A Man of Forty (20 page)

Precisely a week after that parting he saw them together, Mary and Adam, sitting in her grandfather's car at the entrance to Chiselbrook station. It was apparent that Adam had just arrived from town and been met by Mary. Having re-started her engine she was letting the clutch out, and smiling at Adam with her beautiful candid friendliness as her left hand moved the gear-lever out of neutral, when David, on his way to the parcels Qffice, went past them with quickened step
₅
not knowing whether they had seen him or not. In his fancy they were already lovers. He knew Adam; he knew, God help him, Mary; and he had seen the naked laughing looks that passed between them. Their eyes, he said, were stripping each other. And they pretend it's love, no doubt—ha, ha, what a joke ! And now I'm to be stripped too : stripped, humiliated, mocked at. There goes poor David, they'll say. There goes the dreamer, the slowcoach, the man made for failure. You'd hardly believe, darling, how little he knows his way about!—the things I could tell you!—the chances he's missed! But don't stop to laugh now : we're wasting time. Mary, in his fancy, was sometimes an innocent victim doomed to betrayal, and sometimes an insatiable wanton who had stolen his friend from him. But mostly she was both at once, as lovely as she was vile, desirable and degraded, the most precious and the most poisonous thing in the universe. It's not, said David, that I'm jealous. Nothing of the kind : I detest jealousy. I'm simply, and quite calmly, facing facts.

He walked through the booking-hall and on to the platform. Adam's train had already gone on its way.

“Your gentleman's just gone, sir,” said the ticket-collector, eager to be helpful.

“Really? Oh, yes, I've just seen him,” said David. He nodded
pleasantly and went on down the platform, explaining over his shoulder : “ I've got a parcel to collect.”

It was the same ticket-collector as he had talked to on that memorable evening when Mary had first gleamed upon his sight. Four months ago : a lifetime ago. On his way back he exchanged further remarks with the ticket-collector. “ Got it, sir? That's right, sir.” He longed to be rid of the man, longed to be alone with his obsession, that he might look at it from every angle. But he forced himself to be pleasant, to say a little more than was necessary. Coming into the road again he looked quickly round for Hinksey's car. He dreaded seeing them again, Mary and Adam; yet it gave him a pang of renewed desolation to find her gone. With a weakness which he felt to be utterly despicable, he now half-regretted that he had not spoken to her, said hullo, said what a lovely day, said so here you are with Adam, said you're learning to ride a horse, I hear, said well it looks as though we're going to have a nice week-end, said anything, anything, for the sake of being with her, hearing her voice, diverting her beautiful languid warm-eyed smiling friendliness to himself, if only for a moment. A thought that was like death itself occurred to him : perhaps I shall never see her again! And suddenly he decided to convert the thought into a wish, and the wish into a resolution. From this moment she does not exist for me. I will never see her again.

He saw her again just nine days later, and again Adam was with her. In the interval he had thought of nothing else, except, at moments, of Lydia, to whose phantom in his mind he addressed sour congratulations on the success of her tactics. You have done admirably, my dear Lydia. Your hysteria was nicely timed, your silence well planned. You kept me very cleverly on the rack of indecision. You whittled away my nerve. You unmanned me and sent me to my doom. You knew, didn't you, that I should muff the job? You knew that with nothing to offer her but my own unhappiness, my load of domestic care, my damned hag-ridden conscience, I stood no chance against that young, smart, unencumbered heart-breaker, Adam Swinford. Love, like everything else, goes to the highest bidder : except, dear Lydia, the love of a dog for his bone, or shall we say her bone? These things he said to her in absence; but in her presence he disregarded her, being immured in a silence deeper than her own had been. For now they had in one respect exchanged their roles : she was the anxious, unobtrusive watcher, he the watched. She knew that something had happened : whether in him or to him she could only surmise.

His second sight of Adam with Mary was on Sunday evening, nine days after the first. The odds against the encounter must have been heavy indeed, and it therefore pleased him to see the malice of fate in it. With Eleanor as his passenger, and having no aim in view but to be out of the house and kill time, he was driving along a country lane hitherto unexplored by him, when he came upon the happy pair leaning on a gate, hands touching, hearts at peace, everything going according to schedule.

