Sir!' She Said (3 page)

“You couldn't conceivably look lovelier than you do,” said Paramount.

“Caviare, madam,” said the waiter.

Melanie conveyed a century of dead sturgeon to her mouth. Then made a wry grimace. She didn't much care for caviare; any more than she cared for cocktails. If the lad had ordered the dinner himself, it would have cost him less, and would have pleased her more. She pushed the plate forward a little and leant upon her elbow.

Yes, it was a jolly frock. Perhaps she should have bought it. Julia was usually right about clothes; was right about most things, when it came to that; calm-blooded level-headed Julia. Except when she made ridiculous suggestions as she had to-night, about nineteen-year-olds and chaperons. For Julia to talk like that? Julia of all people, when one remembered the way she had talked four years ago. About being able to look after herself; and then all that talk a year later about her flat; how she had maintained that she could not feel really free at home; and that if her father would not give her a flat, she would go and earn the extra four pounds a week that she would need to
support it with. For Julia to start talking about chaperons. Dear Julia, so silly and so sweet.

“The article pointed out,” the lad was saying, “that it's not till a person's fallen out of love with life that she can start falling in love with people. That's why, it said, French novelists choose women in the middle thirties for their heroines.”

“I think,” said Melanie, “that the rather short man with the woman in the gold tissue dress is the best dancer in the room.”

“Bortsch, madam,” said the waiter.

The soup was palatable, but lukewarm.

“You never get good food anywhere that there's dancing,” said the lad.

“Let's dance then,” said Melanie.

The lad was comfortable to dance with, but ungainly as a spectacle. Melanie would have preferred him to look well and hold her awkwardly. “Now, whom would I like to be dancing with?” she thought. Not the dapper little man with the woman in the gold tissue dress. He really was too short. He would have made her look cumbersome. She scanned the other dancers for the perfect partner. Scanned, but did not find him. “If I had the right partner,” thought Melanie as the lad piloted her back to a congealing œuf cocotte, “there's not a woman in the room that wouldn't be jealous of me.”

“Cleopatra was close on forty,” the lad was saying, “when she first met Antony.”

“Let's do it,” wailed the saxophone. “Let's do it. Let's fall in love.”

“Juliet, of course, was only fourteen,” the lad continued,
“but then Shakespeare was only a child himself when he wrote the play.”

With piercing, agonising intensity, drowning the flow of talk, the clarionette pleaded in unison with the drums.

“Let's do it,” Melanie hummed. “Let's do it. Let's fall in love.”

Yes, but it wasn't so easy as all that, she thought as she pushed her plate forward to make room for her elbows. It wasn't anything like so easy as all that. She'ld love to fall in love. For two years she'd been wanting to. But she'd not been able to. Not in the way, anyhow, that one did in books. She had been fond of people, a whole lot fond of them. Once or twice she had been quite thrilled; for about five minutes. She had enjoyed having her hand held by the young men who drove her home from dances. It had been fun seeing people's faces light with surprise when she came into the room; it had been fun hearing people say “I'll only go to that party if you do”; and she had felt angry when a man whom she had fancied to be her particular piece of property had his engagement to her third best friend announced the morning after he had told her that he had cancelled a cricket tour for the sake of a single dance with her. She had experienced a number of secondary emotions.

But as for feeling that the meaning had gone out of existence because she had been rung up at quarter past, instead of quarter to eleven, why, she couldn't even remember when the morning came who'd promised to ring her up and who had not.

“Let's do it. Let's do it. Let's fall in love.”

Wooingly the words were sighed to her.

Well, one day she supposed she would. Most folk seemed to, or said they did. But it was with the feeling that life had somehow cheated her that she looked slowly round the room wondering whether it was by the enchantment that she had missed, that the smiles of this and the other couple were made so light; looking slowly from table to table, from group to group, till her glance fell upon a table by the door against the wall at which two men in dinner jackets were seated by themselves. One of the men was looking at her, intently and purposefully, with eyes that were dark and glowing. His glance did not drop as her eyes met it. She looked away. But she was no longer interested in the other tables, the other frocks, the other faces. She was too conscious of the dark eyes that had met her glance. Were they still fixed on her, she wondered? She looked back and saw they were.

