Laura sat before her mirror in the bedroom of her tiny flat. There was a queer smile on her lips as she studied her face. In her right hand she held a lipstick, and she looked down now at the name engraved on the gilt case. Fatal Apple.
She wondered again at the unaccountable impulse that had taken her so suddenly into the luxurious perfumed interior of the shop that she passed every day.
The assistant had brought out a selection of lipsticks, trying them for her to see on the back of a slim hand with long exotic fingers and deep carmine nails.
Little smears of pink and cerise and scarlet and maroon and cyclamen, some of them hardly distinguishable from one another except by their names – such fantastic names they seemed to Laura.
Pink Lightning, Buttered Rum, Misty Coral, Quiet Pink, Fatal Apple.
It was the name that attracted her, not the colour.
Fatal Apple … it carried with it the suggestion of Eve, of temptation, of womanhood.
Sitting before the mirror, she carefully painted her lips.
Baldy! She thought of Baldy, pulling up bindweed and lecturing her so long ago. What had he said? ‘Show you’re a woman, hang out your flag, go after your man …’
Something like that. Was that what she was doing now?
And she thought: ‘Yes, it’s exactly that. Just for this evening, just for this once, I want to be a woman, like other women, decking herself out, painting herself up to attract her man. I never wanted to before. I didn’t think I was that kind of person. But I am, after all. Only I never knew it.’
And her impression of Baldy was so strong that she could almost fancy him standing behind her, nodding his great heavy head in approval, and saying in his gruff voice:
‘That’s right, young Laura. Never too late to learn.’
Dear Baldy …
Always, all through her life, there had been Baldy, her friend. Her one true and faithful friend.
Her mind went back to his deathbed, two years ago. They had sent for her, but when she had got there the doctor had explained that he was probably too far gone to recognize her. He was sinking fast and was only semi-conscious.
She had sat beside him, holding his gnarled hand between her own, watching him.
He had lain very still, grunting occasionally and puffing as though some inner exasperation possessed him. Muttered words came fitfully from his lips.
Once he opened his eyes, looked at her without recognition and said: ‘Where is the child? Send for her, can’t you? And don’t talk tommy-rot about its being bad for her to see anyone die. Experience, that’s all … And children take death in their stride, better than we do.’
She had said:
‘I’m here, Baldy. I’m here.’
But, closing his eyes, he had only murmured indignantly:
‘Dying, indeed? I’m not dying. Doctors are all alike – gloomy devils. I’ll show him.’
And then he had relapsed into his half-waking state, with the occasional murmur that showed where his mind was wandering, amongst the memories of his life.
‘Damned fool – no historical sense …’ Then a sudden chortle! ‘Old Curtis and his bone meal. My roses better than his any day.’
Then her name came.
‘Laura – ought to get her a dog …’
That puzzled her. A dog? Why a dog?
Then, it seemed, he was speaking to his housekeeper:
‘ – and clear away all that disgusting sweet stuff – all right for a child – makes me sick to look at it …’
Of course – those sumptuous teas with Baldy, that had been such an event of her childhood. The trouble that he had taken. The éclairs, the meringues, the macaroons … Tears came into her eyes.
And then suddenly his eyes were open, and he was looking at her, recognizing her, speaking to her. His tone was matter-of-fact:
‘You shouldn’t have done it, young Laura,’ he said reprovingly. ‘You shouldn’t have done it, you know. It will only lead to trouble.’
And in the most natural manner in the world, he had turned his head slightly on his pillow and had died.
Her friend …
Her only friend.
Once again Laura looked at her face in the mirror. She was startled, now, at what she saw. Was it only the dark crimson line of the lipstick outlining the curve of her lips? Full lips – nothing really ascetic about them. Nothing ascetic about her in this moment of studying herself.
She spoke, half aloud, arguing with someone who was herself and yet not herself.
‘Why shouldn’t I try to look beautiful? Just this once? Just for tonight? I know it’s too late, but why shouldn’t I know what it feels like? Just to have something to remember …’
He said at once: ‘What’s happened to you?’
