No Truce with Time

by Alec Waugh

  In a few hours’ time that girl would be on that same verandah, looking out of that same garden; remembering a tall young man, loose-limbed, with coltish movements; hearing the sound of a light careless laugh that seemed to bring all the freshness, all the gaiety of life to meet you. In the room behind, in that self-same room maybe, there would be a table and a half-finished letter. With the eyes of memory, the eyes of vision, she read the round sloping script, “Barclay, I can’t really believe that you’re not here, that I shan’t be seeing you tomorrow; the first morning, do you realize that, that I haven’t seen you for six weeks....” The table was against the wall. The left-side wall, as you faced the window. The light as you wrote flung the shadow of your right shoulder across the paper. She would have swung the paper round, moving her chair between it and the bed, the low broad bed with the brass foot-rail, with the picture opposite of Victoria’s Jubilee, above that washstand with the flowered basin.

  The first thing she noticed when she woke would be the yellow of the sunlight, contrasting with the magenta poppies of that basin. The letter would be lying on the table, left open to be added to.... “Dearest, I’ve just woken up, to a whole day with no ‘ you ’ in it. I can’t really believe that, somehow.” A letter to a young man who, a bare fifteen hours back.... But, no, that hadn’t happened, of course it hadn’t happened. There would be no young girl waking next morning beside an unfinished letter, opposite that vast Victorian reproduction.

  It wasn’t true. Those things had not been said .. Rather more like a friendship … Of course it sounds an awful thing to say, but even if Kitty were here … You must have guessed straightaway … like love at first sight …”

  Into the sea the sun was setting. Half of its circle was submerged. Another minute, and the last circlet only would remain, a vivid streak of orange that at the last moment before it sank would flare into a brilliant emerald. How often from this balcony had she not watched that sun sinking into that sea. Its familiarity was a proof, a reassurance of the changelessness, the normality of life. It hadn’t happened. It wasn’t true. It couldn’t be. She hadn’t heard those things said. She had fancied them, unnerved in the sudden return of happiness after those long parched weeks: a desert mirage. “Something more like a friendship …” How could he have said that … a bare fifteen minutes after? She had imagined so many fantastic things during these last weeks, that at the last moment she had created this final nightmare. “Something more like friendship.” Of course she had not heard that said.

  From below her in the drive came the sound of a car in labour. There was a crunch of changing gears, a kind of groan, a small explosion, the grate of gravel, as the clutch, too suddenly released, sent the car forward with a sudden jerk. Would he never learn to change gears properly? From the garage came the sound of coughing. Already, she thought resentfully.

  She had not expected him back so soon. There would be no parties tonight. One party in a day was ample. There might be a little golf, a little tennis, but there’d be scarcely any gossiping on the long verandah. They’d be at their homes, relaxed. Only a few of the older men like Gerald would have gone to the Rodney club for billiards and their rounds of drinks. If he were not back at four he would not be back till eight, she had told herself. But even he, she supposed, had to go steadily on a night like this. There he was now, flushed and choking; angrily grumbling against his fate, as though he had not brought that fate upon himself, as though his troubles were not of his own contriving. How old was he ? Fifty; fifty-one. No one would have thought that, looking at him now. Sixty; a full sixty. It was impossible to believe that seven years ago he had seemed younger than his years, that she had thought of him as not being any age, that he had cut a dashing figure. Why couldn’t he have stayed like that? He had doubled his age in seven years. Why couldn’t he have kept his figure, and his dash? Other men did. There was no need to fling up the sponge so soon. He had made his life wretched for himself; not only for himself. If he hadn’t considered himself, he might have considered her. Why couldn’t he have stayed young for her?

  Men grumbled when their wives lost their looks and figures. Didn’t they realize that they had a similar responsibility towards their wives; they had no right to go to seed? Had she ever been in love with him? She did not know. It was so long ago. Love was so many things. But she had been fascinated, yes, she had been attracted. She had been impressed by him; she had respected him. He could have kept her that way if he had wanted; if he had tried, if he had made the effort to keep young for her. If he had made that effort, she would never have been vulnerable in the way she had been when Barclay came. He had left her emotionally unprotected. It was his fault as much as anyone’s. None of this need have happened, none of this would have happened.

  She glared at him, taking angry, aggrieved stock of his slow walk, his heavy movements, his flushed forehead. It was his fault, all his fault, that she was in this mess.

  20

  “Wonderful news,” Barclay was announcing. “Old J. B. is going to do something about the island. And he’s bound to take me into whatever company he forms. He might move me to New York. He might … There’s no knowing where this might not lead.”

  He was excited about the Bruces now in exactly the same way that he had been excited about this hotel when he had first come down here.

