Most Loving Mere Folly

by Ellis Peters

  It was no use talking to her while she was in this utterly confounding mood, so he said nothing more, but his face had grown as hotly vindictive as hers. She went on wilfully goading him, out of her own fear and distress, out of the dread she felt of the young, smooth, girlish faces, and the unclouded eyes, and the light hearts of the generation to which he belonged, and she did not.

  ‘A nice, healthy, straightforward girl, really rather like you temperamentally, I should say – and of course, the exact age for you.’

  The moment she had said it, she knew it had recoiled into her own heart. What a fool she was, what a fool to fling it in his face with her own hands! He did not say a word, but only shut his lips hard, and tramped heavily on the accelerator, staring stonily ahead between the flashing hedges, the angry colour ebbing from his cheeks. She could feel in her flesh the turmoil of his distressed and resentful thoughts, could feel him counting the fourteen years which Perleman and all the voluble commentators in the Press had shaken in his face in vain. It had taken her bitter breath to quicken the seed of realisation into life. Well, he was not likely to forget again. Now he was hating her for saying it – soon he would be hating her because it was true, and she had known it all along, and had not seen fit to warn him. By acknowledging their ages she had forced him to acknowledge them; by feeling them as an offence against him, she had taught him that he was offended. What complaint would she have against him, when he threw them back in her face some day, and walked out?

  She fell into a silence of despair, experiencing already in imagination the eventual and final terror of his loss.

  4

  In October Suspiria was offered an exhibition at a private gallery in London, on terms which did not offend her so grossly as to put her answer out of question immediately. It surprised her very much when Dennis urged her to take it. She had no daily contact now with the world which was most truly hers, and he was achingly troubled by the constant spectacle of her burning away in the ashes of her talent. Her mind could not focus, her hands had not regained the impetus of certainty, there was no joy in the clay. The pieces which satisfied her craftsman’s conscience were few and meagre, the children of her delight would not come back at all. He wanted her to go back into her world, if only for a little while, by any door that opened. The spark might come to life again if she touched some other person’s flame.

  She evaded the idea for a little while, and then agreed to it, if he would go down with her for the week-end, and help her to arrange it. The show had a certain scandalous success, and amused her in a detached way. She kept Dennis close beside her on the afternoon of the opening, but he was not a great asset. Silent, handsome, not quite easy, not quite belonging anywhere, he moved among her friends and her works, only half assimilated. He was as deeply aware of it as she was, and as glad to get away from it, and go home again.

  He travelled home to Great Leddington on the Sunday evening by train, leaving her the car for her return two or three days later. It was this accident of separation which caused him to pick up the crumpled and abandoned newspaper from a corner of his compartment, half-way through the short but tedious journey, and turn the pages listlessly in search of amusement.

  From the middle page, wide-eyed, indifferently printed, his own face suddenly stared out at him. It was a popular paper of large circulation and execrable taste, which he did not normally see; no doubt Harold had thought it well worth the small risk that someone might make it his business to show it to him, for a paper like that could afford to pay handsomely for its dirt.

  ‘MY BROTHER’S HEADLINE LOVE’

  by

  Harold Forbes

  ‘The Intimate Story of the Love Affair Which Survived a Murder Charge, and Found its Happy Ending at Last.’

  And inset into the larger photograph, one of the shots taken on their wedding day, startled, outraged, his arm about Suspiria in the doorway of the register office. No doubt the same persuasive young man had contrived this coup.

  He sat with the paper spread before him, reading the thing from beginning to end with a slow, methodical care. Harold was a bright boy, Harold was saving up for his own wedding, and the prospect of such easy money must almost have torn the heart out of him long ago. His work was not more vulgar than most of its kind, it had a horrible, patronising kindness, it was corrupt and yet innocent. The most terrible thing about it was that it might have been written by any member of his family, except perhaps Marjorie, who would have written in vitriol instead of syrup. This was exactly how the rest of them thought of him now, a blurred figure of sentiment, a clothes-horse for their own sicklier day-dreams. All Harold had added was the offensive facility of the writing.

