‘I tell you we shall never get a taxi here,’ said Wilfred. ‘It’s impossible.’
‘Well, ring for one! I’ll wait here till one comes!’
‘You’ll be home much quicker by tube. If you like we could very easily obtain a taxi at Marble Arch. But the direct tube from here only takes about—
‘Ring for a taxi!’ Pearl said. ‘I’m not going into that tube tonight!’
By luck they found a booth and Wilfred telephoned and Pearl, careless of her clothes, sat on the stone steps of the hall in the icy wind while they waited. People glanced at her curiously, but not many had yet left the hall as there were still two bouts to come. Two officers in a police car passed and stared, but Wilfred stood, a mountainous figure, on guard over her. His size was impressive, so long as one did not challenge it. In about ten minutes a taxi came. While he helped her into it Angell could not but glance at the clock and see that 4/6 was already on it before their journey began.
They drove home in silence. Down Whitechapel and Leadenhall Street and Cornhill and Queen Victoria Street and along the Embankment, where all London glittered about the river in the frosty night, they sat in silence. Up Northumberland Avenue and along the Mall and Constitution Hill to Knightsbridge and down Sloane Street, they sat in silence. As they drew up outside their door Pearl said: ‘I’ll pay for this.’
‘Don’t be absurd, my dear.’
‘I’ll pay for this!’ said Pearl taking out her note case.
He went and opened the door and switched on the light and waited for her. She came in and swept past him and dropped her coat off and went into the drawing room and switched on the lights. Then she switched on the electric fire and crouched shivering over it.
He came in and stood at the door a moment, picking at one of his teeth, staring at her, trying to assess her mood by the curve of her back. Fear stirred in him of what he had done.
‘Let me get you a warm drink,’ he said. ‘It was a great mistake to stand about waiting in that cold wind.’
‘When do you want me to leave you?’ Pearl asked.
The fear had become a reality, no longer treacherously creeping but knife sharp.
‘Whatever do you mean?’
‘It must be plain what I mean. You’ve made it plain what you mean.’
‘I don’t understand. The fight must have upset you.’
‘It upset me – as it was meant to upset me! Wasn’t it? Wasn’t it?’ She turned on him with blazing eyes, all the natural sedateness of her nature melted in this crucible of anger. ‘ It was planned! You planned it, didn’t you? You planned it – somehow – and got seats and took me there to watch it! You knew he’d be beaten, you knew it all, you fixed it, you planned it, you must have bribed somebody!’ Conviction became certainty as she watched his face. ‘I wondered; all evening I wondered – you were so excited, like someone looking forward to a treat. Well, you’ve had your treat, and you’ve had it at my expense! I’d like to pay for the tickets before I leave and then it will have cost you nothing – nothing except what it cost you in your soul to stoop so low!—’
‘You saw your young man beaten,’ said Wilfred harshly. ‘He’s a boxer. At some time or another boxers are always beaten. It’s part of their profession. If you’re upset, that’s what comes of getting – involved with one.’
There was silence. She pulled off her scarf and her hair fell free. It was dropping the last subterfuge. ‘Well, that’s what I thought. I thought it must be that. You know about him and me.’
‘Yes. Yes, I know about him and you.’
She half turned, shivered again though the heat from the fire was growing. ‘ I think I’m going to be sick.’
‘I know you’ve been sleeping together,’ he said with malice. ‘Is that nothing? You married me because you wanted to. Nobody compelled you. I gave you everything – everything I could. Five thousand pounds settled on you. Five thousand! And living in luxury after being just a shopgirl—’
‘You can have your money back.’
‘Oh, yes. But a fine time you’ve had with it! Spending it right and left. I know all the clothes you’ve bought, the spending sprees. And no doubt a lot of it’s gone to him—’
‘Not a penny.’
‘I give you all this.’ He waved his arm at the room as if to include all the luxury, the wealth, the culture, he had offered her: Impressionist paintings, French furniture, dining at the best restaurants … ‘And within a few months – a few months only – you betray me with a cheap scullery boy! Here in this house, in my house, in our house, you let him come here with his dirty pawing hands, his dirty hard common hands, pawing you naked …’ Wilfred choked as if a hand held his throat.
‘So this was the way you got back at us,’ she said. ‘You weren’t man enough to face him …’
‘Man enough! He’s half my age! I’m a man of intellect, an aesthete. What could I do against a pugilist?’
