Before the Fact (14 page)

Lina stared at the cheque. Then she put it down on her breakfast tray and read the letter again.

Lina did not see him all day.

She realized that he would have known that the bank would communicate with her, and he had been afraid to face her. He had probably tried to intercept the letter by the first post, not expecting that the bank would send it over by a special messenger; when there was no letter, he must have thought they would telephone. He had run away.

The special messenger meant that the bank knew. The bank knew that Johnnie was a forger.

Lina had done her best. She had written to the bank that the signature was quite in order, the difference being due to the fact that she had sprained her thumb, but that as there were not sufficient funds to meet the cheque she was cancelling it.

All day long she repeated to herself:

“He goes down to two hundred a year for this.”

He could give up hunting, he was not fit to remain on the county council, she did not care about the car. She felt she did not really care about anything, now.

But Johnnie should pay for it. Johnnie should be cut down to two hundred a year. That was settled.

She spent the day between tears and rage.

Johnnie did not come back till after she was in bed.

All day, while she repeated to herself Johnnie’s punishment, she had visualized the scene. This time she would stand no nonsense. This time she would be absolutely firm. Not angry: it was simply no use being angry with Johnnie: it was no more good being angry with Johnnie than with a puppy that steals a chop off the kitchen table. But puppies have to be trained, and Johnnie had got to be trained too. And when puppies grow up into dogs and have lapses, they have to be punished, for their own good.

Lina, weeping with disappointment that Johnnie had not been trained after all, realized that the only hope for him lay in her own firmness.

She would not be harsh with him. She would try hard to be kind, and sympathetic, and understanding. She would not let her bitterness come to the surface. But Johnnie must be taught that dishonesty simply does not pay.

It seemed very hard to Lina that she, of all the world, must teach him.

She made up the speeches she would say, going through them over and over again until she had them completely by heart. She knew the expressions she would wear, she saw exactly the expressions on Johnnie’s face. Johnnie would not say much. He would be penitent, as usual, and probably try to blarney her. She heard him blarneying, with the exact words that he would use. But she would not be blarneyed. Gently, but very firmly, she would make him understand that he must be punished; and she would cut him down to two hundred a year.

Over and over again she rehearsed what she would say.

When at last she heard Johnnie come into his dressing room she felt quite sick with nervousness.

Her heart thumping unbearably, she lay and listened to him moving about. He seemed neither hurried nor dawdling, just normal.

Then he came into the bedroom, in his pajamas.

He smiled at her, mischievously, quite impenitently.

“Well, monkeyface? Heard the grim news?”

She sat up in bed, looked at him for a moment, her mouth trembling, and then burst into tears. “Oh,
Johnnie!
”

Johnnie took her in his arms, and she clung to him. He kissed her repeatedly.

“Poor old thing. I’m a rotter, aren’t I? It’s tough luck on you, monkeyface. But I really was in a hell of a hole.”

“Oh, Johnnie, how could you?”

Lina knew that she would never utter a single one of her careful speeches, never cut Johnnie down to two hundred a year, never punish him at all.

Johnnie was in a hell of a hole.

Lina gave him four of the five hundred pounds he wanted.

Johnnie volunteered a passionate promise never to get in a hell of a hole again.

Lina had been extremely disappointed that she and Johnnie had no children. She had wanted a child, badly. Now she began to think that perhaps it was not a bad thing that there were none. It would be terrible if Johnnie’s children turned out like Johnnie.

General McLaidlaw had been right. The Aysgarth stock was rotten. It was a pity that its rottenness had not come out in Johnnie physically, instead of providing a warped mind for his sound body.

Johnnie of course was very quiet for a week or two after the episode of the cheque, grateful for his four hundred pounds and most attentive to Lina. Then gradually (Lina could see it happening) the money became a right instead of a favour, and Johnnie rapidly began to forget that he had ever made an attempt, and a very childish attempt, at forgery. Lina wondered desperately whether she had marred forever when she might have made him, or whether her weakness had really been wisdom in disguise.

It was the childishness of Johnnie’s crimes that seemed to her so pathetic.

If they had not been so very amateurish, she might have found the strength to be sterner with him. To the trained eye of a bank cashier, his effort at forgery must have been ludicrous; the theft of her chairs was bound to come out almost at once, for the feeble story about the American would have been torn to shreds the moment the police were called in; if he had thought for a moment, he could not have hoped to conceal his dismissal from Bradstowe for more than another week or two at the most. Johnnie had seemed to commit his misdemeanours in the same spirit of lighthearted irresponsibility as that in which he teased Janet over a dinner table.

Lina could only hope, intensely, that the tale of them was now at last at an end.

In any case, Johnnie, who had appeared at first really to understand this time the enormity of his offense, had quite got over it by the time Freda Newsham came back from London.

Freda had been up in town for a fortnight or more.

Charlie Bowes had still been there; and then, when Charlie himself had to go, Archie had come up, on purpose to see her, and of course, her dear, she couldn’t let Archie down, could she? She meant, not when Archie was as devoted to her as he notoriously was.

“Of course not,” said Lina.

So Freda had come over in her car, on a nice March morning, to have a really good gossip about it all.

Having talked about herself for an hour by the clock, she asked after Johnnie.

“He’s all right,” said Lina. “He’s taken the car over to Bournemouth to have something done to it.”

“What?”

“Good heavens, I don’t know. Don’t ask me anything about cars’ insides. I can’t bear them.”

“I can do any running repairs myself. My dear, I don’t think anyone should drive a car at all who can’t.”

“Well, I don’t drive a car,” Lina said brightly. “What about a cocktail?”

“My dear, I should simply love one. You make the best cocktails I know. I wish you’d teach Harry one day, he’s so stupid about drinks.”

