The Merciless Ladies by Winston Graham
She had certainly grown up.
‘I’ve known him fifteen years’, I said. ‘He’s not failed yet.’
‘I said I was only a little afraid. But that’s because so much hangs on it … Anyway, I felt I had to come. We’ve been trying to get away and so many things have delayed us. So putting it off another week …’
‘Set your mind at rest. I’m content if—’
The door bell whirred. ‘Hold on … Probably someone for the last tenant.’
I went to the door and opened it. Paul was there.
IV
‘I wondered if I might catch you in, Bill.’
‘Yes’, I said.
He stood there, strongly built, well dressed, self-contained, the very reverse, so it seemed, of a temperamental artist.
‘Lucky I remembered your number’, he said, and then he caught sight of Holly. ‘Well, I’m hanged!’ He looked at her quizzically. ‘So this was where you went.’
‘Yes’, said Holly. ‘I thought of telling you, and then I thought I wouldn’t.’
He came in and slipped off his coat. ‘All women are deceitful. Even this one. And I suppose you came here to tell him secretly all the things I came here to tell him secretly.’
‘I thought you weren’t perhaps going to explain everything to him’, said Holly. ‘And he ought to know.’
‘You are a couple’, I said; ‘both sneaking round like this. If you want to go and live in Cumberland, go with my blessing. Paint yourselves pink if you like. Don’t think I care.’
Paul looked at Holly. ‘He doesn’t care.’
‘Yes, he does’, said Holly. ‘He’s just on his dignity.’
‘Well, have it your own way. Stop for a drink now you’re here, anyhow.’
Paul sighed and sat slowly in a chair.
‘So you’re going to cut right away from London?’ I said. ‘Going to be a primitive and grow hair down your back.’
‘One doesn’t need to leave London for that.’ He accepted the drink and looked at it until its presence in his fingers registered itself. Then he put the glass down. ‘ Thanks, I don’t.’ He looked at Holly again and smiled; then turned to me. ‘I’ve been hunting sprats all my life, Bill. Ever since I took to fresh air in the Patience and met Holly I’ve been convinced that I ought to be a deep-sea fisherman. Well, there’s only one thing to do, go out and try, even if I don’t catch anything.’
I said: ‘Send me down a whale from time to time.’
‘When we’re settled—’ Holly began.
‘When we’re settled’, Paul said, ‘you must come up and examine the catch for yourself.’
‘Holly said you wanted to free yourself from old associations. If—’
‘Don’t be a fool. Come for a month to begin with. It’ll be your own fault if you don’t.’
His eyes were darker than usual. They looked quite old.
‘What are you trying to do, Paul?’
‘Do?’ He put the tips of his square fingers together and stared at the cage. ‘I’ve not done much yet. I’m a blind man trying to see, a small-time artist hag-ridden by a vision … I’m trying to learn to spell over again – and to forget most of the words that have come in so useful up to now. How can I say more than that without becoming pompous? It’s nothing unique, for God’s sake. Even great artists get these troubles. Renoir did. Many others.’
‘At one time’, I said, ‘you had another end in view.’
‘Oh, I know. Every second-rate politician eats his words – and I’ll bet you could quote some of mine. But that’s the way it is. We live by our mistakes – and the lucky ones learn by them.’ He looked at the clock. ‘I must get back. Not that there’s much to be done now the daylight’s gone. Coming, Holly?’
‘Yes.’
‘All this, Bill, is for your private ear. We shelter the public from such enterprising views. Tomorrow we leave for a holiday in Cumberland. How long we stay depends on what happens there, and what happens here is nobody’s business but our own.’
‘And mine’, I said.
He patted my arm.
‘Of course.’
Chapter Eighteen
I think it was Bismarck who said that military campaigns are often decided by ‘the imponderables’. You can prepare for so much, plan and arrange and think it all out; but the unexpected, the unforeseen and unforeseeable, will still emerge to upset it. Burns of course had the same idea a good deal earlier.
It might be better for their reputation as thinking adults if the element that went wrong with Paul and Holly’s best laid plans came into the category of an imponderable. Unfortunately not. That evening, and for many months afterwards, it never occurred to me that they had not taken into account a stumbling block which was so obvious.
Letters were desultory; and I have to admit that at this time I was more absorbed in my own work than ever before or since. To become literary editor of one of London’s newspapers, a bachelor, just thirty, with the entrée of all literary and dramatic circles, was as precise a recipe for satisfaction and happiness as I can imagine.
And I was rich too – on an income of a thousand pounds a year. It was a time when a room at Claridge’s cost two pounds a night, you could buy a good shirt for fifteen shillings, beef was sevenpence a pound, coal l/5d a hundred weight, and certain furnishing firms advertised complete furniture for a house for twenty-six guineas.