‘You paid to have him beaten up! Is there anything lower than that? You think you’re civilized! You’re only a gangster in a city suit. Al Capone up to date …’ Rage and anguish were giving Pearl eloquence.
He came over to her, face distorted, mottled. ‘What was I to do? What did you expect me to do? Can you tell me that?’ He stared at her, not masking his horror. ‘Start divorce proceedings after only six months of marriage – make myself a laughing stock and show you up for a cheap little whore? You tell me what I ought to have done! You tell me!’
She went out into the kitchen and vomited in the sink. He followed her angrily, on the attack now.
‘All that I thought you were – a decent charming girl, decently brought up. A sense of loyalty, of honour. This cheap little boxer with his smart-alec ways, his voice like a – a costermonger, his vulgarity, his lack of intellect … Just a brute.’
She turned, wiping her face on a towel, make-up streaked. ‘So he’s a brute! So that’s the way people are made. He happens to be a man. Didn’t you know? You can’t make love with beautiful pictures!’
He stared at her with hate. ‘I loved you. God knows I indulged you, to – to the detriment of my health. I – I made love to you at frequent intervals. Are you trying to say you were deprived!’
‘Yes!’ she said. ‘Yes, yes, yes. Of course I was deprived! Your love … Oh, God, what’s the good of talking!’ She dropped the towel in the sink and turned on the water. ‘I married you, yes. I was unfaithful, yes. Now you’ve got your revenge – isn’t that it? My little boxer is laid up going to hospital, may never box again. Look at his face! Smashed up. And you’re responsible – just as much as if you’d done it yourself! That’s the vilest revenge you could have taken. Why didn’t you take it out on me? Why not? Why didn’t you take it out on me? You couldn’t fight a boxer but you could fight me. You could have knocked me about, couldn’t you. Were you afraid even of that?’
They remained silent, like two people with no weapons left. The armoury had all been discharged in profligate broadsides. Then Wilfred said: ‘I could not have knocked you about. I couldn’t have harmed your looks. Because I love you. Hasn’t that ever – ever been plain?’ He put his hands up to his face and began to cry.
It looked very silly: a mountainous middle-aged fat man blubbering into his hands. But there was no one there to laugh. Pearl stared at him for a few seconds, the bitter desolation in her too complete to admit either contempt or pity. Then she pushed past him and ran out, into the drawing room, through to the hall, and upstairs to her room. In it she looked blindly round, trying to think why she had come. Then she dragged out her old suitcase from under the bed. She opened it, began pushing in a few personal things. Several times she rejected what she had picked up because they were not belongings she had brought to this house. All the great agglomeration of pretty frocks and shoes and hats and gloves and scarves must be left behind. She would take nothing, nothing but what she had brought with her that day in June last year. He could sell them, sell them for what they would fetch. That way he might cut his losses. And there was over four thousand of his money still in the bank, he could have it all back. She would go tonight, first she would go home and then later she would join Godfrey. She’d see him in hospital and then go to his room in Lavender Hill and clean it and make it tidy and home-like for his return. He would need some looking after to begin with until he got on his feet again, until he was fit again, until—
Wilfred was standing at the door.
‘What are you doing, Pearl?’
‘Packing.’
‘Don’t be over-hasty.’
She ignored his remark, threw in a pair of shoes.
‘It’s over-hasty, I tell you. What right have you to leave me like this?’
‘What right have you to expect me to stay?’
‘You’re my wife. Does that mean nothing?’
‘Nothing at all. Nothing any more.’
His face was streaked worse than hers; it was blotched pink and white as if his fingers had been pressed too hard against it. ‘Where can you go tonight?’
‘To a hotel.’ That was better than going home, waking them all.
‘Stay till morning. It can make no difference.’
‘It does to me.’
He came into the room and sat on the bed. The springs squeaked. He suddenly looked like a beaten child. The last combativeness had gone out of him.
‘Don’t leave me, Pearl.’
‘Oh, stop talking to me!’
‘It was a fair fight. He was beaten in fair fight. It’s nothing. He’ll be all right in a day or two.’
‘He was out-matched, and somehow you made sure it was going to happen!’
‘Please don’t go. I am asking you.’
‘You should have thought of that before.’
‘Are you blameless? Tell me that – do you consider yourself blameless?’
