She was going to say something and then saw his cold shrewd face. “Why? What do you mean?”
“Nothing very much. Only I know why that stick cracked in his hands. Good-by—until Monday.”
She stood watching his car and felt that somehow once again he had made her feel a damned fool.
Nicholas took up The Times and put it down again. The letters were turning over and over in his mind, and he felt that he could never get away from them even at Barrington. And thinking of Sidonie he felt a cold repulsion as he remembered her face when she had reminded him last Monday night that he paid. He muttered to himself: “Just a plain kept gold-digger. God, what a fool I am.” He looked out the window and saw the easy swing of Muriel’s body as she ran along the lawn with the dogs. He spoke aloud: “God, is it her I want, not Sidonie?” This habit of talking to himself alarmed him, and he took up The Times and tried to distract himself by scanning the Personal Column. He noted the regular items, and, catching in a subconscious corner of his mind, a minor difference in one of the fixed notices stopped his running eye.
The Aldwycham Orphanage thanks Anonymous
for Eighteen Pounds Tuesday.
For several years now that notice had never mentioned any other sum but twenty pounds. Nicholas laid down the paper with an ejaculation. How very queer. Eighteen pounds...Good God, was it possible? Did she send that money to an orphanage? Or was this just a fluke of the eye? Tuesday? It was always Tuesday in the notice. Good God...Then how did she keep that expensive flat? And if it was possible, why in heaven’s name did she make him pay...Questions revolved around in his mind like people caught in the momentum of a swinging door, and he was almost startled when Muriel came in. He noticed that she still seemed in a state of tension. She sat down and rubbed her ankle.
“Those damn midges. They’re going mad after the rain.”
He looked around for something to say. “Saluby looks as if a game of tennis wouldn’t do him any harm.”
“Not bad advice for yourself!”
“What the hell use in getting fit and sunburned like you to sit all day on my backside in Pall Mall? Only makes it worse. Always found it did. Once you give your body a chance to get in its say it wants the whole lot of you—when I tried that I used to sit in the bank with muscles busting out my coat and feel like a prize fighter with a knitting needle in my hand.”
“Well, some exercise would do you good.”
“It might, but”—he spoke impatiently—“I can’t do things by halves. If I can’t take a thing in both hands I’d rather leave it. I’ve got to take a thing Seriously.”
“Nick, are you taking those letters seriously?”
Her inflection alarmed him.
“The letters! Good Lord, no!” He knew suddenly that she was watching his hands and he tried to keep them still. “What in God’s name makes you think that?”
“I just wondered—when you said you must take everything seriously.” She paused. “I suppose you really aren’t writing them at all. I haven’t noticed you, anyway.”
“I—I dictate them now.”
“Oh, I see.” She paused. “O curse these midges!” She scratched herself on her thigh, and he saw a fringe of yellow lace. Suddenly he spoke: “Why the hell don’t you have a bath and get rid of them?”
She got up, and he felt that under her tan there was a surge of anger, but she said casually: “Yes, that’s an idea. I think I’ll go to bed then. Good night.”
He said good night, and when she went out the door he swore at himself in his own mind: “Why the hell did I say that, when I wanted to go over to her and...” Suddenly he admitted the brutal fact to himself: “I want her so bloody badly that I’m afraid to go near her! Why is that?”
He tried to reason it out in his mind and he didn’t know whether it was because of Sidonie or because Muriel had for so long damped down his sexual lust to the inhibition that had been in her that he was afraid in case she had not changed. But he knew in his heart that in some unaccountable way she had changed, and that every intuition told him that she could now answer the healthy ferocity of desire with all her womanhood. But where the hell had she been for the last ten years? And where the hell had she come from now, with that sense of thunder and lightning bottled up in her? Surely it could not be with that thin and dried-up Saluby that she had found herself? He had no more clue to her than he had to the riddle which seemed to lie in the Personal Column of The Times.
And he wondered why the hell she had watched his hands while questioning him in that casual guarded way about the letters? He was not so sure of Sidonie now as the writer—if his hunch about the Personal Column was right.
