Most Loving Mere Folly

by Ellis Peters

  ‘My God!’ he said, in a stricken whisper, ‘you can’t believe that!’

  ‘It isn’t what I believe that counts, it’s what’s going to be whispered around. What else are they to think, I’d like to know? You were mad to get her, you said it over and over. What can they think, when you don’t make any move now the road’s clear?’

  She was frightened suddenly by the fixed and silent whiteness of his face, and the curiously distant look of his eyes, and she made a hasty step towards him, reaching out her hands to take him by the arms and shake some sense and feeling back into him; but somehow he moved back out of her hold, and left her clutching the air.

  ‘Don’t look at me that way, Dennie, love! I don’t believe that, not for a minute I don’t! But there’s people who will, can’t you see that? I don’t know what’s got into you both. There’s only one decent thing for you to do, why don’t you do it? I can’t understand you – neither of you!’

  ‘No,’ he said, through stiff lips, ‘no, I suppose not.’

  ‘And you don’t help me! You don’t care about us now, any of us, we’re not good enough for you. You tell us nothing! You don’t consider us! Anybody’d think we were your enemies.’

  ‘I’m sorry!’ he said in the same tone. ‘I don’t mean to hurt you. I can’t be any different.’

  ‘You hate everything the papers say about you, but you won’t give anything in your own words, to put it all in a better way. Nothing we say or do is right. The more we try to make it easy for you, the more you back away from us. What are we to do, to please you?’

  ‘Just let me alone,’ he said, rearing his head and turning his face away from her. ‘That’s all anyone can do, and it’s the one thing you won’t do.’

  He saw the hands coming again, and longed to pull himself away from her and run out of the house, but what was the good of that? There was no sense in hurting anyone more than he need, and he was long past the stage where someone else’s pain could ease his own. So he opened his arms to her, and let her cry on his shoulder, and hug him, and complain of him gratefully, while he made the little, laborious, comforting noises which alone were required of him. As soon as she was soothed and satisfied with touching him, and with the constrained caresses of his reluctant but resigned hands, she went back to her ironing, appeased, and he was free to do what he had to do.

  She would think she had been effective, and sent him off to plan the future with Suspiria in order to achieve the compliant respectability which would stop tongues from wagging. Let her think it, then! What harm would it do? She would be happy about it, and that was something to the good. He could see her beginning to shine with secret gratification already, as he took his hat and slipped out of the house. ‘I believe he’s taken notice!’ she was saying to herself. ‘He’s going to her, I do believe! After all, his mother’s still got some influence with him!’

  Yes, he was going to her, but not for so simple a reason. He was going to her because he had nowhere else to go, nowhere in the world where he belonged. Only now, when he had given up the struggle, and was running headlong for the only way of escape, did he realise the opaque dark wilderness of loneliness in which he had been trying to live. He had to get out of it, he had to find his way home. He was going to Suspiria, who was the only home he had.

  4

  At Little Worth the living-room was in darkness, but the door gave to his hand as in the old days, and from under the half-drawn curtain in the doorway opposite, the faint light from the workshop spread thin fingers across the floor. He went through the stony, echoing corridor, and let himself into the long, dusty, disreputable room.

  Suspiria was standing by the open kiln, which filled the air above it with a gush of heat. A few small pots were ranged along the rim, breathing their heat into the air also, and her face as she stood staring down at the floor was flushed to a deep rose colour with their nearness. But it was not at them she was looking. The undistinguished survivors did not interest her, she was looking at the shards of a large blue and grey jar, still quaking with heat on the floor at her feet. She had looked at it living with the same baffled and desperate face which now contemplated its dead body. Its making had cost her untold effort, she had torn it upward to its prodigious proportions with straining arms and hands, and a mind tortured as savagely as the clay itself; and all the time her spirit had known what she had refused to acknowledge until this moment of its completion, that it was a monstrosity, grown out of nature, useless, unjustifiable, better killed and buried quickly. It was not the first thing she had destroyed since her return home, but it was the best and worst, the most terrible.

