Henry Green - Loving, Living, Party Going

‘Good heavens! Come along, what will they think?’ she said brightening. ‘We must get on down.’

‘Well,’ said Thomson, ‘and what do you think of that Emily? Emily,’ he cried in a falsetto voice echoing the old lady who had called her back, but not so loud that she could hear. ‘Where are you Emily, my lovey-dove?’

‘Disgusting, I call it.’

‘And what’s disgusting? Lord, what’s in a kiss? It don’t mean nothing to her, nor anything to me, but it did make an amount of difference when I hadn’t ‘ad my tea.’

‘You do meet some funny ones about these days,’ Edwards said to the porter. ‘Still thinking along of his tea and look what he’s just got.’

‘No,’ said Thomson. ‘No, it’s fellow feeling, that’s what I like about it. Without so much as a by your leave when she sees someone hankering after a bit of comfort, God bless ‘er, she gives it him, not like some little bitches I could name,’ he darkly said, looking up and over to where their hotel room would be. Their porter tapped his forehead. ‘It’s been too much for ‘im,’ he cried at large, ‘too much by a long chalk. So it is for most of these young fellers, carried away by it,’ he said.

‘Waiting about in basements, with no light and in the damp and dark,’ Mr Thomson muttered to himself, and if he and that girl had been alone together, in between kisses he would have pitied both of them clinging together on dim whirling waters.

‘Well, there you are,’ said Julia as she came in and before she could see who was there and in such a tone she might as well have been asking where had they all been all this time. ‘Why it’s you, Angela, my dear,’ she said. ‘Where are the others?’

‘Alex is helping Amabel, actually, in her bath,’ Miss Crevy said, and wished she had a periscope to see that bomb explode. But if it went off it did so out of sight, for Julia did no more than turn to Max, though she did this in the direction her heart had turned over when she heard.

‘How did she get there?’ he said, and he felt shocked.

‘She walked, she told me, and she got here in front of her maid who came in the car.’

‘Is Toddy here then?’

‘Oh, Max,’ said Miss Crevy, ‘who ever heard of Amabel travelling without her maid?’

So she is coming after all, Julia thought, maid and all and six cabin trunks full of every kind of lovely dress. But how unfair, she thought, how vile of her when she knew Max did not want her, how low to pursue him in this way. She also noticed Miss Crevy seemed quick in using her Christian name and wondered if they mightn’t somehow be in league. But it was going to ruin their entire trip her coming, and she went over in her mind when she heard him say he had asked Amabel.

She had been wearing her blue dress and the new shoes and they had gone on together alone somewhere to dance and she had been nervous about whether he would have too much to drink perhaps, but anyway it had been fun and lots of people there and then Embassy Richard had come up. How absurd of Angela to call him Embassy Dick like any bird; she was too free the way she made out she knew people. Perhaps that was why Max had seemed so much against him, but when Richard had come up he had said something jokingly about his knowing someone Max was going to leave behind and who would be simply furious at being left. And that was all, come to think of it, and she had taken it to mean Amabel, but she might be wrong, there might be someone else. What could it mean?

‘I didn’t know Amabel was coming,’ she said, meaning why had he not told her.

‘She was most awfully upset she was so late,’ Miss Crevy told Max, ‘she told me to say to you how dreadfully sorry she was, and of course she would have missed the train if it hadn’t been for this fog. But you see it was just that, the fog’s so thick she simply could not get here, so she says you mustn’t be too hard on her, please, she could not really help herself.’

Julia said, well anyway they had all got here in time, and that she had no maid to pack for her. ‘In fact,’ she said, because this news had upset her so she had to speak about herself, ‘Jemima the old thing who packs for me, you can’t call her a maid really, never can learn to put in my charms. You know,’ she said to Angela very seriously, ‘I simply can’t go anywhere without them, the most frightful things have happened if I haven’t brought them, and not to me only, but to everyone who was with me too. So you see it makes me most terribly nervous. You see I don’t know to this minute whether I have them with me or not, and nervous not only for myself but for all of you, my poor darlings.’

Miss Crevy did not take this well as she could not understand the calm with which they seemed to accept, not Amabel’s presence, which she thought natural, but the fact that Alex was in there with her. It made her furious they should make so little of it, and she burst out:

‘Oh, no, but I think it’s disgusting Ms being in there helping with her bath.’

This was so sudden it made Julia forget about her charms.

‘My dear,’ she said, ‘what do you mean, helping?’ And Angela who, as soon as she began to explain, felt in some way she was weakening her argument, had to say she did not know how he was helping, and at that she laughed, but he was in there and he ought not to in front of all of them.

‘He is not,’ said Max. Miss Crevy looked to see if he was jealous, but saw that he simply did not believe her.

‘But I tell, you I heard them.’

‘My dear, what did you hear about them?’ Julia said.

Feeling in some way she was making her argument still weaker Miss Crevy explained how Amabel had asked him in front of her not half an hour ago.

‘She did not,’ said Max, and Miss Crevy said no more. If they did not believe her then let them find out for themselves and then, rather late, it came over her that she had not seen for herself, it was possible Alex was still in the bedroom and she felt foolish until she thought, well anyway if he wasn’t in there now he soon would be.

On this Julia left them. She thought Miss Crevy an impossible girl and went to find Claire and Evelyn to tell them and ask after Miss Fellowes. This would be her way of apologizing for having gone off with Max. And Max, who wanted time to face up to this news began to make it by asking Angela if she had all she wanted. She would hardly answer him.

When Julia went into that bedroom where Miss Fellowes lay, she said to Evelyn and Claire, ‘Well there you are,’ in such tones she might have been telling them how hard it had been for her to find them, and as though she were saying she had been looking for them all that time she had been upstairs with Max. She asked after Miss Fellowes and they replied, all this in whispers, and then so soon as she decently could she said would they not leave Miss Fellowes to those nannies, she had something she must tell them. Both wondered if she were going to announce her engagement, but it seemed she was more angry than pleased, and for one moment Claire wondered if that idiot Robert, her idiotic husband, had tried to pounce on her.

When those nannies had been got in and they themselves were in the corridor outside, Julia began on Angela. ‘Children,’ she went on, using this word because Evelyn who was older than any of them always used it when she wanted their attention, ‘what do you think of Angela Crevy? And do you know what she has just accused my darling Alex of? Why of being with Amabel in her bath.’ At this Claire and Evelyn registered disgust. ‘Oh, my darlings,’ she went on, ‘isn’t it too despairing, why must Max out of pure good nature ask people like her to come with his oldest friends who have known each other for ages?’ ‘I know,’ they both murmured back. ‘And Amabel, what is she doing, and anyway, why can’t that great ninny Angela see she is trying to set us by the ears?’