Fear

’ve been together all these years. Long before you were even born. Why, I knew her when she was a school girl – a child. Look at what we’ve done together – look at our work.’

I tried to understand. But I seemed to see only a grey ghostly marriage, a kind of deadly, intellectual middle-aged companionship stretching back down the years. There was nothing there, I thought, that should be preserved. It would be so different for us, I thought, and I clung the more desperately. ‘I cannot live without you,’ I said, believing that I could not.

Our dilemma, Allan’s agony, was resolved by Katherine finding out. There was no drama, no scenes. During the next few months I never knew what passed between them. I dared not ask. I felt like a child whose parents are gravely discussing in the next room portents beyond its comprehension. But presently Katherine went unobtrusively back to Canada without Allan …

Allan shut up the house in Hampstead, and talked of selling it. We neither of us wanted to live there. Immediately after our marriage we came up to this cottage in the Western Highlands which we rented through an advertisement in the Times. That year Scotland had one of its rare perfect summers. We bathed and fished, and the long halcyon days passed over us with scarcely a break in the weather. I was blissfully happy. Free from the conflicts and indecisions of the past months, we turned again to each other, discovering new releases, a new and deepening absorption. Our cottage lay by the shore in a curve of the hills, and whenever I remember that summer it seems as if the falling tides of the Atlantic were always in our ears, and as if the white sands were always warm under our bare feet.

But again, it could not last. One scorching day in early September I came round the cottage at lunch-time, carrying a pot-roast over to the table under our rowan-tree. I found Allan sitting staring down at an open airmail letter that the postman had just delivered. He looked up as I put the pot-roast down. His face was dazed, and his hands were shaking.

‘Katherine is dead,’ he said incredulously. ‘Dead … This letter’s from her sister in Toronto … She says –’ and he stared again at the letter as though they were lying words, ‘she says – heart failure. Very peacefully, she says.’

His eyes went past mine to the open sea. Then he got up and went into the house, while I – I stayed, pleating the gingham cloth between my fingers. Once more I felt like the child who had inadvertently witnessed a parent’s distress – shocked yes, but horribly embarrassed. Then I followed Allan into the cottage, and I put my arms round him. All that day I watched over him in my heart as he moved about the place. But we did not mention Katherine – nor the next day – and, although I waited for Allan to speak, her name never passed our lips during the next three weeks.

Three weeks later to the day, among other letters forwarded from London by the Post Office, arrived the telephone bill for the Hampstead house – the second demand. We had forgotten about the first.

‘Damn,’ said Allan – we were once again eating our lunch in the garden – ‘damn, I ought to have had the thing disconnected before we ever left London.’

I picked up the envelope and looked at the date of forwarding. ‘They’ll probably have cut you off themselves by now,’ I said. But Allan was already crossing the grass to collect the pudding from the kitchen oven. ‘Go in by the hall,’ I called after him. ‘You can find out if it’s still connected by ringing the number. If you hear it ringing away at the London end you’ll know it’s still on.’

And I lay back in my deck-chair, staring up at the scarlet rowan-berries against the sky and thinking that Allan was beginning to hump his shoulders like an old man, and that his skin looked somehow as if the sea-salt were drying it out …

‘Well?’ I said. ‘Still connected?’ Perhaps I invented the slight pause before Allan carefully set down the apple-pie, and replied, ‘Yes – still connected.’

That evening I went up to bed alone, because Allan said he wanted to trim the lamps in the kitchen. I was sitting in the window in the late Highland dusk, brushing my hair and looking out over the sea, when I heard a light tinkle in the hall below. I turned my head. But the house lay silent. I went over to the door.

‘Hampstead 96843.’ Allan’s voice – low – strained – came up the stairs.

There was a long silence. And then my heart turned over, for I heard his voice again, whispering:

‘Oh, my dear – my dear –’

But the words broke off – and from the dark well of the hall came a low sob. I suppose I moved, and a floorboard creaked. Because I heard the receiver laid down, and I saw Allan’s shadow move heavily across the wall at the foot of the stairs.

We lay side by side that night, and we never spoke. But I know that it was daybreak before Allan slept.

