Daisy said something of this to Hugo after she got back.
“Poor little Jacko? Don’t you believe it,” he replied, in the half admiring, half contemptuous tone he so often adopted when talking of his friend. “He likes living that way. Probably gets a kick out of terminating little embryos, too. He’s as hard as nails, really.”
“Oh, Hugo, but he can be so sympathetic!”
“Emotional frigging, that’s what it is. The female patients love it. Oh, you’ve got to hand it to him.”
“I think you’re absolutely beastly about him.”
“So you’ve fallen for that bedside manner too? Ah, what hopes it has raised in the girls! But it’s the nearest he ever gets to—”
“Don’t be so foul, Hugo. It’s not like you. And why do you keep on with him if you despise him so?”
“I don’t. I rather admire him. He’s damned good company, and he’s useful. He’d never let you down once you’re really in with him. Why grudge him his vicarious pleasures?”
Their talk blew up to a row. Daisy had often felt the relationship between the two men as a closed circle, from which she was excluded, a freemasonry into which Hugo escaped from her; and this made her aggressive. But it was the last quarrel they were to have. As that chilly spring merged into a wet and doleful summer, Daisy throve on her pregnancy, growing ever more placid and self-possessed. During this period, Hugo continually astonished her by his tenderness, solicitousness. He insisted on their moving away from the East End and the circle of tough customers where he had been so much in his element. He found them furnished rooms in a relatively respectable street near Russell Square, and his old restlessness hardly ever showed itself there: he seemed quite content to sit at home with Daisy, or take her walking in the parks when one of the rare bright days encouraged them to go out. They would talk endlessly about the baby, spinning plans for him as though the whole world would be at his feet. How strange, thought Daisy, for Jacko to have said that Hugo would be hopelessly irresponsible as a father: and Jacko’s misjudging of him made her feel indulgent towards Jacko himself, no less than she was touched by this new Hugo, so that when the three of them were together she felt completely at ease.
Where the money came from to support their present way of life, whether it was borrowed or stolen, Daisy did not know; for it was part of Hugo’s solicitude, that she should not be worried by his affairs, and if he had any criminal enterprises afoot, he did not talk to her about them. From time to time he went out alone, telling her that he was looking for digs or a small flat where the landlord did not object to children. After the lease of their Maida Vale rooms terminated, Hugo had given her £50, the proceeds from the sale of his furniture there, and this money she kept to provide the necessaries for the baby. Fatalistic as she was, her condition made Daisy still less anxious about the morrow. Her life was concentrated upon the life within her, so that everything else, except Hugo, seemed remote, unreal, un-urgent, a dream which demanded nothing of her: but this unreality was different from the oppression she had experienced during her first months with Hugo; it was comforting, enveloping her like a cocoon.
So the weeks drifted by. In the first days of September, London drew breath again after a stuffy, overcast August. Asters, like children’s windmills, spun their coloured rays in the gardens, and the clouds, as if some celestial traffic-jam had at last been broken up, bowled cheerfully across the sky. On one of these blowing days, about the middle of the month, Hugo returned in high excitement to the room where Daisy was knitting.
“We’re going for a holiday, love. A second honeymoon. How do you like that?”
“Wonderful! But we can’t afford it, can we?”
Hugo tugged a roll of notes from his trouser-pocket and scattered them over her head.
“Danae in a shower of gold! Where do you think these came from?”
The girl shook her head, laughing up at him.
“Old Jacko,” he said.
“Oh, darling, ought we to be borrowing money from him?”
“It’s not a loan. It’s a free gift. Or rather—”
Hugo gave her one of those merry, crafty glances which never failed to enchant her—“or rather, it’s conscience-money.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Well now, hold tight and I’ll divulge all.” Hugo sat down on the floor and laid his head on her knee.
“Do I look different?” he asked, gazing up at her.
“You look jolly pleased with yourself.”
“The witness must confine herself to answering the question. Yes or No?”
“No.”
“Hell’s bells! I suggest to you that I look like a reformed character.”
“Sweetheart, what is all this about?”
“My poor great beautiful nit-witted cluck, I’m telling you. You may have noticed my occasional absences from our residence recently. I was not, curiously enough, about my unlawful occasions. I was looking for a job.”
“A job?” Daisy breathed incredulously.
“Yep. A humble post in the great army of mugs.”
“Hugo! But why?”
“Aren’t you pleased?”
“Ye-es. Yes, of course. But—”
“All that sort of thing”—he made a sweeping gesture, as if to include the East End pubs, the wide boys, the amusement arcades, the shifting, feckless, raffish life they had lived—“well, it suited me. And you were angelic about it. But it’s not good enough for young Thomas.”
The girl began to cry.
