Every Man for Himself - Beryl Bainbridge [50]
‘You don’t look it—’
‘I’ve been drinking,’ I cried impatiently. ‘Has it gone six o’clock?’
‘By ten minutes,’ he said, at which I rose unsteadily to my feet and rushed from the room.
There was just time to bathe my face and brush my hair before delivering the note to Wallis. If all went well it wouldn’t matter that I wasn’t dressed for dinner; food would be the last thing on our minds. And if it went badly and she turned me down – why then, I would throw myself overboard.
That wretched steward, McKinlay, did his best to delay me, rambling on about some absurd rumour he’d heard concerning George Dodge. ‘Young Mr Dodge, sir,’ he said, ‘has threatened Mr Ginsberg with the hiding of his life for upsetting his sister.’
‘Young Mr Dodge,’ I retorted, ‘would find it difficult to swat a fly, let alone engage in a punch-up. I advise you to stop listening to gossip.’
Heart thudding, I reached A deck and approached Wallis’s stateroom. As luck would have it people were changing for dinner and the corridor was deserted. I knelt, thrust the note under her door and ran back the way I had come. In my head I saw her sitting at her dressing table, tweaking a glossy strand of hair more fetchingly into place. In a moment she would rise, walk into the next room and catch that gleam of white on the floor. Now she was adjusting a fold in her dress . . . taking those few short steps into my life . . . she was picking up the envelope, tearing it open, smoothing out that creased sheet of paper with the rusted splodge below my name. She was frowning. ‘Oh God,’ I cried out loud, and bursting through the doors into the foyer came face to face with her.
I’ve no doubt my reaction was wild enough. For some seconds I thought time had accelerated, that she was on her way to our assignation; I actually seized her in my arms. I came to my senses when she beat at me with her fists. Appalled, I let her go. She said coldly, ‘Morgan, I suggest you drink several cups of black coffee. I shall pretend this never happened. It would be best, don’t you agree?’ and walked away towards the doors of the library.
I don’t remember going back to her room. For all I knew I might have travelled by balloon, for the earth had given way beneath me. I did have the cunning to knock at the door in case Ida was there. When I entered I could smell lavender water. The envelope rested like a diminutive doormat on the carpet. Snatching it up I crossed into the bedroom. It was in darkness but the light from the sitting room illuminated Wallis’s dress flung upon the counterpane of the bed. There were buttoned shoes to match, poking from the frill of the valance. My velvet dressing-gown lay in a crumpled heap in the shadows of the half-open door. Standing there, noting the glimmer of the powder bowl on the dressing table, the shimmer of silk stockings draped across the knob of the wardrobe, I heard the door open and close in the room beyond.
Wallis said, ‘Hurry.’ Her voice was uneven, as though she’d been running.
Scurra said, ‘My dear, you know I never hurry such things.’
I grew old cowering in the shadows of that room reeking of lavender. In spite of the ghastly nature of my predicament – any moment I might be discovered – I burned with a jealousy so fierce that I had to clench my jaws to keep my teeth from grinding. Not that I would have been heard. How foolishly I had deceived myself in thinking that I desired nothing more than a casual intrigue of the sort often described by more fortunate men – for now, listening to those voices which rose and fell and started up again with horrid definition, I shuddered with revulsion. It wasn’t the words themselves that shocked me – I want your lovely prick, nor his reply – Show me your lovely cunt, but the context in which they were used. Such expressions belonged to anger, mockery, contempt; how foul they sounded when linked to the making of love. I guess I was out of my senses for a time, or rather wholly under the sway of more primitive ones, for I shamelessly pressed myself