Westwood (56 page)

She was painfully excited. A fornight is not long in which to learn philosophy, resignation, devotion to duty and all the other qualities which are necessary in order to bear life’s pains, and she was twenty-four and owned a warm heart. Her one hope, stronger than all other feelings, was that she would not feel a return of her former devotion when she again saw Mr Challis. She dreaded this, for she knew that she could not admire what she did not respect; she
needs must love the highest
when she saw it; and if her feelings did return, they would do so in a debased form of which she must be ashamed.

There was more than one taxi drawing away from Westwood as she came near to the house, and even a private car or two, with dark foreign faces inside, waiting their turn to go into the drive. The delicate iron gates were set wide open and on either side of them, in tubs, were blue hydrangea shrubs in flower. Margaret shyly dropped behind a group of people who had just alighted from a taxi and followed them towards the house.

It was a calm evening, grey and still. Soft plumes of violet cloud lay along the west, where a little golden light broke through, wave on wave of cloud lying beyond the clear reaches of the light. Not a leaf stirred, and the pansies and roses, lifting their motionless faces in the flower-beds, looked as if their eyes were shut. There was a sweet cool smell in the air of freshly mown grass. A trail of blades and severed daisies had escaped as Cortway was carrying the heaped bin over the paths and lay along the ground; his sight was not so good as it used to be, and he had overlooked them when he was sweeping.

She glanced up at the goddess above the portico, with full lips set in their pensive line and her face turned towards the west. A soft glow illuminated it, like a reflection of light rather than light itself. The door of Westwood was open and she could see massive jars filled with flowers, the glitter of lights, people standing about talking and laughing. She could hear a piano being softly played; it was a childish-sounding versioin of ‘Lili-Marlene,’ rendered with an expert touch, and she saw that the grand piano from the drawing-room had been brought into the hall. Some people were gathered about it, singing softly, and she recognized Hebe, in a white dress of net with a wonderful necklace of green stones which looked like emeralds (but surely, thought Margaret, they can’t be). In her brown hair, which to-night was dressed high on her head in a top-knot of curls, there was a quaint little tiara of the same green gems and in the low bosom of her dress there were pink roses, a stiff bunch stuck down her neck in such a way that the beholder felt that their thorns must be scratching her. She looked like a little girl dressed up. Oh, what an hour of careful consideration had been bestowed upon that little-girl look, those ungraceful roses! All the young men there were dying of love for her.

Margaret came into the house in the wake of a large woman in a fur cape who looked as if she must be Somebody and who was talking loudly in French to the men who accompanied her. Margaret’s own intention was to slip away to Zita’s room and leave her coat there before she looked about for Gerard Challis and got over the first shock of seeing him, but before she could even move across the hall, he suddenly came forward from the crowd, tall and slender in evening dress, with his hands held out to the large lady whom he smilingly greeted in French. Margaret’s heart leapt, her throat grew dry, but it was with shame for him. How could he look so dignified and at ease, when all his life was a lie? No; she was saved. Her feeling for him had not returned; she felt nothing but shame and pity. But her heart was empty as she turned away and she already wished that she had not come.

‘Hullo, Struggles, ducky, I’m tight!’ whispered a gurgling voice in her ear and she turned quickly to see Hebe at her shoulder, hand-in-hand with a young man. ‘I wish you wouldn’t always try to shock me, as if I were about fifty!’ Margaret was moved to retort tartly, and Hebe looked surprised and amused as she drifted away. The front door was now shut by Cortway, looking unfamiliar in a white jacket, and Margaret was making her way across the hall to the staircase when Seraphina, who was passing, stopped and put a kind hand upon her arm.

‘So glad you could come, my dear,’ she said. ‘Did you have
too
shattering a time at Kew? We’ve been
wondering
about you. Zita
did
say you had been in once or twice, but I couldn’t believe you’d really
recovered
. Go and leave your things and then come and have a
drink
.’