“Let's dance,” she said.

As they danced, she was conscious of those dark eyes watching her. She piloted the lad towards them. He was forty, she decided, at least forty. He had an interesting face, sallow, fine drawn and lined. The face of a man who has lived life and understands it. “He must have had love affairs,” thought Melanie, “big love affairs, exciting love affairs. What does he think of me, I wonder?.” And she felt angry with the lad for not being different, for not being the vast blond Dempsey, or the dapper
fine
ambassador who would have made this experienced worldling feel her to be the kind of woman who could get any man she chose. What use was the lad to her? Any woman could get a boob like that.

“Let's go and sit down,” she said.

Back at the table with the complicated machinery of a caneton à la presse in front of her, her self-confidence in part returned. At any rate this stranger would realise that she was being done well by her unimpressive host. Boldly she looked across the room. The dark eyes were still turned upon her. They were looking intently, not smilingly, but with an awareness of mutual recognition. With those eyes still fixed upon her, the man put his hand into his hip pocket, drew out a leather note case; opened it, took out a card, drew from his trouser pocket a gold pencil, and began to write.

“I suppose it really is impossible,” the lad was saying, “for a person to fall in love who's thinking half the time of things like clothes and motor cars that aren't connected in the least with love.”

Melanie nodded. Yes, she supposed it was. And “I wonder,” she thought, “what he's writing and whom he's writing to.” It was a funny thing to be doing in a restaurant. It was funny the way in which he had done it: looking at her like that, and then with his eye still on her taking that card and that pencil from his pocket: almost as though that writing and that look were part of the same process: almost as though it were to her that the note was being written.

Not that it was, of course. It could not be. How could it be. He was sending a message to a friend: to his club perhaps: to book a table or to countermand an order. There were a hundred and one reasons for writing notes. Any one of which was more probable than that he should be writing one to her. Of course
he was not writing to her. People did not do that kind of thing. It was the kind of thing that happened in books, but never did in life. In real life people did not write notes to strangers that they had seen across a restaurant. He could not, of course he could not. She could not possibly have made all that effect on him.

But the message, whatever it was, had been written. A waiter had been beckoned, explanations were being given. There was no pointing. Just an inclination of the head and the waiter was coming across the room, threading his way gingerly between the tables towards their table. The dark eyes were looking intently at her.

But it can't be, she thought: it can't. Though even as she thought it, she knew it could. She knew it was. There was no other table that the waiter could be coming to. What am I to do? she asked herself. What am I to do? She felt lost, helpless, incredibly childlike in the presence of this experience, this knowledge of the world.

Another moment and the waiter would be at her table. She shut her eyes in a desperate attempt to think, to collect and free her thoughts from the magnetism of that dark gaze. What shall I do, she thought. Through the darkness of closed eyes she heard the waiter's murmuring.

“Mr. Arthur Paramount. A note for you from the gentleman across the room.”

She opened her eyes, staring blankly at the piece of pasteboard covered with minute handwriting. To the lad, that message!

She had not long to wait for the explanation. The
lad was garrulous with interest. “How curious,” he was saying. “And I didn't know he was in England, even. Do you see that dark man over there at the table by the door, in a dinner jacket? That's Druce Mander, the financier, you must have heard of him. He's terribly rich: and famous. He's been trying to get me on the'phone all day, he says. He wants me to join his party to the Derby. Awfully decent of him. I didn't know he took the slightest interest in me. He's asked me if I'ld like to bring a girl with me, to make the numbers equal. I say,” he added, “would you come to his party, I wonder? I wish you would. He's sure to do us awfully well. Do come, Melanie!”

