"Was the picture meant for you?"
"Of course."
"You knew him that well?"
"We were friends."
"Is he implying you broke a promise to him?"
"Perhaps."
"No, not 'perhaps'. Surely this is a direct reference to you getting married."
"He made no proposal of marriage to me."
It did not tell him much but enough, once he had left for the Swann Bull Ring depot, to disturb him deeply so that he began to ask himself if she had been as frigidly unresponsive with Bernard as she had been with him since he led her to the altar. His wits were very woolly these days and he realised that, without further elucidation, he could make no real attempt to gauge the relationship that existed between her and this actor fellow.
As the days passed, however, the shadow of Etienne Bernard, and the childlike trust he had reposed in her, began to gnaw at him until uncertainty became unbearable. A week later he went to her room with the intention of reopening the subject and persuading her, if that was possible, to tell him more.
It had been customary, until then, for him to tell her when he would come to her after she had retired, but on this occasion he said nothing and did not even knock when he entered her room, discovering her seated at the dressing-table in a silk shift, engaged in brushing her lovely, corn-coloured hair. The sight of her, so bewitching and vulnerable, disarmed him and he moved over to stand behind her, taking the brush and applying it in imitation of her own sweeping strokes. She made no protest and he remarked no change in her expression as he watched the reflection in the mirror but then, bending low, he kissed the nape of her neck, saying, "I've been a bear lately, Gilda. I don't mind admitting that I was jealous."
"Jealous of whom?"
"That actor chap, Bernard, the one who sent you those pictures. It's foolish, I know, for whatever he meant to you or you to him is of no consequence now. How could it be? It was before we met."
She said nothing, so he went on. "Do you mind if I stay?"
"If you wish it, Edward."
Her voice was so impersonal that it stirred in him a kind of fury. "If I wish it? Good God, of course I wish it! We're man and wife, aren't we? If I had my way, we'd share a bed every night!"
"But that was agreed, Edward."
"I know it was agreed, but I never imagined it would be like this, living together under the same roof but behaving as if we hardly knew one another. It's the craziest thing I ever heard of and no man I know would put up with it."
At least he had made some small impression on her. Her face flushed and for a moment it seemed as if she would match his anger, but then, with a shrug, she stood up and when she turned her features expressed the familiar and dreaded blankness of all the other occasions he had come here as a supplicant. She said, "I will go to bed. Come back if you wish. The door will be ajar," and lifting her nightdress from the eiderdown where her maid had laid it, she shrugged herself out of the flimsy shift and raised her arms to replace it with the linen gown.
It was the smooth ripple of her breasts that stimulated him to a degree that nothing else could have done. He saw it, swift and infinitely sensuous, as the lifting of a curtain in everything about her that he had coveted, won and was now so infamously denied. He said, huskily, "Wait, Gilda!" and reached out, taking the nightgown from her and tossing it aside, then seizing her and crushing her against him with such impetuous force that she cried out involuntarily as her flesh came into contact with his clothes. Half distinguishable words, fierce but caressing, accompanied the kisses he rained on her face and shoulders and then, gathering her up, he hooked the open door with his foot and carried her across the landing to his own room. Once here, momentarily undecided how to dispose of his prize, he paused and set her down, turning his back on her for a moment to slam the door and turn the key in the lock.
The click of the tongue slipping home had a curious effect on him, proclaiming perhaps his unexpected victory over her reservations and his own apparent mastery of the situation. He said, gruffly, "Like it or not you'll stay here tonight," and began to pull off his clothes, tossing them in a heap on the floor.
She said, still very quietly, "No, Edward, not this way. I had your promise," but the sight of her standing there stark naked and proposing terms for a conditional surrender increased his sense of outrage. He found he was able to look at her in a way that had never been possible before, objectively and impersonally rather than the summit of all he had ever hoped for from women. His eyes took in every part of her, not sensually, as in her room a moment ago, but coolly and almost mockingly. He went on undressing but less hurriedly, retrieving his jacket and waistcoat from the floor, putting them over a chair and saying, as he sat to remove his boots, "Sometimes I can't imagine why you married me. Since you have, I've rights to exercise whenever I choose."
She remained perfectly calm, a fact that secretly astonished him in the circumstances.
"I've never denied you access."
"Aye, but always on your terms."
"On terms we agreed."
"I renounce them."
He had got as far as removing his trousers and she had him at a disadvantage. Her movement was like the spring of a cat. Before he could regain his balance she was at the door, had turned the lock, and laid her hand on the door knob.
He caught her before she could pull it open, seizing her round the waist and dragging her back into the centre of the room where she writhed from his grasp and made as though to try again, but he shot out a hand and caught her by the ankle so that she fell flat on her face, a flailing arm coming into sharp contact with the fender.