  She heard Dennis come in, and looked up at him slowly, kicking the quivering shards out of her way. She put down the heavy tongs with which she had lifted the abortion from the kiln.

  ‘I can’t work, Dennis,’ she said, in a high, hard voice, vibrating with tension. Her hands were shaking now that the weight was out of them, and they had nothing to which to cling. She fixed upon his face great blurred eyes, brimming with grief and terror. ‘I can’t work any more!’ Her voice ran up into a lamentable, soft cry, accusing and appealing. She began to shake all over, as if she would disintegrate before his eyes. ‘Dennis, help me!’

  He put his arms round her with a wild, grateful gentleness, and lifted her into his heart. She lay tensed against him for a moment, then her body relaxed with a great sigh, and she fastened her arms about him fiercely and her mouth reached upward blindly against his cheek. He carried her back into the living-room, dim now with the deepening June dusk, and wonderfully quiet. Their muted murmurings hardly stirred the hush; the surrender, the whirlpool, the vortex of dark delight into which they drew each other down had almost no voice at all, its plunge was too abrupt, too still for sound. It dragged them down with so headlong an impetus that somewhere in the descent all the tatters of doubt and fear and failure, all the regrets and reservations and rages were stripped from them, and they reached the levels beneath light and consciousness as naked as flames, and lay there lulled and safe in the absolute, silent darkness, mindless, motionless, locked in each other’s arms.

  CHAPTER NINE:

  A Marriage Made On Earth

  1

  They were married in the third week of July, in the register office on the first floor of the Georgian house which lay in a little court off the square. Once they were agreed upon it, there was no point in waiting. When it came to the planning of the future, suddenly it was she who laid every responsibility in his arms, and said yes, not listlessly, but pliantly and gratefully, to every suggestion he made.

  ‘We won’t make any secret of it. No one shall be able to say we hid. We’ll keep it as quiet as it can be kept, but only as other couples do who don’t like fuss. Just an ordinary register office wedding, without any guests except those who have business there.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, faintly smiling, ‘that’s the best thing we can do.’

  ‘And we won’t budge from this town. Nobody’s going to force us out of it. You’ll go on working – don’t worry about it any more, you will be able to work! – and I’ll go on with the same job, at least for a year or so. We’ll make a life for ourselves here, or for ever fail to have one anywhere. If we ran, it would be the end of us. We’ll stay here! We’ll live in this house! In a year most of the people will have forgotten all about it, and all about us.’

  ‘There’ll be plenty of people,’ she said, ‘waiting for the whole thing to fall to pieces. You know that, don’t you? We’re not a good risk, Dennis.’

  ‘They’ll be disappointed. It won’t fall to pieces. Why should it?’ he said strenuously. ‘I love you, you love me. Why should it fall to pieces?’

  ‘Oh!’ she said, brushing her hair back from her brow with a wild, regretful smile. ‘Love—If that was all!’ But she shut her fingers tightly over his hand the next moment, and folded it into her breast. ‘Yes, yes, my darling! Everything will be all right. We shall make a good job of it, of course we
shall!’

  ‘You won’t mind – I promised my mother I’d tell her what we planned to do. You won’t mind if she comes to the wedding, and acts as one of our witnesses?’

  ‘Of course not! Why should I mind?’ But for a moment her eyes shone in the old, alert fashion, between alarm and amusement. ‘I never had a family before, I shall be very bad at it. I never had any practice, except for an absentminded father who forgot I existed half the time, and fed me unsuitable literature the other half, and a placid mother who ignored me almost all the time. She read, too, anything she could get hold of. That was how she came to christen me Suspiria – did I ever tell you? She had a fancy for Oscar Wilde.’ The gleam deepened for a moment, remembering. ‘Yes, of course your family must come – if they can bear the spectacle!’ She shut her lips quickly then upon the trend of her thoughts, because she was only too sure that he would understand it very well, and very readily. Once, his innocence and his youth, the very insignia of his wrongs, would have protected him from understanding that he was wronged.

