The Forgotten Story (32 page)

Soon she would forget it altogether, having convinced herself that it was unimportant and did not affect the deep, rich stream of their love and understanding. Only Perry had known all. Or not quite all, but she thought he understood all. One day soon she had been going to tell him everything in a burst of confidence. Now it would never be.

In the cottage opposite the bespectacled reporter was busy taking notes and wondering how to describe Mr O'Brien's accent. Just once or twice while he listened to the mate's ready flow and contrasted its factual pungency with Mrs Veal's windy hesitations there came to him a twinge of uneasiness, such as he sometimes had when he went to a racing meeting and on impulse put his money on another horse from the one he had all along intended backing: a sort of mental dyspepsia of second thoughts.

Not that he was aware of having missed something which would illuminate his story of the wreck, but he felt once or twice that a cleverer man might have been able to turn her peculiar personality to some account. She was a bore, but an unusual bore. He had watched her closely at first, and listened closely, keen to catch the thread of sense which must lie behind it all. Then he had failed and lost interest and become impatient.

So Madge Veal sat by the fire with her secrets still safe and the reporter made up his story with the larger part of the story left out. Later he would bite his nails in fury and regret.

He might have comforted himself when the time came by reflecting that he failed to understand her where cleverer men had failed. Where all men would fail who tried to assess her behaviour by their own.

For her brain was like a dusty room which had had its doors all locked and barred, a room in which the air had grown stale and noxious for lack of contact with the outer air. Her egoism provided the bolts and keys, sealing up the smallest crack whereby there could be any contact between other people's ethics and her own. Within this room her commonplace, rodent, dangerous personality had had its living and being, like a prisoner free within limits, building up its self-deceptions, concocting its own excuses, imagining its own triumphs, plotting its own satisfactions, growing large and fat and white like a slug under a stone.

Only during the last few days – for the first time for years – events, especially the news Anthony brought, had burst open some of the doors and left them want only swinging. She had hastened to press them to again, her etiolated mind recoiling at the touch of the cold air. She had fought then like a querulous invalid from whom the bedclothes had been pulled away, fought tooth and nail to cover and protect herself again. She had succeeded, but only by admitting the existence of disturbing facts inside the protective screen. Even now they were still there, and Perry had been insistent that they were of a nature which would not remain sterile but would grow and develop and have a fruition of their own.

It had needed hard thinking to put them in their place.

That was why she had felt lonely and off her balance tonight. That was why she had said so much to the stupid staring reporter, talking in spite of herself, ventilating the stored complaints of a lifetime, justifying herself, pitying herself, inviting his commendation of her behaviour, using him in some degree as her confidant. It didn't matter. No harm was done. He had taken nothing in. The mere fact of having been able to talk to a man and of feeling herself so greatly his mental superior had had a reassuring effect; that and the relief of having talked it all out had brought reassurance. Before the comforting warmth of the fire and the self-supporting glow of these reflections she began to doze.

She was very tired. As she dozed she thought of her sister, a tall, comely girl who had had all the good looks of the family. Half dreaming and half waking, she thought of the strange way in which her sister had lost her good looks before she died; her cheeks had sunk and so much of her beautiful fair hair had come out; the family were renowned for their fair hair; her mother had retained it to the end. She thought of her mother, and how one year she had been essential to her well-being, the next superfluous, the next obnoxious, and the fourth she had not been at all; her death had been quite sudden. One, two, three, four, the years had peeled off like ripe plums falling from a tree; like flies falling from a flypaper.

She began to think of flypapers and of flies dying and dropping off them like the years. And in her sleepy mind she began to confuse people and flies, flies and people, so that each had the same relative importance to herself. Sometimes before she had done this; it was a convenient way out of many a moral impasse; her thoughts often repeated themselves in this way, working their way into grooves and sophistries of their own. The older she grew the more unreal became the affairs of other people, the easier it was to reduce the concerns of all living things outside herself to a common level of triviality and unimportance.

As she dozed her over-clothed, flaccid body dropped into new and more indolent shapes, as if the cold Cornish sea had washed away some of its familiar contours, as if someone had shaken the yeast cake when it was rising. Her pinze-nez sat slightly awry, the lines of her mouth drew themselves out like slackening purse strings. When she awoke the facts would have adjusted themselves more closely to her liking. Until then she would sleep.

In the last few days the rude world had broken into her privacy, upon her complacent day-dream. Doors had been shattered, but her patient, persistent, third-rate mind was already building them up again. They should be built stronger than ever before.

At this moment she lacked Perry, who had never imprisoned himself within such lofty seclusion and had therefore a more ready appreciation of the dangers of the outside world; she lacked Perry to insist that no repairs her egoism could effect were strong enough to stand before the impact of what was to come.

The machinery of the law, however trumpery it may be to anyone concerned, as Madge was concerned, with the higher values of her own life, has an unwelcome appearance of reality while it is in motion – as Perry had never failed to appreciate – and deeper resources even than egoism are needed to reject the impression made by steel about a wrist or rope upon a throat.

Pat woke. She had been sleeping for some time, her head in the crook of his arm. She was not cold for the room was not cold, and he had drawn his overcoat across her. The lamp had almost gone out. A small, dying yellow bead of light barely lifted the heavy darkness away from them.

She was not aware of having accepted this position but had not been forced into taking it. Somehow they both felt the need of companionship, and for tonight at least she could not bear to be left alone. She didn't want to go to bed or in fact to move until daylight came. Daylight would bring its own tests and problems but would, by driving away the darkness, help her to meet them. She felt lonely and sick and afraid and yet temporarily at rest, as if in this one corner of an alien and ugly world lay safety and peace. She was afraid to move lest she should break the thin shell of their isolation. Above all else she felt sick as if everything she had eaten in her life, everything and everyone she had known, had suddenly become unclean.