She moved away smiling before Margaret could answer. The latter, who was already regretting what she had said to Hebe and wondering if she had been rude, thought how lovely she looked in a white lace dress, showing arms and shoulders which were only slightly too heavy and setting off the delicacy of her complexion. She had a necklace and bracelets of garnets set in gold.

Zita’s room was untidy and silent. A letter of some twelve pages was flung down upon the bed, covered with exclamation-marks and green writing. It was apparent that Zita was having another love affair and that, as usual, it was leading to complications. Margaret took off her coat, tidied her hair, and stood looking at herself in the glass.

‘I don’t look too bad,’ she murmured at last.

She had taken to heart some of Zita’s scornful remarks about young English misses who dressed in bright colours which ‘did make themselves seem dim,’ and had managed to get herself a dress of dark-grey lace. With this she wore black net gloves and kept her black velvet bow at the nape of her neck, and carried an outsize glittering gold sequin handbag. Her hair was brushed very smoothly and she wore much brilliant red lipstick. No ear-rings, no necklace, no bracelets or rings, for Zita said that young English misses hung themselves with these things as if Christmas-trees they had been.

I look distinguished, she thought sadly, but what’s the use of that? I look so hopelessly serious, so earnest and thoughtful. I look as if I sat on committees all day or made pendants with a hammer. I should like to look like a kitten.

With which reflection, she went downstairs feeling subdued and remote from the rest of the cheerful company, with the intention of finding Zita.

However, Seraphina was agreeably surprised at her appearance, which Margaret had indeed rated too low. She looked elegant, as well as distinguished, and Seraphina thought that any young man who was not hopelessly spoiled by a surfeit of beauties ought to be pleased to talk to her. Accordingly, she presented to her a young man in naval uniform who asked her if she were Angela Britton? He was so bad at names. As Angela Britton was a gifted young repertory actress, Margaret was gratified at the implied resemblance, the young man assuring her that it was striking. But after they had thoroughly discussed this, and exchanged some remarks about one another’s jobs, and had each had a drink, silence began to fall between them, and even while Margaret was searching for something to say, the young man exclaimed, ‘Oh, I say – Nicky! – do excuse me, there’s Nicky Mallison,’ and darted away into the crowd.

She sipped her drink and watched the people. She was standing at the foot of the staircase, on which people were sitting, in groups and in twos, talking – talking – talking. Some of the girls were in Service dress, including a Pole, with the languid eyes of a harem beauty gleaming above her stiff soldierly collar. Many distinguished elderly men in evening clothes were there, and younger ones in uniform, and Hebe’s friends were recognizable by their youth, their air of abundant health, and their wedding-rings; they stood together in corners talking about their children. But there was plenty going on besides talking, for someone was usually at the piano improvising a gay tune or a dreamy one, while the large drawing-room had been cleared for dancing and Margaret could hear the medley of squeaky and metallic noises made by a small swing band. The smoke of many cigarettes wreathed slowly up into the air and the noise of conversation grew steadily louder but the room did not become disagreeably hot, for all the windows and the front door stood open and cool air floated in from the garden.

Presently Margaret saw Zita working a way towards her between the chattering groups, looking very cross and very smart in a dress of thinnest black lawn with wide ruffles round its hem, sleeves and neck. She had brilliant blue delphiniums made into a tight posy, fastened to a black band on one wrist and a tiny watch shimmering with diamonds on the other. Margaret, while admiring her toilette, did not feel quite pleased about it, for her own appearance slightly resembled Zita’s; both might have been dressed by the same House – as indeed they had, for the taste of one had moulded that of the other. We look like two plain women making the very best of ourselves, she thought.

‘Ach! such an evening!’ began Zita in a low, furious tone. She cast a glance over Margaret’s dress and snapped: ‘Good. You look
chic
.’ Then she viciously wound the diamond watch.

‘What’s the matter? I love your dress; did you make it? And what a lovely watch!’ said Margaret soothingly.

‘Of course I made it and much trouble it was. Ach! those children, I thought never should I come away. You like my watch?’ more complacently. ‘My new boy friend gave it to me.’