He called his dog and went out for a walk into the twilight to try and work them both out of his system.
THIRTEEN
Next Monday Nicholas felt his heart give a bounce as Miss Coleman laid down the Personal letter. He wondered why she had not made any comment on this regular Monday letter, and then he knew that his thought was unreasonable, as no secretary would comment on the Personal mail. The postmark seemed to be Birmingham, and he had an unpleasant sense that things were getting closer every week and were being carefully planned.
Miss Coleman went through the diary in her calm way and then took up the letters. Then she said: “Oh, there was a telephone message from Mr. Elder. He is laid up.”
When they had drafted the letters that needed a morning reply, she went out, and Nicholas took up the Personal letter. The postmark was Birmingham. The letter was, of course, the same as usual. Nicholas dandled the paper in his hand and suddenly wondered if there was anything funny in Elder’s absence. And as Elder occupied his mind, something like a tactile memory came into his hand from the notepaper, and instantly he remembered where he thought he had seen this paper before. He pressed the button in the cabinet and told Miss Coleman to send Mr. Law up to him. Nicholas felt an excitement in him as he waited for Mr. Law, who came up promptly and made his polite bow. Nicholas looked at the clerical ledge of Mr. Law’s face and said: “Mr. Law, I want to see some documents of the Elder Bank. Would you get the last yearbook from the Records Safe, and also bring me any forms or notepaper with the Elder Bank letterhead. A friend of mine wants to make a short history of the bank, and I want some of the letterheads, etcetera, to photograph into the book.” Nicholas paused. “You know the kind of thing I want. Bring them yourself, and you might be able to help me.”
Mr. Law went out looking pleased and felt that the unfortunate business of the Durrant deeds had been forgotten in Mr. Bude’s mind. It seemed a long time to Nicholas until Mr. Law came back with a leather case full of the Elder Bank properties. Nicholas conferred with him very seriously on the samples to be used and discovered rather a surprising wit in Mr. Law when he relaxed from strict business. At last he got rid of him and then put away the leather case in the bottom drawer and took up the sheet of paper his eye had seized on. There was no doubt about it, Nicholas thought, as he used his magnifying glass. This note-paper was the same as that used in the anonymous letters. He compared the cutoffs in the anonymous letters for height and found that they just eliminated the heading from the rather tall page.
When he left for lunch he did not walk along to his club but went up by Piccadilly to a first-class optician. He said that he wanted to buy a microscope and explained that he wanted a good one to detect fine grains in paper and legal documents. The young man became interested, and Nicholas produced the two sample strips he had cut off and marked, and the young man took him into the back of the shop and compared them in a special light chamber. They were both the same paper beyond any doubt. Nicholas purchased a microscope, was shown how to use it, and said he would take it with him. He produced his wallet to pay, but the young man politely asked him for his name and address as this one had a special lens and it was their custom to keep track of them. Nicholas was somewhat surprised at this formality. He ate a very good lunch, finished the day with a sense of relief, and felt that he was getti
ng on the heels of the puzzle.
In the evening, he left an envelope on Sidonie’s table which contained twenty-two pounds. That also, he felt, might answer another question in his mind on next Thursday’s Times. On the whole he felt that it had been a good day. Even Muriel had been gay and amusing when he rang her at nine of the clock.
FOURTEEN
Muriel had not felt either gay or amusing that morning when Saluby rang her up as usual at eleven o’clock. She looked out at the sunlight on the lawn and pictured Saluby dark and slick in his natty suit and narrow tie and parsimonious collar and sleek hair that not once had been ruffled in the love-making in that cold and gloomy room in Dorminster. He somehow became very common on the telephone and she winced as he said: “It’s O.K. today with me.”
Her mouth tightened in a way that was becoming less habitual with her now. “I don’t know if it’s O.K. with me, as you put it.”
“Oh hell! Why?”
“I may have a cousin coming to tea.” She paused. “If I can’t come I’ll ring you before two o’clock. Goodby.”
