The Grass Widow's Tale

CHAPTER XIV

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In the back of the police car, speeding south down the A.73 south of Cumbernauld New Town, Bunty and Luke sat all but silent, shoulder to shoulder as on the white wicker settee in Louise Alport’s devastated living-room.

“How am I ever going to face the Alports?” Luke had said, looking round his battle-field despairingly from the weary vantage-point of victory. “Louise will kill me!” So soon do words resume their normal easy and unthinking meaning. And Bunty had consoled him. “They’ll forgive you! On this story they can dine out for life!”

“Your husband’s on the line, Mrs. Felse,” said the driver. “He’s through Kendal now, it won’t be long. We’ll run off and rendezvous with him at Lockerbie.” And to the radio he said cheerfully: “You know the King’s Arms, in High Street? They’ve got no parking space, but at this hour there’ll be room in the street.”

“He’ll find it,” said Bunty.

“You want to speak to him, Mrs. Felse?”

“Just give him my love,” she said.

“Your boy’s coming on now, ma’am. He says you cost him twenty-two bob for flowers, and they’ll be dead before you see them.”

“Tell him half a bottle of Cognac would have kept better.”

“He says no Cognac, but there’s a bottle of Riccadonna Bianca, though you don’t deserve it.”

She laughed, and her eyes gushed tears suddenly and briefly. Luke had never seen her in tears. There was always a new snare, a fresh, impossible attraction. Of course, they were crazy for her, those two men of hers rushing north to meet her because waiting was impossible. There would never be anyone like her, never, never, never. And now there wasn’t much time left for him, he could feel the minutes slipping through his fingers like sand, and there was so much to say, so much that he wanted to say properly before he lost her for ever, so much he knew would never be said. There was the police driver, sitting there in front of them impersonal and incurious, but human. And nothing must ever be said of love, however love crowded his thoughts and made his heart faint.

It was enough, in a way, that she had invited him to go south with her. Naturally she was free to go, and naturally she wanted to reach her family as soon as possible, and return home with them; but he had still certain charges hanging over him, and he could have been held, had not she expressly asked to have him with her, and even punctiliously invited him to go with her, as if he could deny her anything, as if he would willingly have parted with her a moment sooner than he needed. It was enough because it meant that what had happened between them had a validity of its own, present and eternal, for her as well as for him. And in the car, between their few exchanges, she had slept confidingly against his shoulder, even nestled into the shelter of his diffident arm, and settled her cheek against his breast. The journey north, with death on his back and a gun in his hand ready for her, was only twenty-four hours past.

“I could stay,” he said haltingly. “In Lockerbie, I mean. There’d surely be a room for me, this time of year. I mean, you’ll want… your family… they’ll want you to themselves…”

“Don’t be silly!” said Bunty warmly. “You’re coming with us. Didn’t I say I wasn’t going home till I could take you with me?”

“I’m not much of a trophy,” he said, and could not keep all the bitterness out of his tone.

“You’re not a trophy. You’re my co-victor. Without you there’s no triumph, and I need a triumph. My family are very critical.”

“I can imagine,” he said, racked with unwilling laughter. And in a moment, very seriously indeed: “You know there are still several counts against me.”

“I don’t think anybody’s going to be interested in throwing the book at you now,” she said, yawning into his sleeve like a sleepy child. “Not after what we’re bringing them.” It still turned his heart over in a transport of joy and humility when she said “we.”

“I don’t mind. I shan’t complain. Bunty,” he said shyly, “you’re happy, you’ve got everything. Why were you sad? When you came into the ‘Orion’, why were you so sad?”

She looked back at that moment with some astonishment, it seemed now so alien and so far away.

“Sometimes being happy doesn’t seem enough. I was alone, and I’d stopped being young, and suddenly I didn’t know where I was going or what I was for. It was you,” she said, without calculation, “who cured me.”

“I did? But I… I don’t see,” he said, trembling, “how I can have been much comfort or reassurance to you!”

“I didn’t want to be comforted or reassured! I wanted to be used! You had a use for me. Me! Not my husband’s wife or my son’s mother. Me, Bunty!”

She felt his helpless adoration in the devoted stillness of his body and the agonised tenderness of the arm that held her, and she thought: Poor Luke! No, lucky Luke! Everything rounded off firmly and finally for him, no letdowns afterwards, no waking up gradually to the fact that I’m nearly old enough to be his mother, and it’s beginning to show more grossly every year. No rejections, and no disillusionments. Here he has me for ever. And for ever—no, not young, perhaps, but never more than forty-one! And brave and loyal and good, everything he wants to believe me. When I need that reference to forward to the gods, I shall know where to apply.

“All my life,” she said, inspired, “I shall remember you and be grateful to you.”

And he, who had all this time been crying in his heart how he would remember her always, and with eternal gratitude and love, was so disarmed and so perfectly fulfilled by her taking the words out of his heart that he never missed the word she had omitted. So that it did not matter, in the end, that she should wonder whether she had done well to avoid the mention of love. It was not the only word in the language; and as one of the most misused, it was thankful, now and again, for reticence and silence.

She was asleep in his arm when the car ran off the dual carriage-way and wound its way into the small, handsome town, half asleep at the end of Sunday. The car from the south was there before them, Luke saw the two men standing beside it, heads up, eyes alertly roving, waiting for them to arrive. In the beam of headlights the two faces burned out of the darkness eager, intent, impatient, as was only proper when they were waiting for Bunty; and as the car that brought her to them slipped smartly into a vacant parking spot beside the kerb, Luke saw them both smooth away the residue of wild anxiety out of their eyes, and the tension of longing out of their faces. There is a certain duty to take old love easily, even when it scalds.