A Man of Forty

by Gerald Bullet

  “Oh dear!” said Lily. She blushed deeply, ashamed of het mistake.

  “That’s all right, miss. Glad to see you looking yourself a bit. You gave me quite a fright that day.”

  “Yes.” Her blushes faded. She was silent for a while, but at peace, glad of his company. Presently she said : “ We’ll forget about that night, shall we?”

  Stevenage answered, with a comic air : “ Which night, miss?” And to put his meaning beyond doubt : “ See? Blest if I haven’t forgotten already!”

  Lily forced herself to say : “ But I’ll never forget how good you were to me. Don’t think that.”

  Stevenage’s visit did her good. It quite set her up, you might say. She herself said something to that effect in the long letter she presently wrote to Mrs. Parzloe. There was no question of having to live up to Stevenage; no danger of giving oneself away, or being made to feel inferior; in fact, it was rather the other way about, for behind all the man’s friendliness there remained a hint of deference. Quite right, too, seeing he was only a hall porter—oh rats, Lily! she said : stop being so high and mighty, my dear! Him and Mrs. Parzloe are the right sort. What a pity they can’t meet!—suit each other down to the ground… well, in a way, anyhow. She poured out pages of gratitude to Mrs. Parzloe, and had just finished addressing the envelope when Nurse came along and said there was another visitor, a lady.

  Edith Camshaw stayed only ten minutes. She seemed so ill-at-ease behind her queer sharp smile that Lily wondered why she had come at all. The discomfort of the situation made Lily blurt out suddenly :

  “You know what was the matter with me, don’t you, Miss Camshaw?”

  Miss Camshaw jumped to her feet, saying hurriedly : “ I must go. Don’t let them forget to put the flowers in water.” She stood with face half-averted, as if not knowing how to go. “ Shall I post your letter for you?”

  “Will you? Thanks ever so much. Good bye, Edith.”

  Edith, this time. It doesn’t come natural but there’s no point in being unkind, thought Lily.

  § 11

  Following Mrs. Hinksey into the drawing-room, he saw her. Mary, at last. Twenty-four hours had gone by since his previous visit to this house, and every one of them had been brimmed with the thought of her. Seeing her again, seeing her actual and no dream, had the effect of a miracle. This is Mary. I am here in the room with her. This young woman, too beautiful for belief, is real, is flesh and blood, is Mary. But he saw that in the four days of his famine she had subtly changed, though he could hardly have said how. While claiming her for his own, saying she is Mary and she is mine, his heart misgave him a little; for it was as if in the interval she had put on that former strangeness of hers, so long discarded, that distance which their first kiss had dissolved. This was indeed the Mary he had kissed that April morning, the day of the floods; but she was somehow that Mary before he had kissed her.

  Reclining in a long chair, she turned her head at his approach and gave him a faint smile. He supposed it was shyness or lassitude that made her unwilling to meet his glance.

  “Are you better, Mary?”

  He took her hand, but dared not retain it. He looked at her with uneasy delight, very conscious that he was under observation from three Hinkseys. Joyce, Aunt Allie, and Hinksey himself, all were in the room, and all, he could not doubt, were watching him.

  “Of course,” said Mary. “ They’re making a fuss about nothing, you know. How’s Lydia?”

  He answered in a conventional phrase, wondering whether there was anything behind the question, or whether it was designed only to deceive the others. The more he pondered it the more confident he became that she was asking him, under cover of this politeness, what plans he had made, what decision he had come to, what final attitude Lydia had taken up to the question of divorce. He did not doubt that she would, somehow, before long, contrive a way of being alone with him, to hear his answers; but since she was not yet, he gathered, allowed to walk unaided, this contrivance would depend, wouldn’t it, partly on chance, and partly on the good will of others; for how, without Hinksey’s co-operation, could Aunt Allie be got out of the room? Easily enough, thought David, suddenly seeing a way. For Mary, he knew, was capable of the most charming audacities; it was by no means beyond her scope, for example, to dismiss the lot of them, all but him, saying blandly, disarmingly : “ I want to talk secrets with David.” He could almost hear her saying it, could almost see the faint, coaxing, ironical smile with which she would dissolve opposition.

