‘No, no: later, perhaps. I want to talk to Mr Dough. You hadn’t thought of that, had you?’
He stared at her quietly and emptily. At last he mumbled ‘Sorry,’ and lounged away.
‘Really,’ began Mr Dough, ‘not on my account, you know. If you want to dance—’
‘Oh, I have to see those — those infants all the time. Really, it is quite a relief to meet someone who knows more than dancing and — and — dancing. But tell me about yourself. Do you like Charlestown? I can see that you are accustomed to larger cities, but don’t you find something charming about these small towns?’
Mr Rivers roved his eye, seeing two girls watching him in poised invitation, but he moved on towards a group of men standing and sitting near the steps, managing in some way to create the illusion of being both participants and spectators at the same time. They were all of a kind: there was a kinship like an odour among them, a belligerent self-effacement. Wallflowers.
Wallflowers. Good to talk to the hostess and dance with the duds. But even the talkative hostess had given them up now. One or two of them, bolder than the rest, but disseminating that same faint identical odour stood beside girls, waiting for the music to start again, but the majority of them herded near the steps, touching each other as if for mutual protection. Mr Rivers heard phrases in bad French and he joined them aware of his own fitted dinner jacket revealing his matchless linen.
‘May I see you a minute, Madden?’
The man quietly smoking detached himself from the group. He was not big, yet there was something big and calm about him: a sense of competent inertia after activity.
‘Yes?’ he said.
‘Do me a favour, will you?’
‘Yes?’ the man repeated courteously non-committal.
‘There’s a man here who can’t dance, that nephew of Mrs Wardle’s, that was hurt in the war. Cecily — I mean Miss Saunders — has been with him all evening. She wants to dance.’
The other watched him with calm intentness and Mr Rivers suddenly lost his superior air.
‘To tell the truth, I want to dance with her. Would you mind sitting with him a while? I’d be awfully obliged to you if you would.’
‘Does Miss Saunders want to dance?’
‘Sure she does. She said so.’ The other’s gaze was so penetrating that he felt moisture and drew his handkerchief, wiping his powdered brow lightly, not to disarrange his hair. ‘God damn it,’ he burst out, ‘you soldiers think you own things, don’t you?’
Columns, imitation Doric, supported a remote small balcony, high and obscure, couples strolled in, awaiting the music, talk and laughter and movement distorted by a lax transparency of curtains inside the house.
Along the balustrade of the veranda red eyes of cigarettes glowed; a girl stooping ostrich-like drew up her stocking and light from a window found her young shapeless leg. The Negro cornetist, having learned in his thirty years a century of the white man’s lust, blinked his dispassionate eye, leading his crew in a fresh assault. Couples erupted in, clasped and danced; vague blurs locked together on the lawn beyond the light.
‘. . . Uncle Joe, Sister Kate, all shimmy like jelly on a plate. . . .’
Mr Rivers felt like a chip in a current: he knew a sharp puerile anger. Then as they turned the angle of the porch he saw Cecily clothed delicately in a silver frock, fragile as spun glass. She carried a green feather fan and her slim, animated turned body, her nervous prettiness, filled him with speculation. The light falling diffidently on her, felt her arm, her short body, suavely indicated her long, virginal legs.
‘. . . Uncle Bud, ninety-two, shook his cane and shimmied too. . . .’
Dr Gary danced by without his glass of water: they avoided him and Cecily looked up, breaking her speech.
‘Oh, Mr Madden! How do you do?’ She gave him her hand and presented him to Mr Dough. ‘I’m awfully flattered that you decided to speak to me — or did Lee have to drag you over? Ah, that’s how it was. You were going to ignore me, I know you were. Of course we can’t hope to compete with French women—’
Madden protested conventionally and she made room for him beside her.
‘Sit down. Mr Dough was a soldier, too, you know.’
Mr Rivers said heavily: ‘Mr Dough will excuse you. How about a dance? Time to go home soon.’
She civilly ignored him and James Dough shifted his leg. ‘Really, Miss Saunders, please dance, I wouldn’t spoil your evening for anything.’
‘Do you hear that, Mr Madden? The man is driving me away. Would you do that?’ she tilted her eyes at him effectively. Then she turned to Dough with restrained graceful impulsiveness. ‘I still call him Mr Madden, though we have known each other all our lives. But then he was in the war, and I wasn’t.
