At dinner he found he had been put at a table otherwise filled by the younger set. Christie was still doing her best for him. Shamed by this into social efforts, he discovered that the young man opposite was reading medicine at Oxford and intended training at his own hospital. After this Kit’s stock became noticeably more buoyant, and they went off afterwards to have a drink together, Kit managing to trade his hospital assets for a little information about the School, only one item of which—that the auditions were held in camera—did anything to raise his spirits.

At half-past twelve that night, just as he had decided that she would not come at all, Christie tapped on his door.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I couldn’t come before, I’ve had such a lot to do. It’s always like that the first day; been at it since half-past six. Come down in a quarter of an hour. I’ll leave the door ajar so you can see the light.”

Kit looked at his wrist-watch a good many times in the next fifteen minutes. The evening behind him suddenly presented itself in mellower tones. It would be all right, he supposed, when he had found his feet a bit. In any case, it was worth it.

At the end of ten minutes he nearly went down. Surely, he thought, she would have done everything she did by now; it seemed hours. But Janet had been a rigid stickler for privacy in the intermediate stages of her toilet; perhaps other women felt the same about it. He had better wait. He started a cigarette, extinguished it on the point of the fifteenth minute, and groped his way down the dark stairs.

Beyond what seemed a rabbit-warren of little passages and doors, there was a crack of light. Unnerved by the noisy creak of the floor-boards, he found his way to it and pushed open the door.

It was a tiny room, which must have been mostly below ground-level, for the window was made of frosted glass, uncurtained, and high up in the wall. The only furniture beside the bed was a wooden chair and a deal table, over which a mirror in a picture frame hung on a nail. On the table a square of shabby brocade, a remnant of some costume, was covered with Christie’s oddments: powder, a jar of cream with the lid left off, the green brush and comb painted with flowers. On the bed, a hard-looking collapsible affair, Christie was lying in her dressing gown and slippers, fast asleep.

When he bent and kissed her she did not stir. Her cheek felt soft, relaxed and warm against his, and it was as if he touched the hem of her dress, or some other thing belonging to her, when she herself was away. She was drowned in sleep, breathing deeply and evenly, lying on her side with one arm folded across her breast and her hand under her cheek. Her dressing gown, the Chinese-blue one she had worn at Laurel Dene, had fallen apart so that he could see the soft babyish crease in her bare shoulder. He noticed, under the naked electric light, that the blue silk was beginning to be threadbare at the edges, so that the white cotton padding showed through.

He said her name and kissed her, softly, again; but could not bring himself to any gesture louder or stronger than the rhythm of her sleep. She made a little sound, a deeper breath rather than a sigh, and seemed to slumber more profoundly than before. It occurred to him that the Abbey had been organized to receive between thirty and forty people, and that she and Rollo had probably done three-quarters of the work between them.

He looked round the room. There was nothing with which to cover her except the plaid rug on which she was lying already. He took off his camel dressing gown and spread it carefully over her, switched off the light, and, fortunately meeting no one, found his way back to bed.

At breakfast it was given out that auditions would be taken during the morning; members would find a list of times on the notice-board in the hall.

“You’re at ten-thirty,” Christie told him; she had adroitly manoeuvred him into a corner on the way out. “Darling, do be marvellous. I know you will be. Rollo wants you for
Agamemnon,
but don’t for God’s sake tell any one I said so. He isn’t supposed to have any ideas, of course, till people have been heard.”

“In Greek?” said Kit, alarmed. “I don’t remember any.”

“No, ass, of course not, Gilbert Murray. If you are, you’ll wear the Greek armour. You’ll look so lovely in it. I’ve got it all polished up. Darling, I’ve put your dressing gown back in your room. Why didn’t you wake me?”

“I don’t know. You looked as if you could do with a sleep.”

“I thought you’d wake me when you came. You’re always so much sweeter even than I think you’ll be. Don’t be late for the audition, will you? I
know
you’ll be good.”

