Hangover Square Page 5

  A freshly risen wind, coming straight at them as they walked along the pavement on the other side, under the dull brightness of the high electric lamps, was piercingly cold, and he put up his overcoat collar. She did not seem to feel it. (She didn’t seem to feel anything.) They walked along in silence. They would walk in silence, he knew, until they reached the pub, unless he opened the conversation, for when they were alone she never spoke to him unless he spoke to her. It was, really, beneath her dignity to do so. Having disgraced himself, having put himself beyond the pale, by being distractedly in love with her without inspiring an atom of affection in return, he could no longer expect the normal amenities of intercourse. Only in an excess of amiability or generosity might she now treat him as an equal human being. And he knew that her character was devoid of amiability and generosity.

  When he spoke he came straight to the point.

  ‘Will you come and have a meal with me sometime this week, Netta?’ he said.

  ‘How do you mean, exactly, “meal”?’ she said.

  He looked at her and saw from her expression that she really knew what he meant, that she was purposely playing ‘village idiot’. By the word ‘meal’ he had intended to convey several things all of which she had apprehended instantly and clearly. He had meant first of all an evening meal: then he had meant a private meal, particularly excluding the two men walking on in front: then he had meant a high-grade meal eaten outside Earl’s Court. This meant that they would go to a good West End Restaurant (as they had done once or twice before when he had been able to afford it), and this in its turn meant that it would be a meal paid for by the money he had brought back from Hunstanton. All these things they both knew, but she was playing village idiot just to make sure, and also to ascertain to what restaurant he meant to invite her. He was aware that, if it was to be in the West End, she was not going to put up with something moderately cheap in Soho. He had tried that one before, and she had made it clear that it would not do. It either had to be the famous, crowded, and expensive Ragloni’s (where Peter sometimes took her) or else it had to be Perrier’s in Jermyn Street. She had, actually, a passion for Perrier’s, he did not quite know why. He had made up his mind, in fact, to name this restaurant.

  ‘Oh, something in the West End,’ he answered. ‘What about tomorrow? Could you manage it?’

  He was not going to give in all at once. It faintly amused him to set in motion and observe her determination and greed working behind her cool demeanour.

  But she was not to be played about with, and she came straight to the point.

  ‘Where in the West End?’ she said.

  ‘Oh – I thought we might go to Perrier’s again. What about it? Can you manage tomorrow?’

  He knew that she was going to accept, for she would not have asked so blatantly where she was to be taken, unless she had intended to do so.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘that sounds all right to me – so far as I know.’

  ‘Oh – good,’ he said. ‘I’ll phone you tomorrow, shall I?’

  ‘Okay. You phone me tomorrow.’

  Though it was not admitted by so much as a flicker of a facial muscle, there was a good deal more than met the eye in this decision that he should phone her. It was, in fact, an acknowledgement of a joint conspiracy – a secret kept from the other two men, from Peter of course, in particular. Otherwise why did they have to phone tomorrow? Why not appoint a time and meeting-place in due course later in the evening or in ordinary conversation tomorrow? The answer was that later in the evening or tomorrow they might have no opportunity of speaking alone – and this matter had to be arranged in private. She knew as well as he that it was part of the bargain that no one else should be allowed to butt in, that if she went to Perrier’s she went with him alone. She therefore, on her side, had to bear the burden of a certain amount of subterfuge: she had so to arrange matters that Peter or Mickey either did not know, or were presented with a fait accompli in such a way as precluded them from trying to join the party.

  ‘Fine,’ he said, and was filled momentarily with a malicious exhilaration at the mere thought of working a deception on Peter, of being able to do something and laugh at him behind his back, above all, of having Netta working with him in such a deception. Such was the reward of his visit to his aunt at Hunstanton. Was there anything which money could not buy?

