The Impregnable Women, page 20
‘You promise, madam?’
‘I give you my word, Horrocks. In the meantime you will have to go back to the cells – I’ll decide on your punishment later – and some time this afternoon you must help me to plan Bulmer’s reception.’
Her guards returned, and Horrocks was removed. Mrs Curle, full of excitement and curiosity, wanted to be told immediately every word that had been uttered, and Lysistrata could hardly persuade her to wait until they had done with orderly-room. – There was one more case, said the red-haired matronly sergeant.
The last case was an application from Ivy FitzAubrey for release from the service in the love-strike and permission to leave the Castle on the grounds of ill-health.
‘That girl has been nothing but a nuisance right from the beginning,’ said Mrs Curle indignantly.
Ivy had given them a lot of trouble. She had complained about the food and the accommodation, and offended many of her fellow-strikers by an assumption of superiority which they thought unwarranted. Within twenty-four hours she had shown a talent for making mischief and enemies, and from the second day she had regularly attended sick-parade. Her health, she explained pathetically, had never been good, and the excitement of the strike was too much for her. Her heart was weak, she had fainted several times, and always at inopportune moments.
‘I was talking to the Doctor about her this morning,’ said Lysistrata. ‘She said her heart-sounds are definitely not normal, but almost certainly she’s not so ill as she pretends. What do you think about her, sergeant?’
‘She’s malingering,’ said the red-haired matronly sergeant. ‘But she’s doing a lot of harm to the other girls, and you ought to get rid of her.’
‘That’s what I think,’ said Mrs Curle.
‘Well, bring her in.’
Ivy was looking pale and ill, for she wore no make-up and she had been eating a little toilet-soap to upset her heart. Her hair, brushed lankly down, made her face look thinner than usual, and her grass-green frock accentuated her pallor. Her only ornament was Lady Oriole’s O.B.E.
‘Oh, I do feel so ill!’ she exclaimed. ‘Do you mind if I sit down? I just hate to trouble you, Lady Lysistrata, but really and truly I’m not fit for a life like this. It’s simply wearing me out, and I can’t sleep at night, with my heart beating, and. ...’
‘Yes, I’ve seen your medical report,’ said Lysistrata. ‘I’m sorry you think you’re not fit for garrison duty. According to the Doctor there is probably nothing seriously wrong with you, but you may need a rest. So I’m prepared to let you go if you will give me your promise to maintain the principles of the strike outside.’
‘You mean, not to have anything to do with men? Oh, as if I would! Why, in the state I’m in, it would kill me, and anyway that’s not the sort of thing that appeals to me in general. There’s more in life than that, I always say.’
‘Are you able to go out by yourself, and is there anyone who can look after you when you get home?’
‘Oh yes, I can still walk, thank goodness, and a breath of fresh air’ll do me good, I think. – Well there’s plenty of air here, of course, but it seems different, being cooped-up, doesn’t it? And my landlady will look after me. You ought to see the way she mothers me. Breakfast in bed, and everything. – But there, you’re busy, aren’t you? Well, I do think it’s sweet of you to see my point of view, because after all I owe it to myself to look after my health, don’t you think? It’s all that a girl has, in a way. And really Lady Lysistrata, I’m ever so sorry that I can’t help you any more, and it’s been such a pleasure to know you. But perhaps we’ll meet again some time, and if we don’t there’ll be no ill-feeling, will there? Well, ta-ta. Ta-ta, Mrs Curle. I’ll send for my things, sergeant.’
‘My dear,’ said Mrs Curle, ‘she’s simply a bitch!’
‘Yes,’ said Lysistrata, ‘but I’m sorry to let any of the garrison go. It may give the other side an idea that we’re weakening.’
‘She can do less harm out of the Castle than in it,’ said the sergeant comfortingly.
VI
Ivy went lightly down the causeway, singing as she went, and having triumphantly shown her exeat to the sentries, halted on the pavement beyond the drawbridge to make up her face. But she was in a hurry to get home, and paused only for a hasty application of rouge and powder and lipstick. How good it was to be free of that ghastly nunnery! She hated women. And had she not been wise when, as a girl at school, she had learnt how to faint when she liked! And it was brave of her to have eaten so much soap, for the taste was horrible – she opened her bag and threw away a thin violet cake – and for all she knew it might be dangerous. But it had worked. It had deceived the Doctor, and now she was free. She wondered how she had ever been so silly as to join that dreadful unnatural strike. Why, it would be quite a treat to see Mr Small again.
