No Truce with Time

by Alec Waugh

  Mary, on the balcony above, the rhythm thudding not only in her ears but through every nerve-cell, her limbs moving involuntarily to its summons, felt the hot fever of the dance mount like slow-sipped wine along her veins. From the garden across the street rose the scent of jasmin. On her elbow she could feel the touch of Barclay’s knuckles. He had crossed his arms. The touch was so slight that she could not tell whether it was by design or accident that the back of his hand lay there.

  He had drawn close: was bent towards her, whispering into her ear.

  “Every day I find some new thing to love in you, I grudge every second that I can’t spend with you. If I could only find the words to tell you. If only there were a new language to tell you in.”

  There was a fever in his voice that she had never heard before: a fever that matched the dancing in the street below. She did not move : she did not speak. She made no sign that she heard his words, that she was conscious of his knuckles’ pressure on her arm. She made no sign, but her very immobility was a response.

  His knuckles pressed now against her elbow, moved along her arm, in a slow caress.,

  “I adore you, worship you. You’re everything in life to me.”

  River-like, the words flowed on : a refrain to the beating of the music. The pressure of his hand grew tenser, firmer. Her eyes were closed: her lips were parted: her breath came slowly. As long as I live I shall remember this, she thought.

  His words grew wilder. “I adore you,” he was saying. “

  You’re the whole world to me.”

  And then suddenly, but she did not know how, it was no longer his knuckles that were against her arm, it was his hand that was beneath her elbow: a hand that drew her backwards from the balcony: a hand that drew her close against him, so that it was not into her ear but against her lips that that river of words was murmuring.

  With his free hand he flung back the shutters, darkening the room, dimming the sounds of carnival. Close, close into his arms he drew her.

  “No,” she struggled. “No, you mustn’t. No. Oh, Barclay, no.”

  Shading her eyes against the glare, she paused on the verandah steps, her glance turned backwards. Yes, it looked just the same—the long straight streets of Rodney, its tiled roofs glistening in the sunlight: the bungalows white and red against the green of the encircling hills : the battlements of the old French fort lichened and worn above the harbour: the schooners moored against the wharf: the cargo-boats at anchor: the square sails of the fishing-smacks white against the bay: the outline of Martinique shadowy across the fifty miles of the Windward Channel: the high Pitons of St. Lucia silver-clear above the Carenage. All just as it had been, three hours back.

  On the verandah, beside the hammock, lay a magazine, face down where she had flung it. The cushions in the hammock still bore the impress of her head. She crossed into her bedroom. Over the bed lay the crumpled folds of a Chinese dressing-gown. One slipper had been kicked beneath the bed, the other against the wardrobe. A brassière had been tossed upon a chair; powder had been spilt along the table. She looked at the crumpled dressing-gown, the hastily changed underclothes, the slippers kicked across the room. When I flung those there, she thought, it hadn’t happened.

  She walked over to the mirror. Four hours back that same glass had given back the same reflection. She stared at it, unable to believe that she could look the same. On her dressing-table stood an enlarged framed snapshot. A middle-aged man in city clothes was leaning against a garden seat. In the background was the gable of a two-storied rough-cast house. At his side sat a straw-hatted schoolgirl. How little had that girl foreseen that within fifteen years she would have become the woman to whom this had happened.

  It was late, close on seven before she arrived at the club that night. There was no point in her being early. Everyone would be busy until late with their picketings, their telephones, their “All clear “signals. She smiled at the circle of familiar faces. What would they think if they could know how she had spent that afternoon?

  It was funny. She had read about this kind of thing. She had wondered how people would feel afterwards. She had pictured them as miserable, or terrified, exalted, or ashamed: crazily in love, or crazily resentful. But she, she just felt as though she had done something rather clever.