  But Mary said nothing to that purpose. He stayed two hours with her; stayed till the burden of idle general conversation was no longer to be endured; sat with a social smile fixed on his face and saw weariness glazing her lovely eyes. Two hours, and no chance to speak.

  § 12

  David was a slow learner. Having planned his policy he stubborn!} adhered to it, going every day to see Mary, and refusing to suspect that it was in part by her own contriving that he never saw her alone. And when at last he did get her to himself, when he woke up from an evil dream to find himself walking with her towards Radnage Wood, he waited in vain for the old confident delight to spring again in his heart.

  It was Friday evening, the day of his fourth visit, at the end of which, too desperate to care what her relatives thought, he had firmly demanded that she should come out for a walk with him. Taken by surprise, and he saw that her surprise was as genuine as that of the others, she had consented unsmilingly, as if recognizing the inevitable. These days of abortive intercourse, if nothing else, had made strangers of them; and they walked almost in silence across the acres of rough grass that lay between the house and Radnage Woods The hour was intimate, the place friendly to lovers; but David was in the grip of an unacknowledged fear. From Mary something emanated that checked all spontaneity in him, so that what a confident instinct would have done with ease must now be attempted laboriously by the intelligence. They were already far from the house; but it was necessary, he felt to get among the trees before touching her, and so, with an immediacy beyond the compass of speech, restoring their hearts to each other.

  “Let’s go into the wood,” he said, taking her hand.

  Her hand slipped away. “ I don’t think we will.”

  He stared in question. “ Nothing wrong, is there?”

  She shrugged her shoulders. Her smile was cold and uneasy. “ No. Nothing.”

  Against the warning of his pride he forced himself, for a test, to grope for her hand again. “ Are you sure, Mary?”

  “I’m sure I won’t go into the wood,” she said.

  “Have you… have you changed?” he asked her, after a short silence.

  “Yes.”

  She spoke quietly, with decision, and as though relieved to have come so quickly to the point. Her head beautifully poised, she stared at distance. The beauty of her young profile was maddening.

  David said, with studied calm : “ Will you tell me how, please? Have I done something to annoy you?”

  “ I’m afraid you do annnoy me rather,” she said, trying (he imagined) to make the remark sound impersonal.

  “I see.”

  His tone was almost suave. They might have been discussing a point in metaphysics. He was bitterly resolved to betray no emotion until he knew all there was to know, feeling that his only chance of a candid answer was to appear unruffled.

  “What have I done?” he asked gently.

  Mary looked at him : a brief glance. “ I don’t like being mooned after,” she said.

  He knew at once, without pausing to consider, that this was the end. It was the end because what she had said, and said so simply, so sincerely, had killed that in him which had made it possible for him to ask love of her. Her love alone had brought an innocent pride to birth in him; with those words said, that pride lacerated, he could be her lover no more. If she loved him he could forget he was twice her age, but the moment she didn’t love him his pretensions became ludicrous, inexcusable. Nevertheless, said his blood, what
has happened between us has happened : she will always be mine.

  “I see,” said David. “ You don’t like being mooned after.” There was a stunned silence in his mind. Some part of him stood aside from the havoc, watching without pity. He could almost admire the callow unthinking cruelty of the remark. Neat work, my girl : you’re good at executions. He knew that if for one instant he consented to notice his own pain there would be an end to it. I’m not hurt, he thought : I’m dead. She doesn’t like being mooned after. I see the fellow she’s thinking of. He sits gazing at her stupidly, sentimentally, because the presence of a third person prevents his saying or doing what is in his mind to say and do. I see him as she sees him : a middle-aged man, eager, ridiculous, cow-eyed with adoration. At any moment during the past weeks she might have seen him so, but until now, by a miracle, it has not happened.

  “When did this change occur?” he asked.

  “Oh, I don’t know exactly.”

  “You don’t know?” he said incredulously.

  “I don’t keep a diary,” she said.

  “Was it a week ago?” he asked. “ Or less?”

