Now it was different; there was nothing but humility and friendly candour in the way she spoke.
I wished I could respond to her confidence, give some token of acceptance, but there was nothing in my last, flat, eventful years that I could share with her. I began instead to talk of my time in the jungle, of the comic characters I had met and the lost places I had visited, but in this mood of old friendship the tale faltered and came to an end abruptly.
‘I long to see the paintings,’ she said.
‘Celia wanted me to unpack some and stick them round the cabin for her cocktail party. I couldn’t do that.’
‘No…is Celia as pretty as ever? I always thought she had the most delicious looks of any girl of my year.’
‘She hasn’t changed.’
‘You have, Charles. So lean and grim; not at all the pretty boy Sebastian brought home with him. Harder, too.’
‘And you’re softer.’
‘Yes, I think so…and very patient now.’
She was not yet thirty, but was approaching the zenith of her loveliness, all her rich promise abundantly fulfilled. She had lost that fashionable, spidery look; the head that I used to think quattrocento, which had sat a little oddly on her, was now part of herself and not at all Florentine; not connected in any way with painting or the arts or with anything except herself, so that it would be idle to itemize and dissect her beauty, which was her own essence, and could only be known in her and by her authority and in the love I was soon to have for her.
Time had wrought another change, too; not for her the sly, complacent smile of la Gioconda; the years had been more than ‘the sound of lyres and flutes’, and had saddened her. She seemed to say: ‘Look at me. I have done my share. I am beautiful. It is something quite out of the ordinary, this beauty of mine. I am made for delight. But what do I get out of it? Where is my reward?’
That was the change in her from ten years ago; that, indeed, was her reward, this haunting, magical sadness which spoke straight to the heart and struck silence; it was the completion of her beauty.
‘Sadder, too,’ I said.
‘Oh yes, much sadder.’
My wife was in exuberant spirits when, two hours later, I returned to the cabin.
‘I’ve had to do everything. How does it look?’
We had been given, without paying more for it, a large suite of rooms, one so large, in fact, that it was seldom booked except by directors of the line, and on most voyages, the chief purser admitted, was given to those he wished to honour. (My wife was adept in achieving such small advantages, first impressing the impressionable with her chic and my celebrity and, superiority once firmly established, changing quickly to a pose of almost flirtatious affability.) In token of her appreciation the chief purser had, been asked to our party and he, in token of his appreciation, had sent before him the life-size effigy of a swan, moulded in ice and filled with caviar. This chilly piece of magnificence now dominated the room, standing on a table in the centre, thawing gently, dripping at the beak into its silver dish. The flowers of the morning delivery hid as much as possible of the panelling (for this room was a miniature of the monstrous hall above).
‘You must get dressed at once. Where have you been all this time?’
‘Talking to Julia Mottram.’
‘D’you know her? Oh, of course, you were a friend of the dipso brother. Goodness, her glamour!’
‘She greatly admires your looks, too.’
‘She used to be a girl friend of Boy’s.’
‘Surely not?’
‘He always said so.’
‘Have you considered,’ I asked, ‘how your guests are going to eat this caviar?’
‘I have. It’s insoluble. But there’s all this’ — she revealed some trays of glassy titbits — ‘and anyway, people always find ways of eating things at parties. D’you remember we once ate potted shrimps with a paper knife?’
‘Did we?’
‘Darling’ it was the night you popped the question.’
‘As I remember, you popped.’
‘Well, the night we got engaged. But you haven’t said how you like the, arrangements.’
The arrangements, apart from the swan and the flowers, consisted of a steward already inextricably trapped in the corner behind an improvised bar, and another steward, tray in hand, in comparative freedom.
‘A cinema actor’s dream,’ I said.
‘Cinema actors,’ said my wife; ‘that’s what I want to talk about.’
She came with me to my dressing-room and talked while I changed. It had occurred to her that, with my interest in architecture, my true métier was designing scenery for the films, and she had asked two Hollywood magnates to the party with whom she wished to ingratiate me.
