The HOPEFUL TRAVELLER Page 19

  ‘You are the one person I know who has made a complete and final transfer from childhood to maturity,’ her husband had told her bitterly. ‘Every vestige of the frailty of youth has been eliminated.’

  ‘In my family one put away childish things at the age of thirteen,’ she had pointed out. ‘And my father would not have tolerated frailty at any age.’

  She had not resented her husband’s foolishness, but her inability to match it with any of her own had contributed to the breakdown of their marriage. Whoever had said that marriage was for adults had been some way from the truth, she reflected ruefully.

  She turned away from the mantelpiece to tidy up the desk. The copy of The Times was still spread out there; in the agony column there was an advertisement which read ‘A publisher with liberal capital but little paper wishes to meet another publisher whose circumstances are reversed.’ She had ringed this around because it would amuse Adam; now she cut out the paragraph and put the cutting in a drawer. Dear Adam! He of all the people she knew was not in the least in awe of her; in fact, he delighted in her, he was the one person for whom she was a complete success. She was very grateful to him for this and wished that she could help him with his mercurial Irish colleen.

  She had picked a few roses earlier and now she arranged them in a vase and went up to Kerren’s room. The return from holiday was a dreary event and she was glad to see what a welcoming air the roses gave to the room. She opened the window so that the room would smell fresh. It would be nice to have a young presence in the house again. The place seemed more alive when Kerren was there, particularly on the occasions when she forgot herself and came thundering down the stairs, late for work, or went singing up them in the evening when something, or someone, had made her happy. She was such an expressive creature. Just right for Adam who needed a thread of quicksilver in his life. They won’t always be happy, she thought, but they will always be interested and they will always care, and that, in the end, is all that matters.

  Kerren came in an hour later. Her footsteps on the stairs were heavy and Marjorie Neilson hazarded a guess that it was not just the suitcase that was weighing her down. She did not go out to greet the girl, the roses would do that and Kerren would come down when and if she chose. In fact, she appeared half an hour later.

  ‘The roses are lovely! It was so kind of you.’ She was holding something in a brown paper bag. ‘I brought you some home-made jam; things seem much easier over there. It’s plum. I hope you like it.’

  She looked tired, Marjorie thought; not the tiredness that results from a long journey, but a tiredness of spirit that showed in the eyes which lacked their usual clarity.

  ‘Would you like coffee?’ Marjorie asked, it being the hour for coffee rather than tea.

  Kerren accepted more readily than she had expected.

  ‘Thank you for the cards,’ Marjorie said, as they sat down opposite each other. ‘The Irish are very thorough with their ruins, aren’t they! Just a stone left standing here and there.’

  ‘It was the English who were thorough,’ Kerren pointed out.

  ‘Is there still a lot of bitterness?’

  ‘Yes. Their grievances mean a lot to the Irish, they cling to them with great tenacity.’

  ‘You must find the phlegmatic English very dull sometimes.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know . . . I think I’m like a lot of Irish people, I love Ireland most when I’m away from it. We’re a race of prodigal sons. The English love their country enough to live in it.’

  ‘I wonder if this will be true in a few years’ time? Things seem to be changing.’

  ‘England mustn’t change!’ Kerren’s eyes darkened. Something had shifted out of place while she was away.

  Marjorie Neilson said lightly, ‘I suspect things change all the time, and always have. Whatever happens we shall adapt to it.’

  The girl looked at her as though she had uttered a particularly glib platitude.

  ‘How did you find your parents?’ Marjorie asked.

  ‘Very well. I hope I’ve persuaded them to come over in the spring.’

  She accepted another cup of coffee and began to talk about her mother and father. Marjorie had the feeling that there was something else with which she was really concerned, but that the nearest she could come to it was to talk about her parents and her fear of losing them. Yes, that was it . . . She was deeply afraid, and in a way that was new to her. But for Marjorie fear had always been an integral part of life, older than her earliest memory. There was no advice that she could offer, so she merely listened and interjected a word here and there. Kerren finished her second cup of coffee and wiped the bottom of the saucer carefully before putting it down on the polished side table. This commonplace act seemed to bring her to herself and she said awkwardly:

  ‘I suppose it’s stupid to feel like this.’

