We shall have Civil Servants …
The wirelesses changed their tones, they roared:
No longer civil …
Then they were sad and slow:
No longer …
. . . servants.
Nicholas imagined Joanna standing by her bed, put out of business as it were, but listening, drawing it into her bloodstream. As in a dream of his own that depicted a dream of hers, he thought of Joanna in this immovable attitude, given up to the cadences of the wireless as if it did not matter what was producing them, the politician or herself. She was a proclaiming statue in his mind.
A girl in a long evening dress slid in the doorway, furtively. Her hair fell round her shoulders in a brown curl. Through the bemused mind of the loitering, listening man went the fact of a girl slipping furtively into the hall; she had a meaning, even if she had no meaningful intention.
She was Pauline Fox. She was returning from a taxi-ride round the park at the price of eight shillings. She had got into the taxi and told the driver to drive round, round anywhere, just drive. On such occasions the taxi-drivers suspected at first that she was driving out to pick up a man, then as the taxi circled the park and threepences ticked up on the meter, the drivers suspected she was mad, or even, perhaps, one of those foreign royalties still exiled in London: and they concluded one or the other when she ordered them back to the door to which she had summoned them by carefully pre-arranged booking. It was dinner with Jack Buchanan which Pauline held as an immovable idea to be established as fact at the May of Teck Club. In the day-time she worked in an office and was normal. It was dinner with Jack Buchanan that prevented her from dining with any other man, and caused her to wait in the hall for half an hour after the other members had gone to the dining-room, and to return surreptitiously half an hour later when nobody, or few, were about.
At times, when Pauline had been seen returning with in so short a time, she behaved quite convincingly.
‘Goodness, back already, Pauline ! I thought you’d gone out to dinner —‘
‘Oh! Don’t talk to me. We’ve had a row.’ Pauline, with one hand holding a handkerchief to her eye, and the other lifting the hem of her dress, would run sobbing up the stairs to her room.
‘She must have had a row with Jack Buchanan again. Funny she never brings Jack Buchanan here.’
‘Do you believe it?’
‘What?’
‘That she goes out with Jack Buchanan?’
‘Well, I’ve wondered.’
Pauline looked furtive, and Nicholas cheerfully said to her, ‘Where have you been?’
She came and gazed into his face and said, ‘I’ve been to dinner with Jack Buchanan.’
‘You’ve missed Churchill’s speech.’
‘I know.’
‘Did Jack Buchanan get rid of you the moment you had finished your dinner?’
‘Yes. He did. We had a row.’
She shook back her shining hair. For this evening, she had managed to borrow the Schiaparelli dress. It was made of taffeta, with small side panniers stuck out with cleverly curved pads over the hips. It was coloured dark blue, green, orange and white in a floral pattern as from the Pacific Islands.
He said, ‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a gorgeous dress.’
‘Schiaparelli,’ she said.
He said, ‘Is it the one you swap amongst yourselves?’
‘Who told you that?’
‘You look beautiful,’ he replied.
She picked up the rustling skirt and floated away up the staircase.
Oh, girls of slender means!
The election speech having come to an end, everybody’s wireless was turned off for a space, as if in reverence to what had just passed through the air.
He approached the office door which stood open. The office was still empty. The warden came up behind him, having deserted her post for the duration of the speech.
‘I’m still waiting for Miss Redwood.’
‘I’ll ring her again. No doubt she’s been listening to the speech.’
Selina came down presently. Poise is perfect balance, an equanimity of body and mind. Down the staircase she floated, as it were even more realistically than had the sad communer with the spirit of Jack Buchanan a few moments ago floated up it. It might have been the same girl, floating upwards in a Schiaparelli rustle of silk with a shining hood of hair, and floating downwards in a slim skirt with a white-spotted blue blouse, her hair now piled high. The normal noises of the house began to throb again. ‘Good-evening,’ said Nicholas.
And all my days axe trances.
And all my nightly dreams
Are where thy dark eye glances.
And where thy footstep gleams —
In what ethereal dances,
By what eternal streams!
‘Now repeat,’ said Joanna’s voice.
‘Come on then,’ said Selina, stepping ahead of him into the evening light like a racer into the paddock, with a high disregard of all surrounding noises.
7
‘Have you got a shilling for the meter?’ said Jane.
‘Poise is perfect balance, an equanimity of body and mind, complete composure whatever the social scene. Elegant dress, immaculate grooming, and perfect deportment all contribute to the attainment of self-confidence.’
‘Have you got a shilling for two sixpences?’
‘No. Anne’s got a key that. opens the meters, though.’
‘Anne, are you in? What about a loan of the key?’
‘If we all start using it too often we’ll be found out.’
‘Only this once. I’ve got brain-work to do.’
Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white;
*
Selina sat, not yet dressed, on the edge of Nicholas’s bed. She had a way of glancing sideways beneath her lashes that gave her command of a situation which might otherwise place her in a weakness.
She said, ‘How can you bear to live here?’
He said, ‘It does till one finds a flat.’
In fact he was quite content with his austere bed-sitting room.. With the reckless ambition of a visionary, he pushed his passion for Selina into a desire that she, too, should accept and exploit the outlines of poverty in her life. He loved her as he loved his native country. He wanted Selina to be an ideal society personified amongst . her bones, he wanted her beautiful limbs to obey her mind and heart like intelligent men and women, and for these to possess the same grace and beauty as her body. Whereas Selina’s desires were comparatively humble, she only wanted, at that particular moment, a packet of hair-grips which had just then disappeared from the shops for a few weeks.
It was not the first instance of a man taking a girl to bed with the aim of converting her soul, but he, in great exasperation, felt that it was, and poignantly, in bed, willed and willed the awakening of her social conscience. After which, he sighed softly into his pillow with a limp sense of achievement, and presently rose to find, with more exasperation than ever, that he had not in the least conveyed his vision of perfection to the girl. She sat on the bed and glanced around beneath her lashes. He was experienced in girls sitting on his bed, but not in girls as cool as Selina about their beauty, and such beauty as hers. It was incredible to him that she should not share with him an understanding of the lovely attributes of dispossession and poverty, her body was so austere and economically furnished.
She said, ‘I don’t know how you can live in this place, it’s like a cell. Do you cook on that thing?’ She meant the gas grill.