I Shall Not Want (56 page)

She came in carrying the tea tray and set it down on the small table beside him.

“We'll have it like this,” she said. “It's easier.”

He lay back looking at her.

“It seems strange seeing you do this,” he said slowly. She paused.

“Then you must come again so that it won't be strange,” she told him.

“I'd like to,” he replied simply.

And as he said it he realised that, if they were to see each other again like this, it would have to be here that they met. He hadn't got a house of his own now, a house that he could bring her to. It was Louise's house; her house, and he lived in it. The people they entertained were her friends, not his.

“You don't ever go to the Tabernacle now, do you?” she asked.

John Marco shook his head

“I haven't been there since I saw you get married,” he answered quietly.

Mary did not reply immediately: she glanced for a moment at the picture on the mantelshelf and then dropped her eyes again.

“I still go,” she went on. “But the people are different mostly. It doesn't seem like the same chapel nowadays.”

John Marco had closed his eyes: he was sitting back with his hand across his face.

“How long is it?” he asked suddenly, “since the night when you were baptised?”

She hesitated.

“I was eighteen then,” she said. “I'm thirty-nine now.”

She saw the fingers of his hand tighten for a moment.

“Twenty-one years,” he said slowly. “The best years.” He paused. “I wonder what they would have been like if we'd been together.”

“I think we should have been very happy,” she replied.

“Yes,” he said. “We shouldn't have been like this then. We wouldn't either of us have known what it was to be lonely.”

“It's not too late,” she told him. “We can still be with each other sometimes.”

“What has happened to that other woman,” she wondered; “the dark-haired woman who came into the room when I was there. Has he left her, too. Is it this that's added to his bitterness?” She wanted to go over and put her arms round him and comfort him; and she wanted his arms to go round her too, holding her as he had held her that night at the bottom of the staircase in Abernethy Terrace when her mother had allowed them to go as far as the front door together.

But there was too much between them now; the years had separated them. It wouldn't be the same person who went over to him, and it was not the same man who was sitting there. Could she make them both the same again? That was what she wondered. Had she the strength
in her to wind back the years that were wasted, to re-set the hour that was on them both? Then she remembered Hesther; and she remembered the vows that the Chapel imposed on marriage. But what right had Hesther still got to him? Where was her title after those years of separation? He had never loved her; they had never really belonged to each other. It was Hesther's touch that had changed him and made him cold; like the Snow Queen she had taken him away and frozen up his heart. And now at last, when she had not expected it, had come the chance to release him. Like Gerda she could make him free again. But she looked at her hands that were resting in her lap and she saw that they were worn and red; and she remembered the age she was and the way no one ever looked at her now; and the hope inside her slid away into the litter of all other vain, silly things. She was suddenly nearly forty again; and it was five o'clock, and the fire was dying out.

She got up and began clearing away the tea things.

“I've got to make fresh tea for Ann,” she said. “She'll be in any moment now.”

The words roused him and he dropped his hand from his face. A moment before it had seemed that their two lives had joined mysteriously again; he had waited there with eyes closed to feel her hand on his shoulder and know how she needed him, too. But now that she had spoken, it was not of him at all that she was thinking, it was of that other life of hers, the life that centred on the child which Thomas Petter had given her.

“I must go,” he said roughly. “I shall be getting in the way.”

Mary put down the tray she was holding and came over to him.

“But you must stay and see Ann,” she said. “She's grown so, I'm very proud of her.”

He shook his head.

“No,” he said. “It's late. I must be getting back again.”

“I had hoped you'd have seen her,” Mary said slowly. “She's very like I was at her age.”

But John Marco was already buttoning up his coat.

“No,” he said again. “She's part of your life, I don't belong in there at all.”

He held out his hand and they said good-bye quietly, unemotionally, like people who mean nothing to each other.

“I'll come down with you,” Mary said. “It may be dark on those stairs.”

“I can find my way,” he answered.

His back was already towards her as he spoke.

At the door, however, he turned to look back and saw that she was crying. She was standing there with her arms to her side as he had left her and her face was still towards him. He stood for a moment at the door and then came over and put his arms round her.

“I'm sorry, Mary,” he said. “I shouldn't have come here. I'm still jealous. I can't help it.”

Then he kissed her.

But the kiss, when Mary remembered it after he had gone, seemed the last tragic humiliation of that meeting. She had been in his arms again as she had dreamed that sometime she would be, and the kiss which he had given her had been faint and cold and passionless.

It had been a kiss between two people who were unhappy, not in love.

As John Marco drove back round the Park which was dark and sunless by now, and the cold air of the evening blew into his face he shivered, and drew the heavy rug more closely round him. His face was set again into the hard, angry lines that it wore so often; it was the face of a bitter, disappointed man.

But it was not of Mary that he was now thinking: he was wondering how to face a roomful of waiting shareholders, people who had trusted him, and tell them that he had failed; wondering how long the bank would
remain smiling and polite in the face of the overdraft; wondering how long it would be before the spring inside him snapped and he hadn't the strength to go on juggling with all the bits of the business any longer.

Louise was waiting for him in the drawing-room when he got back there. She was wearing a new dress which he had not seen before: it was a costly affair sprinkled all over with sequins. There was a diamond clip in her hair.

“My dear,” she said, “you'll have to hurry. You're late. We've got a lot of people dining at the house to-night.”

When a business begins to go to pieces, the cracks appear everywhere. The process is not immediate; it is slow and scarcely discernible at first. But it seems to advance irresistibly according to certain pre-determined laws.

