Something Light Page 2

  3

  “You seem to have had a whack at it already,” said Hugo ungratefully.

  He was sitting up in bed, his thin little neck protruding from a dirty turtle-neck sweater, under a counterpane littered with play-scripts. These however were so maculate already, with tea, cocoa and gin, that an additional drop of cream wouldn’t make much difference.

  “I had good news,” apologized Louisa. “I took it, quite honestly, for you—at least my subconscious did—then I had good news, and a spot somehow got into my coffee. Eat it up, it’ll build you.”

  Hugo fished a teaspoon from under his pillow, dipped and licked.—The lenient gulletful improved his manners.

  “What sort of good news?”

  “I’m going to get married,” said Louisa.

  It is remarkable how swiftly, once seeded, the idea of matrimony burgeons in a woman’s mind. Some women indeed think of practically nothing else until they stand gazing like startled fawns through a cloud of white tulle veiling; Louisa was so far from being one of these, if she passed a society wedding, two hundred housewives outside identifying themselves with the bride, Louisa identified herself with the photographers. When she opened F. Pennon’s letter, only half an hour had elapsed since her conversation with the milkman, and her subsequent meditations on the lot of the independent modern woman, and her final conclusion as to the desirability of rich husbands all round; when she finished reading, her decision was as swift as if she’d been trained in a first-class finishing school. She was going to marry F. Pennon.

  She was even slightly annoyed that Hugo should now regard her with evident astonishment.

  “And why not?” inquired Louisa coldly. “I’m not a hag yet!”

  “My dear! No reason in the world,” exclaimed Hugo, genuinely shocked. “You’re very attractive. I mean, that’s why I was surprised—you have such a good time knowing such dozens of men.”

  Louisa looked at the stack of dirty plates on the floor beside his bed. In a few minutes, she supposed she’d be having a good time washing them. Quite possibly Number Ten imagined she’d have a good time peddling his beechnuts. “And whose fault is it?” thought Louisa honestly. “It’s not men’s, it’s mine. I’ve asked for it, I’ve made a hobby of it, I’ve been the original Good Sort …” She was damned if she’d wash Hugo’s dishes, but neither would she do him injustice.—As he suddenly coughed like a sick sheep, she hadn’t the heart even to disillusion him.

  “Of course you’re right,” agreed Louisa. “I’ve had a marvelous time. Particularly with you, Hugo dear. I still think I’ll get married.”

  “I suppose it is the modern thing to do,” coughed Hugo, recovering aplomb. “I’m so old-fashioned, I just live in sin.”

  Louisa cast an understanding but expert eye over the traditional attic. There wasn’t room, between peeling wall and unwashed window, to swing a cat; but love (or sin), Louisa was aware, in the circles in which Hugo moved rather throve on squalor. Not a stocking, however, hung to dry …

  “I know you’d like to—” began Louisa sympathetically.

  “My dear good girl,” snapped Hugo, now annoyed in turn, “I assure you I slept with Pammy actually last night.”

  “Then when you’ve still got bronchitis it was very silly,” said Louisa. She paused, and looked round again. Not a stocking, not a flower!—and not a thermometer. “What I mean is,” explained Louisa, “if you were really living in sin with Pammy, she’d be here now, looking after you in sin.”

  “Actually she’s got a rehearsal,” said Hugo sulkily.

  “Which is precisely the point,” said Louisa.—She paused again, suddenly and surprisedly aware of what she really had in mind; which was, briefly, that she herself wouldn’t be giving up work (as she fully intended to do, upon marrying F. Pennon) solely because F. Pennon could support her, but also because she recognized certain reciprocal claims. If F. Pennon had bronchitis, she, Louisa, wouldn’t be out photographing poodles! Nor was the idea unwelcome; in fact she desired such claims—on her time, on her affection; but from a husband.

  Louisa looked at Hugo thoughtfully. She was very fond of him. He was a brave little twirp. Not one of his off-beat plays had ever succeeded, he currently stage-managed at an Outer London rep.; and though it was there, in the drafty wings, he caught his bronchitis, so dedicated was he that he crawled from his bed and back into the drafts each night. Louisa was not only fond of Hugo, she admired him. His dogged, masculine single-mindedness, in the face of so much discouragement, struck her as little short of heroic. All the same she felt, suddenly, extremely tired of him.

