She Died a Lady (2 page)

‘What seems to be the trouble?’

‘I can’t sleep!’

‘Yes; but why not go to Tom?’

‘Tom’s a slowcoach. And he’d only lecture me.’

‘Whereas I wouldn’t?’

Rita smiled a little. It was a smile which would have turned my head thirty years ago. But it was more than that. It erased the fine lines from the corners of her brown eyes; it showed the charm and the muddle-headed good nature behind all those emotions. Then the smile faded.

‘Dr Luke,’ she said, ‘I’m terribly, horribly in love with Barry Sullivan. I’ve – I’ve slept with him.’

‘That’s no news, my dear, from the look of you.’

This took her aback.

‘You mean you can
tell
?’

‘In a way. But never mind that. Go on.’

‘I suppose it shocks you.’

‘It doesn’t exactly shock me, Rita, but it worries me like the very devil. How long has this been going on? What the lawyers call intimacy, I mean.’

‘The – the last time was last night. Barry’s staying at our house. He came into my room.’

No doubt about it, to say I was worried would be putting it mildly. I felt that cardiac twinge which is a bad danger-sign; so I shut my eyes and waited for a moment.

‘What about Alec?’

‘He doesn’t know,’ Rita returned promptly. Again her eyes shifted. ‘He doesn’t seem to notice anything much, nowadays. And, anyway, I doubt whether he would mind if he did know.’

(More danger-signs.)

‘People notice much more than you think they do, Rita. As regards being fair to Alec …’

‘Do you think I don’t know that?’ she cried out. It was hitting on the nerve. ‘I’m fond of Alec. It’s not a lie or a pretence: I really am fond of Alec, and I wouldn’t hurt him for the world. If he would mind, I couldn’t face it. But you don’t understand. This isn’t just an infatuation or a – a carnal thing.’

(That, my dear, is the very reverse of true. But you probably believe you are telling the truth, so let’s leave it at that.)

‘It’s the real thing. It’s my whole being and my whole life. I know what you’re going to say. You’re going to say Barry is a little younger than I am. That’s true, but
he
doesn’t mind.’

‘Yes. What does Mr Sullivan say to all this?’

‘Please don’t talk about him like that.’

‘Like what?’

‘“Mr Sullivan,”’ Rita mimicked. ‘Like a judge. He wants to go and tell Alec’

‘With what end? Divorce?’

Rita drew a deep breath. She shook herself impatiently. She stared round the little surgery as though it were a prison. I think, too, that she felt it as a prison. This was no acting or self-dramatization. A poised and reasonably intelligent woman had begun to talk, even to think, like a girl of eighteen. Rita’s fingers twisted a white handbag all the time her eyes roved.

‘Alec’s a Catholic,’ she said. ‘Didn’t you know that?’

‘As a matter of fact, I didn’t.’

The strained eyes fastened on me.

‘He wouldn’t divorce me even if I wanted him to. But, don’t you see, that isn’t the point. It’s the thought of
wounding
Alec. It’s the thought of how he’d look, maybe, if I did tell him. He’s been so terribly good to me. He’s old and he hasn’t got anybody to turn to.’

‘Yes. There’s that.’

‘So I can’t just run away and leave him, divorce or no divorce. But I can’t give up Barry, either. I can’t! You don’t know what it’s like. Dr Luke! Barry hates this clandestine business as much as I do. He won’t wait for ever; and, if I put him off much longer, there’s no telling what might happen. It’s all such a
mess
.’ She looked at a corner of the ceiling. ‘If only Alec would die, or something like that …’

A certain thought, which entered unbidden, turned me cold.

‘What,’ I asked, ‘are you intending to do?’

‘But that’s just it! I don’t know!’

‘Rita, how long have you been married?’

‘Eight years.’

‘Has this sort of thing ever happened before?’

Round swung her eyes, grown guileless and imploring in their intensity. ‘It hasn’t, Dr Luke! I swear it hasn’t! That’s why I’m sure this is the real – well, grand passion. I’ve read about it and even written about it, but I never knew what it was like.’

‘Suppose you did run away with this fellow …’

‘I won’t
do
that, I tell you!’

‘Never mind. Suppose it. How would you live? Has he got any money?’

‘Not much, I’m afraid. But –’ Again Rita hesitated, on the brink of telling me something; and again, miserably, she decided against it. Her teeth fastened in her full under-lip. ‘I’m not saying it isn’t a practical consideration. But why bother about it at a time like this? It’s Alec I’m worried about. Always Alec, Alec, Alec, Alec!’

