Palladian (22 page)

‘I don’t know how men say these sorts of things to one another,’ Tom said, looking at Marion’s back in the mirror. ‘I am not callous, but I find I can only say it as it is – that Sophy was not your child, but mine.’

Marion made a full stop and then turned it into a comma and waited.

‘Don’t let it change Sophy for you. Children are people. Not bits of grown-ups.’ He kicked at a log on the fire and flames crackled up round his shoe. ‘Margaret taxed me with it just now. It cannot be denied. I’ve always realised that. As soon as people begin to look into the matter, it’s all up.’

‘Are they beginning to look into it?’ Marion asked coldly.

‘Margaret was. I told her you had always known. That was the famous lie.’

‘Thank you.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘No, I
meant
thank you. In an obscure way it seems to save some of my pride. What put the idea into Margaret’s head?’

‘She seems to have been hobnobbing (that seems to be exactly the word for it) with a friend of mine at the pub – a Mrs Veal, a rather tough and tawdry person I am closely, nay intimately, acquainted with.’

Marion laid down his pen and at last turned round in his chair to look at Tom. In a different voice he asked: ‘This is absolutely true, Tom? Beyond all doubt?’

Tom nodded. ‘You shouldn’t have married her,’ he said loudly. ‘She was always mine.’

‘I didn’t force her, or carry her off.’

‘You used her weakness and her impatience. You had money:
I had none. She would have had to wait years for me, and waiting for anything unnerved her so that she no longer wanted it. Then you believed her to be good. I knew her to be bad and sometimes she hated me for knowing it.’

‘I don’t know what you mean by all this “good” and “bad”. Nor all this about money. She was a person of spirit and intelligence, not someone out of a comic song, not this bird in a gilded cage you describe.’

‘If she were going out to tea, I had only to look at her across the table at lunch to throw her into a state of panic and indecision.’

‘Oh, damn you! Damn you!’

Marion walked up and down and with each step he encountered a revelation he could not endure.

‘How long after we were married? Oh, not long, of course,’ he said quickly to cover the wound and avoid seeming too pathetic.

‘It had never stopped,’ Tom said, to blot out from Marion’s mind any crude idea of his own inadequacy. ‘Not since she was eighteen.’

‘Oh, my God! Why did you let me do this to you both?’

‘She
did it. She turned me into a sort of glowering Heathcliff. But she
was
punished. A great deal. More than she deserved.’

‘Tom, we are grown-up people. I don’t understand this in you – this talk of good and bad and deserving punishment. What next? The coils of fate?’

‘No, not that far.’ Tom smiled. ‘You see, I am speaking all the old thoughts that used to come from my conscience when I was very young, and good and bad had separate meanings.’

‘What does Margaret intend to do?’

‘Nothing, I expect. She likes to irritate, not devastate people.’

‘It is odd that you could have told Mrs Veal.’

‘I didn’t. Don’t look at me like that. The woman has no sen
sibility, but she seems to have perception. She cottons-on to things. Her fiendish jealousy makes her “intuitive”.’

‘Did you guess she had – cottoned-on to this?’

‘No. No, but I think I felt her vaguely threatening.’

‘What will
she
do?’

‘I will see that she does nothing.’ When he had said this he sat down, feeling full of tired horror.

‘Don’t take her life,’ Marion sneered. ‘We shall have had our fill of gossip and melodrama.’

‘There is an easier way than that of keeping her quiet.’ ‘But it goes on longer,’ he thought, resting his forehead against the palms of his hands.

‘Please make no sacrifice on my account.’

Marion sat down again at the table and picked up the pen.

‘Who are you writing to?’

‘I am trying to write to Cassandra. I thought of asking her to marry me. So if you and she have any little secrets, it would be doing me a favour if you would tell me now. Or forever hold your peace.’

‘Don’t write to her. Go to her!’

‘I know you are always successful with women, but I didn’t ask your advice.’

While Marion wrote, Tom sat huddled up in his overcoat by the fire. Presently he got up and went towards the door.

‘Tom!’

‘Yes.’

They looked at one another awkwardly.

