While Bartels was fumbling towards his crisis, I was making my own plans. I was crafty all right. I’ve already admitted as much. I wanted Lorna Dickson, and I made the necessary plans to get her. It is odd that I, Peter Harding, the cosmopolitan, the hotel proprietor, the cynic, had fallen for the woman at one meeting.
Yet that is one of the effects which Lorna Dickson had on people: either she made no impression at all, or else, once you had met her, you could think of little else.
I do not know why I fell in love with her. She was no longer a young girl. She had no classic beauty. She was not even unusually witty. So much my brain told me. My senses told me that she was the only woman I had ever met whom I seriously wished to marry. It was all illogical and even nonsensical, but it was a fact.
Lorna occupied my thoughts by day and by night, so that sometimes I hardly paid sufficient attention to the business at the office; instead, I would sit dreaming of her, of a future with her, or torturing myself with the thought that I might lose her to Bartels. The latter, however, was a mere masochistic game; given time, I knew I could beat Bartels.
But first I had to persuade myself that though it might cost me the friendship of Bartels, I had right, of a sort, on my side. For that is the hypocritical way some are made, and I am one of them.
Since I was determined to be so convinced, it was easy. It was merely a question of selecting the most telling argument. I pointed out to myself that I was unmarried, and Bartels was married, and married, too, to a jolly good wife, in whom any ordinary man would rejoice. Further, Beatrice did not deserve a blow of this kind.
I dismissed all Bartels’ own arguments as specious and finicky. I was pretty well off, too, one way and another, whereas Bartels, to put it frankly, was a bit of a failure. He was unlikely ever to have enough money to pay his wife an allowance and to keep Lorna in any real comfort. In fact, Lorna would probably have to continue with her dressmaking if they were going to do anything more than barely make ends meet. It was an iron-clad alibi for an act of treachery to a friend.
I always remember how innocently I wheedled her exact address and telephone number out of Bartels. It was the day the three of us had lunch together, and afterwards, when Lorna had gone, I said to him, quite casually:
“Whereabouts does she live, Barty?”
“Outside Woking,” he replied. “Near a village called Thatchley. She’s got a small, Georgian-style house. Runs a small car, and has quite a nice little business in the neighbourhood.”
“Thatchley,” I said thoughtfully, as though I had heard the name somewhere before. “Thatchley. Yes, I remember now, I’ve seen signposts pointing to it on the road to our hotel near Guildford.”
His face lit up, as though the mere fact that I had seen a signpost pointing to her village was a source of pleasure to him. Poor, foolish old Bartels. It was all so damned easy.
“Yes, I know now,” I said lightly. “Yes, of course-Thatchley, near Woking.”
I remember we had fetched our hats and coats, and were standing in the vestibule before parting. He said:
“If you pass that way during a weekend, pop in and see her. She gets a bit lonely during the weekends. It’s not so bad during the week, because she is often seeing people.”
Easy, dead easy, it was.
“She won’t want to see me,” I said deprecatingly, for I intended to cover my tracks.
Bartels took the bait with one gulp. “She will,” he said eagerly. “I assure you, she’d love to see you.”
“Oh, I don’t think so,” I replied. “Not me. I don’t think she wants to see me.”
He was like the lemmings of Norway, which rush down to the coast and swim out to sea and drown. He just plunged on to his fate, because he thought he could trust me and because he knew that Lorna was lonely at weekends.
“She likes you,” he insisted.
“How do you know?”
“I could see. I can always tell when Lorna likes somebody.”
I hesitated deliberately. “Oh, well,” I said, “perhaps one of these days I’ll call in. I’ll see.”
So he gave me Lorna Dickson’s address. More, he gave me exact details of how to find her house. He said he wanted to make absolutely sure that I would find it all right. Fool.
My attitude towards Bartels is changing as I write the record. I know that. It is changing as it changed that day when I revisited the chateau and relived this story.
I was always tougher than Bartels. More efficient. More worldly and realistic. Bartels was a dreamer, I am not. It is no good being a dreamer if you are running hotels. Perhaps that is why he liked me and respected me.
So I always start off by thinking of the Bartels of my youth with nostalgic affection. But as this story progresses, as I see how I fooled him and beat him, all along the line, I begin to lose patience with him. I know-indeed, I insist-that despite everything he was a gentle-hearted and kindly fellow. And I pity him, but in a contemptuous kind of way. This I regret, but cannot help.
Just beyond Cobham there is a fork in the road; the left branch carries on to Guildford, the right one leads to Byfleet and Woking. You have to take the Woking road, and follow it for some time before you come to the lane in which Lorna Dickson’s house was situated. It was while Bartels was in Manchester that I visited her first.
