John Braine - Room at the Top

She pouted. "Do you mean you wouldn't have come if you'd known I'd come?"

"On the contrary. I couldn't hope to enjoy myself without you. You're a festivity in yourself."

"You're making fun of me," she said in a low voice.

"I'm quite serious. Not that I've any right to be."

She didn't speak for a moment, but stood looking at me intently. I noticed for the first time that her eyes were flecked with gold, bright and alive and dancing. Looking into them and smelling her scent I felt my head swimming.

"I don't see why you haven't any right to be serious," she said. "It's not - not fair if you're joking."

I've never loved her more than I did then. I forgot the Jaguar and the Bentley and the Ford V-8. She loved and she wanted to be loved, she was transparent with affection; I could no more deny that correct response in my heart than refuse a child a piece of bread. In the back of my mind a calculating machine rang up success and began to compose a triumphant letter to Charles; but the part of me that mattered, the instinctive, honest part of me, went out to meet her with open hands.

At that moment Sally's mother came up to me, gushing and bejewelled. "My naughty daughter's failing in her duties," she said. "I must make you known to everyone, Joe." Out of the corner of my eye I saw Reggie take Susan away, and the next ten minutes were a blur of new faces and half-hearted names. There was a young man with a broken nose who was training to be a doctor, a sprinkling of young officers, some young-old men who were, I think, executives of Carstairs and Co., and what seemed to be a hundred girls in party dresses.

It's already difficult to remember the days of rationing, but I am sure of one thing: one was always hungry. Not hungry in the way I'd been at Stalag 1000, but hungry for profusion, hungry for more than enough, hungry for cream and pineapples and roast pork and chocolate. The Carstairses were in the business, of course; but the meal laid out in the dining room would have been considered sumptuous even today. There was lobster, mushroom patties, anchovy rolls, chicken sandwiches, ham sandwiches, turkey sandwiches, smoked roe on rye bread, a real fruit salad flavoured with sherry, meringues, apple pie, Danish Blue and Chesire and Gorgonzola and a dozen different kinds of cake loaded with cream and chocolate and fruit and marzipan. Susan watched me eat with a pleased maternal expression. "Where does it all go?"

"No difficulty," I said with my mouth full. "A sound stomach and a pure heart."

"Our Joe has a huge appetite for everything," Anne Barlby said. "If only he were a little fatter he'd be just like Henry the Eighth."

"You're horrid," Susan said. "I like to see a man eat."

"Henry wasn't famous only for eating," Anne said.

I laughed in her face. "I haven't chopped off anyone's head yet. Or been divorced, for that matter." I smiled at Susan. "I'm singlehearted. There's only one girl for me."

"Which one?" asked Anne. "It becomes confusing."

Susan was going pink. She made me think of a kitten whom someone had kicked instead of stroking. Without having any very clear idea of what was going on, she knew I was being got at.

"I always thought you liked older women," Anne said. "More mature and soignée."

I looked at her too prominent nose and saw near the head of the table Johnny Rogers talking animatedly with Sally; suddenly I understood. "I didn't hear you, love," I said mildly. "Not one word did I hear."

She looked at me angrily. "You've very good hearing."

"Not for anything I don't want to listen to."

Anne went off in the direction of Johnny without saying another word. She knows too much, I thought, feeling a premonition of danger.

"You're scowling," Susan said. "Are you angry with me?"

"Good God, no. I was just thinking."

"What were you thinking about?"

"You. I'm always thinking about you."

"It doesn't seem to make you very happy. You had a horrid murderous scowl. You look awfully hard sometimes, Joe."

"I'm very weak and sentimental where you're concerned."

"What were you thinking about me?"

"I'll tell you some other time."

"Tell me now."

"It's too private. I'll tell you when we're alone."

"Oh," she said. " Wicked."

After supper the floor was cleared for dancing. Susan was a good dancer, precise and light and free, always as it were poised above the ground, gay with weightlessness. In the intervals we sat on the sofa and held hands. Her hands were white and a little plump, and the nails were rosy and gleaming. (I thought of Alice's, already on the verge of boniness, the index finger yellow with tobacco and the nails flecked with white.) Whenever I looked at Susan she gave me a frank fullhearted smile: no reservations, no pretence: I could sense the joyfulness kicking inside her like a child.

Halfway through the evening they put on a tango. "I can't do this one," I said to her;

"Neither can I."

"It's terribly warm in here."

"I was thinking that too."

It was cool outside and as we walked over to the summerhouse we both retained the lightness of dancing in our feet; it was as if the lawn were a sprung floor. There was a full moon, softening the inflamed harshness of the red brick front; from the lounge we could hear the genteel exoticism of "Two to Tango" - like Earl Grey with gin in it - washing against the iron silence of the moors. The night was like a scene from a musical comedy: one word, one change of lighting, and the trellises would bleed with roses and the flowerbeds draw themselves up into a pattern of tulips and pansies and aubrietia and lupins and the damp mustiness of the summerhouse be overlaid by the smell of night-scented stock and the air turn warm and lazy with birdsong and the buzzing of bees.

When I took her in my arms she was trembling violently. I kissed her on the forehead. "That's a pure kiss for you," I said. I kissed her again on the lips. "Don't be frightened, dearest."

"I'm never frightened of you."

I wanted to give her something, as one would give a child a packet of sweets when it's pleased to see you. I wanted badly to give her something worth as much as what I knew she was at that moment giving me.

"Tomorrow?" I asked. "I'll phone at ten."

"No."

"Why?"

"You were very wicked to Susan before. You said you'd phone and you never did. Say when and where."

"Six at the Leddersford Grand. Oh darling - " I kissed her cheeks and her chin and her nose and the smooth nape of her neck. She was still trembling.

"I wish we could stay here for always," she said.

"So do I, dearest." And so I did; perhaps if time had released me then and there, I'd have been able to strangle the shabby little sense of triumph that was being born inside me, I'd have been able to accumulate enough emotional capital to match her gift. Two hours would have been enough in that summerhouse on that night when we were still caught up with the dance, when the moon and the feeling of winter being dead and the first-time delight of our bodies meeting had erased all complications and commitments; but two hours weren't available. Time, like a loan from the bank, is something you're only given when you possess so much that you don't need it.

Susan was already there when I reached the Grand. Against the black buildings of Leddersford, her face was fresh and glowing.

"Hello darling." I took both her hands. "Sorry I'm late."

"You're very naughty." She squeezed my hands. "I won't go out with you again." She held out her face for a kiss. "I've been longing for that. Aren't I wicked?"

"You're the joy of my life," I said, feeling for a moment very old. I took the evening paper from my pocket. There's a good film at the Odeon. Or a mediocre play at the Grand. Or what do you fancy?"