The Hunter and the Trapped (2 page)

Simon had been thoroughly satisfied by the concert. It was indeed a splendid occasion, for the two Oistrakhs, father and son, were playing and in their hands the music sang and soared and glittered with a brilliance that was rare and intoxicating. They both left the Festival Hall excited, bemused, above themselves.

At the first road crossing Penelope stepped off the kerb into the oncoming traffic and Simon, recalled by the instant turmoil of shrieking brakes and horns, seized her hand and dragged her back. So uplifted were they that they only laughed and went on their way, a little more cautiously, but still with hands linked, across Waterloo Bridge and into the Strand and behind the Charing Cross hospital into St. Martins Lane and beyond, until Simon found the small restaurant he was looking for and they parted to take seats opposite one another.

Penelope then saw, from the way he looked at the menu and from his vague glance at herself that his thoughts, unlike hers, were far away, so far that he was scarcely aware of her presence. With a sudden chill at her heart she understood that his extreme pleasure had nothing whatever to do with herself except that he was grateful to her for providing the tickets for the concert. Indeed, after ordering for them both, a thing he had always done since their first meal alone together, he gave her his tender friendly smile and said, “You couldn't have chosen a better programme, could you?”

She laughed, but heard it hollow.

“I didn't, of course. I chose it for celebrity and they certainly lived up to it. They were marvellous, weren't they?”

He did not bother to answer this, which made her feel her remark was too trivial and banal to merit a reply. Simon was looking at the wall behind her head. His eyes were sad now but a ghost of his smile still lingered. He looked both very young and very vulnerable.

“I heard Oistrakh the first time he came to England,” he said. “The same total revelation of the music, the same extraordinary beauty. I was completely carried away, as I was today. In spite of the fact that my companion on that occasion was …” he paused long enough to gather Penelope's unwilling, shrinking gaze, “… was someone I was, and indeed am, very fond of.” He repeated on a lingering note, “Very, very fond of.”

The waiter came with steaming soup. Penelope put a scalding spoonful into her mouth, welcoming the pain because it was less than the sudden agony of her stricken heart. The shock had been severe, as Simon meant it to be.

But Penelope was not without spirit. The older man again, her inner protest struggled to inform her, flaunting his experience. O.K. She'd play up to that.

She said, rather too loudly, summoning all her courage, “You mean a woman you were in love with?”

A shade passed over Simon's face, a hint of anger that passed immediately. The usual charming smile, the light amused voice, came back.

“We were very deeply attached.” He looked away from her, glanced here and there round the restaurant, noted with satisfaction that his appearance had not been overlooked and returned his gaze to Penelope. He leaned forward towards her.

“We still are,” he said softly.

This time Penelope felt nothing. The news had already frozen her. The hurt was too great and too unexpected. For weeks she had observed him, had listened to discussions of him, noted that everyone found him sexually unapproachable. His name carried no scandal, unless a hint of essential impotence counted as such. Plainly his private life was a mystery to the students at the college. They were unwilling to believe it did not exist but they had no evidence whatever to the contrary.

Watching him now, as he waited for her reaction, Penelope was roused to a kind of protest.

“Why don't you marry, then?” she asked, bluntly.

Simon's smile grew even more compassionate, more all-embracing.

“She has children. I could not ask her to leave them,” he said.

“So she's married already?”

“Of course.”

“Why of course?”

“Otherwise I would have married her.”

His arrogance struck her sharply.

“Would her husband have divorced her?”

Again she saw a flash of anger darken Simon's face, but again it passed as quickly as before.

He spoke softly, his eyes again on the wall behind her, his vision turned inwards.

“He, too,” he said, “worships the ground she walks on.”

The waiter changed their plates, brought them generous fillet steaks, poured their wine. Penelope wondered if she could still swallow, but was determined to force the food down. She could not feel sicker than she did already.

Simon fell upon his meal with relish. His enjoyment of the concert had given him a good appetite. He was pleased to see that Penelope was eating well, too. It was not his fault that a string of mortally wounded figures strewed the trail behind him. Cheerful survivors always pleased him. He began to talk to Penelope about her college friends, particularly Caroline Feathers.

“You don't share a flat with her, do you?”

“No. I live at home with Daddy. I must.”

“Why is that?”

“I keep house for him. Since Mother died.”

He was surprised to find that he knew so little of her background. Usually he was, and knew himself to be, very curious about his companions.

“She died four years ago,” Penelope said, beginning to feel more normal. She had always found him easy to talk to until she began to fall in love with him. Now that the love had been struck down with such a savage blow she felt strangely released and able to meet his questions in the old friendly easy way.

“Daddy isn't at home much,” she said. “I mean except at weekends. But I don't think it ever occurred to him to give up the house, even though it's much too big for us. I was still at school when she died. We have a sort of cook-housekeeper, Mrs. Byrnes. A dear. She manages everything, really. I just have to be hostess when people come.”

“Your father is a barrister, isn't he?”

“Yes.”

There was a pause while Simon considered the end of the meal. He persuaded Penelope to have fruit while he ate cheese and ordered coffee to follow.

“Do you never go away on your own, then?” he asked at length.

“Not often. We haven't got many relations. I used to go to the Allinghams' cottage. They asked me after Mother died. Daddy is a great friend of Bill Allingham. But you know all that, don't you? I met you at the Allinghams.”

She wondered a little that he had asked her for her father's profession.

“Yes,” said Simon. “You were telling me about their cottage.”

“Richard, that's their boy, was only ten then and Susan two years younger, about. But Bill's nephew turned up at times. He's in the Navy. Daddy used to have him to crew for him.”

“To what?”

“We've got a yacht. Daddy has, I mean. We always cruise in the summer. Mother didn't like sailing. I adore it.”

