Nest of Vipers

Whether the clearness of the water deceived her as to its depth, whether she did not realise that water deep enough to float a ship, even one of our tonnage, was too deep for her to be able to put her feet down when she was tired, I do not know. Suddenly she panicked, and got a mouthful of water as she submerged. However, I had no difficulty in getting her back to the safety of the ship’s ladder, on to which she was hauled by one of the sailors.

I thought no more of the matter, but after we had returned from the shore excursion she sought me out and thanked me – for ‘saving her life’. I replied modestly and sincerely that I had done nothing of the kind. I was the manager of my local swimming pool and accustomed to keeping an eye on people in the water. That, I supposed, was the end of it, for she took no more notice of me for the remainder of the cruise, although the purser, issuing tickets for the shore excursion at Lisbon on the return voyage, did tell me that she had asked for my home address and that he hoped it had been all right to let her have it.

‘Not that I should have dreamed of it, had the situation been reversed, of course,’ he said.

‘You mean if I’d been a blushing maiden and she a lascivious old man? Glad to hear it,’ I retorted.

So that was that – or so I thought – for I heard nothing more until, nearly five years later, the letter came from her lawyers. I had been left a considerable house standing in its own grounds and a very substantial sum of money.

My first thought, when I had recovered from the shock of discovering that I had become a landed proprietor and a wealthy man, was that now I should have to marry Niobe. It came as a surprise to me to discover that I no longer wanted to do this. I had come to take our six-year understanding for granted. It seemed to satisfy both of us, although we had never lived together in the accepted sense. Perhaps I had better explain this.

When I left the university with an undistinguished honours degree I tried for work in a publisher’s office and then with a literary agency, but found no takers. I was not at all keen on working in an ordinary commercial office, the Civil Service or a bank, let alone becoming a schoolmaster, so I answered an advertisement for superintending and managing a municipal swimming pool. As I held the A.S.A. gold medal and had swum the Channel (although in nothing like record time) they gave me the job.

Niobe Nutley, some few years older than myself, was my opposite number on the women’s side and we soon established an easy, comradely relationship. The work was hard and the hours long. I did not much care for the job and the money was nothing much, but, of course, I could swim free of charge every day, which at least was something.

I got digs with a landlady who mothered me, so that I was given plenty to eat, a decent, clean, comfortable bed and no embargo was placed on female or, indeed, any other visitors. I was an orphan, so I was unembarrassed by parental visits or the need to go home at holiday times, and my most frequent guest was Niobe, so we drifted into an understanding that, as soon as my finances warranted such a step, we would marry.

How this arrangement came about I hardly know. She was a good comrade and a loyal second-in-command at the pool, but if there ever had been the beginnings of a passionate relationship between us, I cannot remember when it was. The years came and went – six of them altogether – and any first fine careless rapture must soon have passed. All the same, until my unexpected rise to affluence came about, the mirage of our ultimately getting married was still on the horizon. It was with that perceptiveness which nature, I suppose, has given to women and which is often miscalled their intuition, that, when I told her of my good fortune, Niobe said, living up to her name and becoming tearful:

‘So now you won’t want me any more.’

I was completely disconcerted by this, for it brought home to me the realisation that she was right. If this seems the reaction of a heel, I’m sorry, but it must be remembered that she and I had had nothing but the most undemanding kind of relationship for at least five years. We had never slept together and, owing to the nature of our jobs, we had never, even at the warmest period of our friendship, spent a holiday together. One or other of us always had to be on duty at the pool, for a deputy could never be placed in full control of the swimming. That was in our contract and the agreement had to be honoured.

Recovering from my surprise at finding that she had hit a nasty smash, with almost uncanny accuracy, straight at my head, unchivalrously I lobbed the ball back into her court.

‘You mean that you don’t want me any more,’ I said. My excuse for saying this was that, now it had come to the crunch, I hoped that maybe she had stuck to me so long merely for the sake of Auld Lang Syne and might be as glad as I was to get out of the entanglement. I had great hopes that for at least the past three years her feelings for me had become as tepid as mine for her and that she was relieved to find a way of escape.

‘I don’t want you any more?’ she asked, wiping her eyes on a used bath towel she had been about to toss into the bin. ‘Well—’ she put on the affected American drawl which she thought funny but which secretly irritated me very much – ‘I guess I never figured on being a rich man’s wife. Anyway, what do you plan to do now?’

I had already made up my mind about this.

‘I shall give in my notice at the pool,’ I said, ‘and as soon as I have worked out my month I shall go to Paris and write my novel.’

‘Won’t you live in the house this woman has left you?’

‘No. It is far too large. Unfortunately it needs a great deal done to it before I have any hope of selling it, but all that can wait.’

‘I don’t want to go to Paris,’ said Niobe. I suppose I looked taken aback. It had not occurred to me to suggest that she should accompany me. That would be no way to break our liaison.

‘Oh, I see,’ she added at once. ‘No doubt I should be in the way.’

‘It isn’t that,’ I said, ‘but, well, I shall be pretty busy with my writing, you know. I mean, there wouldn’t be shopping and the opera and the Folies and all that sort of thing. It wouldn’t be any fun for you. Besides, there’s your job. One of us has to stay here in charge of the pool. You wouldn’t want to – what I mean is that I shall only be gone for a year. I don’t intend to live permanently in Paris.’

‘All right, all right,’ she said. ‘I’ve told you I don’t want to go with you. No need for all these excuses. Anyway, if all I hear about Paris is true, you’ll want to feel perfectly free to go all Montmartre there, so perhaps you’d better have this back.’

She took off the ring I had given her five years previously. At the pool she did not wear it on her engagement finger, but on the forefinger of her left hand.