A Little Treachery

39

He let her go, did not accompany her to the door; for indeed he felt ill. He had even forgotten Simon.

If he had thought them a pair of ageing, insignificant, unattractive creatures, hardly women any longer, for whom anything was good enough, what man could blame him? A brutal, uncivilized judgement, but the usual one.

But a man of his refinement of feeling!

It was true, of course it was true. But he stood looking the thing in the face for the first time. It was true, it was true that he had been reprehensibly careless. He had taken a chance on things working out better than he could foresee. And certainly he had had no right to take such a chance.

Ah, but between the lot of them they had pushed him to it! He had groaned inwardly and wished for courage to be graceless while Margaret Forrester, a dear, charming woman whom he had always admired, had made her appeal on Clemence Hare’s behalf. He had lacked the coarseness to refuse. He was bound to Mrs Forrester by the tie of her long friendship with his first wife, and this in a peculiarly affecting manner. That strain of dark blood in Jessica, that very quality which had appeared exotic and exciting to a susceptible and unthinking youth, so that he had fallen violently in love with her, a woman much older than himself, a later, worldly-wise judgement had come to make him feel was bitterly unfortunate. It had turned out to be more obvious to other people than he had ever thought possible in his youthful ignorance, and to be met with unforeseen prejudice. Then Margaret’s sensible, warm-hearted friendship had accepted it as a fact of interest and charm; and for this he had always regarded her with a deep gratitude. It was not a gratitude which could be expressed except in deeds and he had always seized gladly on any chance to oblige her.

He could not have refused her request; a small one, as it must have seemed to her, and not even made on her own behalf; simply a kindness in which she had invited his cooperation.

Then had come his meeting with the two of them, the little deformity with the repellent manner, and his faded admirer. In a way, it had amused him. Hiding his irritation with an ironic courtesy, the irony of which they were too stupid to fathom (as he had supposed), he had taken leave of them resolved to dispatch their business at top speed.

His shrugging dismay at the sight of the cottage was vivid with him still. ‘Give me patience!’ he had cried to himself at the bare glimpse of it. An ancient with all the vices of sheer old age. Yet a tough ancient, too, in spite of the ominous palsy due to the pounding of the traffic. And it was, after all, he had argued, a case of ignorance and bliss. What the eye did not see would not grieve the heart. (At the age of something past fifty, simplicity has become absurd and calls for no mercy! Surely that is so?) These two women, in their fatuous ignorance, would go on happily enough till the roof fell on their heads – and that most probably would never happen. It was by no means a certainty that it would not happen, but it was a fair probability. And, moreover, the house was saleable; saleable, after all, if they did not care for their bargain – only they would have had to drop a lot. (But hadn’t he known, even then, that prices were likely to rise extravagantly? To be honest, he had not foreseen it. Yet if he could but believe he had –.)

He remembered standing at the top of the garden, gazing down upon the mighty, tell-tale weeds and fuming with annoyance which amounted to a kind of malaise, a longing to be through with a maddening interruption in his tensely calculated programme – to be done with it at any price. He had heard much of this garden, which they had believed to be so promising. But one knew what the gardens of such women were like: a little ground where they could coddle a few favourite plants – and there it was, a little patch of workable ground up near the house, all among the privies. For of the romantic grandeur of Catherine’s plans he had no conception.

Oh, it would do; it must do! ‘For I must settle them,’ he had thought with desperation, ‘or they will send me running hither and thither,’ and he thought of how he would be expected to examine yet another inaccessible little hovel, and then another, until they were settled; and such straitened people with their precious savings are notoriously difficult to suit. For many months previously he had been working under pressure, with an anxiety sometimes approaching agitation. His nerves were at full stretch. He must end it.

That was how he had come to commit this subtle transgression. He had disposed of a gadfly of a situation, and had disposed of it artfully, for good; a deeper consciousness than the one he admitted assuring him that they were settled to such an extent that they would never require his services again – because they could not afford to ‘drop a lot’.

And if for a weak moment he allowed himself a little comfort in the thought that now, not much more than two years after, the picture was quite changed, prices having risen beyond anyone’s reckoning, it was only to remember that now it was too late; too late for the mad one, for the dead one.

