They sat down and talked for a while of trivial things, the burden of the conversation being sustained by Daphne and Michael. John leaned back in his chair and delighted in them both. So often, when he had met someone to whom he longed to be of use, Daphne did not share his longing, and in married life that tended to put a spanner in the works, but it was easy to see that Daphne had taken to Michael. He had seldom seen her so animated. Michael, too, was spilling charm in a remarkable manner; almost, if one wanted to be critical, too remarkable. He was more of a man of the world than John had realized yesterday. Older, too. Yet first impressions remained with John. Looking away a moment he could still see vividly that charming, young face that he had seen yesterday, the face of a boy who would not grow up, who might have been his son. His eyes came back to the man beside the fire and he felt again the intense sympathy that he had felt yesterday. Thank heaven Aunt Maria had invited Michael to stay. Thank heaven he had time before him. He found that in a pause in the talk Daphne had turned to him. She was looking at him, smiling at him, with great tenderness. She got up.
“John’s reading to the children,” she said to Michael. “Come and see the garden with me.”
2
They walked across the lawn and stood together by the sweet-briar hedge, looking out across the valley, over the river to the hills beyond. On the lower slopes the woods were shrouded now in the faint blue of a rising mist, like woodsmoke, higher up they seemed in the golden light to show every gradation of soft color. The sky and the river were gold and it seemed to Michael that he stood knee-deep in gold. He had to go and the sorrow was so bitter that he stood in silence and could not say what he must say. Daphne waited, her body lightly and beautifully poised. Her face was expressionless and yet in the very lack of expression there was a hint of cruelty. She was not hating the man beside her, she was merely emptied of all human kindness.
Upstairs at her open window Harriet watched them. She had seen Michael come and had thought, “Now that’s a nice upstanding young fellow. Must be the one who’s staying at the manor.” Then as he came nearer she said to herself, “Older than I thought. He’s seen too much. I’d rather be myself than him, for all his body gives him no trouble at all.” And her quick sympathy had reached out to him as he took the front-door steps two at a time. And her delight too. It was grand to see a body like that, moving so smoothly and painlessly, with such delightful ease.
And now as she watched it was the beauty of the two bodies that at first enthralled her. Tall though he was he was only an inch or two taller than she. To her fancy they were like poplar trees and had the wind blown they would have swayed as gracefully, with the same silken murmur. But no; it was only the woman who wore silk. Yet the man should have worn it, for there seemed a shimmer of gold about him. Harriet looked more intently and her first delight changed to apprehension. She had never seen a man and woman who physically looked more fitted to stand together, and yet they were not in accord. The very fittingness of the outward picture gave cruel emphasis to a bitterness and emptiness that brought tears to her eyes and a constriction to her throat as she became aware of them. The endurance of much pain had brought her to the same sort of awareness of the happiness or unhappiness of others that Margary had already as her birthright. Margary had been born a beadsman, Harriet had received her sensitiveness as the alms of age that had refused to feed on self. If it were a doubtful blessing it was not the curse that absorption in self would have been. In the last resort there are only the two pains of redemption and damnation to choose from.
And there was nothing she could do. Though the man stood as it were rooted and held in light her intuition told her he was being swept away. It was as though she herself were being tumbled over and over in the dark current towards an end that horrified her. And though the royal-robed woman could have put out a hand and held him where he was she was incapable of that one small gesture of kindness. How many queens had made it. Just one small gesture of the hand and the life was spared. “You silly old woman,” said Harriet to herself. “It’s likely the young man has come about the fire insurance.” Nevertheless she fell to her prayers, for though she had too much humility to trust her intuitions she did not disregard them. There was never any harm in being on the safe side.
