Unsuspected

by Charlotte Armstrong

  “Francis,” said Francis.…“Yes, she’s here.” He looked around at Mathilda coldly, as if to say, “What, are you listening to a private conversation?” He said, as if he were speaking in code, “Is everybody well?” Then he said, with a hint of desperation, “Jane, can you get out? And I mean now?”

  “Why, no,” said Jane cheerfully from Connecticut, “of course not. He’s right here, Mr. Howard. Here he is!”

  Grandy’s voice took her place. “My dear boy, is she really with you?”

  “She’s here,” he said again, this time with a very odd inflection. He held out the phone to Mathilda. She took it, surprised, touched, excited, and suddenly ready to weep again.

  “Oh, Grandy, darling!”

  “Mathilda, little duck, are you all right? You’re back? You’re safe?”

  “I’m fine,” she quavered. “Oh, Grandy, I want to see you.”

  “Don’t cry,” said Grandy. “Don’t cry. God bless us every one. What a darling you are to telephone. Are you happy?”

  “Oh, Grandy!”

  “Tell Francis to bring you home.”

  “I will, I will. I’m coming just as fast—”

  “Strawberries and cream, Tyl,” said Grandy. “You hurry, sweetheart.”

  He hung up and she hung up, sobbing. Strawberries and cream was her special treat. How like him! How dear!

  Mr. Howard was standing with his hands in his pockets, staring out the window.

  “Grandy says you’re to bring me home.” She was willing to smile at him now.

  He turned around. She thought, with a shock, Something’s hurt him. He’s going to cry.

  He said in a low, vibrant voice that startled her with its passionate appeal, “Tyl, don’t you remember?”

  5

  “Remember what?”

  He started to pull his hands out of his pockets and then thrust them deeper instead. “Never mind. Foolish question. Obviously, you don’t. You can’t or you—” He came one step nearer. “Tyl, what happened to you? Were you hurt, darling? You must have been … ill for part of the time. That’s so, isn’t it?” Everything in his manner begged her to say yes.

  “No,” said Mathilda. “That isn’t so.”

  “But it must be so, and you’ve forgotten that too.”

  “I haven’t forgotten anything!” she cried. “I wish you’d tell me! Who are you and what am I supposed to—”

  “I’m your husband,” he said sharply, almost angrily.

  She backed away a little. In her mind was a vague idea of mistaken identity. “Are you sure you know who I am?” she asked gently. “My name is Mathilda Frazier. I have no husband. I’m not married.”

  He moved away from her, and with his hands still in his pockets, almost as if he didn’t dare to take them out, he sat down on a straight chair, keeping his feet close together. He looked like a man controlling himself at some cost.

  “Sorry,” he said. “Let’s try to straighten this out, shall we?”

  He smiled. Mathilda moved to another chair and sat down in it. Her knees felt a little shaky. It was just as well to sit down.

  “Yes, please,” she agreed.

  They sat looking at each other.

  “Do you remember,” said Francis finally, in a quiet conversational tone, “when you left Grandy’s house, that Sunday afternoon last January, to come to New York?”

  Mathilda nodded. She thought, But he knows Grandy. It can’t be that he’s mistaken me for someone else.

  “You came to this hotel,” he was saying. “Do you remember that?”

  “Yes,” said Mathilda. “Yes, of course I did. Not this room.”

  “You were in Seven-o-five,” he stated. The number seemed right to her. She could not have recollected it, but she recognized it. “You had some supper sent up,” he went on. She nodded. “But a little later, about nine o’clock, you went down to the lobby.”

  “No,” said Mathilda bluntly. Not at all. It was not so. She had crawled into bed to read. She hadn’t been able to read or sleep either. She remembered getting up to look for aspirin, waiting for drowsiness that would not come, the desperate tricks she had tried to play on her own mind, the getting up at last to sit by the window, holding her head.

  “So that’s where it begins,” the man was saying.

  “Where what begins?”

  “Your forgetting.”

  “But I— What is it you say I’ve forgotten?”

  “You came downstairs about nine o’clock,” he told her, “that Sunday evening. You were pretty distressed; you were feeling pretty sick about Oliver.”