She returned his gaze equably. A sudden shyness had invaded her, but she concealed it. To regain her poise, she studied him critically.
She liked what she saw. He was not young – actually he looked older than his years (which she knew from the Press accounts of him) – but there was a boyish awkwardness about him that struck her as both strange and oddly endearing. He showed an eagerness allied with timidity, a queer, hopeful expressiveness, as though the world and everything in it was fresh and new to him.
‘Nothing’s happened to me.’ She let him help her off with her coat.
‘Oh, but it has. You’re different – quite different – from what you were this morning!’
She said brusquely: ‘Lipstick and make-up, that’s all!’
He accepted her word for it.
‘Oh, I see. Yes, I did think your mouth was paler than most women’s usually are. You looked rather like a nun.’
‘Yes – yes – I suppose I did.’
‘You look lovely now, really lovely. You are lovely, Laura. You don’t mind my saying so?’
She shook her head. ‘I don’t mind.’
‘Say it often,’ her inner self was crying. ‘Say it again and again. It’s all I shall ever have.’
‘We’re having dinner up here – in my sitting-room. I thought you’d prefer it. But perhaps – you don’t mind?’
He looked at her anxiously.
‘I think it’s perfect.’
‘I hope the dinner will be perfect. I’m rather afraid it won’t. I’ve never thought much about food until now, but I would like it to be just right for you.’
She smiled at him as she sat down at the table, and he rang for the waiter.
She felt as though she was taking part in a dream.
For this wasn’t the man who had come to see her this morning at the Foundation. This was a different man altogether. A younger man, callow, eager, unsure of himself, desperately anxious to please. She thought suddenly: ‘This was what he was like when he was in his twenties. This is something he’s missed – and he’s gone back into the past to find it.’
For a moment sadness, desperation, swept over her. This wasn’t real. This was a might-have-been that they were acting out together. This was young Llewellyn and young Laura. It was ridiculous and rather pathetic, unsubstantial in time, but oddly sweet.
They dined. The meal was mediocre, but neither of them noticed it. Together they were exploring the Pays du Tendre. They talked, laughed, hardly noticed what they said.
Then, when the waiter finally left, setting coffee on the table, Laura said:
‘You know about me – a good deal, anyway, but I know nothing about you. Tell me.’
He told her, describing his youth, his parents and his upbringing.
‘Are they still alive?’
‘My father died ten years ago, my mother last year.’
‘Were they – was she – very proud of you?’
‘My father, I think, disliked the form my mission took. Emotional religion repelled him, but he accepted, I think, that there was no other way for me. My mother understood better. She was proud of my world fame – mothers are – but she was sad.’
‘Sad?’
‘Because of the things – the human things – that I was missing. And because my lack of them separated me from other human beings; and, of course, from her.’
‘Yes. I see that.’
She thought about it. He went on, telling her his story, a fantastic story it seemed to her. The whole thing was outside her experience, and in some ways it revolted her. She said:
‘It’s terribly commercial.’
‘The machinery? Oh yes.’
She said: ‘If only I could understand better. I want to understand. You feel – you felt – that it was really important, really worth while.’
‘To God?’
She was taken aback.
‘No – no, I didn’t mean that. I meant – to you.’
He sighed.
‘It’s so hard to explain. I tried to explain to Richard Wilding. The question of whether it was worth while never arose. It was a thing I had to do.’
‘And suppose you’d just preached to an empty desert, would that have been the same?’
‘In my sense, yes. But I shouldn’t have preached so well, of course.’ He grinned. ‘An actor can’t act well to an empty house. An author needs people to read his books. A painter needs to show his pictures.’
‘You sound – that’s what I can’t understand – as though the results didn’t interest you.’
‘I have no means of knowing what the results were.’
‘But the figures, the statistics, the converts – all those things were listed and put down in black and white.’
