Two months later, Daisy Bland was sitting alone in their Maida Vale lodging-house, darning Hugo’s socks. They had come here five weeks ago, when Hugo’s money ran out. Brought up in thrifty ways, she sighed now to think how they had squandered it; but her sigh was half of pleasure, as she remembered the fairy-tale sequence of those first three weeks.
They had returned from Kew Gardens, Hugo in tearing high spirits, Daisy drugged and expectant with passion. They went first to a Car-Hire firm near Victoria, where Hugo was evidently a well-known client. He filled in forms, and paid the deposit with a handful of £1 notes which he produced, as he was to produce so many more during the days that followed, from his trouser-pocket. She hardly had time to wonder how often this had happened before, with other girls, when he whisked her off to her Pimlico lodging. Then he left her, saying he must pick up his own belongings (he did not say where), and would return in half an hour. She packed a case, then filled in the time by writing postcards to tell her mother and aunt that she was off for a holiday with a girl friend. After posting them, she paid off her landlady and, with a dazed sense of burning her boats, said she would not be needing the room any more.
She saw the little car draw up in the street below. She ran down the stairs as if the house was on fire. He had changed his suit; but he looked just the same, she thought with a new access of happiness—as though that had been almost too much to expect. Soon they were driving out of London, out of her old life.
“Where are we going?” Daisy asked.
“Where would you like to go?”
The way he said it made her feel as if he had all England, the whole universe, at his disposal. She laughed, deep from her heart, and laid her head on his shoulder.
“Anywhere,” she said. “The country. Somewhere we can be alone together. Not—”
“Not a road-house or a flash hotel. You bet your life not!”
“I was going to say, not where you’ve taken your other girls. But I don’t mind, really I don’t.”
He took her right hand, pressing his nails gently into the knuckles. “There aren’t any other girls. Not any more. You can take that for gospel, sweet Daisy.”
She believed it, in the mounting glow of her happiness: and she was never to regret believing it.
They landed up at an inn in an Oxfordshire village, which Hugo liked the look of. Daisy smiled secretly to herself now as she recalled that first evening, when they faced each other in the low-windowed bedroom, she rubbing between her fingers a geranium leaf she had plucked in the courtyard below, and Hugo saying, “Shall we go down to dinner now?”
“If you like,” she replied, tilting her head back, the blood thrumming in her ears. He gazed at her a moment across the little room. With a rush of excitement and terror, she saw his dark face change. His eyes, piercing bright, seemed to pin her against the wall where she stood. She felt impaled, powerless, yet wildly acquiescent. He was a stranger, he was a hawk hovering to swoop down upon her. They came together as if whirled by a clap of wind out of a cloudless sky. She was naked, staring up at him transfixed, an animal in a snare shamming dead under the poacher’s hands, then quivering and struggling. But the pain was good, the surrender and fierce abjection were wonderful; and presently she heard him say, “There’s no one like you, my love.”
She went down to dinner with him in a dream. She did not know what she was eating or what she was saying. They sat in the bar afterwards, watching a darts match. Then Hugo joined a game; he was a good player, she could see, serious, entirely absorbed: whatever he did, a sort of natural grace and featness came through. Once or twice he looked over towards where she sat, like a child demanding his mother’s admiration, and something new stirred in her, quite different from the other feelings he had roused. At the end of the game, he was challenged to a return. He took up the darts again, raising an eyebrow quizzically at Daisy. Hardly knowing what she did, she rested her eyes upon him in the crowded, smoky room, with a look neither shy nor bold but deeply searching, which drew him to her like an invisible thread. Laying down the darts, he said to his opponent, “Not now, thanks. To-morrow night, if you’re here.”
They were upstairs again: and this time Daisy came into full possession of her womanhood. She could not have enough of him. “Master! Master!” her peasant blood cried out. She went to sleep, still sobbing with pleasure, a scent of wallflowers from the window-boxes blowing into the room.
Daisy would have liked to stay there for days, for ever. But on the third day Hugo suggested they should move on. She agreed, sensing a restlessness in him which even his love for her could not appease. And so it went on for three weeks, the little car tracing a random course through county after county. Hugo drove fast, though he would always slow down if she asked him, so that at times she had the fancy that they were fugitives, twisting and doubling on their tracks to escape some remorseless pursuer. The absurd notion was exhilarating, yet remotely disquieting. One day she said to him:
“It feels as if we were running away, being chased.”
