“I adore it. It’s wonderful here, near London, and yet one feels so beautifully isolated.”
Veronica put down her glass. She drew the platinum foxes a little closer round her. She smiled on them all.
“Thank you so much! You’ve been so kind.” The words floated between Sir Henry, Lady Angkatell, and for some reason, Edward. “I shall now carry home the spoils. John,” she gave him an artless, friendly smile, “you must see me safely back, because I want dreadfully to hear all you’ve been doing in the years and years since I’ve seen you. It makes me feel, of course, dreadfully old.”
She moved to the window, and John Christow followed her. She flung a last brilliant smile at them all.
“I’m so dreadfully sorry to have bothered you in this stupid way. Thank you so much, Lady Angkatell.”
She went out with John. Sir Henry stood by the window looking after them.
“Quite a fine warm night,” he said.
Lady Angkatell yawned.
“Oh, dear,” she murmured, “we must go to bed. Henry, we must go and see one of her pictures. I’m sure, from tonight, she must give a lovely performance.”
They went upstairs. Midge, saying goodnight, asked Lucy:
“A lovely performance?”
“Didn’t you think so, darling?”
“I gather, Lucy, that you think it’s just possible she may have some matches in Dovecotes all the time.”
“Dozens of boxes, I expect, darling. But we mustn’t be uncharitable. And it was a lovely performance!”
Doors were shutting all down the corridor, voices were murmuring goodnights. Sir Henry said: “I’ll leave the window for Christow.” His own door shut.
Henrietta said to Gerda: “What fun actresses are. They make such marvellous entrances and exits!” She yawned and added: “I’m frightfully sleepy.”
Veronica Cray moved swiftly along the narrow path through the chestnut woods.
She came out from the woods to the open space by the swimming pool. There was a small pavilion here where the Angkatells sat on days that were sunny but when there was a cold wind.
Veronica Cray stood still. She turned and faced John Christow.
Then she laughed. With her hand she gestured towards the leaf-strewn surface of the swimming pool.
“Not quite like the Mediterranean, is it, John?” she said.
He knew then what he had been waiting for—knew that in all those fifteen years of separation from Veronica she had still been with him. The blue sea, the scent of mimosa, the hot dust—pushed down, thrust out of sight, but never really forgotten. They all meant one thing—Veronica. He was a young man of twenty-four, desperately and agonizingly in love, and this time he was not going to run away.
Nine
John Christow came out from the chestnut woods on to the green slope by the house. There was a moon and the house basked in the moonlight with a strange innocence in its curtained windows. He looked down at the wristwatch he wore.
It was three o’clock. He drew a deep breath and his face was anxious. He was no longer, even remotely, a young man of twenty-four in love. He was a shrewd, practical man of just on forty, and his mind was clear and levelheaded.
He’d been a fool, of course, a complete damned fool, but he didn’t regret that! For he was, he now realized, completely master of himself. It was as though, for years, he had dragged a weight upon his leg—and now the weight was gone. He was free.
He was free and himself, John Christow—and he knew that to John Christow, successful Harley Street specialist, Veronica Cray meant nothing whatsoever. All that had been in the past—and because that conflict had never been resolved, because he had always suffered humiliatingly from the fear that he had, in plain language, “run away,” so Veronica’s image had never completely left him. She had come to him tonight out of a dream, and he had accepted the dream, and now, thank God, he was delivered from it forever. He was back in the present—and it was 3 a.m., and it was just possible that he had mucked up things rather badly.
He’d been with Veronica for three hours. She had sailed in like a frigate, and cut him out of the circle and carried him off as her prize, and he wondered now what on earth everybody had thought about it.
What, for instance, would Gerda think?
And Henrietta? (But he didn’t care quite so much about Henrietta. He could, he felt, at a pinch explain to Henrietta. He could never explain to Gerda.)
And he didn’t, definitely he didn’t want to lose anything.
All his life he had been a man who took a justifiable number of risks. Risks with patients, risks with treatment, risks with investments. Never a fantastic risk—only the kind of risk that was just beyond the margin of safety.
If Gerda guessed—if Gerda had the least suspicion….
But would she have? How much did he really know about Gerda? Normally, Gerda would believe white was black if he told her so. But over a thing like this….
What had he looked like when he followed Veronica’s tall, triumphant figure out of that window? What had he shown in his face? Had they seen a boy’s dazed, lovesick face? Or had they only observed a man doing a polite duty? He didn’t know. He hadn’t the least idea.
But he was afraid—afraid for the ease and order and safety of his life. He’d been mad—quite mad, he thought with exasperation—and then took comfort in that very thought. Nobody would believe, surely, he could have been as mad as that?
Everybody was in bed and sleep, that was clear. The french window of the drawing room stood half open, left for his return. He looked up again at the innocent, sleeping house. It looked, somehow, too innocent.
Suddenly he started. He had heard, or he had imagined he heard, the faint closing of a door.
He turned his head sharply. If someone had come down to the pool, following him there. If someone had waited and followed him back that someone could have taken a higher path and so gained entrance to the house again by the side garden door, and the soft closing of the garden door would have made just the sound that he had heard.
