Mine for a Day (15 page)

CHAPTER
X

NEVER, in her most vivid nightmares, had Leila visualized such a situation as this. That she might one day have to make a fairly full confession to one or the other, in circumstances largely chosen by herself, was something she had accepted. But to have to do so to both of them, and with no preparation, was something so dreadful that she almost turned and ran away.

But Simon’s voice, calm and not at all unfriendly, said:

“Come on in, Leila. Rosemar
y
was in London and—dropped in to see me. Did you know that she didn’t marry Jeremy Whatever-his-name-was after all?”

“Of course she knew! I’ve just told you so!” Rosemary broke in, on a note of unusual irritation. “I don’t understand all this mystery. Leila, Simon is pretending he didn’t know anything about my having left Jeremy.”

“He didn’t know,” Leila said, and even to herself her voice sounded unfamiliar and high-pitched.

“Sit down, Leila.” Simon spoke with an under-current of concern in his voice, but there was also puzzlement now and a shade of reserve.

She sank into a chair, largely because she felt unable to stand any longer, while Rosemary’s surprised, protesting words buzzed round her like flies.

“But
y
ou said that you told him. I don’t understand. You promised to explain to
h
im—to try to arrange for him to see me. You said—”

“I didn’t promise anything,” Leila interrupted with desperate firmness.

Rosemary’s pretty mouth actually fell open.

“You did, Leila!
”

“Not in so many words. You—assumed that I would do so. And—and I let you think that I had.”

“Well, it’s practically the same thing,” Rosemary insisted. “And you almost forced me to return to Durominster, saying it was useless for me to see Simon for the time being. I can’t understand you, Leila. You never played a dirty trick like that on anyone before. At least, not that I ever knew. What came over you? Why did you
do
it, anyway?”

“Yes, Leila. Why
d
id you do it? That’s the point,” Simon put in, less excitedly than Rosemary, but in a tone which was a few degrees colder than the one in which he had bade her sit down.

She wished she could faint or collapse. Just go out, leaving the situation to solve itself. Leaving them to think what they pleased, imagine what they pleased. Anything—anything—so that she did not
h
ave to give them reasons for having done the inexplicable.

But she remained fully conscious. And they went on waiting for her to reply—Rosemary leaning forward in
h
er chair, flushed and bright-eyed, and Simon standing by the desk looking down at herself, gravely, and at last a little suspiciously.

“I thought I was acting for the best,” she brought out huskily at last.

“The best for whom?” enquired Rosemary rather pertinently.

“All of us. But mostly—Simon.”

“I don’t know what you mean.” Rosemary frowned in angry bewilderment. While Simon said:

“You will have to explain that a little further, you know, Leila.”

She pushed back her hair with a nervous hand, and tried again. “When Rosemary first came back so—so careless and assured about—picking things up again just where t
h
ey had left off, I thought—I thought Simon ought to have some time to think clearly, not to be swept into—into an infatuation again—”

“Really, Leila!” Simon exclaimed in protest and some anger. “You had no right to regard my feeling for Rosemary as an infatuation. And it was the most unwarrantable interference to try to arrange my life for me in that way.”

“I meant it—for the best,” she murmured again rather desperately.

“But why did you set yourself up to judge?” he wanted to know. “I don’t understand your attitude. There’s more in this than you have explained so far, I feel.”

“I’ll say there is,” Rosemary put in sharply. “Otherwise, why be so—deceitful and systematic about it all? If you didn’t actually lie to me in so many words—and I still think you did—you certainly gave me a definite and deliberate impression that you’d talked things over with Simon, and found that he didn’t want to forgive me, and that I’d have to wait for a better opportunity to talk him round.”

Simon bestowed a rather complicated glance upon her at that, but it was not devoid of a certain amused indulgence.

Curiously enough, while that glance struck fresh despair to Leila’s heart, it also steadied her a little.

“I’m sorry if it seems to you both that I acted badly,” she said, much more calmly. “I think myself that perhaps I used some—questionable means. But I honestly believed that anyone who could run off the day before her wedding with another man, and then find she didn’t want him after all,
n
eeded some time before she could be sure that she really wanted to be on with the old love again.”

“
You
had no right to take it on yourself to decide about that, though,” protested Rosemary indignantly. “It had nothing to do with you.

