Next day, after some hours on foot, he stood under the grey easterly sky in the grey street, before a plate-glass window protecting an assortment of fruits and sheaves of corn, lumps of metal, and brilliant blue butterflies, in the carefully golden light of advertised Australia. To Bicket, who had never been out of England, not often out of London, it was like standing outside Paradise. The atmosphere within the office itself was not so golden, and the money required considerable; but it brought Paradise nearer to take away pamphlets which almost burned his hands, they were so warm.
Later, he and she, sitting in the one armchair – advantage of being thin – pored over these alchemized pages and inhaled their glamour.
‘D’you think it’s true, Tony?’
‘If it’s thirty per cent true it’s good enough for me. We just must get there somehow. Kiss me.’
From around the corner in the main road the rumbling of the trams and carts, and the rattling of their window-pane in the draughty dry easterly wind increased their feeling of escape into a gas-lit Paradise.
Chapter Nine
CONFUSION
TWO hours behind Bicket, Michael wavered towards home. Old Danby was right as usual – if you couldn’t trust your packers, you might shut up shop! Away from Bicket’s eyes, he doubted. Perhaps the chap hadn’t a wife at all! Then Wilfrid’s manner usurped the place of Bicket’s morals. Old Wilfrid had been abrupt and queer the last three times of meeting. Was he boiling-up for verse?
He found Ting-a-ling at the foot of the stairs in a conservative attitude. ‘I am not going up,’ he seemed saying, ‘until someone carries me – at the same time it is later than usual!’
‘Where’s your mistress, you heraldic little beast?’
Ting-a-ling snuffled. ‘I could put up with it,’ he implied, ‘if you carried me – these stairs are laborious!’
Michael took him up. ‘Let’s go and find her.’
Squeezed under an arm harder than his mistress’, Ting-a-ling stared as if with black-glass eyes; and the plume of his emergent tail quivered.
In the bedroom Michael dropped him so absent-mindedly that he went to his corner plume pendent, and crouched there in dudgeon.
Nearly dinner time and Fleur not in! Michael went over his sketchy recollection of her plans. Today she had been having Hubert Marsland and that Vertiginist – what was his name? – to lunch. There would have been fumes to clear off. Vertiginists – like milk – made carbonic acid gas in the lungs! Still! Half-past seven! What was happening tonight? Weren’t they going to that play of L.S.D.’s? No – that was tomorrow! Was there conceivably nothing? If so, of course she would shorten her unoccupied time as much as possible. He made that reflection humbly. Michael had no illusions, he knew himself to be commonplace, with only a certain redeeming liveliness, and, of course, his affection for her. He even recognized that his affection was a weakness, tempting him to fussy anxieties, which on principle he restrained. To inquire, for instance, of Coaker or Philips – their man and their maid – when she had gone out, would be thoroughly against that principle. The condition of the world was such that Michael constantly wondered if his own affairs were worth paying attention to; but then the condition of the world was also such that sometimes one’s own affairs seemed all that were worth paying attention to. And yet his affairs were, practically speaking, Fleur; and if he paid too much attention to them, he was afraid of annoying her.
He went into his dressing-room and undid his waistcoat.
‘But no!’ he thought; ‘if she finds me “dressed” already, it’ll put too much point on it.’ So he did up his waistcoat and went downstairs again. Coaker was in the hall.
‘Mr Forsyte and Sir Lawrence looked in about six, sir. Mrs Mont was out. What time shall I serve dinner?’
‘Oh! about a quarter-past eight. I don’t think we’re going out.’
He went into the drawing-room and passing down its Chinese emptiness, drew aside the curtain. The square looked cold and dark and draughty; and he thought: ‘Bicket – pneumonia – I hope she’s got her fur coat.’ He took out a cigarette and put it back. If she saw him at the window she would think him fussy; and he went up again to see if she had put on her fur!
Ting-a-ling, still couchant, greeted him plume dansetti arrested as at disappointment. Michael opened a wardrobe. She had! Good! He was taking a sniff round, when Ting-a-ling passed him trottant, and her voice said: ‘Well, my darling!’ Wishing that he was, Michael emerged from behind the wardrobe door. Heaven! She looked pretty, coloured by the wind! He stood rather wistfully silent.