She raised her eyelids to get a glimpse of him without moving her head. He was dozing, his head inclining to one shoulder. Whatever else, he represented stability and cleanness in a tainted world.

He had said more, avowed more tonight than he had ever done before – except perhaps in his letter. She liked him in this eager mood when he carried conviction without eloquence. That was how they had married. Their marriage had been a mistake, but it did not appear so big a mistake tonight as it had recently done. She wished he was never dry and reserved and hesitant and inclined to look on the legal tide to a thing as the be-all and end-all of possession, upon flesh and blood as inferior to pen and ink and a revenue stamp.

Perhaps he had never thought that. But a habit of shyness and reserve had been imposed on him all his life. She had to admit that he had shown very few signs of this side in his recent meetings with her.

It occurred to her for the first time that perhaps her judgment had been coloured by her father's prejudice against all lawyers, by his insistence that the one she had married ran true to his general estimate of them. The influence had been there without her realising it.

Tom stirred and woke, and she found herself looking into his eyes. She was suddenly in contact again with the personality she had been dispassionately considering. The change was drastic. Of all the prospects now open to her the one thing she could no longer do was consider him dispassionately. His eyes, his looks, brought back all the liking and disliking to its original personal equation. There was no avoiding it.

He said: ‘I've been dreaming I was on trial again for assault and battery. You came and testified for me.'

She lowered her eyes. ‘What time is it?'

‘Not late. There are still voices in the bar. Do you want to move?'

It was a question she would have preferred not to answer. Presently she said, ‘No.' Bluntly and honestly.

The monosyllable sent the blood coursing through his veins. In self-defence he took the admission at its lowest value to himself. During the last hour all his hopes had been given up.

‘What'll happen to her, Tom?' she asked.

‘Who?'

‘… Madge.'

‘A clever Q.C. may get her off, but I don't think so. If the – the second analysis confirms the first then there won't be any escape.'

‘Perry didn't come back to England until after mother had died,' she said almost inaudibly.

‘No. Whatever his part, he came late to the scene. I don't think he was more than an accessory to her.'

‘I wish these next weeks were over. I wish …'

‘They'll pass, my dear. It's a question of keeping up until then.'

Silence fell.

‘Dear God,' she said suddenly, a twitch of horror going through her. ‘My mother … It – it doesn't bear thinking of.'

‘It's a nightmare,' he said. ‘Look on it as that. There'll be an awakening.'

‘Yes, but always, always it will have happened.'

He did not reply to that, for he did not know what to say.

Time had passed in the old inn. Almost everyone had retired for the night. The bar at last was empty, except for the smell of stale beer and the tobacco fumes curling like fog about the low ceiling. Mrs Nichols, dozing off to sleep beside Mr Nichols, was aware that she had intended going up to see if the young lady wanted anything, but she had been busy at the last preparing the other two attic rooms for the two men who had come in very late and who her husband said must be accommodated. When she finished that it was so late that she had hesitated to go up and disturb her. Perhaps she was still with the boy. A pity there had not been anything better than an attic room to offer her. It was seven years since they had had such a full house in December, when the
Madrid
ran aground by High Cliff.

In his attic bedroom the detective who had travelled with Tom Harris fit his pipe and wondered what had become of the young solicitor. He had already been to his bedroom, but there was no response. Presently, when he was sure that the house was quiet, he would take a stroll round. It was not his business to sleep tonight.

In the parlour little had changed. The lamp had gone out and the lace curtains let in a glimmer of starlight.

She slept again, fitfully, uneasily, but he was awake. He didn't want to sleep during this time. Her piled chestnut hair had come loose and was straying across his coat. Her breathing was quiet but not quite regular.

His mind wandered lightly, irrelevantly, over his past life, coming back to its present surroundings with a twinge of pleasure and sorrow. He knew that over Falmouth estuary the water would be whitening under the stars. The trees about Penryn, quieter now after all the wind and rain, would stand in groups upon their lonely hills and whisper of man's mortality. Human life was a stirring, a thin fermenting between the breasts of the world, a reaching for the light and a gathering of the dusk. A shifting and temporary interlocking of relationships between light and dark. The worst heartache and the brightest happiness would soon be still. They loomed large as mountains, like clouds they were as large as mountains but dispersed like smoke.

He thought of his schooldays and his mother, and Anthony lying sleeping in another room, and Patricia marrying him, proud and defiant, yet warm and lovable; sweet and kind and forgiving but hasty-tempered and undisciplined and rashly impulsive. Cold and warmth; they were here in his arms now. Anger and love. Waywardness and obedience. Incalculable but loyal. Would he have her any different? Not if he could have her at all. Birth and death, daylight and sunset: they were the impersonal things. Now, now was reality, the few hours in between of youth and understanding.

He thought of his profession and his future. South Africa drew him, accompanied or alone. There, among the great mountains and rivers and forests, small humans were quarrelling as if the world were theirs and theirs not the most temporary lease. He thought of the shipwreck and the baleful wind still moaning from time to time round the inn. He thought of Anthony and
his
future. They owed him much more than a casual thought … Affection and a return of loyalty for loyalty.

‘Tom,' she said.

He hadn't realised she was awake again. He stared at her in the darkness, knowing his expression couldn't be seen.

She said: ‘Why do you want me to come back to you?'

Trying to keep the feeling out of his voice he said: ‘I've already told you why.'

‘For you it means giving up so much,' she said indistinctly. ‘Your place is here, in Penryn, working in your own firm, doing the work you were meant to do. Why give all that up? You're known in Cornwall, known and respected. It means starting somewhere quite new –'