Friendly Young Ladies (18 page)

“But I’m having it partly for her benefit. She wants to meet people, doesn’t she? It’s going to be quite simple and ordinary.”

“Oh, well,” said Leo reflectively, “I dare say it will do her good.” She lapsed into meditation, from which she emerged presently to say, “I wish I were more used to family responsibilities. We’re no nearer deciding what to do with her than we were the day she arrived. Are we abducting her, do you think? I mean in the legal rather than the moral sense. I suppose you can abduct your sister. Or not? I only thought of that this morning.”

“Ask Joe. He knows most things. I should hardly think so. We didn’t entice her to come.”

“No, indeed. If we could only afford to train her at anything. … How about nursing? That’s free, isn’t it?”

“She’s a year too young for any decent hospital. As she’s your sister, I won’t go into the other reasons.”

“Don’t be hard on her. Everyone’s got something they can’t take.”

A look had crossed her face which checked Helen’s neat rejoinder. She said, gently, “There’s a young man somewhere, isn’t there? Some sort of dim medical student, or something. If he comes, we’d better take a look at him. He might be quite worthy and respectable. If we could only get her engaged, she could go home quite comfortably and wait till he was qualified.”

“Well, that would comfort Mother, I suppose. She always hoped indefatigably that one of us would get married. She’d even have got over Tom, I think, if he’d made an honest woman of me and she could have carried a sheaf of chrysanthemums and cried in the vestry. People are odd. It never seemed to occur to her that anything that went on at home could possibly have put me off. … We could have asked this lad of hers to the party, if we’d thought of it.”

“We’ll have another, and ask him to that.”

Elsie got back an hour later, wind-blown, and with a band of early sunburn across the bridge of her nose, to eat a substantial supper, her mind lulled in the peaceful vacancy of a healthy physical fatigue. As she proudly mastered the craft of disengaging the pole from sticky mud without leaving the punt herself, she had been unconscious of her own contentment, the simple product of an hour spent in preoccupations which were, for once, entirely real. Joe had treated her with the friendly detached interest he was equally ready to spend on men, machines, children, places, and most of the women he met. (Helen, near the beginning of her acquaintance with him, had remarked to Leo that he had a mind like a grazing horse; she had been feeling a little annoyed at the time.) The result, in Elsie’s case, had been to give the uneasy growing-pains of adolescence an interval of happy anaesthesia. She came back feeling good, and even looking it. Leo’s bald announcement of next day’s party, however, threw her at once into a violent flutter.

“It’s only some of Helen’s rowdies,” Leo assured her, “coming to make a noise. Half of them won’t ever know you’re there. Oh, by the way, I’ve bought you a frock. Just a cotton thing. No one will dress up, so you could wear that if you like.”

The dress was a bright, simple thing of Viennese inspiration, with a red top, full blue skirt, and bands of bright formal embroidery. It dazzled Elsie; she repressed with difficulty, from her confused thanks, the words artistic and bohemian, having detected in Leo, and still more in Helen, a curious lack of enthusiasm when they were uttered. But she thought them the more. If Leo had told her the price—approximately what she had saved for repairing the wireless, which had wanted valves for the last few months—Elsie would not have believed it. For the rest of that day, and most of the next, the thought of wearing it to meet Peter absorbed her mind to the exclusion of nearly everything else; and she put it on three hours before the party was due to begin. Neither Leo nor Helen had the heart to suggest that she took it off again to tackle the cleaning and tidying necessary for the event. They left her to experiment with the inoffensive and subdued lipstick which Leo had thrown in with it, and set about the sweeping and polishing by themselves.

Elsie, in spite of her growing trepidation, was at pains to be down early. It seemed, however, that one of the guests had been even earlier than she. A slim young woman in a plain, but excellently cut scarlet frock, her back turned, was lighting a cigarette, and taking what seemed to Elsie a rather ill-bred interest in the arrangement of the drinks. Overcome by nervousness at the thought of being left alone to make conversation, she was about to vanish again, when the stranger turned round. It was Leo. She had on lipstick that matched her dress; silvery clips curled upward along her ears, emphasizing subtly the slant of her brows; there was an almost imperceptible green shadow along her eyelids, and she had done something different with her hair. Elsie stared at her, frankly open-mouthed.

“What’s the matter? You look alarmed.” Leo flicked her cigarette in its ivory holder. “Have I got something showing?” She glanced down at her long silk legs and
suède
shoes.

