‘‘I imagine so, somehow. Let’s see: Berkeley Reckitt were the underwriters. I don’t know exactly how it will work out; but if you’d like me to I’ll put in a few inquiries to see if it can be done without publicity. There’s no point in blackening Tracey’s name unnecessarily.”
‘‘I wouldn’t want to, Oliver. He was … Besides, there’s his mother. It would kill her if it ever came out.” She paused. ‘‘But what will happen to the insurance on the house? That isn’t mine to return.”
‘‘Oh, that’s a fair settlement. I think I’m right in saying that that money legally belongs to the trustees, and no insurance company could claim it back. The trustees didn’t fire the place.”
She fumbled with the door handle, and I got out and opened it for her.
‘‘Will you come in for a minute?’’ she said.
I shook my head. ‘‘Thanks. The feeling dates back a bit, but I’m still scared of your father.”
She smiled. ‘‘Hard to believe. Anyway, it’s rather difficult to be frightened of a man crippled with arthritis.”
I said: ‘‘D’you think you can overlook all the shabby suspicions that have been festering inside me all these months?’’
‘‘Oh.… Yes. Were they shabby? I can’t judge. If I’d been in your position …”
‘‘Will you meet me to-morrow evening, then?’’
She stood a minute on the pavement, looking up at the stars.
‘‘Yes,’’ she said.
Next morning I phoned Henry Dane to see if I could make a date to talk the thing over with him. He said he was leaving town almost at once and wouldn’t be back until Saturday, so I fixed to go and see him on the following Monday. There wasn’t any hurry, and he, with the law under his fingers as well as insurance, would have the know-how if anybody had. I had lunch with Charles Robinson, and very nearly put the case to him. But hypothetical cases usually boil down to personal ones, and though Charles was as good a friend as I’d got, he was an underwriter by profession and I didn’t know quite what his attitude might be. I wished it was his firm which had been involved.
In the evening I called for Sarah; and on the Tuesday it was the same, and on the Wednesday. Life suddenly began to have no recognizable identity with what it had been a week ago. Everything was newly significant. It’s no good describing that feeling because those who’ve known it won’t need the description and those who haven’t won’t recognize it as true.
We met and talked about the fire and the consequences of the fire; and the feeling of Tracey’s death was never far from us; yet I hardly remember a thing we said because all that was only on the perimeter of my attention. She was the centre of it, and she knew it, and she still came out with me. I wondered if it was just admiration that she liked. God knows I gave it her. But I began to feel it was more than that. I began to know it was more than that, but sometimes you distrust your own instinct.
On the Wednesday we had dinner at one of the big hotels and danced afterwards. She’d been reluctant to come because she still had a feeling of not wanting to be seen out and about in quite this way by Tracey’s friends. We sat and talked, as usual, and then danced.
She said: ‘‘I thought you didn’t spend your youth socially.”
‘‘What? Oh, no.… This came later, such as it is. I haven’t done much of it.”
‘‘Nor have I—for seven years. I used to like it.”
‘‘Used to?’’
‘‘Yes. Don’t encourage me.”
‘‘But I want to.”
‘‘I know. Dangerous.”
‘‘Who for?’’
‘‘It could get out of hand. Sublimation of my old love for ballet.…”
‘‘Good. Let’s help each other.”
‘‘How?’’
‘‘Well.… Sublimation of my old love for Sarah.”
She didn’t answer that. She was quite tall beside me. A maroon frock with a Medici collar. One pearl ear-ring. Some women—a few women—when they’re dancing seem to have a waist and no feet, a balance and no weight, so that a pleasant sensation gets above itself and becomes an art, a form of sophisticated experience. She was one of them, and I told her so.
When we got back to the table she said: ‘‘ Why do you say sometimes that you can’t express yourself as you want to? Because it isn’t true, is it?’’
‘‘It’s—partly true. Half the trouble is I can’t imagine other people are interested.”
‘‘But you think I am.”
‘‘Aren’t you?’’