  She remembered the wife of one of the police officers saying once, “The only thing that could induce me to have an intrigue would be the fun of keeping it secret from all those old cats.” And that’s what I’ve done, she thought; I’ve fooled them all; I’ve done it and I’ve got away with it. No one will know. No one will suspect: how I shall chuckle to myself when I hear them gossiping away; in this tiny place where everyone knows everyone else; where no one can have a secret from anyone.

  At the far end of the room Barclay was standing by the bar. She wondered how one would feel meeting the other person for the first time, afterwards. She had pictured the scene in terms of embarrassment: of terror lest some slipped word would give away the secret. But Barclay was just someone with whom she had shared a joke, that and no more than that. She waved her hand to him, then turned away.

  Gerald came across to her. She had imagined that it would be with feelings of shame and fear that one would meet one’s husband afterwards. It wasn’t, though. She did not feel she owed him anything: that she had to make up to him in any way. That long darkened afternoon, with the shadows striking through the jalousies, was, as far as she and Gerald were concerned, something that had never happened.

  “You’re going to be furious with me,” she said. “But I broke my promise, I disobeyed your orders. I went down into Rodney after all.”

  She had decided on the way down to tell him that. Someone might have seen. There was no point in telling lies.

  “There was such a din. I couldn’t sleep,” she said. “I watched it from the hotel, with Barclay.

  Turning, she raised her voice.

  “I was just telling Gerald how I explained those calypsos for you.”

  There was no embarrassment in Barclay’s manner as he came across.

  “I couldn’t make out one word of what it was all about,” he said. “I badgered Mary until she came down. It’s an old story, of course, to you, but it was like nothing I’d ever pictured, the way those fellows kept it up....”

  With a smile she listened. He was doing this very well. For all his boyishness, he understood discretion. It was all very fine for him to have talked of that one girl at Jersey. There must have been others : several others. The knowledge gave her a sense of confidence : a sense of pride as well: that she should have been able to capture and hold him in a place like this where an eligible young man was the legitimate prey of a dozen unattached young girls.

  “I’d love to get a record of those calypsos.” he was saying “Do you think we could find one somewhere?”

  It was said so easily. She had not believed that one could be so friendly afterwards. She had imagined that there would be shyness, embarrassment. She had read in so many novels of how the intimacy that exists between lovers when they are alone makes it impossible for them to be even friendly when they meet in public. How many descriptions had she not read of women looking back with homesickness to the days of friendship that had preceded the start of an intrigue.

  It was lucky that nothing like that could happen to herself and Barclay. How could it in a place like this? The whole adventure had been so unplanned : the result of chance : a chance that could never come again. There could be no repetition of that afternoon. How could there be in a place like Rodney, where secrecy was impossible? It would be a memory: a shared and lovely secret between himself and her.

  He was smiling at her now : a smile in which fondness, tenderness, gratitude were mingled. As she met that smile she had the sensation of something underneath her heart going round and over: a sensation of utter happiness; of peace, of self-fulfilment. They would never refer to that afternoon, never speak of it: but the memory of that close-locked hour would be
the basis of a lifelong intimacy. Because of it, she would say things to him that to other people she could never say: could reveal herself in the sure knowledge that she would be understood. She could think out loud with him. You’re the friend that I’ve been looking for all my life, she thought.

  When voices recalled him to the bar, it was with the same feeling of confidence that she watched him go. He was leaving her, only to return.

  Later, two hours later, when finally she left the club, he came across to her, as she had known he would. He had the book for her that she had asked to borrow. There was a letter in it. As she had known there would be.

  She read it as she had read that other, that first letter of his, late at night on the verandah, with the bungalow quiet, with no lights flashing down the streets of Rodney, with the drums beating in the hills, with the croak of the bull-frogs echoing from the valley, with fireflies hovering over the half-shut flowers, with the scent of jasmin rising from the garden.

