The Jury (41 page)

The notion of sailing with Elisabeth for America grew insensibly into a plan. By his constant dwelling on it, it became real, practicable, even wise. He made tentative preparations, ever and again reminding himself that he was not yet committed to the choice towards which he was drifting. Meanwhile his partner, Cradock, was being kept in the dark. Old Cradock had always been a good friend, benevolently interested in Daphne, and because Roderick knew that he would strongly disapprove of the whole situation he felt a
kind of guilt towards Cradock. For Roderick to be away from the office during November was no new thing: for years it had been his whim, a convenient one for Cradock, to stay in London throughout August, when Cradock went fishing in Scotland, and go in search of a second summer at the end of the English autumn. There was no reason why he should not have discussed his impending departure with Cradock, except his invincible aversion to stuffing the old man with lies. For if Cradock once got an inkling of the truth, that all was not well between Roderick and Daphne, nothing could prevent a painful scene, fatherly exhortation rising to anger and culminating perhaps in interference and obstruction. Cradock had given him more than one opening. “You're looking rather run-down these days, Roderick. Time you had your holiday, my boy.” But Roderick had studiously ignored them, saying to himself: It's no good speaking yet. I haven't made up my mind. He didn't in fact make up his mind until six o'clock on the thirtieth of October, and by that time Cradock was on his way home. I can't tell him now, that's obvious. Telephone? He won't be there yet. And besides … It would sound so feeble a story over the telephone: “Oh, I forgot to mention—I shan't be coming tomorrow. Going away for a few weeks.” No: it would be better to telegraph in the morning, and then write a letter.

His decision filled him with energy and agitation. Too impatient to wait for a bus, he walked home, reaching Merrion Square inside the half-hour. Letting himself in with his latchkey, he was greeted portentously by Mrs Tucker, who trotted into the hall while he was taking his overcoat off.

She addressed his back. “Beg pardon, sir!”

“Yes, Mrs Tucker?”

“Madam's gone to bed.” He wheeled round: she faced him triumphantly. It's you that's brought her to this, with your goings-on, she seemed to be saying.

“Gone to bed! Do you mean she's ill?”

“She's not so well,” asserted Mrs Tucker firmly.

“Has the doctor been sent for?”

“Indeed he has. He's been and gone.”

“Well?”

“No cause for alarm, he said. They always do. Better after
a night's sleep. The same as they said about my poor mother. But she never got out of her bed again except to ride to her grave. The doctor gave me …”

Roderick stood rigid. He was listening, but no longer to Mrs Tucker. In moments of excitement Mrs Tucker, ordinarily rather sullen, was a garrulous woman, and Roderick had evolved a technique for not hearing what she said. The same technique had come in useful in his dealings with Daphne on the two or three occasions when her grievance or her enthusiasm had found vent in loquacity. When a spate of words threatened, his mind instinctively closed against it, and he was attentive now, not to Mrs Tucker, but to his own mental conflict. Daphne ill! Was she really ill? How could he leave her then? How could he tell her? Was he, having screwed his courage up, to be beaten after all?

Mrs Tucker went on chattering, till he said abruptly, unhearing: “Yes, yes. I see. I'll go and speak to her.”

“I'm getting madam a nice cup of malted milk,” remarked Mrs Tucker, offended by the interruption.

He was already on his way upstairs. A painful self-consciousness was at war with his anxiety. The situation between himself and Daphne being what it was, their friendship suspended and her heart bitter against him, he would have given a lot to avoid the coming interview. His solicitude was genuine enough, but Daphne, he feared, would take angry pleasure in dismissing it as the merest civility, and hypocritical at that.

He tapped diffidently on the bedroom door, and after a moment's pause, hearing no response, he tiptoed in, thinking she must be asleep. But she was not asleep. Propped against three pillows, she was sitting up in bed, a book lying unregarded in her lap.

“Hullo!” said Roderick. He was nervous. If she chose to treat him as an intruder, he could do nothing.

She glanced up. She was a little flushed, but looked anything but ill. Roderick noted with surprise how extraordinarily pretty she was, and his heart lightened, for hers was a prettiness that could not co-exist with anger or un-happiness. “Oh, it's you,” she said.

