The Rose and the Yew Tree
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I got on the train at Penzance and I took a ticket for third lunch (because I had just finished a rather large breakfast) and when the attendant came along the train shouting out nasally, ‘Third lunch, please, tickets ooonlee …’ I got up and went along to the dining car and the attendant took my ticket and gestured me into a single seat, back to the engine, opposite the place where Jennifer was sitting.
That, you see, is how things happen. You cannot take thought for them, you cannot plan. I sat down opposite Jennifer—and Jennifer was crying.
I didn’t see it at first. She was struggling hard for control. There was no sound, no outward indication. We did not look at each other, we behaved with due regard to the conventions governing the meeting of strangers on a restaurant car. I advanced the menu towards her—a polite but meaningless action since it only bore the legend: Soup, Fish or Meat, Sweet or Cheese. 4/6.
She accepted my gesture with the answering gesture, a polite ritualistic smile and an inclination of the head. The attendant asked us what we would have to drink. We both had light ale.
Then there was a pause. I looked at the magazine I had brought in with me. The attendant dashed along the car with plates of soup and set them in front of us. Still the little gentleman, I advanced the salt and pepper an inch in Jennifer’s direction. Up to now I had not looked at her—not really looked, that is to say—though, of course, I knew certain basic facts. That she was young, but not very young, a few years younger than myself, that she was of medium height and dark, that she was of my own social standing and that while attractive enough to be pleasant, she was not so overwhelmingly attractive as to be in any sense disturbing.
Presently I intended to look rather more closely, and if it seemed indicated I should probably advance a few tentative remarks. It would depend.
But the thing that suddenly upset all my calculations was the fact that my eyes, straying over the soup plate opposite me, noticed that something unexpected was splashing into the soup. Without noise, or sound, or any indication of distress, tears were forcing themselves from her eyes and dropping into the soup.
I was startled. I cast swift surreptitious glances at her. The tears soon stopped, she succeeded in forcing them back, she drank her soup. I said, quite unpardonably, but irresistibly:
‘You’re dreadfully unhappy, aren’t you?’
And she replied fiercely, ‘I’m a perfect fool!’
Neither of us spoke. The waiter took the soup plates away. He laid minute portions of meat pie in front of us and helped us from a monstrous dish of cabbage. To this he added two roast potatoes with the air of one doing us a special favour.
I looked out of the window and made a remark about the scenery. I proceeded to a few remarks about Cornwall. I said I didn’t know it well. Did she? She said, Yes, she did, she lived there. We compared Cornwall with Devonshire, and with Wales, and with the east coast. None of our conversation meant anything. It served the purpose of glossing over the fact that she had been guilty of shedding tears in a public place and that I had been guilty of noticing the fact.
It was not until we had coffee in front of us and I had offered her a cigarette and she had accepted it, that we got back to where we had started.
I said I was sorry I had been so stupid, but that I couldn’t help it. She said I must have thought her a perfect idiot.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I thought that you’d come to the end of your tether. That was it, wasn’t it?’
She said, Yes, that was it.
‘It’s humiliating,’ she said fiercely, ‘to get to such a pitch of self-pity that you don’t care what you do or who sees you!’
‘But you did care. You were struggling hard.’
‘I didn’t actually howl,’ she said, ‘if that’s what you mean.’
I asked her how bad it was.
She said it was pretty bad. She had got to the end of everything, and she didn’t know what to do.
I think I had already sensed that. There was an air of taut desperation about her. I wasn’t going to let her get away from me while she was in that mood. I said, ‘Come on, tell me about it. I’m a stranger—you can say things to a stranger. It won’t matter.’
She said, ‘There’s nothing to tell except that I’ve made the most bloody mess of everything—everything.’
I told her it wasn’t probably as bad as all that. She needed, I could see, reassurance. She needed new life, new courage—she needed lifting up from a pitiful slough of endurance and suffering and setting on her feet again. I had not the slightest doubt that I was the person best qualified to do that … Yes, it happened as soon as that.
She looked at me doubtfully, like an uncertain child. Then she poured it all out.
In the midst of it, of course, the attendant came with the bill. I was glad then that we were having the third lunch. They wouldn’t hustle us out of the dining car. I added ten shillings to my bill, and the attendant bowed discreetly and melted away.
