Long Summer Day (54 page)

‘She was charged under a different name. She didn’t use yours or her father’s. She used her mother’s name, “Philimore” and I don’t know what her grandfather, the canon, would have said about it if he had been living!’

‘You’ve written to her?’

‘Yes, I have but she didn’t even answer. I told her that I’d seen you and that you were anxious to talk things over, and asked if I should get in touch with you. Listen, Paul …’ she spoke with a kind of desperation, ‘if you like, you … you can bring her back here! I’ll get Pierre to take me to the races and if you could keep her out of the way until midday, you are welcome to do that! All I ask is for time to get Pierre away before she arrives. The French can be even more censorious about this kind of thing than the English, and I just won’t face the risk of losing him, you understand? I’ve got a right to my happiness. God knows, I earned it, with Bruce Lovell!’

‘Yes, you did,’ he said, thinking of John Rudd’s comment about the Lovell streak and the misery it introduced into the lives of everyone associated with them, ‘but I won’t risk bringing her here. I’ll take her straight home. It was very good of you to go to so much trouble and I’m not sure that either of us deserve it!’

‘She doesn’t,’ Celia said, ‘but I don’t know why you should blame yourself! Millions of women would consider themselves lucky to have had her chance and I can’t forgive myself for bullying you into marrying her.’

He smiled at that. ‘Nobody had to bully me into marrying Grace Lovell,’ he said, ‘I made up my mind to marry her the first time I saw her. As to blame, I must have gone wrong somewhere or other or perhaps there wasn’t a chance from the beginning. I’ve got Simon, and he’s part of her, and in spite of what you think I’ve got some pleasant memories.’

He kissed her for the first time as a friend and not a relative and it amused him to see the effect, for at once she shrugged off her despondency and said, ‘Let’s join Pierre in a drink. If he asks after Grace say something pleasantly noncommittal,’ and they went into the billiard-room where the big Frenchman was potting with what appeared to Paul to be the expertise of a professional. He was a heavy-jowled, phlegmatic man, more like a middle-class Englishman than a Frenchman and it was difficult to see what an elegant, fastidious woman like Celia found so engaging about him. Then it was obvious, for the surgeon put up his cue, took her hand and raised it deliberately to his lips and Celia smiled over his head and for a moment looked almost girlish. She said, ‘My son-in-law has to be away very early. Would you like a drink before he goes up, Pierre?’ The surgeon looked at him very carefully, as though assessing his chances of surviving a tricky operation and Paul thought, ‘He knows quite well why I’m here but he’s probably got hundreds of more important secrets in his head!’ They drank brandy and soda together and Paul left them listening to a scratchy Mendelssohn recording on Celia’s latest extravagance, an Edison Bell phonograph. The tinny (and to Paul, wholly unmusical) sounds penetrated as far as the first landing. It was not solely his instinctive recoil from mechanical contrivances that made him aware of the mockery of the song.

She came out of a little wicket-door that might have been the twin of the one by which Paul had entered Paxtonbury Gaol and it was of Smut Potter’s shrunken frame and mountebank garb that he thought as he saw her stand uncertainly under the great stone gate, a pitiful little figure against a blank and grotesque background. Then, with a sob, he dodged between carts and cabs and ran across the shining wet surface of the road towards her, expecting to see her stiffen with surprise but she did not seem in any way agog at his presence but merely smiled, politely rather than joyfully, and said, with her customary containment, ‘I thought it would be you, Paul. Celia isn’t very good at concealing things, is she? Have you got a cab?’

He told her a cab was waiting across the road and asked if she had had breakfast.

‘A sort of breakfast,’ she said, casually. ‘Smut Potter might have kept it down but I couldn’t!’ and a sensation of pity and desolation engulfed him, so that for a moment he felt sick and dizzy and must have showed it, for she took his hand and piloted him across the road to the side-street where the cab waited. It was an old victoria and the interior smelt like a neglected tack-room. He called to the cabby, ‘Anywhere! Back to the West End,’ and they moved off at a trot, sitting isolated from one another, like a young couple having a tiff and waiting for each other to capitulate. After a few moments he had mastered himself sufficiently to look at her, deciding with relief that she did not seem to have changed much in the months that had passed since they had parted. If twenty-eight days in Holloway had marked her in any way there was no outward sign of it. Her skin had the same wax-like transparency, her hair was neatly if plainly dressed, and her eyes, reflecting the glint of morning sun after the dawn showers, were still hard and clear and blue.

