by Ursula Bloom
‘Well, I won’t let you go out at midday.’
‘Now don’t you start nagging. I tell you one thing here and now, in the Alpes Maritime, I won’t be hen-pecked.’
‘Do I act like a hen-pecker?’
‘It’s in your family; your father did it. Oh God, what a man!’
If only Richard hadn’t said that! Why did men have to spoil everything? Just when she was trying so hard to be her real self, and this was what he did.
‘You’d better leave my father out of this.’
‘He isn’t one of the fathers you can leave out of the picture, is he?’ Richard took a large rose-flushed peach out of the basket, and set his teeth into it, so that the juice spurted out. She said nothing. She could only stay silent, or she would have said too much, and she wouldn’t do that. She turned her head away. She was thinking, how-revolting-people-are-when-they-are-eating-fruit-in-public! It’s shocking!
‘I didn’t know you were the sulky kind, Lesley.’
‘I didn’t know it either.’
‘What’s the trouble? You thought I was rude about your father, well, I don’t like him, how could I? You yourself did not seem to be so keen.’
‘He’s my father.’ She had to say it because she loved Daniel; when she came to think about it she loved him very much indeed. It was queer that she had never recognized the full extent of her admiration and affection for him, until she had got to Dover on the first day of her honeymoon. Then she added, ‘Oh, do shut up!’
Richard didn’t understand her. He selected another peach, she saw him reach out towards the basket, and knew that she couldn’t bear it. She got up pretending that she would have a look at the garden, she stood there with the miniature cypresses wrapped in their blue shawls, and below her the view of a valley, whilst above her there was the eternal snow. Then she knew the truth. The vista told her, or the air refreshing as wine, and poignant too, but she suspected that she had made a major mistake in her life, and whereas one half of her ‒ the protective half ‒ was screaming to deny it, the other half confessed it. Bluntly. Brutally and with noticeable truth.
When she returned to Richard he had finished the fruit, and was smoking a cigarette.
‘Got over your temper?’ he said. ‘Bad girl to get so rattled about nothing! Guess you and I’ll have to leave our relations out of the conversation if they muck things up like this for us. I never gave a damn for my old man, and it wouldn’t worry me who threw bricks at him. Funny that you should be so damned keen on your old piece.’
She said nothing.
They got to Cap Roche that night.
Cap Roche was a small village in the process of development. There were hot yellow sands, and a sea blue as acquamarines, and never ruffled. There were palms sagging a little, and looking like giant birds that were moulting, cafés and a plage already built, with clove-scented carnations in the beds, and freesias and roses. Young women seemed to be everywhere, all tight trousers and heavy earrings. Strange bathing dresses of so little one could not believe it was true.
The first thing that Lesley did was to buy different clothes, gay things which gave her the sense of thrill. She ordered a huge box of marrons to send to her father who adored them, and she dispatched them with her love. That gave her infinite satisfaction.
She was nostalgic for him. She missed him horribly. In some ridiculous way he was her hero and she could not tear him down from the pedestal which, as a little child, she had set him on. The hotel itself was large and glittering, and their suite superb, for her father-in-law was paying the bill, and had asked for special attention for them. The service was admirable, the food excellent, and Lesley know that she ought to be amazingly happy, yet she wasn’t happy really.
When the first glamour died, and it died fairly soon, there was nothing behind it. It was like scooping a handful of surf from the sea in your hands, and finding it dribbling away, leaving nothing, only the salty smell. Rather bitter. No more.
There was a young widow staying at the hotel, and her name was Claudia Ross. She had lost her husband in a car accident, was twenty-four with raven black hair, and light eyes of which she made the most. She had the table next to theirs in the dining-room, and immediately Richard was attracted to her. Lesley knew that.
‘She’s a lovely looker,’ he told Lesley, ‘beautifully made, don’t you think?’
‘I’m afraid I don’t notice how well made women are.’
