‘Ooh!’ said Marjorie, and George instinctively stopped the car and switched off the noisy engine.
They watched the sun sinking down towards the sea. Everything was silent round them, except for the singing of the distant birds. George had never devoted much attention to the scenery before, but this evening was too lovely to escape his notice. There was agonising pain in Marjorie’s breast as the sun sank lower. There was the sheer loveliness of the place, the sadness of the evening, the regret that this happy time was ending, all this was working on her while she battled with herself to try and reach some decision about Ted. Her head was whirling; she could not think consecutively.
George felt her stir beside him.
‘Let’s walk over that way,’ said Marjorie. ‘I want to watch the sun go right into the sea.’
A few steps took them to the edge of the woods again, and lifted the sea’s horizon above the grassy crest. Here the stump of a tree seemed as if it had been grown there especially to provide a seat, and they sat together on it, close (of necessity), and watched the single straight bank of cloud above the sun change from orange to blood red, while the sun’s disc was on the point of reaching the sea. On that perfect August evening, clear and still, it almost seemed as if one could hear a hiss as the fiery ball touched the water. Then it sank lower and lower, until for a second there was only a red spot on the horizon, a spot of warmer colour amid the red and gold which surrounded it. Then it disappeared, and the eye was suddenly conscious of a three-quarter moon which had been present, unnoticed, on the other side of the sky.
‘Oh, it’s gone, it’s gone,’ said Marjorie; with the setting of the sun her worries pressed in upon her harder than ever before, and the red sky and the silver moon were still there to torment her bosom with their beauty.
George, looking down at her, saw that her eyes were wet.
‘Marjorie!’ he said. ‘What’s the matter, Marjorie?’
And Marjorie turned to him and clung to him, like a child, and he held her, clumsily, and his brain was whirling now as well. For a space the mere contact satisfied them.
Then Marjorie moved in his arms as a whole torrent of reactions overwhelmed her. Fear of the future, horror at the thought of going back to Ted, fear of leaving this island of peace which she had found so unexpectedly in the middle of her life, all these assailed her on the one side; on the other was the thought that here might be a protector, someone sweet-tempered and gentle. There may have been a trace of her fatal weakness there, too – finding herself in Ely’s arms meant a new problem to distract her from the one which demanded a solution, and gave her an excuse for postponement. Besides all this, there was the urge of her body. Three weeks of carefree holiday, of sunshine and leisure had had their effect on her. The masculine scent of George’s tobacco was nicely blended with the delicate underlying odours of toothpaste and shaving soap. All the passion which Ted had so well known how to rouse was still there to be roused. George was something cleaner and finer. She moved in his arms, and, not knowing what she did, she lifted her face to him, and George kissed her, and she kissed him back, and clung to him. That was when passion carried them both away for a mad five minutes.
Those kisses were like strange mixed wine to Ely. The kisses he had known had been few and unsophisticated, and Marjorie kissed as Ted had taught her to – with her lips parted for him, hotly and eagerly, and her sweet bosom pressing against him. It was his first, his very first glimpse of adult passion. His head swam and his arms as they held the lovely thing within them trembled although he did not know it. The boy was drunk with love and desire. All the respect and affection and admiration he had felt towards Marjorie were transmuted by those kisses. He grew hot and eager; perhaps it was only his clumsiness and inexperience which prevented the consummation of the affair on the spot.
As he grew more pressing, Marjorie saved herself by a last effort of self-control. She stiffened a little in his arms, abandoned the lax self-surrender which had maddened him. She was hungry for him now, and her heart had gone out to this clean sweet boy who suddenly seemed so very much younger and more inexperienced than herself. But her experience warned her that here it was barely twilight, that other people might come at any moment – she told herself this, making excuses to herself for postponing the issue, and making no attempt to ascertain her real motives. She was maternal towards him, lingering in his arms, loath to leave them. With her hands she stroked his soft cheek, and neck – soft and smooth to her, accustomed as she was to Ted’s tendency towards bristles and pimples. She smiled into his eyes, but her touch was soothing him now, and her maternal bearing and slightly unyielding attitude drained the urgency from him.
