Fog of Doubt (3 page)

‘Not even three months, in fact.'

‘Oh, well, if you're going to be stuffy about it, I wish I hadn't told you. I mean, I did think
you'd
be a bit more broadminded, Tilda. You usually are.'

Matilda's heart smote her; beneath the airy confidence, she knew there must shelter a sick anxiety, she saw that there was an added whiteness, a paper whiteness, under the pink and white skin, a hint of desperation in the indignant amber-coloured eyes. If only the young could make their demands upon one's pity and affection without feeling compelled to assume an air of such contemptuous superiority. However.… ‘I don't think you can accuse me of a Victorian scene, exactly, Rosie,' she said. ‘I'll help you in every possible, conceivable way I can; only I can't help you to get rid of it, because first of all I think it's horrible in itself; secondly if anything goes wrong it's too dangerous to everyone concerned, including you, and incredibly sordid to boot; and thirdly, I'm married to a doctor, and you're the sister of a doctor, and it would be ghastly for Thomas if either of us got involved in a thing like that. Anything else.…'

‘Well, I shall have to go to Tedward, that's all,' said Rosie.

So Rosie told Tedward. He sat at his desk in the surgery at his house on the canal bank, ceaselessly tapping with the point of a dark green Venus pencil. ‘Do you mean, Rosie, that the man got you drunk?'

‘He was so much older than me, Tedward,' insisted Rosie, gabbling it all out again as she had earnestly gabbled it to him three times already. ‘And he—he took me to this wonderful restaurant, I mean the most frightfully grand place right on the Jardin des Anglais, and—well,
I
don't know, the lime trees were in flower, you know, and it all smelt too heavenly and he was so terrifically sort of sophisticated and all that and I suppose I tried to be sophisticated too.…' She looked up at him piteously, poor little wronged, broken-hearted, disillusioned flower who didn't seem, somehow, to have caught what the gentleman said.… ‘And we had a terrific dinner and simply thousands of wines.…'

‘I'll bet,' said Tedward, dryly.

‘I know it was silly of me, Tedward, but he was so much older than me, I mean really quite old, but really very handsome and terrifically well-dressed and of course terribly experienced and all that. Actually, I suppose he was what you might call a roué.'

‘I wouldn't be surprised.'

‘And then he asked me if I'd like to go back to his appartement and have a cup of real English tea.…'

‘What, no etchings?'

‘No, English tea seems to have been his line,' said Rosie, simply. ‘I suppose it's more original in Switzerland. And he had a wonderful flat, looking out over the bay, because he's quite rich and all that; and then he—he sort of began to make love to me and I felt so stupid and sleepy and I suppose I was sort of flattered.…' She burst into tears again.

He looked at her wretchedly. His kind, round, friendly face seemed quite altered all of a sudden, she thought, covertly watching him through her highly becoming tears; with sagging white cheeks and jaw. She scrubbed her nose to an endearing pink shininess with her silly little handkerchief and went and perched herself on the arm of his chair. ‘Don't take on so, pet. It isn't the end of the world, I suppose.'

‘I just can't believe it, Rosie,' he said. ‘Not about you.'

‘That's because you still persist in looking on me as a little girl.'

‘Don't you believe it,' he said, ruefully. He took up her plump white hand and held it for a moment against his cheek; but immediately released it, rose, and went and stood staring out of the window. He said at last: ‘Rosie—I suppose it wouldn't do if …?' But he broke off. ‘No, never mind. I'm a fool.'

‘Yes, but what were you going to say?'

‘I had a vague idea that I might help you out by making an honest woman of you,' he said. He waited for not more than half a second. ‘But never mind, skip it.' He came back to her and took her chin in his hand, looking down, smiling, into her tear-bright eyes. ‘I don't think we need resort to such desperate measures as that! We'll get round it somehow; I'll stand by you, I'll do everything in the world I can to help.'

But there was one thing, it seemed, that Tedward would by no means consider doing after all; the one thing, said Rosie, when at last it dawned on her that he was adamant, that she had come to see him about. ‘I don't see
why
, Tedward. Because of the risk?'

‘Because of the ethics. But that's something you just wouldn't understand, my little mutton-head, would you?'

‘But Tedward—as it's me?'

‘Put it out of your mind, Rosie. Anything else in the wide world I'll do for you—but not that. After all, we can find a place for you to go to, the baby can be adopted afterwards.'

