Those were the days when she had been never too busy, too late, too pre-occupied to talk to him, or see him. He had often come to the flat after a long, night’s sitting, and she had rekindled the fire for him, and had sat before it leaning back against his knees. That had passed, of course, inevitably, in the nature of things. But something surely should have come to take its place. Surely they should have built for themselves some abiding mansion. Had they squandered their capital? Was there nothing left for them?
Backwards and forwards he paces up and down his study. She is not home yet, and he knows that till she is home, sleep is impossible for him. He would lie tossing in bed at the mercy of his fevered fancy. He must know one way or another. It is a quarter of an hour since he rang up. She is back by now perhaps. Again he raises the receiver. Again he calls her number. Again there is the long delay. Again the sleepy, “Sorry, I can get no answer, sir.”
This time he does not rise from the chair. He takes the watch from his pocket and leans it in front of him against the pedestal of the telephone. “Every ten minutes,” he says, “I will ring her up. I will know the exact minute at which she returns. I will see that she does not lie to me. I shall know whether she is telling me the truth or not.”
And every ten minutes from half past one to two, and from two to three, he raises the receiver and calls in the same steady voice, “Hammerton 5769.” And every time there is the same delay and then the same answer. He does not move from the chair. The fire has become a dull glow among charred ashes; the room is cold. But he sits there, his eyes fixed on the second hand of his watch as it eats into the minutes.
Then suddenly a new fear comes to him. She has been home all the time. She has brought her lover with her and refuses to be disturbed. He can see them in the warm dusk of her room, the small table lamp casting through its silk covering a pale rose radiance upon the white linen of the lace-fringed pillows, heightening the beauty of her face, as she turns it to meet his kisses. There is the ring of the telephone in the other room.
“Your silly old man,” he says, and they laugh together. And he places his hands over her ears that she shall not hear it, and his lips wander over her face and neck. The bell stops ringing, and once more his hands are about her and his mouth is against her ear whispering: “Now I can tell you again how much I love you.”
He sees it with the hard clarity of jealousy and foiled desire. He rises quickly, pushing his chair sideways as he does so, and strides backwards and forwards across the room. There is the sound of an opening door upon the landing, the patter of slippered feet upon the staircase, the rap of a knuckle in the passage. “Come in,” he says. And his wife is standing in the doorway.
Old and shrivelled and pathetic she looks, with her sparse hair falling over the black and gold of her long silk dressing-gown. And yet she is younger than he is; he remembers they are both old stuff, and there rises in him the suffocating need for sympathy, for maternal kindliness, for someone to whom he can say in his loneliness: “I’m tired; I’m an old man: be good to me.”
“But, my dear,” she says, “I thought you would be at the House all night.”
“I know, I know,” he says, on his guard instantly against surrender. “It wasn’t very interesting, and I thought—well, I just came back and I’ve been reading for a few minutes before going up.”