“No, really. But you look so different, I didn’t see for a moment it was you.”

“It’s me,” said Leo, “up to a point. Let’s have a sherry before they come.”

Almost immediately after Helen had joined them, looking like porcelain in black with a cream lace yoke, the party began. They heard it coming, for it arrived
en bloc
, squeezed into two transits of the ferry-boat, each load announcing itself loudly on the way. When the preliminary turmoil was over, it added up to six young men dressed in varying stages between town suiting and corduroys, and four young women, two pretty, one smart, and one dowdy but quite unconcerned about it. Several of them devoted the first five minutes to explaining the trouble they had had in getting away, with confusing effect, as all the obstacles, simultaneously described, were quite different.

“… tried to get me back just as I was leaving to pass two more, but I told him how good it would be for the students to do it ….” “… and believe it or not, this very morning Sister was on the verge of changing my off-duty, but I managed….” “… can’t bear to stitch up without taking something no matter what, so he finished by anastomosing the soundest bit of gut I ever hope to see; I thought we’d be there till morning.”

Helen, and even Leo, seemed not only to understand but to be interested in these events, related as far as Elsie was concerned in a foreign tongue. The introductions at least were less of an ordeal than she had feared; they were brief, sweeping, full of goodwill and succeeded at once by the same din as before, under cover of which Joe added himself to the gathering almost imperceptibly, like a quiet regular entering a pub. He came to rest, apparently by chance, in the relatively quiet corner where Elsie was trying to hide, and settled himself on the floor beside her. Within two minutes, however, he had struck acquaintance with a young man on his other side; their conversation, which they conducted as peacefully as if they had the room to themselves, worked through beer and ballet to the latest developments in plastic surgery. Elsie noticed that Joe was an excellent listener.

The sherry and sandwiches were gone in what seemed to her a matter of moments, and everyone settled down to the more serious business of drinking beer. Joe got up unobtrusively, fixed Elsie a shandy, and continued his discussion where he had left it off. The shandy was nearly all ginger-beer, and she drank it gratefully, taking care not to empty her glass lest someone else should refill it.

The company, nearly all of which was on the floor for lack of chairs, began to settle itself more easily. Each man collected a neighbouring girl and propped her comfortably against his person with a supporting arm. Elsie shrank further into her corner, partly from shyness, partly from the motive which leads wallflowers at dances to linger in the cloakroom. A long arm reached for her and hauled her back again. She found herself settled against Joe’s shoulder with the kind of firm reassuring grip one uses on a child when telling it to keep still and be good. His body felt hard and stable, and as quiet as a resting animal or a tree. There was a simplicity in Joe which defied even Elsie’s powers of misconstruction. She stayed where she was.

It was during a fortuitous lull in the half-dozen conversations that Helen remarked, in her clear gentle voice, “I think we ought to sing.”

The suggestion was evidently so usual as to be practically routine. Elsie was pleased by it, for she enjoyed singing, and, indeed, did it passably and with a good ear. When the chosen ditty had triumphed over two others which had started up at the same time, she was disappointed to find that she did not know it, but listened carefully in the hope of picking it up.

The first verse struck her as rather jolly. The second winded her like a punch in the midriff. At the third, she was unable to believe her ears. She stared, frozen like Lot’s wife on viewing the cities of the plain, at face after cheerful face. It was impossible to credit that these people, looking happy and unselfconscious as scouts and guides at a jamboree, could really be uttering these words; not uttering them merely, but bawling them aloud, in mixed company, meeting one another’s eyes as candidly as children meanwhile. Worse—if anything could be worse—she could feel against her back the regular rise and fall of Joe’s chest and the interior vibration of a deep pleasant baritone joining in the chant.

It seemed to last for hours. Whatever must Helen be thinking, who had so innocently suggested a song? She turned to see. Helen, looking frail and delicate, tucked into the arm of a large athletic young man, was leaning back her head and carolling prettily, as if she were in church.

Horror and shame, combined with sherry and ginger-beer, caused the room to swim before Elsie’s eyes. Dimly she perceived Leo beating time on the shoulder of her neighbour, an intellectual-looking person who had removed his horn-rimmed spectacles and was waving them to the rhythm. Between two especially outrageous verses he remarked, suddenly, “You know, that’s very interesting,” and explained why in terms of the latest psychological research. Everyone agreed that it was, very; and at once fell to with the same zest as before.

