The Merciless Ladies

by Winston Graham

  ‘But …’

  She looked at the door to make sure it was shut.

  ‘And now I feel in a short time he’ll have begun to do what he set out to do. I may always be necessary to him, but not to the same extent. If I were to die tomorrow he’d still go on painting like this. So, in a way, feeling that, I might have begun to – to slack off. Is that the way to put it? Do you see what I mean? But this year I’ve felt more – and now there’s this. There have always been two Pauls I’ve been concerned about: the ordinary human Paul who is just as weak and easily disorganized and responsive to praise, and generous and fractious and fallible as any of us; and the creative, slightly more than human Paul who is prepared to ride roughshod over anything and everything in pursuit of his aims, and can be quite a devil to live with. Now I feel that one, the second one, can get along on his own; but instead I’ve got a young Paul to think of and to care about. It’s a fair exchange and I’m more than content.’

  I rose too and went to the window. The brilliance of the sun dazzled my eyes. I had hardly slept for three nights. I couldn’t be concerned with the finer shades of phrasing.

  ‘Do you mean you don’t love Paul?’

  She made a brief gesture. ‘It isn’t as simple as that. I’ve always been fond of him. From the first, something … But it wasn’t more than that at first.’ I caught the gleam of her teeth again, but wasn’t sure if the glint betokened amusement. She had obviously begun with the intention of speaking lightly, objectively. But every now and then something else crept into her voice. ‘At the start – you see, I was – it seemed such a tall order. The idea of being the wife of a fashionable portrait painter didn’t attract a bit. Yet I knew – I felt he’d never get where he ought if I said no. And he seemed to love me – with such intenseness and such restraint. But I was scared. That seems funny now. I think Lady Jane Grey must have felt like that when someone went in and told her she was going to have to be a queen. Those months while we were waiting for the divorce – they were a bit wearing to us all, but they were trying to me in a way no one suspected. D’you know what I used to do? We can both laugh at it now.’

  ‘No’, I said.

  ‘I didn’t say any prayers. It didn’t seem quite fair to make a convenience of somebody I wasn’t sure about. So every morning I used to cross my fingers and make a wish that before the day was out you’d ask me to marry you instead.’

  There was a pause.

  ‘Oh?’ I said.

  ‘Yes. It does seem pretty quaint now, doesn’t it? But it was very much in earnest then. And even afterwards for a time …’ She bent again to the fire. ‘ Fortunately you didn’t guess. You see, I wasn’t a bit ambitious in the sense of wishing to paint London red or see the lights till the small hours every morning. I just wanted to get married in a quiet way and settle down in a quiet way, and a journalist’s income would have done.’

  ‘I suppose’, I said. ‘I suppose it was a case of any port in a storm.’

  She moved somewhere behind me. ‘Dear Bill. Always so modest. If it won’t embarrass you to know it now, the answer is, no. For two years I’m afraid I felt rather badly about you. If you had felt the same, things would have turned out different; but who’s to say they would have turned out better? I suppose you never suspected anything?’

  ‘… Why are you telling me this?’

  ‘Well, obviously I couldn’t until I’d got over it – or nearly over it. Lucky you didn’t ever receive that letter I wrote you.’

  ‘What letter?’

  ‘… When I was at Oxford working, and waiting for Paul’s divorce, things seemed suddenly to get me down. I had the mad idea that perhaps you really felt the same as I did, and I had to make sure. You know the funny ideas schoolgirls get. So I cut everything and came up to London to see you. But you were in Geneva …’

  ‘So? …’

  ‘So I went to a hotel nearby and ordered tea and wrote you a letter, telling you exactly how I felt.’

  ‘I never got it’, I said. ‘How did it—’

  She laughed apologetically. ‘You couldn’t have, because I never posted it. When I’d finished writing I realized how stupid it all was. Just putting it on paper was enough to purge me of these – feelings. By setting them down I’d – relieved the pressure, and I could see how foolish I was being. Funny … I’ve never felt quite so badly about you since.’ She jabbed at the fire again, which had gone to sleep. ‘Perhaps I shouldn’t have told you this now … but now that things are coming right for us all, I thought I’d like to tell you. Sorry if it embarrasses you. Confession’s good for the soul.’

  Good for the soul. I said at last: ‘I suppose Paul … knows nothing of this?’

  ‘Naturally not. If I didn’t tell him when I didn’t – feel a great deal, I obviously shouldn’t tell him now I feel so very much more …’

  ‘Whatever happens you mustn’t tell him, Holly.’

