Vincent’s Party

The party was in full swing. Evelyn could hear the sexy blare of the trad jazz almost as soon as she got off the bus at St. Mary Redcliffe and began walking over to the Steam Packet, the pub that Vincent—who was a friend of Evelyn’s older sister, Moira—had commandeered for the evening. He’d decided that they all needed a party to cheer them up, because the winter had been so bitter, and because now, in February, the incessant rain had turned the snow to slush. It was raining again this evening; the bus’s wiper had beat its numb rhythm all the way into town, the pavements were dark, and the gutters ran with water. Frozen filthy formless lumps, the remainders of the snow, persisted at the street corners and in the deep recesses between buildings, loomed sinisterly in the gaping bomb sites. Crossing the road, Evelyn had to put up her umbrella—actually, her mother’s worn old green umbrella with the broken rib and the duck’s-head handle, which she’d borrowed without asking on her way out, because she’d lost her own somewhere. Probably she’d get in trouble for this tomorrow, but she didn’t care; she was too full of agitated happiness. Anything could happen between now and tomorrow.

Evelyn couldn’t believe her luck, that she was going to an actual party—and not just any dull, ordinary party but this wild one with her sister’s friends, in a half-derelict old pub with a terrible reputation, hanging over the black water in the city docks. If her parents had known where the party was, they’d never have let her out, but she’d lied to them fluently and easily, saying that Moira had promised to look after her, and that they were meeting in the Victoria Rooms. She was proud of herself. Who knew that you could be a Sunday-school teacher one minute, asking the children to crayon in pictures of Jesus with a lost lamb tucked under his arm, and then lie to your parents with such perfectly calibrated, innocent sweetness?

The rain didn’t matter; Evelyn was impervious to it. Picking her way between the streams of water rippling across the roads, not wanting to spoil her fashionable, unsuitable black ballet flats, she enjoyed the contrast between this desolate outer universe and the heat of the life burning inside her. When she’d had to change buses at the Centre, she’d gone into a cubicle in the Ladies’ to take off her Wellington boots, and also the decent wool dress she’d put on over her party clothes, so that her parents couldn’t see what she was wearing: skintight black slacks zipped up along the inside of her calves, black polo-neck jumper, wide red leather belt with a black buckle. Evelyn was very thin, with a long neck—a swan neck, she thought—a flat stomach, and jutting hip bones. She hoped that she looked spectacular, her hair scraped back from her face like a dancer’s and breasts thrust upward in a new brassiere; she longed for and feared the moment when she would shed her thick winter coat and reveal herself. To tell the truth, she feared everything; part of her wanted to get right back on the 28 bus and go home. Peering at her reflection in the square of tin that served as a mirror above the sink in the Ladies’ toilet, she had clipped huge false pearls to her ears—those were her mother’s, too—and painted her mouth stickily with red lipstick. The boots and the dress were bundled now into a shopping bag, which she’d have to jettison somewhere, along with her coat and the umbrella, for collection later.

The Steam Packet’s austere silhouette, three stories tall, was stark against the gaps that bombs had left in the skyline: the rows of windows on the upper floors were dark or boarded up, but a yellowish light shone enticingly from the ground floor. A clamor of raised voices drew Evelyn toward it, her body beginning to move already to the music. Moira hadn’t promised to look after her—in fact, Moira didn’t even know that she was coming to the party, and probably wouldn’t want her there, but Evelyn was desperate to be part of her sister’s crowd. The girls were born two years apart; Moira had always complained about her kid sister tagging along after her friends. Evelyn had usually tagged along anyway, when they were turned out of the house to fend for themselves for the day, Moira jolting their baby brother along in the pram and intent on some mission with her gang, rolling up leaves in cigarette papers to smoke them, or climbing onto the roof of the glasshouse in the park, or spying on their neighbor who’d lost his mind and walked around nude in the garden.

It was Vincent who’d invited Evelyn to the party, last week when she’d bumped into him in Queens Road on her way to a lecture; he told her he’d persuaded the landlord of the Packet to let him take the place over for an evening. Vincent knew everyone: not just the arty people, although he was an art student like Moira, but also taxi-drivers and bookies and chip-shop owners, pub landlords and veteran soldiers who’d lost limbs in the first war; he talked to these characters for hours and learned their stories, catching them in clever charcoal drawings in his sketchbook. He paid court to a toothless old woman who ran a secondhand clothes shop, where garments were heaped in a rotting dark mulch against the window; you could see the moths and the fleas jumping out, Moira said, from between the layers of clothes. This old woman would save certain items for Vincent, so that he came to classes dressed in an airman’s leather jacket or an evening cloak lined in red satin; Moira refused to sit near him then, because of the fleas and because the old clothes stank of naphthalene from the mothballs. Vincent was tall, with eager, moist brown eyes, a booming voice, and a lot of curly chestnut-brown hair. He wore a wide-brimmed soft black felt hat like Augustus John and played in a jug band.