  ‘—our family resolved to stand by my brother come what might, through the long strain of the trial. At first we had had our qualms about the affection which we saw daily growing between Dennis and Mrs Freeland, but when the blow fell, and the terrible ordeal began, we soon realised that this was real love, which we must recognise with respect and admiration. The apparent barriers between them, the difference in their backgrounds, the discrepancy in their ages, all became as nothing beside that love. Poor Dennis’s suffering during the time of waiting was terrible for us to watch, though we tried to share it with him as devotedly as we could. His faith in Suspiria was supreme—’

  He read carefully, letting himself feel the fearful anger and hate which can only exist, perhaps, between brothers, because only brothers enjoy such intimate opportunities mortally to offend each other. ‘I’ll kill him!’ he thought, half-choking with detestation. ‘I’ll kill him!’ knowing very well he never would. If only it had been a little more loathsomely ridiculous, not still united by a slender, wavering thread to the truth! It had taken his family, in the end, to strip him naked and exhibit him for twopenceha’penny a time. And there was worse, there was Suspiria, the affectionate, offensive use of her name, the coy uncovering of her proud and beloved flesh beside his own. He thought: ‘Oh, God, if she ever sees it!’ and again, with an almost childish descent of the heart: ‘Somebody’s sure to make it their business to show her!’ And it was his people who had done this to her! He felt even his own love for her suddenly smeared with the inescapable Forbes vulgarity.

  ‘—Our hearts bled for Suspiria when she came home, shattered by her ordeal, which she had sustained so bravely while it endured. We tried to make the house bright and welcoming for her return, to show her that we already loved her and recognised her as Dennis’s wife. She was so pale and exhausted, so childishly small and fragile, that my mother and sister could not help crying over her. For a time she allowed no one access to her heart except Dennis, but we understood, and were content to wait patiently until she could bear to emerge from her mental convalescence, and become our sweet and touchingly grateful sister.’

  And for the peroration, of course, all the most solemnly cloying phrases had been saved, a paragraph of pure cliché, saccharine on saccharine. ‘Ideal happiness at last’, ‘true love has found its haven’, ‘in harbour after the storms of tragedy’. ‘Her happy smile—’ Her happy smile – that ravaged face, fixed in the pallor of disbelief, exhausted with unrewarded effort, stooped over the wheel, staring at her own disaster. ‘It repays all our loyalty to see my young brother once again as radiantly happy as when we played together as children.’ She, at least, was spared that! And he was radiantly happy, was he? It seemed to him that the adverb, at any rate, was a shocking joke at his expense, he who spent most of his life, now, fending and frowning people off from him for fear of new bruises. There had been happiness, yes, violent and destructive happiness, too intense to be borne, a kind of dissolution, a kind of nightly death; but he saw it as black rather than radiant.

  When it was all read, he folded it together very carefully, and put it into his pocket; and when he left the train, though it was late for visiting, it was to Lancelot Road he went. He walked in upon them at the supper table, and knew by the abrupt flare of their startled eyes, and the quic
k, deflecting warmth of their welcoming voices, that they had been afraid of the next meeting with him, and suspected the worst from this sudden appearance. Still, they did their best. They hunted all together, he saw. All the others beamed at him with feverishly joyful surprise, and his mother rose to envelop him and kiss him. They were all in it, every one.

  Stiff and unbending between his mother’s hands, he held back his head out of her reach, and shrugged her by as if her touch were wholly distasteful to him. He had not meant to be as convincing as that, but there was no room in his mind or heart for any complicating affection. He unfolded the paper, and dropped it among the dishes on the table, in the middle of the circle of their guilty eyes, which flew to it like pins to a magnet.

  ‘Yes, I’ve seen it. I suppose you don’t want to tell me it’s a forgery?’

