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The young man’s entrance was something of an event, so much of one that Rollo was uncharacteristically tempted to neglect the courtesy due an acquaintance of some duration if no profundity, and loiter out of sight behind one of the mahogany and glass partitions that divided the long bar, just to see how the scene played out. Christie would enjoy—he remembered he would have to communicate the anecdote in writing, and it immediately lost some of its glitter. This particular Dean Street hostelry was an unconventional choice for a fellow whose engagement had been announced in the Times only a very short time ago, or perhaps, on reflection, a very obvious one. He was having to repel approximately one comer a minute, from bristling Guardsmen to mauve-rinsed queans, but he did it with an oblique affability that suggested he knew his business and his purpose. Still, it only took a drunken matelot or a truculent Old Etonian, and sparks—possibly glasses and ashtrays too—would fly.
Rollo slid from the barstool and ambled across the room.
‘Hullo, Julian. What a nice surprise, seeing you here.’
A hopeful whose eyeshadow matched his pale green seersucker suit, his eyebrows plucked away and redrawn in pencil, halted in his conspicuous progress along the tartan banquette to bestow upon Rollo a look of singular venom; Rollo returned a dazzling smile and shook Julian’s hand.
‘Rollo! How do you do? Would you like a drink?’ Julian’s beer, evidently the choice of someone who didn’t care much for booze, stood barely touched on the table between them.
‘Wouldn’t dream of letting you buy it. Aren’t congratulations in order?’
‘Oh, yes. Thank you.’ His shy look contained a deep, mysterious fulfillment; even Rollo, largely immune to beauty of the Fleming sort, experienced a certain stirring. He had known one or two cases in which a Not Impossible She had coalesced into positive possibility for a chap; it still seemed to him an act of especial folly to stake your future on the long odds of a double negative, even when you took into account the salient disadvantages of the alternative.
‘Let me get you something to chase that with.’
He got gin for himself and for Julian a large single malt. He reckoned he could afford the generosity: lunch with a potential Angel for Brimpton Abbey had been a complete success; he was seeing the man, a Lloyds underwriter, again for dinner later that night. It suited Rollo’s sense of humour to be an object of rancorous envy for about three-quarters of the room while actually looking forward to a different class of thing altogether: the Angel was a fallen one, and looked it; but over coffee he’d let drop one or two hints that made Rollo’s pulse race and his mouth dry up.
‘Happy days,’ he said, raising his glass. ‘When is yours, anyway, or hasn’t it been set?’ He offered his cigarette case; Julian shook his head.
Julian named the date, adding his opinions on the futility of long engagements. Rollo nodded and smoked his way through this oration, gently nursing his expectations of the evening.
‘It must involve many of the same joys as putting on a show, the preparations, I mean. Is that what you’re in town for?’ His address in the social column had been a Gloucestershire one; the girl's people were from Shropshire. Rollo wished he had paid attention to her name: something vaguely jubilant: Felicity? Letitia? It was slightly odd that Julian hadn’t said it.
‘Oh, no. It’ll be very small, very quiet. No, I’m staying with Chris Tranter; you remember, the man who was at the Summer School the same year as me.’
‘Who could forget “Origin, Development, an’ Consolidation of the Evolutionary Idea of the Proletariat” Tranter? What’s he doing these days? Not still writing?’
‘Chris is all right,’ Julian said mildly. ‘He’s mellowed a bit. And yes, as a matter of fact: The Three Hundred Club just put on his Hungry Harvest. He had an idea at one point that I might—well. I’m supposed to meet him here at half-past, but I daresay he’s been held up at work: the Treasury, you know.’
Rollo failed to quash in time a grimace expressive of the likely consequences of a civil servant being caught in a police raid.
‘His choice,’ Julian gave an eloquent little shrug. ‘I think it’s material for a new piece.’
‘God.’ He felt a hazy irritation with someone for whom all this, the giddy exhilaration and sordid disappointment, craven betrayals and ferocious solidarity, ecstasy and terror and pain and tedium and consolation, was simply fodder for a self-congratulatingly censorable Sunday-theatre spectacle instead of, well, one’s life: it must be restful, in a way. He smiled with a big, conscious benevolence.
‘Anyway,’ Julian said, ‘what are you up to? Do you live in London now?’
