I Noticed him in the first place because he was the only other person in the pavilion wearing a silk hat. I had the excuse of having come on there from a wedding. But I should have gone back and changed had I known how conspicuous I should be. It was ten years since I had been to the Varsity Match at Lord’s; and I was astonished by the change: by the empty stands, the absence of smart frocks, the lounge-suited atmosphere of the enclosures. A social occasion, for whose sake in remote rectories mothballs had been once shaken out of braided coats and wide-brimmed ‘toppers’ stripped of their tissue wrappings, was now a very ordinary cricket match in which the general public took little interest. As I walked in my sponge-bag trousers and shining hat through the long, high, many-windowed morning-room, I felt as antediluvian as the curved bats and pastoral portraits that adorn its walls: so antediluvian that as I took my seat beside the one other Edwardian survival, a hackneyed Latin tag—the tongue that it is a solecism now to quote—actually seemed appropriate to the occasion. I thought of Lord’s as the pre-war pages of Punch present it; of Lord’s as I had known it in the early ‘twenties; the tight-packed mounds; the coaches by the Tavern; the parade of parasols between the innings; colour, excitement, glamour; and now this: Homburgs and bowler hats in the pavilion, long terraces of white beside the screen.… Nos duo turba sumus, I thought, as I leant sideways towards my fellow relic.
‘I wonder,’ I asked, ‘if I might see your scorecard?’
He turned; and I immediately forgot that it was a need for sartorial kinship that had decided my choice of seat.
He was one of the most striking-looking men that I have ever seen.
He was young: in the latish twenties; and handsome in a clear skinned way. But it was not merely his good looks that startled me. The impression that he made is not to be explained by any cataloguing of separate features; high forehead, grey-blue eyes, full mouth, long pointed nose. I was no more conscious of those separate features than one is of the pattern on a transparent lampshade. Just as there are two kinds of lampshade, the one whose object it is to transmit a softened light and the other that is a decoration, simply, a self-sufficient ornament requiring, like a stained-glass window, a light within it to reveal the intricacies of its design—it is a question of which matters, the lampshade or the light—so are there certain types of face, the one in which the personality is subservient to the featured mask of lip, brow, cheek, to which it gives mobility and meaning, the other in which you are so exclusively conscious of the personality behind that mask that you sometimes find yourself unable to describe the physical appearance of someone with the very texture of whose thought you are familiar.
It was like that now. I was conscious not of a handsome face, but of a new person; of someone who was masterful but unworldly; practical but inexperienced; masculine but with that look of anticipation, of waiting to be fulfilled that you expect to find in a young girl; a combination of characteristics so self-contradictory that the obvious corollary to their catalogue would be: ‘What a mass of complexes. A pretty case for Freud.’ That was what you would have expected.
He wasn’t though. He was of a piece, without self-consciousness; the kind of man who does not know what the word shyness means.
I was curious, alert, excited. ‘I’ve got to find out who you are,’ I thought.
In the lazy atmosphere of a cricket match it is easy to start a conversation. Only a small amount of perseverance is required to maintain it. The cricket was slow, desultory, undramatic. In a little while we were more interested in our talk than in the match. At any rate, I was. His talk had the same contradictory characteristics as his appearance. It was boyishly eager, yet at the same time authoritative. It was the talk of one who stood on the brink of experience, yet was accustomed to the exercise of authority. More baffling still, though his voice had a slightly mannered intonation, it had no trace of the drawl that you would expect to find in a fashionably dressed young man. He was a puzzle, right enough: a puzzle that I meant to solve.
The hands of the turret clock pointed to five o’clock. Stumps would not be drawn till half-past six. In an hour and half I ought to be able to find out something about him, with any luck.
Luck came my way.
An exchange of ideas became an argument, a point at issue which could only be settled by the consultation of a particular book of reference. I had fancied the book was in the Pavilion library. It did not prove to be; or anyhow, we could not find it. I happened to have a copy at my flat.
‘It’s not five minutes’ walk away,’ I said. ‘Let’s go back there afterwards and have a sherry.’
‘Let’s go back now. This cricket bores me.’
An answer that combined his boyishness and his authority; his readiness to accept new suggestions with his assumption that no wish of his would be contradicted. It did not occur to him that I might want to stay on and watch the cricket. Like a schoolboy on his way to a party he chattered without stopping till we reached the large, barrack-shaped apartment-house on whose highest floor I have a one-room flat where I keep clothes and papers, that I use as a kind of office pied-à-terre when I am alone in London.
