Before the Fact (12 page)

“What? Oh, because I won’t.”

“It’s devilish short-sighted of you,” Johnnie grumbled. “I might win a packet any day now. Like I did before. It’s a damned nuisance to be held up just for a spot of cash for the next day or two. Oh, well, I suppose it can’t last forever. How old is he?”

“Father?” said Lina absently. “I don’t know. About sixty-five, I suppose.”

“Damn well time he popped it, then,” said Johnnie, but under his breath. He added aloud: “Seriously, monkeyface, I wish you would touch him for a hundred or two. He could afford it easily enough.”

“Doesn’t all this betting take up a great deal of your time?” Lina asked abruptly. “You can’t be doing much work nowadays.”

“Doesn’t interfere with that,” Johnnie said easily. “Just one wire a day, that’s all. Look here, darling, do listen. I don’t believe you’ve got the hang of this system at all. You don’t realize how absolutely safe it is, in the long run.” He began to explain it all over again.

Lina had to forgive him before they went to bed. He was so much in earnest, and so gullible, and so young.

There was their usual grand reconciliation scene, with Johnnie alternating between pouring out more whisky and kissing her, and Lina crying and laughing at the same time. But she did not try to get another promise out of Johnnie. She knew he would give it, glibly; and it would mean just nothing at all. She had got to find some more effective means of stopping Johnnie in his lunacy.

She decided, after she had lain awake three hours with Johnnie sleeping beside her, to speak to Captain Melbeck.

Although she had adopted it, because she had no choice, Lina heartily resented the responsibility which Johnnie, by his infantility, had passed over to her. She did not want to be responsible, for anything or anyone; she did not want to be responsible even for herself. She hated responsibility with its nagging unrest.

It was not at all fair.

A husband should be responsible for a wife. When she married, Lina had taken it for granted that she would be led, and she had been very ready to follow. Now she had to do the leading herself; and not merely leading, but driving. It was the impulse to shift at any rate some of the responsibility onto male shoulders, which after all should naturally bear it, that determined her to consult Captain Melbeck about Johnnie. In any case, he was some kind of a connection, so that there should be a family as well as an employer’s interest.

She rang Captain Melbeck up the next day and asked him to lunch.

Captain Melbeck seemed oddly reluctant to come to lunch. He stammered excuses for every day that Lina suggested. But Lina, who could be as determined as anyone when she had bolstered herself up to the necessary pitch, broke through his defenses.

“It’s very important,” she said desperately. “I want to talk to you about Johnnie. If you won’t come to lunch I suppose I shall have to come over to you, but it’s awkward, because I haven’t the car and I don’t want Johnnie to know. Can’t you possibly put off your engagement tomorrow and come to lunch? Or tea?”

“Johnnie won’t be there?” Captain Melbeck said cautiously.

“No, no. I said he wouldn’t. I want to talk about him to you.”

Captain Melbeck promised to come to lunch the next day.

He came, a big, burly man with a cropped moustache, and eyed Lina with apprehension over his cocktail. Lina wondered, with some annoyance, why people were so often nervous of her, and what they would think if they knew just how nervous she was of them.

“It’s very good of you to come,” she said, with the forced brightness which still imposed itself on her when she was not at ease. “I’m so worried about what’s going to happen to Johnnie.”

“Oh, well,” mumbled Captain Melbeck, “I told him I wouldn’t prosecute, of course.”

“What?” said Lina, startled.

“I told him I wouldn’t prosecute,” Captain Melbeck repeated uncomfortably. “He’s paid some of it back already, too.”

“What on earth are you talking about?” Lina asked sharply.

“Why about – don’t you
know?
”

“Don’t I know what?”

“Oh, hell,” groaned Captain Melbeck. “I seem to have put my foot in it.”

He did his best to leave things at that, but of course Lina got them out of him during lunch.

The long and short of it was that an unexpected audit of the estate accounts had revealed that Johnnie had been helping himself during the last few months to cash amounting to nearly two thousand pounds. Captain Melbeck had had to discharge him more than six weeks ago.

