We That Are Left (35 page)

On the lighted face of Big Ben, the minute hand trembled, holding its breath.

Marjorie Maxwell Brooke was a perfect fool and so was her perfect fool of a mother, Jessica told herself as the trolleybus rattled down Marylebone Road. She supposed they had not set out to have the most disastrous ball of the Season but it had not prevented them from running away with the prize. Jessica did not need to have gone to any of the other balls to know that. If she had only worked for a proper magazine, she thought, and not a stupid rag for factory girls and drapers' assistants, she might have made a story of it,
A Debutante's Cautionary Tale
. There was nothing anyone could do to mitigate the catastrophe of the previous evening but next year's debs should at least be allowed to learn from the Maxwell Brookes' mistakes.

Rule 1: Do not under any circumstances hold your dance at the end of the Season unless you wish it to resemble the winter sales, and the only merchandise still on the shelves items in peculiar colours or with unflattering necklines or that on closer inspection turn out to have buttons missing and snags in the silk. The bargain-hunting atmosphere will bring out the worst in the girls present and result in an unseemly snatch-and-grab. Do not mistake this lunatic behaviour for success. In the cold
light of day those girls with the slightest glimmer of sense will immediately apprehend the unsuitability of their purchases and return them for a full refund.

Rule 2: In the absence of eligible men, find more eligible men. Do not invite schoolboys, mentally defective relatives, American ex-servicemen with an exhaustive knowledge of English cathedrals, men less than five feet four inches tall, Mummy's boys with speech impediments whose only topic of conversation is the girl who has just thrown them over and without whom life is not worth living, or slack-jowled business associates with wandering hands. All of these undesirables will conspire to fill the dance cards of your most appealing guests upon their arrival and ensure that if there is a single attractive man in the room [see Rule 1, above] he will leave before they have had the opportunity to make his acquaintance.

Rule 3: If one of your female guests has graciously provided an introduction to one of the few acceptably handsome men present, do not conspire to ensure that he is too busy all night with your daughter's fat friends to dance with her.

Rule 4: Do not, moreover, expect your guests to dance to an orchestra last employed during the Napoleonic Wars unless you have failed to follow Rules 2–3, in which case dancing of any kind will already be a wretched and joyless experience.

Rule 5: Offensive, ill-mannered and foul-mouthed gentlemen to be forbidden entry. Should they attempt to humiliate the guests, they should be humiliated in return, preferably publicly and with the greatest conceivable ignominy. Rotten eggs recommended.

She had spied him immediately, a tall athletic-looking man of perhaps twenty with thick, dark hair and a mocking smile that made her think of the film star Leonard Fairbanks. He looked restless, despite the smile and the girls that clustered
around him, weary and bored. Disregarding the name scribbled on her dance card, Jessica had squeezed through the crowd towards him. As she passed him she knocked his drink with her arm, splashing him with champagne.

‘What the . . . ?'

‘I'm so awfully sorry,' she said, smiling up at him contritely. ‘How terribly clumsy of me.'

His face shrivelled. ‘For Christ's sake,' he hissed and he pushed past Jessica, his elbow catching her roughly in the ribs. In her confusion Jessica redirected her smile at a raw-skinned youth of perhaps fifteen with a prominent Adam's apple and a starter moustache who was leading a girl in a pink dress out onto the dance floor. The boy winked.

‘Patience, patience,' he muttered as they passed. ‘Wait your turn.'

The thought of it still made Jessica's insides turn over in mortification. She had fled to the cloakroom, resting her head against the cool glass. It was only when she opened her eyes that she saw the girl on the chaise longue. She was wearing a pale green dress that almost exactly matched the eau-de-Nil silk of the cloakroom walls and reading a book. Their eyes met in the glass. Neither of them said anything. Jessica washed her hands carefully and dried them. She smoothed her hair, ran lipstick over her lips, neatening the corners with her little finger. Then, taking a deep breath, she opened the door. The clamour of the party rushed in like floodwater. Behind her the girl in the pale green dress smiled faintly and raised her book.