David smiled : with pain, with self-derision, with angry satisfaction.

“Did you see who that was?”

“Yes,” said Eleanor.

It would have been natural for a girl to ask why he did not stop the car and speak to these friends, and Eleanor's not asking such a question was significant.

Reckless in his bitterness, David said : “ So he visits his woman every week does he? Well, there's nothing like regularity.”

“Who? Adam?”

“Yes. He's staying at Radnage. For the third time. The second consecutive week-end.”

“What makes you think…?”

“I saw them at the station last week. And he was there a fortnight earlier. The fifth, the nineteenth, and the twenty-sixth of the month. Those are the dates, if you care to have them.”

“Oh,” said Eleanor tonelessly. “ I didn't know.”

David did not pause in his thoughts to judge it odd that Eleanor offered no further comment. The situation was now palpable, the treachery beyond belief. He remembered, for the hundredth time, Adama's story of his liaison with a young woman who now either was or was not in a state of pregnancy by him; and he asked himself, with agonized irony, how much of that story Mary had been entrusted with. But presently, despite his self-absorption, it was forced on his notice that Eleanor was in tears.

He gave her one glance, then looked quickly away. The sight of her weeping startled him. He wanted not to embarrass her further, but on reflection he felt that here was a mystery which could not be passed over in silence. The storm of her grief, moreover, showed no signs of abating. Very gradually he brought the car to a standstill.

“What is it, Eleanor?”

She flung herself against his shoulder and cried helplessly, like a child. It was a shock to him to find that the pale, gentle, dove-eyed
Eleanor had so much passion in her. With his arm round her shoulder, he waited for the convulsion to pass.

“What is it? Is it… Adam?”

She gulped, nodding.

His heart turned over in pity. His heart leapt in exultation. He had now a new and noble reason for hating Adam, and in the excitement of that knowledge he asked Eleanor a question which otherwise he would have been scrupulous to spare her.

“What is there between you—you and Adam?”

“Nothing,” said Eleanor.

He suspected, too late, that he had sounded curt and peremptory

“Are you sure, my dear?”

“Nothing,” she said again. “ Nothing worth mentioning… Oh David,” she said wretchedly, “ I'm so
ashamed
!”

He touched her hand, saying gently : “ I know. I know. I know exactly how you feel.”

Behind his sympathy, behind the mask of his face, he grinned like a hungry dog. There was now a positive merit in hating Adam Swinford, who made it, apparently, the main business of his life to go about the country seducing and abandoning unwary women. Eleanor was the latest of the series, and Mary was next on the list. It can't go on, said David : it's got to be stopped. Eleanor, dear simple-hearted Eleanor; no light of love, no hard-boiled high-stepper, but a girl of character and sensibility; a girl not easily enamoured, but capable, once her heart were given, of boundless devotion, unwavering loyalty! Eleanor and Adam! In high colours and with a swift hand his furious fancy painted the seduction-scene. He saw Adam smirking and prowling and smacking his lips, implacable as Tarquin but with a smoother tongue, a subtler and viler motive. Yes, a viler motive, for with Adam, since Eleanor had neither wit nor conspicuous beauty to attract him with, it must have been mere lust of conquest, an egoism unredeemed by illusion of love, unwarmed by the fire in the flesh. He saw him stealing to her bed when the house was still, just as tonight, no doubt, he would steal to Mary's bed. Mary's doings don't concern me, he said; don't even interest me; but towards Eleanor, my foster-daughter, I have a sacred duty. Eleanor tricked, Eleanor trifled with, Eleanor deceived and insulted! And under my very roof! he cried, in an ecstasy of indignation.

It was an open question whether a man capable of such vile-ness was fit to live. If the decision, he said, rested with me… but it's idle to think of that : I'm not made that way. He continued, nevertheless, to be haunted by visions of vengeance, and by the time
Eleanor reached home he had decided that whatever else happened Adam could not be allowed to go on in his present courses unchecked.

