It was now, I was surprised to see from my watch, nearly eight o'clock in the evening. The sun was shining again, though a part of the sky was covered with dark metallic cloud which had been drawn across it like a curtain. There was a rather lurid light, such as these early summer evenings can produce, when a clear but strengthless sun shines at the approach of night. I noticed green leaves in the suburban gardens outlined with an awful clarity. The feathered songsters were still pouring forth their nonsense.
I felt very tired and a little muzzy and weak at the knees with fear and shock. A mixture of emotions raged. Partly, I still felt something of the sheer unholy excitement which I had experienced initially at the thought of a friend (especially this one) in trouble. I felt too that, as far as the trouble was concerned, I had acquitted myself quite well. However it was also possible that I might have to pay the penalty for this. Both Arnold and Rachel might resent my role and wish to punish me for it. This was a particularly irritating anxiety to develop just as I was proposing to go away and forget all about Arnold for a time. It was alarming to find myself suddenly so bound up by exasperation, irritation, affection. I resented and feared these ligatures. I wondered if I should not now delay my departure until after Sunday. On Sunday I could test the atmosphere, estimate the damage, make some sort of peace. Then I could depart in a suitable state of indifference. That they would both resent me as a witness seemed inevitable. However in so far as they were both decent rational people I could expect from them a conscious effort to inhibit resentment. This seemed a reason to see them again soon so as to allow them to make their effort before the thing became historically fixed. On the other hand I had, in that lurid evening light, a superstitious feeling that if I did not make my escape before Sunday something would grab me. I even wondered if I should take a taxi (one passed me at that moment), go back to my flat, pick up my luggage, and go straight on to the station, catching whatever train I could, even if it meant waiting there until the following morning. But this was obviously an absurd idea.
I then began to wonder what on earth was happening now back at the Baffins' house? Was Rachel still lying like a disfigured corpse staring at the ceiling, while Arnold sat in the drawing-room drinking whisky and listening to The Fire Bird? Perhaps Rachel had drawn the sheet over her face again in that appalling way. Or was it all quite different? Arnold was kneeling outside the door begging her to let him in, weeping and accusing himself. Or else, Rachel, who had been listening for my departure, had come quietly down the stairs and into her husband's arms. Perhaps now they were in the kitchen together, cooking the supper and opening a special bottle of wine to celebrate. What a mystery a marriage was. What a strange and violent world, the world of matrimony. I was glad to be outside it. The idea of it filled me with a sort of queasy pity. I felt at that moment so «curious,» in just Arnold's sense of the word, that I almost turned back to snoop around the house and find out what had happened. But of course such an action was not in my character.
I had crossed the main road and entered the little shopping street that led to the station. The evening had darkened though the pale lurid sun was still shining. Some of the shops had switched their lights on. There was a shadowy light, not exactly twilight, but an uncertain vivid yet hazy illumination, wherein people walked like spirits, bathed in light and not revealed. The rather dream-like atmosphere was intensified, I suppose, by my own tiredness, by having drunk alcohol, by having eaten nothing. In this mood of rather doom-ridden spiritual lassitude I noticed with only a little surprise and interest the figure upon the other side of the road of a young man who was behaving rather oddly. He was standing upon the kerb and strewing flowers upon the roadway, as if casting them into a river. My first thought was that he was the adherent of some Hindu sect, not then uncommon in London, and that he was performing some religious rite. A few people paused to look at him, but Londoners were by now so accustomed to «weirdies» of all kinds that his ritual aroused little interest.
The young fellow appeared to be chanting some sort of repetitive litany. I now saw that what he was strewing was not so much flowers as white petals. Where had I seen just such petals lately? The fragments of white paint which the violence of Arnold's chisel had dislodged from the bedroom door. And the white petals were being cast, not at random, but in relation to the regular and constant passage of motor-cars. As a car approached the young chap would take a handful of petals out of a bag and cast them into the path of the car, uttering the while his rhythmic chant. Then the frail whitenesses would race about, caught in the car's motion, dash madly under the wheels, follow the whirlwind of the car's wake, and dissipate themselves farther along the road: so that the casting away of the petals seemed like a sacrifice or act of destruction, since that which was offered was being so instantly consumed and made to vanish.
I describe Julian here as teen-age because that was how I still thought of her, though at this period she was, I suppose, in her earliest twenties. Arnold had been a young father. I had felt a modest avuncular interest in the fairy-like little girl. (I had never wanted children of my own. Many artists do not.) With the approach of puberty however she lost her looks and developed an awkward sulky aggressive attitude to the world in general which considerably diminished her charm. She was always fretting and complaining, and her little face, as it hardened into adult lines, grew discontented and secretive. That was as I recalled her. I had not in fact seen her for some while. Her parents adored her, yet were at the same time disappointed in her. They had wanted a boy. They had both assumed, as parents do, that Julian would be clever, but this appeared not to be the case. Julian took a long time growing up, she took little part in the self-conscious tribalism of the «teen-age» world, and still preferred dressing her dolls to dressing herself at an age when most girls are beginning, even pardonably, to interest themselves in war paint.
Not notably successful in exams and certainly not in the least bookish, Julian had left school at sixteen. She had spent a year in France, more at Arnold's insistence than out of her own sense of adventure, or so it had seemed to me at the time. She returned from France unimpressed by that country and speaking very bad French which she promptly forgot, and went on to a typists' training course. Fledged as a typist she took a job in the «typing pool» at a Government office. When she was about nineteen she decided that she was a painter, and Arnold eagerly wangled her into an art school, which she left after a year. After that she had entered a teachers' training college somewhere in the Midlands where she had been, I think, for a year or perhaps two when I saw her on that evening strewing the white petals in the path of the oncoming motorcars.
«Hello, Bradley.»
Owing to her absence at college and the demise of our Sundays I had not seen Julian for nearly a year, and before that indeed infrequently. I found her older, the face still sulky but with more of a brooding expression, suggestive of the occurrence of thought. She had a rather bad complexion, or perhaps it was just that Arnold's «greasy» look looked less healthy on a woman. She never used make-up. She had watery-blue eyes, not the flecked hazel-brown of her mother's, nor did her secretive and dog-like face repeat Rachel's large bland freckled features. Her thick undulating mane, which had no trace of red, was streakily fair with that dark blond colour which is almost suggestive of green. Even at close quarters she still slightly resembled a boy, tallish, dour, who had just cut himself in a premature attempt to shave his first whisker. I did not mind the dourness. I dislike girls who are skittish.