Miss Tompkins, who was seventy-six, bright pink-looking in a bath-salts sort of way and full of an alert but dithering energy, looked out of the drawing-room window for the twentieth time since breakfast and found herself growing increasingly excited. The weather, she thought, really was improving all the time it got better. It was going to be marvellous for the party after all.
The morning had improved so much and so fast, in fact, that all the azaleas, mere stubby fists of rose and apricot and yellow the day before, were now fully expanded in the sun, raising the most delicate open hands to a cloudless summer sky. They were very late this year and perhaps that was why, she thought, they seemed to be so much more beautiful. After all, she told herself, you couldn’t hurry nature; everything had its appointed time; everything that was really good was worth waiting for. During all the wet cold weeks of May she had watched the barely colouring buds apparently clenching themselves tighter and tighter and once or twice she had actually prayed for them, in true earnest, against the dreaded threat of frost.
Now they were all in blossom. Great banks of them rose splendidly from the far side of the lawn. As if by a miracle they were all at their best on the appointed day: the day of the party for the girls.
‘If that’s the telephone I’ll answer it,’ Miss Tompkins called to the invisible presence of Maude Chalmers, who was very busy filling the last vol-au-vent cases with cold fresh salmon and mayonnaise in the kitchen, ‘if it isn’t you go.’
No answering word came from Maude Chalmers, her companion-housekeeper, who was working in a silent and practical vacuum at the vols-au-vents, with the kitchen door closed, unable to hear the ringing of the bell that flew with tremulous persistence through the house. Sometimes Miss Tompkins vowed that Maude, who was seventy-eight, actually feigned deafness: either that, she thought, or her hearing deliberately deteriorated the moment she wanted it to get worse.
‘I think it’s the telephone after all!’ she called and rushed into the hall, picking up the receiver and pouring excited ‘Hullos’ into it, only to discover after some seconds that the line was dead. ‘No, it isn’t. I’ll go. It’s the front door.’
‘Oh! it’s the smoked sprats! You splendid man!’ She took from the fishmonger’s man a small parcel, hands clutching it with new excitement. ‘How clever of you to have got them in time. They’re such lovely things for someone who’s never had them before.’
She had read about the sprats in a magazine. They were one of the things by which she hoped to give the party a touch of the unusual, a bit of exciting tone. For the same reason she had decided it should be a morning party. Morning parties were, she thought, different. For one thing they were kinder to the girls, most of whom were no longer quite so young. Some were early-to-bedders; many of them played bridge in the afternoon or had sleeps and later went out to tea. At noon they would, she thought, be fresher, in the mood to peck at something and ready for a well-iced drink or two. They could wander in the garden, gaze at the azaleas, take their plates and glasses with them and chat happily in the sun.
A bell rang stridently in the house again and automatically she picked up the telephone receiver, at the same time calling:
‘Maude, the smoked sprats have come. Isn’t that heaven?’
‘Is that you, Tommy?’ a voice said over the phone. Most of her friends called her Tommy; she never paused to wonder if it suited her. ‘It’s Phoebe here. What was that about sprats? You sound like a warbling thrush.’
‘Oh! I am—I did. I feel like that. Did I say sprats? I suppose I did—I didn’t want you to know. What is it, Phoebe? Could something be the matter? Don’t say you can’t come.’
‘Not a thing, dear. It was simply—I wondered if you’d mind—’
‘Mind? Mind what?’
‘I just wondered if I might bring Horace, that’s all.’
‘Horace? Who’s Horace?’
‘My brother.’ Phoebe Hooper’s voice was deep, throaty, oiled and persuasive in tone; over the telephone it greatly belied her years. ‘He’s eighteen months younger than me.’ Phoebe Hooper was a mere seventy. ‘Would you mind? He’s here staying with me for a week or two.’
‘Well, it was really a party for the girls—’
‘Yes, I know. But you know how it is. Either I’ve got to leave the poor man cold lunch on a tray or something or he goes to the pub for a lonely Guinness and a sandwich. He’s harmless, really. He just needs pushing around, that’s all.’
A sense of uneasiness, touched with disappointment, crept over Miss Tompkins. The fond bright illusion of her female party seemed suddenly to fade. She had created in her mind for so long a picture of the girls wandering through the house, all permed and gay in summer dresses, and about the garden, against the background of azaleas in all their freshest colours, that the thought of a solitary male stranger among them seemed now to obtrude unpleasantly.
‘But it’s just for the girls, Phoebe. It’s all hen, I mean. I’m sure he’ll be frightfully, frightfully bored—’
‘Oh! not Horace. He’ll make himself useful. He’ll buttle for you. He’ll mix the drinks. He mixes beautiful Moselle cup. I’m sorry I left it so late, Tommy—’
‘Late?’ Miss Tompkins felt suddenly helpless and at the mercy of time. It always went so much faster when you thought it was earlier than it was. ‘Is it late? What time is it now?’
‘I make it five to twelve. Is it really all right about Horace?’
‘I must fly. Twelve? It was half-past ten five minutes ago. Yes, it’s all right about—yes, please—perfectly—’
‘You’re a lamb, dear.’ Phoebe Hooper’s voice, smooth as oil, sent yet another tremor through Miss Tompkins, once more despoiling her confidence. ‘We’ll be over in a few minutes. Heavenly day.’
Breathlessly Miss Tompkins flew to the kitchen, actually unwrapping smoked sprats as she went and finally saying to Maude Chalmers: ‘It’s twelve already. That was Phoebe Hooper on the phone. She wants to bring her brother to the party. His name’s Horace. I thought we’d put the sprats on the green dish—you know, the Spode. The green would match so well with the gold.’
‘Green dish? Spode? People are going to eat them,’ Maude Chalmers said, ‘aren’t they? Not use them for interior decorating.’
Maude Chalmers, who spoke tartly, was surprisingly solid, almost beefy, for a woman in her late seventies. Her hair was dark and strong, if rather stringy, and untidy bits of smoky whisker grew out of her upper lip and under-chin in irregular tufts, rather as if left there after a hasty shave.
