A Penknife in My Heart

  “You do, sometimes,” said the girl. “Why?”

  “Oh, nothing.”

  “A sort of contained excitement,” she went on dreamily, “like a pot simmering with the lid on. I noticed it last night.”

  “Not so contained, was I?”

  “I don’t mean that.” Laura turned her bowed head a little away; the fine coppery hair veiled one cheek. There was nothing coquettish in the motion—she often bent her head and looked away when she was pursuing some thought. Yet this elusive movement always worked upon Ned Stowe like a charm—the most flagrant, abandoned look could not provoke him half so much.

  “I don’t mean that,” she was saying. “Last night, when you came upstairs, you looked like a small boy gloating over a secret—no, that’s not quite it—a small boy who’s accepted a dare, and isn’t letting on: a bit frightened; seething with excitement.”

  Ned was never nearer telling her the whole story. He loved it that Laura should be able to read his mind thus: it was another sign that they were meant for each other. Helena, of course, had the same flashes of intuition; but they were the lurid flashes of the neurotic, showing him up in the worst possible light.

  “You bet I was excited,” he said. “Or don’t you know yet how you get me worked up?”

  It was the first time he had prevaricated with Laura, deliberately misled her. The personality of Stuart Hammer must have impressed itself on him very strongly. Well, he had given the chap a promise. And anyway, there was a certain gratification in keeping a secret from Laura—his first secret—for a few days: he would tell her all about it when they met in London the following week.

  “What are you thinking about?” asked Laura.

  “Doesn’t the village look pretty? I’m trying to photograph it on my mind. … All the places we’ve been together in. They ought to put up a plaque in each of them.”

  “‘Here Ned Stowe and Laura Camberson were happy.’”

  “Happy?” He sighed, and the lines on his face deepened. “If we weren’t always seeing everything for the last time, my love—”

  “When I’m with you, I see everything for the first time.”

  From the dune where they sat, the row of waterside houses, half a mile away, resembled a ship rather than a village. The walls, painted black or tarred; the window frames, picked out in white, like gunports; the upper-works of wooden balconies: a long hull of houses, riding low above the water, looking from here as if it and not the land was their natural element. The river and the lagoons were dotted with sails under the huge East Anglian sky. A brisk wind blew from the east, but the two lovers were sheltered by the dune. Ned had got the loan of a sailing dinghy for the morning. After an adventurous hour dodging about in the channels, with a good deal of centerboard work by Laura—for they frequently ran onto the edge of underwater sandbanks—they had landed on this islet, which lay between the main lagoon and the sea.

  “Why do we have to go back?” said Laura. “Let’s build a house on this island.”

  It did not irritate Ned. They knew each other well enough to accept such fantasies for what they were worth.

  “We’ll come back again, won’t we?” he said.

  “Will we?” She was gazing up at him, but there was something withdrawn in her gaze. “Will we?” she said again, in a hurried mutter, averting her eyes now.

  He took it as a plea for reassurance. He had no inkling that she had just, not decided, but known with dreadful conviction, that they must part forever.

  “Of course we will, love. Why not?”

  “Kiss.”

  As he took Laura in his arms, she began shaking all over and sobbing distractedly.

  Ned did his best to comfort her, but he felt momentarily detached, almost cold toward her. Perhaps ten years of Helena has used up my stock of pity, he thought.

  “I’m sorry,” said Laura at last. “All this is killing me.” Her uncontrolled gesture took in the furtive assignations at out-of-the-way restaurants, the guarded telephone calls, the elaborate planning for brief meetings, the false faces they had to wear when in public together, the lies and the everlasting shiftiness upon which their relationship had rested ever since that day, four months ago, in the television studio.

  “It’s not doing me much good either.”

  A flight of terns, flashing in the sunlight, swift and frantic as a volley of guided missiles out of control, did their aerobatics over the little beach where the dinghy was drawn up. Gloomily, Ned watched them. He knew that his nerves were almost frayed through; yet it was only by holding himself in, by incessant watchfulness over word and movement, that he could prevent himself splintering into mad, centrifugal fragments.

