by Ellis Peters
Suspiria moved quickly between the staring, gaping ranks which parted grudgingly to let her through. The ragged little gallery murmured excitedly as it followed at a loose distance to watch her get into the car. Two women passing the alley as she emerged gazed at her indifferently in passing, and the next moment nudged each other and turned to stare with the rest, remembering who she was, and realising from which door she had come.
Nevertheless, it was over. It had seemed an hour, and lasted only perhaps two minutes. Dennis was reaching past her to open the door of the car; the ancient cushions squeaked as he got in beside her. As soon as they were safely away, anonymous in the twirling thread of traffic spinning through the town, he heard her draw a great, violent breath, dragged down painfully to her heart. He did not dare to touch her; all he could do was to thrust the car to its most urgent speed, and withdraw her furiously from the lingering, corrosive memory of the witnesses to her wedding.
2
‘She did drop the hint that brought them, of course,’ said Dennis, when the door of the bedroom was shut, and the sighing summer quiet of the night had taken away, as it seemed, the house from under them, and left them swinging in a small, isolated world slung among the stars. The house by night had a way of seeming taller than it was, and the fields and the town more remote.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Suspiria, brushing her hair at the open window. ‘Don’t talk about it.’
‘But she probably doesn’t even realise she did it. I don’t think she meant anything like that to happen.’
‘I’ve told you, it doesn’t matter! After all, what did happen? Nothing new, for us!’
‘But just today – I’d have given anything to keep them off us today!’ he said, wrenching at the incurable distress.
She said nothing in reply to that, but only turned slowly from the luminous blue radiance of the clear sky, powdered with fine midsummer gold, and moved towards him with the inexpressible languor of the warm breeze in the leaves, or the soft drifting fall of her folds of blue nylon, settling and clinging again about her body as she stood beside him. Where the light fell upon her flesh through it, it warmed into a heliotrope glow, softening the sharp little hip-bones and the thin shoulders, slight as a girl’s, into a suave delicacy of line. The fronds of her hair, cut short as a boy’s now for the hot months, stood up from her head distrait with their own lightness and the stimulus of brushing, and quivered in the thread of breeze. The full, broad forehead looked as smooth as marble beneath them, and her eyes in their deep, arched settings shone upon him with a distant and sorrowful wonder. His wedding day, then, kept a sort of holiness for him, poor child, and he had not wanted it soiled. How he clung for safety still to the conventions of his already forsaken world, in the middle of the incalculable spiritual dangers she had brought upon him!
‘It did hurt you!’ he said insistently, as if she had denied it. ‘It hurt you horribly.’
‘Did I show it so badly?’
‘Oh, no – no, you were kind!’ He was so dizzy with gratitude for her forbearance with his mother that his tongue overstated it without any insincerity; and indeed, she wondered at it herself. ‘But you won’t hold it against her, will you? They don’t think about things like that as you do. They can’t understand.’
She noticed that he did not identify himself with either side. God alone knew where he felt himself to be! Somewhere in the gulf between them, perhaps, eternally falling.
‘No,’ she said, turning down the covers of the bed, ‘no, I won’t hold it against her.’
He slipped into the bed beside her, and reached up and put out the light. His hands folded her, and drew her into his heart. The cool of the night swung over them slowly, star by star withdrawing into infinite dark distance as they went down the long, plunging shaft of rapture to the abyss of peace. Like a deep, dreamless sleep, with conscious joy still awake and radiant at the heart of it; absolute stillness at last, absolute perfection of happiness, the whole being fulfilled, the whole life justified, wanting nothing, needing nothing. They lay dreaming in the profundity of ocean depths where no life survived, of enemy or friend, but their two matched and mated selves, fused now into one immaculate unity by the last convulsion of delight.
She lay for a long time motionless after thought began again; sleep drew back from her, but the exquisite conviction of safety and peace remained. Dennis’s arm lay across her waist, so heavily that she thought he had fallen asleep; but when she turned to kiss his cheek, with delicate, still care for fear of disturbing him, his lifted mouth felt for her lips instead, and his hand cupped her breast, and lay there languid with content.
