All at once I saw that Fay was watching me. She was smoking. The smoke hung round her, and she was looking through it at me. I apologized for being a bad host, but she didn’t answer; she just went on looking through the smoke. Her mouth was all plastered with paint, but the rest of her face was pale. She looked like something artificial in a glass case-beautifully finished and all that, but you wonder what on earth any one would do with it if they had it.
Just as I was beginning to feel annoyed, she said,
“Why did you ask me to dine with you?”
I said the obvious thing.
“Why didn’t you ask Peter’s friend?” she went on- “Clarissa what’s-her name.”
“Corinna Lee.”
“Who is she?”
“An American cousin of mine.”
“And a friend of Peter’s?”
“Yes.”
“What did you tell her about me?”
“I didn’t tell her anything.”
She put her elbows on the table and leaned towards me.
“Did you think I was rude to her?”
“What do you think yourself?”
“I can be ruder than that,” she said, and laughed.
I didn’t like the look in her eye. When I didn’t answer, she began to talk about Rena La Touche the dancer, who had just come in with a boy who looked as if he oughtn’t to have left school, a young ass with pale hair and eyes like a love-sick rabbit. Fay told me his income, and her salary, and how many lovers she’d had in a year, and just what she’d paid for the feather frock she was wearing. She was all feathers and pearls, and bare back, and enormous eyes like pools of ink.
And then all of a sudden she asked,
“Did you tell her I was Peter’s wife?”
“Rena?” I said.
“Don’t be so outrageously stupid! That Clarissa girl.”
“Corinna Lee?”
“It’s all the same thing. Did you tell her?”
“No.”
“Then you’re not to. Do you hear?”
I told her what I thought about this idiot game of secrecy, but she only began to talk about Rena La Touche again.
After dinner we danced. Fay dances beautifully, and the floor was topping. She taught me the new steps. She can be very attractive when she likes. I can understand why Peter…It’s perfectly asinine of them not to give their marriage out.
When we were walking home, I thought she must be thinking me a brute, because the last time we really talked she told me she was absolutely up against it and she asked me to help her. Helping her was going to mean five hundred pounds, and as I hadn’t five hundred pence, it didn’t seem much good talking about it. It was one of the things that made me dally with Z.10 and his offer, so I hadn’t really forgotten Fay-or if I had, it was only for a few hours. It seems stupid to have forgotten a person when you’re actually dining and dancing with her. The fact is, the dining and the dancing rather went to my head-it was like going back to a bit out of the old life-and though I was talking to Fay and dancing with her, I wasn’t thinking about her at all; the nearest I got to her was Peter. When we were walking home I sort of woke up.
It was Fay who wanted to walk. Personally, I was feeling as if I could have walked to Brighton but I should have thought a taxi would have been more in her line. I was feeling a bit reckless, and I thought the exes would stand a taxi all right. She said no, she wanted to walk, so we started off, and for about a mile neither of us said a word.
It was a topping night, warm and windy, with the wind sounding like wings. Fay kept close to me, and all at once I heard her sigh, so I asked her if she was tired, and she said “No” and sighed again. And then I began to feel a brute. I was just going to say something when she pressed up against me and said,
“Have you really come into some money?”
I said “No-I’ve got a job-and part of the job is going and dining at Leonardo’s.”
“With me?” she sounded rather frightened.
“With any one.”
“How odd! I was hoping-Car, is it a good job?”
“I don’t know yet.” Then I went on, “Fay, did you mean all those things you said the other day?”
She slipped her arm through mine.
“Oh, I don’t know. What did I say? I’m damned miserable. Did I say that?”
I felt her shiver up against me.
“You said-”
“What’s the good of talking about what I said?”
“You said you must have five hundred pounds.”
“Can you give it me?”
“No-I can’t.”
“Then what’s the good of talking about it?”
“The man you mentioned-Fosicker-what is he like?” I don’t know what made me think of that, it just came into my head.
“I never mentioned any one.”
“You did.”
“I don’t know any one called Fosicker.”
“You said you got money from him.”
“Are you trying to insult me?”
“You said he paid you.”
She let go of my arm and pushed herself away from me so violently that I stumbled on the curb and nearly lost my balance.
“Hold on!” I said-I was furious. “You told me he paid you for distributing dope.”
She turned round on me in a sort of whirling fury.
“How dare you?” Then she seemed to catch hold of herself and calm down. It would have been more natural if she had gone on being angry. But she didn’t; she laughed and slipped over to me and took my arm again. “You’ve been dreaming, Car darling,” she said.
I wondered what on earth her game was. I could see she was frightened. Had she frightened herself-or had Fosicker frightened her? And who was Fosicker?
XV
September 20th-I got a registered letter next morning. There were five more one-pound notes and two lines of type on a sheet of plain foolscap. They were:
Repeat last night. Post this back to me at old address. Z.10.
I did what I was told-posted his own letter back to Box Z.10, International Employment Exchange, and the rest.
This is one of the things I don’t like-his first letter disappearing, and his second to be posted back to him. The more I go over the whole thing, the less I can make of it and the less I like it.
1. I have a printed advertisement thrust on me in the street. “Do you want to earn £500? If so, apply to Box Z.10, 187 Falcon Street.”
2. I write to Z.10 and I go to Falcon Street to make inquiries, and I hear Bobby Markham talking to a little Jew tobacconist about Benno having planted some one with something. No reasonable doubt that they were speaking about me and the advertisement. I vamoose without being seen-or at any rate I hope so.
3. Letter from Z.10 (signed Smith) asking me to ring up a number afterwards identified as paper shop.
4. Telephone conversation with Z.10 Smith. Tells me to be at corner of Churt Row and Olding Crescent (Putney) ten o’clock same evening.
5. I keep appointment. Am taken by car a long way (Linwood). Anna in car-not recognized till later. Driver perhaps Benno-not sure.
6. Interview in hut on Linwood Edge with Bobby Markham, and then Anna. Anna offers £500 if I will forge my uncle’s name and go to prison for it. She has a nerve!
7. Anna and I walk through Linwood; she to the house, I to village street, where driver and car are waiting- engine trouble. Some one passes in car and goes up to the house-probably Dr. Monk. Sounded like his old Puffing Billy, but I should think it must be dead by now. Wonder if my uncle is ill.
8. Letter next morning from Z.10 Smith, apologizing for having failed to meet me-accident to his car. Asks me to meet some place that evening.