Once again, Georgie felt a chill of conviction. Ruth was right. Grace would never divorce him, unless she wanted to marry someone else; and of that there was no sign at all. Some of the travellers flirted with her in a routine, coarse sort of way, but he knew she did not care twopence about any of them. As soon as she knew about Ruth, she would be purulent with hate, and would punish her defaulting husband in the only way open to her.
And then, all of a sudden, like the bursting of a baleful dawn, Georgie’s sky was filled with light. To Ruth’s surprise, he smiled back at her. He had seen the answer. What had begun as a fantasy of vengeance, prompted by crazy visions, settled into its place as an act of necessity. As he looked at it, it fitted as neatly as the splinter he had stuck back on the mantelpiece. He could have laughed aloud.
Thus, strangely, these two influenced each other at this vital moment in their history. For each the deciding factor was the other’s weakness. Ruth’s reserves of strength had drawn Georgie to her, and she, realizing how much he needed her, had come to love him. Georgie was ready to put his life in her hands, and submit to her guidance. Yet the one point on which she was torn and undecided, the battle between love and conscience, turned Georgie’s weakness into resolution. He did not understand the extent of her struggle, because he accepted without question that her rules were absolute. He simply made up his mind to remove her difficulty.
He did not need Ruth to tell him he would never get any money out of Grace. There was one way to do that, and one way only. Grace had made no will as yet. He knew, because he had heard her talking to a favoured customer, and saying that the solicitor had been nattering to her about it. She was in no mind to do it, though, at her age, and healthy as she was.
“He only wants me to do it so he can charge me for drawing it up.”
You’ll regret that, my lady, he thought. Well, anyway, there were things to make sure of. The first was to get Ruth to say that she would marry him if he could make Grace divorce him. He had to put it that way, since he had no intention of telling her what he had in mind. When she repeated her conviction that Grace would never do it, he hinted that he might be able to make her. There were things he knew which could get her into serious trouble. He would strike a bargain.
Ruth still shook her head. She knew Grace’s sort. Georgie grew impatient.
“Yes, but, Ruth, if I can manage it, will you? I can’t go on until I know.”
“Very well,” she said at last. “If it makes you happier for me to say so, I will.”
Georgie kissed her passionately.
“Mind you,” he said, with new-found cunning, “we may have to go off together, once she’s agreed, so as to give her legal grounds.”
Ruth felt her spine stiffen again, but the thought, depending on a change of heart in Grace she did not believe would ever happen, seemed more remote now, and she was secretly glad to let his insistence wear her down. Anyway, there was no question of doing anything at the moment. Neither of them had any money. But Georgie had got what he wanted most. As soon as they got back to the streets, he left her, smiling and confident.
With a troubled heart Ruth watched him go. There was something about him, a glint in his eye, which she could not understand.
Georgie could hardly have understood it either. There was far too much going on inside him to allow of interpretation or self-analysis. The process of growing up, gradual with most people, had come on him like a swollen river. The long-delayed awakening of instinct and emotion was all the more powerful because of its delay, and because it was allied to hate. A nature which had had little need to make decisions was now committed to a major decision. The effect was seismic in its power. Georgie was shaken and shocked out of normality to a fortnight or more of conduct wholly alien from his nature. In the grip of a part, his whole personality was disrupted: he did not know himself.
The side of him that protected his love and all to do with it worked more and more smoothly. In his eagerness to see Ruth, he had forgotten about the necessary excuse for returning from the auction empty-handed; and was surprised to hear his voice telling Grace that other dealers had bid prices beyond anything she would wish to pay.
For a few days Ruth’s conditional promise to marry him, plus his own secret decision about Grace, buoyed up and made him almost happy. He caught himself humming and whistling about the shop, and broke off sharp, lest Grace be made suspicious. But, whether she noticed or not, Grace barely gave him a glance. She was too busy with schemes of her own. Georgie, no longer necessary as a means to any end, had ceased to matter.
