The Documents in the Case (12 page)

And so on.

It is so very odd that in moments of excitement we should all talk like characters in a penny novelette. However long one lives, I suppose it always strikes one with the same shock of surprise.

‘That’ll do,’ I said at last. ‘We can take that as read. If Mrs Harrison feels as you do about it—’

He interrupted me to assure me at unnecessary length that she did.

‘Very well,’ I said, ‘why not do the decent and sensible thing and take her away? You won’t find this kind of back-stairs intrigue permanently inspiring, you know. Besides, it seems to be the kind of thing you do very badly.’

‘I wish to God,’ replied Lathom, ‘that I could take her away. Heaven and earth, man, do you think I wouldn’t do it like a shot if I had half a chance? But she won’t hear of it. She’s got some poisonous idea about not making a scandal. It’s this damned awful suburban respectability that’s crushing the beautiful life out of her. When you see what she was meant to be — free and splendid and ready to proclaim her splendid passion to the world — and then see what this foul blighter has made of her—’

‘Well, there you are,’ said I. ‘That’s the raw, red life of the suburbs, as per specification. That’s what you came here for, isn’t it? Look here, Lathom, buzz off and let me get to sleep, there’s a good chap. You can blow your feelings off in the morning.’

‘Oh, all right.’ He got up from the bed and hesitated at the door. ‘I only thought I’d warn you,’ he added, a little awkwardly, ‘in case the old woman says anything to you.’

‘Dashed good of you,’ I said dryly. ‘What am I to do? Make love to the confidante while you make love to the mistress, and go stark mad in white linen?’

‘Oh, you needn’t bother to do that,’ said he. ‘I should just treat the whole thing as a joke. Or, if she makes a fuss, apologise and say you were a bit screwed. I’ll back you up.’

I was so infuriated with him for shoving the responsibility on to me in this light-hearted way that I told him to clear out, which he did.

As a matter of fact, I rather under-estimated the seriousness of the thing. I mean, I did not realise the lengths to which Miss Milsom’s resentment might go. I determined merely to avoid the woman in future, and, in fact, treat the whole episode as if it hadn’t occurred. I thought Lathom had received a salutary shock and useful lesson on the difficulties attending suburban love affairs, and that he might bethink himself and stop the whole thing before it had gone too far. A good thing, too. I was clearing out and getting married at Easter, and there, so far as I was concerned, was an end of it. Lathom could fish it out for himself after that. My book had made a sudden success, and I was feeling rather cock-a-hoop with myself.

Consequently, I was quite unprepared for the arrival of Harrison with his accusation. He was dead-white with fury and intensely quiet. He did not offer me a single opening by scattering his usual fiery particles of rage. He put the accusation before me. Such and such things had been stated — what had I to reply? I tried to dismiss the thing with airy persiflage. He was not abashed by my assumption of ridicule. He simply asked whether I denied being on the landing at that time, and, if not, what I was doing there. When I refused to answer so absurd an accusation, he told me, without further argument, to leave the house. His wife must not be subjected to any kind of disagreeable contact. The mere fact that I could take such an attitude to the matter (and, indeed, my attitude had nothing dignified about it) showed that I was an entirely unsuitable person to come into any sort of contact with Mrs Harrison. He was there to protect her from persons of my sort. Would I go quietly or wait to be removed by force?

The deceived husband is usually considered to be a ridiculous figure, but Harrison was not ridiculous. Sometimes I wonder whether he was deceived. I thought at the time that he was, but perhaps the light of faith in his eyes was really the torch of martyrdom. It is fine to die for a faith, but perhaps it is still finer to die for a thing you do not believe in. I do not know. He baffled me. If the garrison was disarmed and beaten behind that impenetrable façade, I was never to know. Nobody would ever know it.

It is ironical that Lathom, coming to Suburbia to find raw, red life, should have failed to recognise it when he saw it. It was there, all right, in this dry little man, with no imagination beyond beef-steak and mushrooms, but it did not wear bright colours, and Lathom liked colours. The thing was farcical. And I believe I was the most farcical fool in the whole outfit. Even then, the mocking censor which views one’s personality from the outside sat sniggering in a corner of my brain. Here was I, a successful novelist, presented with this monstrous situation — one which was quite in my own line of work, too — and I hadn’t even had the wits to see it coming. The thing was a gift.

