As the footsteps were heard, though without any of the perceptible clank and jangle foretold, Zoe again appeared, with comb tugging at her curls.
“I wonder if the sight of you two would upset him.... I’ve told him that I had no friends in the world except him and one old lady who’s kind to the lonely little girl”—she eyed the landlord dubiously—“Oh, you could pretend to be the broker,” with a quick spurt of inspiration. “Will you, Mr Wright? It might make him feel generous, mightn’t it? And you”—even in the extremity of haste and peril she checked herself from a tactless decision that maybe Richard was too young to matter much—“You—behind the curtain. No—your boots will show. Get into the cupboard—Quick!” She banged the door on him, and banged her bedroom door, just as the front-door of the flat, left open at Richard’s entrance, banged shakily behind the entering newcomer.
“Like a bally old farce,” Richard reflected; he did not know that people ever really hid in cupboards. Though in Zoe’s flat such behaviour seemed not only free from eccentricity, but rhythmically correct.
He knew the flat quite well.... Richard’s imagination was not the choked-up affair of a year ago. This was the flat where comic misunderstandings took place, and false identities, where an incriminating glove was left in the corner, and where screens fell down at the wrong moment; it was the flat for runaway wives; the flat where the husband is made to look a fool. It was jolly, now, actually to be in such a flat, actually to be the Man in the Cupboard; Richard chuckled silently ... then grew impatient, till, after seemingly endless waiting in muffled darkness the fourth wall against which he pressed his weight gave way, and he stumbled forward into a room full of people.... “Fancy, I forgot you for the moment,” laughed Zoe, who had released him. “Why didn’t you bang or shout? Here’s Antonia come to find Deb. I’m sure I don’t know why all London is running here this evening to enquire after that sister of yours. Isn’t it funny—she and Monsieur le Caporal met on the stairs, and he thought she was Petite Sœur, didn’t you?—just like I took Mr Marcus for Seul au Monde!”
A young man in uniform, with round red cheeks and a tassel dangling from his cap, stood adoring Zoe with an embarrassed smile, obviously not understanding a word of her harangue. There are two types of Belgian soldier—the stolid peasant who is shy, and the dapper townsman who is bold. Zoe unfortunately had hooked one of the former species. Undaunted, she turned her welcome into French with morsels of pidgin English inserted for the benefit of Mr Sam Wright, that he might not feel left out of the conversation; Richard over by the window, was explaining to Antonia about Deb.
It was Mr Wright who discovered that the Belgian had had nothing to eat for fourteen hours. “’Old on, Missy—the young chap’s guts is fair yawning for a bit o’ something solid. This is my treat—see—and you go an’ cook a steak for ’im. Veev la Belgium!” and the Corporal, understanding, stood at attention—and then bowed gratefully to Mr Wright, to Antonia, and Richard, and Zoe, in turn, while the tassel from his cap bobbed absurdly....
Zoe, interrupted in a rapid résumé of her own intimate history, calculated to set the intruder at his ease, took up the threads again while she ran in and out of the kitchen, laying the table and grilling the steak.
“Isn’t it a good thing I’ve still got some wine in the house—this is the last bottle, but I expect more to-morrow—it’s a present. Oh, not from Captain Braithwaite—I wonder why he’s so late, by the way?—but there’s an Italian wine-and-macaroni shop just round the corner, and the owner is simply crazy about me ... an atrocious old man with black teeth, but he does stock good wines, and so cheap.... His wife caught him out ogling me over the counter one day, and now she won’t leave the shop, so the old demon comes round here, and brings me Chianti on the sly, hoping to melt me. There’s not the slightest chance that I shall be melted, but you don’t think it’s wrong of me to accept the wine, do you? I mean he takes the risk of losing all and gaining nothing, doesn’t he?... Of course I daren’t let him into the flat, besides, I wouldn’t do such a thing! No, I wouldn’t, because I don’t honestly think it’s right, if his wife feels like that about me, do you, Mr Wright? So I half open the door and tell him to leave the bottles outside and go away quietly for both our sakes! He supposes I’ve got a jealous husband—the Italian bandit kind, with ribbons and daggers all the way up their legs.... And just fancy, once he had the cheek to come round without any wine at all, and said—well, I didn’t know men were like that, did you, Antonia? But I sent him home to fetch some pretty quick. Wouldn’t you have?” appealing to the Caporal, who murmured “Mais oui, certainement!” and sat down to his steak as to a serious business. He shovelled up the food strangely, and thought how beautiful was Zoe, in her white frilly dressing-jacket, clouded with yellow curls....
“Why not go round to La llorraine?—Deb might be there,” Antonia suggested. And reluctantly Richard stood up. Deb was a nuisance—of course she was all right. He disliked La llorraine and Manon; but Zoe and her doors and her landlord and her Belgian and her spaniel and her lovers and her stories, had a unique flavour of attraction. Any further developments, comic or ridiculous, might occur at any moment, in this atmosphere.... Sure enough, a door banged four flights of stairs away ... scuffle of many feet approaching—and:
“Why, it’s Captain Braithwaite,” cried Zoe, in a clear, childish treble of astonishment. “And did you find little Becky and Mark and Joey on the stairs? What’s the matter, Becky? broken your scooter? ... never mind, let me give you a ginger-snap—two ginger-snaps are better than one scooter, aren’t they? What a pretty drawing of a thermometer, Joey? Is it for me? Now that is sweet of you.”