nowadays. Well, we kept running into each other at the same exhibitions, and funnily enough in front of the same pictures.' Here he laughed, momentarily raising one shoulder. 'One day he said to me: 'I want to see your work. People tell me it's good.' So I packed up an assortment of small stuff and took it round to his house - it's a lovely place, isn't it? You must know it, of course; one might really be back in the
Fetch him a vomiting-basin, Dixon thought; then horror overcame him at the thought of a man who 'knows what he's talking about' not only not talking about how nasty Bertrand's pictures were, not only not putting his boot through them, but actually seeming to be fetched by one or two of them. Bertrand must not be a good painter; he, Dixon, would not permit it. And yet here was the Gore-Itchbag fellow, not on the face of it a moron, listening to this frenzy of self-advertisement without overt protest, even with some attention. Yes, Dixon saw, with very close attention. Gore-Urquhart had tilted his large dark head over towards Bertrand; his face, half-averted, eyes on the ground, wore a small intent frown, as if he were hard of hearing and couldn't bear to miss a word. Dixon couldn't bear not missing any more of it - Bertrand was now using the phrase 'contrapuntal tone-values' - and switched to his right, where for some moments he'd been half-conscious of a silence.
As he did so, Christine turned towards him. 'Look, do join in this, will you?' she said in an undertone. 'I can't get her to say anything.'
He looked over at Carol, whose eye met his without apparent recognition, but before he could start working on what to say Margaret returned.
'What, still hanging over the drink?' she said vivaciously to the whole party. 'I thought you'd all be on the floor by now. Now, Mr Gore-Urquhart, I'm not going to permit any more of this sulking about in here, Principal or no Principal. It's the light fantastic for you; come along.'
Gore-Urquhart, smiling politely, had risen to his feet and, with a word to the others, let himself be led away out of the bar. Bertrand looked across at Carol. 'Don't let's waste the band, my dear,' he said. 'I've paid twenty-five shillings for them, after all.'
'So you have, my dear,' Carol said, stressing the appellation, and for a moment Dixon was afraid she meant to refuse and so bring the situation, whatever it was, to a crisis, but after that moment she got to her feet and began to move towards the dance-floor.
'Look after Christine for me, Dixon,' Bertrand bayed. 'Don't drop her; she's fragile. Good-bye for a little, my sweet,' he fluted to Christine; 'I'll be back soon. Blow your whistle if the man gets rough.'
'Care for a dance?' Dixon said to Christine. 'I'm not much good, as I told you, but I don't mind having a crack if you don't.'
She smiled. 'Nor do I, if you don't.'
XI
AS he left the bar with Christine at his side, Dixon felt like a special agent, a picaroon, a Chicago war-lord, a hidalgo, an oil baron, a mohock. He kept careful control over his features to stop them doing what they wanted to do and breaking out into an imbecile smirk of excitement and pride. When she turned and faced him at the edge of the floor, he found it hard to believe that she was really going to let him touch her, or that the men near them wouldn't spontaneously intervene to prevent him. But in a moment there they were in the conventional pseudo- embrace, actually fencing together, not very skilfully, but without doubt dancing. Dixon looked past her face in silence, afraid of any distraction from the task of not leading her into a collision, for the floor was a good deal more thickly populated than a quarter of an hour earlier. Among the dancers he recognized Barclay, the Professor of Music, dancing with his wife. She permanently resembled a horse, he only when he laughed, which he did suddenly and seldom, but was momentarily to be seen doing now.
'What was the matter with Mrs Goldsmith, do you know?' Christine asked.
This inquisitiveness surprised him. 'She did look rather fed-up, didn't she?' he fenced.
'Was it because she was expecting Bertrand to bring her here tonight instead of me?'
Did that mean she knew about the switch of partners? It needn't, but it might. 'I don't know,' he said in a muffled voice.
'I think you do know.' She sounded quite angry. 'I wish you'd tell me.'
'I know nothing at all about it, I'm afraid. And in any case it's nothing to do with me.'
'If that's your attitude, then there's nothing more to be said.'
Dixon felt himself flushing for the second time in the last few minutes. Obviously she'd been at her most typical when helping Bertrand to bait him at their first encounter, when reproving him for drinking too much, when treating him this evening as non-existent. Her formal, not her relaxed, pose was the true one. Her cooperation over the sheet had been given in return for anecdote-material likely to amuse her London friends, her amiability over the phone had been to get something out of him. No doubt she was disturbed by the Bertrand-Carol business, but the feminine manoeuvre of using an innocent bystander as whipping-boy was one he'd learnt to recognize and dislike.
They danced on in silence for some time. She'd not been modest in declaring herself an indifferent dancer, but Dixon's enforced avoidance of anything ambitious kept them fairly well together. The other couples moved round them, wheeling when a space momentarily presented itself, huddling and marking time in the crushes. Everybody else seemed to be talking, and eventually a female voice of Christine's pitch, heard close at hand, deceived Dixon. 'What did you say?' he asked.
'Nothing.'
Something would have to be said by him now, so he said what he'd been waiting to say all the evening: 'I never got a chance to thank you for playing up so well over that phone business.'
'What phone business?'
'You know, me pretending to Bertrand that I was a reporter.'
'Oh, that. I'd sooner not discuss that, if you don't mind.'
She couldn't be allowed to get away with that. 'Supposing I do mind?'
'How do you mean?'
'You seem to forget that, but for me, and but for my little impersonation, you probably wouldn't be here at all tonight.'
'Well, that wouldn't have mattered very much, would it?'
The dance came to an end, but neither of them thought of leaving the floor. Through the applause he said: 'No, perhaps it wouldn't, but you seemed to want to come at the time, didn't you?'
'Look, can't you shut up about it?'
'All right, but don't you try to queen it over me. You've no call to do that.'
She shrugged clumsily, then dropped her eyes. 'I'm sorry; that was silly of me. I didn't mean to be like that.'
As she spoke, an inaudible piano introduction led into the last of the set. 'O.K., then,' Dixon said. 'Dance?'
'Yes, of course.'
They moved off again. 'I think we're getting the hang of this quite well,' he said in a moment.
'I wish I hadn't said what I did say. I was a fool. I acted like a perfect fool.'
He saw that when, as now, she abandoned her set expression, her lips were full, and protruded like her uncle's. 'It's all right, really; it was nothing,' he said.
'No it wasn't nothing; it was ridiculous. I thought the whole of the
'Oh come, there's no need to go to the opposite extreme.'
'But you see I didn't feel like discussing it with you because that would have been like laughing at Bertrand behind his back, and that would have been wrong. I'm afraid I must have sounded a bit unfriendly over the phone the second time, but that was only because I couldn't have let myself go like I wanted to without seeming as if I was getting mixed up in a conspiracy to get the better of Bertrand. That's all it was.'
