The housekeeper came in to announce dinner.
“D’you like a wash?,” asked Gaymer. When they were alone, he leaned his head against the mantelpiece, idly kicking the fender with his heel. “You seem to have jumped my claim,” he commented with a note of surprise in his voice.
“Would you say you had much claim to jump?,” asked Eric tartly.
“I think so... Come in to dinner. I’ll give you my version, and you can tell me what you think of it.”
While there was a servant intermittently in the room, Gaymer preferred to talk about his life before the war; and it was not until the end of the meal that he began to speak of Ivy. He was naturally so uncommunicative that Eric had been on nodding terms with him for three years without discovering more about him than that he had been severely wounded in the first months of the war and relegated to light duty ever since; it seemed to Gaymer unlikely that any one should want to know more, and he spoke as though anything that he said might afterwards be used against him. By the end of dinner he had relaxed his hold on unimportant scraps of autobiography, and Eric was able to sketch in a background; Eton and King’s, a father who had died and a mother who had remarried and gone to live in Italy, a sister who had married and drifted out of his life; two years of aimless and mildly dissolute life in London, varied with motor-racing....
“I’d always had rather a turn for mechanics and I used to have a lot of fun taking out cars and motor-bikes for hill-climbing and reliability tests,” said Gaymer, lighting one more in a long succession of cigarettes. He had come into the room smoking and smoked continuously, sending away one dish after another and drinking brandy and water in equal quantities. “You don’t get fat on that sort of thing, though, so I went into a London agency and sold cars on commission to everybody I knew. ’Made a good thing out of it, too. Then I started flying—did you know Babs Neave in the days when we swooped down on Salisbury Plain and broke up the manoeuvres?... I perfected a new aero engine and hoped to make a good thing out of that. Then came the war... I was smashed up a few months before we met; d’you remember, you were dining with that pretentious prig, my aunt Margaret Poynter, at the end of ’15? Barring one trip to America, when I met you again, of course, I’ve been doing office work at the Air Ministry ever since, rather wondering what to do next. My old firm has been making lorries for the War Office these last four years; they won’t have any cars to sell for eighteen months and then they can sell without the help of an agent. I waited till I was quite sure there was nothing for me in the Air Force, then I pulled strings to get out and went to Poynter for a job. He has all kinds of interests, and, if I don’t mind going into exile at Rio, he’ll place me with the Azores Line... Let’s have coffee in the other room; then this old hag can clear away without disturbing us... Lane, this is a delicate position for us. I must tell you again that you seem to have jumped my claim.”
“And I must repeat that you’ve no claim for me to jump. Tell me honestly: did you ever intend to marry Ivy?”
Gaymer poured out the coffee and rang irritably for liqueur glasses. Then he offered Eric a cigar, pierced one for himself and rolled it thoughtfully round and round in his mouth. It was impossible to guess whether he was deciding how much to tell or simply trying to arrange his thoughts. Eric sat down at one end of the divan, wondering why he had come there and what he could add to the few brutal facts which he had thrown at Gaymer in the Park. He would have fainted, if he had gone without food any longer, but, apart from the dinner, he had achieved nothing; there was nothing to achieve. He wondered how Ivy was....
“I—don’t—know,” drawled Gaymer at length, finishing his brandy and throwing himself into a chair. Drink had restored some of his assurance. He was no longer dazed, no longer a suppliant, and, if he had not yet reverted to his old attitude of detached, provocative superiority, he was growing gradually more combative. “You see, when I first met her, marriage was out of the question. Later on, when I said I’d marry her, I was quite ready... if it ever came to that. But I didn’t start out with that intention. I liked her, and she liked me... England’s the only country in the world where people think there’s anything wrong or unusual... And, since the war, girls have altered a good bit; they don’t see why they shouldn’t have a good time. Ivy had a thundering good time, the best she’s ever had in all her life. I got her away from her damned old stick of a father, I took her out and shewed her round; it was all quite innocent and harmless. Then some one began to talk, and she cooled off a bit; people were wondering whether we were engaged, she said. And bit by bit after that she began to put a pistol to my head. She’d evidently made up her mind to marry me; I wasn’t a marrying man, I hadn’t the money, but I told her that when things straightened themselves out... There’s no point in being engaged unless you get some benefit from it... Before she actually came here, I did say as a matter of form that I’d marry her, but at the time I doubted whether either of us would want to. You know how these arrangements end—you have a good time for a month or two; and then the thing begins to pall; and then, if you’re wise, you kiss and say good-bye while you’re still friends—without waiting for the usual dreary scenes and quarrels. After we’d had two or three months of each other I didn’t think she’d talk about marrying me any more; if she had—after three months—, she’d have been different from the others, and perhaps this might be the real thing, perhaps we should both want to go on. In that case I should have to consider ways and means... Even then, you see, I didn’t think anything would come of it. Well, very soon after that she brought the question up again, and we had a bit of a bicker; she went away in a huff, and I waited for her to come to her senses. The next thing was that she came to see me that night—a month later,—and we had an up-and-a-downer. She never said a word then; as I told you, I never suspected till this evening. Well, I went on waiting for her to come to her senses, but, when she cut all communications, I saw I should have to take the first step. I was missing her. Most infernally... So I got myself invited to Croxton and I meant to find out what the trouble was. If she wasn’t the girl I thought she was, if she’d developed a conscience or been talked over or had decided that it wasn’t workable to go on having a good time in the old way, I’d made up my mind to marry her. That was the first time I saw it definitely; she suited me very well, she was a nice girl and very fond of me; it was rather a bore getting married, but I was ready to do it. I tried to talk to her down there, but she told me without any beating about the bush that she’d had enough of me. I should have expected to be a bit put out, but I only admired her for it. I didn’t know she had it in her to hand me out my marching orders quite like that. There wasn’t any opportunity of speaking to her again down there, but I watched out for her this morning and had a word; and, when I met you this evening, I was coming down to have another word... I never bother much about defending myself, but, if I didn’t know till a couple of hours ago, you can’t very well blame me. Now that I do know, I shall do the right thing.”
He poured himself a second glass of liqueur brandy after his unusual effort of sustained articulation and waved the decanter towards Eric.