Thirteen Such Years

by Alec Waugh

  “I won’t pretend that this isn’t a surprise and a blow to me,” Jamieson was saying. “But we’re living in the twentieth century and divorce doesn’t carry the stigma that it used.…”

  Interminably the voice prosed on. In dumb perplexity Gavin listened. What was it all about? A kiss that had meant nothing. Surely Muriel would speak out, surely, surely…

  “When two people love each other,” the voice was saying.

  They don’t, he felt like shouting. That wasn’t at all the way things were. They don’t love each other in the least, they.… Then suddenly, he paused. An idea had come to him. He might not himself love Muriel, but that was no reason why she might not love him. He did not need telling that to love did not mean to be loved back. It might be that as Olivia was to him, so was he to Muriel: that the kiss that had meant so little to him, might have meant to Muriel all that would have mean to him the kiss that he had never won from Olivia. It might be; after all, who knew? Gently, slowly his fingers tightened upon hers; gently, slowly the pressure was returned. It might be, after all. And if it were?… well, if it were, why not then? since the thing he would have was not for having. Why not, since he had the power to make Muriel happy?

  “I’m assuming, of course,” Jamieson was saying, “that Herriott, in the event of my letting myself be divorced.…”

  He hesitated, waiting for Gavin Herriott’s assurance.

  It came with scarcely a pause dividing it.

  “Should Muriel be free,” he said, and his head was flung back proudly, “I’m sure she won’t need my telling her that the first thing I should do would be to ask her to be my wife.”

  §

  It was some three hours later that the party for which Olivia Sergeant had put on her new frock ended. There had been eight of them. When the curtain had rung down they had gone to Ciro’s. After that there had been a night club. When the small noisy smoke-laden room had begun to empty there had been eggs and bacon at an all night café. It was four o’clock before they stood, the eight of them, on the pavement of Piccadilly Circus, discussing drowsily how many taxis would be needed and who should be seen home by whom.

  “I’ll see Olivia home. She’s right on my road.”

  It was a man of forty, suave, modishly youthful, who made the offer. Out of heavy, sleep-laden eyes Olivia peered incuriously at him. It was odd that he should call her by her Christian name. It was done nowadays, of course. But she had never met the man before, she knew nothing of him; they had scarcely talked to one another the whole evening; had not even danced together more than twice. Odd that he should be calling her ‘Olivia.’ Odd, too, that the moment they were together in the taxi he should stretch out his hand to hers.

  Not that it worried her. If it amused people to hold her hand they could. She was tired; her head was aching; she was out of humour with herself. She knew quite well that she would feel out of sorts to-morrow. She always did after that sort of party. One ate too much and drank too much. One’s nerves were stretched to a point that made sleep, however exhausted one might be, impossible. She would be like a rag to-morrow. It was silly. One didn’t get such a fearful lot of fun out of it. One had done that sort of thing so many times. There was nothing new to it. One was a fool to accept shows like that, unless it was with folk one really liked.

  Tired and bored; out of humour with herself, her fingers resting limply in the hand that held them, she lay back in the corner of the cab, watching through half-closed eyes the lazy swaying of the trees in the Green Park. The Ritz, Down Street, Constitution Hill. So familiar, so tediously familiar. How often after so many nights similar in every detail to the one now finished, had she driven back along this road? She knew every inch of it; every shop between Hyde Park Corner and Knightsbridge. Another minute … So familiar was the road, indeed, that the car had done scarcely more than turn to the left at Hyde Park Corner before she was sitting forward.

  “This is the wrong way. We don’t want to go down Grosvenor Place.”

  And then, before she could realise what was happening; before she could ward it off, the thing had come. Arms had been flung about her, lips had been pressed against her cheek, “No, no?” an eager, hotly insistent voice was whispering, “we’re not going to be such fools as to waste an evening such as this. You are coming back with me to my flat, so that we can be together, as all the evening I’ve been longing for us to be together. All the evening I’ve been longing and aching for this moment: to be like this with you, to be holding you in my arms.…”

  She was so astounded that for a moment she could do nothing; could only lie limp and unresisting beneath the storm of words and kisses, whose ardour strengthened as she did not protest. For a moment, but only for a moment. The touch of his lips on hers sent such a fury of revulsion through her nerves, that in another second her clenched fist had been dashed savagely into his face, and she was back again in the corner of the cab panting and dishevelled.

  “How dare you!” she cried. “How dare you!”

  How dare you! The typical Victorian outburst. And from Olivia Sergeant, who had spent five years of modern independence in modern London. But then it was the first time that anything like this had happened to her. She had been made love to often enough, of course. A good many young men had tried, not always unsuccessfully, to kiss her as they drove her home from dances. More than once she had had to be very firm with young men who had not been satisfied with kisses. She had not been angry. That was the sort of thing that one expected. Her vanity would have been hurt, indeed, if now and again men had not lost their heads over her. But between those outbursts and this there was the world of difference. They had come, those other outbursts, from men whom she had liked; whom she had shown she liked; men with whom she had remained friends afterwards. But this… That a man whom she had never met before to-night, of whom she knew nothing, with whom she had hardly spoken, should imagine that he had only to hold out his arms for her to fall swooning into them.…

  “How you dared,” she panted. “How you could have dared!”

