Five Roundabouts to Heaven (12 page)

She went across to the table and filled our glasses.

“After the war, I came back here, and lived with Mother and Leslie. Then Leslie married and moved to London, and three years ago Mother died. So here I am. That’s my life to date.”

She smiled at me. I smiled back. I said:

“You know, when you come to the end of your life, I have a feeling you’ll find it has been divided into four periods: the period of youth, the period of happiness, the period of trial, and the period of renewed happiness. That’s what you’ll find. I’m sure of it.”

I wasn’t being crafty now. It hurt me to think of her pain and sadness. I would have done anything to comfort her: anything, that is, except let Bartels have her.

He never had a chance after I had made up my mind to have her. Not a cat in hell’s chance.

“You’re going through the trial period now, Lorna. But hang on. It’s only a question of hanging on. Do believe me.”

“I hope so.”

She smiled at me again. Again I smiled back, and this time I held her eyes with my own for about as long as it takes a man to draw a quick, deep breath. And that in fact is what I was doing at the sight of the beauty of Lorna’s eyes.

Then I looked away, into the fire, because a voice, the crudely tongued voice which often prompts me, was whispering in my brain: “Softee, softee, catchee bloody monkey—don’t flirt, or you’ll frighten her off; she’ll think you’re a wolf, which you often are, but never mind: softee, softee, catchee bloody monkey…”

I’m cunning with women, I’ve got a kind of knack of seeming gentle, and sympathetic, and understanding, and all that sort of thing. And to some degree I think I must be, because you can’t act those qualities successfully for long: not well enough to deceive women, who are pretty cunning themselves, if it comes to that.

This sounds conceited, but it can’t be helped. It is the truth as I see it, and I’ve got to mention it or otherwise, in view of what happened, Lorna will appear to have been a pretty poor type. Fickle. A bit of a bitch. Which she wasn’t. Like Bartels, she never had a chance, once I got going on her.

There is another side to me, too. I’m interested in everybody, and I’ve made it my business to learn how to play on them, to draw emotions and reactions from them as the bow draws the notes from a fiddle. Against the softer side of my nature, there is a calculating, ruthless, cool streak.

So now I looked away, and did not flirt. Then suddenly, I said, as though it were something which had just occurred to me:

“What about coming out for a bite of dinner? What about driving over to the Crown, at Chiddingfold? Come on, it’ll make a change for you.”

I waited for her answer, feeling tense despite my previous confidence.

“Well, I think I’d like to,” said Lorna.

When she said that, I knew she was in the bag.

But I took it easy that night.

To begin with, I was overjoyed to be dining alone with her, and it was not until we had finished dinner and were having coffee and liqueurs, seated in the bar-lounge in one of the deep settees near the fire, that we touched upon the subject of Bartels.

Indeed, it was Lorna who broached the subject, with a typically direct question:

“What is wrong with Bartels’ marriage?” she asked suddenly, and leant forward to refill the coffee cups.

“Most men would say there is nothing wrong with it,” I answered. “But there is, of course.”

“Whose fault is it?”

I hesitated. “Nobody’s,” I said at length. “Nobody’s, really.”

I had assumed that Lorna would automatically believe that Beatrice was in the wrong, but I misjudged that eminently well-balanced and fair-minded character. Perhaps I had also misjudged Bartels, for I thought he would have played the role of the husband who was not understood by his wife. Her next words showed me that this was not so.

“That’s what Barty says,” she agreed. “He says nobody is to blame, really.” She hesitated and added: “The trouble with Barty is that he is a man who depends upon emotions for his happiness, and he is married to a woman who depends upon material conditions—possessions. Both of them are good people, fundamentally.”

“That’s the tragedy.”

“Barty’s trouble is that he has never had anyone in love with him.”

“Until now,” I said, and looked at her. “You know he is very much in love with you, of course, and I assume that you are in love with him. Right?”

It is curious that both of the women in Bartels’ life were incapable of telling lies. Lorna looked at me now and said:

“I don’t know.”

“Well, for God’s sake! I thought you were both deeply in love and couldn’t do without each other.”

She stared past me into the fire. She said nothing. I listened to the low murmur of conversation from other people in the lounge and said nothing. And waited.

“The trouble is,” she said at last, “I still have my memories of Ronnie. I can’t seem to shake them off. But I am so lonely, you know. People think a woman needs to be loved and that is true, but it is not the whole truth. She also needs somebody to love.”

“Hence poodles and pekes.”

“Hence poodles and pekes. Barty loves me and needs me. I can’t quite see why, but I accept the fact. In a way, I suppose I am terribly grateful to him for loving me.”

“He thinks you’re in love with him,” I said. And when she said nothing, I said again, more slowly and distinctly:

“He thinks you’re in
love
with him.”

