I Shall Not Want (39 page)

During the last few minutes Hesther had been standing in her room ready for him: her plan was ready and prepared inside her mind. As he emerged, she would go out and meet him and would lay her hand on his arm. Once she was there, once she was touching him again, he could see how much she needed him: and at that one moment more than any other when his mind was purified by contact with the everlasting, he might come to her. Her lips were
moving as she stood there in the darkness, waiting; prayer to her seemed every day to grow easier and more natural.

But it all happened so suddenly. Before she had realised even that he had left the room, he had passed in front of her door and was on his way down the stairs. The disaster of it stunned her: her plan, her subtle, brilliant plan, was shattered: and there was nothing left. But wasn't there? She could still catch him, still show him that she belonged. Holding up her skirts, she ran to the top of the stairs, saw his dark figure in the hall below and called after him.

“John! John!” she cried. “Stop. I need you.”

For a moment he paused. He half turned his head. Then, as she called again, he straightened himself again and went forward as though he were alone and had heard nothing.

The front door slammed behind him, rattling the loose fanlight above it, and he was gone.

ii

Mr. Tuke closed his watch with a snap.

“Time we were off,” he said. “We don't want to have to rush things.”

But Hesther was reluctant to move.

“Let's give him five more minutes,” she said. “Just five more minutes in case he's been held up anywhere.”

She was standing at the window looking up Clarence Gardens as she said it. Mr. Tuke regarded her sadly and shook his head over the pity of it. He had seen her standing so often at the same window waiting in vain for her husband to return. It seemed heart-breaking to him that anyone should waste her substance in that way.

But he was patient.

“Very well,” he said. “We must give him every opportunity. It's not nice to think of a man missing his own mother's funeral.”

He was careful to emphasise the last sentence very distinctly as he said it; he wanted to make it quite clear what he really thought of John Marco.

Outside, the mutes—all six of them—were growing restless. They were standing in a small, resentful group on the pavement staring up at the house. Even one of the black horses—chosen by the firm of undertakers for his appearance, and looking like the eldest son of Death himself—was pawing at the roadway like a hackney waiting for the flag to be lowered. And Mr. Tuke, standing beside Hesther with his watch open in his right hand, again might have been the starter.

“It's obvious now,” he said with finality as the second hand came upright for the fifth time, “that he doesn't intend to come.”

Hesther bowed her head.

“At any rate, not here,” she answered. “Perhaps he'll be at the cemetery.”

“Perhaps he will,” said Mr. Tuke. and he raised his thick black eyebrows as he said it.

The journey to Lower Paddington Cemetery was not long; this twenty-acre park of dissolution lay right in the centre of things. You had, however, to be someone—someone with one foot already in the grave so to speak—to be able to get in there at all; and it was only because Mr. Marco had inherited an impressive granite catacomb (on which during a lean period he had once tried to raise a small loan and failed) that Mrs. Marco was privileged to go there at all. As it was, her party swept through the gates like ticket-holders.

Throughout the ride Mr. Tuke had felt curiously melancholy and depressed. Clarence Gardens by now had become inextricably entangled in his mind with memories of death and disaster; and as he bumped up and down on the hard leather cushions of the coach he could not help remembering the dismal, unattended funeral of Mr. Trackett.

To-day, however, the sunshine was brilliant. As they neared the burial ground and the marble confections of the stone-masons rose into view, it was like stepping into the vanished glories of Greece. But the feeling of uneasiness
within Mr. Tuke remained: for all his knowledge of the world and his personal reserves of grace he did not altogether feel at his ease sitting next to a writer of anonymous letters.

The Chapel at Lower Paddington was dingier than at Kensal Rise simply because there was less doing there. The dust rolled out of the hassocks when anyone knelt on them; and it was as much as the light could do to fight its way through the windows. Removing his hat and pulling off his gloves Mr. Tuke took his place on one side of the shining oak coffer, and Hesther in the front pew sat facing him with a handkerchief held to her eyes. The mutes, all wearing their professional countenances of sorrow, stood lined in a row along the back.

