Mandrake (30 page)

Beth lay with her head on Queston’s lap, and he stroked her hair. ‘The last time I did this you were asleep. In a house, beside a fire. You looked wonderful. I didn’t dare touch you when you were awake, but just for that moment—’

She smiled up at him. ‘I wasn’t asleep. I felt your hand on my head, so gentle. I remember breathing very softly, and keeping my eyes shut, in case you thought you’d woken me, and moved.’

Queston felt slightly foolish. ‘You mean you were pretending? And you never told me?’

She said lovingly: ‘O darling, don’t be silly.’

Oakley lurched to his feet on the other side of the fire. ‘Close your eyes, honey.’ He dropped his blanket, and pulled his trousers back on.

Queston was suddenly certain that the words had been chosen at that moment to ridicule him. It was as if they were both joined in secret mockery. A cold flicker of jealousy went through him; he said, irritable and martyred: ‘You’d both better get some sleep. I’ll keep an eye open, just in case.’

‘Good idea,’ Oakley said cheerfully. He looked completely disreputable, with an untidy red bristle of beard above his crumpled shirt. He lay down on the floor, pulled the blanket over him, and was asleep almost at once. Beth was already breathing long and evenly. Childishly suspicious, Queston raised her nearer eyelid with one finger to see if she were really asleep. The upturned white glared, inhuman, and he hastily took his hand away again.

There was an hour of the rain driving down, streaking and battering louder even than the wind. Queston sat listening, in the bare room dim-lit by the fire. The hot wood was glowing a duller red now, fringed with ash, but there was still warmth enough, and he put on no more fuel; safer to avoid the chance of sparks or smoke from the chimney giving them away, even through this filthy rain.

Out of an immense weariness, he sighed, and heard the sound as if its sadness came from somewhere else. Even if they were to survive, what would be the point of it all? On all sides men who had refused to trust other men had brought about their own destruction: what guarantee was there that those who remained would not, in the end, do the same? He had gone his own way before, apart from them; out of what had been, he realized now, a kind of contemptuous arrogance. They had been worth nothing to him; they had been nothing more than the chessmen in an academic game that he played to fill in the weary time of living. If living had held little point for him then, what could it have for him now?

But as he looked at Beth, he knew. She delighted in the world, even now; and in him. On their trust of one another they could build a world of their own—whatever happened, however little was left. There would be enough men and women like Milward’s group, living on their own faith that survival was worth the trying.

He watched the firelight on her cheek, and ached for her even through the exhaustion of his body; it had been too long since they had made love. The delirium of that was the symbol of all he now had: the urgent surrender that was a gain, the total involvement in another mind and body that finally showed him himself. He thought: I would do anything to keep her from hurt. All my being depends on her, she is all of me. He thought in a kind of yearning agony of the way they had thrust and twined and afterwards lain quiet together. And he thought, in a different anguish, of the day in the caravan when he had bullied her into confession of things in the past: hell, that was a terrible day, what would be the significance now of things in the past…

Kit. O God, Kit. That was where the echo had come from. It was in that confession, talking of a man she had loved, that she had used the name before. Suddenly Queston was sitting very still, and the warmth of the fire did not keep him from feeling deadly cold.
Kit.
He heard in his mind Beth’s involuntary cry of anxiety, as Oakley came to them grey and shaking out of the streaming rain.

Despising himself as he did it, he searched fiercely back for every word that she had said, before, and found fearful new meaning in them all. ‘He wasn’t old… it was a writer. His name was Kit. He wrote plays.’ Hadn’t Oakley said something about writing plays? And then Beth, again: ‘… he turned up any hour of the day or night, it was because of his work… We weren’t living together, at the time. I used to wish we were. I loved him very much… ’ And when they had met Oakley in Gloucester, he had known Beth’s name.

He needed no more than that. He was shaking as he sat there, looking at them both. Masochism seared into his imagination, so that the two sleeping figures lying apart beside the fire came together in his mind; and he did not know which was worse, the pictures he drew of them from years before or the hundred possible spectres that rose sneering at him out of the time since Gloucester. And he had convinced himself so soon that Oakley and Beth had become lovers again, since then, that the shaking turned from selfhurt to blind rage.

