Most Loving Mere Folly

by Ellis Peters

  Suspiria had elected to spend the night in a small hotel in the county town, to which Mr Quinn had brought her very quietly, under cover of the excitement. She had slept for about sixteen hours, an exhausted sleep, sunk far below the level of consciousness; and when she awoke and arose, it was into a world so new that it had little colour and almost no form. Presently, she supposed, there would be feeling again; but as yet she moved through a half-made void, trying to exercise her senses where there was nothing for them to taste, or hear, or touch. She had died, of course; one does not get over that in a single day. Even the pain and the rage take longer than that to leave the mind.

  Their escape from the town was effected without hindrance or annoyance; and in the car, where pursuit and interference were no longer possible, she began to feel again. This was new, and of the new world, that she should sit shoulder to shoulder with Dennis, on her way home, and that there should be no shadow nor memory of another person between them. The warmth of his body came to her, first faintly, then with unbearably sweet reminders. They did not touch each other throughout the journey, nor speak more than a few words, until he helped her out of the car at her own door, in the cool, delicate sunlight of the May afternoon.

  Suspiria stood in the yard, looking all round her with dilated eyes just stirring out of their drugged blankness. A blue coil of smoke was spiralling upward from the chimney, the curtains had been changed, and the windows cleaned. When she opened the door and let herself into the living-room, she was met by a subdued and disciplined gleam, for the room had been dusted and polished, an overcrowded vase of tulips stood on the piano, where she had been accustomed to see the gracious swelling lines of the green bowl, and all the pots on the shelves stood in prim rows, like unintelligent soldiers on parade. The books had been tidied so strictly into place that they looked only like paintings of books, created to fill vacant shelves and satisfy the eye. She stood looking round her blankly for a moment in the middle of this unfamiliar domesticity, and then a curious light came into her eyes. He could not be sure whether it was amusement or anger.

  ‘I see someone’s been busy!’ She crossed to the hearth, where a compact fire burned, and stood with her back to him, warming her hands.

  ‘My mother offered to come and put in a fire for you. You don’t mind, do you?’

  ‘It was very kind of her,’ said Suspiria, in a voice he could not translate with any accuracy. ‘And the flowers?’

  ‘I expect that was Winnie. Give me your coat, Spiri! There, now sit down, and I’ll go and make some tea.’ But he hovered with his hands above her shoulders, wanting her to turn and fasten her arms round his neck, and draw him into her heart. It had always seemed to him that the homecoming could begin in no other way; there would be the closing of the door against the world, and then the instant, hungry meeting, everything they had missed through the weeks of waiting, but with a new and indescribable and desperate sweetness added. Now he hung over her sick with longing, and she did not move.

  ‘I’m not an invalid,’ she said, lightly and gently. ‘So – your mother has cleaned the house for me, your sister brought me flowers – and George loaned the car to bring me home. It’s touching, isn’t it?’

  He did not understand; he had been dwelling so much upon her that he had scarcely seen or thought of anything else.

  ‘George has been very decent all round. He let me off the extra day from work without a murmur.’

  ‘He expects to be well paid for it,’ said Suspiria, ‘one way or another. The first instalment will be payable tomorrow, I expect – you’ll have to tell him all about it. Not just the trial, he can read that in the papers. No, the home-coming, and what we said to each other, and how I looked, and how we made love—’

  Dennis took his hands away from her, and stood looking at her, not with the hurt patience she had expected, but in a dark, passive pain, as if she had merely held up a mirror to his eyes.

  ‘They haven’t taken out shares in us, if they think they have. We’re not public property.’

  ‘Oh, yes, we are! That’s just what we are. We belong to the world, my poor little love. Everybody’s rushing to buy into the company, and they all want value for their money. Those who can only get at us through the papers want fine, large gestures from us, that can satisfy their senses from a long way off. Those who’re close round us will want the dialogue, too – appropriate, sentimental confidences, everything they’ve been led to expect. My God!’ she said, ‘what complaint have we got? We wrote our own parts to begin with, didn’t we?’

