Balefanio - tmp0

And so one evening, at the studio, after a par­ticularly hectic party, they'd started—and it had been really very funny and not in the least dis­gusting—but quite hopeless. They sat up in bed and laughed and laughed. "Oh, Edward!" laughed Margaret—for she was pretty tight, too—"I shall never be able to sleep with a man again. At the critical moment I shall always think of you."

"I might return the compliment," said Edward.

In the spring they went south again, stopping

several weeks in Paris. They hadn't been very long at the villa before news came of the General Strike. Edward wanted to return at once.

"But what would you do?" she asked him, half impressed, half amused.

"I don't know. But I want to be mixed up in this."

He didn't even know which side he'd be on. She laughed at him. He was as angry as a boy.

"You don't understand," he said. "Something important is happening. There may be a revolu­tion. And you want me to sit here, hiding in this damned country."

"Why not admit, my dear, that you're simply bored?"

This stung him. It was partly true. Partly—like all women's wisdom. He meditated leaving her. If she'd tried to stop him he'd certainly have done so, but she was too cunning. The days passed. At length came a letter from Mary, making the whole thing seem, of course, a tremendous joke. Maurice had driven an engine. She and Anne had worked at a canteen. The letter ended:

"We all missed you. You would so have en­joyed it."

"I feel quite sorry," said Margaret, "that you didn't go, after all."

The summer passed. The port was infested with painters. Edward sailed, swam, lay in the sun. Margaret didn't offer to paint any more Mimis,

but often he had the impression of being ironically watched. Sometimes the whole situation would seem quite impossible; then, the next day, so simple that one couldn't imagine whatever had seemed wrong. According to Margaret's favourite phrase:

"I can't see that anything's unworkable, if people are really honest with each other."

That infuriated Edward. One day he would retort—yes, but who's being honest?

When the weather began to get cooler, Mar­garet said:

"Why don't we ask Olivier here?"

Olivier was one of their Paris friends. A young ballet dancer.

"Why should we ask him?"

"Only that I thought you liked him."

He'd found himself, in spite of all control, blushing.

"At any rate, I know quite well that you don't."

Margaret laughed.

"My dear, wherever did you get that idea from? Besides," she added, "what on earth has it to do with me? Are we to cut each other off from our friends?"

"I don't notice," he said maliciously, "that you bring your friends here such a lot."

"My friends?" she smiled. "I haven't any."

There it dropped for the moment. But she re­turned to the attack a few days later:

"Edward," she said, "I wish you'd ask Olivier here."

His temper was not at its best. The mistral had been blowing all day, so that every window in the villa banged and grey clouds of dust swirled up from the town. And Edward's friend, the chemist, had run out of his supply of powders which he administered to chronic sufferers from the weather. Edward flashed a look at her:

"What makes you think I'm pining for Olivier?"

She was a little cold in her reply, as if dealing with an ill-mannered child, but patient:

"I never said you were 'pining'. I merely know you well enough to know that you sometimes require other kinds of company than mine. So I suggest Olivier."

"And what," he said, "do you mean exactly by 'other kinds of company'?"

"I mean what I say."

"How typical it is," he said, "of a woman, that she can never stop reminding people of their obligations."

"I don't understand."

"Well, then, I'll put it more plainly. You regard me as married to you."

"Edward—you can't be serious!"

"But I won't stand it—do you hear? I won't have you sneering at me."

The quietness of her reply suggested that she regarded him as a mere invalid:

"You simply aren't thinking what you're saying."

He looked at her for a moment, with his quick mechant smile. Then he said:

"I think you might spare me the final humilia­tion of being pimped for."

She went out of the room.

Later they made it up. Edward took refuge behind exaggerated surrender. It was his liver. It was the mistral. He hadn't meant a word. She shook her head sadly:

"No, my dear. Don't say all that. You did mean some of it."

There was a pause, and she added:

"And perhaps you're right. Perhaps I some­times am a bit—possessive."

He protested. She said:

"I sometimes wonder if all this is workable. The way we live."

"It's worked, hasn't it?"

She smiled sadly.

"Has it?"

"You mean, for you, it hasn't?"

"Oh, I'm satisfied," she answered quickly.

"Then you oughtn't to be," was on the tip of his tongue. He didn't say it. Like a coward he avoided, as always, the final issue between them. That evening they were gentle with each other, but sad. He was polite and she accepted it. Next morning she told him that she was going to England in a few days' time. As before, she spared him the unpleasantness of being the one to make the move.

"I believe I have overcome this difficulties," said the young Dutchman, in his incorrect con­clusive English, tapping the ash from a small cigar and glancing without interest across the Place de l'Opera. He was pale and rather stout. Edward nodded seriously and ordered another absinthe. The Dutchman drank only lemonade.

A week later they had left Paris. The experi­ments were being made at a village not far from Beauvais. The Dutchman had invented a new type of aeroplane engine. He was working as cheaply as possible, but had run out of cash. It was only a matter of a few hundreds. Edward telegraphed to his bank. To Margaret he'd written in a mood of unashamed enthusiasm: "I really believe that this is the genuine Resurrection from the Dead. It's extraordinary, after all these years, to be of some slight use. I only wish I hadn't forgotten all the engineering I ever knew. But even that is coming back by degrees."

Margaret answered warmly, handsomely. He could read between the lines that she was anxious. But she talked gaily of the future. Perhaps Edward would be quite famous.

Everything went splendidly. The French Government was interested. The experts were coming to visit them in a few weeks' time. Two or three reporters appeared, lurked about for a day or two, and were finally driven off, disappointed. The days passed quickly in long hours of work, in discussions, in trial flights. Edward found that his nerve hadn't gone. He was cutting down his drink­ing. He felt ten years younger.

The Dutchman was killed one morning while flying alone, a few days before the experts came. An elementary piece of carelessness on the part of one of the mechanics. A strut broke in mid-air. The machine side-slipped and was burnt to a tangle of wires within a few minutes of striking the ground. All that Edward could do was to make an idiotic plunge into the flames, attempting to reach the pilot's seat. They barely rescued him alive.

"I'm going to carry on," he told Margaret two months later, when he came out of hospital.

"I only wish I could help you more," she said.

But it was not so simple. There was a legal difficulty, it seemed, as to the ownership of the plans. Edward, of course, had made no business arrangement. Some relatives arrived from Amster­dam and carried them off. Edward raved for a week, talked of going to law, wrote furious letters. Margaret made no comment. They both knew that he could do nothing.

A month later, and he was out of Europe. His first destination was Damascus, but he could rest nowhere. Kerkuk, Suliemaniyeh, Halabja. He shot in the mountains. Paid a visit to Sheikh Mahmoud in his cave. In Halabja he nearly died. He had blood-poisoning in the left hand and ami.