The Partnership (20 page)

“You'd better go,” repeated Annice in a voice not free from amusement.

The soldier, however, insisted on calling the waitress and paying her for three coffees before he went. Lydia was in too much distress to notice this last indignity, and when the coffee appeared at her elbow mechanically sat down and began to stir it, without reflecting whence it came. So many things were now abruptly made clear to her. She remembered the day when she had called at Boothroyd House and found Dyson and the children in alone, and realized that Annice had been meeting Evan secretly for months.

“Annice!” she began at last in stern reproach. “What does all this mean?”

Annice said nothing, and Lydia's anger deepened. “Come, Annice,” she said in firm trenchant tones, “you'd better tell me all about it. What is he doing here?”

Annice, after a pause, with her customary air of detachment told her that Evan had met her at the end of the Place for a few minutes' chat
that evening as usual, and she had been annoyed with Eric and said she would come out with him for the evening. So they walked off together. They couldn't get in to the pictures, and it was a wet night, so they came in here. That was how it was.

“I don't mean that,” said Lydia impatiently. “How does he come to be in Hudley at all?”

Annice raised her blue eyes to Lydia's, lowered them again, and observed calmly: “He came to look for me.”

“How did he know you were here?” demanded Lydia.

Annice, glancing casually aside at a dried-up palm which rustled its dusty leaves in a green tub near by, explained in her short scanty sentences that when she first came to Hudley she had written to him once or twice—before she got to know Eric. Then when she got to know Eric she wrote no more. (Having, Lydia thought cynically, other fish to fry.) But as soon as Evan was out of the army and could conveniently come he came to Cromwell Place to look for her.

“I thought he was going to stay in the army and be an officer,” said Lydia.

Annice, raising her eyebrows in surprise, opined that he had forgotten all about that, or perhaps cared more about her.

“Well, go on,” sighed Lydia.

So he came to Cromwell Place to look for Annice, and, of course, they sent him on to Boothroyd House. Annice had introduced him to Eric
as an old friend of hers. His conversation had charmed both Eric and Mr. Dyson—they loved to hear him talk—and Eric had given him a job. It was Evan, it appeared, who had caused Annice to apply to Lydia about the recall of Wilfred; Evan had told her what the men at the mill said about Eric, and how that if he went on as he was doing he'd be ruined in less than six months.

“Did you know, then, when Evan first came, that he was still in love with you?” Lydia, disregarding this last item, said severely.

Annice opened her eyes and stared at her, her look as astonished as if the word “love” were entirely new to her vocabulary. After a while she remarked with apparent irrelevance: “I was sorry for Eric.”

“I'm glad to hear you say that, at any rate,” said Lydia. “You understand, of course, Annice, that all this must stop at once. Evan, or whatever his name is, must leave the town immediately.”

Annice gave her a sombre look and said nothing.

“You must give me your word not to see him again,” pursued Lydia relentlessly.

Annice still made no remark.

“If you don't give me your word,” said Lydia, angered by her silence, “of course I shall have no alternative but to tell Eric the whole story. He will have to know it all.”

At this Annice gave a sinister smile. “There's lots of things that people in Boothroyd House don't know,” she suggested.

“What do you mean?” demanded Lydia, quite at a loss.

Annice, averting her eyes, was heard to murmur: “Mr. Dyson.”

“I still don't know what you mean,” said Lydia loftily. “What has my uncle to do with it, pray?”

At this Annice turned to face her, and brought out bluntly: “He doesn't know Mr. Wilfred is here.”

“Annice!” cried Lydia, struck to the heart as the significance of this reached her. “What do you mean?” As Annice made no reply she gasped out: “Is this a threat?”

Annice smiled and nodded. “If you tell Eric about Evan, I'll tell Mr. Dyson about Wilfred,” she explained cheerfully.

“Annice, you're terrible, terrible!” cried the wretched Lydia. “What good would it do you to tell Mr. Dyson?”

“What good would it do you to tell Eric?” countered Annice prosaically.

“But it's wrong!” cried Lydia in an agony. “What you and Evan are doing is wrong!” Her lofty composure of a moment ago was quite gone; her face was scarlet with anguish, her hands twitched, her breath came in laboured gasps; she leant across the table and gazed beseechingly at Annice from wide and frightened eyes. Annice, on the contrary, remained calm and cool; she sat upright and motionless on the velvet couch and gazed out through the smoke with undiminished serenity. “Annice, how can you
want to make me so unhappy?” pleaded Lydia, almost weeping.

“I don't,” protested Annice, apparently rather aggrieved by this accusation.

“But if you tell Mr. Dyson that Wilfred is here, he'll have to go away,” cried Lydia on a piercing note of fear.

