The Darts of Cupid: Stories (4 page)

"I’ll clean it up for you," said the Sergeant.

"I thought you’d say you’d give me a pair of nylons," I remarked. "They do exist, don’t they? And is it really true that they last longer than silk?"

The Sergeant said, "The harder you work, the sooner the war will be won and the sooner you’ll find out, ma’am. Come along now and get it over with."

"Get over what?" asked the Major, who had just entered.

"I’m off to the slaughterhouse, euphemistically known as the ladies’ rest room," I said.

"Stop clutching your hand," said the Major. "Come over here to the window and show me."

"I’ll cut off the rough edges, sir," said the Sergeant, who had followed us, "and fix it up with iodine and a bandage."

"No," said the Major. "No iodine. With that skin of yours, you’ll get an eczema and no end of trouble. Iodine is all right for the sheep and the cows and the horses. But you are too delicate. I won’t have it. Wash it with soap and cold water and let it dry in the air. Let her be, Sergeant."

When I was coming back from luncheon, Sergeant Parsons approached me. "You women are so stupid, you’ll believe anything. I just thought you’d like to know."

"How do you mean?" I asked.

"Telling you you are so delicate. Routine treatment is all right for others but not for you. Because you are so delicate. And you fall for it."

"He’s a surgeon," I said. "He should know."

"He knows, all right. He knows only too well what he is after," said the Sergeant. "And if you don’t, it’s about time you did. He’s broken you down so he’s only got to whistle and you come. And he won’t let you go. If I say a word, it’s always, ‘She’s our most brilliant coder, and even if she weren’t, what the hell, I’ve got to have her around, she does me good.’ But what good is he doing you? If I were you, I’d get myself moved. You needn’t raise a finger. I’ll fix it for you."

I did not speak.

"Look at it this way," said the Sergeant. "You are only twenty-four, aren’t you, and you are married?"

"Not fearfully, not frightfully," I said.

"I know," said the Sergeant, "but you want to think ahead. Maybe when the war is over you’ll want to go back to your husband."

"What’s all this got to do with the Major?" I said. "You go drown yourself in your iodine. You are barking up the wrong tree. He doesn’t . . . You know quite well he’s never even asked me out. He’s got other fish to fry. He’s got his mistress, with the big blue eyes. And a wife and child in God’s own country."

"He’s been after you from the very first minute he set foot in this office," said the Sergeant. "First, I thought it would blow over, but it hasn’t. Now you are in it up to your neck, and before long you’ll burn your boats. If I were in your shoes, I’d run for dear life."

I did not speak.

"Don’t say I didn’t warn you," he said.

"Charmed, I’m sure. Much obliged, Sergeant," I said.

It was after this—only a few days after, it must have been, because the blood crust on my hand had not yet fallen off— when the Major said to me, "I’d be very pleased if you’d come to dinner with us tonight. Constance—what the hell, you know my setup—she’ll be delighted to have you, and there’s a friend of mine, a colleague, just come over from the States, and he’s staying with us. I told her you are such good company."

"Thank you, Major, I’d love to come," I said.

"Then why do you look so sad about it?" he asked.

"I didn’t know it showed," I said.

"It does," he said. "It doesn’t matter what you say, I can always read you in your large brown eyes. Now, what is it?"

"It’s only—," I said. "Only that it makes me feel so ghastly respectable. Promoted to the position of the trusted family friend, like the maiden aunt. But I feel greatly honored, of course."

It was agreed that he would fetch me from my place at half past seven that evening, and when I started to explain how to find the house where I lived he cut me short, saying that he knew it anyway.

I did not tell anyone of the invitation, but my first thought was of Sergeant Parsons, and how ridiculously wrong he had been with his warning. To me, the invitation had been like a slap in the face.

