Before the Fact Page 14

  Ronald’s tact, and two side-cars, restored her confidence. By the time he rose to lead the way to the grill room Lina knew that she was going to enjoy her evening enormously.

  When he asked her after the oysters what she would eat next, she chose a fillet steak, very underdone. “I’m so hungry,” she explained.

  Ronald was delighted. “A woman who chooses an underdone steak in a restaurant when she might have foie de volaille en brochette must be sound at heart,” he told her.

  Gradually their intimacy returned.

  Ronald, as if to show that he was not going to take advantage of any confidences which Lina might now regret having made, did not refer at all to Johnnie. Their conversation roamed over a large field. They discovered that they both liked travelling, René Clair’s films, looking at cathedrals, chop-suey, and the novels of Mr. P. G. Wodehouse. Ronald told the inside story of a recent murder of an artist’s model, and Lina told him how to cook little plums in red wine.

  She tried to make him talk about his own work, but on that topic only he was shy. “I live among people who are always yapping about their work,” he explained, “and I pray the good gods that I shall never get like them. It may be pharisaical, but it’s a good deal less boring for one’s friends.”

  “But I shouldn’t be bored. I want to hear about your work.”

  “I expect when I know you better I shall bore you with it all right,” Ronald assured her.

  “So you’re going to know me better, are you?” said Lina, quite archly.

  The conversation took a different turn.

  It appeared that Ronald was going to know her very much better. He had decided that almost before they had gone off to hide last night. And now ...

  “Yes?” said Lina provocatively.

  “Now,” said Ronald with a rush, “I know you’re the nicest woman I’ve ever met in my life.”

  “Nonsense!” Lina said; but the words had made her heart give an odd little jump.

  “It isn’t nonsense,” Ronald declared fervently. “I tell you, I know. You’re just exactly what I’ve always thought a woman ought to be and no woman ever has been.”

  Lina tried to keep her head. “It’s sweet of you to say so, Ronald, but, after all, you don’t know me, do you? You really don’t know the first thing about me.”

  “If you’re trying to persuade me that you’re not the sweetest woman in London at this moment ...”

  Lina laughed skeptically, but an insane wish flashed through her mind that Johnnie could be there to hear.

  She put her elbows on the table and leaned her chin on her interlaced fingers. “And what exactly have you always thought a woman ought to be, my poor Ronald?”

  Ronald was not in the least nonplussed. He promptly rattled out a string of adjectives embracing, Lina thought, all the possible varieties of feminine perfection.

  “Well, I’m afraid I’m hardly any of those,” she laughed. “I’ll tell you what I am. You might as well know now as later. Irritable, conceited, intolerant, bad-tempered—”

  “You’re not conceited!” Ronald interposed hotly. “I never saw a less conceited woman.”

  “ – weak, lazy (very lazy), provincial, unpunctual (you saw for yourself!)—”

  “That wasn’t your fault. Your bus was held up.”

  “I ought to have come by taxi. Parsimonious too, you see. Well, anyhow, I don’t come very near that catalogue of yours.”

  Ronald smiled at her. “I think you’re perfect.”

  Lina laughed with happiness. Ronald was absurd, of course; but it was delicious to be discussed like this.

  There was no getting away from it: Johnnie never had appreciated her.

  “And everything about you is perfect,” Ronald added. “Except one. Your hat.”

  “My hat?” Lina knew only too well that hats were her weak point, but she had been sure that this was a success. She had bought it with Joyce last week, and Joyce, whose hats were certainly not a weak point, had very much approved. It was a little black Glengarry worn very much on one side. Lina had secretly thought that she looked quite dashing in it. “What’s the matter with my hat?”

  “It needs a feather over your left ear.”

  “My poor boy, don’t you know feathers have gone out?”

  “I don’t care. It needs it. Besides, you’d look adorable with a naughty little feather over your left ear, Lina.”

  “Ronald, really. Anyone would think you were talking to a young girl of seventeen, instead of a matron of thirty-six.”

