The Only Poet (43 page)

She hurried across the hall to the powder-room, though it was so pretty, unfastening her coat as she went, for she really was too late, it was sheer impudence to come to a party when everybody would be thinking of going home. She briskly handed the coat to the woman in black among the hangers, who, she noted, was not the nice fat blonde Italian whom Patricia usually got for her parties from Willowes-Aumbrie, the caterers in Sloane Street, but an older woman with a rather odd stare. ‘I am so late,' she chattered, because she saw that the woman in black was still staring at her, but seemed to be in the grip of an emotion, even to be about to burst into tears. ‘She is unhappy,' thought Leonora. ‘Perhaps somebody she loves has died. Perhaps she's just poor.' It struck her and amused her that though her coat was quite a good mink – wild, and very well cut – once the woman had got it safely among the powder-room hangers any other guests who caught sight of it would not say, ‘That's a nice mink,' they would deduce, ‘That must belong to someone old.' For some years now Patricia and her friends had held the belief, strong though they might lose it overnight, that all furs short of sable were dowdy, and by night and by day they wore cloth coats, of such remarkable simplicity that, allowing for the difference in wear between cloth and fur, they could have saved little or no money that way.

She herself was unlikely to join in that movement. The people who had been about her in her youth were as sensible as she had ever known, and she had let what they taught her stay in her mind, even if she did not act on it. One of their precepts related to the buying of clothes. Her home had not been actually poverty-stricken but every halfpenny had been bespoken for warmth and repairs to the roof and books and good plain food and drinkable wine, and it had been impressed on her that before buying any article of clothing one must divide the price by the number of years the thing was likely to be wearable, and if the figure was high, well, obviously one abandoned the project. There was some sense in it, of course, though the sum had to be altered just a little to work out the right answer. Nowadays it was only prudent to divide the price of any dress or coat she bought by the number of years she might live. ‘But, God,' she said to herself, ‘how ridiculous I would have looked in the intervening years, had I not thrown that precept out of the window.' All sorts of things would not have happened, she vaguely thought, not specifying what things. ‘No, I did not look ridiculous,' she thought with dreamy unspecifying pride, but she supposed she looked ridiculous now, people did when they were old, but when she peered into the glass it did not seem to her that she did, though such vanity as she had been born with had long since evaporated, as scent does if one leaves it long enough in the bottle. It was many years since her appearance had raised any important issue. But, scanning her image with such matter in mind (and that was how it seemed to her now, just ‘such matters', no faces and no names floated up to the surface), she felt a stirring memory, and it seemed to her that her hair had something special about it, it had been unusually soft and fine, and had some other and rarer quality as well. To pass a comb through it had been to give it a life of its own. It had risen in a cloud round her head, and had drifted about her shoulders, floating far out from her body, and if she brushed it in the darkness that followed, it gave off sparks, she was her own night-sky and shooting-stars.

Her lips were dry. This happened all the time now, whenever she had been out in the open air, however briefly. She pressed the lipstick against the tedious surface, and continued to consider her mink. Dear Philip, her first husband, would have been pleased at her refusal to jettison her mink. He had always encouraged her to buy good clothes, he had often embarrassed her by taking it for granted that she must have what she wanted before his wants were even clearly conceived, which had the tiresome result that when she tried to describe the sacrifices this husband had made for her she found herself able to specify them less clearly than she would have liked. The pattern had been pleasant enough. But it had to be faced whenever they went to Paris, which they did every three months because of his work, and then it was all so pleasant, it flowered into such a pretty occasion. He would urge her to go and buy herself a suit from Chanel or an evening dress from Vionnet, and she would at first put him off by saying every evening that she had preferred to visit an art gallery where they were showing some panels by Bonnard or see a new Guitry film or meet a friend, and then on the last morning, when his work would be done and he would offer to take her to see the collections himself, she would flatly refuse to go; and he always rewarded her with an astonished admiration, that was fresh and candid as if he were a boy in love for the first time, a boy much younger than he had been when he first fell in love with her.

The only thing was that his emotion was founded on a double error. He believed that she did not fit herself out at Chanel's and Vionnet's because she was true to her parents' deliberate avoidance of vulgar expenditure. In fact what prevented her from shopping in Paris was her knowledge that Philip had not got that sort of money, and that anyway there were few people in Dorset who would not, had they seen her in a Chanel suit, think her under-dressed, or think her over-dressed had they seen her in a Vionnet dress; and as for her parents, the reasons that they lived in a house lent by a relative and travelled and entertained very little was that a heart ailment had forced her father to retire early. It was not tragic, they were happy enough reading and gardening and listening to music, and it was quite unemotionally that they said to each other every now and then: ‘We'll be all right if we don't run into debt'. They had meant just that, and nothing more. But how like dear Philip it was to make so much of what was simple hard-headedness and hail it as the restraint which was the attribute he valued most.

Why, she wondered, did he overprice by so much that necessary but negative quality – that dangerous quality, which might only be disguise for a deficiency? There must be some deep reason, for he had pledged himself to his belief in it, he had laboured to cultivate it. Yet why was that? She could not imagine what he feared he might do if he let his nature have its head. There came into her mind a photograph she had once seen in a newspaper, showing a crowd moved by rumour to gather on a foothill near Los Angeles and wait for the Day of Judgement. She told herself it was all part of his humble resolution to make his goodness, which was already remarkable, still better. There were many facets of his personality which she could not understand because she was so far beneath his level. Yet there sounded in her ears, as clearly as if she had said the words to a deaf companion, ‘Philip would have liked me to wear a mink coat till it was bald'.

