‘Take hats for instance,’ Minksie said. ‘The mad, stupid things they do with hats.’
Bright yellow fingers of sunlight falling through Venetian blinds lay across the bed where the two girls sat, still in nightdresses, each holding a pale green coffee cup in her hands. From a far distance, through dead calm summer air, floated the rolling sound of Sunday bells.
‘Every blessed hat they try to sell you nowadays makes you look all mewed-up and daft and prehistoric,’ Minksie said. At twenty-six she was a year older than Connie; she worked as a secretary for a manufacturer of plastic papers who greeted her every morning by slightly ruffling her abundant, fluffy, light golden hair. It was he who had first called her Minksie and it suited her coolly elegant, slightly flamboyant style. ‘You’d think they were designed for dinosaurs.’
‘Mewed-up?’
‘Richard III. I remember it from the film. Haven’t the vaguest notion what it means but it fits what hats do to you. Take that thing I bought last week. That purple bucket affair.’
A recollection of the purple bucket, fifteen inches high, in heavy velvet, suddenly make Minksie roll her large friendly grey eyes in mock affliction.
‘“It will make you look taller, Modom.” Dammit, modom doesn’t want to look taller. She’s the right height now. Men hate tall women anyway. They hate looking up at you.’
Connie laughed and in a slow, rather lazy contralto voice said the trouble was that hats put a spell on you. They got you mesmerised.
‘That’s a true word. And if they’re not buckets they’re flower pots, or waste-paper baskets or something, or they look as if they’re made out of old sheepdogs—’
‘And mangy ones at that.’
Again Minksie rolled her large pellucid grey eyes in mock irritation, this time rather comically, at the same time running her fingers through the sleep-tangled mass of her abundant light fair hair, so that suddenly she had the look of a restless, playful fox-cub.
‘Oh! I’m all of an itch,’ she said. ‘I feel I’d like to go out in the sun and wear a hat that made me feel like a duchess and do something mad and marvellous.’
Impulsively she swung her feet to the floor and started to pull up the Venetian blinds. In the window-box outside a crowded mass of marigolds lifted faces of purest orange to the hot morning sun. On the lime trees in the street below the flowers of full summer drooped motionless, full of bees, in the heavy July air.
‘Do something? Such as what?’
‘Oh! something simple and marvellous and exciting. Like bathing in the nude.’
Connie laughed spontaneously and then drained the last of her coffee.
‘I thought you were the one who never went out on Sundays? Sloppy day you always call it. Slack-about and sloppy day.’
‘Not today.’ Minksie ran restlessly ecstatic fingers through her hair again, lifted her breasts to the sun and drank deep breaths of air. ‘Bells are funny, aren’t they?’ For a few moments she listened, fair head to one side. ‘There’s something about the sound of bells that always seems to call you.’
‘Wonderful how you found out. They’re supposed to call you to church in case you didn’t know.’
‘You know what I wish? I wish I was an Edwardian girl, all parasol and flounce and a big high hat with a million flowers on it. And a man with a mind for oysters and pink wine by a river somewhere.’
‘Hark at the millionairess.’
Minksie, laughing too now, started to search for under-clothes in a chest of drawers.
‘Some hopes. All I’ve got is that. The Thing. The purple bucket.’ A hat of velvet that might have been designed for a bishop in a rural pageant went pitching across the bedroom, landing on a dressing table, narrowly missing a vase of yellow roses. ‘You could never be gay in a hat like that. It sinks you before you start.’
‘You’re in a mad mood.’
‘Just restless. Just the itch. I feel I’d like a bit of swing-high, that’s all.’ Unfolding a white nylon slip, she suddenly paused and looked with a long glance of envious affection at Connie. ‘How do you do it, Connie? You always wake up like a beautiful band-box, just like you went to bed. Never a ruffle. Not like me. I have a fight with sleep all night.’
‘If you’re getting up I suppose I ought to get up too?’
‘And did you know that freckles actually suit you? Your face looks just like a lovely brown bird’s egg. New laid at that.’
The two girls began dressing and once Minksie paused, half-naked, again held in a brief spell of bell-listening at the half-open windows, breasts exposed to the sun.
