The Dangerous Years (15 page)

Timidly letting herself into the room, she called, and Joan appeared from the farther room, and stood in the doorway, looking blankly at her mother, waiting for her to speak.

“Oh, Joan, my dear,” whispered the mother, groping towards the dressing-table and reaching for the bottle of eau-de-Cologne. “My head! I could not bear it. I feel so restless. I could not sleep. I had to move about. I've been out walking, I don't know where; if only I could throw this off!”

Joan stood there without response. Mary paused, and in that moment saw that the girl was suffering too.

“Don't blame me, darling,” she said. “I can't help
these attacks. I shall get rid of them in time.” Another pause. “But tell me, what is the matter? You look dreadful.”

“Did you go far?” said Joan, coldly.

“Joan!” Her mother was hurt.

“Well! I can't help it, Mother. I've had a letter from John. It came just after lunch and I've been waiting to talk to you ever since. He must have been to Limpsfield, after me. He is absolutely impossible! We parted with quite definite resolutions to separate, and I told him why—or I thought I had told him why. But I might have been punching a bag of sand. He has come back to the charge, utterly unaltered. He says I'm making mountains out of molehills. It
would
be mountains! He can't get away from mountains! And that's that!”

Mary was conscious only of a sense of relief, and this again made her realise how she was slipping from that fine, selfless posture maintained since her husband's death, at such cost to her emotional resilience. Her own selfishness stared at her, like a hog from a sty.

“Since that is his frame of mind, if you can call it a mind, I know that he will come after me. And what am I to do with him when he turns up? What
can
we do with a man like that in Paris, amongst all these strangers whom we hardly know? It will be like an iceberg drifting into the tropics, gathering more and more fog round it.”

“He cannot be as cold as that, darling. No man is so utterly without … without …” but she stopped, unable to say what this power might be, though she could feel it beating in her veins, rejuvenating flesh and blood, terrifying her with reckless joy. Joy! At such a moment, with her daughter in desperate need of Sympathy and help!

But Joan was not so passive.

“If he comes here, I am going. We must get away from him, Mother. I am sorry to break up the party. But that's how it is. He has no right to pursue me.”

“Well, he's your husband …”

“Yes, in name! In name! That's just it. I don't know what one has to do to prove anything. It's so revolting. Four years, Mother. You can't understand; the misery and shame of it. Half reluctant myself, but knowing nothing is complete without it. The fool! The fool! Why didn't he knock me on the head, and force me with violence? I'd have welcomed that. At least it would have made up my mind for me, released me from all this ghastly politeness and evasion. I was as frightened as he was. But a man has no right to be so. It's not as though there is anything wrong with him. You have only to look at him. Oh, Mother, please understand me, please help me.”

The girl broke down, and began to weep, and Mary took her in her arms, drawing her down beside her on the end of the bed.

“There dear, there darling. Don't give way like this. We shall find it all works out. Perhaps if John comes here we could persuade him to see Doctor Batten.”

The suggestion caused the young wife to wrest herself from her mother's arms and start across the room.

“My God! What a thought! Picture the consultation! The inarticulate mountaineer, towering on his great limbs over the doctor, making his confession of something lacking in his noble physique.”

“Nonsense, I don't believe it is lacking!”

“You wouldn't know, Mother, you wouldn't know!” The cry was almost a wail of despair. It turned the girl to anger again. She flashed round on her mother, shaking her fist aloft, as though denouncing all heights, all concerns with height and the effort to rise. “I don't know, either. That's the maddening thing. All this cloistered life, all the ignorance! How am I to judge? I can't believe in any men, now. They are all self-concerned. Look at this man here, this Colonel Batten! I can see what he is after. It's something discreditable, I'm certain. Why is he
hiding over here, with nothing definite to do, except to plot and plan to exploit that child?”

Both women were now angry, and from a complication of causes that made sympathy impossible.

