DURING HER TWELVE months back at work Katharine had discovered, with a sort of uneasy relief, that she could type much better when she was worried, or tired, or preoccupied. It seemed that her fingers, like charwomen, could get on with their work much more efficiently if their mistress did not interfere; and so today she was able to ponder Mary’s problem with a clear conscience for a solid hour; and though this hour failed to produce any new or illuminating solution, it did produce three foolscap pages of accurate typing, including several columns of figures whose very existence took Katharine by surprise when she came to check them at the end.
On the whole, it still seemed to her that Mary should leave well alone. In childhood one imagines that an unconfessed crime will weigh upon one’s soul for ever; and one of the pleasantest aspects of growing up is the discovery that this is simply not so; that a very few days of not being caught out, of no trouble having ensued, usually suffice to obliterate the whole thing from one’s memory.
Surely this would be the best solution for Mary? Alan’s reaction, though startling—even bizarre—at first sight, nevertheless might be wise. If he and Mary could, by tacit agreement, talk and behave to each other exactly as if Mary had had nothing to do with his injury, then, within a few weeks, it would really be as if nothing had happened, and no scar would be left on their marriage.
Still musing on these lines, Katharine handed over her copy, and took over telephone duties from Mr Craig’s secretary when that young lady sailed in scented splendour out to lunch, radiating from every glint of her nail varnish the superiority of smart young career girls in their twenties over the middle-aged part-timers, with roughened hands, and shopping baskets dumped beside their desks. Katharine’s task during the ensuing hour consisted less of answering the telephone than of deciphering the notes on odd scraps of paper by which Mr Craig intended to convey what he wished said to various possible callers. These notes suggested to Katharine that Mr Craig communicated with his secretary more by telepathy arbitrarily decorated with red ink than by the actual writing of any known language, so this part of her work demanded a good deal of inventiveness as well as concentration. It took her mind off Mary’s problems so completely that by the time they were due to meet, these problems already seemed a little remote—almost trivial, and already solved.
Mary was sitting, hunched and pallid, at a solitary table in the corner of the cafeteria. In front of her was a cup of coffee—no, two cups of coffee—and a plate of cellophane-wrapped sandwiches, still untouched. Skin was forming on both cups of coffee, and it was a little touching, Katharine supposed, that Mary should first have fetched coffee for both of them, and should have then allowed her own cup to get cold in company with Katharine’s. After two hours in the bustling office atmosphere, Katharine had to make a conscious effort to recapture the doom-laden mood which was obviously still enveloping Mary.
“How are you?” she said—rather pointlessly—as she settled herself at the table, facing Mary. And then, as a sudden thought struck her, she added: “How’s Alan? Is he all right, with you staying out all this time?”
Mary looked a little peevish, as if childishly resenting the deflection on to Alan of any of the concern and attention which had hitherto been focussed on herself.
“Oh, he’s all right,” she assured Katharine, rather perfunctorily. “Auntie Pen’s there. His sister, you know—the one you met last night. She said she’d do his lunch. She wants to talk to him, she said. Do you think—do you, Katharine?—that they’re talking about me?”
Katharine could not help smiling at the naïve egotism of the words—though whether they were prompted by vanity or dread it was hard to tell.
“Why should they be?” she essayed cautiously; and Mary clasped her hands in a schoolgirlish gesture of suspense.
“Oh, I do hope they are!” she continued, as if Katharine had not spoken. “If only he’s telling her the truth—that it was me who stabbed him—than I shan’t mind so much if he goes on lying to me about it. So long as someone else knows, then it doesn’t seem quite so mad. Oh, I do hope he’s telling her!”
Katharine did not know what to say. She remembered the decisive, challenging way in which Auntie Pen had declared last night that “It was an accident!”—defying anyone to query it. Should she tell Mary that it seemed to her likely that Auntie Pen had guessed the truth right from the start? But of course that wasn’t the point. Mary didn’t care what Auntie Pen knew—she only cared what Alan told her—what he in fact knew.
