“No. Way before that.” Did I detect some undercurrent of scorn? “The night you came to the Savoy together.”
“You knew as early as that?” (As early as that? We’d gone to the Savoy on a Monday and she had heard about the car exactly one week later.)
“Not knew. Suspected.”
“My God. Were we so obvious?”
“Not to everybody, I suppose. It was only when Daddy asked what you were living on. You turned the conversation—as usual, of course—with one of those tediously flippant remarks of yours…”
She paused. I thought how all the people who knew me best invariably ended up by growing soured.
“…but I’d caught that look which passed between you.”
“I don’t remember any look.”
“Fleeting but unmistakable.”
“And yet—even suspecting it from then on—you still wanted to marry me?”
“I told you,” she said drily. “By that time I’d fallen in love with you. By that time I’d decided I was going to have you.”
“Decided?” I said. “That’s nice.”
“Yes. Why not? Decided. Anyway, it’s honest.”
“Oh, sure. We can do with some of that. Honesty.”
“I think perhaps we can.”
“Well, weren’t you at all … dismayed … by your suspicions?”
“No. Not particularly. I’m used to overcoming things.”
“You’re quite a girl, Elizabeth.”
“You said that once before. Only—I’m not sure—that time you may have said it with a little more affection.”
“This time I may have said it with a little more awe. You’re quite a frightening girl is maybe what I meant. I begin to see in you the cousin of your cousin: your cousin Sarah, naturally!”
“No more frightening than you, though. Perhaps Mrs Stark was right: we do deserve each other. The two of us are fighters, aren’t we? We both believe in getting what we want.”
“I’ve never especially thought of you as a fighter.”
“That’s because you don’t know me very well. As a matter of fact, I don’t believe you know me at all.”
“I could be starting to agree.”
“I’ve always been a fighter.” Previously, she might have spoken with contempt. Now she used the word with pride. “Even at the age of three. I was still in the orphanage then. If you didn’t stick up for yourself in the orphanage you went under. It was as simple as that.”
Eighteen years ago. Suddenly I could picture her when she was only three. “Actually,” I said, “I don’t stand by that word ‘frightening’. I’m sorry for using it. I was speaking out of anger.”
All this was happening in the flat one Sunday evening. It was November. We hadn’t eaten a proper lunch and now Elizabeth was peeling potatoes at the sink. She kept turning round to emphasize a point. I was seated in one of the armchairs. Up until a short time earlier I had been reading.
“Why were you so withdrawn,” I asked, “those couple of days after seeing Marnie Stark? Now will you tell me?”
“Yes, if you like.” She spoke without expression. “Two reasons.”
“The first?”
“Well, I finally realized you were just what my father had said you were. A fortune hunter.”
“I see. So you believed in all those ravings of a woman made hysterical by shock? Well—thank you for that, thank you very much!”
“It seemed to me I had no choice but to believe in them. Why did she immediately assume I was rich? She hadn’t heard of me. There was nothing in my appearance to suggest it.”
“But she knew that we were staying in Biarritz.”
“So what? You don’t need millions of dollars, not even for Biarritz! But perhaps there was something in my appearance: the fact that my face could never be regarded as my fortune. Moreover, you’re a person who’s always been particularly drawn to good-looking people. So. Putting those two things together…”
I sighed. “To me, Elizabeth, you’re pretty. And even if you weren’t, facial beauty would come a long way down my list of things to look for in a wife. In fact—it’s almost a non-starter.”
“Then what comes at the top? Money?”
“No—a kind heart. Courage. Intelligence. A sense of humour. All of which you happen to possess in abundance.”
She gave a sharp, incredulous laugh. But then apologized for it. “Excuse me! That’s my sense of humour, no doubt.”
“Not to mention silky black hair and a nice big smile—an almost perfect figure—a flair for just the right clothes to set it off—then grace, charm, common sense, patience—the ability to cook…” I grinned. “If you wanted to know the things I married you for, I think you have to admit I’m not doing badly? Come on, sweetheart. You can’t argue with a fellow who’s just drawn up a list like that.”