She just could not go on talking to him. She had invented the cousin as a get-out if she felt unable to go through with it. She sat down in a grim mood and knew that Saluby was playing the devil with her nervous system. Now that she had made up her mind to have a love-life she cursed herself for getting off on the wrong foot. She felt that Saluby in his love-making was not, as he thought, an artist, but an artisan. And her body, she knew, was becoming snobbish about him. But she had a humiliating sense of ignorance about the whole thing, and like so many Englishwomen, she raged at her kindergarten state of mind about what she now guessed was the encyclopedic knowledge of love-making. From the hairy ape of Nicholas she had gone to the bald and bony chest of Saluby. She nearly spoke her thought aloud: “At thirty-one, in the matter of sex, I’m in a cradle, not in a bed.” She stretched her legs out like long golden pythons and felt a ripple of sunlight go lazily through her body. She jumped up and said: “I’d better go down and have an affair with a squash racquet!” She played squash singlehanded rather than endure the company of a neighbor at tennis.
She had a bath before lunch, and at five minutes to two went to the telephone to ring Saluby and tell him that she was not going. She took up the instrument and then put it down with a bang. Oh hell! She might as well go. She called Blake and told him that she wanted the car at two-thirty. She thought that she had better spend a formal half-hour at the Ladies’ Club in Dorminster before going to meet Saluby.
At the club she met Therese Waldenham for the second time. She was French, perhaps thirty-five, perhaps forty, and had just come to live near Dorminster. Muriel liked this dark and enchanting Parisienne and was fascinated by the contrast of her vivacious face and the somber eyes like pools of amorous oil. She was very formal in black and looked enviously at Muriel, who wore a flowered frock and was, Therese felt, like a tall golden flower in the middle of a garden.
Therese laughed. “Ugh, you make me feel like a black crow! But I must address a wretched meeting in the library! Oh, long lovely golden legs, and no stockings, and no complications to keep them up!”
“All I’ve got on,” said Muriel, “is a Cupid’s fig leaf.” Therese tinkled into a musical laugh. “Oh, you’re such fun! I’m sure your tongue is a little red imp that dances in your mouth. I think I must not let you meet my husband! You are so adorable I couldn’t be jealous of you, and then I could no longer take him seriously. You must come and lunch with me!”
“I’d love to.”
“Next Monday week?”
“Yes.”
Muriel had to walk hurriedly to meet Saluby. She liked ‘Therese and had talked too long. She hated the gloomy shade about the Cathedral. She stopped and almost turned back. She felt that the something which danced in her today would die in her when she met Saluby. Youth put on mourning with him. But she went on, the shadows of the leaves checkering her face, and turned down from the close into the cul-de-sac road. She stopped. Saluby’s car was not there. She felt an enormous relief, but walked on lest it be hidden by the corner of the wall. Perhaps he had been delayed by an urgent case. Then when she got to the gate she saw that the door of MacGregor’s house was ajar. So he had come and had perhaps left his car at a garage, or was getting nervous about leaving it here. Muriel got a slight shock of fear. It would be awful and ridiculous if they were caught. She went in the ajar gate and into the house and stood in the hall. Yes, he was in the consulting room. She was just about to go in when her eyes chanced on an old tweed hat and a green macintosh in the hall. My God! She heard another movement inside and wondered if she could get out unseen. But it was too late. The man inside had heard her and came out. MacGregor! She recognized him from Saluby’s description. It was impossible to mistake MacGregor. What in God’s name had happened...
“‘Always leave the door open,’ my father used to say, ‘and ye’ll never know who will walk ini’ Ach, he was a wise braw man!”
She suddenly confided herself to MacGregor’s enormous smile. She knew it was characteristic of the man to greet somebody like this. Awkward as the situation was, his welcoming smile made things less appalling. She could only think of the obvious thing to say: “Oh, I came to see Dr. MacGregor.”
“Dr. MacGregor isn’t on duty. He’s smelled the buttercups in the meadow and turned himself out on grass, like a wise braw man.” He paused. “My name’s MacGregor. What can I do for you?”
“Are you Dr. MacGregor?”
“And would ye expect to see a member of the medical profession dressed like this, young lady?”
“I would, if he were you.”
