The Passionate Year (31 page)

He wondered how she would take it. It never occurred to him that she was
prepared. She answered: “Yes. Mother’s been over here to tell me all about
it. We’re going to Seacliffe in the morning. Catching the 9.5. What were you
doing in Pritchard’s bedroom?”

“Didn’t they tell you?” he enquired sarcastically.

“How could they? They didn’t know. They found you fainting across the bed,
and Pritchard said he woke up and found you staring at him.”

“And you can’t guess why I went there?”

“I suppose you wanted to ask him if it were true that he and I were going
away together.”

“No, not quite. I wanted to murder him so that it could never be
true.”

“What!”

“Yes. What I said.”

She made no answer, and after a long pause he said: “You’re not in love
with Pritchard, are you?”

She replied sorrowfully: “Not a little bit. In fact, I rather dislike him.
You’re the only person I love.”

“When you’re not hating me, eh?”

“Yes, that’s right. When I’m not hating you.”

Then after a second long pause he suddenly decided to make one last effort
for the tranquillising of the future.

“Helen,” he began pleadingly, “Can’t you stop hating me? Is it too late to
begin everything afresh? Can’t we—”

Then he stopped. All the eloquence went out of him suddenly, like the air
out of a suddenly pricked balloon. His brain refused to frame the sentences
of promise and supplication that he had intended. His brain was
tired—utterly tired. He felt he did not care whether Helen stayed with
him or not, whether she ran away with Pritchard or not, whether his own
relationship with her improved, worsened, or ceased altogether, whether
anything in the world happened or did not happen. All he wanted was
peace—peace from the eternal torment of his mind.

She suddenly put her arms round him and kissed him passionately. “We
will
begin again, Kenneth,” she said eagerly. “We
will
be happy
again, won’t we? Oh, yes, I know
we
will. When we get to Seacliffe
we’ll have a second honeymoon together, what do you think, darling?”

“Rather,” he replied, with simulated enthusiasm. In reality he felt
sick—physically sick. Something in the word “honeymoon” set his nerves
on edge. Poor little darling Helen—why on earth had he ever married
such a creature? They would never be happy together, he was quite certain of
that. And yet…well, anyway, they had to make the best of it. He smiled at
her and returned her kisses, and then suggested packing the trunk in
readiness for the morning.

In the morning there arrived a letter from Clare. He guessed
it from the postmark, and was glad that she had the tact to type the address
on the envelope. When he tore it open he saw that the letter was also
typewritten, and signed merely “C. H.”, so that he was able to read it at the
breakfast-table without any fears of Helen guessing. It was a curious
sensation, that of reading a letter from Clare with Helen so near to him, and
so unsuspecting.

It ran:—

“DEAR KENNETH SPEED-AS I told you last night I feel
thoroughly disgusted with myself—I
knew
I should. I’m very sorry
I acted as I did, though of course everything I said was true. If you take my
advice you’ll take Helen right away and never come near Millstead any more.
Begin life with her afresh, and don’t expect it to be too easy. As for
me—you’d better forget if you
can
. We mustn’t ever see each
other again, and I think we had better not write, either. I really mean that
and I hope you won’t send me any awfully pathetic reply as it will only make
things more awkward than they are. There was a time when you thought I was
hard-hearted; you must try and think so again, because I really don’t want to
have anything more to do with you. It sounds brutal, but it isn’t, really.
You have still time to make your life a success, and the only way to do it in
the present circumstances is to keep away from my evil influence. So good-bye
and good luck. Yours—C. H.”—“P.S. If you ever
do
return to
Millstead you won’t find me there.”

He was so furious that he tore the letter up and flung it into the
fire.

“What is it?” enquired Helen.

He forced himself to reply: “Oh, only a tradesman’s letter.”

She answered, with vague sympathy: “Everybody’s being perfectly horrid,
aren’t they?”

“Oh, I don’t care,” he replied, shrugging his shoulders and eating
vigorously. “I don’t care a damn for the lot of them.”

She looked at him in thoughtful silence.