  It was after midnight before she could sit alone there. No one had gone back to dinner. Sandwiches had been requisitioned. It had been a big night at the club; with Gerald in his most expansive mood, ordering drinks, moving from group to group, asking everyone in turn for their separate account of their experiences. It was no wonder, Mary had reflected, that he was one of the most popular people in the island. He was so friendly with everyone, so good-natured. She alone knew that he was playing a part: that when he was back at home he would collapse as an actor does when he leaves the stage. How often had’, not her friends exclaimed, “You can’t have a dull moment married to Gerald Montague.” That’s what they would think of course, seeing him in the club, with that broad grin across his face, hearing his great laugh boom across the room. They did not know what he was like when he got home : how he would slump down into a sleep from which only the roughest shaking could arouse him: how he would stand glum and grumbling, waiting for the inevitable choking fit: how he would fight for breath, cursing as his breath came back at the hereditary trait that had bequeathed this fate to him, his face purplish, great sobs punctuating his angry torrent of invective. “Not a dull moment married to Gerald Montague!” If they only knew. And he was always worse after he had drunk a lot.

  He fell asleep the moment they left the club. She had to shake him hard to rouse him when they reached the bungalow. He blinked as she shook him. He stared stupidly about him. He seemed at such times to be emerging from another planet, as though he did not know where he was, to what place he had returned. He began grumbling at once.

  “What an evening! Did you notice that appalling scarf of Julia’s. With a face like hers. I wonder how often I’ve heard old Simpson tell that story about the milk-can. And to think that for the next twenty years one’s got to listen to that same story, and to see Julia making that precise scarecrow of herself. No wonder one drinks too much. The climate too. If only I could have lived in a decent climate I’d never have had this chest; if I could have wintered in the South of France. Not that it’s any good thinking about that, with cocoa at the price it is. And heaven only knows where it’ll be in a few years time with all these little Englanders at the Colonial Office. They got us into this mess. And what are they doing to get us out? Nothing, nothing at all.”

  Angrily, impatiently, his voice flowed on. Just as it always did. She remembered one of the characters in a novel saying that one of the nicest things about marriage was having someone to talk over a party with when one got back from it. That might be so of some marriages. For herself the last half-hour of every party was spoilt by the knowledge that the moment they were alone this savage outburst would begin.

  Poor, poor Gerald, she thought, as the sound of choking came from the far end of the bungalow, as the sickly smell of himrod was blown down the verandah, as she heard those stifled, punctuated protestations, till finally the slow heavy snoring scarcely audible above the croaking of the bull-frogs told her that he was at last at rest.

  It was not till then that she took out Barclay’s letter.

  “Darling, it’s not five minutes ago : not four, since I stood on the balcony, watching you hurry down the street; not waving to you; since you told me not to; watching you hurry through that crowd, turning out of sight beyond the store. One moment there was your white dress with its green trimmings—is it any good my trying to tell you what I felt, seeing you in that?—and then suddenly there was a street that might have been empty for all I cared.

  “I was alone there on the balcony; the balcony where we had stood together; there were the dancers in the street below : at the back of me was that empty room, the room that was so full of you : on the dressing-table was that comb that you had pulled through your hair. Have you any idea how adorably girlish you looked when you did that? In the ashtray was a pink-tipped cigarette end. On the pillow was that perfume, so heavy sweet, like that white flower ‘Lady of the Night.’ I held it against my face and closed my eyes. I could almost delude myself that you were in my arms.”

  Eagerly the words ran on. Rising to her feet, she walked, just as she had done six weeks ago, when she had read his first letter to her, to the edge of the verandah.

  She sighed—a long slow sigh—as she turned her eyes southwards towards silent Rodney. There in the shadow of the town, was that the light of his window? Was he standing there, looking out across the harbour, reliving that afternoon? Or was he asleep, the pillow that still held her perfume beneath his cheek? Under her hand on the wooden railing was his letter. Whatever happens, I’ve had this said to me, she thought.

