A Voice Like Velvet Page 3

  Thinking of him now, when she had to—for memories chose the queerest times to thrust themselves upon one—she often thought what a contrast there was between Mr Bisham and Captain Bud.

  Ernest always inspired her and made her feel conscious of her increasing position in society. Bud had always made her feel conscious of having married beneath her, which was a horrible thing to think, let alone feel. She would think: ‘Now I know I’m a born snob,’ and she would turn from Bud in disgust. He was called Fred.

  Fred Bud liked pubs. He liked to totter out of one and into another, and he liked to know the Christian names of the owners. He liked to know the Christian names of most of the customers too, and he liked saying, ‘What’ll y’have?’ to all and sundry, though, if any of them failed to return in kind he was singularly quick on the uptake.

  In a few short months Marjorie was filled with a kind of horror at herself for having even contemplated him.

  And she fled.

  And she very soon found that the position of a young girl who is stupid enough to flee even from Satan himself, unless it is legal, is a very acute one. As her solicitor told her, she should have come to him first. She should have come to him on the quiet, and together they would have set a trap to catch Captain Bud when he was up to one of his larks, which were inevitably a neat fusion of alcohol and other women. As things were, the captain, now on the alert, was also now the innocent party, in the eyes of the world, and he could rush round to all his friends and say his wife had run out on him after only a few months, and that he could but conclude there was a man involved somewhere. This he did, adding that he had spoilt her from the word Go, and been sorry for her, but that now he had no option but to divorce her for desertion whether he managed to catch the co-respondent or not. He proceeded to write her two carefully worded letters asking her to return to him. But, as she knew, and her solicitor friend knew, Bud knew quite well she would be too proud to do this even if she wanted to. Marjorie made another mistake in being too thoroughly embarrassed to tell her solicitor everything, but she just couldn’t, he was an old family friend of her father’s. Had she done so, she might have got a divorce from Bud, with a bit of luck and a bit of added scandal. But she dodged this and the next proceeding was to wait three years until Bud brought his desertion case. As she heard from various sources, Bud spent the interim using such of her money as he controlled, and in telling his friends: ‘Damn nuisance this three years wait, old man, but it’s useless to expect any new evidence. I thought there was a man, but I doubt it now. Dear old Marjorie had absolutely no sex appeal, absolutely none at all.’

  Marjorie’s solicitor had side whiskers. He was of the old school of thought, as the saying went, and although his stern countenance had been shocked out of its composure by one or two tasty cases, his mind had never really entered the wild arena which made up the present decade. Even when the blitz shattered his famous office chandelier, under which, it was said, Oscar Wilde had once passed—though on his way to a more go-ahead solicitor—the dignity of the premises remained. Pictures of other side-whiskered solicitors still lined the cracked walls, and the frosted glass on the doors still bore the names of the titled partners. Marjorie’s solicitor still sat in his accustomed swivel chair with the grey stuffing coming out of it, surrounded by the dust of centuries, jewels from the chandelier, bits of glass and a shattered book-shelf. And he sounded very pained to have to tell Marjorie that her case was ‘over yesterday. You’re a divorced woman, my dear,’ he said throatily. He still thought it was a dreadful thing to be, even though she was entirely innocent and had never done anything in her life more abandoned than have three brown sherries. To Marjorie, however, the news came like the announcement of a school whole holiday. She thought at once and, in fact, exclaimed: ‘I’m a free woman again, then! It’s all over and I’m free! It’s all been a sordid and dreadful dream!’ Her strange and immediate impulse was to dash to the nearest Lyons and have a cup of tea in the friendly din there. But she had to be polite and stay until her solicitor had made a pained and stately speech.

  ‘My dear child, you mustn’t mind my offering you a little advice. I’m sure this unhappy business will be an object lesson to you. Men are very unscrupulous, and this little … amateur gentleman belongs to a very common kind. I do most sincerely hope you will treat me as a friend, more of a friend, after this … distressing incident—if you can call a thing that has gone on for four years an incident? Please don’t go hotheadedly into a marriage again without asking my advice, my dear! I’m old enough to be your grandfather, and I was a friend of your father’s. And remember, you must marry some money next time. This man Bud has cost you most of your inheritance.’