  ‘They want to know you,’ he said, watching her steadily. ‘I don’t say it’s only for the right reasons, though.’

  ‘Why should it be?’ she said, quite gently. ‘That sort of thing does upset human relationship. We shall get used to one another in time.’

  Anything, anything, she thought, the parents and the cousins, and the neighbours, and all, just to have him, and never to have to be alone again in the house with her own hands which had lost their knack, and her own mind which had lost its power of concentration, and her own spirit which had lost its peace. Anything to have that unfailing well of forgetfulness waiting for her need every night, his body, in which the long spiral hours of labour without achievement, the terrible fear of her own sterility, sank without trace, leaving not a ripple upon the dark perfection of her exhaustion and fulfilment.

  So Dennis gave notice of their intention to marry, at the register office, and their names were duly inscribed in the notice book. It was very unlikely that any of the still persistent journalists would inspect the book, but if they did he could at least keep the actual date of the ceremony from everyone outside the family. But when he came to tell his mother what had been arranged, he found he could not bring himself to lay great emphasis on their desire for privacy. It was beneath his dignity and Suspiria’s to beg off anything, and besides, his mother ought to understand without any prompting.

  ‘I haven’t told anyone but you. We don’t want anyone there but our own people.’

  ‘You don’t want me to tell anyone else?’ she asked, divided between pleasure and disappointment, her eyes triumphant upon his face. He had taken notice of her strictures, after all; he was still her little boy, for all the hold that woman had over him.

  ‘I’d rather – we’d rather you didn’t. They’ll know soon enough.’

  That was all he could bring himself to say. If he had pleaded with her for secrecy she would gladly have turned herself into the most furtive of conspirators for him, but when it came to the point he could not give her that satisfaction. So she was left with a request, but not a prohibition. She told every member of the family, and went out to telephone to Albert; she wanted the Loders to know, after the way they had drawn back from any contact with Dennis and his folks from the moment things began to look like trouble. She wanted them to know that everything was above-board, and to feel cheated that they had themselves made it impossible to attend the wedding. Shudder as they might at the idea of a connection of theirs being in the Sunday papers, she knew, none better, that they were eaten with secret envy, all the same.

  She did not mean to drop so much as a hint in the way of the brash young man who came to the door one afternoon draped with an unmistakable press camera, and made himself agreeable to her upon the doorstep. She said she did not want to talk to him, and had nothing to say, but he seemed quite willing to do most of the talking himself. Finally, having tantalised and provoked her more than once to the point of confidences, he took his shoulder regretfully from the door-post, and said casually:

  ‘Oh, well, it wasn’t such a big story, really. Looks like there’s no more chapters coming along. We spend a lot of our time running round after false alarms of one sort and another – we’re used to it!’

  ‘Maybe if you knew your job better,’ she said, nettled, ‘you’d find a lot more news than you do. If you were to look in the proper places, there’s plenty to be picked up – instead of worrying hard-working women like me.’

  He gave her a look which should have warned her to say no more, but as smoothly deflected it into innocence. ‘Proper places, what proper places? We cover everything we can think of.’

  ‘You do something you call the rounds, don’t you? Courts, and hospitals, all those public places? You ought to extend the round a bit, and take in some other offices that’s as open to you as to me. I’m not here to do your work for you,’ she said, pleased with his helpless mystification, and withdrew into the house and left him still searching his mind for her meaning.

  It took him the better part of a day to dredge up all the ideas he had concerning offices open to public investigation, but by the next morning he had arrived by a methodical process of elimination at the register office, and found the names in the notice book. It did not take very much detective work to determine, from the days their notice had still to run, the approximate date of the wedding. He went away very contentedly, and set himself to keep an eye upon their movements.

