Marnie (16 page)

I said: ‘Is it much rest when she can’t sleep for the slamming of the door behind her? And she says the food is terrible.’

At least that took the look of strained patience off his face.

‘Young lady,’ he said, ‘I don’t know if you are aware that an influenza epidemic is raging in this city. We can’t find beds for all the urgent cases of one sort and
another that exist, and most of the staff of this hospital is run off its feet. In an ideal community your mother would have a private ward, but it doesn’t run to that; nor will it in my
lifetime or yours. So we do the best we can with the present material and in the present circumstances. I’ll try to get your mother moved from the door. I shall hope to operate on her next
week. The sooner you have her home the happier we shall be. But – she’s in a shop, isn’t she? – I’d warn you that in future she’ll have to take sedentary work of
some sort. She’ll just have to keep off her feet or she’ll be back here in three months with the same trouble or worse. And although she’s in no danger of dying she’s
certainly in danger of becoming permanently crippled. Now I’ll have to ask you to excuse me.’

I went back to Mother, feeling I’d done what I could but still boiling.

‘Don’t worry,’ I said to Mother. ‘They’re going to move you soon from this door. I seen to that . . . I have seen to that. They’ve got to keep you here for a
bit to get your leg healed, but it’ll be all right, I promise you.’

I sat on her bed thinking over what the surgeon had said at the end. Just then the nurse came along.

‘You’ll have to go now,’ she said. ‘This isn’t a proper visiting day, you know. You’ve only been allowed in as a special favour.’

‘Thanks,’ I said, and added ‘for nothing’ under my breath. ‘Don’t worry,’ I said to Mother. ‘We’ll soon have you out of here. Did I tell
you, I’ve got the promise of a marvellous job?’

‘You have? Where?’

‘Swansea. I don’t know the details yet. I only heard of it last week but I think I’ll get it. If I do . . .’

‘Is it respectable?’

‘Of course it is. What do you take me for? But as a secretary. I may get paid quite a lot. Anyway it may mean you won’t have to go to work right away when you come home.’

When I got back to Bristol I gave in my notice at Deloitte, Plender & Griffiths and went to live in Swansea. I took a job in a store in the name of Maud Green. Three months later I slid out
with three hundred and ninety pounds. That was my first haul and I was pretty nervous about it then.

At the time I was dead sure I was doing it all on account of Mother. Now it seems to me I was doing it mainly to satisfy myself.

‘Well, really, I always said you were a deep one,’ Dawn said, picking at a tiny mole on her cheek. ‘Well, really, and how long has it been going on?
Don’t tell me. I really believe it was love at first sight, wasn’t it? I thought one time it was Terry: you remember after the dinner; and I am sure he was interested in you; but of
course you’ve done better. Mark – Mr Rutland I’d better start calling him to you, I suppose – oh, very well, dear, thank you, just between ourselves – Mark is a
different kettle of fish. More
serious
, if you know what I mean. With Terry you put it on the slate and it washes off again. Where are you going to live, Little Gaddesden? We shall miss you,
you know . . . Tell me, do these things grow? I’m sure it’s bigger than it was last year. Of course some men call them beauty spots . . . Are we all coming to the wedding? Oh, very
private. Well I know how you must
feel
. And I expect with you both having been married before. You
are
lucky, you know, two men before you’re twenty-four; some girls have to
slog it enough getting one.’

Sam Ward said: ‘Well, Mrs Taylor, so we have to – hm – congratulate you, I suppose. Such efficiency – business efficiency – should make you a very
successful housewife, shouldn’t it. Naturally I hope you’ll be very happy. But then I’m sure you will be. Would you get me the costing report on the Kromecote? We want to see what
the danger is of killing the gloss.’

‘My dear,’ Terry said, brushing a hand over his suede waistcoat. ‘My dear, you
have
done it this time.’

‘What have I done?’

‘Well, my dear, Mark of all people. Not really your
style
, I should have thought.’

‘What is my style?’

‘A rather tortuous type. A man with a few wrinkles in his soul. Mark’s too downright.’

‘Have you told him?’

‘He knows what I think, I’m sure. It would be unfair of me to dot the i’s and cross the t’s.’