“Extraordinary, the effects of paternity,” Hugo went on. “Sort of throw-back to my lily-white origins. Never thought I’d have a relapse like this. Anyway, I got a nibble of a job the other day—selling advertising space. Nearly got it on the strength of my forceful and winning personality alone. Unfortunately the twirps came out from under the old spell just in time to ask for references. Which is where Jacko comes in.”
“Jacko?” Daisy had quite forgotten how the conversation had started.
“Yes, Dopey. I needed two references. My company-commander gave me quite a hot one, years ago of course. So, Jacko being the only other respectable ha-ha type I know well enough to ask, I applied to him. But the old bastard wouldn’t play.”
“Oh, darling! Surely he couldn’t be so mean?”
“He could, and he was. One sees his point, of course. He’s got to be damned careful about preserving his façade; if it came out that he’d recommended a bloke who’d been over the wall, it’d do him positively no good at all. Actually, he was a bit abashed at refusing. Hence these smackers.” Hugo began to collect the notes off the floor. “And hence our holiday. Where shall we go?”
“But oughtn’t you to have another go at the job first, sweetheart?”
“Jacko said you were peakish—though I must say you look blooming to me—and you ought to have some sea air. And secondly, this job thing needs a bit more organising than I realised.”
Hugo explained how difficult it was for a man with a prison record to get honest work—about as hard as entering a foreign country without a passport. There was a society for helping discharged prisoners, but he had not availed himself of its services, and it was a bit late in the day to do so now. Any employers would ask him what work he had been doing, and almost every employer would demand proof of it. “Can’t get anywhere nowadays without bumf,” said Hugo disgustedly: this meant, in his case, forged references, and someone to answer for them should an employer decide to take them up. The whole thing was a bind.
If there was any wrong in Hugo’s working out a scheme of false pretences in order to go straight, the simple-minded girl did not see it. At the moment, her feelings were confused—indignation with a world which made it so difficult for a man to reform, gratitude to Hugo that he was aiming to do so for the sake of their child, and a certain bewilderment at the idea of being uprooted from a way of life she had come to accept. Her old phantasy of Hugo as the honest breadwinner, now it looked like being realised, seemed less unequivocally desirable. He was such a volatile chap: if he went through with it, her instinct warned her, might he not tire quickly of dull, respectable work, and unload his resentment upon herself and the child, as if they had trapped him into a situation intolerable to him?
Such doubts, however, did not trouble Daisy for long. Her will had always shaped itself to his, and in her present condition she was only the more acquiescent. Like water, she reflected his moods, sparkling or gloomy, rippling or sullenly congealed. Just now it was all light and movement; and if there was something feverish in Hugo’s gaiety, she had felt that too often before to be disquieted by it. As they went down to Brighton, huddled together arm-in-arm at the corner of the railway carriage, Daisy knew she was the luckiest girl in the world.
They spent a few days at Brighton, then moved on to Southbourne. It was Daisy’s idea to go there: she had a vivid memory of a picture postcard which her aunt had sent her from Southbourne many years ago. It was now the first week of October, and they found lodgings without any difficulty. Making amends for that dismal summer, the sun shone day-long, day after day. In a trance of quiet happiness, Daisy sat with Hugo on the esplanade, looking out over the great half-moon of the bay, the golden sands, the long pier pointing towards the horizon. She imagined her child playing amongst those children on the shore one day: they would come here again, they would come every year when Hugo got his annual holidays. The Town Hall clock calmly chimed their hours away: a freshness of autumn and the sea mingled with the smell of asphalt drawn out by the sun’s heat. It was all such worlds away from the greasy squalor of those London back-streets, Daisy felt she had slid from one dream into another.
Some evenings they would stroll along to the harbour, whose narrow waterway ran deep into the town under two bridges, then broadened to a lagoon. Rusting hulks reclined groggily on the mud: there were yachts and paddle-steamers laid up for the winter, and on the lagoon itself a sprinkling of small boats rode at their moorings. The little streets leading from the harbour offered a number of snug small pubs, patronised by longshoremen, the crews of rescue tugs, liberty men from the naval harbour which lay on the far side of the headland, sailors off the Channel steamers.
“It’s romantic,” sighed Daisy, leaning on Hugo’s arm as they watched the lights of the night steamer recede towards the harbour mouth. “I’d like Thomas to be a sailor.”
“Suppose it’s a she?” Hugo teased her. “I don’t fancy having a stewardess in the family.”
“Well, she could be an air hostess. Flying all over the world. Must be a wonderful job.”
“Why not marry her to a millionaire? Then she could have her own aeroplane.”
“Silly! If she could marry a man just like you—that’s all I’d ask.”
They turned into one of the little pubs near the quayside, and Hugo ordered Hollands for them both. The bar was divided up into snugs by high-backed settles, as in an old-fashioned restaurant. Woodwork and brass shone like a naval pinnace’s. The bar was already fairly crowded, but most of the company were regulars, playing dominoes, talking quietly and intermittently, so that Daisy was able to hear a conversation taking place behind the settle where she and Hugo had established themselves.