I could see myself tackling it, too, in quite the right modern, cynical way. No nonsense. No foolish shibboleths about honour and self-sacrifice. A lucid exposure of the situation — an epigram or so — a confrontation of Harrison (as representing the old morality) with the unsentimental frankness of the new.

And the damnable thing was that I didn’t do it. When it came to saying, ‘My good man, you are mistaken. My friend Lathom is the man you ought to be after. He and your wife are carrying on a love affair, for which you are largely to blame, if, indeed, any blame attaches to these unsophisticated manifestations of natural selection’ — when it came to the point, I didn’t say it. Looking at Harrison, I couldn’t say it. I behaved like a perfect little gentleman, and said nothing whatever.

After that, I can only suppose that I became quite intoxicated by this new and heroic view of myself. I went straight off to Lathom and told him about it. I oozed priggishness. I said:

‘I have stood by you. I have kept silence. I have agreed to leave the house at once. But I will only do it if you will promise me to chuck the whole business — clear out at the same time that I do. Leave these people alone. You have no right to ruin the life of this decent man and his wife, who were getting along quite well in their way till you came along.’

I grew solemn and portentous about it. I enlarged on Harrison’s sufferings. I painted a vivid picture of the miseries the woman must needs undergo in the course of a secret love-affair. I called it vulgar. I called it wicked and selfish. I used expressions which I thought had perished from the vocabulary since the eighties. And I ended by saying:

‘If you do not promise me to do the decent thing, you cannot expect me to stand by you.’ Which was mere blackmail.

There must be more of the old inhibitions alive in even the most modern of us than one would readily credit. Lathom was actually abashed by my eloquence. He protested at first; then he grew sulky; finally, he was touched.

‘You’re quite right, old man,’ he said, ‘damn it. I’ve been behaving like a cad. I couldn’t make her happy. I ought to go away. I will go away. You’ve been damned decent to me.’ He wrung my hand. I clapped him sentimentally on the shoulder. We wallowed in our own high-mindedness. It must have been a touching sight.

The first disagreeable consequence of this foolish interference with the course of events arrived in the shape of a letter from my fiancée. Miss Milsom had felt it her duty to send one of those warnings. I dashed up to Scotland to put matters right. The greatest compliment I can pay to the open mind and generous common sense of Elizabeth is to say plainly that I had no difficulty about doing this. But I was reminded with a slight shock that Victorian quixotry has a way of landing one in complications. However, no harm appeared to be done, and later I received a letter from Lathom, dated from Paris, in which he informed me that he was playing the game (the words were proof in themselves of the conditions to which I must have reduced him), and that, after a highly emotional scene, Mrs Harrison and he had agreed to part.

I got married soon after that, and forgot all about Lathom and the Harrisons — the more so as Elizabeth did not encourage me to dwell on the subject. A natural jealousy, I thought, particularly as she had not seemed altogether impressed by my quixotic gesture. But women are unconquerable realists, and nowadays they are not taught to flatter male delusions as they once were. It is uncomfortable to think that perhaps our repressed Victorian ancestresses were as clear-sighted as their franker granddaughters. If so, how they must have laughed, as they made their meek responses. In this century we do know, more or less, what they are thinking, and meet them on equal terms — at least, I hope we do.

I was reminded of Lathom by receiving my ticket for the Private View at the Academy on May 3rd. We had had our honeymoon, and were ready to return to our place in the world. Almost the first thing I saw, as we surged through the crowd, was the painted face of Mrs Harrison, blazing out from a wall full of civic worthies and fagged society beauties, with the loud insistence of a begonia in a bed of cherrypie. There was a little knot of people in front of it, and I recognised Marlowe, the man who paints those knotty nudes, and created a sensation two years ago with ‘The Wrestlers’. He was enjoying his usual pastime of being rude to Garvice, the portrait-painter. His voice bellowed out over the din, and his black cloak flapped gustily from a flung-out arm. ‘Of course you don’t like it,’ he boomed lustily, ‘it kills everything in the place dead. That’s none of your damned art — that’s painting — a painting, I tell you.’ Several pained people, who had been discussing values in low tones, shrank at the unseemly noise, and dodged waveringly from the sweep of his hairy fist. ‘None of you poor pimples,’ went on Marlowe, threateningly ‘can see colour — or thickness — you’re only fit to colour Christmas cards at twopence a hundred. There isn’t a painter in the whole beastly boarding-house crowd of you except this chap.’ I will do Marlowe the justice to say that, except where nudes are concerned, he is singularly generous to the younger men. He glowered round through his bush of beard and spectacles, and caught sight of me. ‘Hullo, Munting!’ he bawled. ‘Come here. Somebody said you knew this fellow Lathom. Who is he? Why haven’t you brought him round to see me?’