She had a flat in Howe Street. She went straight there, and taking off her shoes and her green frock, put on a dressing gown and mules, and got a bottle of brandy and some ginger ale from a cupboard under the stairs. She mixed a horse’s neck and drank it with great enjoyment. The Castle was dry – another sign of the unnatural nature of the strike – and she hadn’t had a drink for days. God, what a fool she’d been! She got up and wandered about the flat, opening a drawer here, and a cupboard there, and found a strange enjoyment in the sight of her familiar things. She opened a window, and leaning out saw two men walking in the direction of He riot Row. She could hardly restrain a temptation to whistle to them.
Then she had another drink, and wondered if she would ring-up Mr Small or wait till the evening. She decided to wait, and lighting a cigarette lay down on her broad comfortable bed. It was lovely to have a bed like that. She had never had a decent night’s sleep in the Castle. She stretched herself luxuriously, and thought she might as well undress properly and have a really good rest. At first she was too excited by thoughts of freedom to sleep, but she finished her second drink, and presently grew drowsy. She turned on her side, drew the quilt to her ears, and curled up like a cat.
It was a little after six when she woke, and her first thought was of Mr Small. She reached for her telephone and dialled the number of his flat.
And unknown voice answered her, the voice of a discharged soldier whom Mr Small had engaged when his female staff went on strike. No, it said, he’s just gone out. It didn’t know where, nor when he would return. It was a rough unsympathetic voice, and offered no help.
Ivy telephoned to the Ministry of Munitions. After a long time a caretaker told her that Mr Small had left about five o’clock, and said she would probably find him at his flat or perhaps in the Conservative Club. She rang-up the Club first. He had not been there. Nor, when she tried again half-an-hour later, had he returned to his flat.
She was feeling hungry by now, and disappointment always made her furious. She went to the larder, but found nothing fit to eat except a bottle of olives, which she opened. After eating a couple she poured out another drink. She felt the room colder than it had been, and switching on the electric fire began to feel sorry for herself. ‘Oh, hell!’ she exclaimed, and drank half the brandy at a gulp. Then she went back to the telephone, and stood uncertain which number to call first.
VII
Had Ivy telephoned a little earlier, Mr Small would have welcomed her with rapture and an immediate invitation to dinner. He was in a state of profound melancholy, and loneliness compelled him to explore its blackest caverns and most abysmal gloom. The horrors and chimaeras that he discovered in this fearful darkness were none the less real because he knew that they and all their noisome tenement would promptly vanish if he had some true congenial friend to stand beside him. But he could think of no sufficient comrade except Ivy, or Tom Hogpool. And Tom Hogpool had never quite forgiven him for stealing Ivy; while Ivy, so he believed, was still in the impregnable Castle.
The love-strike had robbed him of all his confidence and a host of easy friendships. It had filled him with a superstitious fear, as though he had seen nature renounce its laws and proclaim a cosmic anarchy. Had the sun taken to rising in the west and moonlight become hot as day, he could hardly have been more pitiably astonished. And in this mood he was no company for the easy friends he had attracted by an appearance of genial success, and kept in the magnetic field of his jocular vitality; they had, moreover, their own troubles, that made many of them live miserably in a loneliness from which they could not escape; and when the magnitude of so much that had previously seemed of moment was belittled by the indisputable gravity of the present situation, the social importance of a Cabinet Minister could hardly escape a similar diminishment.
Mr Small, then, was living in a solitude to which he had never been accustomed, and which he found unbelievably distasteful. If Ivy had wakened a little earlier he would have welcomed her like a self-abhorrent vacuum opening its doors to a summer breeze. But she slept too long, and ten minutes before she telephoned, he had gone out. He had decided that Tom Hogpool, even though he had not wholly forgiven him, would be better company than none.