It is not often in life that things turn out as one has expected them, but when I saw the Major’s flat it was exactly as I had pictured it beforehand; this was not remarkable, because I knew the square, and I knew that Bathdale, apart from its colleges, is famous as a retiring place for colonial servants. It was situated on the first floor, in the corner of the house of one of those Regency terraces whose pilasters counterfeiting Doric columns and gables give the town its make-believe air of Greek temples. Above these, incongruously, the Chinese-style green copper roofs curving upward over the narrow iron-railed balconies draw an ever-recurring pattern of Oriental fantasy across the eggshell white façades. The big drawing room had the customary three tall windows and stuccowork ceiling, and was furnished, as I had visualized, with easy chairs and settees whose ill-fitting loose covers of faded flowered cretonne partly concealed sagging springs and lumpy stuffing. There were banal ivory carvings, the cloisonné plaques, the brass Benares tray tables, and the dancing Krishna in bronze with which the army officers, the tea and rubber planters, and the civil servants who had once lived here recalled their former life in the Far East.

Whenever I enter a room, I can tell at a glance whether I am attractive to the men who are there, and when I saw the Captain, who stood by the fire, glass in hand, I was glad to feel that I pleased him. It would, I thought, provide me with a measure of consolation for being made to witness the Major’s loving ménage. The guest looked clever, restless, and dissatisfied—an uncomfortable person to be with. In his early thirties, about the same age as the Major, he was thin and narrow-faced, with black curling hair, small eyes, and a strongly jutting nose and chin. His deeply sunburned color proclaimed his recent arrival in England and gave him a perhaps spurious air of vigorous health.

"How do you do it? Where did you get this peach of a girl from?" he asked as soon as he had been presented to me. "Say, what kind of an office is this where she comes from?"

I did not pay much attention to their chaffing. It was along the same lines as, "How can a ghastly man like you get himself such a divine wife?" and as I sipped my drink of gin and lemon I thought what a pity it was that it was night and that the blackout boards had been fitted over the panes; I would have liked to stand by the window on a fair evening, looking at the sunset sky from perhaps the very spot that Beau Nash had done the same.

Constance came in. It was not her easy, beautiful smile that I saw first of all, nor the kind of dress she had on. It was her figure. She was certainly six months pregnant.

"How nice of you to have come, Eve, and at such short notice, too," she said, and I noticed that she, the stranger, called me Eve, when the Major had never done so, and I fell to wondering what he had told her about me. I also gave full praise to the Merry Widow’s judgment; she was genuinely well bred.

"It was awfully good of you to ask me," I said. "Simply thrilling nowadays to be asked to dinner, the cheese ration being what it is."

"I’m so glad, Eve, you didn’t say, ‘I hope you aren’t going to make anything special,’ " she cried. "Because when people say that, they expect you to do something special, and to trouble like mad."

The Major several times made hearty allusions to her state, laughing loudly. Addressing her, he would say, "Now, what will you have to drink, the two of you?" and, "Sit yourselves down, the two of you," and, "Let’s get up—shall I hoist you up with a crane?" Each time, she would first seek my eye, as though waiting for my approval, before joining in the laughter, and then say, radiantly, "Isn’t Calvin silly?" And while I forced myself to smile, too, my heart tightened each time I heard her pronounce his Christian name; I had never heard it spoken before.

We went into the dining room—narrow, ill lit, and chilly, despite two burning electric stoves. This, too, was furnished as expected, with the usual shield-back imitation Hepplewhite chairs and bowfront sideboards. It was hung with dilettante oils depicting Asian women in their native costume, and these provided the Major with further jokes about Constance’s condition, and the danger of her "taking fright."

The meal was lavish, by wartime standards. The fish was cooked with mushrooms and shrimps, both unrationed and expensive, and there was cold tinned turkey, which was a present from the Captain, and the American tinned fruit was served with those little domed cakes smothered in chocolate shavings that were the hallmark of Kunz on the Promenade, the best pastry cook in town.

After the meal, Constance went out to make the coffee. The Captain rose and, despite my offers to help, began to stack up the plates. "I’ll clear away," he said, "and you two go back to the fire. I’ll cough three times before I come into the room."

We went to the drawing room, and the Major, after having put more coals on the fire, came and sat on the arm of my chair. "Sad again?" he asked.

"Not exactly," I said.

"Because of that remark?" he asked.

"Oh, rot," I said. "That was just silly and mauvais genre."

"Then what is on your mind?" he asked.

"Wondering what’s going to happen," I said.

"There are two possibilities," he remarked. "Either it’s going to be a boy or a girl. It isn’t twins."

"And what then?" I asked.

