At the first pub, after they had left, a friend of Laurence had said, ‘That’s Larry’s form of perversion — beautiful neurotic women. They have to be neurotic.’
It was understood that every close association between two people was a perversion. Caroline sensed the idea they had left behind them when they left this pub. Laurence, of course, knew it, but he didn’t mind; he accepted that, for instance, ‘perversion’ was his friends’ code-word for anyone’s personal taste in love. While Caroline and Laurence were on their way to the second pub, this friend of Laurence’s was saying, ‘All Larry’s girls have been neurotics.’ This was true, as it happened.
Later, in the taxi, Caroline said to Laurence, ‘Am I noticeably neurotic, do you think?’
Her eyes were huge and deep, unsettled, but she had the power of judgement in other features of her face.
He said, ‘Yes, in a satisfactory way.’ And he said presently, ‘All my girls have been neurotics.’
Caroline knew this but was glad to hear it again from Laurence; his words made articulate her feeling of what was being said in the pub they had left. She knew most of Laurence’s previous neurotic girls; she herself was the enduring one.
Presently again, and Laurence said, ‘There are more interesting particulars about neurotic women. You never know what you mayn’t find on their persons and in their general carry-on.’
In the second pub, where a fair fat poet said to Caroline, ‘Tell me all about your visions, my dear’; and another poet, a woman with a cape and a huge mouth, said, ‘Is there much Satanism going on within the Catholic Church these days?’; and another sort of writer, a man of over fifty, asked Caroline who was her psycho-analyst, and told her who was his — at this pub Caroline collected, one way and another, that the Baron had been mentioning this and that about her, to the ageless boys and girls who dropped in on him at his bookshop in Charing Cross Road.
The fat poet went steadily on about Caroline’s ‘visions’; he said they would be good for her publicity. Caroline and Laurence had been on short drinks, and both were rather lit up.
‘Wonderful publicity,’ they both agreed.
And the over-fifty, in his brown coat of fur-fabric, persisted, ‘I could tell you of a psychiatrist who —’
‘We know one,’ Laurence said, ‘who analyses crazy pavements.’
Caroline told the girl in the cape, did she know that Eleanor Hogarth had deserted the Baron?
‘No!’
‘Yes. He put me up for the night at his flat last week. All her things were gone. Not even a photograph. He only mentioned her once. He said she was away on tour, which was true; he said nothing about the break. Then Laurence found out definitely — he finds out everything, of course.’
‘Gone off with someone else?’
‘Don’t know, really. But she’s left him, not he her; I know that.’
‘Poor Willi.’
‘Oh, one can’t blame her,’ said Caroline, satisfied that the story would now spread.
The girl in the cape said, ‘Have you tried to convert the Baron?’
‘Me? No.’
‘R.C.s usually try to convert everyone, however hopeless. I thought that was a sort of obligation.’
For good measure, Caroline quoted of the Baron what she heard said of someone else: ‘He exhausted his capacity for conversion when he became an Englishman.’
Indeed, the Baron was rather scrupulous about his English observances and confident that he had the English idea, so that his contempt for the English, their intellect, their manners, arose from a vexation that they did not conform better to the idea. To this effect, Caroline exchanged her views on the Baron with the girl in the cape.
‘But you know,’ said the girl, ‘there’s another side to Willi Stock. He’s an orgiast on the quiet.’
‘A what?’
‘Goes in for the Black Mass. He’s a Satanist. Probably that’s why Eleanor left him. She’s so awfully bourgeois.’
Caroline suddenly felt oppressed by the pub and the people. That word ‘bourgeois’ had a dispiriting effect on her evening — it was part of the dreary imprecise language of this half-world she had left behind her more than two years since.
Laurence was talking to the blond fat poet who was inviting him to a party at someone else’s house next week, describing the sort of people who would be present; and as Caroline got up, Laurence caught her eye just as this man was saying, ‘You can’t afford to miss it.’
Laurence piloted her out to the taxi, for she had been wobbly even when they arrived. But the momentary revulsion had sobered her.
They went to a coffee house, then on to the West End, to the Pylon, where, Caroline thought, thank God the lights are dim and the people not too distinguishable. The West End was another half-world of Caroline’s past.
Eleanor Hogarth had a close look at the couple moving in the sleepy gloom before her. They had a square foot of floor-space, which they utilized with sweet skill, within its scope manoeuvring together like creatures out of natural history. This fascinated Eleanor; she was for a few moments incredulous at the sight of Caroline and Laurence in these surroundings, since she had never seen them before in a nightclub, nor dancing.
Eleanor waved from her table; it was too far away from them to call, decently. Eventually Caroline saw. ‘Oh, see, there’s Eleanor.’
And there she was, with her business partner, white-haired young-faced Ernest Manders. This was Laurence’s uncle, his father’s youngest brother who had gone into ballet instead of Manders’ Figs in Syrup.
When Laurence was quite little he had informed his mother, ‘Uncle Ernest is a queer.’
‘So he is, pet,’ she answered happily, and repeated the child’s words to several people before she learned from her husband the difference between being a queer and just being queer. After this, it became a family duty to pray for Uncle Ernest; it was understood that no occasion for prayers should pass without a mention of this uncle.
And with some success apparently, because in his fortieth year, when his relations with men were becoming increasingly violent, he gave them up for comfort’s sake; not that he ever took to women as a substitute. Laurence had remarked to Caroline one day, ‘I’ve gradually had to overcome an early disrespect for my Uncle Ernest.’
‘Because he was a homosexual?’
‘No. Because we were always praying specially for him.’
He was a religious man and likeable. Caroline got on well with him. She said he was her sort of Catholic, critical but conforming. Ernest always agreed with Caroline that the True Church was awful, though unfortunately, one couldn’t deny, true.
She could not much bear Eleanor these days, though it was through Eleanor that she had first met Laurence. At one time these women were friends, exceedingly of a kind; that was at Cambridge, when, in their boxy rooms, they had leaned on the ignoble wooden fittings which were stained with rings from cocoa-mugs, and talked of this and that; mostly about the insolence of their fellow students and the insolence of their elders, for both girls had potential talents unrecognized. They were united in discontentment with the place as a place; its public-tiled wash-rooms, its bed-sitting-rooms, and other apartments so insolently designed. Eleanor left after a couple of terms to go into ballet. She might easily have gone to an art school, for she also had the art-school gift. It was Eleanor who had removed from one of the ground-floor corridors, and from its place on a wall, the portrait of a former Principal, keeping it for a whole night, in the course of which, by means of innumerable small touchings, she had made a subtle and important alteration in the portrait, which remains undetected to this day.