The Grass Widow's Tale

CHAPTER II

« ^ »

She could have called up her friends, of course; she had plenty of friends. But with them she would simply have worn her normal face and manner, and kept her own counsel. You do not burden your friends with a sudden stranger half-way to the grave. You hide yourself while the darkness lasts—being, even at this crisis, reasonably secure that it will not last long—and emerge when you are yourself as they know you, and fit for their society again. No, at this moment what you need is a stranger in an express train, someone you need never see again, one of those accidental priests in the fleeting confessionals of this life where souls are often saved against the odds.

That was why she took herself for a long, solitary walk that Saturday evening in October, avoiding the places most familiar to her, and the haunts where her friends might be. The air was dove-coloured and still since noon, chilling by dusk to the edge of frost, but never quite touching it. The cloud was low and grey, but the atmosphere beneath it was clear. If it froze by morning, the crests of the roads, at least, would dry, and the film of slime would corrode away in pale dust.

The silence at home had helped to drive her out, but the silence here on the country roads two miles from Comerford was vaster and even more oppressive. She had never been afraid to walk alone in the night, not here; in a city she might have been warier. She met shadows, and, occasionally responsive to some alchemy of recognition in anonymity, exchanged good nights with shadows. She kept aloof from the roads that carried traffic, and the few cars she met passed mysteriously, absorbed in their own missions. And where she came at length to the main road again, she found herself before the broad car park and polished frontage of a modern roadhouse, the sort of place where none of her acquaintance could possibly be encountered.

“The Constellation Orion”; a beautifully imaginative name, at least. She remembered the place being opened, though she had never been inside it. Well, why not now? The building, twentieth-century metal box crossed with by-pass Georgian, didn’t live up to its name, but surely promised strangers as transitory as any to be met with in express trains. And she had plenty of time to walk home, all night if need be; she had nobody at home waiting for her.

Warmth and noise met her in the doorway. The saloon bar was so aggressively modern that it had almost reverted to the jazz-age angularity of the twenties, and its décor reminded her of fair-ground vases from her childhood. It was almost uncomfortably full. For some reason the same degree of actual discomfort in the bar itself seemed more acceptable. The lighting was mellower and milder there, and it was clearly the only room the locals, if they used this place at all, would dream of frequenting. Bunty edged her way to the bar-counter, bought herself a modest half of bitter, and carried it to a remote corner where a young couple had just vacated two chairs at a spindly table. Over the rim of her glass she surveyed the company, and let the confused roar of their many conversations drum in her ears without any effort to disentangle words. There was no one whom she knew, and no one who knew her. Nobody was interested, either; in twos, in threes, in shifting groups, they pursued their own preoccupations, and left her to hers. She had been sitting there in her corner for ten minutes or so before she noticed the only other person who seemed to be alone. She saw him first over the shoulders of two sporty types in mohair car coats, and from his position he might easily have been a part of their circle; but emphatically his face denied it. He looked at them out of another world, a world as private and closed as hers. Quite a young man, maybe somewhere in his late twenties, maybe even turned thirty. Tall, a light-weight but well enough made, rather brittle and nervous in his movements, his straight dark hair disordered. What she noticed first was the greyish pallor of his face, and its tight stillness, like a clay mask, so apparently rigid that the sudden nervous quiver of one cheek was shocking, as though the whole face might be shattered. The taut surfaces quaked and recomposed themselves into the same stony tension. Deep within this defensive earthwork dark eyes, alert and bright to fever-point, kept watch from ambush, glaring from bruised, blue-rimmed sockets. He looked as if he had been on the tiles for two or three nights in succession ; but she noted that the hand that held his glass was large, capable and perfectly steady.

He was getting too tightly hemmed in by the group at the bar. She saw him heave himself clear of them, edge back into the open, and look round for a more peaceful place. His ranging glance lit upon the single chair still vacant in her corner, and he started towards it.

Then he saw her. Really saw her, not as any unknown woman sitting there, but as this one particular woman, taken in entire in one flash of genuine concentration. It was the first time he had been fully aware of anyone in that room except himself and the personal devil with which he was surely at grips. He halted for a moment, poised quite still in the middle of the shifting, chattering, smoky bar, his eyes fixed on her. She thought that he almost drew back and turned away, that if she had lowered her eyes or looked through him he would have done it; but she looked back at him steadily and thoughtfully, neither inviting nor repulsing him, unless it was an invitation to show interest in him at all. One person under stress recognises another.

