Джеймс Хилтон: Morning Journey

He was just about to hang up when the Professor added, with a blandness that George thought remarkable: “I suppose she never arrived home at all and you’re looking for her? I’m afraid I can’t help you much about that. She was wide awake when she left and certainly able to drive a car. I myself drove down the mountain about half an hour later and there was no sign of any accident.”

“Did you expect one?” George asked sharply.

“There’s a dangerous part of the road where several cars have gone over in recent months.”

“And you wondered about it enough to follow her and make sure?”

“Yes… for some reason I can’t quite explain… I did.”

“That’s a strange thing.”

“It is, isn’t it? But she was rather strange too. Behind a surface cheerfulness I’d have guessed her in acute distress of some kind.”

“Look here, Professor, I think we ought to meet personally to talk about all this…”

The Professor agreed, but before George could fix an appointment his secretary had entered with a typewritten message: “Randolph’s been trying to phone you again. He said it’s important—about Miss Arundel.”

George got rid of the Professor as best he could and then called Randolph, who said simply: “She’s gone off with Saffron. It’ll be in the morning papers along with the drunk case. The real topper of toppers. Some paper up the Coast just spotted them together in a hotel. Calls it an elopement. I dare say this means we’re through with her as well—I don’t know what else we can do. If only these people would realize we don’t give a damn what their morals are, provided they don’t make trouble for US with ‘em… Personally, I can’t understand it. Not only throwing away a career but for God’s sake what on earth can she see in Saffron? What on earth DID she see? Don’t suppose we’ll ever get the whole truth about that.”

“Do you ever expect to get the whole truth about anything?” George asked, with all his lawyer’s experience. But behind the hardboiledness he felt a little sad. He was rather sure he would never meet another woman who would make him—even fleetingly—question the validity of his bachelorhood. He added: “She must have had an interesting life, Randy. Born in Ireland, she told me—on a farm… I wonder how she ever…” But there were so many things he wondered.

At the convent school just outside Dublin, Carey had nourished ambitions to be either a nun or an actress; the nuns dissuaded her from the former, and her mother was equally against the latter. Mrs. Arundel, however, died when Carey was fifteen, and a year later, after a period of idleness at home, the girl managed to get a small part at the Abbey Theatre. It was in a bad play that lasted a week, and the sole press report that noticed her at all called her ‘an interesting newcomer’. But whatever she had or lacked, she was both eager and popular, so that during later seasons she was given a number of even smaller parts in other plays. She read all the books she could get hold of about acting and theatrecraft, she studied plays and actors and tried to copy their tricks (some of which, at the Abbey, were among the neatest in the world), and occasionally she put into her lines a curious quality that riveted an audience’s attention in the wrong place and made the director wrinkle his forehead in dismay.

She was a small girl, delicately featured, with a generous expressive mouth that twisted a little when she smiled, as if (a doctor admirer once said) she had once had a very slight attack of Bell’s palsy and had only ninety-nine per cent recovered. Dark hair and grey-blue eyes added to a total that might have taken no first prize in a beauty contest, yet might well have drawn more glances than the winner. Her figure, slow to develop, was still boyish at a time when her voice had already acquired a richness rare even in a mature woman; it was the most striking thing about her, this voice— low pitched, never shrill, yet capable of catching the random ear as colour catches the eye. (Much later, a critic said: “Whenever she speaks, her voice gives a command performance”, but ‘command’ was not quite the word for a compulsion yielded to so happily. And another critic said, also much later: “She has a quality of womanhood so ample, and in a peculiar way so purposeless, that the nerves of the critic unclench and even his judgment is off guard; for this reason she can often be over-praised, but never under-enjoyed”.) At school she had been a bright, gay, normal pupil, cleverer than the average, but no bluestocking. She liked horses, games, picnics. A ribald sense of humour had sometimes got her into scrapes, but never seriously; she had many friends and no enemies, and when she recited Portia’s speech at the school’s annual concert the nuns applauded affectionately, not thinking she was specially good (and she wasn’t), but beguiled by her voice into a vision they found vicariously satisfying—that of wifehood and motherhood in the well-tempered Catholic life.

Those years culminated in the period of the Sinn Fein ‘troubles’; by the time she made her first stage appearance the treaty with England had been signed and the Free State, precariously born, was already fighting for its life against the Republican Army. At the height of the fratricide Rory O’Connor and his men were shelled in the Four Courts (within a few streets of the Abbey Theatre), and many a night the city echoed to sporadic roof-top shooting. One of the lively areas was the neighbourhood of the Portobello Bridge, which lay on a direct route between the theatre and the southern suburb of Terenure, where Carey lived with her stepfather. Several times, along with other passengers, she flattened herself on the floor of a tram as it crossed the bridge during a fusillade, and whenever she could arrange it she drove home with an actress friend named Ursula, who had a very ancient car; they could then make long detours through safer districts. Sometimes, also, if there were shooting near the theatre, she would spend the night with another friend named Mona who lived in an apartment approachable by a sheltered route from the stage-door itself. Since the Terenure house had no telephone, her stepfather could not be notified, but she had always urged him not to worry or stay up for her return.

Often, though, when she got home late at night she found him still hard at work in the room which he called his study. He was learning Gaelic as an apt expression of his enthusiasm for the new Ireland, and perhaps as an aid to promotion in his job—he was an official in the Tax Department of the Dublin City Corporation. “How was it out tonight?” he would ask, as about the weather.

“Ursula heard there was something going on in Rathmines, so we drove around by Donnybrook. It wasn’t so bad that way.”

“Ah, I THOUGHT I heard something—I wouldn’t have been surprised if you’d stayed all night with Mona again… Rathmines, eh? Well, well, that’s getting pretty close.” His casualness was part of an English manner that many years in Ireland had not effaced and which, combined with short stature and a strutting walk, gave him an appearance which to Irish eyes was sometimes a little ridiculous. But he was a kindly man. “You know, Carey, you can always give it up if the journeys make you nervous.”

“Oh, but I love the work—I wouldn’t know what to do with my life if I didn’t have it to think about.”

“Well, well, so long as it doesn’t get you down. These are certainly great days in the history of our country. And of course there’s not much real danger—to you girls, I mean.”

“Oh no.” Which was true—statistically. “It’s fun, in a way.”

But this was not quite so true, for after the strain of a theatre performance all one wanted to do was to go home quickly and get to bed; the effort to find a quiet route and the perhaps ten-thousand-to-one chance of stopping a stray bullet added no pleasurable thrills. “At least I’m getting to know much more about Dublin, finding all these different ways home.” It was a cheerful way to look at it, and the colourful topography of Dublin and suburbs—such names as Crumlin, Dolphin’s Barn, Harold’s Cross, Beggarsbush, Drumnagh, Rathfarnham—became the symbols of her almost nightly ordeals.