Mine for a Day

by Mary Burchell

  “Well, there really isn’t anything else to say about it,” he replied curtly.

  She rose to her feet.

  “You didn’t want to—dictate—or anything?”

  He looked surprised, as though he had forgotten that any official connection existed between them.

  “No. Oh, no, thank you.” Again that slight movement, and this time it carried a suggestion of dismissal in it.

  She reached the door somehow. She was not quite sure how. Neither Rosemary nor Simon said anything in the nature of a good-bye. But then, nor did she. It was not a moment for conventional comment.

  A moment more and she was outside in the passage, the door between her and Simon firmly closed, both actually and metaphorically. And—actually and metaphorically, too—Rosemary was on the right side of the door once more.

  It seemed to Leila that the passage stretched a long, long way in front of her, and she concentrated on the one object of reaching the end of it and regaining the comparative sanctuary of the room where she worked. Not that she would be alone there. But at least she would be with people who had not the faintest idea of the terrible scene which had just taken place. None of them could possibly guess the depths of humiliation to which she had descended in the last half-hour. And at the moment the one desirable thing in life seemed that she should not have to be with people who knew.

  When she re-entered her office, all but one of her colleagues were putting their covers on their typewriters and preparing to leave, and she realized with a start how late in the afternoon it was.

  “Have you been taking dictation all this time?” one of the other girls asked sympathetically. “What a shame—as late in the afternoon as this.”

  “No. I wasn’t taking dictation all the time. We—were discussing something.” She was astonished to hear how calm she sounded.

  “Oh. Anything to type back right away?”

  She shook her head.

  She could go, she realized. Escape. Out of this office—away from the same building that contained Rosemary and Simon. There would not be any escape from her own thoughts and shame, of course. But at least she could go right away from the scene of what had happened. There was nothing to keep her.

  She put on her hat and coat, staring unbelievingly at her own reflection in the office mirror and noting incredulously that she looked very much as she always looked. A little pale perhaps, but not shattered and altered beyond recognition. She felt that way, but she did not look it.

  “Have you much more to do?” She even retained sufficient presence of mind to linger beside her delayed colleague and make the enquiry which office etiquette and plain good nature demanded.

  “No. Just half a page.”

  “Nothing I can do for you?”

  “Thanks—no. There aren’t any enclosures to copy or anything. Just my own notes, and I shan’t be more than ten minutes.”

  She smiled composedly, said good night, and left.

  Outside it was heart-breakingly fine and warm. A soft evening full of hope and enchantment. An evening for lovers and people who were happy, an evening when people walked a little more slowly and looked at each other a little more kindly because it was good to be alive.

  But Leila didn’t feel that it was good to be alive. She felt that life was hardly worth living any more.

  It was not only that she had lost Simon. She had lost her self-respect as well. And of the two she was not sure which loss hurt more.

  Although she tried not to, she found herself going over the events of the past weeks, tormenting herself with the thought of how differently she would behave if only she could have that time again.

  When she had been in the office, she had thought that what she wanted most was to go home and hide herself away from everyone. But now she felt she was afraid to be completely alone with her own thoughts. There was faint comfort in the crowded anonymity of the streets, and somehow it was better to walk and walk and tire herself out, rather than go home and sit there thinking of past follies and future loneliness.

  She must have walked for something like a couple of hours before weariness and an undeniable sense of hunger drove her to seek somewhere where she could sit down and eat. But even then she could not face going home. She hated the thought of her own| exclusive company, and she hated the thought of having to prepare her own meal. Instead, she turned into a small restaurant where she had never been before, and absently chose the first thing she saw on the hand-written menu.

  At first she paid no attention either to the two or three other customers or to the pretty girl in the flowered smock who brought her meal. But later, as the few others gradually departed and she was left alone with the girl who seemed to combine the duties of waitress, cashier and general manageress, she glanced up and felt impelled to make some sort of remark. It seemed hours since she had spoken to anyone.

  When her coffee was set down before her, she said something about the beauty of the evening, and then, with appreciation: “Oh good! That looks like really strong coffee.”

  “Do you like it that way?”

  “I feel I could do with it just now.”

  There was a second’s pause. Then the girl said, incuriously but with a note of sympathy in her voice:

  “You look as though you’ve had a bit of a shock. Have you?”

  Leila supposed that was rather how she felt.

  “N-not a shock exactly. But things suddenly went all wrong and I can’t get myself in focus again somehow.”

  “Over a man?” The girl in the overall began to clear a nearby table, so that it was not necessary to look her in the face, and to talk became easier.

  “Ye-es. But it was my own fault.”

  “It’s very seldom all one person’s fault.”

  “I know. But I was dreadfully stupid and—didn’t behave very well.”

  “I guess that’s easy, if you’re in love—and anxious.” The girl sounded comfortingly matter-of-fact and more knowledgeable than she had need to be at her age. “Can’t you sacrifice a bit of pride and make it up with him?”

  “Oh, it’s not like that!” She remembered what had happened to her pride that afternoon, and hastily averted her thoughts from the memory. “He was engaged to someone else—and it was broken off—and I thought he grew very fond of me. He did, in fact—he did. But she—the other girl came back. And I—I did all sorts of things to keep them from coming together again. And this afternoon he found out. So did she,” Leila added, but as an unimportant afterthought.

