Lucky Jim

XI

AS he left the bar with Christine at his side, Dixon felt like a special agent, a picaroon, a Chicago war-lord, a hidalgo, an oil baron, a mohock. He kept careful control over his features to stop them doing what they wanted to do and breaking out into an imbecile smirk of excitement and pride. When she turned and faced him at the edge of the floor, he found it hard to believe that she was really going to let him touch her, or that the men near them wouldn't spontaneously intervene to prevent him. But in a moment there they were in the conventional pseudo-embrace, actually fencing together, not very skilfully, but without doubt dancing. Dixon looked past her face in silence, afraid of any distraction from the task of not leading her into a collision, for the floor was a good deal more thickly populated than a quarter of an hour earlier. Among the dancers he recognized Barclay, the Professor of Music, dancing with his wife. She permanently resembled a horse, he only when he laughed, which he did suddenly and seldom, but was momentarily to be seen doing now.

'What was the matter with Mrs Goldsmith, do you know?' Christine asked.

This inquisitiveness surprised him. 'She did look rather fed-up, didn't she?' he fenced.

'Was it because she was expecting Bertrand to bring her here tonight instead of me?'

Did that mean she knew about the switch of partners? It needn't, but it might. 'I don't know,' he said in a muffled voice.

'I think you do know.' She sounded quite angry. 'I wish you'd tell me.'

'I know nothing at all about it, I'm afraid. And in any case it's nothing to do with me.'

'If that's your attitude, then there's nothing more to be said.'

Dixon felt himself flushing for the second time in the last few minutes. Obviously she'd been at her most typical when helping Bertrand to bait him at their first encounter, when reproving him for drinking too much, when treating him this evening as non-existent. Her formal, not her relaxed, pose was the true one. Her cooperation over the sheet had been given in return for anecdote-material likely to amuse her London friends, her amiability over the phone had been to get something out of him. No doubt she was disturbed by the Bertrand-Carol business, but the feminine manoeuvre of using an innocent bystander as whipping-boy was one he'd learnt to recognize and dislike.

They danced on in silence for some time. She'd not been modest in declaring herself an indifferent dancer, but Dixon's enforced avoidance of anything ambitious kept them fairly well together. The other couples moved round them, wheeling when a space momentarily presented itself, huddling and marking time in the crushes. Everybody else seemed to be talking, and eventually a female voice of Christine's pitch, heard close at hand, deceived Dixon. 'What did you say?' he asked.

'Nothing.'

Something would have to be said by him now, so he said what he'd been waiting to say all the evening: 'I never got a chance to thank you for playing up so well over that phone business.'

'What phone business?'

'You know, me pretending to Bertrand that I was a reporter.'

'Oh, that. I'd sooner not discuss that, if you don't mind.'

She couldn't be allowed to get away with that. 'Supposing I do mind?'

'How do you mean?'

'You seem to forget that, but for me, and but for my little impersonation, you probably wouldn't be here at all tonight.'

'Well, that wouldn't have mattered very much, would it?'

The dance came to an end, but neither of them thought of leaving the floor. Through the applause he said: 'No, perhaps it wouldn't, but you seemed to want to come at the time, didn't you?'

'Look, can't you shut up about it?'

'All right, but don't you try to queen it over me. You've no call to do that.'

She shrugged clumsily, then dropped her eyes. 'I'm sorry; that was silly of me. I didn't mean to be like that.'

As she spoke, an inaudible piano introduction led into the last of the set. 'O.K., then,' Dixon said. 'Dance?'

'Yes, of course.'

They moved off again. 'I think we're getting the hang of this quite well,' he said in a moment.

'I wish I hadn't said what I did say. I was a fool. I acted like a perfect fool.'

He saw that when, as now, she abandoned her set expression, her lips were full, and protruded like her uncle's. 'It's all right, really; it was nothing,' he said.

'No it wasn't nothing; it was ridiculous. I thought the whole of the Evening Post business was brilliantly funny.'

'Oh come, there's no need to go to the opposite extreme.'

'But you see I didn't feel like discussing it with you because that would have been like laughing at Bertrand behind his back, and that would have been wrong. I'm afraid I must have sounded a bit unfriendly over the phone the second time, but that was only because I couldn't have let myself go like I wanted to without seeming as if I was getting mixed up in a conspiracy to get the better of Bertrand. That's all it was.'

The whole thing sounded rather childish, but better that than peevish. All the same, what messes these women got themselves into over nothing. Men got themselves into messes too, and ones that weren't so easily got out of, but their messes arose from attempts to satisfy real and simple needs. He was saved from having to reply by the intervention of an enormous, half-incoherent voice, like that of an ogre at the onset of aphasia, which now began to sing through loudspeakers with an intonation rather resembling Cecil Goldsmith's:

In trying to pull Christine out of the path of a short red-faced man dancing with a tall pale-faced woman, Dixon got badly out of time.' Start again,' he mumbled, but they seemed unable to move together as before.

'Here, you'll never do any good while you stand right over there,' Christine said. 'I'm not close enough to you to feel what you're doing. Get hold of me properly.'

