From her brief meeting with Hugo’s brother in the foyer, Daisy derived no very clear impressions. Mark Amberley was evidently disconcerted at the encounter: his small eyes swivelled this way and that as though he might bolt off any moment into the crowd. Hugo, however, had a firm grip on his elbow and performed the introductions with mischievous aplomb.
“Mark, let me introduce you to my fiancée, Miss Bland.”
“Oh. How do you do. I didn’t know—er, congratulations, Hugh—Hugo, I should say.”
“It was very sudden. I’m afraid we didn’t put it in The Times,” Hugo affably remarked. “Gertrude with you?”
“Gertrude? Oh, er, yes. Yes. She should be somewhere about.” Mark looked round desperately. “No. Of course. She’s still in her seat. She didn’t come out with me. So crowded and noisy here in the foyer. Are you enjoying the play, Miss—er—Bland?”
“Yes, it’s ever so funny, isn’t it.” Mark Amberley’s embarrassment, communicating itself to Daisy, made her revert to an idiom she had almost lost. She blushed a little.
“Funny? Well now, I suppose from certain aspects one might—but the underlying feeling is hardly that of comedy, surely? Of course, they were playing that first act very broad; too broad, wouldn’t you say?”
“My brother is an Extension Lecturer,” said Hugo, winking at Daisy over Mark’s shoulder.
“An Extension Lecturer?” Daisy was hopelessly at sea.
“Yes. His lectures extend indefinitely.”
Mark gave his uneasy laugh. “My brother’s a great wag, as I expect you’ve discovered, Miss Bland. But I do in fact lecture. London University, you know.”
“You must be very clever,” said Daisy, meaning it.
His head shied away from her—he’s really rather like a horse, she thought, with that long face and that neighing voice—then turned back, and he seemed to be seeing her properly for the first time.
“Why don’t you bring Hugo to tea with us one day?”
“I’d love to.”
“Do I smell fatted calf roasting?” inquired Hugo. “If fatted calf is the word.”
“Bourbons,” Mark unexpectedly came out with. “You always used to like Bourbon biscuits. I’ll see if Gertrude can acquire some.”
Hugo frowned and was silent. Shortly afterwards, the bell rang for the end of the intermission. As Daisy and Hugo went back to their seats, he said moodily:
“Now you’ve done it.”
“But it was very nice of him—”
“Oh, there’s no vice in old Mark: he’s just a bore. But Gertrude’s a real stinker. Just you wait.”
“He’ll probably forget.”
“Not a hope. I know him. He thinks you’re going to reform me. A great chap for lost causes, Mark is.”
And Hugo was right. An invitation duly arrived for the following Sunday afternoon. It had been difficult for the girl to see the desiccated and nervous Mark as Hugo’s younger brother: but their encounter had at least broken new ground, and Daisy looked forward to the next, feeling that the acquaintance would give her a fresh hold on normality. At this period, in bars, on race-courses, and at the club cricket matches to which he once or twice took her, she did meet other young men and women of Hugo’s acquaintance: but, though she was sociable enough and enjoyed such meetings, they were too brief and accidental to mean anything. With Mark it would be different. Daisy looked forward to cosy, womanly chats with Gertrude. Mark, and presumably Gertrude, knew about Hugo’s prison sentence: since then, so Hugo told her, his relationship with them had been confined to an occasional request for a loan when he was on his uppers: they had no knowledge, whatever they might suspect, of how he made a living now. “As far as I’m concerned, they keep their heads in the sand,” he said. “They’re just bloody intellectuals.”
Daisy was not in the least alarmed at the prospect of entering this strange new world. She saw no reason to shrink from “intellectuals,” having met none. The complacence of the well-loved woman, superimposed on her own naturalness and zest for life, prevented any apprehension that the meeting would be an ordeal. She had held her own with Hugo’s smarter acquaintances: why should she worry about a harmless couple living respectably in the Vale of Health?