‘Is this where you live?’ he asked.
I nodded.
He looked up inquisitively at its straight sheer surface, as though he were seeing this particular kind of building for the first time; as though he were a foreigner obtaining the material for a monograph ‘How London Lives’. As I opened the cocktail cabinet and set about the preparation of an ‘old-fashioned’, he deployed none of the diplomatically assumed indifference with which it is customary to take stock of a new room without letting it appear that you are conscious of being in one. With an unabashed curiosity he took a mental inventory of the room: its lighting, its shelves, its chairs, its pictures, the jumble of knick-knacks along the mantelpiece; then started on a tour of investigation, taking up a book, peering into an etching, lifting a cigarette-box; without comment, as though he were visiting an exhibition, till suddenly, with a note of real interest in his voice, ‘What’s that doing here?’ he asked.
He was pointing to the framed original of a jacket design for one of my novels.
‘That? Oh, I’m responsible for that.’
‘You drew the picture?’
‘No—wrote the book.’
‘What, you, the author!’
There was a surprised excitement in his voice that I should have found extremely flattering had not experience counselled me against a readiness to believe that here, at last, I was about to meet that perfect, that dream reader whom every novelist is convinced must exist somewhere, the one reader who has not only read everything that he has written, but read between the lines; for whose sake he has left ‘i’s’ undotted and ‘t’s’ uncrossed in the calm confidence that ‘anyway, he’ll know what I’m about’. I have learnt to distrust that sudden glow in the voice, that quick light in the eyes. A case of mistaken identity, I tell myself. The tribute of sudden interest is in fact intended for the Chairman of Chapman & Hall, or the author of Vile Bodies, or more probably for the horse-trainer at Newmarket. On those rare occasions when I really am the target at which enthusiasm is directed, it is usually to receive some such testimonial as: ‘I’ve been wanting to meet you for so long. There’s a mistake in that last book but one of yours that I’ve been longing to point out. On page thirty-seven you talk about Mildred’s gas fire, and in the last chapter you have coals falling through a grate. Now I wonder if anyone else has spotted that?’
Previous experience did not encourage me to expect from my guest’s excitement a long, sympathetic, interpretive analysis of my short stories. I should have been disappointed if I had.
‘There’s something I’ve always wanted to ask you. Was Julia Thirleigh really the model for your heroine?’
‘Well….’
It is the kind of question that usually a novelist resents; resents because it is impossible to reply honestly. The answer is always ‘Yes and no’. No full-length character is ever a direct portrait; yet no character that is alive has not been drawn in part from life. A trick of speech has been borrowed here, a gesture there. The process of creation must start somewhere; must have some solid foundation in experience. But by the time the story is quarter finished, the novelist has forgotten his model altogether; his character has developed a temperament and destiny of its own, is a separate entity, has become, that is to say, created.
Usually, at least, that is the way it happens. In the case of Julia Thirleigh it had been admittedly rather different; possibly because I had ‘put’ her into the kind of novel that is less a story than an argument, that requires distinct types to contrast different points of view. I needed a character to typify the débutante of the late nine-teen-twenties, the second edition of the Bright Young People, the London of the slump. And it was just because Julia is herself less a person than a type that, when I had finished the book, I was astonished to find how closely my finished character resembled the model which I had meant to employ merely as a first sketch: so closely that I did not see how a great many people could fail to recognize her. In such a connexion Julia was the very first name that would come to any moderately well-informed person’s mind. Through a decade when young women not only claimed, but asserted, their right to the same independence as their brothers, Julia was the most discussed of those Londoners whose activities are photographed week by week in the Tatler, Bystander and Sketch. She was not so much famous as notorious. She had avoided, it is true, any open scandal. She had not shot an unfaithful suitor, been convicted as a drug addict or cited in the divorce courts. To that extent she had been discreet. At the same time, she had been subpoenaed in a slander suit that had been heard in camera. It was at one of her bottle-parties in a top-storey studio that a free fight with gate-crashers had ended in a crumpled figure on the pavement and a comment from the coroner that only her most loyal friends held to be unjustified. There had been no open scandal. But the clothes she had worn, the company she had kept, the places she had frequented, her manner, her habits, her whole way of living had given her the kind of label that made her current coin in any argument. ‘Well now, take somebody like Julia …’ and when people said that, no one had any doubt of what was meant.
