No Love Lost (17 page)

This shook me and I showed it. I couldn't help it. My mouth fell open. For the past twelve hours or so I had thought that I was the only person to know about this latest bombshell of Victor's, but if Andy had picked up the information in the week he'd been in Tinworth it seemed I was rather late off the mark.
I was so amazed I forgot to be humiliated. Some sort of preservative sixth sense was working, however, and I spoke promptly.

‘Victor has explained. That was arranged a Long time ago. You seem to know a great deal about us.'

‘Only what everybody tells me.' He gave me a sudden disarming grin. ‘This is my first experience of a provincial town. You seem to have got yourself in a fine old parrot house, ducky. They're wonderful, aren't they? Every man his own detective. No mystery too small! Do you
like
them, Liz?'

‘I don't know any of them very well, yet,' I said evasively. ‘They're all right. Not terribly exciting.' My mind was beginning to work again. I told myself it was all very unfortunate meeting Andy, and he was behaving abominably, but here was a chance to find out exactly where I did stand with the town. At least I knew him well enough to know he wouldn't lie. I began with great caution. ‘There isn't much outside entertainment in a place like this,' I said. ‘People talk about their neighbours because there isn't much else to interest them. Sometimes they get things rather wrong.' I hesitated. He didn't speak. ‘I don't know what you've heard about me?'

‘About you?'

‘Well, about us generally. What is the gossip? You seem to have the impression that there is some. Let me straighten it out for you.'

He had the grace to look uncomfortable but to my relief he didn't avoid the direct question.

‘There's no gossip, exactly.' He bent forward to push a bundle of untidy memo slips and prescription pads back in the locker in the dashboard, so that I could see only his cheek. It had coloured a little. ‘There's no “talk”, old girl, nothing to worry about'

‘No, but what do they actually say?'

‘Oh, they're only intrigued,' he said at last.

‘About Victor's marriage? Do they mind him marrying? Do they object to a city girl?'

‘Oh no, no, nothing like that. You've got it wrong, Liz.' He was looking at me earnestly now, desperately anxious not to be
clumsy and hating being involved. I knew it served him right but I was almost sorry for him.

‘Well?' I persisted.

‘It's the set-up which they find so interesting,' he began at last. This husband of yours is a well-known local man who for years seemed set to remain a bachelor. He seems to have run his life and his school to a very firmly fixed schedule. The school runs like a machine and his own holidays have followed the same hidebound pattern. At week-ends he plays golf hard and actually has a cottage near the links to save time. On the Easter vacation he goes on some university course designed to fill it. In the long summer holidays he goes on an expedition up a mountain with a team of which he is the president, and at Christmas he has a three weeks' cultural whirl in London or Paris. Tinworth knew all about his programme and was used to it'

He eyed me to see if I was agreeing with him and I made my face impassive.

‘Well,' he went on, ‘think of it. One day this lad turns up with a beautiful young wife who appears to have been something of an organizer herself, and who looks and sounds as if she might have some ideas of her own. Naturally everyone sits up waiting to see the changes.' He paused and gave me one of his shrewder stares. ‘As far as they can see, there haven't been any changes. He seems to be living exactly the same sort of – well, somewhat self-absorbed life he always did. Tinworth is dying to know what you're making of it, that's all.'

It was his tone on the last two words which made me look up. Until then he had told me nothing that I did not know rather too well, except that I had not realized that Tinworth saw things quite so clearly; but something in that last little phrase struck an alarm bell in my mind.

‘It sounds as if it wasn't all,' I murmured, and added, ‘You never were any good at hiding things.'

‘I'm not hiding anything.' He spoke a trifle too loudly but a settled obstinacy had spread over his face and I knew I should get nothing more out of him. ‘I've said too much anyway,' he insisted. ‘I was merely trying to point out that although your
neighbours down here do seem to be a pack of chatty old geese, I don't think they're entirely unreasonable. After all, people always do sit round a marriage and watch who wins, that's natural.'

