The Jewel That Was Ours

'Cedric! How that bloody woman has lived this long without getting murdered. '

Cedric grinned his sad, lopsided grin, removed the somewhat disturbing hand, and looked at her — her upper and lower lips of almost equal thickness, moist and parted, and temptingly squashable. She was a woman he had known for several years now; one with whom he had never slept; one who half repelled, and ever half attracted him.

'Look! I've got to be off. I've got a tutorial shortly, and I ought to sober up a bit between times.'

'Why do that, darling?'

'Sheila! You're a lovely girl, but you — you let yourself down when you drink too much.'

'Oh, for Christ's sake! Not you as well.'

'Yes! Me as well! And I've got to go. I'm meeting Lucy off the train later on anyway, and if you want to know the truth'—he looked about him with rolling eyes—'I'm completely pissed off with the whole of this bloody set-up. I've done my best, though. First I stood in for—' Suddenly he stopped. 'Sorry, Sheila! I shouldn't have said that. Forgive me!' He kissed her lightly on the cheek, then turned and walked out of the hotel.

As Sheila watched him go, she knew that in spite of the hurtful words he had just spoken she would always have a soft spot for the man. But she knew, too, what a lousy judge of men she'd always been. Her husband! God! A quietly cultivated, top-of-the-head English don, incurably in the grip of the Oxford Disease — that tragic malady which deludes its victims into believing they can never be wrong in any matter of knowledge or opinion. What a disaster that had all been! Then a series of feckless, selfish, vain admirers. then Theo. Poor Theo! But at least he was — had been — an interesting and vital and daring sort of man.

Sheila walked slowly over to the window and watched Cedric as he wheeled his bicycle across Beaumont Street towards St. Giles'. He never drove his car if he was having any drink with his lunch. Not like some people she'd known. Not like Theo, for instance. He'd been over the limit, they'd said, when he'd crashed his BMW, and there could have been no sympathy whatsoever for him from the relatives of the woman killed in the other car. Or from his wife, of course — his bloody wife! And yet there was the suggestion that he'd been just a little unlucky, perhaps? Certainly many people had mumbled all that stuff about 'there but for the grace of God. ' And there was a lot of luck in life: some people would go to jail for badger- baiting; but if they'd baited just the foxes they'd like as not be having sherry the next day with the Master of the Foxhounds. Yes, Theo may have been a fraction unlucky about that accident.

Even unluckier now.

And Cedric? Was he right — about what he'd just said? Already that morning she had drunk more than the weekly average for women she'd noticed displayed on a chart in the Summertown Health Centre waiting-room. But when she was drinking, she was (or so she told herself) perfectly conscious of all her thoughts and actions. It was only when she was reasonably sober, when, say, she woke up in the morning, head throbbing, tongue parched, that she suspected in retrospect that she hadn't been quite so rationally conscious of those selfsame thoughts and actions.

God! What a mess her life was in!

She looked miserably back across the coffee-lounge, where several of the group were mumbling none too happily. Six o'clock. Morse had changed their departure-time to six o'clock, unless something dramatic occurred in the meantime.

She walked through into the Lancaster Room again, where Phil Aldrich was still scribbling away on the hotel's notepaper; and for the moment (as Sheila stood in the doorway) looking up with his wonted patience and nodding mildly as Janet propounded her latest views on the injustice of the tour's latest delay. But even as Sheila stood there, his mood had changed. None too quietly, he asked the woman if she would mind leaving him alone, just for a while, since he had something more important to do for the minute than listen to her gripes and belly-aching.

Who would have believed it?

Sheila had heard most of the exchange; and, with the volume of Janet's voice, so probably had several of the others too. It had been a devastating rebuke from the quiet little fellow from California; and as Sheila watched the hurt face of the formidable little woman from the same State (wasn't it the same Church, too?), she almost felt a tinge of sympathy for Mrs. Janet Roscoe.

Almost.

Lewis, too, had been watching as Aldrich wrote out his statement; and wondering how a man could write so fluently. Huh! When Aldrich handed it to him there were only three crossings out in the whole thing.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

Thou hast committed Fornication; but that was in another country, And besides, the wench is dead.

(Christopher Marlowe, The Jew of Malta)

I was stationed in Oxford in early 1944 for Training as a 22-year old GI for the forthcoming landings in Normandy. One night in Chipping Norton I met a married woman and I fell deeply in love with her. Her husband had been serving in the British Merchant Navy on the Russian Convoy run, but after 1943 he was receiving psychiatric treatment in Shropshire somewhere for his nerves. They said nobody survived that posting without getting his nerves shattered. Well while he was in hospital his wife had gotten herself pregnant and she had a baby daughter 2nd Jan. 1945. From what I half learnt the father must have been a forgiving sort of man because he treated the daughter (my daughter) as if she were his own little girl. But there was some trouble with her in her early teens and perhaps she'd guessed something of the truth. The fact is she ran away from her home in late 1962 and her mother heard a few months later that she was living as a common street girl near Kings Cross Station. I only knew something of all this because the girl's mother kept in touch with me occasionally through innocent looking postcards and just the one phone call put through to our telephone me when her husband died in 1986. She moved soon after to Thetford in your E. Anglia and I was able to phone her there a few times. But I could tell there was no real wish on her part to renew any old ties of love and friendship and if I am going to be honest no real wish on my part either. I valued my independence too much to get into any deep down involvement and particularly with a woman who goddamit I probably wouldn't have recognized anyway! But I felt so different about my daughter and tried to learn where she'd gotten to. She attended the funeral so I guess there must have been some contact there. Well then her mother died last Feb. with some awful cancer and her daughter had been beside her when she died and probably learnt then about the secret which must have burdened her poor mother's life for so many years. I guess I ought to be more honest about this because my daughter wrote me after her mother's funeral and said she'd guessed what had happened anyway. I'd never had any children of my own and somehow she seemed very precious just then, but I never expected to see her. She'd not given any address but the stamp had a WC1