‘I tell you what. We’ll go to that pub at Aylesbridge. The one on the river. The Fisherman’s Arms. I went there once with a man and the publican was telling us how in the old days big shoals of smelts used to come up the river. He said you could tell when they were coming because there was a smell like fresh cucumber in the air.’
‘Man? I never heard of this.’
‘It was before I knew you. You couldn’t eat at The Fisherman’s Arms in those days. But you can now. It’s rather good, they say.’
Minksie, hooking on her brassiere, did a short wriggling dance under her white slip. It fell about her like a butterfly. Her long arms made graceful movements in the air, swaying like ivory antennae, and she said:
‘We could have oysters and vin rosé and then chicken afterwards and something else to drink.’
‘Hark at the millionairess again.’
‘I’ll pay. I’ll make it a treat for you. I feel like that today.’ She was sitting on the bed now, rolling on her stockings, one slim leg held straight out, smooth and graceful. ‘Of course if we had men they would pay. An Edwardian girl with a gorgeous big hat with a million flowers on it would have a man.’
‘If you must have a hat,’ Connie said, ‘you could have my big blue straw. It’s two years old now and looks as if it came out of the ark but if it will keep you quiet—’
‘I don’t want to be kept quiet. Didn’t I have one something like that too? Wasn’t it yellow?’
‘White, I think—’
‘I remember now. I threw it away.’
‘You may have done, but I didn’t. I’m the squirrel in the family. It’s still there at the top of the bathroom cupboard. I saw it only the other day.’
While Connie, dressed now, went away to find the hats Minksie stood by the window, still in her slip, slowly brushing her hair with a tortoise-shell brush that glowed gold-brown in the sun. The sound of bells had ceased. In the noon quietness she could actually hear the level murmur of bees in the nearest lime tree and somehow, she thought, it was like the deep sound of flowing water.
Bees were on the marigolds too, flanks heavy with golden pollen, and one flew suddenly into the room and swiftly out again as Connie came back, carrying the two wide straw hats, one pure white, the other chicory blue with a darker ribbon drawn into a big back bow.
‘Slightly soiled, you might say,’ Connie said, ‘but otherwise not unenchanting.’
Minksie plopped the white straw flat on the top of her head, struck another mocking attitude and bent to look at herself in the dressing table mirror.
‘At least you don’t look all mewed-up and dinosaurish in it,’ she said. ‘At least you can’t be mistaken for some crabby old out-of-work bishop at the time of Henry the Second.’
‘Going to wear it?’
‘I might. It needs a bit of swing-high to it, that’s all—’
‘Ribbon?’
‘Oh! not ribbon. Never ribbon. Flowers. It needs flowers on it. Oodles of flowers. Fields and fields of flowers.’
‘Connie will run down into the town,’ Connie said, ‘and knock up a shop that isn’t open and buy acres of trimmings so that Minksie can go all Edwardian and have swing-high and oysters. You’d better wear a scarf.’
‘I’ll be seen dead first.’
Minksie, standing at the window again, with the white straw now slightly sideways on her head, seemed for a moment or two to have become quite suddenly part of the morning’s deep embalmment. She was not really listening: not even to the sound of bees. But presently little waves of gayest mischief began to dance across her wide grey eyes, seeming to make them dance under the smooth golden fringe of hair. Her hands began to pluck at each other in quick excitement and she said:
‘We’ve got the marigolds and the yellow roses and the cornflowers we bought for the kitchen on Friday, haven’t we? Anything else? Well, if we haven’t we can always pick honeysuckle and dog roses on the way to the river—’
‘Oh! Minksie, not real flowers. Don’t be a fool. In this heat—’
‘Why not? We’ll stop and sprinkle them with water occasionally—or something. We’ll give them aspirin. They’ll revive. Don’t be so Sundayish.’
‘Minksie, I always knew you were a fool—’
‘I’m so glad,’ Minksie said. ‘You wouldn’t know me if I wasn’t, would you? Go and get the cornflowers, Connie darling. I’m on the up-swing already. I’ll get the marigolds.’