  ‘Our feelings are there,’ Marjorie answered drily. ‘One might as well say that the Tower of London is stupid. It doesn’t alter the fact of its existence.’

  Kerren laughed. ‘You’re very good for me, Mrs. Neilson.’

  ‘I’m glad of that,’ Marjorie Neilson said, rather surprised. It seemed better not to let the tempo of their exchanges flag at this point, so she said briskly, ‘Are you going back to work tomorrow?’

  ‘Yes. I’ve used all my leave.’ The french window was open and the cool evening scent of the flowers drifted in from the garden. Kerren glanced towards the window. ‘I dread going back to the old routine.’ Her hands clenched on the arms of the chair.

  Marjorie Neilson said, ‘I’ve never liked picking up the threads much myself.’

  They sat quietly for a few minutes, then Kerren said, ‘Well, I suppose an early night would help.’

  Marjorie Neilson found herself thinking about the girl on and off for the rest of the evening. It was not the coffee for which she had stayed, that was poor enough stuff these days; it was something else she had needed. Every time a call for aid comes, one is so helpless; it would be nice if, just once, one could light the way for someone else.

  Kerren, curled up on a chair by the window, was trying to write to Robin while watching a black cat prowling with sure purposeful paws over the roof of the house opposite. If she did not write now, it would be impossible to write at all, she thought, reflecting on the magnificent assurance of the cat advancing tail-high towards the sliver of a moon peeping between the chimneys. A moth flew in and beat itself against the lampshade, a great whirring thing as big as a harvest bug. Kerren wrote, ‘Robin, my dear . . .’ and looked out of the window again. The cat had disappeared; for a moment it had been silhouetted against the sky and then with a flick of its tail it descended into the cradle of the crescent moon. Kerren wrote, ‘It was so nice to see you all . . .’

  But it had been very upsetting to see them, tearing at each other, wounding with weapons more cruel than talon or claw. Perhaps as the years went by they would become so weakened that people would say they were reconciled when what had really happened was that all feeling had been bludgeoned out of them, all hope bled away.

  There had been a disastrous incident on the Saturday morning. Clyde had tried to lay the table and had done everything wrong; then he had not been there when Robin wanted to pass the hot plates to him and he had been there when she was making the coffee so that she complained she had no room to move. In order to lessen the tension when they finally sat down at the table, Kerren began to recount an amusing incident which had occurred when she was working in Jan’s restaurant.

  Robin interrupted sharply. What it was she said Kerren did not hear because her attention was already riveted on Clyde. He, who was always willing to laugh given the flimsiest of pretexts, was now looking at Robin with such naked dismay that if the feeling had not been so intense it would have been comic. Good actors do not over-emphasize, they water down human reaction, organizing their features to an acceptable mould in which one feeling is expressed with clarity, hate, love, fear, rejection . . . To attempt to
mix all four emotions would produce a very inartistic effect. But it was the inartistic raw product with which Kerren was confronted across the breakfast table that morning. It seemed to her, looking at Clyde, that some actual physical harm had been done to him at this moment from which he would never completely recover. In a day or two he would begin to repair the breach, to fill in the cracks with a mixture of hope and resignation. But just now he was seeing his wife stripped of the protective cloak his love had draped around her; he was understanding that however much he might give, however long he might wait, there would be nothing for him at the end. A little spasm of repugnance twisted his face. His body contracted and he hunched forward, one hand pressing his stomach. He muttered something that sounded like ‘cramp’ and made a panic-stricken gesture of pushing his chair back. Then he blundered out of the room.

  ‘Kerren!’ Robin’s face was salt-white except for her cheeks and the tip of her nose which were an unhealthy mauve. She, too, verged on the comic. ‘Kerren, whatever made you . . . I’ve never told him that I met Jan in London . . .’

  ‘Does it matter?’ Fright made Kerren jaunty. ‘Jan is my friend. . .’

  ‘But, you idiot, I let Clyde think that we met for the first time in Burford! Don’t you understand? He thinks he introduced us.’

  ‘But you said you thought he half-suspected something after that week-end.’

  Robin shook her head. She was breaking up pieces of toast and throwing them down again; the table looked like a battlefield. ‘He may have suspected that I did something on an impulse . . . But that it was all arranged, a calculated . . .’ She could not put it into words; she had been caught out in a piece of calculated deceit and this worried her more than the implications of the deception.

