The Rosemary Tree Page 26

  Now she had started she was not finding it hard to talk to Harriet. She felt rather like a little girl running into one of those safe Edwardian nurseries where Nanny sat darning before the fire.

  “Did he act in plays with you, love?” asked Harriet shyly. She had never been to the theatre in her life and was ignorant of the phraseology.

  “No, he is a writer, not an actor. He writes vile but exciting plays and hateful but very gripping thrillers that are read all over the world. You know what thrillers are, Harriet?”

  “The body in the first chapter and the hanging in the last. I’ve tried to read a few but I’ve not the intellect for it,” said Harriet humbly. “I couldn’t seem to make sense of how it was they got from one to the other, and what I could understand took away my appetite.”

  “Michael’s first play would have taken away your appetite,” said Daphne. “It was horrible.”

  “Were you acting in it, love?”

  “Yes, I was the parlormaid.”

  “Parlormaid!” ejaculated Harriet. That a Wentworth (and Daphne’s mother had been a Wentworth) should even in a play demean herself by waiting at table shocked her profoundly. “A parlormaid! You should have been the heroine, my dear.”

  “That’s what I thought,” said Daphne, smiling. “And I was determined that Michael should think so too. It was too late for me to be the heroine of his first play but I made up my mind I’d get a good part in his second. I’d had to fight hard before Uncle Pete and Aunt Mary would let me go on the stage; they said I’d neither health nor talent for it and I was wild to prove them wrong; but when I met Michael I was already twenty-five and had got no further than playing small parts at a theatre in the suburbs. His first play was tried out there. He was only twenty-three and already famous. His first thriller was published when he was nineteen, and made into a movie, and there had been two successful books after that. He was the enfant terrible of literature. Think of it, Harriet, twenty-three and famous! And a junior partner in a flourishing firm of solicitors as well. And I’d got nowhere.” She paused. “It was the Christmas of 1938.”

  “The last Christmas before the war,” said Harriet. “Was the play a success?”

  “Of course,” said Daphne. “Everything Michael did was a success. It was transferred to the West End and I went with it. I only had four words to say but at least I was saying them in a West End theatre, in a play that was assured of a long run, so that I was assured of time in which to captivate Michael. I had my work cut out for he was as popular as his play. I think people were intrigued that so young a man should have such a horrible imagination. Contrast was always part of his charm. He’d be full of vitality one day, and great fun, and the next day he’d be drifting about like a lost spirit, looking into your face as though he wanted to ask the way but expected you would strike him if he did. And his good looks had the same sort of contrast; he was so wiry and energetic and yet he had the sort of grace that makes people appear fragile when they’ve really got a rhinoceros toughness.”

  “Physical toughness,” said Harriet, “not nervous toughness. Folks don’t fall from laughter to fear in that way when they’re nervously strong, and nerves take their toll of the body in the end.”

  “I never noticed a thing wrong with his nerves,” said Daphne.

  “But you noticed his fear, though you did not recognize it,” said Harriet. “When I was a nanny I always gave a scared child phosphates. I hadn’t been a week with John before I started him on phosphates, so scared as he was of those other wretched boys, that Judith’s children, and he never developed anything worse than catarrh and headaches. What sort of childhood did he have?”

  “Michael? I really don’t know,” said Daphne. “He never spoke about it. Really, Harriet, you can’t trace every mortal thing back to childhood.”

  “Every mortal thing,” said Harriet. “It’s only the immortal thing that a man can be judged on, that bit of himself that he makes as he does the best he can with what fate handed out to him. Well, I’m listening. What day was it that you stopped wanting his money and fame and went mad all in a moment for the steel of his body and the fire of his blood?”

  Daphne was profoundly startled by the sudden energy with which Harriet spoke, and looked in astonishment at the serene old face in the frilled nightcap. The bright eyes, so deeply set in their wise puckers, were regarding her with twinkling but penetrating amusement.

