by Ursula Bloom
‘If she did that, she should abide by it. If he is such a very old man, he’ll die fairly soon, and you could have waited for that.’
‘You don’t understand.’
‘The trouble is that I do understand.’ She was pouring out more coffee with vigour. ‘The trouble is that I know you are a rolling stone, and no good to any woman. The sooner your Captain hears of this the better, because Timbuctoo is the place for you.’
‘Hell!’ said Piers, losing his temper.
‘It is no good you swearing at me, and I won’t have it. If you are going to use disgusting language, use it to more fitting people than your poor mother.’
‘I wish you’d meet her.’
‘If I do meet her, I shall tell her what I think of her, which may surprise her a great deal,’ said Mrs. Grant with warmth.
Piers argued desperately, making a wild effort to control himself. It was no use letting the two women meet whilst they were in this mood, Dinah scared, and his mother bossy. He talked half the morning, stayed to lunch for which he had no appetite, and went back to the ship in a fury. He had been unable to get her to promise not to see his Captain, and once she did that he knew it would be the end of everything.
He left the Great Britain fairly early, so that he could pop in on Dinah for a moment and tell her what had happened. She was sitting in her room, feeling desperately unhappy; if only she had the strength of mind to see Mrs. Grant herself and talk it over, quietly and reasonably, how very much better it would be. But she needed courage to do this.
Piers’ head popped round the door, and he said, ‘Darling, she’s got her rag out, good and hearty! She swears she’ll see the skipper, and it will probably take me a week to talk her round. Must fly for the boat. If I miss it, that’ll be the last straw.’
Then off he went again.
In her own room Dinah wondered what was the best thing to do. Piers, with the most virtuous intentions, would be so likely to do the wrong thing, and let his temper get the better of him. If he made arrangements for the two women to meet, it would take them both at a considerable disadvantage, whereas if she could only pay a surprise visit on Mrs. Grant it would make everything easier.
What can I do? she wondered.
3
Dinah arrived at the hotel at eleven the next morning. Mrs. Grant had hated her breakfast brought to her by one of the waiters, which she considered to be highly improper. She was already in a bad temper. She was reading a four days’ old paper, which she disliked, and when she saw Dinah come into the lounge, she put it down, to glance at her through her lorgnettes. That girl looks very nice, she thought, approving the wide hat and cool suit. The waiter brought her the card and immediately when she realised who it was, she felt her hackles rising, and knew this was not a case of first impressions being best. This was the designing hussy who had caught Piers; this was the girl who was making the Woking household so miserable by having staged her disgusting divorce. For a moment Mrs. Grant debated on the cold snub of refusing to meet the scarlet woman, then she decided that the only thing to do was to meet her, to be extremely haughty, and get the odious serpent crushed beneath her foot for ever.
‘So you are Mrs. Hale?’ said she, indicating a chair opposite to her own.
Dinah sat down. ‘I thought if we could meet privately it would be so much better. We have lots to say to one another,’ she said, and hoped that her voice sounded reassuring.
‘Why?’ asked Mrs. Grant.
‘I ‒ I don’t know. I just thought that it might be better.’
‘Oh!’ Mrs. Grant had practised the art of being politely rude in monosyllables. She stared at Dinah with large pop eyes, which bulged unpleasantly owing to an unfortunate tendency to goitre.
‘I know that it sounds dreadful in so many words,’ said Dinah, ‘I know that it sounds as though nothing could excuse our behaviour, but I can assure you that it isn’t really as awful as all that. Piers and I talked it over with my husband, and he himself agreed that this was the best way out.’
‘Your husband said so?’
‘Yes, he did.’
‘I understand that he is senile,’ said Mrs. Grant, after some deliberation. That nettled Dinah.
‘He is nothing of the kind! Max is in full possession of all his faculties, and is a very clever man. He said when we married, that if ever I fell in love with anybody else he would be reasonable. He and Piers and I talked it over in the cottage that night. He said there were three ways out and this was the one that would work.’
