by Ellis Peters
Luke put a finger under Bunty’s chin and gently raised her face, and she awoke with eyes wide open, and smiled at him as if he had always been there, and then, remembering, grew grave, because she knew he wasn’t going to be there much longer. She had too much sense to try to turn him into a family friend, or even offer him a bed for the night in the house where she belonged to someone else. No, he would go, and not look back; he was wise, too. And even for her it was going to be a kind of amputation, another little death.
“Wake up,” said Luke, “we’re here in Lockerbie. And look who’s waiting for you.”
She looked, and there was George already leaning to open the door of the car for her, and his smile was muted, indulgent and a shade superior, the smile every married man keeps for the unpredictable idiot who lives somewhere within his sensible wife. Marriage is a round-dance as well as a sacrament.
Bunty slid her feet out to the pavement, and stepped into her husband’s arms, as simply as if he had been meeting her train after a shopping expedition to London. This is how it’s done, Luke thought, watching. If you’re clever, this is how it’s done. The panic being over, and the fear gone, why exclaim? Why startle and shake the assured equilibrium of a relationship on which the foundations of three lives rest? And why express what is already known, valued, impregnable? Not to say inexpressible! No affectation, no fuss, no explanations. If they ever talked about the fearful truths of that week-end it would be afterwards, in tranquillity, walking softly to shake no hearts. But it did not mean that the hearts had not been shaken. Luke saw George’s face over his wife’s shoulder, as he held her briefly in his arms, and there was no question after that of Bunty being under-valued. George knew what he’d got, all right.
“You’re a fine one,” he said, kissing her roundly. “So you don’t mix with dangerous types who carry guns! Talk about famous last words!”
She kissed him back joyfully. “Did you have a nice trip, dear?” she said wickedly.
“No, I did not!” He took his hands from her slowly. Their delight in her wholeness cried aloud, and their reluctance to relinquish her even to Dominic, who stood waiting his turn. “My man was a dead loss. A perfectly respectable person who didn’t know him has put him miles away from our job. And the next thing I knew, Dom was on the line demanding to know what I’d done with you.”
“It’s all in the family,” said Bunty largely. “You don’t have to go on north to pick up the pieces, do you?”
“No. This one Duckett’s finishing off himself. My only orders are to take you two safely home.”
Bunty turned to offer her cheek for Dominic’s dutiful kiss. The boy—he was absurdly like her—was less practised in carrying the burden. He hugged her fiercely all the time he was saying, in his best throw-away manner: “Many happy returns of yesterday, Mummy! How was the fishing?” The hazel eyes, the image of her own, were devouring her hungrily and jealously with every word, but the voice was all right.
“You mean it’s still Sunday? It seems to have lasted for ever.”
Luke had got out of the car, and was standing well back from a ceremony in which he conceived he had no part. But it seemed that Bunty thought differently, for she turned back to him, smiling, holding George by the hand.
“And here’s Luke. He’s heading home for Comerbourne, too, the police had to hang on to his car for the time being.”
Luke never wanted to see that car again, though he had loved it in its time. When it was released he would get some dealer to remove it, and get rid of it, perhaps even forget it some day.
“You won’t mind if Luke and I collar the back seat, will you?” said Bunty, looking appreciatively at the large black police car George had borrowed for the sake of its radio. “We haven’t had much rest over the week-end, we’re probably going to sleep all the way home.”
We! God bless her for that “we ” that bound him to her even now, for the little while they had left before normality set in.
“Hallo, Luke!” said George gravely. “You seem to have been doing my job for me… even to bringing my wife back safely. Thank you!”
Luke looked from the smiling dark face to the two linked hands, that fitted together with so much passion and so deep a calm, and he suddenly saw in them the whole essence of this marriage, no, of marriage entire. He thought it would be worth waiting and hunting through half a lifetime to find another hand that would fit into his like that.
When he shook hands with George, it was like touching Bunty again, they were so deeply one. What Bunty had given to Luke he couldn’t begin to appraise. What they gave him now between them was a dazzling promise. It seemed this union was possible. If it had happened once, it could happen again. Even in this measure. Even, some day, to him?
Bunty awoke towards morning with a soft, alarmed cry of: “Luke!” stretching out her arm protectively over George’s wakeful body. All night he had lain beside her and watched her exhausted sleep, and learned by heart, even in moderate moonlight, the shadows that marked her face, the memories of things lived through and still not put away. He could wait; he must wait. She had told no more than the half, the rest she would tell when the right time came. He cupped her cheek in his hand and soothed her fully awake, to end her distress.
She folded her arm over him more closely, caressing his neck, and even in the darkness of his shoulder he felt her smile.
“I love you!” she said in a deep sigh. There are times to mention love, as there are times to take it for granted, and keep silent.
“Did you love him,” said George gently, stroking back the tangled brown hair from her forehead.
“It depends,” said Bunty after due thought, “on what you mean by love.”
This is an acid test, if ever there was one. Forget the narrow, deep confines of marriage, so exclusive and so profound, and what do you mean by love?
“I mean,” said George, moistening his lips in awe, “whatever it is that makes it possible to achieve a complete human contact with another person, maybe only for three minutes on a crowded bus. I mean the thing, whatever it is, that suddenly makes you move in on somebody else’s need, and strike clean through conventions into their hearts, so that there’ll always be a link between you, even if you never meet or even think of each other again. I mean the communicated warmth that keeps people alive, the most universal and generous thing there is, not the narrowest. Not sexual love, not married love, not platonic love, not filial love, nothing that has to be qualified—the absolute. I mean love, love!”
She lay beside him for a long while in stillness and silence, he began to think she had fallen asleep again, and this time without dreams. But presently she turned to him impulsively, and wound her arm about him with a sharp, sweet sigh of fulfilment, and embraced him with all her might.
“Then, yes,” said Bunty, “I loved him.”
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[scanned anonymously in a galaxy far far away]
[A 3S Release— v1, html]
[July 22, 2007]
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Ellis Peters
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