“Vincent’s very good-looking,” Evelyn had said experimentally to Moira once, as Moira was cutting out a skirt pinned with a paper pattern on the dining-room table, crunching her scissors confidently through the fabric, which parted cleanly in their wake. She was studying fashion at college and could do tailoring like a professional.

“Ye-es.”

“What do you mean, ‘ye-es’?”

“Shush, Evelyn, let me concentrate. I don’t know. He’s got all the ingredients but somehow he isn’t attractive. Not to me, at any rate.”

Moira’s discriminations were subtle and absolute.

Evelyn dropped her voice, so that their mother couldn’t hear from the kitchen. “Is he queer?”

“God, no. Don’t be an idiot.”

“Well, I don’t know. I’ve never known anyone who was queer.”

“You’ve known loads of them, only you never noticed it. Half of the awful old spinsters who taught at our school, for instance. But not Vince. Vince tries to get off with everyone. He’ll probably try with you. You’d better watch out. Unless you do find him attractive, of course.”

“No, I don’t think I do,” Evelyn said. How could she find him attractive, after Moira had said he wasn’t? “I know what you mean. He’s sort of woolly, somehow.”

Moira laughed, in spite of herself. “Woolly?”

“Yes, like a fuzzy old favorite toy or something. A Teddy bear with big glassy eyes.”

“Well, he’s not my favorite toy.”

“Nor mine, either,” Evelyn said.

The Steam Packet was already full, with the band squeezed into a corner, blasting out music, and everyone shouting to be heard over it. The place was dimly lit by bare electric bulbs, dangling from loops of wire festooned along the old beams of the ceiling. Vincent explained delightedly that the pub hadn’t been connected to mains electricity since the war; it was just piggybacking off someone else’s supply. A few couples were dancing already, in a tight space where the tables had been pushed back; there was sawdust on the stone-flagged floor, the rough-hewn benches and tables and three-legged stools were scarred and gouged, and the plaster walls—stained a dark mahogany by tobacco smoke—were crowded with advertising for brands of beer and rum and pipe tobacco which hadn’t existed for decades, alongside paintings of ships set on choppy blue seas. A chunk of tree smoldered sulkily to ash in a dirty open hearth at the far end of the room. The young people by this time were generating their own heat.

Vincent was officiating behind the bar, where a few sticky bottles were assembled in front of the ornate mirror glass; he was ladling out cider from an open tin bucket, and the pub landlord—wizened and tiny as a jockey, with blue eyes like clear chips of ice—was sitting on a barstool in front of it, overseeing things skeptically. He didn’t drink the cider himself, apparently; he preferred neat gin—Hollands, he called it. Vincent said that he was pickled in it. Some of the rough-looking men standing at the bar were most likely his regular customers: it was a dockers’ pub, Vincent had said, where prostitutes came looking for customers. Evelyn had never seen prostitutes, but she’d read about them in novels. It was a big thing among the art students to want to mingle across the boundaries of class that their parents were so intent upon policing: their mothers putting doilies on cake plates, objecting to milk or ketchup bottles on the table, ironing handkerchiefs and socks and dusters as if respectability depended upon it. Many of the students hadn’t come far from the working class themselves; Vincent’s dad was a plumber in Ashley Down. Moira and Evelyn’s maternal grandfather had been a coal miner—and yet their father was petitioning to join the Masons. After the war, he’d got a job with the Port of Bristol Authority, and they’d moved down to Avonmouth from the northeast of England, leaving their history behind, along with a whole tribe of aunts and uncles and cousins on their mother’s side.

“Oh, it’s you,” Moira remarked without enthusiasm when Evelyn had stowed her coat, and the bag with her boots and dress and umbrella, under a table in a corner, which was a makeshift cloakroom. Moira absorbed her sister’s outfit in one scouring, appraising glance. “Looks nice,” she said, grudging but fair. Evelyn thought now, however, that her Left Bank-themed black clothes had perhaps been the wrong choice for the Packet. Moira was wearing her striped full skirt and a cream blouse; someone had told her once that you should aim to make the other women in the room look overdressed. That was the difference between Moira and her, Evelyn thought. She would go for something striking and zany, which might work and might not, while Moira would never be so foolish as to take that risk. Evelyn veered between two extremes; either she spent hours dressing herself up extravagantly, or she slopped around at home in her oldest skirt and cardigan and slippers. Her scruffy self was her reading self. To give herself properly to a book she had to be crumpled and snug, oblivious of her appearance, scrunched up in an armchair with her shoes off and her legs tucked under her. When she was really reading, she forgot who she was. Yet when she went out to lectures or classes—she was in her first year at the university, studying French—she worked anxiously in front of the mirror to make herself look more like a student and an intellectual: beret tilted to one side, silk scarf fastened insouciantly around her throat. “Insouciant,” she murmured with a French accent, gazing adoringly at herself, finishing off her outfit with a couple of books under her arm.

