Most Loving Mere Folly Read online

  She embraced the thought of him, kissed and dismissed and going away meekly as she ordered him, heavy and full of anxiety for her, while she recoiled into the darkest solitudes of her own nature, and shut herself in there alone with her weariness and disgust. Now, waking, she wanted him for a moment with a piercing insistence, and lay holding the memory of him molten into her body with straining arms. Then the revulsion of her sleeping uneasiness swept over her drowningly, and she sat up in the rumpled bed, and braced herself to listen, all her nerves at stretch.

  The house beneath her was utterly still. Outside the window the moonlit, motionless stillness of the night hung as ominously, reflected pallidly on the oblique faces of the ceiling, and the inward-crowding walls. Cold and dry, but only on the unwhitened edge of frost, the folded fields lay pale between their ebony hedges. Within and without, the world was silent.

  Suspiria got out of bed, and groped for her slippers. She felt suddenly too far away from the heart of the house, up here under her roof. Sounds from below did not carry to her, or at best only from the bedroom below; and she had not meant to fall asleep. She stood quite still beside her bed, and held her breath to listen more intently, but there was no sound at all. She was lost even to time, but only in the small hours of the morning could there be such a silence, for the distant hum of traffic on the main road did not usually cease until after two, and as frequently began again between four and five. The heart of the night, it seemed, between the sodium lights and the daylight, was like this, hushed and hollow and rounded, like a cave closed by a fall of rock, or the inside of a vault after the withdrawal of a funeral.

  She caught up her dressing-gown suddenly, and drew it round her against the startlingly abrupt sensation of cold, though the chill seemed to spring through her flesh rather from within than from without. Very softly she opened the door, and crept out on to the narrow attic stairs. The house did not stir beneath her. Houses, particularly old houses, breathe and turn in their sleep even at night, but now there was nothing to suggest the existence or even the remembrance of life. She went down the stairs. There was only one room below, the big bedroom where she and Theo slept together so many years; only that, and the narrow landing, and the iron-railed stairway down into the living-room. She spread her fingers quietly against the door of the bedroom, and it gave lightly to the touch, with an unmoved ease which assured her that the room was empty. She pushed it wide, and the air within was cold, without the suggestion of a human presence.

  In the living-room the fire had gone out on the hearth, and there was no one in the chairs. Something of humanity was left there, a very faint warmth, and a sort of dying vibration in the air, the last tremor of Dennis’s voice. She stopped at the foot of the stairs, searching through the faint moonlit spaces of the room, the polished gleams and the matt dimnesses, for the shape of him, reluctant in the doorway, looking back at her mutely as he went out.

  Somewhere over there in the town he was lying asleep now, caught back from her into that other and unknown world from which he had emerged to humble her. She knew nothing about it, and had never felt any curiosity, but detachedly she thought of it as a confined place of framed photographs, and sentimental pictures, and neat, guarded relationships, where the kind of woman she was would have a docket of its own, and where they would pretend, if they knew of her, that she did not really exist, but was merely a kind of mental illusion of which Dennis was the unlucky victim. She knew there was a brother, with whom he shared a bedroom. She could imagine, she had seen in his eyes sometimes, his sense of outrage that even the passionate privacy of his nightly memories of her should be invaded. Perhaps he was not asleep at this moment, but lying tightly clenched over the thought of her as over a secret pain, still anxious, already in anticipation burrowing his hand under the stone by the broken gate, to find her morning reassurance which was to help him through the day.

  The warmth of remembering him receded slowly; the chill of the night air, trembling on the edge of frost, made her shiver as she stood, and the echoeless emptiness shook itself free of the last lingering tenderness of his youth. She felt suddenly and inconceivably alone. Turning in the inner doorway, she wrenched the curtain aside with a cold hand, and entered the dark tunnel of the corridor. On the left, the kitchen, and the improvised complex of the bathroom and scullery; on the right, the studio. He must be there, there was nowhere else left where he could be. Why was there still this feeling in her that the whole house had been vacated long ago?

  She waited for a moment, holding her breath again, but there was nothing to hear. But there was something else to hold her still, a faint breath of strangeness in her nostrils, hardly enough to be called an odour at all, and yet perceptible.

  She reached out her hand, feeling the effort by which she advanced it, and turned the handle of the door, and pushed it open. A knife-edge of light sprang out at her, widening, and with it a gush of wind from an open ventilator in the top of one window, cold and unexpected, laden with a sour and nauseous smell. The door swung wide, and she stood just within the room, looking at the chaos of Theo’s night’s work; and at Theo himself lying in the middle of it, contorted between the feet of his easel.

  His back was towards her, his knees drawn up; he, too, was coiled together over his secrets. She went forward until she stood close to him, looking down at the upturned face, in which the eyes stared blindly. His skin was lividly blue under the bright light, fallen and scooped into gaunt hollows the colour of lead. The bitter smell rose and caught her by the throat as the draught set it in motion. He had been sick, but not violently enough, and far too late. His chin was stained, his jaw half-open and rigidly locked. Nothing remained to call her husband to mind, except the terrible brightness and blueness of those open eyes. Dead, he did not look like Theo any more.

