Lucky Jim

They danced on in silence for some time. She'd not been modest in declaring herself an indifferent dancer, but Dixon's enforced avoidance of anything ambitious kept them fairly well together. The other couples moved round them, wheeling when a space momentarily presented itself, huddling and marking time in the crushes. Everybody else seemed to be talking, and eventually a female voice of Christine's pitch, heard close at hand, deceived Dixon. 'What did you say?' he asked.

'Nothing.'

Something would have to be said by him now, so he said what he'd been waiting to say all the evening: 'I never got a chance to thank you for playing up so well over that phone business.'

'What phone business?'

' You know, me pretending to Bertrand that I was a reporter.'

'Oh, that. I'd sooner not discuss that, if you don't mind.'

She couldn't be allowed to get away with that.' Supposing I do mind?'

'How do you mean?'

'You seem to forget that, but for me, and but for my little impersonation, you probably wouldn't be here at all tonight.'

'Well, that wouldn't have mattered very much, would it?'

The dance came to an end, but neither of them thought of leaving the floor. Through the applause he said: 'No, perhaps it wouldn't, but you seemed to want to come at the time, didn't you?'

'Look, can't you shut up about it?'

'All right, but don't you try to queen it over me. You've no call to do that.'

She shrugged clumsily, then dropped her eyes. 'I'm sorry; that was silly of me. I didn't mean to be like that.'

As she spoke, an inaudible piano introduction led into the last of the set. 'O.K., then,' Dixon said. 'Dance?'

' Yes, of course.'

They moved off again. ' I think we're getting the hang of this quite well,' he said in a moment.

' I wish I hadn't said what I did say. I was a fool. I acted like a perfect fool.'

He saw that when, as now, she abandoned her set expression, her lips were full, and protruded like her uncle's. 'It's all right, really; it was nothing,' he said.

'No it wasn't nothing; it was ridiculous. I thought the whole of the /Evening Post /business was brilliantly funny.'

'Oh come, there's no need to go to the opposite extreme.'

'But you see I didn't feel like discussing it with you because that would have been like laughing at Bertrand behind his back, and that would have been wrong. I'm afraid I must have sounded a bit unfriendly over the phone the second time, but that was only because I couldn't have let myself go like I wanted to without seeming as if I was getting mixed up in a conspiracy to get the better of Bertrand. That's all it was.'

The whole thing sounded rather childish, but better that than peevish.

All the same, what messes these women got themselves into over nothing.

Men got themselves into messes too, and ones that weren't so easily got out of, but their messes arose from attempts to satisfy real and simple needs. He was saved from having to reply by the intervention of an enormous, half-incoherent voice, like that of an ogre at the onset of aphasia, which now began to sing through loudspeakers with an intonation rather resembling Cecil Goldsmith's: 'Ah'll be parp tar gat you in a taxi, honny, Ya'd batter be raddy 'bout a parp-parp eight; Ahr, baby, dawn't be late, Ah'm gonna parp parp parp whan the band starts play-eeng…'

In trying to pull Christine out of the path of a short red-faced man dancing with a tall pale-faced woman, Dixon got badly out of time.'

Start again,' he mumbled, but they seemed unable to move together as before.

'Here, you'll never do any good while you stand right over there,'

Christine said. 'I'm not close enough to you to feel what you're doing.

Get hold of me properly.'

Gingerly, Dixon moved forward until they were standing up against each other. He again took her warm right hand, and steered her off. This time things were much better, though Dixon was a little shorter of breath than he thought he should be. Her body felt rounded, and rather bulky, against his. They moved down the floor away from the band, through the sound of which Dixon faintly caught a baying laugh. Bertrand, his big head flung back, was just disappearing into a gap some yards away.

Though Dixon couldn't see Carol's face, this seemed to indicate that she'd been at least partly mollified.

What the hell was Bertrand up to? This was a problem deserving as urgent attention as the problem of why he wore a beard. Was he trying to have two mistresses at once, or was he trying to discard one in favour of the other? If the latter, which one was he trying to acquire and which one was he trying to reconcile to being discarded? Would he bother, though, about reconciling people to what he wanted to do with them? Probably not, in which case it was presumably Carol who was in the ascendant, because that was the only way of explaining her presence here tonight.