  Kerren said urgently, ‘Robin, go to him now. Tell him everything. You must, he’s so dreadfully hurt!’

  Robin stared at her blankly.

  ‘You must go to him,’ Kerren repeated. He was somewhere out there going to ground like a wounded animal, she could not bear to think of the pain he was suffering.

  Robin said, ‘Better to wait until he’s got it out of his system.’

  ‘But he won’t get it out of his system, can’t you see that? It will eat into him. If you don’t go to him now, it will never be the same again.’

  ‘There are times when it’s best to leave a husband alone,’ Robin said sharply. ‘You’ll learn that soon enough if you marry Adam.’

  The mention of Adam touched a nerve and Kerren kept quiet after that. Clyde was quiet for the rest of the week-end; but he was pleasant to Kerren and tried not to spoil the remainder of her stay. He took them out to lunch at a country hotel on the Sunday; but when they were in the house he withdrew from them. Kerren had watched him during that evening, sitting reading while she and Robin talked. He was burrowing an escape hole for himself deep in the book he held in his hands. It would always be like this for him, she realized. Perhaps by next week Robin would have thought up a story that was not too damning and he would have begun to lie to himself. But there would never be any real escape. He turned a page and moved a little nearer to the lamp. His big, flat face seemed quite calm, he didn’t have the sort of features that lend themselves to much drama; the eyes were a little tired, grappling with the small print, and the mouth was gently set, not parading its hurt. He would grow into a figure of fun, a genial fat man whose ample flesh concealed the hard core of bitterness.

  Kerren wrote to Robin, ‘I am so sorry to have caused you this distress. Do let me know that things have eased a bit between you. Be kind to him, Robin dear. Forgive me, I don’t mean to preach and have no right to, goodness knows; but do be kind to him.’

  It was easy to give advice to others, she thought as she stuck down the envelope; but when it came to one’s own affairs reason flew out of the window. There was the matter of Cath’s letter to be resolved; she no longer felt able to dismiss it with mature indifference. The meeting with Con had disturbed her balance.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Adam was startled by Kerren’s appearance when they met in The Strand. He had left the office early, feeling ridiculously eager and excited; it came as a considerable shock to be confronted with a poor, stricken creature who greeted him awkwardly and would not look at him properly.

  ‘I feel a bit off-colour,’ she muttered.

  ‘Poor dear!’ he said, without feeling any real sympathy. It was irritating of her to be sick when he felt so exceptionally well. ‘A brandy will soon put that right.’

  She dismissed the brandy. ‘There’s something I’d like to talk to you about.’

  Adam felt the overpowering sense of foreboding that these words, with their schoolboy associations, always aroused in him. He said, ‘We’ll have coffee in my flat and you can talk to your heart’s content.’ As they walked up Fleet Street he racked his brain as to what sin he could have committed. Or perhaps it was one of those sins of omission, always more heinous in a woman’s eyes. Had she expected him to write to her while she was in Ireland?

  ‘Now what ails you?’ he asked when eventually he brought the coffee in on a tray and set it down on the table. Kerren watched him. When he began to pour the coffee, she said, in the casual way that things sometimes come out after one has spent hours working out approaches of the greatest subtlety, ‘I didn’t know that you knew Dilys March.’ He went on pouring the coffee, he gave no tell-tale start and not one drop of coffee spilt in the saucer. When he turned to her his face wore an expression of complete exasperation.

  ‘Yes, I know Dilys March. Though I can’t for the life of me see that that has any relevance at this moment.’

  ‘She says you are her lover.’

  He stopped half-way across the room with a coffee cup in his hand. He looked startled, but not particularly guilty. ‘She says what?’

  ‘She told Cath that you were her lover.’

  He put the cup down beside her and went to pour his own coffee.

  ‘You can’t really have believed that?’ He was beginning to sound angry and Kerren felt herself losing ground.

  ‘She’s very attractive,’ she pointed out.

  ‘Attractive?’ He looked at her with raised eyebrows. It was apparent that he was not in the least flattered by the suggestion that he could have been Dilys’s lover.

  ‘But she is attractive,’ Kerren protested.