‘What about the drinks?’ Miss Tompkins said. She was going to serve sherry and gin with tomato juice for those who preferred it, though most of the girls, as she knew, adored gin in some form or another. But looking distractedly round the kitchen she saw neither drinks nor glasses and was unpacified by Maude Chalmer’s level, practical voice saying:
‘The drinks are where they should be. On the sideboard in the drawing-room. What are people going to eat the sprats with by the way? Their fingers?’
‘Oh! forks, forks.’
Ignoring this desperate remark except for a sideways hitch of her hairy chin, Maude Chalmers picked up a large Sheffield plate tray filled with canapés, delicate little sandwiches sprinkled with emerald threads of mustard and cress, cold chipolata sausages, rounds of stuffed hard boiled eggs and slices of toast spread with liver pâté and topped with olives. While Miss Tompkins had been fussing with idle fears over the weather, the sprats and whether the azaleas would open in time or not she had prepared every crumb of food herself. Everything, as far as she was concerned, was done. Everything was ready.
‘I feel there’s such heaps still to do,’ Miss Tompkins said. ‘Shouldn’t we have a table or two put out on the lawn? Don’t you think?—’
In fresh, fussy alarm, she followed Maude Chalmers to the drawing-room, taking out her powder compact as she went. Drinks, glasses, plates, dishes, napkins, olives, radishes, cigarettes and even forks were, to her trembling astonishment, placed about the room in perfect order everywhere. The silvery tray of food brought in by Maude Chalmers merely crowned the waiting pattern.
‘Everything looks so cool,’ she said. ‘Where are you going?’
‘To fetch your precious sprats, dear.’
‘Oh! I see. Yes, yes, I see.’ Miss Tompkins held the mirror of her compact so close to her face that she actually recoiled sharply from the reflection of the one jellied uneasy eye that stared back at her. ‘Oh! I look a mess. I’m an absolute sight.’ She hastily salted herself with ill-timed generous dabs of her powder puff, making her face look more sharply pink than ever. Powder flew everywhere, prompting her to give three or four spurting little sneezes, cat-fashion, the last of which seemed to be echoed in a gentle buzz at the front door-bell, so polite as to be almost a whisper.
‘Was that the bell?’ she called. ‘Maude, was that you? Did you hear?’ Maude, she thought, was feigning deafness again, but a moment later Maude was answering with customary tartness from the kitchen:
‘It’s the Miss Furnivals, you bet your life. They’re always on the dot. Can you go? I’ve still got to do the sprats—’
Two ladies of undernourished appearance, greyish and wrinkled as a pair of barely wakening chrysalids, almost fell into the house, as if from sheer surprise or weakness, or even both, as Miss Tompkins opened the front door. Wheezes of timid breath escaped from them in matching rhythm, offering greetings that were not really audible as words. Their shrunken little bodies seemed to float across the hallway, their sharp triangular noses thrusting piercingly ahead, as if already scenting food.
Before Miss Tompkins could dispose of the two drifting bodies with politeness, Maude Chalmers was back from the kitchen, carrying in her hands a golden star of sprats, shining on a green dish, phosphorescently. A moment later a car hooted with a challenge of greeting from the drive-way outside, but before Miss Tompkins could recover from the start of surprise it gave her the front door was actually opened to admit a throaty solo chorus of laughter, followed by words which came with liquid undulation:
‘It’s only me, it’s only me. My god-fathers, Tommy, you chose a thirsty day.’
‘Connie, my angel,’ Miss Tompkins said.
She ran forward to press powdery caressive cheeks on the face of a tallish woman in her late seventies who recoiled slightly as if thinking of tossing back the low-cut fringe of her curled coppery hair. As she did so she raised her hand to her hat as if feeling that it might suddenly fall off. Instead the hat, a very small one, sat with surprising firmness on her flaming hair, looking like a white cake decorated with spring-like airiness in a design of narcissi, pink rose-buds and lily-of-the-valley.
‘I saw Phoebe Hooper driving up.’ Connie Stevens bore widow-hood with a sort of metallic serenity, perhaps because a third excursion into it had given her both confidence and practice. ‘And with a man. I thought this was just for the old hens today?’
‘Her brother. His name’s Horace. He had to be left alone—’
‘Horace? I’ve heard of Horace somewhere. Isn’t he in tea or something?’
Suddenly the door-bell rang again, to be answered this time with calm and beefy promptitude by Maude. At the sound of voices Miss Tompkins turned with the expectation of seeing Phoebe Hooper and her brother Horace, but to her surprise—it was her day of surprises, she suddenly thought, first the azaleas, then the weather, then—it was Dodie Sanders and her mother.
Dodie Sanders, tall, thin and sallow, with depressed fair hair, had a mouth that was not only unrouged but almost perpetually open in a low droop that gave her a look not at all unlike that of a lean, long fish that had been landed and left on a river bank in a state of gentle expiration. Her eyes were reddish and globular; the lashes were like little gingery red ants nervously dancing up and down.
‘Please do go in. Maude will look after you.’ Miss Tompkins felt suddenly, as she always did in the presence of Dodie Sanders and her mother, slightly ill-at-ease. Dodie, although sixty, was like a girl who had never grown up. With fish-like coldness she swam away under the big fin of her mother, who in a shining dress of steel-blue silk glided away to the drawing-room like a watchful shark.
‘Ah! it’s us at last!’ Phoebe Hooper, with habitual domination, was already in the hallway, not having bothered with the formality of the bell. ‘You must blame Horace for it. He’s such a slow coach. He was simply ages getting ready.’
Horace had very much the appearance of a shy and inattentive prawn: the cushiony splendour of Phoebe Hooper, immense in bust and hips, overwhelmed him. Modest grey curls encircled his crimson ears like tufts of sheep wool and two small sepia bull’s eyes stared with wandering apprehension from under mild whiskery grey brows. In one hand he was clutching two long green bottles of wine and in the other a siphon of soda and a third bottle of wine. The strain of this overloading had driven his cream collar and rose-brown bow tie slightly askew and somehow at the same time the trousers of his crumpled fawn suit had become unevenly hitched up, revealing glimpses of white socks that had fallen down.