“What's wrong? You're not going to be ill?”

She smiled, rather shyly, and held out a hand to him. “Come and talk to me, Rod.” He took the hand gratefully and sat down on the side of the bed.

“Are you in pain?” he asked.

“No,” she said softly. “That's just it. I'm not in pain any more. Don't be polite to me, Rod. Let's be …” She left the sentence unfinished, her meaning sufficiently apparent. “I'm not ill, don't worry,” she said, reading his face. “I'm well again.”

He smiled. “That's why you've come to bed, I suppose?”

“Yes.” She laughed, enjoying the absurdity, but added with grave happiness: “It's true all the same. I've come to bed to think. It was so unexpected, and so wonderful.”

It crossed his mind that perhaps she was light-headed. “I'm not sure I quite understand,” he confessed. “What has happened?”

“I suddenly got well: that's what happened. Well in my mind, I mean.”

He gazed at her in concern, but with a flutter of marvellous hope in his heart. “Do you mean——?”

“Yes. Don't ask me how. I don't know. But I suddenly knew that I didn't mind any more.”

“Didn't mind about …?” But that was something he dared not put into words, lest he should be deluding himself.

“About you and Elisabeth,” she explained.

Her use of that name, which she had never uttered before, told him everything and more than everything. He was in the presence of a miracle, something he had absurdly entertained in his wilder imaginings, but had never quite believed in or confidently looked for. It was utopian, impossible, like heaven itself. Yet it had happened. Here was Daphne unmistakably telling him so. In a flash he recalled that other reconciliation, away back in the summer when they had walked together along the cliffs at Widdicot. But that had been more than half hysterical, a grudging surrender, product of sheer exhaustion. This was different: the difference shone clearly in Daphne's eyes, ran warmly in Daphne's fingers, which he was still holding. Something indeed had happened to her.

He bent over her hand, feeling humbled and unworthy.
Now that Daphne was restored to him his first impulse was to give up everything that had made her unhappy. He laid his head in her lap, and after a long silence he said self-accusingly: “I had planned to go away with her tonight.”

Daphne's hand still rested in his hair. “Had you?” Her voice was still rich and warm.

He looked up, half-smiling, half-ashamed. “Yes. And to America tomorrow. She's got engagements there.”

Daphne met him with unflinching affection. “I think it will do you good.”

“But of course,” he said, “this alters everything.”

She agreed. “It makes everything happy.”

“I mean,” he explained, “I shan't go now.”

“Oh, but you must,” she said quickly. “I want you to go. And
now
above all times. It will be lovely for you—yes, and for me too.”

“But don't you see,” he protested, “I don't think I——”

“You don't think you want to go,” she said. “I know, darling. I know how you feel. But that's only for the moment. You do really want to go, I'm sure. And you'll be sure presently. And I'm quite quite sure
I
want you to go.”

It was unbelievable. “You
want
me to go!” Unbelievable, yet—in that fantastic moment—visibly true.

“It will be lovely for you,” said Daphne, glowing. “Just the
sort
of change you need. And such fun for me when you come back,” she ended, with a sigh of content.

“I shall love coming back,” he said simply. The profound truth of the statement surprised him. He perceived, too, that by these words he was already committed to going. A ghost of his old doubt assailed him. Was it fair, was it safe, to count so much on this newborn Daphne? Was it perhaps only a mood in her, an ecstasy, doomed to short life, and to be followed by a reaction of misery? Or was it, again he asked, was this lightheartedness the effect of a temporary lightheadedness, a golden confusion of the mind due to want of sleep? “You've been having bad nights, haven't you?”

She nodded. “But I shall sleep tonight.”

“Very likely,” he answered. “But we must make sure of that. Are you
sure
you don't feel ill? No pain anywhere? No fever?”

“No. Only happiness. It's too much for me. I'm almost limp with it.”

“What did Cartwright say?”

Daphne frowned and laughed, indignation mingling with amusement. “My dear, it was too absurd, her sending for poor Dr Cartwright! I
told
her I wasn't ill.”

