I Shall Not Want

by Norman Collins

  “Well, Mary,” he said.

  He was standing there, his legs apart, his hands in his pockets smiling down at her. It was the old, familiar smile that was not often seen on his face nowadays.

  She looked up at him and, recognising the smile, she smiled back. Even the voice was as she remembered it. And it seemed for a moment as though they had never been separated, as though they had been looking into each other’s eyes for a life-time.

  “Are you finished for to-day?” he asked.

  She nodded.

  “I was just going home,” she answered.

  “Then I’ll take you back there,” he said; “it’s a long time since we really talked to each other.”

  He was looking hard at her as he spoke and noticed that her colour had mounted a little. “It’s almost as if she still blushes when she speaks to me,” he thought.

  She paused, pushing back her hair from her forehead with a little gesture that was half weary, half embarrassed.

  “I’m in no hurry,” she said. “I’ve nothing to go home for yet.”

  “Well, let’s drive round the Park together,” he suggested. “That’s the perfect way for talking.”

  When she came back to him she was wearing her coat. It was a cheap, thin one, not at all like the coats that Louise had hanging up in her wardrobe. John Marco remembered the heavy rug in the carriage and was glad that it was there to wrap her in.

  The air in the Park was cold; and the Park itself had that air of peculiar and even startling sweetness which is to be found in all open spaces in large towns. It was as though, up to its railings, the ordinary grim business of cities went on and then, suddenly, on the other side a new kind of life began, a life in which ladies ride about in carriages, children play together under trees, toy-yachts are sent sailing across ponds, and dogs run barking. John Marco sat back and took his hat off, running his fingers through his hair.

  Mary looked towards him.

  “You look tired,” she said. “You don’t give yourself enough rest.”

  “You’ve noticed that, have you,” he said slowly. “I am tired. Very tired.”

  “Then why don’t you take things more easily?” she asked. “I’ve been worrying about you for a long time.”

  “You have?”

  Somehow, her admission cheered him; simply by telling him, she had made him feel less alone again. And thrusting his hand under the rug he took hold of hers for a moment and held it. Louise, for her part, seemed never to have thought of him as even possibly being tired; she was so rarely tired herself.

  They got out of the carriage and began to walk. A faint breeze, that came and went, kept playing across their faces and the sun was almost warm. Overhead the sky was clear, and the flat acres of the Serpentine, seen through the dark trunks of the elms, showed placid and brilliant. They did not talk much as they walked; they went along side by side in silence like old friends. He held out his arm for her and she took it; to his surprise her touch still pleased him. And as they strolled across the sward he kept glancing sideways down at her.

  The warmth had gone out of the air by the time they got back to the carriage and John Marco suggested that they should go somewhere for tea; Gunther’s was the best place, he told her.

  But Mary answered that she must be getting back again; there was tea to be got for the child who would be coming home from school, she explained. And as she said it, his feeling of loneliness suddenly returned to him; he was aware again of a closed and already complete life that was going on apart from him, something that was self-sufficient and shut-in.

  He asked for the address where she was living. But, when he was told, the coachman had not heard of it, and Mary had to direct them when they came to the corner of the street. She had asked him to drop her anywhere so that she could make her way home as usual by bus; but John Marco had refused to hear of it.

  The street, when they came to it, was not a pretty one. It was of grey brick, and the houses all had the flattened, lifeless look that comes of windows with curtains that have had all the colour and sparkle washed out of them, and front gardens with nothing brighter or more lively than a privet-hedge inside their borders. It was a street in Paddington and not in Bayswater.

  “You will come in, won’t you?” Mary asked him as the carriage stopped. “Then I can make us both some tea.”

  He got down from the carriage and they went in together. Inside, the hall was dark and narrow. It was close, too, as though the air that was imprisoned in it had been breathed a hundred times.

  “It’s upstairs,” she told him. “We live on the second floor.”

  They mounted the stairs in silence, treading the pattern-less strip of oil cloth that ran up the centre. The paper on the walls was shiny, varnished stuff; it glistened. It had been like that in the house in Chapel Villas where he had been brought up; and perhaps it was because of this, or because he was with Mary again, that his mind began working backwards into the past and old Mrs. Marco was alive once more and he himself was young and keeping up appearances on fifteen shillings a week, and the world was spread out before him.

  He started when Mary spoke to him: her voice reached him out of a different level of things.

  “This is ours,” she said.