  This part of the sorry business pained him even more than the other part, and Marjorie noticed he could hardly bring himself to speak of it. But in the end it was just no good speaking of it, he said; they must speak of the present, and of course the future, not the past. The past was dead. When she thought of the past, she must think only of the happier memories, as we all had to. It was awful thinking about our mistakes. There was her father to think of, he pointed out, even though it was not very nice to think of that bull; he had always distrusted Shorthorns. She must not remember her tears. After that, he rang for some coffee, only to be told that all the firm’s cups had been broken by blast, and that the firemen had sprayed their specially imported coffee with some eighty odd gallons of dirty river water. It was still all over the general office floor. His elderly clerk looked rather like a Walt Disney spaniel which had just picked itself up after falling nine hundred feet down a lift shaft. He was permanently pale and panting. Marjorie’s solicitor dismissed him courteously and said it was no fault of his about the cups or the coffee.

  ‘No, Sir Tom,’ the old man quivered, pleased, and he shambled out with his trousers hanging.

  ‘Well, I’ll go,’ Marjorie said, still thinking of the friendly din in Lyons teashops. ‘And I can’t thank you nearly enough for … well, everything.’ She really meant for not charging her very much, but it was difficult to say that.

  On the way out, he asked her what her plans were. When she sounded vague, he suggested that she should put the little money remaining into a bit of property, such as a new house. He said she wasn’t getting any younger, if he might say so, and the great thing was to have a roof over her head. And she had to live somewhere. He said why didn’t she live where he did, amongst her own kind? He lived near Woking, in Surrey, and there was golf and the pine trees were very healthy. He and his wife would help her make some friends. ‘And it’s near to London. But you’re fond of London, perhaps, and want to live there?’

  ‘No,’ she hesitated. ‘There’s the club. And I like theatres. But I think I’m used to the country.’

  Pleased, he said the country was the best idea. Why didn’t she come down for a weekend and have a look round? She thought, well, he can’t be too old fashioned, or he’d frown at a divorced woman! Perhaps people weren’t ever what they seemed? Perhaps they just had to pretend? And times really had changed, hadn’t they? It really wasn’t quite so monstrous for a woman to have been divorced—even if she was guilty? And she wasn’t guilty. She was just silly.

  In any case, if people were still so stupid as to mind if somebody had played one or two bad cards in their day, well, good luck to them.

  She suddenly saw herself as a kind of Woking Merry Widow!

  Yes, it would be rather amusing to buy a house down there, and make people wonder about her. She would make a few intimate friends, no doubt, and the rest could wonder about her to their hearts’ content. She would do the garden with a sad expression in a brown, floppy hat. She would do any war work that cropped up. Nobody would guess her advanced age, and people would wonder why on earth she hadn’t been called up; they’d probably put it down to her kidneys. If life was to be fun, you had to make it so; you had to create some situation whereby Life was inclined to have a go at you. It could surprise you. If you felt secretl
y lonely and often miserable, nobody need guess it. And who knew what might not happen?

  In a burst of excitement she bought Tredgarth, a white mackintosh, a lawn-mower—and a radio. Before the furniture arrived she turned on the radio in the empty hall and tuned in to the Overseas Service. A resonant and attractive masculine voice said, quite untruthfully, that she had just been listening to excerpts from ‘Peer Gynt’.

