Friendly Young Ladies (15 page)

“I am reading a very nice love story,” she stated, “at the moment.”

“Really?” said Joe, turning on her at once a grave but friendly attention. “Who by?”

Elsie had no idea. She chose most books by their titles, supplemented by a peep inside; she hardly knew what it was in Joe’s kindly voice which suddenly made her suspect that this might turn out not to be good form. She went pink.

“Lucille Something-or-other. I—I can’t quite remember the rest of it.”

“What’s it about?” Joe asked, with a companionable smile. They all waited for her to tell them. Elsie’s blush deepened. All at once she was acutely aware that she was out of key, that they were being kind to her, that she had arrested a conversation that interested them and that they were concealing the fact from her as best they could. Now she must go on, and she wished the floor would open and let her quietly down into the Thames.

It’s quite a simple story really, she said rapidly. “I mean it isn’t deep at all. It’s about a girl who’s a mannequin, and she’s very beautiful, and everybody admires her except the chief dress designer who’s very handsome, but he only cares about his work and doesn’t seem interested in women.”

“I met a dress designer once,” said Helen reminiscently, “at a cocktail party.”

“Fancy your never telling me,” said Leo. “Was he handsome and keen on his work?”

“Yes, very. I remember he had his nails varnished a sort of dull mauve. He wasn’t interested in women, either.”

“Do go on, Elsie,” said Leo hastily. “What happened then?”

Once again it seemed to Elsie that the conversation had changed gears for her benefit. Acutely miserable, she floundered on.

“Well, this girl, Star, has a bet with one of the other girls that she’ll get him to take her out, and she does, and they fall in love; and then this other mannequin, who’s jealous, tells him about the bet and he thinks she doesn’t really love him and instead of designing a dress specially for her, as he was going to, he designs one for the other mannequin instead. “That’s as far as I’ve got.”

There was a pause. Presently Joe said “Hot stuff!” His voice reminded her, somehow, of patting a strange dog. For a very little she would have wept.

Then Leo smiled at her. It reminded her of something; an occasion at home, when she was six years old. She had been standing in the corner, and Leo had grinned at her, very much like this, and given her a sweet when no one was looking.

“Elsie ought to be a connoisseur of romance,” she said cheerfully. “She lives in a whirl of it. We didn’t tell you, did we, Joe? She’s just run away from home. Leaving a note on the pincushion, and everything.”

“No?” said Joe. “Not really?” He gazed at Elsie with new interest. Her spirits mounted. She was, after all, as original and important as anyone else.

“It was rather a step,” she said modestly. “But I felt it had to be.”

Well, you managed better than I did, Joe told her. His straight hazel eyes had the least embarrassing stare she had met. “I ran away once, too. I was eight, or maybe nine. I had the idea of seeing the sea; I couldn’t seem to form an impression of it from the things people told me; maybe it was because they hadn’t seen it either. Anyway I didn’t make a very good job of it; in fact, I only got about thirty miles to the next place, because the man who owned it knew my father and brought me back on a buckboard. My father was rather tickled, I think, though he gave me a strapping of course; but my mother took on a bit, so I didn’t try it again.”

Elsie found this anecdote a little confusing. Before she had time to ask him what a buckboard was, Helen said, “I’ll clear now, then you two can use the table. You’ll help me, won’t you, Elsie?”

Elsie rose reluctantly. She was just beginning to enjoy herself, and felt that Helen could have left it till a little later. Through the open door, as they washed up, she could see Joe and Leo with their heads together over odd-looking strips of print a yard long.

“You’ll have to slip a bit in here,” she heard him say once, “and give a pretty good reason why he didn’t look at his cinches. It comes second nature, let alone riding a killer like that. You’d better say he did, and have the Mexican get at them afterwards.”

“I’ll fix that.” Leo pencilled a margin. “I ought to have thought of it. What have you marked wrong here, about the corral?”

After supper, when he had gone, Elsie’s curiosity nerved her to say, “Does Joe often help you with your books like that?”

“He gives me a lot of very sound dope for them,” said Leo. “He doesn’t help with the writing, naturally.”

Elsie thought this natural indeed; Joe struck her as the least literary-looking person she had ever met. Leo was smiling to herself at some private amusement.

“If he did,” she added, “the effect would be pretty peculiar. Like a deal table with walnut inlaid promiscuously here and there.”

