An Accidental Man (14 page)

‘May I see a bigger one?' said Gracie.

The jeweller went to fetch another tray.

Lugwig kicked Gracie's ankle.

‘A diamond ring is just about the soundest investment you can make these days,' said the jeweller. ‘Diamonds are still a girl's best friend, ha ha.'

‘How much is this one?' said Gracie.

‘That is six hundred pounds.'

Ludwig kicked Gracie again.

‘That is a really marvellous ring, madam, a remarkable individual.' He called the diamonds individuals. They all looked the same to Ludwig.

‘I don't like the setting,' said Gracie. ‘What about this one?'

‘Superb! Eight hundred pounds.'

Is this some sort of joke? thought Ludwig. He had suggested that they should find a little Victorian ring in Notting Hill. Gracie had led him to Bond Street. Ludwig was not used to this kind of shop. Nor, clearly, was Gracie.

Ludwig was living in a daze. Ever since he had become engaged the world had looked completely different. A strange white light shone upon things, like a theatre or television light, so that everything was too bright and a little blanched. This light was not quite itself happiness, though Ludwig had no doubt that he was happy. He had even less doubt that he was deeply in love and that Gracie was too. They were still shy with each other, or they were shy in a new way. They did not always know what to talk about. There was the uneasiness and anxiety of real romance, so unlike what is dreamed of. There were curious silences, when they would look at each other and then laugh and clasp hands and kiss. They had not yet been to bed. This tormented Ludwig, not only with physical desire, but also because he felt himself a failure for not being able to take charge. He had still not even managed to discover whether or not Gracie was a virgin. And there had never quite been a context in which he could tell her about his own, as they now seemed, rather dreary and forced adventures. The possibility of something was discussed, if at all, obliquely. Ludwig would say, ‘Why don't we come back to my place this evening, after we've had dinner?' And Gracie would say, ‘I'd rather not. It's so crowded, and I feel Mitzi's against me, and Austin makes me feel funny.' Then Ludwig would say, ‘When are your parents going away for the weekend?' and Gracie would say, ‘They've put it off again.' A hotel seemed so vulgar, and would she come? If only he could have afforded a car. There remained the Park. Could he tear Gracie's tights off behind a bush? Sometimes he felt desperate enough to. But without a lead from her he could hardly suggest it. Would an English suitor have let this absurd situation continue? What would Sebastian have done?

Nights were thus unsatisfactory, and during days Gracie seemed to assume that they would be almost all the time together. This much human company was a novelty for Ludwig, and there were occasional moments when he reflected with dismay how absolutely he had lost his solitude. He and Gracie scoured London like tourists, always following her suggestions and her plans. They went down the river to Greenwich, they visited the Tower, they explored the churches of the City, they went to Hampton Court and Kenwood and Chiswick House, they kissed each other in the National Gallery and the Courtauld Institute and the Victoria and Albert Museum, they were at theatres or concerts almost every evening and sat in innumerable pubs between Ludgate Hill and the Gloucester Road. Gracie scarcely drank alcohol but adored pubs, which were new to her. Ludwig, who had not a very good head, found he was drinking too much. Then there were the restaurants. Gracie, always ravenous and always slim, would eat well twice a day. She liked the Savoy, Prunier's, Wheeler's. She admired the Mirabelle. She cared for the Caprice. Ludwig found he was spending a great deal of money. The remains of his American grant were fading away. And his Oxford salary would not begin until September.

Of course it was all delightful. Gracie enjoyed the sometimes pointless details of life more than anyone he had ever known. She could make a treat out of anything. When they met it would always be at some obscure surprising place, which nobody but Gracie would have thought of as being a place at all. Then there would be a little walk, they would feed the ducks in the park, or the fish at the Dorchester, or look at some tiny monument, or visit a shop which sold the best nougat in London, or go to the Wallace Collection to hear the clocks strike twelve and then go on to a pub with a funny name, passing by a flower shop where Ludwig would buy flowers to be later ceremonially thrown into the Thames from a particular bridge. Gracie seemed to have become, since their engagement, more beautiful and stylish than ever, and he felt intense possessive pride as he paraded his delicious fiancée in theatre foyers or through the streets of the West End. They were often thus privately in public but, evidently at Gracie's wish, did little visiting. They were invited jointly to a number of gatherings, but somehow or other Gracie usually found a reason why they could not go. Ludwig sometimes uneasily wondered whether this was because she wanted to avoid Sebastian.

Their talk was constantly of trivialities but Ludwig had never found trivialities so almost spiritually absorbing. They chatted about food and people and their London travels. Ludwig noticed that Gracie enjoyed each experience but without in any way wanting to connect one with another. Sometimes she asked him questions about history, but these were not so much requests for information as occasions for him to charm her with his omniscience. ‘Why you know everything!' she would cry with shining eyes, after he had stated some of the better known facts about Pericles or Cromwell or Lloyd George. She made no effort to remember anything that he told her. Sometimes she asked more metaphysical questions such as ‘Do fleas suffer in a flea circus?' or ‘Why do we call high notes high notes?' He always attempted an answer. About Oxford, which had been a taboo subject until the great news came, they now talked lightly, talked houses, old or new, town or country. On its deeper mystery Ludwig brooded alone, tipsy with the joy of it.

Yet elsewhere there were quite other and terrible things. He tried at intervals to talk to Gracie about these things but it seemed so portentous and artificial to trouble her happiness with this talk. ‘It's past,' said Gracie once. ‘See it all as past and done. You've made the decision. Let it glide away now. Let it go.' In a way this was wise advice. And Ludwig decided that Gracie's reluctance to discuss his great issues was due not to any indifference but to fear. She feared still that he might depart, she feared his fears and his agitation about matters which she could not fully understand. He had asked her to write to his parents, but she kept putting it off. This perhaps was understandable. It would not be an easy letter to write.

