‘I’ve no idea. I didn’t try to find out in case it went off. It’s in my coat pocket, if you’d care to look. Taking it was melodramatic but I thought it might frighten the brother off. Of course I didn’t have to frighten Cyril off – the mere mention of a gun made him go weak at the knees, though I think he felt even worse when I said the letter might be shown to the police. He’d hardly be persona grata with them seeing that his brother’s been a criminal for years. And the poor child really is very sorry. He’s hoping Mr Quentin need never know about the letter. It was the brother who made him write it, of course.’
‘Then it’s all lies?’
Kit hesitated and then spoke thoughtfully. ‘Well, it’s only fair to say that it wasn’t quite lies to Cyril when he wrote it. His brother made him believe that Mr Quentin wouldn’t have been so kind without, well, some ulterior motive. Cyril said, “Doug said he must have been after me. And he did put his arm round me.” Cyril got worked up into believing things happened that never did – in fact, he couldn’t have written that letter if he hadn’t pretended to himself that it was true. He said, “It was like being in a play, it was sort of real – just for a while.” He has a lot of imagination, Jill. And strange as it may seem, I still like him – which is just as well because I’ll probably have him round my neck for ages. I mean, when you smash anyone down as I smashed Cyril today, you have to rehabilitate them. Anyway, he’s coming to tea tomorrow. You could come too.’
‘No,’ said Jill, chokingly. ‘I never want to see him again.’
‘Jill, what’s the matter? Surely you’re pleased?’
‘Of course. It’s just that –’ But she couldn’t possibly explain. And somehow, somehow she must get out of the house.
‘Jill, what is it? Oh, goodness, are you suffering from shock now?’
Jill managed a smile. ‘No, I couldn’t be better. But – darling, how soon will Robin be back?’
‘Any minute now. Jill –’
‘Then will you be all right on your own till then? I have to … there’s something I must do.’
‘But what, Jill? Oh, do you want to dash to Mr Albion and warn him it’s to be a secret from Mr Quentin?’
‘Yes,’ said Jill. Anything to get away.
‘Well, there’s no need – because I rang Mr Albion before I rang you; I knew from Father that Mr Quentin might be telephoning soon. So you don’t have to go. Father will be home soon and we’ll all have a marvellous evening. Can’t you take it in, Jill? Everything’s all right.’
‘No,’ said Jill, her control snapping. ‘And it’ll never be all right. Never! Never!’
She ran from the room. And Kit, leaping out of bed, came after her begging her not to go.
At the back of Jill’s mind a still sane woman said, ‘Don’t fall down the stairs or you’ll never get out of the house.’
From above came Kit’s wail, ‘Jill, please! You mustn’t rush out into the street in a state of shock.’
‘Leave me alone!’ Jill shouted up. ‘Don’t come after me! Don’t any of you come after me! Tell your father not to!’
She was in the hall now and, in another second, through the front door. She slammed it behind her and raced along the quiet street. When she reached the end of it she turned, half expecting to see a nightgowned figure coming after her. But Kit, now standing at the front door, did not attempt to follow.
The still sane woman now became dominant. ‘It’s no use running. There’s nowhere to run to. But you’ll be slightly better off in the flat. You can take the telephone off and refuse to open the door. They can’t drag you out by force. And by tomorrow you may have the strength of mind to break things off with decency.’ She hailed, successfully, a cruising taxi.
Already she was ashamed of herself. Never before had she so lost control. How could she have treated Kit so badly – and when the child had been through such an experience? She should have been thanked, most lovingly, for accomplishing a miracle. She could hardly be blamed because she had also plunged one into an abyss of guilt from which one could never climb. But one could at least force oneself to behave like a civilized human being.
No, she wouldn’t take the receiver off the telephone. When Geoffrey rang up she would simply say she didn’t feel well enough to see him. And then she would write and tell him that she had changed her mind and now wished to remain with Miles. That shouldn’t be hard to write convincingly, as it was the truth.
