31: A Practical Joke?
THERE weren’t many dates which Margaret and I celebrated: there was one that November which I couldn’t celebrate with her. The twenty-eighth. First anniversary. For her it meant nothing but pain and extreme isolation – the hospital waiting-room, the dead blank, no news. She didn’t wish to be reminded. So I called in at my club and, avoiding friends and acquaintances, stood myself a drink.
That was the most private of celebrations. After all, it had been the most private of events.
I knew by now, not that it was a surprise, that traumas didn’t last in their first efficacy. This trauma didn’t keep me immune from hurt, as it had done for a time, when I had only to recall the date and bring back oblivion. One’s character and one’s nature weren’t so easily modified or tamed. Traumas weren’t so magical as that. And yet, they weren’t, or this one wasn’t, quite unavailing, and the effect took some time to fade right away. Not always but often I could ride over disappointments and worries, just as people more harmonious than I was had been able to do, without effort, all their lives.
That autumn (it hadn’t always been so) Margaret was worrying more about Maurice than I was about Charles. Walking alone in the park I wasn’t thinking of what he used to say to me when he accompanied me. Which added to my well-being and perhaps if he had known, to his.
After Maurice’s visit with his wife, Margaret heard of them only by letter. And it was not until December, when his term had ended, that we had a sight of Charles. He called on us ostensibly to pick up letters, but really to invite us to dinner the following week at Chester Row.
As we got ready to go, we hadn’t an inkling of what to expect. Margaret said it was like going out when she was a young woman, not on terms with social occasions. She was trying to dissemble that she was more than a little tense. When we arrived, we might not have known what to expect: but, whatever we had expected, it wouldn’t have borne any resemblance to this.
The housekeeper, beaming, took our coats from us in the bright hall. ‘Mrs Calvert wonders if you would mind going straight up to the drawing-room, Lady Eliot.’ Inside which, the first thing we saw was Azik Schiff, sitting on the sofa, looking unusually subdued. Muriel came towards us. ‘I’m so very pleased you could come, Aunt Meg,’ she said, giving us formal kisses. She was wearing a long frock, so that Margaret appeared distinctly underdressed: and, I noticed by a sideways glance, so did Rosalind, who was installed in an armchair. I wondered how long it was since Rosalind had gone out to dinner and found herself underdressed.
‘You’ll both probably have Scotch, won’t you?’ said Charles standing beside Muriel, polite and decorous in a dark suit. Though he and Muriel drank so little, they had provided for all our tastes: both Azik and Rosalind had been given Campari, presumably from domestic knowledge acquired by Muriel. As though to make us feel at home, which was the last thing any of their guests were feeling, Charles joined us in taking a whisky, which must have been another display of courtesy.
Two sofas, three armchairs, made an enclave at the street end of the long room. Muriel disposed us and then sat in one of the armchairs, utterly composed, like one presiding over a salon. Charles took his place near to the shelf of drinks: just once I thought or fancied I caught a flashing dark-eyed glance.
They each asked host-like questions, but the conversation didn’t flow. Margaret, trying to sound easy, remarked that the room was nice and warm. Yes, said Muriel, the heating system was efficient. ‘Actually,’ she went on, ‘we both like it a little cooler. But it was a case of majority opinion, we thought. So we stepped it up five degrees. I do hope that was right?’
Her eyes fixed themselves earnestly on her mother, then came back to Margaret. Nothing could have been more thoughtful or made them more uncomfortable. ‘Don’t mind about me,’ said Rosalind, out of countenance. ‘Of course we mind about you,’ said Muriel in a clear voice. An instant of silence. Up in the square, the church clock struck once: it must have been a quarter to eight.
‘How quiet it is here,’ I remarked, thinking it was not the most brilliant of conversational openings. Charles said: ‘At the weekends’ (this was a Saturday night), ‘we might as well be living in a small country town.’
I didn’t have the presence of mind to enquire when he had ever lived in a country town, small or otherwise. Azik made a contribution, standard Mitteleuropa, not Azik’s own uninhibited self, about the charms, the variety, the changes every quarter-mile, the village shopping streets, of London.
It went on like that, after we moved downstairs to the dining-room. I sat on Muriel’s right, Azik on her left, Rosalind next to me, Margaret next to Azik, Charles at the head of the table.
‘Six is the easiest number, isn’t it?’ Muriel said with demure pleasure.
The food was excellent, soup, grouse, a savoury. They had acquired some good claret, such as Azik and I might have provided. It was all as formal as any small dinner-party we were likely to go to. In fact, it was appreciably more formal, since not many of our friends had the domestic help for this kind of entertaining, nor the peculiar deadpan style which Muriel found natural and which, that night at least, it amused Charles to adopt. It all seemed – would they have done this for anyone else’s benefit? – like an elaborate, long-drawn-out practical joke: the kind of joke in which Muriel’s father used to involve himself, so that sometimes it looked as though he had forgotten that it was a joke at all.
The conversation round the dinner table was stylised also. Azik and Charles had an exchange about Asian politics, on which Azik was knowledgeable because of his business. They might have been meeting for the first time. Neither gave much away about his political opinions, or whether he had any opinions whatever. Enquiries about Muriel’s child, not fended off, politely replied to: yes, he was bright and flourishing. Enquiries from me about Charles’ friends: those were fended off, though Charles gave an amiable smile as he did so. The only direct talk, propriety for once relaxed, came when Azik produced the precious, the inevitable topic of his son. Next October, 1967, David would be going to his public school. They had finally decided on Westminster: despite all their resolves, they couldn’t let him go away from home: he might win a scholarship (‘certain to,’ said Charles with professional competence), but even so he would enter as a day boy. For a while Azik’s parental passion dominated the table and the family relations spread among us all. At the end of the meal, however, we had returned to a discussion of jewellery.
Then Muriel gazed along the table towards Charles.
‘Darling,’ she called out, ‘will you bring the others up when you’re ready?’
‘Of course,’ said Charles.
Margaret gave me a stupefied glance before she went with the other two women out of the dining-room. Now I felt sure that this evening must have been prepared for, though it seemed due more to Muriel’s sense of – humour? mischief? even impudence? than to Charles’. He might have thought up a charade, but he wouldn’t have carried it so far. He might have considered that last touch inartistic. He knew as well as anyone there that Margaret and I had never separated men from women after dinner since we set up house. Nevertheless, still grave and decorous, he apologised to Azik and me for not being able to offer us port; could we make do with brandy?
Until we left, I didn’t hear an intimate word spoken. Chat when the party re-formed in the drawing-room, Charles having kept us below for a precise fifteen minutes. Chat admirably tailored for a dinner party in a remote diplomatic mission, third secretary and wife doing their duty by elderly compatriots. Once Rosalind asked her daughter: ‘What are you doing for Christmas?’ – where the ‘you’ was intended to be in the singular.