‘Who said they were unpleasant?’
‘You did.’
‘Not altogether. When I think of Marion now it’s – it’s with less sense of responsibility. Heaven knows, I suppose one grows a sort of skin. Even over the rawest spots . . .’
‘But why the responsibility at all?’
‘Don’t you think I should feel any?’
‘I don’t think that much.’
‘When I was discharged from hospital she came back for a few weeks to look after me. But she was changed. She had some sort of a grudge against me. Eventually it came out. While she was in London she had had an affair with another man. It hadn’t lasted. For her it hadn’t worked. She blamed me. I’d spoiled it for her.’
‘I see.’
‘Yes. It was a difficult time. Gradually she settled back into the old ways, though never entirely. And her leave from the Ministry of Defence was only temporary. She prepared to go back. I couldn’t stop her. Indeed I couldn’t attempt to. One day she left – promising she would see her chief in London and talk it over with him, see if she could be released permanently. Perhaps I over-persuaded her. Anyhow she stayed away, telephoning to say she couldn’t get back. Then three weeks later she wrote to tell me that she was going to marry Richard Healy.’
The rain had stopped again, still reluctant ever to commit itself to a downpour.
He said: ‘I’d first introduced them. Healy was a gunner in Lancasters. We’d flown together several times. Totally unsuitable for her in every way. Utterly charming but drank too much and prattled endlessly. In a year she would be unable to stand him, bored to death with his talk, its shallowness, its uncouthness, its lack of originality. He was marvellous company – but with beer and skittles so to speak. I – I tried, tactfully at first, to dissuade her. She would have none of it. She said she would be down next month and they would be married from her father’s house. She asked me to be best man . . .
‘I went up to London to plead with her. It was no use. We argued – bitterly – long into the night. I told her that, for better or worse, she was committed to me. Anything else would be second best. Always. She took me by the shoulders and shouted at me: “But don’t you understand – there can’t be anything for us together – it’s accursed! I’m breaking free. This is my chance! Richard has given it to me! I must seize it! I must look ahead and never, never again look back!” She shouted. It was something she could never have done before, it wasn’t in her, it just wasn’t in her.’
He sat back for a minute, as if the memory of her vehemence had exhausted him. He looked pale and tired, his face in half shadow like the thin moon that had sunk over the mountains last night.
Norah said: ‘But Simon, I suppose she had realized . . .’
‘Yes, oh yes, she had realized. And of course I was not blind. I too realized. And that made me give way. Against every instinctive judgment I gave way to perfidious reason. So they came down to Morb. And then they told me he was going to desert, to return to Ireland, to lie hidden till the end of the war . . .’ Simon made a hopeless gesture. ‘It was the last straw. I told them I would have none of it. It was a lunatic scheme. He had sworn allegiance to the British Crown. His own government wouldn’t help him or offer him asylum. He said he didn’t intend to ask it. Friends and relatives in Ireland would give them all the cover they needed. The war could not last more than another year. But in that time he might be expected to fly forty more bombing missions. He wasn’t prepared to take the risk. Looking at Marion, he said that his life had suddenly become important and precious. He’d done his bit for a country that wasn’t his own anyway. Let others carry on and finish the war. Not he.
‘I gave way. I blame myself for being so weak. They were married in Llandathery Church just over the hill. Later they came back here and packed and I agreed to drive them to Aberdovey, where he had hired a boat. It was a gusty evening with more wind threatening, and I made a last plea to delay for a day or two. But they wouldn’t listen. His leave was up. They had to get away, he said, before he was posted. He had sailed all his life, and they had a good engine. In a few hours they would be across. I blame myself for being so weak. I drove them to the coast and left them there in the harbour. I waited for a while and presently I thought I saw them leaving. But it was a dark night, and of course they sailed without lights. I know the throb of their engine was clear, and then it disappeared into the gusty night. It was the last I saw of them – anyone saw of them.’
He passed a hand across his eyes. ‘You can’t imagine the remorse.’
‘But why, Simon, why? How could you have stopped them? And why should you have?’
