Friendly Young Ladies (31 page)

She smiled into the dark auditorium, a hard fixed little smile, and the delicate shifting lights and colours hurt her; beauty out of the mind’s reach, like water poured out before the thirsty. She went out quickly at the end, while the audience was still relaxing its tension with the absurd, discordant noises of applause.

“I’m most awfully glad,” said Elsie, “that you went in the end. I felt rather awful about it, but I knew you wouldn’t think anything had happened to me, now I know London so well. I felt sure you’d understand; it’s so
funny
, isn’t it, meeting someone you know in quite different surroundings?”

“Yes,” said Leo. “It is amusing.”

“I do hope you didn’t miss the best part because of me.”

“No, that’s all right. I didn’t miss anything important.”

“I’m so glad. … Thelma and I had the most awfully interesting talk.” The news was on the tip of her tongue; but, somehow, it got no further. She did not want to tell, to discuss, to be edged towards thought or decision by the definition of words. She did not want to know what Leo would have to say. Leo’s thought was apt to have hard shapes and sharp edges, which came through any comfortable draperies in which one tried to wrap it. There was no need to begin thinking today; something might happen to-morrow, splendid, and significant, solving everything. She said, “And I had the most marvellous Knickerbocker Glory; nearly a foot high, and covered in cream.”

“Darling,” said Helen, “you’re crazy, buying stockings like this when we’ve still got the milk to pay. Besides you’ll be through them in five minutes; they’re a size too small.”

“Try them against the red suit. They’re for you.”

“You’re crazier than I thought. Whatever for?”

“Can’t imagine. I just walked into the shop and bought them. It suddenly struck me, for some reason, how much better I like you than anyone else.”

P
ETER AND HELEN SAT
on a fallen log in the Great Avenue at Hampton Court. But for themselves, the stately vista was deserted; it was a weekday morning, and the few visitors had left for lunch. Peter and Helen had brought theirs with them, and were finishing it with the assistance of a large swan which, appearing with an apologetic waddle and a mien deceptively meek, had now reached the stage of snatching from their hands portions intended for themselves. As it gulped and swallowed, it fixed them with a yellow, malevolent eye.

They had come on the spur of the moment; Peter, killing time in Mawley, had met Helen emerging, trim and sleek, from the hairdresser’s. It happened to be one of the days on which none of her surgeons had cases sufficiently curious to be worthy of record. She had accepted his suggestion that they should spend the day together as easily as if it had been the offer of a short drink, without going through any of the conventional motions of having other engagements. This had merely intrigued him; Helen had the looks, and the indefinable aura of success, which enable a woman to convey by acquiescence the idea that she is making no effort. Such a double-bluff would not, however, have occurred to her in a lifetime; it came quite naturally. Taking the lunch had been her idea. She had gone back to get it, without offering to bring him along with her, and had left him wondering. He was wondering still, but had every intention of finding out.

“There are still some tomato sandwiches,” she said. She fished one out for him; the swan, less preoccupied than Peter, forestalled him, missing her fingers by half a centimetre.

“This is ridiculous,” she said, in exasperation rather than alarm; she had met a number of swans. “Give the disgusting creature the bag and let him take it away. Swans ought to stay on the water; it brings out their better natures.”

Without undue reluctance, Peter threw the bag as far as it would go. The swan made off, looking at him first like a boss gangster whose dignity has been upset. Helen, unruffled and cool in her candy-striped print, sat smiling after it. The sunlight glinted on her hair; she wore it down today, its bright curls just reaching her shoulders. Her slim hands, tipped with a delicate varnish of dusty rose, were locked round one knee. Peter shifted himself a little closer along the log.

“Swans ought to stay on the water.” He repeated the words with dreamy, mysterious significance. “I agree with you, my dear.” He slipped his arm round her waist. Warm, slender and compliant, it yielded easily, but somehow non-committally, into his hold. She smelt like a clean little girl, of fresh-laundered cotton, dusting-powder, and sun-warmed hair and skin. He looked up; there was still no one about.

“What are you thinking of, with that solemn face?”