“So we are, darling.”
“What are we running away from?” she asked dreamily.
“Real life. We’re escapists.”
He said it lightly; but, responding to him as she did, she felt as if her question had touched him on some too sensitive spot; and for some little time after, he was unusually silent. To distract him from himself—they happened just then to be driving past a long, high park wall—she said:
“I wonder what’s on the other side of that.”
He stopped the car at once. “Let’s see.” He got out, looked up and down the road, listened for a moment, then ran straight at the wall. She thought he must have gone mad, for the wall was nearly twelve feet high. But he leapt up at it, smoothly as a wave, one foot stretched out before him making contact half-way up, and the impetus carrying his body above it so that his hands reached the top of the wall, and flexing his arms all in the same swift movement he drew himself up to sit astride it. There seemed no effort at all in the proceeding: he just went up like a bubble.
“It’s a knack,” he called down to her, not the least out of breath. “Anyone can get up any wall, if it’s not more than twice his height. Come along.”
He hauled her up—she knew all about the strength in those slender wrists and fingers—then gave her a glance, at once reckless and queerly challenging, which she could neither interpret nor forget. Thinking about this episode afterwards, when she had discovered the truth, she realised that he had given her a hint which he had not dared—or was by nature too evasive—to put into words. She could remember other occasions also, when he had, as it were, acted his secret in dumb show, half defying, half wanting her to guess it; and times when, with the mischievous expression of a schoolboy giving a dare, he had allowed his talk to tremble on the very edge of self-betrayal.
Ah, she thought, taking up another pair of socks to darn, I should have guessed. He was trying to tell me something; he was afraid to tell me—afraid, yes, of losing me: that was why: or afraid of spoiling our honeymoon. Silly boy.
“You’re a funny girl,” he had said one day, twisting upon her finger the wedding ring he had bought for her on their way out of London. “You’ve never asked me to ask you to marry me.”
“Well, ask me then.”
They were lying in a wood, high up on a Dorset hillside. The whole floor of the wood smoked with bluebells, as if the earth below were on fire, and the song of willow-wrens tossed and dwindled through the long afternoon. Hugo turned on his back, speaking up to the trees whose leaf-shadows shifted over his face.
“Would you want to marry a man, whatever he was really like, just because you loved him?”
To Daisy, this seemed an absurd question; but she had gained enough wisdom not to say so.
“I know you’re—not bad,” she ventured.
“You know damn-all about me, my love.” His tone was harsh; but she replied gently:
“You could tell me. But not if you don’t want to, sweetheart.” Then, as he was silent, she went on, “I know you are twenty-eight, your father is a clergyman, you were sacked from your school, you went out to Australia, you fought in the war and were taken prisoner, you’re a commission agent—whatever that is. And you’re the most wonderful man in the world.”
“Quite a dossier.” He looked up at her searchingly. “What did you think about me the first time we met?”
“I thought you looked like a poacher.”
“A poacher? In St. John’s Wood? Well!” Hugo laughed shortly. After a pause, he said, “I hate the idea of being trapped. That’s the one thing I’m really frightened of.”
“Trapped into marriage, do you mean?”
“That might be part of it. I’m not cut out to be a domestic animal.”
“Well, we won’t get married then.”
“Oh, darling, don’t talk like a nurse humouring a fractious patient, for God’s sake!”
The easy tears flooded her eyes, but he was not looking at her now. In a tight voice, Hugo said:
“Would you marry me if I were a—a murderer?”
“Yes,” she answered simply. “If you wanted me to. But—”
“I’m not, actually. Except for killing chaps in the war. Listen, Daisy—if you were a man, and a bad egg, a criminal type, would you ask a girl you loved to marry you?”
“I never started this talk about marriage,” she replied, baffled and still feeling hurt by his rejection of her sympathy.
“Well, would you?” he pressed.
“I suppose criminals do get married. Why shouldn’t they?”
