If he could only be warned. Perhaps he could make a stand of some sort. In her heart she doubted it. What could anyone do against such hate? And Bett had said there was nothing she could do, she was contemptuous of her…Well, she would see about that; hate was contagious.
The next minute she was running towards the hall where, grabbing up the phone, she dialled the house. When she heard Elsie’s precise tones at the other end she said, ‘This is Jenny, Elsie. Is the doctor in?’
‘No, Jenny, he’s out on his rounds.’
‘Have you any idea when he’ll be back?’
‘Oh, not until five.’
‘Elsie, listen. I must find him. Can you give me the addresses where he’s likely to call this afternoon? And don’t let on…Do you know what I mean?’
‘Yes, Jenny, yes. I know what you mean. Just a minute.’ After a pause her voice came again, saying, ‘124 Fowler’s Road, a Mr Smith there. 26 The Avenue, child name of Bailey. Got that? Then 14 Preston Mews, a Mrs Caldwell. Then there’s four calls in Creasy House, Bog’s End. The big block of flats, you know. I’ll just give you the numbers: 8, 17, 24, and 25. Got that?’
‘Yes, thanks, Elsie. And listen…Don’t…don’t let on to anyone I’ve phoned. But when he comes in ask him if he’s seen me. And if he hasn’t, tell him to come straight round here, will you? Tell him it’s very important.’
‘I’ll do that, Jenny.’
‘Thanks, Elsie. Goodbye.’
Jenny now phoned for a taxi, and when it came she gave the driver the address of 124 Fowler’s Road.
It was nearly half an hour later when she reached the block of flats. The doctor had been and gone from all the previous addresses, but when she enquired at the first flat she was told he hadn’t been yet. Also, that if he didn’t get his calls in at the flats in the morning, he often didn’t come until after evening surgery; that was unless it was urgent.
This last information set Jenny a poser. It was now four o’clock. If he wasn’t in the habit of visiting the flats until after surgery where would he go? Not to the club in the afternoon; and he rarely returned home until five, when he would have a cup of tea before starting with the evening patients…Ivy Tate’s. The significance brought her teeth on to her lower lip, and as she stood pondering she became aware that the taxi driver was watching her. Under his stare she considered for another minute. She couldn’t go to Ivy’s place, she couldn’t. To see them even standing together would be a form of torture, for in this she had to agree with Bett, he had let himself down. Yet where would she find him if not there? But one thing was dominant in her mind, pressing everything else aside at the moment: she couldn’t tolerate the idea of his exposure being sprung on him. It was going to be dreadful enough in any case, but if he was warned he might be able to put up something of a defence. She had very little hope of the latter, but the important thing was to let him know that the ice was cracking beneath his feet and that all that meant so much to him, his practice and his house, was going to be swamped. There crept in the thought that Ivy Tate might matter too, but this she disregarded. Getting into the taxi again, she said hastily, ‘Moor Lane. Do you know where it is?’
‘Yes, I know it; it’s on the outskirts, near Wheatley’s Farm.’
Fifteen minutes later the car bumped its way up the narrow lane, and when abruptly it emerged from the shelter of the bushes on to the wide grass verge she whispered hoarsely, ‘Stop! Stop!’
She sat staring out of the window. There was no other car ahead of them, nor to the side of the house, and further on was a dead end, but in the garden beyond the gate Ivy Tate was standing. She had apparently been weeding. Jenny, as if unable to move, watched her open the gate and cross the grass. Then she was standing opposite the open window, facing her. Her face had lost all its high colour; it looked greyish, her eyes were stretched wide and she was visibly trembling as she said, ‘Why! Miss—Miss Jenny…Is anything wrong?’
Jenny now looked at the back of the driver and then to Ivy again before she asked, ‘May I come in a minute, I’d like a word with you.’
‘Yes, yes.’
As she got out of the car the driver said, ‘You want me to wait?’
‘Please.’
‘OK.’ He nodded at her.