  The girl piled several cruets on to a tray, and then came back to Leila’s table with them.

  “Is he in love with the first girl still?”

  “I—suppose so.”

  “What do you mean—you suppose so? Don’t you know?”

  “Not for certain.”

  “Well, that’s the important thing, isn’t it?”

  “N-no. The important thing is that he thinks me ungenerous and petty, and he’s right. The most important thing of all is that—he’s right.”

  The girl regarded Leila reflectively.

  “You don’t look that way,” she said candidly. “My guess is that you’re blaming yourself too much. What was the other girl like?”

  “Ro—? She is my cousin, and she’s sweet and amusing in a thoughtless, rather superficial way. She ran away with another man, and then decided she didn’t want him after all.”

  The other girl laughed incredulously.

  “I wouldn’t worry myself splitting hairs about whether I’d been generous to her or not,” she declared. “She doesn’t sound as though anything would affect her very deeply.”

  “I don’t think I was worrying about the effect on her,” Leila said frankly.

  “On him?”

  “Yes, a bit. But mostly about how it affects me. I—dislike myself so, when I think how I behaved!” she exclaimed vehemently.

  The other girl looked as though she thought the discussion were becoming a little too complicated.
/>   “You mean you know you did wrong, and you hate the fact?”

  “Yes.” Leila smiled faintly at having the whole crisis reduced to these simple terms. “That’s exactly what I mean.”

  The girl slowly wrote out Leila’s bill.

  “I wouldn’t worry too much,” she said again, kindly. “No one can ever do more than be sorry and try again.”

  “Oh—” Leila caught her breath on a half-relieved, half-amused little laugh. “I suppose you’re right. That’s how life goes on, even after you’ve thought it can’t. You’re sorry and you try again. Thank you. It’s a consoling thought.”

  The girl laughed. “You going to try to get the young man again, too?” she enquired good-humouredly, as she counted out Leila’s change.

  “Oh—no!”

  “Well, at least try to find out if he really cares about the cousin still. If he doesn’t—your chance is as good as the next girl’s.”

  “Not after what he knows of me.”

  “You’d be surprised how easily men forget that sort of thing. If you had my job and saw what I see, you’d never believe in the permanence of any quarrel—or any making up, come to that,” declared Leila’s counsellor, with a final burst of good-natured cynicism. “Good night. Sleep on it.”

  Leila said good night, gratefully and with an irresistible lift of her spirits and, with no desire to walk any farther, took the nearest bus home.

  After all, there was a pleasant feeling of sanctuary about the familiar doorway and the familiar stairs. She was not so much afraid of her own thoughts now. Her heart still ached dreadfully over the rift with Simon—that was something which no tabloid philosophy could comfort—but she had been sharply and bitterly punished for anything wrong she had done. Perhaps she might now allow herself just—to be sorry and try again.

  She put her key in the lock and opened the front door. Immediately she was aware that someone was already there before her. Not only was there a light on in her sitting-room, but there was that indefinable feeling of another presence in the place.

  “Who’s there?” she called out sharply, in something like alarm.

  “It’s me—Rosemary,” replied her cousin’s voice, reassuringly if ungrammatically. “How late you are.”

  Leila came slowly forward until she stood in the sitting-room doorway.

  “But what—are you doing—here?”

  Rosemary was sitting in her favourite chair, sipping tea and apparently very much at home. She looked surprised in her turn. “Didn’t you expect me? I wrote, saying I was coming.”

  “But that was before—” Leila broke off.

  “Yes, I know. But I hadn’t anywhere else to go. I mean—it seemed silly to go round looking for a room in a hotel when you’d said I could always come here,” Rosemary explained.

  “Did it?” Leila was struck, not for the first time, by Rosemary’s singular oneness of purpose. Everything else had to give way before her practical requirements. It was less troublesome to come to her cousin’s flat than to seek out a hotel. Therefore any awkwardness of situation between them might be ignored.

  Leila tossed off her hat, and sat down opposite Rosemary.

  “You look tired.” Rosemary sounded not unfriendly.

  “Do I? Yes, I am, I suppose. I—walked a long way.”

  “What for? I mean—were you going somewhere, or were you just walking about?”

  “I was just walking about.”

  Rosemary was not sensitive to wording, or to the overtones in a voice. But at that she glanced at her cousin.

  “Leila, need you—I mean, you needn’t be so cut up over this business.”

  Leila leaned back in her chair and pushed her hair from her forehead.

  “I’m not—cut up. It wasn’t a very nice scene this afternoon, that’s all.”

  Rosemary frowned thoughtfully, as though some recollection teased her.

  “No, I suppose not. But you must have expected something like that to happen eventually. Unless you kidded yourself that we should never find out the exact truth, and I don’t see how you could think that. I don’t see the reason for your ever starting on the whole queer business, come to that. Why did you, Leila? Why on earth did you do anything so unlike yourself as to try to make mischief between me and Simon?”

