The Pursued Read online

  C. S. FORESTER

  The Pursued

  PENGUIN CLASSICS

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  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  1

  Marjorie had no feeling of impending disaster as she walked down Harrison Way from the railway station. It was a tranquil summer evening, there was a gentle breath of wind blowing which cooled without chilling, and set rustling the leaves of the little copper beeches which lined the edge of the pavement. The stars overhead were bright and friendly. Marjorie had no apprehensions.

  She was sufficiently accustomed to being away from her children for the evening to have no worries about them at all. Since Anne had reached the age of seven she could be relied on to sleep soundly from the moment of going to bed, and Derrick, who was not yet four, did not cause trouble once in six weeks, and as both the children were fond of Dot they would have gone to bed without demur. Dot would have had a dull evening just sitting in the house doing nothing, but perhaps Ted had already got back from the billiard hall and set her free to go home to Mother – and in any event Dot seemed to like dull evenings, because she had often said she did not mind coming to sit in the house while the children were in bed, and she never wanted Mother to come round too and share her loneliness.

  Marjorie had enjoyed her jaunt tonight. She had been to town to visit Millicent Dunne. They had dined together in an Italian restaurant, with a waiter to attend to them, and a small flask of Chianti to drink, and after that they had gone back to Millicent’s one-roomed flat at Victoria and had sat and talked for hours and hours, in fact until Marjorie had to hurry to catch a late train home. Marjorie contrasted, without envy, but with some curiosity, her quiet suburban life with Millicent’s as a bachelor girl in town, her duties as a mother and wife with Millicent’s interesting job as a welfare supervisor at a factory. Millicent was a polished and tactful woman of the world now, but – she would be an old maid one day. Marjorie felt that Derrick and Anne compensated her for any possible loss of a professional career; and in any case she thought she had never had enough brains for one. Millicent had always been far cleverer at school.

  The hall light was alight, as Marjorie could see through the glass over the door when she reached the gate, but the sitting room was in darkness. Perhaps Dot was in the kitchen making herself a cup of cocoa; it was hardly possible that Ted should have been home so much before as to have had time to see her off and go to bed. Marjorie opened the door with her key and said ‘Coo-ee’ gently, as was her way. There was no reply, and then, as she passed the threshold, Marjorie smelt gas. The hall reeked with it; when she hesitated at the foot of the stairs she distinctly heard the hissing of escaping gas.

  Marjorie sprang to the kitchen door, dropping her handbag. The kitchen was in darkness, and when Marjorie opened the door the stench of gas seemed to strike her in the face. She reached for the switch. Her head was sufficiently clear for her to wonder for a second whether it was dangerous to turn on a light in that atmosphere, and then to reassure herself that it was only matches or candles which would cause an explosion. The light revealed the kitchen with its blue and white paper; and it revealed, too, Dot in her pretty summer frock lying on the floor with her head inside the open gas oven.

  Marjorie gave a little scream, and as she did so her lungs revolted at the rush of gas into them. She forced herself to recover, holding her breath. Rushing across to the oven, she turned off the tap; still holding her breath, she flung open the kitchen window and then stooped to lift Dot. But she could hold her breath no longer. A sudden gasp brought more gas into her lungs, and she felt her head swim. She could not lift Dot yet. It called for all her strength to totter out into the hall where the reek of gas was not too strong to breathe. Gasping, she pulled open the front door and stood on the front step. The cool night air was like water when she was thirsty. The little wind blew past her; she told herself that, blowing in through the front door and out of the kitchen window, it would soon clear the kitchen of the gas. She breathed deeply again, about to go back to the kitchen, when she heard the sound of steps coming down the quiet street, and someone singing in a subdued tone. It was Ted. She saw him in the lamplight, jaunty as ever in his waisted coat, his bowler hat tilted at its usual angle a little back over his ears.

  ‘Ted!’ she said. ‘Oh, Ted!’

  He gave a start of surprise at the sound of her voice, and hurried up the little path.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s Dot – in the kitchen –’

  He pushed past her, and pulled up short on the kitchen threshold.

  ‘Is she dead?’ he demanded.

  ‘I don’t know. I didn’t have time to look – ’

  There was only a faint smell of gas in the room now. A sudden stronger puff of wind slammed the front door and made the little house shake. Ted took a step forward and then drew back.

  ‘Nobody must touch her,’ he said. ‘Go and fetch help. Go next door. There’s a ’phone there.’

  Up to this moment Marjorie had thought clearly and rapidly, but now the succeeding events of the night began to grow unreal and nightmarish; and in Marjorie’s memory subsequently there remained a series of pictures which, although vivid, were blurred at the edges. There was a picture of Mrs Taylor next door, in her nightdress and with her hair in two plaits, looking round her front door at her in bewilderment after Marjorie had banged loudly on her knocker two or three times. Mr Taylor had flannellette pyjamas with a brown stripe in them; Marjorie saw a tear under his armpit as he dialled for the police. There was a picture of Dot’s face, strangely pink, as they lifted her from the floor with her head hanging. It was not that her cheeks were coloured artificially, for Marjorie knew that Dot only used powder. You could not imagine her dead, except that her skin was so cold that to touch it was repellent. There was a police sergeant there now and a policeman.

