“I’m afraid I don’t,” said Mrs. Agnew.
“Oh, well, you must imagine it, then,” said Perney kindly. “Jan and Gina were the first to risk marriage. There was a howl from relations and elders generally, prophecies of death and disaster, and so on, and even we were a bit apprehensive.
“We let them alone for at least a week and then crept back, one by one, to see if the rot had set in. They looked much the same, but Gina had cleaned the place up and there was some decent food in the kitchen cupboard. After that, of course, we practically moved in.
“Gina looked after us all. She got Jan going, saw he had a clean space to work in, fixed up for him to sleep occasionally and fed us all at least once a week. It was a revelation to us.
“Our generation had the wind up about marriage. We were all brought up to believe that for the thinking man, marriage is death. Jan and Gina risked it and proved it to be a damn fine idea. We were convinced. We saw it work. Marriage is all right. Marriage is good.”
Lynne Agnew laughed. The little tinkling sound jarred in the breathless room.
“How terribly amusing!” she said, and turned to Jan. “I didn’t know you’d had such a difficult beginning, my dear.”
“Difficult?” roared Perney, suddenly infuriated. “My dear girl, you don’t understand. It wasn’t difficult. It was glorious.”
Mrs. Agnew flushed.
“You must forgive me,” she said, “but I can’t bear sordid stories. They’re too Russian, too depressing.”
Gina caught a glimpse of Perney’s wrathful face and Jan’s pallid, tight-lipped mouth, and struggled with the nightmare.
“It was a long time ago,” she said feebly. “We’ve almost forgotten it.”
“I haven’t,” said Perney obstinately, “and I’m never going to forget it.” He sat up. “It was the most enlightening, stupendously comforting thing that ever happened to me, that discovery. I could thank you two on my knees for pointing it out to me. Marriage is all right. Given the right ingredients, it’s the secret of happiness. It does exist. It can be done.”
Mrs. Agnew rose. There was a set smile on her red lips, and her movements were studiously graceful.
“I have a long drive home,” she said. “You’ll be gone in the morning, won’t you, Mr. Perney? It’s been so interesting meeting you. Good-bye. Good-bye, Gina. Good-bye, Mrs. Perney. Jan, I shall see you tomorrow.”
She gathered up her bag and made her exit. Jan hurried after her.
Perney rose.
“I suppose I’d better go, too,” he said. “I didn’t mean to annoy the wretched woman, but she got me down.”
He went out to obtrude his friendly personality upon the departing guest. Gina dared not stop him. She was panic-stricken. She was dimly aware that a matter which a few hours before had seemed so very personal had now become a broader problem.
Sally Perney’s sharp whisper cut through her thoughts.
“It’s definitely female, isn’t it?” she said. “It’s got its eye on your old man. I do admire you, Gina. You didn’t murmur. I’d have scratched and disgraced myself.”
She plumped herself down on the rug and sat clasping her knees, her small, bright face raised to the other woman’s.
“It’s just instinctive with me. Vic says I behave like a bantam hen, but I can’t help it. Even if I know it’s quite safe and the silly little girls haven’t got an earthly, yet I go for them with my claws out. Of course, it’s different for you, in a way. You and Jan must be so absolutely one person after all this time. Still, I’d have snapped at her. She was so disgustingly possessive.”
Gina looked at the girl and smiled at the hopelessness of it all. Mrs. Perney misunderstood her.
“I know I’m silly,” she said. “I always remember you and Jan getting rid of the White Crow. In times of stress that recollection heartens me. It can be done. You do remember the Crow, Gina? She was a model or something, a great white face and a predatory leer. Doesn’t that bring her back to you?”
Gina Baring’s mind was jolted back to a scene in the studio in the third year of their marriage. She saw herself trembling, angry and excruciatingly jealous, with Jan, cold and uncomfortable, at her side.
“My dear, you’re being damned silly,” she had said to the languid, vacant face before her. “A little disgusting, too. Do go away.”
The naiveté of the words brought a blush to her cheeks as she remembered, and she wondered why. Was it that they were then all young, all so idealistically sure of the sanctity of the new love they had discovered?
‘The White Crow,” she said aloud. “Poor girl, we didn’t like her, did we?”
“Jan hated her,” said Sally Perney complacently. “Vic says Jan was shocked by her.”
Gina stared at her and her heart contracted as her early success was so lightly explained. She was saved from betraying herself by the return of the men. Perney came in grinning.
“She’s gone, silly old trumpet,” he said, rubbing his bony hands together. “Let’s go along to the studio and look at Jan’s stuff. Can I have some beer? Put the brandy away, Gina, now the guest has gone.”
Mrs. Baring glanced at her husband and was startled to see that the expression in his eyes was as helpless as her own.
At three in the morning they were sitting before a fire still talking, with the room a chaos of canvases and pencil studies around them. Perney and Gina had raided the kitchen at midnight and the remains of a scratch meal lay on trays on the model’s throne behind them.
For two hours Mrs. Baring had not thought of Fergus Cappet, Jan sat on the hearthrug, his face alive and young with anger. He and Perney had been wrangling over the old argument of inspiration versus technique for the best part of the dawn and they had enjoyed themselves. Now, exhausted and satisfied, they were preparing to make the effort to go to bed.
