‘But what about your bath salts?’ Alex said just as Claire and Evelyna came in from where they had been telephoning.
‘Have I packed mine?’ said Claire, alive to every danger, ‘how enchanting to see you darling,’ she said to Amabel, wondering why she was here. ‘Do they let bath salts through the customs free? Is if true there’s alcohol in them to freshen up one’s skin?’ Amabel explained she was going to have a bath, she was asking Alex to ring up her maid to bring her crystals, and Robert Hignam offered her a drink which she refused. She never drank spirits and very little wine, she was serious about her complexion.
Now even Miss Crevy began to notice how more than strained they had become. Alex’s voice cracked when Amabel’s maid could not understand about her bath salts; he kept on saying yes she is going to have a bath. Evelyn had only just greeted her and this feeling was intensified when Claire began to explain about her Auntie May and how she was so ill.
‘We have had the doctor, Robert did you pay him, what does one do about hotel doctors, Amabel, do you know, or do they put it on the bill?’ She looked round and saw her husband was not listening, he was staring at Amabel. ‘Yes,’ she went on, ‘it really is too strange, Evelyn and I can’t make her out at all, it’s so unlike her.’ And then, more embarrassing still, she realized Amabel was not listening.
‘So here we are, my dears,’ she said at large, ‘stuck here without …’ — our host she was about to say and then thought better of it, it was better not to mention him, it always was. ‘Without any chance to get away,’ she made it into and then bit her lip; put that way Amabel might take it they were all here to escape her which of course in one sense they were, but then what could it matter when people were as rude as Amabel.
But it was not rudeness, not positively that in her case. It is true she did not bother but then she did not expect it of others so that it was almost flattering when she did take notice. At any rate Alex was pleasantly surprised when he had put back the receiver to find Amabel thanking him before he had time to let her know her maid was coming round directly. He did not see she had done this to stop the others knowing. But he did get as far as to feel bewildered; for while he had been sure Amabel would not be coming with them he could not be certain. When she had come in so naturally he had been almost ready to believe Max had changed his plans again as only rich people can and do. Now in his conversation with her maid he had found out she had only just made up her mind to come otherwise she would have had her things packed some time ago or anyway have given orders. It might have been that Max telephoned her but that was not likely if Julia had been with him all this time. So he was embarrassed to know what he should do, whether or no he should get word to Max that Amabel was here, as it seemed likely Amabel had come unknown to Max.
And Alex had that shock when one’s thought is answered by someone present, so much so he wondered if, without knowing, he had let what he was thinking out. For what he had almost decided was to let things well alone, he had all but made up his mind he did not know enough to interfere by tipping Max the wink. But when he had been thanked for telephoning, and by her, it was so like gratitude for keeping other’s secrets and for not doing what he could and should, he had no alternative but to decide that he must warn him.
As for Amabel, she was not going to bother about the others, excepting Alex. Miss Crevy would have been surprised to learn Amabel had spoken to her only to make secrets and because she guessed the other girls would be against her coming, so that it seemed policy to make one friend at once. Also she wanted to make sure she would not be left alone with Max before she had found out how things were. Miss Crevy would have been surprised as well to learn that Amabel classed her equally with the others and lower, and with contempt as being more out for a free trip abroad because she could less afford to go if she was not taken. Amabel was a money snob. So that Amabel’s silence, which Angela in her ignorance might call poise, was no more than wariness coloured by distaste for her own sex. She was here to manage Max and was not going to bother with anyone else but Alex.
At the same time no one can be sure they know what others are thinking any more than anyone can say where someone is when they are asleep. And if behind that blank face and closed eyelids and a faint smile on closed lips they are wandering it may be in Tartary, it is their stillness which makes it all possible to one’s wildest dreams.
In her silence and in seeming unapproachable, although he realized it might be studied, and Alex admired her so much he was almost jealous of her, it seemed to him she was not unlike ground so high, so remote it had never been broken and that her outward beauty lay in that if any man had marked her with intimacy as one treads on snow, then that trace which would be left could not fail to invest him, whoever he might be, with some part of those unvulgar heights so covered, not so much of that last field of snow before any summit as of a high memory unvisited, and kept.
He realized she always worked on him by being there and this woke him to how embarrassed they all were except for Angela and Amabel. Again he offered chairs and drinks for Claire and Evelyn but he was alone in it this time, Robert was too wary to make any move when he saw his wife was fussed.
‘Where on earth have you been, darlings?’ Amabel said to them as though they were at fault, and Claire, who no longer wanted to talk about Auntie May in front of her, said ‘Oh, just outside.’
Evelyn Henderson, who was in fact the least well off of all, said to herself why does this woman always make me feel like a schoolgirl.
If people vary at all then it can only be in the impressions they leave on others’ minds, and if their turns of phrases are similar and if their rooms are done up by the same firm and, when they are women, if they go to the same shops, what is it makes them different, Evelyna asked herself and then gave the answer: money. Amabel sat there without saying anything; not, so it seemed to Evelyn, because there was anything special about her but because, by being rich or, better still, through having piled up riches in presents from young men, or both, the newspapers had picked her out and now there was no getting away from it, Amabel had grown to be like some beauty spot in Wales. Whether it was pretty or suited to all tastes people would come distances to see it and be satisfied when it lay before them. Amabel had been sanctified, so she thought, by constant printed references as though it was of general concern what she looked like or how beautiful she might be. But then there was no question of beauty here, Evelyn thought, because there were no features, and it could not be called poise, and then she became offensive in her thoughts of her. But Amabel had that azure glance of fame and was secure.
She said: ‘How on earth did Max ever come to take this awful room?’ This was another way to ignore Claire and Evelyn, to talk to them without any mention of what they had been saying and Evelyn, when she found herself agreeing, as she did almost automatically, despised herself for playing up to her. It was a question of prestige, she thought. When you come on a famous view you feel bound to praise it as you do with some famous beauty when you see one. ‘And I agree with what any well-known lovely says because she is so handsome,’ she said to herself, ‘it’s not as if I was pretending she was not as beautiful as all that. I have to go and publicly agree with everything she says because she has said it. Really it’s craven.’
Angela, who had by now forgotten Mr Adams she was so excited at being, so she thought, in league with Amabel, tried to put in her word for Max as though she had been confided in and was a party to their intimate affairs.