The Grass Widow's Tale gfaf-7

by Ellis Peters

  The moment of hesitation was gone; he came on with a quickened step. He had a whisky glass in one hand and a small bottle of ginger ale in the other. A long little finger touched tentatively at the back of the vacant chair.

  “Do you mind if I sit here?” The voice was low-pitched but abrupt, as though he had to measure it out with care and constraint.

  “Of course not, help yourself!”

  She moved her glass to make room for his on the tiny table. It had a tray top of beaten brass that had never been nearer Benares than Birmingham. He looked at it for the fraction of an instant with disbelief, and then sat down carefully, and looked up at her.

  “I agree,” said Bunty with detachment. “It’s rather nasty, but it’s somewhere to put things down.”

  Something kindled in his face, no more than a momentary easing and warming of the haggard lines of his mouth, and a brisk spark that was burned out instantly in the intensity of his eyes.

  “You didn’t look as if you belonged here,” he said. “Why are you here?”

  Conversation came out of him without premeditation, and indeed with a famished urgency that ruled out premeditation, but in brief, jerky sentences, spurting from the muted violence that filled him. Violence was the word that first occurred to her, but she found it unacceptable on reflection; agitation might have been nearer the mark, or simply excitement. There was nothing impertinent in his manner, and whatever he was looking for, it wasn’t a pick-up.

  “Because I was alone,” she said, with a directness equal to his own. “Why are you?”

  “The same reason, I suppose. And I needed a drink.”

  It appeared that this was no more than the truth. The whisky had brought a faint warmth of colour into his clay mask, its frozen lines were at least growing pliable now.

  “You don’t mind my talking to you? I’ll shut up if you say so.”

  She did not say so. What she did say, after a moment of deliberation, was: “I came out because it was too silent at home, and I came in here because it was even more silent outside.”

  He uttered a short, harsh sound that might, if he had been less tense, have emerged as a laugh. “That won’t be our trouble here, anyhow. Or would you say this was a kind of silence, too? A howling silence?” The babel was reaching its climax, it was only half an hour to closing-time. The young man cast one brief glance round the room, and turned back to her, his eyes for a moment wide and dark with awareness of her, and strangely innocent of curiosity. “We’ve got something in common, then,” he said, emptying his glass without taking his eyes from Bunty’s face. “You weren’t expecting to be alone, either.”

  “No,” she agreed, thinking how different a celebration this forty-first birthday might have been, “I wasn’t expecting to be alone.”

  “Nor was I. I’m heading north,” he said jerkily, revolving the empty glass dangerously between his fingers, “for a long week-end. Not much to look forward to now, though. There should have been two of us, if everything hadn’t come to pieces.” The glass was suddenly still between his long hands; he stared at it blackly. “I suppose I ought to lay off, but I’ve got to have one more of these, I’m still twenty per cent short of human. May I get you the other half? Or would you prefer a short?”

  “Thanks, the other half would be fine.”

  She watched him worm his way to the bar with the empty glasses, and knew that she had done that deliberately. Why? Because if she had refused he would have taken it as a rebuff and been turned in again upon his own arid company? Or because she would have lost touch with him and been driven back upon hers? What she was courting was the loss of herself in another human creature, and that was what he wanted, too. Not that it would ever be much more than two parallel monologues, the passing of two trains on a double track, somewhere in the dark. But at least the sight of a human face at one of the flying windows would assure the watcher of companionship in his wakefulness. Their need was mutual, why pass up the opportunity of filling it?

  So she waited for him, and watched him come back to her, balancing full glasses carefully as he wound his way between the jostling backs of the Saturday-night crowd.

  “I’m sorry about your spoiled week-end,” she said. And with carefully measured detachment, since clearly this was no light matter to him at the moment: “Of course, there are other girls.”

  He was just setting down his glass on the table, and for the first time his hand shook. She looked up in surprise, and met his eyes at close range, suddenly fallen blank in a frozen face, as grey and opaque as unlighted glass. He sat down slowly, every line of his body drawn so taut that the air between them quivered.

  “Who mentioned a girl?”

  “There are only two sorts,” she said patiently. “There was at least a fifty-fifty chance of guessing right first time about the companion who let you down.”

  He drew in a long, cautious breath and relaxed a little. The slow fires came back distrustfully into his eyes. “Yes… I suppose it wasn’t difficult.” His voice groped through the words syllable by syllable, like feet in the dark feeling their way. “We fell out,” he said. “It’s finished. I can’t say I wasn’t warned, at least half a dozen of my friends must have told me she was playing me for a sucker, but I never believed it.”

  “You could still be right about her,” said Bunty reasonably, “and they could still be wrong.”

  “Not a chance! It all blew up in my face to-day. For good.”

  “There may be more to be said for her than you think now. You may not always feel like this. You and she may make it up again, given a little goodwill.”

  “No!” he said with quiet violence. “That’s out! She’ll never have the chance to let me down again.”

  “Then—at the risk of repeating myself—there are other girls.”

  He wasn’t listening. No doubt he heard the sound of her voice quite clearly, just as those blue-circled, burning eyes of his were memorising her face, but all he saw and all he heard had to do with his own private pain. Bunty was merely a vessel set to receive the overflow of his distress.