‘Aren’t you asleep? I thought you’d fallen asleep?’
‘No, I was just thinking. I don’t want to sleep.’
The ecstatic deliberation of their voices filled the night, though they made only soft shadows of sound within the bed. They had all time in which to think and speak, and no morning would ever come down into the profound deeps where they were.
‘What were you thinking about?’
‘About us. About our future.’ He said it as though nothing else existed, and yet the world was full. ‘You did have some doubts – didn’t you? They won’t last. You’ll see! We can make it perfect, Spiri. In spite of everybody and everything – perfect!’ His lips, stirring between her breasts, prolonged the ‘perfect’ until they reached her heart.
Was it the shortening of her name that started another image out of the void? Suddenly her senses, springing upward out of the guarded deeps, recovered the touch of Theo’s hand, half-asleep and triumphant after long hours of work, the weight of Theo’s head low on her shoulder. More child than this child, when he was not intent on creation; more innocent than this touching innocence, when he was not sharpening his wits upon somebody’s pretensions, like a street-urchin presented with a large and unblemished wall. She had never plunged into this ocean with him; he had never been able to make her realise that it existed, beyond all the levels of his light-hearted and exuberant love. What was the use of trying to allocate the fault now, if there had been a fault? Nevertheless, she felt the chill of his silenced mouth through the warm whispering lips which explored her breast.
‘Perfect! Spiri, promise me – we’ll share everything!’
‘Everything!’ she said, caressing him. ‘Everything!’
‘Spiri – we ought to have absolute truth between us two—’
‘Absolute truth!’ she said, bursting upward into full, cold consciousness. She felt the upward surge of his senses beside her, the night with its wary stillness was all about them once again, the alert and listening air leaned to their lips. ‘There’s something you want to say to me?’
He drew breath, and checked as silently before he spent it. The fingers which had strayed about her body as carelessly as a child trailing bare feet in the July grass, were still and gentle now upon her cheek, pleading with careful, wordless eloquence for her understanding. ‘No – but you’d tell me anything I ought to know – wouldn’t you? As I would you?’
Answering him beneath that touch was difficult and dangerous; so much might be conveyed even by the contraction of the muscles of her cheek, or the momentary arrest of her breath. But she said with the terrible stealth of one who must be convincing at all costs, this once if never again: ‘Yes, of course! You know I would!’
She waited, but he only sighed: ‘Yes—’ and did not say any more. What was it he had just drawn back so stealthily into the closed places of his mind? A confidence? Or a question? The reasons for not asking questions were even stronger now. When neither the one who asks nor the one who answers can hope to prove the truth is in him, why ask? And why answer? For after all the trials and the acquittals, all the oaths and all the perjury, and all the torment and passion of truth among the perjury, the old, the inescapable fact remains. Theo is dead. Theo is dead, and his footprints did not reach the door. And there were only two other people in the case from first to last. The wife, and t
he lover!
When the silence had stretched to breaking-point, she said very quietly: ‘Dennis!’ There was no answer. ‘Dennis, have you gone to sleep?’
His breathing, stealthily measured out slow breath by breath, sighed steadily into the pillow beside her. His fingers had slipped from her breast, his hand lay half-open and relaxed between them. She felt the tension and haste of his recoil making the air quiver faintly, and his mind trying to still the betraying tremors which he would take care never to provoke again. He did not move or speak; and after a moment she turned, very softly, and drew her hand away from touching him. It was more than an hour before either of them slept.
3
They had a week’s holiday in Scotland, slipping with the car from village to village where they could pass unrecognised. Afterwards they remembered that belated honeymoon as a curious interlude of unreality islanded out of their lives, golden, rounded, idyllic, except that like all enchanted castles it had a door in it which they pretended not to see, and were forbidden to open. When the week ended, they came back to Little Worth, and settled doggedly to the resumption of their daily lives. He went back to his work, she to hers; they put on the routine with a brisk resolution in which neither of them fully believed.
It was early in September, one Saturday afternoon when they were shopping in the town, that Dennis edged himself backwards out of a narrow shop doorway in Crane Street, and backed into Iris Moffatt’s arms. As he turned hastily to apologise they recognised each other, and exclaimed together.
