by Nevil Shute
Captain Wysock comes of a very high-born family. His father is a count and has big estates near a place called Jabinka and a town house in Warsaw. He has been very generous to Beryl, and we feel that as things have turned out a divorce would be the fairest thing all round, and I hope you will think so too.
Beryl wants me to say she sends you her love, and we all send our sympathy in what must be a shock to you. But I am sure that it will all be for the best.
Your affectionate father-in-law,
Albert Cousins.
I was at Damascus when this letter came to Cairo, and I didn’t get it till I got back to Egypt a few days later. By that time the letter from Beryl had just come in, so I got them both together. That one read:
Darling Tom,
I saw Dad’s letter before he sent it off and I have waited a bit before I wrote so as you should get his first. I don’t know what you must be thinking, Tom, and believe me I wouldn’t have had things happen like this for the world. It’s such a mix-up. But I’m sure the best way to get it straight now is for you to divorce me. I couldn’t come back and live with you again not after what has happened, not even if you wanted me which I suppose you don’t, not now. Feodor and I are very much in love and we want to get married, so if you divorce me that will be best and you’ll be free to look for someone else. I’m so terribly sorry it’s turned out like this. I never thought a thing like this would ever happen to me.
I wish you could meet Feodor, Tom—he’s such a dear. His family is terribly rich with a big castle in the country and everything; I do hope they’ll approve of me. He hasn’t seen them since the war began, but he knows they’re all right. After the war, when we’re married, we’re going there to live. He’s given me the most lovely engagement ring, diamonds and emeralds, but first of all we’ve got to get the divorce.
Don’t be miserable about all this, Tom. I know it’s all for the best.
Your loving
Beryl.
I was up to the eyes in work at that time. I read these letters through with my mind half occupied with the problems of getting enough aircraft serviceable to maintain our scheduled services, and they were just another thing to me. It was like when you’re counting on an aircraft being finished for the morning flight to Khartoum, and an engineer comes up at six o’clock in the evening and tells you he needs a right-hand contact breaker and they’ve only got left-hand ones in the store and they’ve been telephoning all round and there aren’t any right-hand ones in Cairo. Beryl and her boy friend, in my mind, took their turn in the queue with all my other worries, and must wait for attention till I got the decks cleared a bit. At the same time, I was sick and angry when I got these letters, because there’d been a lot of this sort of thing going on in England. Somebody once told me that ten per cent of the wives of men serving overseas had been unfaithful to them. Now I was in with that ten per cent.
In the brief moments that I had to think about my own affairs that day I wondered how in hell she expected me to set about a divorce in a foreign country like Egypt, in the middle of all my work, in wartime. And then I wondered if they were all mad to go believing such a transparent, cock-and-bull story as this Polish soldier had told them, about his father being a count, and huge estates, and all that. It was a crazy, miserable business that they’d written out to plague me with; the only thing to do was to put it out of my mind and get on with the work.
I had to go to Luxor next day, where a young fool of a pilot had run one of our Ansons into the tail of a Dakota of Transport Command. I had to clear up the accumulation of paper work on my desk before going off again in the morning; I worked on late that night. It was after ten o’clock when I had time for my own affairs and I was dead tired, but I had to write to Beryl because I should be away for another two or three days. I got the letters out and read them through, and I was bitterly angry once again that they should plague me so.
I pulled a sheet of paper to me, and I wrote:
Darling girl,
I got your letter and your Dad’s together when I got back here after being away for a few days. I won’t say what I think because you probably know that, but I’ll say this. I think you must be bloody well daft, all the lot of you.
First of all, I’ll bet you a hundred quid to a sausage that this Polish officer’s father isn’t a count and that he hasn’t got any estates and that the ring he gave you is either stolen or phony. For God’s sake snap out of it and act like a grown-up woman, and tell your Dad to do that too. You’ve been sucked in and fallen for the oldest story in the world, my girl. That’s what’s happened to you.
Now about this divorce you want. I don’t know how in hell you expect me to get you a divorce from here even if I wanted to, and I’ve not made up my mind about that yet. What do you think this is—the Court of Chancery, with lawyers going round in wigs and gowns and that? I’ll tell you what it is. It’s a bloody hot, dirty, dusty aerodrome, no fans and blinding sun, and grit all over my desk. I’ve come five hundred miles from one just like it today, and I’m going off to another like it tomorrow. There’s no English lawyers here and no English law. If it’s a divorce you’re thinking of, you’ll have to wait till I get back to England in a year from now, and then I’ll see if I’m prepared to give it you. Some of you girls seem to think you can get a divorce just by putting a penny in the slot.
You think this over a bit more, and then write and tell me how you’re going on. If I was in England now we’d soon find out if this Polish officer is a count or not, and you’d find out what the end of a strap feels like, my girl. I’m not at all sure that you’d find out what a divorce feels like. You can’t just pick up being married and put it down, like that. You think it over a bit more.
Ever your loving husband,
Tom.
Considering this letter, it seems to me that I said everything that was in my mind, except that I still loved her. I didn’t think to tell her about that. Perhaps I thought she knew.