Her fall, and the metallic clang of displaced fire-irons, brought him up short so that he paused, suddenly aware of the farcical element in the quarrel, she sprawled naked on the carpet, he half entangled in his trousers.
"You aren't hurt, are you?"
She rose to her knees, her left hand holding her wrist where it had struck the metal. She looked so childish and pitiful that shame invaded him. The light of the bedside lamp fell on her back and her crouching attitude, with her hair touching the carpet, suggested the pose of a wounded animal.
"Gilda, it doesn't have to be like this! I'm sorry I treated you that way, but in God's name try and understand how I feel! I love you and want you. Why can't we be like any other married couple? In God's name, why not?"
She rose slowly to her feet, still massaging her wrist.
"Let me see your arm."
She turned facing him and her eyes were blank.
"Do what you have to and let me go back to my room," and she began to walk slowly towards the bed.
Anger ebbed from him. Submission, on these terms, wasn't worth exacting. Sullenly he unlocked the door and threw it open.
"I'm damned if I'll beg, not even from you—wait, you can't go like that," and he stepped out, crossed the landing, and entered her room, retrieving her nightgown and returning with it. She took it wordlessly and slipped it over her head. Then she went out, closing the door.
* * *
The moment he was certain she was not in the house, he forced himself to think logically, rummaging in his mind for possible refuges at her disposal. He could think of none other than her mother's house in Northampton, so he went out breakfastless and summoned a cab to take him to the station, with every intention of boarding the first available train for Peterborough, and some half-formed plan of confronting her in Edith's presence. He did not know what her mother would make of it. He did not know what anybody would make of it. Their quarrel, seen in retrospect, was pointless and childish, and while he had sacrificed his dignity she, in her mysterious way, had succeeded in rescuing hers. He was like a fugitive with the hounds on his heels, brought up short against a twenty-foot wall, and had no alternative now but to face the consequences of the ridiculous episode, already, no doubt, the subject of gossip among servants, who would know that she had fled during the night and that he had gone in pursuit without so
much as a cup of coffee.
It was while he was standing in front of the departures board trying, with all his might, to focus his mind on the train schedules displayed there, that Garside accosted him, touching his cap and saying, "It's gone down, sir. I managed to get it on the workmen's train just after six," and Edward turned, wrinkling his brow and staring at the deputy stationmaster as if he had been a stranger and not a man with whom he had had scores of consultations concerning the despatch of freight since he came to the district as manager.
"What's that you say?"
"Madam's trunk, sir. The three-fifteen was on the point of leaving… matter of fact, I shouldn't have let her pass the barrier, but she was clearly in a great hurry to catch it. I got her on and put her trunk on the next train, as promised. It'll catch her up with that express label on it. Her cross-Channel doesn't leave until just after nine, sir."
His brain, completely fogged at Garside's initial approach, began to clear a little so that he was able to make some kind of sense out of the man's remarks. Gilda had come down here in the small hours with a trunk but had been unable to catch the three-fifteen save by jumping aboard when it was moving off on the whistle. To do this, she had been obliged to abandon the trunk and shout instructions for its forwarding to the obliging Garside, who had obviously recognised her and gone out of his way to help, probably because he regarded Swann-on-Wheels as one of the city's most important patrons of his railway. It was Garside's reference to the cross-Channel packet that baffled him. He said, carefully, "Is that three-fifteen a through train to the coast?"
"Yes, sir, though there's a longish wait at Victoria. Long enough for Mrs. Swann to get breakfast, I daresay."
"Thank you, Garside." He reached into his trouser pocket and drew out a half-crown.
"That isn't necessary, sir."
"Take it, man."
Garside took it with another salute. "Glad to help, Mr. Swann. The ladies will cut it fine, sir."
He went off and Edward, passing a hand over his unshaven chin, sat on a platform seat and made a tremendous effort to think clearly and purposefully. It was no use going after her. By the time he got to Dover (he remembered now that the early morning train from Manchester connected to Dover) she would be in France. It was no use trailing over to her mother's either, or not yet, not until he had had time to think up some plausible story for Gilda's absence. As to the future, he had no wish whatever to explore that. The best course he could take now was to get himself shaved, make some kind of pretence to eat breakfast, and stop the news of her flight being broadcast to tradesmen who might well be numbered among Swann's regular customers. If that happened, the depot would get to hear about it within hours and the thought of moving among the clerks and waggoners as a newly-married husband whose wife had fled from him in the middle of the night was not to be contemplated.
He went out of the station, called a cab, and drove home, telling the housekeeper that Mrs. Swann had been summoned away on urgent family business and that he had been to the station to send on her luggage. He had no means of knowing whether or not she believed him, but she was a discreet woman and he could rely on her to relay the information, for what it was worth, to the other servants. She said, "The breakfast is cold, sir. Shall I get cook to send up some more?" He said no, for he planned to follow Mrs. Swann after a visit to the depot, and would make do with coffee and eat on the train. He then dismissed her and went upstairs to shave, finding that he had to use extra care with his cut-throat for his hand was unsteady. He packed an overnight bag and came down again in ten minutes to drink a single cup of coffee. Then saying no more to anyone, he went out and walked the distance to the station. The depot could await a wire explaining his absence. In the meantime, the need to confide in someone was imperative, and he could think of no one but his mother-in-law, Edith Wickstead.