The two sisters weren’t completely unalike in their appearance. There was a family stamp on both of them, and on their younger brother: they were all strong-featured, full-lipped, dark-browed, with a long doleful nose the girls hated, although it actually made their faces more interesting. The nose came from their father, who was handsome and stern: it was all right on a man, a war hero, first lieutenant on an aircraft carrier that had escorted merchant convoys across the Atlantic. Both sisters were good-looking, although Moira insisted that she wasn’t, that she just knew how to make the best of herself.

“I look more like him,” Moira said. “You’re the lucky one.”

Their mother had pretty, soft Irish looks, although she’d let herself go and grown shapeless, because she was unhappy in the south and in her marriage. Moira was always telling her off for slouching, or eating too much starch. Moira was critical of her own defects, too, staring them down, calculating and resigned. “I hate these lumps of fat under my arms, for instance. These I do have from Mam.”

Whenever she and Evelyn went out together, though, it was Moira the men were drawn to, with her self-possession and sophisticated allure; beside her, Evelyn felt girlish and gauche, no matter how hard she tried. “You shouldn’t talk too much,” Moira advised unhelpfully. “Don’t talk right in their faces.”

At Vincent’s party, Moira had the dreamily smiling, assured look she wore in public, her attention only brushing gauzily against the present moment. And she’d managed to get a table in just the right position—not so near the band that conversation was difficult but commanding a good view. She was sitting with Josephine LaPalma and two men Evelyn had never seen before. Josephine modelled at the art college and was one of Vincent’s characters, glamorous and dangerous, with a broad Bristol accent. It was a coup for him that he’d persuaded her to come. She was said to have gypsy blood, and her black hair reached down to her waist when she undid it; it was in a thick plait tonight, wound around her head. Everything about Josephine fitted in with the students’ romantic idea of a bohemian life. She was even having an affair with a married man, a talented painter who taught at the college.

The two men looked keenly at Evelyn as she joined the table, and stood up to be introduced, as if they belonged somewhere more formal; the older one bent over the hand she held out, to kiss it. They fussed about getting her a chair until she said she could just squeeze onto the bench with Moira—“Oho! Slumming it!” they cried. Their names were Paul and something she didn’t quite catch, like Sandy or Simon, and they weren’t quite right for Vincent’s party: too conventional, something artificial and sneering barely concealed under the sugary surface. They behaved with that mixture of assurance and awkwardness which was a sign of being privileged and posh. Even Evelyn could see that their clothes were good—expensive, made with fine cloth—and the one who’d kissed her hand smelled of some subtle cologne. In the crowd jostling around them, the women wore peasant skirts and striped sailors’ tops, and none of the men, apart from these two, were wearing ties. Evelyn couldn’t help sneaking glances at the younger one, Paul, who didn’t talk as much as his friend, and looked as if he might be quite drunk already. His movements and his speech were slow and syrupy, and he smiled privately, communing with himself, brilliantined treacle-colored hair flopping across his forehead, blinking eyes and dimpled chin making him seem sleepy and childlike. His perfect features were like an angel’s in a picture: upper lip very full, the curve of his cheek like a peach. He might be corrupt, Evelyn thought, remembering some of the poetry she knew.

Paul insisted on buying Evelyn a drink and she said she’d have a gin-and-orange. She hadn’t really learned to like the taste of alcohol yet; she only liked its effects. The men thought she was very wise. “The cider’s undrinkable. We think that creatures have drowned in it.”

“Oh, they encourage creatures to drown in it,” Moira assured them solemnly. “Everything adds to the flavor.”

She and Josephine were drinking the cider laced with black currant, to make it palatable—most of the students did that.

“Well, Evelyn,” the older man asked, “are you an art student, too?”

She told them that she wasn’t, that she was studying French.

“French? La belle dame sans merci! Gosh, what brainy girls you all are. I’m perfectly terrified.”

Josephine reassured him languorously that he needn’t worry; she was an absolute idiot. “You don’t look like an idiot to me,” he said. “I expect you know which side your bread’s buttered on.”

“She isn’t an idiot,” Evelyn said. “The artists all want to paint her.”

“I’ll bet they do. I suppose they pay you to model, do they?” he asked Josephine.

“Nobody works for free.”

“Clothes on or off?”

He wasn’t looking at Josephine as he asked this, but grinning at Paul.

Josephine was indifferent. “Mostly off.”

“I wouldn’t let any daughter of mine earn money that way.”

She laughed at him. “Your daughter might be too ugly. Maybe they wouldn’t want to paint her.”

This man had springy pale hair and rubbery, froggy features; his manicured hands—gathering the empty glasses or reaching to light their cigarettes, a gold signet ring on one stubby finger—made Evelyn think of that trick where you move colored pots around so fast that no one can guess where the bean is hidden. Under cover of his attention to her and Moira, Evelyn saw, he was more fascinated by Josephine. He spoke to her differently—jeering and presumptuous and yet afraid of her. He said that he and Paul didn’t know anyone at the party. They’d never met Vincent before; they’d bumped into him on the street outside and he’d persuaded them to come in. “So you have to take pity on us and look after us,” he said, in a tone of wheedling, teasing flirtation.

