Friends and Lovers Read online

  The notice-board, three porters, and ticket-inspector had been right after all. The train was pulling in proudly, exactly on time. And suddenly the deserted platform was filled with people. The crowd was much bigger than he had ever imagined it would be, and his nervousness returned. It would be easy to miss her after all in this millrace. He didn’t even know what clothes she would be wearing, and she didn’t know he was going to be in London. He had liked the idea of a surprise. Damn fool, he thought now. And then, searching the hurrying crowd with an anxious eye and seeing nothing but tall thin men and small thin men and fat men and old women and young women with young men and children dragging at their mothers’ arms and a girl who looked like Penny but wasn’t, he said savagely, “Anti-climax.”

  “I beg your pardon?” a man beside him turned to say.

  David looked at him bitterly.

  “Sorry,” the man said in embarrassment, and moved away.

  Hell, David thought, you’ve taken your eyes off the crowd. You’ve missed her, damn you.

  And then he saw her.

  There was a man with her, too, a white-haired man dressed in well-cut navy blue, carrying a small suitcase which obviously did not belong to him. David walked over so that he would stand in their path. Penny was happy. Her eyes were dancing as she looked at everyone around her: she was missing no details on the crowded platform as she listened to her companion. David found himself smiling. “Well, London, here I am,” she seemed to be saying. And he wasn’t the only one who thought she was beautiful, either. These passing glances from surrounding males said, “M’m! Nice!”

  She saw him suddenly, stared blankly, halted, and then, without a word of warning to her companion, ran forward to meet him. “Oh, David!” she said. And there they were, holding each other’s hands, gripping them, not shaking them.

  “Well,” the white-haired man said, as he reached them, “I’m glad to see someone did meet you. Yours, I think,” he added, with a broad smile, as he handed the suitcase over to David.

  Penny remembered her manners. “Thank you so much for making the journey so pleasant.”

  “Not at all, not at all. The pleasure was mine.” He raised his hat neatly and left them, still smiling, to merge into the stream of people flowing slowly through the narrow gate.

  “Who on earth was that?” David said, as they too joined the queue.

  “A captain. Navy. He has just been retired. He is sweet, isn’t he?”

  “Oh, a friend of your family,” David suggested.

  “No. I don’t even know his name. I met him at one of those small tables in the restaurant car. You just can’t sit opposite someone all through four courses, concentrating on food like a cow, can you? And after I spilled some salt and threw it over my left shoulder he laughed. And then, of course, we talked.”

  “Penny, you are—” He didn’t finish the sentence, but smiled instead and shook his head slowly. He took her arm and led her out of the station. Penny was the kind of girl whose suitcase was carried for her, whose arm was held as she crossed a street. And the strange thing was that you felt she probably was quite capable of looking after herself; she had enough feminine sense, however, to know when to drop her independence.

  “You know,” David said, still smiling, “you really shouldn’t talk to strangers.”

  “Don’t you?” She laughed. Then she halted and drew in a deep breath of air. “London!” she said. “It smells and sounds so good!”

  “Only Londoners are supposed to think that. But”—he tried to make his voice sound more severe—“men are different. They can talk to strangers without complications. I bet it wasn’t the salt incident that made him talk, either. That was merely the first excuse he could find.”

  Penny laughed again, and said, “David, this is the most wonderful surprise. Did you come up all the way from Oxford?”

  “No, I just happened to be walking past this station, and I tripped over some salt and found myself talking to a beautiful blonde, and when I recovered I was wandering on the platform ready to challenge the whole blasted Fleet.” He looked down at the suitcase he was carrying. “And am I to be called ‘sweet’ too?”

  “No,” Penny said decidedly. “You are much much nicer than sweet.” And then her colour deepened, and she pretended to be interested in the long row of crawling traffic.

  “Where’s the rest of your luggage?” David asked, as he managed to get a taxi.

  “The trunks were all sent on in advance.”

  “Trunks? You sound as if you had come to stay.”

