The Forgotten Story

by Winston Graham

  As she dozed her over-clothed, flaccid body dropped into new and more indolent shapes, as if the cold Cornish sea had washed away some of its familiar contours, as if someone had shaken the yeast cake when it was rising. Her pinze-nez sat slightly awry, the lines of her mouth drew themselves out like slackening purse strings. When she awoke the facts would have adjusted themselves more closely to her liking. Until then she would sleep.

  In the last few days the rude world had broken into her privacy, upon her complacent day-dream. Doors had been shattered, but her patient, persistent, third-rate mind was already building them up again. They should be built stronger than ever before.

  At this moment she lacked Perry, who had never imprisoned himself within such lofty seclusion and had therefore a more ready appreciation of the dangers of the outside world; she lacked Perry to insist that no repairs her egoism could effect were strong enough to stand before the impact of what was to come.

  The machinery of the law, however trumpery it may be to anyone concerned, as Madge was concerned, with the higher values of her own life, has an unwelcome appearance of reality while it is in motion – as Perry had never failed to appreciate – and deeper resources even than egoism are needed to reject the impression made by steel about a wrist or rope upon a throat.

  Pat woke. She had been sleeping for some time, her head in the crook of his arm. She was not cold for the room was not cold, and he had drawn his overcoat across her. The lamp had almost gone out. A small, dying yellow bead of light barely lifted the heavy darkness away from them.

  She was not aware of having accepted this position but had not been forced into taking it. Somehow they both felt the need of companionship, and for tonight at least she could not bear to be left alone. She didn’t want to go to bed or in fact to move until daylight came. Daylight would bring its own tests and problems but would, by driving away the darkness, help her to meet them. She felt lonely and sick and afraid and yet temporarily at rest, as if in this one corner of an alien and ugly world lay safety and peace. She was afraid to move lest she should break the thin shell of their isolation. Above all else she felt sick as if everything she had eaten in her life, everything and everyone she had known, had suddenly become unclean.

  She raised her eyelids to get a glimpse of him without moving her head. He was dozing, his head inclining to one shoulder. Whatever else, he represented stability and cleanness in a tainted world.

  He had said more, avowed more tonight than he had ever done before – except perhaps in his letter. She liked him in this eager mood when he carried conviction without eloquence. That was how they had married. Their marriage had been a mistake, but it did not appear so big a mistake tonight as it had recently done. She wished he was never dry and reserved and hesitant and inclined to look on the legal tide to a thing as the be-all and end-all of possession, upon flesh and blood as inferior to pen and ink and a revenue stamp.

  Perhaps he had never thought that. But a habit of shyness and reserve had been imposed on him all his life. She had to admit that he had shown very few signs of this side in his recent meetings with her.

  It occurred to her for the first time that perhaps her judgment had been coloured by her father’s prejudice against all lawyers, by his insistence that the one she had married ran true to his general estimate of them. The influence had been there without her realising it.

  Tom stirred and woke, and she found herself looking into his eyes. She was suddenly in contact again with the personality she had been dispassionately considering. The change was drastic. Of all the prospects now open to her the one thing she could no longer do was consider him dispassionately. His eyes, his looks, brought back all the liking and disliking to its original personal equation. There was no avoiding it.

  He said: ‘I’ve been dreaming I was on trial again for assault and battery. You came and testified for me.’

  She lowered her eyes. ‘What time is it?’

  ‘Not late. There are still voices in the bar. Do you want to move?’

  It was a question she would have preferred not to answer. Presently she said, ‘No.’ Bluntly and honestly.

  The monosyllable sent the blood coursing through his veins. In self-defence he took the admission at its lowest value to himself. During the last hour all his hopes had been given up.

  ‘What’ll happen to her, Tom?’ she asked.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘… Madge.’

  ‘A clever Q.C. may get her off, but I don’t think so. If the – the second analysis confirms the first then there won’t be any escape.’

  ‘Perry didn’t come back to England until after mother had died,’ she said almost inaudibly.

  ‘No. Whatever his part, he came late to the scene. I don’t think he was more than an accessory to her.’

