Sting of Death

by Shelley Smith

  Ivor’s presence revived all kinds of memories in Werner. He had some knowledge of what it meant to be a prisoner: he had been three weeks in Buchenwald, five months in Dachau. There was little he had not experienced of that sort of torture.

  “That would have been worse than anything I went through,” said Ivor.

  “Indeed, yes,” Werner agreed. He held up bunches of his hair: “I came out of Dachau with all these white hairs. Isn’t it, Ilse? Ask Ilse, she will tell you what I was like. A ruin. I weighed forty-two kilos only. Imagine that!”

  They imagined.

  When Ivor volunteered, quite eagerly, to help Linda with the washing-up or whatever happened to be the chore of the moment (Miss Sharpe smiled on him when she heard this, with all her usual unreliable benignity: “Delighted to hear you mean to do something to earn your keep, young man. Quite enough parasites living here as it is.” Ivor bowed to her charmingly and said: “But we don’t expect old people to work”), Linda accepted. She was obliged to; it was not that she liked to have him limping at her heels while she performed her necessary tiresome tasks but, having promised Edmund to give him her special attention, she was far too conscientious not to carry it out. Anyway, it was agreeable enough for a few days to listen to some words of praise about herself. And Ivor was nice, she found, not in the least frightening.

  She let him talk to her for hours of his experiences. And once in the garden after one of these conversations he kissed her. Although the kiss was harmless enough, she was very cross at this “silly behaviour,” and would not address a word to him all the next day. He was obliged to write her a letter of apology and explanation. Of course she was bound to forgive eventually, and even to forget what happened.

  Once Ilse said to her:

  “Ivor becomes quite good-looking, I think.”

  “Does he?” said Linda. “I haven’t noticed.”

  “No?” Ilse said, smiling. “And you are together so much. I find that very unobservant of you, my dear.”

  So that the next time she was with Ivor she did observe him, and not with her usual absent look.

  “Yes,” she said, “I believe you are putting on weight. Ilse said you were. At least, she said you were getting quite nice-looking, which I suppose is the same thing.”

  “I certainly feel much better. I suppose I shall have to go out into the heartless world again soon and find a job.”

  “Oh, nonsense!”

  Ivor said: “No, I do think I’m taking advantage of your kindness. It isn’t right. I don’t think Edmund has any idea of how much you have to do, how much you have to carry on those thin little shoulders. Somebody ought to nurse you into putting on a bit more weight, my dear; you’re like a wraith. You seem to get thinner and whiter every day.”

  “Oh, Ivor, how absurd you are! You talk as if I was going into a genteel decline, instead of merely being rather overworked like every other housewife in England today.”

  “I wonder what Edmund would say if he saw you.”

  “I doubt if he’d notice. He knows I’m very strong.”

  “You speak as though you thought Edmund didn’t care.”

  “Do I?” She leaned her forehead against the pane and stared out into the garden. “I’d better go and say good night to the children. They won’t go to sleep till I do.”

  Ivor very lightly clasped her shoulders. He said gently:

  “My dear, won’t you tell me what the trouble is?”

  “Trouble?” she said in a high-strained voice. “There’s no trouble. What should there be?”

  “Do you think I can’t see your unhappiness? Do you think I haven’t seen the tears forcing themselves past your eyelids sometimes when you think no one is looking? My heart aches for you.”

  “Oh, don’t, Ivor...! Please...! Please! I don’t know what you’re talking about... I must go!”

  “You are so desperately loyal. I love it in you.”

  The words “desperately loyal” for some reason nearly choked her with sobs. She found herself crying against his shoulder. His arms were round her comfortingly and he made comforting noises. She took his handkerchief and dried her eyes quite vigorously.

  “If Ilse had come in just then, I don’t know what she’d have thought. She’s already told me that I see too much of you. I suppose she thinks it isn’t respectable.”

  “Never mind that,” he said quickly.

  “No, I must go, Ivor. It was just a moment’s foolishness. I expect I’m tired. Forgive me! And – please – say no more about it.” She gave him a fleeting tear-stained smile and was gone like a little ghost in a shabby blue cotton frock.

  There was no need for Ivor to go against her expressed wishes by talking of it again: she spoke of it herself. She thought to herself that she would never mention it again, she honestly intended not to – she was, as Ivor said, desperately loyal; nevertheless, her heart was breaking with what she should do. If she had had a mother...if there had been someone for her to confide in... But there was no one. Even Nanny Potter, whose warm proverbial wisdom would have been a comfort, she dared not speak to, not from shame of mentioning such private matters of the heart to a member of the “lower orders,” but simply because she knew that all Nanny Potter’s loyalties were with Edmund and it was not very likely that, in nursery parlance, she would listen to tales against her very favourite.

  So Ivor said nothing more, was almost indecently uninquisitive you might have said. And a couple of days later, her eyes intent on the porridge she was flopping into the children’s bowls, she said carelessly:

  “Did you know that Edmund was in love with someone else?”

  “So that’s what the trouble is! Did he tell you?”

