She sank down in a chair and struggled with the agonizing little hat that seemed to be gripping her forehead in a vice. Finally she remembered the pin and withdrew it. She pulled off the hat with a sigh of relief and pressed her trembling hand against her damp brow. She lay there in a kind of black trance till Linda loomed through it with a glass of water. Linda opened the windows and a blessed little air wandered across the room. The fly that had been buzzing against the pane dived headlong into the sunshine. Genevieve took greedy sips of the not-quite-cold water. She thought, That was my poor baby making me feel like that; at three months the heart begins to beat; and a tear ran unexpectedly down her cheek. She said aloud:
“I’m sorry to have behaved like that. I’m all right now.” She sat up and powdered her nose, and sleeked out her damp hair with a comb.
Linda said: “I don’t want to hurry you away. Please sit there till you feel all right. But I have to go and see about the dinner, if you’ll excuse me.”
“No, I’m all right,” said Genevieve, getting to her feet. “Don’t go yet, Mrs. Campion! I want to say – ” She came toward her with an expression of deep truth in her face. “I want to tell you that it’s going to be all right. I’m going away. I shan’t see Edmund again. I mean it,” she said and turned away, unable to bear the expression on Linda’s face. She groped about blindly for her bag, her gloves, her hat, and with a little smile pinned crookedly to her lips said good-by to Linda and walked away.
Linda stood there with parted lips and head flung back, listening to the car gliding over the gravel with the sound of rain. Then she closed the door and fell on her knees. She crossed herself and folded her hands. Her lips moved. Her eyes were closed, her upturned face looked like a blind woman’s, rapt, groping, incommunicable.
When she had finished her prayer, she got up with a peaceful face and began straightening the room, fastened the window, pulled-to the shades, stretched the dust covers over the chairs again.
She felt something under her hand as she tucked the sides down and, lifting the sheet, she took out from the chair arm a fine silver hatpin with a great jewel on the end like a smoky yellow diamond.
She recognized it for the ornament that Mrs. Hamilton had worn in her hat. She looked at it discomfited. It was doubtless very valuable, and what on earth was she to do with it? She muffled the sharp point of the pin in her hankie and thrust it into her pocket for the time being.
Her mind was in such a turmoil as she served the dinner that she hardly knew what she was doing. Ivor, who had been tapping away boringly at his typewriter all morning, said to her as he passed:
“What’s the matter? You’re white as a sheet and your eyes are like jewels! What’s happened?”
“Wait for me in the drawing room,” she commanded.
“The drawing room? What kind of a prank is this?”
“We shan’t be interrupted. Please, Ivor? Don’t argue!”
Priscilla saw them whispering in the shadows and looked quickly away for fear of what she might see next. She thought she would die if she should see them embrace.
Linda did embrace Ivor, but not just then; later, when she ran into the drawing room, she flung her arms about him and hugged him ecstatically. Ivor was so taken aback by this totally unexpected caress that he could not even respond to it. It did flash wildly through his mind that perhaps at last she was offering herself to him, but he did not find the notion entirely credible.
“Ivor, I’m so excited!”
“I can tell,” he said dryly. “If I didn’t know I should think you’d been drinking. Kissing me of your own accord! Wonders will never cease!”
“It’s because I’m so happy, darling.”
“Thank you. I didn’t imagine you had suddenly fallen a victim to my charms.”
“Who do you think came to see me this morning?”
“I’m not going to guess, so you might as well tell me.”
“Edmund’s fancy lady...! You may well look amazed. She came to beg me to divorce Edmund...because she’s going to have a baby. What do you think of that?”
“What did you say? No; of course.”
