Nobody had noticed her. Mark Staithes was seated at the piano, with Beppo, a Beppo fatter than ever, she noticed, and balder and more nervously agitated, and – yes, beard and all! – old Croyland, standing one on either side of him, leaning on the instrument and looking down at him while he spoke. Hugh was on the sofa near the fireplace, with the owner of the voice she hadn’t recognized, but who turned out to be Caldwell, the publisher – the publisher, of course, of The Invisible Lover, she reflected, and had a difficulty in checking another uprush of mirth. With them was a young man she had never seen before – a young man with very pale flaxen hair and a ruddy open face that wore at the moment an expression of almost child-like seriousness. His, it was evident, had been the foreign accent – German, she supposed.
But now the moment had come.
‘Good-evening,’ she called, and stepped forward.
They were all startled; but as for poor Hugh – he jumped as though someone had fired a cannon in his ear. And after the first fright, what an expression of appalled dismay! Irresistibly comic!
‘Well, Hugh,’ she said.
He looked up into her laughing face, unable to speak. Ever since the first laudatory notices of his book had begun to come in, he had been feeling so strong, so blissfully secure. And now here was Helen – come to humiliate him, come to bear shameful witness against him.
‘I didn’t expect,’ he managed to mumble incoherently. ‘I mean, why did you . . .?’
But Caldwell, who had a reputation for after-dinner speaking to keep up, interrupted him. Raising the glass he was holding, ‘To the Muse,’ he called out. ‘The Muse and also – I don’t think it’s an indiscretion if I say so – also the heroine of our masterpiece.’ Charmed by the felicity of his own phrasing, he beamed at Helen; then, turning to Hugh with a gesture of affectionate proprietorship, he patted him on the shoulder. ‘You must drink too, old man. It’s not a compliment to you – not this time.’ And he uttered a rich chuckle.
Hugh did as he was told and, averting his eyes, took a gulp of whisky-and-soda.
‘Thank you, thank you,’ cried Helen. The laughter was seething within her, like water in a kettle. She gave one hand to Caldwell and the other to Hugh. ‘I can’t tell you how thrilled I was,’ she went on. ‘Dante and Beatrice by Hans Andersen – it sounds too delicious.’
Blushing, Hugh tried to protest. ‘That frightful article . . .’
Cutting him short, ‘But why did you keep it up your sleeve?’ she asked.
Yes why, why? Hugh was thinking; and that he had been mad to publish the book without first showing it to Helen. He had always wanted to show it to her – and always, at the last moment, found the task too difficult, too embarrassing. But the desire to publish had remained with him, had grown stronger, until at last, senselessly, he had taken the manuscript to Caldwell and, after its acceptance, arranged with him that it should appear while Helen was out of the country. As though that would prevent her knowing anything about it! Madness, madness! And the proof that he had been mad was her presence here tonight, with that strange wild smile on her face, that brightness in the eyes. An uncalculating recklessness was one of the child-beloved’s most characteristic and engaging traits; she was a celestial enfant terrible. But in the real Helen this recklessness seemed almost fiendish. She was capable of doing anything, absolutely anything.
‘Why did you?’ she insisted.
He made a vague apologetic noise.
‘You ought to have told me you were Dante Andersen. I’d have tried to live up to you. Beatrice and the Little Match Girl rolled into one. Good-evening, Beppo! And Mark!’ They had come over from the piano to greet her. ‘And, Mr Croyland, how are you?’
Mr Croyland gave a perfect performance of an old gentleman greeting a lovely young woman – benevolently, yet with a touch of playfulness, an attenuated echo of gallantry.
‘Such an unexpected enchantment,’ he breathed in the soft, deliberately ecstatic voice he ordinarily reserved for describing quattrocento paintings or for addressing the celebrated or the very rich. Then, with a gesture that beautifully expressed an impulsive outburst of affection, Mr Croyland sandwiched her hand between both of his. They were very pale, soft hands, almost gruesomely small and dainty.
