Theirs Was The Kingdom (85 page)

“How do you know?” she said, unexpectedly. “You’ve never been married before.”

“Well, of course I haven’t, but damn it, I’ve watched other people and I’ve read and thought about it.”

“Yes,” she said, “and maybe that’s the trouble. What I mean is you watch and read and think most of the time. The real
you
never comes out, except in flashes like just now. That was almost worth risking being drowned. It made me feel… well… important to you. For just a minute I had the feeling that, if it had happened somewhere more private, I would have had a chance to discover you as a person. You would have treated me as a woman ought to be treated by a man and I would have loved that. It would have made everything more real, if you see what I mean.”

He had no more than a glimmering of what she was trying to say, sensing only that she was as primitive as a South Sea Islander, with all the instincts and appetites of a savage, hopelessly at odds with her environment and even more so with the times in which they lived. In the way that he had been able to see the Exmoor hills as he pictured them a million years ago, he caught a glimpse of her stripped of those fancy, flouncy clothes and removed from this sedate landscape, a woman effortlessly involved in the basics of existence, uncluttered by fads and fashions and prohibitions, groaning under him on the floor of some prehistoric cave, as she clamoured for seed representing continuity. In most ways more animal than human. He saw that much, but what to do about it was something else, although it did cross his mind then that her real personality would never emerge until they were man and wife and lying in one another’s arms. He said, at last, “We’re right for one another, Romayne. I haven’t the least doubt of that. And we could be very happy together, I’m sure of that, too. It isn’t long now, so why waste the rest of the day arguing the toss? Let’s go on down to that spinney and picnic. We can light a fire there and boil up the kettle,” and he put his arms round her and kissed her on the mouth.

3

It wasn’t long certainly but, in the event, it was too long by more than a month.

Three weeks later, as they were bowling along Oxford Street some time after eleven o’clock at night, after dining with a maiden aunt of hers who lived in Bayswater, and wanted to consult them about a wedding gift, she called sharply to the cabby, telling him to stop outside a costumier’s she was in the habit of visiting from time to time. It was a large, opulent establishment called McCready and Moffat, the place where she had bought the hat that ended its brief life in the military canal.

“Why, it’s still there!” she exclaimed. “I made sure it would have gone. Oh, I must have it, Giles. It’s adorable!” As the cab stopped, she pointed excitedly to a scarlet gable bonnet, perched on a stand in the centre of a recently dressed window. “Isn’t it chic? Wouldn’t it just set off my going-away costume?”

“You can’t have it now,” he said. “It’s eleven-thirty and they’ll be closing.”

“Rubbish,” she said, skipping out on to the pavement before he could stop her, “it’s Saturday night and they stay open until mid night on Saturdays. Besides, if I don’t have it now it’ll be gone by the time I get here on Monday,” and without waiting for him to follow, she sailed into the shop and approached the millinery counter.

He followed reluctantly, telling the cabby to wait. The shop was still open certainly but there were no other customers. At various counters yawning girls were folding lengths of material and draping dust-sheets over dummies. The girl at the millinery counter looked tired enough to drop, a very pale, red-haired woman, younger than Romayne, with hair parted in the middle and looped back over her ears. She wore a plain grey dress and was holding herself very straight, Giles noticed, but there was something about the turned-down mouth and drawn expression that suggested more than physical exhaustion. He saw another girl at the glove counter glance sourly across at them as a floor-walker, a paunched man with a mottled complexion and a walrus moustache, wiped the bored expression from his face and shot both cuffs. Romayne said, briskly, “The red gable bonnet in the window. How much is it?” and the pale girl said, with a strong Welsh accent, “I… I’m not sure, ma’am…”

He had a feeling of impending disaster. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the floor-walker glide forward and sensed extreme hostility in every girl within earshot, but the floor-walker said, sharply, “Then find out, Miss Davies! Don’t just stand there!” and the girl’s tired eyes flashed as she said, still politely, “In the centre of the window, it is, Mr. Bryanston. Mean taking everything out to get at it…” But then under his stern gaze she faltered, but went on, after an imperceptible pause, “Just finished dressing the window, we have, and it’s gone closing time.”

