To the North (35 page)

Passing the cigarette-box Emmeline dropped it; the cigarettes scattered: Markie broke off and went down on his knees. In the confusion Cecilia and Julian touched fingers a moment: they smiled and thought: “Not yet.” Kneeling up beside Emmeline’s chair with a handful of cigarettes and reaching over to put them into the box, Markie said quickly: “There’s something I’ve got to tell you.”

Emmeline stared at him, mute.

“You must listen: when can we—”

“All right, never mind,” called Cecilia, bored by this interruption of stooping and groping, “we’ll pick up the rest later.”

Markie stood up: they went on with the case but it dragged rather more. Emmeline leaned back, arms crossed on her knee, fingers curling up idly: she looked at the clock she was too blind to see behind Markie’s shoulder. At twenty past ten he said: “If you won’t think me rude, I must telephone soon for a cab: I’ve got to get down to King’s Cross.”

“Oh dear,” said Cecilia, “must you?”

“Alas yes; I’ve got to get back to Baldock. I’ve got all my things there; not even a toothbrush in town. My sister has shut the house up and taken her family to the sea-side, where one hopes she may drown them. All her servants walked out; she was always incompetent. So I doubt if I’d ever get into the flat— May I telephone?”

“Couldn’t your friends drive you back?”

“No, that wasn’t my host; heaven knows where that car is now. We looked up a train; they’ll meet me.”

Emmeline stood up and smoothed out her silver dress. She said: “I’ll drive Markie down.”

There was a slight movement about the room; an unmistakable protest. Markie said nothing, looking at Emmeline oddly. Cecilia exclaimed: “Oh no, darling, you can’t! She mustn’t, must she, Markie? You’ll easily get a taxi.” “Easily,” agreed Markie, fixing his eyes on Emmeline. Julian, looking from him to her, thought: “Tragedy is disparity,” and did not know what this meant. The room felt very close; he opened a window and let in a rush of dark air. Between the uneasy curtains night came in, thinning the lamplight, and made the room darker and less secure. Cecilia, brushing on Julian’s elbow her falling pink sleeve, whispered: “Julian, don’t let her go; it’s all wrong; I don’t want her to.” Julian staring down the dark garden—the plane rustled, in the bowl by the windows peonies stirred—said: what could one do? It remained their affair. “It isn’t right,” wailed Cecilia… . Meanwhile, Emmeline had left the room to put on her fur coat.

Markie, disarmingly fatalistic, accepted whisky. “Shall I get the car out?” Julian called up from the hall.

“Yes,” Emmeline called from above.

Benito had moved from Emmeline’s dressing-gown on to a scarf of hers that was on the bed. He was still sleeping, one paw out, his little white chin turned up. Bending over Benito to smile, Emmeline touched his chin softly—a shiver of pleasure ran down his flank but he did not stir—and slipped the scarf from beneath him, winding it, warm, round her throat. She took her coat from the cupboard and turned the lights out. As she came downstairs Cecilia ran up to meet her, exclaiming: “You oughtn’t to drive in that dress!”

“Why not? I often have.”

“Then take your gloves—here they are, take them: your hands get so cold.”

Not taking the gauntlets, Emmeline went on down past Cecilia, whom she did not see: Cecilia, helpless, stood back against the wall. They had not parted like this before. In the hall Markie finished his whisky and put the glass down by the telephone. Under the fur coat, the hem of Emmeline’s dress glittered past him and out down the steps with their carpet of light. “Well,” said Markie, looking about for his hat. He said something hearty to Julian and held out his hand to Cecilia, who came down to take his hand in a dream. They said good-night: Markie thanked her, saying how charming it all was: he hoped they might meet again soon. He ran down the steps to where Emmeline sat in the small open car drawn up to the kerb.

“Don’t be long,” called Cecilia, coming out after them.

Emmeline, starting the car, did not seem to hear: “All right,” shouted Markie, “she won’t be long.”

FOR SOME MINUTES they drove in silence. Still on the crest of his impatient resolution to be alone with her, Markie jammed down his hat and leaned back, enjoying the air: the warm lampy evening blew like dust from his brain. He glanced once at Emmeline; but her deliberate profile invited nothing. Turning out of a terrace she bore left, up hill by the Finchley Road.