By comparison, it seemed to Helen that her own brown hand was like a peasant’s. Mr Croyland’s silvery and prophetic beard parted in a smile that ought to have been the gracious confirmation of his words and gestures, but which, with its incongruous width and the sudden ferocity of all its large and yellowing teeth, seemed instead to deny all reality to the old gentleman’s exquisite refinement of manner. That smile belonged to the Mr Croyland who had traded so profitably in the Old Masters; the little white hands and their affectionate gestures, the soft, ecstatic voice and its heartfelt words, were the property of that other, that ethereal Croyland who only cared about Art.
Helen disengaged her hand. ‘Did you ever see those china mugs, Mr Croyland?’ she asked, ‘you who know Italy so well? The ones they sell at Montecatini for drinking the purgative waters out of? White, with an inscription in golden letters: Io son Beatrice che ti faccio andare.’
‘But what an outrage!’ Mr Croyland exclaimed, and lifted his small hands in horror.
‘But it’s the sort of joke I really enjoy. Particularly now that Beatrice is really me . . .’ Becoming aware that the flaxen-haired young man was standing at attention about a yard to the west of her, evidently trying to attract her notice, Helen interrupted herself and turned towards him, holding out her hand.
The young man took it, bowed stiffly from the waist and, saying, ‘Giesebrecht,’ firmly squeezed it.
Laughing (it was another joke), Helen answered, ‘Ledwidge’; then, as an afterthought, ‘geboren Amberley.’
Nonplussed by this unexpected gambit, the young man bowed again in silence.
Staithes intervened to explain that Ekki Giesebrecht was his discovery. A refugee from Germany. Not because of his nose, he added as (taking pity on poor old Hugh) he drew her confidentially out of the group assembled round the sofa; not because of his nose – because of his politics. Aryan, but communist – ardently and all along the line.
‘He believes that as soon as all incomes are equalized, men will stop being cruel. Also that all power will automatically find itself in the hands of the best people. And he’s absolutely convinced that nobody who obtains power will be capable of even wishing to abuse it.’ Staithes shook his head. ‘One doesn’t know whether to admire and envy, or to thank God for not having made one such an ass. And to complicate matters, he’s such a thoroughly good ass.
An ass with the moral qualities of a saint. Which is why he’s such an admirable propagandist. Saintliness is almost as good as sex-appeal.’ He pulled up a chair for Helen, and himself sat down again at the piano and began to play the first few bars of Beethoven’s Für Elise; then broke off and, turning back to her, ‘The trouble’, he resumed, ‘is that nothing works. Not faith, not intelligence, not saintliness, not even villainy – nothing. Faith’s just organized and directed stupidity.
It may remove a mountain or two by dint of mere obstinate butting; but it’s blinkered, it can’t see that if you move mountains, you don’t destroy them, you merely shove them from one place to another. You need intelligence to see that; but intelligence isn’t much good because people can’t feel enthusiastic about it; it’s at the mercy of the first Hitler or Mussolini that comes along – of anyone who can rouse enthusiasm for any cause however idiotic and criminal.’
Helen was looking across the room. ‘I suppose his hair’s naturally that colour?’ she said, more to herself than to her companion. Then, turning back to Staithes, ‘And what about saintliness?’ she asked.
‘Well, look at history,’ he answered.
‘I don’t know any.’
‘Of course not. But I take it that you’ve heard of someone called Jesus? And occasionally, no doubt, you read the papers? Well, put two and two together, the morning’s news and the saint, and draw your own conclusions.’
Helen nodded. ‘I’ve drawn them.’
‘If saintliness were enough to save the world,’ he went on, ‘then obviously the world would have been saved long ago. Dozens of times. But saintliness can exist without the intelligence. And though it’s attractive, it isn’t more attractive than lots of other things – good food, for example, comfort, going to bed with people, bullying, feeling superior.’
Laughing (for this also was laughable), ‘It looks,’ said Helen, ‘as if there were nothing to do but throw up everything and become an invisible lover.’ She helped herself to a sandwich and a tumbler of white wine from the tray.
The group at the other end of the room had disintegrated, and Beppo and Mr Croyland were drifting back towards the piano. Staithes smiled at them and, picking up the thread of the argument that Helen’s arrival had interrupted, ‘Alternatively,’ he said, ‘one might become an aesthete.’
‘You use the word
