I Shall Not Want (27 page)

He sat there in the half-light until the slam of the door told him that the last of the congregation had passed out. Then, on tiptoe, he rose and followed them. But as he turned he saw something that made him stop and step back a pace.

Three rows behind him, in the corner of one of the high pews, Hesther was sitting; there was a crumpled handkerchief in her hand which she kept pressed up against her face.

iii

That night when he returned home was the first for months that Hesther was not waiting for him. Instead, she was sitting alone in the drawing-room her hands folded in her lap. She seemed indifferent, and scarcely looked up when he entered. Already, the child within her had changed her figure; she was heavy and gross. And she filled the whole room with defeat.

He stood there regarding her. Was she going to say anything? he wondered. But a sudden knocking on the ceiling interrupted him. There were three hard knocks followed by a volley of short, irritable ones. He knew the signal well: it was Mrs. Marco from the luxury of her bedroom sending down a summons for her son.

When he got upstairs, however, he did not go in to the old lady immediately. The door in front of him was open and he was aware that the bedroom—his bedroom and Hesther's—was, somehow different; it had been re-arranged. In front of the cupboard that had been his there now stood a tall, cheval glass and his round cardboard hat-box was missing. There was an empty space on top of the wardrobe where it had always stood.

He paused for a moment and then crossed the corridor and went into the small dressing-room that he had occupied before. He saw that it was now furnished again. On the table in front of the mirror his brushes and combs were set out. The cardboard hat-box was standing in the corner.

It was old Mrs. Marco who explained things to him. She was sitting up among the pillows in a profusion of shawls and bed-jackets and she waved a hooked hand in his direction.

“Don't take any notice of what's happened,” she said in a high breathless rush. “It doesn't mean anything. Women get like that when they're expecting. Everything'll be all right. She'll want you back again. Everything'll be all right.”

She kept repeating it as he stood there, as though desperately striving to re-assure herself as well. In her heart she felt frightened and bewildered: no sooner had her children built up their house than it had come crashing down again.

“Go downstairs and pet her a bit,” she advised. “Bring her some flowers. Why don't you buy her something special to eat? Everything'll be all right again, I tell you.”

She lay back and closed her eyes. It was all so different from what it had been like when she was a girl. Husbands and wives hadn't gone about shutting themselves away from each other then; Mr. Marco had been in the big double bed beside her two hours before her son was born. Marriage had been marriage in those days.

Downstairs, John Marco faced Hesther across the wide dining-table. It was a grim, silent meal; they scarcely raised their eyes from above their plates. And when the meal was over Hesther rose from her chair without speaking and left him. He heard her go up to her room and close the door behind her. But he sat on, staring through the window at the blank faces of the houses opposite. He was still there when Emmy, impatient at being kept waiting any longer, cleared away the rest of the china and silver, leaving him
seated there at the head of the table like the host at a vanished banquet.

It was already late. Very soon it would be night-time. And it was only now that he was tasting the real bitterness of having lost Mary for ever. At this very moment another pair of arms would be round her, other fingers loosening the tresses of her hair. Because he could bear it no longer he pushed his chair back from the table and went blindly upstairs to his room.

But he had still not escaped from himself. The same pictures and images came crowding in. And in the surrounding darkness, he and not Thomas Petter was the bridegroom; it was he who saw Mary's white form in the shadows, felt her breath upon his cheek.

A clock struck somewhere and he roused himself: it was midnight. He went over and stood at the open window gazing down into the street. The street was bare and deserted; it slept.

At that moment he might have been the last man in London contemplating the empty pavements of a ruined city.

To the west, the shop next door to Morgan and Roberts' was a gentleman's outfitters. It was a dignified, rather shabby kind of shop. The gilt lettering on the front had tarnished and come loose in places and the window blind was generally caught up at one corner as though it were someone slovenly and impatient who had lowered it. But the shop did a good enough business in its way, not so much in the large things of life as in oddments like braces, collars, and false cuffs. Occasionally too, someone would buy a raincoat or a Norfolk jacket; and when that happened Mr. Skewin, the proprietor, would feel that trade was showing signs of improvement and that it would only be a matter of months, perhaps even weeks, before he could afford to have the whole shop front properly done up again. He was an Amosite himself and his faith had reconciled him to adversity.

The consciousness of those faded premises next door had begun to obsess John Marco. Whenever he was not working, he was thinking about them. Even the architecture was the same; they were really one building already. On the blotting paper of his pad he had made innumerable small drawings of an enlarged Morgan and Roberts, an imposing frontage of five plate-glass windows instead of four. Sometimes, too, he allowed his pencil to run on, sketching in the shadowy outlines of other windows, other entrances. He had only to close his eyes a little to see a shop-front so long that no sign-writer could devise one set of lettering to cover the whole of it; so long that the name would have to be repeated time and time again, like a chorus.

A week ago he had made the first tentative approaches to Mr. Skewin; and Mr. Skewin, in his shiny suit with
the cuffs all frayed and serrated at the edges, had turned him down. He had listened attentively to his visitor in the gloomy interior of his shop into which no important customer ever came, and had smiled a sad incredulous smile and shaken his head. It was exciting, of course, and rather flattering to be offered money for his business; but it was also deeply terrifying. It would mean starting again. And he knew that he was not the sort of man to change; not the sort to endure the anguish of launching out afresh.

Besides he was really very comfortable where he was. He was accustomed to unsuccess, and the bare patches in the oil-cloth and the broken roller blind held no shame for him. So he merely gave a little bow and went on with his work as though a little resentful that he should have been interrupted: he was industriously writing out his own price tickets on small oblongs of cardboard which he snipped off old boxes carefully kept back for the purpose.

