I

My project of settling in the country was well received by my friends.
Each saw in it a likely convenience for himself. I understood their attitude well. Country houses meant something particular and important in their lives, a system of permanent bolt-holes. They had, most of them, gradually dropped out of the round of formal entertaining; country life, for them, meant not a series of invitations, but of successful, predatory raids. Their lives were liable to sharp reverses; their quarters in London were camps which could be struck at an hour’s notice, as soon as the telephone was cut off. Country houses were permanent; even when the owner was abroad, the house was there, with a couple of servants or, at the worst, someone at a cottage who came in to light fires and open windows, someone who, at a pinch, could be persuaded also to make the bed and wash up. They were places where wives and children could be left for long periods, where one retired to write a book, where one could be ill, where, in the course of a love affair, one could take a girl and by being her guide and sponsor in strange surroundings, establish a degree of proprietorship impossible on the neutral ground of London. The owners of these places were, by their nature, a patient race, but repeated abuse was apt to sour them; new blood in their ranks was highly welcome. I detected this greeting in every eye and could not resent it.
There was also another, more amiable reason for their interest. Nearly all of them—and, for that matter, myself as well—professed a specialized enthusiasm for comestic architecture. It was one of the peculiarities of my generation and there is no accounting for it. In youth we had pruned our aesthetic emotions hard back so that in many cases they had reverted to briar stock; we, none of us, wrote or read poetry, or, if we did, it was of a kind which left unsatisfied those wistful, half-romantic, half-aesthetic, peculiarly British longings, which, in the past, used to find expression in so many slim lambskin volumes. When the poetic mood was on us, we turned to buildings, and gave them the place which our fathers accorded to Nature—to almost any buildings, but particularly those in the classical tradition, and, more particularly, in its decay. It was a kind of nostalgia for the style of living which we emphatically rejected in practical affairs. The notabilities of Whig society became, for us, what the Arthurian paladins were in the time of Tennyson. There was never a time when so many landless men could talk at length about landscape gardening. Even Roger compromised with his Marxist austerities so far as to keep up his collection of the works of Batty Langley and William Halfpenny. “The nucleus of my museum,” he explained. “When the revolution comes, I’ve no ambitions to be a commissar or a secret policeman. I want to be director of the Museum of Bourgeois Art.”
He was overworking the Marxist vocabulary. That was always Roger’s way, to become obsessed with a new set of words and to extend them, deliberately, beyond the limits of sense; it corresponded to some sombre, interior need of his to parody whatever, for the moment, he found venerable; when he indulged it I was reminded of the ecclesiastical jokes of those on the verge of religious melancholy. Roger had been in that phase himself when I first met him.
One evening, at his house, the talk was all about the kind of house I should buy. It was clear that my friends had very much more elaborate plans for me than I had for myself. After dinner Roger produced a copper-engraving of 1767 of A Composed Hermitage in the Chinese Taste. It was a preposterous design. “He actually built it,” Roger said, “and it’s still standing a mile or two out of Bath. We went to see it the other day. It only wants putting into repair. Just the house for you.”
Everyone seemed to agree.
I knew exactly what he meant. It was just the house one would want someone else to have. I was graduating from the exploiting to the exploited class.
But Lucy said: “I can’t think why John should want to have a house like that.”
When she said that I had a sudden sense of keen pleasure. She and I were on the same side.
Roger and Lucy had become my main interest during the months while I was waiting to settle up in St. John’s Wood. They lived in Victoria Square where they had taken three years’ lease of a furnished house. “Bourgeois furniture,” Roger complained, rather more accurately than usual. They shut away the model ships and fire-bucket wastepaper baskets in a store cupboard and introduced a prodigious radio-gramophone; they hung their own pictures in place of the Bartolozzi prints, but the house retained its character, and Roger and Lucy, each in a different way, looked out of place there. It was here that Roger had written his ideological play.
They had been married in November. I had spent all the previous autumn abroad on a leisurely, aimless trip before settling at Fez for the winter’s work. My mail at Malta, in September, told me that Roger had taken up with a rich girl and was having difficulty with her family; at Tetuan I learned that he was married. Apparently he had been in pursuit of her all the summer, unknown to us. It was not until I reached London that I heard the full story. Basil Seal told me, rather resentfully, because for many years now he had himself been in search of an heiress and had evolved theories on the subject of how and where they might be taken. “You must go to the provinces,” he used to say. “The competition in London is far too hot for chaps like us. Americans and Colonials want value for money. The trouble is that the very rich have a natural affinity for one another. You can see it happening all the time—stinking rich people getting fixed up. And what happens? They simply double their super tax and no one is the better off. But they respect brains in the provinces. They like a man to be ambitious there, with his way to make in the world, and there are plenty of solid, mercantile families who can settle a hundred thousand on a daughter without turning a hair, who don’t care a hoot about polo, but think a Member of Parliament very fine. That’s the way to get in with them. Stand for Parliament.”
