‘Good, she said to herself. ‘He’s reacting.’
‘But he’s such good company,’ she said aloud.
The General grew redder and frowned. What he hadn’t done for that boy! And how ungratefully the boy had responded, how abominably he had behaved! Getting himself kicked out of every job the General had wangled him into. A waster, an idler; drinking and drabbing; making his mother miserable, sponging on her, disgracing the family name. Anid the insolence of the fellow, the things he had ventured to say the last time they had met and, as usual, had a scene together! The Genleral was never likely to forget being called ‘an impotent old fumbler.’
‘And so intelligent,’ Lucy was saying. With an inward smile she remembered Spandrell’s summary of his stepfather’s career. ‘Superannuated from Harrow,’ it began, ‘passed out from Sandhurst at the bottom of the list, he had a most distinguished career in the Army, rising durng the War to a high post in the Military Intelligence Department.’
The way he rolled out this anticipated obituary was really magnificent. He was thne Times made audible. And then his remarks on Military Intelligence in general! ‘If you look up “Intelligence” in the new volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica,’ he had said, ‘you’ll find it classified under the following three heads: Intelligence, Human; Intelligence, Animal; Intelligence, Military. My stepfather’s a perfect specimen of Intelligence, Military.’
‘So intelligent,’ Lucy repeated
‘Some people think so, I know,’ said General Knoyle very stiffly. ‘But personally…’ He cleared his throat with violence. That was his personal opinion.
A moment later, still rigid, still angrily dignified, he took his leave. He felt that Lucy had offended him. Even her youth and her bare shoulders did not compensate him for those laudatory references to Maurice Spandrell. Insolent, bad-blooded young cub! His existence was the General’s standing grievance against his wife. A woman had no right to have a son like that, no right. Poor Mrs. Knoyle had often atoned to her second husband for the offences of her son. She was there, she could be punished, she was too weak to resist. The exasperated General visited the sins of the child on his parent.
Lucy glanced after the retreating figure, then turned to Walter. ‘I can’t risk that sort of thing happening again,’ she said. ‘It would be bad enough even if he didn’t smell so unpleasant. Shall we go away?’
Walter desired nothing better. ‘But what about your mother and the social duties?’ he asked.
She shrugged her shoulders. ‘After all, mother can look after her own bear garden.’
‘Bear garden’s the word,’ said Walter, feeling suddenly hopeful ‘Let’s sneak away to some place where it’s quiet.’
‘My poor Walter! Her eyes were derisive. ‘I never knew anybody with such a mania for quietness as you. But I don’t want to be quiet.’
His hope evaporated, leaving a feeble little bitterness, an ineffective anger. ‘Why not stay here then?’ he asked with an attempt at sarcasm. ‘Isn’t it noisy enough?’
‘Ah, but noisy with the wrong sort of noise,’ she explained. ‘There’s nothing I hate more than the noise of cultured, respectable, eminent people, like these creatures.’ She waved her hand comprehensively. The words evoked, for Walter, the memory of hideous evenings passed with Lucy in the company of the disreputable and uncultured—tipsy at that. Lady Edward’s guests were bad enough. But the others were surely worse. How could she tolerate them?
Lucy seemed to divine his thoughts. Smiling, she laid a hand reassuringly on his arm. ‘Cheer up!’ she said. ‘I’m not taking you into low company this time. There’s Spandrell…’
‘Spandrell,’ he repeated and made a grimace.
‘And if Spandrell isn’t classy enough for you, we shall probably find Mark Rampion and his wife, if we don’t arrive too late.’
At the name of the painter and writer, Walter nodded approvingly.
‘No, I don’t mind listening to Rampion’s noise,’ he said. And then, making an effort to overcome the timidity which always silenced him when the moment came to give words to his feelings, ‘but I’d much rather,’ he added, jocularly, so as to temper the boldness of his words, ‘I’d much rather listen to your noise, in private.’
Lucy smiled, but said nothing. He flinched away in a kind of terror from her eyes. They looked at him calmly, coldly, as though they had seen everything before and were not much interested—only faintly amused, very faintly and coolly amused.
‘All right,’ he said, ‘let’s go.’ His tone was resigned and wretched.
‘We must do a creep,’ she said. ‘Furtive’s the word. No good being caught and headed back.’
But they did not escape entirely unobserved. They were approaching the door, when there was a rustle and a sound of hurrying steps behind them. A voice called Lucy’s name. They turned round and saw Mrs. Knoyle, the General’s wife. She laid a hand on Lucy’s arm.
