One evening, a fortnight later, Daisy set out to visit John Jaques. The fling of high life was over, and Hugo had taken her back to the rooms in Maida Vale. They had seen Jacko several times during that period. Daisy’s first doubts about him were set at rest by these meetings: he was attentive to her, and he jollied Hugo along in an easy, impish way that made her warm to him. He was in any case a more solid figure than the chance acquaintances of bar, night-club and race-meeting—young men who made difficult conversation or facile passes at her, young women whose eyes lingered upon Hugo—a drifting, brittle society with no more relationship than match-sticks swirling together and apart in some back-eddy.
Jacko represented something more permanent. And it was a measure of Daisy’s need for such stability, now the first flood of passion had subsided a little, that she should seek it in him. Jacko was an abortionist, according to Hugo, and a sort of pilot fish for his own criminal activities, yet Daisy could not feel any moral abhorrence for him. He’s like—like an uncle to us both, she thought as the underground train rattled her towards Kensington High Street. Perhaps I’m just a naturally wicked girl—taking to this sort of thing like a duck to water: I don’t seem to be able to feel shocked any more. She took out her compact. A face pure and dreamy as the dawn gazed at her from its little mirror. So there I am, a burglar’s moll, on my way to visit a doctor who…
Hugo was out this evening. He would not be back till late, he had said. He said no more than this, but she knew—as she was always to know now—that something was in the wind. He had looked taut this morning, withdrawn from her, as if he must listen attentively to something tuning up within himself. But there was the tacit compact between them that he should not tell her his plans, nor she inquire. A louring, foreboding sensation oppressed her; it was like when the sky came down and sat for days upon the wold above her village in Gloucestershire. Outside the station, some impulse made her ask a policeman the route to Albert Grove, though she did not need his directions: he looked at her steadily, in the policeman’s way, but without suspicion or curiosity. As she walked on, Daisy thought how strange it was that the police should not have troubled them yet: disquieting too, and heightening her sense of isolation, as if They knew all about her but were biding their time, waiting maybe for some sign, some crucial, irretrievable error, before They took action.
Albert Grove was a crescent-shaped terrace, lined with plane trees, of early-Victorian houses, which one could imagine inhabited by the widows of Deans and Indian Civil Servants, by sere, punctilious bachelors devoted to stamp-collecting or archery, by distant cousins of county families. In the small double drawing-rooms there would be Benares brass, amateur water-colours, a gold-fish bowl, a solitaire board—relics of a civilisation which had never been fighting against time. The brass plate at John Jaques’s door repeated the note of unobtrusive smugness. He came to the door himself, an image of discreet professional respectability, and taking her by the elbow, led her into a parlour on the left of the hall, its window darkened by ferns and muslin curtains.
For a while, as she sipped the dry sherry he had poured out, they talked on indifferent subjects. Daisy felt both nervous and relaxed. In the dim little room she could only see him as a featureless face surmounted by white hair, outlined against the window. She found herself gradually sinking into this new environment, whose greenish light suggested an aquarium—an impression heightened by Jacko’s slow-motion gestures as he poured out more sherry from a Venetian decanter. His light, throaty voice curled like slow arabesques of smoke in the close air: it was a consoling sound. A phrase swam into Daisy’s head—“bedside manner”—and involuntarily she shivered a little. At once, though how he had noticed it in the gloom she could not imagine, Jacko said with solicitude:
“Are you cold, my dear? Shall I light the fire?”
“No, it’s all right,” she replied, in some confusion. “I’m not—it’s very dark, though, isn’t it?”
“Restful for the eyes. People talk a lot about the effect of noise in our city life; but I believe modern lighting has a more adverse effect on the nervous system—all these high-powered street lights and neons, and hundred-watt bulbs in private houses—it’s against nature.” His voice went soothingly on. Daisy, following her own thoughts, was suddenly arrested by a phrase… “our instincts. We are still creatures of the dark. We ignore the dark element within us at our peril.”
A not very obscure association made Daisy say, “We had an awful scene at the Amberleys’. Did Hugo tell you?”
