The Slaves of Solitude (28 page)

‘Yes. Come in,’ she said.

So thoroughly had the evil and madness of Christmas permeated herself and the atmosphere that it never even crossed her mind that there was any impropriety of any sort in inviting a man into her
bedroom for a talk.

‘Are you coming downstairs?’ he said, sitting on her bed. ‘We thought we’d go out and have a drink.’

‘No – I  don’t think I will,’ she said. ‘I’ve got some work to do, and I think you’d better leave me out of it.’

‘Come and sit down here,’ he said, and held out his hand. ‘I want to have a talk with you.’

‘Yes?’ she said, and took his hand, and sat down beside him. ‘What is it?’

‘What in hell’s the matter with you?’ he said. ‘Have I done something wrong, or something?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘What should you have done wrong?’

‘Then what’s the matter?’ he said. ‘Why won’t you come out? Why aren’t you playing any more?’

‘There’s nothing the matter. I just don’t want to come out, that’s all. I’ve got some work to do.’

‘But
why
? What’s the
reason
? You used to come out.’

‘There’s no reason. I just don’t want to.’

‘But there must be a reason. Come on. What is it?’

‘No. There’s nothing. There’s really nothing.’

‘Oh, come on,’ he said, and tried to kiss her.

‘No,’ she said, and turned her head away.

‘But what
is
it?’

‘Nothing.’

There was a pause.

‘Is it anything to do with
her
?’ said the Lieutenant.

‘Who?’

‘You know who I mean.’

‘Vicki?’

‘Yes.’

‘No, of course it’s not. Why should it be?’

‘Sure?’

‘Yes. Of course I’m sure.’

This, of course, was a complete untruth, but what on earth could she say?

‘Absolutely sure?’ he said.

Miss Roach decided to come out with it.

 ‘I suppose she’s been telling you,’ she said, ‘that I’m jealous, or something like that.’

‘Oh – what does it matter what people say?’

‘Oh – so she
has
been saying that?’

‘Oh – what does it matter? You know you’re the one I love, don’t you?’

‘Am I?’

‘You know that,’ said the Lieutenant, and tried to kiss her again.

‘No,’ she said, and again turned her head away.

‘I thought you liked me at one time,’ said the Lieutenant.

‘I
do
like you,’ said Miss Roach. ‘What are you going on about?’

(Oh, what a
muddle
all this was, thought Miss Roach. What were they both
talking
about?)

‘I thought you were serious,’ said the Lieutenant.

‘I thought
you
were serious,’ said Miss Roach.

‘Well, so I am,’ said the Lieutenant. ‘Aren’t I?’

‘Are you?’

‘Well, don’t I
seem
to be? What’s the
matter
? That’s all I want to know.’

‘Nothing.’

‘Let’s go out together, and leave her out of it.’

‘Is she downstairs now?’ asked Miss Roach.

‘Yes. But that doesn’t matter. Let’s go out together alone.’

‘No,’ said Miss Roach. ‘I don’t want to.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know.’

And this was true. At first she didn’t know. Then she realised why this was. Her pride would not allow her to put herself into competition with such a woman. Presumably, it was now within
her power to go out with the Lieutenant alone and to win him back. But nothing could make her do it. It was beneath her even to score off that woman.

And how was the poor Lieutenant to understand this? What a muddle, what a
muddle
!

‘Don’t you like me any more?’

‘Yes. Of course I like you. I like you very much.’

‘Then let’s go out together.’

‘No. I don’t want to.’

‘Aw – come on,’ said the Lieutenant, and tried more emphatically to kiss her.

‘No. You must leave me alone,’ said Miss Roach. ‘I want to be left alone, that’s all.’

‘Aw, come on!’

‘No. Leave me alone. Please leave me alone. Really!’

‘Aw, I don’t understand you. You’ve got me beat. It seems to me you’re acting all feminine.’

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’ve no doubt I am. But I want to be left alone. Go on. Leave me. I want you to leave me. Will you leave me? Please.’

There was a pause in which the Lieutenant looked at her.

Then, ‘Aw, hell,’ he said, and with a look of anger such as she had never seen on his face before, he rose and left the room.

