For Love Alone (72 page)

Quick said hastily: “Yes, Tess, why don't you go and see them for a day or two? It will change the scene for you before you start another job. You know, she wants to get a job, although I don't want her to——”He said miserably: “I am not enough for her.”

“Why not?” said Girton. “Teresa looks like work to me, she'd make a good commissar.”

“For what?” said she, beaming.

“For push-carts,” laughed Quick.

“Not for care of the home,” said Girton lazily. Teresa frowned. Why this? Quick said: “Tess, why don't you go up to see your Aunt Lobelia or what-is-it, for a day or two? Say I can't go along but give her an account of your luxury flat, show my picture, all the rest, so that she'll write home and say all is in order.”

“No need for that.”

“But still, Tess, go.”

“If you insist, all right.”

“And Harry here can go along with you, it'll be company for you part of the way.”

She said nothing.

“Do you want to come, Tess?” asked Harry.

“Well—but what for, after all?”

“Yes, go, Tess,” insisted Quick. “You'll go to Leamington, stay a day or two or three and come back to me, and see whether you like me better then.”

“What?” cried Teresa, flushing. “Like you better? How could I like you better?” She frowned.

The men began to talk of Spain and local fascists. She got out some sewing and, sitting on a hassock, bent her head over it. She raised her head once to see the blond young man who was stretched out at full length in the arm-chair, as usual, staring at her. She could scarcely believe it. She lowered her head again and paid no more attention to the conversation, but at the end, Quick said: “Well, Tess, are you going with Harry on Saturday?”

She straightened up, put down her sewing. “Is it Saturday?”

“Yes, in the morning,” said Harry.

She looked with confusion from one to the other. “Do you think I ought to?”

“Yes,” said Quick heartily. “Why not? You'll get a chance to talk to Harry, he's going away—perhaps you have some things to talk over with him. He can chaperon you to Leamington—or why not get off at Oxford and take a look around? Harry knows Oxford pretty well, don't you?” and he laughed. He kept chattering gaily and questioning Girton who himself with warmth kept up the conversation. He told about what Oxford was like and the rest, occasionally turning to Teresa whose ears were burning. The meaning of this chatter was that the men were offering and counter-offering her love to each other, as a proof of their love for each other. She wanted to burst into tears and to go away and let them languish after her, “let them amuse each other”. In the end, she rather sulkily agreed to meet Harry in the morning and to go in the train with him as far as Leamington only. Meanwhile, Quick was all good nature, saying he would get the ticket, send a telegram to “the great-aunt Minnie,
not
Lobelia”, and of course, he knew she would have to traipse round the shops for half a day getting presents (for Teresa did not dare enter anywhere without propitiatory presents), and the like, and he sent Girton off with hearty handclasps, saying that he was going to get him several things before he went to Spain and that he was, or would ever be, the dearest and closest friend he ever had.

On Saturday, a bright, windy day with a fixed cloudy sky above and earth-clouds sailing near, Quick got Teresa packed in a great
hurry, took her to the station early, bought her a small hamper and something to drink in the train, counted her money several times and added to it each time with a few coins out of his pocket, took all her packages, including her gloves, so that she would have nothing to carry and gave her infinite instructions. The train time drew near and Quick gaily opined that Harry, who was always one hour and twenty minutes late, by the clock, would miss the train. However, Girton turned up ten minutes before, swinging his satchel into which, this time, he had packed a few things.

His wife came with him, hanging on to his arm, and with her thick, pasty face quiet and cheerful. She seemed very surprised to see the Quicks and when she learned that the woman was was travelling alone, she turned ghastly pale and her face was convulsed.

“Did you know you were going to meet?” she asked Teresa.

Harry Girton made no sign, stood casually by; Quick coughed politely. Teresa, however, replied innocently: “Of course. I was going to see my great-aunt at Leamington and Jim thought I should go by the same train as Harry”, and she pointed at Girton. “You didn't tell me,” said Manette, turning wildly to her husband. “It's very funny, no doubt. Is it an escapade that you conceal it? What does her husband think of that?” and she turned furiously to Quick: “What do you think of that? Concealing it from me, I call it peculiar. I know what I call it. And do you allow that sort of thing?”