He looked up sharply at the windows. Was that curtain moving, had it been pushed aside for someone to look out, and then allowed to fall? Henrietta’s room.
Henrietta! Not Henrietta, his heart cried in a sudden panic. I can’t lose Henrietta!
He wanted suddenly to fling up a handful of pebbles at her window, to cry out to her.
“Come out, my dear love. Come out to me now and walk with me up through the woods to Shovel Down and there listen—listen to everything that I now know about myself and that you must know, too, if you do not know it already.”
He wanted to say to Henrietta:
“I am starting again. A new life begins from today. The things that crippled and hindered me from living have fallen away. You were right this afternoon when you asked me if I was running away from myself. That is what I have been doing for years. Because I never knew whether it was strength or weakness that took me away from Veronica. I have been afraid of myself, afraid of life, afraid of you.”
If he were to wake Henrietta and make her come out with him now—up through the woods to where they could watch, together, the sun come up over the rim of the world.
“You’re mad,” he said to himself. He shivered. It was cold now, late September after all. “What the devil is the matter with you?” he asked himself. “You’ve behaved quite insanely enough for one night. If you get away with it as it is, you’re damned lucky!” What on earth would Gerda think if he stayed out all night and came home with the milk?
What, for the matter of that, would the Angkatells think?
But that did not worry him for a moment. The Angkatells took Greenwich time, as it were, from Lucy Angkatell. And to Lucy Angkatell, the unusual always appeared perfectly reasonable.
But Gerda, unfortunately, was not an Angkatell.
Gerda would have to be dealt with, and he’d better go in and deal with Gerda as soon as possible.
Supposing it had
been Gerda who had followed him tonight?
No good saying people didn’t do such things. As a doctor, he knew only too well what people, high-minded, sensitive, fastidious, honourable people, constantly did. They listened at doors, and opened letters and spied and snooped—not because for one moment they approved of such conduct, but because before the sheer necessity of human anguish they were rendered desperate.
Poor devils, he thought, poor suffering human devils. John Christow knew a good deal about human suffering. He had not very much pity for weakness, but he had for suffering, for it was, he knew, the strong who suffer.
If Gerda knew—
Nonsense, he said to himself, why should she? She’s gone up to bed and she’s fast asleep. She’s no imagination, never has had.
He went in through the french windows, switched on a lamp, closed and locked the windows. Then, switching off the light, he left the room, found the switch in the hall, went quickly and lightly up the stairs. A second switch turned off the hall light. He stood for a moment by the bedroom door, his hand on the doorknob, then he turned it and went in.
The room was dark and he could hear Gerda’s even breathing. She stirred as he came in and closed the door. Her voice came to him, blurred and indistinct with sleep.
“Is that you, John?”
“Yes.”
“Aren’t you very late? What time is it?”
He said easily:
“I’ve no idea. Sorry I woke you up. I had to go in with the woman and have a drink.”
He made his voice sound bored and sleepy.
Gerda murmured: “Oh? Goodnight, John.”
There was a rustle as she turned over in bed.
It was all right! As usual, he’d been lucky. As usual—just for a moment it sobered him, the thought of how often his luck had held! Time and again there had been a moment when he’d held his breath and said, “If this goes wrong.” And it hadn’t gone wrong! But some day, surely, his luck would change.
He undressed quickly and got into bed. Funny that kid’s fortune. “And this one is over your head and has power over you…” Veronica! And she had had power over him all right.
“But not anymore, my girl,” he thought with a kind of savage satisfaction. “All that’s over. I’m quit of you now!”
Ten
It was ten o’clock the next morning when John came down. Breakfast was on the sideboard. Gerda had had her breakfast sent up to her in bed and had been rather perturbed since perhaps she might be “giving trouble.”
Nonsense, John had said. People like the Angkatells who still managed to have butlers and servants might just as well give them something to do.
He felt very kindly towards Gerda this morning. All that nervous irritation that had so fretted him of late seemed to have died down and disappeared.
Sir Henry and Edward had gone out shooting, Lady Angkatell told him. She herself was busy with a gardening basket and gardening gloves. He stayed talking to her for a while until Gudgeon approached him with a letter on a salver.
“This has just come by hand, sir.”
He took it with slightly raised eyebrows.
Veronica!
He strolled into the library, tearing it open.
Please come over this morning. I must see you.
Veronica.
Imperious as ever, he thought. He’d a good mind not to go. Then he thought he might as well and get it over. He’d go at once.
He took the path opposite the library window, passed by the swimming pool which was a kind of nucleus with paths radiating from it in every direction, one up the hill to the woods proper, one from the flower walk above the house, one from the farm and the one that led on to the lane which he took now. A few yards up the lane was the cottage called Dovecotes.
Veronica was waiting for him. She spoke from the window of the pretentious half-timbered building.
“Come inside, John. It’s cold this morning.”
There was a fire lit in the sitting room, which was furnished in off-white with pale cyclamen cushions.
