The Penguin Book of the British Short Story Page 32

  Each carried in her hand a card with a number. Only their shoes were their own, and these were in every case the highest they had – from great clobbering wedges to elegancies of the white summer, from shoes tasselled and curiously strapped to patent black evening shoes that quarrelled painfully with the naked flesh pressed into them. One girl, hard put, had come in a pair of tennis plimsolls: she went round balancing avidly on her toes, a Shetland among the Shires.

  The five judges leaned forward or sat back, pretending thus either keen judicial interest or recessive judicial wisdom. At first they were simply bewildered by so much sudden beauty. They sat in a fog of arms, legs, eyes, teeth, hair and all else. From bubble-bath and mud-tub, from pummelling-board and rubber roller came those fleshlings shining and smiling. Some had enclosed their legs in whole sheets of hot wax, from which they came hairless as ivory; others had forgone the luxuriance of mascara and instead brushed their eye-lashes with black boot polish to get a stronger set, a more lustrous shine. All smiled largely – though some by lowering their eyes achieved a sort of modesty at the same time, a redoubtable feat. All seemed not only to be following in each other’s footsteps but in their own as well – this because their high heels forced their knees forward, so that they hung back on themselves, as if searching out the ground before the main upperwork should follow: bended knees, mad knees stealing on tiptoe to unheard-of larders.

  Miss Great-Belt hung just behind such knees when she first passed the judges’ stand. Then she saw Frederick Morley – and nearly fell on them. For a second she lost her composure. Her face had been stretched into a design of radiant happy loveliness – eyes stretched wide yet with slightly lowered lids, lips stretched ovalling round their last liquid teeth. Now as she saw Morley there, Morley whom she had never expected, Morley whom she had told off only the night before, that expression did not leave her face – but in every feature it contracted, it grew smaller for a moment into an exactly reduced replica of itself. Heavens, her first thought was, what a stupid girl I am! Never to have known! (It never occurred to her how she could ever have known, she instantly blamed herself.) … But what a monster he is not to have told me! Then, as she transferred the blame to him, her self-esteem came flooding back, the eyes and lips opened again like the flesh of a startled anemone flowering for the attack, and never having really faltered and now with new aplomb she passed on. He would be feeling sorry, she thought, and wish to expiate his deception. Besides, deep down he’s fallen for me. Besides, there are four other judges. Besides, whatever the odds I’m good enough to beat the lot of them.

  As she passed him and for a moment their eyes met, Morley was able to look as though he was looking right through her.

  And then round and round the girls paraded. Sometimes the band changed its tune, broke into a dreamy waltz, and then all the girls broke step, bewildered in their dancing blood by the change of tempo: they quickly regained themselves and went kneeing on.

  The vast hall echoed to laughter, catcalls, whistles and sighs from the crowd. ‘Irene!’ some called: ‘Doreen!’ others. ‘Git up them stairs,’ yelled the lustier members, and one man throughout the long parade repeated over and over again, at most regular intervals, and on a note of despair: ‘Roll me over.’

  But despite such convivialities – how misfortunate those girls were! It was cold there in that hall. They shivered, and many arms and legs so smoothly cared for now erupted into gooseflesh. In the changing room the six foreign girls had shivered with cold – and with anger. They had combined in wholehearted vituperation of the English weather, and finally all things English. When they had exhausted everything else – food, clothes, weather and so on – Miss Clermont-Ferrand had summed the matter up with the irrelevant, but emphatic and somehow damning words: ‘Double-decker Buses!’

  Not only was it cold, but it looked cold. That hard mauve light stared down from the ceiling with the glare of arc-lamps on arterial concrete, rinsing all in varying shades of its mauve, killing all other colour. Lilac flesh, lavender crannies, purple lips, night-shade eyes – it became a circumambulation of the dead: corpsy smiles luked the way, rigor mortis was on the move, it was a dream parade of maidens killed before their time. And far away, like an old grey wardress, Life still drizzled a dustbin blessing from the windowed world outside.

