Dermot had married Marjorie Connell a few days after the decree was made absolute.
I was curious about Celia’s attitude to the other woman. She had touched on it so little in her story – almost as though the other woman hadn’t existed. She never once took up the attitude that a weak Dermot had been led astray, although that is the most common attitude for a betrayed wife.
Celia answered my question at once and honestly.
‘I don’t think he was – led astray, I mean. Marjorie? What did I think about her? I can’t remember … It didn’t seem to matter. It was Dermot and me that mattered – not Marjorie. It was his being cruel to me that I couldn’t get over …’
And there, I think, I see what Celia will never be able to see. Celia was essentially tender in her attitude towards suffering. A butterfly pinned in his hat would never have upset Dermot as a child. He would have assumed firmly that the butterfly liked it!
That is the line he took with Celia. He was fond of Celia, but he wanted Marjorie. He was an essentially moral young man. To enable Dermot to marry Marjorie, Celia had to be got rid of. Since he was fond of Celia, he wanted her to like the idea too. When she didn’t, he was angry with her. Because he felt badly about hurting her, he hurt her all the more and was unnecessarily brutal about it … I can understand – I can almost sympathize …
If he had let himself believe he was being cruel to Celia he couldn’t have done it … He was, like many brutally honest men, dishonest about himself. He thought himself a finer fellow than he really was …
He wanted Marjorie, and he had to get her. He’d always got everything that he wanted – and life with Celia hadn’t improved him.
He loved Celia, I think, for her beauty and her beauty only …
She loved him enduringly and for life. He was, as she once put it, in her blood …
And, also, she clung. And Dermot was the type of man who cannot endure being clung to. Celia had very little devil in her, and a woman with very little devil in her has a poor chance with men.
Miriam had devil. For all her love for her John, I don’t believe he always had an easy life with her. She adored him, but she tried him too. There’s a brute in man that likes being stood up to …
Miriam had something that Celia lacked. What is vulgarly called guts, perhaps.
When Celia stood up to Dermot it was too late …
She admitted that she had come to think differently about Dermot now that she was no longer bewildered by his sudden apparent inhumanity.
‘At first,’ she said, ‘it seemed as though I had always loved him and done anything he wanted, and then – the first time that I really needed him and was in trouble, he turned round and stabbed me in the back. That’s rather journalese, but it expresses what I felt.
‘There are words in the Bible that say it exactly.’ She paused, then quoted:
‘For it is not an open enemy that hath done me this dishonour: for then I could have borne it; … But it was even thou, my companion: my guide, and mine own familiar friend.
‘It was that, you see, that hurt. “Mine own familiar friend.”
‘If Dermot could be treacherous, then anyone could be treacherous. The world itself became unsure. I couldn’t trust anyone or anything any more …
‘That’s horribly frightening. You don’t know how frightening that is. Nothing anywhere is safe.
‘You see – well, you see the Gun Man everywhere …
‘But, of course, it was my fault really, for trusting Dermot too much. You shouldn’t trust anyone as much as that. It’s unfair.
‘All these years, while Judy has been growing up, I’ve had time to think … I’ve thought a great deal … And I’ve seen that the real trouble was that I was stupid … Stupid and arrogant!
‘I loved Dermot – and I didn’t keep him. I ought to have seen what he liked and wanted, and been that … I ought to have realized (as he himself said) that he would “want a change” … Mother told me not to go away and leave him alone … I did leave him alone. I was so arrogant I never thought of such a possibility as happened. I was so sure that I was the person he loved and always would love. As I said, it’s unfair to trust people too much, to try them too high, to put them on pedestals just because you like them there. I never saw Dermot clearly … I could have … if I hadn’t been so arrogant – thinking that nothing that happened to other women could ever happen to me … I was stupid.
‘So I don’t blame Dermot now – he was just made that way. I ought to have known and been on my guard and not been so cocksure and pleased with myself. If a thing matters to you more than anything in life, you’ve got to be clever about it … I wasn’t clever about it …
‘It’s a very common story. I know that now. You’ve only got to read the papers – especially the Sunday ones that go in for that sort of thing. Women who put their heads in gas ovens – or take overdoses of sleeping draughts. The world is like that – full of cruelty and pain – because people are stupid.
‘I was stupid. I lived in a world of my own. Yes, I was stupid.’