The Governor's Lady

by Norman Collins

Chapter 56

  The guard had rolled up his green flag as though it were an umbrella; those passengers without tickets, and large parties travelling with too few, had finally been ejected; and the Coronation Flyer, its brass alarm bell clanging, had started to pull out of Amimbo.

  Harold Stebbs leant back and undid his collar.

  ‘Tomorrow, and I’ll be there,’ he was thinking. ‘Only one more night Then we’ll be together again. I should never have left her. It’s being alone so much that’s done it. She’ll be all right once I’m with her. I know she will.’

  From his corner seat in the front compartment, he could see down the whole length of the platform. There was the Sleeper Reservation hut; the new concrete lavatory, with the ‘Out of Order’ notice hanging on the door; the glasswork and flower baskets of the main booking hall; the parcels office, half hidden behind that day’s delivery of miscellaneous, unlabelled rubbish.

  Because everyone else was waving, Harold lowered the window and waved, too.

  ‘I’ll get her away from here. Right away, so that she can forget about all this. England, if she likes. Then she can see Timothy. She ought to see him. After all, she’s his mother. But get her away from here: that’s what matters. And I don’t mind where. Not so long as I’m with her.’

  The Flyer had cleared the hand-points by the marshalling yard, and the train was gathering speed. It began to rock: the blind tassels were hitting the windows and bouncing back again.

  ‘We’ll settle down somewhere. It’ll all work out. They’ll find a job for me. Not back in Amimbo. Can’t go back there. Lots of other colonies. Plenty of places going. We’ll fit in, wherever it is. Do her good seeing a different set of people.’

  The door of the compartment opened: it was the restaurant attendant, with the initials of the railway company embroidered on his jacket, who stood there. He was getting to know Harold.

  ‘Tickets for first and second luncheons, sah,’ he was saying. ‘Cold beer, mineral waters, spirits…’

  Harold took the pink slip of paper with the large figure ‘2’ printed on it.

  ‘Make a proper home for her. Start living like normal people. Got it all in front of us. Years and years of it. Just Anne and me. Probably raise a family. Might do.’

  The train had reached the long, uphill curve towards Burindi. There was a three-mile gradient here, and the driver had given the Coronation Flyer all the steam he had. Wiping his forehead with a handful of cotton waste, he was now looking anxiously at the pressure-gauge wondering whether the ancient engine could take it.

  Beyond the embankment to the south, the capital city of Amimbo was spread out beneath them. But already it had grown smaller; much smaller. It wasn’t like a real township any more: just a coloured page out of the guide book, with the blue dome of the mosque, the Cathedral tower, the vermilion gasholder, and all the trees. Away over to the left, he could see the outline of the Residency, shining white against the green lawns around it. Then the hump of Telegraph Hill cut it off from him; and a moment later, the train had run into a cutting. Amimbo had disappeared.

  ‘And that’s forever,’ he told himself. ‘Nothing to go back for now. Have to get the rest of my things sent on somehow. That is, when I know where. Got to be somewhere she likes, of course. Wouldn’t do to finish up in some dump, or other. Not with her. But no need to worry. I won’t let her down. She knows that.’

  Even though the window opposite was closed, there must have been a draught somewhere: he shivered.

  It had been like that the first time he saw Amimbo.

  The Anglican church of St. Mark’s, Nucca, stood in one of the side streets off the main square. It was a weatherboard building, scarcely larger than a mission hall. Even so, it seemed too big: the eight rows of highly varnished pews behind them were entirely empty.

  That, however, was how Lady Anne wanted it.

  ‘Only the two of us,’ she had kept saying. ‘And the parson, of course: he’s got to be there. Nobody else: it’s not their business. Just you and me. It’s our wedding, not other people’s.’

  More than once, he had wondered why she wanted to be married in a church at all : back in Amimbo, it had been only memorials and parades and the children’s carol service at Christmas, that she had ever attended. But, when he asked her, she had become upset.