“Nobody should drink a cocktail who can’t mix one,” said Lina, and went off to give orders that there would be two to lunch after all.

Freda would talk about Johnnie at lunch. Lina did not want to discuss Johnnie with Freda in the least, but Freda continually brought the conversation back to him.

Lina got a little irritated, and, as always, showed it. It seemed to her that Freda spoke of Johnnie in a positively proprietary way. Her jealousy of Janet, whom she was now pleased to assume to be a really close friend of Johnnie’s, was quite plain.

She resented Lina’s irritation, and responded to it with exasperation of her own. Lina, never slow to take up the tone of anyone with whom she was talking, grew exasperated too. By the end of lunch the two were openly snapping at each other.

How absurd we are, Lina thought as she poured out coffee in the drawing room. I don’t like Freda, and I’m sure she doesn’t like me; but why need we show it? I shouldn’t take her ridiculous remarks about Johnnie seriously.

She began to talk, a little too brightly, on impersonal subjects; but Freda still remained curt.

Then Freda glanced at her wrist watch, and said:

“My dear, I was quite forgetting. I’ve simply got to run over to Pensworthy this afternoon. Why don’t you come with me?”

“Pensworthy?” said Lina. It seemed an odd place for an errand.

“Yes. I promised I’d go this afternoon. You’ve got nothing to do.”

“If you’re going to call on people ...”

“No, no. It’s only to a shop. Something Harry wanted, and he says he can only get it there.”

“I should have thought that anything one could get in Pensworthy one could get better in Bournemouth.”

“It’s a particular man,” Freda said vaguely. “Anyhow, I’ve got to go. Come with me.”

“Well, I don’t know,” Lina said weakly. There were plenty of things she would rather do than go over to Pensworthy with Freda. There was a new book from the library for instance ...

But Freda was determined that she should go, so Lina took the easiest line and went.

Freda seemed preoccupied on the journey.

When they reached Pensworthy she parked the car on one side of the little town’s broad street and jumped out. Lina followed.

“I shan’t be a minute,” Freda said. “Oh, look: we’ve stopped right outside Ella’s shop. You’d like to have a word with her, wouldn’t you? I’ll pick you up there when I’m ready.” Before Lina could answer she had hurried off down the street.

As it seemed determined for her that she should call on Ella, Lina walked to the shop which Freda had indicated. It was a shabby little affair, with a board above the small window which announced that J. Banks, provision merchant, was licensed to sell also cigarettes and tobacco. Lina opened the door, which caused a bell above it to utter a sharp ping! and passed into the rather dim interior.

In answer to the ping! a young woman came leisurely out from the room behind the shop.

“How are you, Ella?” said Lina graciously. “You remember me, I expect? I heard you were living here, and—”

“Lawks!” said Ella, and rubbed her hands nervously on her dress. “It’s Mrs. Aysgarth.”

“Yes.” There seemed very little to say. Lina looked hurriedly round the shop for something to buy instead. “Yes, so you’re married now, Ella?”

“Yes, Mrs. Aysgarth.”

“I hope you’re getting on well here?” Lina’s eyes roamed vaguely over a stack of tinned fruit to a string of onions hanging from a nail.

“Yes, thank you, Mrs. Aysgarth. It’s – it’s a bit of a struggle, of course, in these times; but everyone’s the same, nowadays, aren’t they?”

“Yes, things are certainly in a very bad way everywhere.” Lina wondered why Ella should be so extremely nervous. She used not to be of the nervous type.

“And – is Mr. Aysgarth quite well?” Ella asked in a rush.

“Quite, thank you.” Lina, unable to decide whether it would be tactless to buy something at once and put an end to this inane conversation, racked her mind for something to say. “I hear you’ve got a little boy now, Ella?”

Ella went positively pale. “Wh-who told you that?” she stammered.

“Why, Mrs. Newsham. You remember her? Is your little boy here? I should so much like to see him.”

“He’s out.” Ella discharged the words quite breathlessly.

Lina received a definite impression that Ella did not wish her to see the child. “Oh, what a pity,” she said, a little puzzled but indifferent. “Well, Ella, there are one or two things I want for the house, and I should like to get them here.”

She bought a pound’s worth of assorted groceries.

Ella, who seemed to have got over her nervousness, was grateful, but not unduly.

Lina noticed that she kept glancing a little apprehensively towards the door. There’s something wrong here, she thought: it looks as if the husband was a bad lot; anyhow, it’s none of my business.

While Ella was doing up the package, the shop door opened and a small boy came in. He marched up to the counter behind which Ella was standing.

“I bin up to Willie Brooks’s, mum,” he announced. “They’m got a new calf.”

A ray of sunlight, coming through the dusty window, fell directly on his face.

In one glance Lina understood everything – Freda’s hints, Ella’s nervousness, everything.

She got out of the shop somehow.

When fate is ready for something, she piles up her effects as lavishly as ever Mr. C. B. Cochran did.

Lina had left word at home that she would not be in to tea, as she would be going on to Mrs. Newsham’s. Instead she had asked Freda, quite calmly, to excuse her as she had a headache. Freda, looking a little worried now, took her back to the front gates of Dellfield. They spoke very little on the hour’s journey, and neither of them referred to the subject which was bursting both their minds.

Lina let herself into the house very quietly. She wanted no one to know that she had come back. She intended to go up to her room and think and think. Till now she had been unable to do that.

To reach the stairs she had to pass the drawing-room door. It was just open, and from inside came the sound of voices. Lina paused instinctively to learn who was there.

There was Johnnie’s voice, and then there was Janet’s. At first Lina did not take in what they were saying.

“Darling, of course you can stop to tea. You didn’t know she was going to be out.”