The Ivy Tree Read Free

nothing.
    â€˜Yes. I believe you. But you mustn’t blame me too much for being rude, and staring. It’s a queer experience, running into the double of someone you knew.’
    â€˜Believe me, it’s even queerer learning that one has a double,’ I said. ‘Funnily enough, it’s a thing one’s inclined to resent.’
    â€˜Do you know, I hadn’t thought of that, but I believe you’re right! I should hate like hell to think there were two of me.’
    I thought: and I believe you ; though I didn’t say it aloud. I smiled. ‘It’s a violation of one’s individuality, I suppose. A survival of a primitive feeling of – what can one call it – identity? Self-hood? You want to be you , and nobody else. And it’s uncomfortably like magic. You feel like a savage with a looking-glass, or Shelley seeing his doppelgänger one morning before breakfast.’
    â€˜Did he?’
    â€˜He said so. It was supposed to be a presage of evil, probably death.’
    He grinned. ‘I’ll risk it.’
    â€˜Oh, lord, not your death. The one that meets the image is the one who dies.’
    â€˜Well, that is me. You’re the image, aren’t you?’
    â€˜There you are,’ I said, ‘that’s just the core of the matter. That’s just what one resents. We none of us want to be “the image”. We’re the thing itself.’
    â€˜Fair enough. You’re the thing itself, and Annabel’s the ghost. After all, she’s dead.’
    It wasn’t so much the casual phrasing that was shocking, as the lack of something in his voice that ought to have been there. The effect was as startling and as definite as if he had used an obscene word.
    I said, uncomfortably: ‘You know, I didn’t mean to . . . I should have realised that talking like this can’t be pleasant for you, even if you, well, didn’t get on with Annabel. After all, she was a relative; your cousin, didn’t you say?’
    â€˜I was going to marry her.’
    I was just drawing on my cigarette as he spoke. I almost choked over the smoke. I must have stared with my mouth open for quite five seconds. Then I said feebly: ‘Really?’
    His mouth curved. It was odd that the lineaments of beauty could lend themselves to something quite different. ‘You’re thinking, maybe, that there’d have been very little love lost? Well, you might be right. Or you might not. She ran away, sooner than marry me. Disappeared into the blue eight years ago with nothing but a note from the States to her grandfather to say she was safe, and we none of us need expect to hear from her again. Oh, I admit there’d been a quarrel, and I might have been’ – a pause, and a little shrug – ‘well, anyway she went, and never a word to me since that day. How easily do you expect a man to forgive that?’
    You? Never, I thought. There it was once more, the touch of something dark and clouded that altered his whole face; something lost and uncertain moving like a stranger behind the smooth façade of assurance that physical beauty gives. No, a rebuff was the one thing he would never forgive.
    I said: ‘Eight years is a long time, though, to nurse a grudge. After all, you’ve probably been happily married to someone else for most of that time.’
    â€˜I’m not married.’
    â€˜No?’ I must have sounded surprised. He would be all of thirty, and with that exterior, he must, to say the least of it, have had opportunities.
    He grinned at my tone, the assurance back in his face, as smoothly armoured as if there had never been a flaw. ‘My sister keeps house at Whitescar; my half-sister, I should say. She’s a wonderful cook, and she thinks a lot of me. With Lisa around, I don’t need a wife.’
    â€˜Whitescar, that’s your farm, you said?’ There was a tuft of sea-pink growing in a crevice