Money for Nothing (4 page)

A man whose uncle jerks him away from London as if he were picking a winkle out of its shell with a pin and keeps him for months and months immured in the heart of Worcestershire must inevitably lose touch with the swiftly changing kaleidoscope of metropolitan night-life. Nothing in a big city fluctuates more rapidly than the status of its supper-dancing clubs; and Hugo, had he still been a lad-about-town in good standing, would have been aware that recently the Mustard Spoon had gone down a good deal in the social scale. Society had migrated to other, newer institutions, leaving it to become the haunt of the lesser ornaments of the stage and the Portuguese, the Argentines and the Greeks.

To John Carroll, however, as he stood waiting in the lobby, the place seemed sufficiently gay and glittering. Nearly a year had passed since his last visit to London: and the Mustard Spoon rather impressed him. An unseen orchestra was playing with extraordinary vigour, and from time to time ornate persons of both sexes drifted past him into the brightly lighted supper-room. Where an established connoisseur of night-clubs would have pursed his lips and shaken his head, John was conscious only of feeling decidedly uplifted and exhilarated.

But then he was going to see Pat again, and that was enough to stimulate any man.

She arrived unexpectedly, at a moment when he had taken his eye off the door to direct it in mild astonishment at a lady in an orange dress who, doubtless with the best motives, had dyed her hair crimson and was wearing a black-rimmed monocle. So absorbed was he with this spectacle that he did not see her enter, and was only made aware of her presence when there spoke from behind him a clear little voice which, even when it was laughing at you, always seemed to have in it something of the song of larks on summer mornings and winds whispering across the fields in spring.

'Hullo, Johnnie.'

The hair, scarlet though it was, lost its power to attract. The appeal of the monocle waned. John spun round.

'Pat!'

She was looking lovelier than ever. That was the thing that first presented itself to John's notice. If anybody had told him that Pat could possibly be prettier than the image of her which he had been carrying about with him all these months, he would not have believed him. But so it was. Some sort of a female with plucked eyebrows and a painted face had just come in, and she might have been put there expressly for purposes of comparison. She made Pat seem so healthy, so wholesome, such a thing of the open air and the clean sunshine, so pre-eminently fit. She looked as if she had spent her time at Le Touquet playing thirty-six holes of golf a day.

'Pat!' cried John, and something seemed to catch at his throat. There was a mist in front of his eyes. His heart was thumping madly.

She extended her hand composedly.

'Well, Johnnie. How nice to see you again. You're looking very brown and rural. Where's Hugo?'

It takes two to hoist a conversation to an emotional peak. John choked, and became calmer.

'He'll be here soon, I expect,' he said.

Pat laughed indulgently.

'Hugo'll be late for his own funeral – if he ever gets to it. He said eleven-fifteen and it's twenty-five to twelve. Have you got a table?'

'Not yet.'

'Why not?'

'I'm not a member,' said John, and saw in her eyes the scorn which women reserve for male friends and relations who show themselves wanting in enterprise. 'You have to be a member,' he said, chafing under the look.

'I don't,' said Pat with decision. 'If you think I'm going to wait all night for old Hugo in a small lobby with six draughts whizzing through it, correct that impression. Go and find the head waiter and get a table while I leave my cloak. Back in a minute.'

John's emotions as he approached the head waiter rather resembled those with which years ago he had once walked up to a bull in a field, Pat having requested him to do so because she wanted to know if bulls in fields really are fierce or if the artists who depict them in comic papers are simply trying to be funny. He felt embarrassed and diffident. The head waiter was a large, stout, smooth-faced man who would have been better for a couple of weeks at Healthward Ho, and he gave the impression of having disliked John from the start.

John said it was a nice evening. The head waiter did not seem to believe him.

'Has – er – has Mr Carmody booked a table?' asked John.

'No, monsieur.'

'I'm meeting him here tonight.'

The head waiter appeared uninterested. He began to talk to an underling in rapid French. John, feeling more than ever an intruder, took advantage of a lull in the conversation to make another attempt.

'I wonder . . . Perhaps . . . Can you give me a table?'

