The group of, young people of which Amy was the radiant centre, and which included not only the young Japanese who was her current lover but also the young Jew who had been his most recent predecessor, had moved over towards the portrait of Mrs. Jack above the mantel, and were looking up at it. The portrait deserved the praise that was now being heaped upon it. It was one of the best examples of Henry Mallows’ early work.
“When you look at it and think how long ago that was!”—cried Amy jubilantly, gesturing towards the picture with rapid thrusts of her cigarette—“and how beautiful she was then!—and how beautiful she is now!” she cried exultantly, laughed hoarsely, then cast her grey-green eyes round her in a glance of feverish exasperation—“I mean!“—she cried again, and drew impatiently on her cigarette—“there’s simply no comparison!” Then, realising that she had not said what she had wanted to say, she went on: “Oh, I mean!“—she said in a tone almost of desperation and tossed her cigarette angrily away into the blazing fire—“the whole thing’s obvious!” she muttered, leaving everyone more bewildered than before. With a sudden and impulsive movement she turned towards Stephen Hook, who was still leaning with his elbow on one corner of the mantel, and demanded: “How long has it been, Steve?...I mean!—it’s been twenty years ago, hasn’t it?”
“Oh, quite all of that,” Hook answered in his cold, bored voice. In his agitation and embarrassment he moved still farther away until he almost had his back turned upon the group. “It’s been nearer thirty, I should think,” he tossed back over his shoulder, and then with an air of casual indifference he gave the date. “I should think it was done in nineteen-one or two—wasn’t it, Esther?” he said, turning to Mrs. Jack, who had now approached the group. “Around nineteen-one, wasn’t it?”
“What’s that?” said Mrs. Jack, and then went on immediately, “Oh, the picture! No, Steve. It was done in nineteen”—she checked herself so swiftly that it was not apparent to anyone but Hook—“in nineteen-six.” She saw just the trace of a smile upon his pale, bored face and gave him a quick, warning little look, but he just murmured:
“Oh…I had forgotten it was as late as that.”
As a matter of fact, he knew the exact date, even to the month and day, when it had been finished. And, still musing on the vagaries of the sex, he thought: “Why will they be so stupid! She must understand that to anyone who knows the least thing about Mallows’ life the date is as familiar as the fourth of July!”
“Of course,” Mrs. Jack was saying rapidly, “I was just a child when it was made. I couldn’t have been more than eighteen at the time—if I was that.”
“Which would make you not more than forty-one now,” thought Hook cynically—“if you are that! Well, my dear, you were twenty when he painted you—and you had been married for more than two years…Why do they do it!” he thought impatiently, and with a feeling of sharp annoyance. He looked at her and caught a quick expression—startled, almost pleading—in her eyes. He followed her glance, and saw the awkward figure of George Webber standing ill at ease in the doorway leading from the dining-room. “Ah! It’s this boy!” he thought. “She’s told him then that—” and, suddenly, remembering her pleading look, he was touched with pity. Aloud, however, he merely murmured indifferently:
“Oh, yes, you couldn’t have been very old.”
“And God!” exclaimed Mrs. Jack, “but I was beautiful!”
She spoke the words with such innocent delight that they lost any trace of objectionable vanity they might have had, and people smiled at her affectionately. Amy Carleton, with a hasty little laugh, said impulsively:
“Oh, Esther! Honestly, you’re the most...1 But I mean!“—she cried impatiently, with a toss of her dark head, as if answering some invisible antagonist—“she is!”
“In all your days,” said Mrs. Jack, her face suffused with laughter, “you never saw the like of me! I was just like peaches and cream. I’d have knocked your eye out!”
“But, darling! You do now!” cried Amy. “What I mean to say is—darling, you’re the most...! Isn’t she, Steve?” She laughed uncertainly, turning to Hook with feverish eagerness.
And he, seeing the ruin, the loss, the desperation in her splintered eves, was sick with horror and with pity. He looked at her disdainfully, with weary, lidded eyes, said: “What?” quite freezingly, and then turned away, saying with an accent of boredom: “Oh.”
Beside him was the smiling face of Mrs. Jack, and, above, the portrait of the lovely girl that she had been. And the anguish and the mystery of time stabbed through him.