I suppose the most frightening thing in the world is the moment when one realizes that courage isn’t going to be enough. One plods along cheerfully, convinced that one hasn’t got a breaking point, and then, quite suddenly and at the most unlikely moment one sees it, not yet quite on top of one but not so far ahead.
That was why I crossed the road before old Mrs Wycherley caught sight of me. I had nothing against her, poor old darling. She was kindness personified, and the canon’s sister, but I knew that in less than five minutes I should be seeing her sad eyes peering out of her unpowdered face, should be feeling her gloved hand on my arm, and, out of a warm cloud of cologne and mouthwash, should hear her soft voice saying: ‘How are we today, my dear? Forgive me, but you look so young’ And I felt I couldn’t stand it.
Mrs Wycherley always said that. At first I had assumed that she was worrying because I didn’t start a baby, but just lately it had dawned upon me that she was only guessing, with the rest of the insatiably inquisitive town of Tinworth, and was inquiring if I could be happily married. So far I had always been brightly reassuring but this morning, the moment I saw her black drapery bearing down upon me, I turned and fled across the glistening surface of Tortham Road, panic-stricken. It alarmed me all the more because I had not dreamed that I could ever be that sort of person. Until then I should have said that I was a young woman who didn’t hold with panic. I hurried down the Tortham Road, giddy with the shock of the discovery.
Every provincial town of any size in southern England has its own Tortham Road under some name or other. It is the good road, the residential street leading off the main shopping centre where, in their heyday some eighty years ago, Victorian merchants built their little mansions. These still squat there, portly and inconvenient, each boldly individual in style to the point of mock-Gothic turrets or pagoda-topped conservatories, and each muffled like a sleeping beauty in thickets of laurel and rhododendron. Now, of course, they are nearly all nursing homes, or converted flats, or schools. Our school, the one of which my husband was Headmaster, was at the far end of Tortham Road and our estate marked the end of the town and the beginning of the fields. The main house, dominating the four others put up to form dormitories for the boys, really was a mansion. It had been modernized, but the broad Georgian façade, glowing in rose brick at the far end of wide lawns, had been built by a retiring Tinworth banker at the time of the great merger, and it still bore his name.
Buchanan House was a first-class private preparatory school, and little boys came there as boarders from all over the country to be made ready for Tortham College, which could hold its own with – well, if not quite with Eton, at least with most of the others.
Tinworth was delighted with Buchanan House. As a market town with a side line in the manufacture of agricultural implements, it did not set out to be particularly intellectual itself, but it liked its school and liked it all the more because there was nothing state-aided about it. Parents paid and paid highly, and their money went out into the town’s trade. Ratepayers, startled by the demands of the County Council for the new education account, felt that was as it should be.
As headmasters go, Victor was young. He was in his late thirties and was thought to be brilliant. Indeed, if all I’d been told was true, Tinworth was prepared to credit him with the brain of an Einstein and the knowledge of an encyclopedia, but that did not prevent it from speculating with uncanny insight about his private life. I was beginning to realize that after my six months of marriage to him.
I was walking very fast, almost running, the shopping basket I carried for show swinging on my arm and my straw hat flapping. I was forgetting my dignity and trying to forget everything else, including the atmosphere I had come out to escape, not to mention my latest irritation, which was the news that Andy Durtham, of all people, was going to take a locum job here in Tinworth for Dr Browning while the old man went on holiday.
Dorothy’s letter, mentioning this somewhat startling news amid a host of other gossip from St Jude’s, where she was still a Sister, was in my pocket. It had only arrived that morning, but as usual there was no telling when she had written it. Dorothy wrote letters as some people knit woollies, now and again when the mood took her. It was sometimes possible by carefully noting the changes of ink in the closely scribbled pages, to discover if any particular item was some months old or comparatively recent, and I was just wondering if I could pull the untidy bundle out and examine it again there and then in the street when I saw Maureen Jackson thumping down the sidewalk towards me.
Miss Jackson was the Headmaster’s secretary and, I suppose, about five years older than I was. The notion that the Head’s wife was always older than the Head’s secretary had made our relationship, I thought, vaguely awkward at first, but she appeared to have decided to ‘settle all that’ in her cheerfully efficient way by treating me always with bluff kindliness, as if I was not quite right in the head or a foreigner. So far I had not attempted to enlighten her, because she was Tinworth personified and I was trying very hard to get the hang of Tinworth.
Miss Jackson was the daughter of the town’s best auctioneer and estate agent, quite a powerful person in that community, and her relatives seemed to spread into every conceivable branch of the town’s affairs. Her grandfather had been Mayor seven times. Her uncle was the owner of the great ironmongers and agricultural engineers in the High Street. Her mother was an Urban District Councillor, and at least two of her brothers were Justices of the Peace.
She came thumping towards me, big, bony, and not uncomely, with a pink-and-white face and clear cold-blue eyes which were somehow typical of Tinworth in their bland self-satisfied intelligence. She was known as the ‘thundering English rose’ by the junior masters, whom she used to treat with offhand tolerance. I understood her work was excellent, and she certainly took Victor’s acid rebukes with amiable forbearance.
‘Morning!’ she shouted at me when we were within hailing distance. ‘The vac is heaven, isn’t it? Or don’t you like it?’
Her last question brought her level with me and she did the thing all Tinworth seemed to do, pausing and looking into one’s eyes and investing ordinary trivial questions with direct inquiry. As usual it put me slightly at a disadvantage. To say outright that I’d temporarily forgotten that the day before yesterday all the boys and most of the masters had gone home for the summer holidays, and that yesterday the majority of the domestic staff had dispersed also, would be about as silly as mentioning that one had forgotten a recent earthquake or an invasion in arms. On the other hand, if one said that as far as one’s own life was concerned it appeared to make no difference at all, I knew a shadow of suppressed excitement would float over that bovine countenance of peaches and cream and she would want to know why. To do it justice, Tinworth never minded asking.
‘It’s very pleasant,’ I said, adding idiotically, ‘Are you going to the school?’
‘Of course I am. The letters still come, don’t they? I should have thought you’d have known that.’ There was no impudence in the last observation. It was just another inquiry, a sharp inquisitive inquiry if I’d really forgotten I’d once held down a high-powered secretarial job at St Jude’s Hospital myself. Her blue-eyed stare was filled with pure curiosity. I said nothing at all so she had to go on. ‘I expect the Headmaster’s out of his room by now, isn’t he?’
‘He was there when I came out,’ I told her, adding drily, ‘with Mr Rorke.’
‘Oh.’
I don’t know quite how people bridle, but if it means that an expression both disapproving and self-righteous, if admittedly justified, comes over their faces, Maureen bridled.
‘I’d better hurry along. Good-bye, Mrs Lane.’
The thud of her feet was still in my ears, and I had only just had time to remember that at least she had not asked me outright where we were going for our summer holiday, when I saw my next hurdle. Bickky Seckker was advancing demurely down the path towards me, his gold spectacles glinting in the morning sun.
Mr P. F. Seckker was senior classics master at Buchanan House, and the fact that he’d been just that for more years than anyone would like to mention probably accounted for much of the school’s reputation. His nickname, a reference to his initials, which were the same as those on a favourite brand of shortcake, indicated his standing with successive generations of boys. Very few masters achieve such an innocent soubriquet.
When I first met him I had assumed he was a very ordinary elderly bachelor, a little old-maidish and perhaps the least bit seedy, but as the months went on I had revised my opinion and was fast coming to think he was the kindest soul I had ever met in my life. He smiled at me, hesitated, made sure that I really did want to stop (which I didn’t, of course, but I would have died rather than hurt his feelings), and came out with the one most unfortunate remark which from my point of view he could have made.
‘I don’t know when you’re off for your vacation, Mrs Lane, but my sister and I will be at home here at Tinworth all the holidays and my sister – I mean we – would be delighted if you’d drop in to see us just whenever you feel like it.’ He was a little shy, as he always was with what he was apt to describe quite suddenly as ‘a very, very pretty woman’, and he twinkled and glowed at me as if he were twenty-four and not I. ‘Nothing formal, you know,’ he chattered on. ‘We are too old, and like most other people too poor, for formal entertaining, but my sister was talking to you on Speech Day and she thought that, well, you never know, you might care sometime for a cup of tea in our wailed garden.’
