‘Hallo, darling,’ said Claudia. ‘Oh, darling, I’ve just got your lovely flowers, and—— Oh, you really are——’

  ‘Yes, aren’t I? Never mind that for a moment. Are you alone, or is Rogers there? Just say yes or no—are you alone?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well now, listen, and don’t say anything until I have finished. This is absolutely urgent and deadly serious, really a matter of life and death . . . Are you there?’

  ‘Yes, but you told me not to say anything.’

  ‘Oh, well, I don’t mind your breathing. Now listen. Here it is. I love you like nobody’s business. You are the sun and the moon and the stars and the Milky Way and the sea and the sky and the hills and an anti-cyclone off Iceland, and everything that’s lovely in the world. Will you marry me? Just say yes or no, and we’ll have the apologies afterward. After all, why should you? Still, you’ve got to. Will you marry me? Yes or no?’

  He could hear her breathing now . . . then a small voice said, ‘Just say it again, darling, in case I didn’t get it right.’

  ‘Will Claudia Lancing marry Mr Higgs?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Darling, darling, darling, darling, darling! Listen, sweetheart, don’t think I was afraid to propose to you vis à vis, it was just that I was wondering what to talk to your brother about, and I suddenly thought that it would be nice if I could tell him that he was my brother too. Darling, I love you. Love, as Mr Kelly has observed, is like a melody, a melody sweetly played in tune, a golden melody, my dear, that plucks at the heartstrings of young and old alike. Wait till you see my heartstrings, they’d surprise you, not a feather left. Good-bye, angel! I shan’t come round till the end in case we get too excited, and I know you’re going to be the success of the evening. If you love me very, very much, say “Good-bye and good luck, Mr Higgs”, and then I’ll go back and finish tying my tie.’

  ‘Good-bye and good luck, Mr Higgs.’

  ‘Thank you and bless you. Angel!’

  As he brushed his hair he thought: ‘If only it had been my own play, what a night this would have been.’

  Claude, also tying his tie, wished that he were not going to the play with Higgs. To see a play with your sister in it, probably forgetting the words and making a damned fool of herself, was bad enough, but to see it so in company of the author was hell. All this about Higgs thinking his own play bloody wasn’t good enough; just self-defence when he found that other people thought so. What did he want to write a bloody play for, anyway? He won’t like it if I agree with him, and if I try to buck him up, he’ll be condescending about it, and say that it’s very nice of me, and he knows quite well it’s tripe. So what do I say? And instead of being in the stalls, close to Chloe, perhaps even next to her, I shall be stuck up in the dress circle, and see no more than the top of her head. Damn Claudia. Why couldn’t she let us make our own arrangements?

  Carol, waiting for him at the Berkeley, jumped up eagerly as soon as he came in.

  ‘Hallo, I knew it was you, do you like champagne cocktails as much as I do, otherwise I shall have to drink two? Well, I’m going to anyway, of course.’

  ‘So am I, if I may,’ said Claude. Life seemed a little brighter suddenly. This man had the right ideas.

  ‘Good. We haven’t much time, and I didn’t want to spend any of it snapping my fingers at the backs of waiters, and then trying to pretend I hadn’t. Here we are.’

  They sat down. Claude picked up his glass and said, ‘May we drink to the play?’

  ‘Well, don’t let’s commit ourselves just yet. Let’s drink to Claudia for a first one.’

  They both said ‘Claudia!’ and drank.

  ‘This is the best drink there is,’ said Claude.

  ‘Easily,’ said Carol.

  ‘Is she all right?’ asked Claude. ‘I mean at her job?’

  ‘She’s heavenly. You’ll see. It’s a tiny part, of course, but it gives you the one moment of fresh air in the whole evening. Everybody else is dead. They all died about thirty-five years ago. It’s that sort of play. I’ve ordered two more of those, I hope they’re coming. Perhaps I’d better begin snapping my fingers now, and then by Christmas——’

  Claude caught a waiter’s eye, and the waiter was there.

  ‘I ordered two more champagne cocktails,’ said Carol, and then to Claude: ‘How well you do it. It’s really the whole art of life, calling a waiter without calling attention to yourself. You must give me lessons.’

  Claude began to like Mr Higgs.