We returned to the sitting-room.
‘Darling, I believe you’ve taken against my bird. Don’t be beastly about it in front of the purser. It was sweet of him to think of it. Besides, you know, if you had read about it in the description of a sixteenth-century banquet in Venice, you would have said those were the days to live.’
‘In sixteenth-century Venice it would have been a somewhat different shape.’
‘Here is Father Christmas. We were just in raptures over your swan.’
The chief purser came into the room and shook hands, powerfully.
‘Dear Lady Celia,’ he said, ‘if you’ll put on your warmest clothes and come on an expedition into the cold storage with me tomorrow, I can show you a whole Noah’s Ark of such objects. The toast will be along in a minute. They’re keeping it hot.’
‘Toast!’ said my wife, as though this was something beyond the dreams of gluttony. ‘Do you hear that Charles? Toast.’
Soon the guests began to arrive; there was nothing to delay them. ‘Celia,’ they said, ‘what a grand cabin and what a beautiful swan!’ and, for all that it was one of the largest in the ship, our room was soon painfully crowded; they began to put out their cigarettes in the little pool of ice-water which now surrounded the swan.
The purser made a sensation, as sailors like to do, by predicting a storm. ‘How can you be so beastly?’ asked my wife, conveying the flattering suggestion that not only the cabin and the caviar, but the waves, too, were at his command. ‘Anyway, storms don’t affect a ship like this, do they?’
‘Might hold us back a bit.’
‘But it wouldn’t make us sick?’
‘Depends if you’re a good sailor. I’m always sick in storms, ever since I was a boy.’
‘I don’t believe it. He’s just being sadistic. Come over here, there’s something I want to show you.’
It was the latest photograph of her children. ‘Charles hasn’t even seen Caroline yet. Isn’t it thrilling for him?’
There were no friends of mine there, but I knew about a third of the party, and talked away civilly enough. An elderly woman said to me, ‘So you’re Charles. I feel I know you through and through, Celia’s talked so much about you.’
‘Through and through,’ I thought. ‘Through and through is a long way, madam. Can you indeed see into those dark places where my own eyes seek in vain to guide me? Can you tell me, dear Mrs Stuyvesant Oglander — if I am correct in thinking that is how I heard my wife speak of you — why it is that at this moment, while I talk to you, here, about my forthcoming exhibition, I am thinking all the time only of when Julia will come? Why can I talk like this to you, but not to her? Why have I already set her apart from humankind, and myself with her? What is going on in those secret places of my spirit with which you make so free? What is cooking, Mrs Stuyvesant Oglander?’
Still Julia did not come, and the noise of twenty people in that tiny room, which was so large that no one hired it, was the noise of a multitude.
Then I saw a curious thing. There was a little red-headed man whom no one seemed to know, a dowdy fellow quite unlike the general run of my wife’s guests; he had been standing by the caviar for twenty minutes eating as fast as a rabbit. Now he wiped his
mouth with his handkerchief and, on the impulse apparently, leaned forward and dabbed the beak of the swan, removing the drop of water that had been swelling there and would soon have fallen. Then he looked round furtively to see if he had been observed, caught my eye, and giggled nervously.
‘Been wanting to do that for a long time,’ he said. ‘Bet you don’t know how many drops to the minute. I do, I counted.’
‘I’ve no idea.’
‘Guess. Tanner if you’re wrong; half a dollar if you’re right. That’s fair.’
‘Three,’ I said.
‘Coo, you’re a sharp one. Been counting ‘em yourself.’ But he showed no inclination to pay this debt. Instead he said: ‘How d’you figure this out. I’m an Englishman born and bred, but this is my first time on the Atlantic.’
‘You flew out perhaps?’
‘No, nor over it.’
‘Then I presume you went round the world and came across the Pacific.’
‘You are a sharp one and no mistake. I’ve made quite a bit getting into arguments over that one.’
‘What was your route?’ I asked, wishing to be agreeable.
