The Grass Widow's Tale

instead, with a still and grateful passion, and the instant she let her mind lie at rest in him she fell asleep.

It was nearly noon when she awoke, the sun was high, the light harder, more than half the room now out of the direct sunlight. She got up stiffly, sticky with sleep, and the sense of time pressing fell upon her like fear. She washed and made up her face, and then went to explore the contents of the kitchen cupboard. A canned Sunday luncheon was something of which her family would have disapproved, but it was better than nothing. There were no potatoes, of course, but there was rice, and ham, and some exotic canned vegetables. And blessedly, there was coffee. The kitchen was tiny, built out to the extremity of the level ground, with a broom-cupboard and a store under the same roof. She opened the back door, and the shimmering reflected light from the sea flooded in; and beyond a tiny, flagged terrace, the slatey stairs began to plunge downhill towards the inlet and the jetty, and the moored boat below.

She knew then, busy in the sunlit kitchen with can-opener and pans, that the silence and the brightness were an illusion, and nothing was going to be easily salvaged, neither Luke Tennant’s liberty nor her own peace of mind.

He came down the stairs with a brisk, self-conscious tread that told her plainly he meant to resume responsibility for his own fate. He was a new if slightly battered man, polished, shaven, combed into aggressive neatness; he was the lucky one in one respect, at least, he had his luggage with him on this trip. He had even changed his clothes, perhaps as a symbolical gesture of hope and renewal. The sleep he had had, too short and too drunkenly deep, had left him a little sick and unsteady, but very determined. His face was still pale, but the terrible tension was eased once and for all. He could even smile properly. He smiled when he opened the door of the living- room, and looked for Bunty, and found her. It was as if his eyes had been waiting with the smile in readiness, and she was the spark that set light to it.

“I hope you’re hungry,” she said, rising. “You’ve probably got to be, to eat this concoction I’ve knocked up. It was the best I could do. If you don’t mind, I’ll dish it up in the kitchen and bring it in on the plates.”

“Bunty, I’ve been…” His eyes took in the order she had restored to the room, the laid table, the signs of activity in the kitchen; he was side-tracked by sheer amazement, and then abashed by a devastating sense of his own uselessness by comparison. “Good lord, you can’t have slept at all!”

“Oh, yes, I did,” she called back from the kitchen. “This is one of those five-minute meals. The only thing that isn’t instant, I’m glad to say, is the coffee.” She appeared in the kitchen doorway with the piled plates in her hands, and closed the door behind her with one foot. “Look out, these are hot!”

She had found Louise Alport’s hostess apron, gaily printed crash linen with pockets shaped like tulips, and her nursery towelling oven gloves. The cottage had a fantasy quality, unreal, inexhaustible, and in such dreamlike experiences you take anything you can get, to balance the everything you have lost, your normal world. Also, perhaps, for a better reason, to dazzle your companion, and keep the machinery of his life ticking over until the normal world is recovered.

If, of course, it ever is recovered.

“Bunty, I’ve been thinking…”

“Good!” she said heartily. “Maybe you can infect me. After lunch we’ve got a lot of hard thinking to do.”

“Not we,” he said gently. “I.”

She looked up sharply at that, eyeing him doubtfully across the table. He had regained his balance, at least; whether he yet believed seriously in his own innocence or not, he wasn’t going to be shaken into induced behaviour again. No more doing his worst to act like a killer because he believed that he had reduced himself to that role, and had no right to any other.

“Bunty, I’m more grateful to you than I can ever tell you. But now I’ve got to go on with this by myself. It’s my problem, not yours. I’ve let you do too much for me, and without you I should never have come to my senses. But now I am in my right mind, and I want you out of this mess, clean out of it. I want you home, untouched, as if you’d never known anything about me and my sordid affairs. After lunch I’m going to drive you into Forfar, and put you on a train for Edinburgh, on the way home. I’d make it all the way to Edinburgh, and see you safe on the express, only I doubt if I could get the car that far without being picked up.”

“I doubt,” said Bunty, laying down her fork with careful quietness, “whether you’ll get it as far as Forfar, either.”

“I think I shall. I know these roads. And you know what they said… they’re looking for a car that jumped a red light and scared a policeman out of a year’s growth, but not for a murderer. So they’ll be hunting me, all right, but they won’t have turned out the whole force after me. I’ll make it safely to Forfar with you. And I shall feel a little less guilty if I know you’re clear away. I can’t let you go on carrying my load for me.”

“Aren’t you forgetting,” she said dryly, “that they know I’m here? That I gave them a false name and address, which they may very well be checking up on at this moment? You think that young constable won’t know me again?”

His eyes, devouring her with an unwavering stare of anxiety, compunction and reverence, said clearly that any man who had talked with her even for a moment would know her again among thousands. His voice, quietly reasonable, said only: “What does that matter? He’s never going to see you again. All they’ve got is a false name. They may find out that your Rosamund doesn’t exist, but that still won’t help them to find Bunty. By tomorrow you’ll be home again, and nobody’ll know where you’ve been, and nobody here will know who the woman was who answered the door to the police this morning.”

“It’s impossible,” said Bunty firmly. “In any case, I’ve got no money, not a penny.”

“We have,” he said, and smiled at her.

What surprised her most was the violence of the temptation that tugged at her mind and heart, to accept the offer and escape now, back into her old prosaic life, to close this secret interlude and lock the door on it for ever. She thought with an astonishing surge of joy and longing of her unexciting household in Comerford, and the half of her life that was over seemed to her in retrospect, and from this pinnacle of strangeness, full, satisfying and utterly desirable. Luke was not talking of impossibilities at all. By morning she could be home. No one would ever know where she’d been in the interval. Probably no one need ever know she had been away at all. Not even George!

The very mention, the very thought of George turned her in her tracks, and brought everything into focus for her. Of course she couldn’t consider it. She had never seriously believed that she could.

“And what,” she asked deliberately, “are you proposing to do?”