It was Connie, not Minksie, who had the bright idea of wrapping the hats in damped cellophane and carrying them in big paper-bags across the meadows to keep them fresh. The blue hat, trimmed in delicate spirals of blue and pink cornflower with here and there a cluster of yellow roses, seemed to heighten the delicacy of Connie’s brown bird’s-egg face as she stood before the mirror in the bedroom and tried it on. Under a ravishing bed of burning orange, marigold laid upon marigold until hardly an inch of the white hat’s brim was visible any longer, Minksie’s hair seemed to bleach to a shade of tenderest barley straw, giving her face a rosier, sharper glow.
‘We’re a couple of fools if ever there were two,’ Connie said. We’ll look fine when they start to fade.’
‘By the time you’ve had oysters and vin rosé and something else to drink you’ll be past caring whether they fade.’
‘I sincerely trust you’re right.’
‘Oh! Connie, you look delicious. I tell you, darling, you really do.’
‘The voice of the flatterer is heard in the land. We’re a couple of fools, I tell you,’ Connie said. ‘We’re heading for the drain.’
Grasshoppers in myriads, in almost fiercely sizzling chorus, intensified the heat of high noon as the two girls walked across the meadow path towards the river. Everywhere the tall July grasses, thick and sappy and crowded with moon-daisy and sorrel and red and white clover, were shadeless. The unclouded blue of sky was almost flinty straight above and became softened only in hazy poplared distances, far away.
‘Shall we put the hats on now,’ Connie said, ‘or wait till we get there?’
‘I think now. In the shade of that big sycamore.’
Clever idea of Connie’s, Minksie said, the paper bags and the cellophane. The freshness of the flowers remained unfaded; not a single petal had drooped at all.
‘We’ll eat outside,’ Minksie said, ‘shall we? If I remember rightly they have tables outside, under big chestnut trees.’
Five minutes later the two girls were facing a shady terrace of trees so crowded with diners and drinkers that not a single table remained unoccupied. A slightly harassed waiter waved them inside a bar bursting at the doorway with rubicund shirt-sleeved men holding pint mugs of beer in their hands. Inside it was crowded too. A furnace roar of voices burned in low-ceilinged rooms.
‘I told you we were fools,’ Connie said. ‘We should have known you have to book here on Sundays.’
A second waiter, perky-faced, carrying plates of frosty golden melon, came from the kitchens, gasping like a fish to reach fresh air.
Minksie, tilting her hat to one side, gave him a smile of such destructive charm, expansive as a sunflower, that he actually drew up as sharply as if with brakes, in a sudden skid.
‘Yes, madam?’
‘Is there no chance of a table? I mean outside.’
The waiter, who seemed to be about to swallow the two hats in one large fish-like grin, said with his own particular sort of charm:
‘If we can’t squeeze two hats like that in I’ll go to Jericho.’ He gave both hats another glance of perkiest admiration, openly and frankly captivated. ‘Be with you in two splits—’
‘Thank you.’
‘Mind sharing, dear? Might have to share.’
‘Preferably not, but—’
‘Be with you in two shakes,’ the waiter said and bore away the melon in a golden swirl.
‘Now you see exactly what I mean,’ Minksie said. ‘A real hat has them in a tiz. The purple bucket would only have put the poor man off. Didn’t you hear him call me dear?’
‘This way, madam.’ Back again, swift as if mechanically propelled, the waiter put on all brakes and actually squeezed Minksie with friendly brevity at the elbow before, with equal swiftness, guiding both girls away. ‘Have to share, I’m afraid, dear. For a bit anyway.’
Over by the edge of the river, deep in chestnut shade, two young men were sitting at a table for four, brooding with some evident uneasiness over two pints of shandy.
Wiping up the table and then with swift flourishes the two empty chairs, the waiter gave out a strong impression of conferring great honour on the two drinkers.
‘I’m sure you two gentlemen won’t mind sharing for a bit, will you? Be a pleasure, won’t it, on a nice day like this?’
One of the young men, a dark boy with a hint of moustache, looked shy; the other, older and perhaps shy too or merely reserved, put on a cold expression, rubbing his chin uneasily. It was clear that they did mind sharing; it was not a pleasure. They could only devise unintelligible murmurs to each other and suck at beer and withdraw sombrely into themselves.
