“Look here, Ellie, is there going to be an awful schemozzle over all this, over our marriage, I mean?”
Ellie considered without, I noticed, very much interest.
“Oh yes,” she said, “they’ll probably be awful.” And she added, “I hope you won’t mind too much.”
“I won’t mind—why should I?—But you, will they bully you over it?”
“I expect so,” said Ellie, “but one needn’t listen. The point is that they can’t do anything.”
“But they’ll try?”
“Oh yes,” said Ellie. “They’ll try.” Then she added thoughtfully, “They’ll probably try and buy you off.”
“Buy me off?”
“Don’t look so shocked,” said Ellie, and she smiled, a rather happy little girl’s smile. “It isn’t put exactly like that.” Then she added, “They bought off Minnie Thompson’s first, you know.”
“Minnie Thompson? Is that the one they always call the oil heiress?”
“Yes, that’s right. She ran off and married a life guard off the beach.”
“Look here, Ellie,” I said uneasily, “I was a life guard at Littlehampton once.”
“Oh, were you? What fun! Permanently?”
“No, of course not. Just one summer, that’s all.”
“I wish you wouldn’t worry,” said Ellie.
“What happened about Minnie Thompson?”
“They had to go up to 200,000 dollars, I think,” said Ellie, “he wouldn’t take less. Minnie was man-mad and really a half-wit,” she added.
“You take my breath away, Ellie,” I said. “I’ve not only acquired a wife, I’ve got something I can trade for solid cash at any time.”
“That’s right,” said Ellie. “Send for a high-powered lawyer and tell him you’re willing to talk turkey. Then he fixes up the divorce and the amount of alimony,” said Ellie, continuing my education. “My stepmother’s been married four times,” she added, “and she’s made quite a lot out of it.” And then she said, “Oh, Mike, don’t look so shocked.”
The funny thing is that I was shocked. I felt a priggish distaste for the corruption of modern society in its richer phases. There had been something so little-girl-like about Ellie, so simple, almost touching in her attitude that I was astonished to find how well up she was in worldly affairs and how much she took for granted. And yet I knew that I was right about her fundamentally. I knew quite well the kind of creature that Ellie was. Her simplicity, her affection, her natural sweetness. That didn’t mean she had to be ignorant of things. What she did know and took for granted was a fairly limited slice of humanity. She didn’t know much about my world, the world of scrounging for jobs, of race course gangs and dope gangs, the rough and tumble dangers of life, the sharp-Aleck flashy type that I knew so well from living amongst them all my life. She didn’t know what it was to be brought up decent and respectable but always hard up for money, with a mother who worked her fingers to the bone in the name of respectability, determining that her son should do well in life. Every penny scrimped for and saved, and the bitterness when your gay carefree son threw away his chances or gambled his all on a good tip for the 3:30.
She enjoyed hearing about my life as much as I enjoyed hearing about hers. Both of us were exploring a foreign country.
Looking back I see what a wonderfully happy life it was, those early days with Ellie. At the time I took them for granted and so did she. We were married in a registry office in Plymouth. Guteman is not an uncommon name. Nobody, reporters or otherwise, knew the Guteman heiress was in England. There had been vague paragraphs in papers occasionally, describing her as in Italy or on someone’s yacht. We were married in the Registrar’s office with his clerk and a middle-aged typist as witnesses. He gave us a serious little harangue on the serious responsibilities of married life, and wished us happiness. Then we went out, free and married. Mr. and Mrs. Michael Rogers! We spent a week in a seaside hotel and then we went abroad. We had a glorious three weeks travelling about wherever the fancy took us and no expense spared.
We went to Greece and we went to Florence, and to Venice and lay on the Lido, then to the French Riviera and then to the Dolomites. Half the places I forget the names of now. We took planes or chartered a yacht or hired large and handsome cars. And while we enjoyed ourselves, Greta, I gathered from Ellie, was still on the Home Front doing her stuff.
