by Alec Waugh
“You say that Mr. Hutchins has been trying to ferret out things; I believe that was your phrase. But, my dear lady, what is there that he can ferret out that we do not know already? Gerald had his weaknesses. Who hasn’t? But they were lovable weaknesses. There was nothing in his life that anyone need be ashamed of knowing. If, on the other hand, you are going to waive this claim—and two thousand pounds is a great deal of money—people are bound to say, “There must have been something in his life that we knew nothing of,’ and because they’ll be unable to find anything, they’ll imagine that it must have been something so bad that no one ever suspected it. His memory that should have been green and loved …”
But she was not listening. She had ceased to listen before he had completed his third sentence. It was obvious. Why hadn’t she seen that right away? What a fool she had been. Hadn’t she made here the mistake that sooner or later was made by everyone?
Across the smooth unctuous sentences, she heard the sentences equally smooth of the prosecuting counsel as he addressed the court. “And further, let me remind you, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, that so terrified was the prisoner of detection that she actually besought her lawyer to waive her claim to this two thousand pounds, to which under her husband’s insurance policy she was entitled. And further, let me remind the jury…”
Further, further, further … clause after clause… link after link in that long chain of evidence. How irrefutable it would appear, set out by a clever counsel. There would be no difficulty in proving her affair with Barclay. There would be a hundred testimonies. She had thought she had been discreet. She had destroyed his letters: or at any rate thought she had. But how could you tell what you had concealed from the eyes of a West Indian servant, those scavengers of dust-bins? And even if she had been discreet, had Barclay been? What of her letters to him, might not they be in existence still? And even if there were no letters, how many prying eyes might not have seen that grey-green Chrysler parked under the casuarinas ?
No, there would be no difficulty in convincing a jury on that point. And would a clever counsel have any difficulty in persuading a jury that a woman in love with a man younger than herself, married to an invalid, would not have cause enough for wanting freedom when she saw her lover being won from her and into marriage by a younger rival? Cause enough: ample cause.
Would there be any doubt either, that the thought of murder had been in her mind? There was that list of novels in the library. There were her conversations with young Stewart. Finally, there was the damning evidence of the lock upon the garage door.
Why had that lock been put there? At that particular time? And for what other purpose? With what insistence would she not be cross-examined on that point? And what proof, what sure proof was there that Gerald had driven the car back himself? He had started to drive it back. Yes, but had not a car flashed past during that minute’s pause, when she had changed places with Gerald? Whose car was it? She had no idea. No one had made any comment afterwards. There was no reason why anyone should have made any comment. It was only later, when the significance of the incident was recognized, that the informer would appear; as the informer always did appear. The cabman who remembered that at such a spot on such a night such a man had asked him for a cigarette; the waiter who remembered the client who had kept glancing at the clock, who had left three-quarters of a beer unfinished. There was always someone to remember a thing like that. There would be someone to testify that he had seen the Montagues’ car halted, that he had seen Mrs. Montague in the roadway. And later, when the doctor came to be examined, what proof could he offer that Gerald really had suffered from a choking fit that night? What signs were there? Was there a single sign? “And further, let me remind the jury…”
Further, further… What could her counsel adduce in answer to that chain of evidence? She could hear the judge’s summing up: the jury’s verdict with its recommendation for mercy. She could hear the passing of the sentence. She could hear the judge’s voice, hear the word “murder ”…
Murder.
It was so unlike murder as she had pictured it. She could not associate the word, her preconception of the word, with the thing that she had done. She could not even believe that she had done anything very wrong. She had been weak and foolish: a coward, possibly. But criminal? A crime? It didn’t seem like that. One thing had led so simply to another. The first step taken, the rest had followed, naturally, inevitably.
Sitting there, scarcely conscious of Carrington’s voice as it prosed on, she saw in retrospect the stages by which she had reached that act, heard Gerald saying, “You must help to make this young man appreciate our island ”: saw herself on the quay welcoming a quite ordinary young man; saw herself staring, astonished on the high hill road; saw herself on the balcony, reading the first real love-letter of her life.
It had begun so simply. It had gone on so simply. Even Mardi Gras; the arrival of the yacht, Barbados, the long weeks afterwards. What did it amount to but a very ordinary love affair: unusual to her because it had been personal to her, a new experience to her. But set down in bare synopsis, how very ordinary it would seem. A woman had given way to love, when she was not in love, to find herself later head over heels in love. And later, was not her story the most ordinary one of all: the story of the one who had loved most to start with, wearying first: a very ordinary story?
That restless pacing of the verandah, the mounting jealousy, the fear of the younger rival, the desperate efforts to find some way of rescue. Had she not read that story in a hundred novels? In what way was her story different from those hundred novels? Only in its setting; that there had been this climate, this heat to beat upon her nerves, to inflame her blood; that there had been this constant unavoidable propinquity, this prison house of a small community, where you saw the same people, the same landscape every day, where there was no way of escaping from one’s problems, where those problems sat by one’s elbow every hour of the day.
