III

“V.V.,” said Gillian, “I can’t make out why your bedroom is so different

from this room.”

They were sitting in the large room at Number Thirty-Six, and Gillian

was contrasting its considered effects, seen by daylight to be hastily

contrived, with the muslin and pink ribbons of V.V.’s bedroom, the outer

of the two communicating rooms that completed the set, into the inner of

which Gillian had never penetrated.

“Oh,” said V.V., “this is all Jacky’s furniture. She’s on tour, Cape

Town and Australia. She won’t be back till Christmas. She was very good

to me when I was down on my luck.”

“But you mayn’t sublet flats in the Club, or be away for more than three

months at a time.”

“We haven’t sublet. We live together. But it’s mostly her furniture.

Hers and Peter’s.”

“Who’s Peter?” Gillian was conscious of a growing irritation as each new

woman with a man’s name emerged from the horde of V.V.’s acquaintances.

“Oh, Peter’s Smithy. I was with her before I met Jacky. She’s married

now. She won’t ask for her furniture because we quarrelled and she

doesn’t want Evelyn to know that she lived with me. She never told him

that. He was in the same company on tour and he never came to our flat.”

Gillian did not pursue Smithy and Evelyn into the seclusion of their

matrimonial relationships. She was not particularly interested in their

vague and distant passage through V.V.’s life and she was beginning to

dread the copious and unilluminating anecdote with which V.V. replied to

any polite manifestation of concern for the fortunes of these drifting

adventurers.

V.V. was polishing her manicure-tools. She sat on a low seat by the

table, a duster on her knees and her case of instruments, emptied of its

contents, lying by them on an outspread sheet of the _Daily Mail_. The

sun, shining on her bent head, brought out chestnut lights in the waves

of her dark hair and showed her pale skin, yellowed and sallow below her

ears where her neck had not been covered with the fine, perfumed powder

she always used.

Gillian sat in the window darning her socks. Her attention was absorbed

in the in-and-out in-and-out of her short darning-needle, as it drove

its way backwards and forwards through the warp and woof of the thread

which stretched across the painted glass of the china darning-egg in the

heel of her brown stocking. There was something very satisfying to

Gillian about a good large darn. It gave the stocking, which had looked

so desperate and uncomfortable with a ragged hole in it, a cared-for and

rather interesting appearance of having survived adventure and being

prepared for more, and it was, of all necessary mending, the most

interesting to do, surpassing the sewing on of buttons, always a

tiresome business, especially when, as usually happened, the buttons

didn’t quite match and the strong cotton was missing.

She was in V.V.’s flat for the day because her own was given over to the

workmen who were installing a telephone in Number Seven. This was a gift

of Lady Bottomley’s, who, on several occasions, had wished to telephone

to Gillian without success for the sufficient reason that there was no

telephone at the Club.

The innovation was being showered upon her in recognition of the donor’s

sense of the services Gillian had rendered in introducing Jane Bird. It

was also a valedictory beneficence. Having learnt by one of those rich

coincidences which do occur even in the most heavily sheltered lives,

that the Royal Princess who was to open the next bazaar on her horizon

had just returned from visiting the châteaux of the Loire, Old Winona

had decided that what Royalty had done she could do also, and Miss

Macfarlane, her days heavy with time-tables, hotel tariffs and

interviews with Cook’s clerks and couriers, was realizing the profound

sadness of having a long-treasured dream come true (as it so often comes

true in this trying world) more than a little wrong.

Jane had gone with them, but not Gillian. This was entirely Gillian’s

own fault, for an invitation so pressing that it had almost the force of

a command, had been issued to her as soon as the decision to go at all

had been reached. And she had refused, alleging that the three weeks

already spent at Seaford must be made up before the Secretarial School

closed for a fortnight in August. Old Winona, who respected a business

reason, had acquiesced insisting, however, that the occasion must be

marked in some way, and choosing the telephone as its monument.

To Miss Macfarlane (her real name Gillian discovered was

Bronx-Prittlewell, and this did seem an excuse for going on calling her

Macfarlane)—to the harassed secretary Gillian confessed that the

prospect of three weeks’ pilgrimage from one best hotel to another in a

party consisting of Old Winona, her maid, a courier, three chauffeurs,

two cars, as well as Jane and herself, was so asphyxiating that she felt

as if they would all be smothered if she, Gillian, added herself and her

luggage to the caravan. But, in her heart of hearts, she knew that she

would have endured the restraints and adored the enjoyments of such a

pilgrimage with the utmost indifference to one and abandonment to the

other if it had not meant separating herself again from V.V.

V.V. herself had been quite unscrupulous about it, and had declared that

she would not look after William if Gillian went to France. She had not

looked after William while Gillian was at Seaford. He had gone down to

the basement for the period of Gillian’s absence, on a visit to the

Gordons who looked upon him with mingled admiration and terror as being

“almost a Christian.” And, Christian or no, William had come back with

Mabel’s sniff and Mr. Gordon’s cough and Mrs. Gordon’s raucous cry of

“’Arry!” (this being the title by which Mr. Gordon was known on the

hearth) added to his repertoire, and was in consequence rather more than

Gillian could bear at times. For William was always immensely proud of

any new phrases he had acquired, and had sniffed and coughed and

summoned ’Arry with penetrating distinctness and with reiterations which

would not be quenched for at least half an hour every time Gillian had

come into the flat since her return. She had vowed that she would never

go away again unless either V.V. or Heinrich were left behind in charge

of him. But Heinrich had gone to Bristol for a Musical Festival in which

the orchestra to which he belonged was competing, and V.V. thrust her

own deserted state as well as her refusal to harbour William into the

scale when Gillian had hesitated over the invitation from Knightsbridge.