Prudence as well as friendship counselled me to show my manuscript to Julia before I delivered it to my publisher.
She returned it with a very typical remark.
‘I don’t use Blue-grass.’
‘Is that your only comment?’
‘My only criticism.’
‘There’s nothing there that you object to?’
‘Why should there be?’
‘Well …
She smiled.
‘Is there anything in your book that people haven’t said about me and believed about me?’
‘There’s a difference between gossip and a thing said in print.’
‘If your publishers are afraid of libel I’ll write them a letter of absolution.’
I could scarcely deny, in the face of that, that I had used Julia as a model, yet I was reluctant to admit that my character was a photograph. I hedged.
‘In a kind of way,’ I said.
‘You did? I’d always heard you did, but I wasn’t certain. You must know her, then?’
‘I was lunching with her yesterday.’
‘Yesterday!’
He regarded me with a strange veneration, as though I were haloed in such a light as had transfigured Moses on his descent from Sinai.
‘Yesterday! I can hardly believe it. I’ve heard so much about her, read so much about her. It’s strange to be meeting somebody who really knows her. Is she as beautiful as her photographs? She must be. They are all so different. Yet they are all beautiful. I suppose there are hundreds of people in love with her. There must be. Is she in love, herself? Do you think she ever has been in love, really? I suppose she must have been. At the beginning. But, I don’t think she can be, now. She must be waiting for the big thing; filling an interval; decorating an interval; that’s what you suggested in your novel.’
I hadn’t. But I let that pass. The bubbling Niagara poured on. Was she happy? Was she lonely? Was she one of those who had faced the Gorgon and whose tears had dried? He used various similes. I barely listened to his questions. I was too occupied with my relief at having found a way of continuing and enlarging my acquaintance with this very astonishing young man.
‘If you’re so interested in Julia, why not come here on Friday at cocktail time? She’s coming.’
‘What … Julia Thirleigh … here!…’
His great eyes grew wide with incredulous astonishment, like a four-year-old darkie’s when you offer it a silver coin.
‘She said she’d come but I’ll ask her to make a special point of it. I’ll need to know your name, though, if I’m to introduce you.’
He looked surprised at that. But in a different way: as a school master might when a pupil makes an elementary mistake.
‘You don’t know? I’m Bishopsbourne.’
Then I knew. Then I understood.
During a decade when the careers of the blue-blooded classes have followed unpredictably erratic courses, few members of the aristocracy have been subjected to more unexpected somersaults of circumstance than the present and tenth Lord Bishopsbourne.
When, in the April of 1914, he celebrated his ninth birthday as the Hon. Martin Forest he had an elder brother, a six-months-old nephew, three unmarried sisters, and a grandmother. His father, the seventh Lord Bishopsbourne, was one of the most amply endowed landowners in Kent. Martin was destined, that is to say, for the comfortably obscure existence of a second son. Within four and a half years, however, the accidents of war had deprived him of his father and his brother, the 1918 epidemic of influenza had proved too virulent for his nephew, and his grandmother had summoned the family solicitor to her presence.
‘Martin is now the tenth Lord Bishopsbourne,’ she said. ‘Death duties have been paid three times in as many years. I imagine the estate is almost bankrupt. But I want figures—the precise figures, please.’
She was angular, thin-lipped, tight-stayed, her throat held high by whalebone. Her eyes were bright, and her voice was sharp.
The family solicitor hesitated. He had prepared, during the quarter of an hour he had been kept waiting, a concise and persuasive little speech. The situation was bad, he would explain. Mortgages would have to be raised. It would be many years before the estate would be able to maintain its former standard. He would very strongly recommend that the estate should be placed upon the market. There were a number of war profiteers who would leap at the opportunity of obtaining a house with such traditions and associations. A very good price should be obtained. A smaller property could then be purchased, and a comfortable way of life assured. The arguments had been neatly tabulated in his mind. He hesitated, however, as those small bright eyes fixed themselves on his and the sharp voice snapped: ‘Figures—I want the precise figures, please.’
A great many other men had hesitated in that presence. Lady Bishopsbourne was a survival of those Victorian potentates of the hearth who, at a time when women possessed no political or legal status, had controlled their families with the unquestioned authority of a medieval monarch. ‘You may take away my property at marriage. You may deny me a vote and the right to plead in court; but’—the voice snapped and the keen eyes flashed—‘I will admit no contradiction, no interference in the conduct of my domestic interests.’ There were many such women in Victorian England. There are very few in our ampler Georgian day. Lady Bishopsbourne was one of them.
