A Favourite of the Gods and a Compass Error

by Sybille Bedford

  “Your plans,” said Constanza. Nevertheless, she promised him to leave her mother in the dark until it was all over.

  •

  Then Simon came home with the solution. “Lewis. Lewis is on leave again, he won’t turn a hair. Lewis Ware, Captain Ware, remember? My dark horse. He’s a sport and a good friend, I’m going to ask him today. All right by you?”

  Perfectly all right, said Constanza.

  •

  Lewis did not turn a hair. Thursday, Simon told Constanza. “He hasn’t got much leave.”

  “What a waste for him,” she said. “We can’t accept that.”

  “I told you he’s a good friend.”

  “What do I do next?”

  His detectives were on, Simon said. For the rest she was on her own now. “You’ll have to make the arrangements. I’ve got to keep out of it.”

  Captain Ware—very considerately, she thought—telephoned. “I hear I have the pleasure of taking you out of London. Where shall it be, Mrs. Herbert?”

  Constanza said wouldn’t he prefer a London hotel so that they could go to a theatre or something.

  Very thoughtful of her, he said, “But London isn’t such a good idea for what Simon has in mind.”

  “Brighton, then?”

  “Can you think of a place people don’t go to?”

  “Wouldn’t that be awfully dull for you?”

  “Mrs. Herbert,” the Captain said, “we are supposed to be doing a job. Will you please do as I say.”

  So Constanza named a small inn not far from Cambridge, where she had stayed once or twice in her unmarried days. Captain Ware told her to leave the booking to him.

  •

  They met in the hall and the captain signed the register. Constanza had not thought they might remember her, but it became apparent that they did.

  “Did you put Mr. & Mrs.?” she asked.

  “Captain & Mrs.”

  “Isn’t one supposed to try to be discreet?”

  “Best to play it simple,” he said.

  It was not the shortest evening and night she had ever spent; but Captain Ware was easy and open without asking questions, and she liked him for doing what he did. Before dinner was over she liked him very much. They ate in the hushed dining-room and the food was indescribably and wilfully bad. Captain Ware drank whisky.

  “Would he be the detective?” Constanza said, indicating a table with a single, bald man in mufti.

  Captain Ware gave him a glance. “No. Corner opposite. Second table from the left.” When she could, Constanza turned and saw another bald and single man in mufti.

  They had no friends in common except Simon, and, unlike Simon, Captain Ware would not talk about his own existence in the war, so at first they talked about the technicalities of their situation. “Why did we come here?” Constanza asked.

  “Your choice.”

  “You made me choose. Why?”

  “It’s got to look right, hasn’t it?”

  “So Simon tells me.”

  “Who would know the kind of place a woman wanting to spend a night on the quiet with a man on leave would go to, except the woman?”

  “How were you sure I’d know?”

  “I took a chance on that.”

  Suddenly he began to tell her stories about America. About Chicago, about the West, Colorado, the Arizona Desert, California, the motion-picture studios. He made it all sound fascinating, wide, larger than life.

  “But you are not American?” she said, “I only ask because I am; half.”

  “No, I’m not American,” he said. He did not volunteer where he was born. “I knocked about a good deal on the other side before the war, regrettant l’Europe aux anciens parapets.”

  Startled, she said, “Rimbaud.”

  “I read him in France. He stands up.”

  “I read less now,” she said. “I’ve taken rather to Horace.”

  “I learnt French in Belgium—oh, long before this show—there’s no country where I could have picked up Latin.”

  “You mean you didn’t go to school?” said Constanza.

  “Not what you’d call school.”

  Then they did talk about the war. Captain Ware said it had brought opportunities, as well as interruption—he had begun to write a book. “About a customs man who’s painted some very rum pictures. Rum and beautiful. Still, if it weren’t for the war I should not have met people like you and Simon.”

  “You always would have met people like Simon and me.”

  “That’s what you think.”