“Thinking?” she said in a kind of placid surprise. “No, why should I be?”

“Why should you, indeed?” He worked his arm a little further round. It would have been quite easy, he reflected, to believe her stupid if one had not had evidence to the contrary. Perhaps, at this moment, she even was stupid; she had a faculty of disconnecting the more active part of her personality, as easily, it seemed, as turning off a switch. He tilted her face towards him, smiling into her eyes; she awaited, with contented passivity, the expected kiss, and accepted it as a lazy cat submits to being stroked. He had, as with a cat, the feeling that if her attention were distracted she would have forgotten all about it in a few seconds. Nevertheless she was pleasant to kiss; her superficial candour, her underlying indifference, made a teasing combination. He tried the effect of a little ardour; partly from inclination, partly with an eye to the situation which would be created by her refusal to respond. But the result was still inconclusive; she was sweet and yielding, but, behind it, he felt the smooth surface of her self-possession as undisturbed as a pool in the rock. There was nothing to take hold of, except what he held already; and, in a place which might become public at any moment, the possibilities of this were strictly limited. In any case, there was a cosy and amiable quality in her responses which made it impossible to develop anything in the nature of passion without feeling foolish. It was a pity she had shown so lukewarm an enthusiasm for the Maze.

Peter was not the man, in these circumstances, to neglect the interesting alternative of verbal attack.

“You’re maddeningly elusive,” he said.

There was little in the material situation to justify this; but she received it without surprise. No, he thought, she wasn’t stupid. She smiled at him, not archly, but comfortingly, as if to say, “Never mind,” and rested her shining hair against his shoulder.

“Why?” he pursued, with deliberately brutal directness.

She sighed faintly. She might as well have told him, aloud, not to be tiresome. Peter was not thick-skinned; but determination, inquisitiveness, and boundless self-confidence produced an effective substitute.

“Don’t you trust yourself with me?” he asked, dropping his voice. This, surely, ought to provoke something.

It did. She laughed; charmingly, not unkindly, with sunny amusement. When she had stopped laughing she kissed him of her own accord.

“Really,” she murmured, “you are rather sweet.”

She kissed delightfully; but the pill tasted, in spite of the spoonful of jam. His determination became obstinacy.

“Then it’s me whom you don’t trust?”

She wrinkled her smooth brow; nothing could have conveyed more clearly that she considered the question meaningless. In the tightened pressure of his arm she nestled confidingly; it was as if she protected herself in an armour of down. But, more adaptable than the baffled crusader, Peter was quite ready to abandon the straight blade for the curved, silk-cutting scimitar.

“I think,” he said, “in your heart you don’t trust anyone. I wonder why.”

“I don’t know,” she said simply, “what you’re talking about.”

“All men,” said Peter gravely, “aren’t alike, my dear. Does it seem odd that I’m not content simply to kiss you, satisfactory as that is; that I want you to trust me too?”

“I don’t suppose it would seem odd,” she said in her soft kindly voice, “if I knew what you meant by it. One doesn’t simply trust people. One trusts different people for different things.”

“And you trust me—for what?”

“I haven’t needed to think. Why, is it important?”

Her body was warm in his arm; she herself was like a gently smiling presence resting easily at a distance. He reached after it with words, seeking for something with which to touch it home.

“You trust Leo,” he said. “With everything?”

“Of course not.” She seemed amused. “I don’t trust her to count the change in shops, or to remember to bring things back when she goes to town.” There was a pause, during which he felt her continuing the list in her own mind. “I know what to expect of her; I suppose that’s what you mean.”

“And she knows what to expect of you?” He raised his eyes meaningly to hers.

Unperturbed by his gaze, Helen said, “She’d be pretty stupid if she didn’t, after five years.”

“As long as that? Yours must be a very—unusual relationship.”

“I expect most relationships are unusual when one knows enough about them. We’re pretty well used to ours; it seems quite ordinary to us.”

“It must demand great courage … from both of you.”

“What a queer thing to say. It takes less effort than any other relationship we’ve either of us tried. That’s why we go on living together, naturally.”

