Appointment with Yesterday (22 page)

Of course. It had been a daft thing to do. By hanging around a main line station all through the rush hour you are exposing
yourself to just about as high a statistical chance of being recognised as it would be possible to achieve if you were specially trying. And as for Mrs Mumford’s cheque—that had been idiotic, too, but how else could she have got a roof over her head that night?

After that, it had all been easy for Julian. Victoria …
Seacliffe
… Leinster Terrace. Candida could visualise the
impatient
scorn with which Julian would have brushed aside Jacko’s implausible lies … the effortless charm by which he would have manoeuvred the tight-lipped Mrs Mumford into telling him everything she knew, including the fact that her newest lodger worked for a Mrs Graham—had, in fact, offered this lady’s name as a reference, only Mrs Mumford had never taken it up, on account of her low opinion of references in general (how courteously, in the interests of his ulterior motive, would Julian have listened to these opinions, betraying neither boredom nor impatience, charming to the last). And then the phone calls to Mrs Graham, and finally a visit to her in person, and the extracting from her of the information that her Daily Help worked also for a Mrs Day.

From
Mrs
Graham
?
Information?
But Mrs Graham had never bothered to learn so much as her name!

Not her name, no. But her other jobs, yes. Because this was something that affected
her,
Mrs Graham. The fear of piracy by her dearest friends had never been far from Mrs Graham’s mind since that first morning, when Mrs Day had rung up with that treacherous offer of five pence an hour more.

So, on from Mrs Graham’s to Mrs Day’s … and Candida knew the rest.

Or most of it. Why, though, had he referred to himself as her
husband,
in talking to the caretaker?

She felt Julian give a tiny start.

What a quibble, he protested! Christ, after nearly twenty years of marriage, it was a slip anyone might make!

The moon had set now; and though the filmy rim of the water could no longer be seen, a soft gobbling sound in the shallow water at their feet warned that the tide had begun to turn. In
the starlight, Candida could just make out the sulky hunch of Julian’s shoulders, and knew that he was discomfited, and in a moment would think up something to blame her for.

“You never answered my letter,” he said, aggrievedly; and for a moment Candida stared at him, in total bewilderment.

“What letter …?” she was beginning—and then, suddenly, she knew.

Answer
it! That letter which she had torn into a thousand pieces … the letter which had goaded her through the nights and days, had driven her onward like one possessed, into folly, wickedness, and crime …
Answer
it!

“Oh, I was going to,” she replied lightly, her eyes on the hurrying swirls of the awakening water, just visible in the starlight. “I was going to, but you see I was waiting for the mustard and cress to come up first. I wanted to see if it spelt R.A.T.”

He laughed; and she felt a tremor of surprise go through him. Suddenly she realised that in the old days she had never cheeked him like this in answer to his bullying. This was something new. Something that Milly had bequeathed.

“… I suppose it was then that I got my first inkling of how impossibly touchy and possessive Cora could be,” Julian was saying. “You see, the crazy thing was she’d more or less
written
the damn letter for me—we were both a bit drunk at the time, and I remember how we laughed when she suggested the bit about the aunt! But no sooner had I posted it than she turned on me like a mad thing! Storming at me that I didn’t love her, that secretly I still loved
you,
or I could never have sent you a letter so pointlessly, so deliberately cruel! She accused me of trying to sting you into some kind of reaction, by any flamboyant, childish means I could devise, and declared that this proved I still cared! And by God, Candida, I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately, and I realise she was right! I
did
still care! I still do! Candida, when my divorce comes through, will you marry me?”

*

The cheek of it! The unutterable, brazen impertinence! Now that Cora had thrown him over: now that he was no longer quite
the brilliant success he had once been—
now,
Candida was good enough for him again!

For this was how it must be with him: she could see it clearly now. That Boston research job must have been a step
down,
not a step up … perhaps he had overestimated the permissiveness of the permissive society, particularly where it impinges on the medical profession: perhaps he had found, to his dismay, that the betrayal of an innocent wife
does
still cause raised eyebrows in some quarters, even nowadays.

Whatever it was, his conceit must have taken a beating, and so now here he was, with ego bruised and bleeding, limping back to Candida. And without so much as a word of apology or remorse!

How often had she dreamed of this very scene, during the long nights in the empty Kensington flat, and during the lonely, drifting days! Julian magically back again … pleading with her to forgive him … begging her to marry him all over again … to give him one more chance!

There had been all sorts of endings. Sometimes, after a wonderful scene of remorse and forgiveness, she had fallen into his arms. Sometimes, proud and aloof, she had spurned him, watching, with icy scorn, as his haughty features crumpled….

*

Out in the dark, a small wind had risen with the turn of the tide. Candida could hear the tiny waves lapping restlessly at the foot of the breakwater, limbering up for their journey up the dark sand. Against the starry blackness, she could see Julian’s dark bulk, but not his face. After twenty years, she did not need to see his face: from the set of his shoulders, from the tilt of his half-seen jaw, she knew exactly the expression of self-satisfied expectancy he was wearing; the smug look of a man who has no doubt of victory.

*

Julian, my boy, you’ve got another think coming. This isn’t the Candida that you remember, all meek and compliant.
This
Candida has Milly in her, a woman of whom you know nothing!

*

“Will you marry me?” he repeated, still with that cocksure confidence in his voice and bearing.

*

The conceit of the man! The insufferable, unbelievable smugness! The monstrous, insupportable arrogance!

*

“Yes,” she said.

*

Her friends, naturally, were less than whole-hearted in their congratulations. “Some people never learn!” they confided to one another wryly, with a shake of the head.

But Candida
had
learnt, of course. The only thing was that, as is so commonly the case, the lesson she had learned from her experiences was quite other than the one which seemed so obvious to the onlookers.