Brand X

by Christianna Brand

  It had never been true before; not with any of the others. This time he had ‘got it rather badly’ as Cecilia had suggested; but even so…‘Oh, darling, of course,’ he said uneasily.

  ‘Well, then…?’ She left it in the air.

  ‘You mean you want me to ask my wife for a divorce?’

  ‘I just want to be your own and owned before all the world.’

  ‘But there are the children.’

  They meant nothing to her: the wife and the children, three grey shadows standing between them because he had not had the patience to wait for her as she, indomitable in her faith, would have waited for ever for him. That they should think, feel, suffer, her mind understood; to any other love in the world but hers, her own love made her blind. ‘But, Charles—they can have everything else. Just as long as you’re free.’

  ‘I can’t do it,’ he said.

  She was incredulous. ‘You mean—never? You’ll never be really mine?’

  ‘Dionne, I can’t do it to them. I can’t.’

  She moved away from him; but sweetly, smiling, only the brilliance gone. ‘Well, never mind, darling. We won’t say any more. Let’s go somewhere really terrific for dinner. Canard pressé!’ By no means every restaurant had a canard pressé on the menu and there was a wildly gay evening tracking one down, gathering a small whirlwind crowd in the process, rising up halfway through their own dinners and sweeping out of pained and astonished lesser restaurants, to join in the hunt. Afterwards they all drove down to a river pub and danced and had supper there and drove at monstrous speeds back to town…

  Next day the little flat was closed and empty and she was gone.

  From her tiny hotel bedroom, hard with determination, sick with anxiety, she kept as close an eye as possible upon the fluctuations of his despair. The first stab of fear lest she should do herself some injury, the personal grief, the frantic search—’phone calls unanswered, letters un-forwarded, tricks to find out her hiding place unrewarded. After two weeks, when the first keen edge of his distress had blunted, he taught himself to feel a certain sense of relief: so much was at stake and somehow, some day, the thing would have had to end—was it not better that, searing though the wound might be, the cut should come now?—would he not be wise to meet her when at last she reappeared, with cold reproaches, a refusal to play games of cat and mouse, a take-it-for-granted that since she had apparently ended it, he had accepted the end? But the week-end games of golf were dust and ashes in his mouth, a senseless knocking of a silly ball around a too lush countryside: his wife, despite her valiant efforts, could not force herself to her old natural gaiety, the children were outwardly merry, inwardly aloof. The once pleasant round of evening entertainments seemed distasteful and dull, the familiar friends were suddenly ageing people taking their sober pleasures soberly—who among them would rush off in mock-solemn pursuit of canard pressé?—trailing a glitter of wit and beauty and the easy, unthinking gaiety that to him nowadays had become the breath of life. By the time his children’s summer holidays came round, he would have given all he possessed to have her back.

  Haunted, he cancelled earlier bookings, decreed that they all spend the holiday on the farm in Carmarthenshire. Evan Evans was evicted to temporary lodgings, the big green car rattled once more up the thin, uneven roads. Nanny took one look at the box of a house with its two narrow chimneys, centre doorway, spaced windows, like the face of a hare—took one look at the manure heaps and the cowsheds, the pigsty, the feathering gaggle of large shabby dogs, and gave notice for ever and went back whence she came. The children, however, were enchanted and Cecilia, clinging to all that might placate and please him, wrestled with the difficulties in a spirit of utmost’ good-will. That evening, deliberately trampling on his sickness, he took them all up to the mountain-top behind the house, watched with clenched hands while his boy idly kicked to disorder the circle of stones where once a child, suddenly grown-up, had sold back her soul to ‘the Master’ for her One Desire. And as the days went by, in the necessary hard and simple work of just existing in the bare little unluxurious place, something of peace came back to him, as he had known it would. If I can get through the next weeks here, he prayed, perhaps I can save myself after all. For he thought of it now as salvation—salvation for himself and for those whom, set free of her spell, he so truly loved—that he should be cured of his sickness for Dionne.

  A week of it; and then his little girl came to him. ‘Look what I found. It’s a pair of old shoes.’

