I Shall Not Want (30 page)

It was as she turned that he noticed how old she had become. She was withered. She had looked old enough back in the days in Chapel Villas; as long as he could remember she had been preparing for the end, getting all ready for the day when she and her Maker should suddenly find themselves face to face. After his marriage, however, when she had had someone to wait on her again she had recovered; for a space she had bloomed. But now that her grandchild had been born, now that all the excitement
was over, her years had told again. She had cheated only temporarily, and the reckoning looked dangerously close at hand. Her lower jaw nowadays hung downwards a little even while she was awake, and she had moments of forgetfulness, of blankness, which frightened her.

Already she was tugging at his sleeve, pulling him in the direction of the bedroom. It was her special reward of the day to be allowed to go in and stand by the sleeping child, gloating over him. When no one else was about she would smooth out the clothes and rearrange the hangings. In her youth babies had slept higher; and when Hesther was not near she would bunch up the sheet and push a shawl in underneath to give her grandson a proper pillow.

But they were not alone in the bedroom to-night. Hesther was by the cot already. John Marco remained at the door watching. Her face was tired and worn; but at that moment she looked contented. She was smiling. In a world of sorrow and humiliation this cot contained the one reason for existence; while she was nursing the baby or holding him on her knee or simply standing beside him while he slept, she was able to forget that she was not happy and cherished like other wives.

She raised her eyes and caught sight of him. As she did so, the smile vanished. Only the lines in her face remained and she looked ashamed, as though there were something guilty about caring for the child in this way. Before old Mrs. Marco could get any nearer, she had stepped in front of the cot, shielding it.

“We're disturbing him,” she said in a whisper. “He's restless.”

As she spoke she put her arm through old Mrs. Marco's and led her out of the room; it was obvious that she was jealous and did not want to share her son with anyone. She did not speak as she passed John Marco, and he made no movement; they were within a foot of each other and still separated by an infinite distance.

Then, when the room was empty, John Marco crossed
over to the cot himself. Since it had been born he had seen little of the child; it was still a stranger to him. It was lying there, its fists clenched on either side of its face in a pygmy gesture of defiance; it might have been fighting giants. Its hair, dark already like his own, showed dense and black against the shawl.

He bent over it and studied the small, sleeping face. The eyelids looked pearly and transparent, and the lashes were long and sweeping like a girl's. From time to time the corners of the round mouth would twitch as though it were still greedy to be feeding. Still greedy, or was it that already through that tiny, hazy mind the first dreams were passing? he wondered. He took hold of one of the clenched fists and straightened out the fingers; they were reluctant and resisted him—feebly but instinctively. And as he opened the hand he saw the soft deep folds of the knuckles and the pale, dainty nails; and the sight of this flesh of his own flesh for the first time delighted him. The child did not stir when he touched it; it was so drugged and bewildered by sleep; the whole of its body was resting in a placid world of warmth and mandragora. He let go of the fist and watched it re-clench itself. Then, very gently he began passing his hand across the dark hair. It felt polished and smooth like glass, it was so fine. The head beneath it was warm and alive; it throbbed. But as he looked he saw that it was not
his
hair that was black like that: it was Hesther's. H curled upwards from the forehead, and this lay flat upon it. And the shape of the cheek bones too: that was Hesther's. The child was hers; all hers. At the thought, he drew back a little. The child that he had desired was Mary's. He saw it now in the darkness blue-eyed and yellow-haired. The infant in the cot before him was unesteemed and in no way precious; it had no father.

One day perhaps it would realise this, would realise that this was no household into which any child should ever have been born. And then? He shook his head. At the thought of the sorrows and bleaknesses lying somewhere
in the path of that sleeping child he found himself loving it again. Perhaps it would be his son after all; it would discover all too early what life was like when love was missing. Perhaps it would suffer as he had suffered. And as John Marco stood there looking down on it as it slept, it seemed that this easy slumber of his son was no more than the last rest before the anguish. Stooping, he kissed the child.