“Well,” observed Annice, “if you tell Eric about Evan,
he'll
have to go away. Eric might kill him or something if he stayed. So it's the same for both of us. There's no difference.”

A bell sounded to indicate the beginning of the next act, and the smokers and coffee-drinkers began to leave the café. Lydia thought of the four children in her care, and rose to respond to the call of duty; she then thought of Wilfred, and paused. “Annice, you don't mean it,” she implored her, putting a hand on the girl's arm.

“Yes, I do,” said Annice stolidly.

“But, you silly girl,” argued Lydia, “if you tell Mr. Dyson and Wilfred goes away, you'll all be ruined.”

“
I
shouldn't care,” murmured Annice. “I should go with Evan. That's what he's always wanting me to do. I should have gone with him before only I was sorry for Eric.” She sighed, then added more cheerfully: “But I'm not as sorry for him now.”

“Why not?” breathed Lydia, horrified both by this extraordinary—as it appeared to her—reason for not leaving one's husband, and by the fear that it might lose its force.

“Wilfred's here to look after him,” said Annice serenely.

“But if you tell Mr. Dyson, and he goes!” cried Lydia.

“Then it will be all your fault,” said Annice with a reproving air.

“Annice,” said Lydia, now frankly weeping, “you're a wicked girl, and I wish I'd never met you.”

Annice looked surprised. “Why, Miss Lydia! It's all right if we just go on as we were,” she said soothingly. “There's no need to be upset.”

Lydia gave an inarticulate moan and turned away. Annice followed her, and the two stood together in the empty corridor while Lydia struggled angrily with her tears. Sounds of declamation and laughter came from the stage through the gallery doors.

“It's begun again,” said Annice. “I'd better go in.”

“Yes, go in!” cried Lydia savagely, raising her head. “That's all you care about—your own pleasure.”

Annice seemed about to speak, but changed her mind and laid her hand on one of the swing-doors instead.

“You'd better be careful,” Lydia warned her bitterly. “Eric ‘was down here looking for you before the performance, and he said he'd come again at the end.”

“Oh, we'll leave early,” Annice reassured her, disappearing between the doors.

Lydia made her way back to her own seat and tried to resume the mien and poise proper to authority. But it was almost impossible; the conflict within her was too great. All her conscience and her upbringing, her Tolefree blood—everything, in fact, which was consciously Lydia—urged her that Eric should be told and the behaviour of Annice and Evan stopped at once. To live a lie, to condone Annice's behaviour by concealing it, seemed to Lydia as though it would poison her whole life, blight her happiness, dry up the fountain of her content at its source. The situation between Eric, Evan, and Annice was morally impossible and must be reformed. Lydia shot an angry glance upwards at the blurs which she knew to be Annice and her lover. But if she told Eric of his wife's unfaithfulness she would lose Wilfred; and Lydia felt that she could not, simply could
not,
bear to lose Wilfred again. The mere thought of it dimmed her sight and made the blood beat sickeningly in her ears; and as she imagined herself again alone and deserted her gorge rose against all the happy couples who sat around her. She had been so glad lately to be able to love them, to sympathize with them, to feel that her lot was the same as theirs; if she lost Wilfred she would hate them all again—yes, hate them! It was impossible that she should jeopardize her future with Wilfred; some other way must be found to reconcile the demands of her conscience with her happiness. She must work upon Annice's moral sense—though she felt despairingly
sure in advance that Annice had no moral sense, only a love of life which served instead. In the sheltering darkness Lydia was able to give herself to her own thoughts; she bit her lips and suffered. A Daniel in judgment was needed indeed, she reflected ironically as the familiar words fell on her ears, to decide the dispute which was raging in her mind.

At last the play was over, and Lydia, conscious of great mental weariness and considerable physical dishevelment, shepherded her charges out into the night. The rain had stopped and the night air was pleasantly fresh on Lydia's heated cheeks; she felt more cheerful, and noticing that the exit from their places did not lead through the foyer of the theatre, began to hope that at least she would not see Eric again that night. Her hope was deceived, however, for Eric—who was considerably more familiar with the entrances and exits of the theatre than his cousin—almost immediately pounced upon her and, seizing her arm, kept beside her as she pressed forward through the jostling crowd.

“Have you seen Annice?” he demanded eagerly, thrusting his face into hers.

Lydia, intensely distressed at being thus called on to make up her mind immediately whether to lie or to lose Wilfred, said nothing, and tried to withdraw her arm from beneath his hand. Eric, however, clutched her more firmly, and said with a certainty which was terrible to Lydia: “You have, You have seen her. Haven't you?”

