Accompanied by His Wife

by Mary Burchell

  ‘I’m sorry, Michael,. I’m afraid I don’t altogether believe that. You see—’

  ‘But you know it’s the truth! You know me well enough to judge whether it is or not.’

  ‘No, I don’t know anything about it,’ she retorted quickly. ‘I only know that for weeks before—before the fiasco at Marseilles you were changing towards me and—’

  ‘I was?’ Michael passed his hand over his forehead in angry bewilderment. ‘What are you talking of, Pat?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ interrupted Patricia firmly at this point. ‘I can’t see that I have any part in this discussion. If you want me, I’ll be upstairs in my room.’

  And, without waiting for protest from either, she fled.

  As she passed Mrs. Harnby’s room she noticed that the door was ajar. She checked her almost panic-stricken footsteps a second too late, and Mrs. Harnby’s voice called softly:

  ‘Is that you, Patricia, dear?’

  ‘Yes.’ With a reluctance which she hoped she was concealing, Patricia went into the room.

  Mrs. Harnby looked up, and said at once:

  ‘Why, what is it, my dear? Has someone frightened you?’

  ‘Fr-frightened me? No, of course not,’ Patricia assured her cheerfully, though, when she thought of the woman downstairs and the amount of mischief she could create if she chose, she was hard put to it to conceal her terror.

  ‘I thought you sounded in such a frantic hurry—almost as though you were running away from something. And you look pale and are quite out of breath,’

  ‘Oh, I was hurrying—I’d just thought of something I meant to finish before dinner. I’d forgotten all about it all the afternoon.’

  ‘Oh, I see. Then I won’t keep you. Who was the pretty woman who wanted to see Michael, by the way?’

  ‘The—’ Patricia turned slowly, her hand still on the door-knob—’the pretty woman?’ she repeated stupidly.

  ‘Yes. Julia seemed quite impressed by her. She spoke to me about her. Said she asked urgently for Michael, and then saw you instead.’

  ‘Oh, that woman. I couldn’t think who you meant, for a moment. Yes, she was lovely. She—she was collecting for some charity. An annual affair, I imagine. Michael seems to have been very generous in other years and she was anxious to see him personally. I—promised to speak to him about it.’

  ‘Oh, was that it? How clever to send round someone really pretty. I’m sure it must help the receipts.’ And Mrs. Harnby laughed, as though the idea really amused her.

  ‘Yes,’ Patricia agreed mechanically. ‘No doubt it does.’

  She was amazed at her own glibness in concocting that lie, and hardly knew whether she was more relieved that it was accepted or ashamed that she had had to use it.

  ‘Is Michael in yet?’

  The question was quite casual, but to Patricia’s nervously sharpened hearing there seemed to be something quite appallingly significant about it.

  ‘Michael? Oh—yes. Yes, I think I heard him come in a few minutes ago. But he went straight to his study.

  ‘Without any sort of greeting?’ Mrs. Harnby’s eyebrows rose in amused protest. ‘Patricia, what is the matter with you? Something has agitated you very much. And I don’t see that it could be the visit of a charity collector,’ she added reflectively.

  ‘No, really!’ Patricia could have kicked herself for her bad acting at such a crucial point. ‘There’s nothing wrong at all. Please don’t worry yourself for nothing.’

  ‘Don’t worry—don’t worry! That s all anyone ever says to me now,’ exclaimed Mrs. Harnby with real impatience, though her voice still held some amusement.

  ‘That’s the worst of having been ill. Everyone thinks you mustn’t be worried. In other words, you mustn’t even know if something interesting or important is happening in your own family. And all the time’—she shrugged in a charmingly deprecating manner—‘I could probably manage the situation a great deal better than any of you.’

  Patricia felt this was so unquestionably true that, for a moment, she almost yielded to the wild impulse to tell Mrs. Harnby the whole story.

  But of course it was a ridiculous notion. There was no question of such a thing being allowed to take place. They had not shielded her all this while, at the expense of so much worry and anxiety, simply in order to thrust her now into a scene of emotional stress that would tax the strongest nerves.