  ‘Do dead people always look like that?’ whispered Marjorie – she had never seen anyone dead before.

  ‘Mostly they do when they’ve used gas, madam,’ said the sergeant. ‘I’ve seen a lot of them.’

  The policeman was asking all sorts of questions about letters. She knew of none, but in the end she let the policeman poke about and look for them himself.

  Now there was a doctor in a black coat, asking short cold questions of Ted, who was answering them bluffly and concisely. She admired Ted at that moment for being so unshaken and clearheaded. She could not have answered those questions – the doctor had indeed addressed one to her and she had not heard what he said although she had seen his lips move. Mother had come now, too, in her black coat and hat, neat and brisk and trim as she always was, with the quickness of movement natural to a tiny person like her. She was clear headed, too, and seemingly unshaken at her favourite child’s suicide, or so Marjorie thought until she saw that Mother had tears on her cheeks and more tears in her grey eyes.

  Then all the crowd has passed away, and she and Ted were alone together again, after a great deal had been written down
in black notebooks. The children were still fast asleep, having slept through all the noise and bustle downstairs – at the sergeant’s suggestion she had already gone up once and tiptoed into each room, to find each child quite quiet and no smell of gas noticeable, thanks to their closed doors and wide open windows. Marjorie listened outside each door again, automatically, as she always did before going to bed, while Ted was downstairs turning out the lights and locking the back door.

  She had taken off her frock and was standing before the mirror letting down her hair when Ted came in. It was only then that a flood of realization broke upon her, that it was borne in fully upon her that Dot was dead, had killed herself, and she would never see her again, while here they were going callously to bed as though nothing had happened. She turned away from the mirror to her husband.

  ‘Oh Ted!’ she said. ‘Ted, isn’t it dreadful?’

  She went towards him, and put her hands on his shoulders and rested her cheek on his chest. Her whole body jerked with the violence of her sobs, and she wept passionately, the first tears she had shed that evening.

  ‘Don’t let it upset you, old girl,’ said Ted. He patted first her shoulder, and then lower down her back, where she sat down. During all their nine married years and before that, too, Ted had always patted her there as a gesture of affection; she would probably have missed it if he omitted to do so. By now she had attained indifference to it, but tonight she found herself wishing that he would not do it with Dot dead and in the police mortuary. And though her love for him was by now long dead, although there had been times when she hated him, or feared him, or despised him, although she was now as indifferent to him as she was to the front door knocker or her nightdress-case, he was all she had at the moment to turn to for companionship in her trouble. She clung to him, holding the lapels of his coat, still shaking as her sobs tore at her.

  ‘Don’t worry, lovey,’ said Ted. ‘Lovey’ was one of the vulgar endearments he used when he was feeling affectionate. He put his hand under her chin and lifted her face to his, and kissed her mouth with thick, half-open lips. There was the smell of drink on his breath – she was used to that. But she realized with cold horror as she felt his hands on her body that Ted was proposing tonight to be ‘troublesome’ – that was her word for it to herself – tonight of all nights, when Dot had just killed herself in misery downstairs. She looked up at him. Apparently the rush and bustle of the last hour had excited him as rush and bustle often did. His eyes were very bright, and his forehead was twitching and furrowing spasmodically – a sure sign; it was nearly ten years since she had first noticed it.

  ‘Kiss me, lovey,’ he said, and she closed her eyes and kissed him. That was less trouble than refusing – once or twice she had refused herself to him, both with and without reasonable excuse, and it had always meant an unpleasant scene, and a sulky brute of a husband glowering at her next day until she yielded to him. His hands were searching her body as his tongue was searching her lips. He pressed himself against her, heated and excited; it was more than sexual excitement. She knew, in a clairvoyant moment, that the events of the evening had stimulated him to this pitch, and that to possess her would give him relief. Just as some men transmuted their sexual urgings to something loftier and nobler, so Ted in the opposite way translated all his stimuli into the plane of sex. There could be no denying him. She was engulfed in misery, but at least it was misery demanding some action from her, and not the black passive misery she had felt when she had turned to Ted from the mirror.

  ‘Buck up, old girl,’ said Ted. Instead of patting and pressing her to him he now gave her a little push away from him, and obediently she turned and went away into the bathroom. She was fortunately not revolted by the details of birth control methods, but merely and coldly indifferent to them. She dealt with herself meticulously, for now that she had two children she had no wish to become pregnant again. Ted was waiting for her naked when she came back. She had forgotten the time when it had given her a strange thrill of passionate daring to discover that he had thick black hair over his breastbone.

  ‘Come on, lovey,’ he said eagerly, as she came in.