‘Ah, that’d be telling. Well, I must skedaddle. So long.’
‘Charles, said my wife, ‘this is Mr Kramm, of Interastral Films.’
‘So you are Mr Charles Ryder,’ said Mr Kramm.
‘Yes.’
‘Well, well., well,’ he paused. I waited. ‘The purser here says we’re heading for dirty weather. What d’you know about that?’
‘Far less than the purser.’
‘Pardon me, Mr Ryder, I don’t quite get you.’
‘I mean I know less than the purser.’
‘Is that so? Well, well, well. I’ve enjoyed our talk very much. I hope that it will be the first of many.’
An Englishwoman said: ‘Oh, that swan! Six weeks in America has given me an absolute phobia of ice. Do tell me, how did it feel meeting Celia again after two years? I know I should feel indecently bridal. But Celia’s never quite got the orange blossom out of her hair, has she?’
Another woman said: ‘Isn’t it heaven saying good-bye and knowing we shall meet again in half an hour and go on meeting every half-hour for days?’
Our guests began to go, and each on leaving informed me of something my wife had promised to bring me to in the near future; it was the theme of the evening that we should all be seeing a lot of each other, that we had formed one of those molecular systems that physicists can illustrate. At last the swan was wheeled out, too, and I said to my wife, ‘Julia never came.’
‘No, she telephoned. I couldn’t hear what she said, there was such a noise going on — something about a dress. Quite lucky really, there wasn’t room for a cat. It was a lovely party, wasn’t it? Did you hate it very much? You behaved beautifully and looked so distinguished. Who was your red-haired chum?’
‘No chum of mine.’
‘How very peculiar! Did you say anything to Mr Kramm about working in Hollywood?’
‘Of course not.’
‘Oh, Charles, you are a worry to me. It’s not enough just stand about looking distinguished and a martyr for Art. Let’s go to dinner. We’re at the. Captain’s table. I don’t suppose he’ll dine down tonight, but it’s polite to be fairly punctual.’
By the time that we reached the table the rest of the party had arranged themselves. On either side of the Captain’s empty chair sat Julia and Mrs Stuyvesant Oglander; besides them there was an English diplomat and his wife, Senator Stuyvesant Oglander, and an American clergyman at present totally isolated between two pairs of empty chairs. This clergyman later described himself — redundantly it seemed — as an Episcopalian Bishop. Husbands and wives sat together here. My wife was confronted with a quick decision, and although the steward attempted to direct us otherwise, sat so that she had the senator and I the Bishop. Julia gave us both a little dismal signal of sympathy.
‘I’m miserable about the party,’ she said, ‘my beastly maid totally disappeared with every dress I have. She only turned up half an hour ago. She’d been playing ping-pong.’
‘I’ve been telling the Senator what he missed,’ said Mrs Stuyvesant Oglander. ‘Wherever Celia is, you’ll find she knows all the significant people.’
‘On my right,’ said the Bishop, ‘a significant couple are expected. They take all their meals in their cabin except when they have been informed in advance that the Captain will be present.’
We were a gruesome circle; even my wife’s high social spirit faltered. At moments I heard bits of her conversation.
‘…an extraordinary little red-haired man. Captain Foulenough in person.’
‘But I understood you to say, Lady Celia, that you were unacquainted with him.’
‘I meant he was like Captain Foulenough.’
‘I begin to comprehend. He impersonated this friend of yours in order to come to your party.’
‘No, no. Captain Foulenough is simply a comic character.’
‘There seems to have been nothing very amusing about this other man. Your friend is a comedian?’
‘No, no. Captain Foulenough is an imaginary character in an English paper. You know, like your “Popeye”.’
The senator laid down knife and fork. ‘To recapitulate: an impostor came to your party and you admitted him because of a fancied resemblance to a fictitious character in a cartoon.’
‘Yes, I suppose that was it really.’
The senator looked at his wife as much as to say: ‘Significant people, huh!’