He said at length, ‘I only heard you were there last night. I came up here expecting Celia to give me an address,’ and when she made no reply, ‘She promised to arrange a meeting between us as long ago as last January; I’ve been waiting to hear ever since.’

She turned suddenly, swinging her small, compact body at right angles to him and looking at him with a kind of desperate resignation.

‘I’m not coming back, Paul! You might as well know that at once! It was good of you to come, and I’m glad to see you, but I’m not coming back, for your sake as much as mine!’

It came as no real surprise but it had plenty of power to wound. ‘We can at least discuss it, can’t we?’ he muttered, fighting to keep the note of pleading from his voice.

‘We can talk like civilised human beings, I suppose, but only until ten. After that I’ve got to report to H.Q.’

‘Report?’ he said savagely. ‘What the devil do you mean, “report”? Are you a private in some kind of army? Whoever you have to “report” to can wait! We’re still husband and wife and I’ve neither seen you nor heard of you in almost a year.’

‘Well, I’m sorry, Paul,’ she said quietly, ‘but I still have to report. And we
are
an army, fighting impossible odds. That’s why every individual counts.’

He could not trust himself to reply at once and they bowled along in silence for three or four minutes. Then he said, sourly, ‘I don’t begin to understand you, Grace! Anyone can be absorbed in an abstract idea but not to the extent of throwing everything life has to offer on to the rubbish heap! You’ve got a home and a child, even if I count for nothing, and you’ll never persuade me that you weren’t happy down there most of the time! I’ll concede the right of women to vote, I’ve never seriously challenged it but it can’t be this important! Nothing can!’

‘What about your own “abstract idea”, Paul?’

‘Shallowford? That’s entirely different! It doesn’t hurt anyone and it doesn’t make nonsense of other people’s lives!’

‘No, perhaps not,’ she said, as though debating the substance of a breakfast-table remark, ‘but it obsesses you just as much as mine obsesses me.’

‘You knew about Shallowford when you married me, Grace. It’s true that I also knew you were interested in women’s suffrage but whereas I made it perfectly clear what I had in mind, you didn’t! You didn’t see fit to warn me that you wanted to spend your life between committee rooms and Holloway!’

It seemed that he had scored a point for she considered some time before replying. ‘That’s true enough, Paul, that’s quite true and I suppose it puts me in the wrong. But it doesn’t make any real difference who is right and who is wrong, not now that I’ve had a chance to look back over the past and forward into the future!’ and to the cabby she called, ‘Take us to the Embankment and stop by Cleopatra’s Needle!’ and addressing Paul again, ‘I wonder if it’s possible to make you understand? It was very wrong of me to marry you, I realise that of course, but I think it would be far more wrong to go on pretending to make the best of it, and prevent you from leading a useful life as well as me. No, Paul,’ as he opened his mouth to protest, ‘let me say what I have to. We haven’t very long and we might never have another opportunity.’

‘But that’s monstrous!’ he burst out. ‘It makes me wonder if you understand what you’re doing!’

She looked at him sharply. ‘You mean that I’m slightly insane? Like my mother?’

‘No, I don’t mean that, and don’t keep twisting my words! You’re as sane as anyone in London but you’re allowing yourself to become the victim of a kind of mania. We could agree to differ, couldn’t we? Millions of husbands and wives do, without tearing their lives up by the roots! You say you didn’t love me but you gave a good imitation of love sometimes!’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I did and in that way I still could, Paul. But it doesn’t stop me from despising your whole way of life.’

‘You never shared my way of life and I never insisted that you did!’

She said, with a final attempt at reasoning, ‘Suppose I came back with you now? I should have a choice of playing nursemaid to a community with a medieval outlook, or accepting the role of a toy shut in a cupboard all day and taken out to be played with after dark! I know what would happen well enough, and so do you if you face up to it! You wouldn’t be content to let me develop wider interests of my own, and anyway, even if you were, I couldn’t do it down there, cut off from every new idea and everyone with a spark of intellectual curiosity. In the end you would retreat into a permanent sulk while I bore a child a year and pottered about in the rose garden between pregnancies! You think there is worthwhile work to be done in a place like Shallowford and maybe there is, for a man. But there’s nothing there for me and could never be and that’s why I decided to leave before we began to destroy one another, before it was too late for you to make a fresh start!’

