‘What’s the matter?’ he said presently. ‘Don’t you fancy it?’
‘I do fancy it.’
‘You’re not crying, are you?’—as if saying: not again.
‘No. But—’
‘But you’re not happy?’ He sounded nervous, apprehensive.
‘Very, very happy. This is the most wonderful, incredible night of my life.’
‘But—?’
‘No “buts”. I mean you’re a perfect lover. Simply remarkable for one so out of practice as you say you are.’
He said with a sigh: ‘Well, you’re wonderful too.’
He sounded both gratified and grateful; and again the sense of his youth, of the boyishness that lingered in him struck her.
‘I think,’ she said, ‘I was wondering if you really wished I was—what you said just now.’
‘What did I say just now?’
‘Well, not your bride, that would be very forward of me,’ she said, half laughing, half confused. ‘I mean the other thing.’
He hesitated. ‘Ah … that would be old-fashioned of me wouldn’t it?’ He also sounded shy.
‘Well, I wish it,’ she said passionately. ‘If you knew how much I haven’t enjoyed this, sometimes. I’ve thought there must be something wrong with me. Perhaps I’ve never really been in love before. I love you, Johnny.’
As if it was a difficult admission wrung out of him against his will he said: ‘Hush. I love you back.’
‘What are we to do?’
He muttered: ‘I don’t know. Stop thinking.’
This time his embraces were so violent, almost savage, that again he seemed a stranger; and when he fell away from her he was breathless, pale with a waxen pallor, the sweat running in rivulets off his face, his neck, his great smooth torso.
Presently she put an ear to his heart and listened to its beat.
‘Johnny, your heart is thumping awfully fast and loud.’
He laid a hand quickly on his chest and said:
‘It’s perfectly all right.’ The touch of roughness in his voice surprised her. She sat up and looked down at him. Smiling, but cold, he said: ‘I’m not going to have a heart attack if that’s what you suspect.’
She said lightly: ‘No, don’t. It would be too embarrassing. What would Louis say? And Ellie? And Miss Stay? The imagination boggles.’
‘Staycie would say it was all for the best and a blessed way to go.’ His tone matched hers. Still lightly, he added: ‘She doesn’t anyway expect me to make old bones.’
Her sense of slight malaise persisting, she left his side and went to forage in the kitchen, returning with fruit and Louis’s chocolate and mocha whip and a bottle of white wine which, having uncorked, he drank thirstily, saying: ‘Excellent, château bottled. Wonder where it’s been lurking. Jackie unearthed a dozen the other day and brought them down. Very kind of her. You didn’t know I had a cellar, did you?’
She guessed from whom the dozen had originated. She did not wish to dwell on Jackie.
‘Delicious whip too,’ she said. ‘Where is Louis, by the way?’
‘Having a night off. Gone to visit his girl friend—one of them.’
‘Has he got a girl friend? He’s eighty, isn’t he?—or ninety?’
‘Mon Dieu, cela n’empêche pas, in Louis’s case.’
‘How splendid.’
His French accent was impeccable. She remembered that Mrs Jardine had seen to that, and to his command of the language during his long months in her hospital. She burst out:
‘Oh!—I wish she’d go away. Do you feel she’s near you sometimes?—hanging around here? Well, she is.’
He set his glass down carefully and filled it again; said nothing.
‘So you do know! She was in love with you, wasn’t she?—madly madly in love. You were the last, I suppose. Did you come after one called Gil? Did she ever talk about him? He was killed. I met him once, he kissed me.’
‘And now,’ he said, ‘you’ve met me and I’ve kissed you.’
‘Don’t talk like that! Tell me, were you in love with her?’
‘Of course not.’ A quick bright flush suffused his face. ‘If you mean did I make love to her, or want to, the answer is of course not.’
‘But she wanted you to.’
‘Well, not actually, I suppose.’ He sounded awkward, boyishly embarrassed, but not rigidly constrained as heretofore whenever rumour of Sibyl Anstey weighed the air. ‘It was bad luck for her, I suppose, to grow old and—and still feel young. I did love her, you know. I owe her so much, as I’ve told you before. And of course in a way she was still a beauty. Considering her age she could look stunning. And liked to be told so.’