He paused abruptly and to my horror I realized that my face was growing scarlet.
‘I – I’d love that,’ I said. ‘I would like it better than anything. I’m not sure – quite – when we’re going away.’
‘Naturally.’ Now that I had betrayed embarrassment, any shyness of his own was thrust aside and he took social command with all the charm and ease of his kind. ‘Of course. Well, you must come when you can. We shall be delighted. I love this warm weather. It suits Tinworth. Some people think it’s an ugly town, but I don’t. We’ve got history here, you know. The site of the Roman camp at Mildford is perfectly fascinating. I shall show it to you one day. Much better than half the things one travelled all through France to find.’ And then, abruptly, as if he were a gauche old person surprised into speech, ‘That blue gown of yours makes your dark eyes darker and puts quite a blue light into that black hair of yours. There, isn’t that forward of me?’
The old-fashioned word made me laugh, as I think he knew it would.
‘No,’ I protested. ‘It’s charming of you. I feel better and younger already.’
‘That would be impossible,’ he assured me gravely. ‘Until I show you the Roman camp, then.’ He raised his polished cherry-wood stick in salute, since he was hatless, and strolled on, leaving me shaken to find that even old Miss Seckker, who was considerably his senior and certainly half blind, should have noticed that I might need a little human comfort in the sanctuary of her garden. Yet I was glad I had met him and was grateful for his compliment.
It was at that precise moment as I turned away that I saw Andy. He was speeding down the road towards me in a well-worn open sports car. We looked straight at each other for an instant as he passed and then I heard the shriek of brakes and the revving of the engine as he swung round in the wide road. In the last few hours I suppose I had envisaged meeting him again in half a hundred possible places. For some reason I had assumed that it would be at some very crowded social gathering, the Agricultural Show perhaps, or one of the eternal sherry parties Tinworth likes so much. I’d even prepared an opening gambit: ‘Oh yes, of course I know Dr Durtham. We met at St Jude’s. How nice to see you again, Andy.’
To find him pulling up beside me in this vast and now apparently empty street called for an entirely different approach and I was so amazed and so pleased to see him that I couldn’t think of anything at all suitable.
‘Hullo, animal,’ I said.
‘Hullo yourself,’ he said briefly. ‘Get in.’
They say it is impossible to forget anyone you’ve ever been truly in love with, but it is astounding how easy it is to put out of one’s mind the things about them which one loved. One of the things I had succeeded in forgetting about Andy Durtham was his force. He was a big, rakish, intensely masculine person, dark as I am and not ill-looking in a tough untidy way, but his chief characteristic, and I suppose charm, was vital energy. It was a bit overwhelming and there had been a period when I had found it alarming. It seemed to radiate from him almost noisily, as if he were an engine ticking over. He was young, of course, only just qualified.
‘Get in,’ he repeated, holding the door open for me. ‘I want to talk to you.’
‘I was going to the High Street.’
‘Then I’ll take you there. Come on, Liz.’
I had been called Elizabeth so thoroughly by this time that I had forgotten how much I disliked the abominable diminutive. It just sounded friendly today. I stepped into the car and he sighed, let in the clutch, and turned round in the road again.
‘Hey,’ I protested, ‘where are you going? I said the High Street.’
‘We’re going there, by Morton Road and the by-pass. That’s the way I know best. I’ve only been here a week.’
‘A week? I didn’t know.’
‘Too bad. Nobody tells you anything, do they? But I’m going to, and it’s going to take me just about seven minutes, so – we’ll go by the by-pass.’
I did not speak. Andy was returning to my conscious mind with a rush, and with a new and painful vividness I remembered why I had written to him and not phoned or arranged a meeting when I finally decided to marry Victor.
‘Yes, well,’ he said, and his mouth twisted down at the corners as it always did when he was embarking on one of his more outrageous performances, ‘lean back and relax, because you’re going to take this in if it’s the last thing I do. I’ve been thinking about this lecture very thoroughly for some months and here it comes, piping hot.’
He turned and peered at me from under bristling eyebrows.
‘First of all, I suppose you know you’ve lost twenty pounds.’
It was such an unexpected thrust that it took me by surprise. Until that moment I had been enjoying him, like a beautiful draught of fresh air. Now I was annoyed by his impudence.
‘Don’t be a boor,’ I said. ‘I’ve lost eight.’
‘They were the eight which held your looks. The wan white waif act doesn’t suit you. Don’t touch the wheel. You’ll break our necks. Still, I’m glad to see you’re not completely devitalized in spite of all I’ve heard since I’ve been here.’
I had made no real attempt to touch the wheel, of course. I wasn’t a child, and we were travelling very fast and passing all the people I’d met before, but I must have stiffened and I felt the blood in my face.
‘How extraordinary of you to take this locum job down here,’ I said abruptly. ‘When did you leave St Jude’s?’
‘In my script for this conversation you don’t speak.’ He was not looking at me. At that moment we were negotiating an unexpectedly narrow turn. The Vicarage car was parked on the corner, as usual, and a milk tanker was attempting to pass. We were held up for a second or two and I found myself face to face with the vicar, who was dithering in front of his aged bonnet with a starting handle. He stared at me, recognized me with open astonishment, and was groping for his hat with his free hand when I was whisked unceremoniously from under his nose.
‘You merely listen,’ Andy continued, squaring himself as the car leapt forward down the villa-lined length of Morton Road. ‘You have made a basic psychological mistake and, having got it clear in my own mind, I intend you to see it. It may not do you much good but you’ve no idea how it’s going to satisfy me! Look, Liz, you never forgave your mother for making a mess of her marriage, did you? You always secretly thought she could have saved it. That’s why you made the idiotic mistake of trying to play safe.’
He was speaking with utter sincerity, his tone urgent and forceful, and if instead of speaking he had suddenly pressed a blade directly into my heart I think the pain he gave me must have been exactly the same.
‘No,’ I said violently, because I wouldn’t and couldn’t let it be true, ‘that’s insulting nonsense. For heaven’s sake let me get out of here.’
He put on a little more speed and he bounced out into the stream of traffic on the by-pass which Tinworth uses so freely to relieve its own tortuous streets.
‘You were in love with me,’ he went on doggedly as if I had not spoken. ‘Probably you are still, whether you know it or not. But if it’s not me it’s someone like me, and it always will be.’
He was not looking at me, which was merciful, for we were in traffic, and he ignored any sound I made but continued the harangue exactly as if I were some recalcitrant patient to whom he was in duty bound to report on a considered diagnosis.
‘There’s a great deal of rubbish talked about the kind of love I mean,’ he said. ‘It’s sublimated and sublimized and sentimentalized and generally kicked around, but the one ordinary elementary fact which is self-evident is that it is an affinity exactly like a chemical affinity. You know the definition of that. You must have typed it for old Beaky Bowers at St Jude’s often enough. “The peculiar attraction between the atoms of two simple substances that makes them combine to form a compound.” Now I don’t suggest that love is chemical. I only say that it is like it and quite as irrevocable and inescapable. You love something because you need it. It is made up of the things you have not got. You recognize your need instinctively, and instinctively you go for it as soon as you find it. Be quiet. Listen. You can get out when I’ve finished.’
Since I could do nothing else I sat bolt upright, staring in front of me, the furious blood burning in my face. Since I couldn’t keep my hat on in that air stream I took it off and held it in my lap. I tried not to listen, either, but one might as well have tried to ignore an avalanche.
‘People keep saying that one is attracted by opposites,’ Andy’s lecture continued, ‘but that is one of those sweeping half-truths which are so misleading. What they mean is that if one hasn’t got quite enough of a particular characteristic oneself one is automatically attracted by the person who has a little too much of it. When one finds someone who appears to balance out all one’s own excesses and deficiencies, one falls in love with her – er, or him.’
He turned to me, his vivid grey-blue eyes dark with intelligence, and dropped his professional manner.