The had met, of course, many times since Ivy in the stream of self-interest changed horses; and their relations, rapidly improving from an open quarrel, had now become but little worse than normal. Hogpool had grown richer and richer as the war went on, and he was interested in so many lucrative undertakings, from a new poisonous gas to a new factory making bamboo crosses for soldiers’ graves, that his present wealth was almost incalculable. He lived, however, in a smallish flat in Moray Place, for as he accumulated more and more money, and so became more and more interested in it, he grew less and less willing to spend it. He never grudged his own comfort, or immediate luxury. But he had begun to dislike unnecessary display, and even to think it rather wicked.
Mr Hogpool was out, said a man-servant. But Mr Small said that he was in no hurry, and would wait. He was shown into a large richly furnished room, and as he came in a tall girl, of dark and resplendent beauty, turned inquiringly from the window where she had been standing.
Mr Small’s first sensation was a jealous and disloyal astonishment. She left Ivy at the post, he thought. And that double-dealing, grab-all,dunghill-blossomHogpoolhadbody-snatched her! But in a moment he put away these ungentle thoughts; Tom was his friend, and he loved Ivy with a most passionate fidelity. This girl was nothing to him. Absolutely nothing. He could not deny, however, that she was a winner to look at. Swart as a raven, with the flashing beauty of some country that lived closer to the sun than England. Her nose was slightly aquiline, her complexion olive. She had eyes that were darkly luminous under inky brows, and she carried her head proudly ... Mr Small introduced himself with some diffidence, and was much surprised when she replied in a strong American accent.
‘Come on in,’ she said. ‘I’ve been alone all day, and you just can’t think how tired I get of my own company.’
‘That must be a unique experience,’ said Mr Small gracefully.
‘How’s that?’
Mr Small explained his compliment, and she appeared to be grateful for it.
‘It’s sweet of you to say so,’ she exclaimed, ‘and you must think I’m pretty dumb not to have seen it for myself. But honestly, for that last few months I’ve been more used to beefs than bokays, and I suppose I’ve got out of the way of expecting them.’
She had just spent a year in Hollywood, she said, and confessed that all her hopes had been disappointed. It appeared that the moving-picture industry was a lousy racket. Either you didn’t get any work in months, or you had to work your pants off. ‘When you’re on a job, you begin early and end the next morning,’ she said. So Hollywood having gone completely sour in her opinion, she had packed up and come home to get a lay-off.
‘Home?’ inquired Mr Small.
‘Sure. Why, you didn’t think I was American, did you?’
‘Well, you have such a charming American accent ...’
‘Why, that’s what everybody says, Mr Small, and I just can’t understand it! My home town’s Bootle – I was born there, and everything – and it seems to me I speak just like I always did.’
‘Then Bootle must have changed since I knew it.’
‘Oh no, a town doesn’t change like that. – But say, you were being funny, weren’t you? Aw gee, I’m getting all my signals balled-up. You’ll think I’m really dumb in a minute. How about I shake a cocktail? That’ll maybe brighten me up a bit.’
Mr Small was beginning to enjoy himself. He had felt a little bashful to begin with, but her rather haughty appearance, the aristocratic poise of her head and the droop of her eyelids, apparently meant nothing at all. Or, to be more accurate, he thought, they indicated a natural dignity, but no tiresome affectation of it. She was positively friendly; not a bit cold and aloof, as he had feared. And he was glad that she was English despite her accent. American girls, so he had always understood, had very expensive habits. Not that it really mattered to him, of course – she was Tom Hogpool’s friend, and Ivy was the only woman for whom he cared – but in some way or other it put him more at his ease to know that she was a Bootle girl. It was a friendly town.
‘You don’t know my name, do you?’ she inquired. ‘Well, it’s Mavis Ramona.’
‘That’s a good old Lancashire name,’ said Mr Small light-heartedly.
‘Well, it may be, but I never heard it till I went to Hollywood,’ said Mavis earnestly. ‘They just invented it for me, because they said I was sort of Spanish looking. – But say, you were kidding again! Well, if you aren’t just the regular old kidder!’