“Six weeks!” echoed Lina, aghast. “But he’s never said a word to me. He pretended he was still with you.”

“Rotten business altogether,” muttered her guest, and gloomily swallowed some hock the wrong way.

After he had gone Lina sat for two hours in her drawing room, too numbed even to weep, trying to face at last the fact that her husband was a liar, a thief, and an embezzler, and completely lacking in any sense of right or wrong.

Johnnie had lost his job, and Lina was too dispirited to try to find him another. With what Captain Melbeck knew, and with what Captain Melbeck would almost certainly hint to any other possible employer, the task in any case looked almost hopeless. They were reduced to Lina’s own five hundred a year.

However, this state of affairs did not last for more than a few weeks.

Timing the event with singular neatness so far as his elder daughter and her husband were concerned, General McLaidlaw died that same Christmas, while Johnnie and Lina were staying in the house, rather suddenly, of arterio-sclerosis, and Lina came into an income of two thousand five hundred a year.

Sitting in her kimono in front of her dressing table, Lina was doing her face. In the daytime she used nothing but a little powder on her nose, but for the evening lip stick, and sometimes the rouge pad too, were called in.

The door between the bedroom and Johnnie’s dressing room was open.

“Is that you, darling?” Sounds had reached her alert ears of someone coming upstairs.

“Who else do you expect in your husband’s dressing room?” Johnnie’s voice answered cheerily. “Young Caddis-worm?”

“You’ll have to hurry.”

“Plenty of time. I wanted to go over the vines again.”

There was not really plenty of time, but though Johnnie always came up late to dress, he was never late down.

Lina took off her wrapper and walked over to the doorway in her step-ins. It was what she had been waiting for.

There was no need for her to do so now, but Lina still made all her own underclothes. She enjoyed fine sewing. She had put on this evening for the first time a new set that had just been finished, and which Lina privately thought was rather successful.

She leaned in the doorway, a hand on either jamb. “Did Ethel put out a shirt for you?”

“Yes.” Johnnie, fitting studs into the shirt, looked up at her with a smile. “Hullo! Those the new knick-knicks? I say!”

“Nice?” said Lina, spreading out the little peach skirt.

“The best ever,” said Johnnie, with complete conviction. “Turn round and let’s see them properly. Yes, you’ve hit the mark this time, and no mistake. You look as wicked as a French farce. Clever little devil, aren’t you? Come and be kissed in ’em.”

“Do I really look wicked?” Lina asked happily, under Johnnie’s kiss.

“As wicked as they make ’em,” Johnnie assured her.

She went back to her bedroom in a glow of satisfaction. How many husbands, she wondered, still take an interest in their wives’ undress after six years of marriage?

But Johnnie never failed her in that way. Dress or undress, he was still as interested in her appearance as on their honeymoon: and still as enthusiastic when she looked nice. And he still told her how pretty she was. Lina knew, better than ever, that she was not pretty (though she did not consider she looked anything like her thirty-five years), but she adored Johnnie to tell her so. And Johnnie did.

Whatever Johnnie had done, or been once, Lina knew, as well as she knew the alphabet, that he had never once since their wedding looked beyond her at any other woman. She had that, at any rate, to be thankful for.

She had other things now, too.

Since that terrible time, two years ago, when Johnnie had lost his job at Bradstowe for what had been nothing less than sheer dishonesty, explain it as he might, and had, Johnnie had given her no more worry. He had had a fright, a real fright; and it had done him all the good in the world. He might still be a little hazier than most people upon the moral side of
meum
and
tuum,
but he realized at any rate what other people thought about it: and what they might do if his practice differed from their precept.

Since that day the contents of Dellfield had remained undiminished.

Of course Johnnie did no work nowadays, but that no longer mattered. The money was not needed, and technical idleness had not seemed to hurt him. Not that Johnnie ever was really idle. He had taken to gardening, and a few of the fields surrounding Dellfield had been bought, which Lina had stocked and Johnnie did his best to farm; he was most interested in a line of pedigree cattle with which he was experimenting, and which were to pay better than any other line of cattle. Johnnie’s cattle kept him busy, and the losses on them did not cost Lina more than a hundred or two a year at most.