  “Are you really thirty-six, Lina? My goodness, you don’t look it.”

  “Well, I am. How old are you?”

  “Thirty-three.”

  Lina sighed. It was a pity that any man in whom she was interested must always be younger than herself.

  Ronald took her back to Hamilton Terrace in a taxi. As soon as the more brilliant lights were left behind, he put his arm round her and kissed her.

  “I’ve never been kissed in a taxi before,” Lina said conversationally. “Isn’t it supposed to be terribly vulgar?”

  “That depends who’s doing it,” said Ronald, kissing her again.

  “Well, certainly I don’t feel vulgar,” Lina remarked, rather wonderingly.

  Ronald would not come in for a drink.

  Joyce was reading in the drawing room. She looked up from her book. “You’re back early.”

  “We sat on till the waiters nearly threw us out.” Lina stood abstractedly in the middle of the room, pulling off her gloves. “Joyce.”

  “Yes?”

  “Can you come down to Marshall’s with me to-morrow morning?”

  “Yes, I think so. What for?”

  “I want to get a feather for this hat.”

  “My dear girl, feathers have gone out.”

  “I can’t help that. It needs one.”

  “But nobody’s wearing them now.”

  “It needs one,” Lina said firmly. “Over the left ear. And what’s more, I shall look adorable in it,” she added: but not aloud.

  3

  Of course Lina visualized herself as Ronald’s mistress.

  She spent most of that same night in doing so.

  Here was the lover that Joyce had been counselling her so earnestly to take, for the raising of her little finger. She saw herself in his arms, under his kisses, in bed with him. The result both surprised and horrified her. That he attracted her strongly, and that he was the only man besides Johnnie who had ever attracted her physically, she knew already: what she had not realized before was that she actively desired him.

  To desire a man whom one has known only for a bare, twenty-four hours! In spite of life with Johnnie, Lina was still old-fashioned enough to find that disturbing.

  She wondered whether Johnnie’s moral example had coarsened her. Lying alone in bed, with no man to touch by her side, she felt it rather depraved that she should want to have one there; and a man at that whom she had known such a preposterously short time – whom, in fact, she did not know at all. And when, too, she certainly did not love him.

  (And Johnnie had called her a wet fish!)

  Not that she loved Johnnie any more.

  She hated Johnnie now – hated him bitterly and angrily and revengefully. He might have been her child once, but he had been a monster-child who had turned matricide. No, Johnnie would not stand in the way of her taking Ronald as a lover if she decided to do so in the end. She would not do so yet, of course. Ronald, who had such a delightfully high opinion of her, must never think that she was to be won too easily. It had been drilled into Lina from her early ’teens that no man thinks anything of a woman whom he can win easily. Somehow she had paid no attention to that admirable precept before she became engaged to Johnnie. And look at the result!

  She lay on her back, staring up at the ceiling and worrying over whether she would ever take Ronald for a lover, or not.

  Her thoughts turned to Janet, who had had the same problem to decide and had decided
it.

  She felt no bitterness against Janet. The bitterness that might have been felt against Janet had all been transferred to swell Johnnie’s total. Janet must have suffered a lot before she decided, and more still afterwards. Lina could only be sorry for her.

  Unlike most women, Janet was not a natural hypocrite. That was why Lina had liked her from the first. She must have found the hypocrite’s rôle very horrible. But she had been helpless. One is helpless, when one loves. Lina knew that. Janet must have hated Johnnie for making her a traitress, even while she loved him. Poor Janet: she must have suffered. She could not have made Johnnie a very satisfactory mistress.

  But Johnnie ...

  He had set out to get her, of course. Probably he had been working to do so for years. Janet really had disliked him once, and Johnnie could not have borne that, from a woman. It had been a challenge, which he had felt bound to accept. Johnnie, the charmer: Johnnie, the irresistible. Johnnie, the blackguard.

  Yes, Johnnie was the villain of Janet’s piece.

  Lina began to cry.

