Self Condemned (49 page)
The fact that Professor McKenzie’s wife was an Englishwoman, and one who had come out to this deadly spot since the outbreak of war, caused her almost to look forward to their dinner engagement.
T
wo days later, in the evening at six o’clock, Hester was examining herself in the glass, in a way she had not done since, in her stateroom on the
Empress of Labrador
, she was getting ready to accompany a Knight of the Legion of Honour into the first-class restaurant of the ship. It was now a different face from what it had been then. The stare remained, but it was no longer one of ladylike vacuity. It now was purposeful. The purpose was to escape from Momaco merely, but it might have been that of a woman confined in an iron chest, bracing herself to push up the portentously heavy lid.
René, on his side, was taking his evening suit out of the clothes closet, wondering how much weight he had lost, and looking to see whether the moth had eaten a hole in the middle of the back. When at length he had tied his black tie and put on his jacket, and moved over to the long glass, he saw what the world would consider a very distinguished-looking figure — tall, well-shaped, with elegant, well-brushed beard. This life-size Royal Academy portrait of Professor René Harding impressed him disagreeably — it stepped, for him, straight out of the past of foolish ambitions, and of metropolitan self-importance. But Hester, who was watching him, from where she was sitting attempting to put a discreet gleam on to her nails, did not share his disgusts. With her hands immobilized, she sat following him with her eyes: then one tear, and after that another, began to roll down her cheek. She put down the shammy leather pad, dabbed her eyes with her handkerchief and then jumped up. Going over to her husband she exclaimed, “Darling, you look wonderful!”
“I’m afraid I do.”
“Don’t be silly, René.” She kissed the splendid object, upon the beard not far from the mouth — a mouth worthy of an air marshal. “René darling,” she said coaxingly, “do wear your decoration! I will go and get it for you.” He was speechless with indignation — literally he desired ardently to protest with enormous violence, but something stuck. The scene in the restaurant of the liner rose up in his memory, in all its shameful absurdity. He must put that disgraceful emblem in the waste paper basket; or still better make a present of it to the hotel proprietor. A woman is always on the side of the lousy world. And then of course they want to demonstrate that
their
man is a bigger shot than the other woman’s husband. So he stood, preparing to stamp on the decoration when it arrived. But Hester, who was in the bedroom, could not at once put her hand on the ribbon, and René had begun to think of something else. All of this was giving Hester a great deal of pleasure. More pleasure than she had experienced for many a long day. This was all helping to reconcile her, to make her accept life in this detestable dump. And so, after all, if the Legion of Honour can be utilized to gild the road upward, from the winter of their discontent in Momaco No. I to Momaco No. II, which might become, if not “glorious summer,” at least not quite so oppressive a spot — well, if the wretched decoration would help to that end, why not bedeck himself with it — at the risk of appearing someone he was not to McKenzie?
When Hester returned with the insignia — and a self-conscious smile — instead of encountering the reception she had anticipated, René was sitting with his breast at the ready, inflated to receive the accolade, his face wearing a beatific smile.
“Ah!” he exclaimed, as she approached with the ribbon. “We shall make our debut in Momaco society impressively beribboned.”
They were obliged to telephone for a taxi, for René had omitted to enquire by which route Carmichael Road was approached.The French-Canadian driver took them through the Peasoup quarter by the side of the river, from which seething slum they shot up the road at the foot of the little mountain where the McKenzies lived.
Carmichael Road was a rock-flanked, slightly curving road, on almost the lowest slopes of the hill upon which Mr. Furber, and all other illustrious persons, dwelt. It was extremely clean and prosperous-looking. Subsequently Professor McKenzie explained that this had once been a highly respectable district, but the Peasoup tide flowed in underneath it, between the base of the hill and the river, and the householders on the other side of the road (the McKenzies were on the inner side) found themselves gazing down into Peasoup backyards. As a consequence, house rents in Carmichael Road dropped, sharply, until they had reached a level accessible to impecunious professors. This had suited the McKenzies excellently. There were some quite good French-Canadian shops down below within easy reach, and for their part they did not object to French Canadians.