Travelling about in her own way, sending letters and forwarding all the various post-cards and letters that Ellie had left with her.
“There’ll be a day of reckoning, of course,” said Ellie. “They’ll come down on us like a cloud of vultures. But we might as well enjoy ourselves until that happens.”
“What about Greta?” I said. “Won’t they be rather angry with her when they find out?”
“Oh, of course,” said Ellie, “but Greta won’t mind. She’s tough.”
“Mightn’t it stop her getting another job?”
“Why should she get another job?” said Ellie. “She’ll come and live with us.”
“No!” I said.
“What do you mean, no, Mike?”
“We don’t want anyone living with us,” I said.
“Greta wouldn’t be in the way,” said Ellie, “and she’d be very useful. Really, I don’t know what I’d do without her. I mean, she manages and arranges everything.”
I frowned. “I don’t think I’d like that. Besides, we want our own house—our dream house, after all, Ellie—we want it to ourselves.”
“Yes,” said Ellie, “I know what you mean. But all the same—” She hesitated. “I mean, it would be very hard on Greta not to have anywhere to live. After all, she’s been with me, done everything for me for four years now. And look how she’s helped me to get married and all that.”
“I won’t have her butting in between us all the time!”
“But she’s not like that at all, Mike. You haven’t even met her yet.”
“No. No, I know I haven’t but—but it’s nothing to do with, oh with liking her or not. We want to be by ourselves, Ellie.”
“Darling Mike,” said Ellie softly.
We left it at that for the moment.
During the course of our travels we had met Santonix. That was in Greece. He had been in a small fisherman’s cottage near the sea. I was startled by how ill he looked, much worse than when I had seen him a year ago. He greeted both Ellie and myself very warmly.
“So you’ve done it, you two,” he said.
“Yes,” said Ellie, “and now we’re going to have our house built, aren’t we?”
“I’ve got the drawings for you here, the plans,” he said to me. “She’s told you, hasn’t she, how she came and ferreted me out and gave me her—commands,” he said, choosing the words thoughtfully.
“Oh! not commands,” said Ellie. “I just pleaded.”
“You know we’ve bought the site?” I said.
“Ellie wired and told me. She sent me dozens of photographs.”
“Of course you’ve got to come and see it first,” said Ellie. “You mightn’t like the site.”
“I do like it.”
“You can’t really know till you’ve seen it.”
“But I have seen it, child. I flew over five days ago. I met one of your hatchet-faced lawyers there—the English one.”
“Mr. Crawford?”
“That’s the man. In fact, operations have already started: clearing the ground, removing the ruins of the old house, foundations—drains—When you get back to England I’ll be there to meet you.” He got out his plans then and we sat talking and looking at our house to be. There was even a rough water-colour sketch of it as well as the architectural elevations and plans.
“Do you like it, Mike?”
I drew a deep breath.
“Yes,” I said, “that’s it. That’s absolutely it.”
“You used to talk about it enough, Mike. When I was in a fanciful mood I used to think that piece of land had laid a spell upon you. You
were a man in love with a house that you might never own, that you might never see, that might never even be built.”
“But it’s going to be built,” said Ellie. “It’s going to be built, isn’t it?”
“If God or the devil wills it,” said Santonix. “It doesn’t depend on me.”
“You’re not any—any better?” I asked doubtfully.
“Get it into your thick head. I shall never be better. That’s not on the cards.”
“Nonsense,” I said. “People are finding cures for things all the time. Doctors are gloomy brutes. They give people up for dead and then the people laugh and cock a snook at them and live for another fifty years.”
“I admire your optimism, Mike, but my malady isn’t one of that kind. They take you to hospital and give you a change of blood and back you come again with a little leeway of life, a little span of time gained. And so on, getting weaker each time.”
“You are very brave,” said Ellie.
“Oh no, I’m not brave. When a thing is certain there’s nothing to be brave about. All you can do is find your consolation.”
