A Man of Forty (26 page)

“No wonder,” echoed Spencer. There was a moment's silence before he said : “ I understood you to say, Miss Camshaw, that this so-called telephone man was in disguise. Is there anything you would care to add to that?”

She smiled distantly. Something of her former mechanical jauntiness seemed to return for a moment. “ I've always been fond of dressing up,” she remarked simply. “ Especially in male costume. I assure you I've had any amount of practice.”

Spencer nodded. “ I see. Am I then to understand…”

“Surely,” Edith said, “ I needn't make it any plainer?”

“Mr. Spencer,” said Ashcott, “ is probably wondering just
how
the, er, fatal wound was inflicted. This is not, you see, the first confession he's had to listen to.”

“On the mantelpiece in Adam Swinford's room there is a bronze Phryne,” said Edith Camshaw. “ Or there was then. I put it back after cleaning it up.”

Spencer seemed still unconvinced. “ I made a careful examination of that article myself.

“Did you? Then no doubt it occurred to you, Mr. Spencer, that the third finger of the girl's hand, the hand which she holds before
her eyes, forms something that might almost be described as a
spike
—your own word, I think. The thing's contemptible as a work of art, but it has other uses.” She got up from her chair and poured sherry into the one unused glass. “ Help yourselves, gentlemen. I'm a little tired.”

She was raising the glass to her lips when Spencer jumped up and took it from her. She shrugged her shoulders, smiling wanly. “ Dear Mr. Spencer! Wrong again!”

With a somewhat affected briskness of tone, Spencer said : “ I'm afraid I must ask you…”

“Yes, of course. I'll be ready in five seconds, if you'll excuse me.”

Without waiting for his permission she went into the bedroom and shut the door. After a moment's hesitation he decided to follow her, but the door was locked. Listening anxiously, he heard her move across the room ; heard the sound of the sash-window being raised a little higher ; and heard no more.

If you were to ask me—me, his maker—why Adam Swinford had to meet a violent end, I should be at a loss how to answer precisely. I cannot fall back on the plea that / didn't do it, because in some sense I did do it. In a sense I, since I cannot escape ultimate responsibility for everything that happens in this small world of my making ; and in a sense David and Lydia, to say nothing of Eleanor and Paul, since I am at once behind them and in them all. For innocent though they were, David and Lydia, of the deed itself, was it not perhaps the pressure of their situation, the agony of the tension and the hopelessness of the deadlock between them and within them, that impelled, not them but me, and me not consciously, to invoke the Intervention of an external event, and do my novel a violence by escaping into that mood of garrulous exhilaration which the discovery of a corpse on the premises seems always to induce?

Logically, their problem was insoluble ; and the irrelevant catastrophe has effected not its logical solution but its practical dissolution. For those two, David and Lydia, must turn now to each other for the comfort they can get nowhere else ; and because each embodies so much of the other's past, and because only the past can give a momentary illusion of stability in a world of flux, there will be a sort
of chastened happiness, at least for a while, in this new coming-together. It is true that so soon as they begin again to look to each other for ultimate satisfaction, which exists only in dreams, they will fall again into wretchedness ; but their capacity for hurting and being hurt will gradually diminish as the years multiply upon them, and resignation will set in, sweetened, let us hope, by the charity they are beginning to learn.

Meanwhile—yes, they are happy, happy to have come home to each other, and to the sober satisfying prose of their mutual affection. They met, after Adam's death, without dramatic flourishes. There were no emotional explanations, no scenes of reconciliation ; for each knew, at sight of the other, that they were reunited. And of Mary Wilton, so utterly is that spell broken, they can now talk, or not talk, without pain or embarrassment; and could do so, they believe, even if Mary had not decided, very sensibly, to pay a long visit to her mother in America. As for Eleanor, and as for Paul, neither has suffered irreparable harm; and both are young enough to look rather to the future than to the past.

And now I must take leave of these shadows, with whom, and in whom, I have lived this summer through. Of my desire they were born, such as they are ; and of my substance they are made, and have no other. We, too, in our separateness, are but shadows ; for all desire is for the eternal, and only in time are we divided. As I in my story live and suffer in Lydia, in David, in Adam and Lily and the rest, so, in time and in us, in you, in me, in all living souls, that which we are sustains the illusion of being many and mortal.

August
1939

1
The War of 1914-18.

Author's Note

The manuscript of this novel was completed a few weeks before the outbreak of war in September 1939. All my characters and incidents are fictitious, and in the passages concerning Adam Swinford's business activities no allusion is intended to any actual firm or product.

January 1944
                                            
G. B.

This electronic edition published in 2011 by Bloomsbury Reader

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Copyright © Gerald Bullett

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ISBN: 9781448205868
eISBN: 9781448205554

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