Sir!' She Said (6 page)

When she came out again into the sunlight she shook herself. It had been marvellous. It had been worth much more than the guinea she had paid for it. She would go again. Certainly she would go again; never had she felt herself so understood before. All that had been said to her had been so true. And there was so much of it that she had forgotten. So little, when it came to that, that she could remember.
What was it that she had said, that dark-skinned, quick-voiced woman? Something about hurting people and about not meaning to. Something about Julia: a quarrel with her: and having to be patient with her, dear silly Julia, because there were things in Julia's life that she knew nothing of; though what could there be to worry Julia she did not see: Julia who had her own flat and could do what she liked, when she liked. And what else was it she had said? About her not knowing what she wanted. Melanie laughed at that. Not know what she wanted. Why, surely that was the one thing she did know. It was life she wanted—life. And as for her future, wouldn't it just be a turning to where life was keenest.

Lightheartedly she waved her hand towards a taxi. It was nearly lunch time. She was feeling hungry.

“Albemarle Street—the Six Hundred Club,” she said.

In the Victorian era a single visit to a man's house or flat left you with a fairly accurate idea of that man's material position. In those days economists laid it down that the rent of a house should represent a tenth of a complete income. To-day you can form no such estimate.

In this era of soaring income tax, when every other family has a motor car: when servants are hard to get: when restaurants are plentiful: when home life is disintegrating: when people cannot be troubled with the responsibilities of family life: when they prefer to spend their money outside their homes, on cars and in restaurants and night clubs: when for many a home or flat is no more than a headquarters where they sleep and eat their breakfasts and keep their clothes: when mobility is in itself a goal: when no one will be bothered with anything that cannot be shut up and left at a moment's notice; in such an era you may easily be misled by the standard of comfort that people maintain in their home lives. You cannot judge the extent of a person's income by the number of his spare bedrooms and the spruceness of his domestic staff. Even so and even now a flat will tell you a good deal. Nobody could spend ten
minutes, for instance, in Gavin Todd's without realising that however he might choose to apportion his income, that income was comfortably proportioned.

It was in St. James's, where rents and premiums are high. It was on the first floor. Its rooms were high and wide and airy: facing, the half of them a rambling mews, the others a network of swaying boughs. “He's rich,” thought Jean Ryland, “richer than I thought,” as she looked up at the red brick façade from the street below. And again a cautionary instinct made her hesitate. The same cautionary instinct that all that afternoon had been counselling her against the acceptance of that invitation. What was the point of it, she asked herself. She was only putting herself in a false position, classing herself with all those other girls whom experience had taught him to despise. He had met her in a shop, and she had resolved that in her case none of the cynical masculine prophecies about feminine emancipation were going to be justified.

Before she had been in the shop a week she had decided that. There was much that during that week had come to her as a shock. She had wanted to work. She had wanted the feeling of independence that work would give her. But she had not enjoyed the position in which that work had placed her. She had not liked being in a position where people could be cross and irritable with her; where they could find fault with her and blame her because this and that had not been done exactly to their liking; where she would have to listen to abuse without retorting. It annoyed her that because she was in a shop, because
she was paid to be in a shop, people could speak to her in a way that had they met her anywhere else they would not have dared to do. “Would they speak to me like that,” she had said to Julia, “if we had been on some picnic and I'd made some mistake about the hamper; brought no corkscrew, or the wrong kind of milk? Of course they wouldn't. Because I'm working in a shop they think nothing of me. They've no respect for me. They think I'm something they can wipe their feet on.”

Julia had laughed at her. “Don't be silly,” she had said. “They aren't thinking of you at all. They're just spoilt discontented women who get hysterical when the least thing goes wrong with them. It's life they're railing at, not you.”

Jean refused to be convinced. “That may be or that may not be,” she had said. “I've got to put up with it, of course, but I don't like it. I don't like being spoken to in that way.”

This slight that she imagined she detected in the attitude of the shop's clientele had made her sensitive and punctilious. People spoke to her in a shop as they would never speak to her in private life. They had no respect for her because she was working in a shop. That was how she argued the matter with herself. And so when some of the men who came into the shop spoke pleasantly to her she imagined that there was behind that pleasantness the same lack of respect that there had been behind the unpleasantness of their wives and sisters. “Because I work in a shop,” she had thought, “they think nothing of me. They don't consider that I should be treated in the same way as
the girls they meet in their mother's house. They look on me as fair game.”

Julia had done her best to laugh her friend out of that attitude.

“Men don't think about girls in that way nowadays,” she had said. “They don't divide them into two classes: the kind they meet at their parents' home and the rest: they're just as likely to try and start an affair with one of their sisters' friends as with the girl at the tobacconist's. People don't make those distinctions now.”

Jean had shaken her head, however. “That may be so,” she had said. “But I'm not going to run the risk.”

She was free, but she was not going to abuse her freedom. She was her own chaperone. She was as particular as her Victorian parents would have been as to what men she went about with. She had never run the risk of being treated cheaply. She never went out with men for the mere sake of going out: nor would she ever let men take her to parties for which she had received no invitation from a hostess. Some people were inclined to think her priggish. “You've got to be,” was her retort, “if you're going to keep your self-respect.” Never in her life, though she was twenty-two, though she had been earning a living for eighteen months, had she accepted an invitation as casual as Gavin Todd's.

“And probably in two hours' time I shall be regretting it,” she thought, as she climbed the stairs.