  She always cried now when she thought of Freda (common little upstart Freda, how she must have laughed!), of Mary Barnard, whom she had hardly noticed, of Olive Redmire, of the village girls – of her own servants! She felt somehow that she had been a pander for Johnnie’s horrible amours, by her own blind belief in him. She felt morally fouled, as well as physically.

  She forced her thoughts back to Ronald. Should she become his mistress or should she not?

  There was no possible need to decide that large question at any rate for the next two or three months, but Lina invariably worried over her problems in advance.

  She decided this one in two or three minutes. She would become Ronald’s mistress. That would be getting her own back on Johnnie with a vengeance. She exulted in the idea of getting her own back on Johnnie.

  For Johnnie had not minded.

  That was what upset Lina almost more than anything. Johnnie had thought those preposterous things about Martin Caddis – and he had not minded. Love must indeed be dead when a husband just does not mind the idea of his wife in somebody else’s arms. But then Johnnie had never loved her. She had not been pretty enough for him. How she had wasted her time!

  But she would make up for it now.

  She was pretty enough, it seemed, for Ronald. She would give Ronald everything. Everything she could. Everything.

  Lina, who had never before had an erotic vision in her life, plunged headlong into a series which a month ago would have left her appalled.

  She saw herself with Ronald, and gloried in it. She wanted to be shameless. She wanted to do outrageous things – incredible, impossible, inconceivable things. And still more she wanted Johnnie to know that she had done them.

  Ronald faded out. Lina was walking the streets, haunting bars, blatantly accosting men. Every woman wonders sometimes how she would shape as a prostitute. Lina had wondered, very vaguely, herself. Now she saw herself as one, in full detail: an extraordinarily successful one: a queen of prostitutes. What would Johnnie think about that? Would he mind then?

  She turned over onto her other side. She never would and never could be a prostitute. Prostitutes are born, not made. Why waste time on an unproductive theme?

  Ronald was recalled. Lina might never be a prostitute, but she would be a marvellous mistress. She could be. She wanted to be. She would be.

  She wondered with interest whether Ronald had any abnormalities.

  According to Johnnie, all men had some bias towards abnormality, greater or less. Johnnie had tried occasionally to hint to her of his own, but Lina would never let him.

  “The normal’s good enough for me,” she always said.

  She knew very little about the subject. It did not repel her; it simply did not interest her. She had read one book of Kraft-Ebbing’s, and it had all seemed very childish and silly. A great deal of it she had not been able to understand at all, including the Latin bits. Certainly it had not encouraged her to let Johnnie open his mind on the matter.

  She wondered suddenly if that was why she had lost him.

  With her usual fairness she had to admit that she might have done more for Johnnie. At least she could have provided a sympathetic ear. And of course she had always known that men do go to other women for what they cannot get, or do not like to ask for, from their wives. Joyce had told her all about that, years ago. Joyce had said, very emphatically, that in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred it depends entirely on the wife whether she keeps her husband or not.

  Lina noted with new interest that Joyce had certainly kept Cecil.

  Well, she would not make that mistake again, if that had been her mistake. She almost hoped that Ronald had a few abnormalities, so as to give her the opportunity of not making the mistake. She didn’t care. Ronald at least should never call her prim.

  She tried to remember what she had read in Kraft-Ebbing.

  Yes, she would do far more for Ronald than she would ever have done for Johnnie. Far more! And somehow – somehow Johnnie should learn just what she could do for another man.

  That was quite settled.

  Lina went to sleep.

  4

  The next day Ronald announced that he was going to marry her.

  Early the next morning (a good deal too early, thought Lina, dragged out of bed to speak to him on the telephone) he rang up to ask her out to lunch. Lina refused, a little waspishly on account of her warm bed. He asked her to dine with him. She refused.

  “Don’t be so absurd, Ronald. I can’t see you every day. Besides, we’re going out this evening.”

  “You are going to see me every day,” said Ronald.