  “He expects me to divorce him.”

  “He wants to marry the other woman, is that the idea?”

  But one cannot speak of emotional matters so early in the morning, let alone that there was the breakfast to get and serve. She found herself at her tasks for the rest of the day mentally engaging in long heart-rending conversations with him, conversations in which, curiously enough, he said practically nothing but was an Aeolian harp responding to the wind of her eloquence. For once she was actually eager to get him alone. She was aware of Ilse’s raised eyebrows when she invited him to come for a walk with her that evening.

  They walked in silence for a little way. Then Ivor said:

  “I’ve been thinking all day of what you told me.”

  With that opening, she could plunge right in.

  “...some horrible American girl he’s picked up. You know what they’re like, Ivor. He’ll be sick of her in three months. As a matter of fact, I don’t suppose he really means to marry her at all. I think it’s just that he’s tired of me and wants to be free. As though that was all there is to marriage! That’s what I tried to explain to him, but he won’t listen, he won’t believe me. He’s like a horrible stubborn child – just stands there with a wooden face and shuts his ears to everything you’re saying, till your head feels quite bruised and bleeding from banging it against the stone wall of his mind.” She put her hands to her temples, as though they really were bruised.

  Ivor murmured that he did sound unreasonable.

  “Could we sit down on this wall a little? You’re racing along so fast, I can’t keep up.”

  She stopped, relaxed, and even laughed a little, guiltily.

  “My poor Ivor! How patient you have been to listen to this long tedious complaint. This is how all wives go on, I suppose, when they’ve been married ten years.” She gave a dry little unamused laugh. “I never thought I should be one of them; I really did believe what they told me about love lasting forever. Isn’t it absurd? I thought it was my love and all my prayers that brought Edmund safely through the war; but if it was only for another woman, it wasn’t worthwhile.

  “Why did God bring him back, if I’m not meant to have him anymore? I’d rather he was dead; then at least I shouldn’t have los
t him; he would still be mine.” She crossed herself rapidly. “I didn’t mean that,” she said. She said in a low humble voice: “I’m very self-willed, I know. I ought to make a willing sacrifice of my feelings. But I can’t! I can’t! I don’t believe I’m meant to give him up to God. Or why did God give him to me in the first place, in marriage? Marriage is a sacrament and can never be revoked. Marriage is only ended in death.”

  So that was the way she felt about it, he thought.

  Particularly not looking at her, he asked:

  “Do you love him?”

  “Why, of course I do,” she said, and laughed.

  “No, no. This is just between you and me. I don’t want to know what you consider the appropriate emotion, but what you really do feel in that funny little heart of yours.”

  “Why, you donkey, of course I love him! Haven’t you understood a word of all I’ve been saying?”

  “All right,” he said. “I’m sorry! Let’s go back now, shall we?”

  “Why are you so nice to me, I wonder?”

  He looked down at her with a wry smile.

  “Nice to you? Because I give you a little of the consideration and sympathy you need? You don’t ask for very much from life, do you? And there’s that great houseful of people for whom you slave your fingers to the bone – ”

  “Oh, hush!” She put her fingers to his lips and he caught and held them. “You mustn’t say anything against them. I couldn’t speak to my own family. You wouldn’t expect it. But, oh! Ivor, it has been such a relief to tell someone at last. You’ve no idea!”

  He looked at her whimsically: “One day I’ll tell you my secret,” he said.

  But she did not raise her head, only continued to flatten and stroke the lapel of his coat, as though she had not heard. She whispered something; then cleared her throat and asked timidly, with painful hopefulness:

  “Ivor! Do you think he’ll ever come back to me?”

  *

  From her bedroom window Ilse had chanced to see their return, as they stood in the drive with Linda fingering his lapel shyly and Ivor gazing down at the top of her head, his expression invisible, Ilse was very roguish to him about it. But, queerly, he made no response – only looked at her ironically with quirked brows. She gazed back insolently. A slow reluctant smile curled the corners of Ivor’s mouth. Ilse’s lips parted slightly, like a hungry flower. She might have been about to speak; but she said nothing.

  Ivor said: “It must be very dull for you here, day in, day out. Do you never go to London?”

  “I could go to London if I wished,” Ilse replied languidly. “If there was anything to go for.”

  Ivor grinned suddenly and, turning, limped away.

  At supper that night he remarked casually that he was going up to town on the following day. Linda looked disappointed.

  “You never told me,” she said stupidly.

  “Now what am I supposed to reply to that accusation?” asked Ivor good-humouredly.

  Ilse said: “I, too, should be going to London. I am needing to visit my dentist. I have a tooth here – ”

  She opened her mouth wide and groped an indicative finger at the back somewhere.

  He and Ilse travelled up on different trains but met in the immense palm-fringed and rococo lobby of the Universal Palace. She had an amber-filled glass beside her. She glanced up at him casually when he appeared, with no change of expression, with no word of greeting.

  He said pleasantly: “It was nice of you to come. I was half afraid you might change your mind at the last moment.”

