Railroad Page 7

  Collis detested the idea. He would much rather have simply left his card at the Spooners’ house and then paid Delphine a visit. But Ida adored intrigue, particularly an intrigue which made everybody uncomfortable except herself, and she insisted on ‘a fateful encounter of two like hearts’.

  ‘I don’t know why the devil I’m doing this,’ Collis told his mother, as they waited in the drawing-room for Steadman to bring around their carriage. ‘I feel as if I were ten years old.’

  ‘You’re doing it to please me,’ said Ida. She was dressed in a coffee-coloured gown with a lace-trimmed bodice, and she held her off-white shawl around herself as tightly as if she were sitting in a draught. Her bonnet was overloaded with ribbons and ostrich plumes, and her face was powdered quite white. ‘You do very little to please me, as much as I deserve it, but now you can exert yourself, if only slightly, to see that I am happy.’

  ‘Mother,’ said Collis, ‘I’m not sure that happiness becomes you.’

  Ida clucked, and stretched her neck disdainfully. If Collis was going to be impertinent and unappreciative, then she would rather not listen. She had to admit, though, that she was moderately pleased by his agreement to meet Delphine, and she had tried to see him in a less critical light over the past few days. He was a very fine-looking boy, after all; and in his cream-coloured suit with maroon braiding around the edges, and his cream-coloured silk hat, he was a handsome prize for any girl.

  She was only sorry that this was the last week that she and the Spooners were to remain in New York, before retreating for the rest of the summer. It would mean that, once introduced, Collis and Delphine would have to postpone the continuation of their planned romance until the fall. Still, that would give them time to moon and mope over each other, and in Ida’s view the best romances were full of a good deal of mooning and moping.

  She didn’t even consider for a moment, now that Collis had agreed to look Delphine over, that the ‘young lovers’ might despise each other on sight.

  At last the carriage arrived at the front door, and Collis escorted his mother out on to Twenty-first Street. It was a bright, hazy day, with a faint wind blowing from the north-west, which did something to relieve the ripe smell of garbage and horse manure in the streets. The Edmondses had a newish dark-green brougham, and their coachman, Steadman, was holding the door open for them, with his usual inane smile fixed on his face, as if he were about to burst out laughing. They climbed aboard and settled themselves down while Steadman hauled himself up on to the box and snapped his whip at their two well-polished chestnuts, Scylla and Charybdis. They rolled eastward across town, Ida shaded by her fringed parasol and Collis sitting back on his seat with his white gloves on his knee and his worried eyes looking out at the crowded sidewalks as if he were a French nobleman being taken to the Bastille in a tumbril.

  ‘I always think I look more elegant in light brown,’ remarked Ida. ‘I was wearing light brown when I first met your father.’

  ‘She’d better not be too stout,’ said Collis. ‘If she’s too stout, I’m leaving at once.’

  Ida turned to him, offended that he hadn’t commented on her elegance in light brown. ‘Of course she’s not stout,’ she said coldly. ‘You don’t think I would marry you off to anyone stout?’

  ‘I do, as a matter of fact,’ said Collis gloomily. ‘I think you’d marry me off to anyone, particularly if she looked less elegant in light brown than you do.’

  Ida gave a tight, disapproving sniff. ‘You’re absolutely insufferable, do you know that? I thought you’d changed your ways when you agreed to come today, but now I’m not so certain.’

  ‘I came today because I wanted to,’ Collis told her.

  She shook her parasol to shoo off the flies. ‘I was afraid of that,’ she said. ‘It was too much to expect that you might have come for my sake.’

  Collis sighed. ‘Mother, I am only going along with this preposterous arrangement because I agree it’s time I started to think about my future, and I have to start somewhere. If I like Delphine, and Delphine likes me, there may be a possibility of our coming to some sort of arrangement; but if we dislike each other, then there really isn’t any point in continuing. You may look a picture in light brown and ostrich plumes, but Cupid’s wings and little golden bows and arrows really don’t suit you at all.’

  ‘Oh, if your father were here,’ said Ida.

