"It's locked," he said, adding stupidly, "and it's raining."
"I've got a key. Roger's always kept one. Shall we say eight? The Olive will be only too happy if you have an early dinner."
He dropped the receiver almost guiltily as Charles put his head round the door. And yet the telephone call had not been clandestine but made at Charles's instigation. "I think I've made it all right with the Primeros," he said, and he reflected on words from an unremem-bered source. God gave men tongues that they might conceal their thoughts.
But Charles, with the quixotry of youth, had lost interest. "Tess and her father are just off," he said.
"I'll come down."
They were standing in the hall, waiting. For what? Archery wondered. The storm to cease? A miracle? Or just to say good-bye?
"I wish we hadn't seen Elizabeth Crilling," Tess said. "And yet now I wish I'd talked to her."
"Just as well you didn't," said Archery. "You're worlds apart. The only thing you'd have in common is your age. You're both twenty-one."
"Don't wish away my life," Tess said oddly and he saw there were tears in her eyes. "I'm not twenty-one till October." She picked up the duffel bag that served her as a weekend case and held out her hand to Archery.
"We must love you and leave you," said Kershaw. "Doesn't seem anything more to be said, does there, Mr. Archery? I know you hoped things would work out, but it wasn't to be."
Charles was gazing at Tess. She kept her eyes averted.
"For God's sake say I can write to you."
"What's the use?"
"It would give me pleasure," he said tightly.
"I shan't be at home. I'm going to Torquay to stay with my aunt the day after tomorrow."
"You won't be camping on the beach, will you? This aunt, doesn't she have an address?"
"I haven't got a piece of paper," said Tess and Archery saw that she was near to tears. He felt in his pocket, pulled out first Colonel Plashet's letter—not that, not for Tess to see—then the illuminated card with the verse and the picture of the shepherd. Her eyes were misted and she scrawled the address quickly, handing it to Charles without a word.
"Come on, lovey," said Kershaw. "Home, and don't spare the horses." He fished out his car keys. "All fifteen of them," he said, but no one smiled.
15
If he hath offended any other ... ask them forgiveness; and where he hath done injury or wrong to any man . . . make amends to the uttermost of his power.
It was raining so heavily that he had to dash from the car into the dilapidated porch and even there the rain caught him, blown by the gusty wind and tossed in icy droplets off the evergreens. He leant against the door and staggered because it gave with his weight and swung noisily open.
She must have arrived already. The Flavia was nowhere to be seen and he felt a shiver of self-disgust and trepidation when it occurred to him that she was being purposely discreet. She was well known in the district, she was married and she was having a secret meeting with a married man. So she had hidden her conspicuous car. Yes, it was cheap, cheap and sordid, and he, a priest of God, had engineered it.
Victor's Piece, dry and rotten in drought, smelt wet and rotten now the rain had come. It smelt of fungus and dead things. There were probably rats under these knotted flaking floorboards. He closed the door and walked a little way down the passage, wondering where she was and why she had not come out to him when she heard the door. Then he stopped, for he was facing the back door where Painter's raincoat had hung, and there was a raincoat hanging there now.
Certainly nothing had hung there on his previous visit to the house. He moved up to the raincoat fascinated and rather horrified.
Of course, it was obvious what had happened. Someone had bought the place at last, the workmen had been in and one of them had left his raincoat. Nothing to be alarmed about. His nerves must be very bad.
"Mrs. Primero," he said, and then, because you do not call women with whom you have secret assignations by their surnames, "Imogen! Imogen!"
There was no answer. And yet he was sure he was not alone in the house. What about knowing her if you were deaf and blind, jeered a voice within him, what about knowing her by her essence? He opened the dining room door, then the drawing room. A damp cold smell came to meet him. Water had leaked under the window sill and formed a spreading pool, dark in colour, hideously evocative. This and the rusty veining on the marble of the fireplace recalled to him splashed blood. Who would buy this place? Who could bear it? But someone had bought it for there was a workman's coat hanging behind the door...
Here she had sat, the old woman, and bade Alice go to church. Here she had sat, her eyes closing easily into sleep, when Mrs. Crilling had come tapping at the window. Then he had come, whoever he was, with his axe and perhaps she had still been sleeping, on and on over the threats and the demands, over the blows of the axe, on and on into endless sleep. Endless sleep? Mors janua vitae. If only the gateway to life had not been through an unspeakable passage of pain. He found himself praying for what he knew was impossible, that God should change history. Then Mrs. Crilling tapped on the window.
Archery gave a start so violent and galvanic that he seemed to feel a hand squeeze his heart with slippery fingers. He gasped and forced himself to look.
"Sorry I'm late," said Imogen Ide. "What a ghastly night."
She should have been on the inside, he thought, pulling himself together. But she had been outside, tapping, tapping, because she had seen him standing there like a lost soul. This way it altered the aspect of things, for she had not hidden the car. It stood on the gravel beside his own, wet, silver, glittering, like something alive and beautiful from the depths of the sea.
"How did you get in?" she said in the hall.
"The door was open."
"Some workman."
"I suppose so."
She wore a tweed suit and her pale hair was wet. He had been silly enough—bad enough, he thought—to imagine that when they met she would run to him and embrace him. Instead she stood looking at him gravely, almost coldly, two little frown lines between her brows.
"The morning room, I think," she said. "There's furniture in there and besides it doesn't have—associations."
The furniture consisted of two kitchen stools and a caneback chair. From the window, heavily encrusted with grime, he could see the conservatory to whose walls of cracked glass the tendrils of a dead vine still clung. He gave her the chair and sat down on one of the stools. He had a strange feeling—but a feeling not without a charm of its own—that they had come here to buy the house, he and she, had come early and were reduced to wait thus uncomfortably until the arrival of the agent who would show them round.
"This could be a study," he would say. "It must be lovely on a fine day."
"Or we could eat in here. Nice and near the kitchen."
"Will you be able to bear getting up in the morning to cook my breakfast?" (My love, my love...)