Sir!' She Said (2 page)

“Where is Melanie?” she asked.

“Changing. She's going out.”

“Who with?”

“Somebody she calls the lad.”

“That would be Arthur Paramount. He's not too bad. She goes out a good deal, I suppose?”

“Three or four times a week.”

“Who with, mostly?”

John Terance laughed.

“If I tried to keep track of my daughters' acquaintances,
I should be so busy that I'ld have no time left to make the living they're supported by.”

“You must have some idea.”

“The vaguest. As I said to that very pleasant young American just now, names mean nothing to me till I have a face to attach them to, and that's something I very rarely have. You know how this house is run. There are three tablets by the telephone. The one for me is invariably blank. The ones for your mother and your sister are invariably black. Whenever I answer the telephone, the call is for one or other of them. Usually it's some one who says, ‘Oh, well, never mind. I'll ring up later.' At one time I used to try to recognise the voice. But I've given even that up now. There are so many of them.”

Julia fidgeted impatiently as her father spoke.

“Oh, I know, I know, but all the same, when it's a girl like Melanie, who's no more than a child, one's surely got to keep some check on her.”

At that John Terance's eyes twinkled.

“I seem to remember making some such remark as that myself four years ago. I think I said that though a girl of nineteen might dress like a mature woman and look like one, she was actually only two years out of the nursery. I think that's what I said, but I forget. The arguments that I was met with were put so forcibly that I was made to feel. . . well, at any rate, I abandoned my position.”

He spoke ironically, but affectionately; so affectionately that Julia could not help laughing in her turn.

“I know, Daddy dear, but still. . .”

Before she could contrive an answer, however, the
door had been flung open, and Melanie had burst into the room. In the silken softness of a lavender-hued period frock she looked like a wild and lovely flower. Dainty, dark-haired, grey-eyed, electric with vitality, she was far more her father's than her mother's child, and was quite obviously her father's favourite. John Terance's face creased into a smile as she came across to him.

“Ah, Melanie, my dear, come here,” he said. “I wonder if you could remember and repeat for us some of those arguments we used to hear so much of four years ago about the day having passed when girls were kept behind a show-case in a drawing-room till some man came along to marry them; about the modern girl being as capable as the modern boy of looking after her own welfare; about the modern girl's right to choose her friends; about her right to freedom; to go where she liked, when she liked, with whom she liked. Can you remember, do you think?”

Melanie looked puzzled.

“Darling,” she said, “we're not going to start all that over again, are we?”

“I'm not, my dear. But your sister seems to think you oughtn't to go out with men to whom your parents haven't been introduced.”

Melanie burst out laughing.

“Dear Julia, so sweet, and so absurd.” And running across to her she flung an arm about her sister's neck, kissing her lightly and quickly on the cheek.

“My silly sweet,” she said, “because you knew me when I was a baby, you still think of me as an
infant in half socks that's got to be protected. Isn't that so, mother?”

Her mother smiled. “I'm not worrying about you, much,” she said. And those six words seemed to have ended the discussion.

Melanie laughed happily. “Of course not, nor should any one. And there,” she added, “if I'm not mistaken is the lad calling for me in his centipede.”

She ran over to the window and looked out. “As I thought,” she cried. “There's no one in this world that handles his gears as that child does.” She was hurrying across the room as she was speaking. In the doorway she turned round to wave a hand.

“You needn't bother to wait up for me, Julia,” she said. “I've got a latchkey.”

Faith Terance had taken no part in the discussion. When her opinion had been asked it was her younger not her elder daughter's side that she had taken. But later when Julia as well as Melanie had gone she looked pensively at her husband.

“It was funny of Julia breaking out like that,” she said. “It was unlike her. I wonder why?”

John Terance shrugged his shoulders.

“I've ceased wondering at anything my children do. One's got to let them go their own ways. They don't want anxiety or advice. If they want help they'll ask for it.”

His wife was not satisfied, however.