  ‘If my father were here, there would be very much less room in this carriage than there is now, and that’s all. Now do try to calm down, Mother. We’re supposed to be on a casual shopping expedition, remember? We don’t want to spoil the illusion.’

  Ida’s neck tensed for a moment, rigid with strings and tendons. Then she turned away with an aggrieved toss of her ostrich plumes and refused to speak another word to Collis until they reached Broadway at Franklin.

  Steadman, with one of his old smiles, assisted them to alight outside Taylor’s. Collis told him to wait around the corner, and then he and his mother went in through the glass doors to the grand saloon of Broadway’s most gilded and decorative restaurant. As usual at this time of day, the pillared saloon was humming and twittering with the conversation of ladies who had withdrawn from the midday heat and the dust and crush of shopping to take ices, omelettes, sandwiches, or coffee. They sat clustered, these ladies, in their fashionable dresses of canary yellow and emerald green and sapphire blue, around an archipelago of more than a hundred black walnut tables, their gloved hands fluttering, their feathered bonnets bobbing, and their laughter chirruping above the background bustle like flocks of birds on park railings.

  The maîtred’, in magnificent muttonchops and a swallow-tailed coat, bowed as Ida stalked in, followed at a diffident distance by Collis. He guided them, in a whole cloud of ‘good mornings’, and ‘pleasant days’, and stale perspiration odours, to a table by the mirrored wall on the right-hand side of the restaurant. There he left them in the hands of a rather surly young uniformed waiter, who took their order for coffee and pâté sandwiches in a slow, sloping hand, as if he didn’t care if he was going to be able to read it back or not. Taylor’s interior decor was celestial, but its service was generally regarded as abysmal.

  ‘Well, Mother?’ asked Collis. But Ida shushed him. She had wanted to sit by the mirrors because it was cooler there, away from the windows; and because, more important, she could admire herself in the glass from time to time without seeming vainer than she actually was; and because, even more important, she could see Winifred Spooner and Delphine the moment they walked in.

  ‘I hope you’re not going to say anything embarrassing, Mother, when you introduce us,’ said Collis. He was feeling unaccountably nervous, although he couldn’t think why. He had flirted with enough women, both high life and low life, not to be alarmed by a girl like Delphine Spooner. Perhaps it was the fact that he was considering marriage, and settling down, that was giving him such palpitations.

  ‘What do you mean by “embarrassing”?’ asked his mother haughtily. ‘Do you mean that I should refrain from telling Delphine the truth about you, that you are an insolent scoundrel, and a gambler, and a frequenter of whorehouses?’

  A thin elderly woman in black, eating cinnamon cakes at the next table, turned and stared at Ida in alarm, but Ida cut her down with a glare that could have boiled ice.

  ‘I simply mean that I don’t want you telling her that I’m soft about her, or anything of that kind. “This is my son – he’s been admiring you from afar for years.” That kind of thing.’

  ‘A mother has to try her best to save her son from complete dissipation,’ retorted Ida.

  The waiter brought their coffee, setting the pot down on the walnut table with an insolent clatter. Collis sipped at his cup dejectedly and decided he had never felt so much like a beer in his whole life.

  It wasn’t long, though, before Ida suddenly seized his arm and almost made him spill the whole cupful on his cream-coloured pants. He looked up, and there, through the glass doors, appeared
a plump middle-aged woman in a grey dress and shawl, and just behind her, a short young girl whose face was hidden by the brim of her yellow bonnet. Collis felt a surge of panic. He just knew this was going to be a disaster. If Ida hadn’t been clasping his arm so firmly, he would have excused himself from the table and rushed out. He suddenly felt suffocated by all the women around him, asphyxiated by their perfume and choked by their feathers, and tied and trammelled by their fussy female schemes.

  ‘Winifred! My dear!’ Ida called. ‘What a surprise!’

  Winifred Spooner came through the tables with a beatific beam on her face, like a mother superior on a holy errand. Delphine followed obediently behind. Collis rose to take the ladies’ hands, and found that he was towering over both mother and daughter, although he was only just six feet in height himself. Embarrassed, he clasped Mrs Spooner’s grey-gloved fingers and said, ‘It’s an enormous pleasure, ma’am,’ but then immediately regretted having said ‘enormous’.

