Kind Are Her Answers (21 page)

Kit declined, with thanks. He did not want to sit and watch Christie being embraced and probably kissed by Rollo for half an hour. His reaction to Rollo was permanently coloured by a knowledge that he and Christie had once played in
Romeo and Juliet
together. Besides, nearly a week of mounting anxiety made the thought of passivity suddenly intolerable. He said he had several things to see to in the town, and would be back.

“Well, come up and take a look at the theatre. You needn’t stay for the whole thing.”

“I saw it the first time I came, thanks.” He found he did not trust himself to greet Christie with Rollo, who looked offensively observant, doing the honours. “I really ought to be getting along.”

“Oh, Christie took you over. I expect she told you it’s one of the three best private theatres in England. You want to see the cyclorama with the lighting, of course. But I forgot, you’re coming to the Easter-School, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” said Kit, who, his attention wandering, had thought that
The Easter School
was the name of a play. “I’ll certainly run over for it if I can get away.”

“Good work,” said Rollo to his retreating back. “I’ll put you down.”

Kit got into the car again, and drove about aimlessly. When he rang the Abbey bell again, praying that she might answer it herself this time, he got instead Florizelle Fuller. Here he made an almost embarrassing success. She wafted him into the drawing room, sat him down under a shaded table-lamp, heaped copies of
Drama
before him, and had an earnest conversation with him about Mime, which she pronounced Meem. When she had gone he sat staring, for what seemed several hours, at a photograph of a setting for
Macbeth,
made of round and hexagonal broken columns with flights of steps running in and out of them.

The drawing-room door slammed.

“Oh, darling, isn’t this
lovely!”
Christie ran the length of the room, and flung herself into his arms with such force that she knocked him back into the chair from which he was still rising. Her hair tangled itself, into his eyes, and the sleeve of her cotton smock, smelling of old greasepaint and none too clean, constricted his breathing. He assembled her into a manageable shape on his knee. All the anxieties, fears and jealousies of separation concentrated themselves into the violence with which he kissed her. She clung to him with strong little hands, eager and warm. A telephone bell, distantly ringing, recalled them at last to external things.

“I
did
like that,” said Christie, loosening her arm. She gazed round her in general satisfaction, and remarked, seemingly in the same paragraph, “This room used to be the Abbot’s. The monks were awfully immoral. There’s a book in the library about them.”

Kit pulled her head back by a handful of hair. “Oh, my God,” he said, laughing, “do I have to leave you in a place where the ghosts come after you too?”

“Well, I have heard noises,” said Christie seriously. “But I shouldn’t think they would. The book rather thought choir-boys, I believe; it was rather sort of veiled about it.”

As if they had been seeing each other for days, they began to talk inanely about future archives in which Christie would appear. Kit remembered dimly that he had driven over in a different mood from this, but it seemed distant and artificial. He was back in the charmed circle again; nothing could go wrong, nothing outside was entirely real. “Not in the open shelves, of course. You’d be marked, ‘Not accessible except to bona fide students.’”

“And the students would have to produce letters from two clergymen.”

“Except medical students, naturally.”

There were footsteps in the hall outside. Christie leaped from his knee and, sat in a distant chair, affecting great social poise. A lock of hair trailed down into one eye. The footsteps passed.

“Oh, Kit, I do love you. I get so bored being with every one else but you. Come on out of here. I want to devour you undisturbed. Come up to my room.”

“Of course I can’t. They’d throw you out if they got to know.”

“Who cares? I could get another job just by crooking my finger.”

Kit realized that his victory was won without battle joined. It did not particularly surprise him. The circle was complete.

“I know what,” Christie said. “I’ll take you round the theatre again. If we meet any one I’ll say you’re thinking of coming to the Easter School. But they’re all having tea.”

They went through mazelike passages, broken by purposeless stairs. The smell of greasepaint, old costumes and dry rot seemed like part of the walls. Already it had taken on for Kit the magic of incantation. It would have made Christie present to him if he had smelt it at the Pole. Her dirty flowered smock, unbelted and short to the knee, with deep pockets bulging with string and safety-pins and butt-ends of eye-pencil and carmine, had folded him in it along with her arms. He found it clinging to his coat when he got home.