  ‘Just let’s get it clear,’ he said. ‘Are you the author, or aren’t you?’

  ‘Part author. You’ll see it on the programme. I have a collaborator with whom I do not see eye to eye. Shall we discuss it in terms of your own art? If you had painted your masterpiece—let’s say “Hannibal crossing the Alps” —and I got my little paintbox out and turned Hannibal into John Stuart Mill on Monday, and made three of the elephants balance on cannon-balls on Tuesday, you’d realize on Wednesday that, if you couldn’t stop me, the only way to prevent yourself going mad was to paint Ella Wheeler Wilcox and some swans into the foreground and have a really good laugh.’

  Claude allowed himself a smile.

  ‘Yes, I see. Of course one might disown the picture altogether. I don’t mean in a highbrow sort of way, but as bad for one’s Alpine reputation.’

  ‘There was a reason why I didn’t.’ He picked up his second glass and said, ‘Shall we drink to. Claudia again?’

  ‘Claudia!’ they said together.

  ‘You’re quite right,’ said Carol. ‘This is the best drink there is.’

  ‘Easily,’ said Claude.

  ‘You see,’ said Carol, putting down his empty glass, ‘I gave myself the privilege of falling in love with your sister the first time I saw her at rehearsal. So obviously I couldn’t wash my hands of the play, and walk into the night. On the contrary, by staying on I’ve had the happiest two months of my life. I mean up-to-date. For at 7.15 p.m. this evening—— Oh, good, here come the second ones I ordered before, no, quite all right, we want them badly, that makes six——’ He gave the waiter a £5note, and went on: ‘At 7.15 p.m. I became your brother-in-law. A new glass for this. This is historic.

  Claudia!’ ‘Claudia!’ said her brother and drank. ‘Somehow,’ he added, ‘this one seems even better than the last.’

  ‘Infinitely. I’m so glad that you agree. Of course when I say that I became your brother-in-law at 7.15 p.m., I meant in posse. You can’t do it in esse after 3 p.m., I believe.’

  ‘It’s a damned shame,’ said Claude, ‘not being able to do it in esse after 3 p.m.’ He emptied his glass, and went back to the second one.

  ‘Four p.m. summer-time,’ said Carol. ‘We must be fair. Did the waiter give me my change?’

  ‘You put it in your pocket. I saw you.’

  ‘Did I remunerate him?’

  ‘You gave him ten shillings. Why,’ said Claude, speaking slowly so as not to lose any of the letters, ‘why did you give him what practically amounts to a prince’s ransom?’

  ‘Because, Claude, old man—may I call you Claude, old man?’

  ‘Certainly, Higgs, certainly.’

  ‘My other name, in case you care to avail yourself of it, is Carol.’

  ‘I know what you mean, I used to sing you.’

  ‘That was me. Little did you think, when sniffling in the snow, that one day Good King Wenceslas would practically be your uncle.’

  ‘I admit that I little did think, but I deny in toto that I sniffled.’

  ‘For the sake of your sister, I withdraw sniffling.’

  ‘In toto?’

  ‘In absolute toto. Shall we now drop in at the Belvedere, Claude-old-man, and see what is going on there?’

  ‘We will, Carol-old-man.’

  They arrived safely and cheerfully, and dropped in.

  2

  The circles were full, the stalls were filling. There was a cheerful bustle of conversation, against whose surge the ‘Specially Augmented Orchestra’, or, as it was more generally called, the Bellamy Quartette, opposed ‘The Merry Peasant’ with its heads only occasionally above water. Programme waved to programme, and the wavers turned to their neighbours to explain who they were waving to. Suddenly there was a stir at the back of the Royal Box; all eyes in the circles were fixed on it, as Chloe and Kitty manifested themselves to the expectant audience, leaving Everard at the door to gather in chocolates. Each moved to her chair as if it had been planned and rehearsed in detail, each took her seat, as it were in slow time, giving, with that gentle sweep of the arm which makes the dress one with the body, a lesson to the young in the gracious art of sitting down. They turned and smiled and spoke to each other; one might indeed have been watching royalty. Then they looked down on the stalls, divinely aware that the stalls were looking up at them.

