A Buyers Market - Anthony Powell [49]
“When Gypsy and I were first acquainted,” said Mr. Deacon, lowering his voice, “I was given to understand—well, hasn’t Swinburne got some lines about ‘wandering watery sighs where the sea sobs round Lesbian promontories’? In fact restriction to such a coastline was almost a condition of our association.”
“Did Barnby object?”
“I think he undoubtedly felt resentment,” said Mr. Deacon. “But, as a very dear friend of mine once remarked when I was a young man—for I was a young man once, whatever you may think to the contrary—‘Gothic manners don’t mix with Greek morals.’ Gypsy would never learn that.”
Mr. Deacon stopped speaking. He seemed to be deliberating within himself whether or not to ask some question, in the wording of which he found perhaps a certain embarrassment. After a few seconds he said: “As a matter of fact I am rather worried about Gypsy. I suppose you don’t happen to know the address of any medicos—I don’t mean the usual general practitioner with the restricted views of his profession—no, I didn’t for a moment suppose that you did. And of course one does not wish to get mixed up. I feel just the same as yourself. But you were inquiring about Barnby. I really must arrange for you to meet. I think you would like each other.”
When such scraps of gossip are committed to paper, the words bear a heavier weight than when the same information is imparted huskily between draughts of champagne, in the noise of a crowded room; besides which, my thoughts hovering still on the two girls who had been displaced by Sillery and Colonel Budd, I had not been giving very full attention to what Mr. Deacon had been saying. However, if I had at that moment considered Gypsy Jones’s difficulties with any seriousness, I should probably have decided, rightly or wrongly, that she was well able to look after herself. Even in the quietest forms of life the untoward is rarely far from the surface, and in the intemperate circles to which she seemed to belong nothing was surprising. I felt at the time absolutely no inclination to pursue the matter further. Mr. Deacon himself became temporarily lost in thought.
Our attention was at that moment violently reorientated by the return to the room of Mrs. Andriadis, who now shouted—a less forcible word would have been inadequate to describe her manner of announcing the news—that “darling Max” was going to sing: a statement creating a small upheaval in our immediate surroundings, owing to the proximity of the piano, upon which a bottle of champagne was now placed. A mild-looking young man in spectacles was thrust through the crowd, who seating himself on the music-stool, protested: “Must I really tickle the dominoes?” A number of voices at once encouraged him to embark upon his musical activity, and, after winding round the seat once or twice, apparently more as a ritual than for practical reasons, he struck a few chords.
“Really,” said Mr. Deacon, as if entitled to feel honest disgust at this development, “Mrs. Andriadis does not seem to care in the least whom she makes friends with.”
“Who is he?”
“Max Pilgrim—a public performer of some sort.”
The young man now began to sing in a tremulous, quavering voice, like that of an immensely ancient lady, though at the same time the words filled the room with a considerable volume of sound:
“I’m Tess of Le Touquet,
My morals are flukey,
Tossed on the foam,
I couldn’t be busier;
Permanent waves
Splash me into the caves;
Everyone loves me as much as Delysia.
When it’s wet on the Links, I know where to have a beau
Down in the club-house—next door to the lavabo.”
There was muffled laughter and some fragmentary applause, though a hum