The floor-walker opened his mouth, presumably to roar his indignation, but Giles cut in, “Reserve it, whatever the price. If you really want it, that is,” Romayne snapped, “Of course I want it. I know my own mind, don’t I? And I want it now,” and to the girl, “Get it!”

It was like watching a fuse splutter the last few inches towards a powder barrel. He knew, somehow, that the Welsh shop assistant was going to erupt, that everyone in the shop was watching and waiting for the eruption, as though poised to dive for cover. He heard the floor-walker gibber, “Get it…
get
it, you hear? The customer wants it now…
Get
it!” But suddenly the girl braced herself, seeming, in a curious way, to absorb the dignity that everyone about her had lost. Her knuckles gleamed white on the scissors she was holding and she seemed to rock a little, as though on the point of making a leap. Her complexion turned a shade paler. In the hard light of the overhead lamps it seemed the colour of cheese.

“No!” she said. “No, I won’t get it! Sooner die, I would. Sooner die right here where I stand!”

Suddenly, for Giles, the images blurred and fused so that he had no more than an impression of several things happening simultaneously. The floor-walker raised his hands in supplication and the sound that emerged from him was not a roar but a squeak that might have been that of a child on whose foot somebody had trodden. At the same time Romayne swung round, moving towards the window, as though determined to help herself to the bonnet. The mousy-looking girl at the glove counter popped out from behind her barrier, grinning like an urchin who has just seen a barrel-organ monkey perform a somersault. Then the girl in grey let the scissors fall with a clatter and keeled right over, disappearing from sight behind the stacked counter.

Full awareness returned to him then and he grabbed Romayne by the shoulder, just as she had raised her hand to the catch that fastened the window backing. He spun her round, hissing, “
Out!
Out of here, before I cram the damned hat down your throat!” And then, to the floor-walker, “Look after her, you fool! Can’t you see she’s ill? Hasn’t anybody got any damned sense…?” And without quite realising how it was accomplished, he whirled Romayne across the shop and through the door on to the crowded pavement, holding her tightly above the elbow while he lugged open the cab door and bundled her in so roughly that she pitched on her hands and knees in a flurry of skirts and petticoats. Seconds later he had followed her, shouting to the cabby to drive on, and by the time Romayne had scrambled to the seat they were crossing the Circus and the shop was a hundred yards behind them.

He said, in a voice that went some way towards expressing the terrible anger he felt for her, “That was unforgivable! That poor little devil was sick! Sick and exhausted! She’d been fifteen hours on her feet, serving spoiled little brats like you, and they aren’t allowed to sit on pain of the sack, do you realise that? My God, but I was ashamed for you! Right down in my stomach, you understand? How can you be so… so damned callous? How the hell would
you
like to stand there at the beck and call of every little bitch who fancied a hat, or a length of ribbon at this time of night? And for what, in God’s name? I’ll tell you! I’ll tell you! Five shillings a week, and the mush they feed living-in girls at those places! Five shillings, and halfpenny in the pound spiffs if she’s lucky. Less fines for ‘refusing.’ She’s probably being fined now, the minute she comes out of her faint. Or sacked, more likely. Turned loose without a character, with a choice of starvation or domestic service and someone like you holding the whip over her…!”

She said in a strangled voice, “Have you
quite
finished? Have you done humiliating me?”

“
Humiliating
you! By God, I’d really like to humiliate you! I’d like to peel off your drawers and take the skin from your backside in front of them all, just to prove you weren’t God Almighty! This is the end, you understand? I can’t stand any more of this. Not another day! Not an hour!”

In the dark interior of the cab he felt her stiffen. She said nothing for a moment and then, relatively calmly, “You really mean that, Giles? It isn’t just another show of temper?”

