Before the Fact (19 page)

They lunched out, dined out, talked out, danced out; and when they were not doing any of these things out, Ronald seemed to be doing them in Hamilton Terrace. For Joyce of course encouraged him as hard, if as unobtrusively, as she knew how.

They talked interminably.

They talked about Lina, about Johnnie, about marriage, and about life.

Lina’s views about marriage were undergoing a radical dissolution. “I can’t quite get used to it, yet,” she told Ronald. “I always took it for granted that when one got married, one was married for good.”

“And yet people are getting divorced every day.”

“Other people. Not one’s self. Somehow one never thought of the possibility of divorce for one’s self.”

“You haven’t got religious scruples, have you?” Ronald asked suspiciously.

“Oh, heavens, no. I may be old-fashioned, but I’m not mediæval. But all the same, I simply can’t get used to the idea of being alone again.”

“You won’t be alone, my prettiness,” Ronald would tell her.

One day he gave her, a little cautiously, his own ideas about marriage.

“You know, Lina, I’ve always said I’d never marry a woman until I’d lived with her for at least a year first.”

“Have you, Ronald?” Lina smiled. She saw his caution and knew she was being sounded.

“Yes. Incompatibility of passion is the rock on which eighty per cent of marriages founder. Incompatibility of tastes is nothing to it. And how is one to find that out without experiment? Of course there should be a year’s trial marriage for every couple. It would cut the work of the divorce courts down by half. But I suppose you don’t agree with me there?”

“Why on earth shouldn’t I agree with you?” A year ago Lina would most emphatically have disagreed with Ronald.

“Well, it doesn’t seem the kind of theory you’d hold.”

“Oh, I’m quite broad-minded. And I do agree with you. I think it’s only common sense. If ever we do decide that we like each other enough, the ceremony wouldn’t mean anything to me.” Already Lina was considering marriage with Ronald as something more than just a possibility.

She really was astonished at the way, and the rapidity with which, her views had changed. She saw now that it is impossible to lay down moral rules to govern all cases. They could apply to individual ones only; for what is right for one person can be quite wrong for another. It is a matter of conscience, and consciences differ. That is what the bigots never can understand. Lina did not think it would be in the least wrong for her to live with Ronald for a year to see if they would suit each other for marriage, simply because she would not consider it wrong; but for a Roman Catholic, who really believes in the sacred permanency of marriage, it would be wrong.

A year ago she would have accepted the convention that it was wrong for everyone. Now she was learning to think for herself.

In the same way she tried hard to look on unfaithfulness in marriage with a more understanding eye, though here she was not so sure that she had convinced herself.

“I wouldn’t have minded if Johnnie had come to me and
told
me that he was going off with someone for the week-end,” she would say to Ronald. “I’d have let him go. I shouldn’t have minded a scrap.”

“You would.”

“I don’t think I should, as long as it was all open and honest. What I can’t get over is having been kept in the dark. All those women knew; and I never guessed a thing.” At this point Lina would invariably begin to cry. “That’s what I can’t get over.”

“That’s just wounded vanity, darling.”

“I don’t care what it is. I can’t forgive him for making confidantes of other women and never saying a word to me. I feel I’ve just been made to look a fool.” That, when she came down to it, was really what had turned Lina’s love for Johnnie into bitter anger against him: that she had been made to look a fool to her friends.

“My sweet!”

Lina would lift a streaming face to Ronald. “I’ve just been wasting my time. All these years I’ve just been wasting my time being faithful to him. That’s what I can’t get over. I could have been enjoying myself too.”

“You’d never have taken a lover, Lina.”

Even Ronald’s complacent belief in her own decency would annoy Lina. “I probably should. Why shouldn’t I? At any rate, he ought to have given me the chance.”

Then Ronald himself would get angry. “I hate to hear you talking like that. Wasting your time! It’s a damned good thing you didn’t know, if you’d have been so silly as to give way to that childish tit for tat. Why do you want to make out that you’re as petty-minded as other women, when you’re nothing of the sort?”