In accordance with this plan Basil had stood three times—or rather had three times been adopted as candidate; on two occasions he fell out with his committee before the election. At least, that was his excuse to his friends for standing; in fact he, too, thought it a fine thing to be a Member of Parliament. He never got in and he was still unmarried. A kind of truculent honesty which he could never dissemble for long, always stood in his way. It was bitter for him to be still living at home, dependent on his mother for pocket money, liable to be impelled by her into unwelcome jobs two or three times a year while Roger had established himself almost effortlessly and was sitting back in comfort to await the World Revolution.
Not that Lucy was really rich, Basil hastened to assure me, but she had been left an orphan at an early age and her originally modest fortune had doubled itself. “Fifty-eight thousand in trustee stock, old boy. I wanted Lucy to take it out and let me handle it for her. I could have fixed her up very nicely. But Roger wasn’t playing. He’s always groaning about things being bourgeois. I can’t think of anything more bourgeois than three and a half per cent.”
“Is she hideous?” I asked.
“No, that’s the worst part about it. She’s a grand girl. She’s all right for a chap.”
“What like?”
“Remember Trixie?”
“Vaguely.”
“Well not at all like her.”
Trixie had been Roger’s last girl. Basil had passed her on to him, then taken her back for a week or two, then passed her on to him again. None of us had liked Trixie. She always gave the impression that she was not being treated with the respect she was used to.
“How did he come by her?”
Basil told me at length, unable to hide his admiration for Roger’s duplicity in the matter. All the previous summer, during the second Trixie period, Roger had been at work, without a word to any of us. I remembered, now, that he had suddenly become rather conspicuous in his clothes, affecting dark shirts and light ties, and a generally artistic appearance which, had he not been so bald, would have gone with long, untidy hair. It had embarrassed Trixie, she said, when at a bar they saw cousins of hers who were in the Air Force. “They’ll tell everyone I’m going about with a pansy.” So that was the explanation. It was greatly to Roger’s credit we agreed.
Improbable as it sounded, the truth was that they had met at a ball in Pont Street, given by a relative of Roger’s. He had gone, under protest, to make up the table at dinner in answer to an S.O.S. half an hour before the time. Someone had fallen out. It was five or six years since he had been in a London ballroom and, he explained afterwards, the spectacle of his pimply and inept juniors had inflated him with a self-esteem which must, he said, have been infectious. He had sat next to Lucy at dinner. She was, for our world, very young but, for her own, of a hoary age; that is to say, she was twenty-four. For six years she had been sent to dances by her aunt, keeping in an unfashionable, middle-strata of life in which her contemporaries had either married or taken to other occupations. This aunt occupied a peculiar position with regard to Lucy; she had brought her up and now did what she described as “making a home” for her, which meant that she subsisted largely upon Lucy’s income. She had two other nieces younger than Lucy, and it was greatly to their interest that they should move to London annually for the season. The aunt was a lady of delicate conscience where the issues of Lucy’s marriage were involved. Once or twice before she had been apprehensive—without cause as it happened—that Lucy was preparing to “throw herself away.” Roger, however, was a case that admitted of no doubt. Everything she learned about him was reprehensible; she fought him in the full confidence of a just cause, but she had no serviceable weapon. In six years of social life Lucy had never met anyone the least like Roger.
“And he took care she shouldn’t meet us,” said Basil. “What’s more, she thinks him a great writer.”