  6

  There was a letter the next day. There was a letter the day after. But when he met her at the club, when she sat next to him at dinner at G.H., he made no reference to that afternoon. There were no secret whisperings in corners: no furtive attempts at a caress. She was grateful to him for that. She was grateful to him for everything. He was perfect. Such delicacy. Such tact. If it were not for his letters, she would never have known that it had happened.

  She had read, she had been told that men cared only for the chase; that their prey once snared, they turned to other game. But Barclay’s letters were more ardent, more tender than they had been before. She had imagined that a woman, that first step taken, was haunted with foreboding as to whether she had lost her lover’s respect: whether her lover was disappointed in her. But never had she felt more sure of anything than of Barclay’s loyalty. Everything seemed different in her case.

  Was that because the whole situation here was different? If it had been in London, he would have pestered her for other meetings. And she would have gone. Yes, of course she would. Why not, after all, that first step taken? A first time might be a last time, but only if it had been a disenchantment, if something had happened to make the whole thing seem squalid. In London, she would have listened to his pleading.

  How lucky, she thought, it hadn’t happened there. For him in London it would have been only “an affair “; that and no more than that; to be confused in retrospect with this and the other passages; so that he would not be able to remember whether it was at this or the other restaurant that he had lunched on such and such an afternoon; when he would not be able to remember whether it was she or some other woman who had said this or that on such an evening. She would be confused with other figures : to be remembered vaguely as something that had spelt glamour at the start: that had burnt itself out, to end in boredom, in the usual nothingness.

  No doubt at this moment he was railing at the fate that had staged their romance in the West Indies instead of London. But she, how grateful to fate she was. Nothing that could have happened for them in London could have possessed this unique poetic quality : the beauty of the tropics—the glamour background; the uniqueness of the situation; of a love that was at the same time realized and unrealized, that had to be expressed in secret looks, in letters, that could not avow itself, could not confess itself; a love that was both platonic and unplatonic; that was realized yet sublimated. All his life he�
�ll remember me, she thought. He’ll never tire of me, as he has of all those others; as he will of all those others that are to come. At the back of all his memories of me there’ll be the thought “If only.”

  So she mused, as the spring days moved in familiar sun-soaked monotony towards the parched summer months, till the day when the reverie preceding her siesta was disturbed by a voice pleading and excited over the telephone.

  “My motor-boat’s arrived. I can’t wait to try it out. You must be the first to come in it: to christen it. Can’t you come down to the wharf now, right away?”

  It was one of those days for which the traveller returned to northern latitudes will find himself forever homesick—a day of tempered heat, with a breeze blowing from the hills, a breeze cooled by the streams that ran into the long green valleys : an occasional cloud drifted across a pale blue sky, a fleecy dove-coloured cloud that held no trace of rain. The sea had the smooth surface of shot silk. There was a small wicker chair on the deck, beneath the awning. Mary had missed her siesta. But she did not even feel drowsy as she sat there, watching the familiar landscape curve away, with Barclay at the wheel, in his short-sleeved shirt, his panama hat pulled low over his left eye, looking round and smiling at her : so boyishly excited over this new toy of his. He looked so young : he was so young : so young that she could feel herself on this small boat with him, a girl again.

  “Do you know,” she said, “that I’ve never passed this fort before in anything smaller than a full-sized liner?”

  It was absurd, but there it was. If one lived in a place one got into a rut; one never did anything adventurous or new. She had bathed innumerable times at Petite Anse, driving out from Rodney, parking in the shadow of the palms : using the car as a bathing-hut, looking across the water to the high shrub-covered rock whose undergrowth concealed the lichen-covered tower from which, a century and a half before, the glasses of Hood and Rodney had watched for the French Fleet. Once she had rowed out and picnicked there. But she had never seen Petite Anse, with its thatched huts showing brown between the palm trees, as the natives themselves saw it from their square-sailed boats as they returned with their weight of fish or the contraband silks and spirits that they had smuggled across the Windward Channel from Martinique.