“Joan, you are talking hysterical nonsense, quite unlike yourself. Whatever makes you lose control like this? I am sorry for you both, you and John.” She wanted to keep the colonel out of the argument, to shield him, perhaps. Misgivings moved secretly at the back of her mind, but she would not recognise them here. She had enough to do, under the stress of divided allegiance. “I would suggest that you both go off to Switzerland if John comes here after you. At least, it means that he wants you, and is loyal to you.”

“Wants me! Wants me! What a hollow farce, all this collegiate emotion, if it can be called emotion. I don't know what to say. I wish I did. I do not accuse you, Mother; but I wish we might have been a little less soulful all the while I was growing up. Now it is impossible for me to break away from that, to make any overture that might wake John, release him from whatever it is that keeps him tied down to the level of a schoolboy. I feel more like a Girl Guide than a wife!”

Nothing could come of this argument, for neither was capable of being honest about her own feelings. But Mary knew that she must not let Joan see what was happening. The contrast would be too much. Here was the ebb and flow of desire indeed; but at all the wrong times. She must conceal from Joan the fact that something desperate was carrying her outside herself, away from the devoted life of the past fifteen years, the selfless widowhood. Peace was to be expected now, at fifty. But instead! She stared at her daughter, her eyes bright, her face the face of a girl. And Joan, gaunt, haunted, hungry and afraid to touch the fruit, stared back at her.

Mary saw pain, and distrust, in her daughter's eyes.

“What do you mean?” she demanded, with no relevance to Joan's last words. It was the unspoken accusation to which she referred.

“I mean that I went out, after finding you gone. And I saw you in the Luxembourg Gardens with those two men and the child.”

“There's no need to make a melodrama of it, Joan. Whatever do you suppose I was doing there with them? I met Colonel Batten as I was going out after lunch, and he asked me to go along to collect the boy, and then when we got to the Gardens, we encountered Mr. Sturm, that really rather nice old American. A very kind man, I thought.”

“As kind as the wolf in Red Riding Hood, I should say.”

“You're being romantic and mysterious about that child. I cannot see what …”

“No, but his father can. That is evident enough. But after all, it is none of my business. Only I think you should keep out of it. One can see that something is going on, though, and I would not trust either of those two.”

Mary was horrified to find herself about to quarrel again. She turned away, forcing herself to be silent. During this uncertain pause, the house telephone rang. She was grateful for the interruption.

Joan stood watching her, waiting to see the effect of her words; though she was still without suspicion of her mother's particular interest in Colonel Batten. Mary turned to her, the telephone held at arm's-length.

“You had better come, Joan. It is John. He is downstairs.”

Joan's cheeks paled, and she moved her tongue over her lips.

“I won't see him,” she whispered. “Say that I am out. I must have time to think it over. He should keep to our agreement. No, I won't …!”

Mary held out the telephone.

“Come, Joan. You cannot refuse. It is quite unfair. He has come all this way. You have a duty to him.…”

“Well, I suppose I must. He will have heard us, in any case. But what am I to say, what can I do?”

“I had better leave you together. It is not a moment for three of us, Joan. I want to help you, my darling; but I cannot wholly agree with you. I love John too, and I must leave you together …”

“Mother, you can't let me be alone with him.…”

Mary spoke to John on the telephone, asking him to come up.

“Well, that decides for me,” said Joan, bitterly. “It's none of it my fault, Mother. I want to emphasise that.”

“It never is, darling. You must have learned that, surely. Isn't that the teaching of history? But I'll slip out, after I have greeted him. You realise, I've not seen him since the summer vacation; and all was well then, or appeared to be.”

“Yes, appeared to be!”

A knock at the door. It opened, and a tall figure stooped to enter, though he need not have done so; but Joan saw the characteristic action, and her lips moved in anguish again.

Mary kissed him, and he stooped over his mother-in-law like a lover, murmuring tenderly to her. Then he looked up, at his wife. His eyes were obstinate, frightened, and he quickly veiled them with sternness, the mask of official male-dom. He drew himself up, and his six-foot-four figure, burly and powerful, was forbidding in its massiveness.