‘George, dear,’ she said, and kissed him, gently.
‘Sweetheart,’ he answered, charmingly – and he had never said any endearment to a woman before.
‘We must be sensible,’ said Marjorie, slipping from his hold and sitting upright again upon the tree stump. ‘Look, we’ve lost all the sunset.’
George brought himself under control. He was shaken, and a little ashamed of himself. He had no business to kiss married women – especially the wife of his office superior. He was a little frightened now at the memory of the unsuspected abyss of passion he had found opening at his feet, for he had never dreamed of such a thing, just as he had never dreamed of the sort of kisses Marjorie knew how to give. For the moment, in reaction from the discovery, he was glad to sit quietly, gazing at sea and sky, with the moon brightening above them, with Marjorie chattering beside him, while they pretended that nothing had happened.
Then, after a little while, Marjorie shivered.
‘It’s turning quite cold,’ she said.
‘These clear nights do get cold,’ agreed George.
‘We’d better be getting home,’ said Marjorie.
They got into the car again, without a kiss or even a handclasp, and George started the engine. He drove cautiously, for he was not yet accustomed to night driving, and as they proceeded along the wooded lanes the headlamps called up bizarre beauties of hedge and foliage. Rabbits skipped, amazingly, in front of them. Once they saw the green eyes of what Marjorie thought must be a fox, but which George suspected of being merely a prowling cat. They went down over the bridge, past the old cottages, into the high road ablaze with headlamps, along which the dazzled George could only crawl.
Still only good friends, and not lovers, they turned into the by-road to the sea, and coaxed the car through the gate into the garden of The Guardhouse. It was there, after they had put out the lights and were feeling their way to the door of the house, that the balance tilted once more, and this time irrevocably.
Their outstretched hands touched, just at the moment when Marjorie was suddenly realizing all her troubles again, that she had still reached no decision, that this was Wednesday night and on Saturday she would be in bed with Ted again, that Mother would be inside waiting for them as placid as ever.
The realization and the contact broke down again the frail barrier she had set up between herself and George – perhaps between herself and her inner self.
‘Oh George!’ she whispered, ‘George!’
They came into each other’s arms in the darkness, and they kissed again, and she strained to him, making him conscious of the precious flesh under his hands. It was madness, delirium, only to be dispelled when a chattering party of holiday makers went down the road close beside them. Then she tore herself free from him.
‘Mother must have heard the car,’ she said. ‘She’ll think it’s funny if we don’t come in. Kiss me darling! There! Oh, we must go in. Tomorrow –’
She turned to the door.
‘I can’t come in yet,’ said Ely, thickly. ‘You go in. I’ll come in a minute.’
Mother had nearly finished that sock of Derrick’s, though no one knows what hatred or hope she had knitted in with it.
‘Had a good run, dear?’ she aske
d.
‘Lovely!’ said Marjorie. ‘We saw the sunset. Did you see it?’
‘Yes, I saw it. Where’s George?’
‘Oh, he’s just doing something or other to that old car of his,’ laughed Marjorie. ‘He takes more trouble over it than we do about Anne and Derrick.’
Marjorie passed through the room to take off her hat and coat. She thought her woman’s talent for intrigue had prevented her mother from guessing what had happened. That is possible, but Mrs Clair was keen-eyed, and she probably guessed. Certainly she must have guessed later, when George came in, for the cigarette he had been frantically inhaling outside had not wholly calmed his nerves. He was pale, and his eyes were bright and yet vacant as if he had been drinking. He excused himself at once and went to bed.
