‘Hallo, Michael! I’m rather late. Been to the Club and walked home.’
Michael had a quite unaccountable feeling that there was suppression in that statement. He also suppressed, and said: ‘I was just looking to see that you’d got your fur, it’s beastly cold. Your dad and Bart have been and went away fasting.’
Fleur shed her coat and dropped into a chair. ‘I’m tired. Your ears are sticking up so nicely tonight, Michael.’
Michael went on his knees and joined his hands behind her waist. Her eyes had a strange look, a scrutiny which held him in suspense, a little startled.
‘If you got pneumonia,’ he said, ‘I should go clean out of curl.’
‘Why on earth should I?’
‘You don’t know the connexion – never mind, it wouldn’t interest you. We’re not going out, are we?’
‘Of course we are. It’s Alison’s monthly.’
‘Oh! Lord! If you’re tired we could cut that.’
‘My dear! Impos.! She’s got all sorts of people coming.’
Stifling a disparagement, he sighed out: ‘Right-o! Warpaint?’
‘Yes, white waistcoat. I like you in white waistcoats.’
Cunning little wretch? He squeezed her waist and rose. Fleur laid a light stroke on his hand, and he went into his dressing-room comforted.…
But Fleur sat still for at least five minutes – not precisely ‘a prey to conflicting emotions’, but the victim of very considerable confusion. Two men within the last hour had done this thing – knelt at her knees and joined their fingers behind her waist. Undoubtedly she had been rash to go to Wilfrid’s rooms. The moment she got there she had perceived how entirely unprepared she really was to commit herself to what was physical. True he had done no more than Michael. But – Goodness! – she had seen the fire she was playing with, realized what torment he was in. She had strictly forbidden him to say a word to Michael, but intuitively she knew that in his struggle between loyalties she could rely on nothing. Confused, startled, touched, she could not help a pleasant warmth in being so much loved by two men at once, nor an itch of curiosity about the upshot. And she sighed. She had added to her collection of experiences – but how to add further without breaking up the collection, and even perhaps the collector, she could not see.
After her words to Wilfrid before the Eve: ‘You will be a fool to go – wait!’ she had known he would expect something before long. Often he had asked her to come and pass judgement on his ‘junk’. A month, even a week, ago she would have gone without thinking more than twice about it, and discussed his ‘junk’ with Michael afterwards! But now she thought it over many times, and but for the fumes of lunch, and the feeling, engendered by the society of the ‘Vertiginist’, of Amabel Nazing, of Linda Frewe, that scruples of any kind were ‘stuffy’, sensations of all sorts ‘the thing’, she would probably still have been thinking it over now. When they departed, she had taken a deep breath and her telephone receiver from the Chinese tea-chest.
If Wilfrid were going to be in at half-past five, she would come and see his ‘junk’.
His answer: ‘My God! Will you?’ almost gave her pause. But dismissing hesitation with the thought: ‘I will be Parisian – Proust!’ she had started for her Club. Three-quarters of anhour, with no more stimulant than three cups of China tea, three back numbers of the Glass of Fashion, three back views of country members ‘dead in chairs’, had sent her forth a careful quarter of an hour behind her time.
On the top floor Wilfrid was standing in his open doorway, pale as a soul in purgatory. He took her hand gently, and drew her in. Fleur thought with a little thrill: ‘Is this what it’s like? Du côté de chez Swann!’ Freeing her hand, she began at once to flutter round the ‘junk’, clinging to it piece by piece.
Old English ‘junk’ rather manorial, with here and there an Eastern or First Empire bit, collected by some bygone Desert, nomadic, or attached to the French court. She was afraid to sit down, for fear that he might begin to follow the authorities; nor did she want to resume the intense talk of the Tate Gallery. ‘Junk’ was safe, and she only looked at him in those brief intervals when he was not looking at her. She knew she was not playing the game according to ‘La Garçonne’ and Amabel Nazing; that, indeed, she was in danger of going away without having added to her sensations. And she couldn’t help being sorry for Wilfrid; his eyes yearned after her, his lips were bitter to look at. When at last from sheer exhaustion of ‘junk’ she sat down, he had flung himself at her feet. Half hypnotized, with her knees against his chest, as safe as she could hope for, she really felt the tragedy of it – his horror of himself, his passion for herself. It was painful, deep; it did not fit in with what she had been led to expect; it was not in the period, and how – how was she to get away without more pain to him and to herself? When she had got away, with one kiss received but not answered, she realized that she had passed through a quarter of an hour of real life, and was not at all sure that she liked it…. But now, safe in her own room, undressing for Alison’s monthly, she felt curious as to what she would have been feeling if things had gone as far as was proper according to the authorities. Surely she had not experienced one-tenth of the thoughts or sensations that would have been assigned to her in any advanced piece of literature! It had been disillusioning, or else she was deficient, and Fleur could not bear to feel deficient. And, lightly powdering her shoulders, she bent her thoughts towards Alison’s monthly.