‘Iris!’ He coloured richly at the too close and too sudden encounter, and she was blushing, too, but for all that she was not greatly embarrassed. It was rather as if he were no longer of sufficient importance to her to put her out of countenance. She looked prettier than he remembered her, less prim and defensive, less ready to find slights or evasions in other people’s innocent phrases. She looked happy; that was what it was, happiness. His smile reflected her own, a gradual glow of pleasure. ‘You’re looking awfully well,’ he said.
Propping the most precarious parcel back into the crook of his arm, she let her hand linger for a moment to steady it. Suspiria was sitting in the car at the edge of the pavement, and she saw the gloved fingers hover, touching his sleeve, saw the young face beaming into his. The light of its easy gaiety seemed to shine down into his eyes, and wake an understanding and answering brightness there. He looked purely twenty-two again, eager and astonished, a young man prompt at an assignation. Her heart was suddenly transfixed by a lightning-flash of incredible jealousy, suffocating her with rage and humiliation. She wound up the window of the car, so that she might not hear their conversation.
There must be dozens of them loose in Great Leddington, the girls, the contemporaries, the young things with whom he had grown up, who had known him years before he ever entered her emancipated life. Girls who had run around with him, sharing dances and cinemas, and the hectic youthful excitement of the motor-cycle and pillion, girls who had walked the lanes arm-in-arm with him, and kissed him lengthily at parting, long before he ever heard Suspiria Freeland’s name. She tried to turn her face away, not to watch them, but the clear sound of their voices drew her head round again irresistibly, and her eyes fixed on them and clung with a hungry bitterness.
‘Well, it’s nice to see you again! It’s been ages! How are you?’ A little wary still, but well-disposed; too happy to hold anything against him now, he thought.
‘Oh, not so bad, thanks! I don’t have to ask you that – you look blooming.’
‘I haven’t had a chance to talk to you for months,’ she said, and grew pink again, remembering, no doubt, how he had spent those months. But she was full of her own affairs, and for him could find only the impulse of pure kindness which comes from satisfied happiness. She wanted to give him a little piece of her well-being. ‘I’m a bit late,’ she said, ‘but I’d like to congratulate you, just the same. I’m glad it came out right for you. I hope you’ll be happy enough to make up for everything.’
‘Thank you!’ he said, warmed in spite of his constraint, because she had said it without a thought of curiosity or proprietorship, because she was making no claim on him, and wanted nothing from him. ‘How have you been getting on? What’s new with you? I don’t seem to have heard any of the local news lately.’
‘I’m getting married next month. I thought perhaps your mother would have told you.’ So that was the reason for the glow she had; a comfortable, vindicated glow, all the brighter at the moment for the understandable satisfaction she had in flourishing her victory before these particular eyes. ‘It’s Bill Parkes – remember him? It’s going to be a quiet little affair, if they’ll let us get away with that. But he’s got three younger sisters, and you know what they can be like! I can see me having a flock of bridesmaids, whether we want them or not.’ But she would love it; she was radiant at the thought.
‘I say, I am glad! That’s grand news! I hope you’ll be very happy.’
‘As happy as you are?’ she suggested archly, patting his arm. ‘All right, I know that’s impossible! But maybe we’ll get somewhere near it.’ She wanted to say something more personal, something intimate and magnanimous, something that would take the wind clean out of his sails, and make him remember her always with warm friendliness, perhaps even a faint recurring wonder if he had not been a fool to let her get away from him when he had her. ‘I’m glad you stuck it out here, Dennis, really,’ she said. ‘You were right, and I’m sure you’ll always be glad you did. It must be a bit difficult, sometimes, but don’t take too much notice. You’ll be all right in the end, I’m sure you will.’