  “We should have met after you’d written your book about the customs man’s pictures.”

  “This way is quicker,” said Captain Ware.

  Presently they were left with nothing except empty tables and disapproving stares. “What shall we do now? I’m a noctambulist.”

  “So am I,” said Constanza.

  “The bar shuts at ten.”

  “We could try the town.”

  “There is no town.”

  “I don’t remember that.”

  “I bet you don’t.”

  They went upstairs and talked some more. Captain Ware had brought a bottle. Constanza, who hardly ever drank spirits, thought the least she could do was to be companionable and had a little in the other tooth-mug.

  At length he said: “What a way to spend a night with a woman. A woman like you!”

  “Same here,” she said.

  “Now look,” he said.

  But she said, “I have apologized to you before. It’s got to go according to plan. There are several very good reasons.”

  “Very well,” he said. “I didn’t think you were one to change your mind. Only——”

  “Wrong time,” she said.

  He got out a pack and they played a few rounds of some two-handed game. Constanza had learnt to play piquet and écarté with her father, but she had never had much card sense and there was no use pretending she played well. They did not pretend.

  “Any rate poker is the only game worth sitting down to,” he said.

  “You are a rum man,” said Constanza, “like the customs man’s pictures. Which sides are the pose?”

  He gave her an appreciative look, but did not involve himself in answers.

  Through the rest of it, including witnessed breakfast the next morning, they got with tolerably good grace.

  Captain Ware was off to an early start by himself as he was going back to France that day.

  “Good God,” Constanza said, “your leave?” “It isn’t up. I want to put in a few days in Paris. Iron or two in the fire.”

  He came in again, dressed and shaved, to say good-bye and before doing so, he proposed to her. He added, “I’ve no idea of course what your commitments are, but there’s no harm in asking.”

  Then he said: “I see. Well, there hasn’t been much time. Only let me put in two points quickly: You are exactly the kind of woman I want; and I should have asked you in any case to wait for a year or two. I haven’t got a bean at the moment but I expect I shall be able to look after you quite properly in the not too distant future.”

  Constanza was feeling very sad that morning and her mind was not on Captain Ware, so she held out her hand and said a little vaguely, “You are a very nice man.”

  “I shouldn’t have put it that way,” he said. “Now remember: the offer stands. Good-bye. I shall keep it open—within reasonable limitations.”

  •

  Constanza took her time getting back to Regent’s Park. When she let herself in, she found that Simon had already left his office and was waiting for her.

  “According to plan?”

  “According to plan,” she said.

  “Anna is out.”

  “Thank God.”

  “Oh, Constanza.”

  She sat down. Simon took her hand. “What do we do now? What’s the next step?” she said.

  “I am supposed to react. I must either turn you out, or leave. I shall have to leave you—walk out
of the house.”

  “If you don’t?”

  “Then, my dear, I shall be deemed to have condoned the offence. If you had helped me more with my law-books, you would know. We’d have to start all over again.”

  “Not in Cambridgeshire,” said Constanza. “But I haven’t been notified. At this hour I am the injured but still unsuspecting party. Darling, this is Friday afternoon, that detective’s report can’t come in before Monday morning at the earliest—we have three more days. I am not going to walk out now.”

  “Oh, Simon,” she said.

  At one time in the course of that Sunday, he said to her: “Constanza, tesoro, you’re the only one for me. If you say one word, I’ll throw them all over. We can still go to Guatemala, you and I.”

  “Which word?” said Constanza.

  “A magic word. Potent magic. If you could ever make me feel certain of you! Don’t think that Mary—I often wish I’d never set eyes on her. Don’t think I don’t see that she’s a poor copy of you. But she loves me. Once you’ve had that, it’s hard to do without.” His voice began to tremble: “You hardly wrote to me when I was at the front. Scraps—I felt you didn’t bother to read my letters. It was your mother who wrote to me. I can never forget that.”

