Charles Snow - The Light and the Dark

“Good afternoon, Mr Eliot. I am glad you were able to join us,” said Lady Muriel, and got back to the topic in hand. “I cannot understand how any woman has the shamelessness to throw herself at a man’s head.”

“I can’t help admiring her courage,” said Joan. “But—”

“Joan! I will not listen to anything you say in her favour. She is a mercenary and designing woman.”

“I’ve said already,” said Joan, fierce, sulky, angry with both her mother and Rosalind, “that I think she’s absolutely unsuitable for him. And if she thinks this is the way to get him, she’s even stupider than I thought. Of course, she’s appallingly stupid.”

“I should have called her rather — uninformed,” said Lady Boscastle. “I think our mothers would have thought her a little forward.”

“I don’t know how any man ever allows himself to get married,” said Mrs Seymour, “the way some women behave.”

“She’s a Clytemnestra,” said Lady Muriel surprisingly. We all looked puzzled, until Lady Boscastle observed gently: “I think you mean Messalina, Muriel.”

“She’s a Messalina,” said Lady Muriel with passion and violence. “Of course, she’s not a lady. She’s not even gently bred. No lady could do what this woman is doing.”

Lady Boscastle raised her lorgnette.

“I’m not quite sure, Muriel. I think this girl’s behaviour is rather unbecoming — but haven’t you and I known cases—?”

“It was not the same,” said Lady Muriel grandly. “If a lady did it, she would do it in a different way.”

Soon afterwards Roy came in. When he apologised for being late, Lady Muriel was banteringly, clumsily affectionate, as though she wanted to say that he was still in favour. Then Lady Boscastle began to talk about her party on New Year’s Eve.

“I have at last succeeded in persuading my husband to enter the Sporting Club. It has taken some time,” she said with her delicate, sarcastic smile. “We are dining at ten o’clock. I am counting on you two to make up the party. Will you come, Lewis?”

I said that I should love to.

Roy hesitated.

“I don’t know whether Lady Muriel has told you, Lady Boscastle,” he said, “but a friend of mine is arriving that day.”

“I had heard,” said Lady Boscastle.

“I think I need to look after her.”

His tone was light but firm. He looked at Lady Boscastle. For a second her eyes wavered to Lady Muriel, and then came back to him. In a few moments, I knew that she would not invite Rosalind, and that he would not give way.

“I’m so sorry,” said Roy, as though there had been no challenge. “It’s a shame to miss you all on New Year’s Eve. I should have enjoyed it so much.”

I was shocked that Lady Boscastle could be rude in this fashion. She was acting, so it seemed to me that afternoon, not as herself but as part of the clan. These were not her manners, but the manners of the whole Boscastle circle. Which were often, under their formal politeness, not designed to give pleasure. For instance, it was not politeness of the heart when Lady Muriel, seeing Roy and me constantly together, called him by his Christian name and me “Mr Eliot”, year in, year out, without softening or change. She was intensely fond of him, of course, and neutral to me, but some codes of manners would have concealed those feelings.

On the afternoon of the thirty-first, I was told that Rosalind had come, but I did not see her. Roy and she were together, I assumed, but they avoided the normal meetingplaces of the Boscastle party. So I had tea with the Master and Lady Muriel, dressed early, and put in some hours at the tables before dinner. Mrs Seymour, who was becoming an insatiable gambler, was also in the casino, but I managed to pass her undetected. That was too good to last; and at dinner at the Sporting Club her place was inevitably on my right. Full of excitement, she described to me how she had been invited to a French house at five o’clock that afternoon and offered an aperitif.

“I don’t like wine for tea ,” said Mrs Seymour. For once her vagueness, even her enthusiasm vanished, and she felt like the voice of England.

Lord Boscastle’s table was in an alcove which commanded the whole room. Lights shone, shoulders gleamed, jewellery flashed, expensive dresses rustled, expensive perfume touched the air: champagne buckets were being carried everywhere: there were at least a dozen people in the room whom I recognised from photographs. Lord Boscastle viewed the spectacle with disfavour.

“I don’t know any of these people,” he said. He looked at his sister who, despite his approval of scholarly pursuits, he sometimes affected to think moved in a different circle of existence.

“Muriel!” he called out. “I suppose you know who these people are?”

“Certainly I do not,” said Lady Muriel indignantly.

To her profound annoyance, an elderly man bowed to her.

“Who is that fellow?” asked Lord Boscastle.

“Lord Craycombe,” said Mrs Seymour.

“That family are nothing but nineteenth-century arrivistes,” said Lord Boscastle. “Not a very distinguished acquaintance, my dear Muriel, I should have thought—?”

He was on the rampage. This was his revenge for being dragged into society.

“Talking of arrivistes,” he said, “I noticed one or two over-luxurious yachts in the harbour. I didn’t think they were in specially good taste. But it’s obvious that people whom one simply wouldn’t have known some time ago have managed to do remarkably well for themselves.”

Which noble families was he disposing of now? I wished that Roy had been there.

The party contained eight people. Houston Eggar had been asked to fill Roy’s place; his wife (“Tom Seymour’s girl”) had already left for Rome, where they had been posted for a year past. Lord Boscastle proceeded to interrogate Eggar upon the Abyssinian war. The Boscastles had lived years in Italy; he had a passion for the country; though he called himself a whig, the squabble about a colonial war seemed to him hypocritical nonsense. Eggar tried hard to be both familiar and discreet, but I got the impression that in his heart he agreed. With one criticism of Lord Boscastle’s he did not agree, however; and I could not help feeling that this particular criticism would have seemed unfamiliar to my left wing friends. For Lord Boscastle appeared to regard the mishandling of British policy towards Italy as due to the increasingly middle-class constitution of the Foreign Office.

Joan argued stormily with her uncle. She thought he was clever but misguided, and never gave up hope of converting him. Eggar she dismissed as set in his ways. Actually, Eggar put on a tough assertive manner, as though he were anxious to talk to Lord Boscastle as man to man. Underneath the assertiveness he was deferential and eager to please. He was determined never to say anything foolish, never to let slip a confidence, never to be indiscreet. He was powerfully built, dark, young-looking for a man in early middle age; he was kindly, vulgar, inordinately ambitious, and not at all subtle.

It was eleven, and the room was full. Suddenly Joan said: “There’s Roy.”

Our table fell into silence as we watched. Across the floor, up an aisle between the tables, Roy walked, quite slowly, with Rosalind on his arm. They attracted many glances. Roy looked more than ever spruce, with a white gardenia in his buttonhole; but Rosalind took attention away from him. She was not a beauty, in the sense that several women in this room were beauties; she had none of the remoteness that beauty needs. But her face was mobile, pathetic, humorous and living, and she had dressed to make sure that she would not be overlooked.

The aisle ran only one row of tables away from ours. As they came near, Rosalind, who was on the far side, kept talking to Roy; but he turned half round and gave us a brilliant smile. It did not look a smile of defiance or triumph; it was fresh, cheerful, alight with high spirits.