  She threw open the door in front of him and the fustiness of the house vanished. The room seemed a small oasis of comfort, of civilisation even, amid those deserts of blind windows and sooty brick. There were flowers on the table and pictures that he remembered on the walls. And as he stood there he suddenly saw again that little pink-and-white drawing-room above the chemist’s shop in Harrow Street, and he heard the voice of Mr. Petter’s mother asking if he had been her son’s friend and if he wanted to go upstairs to see him. Everything in the room was just as it had been then. The chair covers were the same, except that the bright dye that had once been so cheerful-looking had faded out of them, leaving them faint and autumnal; and the carpet that had once been new had grown thin and hard to the feet. But there was one difference, he realised; and it was a difference that seemed to mark the whole complexion of the change. Here the paint work was dark; it was something that had been inherited from a succession of shadowy, departed tenants; and in the little flat to which Mary had been taken, it had been all white. John Marco remembered the bridal look that there had been to it.

  “Sit down while I put the kettle on,” Mary told him. “I shall be back again in a minute.”

  He seated himself in one of the easy chairs and stretched his legs in front of him. It was very quiet here—the only sound was that of Mary moving about in the other room—and he felt oddly comfortable and at ease. He thought of the tea-party that was going on in Hyde Park Square, and smiled. The maids there would be going around in their lace caps and aprons offering little sugary tit-bits off a silver cake stand; and here he was in an upper back room in a road that his coachman had never even heard of; and he was preferring it. It seemed suddenly, after all those years, so exactly what he wanted, to be there alone with Mary again.

  But as he raised his eyes to the mantelpiece he saw that he was not alone. Thomas Petter was there, too; and he was regarding him. His coloured photograph set slantwise upon the shelf was staring full at him; and the eyes, cunningly touched up by the photographer’s assistant had more, not less, than the ordinary sparkle of life about them—they hypnotised. At the same moment, John Marco became aware of how much of this room, that had been transported across a score of streets and up three flights of stairs, still belonged to Thomas Petter. His certificate from the Pharmaceutical Society was hanging on the wall in its narrow gilt frame and another photograph of him as a young man, seated amid an Amosite Bible Class that he had been instructing, was opposite. Even the books were his; his Pharmacopoeia was there in the case beside the fireplace in just the spot where a tired man who was interested in his work could stretch out his hand and take it up. If his slippers, too, had been down beside the fender it would not have seemed surprising.

&nb
sp; John Marco avoided Thomas Petter’s bright, unswerving eyes and sank lower into his chair. Through the window, across the double strip of what had once been gardens, he could see the blank, untidy backs of the houses opposite. There was no pretence about them. No matter what façade the fronts supported, the backs were honest and themselves: they were the backs of tenements.

  “So this is what she comes back to at night,” he reflected; “this is her life now.” But it had been about him that she had said she had been worrying. She had spoken as though her existence were the one which was secure and sheltered, and his the bleak, arduous one. It was evident that the other life, the streety one that went on around her, had not touched her at all; inside these four walls she was shut away. “Perhaps she can afford to keep alive her memories,” he thought.

  She came in carrying the tea tray and set it down on the small table beside him.

  “We’ll have it like this,” she said. “It’s easier.”

  He lay back looking at her.

  “It seems strange seeing you do this,” he said slowly. She paused.

  “Then you must come again so that it won’t be strange,” she told him.

  “I’d like to,” he replied simply.

  And as he said it he realised that, if they were to see each other again like this, it would have to be here that they met. He hadn’t got a house of his own now, a house that he could bring her to. It was Louise’s house; her house, and he lived in it. The people they entertained were her friends, not his.

  “You don’t ever go to the Tabernacle now, do you?” she asked.

  John Marco shook his head

  “I haven’t been there since I saw you get married,” he answered quietly.

  Mary did not reply immediately: she glanced for a moment at the picture on the mantelshelf and then dropped her eyes again.

  “I still go,” she went on. “But the people are different mostly. It doesn’t seem like the same chapel nowadays.”

  John Marco had closed his eyes: he was sitting back with his hand across his face.

  “How long is it?” he asked suddenly, “since the night when you were baptised?”

  She hesitated.

  “I was eighteen then,” she said. “I’m thirty-nine now.”

  She saw the fingers of his hand tighten for a moment.

  “Twenty-one years,” he said slowly. “The best years.” He paused. “I wonder what they would have been like if we’d been together.”

  “I think we should have been very happy,” she replied.

  “Yes,” he said. “We shouldn’t have been like this then. We wouldn’t either of us have known what it was to be lonely.”

  “It’s not too late,” she told him. “We can still be with each other sometimes.”

  “What has happened to that other woman,” she wondered; “the dark-haired woman who came into the room when I was there. Has he left her, too. Is it this that’s added to his bitterness?” She wanted to go over and put her arms round him and comfort him; and she wanted his arms to go round her too, holding her as he had held her that night at the bottom of the staircase in Abernethy Terrace when her mother had allowed them to go as far as the front door together.