René, as an older Momacoan, instructed this relative newcomer as to one feature of Canadian life which he might not as yet be quite clear on. “Class is Race, in this country,” commented René. “No Nazi could feel more racial superiority than the English Canucks of Upper Canada.”
On the way to Carmichael Road René attempted to converse in French with the taxi driver. The latter repulsed him in pidgin English. But as his face was almost purely Indian, and with traces of the “nobility” of the Redskin, René tipped him well. There were about fifteen steps to climb, winding up between jagged rocks, in order to reach the house, which was well built and substantial. Professor McKenzie opened the door.
There was a fairly large living room, in which they found Mrs. McKenzie playing the piano — an early Beethoven Minuet. She was a woman a few years younger than Hester. Laura McKenzie was an attractive person, who was aware, but not tiresomely so, of what could be done with eyes of light blue-green in the shadow of a mass of dark hair. Regarding her simply as a big sex trap, to lure a male into a situation where offspring may result, she also, thought René, realized the sex value of the piano — of a mazurka of Chopin’s or a pavan for a Dead Infanta according to taste. Hostesses who, on the arrival of guests, are discovered playing the piano, received from René a very bad mark. The figure rising from the keyboard to greet one was not popular with him. To break off in the middle of a Nocturne to shake one’s hand with a dazzling smile was not a device which recommended the woman who made use of it to René.That a room into which guests are destined shortly to arrive should be impregnated with mazurkas or pavans appeared to him in as bad taste as if some perfume had been sprayed into the air a few minutes before the guests’ arrival.
So the minuet that was still in the air prejudiced René against the McKenzie interior. He glanced sideways a little uneasily at Hester, to see whether the music had made the same undesirable impression upon her. But apparently she had no objection to a hostess clothing herself in the raiment of Beethoven in order to welcome her more adequately; and she showed no signs of feeling that Mrs. McKenzie had put on stilts, and was culturally high-hatting her, or something of that kind.
There was something that Laura McKenzie had, not visible to René, which, from Hester’s standpoint, put in the shadow everything else. And, as an efficient observer, that invisible something should have been the number one article for him to check up on. She was a lady, that was the all-important (to René invisible) something. What he had been looking for was the kind of thing which could influence
him
; and this was a rather usual shortcoming of his.
It was the tones of the hostess’s voice, not the notes of her piano, that mattered. And, staring blandly, Hester swam towards those tones in an entirely satisfactory way, her husband considered.
The four people sat down, René saying to his host, “What luck to have found so nice a house as this,” and it was then that Professor McKenzie explained the reason for so charming a residence being attainable by people in their income bracket.
A sweet, swarthy, merry-eyed French-Canadian maid brought in upon a large metal tray four cocktails and a shaker, and everybody’s tongue began to move with more agility. Hester disclosed her obsession, and said how dearly she would like to be in England once more, instead of this horrible place.
“I do not think you would talk like that if you had had our experiences for the first two years of the war,” their hostess told her, and it was obvious from her tone that she also suffered from an obsession, of an opposite kind from that of Hester.
“Oh, I am sure I should not be affected by that, a hundred bombs would be better than Momaco!” the latter forcibly asserted.
“It is not the
bombs
,” Laura McKenzie cried, “I have never been within five miles of a bomb. You would find there were far more disagreeable things than the occasional bomb — unless of course you were in London.”
“All the same…!” intoned Hester. “Never the less…!”
“The amenities of Momaco, I know, are few,” Laura McKenzie replied, “but I still think that you are extraordinarily lucky to be in Momaco, quite extraordinarily lucky.”
A painful contraction of her raised eyebrows made Hester look suddenly like a hopelessly miserable child, who had lost something she could not replace.
“You have to remember, Laura,” McKenzie warned his wife, “that our guests have had a terrible experience since their arrival here. Apart from anything else, their hotel was set on fire by a ghastly little man, a murderer as well as a firebug …”
“An Englishman, I think,” Laura sharply intervened.
René began to feel that they would never reach the dinner table if this went on. Only a very little more of this dogmatical woman plugging Momaco, and Hester would leave the house. Something must be done at once to save the situation. He shook the party with what he hoped would pass for a sudden, uncontrollable laugh.
“Here we have someone as obstinate as yourself, Hester! I never expected to meet anyone as fanatical as you on the subject of Momaco.”