After his dismissal, John Marco left Mr. Skewin for a time severely alone: the man was untemptable. Like a lay saint, money meant nothing to him. John Marco put all thoughts of gentlemen's outfitting out of his head and buried himself in the management of what he already possessed.

Then he saw something that set the notion raging inside his brain again. There was a “To Let” notice pasted across the shop next door to Mr. Skewin's. The shop had been a stationer's once; the windows had always been full of die-stamps and boxes of envelopes and picture postcards. Only the sudden death of the proprietor—pneumonia, it was: two days, not more—had thrown the shop into the market; and the rival stationer's opposite had bought up everything, the lease, the stock, the book debts and the prized lists of printed note-paper customers. As a shop, the stationer's was admittedly no more than second-rate; it was really on the lock-up level. But to John Marco it was everything: he saw it as his first colony.

The rest of Paddington and Bayswater, however, saw it too; the Terrace was one of the classic shopping thoroughfares of the district and any business there had its place in the sun. A dozen other acquisitive tradesmen were after the shop within twenty-four hours.

John Marco watched them with amusement as they came and stood outside the premises and then went into the agents' opposite to ask for the keys. He could afford to be amused. For at two minutes past nine on the morning when the board had been put up he had gone into the agents himself and had accepted their terms.

He had the lease in his hands at that moment. And as he read it he smiled. It was all so pathetically silly, so lamentably wide of the mark. The lawyers who had drawn it up had stipulated that in no shape or form should it re-open as a stationer's shop; and they went on, after the manner of their kind, to define what a stationer's shop was, ingeniously countering the possible evasions one by one. John Marco shook his head at their innocence; if they thought that he wanted to waste time on stationery they were wrong. He had other and more sensational plans in mind.

A month later, when the front had been decorated and the sign board re-painted in distinctive style, John Marco opened the shop as a gentleman's outfitters.

ii

On the day after the opening John Marco returned home to find the house in chaos.

At the sight of him, old Mrs. Marco uttered a shrill cry of relief.

“Come on in, son,” she cried. “It's Hesther. She's just on her time.”

John Marco slowly undid the buttons of his long great-coat.

“Has the doctor come?” he asked.

“I've sent for him,” old Mrs. Marco went on. “He was having his supper but he'll be round at once.”

“Is the nurse there?”

“She came at lunch-time,” old Mrs. Marco answered. “But she's no good,” she added in a whisper. “She's too young. I shall have to look after things myself.”

John Marco left her and began to mount the stairs. On the landing the nurse met him. She had that startling appearance of cleanliness which is common to all nurses; under her stiff cap her hair might have been starched too. She gave John Marco a quick mechanical smile.

“She's been asking for you,” she said. “You can go straight in.”

The bedroom, with only Hesther in it, looked very large; and Hesther in the wide double bed, very small. She had obviously been suffering and the lines in her face had deepened. She looked older. Strands of silver showed up in the heavy coil of her hair and her hands were thin and blue-veined. She beckoned him to come over.

“I want to talk to you,” she said.

He pulled up a chair and sat down at her bedside.

“Mr. Tuke was here this afternoon,” she said. “We've been praying.”

John Marco nodded. Ever since Hesther had expected this child, she had been growing steadily more and more religious. She spent most of her time nowadays reading her Bible. And she read it greedily, anxiously, as though searching for some crumb of comfort amid that heaped-up mass of words. As he sat there he could see a book of Mr. Sturger's sermons on the table beside her.

“Did the prayer help?” John Marco asked.

And then quite suddenly a feeling—half of shame, half of tenderness—came to him. It was
his
child that Hesther was bearing; she had the right for his love and protection at this moment. He leant forward and began stroking the pale hand on the counterpane.

“Don't worry,” he added. “It'll be all right. He's a good doctor.”

Hesther turned for a moment and looked full at him,
her dark intense eyes staring into his. Then she drew her hands away.

“It wasn't for me or for the child that we were praying/' she said.

“You mean that you were praying for me?” he asked.

“Yes,” she replied quietly. “We prayed that your heart might be opened.”

“Opened for what?” he asked: he was sitting back now, looking at her.

“For love,” she answered. “No one can love if his heart is divided.”

“So you told him about us?”

“Not more than he knew already. He knew all the time that you didn't want this child.”

John Marco paused.

“I shall be a good father to it,” he said. “You need have no fear about that.”

“How can you be?”

“I shall give it everything,” he said.

“You mean money?” she asked.

John Marco nodded.

“Money is not the spirit,” she told him. “A child can grow up poor among riches.”

“But how do you know I shan't love this child?” he asked. “Most fathers love their children.”

“How can you love it?” she asked. “How can you, if you don't love me?”

The nurse entered carrying a basin with a towel spread over it. She came over and placed her hand on Hesther's forehead.

“Have the pains come back?” she asked.

Hesther shook her head.

“Not yet,” she said.

“Well just ring the bell when they do,” she said placidly. “I shall only be in the next room.”

She spoke of pain with a kind of easy familiarity, as something that came and went away again and did not
matter. At the door she stopped and smiled that bright, mechanical smile over her shoulder.

“Just you have a nice comfortable gossip with your husband,” she said. “It's what husbands are for.”

When she had gone Hesther turned to John Marco again. Her voice was different now: it was calmer.

“What's this new shop you've opened,” she asked. “Why didn't you tell me?”

He looked at her in surprise; she had not been out of the house since the shop was opened.

“Who told you about it?” he asked.

“Mr. Tuke,” she said. “Mr. Skewin went to him.”

John Marco raised his eyebrows.

“What did he say?”

“He told Mr. Tuke that you were ruining him. He said that it wasn't right for an Elder to treat one of the brethren in that way.”

John Marco gave a little laugh.

“He said that, did he?” He paused and thrust his hands into his pockets. “Anyhow it shows that he understands.”