Fair Warning (2 page)

“I’m going to meddle,” said Dr. Blakie abruptly, as if coming to a decision. “And I hate meddling. But I’ve seen you change, Marcia—from a healthy normal girl to a—white-faced, nervous, hunted-looking woman.— Don’t say anything. I’ll finish in a minute. I don’t have much to say. It’s only this: You have one life to lead. Just one. I don’t know what Ivan—and Beatrice—have done to you, but you are—you are what those tender young tulip sheaths would be if I walked on them. You are beaten down. Crushed. Your body, your initiative, even your common sense isn’t functioning as it ought to do.”

“Common sense,” said Marcia with dry lips, “doesn’t have much to do with it.”

He looked at her quickly again and then away.

“Useless, huh? Against their combined strength. Well, my dear, I’ve said too much. I’ll say only one other thing, but I want you to remember it: In the end your life lies in your own hands. Do you understand me?”

She didn’t really understand him; the thought of Ivan’s impending return so filled and possessed all her consciousness that everything else
was
veiled and obscure. She felt again, but in a faraway and half-recognized way, that if she had been given a few days more of peace and precious loneliness, she might have arrived at something that would be like a fort, a standing ground.

He was looking at her again, shaking his head a little.

She said belatedly and stumblingly, “I know you mean to help me—I can’t—I don’t know—there’s nothing I can do. Besides—how do I know I’m right?”

Her faltering question hung in the air between them, while the library listened and watched and laid that moment away in its store. Finally Dr. Blakie shrugged. He turned crisply away, as if he recognized futility. He said, all resonance gone now from his voice, so he was again detached and impersonally kind, as for a moment he had been direct and urgent, “Very well, my dear. You know yourself, I suppose. But when the time comes—as it will probably come, for there’s still courage somewhere in you, Marcia, and there must be stamina—when, the time comes that you need a friend, remember—” His voice was becoming deeper.

He checked himself and finished in a light, dry tone, “Remember the old doctor, my dear.”

“Thank you.”

He stopped again beside the desk, his neat, fine hands touching it with their fingertips. He said thoughtfully and in a thin, small voice which was infinitely far away and unapproachable—the voice he used at the hospital with nurses, with other doctors; a voice deprived of all personal feeling, and as neat and economical as the figures in a ledger, “Perhaps you’d better call Beatrice. She wanted to ask me something or other before I left. And I’m due at the hospital in an hour.”

Marcia turned in a kind of automatic obedience toward the door. She did pause before opening it to take a long, queer breath, as one does before lifting a familiar and heavy burden.

The library watched her. The glass covers of the bookcases reflected impressionistically a slender woman in a canary-yellow sweater and skirt—a glimpse of a small head with soft light hair, smoothly waved and clinging. A flash perhaps of dark-gray, shadowed eyes and a too sensitive mouth, set now in lines that went ill with the rather fine and delicate planes of her face. Unhappiness did not become Marcia; she had no tragic beauty. Instead it took spirit and luminousness from her and a certain light, flying grace. She was likely to seem, except in rare moments, flat and one-dimensional, without depth and passion—a woman who might have been beautiful had there been feeling in her regular, merely pretty face. Who might have been interesting had she said anything but automatic, pleasantly bright and social nothings.

Dr. Blakie, watching her again, said suddenly, “There’s danger, you know, Marcia, in bottling up too much. You are supple, you’ve got the slender, tough resiliency of a willow. But you can’t—”

“Don’t!” It was her own voice, but it was short and harsh and full of breath and tore its way from somewhere deep inside her. “Don’t you see?” cried Marcia Godden. “I can’t let go.”

“Oh, my child,” said Dr. Blakie pitifully. But he said it to the waiting room, to the blank white head of Caesar, to the gray world outside the windows. For Marcia had gone out and closed the door behind her.

The hall, as always, was a pool of shadow. At her right on a landing of the broad ascending stairs were stained-glass windows through which light fell downward in mingled bands of red and yellow and green, giving a curiously patterned and disagreeable glow and patina to the objects in the hall below. Behind the stairs was a door leading to Beatrice Godden’s study—a small, neat, and very ugly room where she was wont to sit for hours, arranging the affairs of the household, giving orders to the cook—“Name Emma Beek; age forty-six; worked in the Godden family for twenty years; says she knows nothing of the murder; questioned however gave evidence as follows:” It was to appear in certain records, that and the evidence she gave with such curious willingness—or to the housemaid, or to Ancill.