“I mean it,” he said. “I’ll write to your father in the morning and you can sue me for breach of promise if you’ve a mind to.” And he turned away from her, gloomily watching the reflection of the gas globes on the railings of the palace as the cab moved at a trot into Buckingham Palace Road.

There were no more exchanges after that. They sat in silence until the cab pulled up outside her father’s house and he handed her out. She went up the steps slowly and he stood watching her from the pavement but as she raised her hand to the knocker he called, “Wait!” and ran up beside her. She turned then so that he could see her face in the subdued glow of the porch light. She was very pale but her expression, so far as he could judge, was blank.

“Well, Giles?”

“It wouldn’t work. You must see that. We’re different, utterly different. We see everything differently. All we’d succeed in doing would be to make each other wretched. You see that, don’t you?”

“Yes,” she said slowly, “as things are, I do.”

“They can’t ever be any different.”

“You think not? Well, I don’t. What happened back there wasn’t as important as you make it sound. It was just that I didn’t think, that it never once occurred to me I was doing anything other than buying a hat.”

“But that’s just it! You didn’t think and you won’t ever think. Maybe it wouldn’t matter to most men, but it matters to me. Things like that are important to me and if you haven’t realised that by now you never will. You’d be much better off with someone more like yourself, someone who could have laughed that awful scene off.” He paused. “I’m sorry. I’m desperately sorry for both of us. For your father, too, in a way.”

“Giles?”

“Well?”

“Suppose… suppose we ran off?
Now.
This minute. To Gretna Green, where we could be married at once, with nobody but ourselves. Or not even that. Somewhere abroad where we’d be by ourselves.”

“How would that solve anything?”

“But it would, I know it would. We’d be together all the time, we’d be lovers instead of showpieces for everyone we know, and it
would
make a difference. If we’d done that a long time ago this kind of thing wouldn’t have happened. I’d have belonged to you. I’d have felt settled and… different. Different inside, you see? It’s terribly hard to explain but I know I’m right. I
know
it, you understand? I… I’d grow differently. I’d change into the kind of person you want, that you wouldn’t be ashamed of. Why can’t we do that first and think about everything else afterwards?”

Her naïveté astounded him. That she could imagine, for a single moment, that intimacy and removal from all outside contacts would transform her magically into an entirely different person, seemed to him self-delusion amounting to hysteria. But he saw also that nothing he could say would persuade her that her thinking it was an illusion. He said, “No, Romayne. It wouldn’t change anything. All it would do is to upset a lot of people. I’ll write to your father tomorrow and make him understand somehow. You think about it quietly, and you’ll understand, too.”

He went down the steps and turned towards the palace, having no clear idea where he was going or where he would sleep since he had planned to spend the weekend at her home. It was an airless night, with the street lamps burning steadily and very little traffic about. He felt numb, no longer able to think clearly and logically. He found himself listening to the sound of his own footfalls on the flagstones, as if he was walking alone down an endless corridor in a poor light.

4

Sunday passed and Monday. He said nothing of the quarrel to anyone, avoiding contact with all whom it was possible to avoid. When someone spoke to him he replied in monosyllables, pretending to be occupied with calls that took him away from home and Tybalt’s countinghouse, where he had a small office of his own, used by George when he was about the place. On Tuesday he closeted himself here and made yet another attempt to set on paper to Sir Clive what had occurred, but the words seemed banal and stilted and finally he tossed the page into the wastepaper basket and went out towards London Bridge, threading his way through slow-moving traffic without any clear idea where he was going until he found himself outside the Law Courts. There was a cab rank here and he stood hesitating beside it. Suddenly the prospect of writing to Sir Clive seemed cowardly, and he said aloud, “God damn it, I’ll tell him to his face. It’s mostly his fault she’s like she is,” and he signalled a four-wheeler, giving the driver the address of Sir Clive’s London office where he was likely to be at this hour of the day.