The Art of Love

They were paid on Mondays, and at five o’clock Polly tucked into her purse the thirty-six shillings which Mr Padgett had counted out and given her. She’d pay her rent, which would take twenty-five shillings of it. Then, unless, miraculously, another book jacket came in, she’d have to last the rest of the week on the remaining eleven shillings. Which meant another raid on her almost empty piggy bank.

Sam walked beside her as they left Lion Yard. He’d noticed the way Polly had put her money away, and with sharp, inquisitive eyes, had seen the emptiness of the purse into which she had put it.

‘Care for a flutter?’ he said. ‘I’m going to the races with Larry tomorrow, he’s got a hot tip for the two-thirty.’

Sam’s friend Larry was a bit of a wide boy, in Polly’s view, and certainly not a likely companion for an admiral’s son. But Sam had had some remarkably lucky bets through him, and imagine if she won! She shook her head. ‘I’m broke, and they say if you’re broke, never put any money on a horse, because it will always cross its legs and fall over, or come last, or both.’

‘I don’t think your two bob is likely to make Amarantha trip up. Larry knows one of the stable lads, he’s sure she’s a winner.’

‘Oh, go on, then,’ said Polly, recklessly handing over a precious half-crown coin.

Mrs Horton was at home when Polly went to pay her rent. Which was a pity; Polly preferred to put the money in an envelope and thrust it under the door. She didn’t like Mrs Horton, who had hard eyes and was mean with everything to do with her tenants, from hot water to the cheap, low wattage lamps that so often burned out, leaving the staircase plunged into dangerous darkness.

‘Oh, it’s you, is it?’ Mrs Horton said, drawing the shawl she always wore about her thin shoulders. ‘I wanted to have a word with you. You’d better come in for a moment.’

Polly’s heart sank. What had she done now? Left the front door ajar? Neglected to hang the bathmat over the bath? Forgotten to avoid the creaking floorboard on the landing when she came in late? She stepped gingerly across the threshold, trying not to wrinkle her nose at the pervading aroma of tomcat and boiled cabbage.

Unlike the Spartan rooms she let out, Mrs Horton’s quarters were almost sumptuous. Thick rugs were laid on the floor, overlapping in order to fit in. The sofa, a red velvet affair on stout legs, was piled high with plump cushions, and the lampshades always reminded Polly of a tart’s knickers, since they were pink and black with lace trimmings. It had crossed her mind that scrawny Mrs Horton, who did so well out of the several properties she owned in Fitzroy Street, might have started her career in quite a different profession.

‘I’m giving you notice,’ said Mrs Horton.

‘Notice?’ Polly stared at her, hoping she had heard wrongly.

‘Notice to quit. I want you out by the twenty-fourth of December.’

‘Oh, but Mrs Horton, why? What have I done?’

‘I’m not saying you’re a bad tenant, because I’ve had worse, but I want the room. My son’s coming home for a while, he’s quitting the merchant service and wants to look about for some new line of work. So I’ll be needing the room for him. His ship gets in on the second of January, and I want you out by Christmas, to give me time to clean the room. So you’ll have to move all your stuff out, and don’t go leaving it until the last minute.’

Polly opened her mouth to plead with her landlady. Why her? Why couldn’t one of the other tenants be turfed out? But she knew the answer to that, and knew that there was no point arguing. Her room was the smallest and cheapest in the house, and naturally, Mrs Horton would want to keep her higher paying lodgers on for preference.

‘That isn’t much notice,’ Polly said. ‘Can’t you give me time to find somewhere else?’

‘No, dearie, that’s the way it is. If I were you, I’d get your fiancé to name the day, you’ve been hanging about long enough, you’ll lose him if you carry on that way. A man gets tired of waiting when he’s decided to marry, even,’ and she gave Polly a sly glance, ‘even if he’s doing a bit of anticipating on the bed front. You get hitched in January, that’s my advice, and then you’ll not have to worry about finding a new room for yourself, will you?’

Polly positively stamped up the three flights of stairs to her room, working herself into a thorough temper. Damn Mrs Horton. Damn everything. She looked around at her familiar room, and sank down on the bed. All right, it wasn’t much, but to her it was home. She suddenly remembered the pictures Sam had shown her in a copy of Country Life, of the interiors of that Sir Walter Malreward’s recently built country house, and she sighed. Then she laughed at herself. She didn’t aspire to any such modern, chic opulence; she was content with her chilly and inconvenient attic room, which, compared to some of the places she had lived in before coming here, was almost luxurious.