  But she lingered a moment longer. Long enough to hug her supposed mother-in-law and say with fervent truth:

  ‘If there were anything wrong, there’s no one I would more willingly tell.’

  And as she went out of the room, Mrs. Harnby’s gaze followed her very reflectively.

  Once she was safe in her own room, Patricia dropped into a chair and allowed the anxiety she was feeling to show in her expression at last.

  What were Michael and that woman saying to each other downstairs? And how would she try to turn the whole situation to her advantage? For that she would do so Patricia felt grimly certain.

  Presumably she had found that there was unexpectedly little for her in what Patricia privately called ‘the Marseilles adventure’. And that was why she had been prepared to come back to Michael, as the repentant and sorrowing wife.

  But, if that was so, why make a fuss now over the situation she had found? Of course she knew quite well that there had never been any harm in it, and that she could accept Michael’s explanation at its face-value.

  Provided she was willing to wait the very short while until her position could be acknowledged (‘which is what we’re all having to do,’ thought Patricia grimly), she had very little to complain of, particularly in view of her own actions.

  Then why play the injured wife? Was it simply to establish some sort of fresh hold over Michael?—to distract attention from her own lapse?—or for some much more complicated purpose?

  Whatever it was, it was for no good purpose, Patricia felt sure. And then she sprang to her feet, with every speculation forgotten. For she had heard Michael’s step in the passage outside.

  He hardly more than glanced at Patricia. Then he went over to the dressing-table, and fingered one or two of the things absently, as though he were looking for something but was not quite sure what it was.

  ‘Michael, has she gone?’

  ‘Oh yes, she’s gone.’

  He didn’t turn round, and Patricia anxiously watched his reflection in the mirror.

  ‘Did you—come to any sort of arrangement?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘We didn’t come to any arrangement.’ Then, turning suddenly, he faced her. ‘She insists that she intends to divorce me.’

  ‘Divorce you? She divorce you? But it’s ridiculous! She can’t divorce you.’

  ‘Oh yes, she can,’ he said grimly. ‘And she can cite you as co-respondent.’

  CHAPTER VIII

  For a moment Patricia stared at him in angry astonishment.

  ‘But she’s the one who did the misbehaving, or whatever you like to call it! How dare she have the impertinence even to talk of divorcing you? Does she suppose she can go wandering about the Continent with another man, and then appear all injured innocence and talk of divorcing her husband because he did what he could to cover up her behaviour?’

  ‘According to her,’ Michael explained rather wearily, ‘there was no “wandering about the Continent”, as you call it. She insists that she acted on some mad impulse, and that she regretted what she had done almost before the boat was out of harbour again. She left this—this other man that same afternoon and went on alone to Paris. It was in Paris, in the surroundings we had known together, that she came to her senses and—’

  ‘Came to her senses! If that young woman ever lost her senses, so far as her own interest was concerned, then I’ll never trust my judgment again. And if I called her the names I’d really like to call her, you’d never say again in that reflective way of yours, “What a nice girl you are, Patricia,” ’ she added grimly.

  He smiled
faintly.

  ‘All of which doesn’t get us anywhere, my dear.’

  ‘No, of course not.’ Her anger left her as abruptly as it had come. Sitting down on the side of her bed, she took both his hands and looked up at him with real sympathy. ‘Michael, I’m so sorry. You must be terribly miserable and worried. But—honestly—do you believe her story?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I only know I don’t want you dragged into this, simply because you were so wonderfully good as to help me out of a rotten hole.’

  ‘Oh, that doesn’t matter,’ she began absently. But he interrupted her with passionate energy.

  ‘Of course it matters! It always matters for a girl to appear as co-respondent in a divorce suit. What do you suppose your Phil Magerton would think of it, for one thing?’

  ‘Oh!—I’d forgotten.’ She really was shaken for a moment. Then she recovered herself. ‘But anyway, Michael, it’s all so absurd. It isn’t even a practical possibility. I don’t know much about divorce. I do know there isn’t much chance of getting one if there are charges against both parties. You have at least as strong a story as she has.’

