The Spring Madness of Mr Sermon (24 page)

^{'Well, it's in character, Martin, but why should a single act of physical love between two people who are fond of one another}

^{become an issue at all ? Does it have to ? Do we need to let it ?"}

^{"You mean you can look at it like that, as something that doesn't necessarily make for a far closer development in a relationship between a man and a woman?"}

^{"A man like you and a woman like me? Yes, I can, and I think I should! Would you think more of me if I tried to make a fetish out of my virginity ? Is that what most women do ? Exploit it for all they are worth once they've lost it?"}

^{"Yes," he said soberly, "I think many women do in one way or another and maybe that's one reason why there are so many unhappy marriages."}

^{She looked steadily at him for a moment and he had no inkling of what she was thinking save that somewhere at the back of her mind she was searching for words to comfort him. It struck him then that their roles had been reversed since the word 'divorce* had been spoken, for when she answered it was as if she was a brisk but tolerant mother reminding her little boy that it was past bedtime.}

^{"Now listen to me, Martin, listen carefully! I don't regret what happened and I never will, so stop feeling that our relationship has changed so drastically. It hasn't, hardly at all. I enjoyed you and I hope you enjoyed me, so make up your mind to regard it as lightly as I intend to!"}

^{"Ah, but do you?" he asked, wondering at the lengths to which she was prepared to go to reassure him.}

^{"Yes, I do!" she said, with surprising emphasis, "I suppose you find that difficult to believe because it so happened that I reached the age of thirty-three without giving myself to any man but it's true for all that and I suppose the reason lies in what I said to you at the time. My lack of experience wasn't due to prudery and it wasn't really lack of opportunity either. I imagine fastidiousness played some part in it but tonight it seemed to me natural, right and almost inevitable! I'd always imagined that if and when it did happen I should be full of rue immediately afterwards but I can assure you I'm not, far from it! If I'm a hundred per cent honest I'll admit to being very pleasantly surprised and I don't imagine that's common to every woman!"}

^{He smiled and shook his head, more puzzled than ever. "Men are supposed to regard sex more lightly than women, Olga," he said,}

^{i £2}

^{"but I'm not such a man. It always seemed to me a very wonderful thine, not a casual thing. How do you set about reversing an old-fashioned attitude like that? You're a level-headed woman, what's your prescription?"}

^{"I've got one," she said, smiling, "let's stop this gloomy postmortem and go to bed and I don't mean together, because what you need right now is a good night's sleep and God knows, you've earned one, so off with you and leave me to clear away in here!" and she gave him a friendly push, picked up the fireguard, set it in place and began stacking the china on the tray.}

^{He watched her for a moment or two and then, stifling a yawn, decided that she was probably right and that bed was very inviting indeed.}

^{"The thing about you, Olga," he said, slowly, "is that you keep coming up with new surprises! Very well! We'll go over it all tomorrow!"}

^{"Indeed we won't!" she said firmly, "hold this door open!" and she passed into the hall carrying the tray and kicked open the kitchen door with her foot and flicked the light switch with her elbow. He went up the stairs and along the narrow passage to his room and almost nodded off in the act of pulling off his clothes and flopping into bed but here, in the moment before sleep came to him, his serenity returned, seeping quietly into his mind and filling him with a delicious drowsiness. His adventures floated past him like galleons, Tapper's pictures, the auction sale, the mastery of the 'bus, and finally Olga asleep in his arms, and it seemed to him then that this last was not the least impressive of the fleet.}

^{The little room was flooded with sunlight when he awoke and he knew without looking at his watch that it was late. He lay still for a few moments listening to finches squabbling in the gorse on the edge of the links and as he climbed from bed he heard St. Luke's church clock strike the hour and counted up to ten.}

^{Great Scott!" he said to himself, "that bus-trip must have exhausted me! I've overslept two and a half hours!" and as though}

¹⁵³

^{this was important he hurried through his toilet and slipped into his slacks and sweater, determined to have breakfast and take his swim later in the morning. He expected to find Olga in the kitchen but she was not down, so he laid a tray and carried it upstairs, feeling rather like a newly-wed anxious to please.}

^{"Tea up!" he called, thumping the panel with his foot, but there was no response and when he put down the tray and opened the door he was astonished to find the room empty, with the bed unmade and Olga's crumpled nightdress on the pillow. At that moment he heard the front door bang and hurried to the staircase, calling:}

^{"Is that you, Olga? I brought tea!" and carried the tray down as ·she crossed the hall.}

^{She had obviously been up to the town for she wore the hat and coat that had escaped the mudbath the previous day and he wondered if she had slipped out to make an early call on the gownshop. She said, quietly: "Hallo, Martin. I let you sleep on, I had to go up to Cook's place in the Square. I wanted to get everything fixed before you could talk me out of it and now it's done. Let's have breakfast!"}

^{"Get what fixed ? I thought your cruise was arranged weeks ago ?"}

^{"It was, but I managed to change it."}

^{"You've cancelled it?"}

^{"No, Martin, I've brought it forward. I was to have gone mid-June but I remembered there was an earlier one over the same route starting from Plymouth the day after tomorrow."}

^{"The day after tomorrow! You mean, you'll be leaving then?"}

^{"Tomorrow, Martin!"}

^{He gaped at her, teacup half-way to his mouth. "You're pulling my leg aren't you?"}

^{"No, Martin, it's all arranged."}

^{"But in God's name-I mean-why ? I wasn't sure you'd go at all and in any case there was another month. What made you panic like this?"}

^{"It isn't panic, Martin, it's the reverse. Look, let's have breakfast and pour me a cup of tea. I went without any, because I was afraid you'd come down before I got out."}