With a complacent smile Mr Small accepted a cocktail – a cabinet containing a large assortment of bottles and glasses was part of the furniture of the room – and inquired, ‘What’s Tom doing with himself these days? I haven’t seen him for the last week or two.’
‘Oh, he’s busy about some new company he’s starting,’ said Mavis. ‘He thinks maybe the war’s going to stop, so he’s got hold of a patent for making artificial stone. He reckons it’ll come in useful for war memorials.’
‘There may be something in that,’ said Mr Small thoughtfully.
‘He’s a lousy old mossback,’ said Mavis.
‘You don’t mean Tom?’
‘Yeah. I used to know him before I went to America, and he was different then. He’d give a girl a swell time. But now he doesn’t think of anything but making money, and I haven’t hardly seen him for the last three days. Oh, I know he’s busy. They say he’s just about as well heeled with sugar as any guy there is nowadays, and that would keep anyone busy. But what’s the use of having plenty of jack if you don’t kick it in? He’s just getting an old tightwad, Mr Small.’
Mr Small, without being dogmatic about it, took it upon himself to defend his old friend’s behaviour; but in some curious fashion his rehabilitation of Mr Hogpool’s character became an exposition of his own. In temperament, he explained, they were as different as the poles. He admired old Tom for his energy, his commercial genius, his resolute determination to be a rich man; he had shown that a poor boy, if his nature was a bit brutal to start with, and later on became absolutely ruthless, could overcome all the handicaps of poverty, and lack of education, and absence of moral scruple. Yes, Tom was an admirable fellow. But he did not envy him. He himself had been a shy and rather poetical youth, who had grown up with the romantic notion that one ought to be of service to one’s fellow-men, and do something, however little, to smooth away the roughness of life for those less fortunate than oneself. Well, to a man like Tom, of course, that sort of ambition was merely silly. But he had stuck to it. He had devoted his life to the service of others – in politics, Miss Ramona – and he thought he could say that his efforts had been attended with some success. And when he spoke of success, he did not, of course, refer to the fact that he was now a Cabinet Minister. ...
Mavis had not been aware of his rank. ‘Well, dog my hide!’ she exclaimed with admiration. ‘And here I’ve been talking to you just like you were a guy I’d met-up with in a whistle-stop for visiting firemen!’
The cocktail cabinet was almost as productive as Pandora’s box, and having finished the sidecar that Mavis had first shaken, Mr Small helped her to mix another, equally agreeable, from Bacardi rum, Grand Marnier, and a little lime-juice.
‘Mud in your eye!’ she observed with growing friendliness.
‘Here’s to our better acquaintance,’ said Mr Small.
By half past seven Mavis had described, with interesting detail, some of the hardships of life in Hollywood; Tom Hogpool had not yet returned; and Mr Small had suggested dinner in the Albyn Hotel. Mavis, having again described Tom Hogpool as an old mossback, said that he deserved whatever was coming to him, and accepted the invitation with pleasing alacrity. In the cab that took them to the hotel she allowed him to put his arm round her, and declared she would rather sit and dunk pretzels in beer with a man she liked, than dine on breasts of guinea-fowl with a guy that didn’t appeal to her.
As they walked through the lounge, that was full of lonely men, Mr Small felt again the buoyancy of spirit that he had always experienced when he took Ivy out to dinner; for Mavis attracted the attention of everyone there, and he used all the envious glances, and the rustle of whispered comment, to inflate his self-confidence to its former taut abundance. He entered the restaurant, where again they drew every jealous gaze, with the air of one whom life had acknowledged to be its master.
VIII
In the lounge a stout, pink-faced, bald-headed man, who wore a worried look and a brightly-patterned tweed suit, emitted a softly expressive whistle when Mr Small went by with Mavis. To the two Naval officers who sat at the next table he observed, ‘Well, that was a fine bit of stuff, wasn’t it? I wouldn’t mind putting ‘er on the pay-roll, if there was anything in the bank to pay ‘er with.’
His chance-got neighbours were Commander Lawless and Lieutenant McCombie; and Lawless in a friendly way replied, ‘A nice bit of stuff, as you say. A whitely wanton with a velvet brow, in fact, and two pitch-balls stuck in her face for eyes. You prefer brunettes?’
