The Grass Widow's Tale

She hadn’t been expecting that, but she was equal to it. Startled by her own readiness, she responded without hesitation: “I’m Rosamund Chartley—that’s Mrs. Chartley, of course…” The young one, if not the other, had long since assimilated the significance of her ring. “And I live at 17 Hampton Close, Hereford.” She couldn’t be sure how much he would know in advance about the Alports, but her use of their name had registered immediately, she might as well play for safety and assume that he knew their home town, too. She watched him write down her instant fiction, and smiled at him as he put his note-book away; not too encouragingly, on the contrary, with a slight intimation that if that was all she could do for him she would like to go back to her interrupted breakfast.

“Thank you, ma’am, we won’t keep you any longer now. And I’m sure ye needna be at all uneasy. Good morning, Mrs. Chartley!”

He re-adjusted his cap on the grizzled heather he wore for hair, summoned his subordinate with a flick of a finger, and they departed. She closed the door, and leaned back against it for a moment, listening. They had a car, they must have turned it on the gravel and withdrawn it into the shelter of the trees before knocking at the door. She heard it start up and wind away into the convolutions of the lane. Only then did she re-bolt and lock the door, and go back into the living-room.

The young man was sitting bolt upright on the settee, dark against the brilliance and shimmer of the sea, every nerve at stretch, his eyes fixed wildly on the empty doorway, waiting for her to reappear there. The gun was in the clenched right hand that lay on his knee, and his finger was crooked on the trigger.

She saw it instantly, and instantly understood. He must have lowered his hand in sheer stupefaction when the meaning of that astonishing performance of hers penetrated his mind, with his death only the tightening of a nerve away.

Oh, God, she thought, suppose he hadn’t waited to hear? Why didn’t I take it from him before I went to the door? But there’d been no time to consider everything. And thank God, he had waited, and confusion and bewilderment had kept him from dying. Or curiosity, perhaps, curiosity can be a valid reason for going on living, when no other is left.

So the first thing she had to do, without delay but without any hasty gesture that could startle him back into despair, was to cross the room to him, and gently take the thing out of his hand. He didn’t resist; his cramped fingers opened at her touch, and gave it up without protest. Enormous eyes, cloudy with wonder, devoured her face and had no attention for anything else.

“Why?” he asked, in a rustling whisper.

“You won’t need it now,” she said. But she knew that was not what he meant.

“Why didn’t you bring them in and give me up? Why didn’t you tell them I tried to kill you?”

Without a word in answer, she opened a drawer of the little writing-desk on the other side of the room, and thrust the gun far back out of sight. Then she came back to the settee and sat down beside him.

“Look,” she said urgently, “you and I have got to talk. We’ve got a little time now, and the car’s safest where it is. They won’t come looking for it here now—not yet!”

“But why did you send them away?”

“Never mind that. There are things I’ve got to know, and we may not have all that long. That girl in the car— who is she?”

“Her name’s Pippa Gallier,” he said, with the docility of despair, shock and hopeless bewilderment, but with some positive motion of faith, too, as though she had surprised him into drawing back the first of the bolts that sealed his terrible solitude from the world. “We were going to be married. I thought we were…”

“She’s a Comerbourne girl? That is where you teach, isn’t it? What was she? What did she do?”

“She worked at the big fashion shop, Pope Halsey’s, and did a bit of modelling for them when they had dress shows. She was an assistant buyer. She wasn’t a Comerbourne girl, though, her family belong to Birmingham. She had a little flat over one of the shops in Queen Street. Why?” he asked dully, but at least there was a grain of life in his voice now, and in his eyes, that never wavered from searching her face. He had some kind of stunned trust in her now that told him she must have a reason for probing these irremediable things. Nothing she did was wanton; it didn’t follow that she could change anything.

“And how did she come to die?”

“I shot her,” he said, staring through her and seeing the girl’s dead face.

“All right, you shot her! But that’s not what I want. I want to know how it happened, every detail, everything you remember. Tell me about it.”

He drew breath as if the effort cost him infinite labour, and told her, fumbling out the sequence of events with many pauses. He was terribly tired, and completely lost, but he was still coherent.

“I wanted to marry her. We were running about together steadily, until about a couple of months ago, and we were as good as engaged. And then she got very off-hand with me, for some reason, and started pulling away. She turned down dates, or she rang up to make excuses, and if I objected she flared up and walked out. They’d always tried to tell me she had other men on a string, too… I never believed it. I was daft about her…”

“They?” said Bunty, pouncing on this lack of definition. “Who were they?”

“The chap who shares—shared—my cottage, Bill Reynolds, he teaches at the same school. Other friends of ours, too.”

“And some of them knew her well? Could they have been on her string themselves?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so. They knew her, but not that well. I never believed it. And then just over a week ago it seemed as if we’d got past the bad patch. You know how it can be, everything straightens out and starts running on wheels. She was the sweetest I’ve ever known her, and things were back as they used to be. I bought her a ring. She’d never let me get that far before. I was happy! You know what I mean? I’d never believed there was anything wrong about her, but I’d never felt sure of her before, and now I did, she’d promised, and we were engaged. And then she suggested that we should go to London together this half- term…”