A Tangled Web Page 3

  “Well, would you?” he pressed.

  “I suppose criminals do get married. Why shouldn’t they?”

  Hugo pursued it no further. She felt she had failed him, but she did not know how. The whole conversation had seemed to her crazy, unreal. Criminals were people one read about in newspapers—cosh boys, Teddy boys, masked burglars, murderers—or the narrow-eyed men one saw standing about in groups in the little streets off Shaftesbury Avenue: thugs, riff-raff. Daisy could not begin to associate Hugo, who was so obviously a gentleman, a civilised person for all his streak of wildness, with that underworld. He might as well have said he’d dropped into St. John’s Wood from Mars. Why must he go on as if he had some guilty secret? Perhaps, she suddenly thought, he is a traitor, a Communist agent—something like that. Then she felt his hands upon her, the brushing of cool air against her skin as he took off her clothes. He was saying how beautiful she looked; the only woman on earth; Eve stretched out in the woods of Paradise: and like a leaf in the fire, she twisted, curled up, was consumed. Nothing else mattered. He was her man.

  Towards the end of those weeks, they arrived at a little seaport in the south-west. There was a fair on, and after dinner he took her there. He had been moody, withdrawn, all day; but now—she was getting used to the ebb and flow of his temperament—he suddenly burst into sparks like a stirred bonfire. The shouts of barkers, the snap of rifles in the shooting gallery, the blatant music from the roundabouts, seemed to affect him like a fever, which communicated itself from his blood to hers. Dragging her from booth to booth, throwing for cokernuts, shooting at ping-pong balls dancing on jets of water, careering and colliding in the bumper-car arena, he was like an over-excited child who will run himself to a standstill rather than miss anything. Daisy noticed how the girls eyed him and the stallholders winked at him. “Come on, you lovely great stook of corn,” he exclaimed, and she was tossed on to the back of a wooden horse before she had time to protest that roundabouts made her sick. Lights were spinning and splintering; the fair whirled round her like a room round a drunk man, rising and falling. When the thing stopped at last she felt so giddy-sick that, alighted from the horse, she swayed, staggered, fell to the ground.

  A meaty young man in a platypus cap, standing nearby, said to his companion, “God, another drunk! Look, she’s absolutely plastered.”

  Hugo, who was telling Daisy to put her head between her knees and keep still for a while, straightened up instantly and stepped in front of the man.

  “What did I hear you say about this young lady?”

  “Young what?” sneered the man.

  Hugo had hit him thrice—a left jab to the stomach, a right and left rattling his jaw—before the man had time to realise he was in a fight. However, he was as big as Hugo was fast, and he rebounded from a tent against which Hugo’s blows had sent him reeling, put up his hands, and made for his much slighter opponent. Daisy, feeling a different kind of sickness, scrambled to her feet: the young man in the cap—it was still glued to his head—looked dangerous, a giant. The light of a flare showed her Hugo’s face, intent, malevolently grinning. He seemed to move in and out on castors: he ducked a haymaking right swing—then the crowd closed round the fighters and Daisy could see no more. But she heard cracks of fist on face which made her wince, and then a voice shouting “Police! Police coming!” The crowd heaved, frayed out. Hugo was darting towards her, had seized her hand, was pulling her away, between two booths, out onto open ground, running with her towards the sea.

  “Are you hurt, darling?” she asked when they had reached the esplanade. He shook his head vigorously, as if to clear it, and moved her on from under the lamp where she had stopped, looking up at him in anxiety.

  “It’s all right. I’ll have a thick ear to-morrow, though. Did you see any police, or was it a false alarm?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I could have killed that chap.” Hugo’s arm was trembling in hers.

  “Don’t, love. It doesn’t matter.”

  A little farther on he halted, and stood listening. Daisy could hear nothing but the leisurely thump of waves on the sea wall, and a more distant sound of roundabout music braying above the confused noises of the fair. She became aware that she was still clutching a flaxen-haired doll which Hugo had won for her at the shooting gallery.

  “What is it?” she said.

