The Lonely Unicorn: A Novel

by Alec Waugh

It was amusing to meet in the morning afterwards and exchange confidences. And as everything is transmuted by the imagination, Roland in a little while came to look on those evenings—the wine, the music, the rustle of skirts, the low laughter—not as they had been actually, but as he would have wished to have them. They became for him a gracious revel. And in London his thoughts would wander often from his ink-stained desk, from the screech of the telephone, from the eternal tapping of the typewriter, to those brightly coloured cafés, with their atmosphere of warm comfort, the soft sensuous music, the cool sparkling champagne, the low whisper at his elbow. When he went out to lunch with Marston he would frequently contrast the glitter of a Brussels restaurant with the tawdry furniture and over-heated atmosphere of a City eating-house.

"A bit different this, isn't it?" he would say. "Do you remember that evening when we went down the Rue de la Madeleine and found a café in that little side street?"

"That was where we met the jolly little girl in the blue dress, wasn't it?"

"Yes. And do you remember what she said about the old Padre?"

And they would laugh together over the indelicacies that had slipped so charmingly in broken English from those red lips.

But Gerald was the one figure that remained distinct for Roland. The girls, for the most part, resembled each other so closely that he could only in rare instances recall their features or what they had worn or what they had said. He remembered far more vividly his walks with Gerald through the lighted streets, their confidences and hesitations. Should they go into this café or into that: and then when they had selected their café how Gerald would open the wine list and carefully run his finger down the page, while the waiter would hover over him: "Yes, yes, sir, a very good wine that, sir, a very good wine indeed!" And then when the wine was ordered how they would look round at the girls who sat in couples at the marble-topped tables, sipping a citron or a bock. "What do you think of that couple over there?" "Not bad, but let's wait a bit; something better may turn up soon"; and a little later: "Oh, look, that girl over there, the one with the green dress, just beneath the picture; try and catch her eye, she looks ripping!" They had been more exciting, those moments of expectation, than the subsequent embraces.

Gerald was always the dominant figure.

It was the expression of Gerald's face that Roland remembered most clearly on that disappointing evening when they had taken two chorus girls to dinner at a private room and Roland's selected had refused champagne and preferred fried sole to pheasant—an abstinence so alarming that, in spite of Roland's protests, Gerald had suddenly decided that they would have to catch a train to Paris that evening instead of being able to wait till the morning.

And it was Gerald whom Roland particularly associated with that ignominious occasion on which he had thought at last to have discovered real romance.

They had dropped into a restaurant in the afternoon for a cup of chocolate, and had seen sitting by herself a girl who could hardly have been twenty years of age. She wore a wide-brimmed hat, under which Roland could just see, as she bent her head over her ice, the tip of her nose, the smooth curve of a cheek, the strain on the muscles of her neck. She raised the spoon delicately to her mouth, her lips closed on it and held it there. Her eyelids appeared to droop in a sort of sensual contentment. Roland watched her, fascinated: watched her till she drew the spoon slowly from her mouth. She lingered pensively, and between the even rows of her white teeth the red tip of her tongue played for a moment on the spoon. At that moment she raised her eyes, observed that Roland was staring at her, smiled, and dropped her eyes again.