‘A what?’
‘Goes in for the Black Mass. He’s a Satanist. Probably that’s why Eleanor left him. She’s so awfully bourgeois.’
Caroline suddenly felt oppressed by the pub and the people. That word ‘bourgeois’ had a dispiriting effect on her evening — it was part of the dreary imprecise language of this half-world she had left behind her more than two years since.
Laurence was talking to the blond fat poet who was inviting him to a party at someone else’s house next week, describing the sort of people who would be present; and as Caroline got up, Laurence caught her eye just as this man was saying, ‘You can’t afford to miss it.’
Laurence piloted her out to the taxi, for she had been wobbly even when they arrived. But the momentary revulsion had sobered her.
They went to a coffee house, then on to the West End, to the Pylon, where, Caroline thought, thank God the lights are dim and the people not too distinguishable. The West End was another half-world of Caroline’s past.
Eleanor Hogarth had a close look at the couple moving in the sleepy gloom before her. They had a square foot of floor-space, which they utilized with sweet skill, within its scope manoeuvring together like creatures out of natural history. This fascinated Eleanor; she was for a few moments incredulous at the sight of Caroline and Laurence in these surroundings, since she had never seen them before in a nightclub, nor dancing.
Eleanor waved from her table; it was too far away from them to call, decently. Eventually Caroline saw. ‘Oh, see, there’s Eleanor.’
And there she was, with her business partner, white-haired young-faced Ernest Manders. This was Laurence’s uncle, his father’s youngest brother who had gone into ballet instead of Manders’ Figs in Syrup.
When Laurence was quite little he had informed his mother, ‘Uncle Ernest is a queer.’
‘So he is, pet,’ she answered happily, and repeated the child’s words to several people before she learned from her husband the difference between being a queer and just being queer. After this, it became a family duty to pray for Uncle Ernest; it was understood that no occasion for prayers should pass without a mention of this uncle.
And with some success apparently, because in his fortieth year, when his relations with men were becoming increasingly violent, he gave them up for comfort’s sake; not that he ever took to women as a substitute. Laurence had remarked to Caroline one day, ‘I’ve gradually had to overcome an early disrespect for my Uncle Ernest.’
‘Because he was a homosexual?’
‘No. Because we were always praying specially for him.’
He was a religious man and likeable. Caroline got on well with him. She said he was her sort of Catholic, critical but conforming. Ernest always agreed with Caroline that the True Church was awful, though unfortunately, one couldn’t deny, true.
She could not much bear Eleanor these days, though it was through Eleanor that she had first met Laurence. At one time these women were friends, exceedingly of a kind; that was at Cambridge, when, in their boxy rooms, they had leaned on the ignoble wooden fittings which were stained with rings from cocoa-mugs, and talked of this and that; mostly about the insolence of their fellow students and the insolence of their elders, for both girls had potential talents unrecognized. They were united in discontentment with the place as a place; its public-tiled wash- rooms, its bed-sitting-rooms, and other apartments so insolently designed. Eleanor left after a couple of terms to go into ballet. She might easily have gone to an art school, for she also had the art-school gift. It was Eleanor who had removed from one of the ground-floor corridors, and from its place on a wall, the portrait of a former Principal, keeping it for a whole night, in the course of which, by means of innumerable small touchings, she had made a subtle and important alteration in the portrait, which remains undetected to this day.
The thing about Eleanor, Caroline held, was that her real talent was for mimicry, and so she could have taken up any trade with ease, because all she had to do was to mimic the best that had already been done in any particular line, and that gave the impression of the expert.
Caroline was abroad during Eleanor’s marriage; she did not know much about it, only that she had left her husband after the war, and under her married name had started a dancing school with a male partner. Ernest Manders. A few months later, Caroline and Laurence had set up together, by which time Eleanor’s relationship with the Baron was becoming established. What irritated Caroline now about her old friend was the fact that she had seemed not to change essentially in the years since their Cambridge days, and was apparently quite happy with herself as she was. Now Laurence was another like that. But Caroline could like in Laurence many characteristics which in others she could not tolerate. And she was aware of the irrationality and prejudice of all these feelings, without being able to stop feeling them.
But she said, so that her contempt for Eleanor should be concealed, ‘Look at the band-leader. Who does he look like?’ She mentioned a Cambridge don, with his rimless glasses and the sideways mouth.
Eleanor laughed and laughed. She had been drinking more than Caroline that evening. ‘So he does.’ Then she told Caroline a story from which it emerged that this don was dead.
‘I didn’t know that,’ said Caroline, being shocked then that Eleanor had laughed at her joke. When she saw Caroline involuntarily putting her face serious, Eleanor affirmed, ‘But the band boy is the image of the man, just the same.’
Then Eleanor started picking out other members of the band, likening them to men they had agreed in despising during their friendship days. And she got Caroline to laugh, putting their meeting on a basis of workable humour, considering they were supposed to be enjoying themselves: and this was only possible by reference to the one kindly association between the two women, their college friendship. Caroline got over her annoyance at being caught out putting on a grave religious face when Eleanor had laughed at a dead man. And while she entered into Eleanor’s amusement, she felt almost dumb about her suspicion that Eleanor was humouring her on account of her neurosis. She was right; this was exactly Eleanor’s idea as she sat with her dark-brown head leaning over towards Caroline’s much darker brown.
Two bottles of gin had appeared out of the gloom. Laurence, on his third drink from the first bottle, said, ‘I’ve never felt more sober in my life. Some occasions, it just won’t “take”, you simply can’t get drunk.’
Eleanor looked sorry for him, as if she knew he had worry on his mind from Caroline. This annoyed Caroline, because she knew he was worrying about his grandmother most of all.
While she danced with Ernest, who was weird to dance with, flexible, almost not there at all, so that she felt like a missile directed from a far distance, she saw Laurence examining Eleanor’s cigarette case in his nosey way,
