An aspidistra in babylon, p.4
An Aspidistra in Babylon, page 4
As I handed the stamps through the gap in the door I said:
‘Are you sure, Miss Charlesworth? You haven’t been trying to move those heavy trunks, have you?’
‘No, no. I’ve just lost something. Mislaid something, that’s all.’
I suggested that perhaps I might help her find it, whatever it was, but she hesitated before answering. She started licking her lips and swallowing very hard.
‘Well, possibly you could. Perhaps you could. Your eyes are younger than mine.’
Though my eyes might have been younger they certainly weren’t any keener than Miss Charlesworth’s and it was only when I went into the room and found myself in the centre of that shabbily elegant ruin that I realised why it was that even she couldn’t find what she was looking for.
Where only one jackdaw had worked before, a whole flock, it seemed to me, had now been madly at work in the bedroom. Chairs and tables and chests-of-drawers and trunks were piled against each other. The carpet was half-rolled back. The bed was askew across the fireplace. The mattress was propped up at one end with a brass coal-scuttle and over by the window there was even an open pale pink sunshade.
The cause of all this, it seemed to me, was rather trival. Miss Charlesworth had lost a key.
‘Oh! is that all?’ I said. ‘We’ll soon find that once we get things straightened out a bit.’
‘I’ve been looking for over an hour already,’ she said. ‘Ever since you’ve been gone. It simply isn’t here.’
‘When did you last have it?’
‘This afternoon. Early this afternoon.’
‘Then it must be here,’ I said. ‘What sort of key is it?’
‘It’s the key of one of the jewel boxes,’ Miss Charlesworth said. ‘This one. The tortoiseshell.’
It was really very handsome, that big tortoiseshell box, with its silver lock and hinges. There was something very rich about the opulent polish of that deep brown shell. Involuntarily I smoothed my fingers across the lid of it and it at the same moment I started thinking of Captain Blaine.
‘Did you want something out of the box?’ I said. ‘Haven’t you got another key?’
‘I never have duplicate keys,’ Miss Charlesworth said. ‘I would never entertain the idea.’
‘But if you had another key,’ I said, ‘you could open the box. It’s all so simple.’
‘I don’t want to open the box!’ she half-shouted at me. ‘I don’t want to open the box! I simply want to be sure that no one else has the key. All I want is the key.’
Obsessions, I suppose, often have the effect of clouding the faculties, upsetting the reason and that sort of thing. They are a kind of disease. In my case the effect was entirely opposite. In my first moment of obsession, confronted by a stupidly, agitated old woman fussing over a lost key, I began to feel remarkably logical, extraordinarily cool.
‘Then we shall just have to set about finding the key,’ I said, ‘shan’t we?’
It took me the better part of another hour to put some order into that crazy jackdaw chaos and at the end of it Miss Charlesworth was crying gently.
‘It just simply isn’t here. It just simply isn’t here.’
The worst of over-heavy make-up is that it doesn’t take very kindly to tears. Miss Charlesworth’s face now looked like a rosy-mauve daub in a child’s painting book when the colours have run.
‘Please don’t agitate yourself, Miss Charlesworth,’ I said. ‘It’s all very simple. You must simply get somebody in the town to cut you another key.’
‘Oh! no, oh! no, oh! no.’
In my cool way I took no notice of these protestations.
‘In fact if I were you,’ I said, ‘I should have duplicate keys cut for all your cases at the same time. It’s the only sensible, prudent thing to do.’
I think it was that word prudent that got her. She seemed to pull herself momentarily and sharply out of her agitation.
‘Prudent? You mean to say you don’t think I’ve been very prudent about matters?’
‘No,’ I said, ‘frankly I don’t. If you’ve got a box of jewellery and you can’t open it what on earth’s the use of it? It might just as well be full of sea-shells. In fact the really prudent thing would be to deposit the whole lot with a bank and forget it.’
‘Oh! no. I hate banks. I distrust banks. I really distrust them.’
At this moment I took her by the hands. They were very skinny hands and they were hot and trembling.
