Deliverance

by L. A. G. Strong

  Grace’s decision was therefore of the utmost importance to him. On it hung a list of possibilities ranging from a blow at his pocket to an indefinite and dangerous postponement of his and Ruth’s escape.

  How dangerous, Georgie could all too easily guess. The very thought of it sent him into a frenzy of agitation. It had been hard enough to screw Ruth up to the point of agreement. To postpone their escape would be to give her another chance to consider, and maybe break the resolution she had at last taken. No. Grace had to let him go. He bent all the powers of his mind upon her, as if by a concentrated effort of will he could incline her in the direction he needed.

  And Grace, as if in some dim spiteful recess of her mind she divined his agitation, did all in her power to increase it. She refused to make up her mind, but solaced its perplexity with glasses of her favourite tipple, and kept breaking through the evening into resentful and indecisive monologues in which she paraded the possibilities as she saw them. These harangues were delivered at Georgie, yet had a ruminative quality as if he were not there to hear them. They grew vaguer and more self-pitying as the evening went on. Each one told him more about Grace, if only by showing how little there was to tell. Presently she seemed to forget that he was in the room, and began complaining to business acquaintances about the difficulties of her position with such a helpless worm of a husband, who left her to bear all the responsibility of the business.

  “You’re right. You’re right. A stone roun’ my neck, thass what he is, a stone roun’ my neck. He should support me, but no, oh no, nothing like that. I got to support him. ‘Tisn’t even as if he was a husband. A proper husband. No, I won’t say no more, I’m a lady, but—you know what I mean. What do I get? What good is he? Nothing. And now, on top of everything else, what d’you think he’s done? Gone and started carrying on with a common little soap-faced slut in the town. Not that he can, mind you. I’m a lady, I won’t say, but you know what I mean…”

  At the mention of Ruth a violent rage seized Georgie. He longed to pick up the poker from the new hideous fire-place and bash her head in. Then, breathing hard through his nose, he regained his control and with it his cunning. That would be no good, mad, disastrous. There was a better way, a far better way.

  His limbs ached from their tension as he relaxed them, and sweat broke out on him. With cunning once more uppermost, he composed himself to listen once again, as Grace asked her imaginary companion how she should meet this crisis, and what she should do about the morrow.

  Evidently the business friend advised her to let her erring husband go to Exeter. Holding his breath, Georgie sat rigid as her voice slithered on the edge of acceptance.

  “You think I should? You think it’ll be all right? Oh. Well. If you really think…”

  She leaned forward, as if to hear better, and rocked herself to and fro. Then, without warning, she flinched, her face contracted, the peevish whine came back into her voice, and she began to argue. Georgie let out a long sigh of exasperation and despair, then checked in case she heard it, and turned and saw him. But she was too deeply absorbed in her argument, and, watching as from a distance, he saw it take the familiar course of any argument which went against her. She became furious, and started to rage against her imaginary opponent, just as if she were being opposed by Georgie. Had anyone been here who could observe dispassionately, he must have found something pathetic in this laying bare of the division in her unhappy soul. Seeing her react with her accustomed rage and abuse to an argument put up by a part of her own mind, he would have been appalled to think how solitary she must be, and what anguish must attend any problem which seemed to her to have two sides. To such a mind, any inner debate must have an infuriating quality, only to be avoided by a blind decision passionately maintained.

  But Georgie, even had he been capable of understanding what it was like to be Grace, was in no mood for it now. All that he realized, with an angry sinking of the heart, was that she had not yet made up her mind whether to let him go to Exeter. Everything about her now was a source of loathing to him, and he did all he could to feed his loathing, to blow up the fire of hatred. Hatred gave him the strength he needed for what had to be done.

