‘It’s being engraved Elspeth (after Mrs Buchan) Paula (for obvious reasons) Monteath, from her loving godfather, Paul Frederick Fotheringay.’
‘Well, really, all the cheek! Walter, did you hear that?’
‘Yes, I did. I’ll offer you a double, Jerome. I think those names are O.K., don’t you? It saves trouble if someone settles them for us, because perhaps now we shan’t have to be quarrelling all day. Only I vote we use Paula, I’m not so wild about Buchanism myself.’
‘Thanks, old boy, a very delicate compliment, if I may say so.’
‘By the way,’ said Walter, ‘why Paula and not Pauline?’
‘Cheaper. The thing is, you pay for engraving by the letters. I say, I do hope she lives all right, Sally.’
‘So do I, you know. After all the trouble I’ve had, one way and another, it would be extraordinarily souring if she didn’t. However, Nanny and the charlady between them are battling for her life, as they say in the papers, like mad, so I expect she will. The charlady knows all about it, too, she has lost six herself.’
‘Sounds a bit of a Jonah to me, but I don’t want to depress you. Anyway, I hope you won’t be sparing expense in this matter. Remember that I didn’t over the mug.’
‘One of your own, I suppose, with the name taken out?’
‘Not my name, that’s left in, you see. I had “From his loving godmother, Eliza Stratford” (the Countess of Stratford, carriage folk) taken out. That came after my name, and they’re putting the words “Elspeth Paula Monteath from her loving godfather” in front of it. Such a brainwave, don’t you agree? And who thought it all out for me? Dear little Marcella, bless her heart.’
‘We saw Marcella last night with that man Chikkie. She’s a nasty piece of work, if you like. Walter finds her so repellent that he says he can only suppose he must really be in love with her.’
‘I expect he is, too. Did you ask her to be Paula’s godmother?’
‘No, I did not.’
‘That lends her a certain distinction, doesn’t it? She must be the first person in London you haven’t asked.’
‘How careless you Protestants are of your children’s souls,’ said Jerome looking up from his game. ‘That poor little wretch was born months ago, and there she is, still wallowing in original sin, without mentioning the horrid risk she would run if she should die before next Tuesday week – I call it a shame. Double you, Walter. What does it feel like to be a mother, Sally?’
‘Childbirth,’ said Sally, ‘is an unpleasing process. It must be quite awful for the father who, according to Walter, suffers even more than the mother. I don’t quite understand about that, but of course I take his word for it. To be honest, I should like the baby a good deal better if she wasn’t the split image of Walter’s Aunt Lucy; all the same I am getting quite attached to her in a sort of way, and Walter’s so impressed by being a father that he’s actually looking out for a job. You know, motherhood is an enormous financial asset in these days; to begin with you get pounds and pounds for publishing a photograph of a child twice or three times her age and saying she’s so well-grown because of Gatebury’s food, then you get more pounds for saying that no nursing mother would care to retire without her cup of Bovo, and finally I can now edit the Mothers’ and Kiddies’ Sunshine Page in the Daily Runner under my own name, so I get an extra pound a week for that. Oh, yes, the little dear is pulling her weight in the home and no mistake.’
Later that evening Paul escorted Marcella to a party given by one of her Slade friends. For Marcella, like so many girls, studied Art in her odd moments.
‘It is to be a Russian party,’ she told him as their taxicab threaded the mazes of S.W.14, ‘in honour of Peter Dickinson, who has just come back from Moscow.’
Paul thought that under the circumstances Mr Dickinson would most probably have preferred any other sort of party, but he refrained from saying so.
‘There is to be some interesting conversation,’ said Marcella.
‘I hope there’ll be something to drink,’ said Paul.
They arrived at a basement flat decorated with tasteless frescoes. All Marcella’s arty friends lived in basement flats decorated with tasteless frescoes. There were hardly any chairs, but the floor was covered with the semi-recumbent forms of dirty young men in stained and spotted grey flannel trousers and dirty young women with long greasy hair. One of the young men, presumably Peter Dickinson, was holding forth when they arrived.
‘Yes, I went to see the timber camps; they are fine, wonderful, a triumph of organization. A clean, healthy outdoor life, think what that must mean to these city clerks, people accustomed only to the fetid air of offices. They are as happy as little children, and in everything that they do, their work, their play, they keep always before them their wonderful ideal of communism.’
Paul thought that they sounded rather like Boy Scouts, and was unattracted by the idea. He soon wished he could go home. Marcella had disappeared almost at once accompanied by a tall young man with side-whiskers, and he saw nobody else that he knew. Although the party was by way of being Russian he could find neither vodka, caviare nor Russian cigarettes to cheer him; in fact, the only noticeable attribute of that great country was the atmosphere of dreariness and hopeless discomfort which prevailed. The chains of love, however, kept him there until past three in the morning, when Marcella appeared and announced that she was quite ready to go home. Paul felt too tired to make a scene about the young man with side-whiskers, and devoted his remaining supply of energy to finding a taxi. These are rare in S.W.14 at 3 a.m.
‘How all your friends do dislike
