A Man of Forty

by Gerald Bullet

  His second sight of Adam with Mary was on Sunday evening, nine days after the first. The odds against the encounter must have been heavy indeed, and it therefore pleased him to see the malice of fate in it. With Eleanor as his passenger, and having no aim in view but to be out of the house and kill time, he was driving along a country lane hitherto unexplored by him, when he came upon the happy pair leaning on a gate, hands touching, hearts at peace, everything going according to schedule.

  David smiled : with pain, with self-derision, with angry satisfaction.

  “Did you see who that was?”

  “Yes,” said Eleanor.

  It would have been natural for a girl to ask why he did not stop the car and speak to these friends, and Eleanor’s not asking such a question was significant.

  Reckless in his bitterness, David said : “ So he visits his woman every week does he? Well, there’s nothing like regularity.”

  “Who? Adam?”

  “Yes. He’s staying at Radnage. For the third time. The second consecutive week-end.”

  “What makes you think…?”

  “I saw them at the station last week. And he was there a fortnight earlier. The fifth, the nineteenth, and the twenty-sixth of the month. Those are the dates, if you care to have them.”

  “Oh,” said Eleanor tonelessly. “ I didn’t know.”

  David did not pause in his thoughts to judge it odd that Eleanor offered no further comment. The situation was now palpable, the treachery beyond belief. He remembered, for the hundredth time, Adama’s story of his liaison with a young woman who now either was or was not in a state of pregnancy by him; and he asked himself, with agonized irony, how much of that story Mary had been entrusted with. But presently, despite his self-absorption, it was forced on his notice that Eleanor was in tears.

  He gave her one glance, then looked quickly away. The sight of her weeping startled him. He wanted not to embarrass her further, but on reflection he felt that here was a mystery which could not be passed over in silence. The storm of her grief, moreover, showed no signs of abating. Very gradually he brought the car to a standstill.

  “What is it, Eleanor?”

  She flung herself against his shoulder and cried helplessly, like a child. It was a shock to him to find that the pale, gentle, dove-eyed Eleanor had so much passion in her. With his arm round her shoulder, he waited for the convulsion to pass.

  “What is it? Is it… Adam?”

  She gulped, nodding.

  His heart turned over in pity. His heart leapt in exultation. He had now a new and noble reason for hating Adam, and in the excitement of that knowledge he asked Eleanor a question which otherwise he would have been scrupulous to spare her.

  “What is there between you—you and Adam?”

  “Nothing,” said Eleanor.

  He suspected, too late, that he had sounded curt and peremptory

  “Are you sure, my dear?”

  “Nothing,” she said again. “ Nothing worth mentioning… Oh David,” she said wretchedly, “ I’m so ashamed!”

  He touched her hand, saying gently : “ I know. I know. I know exactly how you feel.”

  Behind his sympathy, behind the mask of his face, he grinned like a hungry dog. There was now a positive merit in hating Adam Swinford, who made it, apparently, the main business of his life to go about the country seducing and abandoning unwary women. Eleanor was the latest of the series, and Mary was next on the list. It can’t go on, said David : it’s got to be stopped. Eleanor, dear simple-hearted Eleanor; no light of love, no hard-boiled high-stepper, but a girl of character and sensibility; a girl not easily enamoured, but capable, once her heart were given, of boundless devotion, unwavering loyalty! Eleanor and Adam! In high colours and with a swift hand his furious fancy painted the seduction-scene. He saw Adam smirking and prowling and smacking his lips, implacable as Tarquin but with a smoother tongue, a subtler and viler motive. Yes, a viler motive, for with Adam, since Eleanor had neither wit nor conspicuous beauty to attract him with, it must have been mere lust of conquest, an egoism unredeemed by illusion of love, unwarmed by the fire in the flesh. He saw him stealing to her bed when the house was still, just as tonight, no doubt, he would steal to Mary’s bed. Mary’s doings don’t concern me, he said; don’t even interest me; but towards Eleanor, my foster-daughter, I have a sacred duty. Eleanor tricked, Eleanor trifled with, Eleanor deceived and insulted! And under my very roof! he cried, in an ecstasy of indignation.

  It was an open question whether a man capable of such vile-ness was fit to live. If the decision, he said, rested with me… but it’s idle to think of that : I’m not made that way. He continued, nevertheless, to be haunted by visions of vengeance, and by the time Eleanor reached home he had decided that whatever else happened Adam could not be allowed to go on in his present courses unchecked.

  At the supper-table, with a sudden strange expansiveness, he announced to the astonished Lydia :

  “Tomorrow I am going to town, Lydia, to have a word with Adam Swinford. I shall go in the evening. He’ll be back in town by then. And don’t be surprised if I’m away several days.”

  “To see Adam?” said Lydia.

  “Yes,” said David. “ To see Adam. I suppose you know, Lydia, that Adam at this moment is staying with the Hinkseys?”

  “Is he?” said Lydia. “ But why, David? Why not with us?”

  “That,” said David pompously, “ is one of the less important questions I shall discuss with him.”