  “We only got engaged ten days ago,” he said. “God knows why she ever said yes, she had this other fellow on the string all along. Whatever she wanted out of it, it wasn’t me.”

  “It happens,” said Bunty. “When you commit yourself to another person you take that risk. There isn’t any way of hedging your bet.”

  “She hedged hers pretty successfully,” he said bitterly.

  “She wasn’t committed. And you’re better off without her.”

  So softly that she hardly heard him, more to himself than to her, he said, “Oh, my God, what is there in it, either way?” His hands clenched into white-knuckled fists on his knees. She thought for a moment that he was going to faint, and instinctively put out a hand and took him by the arm, no hesitant touch, but a firm grip, tethering him fast to the world it seemed he would gladly have shaken off in favour of darkness. It brought his head up with a jerk, his eyes dazed and dark in that blanched face. They stared steadily at each other for a moment, devouring line and substance and form so intensely that neither of them would ever be able to hide from the other again, under any name or in any disguise.

  “Look,” said Bunty quietly, “you’re not fit to drive any distance to-night. Go home, fall into bed, sleep her off, drink her off if you have to, get another girl, anything, only give yourself a chance. It isn’t the end of the world… it had damned well better not be! You’ve got a life before you, and it isn’t owed to her, it’s owed in part to the rest of us, but mostly to yourself. You go under and we’ve all lost.”

  She wondered if he even knew that she was at least twelve years older than he was. She had begun by feeling something like twenty years older, and now she was no longer sure that there was even a year between them. This was no adolescent agony, but a mature passion that shook the whole room, even though the babel went on round it, oblivious and superficial, a backcloth of triviality.

  “It i
s the end of the world,” said the young man, quite softly and simply. “That’s what you don’t understand.”

  The clock behind the bar began to chime with an unexpected, silvery sound.

  “Time! ” called the barman, pitching his voice on the same mellifluous note. “Time, gentlemen, please!”

  She spent an unnecessary few minutes in the cloakroom, tidying her hair and repairing her lipstick, not so much to escape from him as to give him every chance to escape from her if he wanted to. Men are much more likely than women to repent of having said too much and stripped themselves too naked, and it might well be that now, having unloaded the worst of his burden, he would prefer to make off into the darkness and never see or think of her again. But when she stepped out from the lighted doorway, under the silver stars of the sign, he was there waiting for her, a slender, tense shadow beside the low chain fence of the car park. She felt no surprise and no uneasiness.

  “Have you got transport? Then may I give you a lift home?”

  “It’s out of your way,” she said equably. “I live in Comerford, and I imagine you’re heading for the M.6.”

  “It won’t add more than three miles to the distance. And there’s nobody waiting for me,” he said tightly. She was growing used to that tone, but it still puzzled her, because for all its muted desperation it was strangely innocent of self-pity.

  “Then if you don’t mind going round that way, I should be glad to ride with you.” Why not? All he wanted was to warm his hands at this tiny fire for a few minutes longer. And she could take care of herself. She was a mature woman, self-reliant and well-balanced, she was not afraid to venture nearer to another person, not afraid that she would not be able to control the relationship, even extricate herself from it if the need arose. She was old enough to be able to offer him the companionship he needed, and not have it mistaken for something else.

  His hand touched her arm punctiliously as they walked across to the car, but he kept the touch light and tentative, as if mortally afraid of damaging the grain of comfort he had got out of her. The broad space of tarmac was emptying fast, the last few cars peeling off in turn between the white posts of the exit. Soon they would have the night to themselves on the dark country road into Comerford.

  “Here we are!”

  He leaned to open the door for her, and closed it upon her as soon as she was settled. She was incorrigibly ignorant about cars, and worse, in the view of her family, she was completely incurious. Cars were a convenient means of getting from here to there, and sometimes they were beautiful in themselves, but they made no other impression upon her. This one was large but not new, and by no means showy, short on chrome but long on power under the bonnet, and he handled it as though he knew what to do with all the power he could get, and probably considerably more than he could afford. Bunty might have no mechanical sense at all, but she had an instinctive appreciation of competence.

  “Have you very far to go?” she asked, watching the drawn profile beside her appearing and disappearing fitfully as they passed the last lights of the frontage and took the Comerford road.

  “About three hundred miles. It won’t take me long. It’s a quicker run by night.”

  “Maybe… but all the same I wish you’d go home to bed. I don’t feel happy about you setting off on a run like that, in the state you’re in.”

  “There’s nothing the matter with my state. I’m not drunk,” he said defensively.

  “I know you’re not. I didn’t mean that. But in any case, it isn’t going to be a very long week-end, is it, to be worth such a journey? It’s nearly Sunday already. And you did say there was no one waiting for you.” The silence beside her ached, but was not inimical. “Am I trespassing?” she asked simply.

  “No!” It was the first time she had heard warmth in his voice. “You’re very kind. But I’ve got to go. I can’t stay here now. It won’t be such a short stay as all that, you see, I’m not due back till Wednesday. Don’t worry about me, I shall be all right.”

