Mrs Hatch left the table early in order to receive the first guests, commanding the others to remain and give their digestions time to work. Edwin, however, sprang up, and, exclaiming ‘I am sure there must be something I can do,’ followed his hostess, having bestowed a final uncertain glance upon Mr Leech.
‘It’s bad news about our friend Austin,’ remarked the Duke, after a pause.
‘I hadn’t heard, darling,’ said the Duchess.
‘Same old trouble,’ grunted George Goss.
Griselda had meant to enquire further of the Duke, but after George Goss’s remark, felt quite unlike doing so.
‘I hope we have a schottische,’ said the Duchess, brightly making conversation. ‘Mentioning Austin made me think of it.’
‘I doubt whether the younger generation have ever heard of it,’ said Mr Leech. He was at his very gloomiest.
Griselda had to admit that she had not.
‘I’ve heard of it,’ said Pamela, gnawing round an imported nectarine. ‘All those Victorian things are coming back in, you know. Chaperones, petticoats, and all that.’
For Pamela it was quite a speech.
X
‘Hallo, Griselda. What a dress!’
The first person she had met was Kynaston, and she was not as pleased as immediately after she had last left him, she would have expected to be.
‘Hullo, Geoffrey. Don’t think me rude, but I’m on my way upstairs.
Probably it was rude, but she could not help it. Her mood was expansive, something she could not recall having previously felt; and about Geoffrey there seemed an enclosed and private air unsuited to a large convivial gathering. Though, she recollected, she did not know him very well; so that possibly this was wrong.
Approaching her room she felt unreasonably agitated; and entering it, much more unreasonably disappointed. The room was empty. From one of the dressing-table drawers she took the dance programme Mrs Hatch had given her; and looked at it for the first time. There were three names inserted in Mrs Hatch’s clear handwriting (one of them twice), none of them known to Griselda, except that of Edwin Polegate-Hampden, inserted not, as he had hoped, for the first but for the supper dance. There were no names inserted after supper. Griselda was wholly ignorant of the procedure on these occasions, but had thought that dance programmes were obsolete. She wondered whether it was usual for the hostess, unasked, to arrange in this way partners for her guests. It might be important to ascertain whether it was the custom or merely a peculiarity of Mrs Hatch’s. Then Griselda thought of Stephanie des Bourges and hurried from the room, her final preparations abbreviated. This, she felt, was no time to meet a ghost. She wondered where Louise was; and shivered slightly.
Suddenly hundreds of people had arrived. The hall was full and quite a queue extended down the long passage, lined with palms and baskets of flowers, which extended to the resuscitated ballroom, recently the scene of Doris’s dusty labours. At the entrance to the ballroom Mrs Hatch was shaking hands with people, and introducing them to Mr Leech, who stood on her right, himself looking rather in need of a dust, and to another man, standing on her left, whom Griselda divined to be Mr Minnit, the Leader of the Opposition. Mr Minnit was a determined-looking elderly man with sparse black hair and a raucous penetrating voice. His evening suit made an even poorer impression than Mr Leech’s, because, besides having been worn for longer, it had cost less in the first place. Grouped round the trio were a number of men whom Griselda, identifying one or two of them, took to be some of the new Cabinet. Few of them made a more favourable impression than did either of their leaders.
‘I’ve been waiting for you to come down.’ It was Kynaston again. ‘I’m quite as terrified by all this as you are.’
Griselda realized that she wasn’t terrified at all. She considered herself much better dressed than most of the other women; and, quite possibly, no less generally attractive. Looking round her, she even began to wonder whether she would show herself much inferior as a dancer. She smiled at Kynaston to give him confidence, and because she still felt she might have been rude to him.
Just then the band struck up. ‘You hear that?’ said Kynaston. ‘You’d better get your hostess’s money’s worth.’
They began to make their way along the crowded passage. Kynston shook hands with Mrs Hatch, who asked after his poetry. Then they entered the ballroom.
It was a fine large room, though not very inspired architecturally, and expensively decorated not only with vegetation of various kinds but also with a number of patriotic motifs. At one end of the rectangle, the platform occupied by the band was banked with hundreds of carnations which pleasantly perfumed the otherwise already slightly smoky air. At the other end was another, smaller platform, now unoccupied but the purpose of which was clear, as it was swathed in red, white, and blue fabric, and bore an ominous green baize-topped table, with three hard chairs. Above this platform were two oval plaques, edged with laurel, and bearing lively messages from Lord Beaconsfield and John Burns. Presumably many of the guests were not expected to take the floor, as round the walls was ranged a triple rank of gilt chairs with crimson seats, their thin red line becoming disordered as people sat upon them; but already the enthusiastic and the impetuous were in action, their faces settling down to ecstasy or boredom. The long far wall of the room contained a line of big French windows, uncurtained against the chance that later the growing heat might require them to be opened. Griselda wondered who might be without these windows, unseen but all-seeing.
As Kynaston led Griselda on to the floor, they encountered Edwin with a fascinatingly beautiful young partner. Briefly he introduced her as the Marchioness of Wolverhampton. ‘See you later,’ he said to Griselda, in an accent of warm significance. Griselda watched them glide away. Obviously Edwin’s dancing was as flawless as everything else about him. Griselda wondered why he should elect to sup with her instead of with the incomparable Marchioness; or whether this also was Mrs Hatch’s doing.
Griselda danced three times with Kynaston, not precisely with elation, but certainly with competence. Her ancient inhibition against being intimately clasped by a little-known male had not disappeared, but was perhaps in abeyance. In practice, the whole curious transaction seemed, at least with Kynaston, unexpectedly impersonal. They said little, the monotonous music thrummed in Griselda’s brain, and she felt completely mistress of the situation, while still unclear why such store was commonly set by the pastime. Possibly things would be different in the circumstances advocated by the Duchess; but surely it must be only occasionally that the habitual dancer could dance with a partner whose body inspired to passion? Griselda wondered whether possibly she suffered from some physiological deficiency akin to tone-deafness. She then listened with her conscious ear to the music, and deemed that the matter was not worth undue concern.