‘I’m sorry, Tom. I feel so damned foolish.’

‘I know.’

‘
You
are still the same person to me.’

He noted the inflexion, but said nothing.

‘Just now, I was trying to work myself into a rage against you, into seeing you as someone different, but I couldn’t.’

‘Do we shake hands now, do you think?’ Tom inquired.

Marion laughed and then, his glance skidding away, said: ‘Only one thing … you must be truthful about it … you and Violet … I suppose you thought me pathetic and absurd … did you laugh about me, or hate me …?’

‘Nothing. She would never have let you be mentioned,’ Tom lied. He went out then and shut the door quickly, knowing that only a state of agony could have forced such a question from his cousin.

Marion wrote the address upon the square, white envelope and sat staring at it. After a long while he tore it across and dropped it on the fire.

Mrs Veal, who had given up hope of Tom, was dishevelled when he walked in. She came closer to the bar, wishing to hide the old evening shoes she was wearing. He knew that she would say ‘Hullo, stranger!’ She did so.

He sat down on the stool in the corner and looked at her without answering.

She thought: ‘All the time he was bound to come back. Why didn’t I know?’

It was soon after opening-time and he was the first customer. Only Gilbert was walking in and out in his shirt-sleeves, carrying crates.

‘What are you having?’

‘Scotch.’ He laid down a note.

She leant her elbow on the bar and watched him drinking, and when Gilbert had gone out for a moment she said in a low voice: ‘I wanted to say how sorry I was about … I felt so much for you, but I …’

Tom ignored her. Gilbert walked in.

‘How’s his lordship?’ she asked in a different voice.

‘He has gone away,’ Tom said, knowing she meant Marion.
He felt angry with his cousin. ‘It is on account of him that I am here,’ he explained to himself. ‘If it were just me to be considered, I should never darken the threshold of this place again. Although it could not easily be darker than it is.’

‘Yes,’ he said carelessly. ‘He has gone after the governess and I think he will ask her to marry him.’

‘What if she refuses?’ Mrs Veal asked, not able to believe in Marion’s success.

‘She won’t. It is never done.’

Gilbert took his place behind the bar and poured the first light ale of the evening for Charlie, who came in smoking a cigar.

‘Good God. What’s this? Old rope?’ asked Gilbert.

‘That’s right. Try one.’ Charlie took another from his waistcoat pocket and Gilbert held it to his ear, sniffed at it and then put it up on a shelf until he could sell it later to someone else.

‘I’ll have it when I’ve got me strength up. Can’t have two of us turning away good custom.’

‘That’s right.’ Charlie drew at the cigar, savouring it, holding it out at arm’s length. ‘I’d like to see them native girls rolling them on their bare thighs.’

‘Go on,’ said Mrs Veal, turning to him.

‘God’s truth.’

‘Black girls?’

She wrinkled her nose.

‘Well, coffee-coloured. Better still. What say you, Gilbert?’

‘Suits me,’ he said absent-mindedly, bringing in a handful of filled tankards, setting them down before another of the Boys, who said at once: ‘What’s old Charlie got hold of? Burning the hair off his chest?’

‘Don’t be disgusting,’ said Mrs Veal.

‘I don’t think you quite understood what I said.’ He winked at her as he drank. ‘Do Corona to-day, Gil?’

‘I certainly did.
Very
nice.’

Tom rolled a half-crown along the bar towards Mrs Veal, then slammed his hand flat over it. She took his glass and filled it. Under cover of the other’s talk, he said (insulting in that playful way to which no one is supposed to take exception): ‘By the way, I am bloody angry with you.’

‘What have I done, pray?’ she asked, perching herself on the high stool behind the bar, shrugging her shoulders. She tried to be cool, but was only arch.

‘You see,’ Gilbert was saying loudly as a customer went out. ‘Just one quick drink and good night for everyone this evening.’ He looked at Charlie’s cigar.

‘No wonder,’ said Mrs Veal, turning deliberately away from Tom towards Charlie and fanning the blue smoke with her hand.

‘If you weren’t sitting on it I’d slap your wrist.’

‘That’s enough of that sort of talk,’ she said daintily.