This was true. I did not believe Basil, but after I had seen her and Roger together I was forced to accept it. It was one of the most disconcerting features of the marriage for all of us. It is hard to explain exactly why I found it so shocking. Roger was a very good novelist—every bit as good in his own way as I in mine; when one came to think of it, it was impossible to name anyone else, alive, who could do what he did; there was no good reason why his books should not be compared with those of prominent writers of the past, nor why we should not speculate about their ultimate fame. But to do so struck us all as the worst of taste. Whatever, secretly, we thought about our own work we professed, in public, to regard it as drudgery and our triumphs as successful impostures on the world at large. To speak otherwise would be to suggest that we were concerned with anyone else’s interest but our own; it would be a denial of the sauve qui peut principle which we had all adopted. But Lucy, I soon realized, found this attitude unintelligible. She was a serious girl. When we talked cynically about our own work she simply thought less of it and of us; if we treated Roger in the same way, she resented it as bad manners. It was greatly to Roger’s credit that he had spotted this idiosyncrasy of hers at once and played his game accordingly. Hence the undergraduate costume and the talk about the Art of the Transition. Lucy had not abandoned her young cousins without grave thought. She perfectly understood that, for them, happiness of a particular kind depended on her continued support; but she also thought it a great wrong that a man of Roger’s genius should waste his talents on film scenarios and advertisements. Roger convinced her that a succession of London seasons and marriage to a well-born chartered accountant were not really the highest possible good. Moreover, she was in love with Roger.
“So the poor fellow has had to become a highbrow again,” said Basil. “Back exactly where he started in the New College Essay Society.”
“She doesn’t sound too keen on this play of his.”
“She isn’t. She’s a critical girl. That’s going to be Roger’s headache.”
This was Basil’s version of the marriage and it was substantially accurate. It omits, however, as any narrative of Basil’s was bound to, the consideration that Roger was, in his way, in love with Lucy. Her fortune was a secondary attraction; he lacked the Mediterranean mentality that can regard marriage as an honourable profession, perhaps because he lacked Mediterranean respect for the permanence of the arrangement. At the time when he met Lucy he was earning an ample income without undue exertion; money alone would not have been worth the pains he had taken for her; nor were the pains unique; he habitually went to great inconvenience in pursuit of his girls; even for Trixie he took tepidly to horse-racing for a time; the artistic clothes and the intellectual talk were measures of the respect in which he held Lucy. Her fifty-eight thousand in trustee stock was, no doubt, what made him push his suit to the extreme of marriage, but the prime motive and zest of the campaign came from Lucy herself.
To write of someone loved, of oneself loving, above all of oneself being loved—how can these things be done with propriety? How can they be done at all? I have treated of love in my published work; I have used it—with avarice, envy, revenge—as one of the compelling motives of conduct. I have written it up as something prolonged and passionate and tragic; I have written it down as a modest but sufficient annuity with which to reward the just; I have spoken of it continually as a game of profit and loss. How does any of this avail for the simple task of describing, so that others may see her, the woman one loves? How can others see her except through one’s own eyes, and how, so seeing her, can they turn the pages and close the book and live on as they have lived before, without becoming themselves the author and themselves the lover? The catalogues of excellencies of the renaissance poets, those competitive advertisements, each man outdoing the next in metaphor, that great blurb—like a Jewish publisher’s list in the Sunday newspapers—the Song of Solomon, how do these accord with the voice of love—love that delights in weakness, seeks out and fills the empty places and completes itself in its work of completion? How can one transcribe those accents? Love, which has its own life, its hours of sleep and waking, its health and sickness, growth, death and immortality, its ignorance and knowledge, experiment and mastery—how can one relate this hooded stranger to the men and women with whom he keeps pace? It is a problem beyond the proper scope of letters.
In the criminal code of Haiti, Basil tells me, there is a provision designed to relieve unemployment, forbidding farmers to raise the dead from their graves and work them in the fields. Some such rule should be observed against the use of live men in books. The algebra of fiction must reduce its problems to symbols if they are to be soluble at all. I am shy of a book commended to me on the grounds that the “characters are alive.” There is no place in literature for a live man, solid and active. At best the author may maintain a kind of Dickensian menagerie, where his characters live behind bars, in darkness, to be liberated twice nightly for a brief gambol under the arc lamps; in they come to the whip crack, dazzled, deafened and doped, tumble through their tricks and scamper out again, to the cages behind which the real business of life, eating and mating, is carried on out of sight of the audience. “Are the lions really alive?” “Yes, lovey.” “Will they eat us up?” “No, lovey, the man won’t let them”—that is all the reviewers mean as a rule when they talk of “life.” The alternative, classical expedient is to take the whole man and reduce him to a manageable abstraction. Set up your picture plain, fix your point of vision, make your figure twenty foot high or the size of a thumbnail, he will be life-size on your canvas; hang your picture in the darkest corner, your heaven will still be its one source of light. Beyond these limits lie only the real trouser buttons and the crepe hair with which the futurists used to adorn their paintings. It is, anyway, in the classical way that I have striven to write; how else can I now write of Lucy?
