‘Undercover work, old boy. Very hush hush. Poorly paid, though. £1,000 a year I’d be getting now as an MP. (I told you if Labour got in it would go up.) I often remind Isabella how much I’ve given up for her sake.’
How I loathed that coarse jeering devil. I wanted to – well, I wanted to do many things that were physically impossible to me. Instead, I contained myself and accepted the bit of dirty paper with the address scrawled on it that he shoved across to me.
It was a long time before I could get to sleep that night. I was beset by fears for Isabella. I wondered if it was possible to get her to leave Gabriel. Obviously the whole thing had turned out badly.
How badly I only realized on the following day. I found the address that Gabriel had given me. It was a disreputable-looking house in a mean back street. That quarter of the town was a bad one. The furtive men and the brazen painted women I passed told me that. I found the house and asked, in German, of a vast blowsy woman who was standing in the doorway, for the English lady.
She understood German fortunately, and directed me to the top floor. I climbed with difficulty, my crutches slipping. The house was filthy. It smelt. My heart dropped down into my boots. My beautiful, proud Isabella. To have come down to this. But at the same time my own resolve strengthened.
I would get her out of all this. Take her back to England …
I arrived, panting, on the top floor, and knocked on the door.
A voice called out something in Czech from inside. I knew that voice – it was Isabella’s. I opened the door and went in.
I don’t think I can ever explain the extraordinary effect that room had on me.
To begin with, it was definitely squalid. Broken-down furniture, tawdry hangings, an unpleasant-looking and somehow lewd brass bedstead. The place was at once clean and dirty; that is, the walls were streaked with dirt, the ceiling black, and there was the faint unpleasant odour of bugs. There was no surface dirt. The bed was made, the ashtrays empty, there was no litter and no dust.
But it was nevertheless a sordid room. In the middle of it, sitting with her feet tucked up under her, and embroidering a piece of silk, was Isabella.
She looked exactly as she had looked when she left St Loo. Her dress, actually, was shabby. But it had cut and style, and though old, she wore it with ease and distinction. Her hair was still in its long shimmering page-boy bob. Her face was beautiful, calm, and grave. She and the room had, I felt, nothing to do with each other. She was here, in the midst of it, exactly as she might have been in the midst of a desert, or on the deck of a ship. It was not her home. It was a place where she happened, just at the moment, to be.
She stared for a second, then, jumping up, came towards me with a glad surprised face, her hands outstretched. I saw then that Gabriel had not told her of my being in Zagrade. I wondered why.
Her hands came affectionately into mine. She raised her face and kissed me.
‘Hugh, how lovely.’
She did not ask how I happened to be in Zagrade. She did not comment on the fact that I could now walk whereas when she had last seen me I was prone on a couch. All that concerned her was that her friend had come, and that she was glad to see him. She was, in fact, my Isabella.
She found a chair for me and drew it up to her own.
‘Well, Isabella,’ I said, ‘what are you doing with yourself?’
Her reply was typical. She immediately showed me her embroidery.
‘I began it three weeks ago. Do you like it?’
Her voice was anxious.
I took the piece of work into my hand. It was a square of old silk – a delicate dove grey in colour, slightly faded, very soft to handle. On it Isabella was embroidering a design of dark red roses, wallflowers and pale mauve stocks. It was beautiful work, very fine, exquisitely executed.
‘It’s lovely, Isabella,’ I said, ‘quite lovely.’
I felt as always the strange fairy story quality that always surrounded Isabella. Here was the captive maiden doing fine embroidery in the ogre’s tower.
‘It’s beautiful,’ I said, handing it back to her. ‘But this place is awful.’
She looked round with a casual, almost surprised, glance.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I suppose it is.’
Just that, no more. It baffled me – as Isabella had always baffled me. I saw vaguely that it mattered very little to Isabella what her surroundings were. She was not thinking of them. They mattered to her no more than the upholstery or decorations in a railway train matter to someone who is engaged upon an important journey. This room was the place she happened to be living in at the moment. Her attention drawn to it, she agreed that it was not a nice place, but the fact did not really interest her.
Her embroidery interested her far more.
I said, ‘I saw John Gabriel last night.’
‘Did you? Where? He didn’t tell me.’
I said, ‘That’s how I got your address. He invited me to come and look you up.’
‘I’m so glad you did. Oh, I am glad!’
How warming it was – her eager pleasure in my presence.
‘Isabella – dear Isabella,’ I said. ‘Are you all right? Are you happy?’
She stared at me, as though doubtful of my meaning.
‘All this,’ I said. ‘It’s so different from what you’ve been used to. Wouldn’t you like to leave it all – to come back with me? To London if not to St Loo.’
She shook her head.
‘John’s doing something here. I don’t know what exactly –’
‘What I’m trying to ask you is if you’re happy with him? I don’t think you can be … If you once made a dreadful mistake, Isabella, don’t be too proud to own it now. Leave him.’
She looked down at her work – strangely, a little smile hovered on her lips.
‘Oh no, I couldn’t do that.’
‘Do you love him so much, Isabella? Are you – are you really happy with him? I ask because I care for you so much.’