  Winifred Spooner, with an obvious smirk that Collis was quite sure could be plainly interpreted by everybody in the saloon, Delphine included, brought her daughter forward and announced, ‘This is Mr Collis Edmonds, my pet. I expect you’ve heard of him.’

  Delphine kept her head lowered, so that all Collis could see of her was the semicircular rim of her lemon-yellow bonnet, and the yellow satin daisies that decorated it. She wore a dress of the same colour, with a silk facing on her bodice, and white lace trim around her skirts. She was very small, there was no question about that, but Collis noted with some relief that her arms, which may have been plump with puppy fat when he first saw her, were now quite slender, and her wrists were attractively childlike.

  Collis held out his hand. For a moment, Delphine remained where she was, her head down, and then she reached her own hand out, in its small lemon-coloured glove, and placed it in his. She looked up and whispered, ‘I’m very pleased to make your acquaintance, sir.’

  She could have said anything. She could have said, ‘You have a smut on the tip of your nose.’ Collis could do nothing but look at her, and realise, with an extraordinary tight feeling in his upper chest, like a diver rising from the deep, that two years can change a seventeen-year-old girl into a nineteen-year-old woman, and a very remarkable young woman at that.

  Delphine Spooner was hypnotisingly pretty. What Collis could see of her dark hair was arranged in little curls, and beneath the curls her forehead was high and pale. Her eyes were quite huge, and they had a dreamy, myopic look about them which he found irresistible. Her nose was short and slightly upturned, and her lips were pink and sulky. She was petite, yes; but her figure was practically perfect: small, high, rounded breasts; an upright back; and a way of standing that made him think, immodestly, of firm thighs and trim little ankles.

  He kept hold of her hand, although his grasp was very gentle, and would not release it. He let his usual worried look melt away into a warm expression of interest and intrigue, just as he always did when he flirted with a pretty woman. Then, in his huskiest voice, he said, ‘I’m quite devastated to meet you. I think you’ve just made this the most beautiful and the most surprising day of my life.’

  Delphine’s cheeks coloured, and she tried to take her hand away, but Collis lifted her fingers to his lips and brushed her glove with a kiss. Then, still holding her tight, he raised his eyes and gazed at her for a full ten seconds in the darkest, most smouldering way he could manage. Delphine returned his gaze for a moment, but then she dropped her eyes and looked away, although Collis could tell by the way she allowed him to keep her hand captive that she didn’t disapprove. It was all part of the game of courtship and pretended modesty, and he was pleased and excited that she knew how to play it.

  Ida coughed, and Collis suddenly realised that almost everybody at the surrounding tables was staring at them. He released Delphine and busily went around the table to pull out a chair for Mrs Spooner, who thanked him in her lisping, flustered voice as if he had done something quite wonderful for her. Then he pulled out Delphine’s chair, and she sat down with a quiet ‘Thank you, Mr Edmonds’ that left him breathless. He knew this was all quite ridiculous, being made to feel so stimulated by a demure little financier’s daughter from Second Avenue, particularly when his mother, of all people, had arranged for them to meet. But when he saw the dark curls which lay on the nape of Delphine’s neck, and the curve of her ears with their pearl pendant earrings, he decided, a little wryly perhaps, but without any hesitation, that none of those objections was enough to dampen his interest in her.

  ‘What a chance, meeting you here,’ said Winifred, as Collis resumed his chair. ‘We were shopping for birthday presents for the twins. So tiresome of them to be born in the summer, when shopping’s so hot and exhausting.’

  Ida said, ‘That was scarcely their fault, Winifred. Makepeace was born on the Fourth of July, and I gather he was quite advanced in years before he discovered the fireworks and the celebrations weren’t all for him. But you know what egotists men are.’

  All the time she was speaking, Ida was keeping her eyes fixed on Collis and Delphine. Delphine had her eyes lowered still, but Collis, with his elbow on the table and his chin resting on his upturned hand, was staring at her, completely spellbound.

