Marnie by Winston Graham
‘Apart from that,’ he said, ‘you’re a mystery, Mary, and mystery women are always a challenge. Dawn was talking about you to me the other evening.’
‘What was she saying?’
‘Never mind, my dear; nothing to your detriment in my eyes, I assure you. You’ve got a past, I’d guess, but what sort I just wouldn’t know. Not the understood sort, I’m sure.’
‘Honestly, Terry,’ I said, ‘this talking in riddles doesn’t amuse me at all. I doubt if it amuses anyone. If you think something, why not say it?’
‘No, no, dear. I wouldn’t want to offend you. In fact I hope we shall be bosom friends. On behalf of the Holbrooks I have pleasure in welcoming you into the family.’
‘On behalf of the Rutlands, thank you.’
‘Is it to be a lavish wedding?’
‘No. Very quiet.’
Very quiet. So quiet as to be almost secret. Just his mother and two witnesses. But it was happening and there was no escape. It had crept up on me like a cat on a mouse; while it was ten days away it hadn’t quite mattered so much; then it was seven, then four, then tomorrow. I should have gone off the night before, risked everything and run. But I didn’t. I stayed and went to the register office and a red-haired square-jawed man in a shiny blue suit said some words to us and we said some words back and something was written on a piece of paper and we signed our names. My true name, that was what gave me the horrors. I wouldn’t have minded so much if it had been happening to Mary Taylor or Mollie Jeffrey. My sham life didn’t include Marnie Elmer.
And now for the first time I really had changed my name. I was called Margaret Rutland, and Mark kissed me on the mouth in front of his mother and the red-haired registrar and the two witnesses, and I flushed because, although maybe he saw it as a promise, I saw it as a threat.
Afterwards we went back to his mother’s and had champagne cocktails which I didn’t like, but we hadn’t long to spend because we were catching the three o’clock plane for Majorca. While we were standing about talking and trying to be natural I thought of Forio, just to keep myself sane.
Before we left his mother took me on one side and said: ‘Marnie, I won’t say, Make him happy, but I will say, Be happy yourself. I think you’re capable of much more than you think.’
I looked at her and half smiled.
She said: ‘It will be twenty-eight years ago next month since he was born to me. I felt then I had everything – and I had! A husband, a son of eight, a mother and father still alive – and a baby son. I felt as if I were the centre of the universe. Since then they’ve all gone – except Mark. I expect it will seem a long stretch of time to you, but it doesn’t look very long to me, looking back. Life slips so easily through your fingers.’
I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing.
‘Life slips so easily through your fingers. So make the most of it while you can. Grasp it and savour it, my dear. Now, good-bye . . .’
We stayed at a hotel in Cas Catala about four miles out of Palma. Over the evening meal I asked Mark how he had traced me.
‘Must we talk of that tonight?’
‘You promised.’
‘Well sometime on our honeymoon, I said. Are you itching to know?’
‘Not itching. But curious. I – thought I had been clever.’
‘So you had.’ He rubbed his cheek. He was quite good-looking tonight because as usual holiday clothes suited him. Except that the shape of his cheek-bones wasn’t right you could have taken him for a Spaniard. ‘There was nothing ever more premeditated than that theft, was there?’
‘I told you how it was. But I want to know how you found me.’
He looked me over. That was truly what he did. ‘Can you imagine how I felt that Friday morning? I was in love with you, and I suddenly found I’d been made a complete fool of. I was so upset I could hardly think – and very, very angry. I could have strangled you.’
‘You looked as if you could when you found me.’
‘I might have done earlier but you were out of reach. The one important thing in my life from that moment was to catch you. I decided to cover up the theft and at the same time follow you and find you, wherever you’d gone and however long it took.’
‘You weren’t sure, then?’
‘I hadn’t an idea where you were. But all the time I was working, putting the money in the envelopes, I was really thinking about finding you. That’s what surprises me, that I only made two mistakes with the pay envelopes; it shows one’s mind can work in separate compartments—’
‘Yes. Go on.’