She said gravely, ‘You mean happy – happy in the way I was happy at St Loo?’
‘Yes.’
‘No, of course I’m not …’
‘Then chuck it all up, come back with me and start afresh.’
Again she gave that funny little smile.
‘Oh no, I couldn’t do that.’
‘After all,’ I said, rather embarrassed, ‘you’re not married to him.’
‘No, I’m not married …’
‘Don’t you think –’ I felt awkward – embarrassed – all the things that so palpably Isabella was not. Still, I had to find out exactly how matters stood between these two strange people. ‘Why aren’t you married?’ I said brazenly.
She was not offended. I had, instead, the impression that it was the first time the question had presented itself to her. Why was it that she and John Gabriel were not married? She sat quite still, thoughtful, asking herself why.
Then she said, doubtfully, in a rather puzzled way:
‘I don’t think John – wants to marry me.’
I managed not to explode into anger.
‘Surely,’ I said, ‘there is no reason why you should not marry?’
‘No.’ Her tone was doubtful.
‘He owes it to you. It is the least he can do.’
She shook her head slowly.
‘No,’ she said. ‘It was not like that at all.’
‘What was not like that?’
She brought the words out slowly, following up events in her mind.
‘When I came away from St Loo … it was not to marry John instead of marrying Rupert. He wanted me to come away with him, and I came. He didn’t speak of marriage. I don’t think he thought of it. All this –’ she moved her hands slightly – by ‘this’ I took it she meant not so much the actual rooms, the squalid surroundings, as the transitory character of their life together – ‘this isn’t marriage. Marriage is something quite different.’
‘You and Rupert –’ I began.
> She interrupted me, relieved apparently that I had grasped her point.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘that would have been marriage.’
Then what, I wondered, did she consider her life with John Gabriel to be? I didn’t like to ask outright.
‘Tell me, Isabella,’ I said. ‘What do you actually understand by marriage – what does marriage mean to you – apart from its pure legal significance?’
She was very thoughtful about that.
‘I think it would mean becoming part of someone’s life … fitting in … taking your place … and its being your rightful place – where you belong.’
Marriage to Isabella had, I saw, a structural significance.
‘You mean,’ I said, ‘that you can’t share Gabriel’s life?’
‘No. I don’t know how. I wish I could. You see –’ she stretched out her long narrow hands in front of her – ‘I don’t know anything about him.’
I stared at her, fascinated. I thought that she was instinctively right. She did not know the first thing about John Gabriel. She never would know the first thing about him, however long she stayed with him. But I could see, also, that that might not affect her emotional feeling for him.
And he, I thought suddenly, was in the same boat. He was like a man who had bought (or rather had looted) an expensive and delicate piece of craftsmanship and who had no conception of the scientific principles underlying its elaborate mechanism.
‘So long,’ I said slowly, ‘as you are not unhappy.’
She looked back at me with blind unseeing eyes. Either she deliberately concealed the answer to my question, or she did not know the answer herself. I think the latter. She was living through a deep and poignant experience, and she could not define it for my benefit in exact terms.
I said gently, ‘Shall I give them your love at St Loo?’
She sat very still. Tears came up in her eyes and spilled.
They were tears not of sorrow but of remembrance.
‘If you could put the clock back, Isabella,’ I said. ‘If you were free to choose – would you make the same choice again?’
It was cruel of me, perhaps, but I had to know, to be sure.
But she looked at me without comprehension.
‘Does one ever really have any choice? About anything?’
Well, that is a matter of opinion. Life is easier, perhaps, for uncompromising realists like Isabella Charteris who cannot perceive any alternative way. Yet, as I now believe, there was to come a moment when Isabella had a definite choice and took one way in preference to the other with full knowledge that it was a choice. But that was not yet.
Then as I stood looking at Isabella I heard footsteps stumbling up the stairs. John Gabriel flung the door open with a flourish and lurched into the room. He was not a particularly pretty sight.
‘Hullo,’ he said, ‘found your way here all right?’
‘Yes,’ I said shortly.
For the life of me I couldn’t say any more. I went towards the door.
‘Sorry,’ I mumbled, ‘I’ve got to be going …’
He stood aside a little to let me pass.
‘Well,’ he said, and there was something in his expression that I didn’t understand, ‘don’t ever say I didn’t give you your chance …’
I didn’t know quite what he meant.
He went on, ‘Dine with us at the Café Gris tomorrow night. I’m throwing a party. Isabella would like you to come, wouldn’t you, Isabella?’
I looked back. She was smiling at me gravely.
‘Yes, do come,’ she said.
Her face was calm and unperturbed. She was smoothing and sorting her silks.
I caught a fleeting glimpse of something in Gabriel’s face that I didn’t understand. It might have been desperation.
I went down that horrid staircase quickly – as quickly as a cripple could go. I wanted to get out into the sunlight – away from the strange conjunction of Gabriel and Isabella. Gabriel had changed – for the worse. Isabella had not changed at all.
In my puzzled mind I felt that there must be some significance in that if only I could find it.