“Yet how am I to know, Lord?” she sighed deep inside herself. “Wretched I feel, downright wretched, and the sorrow is bitter-tasting, yet how am I to know it’s not just my fancy that that’s the way he feels? Yet there’s sorrow in the world that’s not my fancy. . . Men wandering the earth, homeless men. . . May God have pity. . . Yet I needn’t be asking You when the hairs on their heads are numbered. That’s the queer thing about prayer, to my mind. There’s men and women that shut themselves up and spend their whole lives telling You what You’ve known before they were born. Lord, have mercy, they say, and You the Everlasting Mercy from the beginning to the end. Prayer would seem plain silly if You hadn’t said to do it. So I do it. Lord, have mercy. And what else can I do or say, a useless old woman like me? If I wasn’t shut up here I’d be going down and giving Daphne a piece of my mind. You’re like a painted picture when your pride’s hurt, my girl. Like a hollow thing, empty of kindness. I’d rather have that taste of tears than this emptiness. It is hers? If not hers it’s the poverty of many poor souls the world over. Lord, have mercy. He’s nothing but a child. Lord, say it to her. It’s a difficult way You go to work, I must say. Most times it’s as though You must make use of every soul in the world but one to save that one, and yet there was a time when You used One to save every soul in the world. And that wasn’t easy, either. Who’s to know how difficult it was? But there’s one thing I do know; and that’s that when through whatever means You take a soul at last, Lord, she falls to You at a touch lighter than thistledown. I know, Lord, for I’ve felt it. And why You can’t do it that way at the start I don’t know. But I’ll not understand the ways of Providence this side the grave. And my prayers are a fair disgrace. Lord have mercy on me for I’m not an educated woman. Amen.”
She leaned back in her chair, tired out. A wave of pain came over her, as always when she was tired, and she had to hold to the arms of her chair. She was lucky, she knew, that she could still use her hands to hold on with. So many people could not even do that. That wave passed and another came. Well, never mind, it was part of it, and maybe made up for her lack of education. Not knowing that she suffered Daphne and Michael talked in the garden.
“Daphne, I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ll go, of course.”
“Of course,” she answered. “And so you did not know John and I lived here?”
She hated herself for asking the question, but she had so hoped, when she married John only a year after he had left her, that he would see the notice of her marriage and be humiliated to see how little she had cared.
“No,” he said. “I did not know you had married. I was in Africa. One did not often see the papers.”
Even in Africa, she thought, he could have kept himself informed of her well-being through mutual friends, if he had wished. She took her revenge with charming politeness. “Are you as famous as ever?” she asked lightly. “I have no idea I’m afraid. I don’t go to the theatre or read modern novels. I’m so busy with my home and the children.”
He turned and looked at her so compellingly that she had to look at him, though she had not meant to flatter him with so much interest. Even his lips were white. Had she hurt him as much as all that? She was delighted if she had but, heavens, the vanity of men! She looked at him, trying to think of something else to say that would hurt his pride, but he forestalled her. “Daphne, do you really not know what I’ve been doing lately?”
“My apologies,” she said. “I did not even know if you were alive or dead.” She spoke as contemptuously as she could, and watched to see his face tauten still more at the flick of the lash. Instead of that it softened and the color came back. He smiled a little and his whole body relaxed
with relief. She realized with a pang that she had not hurt him. He was glad that she had refused all knowledge of him since they parted. It was she who was suffering from hurt pride, not he. That shook her, made her feel at a disadvantage. She did not know, now, what revenge to take.
He turned away from her and spoke with gentle humility. “I am so glad you live in this paradise of a place. I am so glad you have married this very great man.”
She was astonished. Belmaray? John? It was not so that she had ever thought of either of them. He stuck his hands savagely in his pockets, as a small boy might do, and memory stabbed her. She had not forgotten a single one of his gestures. She still knew them by heart. He had always done that when he was deeply moved. Nervy, emotional creature that he was his hands would tremble and ashamed of it he would hide them. He had always lost his heart very suddenly to places and people. He did not want to leave Belmaray. He did not want to leave John. Nor would John want him to go. John, this morning, had said he liked him, had thought he needed help. Was that true? It might be, for John had a nose for souls in trouble like that of a pig for truffles. Her thoughts raced. To drive Michael from his paradise, to deprive him of John’s friendship—that would be a revenge that would satisfy her. Her thoughts stopped with a jolt for one hand had come out of his pocket and, still trembling, held her arm. “I’m glad I came, though,” he said. “I’m glad I know how safe you are. It’s such a beastly, terrifying sort of world.”
