A Tangled Web

by Nicholas Blake

  When he had chosen her lunch for her, he left her with a martini while he went out to telephone Madame Ramon. Daisy watched him thread his way past the tables, an alert; compact figure little taller than herself, with something wary, self-sufficient, ambiguous in the way he moved. He is like a cat, was how she put it to herself: but not a tame cat: more like one of those in the zoo, except he hasn’t got bars round him—one of those greater cats, ready poised to pounce or to streak away into the jungle darkness. Absently, she rubbed her elbow where-Hugo had gripped it, walking her away from Mrs. Chetwynd-Smythe’s house. It felt bruised. How strong he must be. With a furtive, blushing delight, Daisy thought to herself, I’m glad I bruise easily.

  “A penny for your thoughts.”

  It was his voice; he was back already. Daisy selected her last thought but one.

  “I was thinking you walk like a cat.”

  An enigmatic look came into his eyes. Was he displeased at the idea? Was he going to streak away? She added quickly:

  “A tiger, I mean. Or a leopard. I’ve seen them at the pictures.”

  “We must go to Whipsnade one day, and I’ll introduce you to my brothers and sisters.”

  “They wander about there, don’t they? Not in cages, I mean. Sort of prison without bars.”

  He was looking at her very strangely. “There’s no such thing as a prison without bars,” he said: then, abruptly changing the subject, “Your Madame, is not to be appeased. You’ve got your cards, old girl. I’m sorry.”

  “Oh dear.”

  “You don’t sound so terribly put out.”

  “Well, I expect I can get another job.”

  “Without references from old Ramon?”

  “My auntie got me that job. I expect she could find me another. I’m good with my hands.”

  Daisy knew, and knew that he knew, that all this meant nothing. Nothing mattered to her now, except him and her. Without anxiety or misgiving, she awaited what, sooner or later, was bound to happen. In the meantime, there was this lovely feed.

  “I do like to see a girl eating hearty,” he said. “How old are you, Daisy.”

  “Nearly eighteen,” she replied, with a smile so radiant that a higher Civil Servant lunching two tables away, who caught the overflow of it, made a mental note to read again A l’Ombre des Jeunes Filles en Fleurs.

  That afternoon they went to Kew. Summer had arrived overnight: everything bloomed, and the air was warm as lovers’ whispers. Lying on the grass, her limbs heavy with indolence, Daisy—a healthy girl who had never had an illness since childhood—felt like a convalescent, weak, passive, dazzled by the vivid sounds and colours of life returning. The stuffy, scented hat-shop, its ritual and frivolity, the mirrored slow-motion of its salon and the tension behind the scenes, might have been years away, faint memories of a delirium she had passed through. But this new world into which she had moved was unreal too as yet—a truant’s world, delicious, yet disquieting and precarious. Its axis was the young man sitting beside her, with arms clasped round his knees; and she felt at times that her slightest-movement might cause him to vanish as abruptly, miraculously, as he had appeared. She wanted to stay here for ever like this, not even touching him. She wanted to run away into the trees, and be pursued, and caught. The sense of deferring what would happen lay heavily upon her, like the scent of white lilac from the bush beside them, making her breathless. She knew she should be considering plans, deciding how to break to her aunt the news of her dismissal, how to set about finding another job, how to face Madame Ramon and demand her week’s pay. Yet she knew none of this was important: it will all straighten itself out, she thought vaguely, and rolled over on her side to look at Hugo.

  He was threading a daisy-chain. His fingers were often restless—she had noticed that already: they seemed to have a life of their own. Now, although they still worked deftly, they were trembling; and this gave her a sharp, novel sensation which she was too artless to understand as the sensation of power. After all, he had hardly touched her yet, and had not spoken a word of love. The notion that so confident, self-sufficient a man could be shy did not occur to her. She accepted him, without any desire as yet to explain him. He, for his part, had shown the liveliest interest in her background and her past. She had told him about her childhood, as the oldest of a large family, in the Cotswold village. Her father, a small-owner, had suddenly pulled up his stakes and left them when Daisy was twelve, so she had looked after her younger brothers and sisters while her mother went out to work. The local lady of the manor discovered in the girl a flair for millinery; and last year she had come to London as an assistant in Madame Ramon’s shop, at the recommendation of an aunt, her mother’s sister, who worked for a fashionable dressmaker in the same street.