‘This is Horace,’ Phoebe Hooper said. ‘I made him bring the wine because I knew he’d adore making that cup for you. It’s his great speciality—’
‘Oh! I don’t know about—’ Horace smiled shyly. Unable to shake hands or finish his mildly protesting sentence, he stood between the two girls with an air of indecisive, wistful meditation. He seemed to be thinking of something far outside the walls of Miss Tompkins’ house: perhaps a quiet glass of Guinness, a walk with a dog, a game of golf somewhere.
‘Oh! it’s my day of surprises,’ Miss Tompkins said. ‘First the azaleas, then the sprats and now—this, wine! And of course, the weather—all the time improving as it gets better.’
Horace reacted to these inconsequential statements with a solemnity far greater than mere surprise. The sheer weight of the wine bottles seemed to drag him down.
‘You’d better lead him to the kitchen,’ Phoebe said. ‘Get him to work. Don’t let him get lazy.’
‘Oh! yes, of course. This way, this way, Mr. Hooper,’ Miss Tompkins said. ‘Maude will find you all you need.’
In the kitchen Maude was topping shining dishes of early strawberries with large blobs of cream. At the sudden appearance of Horace and Miss Tompkins she drew herself straight up, as if about to be tartly affronted, but something about Horace’s modest and crumpled appearance made her pause, spoon in air, while blobs of cream slowly dropped to the tablecloth.
‘This is Phoebe’s brother, Horace. He’s going to make us the most delicious cup or something with wine. Is it Hock, did you say, Mr. Hooper, or Moselle? I think you need lemons for that, don’t you? Do you need lemons?’
Horace, unloading wine bottles and siphon on the kitchen table with evident relief, said yes, he needed lemons and also ice and a little mint, please, if they had it.
‘Plenty of mint in the garden,’ Maude said, her voice brusque as sandpaper. ‘Under the first apple-tree.’
‘I must fly back,’ Miss Tompkins said. ‘I hear the bell again.’
In her light thrush-warbling fashion she flew away, half-singing, ‘I’m coming! I’m coming! I’ll be there!’
‘I suppose you’ll need jugs and glasses,’ Maude said. ‘Anything else?’
‘A little sugar.’
‘Lump or gran?’
‘About a dozen lumps, I’d say. And a cup of brandy.’
‘Brandy? All we’ve got is cooking.’
‘That will do nicely.’
Maude, returning from a kitchen cupboard with a meagre quarter bottle of brandy, paused to eye the three bottles of Moselle and their companion siphon with flinty disapproval. What were people coming to suddenly, bringing their own bottles to a party? They’d be bringing their own nuts or something next.
She supposed Mr. Hooper needed a corkscrew too, she said. He’d brought plenty of bottles, she must say. Did he want to get them all squiffy or something?
Horace, who had no intention whatever of getting anybody squiffy and who hadn’t in the least wanted to make the Moselle cup in the first place but was merely doing so because his sister was a bully and insisted he do a good turn of some kind as a reward for being invited, merely smiled with excruciating shyness again and said:
‘It was really my sister’s idea. She gets rather carried away.’
Something about the smile and the retreating tone of Horace’s apologetic voice made Maude suddenly think of a dog about to cower into a corner after some dire misdeed. She suddenly felt unaccountably sorry for Horace. She knew it was all that Phoebe Hooper’s fault, puffing herself up like a majordomo. The woman was always bossing. She woke up every morning, Maude was sure, with great ambitious ideas bouncing about her head like electrons or whatever they were—let’s all have a picnic, let’s do Twelfth Night out of doors or something—and then made somebody else do all the donkey work. The woman was infuriatingly domineering; she made you wild.
Horace, now armed with a corkscrew, pulled the first cork with such clean, snapping precision that Maude was actually startled and gave a giggle and said Mr. Hooper sounded very expert. She supposed he was doing things like making Moselle cup all the time?
Horace, who hadn’t made Moselle or any other cup since his sister’s sixtieth birthday, to celebrate which she had inveigled the two Miss Furnivals into lending their large bushy garden for an Edwardian street pageant accompanied by three cornet and barrel-organ players and a fish-and-chip van, said:
‘Well, as a matter of fact, not really. Might I have the ice now? And two jugs please?’
Obediently she rushed to find ice and jugs. Two tall Venetian glasses of rose-purple colour seemed to her the very things for the cup and after putting down the ice-tray on the kitchen table she started polishing them vigorously with a cloth, saying at the same time:
‘You said mint. What about mint now? Shall I go and get it? We’ve got lemon mint too, I think.’
Horace, who was trying hard to remember the exact proportions of the cup’s ingredients, put a dozen cubes of ice in a jug and coloured them with a golden film of brandy. Hesistant about something, he stood biting his lip. Oughtn’t there to be a dash or two of curaçao? Something seemed to tell him so.
‘You haven’t a spot of curaçao, I suppose?’
No, but they had maraschino, Maude said, and she thought also a little cointreau.
By now Horace was mildly confused. He couldn’t remember for the life of him whether it was curaçao, cointreau or maraschino that the cup demanded and again he stood biting his lip with that shy perplexity that affected Maude far more sharply than any look of open appeal.
Was something the matter? she said and Horace assured her that no, it was nothing, merely that he wondered if maraschino or—
Before she could allow herself a second of rational thought Maude made the astonishingly impetuous suggestion that they should be devils—they should put them both in!
Maude’s unexpected suggestion of devilry was accompanied by another giggle or two, and had the instant effect of making Horace stir ice with an over-vigorous rattling spoon, as if uneasily anxious to drown the odd sounds that Maude was making. Any moment now his sister would be storming the kitchen, imperiously calling for the cup, scolding him again for being a slow-coach.
‘Oh! all right, let’s put them both in—’
‘Do!’ Maude said. ‘Use them up. It’ll be a way of clearing them out. I’ll get the mint now.’
By the time Maude came back with a handful of fresh mint from the garden the tall Venetian jugs were looking frosty. A translucent glow of green, fresh and light as that of a half-bleached leaf, streamed softly through the rosy-purple patterns of the glass. Finally crowned by mint and ice and lemon the cup looked, as Maude had suggested it would, very expert.