“How do you mean?” asked Elsie, puzzled.

“Well, I mean that about a mile beyond where I leave off, you come to the things Joe takes for granted before he begins.”

“Begins what?”

“Writing, of course. Surely we must have told you who he is.”

“I don’t suppose you did,” said Helen. “You take Joe for granted as if he were the morning’s milk.”

“Oh, well, he’s like that. It’s difficult not to. Actually, he’s J. O. Flint.” Elsie’s blank face caused her to add, “Perhaps you don’t read him?”

“I don’t think I have, really. Does he write about cowboys, like you?”

“Good Lord above, no. Joe really writes.”

“Well, he seems to know a lot about them.”

“He was born in Arizona, that’s why.”

“But he doesn’t talk at all like an American!” People had no business, she was beginning to feel, to be so systematically misleading.

“He left when he was twelve. His mother was English. Went to a rodeo, and married a rancher she sat next to. When his father died (he was shot, by the way, occasional things like that were still happening then) she brought him back home. She’d had enough, I suppose. I think he was rather sore about it at the time, but he settled down; he would, of course. His real name is one of those vague American ones that isn’t a Christian name at all, Jackson or Jefferson or something. No one can remember it, and he’s never been heard to divulge what the O. stands for, so everyone calls him Joe. Partly because he looks like it, I dare say. He’s an American citizen still, I believe.” She added, carelessly, “He had a very happy sort of childhood; he rather enjoys reminiscing about it, I think, once you get him going. Useful for me.”

“What are his books like? Are they nice?”

Helen gave one of her quiet private smiles; but Leo replied quite seriously, even with a certain effort of concentration.

“He’s got one of those very plain styles—like bread, you know—that you forget is good because it disappears into what he’s saying. And he has a way of making you see people against their background without putting the background in, rather the way Ruth Draper can on the stage. What people generally enthuse about is his structure, of course; he’s got a lovely sense of form. His books always seem just to have happened in one piece. It’s quite difficult to imagine him sitting and chipping away at them, unless you’ve actually seen him doing it.”

“But what are they
about
!” asked Elsie, bewildered by this mass of inessential detail. “Are they adventure stories, or love stories, or sort of psychological?”

Leo lit a cigarette at some length. “Sort of psychological,” she said gently. “But you don’t notice it.”

“Oh,” said Elsie, discouraged. “Do they have sad endings?”

“Three of them have, rather. He’s only written four.”

“That doesn’t seem very many, does it,” said Elsie, keeping up as best she could a show of polite interest, at his age?”

Helen laughed. Addressing Leo rather than Elsie, she said, “He’s bone lazy.”

“Joe’s a ruminant animal,” said Leo, with the calm of one who is not to be drawn. “He likes to digest an idea for a year or two and then chew it again, before he spits it out.”

“It sounds insanitary,” said Helen to Elsie, “doesn’t it?”

Elsie smiled back dubiously. She had a feeling that they were sparring an inch or two above her eye-level; but, with Leo and Helen, this never seemed to matter.

“Why does he do that?” she asked Leo, so as to be quite impartial; it still came by instinct.

“I really don’t know. Unless it’s because he feels too strongly about things at the time to get them fair.”

Elsie, who had always taken for granted that white-hot emotion was a first requirement of the inspired state, was finally convinced that Joe’s work must contain every essential of unreadability. She abandoned the discussion to Helen, who for her part had been looking at Leo in some surprise.

“Well,” she said, “the sight of Joe feeling strongly about anything would be news. Man Bites Dog. Don’t tell me you’ve ever seen it.”

“Only once. Let’s clear supper and go out and have a drink.”

“What was it about?” asked Helen, leaning back in her chair.

Leo met Elsie’s eyes fixed on her in expectant interest. She sounded, for the first time, a little irritated.

“Nothing in particular. We were having tea in town and a rather dim sort of couple were quarrelling at the next table. Finally the woman—rather a fool of a woman, really—started to cry. I missed most of it, I hadn’t been properly attending.”

“What did Joe do?” asked Elsie helpfully.

“Well, nothing, naturally. He just said ‘Let’s go,’ without noticing I hadn’t finished my cigarette—he has very nice manners when he’s out, as a rule—and walked me the length of Bond Street at a breakneck speed and in dead silence. Then he went on talking again as if nothing had happened.”

