At the name of the painter and writer Walter nodded approvingly.
“No, I don’t mind listening to Rampion’s noise,” he said. And then, making an effort to overcome the timidity which always silenced him when the moment came to give words to his feelings, “But I’d much rather,” he added, jocularly, so as to temper the boldness of his words, “I’d much rather listen to your noise, in private.”
Lucy smiled, but said nothing. He flinched away in a kind of terror from her eyes. They looked at him calmly, coldly, as though they had seen everything before and were not much interested—only faintly amused, very faintly and coolly amused.
“All right,” he said, “let’s go.” His tone was resigned and wretched.
“We must do a creep,” she said. “Furtive’s the word. No good being caught and headed back.”
But they did not escape entirely unobserved. They were approaching the door when there was a rustle and a sound of hurrying steps behind them. A voice called Lucy’s name. They turned round and saw Mrs. Knoyle, the General’s wife. She laid a hand on Lucy’s arm.
“I’ve just heard that you’re going to see Maurice this evening,” she said, but did not explain that the General had told her so only because he wanted to relieve his feelings by saying something disagreeable to somebody who couldn’t resent the rudeness. “Give him a message from me, will you?” She leaned forward appealingly. “Will you?” There was something pathetically young and helpless about her manner, something very young and soft even about her middle-aged looks. To Lucy, who might have been her daughter, she appealed as though to someone older and stronger than herself. “Please.”
“But of course,” said Lucy.
Mrs. Knoyle smiled gratefully. “Tell him I’ll come to see him tomorrow afternoon,” she said.
“Tomorrow afternoon.”
“Between four and half past. And don’t mention it to anyone else,” she added after a moment of embarrassed hesitation.
“Of course I won’t.”
“I’m so grateful to you,” said Mrs. Knoyle, and with a sudden shy impulsiveness she leaned forward and kissed her. “Good night, my dear.” She slipped away into the crowd.
“One would think,” said Lucy, as they crossed the vestibule, “that it was an appointment with her lover she was making, not her son.”
Two footmen let them out, obsequiously automatic. Closing the door, one winked to the other significantly. For an instant the machines revealed themselves disquietingly as human beings.
Walter gave the address of Sbisa’s Restaurant to the taxi driver and stepped into the enclosed darkness of the cab. Lucy had already settled into her corner.
Meanwhile, in the dining room, Molly d’Exergillod was still talking. She prided herself on her conversation. Conversation was in the family. Her mother had been one of the celebrated Miss Geoghegans of Dublin. Her father was that Mr. Justice Brabant, so well known for his table talk and his witticisms from the bench. Moreover she had married into conversation. D’Exergillod had been a disciple of Robert de Montesquiou and had won the distinction of being mentioned in Sodome et Gomorrhe by Marcel Proust. Molly would have had to be a talker by marriage if she had not already been one by birth. Nature and environment had conspired to make her a professional athlete of the tongue. Like all conscientious professionals, she was not content to be merely talented. She was industrious, she worked hard to develop her native powers. Malicious friends said that she could be heard practising her paradoxes in bed, before she got up in the morning. She herself admitted that she kept diaries in which she recorded, as well as the complicated history of her own feelings and sensations, every trope and anecdote and witticism that caught her fancy. Did she refresh her memory with a glance at these chronicles each time she dressed to go out to dinner? The same friends who had heard her practising in bed had also found her, like an examinee the night before his ordeal, laboriously mugging up Jean Cocteau’s epigrams about art and Mr. Birrell’s after-dinner stories and W. B. Yeats’s anecdotes about George Moore and what Charlie Chaplin had said to and of her the last time she was in Hollywood. Like all professional talkers, Molly was very economical with her wit and wisdom. There are not enough bon mots in existence to provide any industrious conversationalist with a new stock for every social occasion. Though extensive, Molly’s repertory was, like that of other more celebrated talkers, limited. A good housewife, she knew how to hash up the conversational remains of last night’s dinner to furnish out this morning’s lunch. Monday’s funeral baked meats did service for Tuesday’s wedding.
To Dennis Burlap she was at this moment serving up the talk that had already been listened to with such appropriation by Lady Benger’s lunch party, by the weekenders at Gobley, by Tommy Fitton, who was one of her young men, and Vladimir Pavloff, who was another, by the American Ambassador and Baron Benito Cohen. The talk turned on Molly’s favourite topic.
“Do you know what Jean said about me?” she was saying (Jean was her husband). “Do you?” she repeated insistently, for she had a curious habit of demanding answers to merely rhetorical questions. She leaned toward Burlap, offering dark eyes, teeth, a décolleté.
Burlap duly replied that he didn’t know.
“He said that I wasn’t quite human. More like an elemental than a woman. A sort of fairy. Do you think it’s a compliment or an insult?”
“That depends on one’s tastes,” said Burlap, making his face look arch and subtle as though he had said something rather daring, witty, and at the same time profound.
“But I don’t feel that it’s even true,” Molly went on. “I don’t strike myself as at all elemental or fairy-like. I’ve always considered myself a perfectly simple, straightforward child of nature. A sort of peasant, really.” At this point in Molly’s performance all her other auditors had