Besides, Johnnie could not afford to take any more risks.

He was a most important man nowadays: a member of the county council, a J. P., and all sorts of other things that a country gentleman ought to be. Captain Melbeck had been more than fair. He had breathed no word to anyone else of Johnnie’s peculations; the money had been repaid; the affair was forgotten. And he had most conveniently been in Africa when Johnnie had been made a county councillor and a J. P., so that no opportunity was afforded to his conscience of becoming difficult.

Johnnie the county councillor, Johnnie the J. P., had nothing more to fear from that old, now almost incredible spectre of Johnnie, the dishonest steward.

But for all that Lina kept a controlling hand on the purse strings.

She would probably have done so in any case, for she was exceedingly jealous of her own possessions; but she had been too badly frightened to take the smallest risk. Johnnie, of course, had wanted to look after her capital for her. He had promised investments, just as safe as the government securities in which it lay, that would bring in a certain ten per cent. He had begged hard for just a couple of thousands with which to speculate on his own account. (“Don’t you see, the loss of it couldn’t hurt us in any case, monkeyface, and I might make a fortune.”)

But Lina had been firm. She made Johnnie what she considered a more than generous personal allowance, of five hundred a year; over the rest, and over the capital, she kept complete control. Johnnie had sulked about it for weeks, at the beginning, but Lina had shown surprising firmness.

In the end Johnnie had accepted it.

Lina wished sometimes that he had not. It went against all her canons that a husband should be content to live, in apparent idleness, on his wife’s income. This point of view apparently never occurred to Johnnie. He took it for granted that he should do just that. Lina had never suggested that he should try to earn enough money of his own at any rate to keep him in cigarettes, because it was up to Johnnie to make the suggestion himself; but she was sure that if she had, Johnnie would have been quite genuinely surprised; he would have pointed out that they did not need the money in the least. And yet no one could have called Johnnie spineless.

He was still the most popular man in the county.

As Janet once said to her, Lina was as proud of him as if he had ever done anything to deserve it.

She patted and pulled her frock into place, and glanced at the watch on her wrist. There were five minutes before the first arrival might be expected.

“I’m going down, Johnnie.”

“Right-ho! Who did you say were coming?”

“The Newshams, Janet, and Martin.”

“Good. Young Caddis will argue with Harry, and I shan’t have to pretend to be listening.”

Lina sped downstairs and into the kitchen.

“Everything all right, Lily?”

“Yes,’m, quite all right.” Lily beamed through her glasses. She had a right to beam complacently. She was a very good cook, and she knew it. Lina had always got on very well with her during the two years of their acquaintance. They taught each other new and exciting dishes, and experimented in making them. Lily would always ask, after Lina had been out to dinner, whether anything unexpected had been in the menu, and if so how Lina thought it had been made. Lily really enjoyed cooking.

Lina lifted the lid of the saucepan containing the soup and sniffed at it. Lily handed her a spoon. “Just a touch more salt, I think, Lily.” There was no need to look at the birds inside the oven; Lily never omitted to baste them enough.

Everything seemed quite satisfactory.

“Remember, Alice,” Lina said to the parlourmaid, who was young and not yet completely trained (the grenadier had left to be married six months ago), “don’t bring round the tray for the soup cups until everyone’s emptied them. It looks so bad for you to stand and wait at somebody’s elbow.”

“Yes, madam,” said Alice seriously. She contracted her eyebrows in an effort to remember never to wait at a diner’s elbow for his soup cup. Alice was very willing not merely to learn, but to please her mistress. Lina never seemed to have the trouble with her servants that some of her friends in Upcottery had. She put it down to the fact that she paid them more.

She hurried along to the dining room and gave the table a long, critical look.

Everything here seemed quite satisfactory too. She gave the flowers in the centre of the table a little perking up and moved a dish of salted almonds out of the exact symmetry with its counterpart in which Alice had carefully put it.

In the drawing room everything was not so satisfactory. There were no cocktails standing on the Queen Anne bureau. Johnnie had come in too late to mix them.