So Well Remembered (33 page)

I told her flatly it was impossible, and when she stressed the personal
angle I delicately hinted that Government posts were not handed out to
prevent breakdowns. The Kemalpan incident, I said, was of a kind that they
must both recognize had called at least a halt to Jeffrey’s career. At that
she began to protest and argue, but of course I wouldn’t go over all the
details with her. “Even assuming some tragic mistake, one can do nothing
about it now. Men’s careers have been ruined before by mistakes—it
would be nothing new.”

“You look at it very coldly,” she said.

“I look at it very logically,” I answered. “The whole incident, affair, or
whatever you call it, is closed now and can’t be reopened unless some totally
new item of evidence should crop up. And that’s so unlikely that we can
almost say it won’t happen.”

She then said quietly: “It can happen. That’s what I came here for—
to tell you something. It was I who intercepted the cable. I decoded it,
found out what it meant, then decided that Jeffrey shouldn’t ever see it. Of
course he doesn’t know I did that, or that I’m admitting it now to you.”

She waited for me to show surprise, and perhaps I did, but it was not
surprise at what she said so much as surprise that she should expect me to
believe it. Naturally I didn’t. But it would have been equally unwise to
dismiss the matter without further probing.

“What made you do such a thing?” I asked guardedly.

“I just had to,” she answered. “The telegraph line was cut, so I knew he’d
want to take the message himself, and as the country was in the hands of the
rebels I didn’t think he’d have much chance of getting through. And he might
have got killed.”

“He might,” I agreed. “And five others did.”

She said nothing.

“Probably as a result of the message not being delivered.”

“I wouldn’t say PROBABLY. POSSIBLY.”

“You knew the planters and their families were in danger when you
intercepted the message?”

“Yes.”

“And you deliberately let them take their chance in order to ensure your
husband’s personal safety?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t you think that rather indefensible?”

“I’m not defending it. I’m just saying it’s what I did. My husband was
dearer to me than a crowd of people I didn’t know.”

“How many people would you be willing to sacrifice for such a reason?”

She didn’t answer.

I went on, with more sarcasm: “Or shall I put it this way—at what
point would the lives of strangers, by sheer weight of numbers, tilt the
balance against the life of the man you love?”

She answered: “Never.”

“So you’d sacrifice millions, if one can conceive of such a
situation?”

She nodded.

She really was at this point beginning to surprise me. It’s rare that
people, especially women, are willing to let a logical point be pressed home.
I said, rather severely: “I’m glad to think you are probably unique in
looking at things that way.”

“Oh, but I’m not,” she answered. “In war-time wouldn’t you press a button,
if you could, to destroy a million of the enemy rather than lose a single
life on your side?”

“But this wasn’t war-time.”

“When you love somebody it’s always war-time.”

“When YOU love somebody, maybe.”

She nodded. “Then why is my attitude so extraordinary?”

What WAS extraordinary, of course, was her argument, and it was one that
didn’t seem to me profitable to continue. I was still disinclined to believe
her confession, but I was clear in my mind as to the implications of the
alternatives. Either she was lying to save her husband’s reputation— in
which case one could possibly like her for it; or she had actually told the
truth—in which case she was ruthless, unprincipled, and wholly the kind
of wife whom a man in a responsible position should not have.

But in any case nothing could be done. Even if her confession were
accepted at its face value it would not help Jeffrey to get his job back. The
most it could do would be to win him a measure of half- incredulous
sympathy.

I explained all this to her, and it seemed to me that she picked up the
cue, as it were, and from then on made a bid for the sympathy. Jeffrey, she
repeated, was on the verge of a breakdown. All he asked was some job, however
small and ill-paid, just to give him the feeling—perhaps even the
illusion—that he had not been dishonourably discharged. It had even
come to the point, she said, that their marriage might founder if he could
not get such a job; he was finding it hard to settle down in Ireland, and the
book he was trying to write was not going well. This was the first I had
heard about another book and I asked her for details. She said it was a book
about the Far East—one he had long projected—something rather
scholarly and definitive. She had been urging him to use up his time that way
ever since he came home, and surely conditions in Ireland were ideal for
authorship—a quiet place in the country, nothing else to do, and ample
money to live on. “Really,” she added, “he’s quite well off— there’s no
reason why he should worry about a career, or about writing books either, so
far as that goes. The whole Kemalpan business wouldn’t matter if only he
didn’t think it mattered.”