  She saw Barnaby, and gave him her loving smile which he knew so well. She saw Miss Norval next to him, the clergyman’s daughter, and flashed another smile back at him, the mocking smile which was as much part of her as the other. She saw Percy and Maisie, and her smile was (was it not?) a little absentminded this time, as if the rest of her were still with Barnaby and that girl. She acknowledged other friends in the stalls, received their acknowledgments, murmured to Everard who was now between her and Kitty. Her eyes came up to the dress circle; indifferently; none of her friends would be there . . . Claude! And Claude, seeing her face light up, thanked Heaven comprehensively for Claudia and Carol and the three cocktails, and the fact that he was sitting here, level with her, almost within reach of her, instead of right down there in the suburbs. She made a little movement with her hand which seemed to say come in and talk to me at the interval, and the three cocktails told him that he would do exactly that, whether she had invited him or not.

  ‘Chloe Marr,’ he said self-consciously to Carol. Even though the augmented orchestra was now playing Three Dances from Henry VIII, he felt completely master of the world.

  ‘Which?’ said Carol.

  ‘The one at this end.’

  Carol turned to the end of the row, and saw a stout mottled woman forcing her way out of a green satin dress loaded to the plimsoll line.

  ‘Are we looking at the same end?’ he asked, surprised.

  ‘The box, idiot.’

  ‘Ah!’ He studied Chloe with interest. ‘So that’s Chloe. Introduce me afterwards, and I’ll tell you what’s wrong with her.’

  ‘What do you mean, what’s wrong with her?’

  ‘There must be something, or she’d have got married long ago.’

  ‘Why? She just happens never to have fallen in love.’

  ‘That,’ said Carol, ‘may be what’s wrong with her. Mr Higgs, the great authority on love, will tell you.’

  Barnaby was thinking, ‘She’s more beautiful than ever, but I mustn’t be a fool about it, she’s just something beautiful like bluebells in a wood, or Primavera, or the Ode to a Nightingale, they are yours but you don’t own them, and they don’t break your heart.’ He looked at Jill and thought, ‘It will be fun having supper with her, but I’m not going to have any nonsense about champagne. I could drink a whole bottle now. I’d no idea she was so pretty.’ He said in a low voice, ‘Have I told you how terribly pretty you look to-night?’

  ‘No,’ said Jill. ‘Nor has anybody else.’

  ‘Never?’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘Then you either go out with the blind or the dumb. Which?’

  ‘I generally go by myself. My uncle—you know the one I mean—pretends he’s in love with me, but he always leaves out that part.’

  ‘That’s no way to go on. Cut him out of your life at once.’

  She smiled to herself, picked up her programme from her lap, and read it through for the third time.

  Percy nudged Maisie, shaking her programme out of her hand, and said, ‘Look, old girl, there’s Chloe.’ They both waved.

  ‘Who’s that with her?’

  ‘A bloke called Hale. And that’s Kitty Kelso, married a feller called Clavering who has something to do with something or other, she was Kitty Kelso, before your time a bit, she was in Silk Stockings.’

  ‘I expect she is now,’ said Maisie archly.

  ‘What? Oh, no, that was ages ago, she’s chucked the stage now, got two kids.’ Maisie looked a little disappointed, and Percy, sensing that something was wrong, gave his mind to it. A sudden loud laugh announced that it had not been in vain. ‘Oh, I see what you mean. Dam good, old girl. Dam funny. I must tell old George that. Yes, I expect you’re about right.’ He put a large hand on her leg. ‘And I know somebody else in silk stockings, what?’ He pulled up the knob of her suspender in a fold of her dress and let it snap back. Maisie gave a little yelp and said, ‘Darling, you mustn’t, not here,’ and smiled at him with admiring, adoring eyes. Percy laughed and winked at her. To get back to respectability she said firmly, ‘Now which are the critics, you promised to tell me.’ There was always the taxi to look forward to.

  Percy stretched up his head and switched it round the stalls.

  ‘Roughly speaking and without notes,’ he said, ‘any ugly little god-help-us in a black tie, who looks as if he’d dropped in at a funeral between drinks. They generally park ’em on the gangways, so’s they can get back to the bar quickly. Between you and I, old girl, there’ve been times when I’ve wished I was a critic.’

  ‘Oh, darling, why aren’t you? You would have been terribly good.’

