Every Man for Himself - Beryl Bainbridge [36]
‘Last night,’ I said, anxious to change the subject, ‘Mr Seefax told me a confused story about a woman crawling along the outside of a train. You know how he rambles. He said it was in Madrid, where he met you.’
‘So it was . . . at a reception given by the Ambassador. Seefax was negotiating with some arms manufacturer and I was attending the trial of Madame Humbert. An extraordinary case, don’t you think?’
‘I didn’t understand it,’ I confessed.
‘She made up a pack of lies about saving the life of a wealthy American who was having a heart attack in the next carriage. Hearing his groans and finding the door to his compartment locked, she claimed to have climbed out of the window and gone to his aid. Later, she produced letters purporting to have come from him, promising he would leave her his fortune. All forged, of course. There never was an American, rich or otherwise. On the strength of these letters she lived the life of Madame Pompadour until found out. An ingenious woman, don’t you agree?’
‘Very,’ I said. ‘If shameful.’
‘Except in degree, no more shameful than your own action of earlier this morning.’
‘What action was that?’ I demanded, shocked.
‘Pretending to come to the aid of an elderly woman and consigning a snail to the depths,’ he said, smiling gleefully. ‘Both acts are the product of thoughtlessness and from the snail’s point of view yours is the more reprehensible.’
We both laughed, he so much so that he had to blot his eyes with a none too clean handkerchief. Recovering, he asked why I didn’t declare myself to Wallis. ‘At your age,’ he said, ‘you have nothing to lose. She can either respond favourably or let you down gently. Very few women are deliberately cruel. It’s not in their natures. Besides, all women thrive on admiration.’
I said I wouldn’t know what words to use. Wallis was such an unapproachable girl, so downright pure and straight.
‘Good heavens,’ he murmured. ‘How extraordinarily little you know about women, and that one in particular.’
We didn’t lunch together; he said he wasn’t hungry and preferred to nap until tea-time. It wasn’t until he’d gone that I realised he’d told me nothing about himself.
At lunch, Hopper fell out with Ginsberg. It was quite a spat and became so heated that Guggenheim sent Kitty Webb over to tell them to lower their voices. I wasn’t present myself and only heard of it second-hand from Hopper when I ran into him and Melchett on my way to the library later that afternoon. Hopper admitted that at one point it had nearly come to blows. Of course, they’d all drunk a fair amount. Molly Dodge had burst into tears.
‘Molly?’ I said incredulously.
‘Ginsberg was raving on about the German navy again,’ Melchett explained. ‘That and the fiendish nature of the German character. He’s an awful bully when he gets on his hobby horse. He said the Kaiser was a madman and out to ruin us all.’
‘Why the devil should Molly care what Ginsberg thinks of the Kaiser?’ I asked, bewildered.
‘On account of her mother being German,’ said Hopper. ‘A fact Ginsberg kept dinning into her. He held all Germans were crazy, her mother in particular . . . she shot herself, if you remember . . . I tried to quieten him . . . Molly was trembling . . . but he called me a bloody fool and said I was too damned blind to see which way the wind was blowing.’
‘She never knew her mother,’ I said.
‘I jumped up, suggested we go outside to sort the matter out, and Kitty Webb came over to see what was up.’
‘Ginsberg backed off,’ said Melchett, ‘because of Guggenheim. The man’s a frightful crawler.’
‘The mother killed herself,’ I said, ‘when Molly was two months old.’
‘One’s mother is always sacred,’ Melchett said primly. ‘Whether one knew her or not.’ It wasn’t a remark I could argue with.
In the hope of finding inspiration in some poetry book, I was all set on going to the library to write a letter to Wallis. Needless to say, I didn’t breathe a word of my intentions to either