  “I didn’t try to make mischief. As I saw it, the mischief had already been made, by your running off the day before your wedding. What I tried to do was to keep you from joining up again.”

  “Well, it’s much the same thing. And I still don’t see why—”

  “Because I loved him, of course,” Leila said baldly.

  For the second time that day, Rosemary’s lips parted in sheerest astonishment.

  “You were in love with Simon?” Her voice sounded faintly husky with surprise. “But—since when? I mean, when did you start feeling that way?”

  “Almost from the beginning.” Leila—utterly tired and defeated—was unable to voice anything but the exact truth, though she knew, even as the words tumbled from her, that she was being unwise to confide in Rosemary like this.

  “You mean to say that, even before my wedding, when you were staying with us at Durominster—”

  “Oh, yes. I hid it then, of course, because he was going to marry you. But, in a dreadful way, I was thankful that you ran off with Jeremy.”

  “I—see.” Rosemary looked sober and reflective for once. She also looked a little cautious. “And when he asked you to impersonate me—”

  “He didn’t ask me,” Leila reminded her grimly. “It was I who suggested that.”

  “So you did!” Rosemary looked half admiring, half shocked, though few things shocked her in the ordinary way. “Was that your idea at the time? To supplant me altogether in the end?”

  “No. At least, I don t think so. I just wanted to help him out of his difficulty. But I was glad that the way of doing it meant that I should be with him.”

  “Poor Leila. I know it can be pretty awful if one gets struck on a man like that.” Rosemary sounded genuinely sympathetic, and for a ridiculous moment Leila indulged in the luxury of visualizing a generous Rosemary choosing to retire gracefully from the scene, but her cousin’s next words dashed any hopes of that sort.

  “I know you won’t believe me, Leila, but one gets over the feeling gradually. When I first had that break-up with Jeremy, I thought I’d never be happy again. But I got over it.”

  “That’s—different.”

  “Not really. In what way is it different?”

  “You weren’t in love with Jeremy.”

  “Oh, but I was—terribly—at the time,” Rosemary insisted earnestly. “You’ll see, Leila. There’ll be someone else for you, and you’ll wonder then why ever you wanted my Simon.”

  Her Simon! She was casually, affectionately possessive about him again. Leila wondered what had been said after her own departure that afternoon. She gritted her teeth, and tried not to imagine the scene of reconciliation and delight which had given Rosemary the confidence to refer to Simon once more as hers.

  If they could really make it up so easily that meant they were genuinely suited to each other, she supposed. But the admission hurt horribly.

  “I think I’ll go to bed,” she said abruptly, and got up from her chair.

  “It’s quite early.”

  “Yes. But I’m tired.” She paused in the doorway and looked back at Rosemary. “What—are your own plans?”

  “This evening?”

  “No. In the next few days.”

  “Well, I thought I’d stay on here for a little while, if that’s all right with you,” Rosemary said with engaging simplicity.

  Leila bit her lip, and controlled a sudden impulse to hysterical laughter.

  ‘It’s quite all right with me,” she replied steadily.

  In a sense, she supposed, Rosemary was behaving rather generously and forgivingly. She might well have refused to speak to er cousin again after what had happened.

  But then, if
she had refused to speak, she would also have had to relinquish the convenience of a bed in Leila’s flat. Perhaps she was the sensible one, and the other people—people who had pride and certain personal reservations—were the fools.

  “Rosemary, did—did Simon say anything after I had gone?”

  “Yes, of course.” Rosemary smiled roguishly and reminiscently. “He said plenty. What did you think?”

  “I didn’t mean that.” She passed the tip of her tongue over her lips. “I meant—about me. Did he say anything to you about being—shocked or—disgusted? Or even puzzled?”

  “No.” Rosemary wrinkled her forehead, in an obliging attempt to remember if Simon had said anything worth repeating. “No. He didn’t seem at all inclined to discuss you or your part in things. I started to say how strange it was. Because of course it was strange, Leila, if one hadn’t the clue about your being sweet on him.”

  Leila winced at having her burning, all-absorbing passion reduced to this trite phrase.

  “Of course,” she agreed rather coldly. “And what did he reply?”

  “He just said: ‘Don’t let’s discuss Leila’s part in things.’ And we left it at that.”

  “I see.”

  Leila said good night then, and went to her room. There was nothing else for her to learn, nothing else for her to agonize over. That was all he had said. “Don’t let’s discuss Leila’s part, in things.”

  Seven words, which could have meant anything or—much more probably—nothing.

  As she undressed, and as she lay in bed for hours afterwards, staring into the darkness, she went over those few—few words.

  He could have meant that he was too disgusted to want to talk about her any more. Or he could have meant that he still thought too affectionately of her to want to discuss her inexplicable actions with someone who felt as hostile as Rosemary was entitled to feel at that moment. Or he could have meant—and probably did mean—that they need not bother to talk or think about her any more because, now that he had Rosemary again, Leila had ceased to be of any importance.

  Yes, that was it, of course. “Don’t let’s discuss Leila’s part in things,” meant, “Don’t let’s bother to talk about her. We have a hundred other more exciting topics to discuss.”