  ‘Meaning that if I like to counter her disbelief of my story with a disbelief of hers, she would be unlikely to get her divorce?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘And how, my dear,’ he inquired dryly, ‘do you suppose that would improve our—or rather, your— position?’

  ‘Well, I suppose—I— Oh!’ She stopped suddenly, her eyes widening in angry, frightened comprehension.

  ‘Quite so. There would be a grand washing of dirty linen all round. And I hardly imagine that Pat’s failure to get her divorce would be much consolation to you for the loss of your reputation.’

  There was a long silence, during which Patricia slowly digested this most unpalatable situation.

  ‘I don’t understand the idea behind it,’ he said at last with angry impatience. ‘It all seems so pointless.’

  ‘The idea behind it,’ thought Patricia cynically, ‘is handsome alimony.’ But she was not quite sure how Michael would take such a suggestion. It was a little difficult to tell how he felt about Pat now. Whether he was still blindly infatuated, or was beginning to suspect that he was being very, very delicately blackmailed.

  ‘May I ask something which isn’t quite my business?’ she inquired at last.

  He smiled slightly again.

  ‘I suppose so. There doesn’t seem much of this which isn’t rather painfully your business.’

  ‘Well—are you still very much in love with her?’

  For once, he didn’t seem haughtily annoyed at such a personal question. He sat down slowly on the bed beside her, still holding one of her hands in his.

  ‘Patricia, I don’t know. She seems like a different person, somehow—You see, I began by thinking her so wonderful. She was always—elusive, and I suppose’—he laughed a little deprecatingly—‘I used to admit to myself that I never quite understood her. But I never had any doubt about her being the most beautiful and attractive woman I had ever seen.’

  ‘She is very beautiful,’ Patricia conceded, because he had paused, almost as though he intended her to say something.

  ‘Then, of course, when this frightful thing happened I felt that everything I had ever known of her was wrong. My own wife was a stranger to me. It wasn’t exactly that I thought I could never forgive her—’

  ‘No, I know. It was just that the ornament was broken, and even if you could get it mended again, the cracks would always show.’

  He smiled.

  ‘Well, yes, Patricia. Perhaps it was something like that.’

  ‘And then she did come back,’ Patricia prompted him gently, because he seemed inclined to relapse into his own thoughts.

  ‘Yes, she came back. And,’ he said slowly, ‘if she seemed a stranger to me at the time when she left me, she seems doubly a stranger to me now.’

  Patricia regarded him thoughtfully.

  ‘I suppose,’ she said, ‘you don’t like the suggestion that perhaps you are seeing her as she really is, for the first time?’

  ‘No,’ he said dryly, ‘I don’t like the suggestion. But my common sense tells me that it’s not an impossible explanation.’

  ‘And that she’s quite deliberately exploiting your present position so that she will reap handsome alimony?’

  He winced angrily. But, although he refused to agree to that in words, Patricia knew that he was acknowledging the possibility to himself.

  ‘Yet she must know as well as we do that if I contest the suit she wouldn’t get any divorce,’ he said musingly, after a moment. And Patricia then realised, from the way he had worded his reflection, that he had really accepted the true picture of his wife.

  ‘She doesn’t think you will contest it,’ Patricia told him bluntly. ‘She thinks you will let it go through the quickest and quietest way possible.’

  ‘In which, of course,’ he admitted dryly, ‘she is entirely correct.’

  ‘You can’t mean that!’ Patricia was hotly angry. ‘You mustn’t let her get away with it like that. Don’t be so—so spineless.’

  ‘My dear,’ he pointed out coolly, ‘I am not in a position to choose. I must do whatever will mean less scandal attaching to your name. If the suit goes through undefended we may be able to keep you completely in the background. That is what concerns me at the moment.’

  Patricia hardly considered that before she replied:

  ‘But I won’t have it! I will not have that wretched woman exploit you, simply because some mistaken chivalry towards me prevents you from defending yourself. It’s—it’s morally unsound.’