Perney put an arm round his wife and presented her to his hosts.
‘There she is,” he said. “All my own work. Jan’s recipe. Do you remember, Jan? You said to me, ‘Catch one young and train it, and then keep it down.” It’s taken me a long time, but I’ve done it.”
His lean, ugly face was bright with satisfaction, and his next remark startled them.
“We’re following your footsteps. We’re close on your heels,” he observed affably. “You showed us the way and we’re coming after you. What I said to that abysmally silly woman was quite true. You two put us all on to the right track when we were kids. You proved to us that it is possible to be free, egotistical, sophisticated, unconventional and at the same time perfectly happy. You two are both artists in the best sense of the word, both individualists and both experimenters in life. By all the rules you ought to be lonely, unsatisfied and discontented. But you’ve solved the whole problem by teaming up early and working as one man. Sally and I are coming after you. You people put on such a show. You were so happy, so gloriously successful, that you influenced a lot of us, you know.”
His voice died away and the studio was silent. Gina Baring laughed unnaturally.
“Oh, my dears,” she said unsteadily, “don’t go by us. I mean, it’s not—not so easy.”
Jan leant forward and touched her arm warningly, and again she sympathised with his desire to avoid the unbearableness of an explanation. All the same, her conscience pricked her. She tried to compromise.
“Things get difficult,” she said, “As one gets more money and more conventional in one’s ordinary routine, conventional people get in. Then the trouble is that the word ‘conventional” doesn’t mean what it used to any more. I mean, people aren’t necessarily honest or pleasant or kind just because they happen to be conventional. You get them in the house and they play the devil with you because you’re unprepared and unarmed. You’re simple, unsuspecting, natural people. Everyone can see what you are at a glance. Their conventionality cloaks them. It’s their disguise. They beat you when it comes to it.”
Sally Perney grinned. She looked very young and confident, clin
ging to her husband’s arm.
“You can always chuck them out,” she said. “I mean, they never get right in, do they? They never come between you and your old man. They can’t.”
‘Why not?” Jan spoke slowly and with genuine inquiry in his tone.
Mrs. Perney stared at him; her eyes were round and shocked and a wave of scarlet colour swept over her face.
“Well, I mean, you—well, you love each other, don’t you?” she said. “That’s the king-pin. You can’t go and forget you’re in love.”
Perney raised his eyes and groaned.
“Indecency!” he said, shaking her gently. “Horrible little beast. Go to bed. Go on. Gina will take you up, then we’ll come. Beat it.”
Ten minutes later Gina Baring stood on the landing with her back to her own bedroom door and said good night for the fifteenth time to Sally Perney, who had followed her along the passage from the guest room.
“It’s a darling house,” the girl was saying. “A peach of a house. It’s made for you. Have you still got the brass barouche?”
“Our Italian bed from the flat?”
The old nickname for that monstrous couch sounded strange in the painted splendour of the new house and Gina Baring lied gallantly.
“Yes, it’s still alive.”
Sally kissed her.
“I’m so glad. Vic and I are going to have a genuine four-poster when we get a room to hold it. Bless you, pet. It’s grand to see you both again and to know that it really is all right and it can work out, whatever people say. You’ve proved it. Good-night.”
She bobbed off down the passage, looking like a child, and Gina Baring waited until the door of the guest room closed before she opened her own and switched on the light.
The photograph of Fergus Cappet met her as she went in. It regarded her with pallid intensity from the ledge above her narrow convent bed and for a moment she stood staring at it, her arms hanging limply at her sides.
“Oh, dear God,” whispered Mrs. Baring.
In the early dawn she was aroused from her dazed apathy by hearty whispering outside her door. It went on for a long time. She did not understand it immediately, and it was not until the door opened and someone stepped just inside and closed it after him, to stand motionless, listening, that she realised what had happened.
Jan had found Vic even more difficult to shake off than Sally had been, and had been forced into subterfuge, after allowing it to be presumed that his wife’s room was still also his own. There was something horribly amusing in the farce, and she began to laugh quietly, unaware that there were tears in her eyes.
“Shut up, Gina,” Jan’s whisper was agonized. “God, what a chap! He wouldn’t go to bed. He wanted to see the brass barouche. Where is it?”
“In the attic,” she whispered breathlessly.
He came blundering softly towards her across the unfamiliar room and sat down on the end of the bed.
“We’ll have to get it down. He’ll find out. I know him. He’s a most tenacious ass—always was.”
Gina Baring covered her eyes with the back of her hand, as though she were afraid the very darkness would betray her.
“We’ll have to tell them, Jan.”
He was silent for a long time. Presently he leant over and found her among the pillows.
“Gina.”
“Yes?”
“How are we going to get out of this? What are we going to say?”
“Who to? The Perneys?”
“Oh, Heavens, no! Fergus and Lynne. What are we going to tell them? Temporary insanity?”
He was still whispering, and the quiet and the darkness gave the conversation a strange urgency.
Gina Baring lay still. She was crying and her breath trembled.