  He knew that this persistence was idiotic, and despised himself for not being able to leave the point. What did it matter now? Yet it did matter, for all that. It was desperately important to him to keep something of the past unblemished by this sequel. His questions aimed at discovering how much of that past was left to him. He knew, with a mounting angry terror, that if he found she had ever suffered his kisses unwillingly, or wearily, he would never forgive either her or himself. Now that the glamour was faded she could see him only as a tiresome and rather ridiculous person, somewhat the worse for wear. But since when?—that was the crucial question on which, David felt, his very life depended.

  “I really don’t know,” she said impatiently. “ This is an inquisition, David! What does it matter, anyhow?”

  He shrugged his shoulders, smiling ironically. “ Nothing at all, of course.”

  He tried to pretend that that was true. What did it matter? What did anything matter? This love had come to an end because it had found in her heart no depth of soil. She had been flattered, flattered and excited, by the interest of a man so much older and presumably more experienced than herself; but she had brought to the encounter only vanity and curiosity. Her air of maturity was nothing but a trick of nature, and a stale trick at that. She was still a child beautiful and shallow; and, at his age only a romantic fool would have allowed himself to fall in love with her, said David curtly. But the reflection did not release him from his love. Her mere physical presence, even now, had power to turn his heart to water; and though every moment of this conversation was exquisitely painful he longed to continue it indefinitely, rather than forgo the anguish and delight of being with her : a delight of the eye which no reasoning, no bitterness of heart could diminish.

  His heart cried out against the loss of his private Mary, the Mary he had made. Was nothing of that image true?

  “But you can’t be as empty as that,” he broke out suddenly.

  She flushed, but her eyes evaded him, and in the curve of her mouth sat a small, defensive, stubborn smile, which made her look, for once, like the child she was.

  “Yes, I am,” she answered. “ As empty as that.”

  “It’s not true,” said David angrily. “ You’re unjust to yourself. This behaviour of yours, one can’t believe in it. It’s so… trivial. It’s irresponsible. You can’t break into a man’s life, and accept him for your lover, and then coolly announce that you don’t like being mooned after. There’s no sense or dignity in it.”

  Now she was lost to him indeed; for listening to himself in retrospect he perceived that he sounded less like a lover disputing with his mistress than like a father lecturing a delinquent daughter. And a much more suitable relationship too, he thought bitterly. Moreover, though he seemed to reproach her, his reproaches were idle, because he saw with a painful clarity that being what she was she could not have done other than she did. And though he seemed to argue with her, by implication inviting her to unsay her words, there was a kind of insincerity in that; for he already half-knew that in destroying his faith she had destroyed herself for him, leaving only a lovely shell. If now she had suddenly yielded, saying Take me, David, I’m still yours, he would have been nonplussed : for what was there left of her to take?

  Even so, he had to make sure.”

  “Have you forgotten Bledlow, Mary?”

  She raised her eyes and looked at him deliberately. “ Yes, David. I have.”

  That’s fine. And final. A pretty piece of surgery. I’ve been dreaming, and now I’m awake.

  He had one question still to ask : the most difficult, the most dangerous, the most ugly. He could not bring himself to mention Adam by name, and he tried to escape even the thought of him. If that were to happen, said his chattering brain… but no, I couldn’t bear to be alive with that going on in the world.

  “Have I a successor?”

  She looked coldly away from him.

  “Or is he,” said David, “ not yet appointed?”

  He hated himself for this remark, which was quite outside the part he was resolved to play. The better he behaved the more chance there was of her feeling some twinge of regret : no more than a twinge, he thought bitterly, could be suffered in so shallow a heart. It would have been better, therefore, to strike a noble note, noble and humble : infinite charity and sunset calm. Too late, however, for that.

  “Need we talk any more?” Mary asked.

  “No. You’re right. It’s time I went.” He stood hesitating. “ Well… good-bye.”

  “Good-bye,” said Mary.

  Her tone was gentle enough. David even fancied he heard a note of gratitude in it. She was perhaps grateful for being given what she wanted without argument. She was still intolerably lovely in his sight; he was still enthralled, beyond all reason, and willing to prolong even his agony rather than lose her before he must. He stood swaying between this temptation and the pride that urged him to make an end of it. He caught himself wondering whether it would be more seemly, and a more convincing proof of his complete self-command, if he offered to escort her back to the house. But, recognizing this notion for the weak excuse it was, he forced himself at last to turn away from her, with a slight wave of the hand, and saunter—only sauntering could do justice to his indifference—in the direction of the road, which lay about a quarter of a mile to the north. When he reached the road he would have to walk yet another quarter of a mile back to the house, where, just inside the gate, he had left his bicycle. But this simple fact had for the moment dropped out of his mind.