As the days passed without any novel incident to mark the change in his life, Georgie’s long-fostered inertia began to reassert itself. A peaceable man may decide to commit murder under fierce provocation, but he will seldom be able to keep his resolve sharp over an uneventful stretch of time. Georgie could barely nourish a grudge, let alone a plan to kill; and, if nothing had happened for a week or so, his nature would almost certainly have regained much of its normal balance. So, as long as she did nothing to hurt him, Grace’s danger lessened from day to day. Vulgar she might be, mean and unlovely in her habits, and void of all consideration for him: yet the very intensity with which she went about her ends, her complete self-absorption, somehow protected her. It was hard to envisage stopping an activity so whole-hearted and purposeful. One might as well shoot an anmial feeding energetically in the open, oblivious of everything but its greed.
But the crisis in these three lives was not to be evaded. Grace had more than one fatal strand by which unconsciously she drew her doom upon her. One afternoon at about five, while he was busy in the shop, a young nurse from the hospital presented herself at the counter.
Georgie knew her face. She lodged nearby, and dropped in occasionally to make small purchases. He smiled expectantly. She did not smile. Her manner was hurt and cold.
“Matron says, if you want to see your friend alive, you had better come at once.”
Georgie’s mouth opened. He stared at her foolishly.
“Friend? Alive? I don’t understand. What friend?”
“Why, Mr Penberthy.”
“Mr Penberthy?”
She coloured and stamped her foot. “Yes. I left you a message here, last Friday. Didn’t you get it?”
Still staring at her, Georgie shook his head.
“He was brought in that morning. He asked me to let you know. I looked in on my way off duty. You weren’t here, so I told Mrs Bagshawe.” She looked at him accusingly. “She can’t have forgotten to tell you.”
Georgie gulped. “This is the first I’ve heard. What’s wrong?”
“Cancer. Inoperable. In the last stages. Well——” she stepped back, hostile still. “If you want to see him, you’d better go now.”
Without waiting to thank her, Georgie charged into the back, shouted something at Grace, seized his hat and coat, and ran. Exactly seventeen minutes later, breathing fast from the rush, he was led down a long ward to a bed between screens.
Eddie was recognizable. That was the terrible thing. The grey drenched face on the pillow was like the effigy of a long-dead bishop which Georgie had once seen in a cathedral. The toothless mouth gaped inwards, the cheeks had sunk, the eyes, half open, rolled back to show a gleam of white. An irregular snoring came from the mouth: the head rolled weakly on a neck that was now no more than a collection of loose cords: the bony hands plucked at the sheets in aimless fretfulness. Yet, unmistakably, this ghastly suffering wet sunken shape was Eddie.
Horrified though he was, Georgie felt an ignoble tinge of relief. At the first glance, he had feared he was too late. He turned and whispered to the Sister at his side.
“Is he——? Can he hear us?”
“Once or twice, during the afternoon, when I’ve spoken to him, I think he heard.” She bent down, and called out clearly into Eddie’s ear.
“Here’s your friend come to see you.”
The snores were checked for a moment, but the labouring head ga
ve no sign.
“Tell him it’s Georgie.”
The Sister tried again. “It’s Georgie.”
Called out like that, the name sounded unfamiliar even to its owner. With a smile of gratitude at her, Georgie bent down.
“Hullo, Uncle Eddie. It’s Georgie. Georgie Bagshawe.”
The snoring checked once more. The mouth sucked hideously inwards. The shrunken lips seemed to be trying to come together.
The Sister’s hand pressed on Georgie’s shoulder. Suppressing an instinct to retch, he placed his ear against the mouth. The breathing stopped. Then, after an agonizing pause, it sounded again, remote, labouring, weary beyond expression, the last conscientious efforts of a collapsed mechanism to fulfil its task; and, in the gap between each exhalation, Georgie’s ear caught the indefinable stir of dissolution. It was like the sucking and gurgling of the tide far down under the poles of a pier. Everything in that body was involuntary now. The enemy was about to take over. A desperate longing leaped in Georgie’s heart to make contact for the last time.
“It’s me,” he whispered. “It’s Georgie.”
One long, rattling, snore: then, by a miracle, the cardboard lips were mumbling together.
