MATTERS OF NO IMPORTANCE

'Why so quiet, Penny?'

'What?' she blurted, shocked out of her angry reverie. The noise of the reception was momentarily overwhelming, seeming to resolve itself to a stage buzz of background chatter.

With sham outrage, Art rebuked her. 'Penelope, I believe you were dreaming. I have been expending my meagre wit upon you for minutes, yet you've not taken in a word. When I try to be amusing you murmur "oh, how true" with a palpable sigh, and when I endeavour to add a sombre note in an attempt to secure your sympathies, you politely laugh behind your fan.'

The outing was wasted. It was to have been her first public appearance with Charles, her first showing as an engaged woman. She had planned for weeks, selecting exactly the right dress, the correct corsage, the proper event, the suitable company. Thanks to Charles's mysterious masters, it was a ruin. She had been out of sorts all evening, trying not to revert to her old habit of wrinkling her forehead. Her governess, Madame de la Rougierre, had often warned her if the wind changed her face would set that way; now, if she examined herself in the glass for even the trace of a line, she knew the old biddy had not been wrong.

'You are right, Art,' she admitted, quelling the interior fury that always came to her when things were not just so. 'I was gone.'

'That hardly says much for my powers of vampire fascination.'

When he tried to look comically offended, the tips of his teeth stuck out like grains of rice stuck to his lower lip.

Across the hotel restaurant, Florence was engaged in conversation with a tiddly gentleman whom Penelope understood to be the critic from the Telegraph. Florence was supposed to be the leader of this tiny expedition into hostile territory  -  their sympathies were naturally with the Lyceum, and this was the Criterion  -  but she had abandoned her supporters to each other's company. That was typical of Florence. She was flighty, and, even at the advanced age of thirty, a flirt. No wonder her husband disappeared. As Charles had disappeared this evening.

'You were thinking of Charles?'

She nodded, wondering if there were anything in the stories about vampire mind-reading abilities. Her mind, she admitted, must just now be written in large print. She would concentrate on keeping her forehead smooth or she would end up like poor silly Kate, only twenty-two and her face already pulled out of shape by laughing and crying.

'Even when I have you all to myself for an evening, Charles is between us. Curse the fellow.'

Charles, due to accompany the first-night party, had sent his man with a message, pleading off and entrusting Penelope to Florence's care for the evening. He was off on some government business she could not be expected to bother with. It was most vexing. After the wedding, unless she underestimated her own powers of persuasion, the situation in the Beauregard household would be much changed.

Her stays were so tight she could hardly breathe, and her decolletage so low the whole stretch of skin between her chin and bosom was insensate with the cold. And there was nothing to do with her fan but wave it about, for she could not risk setting it down on a chair and having some tipsy clod sit on it.

The original scheme had been for Art to chaperone Florence but he was as abandoned by her as Penelope had been by her fiance and evidently felt obliged to loiter about like an ardent swain. They had been twice accosted by acquaintances who congratulated her, then indicated Art with an embarrassing 'and is this the lucky gentleman?' Lord Godalming was taking it with remarkable good humour.

'I did not mean to speak ill of Charles, Penny. I apologise.'

Since the announcement, Art had been most solicitous. He had once been engaged himself, to a girl Penelope remembered quite well, but something horrid had come of it. Art was easy to understand, especially set beside Charles. Her fiance always paused before addressing her by name. He had never called her Pamela but they were both waiting in dread for that awful, inevitable moment. All through life, she had been plodding in her cousin's brilliant wake, chilling inside whenever anyone silently compared her with Pam, knowing she must eternally be judged the lesser of the Misses Churchward. But she was alive and Pam was not. She was older now than Pamela had been when she was taken from them.

'You can be sure that any matters which detain Charles are of the utmost importance. His name may never appear in the lists, but he is well known in Whitehall, if only to the best of the best, and rated highly.'

'Surely, Art, you are important too.'

Art shrugged, his curls shaking. 'I'm simply a messenger boy with a title and good manners.'

