Often, however, Rendell found her impulsive acts embarrassing.
One night, when they were walking down Bond Street, she suddenly became interested in a street walker, who was hanging about with a dog on a lead.
“Why does that woman have a dog?” she demanded.
“I don’t know, Rosalie, just a whim, I expect.”
“Perhaps she loves the dog—perhaps it’s the only thing she does love. I’m going to ask her.”
She turned and went up to the woman, Rendell having no alternative but to follow, which he did very reluctantly.
“Why do you have that dog with you?”
“I’ll soon tell you that,” the woman replied. “You see, it’s like this. If a policeman sees me speak to a man, he thinks twice about doing anything if I have a dog with me.”
“But why—why?” Rosalie demanded.
“Well, if he takes me up for soliciting, he has to take me to Vine Street—and the dog to Battersea. So he thinks twice.”
She laughed noisily.
Rosalie stared at her, then thrust a note in her hand and walked away quickly.
But, almost immediately, she stopped.
“You’re laughing!” she exclaimed indignantly.
“I was,” Rendell admitted. “I was amused by the inventive genius of the underworld.”
“It’s horrible! This whole town is horrible! We’re all dead people—just dead people walking about. There’s nothing in front of us. You ought to be able to feel the Future. Do you know that? You ought to be able to stretch your hands out and feel it. But if you do stretch them out, there’s nothing—nothing! We’re ghosts in a fog, looking for life.”
“You can’t see things like that, Rosalie.”
“Looking for life,” she repeated.
But these excursions into an unknown London were intermittent. Sometimes, for days together, she refused to leave her hotel. She would sit silent, hour after hour, thereby giving Rendell ample opportunity to review the situation.
His first discovery was the extent to which his association with Rosalie had banished Trent to the background of his mind. But it was the change in her attitude to him which chiefly interested Rendell. She seldom referred to him and, if questioned, only repeated that his refusal to remain in London—just before her husband’s death—had convinced her that their relations were not what she had imagined. Even Rendell’s revelations that Trent had had rooms in Potiphar Street for years, and that he had lied about going abroad, did not greatly disturb her. She was of those who trust absolutely or not at all. Trent’s refusal to stay in London had half-undermined her faith in him. Rendell’s revelations completed that process.
But although she seldom referred directly to Trent, she would sometimes ask questions which related indirectly to him.
“That day I came to your room and found it full of people,” she once said suddenly. “There was a woman there. She was very agitated. What did you say her name was?”
“Vera Thornton,” Rendell replied.
“Vera Thornton,” she repeated.
Rendell waited but, as she remained silent, he began to speculate concerning her affair with Trent.
The more he reconstructed this drama, the more Trent’s part in it amazed him. To make a neurotic woman his mistress—a woman who had had two nervous collapses and was on the threshold of a third—to maintain that relationship for three years, visiting her flat and meeting her husband—was an enterprise so outside the boundaries of Rendell’s imagination that the attempt to bring it within them only revealed the impossibility of any understanding of Trent. Leaving aside all other considerations, why had Trent added risk to risk till they piled mountain-high round him? And what type of power must he possess to have been able to control Rosalie during those three years? Only one thing was certain—his belief in that power must have been absolute, otherwise he would not have dared to leave her, intending to stay away for a year.
And, during a great part of this period, Trent had been in involved relations with Vera Thornton.
It was at this point in his speculations that Rendell finally surrendered all hope of elucidating the mystery of a man capable of such complexities.
What touched him more nearly, however, was his own relations with Rosalie. His daily association with her affected him in a number of ways, none of which reassured him. He was becoming more sensitive, more alive and alert to aspects of people and places of which formerly he had been unaware. Her influence probed all that was dormant in him. He found himself confronted with everything he believed was behind him. Old impulses challenged him. Established certainties became less solid. A strange light slowly invaded his world, altering perspectives, and transforming past and present. He felt life more vitally, responded to it more organically, and so discovered riches even in the commonplace. But, also, he began to experience an irritability which flamed into being with an intensity wholly disproportionate to its cause. More and more frequently he found himself reacting to trifles in a manner which dismayed him.
But Rendell did not realise Rosalie’s power over him till it was established. His defences crumbled before he knew he was besieged. Rosalie’s fascination differed from that of many women in that it was most potent in her absence. When Rendell was with her, he was aware of her weakness. It was when he was alone that he discovered his fetters.
Hence, although the desire for her companionship increased progressively, it was shadowed by a deepening uneasiness. Consequently, while wanting it to continue, he hoped that it would end.
“You can’t stay in this hotel much longer, can you?” he asked, one night when they were dining together. “What about your people?”
“I can’t make plans.”
“But you’ll have to, Rosalie!”
“I can’t! I’m stunned—and I want to remain stunned. My mother keeps writing to ask when I’m going to join her in Italy. I told you, didn’t I? that my father died a year ago, and since then mother practically lives in Italy with her sister. She spends nothing and keeps sending me money. But I can’t go to her yet.”
“But why not?”
“It will make the past real again. When I am with you, it does not exist—because you had no part in it. But, with her, I shall remember. I shall see faces and hear voices. Then I shall be ill again. Don’t you understand yet that I’m afraid?”
Rendell said nothing and a moment later she added:
“I shall have to go—soon. And then—explanations, lies, hypocrisy! Two women talking across an abyss!”
She was silent for the rest of the evening and Rendell regretted having questioned her.
But, a week later, she announced the date of her departure with characteristic suddenness, and in somewhat dramatic circumstances.
It was a Thursday. Rendell was to dine with Rosalie at eight o’clock. He had had a business appointment which had occupied most of the afternoon and returned to Potiphar Street to dress soon after six-thirty.
To his surprise, he found a letter, addressed in Rosalie’s writing, in a prominent position on the mantelpiece.
He tore it open and read:
Come—directly you get this. Don’t dress. Come. Now!
Ten minutes later he entered her sitting-room, but instantly came to a standstill and looked round in astonishment. The room was a chaos of trunks and clothes.
She waved her maid to the bedroom, then crossed swiftly to him.