Deb went on as though she had not heard.
“When Louis Halliwell—yes, the music-hall song-and-patter star—motored me to the Kingston Empire that night of nights——”
“The same night?” from Winnie, incredulously.
“Six years before—he promised me I should see life from behind the scenes. He kept his promise. I spent the evening in his dressing-room, watched him make up, heard him chaff with the other ‘turns’ who drifted in and out. He drove me round to the digs of the Twin Acrobats, after the show, and they filled up a tumbler with port, and he told me in a whisper it was expected of bohemian palliness I should toss it off.... So I was half asleep coming home in the car, but I just remember he put my arm at the back of his waist and said it helped him drive if I kept it there. So I kept it there. On the doorstep he put his hands on my shoulders and said ringingly: “You’re one of us now, Deb!”—and kissed me, once, on the middle of my mouth....
“That kiss was, for me, the dawn of love.”
Winifred was so congealed to a solid state of astonishment, that when she said “Not again?” it sounded quite calm.
“For cherry jam I’d do anything. That must be my excuse. For when Colville came back to me, married, and said I’d been his ideal on and off for seven years, and perhaps his wife would die, although he had a tendency to appendicitis, I thought I’d better discourage him. If he had died in my arms, Gillian, and there’d been an inquest, she couldn’t have divorced him any more, could she? But she might have got a Decree of the High Courts to haul in the cherry jam supposing he’d made a will in my favour. Colville said: ‘I paid 4s. 3d. a pound for it, Deb. I don’t mind paying for what I want most....’ He looked meaning, and I looked far-away and said: ‘There’s—somebody—else—now. There wouldn’t have been if you’d come last Tuesday.” He groaned and asked me for a glove—as if one spoils a pair these days! So I laid my cheek for a brief-fleeting-space-of-time against the back of his hand, instead. It did just as well—but I do think he might have sent me a pot of the jam. But he said he couldn’t get any out of the cellar without her seeing, even in a shrimping-net. He said he had thirty-seven pounds of it in the cellar.
“And that was, for me, the dawn of love....”
Deb sighed.
“Pass over Padraic, the Sorrowful Celt, who used to keen and croon and lilt and lament rhythmically over the misery which would surely be my lot, till I felt like my own corpse privileged to attend my own wake. He would tell me long melancholy Irish stories about his long melancholy Irish friends, and they all sounded to me the same friend,” Deb’s voice rose and fell with the cadences of waves on the shore—“till at the very last, did I not hear myself fading to unreality as a legend of Eire, long and melancholy, re-told by him in the future to other friends, who would also become legends, who would all become the same harrowing, hopeless legend....