I met her first after I had been some weeks in London; after my return, in fact, from my week at the seaside. I had seen Roger several times; he always said, “You must come and meet Lucy,” but nothing came of these vague proposals until finally, full of curiosity, I went with Basil uninvited.
I met him in the London library, late one afternoon.
“Are you going to the young Simmondses’?” he said.
“Not so far as I know.”
“They’ve a party today.”
“Roger never said anything to me about it.”
“He told me to tell everyone. I’m just on my way there now. Why don’t you come along?”
So we took a taxi to Victoria Square, for which I paid.
As it turned out, Roger and Lucy were not expecting anyone. He went to work now, in the afternoons, with a committee who were engaged in some fashion in sending supplies to the Red Army in China; he had only just come in and was in his bath. Lucy was listening to the six o’clock news on the wireless. She said, “D’you mind if I keep it on for a minute? There may be something about the dock strike in Madras. Roger will be down in a minute.”
She did not say anything about a drink so Basil said, “May I go and look for the whisky?”
“Yes, of course. How stupid of me. I always forget. There’s probably some in the dining room.”
He went out and I stayed with Lucy in her hired drawing room. She sat quite still listening to the announcer’s voice. She was five months gone with child—“Even Roger has to admit that it’s proletarian action,” she said later—but as yet scarcely showed it in body; but she was pale, paler, I guessed, than normal, and she wore that incurious, self-regarding expression which sometimes goes with a first pregnancy. Above the sound of the wireless I heard Basil outside, calling upstairs, “Roger. Where do you keep the cork-screw?” When they got to the stock prices, Lucy switched off. “Nothing from Madras,” she said. “But perhaps you aren’t interested in politics.”
“Not much,” I said.
“Very few of Roger’s friends seem to be.”
“It’s rather a new thing with him,” I said.
“I expect he doesn’t talk about it unless he thinks people are interested.”
That was outrageous, first because it amounted to the claim to know Roger better than I did and, secondly, because I was still smarting from the ruthless boredom of my last two or three meetings with him.
“You’d be doing us all a great service if you could keep him to that,” I said.
It is a most painful experience to find, when one has been rude, that one has caused no surprise. That is how Lucy received my remark. She merely said, “We’ve got to go out almost at once. We’re going to the theatre in Finsbury and it starts at seven.”
“Very inconvenient.”
“It suits the workers,” she said. “They have to get up earlier than we do, you see.”
Then Roger and Basil came in with the drinks. Roger said, “We’re just going out. They’re doing the Tractor Trilogy at Finsbury. Why don’t you come too. We could probably get another seat, couldn’t we, Lucy?”
“I doubt it,” said Lucy. “They’re tremendously booked up.”
“I don’t think I will,” I said.
“Anyway join us afterwards at the Café Royal.”
“I might,” I said.
“What have you and Lucy been talking about?”
“We listened to the news,” said Lucy. “Nothing from Madras.”
“They’ve probably got orders to shut down on it. I.D.C. have got the BBC in their pocket.”
“I.D.C.?” I asked.
“Imperial Defence College. They’re the new hush-hush crypto-fascist department. They’re in up to the neck with I.C.I. and the oil companies.”
“I.C.I.?”
“Imperial Chemicals.”
“Roger,” said Lucy, “we really must go if we’re to get anything to eat.”
“All right,” he said. “See you later at the Café.”
I waited for Lucy to say something encouraging. She said, “We shall be there by eleven,” and began looking for her bag among the chintz cushions.
I said, “I doubt if I can manage it.”
“Are we taking the car?” Roger asked.
“No, I sent it away. I’ve had him out all day.”
“I’ll order some taxis.”
“We could drop Basil and John somewhere,” said Lucy.
“No,” I said, “get two.”
“We’re going by way of Appenrodts,” said Lucy.
“No good for me,” I said, although, in fact, they would pass the corner of St. James’s where I was bound.
“I’ll come and watch you eat your sandwiches,” said Basil.
That was the end of our first meeting. I came away feeling badly about it, particularly the way in which she had used my Christian name and acquiesced in my joining them later. A commonplace girl who wanted to be snubbing, would have been conspicuously aloof and have said “Mr. Plant,” and I should have recovered some of the lost ground. But Lucy was faultless.