  “It’s time I had some proper claims made on me,” thought Louisa, “before I turn into the original Mother Figure …”

  She stood up.

  “Darling, you aren’t going?” protested Hugo incredulously.

  “I’ve got to look in at the shop,” said Louisa.

  “But you haven’t told me about your Intended. I’m all agog, honestly I am! Who is he?”

  “Someone I’ve known for quite a while,” said Louisa.

  “Has he any money?”

  “Quite a lot,” said Louisa, rather sharply. “But that’s not only why I’m marrying him.”

  By now, strangely enough, it was true.—Who more mercenary than Louisa, that very breakfast-time, as she contemplated her lot as an independent modern woman? Who more mercenary than Louisa as she dissected F. Pennon’s letter and sent off her wire? During the intervening hours, she had grown fond of him. In a sense this was only to be expected, she was fond of most men; the fact remained that though his money was an essential factor, she now thought of F. Pennon with genuine affection, and thoroughly resented, on his behalf, Hugo’s tone.

  “What a lucky girl you are!” congratulated Hugo, all unconscious. “I suppose he isn’t by any chance interested in the theater?”

  “Not that I know of,” said Louisa—at the door.

  “Because if he should be,” called Hugo, “you might just drop a word—at some tender moment, you know—about my Aristophanes in modern dress …”

  4

  “And when’s it to be?” inquired Mr. Ross interestedly.

  “Well, I’m not quite sure yet,” said Louisa. “But I can’t see why we should wait.”

  “Just give the word in good time,” said Mr. Ross, “and me and the boys’ll have a whip-round. Congratulations again—though I must say the place won’t seem the same without you.”

  It wasn’t much of a place, Louisa’s shop. Fortunately as a photographer of dogs she had no need of any chichi studio, her subjects posed either en plein air or in their own homes; in fact she hadn’t a studio at all, but merely rented darkroom space off Mr. Ross at a highly un-chichi address in Soho. (Mr. Ross’s subjects, though anthropoids, were also photographed en plein air: on the pavement outside Burlington House.) The accommodation suited Louisa very well, however, and she and Rossy had shared many a companionable cup of tea, as they were doing now, by the gas ring on the back landing.

  “Not that we’d expect,” added Mr. Ross delicately, “to be asked …”

  “Good heavens, why not?” exclaimed Louisa. “You don’t think I’m going to drop all my old friends?”

  “If you’re wise you will,” said Mr. Ross.

  Louisa looked at him as she’d looked at Hugo: he stood up better to her scrutiny. He wasn’t so very much the elder, his sharp-cut suit and pointed shoes were as much of a group-uniform as Hugo’s dirty sweater and duffle coat; his oily black locks, styled to kill, inspired no confidence in the conventionally-minded. But his eyes were the sagacious eyes of the Jew; and he was genuinely concerned for her.

  “When embarking on a new life,” said Mr. Ross earnestly, “make a clean break. You’re marrying a well-to-do man, you’re going to have a nice home: so okay, don’t clutter it up with old pals. I’m speaking against my own interest, your society’s been a real pleasure; but I’ve seen again and again how it doesn’t do. My own sister,” said Mr. Ross unexpec
tedly, “married into a chain store. But do I drop in on ’em, Saturdays? Not me. It wouldn’t answer.”

  “Why not?” asked Louisa uneasily.

  “Hampstead and Whitechapel. The grape ’n the grain. In your case, let’s say, Knightsbridge ’n—”

  “Paddington,” supplied Louisa.

  “That where you live? I didn’t know,” said Mr. Ross. “I don’t know, either, that you mayn’t have some very classy friends—”

  Louisa shook her head.

  “Then take my advice, give ’em the go-by. Make a clean break.—And don’t fret about me missing the champagne,” added Mr. Ross humorously, “just pour me another cup of char.”

  5

  Before so momentous an appointment Louisa naturally returned home to embellish her appearance; and met Number Ten on the stairs. He looked even seedier than usual—as though the mites were beginning to get at him too; also his vegetarian breath smelt unpleasantly of garlic. Without a pang, Louisa mentally gave Number Ten the go-by.