  By about nine o’clock, though still occasionally drinking, she was quiet, and had subsided into a kind of watchful malignity. Georgie, pretending to read the evening paper, cast a calculating eye on her. She had been drinking off and on for several hours. Although the habit was growing on her, she had not yet reached the stage where there is no hangover. If she kept on, therefore, there was the hope that in the morning she would feel too ill to go herself, and allow him to go. It was just as likely, however, that she might be merely contrary, and decide that neither should go. The thought that his plan and Ruth’s hung on the whim of the drunken woman huddled there by the fire called up such rage in him that bile stung the back of his throat. He could hardly see.

  The familiar room faded: before him grinned the hoardings, with their deadly message. But now he did not resist. He welcomed them. He allowed the evil film to flicker and play before him. Its power, its actuality made him helpless. It was more real, more vivid than the things around him; and when, presently, it vanished in a huge red blur, and the refrain was taken up by a voice that seemed to be thundering its orders in his ear, he was startled into terror that Grace must hear it and be warned of the danger that hung over her.

  Then the sights and sounds left him. He had not needed their prompting; half his work, the tricky half, the difficult half, had been done. It would not be safe to complete the job—yet. Besides, he did not at this stage want any step to be irrevocable. A deep sigh broke from him, the sort of sigh he used to give when he was a little boy; but it was a very different kind of perplexity that forced it from him now.

  When presently he saw that the bottle was all but empty, he slipped out to the chest of drawers where she kept her stock, opened a fresh one, tiptoed in with it and put it in place of the old one. He kept out of range for the next half-hour, and was rewarded with the sound of a new monologue. Maudlin now and indecipherable through the door, it suggested that his trick had worked: and when, at about half-past ten, he came into the room, he saw with satisfaction that nearly half of the new bottle had gone.

  “Bedtime, Grace.”

  “Uh.”

  “Time for bed. Up you come.”

  “Lemme go.”

  “Come on. You’ll only feel worse, if you fall asleep down here.”

  “Feel bloody good.”

  “I’m glad. You’ll feel even better in bed.”

  “With you?”

  He got her up at last, expecting that she would fall on the bed and sleep in her clothes: but she confounded him by going about her preparations much as usual. She even took her sleeping pills. She could hardly have needed them, for, once in bed, she fell asleep at once, and lay snoring on her back, her mouth open.

  For a moment, by a trick of the candle light, her face looked like Eddie’s, as he had lain in that last sunken immobility before compassionate hands had tidied the collapsed features into decency and frozen calm. The foretaste of her death was sudden and terrible, even to the man who sought it. A sob rose in his throat. For one wild moment he all but broke down and abandoned all. Then, with such violence that it seemed outside him, like a sudden squall upon the window pane, hatred swept back. She, she, she had hated Eddie. She had cheated them of those last days together.

  No longer daring to look at the snoring head that so devilishly linked itself with the one he loved, Georgie blew out the light and got between the sheets. They struck cold against his legs: cold as shrouds. With a moment of real panic, he realized that if he did not get out of the house, he would go mad. He felt mad now. What had he done, to deserve such torment, to be tied to this cruel stranger? He had wanted only to be kind. He would have been kind, he could have been kind, to any decent quiet girl. Why could he not have met Ruth sooner? Why had this clutching harpy to walk into his life and fasten her talons deep
in all he had?

  When she had been asleep an hour or more. Georgie got out. Now that the time had come, he felt numb. Wings of panic fluttered as he made the few movements he had to make. Then he was in bed again, feeling a cool wave flow from his feet up to his head. It was done. How simple. When the panic threatened to return, he reassured it by telling himself that in the morning he would undo what he had done. He was not committed to it. In fact, he could put off the decision. The first step was now taken, instead of planned. That was all. But he knew he would undo nothing. The decision was made.

  The church clock struck several times before an aching sleep came to him. It did him little good. Three times before daylight he woke, rigid, with horror tingling through every nerve and vein, from nightmares so deep and slow-footed that he could remember only the shock and fear, not what had caused it.