  •

  On Monday morning Constanza came down to breakfast. Simon had gone through the post. “Nothing,” he said. “A reprieve.” A few minutes later their English parlour-maid came in with the long envelope. Simon looked white as he signed. “By hand. Damn them.”

  He swallowed some tea. “We can pretend it came in the afternoon.”

  “Simon.”

  “Ought I to leave now? Have I got to walk out of the house now?”

  “I am not driving you out,” said Constanza, “and don’t cry, my sweet.”

  “All right. I am going. Mena——”

  “Yes, Mena will see to your things.”

  “I have to go up to Anna now and break it.” He had promised to do this.

  “Yes,” she said, “we must keep our strength for that.”

  It took him more than an hour. When he came down again, there was a cab at the door, luggage in the hall, and they were no longer really alone.

  “How did you tell her?”

  “Involved.”

  “I must know. Let’s meet somewhere this afternoon.”

  “I’m not supposed to meet you,” he said.

  Constanza went out to the cab with him and he was able to manage a few words. “I’m afraid I had to make you the nigger in the wood-pile. I told her I had just received some very terrible evidence against you; she doesn’t believe in the truth of it, but she believes that I do. So now you know the line.”

  Constanza did some very fast thinking and said, “It was the best you could do.” They had no chance to say more.

  •

  In the months that passed while Constanza was waiting for her divorce, it was her relation with her mother that was intolerably strained. That Anna was shattered goes without saying; the new element consisted of her not knowing, this time, where to turn or whom to blame.

  “Poor woman!” Mena said to Constanza, and Constanza said to Mena. But this did not change matters or help either her or them.

  What the principessa held was, with some vacillations, this: If Simon was convinced that Constanza had spent the night with a man in Cambridgeshire, he was right in what he was doing; where he was wrong, catastrophically wrong, pig-headed, to blame, was in not believing that Constanza had merely appearances against her. The principessa had believed this with to Constanza almost shameful ease.

  “Mama, it was not what it looked like, I can’t say more, but you must take my word for it,” she had flung at her mother in a tone of barely concealed irony, and her mother had chosen to believe her on the spot.

  All the same she was beside herself with grief and anger at Constanza’s conduct and she raved at her, not so much at the folly of having got herself entangled in such appearances at all (Anna was certain that a daughter of hers could have done so only for good and sufficient reason), but at her refusal to explain, to make up to Simon, to exert herself. She accused Constanza of being shallow, wilful, flip-pant and unfeeling.

  “You are a femme fatale,” she said, having this notion of the term, “you are ruining your life and his and mine—all over again—and you’re not thinking of your innocent child.”

  Constanza took on more overtime at her office and told herself that if she were a man this would be the moment to enlist in the Foreign Legion.

  Naturally Anna’s informers told her of the existence of Miss Mary Mouse. Anna said that Simon was being vindictive and was being got at: these people were known schemers who shrank from nothing, and she stormed at Constanza for allowing her husband to fall into the hands of designing women and the Yellow Press.

  Simon was very good about one thing, he came to Regent’s Park every other day or so to be with Anna and to draw her thunder. They did not get anywhere. Anna would tell him at new length why he must believe Constanza and above all herself, while Simon would sit drinking brandy-and-soda after brandy-and-soda and put in from time to time that he couldn’t help it, he still felt that Constanza was perfectly capable of being unfaithful to him.

  To this Anna would say: “Dearest boy, you got these notions by staying so much in Italy.”

  They got nowhere: but these visits made things bearable for Anna. She at least saw Simon, and it saved her from any attack of pitched despair. In some ways, it also helped Simon.

  Simon and Constanza spoke a few times on the telephone.

  “I’m getting some very black looks these days. Have you been talking?”

  “What do you mean?” she said.

  “They say I am treating you shabbily. What do you tell people?”

  “Nothing unless I must. That we haven’t quarrelled, that marriage wasn’t our thing.”

  “Oh God,” he said, “you’re hopeless.”