She still said nothing, and I purposely did not look at her because I did not wish either to press her or to embarrass her. I was in love with her, and my heart went out to her as she tried to fathom her own feelings. I felt like saying: “Don’t bother to explain, darling, I know it all.”

Instead, the calculating side of my mind was at work: the side that plotted carefully, planned to get what it wanted and nearly always succeeded. So I said, with deceptive gentleness:

“Gratitude is perhaps an insecure foundation on which to build a life with Barty. He wants more.”

“And he would have more,” she retorted quickly, almost sharply. I retreated at once.

“I’m sure he would.”

“I do love the man. You don’t seem to realize that. I want to look after him, as he wants to look after me. I want to pour out on him love and tenderness and affection. I think he is hurt and disillusioned, and I want to heal him.”

A stab of jealousy and pain went through me.

“Very laudable. I’m sure you can do it.”

“Well, then?” she looked at me. I smiled and signalled to the waiter.

“Well, then—have another brandy?” I smiled at her, and offered her my cigarette case. She refused both the brandy and the cigarette. I ordered another drink for myself, put the cigarette case away and began to fill my pipe.

“Well?” she said again.

“Well, what?”

“Do you think I am wrong to wish to marry him?”

“I am not the judge of your conscience, and when I say that, I am not thinking of his wife. I am thinking of him. Perhaps of you, too.”

“I can make him happy. Happier than he has been. He is such a lovable chap,” she said, almost sadly, “I do so want to make him happy.”

I felt a little tug at my heart: I, too, was fond of old Barty. For some reason, I thought of him as I had first known him at school; being rolled in the mat, and pushed under the vaulting horse; and watching, pale-faced, from the school window until he could safely come out and run home. But I couldn’t afford to indulge in that line of thought for long.

“Look at me,” I said quietly, and when she had turned her head to face me, I said: “Are you in love with Barty?”

“I love him dearly.”

I shook my head. “Are you in love with him?”

When she hesitated, I dropped my little seed of doubt into the rich kindly soil of her heart, and left it to take root and bear fruit, if so it would.

“Actually, although she is not in love with him,” I said, quite casually, as though it were of no importance, “although she is certainly not
in love
with him, Beatrice loves him, too, in her own way. She’ll take it hardly, I fear. I wouldn’t care to do what Bartels is going to do.”

All the evening I was playing the decent fellow with Lorna; the sympathetic friend, the disinterested adviser; talking of all sorts of things as I drove her home along the frosty roads, back to the house in the lane where she lived; making her laugh now and again; interesting her with stories about the seamy side of big hotels; talking of travels abroad, and, at the end, saying how much I had enjoyed the evening.

I did not even accept her invitation to go into the house for a final drink.

I said goodbye to her on the porch, shaking hands almost primly, even though I longed to take her in my arms and crush her to me, and light the light of passion in her eyes, and feel the softness of her lips on mine, and the warm suppleness of her body.

I was taking no risks.

I wanted her so badly for my own that every nerve and brain cell was alert in my head, and the voice was crying: “Softee, softee, catchee monkey,” and I knew I must be patient or lose her.

T
hey say that jealousy is caused by fear, or a lack of self-confidence, or a feeling of insecurity; but I am under the impression that I felt supremely confident in so far as Lorna was concerned. Nevertheless, I felt the pangs of jealousy most acutely.

In the six days that followed, I visited Lorna on two other occasions, and each time I acted with circumspection, well knowing that to attempt to hasten matters would result in showing me to be the false friend that, in fact, I was. But on each occasion, I contrived to let fall some further hint, some little indication that Beatrice, in her own way, loved Bartels; that for Lorna to encourage a divorce without being romantically in love with Bartels would merely cause him, in the end, to feel the same sense of frustration as he felt at the moment.

In this, I think that I was correct, though I did not act out of a sense of what was right, but simply because I desired the woman for myself. I would have done the same even had I thought I was wrong.

The jealousy which I felt naturally attacked me most fiercely on those evenings when I knew, by one means or another, that Bartels was with her.

It wasn’t any use telling myself that I was a better man than Bartels, and that in the end I would win. I knew it. But it did not prevent pictures forming in my mind. Pictures of Bartels with his arm round Lorna, on the settee in her comfortable drawing room; of Bartels spending long hours with Lorna’s head upon his shoulder, his hand on hers, while the fat roly-poly corgi dozed in front of the fire.

Worst, of course, was the almost unbearable thought of Bartels kissing her, and her lips responding, of Bartels taking her in his arms and telling her how much he loved her.

It came to the point that, when I met Bartels, the sight of his wide mouth, which had formerly only amused me, now filled me with disgust. A dull, painful anger burned in my stomach at the thought that those colourless, thin lips should ever be allowed to press upon Lorna’s mouth.