“Why not?” asked Quick bluffly. “What crime is there in going to Leamington?”

“It isn't going to Leamington they have in mind,” she said bitterly, “but a week-end somewhere—where is it?” She turned to her husband. “Where are you going with that woman?”

Harry Girton looked calmly at Teresa all this time and he now made a gesture as if to ask would she get into the train.

“Are you going?” howled Manette, in astonishment. Teresa looked curiously from her husband to Girton. Manette turned and flung herself upon Quick's left arm, which he was holding across his waist, clutching the button of his raincoat. She looked up into his
face, and the two onlookers, faintly disturbed but calm, because they had their train-tickets perhaps, noticed with surprise that there was a certain resemblance between the swarthy and shallow faces now staring at each other; there was the irregularly impasted flesh around high flat cheek-bones and long-shaped shadows in the cheeks, the deep lines, flesh round the mouth, short noses, long lips, and cleft chins. Apart, they were utterly unlike, except for the colouring; Quick was prognathous and Manette had wide, semi-circular, meeting jaws; Quick's hair was smooth, short and receding, and Manette's hair tendrilly, low-growing and stiff. Quick had the sad, friendly, round but soft eyes of a fine Chinese while Manette had the iron-bound brow and sullen sunken eyes of some ancient forest race, human but stupid and brooding, shaken by forgotten pangs. But the resemblance was there. Teresa without speaking turned to Harry Girton, who was observing her. Anyone would have had the same thought. Girton thought: “By what curiosity of fate—” She thought: “Really, I am a fatal woman, I travel thirteen thousand miles to meet the same mate that Girton picked up somewhere in the marshes of the Thames.” She said without thinking: “Where do you come from, Manette?”

Manette drew back and stared at her. Her pleading with Quick, which she had carried on in her usual dramatic style, had not moved either of the two fair people looking at each other and she had heard the silence behind her. As for Quick, she saw that he was obedient to this woman and would bring her no aid. Her husband, whom she loved hopelessly, now said lightly: “Well, all aboard”, and saying “Bye-bye” to his wife, shaking Quick's hand and pushing Teresa up before him, he sprang on the train. Manette was in despair. Was it inexorable that these two should travel together? She turned to Quick, to gabble at him the dozen infamies which were known about Harry to everyone (by her own mouth) when the train began to move. Quick paid no attention to her, except to say unconsciously: “Yes, Mrs Girton, yes, Mrs Girton”, but was running along the slowly moving car looking anxiously for his woman, his face shining bluish-white in the station light, his splendid large dark eyes wide open, in a circle of
white, like two wood mushrooms turned upside down. Manette could look at these eyes, the colour of her own, but melting and handsomer, and see what they were; her defeat, her denial. She wrung her hands, seeing him running now after the running train and waving. When he came back towards her, his coat flying open, his handkerchief in his hand, a smile and tears on his face, she nearly collapsed.

“Well, he'll be back on Tuesday, won't he?” he asked, smiling, in a tremulous voice and patting her on the hand, as he caught up with her.

“Why do you let them go off like that?” she asked in her hoarse voice. “Are you mad?”

“Mrs Girton,” said Quick, “I read a crazy story somewhere about a wife who believed in her husband and she was right—but never mind that, that won't interest you. You are thinking of Harry because you love him. Why do you think he will deceive you? Don't you know a man can't bear to be nagged? Give the old boy a break. Perhaps he's faithful to you all along, only you don't give him a chance to prove it. Do you know what the Freudians would say? I'm not a Freudian, mark you, far from it, but in this case they might say, and with justice, that for some occult reason, you were pushing him into the arms of other women. Now, Mrs Girton, Manette,” he said with bonhomie, “I've never seen a marriage break up unless at least one of the partners was working for the break day and night, and that partner is always the injured partner afterwards. Don't ask why that is so. It is so, at any rate. Now if you want to lose your boy, just make him scenes in public and nag him and he'll go to the first girlie that tells him she adores him. Why not? Manette, you've got the wrong technique. I send my wife to her relatives and I send her along in the train with a friend of mine because I know she likes him. Would I send her with someone she hated? Do you really think there is any danger in sending out together a decent man and woman? I am willing to bet—five cents—that all your troubles originate with yourself. Harry married you, didn't he? Then he must like you. You've got a clutch on him that the other girls never will
have. For I know you, Manette, you love him, you won't leave him for another man, whatever the temptation.”