“Pal … o’ me ‘eart.”
Had he heard, or imagined it? Georgie drew his head back, and stared with eager joy at the sweat-lined crevasses of the face.
“Yes, Uncle Eddie. Yes! I’m sorry I couldn’t come sooner. I never got your message, or I’d have come at once.”
He stared and stared, praying, willing with all his force that some clear sign of recognition come. At last, from deep within, slow, slow, and feeble, an impulse was born that reached the surface. A tremor, a whimper of pain, and the ghastly human landscape became a face.
In an agony of tenderness, Georgie bent low once more.
“Does it hurt, Uncle Eddie? Is it bad?”
An effort of will flickered in the face. Could the lost frame respond? Was there still life enough to vibrate muscle and nerve?
For half a minute, as if between earth and air, the answer stayed suspended. Then, with incredulous delight, Georgie saw the eyeballs move, and the eyes themselves appear. Dull and lifeless, like those of a fish, they stared meaning-lessly upwards. Then, as it seemed to him, a point of light showed in each, and a sound like the faint rustling of dead leaves came from the mouth. Georgie laid his ears against it. Weak as air, the sounds breathed themselves into remembered words.
“Oo… the eggony… oo the… enguish.”
Starting up, gazing into the veiled eyes, Georgie saw their dark pin-points sharpen to a tiny gleam. A grimace of complicity turned the face into a gargoyle as Eddie willed to smile. Across the distance the spark of love and greeting leaped and shone: for a moment all that divided them vanished. Then the spark went out, the eyeballs rolled up again, and the face was desolate and empty as a rain-sodden cinder.
As he walked back, his eyes stinging with tears, Georgie had no memory of the undelivered message. There was a hole in his heart, an ache as if a piece had been ripped out of it. Even the thought of Ruth was powerless against this loss, this tearing away of his last hold on the old days.
Not till he saw Grace did he remember. She was on him in a flash.
“And where have you been, I should like to know! Rushing off like a mad thing, and leaving me to manage all by myself.”
Shaken from head to foot, he stood in front of her, mouthing painfully in his search for words.
“That message. You never gave it.”
“Message? What do you think you’re talking about?”
“That message from the hospital. About … Uncle Eddie. The nurse said she gave it to you. You never told me.”
“Oh, that!” She looked away for a moment; then, as always, she attacked. “I suppose you think I’ve got nothing better to do than pass on messages from your common friends. As a matter of fact”—her voice dropped—“it slipped my mind.”
He looked at her, finding the words with care.
“Uncle Eddie has died. He’s been lying there ever since that message came, lying in pain, wondering why I never came to see him. If it hadn’t been for another message, which I took, not you, he’d have died without my seeing him.” He paused; then the words came in a hoarse shout that tore his throat. “You bitch! God damn you to hell!”
That was silly, he told himself later, having escaped from the screaming fit that followed his outburst: a worse and more protracted fit than usual, because such novel abuse had frightened as well as enraged her. Yes, that was silly. No need to put her on her guard. For, now, necessarily and finally, she was doomed. The blow of Eddie’s death, the monstrous injury that so nearly went unrighted—for he was sure Grace had kept her mouth shut deliberately—destroyed what little balance Georgie was achieving and flung him back into the state he had been in when she stole his mantelpiece. There was no longer any doubt as to what he meant to do. The only question was how and when.
It was a substantial question. Whatever money he might look forward to, for the moment Georgie had none, and no prospect of getting any. Some ready cash was needed, if he and Ruth were to go away together. Ruth had no savings: her weekly wage left little over for emergencies. Still, Georgie, under the impetus of his decision, felt sure that some chance must come soon.
It did; a better and bigger chance than he could have hoped. An eccentric millionaire grocer, an Australian by birth, had worked his way up from a small shop to own a chain of multiple provision stores. One of his foibles was to give the small shopkeeper conspicuously better terms than the large, thereby affording Grace and her friends the opportunity for yet another petty racket. Grace could not, without arousing suspicions, order quantities vastly in excess of a small shop’s capacity. She could, and did, order plausible amounts of a number of lines the locality did not consume, and sell them to one of her dubious business acquaintances at a price lower than he would have had to pay legitimately. Georgie marvelled that she should think it worth while to go to such lengths in order to make a tiny profit. In fact, such profits added up to a sizable yearly figure, as he was soon to realize.