  2

  She stood looking down at him for what seemed to her a long time, her eyes alert and fixed in a face which had not greatly changed its expression. Something was suddenly broken in her, but it was not any thread of her heart; rather she felt herself tearing loose, of necessity, every affection, every consideration which in this extremity was less than essential. There remained, when she had surveyed the field, only one true essential, and that was Dennis.

  Her senses sprang into an exaggerated and sharply painful activity. Theo was dead, Dennis was alive. She had never felt any timidity about selecting her own priorities.

  The pattern of Theo’s whitened footprints about the floor was like the labyrinths painted on the ground for the ritual fantasies of primitive peoples, the carefully indirect path from world to world. The little beaker of biscuit ware had slipped from between his fingers, and was lying on its side in a puddle of moisture. The broken glass still lay just under the edge of the bench, close to where Dennis had been standing when she interrupted them. The palette was on the floor, too, where it had dropped from his hand, and he was lying partly over it, two or three brushes scattered along the boards beside him.

  Her eyes went from the fallen beaker to the almost empty whisky bottle and the siphon. She looked all round the room, and could not recollect that within her knowledge of last night’s events Dennis had touched anything else here. The prints of several people’s fingers would be on the bottle and the siphon, and who was to say when they had been made? There must be at least fifty people in Great Leddington by this time who followed local scandals with sufficient assiduity to be well aware that Dennis Forbes was a constant visitor at Little Worth, and the incongruity of the association would lead them to make partially correct guesses at its nature. Whatever she did, the truth about Dennis would come out, and the absence of his fingerprints about the house, rather than their presence, might be thought a suspicious circumstance. It must not appear, however, that he was the last, or almost the last, to touch the bottle and the siphon; other prints, more intimate to the house, must lie over his. For whatever other details might be allowed to appear, Dennis Forbes had not been in that room the previous night, had
not handed Theo a drink. Many other curious implications she was prepared to risk; but this was something she could not and would not leave to chance.

  The siphon looked clear and innocent, the last two inches of spirit in the bottle reflected the light radiantly in amber and gold. Only in the biscuit beaker, precarious on its curved side by Theo’s hand, a thin whiteness, a silt, showed under the small cupped lake of liquid.

  She picked it up, and watched the heavy insoluble white particles shift round the curve of the base as she turned it in her hand. There was no smell from it but the smell of the whisky; and a drunken man who was not looking for suspicious deposits would not be likely to notice anything amiss. If he could have looked through the ware as through that broken glass, now, he might well have baulked at tossing it down, drunk as he was; but given an opaque cup, its contents just swung into momentary suspension by the discharge of the soda, a man in a devilish hurry to drink himself into unconsciousness was not likely to hesitate. There remained only this small white mud, from which a competent analyst might build a fabulous house of facts.

  She asked herself, with an almost detached coolness, what would be the reactions of a trained stranger entering here. First he might well think: he did it himself. Then, what is it? Where did he get it? It won’t be found here, whatever it is, but in the workshop – ah, that’s another matter! It won’t take a competent man long to find it there. Did he go to the workshop to help himself, then, when he’d drunk himself to the edge of suicide? Not unless he took off his shoes to go, and put them on again when he came back! The flake white he dropped and trampled all over the floor isn’t dry on his shoes yet, and it doesn’t even reach the door. He made us a map of his movements, complete to the last staggering step. He did not go looking for the means of a death among his wife’s glazing materials. Not last night. Maybe he had it by him already, maybe he’d lifted it some time ago. Or maybe somebody else brought it to him!

  Nothing existed but necessity. A matt surface like that of this unglazed cup ought not to take a good impression of fingerprints. Even from highly finished surfaces washing can erase them, according to the books. But this is not a book; and the prints belong to the fingers of Dennis; and there is always the last, the outside chance, the risk one might, perhaps, take even for oneself, but not for him. She carried the beaker away into the scullery, and washed it very carefully, leaving the tap running for some minutes after it, to ensure that every grain was washed away down the sink. Then she put the cup in its place on the bench in the studio, and replaced the clean brushes in it. With the edge of her slipper she scraped the pieces of the broken glass across the floor, and arranged them beside Theo’s hand. The splashes of moisture it had shed in breaking were already almost dry, and in any case would excite no suspicion, being almost underneath the place where the bottle stood. She set her own fingers about the bottle twice, as if to lift and pour from it, and then deliberately smeared the chromium of the siphon, and set her prints there, too. A moment she hesitated before approaching Theo with it, but in the end she knelt beside him, and lifted an already stiffening hand in hers.