  Without a pang, she felt, she could give Hugo the go-by. She could give them all the go-by, gladly—the whole shiftless bunch of men she was used to being fond of …

  “Rossy’s dead right,” thought Louisa. “It’s time I made a clean break.”

  Chapter Three

  1

  There could still be no stronger proof of her special temperament (which Louisa was now determined to repress, but Rome isn’t built in a day) than the fact that she could enter Gladstone Mansions not only without dismay, but with positive exhilaration. Most women got the willies.

  The first impression produced by the interior was of being underground. Seen from without, twelve massive stories reared almost tower-like; once past the great oak and ground-glass doors the catacomb illusion was complete. A cautious use of electricity left in shadow the high, coved, cavernous ceiling; on the walls, a paper originally representing marble now looked like wet granite. At intervals upon it naked skulls, like the trophies of cavemen, thrust up branching antlers or simple horns. Stray visitors from the provinces, peering uncertain through the heavy doors, felt that a Natural History Museum ought to be brighter. Only the specialist eye of a British club-man—and Louisa’s—at once recognized the entirely appropriate threshold to the most expensive flats in London, single gentlemen only.

  When one rang for the lift, nothing happened.—This was all right with Louisa, who had arrived a trifle early; in any case, she would no more have minded waiting than a scholar minds waiting in a library, or a botanist in a herbarium, or a kindergarten mistress in a show of infant handicraft. She had all the heads to look at. The legend beneath an Oryx indiensis, “Shot by Major Cart-wright-Jones, Himalayas 1885,” filled her with vicarious pleasure. (Though fond of animals, she was fonder still of majors, and besides had never seen an oryx on the hoof like a major in his boots.) A Colonel Hamlyn had bagged a wildebeeste, the Hon. C. P. Coe a moose; Louisa mentally tramped veldts with the one, slogged through tundra with the other—she was having, so to speak, a last orgy—and marveled as always at men’s gratuitous heroism …

  F. Pennon didn’t appear to have shot anything. Even so, Louisa could well imagine some future nostalgia on his part, and easily promised herself to respect it.

  An ancient clock coughed the half-hour. She rang again, and now in the lift shaft something happened. Iron vitals rumbled; machinery shuddered, ropes strained, wheels ground; it was like the birth of the Industrial Age. Rudimentary yet effectual, a great iron cage descended, groaned to a halt, and gaped. Casting a last affectionate thought towards Colonel Hamlyn, Major Jones and Mr.Coe—whom no one else had thought of, let alone with affection, since about 1910—Louisa stepped hardily in.

  “F. Pennon, third,” said Louisa. “What a splendid lot of heads!”

  “The relatives don’t claim ’em,” replied the lift man morosely.

  His aged features, unused to expressing anything but apathy, readjusted themselves to express a dislike of small talk. Louisa admitted her error, recognized, and applauded, a complete absorption in the remarkable task of making six hundredweight of iron go up and down, and held her tongue.

  Up they labored. An eye attuned to the cavern below instinctively sought, between the probably hand-forged bars, for some daubing of elk or mastodon on the lift shaft’s naked brick. But it was bare as a pothole.—To be ejected, at the Third, into civilization, nonetheless came as a shock, even though one was still, unmistakably, in Gladstone Mansions as well. The long narrow corridor still gave the impression of being underground, if only as in a mine; upon the walls, instead of horns and skulls, hung steel engravings—but each commemorating some disaster to British arms. (The Charge of the Light Brigade, the Loss of the Royal George, the Retreat from Corunna.) Louisa passed appreciatively between them, identified the door she sought, and used the Death of Nelson as a mirror to repowder her nose.

  2

  “F. Pennon?” inquired Louisa.

  “Miss Datchett?” inquired the old manservant.

  He might have been the lift man’s twin brother; but Louisa was now too intent on her own affairs even to ask if they were related.—Behind him stretched a typical Gladstone Mansions sitting room—furnished apparently with sarcophagi, carpeted apparently with churchyard moss, the whole gloomy vista closed by curtains not absolutely black, but nonetheless suggestive of a first-class French funeral. The only points of brightness were the silver tea set ready on the tea table and the eager gleam in F. Pennon’s eye as he hurried towards her out of the circumambiant gloom.

