“This is a rotten film,” he said, regarding a close-up of an enormous embrace with an equally enormous nausea. “Let’s get out. Let’s go to that place on the river. You know. We went there once before. And have a drink.”
They drove to the place on the river and sat in the garden watching the swans. Valerie had tea and sugar cakes which made her feel slightly sick after the chocolates and the swaying speed of the car, and Charles had several more drinks. He had to nerve himself to end this thing. It had become ridiculous. Yet he had still said nothing when Valerie began to fuss about getting back to cook Paul’s evening meal. And he must. He couldn’t do it in the car and have a weeping woman on his shoulder. They’d land in the ditch. “Don’t fuss, Val!” he said impatiently. “Paul doesn’t strike me as the kind of chap to make a stink if his chops are five minutes late.”
She looked at him sharply. “How does he strike you? You met him at the local, didn’t you?”
“Not at all what I expected from your description. Quiet, easy sort of chap. We’re going for a walk together on Friday.”
She was horrified, all the magazine stories she had ever read rising up and circling around her like a cloud of bats with warning squeaks. “A walk together? Charles, you can’t do that!”
“Why not?”
“Well, you can’t, he doesn’t know about you and me.”
“I bet he does. He’s no fool.”
She was on her feet in agitation. “Of course he doesn’t know. If he knew he’d have made a scene.”
“He’s no scene maker. Don’t be a fool, Val. Sit down.”
“No. It’s not chops. It’s casserole and it needs a good hour.”
She was walking quickly toward the car and he could only follow her in mingled exasperation and relief. He hadn’t done it, and now, he couldn’t. Another day. A little later. But once in the car, exasperation triumphed over relief and he drove far too fast and not at all steadily. As they whirled through the lanes Valerie was frightened. He was, she thought, a little drunk. And he looked sweaty and hot. How could she have thought him so marvelously good-looking?
“Let me drive, Charles,” she said sharply, hating him for her fear.
“Little fool,” he muttered.
“Stop, Charles! I must drive. If you don’t stop I’ll make you.”
He laughed and drove on, with his elbow out to keep her away from him. They passed a cottage, lurched around a corner on the wrong side and confronted an oncoming car. Charles wrenched at the wheel and they mounted the grass verge and crashed into a telegraph post.
It was what is called a minor accident and after a few moments of bewildering confusion Valerie was aware of herself being helped out of the car, and then she was standing on the grass crying but unhurt. But Charles, it seemed, was hurt, for the occupants of the other car, a man and a woman who were strangers to her, were fussing over him where he lay on the grass. No one was fussing over her and she cried so bitterly that the woman came over to her.
“Don’t worry, my dear. He’s all right. Just concussion and a broken collar bone, we think. My husband is a doctor. Your car is rather knocked about but you two are all right. Come and see your husband. You’ll see for yourself he’s not badly hurt.”
But Valerie shook her head and looked the other way. She hated illness and injury and she didn’t want to look. Her crying took on a hysterical note and the man said curtly over his shoulder, “Take her into the cottage and tell them to give her a cup of tea. Plenty of sugar.”
She was taken into the cottage and a dear old woman gave her tea and made a great fuss over her and she began to feel better. A policeman appeared from nowhere and took notes. The doctor telephoned for an ambulance and it came and took Charles to the hospital. The doctor went with Charles and his wife drove her to Appleshaw. “Put me down here, please,” she said when they got to the green. “My cottage is quite close.”
“Is there anyone at home to look after you?”
“Yes,” said Valerie. “Put me down here, please. And thank you very much.”
Paul would be in and she did not want this woman letting it all out to him. She wanted to tell him herself, carefully. She had seen Charles walking along the road and given him a lift. Rehearsing what she would say, she stood at the front door fumbling for her key in her bag. Paul opened the door quietly from within while she was trying to find it She looked up and saw him there.
“What is it, Valerie?” he asked. “What’s happened?” He took her arm and pulled her into their little sitting room and then suddenly took her impulsively into his arms. “You’ve been in some sort of danger, haven’t you?”