  “I always do what I want to do,” she said, giving him a slow sombre glance.

  “My word, do you really?” Ivor said, pretending to be impressed. “I do admire people who manage to do that.”

  “Also,” she said coolly, “you must not take me for a fool. I understand more than you think, perhaps. And I am very, very discreet. You need have nothing to fear.”

  Ivor said: “You know, I don’t believe we’re talking of the same thing. Or are we?” Her eyes met his and held them. “Oh, yes, I see we are!” He smiled mischievously.

  She said huskily: “You have a very beautiful mouth...”

  *

  ...Her hair lay across his face. She stirred in his arms and remarked:

  “I suppose you think me very wicked to Werner.”

  His arm tightened round her obligingly.

  “My pretty Katzchen, don’t let us spoil a delightful moment by such considerations.”

  She pinched him hard.

  “Little beast!”

  “I want you should understand that I take from Werner nothing that is any longer his. At Dauchau, you understand, they have done such things to him…”

  “Look, Katzchen darling, it isn’t terribly tactful of you to tell me these things about your husband. It makes me feel uncomfortable, guilty; not a nice thing to do. I’d rather hear that he was cruel to you, beat you, or simply that you no longer loved him.”

  “But of course I love him. What are you thinking? That I love you, you – you – creature, you?”

  Ivor laughed and pulled her face down to his.

  “No, no, I can tell you don’t!”

  Between kisses he added, laughing: “And what’s more. I don’t care a fig for you either!”

  “Oh, no,” she purred contentedly in his arms. “We all know who is a fig for you, though.”

  “Do tell!”

  “Do I have to tell you who you are in love with? It gives me great pleasure to think of it,” she avowed, lying against him like a huge voluptuous cat. She began to quiver with wicked mirth. “It is the good little mousy Linda! Who you will never get, I think. She is much too honourable. Ha, Ha! Poor Ivor!”

  CHAPTER 7

  Now Linda had someone to confide in, and confide she did. She was never alone with this much-to-be-pitied Ivor without immediately plunging back into these sad seas wherein her mind eddied wretchedly round and round to the point of foundering. Ivor was quite remarkably patient.

  She was endeavouring now to take more pains with her appearance. She usually remembered at least to dash some powder on her face and run a lipstick – though it was perhaps rather too garish a red – over her mouth. Often she managed to get her hair set, and she bought herself a highly unsuitable dress in the altogether vain hope that Edmund would find her more interesting if she changed her style and became more sophisticated, as she imagined the American girl to be. She had the idea that she should compete with her on her own ground.

  As it happened, on the rare occasions when Edmund came down, it was not to stay – a mere rushed few hours, for one purpose or another, generally business, and either she forgot to put the dress on, or if she did he didn’t notice it. With her bare legs and sandals, she only succeeded in looking like a girl dressed up when she did wear the frock. She never could remember to wear stockings, for they only got ripped into holes in the garden or split with a sudden crack when she knelt to her domestic chores, and, “one simply couldn’t afford the coupons,” she said. Her little ruined hands were red and their nails hopelessly bitten still. Really she looked better when she didn’t try so hard, and was just her simple take-it-or-leave-it self. However, Ivor said nothing to dishearten her, and she was not entirely unaware of the way his eyes rested on her. She found it not unpleasing. Yet she was wholeheartedly shocked and furious when he kissed her.

  It happened one evening when Ivor had been more than usually sympathetic and she had been wrought to the point of tears, a passion of weeping for Edmund, when suddenly Ivor lifted her face, tear-stained and forlorn, and with calm decisiveness kissed her parted lips in a manner that could hardly be mistaken by the most innocent for the chaste kiss of pure affection. Not till he chose to let her go could she express her outrage. She put her fist to her mouth, her eyes large with horror.

  “You beast! ... How could you?” she cried in sincere dismay.

  “Do you thin
k I’m made of stone? Here you weep, almost in my arms. I should be less than human if I didn’t want to comfort you.”

  “You weren’t trying to comfort me, you loathsome beast! Don’t make it worse by lying.”

  “Very well, then. I was trying to comfort myself. What do you think it’s like for me day after day, listening to you talk all the time about another man, seeing you so miserable, and being so helpless? Have you ever given it a thought? You know I’m madly in love with you, don’t you?”

  “Of course I didn’t. You oughtn’t to talk to me like this,” she said unsteadily.

  “Why not?” he said boldly. “Why shouldn’t you hear of someone else’s unhappiness for a change? You think I’ve taken advantage of you by kissing you just now, but, believe me, it’s nothing compared with the advantage you’ve taken of me day after day, playing on my feelings.”

  She stared.

  “I don’t understand. And I think it’s dreadful of you to speak like this. I don’t know how you dare, when you’re Edmund’s friend!”

  “Is it any worse than the things his wife has said about him?”

  “You must be mad! I won’t listen to you,” she said, and ran away.

  They were excruciatingly civil to one another for the next few days when they had occasion to address a remark in public, but when they were alone each preserved a rigid silence toward the other.