On such evenings, when I knew they were together, I would find myself compelled to go out, to a theatre, or a cinema; anywhere, rather than remain at home and imagine what was going on at Thatchley. Sometimes, out of a morbid sense of twisted humour, I would call on Beatrice.

Beatrice suspected nothing.

She was accustomed to him going away for two or three nights a week on a provincial tour selling his wines. She trusted him completely, and she was convinced that, whatever her emotional failings, he needed her and his well-being depended upon her; that without her, without her organizing ability, her strength of mind, he would be miserable and lost. There was no doubt in her mind on that score whatever. She made this clear to me many times in casual little remarks.

“I don’t know where he’d be if he hadn’t me to organize him a bit,” she would say affectionately. Then she would sigh a little and smile. Right up to the end, to the time when he went to Manchester and bought the altrapeine with which to poison her, and even later, Beatrice Bartels thought that her husband needed her.

So much for women’s intuition. I never believed much in it. I believe even less now.

On Friday afternoon, 23 February, I decided to drive down to Bartels’ cottage. I knew that Bartels would be with Lorna all that afternoon and early evening, and the thought of it, as usual, filled me with a restless resentment.

I lunched at my club, but my mood was such that the food was repulsive to me, and I left a great deal of it untouched. After lunch I strolled into the smoking room, and ordered coffee and a brandy. I tried to read some papers and periodicals, but found nothing in them to interest me.

Such people as I talked to bored me, and I have no doubt that I bored them, too.

I felt so restless that I got up and went into the billiards room, and played a game with the marker. I played abominably. My imagination was at work, my mind was elsewhere. I was thinking that at any moment Bartels would be arriving. I could see him drawing up at the front door in his old twelve-horse-power car, and Lorna Dickson greeting him on the threshold.

I could see them going into the drawing room together, and sitting together. I could see Bartels fondling her, and the sight of it so disturbed me that in the middle of the game I suddenly walked to the end of the room and returned my cue to the stand.

The marker looked at me curiously. I made some excuse about an appointment, but it was clear that he thought I was suffering from pique at my lack of skill—not that it mattered a damn to me what he was thinking.

The theatre and cinema guide showed nothing which appealed to me. So on the spur of the moment, I decided to drive down to Bartels’ weekend cottage, near Balcombe. I would take advantage of the open invitation which was extended to me, and spend the night with them. Beatrice, I knew, would be there, and possibly I would take her to a local hotel, in the early evening, where we could usually find one or two people we knew.

At the back of my mind was the thought that I would know exactly when he had returned from visiting Lorna: directly I was certain he was no longer with her, my peace of mind would return.

I drove back to my flat, packed a few things in a suitcase, and set off. I wish a thousand times, now, that I had not gone.

But I could not have foreseen what I would find there, or the quandary in which I would be placed.

You reached the cottage by one of two ways. You could either follow the road round, and turn in at the front gate and arrive at the front door, or you could turn off down a narrower road, leave the car, pass through a small gate at the bottom of the garden, and walk up through the vegetable gardens, via the tree-fringed lawn, and enter the house by the French windows, in summer, or else by way of the kitchen door. This was a shorter route.

The cottage lay in a hollow, and although you had to slow up a little to take the turning into the narrower road, you could, with a certain amount of luck and dash, coast down the last three or four hundred yards with the engine switched off. If you slowed up in the slightest degree before reaching the corner, perhaps to pass a cyclist, you lost just enough momentum to necessitate switching the engine on again.

But nothing got in my way that day, and I coasted down to the back gate, feeling the usual childish pleasure which one experiences after minor triumphs of this kind.

It was a beautiful evening, cold but cloudless, and the day was just fading when I arrived. The sun had set, but there was a red blaze still in the sky beyond the wood by the side of the cottage.

I sat for a moment relaxing, for I had driven fast, and the speed and the control of the car had done me good, and for a while I had even forgotten Bartels and Lorna. I sucked in the clean, cold air, and wondered why the devil I lived in London.

A horse neighed in the distance, and some rooks were still cawing their belated way home. I could see the warm glow of a fire shining through the windows of the drawing room, and guessed that Beatrice, good housewife and efficient as ever, would have tea ready for anybody who might call in. Ready, even, for Barty, I thought bitterly.

It was all wonderfully peaceful and, with the vision it conjured up of muffins and toast, essentially English. The scene was not one in which to anticipate a shock of any kind, but the shock was awaiting me. Not a shock evoked by violence, by murder, or physical wounding, but a pretty big shock all the same.

I climbed out of the car, and as I did so a little wind sprang up and shook the trees at the bottom of the garden. The door by the driving seat had sunk a trifle on its hinges, so that instead of slamming it I had to lift it slightly and push it shut.

