May Fair

May Fair by Michael Arlen (1925)

May Fair* (1925) is a collection of satirical short stories by Michael Arlen set among Britain's wealthy, idle smart set of the 1920s, each tale skewering the vanity, boredom, and posturing of Mayfair society through arch, self-mocking narration. The opening story follows Valentine and Valerest Chambers, a young married couple whose evening quarrel over Valentine's desire for a child (and his jealousy of Valerest's beloved lapdog, Mr. Tuppy) sends him storming out to seek counsel from his guardian, Mr. Lapwing. Over brandy, Lapwing tells an elaborate, seemingly autobiographical tale of two marriages, a lost love, and a son he might have had — persuading Valentine that stubborn pride destroys marriages. Valentine rushes home and reconciles with Valerest, while it's revealed to the butler, Fountain, that Lapwing's entire story was invented on the spot to teach the boy a lesson. The next tale introduces Capel "Beau" Maturin, a penniless, dissolute rake known as "the ace of cads." After losing his fortune at cards, he's anonymously gifted £1,000 and summoned to the house of the imperious Sir Guy de Gramercy, who accuses Maturin of corrupting his grandson and seducing his granddaughter Joan, to whom Maturin is now engaged. Rather than deny his caddishness, Maturin agrees to make Joan renounce him herself — and does so by recounting a supposedly true story of betraying his best friend by stealing his fiancée. The tale devastates the room, but afterward Sir Guy's daughter-in-law, Eleanour, reveals privately that Maturin inverted the story: he was the betrayed friend, not the betrayer, and sacrificed his own reputation to spare the family's peace. A third story follows Pamela Wych, a shopgirl with romantic dreams, who is accosted in Hyde Park by a persistent, love-struck stranger. She confesses she is bound that very evening to meet George, a childhood sweetheart who left five years earlier vowing to return wealthy and marry her. She goes to keep her promise, but a street accident intervenes: a runaway horse causes a car crash, and the young woman killed beneath the wreckage turns out to be a bride on her honeymoon — married to a different George, a policeman who himself failed to keep faith with someone. The lean stranger and a grieving policeman are left to reckon with fate's cruel irony. Another episode centers on George Tarlyon, an impoverished aristocrat killing worms in Berkeley Square, and his brother-in-law Major Hugo Cypress, who lives off his wife Shirley's money while waiting to inherit. Tarlyon falls seriously ill (first diagnosed as pneumonia, then appendicitis) at the same time Shirley goes into labor next door. Under anesthesia, Tarlyon dreams — or perhaps actually experiences — waking up inhabiting his sister's body after death, horrified to find himself expected to be an affectionate wife to the "revolting" Hugo and mother to an ugly newborn, before waking to discover he has survived and Shirley has safely delivered a son. A darker tale recounts the late Admiral Sir Charles Fasset-Faith's story, told to his friend Hilary Townshend: years earlier, Fasset-Faith intervened to protect Manana Cohen, mistress of the beautiful, murderous Jewish counterfeiter and knife-thrower Julian Raphael, whom he pursued with George Tarlyon's help. When Raphael discovered Manana had warned Fasset-Faith of danger, he threw a knife meant for the Admiral that killed her instead, then vanished. Now, years later, the Admiral is haunted by visions of Raphael and Manana on the streets of London — premonitions that culminate in his own death, after which their ghosts welcome him cheerfully into the afterlife. The final major story follows the young Duke of Mall and his American Duchess, Leonora, whose stormy marriage collapses aboard his yacht near Cannes; he abandons plans for Naples and pursues her supposed twin sister, Ava Lamb, in Paris instead, showering her with the same romantic ardor he once gave his wife. Believing himself under an ancestral curse (a prophecy that a crowing weathervane cock heralds his death), he resolves to declare his love to "Ava" and die content — only to discover, in a final twist, that "Ava" is Leonora herself in disguise, having engineered the whole reunion to win back a husband who would never appreciate her as his own wife. A closing fragment introduces an ominous plague of owls fleeing Westminster and a lord who refuses to dance with his wife, setting up further calamity among the same interconnected Mayfair households the collection has followed throughout — Arlen's recurring joke being that beneath this glittering world's wit and elegance lies a great deal of self-deception, cruelty, and absurdity.

By Michael Arlen · First published 1925 · Genre: Satire, Comedy, Gothic · 11 chapters · 106,539 words

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satire · social-commentary · British-literature · 1920s · upper-class · London · romance · wit · humor · high-society · fashion · manners

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