  ‘You don’t regret it?’ he asked, in a voice of such sudden suppressed terror that she put out her hand in protest, and laid it against his cheek, and the moment after was in his arms. This at least remained a vast and violent reality, the mutual tide of their passion, infallible above all their differences, making mere rack of the world that plagued them.

  ‘Oh, no, no! Never, my own darling, my beloved little heart! Don’t leave me – whatever I say or do, don’t leave me!’

  ‘Never, never—Oh, Spiri! Oh, my darling—’

  She felt so fragile in his arms now, and her slight weight sank upon him so heavily, that even the hard-won delight of the moment faded from him into pure tenderness. He lifted her, and put her softly into the chair by the fire.

  ‘I’m sorry! Not the time or the place! Listen, now, you rest there, as you’re told, and I’ll get some tea.’

  He came in from the kitchen a few minutes later with a pile of letters, all nicely sorted into sizes; she thought she recognised again his mother’s housewifely touch. ‘They were on the table there. Look, mountains of it! Do you want to bother with them now?’

  She took them from him with a frown, suddenly conscious of their ugly possibilities. The feel of his mother in the house had made her nudge herself wryly: ‘A mother-in-law – that’s something I never had before!’ The sight of so many unopened envelopes, so many unknown hands, made her think more bitterly: ‘Some of our millions of proprietors!’ But she accepted them with authority, because they were a reality which had to be faced. By the time he came in again with the tea she had torn her way through most of them, and piled them round her upon the floor. The evening paper, fallen sprawling among them, opened to his wincing eyes headlines and photographs full across the page:

  ‘TRAGIC LOVERS VINDICATED: Great Leddington

  Awaits Homecoming of Mrs. Freeland.

  ‘Consistent and Fearless Throughout,’ says Counsel.

  And the large beginning of the text, splayed under a picture taken outside the court after the acquittal: ‘Today young Dennis Forbes will bring home to her studio at Little Worth, under the hanging woods of Great Leddington, the woman whose love for him has triumphantly survived not only all the pressures of her society, but the ordeal of a murder trial. Acquitted yesterday of the slaying of her artist husband, Mrs Freeland returns unsubdued to her own art, and to the love which has successfully defended itself against conventional morality and the gravest of criminal charges.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, seeing with what a passion of dislike he stood regarding it, ‘they must have their satisfaction somehow. If they can’t hang us, they must debauch us.’ She reached down and turned the paper over, to hide the rest of it from him. ‘It’s nothing, it’s almost dignified, only trying to be daring and broad-minded. Wait until the real scandal-sheets begin to compete.’

  ‘They’ll get tired of it,’ he said, ‘in time.’

  ‘In time, we shall all be dead. Then nothing will matter.’ She drew in her skirt fastidiously from the litter of paper she had strewn round her. ‘Most of it’s only fit for burning, but you should look through it before it goes. Yes, if you believe we’ve escaped, you should really add it all up, and see what the sum comes to. Some of them are just filth, the pathological kind people get when they’ve been through the headlines. Some are much more horrible, like the papers, but worse – oozing sentimentality about love, and pawing both of us all over. Even if they meant a
ll they said, they’d be indecent; but they’re dishonest, too.’

  He put the tray on the table, and went to her and took hold of her hands, because she was shaking with silent laughter, and the very quietness of what he took for her hysteria terrified him. ‘Don’t look at them again! Don’t think of them! I’ll burn them all, you needn’t see them any more. We have escaped, Spiri! We don’t have to live the way they want us to, we belong to no one but ourselves.’