But even as I was rising from my chair her next words sent me straight back into it.
“No,” she said. “Stay away from me. There’s only one thing which that manages to prove. You have the gift of the gab. And that—on my list, I may say—would be a total non-starter.”
I should have stood up, anyway, whilst the impulse was still a recent one, and put my arms about her and tried to hold her close. I realized the gravity of what was happening all right (we’d had enough quarrels of a lesser nature to let me know the difference) but the moment when it might have been possible to do it with the energy, the good humour, the conviction it required—that moment was quickly gone. I told her instead:
“I never knew you suffered from quite such an inferiority complex!”
“At the risk of repeating myself—I sometimes wonder how much you do know about me.”
“Meaning?”
“I’ve felt absolutely wretched for the past six weeks but you haven’t seemed to notice a thing. You talked about my being ‘withdrawn’ for just a couple of days.”
(Yes, well. I felt absolutely wretched for far more than six weeks, and you didn’t have the least idea.)
I said: “Of course I noticed. Even though you certainly managed to disguise it pretty well—something I admired terrifically. There you are, you see. That’s the courage I spoke of.”
“We can’t all take to our beds,” she responded coldly, “the first moment life goes a little wrong.”
I made no reply—although she could hardly have said anything more hurtful.
“And even if I did disguise it pretty well,” she added, “I can’t help thinking any man who really loved me would have sensed it.”
I’d already told her that I had. I picked up the book from my lap and pretended to be—as if through utter boredom—reading the blurb on the dust jacket.
“And that’s the trouble, Johnny. I don’t think any longer that you really do love me. Or maybe ever did. Oh, I can’t deny you’ve been attentive and kind and have possibly done your best. But you’ve always kept me at a distance; I can see that now. The times when there’s been the most real warmth in you—the most animation, the most love—those times have had nothing to do with me at all. They’ve been the times when you’ve been talking about Oliver. And you’ve no idea how often I’ve said to myself, ‘If he mentions that name even once more I shall go crazy!’…or how often I’ve felt so plumb jealous that if Oliver hadn’t already been dead I should probably have wished him so. Well, we live and learn, don’t we? Six months ago I was just so innocent it would never have occurred to me that I could hate so much.”
She had finished with the potatoes and the carrots and the sprouts. She was holding onto a chair back and sometimes looking at me, sometimes looking at the floor.
“But now I don’t feel jealous any more. And now, too, I know it isn’t true that I hate Oliver. I’ve gone past feeling hate—or love—or anything. I just feel tired.”
There was a pause. I answered bitterly: “If I may say so, you seem to have done an awful lot of living during these past six months—if finding out all about your capacity for jealousy and
hate can rightly be termed living. Of course, I know that on the afternoon you believed we were going to inherit Merriot Park you thought that Oliver was dreadfully sweet. You did think him sweet, didn’t you?”
She gave an impatient exclamation and gazed at her knuckles for a moment, white against the chair top. “Which brings us to the second thing I learned from Marnie Stark. Oh, I suppose I realized it a long time before that, of course—but up till then it had somehow always been possible not to let it crystallize.”
I waited. “Sounds promising.”
“I fought for you, Johnny,” she repeated. “From the evening we saw ‘Auntie Mame’ I knew I stood a fair chance of getting you. And I felt determined to succeed.”
“Which is something, do you realize—since it appears I had so little choice in the matter—that makes nonsense of what you said about your face not being your fortune? A complete irrelevance.”
“No, it doesn’t. One still lives in hope. One still clings to the old romantic fairytales. Until somebody comes along and spells it all out for you and the illusion shatters. The admittedly fragile illusion.”
“Very well. You fought for me. Bully for you. What then?”
“What then? It was at Mrs Stark’s that I finally faced up to it. I killed Oliver just as surely as you did. Except that I was worse than you. Lady Macbeth to your Macbeth … knowing that all the perfumes of Arabia couldn’t possibly sweeten this little hand. No wonder—as you put it—that maybe (oh, merely for the odd day or two!) I may have seemed a bit withdrawn.”
I stared at her.