I have seen so many young wives go wrong on this point. They have either tried to force an intimacy with their husbands’ friends, claiming, as it were, continuity and identity with the powers of the invaded territory or they have cancelled the passports of the old régime and proclaimed that fresh application must be made to the new authorities and applicants be treated strictly on their merits. Lucy seemed serenely unaware of either danger. I had come inopportunely and been rather rude, but I was one of Roger’s friends; they were like his family to her, or hers to him; we had manifest defects which it was none of her business to reform; we had the right to come to her house unexpectedly, to shout upstairs for the corkscrew, to join her table at supper. The question of intrusion did not arise. It was simply that as far as she was concerned we had no separate or individual existence. It was, as I say, a faultless and highly provocative attitude. I found that in the next few days a surprising amount of my time, which, anyway, was lying heavy on me, was occupied in considering how this attitude, with regard to myself, could be altered.
My first move was to ask her and Roger to luncheon. I was confident that none of their other friends—none of those, that is to say, from whom I wished to dissociate myself—would have done such a thing. I did it formally, some days ahead, by letter to Lucy. All this, I knew, would come as a surprise to Roger. He telephoned me to ask, “What’s all this Lucy tells me about your asking us to luncheon?”
“Can you come?”
“Yes, I suppose so. But what’s it all about?”
“It’s not ‘about’ anything. I just want you to lunch with me.”
“Why?”
“It’s quite usual, you know, when one’s friends marry. Just politeness.”
“You haven’t got some ghastly foreigners you stayed with abroad?”
“No, nothing like that.”
“Well, it all seems very odd to me. Writing a letter, I mean, and everything ...”
I rang off.
Lucy answered with a formal acceptance. I studied her writing. I had expected, I do not know why, a round girlish hand of the post-copper-plate era. Instead she wrote like a man. She used a fountain pen, I noticed; that was unusual in a girl.
Dear John,
Roger and I shall be delighted to lunch with you at the Ritz on Thursday week at 1.30.
Yours sincerely,
Lucy Simmonds.
Should it not have been “Yours ever” after the “Dear John”? I wondered whether she had wondered what to put. Another girl might have written “Yours” with a noncommittal squiggle, but her writing did not lend itself to that kind of evasion. I had ended my note, “Love to Roger.”
Was she not a little over-formal in repeating the place and time? Had she written straight off, without thinking, or had she sucked the top of her pen a little?
The paper was presumably the choice of their landlord, in unobtrusive good taste. I smelled it and thought I detected a whiff of soap.
At this point I lost patience with myself; it was ludicrous to sit brooding over a note of this kind. I began, instead, to wonder whom I should ask to meet her—certainly none of the gang she had learned to look on as “Roger’s friends.” On the other hand it must be clear that the party was for her. Roger would be the first to impute that they were being made use of. In the end, after due thought and one or two failures, I secured a middle-aged, highly reputable woman-novelist and Andrew Desert and his wife—an eminently sociable couple. When Roger saw his fellow guests he was more puzzled than ever. I could see him all through luncheon trying to work it out, why I should have spent five pounds in this peculiar fashion.
I enjoyed my party. Lucy began by talking about my father’s painting.
“Yes,” I said, “it’s very fashionable at the moment.”
“Oh, I don’t mean that,” she said in frank surprise, and went on to tell me how she had stopped before a shop window in Duke Street where a battle picture of my father’s was on view; there had been two private soldiers construing it together, point by point. “I think that’s worth a dozen columns of praise in the weekly papers,” she said.
“Just like Kipling’s Light that Failed,” said the woman-novelist.
“Is it? I didn’t know.” She told us she had never read any Kipling.
“That shows the ten years between us,” I said, and so the conversation became a little more personal as we discussed the differences between those who were born before the Great War and those born after it; in fact, so far as it could be worked, the differences between Lucy and myself.