  CHAPTER IV

  BRIEF but repeated mental excursions into the past being the hobby and the habit of the many, Mr Bisham often forgave himself for indulging it. He was also of the variety who found singular fascination in revisiting scenes from his past, if circumstances made it reasonably easy and attractive. If he passed through Putney, his head always turned towards a particular road and a big house on the far corner. One day, he realized, he might be revisiting the house where he lived now, a solitary figure in a brown overcoat and long white beard, staring sadly at the past which was still safely Now. Mr Bisham liked to dream, and he was decidedly introspective. He never knew whether it was a good habit or a bad one. Perhaps, like most habits, it had its good and bad points. The subconscious mind made a fascinating study, didn’t it? The mind had such depths, you could explore and explore, and it didn’t matter much where you were or what you were doing. You could watch yourself. He was standing in his bedroom-cum-study upstairs at Tredgarth now, watching himself as he had been standing behind those strange velvet curtains in a strange house. There he had stood, with his heart thumping as it always did, and his senses aware of the exotic. As a matter of fact, under the tension, he had thought of quite ridiculous things, such as liking Saturday nights, and hating rugger, but liking soccer and his prep school. It was odd. And now, standing in his bedroom, and looking at the necklace in his hands, instead of concentrating on the rare beauty of it, and regretting that he dare not give it to Marjorie for their wedding anniversary, or for her birthday, or for Christmas, or for any other time, he suddenly started thinking about the two and sixpenny necklace he had given to Celia that time, and for just the same kind of reason. Locked up in their flat, he had had emeralds and turquoise brooches and sapphire pins by the dozen; but they were dynamite. He thought now, as he had often thought then: ‘She doesn’t know, and she must never know.’ And as he made no money out of it, he had regretted not being able to buy a safe. Yet, he thought now, was there any reason why he shouldn’t buy a safe now? He was Ernest Bisham, the famous announcer, and surely it would not be odd for Ernest Bisham to own a safe? One of his most distinguished colleagues owned a fruit farm! That was no more curious than a safe? Besides, he surely owed it to Marjorie? She must never be hurt. He owed it to Bess, and she must never be hurt. Poor old Bess, who believed in him so, but who didn’t really know him at all. Marjorie didn’t know him either. How could she? A woman had to know all about a man—or feel that she knew all about him. And he well knew that it was because she didn’t feel it that things were not quite right between them.

  But where this was true of Marjorie, it was not true of Celia. Celia had no brains, and very little perception. She was just a sex machine. She would probably have been thrilled if she’d ever tumbled upon the truth about him! She adored the pictures! Indeed, it might have saved them! But, if Marjorie ever found out? He often imagined her horrified expression, with Bess, haggard, in the background. Old Marjorie would cry: ‘Whatever do you do it for, Ernest?’ He would smile and say regretfully: ‘I can tell you why I started it, Marjorie! And perhaps the reason is still the same! I wanted to!’ ‘Wanted to!’ they would cry in horror. Then he might say there had never been any money in it, but it had saved him a few times, financially, in a small and sordid way. Now, he might say, he did it partly because he found it irresistible, and partly because in his present exalted position the thrill was so intense through the risk being so much greater; moreover, opportunities for meeting the wealthy had never been quite so splendid before he had become an announcer. He now met rich eccentrics, and rich widows—well, too often. And some of them were very talkative. This did not make it particularly easy, but it made it both attractive and possible.

  He stood looking at the proceeds of his latest robbery, and thought how nice his wife would look in some of it. How thrilling it would be to see her face light up if he gave her the pearl necklace that might have cost him so dear. There was something to solve here, it was galling. This necklace would have been wasted on Celia. But Marjorie would be a perfect setting for it. She had height, and grace, and she had a really lovely throat.

  Hearing someone moving in the house, he put the valuables back in a copy of the Sunday Times and locked it away in a deep drawer in his desk. He kept thinking how much he would like to give Marjorie the necklace. But it would be the act of a lunatic. The papers were full of it, not forgetting photographs. The worst must never happen, and he felt so sure it never would, providing he used his brains. Fate didn’t suffer fools, and he had always conceded that. He thought of Marjorie when he had given her the puppy. He had suddenly seen that there could easily be love between them. Imagine giving her the product of the adventures that ran the risk of costing them both so dear! When he gave her the puppy, she had looked up with such a lovely expression, like an excited child. She was sensitive.

  Locking the drawer and putting the key in his pocket, he sat down in his armchair and idly took up the newspaper. His latest adventure was spread about wherever there wasn’t any war news. He sat frowning and wanting to think about Marjorie and the future, but his thoughts were flooded with memories of Celia—and the past.