The auditions were taking place behind a door at the top of the first flight of stairs. At 10.25 Kit found himself waiting his turn by the door, next to a stooping, big-boned girl in glasses, who seemed to have been arrested for several years at the school-prefect stage. She was clutching a piece of exercise-book paper, and her extreme of apprehension made his own look, and even feel, like self-confidence.

“Have you been to any of these things before?” he asked her, to encourage himself rather than her.

She looked up at him with clumsy eagerness, like a cart-horse to which a sugar-lump is held out. “No. I haven’t at all. Is it dreadful? I expect you’ve done a lot of it?”

“Never in my life,” said Kit, almost cheerfully. Her admiring awe almost induced him to feel that he had, and was modestly concealing it.

“Haven’t you really? What are
you
going to say?”

“Well, actually,” said Kit, speaking with great carelessness to hide his mounting panic, “I haven’t learnt anything. I didn’t know one had to.”

“Oh, you’re one of those
brave
people who just dash at whatever they give you. I do think that’s marvellous. I wish I had the nerve to do that.”

The door opened and one of the younger-set girls came out, radiant and evidently bursting with some esoteric joke, to be received loudly by the cabal on the stairs.

“Miss West,” said Rollo, looking round the door.

“Oh, dear. It’s me now.”

“Cheer up,” said Kit paternally. “You’ll be all right when it comes to the point.”

“Thanks ever so for bucking me up.” She went in.

Kit waited, listening to the indistinct vocal murmurs within. The door handle rattled uncertainly, and turned. Miss West’s audition was over. She came out with her bit of manuscript twisted grubbily round her fingers, stumbled over her own feet, and carefully averted her eyes from the tiers of faces below.

“Dr. Anderson,” said Rollo, appearing again.

“How did it go?” asked Kit over his shoulder.

Miss West gulped. In her soul a longing for comfort warred with loyal resolve not to say anything which could impair this magnificent being’s chance. “Oh, not too bad,” she said, grinned desperately, and strode away down a corridor which avoided the stairs.

Kit went in.

The room was Anna Sable’s private sanctum. He was vaguely and generally conscious of Morris fabrics, of a signed photograph of Ellen Terry in doublet and hose and one of Lewis Waller in armour. But these impressions were swamped at once by the vision of Anna Sable, sitting upright on a chair with a tall back like a throne, her blue-veined hands folded, in a perfect attitude, on a book in her lap. Cross-legged on a humpty, diminished by her neighbourhood to the stature of an anonymous clerk in a presence-chamber, sat Rollo, taking notes.

Kit acknowledged an inclination from the throne, and shot a side glance at Rollo, in some despairing hope of encouragement or even a supporting wink. But Rollo, bent with the application of a monkish chronicler, scribbled on. Kit’s worst fears had not painted anything so awful as this. He had vaguely expected a straightforward ordeal on school lines, with some one—male, he had taken for granted—to be cheerfully caustic afterwards. No, he told Miss Sable (feeling his breathing located somewhere in his esophagus) he was afraid he hadn’t prepared anything to say.

Anna Sable unclasped her hands from the missal on her knee, delicately fingered its silk markers, and opened it. “Well, Dr. Anderson, suppose you begin by reading me this speech.” She extended the book with her marquise’s smile, pointing to the place with a brittle, unvarnished, meticulous nail.

Kit took the book, drew himself upright, and, anxious only that he should not have time to forget where the passage started, read rapidly, “Desdemona’s chamber, Desdemona sleeping, enter Othello.”

“Perhaps,” said Miss Sable gently, “you might like to read it over to yourself for a moment or two first.”

Kit ran his eye along the passage. Paralyzed by the certainty that Miss Sable’s eyes were fixed on him, he took in scarcely a word. Distant recollections of Paul Robeson mingled with the thought that this was one he hadn’t done at school. Good God, there were yards of it. Had he got to read it all? He glanced up. Just as he expected, Anna Sable was gazing at him inscrutably.

“Er—yes, all right,” he said.

Miss Sable nodded. Rollo poised his pencil. Kit cleared his throat, and began to read.