I found the house quite easily, thanks to Bartels’ instructions, despite the darkness and some falling sleet.
It lay behind a thick yew hedge considerably older than the house, so that I was not surprised to learn later that the modern house had been built upon the site of a couple of early Victorian labourers’ cottages.
A wrought-iron gate opened on to a stone-flagged path which led past a flower bed and small lawn to the white front door. Two apple trees stood in front of the house, and the house itself, built of light red brick, was pleasant enough with its clean, straight lines, and large windows. It was not large, having, as I learnt later, a drawing room, dining room, workroom, and kitchen downstairs, and, upstairs, three bedrooms and a bathroom.
I had telephoned her and told her I would like to call in at about 6 p.m. on my way back to London from Winchester. She must have heard my car draw up in the lane, for she had opened the front door, and switched on the porch light, by the time I had passed through the wrought-iron gate.
So I saw her for the second time: standing in the doorway, slim, of medium height, small-boned; dressed in a black barathea coat and skirt, and a turquoise-blue blouse. The light fell on her wavy, light brown hair, and, when she shook hands with me and looked me in the face, I thought once again that she had the most attractive eyes I had ever seen. It occurred to me, too, that her face combined, in a most unusual manner, well-defined features with un-doubted prettiness. The two do not normally go together. It was a face which would wear well through the years; a face which would look handsome in middle age and even old age.
Glancing over what I have written, I see that I have completely failed to describe the charm of Lorna Dickson. I have used the word handsome, yet to me, when that word is applied to a woman, it conjures up somebody rather Juno-esque and forbidding. Lorna was not at all forbidding. Again, I have said that her eyes were attractive, and that might somehow imply a certain superficiality, or lack of intelligence, but Lorna, as I soon discovered, was a very intelligent woman.
I followed her into the house, and into the drawing room. This was a pleasantly proportioned room, in which modern decorations had been combined with antique furniture and with comfort: for one thing, there were a couple of deep armchairs, and a large, chintz-covered settee in front of the fire.
A bright fire was burning; not one of those depressing affairs which depend upon logs for an uneasy flame and a trickle of smoke but a businesslike fire of logs and coal combined; a fire built to warm and cheer.
On a rug in front of the fire a corgi dog lay, looking like a cylindrical woolly bear, and pricked his ears when I came in.
I liked the look of the tray of drinks on a side table, and wondered whether Bartels had supplied them, and paid for them, at trade prices. She gave me a whisky and soda, and helped herself to a gin and Italian. I drank the whisky without a qualm.
I didn’t care if Bartels had paid for them or not. I had come to steal his woman, and I was quite prepared to drink his drink while I did so. If you are going to set fire to a man’s house, there’s no sense in feeling awkward because your cigarette end has singed his mantelpiece.
I had laid my plans carefully, and I felt confident. I was better looking than Bartels-not good-looking, but better looking than Bartels. For one thing I didn’t wear spectacles, and I was better built physically. I had a quicker wit, more experience of the world; and I had a far wider experience of women. Bartels had almost no experience of women.
I was good with women. I knew that most men try to impress women by talking about themselves. They try to show themselves in a clever light, shoot a line, preen their feathers. Women like this for a short while. Then it bores them.
A woman is seriously attracted to the man who talks, not about himself, but about women in general and about her in particular. This never bores her. Nor does it ever bore me to talk about an attractive woman, on the rare occasions when I am with one.
So that’s the way I played it, during the first part of that first evening with Lorna Dickson.
Within a few minutes, by asking questions about silver-framed photographs on the mantelpiece and occasional tables, I had her talking about her family and her own affairs.
Her father, Major Clive Burton, MC, had been killed during the First World War. Her mother, who had a flair for dressmaking, and a circle of friends and acquaintances in the Woking area, had set herself up in business and had built up a reasonable clientele. It was not a flourishing business, not a big money-maker, but it brought in a steady income. And there was a little money from her father’s estate.
There was one other child, Leslie Burton, who was a chartered accountant.
Lorna had helped her mother in the business until she was twenty-three. Then she had married Ronald Dickson, a rubber-planter on leave from Malaya, and in 1938 had sailed with him to Singapore.
Two years later, under protest, but because he wished it, she had sailed for home alone. He had stayed, in the face of the gathering storm, and had been engulfed.
She never saw him again.
She never heard from him again, or, for a long time, received any firm news about him. Only once, through roundabout means, through a friend who had a friend who had fought with Ronnie Dickson, she heard a story that he had last been seen drifting down a river on a raft; wounded, but in good heart. Later, a story trickled through that he had been drowned.
