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  Outside in the street below them the traffic growled and rolled and murmured. Above them on the mantelpiece the little brass clock ticked away the minutes. On the black velvet of the hearth-rug lay the flame-coloured dress, a living pool of colour. The afternoon wore on.

  That night for the first time for eighteen months Manon Granta left unlocked the door opening out of her bedroom into her husband’s.

  wear? she did not Know where Eric Somerset would be taking her. Somewhere, she supposed though, where one changed. He would have told her otherwise.

  Chapter X

  Marjorie Alone

  From the window of her flat at half-past six on a late July evening Marjorie Fairfield watched Ransom’s car vanish round the corner of Albert Road. It had not been a particularly happy afternoon. Their affair was now in its eighteenth month. And an affair is constrained by the same laws as marriage. Free love does not exist. There is no such thing, because no man can control his own reactions. And Marjorie and Ransom had reached that point of intimacy when they had nothing further to learn from one another, nothing further to say to one another, nothing further to do together. They had no longer any secrets from one another. They had reached that point of intimacy when in marriage it is necessary to rely for the stability of a relationship on such common interests as children, bank balances, social positions and advancement, the various exigencies of business and hospitality. Ransom and Marjorie had no such common interests, because they had nothing but their love for one another, and that love had grown quiescent, one meeting was now very like another. They had begun in fact to settle down, to settle down into a situation that only its novelty had been able to excuse.

  It had not been a happy afternoon. Marjorie had been difficult and fretful, fretful because Ransom no longer, she felt, really loved her. He was charming and patient and considerate. But then he was that to everyone. He had pretty things to say to everyone. If only he would be angry with her, and unkind and thoughtless. If only his treatment of her could be different from his treatment of every other woman. Then she would know that she meant something in his life that none of the others meant, that none of the others could ever mean. For she could never rid herself of the fear that it was only his laziness that kept him faithful to her, that he could be just as happy, just as much in love with any of the others. For weeks now they had been on the brink of disagreement, and this afternoon Ransom seemed to have realised it.

  “I’m afraid we’re going to quarrel, little Marjorie,” he had said, “and I don’t want to quarrel. But perhaps if we do quarrel, at the end of it all we’ll understand each other better.”

  She had laughed rather bitterly. “Perhaps if we do quarrel,” she had said, “it’ll be for altogether, Ransom.”

  But he had shaken his head. “Oh, no,” he had answered, “we matter much too much to one another for that to happen. There’ll be a quarrel. And for six months, for a year, for two years perhaps we shan’t see each other, and then one day we shall find we need each other and we shall ring each other up, and we shall find that things are just as they have always been. Just as they have always been,” he had added,” only rather better.”

  With a savage jerk she pulled down the window, turned, walked out of the sitting-room into the bedroom, and pulled back the door of her wardrobe. What was she to wear? She did not know where Eric Somerset would be taking her. Somewhere, she supposed though, where one changed. He would have told her otherwise.

  What was it to be? The gold chiffon or the grey-green marocain, or that black moiré affair, with a red scarf flung round her neck. It was rather a jolly thing. Not that she was feeling in the least bit jolly. She would just as soon stay at home and read a book. She did not expect to enjoy herself particularly. Eric Somerset was a nice enough boy, but it would be rather an effort for four hours with someone she hardly knew.

  The moiré or the marocain! On the whole perhaps the moiré looked a better dress. He would prefer her probably in that. Men seemed to look on women as things to confer credit on themselves, like expensive cars.

  Oh, but she was unhappy though. If only she could know how much or how little she mattered in Ransom’s life. “Rather a lot, rather more than you think, perhaps.” That was what he had said to her at Lady Manon’s dance. She had remembered it, cherished it, as one would a keepsake. “Rather a lot, rather more than you think perhaps.” Had he meant it though? Was it just one of those charming things he found so easy, so irresistible it seemed, to say? She had been driven so often during the last months to ask herself whether he really loved her, whether if he had really cared he would have allowed their present impossible situation to continue. She had never for a moment dreamt at the beginning that he would tolerate it. Day after day she had expected him to come to her with some proposal. Not marriage, she had not expected that. But it had seemed inconceivable to her that he should not want her for himself. She had been ready to do anything he had asked of her. She was not afraid of being poor. She would work if he really wanted her, she would do anything. She had only herself to consider. It had not been for her though to make the first step. And the days had passed and he had done nothing. And she had tried to persuade herself that there was nothing unworthy in their relationship, that there was no actual difference between this and such an intrigue with a married woman as had received, if not the commendation, at least the sympathy of novelists and poets since the world’s beginning. She had not succeeded though. There was a difference. A difference of feeling, if not of fact. And there would rise before her the deadly fear that Ransom did not care for her enough to ask her to leave Everard.