  Chapter 8

  Grace did not feel well in the morning. She let Georgie bring her up a cup of tea, and sat sipping it, her eyes screwed up against the light. He ventured a glance at her, and was at once reassured and confirmed. He saw no hint of last night’s resemblance, but a sallow, tousle-haired, unappetizing, skinny woman, one bony shoulder sticking out of a greyish nightdress, sitting hunched in a welter of bedclothes. She made no reference at all to the previous night’s dispute.

  It seemed too good to be true, and he hardly dared think about it as he did the various early morning chores. But, when he was next obliged to meet her, all was still well, and the list of places where he was to call was lying by his place at the breakfast table. Grace was hunched in her chair, hidden behind the Western Morning News. She was, he saw, inclined to let the battle go by default, and relied on him to make things easy for her. He decided that she wanted the money, and did not feel equal to going herself.

  Saying nothing to challenge her, Georgie picked up the list, and put it in his right-hand breast pocket. It did not say how much money he was to expect, and for a moment he wondered at this. Then he understood. Grace would know how much, and so she had no fear of his being able to cheat her.

  At the last minute, he was seized by a panic lest she should change her mind, and lurked in his room and in the lavatory. But Grace said nothing—not even goodbye. The last he saw of her was her angular outline as she crouched to pick up a thread from the floor. Whatever else had gone, she kept her mania for tidiness. Then he was out of the house, feeling like Spring-Heeled Jack, repressing a mad desire to run and run.

  It was strange, he reflected afterwards, that his last sight of Grace should be so insignificant, when he expected never to see her again. A final farewell should surely have some meaning, some quality of ceremony about it, however glad one was to take it, however odious the person left behind. This farewell, too, should have had a special significance. But there was no character, no air of finality about it. It was simply the last time he saw her.

  The journey to Exeter dragged, a warm vague Purgatory of delay. Fine rain was falling, and now and then it blew against the train window with a soft peevish splash, and, farther off muffled the moorland into a sulky blur. Hedges and fields looked mean and colourless. Sitting opposite, a young farmer in a stiff mackintosh shifted his boots and breathed heavily through his nose. Georgie’s spirits underwent a slow flattening. It seemed impossible that any enterprise with life in it could start to-day. He imagined Ruth pulling aside her curtains, shivering, and deciding not to come.

  At Exeter he climbed out with relief, and made his way through the steamy air to the first of his places of call. Trying afterwards to recollect those hours, he could remember hardly anything that happened. Men spoke to him, money was passed across desks into his hands: but the voices conveyed nothing, and he took away no impression of the faces that smiled into his own.

  At one stage of the afternoon he suddenly found that a discomfort which had been growing in him was hunger, and pushed his way into a little crowded tea-house, full of the smell of rain-wet clothes, where he drank two cups of tea and ate close on a plateful of unappetizing buns. Then he was out again, under a low sad sky, pushing his way along the gleaming pavements, keeping on the move, on the move, on the move, lest he sit and think and let his mind fasten on the huge queries that were beginning to pile themselves up like a vague cloudbank westward of the town. There were things—something—he must not remember.

  At last it was over, an hour before Ruth’s train was due. He made his way to another teasbop, and sat down, aware now that the backs of his legs were aching and that he could not walk any farther. To one point his mind addressed itself critically and precisely, the money he had collected. Swollen by no illegitimate sums—at least, he could remember neither talk nor demeanour that seemed to point to any such thing—this reached a total of forty-nine pounds. Georgie was disappointed. So many calls for so little. After that one superb unlawful haul, he felt cheated.

  True to his nature, he was on the platform long before Ruth’s train was due. It went hard to buy the two tickets, before he was sure they would be needed. Then he began to chide himself for lack of faith. Ruth had said she was coming. She would come.

  The train was fourteen minutes late. By the time the announcement was chalked up, Georgie was past feeling. A few minutes more or less meant nothing now. He walked slowly the full length of the platform, trying to take an interest in the engines that were shunting on a siding, trying to hear intelligibly what two porters were talking about in a doorway, but hearing only words which his dazed mind could not arrange into any pattern of sense.

