‘What are you talking about?’
The man came down the steps. The other man followed him. There was a woman at the door now.
The man who was first down the steps was Mr Strutt.
Terry said: ‘In a way I’m sorry to do this to you. At the last minute it seems pretty hard to – to carry through. In a way I’d rather it hadn’t to be you, my dear. One makes promises to oneself. One pays one’s debts, if you see what I mean. But I doubt if you’d understand.’
‘I don’t understand.’
Even his eyes looked green in the light coming from the house. ‘Just work it out. You don’t need to look very far. I’m sorry, but really, you know, Mark had it coming to him, didn’t he?’ He was still talking half to me, half to himself – talking to keep his own thoughts off himself, I think – when Mr Strutt opened the door.
‘Good evening, Miss Holland. We’d almost given you up.’
‘I telephoned,’ Terry said.
‘Yes, but it is rather late. Do get out, Miss Holland, we want to ask you a few questions. Let me see, you know our Birmingham manager, don’t you? Mr George Pringle.’
When that sort of thing happens to you you don’t faint. Not if you’re my type, you don’t. You get slowly out of the car and look at Mr Pringle for the first time for two years, and you’re suddenly back in that office and you remember every pimple and blemish and blotch of his face.
And behind you you hear the other car door slam and you know that Terry has got out, and for a moment that swallows everything else, how you’ve been such a fool as to think he was willing to be a friend to the wife of the man he hated most in the world. Half of your mind thinks that and the other half thinks but maybe it was better that you never suspected he would stoop this low. If you have to live in the world, then you have to have some view of the world that doesn’t drip with slime.
And they’ve not exactly caught you, but they stand one on either side of you and slowly you begin to walk up the steps to the top where Mrs Strutt is waiting. And you think, well, this is the end of everything now, it’s out of your hands. This is the end. For a second you think, maybe you could fight, you could still fight; deny everything, how can they force you to admit what you won’t admit; just go on stalling till Mark comes. But when the second is gone you know somehow that that isn’t the answer any more, that is, if you really are going to make a break with things as they used to be.
And you think – because it’s true what people say, that a drowning man lives all his back life in a few seconds, and so a drowning woman has plenty of time to think between steps – and you think anyway whatever happens you can still wait till Mark comes. Everything rests on him.
But by the time you are at the top of the steps – and Mrs Strutt, looking embarrassed and rather sorry for you, has stepped aside to let you go in – I mean you know that really deep down at root it isn’t Mark it depends on but you yourself. Because he can only help you to help yourself. If you can’t stand him touching you and you still only want to get away from him and you want to go on living a solitary life and codding up a make-believe world with a different name and personality every nine months and rustling bank notes stuffed surreptitiously in your handbag – then he can’t help at all. He can only help if all that is over and instead you want at any rate to try to love him and to trust him and to be loved.
And the only way to love and trust now was through this door, among enemies, with a police-sergeant any minute being called at the end of the phone.
I stopped there and looked back, but not at any of the three men. I looked across the garden. The high wind was still blowing here, and a ragged cloud like a broken fish and chip bag drifted just over the trees. The trees were rustling and waving and they smelled of pines. All the garden looked dark and foreign and strange.
Mark had said: ‘I want to fight for you. We’re in this together’; that was something I’d have to hold on to.
I thought, the way to love is through suffering. Who had said that? Did it mean anything or was it just the usual talk?
You know, I thought, this isn’t going to be the hardest part, this is the easiest part, going through this door.
I took a deep breath and turned and went in.
MARNIE
Winston Graham is the author of more than thirty novels, which include Cordelia, Night Without Stars, The Walking Stick and Stephanie, as well as the highly successful Poldark series. His novels have been translated into seventeen languages and six have been filmed. Two television series have been made of the Poldark novels and shown in twenty-two countries. The Stranger From the Sea has now also been televised. Tremor, Winston Graham’s latest best-seller, is also available from Pan Books.
Winston Graham lives in Sussex. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and in 1983 was awarded the OBE.
By the same author
ROSS POLDARK
DEMELZA
JEREMY POLDARK
WARLEGGAN
THE BLACK MOON
THE FOUR SWANS
THE ANGRY TIDE
THE STRANGER FROM THE SEA
THE MILLER’S DANCE
THE LOVING CUP THE TWISTED SWORD
NIGHT JOURNEY
CORDELIA
THE FORGOTTEN STORY
THE MERCILESS LADIES
NIGHT WITHOUT STARS
TAKE MY LIFE FORTUNE IS A WOMAN
THE LITTLE WALLS
THE SLEEPING PARTNER
GREEK FIRE
THE TUMBLED HOUSE
THE GROVE OF EAGLES
AFTER THE ACT
THE WALKING STICK
ANGELL, PEARL AND LITTLE GOD
THE JAPANESE GIRL (short stories)
WOMEN IN THE MIRROR
THE GREEN FLASH
CAMEO
STEPHANIE
TREMOR
THE UGLY SISTER
THE SPANISH ARMADAS POLDARK’S CORNWALL
First published 1961 by The Bodley Head Ltd
This edition published 1997 by Pan Books
This electronic edition published 2012 by Pan Books
an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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ISBN 978-1-447-20723-8 EPUB
Copyright © Winston Graham 1961
The right of Winston Graham to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
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