No Love Lost (16 page)

‘Get in,' he repeated, holding the door open for me. ‘I want to talk to you.'

‘I was going to the High Street.'

‘Then I'll take you there. Come on, Liz.'

I had been called Elizabeth so thoroughly by this time that I had forgotten how much I disliked the abominable diminutive. It just sounded friendly today. I stepped into the car and he sighed, let in the clutch, and turned round in the road again.

‘Hey,' I protested, ‘where are you going? I said the High Street.'

‘We're going there, by Morton Road and the by-pass. That's the way I know best. I've only been here a week.'

‘A week? I didn't know.'

‘Too bad. Nobody tells you anything, do they? But I'm going to, and it's going to take me just about seven minutes, so – we'll go by the by-pass.'

I did not speak. Andy was returning to my conscious mind with a rush, and with a new and painful vividness I remembered why I had written to him and not phoned or arranged a meeting when I finally decided to marry Victor.

‘Yes, well,' he said, and his mouth twisted down at the corners as it always did when he was embarking on one of his more outrageous performances, ‘lean back and relax, because you're going to take this in if it's the last thing I do. I've been thinking about this lecture very thoroughly for some months and here it comes, piping hot.'

He turned and peered at me from under bristling eyebrows.

‘First of all, I suppose you know you've lost twenty pounds.'

It was such an unexpected thrust that it took me by surprise. Until that moment I had been enjoying him, like a beautiful draught of fresh air. Now I was annoyed by his impudence.

‘Don't be a boor,' I said. ‘I've lost eight.'

‘They were the eight which held your looks. The wan white waif act doesn't suit you. Don't touch the wheel. You'll break our necks. Still, I'm glad to see you're not completely devitalized in spite of all I've heard since I've been here.'

I had made no real attempt to touch the wheel, of course. I wasn't a child, and we were travelling very fast and passing all the people I'd met before, but I must have stiffened and I felt the blood in my face.

‘How extraordinary of you to take this locum job down here,' I said abruptly. ‘When did you leave St Jude's?'

‘In my script for this conversation you don't speak.' He was not looking at me. At that moment we were negotiating an unexpectedly narrow turn. The Vicarage car was parked on the corner, as usual, and a milk tanker was attempting to pass. We were held up for a second or two and I found myself face to face with the vicar, who was dithering in front of his aged bonnet with a starting handle. He stared at me, recognized me with open astonishment, and was groping for his hat with his free hand when I was whisked unceremoniously from under his nose.

‘You merely listen,' Andy continued, squaring himself as the car leapt forward down the villa-lined length of Morton Road. ‘You have made a basic psychological mistake and, having got it clear in my own mind, I intend you to see it. It may not do you much good but you've no idea how it's going to satisfy me! Look, Liz, you never forgave your mother for making a mess of her marriage, did you? You always secretly thought she could have saved it. That's why you made the idiotic mistake of trying to play safe.'

He was speaking with utter sincerity, his tone urgent and forceful, and if instead of speaking he had suddenly pressed a blade directly into my heart I think the pain he gave me must have been exactly the same.

‘No,' I said violently, because I wouldn't and couldn't let it be true, ‘that's insulting nonsense. For heaven's sake let me get out of here.'

He put on a little more speed and he bounced out into the
stream of traffic on the by-pass which Tinworth uses so freely to relieve its own tortuous streets.

‘You were in love with me,' he went on doggedly as if I had not spoken. ‘Probably you are still, whether you know it or not. But if it's not me it's someone like me, and it always will be.'

He was not looking at me, which was merciful, for we were in traffic, and he ignored any sound I made but continued the harangue exactly as if I were some recalcitrant patient to whom he was in duty bound to report on a considered diagnosis.