Shyly Horace resisted flattery. It wasn’t after all, the looks—it was, he reminded her, the taste of the thing.
‘May I taste?’ Maude said. ‘Just the weeniest—’
Maude was quick to find glasses and Horace poured out two cold and inviting measures of the cup, at one of which Maude drank deeply enough to leave a bead or two of green on the lower and longer sprouts of her moustaches.
‘I’ve never tasted anything quite like it before,’ she said. ‘I think it’s most unique.’
Under this generous tribute Horace looked shyer than ever. At the same time, he had to admit, the fragrant coldness of the cup seemed good. It had something to it. It wasn’t bad at all.
Maude, under the stimulus of a strong second gulp, was about to say again that it was far better than that. The word ‘genius’ hung on her lips. She giggled again and was on the point of asking Horace to top her up when an intruding voice arrested her:
‘What’s all this we hear about punch? Or cup or something? Or aren’t we allowed into the wine sanctum?’
Connie Stevens’ coppery head, arresting as a shining helmet, appeared suddenly in the kitchen door-way. Maude, unable to explain why, felt the moisture all over her body run cold and with a sudden return to customary tartness she said:
‘Mr Hooper will bring the wine-cup when it’s ready. Things take time.’
Without quite knowing what she was doing she snatched up a pair of kitchen scissors and disappeared into the garden, half-running, beefy hindquarters bumping up and down.
‘Everybody’s dilating,’ Connie Stevens said. ‘That’s why I came to peep. They all say you’re mixing a beaut.’
‘Oh! I don’t know—’
‘The girls are lapping up gin like stink already,’ she said. ‘Are you trying to get them all spellbound? By the way, my name’s Connie Stevens. Phoebe told me about you once. Aren’t you in tea?’
Horace, spurting a final squeeze of soda into the wine-cup, said no, he wasn’t in tea. He had been in plastics. Now he was retired.
‘Nonsense. You look far too young to retire.’
He was afraid it was a fact, Horace said.
‘I used to have shares in plastics once. Plastic Research Foundation or something like that it was called. They did marvellously.’
‘My company.’
‘No wonder. I’m sure you were the wizard.’
Connie Stevens peered with a sort of spry innocence, eyelashes dancing, into the wine-cup. ‘It looks so artistic,’ she said. ‘I love drinks that look artistic. May one taste? I mean the merest soupçon?’
‘I rather think it still needs another stir—’
‘The artist’s touch. I know. Will it knock us all flying?’
Connie Stevens gave Horace a look of slow, exploratory charm. In contrast to Maude, who found herself under the spell of the brown shy eyes, she found herself suddenly engrossed by his ears. They were firm but delicate; they were like a pair of clean rosy fossils. Something about their recurring lines spiralling perfectly inward sent the strangest voluptuous spasm through her, so that she felt sharply annoyed when Maude Chalmers burst in through the garden door like a clumsy bear and said acidly:
‘Here’s the lemon mint. I suppose it goes in whole? Or do you chop it?’
Bear-like still, she threw the stalks of mint on the table and retreated with sweeping haste in the direction of the sitting-room. Connie Stevens merely stared and shrugged her shoulders.
‘Strange woman. Embittered. I can’t think why Tommy keeps on with her.’
Without answering, Horace dropped a sprig or two of lemon mint into the wine-cup, giving it a final stir with a spoon.
‘May one taste? You said I might.’
Horace, uneasy at Maude’s acid departure, poured out half a glass of wine-cup. Connie Stevens took it, held her little delicate hat with her free hand and sipped at the glass with lips that, heavy with lip-stick of a deep shade of coppery rose, were designed to match her hair.
After drinking, she paused, held up her eyes in a half-voluptuous glance to heaven and said that some of them would certainly know when they’d had this. This was it: the real McCoy.
‘It’s pretty mild really,’ Horace said. ‘It’s just refreshing. I think we’d better take it in.’
The sitting-room was electric with female voices and springing laughter. Miss Tompkins greeted the arrival of the wine-cup with rising warbles of delight. Her hands played scales in the air. A whole regiment of hats swivelled sharply to concentrate on Horace, modestly bearing the two jugs, but had scarcely a glance for Connie Stevens, carrying a tray of glasses, until Maude rushed up with something like outrage and took it away.
‘On the table here, on the table here,’ she commanded. ‘Set it down here.’
Horace, dutifully setting down the two jugs on a corner table, looked like a one-man patrol ambushed and far out-numbered. Elderly ladies, gay as dolls, seemed to spring from everywhere. Miss Tompkins warbled, for perhaps the tenth time, that when they each had their cup they must take it outside: it was so sunny, so absolutely perfect, they mustn’t miss the azaleas. There mightn’t be another day.
‘Well, young man,’ a clear soprano voice said and Horace, in infinite astonishment, suddenly realised that this could only mean himself. He turned from pouring the first of the wine-cup into glasses to find himself confronted by a neat vision in a white silk suit threaded with narrow charcoal stripes and a little hat, not unlike a silvery pineapple, with an inch or two of light grey veil, that sat slightly tilted on a head of impeccably curled dark grey hair. Lithe and straight as a cane, with eyes as blue as larkspur, she didn’t look a day over sixty, Horace thought. ‘What’s all this about your Moselle-cup I hear?’
‘This is Miss La Rue,’ Miss Tompkins told him. She longed to tell him too that, as all the girls knew, Miss La Rue was within a month or so of ninety, but Miss La Rue was so engrossed in sprightly appreciation of both Horace and the glass of wine-cup he had by now put into her hands that Miss Tompkins realised sadly that she was very much de trop and said only, before moving away: ‘You must talk to her. She has the most wonderful memory. Astonishing. She remembers everything.’
‘I certainly remember this,’ Miss La Rue said. No tremor of age was detectable in voice, air or eye as she lifted her glass and stared at Horace through it, as if with the intention of examining him microscopically. ‘I first had this at Ascot in ’89. That was a glorious day too. Rather like today.’
She drank, afterwards sucking delicately at her firm moist lips.
‘No curaçao?’
No, Horace had to confess, no curaçao.
