Accompanied by His Wife

by Mary Burchell

  She felt a good deal of pleasant curiosity as she set off for Phil’s place the next afternoon.

  The flat, she found, was one of a small group of service flats, where the comfort of the tenants was considered to a most gratifying degree. Phil always had known how to make himself comfortable, of course, but she couldn’t help wondering idly how much all this pleasant indulgence cost him. He would hate giving it up—anyone would—but, for a man who was contemplating marriage on an income which he had to make himself, it certainly was a pretty .expensive luxury.

  He opened the door to her himself, and greeted her with all the gay, affectionate enthusiasm which was so much part of him.

  ‘Like it?’ he wanted to know, as she stood in the small but delightful sitting-room, looking round her with a simile of sheer pleasure and admiration.

  ‘It’s simply lovely, Phil!’

  ‘Come over here, and see the view of the river.’ He drew her over to the window, and they stood there for a moment, very close together, savouring not only their own pleasure but each other’s.

  ‘It’s the nicest place I’ve ever seen,’ she declared at last, sitting down on the window seat and taking off her hat.

  ‘I’m so glad you think so.’

  ‘Fancy your not mentioning it before. How long have you had it, Phil?’

  ‘Three days.’

  ‘Three—days?’

  ‘Um-hm.’ He laughed at her astonishment, and proceeded to pour out sherry for them both.

  She watched him in silence—a slightly troubled silence. What an extraordinary thing for Phil to do! To launch out into the renting of an expensive furnished flat, the moment he knew she was willing to marry him.

  Unless, of course, he thought they were going to be married almost at once!

  ‘Your drink, darling.’

  ‘Oh, thank you. But—there’s something I want to tell you—’

  ‘I know. That you love me.’

  ‘No. At least—’ she laughed protestingly—‘that too, of course. But there’s something else.’

  ‘Then it can wait, my sweet, until you’ve drunk a toast—to our new home.’

  ‘Oh, Phil!’

  ‘Please drink,’ he begged.

  And, half laughing, half distressed, she did so.

  ‘Is this really to be our home?’

  ‘It’s to be our home,’ he agreed.

  ‘I can hardly believe it,’

  ‘No,’ he agreed. ‘I can hardly believe it, even when I see you sitting there.’

  ‘Oh, I—hope you’re not going to be terribly dashed by what I have to tell you.’

  He paled slightly and set his glass down sharply.

  ‘It’s nothing to do with—our not being together, is it?’

  ‘No, not exactly. It’s just that some rotten complication has arisen in the situation with Michael. His wife has come back.’

  ‘Well—’ Phil drew a sigh of relief—‘I should call that a case of simplifying things,, rather than complicating them. He doesn’t need two wives, does he? I suppose even he will consider you free to make your own arrangements now.’

  ‘Oh, it’s—not a question of that. You see, she elected to be very—upset by the discovery of our arrangement. And she talks of divorcing Michael.’

  ‘Divorcing him?’ .For a moment, Phil looked more amused than horrified. ‘But I thought she was the one who had been sowing a dainty crop of wild oats.’

  ‘She has. At least, I think she has. And certainly it looks a bit like it if you go off to the Continent with some man, leaving nothing but an unsatisfactory note for your husband.’

  ‘Definite sign of wild-oat sowing,’ Phil agreed.

  ‘Well, she insists now that it never came to anything, that—’

  ‘The wild oats were Easter lilies when they came up?’

  ‘Something like that. She—she’s a very vindictive sort of person, Phil.’

  ‘Of course,’ he agreed tolerantly. ‘Most of you women are when you find someone else has snaffled your man.’

  ‘It isn’t funny!’

  ‘I’m sorry, darling.’

  ‘It’s deadly serious. She is going to try to divorce Michael. And she’s going to cite me as co-respondent.’

  ‘The deuce she is!’ Phil did sit up then.

  ‘Yes. I thought you hadn’t taken in all the implications,’ Patricia said a little grimly.