The theatre, really so small as to be almost miniature, seemed expanded by emptiness to the size and solemnity of a church. They tiptoed through it, talking in undertones, and climbed the steps into the wings. More steps led down to the junkrooms under the stage, where oddments of furniture and properties were stored. Christie guided him with the stealth of a smuggler, and switched on a yellow light, by which they picked their way. Fragments of scenery divided the space into secret alleys and caves. The heating-pipes went through, wrapped in sacking, and the air was close and full of dry smells.

The ceiling was just half an inch from the top of Kit’s head.

“This way.” Christie navigated him round the corner of a small crenelated tower. Behind it the light was filtered to dimness. He could see on one side a terrace wall festooned with paper roses, on the other a throne draped with threadbare brocade. In the space between he saw, after he had nearly fallen over it, a canvas bank covered with remnants of fibre moss. An ass’s head leered on the floor behind it. Some old cotton cushions and a striped rug, arranged against it, were hollowed from being lain on, like a hare’s form. A packet of cigarettes, a thin book which looked like poetry, a tin of bull’s-eyes and a pocket torch poked out from the folds of the rug. Kit remembered the summerhouse at Laurel Dene, which now interpreted itself.

Christie sat down on the bank, which made a sound of creaking shavings, and pulled at his hand.

“I come down here,” she confided, offering him a crinkled cigarette, “when I get a bit sick of them all, to think about you.”

“Have you been lately?” A recollection of the last few days tinged Kit’s voice a little.

“Oh, my pet, don’t be cross with me.” She curled down beside him, arranging a dubious cushion under his head. “Isn’t it funny, now you’re here I can’t think how I could have been such an ass.”

“You know,” said Kit with the mildness of security, “that contract was obviously phoney.”

“Oh, I shouldn’t think so. Mr. Cowen was awfully sweet about it. I mean, how did I think I could go away from you for all that time? Why, I might not have seen you for months. Of course it was a chance and all that, but I must have been mad to think I could. As soon as I saw you in that chair looking so lovely under the lamp, I knew I wouldn’t go. Oh, darling, I
am
so glad you came. Suppose you’d come after I’d signed up everything and it had been too late. I should have died. Honestly I should.”

Her eyes shone in the half-darkness. Kit pulled her into his arms. His sense of power frightened him with a feeling of having offended fate. He tried to placate the gods with a reasoned exposé of the contract and Mr. Cowen. Christie absorbed it all. Presently she found the defeat of Mr. Cowen’s designs outrageously funny. She mimicked his mannerisms, and speculated vividly on his probable connection with dens of vice in the Argentine, and the methods by which his victims were trans-shipped. Kit found himself actually defending Mr. Cowen, but she waved it away.

“I knew he was a crook as soon as I started talking to you. You show people up. Like a lodestone—isn’t it a lodestone?”

“Touchstone, do you mean?”

“A touchstone, of course.” She pushed her head under his chin. “Kit, darling, I’ve been so silly about people. I’ve been had lots of times. Stop me if I do it again. Don’t send me letters like a
Times
leader, they frighten me. When I got it I nearly wrote off to that shiny little man straightaway, I was so upset.”

“I didn’t want to influence you,” said Kit carefully, “in the wrong way.”

“Is this the wrong way.”

“Probably.”

“Well, it’s the way that works with me.” A clock struck the quarter. Christie smiled, and patted the two cushions together. “They won’t be out of tea for another half-hour,” she said.

I
T HAD OCCURRED TO
Kit sometimes that his life was developing a rhythm which, if he had charted it, would have made a neat and regular graph, rather like the graph of a recurrent fever. He had amused himself one day by tracing it on his blotting pad. It would start with 98.4 on the second day or so after he had seen Christie; then there would be a sharp little rise, say to 99, on the morning when he expected a letter. If, as sometimes happened, the letter did not come, it might go up to 100 or so, or, on the other hand, drop to subnormal. A letter—a satisfactory letter, that is—would keep the line horizontal until the two or three days before his next visit to the Abbey, during which it would climb steeply to 103 or 104, according to the difficulty and danger he encountered in getting away. But during the time he was with Christie, the graph ceased to operate. He lived on a different scale then, to a different time; when he was with her, he seemed to have been with her always. Even the moment of parting did not become real to him till she was gone; it took a dozen gradual steps back into separate life—the road, the garage, the stairs, his own room—knocking at him in succession, to return him to loneliness.