The solicitor, hesitated, cleared his throat, began his argument. She cut him short.
‘Nonsense,’ said Lady Bishopsbourne. ‘A man’s duty is to his family, to the traditions of his family. Martin will accept those responsibilities. The sooner he starts the better. He will leave Eton at Christmas. Latin and Greek will be of small use to him now. He must learn his job.’
And so, at the age of thirteen, Martin was taken away from school to be placed under the guidance of an agent. Instead of memorizing Greek verbs, he pondered the problems of tithes, of soil, of crops and grazing. He exchanged the wide landscape of scholarship for the narrow compound of agriculture. He was living through the most dramatic epoch of modern history, but his interests were as blinkered as those of any medieval Trappist. He met no one of his own age and class. His days were spent with farmers, tenants, grooms, shepherds, with the middle-men through whom he sold his hops. In the life of what is called the ‘county’, his grandmother forbade him to take any part.
‘We cannot afford to entertain,’ she told him.
No Cinderella could have been more cut off from life.
It had gone on like that for fifteen years; fifteen years during which, while other families had depleted their resources with extravagance, he repaired his with industry and economy. On his twenty-sixth birthday he was as rich as his grandfather had been. On his twenty-ninth birthday his grandmother had summoned him to her presence.
‘The time has come for you to find a wife. You will take a flat in London. I will arrange suitable introductions.’
So much of his life was common gossip.…
It was easy now to unravel this mass of contradiction. What other result could have been produced by such a combination of training and heredity. He had inherited his looks, height and health, his dignity of feature: a high forehead, a long pointed nose, a full firm-lipped mouth. He had inherited, too, an ease of manner, a confidence that he would be obeyed, an air of authority that was increased by his exercise of that authority among a rustic and subservient peasantry. These he had inherited. By his training he had acquired an almost feminine curiosity about the world from which he had been excluded. It was easy to see how a girl like Julia would appeal to his imagination. He had led the life of a male Cinderella. Just as Cinderella, while she swept passages, washed pans, scrubbed floors, dreamed of the coloured-sounding world that lay beyond the narrow tether of her kitchen, so Martin, as he inspected leaking roofs, interrogated cottagers, supervised in their proper seasons the lambing, the picking of the hops, the ploughing of the wheatfields, had speculated on the nature of the world, glimpses of which periodically reached him through such books and magazines and newspapers as his grandmother and sisters tolerated in their drawing room.
Cinderellas focus their dreams of the world from which they are excluded upon one person who symbolizes that world for them: an athlete, a prince, a film-star. To Martin, the tenth Lord Bishopsbourne, London and all that London stood for in glamour, adventure, richness of experience, was symbolized by the garish personality of Julia Thirleigh.
I looked forward with the liveliest interest to their meeting. What happened in real life, I wondered, when Cinderellas met their dreams?
Very much what happened, I was to discover, in the simplest fairy tale. When Julia came into the room, a peroxidized mane of curls upon her neck, her face as smoothly white as a magnolia, decorated with a mouth that bore no relation to the actual contours of her lips, her finger-nails pinked to match the bright ribbon of her hat—‘Really,’ I thought, ‘she’s gone too far. This is not the way to dress for a small cocktail party in a one-room flat.’ But on Martin’s face, as he rose to greet her, there was the look of a man who has met his fate.
It was not, however, a moment of tongue-tied rapture.
‘You are the one person in London that I’ve really meant to meet.’ That was his first remark to her. The second: ‘You are even more beautiful than I’d thought you’d be.’ The third: ‘Let’s go over into that corner where we can really talk.’
He led her in his most authoritative manner to the far corner of a many-cushioned divan, and there proceeded to behave as though there were no party, as though there were no one else in the room beside themselves. He allowed me to fill his glass from time to time; but the attempts of one or two of Julia’s friends to disturb his monopoly of her company were frustrated by a frontier of passive resistance. They came up with their ‘Hullo, Julia!’s. They stood expectantly, waiting to be included in the conversation. But he behaved as though they were not there. The river of his talk flowed on. Once, over his shoulder, Julia caught my eye. She made a half-comical gesture of resignation, a ‘What-on-earth-am-I-to-do-about-this?’ look. But rescue was not possible. When at last, ninety minutes later, the colloquy was broken, it was at his side that she rose to her feet, at his side that she left the room. ‘We’ll dine at the Jardin,’ he was saying with that same odd mixture of masterfulness and boyish eagerness.