And after all, Miles would never know of her guilt, her utter lack of loyalty. To have believed Cyril’s letter! Perhaps she had wanted to believe it. Yes, that was it. A Miles less worth caring for set her free to care for Geoffrey – as she would never now be free.
She paid the taxi off, tipped the driver generously, smiled at the hall porter and said good evening to a fellow tenant with whom she shared the lift. From now on, one behaved.
The flat was surprisingly chilly; she saw that the french windows to the balcony had blown wide open. On her way to close them she noticed a long envelope leaning against the telephone. It was addressed simply to ‘Jill.’ Surely the handwriting was Miles’s? And who else could have got into the flat and put the letter there? He must be back.
She was suddenly frightened. The wide-open windows … and why should he leave a letter for her? He sometimes scribbled messages on the telephone pad if he came in when she was out but, judging by the weight, this was a long letter. There were some pencilled words on the back of the envelope but she was too sickly dizzy to read them. Then she steadied herself. The entrance to the flats was almost under the balcony. There had been no signs of any disturbance, the hall porter had smiled at her – and Miles was the last man to leave her a legacy of suicide. Her vision cleared and she read the pencilled words. ‘Just back. Meant to put this through the letter box but as the hall porter told me you’ve just gone off in a taxi I’ve been in and grabbed a few things I needed.’
She sat down and tore open the envelope. The letter had been written in Venice, the previous day. It read:
My dearest Jill,
It’s strange how seldom I’ve written to you – no, not strange really, considering we’ve so seldom been apart except for those periods when I’ve felt unable to write. This, by the way, isn’t one of those times. I am quite alone.
I’d better start by saying I have known about you and Geoffrey almost since you first met. Oh, I don’t mean you both showed signs of falling in love on sight. And I didn’t at first know what it was I knew. Perhaps it was simply that seeing you with him and the girls, even that very first time in the hotel lounge, gave me a pang. I suddenly saw you as you might have been as a normally married woman with charming children – though you’d have had to make a very early start to be Robin’s mother. Later that evening we climbed innumerable steps to look at a very beautiful terrace and we talked – I wonder if you remember – about our marriage. That was somehow connected with having seen you with the Thorntons. I had a feeling of guilt.
During the week I wasn’t too preoccupied with the play to notice Geoffrey’s growing admiration. And though I can’t say you showed signs of being in love – I doubt if you knew you were – when you were with the Thorntons you blossomed. Back in London I was more and more sure. I wasn’t playing at detectives – indeed, I think I was trying not to be sure and anyway I was busy with the play, all the changes and poor Cyril’s woes (remind me to tell you about those; he’d been using his brother’s birth certificate). But – well, I was dead sure after you went with Geoffrey to his country house. You gave nothing away in words but you looked … as you always should have looked.
Will you believe me if I say I was glad? All right, don’t. But I did tell myself I ought to be and I honestly believe I would have been, if it had happened earlier. When we married I took it for granted that you’d eventually have affairs – you’d been, from what you told me, a fairly sexy girl and I didn’t expect you to turn into a nun. But you did, and damn near turned me into a monk. My occasional flings were mor
e of a duty than a pleasure. Every now and then I’d tell myself, ‘Good God, you can’t bow out of sex at your age.’ And then I’d dash off with some usually embarrassing companion – and find myself missing you, and also worrying in case you minded. But don’t feel responsible for any of this. The truth is that for me sex isn’t very attractive without love. I’ve never loved anyone but Alan and you. With Alan, love and sex were a complete whole. With you, love has been the whole.
Well, as I was saying, I would have been glad for you if it had happened in our early days. And though I’d become a bit possessive over the years, I knew I’d no right to be. Also I thought that after a riotous affair with Geoffrey you’d come back to me as I’ve always come back to you. But you didn’t seem to be starting an affair and I wondered if something in you (I suppose I mean what you felt for me) was resisting Geoffrey – so I decided to put up some counter attractions, such as getting a car, taking a country house, a Continental holiday. I even, that night you mentioned the Austrian waiter, invited you to reverse that very sensible decision you made all those years ago. How well I remember you sitting in that meadow, twiddling a very queer flower I’d picked for you. I afterwards learned that its name was a Wild Man – suitable flower for me as regards its queerness but God knows I never was wild (though in German the Wilde has an ‘e,’ which links nicely with Oscar).