The moment of hesitation was gone; he came on with a quickened step. He had a whisky glass in one hand and a small bottle of ginger ale in the other. A long little finger touched tentatively at the back of the vacant chair.

“Do you mind if I sit here?” The voice was low-pitched but abrupt, as though he had to measure it out with care and constraint.

“Of course not, help yourself!”

She moved her glass to make room for his on the tiny table. It had a tray top of beaten brass that had never been nearer Benares than Birmingham. He looked at it for the fraction of an instant with disbelief, and then sat down carefully, and looked up at her.

“I agree,” said Bunty with detachment. “It’s rather nasty, but it’s somewhere to put things down.”

Something kindled in his face, no more than a momentary easing and warming of the haggard lines of his mouth, and a brisk spark that was burned out instantly in the intensity of his eyes.

“You didn’t look as if you belonged here,” he said. “Why are you here?”

Conversation came out of him without premeditation, and indeed with a famished urgency that ruled out premeditation, but in brief, jerky sentences, spurting from the muted violence that filled him. Violence was the word that first occurred to her, but she found it unacceptable on reflection; agitation might have been nearer the mark, or simply excitement. There was nothing impertinent in his manner, and whatever he was looking for, it wasn’t a pick-up.

“Because I was alone,” she said, with a directness equal to his own. “Why are you?”

“The same reason, I suppose. And I needed a drink.”

It appeared that this was no more than the truth. The whisky had brought a faint warmth of colour into his clay mask, its frozen lines were at least growing pliable now.

“You don’t mind my talking to you? I’ll shut up if you say so.”

She did not say so. What she did say, after a moment of deliberation, was: “I came out because it was too silent at home, and I came in here because it was even more silent outside.”

He uttered a short, harsh sound that might, if he had been less tense, have emerged as a laugh. “That won’t be our trouble here, anyhow. Or would you say this was a kind of silence, too? A howling silence?” The babel was reaching its climax, it was only half an hour to closing-time. The young man cast one brief glance round the room, and turned back to her, his eyes for a moment wide and dark with awareness of her, and strangely innocent of curiosity. “We’ve got something in common, then,” he said, emptying his glass without taking his eyes from Bunty’s face. “You weren’t expecting to be alone, either.”

“No,” she agreed, thinking how different a celebration this forty-first birthday might have been, “I wasn’t expecting to be alone.”

“Nor was I. I’m heading north,” he said jerkily, revolving the empty glass dangerously between his fingers, “for a long week-end. Not much to look forward to now, though. There should have been two of us, if everything hadn’t come to pieces.” The glass was suddenly still between his long hands; he stared at it blackly. “I suppose I ought to lay off, but I’ve got to have one more of these, I’m still twenty per cent short of human. May I get you the other half? Or would you prefer a short?”

“Thanks, the other half would be fine.”

She watched him worm his way to the bar with the empty glasses, and knew that she had done that deliberately. Why? Because if she had refused he would have taken it as a rebuff and been turned in again upon his own arid company? Or because she would have lost touch with him and been driven back upon hers? What she was courting was the loss of herself in another human creature, and that was what he wanted, too. Not that it would ever be much more than two parallel monologues, the passing of two trains on a double track, somewhere in the dark. But at least the sight of a human face at one of the flying windows would assure the watcher of companionship in his wakefulness. Their need was mutual, why pass up the opportunity of filling it?

So she waited for him, and watched him come back to her, balancing full glasses carefully as he wound his way between the jostling backs of the Saturday-night crowd.

“I’m sorry about your spoiled week-end,” she said. And with carefully measured detachment, since clearly this was no light matter to him at the moment: “Of course, there are other girls.”

He was just setting down his glass on the table, and for the first time his hand shook. She looked up in surprise, and met his eyes at close range, suddenly fallen blank in a frozen face, as grey and opaque as unlighted glass. He sat down slowly, every line of his body drawn so taut that the air between them quivered.

“Who mentioned a girl?”

“There are only two sorts,” she said patiently. “There was at least a fifty-fifty chance of guessing right first time about the companion who let you down.”

He drew in a long, cautious breath and relaxed a little. The slow fires came back distrustfully into his eyes. “Yes… I suppose it wasn’t difficult.” His voice groped through the words syllable by syllable, like feet in the dark feeling their way. “We fell out,” he said. “It’s finished. I can’t say I wasn’t warned, at least half a dozen of my friends must have told me she was playing me for a sucker, but I never believed it.”

“You could still be right about her,” said Bunty reasonably, “and they could still be wrong.”