  “I won’t let you go,” he muttered, answering a question in his own mind.

  Laura was lying on her back, her hair tumbled over the pale sand, eyes closed. He looked down at the blue veins of her eyelids, the high cheekbones, the long, naked arms like white snakes, the big body that was so fluent and delicate. She should have children, he thought—my children. He studied her attentively, like a map; the map of a country which, though he had been there often, would remain endlessly mysterious to him.

  He had known her long enough to feel that he could never break away from her without mutilating himself beyond recovery.

  “What’ll you do when I’m gone?” she said. The words came like the distant echo of an explosion in his own mind. His voice shook uncontrollably.

  “You’re not going to leave me, Laura?”

  “I mean, tomorrow, and—”

  “Oh, some sailing. Pottering about.”

  “What’ll you do for ballast without me?”

  “A few hundredweights of sand.”

  “Hundredweights! You are a beast!” Laura was sensitive about her large body. She never quite liked even Ned’s making a joke about it; and these moments of self-distrust, self-depreciation, in a woman who appeared to others so calm and invulnerable, always stirred in her lover a deep tenderness.

  “It’s the most beautiful body in the world,” he said, laying his hand on her.

  “No, my darling.” Laura sat up. She held his hand in her lap, looking down at it; then she let go of it, and moved a little away from him. “I can’t say what I have to say when you’re touching me.”

  Ned’s face tightened. He seemed to be bracing himself for a too-long-expected blow.

  “Ned, I should have said this ages ago, but I’ve kept putting it off,” Laura went on, in a low, hurrying, breathless voice. “I cannot go on much longer with this sort of life. Oh, darling, don’t look like a stone image—please try to understand how I feel. I know it sounds selfish, but I must have something to build my life on.”

  “Isn’t my love—?”

  “I’m a woman. It’s not enough to know that you love me. I can’t live in the moment—I’ve got to have some sort of stability. I know it’s just as bad for you—worse probably, with Helena on your mind too. I’ve seen you getting more and more on edge. It’ll drive you into a nervous breakdown. Oh, Ned, I’m afraid of damaging you any more.”

  “But why now? Why do you have to choose our happiest moment to—?”

  “Just because it was the happiest. When we were sailing the boat together just now—we understood each other so perfectly, without saying anything. Don’t you see? We ought to do everything together, all the time, or give each other up. This isn’t just a love affair, for either of us. Half a loaf is worse than no bread. We can’t live on snatched hours; some can, but we can’t.”

  “You mean I must go back to Helena? Haven’t you any idea what you’re condemning me to when—?”

  “Don’t be angry with me, my darling, please. I would live with you openly, as your mistress, if she won’t divorce you. But I must live with you. I can’t stand being treated any longer like a—like a dirty post card.”

  “Laura!”

  “Put yourself in my place. Wouldn’t you feel just the same?”

  “Perhaps. But I’d choos
e to have you, on any terms, rather than to part,” he answered with quiet force.

  After a pause, she said, “That’s because you’re a man. It’s different for you. But I hate dragging on, never knowing—”

  A sea gull wailed overhead. Ned rose abruptly. “Put on your jersey, sweetheart. We’d better go. The tide is ebbing.”

  2 The Water Test

  Ned Stowe drove Laura into Fakenham to catch a late-afternoon train. There seemed no point in her staying another night in her present state of mind; and, though he knew she half wanted to be coaxed or forced out of it, a perverse impulse stopped him doing so. They drove past the heavy cornfields, through the villages dripping with roses. Ned remembered nothing of the drive afterward except the feel of her hand in his: a pall of fatality hung over them, as if they were taking each other to the slaughter. On the platform, Laura said, “I shall always be there”; and a little later, “Don’t hate me.” They might have been ghosts, engaged in the last minutes of some posthumous and futile reunion. As the train moved out, Laura gazed back at him, leaning through the window, never taking her eyes from his, her own face all hollows and shadows, set in the expressionless beauty of a death mask. What message was she trying to send him? A waft of courage? A plea for understanding? He did not know. At one point she just raised her hand—a tentative, timid movement which stabbed him with remorse. He was glad, afterward, that he had waved back.