  In his corner of the cab, angry and disconsolate, her companion sat fingering ruefully an eye that would be black to-morrow.

  “There’s no need to get as excited as that about it.”

  “No need!”

  “After all, a girl like you…”

  She gasped, outraged far more by his words than by his kisses. A girl like her! So that was all he thought of her, a girl like her! There were, she supposed, girls like that: who would go home to the flats of men they had danced with twice. There must be. Otherwise he would not have made the attempt with her. He was not a boy. He must have succeeded often enough with other girls to feel that the rebuff was worth the risking. But that he should have imagined that she was that sort of girl! She had never been so insulted in her life.

  “Will you stop the cab, please,” she said. “I’ll walk home.”

  She would not remain another minute in the company of a man who could thing of her in that way. If only Gavin Herriott were here! He would show this cad quickly enough what she was worth.

  §

  It was in a considerably chastened state of mind that she sat on the following morning in the Carlton lounge, in response to a telephone request from Gavin Herriott.

  “Just for a cocktail,” he had pleaded. “I must see you. It really is important.”

  As Gavin Herriott came into the lounge, tall, and fresh and neat and handsome, she felt that she had never been so glad to see anyone in her life. Nowhere could she have found any one who could more completely restore her good opinion of herself. He did not think of her as a girl like that. In his eyes there wasn’t a girl in the world in the least like her. What did it matter what people like that cad last night thougt about you, as long as a man like Gavin Herriott worshipped you? Gavin was the sort of man you wanted to be respected by; the sort of man whose opinion of you mattered. Never had Gavin’s good qualities seemed so numerous. He was really the perfect man. As long as the per
fect man thought well of one.…

  She rose with a smile of welcome sufficiently radiant to have made Gavin under ordinary conditions happy for several weeks.

  But her smile woke no answering smile in the grey eyes; her bantering: “Aren’t you pleased with me for being early?” brought no laughing light-hearted compliment. There were lines between his eyes; he was worried and absent-minded.

  “There’s something I want particularly to say to you,” he said.

  Sitting down at her side he leant forward, not looking at her, his hands hanging limply over his knees.

  “Something I want particularly to say to you,” he repeated.

  He spoke listlessly, wearily. Olivia had never seen him in this mood. It had not occurred to him to offer her a cocktail. As a matter of fact she did not want one. She had drunk amply overnight. But he was not to have known that. Always up to now her needs, her preferences, had been his first, his sole concern. To-day he seemed hardly to be aware of her.

  “Something particularly important. Something that I shouldn’t like you to hear from anybody else. Olivia, I’m going to be married.”

  “Who to?”

  “Muriel Jamieson.”

  “You’re running away with her?”

  “No.”

  “Her husband’s letting her divorce him?”

  “Um.”

  “And when was all this decided?”

  “Last night.”

  “Tell me, please. Everything.”

  He told her, everything. Undramatically. Just as it had occurred; with Olivia making no interruption, just listening, waiting till he had finished. Then she began to question him.

  “And she spoke… she said… nothing… not a word?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You love her?”

  “Yes.”

  “Very much?”

  He made no answer. A little restively he shrugged his shoulders. A lot or a little, did it matter much? He was going to marry her, he was going to be good to her. He would make her happy. But Olivia was persistent.

  “Very much?” she urged. “Do you love her as much, for instance, as you loved me?”

  Gavin hesitated before he answered. As much as he had loved Olivia; had loved, or loved? Past tense or present? Closely, searchingly, he looked at her, as one might look for the last time at a familiar landscape. An intolerable sense of loss oppressed him. It was not only of Olivia that he was taking leave, but of all that part of himself that he had given to her, and could not now recall; loved as he had loved, as he still loved, Olivia? Ah no. One did not feel that way twice.

  He smiled. He had half wondered on his way that morning whether her vanity would prompt her to put some such question to him; and wondering, had asked himself how he was to answer it; had asked himself whether in some offhand reply he might not take such poor revenge as was available for the unhappiness she had inflicted on him. But looking at her now, with this heavy sense of loss upon him, he knew well that despise him though she might, he must not libel the past that they had shared.

  He shook his head. “Love as I loved you? Oh no, Olivia. One doesn’t love that way twice. At least, my sort of man doesn’t. I had never loved anyone before. There’d been episodes, of course. But I’d never loved before. I never knew that loving would be anything like that. I’ve adored and worshipped you. I’ve thought things about you and felt things for you, and said things to you, that I’ll never think or say or feel for anybody else. There are some things that it just isn’t in one to repeat. But… oh well, life’s a long thing. One’s got to make what one can of second bests. There are other ways, I suppose, of loving.”

