Swing, Brother, Swing

A servant came in and collected the coffee cups. Lady Pastern made conversation with Carlisle until the door had closed behind him.

‘So I repeat,’ Félicité said loudly. ‘I want to hear, Maman, what you’ve got to say against Carlos.’

Lady Pastern slightly raised her eyes and lifted her shoulders. Her daughter stamped. ‘Blast and hell!’ she said.

‘Félicité!’ said Miss Henderson. It was neither a remonstrance nor a warning. The name fell like an unstressed comment. Miss Henderson held an embroidery stiletto firmly between her finger and thumb and examined it placidly.

Félicité made an impatient movement. ‘If you think,’ she said violently, ‘anybody’s going to be at their best in a strange house with a hostess who looks at them as if they smelt!’

‘If it comes to that, dearest child, he does smell. Of a particularly heavy kind of scent, I fancy,’ Lady Pastern added thoughtfully.

From the ballroom came a distant syncopated roll of drums ending in a crash of cymbals and a loud report. Carlisle jumped nervously. The stiletto fell from Miss Henderson’s fingers to the carpet. Félicité, bearing witness in her agitation to the efficacy of her governess’s long training, stooped and picked it up.

‘It is your uncle, merely,’ said Lady Pastern.

‘I ought to go straight out and apologize to Carlos for the hideous way he’s been treated,’ Félicité stormed, but her voice held an overtone of uncertainty and she looked resentfully at Carlisle.

‘If there are to be apologies,’ her mother rejoined, ‘it is Carlisle who should receive them. I am so sorry, Carlisle, that you should have been subjected to these –’ she made a fastidious gesture – ‘to these really insufferable attentions.’

‘Good lord, Aunt Cile,’ Carlisle began in acute embarrassment, and was rescued by Félicité who burst into tears and rushed out of the room.

‘I think, perhaps …?’ said Miss Henderson, rising.

‘Yes, please go to her.’

But before Miss Henderson reached the door, which Félicité had left open, Rivera’s voice sounded in the hall. ‘What is the matter?’ it said distinctly and Félicité, breathless, answered, ‘I’ve got to talk to you.’ ‘But certainly, if you wish it.’ ‘In here, then.’ The voices faded, were heard again, indistinctly, in the study. The connecting door between the study and the drawing-room was slammed-to from the far side. ‘You had better leave them, I think,’ said Lady Pastern.

‘If I go to my sitting-room, she may come to me when this is over.’

‘Then go,’ said Lady Pastern, drearily. ‘Thank you, Miss Henderson.’

‘Aunt,’ said Carlisle when Miss Henderson had left them, ‘what are you up to?’

Lady Pastern, shielding her face from the fire, said: ‘I have made a decision. I believe that my policy in this affair has been a mistaken one. Anticipating my inevitable opposition, Félicité has met this person in his own setting and has, as I think you would say, lost her eye. I cannot believe that when she has seen him here, and has observed his atrocious antics, his immense vulgarity, she will not come to her senses. Already one can see, she is shaken. After all, I remind myself, she is a de Fouteaux and a de Suze. Am I not right?’

‘It’s an old trick, darling, you know. It doesn’t always work.’

‘It is working, however,’ said Lady Pastern, setting her mouth. ‘She sees him, for example, beside dear Edward to whom she has always been devoted. Of your uncle as a desirable contrast, I say nothing, but at least his clothes are unexceptionable. And though I deeply resent, dearest child, that you should have been forced, in my house, to suffer the attentions of this animal, they have assuredly impressed themselves disagreeably upon Félicité.’

‘Disagreeably – yes,’ said Carlisle turning pink. ‘But look here, Aunt Cecile, he’s shooting this nauseating little line with me to – well, to make Fée sit up and take notice.’ Lady Pastern momentarily closed her eyes. This, Carlisle remembered, was her habitual reaction to slang. ‘And, I’m not sure,’ Carlisle added, ‘that she hasn’t fallen for it.’

‘She cannot be anything but disgusted.’

‘I wouldn’t be astonished if she refuses to come to the Metronome tonight.’

‘That is what I hope. But I am afraid she will come. She will not give way so readily, I think.’ Lady Pastern rose. ‘Whatever happens,’ she said, ‘I shall break this affair. Do you hear me Carlisle? I shall break it.’

Beyond the door at the far end of the room, Félicité’s voice rose, in a sharp crescendo, but the words were indistinguishable.

‘They are quarrelling,’ said Lady Pastern with satisfaction.

