Most Loving Mere Folly

by Ellis Peters

  Dennis was in court to see her come. He heard the attendant frenzy outside, and looking up quickly, caught the first glimpse of her as she was brought in. She looked a very long way off, curiously fresh and austere, and almost a stranger, in a severely pressed grey suit and a little blue snail-shell of a hat which hid all her hair except for one frail, curved black feather across her forehead. She looked as if she had dressed with exceptional care, not merely to make a good impression, as most people do when charged with a criminal offence for the first time, but also for more frustrating reasons, because for once in her life her active mind and hands had nothing real to do, and had been driven to expend themselves upon her appearance for want of any more urgent occupation. And in this careful and imaginative grooming she now looked a little lost and startled, as if so unfamiliar a preoccupation had upset her conception of her own personality, and left her in doubt when she had most need of confidence.

  People in court craned, and goggled, and whispered, eating and drinking her. Behind Dennis’s shoulder a girl said to her friend disparagingly: ‘I thought she’d be better-looking than that!’ And her friend replied knowingly: ‘It isn’t the looks that do it. It’s sex-appeal, that’s what she’s got. You look at all the women who get fellows crazy about ’em – there’s none of ’em all that much to look at.’

  Every word aimed at Suspiria, however slight, however innocent of conscious offence, went into his heart now with a bitter and poisonous impetus, inflaming him with useless pain. He lifted his head and looked at her again hungrily, unable to understand why the very lines of her small, aristocratic bones did not move others as they moved him. She looked at him only once, but so straightly and deliberately that he knew she had been aware of him from the instant she entered, and conserved her glances in his direction only for fear of disturbing a composure she had not achieved without care and forethought. When her eyes did meet his they lingered for several seconds, regarding him steadily and without a smile or a change of expression. She sat through the outlining of the case against her, following the thread with an intelligent but motionless gravity, nothing left in her face but patience and resignation, two extraordinary characteristics to be displayed in her. She had never been known to possess more than a crumb of either; it was rather as if she had produced them suddenly at need, as little girls achieve breasts when growth forces them to become women.

  Looking at her now, as she leaned slightly forward, turning her head alertly from her solicitor to the magistrate, from the bench back to her counsel, he could scarcely believe that he had ever touched or even spoken to this woman; and a kind of superstitious despair seized his heart and wrung it, contorting every remaining hope into a doubt. Even if this ordeal passed, and they came out of the din and glare and strangeness of publicity into a normal daylight again, they would be so changed that they would scarcely know what to say to each other. What they were trying to do was to make love stand still and keep its unity of spirit in the middle of a battlefield. They wanted a miracle, and nothing less.

  ‘Why, she’s going on forty,’ said the younger girl, soft and indignant behind him, ‘if she’s a day! I don’t see what makes boys go for old women like that.’

  ‘It’s just the green boys that fall for it. And once they’re in love they go crazy. Well, you know how it is yourself, when you’re just wild about somebody.’

  ‘Oh, yes, but there’s different ways of going crazy. I mean, they say he’s young enough to be her son, nearly, and quite good-looking. What on earth did he see in her in the first place?’

  He tried to shut his ears to the whispers, but they made corrosive patterns of acid upon his mind. Everything about Suspiria and himself belonged to the greedy senses of the public now, even their follies, even their magnificence. By the time both had been pawed over in the headlines, both would be unrecognisable for ever. They were losing their shape, they were being tailored to fit a gap in the news, a pause between the cosh boys and the divorce courts. For a moment he thought with astonished gratitude how safe Suspiria would be from this deforming pressure, once this hearing was over, and he wondered if she, too, felt as if she had ventured out of the only refuge now left to her.

  There were no surprises; he knew already what was likely to happen. The case would go for trial, almost inevitably, so her solicitor had told him, so there was no point in expending themselves at this stage. Better to learn all they could about the police case, and give away nothing of their own.