‘Yes, yes, I know. But that’s machinery again, human calculations. I don’t know the results that God wanted, or what He got. But understand this, Laura: if, out of all the millions who came to hear me, God wanted one – just one – soul, and chose that means to reach that soul, it would be enough.’
‘It sounds like taking a steam-hammer to crack a nut.’
‘It does, doesn’t it, by human standards? That’s always our difficulty, of course; we have to apply human standards of values – or of justice and injustice – to God. We haven’t, can’t have, the faintest knowledge of what God really requires from man, except that it seems highly probable that God requires man to become something that he could be, but hasn’t thought of being yet.’
Laura said:
‘And what about you? What does God require of you now?’
‘Oh – just to be an ordinary sort of guy. Earn my living, marry a wife, raise a family, love my neighbours.’
‘And you’ll be satisfied – with that?’
‘Satisfied? What else should I want? What more should any man want? I’m handicapped, perhaps. I’ve lost fifteen years – of ordinary life. That’s where you’ll have to help me, Laura.’
‘I?’
‘You know that I want to marry you, don’t you? You realize, you must realize, that I love you.’
She sat, very white, looking at him. The unreality of their festive dinner was over. They were themselves now. Back in the now and here that they had made for themselves.
She said slowly: ‘It’s impossible.’
He answered her without due concern: ‘Is it? Why?’
‘I can’t marry you.’
‘I’ll give you time to get used to the idea.’
‘Time will make no difference.’
‘Do you mean that you could never learn to love me? Forgive me, Laura, but I don’t think that’s true. I think that, already, you love me a little.’
Emotion rose up in her like a flame.
‘Yes, I could love you. I do love you …’
He said very softly: ‘That’s wonderful, Laura … dearest Laura, my Laura.’
She thrust out a hand, as though to hold him away from her.
‘But I can’t marry you. I can’t marry anybody.’
He stared at her hard.
‘What’s in your head? There’s something.’
‘Yes. There’s something.’
‘Vowed to good works? To celibacy?’
‘No, no, no!’
‘Sorry. I spoke like a fool. Tell me, my dearest.’
‘Yes. I must tell you. It’s a thing I thought I should never tell anybody.’
‘Perhaps not. But you must certainly tell me.’
She got up and went over to the fireplace. Without looking at him, she began to speak in a quiet matter-of-fact voice.
‘Shirley’s first husband died in my house.’
‘I know. She told me.’
‘Shirley was out that evening. I was alone in the house with Henry. He had sleeping-tablets, quite a heavy dose, every night. Shirley called back to me when she went out that she had given him his tablets, but I had gone back into the house. When I came, at ten o’clock, to see if he wanted anything, he told me that he hadn’t had his evening dose of tablets. I fetched them and gave them to him. Actually, he had had his tablets – he’d got sleepy and confused, as people often do with that particular drug, and imagined that he hadn’t had them. The double dose killed him.’
‘And you feel responsible?’
‘I was responsible.’
‘Technically, yes.’
‘More than technically. I knew that he had taken his dose. I heard when Shirley called to me.’
‘Did you know that a double dose would kill him?’
‘I knew that it might.’
She added deliberately:
‘I hoped that it would.’
‘I see.’ Llewellyn’s manner was quiet, unemotional. ‘He was incurable, wasn’t he? I mean, he would definitely have been a cripple for life.’
‘It was not a mercy killing, if that is what you mean.’
‘What happened about it?’
‘I took full responsibility. I was not blamed. The question arose as to whether it might have been suicide – that is, whether Henry might have deliberately told me that he had not had his dose in order to get a second one. The tablets were never left within his reach, owing to his extravagant fits of despair and rage.’
‘What did you say to that suggestion?’
‘I said that I did not think that it was likely. Henry would never have thought of such a thing. He would have gone on living for years – years, with Shirley waiting on him and enduring his selfishness and bad temper, sacrificing all her life to him. I wanted her to be happy, to have her life and live it. She’d met Richard Wilding not long before. They’d fallen in love with each other.’
‘Yes, she told me.’
