by Ellis Peters
‘You thought I could be changed,’ he said, hitting back against his will. ‘You were going to make a silk purse for yourself, weren’t you? Who’s to blame but you if it didn’t come off?’
She shut her face between her hands, pressing her long eyebrows upward obliquely between her finger-tips, and staring from under them with distorted green eyes sick with frenzy. ‘What have you done to me? I can’t work since I knew you, I’ve lost myself, I’ve lost my self-respect, I’ve lost my peace. Oh, God, what am I to do? I wish I’d never seen you!’
‘What have I done to you? What have you done to me? I was a whole person until you got hold of me. I had a decent life, and a place where I belonged. But you, with your passion for making something of things – what have you made of me? I don’t belong anywhere. That’s your doing! You made a monstrosity of me, just like those pots of yours – forced me out of my own nature without being able to give me another. I wish to God you’d let me alone! At least I should have been something, if it wasn’t much – now I’m nothing at all!’
Such things ought not to be said, never to anyone, never even in the silence of the heart; he knew it, even while he was trying to rein in his tongue from finishing what it had begun. But every retort had gone a little deeper into the quick, and they were so locked by the claws that they could not struggle apart. The last reticences seemed to fall from them, there was nothing left but their wounds, and their frantic desire to wound. The violence of the quarrel rattled at their sanity, almost shattering them as glass is shattered by its own too intense key-tone mercilessly prolonged. They drove each other apart at last, shuddering and exhausted, until at night they had no words left, and no will, and lay side by side in the bed, motionless and silent, drained of life.
It was the most terrible, the most terrifying thing that had ever happened to them. It was like a death, like having the heart and the energy wrenched out of them. They lay without touching each other, too tired and broken to stir a hand across the crumpled sheet to reach for an answering hand. They fell into something which was less and more than sleep, a kind of grey semi-consciousness, with half-open eyes staring at the darkness over them, too listless to close completely and give them rest. The pain and fury of their disruption had become the long, dull ache of amputation; there was no cure for that.
Perhaps they fell asleep truly for a moment. She started into feeling again to find him suddenly trembling beside her, and in the instant of realisation she said: ‘Dennis!’ aloud, in a tone of such wild appeal and reproach that it startled him alive again. There were a hundred ways it could have begun, but only one in which it could end. He drew breath in a great recovering sob, and tore himself out of the drowning apathy of estrangement. The darkness shook and cried. His arms gathered her, and rigid for a moment, she melted into him as suddenly, moaning, winding her arms about his neck, groping with her blind, quivering mouth along his cheek and over the arched lids of his eyes, cool above the burning heat of his breaking tears.
They strained together wildly breast to breast, trying to lose themselves in each other, trying to break through the labouring ribs and gasping flesh into the centre of the heart, to be one and indissoluble for ever, to be safe. They hurt each other, the once-caressing hands now clinging like grapples of steel, the convulsively locked arms struggling to compress their two racked bodies into one. There were no articulate words between them at all, only the heaving gasps and lurching sighs of two tired animals driven to death. Even when the last paroxysm of desperate, agonised delight ebbed into stillness, and left them inextricably twined into exhaustion in the deeps of the private and illimitable sea, they lay without releasing each other, and slept so at last, afraid to relax their despairing hold, for fear their very bodies, pierced through and through by the violence of the storm, should disintegrate and be lost for ever.
They knew before they slept, they knew in awaking, that this was only the first of many such reconciliations, and the mildest of many such deaths. What they did not know, what they already wondered, was how many such violations body and spirit could bear before they shattered past reassembling.
CHAPTER TEN:
The Isolation of the Inseparable
1
By the time they were rid of that interminable autumn and winter, to reach the lost heaven was not more important to her than to escape from the ever-present hell. She had given up trying to make anything else of it. It was a hell of humiliating jealousy, of destroying quarrels and shattering reconciliations, in the recurring fires of which they burned incessantly. So when a respectable London gallery made the offer of a spring show of Theo’s paintings, she accepted eagerly, and insisted on going down to help to arrange the exhibition. He was dead, and safe from the stings of publicity; and his work deserved all the honest notice she could get for it. It was a kind of propitiation to the sad ghost which would not leave them, nor let itself be forgotten.
She threw herself into the arrangements with all the demoniac energy which could find no outlet now through her own hands. She even bought new clothes, carefully chosen and unusually elaborate, for the opening, and went to meet the reviving publicity with a handsomely painted face and challenging eyes. It had become the lesser evil by then.
There was a certain amount of pure pleasure in the spectacle of Theo’s pictures, well-hung to her own orders in a good light; and though a number of people came to the opening for the wrong reasons, still more were there out of a real artistic interest. Those who had known both Theo and Suspiria in the old days approached her with some constraint, but contacts limited to a few minutes of conversation in such an atmosphere confronted her with no difficulties. Nor, she thought, did they see much wrong with her. Perhaps she was even thinner than they had known her, but there was not time for them to find her greatly changed. She felt invulnerable; they could not help her, but equally they could not harm her.