For several seconds she stared back. “Well, say something.”
I said something.
“You bitch…”
“Yes. ‘The Bitch and the Bugger’. Perhaps she’d like that for the title of her next book?”
“She was right about you, wasn’t she? You are just a fucking goddamned little bitch.”
“Well, apparently. With intelligence, courage, charm, grace and—what else was it?—oh, yes, the ability to cook.”
We were silent. Still standing, she folded her arms; and now she dropped her eyes again.
“I feel so tired,” she said. “I sometimes think I must be heading for a breakdown. Even almost hoping that I am. Because is this my natural self? I used to think I was a little nicer. So very tired,” she repeated.
“Well, that makes two of us.” I remembered Icarus flying too close to the sun. “The question is: what do you want to do now?”
“Do?”
“Yes. About us. Is this the end of the line?”
“Actually, I feel it may be.” A solitary tear moved slowly down her cheek. She brushed at it impatiently. “I want to leave you, Johnny.”
I think I’d realized she was going to say that. Half realized it. Yet I felt positive that until I’d put the notion in her head those words hadn’t yet formed. I didn’t know much about telepathy but I thought that in some way I had willed them.
At length I said:
“You can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because it makes the whole damned thing so meaningless! That’s why not!”
I had practically shouted it.
Very briefly, our eyes met.
“You can’t.” I’d said it now more gently.
“I don’t necessarily mean forever. For a month or two. To think things over. Quietly. We both need a chance to do that.”
“No.” Stubbornly I shook my head. “I promise you I don’t.”
“Yes, you do. Before we start a family. I think we’re lucky not to have done so already. If we have made a mistake, this is plainly the time to correct it.”
“Okay,” I said, woodenly.
“Okay?”
“Where will you go?”
“Home.”
“Yes. You’ve never really thought of this as home, have you?”
“Of course I have.”
To neither of us, probably, did her tone sound that convincing.
“Anyhow,” I said, “I can tell you of someone who’ll be pleased. Your father said it wouldn’t last a year. He’s clearly a whiz kid with the horoscopes!”
“Or maybe just a shrewd judge of human nature. No, I’m sorry,” she added quickly, “I don’t want to start it up again. But—as I said—I’m not even sure it will be permanent.”
“Oh, don’t be so naive, babe. As soon as you get back to all those red-blooded, clean-cut, wholesome young Americans, and back to your mommy and daddy, it will be permanent all right.”
There was another silence.
I shrugged. “Well, never mind. I daresay I can always find someone else to keep me. Third time lucky, don’t they say?”
She replied: “I’ll leave you some money—enough to tide you over for a week or two. Obviously I had no intention of clearing out the account. And after that we’ll have to see.”
“An allowance! Gracious me, how bountiful! Perhaps I’ll even get some alimony. And when do you propose to leave this humble residence, my lady, which you could never look upon as home?”
“Immediately,” she said. “After I’ve cooked your supper. There’s no purpose to be served in drawing out the agony—not now that we’ve made up our minds. I shall go to a hotel tonight and catch a flight back to the States tomorrow.”
“Tonight?” I said.
“Yes, Johnny. And please don’t try to stop me.”
“I wouldn’t think of trying to stop you. How could I—your now being such a woman of action? Only please don’t bother to cook me any supper. It would surely choke me.”
“Very well. I’ll get my things ready. May I ask you to look after these peelings?”
In another twenty minutes she had packed her suitcase. I remembered the girl who had struggled across the Strand with two of them that size. She had her coat on. In the meantime, I had scarcely moved.
“I’ll send for the rest later. There isn’t much. It shouldn’t be too complicated to have it all shipped out.”
I thought: there speaks the one who’s coming back. It wasn’t worth putting into words, however.
Nothing was worth putting into words.
As she passed my chair she touched my forehead lightly with the back of one hand. “Johnny, it is for the best, you know.”
“I ought to warn you,” I said. “Once you go I may not be prepared to have you back—even should you want to come.”
“Well, I’m afraid that’s a risk we’ll simply have to take. Isn’t it?”
For a moment she stood beside my chair.
