The Unquiet Grave
Page 35
*
I asked Jack to give me a hand moving my few things out of the Clerkenwell flat and into my new place. He had a friend with a van and I swapped some of the ration coupons I never used for the use of his petrol. Jack himself wasn’t yet working——at least not officially——although I got the impression he and his mate were getting by quite comfortably one way or another.
He had heard from Stan in Burnley who was now working with his brother. There was no shortage of building work to be done, according to Stan, just a shortage of materials to do it with. I was able to tell him Peter had joined a law firm and then Jack told me Susie had left the section she had transferred into when Jekyll closed us down.
‘I got the impression she was hoping Jekyll was going to marry her,’ said Jack as we manoeuvred my old settee down the stairs.
‘Susie and Jekyll?’ I asked in amazement, almost dropping the thing on Jack who was several steps below me.
‘Didn’t you know?’ he grunted, taking the weight. ‘She knew she wasn’t going anywhere with Peter so when Jekyll started sniffing around——’
‘It does explain a few things,’ I said, thinking of how Jekyll had known about my Irish jaunt and Kearney’s IRA connections without my telling him.
‘Anyway,’ said Jack, ‘it didn’t pan out. He was on a promise of some high-powered job up in Scotland and she thought she’d be playing the laird’s wife. The job fell through and now Jekyll’s rejoined his regiment. He’s apparently had to drop a rank to major.’
No Coveney, no job, I presumed, although I didn’t say anything to Jack about it. For a world in which justice had been in short supply I found it gratifying to know that, now and then, someone got what they deserved. As opposed to what they wanted, that is. I didn’t doubt Susie would bounce back; playing the laird’s wife wouldn’t have suited her any more than playing the vamp had. She might try being the girl next door only it always came out as more Betty Hutton than Betty Grable, and that sort of in-your-face bundle isn’t every man’s cup of tea. Not mine, at any rate, despite Susie’s physical attributes.
*
I had been living in the new flat for about two months when I got a letter from Penny. By then her father had pleaded guilty to passing confidential material on to a foreign government—— France——as opposed to an enemy power——Germany. At what I had thought to be a precipitously arranged trial, he was given a lenient three year sentence which led me to wonder if the judge hadn’t been an old acquaintance from the Anglo-German Fellowship. But Gifford let me know the leniency of the sentence had been in return for Forster’s cooperation in tracking Claude Pellisier down to his hideaway in upper New York State where he was living under an assumed name as a French Canadian.
Given all this, and the fact that Forster had lost a great deal of his wealth in America in risky stock speculation, I half expected Penny’s letter to be a contrite admission that she’d been wrong in supporting her family. Instead she wrote that she would be seeking a divorce and would expect me to do the decent thing. It recalled the conversation we had had in the Clerkenwell flat when I’d asked her if she expected me to take Rose to a hotel to furnish the grounds. I thought while reading her letter that instead of Rose she might now suggest Ida for the role, until she mentioned in passing in the final paragraph that Ida had left Julia in the lurch. The girl had run off, she wrote, with that postal worker who had lived in the flat above me.
She meant Sam, of course, who I’d caught once or twice in Ida’s flat and had always suspected of being a housebreaker.
It was then I remembered Sam had told me he had found a flat near in Euston and I finally worked out what Penny meant by his being a postal worker. Euston Railway Station is from where the Travelling Post Office trains operate and while I had been thinking his work was burglary, his unsocial hours were spent sorting letters on the Night Mail.
Had I not been amused by this revelation I might have thought Penny’s letter a cold piece of correspondence. But at least she had spared me news of my mother and brother, George. And later, upon reflection, I concluded that Penny hadn’t sounded particularly bitter. It was the sort of assessment that might lead an optimist into reading into it the possibility of a future reconciliation.
But perhaps I’m not an optimist. My reading was the realization that neither Penny nor I were the same people we had been when we were married. It had hardly been uncommon for couples to drift apart during the war, even those who had not been forcibly separated as Penny and I had. And although I had returned to England thinking I wanted things to go back to the way they once were, in reality what I wanted was that things be as they had once been, only now fitted to the man I had become. But of course it wasn’t only I who had changed, and any dynamic would have to accommodate the change in Penny, too.
Given time, Penny and I might perhaps have grown used to each other’s new personalities, perhaps fallen in love all over again; but there hadn’t been the time. There had been too many other things going on, too much standing between us. A tragedy, I suppose, but a very small one when measured against the great tragedy that had been playing out all around us.
Almost everyone has had to learn to let go of something or someone they had once known; to learn how to cope with different circumstances within a different world. You could look back with regret and stay within your own pool of self-pity, or you could dust yourself off, turn your face to the future——no matter how uncertain——and embrace it. The world is full of what-ifs and what-might-have-beens and the thing to do is to not be content dwelling upon them; to accept what had happened and to strive towards the what-might-yet-be.
A decent enough philosophy, I suppose, but one not always easy to live up to. It is one thing to look at the world and the events of the past decade and count oneself as fortunate to have got through it; unlike those whose lives had ended abruptly, unjustly, and in millions of cases, unspeakably. Yet it is still difficult to entirely ignore oneself, even when faced with the generalizations that encompass the world. We are egocentric creatures, as much as we might practise selflessness and strive for empathy. Great events and ideologies wash us this way and that but it is the small eddies and tides that catch and spin each of us individually that concern us most deeply.
It is good then if, once in a while, we are granted the opportunity to see for once beyond our own petty concerns and, with a selflessly glad heart, be able to take pleasure in the fortune of another.
*
To claim I hadn’t thought about Rose Kearney occasionally wouldn’t have been the whole truth. And any pretence it might be because she hadn’t used her real name, equally disingenuous.
So it was one dank November evening a year or two later when, seeking escape, I took refuge in a cinema.
Sitting cocooned in the dark, looking up at the screen――my mind wandering as it often does these days and thinking of things other than the film――I was shocked to suddenly see Rose standing in front of me, larger than life and smiling at the man who held her in his arms.
I recognized her immediately, even though they had changed her hair and the way she wore her make-up. But they couldn’t change her eyes. And, when she looked down on us in that dark audience, still smiling, it was her eyes I remembered most of all. I felt she was looking at me in the way she once had. And I found myself smiling back at her. Sick of the life she had been living, Rose had found herself another. And the thought of that gladdened my heart, helping to warm it against the cold years ahead.
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