Grand Days Read Free Page A

presenting a clue but it didn’t assist her.
    â€˜In Paris, at the Club des Cent, we ate,’ he looked meaningfully at her, ‘ortolans des Landes wrapped in Sicilian vine leaves.’ He used his glance to prance the tease even further. She did not know what an ortolan was. She decided she could no longer either play with his tease or widen the void. She decided to Tip It All Up.
    â€˜You are teasing me. I don’t know who Vyvyan Holland with two y s is and I do not understand your other references and I am not sure that I want to know what your tease is about.’ She wrapped her Tip-Up in a simulation of gleeful laughter, to makeit pleasant. She felt she was correct in using Tip It All Up to stop him treating her like a girl. She laughed gleefully again to make sure that she was not spoiling things entirely and for all time.
    He now dabbed at his mouth with his napkin, and he seemed uncomfortable, but put on a smile to show he was not too uncomfortable. She could see that he had embarked on the tease without foreseeing its end, and without knowing what it was he hoped to whet in her by teasing her. She looked across at him as the waiter served the oxtail Florentine. He was still uncomfortable. He had moved into his tease and now found himself without pleasure and without a way of gracefully concluding. Not very good for a man from the FO. Teasing could arouse unpleasant things in the person teased but usually, in her experience, it had to do with flirtation. Was he drawing back from the flirtation? Teasing was verbal tickling and, like tickling, could be bullying. She ruled out bullying. The thrill of flirtation, then, was what he hoped to achieve. She’d spotted the true shadow thrown by this anecdote. She’d Tipped It All Up when perhaps she shouldn’t have been so impatient or insecure. Perhaps she should have allowed him to continue to tickle her into confusion and submission. She did not know how to revive the flirt.
    In the silence the sound of the train seemed loud.
    â€˜It’s really very silly of me,’ he said.
    â€˜How is it silly of you?’
    â€˜There is no reason why you should have read De Profundis .’ He was letting her off, but not immediately — not before making this not-so-enigmatic reference to De Profundis . She knew what De Profundis was. He was trying to go on with the flirtatious tease. Good. She let him finish a mouthful of food while waiting for the elucidation she needed. He was not being nasty; hewanted to pleasure her by teasing her so that she would not be in full control of herself, which was perhaps permissible for this kind of luncheon. ‘Oscar Wilde. The manuscript itself is in the British Museum but no one has ever had access to it — some of it came out in the court case in 1913. And there’s the disputed Methuen edition.’
    He then delivered what she took to be his principal item. ‘I have seen it — Vyvyan Holland’s copy.’
    She laughed, relaxing at the end of the tease, relieved by the smallness of the item. She was not overwhelmed at all.
    He responded to her laugh by saying, ‘I am being rather superior. Sorry.’ He was now flustered. Having gained a little superiority he found it an encumbrance. He was not good with his Ways at all. There was nothing she could do to relieve him from his bother because the conversation had become unneat, they were both in confusion and it was of his making.
    Ah. The name Oscar Wilde was what it was all about. That was the secret of his gambit. It was a name he believed could titillate her as a woman. It was a name about which hung sniggers and taboos. Although she was a modern woman and had talked about that subject — of men loving men — she couldn’t lightly do so with a strange man on a train. But she sensed that the titillation he wanted to cause in her was to make her display something of her nature, to find out something about her