Kept

by Alec Waugh

  She spoke in a level, acid, unemotional tone, and they listened to her in silence; a silence that persisted when the vibration of the last syllables had died. There was an uncomfortable pause.

  “There is no other way, I suppose?” said John.

  “There is no other way,” his father answered. “Your mother has spoken of Mrs Fairfield as my mistress. But she has been my wife more truly than are the majority of wives. I have loved her as my wife, I have respected her as my wife. Life for these last years has been very hard for her, and she has been very good to me. My obligations towards her are very great. Besides, I do not believe now that I could do without her.”

  There was again a silence. A silence that again John Tristram broke.

  “And she is,” he addressed Simon Merivale, “she is, this Mrs Fairfield, all that my father says she is?”

  For a moment Simon hesitated. It was still possible for him to save from dissolution this family that was to become in its way an extension of his own. But it was for a moment only that he hesitated; and when he replied it was in words very similar to those that Ransom Heritage had used four months earlier in answer to a question that was similar.

  “I don’t know Mrs Fairfield very well,” he said, “but from what I’ve seen of her, she’s as straight and she’s as clean as a woman can be.”

  Everard Tristram looked gratefully at him. “It’s very true,” he said, “she’s all that.”

  “Then I should think,” said John, “you’d better marry her. No one thinks anything about divorce to-day.” He spoke curtly and in a way contemptuously, and, rising from his chair, he walked across towards his mother, and placed his hand upon her shoulder. It was easy to see which side he would take when the dissolution came. “If two people don’t get on,” he continued, “they’re better off apart. That is the modern view, and it’s the right view. If I were mother, I shouldn’t want a man who had no use for me.”

  “Quite, dear,” his mother began, “but—”

  “There’s no but, mother. None that I can see at least. There’s no difference between this case and the thousand and one other cases that go through the Courts each session. You’ll be happier, you know, when it’s all over.”

  “I daresay, dear, but I don’t know that I’ve been thinking very much about my own happiness.”

  “And there’s father’s too,” he said. “He’s a right to happiness. Why shouldn’t he start again? There’s plenty of time; don’t you agree, Blanch?”

  “It’s for Blanch to decide really,” said her father; “it’s she whom this situation will affect.”

  For the first time since her mother had begun to speak Blanch Tristram’s eyes were lifted.

  “I’m not certain,” she said, “I’d like to talk with David about it first. May we go away for a few minutes and then come back?”

  It was not, though, to talk with David but to be with David that she had asked to be alone. She was unhappy, and she needed comfort; weak, and had need to be protected. In silence they stood together before the fireplace in the dining-room, and she-was grateful that he spoke no word to her of her parents’ quarrel; grateful because he must be realising that it was of themselves, not of her parents that she was thinking; realise that it was not so much the thought of a broken home that saddened her as the knowledge that thirty years ago that home was being made as gaily and as confidently as was theirs to-day. She was grateful to him that he should feel that too, or at least should realise through her silence that she was feeling it; grateful, too, for the pressure of his arm about her waist and for the shoulder against which her head was resting; grateful that he should be there beside her in this adult and unknown world she was about to enter.

  Plenty of time, they had said upstairs. Plenty of time for her father who was over fifty. Plenty of time. In 1960, thirty-six years from now, would their children be saying that of them. Plenty of time to make and remake and reshape; to recoil and retreat and to begin again. All those years in which to displace and shift and resee and alter things; all those years to outgrow things in. And she felt frightened, pitiably and childishly frightened, subdued and overwhelmed by that immense space of time, in which so much could happen, in which they would meet so many people, see so many things, encounter so many points of view, in which so many influences would work their will on them. All those years, and all those things, and all those people. Those waves, and tides, and currents, with their love so solitary a bark.

  “Oh, David darling,” she cried, “I am so frightened,” and turning, flung herself into his arms. “David, David,” she cried, “we’ve got to love each other an awful lot.”

  Chapter XX

  Eric Learns The Rest

  On the following evening Marjorie Fairfield returned from an afternoon’s shopping to find the following telegram propped up against the yellow flower-bowl on the drawing-room table.

  “Calling half six to-night. Wire United University Club if impossible.—Eric.”

