“Well, it can’t be helped,” said Gerald. “It’s done now.”
Mr. Biddle shook his head. “It’s easy for you to talk that way,” he went on. “But it’s different for me. I did it.” He paused and his hand went round the glass of beer which Gerald had poured out for him. After he had taken a drink he spoke again. “I know just what you must be thinking of me,” he said.
“No, I’m not. Really, I’m not,” Gerald assured him.
“There he was in the prime of life,” Mr. Biddle continued, “and everything would have been all right if only I’d kept away.”
“He’d been ill for a long time,” Gerald pointed out.
“Yes, I know. But he was having treatment. He was in the best hands in the country. He’d got another ten years ahead of him.”
“He didn’t think so,” said Gerald.
“But they did,” Mr. Biddle answered. “They felt they’d got it in time. I asked the surgeon.”
“It doesn’t matter,” said Gerald a trifle impatiently.
“But it matters to me,” Mr. Biddle replied. “He’d got a chance and I spoilt it.”
They were still arguing about it when Alice came in and announced that the meal was ready. She led the way into the dining-room. The cold meat and salad looked trivial and rather frivolous against such a background.
Before they had been there for more than a few minutes there was a sound of knocking from upstairs—three heavy knocks followed by three quick ones. Alice listened attentively.
“That means she’d like some supper,” said Alice.
Even Sleepene, it seemed, had not been able to kill Mrs. Sneyd’s consciousness of the life everlasting.
Chapter Twelve
There was a letter next morning from Mr. Umble. It came while Gerald and Alice were having breakfast together and Mrs. Sneyd was still upstairs. It was a formal, respectful kind of letter, but it had a grim significance of its own. It intimated politely that, as Mr. Umble had not the pleasure of an account with Mr. Sneyd, it was necessary to ask for a cash settlement before things could be allowed to go any farther. Then there followed a paragraph quoting a special price if he should prefer to have a reliable and well-appointed motor hearse to make the journey by road, and the letter closed with the writer assuring Mr. Sneyd of his best attention and prompt service at all times.
The bill was enclosed with it. Gerald looked at it blankly for a moment and then stuffed it away in his pocket. He knew perfectly well that at that moment he hadn’t got fifteen pounds.
“Who’s your letter from?” Alice said.
Gerald told her.
“What’s he want?”
“He wants his money.”
“How much is it?”
He told her that, too.
“It seems an awful lot, doesn’t it?” she remarked.
“It was the cheapest sort,” he said.
“What are you going to do,” she persisted.
“Get it from the office, I suppose. They’ll have to lend it to me if I ask them.”
He did not all the same look forward to asking for fifteen pounds as advance out of his commission. Mr. Plymme, the cashier of I.P.P., was a sullen, desiccated little man who made all payments as though they came out of his own pocket, as though in fact he were depriving himself and Mrs. Plymme by making them at all.
There was something humiliating, too, in having to ask for money in advance. It showed what a hand-to-mouth affair his private life really was. He had always done his best to conceal the fact that for him the glorious procession of the seasons was simply a series of financial mishaps with income tax and rates and gas and electric-light bills to mark the passing pageant of the year.
He waited until eleven o’clock that morning before going in to Mr. Plymme: the one thing that he wanted to avoid was seeming to be in anything like as desperate need as he actually was. Mr. Plymme was writing when he entered and did not look up at once. Gerald had the impression that he rather liked keeping people waiting.
“Yes,” Mr. Plymme asked at last, “and what can I do for you?”
“I want to arrange to have fifteen pounds of my commission now.”
He tried to make his voice sound easy and casual, but he succeeded only in sounding awkward and unnatural. There was a strangely threatening ring to the words, as if this were some kind of gentlemanly hold-up.
“You want to arrange to have fifteen pounds of your commission now?” Mr. Plymme repeated slowly.