  They were silent; even Harold, who was seldom at a loss for words, could find none at first gasp to defend his own too facile eloquence. His round, confident face grew pink, he licked his lips, and began: ‘You don’t want to take it too hard, Den. I never meant—’

  ‘How much did you get for it?’ His voice was low, and slightly hoarse with strain, but perfectly level. ‘You sold me out pretty thoroughly,’ he said, ‘so I suppose the price was right. Are you splitting it among you, or does Harold keep the lot?’

  They began to talk all together, in fits and starts, defending themselves, cajoling him, Harold already loudest and most voluble. ‘What’s the matter with it, anyhow? It’s on your side. It’s going to make friends for you, isn’t it? I didn’t think you’d mind all that much. Most fellows would be glad to think their families thought about ’em like that, and stuck to ’em like that. It wasn’t the money! But if I hadn’t accepted, they’d have paid some professional to write it all up a lot worse – without any of the true details and the – the good feeling—’

  It was too much, he had to laugh. ‘The good feeling! That’s rich! The good feeling! You take the clothes off both of us, and stick us up under floodlighting, and you talk about good feeling!’

  ‘Oh, now, Dennis, love, you’re not fair! Harold wrote it beautifully! I’m sure you’ve no call to talk like that about it.’

  ‘You’re pathological about it,’ said Harold strenuously, ‘that’s your trouble. They’ll write these articles, whether you like it or not. You ought to have done it yourself, then you could have said what you like, and left out what you like. But you never would. I didn’t see why it should be left to the newspaper men, when I could do it a lot better and more decently.’

  ‘Decently!’ said Dennis. ‘You call that doing it decently. My God!’

  ‘But really, you’re not being fair! Harold never thought you’d feel so bad about it. He never meant any harm. He only thought—’

  ‘That it was a lot of money, and he might as well have it as anybody else. I know. Well, make sure of your money, then – you’ve lost your goods.’ He drew back from his mother’s hands, which still sought ineffectively to envelop him, as boldly, as insolently, as if he had still been a small boy in a violent paddy, which would break in a storm of penitent tears if only she could once take his struggling form to her bosom. ‘Don’t! Don’t touch me! You don’t think you can do a thing like that to me, and then get round me with a little cheap cuddling! You knew perfectly well how I felt about it, how we both felt. Even if I didn’t care for myself, I could never forgive you for doing this to her. I’m finished,’ he said, his voice sinking to a parched finality of rejection.

  His father, with dropping jaw, asked feebly: ‘What do you mean by that?’

  ‘What I say. I’m done with you, the lot of you. You’ve got your money, you can’t expect to keep me as well.’ He turned abruptly, and his hand clashed at the latch of the door. ‘Good-bye!’

  If only it had sounded petulant, or childish, or as if he were blackmailing them with his hurts, they might have sprung after him with humouring apologies, but the voice had a flatness and finality which paralysed. They let him go. Only Winnie suddenly pulled the door open after him, and ran down the path, and caught him by the arm, almost in tears.

  ‘Dennis, don’t go away like this – please! All right, we just hoped you wouldn’t see it. It was such a lot of money—Oh, we oughtn’t to have done it; I wish we hadn’t, now!’

  ‘It’s a bit late, isn’t it?’ He pulled his sleeve out of her clutch, and went on; and when she pursued him still with a despairing babble of regret, he cried furiously: ‘Let me alone!’ and tore himself away from her at a pace only just short of a run. He wanted to be rid of them all, cleanly, with as little argument and as little distress as possible. What was the use of hanging about them, trying to make the best of a bad job, when it was clear that nothing could result but continued frustration and misunderstanding, for them and him? They had started as a family, but events had altered that, once for all. He no more belonged there now than Suspiria did.

  She came home the next evening, two days before he was expecting her; and as soon as he heard the car in the yard, he knew that someone had called her attention to the article. She was in the doorway before he could go out to meet her. Her face looked small and pinched in the high collar of her coat, her cheekbones flecked with an angry, steady red. She looked at him without a smile, walked past him into the house, and dropped the folded paper upon the piano.