3

And so that was that! There, through the door and out of her life, it all went – the Lieutenant, his Laundry, his inconsequence, his habit of drinking too much, his
failings, his niceness, his kissings in the dark, her little ‘romance’ and renewed interest in life because of him, all.

The trouble was that she liked the man, would, indeed, if he had approached the matter in a proper and serious spirit, probably have been willing to marry him. He was stupid over certain
matters, of course, and he drank too much: but who could blame a man in such circumstances – so far from his own home, and in the shadow of such peril as awaited him when the second front
began – for drinking too much? The drinking probably accounted for his inconsequence, and back home, in Wilkes Barre or whatever it was, he was no doubt a normal and excellent citizen.

If the conversation which had just taken place had taken a different turn, might the situation have been retrieved? No. Nothing would have altered her decision not to go out that night. Her
hatred of that woman exceeded in power any fondness she might have or develop towards the Lieutenant. To have allowed herself to become her ‘rival’, to have put herself in the position
of competing with her, of gaining here or losing there (and in view of the Lieutenant’s inconsequence she might well lose anything she gained at a moment’s notice!) – this would
be to violate the holiest of inner sanctuaries of pride and dignity, and was quite beyond her. It had to be as it was.

And, of course, it would never be possible to explain this to the simple-minded Lieutenant, who would no doubt, to the end of his days, think that she had behaved childishly, pettishly, in a
feminine and ridiculous way. He would probably, indeed, accept the solution, which had obviously already been suggested to him by Vicki, that she was consumed with jealousy and hatred – the
jealousy and hatred of the prim ‘English Miss’, the prude, the soured spinster! Well – let him think it – she didn’t really care enough about him to mind.

Why had life treated her thus, and how had fate contrived to land her in this grotesque, fantastically, wickedly false position? It was, in a manner, a sort of accident, one of those tricks
which life just plays. The evil mind of the German woman was not wholly responsible for what had happened. The trouble had begun on that first night when the three of them had gone out together,
and that had been a pure accident. Vicki’s name had somehow cropped up on the telephone and somehow she had been invited, without the conscious volition of either the Lieutenant or herself.
What would have happened if her name had not cropped up and she had not been invited? Might the whole course of events not have been different?

Impossible to say. Impossible, also, to do anything about it now. The Lieutenant had gone, and the door was closed.

4

The Lieutenant and Vicki were absent from the house and dinner that night, and Mr. Thwaites was quieter.

But there was still the gleam in his eye of the child who was going to break his toy, and Miss Roach was more than ever conscious of the imminence of climax and storm.

She went to bed early that night, and managed to get to sleep by ten o’clock.

At half-past ten she was awakened by Sheila, and had to go down in her dressing-gown to the telephone.

She imagined she was to answer a Lieutenant again in drink, but this was not so. The call was from Guildford, and the news was that her aunt was seriously ill. This news was conveyed by a Mrs.
Spender, the friend with whom her aunt had been staying ever since she had left Thames Lockdon.

Miss Roach asked if she should go to Guildford at once, but Mrs. Spender thought this unnecessary. She should, however, hold herself in readiness, and Mrs. Spender would phone her again
tomorrow.

Among other things, then, she was probably going to lose the only living relation of whom she was fond and with whom she kept in touch. In this manner the season of goodwill came, for Miss
Roach, to an end.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

1

B
UT
the climax did not actually occur until a few days later, when it was least foreseen, and on a Sunday night, and
in the dining-room. And it was not at all the sort of climax which Miss Roach had anticipated.

On the Saturday night Miss Roach had returned at a late hour from Guildford, where she had found her aunt unconscious and almost certainly about to die within a week. Over-tired, she had spent a
practically sleepless night.

Before the storm occurred there was as little atmosphere of storm as there could possibly have been – as there could possibly have been, that is to say, in a room in which Mr. Thwaites,
Vicki Kugelmann, and Miss Roach were sitting together.

The gale of Christmas had blown itself out: the Lieutenant, as was his habit, had vanished completely: deathly dullness and boredom gripped the house, whose guests looked at the end of the year,
and the beginning of the next, with misery and stupefaction.

At Mr. Prest’s table there was a newcomer, a small, thin, dried-up old lady called Mrs. Crewe. Mrs. Crewe’s presence added to the reigning stupefaction.

