I got back to my flat before eleven, in time for the telephone call; I found Roy there himself. He was sitting in a dressing gown, clean from a bath but heavy-eyed.
“Just going to bed,” he said. “Night duty last night. I’m extremely tired.”
He was still working in his civilian office. He had received my message, and taken the first train to London.
“I hear the news is true,” I said.
“It’s true,” said Roy.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“It was the one thing I couldn’t tell you.” He looked at me with a troubled, piercing gaze, as though I and he each knew the reason. Yet nothing came home to me; I was angry and mystified. Quickly, he went on: “I’ve nothing to keep from you now. You see? I’ve come tonight to tell you something no one else knows. I’m going to get married.”
“Who to?”
“Rosalind, of course.”
Roy was smiling.
“You’re not to speak of it,” he said. “I haven’t asked her yet. I don’t know whether she’ll have me. I hope she will.”
“I think she might.”
“Excellent,” said Roy, taking my sarcasm equably. “You’ve always had a weakness for her yourself, old boy. Remember: I shall be a jealous husband. I need a child.”
He went on: “I couldn’t ask her, of course, until the other thing was settled. It will be nice to have everything settled.”
Then he said that he could not keep his eyes open, and must go to bed. I fetched him a book, in case he wanted to read in the morning: he was asleep before I went out of the room.
I could not think of sleep myself. I turned off the lights, pulled back the curtains, and gazed out of the window for a long time. The night was very still. There was no moon; the river glistened in the starlight; there was neither light nor sound down there, except for a moment when an engine chugged across to the southern bank. All over the sky, the stars were brilliant. “I hate the stars.” I heard that cry again.
So he had no hope left at all. I could see no other meaning. I could understand Joan’s relief. I shared it, and knew it was selfish at the root. If he must be driven so — I had felt more than once that night — then I was selfishly glad he could make this choice: I was glad he could choose a way which those round him could accept and approve. It might have been far otherwise. Somehow he had kept within society. It was a help to Joan and me, who cared for society more than he did.
Yet that was a trivial relief, by the side of his surrender. For he had given up now. For years he had struggled with his nature. Now he was tired of it, and he had given up. Active as he was, still eager with the pulse of life, he had done it in the most active way. He was going into battle, he wanted a wife and child. But he had no hope left.
I looked at the brilliant stars. There was no comfort there.
35: Consequences of a Marriage
Roy’s marriage caused more stir than his other choice. The wedding took place in the autumn, three weeks before he sailed across to America for his flying training. I was held in London and could not attend it. One of the features of those years was the geographical constraint under which we had to live; a few years earlier, we had had more leisure than most people in the world; now I could not get out of my office even for the day of Roy’s wedding. In fact, I had only seen him for an hour or two since that night he made the special visit to tell me his news. We were all confined, as it were in prison. Many friends I had not seen since the beginning of the war.
But sitting in London, dining now and then with the Royces, I heard enough furore about the marriage. Lady Muriel was at first incredulous; then, contrary to all expectations, she became unusually indulgent. “I refuse to blame him,” she said. “I’ve seen other men make marriages almost as impossible as this before they went to fight. When a man goes off to fight, he feels a basic need to find a — squaw. I consider this young woman is simply his squaw. As for the future,” she said in a grand, gnomic fashion, “I prefer not to speak.”
Joan suffered afresh from all the different wounds of humiliated and unrequited love. She could feel her confidence and self-respect seeping away; she ached with the hunger of her fibres; she was lost in the depth of her heart. She had been able to adjust herself to loss before, while she could believe that he was weighted down with misery, that neither she nor any woman could reach or console him. But now he had married a stupid, scheming, ordinary woman, as though he were an ordinary domestic man!
Joan was not only hurt to the quick, but bitterly angry. And the anger was good for her. It burned away some of her self-distrust. Anything was better than that she should be frightened off love for good. She might feel that no man would ever truly love her; for her, that would be a mortal wound. But her formidable temper blazed out. I was glad to see it. I was glad to see her defiantly going from party to party on the arm of another man.
From two sources I heard that Ralph Udal had also taken it bitterly. Apparently Rosalind had not considered it necessary to break her engagement to him until she was simultaneously engaged to Roy. Had he suspected nothing? Was he so self-sufficient that he convinced himself all was well? I had not met Lady Boscastle since that final end-of-the-world week in Cambridge, but this was a subject peculiarly suited to her talents. She wrote me several feline, sub-acid letters about the “emotional misadventures of our unfortunate vicar”.
Udal was really unhappy. He showed it by one clear sign. He could not bear to stay in Boscastle where Rosalind had so often visited him, where — as even Lady Boscastle admitted — he must have known delight. He begged Arthur Brown to find him a living, any kind of living, “even one”, Arthur Brown reported over the telephone with a rotund wily chuckle, “even one with slightly less amenities.” Arthur Brown had exerted himself with his usual experienced kindliness; he managed to find Udal a slightly better living in Beccles.
Before Ralph Udal left the vicarage at Boscastle, Roy stayed with him for a weekend. It happened while Roy was on embarkation leave, and I did not see him afterwards. I would have given much to know what they said to each other; I was beginning to realise that Udal was a more singular man than I had at first detected. I guessed that they each felt a surge of their old friendship, unconstrained, warmer and more spontaneous than one could credit.
During the autumn, Rosalind came to see me. It was her first visit to London since Roy married her, and she was living in state at the Dorchester. As soon as she arrived in my flat, she busied herself tidying it up.
“I must find someone to look after you. It’s time you married again,” she scolded me. “I must say, it depresses me to think of you coming back here — and nothing ready for you.”
Then she sat down with a smile, knowing, self-important, triumphant.
“I’d better be careful,” she said. “It’s a bit of a drag for the first few months, so they tell me.” It was her way of telling me that she was pregnant. “We didn’t waste much time, did we?” Again she gave her mock-modest, humorous, surreptitious grin. “Of course, there wasn’t much time to waste. We only had three weeks, and that isn’t very long, is it?”