Evelyn decided that these two men didn’t care about art or literature, and she wished that Vincent hadn’t invited them; yet Moira was energized and spiky, as if she were enjoying their sparring. Mostly she was talking to the older one, but, of course, her attention was really on the beautiful boy, Paul, who rested his chin on his fist and stared into his drink. The older man’s name was Sinden, it turned out, which was his surname. He didn’t like his Christian name, he explained, and wouldn’t tell them what it was, however much they begged him. “I can’t believe the things women get interested in,” he protested. “Now, you see, a man wouldn’t care less about my Christian name, once I said I wasn’t using it. What does it matter, something my mother chose at a time when I didn’t have any say in it? I wouldn’t trust her to name a dog of mine.”

“But imagine if there weren’t any women in the world,” Evelyn said.

Sinden pretended he was anguished by that idea, grabbing her hand and pressing it against his shirtfront to make her feel his heart beating fast; the material of his white shirt was clammy from his body heat, slippery against the vest he wore underneath. He groaned suggestively. “No women! Alas, alack! What would we do without them? But I’ll let you in on a little secret, Evelyn: it isn’t your curiosity we adore you for.”

“But, no, seriously, imagine it,” Evelyn persisted, trying to have a proper conversation. “No one would find anything out if there were no women asking questions. All the secrets would just rot away unnoticed. There would just be a sort of empty framework left. Like one of those wire things they build up plaster on. An armature.”

“I love a bit of gossip,” Josephine said. “Keeps the world going round.”

Sinden winked at her. “It isn’t gossip keeps it going round.”

“You think it’s money, then? Or sex?”

“That’s a poser for you, Sinden,” Paul said, lifting his head from his drink. “Money or sex, old chap?”

“Depends what time of day,” Sinden said. “Depends how many drinks I’ve had.”

“You need the money first,” Paul said. “To buy the drinks that make you think that you don’t care about the money.”

Sinden beckoned them closer, speaking in a hoarse whisper; Evelyn moved her knees away from his under the table. “My friend here has got plenty of it, too,” he said. “Money coming out of Paul’s ears, doesn’t need to do a day’s work in his life. Let’s just say that once upon a time his family were in the tobacco industry, and, when they sold, they invested the proceeds wisely.”

Listening to this description of his wealth, Paul looked bashful and complacent, almost coy. Sinden told them that Paul had been giving him a tour of the war damage in Bristol; he’d never visited before. “Little did we know we were going to bump into you girls! So Paul’s been showing me around and I’m convinced there are opportunities here. For the right sort of people. A fresh start for the city. Building for the future.”

“Do you know about building, then?” Moira asked. “Is that what you do?”

“I’m not a builder.” He laughed. “Do I look like a builder? But I do have very good contacts, with the right sort of men who have the right sort of friends. Contacts are the important thing.”

“Sounds like profiteering to me,” Josephine said. “I hate profiteering.”

“And what’s wrong with making a nice clean profit, out of something everybody wants? That way we win all round.”

“They should just cut out the middleman. Then everything in this city would be a damn sight cheaper. Building by the people, for the people.”

“She’s a Red!” Sinden exclaimed delightedly, staring at her with his goggle eyes. “I’ve never met a real live Red before! Seen a few dead ones.”

“Take a good look,” Josephine said. “Looking is free.”

She settled herself as if she were posing, presenting her head in its dramatic profile, magnificent as a ship’s figurehead. Sinden couldn’t believe, he said, staring at her, why three such lovely girls hadn’t been snapped up. How come they weren’t wearing engagement rings? Weren’t there any red-blooded men around here?

“Moira is engaged,” Evelyn blurted out, as if she were defending their honor, or Moira’s at least. “Sort of engaged. Her boyfriend’s gone as a policeman to Malaya.”

“Cass isn’t my boyfriend.”

“Christ, the poor sap,” Sinden said.

Evelyn protested, astonished. “Why a poor sap?”

“I doubt if you’ll see him again.”

“But we will see him!”

“Don’t suppose he speaks a word of Chinese. I know that game. Put him in charge of a squad of men he can’t talk to, armed with weapons he doesn’t know how to use, in a terrain he doesn’t understand. They’ll supply him with some soft-skinned Austin or Land Rover. Done for at the first road ambush, driving between the plantations he’s supposed to be protecting.”

“But how do you know all that?”

He tapped the side of his nose. “I know what I know.”

“And why are you gloating? It sounds as if you’re glad that he might die.”