  Louisa scrutinized him with natural interest. Her memory had been generally accurate: like a Sealyham he was broad through the chest and rather short-legged, but though not tall he was at least as tall as she was (and she could always wear flat heels), and his graying hair had exactly the springy roughness of a Sealyham’s coat. (Louisa could easily imagine herself dropping a kiss on it at the breakfast table.) In age she judged him about nine—or rather sixty—and though she could have wished him younger, he looked fit as a fiddle.

  “My dear Louisa,” exclaimed F. Pennon, “how good of you to be so prompt!”

  He had her hand even before the manservant stepped back, clasping it enthusiastically between his own.—Where now was his reserve, his peculiar stiffness of address? All swept away, thought Louisa happily, in the joy of seeing her again!

  “It’s a pleasure,” said Louisa sincerely.

  Indeed it was, to see him not only so spry and so delighted, but also, quite obviously, nervous. (He was far more nervous than Louisa; but then she already knew his fate.) He fussed. He fussed over finding her the most comfortable chair, and over the disposition of the tea things. (There were the scones, there was the honey, also a plummy cake shaped like an Edwardian toque.) He asked her to pour out. The weight of the teapot almost sprained her wrist, but how gladly she bore the slight twinge! “Family plate,” thought Louisa—for not even Gladstone Mansions would supply solid silver. The sugar bowl alone could have been pawned for thirty bob. (How different a cup of char with Mr. Ross!) Merely to handle the solid silver sugar tongs, good for at least half a guinea, Louisa took three lumps.

  “This is just,” sighed Louisa, “what I like.”

  “You used to take lemon,” said F. Pennon anxiously.

  There was lemon too, sliced wafer-thin in a silver shell. Not to disappoint him, Louisa added lemon. F. Pennon himself spooned honey onto her plate, beside the hot scone. Then he sat back and watched her eat with an expression of rapture.

  “How well I remember,” he exclaimed, “that week at Cannes!”

  “Oh, so do I!” said Louisa.

  “We did, didn’t we, get on rather well?—D’you think you could call me Freddy?”

  “Easily,” said Louisa—she was only too glad to find it wasn’t F. for Ferdinand.

  “You attracted me at once,” continued Freddy, in happy reminiscence. “I don’t mind telling you I was a bit annoyed—being hit with that roll—then I saw you at the tab
le, and that’s why I came over. What a thundering piece of luck it was!”

  “For me too,” said Louisa.

  “You really mean that?—I don’t live here regularly, you know,” said F. Pennon, “I’ve a house as well, outside Bournemouth.”

  The transition was abrupt—how nervous he was, poor F for Freddy!—but Louisa grasped the implication at once. Wives being obviously tabu, in Gladstone Mansions, he wanted her to know about the house.—Not in Knightsbridge; outside Bournemouth. Mr. Ross however had scarcely erred.

  “I can’t imagine anything nicer,” said Louisa encouragingly.

  “I hope you’ll think so when you see it. That is, if you do see it. I want you to see it.—But I’m going too fast,” said F. Pennon anxiously. “I’m rushing things. Have a slice of cake.”

  Though she hadn’t finished her scone, Louisa accepted it willingly. His nervousness was beginning to be infectious, and eating always steadied her.

  “Not that I don’t like it here too,” added Freddy, with a touch of wistfulness. “I do. I like it uncommonly.”

  At the thought of all he was giving up for her, Louisa’s heart quite melted—particularly as Gladstone Mansions was just the sort of place she liked herself. How different, the huge, solid room, from a divan-bedroom-bathroom-kitchenette-dinette! Even its gloom was tranquillizing—like a thoroughly wet day when there is no question of going out. If Freddy’s eye was wistful, so was Louisa’s; but no one was ever less of a dog-in-the-manger.

  “Why not keep it on?” she suggested kindly. “Then you could pop up to town on your own.”

  “You really think I might?” exclaimed F. Pennon, brightening at once. “It wouldn’t cause … misunderstandings?—My dear Louisa,” cried F. Pennon enthusiastically, “how right I’ve been about you! I knew I was right, even on so very brief an acquaintance as ours was at Cannes! You’re the only woman, I tell you frankly, I’ve been able to think of—”