  The judges, first dazzled, then surfeited, had now become so used to the bodies before them that their minds, obeying the laws of curiosity and creation, began to work on them afresh. Their eyes searched those bodies as a prisoner may search his cell and find in such bareness a new world of hidden detail. Thus they began to notice that where the spine of one girl snuggled like a long and lovely dimple, the next protruded in a sweet and charming ladder of little knobs. Where one naked torso showed a broad squarish form moulded like Greek armour, the next was softly shapeless as the ribless tube of an odalisque.

  Moles took on a new presence, they grew insistent as flies on a bare ceiling. Bruises – wide brown smudges and little purple nips – showed clearer and clearer, freckles came into their own, and in that light the yellowing of armpits took on a new and virulent lilac life. So too the flushed pork-crackling, the armadillo flesh at the backs of heels – this turned deep purple, so that sometimes it looked as if a girl wore the kind of stocking that had a dark reinforcement above the back of her shoe. And the light made Miss Sauerkraut’s ears, which with her blonde pallor were normally bright red, black.

  The veins of auburn girls stood out like nests of rivers on maps and the lines that others wore from navel to pudenda split like cheese-wire. But the navels themselves were a study on their own – dear little buttons, wicked forget-me-knots like cropped pink piglet tails, fingertip holes and penny-size pits and sometimes none at all but simply a recessive folding of modest flesh: one alderman, who had a compulsion complex, who normally had to walk between the lines of pavement stones or make countings of objects in rooms, found himself muttering a kind of permutation gamble to himself as the navels passed: ‘Button-Putton. Holey-Poley. Button-Put – no, damn, Holey-Poley …’

  And there were the operation scars, the appendix marks. And the vaccination marks, brown cornflowers on arm and thigh. And where some had taken the sun, the criss-cross of bathing-costume straps white on brown; and the cabalist label on the wrist where a watch and strap had been. And then all the other little marks, the little creases, and the wobbling and swinging of this and of that – all of these and so much more came to the fascinated eyes of the five startled gentlemen as that blanched and black-lipped procession passed before them.

  (Yet how much more startled they would have been had their ears grown as alert as their eyes – for then they would have heard the ceaseless silent song whispered on the lips of every one of those priestesses as they marched, a song of one word only, the lip-stretched litany: ‘Cheese.’)

  Even Fred Morley, accustomed to rub shoulders with so many ladies of the chorus, was surprised. In the theatre the light was kinder, and there was powder and paint. Here, he found himself thinking, they were like medical samples, girls in bottles, selected picklings.

  Finally the moment for judgment arrived. The judges whispered to each other, passed little scraps of paper. The band stopped playing. The great hall was hushed – a murmur of whispering and tittering only, the sound of a hive of waiting bees. The girls stood in a long line in front of the judges, their hands to their sides, defenceless, offered.

  Three of Morley’s co-judges elected immediately and unreservedly for Miss Great-Belt. It took him some time to disenchant them. But he did. To them he stood as something of an expert, a professional man: he played on this, ironically arguing their lack of taste, making them feel silly. But instantly he raised their esteem by congratulating them on their second and third choices – with raised eyebrows and a knowing wink: ‘Ho, I see you do know a thing or two!’

  Finally a decision was taken.

  Miss Amsterdam was awarded the first prize. A local lady, a blonde Miss Browne, cam
e second, and long pale Miss Sauerkraut romped in third. Miss Great-Belt came nowhere at all.

  The crowd cheered and booed, cheered for Miss Browne, and booed for Miss Great-Belt. But the judges’ decision was final. There was no going back. And now Fred Morley rose to present the prizes.

  A fine crocodile dressing-case for Number One, a portable wireless for Number Two, and oddly a set of pressure cookers for Miss Sauerkraut. And cheques for all. And for everybody present a few words from Frederick Morley.

  ‘Ladies,’ he began, and gave a great sigh, rolling his eyes. Roars of laughter.

  ‘And Gentlemen,’ he continued, with a sniff, as though he disbelieved in the presence of these. Redoubled laughter.

