Conrad Aiken: The Collected Short Stories of Conrad Aiken

She was annoyed, but annoyed only fleetingly: nettled. I wasn’t to think it was as easy as that. Not at all. It might have been easy to make the decision—to act upon it was another matter.

“I couldn’t think how to go about it,” she said.

“Naturally,” I replied.

She added that if you’d been brought up a lady, it wasn’t so easy. How could she begin? She tried to pick up men in the streets, but it was no good. They were always the wrong sort of men, and they looked so horrible staring at her from under their hats. At the crucial moment, she always got frightened and walked on. She would hold her breath, and if she heard them coming after her, she would run. I was asked to imagine what it must have been like. I imagined it, and lighted another cigarette for her. It was as if together we watched her nocturnal maneuvers in Shaftesbury Avenue and Regent Street, her pauses in dark doorways, her uncertain hoverings at the corners.

“It wasn’t any good,” she said. “I decided it wasn’t my line. I had to think of something else.”

She narrowed her eyes at me, partly to screen them from the cigarette smoke, partly in an effort to assume the appearance of a person very wise and very resigned. I assumed the same pose, and said that she ought to have known that she was not the kind of woman for that sort of thing—she was obviously far too refined. She nodded, acquiescing.

“I decided to try the Café Bonaparte. You know the Bonaparte?”

I told her that I knew it only too well.

“You know what it’s like, then,” she said. “I didn’t—except from hearing about it. But I was told that it would be very easy there. So one night I went.”

She indulged in a sour little retrospective smile, the corners of her mouth sharply turned down. Then she looked off toward the dark window of the bar, on which the rain was beating.

“The question was what to do with the boy. You see? I couldn’t leave him at home all evening alone. So I took him along with me.”

“To the Bonaparte?”

She gave me a withering look, and then shook her head wearily: I had been very stupid.

“Certainly not ,” she said. “I took him to a cinema in Leicester Square and told him to wait there till I came for him. Then I had a drink and went to the Bonaparte by myself.”

She began to laugh. It was very funny—the whole thing was hysterically funny. To think that she had been so frightened, by anything so simple! This amused her intensely. She went in, she said, trembling like a rabbit—absolutely trembling like a rabbit. The crowds, the smoke, the mirrors—the whole thing dazzled her. She had no idea what she was doing. She walked in as fast as she could and sat down in the first empty seat she came to. And then, right off, she saw a sign which said that ladies without escort were not admitted. Imagine. A waiter was rushing toward her, and she was on the point of running out again in a panic, when a man sat down opposite her and said good evening. Just like that: she nodded at me for emphasis. He asked her to have a drink with him and she accepted. Then he invited her to dine with him. He was very nice—a clean type of man, she could see that at a glance. But when he asked her to dine with him, she didn’t know quite what to do … She asked me if I saw the difficulty of the situation, and I said that I did.

“I couldn’t leave the boy there all evening without his dinner, could I.…”

“Of course not.”

So she told the man all about it. He asked her questions, and got more and more interested. She could see that he was surprised: of course, that was natural enough. But he was damned nice about it. And he said, when he heard the whole story, that that settled it—they would go and get the boy and all three have dinner together. He paid for the drinks, and they went round the corner to the cinema theater, where she got the boy; and then the three of them went to a Spanish restaurant for dinner. It was the first real dinner, she said, they’d had for a long time. A big bottle of wine, fried eggs with bananas, some Spanish sweets for the boy—they both ate themselves almost sick. And the whole thing was so funny, when she stopped to think about it. She and the Major—he was a major—both said that at the time. They couldn’t get over it. They laughed and laughed.… And the Major kept patting the boy on the head and calling him Cupido. After that, he always called him Cupido. The boy and the Major took to each other at sight, you might say.…

The really funny thing, however, came later: it was when it came time for them to go home.

“It was when we were in the taxi, and the boy kept going off to sleep, that it first came to me.…”

The trouble was that there was only the one bed, where she and the boy always slept together. She couldn’t think how they were going to manage. When they got to the flat in Bayswater, she showed the Major how it was. Just the two rooms, and the one bed, and the boy so sleepy that he couldn’t stand up.… Had I ever heard of a situation like that?

I admitted that I hadn’t.

“So what did you do?” I asked.

She didn’t answer me at once—she wanted to be sure, first of all, that I savored the situation to the full. She cocked her head on one side again, breathed smoke out through haughty nostrils, and surveyed me with amused cynicism. The point was too good: it must not be hurried over. Situations like that, she seemed to imply, didn’t occur too often in life, and should be relished for all they were worth.

“The Major settled it,” she then said. “We put the boy to bed and waited. When he was asleep, we picked him up and carried him into the sitting room and put him on the floor. And later on we carried him back again.… While we were waiting for him to fall asleep we just talked.”

She smiled at me, with an air of modest pride and triumph, and I smiled back. Tacitly, thus, we agreed that life was a really extraordinary business. You could never tell what tricks it would play. She and the Major and Cupido, there in the little flat together, and for that astonishing purpose—could I ask for a queerer thing than that, or one that did her greater credit? It was really unparalleled—really unique.…

III.

After that, it had been comparatively plain sailing. The Major continued to look after them, and she and Cupido had lived in what you might call luxury. They had everything they wanted. Holidays two or three times a year at the seaside, good clothes, good food. The Major was very fond of Cupido, and talked of putting him into a school. Two or three times a week he came and dined with them, or took them to the theater. Everything went along beautifully; she was happy for the first time in her life. But then all of a sudden, out of clear sky, Mac came walking in. Just strolled in to tea, with a bag full of crumpets, as if he’d never been away. She cried all night, wondering what to do. The next day it all came out by accident—it was when Mac said something about where they were going to dine that evening. Cupido piped up with “But Mummy, tonight, don’t you remember, we’re having dinner with the Major.” “Major? What Major?” said Mac; and the whole thing came out, then and there. There was hell to pay. It was the end of Mac, however—he kicked things around a bit, and then put on his tunic and went. It was the last she ever saw of him, and a good riddance, too.

“I was properly fed up with him,” she said.

I said that I didn’t blame her, and got up to replenish the glasses. Then I asked her about the Major. Had he sent the boy to school? He sounded to me like a good fellow.

She gave a flaccid little laugh, brief and bitter.

“What do you suppose?” she said. “No, he didn’t.”