He is so — so experienced you see. And I am only a girl. If I had been a boy like Lee I’d have gone and been a lieutenant in shiny boots or a general or something by now. Wouldn’t I?’ Her turning body was graceful, impulsive: a fragile spontaneity. ‘I cannot call you mister any more. Do you mind?’
‘Let’s dance.’ Mr Rivers, tapping his foot to the music, watched this with sophisticated boredom. He yawned openly. ‘Let’s dance.’
‘Rufus, ma’am,’ said Madden.
‘Rufus. And you mustn’t say ma’am to me any longer. You won’t, will you?’
‘No ma — I mean, no.’
‘Oh, you nearly forgot then—’
‘Let’s dance,’repeated Mr Rivers.
‘ — but you won’t forget any more. You won’t, will you?’
‘No, no.’
‘Don’t let him forget, Mr Dough. I am depending on you.’
‘Good, good. But you go and dance with Mr Smith here.’
She rose. ‘He is sending me away,’ she stated with mock humility. Then she shrugged narrowly, nervously. ‘I know we aren’t as attractive as French women, but you must make the best of us. Poor Lee, here, doesn’t know any French women so we can please him. But you soldiers don’t like us any more, I’m afraid.’
‘Not at all: we give you up to Mr Lee only on condition that you come back to us.’
‘Now that’s better. But you are saying that just to be polite,’ she accused.
‘No, no, if you don’t dance with Mr Lee, here, you will be impolite. He has asked you several times.’
She shrugged again nervously, ‘So I guess I must dance, Lee. Unless you have changed your mind, too, and don’t want me?’
He took her hand. ‘Hell, come on.’
Restraining him, she turned to the other two, who had risen also. ‘You will wait for me?’
They assured her, and she released them. Dough’s creaking, artificial knee was drowned by the music and she gave herself to Mr Rivers’s embrace. They took the syncopation, he felt her shallow breast and her knees briefly, and said: ‘What you doing to him?’ slipping his arm further around her, feeling the swell of her hip under his hand.
‘Doing to him?’
‘Ah, let’s dance.’
Locked together they poised and slid and poised, feeling the beat of the music, toying with it, eluding it, seeking it again, rifting like a broken dream.
9
George Farr, from the outer darkness, glowered at her, watching her slim body cut by a masculine arm, watching her head beside another head, seeing her limbs beneath her silver dress anticipating her partner’s limbs, seeing the luminous plane of her arm across his black shoulders and her fan drooping from her arched wrist like a willow at evening. He heard the rhythmic troubling obscenities of saxophones, he saw vague shapes in the darkness and he smelled the earth and things growing in it.
A couple passed them and a girl said, ‘Hello, George. Coming in?’ ‘No,’ he told her, wallowing in all the passionate despair of spring and youth and jealousy, getting of them an exquisite bliss.
His friend beside him, a soda clerk, spat his cigarette. ‘Let’s have another drink.’
The bottle was a combination of alcohol and sweet syrup purloined from the drugstore. It was temporarily hot to the throat, but this passed away leaving in its place a sweet, inner fire, a courage.
‘To hell with them,’ he said.
‘You ain’t going in, are you?’ his friend asked. They had another drink. The music beat on among youthful leaves, into the darkness, beneath the gold and mute cacophony of stars.
The light from the veranda mounting was lost, the house loomed huge against the sky: a rock against which waves of trees broke, and breaking were forever arrested; and stars were golden unicorns neighing unheard through blue meadows, spurning them with hooves sharp and scintillant as ice.
The sky, so remote, so sad, spurned by the unicorns of gold, that, neighing soundlessly from dusk to dawn, had seen them, had seen her — her taut body prone and naked as a narrow pool sweetly dividing: two silver streams from a single source. . . .
‘I’m not going in,’ he answered, moving away. They crossed the lawn and in the shadow of a crepe-myrtle one with a sound of breath became two. They walked quickly on, averting their eyes.
‘Hell, no,’ he repeated, ‘I’m not going in.’
10
This was the day of the Boy, male and female.
‘Look at them, Joe,’ Mrs Powers said, ‘sitting there like lost souls waiting to get into hell.’
The car had stopped broadside on, where they could get a good view.
‘They don’t look like they’re sitting to me,’ Gilligan answered with enthusiasm.’ Look at them two: look where he’s got his hand. This is what they call polite dancing, is it? I never learned it:
