"I hope he's still alive," I said with an uneasy pang. "He was a sick man."
"Oh yes," said Ellie, "he's alive. I went to see him."
"You went to see him?"
"Yes. When I was in the South of France. He was in a sanitorium there."
"Every minute, Ellie, you seem to be more and more amazing. The things you do and manage."
"He's rather a wonderful person I think," said Ellie, "but rather frightening."
"Did he frighten you?"
"Yes, he frightened me very much for some reason."
"Did you talk to him about us?"
"Yes. Oh yes, I told him all about us and about Gipsy's Acre and about the house. He told me then that we'd have to take a chance with him. He's a very ill man. He said he thought he still had the life left in him to go and see the site, to draw the plans, to visualise it and get it all sketched out. He said he wouldn't mind really if he died before the house was finished, but I told him," added Ellie, "that he mustn't die before the house was finished because I wanted him to see us live in it."
"What did he say to that?"
"He asked me if I knew what I was doing marrying you, and I said of course I did."
"And then?"
"He said he wondered if you knew what you were doing."
"I know all right," I said.
"He said 'You will always know where you're goings Miss Guteman.' He said 'You'll be going always where you want to go and because it's your chosen way.'
"'But Mike,' he said, 'might take the wrong road. He hasn't grown up enough yet to know where he's going.'
"I said," said Ellie, "he'll be quite safe with me."
She had superb self-confidence. I was angry though at what Santonix had said. He was like my mother. She always seemed to know more about me than I knew myself.
"I know where I'm going," I said. "I'm going the way I want to go and we're going it together."
"They've started pulling down the ruins of The Towers already," said Ellie.
She began to talk practically.
"It's to be a rush job as soon as the plans are finished. We must hurry. Santonix said so. Shall we be married next Tuesday," said Ellie, "it's a nice day of the week."
"With nobody else there," I said.
"Except Greta," said Ellie.
"To hell with Greta," I said, "she's not coming to our wedding. You and I and nobody else. We can pull the necessary witnesses out of the street."
I really think, looking back, that that was the happiest day of my life...
Book II
Chapter 9
So that was that, and Ellie and I got married. It sounds abrupt just putting it like that, but you see it was really just the way things happened. We decided to be married and we got married.
It was part of the whole thing, not just an end to a romantic novel or a fairy story. "And so they got married and lived happily ever afterwards." You can't, after all, make a big drama out of living happily ever afterwards.
We were married and we were both happy and it was really quite a time before anyone got on to us and began to make the usual difficulties and commotions and we'd made up our minds to those.
The whole thing was really extraordinarily simple. In her desire for freedom Ellie had covered her tracks very cleverly up to now. The useful Greta had taken all the necessary steps, and was always on guard behind her. And I had realised fairly soon on that there was nobody really whose business it was to care terribly about Ellie and what she was doing. She had a stepmother who was engrossed in her own social life and love affairs. If Ellie didn't wish to accompany her to any particular spot on the globe there was no need for Ellie to do so. She'd had all the proper governesses and ladies' maids and scholastic advantages and if she wanted to go to Europe, why not? If she chose to have her twenty-first birthday in London, again why not?
Now that she had come into her vast fortune she had the whip hand of her family in so far as spending her money went. If she'd wanted a villa on the Riviera or a castle on the Costa Brava or a yacht or any of those things, she had only to mention the fact and someone among the retinues that surround millionaires would put everything in hand immediately. Greta, I gather, was regarded by her family as an admirable stooge. Competent, able to make all arrangements with the utmost efficiency, subservient no doubt and charming to the stepmother, the uncle and a few odd cousins who seemed to be knocking about. Ellie had no fewer than three lawyers at her command, from what she let fall every now and then. She was surrounded by a vast financial network of bankers and lawyers and the administrators of Trust Funds.
It was a world that I just got glimpses of - every now and then, mostly from things that Ellie let fall carelessly in the course of conversation. It didn't occur to her, naturally, that I wouldn't know about all those things. She had been brought up in the midst of them and she naturally concluded that the whole world knew what they were and how they worked and all the rest of it.
In fact, getting glimpses of the special peculiarities of each other's lives were unexpectedly what we enjoyed most in our early married life. To put it quite crudely - and I did put things crudely to myself, for that was the only way to get to terms with my new life - the poor don't really know how the rich live and the rich don't know how the poor live, and to find out is really enchanting to both of them. Once I said uneasily:
"Look here, Ellie, is there going to be an awful schemozzle over all this, over our marriage, I mean?"
Ellie considered without, I noticed, very much interest.
"Oh yes," she said, "they'll probably be awful." And she added, "I hope you won't mind too much."
"I won't mind - why should I? - But you, will they bully you over it?"
"I expect so," said Ellie, "but one needn't listen. The point is that they can't do anything."
"But they'll try?"
"Oh yes," said Ellie. "They'll try." Then she added thoughtfully, "They'll probably try and buy you off."
"Buy me off?"
"Don't look so shocked," said Ellie, and she smiled, a rather happy little girl's smile. "It isn't put exactly like that." Then she added, "They bought off Minnie Thompson's first, you know."
"Minnie Thompson? Is that the one they always call the oil heiress?"
"Yes, that's right. She ran off and married a Life Guard off the beach."
"Look here, Ellie," I said uneasily, "I was a Life Guard at Littlehampton once."
"Oh, were you? What fun! Permanently?"
"No, of course not. Just one summer, that's all."
"I wish you wouldn't worry," said Ellie.
"What happened about Minnie Thompson?"