  “Just listening for the hue-and-cry. Force of habit.” He seemed to be talking to himself.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Oh, prisoner-of-war days. I tried to escape, once or twice.”

  “But the police wouldn’t—”

  “I don’t want the police mixed up with our holiday, my darling.” His bright eyes glanced away from her. “Suppose they ran me in for assaulting that bastard—well, you’d be dragged into it, and it’d come out that we weren’t married. Endless fuss and bother. You don’t know what it’s like.”

  After a few minutes’ silence—they were approaching their hotel now—she asked, “Would you rather we left here? went somewhere else for to-night?”

  “Well… No, to hell with them. It’s too late. We’ll start earlyish to-morrow.”

  They did not start as early as he had intended, however. That night Daisy was awoken by his voice, muttering louder and louder, then crying out in a nightmare. It was a terrible sound, like a dumb man trying to utter his agony—quavering, bellowing sounds wrenched up from his inmost being, and at last achieving words—“Let me out! Let me out! Let me out!”

  She shook him awake, her hands slipping on his shoulders, which were drenched with sweat.

  “It’s all right, love. I’m here. It’s only a dream. Wake up, sweetheart! Poor Hugo, poor Hugo.”

  She pressed his head convulsively against her breasts. For a moment he struggled worse than ever; then, coming fully awake, gripped her so hard that she whimpered.

  “Oh, God, what an awful dream!” he cried, shaking as if the heart she could feel thudding against her would knock his body to pieces.

  Daisy turned on the light, and when she had soothed him, got out of bed to fetch a towel.

  “You’re soaking. I’ll dry you.”

  He looked up at her like a child, an exhausted child, his lips still quivering; followed her with his eyes, as if the sight of her was almost too good to be true.

  “That’s better,” she said briskly. “What were you dreaming about? You made an awful noise.”

  “Sorry, nurse. It shan’t happen again—let’s hope. What did I say?”

  “You kept yelling ‘Let me out!’”

  His eyes changed their teasing expression, and darkened. “I did, did I?” He fell silent for a little, holding her hand. Then he gave her that look, enigmatic, measuring, obscurely challenging, which was becoming familiar to her. “I was buried alive once.”

  “Oh, my dear! In the war?”

  “And once, at school, some chaps shut me up in a locker. I half killed one of them when I got out. That’s why I was sacked.”

  “But that was cruel. Shutting you up, I mean.”

  “People are cruel. Haven’t you noticed it?” His fingers touched the red marks they had left just now on her body. “Because they’re frightened. Frightened people scare me stiff—run a mile from them—including myself. When I was a kid, I was the timid type. So I used to dare myself to do the most hair-raising things. And I did them, as often as not. Showing off to myself—and to anyone else who was, around: that’s what they called it, anyway. So I got into the habit of it.”

  He went on talking in this disjointed way for nearly an hour, as if a floodgate had been opened. Daisy did not understand half what he was saying: his mind moved too fast for her. What is he trying to tell me, she thought. How can I help him? I wish I wasn’t so young, I wish I knew more about people. Women are supposed to know by instinct.

  She felt that it was a stranger lying beside her in the bed, a foreigner speaking out of that familiar body. The sensation was both bewildering and exhilar
ating: the strangeness of it gave her an almost sensual relish. She tasted her power over him, even while her weakness—the failure to follow his erratic, hurrying words-troubled her. A phrase repeated itself in her mind—“buried alive for twelve months”: had he said it just now, or?—No, it was absurd, nobody could be buried alive for twelve months.

  Scraps of what he had said then kept recurring to her during the days that followed: but she could never piece them together so as to make a whole of them: a pattern was missing. And at that time she was still too much absorbed in her own responses, finding out too many new things about herself, to leave much room for curiosity. Besides, the peasant blood which made her fatalistic also gave her the wisdom of letting well alone: you did not stir up hornets’ nests for the satisfaction of proving to yourself that hornets can hurt.

  The next morning they overslept, and did not leave the little seaport till nearly midday. A few days later Hugo said to her, out of the blue, “We must go back now, darling.”