“Perhaps, though, the relatives of the people who were killed there might
still think it mattered.”

“Oh, THEM. I wasn’t thinking about THEM.”

And she wasn’t. She was just thinking of herself and Jeffrey. That seemed
to close the argument quite finally. I got up and made it clear that there
was nothing more I could say or do.

During the next few weeks I found myself thinking even more compellingly
about the Winslows. First, HE had interested me, then she; but now my
interest in each of them separately was more than redoubled in them both.
What went on between such a pair? What sort of thing was their life together?
If she had been lying on his behalf, it was possible that the appalling
selfishness of her argument might not have been sincere. Or had she been
telling the truth, both as to fact and attitude? To summarize it another way:
if she were a liar, one liked her better and her husband less; but if she
were not a liar, one disliked her intensely and felt sympathy for her
husband. And I still could not properly make up my mind. I have rarely been
so puzzled about anything. Then suddenly more evidence filtered through
—I needn’t go into details, but it was of a kind that weighed down one
of the scales pretty conclusively. She HAD told the truth. She HAD
intercepted the message. Which meant that Jeffrey himself was neither a liar
nor a coward, but at worst a victim.

The revelation swung me into a mood in which I recollected our meeting and
how much, from first appearance, I had liked him. I remembered his quietness,
his austere dignity, the simple unassumingness which, I knew, concealed a
mind whose quality had been demonstrated. So on impulse I wrote him a
friendly letter, saying nothing much except that I hoped he was getting on
all right and that if he ever visited London he might find time to have lunch
with me. To my surprise he answered by return and took the invitation with
far more seriousness than I should have thought. He would have been so glad,
he said, to come to London and see me (I hadn’t suggested that, by any
means), but he was not very well and couldn’t get away… would I, however,
visit him in Ireland—stay a week or two—there was good shooting,
fishing, climbing, if that sort of thing appealed to me? He would be very
happy, and please make it soon, because the late summer (and it was then
August) was perhaps the best time of the year at Carrigole.

It happened that I had not had a holiday that year, and though the idea of
visiting the Winslows seemed quite fantastic at first, I soon found myself
thinking of reasons why I might take Jeffrey at his word. After all, I liked
him; it might even be that if he were feeling low-spirited I could help him
by talk and companionship. But I will not disguise that my overmastering
motive was sheer curiosity. I wanted to find out what sort of people they
both were, in their own home and with their own domestic problems. And at
least it could do no harm to call on them if I happened to be holiday-making
thereabouts.

So I looked up Carrigole on the map and found it was a dozen miles from
Galway—a small place, not very accessible, in a district of lakes and
mountains. And that’s why I asked you, Boswell, if you ever knew the Winslows
in Ireland, because I should have liked your opinion of Carrigole.

It began to rain when I first came within sight of it. I had hired a car
for the last stage of the trip and all the way I felt oddly excited about
getting there. Actually I had never been in Ireland before, and crossing the
country from Dublin it had occurred to me that even the trains were antique
—and not contemptibly, as on so many outdated railways all over the
world, but honourably, with dignity, like good sound Victorian mahogany
furniture. And when, at Galway, my train reached its destination, there was
again the contrast with other rail-heads I had seen; for here was no mere
petering out into obscurity, but a grand finale in stone—the massive
quayside station, far too large and almost quiet as a cathedral, shaking a
granite fist into the sea.