That touched Rollo on the lesion left by his audition for Carlos Traherne's company, and he quickly turned a genuine wince into a comical one. ‘Alas, still in the provinces, busily purveying hampers of string hauberks and farthingales to rep. and Art to the largely indifferent but sometimes indecently enthusiastic Folk. I’m only in town overnight. I've been dipping my grubby paws into the handbags of the choir celestial.’
‘Mm?’
‘Lunch with an investor. Very successful afternoon, all told. I daresay I’ve bought myself quite three weeks of Anna and Florrie’s sweetness and light, which is alarming in and of itself, but anything that improves the atmosphere there, my dear, is a blessing.’
‘I thought you all got on very well?’ Honestly, Rollo thought, it was nothing short of crime that the audience for that exquisitely well-bred invitation to scandal should be confined to stolid County folk and an unexceptionable wife; Noël Coward could scarcely have done it better.
‘Since we lost Christie we’ve been in disarray. We’ve had several replacements. One lasted nearly a fortnight.’
‘She left to get married, I suppose?’
‘If only. In fact, she sort of left not to. It all began when she took some time off to nurse her rich great-aunt. I don’t know how well you knew Christie, but you could hardly have missed it really. She has absolutely the most fearful weakness, more than that, a fetish, for a hard-luck case. Give me your poor, your filthy, your garret-dwellers, your tubercular—she can’t really get going without it, I think. And the great-aunt’s GP was the corniest of all: his wife didn’t understand him. Catnip. The way she told it, it was like that bit in Jane Eyre—’
‘He doesn’t keep the wife in the attic?’
‘I’ll come to that. No, he didn’t seem in the least Byronic—a bit of a drip, really, the kids at the Easter school called him the Dumb Blond—but, in any case, one night she felt his soul yearning to hers, for her to come with her succouring cup—’
Julian’s face grew suddenly still and stern, a Pre-Raphaelite Parsifal. Rollo wondered if he’d pushed it somehow, decided he didn’t care, and continued, ‘—though what she actually did was ring him up in the middle of the night, saying that Aunty’d had an attack, and he flew into her longing arms.’
‘But I say, Rollo, that alone could have got him struck off. Should have, really.’ He spoke with a firm but lightly-worn authority, Hollywood’s idea of the passionate but unsentimental medic. ‘You see, Hilary—my fiancée—is a doctor; well, she trained as a surgeon, though she’s in general practice now.'
‘Oh, very dashing,’ Rollo said, hoping that his mental abacus wasn’t visible. She must be eight or nine years Julian’s senior at least, probably a rather tolerant and worldly person with her own interests; if there had to be a double negative, a great deal better that than the other sort, who married boys because they wouldn’t pester them and became, in short order, jealous, weepy human blancmanges.
'But my point is, I was never her patient exactly, but just over a year ago I took a spill from my horse, and she was on duty when things got a bit touch-and-go for me. She saw to it that I had the emergency operation I needed. And even that's dicey, according to the spirit if not the letter. Or so I understand.’
‘But I don’t think we want Christie’s chap struck off,’ Rollo went on, thinking now that he’d unwisely embarked on this one, he’d better keep it anonymous. ‘Even if he did buy her forty guineas'-worth of beaver coat that she can’t wear out of doors. He really doesn’t seem very bright. When Aunty popped her clogs they found out that the maid had known about the affair all along, and they were in living fear of blackmail, except Aunty left the maid—the most marvellously Gothic creature, according to Christie, like Frankenstein's monster in a starched cap—everything but a hundred pounds, so they breathed again. In the meantime the doc’s wife took up with a bunch of these Buchman types, I dare say you ran across some of them as an undergraduate, and ended up pushing off to South Africa. No kids, I think she couldn’t, and that was the hitch. Oh—yes please, same again.’
Julian had returned decisively, a little rebukingly even, to his pale ale; this time, however, he accepted a cigarette.
‘Chin chin. Then at the Easter School, and despite the presence of Doctor Dimwit—you know, in some ways I quite liked him, but one had to put one’s brain into low gear—Christie managed to acquire herself a fiancé, a master in a prep school. I’d be impressed if she knew how she manages it, but she doesn’t seem to, it’s just static electricity, like a rayon slip clinging to her stockings. And that was just as ill-advised, except she wanted to look after the little boys, and that might’ve answered. But then the maid served up her cold consommé and wrote to Christie’s intended telling him he should have asked for a discount. I know it sounds impossibly like a Lyceum melodrama, but it’s true, and he was most horribly generous and forgave her quite elaborately, so Christie broke it off and slunk back to the doc.’