^{He poured her tea but his own seemed tasteless and flat. There was a drag in his stomach and his head began to ache about the brows.}

^{He sat down at the table with his appetite quite gone and watched her move about the room, cracking eggs into the pan and peeling rashers of bacon as though nothing had disturbed the easy camaraderie of the previous day, and he thought, savagely: 'Damn sex! It's always this way when a relationship between a man and a woman is pushed to its logical conclusion! The moment sex enters into it everything else takes to its heels! I wish to God I'd told her to put on her clothes and stop making a fool of herself and of me! Maybe we could have laughed it off, satisfied ourselves with a kiss or two and gone on in the same delightful way, chatting and laughing and behaving like dignified adults instead of a couple of panting adolescents!'}

^{"Well?" he grunted, at length, "tell me what's made you so afraid of me all of a sudden?"}

^{She looked at him calmly as she took her seat opposite. "Don't be silly, Martin, you know very well that I'm not in the least afraid of you!"}

^{"What other reason could there be for this crazy decision?" he demanded and she gave a little chirrup of laughter that did nothing to improve his mood.}

^{"You look more married than ever, Martin!" she said. "Now listen to me carefully and don't interrupt until I've finished. The decision isn't crazy as I think you'll agree if you think it over as carefully as I have. Ordinarily, we should have spent the next four weeks alone here and by the time I was ready to go on the voyage neither of us would have known what we were doing or where we were going or what was to happen to either of us in the end. We should probably have ended up snarling at one another, just as you're spoiling for a quarrel right now; I didn't want that to happen and I'm not going to let it happen. I take full responsibility for what happened last night and when I thought it over it seemed to me that it was also my responsibility to take the initiative before we get out of our depth." Damn it, it was you who shrugged it off last night!" he protested, "I was the one who . . . !"}

^{She raised her hand. "You promised me not to interrupt, Martin!" I didn't! You promised for me!"}

^{Well, go along with me for a few moments, please! I do mean that, it's very important to me!"}

^{"Very well," he said, somewhat more gently, "you'd better say what's in your mind but I'm involved in this too, remember."}

^{"Of course, I'll remember!" she said, sharply for her. "You were upset last night-any fool could see that. If you were the kind of person who took his fun where he found it and moved on it wouldn't have mattered in the least but you aren't. You're a very sensitive person and you couldn't subscribe to that kind of relationship, it would result in making you far more miserable than you were when you ran away to go looking for life."}

^{He realised that she was right, that he was not and never could be a cheerful philanderer looking over his shoulder for the next encounter. Already this relationship, his very first essay in philandering, had surged far beyond the make-merry-and-be-damned stage, so much so that the thought of waking in the morning and finding himself alone in the house depressed him even more than the prospect of moving out and finding new lodgings. He said, "Suppose I hadn't admitted to being married, or suppose I had let it be understood that I was determined to get a divorce or some kind of separation ? Would that have made any difference ? Would you have been satisfied to wait for something permanent?"}

^{"What profit is there in presupposing something that isn't true, Martin? The real point is that so far you haven't spared a thought for the domestic aspect of your truancy and until you do how can either of us know what the future might hold? You've been exceptionally honest and I appreciate that, but it seems to me damned unfair to penalise you for honesty! You haven't made up your mind to leave Sybil and if I stayed on here I should be a party to forcing a decision on you!"}

^{"Is that altogether a bad idea, Olga?"}

^{"It certainly would be if the decision was a wrong one."}

^{He said, bitterly, "A month, two months, will it make that much difference? It depends on so many things, Sybil's view, what I propose to do with my life, and anyway I was never much good at making decisions."}

^{"You were beginning to be and that's the crux of the matter! You need time to sort yourself out. You set out on the most important journey of your life less than a month ago and you're}

^{not half-way there yet, Martin. I've grown very fond of you and I don't want to be the person to stampede you in any one direction. Just think, Martin, what would happen if we stayed on here together until Sybil located you? You might find yourself in a position where other people made decisions on your behalf. I don't know, nowadays people seem to rush into marriages, second, third, or even fourth marriages without any thought at all but most of them are young and the young can afford to squander time. We can't* Martin, neither one of us, and if two people are set on breaking up a marriage at least they ought to be damned sure of each other."}

^{The resentment was dying in him. He knew that she was talking and thinking good sense and also that she had measured to a decimal point the extent of his uncertainty. He understood, too, that she had been successful in isolating what had happened from their relationship as a whole. Perhaps all women were able to do this, perhaps the male assessment of the importance of physical possession in a woman was a fallacy and that women had the knack of weighing the true worth of an association on an accurate basis. He didn't know, he was beginning to realise that he knew almost nothing about women, not even the two women he had held in his arms. He could follow her reasoning so far but beyond that he lost the track in a labyrinth of possibilities and probabilities yet he was ready, grudgingly, to concede her common-sense. For a moment he was tempted to cloud the issue by telling her that he could never return to his old life and that this must inevitably sever him from his wife and family, for what wife with Sybil's notions of comfort would agree to uproot herself and drift about the country with a husband who had cut himself adrift from a settled, orderly existence? He resisted this temptation, however, and said: "Listen, Olga, I've been very happy here with you and I'm going to be desperately lonely when you're gone. If I show up when you come home, if... if I'm clear in my mind what's to become of me, if I've got some sort of plan that is, could we try again and perhaps stay together?"}

^{It was a hollow and hedged-in kind of proposal and most women would have either resented it or laughed at it, but Olga Boxall knew exactly what he was trying to say, so much so that she had to get up quickly and turn her back on him, knowing that if he saw}