“If only she were dead.” The words came, wrenched from her, close to his ear. “If only she were dead.”
Claire did not call for two days. Nor did John call her. He was constantly with Lotte and constantly she was urging him to marry her. She had a determination, an unquenchable desire to keep what she had, which possibly only a European refugee suckled on horror and lawlessness could possess. It was so powerful that sometimes he could almost believe in the picture she painted, the two of them, buoyed up by love, successfully fighting a hostile world together. Once, at her insistence, he began a letter to Claire, trying to explain. But his pen could hardly move. He was a coward. He knew it and the knowledge paralyzed him. Through Lotte’s eyes, he could see now how deftly in the past Claire had laughed and charmed him away from all the other girls. He was frightened of her. A little worm was in him. He was deathly afraid of an existence without her financial security.
During these days Lotte’s love-making was even more torrid. He submitted to it with abandon, its bitter-sweetness heightened by the realization that somehow it must come to an end. He felt exaltation but near-panic too. There was nothing certain any more, nothing to cling to.
On the third evening, just before he was to go to the waterfall with Lotte, a telegram came for John Tuthill Crane. His fingers shook as he picked it up. He did not have the courage to open it, to face the inevitable. He slipped it into his pocket.
But up at the waterfall, in the place which was so completely associated with his love for Lotte, a strange peace descended on him. As Lotte lay, quiet, with her head on his lap, he took the telegram out of his pocket. She twisted up, snatched it from him, and was going to tear it into pieces. Then she changed her mind. She slit the envelope. In the bright moonlight, he could see her, curiously hunched forward, trying to make out the words.
She handed him the sheet of paper. He lit his cigarette lighter. He read:
AM SO WORRIED, DARLING. FORGIVE YOUR SILLY CLAIRE.
ARRIVING TOMORROW ON SEVEN O’CLOCK TRAIN.
From the telegram his glance moved to Lotte. She was sitting close to him and her dark eyes were gleaming with a wild, unworldly brightness that sent a shiver through him.
“If she came here to see the waterfall …” Lotte’s white hand pointed down, down the chasm at their side. “If she came here and fell …”
A moment of terror came to John Tuthill Crane. Then, astonishingly, it went and something else took its place. A dizzy excitement, a sudden, frightening, violent desire for release. He leaned forward and kissed her. He seemed a giant in size.
He said nothing, but the seed was sown. It would grow.
That night, on their return, Johnny Crane went first to Lotte’s room. They lay quietly, clinging together like two children. They hardly spoke. It was as if their bodies were in such a communion that they could converse without words. But finally, in the soft darkness, the words were spoken. Johnny heard Lotte’s voice almost as if it were in his own mind.
“You’ll take her to the waterfall. I’ll be there as a witness. Or you can be the witness and I’ll …”
Mrs. Claire Crane moved up the hotel steps, her gloved hand lying lightly on her son’s arm. John had never seen her more exquisitely turned out. Her lavender dress and big hat, both deliberately unyouthful, completed a portrait delicate as a Gainsborough. In the taxi from the station, she had been all charm, amusing him with anecdotes of his nephews’ measles, commenting wittily on the new Cyril Connolly book she had with her. There was not the faintest trace of the neurotic virago who had babbled over the telephone.
Thrilling inwardly to his purpose, John slipped into a pretense of his mother’s mood with an ease that astonished him.
When she saw the recreation hall, Mrs. Crane gave her little silvery laugh. “My dear, how exactly like your Great Aunt Emily.” John Tuthill Crane smiled. He had anticipated the remark.
He had arranged with Lotte that she should sit at the table next to theirs at dinner. She was already there when he led his mother into the dining room. It was simple, after they had settled themselves, to make a casual introduction.
Mrs. Claire Crane smiled sweetly, but the keen scrutiny from her clear blue eyes did not escape John.
“Delighted,” she murmured. “How nice to know that John has found pleasant acquaintances. I was so afraid he would be bored.”
Ever since a prewar trip to Spain, Claire had adopted the Spanish habit of taking a “digestive” stroll after a meal. There was no difficulty in bringing the conversation around to the waterfall. As arranged, it was Lotte who said: “You should take your mother up to see it by moonlight, Johnny.”