‘Oh, but you couldn’t miss her; she’s lovely. I like slinky women, and you’re big-boned.’
‘Oh, Richard, I’m NOT.’
‘All right, you’re not, but I ought to know. I’ve handled lots of women.’
‘You needn’t brag about it.’
‘You’d have hated me if I’d been chaste. Men need experience when they marry, because that is where most love affairs go wrong. The inexperienced male is hopeless. You ought to try one of the chaps, who don’t know.’
‘Please shut up,’ she said.
He got up and he danced with Claudia, out of spite, she supposed. His hand was on Claudia’s spine, his knee against hers, (as though Lesley didn’t know all the little tricks), and she hated him for it. Afterwards he took Claudia in the garden, and after a long while Lesley went up to bed. It was past two when Richard came, entering cautiously, and obviously thinking that she would be asleep. She let him go through it on tip toe, then she spoke.
‘And what have you been doing?’ she asked.
‘I thought you were asleep. How mean of you to lie doggo, and not say anything.’
‘You’ve been with that beastly girl?’
‘Mrs. North, I congratulate you on your perspicacity.’
Lesley ignored that.
‘To leave me alone like this for the entire evening is monstrous, after all how long have we been married?’
‘I should have said it was six days since you got the ring on.’
‘Exactly.’
‘Claudia is enchanting. She has the darkest hair and the darkest eyes that I have ever seen. All her ribs show.’
‘You ought to know.’
He was terribly young in lots of ways, younger than she was, and he could not contain himself in the glory of a recent success. ‘I ought to know, right enough. The girl’s like a lathe and I always preferred the willowy type. She’s generous, too.’
Lesley did not say a word.
She turned her back on him and pretended to sleep, but she lay there awake amazed that she should find life so dreadful. A newly married man who behaved this way! First the girl’s legs in that barn where two beds had been placed under the window. Now Claudia! And Claudia was the much more dangerous proposition, of course.
She slept fitfully, then into a deep sleep towards dawn, waking with the sense of tragedy hanging over it. At first she could not remember what had happened, then recalled it, and hated herself for the beastliness of the memory.
They had petit déjeuner on the balcony, with the scent of orange and lemon blossom blown up to them, and the threat of a very hot day dawning. Richard was over gay, Lesley wanted to be discreet, and not say too much. She did not want to start on the unpleasant subject, and in the end it was Richard who began it.
‘So,’ he said, ‘you’re still mad about last night? You do let things get in your hair, don’t you?’
‘Any woman would be mad about it. What happened?’
‘Perhaps the truth is that I’ve only got a one track mind, my dear. Only one thing ever happens to me, and I shall never deviate from the primitive plan.’
‘But Claudia couldn’t be that sort.’
‘Most girls are. You were.’
Oh God, this is unbearable, she thought. ‘I honestly believe that I hate you,’ she admitted.
She felt that she had ripped a mask from him, and saw him as he really was. Somehow or other her latent horror of philandering rose in her like a tide. She had detested being aware of it in her father, and the dreadful distaste burned like a torch and refused
to be extinguished. She couldn’t pluck this torch out of her heart, even though she wanted to do so. She had been a fool, so drunk with physical emotion (it had never been love), that she had let the passing episode drift into the permanent arrangement, and now she was paying for it.
She would never forgive herself, nor him either.
He said, ‘It’s no good sitting there and looking like the Wrath of God. You think you can alter me, and you can’t. I’m made this way, and thank the Lord I am, because I get a lot of fun out of it. Now what’s the programme for today?’
‘You mustn’t go out in the sun.’
‘Rot. I’m going up to Grasse. I’m all right. What are you going to do?’
‘I suppose I’ve got to come with you, but I confess it gives me a pain in the neck.’
He rose with elaborate care, lifting the tray to carry it back from the balcony into the suite. He wore a foulard dressing-gown with a paisley pattern in vivid blues and maroon. It was aggravating that it suited him so well. He walked with an overdone precision, not looking back, and he said, ‘You’re not even asked. I’m going adventuring.’ Then he disappeared, tray and all.