  “So,” she said. It was a week since that terrible scene after the theatre, a week of silence, and she did not know whether she was glad or sorry. She had forced herself to face the possibility of never seeing Eric again, had faced it and facing had found the courage to accept it. She was uncertain now whether she wanted to open a wound whose healing had cost much; uncertain whether she had the stamina to face another scene; face the endless reiterated explanation, the attempt to make clear what could be understood only through intuition, to excuse what needed no excuse. If a man loved you, he loved you for what you were, for the thing you were at the moment of his meeting you; and he had no right if he loved you to complain of the way you had come to be what he loved. One was what life made of one. It should be enough that the result was lovable. Was a flower’s beauty to be judged by the soil it had been grown in, or the flavour of a bird by the food it had been fattened on? Ransom must have had several love affairs before he had met her; but she had never been curious, never jealous of them. “If he had not had those love affairs,” she had told herself, “he would be a different person, and I might love him less. It’s what he is, not how he’s become what he is, that matters.” She had never had scenes with Ransom; in the twenty months of their love together she could not recall a single scene between them. But, then, there never had been anyone quite like Ransom, anybody so kind and patient and understanding. He never ruffled you, never uttered the careless word that wounded you. She had been resentful because he had not loved her more, or rather because he had not made enough protest of his love. For it might be that he had loved her more sincerely than she had believed he loved her; but out of his respect for her he had made no pretence of giving what was not his to give. He had not claimed an intensity he did not feel. He had not surrounded their love with the glowing phrases, the protestations of eternal passion that she had longed to hear from him, but that if they had come would have been insincere. She had no right to expect Ransom to love her as a boy or an old man would love. Love for a man of thirty was either a grand passion or the decoration of an interval. Ransom had a standard of values. It was neither for the first time nor the last that he was holding a woman in his arms. Had he protested himself to have never loved anyone so before he would have been libelling the past. Had he protested that he would never love again he would be libelling the future. “There is no one at this moment dearer to me than you are,” that was all that she had had any right to expect from Ransom. But she had demanded more, or rather her vanity had demanded more, the feminine vanity that had liked to think of her beauty as a star so dazzling that no other light in the sky was visible; her vanity that had wished to think of Ransom as someone who had had no existence till she had met him and would cease to exist when she had passed from him; the vanity that had been enraged by the consciousness of Ransom’s independence. It seemed to her now that she had been foolish not to accept Ransom’s love for what it was, instead of attempting to change it into something else.

  Eric arrived punctual
ly at half-past six, carrying under his arm a long, oblong, cardboard box. She looked curiously at it, but said nothing. It was for him to find the opening for whatever he might have to say. He laid the box on the walnut table in the drawing-room, took out a knife from his waistcoat pocket, cut the string, lifted off the lid. “I’ve brought this for you,” he said.

  “Eric, darling, but how sweet of you.” In relief and gratitude and delight she lifted from its layers of tissue paper, a grey-green georgette dress silvered with pleated panels. “It’s a duck, Eric.” She held it at full length from her, surveying it, her head tilted to one side, then drew it close up against her, and jumped across with it to the mirror, holding it so that it fell covering her dress completely. “It is nice, Eric, but you shouldn’t have, really you shouldn’t have spent your money on me like that. You mustn’t again, Eric, but it is sweet of you.”

  So he had understood her then, and the radiant smile with which she turned to him accepted the gift unconditionally both as a token of forgiveness and a recompense for the week’s unhappiness. She turned to fling herself gratefully into his arms, but the expression of his face stayed her.

  “Do you mind,” he said quietly, “putting that dress on now?”

  “Now?” she said.

  “I couldn’t,” he said, “take you out in a thing that other man had paid for.”

  The grey-green dress slipped out of Marjorie’s hands and fell in a rustling pool upon the floor.

  “Eric,” she said with a little gasp as though she had been struck.

  “Please,” he repeated quietly, “will you go and put that dress on now?”

  She did not flinch, she looked him straight in the eyes: “You are hard,” she said, “hard and cruel and unforgiving.”

  Then she stooped down, picked up the dress, flung it across her arm, and left him. Within four minutes she was in the room. She had taken no trouble over her dressing. Her hair was untidy, her stockings twisted, the dress itself was crumpled at the shoulder. She did not ask him how he liked it, she did not even look at him. She walked over to the mantelpiece, lifted the lid of a small painted wooden box that she had bought in Florence, took a cigarette from it, and tapped the end of it against the mantelpiece. She did not speak. She stood with her back half-turned to him, drawing quickly at the cigarette.

  “Marjorie,” he said at last, “we’ve got to get this thing straight.”

  She made no reply, but her head was bent ever so slightly forward in acquiescence. He walked round the table across the room, placed his hands on her shoulders, and turned her round to him. Fearlessly she raised her eyes to his.

  “Well, Eric,” she said.

  Somehow he had not expected that in the light of this new knowledge of her she would look so soft and lovely and desirable. Somehow he had expected to find the sweetness and purity of that loved face disfigured. But she was what she had always been, a very beautiful and lovely woman with calm oval face and quiet colouring and wide-set hazel eyes in whose luminous depths a man’s soul might drown itself; a woman to hold a man’s life in trust as a proud allegiance. That she had always seemed. That she still seemed to him. And the thought maddened him that she must be something other than she seemed. His hands dropped from her shoulders, he turned from her, crossed his arms upon the mantelpiece, and laid his head on them.