  Had he any thought to spare from his obsession it would perhaps have occurred to David that this was as long a conversation as he had had with Lydia for many weeks. He might also have noticed that the tension in her was somewhat relaxed since—since when, since what? As to that, he would have assumed that his loss of Mary had somehow become known to her, and that having gained her point and kept what she held, she was ready to be amiable again.

  § 14

  I Think David would have been right in that assumption, so far as it went. The disappearance of Mary from the field of action did make it possible for Lydia to feel generous towards David. Her capacity for generosity varied inversely with the demands made upon it. She would give him anything in the world except what he wanted. She longed for him to be happy, so long as he was not happy with Mary. All this, when in the train next day he spared it a moment’s notice, was very clear to him and gave him a pang of cynical pleasure. But he did not entertain Lydia in his thoughts for many seconds together : he was too busy explaining to himself that, whether or not he was jealous, jealousy was to play no part in determining his attitude to Adam. One isn’t, he said, so arrogant as to claim immunity from the disease; but one can at least make sure that it does not cloud one’s moral judgment. If I say that a man of Adam’s predatory habit is not fit to live, that opinion is arrived at from a dispassionate scrutiny of the facts before me : it has nothing to do with any injury he may have done me. Nor has he in fact done me any injury; my interest in Eleanor is certainly not that of a lover, nor is it in the strict sense paternal; I am offended only in my sense of justice, my impersonal regard for the decencies of human life. As for Mary, who whatever she may have been is now of course nothing to me, I only hope she will find happiness. Some time or other she will no doubt marry, and who am I that I should wish otherwise? But if she imagines that she can find happiness with Adam… well, that is simply not to be tolerated. I mean the delusion that she can find happiness with him is not to be tolerated. With anyone else, yes. But not with Adam. I won’t hear of it. It must be prevented. If it happened I couldn’t go on living. Not that there’s anything personal in it. No, no. It’s simply that he would bring her nothing but wretchedness. Even if she thought she was happy with him she wouldn’t really be so. She would be living in a fool’s paradise. It is my duty to save her from that. I don’t want to interfere : I’d much rather wash my hands of the whole affair and let them go their own ways. But one has a responsibility in this matter. The unthinkable, the unspea
kable… it’s got to be stopped. Whispering together. Touching. Kissing. No : we can’t have that.

  So there’s David. Portrait of a man not being jealous. There’s David in the train, with a newspaper to hide behind in case anyone threatens to speak to him. He can’t spare a moment for idle talk : he’s got to think everything out very carefully. For as yet he has no very clear plan. He is going to see Adam, of course : that’s the whole point of this journey. But he is reluctant to telephone to the young man; and how, except by telephoning, is he to make sure that he will be at home to listen, to take what’s coming to him? Isn’t it, indeed, far more likely that he’ll be out somewhere looking for new girls to seduce? Precisely the kind of thing that must be put a stop to, once and for all. David still has lucid moments, when he sees himself with a merciless satirical eye, and knows his true motive as well as we do. But such moments are increasingly rare and brief : he is in danger of reaching a point where he will do anything, believe anything, rather than willingly face the reality of his situation.

  That situation is changing, developing, every moment. His view of it, even if he looked straight, could only be partial; for factors outside his knowledge are contributing to it. Lydia, who for so long has behaved like a mechanical doll, has now come to life again. There have been scenes with Eleanor : weepings and mutual explanations. Two self-imprisoned souls have broken out of their silence. thrown down their first-line defences, and exchanged secret for secret, to the untold relief of both. Not all has yet been said; and what has been said hasn’t always been the exact truth; but at least there is now the interplay of confidence and affection where formerly there was suspicion and reserve.

  “I only want him to be happy,” Lydia said. “ I don’t mind standing aside, if it will make him happy.”

  “Yes,” said Eleanor. “ I see that. It’s wonderful of you, mother.”

  Among several things that Lydia did not fully reveal to Eleanor was her attitude to Mary and to Adam. Resuming (in her mind) possession of David, and seeing him defeated and lorlorn, she now made his cause her own, utterly identifying herself with him in thought and feeling, so far as his thought and feeling could be surmised. Formerly she had not hated Mary for loving David. Now she hated Mary for not loving David. She more than hated her; she felt herself deeply insulted by Mary’s rejection of her husband : behaviour that might, a month earlier, have been accounted wisdom or virtue in Mary, but was now the height of insolence. To decline the proposals of a married man would have been commendable; but to reject David in favour of Adam was monstrous, so monstrous that she longed to be revenged on them both, longed to punish them, the sleek young man who had trifled with Eleanor’s love and broken David’s heart, and the girl with her poisonous man-alluring beauty. If I can feel this, she thought, what must my David be feeling? And with that question a fantastic idea was born in her mind.

  To Eleanor she said, her eyes glistening : “ I’m going to see Adam too.”