I explained that I had only just returned from my honeymoon, and introduced Marlowe to my wife. Marlowe roared approval in his characteristic way, and added:

‘Come along on Friday — same old crowd, you know, and bring this man Lathom. I want to know him. He can paint.’

He spun round to face the picture again, and the crowd retired precipitately to avoid him.

‘Well,’ said a man’s voice, almost in my ear, ‘and how do you think it looks, now it’s hung?’

I spun round and saw Lathom, and with him, before I could adopt any suitable attitude to the situation, Mr and Mrs Harrison, flung up from the waves of sightseers like the ball from a Rugby scrum.

Retreat was hopeless, because Marlowe now had me tightly by the shoulder, while with his other hand he sketched large, thumby gestures towards the portrait to indicate the modelling and brushwork.

‘Hullo, Munting!’ said Lathom.

‘Hullo, Lathom!’ I said, and added nervously, ‘Hullo-ullo-ullo!’ like something by P. G. Wodehouse.

12

‘Good God!’ exploded Marlowe, ‘is this the man? The man and the model, by all that’s lucky,’ he bellowed on, without waiting for my embarrassed answer. ‘I’m Marlowe; and I say you’ve done a good piece of work.’

Lathom came to my rescue by making a suitable acknowledgement of the great man’s condescension, and I was sliding away with a vague bow and a muttered remark about an engagement, when I felt a tap on the shoulder. It was Harrison.

‘Excuse me one moment, Mr Munting,’ said he.

A row in the Academy would have its points from the point of view of my Press agent, but I was not anxious for it. However, I asked Elizabeth to wait a moment for me, and stepped aside with Harrison.

‘I think,’ said he, ‘I am afraid — that is, I feel I owe you an apology, Mr Munting.’

‘Oh!’ I said. ‘That’s all right. I mean, it doesn’t matter at all.’ Then I pulled myself together. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘it’s my fault, really. I ought not to have come. I might have known you would be here.’

‘It’s not that,’ he said, determined to face it. ‘The fact is — I fear I did you an injustice that — er — that last time we met. Er — the unfortunate woman who made all the trouble—’

‘Miss Milsom?’ I asked; not because I didn’t know, but to help him on with his sentence.

‘Yes. She has had to take a rest — in fact, to undergo a course of treatment — in fact, she is in a kind of nursing-home.’

‘Indeed?’

‘Yes. There can really be no doubt that the poor creature is — well, demented is perhaps an unkind way of putting it. Perhaps we had better say, unbalanced.’

I expressed sympathy.

‘Yes. From what my wife tells me — and Mr Lathom — and from what I hear from the poor creature’s relatives, I now feel no doubt at all that the — the accusation, you know — was entirely unfounded. A nervous delusion, of course.’

‘Yes, yes,’ said I.

‘I quite understand, of course, your very chivalrous motives for not putting the blame on her at the time. The position was most awkward for you. You might perhaps have given me a hint — but I perfectly understand. And my wife, you will realise, was so very much upset—’

‘Please,’ I broke in, ‘do not blame her or yourself for a single moment.’

‘Thank you. It is very kind of you to take it in this reasonable spirit: I cannot say how much I regret the misunderstanding. I hope you are very well and prosperous. You are quite a famous man now, of course. And married. Will you do me the honour to present me to your wife? I hope you will come and see us some day.’

I was not keen to make the introduction, but it could scarcely be avoided. The preposterous situation was there, and had to be imagined away. Mrs Harrison glowed. For the first time I saw her in full prismatic loveliness, soaked and vibrating with colour and light. I asked her what she thought of the show.

‘We haven’t seen much of it yet,’ she said, laughing, ‘we came straight to see the picture. Is it going to be the picture of the year as they call it, do you think, Mr Munting?’