“That’s right,” said Gerald. “I want fifteen pounds.” And then because Mr. Plymme was now looking full at him, and because of the tone of voice which he had just used he added, “Please.” He despised himself for doing so. The money was his, anyhow; he had earned it. But he decided all the same that perhaps it was as well to be polite.
The politeness, however, was wasted.
“I’m sorry,” said Mr. Plymme; “but there can’t be any more advances without the Secretary’s permission. Some people have got in the habit of making a practice of it.”
“It’s the first time I’ve ever asked,” Gerald began indignantly.
Mr. Plymme raised his eyebrows. “I know,” he replied. “I said some people.”
“O.K.,” said Gerald.
He left Mr. Plymme to his petty-cash ledgers and his wage sheets and his desiccation and went along to see the Secretary. This was altogether a more formal affair. It meant waiting in an outer office while the Secretary’s secretary approached him.
“He won’t be a minute,” she said when she came back.
“O.K.,” said Gerald again.
As he waited while the Secretary’s minute became five minutes and then ten, his feeling of bitterness returned to him. He remembered Mrs. Sneyd whom he had left half-asleep in his own double bed, with a breakfast tray loaded with the best china beside her, and he found it very difficult to think of her with real affection.
Then the Secretary saw him. He was an altogether different caste of man from the Cashier; he gave an air of being on intimate terms with affluence. Even his ink-well was an affair of crystal and silver.
“Yes, Mr.—er—Sneyd?” he asked. He spoke with a kind of calculating heartiness which put all advantage on one side.
“I wanted to draw fifteen pounds of my commission in advance,” Gerald explained.
“Is there fifteen pounds in hand?” the Secretary asked.
“Oh, Lord, yes,” Gerald answered. “There must be nearer thirty by now. I know because … ”
But the Secretary wasn’t listening. The phone had rung and he was deep in conversation with someone else. It was an important sounding conversation, too; there was an odour of wealth and stock markets about it. It made Gerald’s fifteen pounds seem petty and insignificant. There were the vast concerns of the I.P.P. going on above his head and here he was bothering the financial commissar for a little something on account.
“Well, see you on Saturday,” the Secretary was saying. “We’ll try and get a round in before it gets too crowded.”
The Secretary hung up the receiver and seemed surprised to see Gerald still standing there.
“Yes—Mr.—er—Sneyd?” he said.
“It’s about my fifteen pounds,” Gerald reminded him.
“Oh, yes, of course.” The Secretary got up and began to walk up and down. “It’s a bad precedent,” he said. “Is the wife going to have a baby or something?” He was being patronising now.
“Not exactly,” Gerald replied.
“Couldn’t run things at all if everybody wanted his commission before it was due to him.”
“Quite so,” said Gerald.
“You’ve got to remember,” he said, “if you have it now you can’t have it later on.”
Having uttered this financial dictum—and he said it with an air of gravity as though he were recommending a complete novelty of thought—he turned and walked back towards his desk.
Gerald stopped him.
“Is it O.K. about the money?” he asked.
“Oh, yes, if you want it,” the Secretary answered. He took up his pen and wrote a chit authorising Mr. Plymme to pay Gerald all his commission to date—he had evidently forgotten that it was only fifteen pounds that he had asked for.
Then the phone rang again and his mind became occupied with larger matters. He had forgotten Gerald. But outside in the corridor Gerald hadn’t forgotten him.
“Damn swine,” he said. “Why shouldn’t he have said so straight away without keeping me hanging about like that?” And Gerald cursed himself, and the management of the Bon Marché, and the second Mrs. Sneyd, and Fate, and life in general, for the fact that he had to ask at all.
But all the same, he sailed victoriously away and made Mr. Plymme give him twenty-nine pounds fourteen shillings and threepence.
Back in Boleyn Avenue Mrs. Sneyd was getting ready to leave. Two screwed-up handkerchiefs lay on the bed beside the immature, cardboard suitcase.
“There’s nothing more I can do,” she was saying. “Gerald’s promised to arrange everything at this end and I’ve got to get back and get the house ready.” She spoke with the uncheckable rapidity of hysteria; there was no use asking her what precisely it was that she had done of which she could do no more by stopping.