Early next morning she rang me up.
‘That’s an astonishing young man,’ she said.
‘You’re telling me!’
‘It’s like nothing that’s ever happened to me.’
‘Hasn’t anyone ever made love to you at first sight before?’
‘Oh, yes, of course. But—well, not like that. He seems to think—oh, I don’t know—that I’ve nothing else to do except spend my entire time with him. There’s no refusing him. Today I’m supposed to be lunching with the Gregsons, but I find I’m not; I’m motoring with him to Bray. I’d meant to play golf this afternoon. I’m not; I’m going on the river. I had thought I was going down to Pratings for the week-end; but I find I’m going to the first night of Canary Bird. And as far as I can see, he’s already made plans for tomorrow, and the next day and the day after that.’
She hesitated. She tried to explain. Yes, of course, she had been made love to before at a first meeting. But invariably by the kind of man who was too busy to delay attack. The kind of man who was continually consulting a little diary that was black with entries—’Yes, let me see now—Monday—Tuesday—Wednesday—what about Friday, then?’ The kind of man who had to make full use of his few unmortgaged moments. Julia had known that type. She had also known the type whose diary was a blank page for her to write on. ‘Now, what are you doing tomorrow—the next day—well, what about the day after, then?’ A technique which was, she had come to realize, less a proof of devotion than a need on their part to have their minds made up for them. Martin was not like that. He knew his mind, all right. His diary was a blank sheet. He placed it at her disposal. He assumed that she would reciprocate; that hers, too, was blank. That was what puzzled her; his naïve assumption that what he wanted, she must want as well.
‘He’s the oddest creature I’ve ever met. I don’t know, precisely, what it is he’s driving at, but this I do know: he’s serious about it.’
She was not to be left in the dark long. On the sixth day of their acquaintance—and so concentrated had their acquaintance been that she felt she had known him all her life—he invited her to spend a week-end in Kent. ‘It’s all right,’ he explained. ‘My grandmother will be there.’
Then she knew.
It had been an odd courtship. It was an odd proposal. Strictly speaking, there was no proposal. Martin assumed that they were engaged. As the car turned from the main road through the lodge gates, he pointed to the wide, gabled house at the end of a long curving drive.
‘You’ll probably think it a little bare. But we could arrange some herbaceous borders.’ He took her into a large bow-windowed room, its long table littered with papers, its corners stacked with guns and riding-boots. ‘This is my study. It’s very untidy. But it’s light and airy. I expect you’d like to have this for your drawing room.’ On the first floor he led her into a room of pleasant proportions that would have appeared large had not the greater part of the floor and wall space been occupied by a vast, four-poster bed. ‘You’ll like this,’ he told her confidently; ‘it faces south.’ That was surprising to Julia; but he had an even greater surprise in store. There was a door across the end of the passage. It opened on to a separate wing. ‘This is immediately above the kitchens,’ he informed her. ‘It will make a pleasant nursery.’
For the first time since she had been very young, Julia found herself in a situation that was beyond her scope. In a long trailing telephone talk, she poured out to me the recital of the day’s adventures.
‘I’ve never met anybody like him in all my life. He’s the very last person that I could have imagined myself marrying. Still, if he can cajole that gorgon of a grandmother into accepting me as the daughter of the house, I suppose he does deserve me.’
Julia had no doubt of the reception that Martin’s announcement of his intention to marry her would have at his grandmother’s hands. Nor had I. But Martin, where his own wishes were concerned, never considered other people’s plans. He produced his news with a bland and cheerful confidence.
’Well, Grannie, I’ve not taken long in following your advice.’
‘What do you mean, Martin?’
‘Julia, of course.’
‘Julia who, and Julia what?’
‘Julia Thirleigh. We’re going to be married.’
‘The young person who lunched here yesterday?’
‘Yes.’
There was a long pause.
‘I will discuss this matter with you one week from now,’ said Lady Bishopsbourne.
Within three days her grandson had been summoned to her presence.
‘I am afraid that I have painful news for you,’ she said.
‘Oh?’
‘Exceedingly painful news. It will be impossible for you to marry Miss Thirleigh.’ ‘Why?’