Ancill was in the hall. Marcia did not see him at once, only when he moved, for he had already put on a dark coat and carried his chauffeur’s cap in his hand, and he was at the far end of the hall, so he was in its deepest shadow, very near the wide, dark panels of the outside door. He moved toward her, and she had an instant’s altogether untraceable impression that when she opened the library door he had been much nearer it than when she discovered him.

He said a little too respectfully, as if she were a child readily fooled by words, “Is Madam ready to go to the hospital?”

She looked at him, giving herself a protective moment to become Mrs. Godden again. To assume the little extra dignity she was always forced to assume with Ancill because he knew so much. Saw so much. Was so peculiarly and sympathetically Ivan’s man, so innately comprehensive that he had the singular faculty of understanding Ivan’s wishes before they were uttered. Or if they were never uttered.

He was a man of average size and undistinguished looks except that respectability seemed to be laid on him with a trowel. And except that all his motions were fluid and completely silent, as if he had some special thick oil in his joints. He was a little pale by nature, his small dark eyes a little close together, and he had a way of looking over her shoulder instead of into her face which at first had annoyed Marcia and made her a little nervous. But first and foremost and above everything he was respectable.

He held his cap and looked at her and waited.

“We’ll not be going to the hospital this morning, Ancill,” she said. “Mr. Godden is coming home today.”

It was out and it was sealed now and certain.

He looked over her shoulder.

“Very well,” he said. “Good news, isn’t it, madam? Miss Beatrice will be very pleased.”

Did he mean what it sounded as if he meant? Was he, under that smugness and oiliness and respectability, actually as impertinent, as sly, as he sounded? Dared he—She checked herself. He did dare, of course. Knowing his own secret understanding with his master. Knowing her own lack of weapons and backing. There was never and had never been any definite excuse for complaint. His insolence was always veiled, oily, hidden. Nothing that would oblige Ivan to reprove him.

“I don’t know exactly when he will arrive,” she said. “I believe the doctor intends to bring him out in his own car. Is Miss Beatrice in her study?”

She was, sitting with the door closed, watching the garden with clouded, brooding eyes, her black eyebrows brought together over her long, pale face and looking, except for her eyes, exactly like Ivan.

She frowned and blinked when Marcia spoke to her, as if the words recalled her from some secret deeps of thought.

“Dr. Blakie—oh, yes,” she said. “I wanted to ask him if there is anything in particular in the way of diet and care for Ivan. I knew you wouldn’t think to ask him.”

“I did ask him,” said Marcia. “He said there was nothing—”

Beatrice’s mouth had Ivan’s trick of sudden secret indentations at its corners. It wasn’t a smile, but it was like one. She put two cold fingers under Marcia’s chin and said, “Our little butterfly troubling herself with household affairs!” and walked out of the room. The gesture and look were so like Ivan’s in their secret, dark amusement, in the suggestion of something poised and venomous under light words, that Marcia felt a sick wave of foretaste. She turned and followed Beatrice’s tall figure in its trimly fashionable gray knitted dress. Ancill and Delia, the young and somewhat subdued housemaid, were in the hall and had been talking, though as Marcia entered it Delia became ostentatiously busy with a duster and Ancill inspected his cap closely.

Dr. Blakie was on the verge of departure, and had already absently pulled on his gloves and was looking anxiously at his watch. He had devoted more than its quota of time to the Godden affair and was evidently hurried and was telling Beatrice rather crisply that, except for his ankle, Ivan was actually perfectly well.

“It doesn’t seem possible,” said Beatrice, “when he was on the very verge of death so short a time ago. If it hadn’t been for you, Graham—”

“No, no,” said Dr. Blakie hurriedly. “Ivan has the constitution of an ox, really. It was good luck that I happened to be here when you had news of the accident and could go straight to the hospital and operate. By the way, did you ever find out whom he collided with?”

“No, never. The car has been repaired; that will please Ivan. New fenders—various new parts, indeed.”

“Yes, to be sure.” He was abstracted; he looked again at his watch, glanced at Marcia and said, “Well, I must be on my way. I’ll bring Ivan out myself shortly after noon. Can’t say just when—depends upon how things go this morning. No special diet or special care—just keep him from walking too much.” He looked a little grim, as if he wanted to repeat what he had said to Marcia about that, but refrained under Beatrice’s brooding dark gaze.