That my contentment was not absolute was probably because at the heart of the thing, surrounded by all the hard work and the excitement, I was lonely, and though I went out with girls from time to time they never seemed to mean enough. It wasn’t done in those days to live openly with a girl without marrying her, and there was none I wanted to marry.
Yet it was a lovely life, and I have often wondered since why I threw it all away. Was it for friendship, for love, or out of a sort of inverted vanity, supposing I could arrange or alter other people’s lives?
Christmas came and went, and still no news of a return. People were beginning to inquire as to Paul’s whereabouts. I had been given permission to provide vague particulars but no address. Some greeted the information with raised eyebrows or a cynical quirk of the mouth. At the turn of the year he had resigned from two of the three clubs of which he had been a member – his attendances had been falling off ever since his new marriage. Old friends and old members were indignant and laid the blame on Holly. These possessive women: Stafford had been specially unlucky in marrying two of the same sort. One wouldn’t think to look at his second wife that she could grasp and hold the reins, especially when dealing with a headstrong man older and far more experienced than herself. It only showed.
To my suggestion that the change of habits might be Paul’s own choice they adopted a wisely knowing air. After all, why should he want to go and bury himself in the country at the height of his success? When I retorted with the query: Why should she? they responded with, Oh, well, Paul was such a good-looking fellow and such a favourite with the ladies and she so ordinary, was it not fairly clear that she was determined to keep him for herself as long as she could?
In March Paul instructed a firm of auctioneers to sell the contents of his Chelsea home. In a note to me he said: ‘ Did I tell you that when I split up with Olive I made a deal with her father to stay on at Royal Avenue and pay a rent for it? It was a fairly civilized arrangement, except that I was paying a higher rent than he could have got from anyone else. Well, we’re OK up here, and there seems simply no point in keeping a place in London. I’m not bothering to come down for the sale, as it’s a melancholy business disposing of one’s possessions, even though you’ll find when you come to Crichton that we’ve brought most of our favourites with us.’
Morbid curiosity took me to the sale, but I wished I hadn’t gone, for a large number of Paul’s friends were there, puzzled at his move. Most things brought good prices, including twenty-three paintings and sketches. None of his ceramic ware was on offer.
Most unexpected visitor at the
She didn’t bid all afternoon.
Of that other lady who had figured so largely in Paul’s past I saw nothing at all. Nor for a time did I have any news of her. Then one day I saw her maid-companion, the sullen, spotty Maud, on a bus going up Piccadilly, and took a seat beside her.
‘Well, Mister Grant’, she said. ‘Hm – well …’
Maud and I had disliked each other from the start. I asked after her mistress.
‘Oh, up and down as you might say. Attacks of nerves and can’t sleep. Like her mother that way. Just nerves, I say. Things upset her too easy. We came back from Cannes last month.’
‘You’re still in Clarendon Gardens, I suppose?’
‘Oh, dear, yes. Just had it redecorated. Not before it was time, I’d say. And got rid of some of that white furniture. Shows every mark.’
‘Your mistress doing any painting?’
The scornful expression on the woman’s face deepened.
‘Mrs Stafford ain’t well enough to spend all her life before an easel. And she’s plenty of more important things to do.’
‘I’m glad to hear it.’
‘Good life, yes; she’s more invitations than she knows what to do with. What with week-ends in the country and first nights and the rest.’
‘You reassure me. It needs a strong constitution to stand up to that.’
She turned her head towards the window with a sharp movement. The bus ground along.
I felt pleased at having provoked her, but a little disturbed.
‘One gets out of touch with things. Is Mrs Stafford thinking of marrying again?’
She gave an irritable shrug. ‘She don’t confide in me. You’d better ask her about it yourself, Mister Grant, hadn’t you?’
‘I will’, I said. ‘One never knows.’
‘Once bitten, twice shy, I should say.’
‘That’s the way. Keep her to that view, Maud, and you’re safe enough.’
I left the bus, with the satisfaction of knowing that I had rubbed her up the wrong way. But tempering that satisfaction was a sense of disquiet as to who was paying for the expensive refurnishing and redecoration.
It was high time to take up that long-standing invitation to Crichron Beck.
II
The following week there was a chance of a break, so I set off in a little car I had just bought. It was one of the first Morris Minors, Sir William Morris’s reply to the immensely popular and successful Austin 7, a direct challenge in the small car market. It seemed ideal for getting about London. It cost £125 new.
I spent a night in York and decided to go in by the Langdale road and over the Wry Neck Pass. The road past the Pikes is pleasant enough, with the sharp green little mountains rising almost from the fringe of the road. After asking several times I was directed through a couple of gates and a farmyard and began the long slow climb over a bumpy road between narrow stone walls. This goes on for some time before one reaches the pass proper, which in fact seems to be no pass at all but an ill-made track over the shoulder of the mountain. Twice my engine boiled, and once there seemed some danger of the car side-slipping on the greasy mud over the edge and into the field a few hundred feet below.