‘It was as if they were bent on self-destruction,’ he said. ‘The whole crazy plan. By marrying him at all Marion was running headlong into disaster. They were utterly unsuited. But that at least was only a disaster of personality. The attempt to run to Ireland was a disaster of an irretrievable kind. In trying to preserve his life Richard lost it – and with his own my sister’s too . . . I could have stopped that. I could have put my car out of commission, I could have telephoned his commanding officer; I could have done a dozen things to make their escape impossible. Instead, I let them go.’
‘And then . . . this drove you to . . .’
‘To what? Oh, to a clumsy attempt at suicide. Looking back now I don’t know even if I was altogether in earnest. When I learned they had never reached Ireland, and I came to realize that Marion was dead, my life ceased to be of any further use or importance. It was hardly worth trying to destroy myself because there was nothing left worth the effort to destroy.’
He seemed to have come to the end of all he had to say.
She said: ‘It’s – good of you to have told me all this.’ He got up and dropped the brush into a pile of others, went over to the easel, which had a canvas on it splashed with preliminary whites and greens.
‘When I was in the nursing home,’ he said, ‘they were always persuading me to talk. But I never would. Never could perhaps. In the end you get out of the way of it. Some people – most people – think while they’re talking; in their minds they prepare the next sentence while speaking the one before. I can never do that. I lack the confidence. I have to listen to myself. And when there is no real sympathy between the speaker and the listener I dry up altogether. So you are the first person I’ve told this to. You have the quality of sympathy. And of course the likeness.’
‘I hope now you believe I knew nothing about that.’
‘I do now. But some day it may look as if your coming here was a good thing after all. It will to me, if not to you.’
She found herself colouring. ‘Thank you.’
‘This place will always be haunted for me. Maybe I’ll leave Althea in peace and go right away again. Perhaps I shouldn’t have come back.’
‘But you’re better, aren’t you? So much better. I mean . . .’
‘Oh, yes. This last twelve months utterly different. I never want to look back – to the apathy, the separateness, the self-recrimination. I’ve – grown a skin – of protection, of callousness, if you like. Events this last week have done their best to rub it raw. They’ve failed.’
‘They should never have happened.’
He said: ‘When you came in this afternoon, just for a moment the past and present came together in your face. I thought I was lost. And then I kissed you. And then I knew . . .’
‘That I was not Marion.’
‘That Marion will not mean quite so much to me ever again.’
CHAPTER ELEVEN
I
The rain came at last with the dark. It fell in solid pale sheets drumming on roof and soil and window and wall, pale in the masked moonlight, heavy as surf. Gutters spouted and little rivers ran. Here and there the house dripped, here and there the test was too severe for the old slates and they let water in. There was a damp spot on the rocking-horse and another by her bed.
At seven she rang Christopher.
‘No,’ she
said, ‘everything’s pretty well all right. I’m beginning to understand a bit more . . . I think it’s all probably going to work out.’
‘For us?’
‘I didn’t mean – For the moment I wasn’t thinking in that sense; I was thinking of the situation here. But give me perhaps two more days.’
‘For which purpose?’
‘Both . . .’
‘What about tomorrow?’
‘I think I need that. I’ll ring you again about this time.’
‘I’d rather see you.’
‘I know, but . . .’
‘When shall I come? In the morning?’
‘No, I have to type for Althea. I’ll ring you about six. I’d rather.’
‘Why are you being secretive?’
‘I’m not. But, dear Christopher, I’m the one who was invited here, and I want to know before I leave exactly why. And I think I’m the only one who can do it.’
‘Vanity is a dangerous guide.’
‘I know. And I’m not going to rise to that. If I come a cropper it won’t be a very serious one, and you can reprove me then.’
‘Reproof is not in me. Only the usual word of warning: take care.’
‘I will.’
‘And,’ he said as he rang off, ‘I reserve my own freedom of action.’
When she had hung up she felt suddenly very isolated, as if she had been in contact with the normal, level-headed, sophisticated outside world. Now she was back in the ingrown world of Morb House. But this was where she belonged.