Most of the head waiter's eyes were concealed by the upper strata of his cheeks, but there was enough of them left visible to allow him to look at John as if he was something unpleasant that had come to light in a portion of salad.

'Monsieur is a member?'

'Er – no.'

'If you will please wait in the lobby, thank you.'

'But I was wondering . . .'

'If you will wait in the lobby, please,' said the head waiter, and, dismissing John from the scheme of things, became gruesomely obsequious to an elderly man with diamond studs, no hair, an authoritative manner and a lady in pink. He waddled before them into the supper room, and Pat reappeared.

'Got that table?'

'I'm afraid not. He says . . .'

'Oh, Johnnie, you are helpless.'

Women are unjust in these matters. When a man comes into a night-club of which he is not a member and asks for a table he feels that he is butting in, and naturally is not at his best. This is not helplessness, it is fineness of soul. But women won't see that.

'I'm awfully sorry.'

The head waiter had returned, and was either doing sums or drawing caricatures on a large pad chained to a desk. He seemed so much the artist absorbed in his work that John would not have dreamed of venturing to interrupt him. Pat had no such delicacy.

'I want a table, please,' said Pat.

'Madame is a member?'

'A table, please. A nice, large one. I like plenty of room. And when Mr Carmody arrives tell him that Miss Wyvern and Mr Carroll are inside.'

'Very good, Madame. Certainly, Madame. This way, Madame.'

Just as simple as that! John, making a physically impressive but spiritually negligible tail to the procession, wondered, as he crossed the polished floor, how Pat did these things. It was not as if she were one of those massive imperious women whom you would naturally expect to quell head waiters with a glance. She was no Cleopatra, no Catherine of Russia – just a slim, slight girl with a tip-tilted nose. And yet she had taken this formidable magnifico in her stride, kicked him lightly in the face and passed on. He sat down, thrilled with a worshipping admiration.

Pat, as always happened after one of her little spurts of irritability, was apologetic.

'Sorry I bit your head off, Johnnie,' she said. 'It was a shame, after you had come all this way just to see an old friend. But it makes me so angry when you're meek and sheep-y and let people trample on you. Still, I suppose it's not your fault.' She smiled across at him. 'You always were a slow, good-natured old thing, weren't you, like one of those big dogs that come and bump their head on your lap and snuffle. Poor old Johnnie!'

John felt depressed. The picture she had conjured up was not a flattering one; and, as for this 'Poor old Johnnie!' stuff, it struck just the note he most wanted to avoid. If one thing is certain in the relations of the sexes, it is that the Poor Old Johnnies of this world get nowhere. But before he could put any of these feelings into words Pat had changed the subject.

'Johnnie,' she said, 'what's all this trouble between your uncle and father? I had a letter from father a couple of weeks ago, and as far as I could make out Mr Carmody seems to have been trying to murder him. What's it all about?'

Not so eloquently, nor with such a wealth of imagery as Colonel Wyvern had employed in sketching out the details of the affair of the dynamite outrage for the benefit of Chas Bywater, Chemist, John answered the question.

'Good heavens!' said Pat.

'I – I hope...' said John.

'What do you hope?'

'Well, I – I hope it's not going to make any difference?'

'Difference? How do you mean?'

'Between us. Between you and me, Pat.'

'What sort of difference?'

John had his cue.

'Pat, darling, in all these years we've known one another haven't you ever guessed that I've been falling more and more in love with you every minute? I can't remember a time when I didn't love you. I loved you as a kid in short skirts and a blue jersey. I loved you when you came back from that school of yours, looking like a princess. And I love you now more than I have ever loved you. I worship you, Pat darling. You're the whole world to me, just the one thing that matters the least little bit. And don't you try to start laughing at me again now, because I've made up my mind that, whatever else you laugh at, you've got to take me seriously. I may have been Poor Old Johnnie in the past, but the time has come when you've got to forget all that. I mean business. You're going to marry me, and the sooner you make up your mind to it, the better.'

That was what John had intended to say. What he actually did say was something briefer and altogether less effective.

'Oh, I don't know,' said John.

'Do you mean you're afraid I'm going to stop being friends with you just because my father and your uncle have had a quarrel?'

