“I do.”
“Well, he’s dead, believe me. Oliver’s on his own feet now.”
“Tell me about this morning. You frightened Annie Suthurst out of her wits.”
“I ought to have let her know,” Maeve apologised. “I didn’t intend to be out all night. The train went at six. I’d promised Oliver to dance after the show. We danced till about two, and then when I wanted to go home that Pogson man proposed that we should all go on to Oliver’s hotel. There was quite a party of us. It was four o’clock before we knew where we were, and then Oliver said he saw no sense in going to bed at all, so we stayed there till it was time to go to the station.”
I remembered my promise to Dermot, and I asked point-blank: “Does Oliver want to marry you?”
“They all do,” she said wearily, “but I suppose I’m not a marrying sort. Hadn’t we better be getting back?”
I packed her up in the rugs. We had not been travelling half an hour before she was sound asleep, her head resting on my shoulder.
*
A week later Oliver was reported missing, believed killed. A few days after that he was reported to be a prisoner. During the days between the two reports Maeve was in a daze. She had cut out a great many of her promiscuous engagements and lunched with me every day. We were lunching together when a man I knew at the War Office rang me up to give me the first news that Oliver was safe. Maeve broke down and cried. Then she put her arms round my neck and kissed me. “Oh, Bill,” she sobbed, “I couldn’t have borne it if he’d been dead. You pretend to be so cold and restrained, it breaks my heart to look at you. But you love him so much. It would have killed you. You do love him, don’t you?”
“So much,” I said firmly, “that I wish to God we were all twenty years younger. I might make a better fist of things. I haven’t been a conspicuous success, have I?”
“Oh, you dear, you dear. I can’t bear to hear you say that.” She was in my arms, her eyes, swimming with tears, a foot from my own. “Everything’s gone against you since Nellie died.”
“I’ve been my own fool and made my own folly.”
“Don’t, don’t! I couldn’t stand it if life made you bitter. It could all have been so different. I love you so much.”
Her head sank on to my shoulder, and my grip about her tightened.
At that she thrust me away. “But now—it’s too late.”
She strained her tear-marked face back from mine and gazed at me wildly. Then she ran out of the room and up to her own flat.
*
Towards the end of February I received a letter from Dermot. It contained some trivial message which he asked me to pass on to Maeve. After breakfast I ran up to her flat, and went straight into the sitting-room. The door leading thence to the bedroom was open, and I could see Annie Suthurst standing outside the door of the bathroom which opened off the bedroom. She was bent down in a listening attitude, with her ear to the door. Her face was drawn and haggard. Presently she saw me and beckoned me to the bathroom door, putting her finger to her lips to enjoin silence. I heard the sound of a faint moan, followed by painful retching.
Annie took my arm, walked me through the bedroom to the sitting-room and then sank into a chair. She rocked to and fro, stricken with grief. “The same yesterday morning, Mr. Essex. God help us! Oh, Miss Maeve! Miss Maeve!”
*
The man whose car I had borrowed to take Maeve for a drive was Sir Charles Blatch, a physician who lived in Wimpole Street. Blatch, like myself, was a member of the Savile Club. We had nodded to one another occasionally, and then one day he sat in a chair next to mine in the smoking-room and began to talk. He knew my books well and confessed that he had seen Every Street more than once. I have always found it difficult to resist an admirer, and Blatch was frankly that: an admirer of my own work and of Maeve’s. When we had talked for a time, I found that he wanted me to do something for him. He had written a book. I was on my guard at once. They were to be met so often, these people who flattered your work and then asked you to read theirs. But somehow I couldn’t take Blatch that way. He was an honest man. He spoke so diffidently about what he had written and seemed so sincerely to value my opinion that I consented to read his manuscript.
I liked the book, and I liked the way it was written; and I was able to arrange with my own publishers to publish it without alteration. The book had a modest success, and Blatch was very pleased about it all.
There was a chapter on euthanasia. Blatch was a believer in it. He wrote of the many men coming back from the war, doomed to a maimed and tortured life, who would prefer to end their days rather than live on as grim wrecks of the men they had been. “Uneasy ghosts,” he wrote, “tethered by the frailest threads to the ruined habitations that once were those proud mansions their bodies, how gladly many of them would welcome the hand at once courageous and pitying enough to give them release.”