Melanie hesitated. “When is the Derby?” she asked.

“Wednesday, the day after tomorrow.”

The day after tomorrow! She had promised to lunch on Wednesday. And to play tennis and to go to a cocktail party, and she half thought she had promised to go with her mother and that young American to a theatre. She thought she had. But she dismissed the knowledge. Tennis, cocktails, theatres. They could go, all of them. Here was something she could not afford to miss.

“Thank you very much,” she said. “I'll love to.”

She nodded her head slowly. It was to the lad she nodded, but it was with her attention centred upon the dark eyes so closely watching her; that were wondering, she knew, whether she would accept or not.

Melanie had scarcely been in bed four hours when the alarm clock at her sister's side trilled its imperious summons. Julia opened her eyes and blinked sleepily at the sunlight that was streaming in shafts of amber light through chintz curtains on to grey-blue walls and a primrose ceiling. “So soon,” she thought, as she swung herself out of bed, felt for and found her fur-lined moccasins, and shuffled across the passage to the bathroom.

As the water splashed slowly from the geyser, she sat on the edge of the bath reading the morning's letters. It was a typical Londoner's mail. There were one or two bills; an invitation to a private view; a five-line note from a friend reminding her that she was to be called for that evening at half-past eight; a couple of circulars; a letter signed “Mabel Carstairs” expressing a hope that Julia would be able to dine with them on Wednesday week. “. . . it is so long since we have seen you. . .” the letter ended. “I do hope that you'll be able to.” The word “so” was underlined. “Cat!” was Julia's comment. “But I suppose,” she added, “that I've got to go.”

Had scarcely supposed it before her telephone bell had begun to ring. “So early,” she thought. “I
don't mind betting that it's a wrong number.” It was not, however. It was a fretful, worried and familiar voice she heard.

“Oh, you, Leon, yes. I thought at this hour of the night it must be a wrong number.”

“I know, I know. It's terribly early. Of course it is. But I was so afraid of missing you. It seemed the best chance; and there was something I had to say to you.”

“Why, of course, yes. What is it?”

“It's about Wednesday week. You got a letter from Mabel this morning, didn't you?”

“Yes.”

“Are you going?”

“Well, yes, oh yes, I suppose I am.”

“It'll make things much easier for me here if you do.”

A retort leapt to Julia's lips. It was so like Leon Carstairs, that: to see everything in terms of himself: thinking of what would make things easier for him: never thinking whether they would be difficult for her: whether it would be easy or pleasant for her to accept his wife's hospitality: to sit at his wife's table: meeting her and talking to her as a friend. That was the kind of consideration that would never present itself to Leon Carstairs. He saw the whole situation in terms of his own difficulties and troubles. He was too self-centred to consider her. It would have been easy for her to be bitter. But it would have been of no use. There was no sense in trying to alter people. You had to accept them for what they were.

“All right, Leon,” she said. “I'll go. And I'll write to-night to Mabel. I'll be seeing you on Thursday, shan't I?”

“Well, that's another thing I wanted to speak to you about. I wondered if you could manage Wednesday or Friday night instead?”

“Oh, Leon, why?”

“Well, it's like this, you see. . .” And he had embarked on a long explanation of a business opening that it was really important for him to follow up. “I can't tell what it may lead to. And anything like that is so valuable for me just now.”

Wearily Julia listened. “If you can't, you can't,” she said at length. “But I can't manage Wednesday or Friday, I'm afraid.”

“Not manage Wednesday or Friday? What are you doing, then?”

“On Wednesday I'm dining with my father.”

“Couldn't you put that off?”

She shook her head. “He'll be alone. I've promised to keep him company. I've not been there for a week.”

“Surely he'ld understand?”

“I don't know. He might. But I'm not asking him. I'm sorry, Leon. Wednesday's just not possible.”

“What about Friday, then?”

“I'm going to a show on Friday.”