Before the Fact Read Free Page A

She knew herself well enough to realize that she could never be happy alone. And in spite of her brains, Lina at twenty-eight was, in her heart, old-fashioned enough to take it for granted that happiness for a woman lay only in a happy marriage. Having lived all her life in the country, where people do not talk about these things, she had never realized that the percentage of happy marriages among the population of Great Britain is probably something under .0001.
    Lina now wanted to be married very much indeed.
    She nearly had been married, two years ago.
    What Lina had then considered the first, and latterly the only, love affair of her life had then dragged to an ignominious close. It had been with a man of whom her father heartily approved, a solid young landowner in a neighbouring county, of impeccable parentage and equally impeccable reputation. Indeed, the only trifling blot on his perfection was the fact that mentally he resembled one of his own prize bulls, except that the landowner could hardly recognize the significance of a piece of red rag when he saw it; but that of course did not worry General McLaidlaw, and even Lina was able to keep her eyes shut to it. For even the blot had a silver margin: the young man was as solid as one of his own bulls too. For the first time in her life Lina found herself able to lean on someone, morally, at any rate, if perhaps not spiritually; and she found the process singularly restful.
    She had fancied herself very much in love with this rock of gentility.
    When she was away from him she invested him with all sorts of qualities which secretly, though she refused to admit the doubt, she was not at all sure that he possessed. She also put into his mouth certain passionate speeches which she did quite well know that he would never utter. He would, in fact, have gone as deep a red as one of his own Devon cows at the very thought of speech at all on such topics: topics that are obviously undiscussable at all until one is decently married, and probably not to be discussed even then, only performed. When she was with him, it surprised her to find herself at times yawning with boredom.
    His attitude towards her was completely correct. He was kind, if a little obtuse, and most respectful. Lina wished he would not always be quite so respectful. A woman in love, even a young woman, does not want respect. She wants something a good deal warmer. And if she does not get it, she will descend from the pedestal on which she has been unwillingly placed and astonish her worshipper with a totally irrational fit of hysterics.
    Slowly Lina realized that a pillar of any sort, even of respect, though it may be solid, can be incredibly dull. Finding that she had mistaken leaning for love, she allowed the affair to fizzle out. Matters had not even reached the point of a formal engagement, for the pillar was a slow mover. He went back to his pigs and his apple trees, and Lina shed a great number of tears into her pillow, not for what had been but for what had not.
    Lina was no Samson. Within a couple of months the pillar, quite unshattered, had announced his engagement to another, and plainly a more determined, girl; and Lina had resigned herself to perpetual spinsterhood.
    During the last two years nothing had happened to shake her resignation.
4
    It was actually ten days before Lina saw Johnnie Aysgarth again.
    The day was Sunday, and of the kind that only early April can produce. Lina, having left the
Observer
to her parents indoors, had taken the
Sunday Times
out onto the flagged terrace and settled herself in a deck chair in the sun.
    Unfortunately a part of the terrace was under observation from the drive, and though General McLaidlaw had talked for years of running a hedge of
lonicera nitida
across the vulnerable gap, nothing had ever been done about it. Lina looked up from James Agate’s column to find herself surrounded by Frasers.
    The Frasers were very gay, very modern, very jolly. Everyone always