'But the Prime Minister...'

'I'm Ruthven's pet this month, but that means little.'

Florence returned, bearing an official verdict on the piece. It had been something called Clarimonde's Coming-Out, by the famous author of The Silver King and Saints and Sinners, Henry A. Jones.

'Mr Sala says "there is a rift in the clouds, a break of blue in the dramatic heavens, and seems as if we are fairly at the end of the unlovely".'

The play had been a specimen of the 'rattling farce' for which the Criterion was known. The new-born leading lady had a past and her supposed father but actual husband, a cynical Queen's Counsel, was given to addressing sarcasms directly to the dress circle, affording the actor-manager Charles Wyndham opportunities to demonstrate his aptitude for aphorism. Frequent changes of costume and backdrop took the characters from London to the country to Italy to a haunted castle and back again. By the final curtain, lovers were reconciled, cads were ruined, fortunes inherited justly and secrets exposed without harm. Barely an hour after the last act, Penelope could accurately describe to the smallest detail each of the heroine's gowns but could not recall the name of the actress who took her part.

'Penny, darling,' came a tiny, grating voice. 'Florence, and Lord Godalming. Hail and well-met.'

It was Kate Reed, in a drab little dress, trailing a jowly new-born Penelope knew to be her Uncle Diarmid. A senior staffer at the Central News Agency, he was sponsor to the poor girl's so-called career in cheap journalism. He had a reputation as one of the grubbiest of the Grub Street grubs. Everyone except Penelope found him amusing, and so he was mostly tolerated.

Art wasted his time kissing Kate's knuckly hand and she turned red as a beetroot. Diarmid Reed greeted Florence with a beery burp and enquired after her health, never a sound tactic in the case of Mrs Stoker, who was quite capable of describing extensive infirmities. Mercifully, she took another tack and asked why Mr Reed had lately not been attending the after-darks.

'We quite miss you in Cheyne Walk, Mr Reed. You always have such stories of the highs and lows of life.'

'I regret that I've been trawling the lows of late, Mrs Stoker. These Silver Knife murders in Whitechapel.'

'Dreadful business,' spluttered Art.

'Indeed. But deuced good for the circulation. The Star and the Gazette and all the other dogs are in it to the death. The Agency can't keep them fed. They'll take almost anything.'

Penelope did not care for talk of murder and vileness. She did not take the newspapers, and indeed read nothing but improving books.

'Miss Churchward,' Mr Reed addressed himself to her, 'I understand congratulations are the order of the day.'

She smiled at him in such a way as not to line her face.

'Where's Charles?' asked Kate, blundering as usual. Some girls should be beaten regularly, Penelope thought, like carpets.

'Charles has let us down,' Art said. 'Most unwisely, in my opinion.'

Penelope burned inside, but hoped it did not show on her face.

'Charles Beauregard, eh?' said Mr Reed. 'Good man in a pinch, I understand. You know, I could swear I saw the fellow in Whitechapel only the other night. With some of the detectives on the Silver Knife case.'

'That is highly unlikely,' Penelope said. She had never been to Whitechapel, a district where people were often murdered. 'I cannot imagine what would take Charles to such a quarter.'

'I don't know,' said Art. 'The Diogenes Club has queer interests, in all manner of queer quarters.'

Penelope wished Art had not mentioned that institution. Mr Reed's ears pricked up and he was about to quiz Art further when they were all saved from embarrassment by another arrival.

'Look,' squealed Florence with delight, 'at who has come again to plague us with his incorrigibility. It's Oscar.'

A large new-born with plenty of wavy hair and a well-fed look was swanning over to them, green carnation in his lapel, hands in his pockets to bulge out the front of his striped trousers.

'Evening, Wilde,' said Art.