  Daisy told him about her room in Pimlico, the money she sent home every week, the feuds and foibles of the assistants in the shop. She talked without self-consciousness; yet as she talked, she became gradually aware how lonely she had been in London till now. She had no idea, though, of the way her beauty had contributed to her isolation, creating a barrier between herself and the other girls at Madame Ramon’s. As for men, she had been no more touched by their hot glances than Daniel by the fiery furnace. Lacking the nervous vitality of town-bred girls, she was too tired at the end of the day for dancing or gallivanting.

  “No young men?” Hugo had said. “Well, well, you amaze me.”

  He was piqued, though she did not realise it, by her incuriosity about himself. She seemed to take it for granted that a well-dressed young gentleman—for that was how she must see him—should come round a corner into her life, lose her job for her, and carry her off to Kew via the Berkeley. Hugo had never met a girl like this. One couldn’t think of her in terms of pick-up and bed-sitting-room. The usual veiled sex-banter, the perky, pathetically thin self-assurance of the girls he had stalked from time to time, when more interesting prey was not available—these were utterly foreign to her. She attracted him all the more because he was a little frightened of her—frightened by the potential of passion which he felt in her.

  Now, reaching up, he placed the daisy-chain round her neck. His hand brushed her neck, and she shivered a little, but never took her eyes off his face. The chain hung down over her simple, cornflower-blue dress. The sounds of children, playing nearby, seemed infinitely remote.

  “I’m a bad hat, Daisy.” Hugo’s voice was not quite under control.

  “Are you?” Her tone was like a slow caress. “You’ve been very kind to me.”

  “And you’re the Queen of the May.” Hugo felt half relieved, half troubled, as one does when an issue has been deferred which is bound to become more loaded with difficulty the longer one defers it.

  “That’s a poem,” Daisy was saying. “She died, didn’t she?”

  “I won’t call you that, then.” Hugo gazed down at her where she lay on her back, open to the sun, the sweet smell of grass coming up as if it was an emanation from her innocence. “I’ll call you Demeter.”

  She smiled vaguely. “Who’s Demeter?”

  “Mother Earth. A goddess. That’s one of the things I learnt before I was sacked.”

  “Sacked?”

  “From my expensive public school.”

  “So we’ve both been sacked. Goody.”

  Hugo twisted a tress of her corn-coloured hair round his finger; “The point is, what are we going to do about you?”

  “Oh, it’s such a lovely afternoon. Don’t let’s spoil it.” Seeing his expression, uneasy and overcast, she added, “You mustn’t worry about me. Really. I shall be all right.”

  There was a silence between them, and the sounds of children, birds, distant traffic, came back again. He wants to kiss me, thought Daisy: why doesn’t he? Presently she heard him say, with a note almost of desperation, “You don’t know anything about me.”

  “You’ll tell me some time.”

  He looked at the blue veins on her eyelids, the dreamy smile of her half-opened lips, and t
enderness shook him like an agony.

  “Come, live with me and be my love.”

  He hardly knew he had said it aloud. But her eyes opened, shining up at him like dew-ponds, like gems of midsummer blue.

  “Do you want me to?” she murmured, stirring, arms wide, her fingers twining round tufts of long grass. She was his for the taking, and she exulted in it.

  They lay, kissing. Past and future mercifully withdrew for a while, leaving them alone with the consuming present.

  3. A Happy Time

  Two months later, Daisy Bland was sitting alone in their Maida Vale lodging-house, darning Hugo’s socks. They had come here five weeks ago, when Hugo’s money ran out. Brought up in thrifty ways, she sighed now to think how they had squandered it; but her sigh was half of pleasure, as she remembered the fairy-tale sequence of those first three weeks.