‘I have made inquiries about her. She is not the kind of girl you think she is.’
‘What makes you say that?’
‘She has been extremely wild.’
‘I know.’
‘You misunderstand me. I don’t mean headstrong, wilful. I mean that there have been men, a great many men in her life.’
‘What else do you expect? She’s very pretty.’
‘Don’t be silly. I don’t mean in that way. I mean that she has had what the young people of your generation, euphemistically call “affairs”, but for which in my generation we had a very different word.’
‘That’s no news to me.’
‘What?’
‘Nobody worries about that now.’
‘What!’
‘It’s not what a girl’s done before she’s married, but what she does when she becomes a wife, that matters.’
‘Martin.…’
There was a pause; then with the authority of one who has not known opposition of any sort for fifty years, Martin’s grandmother spoke. It was a long harangue. She spoke of family and tradition, of the race and of the future, of woman as the guardian of the race, of woman as the sacred vessel of the race. It was a full quarter of an hour before she abandoned generalities and approached the personal implications of the problem.
‘I cannot imagine how a man with any delicacy of feeling can contemplate such a marriage. Do you expect your grandmother and your sisters to live in the same house as such a woman?’
‘Certainly not. I’m going to have the dower-house done up.’
That evening he wrote to Julia telling her that she would see the announcement of their engagement in the next morning’s issue of The Times.
Julia shrugged her shoulders. ‘Well, if he feels that way about me—but I can’t think why he does. I suppose,’ she added, ‘that Freud would have an explanation.’
Which is the kind of explanation that would be sought in an age which believes that human nature has been recast in the mould of Austrian psychology.
The wedding-day was fixed.
London was frankly and unanimously sceptical. It regarded the whole business not only as the season’s best, but the century’s best joke. ‘Julia in orange-blossom!’ It refused to believe that it could last three years. ‘What else can happen?’ scoffing voices argued. ‘A girl like Julia. Think of the life she’s led! We’re not saying that a girl of her age shouldn’t have some experience. You’d expect her to on the whole. If a girl is not married by twenty-five, it’s probably because she’s been in love with someone that for some reason or other she couldn’t marry. Nowadays that usually means one thing. But Julia—well, you’ve only got to see what’s happened to other girls of that type who’ve married. Three years: that’s the limit. Still, at the end of it, there’ll be a nice comfortable wad of alimony. The girl’s on velvet.’
That was what London thought. But I was not certain. For the most part I sat silent when odds of eight to one against were laid.
In the main I was not certain, because in the last analysis I did not really know what manner of girl Julia was. Though I had known her for so long, she had never been quite real to me. She had remained a type: she typified innumerable things, but what she was herself I did not know. I could not even guess how her marriage would turn out, because I could not guess at the kind of person that marriage would reveal to Martin as his wife.
Martin, who had puzzled me first when I met him at Lord’s, had become a comparatively simple problem; but Julia, about whom I had then scarcely bothered, had become, now that I had really started to consider her, an inscrutable enigma.
Her behaviour during their engagement was altogether different from what I had expected. In view of her reputation, I had anticipated a flaunting and defiant manner, a head held high in self-vindication, lips curled with an unspoken, ‘Didn’t I tell you so? I’ve got the thing both ways: have had my cake and have it still to eat; have played the town and am marrying a peer.’
That’s what you would have expected. But not at all. She grew quieter, dressed less stridently, arranged her make-up in approximate conformity with the contours of her face. At times she would sit quite silent at a party, an abstracted look upon her face. As the marriage day drew close, her moments of abstraction grew so frequent that her manner became almost trance-like. One would have said, had she been anyone but Julia Thirleigh, ‘A young girl in love for the first time!’
So marked indeed was her manner that when I met her two days before her wedding at a cocktail party given in her honour, I could not help exclaiming: ‘Julia, you look like a bride!’
Her answer came back pat.‘I feel like one.’ It was the obvious answer, but the tone of voice and the look that went with it made me feel that there was a meaning behind her words. I looked at her quickly, interrogatively. ‘I’ve every right to feel like one,’ she added. Then I knew there was a second meaning. I took her by elbow. ‘Now, what’s all this about?’
It was the kind of cocktail party where there is so much noise, so much crowding of people into a confined space that no serious
conversation is considered possible, or is, indeed, intended by its organizers, but which provides in actual fact the best of shelters for two people who really want to talk intimately to one another.