  ‘You must try the black-currant ice,’ Collis said. ‘It’s very good. They make it with black-currant leaves. It has a very musky flavour.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Delphine, ‘I do believe I’ve already tasted it.’

  The waiter came to take their order, and huffed and puffed, as if he were mortally offended that they should invite two more people to sit at their table without begging his permission. Winifred asked for tea, and Delphine for a lemon sherbet. Collis kept his gaze on Delphine, and still she sat, straight and self-assured, with her eyes modestly averted.

  ‘It’s very surprising to me that we haven’t been introduced before,’ said Collis. ‘I believe that I saw you once at a party on East Seventeenth Street, but that was quite some time ago.’

  Delphine looked up. ‘There really hasn’t been any reason for us to be introduced,’ she said. ‘We move, as I understand it, in quite different circles.’

  Collis was slightly taken aback. What, exactly, did she mean by ‘quite different circles’? He hoped she wasn’t trying to suggest that he patronised whorehouses and gambling dens, because if she knew about that side of his social life, then he couldn’t see that there was very much hope for any kind of love affair between them. Nice young ladies like Delphine didn’t keep company with rakes.

  ‘Well,’ said Collis cautiously, ‘more’s the pity.’

  ‘Thank you,’ replied Delphine.

  There was a minute’s silence between them. Ida and Winifred, although they were making sure that they kept half an ear on everything that was going on, were now engaged in running down Esmé Blunt, the wife of the art dealer, for her dreadful taste in dinner guests, and that withering cascade of criticism would occupy them for the next twenty minutes at least.

  ‘Do you ride?’ Collis asked Delphine.

  She shook her head. ‘Not much in the city. But when we go to Larchmont, I like to. I’m looking forward to getting out of New York this year, aren’t you?’

  ‘I was until now,’ said Collis.

  Delphine smiled a little. Her lips were very full and sensual, in spite of her cool manners, and Collis couldn’t help imagining what it would be like to press a kiss on them, and then to part them with the tip of his tongue. She was so damned pretty, and now, in the heat of the restaurant, he could smell the fragrance she wore, an essence of jonquils. A flowery, tiny, yellowy fragrance, like Delphine herself.

  ‘You don’t have to flatter me for the sake of it,’ she said. ‘I’m not a child.’

  Collis laughed. She had caught him off balance at first, but now he was beginning to understand her. She didn’t know much about him, but she could see what kind of a man he was, with his fashionably casual clothes and his suave manner, and she was t
easing him. That made him adore her even more. If there was one thing on this earth that aroused him, it was a woman who teased.

  ‘I can see for myself that you’re not a child,’ he told her. ‘You’re the most charming young woman I’ve seen in this city all year, and that’s why I’m flattering you.’

  ‘Does this kind of talk work well for you, usually?’ she asked.

  ‘Usually?’

  ‘I mean, with other ladies. Are they impressed, or do they simply smile and twirl their parasols and give you coquettish little smiles?’

  ‘The way you are now?’

  Delphine smiled. ‘Yes, if you like.’

  ‘So you’re not impressed?’

  ‘Am I supposed to be?’

  Collis grinned. ‘Of course you are. You’re supposed to swoon at my feet. You’re supposed to go home this evening and think about nothing else but me, and how I’m going to call for you on Saturday afternoon and take you riding.’

  ‘I believe my horse is lame. He caught his foot in a railroad line on Hudson Street.’

  ‘I can lend you a mare. I have a beautiful mare called Hopeful.’

  ‘Hopeful?’ She smiled. ‘That’s a perfect name.’

  The waiter brought Delphine’s ice, and she began to eat it with her long-handled spoon. Collis watched her, and the more he watched her, the more he desired her. He hadn’t fallen so immediately and passionately for anyone since he was fifteen years old, when he had sat for hours on the back stairs, hoping to catch a glimpse of their kitchen maid, who was a green-eyed, big-breasted Italian girl, and whose very apron, rustling up the stairs, had made him squeeze his eyes tight shut with frustrated lust. There was more to Delphine than feelings of lust, however. There was a sharp, piquant personality that he knew he was going to have to trounce. She was demure, but she was self-willed and she needed bridling.