  A thrill of dismay and excitement went through Mathilda. How did he know that?

  “So you were restless and you came down to get something to read. It was a kind of excuse to get away from your room. You hated to go back. You drifted across the lobby toward the grillroom. That’s when I saw you.”

  Mathilda said, “You couldn’t have seen me. I didn’t leave my room that Sunday night.”

  “Please,” he begged. He closed his eyes. “You made me think of flying,” he said in quite a different voice. “You made me think of the sky or a bird. You’re like a Winged Victory in modern dress, but with better ankles. You’ve got such a tearing beauty, Tyl—you’re windblown. It’s in your bones, your long, lovely legs, the way you walk, your face, your nose. The molding of the upper part of your cheek, around the outside of your eye. I’ve dreamed about it. And how that dear old soul, your Luther Grandison, can be so blind as to call you his ugly duckling and never see the swan! Why, Tyl, don’t you know you make Althea look like a lump of paste?”

  Mathilda heard what he said; she heard the words. But her mind went spinning off into confusion. How could he say such things? How could such things be said at all? She tightened her fingers around her purse. She felt a little dizzy. She was used to people saying kind words about her looks. It was because she was so rich. She told herself that this, too, must be deliberate flattery, because she was so rich.

  He opened his eyes, he smiled. His voice sank back as if it had begun to tire. “Maybe I’d better make it plain right away. I fell in love with you, Mathilda, but you didn’t fall in love with me. I knew that. I still know it. If you only had, maybe you wouldn’t have forgotten.”

  Mathilda took hold of herself. She dismissed the thought that someone must have gone mad. It wasn’t helpful. She must think better than that. “Why are you trying to make me believe something I know is not so?” she asked quietly. “I do know, because I remember every minute of that time. There is nothing I’ve forgotten. I haven’t been hurt or sick. I know exactly what happened to me in this hotel while I was here, and everything that has happened since. There is no gap.” She straightened her shoulders. “I thought at first you might be honestly mistaken. You’d somehow or other got me mixed up with some other girl. But now I see you aren’t mistaken, Mr. Howard. You’re just lying. I’d like to know why.”

  He shut his eyes to hide a brief gleam that baffled her. He groaned. He took his hands out of his pockets and held his head for a moment. Then his hands fell, relaxed and open, and he said, “My poor Tyl. Don’t—don’t be upset.”

  But Mathilda was thinking hard. “What about Grandy?” she cried. “Grandy knows you! Does Grandy think—”

  “Yes,” he said, “I’ve been—well, I’ve been staying there.”

  Mathilda got up. She was furious. “So that’s why, is it? You’ve wormed your way into Grandy’s house! Are you trying to cheat him, some way? What was it you said? Something about dirty work? What are you trying to do to Grandy?”

  “My dear—”

  “Using my name! Using me!” she stormed. “You probably thought I was dead. Didn’t you?”

  “Perhaps I did,” he murmured. He was sitting still, watching her anger almost as if it couldn’t hurt him personally, but he was curious about it, examining it, studying it.

  “You’d better tell me right away what you meant in the taxicab. About Grandy.”<
br />
  “I was being facetious,” he said in a monotone.

  “Oh, nonsense! Who’s Jane?”

  “Jane is Grandy’s secretary.”

  “Where’s Rosaleen?”

  “Why, she’s … not there any more,” he said. “If you’ll try to listen, I’ll tell you what I meant in the taxicab.” And she caught again that faint hint of antagonism as he looked up at her.

  “If you please,” said Mathilda grandly in her coldest voice, and she sat down stiffly.

  “I was simply making small talk,” said Francis. “I was going on to tell you how Grandy hijacked those strawberries.”

  “I don’t believe you. Why did you all of a sudden act so collapsed? You crawled into the corner—”

  “What you said,” he murmured wearily.

  “What?”

  He made an effort. “You said, ‘I don’t know you.’” Mathilda was silent. “If you will try to accept this weird business that you and I remember the same period of time, the same place, entirely differently. If you will just for one brief second imagine me sitting there, with my wife, my lost girl, found again. Trying like the very devil not to break down and bawl. Thinking in my innocence that you understood, that we were putting off the real—greeting, shall I say?—until we could be alone. And then, without any warning whatsoever, you say—what you said. ‘I don’t know you. I haven’t the faintest idea who you are.’”