Claudia, of course!
Lesley couldn’t believe it. She sat there with her knees hunched and her arms locked round them. She waited for what seemed to be hours, and after a while she saw Richard go out to the waiting car. Gay. Devil-may-care. Unthinking. Claudia was with him. She wore one of those little black suits that only black-haired women can wear quite so exquisitely. She had camellias in her hat, and she looked like a glossy magazine cover, but Lesley was so furious that it consumed her like a fire.
They went off, much too fast.
Lesley watched the car until it was a speck curling up the road to the mountains. They’d find some field, some cool fir forest, somewhere up in the hills, and she had never realised that he was merely animal until she had married him.
What should she do? Daddy will help me, she told herself. She sat down and wrote a long letter to him, then her pride overcame her, and she tore that letter into little pieces. She went out to a café for an aperitif, and an ardent-eyed Frenchman spoke to her, feeling it a shame that so much beauty sat alone. She hated men. At the moment this perhaps was her only method of self-defence. She just hated them.
She couldn’t eat lunch, and she drowsed through a too hot afternoon. When Richard returned she decided to be stone cold. She could not fly at Claudia, slap her face, and make a scene (which had been her first reaction), she would treat the affair with the frigidity of sophistication.
She dressed for dinner, and was putting the final touches to it when the femme de chambre came rather haltingly to the door, and said that the manager wished to speak to Madame.
‘The manager? Whatever for?’
The manager came in from behind the femme de chambre, and Lesley saw that he was a pleasant Englishman of about forty. His name, she knew, was Major Fergusson.
‘Mrs. North, could I have a word with you?’
‘Of course. Is something wrong?’ If it was trouble over the bill her father would settle it. There need be no bother about money.
‘I have received some news over the telephone, and I’m afraid your husband has been delayed.’
The colour left Lesley’s face, and she sat there looking at him with her heart slowing down and the sensation of extreme lethargy coming to her. Did this mean that Richard was intending to spend the night in the mountains with Claudia? Very probably.
The next remark changed that. ‘There’s been an accident.’
‘You mean that somebody’s hurt?’
‘I’m afraid they’re both hurt. Very much so. You’ve got to be brave, you know, and that was why I came up here so that I might tell you myself.’
‘He isn’t …?’ She couldn’t say it.
Major Fergusson looked at her without speaking, then he put out a hand and took hers compellingly. Even at that awful moment she realised that this was a nice hand, a hand that had worked hard, and on which a woman could depend.
‘He’s very ill.’
‘It can’t be true? You don’t mean that he isn’t going to get better?’
‘I ‒ I’m not sure about that.’
Eternity suddenly yawned at her. A chasm. Void. Or didn’t it? Lesley was too bewildered to know what she was doing or saying. They had only been married such a very short time, how could it be that Richard wasn’t going to get better? He was so full of life and fun and the business of enjoying himself. People like that didn’t die. Only the old died, the very old, who had had their fun and were sick of life.
She heard herself speaking. ‘Claudia?’
‘She was killed. They were coming down the road rather fast, and a big car met them. Something happened.’
‘Where is Richard?’
‘There was a nearby convent where they took him. It is a nursing order. I’ve been there myself, and the nuns are very good. He couldn’t be in better hands.’
‘I ‒ I must go to him.’ She got up resolutely.
‘He isn’t conscious. Perhaps ‒ perhaps you would like to speak to the Sister-in-charge at the hospital? I can get through to her, for I said I thought you would like this.’
‘Please? But I must go to him, Major Fergusson, whatever happens he’ll want me, and I must go to him.’
How young she looks! he thought, how utterly unfit to cope with that fellow, and what a mercy it will be if he dies! But he said nothing, and went over to the telephone on the table beside the bed, to put the call through.
‘Here is the Sister,’ he said at last.