Sinden’s horrible knowingness was hard and irrefutable as a rock, Evelyn thought. You couldn’t push back against it unless you understood about guns and vehicles and politics, all those brutally real things. Moira stared at him dry-eyed, challenging him to find the least sign that she cared. “Cass wasn’t my boyfriend. I told him not to go. I knew it was stupid. We never were engaged. He kept on about this cash bonus they were offering, at the end of one year.”

“Good luck with that,” he scoffed. “Getting through to the end of a year.”

“Risking his neck,” Paul said, stirring to wakefulness and slurring his words, “when he could have been spending the evening here with you.”

“You see? Paul likes you,” Sinden said triumphantly. “I knew that he’d like you. He’s pretty choosy, our friend Paul, but he likes you, Moira. Now, why don’t you two lovebirds get dancing, while I buy us more drinks?”

Josephine said then that she was leaving, going on to another party. Evelyn didn’t want anything; she hadn’t finished her first gin-and-orange. The band was playing a bluesy number, and as Paul stood up from the table he pretended to be parping along on an imaginary slide trombone, as if the music were a comedy laid on for his benefit; Sinden joined in on an imaginary snare drum, screwing up his face to feel the beat. Evelyn was buffeted by a gust of rage at their obliviousness. Didn’t they know that this music was serious, it came out of human suffering, it wasn’t a game? The student crowd were all jazz enthusiasts, worshipping Louis Armstrong and Buddy Bolden and King Oliver, whose lives and art set a high-water mark for everything tragic and joyous. The musicians in the band were all just white Bristolians, but seemed to borrow something of that glamour.

Evelyn thought that Moira might refuse to dance, if she was upset by how Sinden had spoken about Cass. But she moved suavely enough into Paul’s arms, with a remote, vague look as if she hardly saw him. Paul wasn’t tall, but he wasn’t slight like a boy: he was muscled and substantial, more authoritative now that he was on his feet. When they’d squeezed their way among the couples on the dance floor, he let his head droop onto Moira’s shoulder and his body rested heavily against hers, as if he really were drunk. He danced well, though, responding to the music’s sluggish melancholy. Evelyn had the surprising thought that bodies were sometimes wiser than the people inside them. She’d have liked to impress somebody with this idea, but couldn’t explain it to Sinden, who would misunderstand her deliberately. When she saw Paul rouse and lift his head to say something in Moira’s ear, pulling her closer with his slow smile and sleepy eyes, Evelyn was stricken with envious desire, in spite of everything. Whatever he said ignited some response in Moira, so that she smiled back secretively, pretending to reproach him, pushing him off a little, not giving anything away. Evelyn had a horror then of Sinden asking her to dance out of sheer obligation, taking second best. She didn’t want to dance with him anyway; she didn’t like him. So when he got up to go to the bar she made her escape with Josephine, said she was popping outside for a bit of air.

“Don’t fall in the water,” Sinden said. “It’s dark out there.”

Emerging so abruptly from the noise and heat of the pub into the night’s blackness and wetness and quiet, Evelyn wondered for a moment if she was drunk, but that didn’t seem likely after one gin. “Don’t men just like to talk?” Josephine said. “They love the sound of their own voices.” Then she hurried away, her big coat flapping, her head down in her gypsy scarf, heels clacking on the pavement, as she weaved her way among the shadowy, slouching men, not afraid of walking by herself through the docklands. It wasn’t quite dark: there were street lamps on the road and lights on some of the wharves and in the timber yards. Light seeped from the pub windows onto its forecourt, where the cobbles gleamed wetly although it had stopped raining; beyond this forecourt a wall dropped abruptly to the water, ten feet below, in a narrow channel that cut through from the Floating Harbor into the Basin. On summer nights, couples would sit on the wall, swinging their legs, drinking the lethal Kingston Black cider, but in winter the idea of that enclosed invisible water was furtive and chilly. When something splashed in the blackness, Evelyn thought of rats. A call from one of the ships in the Basin, in no language she recognized, bounced eerily along the surface of the water.

Probably there wasn’t really any other party, she thought; probably Josephine was hurrying to meet her lover, the married artist. Then she felt sick with loneliness. She longed for a lover of her own and was ashamed of her inexperience, her poor judgment. Things had been hopeless when she was still a schoolgirl, but she’d thought that something would happen now that she’d started at the university—where surely she would thrive, because she was clever. She’d imagined herself surrounded by admirers, and had even been afraid that she’d settle too easily, for someone who wasn’t good enough. Evelyn could have loved Moira’s Cass, for instance, Robert Cassidy, although she didn’t know him well; she’d met him only a few times, when Moira had allowed her to come to the pub with her crowd. Moira kept her emotional life strictly apart from her family, and their parents weren’t to be told that she and Cass were engaged—and, anyhow, now apparently they weren’t. Yet he’d seemed enthralling to Evelyn: bullish, talented, popular, a burly, freckled, red-headed rugby player, his blue eyes watchful and wary. He was a joker and a tease, with a gift for drawing caricatures of his friends. Since Cass had gone off to Malaya, Evelyn had loyally taken a great interest in the Emergency, looking out for snippets about it in the newspapers. It was called an Emergency, their father said, because if they called it a war then the plantation owners wouldn’t be covered by their insurance.