I went on listening to Jennifer.
She’d had a raw deal. She’d stood up to things with an incredible amount of pluck, but there had been too many things, one after the other, and she wasn’t, physically, strong. Things had gone wrong for her all along—as a child, as a girl, in her marriage. Her sweetness, her impulsiveness, had landed her every time in a hole. There had been loopholes for escape and she hadn’t taken them—she’d preferred to try and make the best of a bad job. And when that had failed, and a loophole had presented itself, it had been a bad loophole, and she’d landed herself in a worse mess than ever.
For everything that had happened, she blamed herself. My heart warmed to that lovable trait in her—there was no judgment, no resentment. ‘It must,’ she ended up wistfully every time, ‘have been my fault somehow …’
I wanted to roar out, ‘Of course it wasn’t your fault! Don’t you see that you’re a victim—that you’ll always be a victim so long as you adopt that fatal attitude of being willing to take all the blame for everything?’
She was adorable sitting there, worried and miserable and defeated. I think I knew then, looking at her across the narrow table, what it was I had been waiting for. It was Jennifer … not Jennifer as a possession, but to give Jennifer back her mastery of life, to see Jennifer happy, to see her whole once more.
Yes, I knew then … though it wasn’t until many weeks afterwards that I admitted to myself that I was in love with her.
You see, there was so much more to it than that.
We made no plans for meeting again. I think she believed truly that we would not meet again. I knew otherwise. She had told me her name. She said, very sweetly, when we at last left the dining car, ‘This is goodbye. But please believe I shall never forget you and what you’ve done for me. I was desperate—quite desperate.’
I took her hand and I said goodbye—but I knew it wasn’t goodbye. I was so sure of it that I would have been willing to agree not even to try and find her again. But as it chanced there were friends of hers who were friends of mine. I did not tell her, but to find her again would be easy. What was odd was that we had not happened to meet before this.
I met her again a week later, at Caro Strangeways’s cocktail party. And after that, there was no more doubt about it. We both knew what had happened to us …
We met and parted and met again. We met at parties, in other people’s houses, we met at small quiet restaurants, we took trains into the country and walked together in a world that was all a shining haze of unreal bliss. We went to a concert and heard Elizabeth Schumann sing ‘And in that pathway where our feet shall wander, we’ll meet, forget the earth and lost in dreaming, bid heaven unite a love that earth no more shall sunder …’
And as we went out into the noise and bustle of Wigmore Street I repeated the last words of Strauss’s song ‘—in love and bliss ne’er ending …’ and met her eyes.
She said, ‘Oh no, not for us, Hugh …’
And I said, ‘Yes, for us …’
Because, as I pointed out to her, we had got to go through the rest of our lives together …
She couldn’t, she said, throw everything over like that. Her husband, she knew, wouldn’t consent to let her divorce him.
‘But he’d divorce you?’
‘Yes, I suppose so … Oh Hugh, can’t we go on as we are?’
No, I said, we couldn’t. I’d been waiting, watching her fight her way back to health and sanity. I hadn’t wanted to let her vex herself with decisions until she was once more the happy joyful creature Nature had created her to be. Well, I’d done it. She was strong again—strong mentally and physically. And we’d got to come to a decision.
It wasn’t plain sailing. She had all sorts of queer, quite unpredictable objections. Chiefly, it was because of me and my career that she demurred. It would mean a complete breakup for me. Yes, I said, I knew that. I’d thought it out, and it didn’t matter. I was young—there were other things that I could do besides schoolmastering.
She cried then and said that she’d never forgive herself if, because of her, I were to ruin my life. I told her that nothing could ruin it, unless she herself were to leave me. Without her, I said, life would be finished for me.
We had a lot of ups and downs. She would seem to accept my view, then suddenly, when I was no longer with her, she would retract. She had, you see, no confidence in herself.
Yet, little by little, she came to share my outlook. It was not only passion between us—there was more than that. That harmony of mind and thought—that delight in mind answering mind. The things that she would say—which had just been on my own lips—the sharing of a thousand small minor pleasures.
She admitted at last that I was right, that we belonged together. Her last defences went down.
‘It is true! Oh Hugh, how it can be, I don’t know. How can I really mean to you what you say I do? And yet I don’t really doubt.’
The thing was tested—proved. We made plans, the necessary mundane plans.