  “Back to London?”

  “Yes. No more money. Finito. I’m broke. Truly.”

  Daisy watched the hedge-flowers rushing by the car, streaming into the past. “Stop a minute,” she said impulsively: then, as the countryside slowed and came to a standstill, “I want to say good-bye properly.”

  “To me?”

  “To our holi—our honeymoon.” Opening the window, she reached out and pulled a spray from the hedge. He watched her silently. Not looking at him, she said:

  “Are you—am I to leave you, when we get back?”

  After a pause, he asked, “Was it worth it?”

  “Oh, yes. yes!” she cried, her eyes like morning-glories.

  “Then don’t talk nonsense about leaving me, my beloved.”

  “But how can you afford—?”

  “I can’t afford to do without you.” The merry, reckless look returned to his face. “And I can always lay my hands on some money.”

  4. Evening in Maida Vale

  Her mind still echoing with these memories, Daisy put down the last pair of socks and went to the window. Leaning out, her elbows on the sill, she might have been a castaway searching the horizon for some sign of human life. Her horizon was a row of detached houses, large, seedy and secretive, their ground floors screened by groups of laurel or privet which seemed to be putting their heads together furtively like men planning a dirty deal, the stucco of the façades peeling and discoloured as if they had caught a skin disease from one another. Some of these mansions were still tattered and boarded up, a bomb having fallen nearby ten years ago: but even those which were occupied gave no evidence of it—one might have supposed their tenants to be persons who, having come down in the world like their houses, were ashamed to show their faces in it.

  It was a neighbourhood without neighbourliness. The countrybred Daisy felt her isolation, not acutely, but like a permanent, pervasive ache. She missed the girls in the shop: she even missed the garish, clattering life of her old Pimlico street. Here, little traffic came; the few passers-by seemed intent on getting somewhere else as rapidly as possible; there were no lines of washing, no heads at windows, no gossiping in the street below. Even the other occupants of her own house might have been in a conspiracy of silence. They passed her on the stairs, the coloured students with a polite “good morning” or “good evening,” the others without a word: thin though the ceilings and partition walls were, few sounds of life percolated through them; and what one could hear was spasmodic and somehow meaningless—unrelated to the normal noises of domestic activity.

  This vague, muffled existence going on around her had already begun to infect Daisy with its strong suggestion of fecklessness, raffishness, hand-to-mouth living. Her girlhood had trained her to be tidy, economical, a good housekeeper: but here, in the prevailing atmosphere of sluttishness, her standards were relaxing. And Hugo, though she would not have admitted it, was no help. Untidy as a small boy, he would leave his underclothes, shirts, towels, littered over the floor of their poky bedroom: he stuffed his belongings into drawers anyhow, and if he wanted one of them, he threw everything else out in the search for it, and put nothing back. These habits filled her with affectionate exasperation. She had remonstrated once, upon which he replied, gently but firmly, “You mustn’t try to make a tame cat of me, my girl.”

  She did not want to try. She had enough domesticity for them both. It not merely passed the time but still gave her positive pleasure to follow behind him, righting the disorder he left in his wake; to wash the underclothes he would always have worn far too long; to press and brush the suits which were the only things he had obviously taken care of before they met. No, it was not his rather lordly carelessness over possessions which had begun to influence Daisy, but something deeper—a rootlessness in their life together which, strangely enough, was even more noticeable now, when they had settled down in Maida Vale, than it had been during those first weeks of flitting over the English countryside. One cannot have a home, Daisy obscurely felt, without some prospects: it is not the past but the future into which one puts down roots.

  Daisy had the normal woman’s need for the routine which is an emblem of security. But from her life with Hugo it was impossible to compose a routine. One day he would be out for hours—“looking up his contacts,” as he put it; the next, he might lie in bed all the morning, reading the papers, lazily watching her as she cleaned the room, then pulling her down on the bed beside him. Or, in a sudden access of gaiety, he would take her off for a jaunt somewhere—as often as not, just when she had begun preparing a meal. Such things were delicious to her; but they made life seem more than ever ephemeral, and opened no predictable road into the future: so Daisy was beginning to be adapted to her environment, living for the present hour as well as in it.