The nun spoke in beautiful English and clearly. There was nothing more that could be done, she said, and she exhorted Lesley to be brave. Richard had died five minutes before from a fractured skull. He had never recovered consciousness.
The telephone receiver fell out of the girl’s hand, and she turned her agonized face to Major Fergusson.
‘I ‒ I want my father,’ she whispered.
He laid her back in the big easy chair that was alongside and smoothed her hair away from her eyes.
‘Before you came here to my hotel your father wrote to me asking me to do the best for you, so I took the precaution of cabling to him to come here the moment I knew of the accident. He will get the cable fairly soon now, most certainly this evening, and I know that he will leave immediately for France.’
She stared up at him.
‘The dreadful part is that ‒ I can’t be truly sorry like I should be. It ‒ it’s almost worse to lose someone that you don’t love, than a man you adore. If it had been my father, I am sure that I couldn’t have borne it …’
Chapter Six
THE WIDOW
On arrival Daniel went up to the bedroom which was quite unlike anything he had seen before. He went over to the bed where the girl lay exhausted from weeping, and he sat down on a much buttoned easy chair that was upholstered in oyster satin.
‘Lesley, my dear,’ he said.
‘Don’t sympathise with me Daddy, anything but that. Please be nice to me, because this is all something that I only want to forget.’
‘Yes, of course. That’s my own wise little duchess. Put it behind you. Tell me how do you feel?’
‘My head ached dreadfully at first, but they gave me something to help that. Only now I can’t eat. I don’t believe that I shall ever eat again.’ There was a long silence, and then, she said almost in a whisper, ‘It’s nice seeing you here, Daddy. Comforting. I can lean on you.’
‘Of course, and when it’s cooler, you’re coming out with me.’
‘Oh no, no, I couldn’t do that.’
‘All right, then we won’t go, only I should have liked to see a little of this place whilst I was here, I’ve never travelled before, and this is quite a new experience for me.’
He’d try again later, for she ought to be out of this hot room, with the whirring fans which irritated him by their continuous buzzing. When night fell he tried to tem
pt her on to the balcony, but again she would not stir. The ruse failed that first night, and again on the second, but on the third one he persuaded her.
It must have been about midnight, and they went out together, very slowly arm in arm. It was warmly humid with stars like diamond pin-points in the sequinned blue of the sky; some people were bathing and laughing, making a noise as Lesley had done at Frinton, and Daniel only hoped that did not remind her too sharply of that unhappy episode. They sat on a seat near a bed of geraniums which they could not see for the darkness, but which they could smell.
Then she spoke.
‘I’ve got to tell you, Daddy, and once I have told you, please never mention any of it to me again? Never never, because I couldn’t bear it. You were right and I was wrong. About Richard, I mean. It wasn’t love, as you said, it was just, oh hell, perhaps I don’t really know what it was. In the few days of our marriage, we quarrelled horribly, and that’s what is so dreadful now. I wasn’t in love with him, and I think I actually hated him the last couple of days, and that hurts badly. I wouldn’t expect you to understand that.’
‘But I do understand it, Lesley, you see I didn’t love your mother.’
Lesley wasn’t looking at him. ‘He was just like the surf of the sea, light and shallow, and when you touch it, you’ve got nothing, nothing at all. He married me only because you made him do it, Daddy, and that was wrong of you. It would have been better to face any experience, however unpleasant, rather than the one that I went through, for it stunned me. Now I cannot escape it. I suppose it is early days, but I feel so awful.’
‘Of course it’s early days, my little duchess.’
‘I know that I wanted to get away from him when there was a row with the Customs at Calais; when he was looking at that French girl’s legs. I doubt if he knew it, but I ‒ I didn’t know that there were men like Richard in the world. Owen wasn’t like that.’
‘And who was Owen?’
‘A farmer’s son in Wales. It was at the time when Grannie died, and I went to stay with Miss Everington’s sister. I walked up Snowdon, and Owen found out and came after me.’
