No Truce with Time Page 15

  “And what’s life done to make you so pleased with it?”

  “Sent me a cable to say that the Bruces are catching the next boat down.”

  24

  She woke with a headache, with a dry mouth, with an ache, a limpness in her back and limbs. So soon, she thought. She glanced at the calendar beside her bed. Yes, it was all right. But for the last fortnight she had been thinking of the calendar in terms of one thing only : J. B.’s return. She had marked the days, counted hours to it, just as six months back she had counted days and hours to the docking of the Lady Howard. Twelve days, seven days … Four days, she had said to herself last night.

  Four days. Only three days now. The Bruces would be already here before the drear ache, the acheing bonelessness had left knees and back. Three days. And this afternoon she had planned to drive out to Petite Anse. By the time she would be capable of that.... Never again, she thought, never, never again.

  She pressed her face against the pillow. Her head was aching and her temples throbbed. Always it had been like this, always since she had been a girl. She had believed, she had hoped that it would change with marriage, when she had a child. It hadn’t, though. It was just the same. For those two days she was almost off her head, bludgeoned into a sense of all things’ senselessness. She wasn’t responsible for her actions. She was on guard against herself, taking care to avoid any decision of importance. In a mute misery she pressed her hands against her temples. Never again, never never.

  At breakfast, Gerald was surlily conscious of his health. He was breathing heavily. He beat his fists against his chest.

  “Terrible night. Another terrible night. It takes all the strength out of one. One’s fit for nothing afterwards. How one can be expected to do one’s work properly after a night like that....?”

  “Poor Gerald,” she said.

  Not only said, but thought. His life was a burden to him right enough. A strange thought crossed her mind. Suppose a story out of the Arabian Nights came true; suppose a genie from a bottle offered him one wish. He’d say good health, of course. If that weren’t possible, wouldn’t he ask for death, a painless instantaneous death?

  “You would now, wouldn’t you?” she asked.

  She said it with a laugh, as though it were a joke. Yet it was a serious question.

  “I wonder,” he answered, “how many people would choose to go on living, if just by the lifting of a plate they could be out of it without any pain, Like that character in the Old Wives’ Tale who didn’t want to die, but wanted to be dead. I wonder if there are many people who would really want to go on living, if they could get out of the whole thing painlessly.”

  “You mean, you wouldn’t?”

  “Would you?”

  She shrugged. Would she? Why, but of course she would. If she were free to live the life she wanted. She and Barclay; really together, as they never had been yet. A prolonged Barbados.

  Just as Barbados had been lovelier than the weeks preceding it, would not their life make even Barbados in its turn seem trivial?

  Gerald might not want to go on living, if he could not have good health. If by the lifting of a plate, he could be out of it for ever, he would lift that plate. But she, she would want to go on living, if she could have the life she wanted. How strange to think that if Gerald could lift that plate, if the lifting of that plate could perform that miracle, life would become for her the thing she wanted: the thing that it could not become just because of that one life that its possessor hated.

  It was monstrous: it was unjust. To think, too, that it was an equation that could be solved so easily.

  So easily, so very easily.

  She stood outside the garage; a new lock had been fitted on the door. Anyone, she had explained to Gerald, could have forced that other lock. The natives were such thieves. The half-castes were crazy for cars to take their girls in. “For all we know, they may be taking our car out every night.” There was a strong lock now upon the door.

  She walked into the garage, swung the door to, switched off the light. Not a chink of light showed beneath the door. Not one breath of air could enter, not a fume escape. There would be no need for a hosepipe here.

  She switched on the light. She could picture Gerald driving in the car, a sudden choking fit striking him as he bent down to pull the hand-brake. She pictured him leant forward across the wheel as a gust of wind blew to the outer door: heard the click of the new lock: heard the thudding of the engine growing perceptible as the struggle for breath grew fainter, as he lay forward across the wheel, in the exhaustion that followed struggle.

  Five minutes, ten minutes, and it would all be over: his wretchedness, his troubles: not only his wretchedness, but hers as well. Not only theirs, but Barclay’s too, and Kitty’s, and J. B.’s It would be a release for Gerald. It would be the opening of a new life for four other people. It could happen so simply, too.

  Could happen in so many ways. Suppose that someone else had driven in the car. Suppose that she herself had done. Gerald would be asleep. He always was asleep when he was driven. She would have to shake him, to wake him up. Suppose that she did not shake hard enough. He might stir, groan, relapse into sleep again. She might have left the engine running. It was the kind of thing one did do sometimes, when one was tired. She had done it more than once. There might be a big wind blowing. She would not hear the soft thudding of the engine. A wind would blow the door to with a crash behind her. She would be tired, she would undress quickly. She would be asleep almost before she was in bed. She would not miss the sound of his footsteps at the far end of the verandah. She would not notice, till the morning after.

  And then … Why then, how she would laugh if anyone were to suggest that by the lifting of a plate, she could step painlessly out of life: step out of life, when life could be so good, so full: when one could make it so good, so full for other people.

  If such an accident did happen … Whereas now, as things were … Never again, never, never.

