“Ye-es.” Mrs Pargeter thought she should qualify this generalisation. After all, it didn’t match her own experience. “There are of course some who combine both, who find their fantasies are matched by reality.”
Eulalie dismissed the existence of such earthbound souls with a toss of her coiled hair. “The disadvantage is, for those who have lived the reality, as their lovers die, they too are left to feed on fantasy.”
“Yes, I suppose they are.” Mrs Pargeter wasn’t sure where all this was leading. “What exactly do you mean? Has one of your lovers died recently?”
“Not one of my lovers, no.”
“Who, then?”
“The wife of one of my lovers,” Eulalie Vance said on one sustained, soft breath.
“So does that mean your lover is now free for you?”
“Oh no.” She elongated the ‘no’ to almost impossible dimensions. “He, I fear, is long dead. No, that is the irony. While we were together, how we longed for his wife’s death. ‘If it weren’t for my wife…’ he would always say. If it hadn’t been for his wife, we could have been together years ago. But no. She lived on, and he felt a duty to her. In spite of the passion he and I shared, he still felt a duty to his wife. And, in time, he went back to her.”
“Ah. Well…That happens quite often, I believe.”
“Oh yes. It’s a cliché. To think that the love between me and Norton Selsby should have been reduced to a cliché!”
“Selsby?” said Mrs Pargeter.
“Yes.”
“Like…Mrs Selsby?”
“Yes.” There was now a wildness in Eulalie Vance’s eyes. “Mrs Selsby. That’s the final bitter irony, isn’t it? I end up by chance living in the same hotel with the faded, pale nonentity to whom duty made my lover return.”
“It must have been difficult for you,” Mrs Pargeter said judiciously. “Was anything said?”
“What could be said? She never knew.”
“Never knew her husband had had an affair with you?”
“No. Never suspected a thing. For six months Norton and I lived the heady perfection of love, drained the cup of passion to its dregs…and his bloodless wife continued her tedious domestic round and didn’t notice a thing.”
“In some ways that was rather fortunate, wasn’t it? I mean, if she had known, it could have made your both living here rather awkward, couldn’t it?”
“Huh. Oh no, it wasn’t difficult for her. Nothing had ever been difficult for her. In spite of her coldness, Norton gave her everything, bowed to her every whim. But…” Some director had once taught Eulalie the effectiveness of a mid-sentence pause. “…how do you think it must have been for me?”
“It can’t have been easy. I can see that,” Mrs Pargeter conceded.
“Not easy? You have a gift for understatement. To be constantly reminded of the past, to have constantly before me the pale, insipid thing for which he gave me up…you cannot conceive the torment.”
“So what did you do about it?”
“I was very good. Dear God, how good I was! I did nothing. I said nothing. I suppressed all the emotions boiling within my breast.” She clasped the diary to the Indian print of her substantial bosom. “I tortured myself, but I could stand it. I could stand it…until a couple of weeks ago…”
“What happened a couple of weeks ago?” asked Mrs Pargeter quietly.
“For some reason the conversation got around to letters…old letters, rereading old letters. Lady Ridgleigh, I think, started it. She said how she had kept every word that Froggie – that was her husband – had ever sent her. And then Mrs Selsby said she had kept all Norton’s letters.”
“And you were worried that there were some from you?”
“Good heavens, no! There were no letters between us. I wanted to write, but Norton said no. He was always worried about the risk of being found out, so he never wrote to me, and he wouldn’t let me write to him.”
“So what was your problem when Mrs Selsby mentioned the letters?”
Eulalie Vance looked amazed at this lack of comprehension. “Well, the fact that they existed! There was I, having experienced the greatest love there ever was, and I had nothing to cherish but my memories. And there was she, with a whole set of mementoes of her own anaemic, loveless relationship with the same man.”
“Did she imply that what she had were love letters?”
“Yes.” Eulalie Vance laughed harshly. “Which only goes to make it more ridiculous.”
Mrs Pargeter thought she was beginning to see the picture. Norton Selsby had probably had a perfectly satisfactory physical relationship with his wife. Eulalie had been his ‘bit on the side’. After six months, suffering partly from boredom and partly from risk-fatigue, he had, like so many men before him, decided to quit while he was ahead. So he had ‘gone back to his wife’, who had welcomed him without elaborate ceremony, never having realised he’d been away.
But, though she could easily sketch in the likely scenario of the affair, it was harder to guess at its more recent consequences.
“What happened?” she asked.
“Happened?”
“When you found out about the letters?”
“Well, I…As I said, I am a slave to passion, a creature of impulse. I did something impulsive. It was also…cruel.”
“And that was the thing you were saying you regretted?”
Eulalie Vance nodded, her face set in a tragic mask. “It was just vindictive. At the time I thought it would make me feel better, I thought the shock of what I did would clear the emotions inside me. But now that she’s dead…”
“You feel sorry you did it?”
Eulalie nodded again.
“Tell me exactly what happened.”
It was as if the director had told her that this narration would be most effective delivered numbly, quietly, without overt emotion.
“It was about three days before she died…just before you came to the hotel. I went into her room when I knew everyone would be downstairs waiting for tea. She didn’t keep anything locked up. It was easy to find what I was looking for.”
“The letters…?”
“Yes. They were in one of the drawers of her bureau, a thick bunch, tied with a pink ribbon – or perhaps it had been a red ribbon and faded, I don’t know. I knew they were the right ones. Even though Norton never wrote me letters, I knew his handwriting. I took them.”
“And what did you find out when you read them?”
“I didn’t read them. I couldn’t bring myself to read them. No, I’m afraid I did something wicked.”
“Yes…?”
“I took them down to the basement and I threw them on the boiler. I destroyed them.”
Mrs Pargeter left a pause, of which Eulalie’s director would surely have approved, before asking, “And did Mrs Selsby say anything to you about the loss of her letters?”
“No. Not to me. Not to anyone, as far as I know. And two days later she had fallen down the stairs and was dead.”
“Fallen down the stairs? Are you sure she did fall?”
“What do you mean?”
“She could have been pushed.”
“Pushed?” Eulalie Vance looked at her blankly. “Pushed – what do you mean?”
It is easy to tell when someone so theatrical has stopped acting, and Mrs Pargeter could see that Eulalie Vance had just stopped. Her reaction was genuine surprise. The thought that Mrs Selsby might have been murdered had never occurred to her.
Another name was struck off the list of suspects.
Mrs Pargeter comforted her. Mrs Selsby had been so vague and sleepy that she would never have noticed the absence of her letters. Anyway, by then she had been too short-sighted to read them. No, Eulalie shouldn’t worry. It was something she had done in a fit of passion, but it had been an action with no unpleasant consequences for anyone.