So Gillian saw the expedition start without her and remained at home to

solace V.V. and to strive to soften William’s memories of kitchen life.

On this particular Saturday morning he was entertaining the telephone

men with the whole of his repertoire and Gillian, having warned them

that everything they said would be repeated by the bird, hoping in that

way to keep William pure from the grosser profanities of proletarian

expletive, darned her stockings and listened to V.V., and prayed that

William would not and could not learn to make a noise like telephone men

hammering telephone nails into the well-built and very resisting walls

of the Mordaunt Club.

V.V. prattled on, cleaning the blades of the tiny knives and slender

scissors in her outfit, taking minute stains out of the ivory

file-handles and the pushing and picking instruments, fitting fresh

chamois leather on the large wooden buffers for nail-polishing, testing

the screw tops and the glass stoppers of some bottles and putting fresh

corks into others. She worked without much method but with fastidious

care. Everything about V.V. was fastidiously cared for, immaculate,

crisp or shining according to its kind, from the glass of the

window-panes in her flat, which sparkled every day of the year as the

windows of Gillian’s rooms only sparkled for two or three days after the

quarterly cleaning, to the Japanese paper napkins which replaced

table-linen in her domain and which she used extravagantly and burned

after every meal. V.V. might go without food in the weeks when her

allowance ran short, but she would not go without soap and hot water.

“I wonder,” said Gillian, “if it’s eating so little or washing so much

that makes you so thin.”

“I ’xpec’ it’s a bit of both,” said V.V., whose speech was far more

slovenly than her person; and she rambled on into a fresh tangle of

autobiography in which Smithy and the landlady of some theatrical

lodgings in Wrexham and a box of Keating’s powder all played equally

ambiguous parts.

“What I can’t understand,” said Gillian as the story finally lost itself

in a species of delta with V.V. sitting on Smithy’s dress-basket all one

Sunday morning in the cloak-room of a Welsh railway station whose name

V.V. kept, quite unsuccessfully, trying to retrieve from a long list of

railway stations she had waited in, “what I keep on trying to get you to

explain, V.V., is why if you’ve never been an actress you travelled

about so much with touring companies. Were you really never on the

stage?”

“Never quite,” replied V.V., “I walked on once in a play Jackie was in,

_The Notorious Mrs. Something_ I think it was, or else _When Knights

Were Bold_, I’m not sure, but I was too tall for the clothes and they

got a girl the next night. I was sharing Peter’s rooms then. She was ill

and couldn’t afford things, and my being there helped. It’s cheaper

travelling two.”

“You’re a kind creature,” said Gillian.

V.V. changed the subject.

“Come along, Gillian, put your horrid old stockings away and I’ll do

your hands for you.”

“Wait one minute. I must just put one more thread through this darn to

make it tight. It’s such a beauti_full_ darn, V.V., worth having a

blistered toe for. I walked that toe through in Richmond Park on Friday

evening, seeing the full moon with deer, and I’ve darned it all into the

hole again, moon, and mist over the lake, and an owl that hooted and

flew—no, it didn’t fly, what is the proper word for the way owls make no

noise when they go through the space in front of your nose at night?”

“How you do talk!” said V.V., filling the dragon bowl with warm soapsuds

and a little sponge, “make haste or we shan’t get both hands done before

lunchtime.”

So Gillian put away her darning and pushed up the sleeves of her cotton

frock. She lay back among the gay cushions of Jackie’s Russian-ballet

room which V.V. piled one by one into the big arm-chair by the window,

with consummate knowledge of where you did and where you didn’t need a

cushion to be. And, one hand laid on the clean towel on V.V.’s knee

while she dabbled in the warm, scented soapsuds in the green-dragon bowl

with the other, Gillian forgot the flatness of V.V.’s voice, the

baldness of her narrative style, forgot that she could never talk to

V.V. about the shape of a word, or the meaning of a colour, or the way

people took in life, but could only ask her questions to which V.V.

never could give coherent answers. She could let herself be petted and

caressed and flattered and told how each of her fingers as it passed

under file and cutter and emery board to the ultimate polishing,

exceeded any finger that V.V. had ever polished before in the beauty of

its shape, the fineness of its skin, the rising of the half-moons at the

base of its nail and the colour of the tip. It was all nonsense, of

course, nonsense of the worst kind, but it was extraordinarily soothing

on a hot midsummer day at the end of a long week of shorthand and

typing, card-indexing and tables of precedence, and the most

preposterous lectures on how to address envelopes to persons of title,

it was balmy and cooling to lie back in heavenly comfort and let your

mind be vitiated by it for an hour. Gillian would have been very lonely

after Lilac’s wedding if she had not found V.V.