There was a little cry from behind him. It came from Hesther. She had tip-toed back and was already in the room, standing with one hand still on the door.

“So you do love him,” she said triumphantly. “You do.”

She came forward towards him, her own hands outstretched, and stood waiting for his arms to come round her.

Stood waiting.

Waiting.

The photograph of Mary, that unfinished portrait which the photographer claimed as one of his successes, gradually came to be the centre of John Marco's life; it was all he had.

He had not seen Mary face to face since that day in the Tabernacle. For in Mr. Petter, contented and unsuspecting as he was, she had the most jealous of husbands. Whenever John Marco had seen her in the street she had been accompanied by him, his arm protectively round hers, his head held high in sheer pride of possession of this delicious creature.

The pain, however, even of those brief glimpses was still unbearable. Each time he was reminded of what he had lost, he felt deserted and miserable again. But the knowledge that in the privacy of his bedroom he could hold her picture in his hands and stand gazing at it until he grew tired from watching, strangely supported him. For when her picture was before him the gulf that divided them became very narrow; there was a mysterious bridging of what lay between. It was as though Mary herself came to him at those moments. And by the time he had restored the photograph to the drawer and emerged once more into the dark, empty corridor, the world each time had grown calm again.

During the past months Hesther's own sense of loneliness had increased. She would spend long sessions shut away in her room, sewing or reading the literature which Mr. Tuke made a point of leaving, or simply sitting there listening eagerly for the nursemaid to tell her that the child was awake. Even old Mrs. Marco was no longer a companion. She was all but bed-ridden by now, and lay all day in a huddle of rugs and comforters waiting
for her meals to be brought up to her—her appetite even in extremis remained as spectacular as ever.

And left to herself Hesther spent her time planning hopefully, foolishly for the future. The child: he would not be able to resist the child for ever, she told herself; more than once when he had thought that he was not observed she had seen him go over to the cot and stand by it like a father. And once he had admitted that he loved the child, the rest would be natural. He would grow to love her, too, for having given it to him. Then they would come together again and her loneliness would be over. The more she pondered on it the more certain she became; and because of it the child in the cot seemed doubly precious.

But sometimes the mere thought alone seemed insufficient. She needed something to fill the unhappy present. And she would go through into John Marco's room and stand there wondering what she could do to please him. But it was not easy. There seemed to be so little that he needed. His real life began when he reached the shop in the morning and it ceased again after he had locked the big plate glass door behind him at night. This small, shabby room provided him with all that he could want when he was at home; there was the big drawing-room downstairs with the ebony furniture and the silk wallpaper if only he chose to use it. There was her bedroom, too, still waiting for him; she saw now how she had failed in turning him out, and she was sad. If only he would come back to it, if only for one night he would return to her, she would give him, she kept promising herself, all the love that he was now rejecting. At that moment she did not doubt that the whole of their life together could still be re-made.

And so it was that she went through into his room on this shadowy Autumn afternoon. There was surely, something, she felt, that she could do for him, something that would remind him that he was being cared for. But Emmy had already put the room in order; with the lifetime's
skill of a London drudge she had whisked round the furniture with a mop and duster. Hesther opened the cupboard door; it was tidy. His suits hung there like a company of ghosts. She turned to the high, old-fashioned chest of drawers and began going through it, methodically straightening the contents. First, the ties and the collars and the handkerchiefs. But even these were not untidy: the drawers might have been one of his own showcases. Then she pulled open the next drawer—it was a large one—and shook out the winter overcoat that he had put away there: it was the black one with the handsome velvet collar that he had been wearing that day he had come to the house when she had first seen him. She ran her finger lovingly over the thick cloth; in a sense this seemed as near as she could ever get to him. And when she had put the coat away again her hands were trembling and she knew that she was weak enough to ask him to come back to her, weak enough to throw away all her pride in asking him. As she went on with her task a new kind of happiness began to fill her. Perhaps she had not so long to wait after all. Perhaps it would be only a matter of days before they were man and wife again.