“No; of course,” Linda agreed. “I was very pious about it. Well, I mean, I did think it was disgusting of her to come flaunting her adultery with my husband to my face. Served her jolly well right, I thought, if she was going to have a baby. Though of course she’ll get rid of it. She told me she would.” Linda drummed her heels on the floor. “I do wish you’d been here, Ivor. I made her crawl. It was lovely. Then I told her I was going to have a baby, too. I told her I was seven weeks gone.” Linda fell into wild mirth, pressing her fist against her teeth to stifle the sound. “You should have seen her face! Oh Lord! I thought she was going to faint. Then she said it was all over and she was going away and would never see Edmund again.” Linda clapped her feet in the air. “And she meant it, she meant it. Isn’t it wonderful?”
“Wonderful? You little fool!”
“Now he’ll come back to me, don’t you see? Do be glad for my sake, darling!”
Ivor leaned over her, his face dark and furious.
“You blithering young idiot, don’t you see what you’ve done?” He shook her thin shoulders. “Stop laughing, for Christ’s sake, as if you’d done something clever.”
She sat up, pouting. She wiped the tears of unwise laughter from her eyes, and rubbed her shoulder.
“You hurt me, you brute! Why are you so cross with me! Men are weird!”
“Can’t you see what you’ve done? Haven’t you any sense at all? You’ve put yourself right in the soup, you bloody little fool. What did you want to go and tell her you were having a baby for? She may have believed it was Edmund’s, but Edmund will know damn well it’s not, won’t he?” He continued with slow emphasis, “And when she tells him why she isn’t going to see him anymore, don’t you think he’s going to wonder where you got hold of this baby you were bragging about to his ‘fancy lady,’ as you so vulgarly call her? Doesn’t it occur to you that this is the very opportunity he’s been waiting for? If you’ve been unfaithful to him, he has no religious scruples to prevent him divorcing you. And, by God, he will! You’ve played right into his hands, given him the very information he’s been praying for.”
Linda looked scared to death.
She crouched back in a corner of the sofa and whimpered, her hand plucking at her throat, her frightened, uncomprehending eyes fixed on Ivor’s narrow sneering face.
“I shall tell him I was lying,” she said.
Ivor said dispassionately: “My poor child that will hardly endear you to him, will it?”
...So Linda was thankful to be able to creep up to her room with her headache, after all. For the first time she found herself able to observe her own situation from the outside, as it were. And she saw it in all its hopelessness. She had been a fool ever to imagine she could win Edmund back. That sort of thing only happened in magazines and library romances, not in real life. Edmund wanted to be rid of her. He really wanted to be rid of her. At any price. She saw it all quite clearly now.
Ivor was right; she had been a stupid little fool; but life wasn’t fair. Edmund would never forgive this trick. She knew him; implacable, vengeful, without compunction. She had given him the opportunity he was waiting for. She gave a little sob of self-pity. She wondered, with a dull petrified curiosity, what he would do. Escape! That was what she longed for! She wanted to escape from all her actions, from her fears and loneliness, from him, from them all...
For a long while she sobbed drearily into the pillow, tears that did nothing to dispel the ache at her heart. Then she sat up, fumbling in her pocket for a handkerchief. She stared, with a curious expression, at the hatpin lying on her hand among its folds. She blew her nose and dried her wet cheeks. The fingers of one hand explored gently the region beneath her breast where the ache in her heart seemed like a physical pain. In the triple mirror on her dressing table she could see herself seated
on the edge of the bed, her dark hair tumbled on her dropping shoulders, the picture of woe. She exchanged a glance with herself, knowingly, pityingly. A great blob of tears spilled out and ran down her wan cheeks. From time to time she brushed them away with the back of her hand.
At last she sank back on the pillows and put the medallion she wore round her neck against her lips. On the wall opposite, the infant Jesus leaned forward to take her in his arms. With an odd little grimace of despair Linda suddenly drove the hatpin just under her breast, into the cage where her heart plunged like a terrified bird. Her left hand spasmodically caught the little medallion. Her face contorted as at a vision of terror. And then she lay still on the crumpled coverlet...