“I daresay,” she said, “but when they do something that's out of keeping with their whole attitude—there's a reason for everything, you know.”

The centipede that had called for Melanie was a pre-war Daimler: vast, cumbersome, and erratic. The unique manipulator of its gears was by ten years its senior. He was the kind of man that girls find tiresome and married women describe as “sweet.” He was tall without being distinguished: robust without being strong: well-featured without being handsome. There was always something wrong with his appearance. His tie would be crooked, or his coat would have rucked behind his shoulders, or the right side of his chin would be half shaved, or his collar soiled from a scratched throat; as a complement to which he had a rather jolly, rather winsome smile that seemed to say, “Yes, I know all that. But I'm doing my best about it, I am really!”

His welcoming of Melanie was an effusion of apologies.

“I'm terribly sorry. I'm terribly late, aren't I?”

“Twenty-seven and a quarter minutes.”

“I know. I lost my collar stud. I hadn't a spare one. You can't think how hard it is to get hold of one at this time of night. I'd hoped you'ld be late, too.”

“But I wasn't, Arthur. I was punctual. More
than punctual. I've been waiting for you,” she lied resolutely, “more than half an hour.”

An expression of the utmost gloom oppressed his features. “Heavens!” he said. “Really. . . oh, but. . . well. . . now we are here, where are we going to dine?”

“Any where you like.”

“But you must choose. What would you like, something quiet or something noisy?”

“Noisy, Arthur, naturally.”

“The Vienna, then. It's the noisiest place I know.” He spoke petulantly.

“He's angry,” she thought. “He wanted to go somewhere quiet. Because the food and wine are better there, he'ld say. But I don't care about what I eat and drink; not really. I want lights and music. Besides, it isn't really for the food and wine that he wanted to be quiet. He wanted to have me to himself. Which means that he'ld start getting maudlin half-way through dinner; and I don't like him when he's maudlin. Not so early in the evening, anyhow.” Later on in the evening, she reflected, it was different. At half-past three or so. You'd dined, and had been on to a cabaret; you'd had supper at Ciro's or the Kit Cat. You'd gone on to ‘The Green Grotto' for eggs and bacon. You were tired and happy and at peace. Then it was rather nice to lie back quietly against cushions and have your hand held and hear nice things said to you. That was nice. Then, but not before. Besides,” she thought, “it's his own fault. If he'd wanted to go to a quiet place, he should have taken me to one without asking my opinion.
The man who ask a woman what she wants deserve all that's coming to him.”

With her conscience cleared she chattered rapidly and ceaselessly as the car swung its way past Knights-bridge down the length of Piccadilly. “I'll at least see to it,” she decided, “that the lad enjoys himself.” About her own enjoyment she had no doubt whatever.

As the glass doors of the Vienna revolved before her, a wave of scented heat, crested with the noise of music and the swell of talk, surged up to meet her. Her heart beat fast with anticipation. It was only eighteen months since she had dined for the first time in a big restaurant, and the excitement of entering one still slightly took her breath away.

She felt like an actress on the eve of a first night as she hurried across the lounge, as she handed her cloak to an attendant, as she stood before the glass patting the dark hair that coiled over her ears to the soft roll below her neck, as she smoothed with her little finger the powdered surface of her cheeks, as she turned slowly and self-admiringly before the full glass mirror.

She was alone in the cloak-room and the attendant smiled encouragingly at her.

“There aren't many women who could risk wearing that,” she said.

Melanie smiled back at her. She understood what she meant. It was a young girl's frock: very simple; mauve and period; the bodice cut close, the skirt billowing and hooped. She had only worn it twice before. It would have been madness to have wasted such a frock on a quiet restaurant where no one could have seen it.

As she walked at the lad's side into the restaurant she felt even more like an actress going on to the stage. The air was cool on her bare shoulders. But the blood beat hotly through her veins. Heads were turned in her direction. Eyes followed her lingeringly. What were they saying to themselves, she wondered, as she glanced upwards and sideways at the lad.

