Her casuistry satisfied her temporarily. She put Gabriel out of her mind while she and Felix stole moments for kisses and caresses and enjoyed the complicity of being lovers while the world signed its approbation and happily surveyed them in its ignorance.
But Felix soon began to chafe under the restraints that living at Stackpole imposed. He began to introduce the idea of getting away for a day or two, just to be ‘free’ and ‘natural’ together for a span of longer than a couple of hours. Besides, he reminded her, the new term was starting at Oxford in a matter of weeks. The summer was nearly over.
And so the plan had evolved with a mysterious momentum of its own. Felix was to go to London, ostensibly to visit Holland. Charis would go to Bristol to spend a few days with her aunt. On her way back she would stop at a small hotel that Felix knew in Aylesbury. He would meet her there. Under the guise of husband and wife they would spend a weekend at the hotel. Then Charis would return home. Felix would go back to Holland’s for another brief visit. His return to Stackpole would occur some days after Charis’s to allay all possible suspicions.
The plotting and the anticipation, Charis had to admit, had been exciting. No reference was made to what would happen that weekend in Aylesbury.
♦
Charis dressed slowly. She felt unusually agitated and troubled. This was their second visit to the King’s Arms in Aylesbury, a pre-Christmas visit to Aunt Bedelia coinciding with the end of the Michaelmas term in Oxford. A shaft of unkind watery sun shone through the windows on to the crumpled bed. Felix seemed more sure of himself and composed this visit. Certainly, the pleasure had been more acute…She held her hand out in front of her and watched it tremble. By contrast, her nerve was going alarmingly fast, she felt. The same questions rose inexorably up in her mind. How was it, when she loved Gabriel so, that she could become the mistress of his brother? The same answer came as inexorably in return. She had not been driven to anything, she was not under compulsion, she could exercise her free will. Somewhere inside her, somewhere bidden, she must have wanted it to happen.
It was this thought that made her miserable. She felt confused and baffled. For a second she experienced a shocking sensation of leaping, jostling panic in her chest. Was this true guilt? she asked herself. Were these the symptoms? Trembling hands and breathless turmoil? But it wasn’t so much ‘guilt’ that she was feeling as a kind of fear. She felt dazzled and giddy from the pressures she was under. She went over to the bed, and pulled back the blankets and looked at the still damp stains on the sheets. But it was so nice to be loved, she told herself, to be held by someone, not to sleep alone all the time. She needed that.
Feeling slightly stronger, she went downstairs to the hotel dining room. It was a cheerless room at the best of tunes, walls a pale mustard yellow with waist-high wooden panelling. It was almost empty at this early hour; apart from Felix there were only two other guests at breakfast. Commercial travellers, she thought, by the look of them. One sleepy waitress was on duty.
“Hello,” Felix said as Charis sat down. “Everything fine?”
She smiled. In public he lost some of his assurance, became more boyish and anxious. “Of course.” She reached out and patted his hand in what she imagined as a wifely way.
Felix was eating a kipper. She poured herself a cup of tea and watched him finish it. He had his spectacles on, the better to fillet the fish, she supposed. He wore a tweed suit. He looked older with his glasses on, certainly old enough to be her husband. But she needn’t worry, she told herself, no one at the hotel had ever seemed remotely suspicious.
“Sure you won’t have something?”
She shook her head. He really was so different from Gabriel. Thin-faced where Gabriel was broad, dark not fair. He had none of Gabriel’s unreflecting, stolid contentment. Felix seemed always bothered with life, suspicious of the cards it was dealing him, always weighing things up and criticizing. In many ways he was rather a ruthless person, she thought, but not in the ways he imagined he was. A good person to have a love affair with, she concluded, a little ruthlessly herself. At least one person should be impatient with moral conventions, have no time for social norms, be able to scoff at the predictable judgements of conscience.
Felix put his knife and fork together. “What time’s our train?” he asked.
“A quarter past eight.”
He glanced at the clock on the wall. “I suppose we should be getting along to the station.”
♦
The London train was running late. Charis and Felix stood on the deserted platform and watched the thin sleet fall on the railway lines. Behind them the waiting room windows were fogged with condensation.
“I don’t mind if it’s cold,” Charis said, rubbing her gloved hands together. “It’s when it’s cold and wet that I can’t stand it.”
Felix nodded gloomily, and stamped his feet to restore the circulation.
“Cheer up,” Charis said. “I know the weekend’s over but you are going to be home for six weeks.”
“I know,” Felix said. “But it’s not the same. Christmas last year was bloody. Now what with Nigel and Eustacia too, I…oh, I don’t know.”
Charis slipped her arm through his. After all, they were husband and wife until Marylebone.
“But it’ll be different this year,” she said. “Last year we weren’t together.”
“Yes, I suppose so,” Felix agreed. “It’s not just this filthy weather. Oxford’s ghastly these days. It’s empty. Or rather the colleges are full of soldiers. Drilling in the parks, nurses wheeling wounded men about in the college gardens. OTC this, yeomanry that. And this wretched war going on and on.” He looked down at his feet. “Philip’s changed too. He’s talking about joining an ambulance unit in France. He wants me to come too. Something he read in Nietzsche, about subjecting the soul to all possible torments.” He gave a wry smile. “I read Nietzsche last year. Philip dismissed him: ‘a salon philosopher’. I ask you. And the train’s late.”
Charis laughed and squeezed his arm. “Oh, gloomy old thing. Don’t worry, it’ll be spring before you know it. And this war won’t go on for ever—”
She wished she hadn’t said that. She knew that the thought of the war meant only one thing to both of them. Gabriel’s return. Sometimes she forced herself to think about what would happen when peace arrived and Gabriel came back. Her mind acknowledged the broad truths: that he would come back, that he would be ill or maimed, that he may be changed in some way. But it refused to go into details, details such as how it would be possible for life to return to normal.
When the train arrived, they managed to find an empty compartment at the front. Felix sat with his back to the engine, Charis sat opposite him. The train chuffed off. Felix opened a newspaper. Charis watched the passing countryside, the mesmeric peak, trough, peak, trough of the telephone wires, and tried to tangle and lose her thoughts in the rhythmic clatter and rumble of the wheels on the railway lines. But gradually she felt her early morning panic return. She picked a thread loose from a seam on her glove. The end of the war. It seemed an appalling nemesis, not a moment for rejoicing. How could she live with both Gabriel and Felix at Stackpole? She knew instinctively and confidently that this current state of affairs would never have arisen if Gabriel had been present. Felix had once implied as much to her, joking that in the beginning he had resented her for stealing Gabriel’s affections away. Felix would have to leave, that was all there was for it, she told herself, conscious of the note of hysteria. She could never dissemble in front of Gabriel. Something would happen; he would know, she’d be sure to give herself away. She felt her mouth go dry, heard her pulse resounding in her head.