She began to cry again. “The car. It ran into a telegraph post.”
“Are you hurt?”
“No.”
“You’re sure?”
She nodded, her face pressed against his coat, not willingly but because he was holding her so tightly that she could not help herself. “If I had been hurt,” she said irritably, “you’d be just about killing me, holding me so tightly. Paul, let go. I want to put the casserole in the oven.”
“Damn the casserole,” he said. He picked her up and put her gently on the sofa. He took off her shoes and sitting at the bottom of the sofa held her small cold feet in his hands. Her feet were always cold and he had done that sometimes on their honeymoon. He had been so sweet then, in those days before he became blind and nervy and obstinate, and she began to cry afresh as the memory swept over her. “Don’t cry, Val,” he said. “Do you want a cup of tea?”
“I’ve had it,” she sobbed.
“Then stop crying and tell me what happened. Were you with Charles? Was he driving?”
“Yes.”
“Is he hurt?”
“Not badly. He’s gone to hospital. Coming back from Westwater I saw him walking along the road and offered him a lift.”
“Don’t lie to me, Val,” he said fiercely, and the hold of his hands tightened on her feet. “You’ve the right to spend the day as you like, of course, but not the right to lie about it. Tell the truth for God’s sake. You’ve nearly wrecked our marriage with the lies you tell yourself and me. Do you think I don’t know about the times you tell me the matches are in one place when you’ve put them in another, or that Bess is ill when she isn’t, or all the other little cruelties you think up? It doesn’t matter so much about the lies you tell me, they’re like the pinpricks of a child, but the lies you tell yourself go as deep as death. If you tell yourself you’re one sort of woman when you’re another sort you’ll land up by being no sort. Just a nothingness. No one exists unless they know themselves. Valerie, pull up for God’s sake. Do you think I want to lose you?”
“I do not,” she said. “Hard-working housekeepers are not easily come by these days.”
She watched, with a half-smile on her lips, for that slight tensing of the muscles of his face that came as he constrained himself to silence. It was a look that both maddened and satisfied her, maddened her because she could not ring a retort out of him, satisfied because she knew her thrust had gone in. But it did not come. Instead he flared into anger. “You silly little fool! That’s not what I meant. I don’t care a damn about your housekeeping and life might be pleasanter if you did leave me.”
“Paul!” she cried, divided between fury and an anguish of hurt pride.
“I haven’t finished. Pleasanter but pretty pointless. I don’t only live to write, as you think, I also live to hold you up if I can till you come alive again.”
She burst into floods of tears. “Paul, you’re hateful! Storming at me like this when I’ve just had this awful shock. I feel most dreadfully ill!”
“Come to bed then,” he said and pulled her up from the sofa into his arms. He did not say he was sorry. He was not sorry. The afternoon with Mary, stirring him so deeply, and the joy of the release he had shared with Edith, had brought about release for him as well. All the pent-up anger and grief of years surged up in a flood of power. Without a false step
he carried Valerie upstairs and put her on her bed.
“Send for Mother,” she sobbed. “I want to go to bed for days and days and have Mother.”
“No,” he said firmly. “Neither of us gets on with your mother. Stay in bed as long as you like. But you’ll jolly well stay there, not keep getting up in your dressing gown playing the martyr. If I get stuck over things I’ll ring up Joanna.”
“You’re not to, Paul. I’ve got some pride if you haven’t.”
“I’ll get you some more tea and some aspirins. That’ll quiet you down.”
“It’s your fault if I’m upset.”
“Yes, it is. But you’ll be all right after a good rest. And I’ll ring up Doctor Fraser.”
She raised herself on her elbow. “You won’t! You know I can’t stand him.”
He flung an arm around her and kissed her and the power in him made her feel she was gripped to a dynamo. Then he went downstairs and she heard him ringing up Dr. Fraser.