‘Great pity,’ she said. ‘It gives that touch.’
She nevertheless gave him a glance of matchless gratitude, eyes glowing with the iridescence of young petals. Receiving it, Horace felt for some reason extraordinarily young, almost boyish; he was suddenly a character in some distant, long-lost school party.
‘You’re spilling it, you’re spilling it!’ It was Maude Chalmers now, in rigid reprimand. ‘All over the place. Give it to me, do, give it to me.’ She snatched the jug from his hands. ‘You can’t trust them, Miss La Rue, can you? You can’t trust them.’
In contrast to this dark insinuation Miss La Rue looked, as her eyes smiled under the grey fringe of veil, all trust and light.
‘What of these azaleas I hear so much about?’ she said. ‘Aren’t you going to take me to see them?’
‘Of course. Whenever you wish.’
Horace, less shy now and suddenly feeling more youthful than ever, prepared to move away.
‘Not without your cup, surely?’ she said. ‘I’ll take a little more too before we go.’
Armed with full glasses, they walked slowly into a garden so drenched with sunlight that it gave a fantastic acidity to the brightness of the lawn’s new-mown grass. The amazing transparence of blue sky seemed to lift the whole world up. The voices of several ladies chirping about the thick orange and pink and yellow forest of azaleas might have been the cries of birds.
Presently Horace was uneasily astonished to find Miss La Rue taking his arm: not lightly, but in an earnest lock, almost a cuddle. A breath of perfume, so delicate that the mere movement of her arm might have released it, rose in the air. It might have been mignonette, he thought.
‘I’m walking slowly,’ she said, ‘only because I don’t want to get anywhere,’ and looked down for some moments in silence at her feet.
Horace looked at them too. The ankles were surprisingly small, delicate and well-shaped. Each of her grey shoes had a black frontal bow with a single white spot on the wings, giving the effect of a resting butterfly.
‘Women chatter so,’ she said. ‘The nice thing about you is that you don’t talk too much.’
She sipped wine-cup as she walked along, a feat of such accurate balance and ease, with no hint of haste or awkwardness, that she might have been doing it every day.
‘Why was Maude Chalmers so vinegary?’ she said.
‘I didn’t notice it.’
‘Of course you noticed it.’
‘I suppose the party makes a lot of work,’ he said. He recalled the incident of the mint; though so small it now seemed embarrassing. ‘I suppose the wine-cup put her out of her stride.’
‘She was angry with you.’
‘With me? Oh! dear no.’
‘Flaming.’ She turned and looked him squarely in the eye. It was a look of both intimacy and penetration. ‘You’d been flirting with her.’
‘Oh! never!’
‘Of course you had. She was red all over.’
Ahead, the azaleas flamed. No single petal had yet fallen from the thickly fringed branches. Below them, and to one side, a platoon of delphiniums, palest blue to near black, stood in arrested grandeur, unshaken by wind.
‘I see there’s a seat over there,’ she said. ‘It’s easier to drink wine sitting down—’
‘No, you don’t. No, you don’t. I’m stealing him. Tommy’s desperate.’ It was the strident voice of Connie Stevens metallically beating across the lawn. ‘The wine-cup’s giving out fast. And Phoebe says you have another bottle left.’
Horace, jerked to his feet as by an invisible string, uttered very small disturbed noises.
‘Come, come, come,’ Connie Stevens said, as if bringing a poodle to heel. ‘Oh! he shall come back. I’ll send him back.’
‘Take my glass, young man.’ Miss La Rue drained her glass, lifted it towards Horace and fixed him with a sort of accusative charm. ‘Don’t let them keep you. I want to talk to you.’
As if actually ordered to do so, Horace drained his glass too and then, half-dragged by the imperative hand of Connie Stevens, took both empty glasses away.
‘Oh! you dear man, we work you to death.’ In the drawing-room Miss Tompkins, flushed with gin and after-doses of wine-cup, was full of giddy solicitude. ‘Empty glasses too! Empty glasses! No one should empty a glass when they can have it filled up.’ She laughed on dithering notes, at the same time grabbing from a table a consolatory glass of something that Horace presently discovered was gin and tonic. He drank at it timidly. ‘Oh! drink up, you dear man. You need it. We’ve got work for you to do. That comes of being so popular.’
Popular? The word, sped on its way by gin and wine-cup, rushed through the chattering wings of female voices like an arrow. A bare feminine arm, belonging to someone he didn’t recognise, held him momentarily suspended, just long enough for him to hear:
‘Absolutely marvellous, your cup. Making the party.’
Another voice, cooing gently, primed him to beware. ‘I’m after you for the recipe. Don’t forget, will you? Just scribble it down. I’m after you.’
‘I go for this cup,’ he heard another one of the girls saying. ‘I really do.’
‘You can feel it going down,’ another girl said. ‘You know—creeping.’
Horace presently found himself back in the kitchen. Maude, who had the two Venetian jugs, the remaining bottle of wine and a fresh nosegay of mint in readiness on the table, greeted him with the long rattle of an ice-tray and the voice of a skeleton:
‘Oh! you’re back, are you?’
A certain chill in the air was softened by the unexpected discovery by Horace that he was still holding the glass of gin and tonic in his hands. He drained it gratefully.
‘No more brandy,’ Maude said, in a tersely detached voice, rather as if it were his fault, ‘and the maraschino’s nearly all gone. But I found some Kirsch. Cherry, isn’t it? Tommy brought it from Germany once. Will it do?’
Horace didn’t know and suddenly, impelled by gin mixing itself with wine-cup, didn’t care. He started shovelling cubes of ice into a jug. Popular, was he? He poured generous measures of Kirsch over the ice and stirred madly with a spoon. Popular? Peals of laughter coming from across the lawn made him pause abruptly and gaze through the window. The garden was bright with chattering, wine-flushed girls.
‘Seem to be enjoying themselves,’ Horace said. ‘Gay sight.’
Maude, otherwise speechless, gave a snort that clearly dismissed all other womenfolk as worse than pitiful. Horace, hardly noticing, pulled the remaining Moselle cork and tipped the bottle upside down, vertically, in a gesture meant to be expert. The neck of the bottle struck his gin glass, sending it crashing to the floor.