Our friendship warmed a little, though it never became really deep. He invited me to dinner at his house in Wimpole Street. He was a rugged, thick-set fellow with strong hairy hands and a clean-shaven granitic face. He was a widower, and his only son was serving in the Air Force. There wasn’t much in his life to make him cheerful, and he wasn’t. He was not pessimistic or depressing: sombre is the word for him. He was strong as an oak, and his character seemed as umbrageous.
There were no other guests, and after dinner we sat in his small oak-panelled library with a decanter of whisky on a table between us. Like me, he smoked a briar pipe. He was a good talker, and he liked talking shop, but as it was not my own shop I didn’t mind that. He got on to euthanasia, which was something of a bug with him, and from that to suicide.
“Have you read Richard Middleton on the subject?” he asked.
I recalled that Middleton had himself committed suicide, but said that I had not read the essay he referred to. He took a blue volume down from the shelves and flicked over the leaves with his powerful stubby fingers. “Here you are: ‘We can forgive a man for booing or creating a disturbance in the theatre of life, but we cannot forgive him for going out with a yawn before the play is over.’”
“That’s true enough,” Blatch said, sitting back in his chair with a finger still in the pages of the book, “barring ‘with a yawn.’ It’s not only boredom that leads to suicide. Frustration, more often, I should say.”
He seemed to consider this for a while, then put the book on the table, pulled at his pipe, and said: “I should feel completely frustrate if Roger were killed.” (Roger was his son.) “My wife’s dead, I have no other relative in the world. You can tell me there’s my work. Well—” Then he dismissed the work with a wave of the hand. “No. It wouldn’t do. I couldn’t live without a sense of human continuity.
“Mind you,” he said with a smile, pushing a tobacco jar towards me, “I’m not contemplating suicide, even in the eventuality I mentioned. But, as a possibility, it can’t be dismissed. And,” he said, looking at me narrowly, “if it ever came to that, I should be the only man, I should think, who exemplified in his own life two things I believe in: that in certain circumstances a doctor should be allowed to take life, and in certain circumstances a man should be allowed to take his own.”
He had gone too far to draw back. He saw that as soon as the words were out of his mouth. “Dangerous ground—eh, Essex?” he said.
“Very,” I agreed. “Shut up if you want to; but, if there’s a story you want to get off your chest, here I am. I understand the importance of confession, and I can be as dumb as a Trappist.”
He told me the story: of his early life of poverty in Birmingham, of the struggles of himself and his mother after his father had died. There was a little back-street shop in the story, and there was the indomitable courage of the boy and the woman, his taking at last of his medical degree, and all the wild storm of hope raised thereby.
“Now—don’t you see, Essex?—now she was going to have everything—comfort, growing at last to affluence: servants, a carriage, God knows
what. You know how dreams go when you’re young. But all she got was inoperable cancer, agony...”
Blatch poured himself another whisky, drank, and put the glass down with a steady hand.
“I gave her the means to die,” he said.
Neither of us spoke for a moment, then Blatch continued: “It took me a long time to do it. She begged me to do it, and at last—well, I did it.” He paused. “And I got away with it.”
“Suicide,” he said after another thoughtful pause, “mind you, not any suicide—not any weak-willed chucking down of a bearable burden—but suicide of the sort I’m thinking of is simply saving someone else the trouble of administering euthanasia. And,” he added with his rare smile, “I’m not speaking as a certified medicine man: only as a private disreputable philosopher.”
Well, that was Sir Charles Blatch. That cold Sunday morning when I called to borrow the car I found him alone in his library, standing with his back to the fire, reading a letter. “Talk of the devil,” he said, “or rather of a close friend of the devil’s—” He went on reading. “Excuse my reading this. It’s only the hundredth time. It’s from Roger.”