“But what did he say, nevertheless?” persisted Roderick.

“Oh, he tried to let me down lightly. Didn't call me a humbug to my face. Said a night's rest would do me good. You know. And that'll cost you half a guinea, Rod. What a shame! But tell me about this trip to America. Does Elisabeth know you're going with her?”

What a shrewd question! he thought. How well she knows me! “Not for certain. I wanted to talk to you first.”

With unaffected pleasure she exclaimed: “How lovely! And what a lovely surprise for her!”

Moved beyond speech he put his arms round her, and for a while they held each other in silence, perfectly at rest. Roderick felt this to be the most intimate moment of their marriage, and with an instinct not to impair its bloom by trying to express the inexpressible, he shied away from his emotion and sought refuge in practicalities. “I think you ought to have some sleep,” he said, gently releasing her. Twenty-six hours later, outside a Southampton hotel, he was to be confronted by a plump bowler-hatted stranger with words of hideous import in his mouth; and then, then only, he was to recall a phrase of Mrs Tucker's which he had never consciously heard: “The doctor gave me some medicine to make her sleep.” From that moment, realizing how incredible the truth must sound in the face of what Mrs Tucker would testify against him, he must put his trust in lying, and with the less reluctance because he knew himself innocent not only of what they would charge him with, but of anything but grief for the Daphne he had so newly found and so quickly lost. In the long ordeal that was to follow, many hearts would beat for him. His father, his friend Mark Perryman, Elisabeth herself: he was aware, almost continuously, of these presences about him. But most of all it was the memory of Daphne that sustained him, of Daphne as he had last seen her: it was for Daphne's love and with Daphne's courage that he schemed
and fought to save a life which, but for this menace to it, would perhaps have seemed hardly worth the saving.

But into this moment there came no premonition of what the future held. “I think you ought to try to get some sleep,” he said, and he remembered, suddenly, nights of sleeplessness he had suffered during his last visit to Heidelberg, when the excitement of a dawning new delight had kept the wished-for sleep away. He remembered the pleasant little German doctor he had resorted to, and he remembered … “I've got the very thing for you,” he said, exultantly. “I got it in Heidelberg. Wait a minute.” After rummaging for a while in his own bedroom he returned with a celluloid pill-box in his hand. “This is good stuff. It gave me fifteen hours of perfect sleep and left not a rack behind,” explained Roderick gaily. “But I got hold of a second dose, for emergencies.” On the bedside table was a glass of water which Mrs Tucker had placed there three minutes before his arrival home. “Is this water fresh?”

He dropped a white tablet into the water, crushed it with a teaspoon, and stood watching it dissolve.

“I say, Daffy!”

“Yes?”

“Wouldn't you rather I didn't go tonight? It's not a bit necessary.” He knew, suddenly, that it was both unnecessary and odious.

He handed her the tumbler, and she took a sip. “It doesn't taste
too
nasty. No, I'd like you to do as you had planned. Say good-bye now, at once, and leave me to have my sleep.”

He bent over to kiss her, but his eyes were troubled. “It seems so … unfriendly,” he complained.

“Silly,” said Daphne, smiling with a child's candour. “Don't you see, Rod, it's just perfect, this moment, this goodbye. It wouldn't be quite the same tomorrow.”

He was persuaded. But he felt unhappy and ashamed, hating the situation his stubborn weakness had created. “I shan't be away long, you know.” He stood hovering, about to go. “Mrs Tucker said something about malted milk. I shall send up a biscuit or two with it, in case you're woken by hunger.”

She drank her potion. “Kiss me again.” He kissed her, and wished he need not go. “Good-bye!”

When he reached the door she called to him. “Roddy!”

“Yes?”

“You'll give my love to Elisabeth, won't you?”

He delivered the message, shamefacedly, at eight o'clock that same evening: by which hour Daphne was already lost in dreams, adrift on a dark hurrying tide.

Mark Perryman: journalist

Daphne Strood: wife of Rod-crick Strood

Roderick Strood: architect

*Lucy Prynne: unmarried

Mrs Prynne: Lucy's mother