“Done it. Look!”
He pointed out to her that the upper portion of the Foreign Office embossed stamp had come away with the original photo, and that it would have to be cut away and imposed upon the new photo. Also, the Foreign Office date stamp in violet ink would need reproducing. Probably, the final product would not bear too close an inspection, but the very success of the plan depended upon a perfunctory scrutiny of their two persons and their passports.
“I shall have to buy a rubber stamp and fake that date. It is not so simple as one thought, but nothing worth while is.”
She was looking at the photograph of his dead wife.
“It’s such a risk, John. I hope she won’t haunt me.”
“Does she look like it? Good memories don’t bear malice.”
She seemed glad to surrender the photo to him.
“Won’t you have to take one exactly the same size?”
“Yes, I can manage that.”
She touched her dress.
“Is this the right sort of black? The black part of that seal will have to match.”
“Yes, that’s so. But I think it will do.”
“And I shall travel as your wife, John?”
“Of course,” but the question was not so naïve as it seemed. It contained—within itself—the implications of a far more delicate challenging of fate. Was she sufficiently of the old conventional world to care about society’s passport? He put an arm round her waist and held her.
“Worrying about the conventions? We were outside the conventions—from the moment we came together. Well, try and think of it as a beginning over again in a little world of our own.”
“I’ll try to, John.”
“You’ll have to, my dear.”
2
That night something happened between them, but not quite as it happened to Adam and Eve. There had been another argument over the mattress; he was for returning it to her room, she for insisting that she would not take it from him. And there had been sudden tears.
“Let me give—something. I feel so guilty.”
As though to make certain that the mattress should remain where it was, she had sat down upon it like a distressed and naïve child. This sudden emotion was a little tempest in the woods, wet and shuddering, and it so moved him that he sat down beside her.
“Dear heart, you mustn’t feel like this.”
“But I do, John. I’m taking everything from you, everything. I’m making you a kind of——.”
He had held her and she had clung to him.
“O, love me, dear, let me give something. I’d give you everything—and then—go.”
It had seemed so easy then to lie face to face, kissing and speaking broken words, and what he had told her and what he had not taken had been more assuaging than any act of passion. She had lain there, feeling his face with her fingers, and feeling within herself the realization of the kind of love he was giving her, the love that many a sensitive woman dreams of and never finds.
“I didn’t know a man could be like this.”
“Yes, you did, somewhere——.”
“Yes, perhaps,—in dreams.”
“Life’s a dream, dear, when it’s—real.”
She had kissed him with a kind of deliberate and innocent ardour.
“Oh, I’ll try and make everything up to you. I’ll try to give you——.”
“It won’t be very hard, dear.”
There had been more rain in the night, and the morning, with its fragments of very blue sky and embattled clouds, was a lover’s day. Changeable weather. But as a northern man did he ask for the eternal glare of a land without temperament or atmosphere? He was for Brandon village with his haversack, and as he turned into the village street by the funny old white house with the green shutters the sun came out in sudden strength. He saw the sign of The White Hart inn, and its old pollarded elm with the hollow trunk, and a little crowd of people, and in the white doorway of the pub, P.C. Pook sardonically on duty. What was the occasion? And then he realized it—the inquest on Ballard, twelve plain men collected to view the body and to decide how death had come to it.
Luce hesitated on the footpath. If he was conscious of being observed it was by the eyes of a particular person. Why should life always give him this goat-faced creature as a human contretemps? Some impulse made him cross the road. He had come to Brandon to shop and the world and officialdom should see his haversack.
He nodded at P.C. Pook.
“Good morning, officer.”
The other man’s face was both stupid and satirical. If he regarded Luce as nothing more than a gentlemanly joke, a kind of cultured Bottom, that was good Englishry. Anything strange and outlandish was worth a snigger or a sneer, or you might elect to treat it with suspicion.
“Morning, sir.”
But even the title was satirical, like a gesture inviting other people to observe this funny creature, and to enjoy him with P.C. Pook.
Luce found a large and innocent smile.
“What’s the occasion?”
What a word to use! The man in blue seemed to smirk.
“Ever attended an inquest, sir?”
“No,—I don’t think I have.”
“We might have called on you.”
“I don’t think I’m on the register.”
Authority must have its joke, but it mistrusted any answering glimmer.
“We’ll get you put on, sir. Now then, none of that, you boys.”
He turned upon some youngsters who were hanging on the White Hart fence, and Luce moved on. He felt that Arcady was staring at his back. Someone asked a question.
“Who’s the gent?”
Someone replied to the question.
“Dunno. Never seen ’im before. Ought to get ’is ’air cut, anyway.”
Luce did his shopping, and if he indulged in a few imaginative touches, they were the inspirations of the human dramatist. He said that he expected a couple of men friends to spend the week-end with him. He filled his haversack and a large brown paper bag which Mr. Smith found for him. Brandon was not equal to supplying him with an outfit for developing and printing photographs, and Melford would have to be visited. A Frenchman meeting him in Brandon street might have exclaimed “Voilà le mari,” for Luce looked domestically laden. The crowd outside the White Hart had deliquesced, but P.C. Pook was still on duty in the doorway.