Suddenly unable to watch them any longer, he stumbled up and went out of the room; up the bare, creaking wooden stairs and into the room above. Through the rain-streaked windows the road below lay grey and empty, as dead as the bleak garden. Queston paced to and fro, trying in black misery not to think, not to guess and imagine; but it was no good. His one hope swept away from him, he was on the edge of an abyss whose existence he had never known before. Before he loved Beth, he had been a solitary; but in committing himself to her, he had changed that for ever. If she had betrayed him, there could be no going back to solitude; there could only be loneliness.

When the empty cold became worse even than his jealousy, he went back downstairs. Oakley sat upright, and grinned at him, scratching his head so that the hair stood up in fair spikes. ‘Jeeze, you sounded like a herd of elephants up there. You look pooped, come and get some sleep. I’ll take over for a bit.’

‘I’m all right,’ Queston said coldly. A sense of martyrdom was some comfort, at least.

Beth said sleepily: ‘O come and lie down, darling. You do need rest.’

So she was awake too. Of course. They would have made the most of his absence.

‘Come over here.’ Oakley got to his feet. ‘I think I’ll keep an eye out upstairs too, the view must be wider. Hell, it’s cold, though, away from the fire. Didn’t you freeze up there? I’m taking this.’

He went out, clutching his blanket round him, and they heard his feet clump up the echoing stairs.

Beth extricated one arm and held it out to him, lying smiling upwards in the firelight. He thought, dispassionately: she’s beautiful, I’ve never seen her look so beautiful.

He said, his voice flat: ‘He was your lover, wasn’t he? He’s the man you lived with,’ He longed for her to laugh at him; to deny it even though it might be true.

Something in Beth’s face died, and she drew back her arm slowly and lay very still, looking up at him. It seemed a long time before she said: ‘Yes.’

‘You’ve both been acting very well. It never even crossed my mind.’

‘It was all over years ago, darling.’

‘O, sure,’ Queston said.

‘Truly it was.’ She sat up, wide-eyed. ‘I’m sorry I didn’t tell you, but there didn’t seem any point. We thought it would be more sensible all round not to.’

An immense bitter anger spurted up in him as she said ‘we’. She looked very young, her hair rumpled and her skin shining, and for a moment he felt as helpless as though he were talking to a child. He said: ‘I thought We were as close as two people can be. Obviously my standards aren’t the same as yours. You like to keep things hidden, you like to live secret. Haven’t you ever heard of lying by omission?’

‘What good would it have done to tell you? You know what happened when I did before. You’d only have been hurt, the way you are now.’ She stood up, tugging awkwardly at her sweater like a schoolgirl, and came towards him; but then stopped a few feet away.

‘I shan’t touch you, don’t worry,’ he said in disgust. ‘I’ll leave that to our friend from now on. First thing to-morrow we’ll drive back to Milward and his people, and I’ll join up with them. Then you two can have the car and go off together.’ Somewhere in his mind the small objective censor was showing him his own vehemence, the pitch of his voice and the cold lines of his face; he could see them as if he were acting, and yet not control them.

Beth said patiently: ‘You’re being foolish. I promise you nothing’s happened.’

‘How am I to believe that, when you don’t tell me until I force you to?’

‘Look,’ she said. ‘In love, you don’t wait until somebody’s proved their honesty before you start trusting them. The trust has to come first. Then if you trust them enough, they’ll be honest with you—as a kind of reward, if you like.’

‘My God,’ he said, appalled. ‘Do you really believe that?’

‘Yes, I do. David, please, I love you. I don’t feel anything at all for Kit Oakley. Can’t you even try to trust me?’

The fire spluttered again behind her; outside, the wind and rain were beating at the house more savagely than before. Out of the black sea of his rage. Queston surfaced into a great weariness. Nothing would ever come to any good; no one would ever act in any way but this, the way she took. Faith would always be blurred by suspicion; honesty always hedged about with some kind of precaution. Mandrake, Beth: they perpetuated one another.

But it had to stop somewhere. He said slowly: ‘I can try. I haven’t much choice.’

Overhead there was a hollow thump, and the sound of Oakley’s feet scraping the floor.

Beth jerked at the noise. ‘Don’t tell him you know. Things would be impossible. We can’t afford to have everyone under an even bigger strain. Not now.’

