IT WAS NOT quite ten when Milly stepped out of the train on to the dark, gusty platform of Seacliffe Station. Already it seemed late at night, as it could never have done in London, and the straggling remnant of passengers who had got off the train with her were scurrying head-down towards the ticket-barrier, as if they feared that the last buses, the last taxis, were already leaving.
Milly followed more slowly. Of what concern to her were last buses and last taxis—she who had no destination, nothing to be late for or in time for? If you are going nowhere, it cannot possibly be too far to walk; and so Milly strolled through the ticket-barrier like a queen, insulated from all the haste and anxiety by a despair so complete as to be indistinguishable from peace.
But once outside, she was compelled to rouse herself. The night wind howled in from the sea with a force which set her gasping for breath and clutching at her hat, her hair, her wildly billowing coat. Around her loomed a width of unknown road, dark and completely deserted, with here and there a street lamp glimmering greenly in the fury of the wind.
Milly set off, exactly as if she was going somewhere. Not with any idea of averting suspicion—whose suspicion was there to avert in this storm-swept emptiness? Rather, it was because there was nothing else that she knew how to do. All one’s life, one has been doing things with some sort of small purpose; the mechanisms are built-in, and they cannot cease just because all purpose has suddenly disappeared.
So she plodded on, and though her legs ached with a dull weariness, it did not occur to her to stop; and presently she knew, from the dampness whipping against her face, that she was getting very near the sea.
Ah, here it was! In what a glory of desolation it shouldered its black vastness against the ramparts of the parade—again … again … again, with all its ancient strength! The spray stung against her face, the wet wind screamed round her icy, aching ears, and tugged and wrestled with the wild, damp strands of her hair. Heavens, what must she be looking like by now! Anyone passing by would think she was a mad-woman, dawdling along like this in the wind and storm, with her hair flying out like seaweed!
Well, and why not be mad? The newspapers could put that in the headlines, too! Let them! Why not? Why not dance, and laugh, and scream with the screaming wind? Why not hurl herself like spray into the darkness, until her laughter and her screams became one and the same, one with the thunder of the black waves against the stonework, and the long, grating suck of the shingle as the water drew back, pausing for slow, incredible seconds while it gathered up fresh fury from its secret, inexhaustible store?
Oh, but the cold was wicked! Milly pulled up the collar of her coat round her aching ears, and set off walking again. But already the collar itself was soaked with spray, and the wind whistled through her earache as if laughing at this fatuous attempt at protection. She could no longer see any glory in the black waves rolling in; they looked icy and horrible, and she crossed the road to the side where she Couldn’t see them; where the blank fronts of hotels and shut-up amusement arcades gave at least an illusion of shelter.
As she walked, Milly presently became aware of a strange sense of nostalgia. Some memory, as of a dream, long, long ago, was all about her: and as she came abreast of a little lighted fish-and-chip shop, still open and busy, she realised what the memory was. It was the memory of food. How long was it since she had eaten? Yesterday? The day before? She couldn’t remember: and even now she wasn’t feeling hungry. She felt no temptation to spend any of her few remaining coins in that bright little bar. But all the same, the momentary smell of food as she passed had been comforting, like a stranger’s smile: a reminder that for some people, somewhere, life was still going on.
It must have been after midnight when she finally came to rest, aimless as a blown leaf, in a shelter on the sea-front, a little way outside the town. It was a glass and iron-work affair, three-sided, and by creeping into the furthermost corner, Milly found a little protection from the spray, and from the black, terrible wind screaming in off the sea.
Oh, but the cold! It seemed almost worse in here than outside. Gusts of icy air whirled round her knees, and pierced the soaked fabric of her coat as if it was paper: and presently it began to dawn on her that if she went on sitting here throughout the bitter January night, she was quite likely to die.