The cab had stopped opposite the incongruous monument and they got out, Paul paying the man and following her to a seat facing the sluggish river. The sun shone brightly now and the Thames traffic was in full swing. Behind them trams sang back and forth along the Embankment and in front of them fussy little tugs towed strings of barges downstream, like ducks teaching ducklings to swim. Paul said, when a group of pedestrians had passed by, ‘How can you talk about a fresh start? We’re man and wife, aren’t we? We could only make a fresh start with each other but you won’t even discuss it!’

‘It isn’t easy to discuss it, Paul,’ she said earnestly. ‘When I was back there, alone in that horrible little cell, I could separate everything in my mind and I did think of you a great deal and could see very clearly the differences in our points of view but now, seeing you so hurt and desolate …’

‘Our points of view can’t be all that different, Grace,’ he interrupted. ‘I remember you saying that if we were able to bring physical joy to one another everything else could fall into place.’

‘I said there was a
chance
of that happening, Paul. It took me eighteen months to appreciate the real sacrifices demanded of marriage! Don’t you see, you’re concerned with the particular, and I’m concerned with the whole! Your outlook is honourable and useful enough but you’re content with a tiny field—a few dull-witted villagers, a little bad housing, involving maybe a dozen families. I want to work for an entire change in the system and I can’t even begin until women are admitted into the counsels of men! It isn’t a fad, Paul, it’s my reason for being alive!’

‘Nobody can move mountains alone, Grace. You’ve got to begin somewhere and in a modest way.’

‘That’s well enough for you, Paul and I’ve always understood that, but can you imagine a Raphael happy to paint miniatures? That’s what’s been wrong with us from the beginning. When I married you I thought I could change you, that perhaps I could use your idealism and money to create something worthwhile and enduring! But I can’t, and I never will! I see now that in trying to enlarge you, you will diminish me, until I go dry and sour inside. Neither one of us is to blame for this. You are new to patronage and see nothing contemptible in it but I grew up hating it, and determined to do battle with it! How could I do that if I was still part of it?’

She put her hand on his and looked at him with great earnestness. ‘You can get married again, Paul! You’re the kind of man who desperately needs a wife but the right kind of wife. I’d make it easy for you!’

He looked at her with an expression of such incredulity that she made a hopeless gesture with her free hand, as though to reduce the width of the gulf opening between them. ‘I owe you that much, Paul! It was a selfish, stupid act on my part to marry you but to hold on to you, as a kind of long-term insurance, would be unforgivable! Can’t you see that this isn’t really a personal issue? I’ll never cease to think of you as kind and generous and honest but we don’t make a pair. We never have, in spite of all the self-deception you’ve indulged in about me!’

It was a spiritual annulment of their marriage and the final dissolution of his hopes. He knew then, and with certainty, that he would never hold her again, that there would be no more embraces, no more companionship by the fireside and certainly no more children of the marriage, nothing but a dry interchange of ideas that he only half understood, and her insistence on reducing everything to words and phrases that belonged in pamphlets rather than hearts enraged him.

He stood up, brushing away her hand as though even her touch was repugnant and then he saw tears in her eyes and rejoiced that he had found a means to hurt her. He was surprised at the intensity of his feelings and his sudden move away from her, across to the embankment wall, was a recoil against the violence of feeling that urged him to strike her across the face, to beat her senseless, to fling her down on the pavement and jump on her. He understood then how Martin Codsall must have felt as he struck Arabella, and recalled Rudd’s observation concerning the provocation under which some murders occur, but the moment passed. By the time she was beside him again he was almost drained of emotion and conscious only of a sensation of inertia and drabness, that drained all the colour from life and set him apart from the passage of people and vehicles on the pavement and roadway behind. He stood there silently for a moment but at length managed to say, ‘Simon? I suppose you took Simon into account when you did your thinking back there in the cell?’ She made no reply so he remained looking fixedly at the river until he realised that the touch on his elbow was heavier then hers and turning looked directly into the face of a middle-aged policeman, a man with a heavy walrus moustache and a look of professional concern in his eyes. ‘Are you all right, sir?’ the man said and when Paul stared as though he had materialised from the base of the monument, added, half-apologetically, ‘I thought you looked a bit queer, sir.’