Nothing much happened then. She didn’t write again, nor did I. I was very sore about this Polish officer, and till that was all cleaned up I hadn’t got much to say to her. If I’d been in England I’d have cleaned it up fast enough. I did sit down once or twice to write, but I never finished a letter. I could never think of anything to say that wouldn’t be pleading with her for our marriage, and I was damned if I’d do that.
I had an arrangement to send her money through the bank, deducted from my salary when it was paid in, and this went on as usual; she still took my fifteen pounds a month in spite of her Polish count with his large estates. I was content to leave the matter so. I was far too busy in those Cairo years of war to bother about any other girl. I used to wonder sometimes if I was married or not, and how it was all going on, and then I’d put it out of my mind. Time enough to start and sort out that one when I got home. I think I felt that so long as she went on taking my money there was nothing that couldn’t be ironed out when finally we got together.
The end of the German war came, and the end of the Japanese war, but there was still a vast amount of transport needed in the Near East, and I had to serve my full time out. It wasn’t till the middle of November 1945 that I finally got a date for my air passage home, and then I wrote to her quite shortly and told her I was coming and I’d come and see her at her Dad’s house as soon as I landed in England, probably on the Tuesday of the following week.
I landed in England on the day I’d said, and went up to London on the airline bus. It was pretty late in the afternoon when we got in to Town and I decided to stay in London that night rather than go down to Morden there and then; I didn’t want to have to stay in the same house if this Polish officer was living with her or anything like that. I took my bag to a hotel I knew about just off the Euston Road, that wasn’t too expensive, and I got a room there.
I went out and walked about the streets after my tea, down Tottenham Court Road to Cambridge Circus and to Piccadilly. The V-bombs had made a good bit of blitz damage sin
ce I was there, but London seemed much the same as ever. I was the one who was different. When I left England I hadn’t been too sure of myself; I was good enough on the bench or in the hangar, but it always seemed to me that other people knew much more about the world and business than I did. Coming back after my two years in the East, I felt self-confident. I knew that I could hold my job alongside anyone, and teach them a thing or two besides. When I worked in England I was just Tom Cutter in Airservice Ltd. When I left Cairo I’d been Mr. Cutter to everybody for a long time, from the Managing Director down.
I was looking forward to meeting Beryl again, and I wasn’t much worried about this Pole. I reckoned I could sort out that one without too much trouble. She couldn’t be married to him, and now that the war was over he’d be going back to his own country. The baby might be a problem, but I don’t think I really held that much against her. I was still fond of Beryl and quite prepared to make the best of things and fall in love with her again. There wasn’t any other girl.
I went down by Underground after breakfast next morning and got out at Morden Station and walked up through the streets to her home. It was a fine morning for the end of November, with a pale, wintry sort of sun. I was still in light clothes and a raincoat only, and I remember walking quick, because it was chilly. I went in at the little front garden gate and knocked on the front door, and her young brother came and opened it.
“Morning, Fred,” I said. “Remember me?”
He hesitated, and I looked at him more closely; it was almost as if he had been crying. And then he said, “Oh, yes. How are you, Tom?”
“I’m fine,” I said. “Beryl in?”
“Wait a mo’,” he said. “I’ll go and tell Mum.” And with that he turned and fairly scuttled off into the kitchen at the back of the house.
I waited at the door. It was bound to be a bit awkward for them, but I didn’t care; I hadn’t made the awkwardness. I could hear a lot of whispering going on in the kitchen and then her mother came out to me, wiping her hands nervously upon her apron. And when I saw her face I knew that she’d been crying, too, and for the first time I felt fear of what was coming.
“Morning, Tom,” she said hesitantly. “You didn’t get our letter?”
I shook my head. “No.”
She opened the door of the sitting room. “Come in here.” She led the way in. “I wish Father was here to tell you, but he’s just stepped out.”
“What is it?” I asked her. I think I knew by that time what it was.
“It’s Beryl,” she said. The tears began to trickle down her cheeks. “She did it with the oven, with the gas, some time in the middle of the night when we was all asleep.”
She was weeping unrestrainedly now. “Her Dad told her it’ld be all right,” she sobbed. “We all told her. But she was terribly afraid of meeting you.”
CHAPTER TWO
—And I was but a dog, and a mad one to despise
The gold of her hair, and the grey of her eyes.
JOHN MASEFIELD
THERE WASN’T any count, of course, and there weren’t any estates at Jabinka or anywhere else. Captain Wysock had disappeared one day, and her Dad had gone up to London to the Polish Embassy after a time to ask about him. He found that he had been drafted out to Italy. He had been a waiter at a hotel in Warsaw before the war, and he’d got a wife and family out there. They never heard any more of him. The ring was genuine enough, and was worth about sixty quid. I often wonder where that came from.
He beat it soon after the baby was born, in February or March. Her Dad wanted to write and tell me, but Beryl wouldn’t let him. I think she was too proud to want to come crawling back to me as soon as he’d left her flat. She told her people straight to let her affairs alone; she’d sort them out in time the way she wanted to. So they shut up, and probably that was the best thing.