  It was unbelievable how his fingers resisted her, and how little she felt but the sheer physical struggle with them. Some day she would live all this again without the haste and the urgency which sustained her now, and suffer all the nausea and terror which belonged by rights to this moment. Now she did what she had to do. She laid the hand down again, and the arm rocked a little with the shifting balance. Then she put the siphon back in its place, and looked round a studio which bore, she thought, no positive evidence of Dennis’s last visit.

  She was covering the retreat of three people; there was nothing else to be done. But which of the three she kept first in the line she knew very well.

  At the last moment she looked again at the beaker, and her monstrous uneasiness made its shape quiver and distort as she gazed. Could mere washing wipe out from that porous body every trace of a liquid and an imperfectly soluble solid, which had lain in the crook of it for several hours? Forensic chemists do marvellous things. There might still be traces they could conjure out of the permeable clay, enough even for analysis. How could she be sure? And if they found out so much, they would never rest until they had more. Once they knew that this little cup had held the oxide which had killed Theo, and that someone on the spot had known enough to wash and hide it, they would take it apart grain by grain to find the last faint mark of a finger; and how could she be sure there would be nothing whatever to find?

  No, the thing must go. Not into the dustbin, not into shards which could be fitted together again. It must vanish. The risk of leaving it in existence was one she dared not take.

  She tipped out the brushes again, and took the beaker away with her, pressing the prints of her hands upon the handles of the studio door, both within and without. The ticking of her watch was the first thing which stung her senses as she entered the workshop; she had taken it off when she began to prepare her kiln, and left it lying beside the wheel. For the first time she began to calculate and hurry, because time had come back with the watch, and she had to work within limits, and with much to do. It was past five o’clock, and she had a forest to make, in which she might hide her leaf.

  She kept quantities of her basic glazes constantly ready for use, in covered tubs, so that they needed only the addition of whatever oxide she chose, and some adjustment of the amount of frit or silica to balance the addition. She chose the soft-fired lead glaze, because it need not go beyond a thousand degrees centigrade in the firing, and for all she knew someone’s professional curiosity might well interfere before the temperatures necessary to harder glazes could be reached. Risks she had to take, whatever she did, but at least she could reduce them to a minimum.

  There were enough biscuited pots to fill a glost kiln. She unloaded the green pots she had put into the kiln in that distracted attempt at normality, last night, and assembled quickly all that she had ready for glazing. The pigments would have little time to dry, but she switched on one element, and stood them on the rim of the kiln over it as she completed them. There were beautiful things there. Her hands dwelt lovingly upon them as she handled the brushes, touching them with a wild kindness because there was no time to linger over them. Heavy blue-black banding and a few blown olive leaves on the beaker, and the rest, the spare, flashing strokes the old Koreans used to create a willow, a palm, a bird; with no time to spare for either hesitancy or elaboration she knew that she did her best work. She felt articulate beauty following her fingers, leaping arched across the broad curves of bowl and jug, vigorous and restive under the discipline of time. Three or four colours she used, to free them from the uniformity which might suggest just such a single bout of work as this; and as they dried, she took them from the warmth again.

  When it came to the glazing, a few of the pieces were too large for double-dipping, and she had to give precious extra minutes to ladling the glaze over them; but all the processes were so easy and quick to her hands that there was little time lost. Nearly six o’clock; ten minutes only for the first slow drying, and then she dared wait no longer. She lifted the beaker, now so changed, and lowered it into the centre of the kiln.

  Then suddenly she was still not satisfied. The chemical reactions of the kiln can never be calculated absolutely. Suppose there should be some influence left from the spirit and the oxide even yet? Suppose it should combine with the flame to produce an unexpected shade of colour, a stain, a tinge of yellow which might be material enough for the expert? It was unlikely; but she could not be sure that it was impossible, even now. She knew of only one more thing she could do to suppress it for ever. Potters spend a great many of the hours of firing wondering what damage there may be to discover when the kiln is cooled and opened. It went against the grain to plan a deliberate burst, and the desired results might even evade her against all the odds, but she could do what was indicated to encourage it. She took a large jug, one of the green pieces she had lifted from
the kiln only an hour ago, and dipped it, draining off the surplus glaze, and set it next to the beaker. Now she knew why the skill of her own painting had ached in her fingers, since it was all to be thrown away. Most of that urgent beauty would be stillborn, spattered with fragments of the burst jug, flattened into a shapeless lump with it, a mass of molten glaze and distorted body. She felt, for the first time, a criminal, almost a murderer, turning back thus against her own nature; but she went on quickly with her loading, drawing out the deep, reproachful pain until the bottom of the kiln was full, and the bat shelves lowered into place like a gravestone over the crime.

  By twenty minutes past six she had the brick cover closed over the last of her sacrificial offering, and had switched on the remaining elements. For the sake of speed she must make the necessary heat as soon as possible, and the soft-fired glazes needed no such slow first firing as the harder stonewares. Moreover, it was the rapid ascent of temperature which would burst the raw jug, and make undetectable for ever the form of the beaker. It had stood for over a year in Theo’s studio, a few people might remember it and miss it; but no one would ever identify it after today.