“No,” she agreed, thinking how different a celebration this forty-first birthday might have been, “I wasn’t expecting to be alone.”
“Nor was I. I’m heading north,” he said jerkily, revolving the empty glass dangerously between his fingers, “for a long week-end. Not much to look forward to now, though. There should have been two of us, if everything hadn’t come to pieces.” The glass was suddenly still between his long hands; he stared at it blackly. “I suppose I ought to lay off, but I’ve got to have one more of these, I’m still twenty per cent short of human. May I get you the other half? Or would you prefer a short?”
“Thanks, the other half would be fine.”
She watched him worm his way to the bar with the empty glasses, and knew that she had done that deliberately. Why? Because if she had refused he would have taken it as a rebuff and been turned in again upon his own arid company? Or because she would have lost touch with him and been driven back upon hers? What she was courting was the loss of herself in another human creature, and that was what he wanted, too. Not that it would ever be much more than two parallel monologues, the passing of two trains on a double track, somewhere in the dark. But at least the sight of a human face at one of the flying windows would assure the watcher of companionship in his wakefulness. Their need was mutual, why pass up the opportunity of filling it?
So she waited for him, and watched him come back to her, balancing full glasses carefully as he wound his way between the jostling backs of the Saturday-night crowd.
“I’m sorry about your spoiled week-end,” she said. And with carefully measured detachment, since clearly this was no light matter to him at the moment: “Of course, there are other girls.”
He was just setting down his glass on the table, and for the first time his hand shook. She looked up in surprise, and met his eyes at close range, suddenly fallen blank in a frozen face, as grey and opaque as unlighted glass. He sat down slowly, every line of his body drawn so taut that the air between them quivered.
“Who mentioned a girl?”
“There are only two sorts,” she said patiently. “There was at least a fifty-fifty chance of guessing right first time about the companion who let you down.”
He drew in a long, cautious breath and relaxed a little. The slow fires came back distrustfully into his eyes. “Yes… I suppose it wasn’t difficult.” His voice groped through the words syllable by syllable, like feet in the dark feeling their way. “We fell out,” he said. “It’s finished. I can’t say I wasn’t warned, at least half a dozen of my friends must have told me she was playing me for a sucker, but I never believed it.”
“You could still be right about her,” said Bunty reasonably, “and they could still be wrong.”
“Not a chance! It all blew up in my face to-day. For good.”
“There may be more to be said for her than you think now. You may not always feel like this. You and she may make it up again, given a little goodwill.”
“No!” he said with quiet violence. “That’s out! She’ll never have the chance to let me down again.”
“Then—at the risk of repeating myself—there are other girls.”
He wasn’t listening. No doubt he heard the sound of her voice quite clearly, just as those blue-circled, burning eyes of his were memorising her face, but all he saw and all he heard had to do with his own private pain. Bunty was merely a vessel set to receive the overflow of his distress.
“We only got engaged ten days ago,” he said. “God knows why she ever said yes, she had this other fellow on the string all along. Whatever she wanted out of it, it wasn’t me.”
“It happens,” said Bunty. “When you commit yourself to another person you take that risk. There isn’t any way of hedging your bet.”
“She hedged hers pretty successfully,” he said bitterly.
“She wasn’t committed. And you’re better off without her.”
So softly that she hardly heard him, more to himself than to her, he said, “Oh, my God, what is there in it, either way?” His hands clenched into white-knuckled fists on his knees. She thought for a moment that he was going to faint, and instinctively put out a hand and took him by the arm, no hesitant touch, but a firm grip, tethering him fast to the world it seemed he would gladly have shaken off in favour of darkness. It brought his head up with a jerk, his eyes dazed and dark in that blanched face. They stared steadily at each other for a moment, devouring line and substance and form so intensely that neither of them would ever be able to hide from the other again, under any name or in any disguise.
“Look,” said Bunty quietly, “you’re not fit to drive any distance to-night. Go home, fall into bed, sleep her off, drink her off if you have to, get another girl, anything, only give yourself a chance. It isn’t the end of the world… it had damned well better not be! You’ve got a life before you, and it isn’t owed to her, it’s owed in part to the rest of us, but mostly to yourself. You go under and we’ve all lost.”
She wondered if he even knew that she was at least twelve years older than he was. She had begun by feeling something like twenty years older, and now she was no longer sure that there was even a year between them. This was no adolescent agony, but a mature passion that shook the whole room, even though the babel went on round it, oblivious and superficial, a backcloth of triviality.
“It is the end of the world,” said the young man, quite softly and simply. “That’s what you don’t understand.”
The clock behind the bar began to chime with an unexpected, silvery sound.
“Time! ” called the barman, pitching his voice on the same mellifluous note. “Time, gentlemen, please!”
She spent an unnecessary few minutes in the cloakroom, tidying her hair and repairing her lipstick, not so much to escape from him as to give him every chance to escape from her if he wanted to. Men are much more likely than women to repent of having said too much and stripped themselves too naked, and it might well be that now, having unloaded the worst of his burden, he would prefer to make off into the darkness and never see or think of her again. But when she stepped out from the lighted doorway, under the silver stars of the sign, he was there waiting for her, a slender, tense shadow beside the low chain fence of the car park. She felt no surprise and no uneasiness.
“Have you got transport? Then may I give you a lift home?”
“It’s out of your way,” she said equably. “I live in Comerford, and I imagine you’re heading for the M.6.”
“It won’t add more than three miles to the distance. And there’s nobody waiting for me,” he said tightly. She was growing used to that tone, but it still puzzled her, because for all its muted desperation it was strangely innocent of self-pity.
“Then if you don’t mind going round that way, I should be glad to ride with you.” Why not? All he wanted was to warm his hands at this tiny fire for a few minutes longer. And she could take care of herself. She was a mature woman, self-reliant and well-balanced, she was not afraid to venture nearer to another person, not afraid that she would not be able to control the relationship, even extricate herself from it if the need arose. She was old enough to be able to offer him the companionship he needed, and not have it mistaken for something else.
His hand touched her arm punctiliously as they walked across to the car, but he kept the touch light and tentative, as if mortally afraid of damaging the grain of comfort he had got out of her. The broad space of tarmac was emptying fast, the last few cars peeling off in turn between the white posts of the exit. Soon they would have the night to themselves on the dark country road into Comerford.