Their “respectability” was what Hugo seemed most to resent. He fired off a number of satirical comments on it as the tube conveyed them northwards that Sunday afternoon. For Daisy, the word meant what it means to any village girl—lace curtains, chapel on Sundays, primmed lips, and scandalised whispers. So she was thrown off her balance, on entering the Amberleys’ drawing-room, to be confronted by a stark, staring nude on the wall above the mantelpiece.
“She’s rather a pet, isn’t she?” said Gertrude Amberley, intercepting Daisy’s open-eyed gaze at the picture; and shaking hands briskly without any more formal greeting, she turned to give Hugo a peck on the cheek. Thoroughly rattled, Daisy stood derelict in the middle of the floor till Mark fussed her towards a chair.
“Well, Hugo, how are the ungodly flourishing nowadays? Pretty well, judging from appearances.”
Gertrude’s voice, light and rather girlish in tone, articulated her words with a precision which came near to pedantry. Her talk was like shelling peas—neat, efficient, automatic. Daisy wondered if she was a schoolmistress: that clicking, rapid talk, cleanly gutting each subject; the smack of the lips at the end of a sentence; the high, narrow forehead, with the hair drawn severely back to a meagre bun; the trick of conducting conversation through a series of questions.
“And what’s your job, Miss Bland?”
“I haven’t got a job. I used to work in a hat-shop.”
“Did you like that? What sort of hours do they work you?”
After this catechism had gone on for some time, Daisy felt she must show some reciprocal interest in her hostess.
“Are you a school teacher, Mrs. Amberley?”
“I teach, yes. W.E.A., actually,” came the brisk and, to Daisy, incomprehensible reply.
“Enlightenment to the masses,” Hugo murmured. “T. S. Eliot for bank clerks.”
“Rather suitable,” whinnied his brother, “when you come to think of it. In my end is my beginning.”
“Eliot is finished,” Mrs. Amberley stated. “Nothing more to say. We must look to the neo-classicists now. Don’t you agree, Miss Bland?”
“Well, I—”
“I simply can’t agree with you there,” said Mark. “I admit Harry Grutch is doing some quite promising work: but the rest of them—they’re just dogs returning to someone else’s vomit.”
“Well, of course, if you really. see neo-classicism as a return to the Thirties, there’s nothing more to be said. Auden and that lot have been dismissed long ago—” Gertrude laughed shortly—“Scrutiny settled their hash all right. But the point I’m trying to make is that, although they haven’t produced any very remarkable work yet, the neo-classicists are on the right lines. They do at any rate understand what Leavis wants.”
“The neo-parnassian group at Reading,” suggested Mark, “are on the same alignment, perhaps. I don’t know if they’ve come your way, Miss Bland?”
“All that’s come Daisy’s way, from Reading, is biscuits,” said Hugo, smiling at her.
The smile caused Daisy to make a valiant effort. The name of T. S. Eliot had been the one clue she could grasp in the otherwise unintelligible conversation.
“You write poems yourself, Mrs. Amberley?” she timidly asked.
“Those who can, do: those who can’t, teach,” murmured Hugo.
“Gertrude is too severely self-critical,” said Mark hurriedly. “She is, er, concerned with the setting and maintaining of the highest standards. She could never be satisfied with anything she had written.”
“I can imagine that,” Hugo ambiguously remarked.
“No, I don’t write poems,” said Gertrude, her intonation picking out the last two words for inspection, distastefully, as it were in a pair of tongs. Daisy was made to feel as if she had insulted Gertrude by the suggestion. “Why should one?” Gertrude continued. “This is an age of criticism. All the best work is being done in criticism.” She continued for some time, tossing the ball to her husband over Daisy’s head, and catching it from him. Whether or no it was done to show her up, it made Daisy rather miserable and flustered: it was too like that childhood game of He-in-the-Middle. Mark, to give him credit, did try to draw her into the conversation, but his attempts only emphasised her ignorance. Hugo, as Daisy could see, was beginning to smoulder with rage.
