‘I heard it last night. I heard it for the first time. Is it true?’
Deep in resentment, I stood there without speaking. At last I said: ‘Yes. It is true.’
Few people knew it; as Mr Knight had suggested that night we talked while Sheila’s body lay upstairs, the newspapers had had little space for an obscure inquest; I had told no one.
‘It is incredible that you should have kept it from me,’ she cried.
‘I didn’t want it to hang over you—’
‘What kind of life are we supposed to be living? Do you think I couldn’t accept anything that has happened to you? What I can’t bear is that you should try to censor something important. I can’t stand it if you insist on living as though you were alone. You make me feel that these last twelve months I have been wasting my time.’
‘How did you hear?’ I broke out.
‘We’ve been pretending—’
‘How did you hear?’
‘I heard from Helen.’
‘She can’t have known,’ I cried out.
‘She took it for granted that I did. When she saw I didn’t, what do you think it was like for both of us?’
‘Did she say how she’d heard?’
‘How could you let it happen?’
Our voices were raised, our words clashed together.
‘Did she say how she’d heard?’ I shouted again.
‘Gilbert told her the other day.’
She was seared with distress, choked with rage. And I felt the same sense of outrage; though I had brought the scene upon myself, I felt wronged.
Suddenly that desolation, that dull fury, that I wanted to visit on her, was twisted on to another.
‘I won’t tolerate it,’ I shouted. Over her shoulder I saw my face in her looking-glass, whitened with anger while hers had gone dark.
‘I’ll get rid of him. I won’t have him near me.’
‘He’s fond of you—’
‘He won’t do this again.’
‘He’s amused you often enough before now, gossiping about someone else.’
‘This wasn’t a thing to gossip about.’
‘It’s done now,’ she said.
‘I’ll get rid of him. I won’t have him near me.’
I said it so bitterly that she flinched. For the first time she averted her glance: in the silence she backed away, rested an arm on the window-sill, with her body limp. As I looked at her, unseeing, my feelings clashed and blared — protests, antagonism, the undercurrent of desire. Other feelings swept over those — the thought of Gilbert Cooke spying after Sheila’s death, searching the local paper, tracking down police reports, filled my mind like the image of a monster. Then a wound re-opened, and I said quietly: ‘There was someone else who went in for malice.’
‘What are you talking about?’
In jerky words, I told her of R S Robinson.
‘Poor Sheila,’ Margaret muttered, and then asked, more gently than she had spoken that afternoon: ‘Did it make much difference to her?’
‘I’ve never known,’ I said. I added: ‘Perhaps not. Probably not.’
Margaret was staring at me with pity, with something like fright; her eyes were filled with tears; in that moment we could have come into each other’s arms.
I said: ‘I won’t have such people near me. That is why I shall get rid of Gilbert Cooke.’
Margaret still stared at me, but I saw her face harden, as though, by a resolution as deliberate as that on the first evening we met alone but more painful now, she was drawing on her will. She answered: ‘You said nothing to me about Robinson either, or what you went through then.’
I did not reply. She called out an endearment, in astonishment, in acknowledgment of danger.
‘We must have it out,’ she said.
‘Let it go.’
After a pause she said, her voice thickening: ‘That’s too easy. I can’t live like that.’
‘Let it go, I tell you.’
‘No.’
As a rule people thought her younger than she was, but now she looked much older. She said: ‘You can’t get rid of Gilbert.’
‘I don’t think that anything can stop me.’
‘Except that it would be a wrong and unfair thing to do. And you are not really so unfair.’
‘I’ve told you my reason,’ I cried.
‘That’s not your reason. You’re lying to yourself.’
My temper was rising again. I said: ‘I’m getting tired of this.’
‘You’re pretending that Gilbert was acting out of malice, and you know it isn’t true.’
‘I know more of men like Gilbert than you ever will. And I know much more of malice.’
‘He’s been perfectly loyal to you in every way that matters,’ she said, conceding nothing. ‘There’s no excuse on earth for trying to shift him out of your office. I couldn’t let you do it.’
‘It is not for you to say.’
‘It is. All Gilbert has done is just to treat you as he treats everyone else. Of course he’s inquisitive. It’s all right when he’s being inquisitive about anyone else, but when he touches you — you can’t bear it. You want to be private, you don’t want to give and take like an ordinary man.’ She went on: ‘That’s what has maddened you about Gilbert. You issue bulletins about yourself, you don’t want anyone else to find you out.’ She added: ‘You are the same with me.’
Harshly I tried to stop her, but her temper was matching mine, her tongue was cooler. She went on: ‘What else were you doing, hiding the way she died from me?’
I had got to the pitch of sullen anger when I did not speak, just stood choked up, listening to her accusations.
‘With those who don’t want much of you, you’re unselfish, I grant you that,’ she was saying. ‘With anyone who wants you altogether, you’re cruel. Because one never knows when you’re going to be secretive, when you’re going to withdraw. With most people you’re good,’ she was saying, ‘but in the end you’ll break the heart of anyone who loves you.
‘I might be able to stand it,’ she was saying, ‘I might not mind so much, if you weren’t doing yourself such harm.’
Listening to her, I was beyond knowing where her insight was true or false. All she said, her violence and her love, broke upon me like demands which pent me in, which took me to a breaking point of pride and anger. I felt as I had done as a boy when my mother invaded me with love, and at any price I had, the more angry with her because of the behaviour she caused in me, to shut her out.
‘That’s enough,’ I said, hearing my own voice thin but husky in the confining room, as without looking at her I walked to the door.
In the street the afternoon light was still soft, and the mild air blew upon my face.
25: Catch of Breath in the Darkness
SOON I went back to her, and when we took Helen out to dinner in January, we believed that we were putting a face on it, that we were behaving exactly as in the days of our first happiness. But, just as subtle bamboozlers like R S Robinson waft about in the illusion that their manoeuvres are impenetrable, whereas in fact they are seen through in one by the simplest of men — so the controlled, when they set out to hide their moods, take in no one but themselves.
Within a few weeks, Helen rang me up at the office saying that she was in London for the day, and anxious to talk to me. My first impulse was to put her off. It was uneasily that I invited her to meet me at a restaurant.
I had named the Connaught, knowing that of all her family she was the only one who liked the atmosphere of the opulent and the smart. When I arrived there, finding her waiting in the hall, I saw she was on edge. She was made up more than usual, and her dress had a rigid air of stylishness. She might like the atmosphere, but she could not help the feeling that she had been brought up to despise it; perhaps the slight edge of apprehension, of unfamiliarity, with which, even after all these years, she was troubled whenever she entered a world which was not plain living and high thinking, was one of its charms for her. She did not, as Betty Vane did, take it for granted; for her it had not lost its savour. But added to this temperamental unease, was uneasiness at what she had to say to me.