  ‘But the whole thing is ridiculous. She hasn’t got a leg to stand on—if this Continental trip really took place.’

  ‘Nor have we.’

  ‘Nor have you what?’

  ‘A leg to stand on. How do you suppose our story would sound in the divorce court?’

  Phil gave a long whistle.

  ‘I hadn’t thought of that. But—well, hang it all, isn’t it stalemate, if both the lady and her husband appear to have been transgressing?’

  ‘Yes, I thought of that too. But you see, she’s out to get what she can out of Michael. He is still rather reluctant to believe it, but it’s perfectly obvious. She thinks that, if she puts pressure on him, he won’t bring any counter-charge, because an undefended case will go through with as little publicity as possible, and I—I shan’t have too much unpleasantness.’

  ‘Um—hm, I see. Seems a pretty sound scheme.’

  ‘Phil, it is not a sound scheme! It’s a deliberate and disgusting piece of exploiting. And I won’t be party to it. That’s—well, that’s what I wanted to tell you.’

  ‘I see.’ There was a slight pause. Then he said:

  ‘Well, if you’re asking for my advice, darling, I think you’re overdoing the quixotic element. It isn’t your fault that these two seem to have made a pretty mess of their affairs. I won’t administer the backhand cut of “I told you so”, but I can’t say I’m greatly surprised that you find yourself in some such position.’

  ‘But you won’t—mind if I insist on Michael fighting the case?’

  ‘Mind?’ He smiled and shrugged. ‘Yes, of course I mind anything so damned unpleasant for you, and quite frankly I advise you to let him take the quietest course and cut the losses all round.’

  ‘But it wouldn’t cut the losses all round! It’s Michael who would lose all along the line—and it’s so unfair. She means to get heavy alimony if she can, and, all the time, it’s she who behaved so badly.’

  ‘She won’t get alimony if the case remains unsettled.’

  ‘No. I know. But doesn’t the judge exercise discretion or something of the kind in these cases? l won’t believe that both Michael and I should be set down as liars if we told the exact truth.’

  Phil rubbed his chin reflectively.

  ‘It’s rather a tall story to ask a divorce court judge to swallow,’ he observed. ‘They aren’t exactly what you’d call credulous, you know.’

  ‘Maybe not. But at least if we tell the truth, instead of my letting Michael be blackmailed into silence, then we’ve done the best we can.’

  ‘Better see what your counsel thinks about that.’

  ‘Yes, of course. But—you won’t raise any objection, Phil?’ She gazed at him anxiously.

  ‘I, my dear? No. It’s really a matter for you to decide for yourself. I’ve given you my frank opinion, but the rest is your own affair.’

  ‘Oh, thank you!’

  She was immensely relieved. She was also indefinably puzzled. It was wonderful, of course, to find Phil so tolerant and so anxious for her to follow her own way of thinking. But there was surely something curiously—detached in his attitude. As though he really didn’t .think it was any business of his.

  ‘Phil, you don’t think—’ She hesitated nervously. ‘You don’t think your people will feel very badly about it, do you?’

  ‘My people?’

  ‘Well, I was thinking of your mother. I think I ought to explain the whole thing to her myself.’

  ‘My dear girl!’ His expression changed curiously. ‘I don’t think I’d try to have any heart-to-heart talks with Mater,
if I were you.’

  ‘But I feel I owe it to her, in a way. Most mothers are a bit anxious about the girls their sons marry and—’

  ‘Darling,’ he said rather softly, ‘I think we’re talking at cross-purposes. I haven’t ever said anything about marriage, you know.’

  CHAPTER IX

  Patricia thought she must have stared at Phil for a full minute in silence. But it could have been nothing like so long, of course. Then, even when her voice did come, it was husky and sounded quite unlike her own.

  ‘What—did you say? I don’t understand. I thought we’d been talking all the time about loving each other and—’

  ‘Loving each other, of course, my darling.’ He leant forward suddenly and took her in his arms, regardless of the fact that she instinctively resisted. ‘But that doesn’t necessarily mean the same thing as marriage. Oh, but why argue about it? Nothing was ever settled by argument. All that’s best in the world is settled by this.’ And he kissed her, quickly and passionately, just as he had kissed her that day in the Park.