For a long time Grace had kept transactions of this type to herself. Latterly, growing careless, or perhaps regarding him as being too insignificant to need deceiving, she no longer bothered. She would even send him with lists of orders, written in the same wide sprawling hand which had first told him her name on the cover of a piece of music. He wondered, afterwards, why she had risked allowing him to meet a certain Mr Smithers, but concluded that, as a part of her trade with the firm was normal and above-board, she thought her husband too simple to scrutinize the figures and thereby discover anything about the other part. In any case, she probably did not care if he knew or not.
The one thing certain was that she could not have foreseen what happened this time. Georgie called with his list of orders, and was asked to wait, as usual. A clerk came out of an inner office, looked at him, and went back. A minute later he returned.
“Mr Bagshawe? Could you step in a moment? Mr Smithers would like a word with you.”
He showed the astonished Georgie into the manager’s office, went out, and shut the door. Mr Smithers held out a fat pink hand.
“Ah, Mr Bagshawe.” The voice was thick with cordiality. “Good of you to spare me a minute.”
He came out from behind the desk, made a face at Georgie, crossed mildly to the door, opened it a couple of inches, shut it with a bang, and turned the key. Then he went back to his desk, his manner and voice completely changed.
“Look, boy. Tell your missis. Trouble. Informers. Inspectors. Some sod’s blown the gaff.”
He pulled from his pocket a bunch of keys on a thin chain. Selecting one, he opened a drawer in his desk, and pulled out a wad of one pound notes. Licking his thumb, he proceeded with extraordinary speed and dexterity to count out fifty-three. He replaced the remainder, closed the drawer, locked it, fished out a wallet from his tight-trousered behind, and ex
tracted one ten shilling note. He slid the wallet back, took a handful of silver from the left side pocket of his trousers, and counted out eight shillings.
“There you are, boy. That puts me square. It’s all right: the missis’ll know. What’s that? Receipt? How long’ve you been out? Off you go. Quick as you like. You don’t know me. I don’t know you.”
And off Georgie had gone, fifty-three pounds eighteen shillings the richer, bowed out of the office and bidden goodbye with the same unctuous resonance that had greeted him.
The money was his. He saw that at once. An emergency had made Smithers pay up before Grace could expect it. Here was his chance. Here was the money to make possible the start of a new life with Ruth.
Georgie walked along, staring, unable to believe his good luck. The thought that he was swindling Grace almost made him stop hating her. But he soon recovered himself. Fifty-three pounds wouldn’t last long. He mustn’t let fifty-three pounds blind him to the sums Grace had stolen from him, the money which would be his and Ruth’s once Grace was gone. This windfall made no difference. Grace must go.
Chapter 7
Georgie’s return from his errand passed off without challenge. He had been afraid that Grace might expect a larger sum than he gave her; but his rendering of the legitimate items on the account, with no mention of the clandestine, awoke no suspicion. She evidently found it natural that. Smithers should not speak of their secret arrangements to a third party, even though he were her husband. At all events, she seemed satisfied with his discharge of his errand, and proposed to send him on another, longer one, to Exeter.
Here was the opportunity they needed. Georgie had to endure a day and a half before he could tell. Ruth. They met in the café, and had to wait for an elderly woman to leave the table. She was in no hurry, but dawdled over her cup of coffee, taking a sip at a time and staring resolutely at nothing through thick, round lenses. Georgie sweated and quivered with frustration. He began to fear he would never get time to tell Ruth the news. Worse, Ruth, for the first time since he had known her, seemed remote and out of tune. Although his agitation must have been clear to her, she appeared to be unconcerned and absent-minded. He could almost have thought that she was enjoying the situation, and did not mind the presence of the maddening, coffee-sipping woman.
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