Die. She tried to make the word mean something, and became aware, for the first time, of how much she had deteriorated since this morning. Then, she had been shocked, terrified, but biologically intact. She had been reacting to fear as a healthy mammal should—by flight, and by an overwhelming determination to survive. It seemed incredible now, that determination to survive, and all the trouble she had been prepared to take for it! She remembered, wonderingly, how it had made her run, gasping, panting, for the nearest Underground, like a mouse running for its hole. Like the mouse, too, she had been upheld and guided by sturdy and marvellous instincts, handed to her intact and perfect across millions of years of evolution. These instincts, basic to every living thing, had still been strong and vital in her even while she had sat paralysed—defence by immobility—going round and round the Inner Circle: as she had scanned, tirelessly, the relays of insurgent passengers, with every muscle tensed ready for further flight if she should catch sight of an acquaintance, however remote. How anxiously, and with what zestful sanity, she had counted and re-counted the money in her bag, trying to make it come to more than two pounds twenty-five just as if it actually mattered! And as she trundled round and round on the tube, hour after hour, how she had schemed, and daydreamed, and worried about how to establish a new identity, how to get a job, how to find a room…. It seemed like a dream, now, that fantastic will to live, and all the effort she had been prepared to make for it! Now, it seemed too much trouble even to pull the draggled edges of her coat together over her frozen knees: and as for the idea of getting up and walking again, of stirring the circulation in her numbed limbs—such purposeful effort seemed incredible now; it was beyond anything she could imagine….
*
She became aware, presently, of an ominous lethargy, creeping up from her frozen limbs, and beginning to probe, tentatively, into the very centre of her being. These were the fingers of death. She knew it. Strange how she had seemed to recognise them immediately, as though she had known, all her life, exactly what death would be like when it came.
She had stopped shivering, too, in the last few minutes, and that was the most sinister sign of all. One by one, the marvellous mechanisms for preserving body-heat were breaking down. Soon, her temperature itself would begin to drop, and the blood-supply to her brain would fall to a point where anoxia set in. How easily and naturally the old, familiar medical phrases still slid into her mind, even after all this time! A legacy from her first marriage, this: and from the time even longer ago when she had been trying to train as a nurse. Dropping things: mishandling sterilised instruments: so clumsy and nervous over injections that the patients would plead, with real fear in their eyes, for “the little nurse to do it!” Or “the tall nurse”, or “the blonde nurse”—any nurse at all, so long as it wasn’t Milly!
Only she hadn’t been Milly then, of course, she had been Nurse Harris: soon—if only she had guessed it—to become Mrs Waggett, wife of Julian Waggett, the promising young house-surgeon.
No one in the hospital could understand why he had picked on her. With his dark, arrogant good looks, his charm, his air of absolute assurance, he could have had any girl in the hospital—or outside it, for that matter. All the young student nurses were more or less in love with him; some, like Milly, with a day-dreaming adolescent passion that declared itself solely by tongue-tied paralysis whenever he appeared on the ward: others, bolder and more experienced, were seriously out to get him. These were the girls who knew how to flash provocation from their cool downcast eyes as they stood by a bedside receiving instructions about a saline drip: who knew how to wear their sober uniform as if it was part of a strip-tease. Some of these sorceresses even managed to date the great man, now and again, and subsequently dined out (or perhaps cocoa’d out would be more accurate) for weeks afterwards on tales of wine and orchids and whispered words of passion.
Not that Julian Waggett had been rich—not in those days. He was only a house-surgeon, two years qualified, and earning such a salary as protest marches are based on. But it made no difference. Although he was only twenty-six, and among the lowest-ranking doctors at the hospital, the indefinable bloom of success was already upon him. Already one felt that the deep-pile carpets of Harley Street were unrolling under his feet as he trod the wards; and when he glanced off-handedly at the bed-end chart, or threw out a casual syllable that would light up a pain-racked face, you knew, you knew without any doubt at all, that those unhurried steps were taking him into his future swifter than the speed of sound.
*
And the woman who was to step into the future with him? Not for her would be the harried existence of an overworked GP’s wife—tied to the telephone, meals drying in the oven, never a night’s unbroken sleep. No, whoever finally succeeded in capturing Julian was in for a life of pampered luxury and ease. Service-flats. A town house and a country house. Luxury holidays in the Bahamas. Did he know, Milly (Nurse Harris, that is to say) sometimes wondered, how many thousands of rollers were rolled into how many acres of hair at the Nurses’ Home each night, just for him? How many little pots of eye-liner, eye-shiner, skin freshener, pore-cream and all the rest were lined up in sacrificial array on his hundreds of unknown altars in little cell-like bedrooms? And could he ever have believed that those fluffy little heads, which seemed to find it so impossible to understand the blood-plasma tables, were nevertheless capable of compiling timetables far more complicated than anything dealt with at head office, when it came to engineering “chance” meetings with him on corridors or in doorways? And did he know—did it perhaps even amuse him to know—that several young lives had been drastically reshaped—for good or ill—simply by the fact that it was rumoured that he didn’t like virgins?
