Spade Man from over the Water

Mrs. Asher was having tea with Mrs. Penny when the telegram came. She was leaning back, with her two long feet on the fender, talking and waving her lovely hands, that seemed to go about with her like attendant doves and to lead an independent existence, swooping and perching in gestures that dramatized her share of the conversation and made even her chance remarks sound significant. They settled to rest on her knee when Mrs. Penny opened the telegram, but rose and fluttered towards that lady when she uttered a little cry.

‘My husband! He’ll be home on Friday,’ said Mrs. Penny, looking suddenly transparent with happiness.

‘My dear, I do so rejoice with you,’ said Mrs. Asher, recalling her hands, that had seemed to wish to bear her joy straight into Mrs. Penny’s breast.

‘I wonder . . . Oh, Mrs. Asher, I do hope that you and he will be great friends!’

Mrs. Asher’s dark eyes went to a photograph on the mantelpiece. ‘I know I shall like him,’ she said. ‘He looks everything that your husband should be . . . So kind,’ she said, giving the word a sonorous quality that made kindness into a rare and knightly virtue, ‘and fastidious . . . and sensitive.’ As if she were playing a little tune, she emphasized each adjective on her knee with a different finger. ‘Proud, too,’ she added. ‘Oh, there is integrity in that face! One would trust him on sight.’

‘But,’ cried Mrs. Penny, with a look of dismay, ‘that isn’t Rupert! It’s a cousin of mine, Arnold Cross. He’s a dear, as you say, but not the very least like my husband. Whatever made you . . . ? I can’t think how such a mistake could have come about.’

She was profoundly shocked. Mrs. Asher, that understanding woman, to have been entertaining all this time so erroneous an idea! Why, if she herself were to meet Mrs. Asher’s two little boys in the street, she would recognize them instinctively. She knew by sympathy exactly what they were like. She liked Mrs. Asher so much, she seemed to know her husband too; though he had never been mentioned between them.

Mrs. Asher had a deep sense of tragedy, as people have whose sense of humour is very keen. That was what made her so precious as a friend. Having once found her, you couldn’t bear the thought of ever losing her. She was, like poetry, one of the things that do not fail. If the loss of Mr. Asher had stricken her so deeply that she could not speak of him, it was because she was of heroic stature and had to drain to the dregs the cup that lesser mortals dare only to sip. Mr. Asher, Laura Penny was convinced, was like Charles Lamb—Mrs. Asher’s favourite writer. He must have hated dying and going off into the dark without her.

‘Oh, Mrs. Asher!’ said Laura, ‘I thought you would have known that Rupert is . . . well, a very magnetic kind of person. I still sometimes think that it’s all a dream, my being married to him. Isn’t it absurd—after nearly a year?’

Mrs. Asher looked about her in a hunted kind of way. But there was no other photograph in the room.

‘Oh, dear!’ she said, ‘and I thought I saw the marriage likeness between you, as the gipsies say. He looks,’ she said, ‘like the man you ought to have married. But, never mind! I must readjust my ideas.’ She twisted her mouth in that expressive way that seemed to make it the seat of her emotions, and added, laughing, ‘I suppose you really married the Spade man from over the water!’

Laura gave a little start. A dark man from over the water . . . a stranger. He had walked into the hotel in Bloomsbury to which she had gone, all lost and bewildered, when her father had died and left her, entangled like a desiccated fly in the abandoned web of his existence. Her father had been paralysed for ten years, and she had had to be paralysed too, all the time, every minute of the day. Even now, sometimes, she groped in the night for her dressing-­gown, dreaming that she heard the remorseless thumping of his stick.

And then memory came flooding back, and she sank into the pillows as into a rosy cloud. Being loved by Rupert made you feel as beautiful as Helen of Troy. He had the darkest, most shining eyes in the world, and when he looked at you, you felt as helpless as a rose rifled by bees.

Oh, it was very odd that so intuitive a person had not felt the rare quality of Rupert’s charm! One couldn’t speak of him in just an ordinary voice, because to mention his name was to hear the sound of trumpets, to smell red clove carnations, to feel a warmth as of wine in one’s veins.

Mrs. Asher’s past might lie beyond a closed door. She might have come into one’s life as down a long corridor of time, but she had brought her memories with her. They were behind her eyes, looking out of them, and in the tones of her voice, causing vibrations like those of a bell when its peal has died on the air. One felt her memories like a presence. Soon Laura was thinking of Mr. Asher as a person she had known in the flesh. She imagined them as so much part of one another that they could answer each other’s­­­­ unspoken thoughts, their love so deeply rooted that he could drop a kiss on that delicate hollowed cheek of hers without disturbing her thoughts. He was the sort of man who would bring her the first white violets, or a dead bee, or a young fir-­cone; and she the sort of woman to run to his study crying, ‘Charles (was that his name, after all?), listen to this poem I came across’; or ‘Charles, come quickly and see the light in the sky.’

