And then one afternoon he saw her. It was in a department store in St. Louis, which he was visiting on business. She was standing at a counter a few feet away from him, and at the first glance he was certain that it was she. She had aged, changed, and filled out, and her Titian hair had faded to a pale ginger, but the tilt of her nose, the discontented, down-drawn line of her mouth, and the flat, level setting of her eyes in her face took him back suddenly across the years to his little room in the house in Kilburn, where she used to come and sit on his narrow bed and sing to him.
The next moment, doubt assailed him. Was it really she? How could he be sure? He could not possibly remember, after all this time. He stared at her, and his doubt grew. He was crazy to think of it; it was ridiculous to suppose that he would know her any more. And then, as he was about to abandon the idea, she turned towards him, and he saw that she was wearing a cat’s-eye brooch, the brooch that frightened him in childhood.
Jim felt as though his heart had stopped for a moment; then it began to beat violently, choking him in his throat. She had passed him by, now, and was making for the street. In a moment she would be lost to him. He hurried after her, leaving his order uncompleted at the counter. As he went, he tried to think how he should greet her. If he said: “Aren’t you Violet Delcey?” she would be certain to deny it.
He came abreast with her at the entrance to the store, and, as she was about to pass him, he said casually — as casually as he could for the excitement that was throttling him: “Hello, Auntie Vi-Vi!”
She started violently, and looked around to see who had spoken. He was smiling at her, with a nerve twitching uncontrollably at the corner of his mouth.
“Were you speaking to me?” she asked.
The moment she spoke, he knew her voice, English, and pseudo-refined, with impure vowel sounds. He had not heard a voice like that for years.
“Yes. Don’t you remember me?” he said.
She looked at him for a moment and then dropped her eyes, assuming the indignation of a woman who is being accosted.
“No, I don’t,” she answered, and started to move on.
He caught at her arm.
“It’s Jim — Jim Cawthra,” he said, speaking the name he had not borne for nearly thirty years.
And now she turned to him again, her eyes widening, and her mouth falling open in surprise.
“Jim!” she breathed in amazement. “Not little Jim?”
“That’s me,” he said.
He could see that she was trembling as she tried to laugh and to treat the situation as a social coincidence.
“Well!” she said, but her voice was shaking, too.
“Can’t we go somewhere and talk?” he asked, urgently. “I want to talk to you.”
They went to a place near the store, choosing it because it was dark and empty, and seated themselves in a far corner. Violet Delcey ordered a banana split. She had put on a good deal of weight in the years; she was plump now, and matronly, and her face had lost the delicate contours that he remembered. It was the face of a resentful, self-indulgent woman.
“How did you recognize me?” she asked. “You were only a little boy when I last saw you. I’ve changed, too. How did you know me?”
“By that.” He pointed to the brooch.
She squinted down at it.
“Oh, that!” she said. “Well, fancy your remembering that!”
“It used to scare me, don’t you remember? I used to think it was a real cat’s eye.”
“Did you?” she said. “How silly! I don’t know why I still wear it. It isn’t very pretty. Habit, I suppose. It’s sort of silly, too, seeing it was that that really gave the show away before.”
She gave a little laugh, and he stared at her. This could not be Violet Delcey speaking. But it could be Auntie Vi-Vi; he remembered that laugh: it recalled to him the afternoons in other people’s kitchens and the giggling conversations with the servants.
“Do you live here in St. Louis?” he asked.
She shook her head. “I’m not telling,” she said. “I’m not telling you anything about me now.”
“I wouldn’t give you away.”
“Well, that’s as may be,” she said, and the phrase struck him as odd and old-fashioned. “But I’m not taking any chances. What I was, or used to be, is all over, and no one knows about it. I wouldn’t have come here with you now, except that — well, you’re different. You were only a kid, and it’s nice to get a chance to talk about old times, just for once.”
“Do you think about it — much?” he asked. It was something he had long wondered about.
Again she shook her head.
“Not really,” she said. “No. Now and then, of course, I suppose you can’t help it, but it doesn’t do you any good.”
She took a spoonful of whipped cream. He could not think of what to ask her, what to say next. What did he want to know? “Was it awful?” That was really what he wanted to say, but it sounded such a silly question. Besides, what could she answer? Yes or no — neither would take him any further. He wanted to know what it had meant to her — what it felt like to have lived through all that she had lived through and to have come out on the other side, as she had done; but he could think of no way of putting the question so that she would understand it.
“Will you tell me about it?” he asked, at length. It was the best he could do.
“What? What do you want to know?”
He could not say. He thrust for a question of fact, rather than of point of view.
“Did you ever suspect what he had done? He never told you, did he?”
“No, of course he didn’t. He didn’t want me to know. That was the whole point. He knew I wouldn’t have anything to do with him if I did.”
“But when you were looking after her — the first time she was sick? He’d already started then, hadn’t he?”
“Oh, that was only to make her ill enough to have the doctor in. For the sake of the death certificate the next time, you know. At least, that’s how I figured it out afterwards. I suppose there was weedkiller in the medicine he used to pour out and give me to take up to her. But he always used to pour it out himself, and never let me do it. Just so that I couldn’t be mixed up in it, I expect. He was always very thoughtful of me.”
“Did you love him?” The questions were beginning to come of their own accord now.
Violet Delcey stared at him.
“Love him?” she repeated, incredulously. “How could I have loved him? He was old enough to be my father. But he was always respectful to me. And kind. You wouldn’t believe how kind he was. Of course, he was crazy about me.”
“But you were his mistress, weren’t you?”
She looked offended. “Mistress? I don’t know what you mean,” she said.
There was no point in pursuing that.
“When you went away together — when you ran away — what did you think?” he asked. “He didn’t tell you then what was wrong?”
“No. Of course, I knew there was trouble. I caught that Mrs. What’s-her-name in the kitchen one day, talking to the skivvy. That girl had always hated me, and taken Mrs. Cawthra’s side against me, and I guessed that she’d been saying things, so it wasn’t any surprise to me when Freddie came and said there was a lot of gossip going on, and that it would be a good idea if we were to go away for a while till it had blown over. He said we could get married on the Continent. We were going to get married, you know,” she went on. “I wouldn’t have had anything to do with him in the first place if we hadn’t been. Right from the beginning, he said he wanted to marry me, and that he would, as soon as she died. She was always being ill, you know, and I think he sort of hoped from the beginning that she wouldn’t last. I suppose he got tired of waiting, same as I did.”