  “I wasn’t born in a wheel chair,” continued Harriet placidly. “And I’ve not lost the use of my memory. It’s surprising how hot a man’s lips can be when he desires you, and there are times you think his arms will crack your ribs, and yet you glory in it. There was a man once; he was married. My old dad locked me in my room, and I lived to thank him for it, though at the time I all but kicked the door down. Proper little vixen I was. But I could never seem to take to another man and so I became a nanny. At least I’ll have children, I thought, even if they’re not my own. Go on, love. You won’t shock me.”

  “Yes, I will, Harriet, because I never did.”

  “Never did what?” asked Harriet.

  “Never stopped wanting his money and fame.”

  Daphne looked again at Harriet and saw that she had indeed shocked her. Passion Harriet could understand, calculating passion she could not. Seeing the bewilderment that had taken the place of amusement in Harriet’s eyes Daphne found she was ashamed. The word calculating echoed in her mind, for she had used it long before. She had said that Michael’s cruelty had been calculating, and Harriet had tried to qualify her statement. She did not want to go on with this conversation. She drank from Harriet’s implicit judgments.

  “I’m making you tired, Harriet,” she said.

  “You can’t stop now, love,” said Harriet firmly. “And me with the ears sticking out of the side of my head.”

  “No,” said Daphne, and knew she couldn’t. The common-place humiliating little story had been her secret but now, shaken as she was, it seemed running out of her like liberated poison. “But I wanted Michael himself too, for it was just as you say, Harriet. He kissed me casually one day and the carelessness of his kiss suddenly drove me wild. I wanted the other sort.”

  “Did you get them?” asked Harriet.

  “Not at once, and the scheming for them made me more in love than ever, for I’ve never been patient. I was clever, I think. I found out a little weakness of Michael’s—he was a snob. I played on that. He hadn’t been to a public school or university, he’d gone straight from a grammar school to the solicitor’s office, and he was sensitive about it. He had a ridiculous longing to be intimate with a class to which he didn’t naturally belong. He had thought his fame would help him there but it hadn’t altogether. But I could help. I took him to the right places and introduced him to the right people and he was so adaptable that very soon no one would have known, outwardly, that he had not been born among them. He had always admired me and now he was intensely grateful to me, and also in need of me. Because you know, Harriet, however brilliant their veneer people are never wholly at ease among people who are not their own people. They’re lonely. The acting of a part exhausts them. But I showed Michael that he need not act with me. I worked it so that we were in a delightful conspiracy together. I was the princess smuggling him into the palace in his fancy dress. I showed him that I loved him and he was flattered. It wasn’t long before he was as much in love with me as I was with him. We got engaged and we had great fun; and yet it wasn’t a comfortable love, Harriet. It was like a fever.”

  “Then you got quarrelsome,” stated Harriet. “I remember you in a fever as a child. Regular little spitfire, you were.”

  “He said we must wait to get married,” said Daphne. “He said his career was not firmly established yet, which was nonsense. He kept putting it off and our nerves got frayed to ribbons.”

  “It’s the responsibility frightens a young man,” said Har
riet.

  “Then the war broke out and he said he would not fight. He had not told me before that he was a pacifist and I was furious, Harriet. The lovers and husbands of my friends were all going into the services and I was ashamed. But though I argued with him I tried to keep my temper for his second play was going into rehearsal and there was a good part in it that exactly suited me. You see at that time it was only the phoney war and parts in plays still seemed important. But when I asked Michael to get me the part he said casting was not the author’s business. He wouldn’t even try. I forced him to say why and he said I wasn’t a good enough actress. If the play was not perfectly cast he was afraid it might fail. I lost my temper and he lost his. He said I was a careerist. I said he was a coward. His cruelty made me so furious that I lost my head and said I wouldn’t marry him.”

  “Why was he cruel?” asked Harriet. “Why should he have put you in his play to harm it?”

  “I wouldn’t have harmed it,” said Daphne shortly. “I was a good actress, and if he’d got me the part I’d have been able to prove it.”