It was too cold outside without her coat; Evelyn had only come out, anyway, to get away from where she was stuck in that corner with Moira and Sinden and Paul. She needed another drink to give her the courage to throw herself back into the party, where she barely knew anyone, and no one was interested in her. A character in a novel, in her situation, would break in on conversations and introduce herself, then turn out to be charming and brilliant; people would be amazed by her ideas and her sex appeal, her stylish gamine haircut. Just as Evelyn was imagining this, she heard someone come out from the pub entrance behind her and say hello. It was Donald, from her French class at the university. When Vincent invited her to the party, Evelyn had been on her way to meet Donald in Carwardines for coffee—they were going to go over some ideas about Racine’s “Phèdre.” She’d passed the invitation on, wanting to impress Donald with her bold sociability, mingling with the rough life in the docks, but hadn’t imagined that he’d dare to come. He was wearing the same unsuitable striped blazer that he wore to classes.

“Are you having a good time?” he said.

“Isn’t this just an amazing place? Very ‘Fleurs du Mal.’ ”

“Is that the name of the cider?”

“Oh, dear, did you drink it? I should have warned you—you need to put black currant in, to take the taste away. Was it very awful?”

“Definitely the worst thing I’ve ever drunk. You look stunning, by the way. I’d drink the cider bucket dry, it goes without saying, for the chance of spending an evening with you. The sort of ordeal knights undergo in the old stories.”

“I never heard of one drinking a bucket of cider.”

“They always give girls the expurgated version.”

Evelyn liked Donald, but—it was just her luck—he wouldn’t do for a boyfriend. He looked about sixteen, to start with: overeager and stumbling and pallid, with sticking-out ears and a tense, lumpy jaw. He’d been a boarder at Queen Elizabeth’s Hospital, where the boys’ uniform hadn’t changed in centuries—a sort of long dress buttoning up the front, with yellow stockings and black shoes. Evelyn had seen these boys tormented in the street by children from the local schools, and, once she knew that Donald had worn the yellow stockings, couldn’t help imagining him in them. When Moira first met him, she’d said that he was really sweet, pity he was so N.P.A., which meant Non-Physically Attractive. Donald took off his blazer when Evelyn shivered and put it around her shoulders. “You should come here in the summer,” she said, encouragingly. “In the summer you can sit out on the dock.”

“I should think people fall in, though. After a pint or two of Fleurs du Mal.”

“Are you drunk, Don? I don’t think I’ve ever seen you when you’re drunk. I wonder what you’re like.”

“I’m adorable, apparently.”

“Do you feel drunk now?”

He frowned, as if testing himself inwardly. “Drunk enough to fall in the water, not drunk enough to risk going anywhere near it. It’s an odd kind of drunkenness, different to beer, lighter and more extreme, as if someone had just sliced off the top of my mind, like taking the top off an egg. Yet ask me to supply the past historic first-person plural of the verb saisir, and I bet I could still do it.”

“Nous saisîmes, of course, you oaf.”

He sighed and complained that she was too quick for him.

Evelyn shuddered inside the blazer’s warmth and Donald put an arm tentatively around her shoulders. “Don, if we went back inside,” she said, “would you buy me a drink? Because I need a boost. I’m not really enjoying myself much at this party. I’m not talking to anybody, or not anybody I actually like—I mean, apart from you, of course. I’m always disappointed at parties. I long to be, you know, a succès fou, but I never am.”

“You’re a succès fou with me,” he said.

“Yes,” she said with a flare of irritation. “But that’s not enough, is it?”

“I suppose not.”

Donald bought Evelyn a gin-and-orange with double gin in it, and after that the party went much better. She wasn’t exactly a succès fou, but she submerged herself effectively in the flamboyant, quarrelsome, ecstatic, flirting mass, drifting between different groups as if she were always on her way somewhere else. More drinks were bought for her from time to time, by one man or another; she danced with a couple of these men. In lieu of a lover, she decided to be in love with the glorious, sinuous, shameless music, and with the whole jazz band collectively, from the droopy-faced ironic pianist wreathed in his cigar smoke to the grinning drummer perched so tautly and eagerly upright on his stool; she even included the brooding trumpet player, whip-thin, the quiff of his thick black hair oiled like a pelt, who glared at her when she said something loudly, by mistake, over his solo in “West End Blues.” She danced with Donald only once: predictably, he was a hopeless dancer, with no sense of rhythm. “Are you actually counting?” she asked, accusingly.

“I thought that was what you were supposed to do.”

“Only when you’re learning. Afterward, you’ve got to just feel it, in your limbs.”

“I apologize for my unfeeling limbs,” he said.

“And the counting’s supposed to relate to the beat of the music. It’s not just something random ticking over inside your own head.”