Jenny had hardly entered the bungalow before Ivy, closing the door, turned and whispered under her breath, ‘What is it? Something’s wrong…The doctor?’
‘I…I thought he might be here. I have to see him, it’s important.’
‘You knew a-about him coming here?’
‘No…I mean, not before today.’ Jenny watched Ivy put her two hands up to her face and press them against her cheeks, until her mouth formed a button. ‘Something’s happened. What is it?’
‘I’ve got to find Pa…the doctor. Are you expecting him?’
‘No. No. At least not yet. But look.’ She thrust out her hands now towards Jenny. ‘Tell me, tell me what’s happened. I’m concerned, aren’t I? It’s about me? For God’s sake tell me, please.’
Jenny looked at this homely, ordinary-looking young woman. In attractiveness she didn’t seem to have anything more than she herself had, at least now, except that she was plumpish and a little younger. Yet this was the woman Paul had chosen to come to night after night. For how long? It was two years since she had left the house, and as Bett said it must have started long before that. For years Jenny had known she had been jealous of Bett, but she had never let it get the upper hand; in fact, she had hardly let the emotion breathe. She had told herself it was enough to see Paul now and again, to know that he was fond of her and appreciated her presence in the house. And sanctimoniously she had imagined it was part of her path in life to ease the tension in which he lived. But as she looked at Ivy she knew no such restraint in her feelings, and she cried bitterly within herself: I should have been in your place, I should, I should. And if I’d known as much as I know now I would have been too. As she stared at Ivy there returned to her mind the incident on Boxing Night and she became hot yet again with the shame of his refusal. He had known all right—oh, she was more convinced than ever now that he had known—and he had refused her because he had been faithful to this woman.
‘Don’t look at me like that, Miss Jenny. I did what I had to do; he needed me and me him. I was lonely, but he was more so. If it hadn’t been me it would have been somebody else. I made him happy in a way. Just in a way, the only way I knew. But I also knew that there would be an end to it.’ Her voice had lost its tremor and sounded calm now, and she walked towards a chair and, sitting down, she motioned Jenny to a seat opposite. Then she asked, ‘How did you find out?’
‘She knows; she’s been watching.’
‘Oh, no.’ Ivy groaned out the words, and her head sunk on to her chest.
As Jenny looked at this beaten woman she remembered she had always liked Ivy, she had always got on with her, and she endeavoured now to waive her personal feelings. Leaning towards her, she said hastily, ‘She means trouble, Ivy. I don’t think she’s quite right in her mind where he’s concerned. She’s going to use her knowledge to stop him getting the hospital post. But what is worse, she’ll make a case of it, proving that you’re a patient of his, and then his career’ll be finished.’
‘Oh, my God!’ Ivy began to rock herself, her head still down, her body swaying backwards and forwards as if trying to ease a physical agony. Then slowly the rocking stopped and, lifting her head, she looked at Jenny and said, ‘She’d have to have proof of that, wouldn’t she? I mean legal proof. Has she had us watched, privately?’
‘No, no, I don’t think so. She just came herself.’
Ivy now straightened her shoulders. ‘You have to have proof in these things, eyewitness accounts so to speak. I could say he had been attending me for my allergy…I’ve got an allergy. Certain foods I eat bring me out in great weals and I feel off colour.’ She stared at Jenny for a moment in silence before saying, quietly, ‘It may not be too late; there is something I can do. Would y
ou wait a few minutes more?’
Jenny inclined her head, and Ivy turned slowly away and went into the bedroom, closing the door after her.
Jenny looked about the room. The furniture was cheap and ordinary, there was not a vestige of taste in anything; the only comfortable thing in the room was the couch. It would be. Her mind tried to move away from the couch and its comfort but failed. Even when she had been running helter-skelter round the town trying to find him, there had been in her a feeling that the whole thing was nasty, that he had let himself down. Ivy Tate, who had been a servant in his house. She knew these things happened and always would. It was more prevalent today than ever, but she hadn’t associated Paul with promiscuity, and if she had she would have imagined him picking someone in his own class. Yet had he taken a wife out of his own class? Bett liked to think of herself as having been brought up superior, but the truth was she had been an ordinary working girl, a typist, not old enough when she met Paul to have reached the post of secretary. And then, when she came to think of it, had he, in taking Ivy, stepped so far out of his own class when only two generations ago his grandfather had been a man of Bog’s End? There was a lot of truth in what Bett said, and his association with Ivy Tate proved it.