“I'll leave you together, John,” said Mary, gently. He nodded, without looking at her again, and she slipped away into the other room, snatched up a coat belonging to Joan, and fled to the lift. She had no idea what to do with herself, and she was cold, for the night had set hard. She went down to the lounge, a draughty place, except for
a long glass screen because the hotel doors opened directly into it from the street. She switched on an electric fire, and sat down before it with a pile of thumbed journals, most of them trade papers two or three years old. She was trembling, partly with physical discomfort, and certainly with distress, not only for Joan, but for herself.

All was quiet, for the hotel was almost empty. One or two people came and went, and Mary sat there, trying to be interested in wood-pulp mills, and cement works, and the building of dams in North Africa. Then once again she felt the rush of icy air from outside as the doors swung open. Looking up and into the mirror-panel before her, she saw Colonel Batten at the desk, taking his key from the hall porter. She knew she ought to shrink into herself, to hide from him. But instead, she looked round, and he saw her. She watched him put the key in his pocket, pause, then approach.

“We didn't finish our talk this afternoon,” he said, quietly. “The call of duty, Mary.”

He took her hand, and held it as he sat down beside her.

“Mary! I haven't even been sure I may call you that. But I want to ask you; what has brought us together? The last thing in the world I expected, at my time of life. I'm not a youngster, Mary. And … and … I'm in no position to …”

“And what about me, Tom?” she said, pressing his hand, turning her own in it to show her surrender, to draw him closer.

“Does that mean …?” he whispered.

“I don't know what anything means,” she answered. “I am utterly at a loss. My world is tumbling about my ears. There is Joan upstairs, quarrelling with her husband, who has just arrived, searching for her, refusing to let her go. And he has every right not to, I suppose, though I can understand her feelings.”

The colonel leaned towards her, furtively looking round at the man in the desk.

“That's her life, Mary. What about yours? Where do you come in? May I ask that; may I, Mary, my dear? How absurd it sounds, after we have known each other for a couple of weeks, is it? Or is it a lifetime? I can't say. But I love you, and I have no right to, no right to.”

He touched her face with his other hand, and she turned to look at him. The boyish bewilderment surely could conceal nothing dishonest. What was all this gossip about him, and his affairs in England? What was Joan's animosity?”

“Poor Tom,” she said. “I am sorry for you. Sorry for us both.”

“Why, Mary, does it affect you too; are your feelings involved. Does that mean you …?”

“I'm afraid so, Tom. I'm foolish too. I believe I love you, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary.”

“It means trust also, Mary. It must mean that too!”

“Well, I cannot speak about that, Tom. But love means even more, perhaps. It is quite irrational. I would want to help you, if I could, whatever the world says.”

“I've been a fool; a stupid fool, Mary. If you can help me out of that …”

He broke off, struggling with something that he could not put into words. “But whatever happens, I love you. It's not of much use to you, maybe. I'm not a free man. And I am a poor one who has muddled along since the war, making a mess of things, as far as I can see. Trying to be a business man, and completely fooling myself. I doubt even if I am quite straight, so far as that goes. Though I may plead ignorance rather than cunning, Mary.”

“I don't feel very learned about life, at least since we came to France, Tom,” said Mary, drawing him to her. They kissed each other sadly, and then again gladly.

“We can't stay here in public,” he whispered, after a long and embarrassed silence. “What can we do? I must talk to you. No. Talking is useless. We're too old for that. There is so little time left, my dear. If we are not reckless now, we shall lose all that remains.”

He touched her again, incredulously. She felt his fingers through her sleeve. She felt them trembling.

“Don't, please. Don't worry about things. What is the matter? I know nothing about you, Tom. Nothing. We have hardly met. So late in life it takes … it is impossible to do things quickly. Why are you trembling…?”

She could feel her world crumbling away; a dreadful, but welcome weakness overcoming her. But the emotion was half-recognisable; it recalled a self lost for over a quarter of a century. But such continuity of mood, such a repetition of experience, could not possibly be real! Yet she had to respond to this man pleading silently at her side, to let him know that she understood his appeal, his distress; she did not know what to call it. The fingers so eloquent on her arm!