Incidentally, don’t imagine things would have worked out better if you’d decided otherwise. My suggestion was made from the most loving desire for your happiness, but as a lover of women (off-stage) I’d probably have been embarrassing if not farcical and you might have turned agin me. As for children, I fancy it’s pretty hellish to have a homosexual father.
So – where was I? Ah, yes, thinking I might compete with Geoffrey. And then – it was the night the play ended, when we came back to the flat and you told me he’d been there – I realized I was behaving most selfishly. I ought to encourage you to leap over the wall of your self-erected nunnery, not confuse you by suggesting we should go abroad together – those travel brochures I’d made you get looked at me accusingly. And my best way of encouraging you was to clear out of England and let you construe this as you rightly have in the past. I thought that would help you to throw off your inhibitions and, when I came back, I’d come out into the open and give you my blessing.
The extraordinary thing is that it never once entered my head that you and Geoffrey wanted to marry. No doubt it should have but it simply didn’t and I doubt if it ever would have but for – prepare for a dramatic encounter! Me, sitting in St Mark’s Square wondering what you were up to. A god-like youth comes strolling towards me, smiling. Who is it? Yes – no – yes! None other than the lordly Julian Thornton!
My, I wouldn’t care to be that boy’s father – nor would I fancy any other relationship with him. Actually he’s not queer – yet. We discussed this. I gather he’s sitting on the fence, comme ci, comme ça, depending on how his feelings and the main chance sway him. A cool, calculating lad – though some of it’s put on, and I ended up by liking him. And I shall be eternally grateful to him for his frankness about you and his father. It seems that the whole Thornton family is bursting to acquire you for keeps. Julian, blast his impertinence, thinks you ‘eminently suitable.’ And so you are, my dear, and I can’t think why I didn’t see it before – especially when I did, in a way, see it that first day in the hotel lounge.
Of course that chance meeting with Julian only short-circuited things. Sooner or later, Geoffrey would have insisted on your leaving me – as I do, now. No arguments, love, and no more inhibitions, soul-searchings or whatever it is that has been holding you back. It’s all settled. By the time you read this I shall have posted a letter to Geoffrey asking him to meet me and fix everything up. He’ll know the best way. I imagine ‘wilful refusal to consummate the marriage’ (on my part, of course) will be all right. Nowadays such cases seem only to rate a few lines in the papers – though whether this is the law, or just decency on the part of the newspapers I don’t know. Anyway, if I do get unwelcome publicity I bloody well don’t care. There are times when I feel that those of us who have a little celebrity ought to stand up and be counted. I’m not one of those queers who think that medals should be struck for us but I do think we might be taken for granted, as if we’d simply been born with club feet or extra long ears or something. The fact that some of us like having club-footed long ears – and don’t consider them disfiguring – is neither here nor there.
This isn’t a farewell letter – I shall be in touch with you as soon as I’ve talked to Geoffrey. And we’ll meet and go on meeting. Those Thorntons are going to find they’ve not only gained a wife and stepmother but also landed themselves with her devoted hanger-on. And one tiny, sordid detail. During the past ten years you’ve devoted your entire life to helping me make a considerable amount of money. Some of that, from every conceivable point of view, belongs to you and you will, my girl, accept it.