  Mathilda swallowed hard. “Have you been hurt or ill lately, Mr. Howard?”

  He got up and went back to looking out the window with his back to her.

  Mathilda said with malice, “My father left me a great deal of money.”

  He swung around. She controlled an impulse to cringe. But he was smiling. “Why, so did mine,” he said pleasantly. “I’m nearly as rich as you are, sweetie pie.” Astonishment crossed her face and he laughed. Then he came nearer and spoke very gently. “It was just love,” he said. ‘I’m sorry you don’t remember.”

  The bell rang. It was the porter, come to get the bags. He touched his cap. “How do, Mrs. Howard.”

  Shock sent Mathilda out of her chair. She crowded back against the desk. She was frightened now.

  “Just a minute,” said Francis. “Jimmy, will you do us a favor? Just tell Mrs. Howard when you last saw her.”

  “Why, lemme see, back in January. Last I saw her was Wednesday morning, right after the wedding. You gave me—”

  “But I’m not married!”

  The man looked distressed. “Honest, I never said anything. I never— I’d like to say I’m glad you got back safe, Mrs. Howard,” the man stammered.

  Mathilda turned away. Behind her, she knew Francis was giving him money. She heard him say, “Forget about this, Jimmy. Mrs. Howard’s been ill.”

  She clenched her fists. So that would be his story. And she couldn’t make a scene here, in front of a hotel servant. Or anywhere. She couldn’t run to strangers or cry out that he lied. Not Mathilda Frazier. Not the long-lost heiress. No, never.

  She must get home. Get to Grandy, who would know what to do. Just hold on to what she knew to be so, remember that he was lying, trying for some unknown reason to—to do what? Never mind now. Keep controlled. Get to Grandy as soon as she could.

  But, she thought, it’s not the truth. That porter is lying too.

  She said, quite calmly, when the man had gone, “He was bribed.”

  Francis made no answer. She said, with more anger than she wished to show, “I dare say you forged a marriage certificate. Why don’t you show me that?”

  “Because the bride keeps the marriage certificate,” he said slowly, “and I imagine you … lost it.”

  “No papers?” she sneered.

  “Some,” he said. “Look here, Tyl. Don’t—don’t hate me. Don’t. I’m not trying— Please, can’t we try to be a little bit friendly about this?”

  He really did look upset and distressed, but she said coldly, “I think we’d better go to the station.”

  “Very well,” he said.

  She started toward the door. She stopped. “What papers?” she demanded. He shook his head. “I want to know how you managed to deceive Grandy!” she cried.

  His face went black with emotion, suddenly. “Look here,” he said roughly, “you hurt. you don’t seem to know it, but I’ll be damned if I see why I have to … be hurt. Either you listen to my entire story, let me tell you the whole thing, all that happened, all you’ve forgotten—which seems to me the fair thing for you to do, by the way—or we’ll say no more about it I’ll see you to the train. And good-by. You can divorce me, get an annulment, do whatever you like. Ignore the whole thing. I’m not likely,” he stated bitterly, “to want to marry anyone else for a while.”

  Mathilda hesitated. She thought, I don’t understand. Her mind rebelled at its own confusion. It seemed to her that this man had been forcing her into confusion, and she wanted to fight back. She wanted to feel clear, to understand better. It was a way of fighting. She went back and sat down in her chair.

  “Very well. Tell me,” she said.

  6

  “You were, as I said, standing near the grillroom. I saw you. I made up my mind to have a try at picking you up.” He was speaking bitterly, bluntly and fast. “It worked. You were lonely and upset. You needed to talk to someone. We went into a corner of the bar and you did talk. You told me all about Oliver and Althea and what had happened to you. You were hurt, then; so hurt, my dear, so heartsore.” His voice warmed, “I don’t suppose you realized at all what was happening to me. I don’t suppose you really saw me that Sunday night.