During the next few days I became terribly afraid. I began to watch over Allan with new eyes, those of a mother. For the first time I knew a quite different tenderness, one that nearly choked me with its burden of grief and fear for him as he moved about the cottage like a sleepwalker, trying pathetically to keep up appearances before me, his face, as it seemed, ageing hourly in its weariness. I became frightened, too, for myself. I kept telling myself that nothing – nothing – had happened. But in the daytime I avoided looking at the dead black telephone inert on its old-fashioned stand in the hall. At night I lay awake, trying not to picture that telephone wire running tautly underground away from our cottage, running steadily south, straight down through the border hills, down through England … During that week I tried never to leave Allan’s side. But once I had to go off unexpectedly to the village shop. When I returned I had to pretend that I hadn’t seen him through the half-open door, gently laying down the receiver. And twice more in the evening – and there must have been other times – when I was cooking our supper, he slipped out of the kitchen, and I heard that faint solitary tinkle in the hall …

I could have rung up the telephone people, and begged them to cut off the Hampstead number. But with what excuse? I could have taken pliers and wrenched our own telephone out of its socket. I knew that nothing would be solved with pliers. But by the weekend I did know what I could try to do, for sanity’s sake, to prevent us from going down into the solitudes of our guilt.

On Friday afternoon – after tea – my opportunity came. It was a glorious evening – golden, with the sand blowing lightly along the shore, and a racing tide. I persuaded Allan to take the boat out to troll for mackerel on the turn. I watched him go off from the doorway. I waited until I actually saw him push the boat off from our small jetty. Then I turned back into the cottage, and closed the door behind me. I had shut out all the evening sunlight so that I could hardly see the telephone. But I walked over to it. I took it up in both my hands. I drew a long deep breath, and I gave the Hampstead number. All that I had been told of Katherine during those bad months in London had been of kindness and gentleness and goodness – nothing of revenge. To this I clung, and upon it I was banking. My teeth were chattering, and I was shaking all over when the bell down in London began to ring. I suppose at that moment I lost my head. I thought – I could have sworn – I heard the receiver softly raised at the far end. But I suppose I should have waited instead of bursting into words. Now I shall never know. And they were not even the words I’d planned. I suppose I reverted, being so frightened, to the kind of prayer one blurts out in childhood:

‘Please – please –’ I said down the mouth-piece. ‘Please let me have him now. I know everything I’ve done’s been wrong. It’s too late about that. But I won’t be a child anymore. I’ll look after him, like you’ve always done,’ I said. ‘Only please let me have him now. I’ll be a wife to him. I promise you – if that’s what you are wanting. I can get him right again, and I’ll take care of him. Now and for ever more,’ I said.

And I banged the receiver down, and fled upstairs to our bedroom. Through the window I could see the little boat bobbing about on the sea. I sat down in the window in the full evening sun, and I shook all over, and I cried and cried …

In the small hours of the morning came the crisis. I woke – it must have been about half past four. The bed was empty. In an instant I was wide awake, because down in the hall I could hear the insistent tinkle of the telephone receiver, struck over and over again, and above it, mingled with it, Allan’s voice. Somehow I got the lamp lighted. The shadows tilted all over the ceiling and I could hear the paraffin sloshing round the bowl as I stumbled out to the head of the stairs.

‘Katherine – Katherine –’

He was shaking the receiver, and babbling down the mouth-piece when my light from the staircase fell upon him. He let the receiver drop, and stood looking up at me.

‘I can’t get her,’ he said. ‘I wanted her to forgive me. But she doesn’t answer. I can’t reach her.’

I brought him up the stairs. I can remember shivering with the little dawn sea-wind blowing through my cotton nightdress from the open window. I made him tea, while he sat in the window, staring up at the grey clouds of the morning. At last he said:

‘You must book yourself a room at one of the hotels in Oban. Only for a couple of nights. I’ll come back – probably tomorrow, or the next day. You see –’ and he began to explain carefully, politely as if to a foreigner, ‘you see, I’ve got to find Katherine, and so I have to go down unexpectedly to London –’

From our remote part of the Highlands there are only two trains a day. Allan went on the early morning one. I had, of course, no intention of going to any hotel. I knew where my promise to Katherine lay, where lay my love. I said ‘Yes – yes’ to everything Allan said, and stayed in the cottage all that day. And then I caught the evening train.