The Death of the Heart Read Free Page A

complex,” said Anna. “Stupid from the beginning. It was one of those muddles without a scrap of dignity. Mr. Quayne stayed quite devoted to his first wife—Thomas’s mother—and showed not the slightest wish to leave her whatever happened. Irene or no Irene, the first Mrs. Quayne always had him in the palm of her hand. She was one of those implacably nice women whose niceness you can’t get past, and whose understanding gets into every crack of your temperament. While he was with her he always felt simply fine—he had to. When he retired from business they went to live in Dorset, in a charmng place she had bought for him to retire to. It was after some years of life in Dorset that poor Mr. Quayne started skidding about. He and she had married so young—though Thomas, for some reason, was not born for quite a number of years—that he had had almost no time to be silly in. Also, I think, she must have hypnotised him into being a good deal steadier than he felt. At the same time she was a woman who thought all men are great boys at heart, and she took every care to keep him one. But this turned out to have its disadvantages. In the photographs taken just before the crisis, he looks a full-blooded idealistic old buffer. He looks impressive, silly, intensely moral, and as though he would like to denounce himself. She would never let him denounce himself, and this was rather like taking somebody’s toys away. He used to say her belief in him meant everything, but probably it frustrated him a good deal. It was rather slighting, wasn’t it?”
    “Yes,” said St. Quentin. “Possibly.”
    “Have I told you all this before?”
    “Not as a story. Of course, I’ve inferred some things from what you’ve said.”
    “As a story it really is rather long, and in a way it makes me rather depressed…Well, what happened happened when Mr. Quayne was about fifty-seven, and Thomas at Oxford in his second year. They’d already been living in Dorset for some time, and Mr. Quayne seemed to be settled for the rest of his life. He played golf, tennis, bridge, ran the Boy Scouts and sat on several committees. In addition to that he had paved most of the garden, and when he’d done that she let him divert a stream. Much of his own company put him into a panic, so he was always dangling round after her. People in Dorset said it was good to see them together, because they were just like lovers. She had never cared very much for London, which was why she’d put pressure on him to retire young—I don’t think the business had amounted to much, but it was the one thing he’d had that was apart from her. But once she got him to Dorset, she was so nice that she was constantly packing him off to London—that is to say, about every two months—to stay at his club for a few days, see old friends or watch cricket or something. He felt pretty flat in London and always shot home again, which was very gratifying for her. Till one time, when for a reason that did not appear till later, he sent her a wire to say, might he stay on in London for a few days more? What had happened was that he had just met Irene, at a dinner party at Wimbledon. She was a scrap of a widow, ever so plucky, just back from China, with damp little hands, a husky voice and defective tear-ducts that gave her eyes always rather a swimmy look. She had a prostrated way of looking up at you, and that fluffy, bird’s-nesty hair that hairpins get lost in. At that time, she must have been about twenty-nine. She knew almost nobody, but, because she was so plucky, someone had got her a job in a flower shop. She lived in a flatlet in Notting Hill Gate, and was a protegee of his Wimbeldon friend’s wife’s. Mr. Quayne was put beside her at dinner. At the end of the party Mr. Quayne, all in a daze already, saw her back in a taxi to Notting Hill Gate, and was asked in for some Horlicks. No one knows what happened—still less, of course, why it did. But from that evening on,