That’s almost all – and it had better be, or I shall be smitten with writer’s cramp before I can write to Geoffrey. But there’s one last thing I want to say and it’s more difficult than the whole of the rest of this letter, because I’m so terrified you’ll misunderstand me. Please don’t. I force myself to say it because it’s my best hope of setting you quite free. Well, here goes. It’s just conceivable that being deprived of you may enable me to find someone for whom I can feel just a little of what I felt for Alan. Loving you – so genuinely loving you – has meant that I’ve had no genuine love to spare for anyone else. So I’ve only had meaningless affairs. Perhaps it’s too late for anything else but one never knows. This does not mean that our marriage was a mistake and I’m not going to pretend that I wouldn’t have liked it to go on for ever. Losing you will be like losing a limb – oh, worse than that. Still, compensation isn’t utterly out of the question. Tell yourself that – but at the same time tell yourself that I am your most truly loving
MILES
P.S. No use trying to find me. I shall remain elusive until I’ve talked to Geoffrey. By the way, I like him very much. And I adore the girls.
She folded the letter and put it back in its envelope. Soon she would read it again but, for the moment, she just wanted to think about Miles. She imagined him writing, probably in a hotel bedroom, with the sounds of Venice coming up to him. Page after page of neat, legible writing … she had often heard him say he wrote a schoolboy hand and she knew he believed that homosexuality was largely due to continued adolescence. But she found nothing immature in the contents of the letter.
She felt closer to him now than she had felt for weeks … perhaps closer than she had ever felt. It was as if a veil, a veil of reticence between them, had lifted. She knew him now not so much with her mind as with her heart – to which, without conscious volition, she had clasped the letter as if for comfort. Realizing this, she put the letter down. It had no talismanic quality to help her now. Nothing had. She must just sit back and let the waves of regret wash over her.
In the taxi, coming back from Westminster, she had decided to stay with him because it seemed her best way of making up for her traitorous disloyalty. She had told herself that she wished it, but she had also thought of it as a penance. Now, if he could suddenly come into the flat with the past weeks blotted out, how gladly would she resume their life together, their easy companionship, their trust in each other’s affection. How utterly she had betrayed that trust. It seemed to her now that not only should she have disbelieved Cyril’s accusation; she ought also to have known she would still care for Miles if the accusation were true. Sex was a besieging force, outside the essential self. It could drive out decency and reason. Whatever Miles had done, the essential Miles would have remained the same. But Miles hadn’t done anything. It was her decency and reason which had been driven out. Well, perhaps no wonder, seeing that she had for ten years lived, as Tom said, in a state of suspended animation. That rendered one vulnerable.
She had also lived i
n a state of great comfort, even luxury. Food, warmth, clothes and, above all, absence of anxiety … compared with the hell of her early years, life with Miles had been pretty like heaven. And as sex had brought her little but misery she had barely felt the lack of it. But it had been there all the time, tunneling, undermining – and sometimes coming to the surface surely? Had there not been days when she had scanned the face of almost every man she met – scanned even the faces of strangers – wondering, seeking? But the seeking had been swiftly repressed; always she had reminded herself of past misery, concentrated on present contentment. The state of suspended animation had been self-induced.
That day she had first met Geoffrey … she saw herself strolling along Spa Street, in the afternoon sunshine, remembering her youthful self. She had been fully conscious then of the lack in her life. Perhaps her need had somehow materialized Geoffrey, brought about everything that had happened since. But now she could not feel even a flicker of desire for him. There had been more than desire when they sat here together in silence. Was that all gone too? Perhaps something would creep back, when she let it. But for the moment she only wanted to wrap the years with Miles round her, especially those womb-like years in the old Islington house. But even the months in this flat now seemed valuable.
Where was Miles now? If only she could reach him! Oh, she wouldn’t try to persuade him, it wouldn’t work. But she would be thankful just to be with him for an hour or two. Well, she could be, perhaps even tomorrow. But by then their life together would be a thing of the past. She wanted to prolong it … just a little longer.
The doorbell rang. She ignored it. There was nothing to prove she was in. It rang again. Then the flap of the letter box was pushed in and Kit’s voice came through.
‘Jill, darling, are you there? Oh, you are – I can see a bit of you through the sitting-room door. Please let us in.’
Then Robin spoke. ‘Jill, dear, Kit’s terribly worried in case something she said upset you. Do let us come in – for just a moment. Father, you speak to her.’