‘May we have two martinis?’ Minksie said. She gave another broad sunflower smile that had the waiter instantly running. ‘And we want to eat later.’
‘Yes, dear. Yes, madam. Be with you in two shakes.’
Slowly, almost painfully, as in a dream, the two men became astonishingly aware of the hats. The big circles of blue and yellow and orange and pink dazzled and dominated the air like a pair of Catherine wheels. A deep scent from several sprigs of honeysuckle, gathered by Minksie on the way and hastily tucked like a cream-red tail into Connie’s large blue bow, fell on the air with light intoxication.
Presently the two men seemed to withdraw, embarrassed, still farther into themselves, retrieved from sheer frigidity only by the warm and perky voice of the waiter, returning with two martinis and the bill of fare.
‘Now ladies, what shall it be?’
The waiter set down the two glasses and stood with pencil and order book in hand.
‘I know exactly what I’m going to have,’ Minksie said. ‘I’ve made up my mind.’
‘Yes, madam?’
‘Oysters.’
One of the men, the older one, actually let out a short hard laugh, stifling it immediately with his hand and so giving it sharper emphasis.
‘Sorry, madam. Oysters not in season. It’s July.’
‘Hence the laugh.’ Minksie tilted her hat pointedly, at the same time raising her glass to Connie. ‘Well, here’s goodbye to the oysters, darling. They cannot walk with us. What about smoked salmon?’
‘It travels badly in the heat, madam. We called it off for the weekend.’
‘Goodbye to the smoked salmon.’
‘We’ve got very good trout, madam. Local ones.’
‘Trout is for me,’ Connie said.
Minksie said trout was for her too and afterwards roast chicken with french beans and fresh green salad.
‘And a big fat carafe of vin rosé, please. Cold.’
‘Yes, madam. Two trout, two chicken, two salad, one fat rosé. Be with you in a shake of two fins.’
‘No hurry,’ Minksie called after him. ‘We’re here for the day.’
The waiter having disappeared, Minksie stared at the two men with a studious, positively chilling calm. She had not forgotten the oysters; the laugh was still an echo in her ears. With pointed deliberation she took off her hat and laid it on the table with the apparent intention of executing a small repair on a falling marigold. The hat, covering no less than a third of the table, caused the older of the two men to snatch away his shandy glass and stare coldly across the river.
The dark boy merely sat reserved and mesmerised, becoming acutely aware of an incredible feature in the hats. It came to him as a new revelation that the flowers were real. This fact held him for some time in a painful state of wonder while his friend, even cooler now, seemed to find something of extravagant interest in the repeated disappearance of a diving moorhen, a dark acrobat on the far side of the river.
Minksie, putting the hat with a broad gesture back on her head, presently fixed the dark boy with a long, melting stare. Under it he flushed visibly even before she said:
‘You won’t mind my asking, I know. But when do oysters come into season?’
‘I’m really not sure.’ He had become increasingly nervous. He scraped at his upper lip, with its shadow of moustache, with a tentative finger. ‘September, is it? Isn’t it something to do with an “r” in the month?’
‘I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking you.’
‘September to April,’ the older man said, rather tautly.
‘Oh! really?’ Under the hat, so luxurious but fresh, her face again had that look of playful fox-cub innocence that succeeded only in making the dark boy flush again. ‘That’s interesting. Because I remember I was in Paris once and we ate them there in July.’
‘Portuguese,’ the older man said.
‘Is there some difference?’
‘Much smaller.’
‘Oh? I thought it was larger.’
‘Smaller.’
There was a certain stiffness in the air.
‘Anyway, they’re oysters just the same?’ Minksie said. ‘Connie, we really must remember to ask for Portuguese next time.’
By the end of this conversation the dark boy, teased by innocence of a new magnitude and the incredible glory of the hat, became so uneasy that suddenly Minksie felt strangely sorry for him and was glad to hear once again the chirping voice of the waiter, returning with glasses, cloth and cutlery.
‘Will you be taking lunch too, gentlemen?’
‘We haven’t really made up our minds.’
‘You don’t mind if I lay the table?’
‘Oh! please carry on.’
The two men lifted up their glasses of shandy. The waiter spread the tablecloth and the two men put their glasses down again.