Two
Incident in Whitehall
He was not ill, or not of a sickness that could be diagnosed and cured, yet those who remembered Edward Swann in the days of his apprenticeship, and his surge into the West Country with his brother George when the two of them had raised the eyebrows of every transporter in the country, began to think of him as a sick man, for both his appearance and character had undergone dramatic changes in the last few weeks.
He had always been a ruddy-faced, well-set-up young man, quiet and deliberate in manner. Not too talkative, perhaps, but friendly enough, and a very good man to have beside you, behind you, or even over you in a crisis. He was more equable than George and more approachable than his father, someone who would always listen, who had time to spare for the lowliest employee in the sector, a gaffer, moreover, who was reckoned a first-class mediator in a local dispute and almost as good as his brother Giles at pacifying irate customers. Now there was hardly a trace of those characteristics that had played such a part in enabling this sector of the network to adjust to the 1905 realignment of frontiers and reshuffle of executives after the switch to powered transport. Moody and unpredictable, he slouched through his daily schedule like a sullen schoolboy harassed by an imposition, ranging off to the nearest public-house as soon as the yard shut down, not to royster, it was rumoured, but to sit in a corner drinking and snarling at anyone who offered to share his company.
The direct cause of the vast change in him soon got about, despite his mumbled stories of his young wife being on an extended trip abroad. "Completing her studies," as one senior clerk said to another when the subject was raised in The Funnel's counting-house, and his companion had winked solemnly as he said, "Studies in what, I wonder?"
It could not have been housewifery, for the Swann house at Edgbaston was closed and coming up for auction, its staff dismissed and its new furniture in store at the Bull Ring warehouse. When this proved to be more than a loading-yard rumour, and the young gaffer had taken to biting heads off in every direction, clerks, drivers, mechanics, waggoners, and even customers shared the view that someone should take Edward in hand before the sector slipped to the bottom rung of the Swann ladder, to rub along with regions where the horse and cart predominated. Opinion was divided as to who that someone should be. One Barnes, a summarily dismissed loader at the yard, was heard to exclaim that it should be that flighty young wife of his, after she had been dragged home by the hair, given a hiding, and put to work at milking the bile out of the gaffer. The senior clerk was more restrained. He let it be known that brother George should be informed of how things stood and summoned to give the region an old-fashioned going over. Older men said the Old Gaffer would have sorted it out in a trice, for he had always been partial to sacking from the top whenever things went awry in a particular region. None of these speculators were aware that George had already been called in and told to mind his own damned business, that no one this side of the Channel knew where the flighty young wife could be located, that old Adam himself had made little or no headway with the boy, and that Edith Wickstead (still "Gaffer Wadsworth" to the oldest hands about the place) had twice waylaid her son-in-law and urged him to put her daughter out of heart and mind before his life went sour on him.
Edith came as near as anyone to making a breach in Edward Swann's glowering defences when she said, with her Yorkshire forthrightness, "The girl's not worth a glass of cold gin, lad, and I would have told you that before you married if there had been the slightest prospect of you heeding me. She was hopelessly spoiled from babyhood and had her own way in everything until her father died. By then it was far too late to get it into her head that she wasn't somebody very special, destined to become a great actress or a king's trollop."
It was the word "actress" that made Edward look up and he at once demanded to know if Gilda had always had an ambition to go on the stage.
"It was one of her grander fancies and the most persistent of them. She appeared in school plays, and had a good deal of amateur experience abroad, I believe. But everyone knows that kind of life needs real talent and far more stamina than she possesses, drat her. I thought she had
put aside all thoughts of it when she married. For security," Edith added, "she even had the gall to tell me that!"
Edward said, in a low voice, "She never pretended she was in love with me. She was honest in that respect. But I got the impression she preferred me to any other man she had met. I didn't know about that chap Bernard until later."
Edith had been on the point of interrupting and telling him, with some notion of shock therapy in mind, that what Gilda had preferred was not Edward Swann but Edward Swann's prospects, including his share in his grandfather's fortune, but his mention of Bernard checked her.
"I never heard of anyone of that name. Who is he? And how do you come to know about him?"
He told her the story of the flow of letters from Bernard's sister, and the little he had learned from Gilda of the man who sent the inscribed photograph. "It was brooding about him that sparked off that silly row," he said. "I got it into my head that he had been her lover in France, but I don't think so now. Since you mention her being obsessed with the stage, other things seem to fit."
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