For she did not believe that it had been to ask her advice that he had invited her to his flat. That was simply an excuse: so that he would be able to explain
her to his friends; to say “here is Jean Ryland, who's going to tell me what screen to buy.” She would be presented as a shop girl to his friends, though it was not really as a shop girl that she was being invited there. She was being placed in a hopelessly false position. The temptation to turn away from St. James's to the tubes and buses of Piccadilly was very strong, as she hesitated on the mat outside his door. What was the use, she asked herself. Todd only thought of her as one of these modern girls with whom it was always worth trying to see how the land lay. He had success and money. There had been, there were probably at this very moment numberless women in his life. It was absurd to imagine that she meant anything to him. It was on his part no more than a casual attraction. Probably this cocktail party would be the last she would ever see of him. He must know so many attractive women. He would think nothing of her when he saw her side by side with them, in comparison with them.

The most that it could lead to would be a dinner, a misunderstanding, unhappy memories. And she didn't want to quarrel. She didn't want to have unhappy memories of him. He was so nice. It would be much better to go away before she began spoiling things, and she would have gone if she could have mustered the courage to face Julia's mockery the next morning. But that she could not do. She would rather make a man hate her than a girl laugh at her. She had got to see it through.

She pressed on the bell more firmly and more lengthily than ordinarily she would have done. She was nervous: with a nervousness that made her
truculent. But she was more curious than nervous. She wanted to know more about Gavin Todd: what he was like: how he lived: what friends he had: what people and things he had about him. She looked inquisitively at the hatchet-faced butler who opened the door for her: the one person who rumour had it would be respectless for her host: from whom she could have learnt, had she dared to ask and he to tell her, all that puzzled her.

If only she could ask him, she thought, as she followed him down a narrow passage out of which doors opened on either side, to a door from behind which came the sound of voices. “Will it be an awful crush?” she wondered.

Actually there were fifteen to twenty people in the long high Georgian room from whose bowed window frames the deep brown and gold of a brocade fell in dusky folds. But the room was large enough to seem neither noisy nor crowded, so that she was spared that wretched feeling of arriving at a party where you know scarcely anyone and that is so full of noise and people that you do not expect your host to realise that you have arrived. She had scarcely walked into the room before Todd had jumped to his feet from the stool he had been sitting on and come across to her.

“This is nice,” he said. “I was so afraid as I watched the clock go round that you'ld not be coming. Come over and join us. There's room here on the chesterfield. Let's see, do you know any of us?”

She did not. Introductions were rattled throught and, “we were just discussing,” he went on, “whether negroes ought to be allowed in restaurants.”

“And I was just saying,” a girl cut in, “that colour prejudice was just absurd. That if a negro's nice, he's as nice as any white man, and that there's no reason why we shouldn't have them round us.”

“But I've been in the Southern States,” a man retorted, “and I know that the negro you see over here is just one in about eighty thousand: that the average negro is little better than an animal; that it'll be a good many centuries before he's anything more than one, and that unless he's kept thoroughly in his place we're going to have a precious lot of trouble with him.”

“I don't see,” said the girl, “that that need worry us.”

“Needn't it!” the American retorted. “You've got most of the West Indies, a big chunk of Africa, and though there's all the difference in the world between a negro and a Hindoo or Malay, what do you imagine that they're going to think in India and Singapore when they read about negroes dancing with white women, and hear negroes boasting of their success with them?”

The girl shrugged her shoulders. “I suppose from the Empire's point of view that's very tragic. But you must consider us. You can't blame us, you know, when three quarters of the men we know are fairies.”

There was a laugh at that. A laugh in which Jean Ryland joined. She was happy and at ease. She felt that she was accepted, absorbed into the group, a part of the conversation though she had not spoken. Todd was smiling at her; friendlily encouraging. “Don't worry,” his smile said, “you're among friends here.” And a cocktail had been brought to her. Its cool sweetness
warmed her veins. “It's not in the least as I was afraid it was going to be,” she thought. “He treats me just as he's treated all the others. He's not tried to explain me. He was too nice for that.” Gratefully she smiled back at him, not telling herself that that not explaining was no proof of Todd's particular and peculiar pleasantness: but the idiom of the hour. The day had passed when people had to be explained: life was too diffuse, too cosmopolitan; there were too many people; the standards too relative and temporary. In the third decade of the twentieth century people only had to look all right to be thought all right. That Jean Ryland had not the experience to realise. She was content to sit there, joining in the talk now and again, interested in it, glancing round the room, appreciating the quality of its unostentatious taste, the solitary book-case, the steel engravings, the deep pile carpet, the lacquer cabinet: appreciating, too, the unostentatious skill with which Todd controlled his party, moving from group to group, seeing that the glasses were kept filled, only joining in the conversation when the conversation flagged, or to draw into it some guest or other who had not spoken.

He's charming, she thought, really charming. And she was glad and happy that his eyes should turn so often in her direction to make sure that she was at home there, that she was enjoying herself among people that she was meeting for the first time. He was so nice that it was hard to believe that he was so famous.

At her side they were discussing a challenge match that he would be playing on Thursday against Merivale,
the American champion. “Gavin ought to win,” one of them was saying. “Think of the smashing he gave him at St. Andrews two years ago!”

“Yes, I know,” the answer came. “But Gavin's out of practice. Two years ago he was playing seven days a week. Now he's in the city and working pretty hard there.”

Jean gave a start. She had not known before that Gavin had a job. She had thought he did nothing except play golf and amuse himself. She was glad he worked. It was amusing to compare him as he really was with the lounge lizard for which Julia had taken him. How glad she was that she had come. What an idiot she would have been not to have. She should have known that he would be nice to her. She was only sorry when the party began to disperse that she should have seen so little of him.