‘I won't have any damn baby,' said Rosie, ‘and that's flat.'

‘Rosie, I can't help you in that way; you least of everybody in the world.'

‘But, Tedward …'

‘Once and for all, darling—no.'

‘All right, then,' said Rosie. ‘I'll find someone else. There are thousands of people.'

‘Not available to young ladies with medical backgrounds, my pet.'

‘Anything's available to anyone if they've got enough money,' said Rosie, tossing her head.

So Rosie told Gran. ‘I say, Gran—if I tell you something you won't be shocked, will you?'

Mrs. Evans, like her grand-daughter-in-law, Matilda, was incapable of being shocked by anything other than cruelty or vulgarity. She had been a Victorian beauty, successful and gay, and now was heartily bored with her quiet life in the big, first-floor room in her grandson's home in Maida Vale, looking out over the charming gardens that meet the gardens of Hamilton Terrace and stretch away on either side, concealing the houses in front and to right and left of them. ‘Almost like being in the country,' Matilda would say, advancing the virtues of the quiet room. ‘Well, but who wants to be in the country, anyway?' Mrs. Evans would reply. ‘Not you, for one, my dear; and not me either. Nasty grass and mud and leaves and nothing else—it's just like that awful American song says, “God can only make a tree”.' And she would suddenly go gaily off her head, and, rushing to the window, hurl out whatever came first to hand, crying loudly, ‘Fire! Fire! Fire!' ‘Throw them further out, beyond the greenhouse,' Matilda would say mildly, knowing it useless to resist and concerned only to save the conservatory roof. ‘Throw them across on to the lawn. The flames are coming up through the greenhouse, can't you see?' Mrs. Evans, who often saw a great deal more than she let on, would obediently fling cushions and tea cosy and combs and brushes out on to the grass and even the smaller bits of furniture. It was remarkable that she never threw books, which she loved; and that a certain rather valuable china tea service was also, apparently, invulnerable to the flames.

Rosie, without a tenth of her grandmother's essential beauty, had yet inherited much of her one-time charm: a freshness, a radiance, a look of health and vitality, of generous good-nature, that saved her soft, round face and big round eyes and little round mouth and rounded button of a nose, from insipidity. She settled herself comfortably down on the hearthrug, one arm hung confidingly across the old woman's bony, bird-like knee. ‘It's the most awful thing, Gran, but I know you'll help me. Nobody could possibly understand except you, but even if you
are
old, you're broadminded Gran, aren't you?'

‘It's because I'm old,' said Mrs. Evans. ‘Not in spite of it. What's the matter—you've met some man, eh?'

‘Yes, pet.'

‘When you say a man—do you mean a man? Or a gentleman? Or merely a gent.?'

It had obviously better not be merely a gent, but Rosie was at a loss to know which of the other two would best please Granny in her present mood; Mrs. Evans was an ardent reader of romance and vacillated a good deal between Gentlemen and Rough Diamonds—not to say Black Diamonds, for at the moment she was in the throes of a rediscovery of the works of Robert Hichens. Rosie cast her mind back among her admirers in Geneva; the best of having been really a
bit
of a basket there, was that one didn't have to make up, one could just choose. With the unerring cunning of the intensely stupid, she selected the one best calculated to appeal, even right down to the little dash of colour.… ‘He was so sort of—well, sort of strong, Gran, and of course people in the East have a different idea of how to treat women, that's all, and he just—well, he didn't bother about whether I wanted to be made love to or not, he just swept me off my feet, he didn't give me time to think, I couldn't have resisted even if I'd wanted to and I must say, when people are so sort of strong and sweeping, one doesn't seem to want to very much. He had a boat there and he just took me by the hand and said, “Come with me,” or something like that, because of not speaking English very well, and I was sort of compelled like a rabbit, or a bird with a snake or whatever it is and I just went with him and he carried me down to the water's edge and lifted me into the boat and we sailed out on to the lake in the moonlight.… And the thing is, it's too frightening, but I think I may be going to have His Child.'

‘Then he must marry you,' said Mrs. Evans at once.

‘How can he, darling? He's—well, I mean, he's only a fisherman,' said Rosie, hurriedly improvising.