‘Come back soon,' she said.

By the time the trolleybus reached Regent's Park it was crowded and stiflingly hot. Miss Cooke looked pointedly at her wristwatch as Jessica slunk through the door. Joan was hunched over her desk. She did not look up as Jessica squeezed past.

‘How was the ball?' she asked. They all knew about the ball. Jessica had gone to the hairdresser at lunch time
and for the rest of the afternoon had been unable to talk or think about anything else. It made Jessica squirm to remember it.

She tried to laugh. ‘Actually, it was a nightmare.'

Joan frowned at the typewritten sheet on her desk and pencilled a sharp cross in the margin. ‘Bloody hell,' she said. ‘Sorry, what was that?'

‘It doesn't matter.'

At her desk Jessica shuffled paper and stared out over the cross-hatched sky. The office was sweltering. A trickle of sweat ran down her spine and into the waistband of her skirt. She wrinkled her nose. Was that smell her? She put her wrists to her face and inhaled, but the sharp whiff of her own underarms was stronger, cutting through the bergamot and oak-moss of Chypre by Coty. She was turning into one of
Woman's Friend
's unwashed Bachelor Girls.

Mechanically she began to open letters.

I try to stay cheerful but I can't help thinking any girl who says she wants to stay single all her life is only fooling herself. My sister suggested that perhaps the emigration scheme

She dropped the letter, tore open another.

But since he came back he says he doesn't love me any more.

He says he's met another girl. He says it's for the best, that however hard he tried he could never be the sort of chap I wanted him to be, that we'll both be better off

A third. The envelope was pale blue, the address written vey neatly in green ink.

Not being married and seeing very little hope for it now, my friend and I long to put our small talents to other use. Would you know of any books on how to make paper flowers?

Jessica put her hands over her face. She told herself the things she had wanted Joan to tell her: that she was a silly to worry, that she was beautiful and there was someone out there just waiting for her to come along, someone more wonderful than she could possibly imagine, and till then she had to remember what Theo had always told her: that coming-out dances were ghastly and debutantes were drips, and that anyway there were plenty more fish in the sea.

She did not believe herself any more than she would have believed Joan.

That night Gerald took her to a little Russian place near Berkeley Square where they ate caviar and drank oily cocktails that made Jessica's head swim. Gerald was in a frenziedly good humour. He told Jessica about a scientist he had met whose laboratory was developing a machine to broadcast pictures just as the wireless broadcast sound. He talked very fast about mirrors and cells and the electronic retina. Jessica did not understand very much, except that the images would somehow be sent by telephone. Gerald said that he was going to invest. He ordered champagne so that they could celebrate. Afterwards they went on to a new club in Soho. It seemed that Gerald had invested in that too.

The entrance was tucked down a narrow alley, the door unmarked and unlit. They had to ring a bell to be allowed in. Downstairs Gerald was greeted by a man with hooded eyes and a purple mouth like an overripe plum. All around them the walls of the basement were covered with murals of gods. Jessica gaped. The gods had gold wings and flowing hair entwined with flowers and absolutely no clothes on. From between their smooth white thighs jutted huge erect phalluses.

‘The Erotes,' Gerald told her as they followed the man to a corner booth. ‘The Greek gods of love and desire.'

Ludo Holland was already there with a girl called Freddie. He said she was an actress. Jessica smiled and nodded and tried not to look at the walls. Right behind Ludo's head a
god's phallus stuck up like a unicorn's horn. The god was sprinkling something from a cup onto a lady straddling a bull. She had her head thrown back and her mouth open. The hair between her legs was luxuriously curly and on her bare breasts the nipples stood out like light switches. Jessica swallowed her shock and tried to be amused. How daring and marvellous to throw over the fusty old rules and traditions, to spit in the eye of prudence and propriety. Theo would have loved it. On the tiny dance floor one girl wore leather chaps like an American cowboy, another a diaphanous black slip through which her brassiere could quite clearly be seen. Girls danced with girls, men with men. A black man danced with a white girl, so pale Jessica could see the blue veins in her arms. A man in bare feet and a purple silk coat danced by himself. What better antidote to Marjorie's unspeakable dance? She pictured Lucinda Allingham in her rustly silk taffeta, the rictus of horror on her round face as she took in the tumescence of the gods. The thought made her laugh out loud.