“No. But I’m not surprised. It was Gertrude, I suppose. What happened?”
As Daisy recounted the lamentable scene, she began to shake uncontrollably. Jacko now came to sit on the arm of her chair, and was stroking the hair over her temple with a rhythmic movement she found quite hypnotic. A car, passing in the street, sounded distant as a memory. The window blurred before Daisy’s eyes: she felt weak, convalescent, comforted.
“Probably do her good, in the long run,” Jacko was saying. “That sort of woman needs shock treatment. But old Hugo doesn’t normally carry a gun about with him, does he? Was it loaded?”
“I don’t think so. I really don’t know,” said Daisy, answering both questions. “But I was terrified. Hugo’s face. It scared me dreadfully. I’m afraid what he might do if—”
“That’s a price you must pay—”
“I mean, he really might kill someone. He seems to lose all control.”
“Oh, come now, my dear, I can’t quite believe that. Anyway, it’s what Hugo is like. You’ve got to accept it. You can’t just choose the things you like about a person and say that is the person you love. Though nearly everyone does. You must take him for better and for worse.”
“Oh, I do, I do! But I wish—”
“Wish you could change him?”
“No, understand him. His moods.”
“Hugo’s not all that difficult to understand, surely. He’s a straightforward manic-depressive type, and—”
“Oh,” the girl cried, “he’s not—you don’t mean he’s, well, not right in his head?”
“Of course I don’t. A manic-depressive is simply someone who swings between two extreme states of mind, exhilaration and apathy. Most of us are like that, up to a point. It’s perfectly all right, as long as you don’t swing too far.”
“I see.” Daisy was partly reassured, and pressed Jacko’s hand in gratitude. He patted her shoulder: and a forgotten memory rose momentarily from the past—of her father, that dour, silent man, comforting her over some childhood misadventure.
“Nothing gone wrong between you two?” he presently asked: his voice in the gloom sounded strange to her: if it had been anyone but Jacko, whose sympathy she had come to take almost for granted, Daisy might have imagined something in his tone beyond the usual attentive interest—a kind of eagerness.
“No, nothing at all,” she cried. “But it is difficult. We live such a funny way. The insecurity.”
Even with Jacko, to say more would be, she felt, a kind of disloyalty to Hugo. However, he took it up briskly.
“You worry about Hugo’s anti-social tendencies?”
Dumbly, gazing down at her hands, she nodded.
“Well, you’ve either got to accept them, or make a break,” Jacko went on. “Unless you plan to reform him.”
“I just want to do what’s best for him,” she replied, put on the defensive by his last words.
“Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not being censorious, not being nasty. If anyone could reform him, it’s you. But you must understand what you’re up against. Old Hugo hated his father—you know that—when he was a boy. Now that hatred is deeply ingrained in his character. He’s simply transferred it to a wider reference: authority, respectability, society—whatever represents the father-figure he violently reacts against. It’s not his fault. He can’t help being a rebel, an outlaw. Do you see what I mean?”
“Yes, I think so.” Daisy sighed. “You think I ought to let things go on as they are?”
“Does it sound very immoral advice to you?” Jacko chuckled in his friendly way.
“I don’t know,” she replied.
“Put it this way—do you really want Hugo different, even supposing he could be changed?”
Daisy bowed her head, feeling suddenly confused and unhappy. They had gone so far in confidence, yet the word “criminal” had not once been used. The vague, sub-aqueous light in this room, Jacko’s fingers gently stroking her upper arm now, seemed to have put a spell around her. It was on an almost desperate impulse to break free of it that she said, “Doesn’t it ever worry you, living the way you do?”
She was aware at once that Jacko was taken tremendously aback. Glancing up at him, she saw his face overhanging her, like stone, like a gargoyle. His fingers had left her arm.
“Not in the least,” he said, after a pause. “And what way do I live?” Abruptly rising, he switched on the light, as if to illuminate the early-Victorian respectability of the room.
“Well, Hugo told me—”
“Yes?”