  ‘I wish these next weeks were over. I wish …’

  ‘They’ll pass, my dear. It’s a question of keeping up until then.’

  Silence fell.

  ‘Dear God,’ she said suddenly, a twitch of horror going through her. ‘My mother … It – it doesn’t bear thinking of.’

  ‘It’s a nightmare,’ he said. ‘Look on it as that. There’ll be an awakening.’

  ‘Yes, but always, always it will have happened.’

  He did not reply to that, for he did not know what to say.

  Time had passed in the old inn. Almost everyone had retired for the night. The bar at last was empty, except for the smell of stale beer and the tobacco fumes curling like fog about the low ceiling. Mrs Nichols, dozing off to sleep beside Mr Nichols, was aware that she had intended going up to see if the young lady wanted anything, but she had been busy at the last preparing the other two attic rooms for the two men who had come in very late and who her husband said must be accommodated. When she finished that it was so late that she had hesitated to go up and disturb her. Perhaps she was still with the boy. A pity there had not been anything better than an attic room to offer her. It was seven years since they had had such a full house in December, when the Madrid ran aground by High Cliff.

  In his attic bedroom the detective who had travelled with Tom Harris fit his pipe and wondered what had become of the young solicitor. He had already been to his bedroom, but there was no response. Presently, when he was sure that the house was quiet, he would take a stroll round. It was not his business to sleep tonight.

  In the parlour little had changed. The lamp had gone out and the lace curtains let in a glimmer of starlight.

  She slept again, fitfully, uneasily, but he was awake. He didn’t want to sleep during this time. Her piled chestnut hair had come loose and was straying across his coat. Her breathing was quiet but not quite regular.

  His mind wandered lightly, irrelevantly, over his past life, coming back to its present surroundings with a twinge of pleasure and sorrow. He knew that over Falmouth estuary the water would be whitening under the stars. The trees about Penryn, quieter now after all the wind and rain, would stand in groups upon their lonely hills and whisper of man’s mortality. Human life was a stirring, a thin fermenting between the breasts of the world, a reaching for the light and a gathering of the dusk. A shifting and temporary interlocking of relationships between light and dark. The worst heartache and the brightest happiness would soon be still. They loomed large as mountains, like clouds they were as large as mountains but dispersed like smoke.

  He thought of his schooldays and his mother, and Anthony lying sleeping in another room, and Patricia marrying him, proud and defiant, yet warm and lovable; sweet and kind and forgiving but hasty-tempered and undisciplined and rashly impulsive. Cold and warmth; they were here in his arms now. Anger and love. Waywardness and obedience. Incalculable but loyal. Would he have her any different? Not if he could have her at all. Birth and death, daylight and sunset: they were the impersonal things. Now, now was reality, the few hours in between of youth and understanding.

  He thought of his profession and his future. South Africa drew him, accompanied or al
one. There, among the great mountains and rivers and forests, small humans were quarrelling as if the world were theirs and theirs not the most temporary lease. He thought of the shipwreck and the baleful wind still moaning from time to time round the inn. He thought of Anthony and his future. They owed him much more than a casual thought … Affection and a return of loyalty for loyalty.

  ‘Tom,’ she said.

  He hadn’t realised she was awake again. He stared at her in the darkness, knowing his expression couldn’t be seen.

  She said: ‘Why do you want me to come back to you?’

  Trying to keep the feeling out of his voice he said: ‘I’ve already told you why.’

  ‘For you it means giving up so much,’ she said indistinctly. ‘Your place is here, in Penryn, working in your own firm, doing the work you were meant to do. Why give all that up? You’re known in Cornwall, known and respected. It means starting somewhere quite new –’

  ‘I’m going to Cape Town in any case,’ he said.

  ‘There’s your mother. Why spoil her life? Why should I come between you?’

  ‘You haven’t. We’re on perfectly good terms and I think you could be. She’s become reconciled to the idea of my going abroad in any event.’

  She stirred restlessly, but didn’t try to move away.

  ‘I’m – I’m not your type, Tom. Honestly. I don’t fit in. I felt that always before. Why should it –?’

  ‘One doesn’t have to fit in in a new society.’

