Venus Over Lannery (5 page)

“Are you sure it's me you want?” he asked with a smile. “I'm not Hamlet, you know.” His eyes looked into hers: she could see that he was pleased and flattered.

She held out her programme. “Write on this,” she said.

But he had no pencil, no pen, and she had neither. “I'll send you an autograph,” he said, “if you'll give me your address.”

“But you won't remember it,” she replied, “if you don't write it down,” and they both laughed. And then, after a moment's hesitation, he had invited her to lunch next day. Ah, she thought now, if only one of them had had a pencil, perhaps they would never have met again. Did she really wish

that? No, poor fool that she was, she didn't really: even now, she couldn't wish that. Besides, they had been so gloriously happy at first. When Juliet and Bill came back on Monday she really was independent of them. What fun it had been telling Juliet all about it, and how surprised and shocked and amused she had been. “But, my dear Daff! Really, upon my word, what a one you are!”

She used to meet him for lunch, and sometimes at night after the show, and then, one night, she gave Juliet another surprise by not returning to the flat till next day. After that, Roy began to come to the flat for week-ends when Juliet was away with Bill. It was when Roy made a tremendous hit in that ridiculous romantic play that things began to go wrong. His photo began to appear in the dailies and weeklies and he received letters from admiring women. At first these letters were a joke: Roy used to read them out at the flat and they all roared with laughter. But after a while he began to keep them to himself: whenever his letters arrived while she was in his rooms he put them aside unopened. And now he had engagements, sometimes, after the performance or for Sunday luncheons, and when she complained he pointed out that to refuse them would prejudice his career. He talked a great deal about his career. She began to feel anxious and insecure. There was so much of his life in which she had no share; he had so many friends and acquaintances of whom she knew nothing. She felt that he was slipping from her. Juliet ridiculed the idea.
“Nonsense, Daff! He's just as keen on you as ever he was. After all, he sees you whenever he can, which is a good deal more often than I see Bill.” But Daphne was not convinced, and one Sunday when they were alone in the flat, and he told her that he had an engagement for dinner that evening, she suddenly proposed that they should get married. He rejected the idea at once. It was impossible, out of the question. It was a fearful handicap to a young actor to be married.

“But why?” she asked.

“O, well,” he said vaguely, “you know what women are. If they know you're not free . . .”

“Not free? You mean, to carry on with them?”

“O, well, not exactly that. But in any case,” he went on, “I don't want to marry; never did. What ever put such an idea into your head?”

She became more and more convinced that he had some other girl, grew suspicious and jealous and devised all sorts of ingenious questions as tests of his honesty, and when he saw what she was up to and resented it angrily, that only confirmed her suspicions.

One day, when she reached his rooms before he had come in, she found a letter on his desk and read it. It was a letter of high-flown adoration from someone who signed herself Dorothy Carse. She put it back in its envelope and, when he came in, faced him with it. “Who's that letter from, Roy?”

He looked at her sharply. “You've read it?”

“Yes,” she said vengefully, “I have.”

He shrugged his shoulders. “Then you probably noticed who it's from.”

She became angrily calm. “Hadn't you better tell me about her instead of deceiving me?”

He made a gesture of evasion—a sham stage gesture, she thought. “My dear child, I would, with pleasure, if I knew anything about her, but I've never set eyes on her in my life.”

“That's a lie,” she said.

“Very well,” Roy replied, “if you say it's a lie there's nothing more to be done about it.” He turned coldly away from her, and she, seized with a sudden angry despair, burst into tears. At first he took no notice, standing with his back to her and his hands in his trouser-pockets, staring out of the window. Then, with a sense of blissful relief, she felt his arms close round her.

“Little idiot!” he said in her ear. “What on earth is it all about?”

“I feel,” she whimpered, “I feel I'm losing you.”