When he had finished, he said: “This young devil has met your Maeve O’Riorden. He talks about hopes of leave and says”—Blatch read from the letter—“‘We must go again to see that show Choose Your Partner, so as soon as I give you a date, book seats. Book for every night I’m home if you like. We’ve got all Maeve’s songs for the mess gramophone, and I just can’t make the chaps believe I once took her out to dinner. You never knew that yourself, did you? Well...’”
And as Blatch read on, I was able to identify this Roger. I could see Maeve looking through the window into Berkeley Square, talking to me over her shoulder. “You never saw such a boy. He looked about sixteen, with blue eyes and smooth round cheeks.” I remembered, too, how Maeve had told me that Roger, seeing some lambs, had said: “My mother’d like to see that.” So Blatch’s widowerhood was very recent. It had been last April that Roger took Maeve driving. Well—last April—nearly a year. He’d been lucky for an Air Force boy.
“I should like to meet this Maeve of yours,” Blatch was saying. “She seems good value.”
“She is,” I said with conviction. “She’s tearing herself to pieces for these boys.”
“Well, introduce me some day, will you? I’d like to know her.”
*
The thought of Blatch was in the back of my mind as I stood looking down at Annie Suthurst crumpled in a chair. I took her by the shoulders and shook her gently. “Annie! Pull yourself together! Remember, Maeve wants your help now more than ever she did. Are you listening to me?”
She nodded her grey head. “Well, I’ve got to go out now. Remember, Maeve’s in your charge. Do nothing to upset her, and for goodness’ sake don’t let her know that you suspect anything is wrong. Can you manage now?”
She got up and began to put her face to rights. “Yes, Mr. Essex.”
“Good. I shall be lunching with her. Get out of the room as soon as you can. I want a good talk with her. I’ll let you know if there’s anything you can do. We’ll manage this between us.”
“Eh, Mr. Essex, it looks to me like summat that’s got to manage itself this time.”
Uncomfortable words! They were in my head as I sat at the table facing Maeve a few hours later. She was pale as usual, but quite composed. I thought that she had given if anything more than customary care to her appearance. Her dark hair reflected like polished metal a beam of light from the window. The lips were very red on her white still face. Annie put coffee on the table and slid out of the room, giving me an admonitory look from the doorway.
“Have you heard,” Maeve asked, “that Livia’s gone away?”
I poured out her coffee, shaking my head. Livia’s movements seemed of extraordinarily little importance to me then.
“Yes; she’s gone to France. Joined some nursing unit or other. Tired of waiting for you, Bill.”
“Oh, I don’t think that. I don’t imagine that she has any more use for me now than I have for her.”
She looked at me gravely and said: “So wasteful! So wasteful! What a bad schemer I make. My parts should always be written for me.”
“Perhaps they are,” I said sententiously.
Her face brightened. “You mean predestination and all that. What must be will be. D’you know, Bill, I’d like to believe that. Do you believe it?”
“It’s one of those things you could argue till Doomsday. I don’t see how you can ever reach a solution. I’d like to believe myself that I had occasionally by my own free will turned a corner here and there.”
She looked crestfallen. “It would be such a comfortable doctrine,” she said, “ that whatever I did had been prearranged and was unalterable—that I couldn’t personally be blamed, whatever I did.”
Whatever I did. God forgive me for the blindness of my heart. There was something tragical in her stillness, in the way her beloved mouth let drop those words; but all I did was to say: “My dear child, I cannot imagine you doing anything very terrible.”
“Very terrible—I wonder? Bill, why do you call me your dear child? You’ve always thought of me as a child, haven’t you? I wonder why you should think me a child and Livia a marriageable woman? Have I ceased to please you as I’ve grown up? D’you prefer to think of me always as a little girl snuggling into your coat?”
“Maeve, my sweet...”
“No, no. Don’t protest. I shouldn’t blame you if...”
She turned away suddenly, her eyes full of tears. “I just wanted you to tell me that I haven’t disappointed you,” she sobbed. “You expected so much of me, I know.”
I sprang out of my chair. “Disappointed me?” I shouted. And I knew that in all the sad tangle I had made of my life, Maeve stood clear and uncomplicated, the one thing that had never given me a pang, the one presence in which disappointment could never be felt. I crossed the room to her and took her in my arms. “Maeve, my love,” I said.