  ‘I suppose you’ve seen it. Of course someone took good care to show it to me.’ She dug her hands into her pockets, and wheeled on him suddenly with a protesting cry: ‘Can’t you keep your tribe off my throat?’

  He had nothing to say. He searched for something helplessly, and could find nothing. He might have said that the worst of the humiliation this time had fallen upon him, but it seemed to him that they were so irrevocably one that such a defence meant nothing. He could have told her at once that he had broken with his family once for all as a result of this betrayal, but somehow the first raging note of her voice had made him fly to spread the arms of his spirit between her ferocity and their weakness. He thought he had done with them, but when she aimed at them she drew blood from him. He felt the vehement colour mount his cheeks, and tightened his hold upon his own sore feelings, to remind himself how delicately he must allow for hers. He said with strained quietness: ‘Yes, I’ve seen it. I knew what you’d feel about it. I’m sorry!’

  ‘Sorry!’ She beat her hands together in a sudden, violent blow. ‘Is that all you can say? My God, when I think of it!’ The thin, long fingers locked and clung, wrenching at one another. ‘Wasn’t it enough to have let them in on the wedding? Didn’t they get enough fun out of us? What sort of appetites have your people got? But then, there was the money!’ The flame of her tormented eyes lifted viciously to his face. ‘Did you get a share, too? It would be only fair!’

  ‘You don’t mean what you’re saying,’ he said. ‘You know I had nothing to do with it. I knew no more about it than you did until I picked up the paper in the train last night. I felt the same about it as you do. You don’t need me to tell you that.’

  ‘How do I know it? How do I know you might not find that sort of thing worthwhile, provided it pays a big enough fee? They don’t see anything wrong with it, how can I be sure you do? You’re one of the same tribe, aren’t you?’

  ‘It happened,’ he said, his temples darkening into an angry crimson. ‘I can’t undo it now, I wish I could. What’s the use of raving about it? If I’d had wind of it in time, I’d have stopped it, and you know it. I hate it as much as you do.’

  ‘Then what have you done about it? Entered a mild protest and undertaken to smooth me down? What, and without even a share in the proceeds? Oh, my God!’ she said, hoarse with loathing, ‘what have I tied myself to? I knew it would be the devil for me to keep it up, but I didn’t complain, did I, when that garrulous old woman turned our wedding into a sideshow? I never held it against her. But this – this—’

  She turned her back on him, and fastened her hands upon the edge of the piano, swallowing th
e end of what she had tried to say. He approached her quietly, and taking her by the waist, made to turn her about to face him, but she sprang away from his touch furiously, wrenching her very sleeve out of his grasp.

  ‘No, not like that! It isn’t so simple! How often do you think I can be put up in your family’s shop-window, and not bear any malice? If you’ve promised them to smooth me down again, you’ll have a lot of explaining to do.’

  ‘You talk as if I were on their side,’ he said, aghast.

  ‘Have you said anything to make me think you’re not?’

  ‘My God, what am I supposed to say? You want me to swear on the Bible or something? I tell you I had nothing to do with it, I hate it, I’d have stopped it if I could. If you expect me to bid for your trust by calling them a lot of filthy names, you’ll be disappointed. I leave that to you – you’re perfectly competent.’

  It was the reproach of her impenetrable assurance that he couldn’t stand. How could he bear to leave his family to her alien and aristocratic savagery, whatever their guilt? And yet to see her plying her fingers and writhing her body in the extremity of her humiliation and pain made him hate them as he had not known how to hate them on his own account.

  ‘You want me to say it, then? They’re third-rate people, with the sensitivities of blocks. They gloat over our celebrity. They terrify me! They’re a little monument of vulgarity! And you belong to them! I should have known it,’ she whispered, wringing her hands. ‘I should have seen it! Oh, God, what a fool, to think you could be different!’