Daisy took a plunge at it. “—told me you did illegal operations.”
“Like a good many other doctors. Are you so shocked?” There was something like a jeer behind the usual crooning tone of his voice. The planes of his lumpy face seemed to have altered their relationship, so that it resembled for a moment, under the glaring light, a dead lunar landscape.
“I’m beyond being shocked at anything,” the girl drearily replied. “I just need help.”
“Oh, I see, my dear. You’re pregnant, is that it?”
Daisy flushed, in her turn disconcerted. “No, John, of course I’m not. It’s the way we live—Hugo and I.” She began to flounder in her mind, unable to find words for the sense of unreality and isolation which so oppressed her. She was aware of Jacko scrutinising her; and something wry, dispassionate yet expectant in his regard made her once more uncharacteristically aggressive. “Don’t you feel any responsibility for Hugo?”
“Responsibility?” His voice had a humouring upward inflection.
“Well then, guilt,” she said forthrightly.
Jacko lit a cigarette, his first of the evening; then, apologising, offered Daisy one. “I don’t quite understand you. Do you mean I should feel guilty because Hugo is my friend and Hugo’s way of life is—er—rather unconventional?”
“Oh, do let’s stop pretending,” she cried. “You know perfectly well that Hugo is a burglar.”
Jacko’s nostrils flared, and one side of his mouth twitched.
“All right then. He’s a burglar. Ought I to feel guilt about that?”
“About helping him—what’s the word?—tipping him off.”
“Tipping him off?” The man’s voice became almost falsetto. “My dear child, what are you dreaming about?”
Daisy had gone too far to draw back. She told him what Hugo had told her—how Jacko let fall bits of information which were useful to Hugo. As she spoke, Jacko looked at first amazed, then tickled.
“Oh, my goodness me,” he said, with a chuckle. “The old boy was pulling your leg. He’s a desperate romancer, you know.”
“He doesn’t tell lies to me, really he doesn’t.” Daisy was wounded, and Jacko’s voice at once became solicitous again.
“I’m sure he doesn’t. Not about important things. But as a joke, a tall story—don’t you see? You mustn’t take everything he says too seriously. It’s a sort of game with him, to invent discreditable fantasies about his friends: haven’t you noticed? Though I must say this is a new one to me. You can see, my dear, that a doctor in my position has to watch his step extra carefully. It would be madness for me to talk about my patients, to anyone.”
“Isn’t it dangerous for you to—well, associate with Hugo at all?”
Jacko had an embarrassed look. “One doesn’t drop one’s friends for the sake of one’s reputation.”
“I’m sorry I—” Daisy squeezed his hand. “You’re a good man.”
“And you’re a very very good girl. And a beautiful one,” said Jacko, smiling at her. “Now what about some dinner? You’re not expecting Hugo back till late, are you? It’ll cheer you up.” Jacko chuckled again. “I take it he’s on the tiles again to-night, in a manner of speaking?”
Overwrought, Daisy began helplessly to cry. Jacko watched her in silence for a while, then said, “You must try not to worry. If he thought you were worrying, it would be bad for his nerve.”
Daisy nodded, miserably. But it was not the thought of Hugo’s danger which had made her cry: it was not knowing what to believe. She could have sworn that Hugo had been serious when he told her about Jacko. But now Jacko had convinced her, or nearly convinced her, that the idea was fantastic, impossible. So Hugo must have been lying to her then, quite wantonly. And she could never talk to him about it: he would be furious if she told him she had discussed it with Jacko—equally furious whether it was a joke or the truth. The thing would weigh upon her mind, unresolved, like a malignant lump.