She began to walk round the room as if to get away from her critical thinking. She didn’t want to think like this about him. It was as if she hated him too, and she had to admit that the relationship between him and this woman wasn’t as nasty as she would like to think. There was really nothing nasty about Ivy Tate. In the local idiom, she was a nice lass; you could see it in her face.
When the door opened and Ivy came out of the bedroom she expected to see signs of her crying, but her face wasn’t wet, nor were her eyes red, but there was in her expression a look of painful resignation, and it touched Jenny more than anything else could have done.
‘Will you give him this yourself?’ She held out a letter. ‘And if he should still try to come, stop him, will you? Because it’ll be no use. An’ the less he’s seen coming here the better.’
‘I…I doubt if I’ll be able to stop him coming, Ivy; he’ll want to see you.’
‘I’ve…I’ve explained it all in the letter. I won’t be here. An’ when I do come back things’ll be different. It…it won’t be any use him coming then. It’s all in there.’ She pointed to the letter Jenny was holding.
The two women looked at each other; then Jenny said softly, ‘I’m sorry, Ivy.’ And she was sorry, really sorry.
‘So am I.’ Ivy’s lids blinked rapidly. ‘But I’m not surprised at this, I’m only surprised it went on so long.’ She moved closer to Jenny until she had to look up at her, and her slow words expressed the pain she was feeling. ‘I’d sooner die than anything should happen to him, anything, and through me.’
Jenny at this moment felt very small. She had imagined that in hiding her love for Paul all these years she had been doing something noble. She had imagined there were only two people in the world who really knew Paul, and loved him: one was herself, and the other, Maggie Swan. Lorna’s love she didn’t count; it was that of a child for its father. But this ordinary woman’s love, she saw, was something big. It was an utterly unselfish love. And this was borne out as Ivy said softly, ‘He’s…he’s very fond of you. Will you do what you can for him? He’ll need somebody calm like, for if he loses his temper with her God knows what’ll happen.’
Calm like. She was very far from being calm like. When Ivy turned towards the door she followed her, and she paused in front of her on the step and said, ‘I’ll do my best, Ivy. Goodbye.’
‘Goodbye, Jenny.’ Ivy now omitted the ‘Miss.’
Jenny was aware that the door closed immediately behind her, and as she went towards the waiting car she had the impression that Ivy was standing with her face pressed tight against it.
In a few minutes they were on the main road again. ‘Where to now?’ asked the driver laconically.
‘Romfield House,’ she said. Bett had told her in plain words that she wouldn’t be expected there again, but she was going.
It was a quarter to five when she reached the house, and even as she stood on the pavement paying off the driver the sound of the raised voices penetrated the thick walls. She did not ring the front doorbell but went into the courtyard, and there, immediately, Bett’s high screaming tone met her, answered by Maggie’s thick, loud, coarse twang. When she passed the kitchen window she saw Paul’s back blotting out the room and its occupants. She let herself in through the waiting room door. There was no-one about—Elsie had two hours off in the afternoon and wouldn’t be in until five when the patients started to arrive. Quickly crossing the waiting room, she went into the private hall, and here the voices filled the house, seeming to make it vibrate with their anger.
‘Quiet, woman! Quiet! Do you hear me?’
‘Don’t tell me to be quiet. I’ve told you, she’s going, and now, this very minute.’
‘And how many more times have I to tell you she’ll go when I say, and not before. And that won’t be as long as I’m in this house.’
‘Ha! Ha! Ha! God Almighty man makes big joke…As long as you’re in this house! Well, let me tell you, big fellow, your time’s running out, and fast.’