Roger always showed signs of persecution-mania in the Ritz. He did not like it when we knew people at other tables whom he didn’t know and, when the waiter brought him the wrong dish by mistake, he began on a set-piece which I had heard him use before in this same place. “Fashionable restaurants are the same all over the world,” he said. “There are always exactly twenty per cent more tables than the waiters can manage. It’s a very good thing for the workers’ cause that no one except the rich know the deficiencies of the luxury world. Think of the idea Hollywood gives of a place like this,” he said, warming to his subject. “A maître d’hôtel like an ambassador, bowing famous beauties across acres of unencumbered carpet—and look at poor Lorenzo there, sweating under his collar, jostling a way through for dowdy Middle West Americans ...” But it was not a success. Lucy, I could see, thought it odd of him to complain when he was a guest. I pointed out that the couple whom Roger condemned as Middle West Americans were in fact called Lord and Lady Settringham, and Andrew led the conversation, where Roger could not follow it, to the topic of which ambassadors looked like maîtres d’hôtel. The woman-novelist began a eulogy of the Middle West which she knew and Roger did not. So he was left with his theme undeveloped. All this was worth five pounds to me, and more.
I thought it typical of the way Lucy had been brought up that she returned my invitation in a day or two.
Roger got in first on the telephone. “I say, are you free on Wednesday evening?”
“I’m not sure. Why?”
“I wondered if you’d dine with us.”
“Not at half past six for the Finsbury Theatre?”
“No. I work late these days at the Red China Supply Committee.”
“What time then?”
“Oh, any time after eight. Dress or not, just as you feel like it.”
“What will you and Lucy be doing?”
“Well, I suppose we shall dress. In case anyone wants to go on anywhere.”
“In fact, it’s a dinner party?”
“Well, yes, in a kind of way.”
It was plain that poor Roger was dismayed at this social mushroom which had sprung up under his nose. As a face-saver the telephone call was misconceived, for a little note from Lucy was already in the post for me. It was not for me to mock these little notes; I had begun it. But an end had to be made to them, so I decided to answer this by telephone, choosing the early afternoon when I assumed Roger would be out. He was in, and answered me. “I wanted to speak to Lucy.”
“Yes?”
“Just to accept her invitation to dinner.”
“But you’ve already accepted.”
“Yes, but I thought I’d better just tell her.”
“I told her. What d’you think?”
“Ah, good, I was afraid you might have forgotten.”
I had come badly out of that.
From first to last the whole episode of the dinner was calamitous. It was a party of ten, and one glance round the room showed me that this was an occasion of what Lucy had been brought up to call “duty.” That is to say, we were all people whom for one reason or another she had felt obliged to ask. She was offering us all up together in a single propitiatory holocaust to the gods of the schoolroom. Even Mr. Benwell was there. He did not realize that Lucy had taken the house furnished and was congratulating her upon the decorations; “I like a London house to look like a London house,” he was saying.
Roger was carrying things off rather splendidly with a kind of sardonic gusto which he could often assume in times of stress. I knew him in that mood and respected it. I knew, too, that my presence added a particular zest to his performance. Throughout the evening I caught him in constant enquiry of me; was I attending to this parody of himself? I was his audience, not Lucy.
The fate in store for myself was manifest as soon as I came into the room. It was Lucy’s cousin Julia, the younger of the two girls Basil had told me of, the one whose début had been so disturbed by Lucy’s marriage. It would not, I felt, be a grave setback. Julia had that particular kind of succulent charm—bright, dotty, soft, eager, acquiescent, flattering, impudent—that is specially, it seems, produced for the delight of Anglo-Saxon manhood. She had no need of a London season to find a happy future. “Julia is staying with us. She is a great fan of yours,” said Lucy in her Pont Street manner; a manner which, like Roger’s, but much more subtly, had an element of dumb crambo in it. What she said turned out to be true.
“My word, this is exciting,” said Julia, and settled down to enjoy me as though I were a box of chocolates open on her knees.
“What a lot of people Lucy’s got here tonight.”
“Yes, it’s her first real dinner party, and she says it will be her last. She says she doesn’t like parties any more.”
“Did she ever?” I was ready to talk about Lucy at length, but this was not Julia’s plan.
“Everyone does at first,” she said briefly, and then began the conversation as she had rehearsed it, I am sure, in her bath. “I knew you the moment you came into the room. Guess how.”
“You heard my name announced.”
“Oh, no. Guess again.”
An American hero would have said, “For Christ’s sake,” but I said, “Really I’ve no idea, unless perhaps you knew everyone else already.”
“Oh, no. Shall I tell you? I saw you in the Ritz the day Lucy lunched with you.”
“Why didn’t you come and talk to us?”
“Lucy wouldn’t let me. She said she’d ask you to dinner instead.”
“Ah.”
“You see, for years and years the one thing in the world I’ve wanted most—or nearly most—was to meet you and when Lucy calmly said she was going to lunch with............