  They were walking down Earl’s Court Road in the direction of the station. Instead of making for the ‘Black Hart’ Mickey and Peter were seen to turn capriciously into a pub on the left which they only used at infrequent intervals, and by the time he and Netta had joined them in its saloon bar they were already throwing darts and had ordered their beer. Netta sat down, and he went to the bar and obtained beer for himself and a large pink gin for her. He sat beside her and watched, in silence, the other two throwing darts in the last hours of the Christmas season, nineteen hundred and thirty-eight

  The Second Part

  PHONING

  But now her looks are coy and cold,

  To mine they ne’er reply,

  And yet I cease not to behold

  The love-light in her eye:

  Her very irowns are fairer lar

  Than smiles of other maidens are.

  H. COLERIDGE

  Excitation. – N. excitation of feeling; mental – , excitement; suscitation,

  galvanism, stimulation, piquancy, provocation, inspiration,

  calling forth, infection; animation, agitation, perturbation;

  subjugation, fascination, intoxication; en-, ravishment; entrancement, high pressure.

  Roget’s Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases

  Being your slave, what should I do but tend

  Upon the hours and times of your desire?

  I have no precious time at all to spend

  Nor services to do, till you require.

  W. SHAKESPEARE

  Chapter One

  ‘I suppose it’s because he’s so big that he’s so silly…’

  Her words came back to him as he walked along in the cold grey morning to cash his cheque at the bank. He again decided that it was the best thing she had said for weeks. For months. Ever since the earliest days, before he was in disgrace. She was full of such intoxicating insinuations then. She thought he had a lot of money, of course.

  She was with that theatrical gang, then. She was working on a film down at Denham. It had happened in the big bar of the ‘Rockingham’ opposite Earl’s Court station. They were very noisy, and they couldn’t pay for their drinks. The man who had been going to pay had left his money in a car, and somebody else had taken the car, or something like that. He had buttered in and paid. He was as tight as they were. He had paid again and again, amidst their laughing and incredulous applause. Then the man somehow got back his car and his money, and they stood him drinks, and they were all bosom pals. She was there with them, of course, but he didn’t think she was so terribly attractive at first. He just noticed that she was frightfully smart, striking, actressy. He didn’t really begin to notice her till closing time. Then, as they stood outside on the pavement with bottles of beer under their arms, it was decided that they should go up to her flat and play shove-halfpenny.

  It was not until they were up in her flat that anything happened. The three actors were crowding over the board, garrulous and absorbed in their game: but he was sitting with her on the settee, quietly and reasonably talking. She was telling him about herself, the small part she was playing in the film. Then it happened. At one moment she was just something he was talking to and looking at; at the next she was something of which he was physically sensible by some means other than that of sight or sound: she was sending out a ray, a wave, from herself, which seemed to affect his whole being, to go all through him like a faint vibration. It was as though she were a small amateur wireless station, and he alone was tuned in to her and listening. And the message she was tapping out was, of course, her loveliness. Not that he was tremendously moved by what was
happening: he merely appreciated the fact that it was happening, and was slightly excited – excited, perhaps, as much by the novelty of the experience as by anything else. She continued talking, and he answered her clearheadedly, and all the time she was talking and all the time he was answering, he was ‘listening in’…

  He knew now that those moments on the settee began it all, that he was head over heels in love with her as soon as he had a moment to be near her and look at her, but he had no idea at the time. The party broke up at about half past one. He chivalrously helped her break it up, because she had said she was short of sleep. It was only casually, almost fortuitously, that he arranged to see her again. ‘Well, don’t we meet again or something?’ he said as they all staggered in the doorway, and she said they certainly would if he frequented the ‘Rockingham’. ‘Well, I’ll be in there at twelve tomorrow. Why don’t you come along?’ – ‘Right,’ she said, ‘that’s a date.’ – ‘Right – twelve o’clock tomorrow,’ she said as he went down the stone stairs, and he didn’t believe either of them was serious.