‘Oh,’ said Mrs. Grant, with all her neck veins swelling like little ropes, ‘and does it work?’
‘We thought so.’
Mrs. Grant decided to be quite frank, because she honestly believed that it was the only way out of the difficulty. She said, ‘I am going to Piers’ Captain about this. A boy of his age cannot wreck the whole of his career at the very outset because of a married woman; it doesn’t make sense, and it has got to be stopped.’
‘How can it be stopped? The divorce has gone through and we are only waiting for the decree to be made absolute before we marry.’
‘You’re not married yet, anyway,’ said Mrs. Grant with emphasis.
‘We mean to be the moment that I am free.’
‘I dare say, but that isn’t yet.’
Dinah knew that her throat had gone dry; she made a frantic appeal. ‘Haven’t you ever been in love yourself, Mrs. Grant? Surely you once married very happily and were only grateful to Providence for being allowed such happiness? It would be the same thing for Piers, and for me.’
She had made a mistake, for Mrs. Grant had been jilted in her youth by a young man who had been alienated from her affection by what she had termed a ‘designing widow’. In her own heart Mrs. Grant had been comparing her own case with this one all along, and she felt that Dinah was the designing widow, from whom Piers must be saved at all costs. She rose. ‘I think,’ she said, ‘there is no point in going further with this conversation. I understand what it is my duty to do, and I fail completely to see how you have any view-point. Nobody who loved a young man would wreck his chances like this.’
4
It had been a disheartening interview. Dinah went out of the hotel, unable to say more, and when she got back to the hotel she went to bed with a violent headache. She ought to have left well alone. Piers would probably be extremely angry with her. She meant to send him a note, warning him of what had happened and his mother’s attitude, but she had not the courage left. She lay in the darkened room, with a cold compress on her head, only knowing that it beat like a clock in pain. She felt very sick. As though every piece of machinery in her body had suddenly run down and now refused to respond to her will. She could not go on. She slept a little and awoke feeling faintly better, but she knew that she must lie here for the rest of the day, relying on the cups of strong tea which Giuseppe brought her, and only hoping that Piers would come to see her.
She ached for home; to have Max beside her, telling her what to do next, because he had experience and had always been able to guide her. Quite late at night, when the harbour was very still, and the clover fields unstirring under the stars, she pulled the curtains, and wrote a little pencilled note to Max. He would not misread it, nor put some inference behind her words that was not really there. He had always been so understanding. She gave it to Giuseppe to post, when he brought her some oranges last thing at night.
Next morning she still felt limp from the pain and regretted her letter to Max. She regretted the whole of yesterday, yet could do nothing about it now. The fact that Piers had not been to see her, when obviously he must have visited his mother, now alarmed her. She did not get any message from him until the following morning, when a sailor appeared with a note, and said he was to wait for an answer. He then stood patiently in the doorway of the little hotel, took a cigarette from a packet concealed inside his cap, lit it, and waited without interest for something to happen.
In the smoky little lounge,
Dinah read Piers’ letter to her.
‘Why on earth did you go to see the Mater? There has been the most unholy row. We have got to talk this over; what about the Hastings Gardens to-night at eight? I can’t get to the hotel. I shall then have settled something with the Mater, I hope, and things may be better. Cheer up. Piers.’
Dinah felt elated; she felt thrilled. She went back to the sailor and told him that the answer was yes, because at this particular moment she felt too joyous to write. She could not trust herself to put pen to paper.
The Hastings Gardens were very dusty, for the days were already hot. Lean cats crawled amorously under the geraniums, calling to one another. The palms stirred, and the children played touch with them. She went to the far corner where she and Piers always met, and she climbed on to the ramparts and sat there on the sun-warmed wall, which she had always loved. She hunched her knees and clasped them with her arms, child-like. The whole island sprawled before her, and she stared at it, feeling helplessly young, like a child who has long been lost and who yearns for some older, wiser person to guide her. But Piers had said cheer up, he would not have said that if he had not been hopeful.
