Ten minutes later she was driving along winding uphill streets. She had put the car-top down, for the feel of the night and the kind of excitement it might give; she had wrapped her head in a scarf that would keep her hair in shape. Presently the estate of the Fulton-Griffins came into view. Cars were parked for half a mile along the narrow drive-way; retainers, watchful for gate-crashers, scrutinized first the car, then seemed to recognize her face. The house was baroque and ugly, even in floodlights, but the gardens had spaciousness. A heart-shaped swimming-pool glistened amidst the trees and beside it stood an open-air bar almost as large. Sounds of frolic came from both.
Nobody quite knew why a rich, respectable, and retired Middle Western couple lavished such frequent entertainment, or why they did not prefer seclusion to turning their house into an almost weekly shambles of broken glasses and cigarette-burned carpets. Presumably they liked to meet celebrities, old and new; presumably they liked noise; perhaps also they were generous, or bored, or snobbish. But even all of that could not pierce the final mystery. Their parties, at least, were not exclusive—or not much more so than the lobby of the Waldorf. And the one economy they practised was notorious; their liquor was never quite excellent.
Several hundred guests were already mingling outside and in when Carey arrived, and she made the full sensation she had planned. She had always been able to act when she could do nothing else; it was like starting a motor that left her with some generated strength in herself. She actually enjoyed greeting her hostess with: “Believe me, after the Critics’ Dinner coming here is a godsend. I wouldn’t have missed it for anything, though… Paul’s speech, I mean. The way that man can put his foot in it—with both feet!”
After that, of course, everyone felt free to comment on the affair as outspokenly as they liked before her, and many did. She let them know how little she cared, how little it all mattered, how happy she was to be at a party where nobody would make serious speeches at all, not even silly ones. She felt waves of sympathy reaching towards her, but also waves of awareness that she was hamming it up, for she could hardly conceal that from professionals. It was the quality of the act that she hoped they would recognize. She talked a lot and was perhaps a little too gay at times. She had even a feeling once or twice that the whole idea of coming to the party had been mistaken, but she rallied herself quickly and switched to another group whose different reaction might reconvince her. In a party of such size and at such a stage of festivity there was always a bewildering series of cross-currents—envies and enmities open or hidden, masquerading sometimes in ways that drink, towards the end of a long evening, would reveal; it was this sort of thing that often led at Fulton-Griffin parties to the beginnings of scenes that were usually squelched before they made headlines owing to the Fulton-Griffin tactic of planting several reliable house servants to play guests among the guests. Thus there could develop a faintly sinister atmosphere. The strong-jawed man sipping bourbon at the edge of the pool might be getting ready either to push you in or fish you out.
Carey felt exultant as she worked her way through the crowd. For one thing the rooms were cool, air-conditioned, with the windows wide open, an absurdity that yet contrived an enchantment, for pockets of blossom-scented air drifting in from the gardens were deliriously warm. An evening out of a travel folder, with starlit sky and flood-lit lawns to aid the illusion (as Paul had said after his one experience of a Fulton-Griffin party) that the cream of civilization had coagulated here and would make excellent cheese. Half the guests were already a little drunk. The buffet tables were still laden with food that (like the drink) was not quite excellent. On a platform beyond the swimming-pool a seven-piece orchestra played medleys. Some people were dancing.
Suddenly Carey saw Mr. Hare in a corner of the drawing-room all on his own. “Hello, Mr. Hare,” she said, smiling.
“Well, Miss Arundel, this IS a surprise. You changed your mind?”
“I often do.”
“So we CAN finish our talk. That’s good.”
“Yes, but let’s go outside. The gardens are lovely.”
They stepped through the French windows to the terrace, avoiding the crowd at the swimming-pool end and discovering a side path that led to a grove of eucalyptus trees.
“I felt I had to come,” she said, “just to show I don’t feel all the things people are thinking I feel.”
“You’re very wise.” He took her arm and she knew the entire friendliness of the man; she liked, too, the way he went straight to what must be in both their minds. “What Saffron did say,” he said, “as opposed to all the talk of what he said, wasn’t really against YOU. Therefore there’s nothing for you to be hurt or humiliated about.”
“I’m so glad you think that.”
“Just stupid of him and in bad taste.”
“Oh yes, oh yes, I know it was.”
“Rather odd—coming just after you’d told me his speeches sometimes made you feel nervous.”
Had she said that? Oh yes, during the dinner. “Yes, wasn’t it odd?” Because it really was.
“You must have had a lot of experience of him.”
“Well, we were married, once.”
And it was odd, too, that he hadn’t known that, because it obviously gave him a shock. “You WERE?”
“Didn’t you know?”
“I didn’t, and as everybody else here must, it’s rather astonishing nobody happened to mention it to me. I suppose they assumed I knew.”
“So you’ve been talking about me to people?”
“A few people have been talking about you to me.”
“What do they say?”
“They like you—and they don’t like him.”
Well, that had always been so—almost always. She felt an overwhelming sadness as she answered: “They don’t have to couple us together any more.”
“Except that you were in the picture together.”
