The Merciless Ladies by Winston Graham
I raised my eyebrows but said nothing further.
He said: ‘The first meeting was pretty grim. You’re right: she hasn’t changed much.’
I waited.
‘I went to see het on the Thursday. I knew it wasn’t any good going and telling her the exact truth: that I’m keen to marry again, that I feel I’m at a sort of cross-roads and need – need Holly to help me change direction, that I want to cut out so much … and can’t do it without her help. On the other hand I knew she wouldn’t believe me if I started telling her a pack of lies …
‘So I began according to plan, saying I felt it was time we both had our freedom, and that of course I’d provide her with the evidence if she was willing. She laughed at me.’
‘That’s what I would have expected.’
‘We talked for a while, argued. In the end she said: ‘‘Well, Paul, I’m afraid you’re going to have to stay married to me for a bit yet. Get used to the idea. If you’ve any little starlet lurking round the corner hoping she’s going to become the second Mrs Stafford, tell her to forget it. Explain to her what fun it is living in sin.’’ ’
I could hear Olive’s voice saying this. I could see her sitting on her white settee, carefully moistening her lips each time she spoke.
‘So what has happened to make the difference?’
‘Last week she rang me and said she’d changed her mind and would I like to go round? I dropped everything and went. She said she’d considered it and had decided we’d both be better free, so if I made the necessary arrangements she’d do her part.’
‘Any reason?’
‘Yes, thank God. She’s remarrying herself. I suppose it was the natural thing, but I could have shouted with joy! Apparently some Member of Parliament wants to marry her. I’ve forgotten his name, but it seems they’ve known each other for quite a while—’
‘Peter Sharble.’
‘That’s it. How d’you know?’
‘She’s mentioned him more than once. And I met him at her flat soon after I came back from Rome.’
‘Well, God bless him, that’s all I say! Poor devil, I hope he makes her happy.’
I put out my cigarette. ‘ So it’s all going to come sttaight after all.’
‘Apparently. I’ve already been to see Kidstone, made arrangements about hiring some woman; it’s just a routine one has to go through. I confess I’ll be happier when it’s done.’ Paul ran a finger under his collar. ‘ You know, Bill, it’s all going so well I’m scared. I’m scared of Olive in a way I’ve never remotely been before. There was a smirk about her expression that suggested she was enjoying some secret joke. I didn’t live with her two years and not learn to know her rather well. I’m trying to persuade myself it’s a smirk of self-satisfaction. After all a rising politician of good family is a much better proposition than a successful artist with no background. I looked up Sharble’s constituency and he’s in a safe seat. Olive will absolutely love being the Member’s wife. I hope to God that’s what it is; but I shall be happier when it’s all through.’
V
A letter from Holly, dated 7 November but not delivered until late in the year, having twice crossed the Irish Sea. I have it before me now, much smeared and the ink faint for having been so often exposed to the light.
Dearest Bill,
Thank you so very much for your letter about Paul and me. Do write again, as, while I’m at Oxford, I get out of touch with things. One lives in a fortress – or is it just an ivory tower? – which keeps the world at a respectful distance.
I can count up quickly enough all the letters I’ve ever had from you – total six, and one of those was abusive, so it’s time you made up a bit of leeway.
I do appreciate your good wishes. But to read your letter one would think the whole thing sealed and settled instead of very much in abeyance until Paul can get his freedom. Write and tell me sometime what sort of a woman Paul’s first wife is.
You say in your letter that perhaps this – this being my prospective marriage to Paul – that perhaps this is what I’ve really needed, what I spoke of in the Patience, a lack of a sense of purpose, having no direction or object in life. Well, if it is I didn’t know it then! All I know is that Paul says he needs my help. How can I help him? Perhaps I shall find out. What’s wrong with us all, Bill, that none of us seems to fit into life as it is set out for us? People are like a litter of puppies, all struggling over each other and trying to edge someone else out and squeeze down into the corner that just suits them. And when they get there they find it doesn’t really suit them so well after all.