  “God,” he said, “I can’t bear this.”

  That her body should be the property of another man, that it should have been bought and passed into his keeping. That it should have been the property of that other man through all those months when to himself it had seemed a sacred mystery. How often, when he had danced with her, had that face so near his own seemed of all things in life most utterly unattainable, that face that at all hours was another man’s to kiss. How often in those days when they had lunched and dined together, and when she had seemed to him the embodiment of all purity, must she not a few hours earlier have lain in that man’s arms in complete surrender. How often must she not have come straight to him from that other man. And how often must she not have left him for that other man. He recalled in particular one late September day when she had lunched with him at Simpson’s and they had walked together afterwards by the Embankment It was one of those September days when the sky is blue and the air is warm, and the sunlight lingers lovingly on roofs and trees and chimney stacks, lovingly as though it were asking to be forgiven for the wet June days. He could not remember that they had said anything in particular to one another, but he had been conscious of an exultation more immense than anything that he had ever known. He had felt a new pride in himself because she was near to him. He had felt the world to be the richer and purer for her presence in it. He had spent the morning discussing the details of a particularly squalid case, one of those cases that seem to dirty life for one, that make one say: “The world must be a foul place if such things have part in it.” He had walked down Fleet Street feeling that every man and woman in it was, in a way, tarnished by that atmosphere which he had been breathing for the last three hours.

  And then he had found Marjorie waiting for him in the lounge of Simpson’s, and her calm oval face and quiet colouring and the deep, truthful, wide-set hazel eyes had brought back to him his faith in innocence and goodness and decent living. As long as women like Marjorie were in the world life could be kept clean and beautiful. And to be worthy of her his own life must be kept clean and beautiful; and, as he had waved good-bye to her at the corner of Temple Gardens, and had stood watching her hurry back towards the Strand, he had felt that she was leaving behind her with him something of her own truth and purity, something to be held by him for her sake in trust. And for all he knew she had been hurrying away from him that afternoon to an appointment; that within half-an-hour of saying good-bye to him, she had been with that other man.

  It would be so much easier had he ever thought differently about her. But he had so respected her, had so despised himself for having ever thought on that first evening that she might be one of those women whom men did not marry. He had so respected her. On the first evening that he had kissed her, his hand, as he had drawn her to him, had pressed accidentally over the soft curve of her breast, and for hours afterwards he had tortured himself in fear lest she might think it had been done on purpose—that he should have felt like that when there was not one inch of the body he had so respected that was ignorant of that other’s touch. God 1 it was more than one could bear. And to love her so still in spite of it.

  “What’s to be done, Marjorie?” he said. “What’s to be done?”

  “Was it Merivale that you asked?” she said. He nodded.

  “I wonder then,” she said, “how much he told you?”

  “All that there was to know, I should imagine.”

  She shrugged her shoulders and stubbed the end of her cigarette against the mantelpiece. “You never know,” she said. “There’s always something more.”

  Again there was a silence, and when Eric spoke it was with a voice of angry quietness.

  “There’s one thing though that I do want to know,” he said, “and that’s something that only you can tell me. What did you mean yourself at the beginning of our talk the other night, when you wanted to leave things as they were, when you were so angry when I mentioned money? What did you mean, Marjorie?”

  “Is that a fair question?”

  “It’s a question that I’m going to have the answer to.”

  “Then you are at liberty to go on thinking what I know you do think,” And she stretched out her hand towards the wooden box, took a cigarette from it, and tapped slowly with it upon the mantelpiece.

  “You were offering,” Eric persisted, “to become my mistress in addition to that other man’s.”

  “If you choose to put it in that way,” she said.

  “You thought that I should be willing to take a part share in you, that I should be content to have you in the hours when the man who had first claim on you didn’t want you, in the intervals betwe
en another man’s embraces, that I should make love to you in the flat he’d bought for you, in the room he’d bought for you, on the bed he had bought for you. That I should make love to you on the very bed where five hours earlier he had been with you, and would in another twelve hours be again with you. And you were disgusted because you thought I was offering you money for that, disgusted as though that wasn’t the only clean way in which one could have that sort of love, by buying it, not by stealing it.”

  A slow flush spread across her cheeks, and the fingers of her right hand twisted and broke the paper of her cigarette. “I allow no one, Eric,” she said, “to speak to me like that. You’d better go, I think. I thought you were in love with me, I wanted to make you happy. I made a mistake. I’m sorry. Now please go.”

  He laughed, a high-pitched, hysterical, ironic laugh.

  “In love! Make me happy!—You must have sunk pretty low, Marjorie, to think that I would stand for a thing like that.”

  The blush in her cheeks deepened, and her teeth closed tightly upon her lower lip. She was not going to lose her temper. He could lose his if he wanted, she would hold on to hers.

  “Some men,” she said, “would not feel like that.”