Yes, the setting, the climate, the propinquity had aggravated her nerves, worked on them; allowing her no rest. She would not in any other place have worked herself into quite such an hysteria of despair. There was that difference, that essential difference to make hers not quite the ordinary story. But the ultimate difference, did it not lie in this, that at the moment when despair had been at its deepest, the opportunity of escape, of rescue, had been presented in the mere shutting of a door? Was not that in the last analysis the sole difference between her story and that of all those women who had lived through and survived the hysteria of an unlucky love? The shutting of a door. The chance there of escape. Was it not simply because that opportunity had been offered her that her story was to be blazoned across the headlines—headlines that would make her seem different from other women, when actually her story had been what every woman’s might have been, had the situation been just a little different? “The Montague Case “: that was how she would be labelled; an exhibit in the museum of crime—to be quoted years hence in articles : “It is interesting in this connection to compare the well-known attempt of a woman in El Santo “… Was this how it always was? Did the men and women whom chance had placed in the headlight of notoriety find themselves wondering where and how and why their lives should have come to appear so different from other people’s? Did they find themselves thinking “But this could have happened so easily to somebody else ”?
And there was old Carrington prosing on.
“Now, what I, my dear young lady, should advise is this: that you should leave me to settle your affairs here, and take the next boat home. There’s a sailing of the Harrison Line on Wednesday. I’m sure we could get you a good cabin on it. And I shall be only, I need hardly say, only too glad to make any advance that may be necessary.”
She shook her head. The next boat home. Home indeed. As though there were such a place. And to leave El Santo; to leave the field clear for Kitty Bruce. If that was all she was going to do, why had she bothered to shut that garage door?<
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“No, no,” she said. “It’s very kind of you. But I must see this through.”
See what through, though?
In the street outside the sun was beating down with full noontide strength. She blinked, in spite of her sun-glasses. What next? And why and where and how?
What else was there to do but wait while the chain tightened, wait with such patience as she could summon; avoiding the kind of mistake that she had made that morning; wait and wait while the circle narrowed round her; knowing that it was narrowing, inexorably, inevitably.
As a child in the country she had watched groups of children, when farmers were mowing a field in circles, wait with sticks and stones for the rabbits that would dash out of the narrowing space of grass. She had felt sorry for those rabbits. They had been so safe there, so warm and sheltered, in the sunlight, in the field that had been their home for days. Nothing could touch them at the moment. Yet every instant their field was growing smaller. Sooner or later they would have to make their dash into the open, before the blades of the mowing machine were on them. That was how she was now: a rabbit in a corn-field; safe and warm and sheltered; but with the blades of that mowing machine drawing closer; closer every minute.
Down the street with its smart chauffeur at the wheel passed the Administrator’s car. The Administrator bent forward, smiled and raised his hat. Would he be doing that in a week’s time? She was so warm and sheltered in her circle of spared corn. She was loved and respected here. With a love and respect that she had earned, that she had now to forfeit.
In a week’s time the very people who would be first in her praise now, would be lifting their eyebrows, pursing their lips, shrugging their shoulders. “Of course we always suspected that there was something—well, not quite right about her.”
Yes, that was how it would be. In a week’s time they would have forgotten the kind of woman that she was to them today. She would have become a new woman. They would have forgotten how they would have spoken of her if, as she had driven down this morning, the car had skidded, if she had crashed on that high hill road.
How much easier it would have been for everyone if it had; not only for herself, for everybody; for Barclay, for Kitty, for J. B., for Gerald’s memory. How much trouble it would have saved, how many feelings it would have spared, how many lives would not have been the easier to live. Whereas now … She shrugged. What was it she had said to Carrington, that she had to see it through? See it through. What did that mean precisely? What did seeing it through mean, but a long waiting.... A rabbit in a narrowing circle of corn.
If only that car had skidded.
She walked slowly from the garage to the bungalow. On the table in the centre of the verandah her place had been laid for lunch, a solitary lunch. A symbol of loneliness. And that was, wasn’t it, what her life would be, or rather what it would be were not this mowing machine drawing closer every hour?
She recalled the picture that Mrs. Trevor had drawn of her life as it would be here, with fewer and fewer friends, with herself a nuisance, a responsibility, eating one solitary meal after another, through the long succession of solitary years. That was Mrs. Trevor’s picture. And with what alternative picture could she present herself; small pensions in the south of France; second-rate hotels In Bath and Cheltenham; an occasional cruise, the result of months of close economies; with the feeling when the cruise was over that those economies had been a waste. And as an alternative to that, the only kind of marriage that a widow of her age with her means and background could expect: some widower with children that needed looking after: that, or some bachelor, some half-man who had felt lonely when his mother died, a tiresome man set in his ways, who wanted someone to look after him. What better marriage than that: had she to hope for? It was all very well to talk of the fascination of the widow. A widow needed money, a glamour background of clothes and furniture. Could she on her income hope to look more than neat? Marriage, if she were to marry, would only be marriage for the sake of marriage; as likely as not, she would not want marriage on those lines. And if she did not…
She was only thirty. She could not live like a nun at the age of thirty. Not this new “she,” anyhow; the “she “that had been roused by Barclay. What would happen to that “she”? She remembered how her eyes had met the bold .stare of the mulatto, how her nerves had responded to that stare. Was some alternative to that mulatto the fate that waited the new “she”? She shuddered. The narrowing circle and the mowing blades were preferable. If only the car had skidded.