She looked up at me in wonder. “My love,” she whispered. “You’ve never called me that before... my love...”
“Let me call you that always. My love... my love... my love.”
I tried to get my face upon hers. She forced her head backwards, away from me, gazing deep into my eyes; and suddenly I saw a look of horror born into her face. She gave a little cry and dragged herself free. She sat down and buried her face in her hands, moaning.
“My love, my sweet,” I besought her. “What is the matter? Maeve, I love you. I love you.”
“I have loved you always,” she murmured, “and I have known I loved you ever since the night we saw the swans flying across the moon. So free... so beautiful...”
“Look at me, Maeve. Look at me now, my dear one, my lovely one.”
“God help me, Bill,” she said in a sobbing whisper, “I love you so that I could lie down and let you walk on me and the child that’s in me.”
“I know about that; don’t be afraid about that.”
“It’s not that I’m afraid of. It’s you. You didn’t want Livia till Oliver wanted her. You didn’t want me till Oliver wanted me. What is it about you that seems to prey on young lives? There was something... in your face... It frightened me.”
“My dear, you’re ill. You’re imagining things. God forgive me if my face could bear anything but love for you.”
“No, no! It’s the look that Oliver’s got now—hungry—a look that wants to consume lives. It was the look he had that night... You know that night I told you about? I lied to you. We went back alone to his hotel. This is Oliver’s child. You can’t have me. Christ! You can’t pretend to be the father of your grandchild.”
She reached a hand out blindly across the table, and I took it and as blindly stroked it. Presently she raised her head and I could have cried at the wreckage of her face, especially when a pale wisp of smile waked like a ghost amid its desolation. “So there we are, Bill,” she said. “There we are.
” She lifted her free hand and let it fall with a little helpless gesture.
“Maeve, we must talk about this child. What are you going to do? How can I help you?”
“You can’t help me. I expect you think I’m a pretty fool.”
“God forgive me if I think of anything except how to help you.”
“You can’t! You can’t!” she repeated. “But you do understand, don’t you, Bill? You don’t despise me?”
“Despise you?” The tears were stinging my eyes. “Could anyone in the world despise you if they knew you as I do?”
“There have been so many of them,” she said in a low, rapid voice turning her face away from me. “They’ve all wanted it, even the ones who were too nice to say so. Some of those were the hardest: they looked so dumbly miserable and hungry. I tried to be everything to them—except that. And I felt it wasn’t fair. I felt like a rich man who gives and gives so long as giving won’t hurt him. So many of them have died, and I thought what a little thing it would have been, after all. They have been like waves battering me. You know that line in the Bible, Bill—All Thy waves and Thy billows have gone over me. I’ve wakened up in the morning like that—feeling battered and defeated: the gay Maeve O’Riorden, having such a lovely hectic time. Ask the dirty little gossip papers. You’ll find it all there—my frivolous, heartless career...”
I stroked her hand. “Hush, my dear. Don’t go on with this.”
But she went on rapidly: “You know, it had to come. There would be a wave too many. I should be undermined. Well, it happened with Oliver. We danced and danced, and then he asked me to go back to his hotel to have a farewell drink. We went to his room. He didn’t say a thing, but just locked the door and stood leaning against it looking at me. He looked frightening, with those wounds of his twitching. I knew what he wanted. I said: ‘No. No, Oliver. Please!’ He went on looking at me. Then he laughed. ‘My God!’ he said. ‘You women! You take the cake. You hand us white feathers, you raise hell’s delight in our hearts with your leg-shows and lascivious songs, and you expect the whores in the red-lamp houses in France to do the rest for you. There you are then. Good-night.’ He flung the key down at my feet and started to undress. It was horrible, filthy, and yet it was true. ‘You know, you ought to be a bishop,’ he said. ‘Bless the banners and hand out tracts on purity. Sublimate your passions, lads, by sticking Germans in the guts. And if you want a nice clean change from that, listen to the Lena Ashwell party singing A long, long Trail, or when you’re on leave hear Maeve O’Riorden intone When it’s with You, it’s Wonderful. There’s the key. Aren’t you going?’
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