  Marjorie had known all along that there would be no sleep for her that night – she always lay wakeful nowadays, restless and jangled, after Ted had been ‘troublesome’, and tonight it was far, far worse. She supposed it must have been two o’clock when Ted went to sleep, hot and heavy beside her and with his breathing a tiny trifle louder than when he was awake. She lay on her back at the edge of the bed, with the pillow drawn under the nape of her neck, too weary now for tears, and with her emotions too tangled for her misery to be acute. She was only conscious of black, sleepless depression, of a more deep-rooted unhappiness than ever she had known before.

  2

  A suburban electric railway line ran at the end of the garden of the little semi-detached house. When the service was running the house shook at ten-minute intervals to the passage of the trains, for there was a twenty minute service in each direction, but the last train of the day went by at a quarter past one in the morning, and at first while Marjorie lay wakeful the house was wrapped in the tense quiet of a suburban night. It was midsummer, and the room never grew wholly dark. There was always the twin pale squares of the windows to be seen, and later she noticed that they were growing brighter. And then she noticed the sparrows and starlings beginning to twitter, and then, ever so far away, the trotting hoofs of a horse. That was a milkcart on its way to begin its round – now that the milkcarts had begun to use motorcar wheels you could only hear the horse and never the cart. While the horse was still within earshot she heard a distant rhythmical clanking.

  It was an electric train running down the steep incline of the railway behind the house – up trains and down trains sounded quite different, to the practised ear, because of the slope. If the train were running down, it was ten or thirty or fifty minutes past the hour; if it were running up, then it was exactly the hour or twenty or forty minutes past. This was the first up train, and the time was therefore twenty minutes to six. Its clanking rose in a mild crescendo, the house trembled faintly as it went by, and then the sound continued in a steady diminuendo until it was suddenly cut short by a squeal of brakes as the train stopped at the distant station. Only when everything was quite quiet could one hear that last sound in Harrison Way; as it was the morning was so still that Marjorie heard the compartment doors slamming and the grinding sound of the train getting under way again.

  When everything was quiet once more Ted suddenly stirred beside her. He grunted, and kicked out in very much the same way as little Derrick would kick in his cot when he was not fully asleep, and then he grunted again and turned over on his other side, towards her. This was a little surprising, because Ted usually slept as still as a log, especially after a night during which he had been tiresome. Furtively, and with infinite precaution not to disturb him, Marjorie worked down the bottom of her nightdress until it was over her feet. It may have been that movement which disturbed him, although Marjorie did not think so. Whether it was so or not, Ted grunted once more, and stiffened into wakefulness, and turned onto his back. He cleared his throat with his cigarette-smoker’s cough, as he always did on awaking, while Marjorie pretended to be asleep.

  More unusual than ever, he was muttering to himself under his breath, and then checked himself suddenly. He reached out a cautious hand and laid it on Marjorie’s body, but Marjorie lay quite still pretending sleep; she was so unhappy and she did not want him to be tiresome again, even though she had never known him to mutter to himself as a preliminary to tiresomeness. Satisfied that she was asleep, Ted withdrew his hand. He lay rigid and still – Marjorie had the impression of an unwonted tenseness about him – and once or twice Marjorie heard him muttering again.

  It was all odd, this early wakefulness, this tenseness, this muttering. For a moment Marjorie was at a loss to explain it to herself, until it dawned upon her that he must be seriou
sly upset – far more upset than she had suspected or anticipated – by Dot’s death. There was actual comfort in that for Marjorie; the knowledge that she was not alone in her misery in that house diminished her unhappiness to quite a large degree. Her heart warmed a little to her husband; she might even have reached across and touched him had she not been afraid lest he should misconstrue her action. As it was, she lay still, noting his sleeplessness and sensing the tension.

  The other morning noises began now. Marjorie heard their own milkman’s cart come up the road, and the sharp chink as he put the milk bottle on the step. Other trains went by with their rhythmical clanking and their accompaniment of a faint trembling of the fabric of the house. There was the snap of the letter box as the newspaper was put through. Then she heard Derrick beginning to sing – Derrick when he awoke always piped just like the awakening starlings, but he was a good little boy and stayed in his cot until he was told he might get up. Anne slept later and more heavily.

  Marjorie felt she must make an early start today to be ready to face all the troubles that must soon begin. The police sergeant had spoken about an inquest. She knew nothing about inquests and the thought troubled her. She might have a great deal to explain to the children, too; and Mother would be sure to be round quite early, and she expected that the news would bring everyone else hot foot as soon as it spread. Mrs Posket, for instance, would be sure to come in when she heard about it. Mrs Taylor, of course, would want to talk about it again to her. The sooner she got up the better.

  Marjorie slipped back the bed clothes and swung herself out of bed. Safely out, she looked back at her husband, who lay gazing up at the ceiling – or rather through the ceiling, clean out to the blue sky above, it seemed to Marjorie. She was touched at the sight of his distress, so much so that, as very rarely happened, she stooped and kissed him without an invitation. The kiss was not returned – Ted was unaware of her proximity until she touched him, and she appeared to startle him, for he jumped at the contact. He made no other sign of having noticed the kiss, and Marjorie, a little hurt, turned away and, picking up her clothes ran across to the bathroom in her nightdress.