Round the Bend Read Online Free PDF Page B

and a mad one to despise
The gold of her hair, and the grey of her eyes
.
    JOHN MASEFIELD
    T HERE WASN’T any count, of course, and there weren’t any estates at Jabinka or anywhere else. Captain Wysock had disappeared one day, and her Dad had gone up to London to the Polish Embassy after a time to ask about him. He found that he had been drafted out to Italy. He had been a waiter at a hotel in Warsaw before the war, and he’d got a wife and family out there. They never heard any more of him. The ring was genuine enough, and was worth about sixty quid. I often wonder where that came from.
    He beat it soon after the baby was born, in February or March. Her Dad wanted to write and tell me, but Beryl wouldn’t let him. I think she was too proud to want to come crawling back to me as soon as he’d left her flat. She told her people straight to let her affairs alone; she’d sort them out in time the way she wanted to. So they shut up, and probably that was the best thing.
    They told me that they thought that in a general sort of way she’d been looking forward to me coming home, although she didn’t tell them much. When my letter came, however, saying that I’d be home in a week, they said she seemed to go all to pieces. First she wanted to go away and not meet me, and then there wasn’t anywhere convenient for her to go to, and then she said she’d have to meet me some time so she’d better get it over. They said she didn’t know what to do. She wasn’t sleeping much,they thought. She’d come down to breakfast one day and say she’d made up her mind to go away, and then by dinner time, they said, she seemed to have forgotten about that and was wondering if the butcher would put by a sheep’s heart for them, because she said I was always partial to heart for dinner if it was on the menu at the canteen.
    They said that she was much calmer on the last day, sort of quietlike, and they went to bed quite happy about her. They never heard anything in the night. The baby slept in her room, of course, and at about six in the morning they heard it crying, which was normal, but as she didn’t get up and attend to it her Ma got up after a bit and went in, and she wasn’t in her room, and she hadn’t been to bed. Her Ma called her Dad and went downstairs, and when they opened the door the kitchen was full of gas. Her Dad held his breath and dashed in and turned it off at the oven, and opened the back door and got out into the garden, and then they had to wait a quarter of an hour before they could get in to her. Her Dad went down the road to the call box and telephoned the police.
    She had put a cushion in the oven and put her head on that, and laid down to die. She had a copy of
The Picturegoer
in her hand, open at an article about Anna Neagle and Michael Wilding, the great lovers.
    There was no letter, or anything like that.
    Her father was inclined to be apologetic to me. “I dunno if we should have written to tell you, after he went off,” he said. “At the time it seemed the best thing to let time go by a bit, like. We knew you’d be home before so long, and we thought things’ld settle down.…”
    To comfort him I said, “I couldn’t have done much, if I’d known.” And while I said it, of course, I knew that I was lying. I could have done one thing. I could have written and told her that I loved her.
    They had the inquest the day after I arrived, and I went to that with her Dad and Mum. Her Dad had to give evidence about our marriage and this Captain Wysock, and the baby, and me coming home, and how he found her. The coroner asked me if I’d written to her lately, and I said no, and told him about thefirst letter when I said I wasn’t going to divorce her till she’d thought it over a bit longer. The doctor gave formal evidence about the cause of death, and then the coroner summed it all up.
    “We have here one of those unfortunate cases for which the war is largely responsible,” he said. “The