  On Wednesday evening, the fifteenth of July, Dennis brought out Theo’s old car from the garage at Little Worth, and cleaned and overhauled it. It was all the indication necessary that the day was imminent. The reporter went off happily to confide to one of his colleagues, with whom he had a reciprocal arrangement for sharing titbits, that the Freeland woman was probably getting married next day, and they spent the entire morning and half the afternoon in the back snug of a pub which had a window on the court. A few minutes before half-past three they saw Suspiria and Dennis arrive, with Mr and Mrs Forbes in the back of the car, and a taxi following unobtrusively with Winnie and Mr Quinn, who had been invited to be a witness because he was already so deeply involved in their affairs that his presence was no offence. They all went into the pillared doorway, and out went the hunters from ambush, to take station and await the departure.

  ‘Look better, wouldn’t it,’ said the second reporter, critically surveying the deserted court, ‘if we had a clamouring mob? I suppose that’s why they avoided Saturday. Most Saturday afternoons in summer a few hopefuls hang around here, just in case somebody interesting turns up among the ruck. But weekdays nothing much goes on. Have it your own way,’ he said detachedly, ‘but me, I’d rather have some spectators. Won’t look like a sensation otherwise.’

  The first reporter went into the square, buttonholed a bright local delivery boy who looked suitable for the purpose, and told him what was going on in the register office.

  ‘Run round, quick, and tell everybody you know who might want to have a look. Women! They’ll come with their tongues hanging out. Run, quick, it doesn’t take long to get hitched in that dump – none of your fully choral services there.’

  The boy leaned hard on his pedals, and shot away, grinning gleefully; and presently the women came, his employer’s wife first in the field at a scuttling trot. By the time the little registrar had got through his ten-minute ceremony, and the register had been signed, there were probably thirty people ringed round outside the door waiting for them, with a few children gaping between the elbows of the adults, and a stray dog or two playing among their feet.

  ‘Pretty good!’ said the second reporter approvingly, his camera at his eye. ‘Get ’em when they come out on the steps, and see what’s waiting for ’em. If they don’t stand stock-still and give us a beautiful shot, I’m cheated. By the time they get through the ring there’ll be time enough for a close-up or two, as well.’

  Deep within the open doorway, beyond which a dim an
d dilapidated hall extended, Suspiria appeared. A child shrilled, a woman nudged her neighbour and cried all too clearly: ‘That’s her!’

  The backward start she made from the sound, stiffening her shoulders, brought her into the hollow of Dennis’s following arm, which took her fiercely about the waist and caught her close to his side, as if he expected an attack. It was a difficult shot, rather deep within the shadows of the doorway still, but the second reporter got it, and it duly appeared on the front page of his paper on the following Sunday. The next was easier, but less dramatically rewarding. She recovered herself, she put off her husband’s shielding arm with a single touch of her fingers, and walked forward steadily into the light. Down the steps she came with the frozen assurance of a first-class mannequin ignoring a critical gallery of marchionesses. To the two reporters, however, who were used to penetrating such protective coverings, her eyes gave her away. The shock had got home, all right. Through the cool shell of her face the bitter heat of her loathing and revulsion burned with an incandescent brightness. There was a beautiful opportunity for a classic, symmetrical shot as she came down the steps, the boy pale and flaming with distress at her elbow, the relatives trailing after, divided between embarrassment and gratification, and ranged before them the meagre little group of onlookers which could be made to look so imposing in a well-cut print. It had everything, in particular that oval, ice-cold face raised deliberately to the sunlight, with such clear lines, such sheer, polished bones, and those eyes in it a bitter bright green with distaste and disdain; that, and the boy’s face following her with such agonised attention, his eyes not raised to the light, but fixed only upon her. A very good-looking lad, too, you could quite see her point of view! And a woman as experienced as this one knew how to get what she wanted.

  ‘Evidently there wasn’t a back door,’ said the first reporter, scurrying down the steps from his doorway to intercept the procession across the court. ‘I believe she’d have taken it if there had been.’