“A waterfall by moonlight. How delicious.” Mrs. Crane put her hand over John’s. “Of course we must go—Johnny.” She smiled at Lotte. “And you must come too.”
Unexpected panic seized John. He found himself stammering, “It’s rather steep, Mother. Up the mountain. I—”
“Darling, I’m not quite that decrepit yet.” Mrs. Crane tapped his cheek and turned again to Lotte. “It’s terrible the way he coddles me. I’m always telling him he’s too fond of me and that he should marry. He has such charming girl friends in Worcester. But he’s foolish. He’s determined not to marry until he can support a wife. As if it mattered whether the money was mine or his.”
That attack, delivered in the gentlest tone, not only told him that his mother had already sensed a rival in Lotte, but it gave him a queer thrill that two women should be fighting over him. It also dispelled his moment of uncertainty and fear.
“All right, Claire,” he said almost nonchalantly. “After coffee, we’ll go up to the cascade.”
The roar of the cataract sounded through the night. Lotte was a little ahead. Mrs. Crane kept her hand on John’s arm. He felt she was supporting him rather than needing support herself. For the first time in several days, he was reminded of his lameness.
They turned the bend and the cascade foamed and swirled in front of them. Lotte had moved through the curling ferns to the very brink of the chasm. Mrs. Crane left John’s side, clapping her hands in delight.
“How ravishing.” Her laugh trilled out. “I’m sure this is the site you’ve been choosing for your little picnics, John.”
She moved to Lotte’s side on the extreme edge of the precipice. John heard her voice, sparkling as an unsheathed sword.
“What a charming place for dreaming, dear. I always think the summer’s the time for daydreams, don’t you? Little relationships, pretty, ephemeral as butterflies.”
They were both on the brink. This was the moment. Leaning on his cane, John Tuthill Crane started to move towards the two women. He could see his mother’s slight, graceful back. In the moonlight she seemed hardly more than a girl.
The surge of the water pulsed like the coursing of his own blood. With sudden, gruelling vividness, the realization came of all he was going to lose. As if it was he who was going to drown, his past life, tantalizingly, spuriously golden, paraded before him. Then the image of Lotte rose up, beautiful, voluptuous, the symbol of all that was passionate, enchanting, real. La Belle Dame Sans Merci.
He was so close to his mother he could smell her perfume. Parma Violet. Its familiar fragrance seemed distilled from the very essence of his pretty little sham life in Worcester. A desperate desire for release from the bondage that was not his chosen bondage gave him courage. He dropped his cane. Both his hands went out. He pushed with all his strength.
There was a shrill, thin scream. For a moment it seemed to him the only sound in the world. Then it was lost in the roar of the water.
John Tuthill Crane sat on the bed in his hotel room. He felt delightfully calm. Now that the inquest was over and the verdict of accidental death given, it seemed impossible that there could ever have been that confusion of doubt and fear in him. He was purged now forever of the lethal poison which had infected his blood. He had won the most crucial battle of his life by courage and clearsightedness. He had known what he
wanted—and he had it.
Her voice came to him, part of the new peace. “Poor darling, it must have been an ordeal for you. You were wonderful at the inquest.”
Yes, thought John Tuthill Crane, not modestly, he had been rather wonderful.
“You were fond of her, weren’t you?”
“I suppose I thought I was.”
“I’ll make it up to you, dear. Don’t worry.”
“I know you will.”
“Such a dreadful accident, slipping like that. Dear, this may be the wrong time to say it, but I think it was just as well—for you, I mean.”
Just as well.
“She wasn’t quite right for you. I could tell immediately. She wasn’t quite—well, quite a lady. The possessive type, too. She’d have swallowed you up like a cannibal, dear.”
John Tuthill Crane shivered in memory of those exhausting peaks of passion and smiled across the room at the only woman he could ever love.
“Yes, Mother,” he said.
THOU LORD SEEST ME
The office clock struck five. Mr. Loomis looked up at it and frowned. Mr. Loomis hated and feared five o’clock as most men fear death. And for him it was the death of each day’s life since it meant leaving the office. It was only in the office that Mr. Loomis felt himself a man of stature and importance.