‘I’ve just heard that you’re going to see Maurice this evening,’ she said, but did not explain that the General had told her so only because he wanted to relieve his feelings by saying something disagreeable to somebody who couldn’t resent the rudeness. ‘Give him a message from me, will you?’ She leaned forward appealingly. ‘Will you?’ There was something pathetically young and helpless about her manner, something very young and soft even about her middleaged looks. To Lucy, who might have been her daughter, she appealed as though to someone older and stronger than herself. ‘Please.’
‘But of course,’ said Lucy.
Mrs. Knoyle smiled gratefully. ‘Tell him I ‘1 come to see him to-morrow afternoon,’ she said.
‘Tomorrow afternoon.’
‘Between four and halfpast. And don’t mention it to anyone else,’ she added after a moment of embarrassed hesitation.
‘Of course I won’t.’
‘I’m so grateful to you,’ said Mrs. Knoyle, and with a sudden shy impulsiveness she leaned forward and kissed her. ‘Good night, my dear.’ She slipped away into the crowd.
‘One would think,’ said Lucy, as they crossed the vestibule, ‘that it was an appointment with her lover she was making, not her son.’
Two footmen let them out, obsequiously automatic. Closing the door, one winked to the other significantly. For an instant, the machines revealed themselves disquietingly as human beings.
Walter gave the address of Sbisa’s restaurant to the taxi driver and stepped into the enclosed darkness of the cab. Lucy had already settled into her corner.
Meanwhile, in the dining-room, Molly d’Exergillod was still talking. She prided herself on her conversation. Conversation was in the family. Her mother had been one of the celebrated Miss Geoghegans of Dublin. Her father was that Mr. Justice Brabant, so well known for his table talk and his witticisms from the bench. Moreover she had married into conversation. D’Exergillod had been a disciple of Robert de Montesquiou and had won the distinction of being mentioned in Sodome et Gomorrhe by Marcel Proust. Molly would have had to be a talker by marriage, if she had not already been one by birth. Nature and environment had conspired to make her a professional athlete of the tongue.
Like all conscientious professionals, she was not content to be merely talented. She was industrious, she worked hard to develop her native powers. Malicious friends said that she could be heard practising her paradoxes in bed, before she got up in the morning. She herself admitted that she kept diaries in which she recorded, as well as the complicated history of her own feelings and sensations, every trope and anecdote and witticism that caught her fancy. Did she refresh her memory with a glance at these chronicles each time she dressed to go out to dinner? The same friends who had heard her practising in bed had also found her, like an examinee the night before his ordeal, laboriously mugging up Jean Cocteau’s epigrams about art and Mr. Birrell’s after-dinner stories and W. B. Yeats’s anecdotes about George Moore and what Charlie Chaplin had said to and of her last time she was in Hollywood. Like all professional talkers Molly was very economical with her wit and wisdom. There are not enough bons mots in existence to provide any industrious conversationalist with a new stock for every social occasion. Though extensive, Molly’s repertory was, like that of other more celebrated talkers, limited. A good housewife, she knew how to hash up the conversational remains of last night’s dinner to furnish out this morning’s lunch. Monday’s funeral baked meats did service for Tuesday’s wedding.
To Denis Burlap she was at this moment serving up the talk that had already been listened to with such appreciation by Lady Benger’s lunch party, by the week-enders at Gobley, by Tommy Fitton, who was one of her young men, and Vladimir Pavloff, who was another, by the American Ambassador and Baron Benito Cohen. The talk turned on Molly’s favourite topic.
‘Do you know what Jean said about me?’ she was saying (Jean was her husband). ‘Do you?’ she repeated insistently, for she had a curious habit of demanding answers to merely rhetorical questions. She leaned towards Burlap, offering dark eyes, teeth, a decollete.
Burlap duly replied that he didn’t know.
‘He said that I wasn’t quite human. More like an elemental than a woman. A sort of fairy. Do you think it’s a compliment or an insult?’
‘That depends on one’s tastes,’ said Burlap, making his face look arch and subtle as though he had said something rather daring, witty and at the same time profound.
‘But I don’t feel that it’s even true,’ Molly went on. I don’t strike myself as at all elemental or fairy-like. I’ve always considered myself a perfectly simple, straightforward child of nature. A sort of peasant, really.’ At this point in Molly’s performance all her other