Gerald's mood grew wilder, his vivacity sparkling the air like salt. Jessica let herself be lifted and carried by the tide of him. She felt reckless, greedy for his gaiety, his desire for her. She drank and danced, too much of both, the cacophonous jazz careering through her in riotous swoops and runs, and in the half-dark of their booth she sat on his lap and let him kiss her. It exhilarated her to know the power she had over him. They laughed and drank and from time to time Gerald went away and came back and there was a glitter to him, like sunlight on water. He danced with Jessica and with Freddie and, when they pleaded exhaustion, with a girl with cropped hair and a shimmery backless dress with a fishtail like a mermaid. His hand pressed the bare skin of her back.

When, with a wild crescendo, the music exploded to an end the mermaid put her arms around Gerald's neck and kissed him on the mouth. Gerald's hand slid down her back. Then he pulled away, murmuring something in her ear that made them both laugh. Still laughing, he came back to the
booth and slid in next to Jessica. His face glistened with perspiration, the hair around his temples oily with it. He drained his champagne glass thirstily, then leaned over towards her. She thought he meant to kiss her. Instead, he bit her sharply on the neck. It hurt. When she cried out he laughed more. Under the table his legs twitched with restless energy. The music started up. Immediately he seized her hands.

‘Dance with me,' he said.

‘Aren't you exhausted?' she protested but he only laughed and pulled her into the whirling vortex of dancers, spinning her around until Jessica was dizzy with it.

She did not recognise him at first. He was sitting at a table on his own in a dark corner half-hidden by the bar. He was not in evening clothes. He wore a soft-collared shirt like an artist's smock open at the neck and an unknotted silk scarf. The costume made Jessica think of Lord Byron. It was only when he struck a match to light a cigarette and she saw his face, his full mouth and high cheekbones, that she realised it was Guy Cockayne. He had grown a moustache. It suited him. She watched his elegant fingers as he dropped the match in the ashtray and put the cigarette to his lips. His hair had grown longer. It fell over his brow just as Theo's had once, so that he had to push it out of his eyes. In the dim light of the nightclub he looked pale and very handsome. He leaned back against the banquette, his long legs twisted in an elegant knot, and something inside Jessica turned over.

The dance seemed to last for ever. Guy Cockayne smoked his cigarette and stared into the bottom of his drink. Jessica watched him over Gerald's shoulder, willing him not to leave. He did not look in her direction. When at last the music stopped Jessica went back with Gerald to their table. Ludo and Freddie were smooching, her legs crossed over his. When Gerald nudged him with one elbow Ludo slid Freddie along the slippery banquette but he did not stop kissing her. Gerald rolled his eyes and upended what remained of the bottle of champagne into their glasses.

‘I have to powder my nose,' Jessica said, reaching for her evening bag. In the cloakroom she hurriedly smoothed her hair and reapplied her lipstick. Her cheeks were flushed from dancing, her eyes bright. She looked pretty. Behind her the walls of the tiny cloakroom were painted with black and white zigzags. It was like being inside a migraine headache. Butterflies prickling her stomach, she pushed open the door and went out.

Guy had his back to her as she squeezed around the overcrowded dance floor towards his table. There was another man at his table. The other man leaned towards Guy, striking a match for his cigarette. Jessica hesitated, momentarily disconcerted. Even in the dim light of the club it was plain that Guy's companion was not quite proper. His moustache was too narrow, his oiled blond hair too short at the sides. His suit was the cheap regulation kind issued to privates on demobilisation. It was ill-fitting, too wide in the lapels, the chalk stripe too loud. He held his cigarette like an Irish labourer, pinched between finger and thumb. She could not help wondering what someone like Guy would want with a man like that.