  “Well, there now!” said Harriet soothingly. “But he wouldn’t and so you returned his ring. Was it diamonds?”

  “No, an emerald. Then the war broke out properly, the real war, and France fell, and not long after I heard that Michael was in the army. I’d been wretched, wanting him back again, and now I wondered if he’d given up his pacifism to get me back. I waited for a letter from him but it didn’t come. Then I heard he was on leave in London and I asked a friend of ours to ask us both to her house but not to tell Michael I’d be there. She did that, and he was detestably courteous and polite, but after dinner I took him into the little garden and asked him why he had given up his pacifism. He said he hadn’t, that when the war was over he’d be a pacifist again, but that with England in such danger he couldn’t keep out of it. I felt humiliated that it was nothing to do with me, but I said I was sorry I had called him a coward. He smiled but he didn’t say anything, and so I told him I was leaving the stage and joining the A. T. S. Then he said, ‘Daphne, I’m sorry I called you a careerist. Forget it.’ But he didn’t say anything else and I believe he would have let us part again, only the sirens went, and he had to take me back to my flat. I made him come in and then of course it was all on again.”

  “Had he kept the ring?” asked Harriet. She had Scottish blood in her and was of a saving turn of mind.

  “No, he’d sold it,” said Daphne harshly, for it still hurt her that he had not kept that first ring in the hope of putting it on again. “He gave me another, one that had been his mother’s, a funny little pearl flower with a ruby in the center. I believe I’ve got it still, though I can’t imagine why I kept it.”

  “It may come in useful,” said Harriet economically. “Were you happy when you were engaged again?”

  “Sometimes, but not always,” said Daphne. “We could not be together often and when we were Michael was in such a moody state. I was patient. I did not press marriage on him. I agreed with him it should be sometime soon, perhaps his last leave before he was sent overseas. And then it was his last leave, and I had the weekend off. I was working in London then and still had my flat. He turned up on Friday evening and said he was leaving England on Monday. He did not know where he was going. I waited for him to tell me he’d got the licence and we’d get married before he went, but he didn’t, and I realized that he hadn’t even thought about getting it. His mind was obsessed with something else, not with me at all. His eyes had a queer look in them, as though he did not see anything that was happening about him but was looking at some vile picture inside his mind. I had seen him look like that when he was writing one of his hateful stories.”

  “Only this time it was going to happen to himself,” said Harriet.

  “We had a meal out and went to a show,” said Daphne, “and he pulled himself together and was full of a wild sort of fun that was not in the least amusing. Then we went back to my flat for a drink and all at once he was in love with me again, as much in love as in the old days. And then suddenly, as though he hadn’t realized at all how appallingly he had just hurt me, he asked me if I’d spend the weekend with him in the country. He said he knew of a place where we’d be at peace, and be able to love each other and forget the damn war. That was what he said. ‘Have some peace and forget the damn war.’ He begged me to go. He was like a child begging for a drink of water.”

  “You went?” Harriet asked.

  “No,” said Daphne. “I said, I’m sorry, Michael, but I can’t do it.’ ”

  There was an odd silence. The words of commendation for which Daphne was waiting from the Harriet who had brought up all her nurselings to such correctitude of behavior were not forthcoming. She looked up and saw Harriet looking at her with a puzzled look.

  “But, Harriet—” she murmured, and was herself puzzled.

  Harriet said, “Yes, love? Go on.”

  But Daphne could not go on. “Surely, Harriet, you don’t think that I—Harriet, what are you thinking?”

  “That you behaved as a well-brought-up young lady should have done,” said Harriet evenly. “Your uncle and aunt brought you up very well, I will say that for them. Yet you didn’t love them.”

  “I disliked them intensely,” said Daphne. “Harriet, I don’t understand you.”

  “I was wondering what held you back,” said Harriet. “Not love for them. Not love of God, for you always told me you had no religion before you married John. And you loved Michael; so you say. What held you back?”

  Daphne ignored the question and said sharply, “Harriet, don’t you think I did right?”