  And it was in the face of that fear that she did not dare to leave Everard and the flat and again make the attempt to live on three pounds a week, dared not because she was afraid she might lose Ransom if she could no longer dress as he would have her dress; if living in dingy lodgings, she could no longer give their love its setting of cushioned comfort. If only they could discuss the thing. But they never had, and it seemed unlikely now that they ever would. Ransom seemed to have accepted Everard as an essential figure in the background of her life, one of the conditions of living with which one had to compromise, as one might have to accept a business that kept one at an office from six at night to the early hours of the morning.

  Once she had asked Ransom if he were not jealous of Everard.

  “Jealous?” he had exclaimed. “Why should I be? You don’t give me anything less because of him. You would never give me what you give him. It’s a different side of you.”

  And that was true. She did not give him anything less because of Everard. In the same way, Ransom had not robbed Everard of anything. What she was giving Ransom was something she had ceased for months to give to Everard. It was true. But it was wrong to be so matter of fact in love. If he cared enough he could not endure it. That was what it always came back to with her: did he care enough? She understood him so little really. She did not even know if his six months’ courtship of her had been as unrehearsed a business as it had seemed, or if the climax had been carefully prepared from the first moment he had met her. It might have been what it seemed to be, or again it might only have been that he preferred the waiting game, preferred it because it was so much more certain.

  For six months he had not spoken one word of love to her. For six months he had not tried even to hold her hand. But for six months, some four times a week, he had come between tea and dinner to talk to her. And every ten days or so they had dined and danced together. Quietly, unassumingly, unbeknown to her, he had woven himself into the fabric of her life. And then at the very point when he had come to make himself indispensable to her, he had gone out of England for eight weeks, leaving in her life a gap that no one else could fill. He had become essential to her. And she had realised then that to keep him in her life there was nothing she would deny him.

  He had gone away at exactly the right moment. He had returned at exactly the right moment, before she had had time to grow
accustomed to his absence. Was it from start to finish a rehearsed effect, or had he stumbled as she had done into this impossible relationship? That was how it had happened. That was how for eighteen months now the affair had stood. And God knew where it would end. To be a kept woman and to be unfaithful to the man who kept you. That was what it amounted to: in black and white those were the facts, interpret them how you chose. You might prevaricate and quibble and split hairs. But that’s what it amounted to. Everard clothed her, fed her, housed her, and paid her bills; and if that was not keeping a woman what was. And it was beside the point to ask what essential difference there was between a kept and married woman since in each case a man in return for certain privileges supported her.

  Convention in these matters drew a firmer line than logic. You could prove or disprove anything. But you knew definitely what people held to be honourable and what dishonourable, and whether they thought wrongly or rightly was beside the question. If you live by the laws you must be governed by the laws. She was a kept woman; and she was not faithful to the man who kept her. About as contemptible a thing, most people would say, as any woman could be; dishonour rooted in dishonour. And yet looking back it was hard to see where exactly she had gone wrong, hard to see where she would act differently if it had all to be done again. One thing had led so simply to another.

  If Leslie had lived it would have been different. But in its very nature that wild wooing of her had been foredoomed. She had never expected it to outlast the War—the War of which it was the growth and the expression. Her mother had beseeched her not to marry.

  “It’s madness, my dear, it’s madness,” she had said. “The War won’t last for ever. Leslie’s only a boy, just down from Cambridge. He’s got no money. He’ll have nothing to go back to afterwards. Do think, my dear, do think.”

  But Marjorie had scarcely listened. Afterwards, afterwards. How did she know that there would be any afterwards? Something had warned her that never again would she love or be loved so deeply. “If you miss this now,” that voice had said, “you will never have it. Whatever else in life comes twice, this will not come. You’ll have to pay for it probably if you take it. But there it is. You won’t have the chance again.” And in the autumn of 1914 one did not play for safety, one did not deny to the man who fought for you his right to happiness. She had been married three weeks before Leslie went abroad. Twenty days they had had together. Twenty days of which she had not often the courage nowadays to think. But she had known even then that life was never going to be as good for her again, had known it even when Leslie had held her in his arms whispering of how wonderful life would be when the War was over.

  “To have you always, darling, like this always, always. I’ll make you so happy. I’ll work for you. It’ll be so marvellous.”

  And she had smiled and raised her face to his; but she had known, all the time she had known, that this was everything, that this was the end even as it was the beginning. And knowing it, in those twenty days she had given prodigally all she had to give. For twenty days she had loved and had been loved. Those twenty days would make a whole lifetime rich.

  Her eyes had been dry and the pulse of her heart steady as she walked back from Victoria beside her mother. “I couldn’t understand how you were so calm that day,” her mother had said afterwards. And she had smiled. Why not, after all? Corpses usually are. And she had been a corpse that day. All that was alive in her was in the train speeding its way to Folkestone. “My life’s over,” she had told herself.

  And she had remained a corpse, a corpse with power to move, and do, and think, but not to feel; for five weeks she had remained one, till hope in one splendid rush had returned to her, till she had realised that the memory of those twenty days was not to die with her.