At this particular moment she had the longing to see Max, just for a second. She saw Piers coming across the gardens, walking in those long lopes that she had admired when she first saw him in the village in Buckinghamshire. He came to her side, vaulting on to the rampart and sitting there beside her. She knew at once that he was not in a good mood.
‘I had to go to bed yesterday with the most frightful headache,’ she began.
‘I wish I could find solace in headaches. By Jove, I ought to be having a cracker! The Mater and I have been fighting all day, and she’s won. She has gone to the skipper.’
‘Oh Piers, she hasn’t! She can’t have done!’ Dinah knew that she had turned colour, her voice sounded frightened, even though she tried to hide it, and she had the curiously vague feeling which usually comes before a woman faints.
‘Yes, she has! You bet she meant business when she came out here. No woman in her senses would take that journey for fun, overland too. She went to him, and he sent for me. It seems he had heard rumours before this. He was on our trail and he only needed the Mater to put the last spoke in the wheel.’
‘But how could he send for you? You’re grown up. We are both of us grown up. How could he send for you like a master sends for a small boy in a prep school?’
‘You don’t know the Navy. He asked me bang out, and I had to tell him the truth.’
‘What did he ask about me?’
‘He knew all about you, no need for me to tell him, because Mrs. James had done that for me first. He was shocked and surprised and all the rest of it, and thought it might be desirable for me if I changed my station. I’ve got to tell you what’s happened. There’s probably a nice billet ready for me in Bermuda.’
‘Bermuda? That’s the other side of the world?’
‘Exactly! The old man’s idea of a joke. He is writing home to report on me, and says it would be desirable if you left the island.’
She burst into tears then, burying her face in her hands. ‘It is too much to ask, Piers. We have been through too much. It isn’t fair that he should send me away. Why do we have to suffer and go on suffering? Piers, don’t go away and leave me. I couldn’t bear to be left alone, I couldn’t bear it.’
He put an arm round her, but she felt that it had lost much of its warmth. ‘It’s all right. Don’t think I’ll fail you, because I won’t, I promise you. Only you do seem to be thinking entirely of yourself. What about me? It is pretty rough luck on me too.’
‘I know. I can’t help being frightened about it all. Shall I go and see the Captain? He was very nice to me before.’
‘Ye gods! Haven’t you done enough harm seeing people already? He wouldn’t be nice to you now, and that’s a fact, so don’t you risk it. Leave well alone. He is one of the most narrow-minded men I have ever met,’ and he ground his teeth.
‘What do we do?’
He said, ‘You’ve got to be brave, my pretty. If you went back to England for a bit it might be a good idea. You could go to Dukeleys, or to your Aunt Lydia, or somewhere. You get right home, and I’ll let you know when I appear. I shall get back in a jiffy, I suppose, and then off again to the North Pole. God, what a muck it all is!’
She stopped crying.
Over the Citta Vecchian hills there was a pale yellow sunset, and she saw it as the harbinger of a new day.
‘Yes, it is a muck!’ she agreed.
‘It isn’t any good crying over it.’
‘No, it isn’t any good.’
He gave her a tiny shake. ‘Don’t take it too hard, my pretty. I’ve got out of worse scrapes before, we’ll get out of this one.’
‘I know.’
They walked out of the gardens together, and even then she knew that their affair was over and done with. He need not tell her, for it did not require words. She walked to the hotel and outside the doorway he apologised for having to go back to the ship. He took her hands, but lightly, as though they were branches, and not hands at all.
‘You mustn’t get too worried. I am terribly sorry about all this, but we’ll pull through. I want to get you back to England, before somebody else is insulting to you. England’s your place, my pretty.’
‘Yes, of course,’
‘Good night.’
‘Good night.’