‘You must know what I mean, Liz. You’ve got the warmest heart in the world, but with it you tend to be cautious, intellectual, and reserved. I tend to be headstrong, intuitive, and confiding. You’re levelheaded to a fault, I’m on the verge of being wild.’
‘Wild –’ I was beginning, but he stopped me.
‘You’re unconventional and oversensitive and gentle. I’m basically unconventional and – well, rough. Cruel, if you like.’
Andy’s sincerity had always captured me, holding my attention, forcing me to think along lines I would not normally have chosen. It performed its exasperating magic again now.
I was attracted to you, my lad, because you were alive, I thought, and somehow I don’t seem to be very much alive alone. There was no point in saying it aloud, of course, and certainly I was alive enough myself at that moment. I was outraged by him. The tastelessness, the utter impropriety, the insolence all the old-fashioned words crowded on to my tongue, making me temporarily incoherent.
‘You happened to need someone like me,’ Andy was saying with steady insistence, ‘not in spite of my faults but because of them. You couldn’t help it.’
‘At that rate, nor could you.’ Of all the words in the world those were the last I had intended to say. They were silly and dangerous, but in the last few seconds he had got under my skin.
‘And so what?’ He turned his head and I saw his eyes had become as hard as marbles. ‘We’re not talking about me. I’ve had my own problem and I’ve settled it. I sail in three weeks’ time. I’m perfectly all right. I’m simply explaining your position to you because I don’t think you’ve seen it.’
‘Sail?’ I said, as if it were the only word I’d heard. ‘Where are you going?’
‘Newfoundland. There’s a hell of a lot of work to do there, it’s a rough, hard, free country and it’ll suit me. George Brewster and his wife are going too. She’ll have to do the secretarial work for both of us. It’ll be hard going but worth it, I think. Anyhow, all that is beside the point. I’m clearing out of the country and I just wanted to explain the whole thing to you before I went. You didn’t give me an opportunity at the time and I don’t suppose I should have been able to see it so clearly then if you had.’
‘There’s nothing for you to explain.’ My lips felt stiff as I spoke. We were entering the lower end of the High Street and I gathered my hat and basket with what I felt was a gesture of finality. ‘I had merely made up my mind what I thought would be the best for both of us.’
‘You’d done nothing of the sort, you know, Liz.’ Instead of pulling into the curb he put on a burst of speed which shot us out into the main stream of the morning shopping traffic. I saw several faces I recognized, all of them surprised, but I had no time even to acknowledge them. Andy proceeded to wind his way expertly through the throng of familiar cars, talking all the time in his forceful, forthright way.
‘I had a night out with the boys, got in a stupid rag, and finished up at a police station. There was a row at the hospital and I got an imperial raspberry,’ he was saying cheerfully. ‘It wasn’t very clever of me, but it’s a thing that happens to young doctors who haven’t left medical school quite long enough. It did me no harm, probably a bit of good in the long run because it scared me and showed me I wasn’t quite as intelligent as I thought I was. But the harm it did, the real harm, Liz, was that it frightened you.’
I made an inarticulate noise but he took no notice of it.
‘It frightened you out of all reason, all proportion,’ he said. ‘I ought to have understood it and been prepared for it, but I wasn’t. You’ve grown up obsessed by the broken marriage of your parents which spoilt your childhood, and you were determined not to make the same mistake. Therefore, when you saw yourself as you thought in love with a drunken ne’er-do-well (I’m not blaming you, woman, I’m simply clarifying your mind for you) you panicked, and to save yourself from love you took a safe offer which happened to come along at that particular moment.’
‘If you’ll stop I’ll get out,’ I said.
‘Can’t park on the corner. Besides, I haven’t finished. We’ll go round again. This is the last time I shall ever speak to you and I intend to get this right off my chest.’
We swept out of the main street towards the Tortham Road again and I was suddenly glad. If this was to be a once-and-forever fight I had something to say myself. It welled up inside me in a great wave of self-justification. It was the thing I’d been wanting to explain to the whole of Tinworth – to the world for that matter – for solid months.
‘I married as I did because I was determined to make a success of it,’ I bellowed, and realizing I was shouting, lowered my voice abruptly. ‘You’re quite right, in one sense,’ I went on, trying to sound reasonable and succeeding only in conveying my savage irritation. ‘I did remember Mother. I did remember how a romantic love affair had become a jealous bickering match. I did remember that love can die and a woman and her child can be reduced to dreary misery in the process. I didn’t want that kind of marriage. I didn’t want the humiliation of any more divorces. Mother’s was enough for me. I did remember all that, and therefore I married where I felt I could make a good honest job of it. I wanted to be a good wife and I wanted to stay married. Now do you understand?’
He did not answer immediately and when I looked at him his head was turned a little so that I could only see the angle of his jaw. His face was darker than ever and I was very much aware of the hard angry muscles under the coat sleeve at my side. We were roaring up Tortham Road again by this time and he did not speak until we swung round past the Vicarage once more. Then he said mildly:
‘Then it wasn’t altogether the row?’
‘No, of course it wasn’t. That simply cleared my mind, and, as you said, Victor happened to come along at the same moment.’ I felt I was gaining my point and couldn’t understand why it didn’t make me feel happier.
Andy brought the car to a crawl and looked at me curiously.
‘You just honestly don’t see it, do you, Liz?’ He made the observation almost gently. ‘You don’t want to, of course. That’s why you’re deceiving yourself. You were afraid of love, old lady, that’s what you were escaping from. You wanted something safer.’
His stupidity and obstinacy made me absolutely furious. I had never felt so helpless. For three quarters of a year I had been clarifying my mind in private upon the subject, until I felt I knew all about everything I had ever felt or ever could feel. Now, when I tried to express it for the first time to another human being, it seemed to be going all wrong. To make matters worse, until that moment I should have said that Andy was the easiest person in the world to whom to tell anything. It was his greatest gift, both as a doctor and as a man.
‘Look here,’ I said, making what I felt was a last attempt to get through the wool, ‘call it an ideal, if you like. I had set my heart on a steady, sober, ordinary sort of marriage, something I could make something of.’
‘And have you got it?’
The question came out quite naturally and without the least hint of malice. It hit me, of course. I felt the blood go hot in my face. It rose into my hair, making the roots tingle.
‘I think so,’ I said. ‘I mean, of course I have.’ There was a pause and I added idiotically, ‘Term time is liable to be very busy for Victor.’
He cocked a shrewd eye at me and I realized all over again how very well we two were acquainted. It wasn’t going to be easy to hide much from Andy.
And you haven’t had much except term time so far, have you?’ he was saying slowly. ‘As I hear it, you were married just two days before the spring term began. Your husband had to spend a short vacation at the end of that term on a course at a Swiss university where you couldn’t accompany him. And now here you are at the end of the summer session and he’s due to go on a mountain-climbing expedition – experts only.’
This shook me and I showed it. I couldn’t help it. My mouth fell open. For the past twelve hours or so I had thought that I was the only person to know about this latest bombshell of Victor’s, but if Andy had picked up the information in the week he’d been in Tinworth it seemed I was rather late off the mark. I was so amazed I forgot to be humiliated. Some sort of preservative sixth sense was working, however, and I spoke promptly.
‘Victor has explained. That was arranged a Long time ago. You seem to know a great deal about us.’
‘Only what everybody tells me.’ He gave me a sudden disarming grin. ‘This is my first experience of a provincial town. You seem to have got yourself in a fine old parrot house, ducky. They’re wonderful, aren’t they? Every man his own detective. No mystery too small! Do you like them, Liz?’
‘I don’t know any of them very well, yet,’ I said evasively. ‘They’re all right. Not terribly exciting.’ My mind was beginning to work again. I told myself it was all very unfortunate meeting Andy, and he was behaving abominably, but here was a chance to find out exactly where I did stand with the town. At least I knew him well enough to know he wouldn’t lie. I began with great caution. ‘There isn’t much outside entertainment in a place like this,’ I said. ‘People talk about their neighbours because there isn’t much else to interest them. Sometimes they get things rather wrong.’ I hesitated. He didn’t speak. ‘I don’t know what you’ve heard about me?’
