Read Online Saturn Over the Water by J. B. Priestley, J.B. Priestley - Free Book Online Page B

husband, Bill Dayson, was a fair and fattish chap, who’d had plenty of drink but was now sweating it out, bashing around and shouting remarks that nobody seemed to bother about. Sam and I were separated almost at once, and soon I was in a corner with a husband and wife called Pearson, who must have arrived at the party in the middle of a quarrel, and a delicate but damp-looking blonde, Angel Somebody, who was a bit sozzled and droopy, a jonquil in the rain. Some poor devil was probably half out of his mind about her, but not T. Bedford. Even so, though I’m no portrait painter, I couldn’t help looking at her as if she was sitting for me. I began sorting her out into a splendid range of yellows, some warm greys and washed-out blues. All three were in an argument, hotted up by the mutual hostility of the Pearsons, about whether anti-conformists conformed just as much as conformists. It didn’t seem to be getting them anywhere, except to the bottom of tall glasses of Scotch and ice. The dears and darlings of the Pearsons, as they contradicted each other, dripped vitriol.
    Then Angel suddenly changed the subject. ‘Now see here – yes, you, Mr Man from London – why do you keep looking at me like that? If something’s come unstuck, tell me, and I’ll try to do a repair job for you. Tell me, that’s all – don’t just look – like that – ’
    ‘Angel – honey,’ said Mrs Pearson, a streamlined and highly-finished type, rather like a carving knife bursting out at the end into blue-steel curls. ‘Nobody’s looking at you.’
    ‘He is then. And he knows he is. As if I wasn’t really here – or something’s showing.’
    ‘You’re dead right,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry. I was wondering how to paint you.’
    ‘Don’t you remember, Angel, Jill told us he was an artist?’ said Mrs Pearson.
    ‘No, I don’t. Well, for God’s sake!’ Angel stared at me, her eyes a brighter blue now. ‘I thought you ran an ironworks over there or something. You don’t look aware and sensitive.’
    ‘Then probably I’m not. I just try to paint – for a living and as well as I can.’
    ‘I think you’re cute. Isn’t he – Mildred – George? Well, you can start painting me Monday – I’ll be out of town tomorrow – ’
    ‘And I’m flying to Lima on Monday – ’
    ‘No, we won’t go there. I’ve been and I hated it. We’ll go to Acapulco – and you can paint me there – ’
    Pearson had had enough of this – and I don’t blame him – and his space was more than taken by a character called Nicky, a hard-working funny man, who claimed the women’s attention, though Angel still kept her arm around mine, as if I was a possession she might otherwise forget. Not long afterwards, though I wouldn’t like to say how long because I didn’t feel really there at the party, I heard voices loud and angry in argument. One of them was Sam Harnberg’s. ‘I want to know what my friend Sam has got into, Angel,’ I said to her, trying to disentangle myself. ‘So if you’ll excuse me – ’
    ‘Certainly not,’ she told me, still clinging. ‘ ’Bye now, Mildred – Nicky! Have fun!’ And I had to take her with me, a flowering creeper after the rain, through the crowd, to where Sam was roaring away. ‘Darling, I think you’re crazy,’ Angel screamed in my ear. ‘They’re only arguing. The same old thing. Some men can’t help it when they’re high. Let’s go someplace.’
    ‘No, Angel honey. This is my friend. He brought me here.’
    ‘For God’s sake! Don’t tell me you’re – ’
    ‘No, I’m not. Now, let’s listen.’
    ‘Keep tight hold of me, then.’
    A youngish military type, very red in the face, was bawling at Sam. ‘Okay, okay, okay, mister! But I still say if it’s good enough for Mike Giddings, it’s good enough for me – and it ought to be good enough for you, mister.’
    ‘Well, it isn’t, Colonel, not for me it isn’t,’ Sam shouted. ‘And your General Giddings won’t make