Then she became literary. The dangerous thing about this high-flown talk was that she meant every word of it.

‘His face is a kind of ghost that keeps coming between me and Barry all the time. I want him to be happy and yet neither of us can be happy.’

‘Tell me, Rita. Were you ever in love with Alec?’

‘Yes, I was. In a way. He was perfectly charming when I first knew him. He used to call me Dolores. After Swinburne’s Dolores, you know.’

‘And now?’

‘Well? He doesn’t beat me, or anything like that. But –’

‘How long has it been since you’ve had physical relations with Alec?’

Her face grew tragic.

‘I keep telling you, Dr Luke, it isn’t like that at all! This affair with Barry is something entirely different. It’s a kind of spiritual re-birth. Now don’t rub your hand over your forehead, and sit there looking at me over your spectacles and down your nose!’

‘I was only …’

‘It’s something I can’t describe. I can help Barry in his art, and he can help me in mine. He’s going to be a great actor one day. He laughs at me when I say that; but it’s true, and I can help him. All the same, that doesn’t solve my particular problem. I’m nearly going crazy under it. I want your advice, of course, though I know what it’ll be beforehand. But what I want most of all is something that will make me sleep for just one night. Can’t you
please
give me something that will make me
sleep
?’

Fifteen minutes later, Rita left. I stood and watched her go down the side path between the laurel hedges. Once, before reaching the gate, she looked into her handbag as though to make sure something was there. She had been on the edge of hysteria while telling her story. But hysteria was gone now. In the way she touched and smoothed her hair, in the very set of her shoulders, you could see a dreaminess as well as a defiance. She was eager to get back home to ‘Mon Repos’ and to Barry Sullivan.

O
N
the evening of Saturday, the thirtieth of June I went out to the Wainrights’ house to play cards.

It was thick, thundery weather. Matters were straining towards a breaking-point in more respects than one. France had capitulated; the Führer was in Paris; a disorganized weaponless British army had crawled back, exhausted, to dry its wounds on the beaches where it might presently have to fight. But we were still reasonably cheerful, with myself as complacent as the rest. ‘We’re all together now,’ we said; ‘it’ll be better’ – God knows why.

Even in our little world of Lyncombe there was impending tragedy as clearly to be heard as a knocking at a door. I learned more about the Wainright-Sullivan business when I talked to Tom on the day after Rita’s visit.

‘May cause scandal?’ echoed Tom, who was fastening his bag preparatory to the morning round of calls. ‘
May
cause scandal? It’s a flaming scandal already.’

‘You mean it’s being talked about in the village?’

‘It’s being talked about all over North Devon. If it weren’t for this war situation, you’d hear nothing else.’

‘Then why wasn’t
I
told about it?’

‘My dear governor,’ said Tom, in that irritatingly kindly way of his, ‘you can’t even see what’s under your own nose. And nobody ever tells you gossip anyway. You just wouldn’t be interested. Let me help you into a chair.’

‘Confound it, sir, I’m not as doddering as all that!’

‘No, but you’ve got to be careful of that heart,’ said my serious-minded son. ‘All the same,’ he added, whacking shut the catch of his medicine-case, ‘it beats me how people can carry on like that and think they’re not noticed. That woman has completely lost her head.’

‘What’s … being said?’

‘Oh, that Mrs Wainright is an evil woman leading on an innocent young man.’ Tom shook his head, drew himself up, and prepared to lecture. ‘That’s medically and biologically unsound, by the way. You see –’

‘I am sufficiently acquainted with the facts of life, young man. Your presence in this world testifies to that. So
he
gets all the sympathy, then?’

‘If you could call it sympathy, yes.’

‘What’s this Barry Sullivan like? Do you know?’

‘I haven’t met him, but they say he’s a decent sort. Free spender; typical Yank; that kind of thing. All the same, it wouldn’t surprise me if he and Mrs Wainright got together and murdered the old man.’

Tom delivered this statement with a wise and portentous air. He didn’t believe it himself; it was just his way of airing knowledge, or fancied knowledge; but it struck so sharply and unpleasantly in line with my own thoughts that I reacted as fathers will.

‘Nonsense!’ I said.

Tom teetered back on his heels.

