A Man of Forty (14 page)

Waiting in the darkness, with the receiver pressed against his ear, he felt his very life in the balance. His nerves twitched with anxiety. His inner senses conjured up an almost visible, an almost tangible Mary; yet still he listened for the sound of footsteps descending the stairs.

“Hullo?”

It was Mary's voice, the voice with all Mary in it, her coolness her poise, her white smooth warm gleaming loveliness. At the sound, his tumult was stilled; he was restored to himself, re-created, bathed in bliss, his whole being filled with music.

“It's me,” he said. “ You're not in bed?”

“Evidently not.”

Through the quiet teasing irony which so much delighted him he caught a hint of surprised pleasure, and danger began dancing in his blood.

“Listen, darling. It's five to ten,” he said. “ I'm going for a walk. At eleven o'clock, or just after, I shall be waiting for you at the foot of Bledlow Down. Could you possibly come, do you think?”

After a careful pause she answered : “ It's worth considering, isn't it?”

He guessed she was being overheard. “ Is there somebody listening?”

“You bet.” A faint laugh. “ I haven't read that one. I'll see if I can get it from the library. Where did you say?”

“Do you know the footpath leading up to Bledlow from the Dallington road? I'll be there. By the stile. I'll be there at eleven, and I'll wait till midnight.”

He replaced the receiver and went quickly out of the house, into a darkness scattered with stars, drowsy still with the warm scent of hay yet with occasional freshets of cool air, and palpitating with his own tingling expectancy. That he might have taken the car was an afterthought that presented itself only to be instantly dismissed. Apart from such tactical objections as that it would have set Lydia's
mind on edge and perhaps provoked questions in the neighbourhood, to drive in a car to this encounter, to drive for seven minutes past the hurrying hedges instead of walking for an hour through this dark undulating well-wooded Chiltern country, would have destroyed the bare bracing quality of the adventure. A bicycle, yes; but he did not possess a bicycle, though he had for some days intended to get one : and even a bicycle would have struck a jarring note. Deliberately controlling his eagerness, and with a sort of pleasure holding his very thoughts and hopes in leash, he set off at an easy swinging stride which he could have kept going, if necessary, for three times the hour ahead of him.

Walking, he found, was tonight a rich sensual pleasure, like food after a long fast : the rippling pattern of sensation set moving in him, the pleasant ache of muscles too seldom used, brought his body to life and released him from its tired tension. He gave himself to that freedom, and to the pleasure of being alive and awake in a sleeping shadowy world, under a sky whose dark distances and moon-washed islands of cloud offered to the fancy another world and one scarcely less solid, scarcely more a region of dream, than the woods his path skirted and the hills he climbed. From the tableland where his house was he went down into a valley of meadows; and at intervals, like a suddenly defined thought, the sculptured shape of a cow would loom on his vision, knee deep in milky mist. It was almost cold down here, but the road he presently ascended took him into warmness again, and the smell of wet turf gave place to the dry fragrance of beeches heavy with leaf. The road wound slowly round a great wooded hill; to his left the trees went up and up, and at his right hand, almost within touch, wide acres of ripening wheat, so crisp and straight that he half expected to hear it creak when the air moved over it, slanted gently away to the valley he had just left. This hill surmounted or circumvented, he would descend again, and then, after half a mile of the Dallington road, he would reach his journey's end, standing in the shadow of Bledlow. He did not think of Mary, nor needed to : hearing her voice to-night had brought her too near for thought, into the living communion of
I-you
. Instinctively planless, instinctively averting his eyes from the immediate future lest anticipation should conjure up a joy too great to be borne, he thought lightly of many things, of the trees and fields he
was now with, of earlier generations passing along this ancient road, of night and day and the cycle of the seasons, and not at all of Lydia. And he encouraged himself in the illusion that he was sharing these things with Mary at the moment.

Not till he reached the very stile he had appointed for their meeting-place did he let himself ask, of his anxious heart and of the silent glistening world about him, whether she would indeed come. And at once his spirit grew dark, and thoughts rushed in upon him. How could she come? Why had he ever let himself imagine so vain a thing? How could she leave her grandfather's house at such an hour, and unprotected, and for no reason but to meet him, David? It's ridiculous, he said. It's impossible. She wont come.