Slowly she walked up the verandah steps. As slowly as Gerald had moved up them on his return from a late session at the club.
As she came on to the verandah, Jeanette hurried forward.
“A letter, Mistress Mary. It has just arrived. The boy has just gone. He say der is no answer.”
She took it listlessly. J. B.’s handwriting. What could he want?
To her surprise it was an invitation card : to cocktails three evenings hence. At the bottom was a P.T.O. sign. She turned it over.
“I know you won’t be feeling like parties at a time like this. But it would be very nice if you could just look in to this. It’s to celebrate Kitty’s engagement to young Barclay.”
Kitty’s engagement to young Barclay. What was it he had said that morning: “Things aren’t going too badly there”? And he had not told her; had he lacked the courage, or just not thought it mattered? She shrugged. She was past caring. Two weeks ago this card would have driven her to the borderline of hysteria. But now nothing mattered. The circle was narrowing fast. She could hear the swish of the blades against the corn. She walked over to the woodwork of the balcony, leant her head against it. No, it was too much. It was the end. There was no hope, none; not any. The moment had come to dash into the open.
30
That night she dreamt she was a girl again : a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl, back for the holidays, avidly reading novels in the nursery, resentful of discipline, impatiently awaiting the hour that would bring to her all that had seemed fair in books.
It was just as it had been fifteen years before; just as it was in that photograph on her dressing-table; her father in tweeds that never looked like country tweeds, her mother in an absurd bonnet hat. There was the same admonitory intonation in their voices. The garden looked the same, with its herbaceous border; with the rough-cast house and the red gable of the house next door showing between the poplars. There was the rumble of traffic from the High Street. She was in short skirts, with hair cut short in schoolgirl fashion in a hard line along her neck.
But as always in her dreams, though she looked a schoolgirl, though her parents treated her as though she were a schoolgirl, she herself knew that she was not a schoolgirl, that she was grown up, that she was a married woman. They can’t order me about like this, she’d think, me with my servants, my position in the island.
Usually it was gloatingly that she thought that, in the survival of the resentment that she had felt as a girl, when she had longed to assert herself, and could not because of her youth and weakness. She had exulted at her power to be revenged for all the restraints, the restrictions that had been laid upon her childhood. I’ll show them, she had thought. She had felt resentful when she awoke before her revenge had been realized.
That was how ordinarily it was. But this night it was in a very different spirit that in a schoolgirl’s clothes she had listened to her mother’s refusal to allow her to go to a late theatre. “No, my dear,” her mother had insisted, “you’ve been to two matinees these holidays. That’s quite enough for you. And you know what your father said, ‘ No evening theatres till your sixteenth birthday.’ ”
She had chuckled to herself as her mother had said that. Fancy talking like that to me, a married woman: and more than that, a married woman who’s got a lover.
For as always in her dreams it was to a self of six months ago that she returned. She was never contemporary with herself. It was to the self that was a month home from
Barbados that she in this dream returned, a self that was happy and drunk with life, proud in her happiness.
She smiled indulgently upon her mother. She was so happy that she could afford to be indulgent. How could she feel resentful, how could she harbour an instinct for revenge? Dear mother, she thought, it’s so ridiculous if you only knew.
It was out of that mood of indulgence that her dream broke to meet the day. It was in a mood that was a culmination of that mood, a tranquil mood of contentment, of well-being, of good wishing towards the world, that lying back under the mosquito net she slowly recalled detail by detail the nature of the world to which she had awoken.
She smiled softly to herself. It was weeks since she had wakened in a mood like this, so calm, so tranquil, so fulfilled; so at peace with everything. But then that was what she was. For the first time for weeks; her mind made up.
She lifted herself upon her elbow. She had not drawn the jalousies the night before. Through the thin mesh of the mosquito net she could see the pale blue of the sky, the deep blue of the water, the sunlight upon Diamond Rock. It was kind of fate to have sent her a day like this.
She pulled round her shoulders her Chinese dressing-jacket. She leant against the railings of the verandah. How exquisite it was, the red roofs of Rodney in the amphitheatre of its hills, the bungalows showing white against the green, the square sails of the fishing-smacks, the cargo-boat at anchor, the white statue in the Savane, the proud crested palm trees guarding it. One took it for granted, seeing it every day. One needed to see it with fresh eyes, for the first time: or the last time.