Things went a bit better at first over tea. Hugo, appeased by chocolate biscuits, started teasing Gertrude about her male pupils, and she responded more readily than Daisy would have thought possible. The girl relaxed, half her attention occupied with the room where they were sitting. Its walls were colour-washed a thunderous shade of pink, which rendered corpse-like the flesh tones of the nude above the mantelpiece, and clashed stridently with the copper and white stripes of the curtains and chair-covers and a couple of saffron velvet cushions on the sofa. The tea-set was in thick Italian pottery. Magazines littered a low round table, and the wall opposite the window was lined with bookcases of different heights. The window looked out upon a small neglected garden. There was a gramophone, but no television or radio set. The square of shabby carpet left a narrow strip of naked floor-board on one side, where it failed to meet the staining. No ornaments at all, but ash-trays everywhere; yet cigarette-ash lay in patches, like scurf, all over the carpet: Gertrude smoked incessantly, puffing away as if for dear life, and knocking the ash brusquely in the direction of the nearest ashtray.
There was something nerve-racking, unco-ordinated, schizophrenic almost, about this room, as though a number of total strangers had each, at different times, contributed to it. Neither elegant nor cosy nor agreeably eccentric, it could have been pathetic but for its aggressive disregard of harmony and grace. Its occupants, one might have supposed, either lacked all taste or despised it: an acute observer would have seen that both these predicates were true—indeed, that the latter was, with such people as the Amberleys, a consequence of the former. The room whined a sort of doctrinaire puritanic sermon against the mere enjoyment of life, condemning charm as frivolity: it was a machine, not for living, but for partly living.
None of these considerations occurred to Daisy. She felt oppressed here, certainly: she thought her hostess’s colour scheme very odd, but assumed it to be artistic in the most up-to-date style. The whole atrocious lack of decorum about this room, the perverse and supercilious flouting of the visual decencies, which even turned the nude into a body one would not be seen dead in a ditch with, passed, like the Amberleys’ talk, over Daisy’s head. She was thinking, this is a home, where two people live together, Hugo’s relations. The unreality of her life with Hugo came over her like a suffocating wave. She wanted to scream out, “It’s all wrong! What are we doing here? Why don’t you ask Hugo where his money comes from—you who ask every other question?” It was like in a dream, standing red-handed beside the corpse, when the tongue cannot utter the confession and the passers-by will not notice the deed.
Unconsciously Daisy clasped her hands over her breast, and her eyes turned upwards. She was struggling to release herself from the nightmare. Gertrude, like ill-cooked food, had been its accidental cause; but its core was Hugo—the criminal secret which put a barrier between them and the rest of the world, and might even infect their love with its false pretences.
“She’s just like Lady Hamilton At Prayer. Do look!”
It was a rasping whisper from Gertrude, which at last penetrated Daisy’s unhappy reverie. She looked about her vaguely, a little wildly, wondering what they were talking about now.
“What?—I’m sorry.”
“I was saying you looked just like Lady Hamilton At Prayer. Didn’t she, Mark?”
“Oh, er, yes. Yes.”
“I don’t understand,” faltered Daisy, trying to smile.
“It’s a picture,” Gertrude explained, clicking out the vocables like a string of beads. “By Romney. At Ken Wood.”
Recollection of a history lesson, years ago, came to Daisy.
“Is that Nelson’s?—” the girl found herself unable to utter the next word, which was readily supplied, however, by Mark.
“Nelson’s mistress. That’s right.” He beamed encouragingly at Daisy. “A very beautiful creature she was, too.”
“I think Romney got her essential floosey-ness quite perfectly, don’t you, Mark. In that painting. It’s genuine criticism.”
“Unconscious, I take it.”