“So I only had him for two years,” she said, standing by the mantelpiece looking down into the fire. “Not long, but by heavens it was worth it. I don’t regret a moment of my life.”
“You’re lucky,” I said.
She looked at me and smiled. “Why? Do you?”
“Lots. Did you never think of marrying again? I mean, until recently.”
She side-stepped the reference to Bartels. She said:
“I had no wish to. I joined the WAAFs, and spent most of the war on a crag in Scotland. Hoping, of course. Watching the post every day for a Red Cross letter, or something. Suspense like that is bad. But it gives you a chance to reconcile your mind.”
“I suppose so.”
“I used to cry a good deal at night, at first, especially after I heard the rumours that he had been drowned. But that stopped, too, after a while; and then there was only a sort of dull pain left.”
“And now that’s gone, too?”
She shook her head. “No, it hasn’t. I don’t think it ever will, really. There was no disillusionment. The stardust was still sprinkled over our marriage when he died.”
“He’s all right now,” I said, after a little while. “He wouldn’t want you to go on feeling that pain.”
“Oh, I know that. But you can’t just command yourself not to feel something. When the rumours were confirmed at the end of the war, I thought: Well, this is the end. I’ve had my life, or all of it that matters. Have another whisky?”
“Thank you, I will.”
She went across to the table and filled our glasses.
“After the war, I came back here, and lived with Mother and Leslie. Then Leslie married and moved to London, and three years ago Mother died. So here I am. That’s my life to date.”
She smiled at me. I smiled back. I said:
“You know, when you come to the end of your life, I have a feeling you’ll find it has been divided into four periods: the period of youth, the period of happiness, the period of trial, and the period of renewed happiness. That’s what you’ll find. I’m sure of it.”
I wasn’t being crafty now. It hurt me to think of her pain and sadness. I would have done anything to comfort her: anything, that is, except let Bartels have her.
He never had a chance after I had made up my mind to have her. Not a cat in hell’s chance.
“You’re going through the trial period now, Lorna. But hang on. It’s only a question of hanging on. Do believe me.”
“I hope so.”
She smiled at me again. Again I smiled back, and this time I held her eyes with my own for about as long as it takes a man to draw a quick, deep breath. And that in fact is what I was doing at the sight of the beauty of Lorna’s eyes.
Then I looked away, into the fire, because a voice, the crudely tongued voice which often prompts me, was whispering in my brain: “Softee, softee, catchee bloody monkey-don’t flirt, or you’ll frighten her off; she’ll think you’re a wolf, which you often are, but never mind: softee, softee, catchee bloody monkey…”
I’m cunning with women, I’ve got a kind of knack of seeming gentle, and sympathetic, and understanding, and all that sort of thing. And to some degree I think I must be, because you can’t act those qualities successfully for long: not well enough to deceive women, who are pretty cunning themselves, if it comes to that.
This sounds conceited, but it can’t be helped. It is the truth as I see it, and I’ve got to mention it or otherwise, in view of what happened, Lorna will appear to have been a pretty poor type. Fickle. A bit of a bitch. Which she wasn’t. Like Bartels, she never had a chance, once I got going on her.
There is another side to me, too. I’m interested in everybody, and I’ve made it my business to learn how to play on them, to draw emotions and reactions from them as the bow draws the notes from a fiddle. Against the softer side of my nature, there is a calculating, ruthless, cool streak.
So now I looked away, and did not flirt. Then suddenly, I said, as though it were something which had just occurred to me:
“What about coming out for a bite of dinner? What about driving over to the Crown, at Chiddingfold? Come on, it’ll make a change for you.”
I waited for her answer, feeling tense despite my previous confidence.
“Well, I think I’d like to,” said Lorna.
When she said that, I knew she was in the bag.
But I took it easy that night.
To begin with, I was overjoyed to be dining alone with her, and it was not until we had finished dinner and were having coffee and liqueurs, seated in the bar-lounge in one of the deep settees near the fire, that we touched upon the subject of Bartels.
Indeed, it was Lorna who broached the subject, with a typically direct question:
“What is wrong with Bartels’ marriage?” she asked suddenly, and leant forward to refill the coffee cups.
“Most men would say there is nothing wrong with it,” I answered. “But there is, of course.”
“Whose fault is it?”
I hesitated. “Nobody’s,” I said at length. “Nobody’s, really.”
I had assumed that Lorna would automatically believe that Beatrice was in the wrong, but I misjudged that eminently well-balanced and fair-minded character. Perhaps I had also misjudged Bartels, for I thought he would have played the role of the husband who was not understood by his wife. Her next words showed me that this was not so.