‘I hope you won’t be put off by us,’ Connie suddenly said.
‘I rather think we’d better drink up,’ the older man said.
‘Now that would be just plain silly,’ Minksie said. She turned on the older man an even steadier, more melting stare, followed by another radiant sunflower smile. ‘Now wouldn’t it really?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘I’m sorry we butted in,’ Minksie said. She picked up her martini and drained it with sudden relish. ‘Won’t you have a drink with us? Please.’
‘Well, it’s extraordinary—’
‘Could you stand a martini? I’m going to have another. Connie too.’
‘Well, really—’ It was now the turn of the older man to dissolve into a ritual of uncertainty. All the time Minksie held him spellbound with a smile. ‘What do you say, Phil? It’s really up to you—’
‘Four martinis it is then?’ The waiter, a busy man with neither time nor patience to waste, hopped perkily away, flicking his cloth like a white wing. ‘Be with you in a shake.’
The older man, who though not more than twenty-five had hair that receded sharply at the temples, its fairness singularly aloof in some way, started an elaborate and rather stumbling expression of thanks about the martinis, but Minksie cut him short:
‘Oh! that’s nothing. Forget it. My name’s Minksie. This is my friend Connie Alfreston.’
‘Minksie?’ the older man said. ‘Did you say Minksie?’
‘Her real name’s Elizabeth,’ Connie said. ‘But Minksie suits her better. It’s just her.’
‘Why Minksie?’
‘Like the fur,’ Minksie said. ‘I’m the expensive one.’
The man with receding hair looked inexpressibly startled, as if wondering exactly what expensive meant. The realisation that the two hats were trimmed with real flowers had startled him greatly too but not nearly so much as the sudden suspicion that Minksie might be well, perhaps—
‘I see,’ he said, cold again.
‘Here come the martinis,’ Connie said. ‘Lovely.’
The waiter set down the four fresh martinis and, brisk as ever, asked if the two gentlemen had made up their minds about lunch yet? Because things were getting pretty hot and hectic everywhere. He’d soon have to know.
‘Well, I suppose—’
‘Oh! do,’ Minksie said. ‘We shan’t eat you. Starving though I am.’
‘Well, I suppose there’s no harm in making a foursome. If you really don’t mind.’
‘Must be dutch, though,’ the dark boy said. ‘Must be strictly dutch.’
‘What a glorious day,’ Minksie said and started laughing in her refreshing playful way so that the marigolds quivered all over the hat. ‘I’m beginning to feel all swing-high already.’
Her burst of laughter started a new mood. A pair of swans, coming slowly down river with five still brownish cygnets, added sudden grace to the scene. The flap of a white wing seemed to break the tension of the hot still air and the man with receding hair said:
‘My name is Frobisher. This is Phil Weston.’
The smiles that the girls gave were flowery. The hats almost seemed to dance as they lifted their faces.
‘Cheers,’ Minksie said and raised her glass to each man in turn.
‘I say,’ Frobisher said, ‘these martinis are good. You don’t often get them so good. I suppose you wouldn’t join us in another?’
‘Grand idea,’ Minksie said.
‘Don’t forget we have to eat pretty soon,’ Connie said.
‘We mustn’t forget either,’ Phil Weston said, ‘that we really owe you one.’
‘Put it on the slate,’ Minksie said. ‘Charge ’em up.’
Under the influence of a third martini her eyes seemed to enlarge still further. The dark boy grasped for the first time that their pellucid beauty was full of the grey of the sea. Huge and level under the golden flowery brim of the hat they held him in uneasy suspense, so that he was hardly aware of the arrival of trout, brown butter and vin rosé.
Cold and delicious, the vin rosé woke Frobisher to fresh and unprecedented eloquence:
‘I say, this is nice. We weren’t going to eat really. We had rather a late breakfast and well—’
‘Well what?’ Minksie said.
‘Well, I understand it’s a trifle on the expensive side here.’
Minksie laughed gaily again and looked about her at the densely crowded tables.
‘An awful lot of people don’t seem to mind,’ she said, ‘me among them.’
‘Do you always come here on Sundays?’ Frobisher said.