  ‘Because it’s important,’ she had told him. ‘Very important. I’m older than I was when I married Gardie. I know what I’m doing now. It’s different. I want the service, and the ring, and the blessing; all of it.’ And, after being silent for a moment, she had added. ‘It means a lot to me. It’s all got to be right this time. Really right, I mean. Don’t forget : it’s forever, darling.’

  And now the English chaplain had closed his Prayer Book, put back the embroidered bookmarker and was asking them to come through to the vestry to sign the register.

  Throughout the ceremony, he had tried to keep the right note of cordiality in his voice ; but, at heart, he was a bitterly disappointed man.

  From the moment Harold had first come to him, he had been planning great things. There were not many Protestants in Catholic Nucca, and he had allowed his imagination to stray a little. He would whip up a choir somehow, he had told himself: have all the old hymns, and let them try their hand at a simple anthem. A full church at last; and a sermon.

  And now, in the makeshift built-on vestry, with only the British consul and the Portuguese housekeeper as witnesses, this dreadful feeling of flatness. In his eyes, the whole affair seemed somehow strangely furtive and clandestine. Even signing the register was an anti-climax. Here in Nucca, a Protestant clergyman had no real standing: in order to make the marriage legally binding, bride and bridegroom had been required to present themselves at the Town Hall on the way round to him.

  But there at least it was ; all filled in and freshly-blotted on the yellow, parchmenty paper. In his upright, rather laborious hand, with the big curving loops to the letters, it showed that on the 14th May, 1933, Harold Edward Stebbs, aged twenty-five, single, had married Lady Anne Victoria Hackforth, aged thirty-one, widow, née Bowen.

  The difference in their ages was not important, the chaplain supposed ; not with anyone so strikingly beautiful as Lady Anne. He had never seen eyes quite like hers. There was an inner radiance about them that amazed him: he had noticed it before in the eyes of people who had emerged from great suffering into eventual happiness. The note of true spirituality was something he felt qualified to recognise.

  ‘But I don’t want to go back to see Timothy,’ Lady Anne told him.

  ‘It’ll only upset both of us. He’s much better as he is. He’s settled down now.’

  They were back in the drawing-room of the hired villa; Lady Anne had refused to go away from it.

  ‘Of course, I don’t like it here,’ she said. ‘Nobody could. But we’re together. That’s all that matters. And I don’t want to start meeting a lot of other people. Not yet.’

  And so they had stayed on there, with the jalousies closed against the sunlight; and the Portuguese housekeeper; and the terracotta urns on the terrace outside; and all the dust.

  ‘You’ll have to leave here sometime,’ he reminded her.

  ‘Sometime, yes. But not yet.’ She paused. ‘I don’t want anyone else. I just want you. After all, this is our honeymoon.’

  She turned, and held out her hand towards him.

  ‘You’re not getting bored with me already, are you?’

  They had been married for three days by now, and it was the second time that she had asked him that question. The first had been when he had said something about the Service; when he had wondered aloud where in the end they would be sending him.

  ‘You know I’m not.’

  He had taken her hand, and was fondling it.

  ‘I don’t know anything of the kind,’ she replied. ‘It’s like being married to Gardie all over again. He couldn’t stand just being alone with me, either. You don’t really want us to go over and see Timothy:
it’s simply that you want to be doing something.’

  She drew her hand away from him and reached out for another cigarette; the ashtray at her side had a whole lot of stubbed-out, lip-sticky cigarettes in it. Some of them were less than half-smoked; just lit, and then put down again.

  ‘And I don’t want you to think that I blame you, darling,’ she said. ‘Because I don’t. I know exactly how you feel: you’re a man. You’ve been doing a job, and going about and seeing people. It’s different for me: this is all I’ve been looking forward to.’

  She suddenly thrust the cigarette down into the other litter in the ashtray; and she was too abrupt about it. The cigarette broke in half between her fingers.

  Then she turned to him again.

  ‘The trouble with me is that, now I’ve got you, I can’t make myself believe it.’

  His arms were round her, and he was kissing her. They were small, gentle kisses; on her hair, her forehead. It might have been a child that he was comforting.

