Gethin had given Owen a direct look. Only a husband left to her, Gethin’s glance had said. Can it be that she stage-manages this illness to throw a spotlight on herself once more, to give her back the centre of the well-loved boards? Might explain perhaps why she sometimes ‘forgot’ to take the injections, precipitating an occasional dramatic crisis, the need to be rushed into hospital.
Owen had given the doctor look for look. You’ve been acquainted with her since the day of her birth, his eyes had answered, but you don’t know her. She doesn’t love me, she has never loved me, I realized years ago that she didn’t even love me when she stood beside me at the altar.
What she did love, what she married me for, was the depth and intensity of the love I felt for her. She basked in the warmth of its fires, she felt herself important and secure in the fierce glow of a passion she thought would last all her days–but it never once occurred to her that there was any need to return it. It had survived countless thrusts and wounds, he remembered now with a savage resentment that took him by surprise.
He gripped the receiver tightly, oblivious of Pierson motionless in his chair, no longer bothering to identify the substance of his wife’s complaints, plunged into the bitter past, assailed by the stabs and hurts of memories he had fancied decently interred and forgotten.
It had been a long and painful time in dying, that old and powerful love, but it had died at last, completely and for ever, closing its eyes in the end against the renewal of intolerable suffering.
‘You could have asked Emily Bond to go out and get the tonic,’ he said suddenly into Zena’s fluent stream of words. ‘She’s still with you, isn’t she? You could send her out now if you’re so anxious to have it.’
‘Emily? She’s behind enough in her work as it is, without breaking off to go running errands in the town.’ Zena was deflected into an angry appraisal of the old charwoman’s shortcomings.
She had worked for Zena right from the Yorkes’ wedding-day. In all the difficult times when domestic help had grown scarce and then almost unobtainable she had turned up faithfully, week in and week out. She might not have been the most skilled of workers but she had always been there. She was turned seventy now and old age had done nothing to improve her efficiency–but she was still there, and that, Owen thought, defensive on Emily’s behalf, was surely something.
‘I’ll be home shortly,’ he said abruptly, abandoning suddenly all further resistance. ‘I’ll bring the tonic with me, I won’t forget.’ He replaced the receiver and sat looking down at it for a few moments, his face set in lines of anger and frustration.
‘I’ll be locking up, then,’ Arnold said at last, confident that Yorke had forgotten all about the date of the audit which could surely now be left till Monday to discuss. He pushed back his chair and stood up. ‘You’ll be wanting to get off home yourself.’ There was still time to call in at Mrs Fleming’s shop; the encounter would cast a glow over the whole evening, would extend its gentle radiance across the entire weekend.
‘Oh–yes. Right ho, then.’ Owen got to his feet, pulled back to the present. ‘If you let me know on Monday–about your sister, that you’ve briefed her.’ He had some elusive notion that there was something else he’d intended to mention, but he couldn’t recall it now. He raised his shoulders, letting it go till after the weekend. ‘I hope you find your father improved,’ he remembered to say as Pierson opened the door to make his escape.
When the door closed again Owen crossed to the row of hooks on the wall by the window and jerked down his overcoat.
He glanced at his watch–better get a move on, the shops would be closing soon and he didn’t relish the thought of Zena’s welcome if he arrived home without the precious tonic.
But he didn’t immediately shrug his coat on. He stood looking out of the window at the descending twilight, at a couple of gaily chattering girls released from the typing pool to the pleasures of the weekend. To boyfriends and lovers, dates and parties, he thought with a startling wash of envy that held him motionless, his eyes fixed on the graceful girls with their lovely fluid movements.
He watched them out of sight in the uncertain dusk. I’m not old, he thought, I could marry again, and the words dropped one by one into the depths of his mind with the slowness and finality of a decision that has been a long and shadowy time in forming.
He turned and stared at his unsmiling features in the mirror above the mantelpiece, seeing the face of a man in his prime. I could marry again, he repeated silently, and the moment seemed to illumine his future with a great shaft of glittering light. I could have children. He had always wanted children; he had neither comprehended nor forgiven Zena’s unwavering refusal even to countenance the idea. And now he saw that it was still not too late. A vast wave of joy swept through him, momentarily blinding him to the problem of Zena, who was scarcely likely to be reasonable about making way for a successor when she had been reasonable about little else.
He saw himself holding a child by the hand, he saw other children laughing and calling from a summer garden. And the face that he saw smiling out at him from that flowering doorway was the gentle, pretty face of Linda Fleming.
In the corridor outside his office a cleaner rattled a bucket down on to the floor and the sound brought him abruptly back to reality. He picked up a bunch of keys and moved swiftly round the room, locking up for the night. One or two calls to be made on the way home.
Zena, he thought, there’s something I have to get for Zena . . . He stopped suddenly, frowning, remembering, looking down at his arrested hands for an endless moment. Then he straightened himself, raised his head and met his own intent gaze in the mirror.
Arnold Pierson strode between the last of the shoppers, his mind as usual engaged on the convolutions of his own inner life which seemed a good deal more vivid than the shadowy figures moving past on the edge of his vision.
In the middle of the High Street he was forced to step into the gutter with its crisp heaps of slatternly snow, to give passage to a couple of gossiping women pushing prams.
The momentary interruption to his progress broke through his preoccupation. He glanced about him as he stepped back on to the pavement and saw that he was outside Underwood’s. He paused in front of the lighted windows. A couple of discreet stickers announced the sale due to begin on Monday morning. A girl knelt behind the plate glass with her back to him, pinning a ticket to the skilfully draped bodice of a dinner-gown in sage-green crêpe.
No sign of his stepsister of course; Sarah’s exalted position as manageress had long ago removed her from any necessity to crouch before the public gaze and arrange in artistic folds the skirts of last season’s models. But she wouldn’t be barricaded away behind her office door, conducting the business by remote control; that was never Sarah’s way. She would be moving along the carpeted aisles, keeping a sharp eye on the manners and attitudes of her assistants, or taking up her position behind one of the mahogany-topped counters, to serve a valued customer.
She would remain after the sign on the front door had been reversed to read Closed, dealing efficiently with the books, the orders, the monthly accounts; she would be the last person to leave the premises. Not even old Walter Pierson’s illness would cause her to go home so much as ten minutes early.
For a good many years now she had employed a woman for a few hours every day to clean the house, wash the breakfast dishes and in general perform the bulk of the chores that Sarah herself in her younger days had somehow managed to attend to in addition to a full-time job. Over the past couple of weeks she had simply arranged for the woman to stay all day, looking after Walter as well as the house.
Arnold