  ‘I don’t even fit in with you. I’m – not worth your career. I’m restless, capricious, changeable …’

  ‘I want you as you are. Life can be too safe, too easy. You’ve made me see that. We’re different, but we can each help the other. It’s just a question of taking the chance.’ He said no more, hardly able to believe that so much progress had been made, afraid to spoil it by a wrong emphasis, the ill-chosen word.

  Silence fell in the room. In South Africa the strange stars had moved on two hours ahead in their flight towards a new dawn.

  Then he said: ‘There’s bitter feeling between the British and the Boers. No one can tell how it will turn. That’s another chance.’

  She did not reply.

  ‘All this unpleasantness that’s coming,’ he said, ‘ will pass quickly enough. It’s the further future that counts. If we back it for all we’re worth it won’t let us down.’

  ‘Give me two or three days more,’ she said. ‘Will you? Then I’ll decide.’

  He said quickly: ‘As long as you like.’

  ‘No. Not as long as I like. Two days more. You see – you see, Tom, I’d like to put a term on it. We got married in such a hurry, on the impulse of the moment almost. Then I left you in the same way. When I married you I thought it was for good. I truly meant it to be. Then when I left you I meant that to be for good as well. Now if I come back to you I want that to be all quite changed. I don’t want to come back on impulse like a – a beastly shuttlecock. I want it to be entirely deliberate. And if I do come back – it’s really going to be for good this time.’

  He put his hand on her hair for a moment and thought she did not notice.

  ‘For better or worse,’ he said.

  ‘For richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health. Easy to promise and hard to fulfil. I – I’ve always felt ashamed of leaving the way I did, for the reasons I did. They seemed good enough at the time, Tom. But sometimes I was desperately ashamed. Somehow, it was because I hated myself so much that I tried to hate you. But – I didn’t seem to be able to help it. All sorts of things came up, confused the issue. I – I’ve tried so hard to hate you. Remember that.’

  ‘So long as you failed.’ ‘I failed.’ There was silence in the room. ‘Nothing else matters,’ he said. ‘Nothing. Nothing. Sleep now.’ Her head settled more comfortably upon him. Her breath for a

  time continued to have a catch in it that would not quite settle

  down.

  He listened to it and wondered if she could hear the beating of

  his heart.

  In another room Anthony slept. About him the human comedy had played itself out, swinging him with it from time to time as it gyrated. For the most part he had been uncomprehending, either as spectator or participant. The larger issues had passed him by, happening just beyond his purview, casting shadows upon his life but leaving him out of sight of the main procession.

  Lonely and forlorn, he had come to the house of Joe Veal at the crucial moment of its decay. Like a sick plant the outer petals of the family had one by one peeled off, at length revealing the worm in its heart. Now the ruin and disintegration was complete. Torn between conflicting loyalties, having no mature standards by which to judge, he had contrived to steer a middle course of which no adult need have been ashamed. Much that was unpleasant had happened to him and more was yet to follow.

  But at present, worn out by sea-sickness and nervous strain, he had forgotten what had happened and was ignorant of what was to come.

  He did not know how Pat had contrived to be here so soon. He did not know how the cabin door had come to be locked, nor exactly how, when he should have been drowned, he had yet come to be saved. He did not know that the polite gentleman who had questioned him at Tom Harris’s would come to see him again in the morning and take down a statement which he would later be required to confirm before a stern old judge in a court of law. He did not know that his young personality and companionship were yet to prove the final cement which would bind together during the next two difficult years the young couple who, after an initial breakdown, had just resolved to begin again.

  Nor did he know that his father was married again, to a widow with two young children, and that they could see no place for him in their household. Nor did he know that he would never see Canada, but would travel to South Africa instead.

  Being a normal boy and not a seer, he knew none of these things, and for the present did not care. He had been cold and frightened and sick, and now was warm and safe and comfortable.

  Anthony slept.

  Copyright

  First published in 1964 by Bodley Head

  This edition published 2013 by Bello

  an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited

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  ISBN 978-1-4472-5671-7 EPUB

  ISBN 978-1-4472-5669-4 POD

  Copyright © Winston Graham, 1964

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