McKenzie followed suit. He seized his Laura by the arm and recalled her to her duties as a hostess. “Rein in your rage against the billeting officer and the hostile constable, and the air raid warden! We have guests … let us forget our personal grievances.”
“Sorry!” said Laura. “I was on my hobby horse, was I? And I met someone else riding a hobby horse of a different colour.
I apologize.” She smiled at Hester. “This war has made a savage of me.”
McKenzie then brought forward a less controversial topic. It appeared they had mutual friends named Saunders.
“You know the Saunders, don’t you?” McKenzie began. Soon they were all talking about the Saunders, saying how nice Jessica was, and what an intelligent chap was Tom; and the Saunders drew them closer together, especially warming the homesick Hester; and still speaking of the Saunders they moved in to dinner in the room on the other side of the front door.
A Barsac which could almost have passed for a Château Yquem drew serious commendation from René, who appeared in the role of a sniffer and taster. Next he and McKenzie began speaking of the drink problem, for the control was very tight, with the result that bootleg alcohol was exorbitant. McKenzie had been given the name of a “blind pig,” who was reputed to be a little more reasonable than most. The place of this illicit merchant was not far from the Laurenty. “Half the ‘blind pigs’ in Momaco have their business addresses in our street,” declared René, “but not at our end of it. There are several ‘blind pigs’ in our hotel. One of them, with whom I deal, knows the French vineyards quite well.” He gave the address of this man to McKenzie, and McKenzie gave him the new address he had received. The name of this one was the Sieur Fondot. Were there no “blind pigs” down below in their French-Canadian quarter? René enquired. But it appeared that that traffic mostly was carried on in the district beyond the railway track.
Upon the wall of the dining room hung a photograph of a beautifully built seventeenth-century English house, in what appeared to be what was left of a park. The trees seemed to belong to another time, when “lazy tinklings lulled the distant folds,” which they do no more. Laura’s father was a parson, and this was his rectory in Somerset. René demanded rhetorically if there were anything more beautiful in the world than red Somerset, with its red earth, its red rivers, and its wealth of ancient red brick manor-houses, rectories, farms and inns. And Hester’s staring eyes grew misty as she thought of those sacred counties, in the warm southwest of England — from the indescribable beauties of Shaftesbury and the neighbouring villages, to the landscape of Lamorna Birch, and the splendours of Tintagel. Laura was a little cynical and aloof, when it came to a sentimental tripping around the landscapes of her birthplace, but she allowed that it was first-class hunting country.
But Hester was in no mood to be put off by the cynic. She was fond of wine, and especially of sweet wine. The Barsac was finding its way round her veins. She had a sleepy, happy look as her eyes rested upon the old rectory in the photograph hanging directly in front of her, and, then, finding herself once more in civilized surroundings.
It was at this idyllic moment for Hester that Laura McKenzie felt impelled (perhaps because she divined her guest’s gooey state of mind) to speak of the English countryside as she had last seen it.
“It may be that in another couple of years I shall be feeling the way you do,” said Laura, with a jangling about of the brilliant cold blue and green spangles of her eyes, in the shadow of the impending dark avalanche of her hair. The last thing that Hester realized was that the eyes and hair were the human equivalent of the sumptuous and delicate scene in the West Country which had acted on her with such nostalgic force.
It was a south-English combination, a feminine romanticness of so special a kind that it could not come from the northern counties, would seem very strange in France or Italy, would be far too theatrical in Germany and probably could not be found in Scandinavia. This is only to speak of the
kind
, not of the quality.
“
We
were not living, for the first two years of the war, in anything as pleasant as that.” (Laura waved her hand towards the photograph.) “Do you happen to know that bleakest of counties, Essex? Well, we had to find some sort of a place to live in quickly. We rented a small and ill-furnished house about thirty miles outside London. To get there you pass a dirty forest, an East End forest, and roll through the dirtiest, sootiest, flattest slums ever seen. After an hour or so of chugging through sooty, dank, dispirited fields you reach Crackbrook. No one pretends that it is a show place, or beauty spot, but I cannot make you understand the degree to which to mention it in a guidebook would be disloyal.We lived for two years in Crackbrook.”