For a moment, Hesther raised her head, glanced round the room and then started to cry. At first Mr. Tuke sympathised with her: he approved of women who cry at funerals. But slowly the real significance of that glance came to him. It wasn't old Mrs. Marco she was crying for, it was her husband. And once Mr. Tuke had realised that, he wished that she would stop it. It seemed sheer blasphemy that she should want such a man there at all.

The Marco catacomb when they reached it had been got all ready for them. The big iron gates had been oiled and greased, and a little sand had been sprinkled on the steps. There was an air of homeliness about the threshold. But within, the place still had the undisguisable oppression of the vault. After the bright sunlight outside, the sudden deprivation of warmth and brightness seemed physical and personal. Even Mr. Tuke shivered as he stood there. And in the close confines of the cell, Hesther's emotions became still more noticeable, more distressing. Every intake of breath was audible to Mr. Tuke. It was almost as though she were actually in his arms and sobbing there.

Mr. Tuke deliberately shut his ears to it all. He isolated himself. With his eyes closed and his hands folded across his prayer book he was intoning the final passage of the Amosite order of burial . . . “
As we were once purified by
water,”
he was declaiming,
“so now, life's pageant over, are we purified by earth. Grant, 0 Lord, that . . .
”, when one of the mutes touched him by the shoulder.

“Excuse me, sir,” he said, “the lady's fainted.”

Mr. Tuke opened his eyes immediately; opened his eyes and stared. There lying on the stone floor of the catacomb with her legs spread open in vacant, unthinking fashion lay Hesther. She had slid down to the floor silently and unobtrusively just as he had closed his eyes and begun praying.

The fact that she had done such a thing irritated him still further. But in moments such as these he was a man of prompt and effective decision.

“Well, don't stand there doing nothing,” he said. “Help me to carry her out.”

And because he wanted to do everything he could to preserve the proprieties, he insisted on taking her legs himself. There seemed to him something downright indecent about a handsome stranger in a frockcoat'clasping the unconscious Hesther above the knees.

She was proved to be heavy, however; very heavy. And she kept on slipping. By the time Mr. Tuke had reached the broad gravel highway that ran through the cemetery, he was sweating. His blind, clerical collar had slipped up round his neck and the black shirt-front was creased and puckered. But he struggled on stumbling and slipping—to the contempt of the little cortège behind him who were used to carrying heavy weights without either slipping or stumbling.

The sight of the mourning carriage, when he turned a corner past a handsome granite Parthenon and came suddenly upon it, was so welcome that Mr. Tuke instinctively speeded up. The man in front was quite unprepared for this unexpected acceleration and, for a moment, the unconscious Hesther was folded up between them. Then the undertaker's man recovered himself and they reached the waiting horses almost at the double. The resident chaplain, an old silvery incumbent of the
Church of England, stood in the doorway of his little shrine looking on in amazement. He had always disliked Nonconformists, and Amosites more than most of them: there was a kind of devout heartiness about them that grated on him. But to see a minister of God scrambling into a coach with a fainting girl in his arms, like a couple eloping, was more than he could endure. With a final gesture of disgust he went inside and shut the fancy Gothic door behind him.

Hesther began to come round as they got her onto the seat. She made little stirring movements with her hands and began whimpering.

“Take me home,” she said feebly. “Take me home. I want to lie down.”

The party of mutes had caught up with them by now. They climbed into their places, and the carriage began to move off. Just as they were scrunching rapidly down the gravel past the gates, Mr. Tuke started searching desperately round on the seat beside him. In the rush of departure he found that he had left his top hat behind him.

Letting down the window with a bang he thrust his head out and addressed the driver.

“My hat,” he said. “My hat.”