Getting down from the stile into the road, he went forward and gently touched her with his hands, as though unable to believe what be saw. His fingers lightly' brushed her bare arms, and exquisite tremors ran in his blood. Deliberately, with an instinct to prolong the joy of knowing what bliss was to come, he held desire in check and did not kiss her in greeting, although they were alone in a wide, still, softly glowing world. Turning, with her hand in his, to the winding path which presently they would climb together, he looked with a sudden lift of the heart on the naked curves of Bledlow, and her neighbour hills, lying silvered and shadowed under a dim sky.

“Have you been waiting long, David?”

“Have I? I don't know. Now you're here I…”

“I know,” said Mary. After a silence she began speaking his own thought. “ I can't quite believe it yet. I was so… afraid.”

“Afraid?”

“That you mightn't come after all.”

She had never said so much before. The avowal dropped into the stillness which they shared, rippling it with a moment's heavenly agitation.

“Shall we go a little way up Bledlow?” he said.

They got over the stile and began climbing the hill.

“ Was it difficult, getting away?” David asked.

She shrugged the question aside. “ No. Why should it be?”

“What did you tell them?”

“Merely the truth.”

Amusedly, with an irony echoing hers, “ I see,” said David, “ No more than that.”

“I told them I was going for a walk before bed.”

“Well, that was true, wasn't it?” agreed David. “ Are you tired, darling, after your walk?”

“Just tired enough,” said Mary. “ It's delicious.”

They climbed slowly, hand in hand, pausing at intervals to rest, and to look up at the sky and at each other. The line of a hymn, remembered from childhood, came capriciously into his mind :
They climbed the steep ascent to heaven.
Of the heaven towards which he was climbing with Mary he dared not consciously think, though the thought, the hope, the deep desiring dream, encompassed all his mind. He was even now in heaven, and believed that no joy could be fuller than this joy which he already had. Going up and up, through moonlight and shadow, they talked in low tones, as though by loudness they might wake the world and bring morning back to divide them. By now they had left the footpath and were treading the soft spongy turf of the hillside itself. From David all misgivings had vanished, and in his new confidence he was not afraid to hint at one of them, now that it was gone.

“It's nice of you not to mind my being so old,” he said lightly.

They stood face to face on a high terrace of turf, with the round crest of Bledlow not many yards above them. The sudden beauty of her small firm breasts half-seen half-surmised under the clinging dress, made him almost forget to listen to her answer. She put out both hands and touched him, holding his face cupped while she looked at him.

“You're not old, David. And you're not young, thank goodness. You're just what I want.”

He took her in his arms, and the kiss they had refrained from till now was sweet with the anguish of that long abstention.

“Let's stay here,” David said. “ We're high enough.”

Under the moon Mary's eyes, by day so blue and cold, had a lustrous darkness; the curve of her mouth was kind and passionate;
and in the dim lantern-glow of the surrounding sky nothing was lacking to persuade him that here was the answer to all questions and the crown of the world's desire.

Lifting her off her feet he laid her gently down on the soft dry turf.

“You're not cold, darling?”

She answered in a warm low tone, with words he could not catch; and when he laid down beside her he found her trembling, but not with cold. So, in her arms, he gave himself to a new illusion, the illusion of intimacy. Time vanished and the world crumbled away. Only delight was real.

He reached home a little after three o'clock. Approaching the house he saw a light in Lydia's room. She's awake, he thought. She'll confront me. There'll be a vulgar scene. Why in God's name did I come back? But when he opened the front door and went in, it was not Lydia who stood at the foot of the stairs, but Paul, in slippers and a dressing-gown, carrying a lighted candle, and looking very small, innocent, and alone.

“Hullo!” said David. “ What in the world are you doing down here?”

Paul answered, in his clear, cooing voice : “ I had dreams. They weren't very nice. So I thought I'd come downstairs.”

“All alone? And in the dark? Isn't it cosier in bed?”

“I don't look at the dark,” explained Paul. “ Not very much. I look at the candle.”