‘You think so?’ he said grandly. ‘Look at Thompson and Bywaters. Look at Rattenbury and Stoner. Look at … well, there must be a lot of them. A married woman approaching middle age falls for a mere youngster.’

‘Who are you to be talking about mere youngsters? You’re only thirty-five yourself.’

‘And what do they do?’ inquired Tom. ‘They don’t do anything sensible, like getting a divorce. No. They go scatty and kill the husband. It happens in nine cases out of ten; but don’t ask me
why
it happens.’

(Talk to one of them, my lad; see the nerves shake and the brain dither and the self-control dissolve; then perhaps you’ll understand.)

‘But I can’t stand here gassing,’ pursued Tom, stamping his feet on the floor, and picking up the medicine-case. He is large and broad and sandy-haired, as I was at his age. ‘Got an interesting case out Exmoor way.’

‘It must be something special, if you call it interesting.’

Tom grinned.

‘It’s not the case. It’s the personality. Old boy named Merrivale, Sir Henry Merrivale. He’s staying with Paul Ferrars at Ridd Farm.’

What’s wrong with him?’

‘He fractured his big toe. He was up to some shenanigans – can’t imagine what – and he fractured his big toe. It’s worth going out there just to hear his language. I’m going to keep him in a wheel-chair for six weeks. But if you
are
interested in Mrs Wainright’s latest escapade …’

‘I am.’

‘Right. I’ll see if I can pump Paul Ferrars. Discreetly, of course. He must know her pretty well; he painted her picture a year or so ago.’

But I forbade this as unethical, and preached Tom quite a lecture about it. So I waited for over a month, while the world continued to clatter round our ears and people talked of little but Adolf Hitler. Barry Sullivan, I learned, had gone back to London. I drove out once to see Rita and Alec, but the maid said they were at Minehead. Then, on that overcast Saturday morning, I met Alec.

Anybody would have been shocked at the change in him. I met him on the cliff-road, between Lyncombe and ‘Mon Repos’. He was stumping along slowly and aimlessly, his hands clasped behind his back; even at a distance you could see him shaking his head from side to side. He wore no hat; the wind ruffled his sparse greyish hair and flapped back his old alpaca coat.

Though shortish in figure, Alec Wainright used to have a thick breadth of shoulder. Now he seemed to have shrunk. His square, blunt-featured face, with the kindly expression and grey eyes under tufted eyebrows, had become blurred. It was not that the face had degenerated, or even changed in any definable way: it had merely lost its expression, heightened by a slight twitching of the eyelid.

Alec was drunk, but he was in a dream. I had to call out to him.

‘Dr Croxley!’ he said, and cleared his throat. His eyes lighted up a little. To Alec I was not Dr Luke or even plain Luke; I had the formal title. ‘It’s good to see you,’ he continued, and kept on clearing his throat. ‘I’ve been wanting to see you. Intending to see you. But –’

He made a vague gesture, as though he could not at the moment recall the reason.

‘Come over here,’ he urged. ‘This bench. Sit down.’

There was a stiff breeze blowing, and I said I wished Alec had a hat. Vaguely fussed, he fished an old cloth cap out of his pocket and crammed it on. Then he sat down beside me on the bench. Still he kept shaking his head from side to side in a depressed way.

‘They don’t realize,’ he said in his gentle voice. ‘They don’t
realize
!’

This made me turn round, until I saw what he meant.

‘He’s coming. He’ll be here any day now,’ said Alec. ‘He’s got the planes; he’s got troops; he’s got everything. But when I tell them at the pub, they say, “Oh, for God’s sake shut up! Haven’t we got enough to depress us without that?”’

Alec sat back, folding his stumpy arms.

‘And, do you know, in a way they’re quite right. But they don’t
realize
. Look here!’ This time he fished a crumpled newspaper out of his pocket. ‘See this item?’

‘Which item?’

‘Never mind. The liner
Washington
is coming to Galway to pick up Americans who want to get back to the States. The American Embassy says it’s their last chance. What does that mean? Invasion. Don’t they realize that?’

His fretful voice trailed away. But, at the words, no friend of Alec’s could fail to see a sudden hope.

‘Speaking of Americans …’ I began.

‘Yes. I knew there was something I wanted to tell you.’ Alec rubbed his forehead. ‘It’s about young Sullivan. Barry Sullivan, you know. Nice lad. I don’t know if you’ve met him?’

‘Is
he
going back by the
Washington
?’

Alec blinked at me and made fussed gestures.