the pounding of their hearts and the gusty breaths they drew. Paviour was within six feet of them before they were aware of him. Gus lifted his head and looked over Lesley’s shoulder, and there motionless before him, a lean, angular shape in the darkness, the jealous husband stood waiting with bleak courtesy to be let into their world.
Lesley felt the stiffening jolt that passed through Gus’s body, and stirred and turned protestingly to look for its reason. There was one strange moment while they both stared at Paviour, and he at them, rather as though they had no shared language between them, and speech could not help them. Very slowly the two tangled bodies drew apart and stood clear; the most important thing just then seemed to be to accomplish this necessary manoeuvre with a little grace and dignity, not in a humiliating scramble. Even when they were separate, their linked hands parted only gradually and gently.
‘I’m sorry!’ said Paviour with cold civility. ‘I regret forcing this intrusion upon you, but you’ll agree it’s inevitable.’ He looked at Lesley, without any perceptible signs of anger; all that Gus could detect in his voice and his stillness was discouragement and grief. ‘Go back to the house, my dear,’ he said, ‘and go to bed. Leave me to talk to Mr Hambro.’
The most remarkable thing was that she did as she was told, not in a manner that suggested any fear of him, or any great desire to justify herself or placate him. Her shoulders lifted in a small, resigned shrug. She cast a glance at Gus, hesitated no more than a second, and then turned and walked away into the darkness, towards the distant shape of the house within its girdle of trees.
‘I have no wish to embarrass you,’ said Paviour, when the last faint rustle of her steps in the grass had died away. ‘That was not my intention.’ There was no dislike in his voice, he stood detached and withdrawn into the night, and the lack of precise vision made this encounter easier than Gus would have believed possible. ‘But you see, of course, that I had to intervene.’
‘You’re being absurdly generous, in fact,’ Gus said honestly. ‘I’m not going to attempt to justify myself. But I can at least assure you, for what it’s worth, that things have gone no further than what you’ve seen.’
‘I’m well aware of that,’ said Paviour drily; and though it seemed incredible, there was the suggestion of a sour smile in his voice this time. ‘And it won’t be necessary to defend yourself. I understand the situation perfectly. I should, I’ve lived with it for some years now. You mustn’t think, my dear Hambro, that you’re the first. And I can’t hope that you’ll be the last.’
‘I don’t understand you,’ said Gus, stiffening.
‘You will. Do you mind if I walk with you down to the lodge? It’s a little cold for standing around, and we can talk as we go.’
Bemused, Gus fell into step beside him on the path. They walked with a yard or so of the dark between them. And after a moment Paviour resumed gently; ‘I take it you’ll have heard from Lesley about her earlier love affair, and the way it ended. The way, in fact, that we came to get married. I needn’t go into that again. And I needn’t tell you what’s obvious, that Lesley is a beautiful and charming girl, and highly intelligent. But she has an affliction. Not surprising, in the circumstances. That early shock in love damaged her permanently. She was ill-—not physically, but you’ll understand me—for some time. On that one subject she will never again be entirely well. What has just happened to you is routine,’ he said tiredly. ‘I’m sorry, but you’ll have to get used to the thought. No doubt she’ll have told you that I’m pathologically jealous of every man who so much as comes near her—hasn’t she? Well, have I behaved like that? Do you really think I didn’t see you with her this morning?’
‘I know you did,’ said Gus. ‘I knew it then. That was not quite what it seemed. It happened almost by accident.’
‘You think so?’ said Paviour, and the bitter smile in his voice was clearer than before. ‘My dear boy, Lesley has a temperamental disposition to repeat her ruinous love affair with every unwary male who enters her life. Every presentable one, that is. She behaves with every one of them just as she has been behaving with you today. But heaven help any poor fellow who takes her seriously. The game goes only so far. You may even have detected a rather violent reaction on her part, if you ever got so far as taking the initiative?’
Gus walked dourly beside him, and said nothing.
‘Yes—I thought so. The signals turn red very abruptly. You’d get no further, I assure you. She would kill you or herself rather than actually surrender. I have good reason to know. She’s emotionally crippled for life, and it’s my life-work to protect and conceal her disability, and prevent her from doing harm to herself and others. I married her to take care of her. As I have done already through several affairs, all as fictional as this one with you.’
He felt, and misunderstood, or understood only in part, the obstinate silence walking beside him.
‘Yes,’ he said challengingly, almost as if defending his manhood against some implied accusation, ‘I love her as much as that. It was a little late, in any case, for me to marry for any other kind of passion. This does well enough. It’s more than anyone else will ever have of her.’
Gus came out of his own private chaos of speculation and enlightenment just in time to capture the implication, and too late to absorb the shock in silence.
‘You mean to say that
‘The inference you’re drawing,’ said Paviour, in a voice thinner and more didactic than Gus had ever yet heard it, ‘is a correct one. I knew all about her panic abhorrence before I married her, Sexually, I’ve never touched her. She is a virgin. She always will be.’
Dignified, pathetic and decent, the man stood there quite obviously telling the simple truth as he saw it, and who was likely to see it more clearly? And it all made sense, or would have done if Gus’s blood hadn’t still been racing with the remembered persuasion of her body against him, and the ravenous expertise of her mouth, and the ferocity of her nails scoring into his back. That memory confounded the argument considerably. And yet it was true, the initiative had still been hers. All he’d had time to do was go along with her wishes; and if he’d just been reaching the point of having wishes and intentions of his own, he’d been saved by the bell, and she hadn’t had to react. Try it! she’d said. Touch me! But deliberately he’d left the next move to her. And now maybe he’d never know which of them was crazy, himself or this elderly masochist—or hero, or whatever he was—who got his satisfaction in cherishing and protecting his wife like a delinquent daughter.
‘So you see why it’s essential,’ said Paviour, gently and firmly, ‘that my wife should not see you again. You’re not in any illusion that her heart is involved, I hope?’
‘No,’ said Gus, ‘I’m not in any illusion. She won’t have any trouble getting over my loss.’
By common consent they had halted well short of the low hedge of the garden at the lodge. The house was in