‘Drink up then and forgive. What is it? Guinness?’

Tom never bought her a drink, and she accepted Charlie’s in such a way, she hoped, as to underline Tom’s meanness. She put her lip into the brown froth and then dabbed at her mouth with a lace handkerchief. Presently, against her will, her eyes came back to Tom.

‘Please don’t,’ she said suddenly in a low voice.

‘I hadn’t realised you wanted to drive me away,’ he said, knowing he sounded childish. ‘That is the effect you are having. Your imagination is a little too much of a good thing. You tell your lies by implication, which is always the most efficient way.’ He looked round the bar casually as he spoke.

‘Have
I told a lie?’

‘Yes, but unfortunately it is a lie against which the truth would shrivel away. It would be too delightful. People’ – he glanced round the bar – ‘would find it irresistible.’

‘How would people ever come to hear of it?’ She glanced round too.

He waited for her to finish her Guinness, then he said: ‘If people do not come to hear of it there is no more to be said.’

Charlie’s cigar was the joke of the evening, but it could not last for ever. There was even a little horse-play of the kind which Gilbert permitted his regular customers, but when Tom laid down the money for another whisky he lowered his eyelids at his wife, which was his way of warning her against encouraging drunkenness. She pretended not to see.

‘And a Guinness,’ said Tom suddenly, adding more money to his change and pushing it towards her.

‘Cheers then.’ She lifted the glass. They seemed cut off from the others.

‘Good luck.’

And so they made their bargain, without putting it into too many words: as people do make bargains when ashamed of the sound of the words.

The light was enough to read by. The moon, an uncertain shape, like a broken plate, set this incandescent radiance over the house and garden; fell, not impartially, as rain does, but capriciously, it seemed, striking one chimney-pot but not the next, leaving the steps in blackness, yet revealing a single ivyleaf silvered by a snail in the shrubbery.

The walls of the house were whitened, leprous, and even the moon which illuminated them had a scarred look as if pitted by disease.

Tom’s feet seemed to strike the ground at different levels, coming up the drive, changing from one course to another, the laurels brushing his shoulders as he strayed from side to side.

The moonlight was pearly, very muted and dusty over the wreckage of the conservatory. When Tom came to it he found
he could not indulge in his familiar, transitory annoyance with Marion. Like a cataract gathering speed, the sheets of cracked and splintered glass had come down a night or two ago, started by some small thing, something never to be known, a twig falling, an owl flying, or merely the last imperceptible change of quantity, a foreshadowing of what might happen to the house itself, how, after a long process of decay, one day it would suddenly not be a house any more.

Tom looked at the ragged palm-leaves which were dipped in silver and the little flags and pennants of glass still left on pieces of the shattered framework. He felt that all of the past was quite broken now, his fears broken last of all. Violet gone. Sophy gone. Marion gone. And the moonlight fell with malice upon his tears. ‘A crying jag now,’ he thought, blundering towards the house. Self-pity dragged at him, sucking him down, as waves tug down the shingle on the beach into oblivion. Going upstairs he clung to the thought of Marion and went unsteadily along the passage, burst open the door ready to dramatise himself and unburden himself as he had done countless times before. But the door opened upon darkness.

Like a child he began to cry, one hand over his face, the other fumbling along the walls for the light-switch. The room was cold and tidy, with no fire, no coffee-pot, the books stacked neatly and the cushions uncreased. When he remembered that Marion was away and remembered why, he could not believe in his bad luck. Despair took him right down. He touched the bottom of the sea. Aimlessly, he went round the room. He picked up Violet’s and Cassandra’s Greek books, opened and interlocked, he caught a glimpse of his stained, tired eyes in a mirror, he opened a drawer in a little table by the fireplace and took out a cameo-brooch. He carried it in his hand to the light and sat down at the big table in the middle of the room, remembering some fuss, some quarrel about this brooch and
puzzling over it. Ideas seemed to come first from one side of his head, then the other, they mingled and dissolved. In this way, wearing his overcoat, with the brooch lying in his open hand, he fell asleep, his head dropping on his crooked arm, in Violet’s room.