“So you will, Charley Barley, won’t you?” she ended.
“I might,” he said, feeling sick.
This afternoon of Christmas day, down at old Ernie Mandrew’s, she took Charley out, determined by hook or by crook to bring him to the point at last, for, however little she knew about his intentions, her own mind was still made up.
“Would you ever want to have children?” she asked, as they set off together over the snow, on the way to the village. This made him think of Ridley, whom he had not considered in a long while.
“Why?” he said.
“Oh, why does a person ever put a question?” she gently enquired. “To get their answer, of course, you old silly.”
“I don’t know.” He still did not realize that they might come on the boy when they reached the first houses, and he was not to know this until it was too late.
“Come on,” she insisted. “Having children’s one of the few things anyone can do for herself in this old world, that is if she can rake up a boy to do it with,” she laughed.
“Would you?” he asked.
“We’re not talking of me, this instant minute, thanks,” she replied. “Why won’t you ever tell me anything?”
“I might have one already.”
“Go on,” she said, laughing still. “Why, you’ve never been wide awake enough for that.”
“I might,” he insisted.
“Charley, I really do believe … No, look here, you haven’t, have you, now?”
He did not answer, or even glance at her.
“You said it in such a way that you might at that …” she went on, when he said nothing. “But, Charley, it would be living a lie.”
“How d’you mean?”
“Well, wouldn’t it?”
“I still don’t get you,” he cautiously explained.
“Why, being like me,” she elaborated. “Not having a real father all my life. That’s been my trouble. Oh it mightn’t matter for a boy, but it’s very different where girls are concerned.”
“Rotten luck,” he said.
“No, Charley, you never did, did you?”
“What would you give for me to tell?”
“But this is serious,” she entreated. “You can’t play about with this. It’s all there is that people the same as us can do with their own lives.”
“A man never knows if the kid is his own, or not.”
“Now there’s no need for you to be sarcastic,” she protested. “I haven’t brought you all this long way for that,” she said, with more truth behind the remark than she proposed to reveal. “Can’t you be serious, once in a while,” she begged, although he was the most serious of men.
The snow, and the sun above, lit her face so that each eyelash stood out on its own, and the grain of her skin, until, with those blue eyes, and the way she had of addressing him, on which he had come to rely for peace of mind, and with her walking by his side, she grew upon him, became an embodiment of everything comforting, and true, and good. So much so, that he lost the drift of this argument. She had to press to get him to say he did not really know if he had a child.
“But who with?” she demanded. She was getting upset.
“That would be telling.”
“Oh, I believe it was only your old Rose,” she brought out at last, very much relieved. “And there was me, supposing all that over and done with, ages ago. Did you love her very much then, Charley?”
“It was a long time back.”
“That’s not much help to a girl,” she replied. “Did you or did you not? That’s what I want to know.”
“I suppose so,” he said, unmistakably with no trace of feeling.
“Oh, pity us poor women,” she cried out loud, delighted, thinking this would have taught Rose, if the woman could have been here to learn it. “D’you mean you can’t be certain?”
“I thought I knew, dear. Then she went and married someone else,” he explained.
“Yes, but you carried on seeing her, surely? You told me.”
“I did.”
“Well then?” she demanded.
There was a pause.
“She properly played you up, didn’t she,” Miss Whitmore made comment. But Charley was several sentences behind once more.
“I didn’t trust her quite the same,” he brought out, with difficulty.
“When was that?” she gleefully demanded.
“After she married Jim.”
“Trusting is different,” she announced.
“I wouldn’t know,” he said. “But I seemed to need her more.”
“You know a great deal more than I sometimes credit you with,” she admitted, soberly, sadly.
“Was it the same with your husband?” he asked, greatly daring.
“With Phil? Oh that’s all over, done now. And we didn’t have a kid. I shan’t forget him till the day I die, but he wouldn’t want me to go on to be an old maid.”
“But you never would, would you? I mean you were married once?”
“Well, of course,” she said with a happy laugh. “But if you live on long enough without a man, you go back to be a virgin.”
This remark enormously excited him somehow.
“You don’t,” he cried out.
“Then what’s an old maid, then?” she wanted to know.
He could not think what to say, so stayed silent.
“Oh yes, you know all right,” she insisted. “And it’s not for me. No thank you. Besides, I want kids.”
“Why do you?” He spoke loud.
“Because they’re good for your health, if you’re a woman. But that’s not the real reason. I want to have them so as to love.”
He was very nervous about where all this was leading. But he considered he had been let down so often, in his time, that he was not going to give himself away again just yet.
“You could love the man you married?” he asked.
“I don’t see it that way,” she replied. “You can’t get more out of anything than you put in. And kids are your own flesh and blood. A woman risks her life having them. There’s nothing more a girl can put into it than having her own children, doing everything for them, till they’re of an age to look after themselves, it’s her most.”
“Not much of a look out for the husband, then,” he had the courage to say.
“What d’you mean?” she asked. “What is there that’s wrong for him, in all I’ve just said? I don’t see life as sitting in another person’s lap, as you and your Rose seem to have done together, from what Mother tells me. It’s starting a home and working for it, that’s what I call it,” she said.
“Did your Phil see things that way?”
“You leave him out, Charley. He’s nothing to do with what we’re discussing.”
They fell silent. They were getting near the village.
He was really agitated. She could talk about Rose playing him up, yet she’d had a shot at the same game once or twice herself, or so it seemed. But then, of course, it was all his own fault, he felt. A wife and kids were not for Charley Summers. He knew that. He was too slow. He’d never find a woman to put up with him.
“Then there’s Panzer,” she said suddenly, and, so it appeared, at a tangent, but, in actual practice, with a great deal of purpose. “I couldn’t leave her,” she pointed out.
“You don’t have to,” he objected.