‘They think I'm losing, I suppose?'

‘They think you needn't lie down under the steam roller and quite frankly neither do I. There's no need to lose all that weight, surely? And usen't your hair to have a wave in it – at the sides, I mean?'

That did it. It was that bit of silly masculine clumsiness coming just at the right moment which saved me from going to pieces and telling him the whole story. I might so easily have tried to explain what it felt like to drop feet foremost into just such a machine as he had described, and just how impossible it was to reason with or to cajole a man who never had a moment to hear one. I might also have indulged in the bad taste of recounting what happened when one tried to stage a full-scale row, as I had on the evening before when the news that ‘of course' the alpine expedition would take place as usual had been given me so casually. I might also have dilated upon the difference between a man who is merely cold and one who seemed to have nothing to be warm with … a man one couldn't even make angry. As it was, I was so hurt, I said nothing whatever.

Andy turned the car slowly into the High Street again and edged slowly in to the curb.

‘It hasn't turned out as I meant it to,' he said abruptly. ‘I've been obsessed with the desire to get things off my chest, and now that I've done it it doesn't seem to have got us anywhere. Honestly, I didn't just want to add to any difficulties you may have, Liz.' He was silent for a moment and then said awkwardly, with the idea of making amends, no doubt, ‘I think you'll like to know that nobody blames you for the whirlwind courtship. This fellow, he – er, your husband, has tremendous charm and drive, they say …'

By this time I was shaking with some emotion which I vaguely supposed was anger. I heard myself cutting in with a very stupid and revealing statement:

‘At least the confirmed bachelor did ask me to marry him, Andy. In all the excitement over our private affairs, no one seems to have offered an explanation for that rather important point.' I was looking full at Andy as I spoke and I saw his expression. He looked suddenly guilty. So the gossips had a neat little explanation for that too, had they? Whatever it was, he was not repeating it. He hopped out of the car and came round to open the door for me. Standing on the pavement, we shook hands very formally. ‘Good-bye Andy,' I said. ‘I don't suppose I'll see you again.'

He stood looking down at me gloomily and there was nothing but emptiness all round us.

‘No,' he said at last, ‘no, Liz, I don't suppose you will. Sorry about all this. Silly of me. Good-bye, old lady, good luck.'

We each turned away abruptly at the same moment and I walked off down the crowded pavement, unaware what I looked like and without seeing anyone at all. Yet when I reached the chain store on the corner I went in and bought myself one of those cheap home perm outfits. It was something of a gesture because Victor considered all beauty treatments a waste of time and slightly vulgar, and I had had no money to spare for them since my marriage.

I was standing in the queue at the cash desk, still feeling as if there was a good stiff layer of ice between me and the rest of the world, when Hester Raye pounced upon me.

There may be Hester Rayes in other parts of the earth, but she has always seemed to me to belong quite peculiarly to a certain small section of present-day society in southern England. Her husband, Colonel Raye, was Chief Constable of the county (the police always seemed to choose a retired army man to command them) and she herself had sprung from army stock. At fifty she was still good-looking. Neither time nor experience had bequeathed her any tact whatever, and her intense interest in other people did not seem to have taught her anything important about them at all. She ploughed through the small-town life of Tinworth like an amiable tank.

Her smiling eyes, which looked so misleadingly intelligent, shone into mine.

‘Buying yourself something to make you look pretty? That's right, never give up. I never have.' it was a typical pronouncement, guaranteed at best to be misunderstood, and at the same moment she gave my arm a squeeze which would have startled a bear. ‘I was talking about you only the other day to someone – I forget who, but it was someone quite intelligent – and I said then I did hope you wouldn't let your husband dry all the life and youth out of you – for you're quite beautiful, you know; you are really when you take trouble – but that you'd stand up to him and get a little life of your own however selfish he is. He's
so
charming, isn't he, and
such
a villain …'

I had heard her talk as frankly as this to other acquaintances and I had wondered how on earth one responded to the bland; patronizing gush which yet had a sort of outrageous bonhomie in it. Now I understood the fishlike stares which I had observed on the faces of her victims. There was no protection one could devise against her at all. She was a product of the twenties, when it had been fashionable to say the unforgivable thing, and like the little girl who grimaced in the nursery story, the wind had changed and she had stayed like it. I remember thinking vaguely that it was quite clear that she meant well, and perhaps that was why no one had ever gone berserk and killed her.

