Poor Caroline (5 page)

But Basil did not tell Wing Stretton the other confidences
which Madame Calmier had entrusted to him, though they were infinitely more amusing than the limerick about the
young lady called Hilda. For Madame Calmier had no in
hibitions. Her candour shocked almost as much as her
egotism astounded him. She took for granted his desire to
know all that could be told about her past, and talked of
herself with unaffected enjoyment.

During their second meeting she informed him that her
name was not Gloria at all, but Gladys Irene Mabel. Gladys Irene Mabel Wilcox - 'Well, what could you do with a name
like that?' said she. 'When I went on the stage I changed it to Gloria. Gloria Wilcox went quite well, and I kept the
Wilcox just to spite Dad because I knew he'd throw fits if they ever found out in Peterborough that he had a daughter
in the chorus.'

Her father had been a solicitor's clerk in Peterborough,
but Gladys Irene Mabel had found her style unsuited to
cathedral cities. When just sixteen she was expelled from the
High School for an outrageous flirtation with the grocer's
assistant who played the part of 'Fairfax' in an amateur performance of
The Teaman of the Guard.
'An awful little man he was really. Short legs, you know, and wore a bowler hat and said, "Pleased to meet you," though that wouldn't have
troubled me then. For if he was common, so was I, thank heaven. There's some virtue in vulgarity that swings you
over the hard places when you're young.
He had a nice
tenor voice, though, and I was crazy about the stage. I tried to make him run away with me to
London, but he was much
too pure. In fact, you know, my first attempt at seduction was a wash-out. He
married an elementary school teacher
and sings solos in the choir and has seven children. Oh well.'

But Gloria-Gladys, since she could not persuade the young
man to accompany her to London, went there alone, and
encountered such adventures in that city as are commonly
supposed to occur to stage-struck girls of sixteen from the
provinces. She found, to her dismay, that she was thought
too tall for the chorus. She walked on in pantomime as one of Dick Whittington's young men friends in green tights and a leather jerkin, and she eventually crossed to America with a vaudeville producer in a capacity never clearly denned by
contract. She sold cigarettes in the foyer of a New York
hotel. She acted as hostess in a dance saloon. She displayed
models as an outsize mannequin in a Chicago dress store,
and in Rio de Janeiro she bore a child, which died, to an
Italian real-estate agent whom she had met in Illinois. Dur
ing the war she returned to Europe with an extremely resp
ectable semi-amateur concert party under the auspices of
the American Y.M.C.A.

The concert party went to Paris and there she met Gaston
Calmier, a childless widower, no longer very young, the son
of a Lyons silk merchant. He was a gentle, ineffective little
man, but Gloria liked him, and when, in a panic of loneli
ness before he was finally called up to join his reserve regiment, he asked her to marry him, she accepted even before she knew that he had a small but pleasant fortune, carefully
invested. 'A nice little man. He wouldn't have hurt a
chicken. And he was killed six weeks after he'd reached the
front. It was murder to send little creatures like him to
fight. Well - life being what it is, perhaps it was better so.
For him, and me.'

Basil, perforce, listened to this autobiography. While in
Monte Carlo, he could not escape from Madame Calmier,
and could not leave Monte Carlo while his sole means of
livelihood lay there. But after three weeks of unsuccessful
attempts at evasion, he suddenly succumbed to a sharp at
tack of gastric influenza. He thought then that Providence had sent his illness as an order of release, but on the third
evening he awoke from an uneasy sleep to find Madame
Calmier sitting on his
chaise longue,
placidly polishing her
rose-tipped finger-nails with his ivory-backed polisher.

'Nobody seemed to know how you were or what was
wrong, so I came to see for myself. Your landlady tells me
it's
la grippe.
You certainly do look pretty mouldy.'

Basil was unshaven. His bed was rumpled, his fair hair
tousled as threshed straw, his room squalid, his head aching;
and he knew that he was going to be sick. For the first time
in his life, he swore at a lady.

'God damn you, go away!" he cried in agony. Then that
which he feared must happen, happened.

Madame Calmier was neither embarrassed nor insulted.

'My
poor
lamb!' she cried. 'You
are
in a bad way.'

Then she rose, and with sensible promptitude set about
making him more comfortable.

She made his bed and washed his face and found him
clean pyjamas and gave him milk and soda and bullied the
landlady, secured a room for herself in the same house, and sat down to nurse him. She was lonely, and she had found a
friend. She was bored, and she had found an occupation.
Too indolent for professional efficiency, too feckless for pro
longed caution, she made a good enough nurse to justify her
presence in his room.