‘About you?’
‘Well, about us generally. What is the gossip? You seem to have the impression that there is some. Let me straighten it out for you.’
He had the grace to look uncomfortable but to my relief he didn’t avoid the direct question.
‘There’s no gossip, exactly.’ He bent forward to push a bundle of untidy memo slips and prescription pads back in the locker in the dashboard, so that I could see only his cheek. It had coloured a little. ‘There’s no “talk”, old girl, nothing to worry about’
‘No, but what do they actually say?’
‘Oh, they’re only intrigued,’ he said at last.
‘About Victor’s marriage? Do they mind him marrying? Do they object to a city girl?’
‘Oh no, no, nothing like that. You’ve got it wrong, Liz.’ He was looking at me earnestly now, desperately anxious not to be clumsy and hating being involved. I knew it served him right but I was almost sorry for him.
‘Well?’ I persisted.
‘It’s the set-up which they find so interesting,’ he began at last. This husband of yours is a well-known local man who for years seemed set to remain a bachelor. He seems to have run his life and his school to a very firmly fixed schedule. The school runs like a machine and his own holidays have followed the same hidebound pattern. At week-ends he plays golf hard and actually has a cottage near the links to save time. On the Easter vacation he goes on some university course designed to fill it. In the long summer holidays he goes on an expedition up a mountain with a team of which he is the president, and at Christmas he has a three weeks’ cultural whirl in London or Paris. Tinworth knew all about his programme and was used to it’
He eyed me to see if I was agreeing with him and I made my face impassive.
‘Well,’ he went on, ‘think of it. One day this lad turns up with a beautiful young wife who appears to have been something of an organizer herself, and who looks and sounds as if she might have some ideas of her own. Naturally everyone sits up waiting to see the changes.’ He paused and gave me one of his shrewder stares. ‘As far as they can see, there haven’t been any changes. He seems to be living exactly the same sort of – well, somewhat self-absorbed life he always did. Tinworth is dying to know what you’re making of it, that’s all.’
It was his tone on the last two words which made me look up. Until then he had told me nothing that I did not know rather too well, except that I had not realized that Tinworth saw things quite so clearly; but something in that last little phrase struck an alarm bell in my mind.
‘It sounds as if it wasn’t all,’ I murmured, and added, ‘You never were any good at hiding things.’
‘I’m not hiding anything.’ He spoke a trifle too loudly but a settled obstinacy had spread over his face and I knew I should get nothing more out of him. ‘I’ve said too much anyway,’ he insisted. ‘I was merely trying to point out that although your neighbours down here do seem to be a pack of chatty old geese, I don’t think they’re entirely unreasonable. After all, people always do sit round a marriage and watch who wins, that’s natural.’
‘They think I’m losing, I suppose?’
‘They think you needn’t lie down under the steam roller and quite frankly neither do I. There’s no need to lose all that weight, surely? And usen’t your hair to have a wave in it – at the sides, I mean?’
That did it. It was that bit of silly masculine clumsiness coming just at the right moment which saved me from going to pieces and telling him the whole story. I might so easily have tried to explain what it felt like to drop feet foremost into just such a machine as he had described, and just how impossible it was to reason with or to cajole a man who never had a moment to hear one. I might also have indulged in the bad taste of recounting what happened when one tried to stage a full-scale row, as I had on the evening before when the news that ‘of course’ the alpine expedition would take place as usual had been given me so casually. I might also have dilated upon the difference between a man who is merely cold and one who seemed to have nothing to be warm with … a man one couldn’t even make angry. As it was, I was so hurt, I said nothing whatever.
Andy turned the car slowly into the High Street again and edged slowly in to the curb.
‘It hasn’t turned out as I meant it to,’ he said abruptly. ‘I’ve been obsessed with the desire to get things off my chest, and now that I’ve done it it doesn’t seem to have got us anywhere. Honestly, I didn’t just want to add to any difficulties you may have, Liz.’ He was silent for a moment and then said awkwardly, with the idea of making amends, no doubt, ‘I think you’ll like to know that nobody blames you for the whirlwind courtship. This fellow, he – er, your husband, has tremendous charm and drive, they say …’
By this time I was shaking with some emotion which I vaguely supposed was anger. I heard myself cutting in with a very stupid and revealing statement:
‘At least the confirmed bachelor did ask me to marry him, Andy. In all the excitement over our private affairs, no one seems to have offered an explanation for that rather important point.’ I was looking full at Andy as I spoke and I saw his expression. He looked suddenly guilty. So the gossips had a neat little explanation for that too, had they? Whatever it was, he was not repeating it. He hopped out of the car and came round to open the door for me. Standing on the pavement, we shook hands very formally. ‘Good-bye Andy,’ I said. ‘I don’t suppose I’ll see you again.’
He stood looking down at me gloomily and there was nothing but emptiness all round us.
‘No,’ he said at last, ‘no, Liz, I don’t suppose you will. Sorry about all this. Silly of me. Good-bye, old lady, good luck.’
We each turned away abruptly at the same moment and I walked off down the crowded pavement, unaware what I looked like and without seeing anyone at all. Yet when I reached the chain store on the corner I went in and bought myself one of those cheap home perm outfits. It was something of a gesture because Victor considered all beauty treatments a waste of time and slightly vulgar, and I had had no money to spare for them since my marriage.
I was standing in the queue at the cash desk, still feeling as if there was a good stiff layer of ice between me and the rest of the world, when Hester Raye pounced upon me.
There may be Hester Rayes in other parts of the earth, but she has always seemed to me to belong quite peculiarly to a certain small section of present-day society in southern England. Her husband, Colonel Raye, was Chief Constable of the county (the police always seemed to choose a retired army man to command them) and she herself had sprung from army stock. At fifty she was still good-looking. Neither time nor experience had bequeathed her any tact whatever, and her intense interest in other people did not seem to have taught her anything important about them at all. She ploughed through the small-town life of Tinworth like an amiable tank.
Her smiling eyes, which looked so misleadingly intelligent, shone into mine.
‘Buying yourself something to make you look pretty? That’s right, never give up. I never have.’ it was a typical pronouncement, guaranteed at best to be misunderstood, and at the same moment she gave my arm a squeeze which would have startled a bear. ‘I was talking about you only the other day to someone – I forget who, but it was someone quite intelligent – and I said then I did hope you wouldn’t let your husband dry all the life and youth out of you – for you’re quite beautiful, you know; you are really when you take trouble – but that you’d stand up to him and get a little life of your own however selfish he is. He’s so charming, isn’t he, and such a villain …’
I had heard her talk as frankly as this to other acquaintances and I had wondered how on earth one responded to the bland; patronizing gush which yet had a sort of outrageous bonhomie in it. Now I understood the fishlike stares which I had observed on the faces of her victims. There was no protection one could devise against her at all. She was a product of the twenties, when it had been fashionable to say the unforgivable thing, and like the little girl who grimaced in the nursery story, the wind had changed and she had stayed like it. I remember thinking vaguely that it was quite clear that she meant well, and perhaps that was why no one had ever gone berserk and killed her.
‘Are you going back now? she demanded. ‘Because if you are I’ll give you a lift. I’ve got the car outside. I’ve often seen you walking down Tortham Road and I’ve said, “I bet he doesn’t even let that sweet girl drive his car in the morning.” No, don’t run away. I want to make you promise you’ll come to the Flower Club meeting tomorrow. I’ve gone to fantastic lengths to get Judith Churchman down to lecture on the modern trend in flower decoration, and I just must have a big audience. You did promise, you know.’
‘I’ll be there.’ I realized I had shouted at her a second too late to do anything about it. The avalanche of dropped bricks had been too much for me altogether. I must have looked rather wild as well, for to my dismay she decided I was having a nerve storm.
‘Oh, you poor child,’ she said, her grip on me tightening. ‘Come along. I insist. I’ll drive you home. You’re terribly brave to put such a good face on things, you know. Everybody says so.’