He closed his ledger and with a little sigh carried it over to the safe. He spent as long as he could tidying up his already meticulous desk. He arranged his pencils in a neat row, first vertical then changing them to horizontal; he shuffled his inkpots and next went to fetch his hat and coat. As he appeared from the cloakroom, wearing his old bowler and his black coat with its worn velveteen collar, he looked like any tired little man in post-blitz London. His moustache was frayed like his cuffs; his front teeth needed attention; and he stooped too much for a man of fifty.
His office day was over. Now there remained only the pleasure of saying good night to Miss Henderson. Mr. Loomis hastened his footsteps slightly as, passing downstairs, he saw there was still a light in Mr. Tinker’s office. Rose Henderson was secretary to the president. She was also sales manager and occasionally—for Tinker & Smythe dealt largely in patent medicines for children—Mother’s Service Manager. The latter term was used when she signed letters dealing with the Croup Elixir or the Worm Eliminant which were two of the firm’s best sellers.
“Been kept busy, Miss Henderson?” It was the usual formula repeated almost daily for years.
“So so, Mr. Loomis. I’m just finishing off a few letters.”
Rose Henderson looked up and smiled, showing almost perfect teeth. Unfortunately they were her only really good feature. Her nose was too wide, and behind their rimless glasses, her eyes were too small. Her hair always looked like the nest of a clean but untidy heron. Nevertheless, Mr. Loomis liked her appearance.
In fact, being an incurable romantic, he had been perhaps a shade in love with her for quite a number of years. Oh, it was a perfectly respectable sentiment, for Mr. Loomis was very much a married man. Indeed, he would not have known Miss Henderson’s Christian name had he not, as the firm’s cashier, had to make out a salary check to Rose K. Henderson every month. Sometimes he wondered what the K. stood for.
It had all started with the faded snapshot of herself which Miss Henderson had shown to Mr. Loomis, just for a lark, about ten years ago, at the picnic celebrating Mr. Tinker’s wedding. It portrayed barelegged little Rosie Henderson at the age of eight, happily sucking a stick of candy rock on the sands of Burnham-on-Sea. Mr. Loomis had purloined this picture shamelessly and kept it face downwards in a locked drawer of his desk at home. Occasionally, he took it out and thought to himself how Miss Henderson, who must now be about forty, should by rights be the mother of several little girls who looked just like that. And perhaps he thought that if he and Miss Henderson …
But, no. It must be repeated that Mr. Loomis was married to a most estimable and faithful wife whose lips had never touched liquor, tobacco, or those of any man but her husband.
“Well, good night, Mr. Loomis.”
“Good night, Miss Henderson.”
Mr. Loomis put on his bowler again and passed out into the thick miasma which is Clerkenwell on a January evening. He saw with some satisfaction that there was quite a long queue waiting for the Pimlico bus. With any luck he would miss the first one, possibly the second, and thus delay the ineluctable moment when he would have to knock on his front door and find himself at home.
As he waited, his fingers ran mechanically through his pockets. The contents would have disgraced any self-respecting schoolboy. There were two lumps of sugar, the rock cake (twopence extra) carefully saved from his tea. There was also a cough lozenge, half a biscuit wrapped in an old invoice and two of the firm’s medium-sized manila envelopes. Into one of these Mr. Loomis squeezed his squirrel hoard with some satisfaction, for these fragments were offerings intended for the gratification of his most recently acquired “daughter.”
Mr. Loomis, a father who had missed his vocation, adored little girls. He had had scores of “daughters” and he had wooed them in scores of different ways. There was blue-eyed Lucy Green of the ringlets whose heart he had won with fretwork toys made secretly in his own tiny workshop. There was short-haired, freckle-faced Belinda Wren (now a mother herself) for whom he had ransacked his wife’s rag bag to make stuffed dolls and teddy bears. There were many others, plain and pretty, whose faces had lit up eagerly at the sight of Daddy “Bloomers.”
His latest love was Dinah Milton, who had recently come to live with her mother in the house next door. She was a wisp of a child with an appetite which would have done credit to a regiment of guardsmen. But Mr. Loomis saw her skinny little frame through rosy spectacles, for she reminded him a tiny bit—oh, such a tiny bit—of the little girl whose faded snapshot he kept locked in his drawer.