  Returned to the Nelson Arms, he stood for a while in their empty bedroom, staring at nothing, like a victim of concussion. Then he forced himself to write a short letter to his wife—he’d had some jolly sailing, the pub was comfortable, he was off tomorrow for a sight-seeing trip, didn’t know where he’d land up but a letter poste restante Yarwich would find him on Thursday; he hoped all was well at home—the letter of a prep-school boy to his mum, he thought bitterly.

  It was only after sealing it up that he realized it gave Helena his present address; if she suspected anything, an inquiry agent would soon discover that he had stayed here with another woman. Well, let her discover, if she wants to. Let’s have a showdown. It was the nearest he could come to it. He knew, and despised himself for it, that he had not the moral fiber to make the first move and tell his wife about Laura.

  In an attempt to take his mind off his present misery, Ned began planning how he should follow Stuart Hammer’s instructions. He was staying at the Nelson Arms incognito—unless anyone here had recognized him from the occasional photograph that appeared in the Radio Times and the TV Times, there was no danger of “E. Saunders” being identified as Edwin Stowe. He would spend tomorrow pottering about the Norfolk villages in his car, moving steadily south so as to arrive in Yarwich after nightfall; leave the car at a garage, with his luggage locked in the trunk—he could take what he needed for the voyage in his mackintosh pockets. Stuart Hammer had told him exactly how to get from the town center to the derelict slipway in the outer basin which was their rendezvous. There must be no mistake about this: a man inquiring the way to such a spot, late at night, might rouse unwelcome curiosity. He would buy a large-scale map of Yarwich tomorrow, and memorize the route. It was important, also, to arrive at the rendezvous at the exact time, for he did not want to be noticed hanging about near the deserted slipway. If all went well, he would virtually disappear from view as soon as he left the Nelson Arms in the morning; there would be nothing to connect “E. Saunders,” let alone Ned Stowe, with Stuart Hammer and the Avocet.

  The only danger point seemed to be the slipway. If he arrived there too soon, or the mysterious Hammer was late, and some local accosted him on the lonely foreshore, he must have a convincing story to account for his presence there. As a writer of television plays and adaptations, Ned had seldom found any difficulty in churning out plausible fictions; but now his mind was a blank.

  Going downstairs, he had a drink with the landlord, and several with himself, before supper. Laura’s departure had left him stunned, without feeling, but now his heart began to ache intolerably. His whole bloodstream seemed to be poisoned, with self-pity and with a corrosive resentment—against Laura, against his wife, against his own weakness—which the drink only stimulated.

  “Pity the missus couldn’t stay the extra night,” said the landlord.

  “What? Oh, yes.” Ned came to himself with a start. He was about to add that she had had a message recalling her to London, when he realized it would be a stupid lie—they had received no letters or telegrams here. “Yes, she’s got to start work early tomorrow.”

  “Keep actresses busy, do they, sir?”

  “Actresses?”

  “I understood Mrs. Saunders was on the stage.”

  “Oh, no. She’s a studio manager.”

  This clearly meant nothing to the landlord. “Gentleman who came in last night said he’d seen her in a play.”

  “He’s mistaken.” Ned’s face began to twitch, and he turned it away.

  “Thought he recognized her, anyway. Gentleman with the eyeshade. A stranger here.”

  Stuart Hammer recognize Laura? He gets more mystifying all the time. More likely he just wanted to get off with her, thought Ned. Perhaps his invitation to me was the first move in a campaign. The jealousy always smoldering in him flared up. Laura Camberson at twenty-seven, thirteen years younger than himself, had a reputation for easy-come, easy-go. A certain passivity lying deep beneath her vivacious manner—a sort of sexual fatalism, as Ned judged it—had made her unable to resist the men who swarmed to her. The first time they had met, at a party after a television play, their eyes encountered across the length of the studio and held one another in a long, exploring gaze, till Laura rose, walked like an automaton through the group of people she’d been talking with, and came over to sit beside him. Presently he took her home to her flat, where they fell onto the bed with each other as if poleaxed.

