Lonely Road (10 page)

She shrugged her shoulders as she lit another cigarette. “I suppose so. They think I’m going off, but I’ll have to see Mr. Banks and see if he’ll let me stay on now, and have it later. I expect he will.”

I laughed. “You’d better come down south with me,” I said. “I’m motoring down to-morrow.”

She eyed me quietly across the table, but said nothing at all to that. There was a long, tense silence while I waited for her to say something, wondering whether I was going to be chucked out of the place with ignominy. She sat there opposite
me, very still, smoking and staring at me across the table, inscrutable. I thought of Norman and his methods, and I said:

“You could do that. I live at Dartmouth in a biggish sort of house, with only a housekeeper and a couple of servants. If you care to come down there for a week I’d——” I got stuck in that sentence and began again. “It would be a very great pleasure to me,” I said quietly.

I had roused her curiosity. She moved a little and looked puzzled. “I don’t understand. Do you live all alone like that, in a house? Don’t you have anyone to look after you, or anything? Just servants?”

“Just servants,” I replied.

“Isn’t it sort of lonely?”

“It is at times. That’s why it would be so very good of you to come and stay with me.”

She stared at me, a little helplessly. “I don’t know what to say.” And then she said: “Is this place near Torquay.”

I know now that Torquay had been a dream city to her for all the years she had spent in the grey business districts of the north. “It’s not so far away,” I said. “Go over there as often as you like.”

She said: “It’s lovely, isn’t it? All on hills above the water, with shops on the quay, like you told me. Everyone says it’s lovely there.…”

“You’d better come and see it for yourself,” I said casually. “You’d be quite all right. All my bedroom doors have keys on the inside. And all my guests pack up and go away after the first couple of days because they can’t stand me any longer. So you needn’t let that worry you.”

She smiled. “I’d not want to do that.”

We went and danced again. That was a foxtrot and a very stately dance; we never spoke at all. At the end we went back to the table and ordered something called a fruit parfait, which she said was lovely. And sitting there I turned to her and said:

“Don’t worry if you’d rather not come down with me. You
can go to Scarborough just as well; I’d like to stand you that, if you’ll let me. I’ve had a damn good time these nights that I’ve been here, and I’d like to know that you could get away.”

“It’s been lovely for me,” she murmured. “It’s been so different.”

I had an envelope all ready for her in my pocket, and now I passed it to her across the table. “I don’t suppose I’ll be coming here again after to-night,” I said quietly. “But there’s ten pounds there, if you’ll take it, and it’ll give you a decent holiday in Scarborough. Or if you’d like to come with me it’ll give you something to spend, and if you don’t like the way I carry on you’ll be able to get away from me. But either way, I’d like you to have a proper holiday this year.”

The parfaits came, and proved to be a tinned peach and an ice mixed up together in a cup. “I shouldn’t be able to give you all my time,” I said. “I’ve got my work to do. In the mornings you’d have to amuse yourself. But it’s by the sea and there’s boats and things to play about with, and I expect you’d like it if you came.”

She sat there staring at me absently. “You are a funny one,” she said after a time. “Let me think.”

She sat there staring out across the floor, her chin resting on one hand. She looked very tired, and older than her years. An unpleasant little Jew moved by and spoke a word to her; mechanically she smiled at him. A waitress came and swabbed our table with a dirty cloth. The air was heavy with the acrid smoke of very inexpensive cigarettes; it was hot in the Palais with a moist, unpleasant stuffiness. Above the jazz melody and the shuffling feet I heard the rattle of the machine that issued tickets for the sixpennies.

She turned to me. “All right,” she said at last, “I’ll come away with you.”

They were playing a Blues. The saxophones wept and moaned, the dancers walked upon the floor in long-drawn, graceful movements, the lights swung and changed colour to the plaintive rhythm. A draught from some door brought a sudden whiff of clean air into the place and made me raise
my head. I heard the wind sighing in the rigging of my boat, I heard the halyards flapping on the mast, and I wondered if the mooring-chain were chafing at the bobstay in the running tide.