“Oh, naturally. One wouldn’t expect critical awareness from a Romney. Dear me, no. No doubt she fooled him to the top of her bent. She was a professional poseuse, after all, the absurd creature. And artists are very naïve. That’s really the whole point. He painted exactly what was there—a glamorous, milkmaid-ish ninny putting on an act of prayer. And because she wasn’t even a very good actress, the floosey emerges from behind the prayerful pose.”
“But couldn’t she have been praying?” Daisy said on an impulse. “Praying for Nelson? She loved him.”
“That’s the last thing that would ever occur to Gertrude,” said Hugo.
“She could have been”—Gertrude ignored him—“but in fact she was putting over her sex-appeal on Mr. Romney, and posterity.”
Daisy remonstrated, “I don’t see how you can be so sure of that.”
“I’ve seen the picture. You haven’t, apparently.” Gertrude snapped the words like dry biscuits, and Daisy realised that the woman was suddenly, inexplicably furious; this talk about Lady Hamilton was directed against herself. Though ductile and placid enough in temperament, Daisy could be roused: she was not overawed by Gertrude any longer, now she saw her ill-suppressed venom for what it was.
“You think I’m a floosey, like this Lady Hamilton?” she said, laughing.
Mark, without performing the action, gave the impression of one wringing his hands. “Oh, come now, Miss Bland, Gertrude really never suggested—”
“Why so shocked?” his wife cut in crisply. “You are Hugo’s mistress, presumably? For all I know, you pray for him too—as well as serving him in other capacities.”
Mark began to flap his hands, looking as if he were about to burst into tears, but Gertrude paid him no heed.
“I’ve no objection to Hugo’s bringing his mistress to my house—it’s hardly the first time. But I despise this tawdry camouflage of being his fiancée.”
“I do believe you’re in love with Hugo yourself,” Daisy was startled to hear herself say—and at once bitterly ashamed.
“No doubt you do. Sex is all that moronic shop-girls ever think about.” Gertrude positively spat the words into Daisy’s face. Hugo leant back, speaking with a measured calmness which frightened Daisy:
“Gertrude, nature made you a bitch, but you needn’t be a vulgar bitch. You’ve done your best all the afternoon to make Daisy feel ill at ease. I’ll pass that over, because you can’t help waving your intellectual pretensions under people’s noses. But you will apologise for what you’ve just said.”
“Oh, look now, Hugo. Steady on. That’s damned offensive,” Mark began.
“Shut up, Mark,” said his wife, beside herself now, and turned upon Hugo. “How dare you talk to me like that! You’re a waster. I know you. A jail-bird. You go round sponging on people—d’you know how much you owe us?—throwing your famous charm about. You make me sick. You’re diseased with vanity. I don’t know what keeps you alive, except basking in the admiration of a string of cretinous creatures like—”
“Don’t splutter at me, Gertrude. You’re just adding to the list of things you’ve got to apologise for.”
“Please, Hugo! Let’s go,” said Daisy urgently, pulling at his sleeve.
“Not till my dear sister-in-law has apologised.”
“If you think I’m going to apologise to you—”
“Not to me. To Daisy.”
Gertrude’s grin was a rictus. “I’m not one of your tarts. You can’t bully me. And if you had any brains in your head, you’d know that.”
“Aha, my fearless little highbrow critic, don’t you be so sure,” said Hugo; and before Daisy could anticipate his next movement, he had drawn a revolver from his pocket and pointed it at Gertrude. A muddy flush came over her face and went, leaving it dead pale.
“No, no!” she whimpered, pushing at the air in front of her eyes. It was not the revolver which had done it, so much as Hugo’s expression. Daisy had seen that expression once before: a bleak, cold recklessness: a look of almost ecstatic surrender to the violence within.
“Please, Gertrude, please apologise,” she cried imploringly. “He means it.”
Mark had shrunk back against the wall. Daisy feared that, if she herself stirred, it would pull the trigger. The revolver struck forward a foot towards Gertrude, as if of its own volition. She began nodding her head violently, the eyes staring at Hugo, like a woman in a fit. Her teeth chattered, and at last the abject words came out.