  And he knew again the poignancy, the pang of sweetness, of pity, of a sort of half laughing, half heart-rending tenderness, seeing the white flower-foot thrust into the rough little, stubby little, scuffed-up leather shoe; and the longing for her was more than his soul could for one moment more endure. That evening he talked far into the night with his wife: in the first days of the following week, the newspaper carried the story of their impending divorce.

  Six weeks from the day she had left it, he went back to the little flat: and Dionne was there.

  The first months of her marriage were a glory of the One Desire fulfilled; but—she had said to him that the blackthorn was a bitter blossom, and in the flower of her happiness there were thorns. She had underestimated the force of his devotion to those he had loved, the unease of his conscience, the impulsion to try to make amends. He still spent a lot of time with his children, his division of income with them left a great deal less money for canard pressé, for extravagant presents and rooms full of flowers. She did not complain: she had exulted in the luxuries as proof of his passion, but his love was all that in truth she cared about; if she grudged anything it was his hours away from her, the hours spent with his family or at the office, working with renewed zeal to supply two households with the generosity he longed to offer to both. She felt, moreover, a new uneasiness at seeing the wheel come half circle, at least—for now it was the deserted wife who spent much of her time on the bleak little, once belovèd farm. The children had adopted it with passion, he was glad enough in the new circumstances so cheaply to buy holiday happiness for them. Nor was he by any means so contented now to run the place at a loss. Tax laws were changing, the liabilities were growing more real. He took to going down with increasing frequency; but without Dionne he was ignorant, helpless, and Dionne went no more to Carmarthenshire. Dionne was the gay, easy, exquisite town wife these days: Cecilia, supplanted, must be content with Carmarthenshire.

  He began to feel the strain. Canard pressé might be a joke of the past but the glitter of gay young friends persisted, youth was the keynote of existence as once he had craved for it to be. But he was not young and moreover was weighed down nowadays by several cares. Relaxed in her triumphant happiness, she grew less careful, failed to see that the pace she set him was growing too fast. In the third winter of their marriage, he said: ‘I feel whacked out.’

  ‘Poor darling, you need a holiday.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. He considered it. ‘I’ve promised the kids that they shall have Christmas in Switzerland—’

  ‘Again?’ she said. ‘I thought it was so terribly expensive?’

  ‘Well, yes; but I’ve spent nothing on them for their other amusements this year.’

  ‘You said you couldn’t do it again, Pontresina last time cost the earth.’

  ‘There are cheaper places than Pontresina.’

  ‘But, darling… I mean, it’s only that after their last Christmas you were so broke!’

  ‘Last Christmas you and I also went to Venice,’ he suggested dryly.

  ‘Yes, of course. And if you can manage it, dearest, I’m only too thrilled for them to go.’

  To his horror he found himself about to say with sarcasm: ‘Thank you!’ He amended: ‘I thought I’d go out with them and spend a few days settling them in.’

  ‘Good heavens—can’t Cecilia go out on her own?’

  It was utterly illogical to feel a tiny flare of resentment at her using the name Cecilia. What else was she to say? ‘Your wif
e’? But Cecilia was no longer his wife. ‘Your first wife’ ? ‘Mrs. Shawn’ ? The thing was idiotic. He said: ‘I’m frightfully tired. I thought I’d combine it with a few days rest.’

  ‘Well, then…’ She was fired with enthusiasm. ‘Why don’t I go out too and meet you somewhere else, after you’ve settled them in? I’ve always longed to go ski-ing. Bill and Jane are going somewhere in Austria, lovely and cheap.’

  ‘My darling dear, I don’t want a ski-ing holiday: let alone with Bill and Jane, dancing in the beer taverns all night.’ For the first time he pointed out to her, ruefully: ‘I’m an old man.’

  ‘Well, Jimmy and Tim will probably go too: they’re nice and safe, you can send me off with them if you want to be restful.’

  ‘Thank you very much,’ he said, only half laughing. Jimmy and Tim were in the prevailing fashion of being half in love, as all their world of young men were half in love, with Dionne Shawn. She cared for it not at all, was conscious of it only as it made her more admired, more desirable in his eyes; but really it would be a bit too galling to be the old husband sitting at home in his bathchair, sending the gay young restless wife out with nice safe Jimmy and Tim.

