John Marco’s solicitor through whom he had bought the house had suggested, tactfully and discreetly, that the place was extravagant for a bachelor establishment. He had tried to persuade him into a new block of fashionable flats in which he had an interest. But John Marco had declined to discuss it and had merely said that he must have room, plenty of it. He had hinted vaguely at dinnerparties and entertaining. And so the place had become his; and his drawing-room, with the long mirrors let into the walls, would comfortably have contained not only the blood-red drawing-room in Clarence Gardens from which he had fled, but also the whole of old Mrs. Marco’s shabby villa in Chapel Walk as well.
There was more than one single lady in the neighbourhood, as well as a few married ones besides, who knew John Marco by sight—he was a familiar figure by now: someone to be recognised and pointed out—who tortured themselves to think of this single gentleman with the dark, Italian-looking eyes, shutting himself up every night in the loneliness of this big womanless house.
ii
It was one evening just as he was preparing to return to Hyde Park Square that he was told that one of his assistants wanted to speak to him. The request was clearly unusual: it was Mr. Hackbridge who attended to the staff, and for all John Marco knew about them individually the whole place might have been run by ghosts. But this time Mr. Hackbridge was not sufficient: the demand was to see John Marco personally.
“Very well,” John Marco replied at last. “I’ll give her a couple of minutes.”
“It’s not one of the young ladies,” Mr. Hackbridge explained. “It’s one of the men.”
“What does he want?” John Marco asked.
“He wouldn’t tell me,” Mr. Hackbridge explained apologetically. “He said it was private.”
“Very well,” John Marco answered. “Bring him in. You may as well stop yourself.”
The young man with whom Mr. Hackbridge returned was a familiar enough figure in the drapery. He was thin and smooth-haired, dressed like the rest of them in a shoddy frock coat that suggested that a larger and taller man might have passed it on to him; and his face had the paleness of all things that spend their lives out of the sunlight. John Marco noted that one of his trouser legs was frayed and that his shoes, though they had been polished like a kitchen grate, were cracked and withered across the instep. The young man was clearly more ill at ease than ever when he saw that Mr. Hackbridge was remaining.
“He’s probably come to try and borrow money,” John Marco reflected. “He’s got himself into some kind of trouble.”
But the young man made no such request.
“I’ve come to ask for promotion,” he said.
John Marco regarded him coldly.
“Mr. Hackbridge deals with that kind of request, and he doesn’t waste my time on it.”
“But you see, sir, I’m getting married.”
“That’s no affair of mine,” John Marco answered.
He turned his back on the young man as he spoke and took down his hat from the peg behind his desk. It was clear that so far as he was concerned the interview was over.
Mr. Hackbridge caught the young man’s eye and jerked his head in the direction of the door.
The young man, however, remained where he was.
“I understood, sir,” he said, “that you’d give it to me if I asked you for it.”
John Marco looked up again.
“And who gave you to understand that?” he asked.
The young man paused and pressed his hands together against his sides.
“I’d rather tell you alone, sir.”
“You’ll tell me now,” John Marco answered.
He had put his hat down on the desk and was peering at the young man intently.
“It was Miss Harlow, sir,” he said.
But John Marco paused.
“She told you that, did she?” he said quietly. “And did she send you along to me?”
“Yes. sir.”
“What did she tell you to ask for?”
“Four pounds a week,” the young man answered.
He said it in the hushed voice of someone referring to the ultimate goal of things.
“Four pounds a week,” John Marco repeated slowly.
But he was not thinking of the words as he said them. The young man and the lumbering figure of Mr. Hack-bridge did not exist any longer. It was early morning and he was back in a room into which first fingers of daylight were gradually piercing. There was a bed in the room and in the bed a young woman was lying. Her dark hair was spread out round her head like a fan and one hand was raised under her cheek, supporting it. She looked too young, somehow, and in sleep, too helpless. . . .
Mr. Hackbridge coughed and the image was broken.
John Marco drew himself up.
“Four pounds a week did you say?” he asked. “That’s not a great deal to get married on. Mr. Hackbridge, arrange to have this young man paid two hundred and fifty a year when he marries. Better find a different job for him.”
And before Mr. Hackbridge or the young man could reply, John Marco had stuck his hat on his head and had gone out of the room, leaving them staring after him.
He got into his carriage and drew the rug up over him. The night was chilly and he shivered as he sat back against the leather. But he was cold inside himself as well. That young man with the ill-fitting frock coat had stepped suddenly out of the recent past and had taken him back again with him. It had been another of the pieces of his life that he was wanting to forget, another of the fragments which did not fit into the finished pattern.
And now that his mind had started to drift backwards, he saw other scenes, other times as well. The pattern of his life now became more broken and disfigured than ever, and he was back again on the doorstep in Harrow Street on the night when Mr. Petter had died. Then he remembered a second visit as well. He had returned a fortnight later to find the little shop closed and the windows boarded-up. And as he had stood there he had realised that Mr. Petter’s death had brought Mary no nearer to him. The years had gone by—were becoming dangerously short in fact—and he was still as lonely as on that first night when he had lost her.