“Building houses?”
“No, not that. You’ve less vitality all the time, you see, and therefore building houses becomes more difficult, not easier. The strength keeps giving out. No. But there are consolations. Sometimes very queer ones.”
“I don’t understand you,” I said.
“No, you wouldn’t, Mike. I don’t know really that Ellie would. She might.” He went on, speaking not so much to us as to himself. “Two things run together, side by side. Weakness and strength. The weakness of fading vitality and the strength of frustrated power. It doesn’t matter, you see, what you do now! You’re going to die anyway. So you can do anything you choose. There’s nothing to deter you, there’s nothing to hold you back. I could walk through the streets of Athens shooting down every man or woman whose face I didn’t like. Think of that.”
“The police could arrest you just the same,” I pointed out.
“Of course they could. But what could they do? At the most take my life. Well my life’s going to be taken by a greater power than the law in a very short time. What else could they do? Send me to prison for twenty—thirty years? That’s rather ironical, isn’t it, there aren’t twenty or thirty years for me to serve. Six months—one year—eighteen months at the utmost. There’s nothing anyone can do to me. So in the span that’s left to me I am king. I can do what I like. Sometimes it’s a very heady thought. Only—only, you see, there’s not much temptation because there’s nothing particularly exotic or lawless that I want to do.”
After we had left him, as we were driving back to Athens, Ellie said to me:
“He’s an odd person. Sometimes you know, I feel frightened of him.”
“Frightened, of Rudolf Santonix—why?”
“Because he isn’t like other people and because he has a—I don’t know—a ruthlessness and an arrogance about him somewhere. And I think that he was trying to tell us, really, that knowing he’s going to die soon has increased his arrogance. Supposing,” said Ellie, looking at me in an animated way, with almost a rapt and emotional expression on her face, “supposing he built us our lovely castle, our lovely house on the cliff’s edge there in the pines, supposing we were coming to live in it. There he was on the doorstep and he welcomed us in and then—”
“Well, Ellie?”
“Then supposing he came in after us, he slowly closed the doorway behind us and sacrificed us there on the threshold. Cut our throats or something.”
“You frighten me, Ellie. The things you think of!”
“The trouble with you and me, Mike, is that we don’t live in the real world. We dream of fantastic things that may never happen.”
“Don’t think of sacrifices in connection with Gipsy’s Acre.”
“It’s the name, I suppose, and the curse upon it.”
“There isn’t any curse,” I shouted. “It’s all nonsense. Forget it.”
That was in Greece.
Ten
It was, I think, the day after that. We were in Athens. Suddenly, on the steps of the Acropolis Ellie ran into people that she knew. They had come ashore from one of the Hellenic cruises. A woman of about thirty-five detached herself from the group and rushed along the steps to Ellie exclaiming:
“Why, I never did. It’s really you, Ellie Guteman? Well, what are you doing here? I’d no idea. Are you on a cruise?”
“No,” said Ellie, “just staying here.”
“My, but it’s lovely to see you. How’s Cora, is she here?”
“No, Cora is at Salzburg I believe.”
“Well, well.” The woman was looking at me and Ellie said quietly, “Let me introduce—Mr. Rogers, Mrs. Bennington.”
“How d’you do. How long are you here for?”
“I’m leaving tomorrow,” said Ellie.
“Oh dear! My, I’ll lose my party if I don’t go, and I just don’t want to miss a word of the lecture and the descriptions. They do hustle one a bit, you know. I’m just dead beat at the end of the day. Any chance of meeting you for a drink?”
“Not today,” said Ellie, “we’re going on an excursion.”
Mrs. Bennington rushed off to rejoin her party. Ellie, who had been going with me up the steps of the Acropolis, turned round and moved down again.
“That rather settles things, doesn’t it?” she said to me.
“What does it settle?”
Ellie did not answer for a minute or two and then she said with a sigh, “I must write tonight.”