  ‘What could happen?’ She sounded surprised. ‘I only felt I wanted to tell you today. I only felt … I suppose it might have been better not said.’

  ‘Holly …’

  ‘Yes?’

  I didn’t speak.

  ‘Go on’, she urged.

  Damned banalities. Say something. Get away … No sleep … Quiet Bill never had any troubles. God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the worid.

  ‘I’m sorry too’, I said.

  She uttered a breathy sound which this time was half a laugh and half a sigh.

  ‘That’s the big statement of the morning. I believe I’ve embarrassed you after all.’

  ‘Of course you have’, I said. ‘Who wouldn’t be? … It’s a pretty compliment …’

  ‘Oh, well. Now I’ve told you, let’s forget it. Don’t think me a fool. But it’s funny the way things seem to be going the opposite to the way you want them, and then in the end you find that they’ve been going the right way after all.’

  A pretty compliment. That was just right. How cleverly the mind worked under stress. With what coolness and judgement. I couldn’t see through the window at all. I couldn’t see where the window was. I couldn’t hear what Holly was saying. Fear death? – to feel the fog in my throat, the mist in my face …

  Dear old Browning, always came in helpful. One effort more.

  ‘Let’s go for a walk’, I said. ‘This sun’s beautiful and I must start back soon. Let’s interrupt Paul and take him for a walk … Let’s go for a walk, Holly.’

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  They tried to keep me, but I wouldn’t stay. I left soon after five, so as to be out of the valley before dusk. I went by the valley road, which avoids the mountain passes.

  It’s a beautiful road, just as Holly once described it to me. It follows the shallow bubbling stream. Fine hoary rocks cluster. Small trees dot the route, but mostly the land is barren and silent. Few birds or animals live here. There is a house to be passed half a mile down the valley. It has been repaired and repainted, but now its new tenant will not come.

  This evening the thin snow was already melting, and the damp earth smelt fresh and autumnal.

  As I turned out of the valley into the main road to Broughton a flurry of snow beat on the windscreen, and the screen-wiper began patiently to brush aside the soft silent flakes, but soon the snow turned to sleet and the sleet to rain.

  … It was strange, but I found I couldn’t feel any more. I could remember everything that had happened in my life. I could think it all out. But I couldn’t feel any more.

  I thought of Paul and his painting. I had seen him begin to paint this afternoon. Of course a lot of nonsense was always talked and written about artists, blowing up the fashionable man of the moment. The function of the critic was to rend to pieces what he didn’t like and to discover unimaginable virtues in what he admired. Either attitude was exaggerated, slightly hysterical. Yet I could not believe that what Paul was painting now was not of lasting value. It spoke for itself. And, as such, justified the sacrifices he had made to achi
eve his ends.

  They justified his sacrifices. Did they justify other people’s, those within his orbit whose paths were pulled off their proper course by his gravitational pull? Who knew? A man of genius – or even high talent – must subordinate ordinary considerations to it. So must his friends. All ordinary considerations. But how far did that go?

  I thought of little Olive, whom I had at last got out of his life and out of my life in the most costly and preposterous way possible – but costly only to me. I thought of her glaring at me from the bed, as if even in death she was fulfilling her resentment and her hate. I thought of Holly, gifted, brainy, eccentric, unperceptive as myself, but lovable beyond price. I thought of what she had told me this afternoon.

  I thought of Lady Lynn, tall as a fir-tree, dressed like a gipsy, red-cheeked and preoccupied, lavishing on her puppies the attention her daughter might have found of greater value. I thought of Clement Lynn and his pencils and his ill-knitted pullovers and his growing paunch and his long jaw and his brilliant brain.

  I think of Bertie finding his own happiness among the scarred and diseased natives of Africa; of Leo playing the piano, wirhout humour, punitively, and with all the ego of the merely talented. Of Diana, tall and graceful and spoiled and consumedly selfish, and needing admiration as a flower needs sunlight. I think of my life over the last two years in theatrical and literary London, stimulating, demanding, rewarding; and of my future.

  Westmorland disappears into the darkness, drawing its curtains behind me. Lancaster will soon be here.

  I must stop at Lancaster.

  II

  I enter the telephone booth and give a London number. After a bit of argument I put in enough money for a six-minute call and the girl reluctantly – it seems – agrees to try to connect me. In the intervening gap before she does so she tells me three times that she is doing this. The position is quite private, the phone being in a recess beside the post office. Outside my little car waits, dripping, to continue its journey. I think now it will probably rain all night.