CHAPTER 9
Genevieve really meant it when she told Linda she would never see Edmund again. The knowledge that Linda was going to have a child by Edmund, and that her pregnancy was the more recent by some five weeks, filled her with a horror that was insupportable. It was a betrayal of the coarsest, most animal kind. That Edmund all this while had been “carrying on” with his own wife and deceiving his mistress struck her as the basest of lewd treacheries. He had sworn that there had been no intimacy between himself and his wife since he had known Genevieve, and that had been the biggest lie of all. It was more than likely a lie, too, that he had ever asked his wife for a divorce.
Now Genevieve’s one thought was to get away – anywhere, so long as she need never see him again. She thanked God now that she had not told him she was enceinte. A wave of revulsion and self-pity swept over her, and she feared that seeing him might weaken her will. She knew only too painfully how his touch could turn her limbs to water. But this time she was determined to carry out her resolve. Above all things she dreaded a scene. She wanted to slip away without farewell. If her luck held it would not be as impossible as it sounded. Edmund was gorging at a business luncheon in the City and was not likely to be back before three... And that reminded her that she must be sure to get to the bank before then so as to provide herself with sufficient money. She hadn’t the vaguest idea where she was going, but that was the least of her problems.
It was nearly two when she drew up in Brook Street and, leaving the car outside the entrance, hurried upstairs, her mind full of details. There would be various small bills and she must remember to send a covering check to the agent.
She was calling for Alice before she had got her key out of the door. Then she slammed the bolts home and locked it – just in case Edmund came before she had left. She would not let him in; he could think what he liked.
“Alice, we’re leaving,” she announced, pulling off her hat and gloves and flinging them on the bed. “Get out all the trunks. Everything. I’ve got just about an hour to get out of this place, so we’ll have to make it snappy. I’ll help you to pack.”
Alice, dragging in trunks and suitcases, ventured:
“Where’s madam going?”
“I don’t know, Alice. You can send any mail that comes to my bank. It’s just that I have to leave right away, and I’d rather you didn’t know where I was going because then, if anybody asks you, you won’t have to lie when you say you don’t know.”
Since all the doors in the flat were open to facilitate their constant passage to and fro, she instantly heard the sounds she was half waiting for: the terrible quiet sound of the key grating in the lock. She went as white as the slip she held in her hand. She looked at Alice in terror and put her finger to her lips. She had to strain to hear through the thudding of her heart.
The key twisted...then silence...then, cutting the silence like a sword, the bell. Mechanically folding the slip, she stuffed it into a case, her eyes on the front door. The bell rang twice more. He assaulted the door with his fists: “Genevieve!”
“Genevieve!” the door shook in its frame. “I know you’re in because the car’s outside…Genevieve!”
Then there was no sound for so long that she began to relax. All her muscles seemed to ache with their effort of stillness. To avoid the maid’s eye, she stooped and picked up a yellow check sports jacket and tried to push it into an overfull grip. It was while she was on her-knees before the case that a faint sound in the bathroom caught her attention. She paused, trying to identify it... She looked up, on instinct and saw him standing in the doorway. She almost screamed. She sprang to her feet in a spasm of unreasoning terror, clasping an antique silver mirror defensively to her bosom.
He regarded the dishevelled apartment expressionlessly. He could not imagine what had happened. But why lock the door against him? Why look so startled?
“Apparently no one ever dusts a fire escape,” he said, surveying his hands. He stepped into the room. “Going away?” he asked.
“Yes.”
Alice was on her knees slipping shoes into worn-out stockings with the blank and deaf expression of the correct servant; but she heard Edmund ask laconically: “Bad news?” and her mistress answer: “I know everything.”
“What is it that you know, may one ask?”
Her eyes met his accusingly for an instant. She said shakily: “I’m never going to see you again.”
Edmund said: “All right, Alice. You can cut along now.”
She looked askance at her mistress and then ‘cut along’.
Genevieve said: “I’ve been to Hawkswood and I know everything. I never want to see you again.”
“Just like that? You were going to run away and leave me without a word, without giving me a chance to explain?”
