Читать книгу The Willow Cabin - Pamela Frankau - Страница 15

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Dennis said, “Is that all?”

Caroline said, “Yes. I thought I’d better tell you at once.”

“And you’re off to New York on Thursday?”

“Yes. I told Rokov that in my note.”

“I see. Well, there it is, dear. And now there’s something I want to say to you.”

She said, “I don’t think I want to go on driving round and round.”

“We are not. We’re going to sit beside the Serpentine.”

“Why?”

“Because that is the place where people with illicit relationships go.”

Though she smiled obligingly, he thought that he had perhaps chosen a bad moment; despite her new elegance, she was looking wretchedly unhappy; he wished again that she were more successful in hiding her distress. But there was beginning to be something adult and remote about her grief. In older days she had talked her sorrows out; now she kept quiet and still wore the mask of sadness for anyone to see. She had not adorned her decision in the telling; there had been only the words and this miserable face. “She knows what an idiotic mistake she is making; she can see how hopelessly she is torturing herself, wrecking her life. That is a thing that she cannot explain to herself, any more than she can explain it to me. Yes, it is a bad moment. Even so,” he thought, “the time has come; a plague on both their houses; I can stand no more of it.”

He nosed his car into the line that faced the water. It was a showery afternoon and now the rain began to fall again; the water turned grey and mottled; a rising wind lashed the trees, with their light frosting of green, on the other side.

“We’ll go on sitting here,” he said, “though I rather wanted to walk.”

He turned and looked at her; she was withdrawn as far from him as she might be, leaning back against the door, with her hands in the long, soft black gloves clasped round one knee; she looked as vulnerable as a child.

“Do you know what I’m going to say?” he asked heavily.

“I think so.”

“Before I do say it, I have to make my hopeless point once again; a mere formality, of course.”

She nodded and half-shut her eyes; some of her suffering seemed to be for him.

“There is no need to be sorry for me,” he said sharply. “That I do not want and will not have. But I still love you and I still want you to marry me. Is that clear?”

She nodded again.

“All right.” In spite of himself, he said, “You needn’t sit such a long way away; you should know by now that I do not pounce.”

She shook her head vaguely and did not move.

“Well, darling,” he said, “This is it. I have had about as much as I can take. And I’m not seeing you any more, except by accident, after to-day.”

“Because of Rokov?”

“That has helped to make up my mind for me. But it was on my mind before.”

“I see. Look——” she paused.

“What am I to look at, Caroline?”

“How much is it because of Mercedes? I still have the feeling that you are really fond of her and think that she’s a holy martyr and that I’m the whore of Babylon.”

That, he thought, was a queer piece of mind-reading; “She gets the fact of Mercedes, and misses the truth; the truth that I refuse to tell her.”

He said, “How childish you are; I don’t feel like that about either of you. It is simply that there comes an accumulation of being unable to bear the whole set-up. Perhaps,” he said, trying to be fair, “Rokov is only an excuse. But Mercedes isn’t the reason. The reason is you. If I didn’t see you suffering so much and so determined to suffer, I might be able to hang on a little longer.”

“Suffering?” she said, as though the word were foreign. “I am only sad because I have to be ungrateful to you; and you took so much trouble.”

“Are you sure?” he asked, peering at the sad, stiffened mask; the cigarette-smoke and the mist on the windows made a gloom here.

“Oh, Dennis, sure of what?”

“Never mind,” he said. “To-day I resign my right to ask anything at all.”

She moved restlessly, pressing the palm of her hand against her forehead. “Yes,” she said, “I see there’s nothing in it for you.”

“And nothing in it for you, either, my pretty.”

“Don’t you see? I have no choice. ‘I might go on; naught else remained to do’,” she said and suddenly there was a tear spilling over the lower curve of her lashes, dropping off her cheek, dissolving into a small dark splash on the patterned crêpe de Chine shirt; he watched its progress attentively. She sat still, not sobbing nor making any sound, with scarcely a quiver of her lips and the tears following one another.

“My dear fool—No,” he thought. “Suddenly she has dignity; I cannot upbraid this....” He put his hand on hers. “All right,” he said, “you needn’t explain.”

“That sounds as though you were still on our side.”

He scowled at the windscreen in front of him that was now obscured with the drifting streaks and smudges of rain. “In a sense, of course, I shall always be on your side. But from a distance; from as great a distance as I can manufacture. You see, my beloved, there is a sort of man who can hang around forever, grateful for whatever crumbs he may get. I’m not that sort of man. You nearly turned me into him, but not quite. I refuse, reluctantly, to make me a willow cabin at your gate.”

“ ‘And call upon your soul within the house’.”

“Precisely.”