  •

  Another time he said, “My lawyers tell me it’s going to be sticky about the custody, the court is going to look on you as a loose woman.”

  “Simon, I will have Flavia; I shall insist on that.”

  “That’s the point, darling, you’re not in a position to insist on anything. Well, I shall try to do my best.”

  •

  Mr. James was not a solace either. Never had Constanza found him so uncharitable and so cold.

  “I shall never forgive Simon. I shall never speak to him again.”

  “Things aren’t quite the way you think they are,” she told him.

  “Whichever way, I cannot forgive Simon. And don’t imagine that I haven’t got a pretty shrewd idea of what you’ve been up to.”

  “If you have, why the fuss?”

  “You take too much upon yourself,” he said. “As I told you before. You are an inverted romantic. My poor benighted girl, I never thought I’d see you stand in for Don Quixote.”

  Constanza said lightly, “Oh, not all women treat their men like dirt. Not even all American women.”

  •

  The divorce came on early in November. Next day a paragraph in small print appeared in The Times (the Yellow Press kept—relatively—quiet).

  Mr. Simon Herbert of *** Terrace, London, was granted a decree nisi in the Divorce Court yesterday because of adultery by his wife, Mrs. Constance Herbert, with Captain L. C. Ware, D.S.O. The petition was not contested. Judge Morell awarded the custody of the only child of the marriage to Mrs. Herbert’s mother, the Princess ***.

  Afterwards, Constanza said that she would not describe it as the happiest day of her life. “I ought to have been warned. I had no idea judges talked that way. . . .”

  At the time, she telephoned to Simon in savage anger. “How could you let the child go to mama! It was sprung on me: I didn’t take it in before it was done.”

  “My dear, you don’t know how these old boys feel about adultery. It was that or my mother. In the eyes of the law I am now
a single man with a sixteen-hour-a-day job. It was the best we could do.”

  Constanza hung up on him. She went at once—and too late—to get legal advice; in different words they told her the same.

  Four days later the war was over. So it has come, they said, the Armistice. How we waited.

  “Prayed,” said Anna.

  People telephoned. Where are you?—London’s in an uproar—we are waiting for you—we’re all off to Piccadilly. But they decided to stay in.

  Presently they were joined by Mr. James.

  “We are celebrating,” said the principessa.

  “An inveterate instinct. Hope springs eternal. And how do we start from here? Once the shouting’s over?”

  “The killing is over,” said Constanza, “let us be grateful for that.”

  “A qualified celebration,” said Mr. James.

  “I shall have to think of moving house,” said Anna.

  Telephone calls were still pouring in and at one time of the evening Anna was out of the drawing-room. “I think I ought to tell you,” said Mr. James, “I see you haven’t heard. You didn’t read the evening papers below the headlines?”

  “What is it?” “Major Thomas Herbert. Died on his transport home, it only says, of the after-effects of dysentery.”

  “Brother Tom—how ghastly. How ghastly for all of them. And poor Simon. . . . It won’t be easy to be the survivor, and to that extent. Those poor poor people. I suppose Simon will be expected to go to Northumberland. The strain. . . .” Then Constanza said, “Don’t tell mama. Not just now, not tonight.”

  “That’s what I thought,” said Mr. James. “Does she know about?” He named the house in Somerset. Constanza nodded. “Well, Simon will be the master of that one day.”

  “He never thought he would.”

  “Simon, all in all, will be a very. . . substantial man,” said Mr. James.

  Constanza smiled. “Substantial—he’ll like that.”

  The principessa came back and they began talking about Clemenceau. Later on someone else telephoned. “It is revolution in Germany: they are turning against their officers.”

  “Whatever that means, they won’t stand for another war.” “Nobody will that,” said Constanza. Mr. James said he agreed. He stayed up late with them and when he left, Constanza saw him out. “It was good to have had you with us,” she said, “you must come more often. Well, here we were again, just the three of us, like that other night.”