‘She might have left Henry in the ordinary course of events. But a Henry ill, crippled, dependent upon her – that Henry she would never leave. Even if she no longer cared for him, she would never have left him. Shirley was loyal, she was the most loyal person I’ve ever known. Oh, can’t you see? I couldn’t bear her whole life to be wasted, ruined. I didn’t care what they did to me.’
‘But actually they didn’t do anything to you.’
‘No. Sometimes – I wish they had.’
‘Yes, I daresay you do feel like that. But there’s nothing really they could do. Even if it wasn’t a mistake, if the doctor suspected some merciful impulse in your heart, or even an unmerciful one, he would know that there was no case, and he wouldn’t be anxious to make one. If there had been any suspicion of Shirley having done it, it would have been a different matter.’
‘There was never any question of that. A maid actually heard Henry say to me that he hadn’t had his tablets and ask me to give them to him.’
‘Yes, it was all made easy for you – very easy.’ He looked up at her. ‘How do you feel about it now?’
‘I wanted Shirley to be free to –’
‘Leave Shirley out of it. This is between you and Henry. How do you feel about Henry? That it was all for the best?’
‘No.’
‘Thank God for that.’
‘Henry didn’t want to die. I killed him.’
‘Do you regret?’
‘If you mean – would I do it again? – yes.’
‘Without remorse?’
‘Remorse? Oh yes. It was a wicked thing to do. I know that. I’ve lived with it ever since. I can’t forget.’
‘Hence the Foundation for Sub-Normal Children? Good works? A course of duty, stern duty. It’s your way of making amends.’
‘It’s all I can do.’
‘Is it any use?’
‘What do you mean? It’s worth while.’
‘I’m not talking of its use to others. Does it help you?’
‘I don’t know …’
‘It’s punishment you want, isn’t it?’
‘I want, I suppose, to make amends.’
‘To whom? Henry? But Henry’s dead. And from all I’ve heard, there’s nothing that Henry would care less about than sub-normal children. You must face it, Laura, you can’t make amends.’
She stood motionless for a moment, like one stricken. Then she flung back her head, the colour rose in her cheeks. She looked at him defiantly, and his heart leapt in sudden admiration.
‘That’s true,’ she said. ‘I’ve been trying, perhaps, to dodge that. You’ve shown me that I can’t. I told you I didn’t believe in God, but I do, really. I know that what I’ve done was evil. I think I believe, in my heart of hearts, that I shall be damned for it. Unless I repent – and I don’t repent. I did what I did with my eyes open. I wanted Shirley to have her chance, to be happy, and she was happy. Oh, I know it didn’t last long – only three years. But if for three years she was happy and contented, and even if she did die young, then it’s worth it.’
As he looked at her, the greatest temptation of his life came to Llewellyn – the temptation to hold his tongue, never to tell her the truth. Let her keep her illusion, since it was all she had. He loved her. Loving her, how could he strike her brave courage down into the dust? She need never know.
He walked over to the window, pulled aside the curtain, stared out unseeing into the lighted streets.
When he turned, his voice was harsh.
‘Laura,’ he said, ‘do you know how your sister died?’
‘She was run over –’
‘That, yes. But how she came to be run over – that you don’t know. She was drunk.’
‘Drunk?’ she repeated the word almost uncomprehendingly. ‘You mean – there had been a party?’
‘No party. She crept secretly out of the house and down to the town. She did that now and again. She sat in a café there, drinking brandy. Not very often. Her usual practice was to drink at home. Lavender water and eau-de-Cologne. She drank them until she passed out. The servants knew; Wilding didn’t.’
‘Shirley – drinking? But she never drank! Not in that way! Why?’
‘She drank because she found her life unbearable, she drank to escape.’
‘I don’t believe you.’
‘It’s true. She told me herself. When Henry died, she became like someone who had lost their way. That’s what she was – a lost, bewildered child.’
‘But she loved Richard, and Richard loved her.’
‘Richard loved her, but did she ever love him? A brief infatuation – that’s all it ever was. And then, weakened by sorrow and the long strain of looking after an irascible invalid, she married him.’