Should I except you from this view? You always seem so quiet and level-headed and unperturbed by other people’s strugglings. You’re the puppy in the corner that takes no part in the scramble but ends by getting the most comfortable place. Am I right, Bill; or have you your own secret sorrows and your own special discontent?
I must stop now. Write me a long letter next week.
Love, Holly
In December I had arranged to have dinner with Paul at the Hanover Club, where he was now anxious to put me up for membership. It may be remembered that some of the newspapers reporting the lawsuit had made a lot of that part of Paul’s evidence dealing with the rejection of the picture by Burlington House and the implication that this rejection could have been on politic rather than artistic grounds. So there had been more angry correspondence both in the newspapers and out. Paul’s break with the Academy was now absolute. Since there had always been an influential number of artists who scorned the Academy anyhow, this didn’t bother him, especially as he was now so we’ll known that he no longer needed a showcase.
I called for him at Royal Avenue and we had a drink there first. As we were leaving to get into his car a tall man in a bowler hat asked for Mr Paul Stafford, thrust an envelope into Paul’s hand, said ‘Good evening, sir’, and walked off. Paul tore open the envelope, saw it was the divorce writ Olive had agreed to serve on him, grunted with satisfaction and drove off.
‘I’m happier now it’s really under way’, he said.
He was at his best that night, lively and young-looking, and even witty. The influence of club life over a matter of eight or nine years, and the companionship of clever, successful and amiable men, had encouraged him to relax his guard, to join in their conversation, to be one of them, and had encouraged his personality to flower.
It wasn’t until after dinner that I met him in the passage, thinking it was time I left, and saw a change had come over his face. He put the long envelope in my hand.
‘A lesson to teach us to read what we’re given. Olive’s had her secret little joke after all.’
I took the writ and read it and saw what he meant. The formal, artificial evidence which Paul had been at pains to provide had not been made use of. The corespondent cited was the Hon. Mrs Brian Marnsett.
Chapter Fifteen
If this tale of my relationship with Paul Stafford were to have proper shape and design it would now be necessary to go through the next year month by month and event by event. I don’t want to. I want to tell things just as they come to my memory. Shape and design are poor bedfellows if they bring back what is better forgotten.
First let me explain what puzzled us greatly at the time but which I learned later, explicitly, from Olive. She said that after the break-up of their marriage she had heard that Paul was associating with Diana again, and purely for her own satisfaction had paid to have him watched. ‘After all, it was his money.’ She had had no real intention of using the evidence for she had then had no intention of divorcing him. She was saving the information to confront him with if the occasion arose. But later, when he came and asked for a divorce, and Peter Sharble asked her to marry him, the chance to use this evidence was too glorious to miss.
It put Paul in an impossible position. Through the stilted phraseology of a solicitor’s letter it became plain that Diana Marnsett wanted to defend the suit. He could only refuse. It would be ludicrou
He went to see Olive, but Olive had discreetly disappeared on a cruise.
Although she now wanted her freedom too, he was fearful that she might change her mind – or that Peter Sharble (poor fellow) might change his. Paul’s need of Holly grew no less with delay. Diana would have to fend for herself.
The cause lists were full. Waiting was tedious and a nervous strain. Then a second blow fell that we might perhaps have anticipated. Colonel Marnsett sued his wife for divorce and cited Paul. What was more, he claimed damages. Olive was getting full value for her money.
Paul must have felt he would never be free of the shackles of the law courts and solicitors’ offices and writs.
This year I eventually yielded to pressure from the north and agreed to operate from Cross Street, Manchester, for an experimental period. ‘ CP.’ was obviously determined to keep an avuncular eye on me. In one of my articles I had misused a gerund, and it wouldn’t do.
And Holly stayed on at Oxford, working occasionally for her first, which inevitably she got. Paul and I spent two Sundays with her in June. These are the islands on which remembrance dwells with pleasure. We took a canoe up the Cherwell, paddled it to a shady spot high up the river and picnicked and talked and bathed and talked again, and nothing was further from us than Chancery Lane and vindictive women and the stale old legal language which dries up, as it records, the quicksilver of human passion. Every detail of those two days remains in my memory. They will live as long as I do.