Considering her age … Saddest of reservations for a woman. She felt a pang for Sibyl Anstey, the young beauty of her day.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Poor Sibyl. I remember her once saying: “the fatal gift of beauty”. It’s strange how often it’s a curse. She must always have been hoping—and expecting—it would be proved otherwise.’
‘It was partly my fault,’ he said, with a show of compunction.
‘How?’
‘Well …’ He stretched himself lazily, grinned. ‘I like flirting, and she liked it too. She flirted charmingly. Some elderly ladies do.’
‘I dare say.’ Her voice was sharp. ‘A divine game for two, tremendous fun—except perhaps for onlookers: a person’s husband say, or daughters, or granddaughters. It used to infuriate Maisie, I remember.’
One eyebrow shot up, he glanced at her, his grin of private amusement fading. He said mildly:
‘I don’t think old Maisie took it amiss—we got on very well.’
‘Oh, I’m sure, I’m sure! I’m sure she adored—adores—you too. Who wouldn’t?’
‘My darling, what are you going on about?’
The endearment, for the first time on his lips and in his most beguiling voice, melted her mood. He was holding his arms out and she flung herself into them.
‘I don’t know. I’m frightened. Can I be jealous? When you talk about her you make me feel—outside some inner circle, lonely. She had so much of you. And I’ve got to leave you here, with all her relics round you, her roof to cover you, all the memories.’ With an effort she got out: ‘I want her exorcised.’
There was no reply. She raised herself on one elbow to look at him. He smiled at her sweetly, sleepily; said vaguely: ‘Don’t worry about all that.’ He sighed, and swept a glance around the room. ‘I’ve told you before it doesn’t feel quite real. I don’t belong here. Sometimes I get awfully low.’
With this admission, he laid his head on her shoulder in a gesture of such complete surrender that her very soul seemed pierced with tenderness, contrition. She told herself: ‘He trusts me’; and waited, stroking his forehead, for him to speak again.
‘I have foul moods—vile. I long to be shot of the whole bloody lot—even Staycie, even Louis. As for that de Pas, I dream of shooting him—and Jackie too. I hate her. I dream they’ve all died off or shrivelled up … and I’m left stranded, chewing seaweed—perhaps a squid or two. What on earth am I doing, stuck among these lunatics?’ He uttered a sound part laugh part groan, and rolled over on his back, staring at the ceiling. ‘Have you noticed how her mouth’s twisted?’
‘Whose?’
‘Jackie’s. It used not to be like that—though it was never an interesting feature. I don’t suppose I really hate her. She’s not a bad girl. Damn good nurse. Wiry. Popular in the ward, quite a sense of humour. Can you imagine getting myself into this situation?—out of sheer—chucking my hand in, not giving a curse what happened to me—handing over lock stock and barrel to her—I mean, our mutual friend. Sheer gutlessness. Despair, if you like.’ He leaned across her to take a cigarette from a box on the table, lit it, inhaled once or twice before continuing in a quiet flat
voice: ‘Before I fell out of the sky there was a girl I’d got engaged to.’
‘I thought there must have been. What was her name?’
‘Her name was Sylvia in point of fact.’
‘Tell me more about her.’
‘Sweet girl. Very young. Jolly pretty. Fair hair, blue eyes.’
‘She broke it off?’
‘Not she. I broke it off. As if I’d have let her tie herself for life to a bloody-minded wreck. That’s what she had in mind: she was one of those sacrificial girls. I put paid to all that by wedding my nurse, with Sybil’s blessing. Manage blanc, I hope I needn’t tell you. And then I agreed—I agreed to let myself be shipped far far away to tropic shores, where we could live out our idyll out of reach of any possible interested party.’
‘Including your family?—your parents?’
