“I wonder who was the genius who thought we needed a compère for this week-end?” said Tossa, sighing.
“Somebody shrewd enough to know how to fill the house,” said Dominic simply. “He fetched the fans in, didn’t he?”
And he had, there was no doubt of that; but not only he, as Tossa promptly pointed out.
“You think all those kids fawning round Lucien Galt came for the music?”
“I wouldn’t know, would I?” responded Dominic crisply. “Did you?” The slight edge to his voice, and the faint knife-prick of disquiet that went with it, startled him. He was accustomed to immensely secure relationships in which jealousy would have been an irrelevant absurdity, and the indignities a lover can inflict on himself came as a surprise to him, and an affront. As for Tossa, she wasn’t yet used to the idea that someone could be in love with her, and she wasn’t alert to possible pitfalls; she missed the smarting note and took the question at its face value.
“Idiot!” she said cheerfully. “Are you lumping me in with that lot? Not that I can’t see their point,” she added honestly, studying the lofty male head islanded among hunting girls. “At least he looks and sounds like a real person. Take his microphone away, and he’s still there.”
Lucien Galt certainly could not easily be ignored, even thus hemmed in at close quarters by his unkempt admirers. The black head tossed impatiently, the lean, relaxed shoulders twitched, like a stallion shaking off gadflies, and for a moment his face was turned towards the two who discussed him. Dark as a gypsy, with heavy brows and arrogant eyes, built like a dancer, light-framed and quick in movement, intolerant of too close approach, and scornful of adulation as of any other stupidity, he carried his nature in his looks, and took no trouble to moderate its impact. He slid from between the ranks of his fans and put the width of an inlaid table between himself and them, leaning with folded arms and braced shoulders against the damask-panelled wall. He had put Felicity off her stride by the abrupt movement; he caught her eye, and apologised with a brilliant, brief smile that transformed his saturnine face for an instant. And that was the only move he had made to charm, and no more to him than a brusque gesture of politeness.
He was twenty-three years old, and already an artist on a world scale. In what other field can you climb the peak so fast? Or so suddenly slither all the way down it again and vanish? Or, once vanished, be so completely forgotten?
“You couldn’t say he went out of his way to please, could you?” whispered Tossa. “He as good as tells them they’re a bore and a nuisance, and they lap it up and come back for more. And just look at the other one, working at it every minute, ladling out the honey like mad. He must just hate Lucien.”
Considering she had never set eyes on either of the pair before, it was a fairly penetrating observation; but all Dominic noticed at the time was the easy way the name Lucien came to her tongue. The popular music world deals in Christian names, of course, and there’s no particular significance in it; still, he noted it, and was annoyed with himself for the resulting smart. Ever since he’d brought his girl home from Oxford with him for the Easter vacation, to meet his parents for the first time, he’d been discovering in himself nervous sensitivities he’d never suspected before, like broken nails forever ready to snag in the fine threads of this most difficult of all relationships. It wasn’t doing his vanity any good.
“Theirs is a cut-throat world,” he said sententiously. “Still, he looks as if he can stand it.”
“Oh, I should think he’s pretty tough,” she agreed serenely.
“With a name like that,” said Dominic, involuntarily rubbing the sting, “he’d have to be.” Who knew better than he did the hard training to be derived in early schooldays from having an unusual and provocative name? As if being a policeman’s son wasn’t enough in itself to keep a boy on his toes!
“From what I read somewhere, he was brought up in an orphanage, right from a baby. His parents were killed in the buzz-bomb raids on London at the end of the last war. They say he thinks the world of his home, though, and goes back there regularly. Not at all a deprived child type. And yet you never know,” said Tossa thoughtfully, “maybe that does account for the way they say he is.”
“I haven’t been reading him up,” said Dominic patiently. “How do they say he is?”
“Oh, like he looks. You-be-damned! Terribly independent, won’t compromise, won’t pretend, a real stormy petrel. The way I heard it, his agent and the recording people, and all the ones who have to work with him took to calling him Lucifer instead of Lucien.”
Lucifer leaned with folded arms against the wine-coloured damask panelling of the long gallery, under the carved black ceiling and the Venetian chandeliers. Rankly dramatised Cothercott portraits hung cloaked and hooded about him, the expensive, perilous and eclectic accumulations of generations of Cothercott collectors were elegantly displayed along the walls at his back, their often lovely and sometimes repulsive furniture fended off teen-age girls from too close contact with him. The dark, rich, Strawberry Hill colours, the heavy gilding, the assured and lavish use of black, all framed him like one of the family pictures. He looked at home here, and in his element, a little sinister, a little dangerous, treacherously winning, like the house itself.
“Now you can’t,” Dickie Meurice was saying persuasively, his incandescent smile trained at full-tooth-power on the warden’s niece, “you really can’t ask us to believe that all these characters were models of industry and virtue. Just take a look at ’em!” He waved a hand towards the family portraits deployed along the wall, and indeed half of them did look like romantic poets and half like conspirators. Even the ladies appeared somewhat overdressed in conscious merit, as though they had something to hide. “Every one of ’em straight out of the wanted file. There ought to be profiles alongside. Don’t tell me they got the fortune that built this pile out of honest trade.”
“Ah, but I think that’s just what they did,” said Felicity with animation, “and just what they didn’t want you to believe about them. They much preferred to put up on their walls something that looked like degenerate aristocrats who’d never done a day’s work in their lives.”
She had abandoned her usual recital already, derailed by Meurice’s facetious comments, and begun to indulge her own suppressed feelings about this formidable place; but it wasn’t at Meurice she was looking, and it wasn’t for him she was lighting up like a pale, flickering candle, her serious grey eyes warming into brilliance. She gazed wide-eyed at Lucifer, leaning there against the wall with his dark brightness dulling the painted faces on either side of his head, and her small, grave face reflected his slight, sardonic smile like a mirror. She was the teen-age fan with a temporary and precarious advantage, and she was using it for all she was worth, bent on catching and holding his attention now or never, and reckless as to how pathetically she showed off in the attempt. She had begun this tour, as on all the other similar occasions, very poised, very grownup, a world-weary sophisticate aged fifteen and a half, but the first time he had looked at her the shell had begun to melt, and let in upon her all the hurts and all the promises of the untasted world of maturity, and from the time that he had smiled at her she had thrown away everything else and bent herself to make an impression. Once for all, and now or never. She hated being fifteen, but she wouldn’t always be fifteen. She looked rather more, she hoped, even now. And he was only twenty-three himself. She knew all about him, he’d been written up lavishly since he became famous, and she hadn’t missed a single article about him if she could help it.