“Yes, it had,” Leila retorted, stung. “You had forced me into the position of having something to do with it. You had left it to me to tell Simon of your disgraceful behaviour. You had left it to me to settle the terrible tangle you had left behind—and Simon, on his part, agreed to my even impersonating you. You left it to me to explain to him when you chose to come back. And now you try to say it all had nothing to do with me. Am I to have no opinion and no feelings in the matter?”

There was complete silence in the office for a second or two. Then Simon said rather coldly:

“I don’t quite see where your feelings entered into it, Leila. An opinion you were, of course, perfectly entitled to hold. But, even so far as that was concerned, you seem to have gone to the most extraordinary lengths to impose your opinion on Rosemary and me. It was, after all, entirely for me to decide what I wished to do after Rosemary returned. I can’t for the life of me see why you thought you were entitled to withhold the news of this from me. Still less why you should engage in this elaborate deceit. And as for forcing Rosemary to return to Durominster when—”

“I didn’t force her to return.”

“Yes you did,” Rosemary declared. “You even saw me on to the train, as though I were a prisoner on remand.”

“I don’t think we need
picturesque details of that sort, Rosemary,” Simon said dryly. “The fact is, Leila, that you took the most elaborate precautions to prevent my knowing the very thing Rosemary most wanted me to know—that she
h
ad returned, an
d
that she was sorry for what had happened.”

“I thought—”

“And in addition,” he continued slowly, frowning as though some recollection angered or pained him unexpectedly, “in addition, you deliberately evaded m
y
own specific enquiry about whether there was any news of Rosemary. You deliberately deceived me, too, Leila.
”

She sat there with
h
er head bent. Anguish and humiliation washed over her in waves. She wished she could die. To faint was not enough now. One recovered from a faint. And she didn’t want to recover. She didn’t want ever, ever, to have to face Simon again, or to take up life again, to think daily, hourly, of the depths of shame to which she
h
ad sunk in her efforts to make him love her as she loved him.

Now, she could not imagine why she had ever embarked on this mad and wicked course: She was appalled to think that she had implied all sorts of untruths in her attempt to keep Simon and Rosemary from meeting, and she could not understand now how she had possibly justified her behaviour to herself, either on Simon’s account or her own.

It was like recovering from some sort of delirium and viewing her conduct with shocked sanity. And to have Simon, of all people, accusing her—with justice—of deceiving him, was something she felt she could not bear.

Only—she had to bear it.

“I’m terribly sorry,” she whispered, with what she knew was dreadful inadequacy.

He made a little movement of something between impatience and embarrassment. And she knew then that the lovely friendly intimacy between them was gone for ever.

“Well, there really isn’t anything else to say about it,” he replied curtly.

She rose to her feet.

“You didn’t want to—dictate—or anything?”

He looked surprised, as though he had forgotten that any official connection existed between them.

“No. Oh, no, thank you.” Again that slight movement, and this time it carried a suggestion of dismissal in it.

She reached the door somehow. She was not quite sure how. Neither Rosemary nor Simon said anything in the nature of a good-bye. But then, nor did she. It was not a moment for conventional comment
.

A moment more and she was outside in the passage, the door between her and Simon firmly closed, both actually and metaphorically. And—actually and metaphorically, too—Rosemary was on the right side of the door once more.

It seemed to Leila that the passage stretched a long, long way in front of her, and she concentrated on the one object of reaching the end of it and regaining the comparative sanctuary of the room where she worked. Not that she would be alone there. But at least she would be with people who had not the faintest idea of the terrible scene which h
a
d just taken place. None of them could possibly guess the depths of humiliation to which she had descended in the last half-hour. And at the moment the one desirable thing in life seemed that she should not have to be with people who
knew.

When she re-entered her office, all but one of her colleagues were putting their covers on their typewriters and preparing to leave, and she realized with a start how late in the afternoon it was.

“Have you been taking dictation all this time?” one of the other girls asked sympathetically. “What a shame—as late in the afternoon as this.
”

“No. I wasn’t taking dictation all the time. We—were discussing something.” She was astonished to hear how calm she sounded.

“Oh. Anything to type back right away?”

She shook her head.

She could go, she realized. Escape. Out of this office—away from the same building that contained Rosemary and Simon. There would not be any escape from her own thoughts and shame, of course. But at least she could go right away from the scene of what had happened. There was nothing to keep her.

She put on her hat and coat, staring unbelievingly at her own reflection in the office mirror and noting incredulously that she looked very much as she always looked. A little pale perhaps, but not shattered and altered beyond recognition. She
felt
that way, but she did not look it.

“Have you much more to do?” She even retained sufficient presence of mind to linger beside her delayed colleague and make the enquiry which office etiquette and plain good nature demanded.

