W. MAUGHAM - The Razor's Edge

'If you feel like telling me I'm a damned fool, don't hesitate. I wouldn't in the least mind.'

'No, I don't particularly feel like that. I was only wondering if your life wouldn't have fallen into a more perfect pattern if you'd married and had children like everybody else.'

He smiled. I must have remarked twenty times on the beauty of his smile, it was so cosy, trustful, and sweet, it reflected the candour, the truthfulness of his charming nature; but I must do so once again, for now, besides all that, there was in it something rueful and tender.

'It's too late for that now. The only woman I've met whom I could have married was poor Sophie.'

I looked at him with amazement.

'Can you say that after all that's happened?'

'She had a lovely soul, fervid, aspiring, and generous. Her ideals were greathearted. There was even at the end a tragic nobility in the way she sought destruction.'

I was silent. I did not know what to make of these strange assertions.

'Why didn't you marry her then?' I asked.

'She was a child. To tell you the truth, it never occurred to me when I used to go over to her grandfather's and we read poetry together under the elm tree that there was in that skinny brat the seed of spiritual beauty.'

I could not but think it surprising that at this juncture he made no mention of Isabel. He could not have forgotten that he had been engaged to her and I could only suppose that he regarded the episode as a foolishness without consequence of two young things not old enough to know their own minds. I was ready to believe that the suspicion had never so much as fugitively crossed his mind that ever since she had been eating her heart out for him.

It was time for us to go. We walked to the square where Larry had left his car, very shabby now, and drove to the mortuary. The undertaker was as good as his word. The businesslike efficiency with which everything was accomplished, under that garish sky, with the violent wind bending the cypresses of the cemetery, added a last note of horror to'the proceedings. When it was all over the undertaker shook hands with us cordially.

'Well, gentlemen, I hope you were satisfied. It went very well.'

'Very well,' I said.

'Monsieur will not forget that I am always at his disposition if he has need of my services. Distance is no object.'

I thanked him. When we came to the gate of the cemetery Larry asked me if there was anything further I wanted him for.

'Nothing.'

'I'd like to get back to Sanary as soon as possible.'

'Drop me at my hotel, will you?'

We spoke never a word as we drove. When we arrived I got out. We shook hands and he went off. I paid my bill, got my bag, and took a taxi to the station. I too wanted to get away.

A few days later I started for England. My intention had been to go straight through, but after what had happened I particularly wanted to see Isabel, so I decided to stop in Paris for twenty-four hours. I wired to her to ask if I could come in late in the afternoon and stay to dinner; when I reached my hotel I found a note from her to say that she and Gray were dining out, but that she would be very glad to see me if I would come not before half past five as she had a fitting.

It was chilly and raining off and on quite heavily, so that I presumed Gray would not have gone to Mortefontaine to play golf. This did not suit me very well, since I wanted to see Isabel alone, but when I arrived at the apartment the first thing she said was that Gray was at the Travellers playing bridge.

'I told him not to be too late if he wanted to see you, but we're not dining till nine, which means we needn't get there before nine-thirty, so we've got plenty of time for a good talk. I've got all sorts of things to tell you.'

They had sublet the apartment, and the sale of Elliott's collection was to take place in a fortnight. They wanted to attend it and were moving into the Ritz. Then they were sailing. Isabel was selling everything except the modern pictures that Elliott had had in his house at Antibes. Though she didn't care much for them she thought quite rightly that they would be a prestige item in their future home.

'It's a pity poor Uncle Elliott wasn't more advanced. Picasso, Matisse, and Rouault, you know. I suppose his pictures are good in their way, but I'm afraid they'll seem rather old-fashioned.'

'I wouldn't bother about that if I were you. Other painters will come along in a few years and Picasso and Matisse won't seem any more up to date than your Impressionists.'

Gray was in process of concluding his negotiations and with the capital provided by Isabel was to enter a flourishing business as vice-president. It was connected with oil and they were to live at Dallas.

'The first thing we shall have to do is to find a suitable house. I want a nice garden so that Gray can have somewhere to potter about when he comes home from work and I must have a really large living-room so that I can entertain.'

'I wonder you don't take Elliott's furniture over with you.'

'I don't think it would be very suitable. I shall make it all modern, with perhaps just a little touch of Mexican here and there to give it a note. As soon as I get to New York I'll find out who is the decorator everyone's going to now.'

Antoine, the manservant, brought in a tray with an array of bottles, and Isabel, always tactful, knowing that nine men out of ten are convinced they can mix a better cocktail than any woman (and they are right), asked me to shake a couple. I poured out the gin and the Noilly-Prat and added the dash of absinthe that transforms a dry Martini from a nondescript drink to one for which the gods of Olympus would undoubtedly have abandoned their home-brewed nectar, a beverage that I have always thought must have been rather like Coca-Cola. I noticed a book on the table as I handed Isabel her glass.

'Hello!' I said. 'Here's Larry's book.'

'Yes, it came this morning, but I've been so busy, I had a thousand things to do before lunch and I was lunching out and I was at Molyneux's this afternoon. I don't know when I shall have a moment to get down to it.'

I thought with melancholy how an author spends months writing a book, and may be puts his heart's blood into it, and then it lies about unread till the reader has nothing else in the world to do. It was a volume of three hundred pages nicely printed and neatly bound.

'I suppose you know Larry has been in Sanary all the winter. Did you see him by any chance?'

'Yes, we were at Toulon together only the other day.'

'Were you? What were you doing there?'

'Burying Sophie.'

'She's not dead?' cried Isabel.

'If she hadn't been we'd have had no plausible reason to bury her.'

'That's not funny.' She paused for a second. 'I'm not going to pretend I'm sorry. A combination of drink and dope, I suppose.'

'No, she had her throat cut and was thrown into the sea stark naked.'

Like the brigadier at St Jean I found myself impelled a trifle to exaggerate her undress.

'How horrible! Poor thing. Of course leading the life she did she was bound to come to a bad end.'

'That's what the commissaire de police at Toulon said.'

'Do they know who did it?'

'No, but I do. I think you killed her.'

She gave me a stare of amazement.

'What are you talking about?' Then with the ghost of a chuckle: 'Guess again; I have a cast-iron alibi.'

'I ran across her at Toulon last summer. I had a long talk with her.'

'Was she sober?'

'Sufficiently. She told me how it happened that she'd disappeared so unaccountably just a few days before she was going to be married to Larry.'

I noticed Isabel's face stiffen. I proceeded to tell her exactly what Sophie had told me. She listened warily.