The Tumbled House
Page 42
A dock chimed. Joanna moistened her lips. “If we talk any more now you’ll miss your train.”
“Let it go.”
“You made me do my job today. Yours—tomorrow—is much more important.”
“To hell with—with the train. To hell with my music, if that has in any way been the cause. I’d better have been a navvy.”
“Don, let me come with you to the station.”
“Answer me, and then we’ll see.”
“What do you want me to say?”
“Why did you come back tonight?”
“I’ve told you.”
“It isn’t true.”
She turned, her face suddenly seeming to break up. “No, it isn’t true.… I’ll get the car.” She went from the room.
He followed her half-blindly down the stairs. By the time he had taken two mackintoshes out of the cupboard she had started the engine. He threw his case on the back seat and got in at the wheel as she slid over. Her eyes were glassy with tears that didn’t come.
They turned out into Knightsbridge. The traffic was sparse and only knotted at the lights. He drove to Hyde Park Corner and up Park Lane. For a time they didn’t speak at all. The break in her self-possession had left him suddenly with no escape from feeling again. It was there in his stomach like a raw wound. He was caught up with a sense of self-blame, and also, perhaps illogically, with a sensation of pity and sadness, not alone for the woman sitting beside him but for all that had been lost today: their marriage, Michael’s life, Bennie’s love, even a little for Roger’s twisted hopes. He seemed to see then and understand that the compulsions of life existed as elements too strong for the frail human beings that gave them existence. Like electrical forces they exerted sudden movements of attraction or repulsion, and the men and women in whom they moved were the victims of this force, not its masters. It was a new kind of pain that came to him then, a pain at once of compassion and contrition, as if he could suffer for them all.
They went right along Oxford Street and up Tottenham Court Road. He began to slow down.
“I can’t go. How can you expect me to? I tell you I can’t go now.”
She said: “ You’re much better to have done with me. You need someone quite different, able to see things in quite a different way.”
“Why did you come back?”
“I’m vain—and temperamental—and even now there’s some sort of—of … I can’t invent or pretend the—the little excuses. Don’t stop.”
They turned into Euston Road and drove some way.
She said: “ Of course I’m sorry it ever happened, but you may say it’s easy to be sorry for something that’s over. And I’m sorry, sorry that I’ve hurt you. But that wasn’t why I came back. I came because … well, with you is where I belong. I thought even if this thing is too big between us now we might—well, after a time I thought.… You see, Don, I love you. That may sound pretty unbelievable after all the rest you’ve heard about me today, but it happens to be true.”
He stopped the car.
“Turn in here,” she said.
“I’m turning round.”
“No. I’ll come to Edinburgh with you if you like.”
“To Edinburgh?”
“Yes.”
“That’s nonsense.”
“It isn’t nonsense. We can—talk it out on the train.”
“I don’t want to go!”
“Don, don’t you see, if there’s to be anything between us at all, that you must? That’s the first condition.”
“What’s it to do with us tonight!”
“Everything.”
They parked the car, and reluctantly he went up the steps. The station was dark and nearly empty. The clock said ten to twelve. A string of attached wagons piled with tomorrow’s newspapers rumbled past them. Two soldiers were sitting asleep on a form. An elderly man in a tweed suit was weaving his way drunkenly in the wake of a porter.
“You can’t come,” Don said. “You’ve nothing with you.”
“That doesn’t matter.”
Don didn’t speak.
They went towards the booking office. Joanna said: “You’ll have to sit up. We’ll both have to sit up. We can talk then—if there’s any more to say. At least—maybe I can.… By morning we shall know. If we still can’t see it right then I’ll—drop out of the game.”
Don went to the window. “ I want two tickets to Edinburgh, please.” He began to count the notes.
“Single or return, sir?” said the clerk.
Don looked at his wife. A stray breeze was blowing her hair. She looked back at him with glittering embarrassed eyes.
“Return.” he said.
THE END
Copyright
First published in 1959 by Hodder & Stoughton
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