  Mr Bisham, amidst the stress of present problems, found it comfortable to tell himself he ought never to have met Celia. In the same way, it was comfortable to think that Marjorie ought never to have met that dreadful fellow Captain Bud. One of the first things she had suggested was that she and Ernest should tell each other everything they thought conducive to a successful second marriage. To this he had agreed; and whereas he had told her everything except the darkest secret in his life, she had told him absolutely everything. But if you were going to say that all couples who made dreadful marriages ought never to have met each other, it wasn’t going to get you anywhere. So perhaps it was better to think how character forming it was, or how character damaging. It was a kind of fast trick pulled by Life, or Fate, which had a perverted sense of humour at times; it was rather like a man who knows you are sincere and so pulls a fast one. It was true that later on it could make it up to the victims, who lay flat on their beds feeling rather tired. Life was a great one at timing, too, better than the very best actor. These little jokes always happened at the psychological moment; either you were broke, or desperate in some other way; Fate waved a wand shaped like a devil’s tail—and the trouble began. And the worst of it was it could go on and on; for, easy as it always was to get into trouble, it was perfectly frightful trying to get out of it. It was like trying to reland on a rocky coast when the storm was at its height. As a boy, Mr Bisham thought that his one and only bit of trouble was likely to be his father. He had much in common with Marjorie, for his mother had died before he had been old enough to know her, and for some hidden reason which even Bess didn’t know, Mr Bisham Senior had kept no photographs of her and never spoke of her. Even more queerly, Bess had herself been banished the Putney house when still a girl, and sent to a relative in far away Norfolk. Ernest knew nothing of her existence until he was adult, so strange were the ways of fathers. He never even contemplated enquiring about his mother, for his father was a formidable kind of man who didn’t go in for talking. He went in for silences. He was very high up in one of the Ministries, and his work in the Great War appeared to have been of a vital and secret nature. There were clues of various kinds that he had made the name of Bisham a very strong and reliable one, and perhaps it was the very knowledge of this that had perversely inspired Ernest to his unusual hobby, which he had first regarded, sinfully, indeed, as a profession. There were plenty of clues, too, that people were afraid of Mr
Bisham Senior, and this also seemed to be a sort of challenge. Clerks would call at the Putney house, moving rather furtively, and they would timidly ask if they might be ushered into the Presence. And one of them always asked, pale, ‘What kind of mood is he in this morning, young man?’

  The house in Putney was square and formidable itself, cold through unnecessary coal economy, and all the doors seemed frightened to open. Where the Bisham relations hid, never came to light, and it was only later that he discovered Norfolk was the place. The only touch of humanity at all was old Mrs Clarkson and a series of charwomen who crept about with buckets to do the doorsteps. They stayed till they could stand the silences no longer and then fled from the place. Mrs Clarkson seemed to stand it; Ernest always supposed she was adaptable, like an old cat, and he grew very fond of her. She was always there all through his prep school days at Harrogate, and his public school days, and whenever he came back for holidays she looked after his clothes and tried hard to take the place of a mother or an aunt. She was a beady-eyed old thing with a witchlike chin, and he still remembered her frequent position, peeping at keyholes in his interest, to see how the latest silence was getting on within. Ernest got through unbelievable silences, usually with Havelock Ellis propped up against the water-jug, and now and again a spot of Meredith. It had long since dawned on him that life wasn’t playing fair by him. What was the use of being taught the public school notion that you must always be a sportsman and a gentleman, if life didn’t keep to the same rules? He was still at his public school when it occurred to him he might have to take the matter into his own hands sooner or later, but before he was quite ready to do so a schoolboyish incident set a strange train of thought seeping through his young mind. He was dared to climb through the Headmaster’s study window one wintry night and steal his birch. His reaction to this challenge startled even himself. He at once accepted the challenge and with an outward air of complete calm proceeded to accomplish the unnerving feat. He still remembered the intensity of his feelings in the darkness of that awe-inspiring study; the speaking furniture and the distant footsteps in the quadrangle outside: his noiseless return, with the birch prized out of the locked cupboard with a bit of wire. Moreover, on a second challenge, he calmly took it back again. And he remembered being asked: ‘But I say, man, weren’t you dead scared of being caught? It would have meant six of the best!’