It was a cold sunny morning when I woke up and realized that on that day our new life was starting. From now on Jennifer and I would be together. Not until this moment had I allowed myself to believe fully. I had always feared that her strange morbid distrust of her own capabilities would make her draw back.
Even on this, the last morning of the old life, I had to make quite sure. I rang her up.
‘Jennifer …’
‘Hugh …’
Her voice, soft with a tiny tremor in it … It was true. I said:
‘Forgive me, darling. I had to hear your voice. Is it all true?’
‘It’s all true …’
We were to meet at Northolt Aerodrome. I hummed as I dressed, I shaved carefully. In the mirror I saw a face almost unrecognizable with sheer idiotic happiness. This was my day! The day I had waited for for thirty-eight years. I breakfasted, checked over tickets, passport. I went down to the car. Harriman was driving. I told him I would drive—he could sit behind.
I turned out of the Mews into the main road. The car wound in and out of the traffic. I had plenty of time. It was a glorious morning—a lovely morning created specially for Hugh and Jennifer. I could have sung and shouted.
The lorry came at forty miles an hour out of the side road—there was no seeing or avoiding it—no failure in driving—no faulty reaction. The driver of the lorry was drunk, they told me afterwards—how little it matters why a thing happens!
It struck the Buick broadside on, wrecking it—pinning me under the wreckage. Harriman was killed.
Jennifer waited at the aerodrome. The plane left … I did not come …
CHAPTER 2
There isn’t much point in describing what came next. There wasn’t, to begin with, any continuity. There was confusion, darkness, pain … I wandered endlessly, it seemed to me, in long underground corridors. At intervals I realized dimly that I was in a hospital ward. I was aware of doctors, white-capped nurses, the smell of antiseptics—the flashing of steel instruments, glittering little glass trolleys being wheeled briskly about …
Realization came to me slowly—there was less confusion, less pain … but no thoughts as yet of people or of places. The animal in pain knows only pain or the surcease of pain, it can concentrate on nothing else. Drugs, mercifully dulling physical suffering, confuse the mind; heightening the impression of chaos.
But lucid intervals began to come—there was the moment when they told me definitely that I had had an accident.
Knowledge came at last—knowledge of my helplessness—of my wrecked broken body … There was no more life for me as a man amongst men.
People came to see me—my brother, awkward, tongue-tied, with no idea of what to say. We had never been very close. I could not speak to him of Jennifer.
But it was of Jennifer I was thinking. As I improved, they brought me my letters. Letters from Jennifer …
Only my immediate family had been admitted to see me. Jennifer had had no claim, no right. She had been technically only a friend.
They won’t let me come, Hugh darling, she wrote. I shall come as soon as they do. All my love. Concentrate on getting better, Jennifer.
And another:
Don’t worry, Hugh. Nothing matters so long as you are not dead. That’s all that matters. We shall be together soon—for always. Yours Jennifer.
I wrote to her, a feeble pencil scrawl, that she mustn’t come. What had I to offer Jennifer now?
It was not until I was out of the hospital and in my brother’s house that I saw Jennifer again. Her letters had all sounded the same note. We loved each other! Even if I never recovered we must be together. She would look after me. There would still be happiness—not the happiness of which we had once dreamed, but still happiness.
And though my first reaction had been to cut the knot ruthlessly, to say to Jennifer, ‘Go away, and never come near me,’ I wavered. Because I believed, as she did, that the tie between us was not of the flesh only. All the delights of mental companionship would still be ours. Certainly it would be best for her to go and forget me—but if she would not go?
It was a long time before I gave in and let her come. We wrote to each other frequently and those letters of ours were true love letters. They were inspiring—heroic in tone—
And so, at last, I let her come …
Well, she came.
She wasn’t allowed to stay very long. We knew then, I suppose—but we wouldn’t admit it. She came again. She came a third time. After that, I simply couldn’t stand it any longer. Her third visit lasted ten minutes, and it seemed like an hour and a half! I could hardly believe it when I looked at my watch afterwards. It had seemed, I have no doubt, just as long to her …
For you see we had nothing to say to each other …
Yes, just that …
There wasn’t, after all, anything there.