Mr. Thwaites had spoken little throughout the meal, and, of course, while he remained silent, no one else had spoken.

It happened at the end of the meal, a minute or so before they were due to rise. If they had risen a minute or so earlier it would almost certainly never have happened at all.

Miss Roach never remembered exactly how it was led into. Mr. Thwaites, who had been listening in to the news before dinner, was discussing the war and post-war problems.

‘Yes,’ said Mr. Thwaites, summing up. ‘A complicated world we live in, my masters.’

Whenever Mr. Thwaites alluded thus to the world in general terms, calling it ‘funny’ or ‘strange’ or ‘wicked’, he always said ‘My masters’
afterwards.

‘Yes,’ said Vicki, and that curious tone was in her voice again. ‘A very complicated world . . . A very complicated situation altogether.’

Miss Roach knew exactly what she was getting at. This was ‘Yes, Peace – and understanding’ all over again. Her suggestion behind the stress she laid upon the complication of
the situation was as clear as day. She meant that the world was in a state of complication owing to misunderstanding generally, and of Nazi Germany in particular.

Now Miss Roach was not going to stand for this. She had made up her mind she was not going to stand for this. She could stand, and had stood, practically everything from this woman, but somehow
this was the one thing she did not mean to stand.

She hesitated, and then spoke in a calm, off-hand, and quite good-natured way.

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I don’t know that it’s so complicated.’

‘What do you mean?’ said Mr. Thwaites, sharply, and with the old bullying look, ‘ “It’s not so complicated.’ ”

‘Oh,’ said Miss Roach. ‘I just don’t think it’s so complicated, that’s all.’

‘I know. You said that,’ said Mr. Thwaites. ‘But I want to know why.’

There was a pause.

‘Go on,’ said Mr. Thwaites. ‘Why?’

‘Oh,’ said Miss Roach. ‘I just think it’s quite simple, that’s all. It’s a simple conflict between all that’s decent and all that’s evil –
and it’s
simple
, that’s all . . .’

There was another pause, and then Vicki made the remark which, blowing up the ammunition dump, disclosed the amount of ammunition stored away.

‘Simple, perhaps,’ she said, ruminatingly, ‘to people with simple minds . . .’

‘No,’ said Miss Roach. ‘Only complicated, actually, to people with simple minds – or people with distorted minds.’

‘Perhaps,’ said Vicki, ‘we had better not talk international politics.’

‘No, perhaps we’d better not,’ said Mr. Thwaites, looking at Miss Roach as if to say that Miss Roach had better not, anyway.

It was the two-against-one business that got Miss Roach. If it had not been for that she might still have kept her temper, which now she lost completely.

‘And were you suggesting,’ she said, looking at Vicki, ‘that I’m a person with a simple mind?’

‘I think, perhaps,’ said Vicki, ‘that we’d  better not talk about international politics.’

‘That’s not the point—’ began Miss Roach, but Mr. Thwaites cut in.

‘No, I think we’d better not,’ he said, glaring at her threateningly.

‘Yes, but that’s not the point—’ began Miss Roach, and this time Miss Steele cut in, in a last moment bid to avert total calamity.

‘No,’ she said, ‘it’s never wise to talk about politics – is it? I quite agree with Miss Roach, as a matter of fact – but it’s never wise to talk about
them.’

‘No,’ said Vicki, ‘we had better leave politics to those who are qualified to talk about them.’

There was another fearful pause.

‘Are you suggesting by that,’ said Miss Roach, ‘that
I’m
not qualified to talk about politics?’

‘Really,’ said Vicki, appealing to Mr. Thwaites, with a little smile, ‘she is in quite A Pet – no?’

‘Or are you suggesting,’ said Miss Roach, ‘that
you
are more qualified than I?’

‘Possibly,’ said Vicki. ‘I have travelled a little about the world, you know.’

‘I think it’d be better if we went upstairs, don’t you?’ said Mrs. Barratt, but nobody answered  her,  and nobody showed any sign of going upstairs.

‘And does that mean,’ said Miss Roach, ‘that
I
have
not
travelled about the world?’

‘Really,’ said Vicki, ‘I do not know about your travels. All I know is that you are not altogether – what shall we say? – cosmopolitan in outlook? No?’