  But then he silenced the laughter with measured and grave opening words. He made one of those speeches that keep the audience well on their toes – as soon as he got them uncomfortable and guilty with a passage of great gravity, he let fall a howling joke (and he was careful to make it a howler, not to serve wit in that most mixed hall). And as soon as they were howling, down he came on them hard with a passage of such stony grandeur that the air echoed a susurrus of shoe shufflings and coughs as presenceful as the laughter itself.

  He had prepared this. And the reason he had taken so much trouble was to introduce a more personal condiment addressed to Miss Great-Belt. It was an address of omission. He made particular reference to the other international visitors – but not to her: and to make this the more striking he made it the less pointed by omitting one of the others, Miss Rotterdam, as well. He expressed on behalf of all present his gratitude to these ladies of lands across the sea for the honour of their visit – and then brought out some personal whoppers: of the lady from Rome’s seaside, ‘all roads lead to Miss Civitavecchia’; of Miss Sauerkraut, ‘my little cabbage – and not so sour at that’; of the first prize-winner, ‘not only a fair damsel but a veritable Amsterdamsel’, and so on, whoppers that issuing from his presidential mouth achieved an arch and fearful force.

  And that, all but the shouting, was that. There was nothing left but to go off into the drizzle.

  Except – for a brief moment, but a moment which was to have great repercussion – for Miss Great-Belt.

  Miss Great-Belt had her place, like all the others, in the line of girls listening to Morley’s speech. But with a difference – she was the only one who somehow appeared thoroughly and properly dressed. It was as usual – her self-containedness at its magic work again. There she stood in her little triangle and her two small moons, nothing else, with her hands to her sides. She should have stood as sacrificially slavishly offered as all the others. Instead she remained composed and remote. She stood on her own legs, in her own right, occupied only by herself.

  But when the speech ended, and the line of girls broke up, she simply stood on.

  For only a few seconds – yet seconds at such a time that stretched in the eyes of the onlookers into statuesque minutes – she stood alone exactly as she had stood for the previous quarter-hour, her eyes fixed vaguely on the platform of judges.

  Then her eyes woke up, startled. She looked around her. For a moment she hesitated. She seemed even to totter, not knowing which way she had to go. Then she saw, regained herself, turned and walked with all composure down the gangplank.

  Miss Great-Belt had been thinking.

  That moment of action, or of inaction, had not gone unperceived by Fred Morley. He had noticed it from the corner of his eye, not then wishing to turn his full face upon her, and had triumphantly noted it as an expression of her discomfort at losing the prize. But intuition is not a monopoly of the feminine, and far back and vaguely through his jubilation a bell of unease had tolled. An intuitive woman, in his place, would have sought for an immediate solution, right or wrong, to such a problematic sound; but Fred Morley had preferred to shut his ears to it, it was uncomfortable, he had done a good day’s work and wished to relax upon his laurels.

  Relaxation took the form of a visit to the Yacht Club. There, again in manly company, again among the chaffing and congratulations of his fellows, there was every hope of a pleasant end to a perfect day. But the opposite occurred. As the conviviality compounded, so did the tolling of that small bell of unease. It rang louder and louder. He tried to be, but he could not remain, deaf to it. And as the sound grew louder it took shape – from a vague unease it invented form. What – he began to consider – would be her real reaction to the afternoon’s happening? How on earth could – he thought between drinks and digs in the ribs – a strong woman like that take such treatment lying down?

  In the end he grew certain she would have her revenge. He remembered that women are said to like the last word: he considered this afresh, and began to believe it. He remembered the adage about he who laughs last laughing longest: he believed that too. And when he mixed the two ideas, substituting a ‘she’ for a ‘he’, the significance grew appalling.

  But what form could such revenge take? Whichever way he looked at it, his apprehension grew. He knew that the ways of women were profound and unpredictable, their veiled wiles a labyrinth, their capacity for innuendo prodigious. Yet on the other hand there was the fact that when women fought, when the battle-cry was really raised, then they fought with the gloves off. His mind grew confused with visions of the Wives of Kings and Fishwives with Arms Akimbo. But since his own capacities for innuendo were small, his mind attached itself to, and enlarged upon, the latter conception.

