He shook himself, sat upright. God, he must have been more tired than he had thought and had actually dozed off. When had she ever done embroidery or played to him anything but records? And where had he got the name Cranstock from? The Craigs lived in Sapley and her father was dead.
The brief dream had been rather unpleasant. He said sharply, “Anyone want a drink?”
“Nothing for me,” said Philip.
“Sherry, darling,” said Marion. “Did you say a manor house, Philip?”
“Remember all these inner suburbs were villages in the early part of the Nineteenth Century, my dear. The Hewsons were lords of the manor of Palomede until the last one sold the estate in 1838.”
His ill temper welling, Geoffrey brought their drinks. What right had that fellow to call his wife “my dear,” and who cared, he thought, returning to catch Philip’s words, if some Hewson had been a minor poet or another had held office in Lord Liverpool’s government?
“The last one murdered his wife.”
“In that garden,” said Geoffrey rather nastily, “and they took him up the road to Tyburn and hanged him.”
“No, he was never brought to trial, but there was a good deal of talk and he was never again received in society. He married a wife half his age and suspected her of infidelity. She wasn’t quite sane — what we’d now call mentally disturbed — and she used to spend hours wandering in the manor gardens. They extended over the whole of this square, of course, and beyond. He accused her of having trysts there with her lovers. All imagination, of course — there was no foundation for it.”
Geoffrey said violently, “How can you possibly know that? How can you know there was no foundation?”
“My dear Geoff! Because the young lady’s diary happens to have come into my hands from a great-niece of hers.”
“I wouldn’t believe a word of it!”
“Possibly not, but you haven’t read it. There’s no need to get so cross.”
“No, please don’t, darling.”
He shook off the small hand which touched his sleeve. “Be silent, Marion! You know nothing about such matters and shouldn’t talk of them.”
Philip half rose. He said slowly, “And you accuse me of being Victorian! What the hell’s got into you, Geoffrey? I was simply telling Marion a tale of old Palomede and you fly into a furious temper. I think I’d better go.”
“Don’t go, Philip. Geoffrey’s tired, that’s all.” Her lips trembled but she said in a steady voice, “Tell us what became of Mr. Hewson and his wife.”
The historian said stiffly, “In the end he took her away to Italy where she was drowned.”
“You mean he drowned her?”
“That’s what they said. He took her out in a boat in the Bay of Naples and ha came back but she didn’t. After that he was blackballed in his clubs and even his own sister wouldn’t speak to him.”
“What God-awful romantic tripe,” said Geoffrey. He was watching his wife, taking in every slatternly detail of her appearance and thinking now of the City banquet he and she were to attend in the week before Christmas. All summer during their engagement he had looked forward to this banquet, perhaps the most significant public occasion of his year, and thought how this time he would have a beautiful young wife to accompany him. But was she beautiful still? Could she, changed and waiflike and vague as she had become, hold her own in the company of those mannered and sophisticated women?
He phoned her on the afternoon of that dim December day, for she had had a slight cold in the morning, had awakened coughing, and he wanted to be sure, firstly that she was well enough to go, and secondly that she would be dressed and ready on time. But the phone rang into emptiness.
Alarmed and apprehensive, he called Philip, who was out, and then the driving school to be told that Mrs. Gilmour’s instructor was out too. She couldn’t be out with both of them and yet—
He got home by six. It was raining. A trail of wet footmarks led from the elevator to the door of their flat like the prints left by someone who has been called unexpectedly from a bath. And then, even before he saw the damp and draggled figure, still and silent in front of the balcony windows, he knew where she had been, where she had been every day.
But instead of calming his jealousy, this revelation somehow increased it and he began shouting at her, calling her a slut, a failure as a wife, and telling her he regretted their marriage.
The insults seemed to pass over her. She coughed a little. She said dully, remotely, “You must go alone. I’m not well.”
“Of course you’re not well, mooning your life away in that foul garden. All right, I’ll go alone, but don’t be surprised if I don’t come back!”
Geoffrey drank more than he would have if she had been with him. A taxi brought him home to Palomede Square just after midnight and he went up in the elevator, not drunk but not quite sober either. He opened their bedroom door and saw that the bed was empty.
There were no lights on in the flat except the hall light which he had just put on himself. She had left him. He picked up the phone to dial her mother’s number and then he thought, no, she wouldn’t go to her mother. She would go to that driver chap or to Philip.
Philip lived in a flat in the next house. Geoffrey came down the steps into the square and was on the pavement, striding to the next doorway, when he stopped and stared into the garden. At first he thought it was only a pale tree trunk that he could see or a bundle of something dropped behind the stone table. He approached the railings slowly and clasped his hands round the cold wet iron. It was a bundle of clothes, but the clothes enwrapped the seated and utterly still figure of his wife. He began to tremble.
She wore the lilac dress, its skirt sodden with water and clinging to the shape of her legs, and over it her mink coat, soaked and spiky like a rat’s pelt. She sat with her hands spread on the table, one gloved, the other bare, her face blank, wax-white, lifted to the rain which fell steadily upon her and dropped sluggishly from the naked branches.
He opened the gate and went up to her without speaking. She recoiled from him but she didn’t speak either. He dragged her from the seat and brought her out of the garden and into the house, half carrying her. In the elevator she began to cough, sagging against the wall, water dripping from her hair which hung in draggles under the slackened scarf that wrapped it, water streaming down her face.
Heat met them as he unlocked the door of the flat. Transiently, he thought as he pushed her inside, what have we come to, we who were so happy? A drunken autocrat and a half-crazed slattern. What has come over us?
The warmth of the radiator against which she leaned made steam rise from her hair and coat. What have we come to, he thought, and then all tender wistfulness vanished, spiraling away down some long corridor of time, taking with it everything that remained of himself and leaving another in possession.
The lamp in the square lit the flat faintly with a sickly yellow radiance. He put on no lights. “I demand an explanation,” he said.
“I cannot explain. I have tried to explain it to myself but I cannot.” Beneath the coat which she had stripped off, over the soaked and filthy dress, she wore an ancient purple and black wool shawl, moth-eaten into holes.