“Yes—for a special reason, but that’s a long story—I might tell you some time if you’re interested.”
Some men and girls were approaching.
“Maybe tomorrow? Don’t forget you have a date at my office. Make it eleven-thirty and I’ll take you to lunch.”
“Fine.” She would like that. But her thoughts were on Paul, now that he had been spoken of by both of them. She wondered where he was, what he was doing. She said, as they walked back towards the house: “He didn’t show up here tonight, did he?”
“No. I’m sure I’d have known if he had. Did you think he might?”
“He’s capable of it. If he’d been here I’d have wanted to leave—I couldn’t stand any more.” And that was true enough.
“I don’t blame you.”
“I’m just about at the limit of what I can stand, to be frank.”
“You probably need that holiday in Ireland you talked about. But why Ireland?”
“I was born there. Where were you born?”
“Vermont… on a farm.”
“So was I. In County Kildare. The greenest fields, and my father rode the wildest and most beautiful horses…” The vision filled her—oh, the lovely country, the white clouds rolling shadows over the fields, the green-blue mountains in the distance. Her eyes could always fill when she thought of it, but now she was embarrassed because she knew Mr. Hare was watching her. She added: “Oh, I guess we all feel like that about where we were born. Vermont is beautiful too.”
“Yes, very.” And then, telling her there was just time for one more question, he went on to say something that both amazed and puzzled her. He seemed to think it might, for he cautioned her in advance. “A rather personal question, so don’t be startled… Did Saffron ever—in a dressing-room at the studio while the picture was being made—did he ever quarrel with you and threaten you with a gun?”
She had to laugh. “Good heavens, no. Who on earth made that one up?”
* * * * *
They separated inside the house and she guessed that he left soon afterwards, before she
did. She stayed till nearly one, talking and dancing with a few of the sober survivals, but when she was in her car driving downhill towards her apartment the beginnings of panic seized her. Would there have been more messages, newspaper enquiries? The desk man said: “Did you know you left your phone off the hook, Miss Arundel?”
She said: “Oh, did I? Have there been calls?”
“Quite a number…” He was going to hand her the slips but she said: “I can’t do anything about them tonight—send them up tomorrow.”
She had hoped the apartment would seem cheerful to relax in after the long strain of the evening; it was really an elegant apartment, and if only it had been higher, as in New York, she felt it might have worked a miracle on her mood; she loved height, the look of streets spread out below, a corner window like the prow of a ship in air. She switched on all the lights and lit a cigarette. She did not know whether she could sleep or even whether she wanted to. In a way the evening had been her triumph—she had rallied friends and admirers in droves. Yet was there anyone, anywhere, now, at one in the morning, who would greet her warmly yet incuriously, welcomingly yet without drama, if she telephoned or rang a door-bell? Greg?… Austen?… Norris?… Even Paul?… It seemed to her that most of those she had talked to so excitingly throughout the evening were by now either drunk or climbing into some little bed, like Mr. Hare… Then suddenly she thought of Professor Lingard. How incredible that anyone should fill so exactly her precise requirements—Professor Lingard, who had given her a cordial invitation to look through his observatory telescope in the middle of some night! But he had warned her to telephone first, to find if the skies were clear enough. So she telephoned, and soon heard his voice, amiable and distant-sounding: “Why, yes, Miss Arundel… of course I remember… yes, wonderful… no, I’m working as usual… TONIGHT?… Why, certainly, you couldn’t have chosen a better one… As soon as you like, then… An hour and a half, I should think—there’ll be very little traffic… you know the way… but take it easy now, especially the last stretch…”
The thought of leaving the city and driving into the mile-high mountains lifted her spirits again to a peak of their own; she changed into street clothes and went out. Her car had ample gas; she drove east along Sunset as far as Western, then turned north.
* * * * *
There was no doubt of her mental plight. She was in desperate need of reassurance which no one then available could give, and her own name on a darkened theatre marquee did nothing to help—rather the contrary, since it stressed the irony of being alone amidst so many sleeping strangers who knew her by sight and perhaps had warmed to her for a few moments of their waking lives. As she drove she felt the tingling of all her nerves into alternating fear and excitement, so that every car whose lights she saw in the rear-view mirror seemed to be following until it actually overtook; she was used to this illusion by now, and knew how foolish it was, but it made her drive a little faster than usual, though not recklessly. At the corner on Foothill where the climb began, the great eye of the observatory became a symbol in her mind of some ultimate scrutiny, and Professor Lingard himself a human answer to a different problem. For at their one meeting they had established kinship, she had been aware of it; she also guessed he was not a man to invite her to his mountain-top unless he had rather liked her. As she had said to Paul (the remark that had perhaps most of all shocked him), she found it easy to hit it off with men—Paul’s phrase for whatever there was of murk or mystery in his own concept of the relationship. She had an idea she would find it easy to hit it off with Professor Lingard if only his physical eye would leave the heavens for a moment… and at that she began to smile, for the quality in her that she freely agreed was sensual was always mixed up with smiling and fun—a comedy role that Paul had disapproved after the first entrancement, and Austen had accepted but never perfectly understood.