“I’ve been wondering,” Mary went on, slightly at a tangent, “whether to tell Auntie Pen myself all about it, and get her to persuade Alan to—well—not to be like this about it. Should I, Katharine, do you think? Should I tell her?”
Katharine was silent for a moment, pondering.
“Well—she seems a kind person,” she ventured non-committally. “I’m sure she’d want to help you, but …”
“But you think she disapproves of me?” flashed Mary; and Katharine was taken aback.
“I don’t! I don’t think anything of the sort!” she retorted. “As a matter of fact, she was talking about you last night—to me and Stella, you know—and she spoke very kindly of you. I think she’s sorry for you—she knows that Alan’s difficult——”
“Oh, I wish people wouldn’t keep telling me that Alan’s difficult!” cried Mary—a protest that, in the context of Mary’s own ceaseless complaints about her husband, seemed so gratuitously unreasonable that it left Katharine speechless.
“It’s not fair to say he’s difficult!” persisted Mary bewilderingly. “It’s not fair! He’s strict, that’s all. Strict, and rather reserved—like lots of men. Isn’t he, Katharine?”
Half-dazed by this totally unprovoked attack, Katharine still could not answer; and suddenly Mary’s whole face crumpled and dissolved into unrestrained, defenceless weeping.
“I’m sorry, Katharine,” she sobbed “But it’s so awful when other people say something that suggests he’s not—not quite normal. I keep trying to persuade myself, you see, that he’s just a bit more pernicketty than other men—a bit more reserved. That there’s nothing special the matter … no more than lots of wives have to put up with….”
Her words blurred and mingled with her tears in the depths of a great serviceable handkerchief as Mary tried to hide her tear-stained features. When she looked up, her face was under control again, her voice clear, even argumentative.
“There’s one thing Auntie Pen definitely disapproves of about me,” she declared, as if scoring a point against Katharine, “and that’s having adopted Angela. It was my idea, you see. Alan was always rather against it—he said if we couldn’t have children then we couldn’t, and it was best to leave it at that. He was always very scrupulous about saying ‘we’, you know—‘we can’t have children’—although we both knew perfectly well that I was the one who couldn’t. I know it was very considerate of him to put it like that, but somehow it made me feel worse about it, not better. Can you understand that? Anyway, I persuaded him. I thought, you see, that if we had a baby—even an adopted one—it would somehow make things come right. I know they always say in the articles that you shouldn’t adopt a baby for that sort of reason, and Auntie Pen said so too, and of course she was quite right—and so were the articles. It seemed so unfair, somehow—so many against one, I mean. Auntie Pen, and Alan, and the articles all saying the same thing, all lined up against me. And now Angela as well. Did you know that Angela told me the other day that she thought we oughtn’t to have adopted her?”
“No,” said Katharine, smiling. “But honestly, Mary, I wouldn’t take it too seriously. Children are always saying things like that. Jane was saying a little while ago that she wished she was an adopted child, like Angela, because it would be so lovely if Flora wasn’t her real sister. They’d just been quarrelling about something, and Flora had got her own way, as usual. But you don’t want to take too much notice when kids talk like that. It doesn’t mean anything.”
“It means something with Angela,” said Mary sombrely. “You see, I can tell for myself that it hasn’t really worked out. I’m very fond of Angela, of course, and so is Alan—that is, he’s good to her, and treats her well. But it just hasn’t—jelled—if you know what I mean. I still feel that she’s a sort of visitor in the house. I suppose, really, the trouble was that she was too old. She was past three, you know, when we got her. She can sort of remember the orphanage—though I must say she seems to remember some very queer things about it. As if it was a sort of Paradise, you know, and it just wasn’t. It was rather a miserable place, actually, and smelt of disinfectant. And when I tell her all the things that you’re supposed to tell them—you know, that we actually chose her out of all the other babies, instead of just having to take what we got, like other parents—when I tell her that, she just says it’s not fair, and that she ought to have been allowed to choose us. What on earth can I say to that?”
Katharine laughed.