Unserene and highly silent, Maude swept up the broken glass with brush and dust-pan and then left the kitchen abruptly, in even higher silence, carrying with her a tray of strawberries and cream.
Left alone, Horace discovered that he was actually laughing to himself. Popular, eh? It was getting to be rather fun. Popular? He stirred with joyful energy at the nearly completed cup, raising a veritable sonata from the ice as it went swirling round and round. An over-generous squirt of soda sent the level of liquid too high in the jug and suddenly it was all brimming over. Horace, laughing to himself again, remedied the situation by pouring himself a generous glass of wine-cup and then tasting it deeply. Not bad at all, he thought. Not bad. Small wonder it was popular. The Kirsch, allied to maraschino, had undoubtedly given it a remarkably bizarre and haunting flavour.
After giving the jug its final garnish of mint he bore it back to the drawing-room, now three parts empty. One of the girls, elderly by any standards, was holding trembling court in a corner by the fire-place, listened to by Mrs. Sanders and three others, who now and then responded by laughing sweetly and bobbing up and down, like puppies.
Another, crowned by a precious piece of millinery in black velvet, dancing bits of jet and what seemed to be the hind part of a vermilion cockatoo, suddenly bore down on him as from some secret hiding place, saying:
‘Ah! Ha, ha. I’ve caught you.’
A smoked sprat, speared on the end of a silver fork, waved merrily in front of his face.
‘The pageant, wasn’t it? I’ve been drilling my brain all morning trying to remember. You haven’t forgotten, have you?’
Horace had hardly begun to protest that he had indeed forgotten when the waving golden sprat cautioned him, with the accompaniment of laughter as thin as a tin-whistle, not to be silly. Of course he hadn’t forgotten.
‘Gorgeous day, that. I ran a fish-for-the-bottle stall. You won nearly every time. You knew the knack. I knew you did. I knew all the time you knew the knack, but I wouldn’t split. You did know, didn’t you?’
A moment later the sprat described a smart elliptical dive in the air and fell on the floor. Horace, hastily setting down the jug of wine-cup on a side-table, rushed to pick it up, holding it by its tail.
‘Well, that’s the end of that.’ The precious piece of millinery suddenly disdained all connection with the sprat. ‘I hardly knew what it was for, anyway.’
‘You mean you don’t want it?’
Horace, left suddenly alone, turned to dispose of the sprat by dropping it into a vase of irises but then thought better of it. At the same time he recalled the excellence of the fresh-made cup and told himself that now was as good a time as any to sample it again. But before he could pick up the jug the peremptory hands of his sister had snatched it away and the bullying voice was at him again:
‘Where on earth have you been? They’re all panting with thirst outside. And what’s that in your hand?’
Phoebe Hooper actually pushed him through the open french windows and into the garden. It was blissfully warm outside and her voice was jagged as glass as it nagged him about his duty and the way he had neglected it. He wondered how and where he had failed and, still holding the sprat by its tail, wondered equally what on earth he should do with it. He made as if to throw it casually into a bed of pansies but at once she positively flew at him:
‘Not in there. That’s disgusting. Put it in your pocket or something.’
He dutifully put the sprat in his pocket. He then remembered Miss La Rue and how much she wanted to talk to him and that it was his urgent duty to take her another glass of the cup.
He hurried back into the house for glasses, only to be met on the threshold by Maude, bearing another tray of strawberries and cream. She made way for him in silence; their paths might never have crossed; she was a cold stranger a thousand miles away.
In the corner of the drawing-room the elderly girl and her court were all eating strawberries and cream, bending closely over their plates like lapping puppies at their dinners.
Horace picked up a pair of empty glasses and started to pursue his sister across the lawn. The girls were scattered everywhere in the sun and now in his haste he half ran into one of them. Solitary and confined as if by an invisible wall of glass Dodie Sanders held him for the swiftest moment in too exquisite embarrassment, eyes dropping into excruciating shyness a moment later.
Something made him say: ‘You haven’t got a glass,’ but a moment later she timidly lifted one containing a thimbleful of sherry, as if from somewhere up her sleeve. The smile on her face was wan; the three words she dropped were a ghostly trinity of whispers:
‘Quite all right—’
Disturbed, and with some of his own shyness unaccountably returning, Horace was about to tell her that he would be back in a minute with more sherry when Phoebe Hooper, accusing him yet again of slacking about and doing nothing when everybody was dying of thirst, thrust the Venetian jug into his hands and flew away.
He paused to look at Dodie Sanders. The lids of her eyes quivered and fell again. She looked for a moment like a fish embalmed in the centre of a dazzling aquarium of aimless light.
‘Have you tried my cup?’
No, the droopy lips confessed, she hadn’t—she—
‘Try it.’
Horace waited for her to drain her glass of sherry. He thought he actually saw her start to smile, and then think better of it, as he poured a little of the cup for her.
‘Did you try the first lot?’ he said. ‘This is different. Would you hold my glass? I’d like a drop myself. No harm in the barman having—’
Eyes downwardly fixed on the two glasses, she was utterly silent as Horace poured wine-cup from the jug. The interlude, Horace thought, was almost like a dreamy doze after all his hectic travellings between kitchen and garden, with Maude and his sister and the various girls at his heels, but he woke suddenly to hear:
‘Popular man, popular man. Can’t have you being cornered.’ Miss Tompkins, laughing frivolously, caught his arm and started to pilot him away. He had just time to grab his glass from Dodie Sanders and take a hurried drink at it before she set him fully on his course. ‘Miss La Rue was one of those who was asking—’
He moved about the lawn, topping up glasses. A group of five girls, standing by a magnolia that had only recently shed the last of its blossom in big ivory curls, were clearly telling stories of doubtful character, he thought, and a hush like a strait-jacket encircled them tightly as he arrived.
One by one they all refused the cup. They were all ginny girls, they said. Eyes much reddened, they laughed with unseemly pleasure into his face as he prepared to retreat with jug and glasses, but just before he turned his back one called to him with arresting winsomeness:
‘I’ll have a spot. I’ll try it. They all tell me it’s been ’normously popular.’