‘But you did say once you trusted me, didn’t you. Miss Charlesworth?’
‘Yes, I did. I did indeed.’
With cool reassurance I patted her hands.
‘All right,’ I said, ‘I’ll go down to Carter’s the ironmongers in the morning and they’ll send a man up.’
By this time she was crying again, though more vigorously than before, rather as if in relief, and at the same time saying between her sobs how greatly indebted she was to me for all my help and comfort and patience and so on. It really seemed an awful fuss to make over that stupid little key.
The following morning I got the man from Carter’s to call. Before I left for the town Miss Charlesworth confided in me that she’d hardly slept a wink all night but that things were better now. She had seen the force of my logic suggesting that all four boxes should have new keys. It would be the prudent thing to do.
That, of course, is another curious thing about obsession. It breeds its own logic; everything about it has a way of seeming inevitable, of being right.
That was why, later on that afternoon, when I called at Carter’s a second time and told them that Miss Charlesworth had changed her mind and had decided to have duplicate keys cut for all the boxes it seemed a logcial rather than merely a clever part of the pattern.
Even Carter’s agreed that it was the sensible, prudent thing to do.
6
It took about a week to get the keys made but, like the Frenchman who is warned that alcohol kills slowly, I was in no hurry. The holiday season in a sea-side town is inevitably a great time for key-cutting. Hotel guests have a tiresome habit of losing keys or taking them away and forgetting to post them back.
I spent a good deal of that time trying to decide whether or not to tell Captain Blaine. It is of course not obsession that clouds the faculties or bends the reason at all, but pure innocence. And no one in the world could have been more obligingly, sublimely innocent than I was that summer. I have already described how my soul had acquired the habit of singing but you might well think that in three months it would have got over that. Not at all. Even seduction hadn’t sullied me.
The rest of the time I spent in going over and over the fabric of my—or rather our—dream. I suppose it’s really the oldest and most universal of all the silly dreams that women feed on: the desire to escape familiar drudgery, to exchange the commonplace for the celestial, to put trust in unfamiliar princes and finally be carried splendidly away.
In the same way I saw myself over and over again on the afternoon cross-channel steamer, eating dinner on the Blue Train, waking up to the carnation world of the Mediterranean, opening windows on to the blue heaven of Shelley’s Italy. I was about to leave our rather stuffy little boarding house, the smell of frying fish and bacon, the front drawing room that still actually had curtains of green chenille, antimacassars and brass pots of aspidistra. I was going to leave the world of guests who didn’t know how to behave at table, who complained of how the soup was cold and the potatoes underdone and bony, who fussed over damp sheets and forgot to tip the maids.
I was going, above all, to leave my mother, with her tedious philosophy of putting herself into other people’s places, her infinite timidity and her spurious wisdom about trusting other people in order that they, in turn, could trust you. Weeks of silent disapprobation had turned my mother more and more into a kind of shadowy smudge and I was, thank God, going to escape from that too.
The day I collected the keys from the ironmongers I decided to tell Captain Blaine what I was doing—or rather to tell him half of it and later surprise him with the rest.
‘Supposing I told you, darling, that I could get the money to go away,’ I said. ‘When could we go? Soon?’
‘Now steady, girl,’ he said. ‘I’m a soldier. I just can’t walk out like that.’
‘You could get leave.’
‘I suppose so. But where’s this money coming from, girl? Dammit, I’m broke. I tell you I’m solid, stony broke.’
‘You won’t be tomorrow.’
‘She talks to me in riddles,’ he said. He laughed, half-mockingly I thought. ‘She fills my head with dreams. But the cash, girl, the cash. Show me the tree where grows the cash.’
I loved, as I say, to hear him talk in that extravagant fashion and I said:
‘Well, first I’ve got forty pounds of my own. We could buy the tickets with that.’
‘With you now?’
Yes, I told him, I’d got it with me now. That made him laugh again, not mockingly this time, and he said:
‘Comic, funny little girl. How long do you suppose we’d last on forty pounds?’
