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,