“I don’t know,” she mumbled. “Oh, Jan, I don’t know.”
He laughed. The sound was gay, spontaneous and entirely young.
“We’ll bunk,” he said. “It’s cowardly, childish and utterly disgusting, but it’ll save a lot of trouble in the end. We’ll go to France and lie low till it blows over. After all, it’s the only thing we can do. We’ve got to go on, Gina. We haven’t finished. We’ve got work to do. We’ve both been hysterical, darling. You do see that, don’t you?”
She did not answer, and he repeated the question with a falter in his voice which demoralised her.
“Don’t you?”
Gina Baring opened her arms to him and, after a while, they lay laughing at themselves in the darkness.
The Sexton’s Wife
They say it’s unlucky to marry for love,” said the old woman, peering across the rag hearthrug to where I sat in the shadow. “But I don’t know. I often wonder how it would have been.”
“If you hadn’t married for love?” I said.
Old Mrs. Hartlebury shook her head and the firelight played over the wrinkles on her brown face.
“No,” she said. “If I had.”
We were sitting in the downstairs room of her cottage, which stands midway between the church and the turning which leads through the Street to the Hard and the sea.
It was pouring, and I had dropped in to see her as I went back to the house after an expedition to the landing stage to get some fresh fish off the boats.
We had sat talking for some time while the room grew gradually darker. Now it was so dark that I could only catch a glimpse of the gold-spotted spaniels on the mantelshelf high above my head when an extra big flame spurted from the wood fire and lit up the small warm room for a second.
But it was still raining and I did not want to move. There was plenty of time to get back when it stopped, and I was drowsy and comfortable sitting there in the warm.
Mrs. Hartlebury did not mind. She went on talking and sighing, hardly noticing me as I sat on the far side of the hearth, on a hassock borrowed from the church and with my back against the log heap which filled that corner of the room.
There was a long pause after her last remark. I did not speak. If she wanted to talk I was ready to listen; if she did not want to her business was not of any account to me. Like herself I had been bred on the Essex coast and we understood one another.
After a while I heard her stirring in her chair and I saw her eyes for a moment as they reflected the glow of the fire when she turned her head.
“Have you heard about Hartlebury, the way he died, or anything?” she asked suddenly.
“No,” I said not very truthfully.
I had heard something, of course, but then you hear something about the way everyone dies and I did not know if the gossip were true.
“He died the way he deserved to die,” she remarked, and although I could not see her face I knew it was unforgiving.
I made some non-committal sound and drowsed again.
“When I was a girl I was wonderful pretty,” she went on after a bit.
I could believe that, for she is a very fine looking old woman now and she is eighty-two years old.
“I had black hair,” she said proudly, “and a skin you’ll never see these days when girls get as many victuals as their fathers and brothers. That time there weren’t much food about and men can’t go fishin’ hungry, so the women weren’t overfed and I count that done “un good. I had a sweetheart long before I was sixteen,” she added, and she spoke comfortably as though she was glad to think of it even after all this time.
“A fine boy he was,” she went on quickly. “Seventeen or eighteen, with yellow hair and a soft sort of smile when he saw me coming down to the Hard to meet “um.”
She paused and I saw her as she bent down to lift a stick on to the fire. For a moment she startled me. The shadows had crept into the hollows of her face and filled them, so that I suppose I saw her as she must have been when she stood on the Hard waiting for her sweetheart all that time ago.
When the flame died down she went on talking.
“We went about together, Will and me. Did I tell you his name? Will Lintle. His father, Joe, had a smack, and they
two went out together almost every day. We couldn’t get married. Neither on us had enough to live on. So we went on sweet-hearting, years it was, until I was turned nineteen.
“He was true to me,” she said. “All that time he was true. I wasn’t very old and I crossed him time and again, and I’d say things to hurt, the way girls do. Yet he’d never walk out with another girl, but would look at me puzzled and sort of wondering why I’d hurt him, so that I’d be ready to tear my tongue out rather than speak so again.”
She paused and I suppose I sighed, for she laughed and I could feel her grinning at me in the darkness.
“Ah, you’re young,” she said. “I’m old, and, though I ain’t forgot, I’m different.”
I did not say anything and presently she went on in a sing-song which was addressed more to herself than to me:
“I reckon I loved Will just as he loved me, and when it’s like that you can’t be much less than happy. We counted we should get married some day and we were content.”
She paused a moment and when she spoke again her voice was sharper.
“But when I was nineteen Hartlebury stepped across to see my father one day and told him and my mother that he was after me.”
She broke off and mumbled rather irritatingly, as very old people do, and I was sorry that I could not see her clearly as she sat huddled up in her chair.
Presently, when I had almost forgotten what she had been talking about, she went on with the story again.
“James Hartlebury was the carrier at that time, and he was sexton too, so he lived right over against the church where the Reading Room is now. Pretty little house he had, with a long path up to the door which had rosemary bushes all down the sides of it. I can’t bear the smell of rosemary even now,” she put in suddenly, “though many’s the time I’ve washed my hair with it when I was a girl. It’s a wonderful fine thing for black hair, is rosemary.”
Mr. Campion's Lucky Day & Other Stories Page 22