III

As Edward Manx sat silent in his chair, a glass of port and a cup of coffee before him, his thoughts moved out in widening circles from the candle-lit table. Removed from him, Bellairs and Rivera had drawn close to Lord Pastern. Bellairs’ voice, loud but edgeless, uttered phrase after phrase. ‘Sure, that’s right. Don’t worry, it’s in the bag. It’s going to be a world-breaker. OK, we’ll run it through. Fine.’ Lord Pastern fidgeted, stuttered, chuckled, complained. Rivera, leaning back in his chair, smiled, said nothing and turned his glass. Manx, who had noticed how frequently it had been refilled, wondered if he was tight.

There they sat, wreathed in cigar-smoke, candle-lit, an unreal group. He saw them as three dissonant figures at the centre of an intolerable design. ‘Bellairs,’ he told himself, ‘is a gaiety merchant. Gaiety!’ How fashionable, he reflected, the word had been before the war. Let’s be gay, they had all said, and glumly embracing each other had tramped and shuffled, while men like Breezy Bellairs made their noises and did their smiling for them. They christened their children ‘Gay,’ they used the word in their drawing-room comedies and in their dismal, dismal songs. ‘Gaiety!’ muttered the disgruntled and angry Edward. ‘A lovely word, but the thing itself, when enjoyed is unnamed. There’s Cousin George, who is undoubtedly a little mad, sitting, like a mouth-piece for his kind, between a jive-merchant and a cad. And here’s Fée antic-ing inside the unholy circle while Cousin Cecile solemnly gyrates against the beat. In an outer ring, I hope unwillingly, is Lisle, and here I sit, as sore as hell, on the perimeter.’ He glanced up and found that Rivera was looking at him, not directly, but out of the corners of his eyes. ‘Sneering,’ thought Edward, ‘like an infernal caricature of himself.’

‘Buck up, Ned,’ Lord Pastern said, grinning at him. ‘We haven’t had a word from you. You want takin’ out of yourself. Bit of gaiety, what?’

‘By all means, sir,’ said Edward. A white carnation had fallen out of the vase in the middle of the table. He took it up and put it in his coat. ‘The blameless life,’ he said.

Lord Pastern cackled and turned to Bellairs. ‘Well, Breezy, if you think it’s right, we’ll order the taxis for a quarter past ten. Think you can amuse yourselves till then?’ He pushed the decanter towards Bellairs.

‘Sure, sure,’ Bellairs said. ‘No, thanks a lot, no more. A lovely wine, mind you, but I’ve got to be a good boy.’

Edward slid the port on to Rivera, who, smiling a little more broadly, refilled his glass.

‘I’ll show you the blanks and the revolver, when we move,’ said Lord Pastern. ‘They’re in the study.’ He glanced fretfully at Rivera who slowly pulled his glass towards him. Lord Pastern hated to be kept waiting. ‘Ned, you look after Carlos, will you? D’you mind, Carlos? I want to show Breezy the blanks. Come on, Breezy.’

Manx opened the door for his uncle and returned to the table. He sat down and waited for Rivera to make the first move. Spence came in, lingered for a moment, and withdrew. There followed a long silence.

At last Rivera stretched out his legs and held his port to the light. ‘I am a man,’ he said, ‘who likes to come to the point. You are Félicité’s cousin, yes?’

‘No.’

‘No?’

‘I’m related to her stepfather.’

‘She has spoken of you as her cousin.’

‘A courtesy title,’ said Edward.

‘You are attached to her, I believe?’

Edward paused for three seconds and then said, ‘Why not?’

‘It is not at all surprising,’ Rivera said, and drank half his port. ‘Carlisle also speaks of you as her cousin. Is that too a courtesy title?’

Edward pushed back his chair. ‘I’m afraid I don’t see the point of all this,’ he said.

‘The point? Certainly. I am a man,’ Rivera repeated, ‘who likes to come to the point. I am also a man who does not care to be cold-shouldered or to be – what is the expression – taken down a garden path. I find my reception in this house unsympathetic. This is displeasing to me. I meet, at the same time, a lady who is not displeasing to me. Quite on the contrary. I am interested. I make a tactful inquiry. I ask, for example, what is the relationship of this lady to my host. Why not?’

‘Because it’s a singularly offensive question,’ Edward said and thought: ‘My God, I’m going to lose my temper.’

Rivera made a convulsive movement of his hand and knocked his glass to the floor. They rose simultaneously.

‘In my country,’ Rivera said thickly, ‘one does not use such expressions without a sequel.’