‘Leave the wall,’ he had said. ‘I’ll build it up this side as best I can when you’re through. Then tomorrow I’ll make a bit of mortar in the garage and block it up properly, if only to restore your privacy.’ ‘Don’t bother, I’m leaving tomorrow.’ ‘Tomorrow? Must you? Can’t you stay longer?’ ‘Why? I thought I was . . .’ ‘Not now. The very opposite, after this afternoon.’
Up in her rooms she saw he had done his best to put the bricks back. She had moved the rocking-horse into the centre of the sitting-room, and there it was just a shabby toy without capacity for movement or menace.
As she made up her face it looked yellow in the yellowing light; more like Marion’s than ever. But Marion’s ghost was laid. The terror of this afternoon followed by the tremendous relief had left her shaken and exhausted; but out of this exhaustion new emotions had already sprung. One was the liberating realization of her complex accord with Simon. Another was bitter anger against Althea Syme.
Impulse would have taken her down right away to face her friend and demand an explanation, for she could not be entirely innocent of Simon’s private history. Or if she was it was time she was acquainted with it. It was hard to believe that there could be any real design on Althea’s part – for what had she to gain? This surely was one remaining sign of Simon’s illness, to suspect a plan where there had only been callous indifference. But such indifference, such callousness was intolerable. Certainly she, Norah, could not tolerate the situation in which she found herself, and she must leave at the earliest opportunity. But Simon now cautioned some delay. Simon now badly wanted her to stay ‘a day or two more’, and she necessarily went along with him.
Necessarily? It seemed so. She must support him as his sister had supported him, and not let him down as his sister had once let him down.
After leaving him this afternoon she had got out Marion’s exercise book and looked again at the writings and the drawings. Now she picked it up again and leafed through it. ‘Marion Mary Syme, Morb House, Llandathery, Montgomeryshire, Wales, Great Britain, Europe, The World.’ Marion Norah Faulkner Syme, Morb House, Llandathery . . .
He had said this afternoon: ‘After I came out of the nursing home in September, I didn’t come straight back here, I spent three weeks in Ireland. It was a last despairing thought. Supposing, just supposing, they had landed after all. Supposing they had made landfall safely and just – disappeared – without getting in touch with any of his relatives. I spent three weeks, asking, asking everywhere. I tried all his relatives, but they all knew they were dead. I’ve no doubt in my mind now. Perhaps I never had. Perhaps we were always too close, she and I, for the other not to know . . .’
The drawings of the boy of fifteen with the mop of fair hair. They were Simon, she saw quite distinctly now. She felt she had known him all her life. Were her feelings towards him sisterly? How could they be? Was she the girl climbing the tree with the boy clutching her ankle? What had Marion’s first feelings for Simon been, and when had they changed? The untouched, unsullied beauty of a woman discovering herself before your eyes . . . It was total commitment on both sides . . .
She dropped the book on the bed. How and when had her commitment begun? This afternoon or earlier? She did not know. All she knew now was that she was deeply and emotionally involved.
Before they separated they had spent a time looking more closely at his portraits of his sister. ‘I still want to paint her. Perhaps you think it’s all part of my morbid preoccupation with a dead girl. The classic idee fixe. But it’s not quite that. It’s something to do with my creative life as well . . . If you stayed long enough, I wish you’d let me paint you.’
‘. . . I believe I like this one best – the unfinished one in the black frock. She has more character in her face.’
‘That was the best and the last. I mean the last before the war separated us. I still have the frock in there. It was one she wore when I took her to a dance in Bristol.’
‘You never tried to finish the hands and arms?’
‘I’d not the talent, without a model, and not the heart, without her . . . I remember my mother didn’t like the frock. She thought it was too grown-up for a girl not yet twenty – black velvet. And too low-cut.’
‘I expect that was what appealed to her.’
Simon smiled. ‘Yes. She told me so.’
So they had talked, friendship stirring between them. The first tensions past, there seemed no bar. Affinity grew in the reaction from fear.