  “Oh, I brought a lot of things from my room at home. I got attached to them, you see.”

  She settled back in the taxi. She had never been happier in her life, she thought. She studied David’s face, believing he didn’t notice it, as he gave the driver her address. David had come especially to meet her. Everything was wonderful: London and the smell of petrol and the multitude of noises, the swarming traffic and this wheezing taxicab and its red-nosed, bemufflered driver, with his draggling moustache and drooping mouth and his shoulders hunched over the wheel. And David.

  “We’ll dump your suitcase at your address,” David was saying. “And then we’ll have dinner at a little place I know of, and afterwards we’ll take in a theatre. How’s that?”

  “Marvellous.” Everything was marvellous. “But shan’t I have to report or something at this women’s residence? It is a terrifying name for it, isn’t it?” She wrinkled her nose in disgust.

  “You can do that tomorrow, as if you had arrived by a late train today. I know these institutions, anyway. You just sit around waiting anxiously, and it is only afterwards that you realise that things just arrange themselves anyway, so why all the worry?”

  “I wish I could treat it so casually. I’m sort of nervous inside, David. I keep trying to imagine what it will be like.”

  “It is a place for women run by women, so you’ll have chintz and dainty salads and rice puddings and gay girlish laughter all around you. You’ll find it pretty awful, I expect. What on earth made you take a room there?”

  “Father and Mother. They only let me come to London on the understanding that I’d stay at this place. They think it is ‘safe’! And because it is expensive it must be good!” She laughed. “It is funny how one has to keep compromising in life, isn’t it? I wanted a room of my own. I’ve got it, but not just the way I wanted it. Still”—she looked out of the taxi window, saw that the numbers in Gower Street were going by rapidly—“it may not be so bad.” She stared doubtfully at the row of four houses which had been converted into one building, before which the cab had drawn up. Like the other houses in this part of the street, it had a basement surrounded by iron railings, and a bridge of steps over the deep basement area to the front door on the ground floor. There were three stories of uniform windows above that, and attic windows set into the steep-sloping roof with its lines of chimney-pots. Three of the doorways had been blocked up, but the fourth was painted a bright green. A large polished-brass name-plate informed the ignorant that it was baker house.

  “I’ll wait in the cab for you, Penny,” David said, as he deposited the suitcase in the hand of a stiffly starched maid with a measuring eye. Penny nodded, and stepped into the large, dark hall. The door was shut firmly in his face.

  When she came out at last he could sense her disappointment. She greeted him with too determined cheerfulness.

  “Well, did they show you your cell?” he asked.

  She smiled then. “No chintz at least,” she reported. Just faded green baize. Walls distempered at least five years ago in a safe cream colour. “And the trunks have arrived.” With two of them standing in her ten-by-eight-foot room, there wasn’t an inch of free space. I’ll have to unpack with my feet up on my bed, she thought. One trunk probably wouldn’t need to be unpacked. “I’ve a window too,” she said. “One of those up there on the top floor.”

  “The very top floor?” David asked. The attic would be cold in winter, hot in
summer. “Do they use the attic too?”

  “They use every inch,” Penny said. “There was another room vacant on a lower floor, but it would cost two guineas a week more.”

  She looked at him quizzically. “It isn’t only the Scots who count every penny, seemingly.”

  David refused to be side-tracked. “Look,” he said, “this wasn’t exactly what your parents planned, was it?”

  “Hardly.” Not at three and a half guineas a week. “Anyway,” she said, “I am in London.”

  “And it is now my turn to be guide.” That was a good enough excuse to take her thoughts away from Baker House. The cab had left Bloomsbury, and turned down Tottenham Court Road. Furniture shops, he explained. Then Charing Cross Road. Second-hand books. But as Penny looked interested he added hastily that it wasn’t a particularly pleasant place to walk through. And here was Shaftesbury Avenue: gallery queues.

  “You make it all sound so much simpler than it looks,” Penny said. “I suppose if we were to pass the Tower you’d just point an arm and say, ‘Rolling heads.’ And Trafalgar Square would be ‘Lions.’”