  “Yes,” said Harriet dryly. “Above ground. But it’s a poor sort of virtue that has no roots in love. It’s why you do or don’t do a thing that matters most to my mind. If love of God comes first with you then you deny yourself to keep His commandments, you give away your whole life to Him and glory in what the world calls loss. But there wasn’t any obedience in your life at that time, Daphne, and no love at all except your love of Michael. Was it for love of him that you said no?”

  Daphne was an honest woman when not self-deceived. “No,” she said. “And I was not trying to do right either. I was just—reacting.”

  “That’s what we mostly do,” said Harriet. “But what were you reacting to? To the fact that he’d forgotten about the license? Punishing him?”

  Daphne hurried on. “He came to see me on the Saturday and Sunday and was very gentle and courteous. We agreed that we’d be married as soon as he got back to England. I was in a queer state, in love with him, wretched because he was going away yet full of resentment too.”

  “We do feel resentment against those we’ve hurt,” said Harriet. “It restores the balance.”

  Daphne flushed scarlet. This was an arraignment. It was as though with every quietly spoken sentence Harriet was writing an indictment against her that later she would have to read through and understand before she could plead guilty or not guilty before the tribunal of her own mind. Now honesty demanded that she tell Harriet the rest of the paltry little story as truthfully as she could.

  “Michael fought in Crete,” she said. “One is forgetting the horrors of the war now—at least,” she added, seeing Harriet’s eye on her, “those of us who did not endure them are forgetting them. Crete was awful. You remember, Harriet? But Michael was lucky. He had a head wound, not very serious, and was evacuated on one of the last ships that managed to get away. He soon got well again. But he was very changed.”

  “What was he like?” asked Harriet.

  “Tired and secretive. He wouldn’t say how he’d been wounded. I thought it would do him good to tell me, but when I asked him questions he wouldn’t answer. He had a long leave and I could plan a really lovely wedding. He seemed rather apathetic about it all but he agreed to all my ideas and was so sweet to me that I was more in love than ever. Harriet
, I really was in love.”

  “Wouldn’t a quiet wedding have been better for him, if he was tired, and war time and all?” asked Harriet.

  “I thought he needed taking out of himself,” said Daphne. “And our engagement had lasted so long, Harriet. I was sure all our friends were talking about it, and perhaps thinking he’d got tired of me. Now it was happening at last I did not want it to be a hole and corner affair. Uncle Pete and Aunt Mary were pleased I was marrying a well-known man. They were glad, for the sake of family pride, that I should have the sort of wedding I wanted. We asked everyone, my friends and Michael’s and all the family.”

  “Did you ask John?” asked Harriet.

  “No, he was still in hospital. And at that time I think I’d almost forgotten John. I hadn’t seen him for years.”

  “Years wouldn’t have made him forget you,” said Harriet. “But go on, dearie.”

  “I was in my room the night before the wedding,” said Daphne. “Aunt Mary was with me and we’d just finished packing my suitcases for the honeymoon. While we packed I had one ear open for the bell, for Michael had promised to come round and say good-night to me. For the first time in my life I felt happy and triumphant. Things were going right with me at last. The bell rang and I went to the door. But it wasn’t Michael, it was a messenger boy with a note. It was carelessly scrawled and it just said, ‘I’m sorry, Daphne, but I can’t do it. Michael.’ ”

  Harriet was silent. Such a blow breaks a weak woman, twists a strong one. From the angle of her intolerable humiliation Daphne would have looked askance at everything that had happened to her ever since.

  “Poor girl, poor Daphne,” she said at last.

  “Like a scene in a second-rate film, wasn’t it?” said Daphne, her voice expressionless.

  “To be taking it to heart like this after all these years,” thought Harriet. “Never to have forgiven it. And I don’t believe she’s ever told a soul.” She felt a little nauseated as she thought of Daphne pushing the memory of her humiliation further and further down yet never able to get rid of it. The measure of her bitterness was the measure of her failure.