He picked a cigarette from the box and lit it with the table-lighter. The clock tapped slowly as the smoke rose. Where had she said she was coming from? He'd written it down somewhere, next to the words "Tea at Three", so that he wouldn't forget.
The doorbell rang and he jerked in his chair, spilling ash over the knees of his trousers. He dusted himself off, making pale grey smears, and put his cigarette out in the ashtray. Then he stood and adjusted his tie and walked to the door.
She looked no older. She was wearing a coquettish navy-blue hat with a cream feather, and a suit to match, blue serge with white piping. She wore dark glasses with white frames and did not take them off to kiss him. He held on to her white-gloved hands and spread her arms wide, the better to look at her. She accepted his scrutiny, smiling. She didn't used to wear such brilliant red lipstick, he thought.
"Well," she said after a moment or two, "do I pass muster? May I come in?"
"Absolutely!" he said hurriedly. "Where are my manners? I'm so sorry, it's just – it's been such an awfully long time. Please, come in."
She smiled ironically.
"Thank you, darling."
He stood aside to make way for her and she swept past, her heels brisk on the wooden floor. Her hair was lighter now, blonder; she'd had a permanent wave. Her eyes were still their soft petal blue, like violets or bluebells.
He made more tea but she asked for a small glass of sherry instead. She never touched tea any more; she said it stained her teeth. She'd had them all whipped out in Hollywood, she said, laughing, showing them off, and replaced with porcelain caps, but it meant she was a stranger to tea, coffee and red wine now. He noticed that it did not prevent her from smoking.
She smoked American filter-tipped cigarettes, Chesterfields, imported especially for her by a tobacconist's on Victoria Street. She leaned over the flame of his outstretched lighter, and he saw that the blouse she wore beneath her smart tapered jacket was cut rather low.
They talked inconsequentially, of their old friends, of the Best Boys and chorus-girls they had known, the juvenile leads now turning grey, the old warhorses of repertory who'd died in harness. She was playing in something in the West End, a "dreadful little thriller" which was sold out until September.
"I despise it, darling," she said airily, "but it's all I know how to do."
He remembered her Juliet at Broadstairs, and couldn't help but agree. She didn't act, she projected. She threw herself out from the stage, like music, like a bright light. Carolyn Chambers with a little dusting of Eliza Doolittle, a pinch of Madame de Pompadour, a thin veil of Lady Windermere. That was why she hadn't worked on film – too brash, too big. A year in Los Angeles was more than enough, she said, shuddering.
But on stage it was a different story. No matter that the music was an empty, easy, popular tune; no matter if her light was more flash than true illumination – after all, that was what the public wanted these days, wasn't it? They'd tired of his sort of actor long ago. She was what they liked, now. She was no Ellen Terry, but she had presence, and she had timing.
"Carolyn," he'd said at their first rehearsal together. "I shall call you Carrie." She was modern – he'd seen that the minute he met her. Tantalising and unknowable, but somehow familiar. Like the future.
He didn't know why she'd come, and couldn't think how to ask. She laughed elegantly, trillingly, and told anecdotes about the Mickey at the Palace and Esme at the Duke of York's. He smiled but the names meant nothing to him; his memory was ragged these days, full of holes. He excused himself and on the way downstairs, caught himself in the mirror.
His tie was lopsided and the smart cardigan he had put on specially bore a dried-in inkstain he hadn't noticed before. It was an old-man stain, an old-man cardigan. He pulled it off, loosened his tie and unbuttoned his collar. Let her see him like this. Once, she had despaired delightedly at his slovenly habits.
Whenever they'd gone out together, to the Ivy or the Savoy or the Café de Paris, when they were starring in that American play – what was it called? – she'd scolded and fussed over him. She wouldn't let him out of doors in anything less than full evening-dress.
"Anthony," she would say, "your fans would be so disappointed! And think of the photographers!"
Seventeen, eighteen years ago, was it? He'd won the London Evening Standard Award for his performance that year, and that Christmas they had got married. Their affair had been clandestine, then an open secret, then a delicious scandal. Marie had retreated in silence and dignity, taking the children back to Berkshire. The papers had called them names: cradle-snatcher, femme fatale, but he hadn't cared about anything but Carolyn. Twenty-two years old, and him a family man! Old enough to be her father; her grandfather, almost. When he held her, he'd felt as though he was touching youth itself. His hands trembled.
"What are you doing, darling?"