  § 13

  Precisely a week after that parting he saw them together, Mary and Adam, sitting in her grandfather’s car at the entrance to Chiselbrook station. It was apparent that Adam had just arrived from town and been met by Mary. Having re-started her engine she was letting the clutch out, and smiling at Adam with her beautiful candid friendliness as her left hand moved the gear-lever out of neutral, when David, on his way to the parcels Qffice, went past them with quickened step 5not knowing whether they had seen him or not. In his fancy they were already lovers. He knew Adam; he knew, God help him, Mary; and he had seen the naked laughing looks that passed between them. Their eyes, he said, were stripping each other. And they pretend it’s love, no doubt—ha, ha, what a joke ! And now I’m to be stripped too : stripped, humiliated, mocked at. There goes poor David, they’ll say. There goes the dreamer, the slowcoach, the man made for failure. You’d hardly believe, darling, how little he knows his way about!—the things I could tell you!—the chances he’s missed! But don’t stop to laugh now : we’re wasting time. Mary, in his fancy, was sometimes an innocent victim doomed to betrayal, and sometimes an insatiable wanton who had stolen his friend from him. But mostly she was both at once, as lovely as she was vile, desirable and degraded, the most precious and the most poisonous thing in the universe. It’s not, said David, that I’m j
ealous. Nothing of the kind : I detest jealousy. I’m simply, and quite calmly, facing facts.

  He walked through the booking-hall and on to the platform. Adam’s train had already gone on its way.

  “Your gentleman’s just gone, sir,” said the ticket-collector, eager to be helpful.

  “Really? Oh, yes, I’ve just seen him,” said David. He nodded pleasantly and went on down the platform, explaining over his shoulder : “ I’ve got a parcel to collect.”

  It was the same ticket-collector as he had talked to on that memorable evening when Mary had first gleamed upon his sight. Four months ago : a lifetime ago. On his way back he exchanged further remarks with the ticket-collector. “ Got it, sir? That’s right, sir.” He longed to be rid of the man, longed to be alone with his obsession, that he might look at it from every angle. But he forced himself to be pleasant, to say a little more than was necessary. Coming into the road again he looked quickly round for Hinksey’s car. He dreaded seeing them again, Mary and Adam; yet it gave him a pang of renewed desolation to find her gone. With a weakness which he felt to be utterly despicable, he now half-regretted that he had not spoken to her, said hullo, said what a lovely day, said so here you are with Adam, said you’re learning to ride a horse, I hear, said well it looks as though we’re going to have a nice week-end, said anything, anything, for the sake of being with her, hearing her voice, diverting her beautiful languid warm-eyed smiling friendliness to himself, if only for a moment. A thought that was like death itself occurred to him : perhaps I shall never see her again! And suddenly he decided to convert the thought into a wish, and the wish into a resolution. From this moment she does not exist for me. I will never see her again.

  He saw her again just nine days later, and again Adam was with her. In the interval he had thought of nothing else, except, at moments, of Lydia, to whose phantom in his mind he addressed sour congratulations on the success of her tactics. You have done admirably, my dear Lydia. Your hysteria was nicely timed, your silence well planned. You kept me very cleverly on the rack of indecision. You whittled away my nerve. You unmanned me and sent me to my doom. You knew, didn’t you, that I should muff the job? You knew that with nothing to offer her but my own unhappiness, my load of domestic care, my damned hag-ridden conscience, I stood no chance against that young, smart, unencumbered heart-breaker, Adam Swinford. Love, like everything else, goes to the highest bidder : except, dear Lydia, the love of a dog for his bone, or shall we say her bone? These things he said to her in absence; but in her presence he disregarded her, being immured in a silence deeper than her own had been. For now they had in one respect exchanged their roles : she was the anxious, unobtrusive watcher, he the watched. She knew that something had happened : whether in him or to him she could only surmise.