“Sorry.”

Evelyn didn’t lose sight of her sister, in her circulation around the party. Moira hadn’t stuck with those two men, thank goodness; she’d shaken them off and danced with different people. She’d been at the heart of the knots of fun and laughter that Evelyn had most wanted to break into. Had someone replaced Robert Cassidy in Moira’s affections? Evelyn kept a lookout, but couldn’t see anything obvious. Toward the end of the evening, when Evelyn was thinking she needed to leave, to catch the last bus home to Avonmouth, she made her way to where Moira was standing, talking again, as it happened, to Sinden and Paul, who had their coats on and their hats in their hands. Evelyn didn’t know whether Moira was coming home with her or not; often she stayed over in town with friends.

“We’re making efforts to abduct you and your sister,” Sinden said jocularly to Evelyn. “Paul wants to give you girls a lift somewhere, anywhere. The night outside is not only dismal—it’s also young. I know a little place we can get a drink after hours, something that doesn’t taste of dead animals. Surely nobody wants to go to bed yet?”

“No matter how dog-tired I am, I can’t sleep,” Paul volunteered unexpectedly with a drunk’s solipsism, more or less talking to himself. “Soon as the old head hits the pillow, bang! Whole caboodle starts up again, the merry-go-round.”

Evelyn said she didn’t want a lift, though it was very kind. She’d rather get the bus.

“No monkeying around,” Sinden assured her. “Evelyn, I swear. If you want to go straight home, we’ll take you straight home. But there’s a business proposition I’d like to discuss with your sister.”

She looked at Moira anxiously. “What kind of business proposition?”

“A good friend of mine is in lingerie,” Sinden said. “Very exclusive and expensive. He has a salon and a small workshop in London, and I’m aware he’s wanting to expand into dress design. All I’m saying is that I’d like to take a look at Moira’s portfolio—not tonight, of course, but some other time. If I thought her work was good, then I could introduce her to my friend. At least let me give you my card, Moira, with my telephone number.”

Moira said it was an interesting idea and she would think about it; she took the card and put it in her purse. Sinden insisted again that in the meantime they should come for a spin in the Bentley. “I’m happy to take the wheel, if you’re afraid Paul’s had a few too many.”

Evelyn was about to repeat that she’d rather not, when Moira seized her by the arm and jerked her away. “Wait for us here,” she said to Sinden. “We’ll get our coats, then we need to pop upstairs and powder our noses.”

“But I don’t want to, Moira,” Evelyn protested sotto voce, as her sister pulled her toward the bar. “I hate those men.”

“Just follow me,” Moira hissed, not letting go of her grip. They found their coats and Evelyn’s bag; when Evelyn saw Donald watching her, solitary, across the room, she was smitten with compunction. Perhaps before she left she’d dance with him once more, even though he was hopeless. The sisters hesitated, coats over their arms, at the foot of a dark staircase; they’d seen girls disappearing up here in the course of the evening, presumably in search of the toilet—impossible to tell, when those girls came down again, if they’d been successful. The men just went to pee whenever they needed, in the harbor outside. “Is there a Ladies’ upstairs?” they asked Vincent, who looked doubtful and said that not many ladies drank in the Packet as a rule.

Evelyn was hesitant. “We could wait until we get home.”

“I can’t wait.”

Now that they’d imagined relieving themselves, they were both desperate to go. It was very dark on the stairs. Evelyn discovered a light switch and tried it, but nothing came on; they felt their way, hanging on to a greasy handrail. Moira found a book of matches in her bag and by their wavering feeble light—they were only little paper ones, the kind they give you in hotels—she and Evelyn climbed the winding wood-panelled staircase and peered into rooms, one after another, of an extraordinary ancientness and awfulness. Some had their windows boarded up; in others, they could make out, by a dim light creeping through filthy windowpanes, looming forms that might have been rolled-up drugget, broken chairs, crates full of bottles, coiled rope, heaps of white china crockery, a birdcage, a painted sign lying on its side. The staves of a barrel, whose hoops had burst, fanned in a toothy grin. Each time a match went out, the dank smell of the place—tarry and rotten—settled on them like the whole foul weight of the past. “I suppose this would be Vincent’s idea of heaven,” Moira said disparagingly. The top floor was emptier, but still none of these rooms was any kind of bathroom or toilet; in one of them, where iron bedsprings were propped against one wall and the torn old wallpaper was printed with flower baskets, Moira exclaimed, “Oh, I’m just going to go right here.”

Evelyn squealed. “You can’t! Moira!”

“I can! No one will ever know. The place stinks anyway. Hold my coat, will you, and strike another match for me? I don’t want to get pee on my dress.”

They were probably both drunker than they realized. Moira hoicked up her skirt and petticoat, pulled down her knickers, spread her legs, and peed against the wall with a satisfying splashing. “God, that’s good,” she said, laughing. And when she finished she struck the last match for Evelyn, who had more difficulty, tugging her tight slacks down.