  She smiled wryly to herself. He was not really excited about this girl. He was excited about the things she stood for. He saw her as the gateway to a broader life. He did not realize it, but that’s all it was. You fool! she thought. You fool!

  If he only saw how short was the view that he was taking, how hopelessly he was prejudicing his future by harnessing it to an emotional situation. When he’d tired of this girl, as of course he would, he would be unable to break loose. If he did, he’d quarrel with her father. He would pull down the whole structure of his career. At thirty he’d find himself tied to a woman that he couldn’t break from, that he’d not dare to break from, for his ambition’s sake. How he’d hate her.

  Her mind gloated on the prospect. With a savage delight she painted the details of his predicament. They said, didn’t they, that when a woman had loved a man and lost him, she prayed unselfishly for his happiness. It was nonsense. You prayed for him to be wretched. How could you want a man you loved to be happy with someone else? You wanted him to be as wretched as you were yourself.

  You’ll be miserable, she thought. You’ll pay for this. You’ll be paying for it when I’m past caring: long after I’ve outgrown it all. How I shall chuckle then. You fool! You little fool!

  “I’m so lucky,” he was saying. “And really, when I come to think back, I know that I owe it all to you.”

  An expression of boyish gratitude lit his eyes, a look that touched her. It was pathetic, he was such a babe. One couldn’t be angry with him. And it was unfair, criminally unfair, that his life should be ruined at its very start. I could have saved it for you so easily, she thought.

  If only she were free. It wasn’t as though he were leaving her for another woman. If she were free, he’d not be leaving her. It was his career, that was all it was. And she wouldn’t want him, would she, to be without ambition. Wasn’t it his ambition that in the first place had attracted her? It was cruel that the very thing that was best in him should be ruining his life. He didn’t care for this girl. How could he. when the very first moment that her back was turned …

  “How does Kitty feel about all this? Do you often hear from her?” she asked.

  He shrugged.

  “She’s too busy to write letters. She’s cabled once or twice.”

  “You aren’t actually engaged, are you?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “What do you mean, not exactly?”

  “In an American way we are.”

  “And what kind of way is that?”

  “You’ve read American novels. You know what Americans are. All that flinging woo.”

  “I see.”

  “One doesn�
��t quite know how much it means. When one tries to explain that it isn’t just a game, they interrupt. ‘ You’re crazy about me,’ she’ll say, ‘ of course you are. And I’m crazy about you. And you want to marry me, of course you do. So that’s fine and settled. Now let’s go some place.’ ”

  He imitated her voice, so accurately that Mary burst out laughing. Yes, that was how it was; a kind of game. Was Kitty in love with him? She scarcely imagined so. Kitty was young and gay. She was in love with life, too much in love with life to love a person. It was not till you were out of love with life that you could fall wholeheartedly in love. It was a game to Kitty—a game, though, that would cease to be a game for Barclay. And she could have saved him : so easily, so very easily.

  If only she were free. As things were, it had never occurred to him that she could save him. The English had cut-and-dried ideas. There were two kinds of girls; the girl one married, and the other kind. It would no more occur to a man like Barclay to propose a week-end in Barbados to a girl like Kitty than it would to suggest divorce and marriage to a married woman. Yet Kitty might be ready enough to accept an adventure to Barbados if it could be managed with circumspection; yet be extremely reluctant to relinquish her independence in a marriage. Whereas to a married woman the chance of a new life would be far more attractive than an intrigue with all that it involved of nerve strain and deception.

  How blind he was! Blind to himself, blind to his own nature. He didn’t want Kitty, an inexperienced child like that. It was men of forty who fell for things like that. Kitty. Why should he want Kitty when he had her, this new “her “: the “her “that he had himself created? He did not want Kitty. He did not want the things that marriage to Kitty would involve: responsibilities, children, housekeeping books, the close of freedom. No young man wanted that. And if he wanted marriage, the stability and continuity of marriage, how much more could he get out of a marriage to herself: a marriage that would not tie him with responsibilities.

  A widow with a private income would be an asset. With his worldliness, his shrewdness, his eye to his own future interests, Barclay would recognize her as an asset. He had never thought of her as a widow. He had thought of her from one angle only, seeing her in terms of “fun.” From any other point of view she would have been a liability. They had never considered the possibility of running away together. There had been that time—how clearly she recalled it—when she had told him that he had been lucky to have fallen in love with someone that he could not marry. He had denied that he had been lucky. She had been touched and grateful that he should have denied it, but there had never been any question that she was a woman of whom it would be impossible for him to think in terms of marriage. They had never even discussed that. It was too obvious. There were those to whom a scandal of this kind might not matter. You expected scandal among the titled and idle worldlings whose photographs filled the illustrated journals, who had nothing else to do except fall in and out of love—actors, screen stars, artists, athletes; people who lived in the public eye; who lived upon their nerves, who needed the stimulus of a heightened, intenser living; whose lives were a public show, in whom the public lived vicariously, of whom the public indeed expected the licence that their own lives lacked. It was all very well for people like that to splash their emotional lives across the headlines of the tabloids.