“Oh, you don’t understand.” Lina’s tears would burst out again. “I feel so battered. You don’t know all I’ve been through. And when
you
speak to me like that ...” She had never told him about her other troubles with Johnnie. That would not have been fair, yet.

Then Ronald would hug her and croon over her and say all the things she wanted him to say.

Lina did not know what she would have done, during this time, without Ronald and Ronald’s shoulder.

Ronald himself told her plainly what he was trying to do for her.

“You
have
been battered, poor little thing. And my first job is to rehabilitate you in your own eyes. You’re altogether too humble, my Lina. You think now that because Johnnie couldn’t see what he’d got, you’re no use to anyone. I never heard such nonsense! It’s Johnnie I’m sorry for, for not realizing what he was throwing away. Not you. You’re jolly well rid of him. And you’re going to be happier with me than you could ever have been in a century of Johnnie. Aren’t you?”

“Am I, Ronald?”

“You know perfectly well you are. My little beauty, if I were married to you, do you think I’d ever look beyond you for one single second? In any case, I’m not the promiscuous kind, for promiscuity’s sake.”

“No,” Lina would say comfortably. “No, I don’t think you are. But could I make you happy, Ronald? I wonder now whether I could make anyone.”

Ronald’s reply to that would be a physical one, and leave Lina squeaking a recantation of such heresy.

“So that, my lovely,” Ronald would explain, “is why I tell you just what I think about you. Any other woman would become unbearable if she knew how much I adored her and how perfect I thought her. So conceited you’re going to get if I’m not careful! You pretty little creature – stop just like that till I kiss the edge of your smile!”

“But you mustn’t overdo it, Ronald,” Lina would say, kissed. “No one knows better than I do that I’m anything but pretty.”

Then Ronald would say, quite seriously: “When you smile like that, I think you’re the prettiest thing I’ve ever seen.” He would say it, too, with such quiet conviction that Lina would have to believe that he really did think so, deliciously absurd though it might be.

They discussed too, with astonishing detachment, whether Lina should become Ronald’s mistress. They called it“
the
question.” Afterwards Lina would wonder sometimes whether it had really been herself talking so calmly, and with such common sense, about such a revolutionary conception. Circumstances alter women.

Ronald of course was thoroughly in favour of the idea, though he did not want to stampede Lina into it before her mind was fully made up about himself.

“It wouldn’t be just the ordinary surreptitious, rather vulgar
affaire,
you see, darling,” he pointed out. “It would only be in anticipation of marriage.”

“Don’t make it sound so dull,” Lina laughed. “I’m not sure that I shouldn’t rather welcome an
affaire,
just at present. Can’t I ever be im proper in my life?” “No. Not you. You just couldn’t, my loveliness.”

“How half-baked you make me sound, Ronald.” But it was a fact that Lina could never be deliberately improper. She detested smoking-room stories: not because of their rudeness, but on account of their manufactured artificiality; whereas a really spontaneous remark would always make her laugh, however improper. Joyce called her prim, which annoyed her. Lina did not consider herself prim in the least.

“Of course we should have to be careful, till your divorce is through.”

“I should hate that. I shouldn’t like to be hole-and-cornerish, Ronald. I’d much rather come and live with you openly, if it came to the point.”

“You sweet thing! I know you would. But we just can’t. So are we to waste the next nine months, on account of these incredible divorce laws of ours, or are we not? That’s really the question.”

“There’s one thing I feel. If I
did,
it might make you feel that I’d got a claim on you; and that would be awkward if you got tired of me.”

Ronald protested against such a ludicrous possibility.

“But you might,” Lina insisted. “You say you’re the faithful kind, but I don’t know, do I? You’ve only known me for about a fortnight. I’m so afraid that this will all burn itself out when you know me better and realize I’m not nearly so perfect as you think now.”

“If you’re holding things up for anything so ridiculous as that ...”

“No, I’m not. But it’s no good forgetting the possibility. Besides, there’s another thing.”

“What?”

“I’m so afraid you might be disappointed in me,” Lina said wistfully.

“Oh, my darling.”

“I’ve been told so very plainly I’m no good at that sort of thing, you see. I thought I was all right, but apparently I’m not.”