Towards the end of the meal he had begun to wonder if it had been Clare’s
object to put him in just that mood of fierce aggressiveness and truculence.
He wished he had not thrown the letter into the fire. He would like to have
re-read it, and to have studied the phrasing with a view to more accurate
interpretation.

That was about seven-thirty in the morning. The bells were just beginning
to ring in the dormitories and the floors above to creak with the beginnings
of movement. It was a dull morning in early March, cold, but not freezing;
the sky was full of mist and clouds, and very likely it would rain later. As
he looked out of the window, for what might be the last time in his life, he
realised that he was leaving Millstead without a pang. It astonished him a
little. There was nothing in the place that he still cared for. All his
dreams were in ruins, all his hopes shattered, all his enthusiasms burned
away; he could look out upon Millstead, that had once contained them all,
without love and without malice. It was nothing to him now; a mere box of
bricks teeming with strangers. Even the terror of it had vanished; it stirred
him to no emotion at all. He could leave it as casually as he could a railway
station at which he had stopped
en route
.

And when he tried, just by way of experiment, to resuscitate for a moment
some of the feelings he had once had, he was conscious only of immense mental
strain, for something inside him that was sterile and that ached intolerably.
He remembered how, on the moonlight nights of his first term, his eyes would
fill with tears as he saw the great window-lit blocks of Milner’s and
Lavery’s rising into the pale night. He remembered it without passion and
without understanding. He was so different now from what he had been then. He
was older now; he was tired; his emotions had been wrung dry; some of him was
a little withered.

An hour later he left Millstead quite undramatic-ally by the 9.5. The taxi
came to the door of Lavery’s at ten minutes to nine, while the school was in
morning chapel; as he rode away and out of the main gates he could hear,
faintly above the purr of the motor, the drone of two hundred voices making
the responses in the psalms. It did not bring to his heart a single pang or
to his eye a single tear. Helen sat beside him and she, too, was unmoved; but
she had never cared for Millstead. She was telling him about Seacliffe.

As the taxi bounded into the station yard she said: “Oh, Kenneth, did you
leave anything for Burton?”

“No,” he answered, curtly.

“You ought to have done,” she said.

That ended their conversation till they were in the train.

As he looked out of the window at the dull, bleak fen country he wondered
how he could ever have thought it beautiful. Mile after mile of bare,
grey-green fields, ditches of tangled reeds, forlorn villages, trees that
stood solitary in the midst of great plains. He saw every now and then the
long, flat road along which he had cycled many times to Pangbourne. And in a
little while Pangbourne itself came into view, with its huge dominating
cathedral round which he had been wont formerly to conduct little
enthusiastic parties of Millsteadians; Pangbourne had seemed to him so pretty
and sunlit in those days, but now all was dull and dreary, and the mist was
creeping up in swathes from the fenlands. Pangbourne station…

Again he wished that he had not burnt Clare’s letter. At noon he was at
Seacliffe, booking accommodation at the Beach Hotel.

“Heaven knows what we are going to do with ourselves here,”
he remarked to Helen during lunch. “You’ve got to rest,” replied Helen.

He went on to a melancholy mastication of bread. “So far as I can see,
we’re the only visitors in the entire hotel.”

“Well, Kenneth, March is hardly the season, is it?”

“Then why did we come here? I’d much rather have gone to town, where
there’s always something happening. But a seaside-place in winter!—is
there anything in the world more depressing?”

“There’s nobody in the world more depressing than you are yourself,” she
answered tartly. “It isn’t my fault we’ve come here in March. It isn’t my
fault we’ve come here at all. And what good would London have done for you?
It’s rest you want, and you’ll get it here.”

“Heavens, yes—I’ll get it all right.”

After a silence he smiled and said: “I’m sorry, Helen, for being such a
wet blanket. And you’re quite right, it isn’t your fault—not any of it.
What can we do this afternoon?”

“We can have a walk along the cliffs,” she answered.

He nodded and took up a week-old copy of the
Seacliffe Gazette
.
“That’s what we’ll do,” he said, beginning to read.

