I said: ‘You have made sacrifices, Mavis, no doubt. For your Art. So have I made sacrifices, for your Art!’
She laughed, in a lightly-fluttering, high-pitched way, and said: ‘Oh no! What, you? Sacrifices? Oh no! I sacrificed my body for my Art!’
A great cold came over me then. ‘You sacrificed your body to whom?’
‘To you, of course,’ she said.
Quite calmly, I believe, I said: ‘Very likely. But for your Art, and my love of you, Mavis, I have sacrificed my immortal soul.’
‘Don’t let’s be intense,’ said she, wearily, ‘because I don’t think I could bear it.’
A strange, unpleasant light made a sickly sunrise in my disordered head. ‘Why, I believe you were really in love with Abaloni!’ I cried.
‘Please, Rod, let’s not go into that, now!’
And then I knew that it was the choreographer Abaloni whom Mavis had always truly loved. There surged up in me a great white hate – boiling bubble-to-bubble with my love for her. In circumstances such as this, a man feels at the tip of his tongue some stupendous speech … and comes out with something trite and silly.
I could only say: ‘Abaloni’s fat!’
‘You’re no oil painting,’ said she.
Before I could find words to say in reply, Mavis sat up. For the moment, I thought that she was crying, because tears were running down her cheeks, and I said: ‘Dear Mavis, forgive my inadequacies, and pardon me if I hurt you. I love you most dearly. If it will be better for you to be with Abaloni, then go. I thought you loved me. I was a fool to think so. Take half of what I have, and go to Abaloni——’
But she was not crying. She could not catch her breath.
I called for the doctor. He said: ‘It happens, occasionally. There are people, especially women, who are affected like this in the mountains by changes in atmospheric pressure. Come away, and let her rest.’
I came away with the nurse, who put me to bed with cold towels on my head. Next morning, when I went to see Mavis, she said: ‘I must have been sort of woozy yesterday. Rod, did I say all sorts of silly things? … I can sit up today. Let’s go home soon…. But tell me – did I talk all kinds of silliness?’
‘Not a word,’ I said.
‘I must have had a temperature,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what’s the matter with me, but I seem to have caught a virus, or something——’ Mavis began to struggle for breath, and the sound that she made – how can I describe it? – was as if she had been caught at that fine point between breathing-in and breathing-out. She agonised, at last, in a convulsive combination of coughing and sneezing.
‘The doctor says this has something to do with atmospheric pressure,’ I told her. ‘As soon as he gives permission, I’ll take you home. I’m sorry our little holiday turned out so wretchedly.’
Mavis said: ‘Please, Rod, let it be soon! I can’t breathe here…. Do you very much mind not kissing me, Rod? This might be catching. Yes, that’s it – it might be catching. Do you mind awfully leaving me alone a bit? Pretty please?’
I had to say: ‘Look, Mavis – did you mean what you said last night about loving Abaloni?’
She became angry at this, and cried: ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, do try to be civilised just for once in your life! Please leave me alone, Rod. Sort of go away, kind of, for the moment; and tomorrow, perhaps.’
So I left her, and went to see the doctor. He handed me a cablegram. It was from my uncle’s solicitor, Mr Coote. My uncle, Sir Arnold Arnold, had died suddenly in Paris: would I, his heir and executor, return to London at my earliest convenience?
When I read this, I put my head between my hands and sat for a while rocking to and fro in deep grief. Then this grief was overlaid with black fear. Was it I who killed him? I wondered. But I reassured myself – this could not be: oysters would not be in season until the first of September. So I went back to Mavis’s bedside.
‘Oh, please, Rod——’ she began.
‘– I must go back to England immediately,’ I said. ‘My uncle’s dead.’
Her face was radiant as she cried: ‘Oh, how – terrible! Oh, I’m so – sorry!’
I could almost have killed her then. But I stooped to kiss her. I hope I shall not long remember – I am sure that I shall never forget – the quick little gesture of revulsion with which she turned away as soon as my lips touched her cheek. ‘Better hurry, Rod, darling,’ she said: and began to weep.
‘You’re crying!’ I said.
‘So are you,’ said she.
‘I loved the old man very much, I think,’ I said, ‘and you even more, Mavis. Until soon. Good-bye.’
I arranged for transportation to the nearest airport. Before I left I sent for the woman who had given of her blood to my wife and, in genuine gratitude, put some money into her hand, and thanked her most warmly.
She burst into tears and rushed out of the room.
When I went to see Mr Coote in his office in Staple Inn, my worst fears were confirmed. Discreetly congratulating me upon my inheritance, which, even after death duties had been paid, would still leave me rich – Coote told me the story of my uncle’s death:
‘… As you no doubt know, the late Sir Arnold was of – de mortuis nil nisi bonum – an impatient, an impetuous disposition. Oh dear! In a nutshelclass="underline" the oyster season being over, he resented having to live on “slops” – he said he’d be damned if he would, and said in Paris they served oysters all the year round. “And what the devil’s the matter with a fat Portuguese oyster, damn it all?” Sir Arnold said.’
‘Go on, Mr Coote!’
‘To proceed … Sir Arnold went to Paris. He went straight from the train to Fratelli’s Restaurant, ordered three dozen of the finest Portuguese oysters and half a bottle of wine. He ate the oysters, drank the wine, and collapsed in a convulsion; a sort of asthmatic convulsion, but of the most violent kind. And this, I regret to say, was too much for his poor heart…. Now, please, oh, please, you really must pull yourself together! … Dunhill! A glass of water, quick!——’
For, at this, I fainted.
The Victorian novelists used to call it a ‘brain fever’. Now, I believe, we refer to my condition then as a ‘nervous breakdown’. I was put to bed and given opiates and sedatives – bromide of this, bromide of that. But always, when the world slipped away, and I slid out of it into the cool dark, I was snatched out of my black, drugged peace by fantastic nightmares.
In these, invariably, my Uncle Arnold appeared, curiously blue in the face and unpleasantly bloated, wheezing: ‘Give me credit for it, Rod, my boy – never dreamed you had it in you to kill your old uncle! … But you ought to have done it with a poker, or even the paper-knife, face-to-face like a man … I could have forgiven you for that, Rod. But yours was a woman’s trick, a poisoner’s trick…. I’ll lime you for that, my fine-feathered friend – I’ll give you a taste of your own medicine – I’ll give you a dose of your own poison, you woman, you!’
Then my uncle coughed himself into dissolution, and I awoke with a loud cry.
I might have lain there for a week or more; only on the third morning there came a telegram from Mavis, saying that she was arriving at Victoria Station by the boat train from Paris the following day. I got out of bed at once, and made myself presentable, and was pacing the platform a good hour before the train came in. She was more beautiful than ever. ‘Oh, Mavis, Mavis!’ I cried, kissing her.
To my horror and astonishment, her eyes filled with tears, and her chest heaved in a fit of coughing that sounded like thin steel chains being shaken in a cardboard box. ‘For God’s sake go away!’ she said, as soon as she could talk. ‘You make me ill!’