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By Root 2263 0

private fortune. Money, her money, was of great importance to her. If she had lived among the rich it would have been different; she would then have thought it normal to be assured, for life, of the possessions for which others toiled; she would, indeed, have thought herself rather meagrely provided. But she had been brought up among people poorer than herself to regard herself as somebody quite singular. When the age came of her going to dances, her aunt had impressed on her the danger she ran of fortune-hunters and, indeed, nearly all the young men with whom she consorted, and their mothers, regarded £58,000 as a notable prize. “Sometimes by the way that girl talks,” Basil had said, “you’d think she was the Woolworth heiress.” It was quite true. She did think herself extremely rich and responsible. One of the advantages to her of marrying Roger was the belief that her money was being put to good use in rescuing a literary genius from wage-slavery. She was much more afraid of misusing her money than of losing it. Thus when she was convinced that all private fortunes like her own were very shortly to be abolished and all undeserved prominence levelled, she was delighted. Moreover, her conversion had coincided with her falling in love. She and Roger had been to meetings together, and together read epitomes of Marxist philosophy. Her faith, like a Christian’s, was essential to her marriage, so, knowing that I was hostile, she sequestered it from me by making it a joke between us. That defence, at least, she had already picked up from watching Roger and his friends.

It was convenient for Roger to have me in attendance. He was not domestic by nature, and it was inevitable that these months should come to him as an anticlimax after the adventure of marriage. He did not, as some husbands do, resent his wife’s pregnancy. It was as though he had bought a hunter at the end of the season and turned him out; discerning friends, he knew, would appreciate the fine lines under the rough coat, but he would sooner have shown something glossy in the stable. He had summer business to do, moreover; the horse must wait till the late autumn. That, at least, was one way in which he saw the situation, but the analogy was incomplete. It was rather he that had been acquired and put to grass, and he was conscious of that aspect too. Roger was hobbled and prevented from taking the full stride required of him, by the habit, long settled, of regarding sex relationships in terms of ownership and use. Confronted with the new fact of pregnancy, of joint ownership, his terms failed him. As a result he was restless and no longer master of the situation; the practical business of getting through the day was becoming onerous so that my adhesion was agreeable to him. Grossly, it confirmed his opinion of Lucy’s value and at the same time took her off his hands. Then one morning, when I made my now habitual call at Victoria Square, Lucy, not yet up but lying in bed in a chaos of newspapers, letters and manicure tools, greeted me by saying, “Roger’s writing.”

Couched as she was, amid quilted bed-jacket and tumbled sheets—one arm bare to the elbow where the wide sleeve fell back and showed the tender places of wrist and forearm, the other lost in the warm depths of the bed, with her pale skin taking colour against the dead white linen, and her smile of confident, morning welcome; as I had greeted her countless times and always with a keener joy, until that morning I seemed to have come to the end of an investigation and hold as a certainty what before I had roughly surmised—her beauty rang through the room like a peal of bells; thus I have stood, stunned, in a Somerset garden, with the close turf wet and glittering underfoot in the dew, when, from beyond the walls of box, the grey church tower has suddenly scattered the heavens in tumult.

“Poor fellow,” I said. “What about?”

“It’s my fault,” she said, “a detective story,” and she went on to explain that since I had talked to her about my books, she had read them—“You were perfectly right. They are works of