“… Don’t give me Princess. You want to know what I think? I’ll tell you then. She’s a spy.”
“If she’s a spy, you’re Marilyn Monroe.”
“What she come to roost for in a dead-alive hole like Southbourne then? If she’s a bona-fide resident, why does she hang about the pubs this end of town?”
“All right, you tell us.”
“I’m telling you. Because it’s handy to the naval harbour see, and the Navy lads talk when they’re in these pubs. She come from Roumania, didn’t she, and Roumania’s Red, isn’t it? Trouble with you, matey, you couldn’t recognise a hammer and sickle if little old Malenkov walked in and stuck it under your nose.”
“Wait a minute. Look. Spies don’t make themselves conspicuous. They don’t want anyone to notice them. Now the Princess—well, I ask you! Those hats she wears, and talking in broken English, and—”
“Double bluff. Where does she get her money from, then? You answer me that. You know what the rent of those houses in Queen’s Parade is? Well I do. Here’s a woman who’s supposed to have escaped just in time from the revolution over there—a refugee—the Commies take over her family estates. Why isn’t she broke, like any other D.P.?”
“I can answer that one.” It was a third voice, mellow with liquor and authoritative. “She got out with the family jewels. Worth a king’s ransom. The Popescus were one of the wealthiest—”
“You seen these jewels?” broke in the first speaker sceptically.
“No, but my niece Alice did. She was working for the Princess. The old girl took a fancy to Alice, and showed them her one day. That was some years ago, mind you. She must have popped a few of ’em by now. But she told Alice they’d last her out her time all right.”
Daisy stole a glance at Hugo. He was sitting quite still, gazing into his glass of Hollands. She put out a hand, in what might have been a restraining gesture; and when Hugo felt it on his wrist, he started.
“Want to go, love?” he said.
The girl shook her head. Hugo gazed at her more attentively. Then he whispered:
“Don’t you worry. That’s all over and done with now….”
The next evening, Daisy was not feeling so well. She decided to go to bed early, and Hugo went out for a drink alone. He returned, an hour or so later, in high excitement. At the bar of the Queen’s Hotel, he told her, he had met an old acquaintance, a trainer, who had a horse running in the local races tomorrow—an outsider which simply could not lose: it was a red-hot tip.
“And, do you know, love, it’s called Autumn Daisy! If ever there was a sign from heaven! Shall we have a real splash on it?”
“Oh, darling, you know we haven’t much money.”
“But the odds, my pet. Twenty to one. Think of it. Come on, say yes.”
She could never refuse him when he was in this boyish, extravagant mood, for it filled her with his own recklessness. She was a little dashed, the following morning, to find that he did not intend to take her, but was quickly comforted when he said:
“No, love. You get a rough crowd at these local meetings. Too much bumping and boring—might be bad for young Thomas.”
She sat out on the sea-front all that afternoon, making clothes for the baby, sunning herself, and basking in the thought of Hugo enjoying himself: it was good for him to get away from her now and then.
So, when Hugo got back to their lodgings that evening, the sight of his face, tight and haunted, was all the more of a shock.
“The bloody brute fell down on me,” he flung out. “Beaten by a head. I could kill myself.”
“Never mind, precious, it’s only a horse.”
“A horse? A God-blasted, spavined cripple. It had the race in the bag, and then—”
“How much did you put on it?”
Hugo’s expression changed, from black rage to a kind of childish mutinous guilt. Looking away from her, he sullenly muttered:
“Fifty quid.”
“But where did you get fifty—?”
“You agreed we should have a real splash, put our shirt on it.”
“Oh, Hugo! You didn’t take the money I was keeping for the baby?”
“Yes I did take the money we were keeping for the baby!” he exclaimed furiously. “Where the hell else would I get fifty pounds?”
It was her heartbroken tones, Daisy knew, which had stung him into this cruel violence. What Jacko had said once—“you must accept him for better and for worse”—came into her mind, and she made a superhuman effort to conceal the grief, resentment, dismay which she felt.
“Never mind, darling. We’ll manage,” she said at last.
“I am to be forgiven?”
Daisy fought down her temper, which had risen at the sneer behind these words. She spoke quietly:
“There’s nothing to forgive, my sweetheart. It was your money.”
At once, with an impetuous movement, he was beside her.
“Oh, Daisy, Daisy, I’m sorry, I am sorry! I’m utterly worthless. I even have to steal from my own wife and child.”
Her heart lifted, hearing him call her “wife,” and she began to soothe him. She hated his self-pitying mood, anyway—hated, or feared, anything he did to humiliate himself. But he went on brokenly:
“I did it for young Thomas, for you both. It would have given him a proper start in life. And it was a certainty—an absolute certainty. It’d have won us £1000, given me time to look around for a decent job. You could have had a nurse for the baby. And now I go and muck everything up!”
