Mary Westmacott - Giant's Bread

If something in him winced he didn’t show it.

‘Are you, my dear? Did La Marre get a divorce?’

‘No. I left him. He was a beast – a beast, Sebastian.’

‘I can imagine he might be.’

‘Not that I regret anything. One has to live one’s life – to gain experience. Anything is better than shrinking from life. That’s just what people like Aunt Myra can’t understand. I’m not going near them at Birmingham. I’m not ashamed or repentant of anything I’ve done.’

She gazed at him defiantly and his mind went back to Joe in the woods at Abbots Puissants. He thought, ‘She’s just the same. Wrong-headed, rebellious, adorable. One might have known then that she’d do these sort of things.’

He said gently, ‘I’m only sorry that you’ve been unhappy. Because you have been unhappy, haven’t you?’

‘Horribly. But I’ve found my real life now. There was a boy in hospital – terribly badly wounded. They gave him morphia. He’s been discharged now – cured, though of course he isn’t fit for service. But the morphia – it’s got hold of him. That’s why – we were married. A fortnight ago. We’re going to fight it together.’

Sebastian did not trust himself to speak. Joe all over. But why, in the name of fortune, couldn’t she have been content with physical disabilities? Morphia. A ghastly business.

And suddenly a pang shot through him. It was as though he resigned his last hope of her. Their ways led in opposite directions – Joe amongst her lost causes and her lame dogs, and he on an upward route. He might, of course, be killed in the war, but somehow he didn’t think he would be. He was almost certain that he wouldn’t even be picturesquely wounded. He felt a kind of certitude that he would come through safely, probably with moderate distinction, that he would come back to his enterprises, reorganizing and revitalizing them, that he would be successful – notably successful – in a world that did not tolerate failures. And the higher he climbed the further he would be separated from Joe.

He thought bitterly, ‘There’s always some woman to pull you out of a pit, but nobody will come and keep you company on a mountain peak, and yet you may be damned lonely there.’

He didn’t quite know what to say to Joe. No good depressing her, poor child. He said rather weakly:

‘What’s your name now?’

‘Valnière. You must meet François some time. I’ve just come over to settle up some legal bothers. Father died about a month ago, you know.’

Sebastian nodded. He remembered hearing of Colonel Waite’s death.

Joe went on.

‘I want to see Jane. And I want to see Vernon and Nell.’

It was settled that he should motor her down to Wiltsbury on the following day.

Nell and Vernon had rooms in a small prim house about a mile out of Wiltsbury. Vernon, looking well and brown, fell upon Joe and hugged her with enthusiasm.

They all went into a room full of antimacassars and lunched off boiled mutton and caper sauce.

‘Vernon, you look splendid – and almost good-looking, doesn’t he, Nell?’

‘That’s the uniform,’ said Nell demurely.

She had changed, Sebastian thought, looking at her. He had not seen her since her marriage, four months previously. To him she had always fallen into a class – a certain type of charming young girl. Now he saw her as an individual – the real Nell bursting out of her chrysalis.

There was a subdued radiance about her. She was quieter than she used to be – and yet she was more alive. They were happy together – no one who looked at them could doubt it. They seldom looked at each other, but when they did you felt it … something passed between them – delicate, evanescent, but unmistakable.

It was a happy meal. They talked of old days – of Abbots Puissants.

‘And here we are, all four of us together again,’ said Joe.

A warm feeling fastened round Nell’s heart. Joe had included her. All four of us, she had said. Nell remembered how once Vernon had said ‘We three –’ and the words had hurt her. But that was over now. She was one of them. That was her reward – one of her rewards. Life seemed full of rewards at the moment.

She was happy – so terribly happy, and she might so easily not have been happy. She might have been actually married to George when the war broke out. How could she ever have been so incredibly foolish as to think that anything mattered except marrying Vernon? How extraordinarily happy they were and how right he had been to say poverty didn’t matter.

It wasn’t as though she were the only one. Lots of girls were doing it – flinging up everything – marrying the man they cared for no matter how poor he was. After the war, something would turn up. That was the attitude. And behind it lay that awful secret fear that you never took out and looked at properly. The nearest you ever got to it was saying defiantly, ‘And no matter what happens, we’ll have had something .’

She thought, ‘ The world’s changing. Everything’s different now. It always will be. We’ll never go back …’

She looked across the table at Joe. Joe looked different somehow – very queer . What you would have called before the war – well, ‘ not quite ’. What had Joe been doing with herself? That nasty man, La Marre … Oh, well, better not think about it. Nothing mattered nowadays.

Joe was so nice to her – so different to what she used to be in the old days when Nell had always felt uncomfortably that Joe despised her. Perhaps she had cause. She had been a little coward.

The war was awful, of course, but it had simplified things. Her mother, for instance, had come round almost at once. She was disappointed naturally about George Chetwynd (poor George, he really was a dear and she’d been a beast to him) but Mrs Vereker proceeded to make the best of things with admirable common sense.

‘These war marriages!’ She used that phrase with a tiny shrug of the shoulders. ‘Poor children – you can’t blame them. Not wise, perhaps – but what is wisdom at a time like this?’ Mrs Vereker needed all her skill and all her wit to deal with her creditors and she had come off pretty well. Some of them even felt sympathy for her.

If she and Vernon didn’t really like each other, they concealed the fact quite creditably, and as a matter of fact, had only met once since the marriage. It had all been so easy.

Perhaps, if you had courage, things were always easy. Perhaps that was the great secret of life.

Nell pondered, then waking from her reverie plunged once more into the conversation.

Sebastian was speaking.

‘We’re going to look Jane up when we get back to town. I’ve not so much as heard of her for ages. Have you, Vernon?’

Vernon shook his head.

‘No,’ he said, ‘I haven’t.’

He tried to speak naturally but didn’t quite succeed.

‘She’s very nice,’ said Nell. ‘But – well – rather difficult, isn’t she? I mean you never quite know what she’s thinking about.’

‘She might be occasionally disconcerting,’ Sebastian allowed.

‘She’s an angel,’ said Joe with vehemence.

Nell was watching Vernon. She thought, ‘I wish he’d say something … anything … I’m afraid of Jane. I always have been. She’s a devil …’

‘Probably,’ said Sebastian, ‘she’s gone to Russia or Timbuctoo or Mozambique. One would never be surprised with Jane.’

‘How long is it since you’ve seen her?’ asked Joe.

‘Exactly? Oh! about three weeks.’

‘Is that all? I thought you meant really ages.’

‘It seems like it,’ said Sebastian.