“You admired the Spenser? I’m so very glad.”
“So much. And now,” she continued with an enchanting air of diffidence, “I’m going to ask you something that you’ll think quite preposterous. I’ve come with an invitation. You are, I know, great friends of my ward’s — of Dicky’s — and I, like you, am a creature of impulse. I want you both—please—to come to my little party this evening. Drinks and a handful of ridiculous chums at half-past six. Now please be very sweet and spoil me on my birthday. Please, say yes.”
Octavius turned quite pink with gratification. He didn’t hear his niece who came near to him and said hurriedly, “Unk, I don’t think we…”
“I have never,” Octavius said, “in my life attended a theatrical party. It is something quite outside my experience. Really it’s extraordinarily kind of you to think of inviting us. My niece, no doubt, is an initiate. Though not at such an exalted level, I think, Nelly, my love?”
Anelida had begun to say, “It’s terribly kind…” but Miss Bellamy was already in full spate. She had taken Octavius impulsively by the hands and was beaming into his face. “You will? Now, isn’t that big of you? I was so afraid I might be put in my place or that you would be booked up. And I’m not! And you aren’t! Isn’t that wonderful!”
“We are certainly, free,” Octavius said. “Anelida’s theatre is not open on Monday evenings. She had offered to help me with our new catalogue. I shall be enchanted.”
“Wonderful!” Miss Bellamy gaily repeated. “And now I must run. Au revoir, both of you. Till this evening!”
She did, almost literally, run out of the shop filled with a delicious sense of having done something altogether charming. “Kind!” she thought. “That’s what I’ve been. Kind as kind. Dicky will be so touched. And when he sees that rather dreary rather inarticulate girl in his own setting — well, if there has been anything, it’ll peter out on the spot.”
She saw the whole thing in a gratifying flash of clairvoyance: the last fumes of temperament subsided in the sunshine of her own loving-kindness. She returned to the house and found Richard in the hall.
“Darling!” she cried. “All settled! I’ve seen your buddies and asked them. The old fuddy-duddy’s heaven, isn’t he? Out of this world. And the girl’s the nicest little thing. Are you pleased?”
“But,” Richard said, amazed. “Are they…? Did Anelida say they’d come?”
“My dear, you don’t imagine, do you, that a bit-part fill-in at the Bonaventure is going to turn down an invitation to my birthday party!”
“It’s not a bit-part,” Richard said. “They’re doing Pygmalion and she’s playing Eliza.”
“Poor child.”
He opened his mouth and shut it again.
“There’s something,” Miss Bellamy said, “so endlessly depressing about those clubs. Blue jeans, beards and a snack-bar, no doubt.” He didn’t answer and she said kindly, “Well! We mustn’t let them feel too lost, must we? I’ll tell Maurice and Charles to be kind. And now, sweetie, I’m off to keep my date with the Great Play.”
Richard said hurriedly, “There’s something I wanted to alter… Could we…”
“Darling! You’re such heaven when you panic. I’ll read it and then I’ll put it in your study. Blessings!”
“Mary — Mary, thank you so much.”
She kissed him lightly and almost ran upstairs to read his play and to telephone Pinky and Bertie. She would tell them that she couldn’t bear to think of any cloud of dissonance overshadowing her birthday and she would add that she expected them at six-thirty. That would show them how ungrudging she could be. “After all,” she thought, “they’ll be in a tizzy because if I did do my stuff with the Management…” Reassured on all counts she went into her room.
Unfortunately, neither Bertie nor Pinky was at home, but she left messages. It was now one o’clock. Half an hour before luncheon in which to relax and skim through Richard’s play. Everything was going, in the event, very well. “I’ll put me boots up,” she said to herself in stage cockney and did so on the chaise-longue in the bow-window of her room. She noticed that once again the azaleas were infected and reminded herself to spray them with Slaypest. She turned her attention, now growing languid, to the play. Husbandry in Heaven. Not a very good title, she thought. Wasn’t it a quotation from something? The dialogue seemed to be quite unlike Dicky: a bit Sloane Square, in fact. The sort of dialogue that is made up of perfectly understandable phrases that taken together add up to a kind of egg-headed Goon show. Was it or was it not in verse? She read Dicky’s description of the leading woman.
“Mimi comes on. She might be nineteen or twenty-nine. Her beauty is bone-deep. Seductive without luxury. Virginal and dangerous.”
“Hum!” thought Miss Bellamy.
“Hodge comes out of the Prompt corner. Wolf-whistles. Gestures unmistakably and with feline intensity.”
Now, why had that line stirred up some obscure misgivings? She turned the pages. It was certainly an enormously long part.
“Mimi: Can this be April, then, or have I, so early in the day misinterpreted my directive?”
“Hell!” thought Miss Bellamy.
But she read one or two of the lines aloud and decided that they might have something. As she flipped over the pages she became more and more satisfied that Dicky had tried to write a wonderful part for her. Different. It wouldn’t do, of course, but at least the loving intention was there.
The typescript tipped over and fell across her chest. Her temperaments always left her tired. Just before she dropped off she suffered one of those mysterious jolts that briefly galvanize the body. She had been thinking about Pinky. It may be fanciful to suppose that her momentary discomfort was due to a spasm of hatred rather than to any physical cause. However that may be, she fell at last into an unenjoyable doze.
Florence came in. She had the flask of scent called Formidable in her hands. She tip-toed across the room, put it on the dressing-table and stood for a moment looking at Miss Bellamy. Beyond the chaise-longue in the bay-window were ranks of tulips and budding azaleas and among them stood the tin of Slaypest. To secure it, Florence had to lean across her mistress. She did so, delicately, but Miss Bellamy, at that moment, stirred. Florence drew back and tip-toed out of the room.
Old Ninn was on the landing. She folded her arms and stared up at Florence.
“Asleep,” Florence said, with a jerk of her head. “Gone to bye-byes.”
“Always the same after tantrums,” said Old Ninn. She added woodenly, “She’ll be the ruin of that boy.”
“She’ll be the ruin of herself,” said Florence, “if she doesn’t watch her step.”
When Miss Bellamy had gone, Anelida, in great distress, turned to her uncle. Octavius was humming a little Elizabethan catch and staring at himself in a Jacobean looking-glass above his desk.
“Captivating!” he said. “Enchanting! Upon my word, Nell, it must be twenty years since a pretty woman made much of me. I feel, I promise you, quite giddily inclined. And the whole thing-so spontaneous: so touchingly impulsive! We have widened our horizon, my love.”