Chapter Twenty-five
There are some horrible memories you can never manage to forget. One of those was that nightmare evening in the Café Gris. I am convinced that that party was arranged entirely to satisfy Gabriel’s malice towards me. It was, in my view, an infamous party. John Gabriel’s friends and associates in Zagrade were introduced to me there – and in the midst of them sat Isabella. They were men and women she should never have been allowed to meet. There were drunkards and perverts, coarse-painted trollops, diseased dope addicts. Everything that was mean, base, and depraved.
And they were not redeemed, as might so easily have been the case, by artistic talent. Here were no writers, musicians, poets or painters; not even witty talkers. They were the dregs of the cosmopolitan world. They were Gabriel’s choice. It was as though he had deliberately wished to show how low he could go.
I was wild with resentment for Isabella’s sake. How dared he bring her into such a company?
And then I looked at her and resentment dropped from me. She showed no avoidance, no disgust, still less did she display any anxiety to gloss over a difficult situation. She sat there smiling quietly, the same remote Acropolis Maiden smile. She was gravely polite and quite untouched by her company. They did not, I saw, affect her – any more than the squalid lodgings in which she lived affected her. I remembered from long ago her answer to my question as to whether she was interested in politics. She had said then, looking a little vague, ‘It is one of the things we do.’ Tonight, I divined, came into the same category. If I had asked her what she felt about this party she would have said in the same tone, ‘It’s the kind of party we have.’ She accepted it without resentment, and without any particular interest, as one of the things John Gabriel chose to do.
I looked across the table at her and she smiled back at me. My agony and distress on her behalf were simply not needed. A flower can bloom as well on a dung heap as anywhere else. Perhaps better – for you notice that it is a flower …
We left the café in a body. Nearly everybody was drunk.
As we stepped into the street to cross it, a large car came noiselessly out of the darkness. It nearly hit Isabella, but she saw her danger in time and made a sudden leap for the pavement – I saw the whiteness of her face and the sharp terror in her eyes as the car went hooting down the street.
Here, then, she was still vulnerable. Life, in all its vicissitudes, was powerless to affect her. She could stand up to life – but not to death – or the threat of death. Even now, with the danger over, she was white and shaken.
Gabriel cried out:
‘My God, that was a near shave. Are you all right, Isabella?’
She said, ‘Oh, yes! I’m all right.’
But the fear was still in her voice. She looked at me and said, ‘You see, I’m still a coward.’
There isn’t very much more to tell. That evening at the Café Gris was the last time I was to see Isabella.
Tragedy came, as it usually comes, unheralded, without forewarning.
I was just wondering whether to go and see Isabella again, whether to write, whether to leave Zagrade without seeing her, when Gabriel was shown in to see me.
I can’t say that I noticed anything unusual in his appearance. A certain nervous excitement, perhaps, a tightness. I don’t know …
He said quite calmly, ‘Isabella’s dead.’
I stared at him. I didn’t take it in at first. I simply didn’t feel that it could be true.
He saw my disbelief.
‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘It’s true. She was shot.’
I found my tongue, as a cold sense of catastrophe – of utter loss – spread through me.
‘Shot?’ I said. ‘Shot? How could she be shot? How did it happen?’
He told me. They had been sitting together in the café where I had first met him.
&nb
sp; He asked me, ‘Have you ever seen pictures of Stolanov? Do you see any likeness to me in him?’
Stolanov was at that time virtual dictator of Slovakia. I looked at Gabriel carefully and I realized that there was quite a strong facial resemblance. When Gabriel’s hair fell forward untidily over his face, as it frequently did, that slight resemblance was heightened.
‘What happened?’ I asked.
‘A damn fool of a student. He thought he recognized me as Stolanov. He had a revolver with him. He ran shooting across the café, yelling out “Stolanov – Stolanov – I’ve got you at last.” There wasn’t any time to do anything at all. He fired. He didn’t hit me. He hit Isabella …’
He paused. Then added, ‘She was killed instantaneously. The bullet went through her heart.’
‘My God,’ I said, ‘and you couldn’t do anything?’
It seemed to me incredible that Gabriel hadn’t been able to do anything.
He flushed.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t do anything … I was behind the table against the wall. There wasn’t time to do anything …’
I was silent. I was still stunned – numb.
Gabriel sat watching me. He still showed no sign of emotion.
‘So that’s what you’ve brought her to,’ I said at last.
He shrugged his shoulders.
‘Yes – if you like to put it that way.’
‘It’s your doing that she was here – in that foul house, in this foul town. But for you she might have been –’
I stopped. He finished the sentence for me.
‘She might have been Lady St Loo, living in a castle by the sea – living in a gingerbread castle with a gingerbread husband and a gingerbread child on her knee, perhaps.’
The sneer in his voice maddened me.
‘My God, Gabriel,’ I said. ‘I don’t think I shall ever forgive you!’
‘I can’t say it interests me very much, Norreys, if you forgive me or not.’
‘What are you doing here, anyway?’ I asked angrily. ‘Why come to me? What do you want?’
He said quietly, ‘I want you to take her back to St Loo … You can manage it, I expect. She ought to be buried there, not here where she doesn’t belong.’
The Rose and the Yew Tree Page 19