Luce turned his back on Brandon. He was passing along the red brick wall of the local brewery, and enjoying the smell of it when yet another inspiration arrived. He remembered his married sister who lived in Canonbury. Could not Christine be used in the crisis, not as a confederate but as a friend to be plundered? Christine and Rachel were much of a size. If he went to visit Christine would it not be possible for him to purloin a pair of his sister’s shoes, and a hat? But how to get them away? A man who was supposed to be in town on business might surely be allowed to carry an attaché case?
They were unpacking his haversack when he told her of his plan for providing her with shoes and a hat. He had said nothing of the inquest upon the dead man. She met his proposal with the most obvious of questions.
“But won’t your sister miss the things?”
“I suppose she will.”
“Has she a maid?”
“She had.”
“Would not that mean her suspecting the maid?”
“It might.”
“I don’t think we ought to do that.”
He did not quarrel with her sensitive seriousness. So she could flinch—even in a crisis—from foisting a small suspicion upon some other woman.
“I might ask my sister if she has a hat and shoes to spare for someone.”
“Yes, you could do that, John. It would not hurt anybody, would it?”
She was putting the stores away in the cupboard, and as she came back to the table he took her face between his hands and kissed her.
“What a pair of sensitive idiots! But better to be like that.”
3
Four o’clock, the window open, and the tea-table laid for two. Rachel had put the kettle on the oil-stove, and was cutting bread and butter. Luce, sitting at the table, had begun a letter to his sister, for it was as well that Christine should be warned of his visit.
Voices in the garden, laughter, a man hailing the tower.
“Hallo, there, anyone at home, anyone at home?”
Luce’s head came up with a jerk. His eyes met Rachel’s. She was standing on the other side of the table, suddenly motionless, her left hand steadying the loaf, the knife arrested in the act of spreading butter.
He stood up, pointed towards the door, and saw her leave loaf and knife and go quickly across the room. She turned, pointed meaningly at the table, and disappeared. There had been no need for her to prompt him, and he seized the second plate and cup and smuggled them into the cupboard.
The voices were active without.
“No one at home, H.P.”
“Hallo, there, Jonathan. Show a face.”
Luce walked to the window and looked out. Ye Gods, that ass Pusey, and Lottie Reubens the novelist!
XV
Lottie Reubens had a cigarette stuck in her mouth. Her greasy and sallow cleverness were as familiar as her face to those who were supposed to take literature seriously. Gossip had ascribed all the more modern vices to her; she drugged, she drank; and, as a matter of fact, she did neither. Being a Jewess with a feeling for finance, a scalding tongue and infinite assurance, she collected such decorations and wore them in the cause of publicity. Her books might have an insolent smartness. She was catalogued as a highbrow, but under her greasy black hair was the brain of a business woman.
She possessed an insatiable appetite for men. She wallowed in the male, analysed, pretended to despise, but devoured him, and Hugh Pusey was her latest, one of those busy and genial little chatterers who attach themselves to the world of letters. He had scribbled poetry, produced two or three indifferent biographies, served as a sub-editor on one of the society illustrateds, and written one bad novel. His association with Luce had dated from their Oxford days, and Luce had not shed him because he divined pathos and futility in this bald-headed, good-natured little ass.
“Hallo! Well—I’m damned!”
It was the sort of greeting that one gave to Lottie. She was in one of her fish-wife moods. She had been damned by far better men than Luce, and said so. She held Hugh by his puddy little hand, and looked at him obliquely with eyes that suggested that they were covered with fish scales. Was she going down with Hugh in the heather? O, possibly! And damn the public! There was a zest in the chance of your being surprised. It was like undressing yourself in a book or a shop window.
“Where did you drop from?”
Hugh raised the lady’s hand and kissed it.
“We did not drop, John; we adhered to the Portsmouth road at fifty. We got the car up as far as we could.”
“We—my dear!”
“O, yes, I just sat and gibbered. My liver nearly fell out in that snotty lane.”
“Veridical,” said Miss Reubens.
She liked such words, and used them. She manufactured words. She referred to Hugh’s courage as slubby.
But she looked at Luce up above, and she looked at the tower. He might be a little remote but he was hairy and actual. She was not sufficiently romantic to think of him as a Norse jarl in a ship.
“Are you coming down, or do we float up?”
Hugh giggled.
“He’s been napping. I see the sleep in Thor’s eyes.”
Luce, more concerned with other concealments, smiled down upon them.
“I was just going to have tea.”
Lottie had stuck her cigarette back in her insolent mouth.
“Tea—in a tower! Strike me a match, Slubby. My septic fag’s gone out.”
Luce, with one more comprehensive and careful glance round the room, went to open the green door for them. It would save time and tissue for him to give them tea, while poor Rachel would have to go tealess, shut up in her secret room. And what contrasts these two women were, Cinderella and this chalk-faced sensualist with her brutal mouth and her eternal posing.