  Then, suddenly, the train was there, sidling and hissing its way in. A flood of faces streamed towards the barrier, pale in the lamplight, anxious, meaningless: till there, at last, huddled in the midst of them, small and white and shrunken, Ruth.

  The journey to the little Dorset town passed in a series of pictures that were only one picture: a dim gaslit compartment, with trickles running down the panes, whether inside, out, or both, one could not tell: faces and shoulders of fellow-travellers, changed as the train stopped, yet each new one seeming after five minutes to be unchangeable and to have been there always: talk heard but not apprehended: and, all the time, at his side, her small flank warm against his, her hand in his, damp, and clutched tight under the folded mackintosh, Ruth. It could not be true. Such things did not happen. It could not be true. Yet it was.

  It was late when they reached the little lodging house, down a narrow lane lit by a single unsteady lamp. The rain had stopped, though the pavements still glistened, and a cool breeze blew in their faces the tang of the sea. Nothing was visible beyond, but a slow murmuring crash, repeated in a pattern of sound that checked and quickened, told that the beach was not far off.

  Maybe because of their lateness, the dreaded embarrassment of their reception somehow disappeared. They were too tired: they had felt too much already. Unexpectedly, Ruth had changed her mind, and there was now no question of separate rooms. They refused the landlady’s half-hearted offer of a meal, and were shown straight up to their room. It was cold, pale, and bare, with the indefinable damp of places near the sea. The chest of drawers was painted white. The double bed, square and high, was covered with a white quilt worked in a pattern like a honeycomb.

  Ruth at once busied herself with her undressing. She kept her back to him, but seemed almost unaware that he was in the room. Too heavily belaboured for any feeling of anticipation, whether for pleasure or dread, Georgie got out of his clothes. His mind seemed to have stopped.

  “Shall I blow out the candle?”

  “No. I’m not quite ready.”

  She went away down the passage. Georgie climbed into the bed, and shuddered. Then his hand found a kindlier patch. A hot water bottle had been put in, hours ago, and a ghost of its warmth was left.

  Ruth came back. She blew out the light. Her clothes rustled. Then the bed creaked, and she was in. He heard her catch her breath at the chill of the sheets.

  “It’s warmer here. There’s a bottle.”

  Abr
uptly, with a jerk, she was in his arms, pressing herself against him, her thin form shaken with little shivering sobs. A stab of fear shot through him, and he tried to flog his aching body to respond: but it was not in passion that she sought him. She longed only for the clasp of his arms, the certainty that he was there, that they were together at last.

  And Georgie clung to her, desperately, holding her close, barely conscious that she was a woman, knowing only that now they were together, and nothing could tear them apart.

  It was dark when he woke. The light in the lane reached a corner of the wall. The rhythm of the sea was clearer now: clearer, yet softer. With a slow wonder, he realized where he was. Ruth lay so silent beside him, a small hump under the clothes, that he turned in sudden anxiety to know if she still breathed.

  And then, with a hideous shock, the truth hit him. His mind, which for days had worked in a half dream, was knocked awake; he saw the horror which had trapped him, the peril into which he had wantonly plunged both their lives, the appalling thing he had done.

  A great groan rose to his lips, and in his terror he did the one thing possible: reached out for his love, grasped her shoulder, and hoarsely called her name.

  She was awake in an instant, sat up, and flung her arms tight around him.

  “Georgie darling, it’s all right, I’m here, I’m here.”

  She thought he was in the grip of a nightmare, and his first words made her sure.

  “Murder! Murder!”

  “Ssh, darling. It’s all right.”

  “Murder, Ruth—I’ve done murder!”

  “There, darling, there.” She let him go, and reached for the matches. The box was damp. She had to scratch several times before the light reluctantly sputtered into being. She smiled, and shook his shoulder. “Wake up. You’re safe. We’re here.”