About six, there was a knock on the door, and the stockier of the two girls I had seen was standing there.
“Oh hi. I’m Margaret. From below.” I took her outstretched hand. “Gled to know you. We’re heving ourselves a bottle pardy. Like to come along?”
“Oh. Well actually…”
“It’ll be noisy up here.”
It was the usual thing, an invitation to kill complaint. I hesitated, then shrugged.
“All right. Thanks.”
“Well thet’s good. Eight?” She began to go downstairs, but she called back. “You hev a girl-friend you’d like to bring?”
“Not just now.”
“We’ll fix you up. Hi.”
And she was gone. I wished then that I hadn’t accepted.
So I went down when I could tell a lot of people had already arrived, when the ugly girls—they always arrive first—would, I hoped, be disposed of. The door was open. I went in through a little hall and stood in the doorway of the living room, holding my bottle of Algerian burgundy ready to present. I tried to discover in the crowded room one of the two girls I had seen before. Loud male Australian voices; a man in a kilt, and several West Indians. It didn’t look my sort of party, and I was within five seconds of slipping back out. Then someone arrived and stood in the hall behind me.
It was a girl of about my own age, carrying a heavy suitcase, with a small rucksack on her shoulders. She was wearing a whitish old creased mackintosh, and she had the sort of tan that only weeks in hot sun can give. Her long hair was not quite blonde, but bleached almost to that color. It looked odd, because the urchin cut was the fashion; girls like boys, not girls like girls; and there was something German, Danish, about her—waif-like, yet perversely or immorally so. She kept back from the open doorway, beckoned me. Her smile was very thin, very insincere, and very curt.
“Could you find Maggie and ask her to come out?”
“Margaret?”
She nodded. I forced my way through the packed room and eventually caught sight of Margaret in the kitchen.
“Hi there! You made it.”
“Someone wants to see you outside. A girl with a suitcase.”
“Oh no!” She turned to a woman behind her. I sensed trouble. She hesitated, then put down the quart beer bottle she was opening. I followed her plump shoulders back through the crowd.
“Alison! You said next week.”
“I know, Maggie. I spent all my money.” Her voice was faintly Australian. “It doesn’t matter. I feel like a party. Is Pete back?”
“No.” Her voice dropped, half warning. “But Charlie and Bill are.”
“Oh merde.” She looked outraged. “I must have a bath.”
“Charlie’s filled it to cool the beer. It’s stecked to the brim.”
The girl with the tan sagged. I broke in.
“Use mine. Upstairs.”
“Yes? Alison, this is…”
“Nicholas.”
“Would you mind? I’ve just come from Paris.” I noticed she had two voices; one almost Australian, one almost English.
“Of course. I’ll take you up.”
“I must go and get some things first.” As soon as she went into the room there was a shout.
“Hey, Allie! Where you been, girl?”
Two or three of the Australian men gathered round her. She kissed them all briefly. In a minute Margaret, one of those fat girls who mother thin girls, pushed them away. Alison reappeared with the clothes she wanted, and we went up.
“Oh Jesus,” she said. “Australians.”
“Where’ve you been?”
“All over. France. Spain.”
We went into the flat.
“I’ll just clean the spiders out of the bath. Have a drink. Over there.”
When I came back, she was standing with a glass of Scotch in her hand. She smiled again, but it was an effort; shut off almost at once. I helped her take off her mackintosh. She was wearing a French perfume so dark it was almost carbolic, and her primrose shirt was dirty.
“You live downstairs?”
“Uh huh. Share.”
She raised her glass in silent toast. She had very wide-apart gray eyes, the only innocent things in a corrupt face, as if circumstances, not nature, had forced her to be hard. To fend for herself, yet to seem to need defending. And her voice, only very slightly Australian, yet not English, veered between harshness, faint nasal rancidity, and a strange salty directness. She was bizarre, a kind of human oxymoron.
“Are you alone? At the party?”
“Yes.”
“Would you keep with me this evening?”
“Of course.”
“Come back in about twenty minutes?”
“I’ll wait.”
“I’d rather you came back.”
We exchanged wary smiles. I went back to the party.
Margaret came up. I think she’d been waiting. “I’ve a nice English girl enxious to meet you, Nicholas.”
“I’m afraid your friend’s jumped the gun.”
She looked round, and pulled me out into the little hall.
“This is difficult to explain. But Alison—well, we’re second cousins, and she’s engaged to my brother. A lot of my brother’s friends are here tonight.”
“So?”
“She’s been very mixed up.”
“I still don’t understand.”
“It’s just that I don’t want a roughhouse. We hed one once before.” I looked blank. “People grow jealous on other people’s behalf?”
“I shan’t start anything.”
Someone called her from inside. She tried to feel sure of me, but couldn’t, and apparently decided she couldn’t do anything about it. “Fair deal. But please remember. Will you?”
“If you insist.”
She gave me a veteran’s look, then a nod, not a very happy one, and went away. I waited for about twenty minutes, near the door, and then I slipped out and went back up to my own flat. I rang the bell. There was a long pause, then there was a call behind the door.
“Who is it?”
“Twenty minutes.”
The door opened. She had her hair up, and a towel wrapped round her; very brown shoulders, very brown legs.
“I’ve been soaking. Boy, it was good.” She went quickly back into the bathroom. I shouted through the door.
“I’ve been warned off you.”
“Maggie?”
“She says she doesn’t want a roughhouse.”
“Fucking cow. She’s my cousin.”
“I know.”
“Studying sociology. London University.” There was a pause. “Thinks she knows it all.”
“She tells me you’re engaged.”
“Isn’t it crazy? You go away and you think people will have changed and they’re just the same.”
“What does that mean?”
“Wait a minute.”
There was a long pause.
“Here I am.” The door opened and she came out into the living room. She was wearing a very simple white dress, and her hair was down again. She had no makeup, and looked ten times prettier.
She gave me a little bitten-in grin. “Je vous plais?”
“Very much.” Her look was so direct I found it disconcerting. “We go down?”
“Just one finger?”
I filled her glass again, and with more than one finger. Watching the whisky fall, she said, “I don’t know why I’m frightened. Why am I frightened?”
“What of?”
She turned away. “I don’t know. Maggie. The boys. The dear old diggers.”
“This roughhouse?”
“Oh God. It was so stupid. There was a nice Israeli boy, you see, and we were just kissing. It was a party. That was all. But Charlie told Pete, and they just picked a quarrel, and… oh God. You know. He-men.”
Downstairs I lost her for a time. A group formed round her. I went and got a drink and passed it over someone’s shoulder; talk about Cannes, about Collioure and Valencia. Jazz had started in the back room and I went into the doorway to watch. Outside the window, past the dark dancers, were dusk trees, a pale amber sky. I had a sharp sense of alienation from everyone around me. A girl with spectacles, myopic eyes in an insipidly pretty face, one of those soulful-intellectual creatures born to be preyed on and exploited by artistic phonies, smiled coyly from the other side of the room. She was standing alone and I guessed that she was the “nice English girl” Margaret had picked for me. Her lipstick was too red, and she was as familiar as a species of bird. I turned away from her as from a cliff-edge, and went and sat on the floor by a bookshelf. There I pretended to read a paperback.