  But when he awoke next morning he remembered his novel listening-in experience of the night before, and trying, not quite successfully, to recapture it in his mind, developed a longing to recapture it in reality. He didn’t expect her to turn up at the ‘Rockingham’, but he decided he must see her again by some means or another. He went to the ‘Rockingham’ at twelve and to his amazement she arrived five minutes later. He at once saw that she was incredibly beautiful, and that he was wildly in love.

  He had money, then, of course, and he was spending it. It was just after he had had that mad streak of luck with his Pools, and had made two hundred pounds in a single week. He had that blue suit, too, and those shirts from Jermyn Street. He must have looked prosperous, and behaved prosperously. Perhaps she thought he would back her in a show or something. Why else should she have turned up that morning? Why, else, should she have acted the part she did, have gone about with him?

  And how she piled it on, in her quiet way. So polite, so ravishing, so available! So apparently friendless, or mildly bored by her friends. So serious and hardworking! That week he took to getting up at six in the morning and motoring her down to Denham in a hired car.

  He once called her, jokingly yet fondly, a ‘glamour’ girl. ‘Oh, no, a fireside girl,’ she answered in her own crisp, fascinating way. ‘A fireside girl, definitely.’ And he, poor fool, took it to mean that if she was offered a fireside by himself, she might accept the offer. There were even moments when he was afraid of committing himself!

  How, in that first week, was he to be blamed for falling as he did? Was it his fault that he had caught her at a freak period, when she was working, when her usual friends and background were absent, when she believed he had a lot of money and was pleased to tolerate him, to attempt to attract him, even?

  Yes – he ought to have known, he ought to have acted in accordance with the premonition which he sometimes definitely had that this sudden delight in his life was too good to be true, that she was as hard as nails, that she had a virulent, competent life of her own, about which he knew nothing, and in which he could play not even a remotely effective part. On one occasion, on the fourth day of knowing her, he came up to her flat, and found her phoning. There was something in her voice, in her manner at the telephone, in the man’s voice at the other end, which warned him of everything. But by then he could not act upon his premonition, because by then he was crazy about her, and the premonition itself, the premonition of her real character and inaccessibility, only served, suddenly and violently, to intensify his longing for her.

  Then, even if he ever had a chance, how he had bungled it! That night! He had lost his nerve by then, of course, good and proper. He had told her he hadn’t any real money. He wasn’t sleeping because of her. When he lay on his bed her face, her colouring, the blend of cruelty and mischief on her mouth, the blend of heavenly kindness and mockery in her brown eyes, stood on guard between him and unconsciousness. Without consulting his will, his whole being had of itself decided to engage itself, to employ and strain all its faculties, in loving her, and now there was no other woman, no other colouring or texture, no other blend of heavenly kindness and cruelty on any other woman’s mouth or eyes that would do. He was hers for ever and ever.

  It was because he hadn’t slept that he made such a mess of it that night in her flat. He had drunk a lot, but he was more exhausted than drunk when he tried to make love to her, tried to kiss her. His mind was in a mist. He had to concentrate to think, to stand properly on his legs. She remained quite cool, and turned him out of the flat, of course. He went like a lamb: he had enough sense to do that. Then, as he stood in the doorway, protesting, apologizing, she said ‘All right. Good night,’ and slammed the door in his face.

  Slam. Just like that. Snap. Finished. From that moment his charming friend, his new acquaintance, his polite companion, the solitary and friendless actress of his imagination, the ‘fireside girl’, became Netta, the Netta he knew. There were no half measures: he was given no period in which to acclimatize himself. When he rang her up next morning her voice and manner proclaimed their new relationship (their permanent relationship – the one existing until this day) with sharp and efficient clarity. It was not that she was tangibly rude in anything she said: she accepted his apologies gracefully: she even let him come along and see her that morning. It was the sudden familiarity of her tone which was so insulting and wounding. She had dropped her pretence of reserve, of reticence, of interest in himself like a hot brick. She was completely at ease with him, ‘matey’, natural, outspoken, good-tempered or bad-tempered at will. Whereas yesterday they behaved and talked like two charmed, tentative strangers, today they might have been old friends for years. (‘Can I come round and see you?’ ‘Certainly.’) The brief episode of the night before, the fact that his unreciprocated desire for her was formally acknowledged, enabled one like herself to make this transition without a qualm, directly and mercilessly. In her mind he was put instantly into a class of men – the class of men who desired her, who sought her favours, and to whom she intended to give no favours.