‘Why, for God’s sake?’
‘Oh, you know, Christie. Being nice to men. Wonder she didn’t—’ Rollo cleared his throat hurriedly and sipped his drink. ‘She thinks it’s her métier.'
‘No—I mean, why did the maid stop at that? People who are low enough to do it at all always go for someone who’s got something definite to lose.’ His voice had the gravitas of expertise, no, Rollo realised, of experience. He thought he might rather like to meet Julian’s fiancée. ‘Even if her own ideas were rather Victorian, she must have seen that the chances of getting much satisfaction out of Christie were small: you said the schoolmaster was prepared to go through with it; it was the merest chance that Christie didn’t fancy spending the rest of her life with his magnanimity. Whyever didn’t the maid write to the GMC?’
Rollo shook his head. ‘She didn’t know she could, I suppose.’
‘To the doctor’s partner, then, or his wife.’
‘Perhaps she had fixed ideas about Men and Women, and that nothing is to be expected of the former. And I think the chap's senior partner in his practice now, someone died. Which isn't to say that Nemesis in a Mob-Cap couldn't work out the approximate function of the General Medical Council and serve him up hashed to it at any point, though I suppose the longer she leaves it the less likely it gets. But the upshot of it all was that Christie wouldn’t hear of continuing at the Abbey, he needed her, and she’s installed in a beastly little bedsitter with nothing to do except warm the part-time slippers he keeps there and pack his part-time pipe.’
Julian did not respond for a moment. ‘And I suppose this rotter thinks he’s too much of a gentleman to divorce his wife for desertion?’
‘Too much of a damned ass, more like. She wrote to him from Cape Town or wherever the hell, saying “oh, by the way, darling I’ve started up a nursery—” infants, I think, not roses, ‘“with a close woman friend of mine”—exactly—’
Julian’s jaw and eyes hardened. Rollo contemplated him interestedly for a moment—nor appear'd / Less then Arch Angel ruind, and th' excess / Of Glory obscur'd. He wouldn’t have had Julian down as the sort to harbour an irrational resentment of lesbians, and it made him all the more curious about the lady surgeon.
‘—and would you believe, the prize chump wrote back, essentially, “oh, fine, dear, stay as long as you like.” Christie was in despair, poor girl. All she’s ever really wanted is an adorable little baby of her own, and she’s too honest to stage an accident.’
‘I expect that wouldn’t be quite such a clincher, with a doctor, anyway.’ Julian gulped beer. Fascinated, Rollo examined, like geological strata, insouciance laid upon a carious braggadocio, which in turn rested on a certain genuine conversancy, the kind borne of women finding a man ‘safe’.
‘Well, anyway, I think we’ve finally found a replacement—but it’s been murder: you might remember what Florrie’s like when she plays a heroine—’
At that moment, Tranter appeared, florid, plump and apologetic, his attempt at a tolerant, habituated manner unfortunately emphasising his general air of being all agog. Rollo repressed the urge to confirm his evident expectations with a surreptitious hand on his backside. A voice pealed, piccolo-sharp, into one of those uncanny conversational lulls that are seemingly written into human scenes by a superlunary playwright. ‘Can’t say I can make arse or tit of Beautiful’s taste, can you, Binky?’ It seemed like Rollo's exit cue, and he took it.
He left the pub to rain-wet streets and the tawny sunlight of an evening in late May: how unlikely it always seemed, that the days had again grown long. And time short, he thought obscurely, he supposed meaning the European situation, but also the senseless waste of Christie’s youth; of Julian’s, even. But they alike lacked some crucial facility, one that in him was over-developed to the point of grotesquery, like an archer's bow-arm. How queer that they should both have ended up entangled with medicos. He pushed his hands into his pockets, shoving back the skirts of his mackintosh, and murmured a favourite speech, Gaveston from Edward II: ‘I must have wanton Poets, pleasant wits’.
At ‘Sometime a lovelie boy in Dian’s shape,’ he found himself recalled to last week’s auditions, and ceased his recitation. Of all the candidates one had stood out from a crowd of pert, affected simperers, and the appointment had been unhesitatingly made. He thought he would probably enjoy the company of Miss Kimball, who gave the impression of humour, competence and perspicacity; a vivid personality who handled others with care and reticence. She moved like a panther on the stage, and her voice was as clear and pungent as pine resin. He stopped at the curb and crossly lit a cigarette. In fact, she would be damn near perfect, if she weren’t five foot bloody ten.