Is there any bitterness like the bitterness of a fool’s paradise? All that communion of mind with mind, our thoughts that leapt to complete each other’s, our friendship, our companionship: illusion—nothing but illusion. The illusion that mutual attraction between man and woman breeds. Nature’s lure, Nature’s last and most cunning piece of deceit. Between me and Jennifer there had been the attraction of the flesh only—from that had sprung the whole monstrous fabric of self-deception. It had been passion and passion only, and the discovery shamed me, turned me sour, brought me almost to the point of hating her as well as myself. We stared at each other desolately—wondering each in our own way what had happened to the miracle in which we had been so confident.
She was a good-looking young woman, I saw that. But when she talked she bored me. And I bored her. We couldn’t talk about anything or discuss anything with any pleasure.
She kept reproaching herself for the whole thing, and I wished she wouldn’t. It seemed unnecessary and just a trifle hysterical. I thought to myself, Why on earth has she got to fuss so?
As she left the third time she said, in her persevering bright way, ‘I’ll come again very soon, Hugh darling.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Don’t come.’
‘But of course I shall.’ Her voice was hollow, insincere.
I said savagely, ‘For God’s sake don’t pretend, Jennifer. It’s finished—it’s all finished.’
She said it wasn’t finished, that she didn’t know what I meant. She was going to spend her life looking after me, she said, and we would be very happy. She was determined on self-immolation, and it made me see red. I felt apprehensive, too, that she would do as she said. Perhaps she would always be there, chattering, trying to be kind, uttering foolish bright remarks … I got in a panic—a panic born of weakness and illness.
I yelled at her to go away—go away. She went, looking frightened. But I saw relief in her eyes.
When my sister-in-law came in later to draw the curtains, I spoke. I said, ‘It’s over, Teresa. She’s gone … she’s gone … She won’t come back, will she?’
Teresa said in her quiet voice, No, she wouldn’t come back.
‘Do you think, Teresa,’ I asked, ‘that it’s my illness that makes me see things—wrong?’
Teresa knew what I meant. She said that, in her opinion, an illness like mine tended to make you see things as they really were.
‘You mean that I’m seeing Jennifer now as she really is?’
Teresa said she didn’t mean quite that. I wasn’t probably any better able to know what Jennifer was really like now than before. But I knew now exactly what effect Jennifer produced on me, apart from my being in love with her.
I asked her what she herself thought of Jennifer.
She said that she had always thought Jennifer was attractive, nice, and not at all interesting.
‘Do you think she’s very unhappy, Teresa?’ I asked morbidly.
‘Yes, Hugh, I do.’
‘Because of me?’
‘No, because of herself.’
I said, ‘She goes on blaming herself for my accident. She keeps saying that if I hadn’t been coming to meet her, it would never have happened—it’s all so stupid!’
‘It is, rather.’
‘I don’t want her to work herself up about it. I don’t want her to be unhappy, Teresa.’
‘Really, Hugh,’ said Teresa. ‘Do leave the girl something!’
‘What do you mean?’
‘She likes being unhappy. Haven’t you realized that?’
There is a cold clarity about my sister-in-law’s thought processes that I find very disconcerting.
I told her that that was a beastly thing to say.
Teresa said thoughtfully that perhaps it was, but that she hadn’t really thought it mattered saying so now.
‘You haven’t got to tell yourself fairy stories any longer. Jennifer has always loved sitting down and thinking how everything has gone wrong. She broods over it and works herself up—but if she likes living that way, why shouldn’t she?’ Teresa added, ‘You know, Hugh, you can’t feel pity for a person unless there’s self-pity there. A person has to be sorry for themselves before you can be sorry for them. Pity has always been your weakness. Because of it you don’t see things clearly.’
I found momentary satisfaction in telling Teresa that she was an odious woman. She said she thought she probably was.
‘You are never sorry for anyone.’
‘Yes, I am. I’m sorry for Jennifer in a way.’
‘And me?’
‘I don’t know, Hugh.’
I said sarcastically:
‘The fact that I’m a maimed broken wreck with nothing to live for doesn’t affect you at all?’
‘I don’t know if I’m sorry for you or not. This means that you’re going to start your life all over again, living it from an entirely different angle. That might be very interesting.’
I told Teresa that she was inhuman, and she went away smiling.
She had done me a lot of good.