“Write to whom?”
“Oh, to Cora, and to Uncle Frank, I suppose, and Uncle Andrew.”
“Who’s Uncle Andrew? He’s a new one.”
“Andrew Lippincott. Not really an uncle. He’s my principal guardian or trustee or whatever you call it. He’s a lawyer—a very well-known one.”
“What are you going to say?”
“I’m going to tell them I’m married. I couldn’t say suddenly to Nora Bennington ‘Let me introduce my husband.’ There would have been frightful shrieks and exclamations and ‘I never heard you were married. Tell me all about it, darling’ etcetera, etcetera. It’s only fair that my stepmother and Uncle Frank and Uncle Andrew should be the first to know.” She sighed. “Oh well, we’ve had a lovely time up to now.”
“What will they say or do?” I asked.
“Make a fuss, I expect,” said Ellie, in her placid way. “It doesn’t matter if they do and they’ll have sense enough to know that. We’ll have to have a meeting, I expect. We could go to New York. Would you like that?” She looked at me inquiringly.
“No,” I said, “I shouldn’t like it in the least.”
“Then they’ll come to London probably, or some of them will. I don’t know if you’d like that any better.”
“I shouldn’t like any of it. I want to be with you and see our house going up brick by brick as soon as Santonix gets there.”
“So we can,” said Ellie. “After all, meetings with the family won’t take long. Possibly just one big splendid row would do. Get it over in one. Either we fly over there or they fly over here.”
“I thought you said your stepmother was at Salzburg.”
“Oh, I just said that. It sounded odd to say I didn’t know where she was. Yes,” said Ellie with a sigh, “we’ll go home and meet them all. Mike, I hope you won’t mind too much.”
“Mind what—your family?”
“Yes. You won’t mind if they’re nasty to you.”
“I suppose it’s the price I have to pay for marrying you,” I said. “I’ll bear it.”
“There’s your mother,” said Ellie thoughtfully.
“For heaven’s sake, Ellie, you’re not going to try and arrange a meeting between your stepmother in her frills and her furbelows and my mother from her back street. What do you think they’d have to say to each other?”
“If Cora was my own mother they might have quite a lot to say to each other,�
� said Ellie. “I wish you wouldn’t be so obsessed with class distinctions, Mike!”
“Me!” I said incredulously. “What’s your American phrase—I come from the wrong side of the tracks, don’t I?”
“You don’t want to write it on a placard and put it on yourself.”
“I don’t know the right clothes to wear,” I said bitterly. “I don’t know the right way to talk about things and I don’t know anything really about pictures or art or music. I’m only just learning who to tip and how much to give.”
“Don’t you think, Mike, that that makes it all much more exciting for you? I think so.”
“Anyway,” I said, “you’re not to drag my mother into your family party.”
“I wasn’t proposing to drag anyone into anything, but I think, Mike, I ought to go and see your mother when we go back to England.”
“No,” I said explosively.
She looked at me rather startled.
“Why not, Mike, though? I mean, apart from anything else, I mean it’s just very rude not to. Have you told her you’re married?”
“Not yet.”
“Why not?”
I didn’t answer.
“Wouldn’t the simplest way be to tell her you’re married and take me to see her when we get back to England?”
“No,” I said again. It was not so explosive this time but it was still fairly well underlined.
“You don’t want me to meet her,” said Ellie, slowly.
I didn’t of course. I suppose it was obvious enough but the last thing I could do was to explain. I didn’t see how I could explain.
“It wouldn’t be the right thing to do,” I said slowly. “You must see that. I’m sure it would lead to trouble.”
“You think she wouldn’t like me?”
“Nobody could help liking you, but it wouldn’t be—oh I don’t know how to put it. But she might be upset and confused. After all, well, I mean I’ve married out of my station. That’s the old-fashioned term. She wouldn’t like that.”
Endless Night Page 6