There remained only one drawer now and she went down on her knees to empty it. It contained nothing that a man might value. There were some tied bundles of papers, an old jacket worn bare at the cuffs and elbows, and a book,
Holy Hours
that he had once read in. She folded the coat as carefully as if it had been new and smoothed down the dog-eared corners of the book. It was as she put it back that her eye caught sight of something thrust away into the corner of the drawer. Only a portion of it was showing; but it was enough. She dropped the book that she was holding and reached out for this other thing. Then she knelt there staring at Mary's picture in front of her.

For a moment she held it in front of her, her lips drawn back in a thin, hard line of anger. Her whole vision of
the future had faded in that instant and disappeared. There could be no future for them while this was in the house; it denounced everything on which her hopes were being built. And it was no old photograph either. The wedding dress was proof of the iniquity of the thing; it was something that she had given him after she had become another man's wife. She took one last look at the smiling features that seemed to be mocking her. Then, laying the photograph flat on the floor, she put her heel upon it.

The splintering of the glass and the crack of the expensive frame that the photographer had supplied by way of compensation reminded her abruptly of what she had done; and she paused frightened. The rug at her feet was covered with fragments, and tiny slivers of glass glistened on the oil-cloth. The lower part of the face was broken away now, but the forehead and the veil remained untouched. The eyes, too, were still smiling up at her; and in a sudden rage she crushed her heel down on to the picture again. This time when she looked there was nothing that remained.

For a moment she was glad: she had obliterated this piece of wickedness, and the house was now clean again. But the mood did not last for long. It was succeeded by panic, blind awful panic. She looked again at the drawer and saw that the bundles of papers were not old things thrust away and forgotten. They were Chapel notices and copies of the Synod minutes. John Marco's Amosite Hymnal was among them. It was to this drawer that he went every Sunday before attending the Tabernacle; there would be no time at all before he found that the photograph was destroyed.

The realisation alarmed her still further and she saw that she would have to obliterate her deed. Going down on her hands and knees she began hurriedly gathering up the pieces. Then, when there was nothing left to show what she had done, she closed the drawer again and went out of the room carrying the broken jumble of frame and paper, silk mounting and shattered glass.

At this time every afternoon the rest of the house was deserted; old Mrs. Marco was sleeping in her room and Emmy was upstairs in her attic snatching her last precious minutes of rest before it was time to get tea. Hesther opened the door silently—she felt guilty now, like a criminal—and went downstairs into the dark basement kitchen. There, lifting the iron cover from the range, she thrust her handful of pieces into the flames. There was a sudden flare as the paper and the silk ignited; then the wood began to catch as well and soon only the twisted metal work of the frame remained. The evil picture no longer existed.

When she reached her room again she sat down and covered her face with her hands. Already she doubted the wisdom of what she had done, questioned whether a stronger woman would not have found some other way. The photograph itself was nothing; it was no more than an accusing finger pointing out a sin. The sin itself remained; and she had done nothing to stop its spreading. She sat there rocking herself backwards and forwards on the chair in misery. After a while she went down on her knees and prayed. It was nearly ten minutes later when she rose, exhausted.

Then, when she heard Emmy's door upstairs open and the tired feet begin to descend the stairs towards the kitchen, she went quickly to the cupboard and put on her hat with the high feather and her long black coat.

Her burden at that moment seemed too heavy to bear alone any longer.

Mr. Tuke recognised at once that she had come to lean upon his strength; and he was a pillar. As soon as he heard that Hesther's business was private and urgent, he signalled to Mrs. Tuke to collect her sewing and shoo-ed her out of her own drawing-room as if she had been a servant. Then, after he had helped Hesther to remove her coat, he took her hand in his and pulled his chair up very close beside her.