I’m so pleased. One is so glad to know people like one’s books.” All the stale old things. Rather as though you put a hand into a box and took out some useful words already strung together like a necklace of beads. And then, before very long now, she could leave.
Her eyes went round the table because she might perhaps see some friends there as well as would-be admirers. Yes, she did see in the distance Maurine Grant, who was great fun.
The moment came, the literary women and the attendant cavaliers who had also attended the lunch, rose. They streamed towards chairs, towards coffee tables, towards sofas, and confidential corners. The moment of peril, Mrs. Oliver often thought of it to herself, though usually at cocktails and not literary parties because she seldom went to the latter. At any moment the danger might arise, as someone whom you did not remember but who remembered you, or someone whom you definitely did not want to talk to but whom you found you could not avoid. In this case it was the first dilemma that came to her. A large woman. Ample proportions, large white champing teeth. What in French could have been called une femme formidable, but who definitely had not only the French variety of being formidable, but the English one of being supremely bossy. Obviously she either knew Mrs. Oliver, or was intent on making her acquaintance there and then. The last was how it happened to go.
“Oh, Mrs. Oliver,” she said in a high-pitched voice. “What a pleasure to meet you today. I have wanted to for so long. I simply adore your books. So does my son. And my husband used to insist on never traveling without at least two of your books. But come, do sit down. There are so many things I want to ask you about.” Oh, well, thought Mrs. Oliver, not my favorite type of woman, this. But as well her as any other.
She allowed herself to be conducted in a firm way, rather as a police officer might have done. She was taken to a settee for two across a corner, and her new friend accepted coffee and placed coffee before her also.
“There. Now we are settled. I don’t suppose you know my name. I am Mrs. Burton-Cox.” “Oh yes,” said Mrs. Oliver, embarrassed, as usual. Mrs.
Burton-Cox? Did she write books also? No, she couldn’t really remember anything about her. But she seemed to have heard the name. A faint thought came to her. A book on politics, something like that? Not fiction, not fun, not crime.
Perhaps a high-crow intellectual with political bias? That ought to be easy, Mrs. Oliver thought with relief. I can just let her talk and say, “How interesting!” from time to time.
“You’ll be very surprised, really, at what I’m going to say,” said Mrs. Burton-Cox. “But I have felt, from reading your books, how sympathetic you are, how much you understand of human nature. And I feel that if there is anyone who can give me an answer to the question I want to ask, you will be the one to do so.” “I don’t think, really…” said Mrs. Oliver, trying to think of suitable words to say that she felt very uncertain of being able to rise to the heights demanded of her.
Mrs. Burton-Cox dipped a lump of sugar in her coffee and crunched it in a rather carnivorous way, as though it was a bone. Ivory teeth, perhaps, thought Mrs. Oliver vaguely. Ivory?
Dogs had ivory, walruses had ivory and elephants had ivory, of course. Great big tusks of ivory. Mrs. Burton-Cox was saying: “Now the first thing I must ask you—I’m pretty sure that I am right, though—you have a goddaughter, haven’t you? A daughter who’s called Celia Ravenscroft?” “Oh,” said Mrs. Oliver, rather pleasurably surprised. She felt she could deal perhaps with a goddaughter. She had a good many goddaughters—and godsons, for that matter. There were times, she had to admit as the years were growing upon her, when she couldn’t remember them all. She had done her duty in due course, one’s duty being to send toys to your godchildren at Christmas in their early years, to visit them and their parents, or to have them visit you during the course of their upbringing, to take the boys out from school perhaps, and the girls also. And then, when the crowning days came, either the twenty-first birthday at which a godmother must do the right thing and let it be acknowledged to be done, and do it handsomely, or else marriage, which entailed the same type of gift and a financial or other blessing. After that godchildren rather receded into the middle or far distance.