I wish now that I had had that hinge repaired when I had first intended, days before, but I had postponed doing so. It might have saved me a good deal of heartache, and—I suppose—remorse.

I passed through the vegetable garden, walking along the side, on the grass path, and so came to the little lawn, with the trellis-work and ramblers which partly screened off the vegetable garden.

There were a few apple and pear trees on each side of the lawn, and I followed the grass path through them, and came to a gravel path, which ran round the back of the house. It was an old path, still damp from the morning’s rain, and very mossy in places.

I thought of going round to the kitchen door, but instead crossed the path and went up to the French windows, thinking that Beatrice could let me in.

The blazing fire lit up the room, but otherwise there was no lighting. I could see the deep armchairs near the fire, and the writing table in the window with its silver ink-pots, and two little carved ivory elephants; and the glass-fronted bookcase against one wall, and the corner cupboard where they kept the drinks.

I could also see, at an angle to the window, the big settee, and Beatrice upon it, her arms round the neck of a man whose lips were pressed upon hers. He was bending over her, and because the top of his head was towards me, and the light was dim, I did not recognize John O’Brien until, after some seconds, and for some reason unknown, he looked up and saw me.

I heard him murmur something to Beatrice, and saw him stand up and automatically straighten his tie and smooth his dark hair with his hands. I saw Beatrice sit bolt upright, suddenly and quickly, and she, too, put her hands to her hair.

It was difficult to know what to do. I had a quick tempting thought that it might be better to walk away, back to the car, as though I had seen nothing; and greet them some other day as though the incident had never happened.

I might have done so, except that even while I hesitated, the first dim realization of what this involved for me was beginning to emerge.

I decided to compromise, to walk round to the kitchen door, slowly, giving them time to recover, and then allow John or Beatrice to make the running. If they said nothing, I would be content to say nothing, at any rate for the time being.

I moved away from the window, but I had not gone more than two or three paces when the French window was opened, and John’s voice called:

“Hey, Pete!”

I looked round, and tried to put a surprised tone into my voice.

“Why, hullo, John! I was just descending upon Beatrice and Barty for a breath of fresh air.”

“The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold,” said John, with a bitter little laugh. “Well, come in this way.”

“Thanks,” I said and retraced my steps, and entered the drawing room by the French window which he was holding open for me.

Beatrice was standing by the fire.

“Hullo, Beatrice,” I said. “Got a bed for a poor London sparrow with soot in his lungs?”

“Of course I have, Pete. You know that, or you wouldn’t be here.”

In the incredibly quick way in which women can do these things, she had managed to straighten her hair and clothes, and even plump up the cushions on the settee, all within the few seconds which had elapsed since I had turned away from the French windows.

She stood with her hands behind her back, her fine hazel eyes meeting mine without flinching. She was smiling, in friendly and hospitable fashion. Only her chin was a little higher than usual. There followed a short conversation which, in the circumstances, was the most futile I have ever taken part in. We were all trying so desperately hard to appear normal. The only real normal living creature in the room was the dog, Brutus. Sleepy with age, he lay with his big, square, white-and-brown bulk stretched out before the fire.

“God, what a lovely evening,” I said.

“Isn’t it absolutely heavenly?” said Beatrice.

“Should be fine tomorrow, too, judging by the sunset,” said John.

“I don’t know why I live in London.”

“Nor me,” said John. “Why not make the break, like I did?”

“Maybe I will, one day.”

“Have you had tea?” asked Beatrice.

“Not yet.”

“I’ll put the kettle on.”

“Don’t make it specially for me.”

“We haven’t had any yet, either.”

“I could do with a cup,” said John, and I thought: That doesn’t surprise me, either, brother.

“Or even two,” said John facetiously. Or even, I thought, a bloody great whisky and soda, but that’s just what you can’t have, because it’s too early.

“And some toast,” John plunged on bravely. “Lashings of toast. Eh, Beatrice?”

Maybe it was a case of telepathy, because he paused for a moment, and then said: “Or would you prefer a whisky and soda, to warm you up after the drive? I expect Beatrice could provide it.”

I suppose he would have made some pretext to join me in one, to judge by the hopeful way he was looking at me.

“I think I’d just as soon have a cup of tea, thanks,” I said.

There was a pause. Beatrice moved to the door.

“I’ll take my bag up to my room,” I said at last.

I went upstairs. Beatrice went into the kitchen to put the kettle on. After a few moments, I heard John join her, and they talked in low tones. I began to unpack, very slowly, for I wanted to give them time to sort things out. After about a quarter of an hour I went down to the drawing room, and found tea laid out on a gate-legged table before the fire.

Beatrice and John were sitting side by side on the settee, eating crumpets. I sat down in one of the deep armchairs, and helped myself to a crumpet from the dish which John passed to me. Beatrice poured me out a cup of tea.