  “You see, it is quite simple. London is the one city you can remember by Pelmanism. Here is Piccadilly Circus. Now guess what?”

  “Eros?”

  He paid off the cab. “Let’s visit him,” he said. He took her arm to guide her through the swooping traffic towards the little island in the centre, where Eros balanced on one leg as he reached forward to pluck an invisible rose out of the air. Below his statue the flower-girls strewed their sweet violets. Like the ancient sibyls that they were, they guarded their mysteries impassively until David’s offering clinked into one of their capacious pockets. Then the omens were good, it seemed: Penny became a pretty lady and David was God-blessed.

  They came to the restaurant he had chosen. Dusk was beginning, and the lights in the streets were going on. Penny had recovered her first enthusiasm. There was a gaiety in her smile that caught the eye. Several men and women looked at her sharply.

  “That’s the fifth man we’ve passed who wishes I would drop dead,” David said. “Here’s the place. We’ll have Hungarian music to help us digest the goulash.”

  Penny halted. A little place I know of... “Oh, David,” she said. “Really... It looks awfully expensive.”

  “It isn’t,” David said cheerfully, as he caught her arm and guided her through the doorway. “Come on, don’t thwart me. I’m a dangerous man when I’m thwarted. I fall down and have fits. Imagine me, reeling, writhing, and fainting in coils in Lower Regent Street.”

  She smiled at that, and offered no further resistance.

  “Well,” he said, when they had settled themselves at a comfortable table for two, and he had ordered, “this is slightly better than a tavern in an Edinburgh side-street, isn’t it?”

  “I like it,” she admitted. “But a man probably enjoys himself more in the kind of place where we lunched in Edinburgh. Doesn’t he?”

  He watched her, wondering at her good sense. And tact too: when she had seen that he was set on this place she had made no further objections, but had come in here looking happy, charming, and absolutely delighted with his choice.

  “I find you very unsettling,” he said. Her eyes were puzzled. And blue, so very blue above the simple grey dress. Her coat had been thrown back over her chair, and she was leaning forward slightly with her arms resting on the table. The line of her shoulder was hidden and yet revealed by the well-cut wool dress. Her hair was smoothly brushed, and its warm red lights gleamed under the small piece of dark blue felt, curiously crushed into a pretence of a hat, which was tilted just enough over her right eye.

  “I believe,” he said slowly, “that you would be just as charming if I had taken you to a little café.”

  “That could be fun too. If one were enjoying oneself, that is.” She pretended to look at a group at another table, picked up the bunch of violets which lay beside her handbag and held them to her face.

  “No scent, I’m afraid,” he said. “They look too perfect. You can’t get everything, it seems.” His eyes caught hers, and held them. “Only sometimes,” he added, his voice now quite serious, desperately sincere. Only sometimes, perhaps...by the most miraculous good fortune.

  But an efficient waiter chose this moment to serve them, with much darting and hovering, like an inquisitive hummingbird. Penny, with a smile in her eyes as she watched David’s face, began to talk of things to which even a waiter might listen. Her father had won a Mixed Doubles tournament at North Berwick, and then spent two days in bed recovering. Much to his annoyance. Moira was still showing signs of strain from three weeks of International Students’ meetings, and she was receiving constant letters from someone who had gone back to Italy. This had been very useful, really, in diverting the family’s interest from Penny’s own correspondence. Betty was hockey captain of the second team at school this year, and so she had not so much time for her novel. She had decided, anyway, after hearing a visiting missionary’s sermon in church one Sunday, to transfer its scene to Madagascar. She was now searching for a new title before she could go on writing. Penny’s suggestion, With Rod, Pole, and Perch in Deepest Africa, had not been too well received. Mrs. Lorrimer had become the President of the new Rambling for Health Club (which hoped to persuade girls from shops and factories to spend Sundays on their feet too); Treasurer of the Committee to set up Clubs for Bonnier Bairns (Penny could not convince Mrs. Lorrimer that its title had an ominous ring, likely to frighten away literally minded mothers); and a member of a Citizens’ League for the Preservation and Protection of Ruins.

