“You look as if you’d had a shock,” she said and she gave a little giggle. “Well, you have, haven’t you? It’s not every day you hear the man you thought was your husband is someone else’s.”
I began rather shakily: “I don’t know who you are or what your motive is…”
“My motive,” she interrupted, “is to tell you what you ought to know. You’re a lady, I can see that. You’re well educated and I’ve no doubt you were very pleased with yourself… till now. I’ve watched you in the Gardens. I wondered whether to speak to you then. I had to do a bit of detective work to find him. Then I thought this is better. I’d call and tell you. I’ll wait here and see him if you like. That’s going to be a nice surprise for him! What about some refreshments? I could do with a glass of wine.”
I said to her: “I don’t believe a word you’re saying.”
“Not when you’ve seen the lines?”
“It’s not possible. If he were married to you how could he marry me?”
“He couldn’t. That’s the point. He’s not married to you, he’s married to me.”
“He would never do such a thing.”
“He thought I was dead. I was traveling down from Oxford to London by train. That was a year ago. There was a disaster on the line outside Reading. You must have heard of it. It was one of the biggest crashes ever. Many people were killed. I almost was. Unlucky for him not quite. I was in hospital for three months and nobody knew who I was for some time. I had no papers on me and I couldn’t remember much myself. As for my devoted husband, he made no effort to claim me. Jolly good riddance, he said. He’d realized long before that what a mistake he had made. It goes to show that young gentlemen up at Oxford for their education shouldn’t get caught up with barmaids, leastways they shouldn’t go so far as to marry them. Joliffe was a hothead. No sooner do I say ‘Unhand me, sir. Nothing of that till I get my marriage lines’ and there are my marriage lines as you see them now! But marriage is for good. That’s what he forgot. So there you have the story of my life in a few sentences. It’s not uncommon. He’s not the first young gentleman who’s acted rash and lived to regret it.”
“If this had been so he would have told me…”
“Joliffe tell you! You don’t know half what goes on behind that handsome mug of his. I used to say to him, ‘All that charm of yours will be your downfall.’ There were lots of fellows after me, I can tell you, but it had to be him and there he was caught. He couldn’t let me meet his family, could he? He saw that. What ructions there’d be! So he got me rooms in Oxford and we were there for close on a year. Married bliss! It didn’t last very long. He saw his mistake. He was always making excuses and going away. Then I was coming to meet him in London and there was this train. He always used to say he was lucky. I reckon he thought the day that train went off its rails was the luckiest in his life. But he didn’t look far enough, did he?”
“This is such a fantastic story,” I said.
“Life with Joliffe Milner would always be like that. Fantastic, that’s the word for it.”
“You had better come back when my… Mr. Milner is here.”
She shook her head.
“No, I’m staying. I want to come face to face with him. I want you to be there when I do. Because if you’re not he’ll cook up some story for you. He’s a great cooker-up, our Joliffe. No, I want to catch him, just like that before he’s had the time to work something out.”
“This is going to be proved a great mistake. There must be some other Joliffe Milner who is your husband.”
She shook her head.
“Oh no, I’ve made sure of that.”
I did not know what to do. From the moment I had first set eyes on her I had felt a sense of terrible foreboding. There had been something about the manner in which she had shadowed me which had filled me with apprehension.
I could not bear to sit in this room with her. I said: “You will excuse me…”
She inclined her head with a smirk as though she were the mistress of the house, giving me leave to go.
I ran up to our bedroom. It was like a nightmare. It simply wasn’t possible. It was some horrible joke in the bad taste to be expected of such a person. I was thinking of her in Annie’s terms. A person!
What a wretched half hour I spent. I wondered what she was doing in the drawing room. I imagined those big calculating eyes assessing everything. If Joliffe had married surely he would have told me. But would he? There was so much I did not know about him and the more I discovered the more I realized there was to learn.
It seemed an age before I heard his key in the lock. I sped to the top of the stairs. He was in the hall and smiled when he saw me.
“Hello, my darling.”
“Joliffe,” I cried. “There’s a woman… She’s here.”
He came up the stairs two at a time. I did not wait for him to reach me. I started to walk towards the drawing room and threw the door open.
She was seated on the sofa, her legs crossed, showing the flounces of petticoats, a sly smile on her face.
The next seconds I knew would be the most important through which I had ever lived.
In that short time I promised myself that he would look at her, prove her to have made false accusations, show me and her that he was not the Joliffe Milner whose name appeared with hers on those marriage lines.
I advanced into the room. He followed me. He stopped short. She smiled at him insolently. And in that moment I felt my world collapsing about me.
“Good God,” he said. “Bella!”
She answered, “Your own loving little wife, no less.”
“Bella… no!”
“A ghost returned from the grave. Not quite. Because I was never in the grave. A little shock for such a devoted husband.”
“Bella,” he repeated. “What… does this mean?”
“It means I’m here. Mrs. Joliffe Milner herself come to claim her conjugal rights and all that goes with it.”
He said nothing. I could see that he was completely stunned.
“It was quite a job to find you,” she said.
“But I understood…”
“You understood what you wanted to understand.”
“You were killed. There was proof. Your coat had your name on it.”
She laughed with exaggerated heartiness. “That was Fanny. Remember Fanny? She had a sealskin hat and I lent her my sealskin coat. Oh that was a lovely coat, one of your presents to me. Remember? I was so fond of it I had my name worked on the lining. We went up to London together—she in my sealskin I in her beaver. She was killed, poor Fanny, and they thought she was me of course. I was nearly done for. I didn’t know who I was for three months… then it came back slowly. It took me a long time to find you, Joey, but here I am.”
I said: “It’s true… what this woman says…”
He looked at me blankly.
I turned and went from the room.
I stumbled up to our bedroom and I asked myself what I could do next. I was bewildered; my happiness had disintegrated so rapidly that I could not think clearly. The only thought which kept hammering in my head was: Joliffe is that woman’s husband. Not yours. You have no place in this house. It belongs to her.
What could I do? I should have to go away, leave them together.
I must do something. I took a case and started to put a few things into it. Then I sat down and covered my face with my hands. I wanted to shut out the sight of this room where I had been so happy for I knew that that happiness was built on no firm foundation. It had collapsed as quickly as the houses of cards my mother used to build with me when I was a child.
Joliffe came into the room. He looked stricken—all the assurance drained from him. I would never have believed he could have looked like that.