Would the time ever come for Laura to be unaware of Rupert’s kiss? To think her own thoughts in his presence as tranquilly as if he were the air she breathed? Or would he always make her feel in his arms as if the world had spun away from beneath her feet? Would she ever meet that dark, mocking gaze without a shyness that was exquisite pain? ‘So prim,’ he said, with the chuckle that seemed to come from unplumbed depths of humour in him, ‘and chilly, like a snowdrop. It always was my favourite flower.’

There had been a break in the continuity of her existence. It was almost as if Rupert had created a new Laura. Drawn into his orbit, one could but revolve dizzily round him in the void. She had lost touch with her past self. She was wildly happy, but there was this queer feeling of disintegration.

It was Mrs. Asher who gave her back the self she had lost, the self that first her father and then her husband had filched from her, the Laura who had loved to be alone to think her thoughts, to dance to the tunes she heard in her mind. For Mrs. Asher was as good as solitude. Laura could hardly have paid her a greater compliment. It was strange that so restless and nervous a person should create so deep a tranquillity about her. All Mrs. Asher’s tricks, her gesticulating hands, the twisting of her mobile mouth, the way she was always losing things and having to search for them, but served to emphasize the sense of inward peace one felt in her company.

She had moved into the house over the way on the very day that Rupert went abroad. He had allowed Laura to choose the country to live in because the nature of his work took him away quite often, but he hadn’t let her have the empty house she had fallen in love with—a tip-­tilted black-­and-­white cottage, with the date 1590 carved into the lintel and the intriguing name ‘Miss Lemon’s Cottage’ painted on the gate.

‘Too dilapidated. And damp, I shouldn’t wonder. It’s been empty for years,’ he said, ‘and nobody’s likely to take it, thank God! Fields on either side and a derelict house opposite—what could be better! No one to run in and out—a thing I can’t stand. Why, we could play at Adam and Eve in our garden, and not a soul to spy. Besides, your home is in my heart . . . isn’t it, isn’t it?’

So they settled into their modern house, and she made it very fresh and gay with cretonnes and limed oak from Heals’s to match its newness. On the days he went to London, the house seemed strangely empty—like a beach when the tide goes out. When he returned, it glowed and sang, as if life had come pouring back into it.

Mrs. Asher came over to borrow some matches. She looked terribly tired. Her furniture was standing in the road, amidst the litter of straw and sacking disgorged by the pantechnicon. The pieces looked forlorn, as if they felt the wrench from the past and were suffering in the east wind. Looking at them, one felt a little dubious of Mrs. Asher’s good taste. No Chippendale, no elegance.

But one’s heart went out to her instantly, as it might go out to a giraffe at the Zoo because of its limpid eyes and its awkward grace.

‘You’ve taken the house I’d set my heart on,’ said Laura.

‘Then, please, make it yours,’ Mrs. Asher said, with a queenly gesture. ‘Please run in and out as you like.’

How trusting and generous, thought Laura, with a little pang, remembering Rupert’s prejudices. He had only just quitted the house. It seemed still to vibrate with his presence. She hadn’t had time to look into the abyss of the three months’ parting that yawned at her feet.

Mrs. Asher gave her no time.

‘Come and help me,’ she said, as if to an old friend.

And in a little while, ‘Miss Lemon’s Cottage’ seemed as much Laura’s as Mrs. Asher’s.

It was extraordinary the way the heavy mahogany snuggled into it with an effect of integrity and permanence, an air of being valued not for aesthetic reasons, but for something that had to do with the heart’s affections. The house was one in which light bloomed softly like a great golden rose. The smell of newly-­baked bread and roses greeted one’s nostrils, even though the year was too old for roses, and the incongruous things in the drawing-­room achieved a harmony that was completely satisfying, because of Mrs. Asher’s instinct for reconciling one colour with another, one period with another, by placing in juxta­position to the discordant elements some object that beautifully resolved their differences.

‘I shall live and die here,’ she said, with a contented sigh. ‘There will never be any reason to move again.’

In the chances and changes of life with a rover like Rupert, it was comforting to think that ‘Miss Lemon’s Cottage’ would always be there, with its golden light and its quintessence of rose.

She had come, Mrs. Asher said, because of the ancient Grammar School. Her little boys were at boarding-­school till the end of term, but next term they would live with her and go to the Grammar School.

‘Oh dear!’ she said, coming upon a small, very dirty eiderdown in a chest. ‘Here is Gavin’s downie, his totem-­rag. He couldn’t bear to be parted from it, couldn’t sleep, or come downstairs, or face strangers without hugging his downie. I suppose it gave him a feeling of protection. I must give it a good wash and put it on his bed,’ she said, her eyes lit with tenderness.

Somehow, Laura couldn’t mention Mrs. Asher in her letters. She knew very well how irksome Rupert would find the thought of a woman on his doorstep, and one, moreover, who was wholly unaccustomed to the idea of intrusion. It would be better, she thought, to break to him gently the astonishing fact that in his absence she had formed a friendship which would last as long as life lasted.