‘Yes, my parents. Charming people. I was very fond of them, they’re both dead now. I couldn’t stand seeing any of them, or letting them see me: pretending they weren’t embarrassed, or shattered, or sorry for me. I’ve got a sister—nice outdoor girl. She married during the war and he was killed, of course. I do hear from her occasionally. She lives in our old home in Cumberland and breeds Jack Russells. Monica, her name is.’
‘You don’t hear from Sylvia?’
‘No, I do not. She got married and had some children. All as it should be.’ His hand moved towards his chest, as if to touch the medallion that generally hung there; but he had taken it off. ‘I know where she lives,’ he added. ‘I used to have a beastly dream of walking up to her front door and opening it and looking for her. But I never could find her, she was always just out of sight. That’s all over. It belongs to another life—finished; nothing.’
‘You did love her very much?’
‘Thinking about her tonight, I wonder. I thought I did, of course. But why should I think about her tonight? Perhaps,’ he suggested, ‘it’s not very flattering to you?’
‘You are silly, darling. If one’s thinking about love, as you are perhaps, one’s bound to think about all the people one has loved.’
‘Jolly few, in my case—I don’t know about you. Don’t tell me.’ He kissed her affectionately, but absent-mindedly. ‘Is that it? Perhaps it is. That’s where Sibyl came in. She was my anaesthetic. What I’d have done without her … She invented a whole new life for me—a proper, going concern. She put so much energy into it … And I think it was—what’s the word?—disinterested. She knew what she was looking for, and she set about finding it: a place where I could live outdoors mostly, and reconstitute my framework. No swimming pool stuff—big swimming. She scoured the coasts of the world. If you remember her you’ll know how practical she was and thorough.’
‘Oh yes, I do remember. That was one of the reasons why children felt so safe with her.’
‘Yes. I felt safe,’ he said musingly, with a faint wry smile. ‘Like all her schemes, it was magnificent. But it had a flaw in it. Three flaws, you might say.’
Echoes assailed her of almost the same words, a similar theme, to which she had listened long ago.
‘Her, me, Jackie,’ he continued, ‘the equation: that’s what she didn’t manage to get right.’
‘She never did. But then, who does? Did everyone get into a frightful muddle?’
He considered. ‘I wouldn’t say that. Jackie anyway shook it all off. It wasn’t me that ever troubled Jackie, it was Sibyl: she had a crush on her. But she got over it in time. She’s not one to pine; she’s a resourceful girl: she settles for what’s available.’
‘That left two of you.’
‘I didn’t quite—’ he began to speak disjointedly. ‘She was such marvellous stimulating company, and old enough to be—I never could understand why she should bother about me. I’m not in the least brainy, I’m simply average, ordinary—’
‘But simply beautiful.’
He gave her a slight impatient shake, as if, perhaps, to say he had heard that often enough; or as if some disturbing chord of memory had been touched. She could hear the syllables vibrate in Mrs Jardine’s throat. She added:
‘And she simply fell in love with you, poor Sibyl. Oh, how glad I am I wasn’t there. She would never have let you make love to me.’
After a tense pause he got out: ‘I couldn’t possibly have … Unthinkable. Apart from her being old—and ill as well—I sort of put her on a pedestal. It would have been like violating—Well, I don’t know.’
‘But that’s not how she saw it.’ She hesitated. ‘I see—I do see how it seemed to her.’
‘How did it seem?’ he said rather sulkily.
‘Well … Making you whole again, which was her job, meant—as she saw it—loving her exclusively. Being restored meant being her perpetual captive.’
‘I never counted on being what you call restored—never even began to count on it. In the beginning I was much more helpless than I am now. Besides—’
‘You thought you’d never be able to make love again.’
‘I was sure I was done for—impotent.’ He heaved a huge sigh and gave her a quick kiss. ‘Not that we ever actually discussed it, but—’ he sighed again, ‘it got rather embarrassing sometimes, knowing she was—oh Lord!—making herself—you know—seductive, sort of …’
‘Oh dear …’ He had delicate feelings, he was chivalrous. Unlike some people … He leaned across her to stub out his cigarette, fell back again and said:
‘I killed her.’