‘Then I think everybody’s making rather a silly mistake.’ I walked along beside her as I spoke and climbed into her car. There had been more cold venom in my tone than I thought I could summon and I noted her startled expression with deep satisfaction. ‘People who discuss couples whom they don’t know at all often make utter and rather offensive fools of themselves, don’t you think?’
She did not answer. The colour had come into her face and she made a great business of starting up and getting out into the traffic. However, I had reckoned without her powers of resilience. Before we had gone fifty yards she was herself again.
‘You don’t know how you surprised me or how pleased I am,’ she announced with gay naïveté. ‘We’d all been pitying you, you know. Wasn’t it dreadful of us? I expect it’ll make you furious, but it’s terribly funny really. Of course we’ve all known Victor for years, that’s why. You’ve got him right under your thumb, have you? Good for you, my dear. He’s going to give up that old summer expedition and take you somewhere, is he?
‘He’s not going on the expedition.’ The words came out with a conviction which was completely unjustified, particularly in view of the few chill words Victor and I had had on the subject the evening before. Victor never had a row. That was one of the few things I had come to learn about him so painfully in the past few months. He simply stated his intention. Usually that was enough. However, as soon as I spoke to Mrs Raye that morning I realized that I had started some intentions too, and I knew that the expedition would have to be the issue which settled things between me and Victor for good and all. She gave me an odd little glance and I met it steadily, in fact our eyes watched each other until hers dropped. After a while she giggled.
‘My dear, how wonderful! Just to see you about, you know, one wouldn’t dream that you had it in you. You sounded positively sinister.’ She laughed, as far as I could tell with genuine amusement, and settled down to be cosily confidential. This really is quite terrific and I’m terribly glad because we’ve all been thinking that it was rather mean of Victor getting married suddenly like that to silence all the talk, but then we never realized you knew. We all thought that you were the complete little innocent, you see.’
She was watching the road ahead and did not see my face, which was fortunate. She drove with the same calm effrontery with which she seemed to conduct her social life, and while she forced her way through a bunch of traffic I had time to grasp what she was telling me.
Victor’s sudden decision to find a wife had been occasioned by his desperate need to silence some sort of gossip which threatened, presumably, his position at the school. That was the part of the story which Andy had forborne to mention. I knew it was true as soon as Mrs Raye spoke. It explained so much about Victor and my life with him, and made so clear and even forgivable the attitude of the townsfolk towards me. So that was it. That was the solution to the one mystery which, until now, had given me some sort of justification, some sort of hope for my ridiculous ideal for a safe, sound marriage, based on something more solid than the dangerous sands of love. Now I could see exactly the sort of fool I’d been.
To my relief I discovered that I was quite past feeling hurt. I had had more than I could take already that morning, and now I found myself in that quiet grey country which is on the the other side of pain. I was hard and uncharacteristically shrewd and quick-witted.
‘Oh, I think any bachelor in a small town like this is hopelessly vulnerable to gossip,’ I remarked lightly, ‘but I hardly see poor Victor as the local Don Juan, I’m afraid.’ In my tone there was just enough contempt for the wild life of Tinworth to arouse her. I found that once one decided to pull no punches she was almost simple to manage. She rose to the bait at once.
‘Oh, don’t you be so sure,’ she said, quite forgetting who I was, apparently, in her anxiety to make her point. ‘He’s been awfully well behaved lately, of course, but last winter …! Well, there never is any smoke without fire, is there? Besides, you can’t tell me. What about that little hidey-hole he has out on the road to Latchendon?’
The cottage by the golf course?’ I said wonderingly.
‘Golf course!’ she exploded. ‘What other man wants a cottage to play golf in?’
It occurred to me that she had something there, and that either I’d been born blind or was ripe for the half-wit home. But to do Victor justice, I’d been shown over the place, which was a very primitive little affair, and had understood it was merely an escape from the school for an occasional semi-camping week-end. I knew he’d lent it to a couple of masters once or twice during term, and it had been used for school picnics. It had certainly never struck me as being anything in the light of a love nest. But now that she mentioned it, I could see that it was perhaps a rather odd place for him to possess, little more than a couple of miles out of town.
‘What is he supposed to take up there?’ I demanded. ‘Strings of dancing girls?’
I suppose the bitterness showed through. Anyway, it was not an intelligent thing to have said, for she gave me a sudden wary glance and began to retract, stumbling over herself in her anxiety.
‘Oh, I’m not saying there was anything wrong, my dear. I only spoke of the talk, and how grateful he must be to you that that’s all died down. Tinworth isn’t narrow-minded. After all, none of us are saints, are we?’
She gave me a roguish smile which belonged all to the 1920s and pulled up beside the school gates.
‘I thought your boy friend was very handsome this morning, for instance. Had you met him before? You seemed to be getting along very well.’
She caught me off guard and I felt my expression growing horror-stricken. She laughed outright at that and touched my arm.
‘Round and round the town, every time one came out of a shop there you were tearing down the road with your heads together. You can’t say you don’t know who I mean. He’s doing a locum for Dr Browning, isn’t he? Somebody pointed you both out to me this morning and said so, I forget who. Well, don’t cut the Flower lecture tomorrow, will you? So long, my dear, and I shall tell everybody that we were quite wrong about you. I think you’re quite wonderful …’
The car slid away without my having to say anything at all, which was merciful in the circumstances.
The rose-red buildings looked forbidding and forlorn as schools do out of term time. The shaven grass was well worn and although there was no litter or untidiness about, yet the place had all the shabby sadness of a deserted nursery. I walked along the side path, aware of the heat haze and of the loneliness, but principally conscious that I had no place there. This was not my home. However much I tried, it would never have room for me.
I passed under the main arch which had been constructed through the house into the quadrangle behind without seeing a soul, but instead of going straight to the Headmaster’s Lodging, which was in the centre of the block on the southern side, I passed by it and went on to the narrow gate behind the chapel. I had got to have things out once and for all with Victor, but I wanted to be quite sure of myself first. There must be no tears or other signs of hysteria in that interview, and I needed a little more time to collect myself.
Behind the chapel lay all those utility buildings, old and new, which did not fit into the main architectural scheme. The boiler houses were there, and the glasshouses and the swimming pool, the disused stables and the laundries, all huddled together in a fine muddle of old elegance and new necessity. I went into the stables, and as my footsteps sounded on the bricks there was a single shrill bark from the farther loose-box. Izzy was in my arms a moment later, bounding up on his short legs, his hard brindled body wriggling in ecstasy. This wild greeting nearly broke my heart, it was so uncharacteristic of his dour Scotty personality. A year before he would never have lowered his dignity by anything more than a discreet wagged tail at my arrival, but then at that time we had never been apart during his lifetime. This kennel business was part of Victor’s discipline. He had been very nice about it but very firm. I had seen that if the boys were not allowed pets in the school I could hardly expect to have mine at large, and so very comfortable quarters were arranged for Izzy and I took him for walks every day. It was very nice, but just not our idea of life, that was all. Poor Izzy and poor Liz, both victims of the same silly mistake. However, this was the end of all that. I had decided it.
I set Izzy down and left the door of the box wide.
‘Come on, I said, ‘you get a bath after lunch. You smell like a dog.’
He peered at me from under his fierce old-man eyebrows and the little black eyes which had earned him his pet name were shining and hopeful. He bounded a little, very clumsily as Scotch terriers do, and then parked himself at my heels in complete content. Where I was going, so was he. I felt much better with him behind me.
We came back together and were crossing the yard when the door of the shower room, which was next to the pool, was shattered open and a most unexpected person came reeling out almost on top of us. It took me a moment or two to recognize Mr Rorke, our much-discussed science master. It was generally understood that Rorke, although admittedly brilliant, possessed what was euphemistically described as an ‘unfortunate failing’. Until now I had never taken the story seriously. I had only seen the gaunt white-faced scarecrow of a man at meals in the dining-hall, and perhaps twice at the dreary functions which were described as the ‘Headmaster’s coffee party’, and then he had seemed to me to be a harmless and even a pathetic figure. I had supposed somewhat vaguely that his transgressions took the form of quiet tippling in the secrecy of his room, and was quite unprepared for this spectacular performance so early in the day. Moreover, he appeared to have attempted to remedy matters by taking a shower, at least from the waist upwards, but as he had omitted to remove even his jacket for the operation his condition now was pitiful. I never saw a man in such a mess. His hair hung over his eyes in a damp mass and he was shaking violently. Izzy drew back and began to growl and I hesitated, uncertain whether it would be kindest to offer assistance or to ignore him altogether. To my dismay he paused directly in my path and shook a wavering acid-stained hand at me.