He was breathing through his nose, the way he did at poker sometimes. And he was at his most cissyish – which was queer, because sometimes he wasn’t that way at all. I thought he
doesn’t really care all that much for me, but he cares that Mark is getting what
he
hasn’t had.

‘Apart from that,’ he said, ‘you’re a
mystery
, Mary, and mystery women are always a challenge. Dawn was talking about you to me the other evening.’

‘What was she saying?’

‘Never mind, my dear; nothing to your detriment in
my
eyes, I assure you. You’ve got a past, I’d guess, but what sort I just wouldn’t know. Not the
understood
sort, I’m sure.’

‘Honestly, Terry,’ I said, ‘this talking in riddles doesn’t amuse me at all. I doubt if it amuses anyone. If you think something, why not say it?’

‘No, no, dear. I wouldn’t want to offend you. In fact I hope we shall be bosom friends. On behalf of the Holbrooks I have pleasure in welcoming you into the family.’

‘On behalf of the Rutlands, thank you.’

‘Is it to be a
lavish
wedding?’

‘No. Very quiet.’

Very quiet. So quiet as to be almost secret. Just his mother and two witnesses. But it was happening and there was no escape. It had crept up on me like a cat on a mouse; while
it was ten days away it hadn’t quite mattered so much; then it was seven, then four, then tomorrow. I should have gone off the night before, risked everything and run. But I didn’t. I
stayed and went to the register office and a red-haired square-jawed man in a shiny blue suit said some words to us and we said some words back and something was written on a piece of paper and we
signed our names. My true name, that was what gave me the horrors. I wouldn’t have minded so much if it had been happening to Mary Taylor or Mollie Jeffrey. My sham life didn’t include
Marnie Elmer.

And now for the first time I really had changed my name. I was called Margaret Rutland, and Mark kissed me on the mouth in front of his mother and the red-haired registrar and the two witnesses,
and I flushed because, although maybe he saw it as a promise, I saw it as a threat.

Afterwards we went back to his mother’s and had champagne cocktails which I didn’t like, but we hadn’t long to spend because we were catching the three o’clock plane for
Majorca. While we were standing about talking and trying to be natural I thought of Forio, just to keep myself sane.

Before we left his mother took me on one side and said: ‘Marnie, I won’t say, Make him happy, but I will say, Be happy yourself. I think you’re capable of much more than you
think.’

I looked at her and half smiled.

She said: ‘It will be twenty-eight years ago next month since he was born to me. I felt then I had everything – and I had! A husband, a son of eight, a mother and father still alive
– and a baby son. I felt as if I were the centre of the universe. Since then they’ve all gone – except Mark. I expect it will seem a long stretch of time to you, but it
doesn’t look very long to me, looking back. Life slips so easily through your fingers.’

I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing.

‘Life slips so easily through your fingers. So make the most of it while you can. Grasp it and savour it, my dear. Now, good-bye . . .’

We stayed at a hotel in Cas Catala about four miles out of Palma. Over the evening meal I asked Mark how he had traced me.

‘Must we talk of that tonight?’

‘You promised.’

‘Well sometime on our honeymoon, I said. Are you itching to know?’

‘Not
itching
. But curious. I – thought I had been clever.’

‘So you had.’ He rubbed his cheek. He was quite good-looking tonight because as usual holiday clothes suited him. Except that the shape of his cheek-bones wasn’t right you
could have taken him for a Spaniard. ‘There was nothing ever more premeditated than that theft, was there?’

‘I told you how it was. But I want to know how you found me.’

He looked me over. That was truly what he did. ‘Can you imagine how I felt that Friday morning? I was in love with you, and I suddenly found I’d been made a complete fool of. I was
so upset I could hardly think – and very, very angry. I could have strangled you.’

‘You looked as if you could when you found me.’

‘I might have done earlier but you were out of reach. The one important thing in my life from that moment was to catch you. I decided to cover up the theft and at the same time follow you
and find you, wherever you’d gone and however long it took.’

‘You weren’t sure, then?’

‘I hadn’t an idea where you were. But all the time I was working, putting the money in the envelopes, I was really thinking about finding you. That’s what surprises me, that I
only made two mistakes with the pay envelopes; it shows one’s mind can work in separate compartments—’

‘Yes. Go on.’