It was because of this that he had tried to find other things that would help him to forget. The house in Hyde Park Square was only a part. But it was a very successful part. It was something after all to be able to go into his house up a broad flight of steps that were flanked by marble, and hand his hat and gloves to a maid in a hall the size of an auditorium. And it was something to have such an address on his notepaper.
To-night the lamp in the hall cast a gleam across the rich mahogany of the furniture and showed the curving staircase with its polished balustrade. There was an air of richness, of opulence, even, about everything around him.
He went up the staircase with the quick, lively tread of an active man. But at the door of his bedroom he paused for a moment; paused with a smile on his lips and then went inside. The curtains had been drawn and the big gas fire was blazing. The air that came into his face was warm and heavy: it was loaded with scent. A silk wrap was lying across the bed and carelessly thrown beside it was a pair of satin slippers. In front of the mirror a woman was sitting, her hand raised to her head stroking down her dark hair.
“You’re late, my dear,” she said as he entered. “I thought you were never coming.”
She turned towards him and smiled.
It was Louise.
The translation of Louise from the dress salon in Tredegar Terrace to the house in Hyde Park Square had been easy, astonishingly easy. From the way she had accepted it, moving in her two suitcases and a dubious-looking cabin-trunk from the single room in Cambridge Gardens where she was lodging, she might have been waiting for this thing to happen; her whole life might have been directed to this single moment when at last she would be able to catch the eye of her employer.
It was a tribute to her intelligence—her shrewd, calculating, Manchester-born intelligence—it was not until so
me time later that he discovered that she was not Louise Duval at all but Sophie Roseman from Old Trafford—that she learnt her new role so quickly. She was as complete a lady as any in the Square on the first morning when she descended the steps to go shopping in her carriage. Her wide hat, the piece of sable round her neck, the tapering shoes, might all have come from one of Mr. Bradley’s fashion drawings. It was only her colouring, a trifle higher than that of most of the other ladies, that was suspect. But no one would have questioned it beneath the flowered mesh of her veil.
And John Marco was content. She kept him amused; she was a handsome companion to be seen about with; and she was a woman. Above all there was no need for any misgivings: she brought with her her own experience of the world. Indeed, for a single woman who had always lived alone, she brought with her quite a surprising amount of experience; so much, in fact, that John Marco was careful not to enquire too closely into her shrouded, mysterious past. It was sufficient that she was there, that she knew why she was there; and it was obvious that she intended to go on being charming enough to remain there.
She was not even extravagant. When she had established what her dress allowance was going to be—it was better, she had said, that they should come to an understanding about that kind of thing straight away—she bought carefully and well. The little pieces of jewellery that she needed, she asked for. And before she put her hair—it was smooth and sleek and blue-black—into the hands of a West End hairdresser, and emerged with a coiffure of curls, she asked for John Marco’s permission.
The effect of a woman in the house was immediately discernible. She re-modelled the place. There were flowers in the rooms, and the curtains that had been bought before she came there, were taken down and replaced. The bedroom was transformed. She had asked for single beds as being more modern. But there all restraint in the room ended abruptly. The suite that she chose for herself was of satinwood with mischievous scrolls of gilt on the corners. And she stuck mirrors all about the walls. In the evenings when the candles on the dressing table were lit and the pink silk coverlets were turned down at the corners there was an air of wantonness and luxury that could not have been bettered even in Park Lane.
It was, in a way, the sinful costliness of it all that he enjoyed. By himself he would never have indulged in such an orgy of spending. But now that it was there it served its purpose: it made the break with the past final and complete. The tabernacle of Amos and that bedroom belonged to two different worlds.
The only thing that was missing from the house was friends. But no man who can afford to be hospitable is left unattended for long. And Louise took to issuing the invitations herself. She cultivated the Mayor at first; and then when she had met his friends, she dropped him and asked the richer Aldermen instead. Stray acquaintanceships began to spring up, and city men with large businesses, gentlemen of leisure with private incomes, and professional mixers like Mr. Bulmer, started to come to the house. The whole complexion of their dinner parties gradually changed. There was now usually poker in the evenings afterwards, and the drinks became more liberal. Within six months there was a row of carriages outside the house in Hyde Park Square two or three nights a week
Perhaps it was the open secret about them—for John Marco now openly paraded Louise as his wife—that decided the nature of their friends. The majority of London would not have cared to be seen there; and the Mayor himself was no more eager, after he had learnt the truth about her, to be sitting down with a kept woman than Louise was to have him. And so the circle widened and grew more mixed, and they laid extra places for dinner, and John Marco kept telling himself that he was enjoying it all.
It was during these late evenings—and on nights when there was poker the party did not generally break up until half-past one or two in the mornings—that John Marco began to drink a trifle more than he had been accustomed to. The transition was very gradual; at first he would take simply an extra whiskey when he felt his energy flagging. But later he took more; took more, and took it steadily. There seemed really to be no way out of it. He was at his desk by half-past eight every morning and, when midnight had passed and there were guests still sitting round expecting to be entertained, he had to find a way of keeping level with them. In a sense it was Louise herself who forced him to it: she had her forbears’ unexpendable reserves of energy; and she was still smiling and immaculate when the last carriage door outside the house had slammed and she and John Marco were alone again.