‘You too,’ he shouted, ‘you too.’
I did not quite gather the rest of the sentence. It sounded as if he prophesied that I should or should not be sorry, I was not sure which.
‘You go and change and lie down,’ I commanded, summoning all the authority I could muster. ‘You’ll feel better.’ But my tolerance faded suddenly and the smile was wiped off my face.
Through his tousled hair his eyes peered at me with an intensity which was intelligent and menacing. I drew back involuntarily and he swung away and lurched off down the yard towards the back gates. I looked after him, wondering if I ought not to do something to see he came to no harm, or if it would be unwise to interfere. Izzy settled the matter by prodding me firmly in the ankle with his wet nose. It was one of his most characteristic gestures and meant ‘get along out of here’. It reminded me that I had troubles of my own to attend to, so I collected myself and went along to the Lodging to find Victor.
As Izzy and I entered the light, white-painted hall where the parquet shone with hygienic cleanliness, the silence of the building descended on me like a tangible cloak. In the normal way the house was full of hurrying people, and the chatter of typewriters from the school office never seemed to cease. But all was quiet now and still in the sunlight. It was a queer little dwelling, designed for its purpose by the architect who had converted the mansion. On the ground floor there were two rooms, one on either side of the square hall. One was the office, the other was the Headmaster’s study. On the floor above was a drawing-room for the Headmaster’s entertaining, a very small dining-room, a bachelor bedroom and bath. One floor higher still was a little suite of three rooms for the use, presumably, of any family the Headmaster might want to tuck away up there. Until my arrival it had been deserted. Now I lived there, for the most part of the time alone. There was no housekeeping. We came under school management. The school servants kept the house clean. We fed in hall with the boys during the day, and in the evenings our meal was sent up from the school kitchens and served with due ceremony by the head steward. Victor had always lived like that and had seemed horrified when, early in the present term, I had suggested that I might install a small kitchen of my own. I suppose I ought to have put my foot down over some of these points, but when one is fighting against the conviction that one has made a really big mistake, one is apt to be unduly cautious about making small ones, so I had concentrated on trying to make a go of things, on fitting in and giving way. It had got me exactly nowhere. I was getting that into my head at last.
Well, if it was to be settled once and for all, the sooner the better. I pulled myself together and walked into the study. I did not knock, as I usually did in case Victor was interviewing somebody. Term was over and I was in my own house.
But there was no one at the big desk which spread so importantly over the far half of the carpet. The tall windows draped with formal curtains were closed. The room was airless and deserted. It was anticlimax and I was turning to go out again when a smothered gasp from the fireplace on my left brought me wheeling round towards it.
Mr Seckker was kneeling on the hearthrug, surprised in the very act of burning something in the empty grate, for a thin blue wand of smoke still wavered up the chimney as I looked. For a second he stared at me, dismay on his prim, wrinkled face, but he recovered himself at once and hopped up with quite remarkable agility to stand smiling at me with all his wonted courtliness, although he took care, I noticed, to step between me and the fireplace.
‘Oh, it’s you, Mrs Lane,’ he said easily. ‘I thought for a moment it was the Headmaster returning. I don’t know that I shall wait for him after all. I can come up tomorrow.’
‘Is Victor out?’ I said in surprise. ‘I’ve just come back from the town. I didn’t meet him.’
‘Then he must have gone the other way, musn’t he?’ he said, twinkling at me. ‘I was in my classroom and I saw him drive out of the gates – when was that? Let me see, half an hour ago perhaps. I came in here to bring him some books and settled down to wait with my pipe. I flicked a match into the grate and I’m afraid I set light to some litter which was there. I was just seeing it was all right when you came in.’
He made the unnecessary explanation with bland charm and even waved a palpably empty pipe at me by way of corroboration. I nodded absently. Whatever he was doing, it had nothing to do with me. I was thinking of Victor.
‘You don’t know where he’s gone, do you?’ I said. ‘I mean, he’ll be in to lunch, won’t he?’
‘I really don’t know.’ He looked astounded at my ignorance and faintly disapproving. I realized that Mr Seckker’s sister knew to the hour and second when her brother would be in to a meal. ‘I’ve not seen him myself this morning. He was closeted in here with Rorke when I arrived and so I went up to my classroom. Then I saw him go out. Dear me, it’s past twelve. I must get back.’
He glanced behind him at the fireplace with misleading casualness and, seeing, no doubt, that all was well, came across the room to me. As he passed I suddenly remembered.
‘Oh yes,’ I said, ‘Mr Rorke. I suppose he’ll be all right?’
‘All right?’ He stopped in his tracks and stared at me with sudden sternness. ‘What do you mean by that?’
I told him of my encounter in the stable yard and as he listened I got the impression that he was relieved rather than scandalized.
‘Wet, was he?’ he said, laughing a little in a dour elderly way. ‘Oh yes, he’ll be all right, silly fellow. Don’t give him another thought, Mrs Lane. Good morning.’ Half-way across the hall he glanced back. ‘Please don’t bother the Headmaster with any message from me. I may or may not drop in tomorrow. The matter I was going to mention to him is of no importance.’ Without actually saying so he made me realize that it was a definite request and I said, ‘I won’t then.’
He still hesitated and finally added, with a diffidence which was quite charming: ‘Unless you feel you ought, I don’t think I should bother him about Rorke either. He’s a silly young juggins, but it’s not strictly term time, although he was on school premises …’
‘Of course,’ I said. ‘I shouldn’t dream of mentioning it to him.’
‘Ah.’ It was a satisfied little sound. He gave me a nod which was almost a bow, and pattered off, letting himself quietly out of the house and closing the door behind him. I started upstairs, the little brindled shadow which was Izzy close at my heels, and smiled at his description of Rorke, who must have been close on the, to me, impossible age of forty if I was any judge at all. The sudden vista of years all to be spent in the aridity of Buchanan House took me by surprise, and to my dismay I felt if not a scream at least a protesting squeak rising up in my throat. I blushed at myself. Things were getting me down farther than I had supposed. I realized this afresh when Izzy’s low growl behind me made me start so violently that I almost stepped on him.
‘What is it, boy?’ I said, and at the same moment I heard from above us the clatter of footsteps on the parquet of the dining-room, and the school housekeeper, Miss Richardson, came bustling out on to the landing.
‘Oh, there you are, Mrs Lane,’ she said. ‘I’m so glad to have caught you. I thought I should have to go without saying goodbye, and I did want to tell you what I’ve arranged.’
I stared at her. In all my time at the school I don’t suppose we had exchanged half a dozen words. In the very beginning Victor had made it clear to me that one of the dangers of my position at the school was that the domestic staff, who were the employees of the governors, might suspect me of intrusion, with the result, of course, that I had avoided any contact with them. I’m afraid I had hardly dared recognize this plump middle-aged woman, with her strings of domestic science diplomas, as an ordinary human being. I had passed her occasionally in the grounds, looking very aloof in her black skirt and twin set, and we had shown our teeth at each other in polite mirthless smiles. Now I scarcely recognized her in a pale grey linen suit with a white flower on her lapel and a smart white straw set pertly on her glossy dark hair. She had a warm voice, I noticed for the first time, and, now that she was in holiday mood, real gaiety in her smile.
‘I couldn’t find you anywhere this morning, and the Headmaster was engaged, so I couldn’t ask when you were going off,’ she rattled on. ‘I was a bit worried, but I’ve done what I think will suit you. Williams will be caretaking all through the holiday …’
‘That’s the porter.’
