The Grass Widow's Tale

mask, its frozen lines were at least growing pliable now.

“You don’t mind my talking to you? I’ll shut up if you say so.”

She did not say so. What she did say, after a moment of deliberation, was: “I came out because it was too silent at home, and I came in here because it was even more silent outside.”

He uttered a short, harsh sound that might, if he had been less tense, have emerged as a laugh. “That won’t be our trouble here, anyhow. Or would you say this was a kind of silence, too? A howling silence?” The babel was reaching its climax, it was only half an hour to closing-time. The young man cast one brief glance round the room, and turned back to her, his eyes for a moment wide and dark with awareness of her, and strangely innocent of curiosity. “We’ve got something in common, then,” he said, emptying his glass without taking his eyes from Bunty’s face. “You weren’t expecting to be alone, either.”

“No,” she agreed, thinking how different a celebration this forty-first birthday might have been, “I wasn’t expecting to be alone.”

“Nor was I. I’m heading north,” he said jerkily, revolving the empty glass dangerously between his fingers, “for a long week-end. Not much to look forward to now, though. There should have been two of us, if everything hadn’t come to pieces.” The glass was suddenly still between his long hands; he stared at it blackly. “I suppose I ought to lay off, but I’ve got to have one more of these, I’m still twenty per cent short of human. May I get you the other half? Or would you prefer a short?”

“Thanks, the other half would be fine.”

She watched him worm his way to the bar with the empty glasses, and knew that she had done that deliberately. Why? Because if she had refused he would have taken it as a rebuff and been turned in again upon his own arid company? Or because she would have lost touch with him and been driven back upon hers? What she was courting was the loss of herself in another human creature, and that was what he wanted, too. Not that it would ever be much more than two parallel monologues, the passing of two trains on a double track, somewhere in the dark. But at least the sight of a human face at one of the flying windows would assure the watcher of companionship in his wakefulness. Their need was mutual, why pass up the opportunity of filling it?

So she waited for him, and watched him come back to her, balancing full glasses carefully as he wound his way between the jostling backs of the Saturday-night crowd.

“I’m sorry about your spoiled week-end,” she said. And with carefully measured detachment, since clearly this was no light matter to him at the moment: “Of course, there are other girls.”

He was just setting down his glass on the table, and for the first time his hand shook. She looked up in surprise, and met his eyes at close range, suddenly fallen blank in a frozen face, as grey and opaque as unlighted glass. He sat down slowly, every line of his body drawn so taut that the air between them quivered.

“Who mentioned a girl?”

“There are only two sorts,” she said patiently. “There was at least a fifty-fifty chance of guessing right first time about the companion who let you down.”

He drew in a long, cautious breath and relaxed a little. The slow fires came back distrustfully into his eyes. “Yes… I suppose it wasn’t difficult.” His voice groped through the words syllable by syllable, like feet in the dark feeling their way. “We fell out,” he said. “It’s finished. I can’t say I wasn’t warned, at least half a dozen of my friends must have told me she was playing me for a sucker, but I never believed it.”

“You could still be right about her,” said Bunty reasonably, “and they could still be wrong.”

“Not a chance! It all blew up in my face to-day. For good.”

“There may be more to be said for her than you think now. You may not always feel like this. You and she may make it up again, given a little goodwill.”

“No!” he said with quiet violence. “That’s out! She’ll never have the chance to let me down again.”

“Then—at the risk of repeating myself—there are other girls.”

He wasn’t listening. No doubt he heard the sound of her voice quite clearly, just as those blue-circled, burning eyes of his were memorising her face, but all he saw and all he heard had to do with his own private pain. Bunty was merely a vessel set to receive the overflow of his distress.

“We only got engaged ten days ago,” he said. “God knows why she ever said yes, she had this other fellow on the string all along. Whatever she wanted out of it, it wasn’t me.”

“It happens,” said Bunty. “When you commit yourself to another person you take that risk. There isn’t any way of hedging your bet.”

“She hedged hers pretty successfully,” he said bitterly.

“She wasn’t committed. And you’re better off without her.”

So softly that she hardly heard him, more to himself than to her, he said, “Oh, my God, what is there in it, either way?” His hands clenched into white-knuckled fists on his knees. She thought for a moment that he was going to faint, and instinctively put out a hand and took him by the arm, no hesitant touch, but a firm grip, tethering him fast to the world it seemed he would gladly have shaken off in favour of darkness. It brought his head up with a jerk, his eyes dazed and dark in that blanched face. They stared steadily at each other for a moment, devouring line and substance and form so intensely that neither of them would ever be able to hide from the other again, under any name or in any disguise.

“Look,” said Bunty quietly, “you’re not fit to drive any distance to-night. Go home, fall into bed, sleep her off, drink her off if you have to, get another girl, anything, only give yourself a chance. It isn’t the end of the world… it had damned well better not be! You’ve got a life before you, and it isn’t owed to her, it’s owed in part to the rest of us, but mostly to yourself. You go under and we’ve all lost.”

She wondered if he even knew that she was at least twelve years older than he was. She had begun by feeling something like twenty years older, and now she was no longer sure that there was even a year between them. This was no adolescent agony, but a mature passion that shook the whole room, even though the babel went on round it, oblivious and superficial, a backcloth of triviality.

“It is the end of the world,” said the young man, quite softly and simply. “That’s what you don’t understand.”