When the summit was reached, the mountain tops, so much more impressive than their real height, brooded and gloomed. One didn’t feel one had much right pottering about up there among the clouds and the silence. The descent was not fierce but the surface was bad and crossed a number of watercourses. One came down into a shallow cup of a valley, largely barren but with a few clusters of trees dotted among boulders and cairns. In the distance was a grey stone-built, slate-roofed cottage, with another small stone house about half a mile beyond.
A stream ran beside the cottage and several elm trees clustered behind. A woman was in the garden playing with a dog. It was Holly.
As the sound of my engine reached her in the great empty silence she looked up, shading her eyes with her hand. Then she saw the car and ran indoors. Presently she came out again with a man in his shirtsleeves, and they both peered up. I blew my horn, with a sense of apology for the noise. The echo came back from the opposite hill. They waved.
It seemed ages then, traversing the bumpy road, before I reached the cottage. The dog ran up barking. I recognized his russet brown snout. He was Ethelred, that cocker spaniel who had disgraced himself in the drawing-room at Newton on the afternoon when I had discussed Holly’s marriage with Lady Lynn.
III
They had spent money on the house, and everything was painted light to give an added sense of airiness and space and cleanliness. Some of his furniture had been brought here and also the best of his ceramic ware. Upstairs they had knocked two bedrooms into one to make a studio for Paul. The furniture was covered with chintzes and the curtains were of the same material. Whatever it had been at the time of their first visit, the cottage wasn’t gloomy now.
Nor even dusty and untidy like Newton. Compelled to do her own work, Holly had developed some latent housewifely sense which kept the place neat and clean.
Of course the valley was eerie. No suggestions from Holly were needed. Spring was not far away, but one scarcely heard the song of a bird. The stream was the only commentator, the one never-ceasing voice in a vacuum of silence. The mountain slopes lay quiet and bare, ever changing in mood and colour under the ever-changing sky; cloud and sun, cloud and sun, rain and sun and mist and sun. Black specks of sheep were crumbs on a counterpane which changed patterns away in the distance; a wind now and then moved down the valley; clouds drifted with it bringing soft rain; and through all the empty silence ran the thin, brittle voice of the stream.
But they were not altogether alone. The house a quarter of a mile down the valley was still empty, bur there were three farms within a radius of five miles, and milk and bread was brought to them daily from one of these. Gipsies and crofters passed up the valley.
Paul had become a walker. Every day, in an open-neck shirt, a worn pullover worthy of Sir Clement, and old flannel trousers, he went off, pipe in mouth and satchel over his back, striding across the moors. Sometimes Holly went with him. He smoked constantly but didn’t drink at all. He seemed serious, absorbed, more open of manner than I had known him.
As for his pictures, one had no need to ask to see them, for they were everywhere, none of them hung on the walls, but stacked in corners of the kitchen, the living-room, the bedrooms and his studio. He had no regard for them; they were not treated as ornaments but as lumber. Much of his work had gone little further than the sketching stage. But all of it was taken from definite models and all models were recognizable for what they were. There was no question of inventing abstract forms. He seemed to depend closely on his model to help him towards the reality of what he was looking for.
I said to him: ‘The more I see of art the less I’m able to judge it. A few of these appeal to me, but I don’t know – whether they’re good.’
‘They’re rungs in a ladder. But all the rungs aren’t a step up.’
‘I’ve often wondered about you. Do you miss London and its excitements?’
‘Not its excitements. I’m well content up here; shall be more so in another six or twelve months when I begin to get somewhere.’
‘You’re not thinking of returning, then?’
‘What makes you ask?’
‘Most of your friends think you will.’
‘What friends have I got? Do you think I’m likely to let up at this stage?’
‘Up to this visit I’d reserved my judgement. Now I’d say no.’
‘The only thing
I began again to look through the pictures.
‘If you like’, he said, ‘pick out a dozen and take them home. They’re no use to me.’
I stared at a curious farm scene, seen through the wheel of a cart. It was all suggested rather than shown, in the way that the Japanese by painting a line of blue along a horizon suggest the sky.
‘I might even try to sell them for you. No point in letting them get mildewed and dirty.’
Paul smiled. ‘Would you show them if you were an art dealer?’
‘Well, yes, I think so.’
‘Go on: look again.’
‘All dealers aren’t afraid of new ideas.’
‘But they wouldn’t buy these. I don’t think Leo is a genius, but even if he were, do you think the public would pay money to hear him practising scales? These are my scales.’
‘Why not let the public judge? Your name still counts. You’re not an unknown artist struggling for recognition. You’re a well-known artist breaking new ground.’
‘With a well-known flair for publicity’, said Paul. ‘Well, take ’em if you like. Take what you fancy. Don’t think I’ve come to despise money. I could do with some now. But it’s got to be kept in its place – and its place is below stairs.’
I thought he was going on, but the dog came in and he said nothing more. The opportunity to put my questions passed. Well, I would first sound Holly.