Suspiria saw the warm flush mount Dennis’s face, and his hand go out to take the girl’s proffered hand. ‘What do I know of his life up to a year ago?’ she was thinking, her eyes upon the two glowing profiles. ‘Nothing! He came out of an absolutely unknown past, and some day he’ll go again, and disappear as completely. I shall have nothing left but this bit of his life to remember. Why should he give me anything else? I’ve been a kind of disease that drove him to bed for a time. When he gets over it he’ll leave me. Why should I expect anything else? He’s young, he belongs to his own generation. People like this girl! This girl – she knows him very well. Who is she? He never talked about any of them. What is there in her to talk about, anyhow? She’s not good-looking, she wouldn’t be noticed in a crowd, she doesn’t look particularly clever—’
But she was young, young, young! The answer to everything!
The two on the pavement were separating now, their hands clinging for a moment as they drew apart, with that easy and confident flurry of last-minute words which marks old and intimate acquaintance. Dennis put a hand to the handle of the car door, and leaned inside to tip his purchases into the back seat. The girl had not realised until then that Suspiria was sitting there so close to them. She flashed a startled and conciliatory smile at them both, and made off up the street rather quickly. Dennis slid into the driving seat, and slammed the door, and the car moved away from the kerb jauntily, as if it had caught some of the encouraged lightness of his mood. The girl’s touch had done him good. His eyes had a sparkle, his lips an eager half-smile, hopeful and boyish.
‘Who was that?’ asked Suspiria, drawn together extremely small and compact beside his shoulder.
‘A girl I used to know,’ he said cheerfully, noticing nothing amiss with her tone. ‘Her name’s Iris Moffatt. I haven’t seen her for a long time.’
‘No, it seemed to be a pleasant surprise, on both sides.’
This time he heard it clearly, the ice and acid bursting upward into the harmless words. He gave her a quick, astonished look along his shoulder, and said indignantly: ‘It was on my side, at any rate. Why not? She’s a nice girl, I’ve known her a long time.’ The next moment he laughed aloud, it was so unexpected and so ridiculous that she could feel like that, just because he spoke to poor Iris.
‘Don’t be a fool!’ he said. ‘She’s getting married next mo
nth, and she couldn’t think of anything else. What do you suppose she wanted with me, except to tell me all about it? I haven’t set eyes on her for – must be nearly ten months. Soon after I got to know you.’
‘Really! I hope I didn’t break anything up for you both? She looked as if she might have done rather well for you. Not very much imagination, perhaps, but you can have too much of that. And otherwise, yes, I’d say very suitable!’ Her pure profile smiled, but not kindly. Her voice was as limpid as snow-water, and as cold.
‘If you enjoy this,’ he said, still not seriously disturbed, but vexed and chafing, all the same, ‘I used to know several more girls. We could call round on a few of them, and you could have a really wonderful time.’ He shook his shoulders, putting off the impulse of irritation.’ ‘Don’t be so silly! How many men do you suppose I saw around you, those first weeks, without being mad with jealousy? Men who knew you intimately, and could talk to you as I didn’t know how to talk. I could have killed the lot of them. But let Iris alone, poor girl, what harm’s she ever done? If you want to know all about her, I can tell you. There isn’t so much of it. We used to knock about together, before I knew you; and after I knew you, I broke it off. I haven’t even seen her to speak to since, until today.’
‘Do I detect a slight note of regret?’ asked Suspiria, the raging smile curling her lips more deeply. ‘You may live to be sorry you were in such a hurry to make up your mind. One should never do these things too hastily.’
‘I don’t know why you want to quarrel with me,’ he said, in incredulous exasperation, still only half in earnest, ‘but it wouldn’t take a lot of this to manage it. Do you have to behave like a jealous child because I speak to another woman in the street? What’s got into you?’
There was no profit in it, but she could not let it alone. The very lightness of his voice, still unconvinced of danger, made her long to stab him with the pain she herself was experiencing, for it was new, and terrible, and she did not know how to deal with it. ‘I’m simply interested,’ she said. ‘You never told me you’d had a regular girl in the days of your innocence. Do tell me more about it! Did you walk the monkey-run with her? And sit in the back row at the cinema? She didn’t look the type to fill your days with unbearable excitement, I thought. I should imagine your mother was quite easy about you in those days. She must sigh over the memory of your Iris, sometimes.’