The great issues themselves pained him all the time. His parents' opposition hurt him because of old habits of concord and obedience. He had never been explicitly at odds with them before, although quietly their lives and opinions had diverged. Their arguments could not move him, but the sheer fact of their opposition stirred and wounded his conscience in obscure and frightening ways. He could see, and even be touched by seeing, that they cared what the neighbours thought, they feared the laws, they feared the police, they did not want to be ‘out of line', they did not want their fragile achievement of Americanness to be damaged, they feared that the long arm of American power would somehow seize him, disgrace him, destroy him. That they saw the war differently was probably their most rational area of disagreement, and that was difficult enough. They loved one America, and he, if he loved at all, loved a different one. But he could readily have endured his pain at their distress if only he had felt absolutely sure of himself.

He had no doubts about his judgment of the war. When he looked outward all was plain and clear. But when he looked inward . . . Did his parents really believe that he was moved by worldly motives, that he could prefer English cosiness to his duty, or that he was simply a coward? Could he believe it himself? Of course he liked England, of course he wanted Oxford, of course he was a coward, anyone would be, no one wanted to fight that war. The trouble was that on this side of the Atlantic there was no test to which he could put himself to make sure that he was acting on principle. Here there was nothing hard at all. The hard things were all over there. Ought he not to go back and suffer? How necessary was suffering? How necessary was it to
him
? How was Christ to be imitated? Ought he not to go through the centre of this drama rather than round the edge? Was it fair to those who could not escape, thus beautifully to do so? As he had said to his parents, he could face prison, he could even have loved it, but he could not face the haunting possibility of having his wings clipped forever. No passport, no Europe, no scholarly world, no using of his real talents. That was the hell that he feared. And in acknowledging, as he must, these motives, was he not, in taking what was in effect the easy way, but an inch away from dishonour? Very occasionally he even conceived that he ought simply to go back and don the uniform as most of the others did. Why did he think he was so special?

And now he had Gracie, a responsibility forever and a link with the easy world which he so much loved and feared. The English milieu into which she brought him was relaxed and liberal and hazy. Here no one seemed to conceive that he could have any problems about going back. No one seemed to want to talk about it or to be interested or to understand. Or perhaps they felt a certain delicacy. It was hard to tell with these people. Meanwhile the big talk with Garth to which he had been so much, even for months, looking forward had not yet taken place. He had only seen his friend once briefly before Garth's disappearance to the East End, and not at all since his return. Was Garth avoiding him because of Gracie? It was but too possible that Garth despised him for this match, and felt already that they were hopelessly divided. It was also possible that Garth's affection for him was wounded because Ludwig was no longer solitary. Whatever the reason, Garth remained elusive. To hell with him, Ludwig sometimes thought, if he's got so damned touchy. If we can meet, good, if not I'm certainly not going to chase after him. He greatly needed that talk, however.

Now here was Gracie asking to see yet another tray of rings.

As the shopman moved away Ludwig said to her in a low voice, ‘Look, honey, this stuff isn't our class. I can't afford you a ring like any of these. That one costs more than I've got in the bank. Let's get out of here, come on. Tell the man we'll think about it.'

Gracie flashed him a dazzling smile and began to turn over some of the grander rings.

‘Gracie!' said Ludwig. There was a hint of the authority of the husband. He had already ceased to call her ‘Gracie' except at very solemn moments.

‘Sssh!' said Gracie, ‘you're distracting me.'

‘Honey, have a heart —'

‘It's an investment.'

‘But, sweetie pie, in order to invest money you have to have the money to start with.'

‘Shut up, Ludwig, you're not paying for this ring,' said Gracie. She said to the shopman, ‘I think I'll have this one. Will you take a cheque? I have my passport and a banker's card. Or you can telephone my bank.'

The shopman was happy to trust madam. Gracie wrote out a large cheque.

‘Don't wrap it up, I'll wear it. Ludwig, could you put it on my finger now? No, on this finger. That's right.' She darted the stone to and fro to catch the light.

‘I congratulate you on a wonderful purchase,' said the shopman, ‘and may I wish you happiness. A diamond is forever.'

Ludwig staggered out into the dusty sunshine of Bond Street. He grasped the skirt of Gracie's cool crinkly stripy dress in a hot hand. ‘Poppet, are you mad? You haven't got that much money.'

‘Yes, I have,' said Gracie coolly, ‘now. Don't mess my dress, Ludwig.' She hailed a taxi. ‘The Savoy, please.'

‘What do you mean “now”?'

‘Grandma left everything to me.'

‘To you — everything?'

‘Yes. The house, the stocks and shares, the great big bank balance, the lot. Ludwig, I am rich. You are marrying an heiress.'

‘God!' said Ludwig. He fell back in his seat. ‘But, poppet, can that be right? I mean
all
to you?'

‘All.'

‘And nothing to your mother or Aunt Charlotte?'

‘Not a bean.'

‘But shouldn't you give it to them? I mean, it's not right — particularly Aunt Charlotte —'

‘We must respect the wishes of the dead. My, have you ever seen such a large diamond really close to?'

Suddenly everything was frightening.

A young man on the doorstep was delivering flowers.

But flowers were for Alison, they must be. Only this week Alison was dead.

Charlotte could read the name of the flower shop on the paper, but there did not seem to be any note attached. The flowers were pink gladioli. She motioned them away.

‘Are they for Mrs Ledgard?'

‘No, they —'

‘There must be some mistake. Are you sure this is the right address?'

‘Yes, I —'

‘All right, thank you,' said Charlotte. She snatched the flowers and shut the door quickly.