“I hope you find everything all right,” Alice said.
She had told herself all the time that she must be nice to this unfortunate woman, but she was secretly happy at the prospect of her departure. During the past three days she had discovered that sympathy like everything else can be used up if it is drawn on too heavily; and all yesterday and the day before she had been exhausting herself.
The past three days, moreover, had induced a change in their visitor. She was no longer so unremittingly grateful. She had even begun to accept their kindness as a duty.
“It’s so much easier for Gerald to do everything,” she remarked at random. “They take so much more notice of a man.”
Alice said nothing. She wanted Gerald unworried and to herself.
“I hope he won’t be late,” Mrs. Sneyd said. “There isn’t another train. If he doesn’t come soon I shall have to go by bus.” She paused. “I’ve never been away even for a single night before,” she added almost as though shaking hands with herself for her self-discipline, “except of course on holidays.”
While they were waiting for Gerald, Alice made Mrs. Sneyd some tea. It seemed to her as she spooned the tea out of its enamelled caddy that ever since Mrs. Sneyd’s arrival she had been making tea for this other woman. At first, it had been as an anodyne against misery; but latterly its character had changed. It was now a far sweeter and more convivial brew, something that was drunk in the spirit of company. Mrs. Sneyd smacked her lips over it. She dropped the lumps of sugar in one by one and talked about Mr. Sneyd. And either the tea or the merciful passage of time had given her a new confidence in herself; she now spoke of her widowhood as being in a way a vindication of her own uncanny prescience.
“I saw it all coming,” she said as she had said over and over before. “I could have told you that this would happen.”
“It’s been awful,” Alice agreed.
“Oh, don’t be sorry for me,” Mrs. Sneyd replied boastfully. “I can stand anything after all I’ve been through. It’s the second time with me, remember.”
“You’ve had a lot to put up with,” Alice agreed. “And then this on top.”
“I knew how it would be when I married him,” Mrs. Sneyd assured her. “It’s always been the husbands who go first in our family.”
She wiped her mouth with her handkerchief and passed her cup over to Alice. “Not quite so much milk this time, dear,” she said. “And his father went first, too; I asked Stan.”
By the time Gerald came in, Mrs. Sneyd was in a condition of almost bird-like agitation. Big woman though she was, she fluttered. She had twice made up her mind to carry her case down to the end of the road and go by bus, and twice she had unmade it. By turns, she had considered sending a wire and stopping the night; stopping the night without sending a wire; and even sending a wire in any case saying that she was coming when she could get there. Gerald’s entry shortly after seven proved a disconcerting simplification.
But Gerald was hungry; he wanted his dinner. At the first signs of appetite, however, Mrs. Sneyd’s agitation increased. He tried to soothe her. He assured her that if they left now they would be too early. But she would not listen to him. When she began once more to talk of sending a wire and staying on until the morning, Gerald saw that there was nothing for it but to take her at once.
Alice did not accompany them. She complained of feeling tired and said good-bye on the doorstep. Mrs. Sneyd on her part was almost overcome by a sudden return of gratitude. She kissed Alice both with her veil up and with it down. If ever, she said significantly, she could do as much for Alice, Alice had only to ask her.
“I settled up with the undertaker,” Gerald remarked as they drove along together.
“I’m glad,” Mrs. Sneyd remarked complacently. “He seemed such a nice sort.”
“He promised to attend to everything,” said Gerald.
Mrs. Sneyd paused. “I don’t know what I should have done without you,” she said. “I haven’t got fifteen pounds and that’s all there is to it.”
She spoke with the carefree abandon of the bankrupt. As Gerald heard her say it, and heard the little self-conscious laugh that accompanied the remark; he knew that his fifteen pounds had gone forever. There would be no talk of paying it back as soon as things had settled down a bit.