“Offer to play ping-pong with her, I should think,” she suggested, “or whatever it is she best likes doing with you at the moment. And don’t worry. I’m sure it’s quite natural that she should make up flamboyant fancies about the orphanage—in fact, I’ve heard her do it, and it strikes me as perfectly harmless—a sort of game. When she and Jane and Flora were sorting out their fireworks for next week, she was telling them some wonderful story about a catherine wheel they’d had at the orphanage that was twenty feet across and threw out red and purple sparks as high as a church. And then Flora spoilt it all by telling her that if she was only three she couldn’t possibly have known it was twenty feet across, because children of three can’t count up to twenty; and they spent the rest of the evening arguing about how far children of three can count. By the way, it is your turn to have the bonfire in your garden this year, isn’t it?”
Katharine spoke brightly, trying to make it sound like a lovely treat, though she knew as well as Mary that being the one to have the joint bonfire for the two families also meant being the one to have mud all over the carpets, the lawn trampled bare, and hundreds of sodden fireworks cases to clear up the next morning, as well as the wet forbidding remains of the bonfire. It also meant being the one to find stuffing for the guy, to supply paraffin when the bonfire wouldn’t light, and to produce endless mugs of cocoa which would get left about, half-drunk, in various obscure corners of the garden. Still, Katharine had done it last year, and fair’s fair. Besides, the prospect of all this might take Mary’s mind off her present troubles, curtail her profitless brooding over it all.
But it didn’t. Mary began to sip grimly at her tepid coffee, as if it was a medicine whose sheer nastiness must somehow cure something.
“I can’t think about bonfires with all this hanging over me,” she complained. “And I still can’t decide whether to tell Auntie Pen about what I did. Shall I? Or not? Would it be better not?”
Katharine suddenly felt curiously strong, curiously certain on her friend’s behalf.
“Definitely not,” she said firmly. “You see, Mary, it seems to me that you must think first and foremost of Alan, and never mind your conscience. You have to look at it like this: There are two possibilities. One is that Alan has genuinely forgotten how it happened—what with the fainting and the anaesthetic and everything—in which case I can’t see any point whatever in upsetting him by telling him the truth. The other possibility is that he does know, but wants to put it out of his mind as quickly and completely as possible. And out of your mind, too, so that you can both carry on with the marriage as if it hadn’t happened. Which seems to me a very sensible way of taking it——”
“But how on earth can he suppose that this extraordinary carry-on will put it out of my mind?” protested Mary. “It just makes me worry about it more and more——”
“Only if you let yourself,” interrupted Katharine eagerly. “Honestly, Mary, you’ll be surprised how quickly you’ll forget about the whole thing if you’ll only let it all slide, as he obviously wants you to. It’s not as if you can do him or anyone else any good by letting yourself be weighed down by guilt for evermore. Why, if you’ll only accept his story, back him up in it—even tell it to yourself in your spare time!—why, then, before you know where you are, you’ll find yourself actually believing it—and him too! Really you will! And then the whole thing can fade into oblivion for ever—only with both of you that much wiser for the experience. So do stop tormenting yourself, Mary. Please!”
There was something dreadful in the way Mary swallowed the cold remnant of coffee skin, as if it was some delicious titbit. Her empty cup clattered down into its saucer, and she stared across at Katharine with large, questioning eyes, seeking, it seemed, to be convinced. For surely Katharine’s advice, whatever one might think of its ethics, was offering her far and away the easiest escape from her situation. As she stared, slowly, miraculously, the uncertainty flickered and faded from her eyes, leaving them clear and brilliant, empty of doubt.
“You’re quite right, Katharine,” she said slowly, almost luxuriously, as if savouring to the last mouthful her victory over her own conscience. “After all, I mustn’t be selfish, must I? Alan’s own self-respect is at stake as well as mine. I mean, he’d hate it to be known at his job that he had a wife—like that. For a man like Alan—it would hit him very hard. You’re right, Katharine; I’ll do it! I’ll repeat his story to everyone. To him—to myself——”
“Even to me, just for practice!” laughed Katharine; and it was with a feeling of enormous relief—of pride in a job well done, in an important victory gained—that she hurried back to her office that afternoon.