I heard Julia across the table trying to trace, for the benefit of the diplomat, the marriage-connections of her Hungarian and Italian cousins. The diamonds flashed in her hair and on her fingers, but her hands were nervously rolling little balls of crumb, and her starry head drooped in despair.
The Bishop told me of the goodwill mission on which he was travelling to Barcelona…’a very, very valuable work of clearance has been performed, Mr Ryder. The time has now come to rebuild on broader foundations. I have made it my aim to reconcile the so-called Anarchists and the so-called Communists, and with that in view I and my committee have digested all the available documentation of the subject. Our conclusion, Mr Ryder, is unanimous. There is no fundamental diversity between the two ideologies. It is a matter of personalities, Mr Ryder, and what personalities have put asunder personalities can unite…’
On the other side I heard: ‘And may I make so bold as to ask what institutions sponsored your husband’s expedition?’
The diplomat’s wife bravely engaged the Bishop across the gulf that separated them.
‘And what language will you speak when you get to Barcelona?’
‘The language of Reason and Brotherhood, madam,’ and, turning back to me, ‘The speech of the coming century is in thoughts not in words. Do you not agree, Mr Ryder?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes.’
‘What are words?’ said the Bishop.
‘What indeed?’
‘Mere conventional symbols, Mr Ryder, and this is an age rightly sceptical of conventional symbols.’
My mind reeled; after the parrot-house fever of my wife’s party, and unplumbed emotions of the afternoon, after all the exertions of my wife’s pleasures in New York, after the months of solitude in the steaming, green shadows of the jungle, this was too much. I felt like Lear on the heath, like the Duchess of Malfi bayed by madmen. I summoned cataracts and hurricanoes, and as if by conjury the call was immediately answered.
For some time now, though whether it was a mere trick of the nerves I did not then know, I had felt a recurrent and persistently growing motion — a heave and shudder of the large dining-room as of the breast of a man in deep sleep. Now my wife turned to me and said: ‘Either I am a little drunk or it’s getting rough,’ and, even as she spoke we found ourselves leaning sideways in our chairs; there was a crash and tinkle of falling cutlery by the wall, and on our table the wine glasses all together toppled and rolled over, while each of us stead
ied the plate and forks and looked at the other with expressions that varied between frank horror in the diplomat’s wife and relief in Julia.
The gale which, unheard, unseen, unfelt, in our enclosed and insulated world had, for an hour, been mounting over us, had now veered and fallen full on our bows.
Silenced followed the crash, then a high, nervous babble of laughter. Stewards laid napkins on the pools of spilt wine. We tried to resume the conversation, but all were waiting, as the little ginger man had watched the drop swell and fall from the swan’s beak, for the next great blow; it came, heavier than the last.
‘This is where I say good night to you all,’ said the diplomat’s wife, rising.
Her husband led her to their cabin. The dining-room was emptying fast. Soon only Julia, my wife, and I were left at the table, and, telepathically, Julia said, ‘Like King Lear.’
‘Only each of us is all three of them.’
‘What can you mean?’ asked my wife.
‘Lear, Kent, Fool.’
‘Oh dear, it’s like that agonizing Foulenough conversation over again. Don’t try and explain.’
‘I doubt if I could,’ I said.
Another climb, another vast drop. The stewards were at work making things fast, shutting things up, hustling away unstable ornaments.
‘Well, we’ve finished dinner and set a fine example of British phlegm,’ said my wife. ‘Let’s go and see what’s on.’
Once, on our way to the lounge, we had all three to cling to a pillar; when we got there we found it almost deserted; the band played but no one danced; the tables were set for tombola but no one bought a card, and the ship’s officer, who made a speciality of calling the numbers with all the patter of the lower deck — ‘sweet sixteen and never been kissed — key of the door, twenty-one — clickety-click, sixty-six’ — was idly talking to his colleagues; there were a score of scattered novel readers, a few games of bridge, some brandy drinking in the smoking-room, but all our guests of two hours before had disappeared.