  Abruptly she asked: “When did you last eat?” Astonished, he peered back into the recesses of his memory, and admitted blankly: “I don’t even know! Yes, wait… I did have a lunch… of sorts, anyhow. Opened a tin… one of those repulsive dinky grills.”

  “Nothing since then?”

  “No…I suppose not! I haven’t wanted anything.”

  “No wonder you look sick,” she said practically. “You’d be wanting something before you got to the end of your journey, believe me. And those two whiskys will settle better with some food inside you. If Lennie hasn’t closed up his stall we’ll stop there and pick up some sandwiches or hot dogs for you, and a coffee.”

  “I suppose,” he admitted, “it might be an idea.” The lights of Comerford winked ahead of them, orange stars against a moist black sky. Old Lennie’s coffee-stall always spent Saturday evening on the narrow forecourt before the old market cross, handy for the late crowds emerging from the Bingo hall and the billiard club. All the new estates and the commercial development lay at the other end of the town, and this approach across the little river might still have been leading them into the old, sprawling village the place had once been. A foursquare Baptist chapel, built a hundred years ago of pale grey brick, looked out across the water between pollarded trees. Once over the slight hump of the bridge, they could see the white van of the coffee-stall gilded by the street lamp above it, and with its own interior light still burning. The small, lame proprietor, hurt in a pit accident twenty-five years ago, was just clearing his counter.

  “Pull in for a minute and drop me,” ordered Bunty, “and I’ll see what he’s got left. We can’t park here, but we can turn down by the riverside and find a place there for you to eat in peace.”

  She was back in a minute or two with two paper bags and a waxed carton of coffee.

  “It’s a good thing Lennie knows me so well, he wouldn’t have opened up again for everybody, not after he’s cashed up.”

  The old man had come limping out from his stall to close the shutter, and stood looking after his customer now with candid curiosity, watching her tuck her long legs into a strange car, beside a strange young man. He stood stolidly gazing, with no pretence at other preoccupations, as the car took the right-hand turn that would bring it down towards the park and the riverside gardens.

  “This is all right, anywhere here. This is only a loop road, it brings us back to the main one just before the lights. We shan’t be in anyone’s way here, there won’t be much traffic at this time of night.”

  There were no houses along here, and hence no homeless cars parked overnight outside them, an inevitable phenomenon in every urbanisation. He halted the car with its hub-caps brushing the overgrown grass under the trees. A narrow path and a box hedge separated them from the park on this near side, and across the road, beyond fifty yards of ornamental shrubbery and trees, the Comer gleamed faintly. After he had stopped the engine it was very quiet, and unaccountably still, as if every necessity for measuring time had stopped. Nobody was waiting for either of them at the end of their journey.

  Suddenly she felt him shaking beside her, the only shaken thing in all that stillness. It happened as soon as he took his hands from the wheel and let his concentration relax, and for a full minute of struggle he could not suppress the shudders that pulsed through him. Bunty tore open the waxed carton of coffee and put it into his hand, closing her own fingers over his to guide the cup to his lips. He drank submissively, and presently drew a long, cautious breath, and let it out again in a great, relaxing sigh, and she felt his tensed flesh soften again into ease.

  “I’m sorry… I’m all right, just more tired than I realised.”

  “At least get some food inside you and rest for a bit.” She dumped the paper bags of sausage rolls and ham sandwiches on his knees, and watched him eat, at first with weary obedience and little interest, then with sudden astonished greed, as though he had just discovered food. “You see, you were hungry.” She sat nursing the
half-empty coffee carton, studying the shadowy form beside her with a frown.

  “Look, you simply can’t go on with this, it would be crazy.”

  “Maybe I am crazy,” he said perversely. “Did you ever think of that? You were right about the food, though. Look, I owe you for all this, you must let me…”

  “My round,” said Bunty. “A return for the other half.”

  He didn’t argue. He stretched himself with a huge sigh that racked and then released him from head to foot, and lay back in the driving seat, turning his forehead to rest against the glass. A large hand crumpled the empty paper bags and held them loosely on his knee.

  “Better?”

  “Much better!”

  “Then listen! You shouldn’t go on to-night. It isn’t fair to other road-users to drive when you’re as exhausted as this. You might pass out on the motorway, what then?”

  “I shan’t pass out on the motorway,” he said through a shivering yawn, “I can’t afford to.” The note of grim certainty sank into a mumble; he yawned again. “No choice,” he said distantly, “no choice at all…”

  She sat silent for a while, though she had had much more to urge upon him; for after all, she told herself, he was not hers. And the moment that thought was formulated she knew that he was, that he had been hers since the moment she had accepted him. Now she didn’t know what to do about him. People to whom you have once opened your doors can’t afterwards be thrown out, but neither can they be kept against their will. If he would go on, he would, and she had no right to prevent him even if she could. Only then did it occur to her how completely, during this last hour and a half, she had forgotten about herself.

  What drew her out of her brooding speculation was the rhythm of his breathing, long and easy and regular, misting the glass against his cheek. He was asleep. The hand that lay open on his knee still cradled the crumpled paper-bags; she lifted them delicately out of his hold and dropped them into the empty carton, and he never moved.