‘Carlisle,’ said Lady Pastern, rising, ‘shall we …?’
She swept her ladies into the drawing-room.
II
Félicité was puzzled, resentful and uneasy. She moved restlessly about the room, eyeing her mother and Carlisle. Lady Pastern paid no attention to her daughter. She questioned Carlisle about her experiences in Greece and received her somewhat distracted answers with perfect equanimity. Miss Henderson, who had taken up Lady Pastern’s box of embroidery threads, sorted them with quiet movements of her hands and seemed to listen with interest.
Suddenly Félicité said: ‘I don’t see much future in us all behaving as if we’d had the Archbishop of Canterbury to dinner. If you’ve got anything to say about Carlos, all of you, I’d be very much obliged if you’d say it.’
Miss Henderson, her hands still for a moment, glanced up at Félicité and then bent again over her task. Lady Pastern having crossed her ankles and wrists, slightly moved her shoulders and said: ‘I do not consider this a suitable occasion, my dear child, for any such discussion.’
‘Why?’ Félicité demanded.
‘It would make a scene, and under the circumstances,’ said Lady Pastern with an air of reasonableness, ‘there’s no time for a scene.’
‘If you think the men are coming in, Maman, they are not. George has arranged to go over the programme again in the ballroom.’
A servant came in and collected the coffee cups. Lady Pastern made conversation with Carlisle until the door had closed behind him.
‘So I repeat,’ Félicité said loudly. ‘I want to hear, Maman, what you’ve got to say against Carlos.’
Lady Pastern slightly raised her eyes and lifted her shoulders. Her daughter stamped. ‘Blast and hell!’ she said.
‘Félicité!’ said Miss Henderson. It was neither a remonstrance nor a warning. The name fell like an unstressed comment. Miss Henderson held an embroidery stiletto firmly between her finger and thumb and examined it placidly.
Félicité made an impatient movement. ‘If you think,’ she said violently, ‘anybody’s going to be at their best in a strange house with a hostess who looks at them as if they smelt!’
‘If it comes to that, dearest child, he does smell. Of a particularly heavy kind of scent, I fancy,’ Lady Pastern added thoughtfully.
From the ballroom came a distant syncopated roll of drums ending in a crash of cymbals and a loud report. Carlisle jumped nervously. The stiletto fell from Miss Henderson’s fingers to the carpet. Félicité, bearing witness in her agitation to the efficacy of her governess’s long training, stooped and picked it up.
‘It is your uncle, merely,’ said Lady Pastern.
‘I ought to go straight out and apologize to Carlos for the hideous way he’s been treated,’ Félicité stormed, but her voice held an overtone of uncertainty and she looked resentfully at Carlisle.
‘If there are to be apologies,’ her mother rejoined, ‘it is Carlisle who should receive them. I am so sorry, Carlisle, that you should have been subjected to these –’ she made a fastidious gesture – ‘to these really insufferable attentions.’
‘Good lord, Aunt Cile,’ Carlisle began in acute embarrassment, and was rescued by Félicité who burst into tears and rushed out of the room.
‘I think, perhaps …?’ said Miss Henderson, rising.
‘Yes, please go to her.’
But before Miss Henderson reached the door, which Félicité had left open, Rivera’s voice sounded in the hall. ‘What is the matter?’ it said distinctly and Félicité, breathless, answered, ‘I’ve got to talk to you.’ ‘But certainly, if you wish it.’ ‘In here, then.’ The voices faded, were heard again, indistinctly, in the study. The connecting door between the study and the drawing-room was slammed-to from the far side. ‘You had better leave them, I think,’ said Lady Pastern.
‘If I go to my sitting-room, she may come to me when this is over.’
‘Then go,’ said Lady Pastern, drearily. ‘Thank you, Miss Henderson.’
‘Aunt,’ said Carlisle when Miss Henderson had left them, ‘what are you up to?’
Lady Pastern, shielding her face from the fire, said: ‘I have made a decision. I believe that my policy in this affair has been a mistaken one. Anticipating my inevitable opposition, Félicité has met this person in his own setting and has, as I think you would say, lost her eye. I cannot believe that when she has seen him here, and has observed his atrocious antics, his immense vulgarity, she will not come to her senses. Already one can see, she is shaken. After all, I remind myself, she is a de Fouteaux and a de Suze. Am I not right?’
‘It’s an old trick, darling, you know. It doesn’t always work.’
‘It is working, however,’ said Lady Pastern, setting her mouth. ‘She sees him, for example, beside dear Edward to whom she has always been devoted. Of your uncle as a desirable contrast, I say nothing, but at least his clothes are unexceptionable. And though I deeply resent, dearest child, that you should have been forced, in my house, to suffer the attentions of this animal, they have assuredly impressed themselves disagreeably upon Félicité.’
‘Disagreeably – yes,’ said Carlisle turning pink. ‘But look here, Aunt Cecile, he’s shooting this nauseating little line with me to – well, to make Fée sit up and take notice.’ Lady Pastern momentarily closed her eyes. This, Carlisle remembered, was her habitual reaction to slang. ‘And, I’m not sure,’ Carlisle added, ‘that she hasn’t fallen for it.’
‘She cannot be anything but disgusted.’
‘I wouldn’t be astonished if she refuses to come to the Metronome tonight.’
‘That is what I hope. But I am afraid she will come. She will not give way so readily, I think.’ Lady Pastern rose. ‘Whatever happens,’ she said, ‘I shall break this affair. Do you hear me Carlisle? I shall break it.’
Beyond the door at the far end of the room, Félicité’s voice rose, in a sharp crescendo, but the words were indistinguishable.
‘They are quarrelling,’ said Lady Pastern with satisfaction.
III
As Edward Manx sat silent in his chair, a glass of port and a cup of coffee before him, his thoughts moved out in widening circles from the candle-lit table. Removed from him, Bellairs and Rivera had drawn close to Lord Pastern. Bellairs’ voice, loud but edgeless, uttered phrase after phrase. ‘Sure, that’s right. Don’t worry, it’s in the bag. It’s going to be a world-breaker. OK, we’ll run it through. Fine.’ Lord Pastern fidgeted, stuttered, chuckled, complained. Rivera, leaning back in his chair, smiled, said nothing and turned his glass. Manx, who had noticed how frequently it had been refilled, wondered if he was tight.
There they sat, wreathed in cigar-smoke, candle-lit, an unreal group. He saw them as three dissonant figures at the centre of an intolerable design. ‘Bellairs,’ he told himself, ‘is a gaiety merchant. Gaiety!’ How fashionable, he reflected, the word had been before the war. Let’s be gay, they had all said, and glumly embracing each other had tramped and shuffled, while men like Breezy Bellairs made their noises and did their smiling for them. They christened their children ‘Gay,’ they used the word in their drawing-room comedies and in their dismal, dismal songs. ‘Gaiety!’ muttered the disgruntled and angry Edward. ‘A lovely word, but the thing itself, when enjoyed is unnamed. There’s Cousin George, who is undoubtedly a little mad, sitting, like