But the driver who did not know what he meant, merely nodded: he supposed that Mr. Tuke was airing his feelings and, being a man of God, could not allow himself to say more.

iii

At half-past-six John Marco left Tredegar Terrace and went into the florist's. The girl behind the counter expected him to buy roses or even orchids: there was an expensive look about him that suggested that he might be the sort of gentleman who would put down half-a-sovereign and his card on the counter and so make some fortunate woman happy. But instead, he bought Arum lilies—a great vase-ful of them. And he insisted on carrying them away himself. He left the shop holding the enormous sheaf, with the
white, soapy faces of the flowers peering up over his shoulder.

Outside, he hailed a hansom and followed the mourning carriage along the same route that it had taken two hours earlier. The scent of the lilies rose up and made the air sickly and sweet; John Marco's nostrils were full of it. It drugged him. He no longer seemed to belong to this world at all and the hansom trotting smartly up the Edgware Road might have been a balloon cruising in empty space. In this remoteness—even the shop fronts and the people on the pavements seemed shadowy and unreal—his thoughts came and went as they pleased. But a woman standing on the street corner with a small boy beside her remained in his memory long after he had passed her, and he began to think of his own son—Hesther's son. The boy must be almost as tall as that child, he supposed. He was four now—or was it four and a half? Soon he would be going to school, like other boys. He wondered as he sat there with his hands clasping the iron canopy that rose up in front of him, whether the child ever asked after him. And if he asked what did Hesther tell him? Or had the child long since given up asking altogether? Did he even know he had a father? he wondered. The child had always been asleep when John Marco went to Clarence Gardens; asleep in the small room that led out of Hesther's. Perhaps he did not even know that anyone came to the house; did not know that every week there was a man who went swiftly up the stairs, stayed for an hour in one room and then went as swiftly down the stairs and out of the house again. And now even that would be over.

The cab had just reached the gates when John Marco suddenly realised that he
wanted
to see his son again; if he actually saw him he might, he realised, even find himself loving him. The boy would have grown into a separate human being by now; he would no longer be Hesther's entirely. And to see him, if only for a moment, might help him to fill in some of the lonely places.

But the jolt of the cab as it stopped brought him sharply to his senses. To see the boy would mean that he had to see Hesther, too; would mean that he had to admit her into his life again. And even now he could not trust himself to be brought face to face with the woman who had written that letter which Mr. Petter in his innocence had shown him.

The cemetery by now, was closed, and the big gates padlocked. But the groundsman, for a consideration, opened the little wicket and let John Marco through: he could give just a quarter of an hour, he said. John Marco thanked him and carrying the heavy bundle of flowers that creaked in his arms with every step he took set off down the broad pathway past the silent tombstones. It was dusk, and the cemetery seemed to have a stillness of its own. The sounds of London came washing up to the limits of the high wall that ran round the graveyard and broke themselves there. Inside, it might have been a desert of fallen rocks through which he was walking.

He knew the way to the catacomb well enough; he had been there with his mother to take flowers. And now his mother was there, too; these flowers in his arms were for her. And as he thought of it, his hatred of Hesther grew within him again. If it had not been for her, old Mrs. Marco could have seen him happy like other men; she would have had a grandchild whom she knew was loved.

Inside the catacomb it was almost midnight. He struck a match and groped his way in. The sand on the floor had been trampled, and the trestles on which the coffin had been rested were still there. The coffin itself was up on its stone shelf with only its brass name plate showing.
“Eliza Henrietta Marco,”
he read, “1839-1907”: that was what in the end it had come to. All her hopes and expectations and disillusions and disappointments, her marriage and her early widowhood, her poverty and piety and her grief for her son—and the undertaker's engraver had been able to tell the whole story in five words.

On the shelf below was another coffin, not shiny and polished like this one, but old and weather-beaten. John Marco struck another match and peered at the inscription.
“John Augustus Marco”
this one said when he could discern the letters, “1830-1875.” Only forty-five years were hidden there: he had left his wife to carry on nearly as long again without him. John Augustus Marco, it seemed, had chosen the easier way.