  Mr. Quinn, the solicitor, was a thin, cool, fastidious man of middle age, who had known the Freelands casually for some years; but in the course of his anxious interviews with him Dennis had been unable to discover how he felt about his client. Did he believe in her guilt? He looked as if he would find it easier to believe in the guilt of human beings than their innocence. Did he feel any of the exquisite fear and rage for her life which burned in her now, those violent sensitivities which hurt Dennis even across the crowded and voracious court, out of her silence and calm? He looked only like a little book on the law, grey unobtrusive, neatly bound, informative but without sympathy.

  The Q.C. who was to defend her seemed to him to have scarcely more warmth. He was younger, bigger, a personable man of about fifty, with a name which might have meant something to a person who followed the proceedings of criminal law, but which Dennis in his preoccupation had heard and forgotten in a breath. Nothing mattered, except that he should be effective for Suspiria; but the very serenity with which he regarded her situation was unspeakable offence.

  Following with painful intensity and some difficulty – for he could not concentrate as he wished – the curiously dull recital of the police case, he could not see that they had the means to prove anything more than that Suspiria had had motive and opportunity for killing Theo. He wished he knew more about the processes of law. He wished he could change places with Suspiria, but she had put it out of his power. All he could do was sit watching her and suffering for her, and keep silence, and wait. Wait without sight or touch of her, wait with his hunger for her daily renewed in him, and no secure promise that he would ever regain her, even if they both survived this ordeal.

  Two days of this, and always more curious people milling about the pavement outside the court, craning and jumping to peer in at the windows of the car, always more dancing cameras, more avid-eyed girls gaping in the doorway and nudging one another as the victims came in sight, more greedily cheerful young men, pulling at his sleeve in the street, since they could not get at her. He thought she must have sighed with relief when it was over, and she was safely committed for trial at the Assizes, two months away, and could recoil into her walled solitude, and forget the weight of the eyes, all the shining, watching eyes, even his, which loved her.

  2

  He was not safe even at the garage. Even there cars came in for minor repairs, and their owners, penetrating insinuatingly into the particular rear corners where Dennis sought to hide himself, would suddenly have notebooks in their hands and aggressive professional charm in their mouths. If he said anything, anything at all, it was reproduced word for word, or with imaginative descriptive phrases, in the evening papers. If he simply turned his back and went on with his work, that, too, could somehow be made significant. He could not go into a pub for a drink, but some unknown young man would slide along the bar to his elbow, and begin again the persuasive whisper in his ear: ‘Mr. Forbes? Look, I’d like to have a personal line on your story – nothing sensational at all, believe me, we don’t use that kind of thing—’ After a while he gave up saying that he had nothing to say, gave up being angry, gave up telling them to go to hell; he turned his shoulder on them at the first word, and went away himself. But they were everywhere, in his own front garden, on the very doorstep when he reached it, standing in the shadow of the lilac tree, waiting to step out and pluck at his arm before he could plunge inside and close the door.

  The family lived in a state of siege. Each of them, before leaving the house, had to p
eer from behind the front curtains, and see if the coast was clear, or else leave by the back door and the gap in the garden hedge, which brought them on to the common field below. They never opened the door to any knock until it had been investigated from an upstairs window. And yet on Sunday morning, when the paper slipped through the letter-box, no less than three members of the family were waiting with ears strained for its coming, and hands itching to open it. They avoided his eyes when he came in and saw them scatter from it, but they converged again upon its headlines as soon as he was gone from the room. And in the afternoon Harold returned from a walk with two more newspapers in his pockets, and these, too, were circulated from hand to hand, and read greedily.

  ‘Passionate Friends Case Electrifies Artists’ Town’. ‘Mechanic Lover of Accused Wife Shuns Publicity’. ‘Star-Crossed Lovers in Great Leddington Tragedy’.

  They read every word of every account, when he was not there. Fascinated, repelled, titillated, they turned back to read them again, and the phrases began to have a taste secretly almost pleasant. He could feel the half-horrified, half-sweet excitement in the house, fermenting, filling the air with a faint smell of fever.