‘‘Yes.… That’s what I mean.” She smiled quickly at me.
‘‘It doesn’t convince me of anything.”
‘‘That’s the other half of the trouble. A lack of faith, is it? There’s something in you, isn’t there, that won’t—believe …”
I didn’t speak.
‘‘What’s the matter with you, Oliver?’’ she asked quietly. ‘‘Did all your dreams fail?’’
‘‘I only ever had one—a grown-up one, I mean.”
‘‘What was that?’’
I smiled back at her. ‘‘ I thought we’d got that clear.”
After a while she said: ‘‘ That’s all very well but … it isn’t the grown-up ones that matter in this respect, is it? You’ve got a thing about yourself—dating back I don’t know how long—and it isn’t valid any longer—not any of it. How d’you suppose you’ve done what you have done, during and since the war? Just because you’re a driver, a hard worker; is that what you think? Well, it isn’t true. Tracey may have made a friend of you for his own reasons but—other people haven’t.”
‘‘No.… I thought they had but they hadn’t—thank God.”
‘‘I didn’t mean just me. There’s Michael Abercrombie; and this Henry Dane you speak of. And in the army too. There was a man I met the other week called John Graves. I expect there are lots of others. They don’t speak well of you because of what they can get out of you.”
‘‘No. John——’’
‘‘So why not stop being like that? Why not let yourself be accepted as likeable, direct, honest, kind; all the things you are but don’t believe you are. I used to think—at one time I used to think you were intolerant towards other people. But now I know the only person you’re really intolerant towards is yourself.”
We danced again but talked very little.
As we left the floor and sat down I said: ‘‘You know it’s all very well to say those things about me. I like listening to it—and I’m grateful.…”
‘‘I don’t want you to be grateful. That——’’
‘‘Well, I am—whether they’re really true or you only think they’re true. But yours is the only approval or disapproval I really care about. Maybe there’s things the matter with me, as you say. Good stuff for the trick psychologist. But the chief thing wrong these last few years is that I’ve been in love with a woman who is—and always has been—out of my reach.”
She said: ‘‘You think that’s the chief thing wrong?’’
‘‘I’m sure it’s the chief thing wrong.”
She looked at me and smiled doubtfully.
I added: ‘‘But of course I don’t ask you to believe it.”
‘‘Perhaps you ought to. Perhaps it would be a worse thing if I was lacking in faith too.”
My pulses began to beat. I said: ‘‘Darling Sarah, I don’t know what you mean by that, but it seems an on-coming sort of remark.”
She struck a match from the box in the middle of the table and watched the flame.
‘‘Does it?’’
The match went out. She looked up and met my look. And I knew then that she wasn’t out of my reach any more.
I paid the bill somehow and we got out of the hotel. We’d come by taxi, and the commissionaire got one for us. As soon as he’d shut the door, before the driver had flicked down his flag, I said:
‘‘Will you marry me?’’
‘‘Yes, Oliver.”
‘‘When?’’
‘‘When?’’
‘‘When you say.”
‘‘You mean that, Sarah?’’
‘‘… Yes. If you want me to.”
‘‘To-morrow? Saturday?’’
The driver pushed open the partition. ‘‘Did you say Twenty-one or Thirty-one Ponting Street?’’
‘‘Either,’’ I said. ‘‘You take your choice.”
He shut the window, muttering, and the taxi lurched out into the traffic.
I didn’t try to touch her. Her voice had been queer, uncertain. After a bit I said: ‘‘ Saturday?’’
‘‘What—in three days?’’
‘‘Could you face it? Before anyone has time for wise advice—or good intentions. A very quick matter-of-fact thing at a registry office, and then Paris or Rome or somewhere. So that there’s the absolute minimum of fuss.… I’m not afraid for myself but I am for you. If you let the light of too many cold mornings——’’
‘‘Please,’’ she said. ‘‘It won’t make the slightest difference.”