11
It seems a plausible theory that it was that last change of mind of Marjorie’s in the darkness of the garden which precipitated affairs and made disaster possible. The kisses she had given George at sunset – even those particular kisses – might have been forgotten, and George might have come to look back on the incident as an unaccountable lapse on Marjorie’s part, never to be expected again. But she had changed her mind in the garden, and when she had changed her mind once she might be expected to do so again. And there was that fateful word ‘tomorrow’, which she had uttered. Marjorie had meant, if she had meant anything at all by it, merely that she wished to postpone all thought of the matter to some indefinite date, but to George’s simple mind the word meant literally that on the morrow she would kiss him again; it was that thought which helped him through a restless night during which, like any young lover, he went over in his mind every unconsidered action of hers, and analysed every single word, reading meanings and drawing inferences which were as likely as not quite unwarranted.
Deep within him Marjorie had wakened into activity a volcano of passion which might perhaps have appeared unlikely in someone as insignificant and retiring as George Ely. He had reached his comparative maturity with little or no contact with women. Now that the spark had been fired he was as ardent as any boy. The last few weeks had piled up explosive ingredients within him at a rate far greater than had been the case during the preceding years, and Marjorie last night had touched them off. He was mad with a man’s first love. He worshipped her dark beauty, and what he considered to be her poise and her tact and her ability. He tossed and turned through the night, conjuring up pictures of her before his mind’s eye, and waiting expectantly for the morning – it would be hard to say exactly what he expected of the morning, but he expected something.
Needless to say, the morning brought him small comfort. His glance followed Marjorie round the room as he devoured her with his eyes, but she tried to avoid meeting it; she appeared to be a tiny bit more preoccupied than usual with attending to the children and serving the breakfast. She granted Derrick’s petition (while they were all debating how they should spend the day) that she should accompany him and Anne to the beach that morning, and it was only in reply to a direct question from Anne that she agreed that ‘Uncle’ should come too, if he cared to. He cared to. He accepted the invitation eagerly.
Yet on the walk down to the beach Marjorie had Anne on one side of her and Derrick on the other, and when they had chosen their place for the day, on the leeside of a groyne, she was very busy suggesting to the children what game they might play. George was on the point of sulking before he was able to secure a moment of her attention when the children were not about. He caught her hand.
‘Marjorie!’ he said urgently, leaning towards her, compelling her to look at him. ‘Marjorie! What’s the matter this morning?’
The touch of him, and the anxiety in his face, broke down the indifference she had striven to assume.
‘Oh don’t,’ she said pitifully. ‘Wait. Wait till this evening.’
That was enough for George. It was all he wanted. He cursed himself for being a blind tactless fool – of course she would not want to risk word or gesture to him which might be observed by her children. That would of course be horrible, although (as George assumed quite for granted, without thinking for a moment of the cost) they would be looking on him as their father in a few months’ time. As long as Marjorie still loved him he was content to spend all day on the beach, to play with the children, to go bathing with her and to pretend the heart-whole camaraderie he had felt towards her when this holiday had begun, to treat her in her mother’s presence with what he intended to be respectful indifference and which did not deceive Mrs Clair for a single instant, neither when they came in to dinner nor when, with the children tired and sleepy, they finally left the beach and arrived for tea.
At tea time Mrs Clair made a surprising announcement.
‘I want to go and see my young man tonight,’ she said, archly.
‘Your what, Mother?’ asked Marjorie, a little startled.
‘My young man. Gary Cooper. He’s on at the Majestic in Mr Deeds. It’s no good asking you to come, of course. You’ve seen it already with Ted. Besides, someone’s got to stay at home and I think it’s my turn to have an evening off. Don’t you think, so, George?’
‘Yes,’ said George, fighting down the eagerness in his voice.
Mrs Clair was clever. It was perfectly true that someone had to stay in the house while the children slept. But it was equally true that Ely was a lodger and his own master; it was unthinkable that he should be asked to stay while the two women went out. He must be allowed to do whatever he chose.
‘Is George going to take you in the car?’ asked Marjorie. That might mean a postponement.
‘Oh no. I wouldn’t think of troubling him. The six-thirty bus will do for me quite well. I’ve travelled in it often enough. And there’s the bus at ten-thirty to bring me back.’
‘Oh,’ said Marjorie, with no inflexion of tone in the monosyllable at all.