Some of the cracks start as tiny, thread-like things, but they run down into the heart of the organisation: they divide it. Mistakes, for example, occur in the buying, and disputes arise with the manufacturers. Heads of departments make miraculous, unaccountable blunders and blame their seconds-in-command for the consequences, and junior assistants offend important customers. Then the network of small fissures widens and other pieces become unstuck as well. People arrive late for no particular reason or stay away altogether without warning. Lunch-time becomes an hour and five minutes, and illicit tea is drunk in the afternoon and is lingered over. Stock is mislaid, and articles that are lying in bales in the store room downstairs are reported up in the shop as unobtainable. In short, though the business continues to look as if the whole city of London depended on it, there is not a department or sub-department in the place but has gone quietly and successfully to blazes.

When a business is in this state, it needs a man with energy bursting out of him to put things right again. John Marco had been full of that kind of energy once. He had bullied and worn down Mr. Hackbridge, and Mr. Hackbridge had bullied and worn down the heads of each department and they in turn had bullied and worn down the assistants that were under them until there was not a person in the shop who was not jumpy and on his toes in case someone else just a little above
him should notice that, even for a second, he was resting.

But for the last eighteen months or so, John Marco had left the ordinary, everyday supervision of the shop, the poking about into corners to see that the dust hadn't been allowed to settle there, more and more to Mr. Hackbridge; and Mr. Hackbridge, exhausted and frayed by years of working for John Marco, had left it more and more to itself. Mr. Hackbridge still made the same morning tour in the place of his master, visiting the same departments in the same order; but the old spirit was missing. The assistants scarcely even looked in his direction as he passed.

John Marco himself was seen less than ever. He shut himself away in his room, guarding his soul and Mr. Lyman's financial statements in solitude. On the rare occasions when he did emerge, it was usually to make trouble. There were sudden furious sallies when he would stamp through the shop at his old speed, his face dark and angry, on his way to annihilate some employee or other who had displeased him. The pretext for these excursions were sometimes slight—a mistake in cutting, a colour that did not match the rolls that were already in stock, or a letter of complaint from a customer. But at those moments it was the original John Marco who was there again, the man whom his assistants were afraid of; and Mr. Hackbridge, hearing John Marco's voice raised, even though it was someone else that he was shouting at, used to feel the pit of his stomach grow cold on these occasions and the tips of his fingers begin to tremble.

There were some people who said that John Marco's temper was shorter than it had been because he was drinking too much—the fact that he kept spirits in his room had not passed without comment in the house. And others, the very knowing ones, said that it was because the lady in Hyde Park Square, their own mysterious ex-colleague, was unfaithful and extravagant.
And though both these reasons were perhaps true they were only a part, a small part, of it all.

The real trouble lay outside the business, somewhere five or six miles away down in the heart of London. It was there that the ugliest of rumours of all were circulating; it was in the offices of brokers and half-commission men that people shook their heads and said that the business of John Marco Ltd. itself was shaky.

They were right too: that was the grim point. John Marco knew perfectly well that they were right; and he knew why. That enormous palace of Portland stone and plate glass was too expensive to be lived in. It wasn't that the public didn't come there: he could still fill the shop by one of his advertisements whenever he had been able to buy at the right place. But even when the gangways were blocked, and the stuff was passing in waves over the counters, there was still that marble court with the Pompeian pillars to be paid for, still the cost of that building that he had dreamed about, to be snatched back somehow out of thin air above his head.

Alone in his room, he had grown to hate the splendour that he had insisted upon; the fact that he was surrounded by it, oppressed him. He had only to go outside and look at the majestic sweep of the staircase to know that you can't pay for that sort of thing out of a yard or so of ribbon and stray reels of cotton; it was a lifetime's work for one man to recover what he had paid for his crystal chandeliers. And it all meant that the whole time, without daring to pause even for a single moment, he had to be just that bit cleverer than every other draper in London over everything he bought and over every price that he charged. “Without it all,” he had said to himself a hundred times—and the yellow uniforms of the page boys, and the floristry department stocked with lilac out of season, and the fancy dresses for the assistants at Christmas time, had long since disappeared and had even ceased to be talked about—“I should be making my profit: the gold would have piled itself up inside the
bank by now. But with it all, it means that I must spend my whole day from eight-thirty in the morning until I go to bed at night juggling about with fractions of halfpennies and decimals of farthings, and I can't even pay a dividend.”

And on those occasions as he sat alone in his room with the reports of the various departments spread out on the desk in front of him, like a bewildering patch-work table-cloth, there was a strange, recurrent nightmare, a kind of inner panic, that infected him: it seemed at those moments as though, if he stopped thinking about the business even for a single instant, he would see the whole carefully-oiled mechanism of buying and selling go to pieces before his eyes, as though his brain were the dynamo that was driving everything, and if that stopped, everything else in the shop would have to stop at exactly the same moment. And the nightmare, the panic, always developed along exactly the same lines until finally it had enveloped him. First of all, there was the terrible fear of what would happen if he did stop; and then there was the even more terrible fear that he would
have
to stop.

“I can't go on,” he had heard himself saying aloud when the panic was at its worst and he had been there alone, working late. “I can't go on.” And then he would go over to the cupboard and place the decanter on the table beside him, and run his fingers through his hair and start working again, with every bit in his brain red hot and the figures, huge, silly piles of them, forming and reforming themselves before his eyes.

For some time now Mr. Skewin and Mr. Hackbridge had both been keeping a very careful eye on John Marco: they had been observing him. And they had been talking him over together pretty thoroughly, dissecting him coldly and dispassionately like a specimen under the glass.