‘‘But I know it’s harder for you. I’ve no ties—or people to mourn—or anyone’s feelings to consider. You see——’’
‘‘I’ve other people’s feelings to consider …”
‘‘Your father——’’
‘‘And there’s Mrs. Moreton. She always liked you—I don’t think she would be upset after a time. But she’d think it far too soon. She … and Victor …”
‘‘I’d be sorry to upset them. But wouldn’t they get over it? Won’t it seriously, really, have to be at once, almost before they know—or not for twelve months?’’
‘‘I don’t know. It might be three.”
‘‘We’ve lost ten years already.”
And it was in fact as if something had broken down between us, something that had been accumulating for years, perhaps unknown to me, certainly unknown to her. She’d drawn well back into the corner of the cab. I couldn’t see her face. It was as if in spite of this sudden give-way of things she was trying to keep her balance, trying to satisfy the critic, the reasonable mind within
herself.
There wasn’t anything more said until the taxi-driver, guessing
right, drew up at No. 21. I got out and began to pay him. Sarah
looked at me but didn’t say anything. As we went up the steps
and she took out her key I said:
‘‘I must see your father to-night—try to explain to him …”
She said: ‘‘It’s half-past one. He’ll have been in bed two hours.”
‘‘Oh, God, I’d forgotten. Can you break it to him?’’
‘‘If you could come round to-morrow. I’ll phone you in the
morning.”
Somehow we were inside the house.
I said: ‘‘When I come, can I bring the air tickets for Saturday?’’
She said: ‘‘Sometimes you frighten me, Oliver. There’s no let-up,
is there? There’s been no let-up since Sunday afternoon.”
‘‘Sorry. I’m sorry.”
‘‘No, it isn’t that. But some ways we’re much alike. Isn’t that a
risk? I’m trying to think for two.”
When she got her mouth free I spoke just ahead of her. ‘‘Saturday?’’
‘‘In a queer way I want to as much as you. To take this now.
Now. It’s something stronger than either of us.… But I’d not even
have time to try to explain …”
‘‘Saturday?’’ I said, and began to kiss round her mouth for a
change.
She said: ‘‘Oh, darling, don’t …” in such a drowning sort of
voice that I stopped.
We clung to each other then in the darkness for a minute or
two while I waited for her decision.
She said: ‘‘There’s that money that doesn’t belong to me.…”
‘‘It won’t hurt for a week or two. They won’t expect interest on
it.”
‘‘There’s Tracey’s memory.…”
My hands slackened. ‘‘I can’t fight that.”
After a pause she said: ‘‘But since Sunday I’ve had to revalue
everything. Do I owe him a lot or very little? I don’t know. That’s
still a new thought.”
Chapter Seventeen
I suppose it was asking for trouble rushing my fences like that. At any rate I got trouble. But when you’ve wanted something for ten or eleven years, at first subconsciously, but then very consciously, and for all except four days of that time.…
And besides, when I was away from her I was never for an instant sure of her. Spectres that she would change her mind kept me company everywhere. I could see her swayed by other people’s opinions; and no amount of conviction that she was not a person easily put off her course made any difference. I knew what I felt but I had no sureness how she felt Perhaps it was that shortcoming in me. She’d called it a lack of faith.
I knew that she’d really cared for Tracey more than anyone, knew that she was suffering a temporary let-down in her feelings for him, feared that I was catching her on the rebound. There was such a difference between us, between him and me, in every way. Let her first impulses fail.…
So among all the other sensations as the plane taxied along the runway and then took off lumpishly into the wind, was one of relief. Whatever happened now, the thing was done. There was no going back. I looked down and thought: bits of paper scattering.… Oliver Branwell, the stoker, the hobo, the conscript, the officer, the adjuster, the partner; tear them up, let them blow.
