head and shoulders were visible in the general darkness. Her back was turned to him, and as he stood in the doorway and regarded her still shape he wondered if she was asleep. But she became aware of his presence. She turned with opened eyes.
‘Has she gone at last? She stayed a very long time; it’s nearly six o’clock. You must be worn out. Did she bring her baby?’
‘No.’
‘I couldn’t face meeting her. She is always so healthy. I feel unwell even seeing her.’
The old man gave a grunt. ‘She is much younger than you.’
This was true, for Florence was a score of years older than Gertie, but it was also true that Florence’s health was far from good. She had a weak constitution and suffered not only from headaches and recurrent toothache, but also from neuritis, a condition caused by undernourished nerve endings, for which she took some large pills manufactured by a chemist in the town. Nor was this all: less than a month earlier, in London, she had had a surgical operation to remove a lump from her neck. It was to hide the scar that she had taken to wearing the fox stole, an object that the old man had never much liked.
She was wearing it now. She sat up, pulling it tight round her neck. ‘It’s very cold in here,’ she complained. ‘What did you talk about?’
‘Nothing. Nothing of any consequence.’
‘Who was on the telephone? Someone rang.’
‘I didn’t hear it.’
‘It rang several times.’
‘One of the maids must have answered it. I never heard it ring. Perhaps it was a bird,’ he said, rather improbably.
‘Thomas, it rang at least four or five times, about an hour ago. Of course it wasn’t a bird. It was nothing like a bird.’ Her voice was suddenly severe. ‘I certainly didn’t imagine it. I must ask the maids.’
‘I’m sure you didn’t,’ he said hurriedly, not wanting to upset her.
There was a silence between them.
‘I can’t think who it can have been,’ she said. ‘Maybe it was Cockerell. He sometimes rings.’
‘Why would he have rung?’
‘I don’t know. He does ring.’
The conversation was going nowhere.
The old man returned to the drawing room. The fire was burning down – let it burn, he thought, she had gone, she was on her way back to Beaminster, there was no point in wasting more coal. Yet something of her presence remained, even now. The cup from which she had drunk still sat in its saucer, and the faintest smudge of red was visible on the rim. There it had touched her lips – and there she had sat! There – one of the sofa cushions was indented – she had sat only minutes before! Something else caught his eye. On the sloping back of the sofa lay a long black hair.
With some difficulty he grasped it between finger and thumb and held it to the firelight. It trembled and swayed, stirring in the current of his breath like a living thing.
One of the maids entered with a tray. She stopped short at the sight of him.
‘Excuse me, sir.’
‘No, no, go on.’
He watched without a word as she cleared the tea things. Then he went upstairs to his study. He spread the hair on a sheet of white paper and turned up the lamp so that it shone as brightly as possible. In its light the strand of hair gleamed, thick and strong. A hair was merely a hair, but it was the kind of token that, in a romantic age, a secret admirer might have treasured – might have put in a locket and worn on a chain around his neck, and examined now and then when unobserved. According to the common view of such matters he was many years too old for that sort of thing, yet he was reluctant to throw it away. Why throw it away? Only a short space of time ago it had been part of her.
On one of the book-shelves in his study was a small volume bound in green leather, containing the collected poetical works of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Of English poets, there was no one whom he admired more than Shelley, a man of blazing courage and single-mindedness, ready to defy the narrow morals and social conventions of his age. The old man pulled down the book and turned its leaves until he reached the title page of a poem entitled ‘The Revolt of Islam’. A long and obscure work, little read nowadays but breathless in ambition and beauty, its opening section was a passionate address to Shelley’s young wife Mary, with whom he had eloped not long before. The section concluded with an image of the two lovers as a pair of tranquil stars, shining like lamps on a tempestuous world. It was on these last lines that the old man placed Gertie’s hair.
As he closed the book and replaced it on its shelf in the bookcase he was conscious of a certain absurdity in what he had done. He was eighty-four! Too old! What a thousand pities that he and she had not met when they were both young. Had she been born earlier, or he later, ‘had time cohered with place’, what then might have ensued? How different their lives might have been!
It was the type of reflection that often appealed to the old man as the subject for a poem: how different lives might have been in different circumstances. Picking up his pen, he dipped it in the ink-well and began to write freely.
The old man’s interest in Gertrude Bugler was a complicated one, and he frequently found himself dwelling on her in the damp days that ushered in the start of winter. At one level, it might be said, he had always been an admirer of feminine beauty, and she was, without question, a radiant member of that company, young and healthy and full of joie de vivre. Yet, as he was well aware, there were other reasons that lay behind his sentiments towards her, and these had their origin in an incident that had occurred many summers earlier, on what he remembered, whether correctly or not, to have been his forty-seventh birthday.
He had spent the day at the house. During the morning he had worked hard on the final draft of a novel, and during the afternoon he and Emma, his first wife, had taken tea in the garden. The sun shone, but he had been in a reflective mood; birthdays always filled his consciousness with a sense of the brevity of life. How many years were left before Death laid its cold hand upon his shoulder? How much more had he to do before he could feel that he had accomplished his life’s aims? True, he came from a long-lived family, but longevity was not something upon which anyone could count with certainty. He was not yet financially secure; and the house was proving much more expensive to run than he had originally anticipated. What if he were to fall ill, or what if, for some reason, his novelistic powers were to leave him? He felt no waning of ability, but there were many examples of writers whose once bright careers had ended badly. Such were the thoughts that came to oppress him, that summer’s afternoon.
There was another reason for the cloud that hung on his spirits. His relations with Emma, which for so long had been excellent, had undergone a sharp turn for the worse. It was not largely his fault, or so he felt. Not long before, she had claimed – he recalled this distinctly – that he loved his mother more than her. This charge had caught him by surprise, although in an earlier novel he had written about just such a problem – there one of the central characters had been fatally torn between the demands made by his mother and those made by his wife.
He had considered Emma’s words – which had struck a gaping wound in his heart – and rejected them. It seemed to him that she was asking him to choose between her and his mother, when no choice was necessary. Surely, he had said to her, it was possible for a man to love and respect his mother, and also to love and respect his wife. The one did not make the other impossible. But this careful, emollient response she had immediately and wilfully misinterpreted as confirmation of his elevation of his mother above her.
In truth, this dispute was merely a symptom of deeper division. They talked less to each other than they had once, and laughed even less. She was dissatisfied here in the country, and lately had begun to make disparaging remarks about the house: ‘an ugly, misshapen house, on the edges of a narrow, ugly, superstitious town’. Such words, never to be forgotten! Now, this very day – his birthday – as they sat over tea, she had gone further,