CHAPTER II
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She could have called up her friends, of course; she had plenty of friends. But with them she would simply have worn her normal face and manner, and kept her own counsel. You do not burden your friends with a sudden stranger half-way to the grave. You hide yourself while the darkness lasts—being, even at this crisis, reasonably secure that it will not last long—and emerge when you are yourself as they know you, and fit for their society again. No, at this moment what you need is a stranger in an express train, someone you need never see again, one of those accidental priests in the fleeting confessionals of this life where souls are often saved against the odds.
That was why she took herself for a long, solitary walk that Saturday evening in October, avoiding the places most familiar to her, and the haunts where her friends might be. The air was dove-coloured and still since noon, chilling by dusk to the edge of frost, but never quite touching it. The cloud was low and grey, but the atmosphere beneath it was clear. If it froze by morning, the crests of the roads, at least, would dry, and the film of slime would corrode away in pale dust.
The silence at home had helped to drive her out, but the silence here on the country roads two miles from Comerford was vaster and even more oppressive. She had never been afraid to walk alone in the night, not here; in a city she might have been warier. She met shadows, and, occasionally responsive to some alchemy of recognition in anonymity, exchanged good nights with shadows. She kept aloof from the roads that carried traffic, and the few cars she met passed mysteriously, absorbed in their own missions. And where she came at length to the main road again, she found herself before the broad car park and polished frontage of a modern roadhouse, the sort of place where none of her acquaintance could possibly be encountered.
“The Constellation Orion”; a beautifully imaginative name, at least. She remembered the place being opened, though she had never been inside it. Well, why not now? The building, twentieth-century metal box crossed with by-pass Georgian, didn’t live up to its name, but surely promised strangers as transitory as any to be met with in express trains. And she had plenty of time to walk home, all night if need be; she had nobody at home waiting for her.
Warmth and noise met her in the doorway. The saloon bar was so aggressively modern that it had almost reverted to the jazz-age angularity of the twenties, and its décor reminded her of fair-ground vases from her childhood. It was almost uncomfortably full. For some reason the same degree of actual discomfort in the bar itself seemed more acceptable. The lighting was mellower and milder there, and it was clearly the only room the locals, if they used this place at all, would dream of frequenting. Bunty edged her way to the bar-counter, bought herself a modest half of bitter, and carried it to a remote corner where a young couple had just vacated two chairs at a spindly table. Over the rim of her glass she surveyed the company, and let the confused roar of their many conversations drum in her ears without any effort to disentangle words. There was no one whom she knew, and no one who knew her. Nobody was interested, either; in twos, in threes, in shifting groups, they pursued their own preoccupations, and left her to hers. She had been sitting there in her corner for ten minutes or so before she noticed the only other person who seemed to be alone. She saw him first over the shoulders of two sporty types in mohair car coats, and from his position he might easily have been a part of their circle; but emphatically his face denied it. He looked at them out of another world, a world as private and closed as hers. Quite a young man, maybe somewhere in his late twenties, maybe even turned thirty. Tall, a light-weight but well enough made, rather brittle and nervous in his movements, his straight dark hair disordered. What she noticed first was the greyish pallor of his face, and its tight stillness, like a clay mask, so apparently rigid that the sudden nervous quiver of one cheek was shocking, as though the whole face might be shattered. The taut surfaces quaked and recomposed themselves into the same stony tension. Deep within this defensive earthwork dark eyes, alert and bright to fever-point, kept watch from ambush, glaring from bruised, blue-rimmed sockets. He looked as if he had been on the tiles for two or three nights in succession ; but she noted that the hand that held his glass was large, capable and perfectly steady.
He was getting too tightly hemmed in by the group at the bar. She saw him heave himself clear of them, edge back into the open, and look round for a more peaceful place. His ranging glance lit upon the single chair still vacant in her corner, and he started towards it.
Then he saw her. Really saw her, not as any unknown woman sitting there, but as this one particular woman, taken in entire in one flash of genuine concentration. It was the first time he had been fully aware of anyone in that room except himself and the personal devil with which he was surely at grips. He halted for a moment, poised quite still in the middle of the shifting, chattering, smoky bar, his eyes fixed on her. She thought that he almost drew back and turned away, that if she had lowered her eyes or looked through him he would have done it; but she looked back at him steadily and thoughtfully, neither inviting nor repulsing him, unless it was an invitation to show interest in him at all. One person under stress recognises another.
The moment of hesitation was gone; he came on with a quickened step. He had a whisky glass in one hand and a small bottle of ginger ale in the other. A long little finger touched tentatively at the back of the vacant chair.
“Do you mind if I sit here?” The voice was low-pitched but abrupt, as though he had to measure it out with care and constraint.
“Of course not, help yourself!”
She moved her glass to make room for his on the tiny table. It had a tray top of beaten brass that had never been nearer Benares than Birmingham. He looked at it for the fraction of an instant with disbelief, and then sat down carefully, and looked up at her.
“I agree,” said Bunty with detachment. “It’s rather nasty, but it’s somewhere to put things down.”
Something kindled in his face, no more than a momentary easing and warming of the haggard lines of his mouth, and a brisk spark that was burned out instantly in the intensity of his eyes.
“You didn’t look as if you belonged here,” he said. “Why are you here?”
Conversation came out of him without premeditation, and indeed with a famished urgency that ruled out premeditation, but in brief, jerky sentences, spurting from the muted violence that filled him. Violence was the word that first occurred to her, but she found it unacceptable on reflection; agitation might have been nearer the mark, or simply excitement. There was nothing impertinent in his manner, and whatever he was looking for, it wasn’t a pick-up.
“Because I was alone,” she said, with a directness equal to his own. “Why are you?”
“The same reason, I suppose. And I needed a drink.”
It appeared that this was no more than the truth. The whisky had brought a faint warmth of colour into his clay mask, its frozen lines were at least growing pliable now.
“You don’t mind my talking to you? I’ll shut up if you say so.”
She did not say so. What she did say, after a moment of deliberation, was: “I came out because it was too silent at home, and I came in here because it was even more silent outside.”
He uttered a short, harsh sound that might, if he had been less tense, have emerged as a laugh. “That won’t be our trouble here, anyhow. Or would you say this was a kind of silence, too? A howling silence?” The babel was reaching its climax, it was only half an hour to closing-time. The young man cast one brief glance round the room, and turned back to her, his eyes for a moment wide and dark with awareness of her, and strangely innocent of curiosity. “We’ve got something in common, then,” he said, emptying his glass without taking his eyes from Bunty’s face. “You weren’t expecting to be alone, either.”