I told her it wasn’t probably as bad as all that. She needed, I could see, reassurance. She needed new life, new courage—she needed lifting up from a pitiful slough of endurance and suffering and setting on her feet again. I had not the slightest doubt that I was the person best qualified to do that … Yes, it happened as soon as that.
She looked at me doubtfully, like an uncertain child. Then she poured it all out.
In the midst of it, of course, the attendant came with the bill. I was glad then that we were having the third lunch. They wouldn’t hustle us out of the dining car. I added ten shillings to my bill, and the attendant bowed discreetly and melted away.
I went on listening to Jennifer.
She’d had a raw deal. She’d stood up to things with an incredible amount of pluck, but there had been too many things, one after the other, and she wasn’t, physically, strong. Things had gone wrong for her all along—as a child, as a girl, in her marriage. Her sweetness, her impulsiveness, had landed her every time in a hole. There had been loopholes for escape and she hadn’t taken them—she’d preferred to try and make the best of a bad job. And when that had failed, and a loophole had presented itself, it had been a bad loophole, and she’d landed herself in a worse mess than ever.
For everything that had happened, she blamed herself. My heart warmed to that lovable trait in her—there was no judgment, no resentment. ‘It must,’ she ended up wistfully every time, ‘have been my fault somehow …’
I wanted to roar out, ‘Of course it wasn’t your fault! Don’t you see that you’re a victim—that you’ll always be a victim so long as you adopt that fatal attitude of being willing to take all the blame for everything?’
She was adorable sitting there, worried and miserable and defeated. I think I knew then, looking at her across the narrow table, what it was I had been waiting for. It was Jennifer … not Jennifer as a possession, but to give Jennifer back her mastery of life, to see Jennifer happy, to see her whole once more.
Yes, I knew then … though it wasn’t until many weeks afterwards that I admitted to myself that I was in love with her.
You see, there was so much more to it than that.
We made no plans for meeting again. I think she believed truly that we would not meet again. I knew otherwise. She had told me her name. She said, very sweetly, when we at last left the dining car, ‘This is goodbye. But please believe I shall never forget you and what you’ve done for me. I was desperate—quite desperate.’
I took her hand and I said goodbye—but I knew it wasn’t goodbye. I was so sure of it that I would have been willing to agree not even to try and find her again. But as it chanced there were friends of hers who were friends of mine. I did not tell her, but to find her again would be easy. What was odd was that we had not happened to meet before this.
I met her again a week later, at Caro Strangeways’s cocktail party. And after that, there was no more doubt about it. We both knew what had happened to us …
We met and parted and met again. We met at parties, in other people’s houses, we met at small quiet restaurants, we took trains into the country and walked together in a world that was all a shining haze of unreal bliss. We went to a concert and heard Elizabeth Schumann sing ‘And in that pathway where our feet shall wander, we’ll meet, forget the earth and lost in dreaming, bid heaven unite a love that earth no more shall sunder …’
And as we went out into the noise and bustle of Wigmore Street I repeated the last words of Strauss’s song ‘—in love and bliss ne’er ending …’ and met her eyes.
She said, ‘Oh no, not for us, Hugh …’
And I said, ‘Yes, for us …’
Because, as I pointed out to her, we had got to go through the rest of our lives together …
She couldn’t, she said, throw everything over like that. Her husband, she knew, wouldn’t consent to let her divorce him.
‘But he’d divorce you?’
‘Yes, I suppose so … Oh Hugh, can’t we go on as we are?’
No, I said, we couldn’t. I’d been waiting, watching her fight her way back to health and sanity. I hadn’t wanted to let her vex herself with decisions until she was once more the happy joyful creature Nature had created her to be. Well, I’d done it. She was strong again—strong mentally and physically. And we’d got to come to a decision.
It wasn’t plain sailing. She had all sorts of queer, quite unpredictable objections. Chiefly, it was because of me and my career that she demurred. It would mean a complete breakup for me. Yes, I said, I knew that. I’d thought it out, and it didn’t matter. I was young—there were other things that I could do besides schoolmastering.
She cried then and said that she’d never forgive herself if, because of her, I were to ruin my life. I told her that nothing could ruin it, unless she herself were to leave me. Without her, I said, life would be finished for me.
We had a lot of ups and downs. She would seem to accept my view, then suddenly, when I was no longer with her, she would retract. She had, you see, no confidence in herself.
Yet, little by little, she came to share my outlook. It was not only passion between us—there was more than that. That harmony of mind and thought—that delight in mind answering mind. The things that she would say—which had just been on my own lips—the sharing of a thousand small minor pleasures.
She admitted at last that I was right, that we belonged together. Her last defences went down.
‘It is true! Oh Hugh, how it can be, I don’t know. How can I really mean to you what you say I do? And yet I don’t really doubt.’
The thing was tested—proved. We made plans, the necessary mundane plans.
It was a cold sunny morning when I woke up and realized that on that day our new life was starting. From now on Jennifer and I would be together. Not until this moment had I allowed myself to believe fully. I had always feared that her strange morbid distrust of her own capabilities would make her draw back.
Even on this, the last morning of the old life, I had to make quite sure. I rang her up.
‘Jennifer …’
‘Hugh …’
Her voice, soft with a tiny tremor in it … It was true. I said:
‘Forgive me, darling. I had to hear your voice. Is it all true?’
‘It’s all true …’
We were to meet at Northolt Aerodrome. I hummed as I dressed, I shaved carefully. In the mirror I saw a face almost unrecognizable with sheer idiotic happiness. This was my day! The day I had waited for for thirty-eight years. I breakfasted, checked over tickets, passport. I went down to the car. Harriman was driving. I told him I would drive—he could sit behind.
I turned out of the Mews into the main road. The car wound in and out of the traffic. I had plenty of time. It was a glorious morning—a lovely morning created specially for Hugh and Jennifer. I could have sung and shouted.
The lorry came at forty miles an hour out of the side road—there was no seeing or avoiding it—no failure in driving—no faulty reaction. The driver of the lorry was drunk, they told me afterwards—how little it matters why a thing happens!
It struck the Buick broadside on, wrecking it—pinning me under the wreckage. Harriman was killed.
Jennifer waited at the aerodrome. The plane left … I did not come …
There isn’t much point in describing what came next. There