  They had returned from Kew Gardens, Hugo in tearing high spirits, Daisy drugged and expectant with passion. They went first to a Car-Hire firm near Victoria, where Hugo was evidently a well-known client. He filled in forms, and paid the deposit with a handful of £1 notes which he produced, as he was to produce so many more during the days that followed, from his trouser-pocket. She hardly had time to wonder how often this had happened before, with other girls, when he whisked her off to her Pimlico lodging. Then he left her, saying he must pick up his own belongings (he did not say where), and would return in half an hour. She packed a case, then filled in the time by writing postcards to tell her mother and aunt that she was off for a holiday with a girl friend. After posting them, she paid off her landlady and, with a dazed sense of burning her boats, said she would not be needing the room any more.

  She saw the little car draw up in the street below. She ran down the stairs as if the house was on fire. He had changed his suit; but he looked just the same, she thought with a new access of happiness—as though that had been almost too much to expect. Soon they were driving out of London, out of her old life.

  “Where are we going?” Daisy asked.

  “Where would you like to go?”

  The way he said it made her feel as if he had all England, the whole universe, at his disposal. She laughed, deep from her heart, and laid her head on his shoulder.

  “Anywhere,” she said. “The country. Somewhere we can be alone together. Not—”

  “Not a road-house or a flash hotel. You bet your life not!”

  “I was going to say, not where you’ve taken your other girls. But I don’t mind, really I don’t.”

  He took her right hand, pressing his nails gently into the knuckles. “There aren’t any other girls. Not any more. You can take that for gospel, sweet Daisy.”

  She believed it, in the mounting glow of her happiness: and she was never to regret believing it.

  They landed up at an inn in an Oxfordshire village, which Hugo liked the look of. Daisy smiled secretly to herself now as she recalled that first evening, when they faced each other in the low-windowed bedroom, she rubbing between her fingers a geranium leaf she had plucked in the courtyard below, and Hugo saying, “Shall we go down to dinner now?”

  “If you like,” she replied, tilting her head back, the blood thrumming in her ears. He gazed at her a moment across the little room. With a rush of excitement and terror, she saw his dark face change. His eyes, piercing bright, seemed to pin her against the wall where she stood. She felt impaled, powerless, yet wildly acquiescent. He was a stranger, he was a hawk hovering to swoop down upon her. They came together as if whirled by a clap of wind out of a cloudless sky. She was naked, staring up at him transfixed, an animal in a snare shamming dead under the poacher’s hands, then quivering and struggling. But the pain was good, the surrender and fierce abjection were wonderful; and presently she heard him say, “There’s no one like you, my love.”

  She went down to dinner with him in a dream. She did not know what she was eating or what she was saying. They sat in the bar afterwards, watching a darts match. Then Hugo joined a game; he was a good player, she could see, serious, entirely absorbed: whatever he did, a sort of natural grace and featness came through. Once or twice he looked over towards where she sat, like a child demanding his mother’s admiration, and something new stirred in her, quite different from the other feelings he had roused. At the end of the game, he was challenged to a return. He took up the darts again, raising an eyebrow quizzically at Daisy. Hardly knowing what she did, she rested her eyes upon him in the crowded, smoky room, with a look neither shy nor bold but deeply searching, which drew him to her like an invisible thread. Laying down the darts, he said to his opponent, “Not now, thanks. To-morrow night, if you’re here.”

  They were upstairs again: and this time Daisy came into full possession of her womanhood. She could not have enough of him. “Master! Master!” her peasant blood cried out. She went to sleep, still sobbing with pleasure, a scent of wallflowers from the window-boxes blowing into the room.

  Daisy would have liked to stay there for days, for ever. But on the third day Hugo suggested they should move on. She agreed, sensing a restlessness in him which even his love for her could not appease. And so it went on for three weeks, the little car tracing a random course through county after county. Hugo drove fast, though he would always slow down if she asked him, so that at times she had the fancy that they were fugitives, twisting and doubling on their tracks to escape some remorseless pursuer. The absurd notion was exhilarating, yet remotely disquieting. One day she said to him:

  “It feels as if we were running away, being chased.”