  ‘Well, then, somewhere quiet, no Bills or Janes or Jimmies anywhere near.’

  ‘You’d go mad,’ he said. ‘I’d end by having to take you ski-ing and dancing myself. And I just want to rest. Besides we can’t afford it. And besides that, as I say, I’ve promised the children.’

  And as the supplanted wife had once sought wistfully to placate and please, so the triumphant successor now kissed and smiled and said of course, of course, sweetheart, whatever-you-think-best, and you-know-that-all-I-care-about-is-being-with-you… And that at least was entirely true. Waxing or waning, his love for her had never for one moment touched the intensity, the single-minded passion of her love for him.

  Ten days before Christmas she said her brief farewells, he went off to meet his little family at the airport. Ninety minutes later the telephone rang. A voice said, ‘Mrs. Shawn?’ a voice interrupted persisting: ‘Let me tell her, I want it to be me that tells her.’ A child’s voice, a boy’s voice, with tears behind it, yet bitterly controlled. ‘This is Robert Shawn here. I wanted to be the one to tell you. Our aeroplane crashed taking off. My sister and I are all right; but my mother’s dead.’

  She knew that he was waiting, white, shaking, half in tears yet with a terrible, unchildish, grim triumph, for her to put the only question that mattered to her. But her throat was dry, her heart dead within her with foreknowledge, no words would come. He remained obstinately silent. The other voice took over, she knew that the boy had been pushed aside. ‘Mrs. Shawn, we’re speaking from London Airport. Can you come at once? Your husband’s very badly injured, there’s not much time.’

  Just time for him to mutter: ‘The children. Look after the children…’ No word for her at all who, ceremoniously on a bare mountain-top in a long ago springtime, had slain her own childhood for love of him.

  She closed her own home, moved into theirs: she thought familiar surroundings would be best for them. They received her with cold repudiation, tearless, white-faced, relentlessly grim. ‘For your father’s sake,’ she said, ‘we must try to be friends. With his last words, he gave you into my care.’

  ‘If it hadn’t been for you, we’d still be in our mother’s care. And in his.’

  ‘You must try to understand,’ she said. ‘I loved him very much.’

  ‘So did we,’ said the little girl.

  ‘Sometimes,’ she said desperately, ‘people are—are meant for one another. When I first saw your father, I knew that he and I had been meant for one another from the moment we were born.’

  ‘A father is meant for his children,’ said Robert, ‘from the moment that they are born.’

  ‘If I did wrong,’ she pleaded humbly, ‘I’m trying to make up for it now.’

  ‘Nothing could make up for it,’ said Robert. ‘Nothing. We have to live with you but we’ll never pretend to love you or want you, we’ll hate you for the rest of our lives. We’ve promised each other: haven’t we, Alice?’

  ‘Yes,’ said the girl. ‘So don’t try to make us like you because we never will.’

  ‘She won’t try,’ said Robert. ‘Why should she? She doesn’t care about us.’

  ‘I care about what your father wanted,’ said Dionne, ‘and nothing more and nothing less.’

  ‘We needn’t worry. She’ll soon go off with someone else, someone else’s husband and someone else’s father.’ He mimicked, posturing, childishly crude and silly: ‘Darling Timmy and Johnny—And Jimmy and Ronnie—Would love to marry—Darling Dionne-y—and take her away from us, thank goodness…’

  ‘What do you know about Tim and Jimmy?’ said Dionne.

  ‘Do you think our mother didn’t pray every night on her knees that you would desert our father and go off with one of them?’

  ‘I never cared one moment for any of them. Do you think,’ said Dionne, bitterly, ‘that if I hadn’t loved your father more than all the world and everybody in it, I’d be here now with you? That I’d have fought them all to let me make this home for you?’ And she repeated: ‘I care about what he wanted, nothing more, nothing less. Nothing else matters to me.’