He half grinned. ‘I think perhaps I’ll keep the secret for a day or two more. Why can’t you sit and enjoy the view?’
‘No. I want to know, Mark! I’ll enjoy the view afterwards.’
‘But it might spoil it for you. It was largely luck the way I found you.’
He poured out the last of the wine and sipped at his glass. ‘Odd how much better this Rioja tastes here than in England.’
‘It was largely luck?’
‘Well, I thought to myself, what did she show herself really interested in? Not me, certainly. But wasn’t she genuinely interested in horses? Was that a sham too, all that enthusiasm and knowledge? It couldn’t be. So I thought of horse racing.’
‘Yes, I see.’
‘I thought, what will she do with the money? Go to race meetings, probably, and bet. What race meetings are on next week and the week after and the week after? If I follow them every Saturday I’m bound to catch her out eventually even if it takes a year.’
‘But it only took a day.’
‘Two.’ He offered me a cigarette. I shook my head.
He said: ‘I went carefully over everything we’d said to each other at all our meetings – piece by piece. And when you feel about a girl the way I felt about you it isn’t difficult to remember because – well because you think a lot about it in any case and that fixes it in your mind. And presently I came across something you had said at Newmarket. You advised me to back a grey filly called Telepathy and you said you’d seen her training as a one-year-old.’
‘Oh!’ I said. ‘Oh!’
‘Yes . . . Anyway, it was the only trail I had. I looked up Telepathy in Ruff’s Guide and saw she belonged to a Major Marston of Newbury, but that she had been bred by a Mr Arthur Fitzgibbon at Melton Magna, near Cirencester. On the Sunday morning I phoned Marston and got details from him and then went down to Melton Magna. Unfortunately Fitzgibbon had left, and it took me most of the morning tracing him to Bath. Even then he couldn’t help me; he knew no one who answered to your description. So I went back to Melton Magna, and just got in the Oak Leaf before closing time at two. Saunders, the innkeeper, didn’t know anyone of your description either, so then I asked him if – apart from the ex-Fitzgibbon place, which was private – there were any riding stables around where it was possible to hire a horse. He gave me the names of three. Garrod’s was the third I tried.’
‘Oh,’ I said again, dismally.
‘I almost gave it up just before getting to Garrod’s. The sun was setting and I was very tired and feeling very played out.’
I looked at him. ‘It was just as if you had come out of the ground.’
‘Like your conscience.’
‘Like the devil.’
He laughed. I stared out at the view now, thinking over my mistake. We were on a closed veranda looking over a small cove. A quarter moon was going down, and the small boats anchored in the bay cut the moon’s track like into a glimmering jigsaw. I suppose it was beautiful. But I thought only of my mistake. How I could have done it. If I hadn’t been such a fool none of this need have happened and I should have been free and happy.
I looked down at the gold band on my finger. I had been feeling sick and frightened but now I felt sick and angry.
‘You might not have found me,’ I said. ‘You might never have found me again. What would have happened to your money then?’
‘I should have had to
‘You have so much money?’
‘No. But I thought you were worth the risk.’
‘I’m not.’
‘I think you are.’
‘I’m not. I know I’m not. You should just have taken your money back and then let me go.’
‘Darling, what’s the matter?’ he said later that night. ‘Are you afraid?’
‘Yes. I can’t stand it, Mark. I’ll die.’
‘It seems improbable. Tell me what’s the matter. Do you hate me?’
‘I hate the thought of this. I screw up. I feel – sick.’
He put his hand on my bare leg just above the knee, and I moved quickly to cover it. He said: ‘Why do you shrink from me like that?’
‘I don’t shrink from you. It’s just the contact.’
‘Isn’t that the same thing?’
‘Not quite.’
‘Marnie, do you love me?’
‘I don’t love this.’
‘Aren’t you fighting against something in yourself?’
‘Not in myself.’