At the very last he had said: ‘If you’d only wait a day or two – I’d have to make business arrangements with Althea first – but if you’d wait a day or two, maybe I could come with you when you leave.’
She had stared at him, startled. They had looked at each other very carefully for a moment or two.
She said: ‘If you think that’s the right thing – for you, I mean.’
‘I’m sure it would be the right thing for me. I believe you could help me to forget the past.’
‘But how can I when I am so much like her?’
‘That’s why, Norah, that’s why. One can’t destroy the past with some radical change – one can’t cut it away. But one can forget it with a perpetual merging. Your likeness to her is no longer a threat. It could be a promise.’
‘A promise of what?’
He had replied, his eyes deeply engaging her: ‘For me perhaps a new life. For you as much or as little as you care to give.’
II
At dinner Althea asked Norah if she were feeling well, as she was looking rather pale and seemed quieter than usual. Norah said she was fine. Trivialities passed the meal, but Simon excused himself as soon as he had finished.
In the drawing-room over coffee Norah said: ‘Althea, you knew Marion. D’you think I’m really like her?’
The older woman’s glasses were misted with the coffee steam as she looked up. ‘Simon hasn’t been worrying you about it again, has he? Because . . .’
‘I’ve been thinking . . .’
‘What?’
‘You put me in her room, didn’t you?’
‘Well, it was her room once – when she was a girl. But that was long years ago.’
‘I found some of her old drawing-books today, and a few of her belongings – slippers, etc. in that cupboard. The memories of her are still there.’
Althea frowned. ‘Sorry about that. I’ll have them cleared out.’
‘I’d like to know if you think I’m at all l
ike her. Not in looks – I know that – but in temperament, voice, character . . . personality, if you like.’
‘Voice – a little. I was struck by a resemblance on the tape. Temperament – a little. Quick, volatile, easily roused – perhaps emotional? Personality – I hope not.’
‘Didn’t you like her?’
‘I don’t say that. But she didn’t have your warmth. She could be very calculating, very hard. She didn’t show that side very much to those she cared for, but it was always there – like a stone in a peach – sooner or later you knew it was there.’
Silence fell. Norah quietly studied her friend. Whether or not the afternoon had lent her new eyes, she seemed to see defects she hadn’t noticed before. Or perhaps it was the thunder, the headache, the heavy day that had brought Mrs Syme to dinner with her lipstick off one corner of her mouth, the face powder crusted, the excellent lace of her cuff stained with something blue. There seemed also to be an element of shallowness, of meretriciousness in the affection in her voice. Did growing distaste produce a new perception or did new perception produce a growing distaste?
She said: ‘It’s a very odd feeling; coming to a house where there’s been someone so much like yourself – and your age when she died. I wonder you didn’t think of that when you invited me.’
‘You know exactly why I invited you, my pet. Because I’m very fond of you, because I love your company, and because I get the distinct impression that you have a certain affection for me. If Simon bothers you I can’t get rid of him. But if being up in these rooms makes you feel spooky, just say the word and you can come down.’
Norah sipped her coffee. ‘I have the oddest feelings sometimes when I look in the mirror – as if I might see Marion there instead of myself. Or as if there’s another person beside me trying to share my thoughts.’
‘Good grief, you are in a strange mood! Whatever has got into you?’
‘That’s what I ask myself. Exactly. What has got into me?’
Although resolved not to force an issue tonight, she had been unable to keep off what was uppermost in her mind, and if she couldn’t challenge Althea with the enormity she wanted to, she could at least nag at the fringes of the subject. So although all her fears had now been dissipated, she perversely chose this moment to thrust them at Althea, to display them, as another challenge or as a taunt, like someone showing the spent bullets of a fusillade they have narrowly escaped. Yet in the moment of speaking it crossed her mind to wonder whether all the bullets were quite spent. Marion’s ghost was laid. But was she really looking forward to going up to those rooms to sleep tonight? Was she absolutely free of compulsions not quite her own?