A well-built girl of seventy, with hair as light as the head of a seeded dandelion, came forward to capture him with a pair of violet eyes brimming over with alcohol. A pair of heavy garnet ear-rings dangled against her neck. The front of her carmine dress was low. Her bosom, unusually white, exposed itself like the upper portions of a pair of wrinkled turnips. She gazed down on it with the most possessive and flirtatious of glances, all the creases of her neck quivering like crumpled lace, and said, laughing:
‘One man and his jug, eh? Well, let’s try it.’ Horace, now laughing too, the word popular again dancing mystically in his ears, poured wine-cup into his own glass—it was important to keep the other one, he thought, for Miss La Rue—and the well-built girl drank with heartiness, telling him:
‘ ’Licious. Absolutely ’licious. Can’t think why you didn’t come before. Nice to share your glass—’
She gave it back to him, empty. The possessive and inviting glance that she had previously reserved for her own bosom was now suddenly turned on Horace. She muttered a few low, amorous words about his big, brown eyes, at the same time gazing into them, and Horace glowed.
‘Got to do the rounds!’ he suddenly told her in an amazing burst of abandon. ‘Customers everywhere.’ An abrupt turn of the heel caused him to stagger slightly. ‘Too damn popular, this stuff. That’s the trouble.’
‘ ’Licious. ’Bye,’ she said. She waved a hand infantile in its spidery fluttering, her seedy violet eyes overflowing. ‘Quite ’licious—’
He went in search of Miss La Rue. He found her beyond the azaleas, alone, sitting on a white iron seat against the trunk of a vast acacia. Although she sat with grace, legs crossed, she had allowed the skirt of her costume to ride up, exposing a shapely silken knee. A delicate and bewitching smile accompanied her invitation to Horace to come and sit close to her. She actually patted the seat an inch or two from her thigh, affectionately scolding him at the same time:
‘You’ve been naughty. Where have you been? You neglected me.’
Horace protested that he had been rushed off his feet. The cup had taken some time to make and there were customers everywhere.
‘Nonsense. You’ve been flirting again.’
‘My goodness, no.’
‘I saw you. I watched you from here. First Miss Sanders and then the creature in the red dress.’
From somewhere behind the acacia a fountain tinkled. Its bright and spirited notes might have been Horace’s own responses to Miss La Rue’s flattering, warming words.
‘Well, now that you’re here you might at least give me some cup. Of course if you’re too engrossed in looking at my knee—’
‘Oh! I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.’
‘Oh! I don’t mind.’ She turned the knee delicately from side to side, appraising it. ‘I’m rather proud of it. Not at all bad, I think, do you?’
‘Well, certainly it—’
‘Don’t be afraid. You were going to say for a woman of my age, weren’t you?’
Horace, embarrassed, started to pour out the remainder of the wine-cup, at the same time making apologetic noises intended to indicate that he couldn’t agree with her at all.
‘Oh! yes you were,’ she said. ‘The trouble is you’ve no idea how old I am, have you?’ Not waiting for an answer, she raised her eyes to the sky, wonderfully remote and ethereal in its clear blue spaciousness beyond the little white flowers of the gigantic acacia. ‘I am a little older than the tree—the acacia, I mean. It’s eighty-five. I know to the day. I remember it being planted.’
It was on the tip of Horace’s tongue to pay her an immediate compliment but shyness overcame him again and he stopped in the middle of his opening syllable.
‘Well?’ she said.
‘Oh! nothing, nothing.’
‘I thought for a moment you were going to flatter me.’
‘Oh! no, no.’
‘How disappointing,’ she said. ‘I hoped you were.’
Glass in hand now, she moved more closely to him, squeezing his elbow gently with her free hand. She drank, raising miraculously bright eyes to the summer sky.
‘You’ve been experimenting with the cup.’
Horace, once again engrossed in the shining silken knee, confessed that as a matter of fact he had. It had been forced upon him.
‘Kirsch,’ she said. She drank again and smacked her lips appreciatively, with the utmost delicacy. ‘And a touch of maraschino. Strange combination but clever of you. Fill me up.’
She gave him a flattering and vivacious glance and he filled her up, at the same time topping his own glass too. Freed of his sister and the chattering demands of the girls, Horace was beginning to feel absolutely splendid again. Clever, was he? Popular? Popular and clever! Ah! well, the party was terrific too. He was very glad, after all, that he’d come. He was just the chap to have around at a party. All the girls appreciated him.
He drank again and Miss La Rue moved closer. All the warm intoxication of the summer day seemed suddenly to descend like a pillar of light fire from heaven and Horace gave the exposed shining knee a long look, covetous and almost idolatrous at the same time.
Miss La Rue was quick to notice it and beguiled him further by saying:
‘Go on. You may squeeze my knee if you want to.’
Horace, freshly flushed with wine-cup, started to protest that nothing was further from his mind but she merely laughed, mocking him slightly.
‘Don’t be silly. You’ve been wanting to for some time.’
The beginnings of an outrageous fire started to dart about Horace’s veins. He felt himself drawn with irresistible force to the knee and suddenly, with an impulse of considerable abandon, started caressing it.
‘It’s perfectly all right,’ she said with a light coolness that was also slightly mocking. ‘Don’t be afraid. No one’s watching.’
Horace, encouraged, squeezed the knee with relish, at the same time laughing a little tipsily. Miss La Rue laughed too and pressed the side of her face close to his ear, the little veil of her hat touching and slightly tickling him. The whisper she gave him a moment later might have been a thunderclap of emotional surprise:
‘It isn’t the first time it’s been squeezed. Nor, I hope, the last.’
‘No?’ Horace said exultantly. ‘No?’
The noise of the fountain rang thrillingly in his ears, to be echoed suddenly by the notes of a blackbird almost bursting its breast in song somewhere at the very pinnacle of the acacia tree.
‘You do it rather well, too,’ she said.
‘My God,’ Horace said all of a sudden, ‘you must have been absolutely great when you were young!’
Instantly she regarded him with sly petulance, eyes bright with overtones of mocking reproval.