She looked down the long room, on the second morning, and saw a tall, grey-haired man standing before her portrait, and studying it with a severe and thoughtful attention which was somehow familiar. She recognised the poise of the large head, the set of the heavy but straight shoulders. She had once told him she would not want to see him again, even if he gave her life back to her; but now she moved impulsively down the room, and touched his arm.
‘Sir Howard! – I thought I couldn’t be mistaken. I didn’t know you cared about this kind of thing.’
‘Psychological curiosity,’ he said candidly, ‘not artistic. How are you?’ He looked at her, she thought, with every appearance of pleasure. For better or worse, they would always be more than acquaintances; there is no escaping from the facts of your past life. His presence was the acknowledgment of one such fact, and nothing more. Yet his eyes dwelt on her with a long and searching regard as he waited for the conventional reply.
‘Very well, thank you! And you?’
‘Thank you, I survive.’ His eyes went back from her face to the uplifted face in the portrait. ‘Your late husband was a very considerable painter.’
‘I think so. I’m glad you agree.’ She looked up at the singing colours, the vibration of the reds and greens, the cool, limpid greys. The touch of Theo’s lively hand was everywhere in it, clearer than any signature. Poor Theo, who had never had justice yet!
‘Are you happy?’ Sir Howard asked her abruptly.
‘Happy? What is that? I’m alive. I said I should never thank you for it, but I do. I wanted to remain alive. Perhaps it was an instinctive desire rather than a responsible one, but I wanted it.’
‘If I’m not too grim a reminder,’ he said, encouraged by the patience with which she had followed him so far, ‘will you come and have lunch with me?’
She went with him almost gladly. His interest in her had a weight and thoughtfulness in strong contrast to the emotional inquisitiveness to which she had become accustomed. To be regarded with respect, even a disapproving and detached respect, was almost a novelty; and at least he was a peaceful companion
in this, that he knew far more about her than most people knew. The things she might say to him would need no explaining; he had the language.
Over a secluded table in the most discreetly hidden of restaurants he looked up at her suddenly, and said: ‘I heard that you married him.’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I married him.’
He did not comment, but she knew that he had seen, as clearly as she saw them herself, the little insidious threads of necessity by which they had been drawn to the register office. ‘We did what was expected of us,’ she said, and was disturbingly aware of the bitterness in her own voice. It needed so little to steer this man’s intuition into the secret channels where no one should ever be allowed to penetrate. And yet she was tempted, for the first time in her life, to the violent confidences of the confessional.
‘There was nothing else for you to do,’ he said simply. ‘That was easily seen from the beginning.’
‘I suppose so, at least from where you were sitting. But you see, I’ve not been used to going a step out of my way either to do what was expected of me, or to avoid doing it. It did something to my equilibrium. All the qualities I had have gone out of gear.’ She added with a wry smile: ‘It didn’t do Dennis any good, either. For me it was a dangerous step away from my own individuality. For him it was something worse, a step towards his. Oh, it was what was expected of him, in the circumstances, too. But the only way he could have got back on an even keel was by running away like mad from the whole issue. He did try. We both tried, but what other way was there for us to go? If we’d run off together, somewhere abroad, where nobody knew us, that would have been a violation of the truth, too.’
‘And if you’d broken loose from each other, once for all?’
She raised her fierce eyes, and looked through him into a terrifying emptiness. ‘Did you ever try to break loose from your own blood and bones?’
He tilted the wickered bottle of Orvieto, and filled her glass, and for a moment sat gazing into the pale amber light of the wine. ‘I often wondered!’ he said, more to himself than to her.
‘What did you wonder? How far Perleman was right in calling it an infatuation?’
‘No,’ he said unexpectedly, ‘I was never in any doubt about the passion being genuine enough, on both sides. No, what I always wondered was who did give Freeland the poison. And what it was going to be like for you both, when you had time to wonder about it, too.’
The upward flare of her lashes, swift as it was, was so smooth and steady that he knew she felt no surprise, the flash of her eyes blazed recognition and response. ‘You seem to have given up the idea,’ she said, ‘that I might be the one person who knows the answer to that.’
‘I gave that up during the trial. To be exact, when Forbes was in the witness-box. It became so plain then that you were afraid he was the one who knew the answer. At that stage,’ he said carefully, ‘it didn’t matter much to you, I realise that. All that mattered was keeping him and yourself alive. It was his possible danger, not his possible guilt, you were seeing, but I couldn’t help wondering how you would get on when the danger was gone, and you were left with the guilt.’
‘You are really a very subtle person,’ she said softly. ‘Have you also considered the possibility that, after all, Dennis didn’t do it, either?’
‘I had an open mind about it. But you were so insistent that he wouldn’t have done it himself, you see. At first I thought that was a curious piece of chivalry, a gesture of honour towards a man you had pushed out of your way, but whom you wouldn’t have traduced, even in so sympathetic a fashion. It was one of the chief reasons why I felt you probably had killed him – having the opinion of you which I had formed by then, it matched. But when I became sure that you hadn’t done it yourself, it lost that quality of atonement. It left me no option but to think that it was a simple statement of truth. You knew him – and he was not a likely suicide.’