‘Yes. The physical act of love is a normal outcome of the emotional state of being in love. Surely.’
‘Maybe. For some people.’
‘Of course without emotion there is only sex. But without sex there is only sentimentality. Between a man and a woman the two elements of love become one. Don’t they?’
I stared up at the curved stone ceiling which was quite low in the alcove over the bed. ‘To me it’s so degrading.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Give me one reason why you think that.’
‘It’s . . . animal.’
He made a first little movement of annoyance. ‘We are animal – in part. We can’t take our feet out of the mud. If we try we fall slap on our faces. It’s only by accepting our humanity that we can make the most of it.’
‘But—’
‘We can degrade anything, of course – that’s the price we pay for our brains and our ingenuity – but if we do, it’s our own silly fault. We can just as easily exalt it. Whoever made us gave us the whole pack.’
In the café on the quay outside someone was playing a guitar. It sounded twenty miles away from me just then. I was trying not to tremble because I knew if I started he would know at once, and I’d really have hated to give myself so much away. It wasn’t exactly a trembling of fear but of sheer nerves. All those nice nerves that kept so steady when I was stealing money had gone back on me just now. And my mixed feelings for him weren’t mixed any longer; I didn’t like anything he stood for, male body, male superiority, male aggressiveness disguised as politeness. I hated him for having humiliated me, for having come into the room when I had practically no clothes on and put his hands up and down my body so that I was sick and hot and ashamed of myself and him.
Of course it was what was expected. I knew that. You don’t live the way I’d lived without knowing it all. But it doesn’t mean you have to want it all. Right through the evening I’d been trying to set myself to see it sensibly, like not happening to me, like it might have been if Mollie Jeffrey had got sent to prison, something you could keep at a distance. But you can’t always do what you set yourself to do.
He said gently: ‘I’d give a lot to know how your mind works.’
‘My mind? Why?’
‘It turns too many corners. It never goes the straight way to anything. It ties itself up in little knots and sees things inside out.’
‘Why d’you say that?’
‘These quaint ideas you have about sex. If they were nothing else they’d be desperately old-fashioned.’
‘I can’t help it.’
‘You’re a very pretty girl – made for love. It’s like a bud saying it won’t open, or a butterfly that won’t come out of its chrysalis.’
I looked at him. I’d thought when it came to this, when there wasn’t any escape, I’d be able to pretend that I liked it. But I knew now I couldn’t, not for all the tea in China. But I daren’t risk yet being outspoken about it – not any more than I had been. I wasn’t sure enough of him.
I sighed and said: ‘I’m really most awfully sorry, Mark. Perhaps I’ve got it all wrong tonight. But I promise you, it isn’t just something wrong with my reasoning. It’s something I feel afraid of and have got to – to overcome. Give me time.’
He was really too easy to cheat. ‘That’s a very different matter. Perhaps you’re tired and overexcited. Perhaps too much has happened in one day.’
He was even giving me excuses. I said: ‘The plane upset me a bit. Don’t forget it was my first flight. And don’t forget either that this is my first wedding. It would have been better for you if I really had been a widow.’
‘Well, we’ll carry that over for consideration tomorrow.’
The next day the weather was bright but showery. We hired a car to take us across the island to see the stalactite caves and a pearl factory. I bought some earrings and two or three brooches. In the evening we went to a night club and watched Spanish dancers. When we’d seen the best I was taken ill with pains in my stomach and we had to get back to the hotel by taxi. That took care of that night, but I didn’t think it was going to be a good excuse for long. The day after we spent in Palma. We bought a decanter and wine glasses in the glass works, and a handbag for me and a wallet and some shoes for him. I quite enjoyed it, just as I’d found it all right being with him at the races. That part was all right – though I should have been just as content on my own. When night came I was all tensed up for another argument and with a new set of excuses, but to my surprise he was quite matter-of-fact and didn’t try to touch me. We had twin beds, and except for the embarrassment of sharing the room I’d nothing to complain about. The same the next night and the next. I mean, it was surprising.
