Before the Fact (24 page)

How she had got through the rest of last evening she hardly knew; still less how she had got through that interminable night, with Johnnie sleeping at her side till it was all she could do to hold herself back from screaming and screaming and throwing herself out of the bed, out of the room, and out of the house; while all the time there beat on her brain, as if it were the drum in some never-ending jazz band, the same refrain – “No, not since
two minutes
before Father died, no, not since
two minutes
before Father died, no, not since
TWO MINUTES
before Father died ...”

She had had to bite the sides of her hands to fight down her hysteria.

As soon as Johnnie was out of the house she had telephoned her wire to Ronald and then run straight upstairs to pack.

In the train she regained some of her control.

Upcottery was left behind, definitely now and forever. Upcottery and Johnnie. Johnnie the J. P. Johnnie the murderer of her own father.

Of course, now that she was calmer, she could understand how Johnnie’s mind had worked.

To have called Johnnie a murderer to his face would have upset him very much indeed. Johnnie of course had never looked on what he had done in that light, not even when it was in contemplation. He had used no poison, he had employed no “blunt instrument,” such a thing as murder had never entered his thoughts.

Besides, gentlemen don’t murder. But they may, quite permissibly, help another gentleman out of life.

Johnnie’s reasoning would have been perfectly simple.

“General McLaidlaw might die at any moment. It would suit me extremely well if he would die at this one. If General McLaidlaw did certain things at this minute, he actually would die. Well, if he does them, that’s his own lookout; no one’s going to force him.”

And so Johnnie filled up the old man’s port glass and gone on filling it, hidden his spectacles so that Cecil could be sent to find them, led him on to excite himself with the memory of youthful exploits, and then ...

“How could anyone call that
murder?
” Johnnie would have demanded, in surprised as well as hurt tones.

Lina called it murder.

She did not shirk the word or the thought.

Johnnie had murdered her own father as certainly and as carefully as if he had shot him through the heart across his own dining table.

She could not cry, yet. This shock was too great for tears.

Johnnie ...

And she – incredibly
she
– could have Johnnie hanged. Hanged by the neck until he was dead. Johnnie ...

She had only to take that notebook out of her suitcase, into which she had thrown it, and go with it to Scotland Yard. They would not refuse to recognize what she had known in her heart all the time but would not admit to her reason – that those notes had been made before and not after her father’s death: that they were not the jottings of an interested novice of science, but a murderer’s deliberate plan for his crime. Not they! They would ...

Lina tugged the heavy case down from the rack, delved into it to find the notebook, pulled out the pages and tore them into little bits, and threw the scraps out of the window.

Or was it, legally, not murder at all?

Lina, thankful she had the carriage to herself, pulled off her hat and passed her hand over her hot, aching forehead.

When you incite a person to do something which both of you know will probably kill him – is that legally murder or not?

Oh, what did it matter? The legal aspect did not count. Morally it was murder. Morally, Johnnie had touched bottom at last.

Lina would have liked to cry, but could not.

For the really heartrending thing was that Johnnie could never recognize it as murder. Johnnie, with his infantile moral blindness, could never see those things as any ordinarily decent person sees them: as Lina herself saw them. Lina saw Johnnie as a murderer. Johnnie saw himself either as one driven by circumstances to a certain unconventionality of action, or else as a rather clever person. Probably he had managed to persuade himself, too, that he was doing his father-in-law quite a kind turn. Relieving pain. Euthanasia.

Lina shuddered.

Yet she could not hate Johnnie. She was horrified, even appalled; but one cannot hate a moral defective. But one cannot, equally, go on living with him.

She forced herself to think of Ronald.

Her flight to him had been instinctive. Ronald, with his solidity and dependability. Lina wanted desperately now to depend on somebody else at last. It had been part of the irony of her marriage with Johnnie that she, so unfitted to be the responsible partner, had had to support Johnnie in character as well as in purse. Well, that was all over now. Love is very decidedly not everything. Lina did not know whether she still loved Johnnie or not. She very much feared that she might go on loving him, whatever he had done. And four years is a long time.