S
HE
had a bed-sitting-room in the district rather to the west of Leeds; I found the house next morning with some difficulty. It was in an industrial neighbourhood. It was one of many little streets of drab brick houses, semi-detached and each with a little front garden for the cats; not quite a squalid street, but very nearly so. It was called Acacia Road, and she lived in the house of a man who worked in the goods office at the railway. That road was a playground for the children of the neighbourhood.

It was just after ten o’clock when I drew up before her house; the children swarmed around, staring and fingering the car. She must have been on the look-out for me, unseen, because as I got out of the saloon the door of the house opened and she came out to me, suitcase in hand. I went forward to meet her; in the front window a faded blind was pulled aside to disclose a woman’s face pressed close against the glass.

I smiled and took the case from her, bulging a little and cracked and gaping at the corners. I think it had in it all that she possessed, or nearly all. She was in grey; grey shoes, grey stockings, grey overcoat, and grey felt hat; she had taken great pains over the adornment of her face. “It’s going to be fine,” I said. “We’ll have a good run down.”

She hesitated, motionless upon the pavement. “Oh!” she said. “Is this your car?”

I never did like little cars, and my Bentley suits me pretty well. A dead, dull black saloon with a silver radiator and fittings, it loomed immensely in that narrow street; it seemed to shame the cramped style of the little villas. She moved forward on the pavement and peered in through the window at the deep, low seats, the hide upholstery and the gleaming wheel. “Oh!” she said. “Is this your car?”

I nodded. “Do you like her?”

She breathed: “It’s awfully grand.” And then she said: “Are you going to drive it yourself?”

She thought, I think, that the driving of a car like that was a professional matter and that lurking somewhere round about would be Adams in his livery, who at that moment was mowing the lawns of the Port House, down in Devonshire. I smiled at her. “I am,” I said. “That is, unless you’d like to take her for a bit, later in the day.”

She shook her head. “I only drove a car once, one day with Billy. He said it was a Morris—Morris something. But I couldn’t drive a car like this.”

I swung her suitcase into the back of the car beside my own and opened the front door for her. “All right,” I said equably. “Then you’ll just have to sit and watch me for the best part of three hundred miles.”

She stared at me wide-eyed. “Is it as far as that?”

“Something over two-fifty, anyway,” I said. “It may be over three hundred. It’ll take us most of the day, taking things easily. But it’s a good day for a run.”

She hesitated for a moment in the door, examining the car and feeling the upholstery. “I used to go out with a boy who had an Essex coach, in Birmingham,” she remarked. “But that wasn’t like this.…”

I thought of Le Mans. “This isn’t quite so handy in a busy street,” I said politely. “It’s too big.” And with that we got into her, and moved away down the road.

We went down through Huddersfield, through a bleak and blackened land of little fields and little mills. Between the towns it was bright and sunny on the road; Sixpence sat quiet by my side. I gave her a map to study, but she couldn’t read it, and so we went on more or less by dead reckoning, eked out by signposts and by my memory of the road. Before we had been going for ten minutes I had absently thrown off my hat into the back seats of the car; I generally drive bareheaded in a saloon.

She turned an eager, delicately-painted little face to me. “May I do that too? Take off my hat, I mean?”

I smiled. “Of course. Better make yourself really comfortable; we’ve got a good way to go.” I reached behind and got her a rug; she took off her hat and patted her hair into shape before the mirror of her bag, powdered her nose, and settled down happily beside me as I drove.

“There’s cigarettes there, if you like,” I said. “You might give me one.…” I had to show her how to use the lighter then, and that amused her almost more than anything we saw that day. All morning I was smoking cigarettes; with each cigarette she pressed the button till the unit glowed, lips parted, watching it entranced; then she pulled it out and handed it to me. She couldn’t make out how it worked at all.

I gave the Midlands a miss that day and went down the Welsh side. We got up on the high land after Huddersfield and went across the moors, skirting Manchester, to Buxton; then down to Newcastle-under-Lyme. It was there that Sixpence asked in all innocence if my car was a fast one and we got her up to eighty-six before I had to shut down for a corner, but mostly we were running at about fifty. We turned away from Staffordshire and cut down through Market Drayton to Shrewsbury, and when we had passed through that we began to think about our lunch.

