The Unburied (41 page)

‘It seems ungenerous to inflict it on you.’

‘I am truly interested. I should like to hear it, Dr Courtine. But let us move to the drawing-room and have our coffee there.’

A few minutes later we were sitting on the large sofa in the brightly lit room with a cheerful fire blazing before us. My hostess prompted me to keep my promise.

‘Well, it was very strange,’ I began. ‘I had my arms locked around some creature – something that was reeking with the most appalling smell. My eyes were closed. I seemed to be fighting it. I was high up somewhere. I think I was lying on a bed. There were birds crying outside the window. What was so upsetting was my conviction that the monstrous thing had some kind of claim upon me. It was almost a part of myself. In desperation and in order to save myself, I tore off an arm – or, rather, a thing like an arm which was more like a wing or a tentacle – and I felt pain in my left arm. Then I woke up – in my dream, I mean, though I believed I had really awoken – and found that I was lying on the sofa in my rooms in College. I felt such a terrible, black sense of despair. There was a period in my life when I slept on that sofa. It was not the happiest of my existence. Then I really awoke and found what seemed to be my own severed arm beneath me. I had been sleeping on it and it had lost all sensation.’

She shuddered sympathetically. ‘Nightmares are like vultures that emerge to prey upon us in our moments of vulnerability.’

‘I have been sleeping badly ever since I arrived. I will be glad to leave the town.’ Tomorrow I would be making a long journey by train, travelling from one place where I was not wanted to another. ‘I’m sorry. That was rather rude of me.’

‘Of course not. You must be looking forward to Christmas and the children will be excited at the prospect of seeing their uncle.’

‘The truth is that I am dreading it.’

If she was surprised she concealed it and waited for me to go on with an expression in which sympathy was so evident and was so different from mere curiosity that I continued: ‘They are so happy with their new baby and so much in love that I know they don’t want me there. They ask me each year because they feel sorry for me being alone at Christmas.’

‘I’m sure they want you there, I’m sure of it.’

‘Why should they want me?’

‘You seem to me to be a very kind person. Well-intentioned and honourable. Forgive me for being so presumptuous but I can’t believe that you don’t have friends who love you.’

I smiled. ‘A few old College chums, as dusty and as dull as myself. I don’t think “love” would be at all the appropriate word for our feelings for each other. I should have stayed in College with them as usual and not thought of inflicting myself on my niece. It’s a terrible thing when the happiness of others makes one feel sad. And then one feels so guilty for resenting their happiness.’

‘It would be unnatural not to feel that,’ she said. ‘But that’s not the same as wishing them harm.’

‘No, no. I don’t wish anyone harm. I just wish myself a little more good. I could never have guessed when I was young that at nearly fifty I would have so little. I thought that everything I wanted would just happen. I threw away my single chance.’

I regretted the confession as soon as I had made it and perhaps because she sensed that, she said: ‘I believe you can be more lonely when you’re not alone.’

I was surprised by the frankness of her admission. I had seen enough of her husband’s manner towards her to have formed some conception of their life together. In that moment I had a vivid and unbidden image of what I had glimpsed in the front-parlour two hours earlier and it seemed to me suddenly that I had lived a life devoid of courage or daring. At least Burgoyne and Fickling had not done that.

‘Especially’, she added, ‘when there are no children.’

‘That is my great regret,’ I said, recalling what Dr Sisterson had said about her loss of a child. ‘I feel it more and more as I grow older.’

She gave me a sad smile: ‘I have known gentlemen considerably older than you marry and have children.’

‘As far as marriage is concerned, I’ve had my single chance.’

‘But I understood you to say you have no wife.’

‘I can’t marry. I wasn’t merely rude a little while ago. I was also somewhat dishonest. I told you I have no wife. The truth is ...’ I stopped.

‘You don’t need to say anything,’ she said gently.

‘She left me. I was devastated. I was completely destroyed by it. It’s easier to give the impression that she is dead. I used to try to think of her as dead. But I now know that is wrong. It’s not she who has been dead all these years. It is I.’