‘And she wasn’t happy. I still can’t believe it.’
‘How much did you know about your sister? Does a person ever seem the same to two different people? You see Shirley always as the helpless baby that you rescued from fire, you see her as weak, helpless, in need always of love, of protection. But I see her quite differently, although I may be just as wrong as you were. I see her as a brave, gallant, adventurous young woman, able to take knocks, able to hold her own, needing difficulties to bring out the full capabilities of her spirit. She was tired and strained, but she was winning her battle, she was making a good job of her chosen life, she was bringing Henry out of despair into the daylight, she was triumphant that night that he died. She loved Henry, and Henry was what she wanted; her life was difficult, but passionately worth while.
‘And then Henry died, and she was shoved back – back into layers of cotton-wool and soft wrapping, and anxious love, and she struggled and she couldn’t get free. It was then that she found that drink helped. It dimmed reality. And once drink has got a hold on a woman, it isn’t easy to give it up.’
‘She never told me she wasn’t happy – never.’
‘She didn’t want you to know that she was unhappy.’
‘And I did that to her – I?’
‘Yes, my poor child.’
‘Baldy knew,’ Laura said slowly. ‘That’s what he meant when he said: “You shouldn’t have done it, young Laura.” Long ago, long ago he warned me. Don’t interfere. Why do we think we know what’s best for other people?’ Then she wheeled sharply towards him. ‘She didn’t – mean to? It wasn’t suicide?’
‘It’s an open question. It could be. She stepped off the pavement straight in front of the lorry. Wilding, in his heart of hearts, thinks it was.’
‘No. Oh, no!’
‘But I don’t think so. I think better of Shirley than that. I think she was often very near to despair, but I don’t believe she ever really abandoned herself to it. I think she was a fighter, I think she continued to fight. But you don’t give up drinking in the snap of a finger. You relapse every now and then. I think she stepped off that pavement into eternity without knowing what she was doing or where she was going.’
Laura sank down on to the sofa.
‘What shall I do? Oh! What shall I do?’
Llewellyn came and put his arms round her.
‘You will marry me. You’ll start again.’
‘No, no, I can never do that.’
‘Why not? You need love.’
‘You don’t understand. I’ve got to pay. For what I’ve done. Everyone has to pay.’
‘How obsessed you are by the thought of payment.’
Laura reiterated: ‘Everyone has to pay.’
‘Yes, I grant you that. But don’t you see, my dearest child –’ He hesitated before this last bitter truth that she had to know. ‘For what you did, someone has already paid. Shirley paid.’
She looked at him in sudden horror.
‘Shirley paid – for what I did?’
He nodded.
‘Yes. I’m afraid you’ve got to live with that. Shirley paid. And Shirley is dead, and the debt is cancelled. You have got to go forward, Laura. You have got, not to forget the past, but to keep it where it belongs, in your memory, but not in your daily life. You have got to accept not punishment but happiness. Yes, my dear, happiness. You have got to stop giving and learn to take. God deals strangely with us – He is giving you, so I fully believe, happiness and love. Accept them in humility.’
‘I can’t. I can’t!’
‘You must.’
He drew her to her feet.
‘I love you, Laura, and you love me – not as much as I love you, but you do love me.’
‘Yes, I love you.’
He kissed her – a long, hungry kiss.
As they drew apart, she said, with a faint shaky laugh:
‘I wish Baldy knew. He’d be pleased!’
As she moved away, she stumbled and half fell.
Llewellyn caught her.
‘Be careful – did you hurt yourself? – you might have struck your head on that marble chimney-piece.’
‘Nonsense.’
‘Yes, nonsense – but you’re so precious to me …’
She smiled at him. She felt his love and his anxiety.
She was wanted, as in her childhood she had longed to be wanted.
And suddenly, almost imperceptibly, her shoulders sagged a little, as though a burden, a light burden, but still a burden, had been placed on them.
For the first time, she felt and comprehended the weight of love …