‘You’re crazy, woman. There’s been times in the past when I’ve doubted your sanity, but now…’
‘Crazy, am I? Well, we’ll see who’s the craziest before the next twenty-four hours is over. But the point in question at the moment, doc-tor, is that I’m dismissing my cook. I’M DISMISSING HER HERE AND NOW. Get that into your thick skull. And you, or no-one else, is going to stop me. Her time, like yours, is short anyway, but I’m going to have the pleasure of seeing her going through that door, her bust flat. And it’ll be the first and last time, won’t it, Maggie, for you’ve got the most fluctuating bust in the human race, haven’t you?’
‘I know what you’re after suggestin’, Madam, but I’ve told you afore I take nothin’ away up me jumper. But if I did it wouldn’t be yours I was takin’, an’ that I’ve told you afore an’ all. An’ I’ll tell you this, I’ll come back to the door each mornin’ and himself will let me in, an’ I won’t stop comin’ till he says with his own lips that I’ve got to. Not that it’s any pleasure workin’ in this house. Sheer hell it’s been for years now, for you’re no more fit to be a doctor’s wife and have a place like this than any slut from Bog’s End. But then you were born and bred not a kick in the backside from the place itself, an’ you went to what was in my day the council school, an’ you stand there darin’ to put on your airs to me…’
At the sound of splintering china Jenny was impelled into the kitchen, there to see Maggie pressed against the fridge door and to her side the shattered remains of a heavy glass water jug which had fortunately missed her and hit the wall.
At the centre of the kitchen Paul stood holding Bett. He was gripping her shoulder with one hand, while with the other he slapped her face.
Jenny herself screamed as she ran in between them, and when she caught the deflected blow from his open palm he stopped, but still held Bett, who, her face now scarlet with inward rage and the slapping, continued to kick out at him and claw his jacket—which was as far as she could reach the way he was holding her—as if bent on tearing him to shreds. Like an enraged bull he swung her about and, gripping her around the waist, hauled her ignominiously from the room, across the hall and into the drawing room. There, throwing her bodily on to the couch, he stood over her, glaring down at her as he panted for breath.
Bett lay still now, rigidly still. Her eyes and lips looked colourless and stood out from the rest of her face, and the hate that was in her came up like vapour and enveloped him.
When he could speak he said, ‘This is the finish, do you hear me? It’s the finish. I’m divorcing you.’
Jenny, standing with her back to the closed door of the drawing room, could not see Bett’s face but she heard the strange noise she made. It was an unreal, inhuman sound. Then
she saw her head slowly appear as she pulled herself upright on the couch.
Bett hadn’t taken her eyes from Paul, and now they bored into him, seeming to screw each word home. And they were more impressive because they were spoken quietly. ‘You! You are going to divorce me? Oh, no. No, you’ve got it wrong. It’s me who’s going to divorce you. I’m not only going to divorce you, I’m going to ruin you. I always said I would and that’s just what I’m going to do. The wheels are already moving and you can do nothing to stop them. This is final, final, big fellow, do you hear? Oh, you’ve got something coming to you, and I won’t spoil it by telling you.’
Glaring back at her he wondered if she really had become unbalanced. He imagined that if she’d had any real evidence on which she could get a divorce, such as knowledge of Ivy, she would have spurted it out. He didn’t give her credit for enough hate to make her diabolically cunning. All this was an act coupled with wishful thinking. But there was one thing clear in his mind: he couldn’t go on. A little more of this and he might do her an injury. He said now, ‘Who divorces who doesn’t matter as long as it comes about.’
‘You think so? Oh, but I see it differently. As I told you, you’re going to learn a lot within the next few hours. And in a very short space of time I’ll see that you own just what you stand up in. You’ll be so fleeced you’ll feel the wind through your clothes. And you’ll have no chance to earn more.’
No chance to earn more? What was she up to? Unblinking, he returned her glare before he said, ‘Well, you must remember that if I have no practice I have no money.’ He sounded tired now.
The Long Corridor Page 12