“Not a chance! It all blew up in my face to-day. For good.”

“There may be more to be said for her than you think now. You may not always feel like this. You and she may make it up again, given a little goodwill.”

“No!” he said with quiet violence. “That’s out! She’ll never have the chance to let me down again.”

“Then—at the risk of repeating myself—there are other girls.”

He wasn’t listening. No doubt he heard the sound of her voice quite clearly, just as those blue-circled, burning eyes of his were memorising her face, but all he saw and all he heard had to do with his own private pain. Bunty was merely a vessel set to receive the overflow of his distress.

“We only got engaged ten days ago,” he said. “God knows why she ever said yes, she had this other fellow on the string all along. Whatever she wanted out of it, it wasn’t me.”

“It happens,” said Bunty. “When you commit yourself to another person you take that risk. There isn’t any way of hedging your bet.”

“She hedged hers pretty successfully,” he said bitterly.

“She wasn’t committed. And you’re better off without her.”

So softly that she hardly heard him, more to himself than to her, he said, “Oh, my God, what is there in it, either way?” His hands clenched into white-knuckled fists on his knees. She thought for a moment that he was going to faint, and instinctively put out a hand and took him by the arm, no hesitant touch, but a firm grip, tethering him fast to the world it seemed he would gladly have shaken off in favour of darkness. It brought his head up with a jerk, his eyes dazed and dark in that blanched face. They stared steadily at each other for a moment, devouring line and substance and form so intensely that neither of them would ever be able to hide from the other again, under any name or in any disguise.

“Look,” said Bunty quietly, “you’re not fit to drive any distance to-night. Go home, fall into bed, sleep her off, drink her off if you have to, get another girl, anything, only give yourself a chance. It isn’t the end of the world… it had damned well better not be! You’ve got a life before you, and it isn’t owed to her, it’s owed in part to the rest of us, but mostly to yourself. You go under and we’ve all lost.”

She wondered if he even knew that she was at least twelve years older than he was. She had begun by feeling something like twenty years older, and now she was no longer sure that there was even a year between them. This was no adolescent agony, but a mature passion that shook the whole room, even though the babel went on round it, oblivious and superficial, a backcloth of triviality.

“It is the end of the world,” said the young man, quite softly and simply. “That’s what you don’t understand.”

The clock behind the bar began to chime with an unexpected, silvery sound.

“Time! ” called the barman, pitching his voice on the same mellifluous note. “Time, gentlemen, please!”

She spent an unnecessary few minutes in the cloakroom, tidying her hair and repairing her lipstick, not so much to escape from him as to give him every chance to escape from her if he wanted to. Men are much more likely than women to repent of having said too much and stripped themselves too naked, and it might well be that now, having unloaded the worst of his burden, he would prefer to make off into the darkness and never see or think of her again. But when she stepped out from the lighted doorway, under the silver stars of the sign, he was there waiting for her, a slender, tense shadow beside the low chain fence of the car park. She felt no surprise and no uneasiness.

“Have you got transport? Then may I give you a lift home?”

“It’s out of your way,” she said equably. “I live in Comerford, and I imagine you’re heading for the M.6.”

“It won’t add more than three miles to the distance. And there’s nobody waiting for me,” he said tightly. She was growing used to that tone, but it still puzzled her, because for all its muted desperation it was strangely innocent of self-pity.

“Then if you don’t mind going round that way, I should be glad to ride with you.” Why not? All he wanted was to warm his hands at this tiny fire for a few minutes longer. And she could take care of herself. She was a mature woman, self-reliant and well-balanced, she was not afraid to venture nearer to another person, not afraid that she would not be able to control the relationship, even extricate herself from it if the need arose. She was old enough to be able to offer him the companionship he needed, and not have it mistaken for something else.

His hand touched her arm punctiliously as they walked across to the car, but he kept the touch light and tentative, as if mortally afraid of damaging the grain of comfort he had got out of her. The broad space of tarmac was emptying fast, the last few cars peeling off in turn between the white posts of the exit. Soon they would have the night to themselves on the dark country road into Comerford.

“Here we are!”

He leaned to open the door for her, and closed it upon her as soon as she was settled. She was incorrigibly ignorant about cars, and worse, in the view of her family, she was completely incurious. Cars were a convenient means of getting from here to there, and sometimes they were beautiful in themselves, but they made no other impression upon her. This one was large but not new, and by no means showy, short on chrome but long on power under the bonnet, and he handled it as though he knew what to do with all the power he could get, and probably considerably more than he could afford. Bunty might have no mechanical sense at all, but she had an instinctive appreciation of competence.

