He knew very well where Magdalen was. Of course. Magdalen wasn’t the sort of woman to hang about just anywhere all the time between lunch and dinner—like Virginia and Lois and that crowd, who either sat about for hours in one place or dashed about to a thousand places in an afternoon, doing nothing at all. Magdalen was not like that, she either had a purpose or she hadn’t; and if she hadn’t, she sat at home reading a book. She read a lot of books. Hadn’t Gerald Trevor said of her, so long ago, that Magdalen didn’t loiter unless there was something to loiter for? She loiters actively, he had said. And Gerald was always right about the women he wasn’t in love with, he would always make a very good husband to the wrong wife.... But he would have liked to have seen her, if only for a minute. Maybe she would have taken away this pain in the back of his head, or anyway told him what to do with it. Extraordinary how helpless he felt without her! But he would go to a doctor to-morrow, if he wasn’t better. He had never been to a doctor about anything before, but he would easily find one, they were everywhere. He would ring up Magdalen and ask her, she knew several. Maybe if he went back to Wilton Place now, maybe she.... But he strode on. He had forgotten to button his overcoat on leaving her house, and the icy wet wind billowed it out round his tall figure, it added to the confusion of his passage through the dense evening crowds about Hyde Park Corner. No fun in walking in the rain now! It was horribly ugly, this sodden darkness. He felt ill and weak, but he couldn’t find a taxi, he had to jostle through the crowd. Black and furious he looked, and several people stared round at the tall lowering young man with the defiant nose, who strode viciously past them in a billowing overcoat....
2
He dressed with extreme care and pomp that evening. He had a comical idea that this throbbing pain in the back of his head would respect him more if he put on a dress-suit. One should always be taut and rigid and soigné, he thought. Magdalen said that too. The homely dinner jacket wouldn’t impress any pain, there was no dignity in it. It suited Argentines very well, le smoking. But Englishmen were made of sterner stuff.
It had been his intention to dine at his club, and he was well down the slope of Saint James’s Street before he sharply changed his mind. He loathed his club, or any club. Lot of cow-eyed men. So he turned into Arlington Street and into the Ritz. It was still raining.
In the restaurant he found a corner table, by the windows that face the Green Park. It was a table for four, and may or may not have been reserved, but as the young gentleman (who happened to be quite unconscious of the diabolical frown on his forehead) seemed entirely oblivious of every protest that was made, the second maître d’hôtel shrugged his shoulders and let him have it. The second maître d’hôtel lost nothing by this complaisance, however, for Ivor ordered magnificently. There was naturally no question of offering him the table d’hôte; you can’t singly take a table for four and then play about with a table d’hôte. But the second maître d’hôtel found him every bit as good as four ordinary diners, and much less trouble; and he ordered his waiters to take an interest in le pauvre gigolo....
Ivor also drank magnificently. He had a vague remembrance of some one having once told him that champagne was the best remedy for any kind of cold, and so he drank a bottle. And, because he had drunk a bottle, he also broached a half-bottle. Krug, 1907.
“Coffee, sir?”
“Please. But do take the chill off it.”
And then a few brandies, ... without, he considered, the slightest effect. It seemed to require a devilish lot of concentration to get drunk, and concentration was just what he hadn’t got. So he gave up the attempt, and after having stood on the hotel steps in Arlington Street for several minutes, he thought to ask George Prest, the commissionaire, if he had any striking and original ideas as to what to do in London on a rainy night.
“How do chaps go wrong in London, George?”