  The coolness and quickness with which she made the change, the arrogance of spirit which her sudden familiar manner over the phone implied, made him hate her more than he could ever have hated her if she had avoided him, or not allowed him to see her again. He still remembered it and hated her for it.

  But that was merely the beginning. His peremptory dismissal from the fool’s paradise in which he had been living was not to be atoned for merely by bitter disillusionment about this girl and her intentions towards him. He had asked for all he got there: but there was plenty more to come. The blows fell thick and fast. Peter came back (he had been in Scotland for three weeks: there was an awful man called Bermann hanging about (thank God he at any rate had faded out now): he met for the first time her atrocious masculine woman-friend, Enid Staines-Close: her actor friends turned up again. Mickey appeared on the scene. As though under the direction of the evil genius which had made him make love to her that night, in the course of two or three days the whole scene, her entire background, was transformed. He was no longer the sole escort of a delightful girl: he was an interloper in a strange gang, her gang, her crowd, an outsider, a curious hanger-on. He had appeared from nowhere: he was looked at frigidly. He didn’t even know their language, their idiom. He would never forget the way Peter looked at him and behaved when they first met around at the ‘Black Hart’. Netta, of course, made no attempt to introduce him. She seemed to take a sort of cold delight in his humiliation. He didn’t know to this day how he had stuck on: he had only made the grade because he just couldn’t stop himself from seeing Netta, and because he had money at that time. If he hadn’t had money they would have frozen him out: but money talks. You put up with a hanger-on, an interloper, if he is paying. He kept on the hired car, and that talked too. His money and the hired car talked for him, while he remained dumb, absolutely sill
y and dumb; it was not as though he had then, or even would have, any social graces with which to make himself liked.

  His money, his fluke Pool money, was gone soon enough, but by then he had established himself with her crowd, created ; negative personality and found a place of sorts. He was ‘George’ or sometimes ‘our friend George’, or ‘poor old George’ famous for his stupidity generally, and in particular for his occassional ‘dumb’ moods (which was their name for what he called hi ‘dead’ moods). Not that Netta called him ‘poor old George’ she never called him anything. She remained completely silent about him, both when she was alone with him and when then were others present. Slowly, too, the bitterest aspect of his humiliation as an interloper in a strange crowd, that is, his manifest, dog-like infatuation for Netta, became an accepted thing, stale joke, something no longer uppermost or even present ii their minds.

  All that was years ago – a year and a half to be exact. He had stuck on grimly, slowly, patiently, tortoise to their hare, and he had stuck a lot of them out by now. They had either fallen our or gone away. At the moment Peter and Mickey were the only effective survivors from those days, though you never knew who would come back, or who would turn up.

  Chapter Two

  By now he had reached the bank, and he pushed through its oiled door into the hushed, pervading post-officy warmth of polished wood and pound notes.

  He meant to cash his cheque over the counter. No niggling no putting it into his account and drawing out. This ten pound was ten pounds of concrete, clearly visualized pleasure, with ; beginning and an end – ten pounds’ worth of Netta’s company He was going to keep it in a separate pocket, and see when it had gone.

  ‘A very cold day, I fancy, Mr Bone,’ said the bank clerk in his emphatic, good-natured way, as he took the money from the drawer. ‘A very cold – nasty – day.’ This man, who was little older than himself, had, seemingly, a surfeit of good humour, and he never failed to call him ‘Mr Bone’ or to make a cordial observation of some sort.