Loving him, but not living with him. She had found that she could live with a thief, a cheat, a forger, a reprobate even; but not with a murderer.

A murderer ...

It was still almost impossible to believe that Johnnie was a murderer.

Murder is always a thing apart from one’s own life. People murder and are murdered, yes; but not the people one knows; certainly not the people one loves. Lina thought bitterly that, just as the last person to realize a husband’s promiscuity is his own wife, so the last persons to believe in a man’s murderous possibilities are those who are closest to him. “What, George!” they cry, horror-stricken. “Impossible! He was always so kind to the cat.”

But Johnnie was a murderer. There was no getting away from it. Though in this case the last person to believe it would certainly be Johnnie himself.

She was still thinking about Johnnie.

Lina changed to the other side of the carriage, though sitting with her back to the engine always made her feel rather sick. She wished it would make her feel sick now, to give her something else to think about; though ever since last night there had been a horrid empty feeling in the pit of her stomach, as if she were eternally descending a headlong lift, which was worse than any genuine nausea.

Ronald ...

Lina’s mind reached forward from the quicksand of its emotions to his rocklike solidity. She had not treated Ronald very well. She had disappointed him, too severely and too often. She had been a feckless little idiot, unable to make up her mind, unable to decide what she really wanted, drawing back each time she approached the brink of a decision. No wonder his letters had become fewer and less impassioned. It was in fact nearly a fortnight now since she had heard from him at all.

No, she had not treated Ronald well. But she was going to make up for that now. The tears came into her eyes at last as she thought of Ronald’s delight when she told him that she had made up her mind at last: that she had come to him for good, without any reservations at all. It was wonderful to be wanted like that.

Johnnie had wanted her like that....

But no. That was finished. There could be no possible weakening this time.

Besides, within a few hours she would have made any return to Johnnie impossible. Once he had got her, Ronald would never let her go again. Lina knew that.

And she knew that this time she would not want to go.

No, she was not in love with Ronald. She could never be in love with anyone again. But she did love him. And she was going to try, thankfully and with all her power, to be a good wife to him.

She wondered, would he kiss her on the platform?

Ronald met her at Waterloo, but he did not kiss her on the platform.

Lina’s heart jumped as she saw him waiting for her. Yes, she loved him a lot. More than she had thought.

She clung to him, with both hands clutching his coat sleeves, in gratitude and relief. She felt safe at last. Ronald would look after her now.

“I’ve come to you, Ronald.”

“Yes.”

Ronald was looking down at her. She noticed with surprise that he seemed very much embarrassed. She thought it was because she was clinging to him in public, but she did not care: Ronald was there to be clung to.

He cleared his throat.

“I’ve got something to tell you, Lina.”

She smiled up at him affectionately. “Yes, darling?” It was good to be with Ronald, so safe and dependable.

“I’d better tell you at once. I – well, you kept me on a string too long.”

“I – what?”

“You kept me hanging too long. I decided you didn’t care for me,
really.
I made up my mind you were in love with your husband all the time. I – I couldn’t go on standing by indefinitely. So – well, I’m engaged to somebody else.”

“You don’t – love me any more?”

“No,” said Ronald miserably.

They looked at one another.

Lina became conscious that people were beginning to stare.

“My suitcase,” she muttered.

Ronald got her suitcase out of the carriage. He asked her if she wanted a taxi.

“No,” said Lina. “Will you get me a porter?”

Ronald hailed a porter.

Lina held out her hand. “Good-bye, Ronald.”

He took her hand awkwardly. “If there’s anything I can do ...?”

“No,” Lina said. “Good-bye.”

Ronald hesitated a moment, then lifted his hat and shambled away. Lina knew that he was feeling the worst possible cad, and she was sorry for him, when it was not his fault at all.

“Taxi, miss?” said the porter.

Lina looked at him stupidly.

“Put it in the cloakroom, miss?”

