‘Will anyone have a drink?’ said Alex, ‘I fancy it would do us all some good,’ but no one answered and now that Max was no longer with them Angela and Julia had nothing to say, nor had Amabel. He wondered how often this had happened to him before and marvelled again that anyone should be so run after as Max, though never so run after in such an awful room before. Places alter circumstances, he thought, and there was little amusing in being ignored in these surroundings, armchairs that were too deep with too narrow backs and covered in modified plush, that is plush with the pile shaved off so that those chairs were to him like so many clean-shaven port drinkers.
Clean-shaven port drinkers enough, he went on, mixing his drink, one for each girl, that is three chairs but only Amabel sitting on those gouty knees, that sodden lap; and then public house lace curtains to guard them in from fog and how many naked bodies on sentry go underneath adequately, inadequately dressed. Here he pointed his moral. That is what it is to be rich, he thought, if you are held up, if you have to wait then you can do it after a bath in your dressing-gown and if you have to die then not as any bird tumbling dead from its branch down for the foxes, light and stiff, but here in bed, here inside, with doctors to tell you it is all right and with relations to ask if it hurts. Again no standing, no being pressed together, no worry since it did not matter if one went or stayed, no fellow feeling, true, and once more sounds came up from outside to make him think they were singing, no community singing he said to himself, not that even if it did mean fellow feeling. And in this room, as always, it seemed to him there was a sort of bond between the sexes and with these people no more than that, only dull antagonism otherwise. But not in this room he said to himself again, not with that awful central light, that desk at which no one had ever done more than pay bills or write their dentist, no, no, not here, not thus. Never again, he swore, but not aloud, never again in this world because it was too boring and he had done it so many times before.
It was all the fault of these girls. It had been such fun in old days when they had just gone and no one had minded what happened. They had been there to enjoy themselves and they had been friends but if you were girls and went on a party then it seemed to him you thought only of how you were doing, of how much it looked to others you were enjoying yourself and worse than that of how much whoever might be with you could give you reasons for enjoying it. Or, in other words, you competed with each other in how well you were doing well and doing well was getting off with the rich man in the party. Whoever he might be such treatment was bad for him. Max was not what he had been. No one could have people fighting over him and stay himself. It was not Amabel’s fault, she was all right even if she did use him, it was these desperate inexperienced bitches, he thought, who never banded together but fought everyone and themselves and were like camels, they could go on for days without one sup of encouragement. Under their humps they had tanks of self-confidence so that they could cross any desert area of arid prickly pear without one compliment, or dewdrop as they called it in his family, to uphold them. So bad for the desert, he said to himself, developing his argument and this made him laugh aloud.
‘What are you laughing about?’ said Julia, who felt out of whatever Max was doing with himself outside.
‘Oh, nothing,’ he said.
‘I do hate people who go away, darling,’ she said to Amabel, ‘not physically I mean,’ she said, catching herself up, ‘but when they are in a room and then they go and leave one.’ But while Amabel had been ready to take this up where Max was concerned, Alex did not exist for her any more and her answer was to send him for her nail things with another smile just as brilliantly blue as when she had been thinking of him. And now, when for the moment he was gone, silence fell over them with lifeless wings.
While he was away, which was not for long, no one spoke. Amabel looked at her nails from which she was going to take one coloured varnish to put on another. Julia fidgeted with the cuff of what she was wearing and Miss Crevy examined her face in a mirror out of her bag like any jeweller with a precious stone, and it was indeed without price, but it had its ticket and this had Marriage written on it.
When he came back and gave Amabel what she wanted he was struck again by how glum they seemed. He said into their silence, ‘and to think this is supposed to be the happiest time of our lives.’ Julia did not understand. ‘Why now exactly?’ she said from far away. ‘Well, we’re young,’ he said, ‘we’ll never be young again you see.’ ‘Why aren’t you happy then?’ she said, as though she was on an ivory tower. ‘That’s not the point,’ said he, his eyes on Amabel, ‘but I’m so bored.’ ‘Aren’t we all?’ she said and because she thought this sort of conversation silly Miss Crevy broke in by asking Amabel what kind of nail polish she used. Already the acetone she had filled this room with its smell of peardrops like a terrible desert blossom. He coughed, it stifled him.
‘I was wondering if I wouldn’t make them darker,’ she said, ‘like the sloe gin Max gives me out shooting.’
‘What’s that?’ said Angela.
‘It’s more like port, isn’t it?’ Julia said to show she had been out with him too. ‘Oh, do you remember?’ she asked, though as she did it now it was almost automatic as though it was her part she had to play to evoke good times, alone, on top of this ivory tower with his dreaming world beneath, sleeping beauty, all of them folded so she imagined into their thoughts of him. ‘Amabel,’ she said, ‘d’you remember that time it was corked?’ But she said it so low, so quietly this time that no one followed her. Memory is a winding lane and as she went up it, waving them to follow, the first bend in it hid her from them and she was left to pick her flowers alone.
Memory is a winding lane with high banks on which flowers grow and here she wandered in a nostalgic summer evening in deep soundlessness.
Angela went back to her mirror and began touching the tips of her eyelashes with her fingers’ ends. Alex picked up a newspaper and behind it picked his nose.
Night was coming up and it came out of the sea. Over harbours, up the river, by factories, bringing lights in windows and lamps \on the streets until it met this fog where it lay and poured more darkness in.
Fog burdened with night began to roll into this station striking cold through thin leather up into their feet where in thousands they stood and waited. Coils of it reached down like women’s long hair reached down and caught their throats and veiled here and there what they could see, like lovers’ glances. A hundred cold suns switched on above found out these coils where, before the night joined in, they had been smudges and looking up at two of them above was like she was looking down at you from under long strands hanging down from her forehead only that light was cold and these curls tore at your lungs.
It was not comfortable and there were signs that this long wait was beginning to fray tempers. At first there had been patient jokes and then some community singing but nice as these had been and as everyone had felt in taking all this nicely, it was beginning to wear thin until only those who were getting off with girls could say they were enjoying themselves. They searched round and about picking and choosing. ‘I hope you don’t mind my speaking to you,’ they would say or ‘I don’t know when we shall get back, do you?’ or ‘I say this is very unconventional my speaking to you like this,’ although they had wifey and the couple of kids at home. These girls, and many of them had been chosen for their looks where they worked, were so sick and tired, and this kind of approach was so much more reason for tiredness, they turned away with no words to answer them, disgusted.