‘Forty pounds is only the beginning,’ I said. ‘Tomorrow you can have a thousand.’
He gave a long sharp whistle of astonishment.
‘There must be something wrong with your little head, girl,’ he said. ‘You must have got in a draught.’
No, I told him, there was nothing wrong with my little head and I hadn’t been in a draught and there and then I decided to tell him the rest. When he heard what I had to say he suddenly took my face in his two hands in a rhapsodic gesture of delight.
‘Clever little girl,’ he said. ‘I always knew you were a clever little girl.’
He couldn’t have put it more plainly if he’d said outright that I’d done exactly what he hoped and expected I’d do. And in turn I felt supremely flattered because I’d so successfully put myself in his place, into and under his skin.
‘Now this, I think,’ he said, ‘is what we’ll do. Tomorrow, when I take Bertie for her drive, I’ll invite the old girl out to lunch up in town. I’ll lunch her at the Carlton. Oysters, champagne, pheasant, a marvellous soufflée, green Chartreuse. I know she wants to see her lawyers in town and I’ll say “Bertie dear, it’s exhausting doing that journey back at the end of the day. I’ll wire for a room for you for a couple of days. The change will pep you up. You were coughing yesterday”.’
‘And what then?’
He laughed: again, as I fondly understood it, not mockingly.
‘The rest, dear girl,’ he said, ‘is largely up to you. What you have to look for is an emerald and diamond tiara. It’s really big. You can’t mistake it. No: perhaps not, after all. Too big. A bit too conspicuous. Better concentrate on rings. Bring a sample half dozen. They’re mostly emerald and diamond too. That way we can dispose of them one at a time, whenever the champagne runs dry.’
Yes: he talked too much. But I, as I listened to him in brittle excitement, all tension, hardly talked at all. And later that night, in bed, I was vaguely aware that that brittle tension had been responsible already for a great change in me.
My soul had actually, at last, stopped its starry singing.
7
Two days later Miss Charlesworth went to London with Captain Blaine, who had my forty pounds in his pocket and a large companionable smile on his face as he called and drove her to the station. I still felt tense and brittle as I watched them from an upstairs window and I hardly knew how I’d get through the day until seven o’clock, when he’d be coming back again.
That afternoon was Ruby’s half day. She generally left the boarding house about three o’clock but that day I decided to give her until four. But to my utter astonishment I was on my way up the back stairs, with a skeleton house-key to Miss Charlesworth’s room in my hand, when Ruby suddenly came tripping down, humming happily to herself, all her war-paint on.
‘Hullo, duckie. Just off. Bit late today. Wrecked my face first time and had to do it all over again. Bit excited I expect.’
‘Excited?’
I was so excited and staggered myself that I hadn’t the wit to hide the key. I just stood there twisting it round and round in my fingers.
‘Like the hat?’ Ruby said. It was a big and floppy yellow straw, with a single magenta rose on it twice as large as a saucer. ‘Had it re-trimmed. Excited?—I should say. It’s my birthday. Going to lash out tonight and have supper at the Royal Clarence with my sister. You know, the one who works in the café. Been saving up for it. Going to do it big.’
Ruby gave one of her ripe explosive laughs and I, having nothing to say, simply stood there twisting the key.
‘You look a bit pale, duckie,’ Ruby said when that laugh of hers had finally stopped rudely slitting the air. She peered at me sharply from a face as heavily pink with powder as a marshmallow. She was really very handsome with all her war-paint on and you hardly knew her as the rather blowsy rag doll who, in the mornings, emptied bedroom slops and scrubbed the floors. ‘Feeling under par?’
No, I was not, I told her and again I stood witlessly fumbling with the key.
‘Well, cheery-bye, then,’ Ruby said. My heart was racing frenziedly. ‘Expect I’ll be late. Going on to the Tennis Club dance afterwards. They’ll probably wheel me home about four. Don’t tell your Ma.’
I vaguely muttered something about wishing her a good time and then she was away downstairs. At the foot she turned and looked back at me, the heavy dark mascara on the lashes of her eyes making them look bigger and juicier than ever.