“Come in.”
“Say, John, Lottie’s been combing the country for a place like this.”
“Really?”
He stood aside for them to pass. Miss Reubens winked at him.
“Did he always bubble, Mr. Luce? Say, Slub Rep, what about carrying me up these steps?”
“My dear!”
“Doesn’t that sound marital!”
She looked at Luce as though passing him the right to pick her up and treat her like a Sabine woman, but Luce had always been shy of such ladies.
“Interested in houses?”
She crinkled up her nose at him and prepared to ascend.
“Am I as adipose as all that? I’ve got a tale stewing and it wants a focus, or a blocus. Do you know what a blocus is, Slub?”
“Roman for bloke. Get along up, my dear.”
She turned and smacked him.
“Don’t be—so—marital.”
And Pusey retorted by smacking her large posterior. She liked that sort of thing.
O, yes, easy people. There would be no gaps in the conversation, but when Miss Reubens saw that most ascetic room, she pulled off her hat like a soldier unhelming, and crammed it upon Hugh’s head. “Let it stay—there. Say,—you seem some cenobite.” She went and sat side-saddle on the window-sill, while Hugh removed the hat from his head. “Where do you put hats, John?” Luce had gone to the cupboard, and was collecting the necessary china. “Oh,—anywhere, my lad.” Miss Reubens sat observing her host. She found him an appetizing person after the smooth and obese hairlessness of Hugh. Hairy men were supposed to be so virile.
“No frocks here, I see.”
Pusey had placed her hat on a Windsor chair. He waggled a finger at her and sat down.
“Carlotta—no understand. Temple of Virtue.”
Luce was as grave as a Trappist.
“Do you take tea, Miss Reubens?”
Did she take tea? How very remote he sounded! Rather provocative this Stylites person.
“I take anything—with a temperature—above normal. And how do you manage baths?”
“Just take them,” said Luce.
“Hear that, Slub Rep? He just takes them. How formidable!”
Hugh giggled.
“He always did. Remember Ponder up at Magdalen, John? Whenever there was a binge, he used to finish it by being sick into his bath.”
“No, I had forgotten that,” said Luce.
Miss Reubens stroked her thigh.
“Sublimation—I presume. Your subconscious isn’t allowed to come up the pipe and wiggle its wicked toes at you.”
Luce smiled at her.
“Does everyone take sugar? Afraid you’ve caught me cakeless.”
It could not be said that Luce’s extemporized tea-party was a difficult meal, in spite of the absence of cake, for both Miss Reubens and Pusey were great talkers, and as often as not they were talking together. Miss Reubens had undertaken to write a weekly criticism of current literature for one of the London dailies, and Pusey devilled for her. He happened to mention Peter George’s latest novel, the review copies of which had just been distributed. Pusey was interested financially in the publishing house who dealt with Peter George, and Peter George, as a commercial asset, was to be boosted. And there the argument began, or rather—Miss Reubens spiflicated Hugh. To Lottie Reubens Peter George was a particularly popular and nauseous person, a crapulent humanist who spread sentimentality like birdlime to catch housemaids. Peter George was her pigeon; let there be no doubt about it. She was not going to leave a single feather on Peter George’s latest product.
Luce, listening to the hubbub, contrived to change the conversation.
“By the way—you know about cars, Miss Reubens.”
She knew about everything. She could drive a car wit
h the same insolent and crashing efficiency with which she would splash vitriol over Peter George.
“Want a car?”
“As a matter of fact I’m thinking of hiring a motor caravan for a month. Just a modest affair. I suppose one can hire——?”
She could give him all the information that he needed. She had caravaned for a month last year with a young man who was a dancing pro. in town. Custs were the people, Custs of Edgware. They supplied you with everything, including an insurance policy. She could give Luce an introduction to Messrs. Custs; they were under an obligation to her, for she had presented them with some publicity in one of her novels.
“I suppose they can arrange for a car?”
“Certainly. But surely a civilized man could not exist in this isolated ruin without a car.”
“But I do, somehow.”
“Without even a good girl Friday?”
“Yes, even without that.”
Miss Reubens lit a cigarette and stuck it in her mouth. How did he manage? How did he satisfy sex? She was quite capable of asking him such a question.
“Prodigious! The happy celibate, Slub Rep. Make a note of that.”
Luce had risen to refill the teapot. Did anyone desire more tea?
“Carlotta wants to explore the tower, John. She’ll turn you into copy.”
But Luce was not listening to Pusey. He had heard someone knocking at the green door.
2
For a moment he hesitated. Should he ignore the sound? But realizing that the others had heard or would hear it, he put the kettle back on the stove, and with an “Excuse me” went out to take up this second challenge. Assuredly, on this summer afternoon he was suffering from a surfeit of human interest. Who the devil would he find on his doorstep? And yet, might not the presence of this literary lady and her cicisbeo provide him with an atmosphere of social rectitude? He left the sitting-room door wide open, and willed Hugh and the lady to go on talking.
The Woman at The Door Page 15