“Darling, please don’t. We can—”
“I’ll make it up to you, I swear I will. I’ll get that money back somehow.”
“Yes, love, of course you will. It’ll be all right, I promise you.”
The next morning Hugo went out early. When he returned, he told her he had found cheaper lodgings nearby. He was determined that she should not miss the last few days of her holiday. As Hugo paid the landlady, Daisy heard him say they had been called back to London suddenly. “Well, I couldn’t very well tell her we were moving to other lodgings in Southbourne, could I? She’d have been dreadfully offended,” Hugo explained when Daisy commented on this later. The new lodgings were five minutes’ walk away. When they arrived, Hugo registered them as Mr. and Mrs. Bland: he had often used Daisy’s maiden name like this, and she thought no more about it.
The scene of the previous night had taxed the girl more severely than she realised, so she was quite amenable to Hugo’s suggestion that she should lie down and rest after lunch. He himself went out, not returning till the late afternoon. They had high tea together. Then Hugo asked her, if she felt better, to come out for a blow with him. He changed into his dark green tweed suit, put on a cap she had bought him in Brighton, and tucking a brown-paper parcel under his arm, led Daisy out of the house. He was very gentle with her, but subdued and withdrawn—which Daisy put down to the shame he felt at having lost them the £50. But she herself was still too numbed by that bitter blow to react with her usual sensitivity.
They sat down in a shelter on the esplanade. Hugo clung to her side, yet his mind did not seem with her. Presently, as if by a hard physical effort, he detached his arm from hers.
“Wait for me here,” he said abruptly. “I shan’t be very long.”
He flipped his hand at her, unsmiling, and walked away into the dark, walking with that limber, self-contained gait which always made him look alone, even in a crowd. “Come back, Hugo!” To Daisy it sounded like a scream, but she had only whispered the words, and he did not even glance back.
The girl was used to these comings and goings of Hugo’s, sudden and unexplained; but this evening it felt different. Her eye lit upon the brown-paper parcel. Had Hugo left it behind by mistake? She would have run after him with it, but he was already out of sight and she did not know where he had gone. The Town Hall clock chimed a quarter—7.15. Daisy opened the parcel. It contained a length of rope, about twenty feet, with a hook at one end. She gazed at it in a stupor. Her first thought—she almost smiled at the absurdity of it—was that Hugo had gone off to hang himself and forgotten to take the rope. But it could be used for burglary too. Her mind filled with vague misgivings. Carefully she did up the parcel again, then pushed it behind her as if to conceal from herself the riddle it contained.
The incoming tide crept up, a splash of sea upon the pebbled beach below, then the hoarse, bronchial, rattling sound, as of wounded lungs gasping hard for air, when a wave drew back, dragging at the stones. From time to time, strollers went past; but Daisy, wrapped up in her own foreboding, did not notice them. A fantastic notion had begun to pluck at her mind—that Hugo had gone for ever, deserted her, and left her the rope to hang herself with. She thought she must be going mad. Getting up, she moved to the edge of the esplanade and gripped the iron railing. She was still standing there, peering seawards, when, half an hour after he had left her, Hugo returned.
Daisy flung herself upon his breast, sobbing, “I thought you were never coming.” He comforted her, but in an absent-minded way so unlike himself, so mechanical, that she drew back and looked full into his face, and saw a fixed wild glare she had never seen there before.
“What’s the matter, love? What is it?”
“Nothing. Come on, let’s go back.”
“All right. Oh, what about that parcel? You left it behind.”
“You may as well throw it away now.”
She flung it down on to the beach below the esplanade, and took his arm. It was like walking with an automaton.
“Where’s your cap, darling?” she asked. “Have you lost it?”
“It blew off,” he answered, still in that dead voice. Petrified by this stranger who had returned to her Daisy said nothing more, though she was hurt that he expressed no sorrow at losing a present she had given him.
When they got back to their lodgings, Hugo sat for a short while, still as a stone image except for his fingers ceaselessly tapping on the table. Then he jumped up again, saying he must go for a walk, and was out of the door before Daisy could stop him. Calling to him to wait for her, she put on a coat and ran downstairs after him. Daisy had known these moods of his before, which froze him into glum silence and made him at the same time edgy and restless: she knew from experience there was no talking him out of them. One had to distract him, as one would distract a child from a fit of grief by showing it some new object. She suggested now that they should go to a cinema, and listlessly he agreed.
The next morning, when the landlady brought in their breakfast, she was breathless with excitement.
“Terrible doings last night! It’s all over Southbourne. A murder. A police Inspector was shot. Burglar trying to get into a house on Queen’s Parade. Such a respectable district. But you’re not safe anywhere nowadays, I always say. Poor man had a wife and kiddies, too.”