I was not at either of the divorce hearings, but I gather the first ran its predestined course. The second was complicated by Colonel Marnsett’s claim for damages. After commenting unfavourably on the claim, since it had become distasteful to the modem Englishman to assess the loss of a wife in hard cash, Mr Justice Buckley said that, nevertheless, since it had been put forward, he was legally bound to make an award. He assessed the damage sustained by Colonel Marnsett at one thousand pounds. Judgement would be entered accordingly.
While this was going on Paul’s and Olive’s solicitors were battling with each other as to the amount of maintenance Paul should be bound to pay her when the divorce was made absolute. Since Olive was likely to marry within the year, this was largely a matter of form, but the legal argument went on just the same. Paul said this was because both firms of solicitors were anxious to refurnish their dingy offices out of the proceeds. He was becoming more and more inclined to nod his head wearily at any suggestion put forward. It was an expensive tendency, but he was making enough money to feel that a few hundred pounds one way or the other weren’t worth the worry and delay. Anything to have done with it.
Yet with all the delays and disappointment eventually a day for Paul and Holly’s wedding really could be fixed, and, having been fixed, really did arrive. The date, as everyone knows, was 12 April 1928.
As was to be expected, their wedding conformed to no conventional standards. No one was present but immediate relatives. The vicar of the parish in which Newton was situated had agreed, rather against his principles but out of friendship for the Lynns, to marry them in church, and he did this with a great deal of dramatic vigour as if to cover up his own heart-searchings. He was a little man with an ovoid bald head, dark glasses to assist his near-blindness, and bird-like movements.
Sir Clement, against all advice, had resurrected a professorial morning suit with a green tinge from among the accumulated lumber in his bedroom; but his recent paunch made the waistcoat too tight, and Lady Lynn had to slit it up the back.
Lady Lynn strode uncertainly about in a passion of vagueness, her long blue frock, relic of some garden party of thirty years ago, flapping about her heels like a cassock. Her sister was there, tall and bony as a Grenadier Guard, and an uncle – the one who had financed Leo – played the organ. That was the sum of Holly’s relatives – Bertie being in Africa and Leo in Paris – and I, again, most reluctantly, his best man, was the only outsider. Paul had no other representative present. His father had been invited but was ill with jaundice.
Holly was in grey, neat and fresh and tall, though happily dwarfed by her two female relatives.
No sentimentality was encouraged. Everything was done with the utmost decency and despatch. One went to church and saw them married, properly married in the sight of God, thank God; that was over, good; hurry up and sign the register; now everyone had better come home – everyone being eight – for tea and sandwiches. You’ll come, Vicar, of course? Good. A busy man, but able to spare an hour. We would just go nicely into two cars.
In the dining-room Sir Clement said, ‘Sit down, sit down, help yourself to the sandwiches’; and at once took his own advice. He had boiled himself an egg for breakfast, but since then his wife and sister-in-law had been too busy to see about any food for him.
‘No, no, sit down, Holly dear’, said Lady Lynn; ‘you mustn’t wait on yourself today of all days. Vera, we’ve forgotten the lump sugar; you’ll find some in the three-pound mustard tin in the first cupboard, marked rice. Paul, you don’t take sugar, do you? So sorry we haven’t any whisky for you, but we don’t usually drink it, and the wine merchant in Reading must have forgotten to deliver what I ordered. Plenty of soda water and lemonade and barley water. Holly … no, Clem: be a dear and fetch the soda water.’
‘My dear Lady Lynn’, said Paul. ‘I’m as ardent a tea drinker as anyone here.’
‘Best way to drink tea’, said Uncle Frederick, ‘is with no milk or sugar and a slice of lemon. When I had a duodenal ulcer …’
‘When you had a duodenal ulcer’, said Aunt Vera, reappearing from the kitchen, ‘you wrote the best fugues of your life. I wonder what connection there is between inspiration and ill-health. What do you say, Mr Stafford?’