3
It was a long time since anything so gossip-worthy had happened at Appleshaw and details of the affair were not wanting, for the policeman who had taken notes turned out to be their own policeman, Ted Barnard, visiting his aunt at the cottage. People could not help enjoying the gossip but they were sorry too because of Colonel and Mrs. Adams. They took it quietly but they aged a good deal and they got very tired going backward and forward to see Charles in Westwater Hospital. He was slow in recovering, for the concussion turned out more serious than they had thought at first and the shock brought back the nerve trouble of the war. Their friends were good to them, taking them in and out by car. Mrs. Hepplewhite was especially kind, driving them herself in the Bentley with Tania placed on Mrs. Adams’s lap to console her. They were very exhausted on Mrs. Hepplewhite’s days and not so tired when Mary or Joanna took them, but somehow it usually seemed to be Mrs. Hepplewhite. She was so eager and one could not hurt her. She was so extraordinarily kind. She came to see them at the cottage too, her arms full of flowers. Arranging them after she had gone made Mrs. Adams so tired that she couldn’t sleep at night. Mrs. Hepplewhite took flowers to Valerie as well, and held Paul’s hand in both hers to show her silent sympathy. Not that she was exactly silent but she did not refer to what had happened. Her talk flowed under and over it and embedded it in honey. Her tact was as overwhelming as her kindness. But Paul was not overwhelmed, only amused. He knew what the sympathetic pressure meant. He had never supposed that Hepplewhite was a satisfactory husband. In Mrs. Hepplewhite’s thoughts he and she were now twin souls, locked together in understanding. Gravely he would return the pressure and bow her from the gate with a courtesy that brought the tears to her eyes.
Valerie was in bed for a week, for Dr. Fraser said she was anemic and run down as well as shocked. The rest was something she was supposed to enjoy but it was frightful lying and listening to Paul laughing downstairs with the other women. One or other of them always seemed to be there, Joanna mostly but sometimes Mary or Mrs. Croft. They prepared dainty meals for her and carried them up, Mrs. Croft with the cheerful briskness of the professional nurse, Mary with grace and smiling dignity, Joanna matter-of-fact and kind, but all of them equally maddening. They knew all about her and Charles now and were thinking the worst and enjoying it. They were flirting with her husband and enjoying it. Their food choked her and she ate very little of it, at least while they were there. When they were not there and Paul brought her up a tray with delicious leftovers she thought it her duty to get her strength back. She had begun by disliking Joanna the least of the three but ended by almost hating her.
On the last day before she got up, Joanna came in after tea to get the trays ready for supper. She sent Paul out for a walk and came up to Valerie’s room.
“Look here, Val, I want to talk to you,” she said, shutting the door firmly behind her, and sitting on Valerie’s bed she tucked her feet up.
“I’ve got an awful head,” Valerie murmured.
“I dare say. You don’t eat enough. Now look, Val. When you get up you’ll feel weak. Let Paul help you. I’ve simplified the arrangement of the kitchen and he knows where everything is and can find his way about perfectly well.”
“You’ve rearranged my kitchen?”
“I had to. The way you had things it was so confusing that Paul couldn’t possibly manage in it. Now he can. Let him do things. He’d be happier if you let him do more.”
“So you think I don’t make my husband happy?”
“I didn’t say so. Now don’t fly off the handle because there’s something else I must say.”
“What?”
“You’ll be thinking now that all of us know about your friendship with Charles. Well, some of us knew before you had that smash. You can’t keep things dark in a village as small as this one. But what I want to say is this. No one supposed for a moment that the affair was serious. You know what I mean. We knew you wouldn’t be such a fool, especially with a man like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like Charles.”
Valerie looked blank. “He’s so distinguished,” she said. “Like his father.”
“Unfortunately not,” said Joanna. “He has a sort of look of his father sometimes and he might have looked like him if he hadn’t been just no good at all.”
“Charles? No good?”
“Surely you know?”
“No.”