Presently Jacko rang for his housekeeper to take Daisy upstairs. The housekeeper was an elderly woman with a non-committal expression, natural or cultivated, who proved, however, unexpectedly talkative. It was nice for the doctor to have company—they didn’t often have visitors, except professionally of course—she hoped Miss Bland could fancy a chicken omelette and a trifle—watch the step down into the bedroom, it could be dangerous. It soon became evident to Daisy that the woman was putting out feelers to discover whether she was a prospective patient of the doctor’s; and Daisy, who had glanced timidly about her in the hall below, wondering which of those doors led to the surgery, felt an acute shame—an apprehension, almost, as though the place were haunted by the furtive desperate shades of women who had been here to have the life within them destroyed. While the housekeeper hovered inquisitively beside her, it came to Daisy, with all the force of a great discovery or a great decision, that if ever she were pregnant by Hugo, however difficult it might make things for them, she would have the baby.
“Why, that’s better,” Jacko exclaimed, when she came downstairs again. “You look as if someone had given you a million.”
From time to time during dinner she noticed his eyes upon her, a puzzled look in them she had never seen before. She was used to him reading her like a book: she could not imagine that this new page might be in a language he did not understand. Her heart was so lightened by the simple discovery she had just made, she felt like hugging it to herself for a while, not sharing it—even with Jacko. From a round mirror above the sideboard her own face gazed at her dreamily, complacently, with an expression which almost duplicated that of the Piero della Francesca Madonna reproduced on the wall to her right.
“Don’t go broody on me,” Jacko said.
“I’m sorry. I was thinking.”
“A penny for them.” His eyes followed every movement of hers, like a dog’s waiting for a tit-bit from the table. It seemed a shame to disappoint him, yet she could not come out with it point-blank: instead, she murmured:
“I can’t understand a woman wanting to get rid of her baby.”
Jacko dabbed his mouth in a finicky way with his napkin. “It’s need, not want, with most of them. And of course some women’s maternal instinct is completely dormant till after a child is born.”
“It must be horrible for you,” said Daisy.
“You mean, you’re horrified by me?”
“Oh no, no!” Daisy was distressed. “I’m sure you don’t like doing—well, it is taking life, isn’t it?”
A strange expression, which she was to remember afterwards, passed over his face and was gone. It reminded her of the impish, “dare-you” look which Hugo sometimes had; yet it was different, more secretive.
“It’s only a small part of my practice, you know,” he answered mildly.
“You are nice. You never tell me how young and inexperienced I am.”
“Why should I? You’re wise beyond your years. Like any child of nature. I hope Hugo, realises it.” Jacko’s eyes were upon her steadily again, like fingers feeling a pulse. “I’d never forgive him if he hurt you.”
“Oh, one can’t be truly in love without getting hurt,” she gaily proclaimed. “That’s how you know it’s the real thing.”
“Well! You little masochist! You’ll be telling me next you want Hugo to beat you. Or perhaps he does.” Jacko leant forward, his eyes brightly interrogative.
“I’m black-and-blue all the time. Silly! Of course he doesn’t.” Daisy blushed, thinking of the love-bruises, and went on quickly, at random, to conceal the thought, “I wonder would Hugo be a good father.”
Jacko leant back again, neatly skinning an orange with his dessert knife: he did not reply at once.
“My dear,” he said at last, “if that’s the way your mind is working, I must warn you. Hugo travels light. He’d never let himself be saddled with a family.”
“But—”
“Remember, I’ve known him some time. He’s a fine chap, but he’s not cut out for responsibility. Can you see him as a family man—nappies, regular hours, life insurances? Bless your heart, he’d as soon be in prison.…”
Jacko’s words were still tolling in her head when Daisy got home. The Maida Vale flat seemed a poor place after the spruce, spinsterish little house in Albert Grove. Daisy set herself to tidying up the sitting-room, a leaden depression weighing on her mind. If only Hugo would come back soon! It was so silent here, so desolate.
She went into the bedroom, and switching on the light, gave a little cry. Hugo was there, lying full length, fully clothed, on the bed, his eyes staring at her, past her, with a lack-lustre expression.
“Hugo! What’s the matter, darling? Didn’t you hear me come in?”
“It was a flop,” he said in a bitter, dead voice. “A proper bloody wash-out. All I’ve got out of it is a sprained ankle. Managed to find a cab, and save myself from the wreck. For Christ’s sake, love, don’t look as if I’d raped you or something!”