“WELL, THAT EXPLAINS everything!” declared Cynthia. “In love with Ivor! Would you believe it! No wonder we couldn’t get any sense out of her about her ‘boy-friend trouble’. Though mind you, Imogen, I suspected something of the sort all along….”
“I’m sure you did,” said Imogen drily—and then repented almost at once of her sarcasm. Cynthia had a habit of being wiser, after a greater variety of events, than almost anyone Imogen had ever known, but this was no time to start an argument about it. Cynthia had, after all, suffered quite a bad attack of nerves last night, and this morning—as is so often the privilege of the one who has caused all the trouble—was having breakfast in bed. In her pink lacy bedjacket, and with her fluff of pale hair all anyhow, she looked like a bruised child. The blue eyes, still muzzy from all those sleeping-pills and things, looked up at Imogen questioningly.
“Have another piece of toast?” Imogen invited, trying to make amends—though in fact no such effort was necessary. Cynthia was more or less impervious to sarcasm (perhaps this was one of the things that had made her so difficult to divorce?), and had taken Imogen’s snide remark as a compliment.
“Yes, well, I’ve always had this sort of rapport thing with the young,” she agreed modestly. “As Teddy always used to say—Oh, thank you—Yes; yes please … Thanks a lot….”
To avert being told who Teddy was and what he used to say, Imogen was feverishly plying her companion with butter, marmalade, more coffee … and sure enough, it worked. Cynthia’s stream-of-consciousness soon meandered obediently back to the matter in hand: namely, Piggy, and Imogen’s strange encounter with her last night. The last half of the story was even more dramatic than the first, and Cynthia was soon listening open-mouthed, asking pertinent questions here and there, and putting Imogen right on points of detail.
Not that Cynthia had actually been present, of course, or knew anything about the sequence of events, but she was very quick at knowing what should have happened.
“But she was still crying, Imogen, she must have been …”
“Oh, but Imogen, she’d never have said a thing like that, not at such a moment….” “Oh, but she couldn’t have, Imogen, not unless the light was on….”
And so on and so on. Imogen began to wish that she didn’t have to tell the story at all, and particularly not to Cynthia. She would have preferred, for Piggy’s sake as well as her own, to have kept the whole thing to herself and never mentioned it to anyone: but the way it had all ended made secrecy impossible.
*
She had grown stiff, standing there behind the curtain. Stiff and cold, and aching in all her limbs. Once or twice, she had imagined that Piggy must have tiptoed away, but each time, when she peeped through the curtains, the girl was still there, spreadeagled across the chair in an attitude of silent, abandoned grief. She was no longer weeping, but neither was she asleep. Her eyes were bright, and wide open, staring, apparently, straight into Imogen’s own eye, though of course they couldn’t have been. In the faint light from the dying fire it was impossible to read their expression, they looked like two silver beads; the rest of the girl’s face was quite lost in the shadows.
More than once, as the aching of her back worsened, Imogen was tempted to throw in her hand; to walk out from behind the curtain and make a clean breast of it. Yes, I’m sorry, I was spying; but not on you … I never meant … I’d never have dreamed … I was expecting something quite absolutely different….
Piggy’s anger she could have faced. It was the girl’s embarrassment that would be so insupportable. How awful for the poor child to learn that her most private emotions had been spied on, the extravagant secrets of her heart laid bare. For someone so young, and so emotional, it could be quite traumatic.
No. Backache or no backache, she must stick it out.
Hardly had this heroic decision crystallised in her mind, than she became aware that it was unnecessary. Her vigil was right now coming to an end. The figure on the chair was moving.
Imogen dared not peep through the crack any more. Flattening herself against the glass, holding her breath in sheer relief, she waited to hear the soft barefoot padding towards the door … the swish of the burnous as it brushed the lintel … and then the lovely, luxurious silence that would swing back into the room once the girl was well and truly gone.
That all this wasn’t happening was at first unclear. Through the muffling folds of curtain, the direction and quality of the sounds were hard to assess, and Imogen only took in what was happening when the long, heavy curtain swept softly against her, and Piggy stepped through into the moonlight.
Even then, Imogen might have escaped unnoticed. She was still partially hidden, and Piggy, her hair all around her in a silver waterfall, looking neither to the right nor to the left, stood as one enchanted, her eyes upraised towards the moon, which hung, larger than life it seemed, and almost exactly at the full, just above the bare, motionless elms. Their black shadows lay across the frost-bitten lawn at a strange angle, never seen at a normal hour of the night. If ever witchcraft were to be abroad, if ever magic were to come into its own, it would be on such a night as this.
Slowly, her eyes still fixed upon the giant moon, the girl lifted her arms—slowly, slowly … reaching upwards and outwards towards the heavens like some primitive worshipper from the very dawn of history….
“Bloody Christ almighty …!”
Piggy’s shriek burst from her as her outspread fingers encountered Imogen’s shrinking flesh … and in the ensuing confused medley of rage, and outrage, and useless apology, it was amazing that the whole household wasn’t awakened.
They weren’t, though. Perhaps noises at night seem louder to the perpetrators than they do to others. Anyway, no one came down … no one intervened to demand explanations, or to say calm down, take it easy, or to take one side or other in the furious battle.
Furious, but not, actually, a battle; for they were on the same side, right from the start. Imogen sympathised totally with Piggy’s anger, and was fully conscious of the unforgivable injury she had unwittingly inflicted: consumed by guilt, she attempted to explain to excuse and to apologise all at once, in a confused, incomprehensible jumble: “I never meant …” “I wouldn’t for worlds …” “… and from then on I felt I had to stay hidden…. Oh, Piggy, Piggy, please try to understand….”
*
Piggy’s face was pale as pudding in the moonlight, and Imogen tried to recall, like something in a dream, how beautiful it had been a few minutes ago. On the whitish forehead sweat gleamed, and from the contorted mouth came toads, in the form of insult after insult.
Imogen had always known that Piggy disliked her; but never before had she grasped the virulence of that dislike, nor the reason that lay behind it.
Partly, of course, it was that she, Imogen, was Ivor’s wife, and during her year or more of unrequited love, Piggy had had plenty of time to observe, from her vantage-point on campus, all the ways in which her hero’s wife was unworthy of him, and to collect evidence (albeit mostly hearsay) of the woman’s inadequacies. Fair enough: any girl-friend worth her salt will do as much.
But it hadn’t stopped there. After Ivor’s death, the girl’s natural grief and shock had been compounded by a new and unprecedented factor: she had heard, somehow, of the same rumour that Teri had heard: the two of them had got together on it, talked it over, come to a joint decision. Between them (she hissed, her lips grey and drawn in the moonlight)—between them, they would get Imogen hanged; yes, they would, capital punishment would be back just in time….
“… but that’s silly …” Imogen protested weakly, just as she had protested to Teri. “I mean, I can prove that I wasn’t …”
“Proof! … Proof …!” Piggy mouthed the word as if it was an obscenity. “You’ll find that it’s too late for proof now, Mrs B. You’ve left it too long. By now, even your own family know that you did it! Yes, they do …!”
She faced Imogen with blazing eyes and fists white to the knuckles. Imogen, for some reason found herself giving a short, breathless little laugh.
“What, Herbert and all?” she asked. Really, it was too absurd. “Well, why haven’t they mentioned it, then? Why haven’t they accused me …?”
Piggy looked at her with narrowed, shining eyes.
“Because they’re frightened, that’s why. They’re scared. They know you’re mad, you see. They’ve known it for weeks now, and so they’re frightened. They don’t know what you might do next.”