‘There's a great deal of rubbish talked about the kind of love I mean,' he said. ‘It's sublimated and sublimized and sentimentalized and generally kicked around, but the one ordinary elementary fact which is self-evident is that it is an affinity exactly like a chemical affinity. You know the definition of that. You must have typed it for old Beaky Bowers at St Jude's often enough. “
The peculiar attraction between the atoms of two simple substances that makes them combine to form a compound.
” Now I don't suggest that love
is
chemical. I only say that it is
like
it and quite as irrevocable and inescapable. You love something because you need it. It is made up of the things you have not got. You recognize your need instinctively, and instinctively you go for it as soon as you find it. Be quiet. Listen. You can get out when I've finished.'

Since I could do nothing else I sat bolt upright, staring in front of me, the furious blood burning in my face. Since I couldn't keep my hat on in that air stream I took it off and held it in my lap. I tried not to listen, either, but one might as well have tried to ignore an avalanche.

‘People keep saying that one is attracted by opposites,' Andy's lecture continued, ‘but that is one of those sweeping half-truths which are so misleading. What they mean is that if one hasn't got quite enough of a particular characteristic oneself one is automatically attracted by the person who has a little too much of it. When one finds someone who appears to balance out
all
one's own excesses and deficiencies, one falls in love with her – er, or him.'

He turned to me, his vivid grey-blue eyes dark with intelligence, and dropped his professional manner.

‘You must know what I mean, Liz. You've got the warmest heart in the world, but with it you tend to be cautious, intellectual, and reserved. I tend to be headstrong, intuitive, and confiding. You're levelheaded to a fault, I'm on the verge of being wild.'

‘Wild –' I was beginning, but he stopped me.

‘You're unconventional and oversensitive and gentle. I'm basically unconventional and – well, rough. Cruel, if you like.'

Andy's sincerity had always captured me, holding my attention, forcing me to think along lines I would not normally have chosen. It performed its exasperating magic again now.

I was attracted to you, my lad, because you were alive, I thought, and somehow I don't seem to be very much alive alone. There was no point in saying it aloud, of course, and certainly I was alive enough myself at that moment. I was outraged by him. The tastelessness, the utter impropriety, the insolence all the old-fashioned words crowded on to my tongue, making me temporarily incoherent.

‘You happened to need someone like me,' Andy was saying with steady insistence, ‘not in spite of my faults but because of them. You couldn't help it.'

‘At that rate, nor could you.' Of all the words in the world those were the last I had intended to say. They were silly and dangerous, but in the last few seconds he had got under my skin.

‘And so what?' He turned his head and I saw his eyes had become as hard as marbles. ‘We're not talking about me. I've had my own problem and I've settled it. I sail in three weeks' time. I'm perfectly all right. I'm simply explaining your position to you because I don't think you've seen it.'

‘Sail?' I said, as if it were the only word I'd heard. ‘Where are you going?'

‘Newfoundland. There's a hell of a lot of work to do there, it's a rough, hard, free country and it'll suit me. George Brewster and his wife are going too. She'll have to do the secretarial work for both of us. It'll be hard going but worth it, I think.
Anyhow, all that is beside the point. I'm clearing out of the country and I just wanted to explain the whole thing to you before I went. You didn't give me an opportunity at the time and I don't suppose I should have been able to see it so clearly then if you had.'

‘There's nothing for you to explain.' My lips felt stiff as I spoke. We were entering the lower end of the High Street and I gathered my hat and basket with what I felt was a gesture of finality. ‘I had merely made up my mind what I thought would be the best for both of us.'

‘You'd done nothing of the sort, you know, Liz.' Instead of pulling into the curb he put on a burst of speed which shot us out into the main stream of the morning shopping traffic. I saw several faces I recognized, all of them surprised, but I had no time even to acknowledge them. Andy proceeded to wind his way expertly through the throng of familiar cars, talking all the time in his forceful, forthright way.

‘I had a night out with the boys, got in a stupid rag, and finished up at a police station. There was a row at the hospital and I got an imperial raspberry,' he was saying cheerfully. ‘It wasn't very clever of me, but it's a thing that happens to young doctors who haven't left medical school quite long enough. It did me no harm, probably a bit of good in the long run because it scared me and showed me I wasn't quite as intelligent as I thought I was. But the harm it did, the real harm, Liz, was that it frightened you.'