“Oh! No, thank you.” She looked mechanically at the watch on her wrist.

Three minutes later she crept into a train that would take her back to Upcottery.

There seemed nothing else to do.

Beaky Thwaite appeared to have no relations, few friends, and nothing at all to do. When Lina asked him, as she often did, how he spent his time, he did not seem very sure even of that.

“Oh, I don’t know. Wander about, you know. Look up some old bean occasionally, and all that sort of thing.”

“Don’t you ever go to your house in Yorkshire?” Beaky was the not very willing owner of a large mansion and estate, including several thousand acres of grouse moor, in Yorkshire.

“Oh, yes. I take some old bean up there now and then, you know. Don’t stop there alone, though, if I can help it. Bores me stiff.”

“What you want is a sensible wife to look after you. Why don’t you get married, Beaky?”

Beaky would laugh hugely. “What? Married? No, thanks. Not me. What? Besides, there aren’t any sensible wives, what? Oh, sorry, Lina. Put my foot in it again. You’re sensible, all right. Damned sensible. I don’t know what the old bean would have done without you. Toddled off to the bow-wows, I expect, what?”

“Why do you say that?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Beaky would answer vaguely. “Old Johnnie always was a bit of a lad, what?” But Lina knew that even Beaky had no idea how much of a lad old Johnnie had been.

Beaky stayed at Dellfield a lot now. Johnnie, rather surprisingly, encouraged him to do so; and Beaky needed very little encouragement. It was obvious to Lina that Beaky was enormously fond of Johnnie. The worship which had been accorded him when they were schoolboys was still hardly diminished. In his admiration of Johnnie, Beaky was never tired of relating to Lina episodes and escapades in which Johnnie had played the principal part, to the enthusiastic audience of Beaky. Beaky admitted that his own schooldays would have been distressingly dull but for the way Johnnie had dared him into sharing his adventures.

Lina was interested in these stories, for the light that they threw on Johnnie the fledgling. The actual friendship between the two was illuminating. It was plain from Beaky’s remarks that Johnnie had been one of the most popular boys in the school, even before he reached the glories of the first eleven and the first fifteen. He might have chosen anyone as his particular friend; and he had chosen Beaky, the unathletic (though persevering) and the not-too-popular. Lina thought she knew why Johnnie had done this. For one thing, the abundant admiration which Beaky offered him, and the ability to twist his Jonathan round his little finger, had appealed more to Johnnie than a more equal friendship with someone of his own standing in the school. That was usual enough, when the more spectacular character of the two lacked ballast. But Lina thought there had been a little more in it than that. Beaky had probably applauded escapades which a less infatuated friend would have denounced. Even now, for instance, he seemed to think it only a joke that Johnnie should have been asked to leave two terms before he should have done so, owing to certain petty thefts of money from trouser-pockets in the changing room having been traced to him.

Lina did not like Beaky. But it was impossible to dislike him. He was the most vacuous person she had ever known.

The land scheme in Bournemouth still seemed to be hanging fire. Johnnie reported fresh difficulties from time to time. Always, just when things appeared to be going smoothly at last, some new trouble would crop up. However, Johnnie’s spirits did not suffer. He remained just as cheerful, whatever happened.

Beaky left everything to him. He took no part in the negotiations whatever, confining his activities to sitting beside Johnnie occasionally in the car when they went out to look for new sites. The prospect of making a few more thousands did not excite him at all. He had more already than he could spend. Lina thought his only interest in the affair was the excuse it offered of seeing Johnnie and staying a great deal at Dellfield.

She wished that something could be settled, so that Beaky should not have to stay quite so much at Dellfield.

From time to time she hinted as much to Johnnie.

But Johnnie unexpectedly seemed to want Beaky to stay at Dellfield as much as possible. Lina was sure that Beaky bored Johnnie almost as much as he bored her, and she could not understand why he should want him about the place.

Johnnie, however, could not help her there. He did not seem to know himself. Or, if he did, could not explain.