  ‘No! Please—’ She broke away from him as though he were a stranger who had kissed her. ‘I don’t want you to do that.’

  ‘You don’t want me to kiss you?’ His slight laugh was incredulous. ‘But, darling, what is there that either of us could want more? You know I love to kiss you. You know you love to be kissed. Patricia, don’t let old prejudices and scruples stand in the way of our happiness! I know it’s something of a shock to you, with your terribly clear-cut ideas of right and wrong—though, God knows, playing wife to someone should have opened your eyes a—’

  ‘How dare you!’ She would never have believed she could have spoken so icily to Phil. ‘You know there was never the slightest question of anything disreputable between Michael and me. Michael wouldn’t have insulted me or himself by suggesting it.’

  ‘Then the more fool he, my dear,’ Phil retorted curtly. ‘It’s no affair of mine if he chose to behave like a bloodless dummy. But if you can coolly take on the position of sharing a bedroom with a man and equally coolly talk of playing co-respondent in a divorce suit, it’s unthinkable that you should turn cold and squeamish over the one thing that really matters, with the one man you love.’

  ‘If you think what I did with Michael was nothing but a preparation course for becoming your mistress—’

  ‘Patricia! Listen, darling. Don’t let’s spoil it all by angry words and arguments. There’s something very precious between you and me. Something that doesn’t happen with many people. We could be utterly happy here together. You said yourself it was the loveliest place you had ever seen. You looked radiant when we spoke of it as our future home. Don’t let it all go for the sake of that one cramping, worn-out word marriage. It doesn’t mean so much as that, you know.’

  ‘It means just that little line between the things I will do and the things I won’t do,’ Patricia told him coolly. ‘It’s just the difference between “yes” and “no.” I’m sorry. Phil. As you said, we’ve been at cross-purposes.’

  ‘You can’t dismiss it like that!’

  ‘I have dismissed it like that,’ Patricia said, find she stood up to go.

  ‘No! My dear, it’s impossible!’ He tried to take her in his arms again, but she put his hands aside, and there was something in her angry blue eyes that made him step back. ‘Patricia, it’s the happiness of both, of us that you’re throwing aside.’

  She faced him then, and said very distinctly:

  ‘You were never specially concerned with my happiness. You knew perfectly well that you were appealing to me under false pretences. I’m not going to pretend that I’m ashamed of thinking you meant to many me. I’m ashamed of you that you didn’t mean it.’

  ‘My dear, I’m simply not the marrying kind.’ He shrugged a little sullenly.

  ‘Then that’s all there is to say, Phil.’

  He would have stopped her even then, as she turned to go, but she put him aside quite finally and definitely.

  Outside in the bright sunshine once more, she mechanically turned her steps in the direction of home. It was unthinkable that she should sit still in some taxi or bus. She must walk, and somehow force herself to some calm contemplation of the way her world had crashed.

  It was over. She was not going to marry Phil, after all. He had never meant that she should. Only have some cheap little affair, which he dared to call ‘something precious between them’.

  She saw now, with quite deadly clearness, how it had come about. In the old days, when she belonged by right to his own social set, he had never thought of her in that way. It was not a question of snobbery. It was simply a matter of social convention. Then he had met her again, with none of the security of her old environment round her—playing, in fact, a role, which very definitely put her in another light.

  He had not been specially relieved to find she was not really married to Michael. She saw that now. It was immaterial to him, in any case.

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ she said in a whisper to herself. ‘Even now, I don’t believe it.’

  But she did, of course.

  She had just reached the corner of Bridge Street when suddenly a car drew up at the kerb beside her, and Michael’s voice called:

  ‘Patricia! Hello—jump in and I’ll drive you home. That is, if you were going home.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said rather carefully, because she didn’t want him to guess from her tone or her words that anything was wrong. ‘Yes, I was going home.’