“Here, I say—this isn’t the way to King’s Cross I”

“We’re going to Baldock.”

“My dear …” he said uncertainly, “that’s very nice of you.”

She did not reply. They swung up the winding curves of the Finchley Road, past Swiss Cottage station, past blind shop windows reflecting lamplight and couples halting and sauntering in the cool restless night. Lit parapets, at which he glanced up, uneasy, fretted the darker sky; swept by long spokes of light the wide street was watery. Eyes fixed ahead, never looking his way, she said quietly: “Well?”

Indecisive, his look stole round, seeing blown-back hair, her white profile, her long bare hands on the wheel: an end of her thin scarf trickled and flew in his face. Slipping ahead through the traffic at an even speed, they left down the Finchley Road a long wake of tension.

“Well, Emmeline?”

“You said you had something to say.”

Among street lights crossing like spears his thoughts were at every angle; indecision and stifling urgency held him tongue-tied beside her. Her white fur coat, slipping apart, showed a silver knee and some quenched light running among the folds of her dress: she was so close, his nerves leaped into his fingertips. Her swerve round the blank black back of a lorry swayed them together.

“—Don’t touch me,” she said, contracting.

“Sorry,” he said, with but general reference to the incident. “But you knew I was always out for what I could get.”

“So that’s been all right,” she said, in a tone so gentle and accurate he could detect no bitterness.

“Never,” he said briefly.

Not a line of Emmeline changed: she did not pause to consider this or to wonder, but, slackening speed for a moment took the wide black Hendon way: they bumped over tramlines; a long lit road running brighter with traffic crossed theirs. Left and right, homely windows were now beginning to darken, downstairs then up; large cars racing back to London shot ahead slipping vivid stretches of turf and kerb, sweeping fans of light over ceilings under which people lay half awake. A cold night smell came from the turf. Then: “I’m sorry,” Emmeline said: at a pressure from her silver slipper the speedometer needle went creeping up.

Turning awkwardly in the small car, he put a hand over hers on the wheel, then felt her fingers harden. “You’re cold,” he said.

“We’re going north.”

The cold pole’s first magnetism began to tighten upon them as street by street the heat and exasperation of London kept flaking away. The glow slipped from the sky and the North laid its first chilly fingers upon their temples, creeping down into his collar and stirring her hair at the roots. Petrol pumps red and yellow, veins of all speed and dangerous, leapt giant into their lights. As they steadily bore uphill to some funnel-point in the darkness—for though lamps dotted the kerb the road ran and deepened ahead into shades of pitch like a river —this icy rim to the known world began to possess his fancy, till he half expected its pale reflection ahead. Cut apart by cold singing air he and she had no communication, till his waking sense of the live warmth inside her fur coat, of her heart in her breast beating, quickened recollection into desire of her known beauty. While she sat, an image of strangeness, fixedly eyeing the dark, he slipped his touch to her wrist, whose blue veins and every flexible movement were written over his nerves. A sense of that unknown presence within her outline —a presence that slipped behind veils every time they kissed —made his fingers, jumping and burning with fresh excitement, tighten about her tense cold wrist as she drove.

“Mind,” said Emmeline calmly. “How can I drive?”

“I don’t want you to: stop!”

She disengaged her wrist with finality.

He said urgently: “Listen: turn back. Come back to the flat.”

He waited, thinking his words had been blown past her. Then she looked his way: “It’s shut up, you said.”

“Not really: we could get in.”

“But then why—”

“Why tell them it was shut up? I don’t know: it’s not their affair.”

With that blink of her lashes, as though something were going to strike her, Emmeline turned away quickly. “There’s no truth left,” she said. “Or is it I that am mad? There seems to be no truth anywhere. Even our servants lie.”

“I’m left,” he said, “whether you want me—”

“I only want to be quiet,” said Emmeline.

He insisted: “Come back to the flat.”

“Was that what you had to say?”

He had little idea. Hendon Circus stood empty, asleep in lamplight: she crept so slowly over the cross-roads he thought she would surely turn. But she looked up round the facades of pretty suburban elegance and in at dark windows as though someone else had spoken, or someone up there might reply: this halt in her faculties made the car almost stop… . Recollecting herself, she glanced at the clock on the dashboard, they gathered speed and went forward, uphill, then down. He saw “The North” written low, like a first whisper, on a yellow A.A. plate with an arrow pointing: they bore steadily north between spaced-out lamps, chilly trees, low rows of houses asleep, to their left a deep lake of darkness: the aerodrome.