And after all the sound and fury, what happened? He married Milly—Nurse Harris, that is to say! Nurse Harris of the gingery hair, and the freckles. Nurse Harris of the thick waist, and the stubby fingers, who couldn’t wear eye-make-up because it brought her out in styes. And a virgin to boot. It was no wonder that when the engagement was announced, the whole, vast humming hospital seemed to stop in its tracks for a moment, from the top consultant to the lowest-paid washer-up, all of them asking the same question. Why? Why?
All their guesses were wrong. Nurse Harris wasn’t pregnant. She hadn’t inherited half a million pounds from a deceased uncle. Nor was Julian trying to call the bluff of some disdainful glamour-puss by making her jealous. He really did want to marry Nurse Harris. He did marry her. There were flowers, champagne, congratulations, and after that, of course, all that the mystified well-wishers could do was to sit back and wait for the marriage to crack up. Six months, most of them gave it.
But it didn’t break up. Not in six months, nor even in a year. Two years passed—three—even five; and during this time Julian went from strength to strength. House-Surgeon, Registrar, Senior Registrar…. Before he was thirty-five he was a consultant, and with a private practice on the side that was rapidly becoming fashionable. His name, now and then, began to appear in the papers, in connection with some tricky operation on a minor celebrity. By now the prophets of doom were having to eat their words: they had to admit that a man isn’t likely to achieve success like this if he is all the time wresting with an unhappy marriage. In some inexplicable way, drab little Nurse Harris must have been right for him. But why?
Milly, of course, knew why. She had known all along, but had had no intention of allowing the knowledge to mar her joy and excitement over her extraordinary good fortune. She had known right from the start that what Julian wanted—nay, needed—was a wife who would serve as a foil for his own brilliance. A woman so retiring, so inconspicuous, that in contrast to her dullness his own wit, his own charm, would shine out with redoubled radiance. A woman who never, ever, in any circumstances, would draw attention away from him and on to herself.
And for a while—indeed for a number of years—the lopsided bargain seemed to work very well. Milly was not an ambitious woman, she had no desire for the limelight for herself. Besides, she loved Julian, and rejoiced genuinely to see him where she knew he so loved to be—in the centre of an admiring crowd. She was proud of his success, proud to know that this dazzling, sought-after figure was her husband: and she felt, too, a deep and not unjustified pride in the thought that it was she, herself, who in all sorts of dull little inconspicuous ways had provided the background against which his wit and charm could sparkle their brightest, and his talents be displayed to best advantage.
Right from the beginning, Julian had loved to give important little dinner-parties. Even in the early years, when they could ill afford it, he had always insisted that there should be wine, and flowers, and at least four courses of excellent food for their guests. Luckily, Milly was a good cook, though slow, so by dint of anxious planning and long hours at the stove, she always managed to produce a meal that was inexpensive and yet came up to Julian’s exacting standards: and if, by the time they sat down to table, the hostess was too flustered and exhausted to join much in the conversation what matter? It was Julian who was the star of the evening, Julian who led the conversation, filled up the glasses, radiated hospitality and charm. Sometimes he would chide her, afterwards, for being “such a little mouse!” but she knew that he liked it really, and she exerted such womanly guile as she possessed to see that her inadequacies remained a joke between them, and never became a serious issue.
But they did become a serious issue, of course, in the end. As the years went by, and success followed success for Julian, the dinner parties became larger, and grander. Little lions from the social and artistic worlds were invited to them, and then bigger lions. Until, at last, secure in his own unassailable reputation, Julian began to feel the need of a wife who would be a credit to him. Not one who would outshine him, of course—as if such a thing were possible! —Oh no! But he needed someone elegant, sophisticated; a fitting hostess for a man in his position. And one night, he looked at his existing wife, nervously sipping her sweet sherry, boring the Finnish Ambassador, and allowing her anxieties about the chestnut soufflé to show on her round shiny face. He contemplated her faded ginger perm, her freckles, and her thickening figure bulging under her black velvet dinner dress; and that had been the beginning of the end.