At the supper-table, with a sudden strange expansiveness, he announced to the astonished Lydia :

“Tomorrow I am going to town, Lydia, to have a word with Adam Swinford. I shall go in the evening. He'll be back in town by then. And don't be surprised if I'm away several days.”

“To see Adam?” said Lydia.

“Yes,” said David. “ To see Adam. I suppose you know, Lydia, that Adam at this moment is staying with the Hinkseys?”

“Is he?” said Lydia. “ But why, David? Why not with us?”

“That,” said David pompously, “ is one of the less important questions I shall discuss with him.”

Had he any thought to spare from his obsession it would perhaps have occurred to David that this was as long a conversation as he had had with Lydia for many weeks. He might also have noticed that the tension in her was somewhat relaxed since—since when, since what? As to that, he would have assumed that his loss of Mary had somehow become known to her, and that having gained her point and kept what she held, she was ready to be amiable again.

I Think David would have been right in that assumption, so far as it went. The disappearance of Mary from the field of action did make it possible for Lydia to feel generous towards David. Her capacity for generosity varied inversely with the demands made upon it. She would give him anything in the world except what he wanted. She longed for him to be happy, so long as he was not happy with Mary. All this, when in the train next day he spared it a moment's notice, was very clear to him and gave him a pang of cynical pleasure. But he did not entertain Lydia in his thoughts for many seconds together : he was too busy explaining to himself that, whether or not he was jealous, jealousy was to play no part in determining his attitude to Adam. One isn't, he said, so arrogant as to claim immunity from the disease; but one can at least make sure that it does not cloud one's moral judgment. If I say that a man of Adam's predatory habit is not fit to live, that opinion is arrived at from a dispassionate scrutiny of the facts before me : it has nothing to do with any injury he may have done me. Nor has he in fact
done me any injury; my interest in Eleanor is certainly not that of a lover, nor is it in the strict sense paternal; I am offended only in my sense of justice, my impersonal regard for the decencies of human life. As for Mary, who whatever she may have been is now of course nothing to me, I only hope she will find happiness. Some time or other she will no doubt marry, and who am I that I should wish otherwise? But if she imagines that she can find happiness with Adam… well, that is simply not to be tolerated. I mean the delusion that she can find happiness with him is not to be tolerated. With anyone else, yes. But not with Adam. I won't hear of it. It must be prevented. If it happened I couldn't go on living. Not that there's anything personal in it. No, no. It's simply that he would bring her nothing but wretchedness. Even if she thought she was happy with him she wouldn't really be so. She would be living in a fool's paradise. It is my duty to save her from that. I don't
want
to interfere : I'd much rather wash my hands of the whole affair and let them go their own ways. But one has a responsibility in this matter. The unthinkable, the unspeakable… it's got to be stopped. Whispering together. Touching. Kissing. No : we can't have that.

So there's David. Portrait of a man not being jealous. There's David in the train, with a newspaper to hide behind in case anyone threatens to speak to him. He can't spare a moment for idle talk : he's got to think everything out very carefully. For as yet he has no very clear plan. He is going to see Adam, of course : that's the whole point of this journey. But he is reluctant to telephone to the young man; and how, except by telephoning, is he to make sure that he will be at home to listen, to take what's coming to him? Isn't it, indeed, far more likely that he'll be out somewhere looking for new girls to seduce? Precisely the kind of thing that must be put a stop to, once and for all. David still has lucid moments, when he sees himself with a merciless satirical eye, and knows his true motive as well as we do. But such moments are increasingly rare and brief : he is in danger of reaching a point where he will do anything, believe anything, rather than willingly face the reality of his situation.

That situation is changing, developing, every moment. His view of it, even if he looked straight, could only be partial; for factors outside his knowledge are contributing to it. Lydia, who for so long has behaved like a mechanical doll, has now come to life again. There have been scenes with Eleanor : weepings and mutual explanations. Two self-imprisoned souls have broken out of their silence.
thrown down their first-line defences, and exchanged secret for secret, to the untold relief of both. Not all has yet been said; and what has been said hasn't always been the exact truth; but at least there is now the interplay of confidence and affection where formerly there was suspicion and reserve.