Her knees would scarcely support her.
“I don’t want to hear any explanations. I don’t want to talk about it. Please go, Edmund.”
“Damned if I do, till I know what it’s all about.”
She said with bitter clarity: “I have seen your wife and I know she is going to have a baby.”
He looked at her uncertainly and then began to laugh.
“You don’t mean to say you believed her. You might have known she was lying. That is, if she pretended it was mine... Come, you don’t mean you were going to walk out on me just for a fairy tale like that? Oh, my dear, where’s your sense of proportion?”
“Please don’t make a scene, Edmund,” she begged.
“I’m not making you a scene. I’m simply trying to understand how you can be so crazy as to fall into Linda’s trap and do the very thing she wants you to do. Just because she tells you some fudged-up tale about having a baby you go right off the deep end. It isn’t reasonable.”
“It wasn’t a tale.”
“Well, if she’s having a baby, it’s not mine, I can assure you of that. My God, how can you believe it could be when you must know perfectly well that we’ve meant nothing to one another for years? Can’t you see it’s a deliberate trick of hers to separate us?” He stared at her obstinate shut face in despair. He fell silent, thinking in a savage fury of frustration, I’ll kill Linda for this, I swear before God I’ll kill her for this. His feelings toward her just then were utterly merciless, that she should have maliciously succeeded in tricking him out of Genevieve. That he must not lose Genevieve was his one reiterating thought: that he could not afford to lose her and all that she represented to him of wealth and happiness and security: it was as if he said, I will accept life on these terms and no other.
He stood with his back to her, watching her in the dressing-table mirror as she moved to and fro. He kept picking up the bottles and lotions littering its top and pretending to be absorbed in them to hide his sick desperation. For a long time he stood there with a bottle in his hand staring at the label. He must have read it twenty or thirty times without the words reaching his mind. It was called SEDIDORM...his eye wandered incuriously over the Table of Constituents: chloral hydrate 20 grs...potassium bromide 30 gr...extract of hyoscyamus 5 mins...syrup 2 dr... water 1½ ozs... To be taken on retiring. He did not remember her ever taking a sleeping draught; she must have brought this with her from the States, probably to take on the boat. Soon sh
e would be on the boat again, if he could not prevent her. If he could not prevent her. The blood rushed into his face so hotly that he broke into a sudden sweat. He slipped the bottle in his pocket.
“Lord, I want a drink,” he said. “Do you mind?”
“Alice will get you one. Ring the bell,” she said indifferently.
But he had already opened the door and seen Alice’s tail disappearing through the opposite door as he did so. He went into the dining room and poured out two stiffish whiskies. “Alice!” he called. “Where’s the soda?”
When she brought the fresh siphon, he said, squirting a little into each glass, “You’d be sorry to lose your mistress, wouldn’t you?”
“Yes, sir,” said Alice noncommittally.
“Then you’ll be glad to hear that she’s not leaving, after all. A little misunderstanding, Alice,” he said cheerfully. “You run off and enjoy yourself for the rest of the day. We shan’t need you again,” he added, slyly tucking a note in her palm and folding the fingers over it with a fatherly pat.
“What about dinner, sir?”
“We shall be out.”
“Thank you, sir,” said Alice without enthusiasm, and went.
“I thought you could probably do with one, too,” said Edmund, in the bedroom, handing Genevieve her drink.
“No, thanks,” she said stiffly, not looking at him.
“Come on, it’ll buck you up! Can’t we have one last drink together – as if we were parting friends?”
She took the glass, in silence.
He wanted her to meet his eyes, but when he raised her chin she drew sharply away. She shivered.
“Don’t touch me. Please.”
He looked at her ironically.
“Sit down for a few moments. I won’t come near you, I promise, if you can’t withstand me.”
She flushed and her eyes filled with tears. Quickly, she swallowed half the liquid.
“Do you really mean to go?” he asked, with a whimsical look. “Would nothing persuade you to change your mind?”
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