The Death of the Heart - Elizabeth Bowen [5]
"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 protégée 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, Thomas's father lost his head completely. He didn't go back to Dorset for ten days, and by the end of that time—as it came out later—he and Irene had already been very wicked. I often think of those dawns in Notting Hill Gate, with Irene leaking tears and looking for hairpins, and Mr. Quayne sitting up denouncing himself. His wife was much too nice to have pretty ways, but I daresay Irene had plenty—if that is how you like them. I've no doubt she made the most fussy capitulations; she would make him feel she had never fallen before—and I should think it's likely she never had. She would not be everyone's money. You may be sure that she let Mr. Quayne know that her little life was from now on entirely in his hands. By the end of those ten days he cannot have known, himself, whether he was a big brute or St. George.
"At all events, he arrived back in Dorset at once pensive and bouncing. He started in digging a lily pond, but at the end of a fortnight said something about a tailor, and went dashing off back to London again. This went on, apparently, all through that summer—he and Irene had met in May. When Thomas got back in June he noticed at once, he remembers, that his home was not what it was, but his