“You should have let her go,” I said.
“I went after her,” George said. “She insisted on being married, so I married her.”
“That’s not a proper secret, then,” I said. “The news of a mixed marriage soon gets about.”
“I took care of that,” George said. “Crazy as I was, I took her to the Congo and married her there. She promised to keep quiet about it.”
“Well, you can’t clear off and leave her now, surely,” I said.
“I’m going to get out of this place. I can’t stand the woman and I can’t stand the country. I didn’t realize what it would be like. Two years of the country and three months of my wife have been enough.”
“Will you get a divorce?”
“No. Matilda’s Catholic. She won’t divorce.”
George was fairly getting through the highballs, and I wasn’t far behind him. His brown eyes floated shiny and liquid as he told me how he had written to tell his uncle of his plight, “Except, of course, I didn’t say we were married. That would have been too much for him. He’s a prejudiced, hardened old Colonial. I only said I’d had a child by a colored woman and was expecting another, and he perfectly understood. He came at once by plane a few weeks ago. He’s made a settlement on her, providing she keeps her mouth shut about her association with me.”
“Will she do that?”
“Oh, yes, or she won’t be able to get the money.”
“But as your wife she has a claim on you, in any case.”
“If she claimed as my wife, she’d get far less. Matilda knows what she’s doing, greedy bitch that she is. She’ll keep her mouth shut.”
“Only, you won’t be able to marry again, will you, George?”
“Not unless she dies,” he said. “And she’s as strong as an ox.”
“Well, I’m sorry, George,” I said.
“Good of you to say so,” he said. “But I can see by your chin that you disapprove of me. Even my old uncle understood.”
“Oh, George, I quite understand. You were lonely, I suppose.”
“You didn’t even ask me to your twenty-first. If you and Skinny had been nicer to me, I would never have lost my head and married the woman, never.”
“You didn’t ask me to your wedding,” I said.
“You’re a catty bissom, Needle, not like what you were in the old times when you used to tell us your stories.”
“I’ll have to be getting along,” I said.
“Mind you keep the secret,” George said.
“Can’t I tell Skinny? He would be very sorry for you, George.”
“You mustn’t tell anyone. Keep it a secret. Promise?”
“Promise,” I said. I understood that he wished to enforce some sort of bond between us with this secret, and I thought, “Oh well, I suppose he’s lonely. Keeping his secret won’t do any harm.”
I returned to England with Skinny’s party just before the war.
I did not see George again till just before my death, five years ago.
After the war, Skinny returned to his studies. He had two more exams, over a period of eighteen months, and I thought I might marry him when the exams were over.
“You might do worse than Skinny,” Kathleen used to say to me on our Saturday morning excursions to the antique shops and the junk stalls.
She too was getting on in years. The remainder of our families in Scotland were hinting that it was time we settled down with husbands. Kathleen was a little younger than I, but looked much older. She knew her chances were diminishing but at that time I did not think she cared very much. As for myself, the main attraction of marrying Skinny was his prospective expeditions to Mesopotamia. My desire to marry him had to be stimulated by the continual reading of books about Babylon and Assyria; perhaps Skinny felt this, because he supplied the books and even started instructing me in the art of deciphering cuneiform tables.
Kathleen was more interested in marriage than I thought. Like me, she had racketed around a good deal during the war; she had actually been engaged to an officer in the U. S. Navy, who was killed. Now she kept an antique shop near Lambeth, was doing very nicely, lived in a Chelsea square, but for all that she must have wanted to be married and have children. She would stop and look into all the prams which the mothers had left outside shops or area gates.
“The poet Swinburne used to do that,” I told her once.
“Really? Did he want children of his own?”
“I shouldn’t think so. He simply liked babies.”
Before Skinny’s final exam, he fell ill and was sent to a sanatorium in Switzerland.
“You’re fortunate after all not to be married to him,” Kathleen said. “You might have caught T.B.”
I was fortunate, I was lucky… so everyone kept telling me on different occasions. Although it annoyed me to hear, I knew they were right, but in a way that was different from what they meant. It took me a small effort to make a living; book reviews, odd jobs for Kathleen, a few months with the publicity man again, still getting up speeches about literature, art, and life for industrial tycoons. I was waiting to write about life and it seemed to me that the good fortune lay in this, whenever it should be. And until then I was assured of my charmed life, the necessities of existence always coming my way and I with far more leisure than anyone else. I thought of my type of luck after I became a Catholic and was being confirmed. The Bishop touches the candidate on the cheek, a symbolic reminder of the sufferings a Christian is supposed to undertake. I thought, how lucky, what a feathery symbol to stand for the hellish violence of its true meaning.
I visited Skinny twice in the two years that he was in the sanatorium. He was almost cured, and expected to be home within a few months. I told Kathleen after my last visit.
“Maybe I’ll marry Skinny when he’s well again.”
“Make it definite, Needle, and not so much of the maybe. You don’t know when you’re well off,” she said.
This was five years ago, in the last year of my life. Kathleen and I had become very close friends. We met several times each week, and after our Saturday morning excursions on the Portobello Road very often I would accompany Kathleen to her aunt’s house in Kent for a long weekend.
One day in June of that year, I met Kathleen specially for lunch because she had phoned me to say she had news.
“Guess who came into the shop this afternoon,” she said.
“Who?”
“George.”
We had half imagined George was dead. We had received no letters in the past ten years. Early in the war we had heard rumors of his keeping a night club in Durban, but nothing after that. We could have made inquiries if we had felt moved to do so.
At one time, when we discussed him, Kathleen had said, “I ought to get in touch with poor George. But then I think he would write back. He would demand a regular correspondence again.”
“We four must stick together,” I mimicked. “I can visualize his reproachful limpid orbs,” Kathleen said.
Skinny said, “He’s probably gone native. With his coffee concubine and a dozen mahogany kids.” “Perhaps he’s dead,” Kathleen said. I did not speak of George’s marriage, nor of any of his confidences in the hotel at Bulawayo. As the years passed, we ceased to mention him except in passing, as someone more or less dead so far as we were concerned.
Kathleen was excited about George’s turning up. She had forgotten her impatience with him in former days; she said, “It was so wonderful to see old George. He seems to need a friend, feels neglected, out of touch with things.” “He needs mothering, I suppose.”
Kathleen didn’t notice the malice. She declared, “That’s exactly the case with George. It always has been, I can see it now.”