  Leslie never got the letter she had written him telling him the news. It was returned to her with the papers and valise that he had left behind him at headquarters before Neuve Chapelle. That was the only time she ever cried, when she found it unopened there among his other letters. “If only he had known,” she sobbed, “if only he had known.” But she was not unhappy, not really unhappy then. She had not lost Leslie. She would see his features mingling with hers in their child’s face. She would recognise one by one the things she had come to know and love in him; his way of saying and doing things, his attitudes, the way he had looked at her. “It’ll be a wonderful child,” she said; “we so loved each other, so much love went to the making of it. It won’t be like other children.” There had been dark moments for her during the seven months after Neuve Chapelle, but she had not been unhappy really. Leslie was still with her.

  When the baby died though, then, indeed, she had thought her heart was broken. To be told after those hours of agony that her child was dead, that nothing remained of Leslie, that she was alone in life. For days she had sobbed unceasingly. The news later that she would never be able to have another child did not affect her. What did that matter. Leslie was dead and the expression of their love was dead. And she who had lived only through Leslie and her love of him, she was alive still.

  Well, and she had faced things then, had taken as soon as she was well again that V.A.D. job at Portsmouth, had worked day after day, night after night, had scrubbed and cleaned and mended till her back had seemed to be breaking and her arms had ached to a point at which even pain was passed. For three years, those three, mad, intoxicating years, she had turned her back on pleasure. The other girls had not understood her, had thought her prim and stupid and superior. “Why could not she,” they asked, “do what the others did? They had lost lovers and husbands and had got over it. Had been widows more than once, some of them. But one didn’t chuck up the sponge in the early twenties. There was plenty of fun to be had still, plenty of young officers, and plenty of money to be spent on them. You were a fool not to take pleasure when it is offered you. Wouldn’t she come out that evening? Just for once. They were certain she’d enjoy it. A jolly party. And they were a girl short.” But she had shaken her head. And after a while they had stopped asking her. She did not want to dance, to go to parties, to be entertained by men. She did not want to do anything really. There was nothing left for her to do. Nothing personal, at least. As she had to go on living, she might as well be useful. And the men at the hospital seemed to need her, to value the small things she was able to do for them.

  In the spring of 1918 her mother died. “She’s well out of it,” Marjorie thought. “She can’t have found life terribly amusing. I am alone now though with a vengeance.” There was no one left in the world to whom she mattered. She had no brothers or sisters. There were some aunts whom she had never seen, living, she believed, in Yorkshire somewhere. She had lost touch with her old friends during the last three years. She had dropped out of their world, and once out of it you were soon forgotten. She was alone. “And I suppose,” she had added, “that I may expect to live for another forty or fifty years.” It was going to be a long business. She did not want to think about it. She worked the harder at the hospital.

  Slowly the long summer of ’18 passed. The summer that began in uncertainty and dread, and ended in a crescendo of excited hope. The Germans were being driven back. The Americans had arrived in France. Another year and it would be all over. The autumn came, and with it the diplomatic exchange of notes, and the discussion of Wilson’s fourteen points, and everywhere in every heart a spirit of buoyant optimism.

  “With a bit of luck we shan’t ever be seeing Wypers again, Miss,” the men in the wards would say to her. “We’re through the Hindenburg line this morning.”

  And the days passed, triumph was added upon triumph. Eleven o’clock on the eleventh of November, and England broke into an orgy of relieved delight. On that morning for the first time for three years Marjorie cried. It was over now, had come and gone, taking with it her hope, her youth, her happiness. Leslie gone, their baby gone, her mother gone. And now they would all be returning to civilian conditions and she would have to find some
job, and for the remainder of her life there would be the long struggle in a competitive society against penury and want. The War over. All the soldiers coming back to their wives and children. And she with no home, no children, and no husband.

  On New Year’s night a dance was given at the hospital. It was the first time for four years that Marjorie had danced.

  “I shall be quite lost,” she said, “with all these new steps.”

  “Oh no, you won’t, dear,” they assured her. “You’ve only got to have a sense of rhythm and follow what the man’s doing. It’s quite easy.”

  And she laughed and had enjoyed the decorating of the room, the arranging of the holly and the mistletoe, the lighting of the Chinese lanterns. It was a fancy dress dance, and she had found herself, to her surprise, spending quite a long time and a great deal of thought on the recreation of an old Dresden shepherdess costume in which she had danced in 1913 at the Three Arts ball.

  “You look quite a different person,” one of the girls had said to her.

  “And I feel it too,” she had laughed gaily, expectantly, in answer.

  It was on that night that she had met Everard, and seen for the first time for four years the look in a man’s eyes of wakening interest. He had asked after their second dance together whether on her next free afternoon he might take her for a ride along the front. Perhaps she should have refused. But how was she to know then that he was married. When you were lonely and a man was nice to you—. She had seen him quite often during the weeks that followed, the rather difficult weeks when the hospital was slowly emptying, and nurse after nurse was leaving in search of some other job, and every day she was being forced to realise that she, too, must be thinking very soon of finding employment for the days when the hospital would be empty and closed down. But she did not want to go, so long as there were still soldiers there who wanted her. So she had stayed on till in March the remaining patients had been moved to another hospital.