"Nothing," he said. "I suppose she’ll get herself a pram. What the hell, she’s got money of her own."

I did not speak.

He said, "What the hell, I didn’t want it to happen. But she was all set for it. And besides, what was done could have been undone. I offered it to her ten times over. It would have been child’s play, I have so many friends among my colleagues. But she wouldn’t hear of it. She wants to have it and she is going to have it, and I’ll leave her to it. She knows it. She knew it from the beginning."

"Dreadful," I said.

"No. It’s what she really wants."

"It’s dreadful just the same," I said, "and she is really and truly a sweet girl."

"Oh, what the hell. She’s sweet. All right, sure, she’s sweet," he said in a weary voice.

"She isn’t married?" I asked.

"There’s a husband floating about. English. He’s a major in India now. She’ll never go back to him. She was off him already before I met her, so I didn’t grab her and break up a happy home, if that’s what’s worrying you."

I remained silent.

"Have a drink," he said.

"Not just now."

"Come on, behave like a guest. You didn’t come here for the pleasure. Just a tiny drop. Do you know what the old lady said to the bishop when she went bathing in the sea? ‘Every little drop helps.’ "

I forced myself to laugh.

"Oh, Eve, you two make such a lovely group sitting there by the fire," said Constance from the door.

"Sure we do," said the Major. "We are used to making a lovely group. We are old friends by now, aren’t we?"

"Or old enemies," I said. I watched the Captain coming in; he was pushing a trolley. While setting out the coffee cups on their saucers, he said in a distracted tone, as though intent on his task, "Do you know what the Chinese call a lover? They call him one’s preordained enemy."

"The Chinks do give me the creeps," Constance said. "Don’t they you, Eve?" And she gave me a cordial smile.

"Not me," I said. "I always think I’d like to go to bed with a Chinese. And failing this, with a plumber. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do to get in well with a plumber. He is the only man a woman can’t do without."

"Oh, Eve, aren’t you naughty? Isn’t she dreadful?" cried Constance with a delighted smile.

"Now I know what made me think of the Chinese," the Captain said to me. He had remained grave and preoccupied. "I’ve been trying to figure out all along why you are so fascinating, and who you look like. And now I’ve got it. You look like Luise Rainer when she played in
The Good Earth.
That’s set in China."

"I didn’t see it," I said.

"Oh, Eve, he’s right," said Constance.

"What the hell, stop buttering her up," said the Major. He seemed annoyed, but Constance did not see his vexation. The Captain did, though, and he appeared to enjoy it.

After we had drunk the coffee, Constance brought out an album and made me sit next to her on the settee. I thought she was going to show me photographs, but when I opened it I saw it was a book of remembrance. "You must write down something for me, Eve," she said, "because this is such a nice get-together, and nice people are always ships that pass by night."

I glanced at her sideways. She was smiling, her hands folded over her breast.

"You mean here today and gone tomorrow," said the Captain, watching her, too. Then his eyes flashed on me, and I bit my teeth together and returned his look.

The Major gave me his fountain pen. "Make it as good as Widow Dicks’s," he said.

"Don’t remind me of that," I said.

Then I wrote quickly, feeling embarrassed because they were all watching me in silence. "Here," I said, handing the book to Constance. "As a souvenir of Bathdale."

"Oh yes, of course, how clever of you," she said. "But they won’t get it, poor lambs."

"Let’s have it, what the hell, then we’ll say whether we’ve got it or not," called the Major. And Constance, who had closed the album, recited:

Miss Buss and Miss Beale
The darts of Cupid don’t feel.
How different from us,
Poor Beale and poor Buss.

The Major said, "Good, clean English fun. It’s always beyond me. Come on, unbosom yourselves, the two of you."

"It’s to do with the Bathdale Ladies’ College," said Constance.

"The Merry Widow went there, and Claudia," I said. "That’s why they are so pally."

"You tell them, Eve," said Constance. "You are heavier in the brain than I am," and I told about the birth of the poem, which was and still is famous and to which no one has ever owned up as being the author. In Victorian times, when the school was at the height of its fame, the principal, Miss Buss, invited Miss Beale, headmistress of a girls’ school in north London, to look over the college. While touring the empty classrooms they found the poem chalked on a blackboard.