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.”