During the day I could tell he was watching me sometimes, and now and then I caught a look on his face as if I was a puzzle that wouldn’t come out. But all round he was considerate enough, except that we did so much in so short a time.
Now I’m as strong as a horse, but even I felt tired with all we did. He might be thin and pale, but I realized he was about as delicate as a four-minute miler. Perhaps he was trying to tire me out.
On the fifth day we flew to Ibiza and took a car to watch a Saint’s Day fiesta in one of the tiny villages. It was queer and strange, with the sun reflecting off the blank white wall of the church, and the mass of black-clothed peasants seething in the square like a lot of beetles that have just hatched out. The only colour was the procession of sacred images bobbing through the crowd, and the young girls who wore bright fiesta costumes with lace and silk and coloured underskirts.
I saw one of them who was specially pretty standing next to Mark. She had long plaited black hair with a great satin bow and she was chattering to a crowd of these older women who were all in black, and wrinkled and weather-beaten as if they’d spent forty years in the sun and the rain. He caught my look and smiled, and I think he saw what I was thinking because when we moved off he said:
‘Youth doesn’t last long here, does it? A year or so, and then she’ll marry a farmhand and it’ll be all childbearing and work in the fields.’
‘It’s so unfair,’ I said. ‘She’s trapped – no escape.’
‘Oh, yes, I agree. Though if you weep for her you weep for all the world. We’re all trapped the instant we’re born – and we stay so until we die.’
I felt he was blunting the point; by making it general he was taking the edge off what I felt for that girl; but I could not find the right words to say so.
Afterwards we sat in a café and drank cognac at fourpence a glass and watched the Spaniards crushing to the bar trying to get served. Quite a lot of the young men were already pretty well on and we could hardly hear ourselves speak for all the noise. Three young men at the door of the café were trying to get three girls to talk to them. The girls were gigg
I said: ‘Men only want one thing from a woman really, don’t they? Something that’s over in five minutes, and then they can pass on. It doesn’t seem to me it matters what woman it is as long as it’s a woman.’
Mark drank his brandy. I knew as soon as I saw his face that I’d said the wrong thing, and afterwards I wondered why I’d said it, knowing it would really sting him.
‘We’re all caught up in systems bigger than ourselves, Marnie. This isn’t a very good one: most of the girls here will be elderly drudges by the time they’re thirty. But it doesn’t follow that their standards are lower than ours. In fact what you’ve just said comes from a lower view of life than theirs, not a higher. Most of them would despise you for it.’
‘Like you do?’ I said gently.
He took a slow breath. ‘Darling, you’re a big girl now. If someone gave you a new system of bookkeeping to learn, you’d learn it. Quicker than I could. Well then, try to keep an open mind, be ready to learn about other things.’
‘Such as this, I suppose.’
‘Such as trying not to have set ideas – other people’s ideas – about love.’
There was an awful wild cackle of laughter from the men at the bar. It reminded me of Keyham. If that was love I thought . . .
Mark said: ‘Everybody’s experience is something new – absolutely new to themselves – unique. Right?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘Well, have you ever been to a Spanish fiesta before?’
‘No.’
‘Would anybody telling you about it be the same thing?’
‘No.’
‘Then don’t let yourself be told about sex. It’s a nasty trivial little indulgence only if you make it that.’
‘It isn’t what I’ve been told, it’s what I feel!’
‘You can’t feel about what you haven’t known.’
I moved my glass into one of the damp rings on the table that other glasses had left.
He said: ‘If you study some of the Eastern religions you’ll find that the act of love is closely linked with the act of worship. Not necessarily in the way of orgies, but because they think that on the rare occasions when there is great love between a man and a woman, it copies on a lower level the love of man for God and the ultimate union of man with God.’ He stopped. ‘All right, that’s high-flying stuff you may think. But it’s better to keep that in mind than dragging it all down to the level of the lavatory and the gutter and the brothel. You pays your money and you takes your choice.’