Patricia Wentworth - Out of the Past

“She hasn’t the slightest idea.”

“You mean he just broke it all off and disappeared?”

“Something like that.”

She wouldn’t turn away. It didn’t really make things any worse to speak of them. Sometimes it made them better, and-it was only Pippa.

“But Carmona! Darling, you’ve simply got to tell me all about it! When I had your wire to say it was all off I wanted to rush to you! But Bill put his foot down-you know, he does sometimes. He said I couldn’t do any good, and he was sure you’d rather not, and it wasn’t reasonable to expect him to put up about a hundred pounds for me to fly home just to hold your hand. I could see his point, you know, and when he is like that I do find it’s better to do what he says. Darling, you did understand, didn’t you?”

“Of course.”

“You must tell me all about it now. What did you quarrel over?”

“We didn’t.”

Pippa’s voice rose a third of an octave.

“Didn’t quarrel? But, darling!”

Better get on with it.

“He just didn’t turn up.”

“On your wedding day!”

“Yes.”

“Darling, how perfectly frightful! You don’t mean to say you were there waiting at the church!”

“Yes.”

It was hurting horribly. Much more than she had thought it would. It was hurting like hell. The grey church, cold and dark, with that odd smell which empty places have. Empty- at least thank God for that! Only Tom, and Maisie, and kind Esther there to look on whilst she waited for Alan who didn’t come. A parson and a verger too, but they didn’t count. Grey old men quite alien from what was happening to her, their own days of quick anguish and hot tears all past and gone. She looked vaguely at Pippa, but she did not see her. She saw the empty church.

“Darling, how frightful! But what on earth made him do a thing like that? If he wanted to break it off, why didn’t he do it properly? I just can’t imagine Alan-Alan getting cold feet at the last minute and not being able to come up to the scratch! Carmona, he must have written! Something must have happened to the letter-or to him!”

Carmona moved her head. It was the slightest of movements. It said, “No.”

Pippa Maybury repeated what she had said before.

“Something must have happened to him!”

This time it was Carmona’s lips that moved.

“No-he wrote afterwards. The letter came next day. He said he couldn’t go through with it-he wasn’t cut out for marriage, and he was going to join a friend on a horse-breeding ranch in South America.”

“And that was all?” Pippa stared. “Well, darling, I really do think you were well rid of him! He was a charmer and all that, and marvellous to go about with, but when it comes to husbands-” she shrugged and laughed-“well, you know, there’s something to be said for having them solid. After all, they’ve got to run the show, and pay the bills, and do all the unpleasant sort of things like income tax, and washers on taps, and spiders in the bath, and I don’t really see Alan making much of a show of it. Speaking quite frankly, you know.”

Carmona didn’t see it either. She never had. She had always known that if there was anything unpleasant to be done, she would have to do it herself. The thing that had been broken in her was the conviction that Alan needed her. It was a conviction that went right back into her childhood. He was selfish, he could be cruel, he had a fatal knowledge of his own charm and of other people’s weaknesses, but-he needed her. And then when she found out that he didn’t, that he could push her aside and put the width of the world between them, something broke. She said,

“No-”

Pippa gave her a light pinch.

“Wake up, darling! You said that as if you were about a hundred miles away, and the one thing one ought never to let oneself do is to go dreaming back into the past. Fatal! And it isn’t as if you had got left on the shelf, or anything like that. Why, it was no time at all before you married James. To tell you the truth, I didn’t think you’d have had the spirit.”

“Thank you, Pippa.”

“Well, you know, you were always one of the quiet ones, and you might have taken up good works, or gone into a mouldering melancholy-like the girl in Shakespeare who sat on a monument and smiled at grief, which I always thought a particularly stupid thing to do, because young men aren’t really interested in monuments and they wouldn’t bother to climb one. And now tell me all about you and James! He isn’t nearly as good-looking as Alan of course.”

“Not nearly.”

Pippa nodded vivaciously.

“Husbands don’t need to be. And I always thought Alan overdid it. After all, looks are more in the woman’s line, don’t you think? Anyhow I’m dying to see him again.”

“He’s away,” said Carmona.

“Away!”

“He’ll be coming any day now. He has been doing a job under U.N.O.-something to do with tracing people who have disappeared. He speaks a lot of languages, so they find him useful.”

“Doesn’t it take him away a lot? It sounds as if it might.”

“It does rather.” After a pause she said, “Sometimes I go with him. I went over to the States with him in the spring.”

Pippa stared.

“It sounds a bit detached. I hope he turns up in time for me to see him. And where is everyone else? You say you’ve got the house packed with relations. Where are they?”

“Down on the beach. I hope you won’t find it dull here. There’s nobody young.”

Pippa looked through her eyelashes.

“Too, too reposeful. Not all the time, you know, but every now and then-relations, I mean-the nice quiet elderly sort who have never had anything happen to them.”

“Do you suppose anyone is really like that?”

Pippa burst out laughing.

“Marvellous if they all had buried secrets! But, no, I’d really rather be soothed. Where are they?”

“Down on the beach-and we should just have time for a swim before tea.”

The tide came up slowly. There was a shimmer of heat over the sea and no breeze. Esther Field sat on a cushion in the shade of the beach hut and knitted diligently. Since this year she was giving shawls as Christmas presents to the three or four old pensioners whom she had inherited from Penderel Field’s mother, and since this particular shawl was almost complete and of a lively shade of crimson, she both looked, and was, extremely hot. Billows of red wool flowed from her in every direction.

“Extra big,” she was explaining to Lady Castleton who was sharing the patch of shade. “For old Mrs. Mount. She gets larger every year and is really quite proud of it, so of course it wouldn’t be the least bit of good my giving her anything skimpy.”

They had been at school together thirty years ago, when Adela Castleton was Adela Thane with a brother in the Army whose occasional visits provided the other girls with a thrill. They had neither of them changed very much. Esther had always been large, and kind, and dowdy, and Adela had been beautiful. She had kept her looks wonderfully. The celebrated profile, the celebrated complexion, the celebrated figure were all still intact. If they had become a little fixed, a little-how shall one say, stereotyped-the effect was sufficiently imposing. She made Esther Field look like a rag-bag, and Maisie Trevor of that out-dated smartness which is so much worse than just being dowdy. Her own dark blue linen was exactly right, and so was the simple shady hat which had probably cost more than Esther had ever paid for one in her life. She glanced at the billowing shawl and said,

“Really, Esther-I don’t know how you can! Do put that ghastly thing away and give us all a chance to get cool! You don’t have to think about Christmas now!”