“But how could you not know? It’s so obvious. Val, what a child you are!”
Valerie flushed scarlet and the tears came into her eyes. Had she really cared for the man? Joanna wondered. She was ready with her sympathy but Valerie’s next remark scattered it.
“What a fool you must all think me!”
“Never mind, Val. It’s over now. Forget it.”
Valerie forced the tears back, for she was too humiliated to cry. Joanna kissed her and went away and her anger at the motherliness of the kiss, the kindness as to a child, kept her going until bedtime. But the next day, downstairs in the sitting room for tea, she felt sunk in humiliation. How could she go on living with everyone thinking her such an ignorant fool and with her wonderful romantic love, that had seemed like a round golden ball, sunk to the proportions of a little sordid pebble? And she had not even got Paul now. Mary Lindsay had taken him from her. She had deliberately set out to steal him. Now she had lost the two of them, both lover and husband. No story that she had ever read had ended like this in total loss.
After supper Mrs. Hepplewhite came with a huge armful of roses and carnations.
“She’s a bore!” said Valerie, exhaustedly contemplating them when she and Paul were alone again. “I’ve not enough vases.”
“She’s a darling,” said Paul. He was in the armchair, contentedly smoking, Bess at his feet, but he got up. “I’ll get something for them.”
Valerie collapsed upon the sofa and listened. He was moving about the kitchen, as though he were sighted. She had never allowed him in the kitchen because it drove her distracted when he bumped and fumbled, and she had not had the patience to simplify things for him, as Joanna had done. Besides, she did not want him there. Joanna was maddening! He came in with the kitchen bucket, filled with water. “Here you are, Val. Stick the flowers in here for now. You can deal with them in the morning.”
He put the bucket carefully beside the flowers, but he had filled it fuller than he knew and some water slopped over onto the carpet. It was the last straw and she burst into tears. He sat by her on the sofa and flung an arm around her, but without alarm. That sense of release and power was still with him, and with it the joyous conviction that nothing just now could go very wrong. Rarely, these times came, tossing one up like a lark from the earth, and one continued to go up until the meridian was reached. One had to come down again but there could be quite a long spell in the sun before the impetus was spent.
“Why are you crying now?” he asked her. “Is it Charles? Are you in love with him?”
“You wouldn’t care if I was
!”
“I care very much. Tell me, please, and tell the truth. You don’t know how much it matters to both of us that you should tell the truth.”
He held her more firmly, his heart beating so hard with the urgency and risk of this turning point that she could feel it, and moved her hand that she might feel it beating under her palm. She had done that in the old days and now she did it again, a reflex response of memory, but in spite of her wretchedness an echo of the old thrill came back. She felt weak as water, and as though her limbs were dissolving and flowing away. She tried to move her hand but she couldn’t. She left it where it was, the strong beat sending answering hammer strokes through her own blood. Paul pulled her closer so that her head was on his shoulder.
“Tell me,” he said. It was not a plea but a demand. He had lifted her clean above deception and evasion and she answered truthfully, “I thought I was. I’m not any more.”
“Then why are you crying? Because people are talking about you and thinking you a little fool?”
“Not only that.”
“What else?”
She struggled suddenly but he did not let her go. She felt a ruthlessness in the pressure of his arms and answered in anger. “What right have you to blame me for Charles? If I’m a fool so are you.”
“I haven’t blamed you for Charles. And why am I a fool?”
“Can’t you see that woman’s out to get you?”
“You mean Mary? I like her and she likes me and she likes my work. That’s all. You answered me truthfully and I’ve answered you truthfully.”
“Not all as far as she’s concerned. Your work! It’s you.”
He considered this. “I honestly think not. It would be absurd.”
“Of course it’s absurd. She’s probably even older than she looks. But women can be vampires at that age. It’s their last chance.”
The word vampire as applied to Mary dissolved him into laughter against his will but he was careful to hold her closer while he laughed. “I mean absurd because of my deficiencies, not Mary’s age.”