‘Oh! no,’ Connie said, ‘we usually stay in bed and snoozle and read the papers. Or slop about and do jobs.’
‘We generally read too,’ Frobisher said. ‘I say, this trout’s delicious. I adore the butter.’
Gazing at the swans, who had revolved on the width of the river some distance up and were now returning, the dark boy remarked that the day reminded him in some curious way of Proust. Perhaps it was the swans. There was some connection there of course—Swann’s Way. Did Minksie, he wondered, ever read Proust.
‘Generally the News of the World,’ Minksie said.
Even Frobisher was constrained to laugh quite loudly at this. All his early frigidity melted into air and he almost exploded into sudden pleasantry:
‘Look, the swans are coming to be fed.’ Phil Weston had noticed it too and was already breaking bread into small pieces in preparation. ‘Oh! I don’t think so. Much as I like you I fear you’re not going to share my delicious bread and butter.’
Arching white swan necks broke the reeds below the terrace.
‘Do you suppose they’d eat a piece of trout skin?’ the dark boy said.
‘You try ’em and see,’ Minksie said.
‘I don’t think one should,’ Frobisher said. ‘I somehow don’t think the management would approve.’
In the soft grey mirror of Minksie’s eyes Phil Weston saw the reflected tangle of swan necks twine and untwine like some engrossing piece of crochetry. The sight held him spellbound while he drank vin rosé in rapid gulps and thought of Proust again. It was all so like those eternal summers in the France of long ago. What was it?—a frieze of girls? A la Recherche du Temps Perdu.
‘You’re looking awfully hard at me,’ Minksie said. ‘Something wrong?’
‘Oh! I’m sorry,’ he said and confessed that he was really thinking of Proust again and how she would fit in.
‘Fit in?’ Minksie said. ‘With what?’
‘I suppose it must be the hat, but I think you look awfully like one of those girls he was so fond of describing. You know, sort of all Edwardian and flouncy.’
Even Minksie now looked startled.
‘Strange you should say that,’ she said. ‘That’s how I felt I wanted to be today.’
‘You’re not psychic, by any chance, are you?’ Connie said.
Phil Weston said he wasn’t aware of it and was once again caught up in the engrossing crochetry of swan-necks reflected in the grey sea of Minksie’s eyes.
‘I must read this Proust,’ Minksie said, ‘instead of the News of the World.’
‘Oh! would you like to?’ he said. ‘I’d gladly lend you a copy.’
Minksie expressed her thanks, at the same time noticing that the vin rosé had been reduced to a mere pink centimetre’s depth in the bottom of the carafe. Connie noticed it too. By chance the waiter was within hailing distance and in a moment had gone away with an order for more.
The notion of being like a girl in a book had already induced in Minksie a strange sensation of floating unreality and after more wine it was Connie, not Minksie, who started to come to gayer life. Her brown bird’s-egg face turned more and more to Frobisher, who now sat rapidly breaking bread into tiny pieces and throwing it to the swans, dreamy-eyed, as if totally unaware of what he was doing.
With still more wine Connie’s throat and chest presently became flushed a deeper rose. In the stifling air she kept throwing back the neck of her blue dress an inch or two, sometimes leaving the deep division of her breasts startlingly white and bare. Gin, she was fond of telling Minksie, made her amorous and vin rosé even more so.
As she turned her beautiful brown eyes more and more on Frobisher she was aware that he too was under a spell, so much so that in the middle of the chicken course white morsels of bread sauce got stuck to his chin and were left there, like blots of lather after a shave, with Frobisher all the time oblivious and not troubling to wipe them away.
Quite soon, while Minksie seemed to drift upwards, dreamy, capturing her long-wanted mood of pure swing-high, Connie started to think of meadows deep with flowering grasses and she lying with Frobisher among them, somewhere far out of sight. Almost as if reading her thoughts Frobisher sprang up, slightly unsteady, and took off his jacket and flung it over the back of his chair.
‘By God, it’s hot. I’ve only just realised how awfully hot it is.’
‘I wonder you didn’t do that before,’ Connie said.
‘I really didn’t like to, you know,’ Frobisher said, ‘but by God this heat’s sort of bewildering.’