‘Of course not! Of course I’m not! I’ve told you, I’m to blame as much as anyone. But I don’t go in for this vile way of planning to – to destroy someone. I don’t—’ She had been going to say she did not do things in this underhand way; but what difference – at least in method – between his way and hers? The stolen meetings in the bedroom …
Wilfred took out his handkerchief and mopped his face.
‘Do you – love this man?’
‘Yes!’ Did she? Was it love she felt when she was with Godfrey or a mixture of attraction and lust?
‘And you don’t love me?’
‘No!’
‘But you’re my wife, Pearl. We’re married.’ His legal mind still clung to this, like a drowning man to a rope which at its other end was attached to nothing.
‘Well, we’re going to end it now.’
‘In the morning. You’re worn-out, exhausted, chilled. Sleep here.’
She looked at him. His face was still blotchy, uneven like a child’s. But how did it compare with Godfrey’s? In those closing seconds before the referee stepped in it had become a mask of blood.
Wilfred said: ‘What is there you see in him?’
‘I’ve told you. He’s a man …’
‘He’s a brute, nothing more. His brutality appeals to your baser instincts.’
‘You dare to talk about baser instincts tonight!’
He sat there in a sort of backwash of passion, half accusative, half in retreat. ‘I need you more than he does, Pearl – even though he is superficially injured. He will have many women. I have only you. If I have done something wrong, unethical … But there has been wrong on both sides. You’re all I have, Pearl. I don’t believe now that without you I can go on living.’
She closed the lid of her case. ‘Why should you?’ she said.
At this direst of all blows, Wilfred put his hands to his face again. ‘Oh, Pearl. Oh, Pearl …’
She went to the cupboard, dragged out her old coat from among all the smart new ones, dropped it on top of the bag. She felt so faint and sick with emotion that it needed all her anger to drive her to leave tonight. She needed to inject herself all the time with memories of the fight, like adrenalin, to keep up the anger.
As she passed him Wilfred grabbed her hand. ‘Pearl don’t leave me. You promised …’
She pulled her hand away. ‘ Promised what?’
He said: ‘I suppose I fell in love with you on that aeroplane. I deluded myself, provided myself with all the other reasons why I should marry you, to avoid admitting that. Only these last two months I’ve come to realize. There wasn’t any other reason for marrying you, there isn’t any other reason why I did what I did tonight. There isn’t any other reason – as I know that you’ve been unfaithful to me – why I ask you now to stay.’
A sort of cramp descended on her. She stood there. ‘I’m sorry.’
He said: ‘In marriage a – a contract was entered into. It is for better or for worse. If I have done you harm tonight, think of the good times we have had, the – the companionship. There has been the better … Don’t deny it. We have much in common – you have a love of the good things in life – good wine, good scent, a cultured way of existing, pretty clothes, intelligent conversation, all the rest. Even if I can’t give you all the love you want, there’s all the rest. Must you throw it all away?’
‘Yes, I must.’
He went on talking, pleading, took her hand again and held it in spite of her efforts to get free. In the end she wrenched her hand away and almost fell with the effort.
‘Don’t you see?’ she cried. ‘Can’t you even begin to see! After tonight …’ She burst into tears.
There was no conversation between them for a time. She was weeping, silently, bitterly, hideously unable to stop. He had his hands before his face, hair falling over his hands, rocking a little on the bed. She tried to gather her last few things, but in a defeated way, as if every movement weighed a ton. At last she was ready and moved to the door. He fell on his knees and took her hand again, talking to her almost incoherently, muttering endearments that had no place in his ordered, careful, legal life before. It was a painful, embarrassing few minutes that always remained as incoherent in Pearl’s memory, the sentences, the postures, clear in meaning but imprecise in detail, as if the embarrassed mind developed astigmatism as a defence. At some stage she found she too was sitting on the bed conceding that she would not leave until the morning.
If she stayed tonight it was certainly no victory for Wilfred but only for a consummate weariness that told her she had no strength left to go through the last processes of departure. The walk downstairs, out into the bitter February night, the walk to the Cadogan Hotel, with the probability that they would be full, then if she were lucky a taxi to some hotel where there was room, signing, the covert stares, the lift to the bedroom, the porter and the tip and the cold cheerless bed.
At some stage Wilfred, half reassured, half forlorn, was pushed out and she was alone in her own room – her own room for one more night.
She was determined to leave early in the morning. After what had happened tonight, and with his knowledge of her unfaithfulness, there just wasn’t a basis for a relationship any more. She could not understand how he supposed there was. Whatever else, her marriage to Wilfred was ended.