He half grinned. ‘I think perhaps I’ll keep the secret for a day or two more. Why can’t you sit and enjoy the view?’

‘
No
. I want to know, Mark! I’ll enjoy the view afterwards.’

‘But it might spoil it for you. It was largely luck the way I found you.’

He poured out the last of the wine and sipped at his glass. ‘Odd how much better this Rioja tastes here than in England.’

‘It was largely luck?’

‘Well, I thought to myself, what did she show herself
really
interested in? Not me, certainly. But wasn’t she genuinely interested in horses? Was that a sham too, all that
enthusiasm and knowledge? It couldn’t be. So I thought of horse racing.’

‘Yes, I see.’

‘I thought, what will she do with the money? Go to race meetings, probably, and bet. What race meetings are on next week and the week after and the week after? If I follow them every
Saturday I’m bound to catch her out eventually even if it takes a year.’

‘But it only took a day.’

‘Two.’ He offered me a cigarette. I shook my head.

He said: ‘I went carefully over everything we’d said to each other at all our meetings – piece by piece. And when you feel about a girl the way I felt about you it isn’t
difficult to remember because – well because you think a lot about it in any case and that fixes it in your mind. And presently I came across something you had said at Newmarket. You advised
me to back a grey filly called Telepathy and you said you’d seen her training as a one-year-old.’

‘Oh!’ I said. ‘Oh!’

‘Yes . . . Anyway, it was the only trail I had. I looked up Telepathy in
Ruff’s Guide
and saw she belonged to a Major Marston of Newbury, but that she had been bred by a Mr
Arthur Fitzgibbon at Melton Magna, near Cirencester. On the Sunday morning I phoned Marston and got details from him and then went down to Melton Magna. Unfortunately Fitzgibbon had left, and it
took me most of the morning tracing him to Bath. Even then he couldn’t help me; he knew no one who answered to your description. So I went back to Melton Magna, and just got in the Oak Leaf
before closing time at two. Saunders, the innkeeper, didn’t know anyone of your description either, so then I asked him if – apart from the ex-Fitzgibbon place, which was private
– there were any riding stables around where it was possible to hire a horse. He gave me the names of three. Garrod’s was the third I tried.’

‘Oh,’ I said again, dismally.

‘I almost gave it up just before getting to Garrod’s. The sun was setting and I was very tired and feeling very played out.’

I looked at him. ‘It was just as if you had come out of the ground.’

‘Like your conscience.’

‘Like the devil.’

He laughed. I stared out at the view now, thinking over my mistake. We were on a closed veranda looking over a small cove. A quarter moon was going down, and the small boats anchored in the bay
cut the moon’s track like into a glimmering jigsaw. I suppose it was beautiful. But I thought only of my mistake. How I could have done it. If I hadn’t been such a fool none of this
need have happened and I should have been free and happy.

I looked down at the gold band on my finger. I had been feeling sick and frightened but now I felt sick and angry.

‘You might not have found me,’ I said. ‘You might never have found me again. What would have happened to your money then?’

‘I should have had to make it good out of my own pocket and written it down to experience.’

‘You have so much money?’

‘No. But I thought you were worth the risk.’

‘I’m not.’

‘I think you are.’

‘I’m not. I know I’m not. You should just have taken your money back and then let me go.’

‘Darling, what’s the matter?’ he said later that night. ‘Are you afraid?’

‘Yes. I can’t stand it, Mark. I’ll die.’

‘It seems improbable. Tell me what’s the matter. Do you hate me?’

‘I hate the thought of
this
. I screw up. I feel –
sick
.’

He put his hand on my bare leg just above the knee, and I moved quickly to cover it. He said: ‘Why do you shrink from me like that?’

‘I don’t shrink from you. It’s just the contact.’

‘Isn’t that the same thing?’

‘Not quite.’

‘Marnie, do you love me?’

‘I don’t love this.’

‘Aren’t you fighting against something in yourself?’

‘Not in myself.’

‘Yes. The physical act of love is a normal outcome of the emotional state of being in love. Surely.’

‘Maybe. For some people.’

‘Of course without emotion there is only sex. But without sex there is only sentimentality. Between a man and a woman the two elements of love become one. Don’t they?’