  “I was someone to listen. A stranger, who wouldn’t care, you thought, who wouldn’t tell. Who’d listen and be sympathetic, and go away taking some of your trouble with him just by virtue of having listened. It didn’t work out that way, because I fell in love, and I am a very persistent fellow and I would not go away. I’m afraid I hung around. We were together Monday. Had lunch. Roamed around. In the evening, we went back to our corner in the bar. This time, I talked. I told you I was in the Air Force, but I was being let out. I told you quite a bit. You listened. I wonder if you heard.”

  Mathilda closed her eyes, squeezed them tight. But when she opened them, he was still there, still talking.

  “Tuesday,” he said, “well, on Tuesday, in the morning, you said you’d marry me.”

  “Why?”

  He took her up quickly. “Why you said you’d marry me, I … don’t know. You never said you felt anything for me but just … comfortable in my presence. It was one of those half-cold-blooded things. I knew I was getting you on a rebound. And, Tyl, darling, I knew perfectly well that there was a little bit of a nasty human wish for revenge in your heart.”

  She frowned, but her heart had jumped in surprise.

  “Oh, yes, that was obvious.” he went on. “But I was going to get you on any terms at all. So I was pretty unscrupulous. Who am I to take a high moral tone? And you—honey, it was babyish, but I understood, still understand. It wasn’t so much revenge on Oliver, the poor sap, but on Althea, the louse.” He grinned.

  “I—I see,” said Mathilda dazedly. He leaned forward. His eyes searched her face. “No, no,” she said. “No, I don’t mean that I remember. It just sounds— It didn’t happen, but you make it sound as if— I can see it might have.”

  He said, with an unfathomable expression in his dark eyes, “Thank you, Tyl.” He went on, “At ten in the morning, Wednesday, we were married.”

  “It can’t be done!” she gasped.

  “It was done,” he said calmly. “Are you thinking of all the red tape? It wasn’t so bad. You already had your blood test. You had been all set to marry somebody else.”

  She winced.

  “I had only to get a certificate from the medical officer. And they waive the waiting period, you know, for men in the service.” He took something out of his pocket “We got the license Tuesday. I do have a copy.”

  Tyl looked and saw “WHITE
PLAINS, NEW YORK. MARY FRAZIER. JOHN FRANCIS HOWARD.”

  “That’s not my name.”

  “It’s your second name,” he said gently. “Or so you told them. It was understood that you didn’t want publicity. The newspapers would have had fun with all our haste.”

  She thought, But why White Plains? Why not New York City? She would have asked, but he was talking.

  “Even now, it’s been kept quiet, Tyl. Grandy and I agreed to that Nobody knows except a very few. Oliver knows, of course, and Althea.”

  “Oh?”

  Mathilda felt hysterical. It was so funny. What he was saying. Oliver, all this time—Oliver had thought her married to somebody else. So had Althea. Romance, tragedy, love and death, and Mathilda in the middle. All the while she’d been playing dull bridge with filthy cards, slapping at the flies, Althea had been believing this wild yarn. Mathilda put her thumb in, her mouth and bit it. It was too funny, too terribly funny.

  “And as a matter of fact, that porter was bribed. He was bribed not to say anything about us. My dear, you bribed him yourself. That’s what he thought you—”

  Mathilda said, “Could I have a drink of water?”

  He got her the drink quickly. He was watching her as if he cared how she felt.

  She said, “But I got on board my ship at noon on Wednesday.”

  “You remember that?” he murmured.

  “Perfectly,” she snapped. She was annoyed at a little demon of glee that kept thinking of Althea, outdramatized. She put the glass down, feeling calmer. “I was quite alone,” she said.

  “When we got back here after the wedding,” he said, “there was a message that I had to report immediately. We figured that it would be better for you to go on, that I would go see what the hell, do what I could. I was optimistic. I said I’d fly down after you. I even thought I might make it as soon as you did.” He paused.

  “I won’t go into how I felt. I thought, after all, I had you legally, and for the rest I had, more or less, planned to wait—if you understand me.” He sent her a queer, tortured glance. “But now it looks as if I haven’t got you at all.”

  She took up the glass and tilted it. “Is there more?”