“Certainly I have,” replied Lydia with assumed coldness. Her heart beat wildly, and she again tried to withdraw her arm.

“And who was she with?” cried Eric.

“Really, Eric!” said Lydia, throwing as much indignation into her voice as she could command, “these are questions you must ask Annice. It's insulting, both to her and to me, to expect me to spy on her in this way.”

“She was with Wilfred!” exclaimed Eric with intense conviction.

“Nonsense!” said Lydia emphatically, feeling that here she was on firm ground.

“Who was she with, then?” demanded Eric. “Tell me that.”

“I must look after these children, Eric,” evaded Lydia, absolutely unable to face the issue at such short notice. “Let go my arm.”

“She was with Wilfred!” repeated Eric slowly, tightening his grasp. “Else what have you been crying about?”

The light of the lamp which had revealed the traces of Lydia's tears to Eric showed him to her as pale and frantic; drops of perspiration stood on his receding brow, and his dull eyes were dilated, almost squinting. Lydia's heart was wrung with pity for him.

“Why have you got this absurd idea about Wilfred and Annice into your head, Eric?” she said soothingly. “You know it's quite ridiculous.”

“She's never had a good word for me since he came back,” said poor Eric bitterly. Lydia sighed,
and did not know what to say. “It's no use, Lydia,” pursued her hapless cousin, weeping. “You stand up for Wilfred because you're in love with him, and I'm sure I'm very sorry for you, I am really; but I know what to think. In the old days he was always praising her, and while he's been away she's done nothing but praise him up to father. Since he came back she never has a good word for me, and she's always running off out of the house to meet him.”

Lydia wrung her hands, and felt as though she would go mad under the strain of her dilemma.

“You're quite wrong, Eric,” she told him in a muffled tone, almost choked with emotion.

“And here she is at the theatre with him to-night,” concluded Eric.

“She wasn't with Wilfred,” faltered Lydia.

“Then who was she with?” repeated Eric. “Tell me that! Tell me that, and I'll believe she wasn't with Wilfred.”

Lydia now regretted that she had not spoken of Evan as soon as she saw Eric and made light of Annice's presence with him as a mere coincidence, a chance meeting; but it was too late for that now. She stared at Eric in helpless anguish for a long moment in which she tried but could not for her life bring herself to utter any word which might have the effect of driving Wilfred from Hudley, and at last stuttered incoherently the lie that Annice was alone.

“She was with Wilfred!” shouted Eric violently. “I know what to think!” He pushed her
arm aside in angry contempt and made off headlong through the crowd.

Lydia, sick and shaken, marshalled her charges and saw them safely into their appropriate trams.

The ensuing week was one of the longest Lydia had ever known, for she was in torment. At times she felt cheerfully—helped by the bright spring sunshine—that the whole thing was a nightmare on her part. The relation between Evan and Annice was perfectly natural and innocent; the evil existed in her mind alone, and she blushed for her own impurity and baseness. At other times her common sense returned and she knew that the mere fact of Annice's concealing her meetings with Evan from her husband made them far from innocent. And how anxious Annice had been to conceal Evan's identity from Lydia! When she thought of these things a righteous indignation rose in Lydia's breast, and she became conscious of an unswerving rectitude of purpose which demanded that justice should be done though the heavens fell. Unfortunately she had already swerved slightly from absolute rectitude in the matter, in her interview with Eric outside the theatre. Her conscience reproached her on that score bitterly. But at this point she was usually swept away by a fierce rush of feeling in which she declared to herself that she would never let Wilfred go. Never! She had a right to her life, to her love; and she meant to cling to them at all costs. She set her lips in a thin line of obstinate tenacity on this resolution, and though both
Charles and Louise made gentle attempts to persuade her to unburden her obviously troubled soul to them, she would tell them nothing. She had not made up her mind yet, and would not be forced into a decision. To confide the matter to Charles was as good as buying Wilfred a ticket to take him away from Hudley, and that was something Lydia would never resign herself to. As it chanced, Wilfred did not turn up at Ribourne that week either on the Saturday or the Sunday, and this foretaste of what life would be like without him hardened Lydia in her resolution. The demands of her conscience would have to be fulfilled, certainly, but not in a way which would drive Wilfred away from her. Another interview with Annice seemed the only possible mode of action, but on reflection Lydia found that she was deeply incensed with Annice, and had better allow herself a little time to cool down before she saw her again. She therefore kept rigidly away from Boothroyd House, and even refrained from going into Hudley. Privately she wondered whether Annice would have the audacity to ask her to go there next Wednesday, as usual, and what she herself would do if so asked; and she positively dreaded the arrival of that day when some decided action on her part would almost certainly be required.