  ‘My dear girl, she’s a complete neurotic. Surely you can tell that.’

  ‘That’s unkind.’

  ‘Maybe you’re both neurotic’ He put saccharine in the cup and stirred vigorously so that the coffee slopped into the saucer. ‘Dilys March!’ he muttered. ‘Good God! What sort of a man do you think I am?’

  ‘That’s what I’m waiting to find out. After all, you’re not very willing to talk about your emotional life, are you?’ She did not care about Dilys any longer. It was Alison that was really between them. She tried to sip her coffee, but her lips were trembling so much that she could not manage it. Her distress sobered him.

  ‘You shouldn’t take too much notice of anything that Dilys March tells you,’ he said. ‘She isn’t a liar in the normal sense, but she weaves fantasies about all sort of things and sometimes the dividing line between truth and fiction gets a bit blurred. Let’s leave it at that.’

  ‘It’s rather a devastating thing for her to have said if it isn’t true.’

  He looked at her. ‘Do you still believe it?’

  ‘No.’

  He looked down at his cup. If we start with Dilys perhaps we’ll get round to Alison, Kerren thought. At least, I’ll find out a little more about him.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me you knew her?’ she asked.

  ‘I had no idea that you knew her. You have probably mentioned the name once or twice, but I didn’t associate it with the Dilys I knew. Besides, I don’t see her often and she isn’t really a friend. Her father, Sam March, is a journalist. I’ve known him for years, he was a friend of my father. He’s in Russia at the moment. His wif
e left him for the first time soon after Dilys was born; Dilys was an inconvenience to both of them and they pushed her into a boarding school when she was little more than a toddler. As her father is out of the country so much he persuades friends and acquaintances to keep an eye on her. It’s as simple as that.’

  ‘What happened to her mother?’

  ‘She drifted about the south of France for ten years, during which time she had as many affairs. Finally she became the mistress of a South American millionaire. He didn’t please her either. In the end, she took an overdose of sleeping pills.’

  So this was the great love of which Dilys had talked! Kerren said sadly, ‘No wonder she weaves fantasies. Her childhood must have been pretty bleak.’

  ‘Very probably. But it hasn’t got anything to do with you and me.’

  ‘Other people’s unhappiness matters.’

  ‘That sounds rather pretentious to me. Has Dilys ever asked for your pity?’

  They were thoroughly out of sympathy by now.

  ‘You’re in danger of losing all feeling,’ Kerren told him.

  ‘I don’t seem to be having much success this evening,’ he said grimly. ‘First you were agitated because I was supposed to be Dilys’s lover and now you’re cross that I’m not.’

  ‘You’re one of the most conceited men I’ve met,’ she flared. ‘Ever since I first knew you you’ve been standing back being sardonic and amused and intolerably superior as though you were looking over your shoulder and wondering what all those funny little creatures are doing down there, grubbing about in the dust, flailing around . . .’

  ‘Be careful or you’ll get your metaphors mixed!’

  ‘I have nothing but contempt for you.’

  On this note she left him. He did not offer to see her home and though she would certainly have refused she was nevertheless wounded by his neglect. When she got to her room she flung herself on the bed and cried bitterly. The tears seemed to have been waiting a long time for release, and as she cried she felt as though something of herself was escaping, something she would dearly like to have kept. Why did one have to grow up, to become – hateful word – mature? When you were young, everything was fresh and exciting, even pain was a kind of joy. Then, the second time round, you began to notice the machinery of existence, to make judgements. Dilys was neurotic. Neurotic! The word didn’t exist when you were young. People were individuals, you liked them or you didn’t according to something that was theirs and theirs alone, some inner thing that defied definition. You didn’t relate actions to character traits, you didn’t associate relationships with moral issues, you just let people be and loved them for being. Then, when you emerged into the adult world, the process of classification began. People were stable or unstable, well-adjusted or neurotic, over-sexed or cold . . . They were each given their label and left to journey on with it, somehow diminished once they were placed in the appropriate category. There was no mystery, no magic, all the quirks were accounted for. Yet how splendid they could be, the misfits, the outsiders; what a grace and a glory they had given to life before the years and the adult world’s disapproval drove them into corners or outside the civilized stockade. She was glad that Beatie had died before they had labelled her a high-class whore.