Jerusalem the Golden Read Free Page A

was so pretty that Clara could hardly take her eyes off him, although it would clearly have been more profitable to pay her attentions to Samuel Wisden, who was handsome enough, without being excessively, exclusively so. And then there was Sebastian Denham’s daughter. In view of all the other men in the room, Clara paid no attention at all to Sebastian Denham’s daughter, apart from wondering whether she had heard her name aright, for she seemed to be called Clelia: the name, at first hearing, was so uncannily like Clara that Clara dispensed with the notion that she might have misheard the initial consonant, and that the girl might be supposed to be called Dahlia. Clelia was a name with which she had no acquaintance. She
did not think it likely that she would ever need to use it, so she was not unduly uneasy about her ignorance.
    On the other hand, as time wore on, she did begin to feel mildly uneasy about her claims to existence in that dressing room. She wondered, in short, if she and Peter ought to go. Nobody else seemed to be going, and Peter’s friendship with his poet seemed to be, fortunately, at least as intimate as he had claimed, but she did feel that they ought not to spend the evening there. She wondered if anyone might want to put the room to its true purpose, and undress in it. She did not see why anyone should want to undress, as everyone was quite respectably clothed; nobody was wearing anything outlandish and embarrassing, like a dinner jacket. The only person who might have been thought to be uncomfortably or unsuitably dressed was Miss Cassell, whose dress was even more amazing off stage than on, but then it was not even her dressing room; her dressing room was next door. Moreover, she showed no inclination to change her dress; she clearly enjoyed its extravagance, and leaned right forward from time to time to make sure that no one missed the magnificence of her bosom. And Clara, whenever she managed to wrench her gaze away from the beautiful young man, found it resting itself inevitably upon those two tight pale mounds, and the deep powdery yawning cave between them. She had never before seen such a dress upon anyone with a right to wear one, and the combination of natural and unnatural gifts was quite startling; she suddenly saw what all those other women had been aiming at in their strapless gowns and their deep cleavages with their large chests and their thin collar bones. And she understood the other women, because it was an effect worth taking a few risks for.
    She did not want to go. She wanted to stay there, and hear them talk about poetry and money, and about how Eric Harley got more for being on ‘The Spoken Word’ series on ITV than he’d made out of a year’s writing. After a few minutes, somebody suggested opening a bottle of champagne, and then somebody else said that it might be better to go down to the pub before closing time, and she hoped that they would go to the pub, because she did not feel that she could stay and drink their champagne, even if it was offered to her.
Although it would have been nice to have been obliged to drink a glass of champagne in a dressing room. She could not recollect that she had ever tasted champagne, and she liked the thought of its spiritual flavour. However, as so often happened, the gathering, threatened with action, started to show signs of breaking up; Margarita Cassell said that she had to go to the pub anyway as she had to meet a friend there, Eric Harley also claimed a friend in the pub, and the Lionel man said he had to go home, and put on his coat and went. Then Clelia Denham, who had hitherto spoken not a word, rose to her feet and said, ‘I’ll be off too.’ Clara began to feel slightly alarmed, not because she had any interest in Clelia, but because she did not like this desertion of the evening and she was afraid that if enough people went Peter would decide to go too. She thought she could rely on Samuel’s inclinations, but then on