I made an inarticulate noise but he took no notice of it.

‘It frightened you out of all reason, all proportion,' he said. ‘I ought to have understood it and been prepared for it, but I wasn't. You've grown up obsessed by the broken marriage of your parents which spoilt your childhood, and you were determined not to make the same mistake. Therefore, when you saw yourself as you thought in love with a drunken ne'er-do-well (I'm not blaming you, woman, I'm simply clarifying your mind for you) you panicked, and to save yourself from love you took a safe offer which happened to come along at that particular moment.'

‘If you'll stop I'll get out,' I said.

‘Can't park on the corner. Besides, I haven't finished. We'll go round again. This is the last time I shall ever speak to you and I intend to get this right off my chest.'

We swept out of the main street towards the Tortham Road again and I was suddenly glad. If this was to be a once-and-forever fight I had something to say myself. It welled up inside me in a great wave of self-justification. It was the thing I'd been wanting to explain to the whole of Tinworth – to the world for that matter – for solid months.

‘I married as I did because I was determined to make a success of it,' I bellowed, and realizing I was shouting, lowered my voice abruptly. ‘You're quite right, in one sense,' I went on, trying to sound reasonable and succeeding only in conveying my savage irritation. ‘I did remember Mother. I did remember how a romantic love affair had become a jealous bickering match. I did remember that love can die and a woman and her child can be reduced to dreary misery in the process. I didn't want that kind of marriage. I didn't want the humiliation of any more divorces. Mother's was enough for me. I did remember all that, and therefore I married where I felt I could make a good honest job of it. I wanted to be a good wife and I wanted to stay married. Now do you understand?'

He did not answer immediately and when I looked at him his head was turned a little so that I could only see the angle of his jaw. His face was darker than ever and I was very much aware of the hard angry muscles under the coat sleeve at my side. We were roaring up Tortham Road again by this time and he did not speak until we swung round past the Vicarage once more. Then he said mildly:

‘Then it wasn't altogether the row?'

‘No, of course it wasn't. That simply cleared my mind, and, as you said, Victor happened to come along at the same moment.' I felt I was gaining my point and couldn't understand why it didn't make me feel happier.

Andy brought the car to a crawl and looked at me curiously.

‘You just honestly don't see it, do you, Liz?' He made the observation almost gently. ‘You don't want to, of course. That's why you're deceiving yourself. You were afraid of love, old
lady, that's what you were escaping from. You wanted something safer.'

His stupidity and obstinacy made me absolutely furious. I had never felt so helpless. For three quarters of a year I had been clarifying my mind in private upon the subject, until I felt I knew all about everything I had ever felt or ever could feel. Now, when I tried to express it for the first time to another human being, it seemed to be going all wrong. To make matters worse, until that moment I should have said that Andy was the easiest person in the world to whom to tell anything. It was his greatest gift, both as a doctor and as a man.

‘Look here,' I said, making what I felt was a last attempt to get through the wool, ‘call it an ideal, if you like. I had set my heart on a steady, sober, ordinary sort of marriage, something I could make something of.'

‘And have you got it?'

The question came out quite naturally and without the least hint of malice. It hit me, of course. I felt the blood go hot in my face. It rose into my hair, making the roots tingle.

‘I think so,' I said. ‘I mean, of course I have.' There was a pause and I added idiotically, ‘Term time is liable to be very busy for Victor.'

He cocked a shrewd eye at me and I realized all over again how very well we two were acquainted. It wasn't going to be easy to hide much from Andy.

And you haven't had much except term time so far, have you?' he was saying slowly. ‘As I hear it, you were married just two days before the spring term began. Your husband had to spend a short vacation at the end of that term on a course at a Swiss university where you couldn't accompany him. And now here you are at the end of the summer session and he's due to go on a mountain-climbing expedition – experts only.'