She looked round at him and the fear in his eyes shocked her. What a child he was. It was odd, she had not before thought of him as a child, though she was a little older than he. Did she think this because of the maternity that was now in her, or because of his faint but to her eyes unmistakable likeness to Pat? How it had shamed her when she had first noticed in John’s child that fugitive likeness to the man she had not seen for two years. It had proved that say what they would the intense absorption of the mind can influence even the physical likeness of a child. For so long after he had left her he had haunted her like a ghost. She would see him running down the stairs in the twilight, hear his step on the gravel and his voice calling her. He was with her in her dreams and when she woke she would see his face as clearly as though he stood beside her bed. She had fought the obsession with shame and anger but it had not left her until after Pat’s birth, and had left its mark on Pat, and because of it she could never love Pat as a mother should love her first-born. It was Winkle who was her best-beloved, Winkle who had roused all the motherhood in her and made it possible for her to be touched now by the child in this man beside her. She fought hard, her longing to hurt at war with her sudden pang of pity, and through intensity of feeling was suddenly aware of the golden light that was pouring over them. Its amazing beauty was like a voice speaking, a challenge like that of the flowers yesterday to her power of correspondence, and she could not react to it with the ugliness of refusal.
“Stay if you like,” she said coldly. “It does not matter to me in the least what you do but I’d like you to stay for John’s sake. He likes you.”
“Likes me?” said Michael breathlessly. “He won’t when he knows who I am! My God, he won’t!”
“Why should he know who you are? For his sake I won’t tell him.”
“I told him I was Michael Stone. It didn’t seem to ring any bell at the time, but later it will.”
“I don’t think so. Whenever I spoke of you to him it was always as Mike Davis—but I did not speak of you more than was necessary. He knew you were a writer but not the name under which you wrote. When in the old days he went to the theatre it was to see Shakespeare, not to see the horrible kind of macabre plays you used to write, and still do I expect, and he does not read detective stories. I doubt if he’s ever heard of Michael Stone. A lot of people haven’t.”
She was able again to put the flick of the lash into that, and was again aware not of his resentment but his profound relief. “You’ve changed, Michael,” she said.
“Yes,” he said. “Thank you, Daphne, I’d like to stay for a bit. If you’re sure you don’t mind?”
“Mind? Why should I mind? You don’t suppose you mean a thing to me now, do you?”
“No, I don’t,” he said humbly, and did not remind her of the promptness with which she had agreed earlier that he must go.
“It’s all so long ago and so entirely dead,” she murmured.
“Yes,” he agreed. He found he was still holding her arm, let go abruptly and went away. She walked slowly back to the drawing room.
“Stone hasn’t gone, has he?” asked John surprised.
“Yes,” she said, sitting down in her chair. Her legs would not hold her any longer and she felt as though her face was stiff and frozen.
“What a shame, Mother,” said Pat. “Why did you let him go?”
“Aunt Maria wanted him. John, read another story. A short one. There’s just time.”
“The Princess and the Pea,” said Winkle.
“That pea,” thought Daphne. “It’s just like Michael. However many layers of oblivion I spread over him he always comes through.”