Hugo pursued it no further. She felt she had failed him, but she did not know how. The whole conversation had seemed to her crazy, unreal. Criminals were people one read about in newspapers—cosh boys, Teddy boys, masked burglars, murderers—or the narrow-eyed men one saw standing about in groups in the little streets off Shaftesbury Avenue: thugs, riff-raff. Daisy could not begin to associate Hugo, who was so obviously a gentleman, a civilised person for all his streak of wildness, with that underworld. He might as well have said he’d dropped into St. John’s Wood from Mars. Why must he go on as if he had some guilty secret? Perhaps, she suddenly thought, he is a traitor, a Communist agent—something like that. Then she felt his hands upon her, the brushing of cool air against her skin as he took off her clothes. He was saying how beautiful she looked; the only woman on earth; Eve stretched out in the woods of Paradise: and like a leaf in the fire, she twisted, curled up, was consumed. Nothing else mattered. He was her man.
Towards the end of those weeks, they arrived at a little seaport in the south-west. There was a fair on, and after dinner he took her there. He had been moody, withdrawn, all day; but now—she was getting used to the ebb and flow of his temperament—he suddenly burst into sparks like a stirred bonfire. The shouts of barkers, the snap of rifles in the shooting gallery, the blatant music from the roundabouts, seemed to affect him like a fever, which communicated itself from his blood to hers. Dragging her from booth to booth, throwing for cokernuts, shooting at ping-pong balls dancing on jets of water, careering and colliding in the bumper-car arena, he was like an over-excited child who will run himself to a standstill rather than miss anything. Daisy noticed how the girls eyed him and the stallholders winked at him. “Come on, you lovely great stook of corn,” he exclaimed, and she was tossed on to the back of a wooden horse before she had time to protest that roundabouts made her sick. Lights were spinning and splintering; the fair whirled round her like a room round a drunk man, rising and falling. When the thing stopped at last she felt so giddy-sick that, alighted from the horse, she swayed, staggered, fell to the ground.
A meaty young man in a platypus cap, standing nearby, said to his companion, “God, another drunk! Look, she’s absolutely plastered.”
Hugo, who was telling Daisy to put her head between her knees and keep still for a while, straightened up instantly and stepped in front of the man.
“What did I hear you say about this young lady?”
“Young what?” sneered the man.
Hugo had hit him thrice—a left jab to the stomach, a right and left rattling his jaw—before the man had time to realise he was in a fight. However, he was as big as Hugo was fast, and he rebounded from a tent against which Hugo’s blows had sent him reeling, put up his hands, and made for his much slighter opponent. Daisy, feeling a different kind of sickness, scrambled to her feet: the young man in the cap—it was still glued to his head—looked dangerous, a giant. The light of a flare showed her Hugo’s face, intent, malevolently grinning. He seemed to move in and out on castors: he ducked a haymaking right swing—then the crowd closed round the fighters and Daisy could see no more. But she heard cracks of fist on face which made her wince, and then a voice shouting “Police! Police coming!” The crowd heaved, frayed out. Hugo was darting towards her, had seized her hand, was pulling her away, between two booths, out onto open ground, running with her towards the sea.
“Are you hurt, darling?” she asked when they had reached the esplanade. He shook his head vigorously, as if to clear it, and moved her on from under the lamp where she had stopped, looking up at him in anxiety.
“It’s all right. I’ll have a thick ear to-morrow, though. Did you see any police, or was it a false alarm?”
“I don’t know.”
“I could have killed that chap.” Hugo’s arm was trembling in hers.
“Don’t, love. It doesn’t matter.”
A little farther on he halted, and stood listening. Daisy could hear nothing but the leisurely thump of waves on the sea wall, and a more distant sound of roundabout music braying above the confused noises of the fair. She became aware that she was still clutching a flaxen-haired doll which Hugo had won for her at the shooting gallery.
“What is it?” she said.
“Just listening for the hue-and-cry. Force of habit.” He seemed to be talking to himself.
“What do you mean?”
“Oh, prisoner-of-war days. I tried to escape, once or twice.”
“But the police wouldn’t—”
“I don’t want the police mixed up with our holiday, my darling.” His bright eyes glanced away from her. “Suppose they ran me in for assaulting that bastard—well, you’d be dragged into it, and it’d come out that we weren’t married. Endless fuss and bother. You don’t know what it’s like.”
After a few minutes’ silence—they were approaching their hotel now—she asked, “Would you rather we left here? went somewhere else for to-night?”