But my first glimpse of Carrigole was equally memorable—or perhaps
the mood I was in gave me extra percipience—a kind of mystic awareness
I am naturally distrustful of, but can’t deny exists, at certain rare times
and places. I knew Ireland was supposed to be like that, and therefore I was
perversely surprised to find it so. Through the rainswept windows of the car
I saw blue smoke drifting over the roofs of whitewashed cottages, and beyond
them a mountain rising into clouds that totally covered the summit. I
gathered, from the map on my knee, that this must be Slieve Baragh, not much
higher than a hill, yet as I saw it then for the first time it seemed in
another world of measurement. Presently the car slowed down for the village,
and here the swollen clouds dipped lower, bringing no raindrops but emptying
silently; Slieve Baragh was now hidden behind a curtain that suggested
Himalayan heights—and yet, I remembered again, it was not much of a
mountain—a mere two thousand feet. I couldn’t help making other mental
notes of the near and the practical—the uneven walls and mud-brown
pavements, the butcher who called himself a ‘flesher’ and the chemist’s shop
magnificently styled a ‘Medical Hall’. I wound down the side window to catch
the whiff of peat on the wet breeze as the car bumped over a bridge across a
river—only a minor river, like the minor mountain, but turbulent now as
it filled almost directly from the sky.

A mile or so past the village the Winslows’ house stood behind a drenched
garden, and Jeffrey was waiting at the gate in the rain. He looked pale and
worn, and there was intense nervousness in the way he greeted me.

I ought to describe the house; it was substantially built, thick- walled
and small-windowed, in a style conditioned by roaring Atlantic gales for half
the year, and political troubles for half a century. These indeed had left
the house with its most conspicuous attribute—a large, burnt-out wing,
blackened and roofless, which provided a ready topic of conversation. “They
tried to burn the whole place down in ‘twenty-two,” Jeffrey explained. “Livy
got it cheap because it hadn’t been lived in since then and needed so much
repairing, but part of it’s beyond repair—it would be too large for us,
anyway. We have a couple of servants and the boy when he’s home from
school—that only makes five…”

By then we were in the square hall, from which the main rooms of the house
opened on all sides, and it was there that Livia met me. Perhaps because of
the dark afternoon it seemed to me that she appeared from nowhere, a sudden
distillation of shadows. I was not surprised when she greeted me as a
stranger, allowing Jeffrey to make the unnecessary introduction. I played up
accordingly and thought it equally unnecessary when, a few minutes later in
the bedroom I had been shown to, she closed the door behind her and said with
a sort of conspiratory quietness: “Jeffrey still doesn’t know I came to see
you in London.”

I nodded and said I would have surmised that he didn’t.

“And of course he doesn’t know anything else either.”

I knew what she meant, and I nodded to that also.

“I hope you won’t ever repeat what I told you in confidence,” she went
on.

I said temporizingly and in the bland way which I have cultivated as part
of my official equipment: “My dear Mrs. Winslow, I wasn’t aware that you were
telling me anything in confidence, but as a matter of fact I don’t usually
gossip.” I added, to change the subject: “It’s so kind of you to have me
here, and I hope it isn’t too much trouble.”

“Not at all,” she answered, with cold politeness. “You’re on your way to
Limerick, aren’t you?”

That was as broad a hint as I needed, and clear proof of what I had
already guessed—that she didn’t want me to stay, and that Jeffrey had
invited me either without her knowledge or against her wishes. I had guessed
this subconsciously enough to have wired my time of arrival too late for any
cancellation of the invitation—and, as it happened, too late even for
Jeffrey to meet me at Galway.

“Yes,” I said. “I’m on my way to Limerick.”

I had a bath, changed into drier tweeds, and went down to dinner. I met
the boy then, Charles I think his name was—a youth of thirteen, at
Charterhouse—tall, good-looking, shy, likable. Intelligent, too, as I
discovered after a few casual remarks. He was piling turf on the
old-fashioned fire as I entered, for it was chilly enough to have one, and
that set us talking of turf and electricity, old and new, the Shannon
hydro-electric scheme and the ancient Irish tongue that nobody spoke except
illiterate peasants and modern school teachers. Livia then said: “We’re all
half mad with our opposites,” which seemed to end rather than clinch any
discussion. She had a curious way of saying things that were never quite
clear, yet never so meaningless as to be easy to ignore. Jeffrey noticed my
interest in the boy and soon found a chance to tell me, like any other proud
father, that Charlie was keen on music and by no means a bad piano-player. We
went on chatting desultorily throughout the meal; then the boy made a polite
excuse and left us three adults together. I somehow had an impression that he
got on better with his father than with Livia, accepting the shy approach
more readily than the frontal assault; and it has amused me since to reflect
that Livia ranged against the polite taboos of the English public-school
system would be a unique example of an irresistible force meeting an
immovable body.