He laughed. Then they had a good look at each other. The sunlight struck on his face as if it had gone straight to the living thing in this chamber of gloom. His great red beard and Highland blue eyes made a grand picture in the shock of the light. He had a warlike nose and bony cheeks and his skin was weather-beaten in wind and sun and rain. His hair glistened as though with the brine of a sea. He wore an old stalking coat of a heather mixture spun on a cottage loom, and his eyes seemed to gather up a purple shade from it. His rough shirt was open at the neck and he wore trousers of a kind of green cord. Suddenly he put out his hand and took hers in a clean grip.
“Don’t tell me there’s anything wrong with you.”
“Oh no—it is just a kind of consultation. I’m not ill.”
“In that case Dr. MacGregor is staying out on grass. He’s only just back anyway from herding a lot of young medical goats in his native Scotland through the sewers of Harley Street hygiene—there I am blaspheming in me own tabernacle of healing—and he’s proposing to go down to a quiet bit of river he knows, with a rod in his hand, for the rest of this day and not be bothering himself with a young lady who’s probably got toothache in her big toe, and who stands there with her mouth open and her tongue peeping out to laugh at him. So now go back to your ladies’ refined teashop in the cathedral town of Dorminster and let him be away to his dallying with the trout.” Suddenly Muriel made up her mind. “Where did you say that river was?”
MacGregor looked at her and saw the laugh rippling in her face. “Just wait one minute.”
He went into the room and got a piece of paper and scribbled two words on it and pinned it on the front door. As Muriel read it she laughed. It was like him: back sometime.
“Did ye have any tea?”
“No.”
“We’ll stop on the way down. Women are always a damn nuisance. I had to stick that up because I’m only back a couple o’ hours and I rang up a cadaverous scion of a doctor that I know out in a place called Barrington and I suppose he’ll be coming in to haunt me like Hamlet’s ghost some time today. Now, come on.
Me old truck’s out at the back. It’s ashamed to stand at the front door.”
As she went out through the gateway and along the path to the back road her worry about Saluby was lost under the exhilaration of MacGregor’s company. She realized that she had
left Barrington early and that Saluby had probably tried to stop her coming here. But now she was glad she came. She could not help a laugh when she saw MacGregor’s chariot.
“Th’ original o’ that,” said MacGregor, “was a motorcar—speakin’, of course, from memory. If she’d only go fast enough to get away from the smell o’ the exhaust—the pipe is busted—it wouldn’t be so bad. She’s just hangin’ together by her sinews and she’s liable to fall asunder if you sneeze in her. But get in.” She was looking at him with a smile. “What are you thinkin’ about me?”
“I was just wondering how one tells the age of a man with a beard!”
“I’ll be explaining that to ye, as the day goes by. And what age axe you, me lassie?”
“Oh—thirty-one.”
MacGregor scrambled the clutch.
“Ye’re what?”
She nodded.
“Don’t be daft!” He saw her ring. “Oh, so ye’re married! Oogh, the selfishness o’ man! If ye want to meet him out o’ the office at six o’clock, ye’d better disengage yerself from this chariot.”
“Drive” on, MacGregor, and don’t talk so much!” MacGregor pushed in the gears and put down his foot, and they went off as quietly as a brass band.
“Pulmonary trouble, by the sound of it!” said MacGregor. Then he did exactly what she knew he would, ignored her altogether and gave over his fine baritone to Scottish ballads. She had a sense of swinging along and around the countryside in an extraordinary rhythm as MacGregor always climbed to a high note and descended again as he swung the car around the grass margins of the corners in the lanes. Once or twice his knee touched hers as he grabbed between his legs for the brake, and she wondered if it was possible to get such a shock and yet for him to be insulated from it. But he gave no sign of being aware of her, except by an occasional smile, as he scraped a corner. After a while she began to find herself borne away in the rhythm of motion and singing and once she had an odd feeling that they were still and the countryside unrolling by them. At last with a fearful turn of the wheel he threw her on to him as he swung down a narrow lane to a farmhouse where they were going to have tea.
The Chinese Room Page 7