  It was true: and yet… She was twenty-three: from her childhood she had lived only in the dream of the fulfilment of her passion, for the past four years had been lapped in love, adored, admired, spoilt, surrendered to, sheltered close. The struggle with the children was hard, endless, unrewarding and strangely intrusive upon her own inward life of unavailing grief. Money was scarce, she must fight and plan to keep up even something of the standards their father, nursing his own guilt, had maintained for them. Robert was in his second year at his public school, Alice went to an expensive day school in London. But there were still the rest of the Christmas holidays to be got through. She made small, hopeful, enthusiastic plans. At breakfast they would say: ‘We’re going to the ice rink for today, the whole day.’

  ‘Oh, dear: I had another suggestion I thought you might like.’

  ‘All right then, we won’t go to the ice rink.’ They never argued, they invariably simply coldly acquiesced: no dream was so dear but that they would give it up at the first sign of disagreement on her part, lest for one moment they might seem to plead with her.

  ‘Well, I heard you saying you’d like to go to Olympia—’

  ‘We wouldn’t really,’ lied Robert. ‘We don’t approve of circuses.’

  ‘—so I got three tickets for this afternoon.’

  ‘All right,’ said Alice. ‘We don’t care. We’ll go skating tomorrow.’

  And they went with her, chilly and silent, and sat in the expensive seats she could now ill afford: and if one of them, forgetful for a moment, showed signs of enjoyment the other would give a violent nudge or say coolly, ‘Our father hated seeing performing animals,’ or ‘Our mother thought people watched acrobats in the hope of seeing them fall, she said it was degrading.’ When it was over they thanked her with extreme politeness and coldly accompanied her home again. Next day when she said, valiantly bright, ‘Well—skating today?’ they were ready with chill repudiation. ‘We thought after all we’d go to one of the museums.’ Stupefied with her own private grief, she always let herself be caught out by it. ‘Oh, dear—I thought you were so set on going skating?’

  ‘All right,’ they would say, shrugging, as though it were an order, ‘we’ll go skating. We can go to the museum tomorrow.’

  And the boy went back to school and she and Alice were left alone. Robert wrote several times a week to his sister. Dionne stooped to reading a couple of the left-about letters. Each bore the same burden, ‘I hate this beastly school, it’s awful knowing you’re left alone with her, but even if you’re miserable and lonely don’t give way to her, don’t forget if it hadn’t been for her we’d still be our whole family…’

  One afternoon, towards the end of term, there came a ‘phone call. It
was the headmaster. Robert had run away.

  She telephoned to Alice’s day school in London. Alice had not come to school that morning. The children had gone off together. They had ended a situation which to them had become intolerable.

  And to her also. Her first feeling was one of relief: let them go, how can I struggle, why should I struggle any more? But she heard the dying voice, ‘Look after the children,’ her wounds bled afresh and she knew that only one duty done could ever assuage, however faintly, the loneliness and the pain. She telephoned the farm. Yes, said Evan Evans, the children were there.

  Robert came to the ‘phone. ‘Yes, we’re here. We couldn’t stick it any longer. We’re perfectly safe, Evan can look after us, Mrs. Morgan will keep an eye on Alice.’ Mrs. Morgan was the wife on a neighbouring farm.

  ‘Couldn’t you just have waited for the holidays?’

  ‘No, we couldn’t. You may as well know that I’m not going back to school. And neither is Alice.’

  ‘I’ll come down tomorrow.’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ cried the boy, ‘can’t you leave us alone for a little while?’ And he blurted out, hard and angry, ‘This is my farm, my father left it to me, I won’t have you here, please stay away.’

  She rang up their schools. She thought it would be best to let things remain as they were till the following term. Both principals were anxious with complaints about the children’s states of mind: both seemed deeply ‘disturbed’, anxious and unhappy, the boy too taut and controlled, the girl a bundle of nervous tensions manifesting themselves in blinking eyelids and twitching hands. They were evidently under considerable strain… No one wonders, reflected Dionne, bitterly, whether I, perhaps, also am under some strain. But if she were, there was no one to blame but herself.

  She rang up Mrs. Morgan. Mrs. Morgan answered stiffly, in her native Welsh. The children seemed all right, she would see that they ate properly and would get their washing done for them; no harm could come to them, after all. But—it was no business of hers, but she thought Dionne should come down. Things under Evan Evans were going from bad to worse, everyone round said it was a shame so to let the place go.