Richard Gordon: A QUESTION OF GUILT

'I gather my sister is to be examined by the Rцntgen rays?' said Nancy.

'Yes. We shall look inside to see what's going on, rather than imagining it from tapping and listening. Why should physicians be blind men?'

'Are the rays dangerous?'

'Not in the right hands.'

'Do you expect to find anything disconcerting?'

'If I knew what I should see, it would not be worth the trouble of the examination.' The concierge opened the carriage door. Eliot added, 'You must find life at Champette dreadfully tedious.'

'Not at all. I'm learning French. My maid helps with the pronunciation, though I suspect she has a vile Parisien accent. I'm also learning watercolouring from the wife of a British major. Every Monday, I go into Lausanne. All excitements in life are relative, aren't they?'

'You can't spend all your time swotting French.'

'I am blessed with plenty of books, and plenty of friends who must be written to.'

'Are you making new ones?'

'I prefer not making friends under duress.'

'I'll come and dine with you tomorrow night.' Nancy looked shocked, 'I'll pay my own bill, naturally.'

'You may invite yourself to dine in the hotel restaurant, Dr Beckett, but not in my company.'

'Oh, come,' he disposed of the objection. 'If you saw me sitting on one side of the room with my inevitable _potage de legumes,_ you'd invite me to join you, surely? I shall be there at eight.'

He helped her into the carriage, shut the door and strode into the building.

Nancy was outraged. No man in New York dared break into her company, no more than into her father's banks. She was puzzled. She had heard that all Englishmen were desperately punctillious, so terrified of 'doing the wrong thing', even if it was wearing the wrong hat.

The carriage had not rattled down the winding road before she was smiling at Eliot's self-invitation. He was as gauche as a raw college boy, but she was bored, and she was lonely. Anyway, Champette was a social desert island where no civilized rules applied.

She instructed Maria-Thйrиse to press her pink chiffon gown, not worn since leaving New York. For a woman to dress up without a man to impress was like cooking a splendid dinner to eat herself. Most of her jewellery was in New York. Nancy selected the next evening from her crocodile jewel-case a triple string of pearls which had cost twenty thousand dollars, and two single black pearl ear-rings worth twelve hundred and fifty. She came downstairs slowly, one white gloved hand gathering her skirt, the other gently waving her grey ostrich-feather fan.

In the hall were two English couples-a major and a solicitor with pallid, scrawny wives who Nancy found indistinguishable-just returned with wild flowers from walking. There was the jolly family from Lyons on whom she practised her French, and the solemn one from Frankfurt who practiced their English to her. They stared like the urchins on the New York sidewalks watching the gorgeous rich gather for a ball. The frock-coated receptionist craned across his counter. The concierge amid a pile of luggage involuntarily whipped off his cap. She wondered if Dr Beckett would be wearing his usual shooting-jacket.

Eliot appeared in a long black cape like a cavalry officer's, its deep collar secured by a chain. He handed it to the concierge with a wide-brimmed velour hat and a small square lantern. He wore a dinner jacket of unmatchable London cut, diamond studs in his shirt front, his tie as symmetrical as a butterfly. She was amused at his startled look. The dress was cut low across her bosom, in the latest American fashion.

'May I congratulate you on your gown, Miss Grange? It must quite overawe this nation of _petits bourgeois,_ as if the snow had miraculously melted and revealed the magnificent peak of the Matterhorn.'

'I imagined you looked at a chest with the emotions of a watchmaker at a watch, Dr Beckett.'

'Even one of that unimaginative profession is moved by a Fabergй clock. Is this the Gibson Girl silhouette we read is all the rage in America?'

'I thought everyone knew that the Outdoor Girl had replaced the Gibson Girl?' she corrected him. 'Because of the automobile, you know. Women have taken to driving them. We apply freshly cut cucumber to soothe the suntan and smooth the dreaded automobile wrinkles. But really, Dr Beckett-would my dress shock a nation which stands idly by while fathers shoot apples off their son's heads?'

'Perhaps only the expense would. Which I suppose is necessary, to keep up with The Four Hundred'?'

'Only vulgar people talk about "The Four Hundred", Dr Beckett. It was nothing but the capacity of Mrs Astor's ballroom. Are you retaining your carriage?'

'I walked. It's a splendid evening. I always take the path down the cliff to the village. They've marked the stones at every turn with white paint. I've brought an acetylene, so I shan't break my neck in the dark.'

Two white-jacketed commis threw open the glass doors of the hotel restaurant.

'I hear that in American society, a lady considers a dress allowance of five thousand dollars a year as reducing her to rags?' Eliot resumed. 'All the families in Champette could be kept comfortably on that. And I hear that two hundred million dollars worth of diamonds are suspended from the necks, bosoms and stomachs of the New York females. You could run the whole of Switzerland on that. I assume your father is a millionaire?'

'Oh, there's seven thousand millionaires in America, Dr Beckett. There are millionaires, then there are multimillionaires, and then Pittsburg millionaires.'

They sat at a corner table. Eliot was amused to notice everyone forget their food to stare at them. They seemed a rich and smart young couple, more likely to be encountered at some fashionable hotel on the Quai du Mont-Blanc in Geneva.

'Isn't the definition of a millionaire the ability to live off the income of your income?' Eliot asked.

'In New York, it is only spending the income of a million dollars, whether you have either. Do you know, the Granges don't even possess a two-ton bath-tub carved from solid marble, like the Astors?'

'How much wiser to watch the smart set outdoing each other with displays of wealth. That only ruins the millionaires and makes millionaires of the tradesmen.'

'It doesn't prevent my father being villified in the newspapers as a ruthless man.'

'That can be a compliment. It takes the same resolution to throw a man into a river as to leap in and pull him out of it. Why did you allow me to intrude on you tonight?'

'Surely it's a social distinction to sit at table with a well-born Englishman? In New York, noblemen charge to provide that honour for eager hostesses.'

'Only the Russian aristocracy do. And I'm not well-born. You're looking at my dress-studs? A coming-of-age gift from the Duke of Lincoln. Have you admired my clothes? Cut by the Duke's tailor in Savile Row, half-price. To provide a young man with impressive studs and a good tailor shows the grasp on essentials which brought the Duke's family its fortune. My father is the Duke's agent, his man of business, attending to his houses and estates. I was brought up staring through the plate glass dividing one station of life from another. I've seen balls with ladies wearing dresses far richer than yours, one woman made beautiful by fifty miserable, starving, ugly people. I've seen good food transformed into diverting shapes and pretty colours by slaving cooks. I've seen cosseted pheasants beaten into the air by half-starved farm-labourers to be shot. I've seen the cigars, the champagne, the waste. My father saved every penny that I might escape.'

'And a spy never forgives his enemies?'

'The waiter is becoming impatient,' said Eliot, taking the menu.

'You're very fluent in French,' she said admiringly, as he ordered.