I looked down at the small knot of figures. Michael would go back to the office. I remembered his startled face when I told him, the puzzled, half jesting way he took it; his tall stooping square-shouldered figure standing beside me in the church—Sarah had wanted it in church. Dr. Darnley would probably go back to his club. I’d had lunch with him there yesterday: a big early Victorian place that looked as if it hadn’t been decorated since Albert died; we sat opposite each other and sized each other up over the hors d’œuvres and the roast pork, and he didn’t know he’d ever seen me before. To me he was equally unrecognizable as the man who’d spoken brusquely to the tramp; too quiet and restrained—perhaps more than half the hostility had been in me that night. We talked about arthritis and the exploitation of Coca-Cola in Egypt and the origin of Lloyds and the rise in the price of newsprint, and everything except Sarah. He was just finishing a book on the dialects of South India. I’d never known, I’d always thought him a doctor of medicine.
Neither Mrs. Moreton nor Victor had turned up. Mrs. Moreton was in the Isle of Wight, and Victor had been leaving for Scotland on the night train on Friday; Sarah had telephoned him, and she said he had been quite nice about it.
I glanced at her sitting beside me. She had asked to have the gangway seat because she didn’t like looking down. There was a lot we should have to talk of, lots of prosaic stuff; but at present that could slide. The old existence was still too near to start making arrangements for a new one. The only thing that mattered was Sarah’s hand, which she’d not yet taken from my arm.
Very late that night as we lay together in the dark listening to the thinning traffic of the Rue de Rivoli, I told her a bit about the way it had been with me as a kid. I’d never told anyone before and she seemed to want to know.
I told her how, when I was seven, my father lost his job because the line laid up his ship, and how he never got any other proper work, and how we moved from a house to three rooms, and from there to two in a tenement, and how he rotted quicker than his ship.
I tried to tell her something of the sort of life it had been: the steamy pubs with their red blinds drawn, the tough kids, the fish and chip shops with greasy papers blowing down the street, the pawnbrokers and the touts, and the scores of idle men, like prisoners, the derelict sheds, the ships’ sirens and the muddy tide. And how
my mother couldn’t see that being out of work wasn’t a personal disgrace, and how she never let my father forget how it was with him. There was never any repose in those two rooms; you couldn’t come back to them—even I as a boy couldn’t come back to them—with the right feeling at all. There was more sanctuary on the street corner.
I said: ‘‘Talking of it now, after so long, I get a bit ashamed of the way I’ve felt about her. You set up to judge a person, and then in a few years, when you get nearer their age, you wonder if you could have made out any better yourself. In many ways she was good: thrifty, handy with her needle, efficient, painfully clean. All the things that should have been helpful—that were. It’s hard to explain, but, you see, he—he had different horizons—if he’d been allowed—if he’d not for ever been dragged back to his own failure. He used to try to make me see.…”
‘‘What happened?’’
‘‘Oh, nothing dramatic. At least, the end was; but that was only the last lap. The rest had happened before. It was only that last year or so that I was old enough to notice the way he was going downhill. He must have felt things just as much as my mother, but it was a different sort of pride. He kept it inside himself. He wasn’t a particularly easy man to know.”
There was silence. Sarah said: ‘‘ Was he like you to look at too?’’
I didn’t answer. Yet talking about it had loosened something, eased something that had been held in too long. I said: ‘‘For about three years he’d been promised the next job with his old company. It was something to hang on to—a sort of lifeline. Mother was always talking about it. ‘When you go to sea again.’ ‘ When your father gets that job back.’ ‘When my husband joins his ship.’ It was a bit shop-worn, but we all reckoned on it more or less. Then one day when my mother had gone to visit Marion, who was married to a clerk, Dad got a phone message asking him to go round to the offices at once. The vacancy’d come up. He went along full of hope, and they asked him his age and he said he was fifty last birthday, and they turned him down for a younger man—even though he’d been waiting since he was thirty-nine. He came back and shut the door and window and turned on the gas. I was working in a garage then, and I found him when I got back. He wasn’t quite dead, and I might have been able to save him if I’d known what to do or we’d been able to get a doctor in time. But he passed out with his head on my knee without ever properly coming round. The only word he said was ‘Dorothy’.”
Fortune Is a Woman Page 14