“Have you very far to go?” she asked, watching the drawn profile beside her appearing and disappearing fitfully as they passed the last lights of the frontage and took the Comerford road.

“About three hundred miles. It won’t take me long. It’s a quicker run by night.”

“Maybe… but all the same I wish you’d go home to bed. I don’t feel happy about you setting off on a run like that, in the state you’re in.”

“There’s nothing the matter with my state. I’m not drunk,” he said defensively.

“I know you’re not. I didn’t mean that. But in any case, it isn’t going to be a very long week-end, is it, to be worth such a journey? It’s nearly Sunday already. And you did say there was no one waiting for you.” The silence beside her ached, but was not inimical. “Am I trespassing?” she asked simply.

“No!” It was the first time she had heard warmth in his voice. “You’re very kind. But I’ve got to go. I can’t stay here now. It won’t be such a short stay as all that, you see, I’m not due back till Wednesday. Don’t worry about me, I shall be all right.”

Abruptly she asked: “When did you last eat?” Astonished, he peered back into the recesses of his memory, and admitted blankly: “I don’t even know! Yes, wait… I did have a lunch… of sorts, anyhow. Opened a tin… one of those repulsive dinky grills.”

“Nothing since then?”

“No…I suppose not! I haven’t wanted anything.”

“No wonder you look sick,” she said practically. “You’d be wanting something before you got to the end of your journey, believe me. And those two whiskys will settle better with some food inside you. If Lennie hasn’t closed up his stall we’ll stop there and pick up some sandwiches or hot dogs for you, and a coffee.”

“I suppose,” he admitted, “it might be an idea.” The lights of Comerford winked ahead of them, orange stars against a moist black sky. Old Lennie’s coffee-stall always spent Saturday evening on the narrow forecourt before the old market cross, handy for the late crowds emerging from the Bingo hall and the billiard club. All the new estates and the commercial development lay at the other end of the town, and this approach across the little river might still have been leading them into the old, sprawling village the place had once been. A foursquare Baptist chapel, built a hundred years ago of pale grey brick, looked out across the water between pollarded trees. Once over the slight hump of the bridge, they could see the white van of the coffee-stall gilded by the street lamp above it, and with its own interior light still burning. The small, lame proprietor, hurt in a pit accident twenty-five years ago, was just clearing his counter.

“Pull in for a minute and drop me,” ordered Bunty, “and I’ll see what he’s got left. We can’t park here, but we can turn down by the riverside and find a place there for you to eat in peace.”

She was back in a minute or two with two paper bags and a waxed carton of coffee.

“It’s a good thing Lennie knows me so well, he wouldn’t have opened up again for everybody, not after he’s cashed up.”

The old man had come limping out from his stall to close the shutter, and stood looking after his customer now with candid curiosity, watching her tuck her long legs into a strange car, beside a strange young man. He stood stolidly gazing, with no pretence at other preoccupations, as the car took the right-hand turn that would bring it down towards the park and the riverside gardens.

“This is all right, anywhere here. This is only a loop road, it brings us back to the main one just before the lights. We shan’t be in anyone’s way here, there won’t be much traffic at this time of night.”

There were no houses along here, and hence no homeless cars parked overnight outside them, an inevitable phenomenon in every urbanisation. He halted the car with its hub-caps brushing the overgrown grass under the trees. A narrow path and a box hedge separated them from the park on this near side, and across the road, beyond fifty yards of ornamental shrubbery and trees, the Comer gleamed faintly. After he had stopped the engine it was very quiet, and unaccountably still, as if every necessity for measuring time had stopped. Nobody was waiting for either of them at the end of their journey.

Suddenly she felt him shaking beside her, the only shaken thing in all that stillness. It happened as soon as he took his hands from the wheel and let his concentration relax, and for a full minute of struggle he could not suppress the shudders that pulsed through him. Bunty tore open the waxed carton of coffee and put it into his hand, closing her own fingers over his to guide the cup to his lips. He drank submissively, and presently drew a long, cautious breath, and let it out again in a great, relaxing sigh, and she felt his tensed flesh soften again into ease.

“I’m sorry… I’m all right, just more tired than I realised.”

“At least get some food inside you and rest for a bit.” She dumped the paper bags of sausage rolls and ham sandwiches on his knees, and watched him eat, at first with weary obedience and little interest, then with sudden astonished greed, as though he had just discovered food. “You see, you were hungry.” She sat nursing the half-empty coffee carton, studying the shadowy form beside her with a frown.