That was the worst of being old. One had time to think over things which really required no further mental attention, only a sort of physical fostering made one familiar with them over a long time so that one could look at them from every angle, every useful angle, and judge them by their consequences over the decades, and one surely might have left it all at that. But suddenly one found that one held opinions which were nothing like what one had worked out through one's lifetime, and these were sometimes subversive and ungrateful, and always, that was the treason, superfluous. It was no use starting chewing over things all over again. But she was so unsettled by what she had been thinking about Philip that she had to remind herself that her second husband's attitude to money had been the exact opposite and had been just as irritating. Lionel had liked her to spend money – no, it was worse, he loved her to waste it. But his attitude was not so simple as that. It sprang from deep roots, being involved, she sometimes imagined, in a far-fetched fantasy about the abundance of womanhood, overturning her conscience. He enjoyed her having large bills and running up an overdraft in much the same spirit that he insisted on her keeping her hair long at a time when all her friends were bobbed and shingled.

A distant pleasure warmed her, she was on the point of return to a long unvisited satisfaction, but she was too tired to make the long journey. She looked away from the cheval glass, closed her eyes and put her right forefinger between her lips and bit it, as she had done when she was a child and wanted to be somewhere other than where she was. Then suddenly she opened her eyes and turned about. The woman in the black dress had left her place beside the hangers and was standing close behind her and had just called her by the name of her first husband, who had died fifty years before.

‘You are Mrs Philip Le Measurer, aren't you?'

She supposed the woman was the child of someone who had worked for her father-in-law in the house in Dorset or who had possibly herself worked there when she was very young. But Leonora felt no curiosity about that. She was conscious of nothing except that the three words ‘Philip Le Measurer' had pierced her with horror. Not that Philip's name could raise any horrible image. Sometimes, even now, when she had passed in the street or seen in a group of young people at a friend's house some boy not yet spoiled in skin or smile or look of candour, she had said to herself, ‘Philip was like that when he was forty'. What was so terrible about hearing his name was simply that it was so many years since it had been spoken. By now all his friends were dead; he had been twenty years her elder. Her two daughters had been eight and six when he died, and had married in their teens; ‘Le Measurer' must be to them what they had burnt on to their pencil boxes with a magnifying glass when they were at school. She herself had remarried only four years after she became a widow, and had then passed into a world he had never known. The last time she had heard him mentioned was in a lawyer's office five years or so before, when a young solicitor (grandson of the one she had started with) had read out the list of parties affected by the breaking of a family trust, paused to ask who Philip Le Measurer might be, and on hearing, crossed off his name without comment.

She stood quite still, in her ears the humming which is the abstract sound of the night, and she ached because she had given Philip no son to keep his name alive. ‘But this is nonsense,' she told herself, ‘we had our children as they came, and if I didn't have a son it was because there wasn't a son about for me to have.' There was no occasion for self-reproach; but one must shudder in the pervading chill.

But now the woman in black was surely speaking to her in the warm and soaring voice of affection. ‘Forgive me. I knew I should call you Mrs Morton. I've known for years you're Mrs Morton, I cut the notice from the
Continental Daily Mail.
You'll understand,' she added huskily, ‘there's nobody in the world whose life I 'd be more likely to follow than yours.'

Leonora smiled insincerely and raised her eyebrows as if in eagerness to arrive at some recognition which she could trust to be delicious when it came. ‘No relation to that odious housekeeper I do hope,' she thought, ‘but thank goodness, by now she must be dead and in hell.' But then she felt a sharper twinge of curiosity. When one came to look at the woman in black she was not at all the kind of woman whom caterers sent out to take charge of the cloakroom at parties. For one thing, she was too old, in her middle or even late sixties, and for another her elderly good looks were being expensively maintained. Her black dress was no uniform, Leonora would not have minded wearing it herself for a lunch at, say, the New Berkeley, and her thick silver hair was arranged in the casual order which meant costly hours and carefulness from hairdressers who were respecters of persons. The jewellery, too, didn't fit. The string of pearls would be worth little enough now, they had that look of being bought long ago, a reward for a first child, perhaps, but when this woman was young they would have stood for a large packet of stocks and shares; and she had combed forward two cushioning curls of hair in an effort to hide earrings which were really prodigious, the sort of thing one saw if one still crossed the Atlantic by liner, worn by the women at the next table in the restaurant, who were always much richer than oneself. She plainly had all she wanted in a material sense, though she was not, as people used to say, a lady. But that was only because she did not want to be taken for a lady. She was being industriously deferential as she explained how she happened to be in Patricia's cloakroom. Leonora did not believe a word of it. Whoever she was, she was supported by a group, a family, an association, which had stopped at a lower step on the social staircase than Leonora's own people simply because they were not going to risk their dignity by a dispute about their right to mount any higher, and anyway they were all right where they were. And they did not mind being deferential because they were used to exacting deference themselves.

But her explanation, which was going on and on without actually explaining anything which Leonora wanted to know about this encounter, threatened an outburst of emotion which would crack the opaque varnish of her manner; and at this Leonora felt the sweat form on her forehead, for that emotion must be purely illusory, product of a mistake which would have to be laughed off although it was probably not in the least amusing. Not a single word was enlightening. It seemed that this woman had come from her home in Brussels to London a day or so earlier, to visit her grandson, Jean-Pierre, who was going through the mill at Willowes-Aumbrie, and was, in fact, at this very moment carving at the buffet in the next room. He had, of course, had his full training already, in the original establishment in Brussels. But his father (who was, the woman in black explained, with what would have been a sob had she not been solid like an Ingres portrait of a Louis Philippe matron, their eldest child, yes, her first-born) was starting a catering business in Antwerp.

‘Our third,' she said, and paused. Then started again, in a pure gush of pride and joy. ‘Our third. Not counting,
not counting,
the original establishment. Oh, Mrs Morton, I do want you to understand. It's all been as successful as that.'