“What if anyone comes? What about rats?”

“Well, hurry up, then.”

Evelyn screamed while she peed, imagining the rats. When the match went out, as she struggled to pull up her slacks, Moira told her that Cass was dead.

“What?”

“His mother wrote to me last week, at the art college. He was ambushed. I suppose he was shot, just like the man said. It was all my fault. Which is what his mother more or less thinks, too.”

Evelyn stood frozen with her slacks halfway up her thighs. “Oh, Moira. Oh, no.”

“I feel so awful. He said he’d sign up if I wouldn’t go with him to Paris.”

“That doesn’t make it your fault.”

“I told him that I didn’t love him. That I loved someone else.”

Moira sobbed just once, or at least Evelyn thought it was a sob: an ugly barking noise, roughly torn out of her, almost like exasperation. When Evelyn tried to console her, Moira pushed her away, wiping her eyes brusquely with the back of her hand. Evelyn sobbed, too, in sympathy with her sister; she couldn’t truly grieve for Robert Cassidy, she realized, because she’d hardly known him. His death was too improbable—he had seemed so solidly alive, with his loud laugh, the explosion of his freckles. As the girls grew used to the dark, each could make out the other’s shape; the darkness anyhow seemed thinner up here at the top of the building. There must have been a broken windowpane, because the wind whistled and a draft blew around their shoulders.

“So who is the someone else?”

“I can’t tell you. Because it isn’t really anything. Not yet.”

“Who, though? You have to tell!”

Moira couldn’t suppress her shudder of voluptuousness. “The trumpet player.”

Evelyn felt like a fool. Of course it was: with his forbidding frown and his high notes. She saw, in a flash of revelation, that Moira had been performing that entire evening, dancing and flirting with Paul and all those other men, for the eyes of the trumpet player only. “And does he know? I mean, what you feel about him?”

“He sort of knows. He knows, yes. Though he’s still with someone else right now.”

In her sister’s expression—vivid even in the dimness, and so familiar from their childhood—Evelyn saw recklessness, fear, concealment, power. Moira had made such efforts to transform herself, when they moved down to Bristol, into this controlled, poised young woman. Yet some essence of the fierce, bold child persisted in her, and had been diverted into new channels, sexual and personal.

“And now,” Moira declared, “we have to get away from those hideous men.”

“I thought you liked them!”

“I hate them. I could kill them.”

At one end of the landing on this upper floor, light came weakly through a half-glassed metal-framed door, which led onto a fire escape. Moira tried the door handle, tugging it abruptly so that the door opened and boisterous wet night rushed in. “I thought so,” she exclaimed in triumph, her voice whipping away from her in the blast.

“No, Moy, I can’t. I’m not going down there. Not in a thousand years.”

“You can!”

“Why don’t we just go downstairs normally and insist on getting the bus home?”

“Because you can never get away from that kind of man. They’ll inveigle us into something or other and then it’ll be too late.”

Evelyn was sure that she could have got away from them. But Moira had buttoned up her coat already and stepped out onto the rickety, rusty platform. Evelyn screamed again: was the fire escape swaying away from the stuccoed side of the building? “It’s fine,” Moira reassured her. “Just a little bit shaky. I’ll go first.”

This was more or less what she’d said all those years ago, when they’d walked on the metal struts across the glasshouse roof in the park, up in the north. That hadn’t ended well: Moira had put her foot through the glass and needed twelve stitches—they’d got into serious trouble. At least this fire escape was a proper stairway, with a bannister to hold on to, and not just one of those ladders attached to a wall. Moira ran down swiftly and lightly, with a jangle of her heels on the iron, to the bottom, which was still about six feet off the ground, in an open yard at the side of the pub. Then she jumped like a cat, landing gracefully in a crouch on all fours, pale coat billowing around her in the wet.

“See! It’s easy.”

Evelyn stood on the narrow platform at the top, sick and dizzy and exalted, while the wind flew at her and threw rain at her. Lights on the ships in the Basin and on the wharves were reflected in the black water; beyond the harbor she could make out the great masses of the city against the night sky, its ghostly terraces climbing the hills. How could she take in that Cass was dead, while she was still alive and young? All the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them, were in that giddy moment spread beneath her. Evelyn made her way down the fire escape more cautiously than Moira, then hesitated at the bottom.

“Throw me your bag,” Moira said. “What’s in it?”

“A dress I wore so that they couldn’t see me. And Mam’s umbrella.”

“She’ll be annoyed. It’s her whist drive tonight.”

“Oh, Moira, are you full of grief?”

“Just jump,” Moira said impatiently. “Trust me.”

And Evelyn jumped and she was all right. She was jubilant, landing in a crunch of gravel beside her sister, though the jolt shocked all thought out of her body for a moment, and her palms stung from the sharpness of the stones, down there in that filthy salty bitter underworld of dark. ♦

This is drawn from “The Party.”