Gingerly, Dixon moved forward until they were standing up against each other. He again took her warm right hand, and steered her off. This time things were much better, though Dixon was a little shorter of breath than he thought he should be. Her body felt rounded, and rather bulky, against his. They moved down the floor away from the band, through the sound of which Dixon faintly caught a baying laugh. Bertrand, his big head flung back, was just disappearing into a gap some yards away. Though Dixon couldn't see Carol's face, this seemed to indicate that she'd been at least partly mollified. What the hell was Bertrand up to? This was a problem deserving as urgent attention as the problem of why he wore a beard. Was he trying to have two mistresses at once, or was he trying to discard one in favour of the other? If the latter, which one was he trying to acquire and which one was he trying to reconcile to being discarded? Would he bother, though, about reconciling people to what he wanted to do with them? Probably not, in which case it was presumably Carol who was in the ascendant, because that was the only way of explaining her presence here tonight. Christine must be functioning merely as Gore-Urquhart's niece, but would have to be somehow retained on Bertrand's establishment until the Gore-Urquhart deal was safely concluded. Dixon found his head beginning to sing slightly as he realized that the third round in his campaign against Bertrand was about to begin, though he didn't yet see how battle was going to be joined.

'How are you getting on with Professor Welch these days?' Christine asked suddenly.

Dixon stiffened. 'Oh, not too badly,' he said mechanically.

'He hasn't been on to you about that phone call?'

He couldn't stifle a howl, but hoped the music would drown it. 'You mean Bertrand did find out it was me after all?'

'Find out it was you? How do you mean?'

'That I was pretending to be the reporter that time.'

'No, I wasn't talking about that business. I meant the phone call from that man in your digs, that Sunday.'

As the body of a decapitated hen is said to go running about the farmyard, Dixon's legs continued to perform the requisite dance-steps. 'He knows that I arranged for Atkinson to tell me my parents had come down?'

'Oh, is that who Atkinson is? He seems to have done a lot of phoning since we met. Yes, Mr Welch knows you asked him to ring you up about your parents.'

'Who told him? Who told him?'

'Please don't dig your nails into my back… It was that little man who played the oboe - you did tell me his name…'

'Yes. I did. Johns is his name. Johns.'

'That's right. It was the only thing I remember him saying the whole time I was there. Except for when he said you must have gone to the pub the previous evening, that is. He seems to have got it in for you rather.'

'Yes, he does, doesn't he? Tell me: was Mrs Welch there when he blew the gaff about the phone call?'

'No, I'm sure she wasn't. Just the three of us were chatting together after lunch.'

'That's good.' There was a fair chance that Welch hadn't noticed what Johns had told him, since he'd presumably only told him once; Mrs Welch, on the other hand, would have been likely to go on telling Welch until he did notice. But perhaps Johns had told her separately, out of Christine's hearing. Then a fresh aspect of the situation struck him: 'How did Johns say he got to know about this? I didn't tell him, as you can imagine.'

'He said he was there when you were arranging it.'

'That's pretty rich, isn't it?' he said, scowling. 'As if I'd have said a word in front of that little ponce… Sorry. No, he was listening outside the door. Must have been. I remember thinking I heard something.'

'What a filthy trick,' she said with unexpected venom.' What had you done to him?'

'Only mucked about with a photograph of a chap on the front of a paper of his with a pencil.'

This utterance, enigmatic enough in itself, was half blotted out by the disturbance which now arose to mark the end of the set. After Dixon had explained, Christine, who was just starting to move off at his side, turned and looked at him, laughing with her mouth closed. When he smiled sourly, she began laughing with her tongue between those slightly irregular teeth. Dixon felt desire abruptly flooding his entire frame with an immense fatigue, as if he'd been struck by a bullet in some vital spot. All his facial muscles relaxed involuntarily. She caught his eye and stopped laughing.

'Thank you for the dance,' he said in a normal tone.

'I enjoyed it very much,' she replied, compressing her lips after she spoke.

Dixon realized with wonderment that he didn't really care about Johns's latest piece of gaff-blowing, for the moment anyway. It must be because he was having such a good time at the dance.

In the bar again, they found Gore-Urquhart in his former seat, already being talked to by Bertrand, as if their conversation had never been interrupted. Margaret was in even closer attendance, if possible; she broke off from laughing at a retort of Gore-Urquhart's to look up casually at Dixon with an air that suggested she was wondering idly who he might happen to be. More drinks arrived, proving inexplicably to be double gins. They were brought, of course, by Maconochie, one of whose jobs at these functions was to prevent the importation of spirits. Dixon, who was beginning to do what he'd have described as 'feeling his age', sat down in a chair and began drinking his drink and smoking a cigarette. How hot it was; and how his legs ached; and how much longer was all this going to go on? After a moment he roused himself to talk to Christine, but she was sitting next to Bertrand and, though unheeded, evidently listening to what he was saying to her uncle, who was keeping his eyes on the floor in the way that Dixon had noticed earlier. Margaret was laughing again, swaying towards Gore-Urquhart so that their shoulders kept touching. Oh well, Dixon thought, each must enjoy himself as and when he can. But where was Carol?

Just then she reappeared, walking up to them with a kind of deliberate carelessness that made Dixon suspect her of having a bottle of something, now no doubt much depleted, hidden in the ladies' cloakroom. The expression on her face boded ill for somebody, or perhaps everybody. When she reached the group, Dixon saw Gore-Urquhart look up at her and try to flash some facial signal; 'You see how I'm placed' was possibly its nearest equivalent. Then, alone among the men present, he stood up.

Carol turned to Dixon. 'Come on, Jim,' she said rather loudly, 'I want you to dance with me. I take it that nobody here will object.'