They arrived at the station ridiculously early and there was nothing to do but hang about waiting for the train to be pushed in backwards. Mrs. Sneyd did not say much. Her remarks were mostly vague and associated in some way with the tragedy from which they were emerging. “Poor Stan,” she would observe, “they did all they could for him;” or “I shall never forgive myself for not being there; never.” But for the most part she sat on the long station seat polishing the toes of her shoes against her stockings and staring aimlessly at the crowds on the platforms.
By the time he had seen her into the corner of the compartment—a swathed, sepulchral figure against the rich red of the third-class upholstery—he felt really sorry for her again. There was going to be plenty of time for thought on that journey; and they wouldn’t be particularly pleasant thoughts either. She had lost everything; and, no matter how much she might try to conceal the fact from herself with her tea and aspirin and Sleepene, she must know it. No one was ever going to take care of her again, as Mr. Sneyd in his infatuation had tried to do.
In a sense it was her fault: she had married a man twenty years her senior and he simply hadn’t lasted out. She was forty-two herself now and short of breath after going upstairs. The future promised nothing better than an endless condition of hope, which in the nature of things was bound to be disappointed.
To cheer her up, Gerald bought her an evening paper and a shiny weekly. It was the shiny weekly that she appreciated. The world of luxury and society somehow made poverty and loneliness seem a great deal easier to bear. Looking at pictures of Ascot and Lords and the Riviera it was possible to forget all about Station Approach and St. Martin’s Hospital and Mr. Umble.
“That is nice of you,” said Mrs. Sneyd. “I shan’t ever forget.”
“Just something to look at,” said, Gerald self-depreciatingly.
The platform porter came along slamming doors and Mrs. Sneyd realised that she was about to go. She leant out of the window and kissed Gerald warmly.
“Thank you so much,” she said. “You and Alice. You’ve been splendid. You really have.”
He kissed her back. “Not at all,” he said gallantly. “Least we could do.”
A whistle blew and Mrs. Sneyd sank back in her seat. Then, as the train began to move out, she leant out of the window again arid called to him.
“See you on Tuesday,” she said. “Don’t be late.”
“O.K.,” said Gerald.
“We’ll be expecting you.”
A trolley stood in his way and when he had walked round it Mrs. Sneyd had already out-distanced him. He stood looking after her as she waved to him; he could see the tiny square of cambric moving excitedly up and down against the drooping folds of black. Then she was lost to sight altogether.
He turned and walked away slowly, looking down at his feet as he walked.
At the back of his mind lurked the suspicion that in a strange foolish fashion Mrs. Sneyd had rather enjoyed herself. Into a life of suffocating tedium this jaunt to town had come as an adventure. It was something that she would be able to look back on for years.
She was a widow, admittedly; but, within her special circle, she was, temporarily at least, also news.
Chapter Thirteen
For the first time in his life Mr. Biddle was disappointed in the Order: it had turned down Mrs. Sneyd.
Not that the application had been cursorily dealt with. On the contrary a Sea Lord, two Admirals and a bench of Commodores had given the matter their consideration. But they were unanimously of the opinion that a lapsed Mariner was less than no Mariner at all. Upon occasion. the Order had been known to pay the subscription of one or other of their number who had fallen on evil times—putting your hand in your pocket to help a brother, the Fleet Admiral had said, was one of the privileges of membership. But it was a very different matter being asked to contribute to the upkeep of a widow whose husband in life had thought so little of the Order that he had dropped out of it altogether like a stranger. Indeed, the whole attitude of the Order towards Mr. Sneyd was something like that of a jilted and rather vindictive virgin.
Mr. Biddle sat in the corner of the third-class carriage and considered the point. He considered how he was going to break the news to Mrs. Sneyd. It was something that he hadn’t reckoned on. Right up to the Sea Lord’s concluding speech he had thought that the Order was going to be big and do the generous thing. And now he had been let down. Telling Mrs. Sneyd that the Mariners simply washed their hands of her was something that he did not look forward to.
Love in Our Time Page 14