“Look, you simply can’t go on with this, it would be crazy.”

“Maybe I am crazy,” he said perversely. “Did you ever think of that? You were right about the food, though. Look, I owe you for all this, you must let me…”

“My round,” said Bunty. “A return for the other half.”

He didn’t argue. He stretched himself with a huge sigh that racked and then released him from head to foot, and lay back in the driving seat, turning his forehead to rest against the glass. A large hand crumpled the empty paper bags and held them loosely on his knee.

“Better?”

“Much better!”

“Then listen! You shouldn’t go on to-night. It isn’t fair to other road-users to drive when you’re as exhausted as this. You might pass out on the motorway, what then?”

“I shan’t pass out on the motorway,” he said through a shivering yawn, “I can’t afford to.” The note of grim certainty sank into a mumble; he yawned again. “No choice,” he said distantly, “no choice at all…”

She sat silent for a while, though she had had much more to urge upon him; for after all, she told herself, he was not hers. And the moment that thought was formulated she knew that he was, that he had been hers since the moment she had accepted him. Now she didn’t know what to do about him. People to whom you have once opened your doors can’t afterwards be thrown out, but neither can they be kept against their will. If he would go on, he would, and she had no right to prevent him even if she could. Only then did it occur to her how completely, during this last hour and a half, she had forgotten about herself.

What drew her out of her brooding speculation was the rhythm of his breathing, long and easy and regular, misting the glass against his cheek. He was asleep. The hand that lay open on his knee still cradled the crumpled paper-bags; she lifted them delicately out of his hold and dropped them into the empty carton, and he never moved.

So it seemed that she had nothing left to do here, after all. She didn’t even consider waking him; sleep was probably the thing he most needed, and perhaps if he had his rest out he would wake up ready to see sense and go home. And you, she told herself, might just as well do the same. It was no distance from here, she could walk it in ten minutes. A pity, in a way, to slip away without a good-bye, but these encounters are sometimes better ended without ceremony, and the partners in them don’t need any formulae in order to understand and remember them.

She waited a little while, but he was deeply asleep, she could easily depart without disturbing him. The sky had cleared overhead, there were stars, and the moisture in the air would be rime by morning. Not a good night to be sleeping out in a car. Maybe he had a rug tucked away somewhere, old cars without modern heaters often carry them as a matter of course. She looked round on the back seat, but there was nothing there but his suitcase. If there was a rug that lived permanently in the car, it might be in the boot; and there were his keys, dangling in the ignition close to her hand. Would he regard it as a breach of their delicate, unformulated agreement if she made use of them to look for something to cover him?

She hesitated for a few moments over that question, but when it came to the point she knew she could not leave him to wake up half-frozen in a rimy dawn. She raised her hand to the keys, and carefully drew them out, and her companion slept on peacefully. Quietly she opened the door, and quietly closed it after her.

The black butt-end of the car was as broad as a cab. There was enough light for her to find the lock easily, and the key was the second she tried. The large lid of the boot gave with a faint creak, and lifted readily. Faint starlight spilled over the rim into the dark interior, but called into being only vague shapes under the shadow of the lid. She felt forward into the dimness, and her hand found something woolly and soft, but with a hard stiffness inside it that rocked gently to her touch. She felt her way along it, and her fingers slipped from its edge and grasped something cold, articulated and rigid.

For one instant she was still, not recognising what she held; then she snatched back her hand with a hissing intake of breath, so sharply that the chill thing she touched was plucked momentarily towards her. With minute, terrible sounds the folded shapes within the boot shifted and rocked, leaning towards the open air as if they would rise and climb out to confront her. The marble hand she had grasped hung poised at the end of its sleeve. Something pale and silken and fine swung forward and flowed over Bunty’s hand, encircling her frozen fingers in the curled ends of long, straight blonde hair.

The girl coiled up between the tool-box and the spare wheel was dead and stiffening. Until that blind touch disturbed her, she must have been lying like a child asleep. Her dark coat was unbuttoned over a cream-coloured sweater, and in the breast of the sweater, even by this curious, lambent half-light, a small round dot of darkness could be seen, crusted and rough-edged like a seal, the only indication of the manner in which she had died.

Bunty crouched, staring, her hands at her mouth, numbed and cold with shock.

So this was why that girl of his was never going to have the chance to let him down again, this was why he had to get out of here to-night at all costs. This was how their quarrel had ended.