So that afternoon they had a walk along the cliffs. In fact there was
really nothing at all to do in Seacliffe during the winter season except to
take a walk along the cliffs. Everything wore an air of depression—the
dingy rain-sodden refreshment kiosks, the shuttered bandstand, the rusting
tram rails on the promenade, along which no trams had run since the preceding
October, the melancholy pier pavilion, forlornly decorated with the tattered
advertisements of last season’s festivities. Nothing remained of the town’s
social amenities but the cindered walk along the cliff edges, and this,
except for patches of mud and an absence of strollers, was much the same as
usual. Speed and Helen walked vigorously, as people do on the first day of
their holidays-grimly determined to extract every atom of nourishment out of
the much-advertised air. They climbed the slope of the Beach hill, past the
gaunt five-storied basemented boardinghouses, past the yachting club-house,
past the marine gardens, past the rows of glass shelters, and then on to the
winding cinder-path that rose steeply to the edge of the cliffs. Meanwhile
the mist turned to rain and the sea and the sky merged together into one vast
grey blur without a horizon.

Then they went back to the Beach Hotel for tea. Then they read the
magazines until dinner-time, and after dinner, more magazines until
bedtime.

The next day came the same routine again; walk along the cliffs in the
morning; walk along the cliffs in the afternoon; tea; magazines; dinner;
magazines; bed. Speed discovered in the hotel a bookcase entirely filled with
cheap novels that had been left behind by previous visitors. He read some of
them until their small print gave him a headache. Helen revelled in them. In
the mornings, by way of a variant from the cliff walk, they took to sitting
on the windless side of the municipal shelters, absorbed in the novels. It
was melancholy, and yet Speed felt with some satisfaction that he was
undoubtedly resting, and that, on the whole, he was enduring it better than
he had expected.

Then slowly there grew in him again the thought of Clare. It
was as if, as soon as he gained strength at all, that strength should bring
with it turmoil and desire, so that the only peace that he could ever hope
for was the joyless peace of exhaustion. The sharp sea-salt winds that
brought him health and vigour brought him also passion, passion that racked
and tortured him into weakness again.

He wished a thousand times that he had not burned Clare’s letter. He felt
sure that somewhere in it there must have been a touch of verbal ambiguity or
subtlety that would have given him some message of hope; he could not believe
that she had sent him merely a letter of dismissal. In one sense, he was glad
that he had burned the letter, for the impossibility of recovering it made it
easier for him to suppose whatever he wished about it. And whatever he wished
was really only one wish in the world, a wish of one word: Clare. He wanted
her, her company, her voice, her movements around him, the sight of her, her
quaint perplexing soul that so fitted in with his own, her baffling
mysterious understandings of him that nobody else had ever had at all. He
wanted her as a sick man longs for health; as if he had a divine right to
her, and as if the withholding of her from him gave him a surging grudge
against the world.

One dreary interval between tea at the hotel and dinner he wrote to her.
He wrote in a mood in which he cared not if his writing angered her or not;
her silence, if she did not reply, would be his answer. And if she did not
reply, he vowed solemnly to himself that he would never write to her again,
that he would put her out of his life and spend his energies in forgetting
her.

He wrote:—

“Dear CLARE—I destroyed your letter, and I can’t
quite remember whether it forbade me to reply or not. Anyhow, that’s only my
excuse for it. I’m having a dreadfully dull time at Seacliffe—we’re the
only visitors at the hotel and, so far as I can see, the only visitors in
Seacliffe at all. I’m not exactly enjoying it, but I daresay it’s doing me
good. Thanks ever so much for your advice—I mean to profit by
it—most of it, at any rate. But mayn’t I write to you—even if you
don’t write to me? I
do
want to, especially now. May I?—Yours,
KENNETH SPEED.”

No answer to that. For nearly a week he scanned the rack in the
entrance-hall, hoping to see his own name typewritten on an envelope, for he
guessed that even if she did reply she would take that precaution. But in
vain his hurried and anxious returns from the cliff-walks; no letter was
there. And at last, tortured to despair, he wrote again.