The mountains heaved into outlines against the blue-black sky; it was the smell of manzanita that crossed the roadway in gusts; the eyes of tiny animals blinked out of their secret, populated world… and there came to her mind the road over the Sally Gap, the climb so different from this, the car so different from this, herself so different from now, the point where she had left the road once and clambered through high gorse to the summit of Kippure; there had been tin cans on that summit, not left by picnickers but by gunmen on the run during the time of troubles—tin cans and rotting puttees and an old cartridge belt; and from the summit where one stood amongst the litter of men’s idiocy one could see far over the Gap to the great names of Wicklow—Mullaghcleevaun and Lugnaquilla that lay over the vale of Glenmalure…
And she remembered Paul as he had been for a little time after their marriage; his ways her own, his discovering joy over what was so natural to her, but partly as spectator even then, and later ceasing to applaud; his understanding of her that was deep at first, so that they had both felt that life could carry them on its own tide; but after a while the understanding had fled from the heart to the brain, and then (but only in his moments of greatness) back to a heart that was not hers.
She remembered that year in Los Angeles (for Hollywood had not yet become the magnetic, polarizing name), the year he had tried to crash the picture industry on the ground floor, and it would have none of him; the great names —Chaplin, Sennett, Lasky, Griffith. If only, she had often thought, if only someone then had given him a chance he might have become as great as they, and with an easing of so many frustrations that had bedevilled him since—not all, but many. In vain he had written letters, submitted ideas, sought interviews; his stage success in London had counted for nothing. That was the second year after their marriage, and he had already wooed the New York stage equally in vain. Careers also have currencies, and sometimes a prestige account in one country is not transferable to another; at any rate nobody in Hollywood was interested in English press clippings about Othello. They had rented a frame bungalow between Western and Vermont for twenty dollars a month, Paul assuming that even if he couldn’t find a studio job there was always journalism to fall back on. Gradually he had found how that, too, could fail him; either, after his taste of the stage, he could not write, or else the kind of thing he wrote had lost its small vogue. Merryweather was dead and there was no other editor interested in him. He kept on writing, nevertheless, and the stuff kept on coming back. Then, when they owed a couple of months’ rent, she had taken a job as waitress in a restaurant on Pico Boulevard—hard work, but she could earn enough to keep them both till at last his chance came to direct a play in New York —the one that led to the first big success.
And the strange thing was that this year in Los Angeles—the year he later chose to forget (because he thought of it only as the time and place of his failure)—had actually been the happiest in all her life. They had been so close together, and whenever she had returned from the restaurant or he after hours of fruitless job-seeking, the little house had been there to welcome them, its privacies their own and its tasks a pleasure. The first thing she had had to do was to patch the screens because of his phobia about flies; the second thing was to clip the pepper tree that did not let enough light into the room where he planned to work. And the last thing of all was on the day they left so jubilantly (he with the New York offer in his pocket); she had leaned out of the window as the taxi turned the corner, and something deep in her heart had said goodbye. For she had been able, in that house, to make him happy as never before or since; there he had needed her enough to accept the clearance she could make in the thickets of his emotions —a sunlit clearance before the jungle grew again.
Strange, the moments of pure emotion one remembered. There was a play tried out at New Haven (or was it Philadelphia?)—it had flopped so badly it never reached Broadway, but a curious thing, a very curious thing, happened on the second night. It was a Civil War play, with Lincoln, McClellan, Seward, Pope, and others in it—poor fustian stuff, but Paul had believed he could make it spectacular—one of those mistakes of his that alw
ays seemed fewer than they were. Anyhow, there was this play, with authentic scenes and uniforms and guns booming off-stage; and on the second night the press agent had thought to invite local Civil War veterans as guests of the management. About half a dozen came—tottering into the front row and cupping their ears to catch the lines; afterwards Paul asked them on stage to meet the cast and be photographed. So they came, and nobody knew what to say except one old fellow who suddenly hobbled up to General McClellan and shook his gnarled fist in the actor’s face while his own became contorted with rage. “For Christ’s sake, you——, why weren’t you there to help us at Manassas?” He would have struck the actor had not others led him away. The whole incident was chilling to all who witnessed it, and made the paltry little play seem paltrier than ever. No one had any hopes of success after that; it was as if a curse had been laid.
How odd the mixture when memory sinks its net into the past and makes a random haul, with the mind quiescent and bemused over its find, savouring the items with infinite detachment. For it was indeed a series of other Careys whom Carey saw in all these wayward recollections—a young woman climbing Kippure, a waitress serving pie ŕ la mode, an actress in crinolines… and now a woman over forty with her name on a thousand marquees, driving an open Cadillac on a summer night to a mountain-top observatory.
* * * * *
Professor Lingard met her at the parking-place, where he had apparently been waiting. Everywhere there was a vast cool silence to which the mind added its own image of height and loneliness. He greeted her warmly but seemed shyer than ever as he guided her by flashlight to the roadway. The stars were brilliant, but it was very dark under the shapes of trees.
“You’ve chosen a grand night, Miss Arundel.”
“I’m glad. I was at a party and when I left I suddenly felt in the mood.”