He laughed abruptly, and thought the sound was like a groan. ‘Covering things up to the end. My open, straightforward girl.’ He stared sneering at the appeal in her eyes; and then suddenly everything was gone from their faces, to leave only a fierce communion of loving. Or so it seemed to Queston. She came towards him, tentatively, and he took both her hands; even now, he thought, he saw his own life in her face. He did not kiss her, but held her hands so tightly that he felt his nails sink into the skin.

Then they heard Oakley running down the stairs, and he burst into the room, dishevelled and urgent.

‘Outside. Look.’

Queston contemplated him coldly, bleak with exhausted jealousy; but when he turned to look outside, everything that was in his mind fell away. He dropped Beth’s hands.

It was moving slowly past the house: a shadowy shape through the trees. A black Ministry car. He crossed to the window; then ducked hurriedly as two other cars followed it, faster, and vanished up the road. Suddenly the house seemed restless, uneasy.

‘They’re after us.’

‘Thank God for the rain. No tyre tracks.’ Oakley came to join him, and looked out at the bare garden; dark, hanging clouds held down the afternoon, and thunder was rumbling again overhead. Rain hissed down the windows in malicious gusts.

‘Jesus, look at it. Well—do we go or stay?’

Queston looked at Beth, standing tousled and anxious. She said: ‘They mustn’t catch you.’

‘Come on.’ Oakley began piling blankets and tins together.

‘We shouldn’t get Beth out again in this. Perhaps they’ve gone straight through.’

‘I’ll have another look from upstairs.’

He was down again swiftly. ‘They’re searching every house in the road. Two cars parked up the far end, and they’re working down this way. Great thugs in Ministry uniform, and one man in a raincoat. We have to get out, David, quick.’

‘How the devil did they know we were here?’

‘Second sight, maybe. Or your friends in the field.’

‘It wasn’t them,’ Queston said. ‘Anything else, but it wasn’t them.’

‘Have it your way. I just don’t have your touching faith in people.’

‘I haven’t had it long either.’ Deliberately he looked across at Beth. ‘But there doesn’t seem to be much else left to have faith in, now.’

‘There’s always luck,’ Oakley said, his pale eyes glinting. ‘Sweet simple luck, which is what the world rims on. And brother, do we need it now. Come on.’

They bundled into the car, Queston and Beth at the front. The rain drove in at the broad back window, through the open garage doors; great blurring streaks of water broken into drops only by the gusting wind. The roar of it was all round them, and the deeper growl of thunder overhead. A white branch of lightning split the sky above the trees, and the electric snarl of it cracked and rumbled down. Beth said shakily, and they understood her: ‘I wonder which is worse?’

‘
Now
,’ Queston said. The engine howled up through his fingers, bringing a kind of delight; he let power flare into the car, and swung it backwards out of the gates, round in a shrieking tight turn and away up the empty road, towards an east unbroken black as the sky all around.

‘Caught them with their pants down,’ Oakley shouted, behind him. ‘Inside a house. Driver’s gone tearing in after them. No sign. We’ll have a good start. Ah, here they come—’

Queston skidded round a bend, and houses cut off their view of the road behind. The air was growing dark, as the muffled afternoon light died behind the clouds; there was a ghostliness already round the edges of buildings and trees. Lightning flashed suddenly round them with a vicious simultaneous crack, and Beth flinched against him. He heard somewhere through the din of the storm the clattering thud of bricks falling to the road.

Rain whipped at the car; the windscreen-wipers flicked desperately under streaming arcs. Queston clenched his teeth as he forced the car through the juddering wind that tore and strained at the wheel. He was driving diagonally into an easterly gale.

Through the gloom he saw a turning ahead. Oakley yelled: ‘I think I can see them. Go south!’

‘No. The coast.’ He was certain of it, but there was no reason at work; only an instinctive mastering mechanism that drove him as he drove the car. He fought the wind with his hands and wrists, throwing the car recklessly forward but never quite into the skid that would hurl them off the road.

The land was low now all round, through the blur of rain and dying light. For an instant Queston gasped under a complete convinced sense of familiarity: I have been here before, I have been here before… Then it vanished. In a long flicker of lightning he glimpsed on the horizon two rounded shadows, unidentifiable, flashing into sight and out again; they were the mysterious shapes he had seen from the field where Milward and his group had worked, but nearer and bigger now.