Milly had seen it coming, of course. She had known, long before he did, that she wasn’t going to be able to “keep up with him”. It often happened, of course, in their sort of circle. She had seen it with her own eyes, over and over again, among their acquaintances: the brilliant, ambitious husband rocketing his way to the top and discarding his dowdy, middle-aged wife en route, like a snake shedding its outworn skin in springtime. She’d met the wives, too, after the amputation was over: drab, dejected creatures, moaning on and on about the meagreness of their alimony, and about “his” ingratitude after all they had done and all they had sacrificed for him during the early years of struggle.
Had they no pride? It was all true, of course—but even so, surely a woman could keep her lips closed and her head held high? And as for alimony, Milly had thought—and sometimes, to selected cronies, had actually said—that if her husband ever deserted her, she would starve in the gutter before she would take a single penny from him!
But she took it, of course, when the time came, just like all the others. When it came to the point, there didn’t seem to be anything else she could do. There she was, in the Kensington flat, and with bills pouring in for services and commitments that she hadn’t even known existed; and even while she drifted about looking for somewhere cheaper to live, with landladies laughing in her face when she mentioned the sort of rental she had in mind—even in that short time, the second round of bills had begun to arrive. Demands, Final Demands, threats of legal action—what could she do but accept the hundred and fifty pounds a month offered by her former husband, so generously and with such calculated spite? It was, in fact, a larger sum than had been awarded by the Courts, and he explained this gratuitous munificence in a letter written to Milly just after his much-publicised marriage to Cora Grey, the up-and-coming young movie star who had divorced her nonentity of a husband specially for Julian. The two of them had made the front page of the evening papers at the time, and since then their bronzed faces, full of improbably glittering teeth, had leered up against a background of sea and sky in at least two of the colour supplements. No doubt it had all gone to Julian’s head a bit: and this explained—or Milly supposed it did—the schoolboy spite, the easy, throwaway cruelty, of the letter he chose to write to her, from his honeymoon paradise, at the very height of his triumph:
“I’m sorry, my dear,” he wrote, “that things had to end this way; but there it is. I suppose it’s just one of those things, and for my part I’m happier than I’ve ever been in my life before. Cora is a marvellous girl, we are made for each other. To show you what a marvellous girl she is, let me tell you that it was her idea that I should allow you fifty pounds a month more than I am legally obliged to do. Wasn’t that terrific of her?—she is the most generous-minded person I have ever known, and just doesn’t know how to bear grudges.
“Needless to say, I agreed with her that you should have the money. As she says, a woman in her forties has little chance of starting a new life, and so she really needs money: whereas a man in his forties is still in his prime, with a whole marvellous life ahead of him, I’m sorry, my dear: it seems unfair of Nature to have arranged things like that, but that’s the way it is: and as you see from this cheque, Cora and I are trying to do what we can to make up to you for the fact that hope and happiness are all on our side.
“Well, that’s all for now. We’re dining with Lord and Lady Erle tonight, on their new yacht, so must hurry and get into our glad rags. Cora joins me in sending greetings, and she asks me to tell you that she hopes that your remaining years will bring you some sort of contentment. She tells me that she once had a great-aunt who, when her life’s work was over, derived a lot of pleasure from growing mustard and cress in the shapes of letters of the alphabet. It was very interesting, she says, waiting for it to come up.
Yours, with all good wishes
Julian.”
“I’ll show him!” Milly had thought, as she tore the letter into tiny shreds.
*
And show him she did. Which was how, all these months later, she came to be crouching here, in this freezing seaside shelter, battered by wind and spray, with no food, no home, and, very likely, only a few more hours to live.
*
What would Julian say, she wondered, when he read the whole story in the papers tomorrow, or perhaps the next day? Would he just say, with that familiar curl of the lip, “God, how sordid!” Or would he, perhaps, murmur, with a tiny glint of unwilling admiration in those self-satisfied eves: “Good Lord! I’d never have thought she had it in her!”