The poet sneered a curt 'Godalming' of acknowledgement at Art, and then extravagantly paid court to Florence, pouring so much charm over her that a quantity of it naturally splashed over on to Penelope and even Kate. Mr Oscar Wilde had apparently once proposed to Florence, when she was Miss Balcombe of Dublin, but been beaten out by the now-never-mentioned Bram. Penelope found it easy to believe Wilde might have made proposals to a number of persons, simply so the rebuffs would give him something else about which to be wittily unconventional.

Florence asked him his opinion of Clarimonde's Coming-Out, whereupon Wilde remarked that he was thankful for its existence, for it might spur a canny critic, such as he obviously adjudged himself, to erect a true work of genius on its ruins.

'Why, Mr Wilde,' Kate said, 'it sounds as if you place the critic higher than the creator.'

'Indeed. Criticism is itself an art. And just as artistic creation implies the working of the critical faculty, and, indeed, without it cannot be said to exist at all, so criticism is really creative in the highest sense of the word. Criticism is, in fact, both creative and independent.'

'Independent?' Kate queried, surely aware she invited a lecture.

'Yes, independent. Just as out of the sordid and sentimental amours of the silly wife of a small country doctor in the squalid village of Yonville-l'Abbaye, near Rouen, Flaubert was able to create a classic, and make a masterpiece of style, so, from subjects of little or no importance, such as the pictures in this year's Royal Academy, or in any year's Royal Academy for that matter, Mr Lewis Morris's poems, or the plays of Mr Henry Arthur Jones, the true critic can, if it be his pleasure so to direct or waste his faculty of contemplation, produce work that will be flawless in beauty and instinct. Dullness is always an irresistible temptation for brilliancy, and stupidity is the permanent Bestia Trionfans that calls wisdom from its cave.'

'But what did you think of the play, Wilde?' asked Mr Reed.

Wilde waved his hand and made a face, the combination of gesture and expression communicating considerably more than his little speech, which even Penelope found off the point, albeit elegantly so. Relevance, Wilde once explained, was a careless habit that should not be over-indulged.

'My Lord Ruthven sends his regards,' Art said.

The poet was almost flattered to be so noticed. As he began to say something marvellously amusing but unnecessary, Art leaned close to him and, in a voice so small only Penelope could make it out apart from Wilde, said, 'and he would wish that you took great caution in visiting a certain house in Cleveland Street.'

Wilde looked at Art with eyes suddenly shrewd and refused to be drawn further. He escorted Florence off, to talk with Frank Harris of the Fortnightly Review. Since turning, Mr Harris sported goat-horns which Penelope found daunting. Kate tripped off in the poet's wake, presumably hoping to suck up enough to the editor to place with him an article on women's suffrage or some such silliness. Even a devoted libertine of Mr Harris's reputation would presumably think Kate too undernourished a fish to count as worth netting, and cast her back into the seas.

'What an earth did you say to so upset Wilde?' Mr Reed asked, scenting a story. His nostrils actually did twitch whenever he thought he was on the track of some scrap that might possibly qualify as news.

'Just some craze of Ruthven's,' Art explained.

The news-gatherer looked at Art, eyes like gimlets. Many vampires had piercing gazes. At social gatherings, they could often be found trying to outstare each other like a pair of horn-locked moose. Mr Reed lost the contest and wandered off himself, searching out his wayward niece.

'Sharp girl, that,' Art said, nodding after Kate.

'Pfui,' said Penelope, shaking her head. 'Careers are for girls who can't get themselves husbands.'

'Meow.'

'Sometimes I think everything is going completely above me,' she complained.

'Nothing to worry your pretty little head about,' he said, turning back to her.

Art tickled her under the chin, and angled her head up to look into her eyes. She thought he might plan to kiss her  -  here, in public, with all of theatre London about  -  but he did not. He laughed and let her go after a moment.

'Charles had better realise soon it is not safe to leave you lying around. Or else someone will steal you away and make of you a maiden tribute of modern Babylon.'

She giggled as she had been taught to do when anyone said anything she did not entirely understand. In the darks of Lord Godalming's eyes, something glinted. Penelope felt a tiny warmth growing in her breast, and wondered where such might lead.