After the watch had been admired and Margaret had suppressed some disloyal reflections on Zita’s capacity for attracting boy friends who could afford to buy her miniature diamond watches, they chatted for a little while and then Zita darted away to speak to Mrs Challis and did not return and Margaret was once more left alone, but not so isolated as to be conspicuous. One or two people glanced at her with vague smiles but no one addressed her, and after some time she began to think that most of these people knew each other, for she heard many nicknames exchanged and caught shreds of gossip which argued intimacy between the gossipers. To her, everyone whom she studied seemed distinguished, interesting, beautiful, and she recognized several celebrities, while the soft continuous music, the warm air filled with perfume and cigarette smoke and the scent of dying roses, the brilliant lights and the continuous babble of lively voices, presented such an entertaining spectacle that after a while she ceased to wish to take an active part herself and was content to listen and look on.

In a little while she thought: I am enjoying it. Here I am, at a brilliant party that I would have given ten years of my life to go to when we lived in Lukeborough, but I’m not taking any part in it; I’m just looking on as if I were at a play; and yet I’m enjoying it. I
am
more content than I was a year ago; yes, I really am.

‘There’s
the
most wonderful view from the roof,’ suddenly said a girl’s voice above her head. ‘
Too
impressive.
You
go up and look at it, darling. You can see absolutely to the
Ruhr
!’

Margaret glanced up as the speaker came down the marble staircase, picking her way between the guests seated upon the steps, and saw that people were going along the corridor at the head of the stairs as if on their way to the roof. She suddenly felt that a breath of evening air would be delicious.

A few minutes later she stood breathing the faint breeze and gazing out across London, that beloved city, that wounded, unmartial group of villages, lying spread for mile upon mile, east and west and north and south, as far as the eye could reach, under the darkening summer sky. For the clouds had drifted away, and now every tower and dome and factory, every palace and church and stadium, stood out ghostly clear in the soft afterglow. Sometimes the myriad grey and cream tints were broken into by a dark-green mass of summer trees and occasionally, like bones, white or yellow ruins reared up. A few lights sparkled here and there amid the miles of buildings and smoke from the trains spread itself rollingly along the dark-blue or brown façades. It was the minute yet clear detail of the whole colossal expanse of masonry which gave it an irresistible fascination to the eye: the vastness of it awed the heart, and the pride and splendour of its history awed the mind, but these tiny rose-pink walls and dwarfed houses of tea-colour or livid white, each with its very windows distinct and each unlike its fellow, were – in the sense that they excited the imagination of the beholder and set it soaring – wonderful.

Margaret leant upon a parapet and gazed, her thoughts moving on from dream to dream. A few people were on the roof when she first came up, pointing out landmarks to one another and exclaiming at the clearness of the air, but soon they went away and she was alone. She had not thought to bring her coat, and presently she shivered.

‘Cold or miserable?’ asked Alex Niland’s voice, and she turned and saw him coming towards her across the leads. His evening clothes were rumpled and his hair was disarranged and under one arm he carried a bottle.

‘Which?’ he repeated, and put his arm, which was pleasantly warm, about her shoulders.

‘Having a nice little brood, eh?
What are we here for? What does it all mean? Where are we all going and why
? I know. Have some,’ and he unscrewed the bottle, putting both arms tightly round her in order to do so, and invitingly held out the foaming neck.

‘No, thank you – oh – all right – thanks, I will –’ and she drank some foam, hoping that he would not spill it over her dress and wondering what was coming next.

‘That’s better,’ he said, and carefully wiped the neck of the bottle with a large, grubby handkerchief and drank himself.

‘You miserable?’ he went on earnestly, putting his face close to hers and gazing intently into her eyes with his own large ones, that looked dark and strange in the fading light. ‘Yes. Worrying about Gerry, aren’t you? Poor old Gerry, he’s had it. You don’t want to worry, you know.’ He waved his arm at the wonderful panorama spread below and around them and then at Venus, flashing above them through air so clear that an infinitely thin fiery net made of her own light seemed flung about her. ‘Look at that. Always something to look at. Minute you open your eyes in the morning. Have some more.’