“Losing me?” he said. “But what have I done? It's you that started the trouble. You come here, take a letter from my desk, read it, question me about it as if I were a criminal, insult me when I answer your question perfectly truthfully, and then begin howling. I don't in the least mind your reading the letter, but I do object strongly to your doing so on the sly, when I'm not here, and I object to being treated as a criminal, and I object to being told I'm a liar. So now you know.” He shook her gently. “Do you understand?”

“It's only because ... because I love you so much,” she said.

He laughed. “Funny way of showing it! Treat a fellow like a criminal and tell him he's a liar because you love him so much. Why not try loving me a little less?”

He had said it jokingly, but that, she was sure, was what he really wanted—that she should love him less. But she couldn't tell him so: if she did he would assume a bland tolerance and tell her she was talking nonsense. No, she couldn't tell him, she couldn't tell anyone; she would have to keep it to herself, gnawing at her heart. It was all too plain: he no longer showed her his letters; he was furious when she found one and read it; he refused to marry her, actually admitted that he wanted to be free; he could spare her only three or four days a week now; and he was telling her lies, she was sure he was telling her lies.

One night—it was the night of the final performance of his play and the night before they went down to stay with Mrs. Dryden—when Juliet was out with Bill and she was alone in the flat, moping by herself and tormented by her suspicions, she suddenly determined to find out for herself. She glanced at the clock: it was twenty past ten. If she hurried she might still reach the theatre in time. She arrived just as the audience was beginning to pour out. A small group hung round the stage door and she chose a place where she thought she could see without being seen. One or two people dribbled out, then one or
two more, and then two more—Roy, bland, handsome and important, with a woman. Someone in front of Daphne held out a flower, a gardenia, to the woman. She paused, took the flower with a smile and a bow and said a few words, and Roy paused too, smiling with a proprietary air. Suddenly, to Daphne's horror, his eye met hers, stared, recognised her, and at once his smile changed suddenly, horribly. He turned away his head, and next moment he and the woman went on their way.

They had arranged to meet at the station and travel down to Mrs. Dryden's together, and she waited for him at the bookstall, cold with fear, believing that he wouldn't come. But five minutes before train-time he came, greeted her coldly and politely, and they got into the train together. It had been an awful journey and the week-end at Mrs. Dryden's had been awful too. If only he had spoken out and cursed her: but he said nothing and she said nothing: they kept up, throughout the week-end, the horrible pretence that nothing whatever had happened, except that he avoided her the whole time. In the train back to London—fortunately they had the carriage to themselves—her nerves had given way and she had “howled,” and before they reached Victoria they were friends again. The woman she had seen him with, he told her, was Clare Duffield, his leading lady. He had to take her out occasionally. “Besides,” he said, “why shouldn't I? She's a friend of mine and a damned good sort.”

Yes, all that was true enough, no doubt, but it wasn't, she was sure, the whole truth.

“You see,” she explained to him in excuse, “I can't help knowing I'm losing you, Roy.”

His face became very serious. “You
will
lose me, Daphne, if you go on like this, and it'll be your fault, not mine.”

That was the worst of him: he would admit nothing, do nothing to relieve her gnawing anxiety, so what was there for her to do but cling to him desperately? It was like some horrible nightmare.

And then, quite by chance, she heard from Bill that Roy's company was going to America. She waited day after day for him to tell her about it, but he never breathed a word. Yes, he really was deceiving her this time: this, at least, was a perfectly definite case, a trial of his honesty which he couldn't evade unless she betrayed her knowledge. If she did that, if she revealed the fact that she knew, he would reply that he
was
going to tell her, that he didn't want to upset her by telling her too soon, that he was waiting till the tour was definitely settled—anything, anything to put himself in the right and her in the wrong. During the fortnight that followed she had forced herself, though the effort was almost too much for her, to be cheerful and friendly: that, surely, would disarm him, force him to be honest with her. She made enquiries, found out the exact date of their departure, the boat by which they were sailing from Southampton, the time the boat-train started from Waterloo, but she said nothing and Roy
said nothing. He spent his last evening with her and, when he left her, kissed her good night as if they were going to meet again next day. That was the last straw: as he turned from her and went to the door she broke into passionate weeping. He came back, of course—he had to—petted her and asked what was the matter, but she told him nothing, only said she was feeling unwell, and after a few minutes he left her. She heard his footsteps hurrying down the stairs as she sat staring at the closed door, her eyes wild with hatred and misery. The horrible falsity of his petting and sympathy had wounded her beyond endurance. That settled it: she would carry out her plan. She had already provided herself with a passport, got together enough money for her passage and found out that there would be plenty of spare accommodation on the ship. She would book her passage to-morrow morning.

