Point Counter Point - Aldous Huxley [46]
‘But of course,’ said Lucy.
Mrs. Knoyle smiled gratefully. ‘Tell him I ‘1 come to see him to-morrow afternoon,’ she said.
‘Tomorrow afternoon.’
‘Between four and halfpast. And don’t mention it to anyone else,’ she added after a moment of embarrassed hesitation.
‘Of course I won’t.’
‘I’m so grateful to you,’ said Mrs. Knoyle, and with a sudden shy impulsiveness she leaned forward and kissed her. ‘Good night, my dear.’ She slipped away into the crowd.
‘One would think,’ said Lucy, as they crossed the vestibule, ‘that it was an appointment with her lover she was making, not her son.’
Two footmen let them out, obsequiously automatic. Closing the door, one winked to the other significantly. For an instant, the machines revealed themselves disquietingly as human beings.
Walter gave the address of Sbisa’s restaurant to the taxi driver and stepped into the enclosed darkness of the cab. Lucy had already settled into her corner.
Meanwhile, in the dining-room, Molly d’Exergillod was still talking. She prided herself on her conversation. Conversation was in the family. Her mother had been one of the celebrated Miss Geoghegans of Dublin. Her father was that Mr. Justice Brabant, so well known for his table talk and his witticisms from the bench. Moreover she had married into conversation. D’Exergillod had been a disciple of Robert de Montesquiou and had won the distinction of being mentioned in Sodome et Gomorrhe by Marcel Proust. Molly would have had to be a talker by marriage, if she had not already been one by birth. Nature and environment had conspired to make her a professional athlete of the tongue. Like all conscientious professionals, she was not content to be merely talented. She was industrious, she worked hard to develop her native powers. Malicious friends said that she could be heard practising her paradoxes in bed, before she got up in the morning. She herself admitted that she kept diaries in which she recorded, as well as the complicated history of her own feelings and sensations, every trope and anecdote and witticism that caught her fancy. Did she refresh her memory with a glance at these chronicles each time she dressed to go out to dinner? The same friends who had heard her practising in bed had also found her, like an examinee the night before his ordeal, laboriously mugging up Jean Cocteau’s epigrams about art and Mr. Birrell’s after-dinner stories and W. B. Yeats’s anecdotes about George Moore and what Charlie Chaplin had said to and of her last time she was in Hollywood. Like all professional talkers Molly was very economical with her wit and wisdom. There are not enough bons mots in existence to provide any industrious conversationalist with a new stock for every social occasion. Though extensive, Molly’s repertory was, like that of other more celebrated talkers, limited. A good housewife, she knew how to hash up the conversational remains of last night’s dinner to furnish out this morning’s lunch. Monday’s funeral baked meats did service for Tuesday’s wedding.
To Denis Burlap she was at this moment serving up the talk that had already been listened to with such appreciation by Lady Benger’s lunch party, by the week-enders at Gobley, by Tommy Fitton, who was one of her young men, and Vladimir Pavloff, who was another, by the American Ambassador and Baron Benito Cohen. The talk turned on Molly’s favourite topic.
‘Do you know what Jean said about me?’ she was saying (Jean was her husband). ‘Do you?’ she repeated insistently, for she had a curious habit of demanding answers to merely rhetorical questions. She leaned towards Burlap, offering dark eyes, teeth, a decollete.
Burlap duly replied that he didn’t know.
‘He said that I wasn’t quite human. More like an elemental than a woman. A sort of fairy. Do you think it