They told me that they thought that in a general sort of way she’d been looking forward to me coming home, although she didn’t tell them much. When my letter came, however, saying that I’d be home in a week, they said she seemed to go all to pieces. First she wanted to go away and not meet me, and then there wasn’t anywhere convenient for her to go to, and then she said she’d have to meet me some time so she’d better get it over. They said she didn’t know what to do. She wasn’t sleeping much, they thought. She’d come down to breakfast one day and say she’d made up her mind to go away, and then by dinner time, they said, she seemed to have forgotten about that and was wondering if the butcher would put by a sheep’s heart for them, because she said I was always partial to heart for dinner if it was on the menu at the canteen.
They said that she was much calmer on the last day, sort of quietlike, and they went to bed quite happy about her. They never heard anything in the night. The baby slept in her room, of course, and at about six in the morning they heard it crying, which was normal, but as she didn’t get up and attend to it her Ma got up after a bit and went in, and she wasn’t in her room, and she hadn’t been to bed. Her Ma called her Dad and went downstairs, and when they opened the door the kitchen was full of gas. Her Dad held his breath and dashed in and turned it off at the oven, and opened the back door and got out into the garden, and then they had to wait a quarter of an hour before they could get in to her. Her Dad went down the road to the call box and telephoned the police.
She had put a cushion in the oven and put her head on that, and laid down to die. She had a copy of The Picturegoer in her hand, open at an article about Anna Neagle and Michael Wilding, the great lovers.
There was no letter, or anything like that.
Her father was inclined to be apologetic to me. “I dunno if we should have written to tell you, after he went off,” he said. “At the time it seemed the best thing to let time go by a bit, like. We knew you’d be home before so long, and we thought things’ld settle down.…”
To comfort him I said, “I couldn’t have done much, if I’d known.” And while I said it, of course, I knew that I was lying. I could have done one thing. I could have written and told her that I loved her.
They had the inquest the day after I arrived, and I went to that with her Dad and Mum. Her Dad had to give evidence about our marriage and this Captain Wysock, and the baby, and me coming home, and how he found her. The coroner asked me if I’d written to her lately, and I said no, and told him about the first letter when I said I wasn’t going to divorce her till she’d thought it over a bit longer. The doctor gave formal evidence about the cause of death, and then the coroner summed it all up.
“We have here one of those unfortunate cases for which the war is largely responsible,” he said. “The evidence is perfectly clear. The deceased woman was unfaithful to her husband during his absence overseas, and gave birth to a child born out of wedlock. She was deserted by her lover, himself a married man, so that in any event no divorce and marriage with her lover would have been possible. Her husband seems to have behaved with commendable restraint and wrote nothing to her which would have led her to take her life, and her family appear to have treated her with sympathy and understanding. The deceased appears to have been the victim of her own conscience, and as the time for the return of her husband drew near she became mentally upset. I find that the deceased committed suicide while the balance of her mind was temporarily deranged.”
He turned to us with fishlike, stupid eyes blinking behind his spectacles. “I must express my sympathy with the husband and the parents of the deceased woman.” With her Dad and Mum I said, “Thank you, sir,” mechanically, and as I did so indignation rose in me that such a fool should be a coroner. Because I killed her, slowly, like a chap might do with small doses of arsenic over a period of years. I started killing her when I married her without giving her a home.
A bit was said about the baby, and a woman, a police court missionary or somebody like that, came up and talked about it to her Dad and Mum. They wanted to keep it and bring it up as a grandchild, which of course it was, and that seemed the best thi
ng to do. Then the inquest was over, and we went back for the funeral which happened in the afternoon.
I left her parents at the cemetery when it was all over; they wanted me to go back home with them for tea, but I said I had to get down to Southampton that night. I hadn’t, but I had got to be alone. I went back to my cheap hotel near Euston Station, and went up into the bare, white bedroom, and sat down on the bed. I must have sat there for two hours or more, just staring at the wall ahead of me.
You can only do a thing for the first time once, and that goes for falling in love. You may do it over and over again afterwards, but it’s never the same. When you chuck away what’s given to you that first time, it’s chucked away for good. I started chucking it away when I married Beryl and went off to Egypt, leaving her alone.
You can be very, very cruel just by acting with restraint, and everyone will say what a good chap you are.
You can kill somebody just by doing nothing, and be complimented at the inquest.
You can be absolutely right all through. And what you’ll get for it is a memory of happiness that might have been, if you had acted a bit kinder.
I might have dozed a bit that night—I don’t know. I know that I heard every hour strike from a church clock outside my room.
I had to go and report to the Company next day, and that, of course, was at Morden, just by her house. I had to go down again to the same Underground station, and there were the same red buses rattling the same Diesel engines at the bus stop by the entrance where we had said good-bye. She had said, “I’ll be terribly lost without you.” She had been.
I stood staring at the place by the Metroland poster where I had stood holding her in my arms, stood there in a daze. I had told her that it was only for two years. She had said miserably, “It sounds like as if it was for ever.” It had been.