‘Are you going back now? she demanded. ‘Because if you are I'll give you a lift. I've got the car outside. I've often seen you walking down Tortham Road and I've said, “I bet he doesn't even let that sweet girl drive his car in the morning.” No, don't run away. I want to make you promise you'll come to the Flower Club meeting tomorrow. I've gone to fantastic lengths to get Judith Churchman down to lecture on the modern trend in flower decoration, and I just must have a big audience. You did promise, you know.'

‘I'll be there.' I realized I had shouted at her a second too late to do anything about it. The avalanche of dropped bricks had been too much for me altogether. I must have looked rather wild as well, for to my dismay she decided I was having a nerve storm.

‘Oh, you poor child,' she said, her grip on me tightening.
‘Come along. I insist. I'll drive you home. You're terribly brave to put such a good face on things, you know. Everybody says so.'

‘Then I think everybody's making rather a silly mistake.' I walked along beside her as I spoke and climbed into her car. There had been more cold venom in my tone than I thought I could summon and I noted her startled expression with deep satisfaction. ‘People who discuss couples whom they don't know at all often make utter and rather offensive fools of themselves, don't you think?'

She did not answer. The colour had come into her face and she made a great business of starting up and getting out into the traffic. However, I had reckoned without her powers of resilience. Before we had gone fifty yards she was herself again.

‘You don't know how you surprised me or how pleased I am,' she announced with gay naïveté. ‘We'd all been pitying you, you know. Wasn't it dreadful of us? I expect it'll make you furious, but it's terribly funny really. Of course we've all known Victor for years, that's why. You've got him right under your thumb, have you? Good for you, my dear. He's going to give up that old summer expedition and take you somewhere, is he?

‘He's not going on the expedition.' The words came out with a conviction which was completely unjustified, particularly in view of the few chill words Victor and I had had on the subject the evening before. Victor never had a row. That was one of the few things I had come to learn about him so painfully in the past few months. He simply stated his intention. Usually that was enough. However, as soon as I spoke to Mrs Raye that morning I realized that I had started some intentions too, and I knew that the expedition would have to be the issue which settled things between me and Victor for good and all. She gave me an odd little glance and I met it steadily, in fact our eyes watched each other until hers dropped. After a while she giggled.

‘My dear, how wonderful! Just to see you about, you know, one wouldn't dream that you had it in you. You sounded positively sinister.' She laughed, as far as I could tell with genuine
amusement, and settled down to be cosily confidential. This really is quite terrific and I'm terribly glad because we've all been thinking that it was rather mean of Victor getting married suddenly like that to silence all the talk, but then we never realized you
knew
. We all thought that you were the complete little innocent, you see.'

She was watching the road ahead and did not see my face, which was fortunate. She drove with the same calm effrontery with which she seemed to conduct her social life, and while she forced her way through a bunch of traffic I had time to grasp what she was telling me.

Victor's sudden decision to find a wife had been occasioned by his desperate need to silence some sort of gossip which threatened, presumably, his position at the school. That was the part of the story which Andy had forborne to mention. I knew it was true as soon as Mrs Raye spoke. It explained so much about Victor and my life with him, and made so clear and even forgivable the attitude of the townsfolk towards me. So that was it. That was the solution to the one mystery which, until now, had given me some sort of justification, some sort of hope for my ridiculous ideal for a safe, sound marriage, based on something more solid than the dangerous sands of love. Now I could see exactly the sort of fool I'd been.