  “The idea,” Penny said determinedly, in spite of the waiter, as he fussed over their coffee-cups and emptied the ashtray for the third time, “seems to be that Ruins should look like Ruins without being Ruins. They are all to be cemented up efficiently so that they will stop falling down, but they still must not look like anything except a Ruin. That would ruin the Ruins.”

  Then, from discussing ruins, they turned to elder statesmen, which, in the condition of the world in 1932, was quite a logical development for such conversation.

  “I’ll pay this, and then perhaps we shall get some peace,” David said, as the bill was unostentatiously presented. Steep, he thought, as he glanced at it, but fortunately he had come well prepared: he had managed to save some money in the last six weeks by resisting most amusements. He gave Penny a reassuring smile. “And,” he said firmly to the waiter, “we shall take half an hour over our coffee, and we don’t need any more ashtrays emptied. We like them as they are. Is that quite clear?”

  It may have been the tip or the belligerent look which had suddenly appeared in David’s eye, but at any rate the waiter removed himself to another table.

  “Well!” David said, as he lit a cigarette with enjoyment. He looked at her with pleasure. “I like that colour of grey. And I like that hat or whatever you call it.”

  “What else could you call it?” She was delighted. She had insisted on buying this hat, in spite of her mother’s horror. She had won the argument by saying she could always travel without a hat to London and buy one there.

  “I know what’s different now,” David said suddenly. “You are wearing earrings. And lipstick.”

  “Then they can’t be as obvious as I feel,” Penny said, “or you would have noticed them at once.” She touched the small pearl studs in her ears to make certain that they were still secure. “My gesture of independence,” she added, with a laugh. “I put them on just as the train was crossing the Border.”

  “Gauguin setting out for Tahiti?” David suggested. “And did you put them on before or after lunch?”

  “Before.” And then she remembered. “David! Really, he was the nicest Naval officer imaginable!”

  “I am imagining hard,” David said. Strange, he thought, how natural, how pleasant all this is: no irritation, no sense of being criticised or of criticising, only this deep feeling of ease and contentment. “How many times in our life
have we sat together like this, talked and laughed together?” he asked suddenly.

  She didn’t answer him, but her eyes met his.

  “Or am I talking nonsense?” he asked, with a good pretence of lightness in his voice. “Must be this music bringing out my gipsy blood.” There he was, already backing away from the serious into the facetious, afraid of saying too much in case she would be amused or pitying or polite. He waited for her answer, no doubt sweetly phrased so as not to hurt him, and dreaded it. He even forced a smile. Everything, he suddenly realised, depended on this answer.

  She said in a low voice, “It isn’t nonsense, David.”

  Watching her eyes, he believed her. He touched her hand.

  The waiter drew near once more: there were still other tips to be earned this evening.

  “Let’s go,” David said quickly, and helped her with her coat.

  The moment was lost. She was talking to him in her natural voice again; he was being equally matter-of-fact and composed as they passed the crowding tables and at last came into the street.

  “We had them specially arranged for you,” he said, as they stood for a moment looking at the clear stars which shone in the crisp autumn sky. “Now what about a theatre?”

  “Whatever you like,” she said. She was still looking at the stars.

  “No, it is what you want. Something serious or something gay?”

  “Might we walk, first of all?” she asked. “It is a heavenly night, and I’ve been sitting in a train practically all day. And I never have walked about a city at night. It would be fun. Besides,” she smiled up at him as they fell into step, “I’ve had a lovely time already. You are spoiling me, you know.” It was awfully expensive, she thought: he can’t possibly afford to spend so much money on me as all that in one night.

  “Let me worry about that,” he said. “Penny, you are the strangest girl.”

  That was what her mother often said, but David was not saying it in her mother’s way. He made it sound like a compliment.