Helen said, in her placid voice, “Probably it hadn’t. It doesn’t sound much like Joe. I expect he just had indigestion or something.”

“Maybe,” said Leo coolly. “If he had it was probably the first time in his life, so it would attract his attention a bit.”

“Did you ask him afterwards what he thought about it?”

“Good God, no. Nor would you have done, if you’d been there.”

Elsie, who had been feeling it time that she added something more dynamic to the conversation, said, “I should have thought he’d get rather out of practice, not writing for so long at a time.”

“He practises living in the intervals. And reviews books now and again. It seems to work out all right.”

“Then I suppose he must have money of his own?” He had scarcely looked like it; but Elsie had ceased to regard his externals as reliable.

“He’s only got what he earns. When he’s finished a book and got in some of the royalties, he buys a few things he wants and puts the rest in the bank, ready to live on when he starts another. Then he takes a job for a year or so, till he gets an idea.”

“What does he work at?”

“Brewing.”

“Oh,” said Elsie, other words failing her.

“Of course, it isn’t a job you can take up and put down as a rule. But he’s got an uncle who’s a director or something and likes him in spite of his peculiarities. He’s not difficult to fit in somewhere; he doesn’t mind what he does, you see. Once one of the firm’s licensees died suddenly, and there was no one they could put in straight away, so Joe took the pub over for a month. He did quite well at it, too, and they said he could keep it on if he liked; but while he was there some of the people in the bar had given him an idea, I suppose, and he knocked off again. He says he’d like to do a spell driving one of the horse-drays, but so far the uncle’s stuck in his heels.”

“Well,” said Elsie helplessly, “he must have had a very interesting life.”

“He’s had a very interested life, anyway. You’ll see plenty of him, I expect; he’s working on a book now.”

“A fat lot he’s done today,” said Helen, affecting tartness.

“Oh, he’ll be at it all night, probably. He likes keeping peculiar hours; he says he gets enough of clocks when he’s brewing. He ought to be here for another six months, at least.” She looked pleased. Elsie eyed her sidelong, reviving, only to abandon again with regret, an interesting theory. Perhaps it was Helen; after all, it was Helen he had kissed. With Helen it was always impossible to tell. A train of thought like this was bound to bring her, sooner or later, to Peter.

She looked at Helen, who was buttering a biscuit, quiet, collected, absolutely self-assured. It was admiration and envy, as much as anything, which caused her to say, with rather breathless nonchalance, “I know a very interesting man too. He lives in London.”

“What’s he do?” asked Leo, whose mouth was rather full.

“He’s a doctor.”

“Is he at a hospital?” asked Helen, with genuine interest. “I might know him.”

“He works at St. Jerome’s. His name’s Bracknell. Peter Bracknell.” Her heart was thumping so that it nearly choked her.

“No, I haven’t a surgeon there. Ask him along sometime, why don’t you?”

“Yes, do, of course,” said Leo. “Any time.” She spoke a little absently; her mind having wandered back to the galley-slips, she was working out an interpolation about cinches.

“Thank you very much.” The effort at casualness made Elsie’s voice nearly crack. Supposing she dared to ask him, and they knew she had asked him, and he did not come. “Perhaps I will sometime if I feel like it. He’s frightfully busy always, though.”

“Oh, well, of course.” Evidently this had convinced Helen, at least. “Just ask him to drop along any time he can. If we’re tied up you can look after him, which will be all the better, won’t it?”

Elsie blushed.

She posted her letter next morning. It ended, “P.S. I told my sister about you, and she says do come down here any time, if you feel like a breath of fresh air.”

P
ETER STRAYED DESULTORILY INTO
the housemen’s common-room, found it empty, and looked about it with dislike. It was a reasonably comfortable but dingy place, had the air of having been treated with indifference by many generations, and faced a blank wall. Tea, of which only the used crockery remained, had been served there an hour before. He sat down in an out-at-elbows armchair, beside an overflowing ashtray on a burnt tablecloth, and picked up a copy of the
Statesman and Nation
, which turned out to be last week’s and one he had read before. Peter pushed it irritably into the waste-paper basket, and turned the radio on. A light orchestra rewarded him, playing one of those light orchestral works of which one ought, but feels no inclination, to remember the name.