There was something particularly touching about Dinah’s greediness because the shortage of food in England was hard on hungry little girls. An added bond was the fact that Mrs. Loomis disapproved monumentally of the easygoing habits of Dinah’s mother. That she disapproved of Dinah herself went without saying. Mrs. Loomis’ childlessness had not made her sympathetic towards the offspring of others.
The bus disgorged Mr. Loomis at last and he made his way through the gloom of the familiar streets, past little brick houses, all alike, until he reached the one which was called his home.
He slowly climbed the steps and gave an almost inaudible rap on the knocker. He was not trusted with a latchkey of his own.
The door was opened by his wife, a large, not uncomely woman with a complexion, once peachlike, now purpling to damson plum.
“You’re late, Loomis,” she said in the voice of one who has said the same thing many times before. “Kept late at the office, I suppose?”
“No, no, my dear.” Mr. Loomis pecked hurriedly at the damson of his wife’s cheek. “It’s these bus queues. Really, I don’t know what London’s coming to.”
He moved crabwise to hang his coat and hat in the hall cupboard, fearful lest his wife’s X-ray eye might detect the contraband in his pocket.
“Well, don’t blame me if dinner’s burnt to a crisp.” Mrs. Loomis turned her broad back and flounced into the kitchen, while her husband made his way into the parlor, where he drew a box of matches from his pocket and lit the wall gas bracket. Electricity had not yet reached this particular section of London.
Mr. Loomis sat down gingerly on one of the hard chairs by the small gas fire which he did not dare to light until after the evening meal. He surveyed the room gloomily without noticing that it was, as usual, scrupulously clean and scrupulously tidy. He knew only that it was scrupulously dull.
His eyes settled on the framed wool text above the mantel—THOU LORD SEEST ME.
“Loomis, dinner’s on the table.”
Mr. Loomis rose obediently and after retrieving the manila envelopes from his overcoat in the hall closet, passed into the tiny dining room.
There was a clean cloth on a neatly set table which bore a whale steak smothered with onions. There was also a dish of fried potatoes, another of Brussels sprouts, and bread, and margarine. It was as good a dinner, so Mrs. Loomis averred every evening, as they were sitting down to in Buckingham Palace.
It was also a familiar dinner. And his wife’s dinnertime conversation was equally familiar. Mr. Loomis only half listened as Mabel told of her indomitable prowess in pushing to the head of the butcher’s queue; of her tactical success in wheedling a little extra flour from the grocer; of the shocking moral laxity of her neighbors in general and, in particular, of Mrs. Milton next door.
“…bottles and bottles of beer … men at all hours of the day and night … that brat of hers … it’s my belief she’s no better than her mother. Sitting on our garden wall with her bare legs hanging down … at this time of year … bare skinny legs….”
While Mr. Loomis chewed his Antarctic steak, vague sentimental pictures passed through his mind of little Dinah Milton on the wall, waiting hopefully for the tidbits that he always tried to bring home for her. Incongruously, the bare skinny legs merged into another pair of childish legs as seen in a discolored photograph snapped at Burnham-on-Sea.
“Bare legs in January!” Mrs. Loomis had risen heavily and started to remove the plates. It was one of her many admirable qualities that she seldom allowed her husband in the kitchen. This virtue, however, rendered far more difficult Mr. Loomis’ task of stealing morsels for his insatiable pet cormorant next door. He took advantage of his wife’s absence to slip a small square of bread and margarine from his plate into the manila envelope in his pocket.
Mrs. Loomis returned from the kitchen bearing a dish of six delicious-looking jam tarts. As she withdrew again for the inevitable custard, her husband made some lightning calculations. Dare he risk stealing a tart now? No, Mabel was not, as he well knew, like the proverbial mother bird who can count only to two or three. Perhaps he could claim that an overwhelming greed had constrained him to pop one of them into his mouth without waiting for her. No, alas. For she knew only too well that greed was not one of his weaknesses and this would only be inviting suspicion.
The Ordeal of Mrs. Snow Page 21