  “I really don’t make a habit of this sort of thing,” he said afterward.

  “I’m glad,” she replied. She did not say, then or later, that she didn’t make a habit of it either. Remembering it now, Ned thought, “She may be a bitch, but she’s always been an honest bitch.”

  He believed she had been faithful to him since then: he believed her when she told him she had never loved anyone as she loved him. But her truthfulness, her fidelity hardly mattered any more, for she had got herself into his system like a virus and he felt that, whatever she did now, he would never be rid of her.

  Perhaps Laura’s threat to leave him was made so that he should be forced to decide between her and Helena. Perhaps, on the other hand, when Stuart Hammer came into the pub last night and saw Laura, a long look was exchanged—the same questioning, answering look as Ned and Laura had exchanged at the party four months ago. Why else should Hammer have suddenly chummed up with him? Why else should Laura suddenly decide to go? The thoughts writhed and lashed like snakes in Ned’s brain.

  At 10:30 the next night Ned walked out of the garage where he had left his car and, with the sensation of moving into a dream within a dream, directed his steps toward the rendezvous. The market square of Yarwich, with its elegant eighteenth-century town hall floodlit; timbered almshouses; a main street of rather garish shops; a cinema, a church, a river bridge—he registered these as landmarks on the way. Like most provincial towns, Yarwich went early to bed. Once he had left its center and was walking through the streets of smaller houses which stretched toward the docks, Ned hardly met a soul. He paused occasionally under a lamp to check the name of a street with a list taken from his mackintosh pocket: in the hotel, where he had dinner, he had worked out his route with the help of a large-scale town map.

  A quarter of an hour’s walking brought him to the inner basin. Wharves, a fish market, Customs & Excise buildings, derricks, a collier tied up near a gasworks. The night felt colder here. There was a compound smell of gas, fish, seaweed and oil. The water lay stiff and gleaming like black treacle against the wharves.

  Ned turned left and, crossing a set of railway lines
, moved along the waterfront. He was ahead of time, having allowed himself half an hour in case he should lose his way; but everything had been so easy—inevitable as progress in a dream. He knew exactly what would come next: a row of warehouses, a footbridge over an inlet of the river, a chapel for seamen, a public garden, a yacht club, a—

  “Evening.”

  A torch was flashed briefly in his face. Ned suppressed a violent impulse to run for it. A policeman emerged from the shadows between two buildings.

  “Lost your way, sir?”

  “No, thanks. Just taking a walk. I’m not trespassing or anything, am I?”

  Ned was impressed by the careless coolness of his own voice. So, apparently, was the policeman.

  “That’s all right, sir. Good night.”

  “Good night.”

  He sauntered on, his heart still pounding. Odd that he should have felt so guilty. He wasn’t even a smuggler. Yet.

  Past the yacht club. A jetty, curving its stone arm protectively round a cluster of small yachts and dinghies. A rusting M.L., stripped to a hulk, canted beside the sea wall. A hundred yards further, the slipway. Five to eleven. The moon was behind clouds, and the wind blew colder. Ned moved into shelter behind a ramshackle wooden boathouse, then peered out over the dark water. A few masthead lights. Silence, but for the steady burring of the wind. Shivering in his thin mackintosh, he felt for his cigarette case. No, better not: might as well play this game thoroughly, childish though it is.

  Distant church clocks began striking eleven. When they ceased, the silence flowed back. Did I dream the Stuart Hammer episode? thought Ned; then, with a sickening lurch of the heart—or am I getting delusions? am I going mad—going mad? A nervous breakdown, Laura said. Is this it?

  A lisp of water: oars creaking in rowlocks. The darkness by the slipway shaped itself into a boat and a man. Ned came out from the shelter of the hut, stepped cautiously along the slipway.

  “Good man,” said Stuart Hammer. “In you get. Take an oar, like a good chap; I’m lying quite a way out.”