  Part V

  The Inquiry

  § 1

  At ten o’clock, that Monday evening, Stevenage the hall porter was in a state of considerable perturbation, though only a close observer would have been aware of it. He had been five years in his job, and nothing like this commotion had ever happened before. He stood in his accustomed place in the hall, keeping one eye on the exit and one on Mr. Hortman, the manager of the flats. Mr. Hortmanhad been his boss for only the last eighteen months of his five years, and Stevenage, who disliked change, often thought regretfully of his predecessor; but he was all for live and let live, and he could not have said that he had anything against the man. Bushy eyebrows and a heavy brown moustache did not, after all, provide legitimate grounds for complaint. For some minutes Hortman had been pacing to and fro between Stevenage’s observation-post and the door of his own office five yards away, pausing at intervals to utter a pointless remark or an unnecessary exclamation. Stevenage, whose nerves were twitching from his recent shock, wished the fellow would shut up and not make a spectacle of himself in front of the doctor. He felt that Hortman was somehow letting the establishment down. Dr. Grove, a sleek youngish man from just round the corner, sat perfectly self-controlled in the only available chair, taking no notice of either Hortman or Stevenage. Even in his world this sort of thing did not happen every day, but it was part of his code to maintain an air of well-bred indifference. While the three men waited for the arrival of the police, it crossed Stevenage’s mind that tonight was the first time he had seen a dead body since the War. And in some ways tonight’s experience had been worse. More out of place, like. More what you couldn’t have possibly been prepared for.

  “Ah, here they come,” said Stevenage.

  He spoke half to himself, but the doctor heard him and at once rose to his feet. To Stevenage’s startled senses the hall of Orkney House was suddenly crowded with men, though in fact the new arrivals numbered only three : one tall, lean, and fortyish, wearing a raincoat and a soft hat; and an older, middle-sized man, very precise in his movements.

  Hortman came hurrying forward. “ Good evening. You’re…?”

  “That’s right,” said the man in the raincoat casually. He turned from Hortman to say : “ It’s you we want, sir, I think. Dr. Grove?”

  “Yes,” said Grove.

  “My name’s Spencer. This is Dr. Trewin. Shall we go along?” His glance fell on Stevenage. “ You’re the hall porter, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, sir. Name of Stevenage.”

  “It was you who let the doctor in, eh, upstairs?” He gave a jerk of the thumb to reinforce his meaning.

  “Yes, sir. Name of Stevenage.”

  “Good. You can come along too. No,” he said to Hortman, “ we shan’t need you for the moment. Mr.… er…”

  “ Hortman. I’m the manager here.”

  “I see. I suppose you’ve made a note of everyone who has left the building since the… little discovery was made?”

  Hortman looked anxiously towards Stevenage. “ I hope so, I’m sure.”

  “All right, don’t worry,” said Spencer, with a half a grin. “ Well, . gentlemen, let’s get along.”

  Stevenage, by no means enjoying his privilege, led the party up the first flight of stairs and along the stone corridor till they came to Flat No. 47. Stevenage produced a key from his pocket and opened the front door.

  “You needn’t come inside, if you don’t want to,” said Spencer.

  Stevenage made a half-humorous grimace to hide his embarrassment. “ Well, I can’t say I fancy it, sir.”

  “You have kept your hands off everything, I suppose? Right you are. By the way, who lives next door?”

  That question disposed of, the party went into No. 47 to make their investigations, leaving Stevenage to his own devices for a while. After a glance of distaste at the now shut door, he turned away and went thoughtfully back to his duties, wondering how much it would be safe to tell this Mr. Spencer, when the time for being questioned arrived. Stevenage had never liked young Mr. Swinford since that funny business with the girl that Sunday; and though it made you feel a bit different towards anyone when you saw them lying dead, because after all we’re all human and everyone has their faults, Stevenage still had his reasons for wanting to keep out of it. If it was suicide, all well and good : least said soonest mended, especially for Orkney House. But if it wasn’t suicide, and it didn’t look as though it was, then Orkney House was in for a bad time; and so was Stevenage himself; and so were some other people. Stevenage, with wry humour, looked forward to seeing the place festooned with policemen, and to having the distracted Mr. Hortman accost him twenty times a day with the news that this was a very serious matter, a very serious matter indeed. It’ll give the place a bad name sure enough, conceded Stevenage : the old fusspot will be right so far. And the more they find out the worse it will be for all concerned, except the police, nosey old parkers, though of course you couldn’t hardly expect them to shut their eyes to a thing like that : have some common sense,
Stevenage admonished himself. All the same, it was true, wasn’t it, that this poking and prying would do nobody any good? The young fellow had treated a girl wrong, and now he had got what was coming to him. You couldn’t help him by making a fuss; you could only bring it all out into the open and ruin people’s lives that were still left.

  The problem of what should and what shouldn’t be told was still unsolved when Spencer and the two medical men came downstairs : but there was no doubt that he must answer whatever questions were put to him, and answer them truthfully. He had not long to wait. Mr. Hortman gratified himself by putting his office at the disposal of the police, and was then deprived of his reward by being excluded from the subsequent conference. He would be so much more usefully employed, Spencer gently explained, if he stayed outside with the sergeant and told him who the people were who came in or went out. Poor old top, thought Stevenage : this isn’t his lucky day. He followed Spencer and the doctors into Hortman’s office and carefully closed the door behind him.