She had drawn herself away from his arm; not in hostility, but, just as he had imagined, like the stroked cat that sees a bird through the window. The positive current of her personality had been switched on. Its sudden vitality made her more interesting at the very moment when she became less accessible.

“You would sacrifice a great deal,” he hinted, “rather than hurt her?”

She stared at him. “You do have odd ideas. I don’t need to sacrifice things not to hurt her. I keep telling you, we live together because we enjoy it. Anyone would think, to hear you talk, that we were a married couple.”

She delivered this staggering speech without as much as a shade of emphasis; merely with a gentle reasonableness. He was, for a moment, on the verge of abandoning all his principles by allowing himself to be shocked. Hastily he reassembled them.

“I suppose I shouldn’t ask,” he said, “what has happened to make you afraid of marriage?”

“You can ask if you like. But I’m not afraid of it, so there isn’t much point.”

“You’re young,” he said. “You’re very pretty; you’re domesticated, I imagine, and, forgive my mentioning it, normally sexed. You may want to marry some day; what then?”

“Well if I wanted to, I should, I suppose.”

“You wouldn’t find the decision hard to make?”

“What decision? The decision would have been made. You don’t suppose Leo would want to keep me if she knew I wanted to be somewhere else?”

There seemed to be no penetrating her contentment. He became cruel, not in malice, but as, in the hospital, he might have applied increasingly painful tests to a patient who showed no signs of sensation.

“Perhaps,” he said, “when it came to the point, you might be afraid to let her know.”

“
Let
her know?” She might have been repeating an incomprehensible phrase in a foreign language. She seemed to be about to say something, to think it not worth the effort and give it up. At last she remarked, “I think you must have read a lot of novels, or something. People don’t live that way.”

She could hardly have delivered, if she had thought it out for weeks, a more deadly insult to the
sanctum sanctorum
of Peter’s self-esteem. He found it hard to believe, indeed, that the words had been uttered, or, if uttered, that they meant what they seemed to mean.

“You have,” said Helen serenely, “such sensational ideas.”

He was speechless; but Helen, who had intended to go on talking in any case, did not notice it.

“Mind you,” she pursued with friendly toleration, “I like men. They’re perfectly all right in their way. I lived with one, once.”

“Really?” said Peter. Nothing else would emerge.

“Yes, for several months, while I was at the Slade. He was quite pleasant, but a bit of a cad.”

Peter had recovered, by this time, to the extent of caressing her gently and making a sympathetic noise.

“Not a cad as a lover, mind you. He did all that very well. He was just a cad to live with. Things like wanting all the space for his own work and not leaving me any room for mine. Or time. I don’t think he liked, really, seeing me work at all. I was better at it than he was, that might have been one reason why. Between women, you see, an issue like that is bound to come out straightforwardly, but a man can cover it up for ages. And then, he thought I ought to like his friends but he needn’t like mine. If I had a cold or a headache or wasn’t feeling bright for the usual sort of reasons, he just used to go out; it never occurred to him to do anything else. Leo isn’t any more domesticated than most men, but she isn’t above filling you a hot-water bottle and fussing you up a bit. Well, anyway, he kept on assuring me he loved me, and I feel sure he believed it. When he asked me to marry him he was thunderstruck that I didn’t fall into his arms with tears of gratitude. He kept on at me about it; he thought I was afraid of being a burden on him, I think. Finally he tried to make me have a baby so that I’d have to. He said it was for my good. I was tired of arguing by then so I just packed and went. I expect he’s scratching his head about it still.”

“That’s too bad.” Peter’s soft voice, and the pressure of his hand, brought a smile and answering squeeze, but both were distrait; Helen had become interested in what she was saying.

“Shortly after that I took up nursing, and met a great many people, as one does. But instead of asking myself what they’d be like in some romantic situation, I always found myself imagining them shut up with me in a three-room flat. Only two people passed. One was an honorary surgeon who was fifty and happily married. Leo was the other. I’ve never regretted it.”

“And is that all?” asked Peter at length.

“Of course it isn’t. You asked me why we were still living together at the end of five years. As far as I’m concerned, that’s the reason.”