‘Have a lay down, duckie,’ she said. ‘Don’t like that look you got.’
A moment later the big floppy hat and the equally floppy dress, a bright petunia satin, had disappeared.
I gave her another five minutes and then let myself into Miss Charlesworth’s bedroom. If my soul had stopped singing my heart certainly hadn’t stopped racing and as I put the key into the tortoiseshell jewel box it felt like a toy windmill whirling madly round and round.
In my witless excitement I hadn’t even had the sense to take the key out of the bedroom door and about a minute later the door suddenly opened and there stood Ruby.
There was a curiously impassive look on her juicy red lips and in those old grey eyes that I’d never seen before and she simply stood for a full minute without speaking, quietly staring through me.
When she spoke at last it was in a level whisper. It couldn’t have startled me more if it had been a bomb.
‘Looking for something, duckie?’
I couldn’t speak. My tongue felt frozen. I simply stood there goggling. And then something extraordinary happened. At the very moment when I felt sure she was about to start pleading with me about this and that she simply uttered one more sentence and it hit me like a whip.
‘I’ll drink your health tonight, duckie,’ she said, again in that level whisper, ‘I really will.’
That was all. I actually felt my eye-balls jump and a moment later that big floppy hat of hers had disappeared completely for the second time.
I suppose I stood there for fully half a minute before realising that the only clever thing to do was to try and call her back. I remember actually rushing out on to the landing and calling ‘Ruby’ several times before realising with horror that someone else might hear me. It was too late anyway by that time and all I could think of doing next was to rush back into the bedroom, grab up seven or eight rings and then lock the box and the bedroom door before scrambling upstairs to my room.
For the next three hours I couldn’t make up my mind who I wanted to see most: Captain Blaine or Ruby. I lay on the bed in unparalleled idiotic confusion, incapable of thinking, my mind a jelly. I hadn’t even looked to see what the rings were like but had simply thrown them loose, like so many peppermint lumps, into my bag.
At seven o’clock I went out to meet Captain Blaine. At the eastern end of the front there used to be public gardens with lawns and beds of geraniums and fuchsia in summertime and it was a good place for meeting. I waited there till eight o’clock. I’ve explained before, I think, how Captain Blaine often kept me waiting, sometimes for an hour or more. ‘Not because I didn’t want to come, girl, but because other chaps decreed otherwise,’ was how he would charmingly explain it. ‘In the army most of the money and the time you have are really someone else’s.’
At half past eight I walked to the railway station. There were two more trains from London that night: one at nine and the last at midnight. When Captain Blaine didn’t come on the nine o’clock train I walked up the hill to the garrison. Now and then I saw an officer or a group of officers walking towards me down the hill and my heart started racing again. But Captain Blaine was never among them and by ten o’clock I was back in the gardens, staring at the flowers.
I went over the same futile procedure a second time after meeting the train at midnight and it was one o’clock in the morning before I was back outside the rear door of the boarding-house, waiting for Ruby. It was getting cold by that time and now and then I had an intolerable fit of trembling.
Yet the most vivid thing I can remember about that grotesque wandering of mine is not the cold or the trembling or the impossible racing of my heart every time I heard footsteps in the darkness, but the curious sensation that I had no longer any legs. I had somehow been left with two fleshless husks, above which my body simply drifted emptily along.
It was after three o’clock when Ruby finally appeared. I knew it was Ruby some time before she got to me. It was not merely that I recognised that big floppy straw hat and its magenta rose as she swung it under the one remaining street light.
Ruby, unlike me, was in a happy frame of mind. She was singing.
8
‘Hullo, duckie,’ she said and it was almost as if she knew I’d be waiting there. ‘You’ll miss your beauty sleep if you’re not careful, won’t you?’
Without hesitation she threw back her blonde head and laughed in that rich, air-splitting fashion of hers. Then she swung unsteadily on her feet and did a complete turn on her heels, ending up with her back to me.