“That’s what Barty says,” she agreed. “He says nobody is to blame, really.” She hesitated and added: “The trouble with Barty is that he is a man who depends upon emotions for his happiness, and he is married to a woman who depends upon material conditions-possessions. Both of them are good people, fundamentally.”
“That’s the tragedy.”
“Barty’s trouble is that he has never had anyone in love with him.”
“Until now,” I said, and looked at her. “You know he is very much in love with you, of course, and I assume that you are in love with him. Right?”
It is curious that both of the women in Bartels’ life were incapable of telling lies. Lorna looked at me now and said:
“I don’t know.”
“Well, for God’s sake! I thought you were both deeply in love and couldn’t do without each other.”
She stared past me into the fire. She said nothing. I listened to the low murmur of conversation from other people in the lounge and said nothing. And waited.
“The trouble is,” she said at last, “I still have my memories of Ronnie. I can’t seem to shake them off. But I am so lonely, you know. People think a woman needs to be loved and that is true, but it is not the whole truth. She also needs somebody to love.”
“Hence poodles and pekes.”
“Hence poodles and pekes. Barty loves me and needs me. I can’t quite see why, but I accept the fact. In a way, I suppose I am terribly grateful to him for loving me.”
“He thinks you’re in love with him,” I said. And when she said nothing, I said again, more slowly and distinctly:
“He thinks you’re in love with him.”
She still said nothing, and I purposely did not look at her because I did not wish either to press her or to embarrass her. I was in love with her, and my heart went out to her as she tried to fathom her own feelings. I felt like saying: “Don’t bother to explain, darling, I know it all.”
Instead, the calculating side of my mind was at work: the side that plotted carefully, planned to get what it wanted and nearly always succeeded. So I said, with deceptive gentleness:
“Gratitude is perhaps an insecure foundation on which to build a life with Barty. He wants more.”
“And he would have more,” she retorted quickly, almost sharply. I retreated at once.
“I’m sure he would.”
“I do love the man. You don’t seem to realize that. I want to look after him, as he wants to look after me. I want to pour out on him love and tenderness and affection. I think he is hurt and disillusioned, and I want to heal him.”
A stab of jealousy and pain went through me.
“Very laudable. I’m sure you can do it.”
“Well, then?” she looked at me. I smiled and signalled to the waiter.
“Well, then-have another brandy?” I smiled at her, and offered her my cigarette case. She refused both the brandy and the cigarette. I ordered another drink for myself, put the cigarette case away and began to fill my pipe.
“Well?” she said again.
“Well, what?”
“Do you think I am wrong to wish to marry him?”
“I am not the judge of your conscience, and when I say that, I am not thinking of his wife. I am thinking of him. Perhaps of you, too.”
“I can make him happy. Happier than he has been. He is such a lovable chap,” she said, almost sadly, “I do so want to make him happy.”
I felt a little tug at my heart: I, too, was fond of old Barty. For some reason, I thought of him as I had first known him at school; being rolled in the mat, and pushed under the vaulting horse; and watching, pale-faced, from the school window until he could safely come out and run home. But I couldn’t afford to indulge in that line of thought for long.
“Look at me,” I said quietly, and when she had turned her head to face me, I said: “Are you in love with Barty?”
“I love him dearly.”
I shook my head. “Are you in love with him?”
When she hesitated, I dropped my little seed of doubt into the rich kindly soil of her heart, and left it to take root and bear fruit, if so it would.
“Actually, although she is not in love with him,” I said, quite casually, as though it were of no importance, “although she is certainly not in love with him, Beatrice loves him, too, in her own way. She’ll take it hardly, I fear. I wouldn’t care to do what Bartels is going to do.”
All the evening I was playing the decent fellow with Lorna; the sympathetic friend, the disinterested adviser; talking of all sorts of things as I drove her home along the frosty roads, back to the house in the lane where she lived; making her laugh now and again; interesting her with stories about the seamy side of big hotels; talking of travels abroad, and, at the end, saying how much I had enjoyed the evening.
I did not even accept her invitation to go into the house for a final drink.
I said goodbye to her on the porch, shaking hands almost primly, even though I longed to take her in my arms and crush her to me, and light the light of passion in her eyes, and feel the softness of her lips on mine, and the warm suppleness of her body.
I was taking no risks.
I wanted her so badly for my own that every nerve and brain cell was alert in my head, and the voice was crying: “Softee, softee, catchee monkey,” and I knew I must be patient or lose her.