“So you are a permanent crew?”

“Oh, yes. John never gets away now. Too tied up in the Navy. Do you ever sail?”

“Certainly not. I detest waves, even small ones. Crossing the Channel is a misery.”

Penelope felt this as an extra bar between them, but as Simon encouraged her to go on talking about herself and her family she forgot this. When they left the restaurant she was outwardly cheerful, happy, grateful for the meal he had given her, in fact thoroughly pleased with her evening. On parting he pressed her hand between both of his and turned away very content with his conduct of affairs. Penelope went home by bus in a mounting cloud of despair, to spend half the night in bitter tears and the rest in exhausted sleep from which she awoke with swollen eyelids and a raging headache. Mrs. Byrnes diagnosed the case correctly but did not think it merited any special treatment at Penelope's age. Hubert Dane decided that his daughter was sickening for 'flu and ordered her to bed for the day, in spite of her protests, pointing out that she had no right to spread infection among the other students.

After leaving Penelope Simon walked slowly through the crowded streets to the flat of his friend George Clark in Hampstead. Simon himself had a flat in Kilburn.

George was in and welcomed his friend. A physicist, who had left teaching for industry because the pay was so much better and the laboratory equipment so much more modern, George always enjoyed Simon's total ignorance of science and his acute, if superficial outlook on the world and its ways.

Simon described his evening in some detail.

“Another victim?” George asked, smiling.

Simon laughed.

“Is it my fault if they take me so seriously?”

“Isn't it?”

“I protest.”

“You may protest, but you can't deny it. You adore admiration.”

“Who doesn't? I consider I'm very good for them. ‘L'éducation sentimentale.' No fees in it, though God knows I sometimes have to work very hard.”

“And this poor girl? Was it the usual coup de grace? Did you trot out the beloved mistress, your own faithfulness, the great sacrifice?”

Simon laughed again, half from real amusement, half embarrassed.

“She exists, you know.”

“Does she?”

George had never quite believed in his friend's grand passion. He never quite believed any of Simon's stories, whether they were about himself, as they usually were, or of wider scope, about people he had known. George enjoyed Simon because he was different from everyone else he met in his daily round at the laboratory and because he presented to George's very peaceable, highly intellectual personality no emotional problems of any kind whatever.

Diana Allingham stood close to the big open window of her drawing room on the third floor of the house in Welmore Street.

A sunblind in the form of a canopy jutted out from the top of the window, shading the spot where she stood. But the hot June air, full of London dust and petrol fumes, seared her lungs at every breath. The sun bit at her through the canopy. She felt her thin dress stick to the naked skin of her back as she moved restlessly, trying to see down into the street far below, but not really caring whether she did so or not. It was a habit from the past, from the time when Bill, sweeping successfully to the top of his profession, had put up his plate on the door down there in the street, adding it to half a dozen others and therewith acquiring a small dark consulting room at the back of the house. He had also managed to secure this flat, three storeys up, where he and Diana had lived ever since.

She often wondered now why Bill had insisted upon staying in the flat. When the two children were young it had been far too small. Her objections of that period were over-ruled by the appearance of the country cottage. Now that the children were at boarding school, with the holidays spent at the cottage, except at Christmas, the flat was once more large enough, even too large. But on mid-summer days, such as this one, it was hell, Diana decided.

She pulled up the window at the bottom and the roar of the traffic grew louder than before. She pulled it down again and leaned her forehead on the cool glass. As she did so two hands took her from behind.

She swayed back with a little cry and Simon's hard head came round her shoulder to kiss her neck and slide his lips down to her breast.

“I didn't hear you come in,” she said stupidly, breathing deeply under his touch.

“Why should you? You were watching the street, though what you find there …”

She could not be bothered to explain the habit again. He knew it too well. Besides, it now had no meaning, or no worthy one. When they first lived here – no, longer – until she met Simon – her watching had been to discover if Bill had returned to the house. Now it was to discover if he were absent.

She released herself, to move away from him and sink into a chair.

“I didn't expect you today,” she said, dully. The heat had drained her. It was not an afternoon for lovemaking.

“Isn't it one of the safe days?”

She winced a little. His quite frank, deliberate deception of Bill always shocked her. He had never ceased to admire and respect Bill, to treat him as a friend and accept his friendship in return. He was the most a-moral being she had ever met.

“You aren't expecting William back, are you?” he insisted. “That wasn't why you were glued to the window so intently that you didn't hear me come in?”

“No,” she said, lifting her arms from the chair and putting them down again on a different part of the cool chintz. “No. He won't be back. I hope you didn't meet anyone on the way up.”

“The lift was empty.”

She frowned.

“Did you have to wait for it?”

“No. It was there and the formidable Mrs. Stone was nowhere about and no one saw me and here I am and I want you.”

He had been standing near the window where she had left him when she moved away. He now came quickly to her, took her hands, pulled her to her feet, quickly and skilfully unfastened her dress and lifted her from the little heap of linen that had dropped to her feet.

She moaned softly as his hands moved over her. Even on a day like this her desire burned up her separate identity, her possible protests, even her anticipation of pleasure or her fear of spoiling it. She was in pain until he took her; her subjection was total.

Simon, bright-eyed, well pleased with himself and with her, watched her smilingly as she gradually came back from her ecstasy. When he saw that she looked at him with cool eyes he looked at his watch.

“Time to dress,” he said, patting her thigh in a kindly, indulgent manner. “Not one of the days I've just dropped in to see William. I've got a date.”

“Who with?” she asked, instantly jealous. There had been rumours, roundabout ones, but fairly definite, that he had been seen with Penelope Dane. She already deeply regretted having asked Simon to dinner on the same night as the Danes.