“Yes, but you ought to be in bed,” said David.

“But you said isn't it cosier ...”

“Run along, there's a good boy.”

“... and I was just explaining.…”

“No arguments to-night. It's too late.”

“Yes, it is, isn't it? Mummy's been walking about.”

“Walking about?”

“Her room. Up and down. I listened. It's funny,” Paul
added, after a pause, “ when people think you're asleep and you re really not.”

David looked at his son's large dark eyes, and wondered what odd idea or sensation he was trying to describe. Behind those eyes was a mysterious universe, a conscious I re-fashioning all it perceived : and though the mind was young and vulnerable, the indwelling spirit, the I behind the I, was ageless, not of time. Touched and shamed by the child's air of patient bewilderment, David was no longer sure that this broken marriage would be only a small inconvenience to him. He was seven years old : young enough to suffer, and not young enough to forget so easily as David wished. Tired and spent as he was, even his immense new-won liberation and recreation being not proof against the disillusionment of this dismal return, David could bear no more of Paul to-night. Because the child's uncomplaining forlornness hurt and accused him, he took refuge in blind anger. I can't stand another moment of it. I must go to bed. And there's only a spoilt child to prevent me.

Taking the candlestick from Paul's hand, he seized him by the shoulder and turned him about.

“Get along now. You're going to bed.”

And so am I. So am I, by God! But not before… not before what? His mind was in a state of wincing apprehension about Lydia. Paul, in imminent danger of being tripped up by his own dressing-gown, hoisted himself from stair to stair, his father patiently, impatiently, following. When they reached the landing David resumed possession of Paul's shoulder and marched him to bed.

“Are you going to bed, too, Dad?”

“Shsh! Not so loud. You'll wake Mummy.”

“Mummy's not asleep,” said Paul. “ I
told
you.”

“Eleanor then. We mustn't wake poor Eleanor.” He watched Paul climb into bed and pull the bed-clothes about him. Disarmed by this docility he bent over him and put a caressing hand on his head. “ Good-night the apostle!”

“Good-night the parent!”

Paul's voice was unwontedly small and meek, and David went out of the room, saying, What a brute I am! He went slowly to Lydia's door, on his way passing the room where Eleanor, newly
wakened, lay wondering what was going on. He turned the handle noiselessly and murmured : “ Are you all right, Lydia?” Lydia was his conscience : he could not sleep while she was awake, and Paul's talk of her pacing up and down her room lay like a piece of grit among his thoughts of Mary. But Lydia's light was out now, and she did not answer him. Whether awake or asleep she did not answer him, and he went uneasily to his bed.

Go, said Lydia, go and sleep, while I lie here suffering. She lay in the darkness, in the bottomless pit,. “ Are you all right?” She snatched at the question with bitter joy, to scourge herself with it, to echo it with a sneer till it seemed a masterpiece of cruel complacency. For five hours she had been alone and sleepless in this room, alone with her fantasies, proud, angry, forlorn, murderous. By enduring these tortures she punished herself for David's fault, thus adding to the fault and to his debt. Though she was only just forty and did not possess a grey hair, it suited her now both to despise herself as a drab, dull, ageing woman, and to hate David for not seeing in her, instead of in Mary, a new strange ever-surprising loveliness. She lay in the darkness, still fully dressed; and not till the beginning of daylight did she get up and take some of her clothes off and then only to put others on. In search of these others, which had lain unused in an old trunk for many years, she tiptoed through the silent dawn-haunted house to the lumber-room. The new little excitement made her breath come hot and her eyes glitter. She looked in her glass and saw the glitter of her eyes, and the dark rings under them, and the crow's feet. It was a good plan, with a spice of cruelty in it; and it did, for a few minutes, distract her from her crowding visions of David and Mary : David and Mary talking her over, pulling her to pieces, pitying her and scoring off her; David and Mary—yes, she knew, she knew—making passionate love together, for no other reason than to put her, Lydia, to shame. David and “ that woman,” who talked of love no doubt, and didn't know, poor wretched things, the meaning of the word. She despised them pitied them; loathed them. She vomited her gall upon them.