As for Basil, his first horror melted into acquiescence. He derived a measure of comfort from her affirmation that there
was nothing about a bedroom to embarrass her. The nature
of his illness stripped him of all dignity. To his surprise, she
never seemed to see his nakedness. Or perhaps, he reflected,
she never saw men or women as anything but naked. Her
cheerful glance ignored the masks and the ritual behind
which men like Basil seek to hide themselves. She set no
value on the decorum which he had cultivated with such
care. At first he was too ill to do anything but surrender to
her unperturbed initiative. Later he was amazed by the
restfulness of complete collapse. As he grew stronger he
found himself even enjoying her shameless intimacy, her
Rabelaisian anecdotes, her absurd yet amicable limericks. He had found somebody before whom he could relax com
pletely the rigid discipline of his pose, and he was grateful.

A month after his recovery, he married her. 'And quite
time too,' said she. 'Anyone could see with half an eye that
you were a neglected only child from a country rectory. If
I hadn't rescued you, you'd have been a finicky old maid in

no time.' And that was the extent to which his grand poses had impressed her.

§4

For nearly five years Basil and Gloria drifted about the continent, losing a little money here, speculating profitably
there. Gloria once did a good trade in Viennese em
broideries, and once she lost money in a stupid venture in Hungarian gas works.

'If the worst comes to the worst,' said Gloria, 'I'll sell out my French bonds and buy a little hotel somewhere between Nice and Cannes. We ought to do quite well there. You
understand all about food and wines, and I know how to
deal with people.'

'That will indeed be the worst," said Basil.

'Well, my friend, life being what it is, it's as well to have
a way of retreat mapped out. Still, we won't despair yet.
What about London for a change?'

They went to London. Gloria found a post as sales
woman of outsize models in a Hanover Square dress-maker's
establishment. She and Basil took a small flat in Maida
Vale, and Basil went home for a week-end to the Rectory. He showed his parents a photograph of his handsome wife,
and they were too thankful to learn that she was a wife to
ask disturbing questions.

By this time Basil had succumbed almost completely to Gloria's dominion. In her presence he relaxed his heroic
tension of deportment. He had learned to drink port out of
a claret glass, to scribble a note on
unstamped paper, and to
sit down to supper in a lounge suit. On the other hand he
could now sleep for more
than two hours consecutively. He ate better; his cough left him: he was less cadaverously thin,
and more handsome than ever. His wife was well pleased
with her handiwork.

One August Sunday morning in 1928, just before noon,
Basil lay on his bed in the Maida Vale watching Gloria,
who, in a brief apricot-coloured chemise, wandered about
the room performing a leisurely Sabbath toilet. She painted her eyebrows; she examined a ladder in a silk stocking; she criticized London in August; she complained of the price of

invisible mending; and she turned up the ends of her thick
curling hair with a pair of heated tongs. She was trying out
the tongs on a sheet of the
Churchman's Weekly,
left in the flat
by an Anglo-Catholic charlady, and the smell of scorching
paper mingled pleasantly with the scent of
Quelques Fleurs
and cigarette smoke.

'You know, Basil,' she said with her habitual irrelevance,
'you ought to get a job.'

'My
dear
Gloria! What next? And why that now?'

'This loafing's bad for you. You'll lose your figure. You'll
develop into the Perfect Clubman - all smile and stomach.
Incidentally, Mitchell's won't let you have any more credit,
and I'm not exactly rolling in money at the moment. You
ought to do some of the world's work.'

'I have a wife who works. Surely one member of the
family suffices to satisfy this Anglo-American god of com
mercial Go-getting? Besides, I have the very strenuous job
of being your husband.'

'Well, you're going to have something else very soon if
you're not careful. I've been thinking. It doesn't matter so
much what you do, so long as you do something.'

'Jobs, my charming Gloria, do not seem exactly to fall
into my lap.'

'I know. That's why you've got to make your own job.
You know, where we go wrong is that we always try looking
for money in the same place. That's no good. I remember
a man in America telling me, "You can't go on hammering the same nail for ever. One day it'll get right down into the
wood." I remember him telling me that if I wanted to make money I must keep off cabarets and clubs and go in for uplift. He said that there was an enormous lot of kick to be got
out of uplift, and that what people liked best in the world
was to feel that they were getting fifteen per cent, interest and the pleasant sensation of doing good at the same time.'

'But, my dear Gloria, do you suggest that I should attempt
to uplift anyone?'

'Rather. Why not? I want you to listen to this.' She
cleared a place on the dressing-table by sweeping aside bottles of pomade, talcum powder and cosmetics. She spread
there the scorched and goffered sheet of the
Churchman's