  ‘It was awfully lonely after Sybil left,’ she said. ‘And I kept getting so frightened. That’s why I began to drink so much.’ She paused, ‘You nearly married an alcoholic.’

  She gave a little laugh as she said it; there was just the faintest trace of huskiness in her voice already.

  ‘I’d like another drink now,’ she said. ‘Only I don’t want you to leave go of me.’

  ‘I’ll get you one if you like.’

  She pressed herself down closer onto him.

  ‘Later,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to move. I’m too happy.’

  He was still kissing her; the same, soft caressing kisses. It was growing late. He had heard the footsteps of the Portuguese housekeeper as she had gone up to bed long ago: soon they would be going through themselves into the bedroom. He began to slide his hand down into the open neck of her housecoat.

  As he did so he felt her draw away from him. It was not his touch that she minded: he was sure of that. It was rather as if somehow he had interrupted her, cut across some private thoughts that had been passing through her mind.

  ‘What was I wearing when you came into Gardie’s tent?’ she asked. ‘Was it my housecoat? I can’t remember little things like that. I’ve thought about it so much, it’s all muddled up by now.’

  Chapter 57

  Over the past week, the wedding presents had started to come in; the postman, sheltered from the sun by the large white umbrella that he always carried about with him, kept arriving at the front door, arms laden, like a black St. Nicholas.

  The most imposing of the gifts was the one from Mr. Ngono. It was enormous. A great, sinning silver-gilt box, it was too large for cigarettes; too large for cigars, even. It was picnic-size. And was obviously very expensive. But it must have been pure love that had prompted it; the entwined initials, ‘A’ and ‘H’, with, for some reason, an embossed coronet over them, had been engraved in the centre panel.

  ‘Well, I think it’s sweet of him. Absolutely sweet of him even to have thought of it,’ Lady Anne said. ‘It must have been for your sake he sent it, because I hardly knew him. I don’t think he even particularly liked me.’

  She was looking down at a telegram that the housekeeper had given her. It must have come the day before; telegrams weren’t delivered in Nucca after four o’clock.

  ‘Well, this is funny,’ she said. ‘Really funny. It’s from Tony. And to think that he’s the one Gardie had to spy on me. Now he wishes us every happiness; I wonder if he really means it.’

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘It doesn’t say. It never does on a telegram. Somewhere on the Continent probably. London might have been a bit awkward for him. He didn’t come out of it awfully well, did he?’

  She folded up the telegram again and put it down on the pile of letters, greeting cards, other telegrams, all heaped up there on top of the desk.

  ‘They’re more than I expected,’ she said. ‘We’ll have to answer them some time. It’ll be ghastly. But it’d be too rude not to.’

  She was running her finger over them as she said it; and, as she did so, she began smiling. It was a half-hidden, private kind of smile.

  ‘I wonder what Gardie would have made of all this if he could have seen it,’ she remarked. ‘I think he’d have been rather pleased. He couldn’t have borne it if people hadn’t noticed. He’d have thought they’d forgotten about him, or something.’

  Her glass was empty and she held it out towards him. She had been drinking on and off all the evening; had started before dinner because, after the heat of the day, she was always so tired, so suddenly played-out at sundown.

  ‘It doesn’t matter having another one like this when we’re together, does it?’ she asked. ‘It’s only drinking alone that’s bad, isn’t it?’

  She was speaking very fast by now; the sentences came tumbling out one on top of each other. But the tiredness had all gone. There was colour in her cheeks, too; and she was wearing her hair loose over her shoulders.

  He kissed her when he brought the glass over to her. Then she settled herself back deeper into the cushions. There was something catlike about the way she made herself so comfortable.

  ‘This is what I always knew it would be like,’ she said. ‘Just you and me. I knew it’d be all right from the moment you told that lie about us— about not being lovers, I mean. After all, it wasn’t any of his business, was it? And it was better for Gardie that way. It kept him right out of it.’

  She took another sip of the whisky.