‘I see! So it was I myself who reduced the three to one.’
‘Not quite that, there were still two. One of them, according to you, is an unlikely starter, but the possibility remains a possibility. You ought to be the first person,’ he said seriously, ‘to be able to assess the full force of your loss on a man. But you’re probably the last.’
She was silent, looking down at her hands, in which she turned the stem of her glass steadily. ‘I don’t know. I just don’t know. No amount of thinking will bring me any nearer knowing. Of course it could have happened! Any time during that last week, except that final evening, he could have helped himself to it, if he’d wanted it. All I know is that for him to want it would be against everything I knew of him. But then, what do you ever know of another person? How reliable is what you learn in ten years of living together? When it comes to the point, every one of us is alone.’ She looked up, fixing her tormented eyes on him insistently. ‘If what you say is true, and you’ve been in no doubt now for a long time that I was not the murderer, then you must also know very well that I went to a lot of trouble to suppress half the evidence. I expect you took that to mean that I knew the answer, and the answer was Dennis. But I didn’t! I don’t know now! All I knew was that there were just the three of us involved, and my part of the responsibility, whatever it might be, had nothing to do with antimony oxide. Which left just two people, both, in a way, my victims, though heaven knows I never intended any harm to either of them. The only way to be fair to them both was to protect them both. And as for what I myself thought, I made my guess like all the rest, and knew no more than they did whether I was right or wrong.’ And supposing, only supposing, that I was wrong, and you were right, and Theo killed himself. Supposing that Dennis doesn’t know the answer, either?’
‘Then he will still be looking for it, like you. And like you, he’ll have only one place to look.’
‘Yes,’ she said in a very low voice, ‘exactly! He knows he did it, or he believes I did it. Which is it? Can you tell me of a way of finding out the answer to that? Do you know any kind of test for it? I don’t. I’ve listened to him, and watched him, and weighed everything he said and did since I began to have time to care about the answer. The variety of interpretations that can be put upon even the least word a man utters is something to marvel at. Asking and answering is no good, you see. The question was asked and answered so often and so definitely by both of us in court; ‘did you’ and ‘no, I swear I didn’t,’ don’t mean anything at all. And yet there’s only one other person it could have been, and neither of us really believes in that solution. Once, he began to try me out, he said something about having absolute truth between us – and then he drew back, and left it standing there as a pious generality. He took fright, and couldn’t go on. Why? Was he going to ask me? Or tell me? I’ve wondered ever since, but there’s never been anything to tell me the answer, there never will be anything. If you are a murderer, and love someone better than your own life, you don’t tell the beloved what you are. If you love someone better than your own life, and feel reasonably sure she’s a murderer, you don’t ask her. Partly because you don’t want to be sure past all hope, partly because even silence between the two of you is a kind of protection for her. So he didn’t ask me, and he didn’t tell me. And a silence like that is something you don’t break from the other side, either. I doubt if there’s any way over it, or through it.’
‘Then what do you propose to do? Live with it?’
‘And bear it. What else?’
‘You can’t do it!’ he said, almost angrily. ‘No one could! You’re asking too much of yourself, and of him.’
‘What do you suggest, then? Forget it? Show me a way, and we’ll be happy to try it. Break up the marriage as a hopeless proposition, and leave him? I should be leaving my life. Besides, even if we were ever driven to consider breaking up that marriage, has it occurred to you how completely unbreakable it is? The forces that made it inevitable have taken good care to make it permanent, too. Oh, no,’ she said, watching him fixedly across the table with her
beautiful and haggard eyes. ‘We shall never get away from each other in this life. We shall never even be able to long for it with an undivided mind. We still love each other, you see. Of all the married and damned living in this world, my dear man, we’re the farthest beyond help. There isn’t any escape – except, of course, the way Theo escaped.’
He drew back then from further discussion, as suddenly as if he had found himself walking over the edge of a cliff, to which he had come unnoticing. The conversation was wrenched into safer channels, and she followed indifferently, willingly entering into consideration of Theo’s paintings. There was nothing wrong with her critical faculties, and her mind still glittered; only it had no stability, and no peace. Some disintegration of despair had begun within her, and was eating her substance away; the disorganisation of her hands had begun in her heart. And what was there to be said to her? What could be said, that would not be an impertinence? She was a woman capable of seeking her own solutions, and taking them at whatever cost. She wanted neither advice nor sympathy. She had, perhaps, made use of him this once to help the definition of her diagnosis, as men maddened by silence may talk sensibly to their mirrors to break the spell; but he knew, when she gave him her long, cold hand at parting, that she would never let him approach her so closely again. Never, unless the problem somehow solved itself, and set her free. He had served his purpose. Like the mirror he would be silent; but she would never again care to be with him, or to read back the confidences she had printed into his memory.
She released her hand, withdrawing strongly, and walked away from him towards Bond Street, the draped folds of her fashionable coat swirling back richly from her shoulders. He thought he had never seen nor imagined a figure so erect, and so lonely.
