She noticed in the last intense scrutiny before her mirrors that her mouth was beginning to droop a little at the corners. It was not the disappointed pout that she knew in so many of her friends; it was as the droop you sometimes saw in death masks, when the jaw had been set and the face had stiffened in lines which told those waiting round the bed that the will to live was gone.
At dinner she drank Vichy water and talked like a man. She said that France was no good any more and Peter used a phrase that was just coming into vogue, accusing her of being “fifth column.” They went on to dance at the Suivi. She danced and drank her Vichy water and talked sharply and well like a very clever man. She was wearing a new pair of ear-rings an arrow set with a ruby point, the shaft a thin bar of emerald that seemed to transfix the lobe; she had designed them for herself and had called for them that morning on her way home from seeing her man of business. The girls in the party noticed Angela’s ear-rings; they noticed everything about her clothes; she was the best-dressed woman there, as she usually was, wherever she went.
She stayed to the end of the party and then returned to Grosvenor Square alone. Since the war there was no liftman on duty after midnight. She shut herself in, pressed the button for the mansard floor and rose to the empty, uncommunicative flat. There were no ashes to stir in the grate; illuminated glass coals glowed eternally in an elegant steel basket; the temperature of the rooms never varied, winter or summer, day or night. She mixed herself a large whisky and water and turned on the radio. Tirelessly, all over the world, voices were speaking in their own and in foreign tongues. She listened and fidgeted with the knob; sometimes she got a burst of music, once a prayer. Presently she fetched another whisky and water.
Her maid lived out and had been told not to wait up. When she came in the morning she found Mrs. Lyne in bed but awake; the clothes she had worn the evening before had been carefully hung up, not broadcast about the carpet as they used sometimes to be. “I shan’t be getting up this morning, Grainger,” she said. “Bring the radio here and the newspapers.”
Later she had her bath, returned to bed, took two tablets of Dial and slept, gently, until it was time to fit the black plywood screens into the window frames and hide them behind the velvet draperies.
“What about Mr. and Mrs. Prettyman-Partridge of the Malt House, Grantley Green?”
Basil was, choosing his objectives from the extreme quarters of the Malfrey billeting area. He had struck east and north. Grantley Green lay south where the land of spur and valley fell away and flattened out into a plain of cider orchards and market gardens.
“They’re very old, I think,” said Barbara. “I hardly know them. Come to think of it, I heard something about Mr. Prettyman-Partridge the other day. I can’t remember what.”
“Pretty house? Nice things in it?”
“As far as I remember.”
“People of regular habits? Fond of quiet?”
“Yes, I suppose so.”
“They’ll do.”
Basil bent over the map tracing the road to Grantley Green which he would take next day.
He found the Malt House without difficulty. It had been a brew house in the seventeenth century and later was converted to a private house. It had a large, regular front of dressed stone, facing the village green. The curtains and the china in the window proclaimed that it was in “good hands.” Basil noted the china with approval large, black Wedgewood urns valuable and vulnerable and no doubt well-loved. When the door opened it disclosed a view straight through the house to a white lawn and a cedar tree laden with snow.
The door was opened by a large and lovely girl. She had fair curly hair and a fair skin, huge, pale blue eyes, a large, shy mouth. She was dressed in a tweed suit and woollen jumper as though for country exercise, but the soft, fur-lined boots showed that she was spending the morning at home. Everything about this girl was large and soft and round and ample. A dress shop might not have chosen her as a mannequin but she was not a fat girl; a more civilized age would have found her admirably proportioned; Boucher would have painted her half clothed in a flutter of blue and pink draperies, a butterfly hovering over a breast of white and rose.
“Miss Prettyman-Partridge?”
“No. Please don’t say you’ve come to sell something. It’s terribly cold standing here and if I ask you in I shall have to buy it.”
“I want to see Mr. and Mrs. Prettyman-Partridge.”
“They’re dead. At least one is; the other sold us the house last summer. Is that all, please? I don’t want to be rude but I must shut the door or freeze.”
So that was what Barbara had heard about the Malt House. “May I come in?”
“Oh dear,” said this splendid girl, leading him into the room with the Wedgewood urns. “Is it something to buy or forms to fill in or just a subscription? If it’s the first two I can’t help because my husband’s away with the yeomanry; if it’s a subscription I’ve got some money upstairs. I’ve been told to give the same as Mrs. Andrews, the doctor’s wife. If you haven’t been to her yet, come back when you find what she’s good for.”
Everything in the room was new; that is to say the paint was new and the carpets and the curtains, and the furniture had been newly put in position. There was a very large settee in front of the fireplace whose cushions, upholstered in toile-de-Jouy, still bore the impress of that fine young woman; she had been lying there when Basil rang the bell. He knew that if he put his hand in the round concavity where her hip had rested, it would still be warm; and that further cushion had been tucked under her arm. The book she had been reading was on the lambskin hearth-rug. Basil could reconstruct the position, exactly, where she had been sprawling with the languor of extreme youth.
The girl seemed to sense an impertinence in Basil’s scrutiny. “Anyway,” she said. “Why aren’t you in khaki?”
“Work of national importance,” said Basil. “I am the district billeting offer. I’m looking for a suitable home for three evacuated children.”
“Well, I hope you don’t call this suitable. I ask you. I can’t even look after Bill’s sheepdog. I can’t even look after myself very well. What should I do with three children?”
“These are rather exceptional children.”
“They’d have to be. Anyway I’m not having any thank you. There was a funny little woman called Harkness came to call here yesterday. I “do think people might let up on calling in wartime, don’t you? She told me the most gruesome things about some children that were sent to her. They had to bribe the man, literally bribe him with money, to get the brutes moved.”
“These are the same children.”
“Well for God’s sake, why pick on me?”
Her great eyes held him dazzled, like a rabbit before the headlights of a car. It was a delicious sensation.
“Well, actually, I picked on the Prettyman-Partridges…I don’t even know your name.”
“I don’t know yours.”
“Basil Seal.”
“Basil Seal?” There was a sudden interest in her voice. “How very funny.”
“Why funny?”
“Only that I used to hear a lot about you once. Weren’t you a friend of a girl called Mary Nichols?”
“Was I?” Was he? Mary Nichols? Mary Nichols?
“Well, she used to talk a lot about you. She was much older than me. I used to think her wonderful when I was sixteen. You met her in a ship coming from Copenhagen.”
“I daresay. I’ve been to Copenhagen.”
The girl was looking at him now with a keen and not wholly flattering attention. “So you’re Basil Seal,” she said. “Well I never…”
Four years ago in South Kensington, at Mary Nichols home, there was a little back sitting-room on the first floor which was Mary’s room. Here Mary entertained her girl friends to tea. Here she had come, day after day, to sit before the gas fire and eat Fullers’ walnut cake and hear the details of Mary’s Experience. “But aren’t you going to see him again?” she asked. “No, it was something so beautiful, so complete in itself” Mary had steeped herself in romantic literature since her Experience. “I don’t want to spoil it.” “I don’t think he sounds half good enough for you, darling.” “He’s absolutely different. You mustn’t think of him as one of the young men one meets at dances…” The girl did not go to dances yet, and Mary knew it. Mary’s tales of the young men she met at dances had been very moving, but not as moving as this tale of Basil Seal. The name had become graven on her mind.