“My little thing, just give me the chance to tell you what you really are,” Ronald said fervently.

Lina sighed. The spectre of Johnnie was at her elbow again.

They were both silent for a few moments.

“Lina,” Ronald said, “come away with me for a week, to-morrow.”

“No, Ronald.”

“You don’t like me well enough yet?”

“It isn’t that. I do like you well enough. You’re the only man I ever have, besides Johnnie.”

“Oh, damn Johnnie! Darling, don’t keep dragging him in with every other sentence. Do get him out of your mind.”

“I can’t,” Lina said mournfully. “I do try, Ronald – honestly I do. And it isn’t as if I still loved him. I hate everything to do with him. But it’s no good going away with you until I can get Johnnie out of my mind, is it?” Lina did not want a spectre in her bed as well as at her elbow.

“No, I suppose not. Though I wish you didn’t say you hated Johnnie. I’d much rather you were just indifferent to him. But, Lina ...”

“Yes?”

“Don’t keep me hanging too long. I’m no celibate, you know.”

Lina gave his hand a squeeze. “I don’t mean to keep you hanging. It’s just that I must be sure.”

“Yes, of course. But I’m not a celibate; and since I met you ... Lina, sweetheart, they say there’s nothing like a really good woman to drive a man who loves her to prostitutes. I’ve always said that was nonsense. Don’t make me understand what they mean.”

Lina sighed again. “You must do as you think best.” It was a favourite observation of hers. It evaded responsibility.

But for all Ronald’s hint, she could not make up her mind to that first, final step.

For a fortnight or more Lina was thrilled to ecstasy by Ronald’s wooing.

During the third week she began to find him a little overwhelming. In the fourth a kind of mental claustrophobia set in. She felt that Ronald was stifling her.

They were sitting one evening in the Chinese restaurant, after a crab omelette, lobster chop-suey, and special rice with prawns; and Lina at any rate felt that her belt was uncomfortably tight. Lina had to take a good deal of trouble with her figure nowadays.

Ronald, upon whom the gargantuan helping provided by the restaurant appeared to have had no effect, was engaged in his favourite occupation of calling Lina’s attention to her physical charms. He had just discovered, in the cinema which they had visited, that Lina’s fingers besides being unbelievably soft had a fascinating tendency to curl, preferably round his own.

Usually Lina loved this sort of thing. After having been dismissed physically all her life and praised (when she was praised) only for her intelligence, it was delightful to have her intelligence taken for granted and to be told that, physically, she was the most attractive woman Ronald knew. She loved him to call her “my pretty” and “my lovely,” because he so genuinely found her pretty. She was very ready to listen to Ronald on the subject of her smiles, of which it appeared that she had no less than four quite separate varieties: one when she was just amused, one when she was smiling at something which she thought she ought not to smile at, one when she was very much amused, and one, when she was very happy, in which her nose made three little wrinkles on either side of the bridge. That was very interesting and very gratifying.

But this evening Lina was not interested in either the wrinkles on her nose or the curling propensities of her fingers.

“Ronald,” she said abruptly, “do you know we’ve seen each other every single day for nearly three weeks?”

“I do, my sweet. And I hope to go on seeing you every day for the next three years.”

“Well, I don’t.”

“What?”

“I mean, it’s quite time we gave each other a rest.”

“I don’t want a rest.”

“Perhaps not a rest. A breathing space. I feel we’re seeing each other too much.”

“How can we see too much of each other?”

“I must have air. You must let me have some air, Ronald.”

Ronald looked at her doubtfully. “You’re getting bored?”

“No, no.” Lina squeezed his hand. “It’s just that I don’t think it’s a good thing for us to see so much of each other. You’ve never given me a minute to – to get adjusted to you. I’ve been very upset, you know. One can’t switch over at a minute’s notice from one person to another.”

“I’ve always been afraid you were a one-man woman.”

“I don’t think I am. I don’t know; I may be. I’ve always told you I’m a clinger.”

“I love you to be a clinger. I want to be clung to. I love the way you always take my arm in the street. Do you know how I always see you when you’re not there? On my arm, looking up under that wicked little hat of yours with the green feather.”