  “So we are, darling.”

  “What are we running away from?” she asked dreamily.

  “Real life. We’re escapists.”

  He said it lightly; but, responding to him as she did, she felt as if her question had touched him on some too sensitive spot; and for some little time after, he was unusually silent. To distract him from himself—they happened just then to be driving past a long, high park wall—she said:

  “I wonder what’s on the other side of that.”

  He stopped the car at once. “Let’s see.” He got out, looked up and down the road, listened for a moment, then ran straight at the wall. She thought he must have gone mad, for the wall was nearly twelve feet high. But he leapt up at it, smoothly as a wave, one foot stretched out before him making contact half-way up, and the impetus carrying his body above it so that his hands reached the top of the wall, and flexing his arms all in the same swift movement he drew himself up to sit astride it. There seemed no effort at all in the proceeding: he just went up like a bubble.

  “It’s a knack,” he called down to her, not the least out of breath. “Anyone can get up any wall, if it’s not more than twice his height. Come along.”

  He hauled her up—she knew all about the strength in those slender wrists and fingers—then gave her a glance, at once reckless and queerly challenging, which she could neither interpret nor forget. Thinking about this episode afterwards, when she had discovered the truth, she realised that he had given her a hint which he had not dared—or was by nature too evasive—to put into words. She could remember other occasions also, when he had, as it were, acted his secret in dumb show, half defying, half wanting her to guess it; and times when, with the mischievous expression of a schoolboy giving a dare, he had allowed his talk to tremble on the very edge of self-betrayal.

  Ah, she thought, taking up another pair of socks to darn, I should have guessed. He was trying to tell me something; he was afraid to tell me—afraid, yes, of losing me: that was why: or afraid of spoiling our honeymoon. Silly boy.

  “You’re a funny girl,” he had said one day, twisting upon her finger the wedding ring he had bought for her on their way out of London. “You’ve never asked me to ask you to marry me.”

  “Well, ask me then.”

  They were lying in a wood, high up on a Dorset hillside. The whole floor of the wood smoked with bluebells, as if the earth below were on fire, and the song of willow-wrens tossed and
dwindled through the long afternoon. Hugo turned on his back, speaking up to the trees whose leaf-shadows shifted over his face.

  “Would you want to marry a man, whatever he was really like, just because you loved him?”

  To Daisy, this seemed an absurd question; but she had gained enough wisdom not to say so.

  “I know you’re—not bad,” she ventured.

  “You know damn-all about me, my love.” His tone was harsh; but she replied gently:

  “You could tell me. But not if you don’t want to, sweetheart.” Then, as he was silent, she went on, “I know you are twenty-eight, your father is a clergyman, you were sacked from your school, you went out to Australia, you fought in the war and were taken prisoner, you’re a commission agent—whatever that is. And you’re the most wonderful man in the world.”

  “Quite a dossier.” He looked up at her searchingly. “What did you think about me the first time we met?”

  “I thought you looked like a poacher.”

  “A poacher? In St. John’s Wood? Well!” Hugo laughed shortly. After a pause, he said, “I hate the idea of being trapped. That’s the one thing I’m really frightened of.”

  “Trapped into marriage, do you mean?”

  “That might be part of it. I’m not cut out to be a domestic animal.”

  “Well, we won’t get married then.”

  “Oh, darling, don’t talk like a nurse humouring a fractious patient, for God’s sake!”

  The easy tears flooded her eyes, but he was not looking at her now. In a tight voice, Hugo said:

  “Would you marry me if I were a—a murderer?”

  “Yes,” she answered simply. “If you wanted me to. But—”

  “I’m not, actually. Except for killing chaps in the war. Listen, Daisy—if you were a man, and a bad egg, a criminal type, would you ask a girl you loved to marry you?”

  “I never started this talk about marriage,” she replied, baffled and still feeling hurt by his rejection of her sympathy.