  She shook herself. I’ve got to go into Rodney, to see Barclay, she told herself.

  It was easy enough to find him. He had taken an office above Gerald’s store. He was always there between half-past nine and ten. She had only once been to see him there: on the first day he had moved in, a house-warming visit, she had called it. She hadn’t been since. There was no point. You could not talk in a place like that, with matchboard partitions between the rooms. It was risky, too. It was so easy, when one was really intimate with a person, to let something slip. But now; nothing mattered now.

  And she had to tell him; as soon as possible; so that he could get his day rearranged.

  Never again, never, never again. She repeated it as a refrain, as she drove down to Rodney, repeating the syllables in time with the humming of the engine.

  It was a hot and windless day. She had left her sunglasses behind, and the glare from the dusty road increased her headache. She oughtn’t to be out on a day like this; she knew it. What did it matter though? Did anything matter now? She had to put a face on it: that was all that mattered : not to break down : to be the thing he wanted, casual, carefree, indifferent; so that he should have no consciousness of guilt; so that he need not feel badly over it. She must smile, keep her tone light and her voice steady.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. And her voice was light. “But today isn’t going to be possible after all.”

  “No?”

  He raised his eyebrows. And she nodded.

  “It’s too bad, isn’t it?”

  “Then what about …”

  He checked. As his eyes met hers, she smiled: a conspiratorial smile. She knew so exactly what he was thinking: that within three days the Bruces would be here. Never again, never, never again.

  “Some other day,” he said.

  “Some other day,” she echoed, with the same conspiratorial smile twinkling in her eyes.

  “You’re marvellous,” he said.

  She laughed out loud at that. Marvellous. If h
e only knew how marvellous! That she could act like this, smiling as though it were an amusing secret that they shared, smiling so that he should be able to feel happy about it all, so that he could enter with a light heart on this new adventure. Light-heart indeed. If he only knew, as she knew, what its outcome, its inevitable outcome must be.

  “Shall I be seeing you at the Osbertons’ to-night?”

  Again she nodded. Yes, she’d be seeing him there all right. Just as she had seen him at the Cartwrights’ yesterday; just as she would be seeing him next week at all the parties there would be to welcome the Bruces back. All the time she would be seeing him; seeing him, yet never really seeing him.

  A shaft of sunlight through a half-closed jalousie cut across his cheek, running diagonally across his “jeudi “tie, across the holland of his Palm Beach suit. How often had not her finger traced a shaft of sunlight across his cheek, running from the rough sunburnt throat, to the smooth whiteness of his shoulders. Never again, never, never again.

  In the street below, the glare struck up at her from white-washed walls and dusty sidewalks. She blinked; she checked her step. She was weak and dizzy. It was an effort to square her shoulders, to fling back her head. She did it, though, and with an air. She knew that ill though she might be feeling, she was at just this time her most impelling. Some people look more vivid when they are in ill-health. The drawn mouth, the dark lines under the eyes suited her.

  At the sight of her, a handsome mulatto youth, one of the better class of half-castes who worked in the Customs and was just, but only just, not eligible for membership of the club, started, fixed his eyes on her in a stare of admiration that at any other time would have seemed the grossest insolence, but that now sent a flutter along her nerves, so that meeting that stare, without smiling, without recognizing it, by the mere fact of meeting it, she acknowledged it.

  What must he think of me, she thought: thinking even as she thought that, what does it matter now. Never again, never, never again.

  Never again, never, never again.

  All day the syllables beat through her brain, as she made conversation with Gerald over lunch, as she tried to concentrate her attention on a book, as she lay, inert and supine under the mosquito net, with that ache dragging at her back, that dreary bonelessnes of every limb tugging at her resistance; her thoughts revolving in concentric circles, seeing herself in pictures, a series of separate pictures of her separate futures, herself at forty, at forty-five, at fifty; growing middle-aged, then old; shrivelling or growing fat; like fruit that rotted or that shrivelled; changing not only in her appearance, but in herself; her very nature changing; growing querulous, irritable, bored; going to seed, like the old plantation houses in the bush. Never again, never, never again.

  I’m going mad. I’m off my head, she thought. Desperately, she tried to think of something else, to distract her thoughts from this recurring trouble.

  It was no good. Try as she could, her thoughts came circling back on their familiar route. Never again, never, never again.

  Yet even as she saw those pictures, those drab pictures of the future, she saw side by side with them, superimposed on them a series of other pictures; of another future; a future that was still not really closed to her, the future that waited her with Barclay; picturing the fun that they could have together, travelling, entertaining, working, building a career; pictures of liners,-of restaurants, of country cottages, of quiet fireside talks—a fireside, something that she had not seen for seven years, a fireside with someone that one loved; a young life lived among young people, among young interests in an atmosphere of hope : pictures that seemed just as true as those other pictures: so that side by side with the refrain, “Never again, never, never again.” beat ether syllables, It could be so easily. It could be so easily “: so that beside those pictures of a liner’s docking, of the Bruces waving to the shore, the pictures that were the prelude, the opening to that drab series, stood other pictures, pictures that were the prelude to those other, those lovely pictures: pictures of a cement-lined garage, the slam of a door, the click of a new lock, the gentle thudding of an engine … It could be so easily … Never again … Could be so easily … Never, no never again … Easily … never … easily … never … easily, easily, so easily....