Julia chuckled as I led her toward a window-seat.
‘Come along,’ I said. ‘What is it?’
Her chuckle became a laugh.
‘I’ve always wanted you to know. I’d wanted to tell you when you wrote that novel. But I thought: No, I’d better wait. I’ve waited so long that I can afford to wait a little longer.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘No, you wouldn’t. It was what you said about my looking like a bride. I feel like one. I’ve every right to feel like one. I’ve as much right to wear orange-blossom as any Victorian damsel that walked up an aisle.’
‘I still don’t follow you.’
‘Of course you don’t. You got me wrong. Everybody got me wrong. I let them. I encouraged them. All those things you wrote about me—it’s not true, any of it. I’m not like that at all.’
‘But—’
‘I’ve been wild. I know that. But not in that way.’
I stared at her uncomprehendingly.
‘But those men, those love-affairs?’
She shook her head.
‘No, not one.’
I stared blankly. Had I been offered proof of Queen Victoria’s frailty, I should not have been more astonished.
‘But how, when, why, where, what—’ I stammered.
She laughed: the kind of laugh that comes from the depths of a great happiness.
‘It was shyness to begin with,’ she explained. ‘All the girls I knew were talking about their affairs, I felt ashamed of not having any. So I pretended that I had, just so as not to seem out of things. I expect that a great many more girls than one would ever suspect are like that too. There’s more talking about things than doing things. Perhaps if I’d ever been attracted by anyone, really attracted, I’d have had a real affair; but I wasn’t, so I just pretended. And when one starts pretending, one can’t stop—even when one realizes that it’s gone too far; as I knew it had, of course. But I couldn’t have told anyone then. I should have looked so silly. Besides, it was fun, too, in a way, deceiving everyone. I used to chuckle when people warned me, when they told me that I’d never find anyone who’d want to marry me. I knew that some day someone would come along who would be so much in love with me that he wouldn’t mind what I’d been, who’d want me for what I was. I knew that would happen. But what I never had suspected, was how completely I was going to fall head-over-heels in love with him myself.’
The smile on her lips and in her eyes was touching.
I had listened to her in silence; stupefied at the start, but with a dawning sense of comprehension. It was rather like the sensation one gets from a good detective story, when the least suspected person is revealed to be the murderer. You say: ‘Oh, but that’s impossible.’ You feel fooled and cheated; then gradually, as clue after clue is stated, you recognize that you have not been fooled, that the clues were there if you had had the sense to spot them; that subconsciously, indeed, you had spotted them; that no other conclusion would have fitted all the facts. Astonishing though Julia’s confession was, it did explain all that had puzzled me before. I could understand now why she had never seemed quite real: why she was someone who had done things rather than somebody who was something. She had been acting a part. No wonder she had seemed a type.
Her confession explained a lot. It did not, however, appreciably determine the outcome of her marriage.
‘Are you going to tell Martin this?’
‘Naturally. I’ve been keeping it as a surprise for him for the wedding-night.’
‘You think he’ll be pleased?’
‘What man wouldn’t be?’
I answered her obliquely.
‘Have you ever read a book called Tess of the D’ Urbervilles?’
‘No. What about it?’
‘It was much discussed in my parents’ day. It’s about a dairy-maid who had an illegitimate child that died. Several years later, she married. On her wedding-night, her husband discovered the secret of her past. He was so shocked that he left her there and then.’
‘It was very natural. Angel Clare—that was the husband’s name—had thought he was marrying an innocent girl, the daughter of peasant stock. He had to reconstruct his entire picture of her when he discovered that she was not that at all, that she was the descendant of degenerate aristocrats, that she had already borne a child. He had fallen in love with her, not knowing her for what she was. He had to adjust himself to a strange woman. He could not do it.’
Julia looked puzzled.
‘Well, what about it?’
‘Don’t you think it might be just as much of a surprise to Martin to discover that you were completely without experience?’ She laughed out loud.
‘I suppose it’s by putting things like that in your books that you claim you’re a psychologist.’
I tried to explain to her. I argued that if Martin had fallen in love with her, believing her to be a certain kind of woman, when he discovered her to be another kind of woman altogether, she would have become a stranger to him, a stranger with whom, very possibly, he would not be in love.
She listened mockingly. Then she asked in great amusement:
‘What do you think’ll happen? Will he get up and leave me then and there, like the hero in that novel?’
‘It might spoil an idyll.’
She shook her head.