Elsie scarcely knew when one song ended and another began. This time it was the ancient classic about the rich man getting the pleasure and the poor getting the blame. They had, naturally, improved it a little. It seemed to Elsie scarcely less appalling than the first. Several people had pet verses of their own, and contributed them solo. During one of these she realized that Joe’s arm was still round her waist, and felt herself grow cold all over. She was wondering how to get away when, in the most natural way in the world, he withdrew his arm to light a cigarette, and did not put it back again.

See ’is heir in silken cradle,

With attendants by the score,

While she lays a nameless barstard

Down beside Barnardo’s door.

“Getting a bit hot in here, isn’t it?” said Joe in her ear. Elsie turned on him the eyes of a hunted hare.

“It is,” she whispered, “a bit.” She was surprised to find that she could still speak.

See him at the billiard-table,

Potting cannons off the red,

While the victim of his passion. …

“Like to come out on deck for a bit, and have a blow?”

“Yes,” said Elsie, “please.”

No one seemed to notice them go. Outside the air was cool and sweet, and in the light from the windows behind them, the water rippled like black satin. Joe sat down on the low rail, straddled a leg over it, and took a deep breath, smelling the night. He looked as if he were alone; and Elsie, too, felt peaceful, unmolested and free. Even the song, drifting through the window, seemed musical and remote.

“A lovely night,” said Joe, breaking a silence of nearly a minute. “Isn’t it?”

“Yes. … It
was
a bit hot indoors.”

As if he were pursuing the same subject, Joe said, “You don’t want to pay any attention to that. It does them good, you know.”

“Oh,” said Elsie. She picked up the end of a splinter from the rail, and became absorbed in pulling it off.

“Not that I’ve had much truck with hospitals myself: but it stands to reason. No one who does what these people do, and sees what they see, could go on taking the human body seriously all their spare time. If they did, they’d go loco—I mean it would get them down.”

“Oh,” said Elsie. “I see.”

“The women particularly. On top of their own troubles, they’ve got several generations of hush-hush and brooding in corners, and then all that nervous frank-and-fearless stuff in the twenties, to get off their chests. Personally, it makes me feel good to see them. Healthy as your mother sweeping house.”

Elsie felt a little offended by this simile; her mother had never been without a good general and help with rough, and she would have liked to indicate this; but suddenly it seemed less important than she had thought. She looked at Joe’s silhouette, square and angular, planted firmly on the rail, and thought, she did not know why, of the man with the sandwiches on the train. He had given her a feeling that was rather the same, like a glimpse from shipboard of a safe and happy land. Indoors, the voices rose to a fortissimo for the final chorus.

It’s the same the ’ole world over—

It’s the poor wot gets the blame,

It’s the rich wot gets the pleasure;

Ain’t it all a bleedin’ shame?

“I’m all right really,” she said.

“Of course you are.”

She moved her hand over the rough wood of the rail. Its grain and texture, the flaking paint under her fingers, were new and delightful, as if she were feeling them for the first time. Her senses seemed to clear and quicken, making her aware of smells and sounds unregarded before; the plop of a jumping fish, a whiff of Turkish tobacco mixed with the dankness of water-weed, the whistle of a distant train. Joe’s cigarette glowed against the pale translucence of the reflected sky. His even voice ran on, without insistence, indifferent to reply.

“You know, this reminds me of something. When I was a kid, if I’d behaved myself for a week or two beforehand, they used to let me tag along with the remuda now and again. I’d help with the bedding-rolls and give a hand on the chuck-wagon, easy jobs like that. The nights were the best. We slept in the open, mostly, in blankets round the fire; there was a smell of wood-smoke and coffee and old leather and grass, and you could hear the wrangler—that’s the fellow who keeps an eye on the horses—singing somewhere to pass the time and keep himself awake, just bits of things, you know, as they came into his head. Some of them were as sentimental as a valentine, and some—well, they’d make tonight’s repertoire sound like nursery rhymes. I remember one beautiful night, rather like this—clearer, of course—waking a bit before dawn and being slightly astonished by what I heard, and thinking to myself, “Oh, well, it’s only Slim, so it must be all right,” and turning over and going to sleep again. Queer how one forgets things for years, and suddenly they come back. Do you smoke, by the way?”