She'd come out into the hallway and was staring at him quizzically in the mirror, her shiny blonde head cocked, the cigarette in its short holder smoking between her white-gloved fingers.
He shook his head and half-smiled at his own foolishness.
"Forgetting what I came out for," he said. She laughed and her teeth gleamed in the mirror.
"I'm always doing that, too," she said. "I must be getting old."
"Nonsense," he said. He noticed her glass was empty.
"Have another, won't you?"
"Not at this hour," she said, but she let him anyway.
*
"You heard about Max and me, I suppose?" she said, a little later. She was looking away from him, out of the half-shuttered window and down the street to the church at the end.
"Sort of," he said awkwardly. He hadn't. He hadn't wanted to know anything about them. Max had been a friend; almost his own age. Besides, he didn't take the papers any more; they were full of gossip and nonsense and scare-mongering talk of war. She smiled and nodded, her head still turned away.
"A younger woman!" she exclaimed in her arch stage-voice. "Men! So predictable. When will they learn?"
He didn't know what to say. He remembered Marie's voice when he'd told her he was leaving her; that same bright, glassy tone.
"I'm awfully sorry, old girl," he said.
"Damned if I am," she said, draining her glass. "Oh well, it's all in the past now, I suppose."
"How's Teddy?" he asked, in the silence.
"Teddy's fine," she said. "He simply adores Eton. I'm half-glad he's away from home, to be honest. Divorces are bloody."
"Yes," he said.
"Besides, if he were in town my secret would be out."
"What secret?" He was startled.
"The fact that I'm the mother of a seventeen-year-old. My agent's lips are sealed, of course – I'm with Johnny Mure now, by the way – but I've told him that if the boy is very pretty he's allowed to let slip that I'm thirty-three. People always say I don't look it, even then," she said, with a hint of pride. "Teddy would love to hear from you, you know," she added suddenly. "He misses you."
"I'll go down to visit," he said, "as soon as I can."
She smiled in relief. There was such gratitude in it that he thought he might even keep his promise. But Eton was a long way away, and he had no idea what to say to his son. Besides, an old man like him – it would be embarrassing for the poor boy. Teddy was better off on his own. What were boys interested in these days, anyway? He had no idea. Rugger, he supposed, and guns, and girls, very likely. Teddy's friends were probably all in love with Carrie. They didn't want to see his wreck of a father wash up in his old-fashioned suit, getting things wrong, forgetting things.
*
She stood in the doorway, angular, beseeching. The evening was painted purple over the sky behind her, like a backcloth. She was a grey silhouette against the light, the white feather on her little hat swaying and bobbing in the breeze. It had turned cold, and he was glad he wasn't going out in it.
"Won't you come, really?"
He shook his head as though he were ashamed.
"I can't," he said. "I really can't."
"It doesn't matter if I don't win," she said softly. "And of course my agent will find me an escort. But I would so like you to be there, Anthony. Don't you remember when you took me? Marie was ill, and it was the first time we were out in public together! I was so excited. And then you won! And think of all their faces! No-one's seen you in years!"
"Exactly," he said, "They shan't know who on earth I am. Besides, it's not … appropriate."
"You're ashamed of me," she said in astonishment, and her bluebell eyes went flat and dark, like pressed flowers.
He thought of himself in the mirror; a crumbling Lear, a withered, shambling old man in a stained cardigan, and her standing behind him, trim as a bird, her bright head alert, inclined. She had fallen in love with him when he was in his prime. Perhaps she loved him still: perhaps she really couldn't see that while she was still beautiful, he was no longer handsome. He was ashamed of himself. He wasn't fit to be seen with her. Not any more.
"I'm sorry," he said. He leaned forward and kissed her unresisting cheek. Her perfume surrounded him and he felt her sticky lipstick brush the side of his face. When he went to wipe it off in the mirror, it looked as though she had bitten him.
He went back and sat down in her place on the sofa, settling into the dent her body had made. It was still warm. In the ashtray were scarlet-stained cigarette-ends. She had left her Chesterfields behind. The sherry was half gone. He imagined the Awards tonight; the gowns, the lights, the glittering ceremony. Of course it didn't matter whether she won or not; what mattered was that she would be on the red carpet, in the limelight, where she belonged, where she wanted to be. And she would have a handsome man on her arm – no, a boy. There was no room for old men any longer.
A boy with porcelain teeth and skin like a girl and thick blonde hair, he thought. And when she looked into his eyes they would be clean and empty and full of possibility; like the future.
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