by Alec Waugh
She recalled that last afternoon that they had spent together, the afternoon over which had hung the shadow of impending trouble. “I’m afraid we’re going to quarrel, little Marjorie,” he had said,” and I don’t want to quarrel. But perhaps if we do quarrel, at the end of it all we’ll understand each other better.”
And she had laughed rather bitterly. “Perhaps, if we do quarrel,” she had said, “it’ll be for altogether, Ransom.”
But he had shaken his head. “Oh, no,” he had answered. “We matter much too much to one another for that to happen. There’ll be a quarrel. And for six months, for a year, for two years perhaps we shan’t see each other, and then one day we shall find we need each other, and we shall ring each other up, and we shall find that things are just as they have always been—just as they have always been,” he had added, “only rather better.”
Ransom was like that. Because he loved people for what they were he did not cease to love them for doing what from the beginning he must have realised, through knowing them, that it was possible for them to do. He had never seen her through the distorting mirage either of a boy’s or an old man’s idealism. He had loved her for what she was. He was one of the few men with whom after an interval things could return to what they had been before, because during that interval she had not changed or ceased to be what she was before. She was still the woman he had cared for.
“One day,” he had said, “we shall find we need each other, and we shall ring each other up, and we shall find that things are just as they have always been, only rather better.”
Slowly as a ship that comes into harbour her hand was stretched out towards the telephone. Slowly it lifted the receiver. Slowly her lips repeated the familiar number.
“Western,” she said. “Western five—three—two—six—two.”
To my Brother
Evelyn
With Much Affection
This electronic edition published in 2011 by Bloomsbury Reader
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ISBN: 9781448201303
eISBN: 9781448202621
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