‘I understand. When you love, you entrust to that person your sense of your own worth and if that person throws you aside, you believe profoundly and utterly that it is because you are worthless. That is a kind of death.’

‘That describes my experience precisely. May I tell you the whole story?’

‘Are you really sure you want to?’

‘Yes, though I’ve never spoken of it to anyone. There has been enough lying and concealment and I would like to tell the truth now. That is, if you don’t mind hearing a common enough tale?’

‘Every such story is unique.’

‘Twenty years ago I married a woman – a girl, for she was ten years younger than I. She was the daughter of the Master of an Oxford college. She was very beautiful. Very sweet and very beautiful. I loved her and I believed, I still believe, that she loved me – to begin with. And we were happy at first. At first! But it all happened so quickly. Our time together was so brief – just a few months. I first saw her when she was fifteen. But then she was sent abroad to be educated and I did not see her again until one Christmas – just after I had been elected to a Fellowship at my old College, Colchester. I proposed that January and we were married in April. After the honeymoon – which we spent in a Scottish castle owned by relatives of my wife – we moved into a house my College owned. We were happy then.

‘I had a friend. An old friend from my days as an undergraduate. He had been disappointed in the degree he had hoped to obtain and had had to abandon his expectations of a Fellowship but he had stayed on and was teaching at one of the choir-schools. He was witty and charming and he made my wife laugh, and moreover he sang and played the flute and she sang and played the piano, so they made music for whole evenings together. And I was grateful, for I fear that our life was rather dull for her. She must have been lonely for she knew very few young women in Cambridge. I was deeply preoccupied with my duties – for I was now Junior Dean of my College – and my historical studies and spent all day at the College and most evenings working in my library. Then my friend began to bring a friend of his. I was a fool. A complacent, conceited fool. I hardly need to go on.’

‘Go on if you wish,’ she said very gently.

‘I both knew and did not know – or did not want to know – what my friend was doing. Many years later I forgave him. Or, rather, I thought I had forgiven him because I allowed myself to believe that he did not play a malign role in what happened. I have recently discovered that he did indeed do exactly what I accused him of. He must have resented me. I suppose he envied my happiness. I had embarked on a career as a scholar and was happily married. He was in neither of those fortunate situations. So he envied me, but I think that he was even a little jealous of me. And perhaps he wanted to do a favour to his friend, even though it was at my expense. The friend was a man he was fond of. Particularly fond. The story is banal – like an incident from a French novel.

‘As I have said, my wife was young, beautiful and she was even rich. I didn’t mention that, did I? Her mother had been a great heiress. So my wife was a wonderful prize. I was a very lucky man. And in some ways I knew it and yet at the same time I did not. My friend, the schoolmaster, stopped coming so often and on those occasions his friend – who never became a friend of mine for there was something in him I never cared for – came alone. He was handsome, charming and knew how to make himself very amusing. He had lived in exotic places and done extraordinary things. He had a little money of his own. Enough to indulge some of his tastes but not enough to live the kind of life he desired. He wrote poetry and travel sketches, and must have dazzled a young woman who had known only dusty university men. But he was unworthy of her. I felt so humiliated by her preferring him to me.’

I had to break off for a few moments.

‘The worst time, I think, the worst time of all the bad times was when I suspected but did not know. It was in the last weeks of Trinity term just before the summer vacation. There was an occasion when I came home unexpectedly and happened to pass an open window and saw them in the drawing-room. They were simply looking at each other, not smiling or speaking but sitting at opposite ends of a sofa and gazing at each other with such an intensity of emotion between them that it was palpable. She seemed so sweet and innocent, and yet I believed she was planning to betray me. I started to follow her. I’m so ashamed of myself now. When she believed me to be in College I skulked about the streets near our house like a thief, waiting to see where she was going and whom she was meeting. The strangest thing was that I became frightened of her.’

‘Frightened?’

