I could have rung up the telephone people, and begged them to cut off the Hampstead number. But with what excuse? I could have taken pliers and wrenched our own telephone out of its socket. I knew that nothing would be solved with pliers. But by the weekend I did know what I could try to do, for sanity’s sake, to prevent us from going down into the solitudes of our guilt.
On Friday afternoon – after tea – my opportunity came. It was a glorious evening – golden, with the sand blowing lightly along the shore, and a racing tide. I persuaded Allan to take the boat out to troll for mackerel on the turn. I watched him go off from the doorway. I waited until I actually saw him push the boat off from our small jetty. Then I turned back into the cottage, and closed the door behind me. I had shut out all the evening sunlight so that I could hardly see the telephone. But I walked over to it. I took it up in both my hands. I drew a long deep breath, and I gave the Hampstead number. All that I had been told of Katherine during those bad months in London had been of kindness and gentleness and goodness – nothing of revenge. To this I clung, and upon it I was banking. My teeth were chattering, and I was shaking all over when the bell down in London began to ring. I suppose at that moment I lost my head. I thought – I could have sworn – I heard the receiver softly raised at the far end. But I suppose I should have waited instead of bursting into words. Now I shall never know. And they were not even the words I’d planned. I suppose I reverted, being so frightened, to the kind of prayer one blurts out in childhood:
‘Please – please –’ I said down the mouth-piece. ‘Please let me have him now. I know everything I’ve done’s been wrong. It’s too late about that. But I won’t be a child anymore. I’ll look after him, like you’ve always done,’ I said. ‘Only please let me have him now. I’ll be a wife to him. I promise you – if that’s what you are wanting. I can get him right again, and I’ll take care of him. Now and for ever more,’ I said.
And I banged the receiver down, and fled upstairs to our bedroom. Through the window I could see the little boat bobbing about on the sea. I sat down in the window in the full evening sun, and I shook all over, and I cried and cried …
In the small hours of the morning came the crisis. I woke – it must have been about half past four. The bed was empty. In an instant I was wide awake, because down in the hall I could hear the insistent tinkle of the telephone receiver, struck over and over again, and above it, mingled with it, Allan’s voice. Somehow I got the lamp lighted. The shadows tilted all over the ceiling and I could hear the paraffin sloshing round the bowl as I stumbled out to the head of the stairs.
‘Katherine – Katherine –’
He was shaking the receiver, and babbling down the mouth-piece when my light from the staircase fell upon him. He let the receiver drop, and stood looking up at me.
‘I can’t get her,’ he said. ‘I wanted her to forgive me. But she doesn’t answer. I can’t reach her.’
I brought him up the stairs. I can remember shivering with the little dawn sea-wind blowing through my cotton nightdress from the open window. I made him tea, while he sat in the window, staring up at the grey clouds of the morning. At last he said:
‘You must book yourself a room at one of the hotels in Oban. Only for a couple of nights. I’ll come back – probably tomorrow, or the next day. You see –’ and he began to explain carefully, politely as if to a foreigner, ‘you see, I’ve got to find Katherine, and so I have to go down unexpectedly to London –’
From our remote part of the Highlands there are only two trains a day. Allan went on the early morning one. I had, of course, no intention of going to any hotel. I knew where my promise to Katherine lay, where lay my love. I said ‘Yes – yes’ to everything Allan said, and stayed in the cottage all that day. And then I caught the evening train.
There was no chance of a sleeper. I huddled in the corner of a carriage packed with returning holidaymakers, my face turned first to the twilight, and then to the darkness rushing past the window. In the dead cold hours, when the other passengers sprawled and snored, the terror for Allan nearly throttled me. Once I dozed off, and woke, biting back a scream because I thought I saw the telephone wire running alongside the train, stretched and singing, ‘You’ll never know. You’ll never know …’
Euston in the morning loomed gaunt and monstrous. The London streets were dripping