‘Novelists are nearly always wrong when it comes down to a problem in real life. You got me wrong. You’ve probably got Martin wrong as well. What are you suggesting that I should do? Say nothing?’
‘Yes.’
Into her face came a look of real indignation.
‘I’ve been saving up this secret for five years. If you think I’m going to miss the best chance I’ll ever have of spilling it, you’re stupid.’
She left me in a fine fury.
It was, in its way, a quite grand wedding. Julia had produced from
an estate in Norfolk an unsuspected and quite distinguished parent. Lady Bishopsbourne had seen to it that the family’s first public appearance in twenty years should not lack splendour. Rarely had the altar of St. George’s been more opulendy bowered with unseasonable blooms. The mansion in Chester Square which had been requisitioned from an exceedingly distant aunt, was feudal in its parade of footmen. Every acquaintance of any consequence had been invited. Curiosity had led to the acceptance of ninety-seven per cent, of the invitations. An attendance fully twice as long as the invitation list, sweeping like a tidal river in its armada of long, low, shining cars, forced the lorries and taxi-cabs of Belgravia into inextricable traffic blocks in the remoter reaches of Grosvenor Place. An entire floor was required to display appropriately the generosity of the guests.
Unquestionably it was a grand occasion. And there, at the end of the long L-shaped drawing-room was the young couple—so blissfully, so blindly absorbed in one another that only two glasses of champagne were needed to render me tearfully wistful over the fate that threatened them. Something must be done. They were such innocents! I had brought them together. I was in a way responsible for their future. I had pondered the problem during the long, inaudible address. I had believed myself to have discovered a solution—if, that is to say, I could find an opportunity to propound it; or rather, if I should have the courage to make the opportunity. A third glass of champagne gave me the courage.
I pushed my way through the crowd to Julia.
She welcomed me friendlily. Two days earlier she had been angry. But on a day like this she had forgotten that. Besides, it was I who was responsible for her happiness.
‘Julia, I must have one word, just one word, alone with you.’
She pouted. ‘Darling, not that again!’
‘It won’t take two minutes.’
‘Very well, then.’
She let herself be led away. I kept my promise: it did not take a minute. I knew exactly what I had to say. I had phrased it very carefully during the address.
‘You said that you’d been saving your secret for five years: that you wanted to make the most effective use of it. You’re right. You should. But let me assure you of this. Now is not the time. Within the first year of marriage there comes the first big quarrel, when each turns on the other and flings every available recrimination at the other’s head. On the outcome of that quarrel depends the course of marriage. You’ll want every possible weapon then. Keep your secret till then. It’ll torpedo any opposition.’
‘Is that really true: about the quarrel, I mean to say?’
‘Invariably.’
‘In that case, then, perhaps—’ She was half convinced; but there was still a pensive, puzzled look upon her face. She hesitated. Then suddenly she looked up, and with a brilliant flush, she asked me a question so naïve that I could have kissed her.
‘But on a point like that, could one really make a man believe one wasn’t what one was?’
I reassured her. ‘Him, you could.’
‘Oh, well, then in that case, perhaps—perhaps it would be best to wait.… And, thank you, anyhow.’
She turned away, caught up by her obligations as a bride: the cake to be cut, the toast to be responded to, the innumerable good wishes. She was only half convinced, but I was pretty sure that she would not say anything that night, nor the one after, nor ever, probably, till the time had come when their relations with one another were so firm-knit that no premarital confession could disturb it.
They were together now, he and she. As they stood answering the stream of congratulations, her fingers plucked at his trouser seam, signalling for the hand that crept down to hers.… They stood there, their fingers interlocked. It was very touching.
Perhaps no one nowadays would care to offer long odds on any marriage lasting, but these two had had as the prelude to this moment so much of self-doubt and of anticipation; there was so much for them to reveal to one another, so much of themselves to learn for the first time, so many things to share, that I would have been prepared to lay, well, seven to one on.
I turned away, to climb the flight of stairs to the higher floor on which was set out the imposing tribute to the young people’s prominence and popularity. Usually at such a wedding it is with some diffidence that I walk past the long high-piled tables in the hope that my modest contribution of book or brooch has not had its modesty too markedly accentuated by the adjacency of ancestral candelabra. But on this occasion I did not care. I felt that the advice I had just forced upon the bride was a more valuable wedding-gift than the studded circlet of the Bishopsbourne tiara.