She bent her head and took a handkerchief from the black suède envelope that she carried; he could not help noticing that it was a small, fine handkerchief embroidered with a square initial; and remembering a day when she had cried and borrowed his handkerchief and forgotten to give it back.

All these new things, he thought—clothes bought on credit; for the foolish journey, for Michael’s pleasure; like a poule de luxe; you, who are a genius in your own right.

“As it’s my last day for questions,” he said, “here’s one more. Have you told Michael?”

“No; and you musn’t, please.”

“You are putting a considerable responsibility on him, you know.”

Her eyes were reproachfully wide. “But Dennis, that is what you always say you want me to do.”

“It’s no good,” he said, “I don’t know why we go on talking.”

“Do you despise me now more than you did before?”

Angrily, he snapped open his cigarette-case, lighted two cigarettes, and placed one between her lips. “I’m sorry, Caroline, but I cannot make mathematical calculations of that sort. It amazes me sometimes that you can be so common.”

“What is common about the word ‘despise’?”

“The thought, not the word. I don’t despise you; I never did. I think that you are making a crazy nonsense of your life, but that’s incidental. Let’s leave the whole thing.”

“Yes, please,” she said faintly. She was so pale and shivering so much that he put his arm round her shoulders, forgetting his rôle.

“Just how ill have you made yourself feel with all this?”

“Pretty ill; but pay no attention.”

“Now, damn you,” he said, “you rouse my paternal instincts. Why do you always work yourself up into such a state of nerves? Would you like to come back to Albany and lie down?”

She laughed and said, “No; it isn’t really that sort.”

“It doesn’t look a very good sort to me.”

“I have jitters; take no notice.”

“You must remember this,” he said, starting the engine, “that I’m only going because you don’t want me. If you ever do—and I don’t mean as a lover, I mean if there is any way that I can help you, then you must send for me. And I’ll be there. That’s a cliché, isn’t it? I expect they all say that.”

“They? Who are they?”

“Other gentlemen in similar situations. Ein Jüngling; you should read Heine.”

She said, “Yes, well....” That familiar laziness of rejoinder made him chuckle. “You have given me a great deal of pleasure, darling,” he said, “and I will not have you being sorry.”

“At least I never lied to you.”

“And you’d better not. Where shall I take you now?”

“Would the Rufford be out of your way?”

“I haven’t got a way.”

He drove across the bridge, past Knightsbridge Barracks, to Hyde Park Corner and down Constitution Hill. She said nothing until he spoke and it was small conversation all the way. As they drove up St. James’s, he wondered how long this corner would remain haunted ground, how soon it would lose the dimensions imposed on it by Caroline and let him pass by, thoughtless and comfortable. There would be a time; that was all he knew.

She paused for a moment before she climbed out of the car; he sat there, staring ahead of him, not wanting to look at her. She said flatly, “Well, good-bye; take care of you.”

“Have fun in America,” he said, feeling as fatuous as he sounded. He did not look back; after he had left the car in Albany courtyard and was going up the Rope-walk, he found his mind repeating, “Have fun ... have fun....” He saw her having fun. Remembering things about her now as though she were dead, he reflected upon her talents as a traveller and as a guest; the ease with which he had seen her move on the background of hotels, restaurants and houses not her own; always amiable, graceful in acceptance; adapting herself without effort; it was his sister Kate who had said that Caroline was her favourite week-end guest, because she never needed to be entertained. She was equipped, he thought, with an endless and spontaneous joy of living. How long would it take Michael to kill that thing?

He shut the oak door and stood in his room; that was a little misty and cold, like all the ground-floor rooms in Albany, a room furnished to his own taste, having about it the solid haunt of the past, when Byron and Macaulay and the rest had made these apartments their homes in another version of London.

Dennis looked at the large, accommodating sofa and saw Caroline sitting there, with her long legs curled under her, saying, “Yes, I think I would——” and holding out her hand with the empty glass to be refilled. He saw her lounging gracefully against the mantelpiece, where the French clock and the miniatures were; lighting another cigarette and murmuring, “If Michael hasn’t rung by eleven-thirty.” He remembered the evening when he lost his temper with her, cut off her monologue, and said, “I’ll take you home”; after which, he had slammed the door and left his keys inside. She had helped him climb through the window and the quarrel had blown away in giggles, and she had won again.

He could hear newsboys shouting in Vigo Street; there could be no news that was not ominous. “And that’s the answer,” Dennis thought. He could see nothing ahead for any of them, the tight little circle of temporarily-favoured persons to whom all this was important. “It is the last spring; the guillotine is coming down. And after that it won’t matter who loves and who is unloved; we are for the dark.” How foolish not to be able to be happy now, when there was so little time left.