  ‘That was when I felt certain you really loved me,’ she added. ‘I can still see you standing up there in that little box place. It can’t have been nice for you. Because you’re not the sort that tells lies, are you? You’re like a Boy Scout: you don’t approve of them. But everything was all right once you’d said it. I was quite sure then. I knew you’d be ready to through with it.’

  ‘Go through with it?’

  There was the sound of a siren from the direction of the harbour: the two short blasts of a steamer that was leaving.

  ‘I don’t know why it makes me so sad when I hear it,’ she said. ‘But it does. It means the ending of things. It was worse hearing it in the night when I was all alone. That’s when I always thought about killing myself.’

  She was smiling again.

  ‘I suppose I was lucky Gardie didn’t kill me first. But that wasn’t the way his mind worked. He was always so careful. He liked planning everything. That was his trouble. He planned once too many.’

  She had leant back, and her hands were clasped behind her head, rumpling up her hair. She was staring up at the ceiling.

  ‘Gardie wasn’t all that bad, though,’ she said quietly. ‘Not right through and through. There were some nice things about him. It’s just that we weren’t right for each other. And that’s what is so strange. Because he rather liked women: they always made such a fuss of him.’

  She had dropped her voice while she was speaking; it was so low that he could scarcely hear her. And, when he looked across at her, he could see that her eyes were closed. She seemed to have forgotten about him; seemed simply to be thinking a whole lot of her thoughts out loud.

  ‘But I don’t think he was ever once unfaithful. It would have taken up too much of his time. And he’d never have let that happen. He was always working. That was half the trouble. He hardly came near me again after Timothy was born. He’d got what he wanted.’

  Her eyes were open again; she had turned her head slightly, and was watching him.

  ‘D’you realise that we probably wouldn’t be here, not like this, if he’d needed me even a little bit more.’

  ‘I need you.’

  She did not seem to have heard him.

  ‘After all, I was only eighteen when I had Timothy. That wasn’t exactly ancient. I didn’t even want a baby; not particularly, that is. I just wanted to be loved. There’s nothing unnatural in that, is there? So I had to find somebody when Gardie wouldn’t. Only they weren’t always awfully nic
e people. I wish now I hadn’t.’

  She sat up, and was facing him.

  ‘Miles wasn’t the first, I mean. That’s what I’m trying to say. You don’t think I’m wicked, do you? Not really wicked, I mean?’

  The words had come all in a rush as though it were something that had been in her mind for a long time, the one question that she had to ask.

  Harold sat there, staring past her.

  ‘I don’t think about it at all,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to.’

  There was a rustle from the couch, and she came over to him.

  ‘I didn’t have to tell you, did I? I only did it because I love you so much. It just wouldn’t have been right to have any secrets between us.’

  She was standing in front of him, smoothing back her hair. He noticed that she was swaying slightly.

  ‘But all that’s over. I shall be as good as gold from now on. We won’t ever talk about it again. There’s no need to.’

  The gilt clock on the mantlepiece struck one: they’d sat up a long time talking.

  Lady Anne pushed her foot up against his.

  ‘Give me another drink,’ she said. ‘And then we’ll go to bed. I feel all at peace inside me. That’s because I’ve told you everything.’

  He was careful about the drink that he poured her. There was not much whisky in it; just enough for her to feel that she hadn’t actually been refused it. And she didn’t seem to notice the pale straw-colour when he gave it to her.

  She was smiling to herself again.

  ‘It might quite easily have been the other way round,’ she said. ‘If he’d had his way, all those presents would have been for Gardie and his new wife. He was still frightfully attractive, you know. He’d have got married again for certain, if I hadn’t killed him.’

  ii

  The hands of the clock showed two-fifteen.

  She got up and went over to the window, standing there with her back against the closed shutters. It was as far away from him as possible.

  ‘Well, what are you going to do?’ she asked. ‘Hand me over to the police, or something?’

  She was calm now; perfectly calm. Only the catch in her voice showed that she had been drinking; but that had been earlier, much earlier.