‘I know you won’t think I’m rude, George,’ said Mrs Clair. ‘I do want to see that picture. Everyone says it’s so good, and I’m dreadfully fond of Gary Cooper. It’s such a good chance for me now that it’s on down here after I missed it in London. And tomorrow night we’ll be too busy packing.’
‘Of course,’ said George.
‘Will you barf me, Uncle?’ said Derrick, hastily. He had remained out of the conversation for quite as long as a small boy could be expected to.
‘Uncle doesn’t want to be bothered with little boys,’ put in Marjorie, more by instinct than by reason.
‘He likes little boys,’ said Anne. ‘He told me so. But he likes little girls best.’
Derrick was a sociable little creature at bath time, and it seemed as if the collector’s instinct was early manifesting itself in his case, judging by the way he tried to add new names to the lengthy list of people who had bathed him. He had his way, and while Mrs Clair put on her hat and coat it was Ely who, a little nervously, soaped him and rinsed him and dried him, and buttoned up the blue and white pyjamas which Derrick had laboriously demonstrated, as he had proudly boasted, he could put on all by himself. Derrick rode triumphantly on Ely’s shoulder to say goodnight to his mother, who with Anne’s assistance had just completed washing up the tea things.
‘Goodnight, Mummy,’ he shrieked, wriggling on his lofty perch while Ely held him in an anxious grip. ‘Goodnight, Anne.’
Ely took him away and lowered him into his bed. He lay there looking like an angel with his hair all newly brushed and his fresh-washed baby’s complexion.
‘Goodnight, Uncle,’ he said. He was sleepy already, in his usual startling contrast with his high spirits of a moment ago. He snuggled down into his pillow.
‘Goodnight, old man,’ said Ely. Tenderness was welling up within him. It was as unusual for him to be fond of a child as of a woman, but as he did not stay to analyse his feelings he was not surprised at himself.
His mind was in a turmoil as he sat down in the living room and listened to the splashing
s upstairs which told that Anne was in her bath under Marjorie’s supervision. Yet nothing had come of the turmoil when Anne came scampering in in her nightgown to sit at his feet while she ate the two biscuits which constituted her supper.
‘I want Uncle to put me into bed, too,’ said Anne, with decision, when Marjorie appeared to fetch her away.
‘You big silly,’ said Marjorie. ‘Uncle can’t put little girls to bed.’
‘Yes he can. You will, won’t you, Uncle?’
‘If it’s all right,’ replied Ely, looking up at Marjorie.
‘If you don’t mind, I don’t,’ said Marjorie.
Ely picked up the little skinny creature in his arms and bore her away. The touch of her arm round his neck was oddly pleasant – so was the sight of Derrick, already fast asleep in the other bed.
‘Prayers first,’ said Anne. She crouched beside the bed and whispered earnestly to herself. Then with a whisk of spider limbs she scrambled into bed and pulled up the clothes.
‘Did you hear what I said?’ she asked anxiously.
‘No.’
‘You weren’t supposed to hear, because I said something nice about you to God,’ said Anne. She snuggled down just like Derrick. ‘Goodnight, Uncle.’
‘Goodnight, dear,’ said Ely.
He came out of the room and shut the door quietly behind him, his mind still in a turmoil. Marjorie would be downstairs.
At the head of the stairs he heard a slight noise through the door of the women’s bedroom beside him – a faint ‘ping’ as a hairpin or a brooch was laid down in a glass pintray on the dressing table. Marjorie was not downstairs; she was in there. He was not properly conscious of what he was doing as he put out his hand to the handle and opened the door. Marjorie was standing at the mirror close beside him; she had taken off her frock and was in her petticoat, with her neck and arms bare, and her hair loose. She had fled to this sanctuary ostensibly to put right the disorder in her appearance consequent upon bathing Anne; actually because she had found the seconds of waiting while George was away too much to bear, and had come up here to occupy her mind on the only task she could think of at that moment. It would help to postpone the inevitable tête-à-tête with George, at which she did not know what she wanted to say nor what she ought to say.