  It is cold waiting.

  A voice comes through. The wait has not really been so long.

  ‘Is that Scotland Yard? I want to speak to Inspector Priestley.’

  ‘I don’t think he’s in’, says the voice. ‘I’ll inquire. What name is it?’

  ‘Never mind that. It’s important.’

  A wait. The dark shadows of stray pedestrians stretch and restretch beneath the light of the lamp outside.

  ‘Hullo.’

  ‘I want to speak to Inspector Priestley.’

  ‘Speaking.’

  ‘Oh … You’re the man engaged on the investigation into the death of Mrs Olive Stafford? Is that correct?’

  ‘It is. Who’s that speaking?’

  ‘At the inquest yesterday, I think you came to the conclusion that some man was in her flat at the time of her death. You want that man. Am I right?’

  ‘Perfectly.’

  ‘I’m that man’, I say.

  There is a pause at the other end of the wire. Then the voice comes very casually.

  ‘Who are you? Where are you speaking from?’

  ‘Some distance away. My name doesn’t matter. You’ll know it very soon.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘I’m returning to London by car tonight. I’ll call at your office in the morning at ten. Will that be agreeable?’

  ‘Is this a hoax?’

  ‘No hoax. I’m prepared to make a full statement. The inquiry agent will be able to identify me. I’ll call at ten.’

  ‘Where are you speaking from?’

  I hang up the receiver.

  I leave the telephone box. Someone is waiting to use it after me. A tall, fair girl with full lips and large prominent, breasts. No doubt she is going to ring up some boy-friend or tell her husband she’s going to be late. Or both.

  I climb into the car and start the engine.

  I drive out of Lancaster and take the road south. A long night ahead. The road glistens like wet coal.

  I have to make the move at this stage, with its irreversible consequences, while the decision is clear cut, before the anaesthetic wears off, before the doubts and the regrets begin. There’s no place now for second thoughts.

  Now those patient men will turn their attention on what I have to say, listening to it gravely, sifting through it for the truth and the lies. What is the truth but the opinion of a majority when only one man knows it and his integrity is suspect? But if I tell the absolute truth, the whole of it and nothing but it, how shall I come to greater harm than if I attempt any subterfuge?

  I wonder then – and have wondered since – what took me to Crichton Beck before deciding on any other action. I suppose I wanted to see Paul and his paintings again and I wanted to see the girl I loved. There might be some justification for the mess and the tragedy that had occurred if as a result of it I could consider them so much the better for it.

  That no doubt was a consolation I would have come away with – if Holly had not spoken. But there’s a limit to the extent to which one can put other people’s happiness first. And I have reached it. Fortunately I cannot yet feel the extent of the personal loss. Emotion is played out.

  I drive all through the night without apparent fatigue. This is the fourth night I haven’t slept. Lack of sleep is like lack of food, it induces a high sense of physical perception. Towards dawn my screen-wipers pack up, but fortunately the worst of the rain is over and soon it stops altogether. I draw up beside the road and get out and feel the cool breeze on my face and eyes. I stand beside the car and watch the canopy of cloud begin to lift from the east like a roll-top desk. After a few minutes the desk jams and the brilliant sky shows only for a few inches above the horizon. Then as the sun rises the whole of the desk top catches fire and crumbles into crimson ash.

  Red sky in the morning … I get back into the car and drive on. My finger-tips are sensitive to the thin rim of the wheel. The speedometer in this car is not by clock face and needle but by a moving tape that slides behind a window. It is showing sixty miles an hour, which is a fair speed for this car, and on roads still wet. But somehow I’m convinced I’ll not have an accident. That wouldn’t please the fates.

  And presently as I near London I realize I’m becoming myself again. Sensation is being unfrozen. I’m almost out of the chloroform. There is pain again. But not much fear. And not much remorse. Something after all has changed, and I wonder what is the difference.

  I look back on what has happened with an eye still detached, and with a cool mind. I look back on what has happened and find that there is little room or time for regret. I look forward into the future and find there is little to be afraid of. For the worst has happened. And once the worst has happened there is nothing more to fear.

  By the time I reach London the buses are out in the streets, the workers thronging along drying pavements, the newspaper posters flapping. What news will they have tomorrow? I say it over to myself as I drive through the traffic: once the worst has happened there is nothing more to fear.

  Copyright

  First published in 1979 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 978-1-4472-5659-5 EPUB

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  Copyright © Winston Graham, 1979

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