Not that she would put it like that, of course. Rupert’s mind was still an unexplored country. Once she dreamed of being lost in the dark in some strange landscape and of hearing a sound of gurgling water. ‘That’s Rupert’s laughter; but I don’t know where it comes from,’ she cried in her dream. She felt a terrible urgency to find the source of the chuckling water, and set off on one of those perilous and futile dream-­journeys, when one’s legs seem weighted with lead and intangible obstacles block one’s path. When she woke, the dream seemed to have lasted all night. It left her feeling physically exhausted and a little frightened.

The truth was that Rupert didn’t really like people; though people fell for him . . . old ladies in hotels and young women in the train, and tradesmen and bus-­conductors and charwomen.

‘Your starchy Cheltenham relations—let’s keep them at arm’s length,’ he said. And when Arnold Cross sent that photograph from India—‘Good Lord, what a prig! So long as he stays in Delhi and doesn’t come bothering us . . .’

From the depths of her armchair, little Mrs. Penny looked at Mrs. Asher consideringly, the colour coming and going in her cheeks. She was trying to see her friend with Rupert’s eyes. It was terrible—like seeing a distorted reflection in a train window which bestows a foreknowledge of the friend beside you in extreme old age, or even in death. And then, as you turn with relief to the contemporary, the real, face, Laura saw once more the face of her Mrs. Asher, and vowed to herself that neither Rupert nor any other force should come between them.

The winter afternoon had closed in. The sky still held a watery yellow light, faint as primroses, and pools of heliotrope shadow lay under the trees. The withered bines of the clematis on the wall were ropes of silver. In the myrtle bush beyond the window a ghost fire was fantastically burning. How lovely! And there was the back view of a ghostly Mrs. Asher sitting on the frosty grass, like Keats’s ghostly queen of spades. (‘A Spade man from over the water’, she had said, with her little hollow laugh.)

Mrs. Asher was still looking pensively at Arnold’s photograph, her chin cupped in her hand. But probably her thoughts were far away.

‘Wait!’ said Laura. ‘I have a snapshot of us on our honeymoon, feeding the pigeons in Venice.’

She got up and searched in a drawer.

‘Here it is!’

She handed the bit of pasteboard to her friend with an expectant look, as if she were waiting for a little sound of surprise.

‘It’s getting dark. I must take it to the window,’ Mrs. Asher said, rising in her leisurely way.

‘We’ll have the light,’ Laura put out her hand to the switch, but on Mrs. Asher’s protesting that she loved the twilight, she poked the fire instead.

Mrs. Asher’s tall, straight figure at the window quenched the fire in the myrtle bush. The warmth and cosiness inside were no longer projected into the grey and silver world without. The light had died in the sky and a greenish star shone, faint as a glow-­worm, over the thin black poplar.

Mrs. Asher seemed to be peering at the snapshot as if she couldn’t quite see.

‘As I’m to meet him at Greenock,’ said Laura, waiting, ‘I suppose I shall be away a couple of days.’

‘Yes,’ said Mrs. Asher, turning at last. ‘No doubt you will want to spend a night in London. He is a very handsome man, my dear.’ She gave her soft little laugh. ‘No wonder you were surprised at my . . . absurd mistake!’

She gathered her furs about her, stooped, and for the first time kissed Laura’s cheek. She was not a demonstrative woman, and a kiss from her was as sweet and surprising as a gift of chill Christmas roses.

Laura caught her hands. ‘Oh, my dear, how glad I am that Fate sent you my way! But you’re not going yet? Do have another cup of tea.’

‘You must have much to do. And so have I,’ said Mrs. Asher. Yes, of course; she was expecting the boys home. How nice that Mrs. Asher, too, had happiness to look forward to.

She would like Rupert, of course. Oh, everyone had to succumb to that compelling charm of his! And he? If one were very tactful, if one didn’t rush things, if one let her dawn on him, as it were, gradually, oh! surely Rupert would take to her unique, her delightful Mrs. Asher. Laura wouldn’t, at first, say a word. Indeed, she knew very well that her thoughts would be too much in a whirl, and for him alone.

But, as they approached ‘Miss Lemon’s Cottage,’ he might notice, perhaps, that it was inhabited. Golden light would be shining out through the curtains, smoke coming from the chimneys. ‘Hullo!’ he might say. ‘So the house opposite has been let.’

That would be her chance. ‘Yes,’ she would reply, in a light, unconcerned voice; ‘but to a quiet, unassuming kind of person—a Mrs. Asher. You’d like her, I think.’

But when the time came there was no golden light, no smoke. ‘Miss Lemon’s Cottage’ was as dark as the tomb, as hollow as a forsaken nest. A house-­agent’s sign creaked in the wind. Some wisps of straw were blown to Laura’s feet, then lifted and whirled away with a faint rustling, like a desolate word whispered in the ear. ‘Treachery,’ her lips repeated soundlessly, over and over again, ‘treachery, treachery.’

‘But whose?’ asked a little, lost, cold voice from nowhere.