came face to face with Mr Denham, in the large and shabby dressing room, she found it surprisingly simple to shake his hand and to say that she had so much enjoyed the evening. He replied, unremarkably, that he was glad; clearly he expected and hoped for no more original a salutation. He stood quietly, with his back to the wide dusty mirror, smiling affably, mild, adult, dissociated. Margarita Cassell, on the other hand, though her age might have equalled his, seemed genuinely anxious for opinions: when Samuel Wisden introduced Peter and Clara to her, and when she had made polite inquiries about Peter’s mother, with whom she had once been at school, she turned about the subject of the past evening with an eager greed. ‘Well then, what
about
it?’ she said to them, and the rest of the assembled company. ‘Whatever did you think of it? Was there anybody
there
? I just kept my eyes shut and didn’t look, I was so afraid there wasn’t going to be
anybody
there at all.’
‘Of course there were people there,’ said Samuel Wisden. ‘There are always people at these things. God knows why they go to them, but they do. The poetry lovers of England, you know.’
‘It was quite a good house, actually,’ said Peter. ‘The front stalls were a bit thin, but the rest was almost full.’
Clara listened to this and to the ensuing discussion with pleasure: she liked to hear people use phrases like ‘quite a good house’. She knew them all, all the right phrases, but some deeply excluded modesty prevented her from using them. And she liked the way they talked about poetry and about poetry readings, and audiences, and whether people understood it or not, and whether people liked it or not, and whether people who went to poetry readings liked whatever they heard anyway, simply because they were the kind of people who liked going to poetry readings and hearing poetry: and she could tell from the tone and the pattern of the talk that everyone there had expressed similar views in similar conversations a dozen times before, but was nonetheless ready to express them yet once more, for all that: and it was this sense of trivial, gossipy familiarity and repetition that most pleased her, for it convinced her that she was listening to real professionals. Even Peter, who could be intense and zealous enough when on his own, was managing to affect a
finely nonchalant contempt about the problems of communication; she liked the cosy way they all seemed to assume that the evening was a wash-out, inevitably, and that the whole job of writing and reading poetry was somehow fundamentally ill-conceived. And yet, at the same time, they wanted to think they had done it well. The mixture of general cynicism and personal vanity was peculiarly appealing; Margarita at one point, perched most delicately and leggily upon Sebastian Denham’s dressing table, said, ‘Of course the
most
depressing thing is the way they all grow instantly silent for the
worst
possible poems, like that one I did of Reggie’s, and no offence to poor darling Reggie, but it really is
nothing
but a bit of sophisticated
jingle
, and yet it always goes down marvellously at readings, haven’t you noticed?’ Clara, who was often depressed by her own observations, found herself merely enchanted by such emphatic indulgent transparency.
And while they talked, Clara found time to watch, and to check up on who was there. Apart from herself and Peter and the four performers, there was a man from the BBC called Lionel, who was connected in some way with the show – director, she thought, or producer, or possibly both. There was another man whose name she had not caught, but who might have been Margarita Cassell’s husband. There was also an astonishingly pretty boy, who was quite clearly an actor; she worked this out for herself and felt clever, and then reflected that in the circumstances the deduction was not truly brilliant. He too seemed to be connected with Margarita Cassell. He