  ‘Been shopping?’ he inquired, as the car slid into the stream of traffic once more.

  ‘No.’ Then she took a deep breath. ‘As a matter of fact, I’ve just been to see Phil.’

  ‘Phil, eh?’ He glanced at her and then away again. ‘To discuss—’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And—what does he want you to do about things?’

  ‘About the divorce?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He has lefjt.it,’ Patricia said, ‘entirely to me. I am to decide what I think should be done. And I’ve decided. You can go ahead with contesting the suit just as soon as you like.’

  ‘Patricia! He really feels that way about it?’

  ‘More or less.’

  Michael raised his eyebrows.

  ‘I don’t think I should have been prepared to do that if it had been my fiancée who was involved,’ he admitted.

  ‘Very likely not,’ she said, as the car drew up outside the house. ‘But perhaps,’ she added with unusual dryness, ‘Phil understands that when it comes to a contest of wills, he might just as well let me have things my way.’

  ‘Is that so?’ Michael laughed, as he handed her out’ of the car. ‘Well, I can’t say I’ve found you as difficult as that, Patricia. If you are as good a wife to Phil as you have been to me, he should have very little to complain of.’

  She smiled faintly in answer to that, since she saw that he was expecting it. But she slipped past him into the house, and ran upstairs to her room, hoping devoutly that he would not follow her.

  Evidently something downstairs required his attention, because she was left in solitary possession of the room until dinner time. And by then she had her voice and her expression—if not perhaps her feelings—completely under control.

  Isobel, as it happened, was in one of her most chatty—and therefore least observant—moods that evening. She was quite unaware of the fact that both Michael and Patricia were a good deal occupied with their own thoughts, and the only time Michael really came completely out of his silent musing was when she remarked that Susan thought Mrs. Harnby was not quite so well.

  He glanced up quickly.

  ‘I thought she looked very much herself when I saw her,’ he said anxiously. ‘Though she was disinclined to talk.’

  ‘Well, that isn’t like her, is it?’ Isobel replied.

  ‘No, I suppose not.’ Michael smiled faintly. ‘I thought perhaps she was a little tired.’

  ‘It may be that, of course. Susan see
med to think she was fretting rather about something.’

  ‘Fretting? She has nothing to fret about.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know.’ Isobel became vague and a trifle soulful. ‘Women—and particularly mothers—do have things to worry about, you know.’

  ‘I don’t think Mother has any reason to worry about me.’

  ‘Well then, perhaps it’s something quite different. Perhaps she just got melancholy, remembering things. After all, it is the anniversary of your father’s death some time this month, isn’t it?’ Isobel became still more vague.

  ‘I think,’ Michael said dryly, ‘that you’re stretching things extremely far if you are trying to attribute any melancholy on Mother’s part to that particular anniversary.’

  ‘Oh, Michael! You really shouldn’t be so disrespectful when speaking of the dead. De mortuis, you know. (I never can remember the rest. But then I don’t think anyone else ever can either.) After all, he was your father.’

  ‘Which gives him no special right, my dear Isobel, to a post-dated halo. I shouldn’t go out of my way to abuse him. I suppose I shouldn’t even go out of my way to speak of him with candour. But since he has been mentioned, you know as well as I do that he was that most contemptible of all things—an incurable philanderer.’

  Patricia moved sharply, but neither of the other two noticed.

  ‘Oh, we—ell, yes, I suppose that is true. But, of course, he was so extremely attractive. That does mean a certain amount of temptation for a man.’

  ‘My mother is extremely attractive too,’ retorted Michael shortly. ‘But that didn’t make her forget either her dignity or her duty.’

  ‘No, no, of course not. And it’s true that Aunt Leni is most attractive. Clever, too,’ added Isobel reflectively, ‘or else how did she make Uncle marry her?’

  ‘I have often thought myself that was a great tribute to her powers,’ Michael agreed dryly.

  ‘All the same, I think you’re rather hard on that type of man, because charm does excuse a great deal.’