“How long have I got to go on sitting next to that equerry of Theodoric’s, Bill?” she asked. “I’ve been through his favourite dance tunes at dinner last night. I can’t stand them at lunch again to-day. I’m not as young as I was.”
“Talk to him about birds and beasts,” said Stringham. “I’ve already tried that with great success — the flora and fauna of England and Wales.”
Mrs. Wentworth seemed not greatly amused by this facetiousness. Her demeanour was less friendly than Peggy Stepney’s, and she did no more than glance in my direction when we were introduced. I was impressed by Barnby’s temerity in tackling so formidable an objective. Luncheon was announced at that moment, so that the four of us temporarily parted company.
The dining-room was hung with sixteenth-century tapestries. I supposed that they might be Gobelins from their general appearance, blue and crimson tints set against lemon yellow. They illustrated the Seven Deadly Sins. I found myself seated opposite Luxuria, a failing principally portrayed in terms of a winged and horned female figure, crowned with roses, holding between finger and thumb one of her plump, naked breasts, while she gazed into a looking-glass, supported on one side by Cupid and on the other by a goat of unreliable aspect. The four-footed beast of the Apocalypse, with his seven dragon-heads dragged her triumphal car, which was of great splendour. Hercules, bearing his club, stood by, somewhat gloomily watching this procession, his mind filled, no doubt, with disquieting recollections. In the background, the open doors of a pillared house revealed a four-poster bed, with hangings rising to an apex, under the canopy of which a couple lay clenched in a priapic grapple. Among trees, to the right of the composition, further couples and groups, three or four of them at least, were similarly occupied in smaller houses and Oriental tents; or, in one case, simply on the ground.
I had been placed next to Rosie Manasch, who was, at the moment of seating herself, engaged in talk with her neighbour on the far side; and — curious to investigate some of the by-products of indulgence depicted in this sequence of animated, and at times enigmatic, incidents — I found myself fully occupied in examining unobtrusively the scenes spread out on the tapestry. There had been, I was dimly aware, some rearrangement of places on my right-hand side, where a chair had remained empty for a moment or two. Now a girl sat down there, next to me, to whom I had not yet, so far as I knew, been introduced, with some muttered words from Truscott, who had instigated the change of position — possibly to relieve Mrs. Wentworth from further strain of making conversation with Prince Theodoric’s equerry.
“I don’t think you remember me,” she said, almost at once, in a curiously harsh voice that brought back, in fact, that same sense of past years returning that Stringham’s inquiry for matches had caused me at the coffee-stall. “I used to be called Jean Templer. You are a friend of Peter’s, and you came to stay with us years ago.”
It was true that I had not recognised her. I think we might even have exchanged words without my guessing her identity, so little had she been in my thoughts, so unexpected a place was this to find her. That was not because she had changed greatly. On the contrary, she still seemed slim, attenuated, perhaps not — like the two other girls with whom I had been talking, and round whom my thoughts, before the distraction of the tapestry, had been drifting — exactly a “beauty;” but all the same, mysterious and absorbing: certainly pretty enough, so far as that went, just as she had seemed when I had visited the Templers after leaving school. There was perhaps a touch of the trim secretary of musical comedy. I saw also, with a kind of relief, that she seemed to express none of the qualities I had liked in Barbara, There was a sense of restraint here, a reserve at present unpredictable. I tried to excuse my bad manners in having failed at once to remember her. She gave one of those quick, almost masculine laughs. I was not at all sure how I felt about her, though conscious suddenly that being in love with Barbara, painful as some of its moments had been, now seemed a rather amateurish affair; just as my feelings for Barbara had once appeared to me so much more mature than those previously possessed for Suzette; or, indeed, for Jean herself.
“You were so deep in the tapestry,” she said.
“I was wondering about the couple in the little house on the hill.”
“They have a special devil — or is he a satyr? — to themselves.”
“He seems to be collaborating, doesn’t he?”
“Just lending a hand, I think.”
“A guest, I suppose — or member of the staff?”
“Oh, a friend of the family,” she said. “All newly-married couples have someone of that sort about. Sometimes several. Didn’t you know? I see you can’t be married.”
“But how do you know they are newly married?”
“They’ve got such a smart little house,” she said. “They must be newly married. And rather well off, too, I should say.”
I was left a trifle breathless by this exchange, not only because it was quite unlike the kind of luncheon-table conversation I had expected to come my way in that particular place, but also on account of its contrast with Jean’s former deportment, when we had met at her home. At that moment I hardly considered the difference that age had made, no doubt in both of us. She was, I thought, about a couple of years younger than myself. Feeling unable to maintain this show of detachment towards human — and, in especial, matrimonial — affairs, I asked whether it was not true that she had married Bob Duport. She nodded; not exactly conveying, it seemed to me, that by some happy chance their union had introduced her to an unexpected terrestrial paradise.
“Do you know Bob?”
“I just met him years ago with Peter.”
“Have you seen Peter lately?”
“Not for about a year. He has been doing very well in the City, hasn’t he? He always tells me so.”
She laughed.
“Oh, yes,” she said. “He has been making quite a lot of money, I think. That is always something. But I wish he would settle down, get married, for instance.”
I was aware of an unexpected drift towards intimacy, although this sudden sense of knowing her all at once much better was not simultaneously accompanied by any clear portrayal in my own mind of the kind of person she might really be. Perhaps intimacy of any sort, love or friendship, impedes all exactness of definition. For example, Mr. Deacon’s character was plainer to me than Barnby’s, although by then I knew Barnby better than I knew Mr. Deacon. In short, the persons we see most clearly are not necessarily those we know best. In any case, to attempt to describe a woman in the broad terms employable for a man is perhaps irrational.
“I went to a party in your London house given by Mrs. Andriadis.”
“How very grand,” she said. “What was it like? We let the place almost as soon as we took it, because Bob had to go abroad. It’s rather a horrid house, really. I hate it, and everything in it.”
I did not know how to comment on this attitude towards her own home, which — as I had agreed upon that famous night with the young man with the orchid — certainly left, in spite of its expensive air, a good deal to be desired. I said that I wished she had been present at the party.
“Oh, us,” she said laughing again, as if any such eventuality were utterly unthinkable. “Besides, we were away. Bob was arguing about nickel or aluminium or something for months on end. As a matter of fact, I think we shall have to sue Mrs. Andriadis when he comes back. She has raised absolute hell in the house. Burnt the boiler out and broken a huge looking-glass.”