  ‘Well, you have to mix with such dam strange people. Look, there’s one over there—scratching himself against the pillar.’

  ‘Oh, darling, he’s quite nice-looking.’

  ‘Ah, then perhaps he isn’t one.’

  Percy attributed his dislike of dramatic critics to the fact that the bloody fellers couldn’t dress properly in the evening; but, as he was to explain later to Claude when he got him up against the wall of Claudia’s dressing-room, it went deeper than that. He had once put up the money for a dam fine show called Bedroom Bertie—well, when he said he put it up, it was really old George, George Chater, who found most of the doubloons, but Percy had put a monkey into the pot because he didn’t want to be out of it when old George was in, and naturally when you have a sweet little girl like Babs on your knee, calling you her great big man and saying why couldn’t you get her a teeny-weeny part in one of the new autumn shows—well, anyhow, he had gone out of his way to give a hand to one or two of these bloody fellers, taken ’em into the Ritz Bar and soused ’em well, and told ’em all about Babs, so’s they’d know what they had to look out for, and mentioned what a dam fine feller old George was, and how the feller who’d knocked together the music came down to Woking and played it to them, had a haircut and all, you’d never have guessed he wasn’t a gentleman—well, it wasn’t losing the monkey or what a sensitive little girl like Babs naturally felt at being referred to as a pier-less beauty, p-i-e-r and intentional, mark you, not a misprint, it was the dam cold-blooded ingratitude of it which struck him so forcibly.

  Maisie had picked up her programme, and was trying to commit it to memory before the lights went out. ‘Zella a gypsy girl,’ she read aloud; ‘Miss Claudia Lancing. Who’s she?’

  ‘What’s that?’ said Percy, coming back to the present. ‘Here, let me look.’ He took the programme from her. ‘Well, I’m damned. That’s the pretty little girl I told you about when I met this long-nosed feller in Chloe’s flat. Claudia Lancing, that’s right, and she’s got a brother, Claude. Dam silly, I call it.’

  ‘Oh, darling, you know everybody!’ said proud Maisie. ‘You will introduce me, won’t you? You promised.’

  The augmented orchestra came to the bottom of a page of Merrie England, turned over three pages by mistake and found to its surprise (or so it seemed) that it was playing the Barcarolle. The lights slowly dimmed; reluctantly the stalls hushed themselves at the request of the pit; and the curtain went up.

  3

  The curtain went down, and one could talk to one’s neighbour in comfort, without being scowled at by the rude man in front; or one could go outside and line the stairs, hoping to be noticed by the noticeable on their slow progression to the bar. With the advantage of the dress circle Claude was the first into the Royal Box. Carol’s refusal to come with him was accepted gratefully, for it gave him Chloe to himself, and spared her the embarrassing company of an author beyond congratulation. ‘You must tell her my unhappy story,’ said Carol, ‘and then, when I see her behind—old, but unintentional joke, sorry—when I see her in Claudia’s dressing-room, we can talk lightly and easily about the Barcarolle.’ Claude grunted, and pushed his way out. Old though he was in many ways, his love was so young and innocent that the altogether physical Chloe never disclosed herself to his mind, and he felt Carol’s ‘joke’ to be a desecration.

  ‘Darling,’ said the loved one, ‘how nice to see you, and how nice you look. Everard, this is Claude Lancing, who you know by name, anyway.’

  ‘Every way,’ smiled Everard. ‘Boxer, artist and friend of Chloe’s.’ He held out his hand, smiling again a little ruefully at the ‘Sir’ with which Claude greeted him. ‘We both want to marry her,’ he thought, ‘and one of us calls the other “Sir”. One of us must be wrong.’

  ‘And Mrs Clavering. Kitty, come and be introduced— Claude Lancing. Ducky, wouldn’t it be a nice idea if Claude and Claudia had supper with us?’ And then to Claude, ‘You could, couldn’t you, darling?’

  ‘You can no more resist that than I can,’ said Everard. ‘Do come.’

  ‘Of course we’d love it, sir, thank you very much. At least, I should, but——’ he hesitated.

  ‘Miss Lancing is already committed? Couldn’t he come along too, or would they prefer to be alone?’

  ‘Oh, Claude, we must see him. Who is he?’