He actually started to roll up his shirt sleeves, revealing unexpectedly muscular fore-arms covered with strong gingerish hair. A strange hot leap went through Connie’s veins as she saw them and in a momentary daze she heard Minksie urging Phil Weston to take off his jacket too and she said:
‘Do you swim, Mr. Frobisher?’
No, he didn’t swim, he confessed. Not all that well anyway.
Reduced to disappointed silence by this she thought of Minksie wanting to swim in the nude and found herself suddenly longing to drop her clothes, fall lazily into deep cool water and float away with her breasts to the sun.
‘Oh! let’s all go swimming,’ she said. ‘What say? Minksie swims like a seal. She’s got the figure for it too.’
‘Hardly wise, surely?’ Frobisher said, ‘after this big meal? Delicious though it is.’ With something like abandon he threw a piece of burnt chicken skin over his shoulder to the waiting swans. ‘I feel replete. Marvellously replete.’
‘What’s wisdom got to do with an afternoon like this?’ Minksie said. She gazed with dreamy disbelief at the carafe, now almost empty for the second time. ‘These carafes have holes in the bottom. They must have. We’ll get some more.’
‘Oh! no, no,’ Frobisher started saying. ‘You think we should? I’m honestly replete—’
‘Replete my foot,’ Minksie said. ‘With four people at it you hardly get a taste at all.’
‘If I can’t swim,’ Connie said, ‘I’d like to lie down somewhere in green, green pastures.’
‘Me too.’ the dark boy said.
‘Oh?’ Minksie said, ‘really?’
A pink frosty circle waved over the luncheon table, making a repeated bow to the glasses. Beyond it the dark boy could have sworn, for the first time, that he saw four separate flowery hats. For a second or two they floated independently in air. Then they merged again, settling uneasily above the pellucid beauty of Minksie’s eyes and the brown bird’s egg of Connie’s laughing face.
Connie, it seemed, was laughing at nothing, nothing at all: simply for the pure joy of it, he supposed. Frobisher too began laughing, tossing another and yet another piece of chicken skin to the swans. In the middle of it all he was caught once again by the melting beam of Minksie’s sunflower smile. He was held completely entranced by the crocheted reflection of swan necks. A reed cracked sharply under the swift turn of a swan’s wing and in an incredulous moment he heard Minksie saying:
‘Wouldn’t you really like to swim? I know a place where we could go.’
Before he could respond to this low-voiced invitation of hers he was aware of the arrival of two waiters. They were clearly twins. Speaking in one voice they said:
‘Dessert, ladies and gentlemen? What about dessert?’
‘Oh! ice-cream,’ Minksie said. ‘Lashings of ice-cream.’
‘We have very nice iced champagne trifle,’ the waiter said. ‘Speciality of the house.’
‘Sounds delicious,’ Connie said.
‘Isn’t it a bit extravagant?’ Frobisher said. ‘I’m replete.’
‘Light as love,’ the waiter said.
‘Oh! replete my foot,’ Minksie said. ‘Let’s all have it. It’s just the thing for this sort of Sunday.’
The intense frigidity of the champagne trifle presently took a biting grip on Frobisher’s bowels. He was aware of it slipping down in freezing streams to his legs. A desire to lean his head on Connie’s shoulder was so irresistible that his head actually gave a sideways jerk, as if about to fall off, and Connie laughed uproariously. He laughed too, without point, his spoon shaking so much that a large lump of chilling trifle fell down on to his middle trouser buttons, with an effect so startling that he gasped aloud.
‘Oh! the flowers on your hats are fading,’ the dark boy said. ‘I don’t want them to fade.’
‘We’ll sprinkle them with water when we swim this afternoon,’ Minksie said and once again held him in that imprisoning pellucid stare.
It suddenly occurred to the dark boy that they were all talking nonsense.
‘Swim? We can’t swim. We’ve got no trunks or anything.’
‘In this place I told you about,’ Minksie said, ‘you don’t need any.’
Frobisher, rising with groping astonishment from trying to spoon trifle from his trouser buttons, expressed the alarmed opinion that they must all be mad. On Sunday too.
‘They’re fading,’ Phil Weston said. ‘The roses are going first.’