And, although she stood there staring with eyes that were strained, she never saw him go.
5
She went upstairs and began to pack, not very carefully because she did not care. She sent the cadaverous-looking guide down to the Customs House to find out about the sailings, because she decided that she would go home by sea. It took longer, but it would be cleaner, and somehow she felt that she needed cleanliness and time, and quiet!
The guide, told to be expedient, was a trifle too expedient, because he got her on to a boat the next day, a cargo boat which lingered along the North African coast, and dawdled into Gibraltar ten days later, having taken its full time.
In those ten days, cut off from the world, a new Dinah was born. She lay on a rug on the deck, staring at the hazy wobbling coast line, listening to the waves, and the cries of the gulls, and trying to focus her attentions on the crisis in her life.
She was sure that she would never see Piers again. She had been a child before this, but now she had crossed the rubicon, and was a woman. She had never guessed that it would hurt so much.
The cargo boat chugged solemnly up the Bay, popped into Bordeaux and lingered pleasantly there; finally, a very long time after when the island of sunshine and romance seemed to be faded into a memory, it landed her at Plymouth.
She thought of Plymouth as it had been last time that she had seen it; the hotel with the room that was a shrine; she thought of the houses in Devonport, which had seemed then to be so romantic, and now were ordinary and dull. It is funny to think that love can paint dullness with such a bright brush, and deceive the eyes so cruelly.
She went to Aunt Lydia’s.
It had been an experiment which had failed. The only thing that worried her now was how she would go on. Somehow their love had seemed too bright to die; too bright to live was nearer the truth.
FINALE
‘Three points of a triangle,’ Max was saying slowly. He leaned back against his chair, his hands palm to palm, the finger tips padding one another slowly; it was a little mannerism of his that she had often noticed. ‘In each of them as I see it, a ghost lurks. It may be your ghost, or my ghost, the shape of it is immaterial, it is conscience!’
Dinah went over to the coffee tray and lifted up the silver coffee pot, beginning to pour out, but her hand shook too much. ‘There isn’t any way out. It is quite obvious that whatever we do is wrong.’
‘The best way,’ said Piers, ‘is to stay as we are. That is the satisfactory way, because anyway we shall each be doing what is right, and that ought
to lay conscience with bell, book, and candle.’
She said nothing at all.
Her heart was making horrible noises again, noises that she was afraid the others might hear. She cared so deeply for Piers, it seemed impossible to think that she could dismiss him. If he went to Malta she was convinced that she would never see him again, just as it had been when they had looked closer into that point of the triangle. Three years is too long. There would be other attractions. It was not that he would grow tired, but that the memories would dim, and he would be forced into new contacts.
Still Max sat there, with the fingers padding like a faint drumming, and his eyes watching them. ‘I leave it to you,’ he said, ‘it is a decision that you, and you only, can make.’
At the end of the garden the light died, and the golden shuttle ceased to dart in and out of the loom of green acacia leaves beside the window. She felt very tired, as though she could not bear much more. Although she knew that the only satisfactory way was the one which risked never seeing Piers again, she felt that it was the hardest road to take. If she ran away with him the pressure of circumstances would be too humiliating, they would tarnish what once had been a lovely emotion. It was unthinkable that Max should destroy himself. In this particular moment she knew that the decision was hers to make, and the quicker it was made, the better for all three of them.
‘I’m staying,’ she said.
She heard Piers’ little intake of breath, and although she knew that it registered dismay, she was aware that he was proud of her for making the right decision. Proud, yet disappointed. It was curious that he could be both.
Max hesitated. ‘You are quite sure?’
‘Yes, quite sure.’
He turned to Piers. ‘Give me some more brandy, would you? There is something else, something that I have kept back which I think I ought to tell you now; it has some effect on the future, only I wanted you to make your own decision first.’
Piers went across to the side, poured out the brandy into the round goblets with the grapes and their five-pointed vine leaves carved in crystal. He handed it to Max.