But when she looked across the room and saw him and he looked at her, she couldn’t go through with it. She didn’t know what was happening, or what was going to happen. She only knew that it couldn’t happen here under all these curious eyes. The long unnatural control of years was cracking, she must get out of the room before it broke. She threaded her way between people all shouting at each other without very much chance of making themselves heard. She didn’t look at Nicholas again. She heard Ella Harrison’s metallic laugh, and quite suddenly in a momentary lull a girl’s voice said, ‘and his nose was as cold as ice!’ And then she was at the door. There was a fat man leaning against it. He seemed to have had a good many cocktails and to need support. She was wondering how she was going to get past him, when she heard Nicholas say, ‘Just a minute, old chap, we want to get out.’ A hand came over her shoulder. The fat man was eased along the wall, the door opened, and she found herself in the passage. Nicholas said, ‘Quick!’ and ran her along with an arm about her shoulders to the little room which used to be Sophy’s. With the door shut on them, he let go of her and stood back. They didn’t speak, they looked at each other. In the end he said, ‘Well?’ and she said, ‘Where have you been?’
EIGHT
NICHOLAS’S LAUGH WAS not quite steady.
‘Oh, just going to and fro in the earth and walking up and down in it, like my namesake in the book of Job.’
She said with a kind of soft irrelevance,
‘Do you remember when you dressed up as the devil with horns and a tail and frightened Sophy’s birthday party into fits by turning out the lights at the main and coming in all daubed with phosphorescent paint?’
He laughed again.
‘It went with a bang!’
‘Because you had a squib at the end of your tail and when you let it off everyone screamed.’
‘You didn’t.’
‘I can’t when things happen – I go stiff.’
‘The trouble with you, darling, is that you’re just a mass of inhibitions. You don’t scream, and you don’t cry, and you don’t climb on a chair when you see a mouse.’
‘I might if it was a spider.’
‘Spiders can run up chairs, but it’s only the little ones that have an urge that way. The large hairy ones are given over to sloth. They lurk and brood in baths and places where you want to wash. Let us return to your inhibitions. If you don’t get the better of them, they’ll end in turning you to stone. You know that, don’t you?’
She said, ‘Yes…’ from the very bottom of her heart.
‘What are we going to do about it, Allie?’
Her lips were stiff, but she made them move.
‘I don’t know…’
‘Sure? What about this?’ His arms came round her hard and strong. They held her up against him and she felt the beating of his heart. He didn’t kiss her, just held her there and looked into her eyes. She didn’t know what he saw in them, but she knew what she saw in his. It wasn’t any of the things she expected to see. Anger, mockery, passion – he had looked at her with all of these in his time. This look was different, and she couldn’t look away. He said,
‘What are we going to do about it, Allie?’
There wasn’t anything they could do about it. She said,
‘Nothing.’
‘It’s very strong. I didn’t know it was as strong as this. Did you?’
‘Yes…’
‘You ought to know. You did your best to kill it five years ago, and I’ve been having a go at it ever since. If it hadn’t been practically indestructible we ought to have been able to polish it off. I’ve been telling it just how dead it was for the last five years, but it doesn’t seem to have had the slightest effect.’
‘No…’
‘I only came down here because I had to. Emmy left all my things behind when she sold the house to Jack Harrison. I wasn’t going to come and see you, because I was afraid. And do you know why? I kidded myself that it was because I didn’t want to risk the whole thing starting again. But it wasn’t that. I was afraid that I might find out how dead everything really was. And what do you do when you’re left with a corpse on your hands? Very difficult things to get rid of corpses. I wasn’t going to risk it! And I needn’t have troubled, need I? The damned thing was not only alive, it was ramping. I had only got to see you across the room and there it was, shouting at the top of its voice and hurting like hell!’
He spoke with extraordinary velocity. The words drove, and checked, and found their way again, his voice quite low, his clasp of her unbroken, and through it all the heavy beating of his heart. Something in her that had been slowly freezing to death began to thaw. She felt a warmth and a relaxing. She couldn’t move away, she couldn’t move at all – they were too close. She laid her head against his sleeve and felt the tears run down. It was all that there could ever be between them, tears and parting and pain, but at least they were shared, they hadn’t to endure them alone.
He let go of her suddenly and stepped back.
‘Allie, you’re crying!’
No use to say she wasn’t with her face wet and the tears still running. She said,
‘Yes…’
‘You never cry!’
‘No…’
He broke into sudden shaken laughter.
‘Well, you’ve made a proper job of it now! Here, have my handkerchief. I don’t suppose you’ve got one – unless you’ve changed a lot.’
The linen was soft and cool. She held it to her face and said,
‘That’s just it, Nicky, I have changed – dreadfully…’
‘And how?’
‘I’ve got hard and cold – and – and resentful. I don’t like people any more – I don’t have friends. I’m not a bit the same as I used to be. You wouldn’t like me a bit. I don’t like myself.’
‘And who is to blame for that? She’s made a slave of you. Even Ella Harrison says so.’
She said, ‘Yes…’
The barriers were all down and nothing was there but the truth. Her tears had even washed away the futile pretence of girlish bloom. He could see her as she was, too thin, too pale, too old for her years. He said in a laughing voice,
‘Darling, some of the colour has got on to your nose. Here, you’d better let me have the handkerchief.’
All at once something happened. It was like a fresh wind blowing over her and carrying away all the morbid thoughts that had been crowding in her mind. She felt a thrusting impatience of them, she felt as if she couldn’t do with them any more.
Nicky was here, and he loved her, and the past was gone.
He finished drying her face and put the handkerchief back in his pocket.
‘Or perhaps you had better keep it.’
‘No, I’ve got one – I really have. Nicky, we ought to go back.’
‘No – we’re going to talk. You will sit and I will sit, and we’ll get down to brass tacks. But you’re not to cry any more, because it interferes with rational conversation. And just in case anyone comes you’d better powder your nose. I suppose you’ve got something in that bag of yours?’
She opened it and took out the compact he had given her for Christmas, a month before the crash. When she had finished with it he took it out of her hand.
‘I’ve seen that before. Did I give it to you?’