  ‘And that’s not all!’ she said, as if he had never spoken. ‘That’s no more than the beginning, my poor little innocent. After all the suppressed romantics who want to congratulate us on losing the world for love, and the perverts who want us to go to bed together in public for them, the subtler insults begin. There are four offers here from newspapers, for my – or even better, our – exclusive story of martyrdom for love. Have you any idea how much money you could get, Dennis, my darling, for a five-hundred-word article in your own hand? I won’t tell you, the temptation might be too much. I can understand now why people do exhibit themselves, people who’ve never had that much money in their lives. And then, think of the competition! You could force them to double their offers, easily, if you kept your nerve!’

  ‘Don’t!’ he said, his voice rising into a cry. ‘Stop it, Spiri, I can’t bear it!’

  ‘I’m sorry!’ she said, light and quiet again, and freed one hand to touch his forehead, so softly that he could not doubt her calm. ‘You mustn’t be upset, I’m quite in control of myself. You shouldn’t grudge my laughing – unless you want me to die of spite. Either it’s funny or it’s a horrible outrage, and I think I prefer to find it funny, but if you don’t like it—And then, there are some more original angles, too. There are two dealers making me offers for London exhibitions, and a big shop wanting to put me on contract. They’re specially interested in recent work – that means work I did while we made love to each other, and Theo painted away in happy ignorance in the next room. I’m a good business proposition now, Dennis, better than I’ve ever been before. It doesn’t even matter very much whether the pots are any good, as long as they’re my children by you.’

  ‘You could have expected things like that,’ he said, trembling nevertheless because he himself had never foreseen them. ‘It’ll all blow over in a few weeks. They’ll let us alone.’

  ‘And you think we shall still be intact? Intellectual and spiritual virgins? After wading through this? You haven’t heard everything yet. The cream of the joke is still to come. There’s a letter from a firm of caterers, offering to take care of all the wedding arrangements for us, discreetly and tastefully – in a style befitting the remarriage of a notorious widow, no doubt.’

  This time he really did not understand. He sat there at her feet on the rug, still holding her hand between his own, his fingers tight upon hers as if he felt himself to be hanging on desperately to his own personality. She put her free hand over his eyes, because she did not want to see the beginning of understanding in them; and bending her head, kissed him very tenderly on the mouth.

  ‘I shouldn’t have told you. But even if I’d said nothing, some day you’d have realised all this. Close your eyes! Don’t look at me yet! I love you!’

  The long brown lashes lay obediently on his cheeks. After a moment he said, so quietly, with such strenuous serenity that she knew he had understood at last: ‘What does it matter? We shall be doing what we decide to do. I want to marry you. I hope you want to marry me. I don’t care about anyone else. They can go to hell, or queue up outside the gate to stare at us, it won’t matter to me.’

  Perhaps he even believed it, she thought; he had a furious faith in her, and in the person she had unwittingly made of him. He would ask God knew what miracles of them both!

  ‘You didn’t look forward to quite this kind of shotgun wedding, I suppose,’ she said dryly.

  The contortion of his face made her feel as if she had struck him. He opened his eyes upon her widely, then, and said in the same resolute tone, yet somehow with less conviction: ‘I think you’re making too much of it – too much of them all.’

  ‘Do you? Haven’t you realised yet that we’ve put ourselves in their power? We started a course of events, and we’ve no choice now but to go with it. If we love each other, as we’ve gone to a great deal of trouble to state as publicly and often as possible – if through no act of ours, as we’ve also sworn, the barrier between us has been removed – if we mean what we’ve said about both our love and our innocence, my poor child – then there’s just one move open to us. If we make any other, can’t you see all those eyes turning to look at us again, and all those minds beginning to wonder? We’ve even put it out of our power to delay for long, since conventions mean nothing to us! Oh, we’ve been wonderfully thorough, we’ve shut every escape route against ourselves! No, we’ve got to go on. There’s just one end for us – to marry, and live together, and be perfectly, triumphantly happy, in full view of all our public. And if we don’t make a good showing, can’t you hear the whispers of murder going round again? As soon as we cease to provide value for money one way, they’ll set out to get it another. We belong to them, now.’