  On Monday Winnie came downstairs first in the morning, and had just put the kettle on for tea when the postman passed the window. She did not look to see if he turned in through the minute front garden, but a moment after his passing there was a brisk knock at the door, and she answered it automatically in the assurance that it must be he. A brogued foot inserted itself promptly in the door, and a young man in shaggy tweeds thrust his shoulder across the threshold, and angled his way in past her into the hall. She opened her mouth to begin the inevitable protests, and felt them falling a little dully into the abyss of his eager friendliness. She faltered, and he moved a step farther into the house, and very gently, very gradually, let the door close behind him.

  ‘He doesn’t want to see you or any other newspaper man,’ she said protestingly. ‘Why can’t you leave him alone? You’ve no right forcing your way in here like this, you’d better go.’

  ‘So I will if you insist. But, look, Miss Forbes, really, I don’t want to do anything you wouldn’t want. I only want to help you. Look, your brother’s missing his tricks. I know what I’m talking about. There’s a fund of sympathy for him among the public, it only wants tapping, and he’s got a right to public support. There’s no need to bother him about it, I know how he feels. But that’s no reason why his side of the affair shouldn’t be put across, is it? People only need to know the genuine facts to send out their sympathy to him. Real love isn’t so common they run up against it every day! And in an ordeal like this, isn’t it worth while putting his case fairly to as many people as possible? People in his position tend to look on us as their enemies, but that isn’t so, Miss Forbes, believe me. We’d like your brother to get a fair hearing – and if you’ll help us, you’ll be surprised at the goodwill he’ll find pouring in to his support. That’s why I’ve taken the liberty of stepping in like this. I do hope you’ll forgive me. If you throw me out, that’s all right, I’ll go.’

  She was wavering; she looked at him with large, dubious eyes, and said: ‘I’d like him to get some support, certainly, but it’s his affair. What can I do about it? He doesn’t want to talk to you, I can’t make him.’

  ‘Well, for instance, there aren’t any really good photographs of him, that I’ve been able to trace. I don’t want to pester him with photographers, at a time like this, but you know, if you happened to have one in the house – a good one—? You see, it would put over half the story. An attractive personality, youth, good looks—People have a right to understand!’

  She hesitated for a moment, and then suddenly turned and went into the parlour. There was a photograph of Dennis, her own favourite, in one of the table drawers. It was aggressively touched up and unnecessarily handsome, in the false studio manner; she thought it romantically pleasing, in keeping with a high and tragic love affair, and when she imagined it enlarged upon the front page of a Sunday paper her courage stiffened to the small, loving treason. She took it back with her into the hall, and gave it to the reporter.

  ‘That’s fine! Just what we needed! And if you could just tell me something, some little outline, about how he met Mrs. Freeland! It’s a kind of fairy-tale, you know, because of her being an artist, and all that.’

  Before she opened her lips she heard a foot upon the stairs, and looked up guiltily into Dennis’s eyes. The intruder had recognised him, too, and backed rapidly towards the door, but as quickly recovered his balance, and even stepped forward with some assumption of confidence and honesty.

  ‘Mr. Forbes? I was just asking your sister if you—’

  Dennis reached the foot of the stairs, and stood looking at him with heavy dislike. He held out his hand for the photograph.

  ‘If you’ll give me just ten minues, Mr. Forbes, I can convince you—’

  ‘You can give me that picture,’ said Dennis, in a perfectly flat, disinterested voice, ‘and get out.’

  He gave up the photograph without any more words, startled into compliance by the very deadness of the voice. A moment he hesitated, shot an uncertain glance at Winnie, and then slid out through the half-open doorway, and made off thankfully down the road.

  ‘I gave it to him,’ said Winnie, staring at her brother with an anxiety far more intense than if he had broken into the hot rage she might have expected from him.

  ‘I know.’ He dropped the thing upon the table with a look of distaste, and went into the kitchen, and sat down to put on his shoes. She followed him closely, flushed but insistent.