Looking at her this morning with an appraising eye, he saw the differences there were from the girl he remembered, as he had not been able to see them last night.
Strictly speaking, he thought, she was more beautiful now than then. She understood her beauty better, and she cared for it and enhanced it in every way. Her hair, which had been deep golden, was now a silvery platinum colour. Her eyebrows were different, giving much more poignancy to her expression.
Hers had never been a mindless beauty. Veronica, he remembered, had qualified as one of our “intellectual actresses.” She had a university degree and had views on Strindberg and on Shakespeare.
He was struck now with what had only been dimly apparent to him in the past—that she was a woman whose egoism was quite abnormal. Veronica was accustomed to getting her own way, and beneath the smooth beautiful contours of flesh he seemed to sense an ugly iron determination.
“I sent for you,” said Veronica, as she handed him a box of cigarettes, “because we’ve got to talk. We’ve got to make arrangements. For our future, I mean.”
He took a cigarette and lighted it. Then he said quite pleasantly:
“But have we a future?”
She gave him a sharp glance.
“What do you mean, John? Of course we have got a future. We’ve wasted fifteen years. There’s no need to waste any more time.”
He sat down.
“I’m sorry, Veronica. But I’m afraid you’ve got all this taped out wrong. I’ve—enjoyed meeting you again very much. But your life and mine don’t touch anywhere. They are quite divergent.”
“Nonsense, John. I love you and you love me. We’ve always loved each other. You were incredibly obstinate in the past! But never mind that now. Our lives needn’t clash. I don’t mean to go back to the States. When I’ve finished this picture I’m working on now, I’m going to play a straight play on the London stage. I’ve got a wonderful play—Elderton’s written it for me. It will be a terrific success.”
“I’m sure it will,” he said politely.
“And you can go on being a doctor.” Her voice was kind and condescending. “You’re quite well-known, they tell me.”
“My dear girl, I’m married. I’ve got children.”
“I’m married myself at the moment,” said Veronica. “But all these things are easily arranged. A good lawyer can fix up everything.” She smiled at him dazzlingly. “I always did mean to marry you, darling. I can’t think why I have this terrible passion for you, but there it is!”
“I’m sorry, Veronica, but no good lawyer is going to fix up anything. Your life and mine have nothing to do with each other.”
“Not after last night?”
“You’re not a child, Veronica. You’ve had a couple of husbands, and by all accounts several lovers. What does last night mean actually? Nothing at all, and you know it.”
“Oh, my dear John.” She was still amused, indulgent. “If you’d seen your face—there in that stuffy drawing room! You might have been in San Miguel again.”
John sighed. He said:
“I was in San Miguel. Try to understand, Veronica. You came to me out of the past. Last night, I, too, was in the past, but today—today’s different. I’m a man fifteen years older. A man you don’t even know—and whom I daresay you wouldn’t like much if you did know.”
“You prefer your wife and children to me?”
She was genuinely amazed.
“Odd as it may seem to you, I do.”
“Nonsense, John, you love me.”
“I’m sorry, Veronica.”
She said incredulously:
“You don’t love me?”
“It’s better to be quite clear about these things. You are an extraordinarily beautiful woman, Veronica, but I don’t love you.”
She sat so still that she might have been a waxwork. That stillness of hers made him just a little uneasy.
When she spoke it was
with such venom that he recoiled.
“Who is she?”
“She? Who do you mean?”
“That woman by the mantelpiece last night?”
Henrietta! he thought. How the devil did she get on to Henrietta? Aloud he said:
“Who are you talking about? Midge Hardcastle?”
“Midge? That’s the square, dark girl, isn’t it? No, I don’t mean her. And I don’t mean your wife. I mean that insolent devil who was leaning against the mantelpiece! It’s because of her that you’re turning me down! Oh, don’t pretend to be so moral about your wife and children. It’s that other woman.”
She got up and came towards him.
“Don’t you understand, John, that ever since I came back to England, eighteen months ago, I’ve been thinking about you? Why do you imagine I took this idiotic place here? Simply because I found out that you often came down for weekends with the Angkatells!”
“So last night was all planned, Veronica?”
“You belong to me, John. You always have!”
“I don’t belong to anyone, Veronica. Hasn’t life taught you even now that you can’t own other human beings body and soul? I loved you when I was a young man. I wanted you to share my life. You wouldn’t do it!”
“My life and career were much more important than yours. Anyone can be a doctor!”
He lost his temper a little.
“Are you quite as wonderful as you think you are?”
“You mean that I haven’t got to the top of the tree. I shall! I shall!”
John Christow looked at her with a sudden, quite dispassionate interest.
“I don’t believe, you know, that you will. There’s a lack in you, Veronica. You’re all grab and snatch—no real generosity—I think that’s it.”
Veronica got up. She said in a quiet voice:
“You turned me down fifteen years ago. You’ve turned me down again today. I’ll make you sorry for this.”
John got up and went to the door.
“I’m sorry, Veronica, if I’ve hurt you. You’re very lovely, my dear, and I once loved you very much. Can’t we leave it at that?”