She looked at me as if I were demented. ‘Yes, you know, the man at the lodge. He’ll be there all the vacation and he’ll have the keys. Mrs Williams is always very anxious to help, and if you should come back at any time you can always send her a card and she’ll get the place aired and have a meal for you. But I was really worrying about the next day or so before you go. I’ve fixed up for Mrs Veal, who is the best of our charwomen, to come in tomorrow morning to see what you need. I’ve had some cold lunch laid here now, and if you’ll just leave everything she’ll see to it …’
Her voice trailed away and died before the expression on my face, which I suppose was utterly blank.
‘You did know, I suppose?’ she demanded abruptly.
It was one of those purely feminine questions which seemed to have ‘I thought so’ lingering somewhere in their depths, and it pulled me together at once.
‘If you mean, had I realized that the whole of the staff was going on holiday today, I’m afraid I hadn’t,’ I said, trying to sound easy and casual, as if minor items of this kind meant nothing to me. ‘I was thinking of last vacation.’
‘Oh but that was Easter, the short vac. We don’t bother to disrupt the working arrangements for three weeks or so. But this is a long holiday, nearly nine weeks.’
‘Yes, yes, of course,’ I said hurriedly. ‘Well, thank you tremendously. I’ll look out for Mrs Veal and …’
‘How long do you expect to stay here, Mrs Lane?’ She was watching me with black-fringed candid eyes.
‘I – I’m not sure at the moment’
She did not seem to hear me but went on as though she had made up her mind to say something and was going through with it at all costs.
‘I asked because some weeks ago when I mentioned the holidays to the Headmaster he told me that he would be going off to the Continent almost immediately the term ended, and that you would probably leave at the same time to stay with friends in London. That’s why I haven’t consulted you before. Do believe me, Mrs Lane, it wasn’t until last night, when I realized that you hadn’t made any arrangements yet – about travelling, I mean – that I began to worry how you’d get on. This morning I tried to find you, but when I discovered I’d missed you I went ahead and made the best arrangements I could.’
‘It was very kind of you,’ I said, and meant it.
‘Not at all. I feel terrible about it.’ She gave up all pretences and was appealing to me for my confidence. ‘I wish I’d known you weren’t going off somewhere at once. I’d have done anything, I would really. I’d have stayed myself.’
‘Don’t be silly,’ I said cheerfully. ‘You go and catch – your train and have a wonderful time. Where are you going?’
‘Devon,’ she said, and made it sound like a prayer. Then she caught my eye and actually blushed, so that I got a glimpse of fuchsia hedges and bowls of clotted cream and someone waiting for her, no doubt.
She glanced at her watch and fled, but at the bottom of the stairs she looked back.
‘You’ll have to order some milk,’ she called up to me. ‘Mrs Veal will get it if you tell her how much you want. Good-bye.’
The door closed behind her and the house became so quiet that even the warm sunlight seemed eerie. I had never known a place to feel quite so empty. I sat down on the top step of the, stairs because I happened to be standing there, and Izzy sat beside me. My first thought was that it wasn’t true. ‘Men don’t behave like that,’ I said aloud. But they do to their wives, said a voice in my mind. Don’t be silly; you read it every day in the newspapers. Besides, it’s so like Victor, isn’t it? Just quietly arranging to get his own way without considering anyone else in the world. Victor doesn’t get involved in arguments or explanations. He just fixes up to avoid giving any. Sometimes he goes to considerable lengths in this direction, getting married for instance. By all accounts that must have avoided one father and mother of an argument.
I felt myself growing very hot and presently I got up slowly and mounted the stairs to my own rooms. Sitting before my dressing-table, I looked dispassionately at the pale, thin-faced creature in the glass until I awoke a gleam of courage in her eyes. After a while we even laughed at each other.
‘Well, he’ll be in for lunch in a minute and this is the one argument he isn’t going to avoid, my dear,’ I said. ‘I’d go and get a rolling-pin – if we had a kitchen.’
That was just before one o’clock. By a quarter past three it had become evident that wherever Victor was lunching it wasn’t at home. He’d side-stepped again, very neatly, very completely. It was typical.
Izzy and I had some of the cold food which Miss Richardson had so kindly left for us, and afterwards I stacked the two plates and left them on the minute sideboard and tidied the table. There was nowhere to wash up unless one used the bathroom.
By this time I had begun to hate myself and the house even more, so I thought I’d walk it off. Just round the school the fields were dull and highly cultivated but about half a mile farther down the road there was a lane that led to the water meadows which cradled our local river. It would be cool down there and lonely, I thought, a good place to think things out and get myself reorientated. Everyone in Tinworth who was not actually infirm owned a bicycle and I was no exception. I got it out of the shed next to the stable where Izzy had lived so long and put him in the basket. He was too big for it and he made the handlebars wobble, but his legs were rather short for fast running and the main road was very hard for his pads. He was used to this form of transport, so he sat very still, his ears flat, and tried, I was certain, to adjust his weight to the balance. One of the gardeners was sweeping near the back gates and he swung them open for us. I saw his surprise as we appeared and his grin as we passed him. Taking advantage of the pause, he pulled a watch out of his pocket and glanced at it to see how much more he had of the afternoon. It was an insignificant incident. I don’t know why I noticed it.
There was very little traffic on the high road and once we entered the lane we did not see a soul. I rode on until the going became too rough, and afterwards left the bike in the hedge and walked on to the stile. Izzy was delighted and showed it in his own sedate way, by taking short meaningless runs through the lush grass, his head ploughing up and down through the green as if he were swimming.
It was Andy who, long before in a London park, had pointed out that Izzy was like a very small old-fashioned railway engine, squat, rusty, and quite incredibly heavy. I smiled at the recollection and dismissed it hastily. I was determined to put Andy right out of my mind. He had loved me and I had jilted him and he had got over it. That was all there was to that story and to think about it now would be to complicate things quite unbearably.
‘I did love you once’ The line from Hamlet came back unbidden, the most cruel thing man had ever said to woman, my English mistress had once remarked in a moment of uncharacteristic self-revelation. A whole classful of girls had gaped at her, but she had been right. I knew it now. Andy had said that, almost in as many words, and he’d made it worse by not even meaning to be unkind. I did not blame him. I was just going to forget him, that was all.
I wandered on beside the running water and Izzy puffed and grunted beside me. It was a glorious afternoon, sleepy and golden, and I discovered that I was being careful to think only of immediate things, like the moor hen I disturbed or the lark I tried to see high in the white-flecked blue. It would not do. There was one vital issue I had got to face and the sooner the better if I was going to have it out with Victor. Was it to be divorce, or was I going to sit down under this slow-starvation marriage for the rest of my life?
I lay down on the bank where the turf was short and let my hand dangle in the water, and Izzy came and sat beside me, panting, until he found how to get his nose down to lap. Theoretically the thing was perfectly simple. I had made a hash of getting married and the sensible thing to do was to cut my losses and clear out and get a job. Any civilized young woman of the Western Hemisphere surely knew that by this time. Yet now that I was up against the reality I found there was a remarkable difference between knowing and doing. It may have been just the failure I didn’t want to face. Everybody, all my friends, anyone who had ever known me, knew that I was unreasonably terrified of divorce. What Andy had said about me was true. Mother’s divorce had coloured my entire outlook from babyhood, and now, although I saw my foolishness, I also saw that one couldn’t alter oneself just by knowing one was silly. I still hoped to cling to the crazy idea that somehow I could make it come all right. All the same … Victor would never alter. That was the conviction I’d been fighting off for weeks. People don’t alter. They may with enormous difficulty modify themselves, but they never really change. I’d got myself married to an overbearing selfish man with a masterful personality, and unless I got away from him he’d reduce me to the colourless cipher he needed as a front-of-the-house wife.
But there again … was it so easy to get a divorce? This was England, not one of those countries where a thoroughly unhappy marriage is considered to be, by and large, fair ground for an appeal. If Victor did not help, and I did not think he would for a moment, then I might easily merely provoke a scandal which would ruin his career and leave me tied to him irrevocably for the rest of my life … or his.
