Джеймс Хилтон - Morning Journey

The chairman sat down, having said nothing that she had really heard, and during the applause Mr. Hare turned to her again. “Are you by any chance going on to the Fulton-Griffins’ when this thing is over?”

“Oh, I don’t think so. I was asked, but I understand there’s such a crowd always there, and I hate crowds.”

She had never been to a Fulton-Griffin party, though Paul had been once and told her what it was like. She had known then that she wouldn’t enjoy it.

“So do I,” Mr. Hare said, “but a Fulton-Griffin party is something you ought to see if you haven’t been to one before. I thought if you were going I’d have a chance to talk to you without all these interruptions.”

“Oh yes, I’d like that, but I really think I ought to go home. I’ve been rather tired since the picture finished and—”

The chairman was introducing the next speaker, Calvin Beckford. After his first half-dozen words she glanced at Paul with renewed apprehension, sure that he would dislike the man fiercely and progressively. For Beckford had the kind of fruity voice that Paul could not stand, even when an actor assumed it for a part; “Be an undertaker, not an actor,” Paul had once said, to a youth whose natural voice had been of that kind, “and change the funeral service to read ‘O Passing On, where is Thy Sting?’” Now why did she recall that?… She looked at Paul again and noted every sign that he was in a profound gloom. Beckford’s voice droned on, the lard-like face falsely radiant as the compliments poured forth. “Unforgettable career fittingly climaxed” was one of them, aimed at herself. Paul would hate that too, and for a number of reasons, one of which was that he hated the word ‘unforgettable’. It was a radio word, he always said, meaning ‘forgettable’.

At last the orator reached his point, which was the presentation of the plaques; she took hers, bowed to the applause, then made her little speech and forgot to congratulate Mr. Beckford on his approaching seventieth birthday, though she did remember to mention Majestic Studios as the alma mater that had nourished Morning Journey in its bosom. All very pretty, and over in exactly three and a half minutes.

“Bravo,” Mr. Hare whispered, when she sat down. “You did very well.”

She smiled and felt that he had been duly impressed.

Then the presentation to Greg, who took even less time to get on his feet and off again.

Then Paul.

She knew from the outset, from the look on his face, from the set of his jaw, from the way he strode to a microphone and focused himself, as it were, into the centre of a silence, that he was going to be impossible. He took the plaque without a smile, and Carey, guessing what was ahead, bit her lip and stared at the table. Then it began… practically all the things he had said to her that afternoon. They had either simmered in his mind since then, or in a subconscious way he had been trying them out on her as he so often did… a weapon not necessarily to be used, but kept sharpened in readiness. She knew that his decision on such matters was almost always last-minute and capricious—that perhaps if he had been given a better place at the table, if one of his neighbours had been interesting, or if Calvin Beckford had been Jack Benny… then he might well have said his thank-you like a gentleman, like the little gentleman he sometimes looked but never actually was.

When it was over she got up from the table and left, slipping out by a side door without a word to anyone. Nobody tried to stop her; she had an impression that Paul’s speech had made everything else, for the moment, unnoticed. She ran down the road to the car park, not waiting for the boy to take her ticket. She was full of that curious vacuum of sensation that comes after one has been hurt and before one can really feel anything.

Back at the apartment she entered by a tradesmen’s side door that bypassed the desk; she did not want to be told there had been any messages for her. When she reached her rooms the telephone was ringing. The desk usually gave the name of a caller, but this time she lifted the receiver to hear a woman’s voice mentioning the name of a newspaper and asking what she thought of Paul Saffron’s speech at the Critics’ Dinner. She answered, in a flustered way: “Oh, I don’t know—I haven’t much of an opinion about it.”

“But Miss Arundel, what do you think of his remark that Morning Journey is the worst picture he ever made?”

“I—I don’t know. I—I—”

“Do YOU think it’s the worst picture he ever made?”

“Well, no—or rather I don’t know—I can’t say—I haven’t seen all the pictures he ever made…”

A laugh at the other end seemed to show that her answer had been considered adequate.

“Just one more question, Miss Arundel, what did you think about Mr. Saffron’s statement that—”

“I’m sorry,” she interrupted, “that’s all I can tell you. I must hang up. I’m very sorry.”

She hung up. As she stepped from the instrument she tried to remember what little she had said. Question: “Do you think it’s the worst picture he ever made?” Answer: “I can’t say—I haven’t seen all the pictures he ever made.”—Oh, what a snide remark, the way it would look in print. She felt a heart-constriction, then a surge of anger against Paul for getting into this mess and dragging her into it with him. The telephone rang again. This time she lifted it off the hook and ignored it. She heard the intermittent clicking and wondered how soon the desk clerk would send someone up to see what was the matter. Abruptly, as if challenged to face some issue with every final scrap of strength she had, she made up her mind to go to the Fulton-Griffins’. She would startle everyone there, would make a stage entrance, act the unruffled queen, show everyone that she did not care for anything that had happened, that Paul could go to the devil his own way. An impulse of such magnitude demanded either enthusiasm or quick extinction; she was able to muster the former as she chose a new dress, changed quickly, and left by the same side entrance.

Ten minutes later she was driving along winding uphill streets. She had put the car-top down, for the feel of the night and the kind of excitement it might give; she had wrapped her head in a scarf that would keep her hair in shape. Presently the estate of the Fulton-Griffins came into view. Cars were parked for half a mile along the narrow drive-way; retainers, watchful for gate-crashers, scrutinized first the car, then seemed to recognize her face. The house was baroque and ugly, even in floodlights, but the gardens had spaciousness. A heart-shaped swimming-pool glistened amidst the trees and beside it stood an open-air bar almost as large. Sounds of frolic came from both.

Nobody quite knew why a rich, respectable, and retired Middle Western couple lavished such frequent entertainment, or why they did not prefer seclusion to turning their house into an almost weekly shambles of broken glasses and cigarette-burned carpets. Presumably they liked to meet celebrities, old and new; presumably they liked noise; perhaps also they were generous, or bored, or snobbish. But even all of that could not pierce the final mystery. Their parties, at least, were not exclusive—or not much more so than the lobby of the Waldorf. And the one economy they practised was notorious; their liquor was never quite excellent.

Several hundred guests were already mingling outside and in when Carey arrived, and she made the full sensation she had planned. She had always been able to act when she could do nothing else; it was like starting a motor that left her with some generated strength in herself. She actually enjoyed greeting her hostess with: “Believe me, after the Critics’ Dinner coming here is a godsend. I wouldn’t have missed it for anything, though… Paul’s speech, I mean. The way that man can put his foot in it—with both feet!”