‘There's as many good fishermen in the sea as ever came out of it,' said Mrs. Evans vaguely. ‘And he must marry you.'

‘Yes, but he can't, Gran, you see, he's—well, he's gone back to the East with his fish by now.'

‘Then he must be brought back from the East. Your father must seek him out and drag him back here; by the scruff of the neck, if need be.'

‘But Granny, darling, don't be silly—how can he? He's dead.'

‘Dead?' said Mrs. Evans. ‘Nonsense! Why should a man die all of a sudden like that? It's a ruse to get himself out of this mess, depend upon it.'

‘I don't mean him, Granny. I mean my father.'

‘Who's talking about your father? I know
he's
dead—bother it all, he was my own son, wasn't he?'

‘But you said … Well, never mind, Gran, but the point is that I simply can't marry this chap because he's—well, you see, he's really got a girl of his own already, a gorgeous ranee or sari or whatever they call it, back home in where-ever-it-is. So you see, I thought,' said Rosie desperately, ‘that perhaps you might possibly lend me a hundred pounds or so and then I could get something—well, some sort of pills or something, only they're frightfully expensive, and then I needn't have the baby at all.…'

But a terrible storm had suddenly blown up and the waves in the garden were lashed to fury by the whistling wind blowing down from the Swiss Alps, and it was necessary to jettison the contents of Mrs. Evans' room immediately—out of the front window, this time, on to the garage drive. The neighbours, who were used to a sudden descent of household linen and infrangible objets d'art, took it all in good part and merely remarked that old Mrs. Evans was having one of her turns again; but a gathering crowd of passers-by remained to stare and a small boy improvised a commando raid. Rosie, flying downstairs to rouse the household and warn off the marauders, sadly acknowledged that she was a fool to have forgotten that one could never get anywhere positive with Gran before flood or fire or earthquake intervened; and that it would be useless to try again. Only one chance remained to her and a pitifully small one it was likely to turn out to be. But he
had
got a couple of hundred pounds in the bank, she knew, and he
had
been in love with her for years and years.… She must tell Damien.

So Rosie told Damien.

Damien lived with his mother who kept a terribly superior sort of lodging house somewhere off behind Kilburn, almost far enough up to be called St. John's Wood, and not very far from the Evans menage in Maida Vale which, unlike Damien's mother, they frankly called Maida Vale. He had been on and off in love with Rosie since she had been a tiny thing with yellow pigtails in the kindergarten of his little-boy school in the country, years ago. More off than on, of course, since he had become a serious, though not very well-informed, Communist, and realized how deeply involved her family was in bloated capitalism. Old Twm, Thomas Evans' grandfather, had had interests in coal, grinding the blackened faces of the miners, though from a decent distance which did seem to make a difference when one remembered—and couldn't help loving the memory of—Old Twm. But Twm had died years ago, and then what had happened to the money? Passed on by inheritance, by inheritance, mark you, and not a hand's turn done to earn it, except of course by Old Twm who, having so earned it, had had the idiotic idea that he might use it as he would, even to the education and advancement of his only son, young Twm. But young Twm, had not lived to enjoy it, but very deservedly had been killed off during the first world war; leaving it all to his own son Thomas who had invested it in a medical training and was now living very comfortably on the proceeds. It was true that Thomas Evans had never ‘gone on and specialized' because the famous fortune had, in fact, been less than enough when it came to providing a home for his sister and for his widowed grandmother who was slowly and delightfully going off her nut; but there it was, they all lived in comfort and happiness; founded upon—what? That sorry old story of laugh, clown, laugh, smiling nigger-minstrel faces that had concealed exploited and aching hearts. Damien's mother, upon attaining widowhood had not, it was true, immediately distributed
her
legacy among the workers whose horny hands had accumulated it for her; but then she had not let it just lie fallow in the bank but had sunk it (and sunk was right!) in her ‘house' and now worked herself to skin and bone, lying on a sofa directing the activities of a host of little old women who came in at odd hours of the day and were referred to collectively as ‘my wretched staff'. Moreover, it had not been a success. They didn't live in comfort (and neither did their lodgers) like the family in the shabby, but indisputably Regency house in Maida Vale, careless about money and, if not actually extravagant, at least not saving of pennies and tuppences and cockle-edged threepenny bits.… Somehow, even where principle was involved, it did make a difference to right and wrong—whether the result were failure or success.