‘What do you mean?’ But it was as if he had said it in the first moment of their meeting; or as if she had all along been waiting for the moment of his saying it.
‘I do not mean I took an axe to her, or strangled her.’
He brooded, and to encourage him she enquired:
‘Was it her heart? I remember her propped up with pillows, her lips blue, and somehow getting the idea from Maisie she might die any moment—from a sudden shock.’
‘That’s it. The moment came. And Maisie. And the shock.’
Again it all seemed about to become the beginning of a once familiar story.
‘A shock she died of?’
‘Not on the spot. But—yes.’
‘I see, I see. You got on well—too well—with Maisie.’
‘It was all right in the beginning. Everybody happy. She was so wrapped up in that kid of Maisie’s; and so proud of Maisie being a doctor. But then … You may remember, Maisie’s a free and easy convivial sort of bloke. And Sibyl started to get suspicious.’
‘Of anything in particular?’
‘Well, we liked sitting up late. And drinking.’
‘Ah, Sibyl wouldn’t approve of that. She’d think that very vulgar. Also she would deplore what sitting up late and drinking leads to.’
‘That was just the trouble,’ he said, with simple if rueful amusement. ‘We got sort of amorous. Nothing serious. You might not think it to look at her, but the doctor’s quite game for a romp. And she didn’t mind that I wasn’t any good. She’s a kind old bag.’
‘She helped restore your manly confidence.’
‘Perhaps she did. Don’t be so beastly sarcastic.’
‘It all sounds to me very vulgar. I’m on Sibyl’s side. I don’t care for romps.’
‘Oh, you don’t!’ He hugged her, teased her, laughing silently, perfectly relaxed.
‘And I doubt if Maisie’s motives were altogether pure. Though of course that wouldn’t bother you.’
‘Oh, you are cross! Why are you? One thing I do promise you: she’s not nearly, not nearly as attractive as you. Not really my type.’
‘That is good news. But stick to the point. This is supposed to be a deadly serious confession. What happened?’
‘O-o-oh! …’ He let out a prolonged groan and sank into depression. ‘What happened was: in the early hours, there was Sibyl suddenly, in the doorway. Glari
ng, shaking. We thought Louis had carried her up hours ago. But it seems she’d told him to leave her, that Maisie was going to see to her. She said she’d been calling for hours, that she needed whatever it was she took for her palpitations, that she’d been deserted. She cried, it was terrible, she collapsed on the floor, and sobbed and sobbed. She said it was the bitter shame—her own granddaughter no better than a trollop. And one of the most revolting crimes was abuse of hospitality.’
‘What did that mean?’
‘Using her precious sacred house for immoral purposes. Actually,’ he said, suddenly becoming a caught-out, self-justifying schoolboy, ‘we were only drinking and smoking, thank the Lord—and playing the guitar. But it was unpardonably squalid according to her standards.’
He paused; went on despondently: ‘From first to last she never looked at me. Maisie picked her up and carried her all the way back to the house. She was almost unconscious. Just before dawn she died … Maisie holding her hand.’ He added in a strangled voice: ‘That was the last I saw of her. I don’t think she forgave me.’
‘I’m sure she did. Of course she did. She loved you—and she always forgave. She was magnanimous.’
‘Yes. Well, I hope so. She sent me an odd sort of message. Actually, the last thing she said.’
‘What was it?’
‘Something about a slayer. O young man O my slayer . . . that was it. She said: “Tell him it’s a quotation”, and she smiled, according to Maisie—a real smile. You remember her smile?—enormously amused.’
‘I do. And her tears. I remember both.’
She lay back, straining her ears as if to catch the echo of a voice. ‘And I remember one of the last things she said to me.’ She paused and he turned his head enquiringly. ‘That you don’t want to be—saved.’
‘Oh, saved?’ Disgusted voice. ‘But what on earth—I don’t know what you’re getting at.’
‘Never mind. I felt she had come to warn me off. You were her property and trespassers would be prosecuted—that was the feeling she conveyed. But I dare say it was just my guilty conscience. You know how it works in dreams.’
A Sea-Grape Tree Page 11