‘Are they?’ Frobisher said, ‘are they? Where? Let’s see,’ and tried gropingly but unsuccessfully to get up. A certain glassiness sat on his eyes. He licked his lips uncertainly several times and asked at last what time it was. ‘Ought to be trotting along, don’t you think? Pretty soon?’
‘Fading, all fading,’ Phil Weston said.
‘Oh! coffee first,’ Minksie said.
‘That’s it,’ Frobisher said, ‘lashings and lashings of coffee. Best idea yet.’
‘You were talking about Proust,’ Minksie said. ‘When can I have the book?’
It was a real lovely swing-high of a day, she thought. She felt absolutely great. First the hats and then she like a girl in a book and then the vin rosé and the champagne trifle and the thought of swimming in the nude.
‘Was I? Proust?’
‘All those girls, you said.’
‘Lots of girls in Proust,’ he confided deeply. ‘Always lots of girls.’
‘I’ll bet you’re great with them too.’
‘Me?’ The flowers were fading rapidly and it made it all the worse because there were so many of them to fade. Acres and acres of them. All fading. ‘Me?’
This monosyllabic pronouncement was all his lips could manage. By contrast the tones of Connie’s voice were distinct and clear and untroubled as she said:
‘The swans have gone. It’s no use trying to feed them now.’
Frobisher, pausing in the act of whisking a spoonful of trifle riverwards, murmured in a stuttering, directionless sort of way that he’d be damned. She didn’t mean it? They’d been there a moment ago.
‘Well, they’ve gone now. Wise things. For a nice cool swim.’ The champagne trifle had stimulated once again the more amorous of her thoughts. She actually laid a hand on Frobisher’s shoulder, whispering, ‘Got a car?’
‘We walked. Morning was so delicious.’
‘You’re a pet anyway,’ she said and kissed him lightly on the ear.
It was half past three before the coffee came. By now most of the tables were empty but whenever the dark boy could focus them they seemed to be populated afresh. Strange figures wandered between them and one of these, he suddenly realised, was Frobisher. With flailing arms he was navigating a spiral course towards the pub.
‘I ought to pay a visit too,’ the dark boy tried to say and sat in remote surprise at the inarticulate nature of the sentence that emerged. It had nothing whatever to do with what he wanted to say. ‘All faded yet? Yes? Didn’t want them to fade.’
‘One thing I’d adore,’ Minksie said, ‘would be a nice cold Kirsch.’
But presently when the waiter came again it was to say, first, that the bar was closed for the afternoon and then, in the perkiest and most natural of voices, that he’d taken the liberty of ordering a taxi.
‘Taxi?’ Minksie said. ‘What taxi?’
‘What on earth for?’ Connie said.
‘For the gentleman,’ the waiter said, ‘what just fell down. He went a terrible bang.’
No swim, Connie thought, no meadows.
The dark boy, with a tremendous, earnest lurch, staggered to his feet.
‘Poor old Frobisher—’
‘I’ve got you, sir,’ the waiter said, catching the drooping dark boy, and at the same time with the calmest of glances at Minksie laid the bill on the table. ‘May I leave it with you, dear? I don’t think the two gents—’
Minksie took off her fading crown of marigolds and laid it on the table. Connie took off her hat too. The dark boy was borne like a lurching dummy into the distance. A brief chorus of small sharp croaks showed that the swans were back again and in a moment their entangled white necks were dancing in Minksie’s eyes.
‘How much are we sunk for?’ Connie said.
Minksie lowered her swan-filled eyes, laughing loudly, and looked at the bill.
‘It’ll break us for the week. Both of us.’
‘I told you we were a couple of fools.’
Minksie picked up her golden hat, stared with dancing eyes at the fading flowers and laughed again.
‘Lovely to be a fool,’ she said. ‘Marvellous. Just to be all swing-high and a fool. The others miss so much.’
A moment later she threw her hat of fading flowers into the water. Connie threw hers in too and presently the swans were pecking inquisitively at the crowns of marigold and honeysuckle and cornflower and rose as they floated away.
‘See what a good hat can do.’ Minksie said. ‘Well, better see if they’ll take a cheque.’