Something of her self-confidence evaporated, however, as her eyes met his. The lad was not somehow the kind of man beside whom a woman would choose to walk into a restaurant. It was not that he was a discredit to her, but that he might have been a greater credit. The man she would have liked to have been seen walking beside would have been tall and strong and handsome; some vast blond Dempsey of a man, so that people would have said, “What a magnificent couple. Look there. How rarely you see a really attractive woman with a man that's worthy of her.” Either that or some one elegant, well-produced; in the French sense,
fine.
He need not necessarily have been young, or tall, or handsome. He could have been short and neat-waisted; foreign, possibly, with a little pointed beard, so that people would say, “What a distinguished-looking man that is beside the extremely pretty girl. I wonder who they are? He looks as though he might be a diplomat.” That was how she would have liked it to have been. It was impossible to produce a really satisfactory effect when you were with the lad. The sooner she got him safely seated at a table the better.

“We'll go over there,” she said.

The moment she was at the table she leant forward across it on her elbows looking about her with quick, eager glances, seeing in a first hurried survey the shape and colour of the room; its pale green pillars edged with gilt; the rose-pink curtains falling behind the curved and cushioned window seats; the black ebony of the oval dancing floor; the swinging kaleidoscope of the hanging lustres; the flowered tables; the steaming ice pails at their sides; the reds and lilacs, the yellows, the pinks, the greens; the brocades and marocains and georgettes of Poiret, Paquin, Paris Trades; the handiwork in black and white of Poole, Hawes and Curtis, Anderson and Sheppard. In one glance she took all that in. Then slowly, deliberately, she looked round the room, examining each frock, each face in turn, searching for acquaintances, searching for celebrities.

At her side the lad was asking her about cocktails. What would she have? a Bronx, a Martini, a Manhattan? She shook her head. She didn't want a cocktail. This room, these lights, this music were all the intoxicant she needed.

“Look,” she said, “isn't that Judy Carmichael over there?”

The lad was not interesting himself, however, in any number of Judy Carmichaels. He was puzzling over a long, heavily embossed menu.

“Now, what shall we start with?” he was saying. “If we have smoked salmon, we shouldn't want any fish after our soup. Would you rather begin with grape fruit? Then we could have a sole colbert, or a truite au bleu.”

But Melanie was as uninterested in the menu as was her companion in the Vienna's clientele.

“I don't mind,” she said. “I leave it to you. You choose.”

“Oh, but I can't,” Paramount expostulated. “You must really, surely now. . .”

The waiter shifted from Paramount's side to Melanie's.

“Perhaps, Madam,” he said.

Melanie did not care what she ate. She was too excited to notice what she was eating; would be too excited probably to eat anything at all. She took the menu up, and read off the top dish of every heading; it seemed the easiest way, and it didn't sound too bad. Caviare, Bortsch. Œufs Cocotte. Caneton à la Presse. Pêche Melba. One might do worse.

“And wine,” the lad was asking, “what would you like to drink; a dry or a sweet wine?”

Melanie felt thirsty; she was also hot. An ice cream soda was what she would have really liked. But that, she supposed, she could not ask for. So she took the wine list, read down it till she saw a name that attracted her, glanced to see if its price justified her choice, decided that it did, pointed to Chambertin 1916, ordered herself a glass of water, and leaning across the table, returned to her examination of the room. Was it or was it not Judy Carmichael in the green dress by the second pillar?

At her side the lad was trying to embark on a serious discussion.

“I was reading an article in the
Meteor
the other day, about young girls being too much in love with
life to be able to fall in love with a person. Do you think there is anything in that? I half think there is.”

Melanie nodded her head.

“I expect so,” she said. “Do you see that girl over there, dancing with the very tall, fair-haired man? What do you think of the frock she's wearing? It's out of Julia's shop. I nearly bought it. Julia wanted me to. I wonder if I ought to have. What do you think?'