  He spoke calmly, undramatically, with no stressing of words or syllables, but with an intensity that proved beyond doubting that he spoke the truth. To Olivia as she listened came something of that same sense of loss that lay upon Gavin Herriott. She, too, had the sensation of having something taken away from her forever. He had loved her, he never would love any other woman as he had loved her. They were words that came lightly enough to the lips of men who wooed. But their finality as Gavin Herriott pronounced them, had an unexpectedly alarming quality of truth. Since he would never say those words truthfully again, might it be that she was never again to hear them uttered truthfully?

  In a world where there was so much love-making, so much talk of loving, she had felt always that the loss or acquisition of any individual admirer was of no great account. There were plenty of others. It might be, though, that she had been mistaken. It might be that as it came once only in a man’s life to utter these words, truthfully, so might they only come once in a girl’s life for hearing. By the law of averages it would seem so. Was it to be that never again was she to be loved in just that way? The only way in which it was worth while being loved?

  As she listened she had a desolating impression of being cast adrift in a world of men who would feel differently about her; who would think of her as “a girl like that”; who might want to marry her, but not as Gavin had wanted to; men who might be sufficiently attracted to her to feel that were marriage the value she were to set on her attractions it was a price worth paying, but who would not feel, as Gavin had, that there was no other woman in the world for them. A world of pirate lovers. And it would be so lonely in that world. She would have to fight so hard to keep her footing. She felt frightened, defenceless, alone. She looked despairingly at Gavin as the one man who could protect and save her.

  “I mustn’t let him go,” she thought. “Whatever happens I mustn’t let him go.”

  §

  The liquidation of the Hardware Shipping Company was not of sufficient general importance to warrant more than a paragraph in the commercial columns of the London press. There were probably not more than a thousand people in the whole country who would be interested. The number of people whom it would affect seriously could have been counted in a minute, and of those dozen or so persons there was probably only one who stood gazing at that paragraph with gaping mouth and startled eyes, his consciousness numb with the impression that the world had come to an end.

  “Bankrupt!” murmured Gavin Herriott. “Bankrupt. It’s pretty nearly what I am myself.”

  He had spoken the truth when he had told Olivia that on her assurance that her uncle was to buy up the Hardware Company, he had put his shirt on it; while later, with the prospect, owing to marriage, of additional expenses, he had put rather more than his shirt on it.

  “It’s gone. Every penny of it,” he thought.

  With half comprehending eyes he stared stupidly at the paper. Then with a quick shake of his head he pulled himself together. It might be worse. It was a blow, a heavy blow; but with close economy and untiring effort he should at the end of three years or so have been able to pull round. Muriel would be a help to him. In that moment he was inclined for the first time to thank heaven that it was to her and not to Olivia that he was to be married. Olivia could never have stood poverty. But Muriel was different. She was soft, forgiving, adaptable. A loving creature who asked only to be loved. When he told her she would smile fondly. “A pity, darling,” she would say. “But we’ve got each other. I’ll be ever so good and careful about frocks and things.” Muriel was the sort of woman that one needed in this kind of crisis. It was a long and very affectionate letter in which he explained the change that had come over their position.

  §

  The letter arrived while Muriel and her husband were arranging the division of property that was to follow the selling of their house. It was a delicate business, for it is difficult to know the rightful owner of possessions that have come as wedding presents from friends that are had in common. It invariably involves bad blood. However modern one may claim to be, however matter of fact one’s attitude to divorce, no sooner does it become a question of dividing furniture than the sense of property will out. But on this occasion proceedings were being conducted with an exemplary absence of ill feeling. Muriel was charming and unacquisitive.


  “No, no,” she would say, over some object to which ownership was doubtful. “I’m sure you’d better have it. Arthur’s far more your friend than mine. Besides, it’s a picture that I know you’re fond of.”

  So kindly, so unacquisitive, that Edward had practically to force her to accept things to which under less kindly circumstances he would have felt inclined to argue her right hotly. He was touched deeply by her behaviour. Never had her nature seemed to him more harmoniously compounded of gentle qualities. He could not allow her to rob herself. He must protect her from herself.

  “No, no, I insist on your taking that spare-room suite.”

  It was at that moment that the letter came. Muriel blinked cautiously as she read it. It was a blow admittedly. It was one thing to have the excitement of a new husband; quite another to have the experience of it under conditions of discomfort. It might be that in three years’ time Gavin Herriott would be re-established. There was little doubt that he would worship her as the woman who had stood by him in his trouble. At the same time three years, and three wearying, wearing, exacting years, were a large chunk out of the dozen or so years of full physical attraction that remained to her. Muriel was not the woman to argue against Fate. She made the best of conditions as they came. Should Fate decide on her marriage to Gavin Herriott, she would go to the registry office with smiling lips and grateful eyes, in a three months’ old hat. “Darling, as long as we’ve got each other,” she would say. There was just a chance, however, that Fate might be persuaded to will otherwise.

  With a sigh she dropped the letter into her lap.

  “And now,” Edward was saying, “there are those chairs in the dining-room. I think George gave us those. Since he’s your uncle…”

  Her eyes were a little sad as she looked at him.

  “Edward dear,” she said, “I’m sorry to be difficult, but I was just wondering: you’ll have to replace all these things I’m taking. That’ll cost money. Wouldn’t you prefer to buy back from me what’s mine?”