The sense of inner fatigue, of nerves stretched taut all the time like wire, was something that he had got used to by now; but it served to remind him that he was on the wrong side of forty—so much on the wrong side, indeed, that he would soon be on the wrong side of fifty, as well. But nevertheless it was the life that he wanted. It was full. It was crowded. And the present moment was always the one that had to be lived in. There was nowhere in it any time for regrets about the past. For all those earlier years now worried him, he might have been born into the middle of this life in Hyde Park Square. He was able to forget the gnarled hands of old Mrs. Marco, the Tabernacle, Mr. Trackett’s hoarded money—everything, in fact, that had once seemed sentenced to bear down on him forever.
He was like a man who has escaped handsomely from the darkness of his own shadow.
iii
It was one evening after the ladies had left them and the men were sitting round the table over their port when the maid came close behind John Marco’s chair and announced that there was a lady to see him. The lady had seemed distressed, she said, and she had not been able to catch her name.
“What’s she like?” John Marco asked.
A faint, almost instinctive, feeling of uneasiness had come over him and he half rose from his chair as he spoke.
“She’s all in black, sir.”
“Do you mean a widow?”
“Yes, sir, a widow.”
“And did you show her in?”
“She’s in the morning-room, sir. She said she knew you’d see her.”
There was a laugh at this and the guest on his right dug John Marco in the ribs and said something about his sins finding him out.
But John Marco was in no mood for laughing. He should, he supposed, have been prepared for this: it was too much to expect that Hesther should leave him alone altogether. She was like a ghost, whose coming was inescapable and unannounced. But how to be rid of her again? How to clear the house of her without tears and recriminations? He was at her mercy now that she had come there; and she would know it. There was no place for tears and hysterics in this respectable mansion.
“Excuse me, gentlemen,” he said. “Business is intruding on pleasure.”
He crossed the broad expanse of the hall in trepidation; he was as much afraid as when she had first come to him. But when he opened the door of the morning-room it was not Hesther who was sitting there.
It was Mary.
The past year, however, had lain heavily on her. She seemed much slighter now, thinner even, in the black clothes that she was wearing. The clothes draped themselves about her dejectedly. They seemed to have no substance, no texture, left in them. Her bright hair, too, was hidden under the close hat that she was wearing. But he noticed—and his heart went grey within him as he saw it—that her hair where it was drawn down over her ears was bright no longer. And the hand that she was holding out to him was worn and reddened.
“Mary!” he said and stopped himself.
For, as he looked at her he realised that it was no use any longer. He could only stand there, staring at her, trying to find in her face that secret that had once excited him. The marks of the world were there in its place now, and the face that looked up at him was not the face that he remembered.
As he stood there, his own hand outstretched, he was aware, suddenly aware, of a new truth that dismayed him. It was a truth that cut his life in two. Mary herself, he now realised, was a part of the old life, the other life; she was another figure from the shadows.
T
here was a mirror behind the chair in which she was sitting and he saw the image of himself in front of him. That was not a young man, either, who was standing there. It was a man whose face beneath the greying hair was lined and heavy. The eyes were still deep and powerful; but the skin beneath them had already puckered into tiny pouches. It was the face of a man in which the spirit is just a little stronger than the flesh; and at that moment John Marco, the unrisen counter-jumper, seemed the happier man.
But Mary was speaking to him and he turned away from the portrait in the mirror.
“I expect you wonder why I’ve come here,” she was saying.
“I told you you could always come,” he answered. “I’m glad you remembered.”
The words sounded dull and stupid; they were not like real words at all. It wasn’t in this way that he talked to Mary.
“There wasn’t anything else to do,” she said wearily. She paused for a moment as if hesitating to go on any longer and then added suddenly: “I’ve tried, but it’s no use. I can’t go on any longer.”
He drew another chair up alongside her.
“Tell me,” he said.
It was all so pathetic and so obvious when she told him; it was what anyone but a woman must have known would happen. Mr. Petter had left behind him in the bank the round sum of eighty-five pounds as a legacy to his wife and child; and when the manufacturers had been paid and the undertakers had claimed their share of the riches, there remained some twenty-two pounds on which, with the help of Mr. Kent, to face the world. And the twenty-two pounds had vanished, squandered in odd shillings and half crowns to make life more cheerful. And even Mr. Kent at last had been unable to assist any longer. With his eye-sight half gone—he had frittered it away fiddling about with his beloved clockwork in the evenings—he could now do little more than sit behind the counter of his shop waiting for a customer to come in and buy something. But there were no buyers any longer for guinea watches with Swiss movements that wound up with a key, when the market was full of five shilling bits of machinery from America; and the jewellery that he sold was heavy, old-fashioned stuff of the kind that no one wore nowadays. He was going to shut up altogether, Mary said, if things didn’t improve somehow.
I Shall Not Want Page 38