“Hendon,” he said. “I wish we were still flying.”

“So do I,” she said with an irrepressible smile. “I wish it were still that day.”

That day flooded him, with its tilted plan of two countries, the intoxication of its warm evening, the terrible sweetness of the succeeding night. He said: “Would you want things different?”

“No, that was our only way.”

“Then can’t we go back?”

She glanced at him. “Back? To where?”

“Then.”

“And tell the same story again and again and again? There’s nothing more left ahead of us.”

“I’m sorry, you know,” he said. “I am most mortally sorry. But I was what I was because I am what I am. You expected too much. What we had always seemed to me good, but you wanted more.”

She cried: “But nothing ever seemed good to you: nothing was ever enough!”

“Look out: not so fast!” he said, suddenly rigid. Their speed had mounted; they swung in and out from the kerb on the polished black road: grassy breaths from fields rushed at them; like a bubble frozen a little observatory hung on the dark. The car hardly holding the road seemed to him past her control. Recalling his face in the taxi in Paris, she saw he was very frightened. Slowing down, she turned calmly right up the Barnet bye-pass.

“I wouldn’t kill you,” she said.

“You don’t think much of me, do you?”

“How can I judge you? We’ve both been wrong.”

“All the same, times were good.”

“Yes, they were good,” said Emmeline. “They are still too close to remember, but that must have been like the sun: it changed everything; you were everywhere. Such little things were happy: the early mornings, Smith’s at the corner of Sloane Street, even times we wasted, tables and chairs where we sat. All that can’t have been for nothing; it can’t just have been a deception. I still think there must have been meant to be something more.”

“Let’s look again.”

“No, we’ve seen.”

“But let’s try again.
Could
you marry me?”

“No,” she said. “I can’t marry anyone now.”

“I want you so terribly, Emmeline.”

“No,” she said gently, “not really. No.”

“You seem right,” he said violently, “but you’re wrong, all the same. I know I did hurt you, I’m sorry: it couldn’t be helped. I had had enough, this last week; things were getting too much; I was all for letting things go. I never knew what you were after; I didn’t think you knew yourself. I don’t think you knew how unfriendly you sometimes were.”

“Poor Markie,” she said. “I see now.”

“I don’t much like anyone, really. I’m not much, I just like a bit of fun. You never let anything be what it was. After Devizes—honestly, yes: I was through. We were up to no good.”

“Yes,” she said, “yes, I saw.”

“So I thought: that was that.”

“Yes, it was.”

“But it wasn’t; it’s not!” he cried with a violent movement, unbearably cramped in the car. He watched their lights fly over wires and sheep’s stubbed backs. “I’d forgotten to count all
this
in. I’d forgotten what you were like. As futile as adding up and forgetting a column. When I came in tonight and saw you miles off in that silver dress, saying nothing and tipping your sherry about like you always did, I knew we should never be clear. You wouldn’t have smiled like that if you’d thought so, either. My heart sank, I don’t mind telling you, Emmeline. I agree it’s the devil; it may be a pity we ever met. We may be each other’s bad luck, but luck sticks, you know. First you thought too much of me, now you don’t trust me an inch, and you’re right. But here I still am. And you’re something I can’t get past. In a sense, I’m done for. This is ten times worse than if I hadn’t had you in Paris. If you meant to go back, you should never have loved me then.”

“Then I was wrong,” said Emmeline.

“We reckoned without each other. If you can’t stick things out as they were, we’ll have to be on a footing: we’ll have to marry.”

She repeated: “I can’t marry anyone now.”

“But what
were
you after?”

“It can’t have been there.”

“But you loved me—or why are we driving to this damned place?”

“You said there was something to say. I thought we’d say good-bye. Our last parting was mean and horrible.”

“But I love you: you’re ten times myself!”

“But all our time was a struggle: first trying to understand, then trying not to. I have to be quiet now. You must, leave me quiet, Markie.”

“If you take this away, I go right to pieces, Emmeline.”

“That can’t be true: you’re a man.”

“But it is,” he said, with a frightening drop in his violence.