Work Text:
1928
Marjorie Phelps picked up the figure, now glazed and fired like its predecessor. Viewed dispassionately, it was a success. Nine inches high, a sound piece of work, with painstaking attention to detail. It would be a pity to smash it to bits with the poker that he had left on the hearth, appealing though the thought might be at this precise moment. Perhaps, in time, she would be able to look at it again. She would send him his, she decided. A Christmas present was a Christmas present, and to keep it now would be to admit that things had changed, but she did not think, after all, that she would send this one to his mother.
“I’d almost take you on myself if you asked me.”
She groaned and kicked the fender. The dinner had been a strain despite his practised charm, its full impersonal force never before trained on her, and her overly strenuous attempts to live up to it. It had been a relief when he did not suggest going on to a show but deposited her politely home.
He had never lied, never pretended, never laid claim to anything but the pleasure of her company, the comfort of her fireside, easy conversation and buttered crumpets, honey thoughtfully provided. Unlike Ann Dorland, she had not been deliberately misled by a heartless cad. That might have been almost easier to bear. This mistake was hers alone.
It was an uncomplicated friendship, free of the loud and tumultuous emotions with which the studios of Chelsea were awash, not to mention a refreshing lack of the self-proclaimed genius in need of devoted acolytes to mend his socks. He listened to her, laughed with her, matched her wit and finished her sentences as she finished his. She relished it, delighted in it. Ruined it.
She had assumed too much.
He had admired her work, received her compliments with equanimity and given them in return, light-heartedly offered to run away with her and made no objection to her dropping his title. He had taken her out to the theatre and sprawled, their legs entangled, in cramped studios eating kippers at three in the morning, called her his dear girl and admired and accepted his image, given with fine-tuned casualness, in nine inches of porcelain.
She had imagined too much.
She had cleared the ground, ascertaining that his interest in Ann Dorland was purely investigatory, while conveying in passing the fact that her own life was at present a loveless desert devoid of hectic passion. She had established her Bohemian credentials with amusing conversation about adultery and invitations to avant garde theatre, where his lack of enthusiasm for a play that had only narrowly squeezed past a Lord Chamberlain still perturbed by Oscar Wilde had given her cause to rule out another, albeit remote, possibility. Yet he continued to take her to dine, his hand on her arm, before returning her chastely to her door. Damn it!
Conventional approaches were barred. It was not as if she could invite him to dinner or the theatre with any sense of ceremony. More unconventional displays of affection, frequent among the Chelsea set, particularly of the public and inebriated sort, were tiresome. She had her pride. But that night in her flat, free at last of the glum presence of Ann Dorland, she had looked at him, frustratingly and determinedly perched in the battered armchair when she and a perfectly good couch were at his disposal, and finally ventured a deceptively casual enquiry.
“You don’t feel inclined that way I suppose?”
He didn’t.
She had carried it off moderately well, she thought. She would remain outwardly cool, calm and collected, however much it cost her, and perhaps, with time, the friendship could be salvaged. But her faith in her own judgment was shattered and she distrusted her own emotions. Komski had turned out a bully and a swine, Peter a fantasy of her own making. She would not run the risk of getting it so wrong again. If she couldn’t have the real thing, she would make do with the imitation.
She would not be able to sleep. She found her overall and a reassuringly compliant ball of clay.
**********
1940
In the process of determining which belongings needed to be packed and taken to Talboys, which needed to be packed and stored in the basement, and which could be left under dust sheets to take their chances with the air raids, a performance which made one rather long for the days when all one’s worldly goods could be crammed into a single trunk, Harriet found the figurine at the back of the top shelf of the drawing room dresser half concealed behind some tastefully arranged Venetian glass. She held it out to Peter with an inquiring eye.
“Good Lord,” he said. “I didn’t know that was there. I suppose Bunter must have brought it when he packed up the flat and it’s been sitting up there all that time like the purloined letter.”
“It’s very good,” Harriet said, turning it over to inspect the monogram on the base. “Marjorie Phelps, if I’m not mistaken. I didn’t know you knew her, though by the look of it, it must have been a while ago.” She paused, absorbing the fact that the piece depicted her husband in his dressing gown and judging by the fluid lines of the bare calves not much else, and wondered just quite how well he had known its creator.
“Not from the life,” he said quickly.
“I wasn’t going to ask.”
“We knocked about a bit,” he said, looking up at her from a straw-filled packing case. “In my youthful past. Getting on for ten years ago or so it would have been – before l met you.” He paused, eyes meeting hers. “There was a time when she did once casually suggest… but l liked her too much to take her up on it.”
Harriet pondered a mental outlook that had rendered liking incompatible with lust, and, contemplating the figurine, doubted that the suggestion had been quite as casual as all that. She had liked Marjorie Phelps, cheerful and competent, and, at the time she had known her, accompanied by a succession of admiring hangers-on, none of whom she had seemed to care a fig for and none of whom had lasted very long. Though she had always gained the impression that Marjorie thought her rather an idiot for going so spectacularly overboard over Phil. Well she had been right about that. And since the trial she had hardly seen her at all. Examining the piece, taking in the delicate scrolls of the ear, the flowing dressing gown – however imaginary – its lapels clearly delineated against the finger-smooth surface of the neck, and the hands – good heavens those hands – she thought perhaps she knew why.
They were all products of their earlier experiences. She hoped Marjorie too, clearly aware nearly a decade earlier of what it had taken Harriet five years to realise, had managed to vanquish the ghosts of the past. She also hoped that that earlier Peter had managed to be tactful. Remembering Miss Hillyard, she wondered just how much practice he had had and thought that had it had been her, rather than making him a present of flattering bits of china, she would have been tempted to run off several dozen and sell them at vast profit in Heals just to serve him right. Perhaps, she thought, she should think herself fortunate that with Phil and Peter both, she had never had to ask but only, gloriously, to acquiesce.
She handed Peter the figure with care. If he hadn’t seen it, it wasn’t for her to tell him. It was a long time ago and she owed Marjorie that much.
"We'll take it to Talboys," she said.