“Well… No, to hell with them. It’s too late. We’ll start earlyish to-morrow.”
They did not start as early as he had intended, however. That night Daisy was awoken by his voice, muttering louder and louder, then crying out in a nightmare. It was a terrible sound, like a dumb man trying to utter his agony—quavering, bellowing sounds wrenched up from his inmost being, and at last achieving words—“Let me out! Let me out! Let me out!”
She shook him awake, her hands slipping on his shoulders, which were drenched with sweat.
“It’s all right, love. I’m here. It’s only a dream. Wake up, sweetheart! Poor Hugo, poor Hugo.”
She pressed his head convulsively against her breasts. For a moment he struggled worse than ever; then, coming fully awake, gripped her so hard that she whimpered.
“Oh, God, what an awful dream!” he cried, shaking as if the heart she could feel thudding against her would knock his body to pieces.
Daisy turned on the light, and when she had soothed him, got out of bed to fetch a towel.
“You’re soaking. I’ll dry you.”
He looked up at her like a child, an exhausted child, his lips still quivering; followed her with his eyes, as if the sight of her was almost too good to be true.
“That’s better,” she said briskly. “What were you dreaming about? You made an awful noise.”
“Sorry, nurse. It shan’t happen again—let’s hope. What did I say?”
“You kept yelling ‘Let me out!’”
His eyes changed their teasing expression, and darkened. “I did, did I?” He fell silent for a little, holding her hand. Then he gave her that look, enigmatic, measuring, obscurely challenging, which was becoming familiar to her. “I was buried alive once.”
“Oh, my dear! In the war?”
“And once, at school, some chaps shut me up in a locker. I half killed one of them when I got out. That’s why I was sacked.”
“But that was cruel. Shutting you up, I mean.”
“People are cruel. Haven’t you noticed it?” His fingers touched the red marks they had left just now on her body. “Because they’re frightened. Frightened people scare me stiff—run a mile from them—including myself. When I was a kid, I was the timid type. So I used to dare myself to do the most hair-raising things. And I did them, as often as not. Showing off to myself—and to anyone else who was, around: that’s what they called it, anyway. So I got into the habit of it.”
He went on talking in this disjointed way for nearly an hour, as if a floodgate had been opened. Daisy did not understand half what he was saying: his mind moved too fast for her. What is he trying to tell me, she thought. How can I help him? I wish I wasn’t so young, I wish I knew more about people. Women are supposed to know by instinct.
She felt that it was a stranger lying beside her in the bed, a foreigner speaking out of that familiar body. The sensation was both bewildering and exhilarating: the strangeness of it gave her an almost sensual relish. She tasted her power over him, even while her weakness—the failure to follow his erratic, hurrying words-troubled her. A phrase repeated itself in her mind—“buried alive for twelve months”: had he said it just now, or?—No, it was absurd, nobody could be buried alive for twelve months.
Scraps of what he had said then kept recurring to her during the days that followed: but she could never piece them together so as to make a whole of them: a pattern was missing. And at that time she was still too much absorbed in her own responses, finding out too many new things about herself, to leave much room for curiosity. Besides, the peasant blood which made her fatalistic also gave her the wisdom of letting well alone: you did not stir up hornets’ nests for the satisfaction of proving to yourself that hornets can hurt.
The next morning they overslept, and did not leave the little seaport till nearly midday. A few days later Hugo said to her, out of the blue, “We must go back now, darling.”
“Back to London?”
“Yes. No more money. Finito. I’m broke. Truly.”
Daisy watched the hedge-flowers rushing by the car, streaming into the past. “Stop a minute,” she said impulsively: then, as the countryside slowed and came to a standstill, “I want to say good-bye properly.”
“To me?”
“To our holi—our honeymoon.” Opening the window, she reached out and pulled a spray from the hedge. He watched her silently. Not looking at him, she said:
“Are you—am I to leave you, when we get back?”
After a pause, he asked, “Was it worth it?”
“Oh, yes. yes!” she cried, her eyes like morning-glories.
“Then don’t talk nonsense about leaving me, my beloved.”
“But how can you afford—?”
“I can’t afford to do without you.” The merry, reckless look returned to his face. “And I can always lay my hands on some money.”