I chose the Chequers at Church Stretton, a place that I had had meals at before. The house dates back to the sixteenth century; a grey stone building, rather rambling, and full of open fireplaces burning wood. They have restored it and built on a dining-room within the last few years, and spoilt it altogether. They run it as a show place now, with prices commensurate, and no good American goes home without having spent a night in the room where Charles II slept and knighted Perrhyn.

We left the car by the grass plot in front and went into the hall, ushered by a porter in brown livery. I knew that I had made a mistake as soon as I got inside; we should have lunched at some little pub by the roadside. The place was all white paint and glass panels inside, like a hospital; the mere travesty of an English country house. The new dining-room was very
white and spacious, with tables round the edge of a bleak dancing-floor.

I was occupied with Sixpence at the beginning of our meal, and we had finished the fish before I was free to look about the room. Over in an alcove by the window there was a lady lunching with a couple of children, very neat and clean, in charge of a neat, clean nurse in the uniform of some institute or other. Something about the lady seemed familiar to me and drew my attention; I stared at her a little harder, and it was Marion.

Marion, whom I hadn’t seen or heard of for the last nine years since we parted in the stables down at Courton, crying her eyes out because she didn’t want to marry me. Why she should have cried like that I never understood; if anyone had a right to cry it should have been me, but I can only remember feeling a bit uncomfortable about it all. Nine years is a long time; she had filled out and collected a couple of children, but it was Marion all right. I seemed to remember having heard that she was married; I wondered what her name was now.

Towards the end of lunch the nurse marshalled the children and went out with them, and she was left alone for coffee. I bent across the table to Sixpence.

“I’ve just seen an old friend of mine at that table over there—the lady. Do you mind if I go over and speak to her for a minute or two?” And so I crossed the room to her table.

“Good morning, Marion,” I said quietly. She looked up in surprise; then she recognised me. “Malcolm!” she said. “After all these years. My dear!”

I sat down beside her table and talked with her for a few minutes of the old days and friends that we had known. She had a neat and orderly mind even in the old days; with the years this had grown on her and now she was very social, very rigid in her class. She told me that she was living in the hotel with her two children for the summer “because the air was so good for them;” I heard no mention of her husband, nor of any home that they had made. I sat there listening, thinking that I could have done better for her than that.

In turn she wanted to know my news. “There’s nothing much to tell,” I said. “I still live down in Dartmouth, just the same. I have my work down there, you see, and that’s all one really wants.” I smiled. “That,” I said, “and a certain amount to drink.”

She said: “Oh, my dear. Do you mean you’ve never married, all these years?”

I laughed. “Lord, no,” I said; “nor likely to. You should know that.”

She said: “Oh, Malcolm!”

She leaned across and put her hand on mine. “Malcolm,” she said, “we were good friends once, and I’ve sometimes thought I didn’t treat you very well.” I said something or other—I don’t know what. “But you’re still a young man, and its not too late now for you to marry some nice girl and be happy with her, as you used to want to be. There’s ever so many nice girls about, Malcolm. You mustn’t go and hurt all your old friends by getting down too low. I know what men are, of course … but don’t go down too far, Malcolm.” And she glanced across the room at Sixpence, sitting all alone.

I knew that Sixpence wasn’t happy there. It was not that she was unaccustomed to a good hotel, because she evidently was; she knew the ropes all right, but there was a bleak austerity about that place that might have daunted anyone. She was sitting rather stiffly on her chair, ill at ease and anxious in the menacing presence of the waiters. In the freezing cleanness of that room she looked a little shabby and a little overdressed; the paint upon her face showed up most cruelly.

I smiled. “Looks a bit high and dry, doesn’t she?” I said cynically. I knew that I must get back to her; it was bad luck for her to be made to feel like that upon the first day of her holiday.

“Who is she, Malcolm?”

I glanced at Marion for a moment, thinking what a different life I should have had to lead if we had gone through with it. Some things cannot be explained; I knew that Marion would never understand me if I talked to her all night. I
shrugged my shoulders. “One of my little friends,” I said. “I picked her up in Leeds.”