The Grass Widow's Tale

“As soon as I’ve seen you safely out of here I’m going to tidy up this place and leave it as nearly as possible the way we found it. Maybe I shan’t succeed, but at least I can try to keep the Alports out of the deal. And then I’m going to take the car and everything that’s in it, and somehow get myself to a police station without being picked up on the way. I can manage that much, if I put my mind to it. And I’ll tell them everything I know about how Pippa got killed. Everything,” he said, his grey gaze wide and steady on her face, “except about you. And then it will be up to them.”

And I will remember you for ever, the grey eyes said, but not for her to hear; whether I ever see you again or not, and whatever becomes of me.

The moment of silence between them was brief and hypnotic; she couldn’t let it go on, there were those urgent realities all the while drumming in her brain, and she knew, and it was time he knew, too, that she had no intention of going anywhere.

“Eat your lunch,” she said practically, “it’ll be even more revolting cold. You’re wasting your time, in any case. I won’t leave you. We’re in this together, and we stand or fall together. I’m not going home to Comerbourne until I can take you with me, a free man.”

In a sudden harsh gasp he burst out: “I meant to kill you!” and shuddered at the memory.

“I know you did. I know you meant to, but you couldn’t. There was never any possibility that you’d be able to do it, when it came to the point. And neither can I go away and leave you now. Maybe I meant to, for a moment, but I can’t. We mean to do things, out of some misconception of what we are, but what we really are always goes its own way when it comes to the point.”

“I owe you everything I’ve got in the world now,” he said carefully, “and everything I am, for whatever it’s worth. You don’t owe me anything, except a great deal of fear and pain.” But he didn’t say that he wanted her to go; it wouldn’t have been true.

“That isn’t how I see it. You chose me for a companion in your extremity. But it happened to be my extremity, too, and I chose to accept your companionship for my own salvation. That’s a bond, and I’m not going back on it. You didn’t make it alone, I helped to make it. We made it,” she said, “and now we’ve got to resolve it.” And abruptly she rose from the table, and marched away into the kitchen for the coffee.

When she came back, he was staring out of the window with his chin on his fist, his face turned away from her; and she would never know whether he abandoned argument because he knew it would not be effective, or because he was only too afraid that it might, and he didn’t want to lose her. For what he said, after a long pause, was only :

“Then I’d better bring in her things from the car, and see if there’s anything there that means anything, to begin with.”

“We should have a look at the gun, too,” Bunty agreed, relieved.

“I suppose,” he said, “I ought to bring her in, too.” Bunty, watching his profile narrowly, noting its determined calm, and impersonality brittle as glass, saw sweat break in beads on his lip. “In any case I shall have to, to get at her suitcase.”

She almost offered to help him, and realised in time that she must not. Where death was concerned she was stronger and better rehearsed than he was—hadn’t she, in a sense, passed clean through a death of her own to this uncanny understanding of him? But there were now almost more ways of hurting and affronting him than there were of helping him, and most of them had to do with his wish to protect and spare her. She knew him now as well as she knew her own son, she was sensitive to everything that happened within him. It wouldn’t cost her much to humour him. So she refrained from offering him the obvious comfort that would have shocked him deeply; for she had been on the point of reassuring him that by this time rigor mortis would most probably be passing, and he wouldn’t have to struggle with a twisted marble girl.

He laid her down carefully on the bed, and turned back the folds of the blanket from her. She was limp and pliant in his hands. He settled her head on the pillow, and straightened her legs and arms, trying to remember whether there had been any expression of fear in her face, where now there was nothing but indifference, and sadly conscious that he would have been unable to see it for the fear in himself. The dead never look as if they are alive and sleeping, whatever people may say. They always look dead. There is an absolute quality about death.

So there she was, young and slender and lovely, the sum of three years of his life, and the focal point of everything he knew about suffering. And maybe he had killed her, but in his heart he felt an increasing conviction that he had not. If he could have been quite sure of his innocence he might have felt the last convulsion of love for her at this moment; but because he was not quite sure, all he dared feel was a terrible, aching pity at such cruel waste. He smoothed her long, fair hair on either side of her face, trying to make something orderly out of disorder.

Then he locked the door, and went down to bring in her suitcase and handbag from the car.

CHAPTER VII

« ^ »

The gun lay between them on the table, a tiny, compact shape of bluish steel, hardly more than four inches long, to the outward view of so simple and innocent a construction that it looked more like a theatrical property or a toy than a machine for killing. It had a tiny cameo head engraved on the side of the grip, and the lettering along the barrel clearly announced its name and status :

LILIPUT KAL. 6.35

Modell 1925.

“I suppose there’s no point in handling it carefully,” said Bunty, eyeing it dubiously. “We’ve already plastered the outside of it with our prints, and in any case we can be certain they haven’t left any others there to be found.”

Nevertheless, neither of them was in any hurry to touch it again. This trifle, hardly too big to have fallen out of a child’s lucky-bag, had bound them together and held them rigidly apart the whole night long, but it had no place in their relationship now. For a moment Bunty had an impulse to ask him why, when he had dragged himself to the very brink of murder against his nature, he had not, after all, used the gun. But that was only one of the many things she could never ask him, and in any case he would not have known the answer. On reflection, she felt that she might be better able to explain it to him. The Luke who had approached that moment in such sickness and despair had believed himself—no, had known himself—to be a murderer; but his own blood and sinews had felt no conviction of any such identity, and had done everything possible to avoid making it true. The gun might have made success only too certain, and his hands had shirked it at the last moment, and come to the decision naked, and still fighting hard against what he was trying to make them do. So she was alive, and he…

He picked up the Liliput suddenly, and thumbed over the small, grooved catch at the left side of the grip. “It’s all right,” he said, holding it out to her with a faint smile, “I’ve only put it on safety. That won’t foul up any evidence