Chapter 10
1
Mary O’Hara woke up on Monday morning in a shocking temper. Before she got her eyes open she knew she was in it. She also knew she had a slight headache and that ominous tickle at the back of the throat that presages the beginning of a cold in the head. Then came the realization that it was raining, that it was Monday morning, that her hot water bottle had leaked in the night and that she hated everybody. As a general rule her temper was of the fireworks variety, an affair of sparks and flashes that seemed a mere effervescence of her vitality and was enjoyed by all, but upon rare occasions she woke up in the morning possessed by an absolute demon. . . She could feel him muscling within her now. . . And yesterday she had spent most of her time in church, praying a great deal for poor old Giles, remembering that Don Quixote had urged her to it and was doing the same. Though probably, she had thought once or twice, not in the same manner, not so wordily; by bedtime she had been exhausted by the spate of her own words. And today she had intended to inaugurate a new epoch at Oaklands, an era of Christian charity which should gradually win each soul in the house to love first Mary O’Hara, and then that way of life of which throughout the whole of yesterday she had been such a shining example. She had intended to begin with old Giles, whose alarm clock was now shrilling in the next room.
“Damn that woman!” she ejaculated, and reaching for her bedroom slipper flung it at the partitioned wall. Mercifully it went wide of the mark, sending a vase of flowers on the dressing table crashing to the floor.
Mary got one eye open and looked at the stream of water trickling towards a wide crack in the floor. The drawing room was underneath. She closed the eye, smiled in unholy glee, and then in deliberate defiance of that conscientious shrilling next-door, rolled over and went to sleep again. But it was the hot fitful sleep of an incipient cold, and under it her conscience nagged at her and woke her up again. “Damn that water!” she groaned, and rolled out of bed. She flung her bath towel savagely into the center of the pool and stood shivering in her dainty green silk pyjamas, looking irritably about her. By the time she had gone to bed last night her virtue had been wearing a little thin and her room presented its usual morning-after-the-night-before appearance. Every drawer and cupboard was open, showing the confusion within. The clothes she had taken off were on the floor where her shoes should have been, and her shoes on the chair where her clothes should have been. The book she had been reading was also on the floor, and her dressing gown was nowhere to be seen.
For a moment she was aware of herself in her customary optimistic early morning manner, Mary O’Hara, young, pretty and charming, and made a half-turn towards the glass to greet this nymph and paragon. She was met with a scowl, and glowered back in return at the red-nosed, tousle-headed horror with the bleary eyes and half-open mouth. “How I hat
e you!” she said to it. “Hideous, revolting little prig!” On her demonic mornings her hatred of everybody always included herself, for even her rages had a wide generosity about them and left nothing without the pale. She poured cold water into her basin and washed herself with distaste but thoroughness. Untidy though she was over her belongings she was fastidious over her person and always herself rose immaculate above their welter. She did so now, but in the most severe of her tweed skirts and blouses, with her curly hair restrained by a sober brown velvet band and her make-up restricted to a dusting of powder on her already swollen nose. A chastened appearance was her armor in her warfare against the demon, and a sign to those about her to take shelter. The noise of the breakfast gong rolled through the house but she disregarded it while she banged her drawers shut, stripped her bed as one scalping the head of the enemy, and then fought herself to her knees to say her prayers; for on these mornings even her Maker fell under her disapprobation. If He had to make her at all why couldn’t she have been made with smooth brown hair, dovelike eyes, a sweet temper and the ability to implement her beautiful intentions? “Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners.” Jumping up from her knees a little calmed she felt a ladder rip from knee to ankle in one of her nylon stockings and her calm was gone. With her teeth set she rummaged in a drawer for another pair and with one stocking off and one on looked up to see Annie standing in her bedroom door.
“Didn’t you ’ear the gong?” asked Annie.
“Hear it? Of course I heard it!” flamed Mary. “You sound that gong as though it were the last trump. And what’s it when we get there? Tepid tea and that revolting cereal gone limp and stale. Why can’t you crisp it up in the oven? Why can’t you wait until the kettle boils before you make the tea? I’d sell my soul to the devil that’s in me for the hot coffee and sizzling bacon you’ve just taken to Aunt Rose.”