  But for people like themselves, solid middle-class people, who were supposed to represent “the backbone of the country,” a different standard was expected. Respectability was demanded of the middle-men through whose hands passed the care of property. If doctors, directors of companies, lawyers led frivolous lives, the livelihood of millions was in danger. People like Gerald and Barclay could not afford a scandal. It would stand against Barclay all his life that, entrusted with a mission, he had eloped with the wife of the man who had entertained, trusted and sponsored him. He would have to start a whole new life.

  What a start, too, to that new life! There would be not only the scandal, but the practical difficulties. There was Gerald’s religion. Would he ever agree to a divorce? Moreover, divorce in the West Indies was not the easy, straightforward thing it was in London. It would take months. It might be years. And how impossible, how strained those years would be: the very years, too, that Barclay could least afford to waste. Then there would be a financial problem. She would be penniless. There had been no marriage settlement. Gerald would not sue for damages; he was not that kind of man. But it was extremely improbable that Barclay’s father would be very helpful towards the elucidation of a state of affairs of which he would thoroughly disapprove. You needed money to live unconventionally. And then again, there was the difference of age. Herself and Barclay, and herself and Gerald. She could imagine the headlines that would spread across double columns of the tabloids when the divorce petition reached the courts. “Tropical Romance: Wife of Middle-aged Planter: Lover Ten Years her Junior.” The very thought of it made her shudder. By the time that they were free to marry they would have come to hate each other. An impossible situation. Yes, there was no doubt of it, none whatever—she was as Gerald’s wife a woman whom no young ambitious man would consider in terms of marriage.

  Ah, but if she were free. That was another matter. Was not, in contrast, the attractiveness of that picture as vivid as the horror of the other?

  If only she were free.

  21

  “But I still don’t understand why you didn’t want me to read Notre Cœur,” she said.

  Like a child with chicken-pox that longs to scratch, she could not resist the temptation to aggravate her distress,

  “Why didn’t you?” she said.

  “I was afraid it might hurt your feelings.”

  “I know. But why?”

  “It seemed too like our story.”

  “But I’m not in the least like that woman.”

  “Of course you aren’t …”

  “Then why …?”

  He interrupted her.

  “It was silly of me. But I thought if you read that book and knew I’d liked it, you might get the impression that I’d taken it to heart … that … I’m not explaining this very well … But there was a parallel. A man who’d been made very unhappy in Paris by a sophisticated modern, running away from her, going down into the country, letting himself be consoled by someone simple.”

  “And you thought that a parallel?”

  “In a sense it was. I mean, there was that girl, she was a flirt, she did make me unhappy, and in a city. I did take this trip here to forget her.”

  “And you did find consolation.”

  “Well, didn’t I?”

  They laughed at that. It’s ridiculous, she thought, that he can treat the whole thing as a joke.

  “And you were afraid,” she said, “that I’d see myself as that chambermaid who bought cheap scents to fascinate the worldly man from the city?”

  “Well, not quite that.”

  “But nearly that, nearly enough for you to think that I’d spot a resemblance and be hurt by it.”

  “I shouldn’t now.”

  “No?”

  “Of course not. Now that we know each other so well that we can talk like this. I didn’t know then how you’d look at things. I thought you might resent the idea that I’d come out here to forget someone.”

  “And that I was your way to a quick forgetting?”

  “If you put it that way …”

  “And that’s how it was, wasn’t it?”

  “In a sense.”

  “And when you came here to be cured, you did look round to see who’d be the most suitable medicine?”

  “What a way to put it! “

  “It’s the correct way, isn’t it?”

  “In a sense.”

  “And I was the first person that you picked upon?”

  “Not quite the first.”

  “What!”

  “I had to look around a little.”

  “But I thought that the first time you saw me on the qu
ay in that white dress with the green trimming …”

  “I know. It was a shock right along my nerves, but that isn’t the same thing.”

  “No?”

  “Not in the mood I was.”

  “I see. Not if you were looking for a medicine.”

  He laughed.

  “You do say the funniest things.”

  “Do I? If I wasn’t your first choice then, who was?”

  “You were my first choice all right.”

  “But you had a good look first. Who else was on your list? Mavis?”

  “Good heavens, no.”

  “Why so assertive?”

  “I didn’t want that kind of complication.”

  “Didn’t you? No, of course you didn’t. You wanted someone who couldn’t be a nuisance. Somebody quite impossible, a someone married. Who did you think of? Not that appalling June Langley?”