He had on the wrong clothes. A salmon silk tie worn over the top of a striped pullover in sick-making pastelly shades, one that I grant you might have been just the thing for the plage at Juan-les-Pins but was utterly out-of-place in an English country house in December. And a pair of grey Oxford bags squashed ever so nonchalantly into Nile-green wellies. Would that we could all be that careless in our attire. Most of us, though, just don’t have the time or patience.
He was tanned, he said, but anyone could see there was more than a touch of the tarbrush there. He said ‘Dahling!’ all the time, to all of us indiscriminately, and not even Cora does that. Can you imagine, I chanced to catch him brushing away a fly that had settled on the rim of his cocktail glass and I actually heard him say, ‘Buzz off, dahling!’ A fly! But then, with him everything had to be a superlative. When he burbled on incessantly about the finest this and the greatest that, you felt you were being sprayed by the spittle of exclamation marks. And he was the type of name-dropper who doesn’t just drop names, he drops nicknames. His conversation was all Binkie and Larry and Gertie and Viv – half the time it was like listening to baby-talk.
Even when he agreed with you, it somehow grated, he exaggerated so! Farrar here totes his own little ashtray around – it’s a tiny bronze urn with a lid that opens and closes – there it is, perched on the arm of the sofa. Well, when Raymond claimed to admire it and Farrar confessed that the one problem he had with it was winkling out the pile of cigarette butts at the end of the day, he actually shuddered and said, ‘Oh, I do, do sympathise! How atrocious that must be!’ Now I ask you. Atrocious? Removing a tangle of cigarette ends from an ashtray? You never knew if he was serious or not.
Oh, and he had this word. Penetrating. Tagore’s poems were penetrating. Spengler’s philosophy was penetrating. A sole aux ortolans at the Eiffel Tower was penetrating. And, incidentally, when I say the Eiffel Tower, I mean the restaurant in London, not the monument in Paris, a gaffe Mary made and for which she paid dearly. She also confused The Rite of Spring with The Rustle of Spring, a mistake anyone could have made, but did she suffer for it! Oh, he was wrong, wrong, wrong! Just not one of us, you know. I can’t put it any other way.
Well, Trubshawe, I leave it to you to guess how frayed our tempers had got well before the evening was at an end. It was, though, the following day, yesterday, Christmas Day, that they started to rip apart. And since there’d been a deep snowfall overnight, Roger couldn’t simply kick Raymond out, ordering him to drive straight back to Town in his blasted Hispano-Suiza, something we all knew he was dying to do, Selina’s feelings notwithstanding.
He didn’t come down to breakfast at all, which was unpardonably impolite of him, but it did at least give Selina an opportunity to offer belated amends and apologies all round for his conduct. If it hadn’t been Christmas, I do believe there’d have been an unpleasant scene between her and her father. But, in the spirit of the season, the Colonel decided, and suggested we all decide likewise, to make the best of a difficult situation.
Then, when he actually did surface, still unshaven, still wearing his dressing-gown, at ten forty-five, and found that the breakfast things had been cleared away, he at once went down to the kitchen and insisted that Mrs Varley – she’s the cook – he insisted that she prepare him some bacon and eggs, which he proceeded to wolf down, his plate sitting on his knees, the aroma wafting round the drawing-room, while the rest of us were trying to have a game of Canasta. Even after he’d finished, he continued to prattle on unapologetically through the game – I can’t tell you how distracting that was – and chain-smoke his stinky mauve fags – Sobranies, I think they’re called – and take revoltingly gurgly swigs from his hip flask.
And then, very gradually throughout the afternoon, that nasty tongue of his turned positively viperish.
Examples? It’s hard to remember, for there were just too many of them. Oh yes – wait. When Madge, looking out of the french window at the snow that was still swirling about the house, mentioned how queer it made her feel, since no more than a couple of months had gone by since she’d been swimming in Greece, Raymond remarked, all innocence, that the phrase she used reminded him of Mrs Varley’s cooking. When she asked him why, his answer was that his bacon and eggs, too, had been ‘swimming in grease’!
Well, tee hee. And yes, you might think that all very droll and delightful, except that, when you come right down to it, it was also, for our hosts, beastly and gratuitous. And, needless to say, simply not true. But, you see, he just couldn’t resist being funny at other people’s expense. He genuinely enjoyed hurting their feelings. Because he had, I’m certain, what Dr Freud calls an Inferiority Complex, he just couldn’t help dragging everybody else down to his own abject level.
When Cynthia Wattis praised Garbo’s acting in Queen Christina, which had made her weep buckets, and politely asked Raymond for his opinion, he instantly dismissed it – not impromptu, if I’m any judge – as ‘Greta garbage’. Oh, I daresay it was a terribly smart thing to say and all, but it quite crushed poor Cynthia and, really, one wanted to slap him.
Or when Don spoke about his ‘creativity’ as a painter – I’m told he exhibited some very dramatic seascapes at the Art School end-of-term show – all Gentry could find to say was that, just as if you talk too much about suicide you’ll never commit it, so if you talk too much about your creativity it’s a fatal sign you haven’t got any.
Not even Selina, whose responsibility he was in a way, was immune to his barbs. Since she knew how he detested the music her mother had been playing on the piano, she ventured to propose that she herself execute some Debussy, seeing as, even though he’s modern, he’s also surprisingly melodic.
‘I’d really rather you didn’t, Selina,’ he drawled at her in his most grating voice. ‘Debussy isn’t as easy as he sounds, you know, and your pianism – well, let’s just say “execute” might be all too apt a word. Better if you were to ruin some naice’ – he really did pronounce it ‘naice’ – ‘some naice little piece of cod-Debussy. Like Cyril Scott.’
Naturally, I bridled at this calumny of my favourite composer and I saw Don itching to biff Raymond one on the jaw. But Selina herself, spirited as always, was determined to put a brave face on it. ‘Why, Ray,’ she said, ‘I played Clair de lune at Roy and Deirdre Daimler’s anniversary do, and the Daimlers’ tabby, Mrs Dalloway, who hates music, any music, so much she slinks away in disgust at the first note, perched on my knees and only stopped purring when I’d finished.’
‘Did it not occur to you, my sweet faun,’ was Raymond’s reply, ‘that she probably didn’t realise it was supposed to be music?’
By the evening it had got worse, much worse. He’d been drinking pretty steadily during the day and because he mixed his own cocktails – he referred to them as Spanners or Screwdrivers, some-such silly name – and never offered one to anybody else, it was difficult keeping up with just how many he’d got down himself. But a whole new layer of malevolence had begun to transform his face into a mask of rancour and devilry. You could see he was just waiting to be affronted by what he considered to be our philistinism.
As a result, we didn’t dare talk about all the latest books and plays. We were afraid of being shot down by him, afraid of being told that the people we liked were hopelessly vieux jeu, as he would put it, afraid of being ridiculed for believing that Charles Morgan’s The Fountain and Sutton Vane’s Outward Bound were imperishable masterpieces. Proust, naturally, was the thing. Pirandello, naturally, was penetrating. You had to be a foreigner to be admired by Raymond Gentry. Unless, of course, you were born a Sitwell!