  ‘We belong to ourselves,’ he said doggedly, ‘and we can do what we please. If you want me to go away now, and leave you alone, I’ll go. If you tell me not to come back—’ But he could not end the challenge, it stuck in his throat and he could not get it out.

  ‘I want you to continue to be the person you are. I want you to love me, and to let me love you, but oh, God, not their way!’

  ‘It won’t be their way, it will be ours. You needn’t do anything you don’t want to do. You shall only take me when you choose to take me. You shall work, and only sell your work where you choose to sell it – not at all, if you don’t want to. We won’t touch these damned dealers who want to cash in on the scandal. There must be others! We won’t get married till we’re ready – never, if you want to make a gesture. I don’t care if they dig the case up again,’ he said, rocking her hands against his burning cheek. ‘They can’t touch you again, I don’t care if they try to get at me. I don’t care if everyone turns against us! I won’t have you bent out of shape!’

  She felt the sudden heat and tremor of his tears upon her fingers, a slight and scalding dew, bursting out from his eyes to blur the image of her deformity and defeat. It was then that she knew he had understood; the violence of his recoil from the conviction of their helplessness shook him from head to foot in a convulsion of denial and despair. Every assertion of defiance was an acknowledgment of his hopelessness and disbelief, and a recognition of hers; and at the point where he knew his struggles for what they were, he suddenly ceased to make them, and the unwonted and ungovernable tears broke along his lashes, terrifying him and putting him to silence. She tore her hands free from his hold, and caught him to her breast with a soft, grieved cry.

  ‘Don’t listen to me! It’s the reaction – it isn’t really true! They can’t change us! They can’t make us change!’

  But he did not look up. He shut his arms round her body and clung to her, while she strained him to her heart. They lay still in the chair, encircled and encircling, bound indissolubly together, like guilty lovers tied breast to breast and set adrift upon a fast-flowing river, to perpetuate to death and beyond one terrible embrace.

  2

  Afterwards, when the moment had passed and they had torn themselves apart, each blamed the other, pitifully and tenderly, for the remembered distress, and each refused to believe in it.

  ‘It was just the reaction,’ Dennis told himself, driving back alone to the garage. ‘How could she be expected to come through that without a scratch? Of course the nervous strain is just coming out this way. In a few weeks she’ll get over it, and be back to normal. I must be in a pretty low state myself – for a little while I really believed in it. We’ll have to take things quietly for a bit, and wait for the whole thing to blow over. I must be very good to her.’

  But the lingering
uneasiness did not leave him. Of course they had made their stand throughout the case upon their love and their innocence – what else could they have done? But they hadn’t given up one atom of their own personalities. They owed nothing to anyone, and nothing even to each other. If they wanted to get married, they could, now. But as for having to, that was ridiculous. There was no compulsion about it. They loved each other, but marriage was a practical step, something that had to be thought about. Suddenly he knew that he had never really thought about it at all. Even when he had talked about getting Theo to divorce her, he hadn’t really begun to realise what the results would be. It had been just a kind of sweet, painful and remote dream, and its very remoteness had absolved them both from examining or regarding the possibility of its accomplishment. But now the impossible had become possible, and they would do well to step back and consider it from every angle, before they did something which could not be undone. For both their sakes!

  Perhaps it was only this sudden realisation of the responsibility they had for the future that had caused her mind to recoil in rage and protest. She couldn’t bear to take even what she wanted at the compulsion of the world. She needed an interlude of work to regain her passion of creative satisfaction, to feel her own vindicated stability again, to defy the world out of the rock of her own personality. Then she could give herself again, with the old candour and generosity, she who couldn’t bear to have things snatched from her when all she wanted was to give them of her own free will. And he had to have something positive to give in return, an identity of his own to match with hers. Yes, she was right to resist the too hasty thrust of events. Only, he told himself vehemently, she would never have been afraid of the challenge at any other time; the despair had come from her nerves and her weariness, not from her spirit.