But Hungerford was not a callous man; he was a very sensitive man; he was so sensitive that he felt ill after this scene he had been through, restrained though it had been. Its intensely dramatic quality had been felt by him to the full, nor had the tragedy escaped him, not his own tragedy, but theirs; he had fineness enough for that. During the past quarter of an hour his nerves had been tensed almost unendurably, and felt all drawn out, as if he had been through some form of torture. His very body felt stiff and awkward, he was conscious of his own gestures. He was so sensitive that he could not bear to think of what he had done – and that was how he had ceased to think of it.

‘Well, face it,’ he thought at last. ‘Reprehensibly careless.’

If that had been all! But it was not all. There had been other motives – no, not motives, but other influences; grounds for another charge, far more disreputable.

He was back in the sour, water-logged garden and had just come to an exasperated stand, a point where he had all but confessed the game was up, his precious time had been wasted in vain; and at that moment he was accosted by the small man in gumboots whom he had noticed crossing the plank bridge to a neighbouring plot a little higher up the stream, who had come splashing up out of the water, grinning, like a bandy-legged dog. They had exchanged a few guarded comments upon the cottage and had fallen into talk, led by a common knowledge and experience of building conditions. Then it happened that the young woman, Mrs Ransom, seeing her neighbour, had run down the grass balk of the next plot to beg saucily for an invitation to lunch, she being a friend of the man’s wife; and so an invitation to himself had followed. He had accepted it because it happened to be convenient; he had left his car in the town and would have had some little way to walk before he could get a meal. Or he had accepted it because he could very happily bear the sight of that pretty, soft-eyed face for a little longer.

So they had crossed over and she had picked her way between them over the water meadow and up through the garden of the big house.

But how tainted and heavy with meaning was this whole incident in retrospect! That little impromptu luncheon party, for the short-comings of which nobody had apologized, had at once achieved a strange air of intimacy, almost of conspiracy, though nothing at all memorable had been said. They had laughed a good deal, he remembered, yet he could not recall any particularly amusing remark or anecdote – it was rather that a kind of cynical humour connected with the cottage had seemed to be in the air and pervading all the talk, even though the place had not been discussed, barely mentioned.

Yet surely he had imagined that later! For the idea was really very horrible – too indecent to entertain.

He seemed now to picture that ill-assorted quartette, of which he was one, sitting there jesting like conspirators or people in high spirits who wink at each other over a shady understanding. Fantastic! As far as he could remember he had said little about the cottage, he had been discreet enough.

But she had said – yes, sweetly, ingenuously she had told him that she and her husband did so want to get their price for the cottage, or something very near it; it was so vital to them that they should, and sell quickly, too; and had spoken artlessly of her coming baby. He had smiled and said, ‘You’re asking rather too much;’ but did not say ‘much too much’, still less that such a price could only be regarded as an impudent try-on. She was innocent of any dishonest intention, perhaps, but a coaxing creature of soft femininity, with her little lullaby voice dragging out the commonplace phrases until they blushed with meaning; a born charmer. The weather was warm, an unpleasant, clammy languor was upon him; the air of the damp valley was bad, and he felt it. In fact, he had been doing too much of late. And the young woman, caressive and flattering, her pregnancy just visible, had affected him disastrously.

So when the husband had gone off, unceremonious and obviously not caring what his wife felt or what happened in his house, he had had the folly to linger, talking with soothed vanity to the two women in the large, lofty, sunny room from which they overlooked a decayed, overgrown garden full of decrepit trees long untended and throttled by masses of the parasite ivy. There he had stayed, behaving with great folly, wasting precious time, while now and again taking an astonished glance at himself. For soon all his attention was given to the younger woman, the hostess making a silent third – but of course it was her presence which had emboldened him, alone with the charmer he would have been more wary. At moments he had vaguely wondered at her. She was ambiguous; a pale, rather mannish creature with censorious eyes; an austere woman, she seemed, yet displaying a curious forbearance with the little purring beauty, an indulgence which had almost an air of tenderness. But her he had hardly taken into account. Oh, no, it was not his hostess’s attractions or the husband’s schemes which had caused him to linger so long in the house of this uncongenial couple, the wife off-hand and unwelcoming, the man a type of wolfish speculator, a shady ranger on the outskirts of his professional world, with whom he would ordinarily have had no dealings; a little fair, bandy Jew.

Nothing had come of it, of course, and nothing was intended by the young woman to come of it – except an advantageous sale of her cottage. She was merely a natural flirt; but in his supersensitive state, her gravid and innocent animalism had caught him fast, and he had taken away a disturbing, enkindling memory, morally weakening.

So she had got something very near her price.