Beatrice went with him to the outside door, closing the door of the library after her, as if to keep Marcia from hearing any words she might have wished to have with the doctor. But, if so, the words were very few, for presently Marcia heard the slow, quivering jar the heavy door gave when it closed. Beatrice did not rejoin her in the library, and Marcia stood quite still in the middle of the room.

The clouded green waters of the aquarium moved slightly now and then. The white head of Caesar looked blankly down at her. The half-glimpsed reflections along the bookshelves glimmered a little and seemed to move. She found herself staring fixedly at Ivan’s desk again—Ivan’s desk, so strangely, flatly empty since Ivan’s absence—and again seeing Ivan’s face behind it, watching her with those blank light eyes. As he had looked that day of March eighteenth—the day he had been injured in the accident and Dr. Graham Blakie had literally, almost miraculously, saved his life.

As he had looked when she had unexpectedly, dreadfully, defied him.

She could still see the three long red marks appearing against his livid face, and the horribly blank, bright look in his eyes. ...

She closed her own eyes with a long shiver of revulsion and of fear. During all those weeks at the hospital he had said, nothing of what had happened that day. But now that he was well, now that he was to be at home, it would come.

The room pressed too closely upon her—Ivan’s room, which was so soon to take up its familiar life.

Beatrice had retired to her own study again—there was no sound in the house, or, if there was a sound, it was muffled by other sounds and far away, so that even the high, remarkably acoustic spaces overhead could not pick up and amplify it hollowly as they did any sound at night.

Marcia turned rather blindly to the french doors, opened one and went out.

The gray sky hung low over tiny bright leaves just budding. The lilacs
had
been caught by the frost; only a few of them were turning a pale purple, touched still with brown. Her feet slipped a little on the wet flagstones and over moist grass as she turned toward the summerhouse at the bottom of the garden. It was cold, too, but anything was better just then than the house. Besides, the vines over the summerhouse, still brown though they were, were yet a kind of screen—a screen from the prying, watching eyes of the household.

The household of which she was not, and never had been since the day she became Ivan Godden’s wife, the mistress.

The lily pool was gray and full and choked a little with last summer’s rushes. Already, owing to the many rains of the spring, the grass needed cutting, and the hedges and trees gave promise of being too lush and green, although just now there was a faintly yellow tone about them. Across the garden wall the Copley house looked very bright in its red bricks and neat white trim.

She had liked seeing it there. In the very cheer of its neat red bricks—contrasting with the heavy gray stones of the Godden house, only half masked in strong, old ivy—it gave a kind of promise of friendliness. Besides, occasionally across the wall she could see Robert Copley and his mother, walking in the garden or throwing sticks for Bunty to catch. And always at night the windows were bright, even though, lately, Rob had been gone so much.

The thought of Bunty recalled her again to the day of March eighteenth.

The false peace of the past few weeks was gone.

Ivan was returning.

There was a bench in the damp summerhouse. Marcia Godden sat down there and put her face in her hands.

I
T HAD BEEN THREE
years since Marcia married Ivan Godden and came to live at the Godden house.

The three years made so deep and dangerous a chasm that it was almost impassable. She remembered only in a kind of unreal series of pictures a faraway girl, Marcia Trench—with her fine blond hair and wide gray eyes and a pink flame in her cheeks. School days under the wing of Aunt Marcia Trench, kind and slightly irresponsible like her son, Galway. Her own parents growing more and more vague in her memory as she grew older. Their first dance—hers and Gally’s; herself in white chiffon ruffles, with eyes like stars and Gally very bony and gangling in his first tails and blushingly in love with the girl next door. Skating and tobogganing, with Gally breaking unheard-of bones at every possible opportunity, and smashing up uncounted cheap roadsters. He was an adept at it; Aunt Marcia would sigh good-naturedly and pay the bills. Dear old Gally; he hadn’t changed, though everything else in Marcia’s world had done so; he was still rattlebrained and not too bright; still harum-scarum and noisy; still acquiring unexpected fiancées through his irrepressible habit of casual love-making and being surprised and slightly wounded because some girl had taken him seriously. Not that he was any great catch. With the candor of a sister, Marcia was obliged to admit that, though she loved him dearly. And he was still an adept at smashing up roadsters, and they were still cheap roadsters, though they were no longer decorated with alarming signs. For 1930 had come and foundations had developed a way of sliding out from under one, and 1931 had been no better. And one day Aunt Marcia, as simply and placidly as she had done everything else, died. There was another hiatus there in Marcia’s memory. Then all at once she was living at the Godden house, married to Ivan Godden, who was going to take care of her and make her happy.