With no money to pay a deposit, she’d be back in one of those dreadful places, like the room on the third floor of that house in Pimlico, which had peeling damp patches on the walls and where the nearest supply of water was down in the basement, and that a solitary tap. Moreover, the basement had had its own tenants, an impoverished, elderly artist and his wife — dear God, was that how she would end up, if she didn’t marry Roger?

She shook herself into sense. It didn’t arise. She was going to marry Roger, and besides, she wasn’t the kind of person who ended up in a damp and dingy basement, painting rural scenes on stones as Joseph Forbes, the inhabitant of that dank region, had done.

She must be practical. How could she find a new room at this time of year, one that she could move into before Christmas? Drat Mrs Horton and her son, she couldn’t have sprung this on her at a worse time.

Roger would be pleased. He would point out that she didn’t need to look for a new place to live, given that they would be married so soon. Why did that depress her so much? She looked at the ring on her finger, the neat hoop with a sapphire nestled between two diamonds. Not a flashy ring, but a good one, made from stones reset from one of his mother’s brooches. ‘No point splashing out on tawdry jewellery when you can have something decent,’ he had said.

She loved Roger, she admired him, she knew that he was the perfect balance for her: his intellect as against her emotional approach to life — so why did the prospect of their marriage make her more and more dispirited as the actual day grew nearer? She’d welcomed the brief postponement, but the weeks would fly by, and that would be that. Hitched. It was such a big step, marriage. They had discussed living together; Roger was quite keen on that, since as a good socialist, he considered marriage by and large an outmoded and bourgeois institution. His parents, however, although modern in their outlook, weren’t impressed by his idea of him and Polly living in sin. ‘The hospital won’t like it,’ his father had said.

Polly had raised the subject with her mother, and been surprised at her response.

‘No, dear, it would never do. It can work for some people, but Roger’s people wouldn’t like it, and there’d be all kinds of inconvenience. It’s one thing to have an affair’ — this with a sideways glance at Polly, what did she know about her and Jamie? — ‘but living together, setting up home together without being married, it won’t do, not for a man in Roger’s position. He’d feel it in the end, and then there are always problems with the income tax and landlords and so on. I dare say he’d end up blaming you, men tend to do that.’

How could she know about that, for heaven’s sake?

In the end, Polly knew, she would have to throw herself on Ma’s mercy, and stay in Highgate while she waited for Roger to get back from America. The prospect filled her with dismay. Perhaps Oliver knew of some artist who was going to be away for a few weeks, who would be glad of someone who would look after their studio and in return pay a modest rent. Unlikely, and what most people considered a modest rent would probably still be beyond her present resources, but still, she would ask him.

That night her sleep was haunted with dreams. She was watching Mrs Horton, improbably attired in Cynthia Harkness’s lovely frock, dancing with Sir Walter Malreward, who was wearing the brown overalls Mr Padgett put on while attending to the messier business of the workshop. Then the image faded, and she was standing on the doorstep of Sir Walter’s white country house, at the bottom of a flight of steps flanked by two creatures out of ancient Egypt. She had a suitcase in her hand, and was explaining to a lofty personage dressed in a black uniform that she was Polyhymnia Tomkins, come about the room.

To which he had replied in a resonant voice that there was no such person as Polyhymnia Tomkins, and so certain had been his utterance, that Polly woke up in a cold sweat, to find herself exclaiming out loud that it was true, Polyhymnia Tomkins did exist, there was indeed such a person.

She sat up in bed, too unsettled to want to go back to sleep yet. Her eye fell on the table where she had left some sketches she had done before going to bed. She had drawn a caricature of Mrs Horton, complete with sequinned slippers and shawl and expression of long-suffering weariness, and, peeping out from a battlement of cushions and frilly lampshades, the heavy features of Eric Horton, her son, whom Polly had met on the stairs some months previously and taken an instant dislike to. She hated the thought of him taking possession of her room, and, by the dim light of the bedside lamp, she glared at his exaggerated features as though she could compel him to change his mind and go back to sea, preferably to be wrecked and cast up on a desert island on the other side of the world.

NINE

‘They think you must be a war hero, limping like that,’ Harriet said, as she slung her lacrosse stick into the back of Max’s blue Delage.

‘Hey, careful there, I don’t want rips in the leather.’

‘That’s the trouble with a swish car, you can’t just sling things in,’ said Harriet. ‘Daddy’s old jalopy was much better in that way, although of course not nearly so smart.’