‘Yes, I mean literally afraid. She could do me so much harm. I felt I had mistaken her nature. She was not what I had fallen in love with. The innocent, sweet young girl I had loved could not have done such a cruel thing to me. By a horrible perversity, I believe my suspicions drove her into what she did. I believe I suspected the truth before there was anything to suspect, at least, before the situation had become irretrievable. But I said nothing. I found I could not speak to her about it. When at last I found out ... When I knew the truth ... For everybody in Cambridge knew the truth before I did. I was so humiliated. No, I believe I can guess what you are thinking. But it wasn’t the public shame that I can’t forgive her for. After all, I stayed on in Cambridge afterwards when I might have resigned my post and left. I found I couldn’t stay in the house, though. It frightened me. I started sleeping on a sofa in my rooms in College. After a year I gave up the house.’ Again, I had to break off for a moment or two before I was able to continue. ‘I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten what I was going to tell you.’

‘You were telling me about how you found out. But please don’t say any more if it would distress you.’

‘It came to a head in the summer vacation. The three of us – my wife and I, together with my friend, the schoolmaster – went to the coast, to Great Yarmouth in fact. She was very quiet, very sad. I feared she was missing her lover but I still was not sure of her feelings about him or what had passed between them. I kept trying to talk to her about it but I couldn’t. Then on the night before we were to return to Cambridge, I managed at last to raise the subject. To my horror – and, I suppose, my relief – she confessed. She told me the whole story. How she had believed she had been in love with me but when she had met this man she understood what passion really was. And he had returned her feelings, she said, with an intensity that she had never found in me. Though, God knows, I adored her. I suppose I lacked her new friend’s facility in expressing those feelings. She told me that our friend, the schoolmaster, seemed to have guessed from the beginning and she said that he even seemed to be encouraging them.’ I looked down at the floor. I felt there had been enough evasions. I said: ‘They had become lovers, she told me.’

I broke off and covered my face for a moment. ‘She was not the person I had fallen in love with and married. She was not the innocent young girl I loved. That was the real deception.’

I felt a touch on my arm and lowered my hands. Mrs Locard was looking at me solicitously. ‘Forgive me, Dr Courtine, but perhaps that was the cause of the misunderstanding between you. You believed you were married to an innocent young girl and it may be that she felt that she was no longer that – if she ever had been even when you first knew her.’

I thought of Fickling’s cruel words about why she had married me.

‘Do you mean that she married me under false pretences?’

‘Not exactly, no. Or not deliberately. It may be that she came to feel more and more that you did not understand her true nature, that you did not see the whole of her. You wanted her to remain a sweet young girl but she was growing and learning and changing.’

‘And I was too immersed in my work to see that? Yes, there may be some truth in that.’

‘But more than that, you wanted her to stay as you imagined her to be when you first knew her. So when she told you what had happened you believed that she had betrayed you by hiding her real nature from you, and that’s quite understandable because what she did hurt you dreadfully. You think she acted simply from selfish motives but don’t you think it’s possible that she felt she was deceiving you – I mean, before she actually deceived you? She felt guilty and came to believe that it would end in unhappiness for both of you?’

‘Someone said something rather like that to me very recently. Is it possible that in some perverse way I wanted her to betray me in order to feel superior? To feel like a heroic martyr?’

‘There are people who invite betrayal. They are demanding towards themselves and don’t realize how hard they are on other people. They make it difficult for others not to fail them. And in some cases they even take a grim pleasure from being let down. But that’s not the same as saying they want to be betrayed.’

‘I believed I was being kind and fatherly to her. I was so much older than she.’

‘But if I’m right, Dr Courtine, that was part of the difficulty. You did not treat her in the way she wanted. And perhaps the other man did because he talked to her as an adult woman and an equal. And so she felt that her true self was engaged with him and only a false self with you.’

I was not sure I was understanding her. Seeing my perplexity, Mrs Locard said: ‘May I ask if, when she made that admission that night in Great Yarmouth, she was asking you for a separation?’