Since the business of Mr. Cowen, however, the graph had tended once or twice to lose shape. The hours he spent with Christie still had their charmed completeness, but the intervals between were subject to sudden disturbances set in motion by nothing in particular; a couple of days’ delay in her letter made him absurdly anxious, and, when it came, he would torment himself over some doubtful phrase which had its origin in nothing graver than Christie’s slapdash methods of composition. He took to worrying four days beforehand, instead of two, over the chances of getting away to see her. When he was with her, the memory of all this faded, so that he did not perceive the undercurrent of strain threading even through his happiness, and, when it broke the surface, could not imagine what had happened to him.

One day he was driving Christie out to tea in a small hotel they had found; a friendly place where, in the off season, they generally had the little tea lounge, and a log fire, all to themselves. It was on the other side of Paxton, so that they had to pass through the town. In the middle of a shopping street, Christie gripped him by the elbow and said, “Look. Look there.”

Kit corrected the swerve that had threatened, and heard an indignant sound of brakes from a car behind.

“For heaven’s sake,” he said, “don’t ever grab any one’s arm when they’re driving. I nearly ran over a woman then.”

“But didn’t you see who it was? No, don’t look now.”

Kit gave an irritated and perfunctory glance at the pavement. The middle-aged woman he had avoided had turned on the kerb to look at the car. It was Pedlow, dressed in black from head to foot; flat black hat, black sealskin coat, black stockings, flat black shoes. Even so briefly, he had time to notice that she had contrived to merge into prosperity without making a single essential change in her appearance. Under the elderly, conservative lines of the fur coat her body still had the same look of being made of leather bands strapped tightly over an iron frame. He could almost believe, from where he was, that he heard her squeak. Her head was turned away, but something about its angle suggested that she had just looked at him, or was just about to look. Then the car moved past, and she was gone.

Christie was sitting pressed back in her seat; she looked quite white.

“What’s Pedlow doing here?”

“Shopping,” said Kit shortly, “by the look of it.” He was particular about his driving and disliked making an exhibition of himself. The oddly uncomfortable impression Pedlow had made on him was somewhere in the background of his irritation; but, reacting from Christie’s nervousness, he pushed the feeling away.

“She’s come here to watch us,” Christie said.

“Of course she hasn’t. You can’t even be certain she saw us. She’s probably visiting an invalid sister. Pedlow would be sure to have an invalid sister or two.” Privately he thought she was as likely as not to be living in Paxton; there had been, somehow, a resident air about her. But he knew it would be tactless to suggest it.

“It was horrible seeing her like that. I don’t like it.”

“Don’t be a baby,” said Kit a little irritably, because he had not liked it himself. “Pedlow’s settled. We know what she wanted, and she’s got it. She’ll have just about as much interest in you now as people have in a rain storm after it’s blown over. Darling, we’ve only got a few hours. Don’t let’s waste them getting into a fuss over Pedlow.”

“I know. I’m sorry. It
was
a bit soft of me.”

They talked about other things, but a vague discomfort worked like yeast below the surfaces of both their minds. When they got to the hotel, their special table was taken by a couple of middle-aged American women; they raked the room, every minute or two, with eager bird-like glances, anxious that no oddment of Englishness should escape them. Kit and Christie talked in undertones, freezing up altogether when the conversation at the other table stopped. Both of them wanted to go to some quiet place and make love, but the Abbey was particularly impossible because a party of visiting schoolgirls was being shown over it, and the country was sodden after a spell of rain. Both of them disliked the thought of what Christie always described as “messing about in the car”; knew it would end with that; and felt a kind of self-distaste which infected their mood. Christie tried to entertain Kit by describing the progress of the current play; this she did quite amusingly, but with too much recourse to Rollo’s bons mots at the expense of the cast. Kit received the first two with polite amusement, the third and fourth strained toleration, and, at the fifth, said, “Well, I wonder he’s not on the London stage if he’s so damned superior to every one here.”