  But there was too much between them now; the years had separated them. It wouldn’t be the same person who went over to him, and it was not the same man who was sitting there. Could she make them both the same again? That was what she wondered. Had she the strength in her to wind back the years that were wasted, to re-set the hour that was on them both? Then she remembered Hesther; and she remembered the vows that the Chapel imposed on marriage. But what right had Hesther still got to him? Where was her title after those years of separation? He had never loved her; they had never really belonged to each other. It was Hesther’s touch that had changed him and made him cold; like the Snow Queen she had taken him away and frozen up his heart. And now at last, when she had not expected it, had come the chance to release him. Like Gerda she could make him free again. But she looked at her hands that were resting in her lap and she saw that they were worn and red; and she remembered the age she was and the way no one ever looked at her now; and the hope inside her slid away into the litter of all other vain, silly things. She was suddenly nearly forty again; and it was five o’clock, and the fire was dying out.

  She got up and began clearing away the tea things.

  “I’ve got to make fresh tea for Ann,” she said. “She’ll be in any moment now.”

  The words roused him and he dropped his hand from his face. A moment before it had seemed that their two lives had joined mysteriously again; he had waited there with eyes closed to feel her hand on his shoulder and know how she needed him, too. But now that she had spoken, it was not of him at all that she was thinking, it was of that other life of hers, the life that centred on the child which Thomas Petter had given her.

  “I must go,” he said roughly. “I shall be getting in the way.”

  Mary put down the tray she was holding and came over to him.

  “But you must stay and see Ann,” she said. “She’s grown so, I’m very proud of her.”

  He shook his head.

  “No,” he said. “It’s late. I must be getting back again.”

  “I had hoped you’d have seen her,” Mary said slowly. “She’s very like I was at her age.”

  But John Marco was already buttoning up his coat.

  “No,” he said again. “She’s part of your life, I don’t belong in there at all.”

  He held out his hand and they said good-bye quietly, unemotionally, like people who mean nothing to each other.

  “I’ll come down with you,” Mary said. “It may be dark on those stairs.”

  “I can find my way,” he answered.

  His back was already towards her as he spoke.

  At the door, however, he turned to look back and saw that she was crying. She was standing there with her arms to her side as he had left her and her face was still towards him. He stood for a moment at the door and then came over and put his arms round her.

  “I’m sorry, Mary,” he said. “I shouldn’t have come here. I’m still jealous. I can’t help it.”

  Then he kissed her.

  But the kiss, when Mary remembered it after he had gone, seemed the last tragic humiliation of that meeting. She had been in his arms again as she had dreamed that sometime she would be, and the kiss which he had given her had been faint and cold and passionless.

  It had been a kiss between two people who were unhappy, not in love.

  As John Marco drove back round the Park which was dark and sunless by now, and the cold air of the evening blew into his face he shivered, and drew the heavy rug more closely round him. His face was set again into the hard, angry lines that it wore so often; it was the face of a bitter, disappointed man.

  But it was not of Mary that he was now thinking: he was wondering how to face a roomful of waiting shareholders, people who had trusted him, and tell them that he had failed; wondering how long the bank would remain smiling and polite in the face of the overdraft; wondering how long it would be before the spring inside him snapped and he hadn’t the strength to go on juggling with all the bits of the business any longer.

  Louise was waiting for him in the drawing-room when he got back there. She was wearing a new dress which he had not seen before: it was a costly affair sprinkled all over with sequins. There was a diamond clip in her hair.

  “My dear,” she said, “you’ll have to hurry. You’re late. We’ve got a lot of people dining at the house to-night.”

  Book VI

  The Cracks Widen

  Chapter XXXIX

  When a business begins to go to pieces, the cracks appear everywhere. The process is not immediate; it is slow and scarcely discernible at first. But it seems to advance irresistibly according to certain pre-determined laws.

  Some of the cracks start as tiny, thread-like things, but they run down into the heart of the organisation: they divide i
t. Mistakes, for example, occur in the buying, and disputes arise with the manufacturers. Heads of departments make miraculous, unaccountable blunders and blame their seconds-in-command for the consequences, and junior assistants offend important customers. Then the network of small fissures widens and other pieces become unstuck as well. People arrive late for no particular reason or stay away altogether without warning. Lunch-time becomes an hour and five minutes, and illicit tea is drunk in the afternoon and is lingered over. Stock is mislaid, and articles that are lying in bales in the store room downstairs are reported up in the shop as unobtainable. In short, though the business continues to look as if the whole city of London depended on it, there is not a department or sub-department in the place but has gone quietly and successfully to blazes.

  When a business is in this state, it needs a man with energy bursting out of him to put things right again. John Marco had been full of that kind of energy once. He had bullied and worn down Mr. Hackbridge, and Mr. Hackbridge had bullied and worn down the heads of each department and they in turn had bullied and worn down the assistants that were under them until there was not a person in the shop who was not jumpy and on his toes in case someone else just a little above him should notice that, even for a second, he was resting.