  ‘Why don’t you make use of them? He wasn’t a bad sort. He wanted to put people in the picture for your sake, as well as just as a matter of business. He says you need to have your view put fairly, you need sympathy, you need as many of the public as you can get on your side. So you do! I wasn’t trying to do you any harm. I wanted to do something for you!’

  He tried to smile at her, because he knew it was true, and there was no point in quarrelling with her. But he felt sick, and full of a kind of inexplicable panic. She was the nearest to him of them all, and even she was now so far from him that sometimes he could scarcely see her, and the effort of speaking to her seemed hardly worth while, so improbable was it that his words would even reach her, or be in the right language if they did. So profound was this impression of separation that it was a serious effort to him to look up at her and say: ‘It’s all right, I know you didn’t mean any harm. But it wouldn’t have come to any good, you know. Don’t give them anything! Keep them right off me – will you?’

  This comunication at least had reached her, and been understood, for her face eased readily into a relieved smile. Perhaps the ears of people who have been fond of one another are always more ready to receive and interpret requests than any other formulae into which words can be fitted.

  ‘All right,’ she said, ‘if that’s what you want. But I wish—’ She hesitated, in her turn despairing of making him hear and understand. No, there was nothing more she or anyone could do for him. She went away quickly, because her eyes were full of tears, and she did not want him to know.

  3

  He visited Suspiria as often as was permitted. Each time, when she was brought in to him, the sight of him touched her afresh with a painful and wondering tenderness, so that she felt the laborious erection of her tranquillity crumbling, and could not bear the too frequent repetition of so distressing a delight. She rebelled against the thought of being seen by him at all in this condition, confined, restricted, on guard, emaciated with her constant watchfulness; and yet she thought she could not have lived through it at all without the occasional dangerous joy of this confrontation.

  Their meetings were always attended. The wardress would sit retired from them, making believe to see and hear nothing, seeing and hearing everything. She was a kind, hard, disillusioned woman, the one they usually had, so inured to her duty that she could dissolve int
o the background and be no more substantial to them than a shadow. It never occurred to her to wonder whether Suspiria was guilty or innocent; such words had almost no meaning for her. She did what she was paid to do, but it had ceased to be interesting.

  When Suspiria entered Dennis would rise, staring at her with all the anxiety and hunger which had been burning in him since the last glimpse of her. Often he forgot to speak, so much of his being had flowed into the single look of his eyes. Throughout the brief interview those eyes would never leave her face. He stared at her as if he were defying change, precisely because he feared it so much, his eyes furiously denying that she was in any way diminished for him, or paler, or older, or less complete than when he had first loved her. And yet he knew that a terrible metamorphosis was taking place in both of them, that nothing would ever again be the same, that there was no going back. Sometimes, therefore, they sat through their short time together virtually without words, struggling towards each other through a panic of estrangement. Sometimes they were luckier, and a mere familiar word, a turn of the hand, a sudden flame of physical memory, would dissolve the distance, and leave them articulate at last in a passion of tenderness, their tongues hurrying to say everything while the gift remained to them; for then there was nothing, nothing in the world, they could not say.

  ‘You’re worrying too much about me. You know there’s no need. It’s harder for you. Try not to worry – in the end everything will be all right. It must! We’ve done nothing wrong, no one can prove that we have.’

  ‘No,’ he repeated obediently, the pale flame of her smile dazzling him. ‘No one can prove what isn’t true. If only there wasn’t this awful waiting!’

  ‘It hasn’t done me any real harm,’ she said. ‘There’ll be a lot of years after it, to make up for this. I’ll soon put back the little weight I’ve lost.’ And when she saw the uncontrollable convulsion of pain which wrung his face at the steadily nearing danger-point beyond which, in his darkest moments, there was no afterwards, she gave him a sudden beautiful, glimmering look of reproach and tenderness, and said, with the simplicity with which, in other circumstances, she would have enfolded and kissed him: ‘My beloved darling, my heart’s heart, you have got to believe in justice, as well as in me. I believe in it, and I promise you there will be an afterwards, and we shall spend it together, and all this will be forgotten. I love you,’ she said, steadily shining upon him.