  She would slap his face in public! She would tear the house down – shatter the windows, slash the furniture, flood the baths, fire the curtains! (If that were only all … !) But what among these oversize visions he really feared was that she would invent a story against him, perhaps make some appalling charge. Assault. Rape. Or what was that word even worse? … Interference! She would say he had Interfered with Her. No proof, no witnesses? No such luck – he knew that two women can get together, and that there would be one or two others dissatisfied with the result of the Contest.

  He became overwrought. He dared not go home: but nor could he bear the anticipation.

  Finally, less from courage than from a simpler impulse to ‘go and see what it’s all about’, he excused himself from Evans and the others (‘Ho, the Homing Pigeon!’ ‘Bye Bye, Bluebeard! Love to the Misses!’) and made his way home. Less certainly from courage, for he made his way in by the back door.

  Excusing himself round the maid in the kitchen, who looked at him with surprise and suspicion mixed (another black mark? ‘Miss Abercrombie, a temporary domestic in the employ of the accused, was called to the witness stand’), he tiptoed into the hall and listened.

  No one downstairs.

  Upstairs, sounds that might have meant packing.

  What voices he now heard spoke in their own languages. No more need of a common language? Getting into groups? Not too good.

  Then suddenly down the stairs the sounds of running rustling skirts, heels! In panic he looked each way – impossible to return to the kitchen, no time to cross to the lounge! He was cornered! However, thank Heavens, it was only one of them – Miss Amsterdam, first prize-winner, a friend!

  She gave a cry of delight, flung her arms round him and kissed him.

  ‘Oh you dear good kind man,’ she cried, hugging him, ‘thank you, thank you, thank you!’

  If anyone comes in now, Morley thought, then Evidence, Witnesses, Deeper than Ever … gently and quickly he disengaged himself, more formally congratulating her.

  ‘But I am so glad you’re here,’ she went on to say, ‘we’ve been looking all over for you! Now I must tell you …’ And she went into details of how some girls would leave on the morrow, by what trains, and the rest on the following day. She made no mention of Miss Great-Belt’s intention. But as an afterthought, turning her head back from the front-door: ‘Oh by the way, that Danish girl wants to see you – urgently, she said.’

  He was left alone with this. He went on standing in the hall, too centrally for simply standi
ng. The maid came in to ring the gong. He threw out a hand, giving the barometer a great thud, nearly knocking it from the wall. Simultaneously as he went on pounding that thing, the old brass gong rang out. The house echoed with huge sudden noise. And for once, all at once, all the girls seemed to pile out of their rooms together. They came tripping down the stairs at him.

  He was cornered with greetings. He could not opt but to go into dinner with them.

  Miss Great-Belt nearly forced Miss Sauerkraut out of her chair in order to sit next to him. And of all others her smile was the most welcoming, throughout dinner she was charming.

  Naturally, he made himself most gracious to her in return. But he distrusted her, he distrusted every flutter of her lovely eyelids. It must all be a cover for something terrible to come.

  And after dinner, after all valedictory speeches had been made, Miss Great-Belt went so far as to suggest that he take her out for some coffee, perhaps even to dance. ‘But I know dancing must be a sore question between us,’ she went on to say, ‘I know it was uncivil of me to go dancing that night you invited me to the theatre. But I do apologize. Let’s say bygones are bygones? Shall we?’

  At that moment Fred Morley could easily have excused himself. His better judgment advised him to. But two other voices spoke inside him. One said that a dance-floor in a hotel was public and therefore safe; the second whispered that perhaps she really was, after all, making her peace with him. The latter voice, though in a whisper, spoke the louder. In fact, engaged again by her charms and never at a loss for respect of his own, he had already begun to believe that she was finally expressing a real attraction towards him.

  They took coffee together at Morley’s favourite hotel – the very terrace, glass-shaded, where once he had foreseen himself with the Misses Rotterdam and Clermont-Ferrand – and later went in to dance. He took care to act with the greatest propriety and even introduced her to his friend the head-waiter as a professional lady from Denmark, who, with her colleagues, had been billeted by the Town Hall on his house. This would put to rest any wilder speculations as to the nature of his strange and beautiful guest. The bush-telegraph would tap round the room a rational and respectable tune.