“No. Just half a page.”

“Nothing I can do for you?”

“Thanks—no. There aren’t any enclosures to copy or anything. Just my own notes, and I shan’t be more than ten minutes.
”

She smiled composedly, said good night, and left.

Outside it was heart-breakingly fine and warm. A soft evening full of hope and enchantment. An evening for lovers and people who were happy, an evening when people walked a little more slowly and looked at each other a little more kindly because it was good to be alive.

But Leila didn’t feel that it was good to be alive. She felt that life was hardly worth living any more.

It was not only that she had lost Simon. She had lost her self-respect as well. And of the two she was not sure which loss hurt more.

Although she tried not to, she found herself going over the events of the past weeks, tormenting herself with the thought of how differently she would behave if only she could have that time again.

When she had been in the office, she had thought that what she wanted most was to go home and hide herself away from everyone. But now she felt she was afraid to be completely alone with her own thoughts. There was faint comfort in the crowded anonymity of the streets, and somehow it was better to walk and walk and tire herself out, rather than go home and sit there thinking of past follies and future loneliness.

She must have walked for something like a couple of hours before weariness and an undeniable sense of hunger drove her to seek somewhere where she could sit down and eat. But even then she could not face going home. She hated the thought of her own| exclusive company, and she hated the thought of having to prepare her own meal. Instead, she turned into a small restaurant where she had never been before, and absently chose the first thing she saw
on
the hand-written menu.

At first she paid no attention either to the two or three othe
r
customers or to the pretty girl in the flowered smock who brought her meal. But later, as the few others gradually departed and sh
e
was left alone with the girl who seemed to combine the duties o
f
waitress, cashier and general manageress, she glanced up and fel
t
impelled to make some sort of remark. It seemed hours since sh
e
had spoken to anyone.

When her coffee was set down before her, she said somethin
g
about the beauty of the evening, and then, with appreciation: “Oh good! That looks like really strong coffee.”

“Do you like it that way?”

“I feel I could do with it just now.”

There was a second’s pause. Then the girl said, incuriously bu
t
with a note of sympathy in her voice:

“You look as though you’ve had a bit of a shock. Have you?”

Leila supposed that was rather how she felt.

“N-not a shock exactly. But
things suddenly went all wron
g
and I can’t get myself in focus again somehow.”

“Over a man?
”
The girl in the overall began to clear a nearby table, so that it was not necessary to look her in the face, and to talk became easier.

“Ye-es. But it was my own fault.”

“It’s very seldom all one person’s fault.”

“I know. But I was dreadfully stupid and—didn’t behave very well.”

“I
guess that’s easy, if you’re in love—and anxious.” The girl sounded comfortingly matter-of-fact and more knowledgeable than she had need to be at her age. “Can’t you sacrifice a
b
it of pride and make it up with him?”

“Oh, it’s not like that!” She remembered what had happened to her pride that afternoon, and hastily averted her thoughts from the memory. “He was engaged to someone else—and it was broken off—and I thought he grew very fond of me. He did, in fact—he did. But she—the other girl came back. And I—I did all sorts of things to keep them from coming together again. And this afternoon he found out. So did she,” Leila added, but as an unimportant afterthought.

The girl piled several cruets on to a tray, and then came back to Leila’s table with them.

“Is he in love with the first girl still?”

“I—suppose so.”

“What do you mean—you suppose so? Don’t you know?”

“Not for certain.”

“Well, that’s the important thing, isn’t it?”

“N-no. The important thing is that he thinks me ungenerous and petty, and he’s right. The most important thing of all is that—he’s right.”

The girl regarded Leila reflectively.

“You don’t look that way,” she said candidly. “My guess is that you’re blaming yourself too much. What was the other girl like?”

“Ro—? She is my cousin, and she’s sweet and amusing in a thoughtless, rather superficial way. She ran away with another man, and then decided she didn’t want him after all.”

The other girl laughed incredulously.

“I wouldn’t worry myself splitting hairs about whether I’d been generous to
her
or not,” she declared. “She doesn’t sound as though anything would affect her very deeply.”

“I don’t think I was worrying about the effect on her,” Leila said frankly.

“On him?”

“Yes, a bit. But mostly about how it affects
me.
I—dislike myself so, when I think how I behaved!” she exclaimed vehemently.

The other girl looked as though she thought the discussion were becoming a little too complicated.

“You mean you know you did wrong, and you hate the fact?”