“Goodbye, honey. Look after yourself.”
“Oh, I think you can rely on me for that.”
I heard the front door close. It reminded me of the August Bank Holiday, when she’d gone off to Regent’s Park and had seen those two lads capsizing their canoe. She had wished I could have been there with her, to share in all the fun.
35
I didn’t start looking for work. I went on a round of frenzied entertainment—nightclubs, theatres, cinemas (I saw five films in three days)—always getting up late, usually after midday, and then sitting well into the small hours every morning, always with a glass in my hand, leaving an accumulation of other unwashed glasses and coffee cups and dirty laundry. But mainly glasses. Memories had to be erased.
Yet memories also had to be revived. I had nothing else to live on.
And so one Sunday in January (it couldn’t be a weekday; by then I’d started back at Selfridge’s) I returned to Merriot Park.
“Oh, no! This is too much! Am I to find no sanctuary?”
“I agree that—to use your own phrase—it isn’t ‘absolutely necessary’. But it’s important.”
“Important to you, I suppose? To Mr John Wilmot? Well, yes, of course! What else could ever be important?”
I was growing accustomed to the weariness in her tone; the resignation.
“So tell me the worst,” she said, “and get it over with!”
“I’d like to see some sn
apshots of Oliver. When he was young. Before the war, during the war, anything you have.”
“You’d like to see them, or you’d like to take them from me? As a further part of your—in quotation marks—settlement?”
“I wouldn’t take them from you. Unless, that is, you had copies. Or copies could be made.”
She rang a bell. “Janet will fetch the album,” she observed, tersely—and for the second time during my visits to Merriot Park I experienced a keen sensation of relief.
I hadn’t seen James that day. Janet had opened the front door. When now she brought the album she naturally went towards her mistress.
“No, no. Give it to Mr Wilmot, please.”
Janet did so and then left. Without opening the album I turned to Mrs Cambourne and indicated a sofa in the centre of the room.
“Couldn’t we sit on that? Then you could provide me with a commentary. Which I know would double my enjoyment.”
“Your enjoyment? Why should I regard that as any matter for concern?”
“No reason whatsoever.” But I took a chance. I smiled as I said it.
She gave a token grunt of impatience; yet then rose from her chair and, as always now, leaning on her stick, took careful steps towards the sofa. I helped her down onto it—it wasn’t very low—and so far from shrugging off my assistance she even acknowledged it. “Thank you, Mr Wilmot. Perhaps you would hand me my glasses?”
And less than a minute later we were settled. It felt distinctly strange, after the great distance she had recently kept between us—physical as far as she could, as well as metaphorical—now to be so close that our knees were almost touching, with the album resting bridge-like on our laps. I thought that she must be aware of this, also; she appeared more than usually brusque as she commenced her exposition. Indeed, she turned over the first few pages without even giving them a glance. “Those are photographs my mother left me. Mostly of myself as a child. They won’t be of any interest to you. Neither to you nor anybody else.”
“Oh, but I’d like to see them if I may.”
She shrugged. “As you like.” Her tone implied it was entirely immaterial. “Then you’d better be the one to turn the pages.”
I went back to the beginning and was taken at once into another world. The eighteen-nineties, early nineteen-hundreds. Beach pictures: bathing machines, donkeys on the sand, moustachioed men in striped swimming apparel, giggling young beauties in frills and flounces. Picnic parties on the river: punts, parasols, straw boaters, white summer dresses. The grounds of a large country house: croquet hoops, delicately trailing willow trees, a young girl crossing the lawn. On closer inspection this young girl turned out to be Sarah Cambourne herself. She had figured a good deal in earlier photos, too—a pretty child with fair curls and a slightly aggressive tilt to her chin; but here she looked for the first time a positive beauty, vivacious, assured, aware of the promise life held out to her and determined to take hold of it. That made me warm to her a lot: I, of course, had once felt much the same. At her side—an almost indistinguishable blur—bounded a small dog. ‘A fifteenth birthday present’, I read beneath the photo. “What did you call him?” I asked, smiling.
The Man on the Bridge Page 22