Oh, dear God, I thought, it is difficult, too difficult. I put my head down in the warm grass and shut out everything from my mind but the sound of the gently lapping water. The sun was warm on my back. Izzy waddled over and settled his hard little body against my shoulder. The river sang softly, lipperty-lapperty, lipperty-lapperty….
I woke cold and stiff, and astounded to find it nearly dusk.
Doubtless it was the air, following all the emotional upset, which had put me out. At any rate, I had slept deeply and dreamlessly for heaven knows how long and might have stayed there half the night had not Izzy’s patience given out. He prodded my ear gently until I sat up and stared about me. Even if one has nothing in the world to do, one feels guilty at dropping off to sleep unintentionally, and I got up in a fine flurry and set off back to the stile and the bicycle with as much haste as if I had a nurseryful of youngsters to feed. I had no idea what the time was but when we reached the high road one of the cars which passed us had its sidelights on.
I had guessed the back gates of the school would be closed, but the big main ones in front were locked also and I had to rouse Williams in his lodge beside them to get in. He was astonished to see me, and apologetic.
‘I thought we was on our own, me and the missis,’ he said, his little bright eyes peering at me from out of a mass of wrinkles. ‘Thought you’d all gorn. The Guv’nor’s out, you know. Leastways, his car ain’t in the garridge because I’ve been to look. ’E’s not back.’
There was something in his manner, or else I imagined it, which was infuriatingly knowing. It seemed to epitomize the whole of Tinworth’s attitude towards me, a sort of pitying condescension, an inquisitive commiseration. It got under my skin.
‘I didn’t suppose he would be,’ I said, and was shocked by something odd in my own tone. I had tried to sound casual and had changed it at the last moment for authority. Williams seemed interested.
‘Shall I leave the gates, then?’
I hesitated and he stood waiting.
‘What d’ye think?’ he inquired at last, and added ‘ma’am’ as an afterthought.
‘Yes, leave them open,’ I said. It won’t do any harm. Good night.’
‘Good night, m’m,’ I heard him muttering as he bent down to fix the gate-stop. ‘Harm?’ he was saying. ‘Harm?’
The house was dark and quiet as a grave. No one had been in. Everything was just as I had left it. I took Izzy upstairs with me. This was too bad of Victor altogether. I assumed he was punishing me for even daring to try to stand up to him on the evening before. The situation was crazy. I realized it now that I’d faced the problem and slept on it.
Meanwhile Izzy had begun to utter that distinctive Scotty mew which is at once the most apologetic and yet the most demanding sound in the world.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘there’s the remains of lunch, chum. We’ll go into housekeeping tomorrow when we see what the form is.’
Dinner was on the drab side and Izzy enjoyed it more than I did. There was nothing but tepid water out of the bathroom tap to drink, and I discovered that the main boilers from which we were supplied were out and there was no hot water. Finally I had a brain wave and went down to the secretary’s room. There I discovered what I expected. Tucked away in a cupboard was a small tin kettle and a half-full packet of tea. There was sugar there and a cup, but no milk, and a gas ring in the fireplace. I made tea.
It was while I was drinking the abominable stuff, and fighting the unreal atmosphere of the empty school buildings crowding in all round me, that it occurred to me that if Victor had been an ordinary human being he would at least have left me a message. If he had it would have been a note. He was a man of notes and the whole school seemed to copy him. At Buchanan House no one ever seemed to use a phone or send a verbal message. If they were going to be late for dinner, or the team had won a match, or a leak had been discovered in a bathroom, someone sat down and wrote someone else a little note about it. There was no sign of an envelope upstairs but it occurred to me that he might have left one for me in his study and I went in there to see. There was nothing on the mantelshelf and I went over to the desk and crossed round behind the big chair. There were no loose papers, no miscellany, and certainly no note propped for me to find. Everything was meticulously tidy, as if its owner had cleared up before he left. The only sign of use was the blotter, well inked over because Victor was careful over small matters like stationery and did not have it changed until he had to.
I glanced at it casually and suddenly stood transfixed, my heart jolting on a long and painful beat.
One of my minor accomplishments is that I can read what is called ‘mirror writing’ quite easily. I had been the overworked editor of a school magazine which had been produced on one of those home-made jelly duplicators, and I had learned the trick to facilitate corrections. Now, as I stood staring at the blotter, a message in Victor’s precise handwriting stood out from the rest with startling vividness.
‘Thursday the 27th then, my darling. Until … rest assu .. love you … difficult … know that. Always, V.’
I glanced up from the message to the desk calendar, which was neatly kept to date: ‘Thursday, July’ and underneath a huge red ‘27’.
I ought to have been furious, sick, outraged. The conventional streak in me which Andy had pointed out was aware of all the right reactions, but I felt none of them. I felt freed.
I suppose it was the generations of proud law-abiding religious women behind me whose legacies were deep in me, forming my reactions despite any fancy thinking which I might be doing on my own account, who suddenly let up and washed their hands of Victor. I realized I could go. I was absolved. I could depart and not look back … but not untidily. That was the last of the iron rules which must be obeyed. I could go free but I must not take revenge. I must not ruin him and above all I must not foul my own nest. He and I must come to understand one another and the parting must be arranged without fuss.
I took the sheet of blotting paper out of the pad and rolled it carefully into a cylinder.
‘Come on,’ I said to Izzy, ‘we can go from here, old boy. But we must tell him first.’
It was about half after midnight, I think, when I decided to try out the home perm outfit on the side pieces of my hair. I had packed most of my clothes and I had very few other possessions because I’d been living rather as if I were in a hotel. Wherever I was going, I shouldn’t have much luggage to bother about. I was not sleepy and I was not worried. At last I knew what I had to tell Victor, and I knew I had to do it the moment he came in. I should not look very imposing with my hair in curlers and he’d probably be scandalized by them, but that didn’t matter any more. I had plenty of time and I wanted to get it done.
It was quite a business because of the hot water. Izzy and I trotted up and down several times with our kettle, and the directions on the flimsy folder inside the perm packet were long and complicated. All the same, we conquered, and by the time I’d got to ‘Operation 8: rinse thoroughly but do not unwind’ the clock on my bedside table said two-fifteen.
I was in the bathroom with my head tied up like a pudding when Izzy began to growl. It was his warning noise, very deep and soft in the back of his throat, and it sent the blood tingling into the nerves of my face and back. I hurried into the bedroom to find him stiff-legged in the middle of the floor, his ears coming off the top of his head, every hair quivering as he faced the open window. Someone was in the courtyard, and since he had not entered presumably it was not Victor. I stood listening and presently I heard an odd splattering sound high up under the window. Izzy growled and started back as a pebble sailed in and rolled on the carpet near him.
I went over at once and put my head out, towel and all.
‘What is it?’ I demanded.
‘Mrs Lane …?’ It was Maureen Jackson’s voice and I could just see her in the dusk. She was wrapped in something which I took to be an evening cloak. There was another shadow in the darkness behind her. I could hardly make it out at all and I assumed it was her dancing partner. I drew back at once. My towel was slipping and I was coy about the curlers.
‘Yes,’ I said from just inside the room, ‘what on earth is it?’
‘Could – could I possibly speak to the Headmaster?’ Her voice was most unnatural and it came to me that she was suppressing giggles. This was most unlike her, of course, but then the hour was not exactly usual. I could hear the engine of a sports car throbbing somewhere in the stillness and I decided that they were on their way home from a party where they had got a little high. Perhaps there had been a lot of gossip about us. Perhaps Victor had been seen with someone. Perhaps Maureen had been dared to find out if I knew.
‘Is he in?’
Something in the question raised a devil in me that I did not know that I possessed. I made a sudden irritable movement and did the silliest thing I have ever done in my life.
‘Yes, of course he is,’ I said firmly, ‘fast asleep, and I shouldn’t dream of waking him. Whatever it is must wait till tomorrow. Good night.’
It was a mad thing to do, criminally idiotic. At the time I felt a vague premonition about it, but I did not dream then just how insane it was going to prove to be, for it was not until the following afternoon that Victor’s body was discovered and by then he had been dead between twelve and twenty-four hours, so the police doctor said.