Paul said: ‘It’s probably much easier to create masterpieces when underfed. I suppose that was the idea behind mortification of the flesh. The old monks knew how to achieve sanctity.’
‘I remember when I was student’, began the Vicar in his pleasant chirping voice, ‘a friend of mine who—’
‘Sanctity’, said Sir Clement, helping himself to another sandwich. ‘The odour of sanctity became known as that, being a familiar smell upon the breath of monks, you know, and was associated by ignorant people of those days with holiness and shaven heads. (I beg your pardon, Vicar, but yours is not shaven.) In actual fact, when the stomach has been empty for so many days – anybody’s stomach – the digestive juices create a distinctive sourness which lends itself to the breath—’
‘Daddy’, said Holly, ‘ suppose you concentrate a bit more on that sandwich and less on—’
‘What sandwich?’ said Sir Clement.
‘This one’, said Paul, passing the plate.
‘Don’t eat them all, Clem’, said Lady Lynn. ‘After all, it isn’t your wedding day.’
‘So, of course’, said the Vicar, ‘ I said to my friend, ‘‘You may be a student of theology, but I hesitate to imagine what sort of a student you would—’’ ’
‘Eat up, Bill’, said Paul. ‘Meals at weddings are provided solely for the parents and the best man. Don’t contradict me, it’s an acknowledged fact.’
‘When I had a duodenal ulcer’, said Uncle Frederick, ‘certain forms of meat were plain poison to me …’
‘A very interesting old church, Paul’, Lady Lynn said. ‘Unfortunately it was restored by Sir Philip somebody or other in Victoria’s reign. Most distressing. Those pitch-pine pews.’
‘… the operation’, said Uncle Frederick. ‘ On the table for three hours. Of course they found more than they expected. Sir Giles Landsdowne, who performed the operation, described to me afterwards …’
‘Unfortunately’, said the Vicar, ‘there is a good deal of beetle in that part which has not been restored. We opened a fund last year. If we may, I should
‘What was the name of the man who spoiled so many churches about that time?’ asked Lady Lynn. ‘ The fellow who would have built those Government offices in Whitehall pure Gothic if Lord Palmerston hadn’t put his foot down and said Italian Renaissance or nothing.’
‘This cutting up fashion’, said Sir Clement, swallowing tea, ‘seems to me greatly overdone. Where, of course, the trouble cannot be cured any other way—’
‘Mine could not’, said Uncle Frederick.
‘I’m not asserting that it could. But in so many minor cases—’
‘Lord Palmerston spent a long life putting his foot down’, said Paul.
‘I wonder why?’ said Aunt Vera, who frequently used this opening gambit. ‘I wonder why the Victorian era produced so many great men? Now—’
‘Because it lasted so long, Auntie’, said Holly gravely.
‘Not at all. You speak from ignorance, child. Darwin, Ruskin, Browning, Gordon …’
‘The cutting away of living tissues’, said Sir Clement, ‘is a fundamentally artificial process which must create a profound and incalculable reaction on other parts of the body …’
‘The reaction in my case’, said Uncle Frederick, ‘has been entirely beneficial. But I do not contend that in other instances …’
Surrounded by these amiable eccentrics, Paul might have exhibited some signs of boredom in view of the usual company he kept. Or as a compromise he might have talked and listened exclusively to Holly, letting the others chatter among themselves. Instead he joined in with them as one of the family without effort and with a genuineness and gentleness which one could not begin to doubt.
The meal over, they were soon ready for off. They were to spend their honeymoon in the Channel Isles, where they hoped to do some more sailing.
No sentimentality now. Especially none now. Kiss and goodbye.‘Goodbye, Daddy; look after yourself. Don’t forget to take your bi-focals when you give that lecture on Saturday. Goodbye, Ma; bless you; I’ll write. Goodbye, Bill; I don’t know why you’re left to the end.’