My spirits sank. For the first time I realised Jack's colossal advantages. I thought that I was big and strong; but there was a lot more of the house than there was of me. It was a physical extension of Jack, at least fifty thousand pound's worth of brick and mortar stating his superiority over me as a suitor.
The Aisgills' house stood at the end of a narrow dirt road just off St. Clair Park. It was 1930 functional in white concrete, with a flat roof. There were no other houses near it, and it stood on the top of a shelf of ground with the moors behind it and the park in front of it. It looked expensive, built to order, but out of place, like a Piccadilly tart walking the moors in high heels and nylons.
Inside it was decorated in white and off-white with steel and rubber chairs which were more comfortable than they appeared. There were three brightly coloured paintings on the walls: two of them were what seemed to me no more than a mix-up of lines and blobs and circles but the other was a recognisable portrait of Alice. She was wearing a low-cut evening dress in a glittering silver cloth. Her breasts were smaller and firmer and there were no lines on her face. The artist hadn't prettified her; I could see the faint heaviness of her chin and the beginnings of lines.
"Don't look at it too closely, Joe," she said, coming up behind me. "I was ten years younger then."
"I wish I were ten years older," I said.
"Why, Joe, that's very sweet of you." She squeezed my hand but didn't release it straightaway. "You like the room?"
"Very much," I said. But I wasn't quite sure that I did. It was a strange room, very clean, very bright, in good taste, but somehow without comfort. The low white-painted shelves across the wall opposite the fireplace were full of books, mostly brand new, with the jackets still on; they should have humanised the room but they didn't; it seemed impossible that they should be read; they were so much a part of the room's decorative scheme that you wouldn't have dared to have taken one.
"Drink?" George asked, going to the cocktail cabinet. "Gin, whisky, brandy, rum, sherry, and various loathsome liqueurs which I can't really recommend."
"Whisky, please."
He gave me a malicious look. "It's not Scotch, alas. An American customer gave me a crate. Tastes like hair oil. I warn you."
"I drank a lot of it in Berlin," I said. "No soda, thanks."
It left a warm glow inside my stomach after it had for a split second dried my mouth and sent a little rush of air up my throat.
"Alice says you're from Dufton." He filled up his glass with soda-water and sipped it like a medicine.
"I was born there."
"Been there on business once or twice. My God, it's depressing!"
"You get used to it."
"You'll know the Torvers, I suppose."
I did know them in the same way that I knew the Lord Lieutenant of the county. They were Dufton's oldest mill-owning family; in fact, the only mill-owning family left after the Depression, the other mills having gone either into the hands of the Receiver or London syndicates.
"My father worked at their mill," I said. "He was an overlooker. So we never met socially, as you might say."
George laughed. "My dear Joe, no one ever meets the Torvers socially. No one would want to. The Old Man hasn't had one decent emotion since he was weaned, and Dicky Torver spends what little time he has left over from the mill-girls in drinking himself to death."
"We used to call Dicky the Sexy Zombie," I said.
"Damned good. I say, damned good!" He refilled my glass as if he were giving me a little reward for amusing him. "That's just how he is with that awful pasty face and that slouch and that fishy gleam that comes into his eyes whenever he sees a bedworthy woman. Mind you, he's a good businessman. You'd have to get up very early to catch Dicky Torver."
"He's a horror," said Alice, entering with a tray of sandwiches. She poured herself a whisky. "I met him at the Con ball at Leddersford. He made a pass within the first five minutes and invited me to a dirty weekend within another five. Why doesn't someone beat him up?"
"Some women might find him attractive," George said. He nibbled a cheese biscuit.
"You mean that their husbands might want to do business with him?" I said.
He laughed again. It was a low, pleasant laugh; he could evidently call it up at will. "Not that way, Joe. It's like bribing an executioner; if you're reprieved, he says it's due to his efforts and if you're hanged you can't talk. If someone's wife is - well, kind to Dicky, and the husband lands the contract or whatever it is, then Dicky's kept his side of the bargain. If the husband doesn't land the contract he can hardly make a public complaint. No, business isn't as simple as all that."
"It happens," said Alice.
"Occasionally." His manner indicated the subject was closed and I'd been put in my place.
"Joe," Alice said, "do have a sandwich. They're there to be eaten."
The sandwiches were the thinnest possible slices of bread over thick slices of cold roast beef. The plate was piled high with them. "You've cut up all your ration," I said.
"Oh no," she said. "Don't worry about that. We've lots more. Truly."
"The farmers have meat," George said, "I have cloth. See?"
It was perfectly clear; and I enjoyed the meat all the more. It was like driving Alice's car; for a moment I was living on the level I wanted to occupy permanently. I was the hero of one of those comedies with a title like King for a Day . Except that I couldn't have deceived myself as long as a day, and I could, in that room, tasting the undeniable reality of home-killed beef and feeling the whisky warm in my belly, put myself into George's shoes.
Alice was sitting a little away from the table, facing me. She was wearing a black pleated skirt and a bright red blouse of very fine poplin. She had very elegant legs, only an ounce away from scragginess; her likeness to a Vogue drawing struck me again. I looked at her steadily. We were the same sort of person, I thought fuzzily, fair and Nordic.
George poured me another bourbon. I swallowed it and bit into a second sandwich. Alice gave me a light little smile. It was no more than a quick grimace, but I found my cheeks burning as I realised that I'd like to be in George's shoes in more ways than one.
8
Waiting for Susan on Saturday evening, I was as excited as if it had been the first time I'd taken a girl out. I standing in the foyer of the Leddersford Grand; it was the usual sort of theatre foyer with red carpets, white pillars, photos of stars with white teeth and glossy hair and sparkling eyes, and over it all a faint smell of cigars and perfumed disinfectant, but at that moment it seemed to possess a sort of innocent splendour. I experienced so many different emotions that I was like a child with one of those selection boxes the chocolate manufacturers used to bring out before the war. I was undecided as to which to taste first; the plain dark chocolate of going out with a pretty girl, the Turkish Delight of vanity, the sweet smooth milk of love, the flavour of power, of being one up on Jack Wales, perhaps the most attractive of all, strong as rum.
If she'd come then I would, so as to speak, have eaten the whole selection box. But at three minutes to seven there was no sign of her, and the whole evening began to turn sour on me. I heard again the panic in her voice. 'Golly, here's Mummy.' Why should she be so frightened of her mother knowing about me? Why shouldn't I call at the house? And why should I? I saw myself as Mummy would see me, ununcouth and vulgar and working-class - with all the faults of the nouveau riche, in fact, but none of those solid merits, such as a hundred thousand in gilt-edged securities, for the sake of which so much can be forgiven. "That awful Lampton boy with the funny teeth," I heard Susan say. "He's pursuing me. Yes, really! I don't know why, but I said I'd go to the ballet with him. Yes, I know, it was silly of me, but I wasn't thinking ... Well, my dear, I forgot ! It went right out of my head ! For all I know, he's still waiting. Aren't I awful ?"