  She pressed her hands against her temples, trying to smother the vibration of those refrains. Stop, stop, I’m going mad, stop, stop.

  She could have screamed if she had been alone—if at the end of the verandah Gerald had not been sleeping off the effects of a session of rum punches. Never again, never, never again. Stop, stop … So easily, so easily … Oh, stop, stop. If only she could have screamed. If only she could have been granted that relief.

  She rolled over, forcing the pillow into her mouth, half sobbing. If only … if only … so easily, so easily....

  I’m going mad, I’m going mad, she thought.

  Never again, never, never again. It was that refrain, that and not the other, that thudded through her brain that evening at the Osbertons’.

  It was a small but formal dinner party, eight covers, to celebrate Jack Osberton’s fifty-eighth birthday: a party that had not been preceded by indiscriminate hospitality at the club: an occasion for which punctuality and evening-dress were considered suitable.

  Never again, she thought, never, never again, as she sat on the verandah before dinner gulping rather than sipping at a punch; listening to the familiar talk, the price of cocoa, the Governor’s visit to St. Lucia, the Administrator’s high-handed treatment of a councillor.

  Never again, never, never again.

  The familiar routine of the seven-course dinner followed its familiar course: the sherry with the soup, the single glass of sweet white wine with the fish, the switching with the entree into whiskies. Across the table she watched the candlelight glistening on the wave in Barclay’s hair. Never again, never, never again. Never again to draw the palm of her hand softly over its sleek surface, then suddenly to run her fingers through it, touselling it, pulling it forward over his forehead. Never again, never, never again.

  Never again, she repeated, as Barclay, half-way through a dance, whispered that familiar “Why don’t we sit this out?”

  It was a moonlight night. But the cars were parked in the drive in full view of the drawing-room. It was on the verandah that they sat.

  “It’s funny,” he said.

  “Funny?”

  “About us, I mean.”

  “In what way funny?”

  “The way one feels it’s going on for ever.”

  “In a sense it is.”

  “Yes, but in another …”

  “I know.”

  She laughed, a low and happy laugh. When you were as wretched as she was you could make a laugh sound happy; the extremes were close enough to touch.

  “It’s like your goodbye to that girl on the Jersey boat/’ she said. “You never wanted there to be a last time, a conscious last time.”

  “But ours wasn’t a last time.”

  “Of course it wasn’t.”

  “If I really thought it was …”

  In the moonlit dusk, she laid her hand over his, pressing it.

  “Don’t worry, darling. It’ll be all right. But let’s suppose it were the last, there always has to be a last time, hasn’t there? Suppose for instance that a car were to skid tonight. It’s nice to be able to know, isn’t it, that if that were to prove the last time, it couldn’t have been happier?”

  “Darling.”

  There was tenderness in that “darling ” : a tenderness that was half born of gratitude: gratitude that he could have the thing both ways; that he had been spared a goodbye scene. That was what he had wanted: that was what he had got. To be free, yet to be able to think at the same time that it wasn’t over.

  As it was over: of course it was. Kitty would see to that. The very fact that she was coming back proved that. She might not be in love with Barclay. But she might very well back there in New York have fal
len in love with the picture of herself as a married woman. She had made up her mind she wanted Barclay. She was coming back to get him.

  And I, she thought: what sort of fight can I put up, as Gerald’s wife?

  It was over. And there was the music starting. Another record had been put on. Barclay was engaged for the next dance with his hostess. And this wasn’t the kind of occasion where you could for get a dance. To prove you couldn’t, there was Gerald, flushed and debonair.

  “What about trying a step with the old man?”

  In his eye was the unmistakable gleam that meant a bad, a very bad night for him. His steps would be uncertain. It would be painful, definitely painful to dance with him. But that was one of the things he must never be allowed to know. She rose to her feet.

  Before they could take the floor, however, the honking of horns in the drive relieved her. She walked over to the window. There were a full half-dozen cars there. Half the club was clustered there with presents. They hadn’t realized, they shouted, that it was the old boy’s birthday: they had come to celebrate. And at the sight of a crowd, at the prospect of noise, of joviality, of himself the centre, the pivot of that noise, that joviality, the light brightened in Gerald’s eyes, his hold on her waist loosened.

  “Yes,” she said, “go on. Have fun. I’ll be all right.”

  With a wry smile she watched him hurry out into the hall. I’m good with them she thought: guessing at what they want, giving them the thing they want in the way they want it. I could have made any man happy. But the only man I’ve wanted to make happy, I’m not allowed to. Yet I could— so easily.

  Never again, never, never again.

  It was that refrain, that and not the other that thudded through brain and heart as she sat alone in the shadow of the verandah, while behind her the music of the successive foxtrots grew fainter and fainter against the noise of the gathering hilarity; the shouts, the laughter, through which she could hear like punctuation the bursts of Gerald’s voice.

  Never again, never, never again.