CHAPTER 3
It was soon afterwards that we moved to St Loo in Cornwall. Teresa had just inherited a house there from a great-aunt. The doctor wanted me to be out of London. My brother Robert is a painter with what most people think is a perverted vision of landscapes. His war service, like most artists’, had been agricultural. So it all fitted in very well.
Teresa went down and got the house ready and, having filled up a lot of forms successfully, I was borne down by special ambulance.
‘What goes on here?’ I asked Teresa on the morning after my arrival.
Teresa was well-informed. There were, she said, three separate worlds. There was the old fishing village, grouped round its harbour, with the tall slate-roofed houses rising up all round it, and the notices written in Flemish and French as well as English. Beyond that, sprawling out along the coast, was the modern tourist and residential excrescence. The large luxury hotels, thousands of small bungalows, masses of little boarding houses—all very busy and active in summer, quiet in winter. Thirdly, there was St Loo Castle, ruled over by the old dowager, Lady St Loo, a nucleus of yet another way of life with ramifications stretching up through winding lanes to houses tucked inconspicuously away in valleys beside old world churches. County, in fact, said Teresa.
‘And what are we?’ I asked.
Teresa said we were ‘county’ too, because Polnorth House had belonged to her great-aunt Miss Amy Tregellis, and it was hers, Teresa’s, by inheritance and not by purchase, so that we belonged.
‘Even Robert?’ I asked. ‘In spite of his being a painter?’
That, Teresa admitted, would take a little swallowing. There were too many painters at St Loo in the summer months.
‘But he’s my husband,’ said Teresa superbly, ‘and besides, his mother was a Bolduro from Bodmin way.’
It was then that I invited Teresa to tell us what we were going to do in the new home—or rather what she was going to do. My role was clear. I was the looker-on.
Teresa said she was going to participate in all the local goings-on.
‘Which are?’
Teresa said she thought mainly politics and gardening, with a dash of Women’s Institutes and good causes such as Welcoming the Soldiers Home.
‘But principally politics,’ she said. ‘After all, a General Election will be on us any minute.’
‘Have you ever taken any interest in politics, Teresa?’
‘No, Hugh, I haven’t. It has always seemed to me unnecessary. I have confined myself to voting for the candidate who seems to me likely to do least harm.’
‘An admirable policy,’ I murmured.
But now, Teresa said, she would do her best to take politics seriously. She would have, of course, to be a Conservative. Nobody who owned Polnorth House could be anything else, and the late Miss Amy Tregellis would turn in her grave if the niece to whom she had bequeathed her treasures was to vote Labour.
‘But if you believe Labour to be the better party?’
‘I don’t,’ said Teresa. ‘I don’t think there’s anything to choose between them.’
‘Nothing could be fairer than that,’ I said.
When we had been settled in at Polnorth House a fortnight, Lady St Loo came to call upon us.
She brought with her her sister, Lady Tressilian, her sister-in-law, Mrs Bigham Charteris, and her grand-daughter, Isabella.
After they had left, I said in a fascinated voice to Teresa that they couldn’t be real.
They were, you see, so exactly right to have come out of St Loo Castle. They were pure fairy story. The Three Witches and the Enchanted Maiden.
Adelaide St Loo was the widow of the seventh Baron. Her husband had been killed in the Boer War. Her two sons had been killed in the war of 1914–18. They left behind them no sons, but the younger left a daughter, Isabella, whose mother had died at her birth. The title passed to a cousin, then resident in New Zealand. The ninth Lord St Loo was only too pleased to rent the castle to the old dowager. Isabella was brought up there, watched over by her guardians, her grandmother and her two great-aunts. Lady St Loo’s widowed sister, Lady Tressilian, and her widowed sister-in-law, Mrs Bigham Charteris, came to join her. They shared expenses and so made it possible for Isabella to be brought up in what the old ladies considered her rightful home. They were all over seventy, and had somewhat the appearance of three black crows. Lady St Loo had a vast bony face, with an eagle nose and a high forehead. Lady Tressilian was plump and had a large round face with little twinkling eyes. Mrs Bigham Charteris was lean and leathery. They achieved in their appearance a kind of Edwardian effect—as though time had stood still for them. They wore jewellery, rather dirty, indubitably real, pinned on them in unlikely places—not too much of it. It was usually in the form of crescents or horseshoes or stars.