  Finally Lina promised to have tea with him in his studio, to see his pictures. Ronald lived in a service flat in Westminster, but he rented a studio in Chelsea. His sitters preferred to be painted in Chelsea.

  Lina got there punctually at four-thirty. She had had to hang about for a quarter of an hour on the embankment in order to do so.

  A little anticipatory thrill ran through her as she knocked on the door inscribed with Ronald’s name.

  A bigger one followed it when Ronald opened the door to her. For Ronald wasted no time. He took her straight into his arms, and kissed her as if he had been living for that minute all day.

  “My darling!”

  He held her away and looked at her.

  “You enchanting creature! You’ve done it!” He had noticed the feather instantly. “It makes all the difference. I told you you’d look adorable, and you do.”

  “What nonsense,” Lina said happily.

  Ronald helped her off with her coat. He wanted her to take her hat off too, but Lina felt a curious reluctance. It seemed somehow more final.

  The kettle was almost boiling, and Lina made the tea. They used a corner of the model throne for a table.

  Lina walked about the studio, a bun in one hand, looking at Ronald’s pictures. She was relieved to find that the modern influence in them was slight. Ronald did not paint his sitters with red noses, by way of a crude suggestion that they drank too many cocktails, or with no tops to their heads and enormous thighs. But he was not photographic either. No photograph could have done his women such justice.

  Lina was impressed. Without doubt Ronald was clever. And he worked.

  It was Joyce who had said, very significantly: “And he works.”

  “I’m going to paint you as soon as I can work off the commissions I’ve got on hand,” Ronald told her. “Just like you are now.”

  “In this frock?” She was wearing a frock of green jersey with a white collar and very long white cuffs. The feather had been chosen to match it.

  “Yes. I shall call it ‘The Green Feather.’ But I’m afraid it will blast my reputation forever.”

  “Then you’d better not paint me. Why should it?”

  “Because I live on silly women who like to inform the world, through my portraits of them, just how fatuous or vicious they are.
I seem to have a knack of showing it in their faces.”

  “Well,” Lina smiled, “I don’t think I’m vicious, but I often think I’m very silly, so that will be all right.”

  “If I painted you, Lina,” Ronald said seriously, “it would be to show the world that there’s one woman in it who’s everything a woman could be. In fact,” he added with a laugh, “if I go on knowing you much longer, Lina Aysgarth, I’m afraid you’ll rob me of my livelihood.”

  “I shall? How?”

  Ronald laughed again. “Well, let’s put it, by destroying my lack of faith in women.”

  5

  “Lina, I’ll tell you one thing. I’m going to marry you.” Ronald bent over her as she sat on a pouffe cushion between his knees, and kissed her hair.

  Lina caught her breath. “Ronald – you frighten me when you say things like that.”

  “Frighten you? Why, my darling?”

  “I don’t know. You’re so impetuous. What do you know about me?”

  “I know you’re the only woman I ever could marry. No, don’t shake your head. It’s part of my job to be a quick judge of character. I made up my mind at that party, as soon as I knew you were going to be free, that I’d marry you.”

  “Ronald! Did you really?” It rather took one’s breath away to have one’s future settled so decidedly without apparently any say in the matter at all, but undeniably it was exciting.

  “Yes. You like me, don’t you?”

  Lina gave the knee she was holding a little hug. “Should I be doing this if I didn’t? I can assure you, this sort of thing is quite out of my line.”

  “I know it is, you darling. That’s why I want to marry you. You’re so ... well, there’s no other word for it, clean. Most women have such unpleasant minds, you know.”

  “Do they?” said Lina doubtfully. It sounded rather a sweeping statement. “You have got a poor opinion of women, Ronald, haven’t you?”

  “Very.”

  “And yet it’s so silly to generalize about them.”

  “I’ve got plenty of experience to speak from, my dearest. Anyhow, I can quite honestly tell you this: you’re the first woman I’ve met who hasn’t either bored or irritated me, or whom I’ve even wanted to see a second time.”