  She still had a little of the money saved from her employment. The rent was paid, Hugo had told her, for the rest of the year—he kept these rooms permanently, as a place of retreat for times when his funds ran low. Where these funds came from, she still did not know. Every now and then Hugo gave her a few £1 notes for the housekeeping; and, so wildly was she in love with him, it seemed like a present. It was enough that the money came from him. She had asked him once, less out of curiosity than out of a woman’s simple pleasure in talk, what a “commission agent” did. “I just organise a deal between two chaps, and take a percentage,” was his reply, which left her as much in the dark as ever. Daisy was still the village girl, for whom the “gentry” are a race apart, their foibles and failures the subject of cosily malicious gossip, their sources of income always taken for granted—amateurs of life, who move round the villages in an outer orbit, romantic, envied, but never taken quite seriously. Hugo was clearly “one of the gentry”: so Daisy did not find his eccentricities at all surprising, and assumed that his cavalier way with money—spending it lavishly when he had it, then doing a bit of work when he needed to “lay his hands” on some more—was quite the normal thing for high-spirited young men of his class. It fitted in with the notions of “society” life she derived from gossip columns, which she assiduously read with a vague idea of preparing herself for the time when he might introduce her to such glittering circles.

  For the present, however, she was content to stay as she was. Even her isolation, though it irked her at times, could be cherished as a necessary part of the wonderful dream in which she was living. Soon after returning to London, she had gone to see her aunt—gone in a flush of joy which the stony reception of her news, frankly and freely offered, that she was living with a man, could not dissipate. The aunt had grumbled rather than threatened: a good deal was said about the bad blood which Daisy had clearly inherited from her runaway father: but it soon became evident that this aunt was more concerned with her own reputation than with her niece’s—she could not recommend the girl to any of her connections in the trade so long as she persisted in this disreputable association. “You’re throwing yourself away on this young man,” she kept saying. Only at the
end of the interview did her grudging tone alter, as, looking again in her sidelong, flustered way at the radiant girl, she came out with, “Well, it’s your life, not mine. He seems to be making you happy. Yes, you only live once, Daisy my dear”—and then, as if regretting such a lapse from her own respectability, “but it won’t last, my dear. These things never do, take my word for it! You should get him to marry you.” And Daisy, feeling infinitely wise, profoundly sure of him, had replied, “We couldn’t be more married, Auntie; not if we’d been wedded in Westminster Abbey.”

  Hugo did not get back till after nightfall. Daisy heard his rapid step on the landing outside, and flung herself upon him when he opened the door.

  “Sweetheart! I thought you were never coming.”

  “Supper spoiled again?”

  “Well, it has been in the oven rather a long time.”

  “Never mind. Your burnt offerings have a sweet savour in my nostrils, saith the Lord. And here’s my contribution to the shrine.” Withdrawing a hand from behind his back, he held out a great bunch of carnations.

  “Oh, how lovely! Hugo, you shouldn’t. Wherever did you get them?”

  “Well, I happened to be passing your Mrs. Chetwynd-Smythe’s garden and I saw them. Her carnations needed thinning out—she’s got far too many—such a vulgar display. So I did a little gardening for the old basket.”

  “Oh, Hugo, you are a fool!” She beamed at him over the top of the flowers. “I know what happened. You went without your lunch to buy them for me. You’re a very naughty boy, and I love you.”

  He sent his hat spinning like a quoit at the peg on the door, waltzed Daisy round the room, then collapsed laughing into the rickety basket-chair. “Yes, I am hungry. Bring on the grub, slave, or I’ll eat you, you succulent great morsel.”

  Daisy retrieved his hat from the floor where it had fallen. Infected, as she always was, by his gay mood, she showered the carnations over him and ran out into the tiny kitchen before he could struggle up. When she returned with their supper, he had arranged the flowers in a vase, and there was a card stuck in amongst them.