She raised her strange black and white eyes to him and looked at him through her lashes. His eyes were wet. Her face had smoothed out and she sketched a small, scornful smile. Now she said: “Imagination isn't my strong point, that's his. I work from facts. I'll never let him get away with anything like that again—I have ways and means. And if you're thinking we're married—we're not. We never were. He was too modern to marry me. I'm years older than he is, you see, I'm almost fifty, Mr Quick. Look at me! You see a woman verging on fifty. I'm jealous because I'm an old woman and he doesn't leave me only because he's afraid of what people will say. It's his conscience. He's a nice boy and he always had a nice conscience, that's how I have him; it's to fly away from me that he's going first to fight for Spain and then to Tanganyika, if he can, and after that to the ends of the earth. The Kipling ideal, and all to avoid a woman of fifty. He wouldn't give me a baby and he said why, everybody knows. Day after day, day after day, we stuck, ‘nor sound nor motion, as idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean'. He's my prisoner, and the man that's gone off with your wife, if she is your wife, Mr Quick, is a man who's aching to escape and who will face death, if he doesn't get a fat Madrid job, rather than face an old woman. So don't give me this soft soap, because I know him.”

Her raucous, deep voice went on and she clung to Quick's arm as they hastened along. But Quick had only heard fragments after the words, “he was too modern to marry me”. He was overwhelmed. In spite of gossip, he had heard Manette so often called “Mrs Girton” that he had preferred to think of her as married. He knew that Teresa did not know this, she would soon find it out. His secret he would tell to none—that he and Teresa were not married. James Quick now feared that at the first question Teresa would admit to Girton that she was free. What would happen then?

Thus he imagined the train rushing out of London into the clear, spring countryside, the weighted stands of trees on old grassy hills,
the trout-coloured falls, and ponds of trout rivers, the abandoned fields of half-dug turnips between turned hedges and windbreaks, the brown earth, the isolated country houses, the wide undulating fields, knotted together by copses and the whole silent countryside of England spread out beneath them, while these two, fated, marked out for each other, sped on and found out the truth about each other. He had no sign for that but his instinctive fear; but he knew that others had seen the similarity between the two and watched them, expecting some event, love or trouble, joy and anguish for them both, and all eagerly watched. Harry Girton had always been a wanderer; there was the war in Spain. Already, rumours of a scandal had flown round their small, hastily assembled circle exactly as if scandal had arisen; it was weird, shocking, frightening.

Presently Quick, no longer able to listen to Manette, put her in a bus and set off to walk home in his rapid easy trundle; but half-way there, he found he could not face the dark flat at the bottom of the Court and the silent week-end without her. He regretted his folly in sending her away. She had every reason to confide in Girton. He himself had sent her away in his care. Quick suddenly felt that he could not stand the looks of strangers and he changed his mind again, taking a bus to get home. Why had he thrown them together? He had always been like that, running on his unhappiness out of desperation, like a suicide on his knife. Once home, he took down a serious book and began to read. When he looked up, he saw before him the smiling countryside and the train, very small now, running away from him north-west.

Meanwhile, in the train the man and woman sat facing each other, saying little, but quite at ease. As they approached Oxford, Girton muttered almost incomprehensibly: “Let's get off here after all, would you? I don't want to see the old place particularly, but we could—”

“But your people? And Jim sent a telegram to Aunt Minnie.”

“We can forget them,” said Girton, slurring, as if he wished the recording angel not to hear those words.