When she got out of her taxi at Waterloo her legs almost failed under her, but she pulled herself together and managed to put a cheerful face on it as she walked up the platform. Yes, there he was. He was standing outside his carriage talking to someone—to Norman. So Norman had been let into the secret; and so, no doubt, had all their other friends. They had all plotted against her, all promised to keep quiet and laughed together over the joke. When Norman greeted her and gave her the cigarettes she believed for a moment that Roy was really expecting her, that the whole thing had been some sort of joke that she didn't yet understand. But the first glimpse
of Roy's face undeceived her. He greeted her politely, as if she were an acquaintance who had turned up unexpectedly, and introduced her to a woman who stood in the doorway of the carriage, the same woman she had seen him with when she had waited outside the stage door. There was another woman and two men in the carriage, all apparently members of the cast, and they all travelled down together to Southampton.

On the ship they all separated and went to their cabins and she did not see him again until dinnertime. She was given a little table to herself, from which she could see him and his lady and the other three, all at a table together. The sound of their voices and occasional bursts of laughter came to her through the murmur of conversation and the low throb of the engines. Once the voice of the second woman rose clear and articulate in shrill amusement: “Roy,
really
! You really
are
!” To hear her calling him Roy cut her to the heart. She left her table before the end of dinner and, getting a cloak from her cabin, went on deck. A chilly wind flapped her cloak and drove her dress against her legs and she pushed her way to the rail and leaned over it, watching the twinkling lights on shore. Was it the Isle of Wight? She didn't know and it didn't matter. She stared in front of her in a stupor of misery, trying to make up her mind to move, to go down and shut herself into her cabin: but she couldn't. She had neither the energy nor the will-power, and the minutes went by and she leaned there motionless,
shivering with cold, her face cupped in her hands, her bare elbows aching with the pressure of the rail.

She was brought to her senses, suddenly, by his voice in her ear. “I think we'd better have a talk, Daphne.”

She turned slowly towards him, but he avoided her eyes, determined, it seemed to her, not to admit the smallest contact. He pointed up the deck. “We can sit over there and talk undisturbed.”

They bent their heads to the wind, pushing their way along the deck, but, weak with emotion as she was, she could hardly struggle along. “Let me at least take your arm,” she said. He didn't refuse and the touch of his sleeve against her hand sent a little ray of comfort to her heart.

They sat down in a sheltered nook at the forward extremity of the deck and for a long time neither of them spoke. It was agony to her to have him there with his body so thrillingly close and his mind so detached and hostile. At last he stirred and his face turned to her. “What's the next move, Daphne?”

At the thought of explanations and arguments a desperate weariness came over her. What was the use of talking? What was there to explain? She laid her hand on his arm. “Why didn't you tell me, Roy? Why did you make a secret of it?”

“I didn't tell you,” he said bluntly, “because I daren't. I knew that if I did there would be scenes and howls and all sorts of suspicions and accusations. You've taught me only too well what to expect.”

“I can't help it,” she said wearily. “You drive me to it. You've changed. As soon as you ... you became famous you changed, and I can't bear it.”

“But I didn't change,” he said. “It's you who changed. We were perfectly happy until you—heaven knows why—suddenly began to imagine all sorts of idiotic things and to behave like a detective tracking down a criminal. It wasn't till then that I changed. You forced me to. You can't expect a fellow to remain the same if you keep on telling him he's a liar and spying on him and making all sorts of ghastly scenes.”