  ‘Patricia, dear.’ He laughed, but he was holding her hand painfully tightly, and his slightly heightened colour showed that he was moved. ‘It’s so like you to want to sacrifice yourself for the sake of abstract justice, but—’

  ‘It isn’t in the least like me to want to sacrifice myself for anything,’ she retorted promptly. ‘I’m much too common-sense for that. But I’m hanged if I’ll let that—that chromium-plated harpy get away with such an obvious ramp, if I can stop it.’

  He did raise his eyebrows rather at this unusual description of his wife. But all he said was:

  ‘Aren’t you forgetting that you are not the only person to be consulted about this business?’

  ‘You, you mean?’

  ‘Oh—well, I wasn’t thinking of myself just then. I was thinking of your fiancé, who certainly is entitled to some say in the matter.’

  ‘I don’t think it really concerns Phil,’ she said slowly at last. ‘It’s a question of right and wrong which I have to decide.’

  ‘I doubt if he will agree, with you there,’ Michael remarked dryly.

  ‘I can’t help that. A truth isn’t any the less a truth because someone you’re fond of doesn’t agree with you.’

  Again he gave her that smile, and his hand tightened.

  ‘I refuse to let you rush into any decision which you may regret. So far as that goes, I insist on being the heavy husband.’

  She smiled, too, then.

  ‘Well, I’ll have to see Phil about it, of course.’

  ‘I think it would be best.’

  ‘Though I reserve the right absolutely to make my own decision.’ Then, after a pause—‘What did you and she finally—decide?’

  ‘I said that I should have to think it over.’

  ‘And she was going to do the same?’

  ‘I suppose so.’ He looked dubious. ‘I don’t think she intends to alter her mind at all.’

  ‘Of course she doesn’t—unless she can see more profit in some other wangle. No, Michael, she has us very nicely cornered. And she knows it.’

  He winced again. More, Patricia thought, from the realisation that it was really his wife who was behaving like this than from any alarm at his own position.

  It was not until fairly late that evening that Patricia had a suitable chance to telephone to Phil. But, when she could d
o so, she seized the opportunity at once. Isobel was upstairs with Mrs. Harnby and Susan, and Michael in his study, so there was no one to hear her relieved, ‘Oh, Phil, is that you?’ when she finally got through to him.

  ‘Patricia dear! I had almost decided to break my promise and ring you up.’

  ‘Well, there isn’t any need now.’ She was smiling, she found, in sheer relief at having someone so lighthearted as Phil to talk to—someone who had nothing to do with the complicated and harassing position in this household. ‘When can I see you?’

  ‘To-morrow?’

  ‘Yes. To-morrow, if you can manage it.’

  ‘If I can what? Don’t be silly, darling. First thing in the morning?’

  ‘I think the afternoon’s more comfortable, don’t you?’ She was laughing again. ‘Somewhere where we can have a real talk, Phil.’

  ‘Why not come along to my place?’

  ‘Your place?’

  ‘Yes. Didn’t you know I have a little box of a place near the Adelphi? You have to take a magnifying glass to it to see it properly, but it’s cosy.’

  ‘Do you mean you’re not living at home any more?’

  ‘Oh, in the ordinary way—yes. But I’ve wanted a place of my own for some time now. Business reasons, you know—and some reasons of pleasure too,’ he added wickedly. ‘Now I have it, and I think it’s time you were introduced to it.’

  ‘Phil, how delightful. I’ll be there about four. What is the address?’

  He told her, and added that she was not to be late, or she would find him roaming the Embankment ‘looking for a likely spot for a dejected suicide.’

  She rang off, considerably cheered by his good-humoured nonsense. Now that he was happy, and confident of her love for him, he was much less inclined to raise objections about her position in Michael’s house. It was even possible that she would be able to make him see the whole affair of the returned wife in the same light as she did.

  ‘Well—no. I expect he’ll be sticky over that,’ Patricia reflected the next moment. It was difficult enough to think of oneself as a co-respondent in a contested divorce suit. For Phil to regard such a contingency placidly was asking rather too much, perhaps.