I went to my room, and lay down on the sofa in front of the fire. After a time, footsteps sounded on the stairs, then a knock at the door. The maid came in, and after her Olive. At once I felt sure of what she was going to say. She stood between me and the fire.
‘You’ve worn yourself out,’ she said. Then she burst out: ‘But you’ve finished now, it doesn’t matter if I talk to you?’
She threw cushions from the chair on to the hearthrug, and sat there.
‘There’s something — I shall feel better if I tell you. No one else must know. But I’ve got to tell you, I don’t know why. It can’t affect things now.’
‘It couldn’t at any time,’ I replied.
She laughed, not loudly but with the utter abandonment that overtook her at times; the impassiveness of her face was broken, her eyes shone, her arms rested on the sofa head.
‘Well, I may as well say it,’ she went on in a quiet voice. ‘This business isn’t all a mistake. We’re not as — spotless as we made out.’
‘Will you tell me what happened?’
Without answering, she asked abruptly: ‘What are our chances?’
‘Getliffe still thinks they’re pretty good.’
‘It oughtn’t to make much difference,’ she said. ‘I keep telling myself it doesn’t matter.’ She gave a sudden sarcastic laugh, and said: ‘It does. More than you’d think. When I heard you say there was still a chance I was more shaken — than if I suddenly knew I’d never done it at all.’
She was silent for a moment. Then she said: ‘I’m going to tell you some more. I can’t help it.’ She broke into a confession of what had happened between the three of them. She was forced on, degraded and yet relieved, just as Jack had been that night in the park years ago. Often she evaded my questions, and more than once she concealed a fact that she clearly knew. There were still places where I was left baffled, but, from what she said and what I already knew, their story seemed to have gone on these lines:
They actually did begin to raise money for the agency in complete innocence. George believed Martineau’s account, and Olive took George’s opinion; so probably did Jack, for a time. Jack had suggested the idea of taking over the agency — for him it was a commonplace ‘flutter’, and it was easy to understand George catching at the new interest. He was genuinely in need of money, compelled to see that he had no future in the firm, and, though he would not yet admit it to himself, tired of the group in its original form.
Olive, less clear-sighted on herself than on any other person, gave confused reasons for joining in. I thought that, even so early, she had wanted to control Jack — and that also, as she half-saw, she had been dissatisfied with herself for going back to her father and reverting to the childish, dependent state. This business seemed a ‘hand-hold on real things’.
They borrowed their first amount, still believing in their own statements. George and Jack seemed to have realised the true position at about the same time. Neither said anything to the other. All through the transactions, the pretence of ignorance was kept up. Jack only made one hint to Olive (this happened, of course, some time before they were lovers): ‘You might get some interesting information if you called on Exell. But it’s always safer to wait until we’ve got the money in.’
As soon as he knew the truth, George passed through a time of misery and indecision. He thought for weeks that he alone had discovered it. He still wanted to consider himself responsible for the other two. At times he came near to stopping the entire business. He went so far as to call a meeting of the others and two of their creditors: and then made an excuse to cancel it. No doubt he was justifying himself: ‘after all, we still have Martineau’s authority’ …‘anyway, we have raised most of the money now. The harm’s done, whatever we do.’ He could also tell himself that, despite the false statement, they would make a success of it and bring money to their creditors. Most of all, perhaps, he was afraid of disclosing his knowledge to the others: because he dreaded that Jack’s influence would be too strong — and that Jack would force him through it with both of them knowing everything.
George had few illusions about Jack. He remembered Jack’s early attempt at something like fraud over the wireless company. But he could not escape from the power which Jack had obtained over him, as their relation slowly developed through the years.
As George went through this period, Jack looked on with a mixture of contempt, anxiety, and even amusement. Himself, he was enjoying the excitement of raising the money and ‘putting it across’. He found the same kind of exhilaration that a business deal had always given him — but now far more intense. Often he seemed little more affected than when he first invoked George’s help. He told Attock the false story with the same single-mindedness, the same sense both of anxiety and of life beating faster, that he had once experienced when going round, Roy’s present in his pocket, to call at George’s house.
‘He enjoyed it. It was part of the game,’ said Olive. She did not talk, however, of the pleasure and authority which Jack now felt completely in George’s presence. At last he had become the real leader. Though George still talked as though they all accepted his control, each of them in secret knew what the position was.
Olive said that, about this time, she hated Jack and found herself on George’s side. She wanted to break up the whole business. She told Arthur Morcom something of it; she wondered how she could withdraw without throwing suspicion on the others. ‘Arthur tried everything he knew to get me out of it. But I couldn’t trust him then. If I had been on my own, I should have had more chance of escaping.’
At that time she was not yet living with Arthur, and it was a few months before Jack seduced her. Throughout the confession, her tendency was to see her immersion in the business as a result of her relations with these two. I thought she always undervalued how much she needed to influence and manage and control. As she watched Jack at the drunken party after the police court, she had seen herself more clearly and tonight, with a flash of penetration, she said: ‘You used to tell me that I insisted too much on how I liked being someone else’s slave, didn’t you? I used to say how I wanted someone to make me feel small and dependent. Yet that’s always been true. At least it’s seemed true. But as soon as I looked at what I’d done, I had to see myself trying to get the exact opposite. I still wanted him to order me about. But in all the big things I was trying to make sure that I should have him in my hands.’
For all her passions of subjection, she actually — in another aspect of her nature — was a strong and masterful person. Perhaps stronger than either George or Jack. Those passions were so important to her that they often obscured her insight. She did not realise how violently she wanted her own kind of power.
Neither she nor George could face easily the actual thought of fraud. All three were often seized by anxiety and almost physical fear — from their first realisation of Martineau’s lie down to tonight. But there was something different in Olive and George; they were sometimes conscience-stricken in a way which Jack did not know. They could not excuse themselves for these dishonesties over money. They felt cheapened in their own eyes. They did not even possess a ‘rational’ excuse to themselves. It was different from their sexual lives; for there, when they acted in an ‘irregular’ fashion, they had at least a complete rationale to console them. Many of the people whom they had known for long talked and acted against the sexual conventions. On the surface, George, Olive and Morcom would, each of them, recognise them only ‘out of convenience’. On the levels of reason and conscience, they were completely at ease about the way they had managed their sexual lives; one had to penetrate beyond reason and conscience, before one realised how misleading George’s ‘justifications’ were.