‘After that remark,’ she said, ‘I think I should take my leave.’
‘Oh! no, no. Please,’ Horace said. He felt suddenly reduced to the proportions of a small boy again. ‘I didn’t mean—no, please—’
‘Up to that moment you’d been very tactful.’
‘Oh! no please—’
‘It was heaven sitting here under the acacia and you went and spoilt it all.’
‘Now, really, listen—’
‘You wouldn’t say a thing like that to the tree, would you? My tree, I mean.’
‘Yes, but that’s different—’
‘How?’ she said. She gave him a glance of flirtatious severity, at the same time lifting his hand from her knee rather as if she were lifting up the arm of a gramophone. ‘The acacia is far more beautiful now than the day it was planted.’
‘So are you,’ Horace said. ‘So are you. I mean—’
‘It’s all very well to say that now.’
‘Yes, but I mean it.’ In an effort to exert physical as well as moral pressure Horace again put his hand on her knee. She moved it away at once, with a gesture aloof and almost prudish.
‘Oh! look, we were getting on so well—’
‘We were indeed. In fact I was thinking of letting you—’
‘Letting me what? Letting me what?’
‘It’s too late now.’
‘Oh! what was it?’ Horace said. ‘Please.’
‘I was thinking of letting you kiss me.’ She smiled teasingly. ‘My hand, of course.’ To Horace’s dismay and astonishment she drained the last of her wine-cup, gave him the glass and actually stood up. ‘But it’s too late now. You can kiss Miss Sanders instead.’
‘Miss Sanders?’ Either he or she was going mad, Horace thought. ‘Miss Sanders? Why on earth Miss Sanders?’
‘Because she’s coming this way. She’s looking terribly soulful. She’s obviously looking for someone like you to talk to.’
Horace turned his head to see, coming from the direction of the flaming azaleas, the wandering Dodie Sanders. Alone and shy, she seemed about to turn away when Miss La Rue waved her hand and called:
‘Dodie. Come over and sit down. Mr. Hooper’s dying to talk to you.’
‘Don’t,’ Horace said. ‘Don’t. Please. Don’t.’
‘Don’t be silly. She’s charming when you get to know her.’
‘I don’t want to get to know her.’
‘Don’t be unkind. She’s a girl who needs company.’
‘But not mine, for God’s sake.’
‘Don’t talk like that. It’s tactless.’ She gave him a maddening smile of mocking intimacy, with the added pain of a slight touch on his arm. ‘Of course you’re very young. You’ll learn better as you grow up.’
Speechlessly, crushed and in positive pain, Horace watched the arrival of Dodie Sanders as if she were chief mourner at the sudden and cruel demise of the summer morning. He was no longer aware of the thrilling voices of the fountain and the blackbird.
‘Come along, Dodie dear. Sit down,’ Miss La Rue said. Once again the polished curve of her chin caught for a moment a reflection of sunlight as on a shell. Her neat light figure, belying all its years, turned away with grace and poise. ‘There’s a little of Mr. Hooper’s wine-cup left. You can have my glass. Mr. Hooper will wash it out in the fountain, won’t you, Mr. Hooper?’
She walked away, airily, a moment later. When she had gone Dodie Sanders sat down on the seat, Miss La Rue’s empty glass in her hands.
‘Give it to me and I’ll wash it,’ Horace said.
‘Oh! please don’t bother.’
‘It’s no trouble.’
‘Oh! please don’t bother.’
After that Dodie Sanders stared, in complete silence, at the distances. Across the lawn some of the girls were drifting away in groups or in ones and twos. The casual uplift of semi-distant voices only seemed to deepen the pall of silence that hung between Horace and the shy Miss Sanders, who sat twisting the empty glass in her hands.
‘My Heavens it’s hot,’ Horace said. A long and intolerable interval of utter silence had left him constrained and sweating. ‘I really think I shall have to go in.’
A moment later he took out his handkerchief to mop his forehead and as he did so the smoked sprat fell to the ground.
For almost half a minute Dodie Sanders gazed down at it with uninspired gravity. Once she lifted her head and stared up into the acacia tree, as if thinking perhaps that the sprat might mysteriously have dropped from there.
‘Where did that come from?’
‘It fell out of my pocket.’
‘It’s one of those sprats, isn’t it?’
Horace said it was. After another silence of considerable length, during which Horace suffered himself to be tortured by a vision of Miss La Rue’s brilliant ageless eyes seemingly doting on him to a mocking chorus of fountain and blackbird, she made a remark so astonishing that it reduced him to a profound and impotent silence too.
‘In a way sprats are rather beautiful,’ she said, ‘aren’t they?’
Horace squirmed; he uttered, mentally, a protesting ‘Blast!’ And suddenly, as if the imposition of yet another awful silence were not enough, he heard a familiar goading voice driving across the lawn:
‘Horace! Time to go! We’re departing!’
‘My sister,’ he explained. ‘I’m afraid I’ll have to say goodbye—’
He fled across the lawn. Hastily he bore the Venetian jug and the last dregs of its wine-cup out of the deep acacia shade, past the flaring azaleas, across the lawn and through the drifting procession of departing girls. A late glimpse of Miss La Rue getting nimbly into a black limousine aroused an echo so searing that he uttered, aloud this time and almost involuntarily, another monumental ‘Blast! and blast again!’
‘What’s the matter with you?’ Phoebe Hooper said. ‘Didn’t you enjoy the party? I thought it was you who was the great success?’
‘Of course he was, of course he was.’ Miss Tompkins, in almost passionate assertion, waved delighted and almost tipsy hands to the sky. ‘He was like the weather. He was wonderful. He improved all the time he got better.’
Half an hour later the lawn was empty. The heat of early afternoon had already woven a hush so deep that each water-note from the fountain beyond the acacia tree could be distinctly heard in a separate crystal fall. The only figures to be seen now were those of Maude and Miss Tompkins, occasionally darting into the garden to pick up a glass, and the solitary figure of Dodie Sanders, silent under the old acacia, staring down at the fallen sprat, golden at her feet.
She alone did not seem to realise that the party for the girls was over.