'Yes,' said John. It was not quite all he had meant, but it gave the general idea.

'What a weird notion! After all these years? Good heavens, no. I'm much too fond of you, Johnnie.'

Once more John had his cue. And this time he was determined that he would not neglect it. He stiffened his courage. He cleared his throat. He clutched the tablecloth.

'Pat...'

'Oh, there's Hugo at last,' she said, looking past him. 'And about time. I'm starving. Hullo! Who are the people he's got with him? Do you know them?'

John heaved a silent sigh. Yes, he could have counted on Hugo arriving at just this moment. He turned, and perceived that unnecessary young man crossing the floor. With him were a middle-aged man and a younger and extremely dashing-looking girl. They were complete strangers to John.

Hugo pranced buoyantly up to the table, looking like the Laughing Cavalier, clean-shaved.

He was wearing the unmistakable air of a man who has been to a welter-weight boxing contest at the Albert Hall and backed the winner.

'Hullo, Pat,' he said jovially. 'Hullo, John. Sorry I'm late. Mitt – if that is the word I want – my dear old friend . . . I've forgotten your name,' he added, turning to his companion.

'Molloy, brother. Thomas G. Molloy.'

Hugo's dear old friend spoke in a deep, rich voice, well in keeping with his appearance. He was a fine, handsome, open-faced person in the early forties, with grizzled hair that swept in a wave off a massive forehead. His nationality was plainly American, and his aspect vaguely senatorial.

'Molloy,' said Hugo, 'Thomas G. and daughter. This is Miss Wyvern. And this is my cousin, Mr Carroll. And now,' said Hugo, relieved at having finished with the introductions, 'let's try to get a bit of supper.'

The service at the Mustard Spoon is not what it was; but by the simple process of clutching at the coat tails of a passing waiter and holding him till he consented to talk business Hugo contrived to get fairly rapid action. Then, after an interval of the rather difficult conversation which usually marks the first stages of this sort of party, the orchestra burst into a sudden torrent of what it evidently mistook for music, and Thomas G. Molloy rose and led Miss Molloy out on to the floor. He danced a little stiffly, but he knew how to give the elbow and he appeared, as the crowd engulfed him, to be holding his own.

'Who are your friends, Hugo?' asked Pat.

'Thos G....'

'Yes, I know. But who are they?'

'Well, there,' said Hugo, 'you rather have me. I sat next to Thos at the fight, and I rather took to the fellow. He seemed to me a man full of noble qualities, including a loony idea that Eustace Rodd was some good as a boxer. He actually offered to give me three to one, and I cleaned up substantially at the end of the seventh round. After that, I naturally couldn't very well get out of giving the man supper. And as he had promised to take his daughter out tonight, I said bring her along. You don't mind?'

'Of course not. Though it would have been cosier, just we three.'

'Quite true. But never forget that, if it had not been for this Thos, you would not be getting the jolly good supper which I have now ample funds to supply. You may look on Thos as practically the Founder of the Feast.' He cast a wary eye at his cousin, who was leaning back in his chair with the abstracted look of one in deep thought. 'Has old John said anything to you yet?'

'John? What do you mean? What about?'

'Oh, things in general. Come and dance this. I want to have a very earnest word with you, young Pat. Big things are in the wind.'

'You're very mysterious.'

'Ah!' said Hugo.

Left alone at the table with nothing to entertain him but his thoughts, John came almost immediately to the conclusion that his first verdict on the Mustard Spoon had been an erroneous one. Looking at it superficially, he had mistaken it for rather an attractive place: but now, with maturer judgement, he saw it for what it was – a blot on a great city. It was places like the Mustard Spoon that made a man despair of progress. He disliked the clientele. He disliked the head waiter. He disliked the orchestra. The clientele was flashy and offensive and, as regarded the male element of it, far too given to the use of hair oil. The head waiter was a fat parasite who needed kicking. And, as for Ben Baermann's Collegiate Buddies, he resented the fact that they were being paid for making the sort of noises which he, when a small boy, had produced – for fun and with no thought of sordid gain – on a comb with a bit of tissue paper over it.