"They had to go up to 200,000 dollars, I think," said Ellie. "He wouldn't take less. Minnie was man-mad and really a half-wit," she added.
"You take my breath away, Ellie," I said. "I've not only acquired a wife, I've got something I can trade for solid cash at any time."
"That's right," said Ellie. "Send for a high powered lawyer and tell him you're willing to talk turkey. Then he fixes up the divorce, and the amount of alimony," said Ellie, continuing my education. "My stepmother's been married four times," she added, "and she's made quite a lot out of it." And then she said, "Oh, Mike, don't look so shocked."
The funny thing is that I was shocked. I felt a priggish distaste for the corruption of modern society in its richer phases. There had been something so little girl-like about Ellie, so simple, almost touching in her attitude that I was astonished to find how well up she was in worldly affairs and how much she took for granted. And yet I knew that I was right about her fundamentally. I knew quite well the kind of creature that Ellie was. Her simplicity, her affection, her natural sweetness. That didn't mean she had to be ignorant of things. What she did know and took for granted was a fairly limited slice of humanity. She didn't know much about my world, the world of scrounging for jobs, of race-course gangs and dope gangs, the rough and tumble dangers of life, the sharp-aleck flashy type that I knew so well from living amongst them all my life. She didn't know what it was to be brought up decent and respectable but always hard up for money, with a mother who worked her fingers to the bone in the name of respectability, determining that her son should do well in life. Every penny scrimped for and saved, and the bitterness when your gay carefree son threw away his chances or gambled his all on a good tip for the 3:30.
She enjoyed hearing about my life as much as I enjoyed hearing about hers. Both of us were exploring a foreign country.
Looking back I see what a wonderfully happy life it was, those early days with Ellie. At the time I took them for granted and so did she. We were married in a registry office in Plymouth. Guteman is not an uncommon name. Nobody, reporters or otherwise, knew the Guteman heiress was in England. There had been vague paragraphs in papers occasionally, describing her as in Italy or on someone's yacht. We were married in the Registrar's Office with his clerk and a middle-aged typist as witnesses. He gave us a serious little harangue on the serious responsibilities of married life, and wished us happiness. Then we went out, free and married. Mr. and Mrs. Michael Rogers! We spent a week in a seaside hotel and then we went abroad. We had a glorious three weeks travelling about wherever the fancy took us and no expense spared.
We went to Greece, and we went to Florence, and to Venice and lay on the Lido, then to the French Riviera and then to the Dolomites. Half the places I forget the names of now. We took planes or chartered a yacht or hired large and handsome cars. And while we enjoyed ourselves, Greta, I gathered from Ellie, was still on the Home Front doing her stuff.
Travelling about in her own way, sending letters and forwarding all the various post-cards and letters that Ellie had left with her.
"There'll be a day of reckoning, of course," said Ellie. "They'll come down on us like a cloud of vultures. But we might as well enjoy ourselves until that happens."
"What about Greta?" I said, "won't they be rather angry with her when they find out?"
"Oh, of course," said Ellie, "but Greta won't mind. She's tough."
"Mightn't it stop her getting another job?"
"Why should she get another job?" said Ellie. "She'll come and live with us."
"No!" I said.
"What do you mean, no, Mike?"
"We don't want anyone living with us," I said.
"Greta wouldn't be in the way," said Ellie, "and she'd be very useful. Really, I don't know what I'd do without her. I mean, she manages and arranges everything."
I frowned. "I don't think I'd like that. Besides, we want our own house - our dream house, after all, Ellie - we want it to ourselves."
"Yes," said Ellie, "I know what you mean. But all the same -" She hesitated. "I mean, it would be very hard on Greta not to have anywhere to live. After all, she's been with me, done everything for me for four years now. And look how she's helped me to get married and all that."
"I won't have her butting in between us all the time!"
"But she's not like that at all, Mike. You haven't even met her yet."
"No. No, I know I haven't but, but it's nothing to do with, oh with liking her or not. We want to be by ourselves, Ellie."
"Darling Mike," said Ellie softly.
We left it at that for the moment.
During the course of our travels we had met Santonix. That was in Greece. He had been in a small fisherman's cottage near the sea. I was startled by how ill he looked, much worse than when I had seen him a year ago. He greeted both Ellie and myself very warmly.
"So you've done it, you two," he said.
"Yes," said Ellie, "and now we're going to have our house built, aren't we?"
"I've got the drawings for you here, the plans," he said to me. "She's told you, hasn't she, how she came and ferreted me out and gave me her - commands," he said, choosing the word thoughtfully.
"Oh! not commands," said Ellie. "I just pleaded."
"You know we've bought the site?" I said.
"Ellie wired and told me. She sent me dozens of photographs."
"Of course you've got to come and see it first," said Ellie. "You mightn't like the site."
"I do like it."
"You can't really know till you've seen it."
"But I have seen it, child. I flew over five days ago. I met one of your hatchet-faced lawyers there - the English one."
"Mr. Crawford?"
"That's the man. In fact, operations have already started; clearing the ground, removing the ruins of the old house, foundations - drains. When you get back to England I'll be there to meet you." He got out his plans then and we sat talking and looking at our house to be. There was even a rough water-colour sketch of it as well as the architectural elevations and plans.
"Do you like it, Mike?"
I drew a deep breath.
"Yes," I said, "that's it. That's absolutely it."
"You used to talk about it enough, Mike. When I was in fanciful mood I used to think that piece of land had laid a spell upon you. You were a man in love with a house that you might never own, that you might never see, that might never even be built."
"But it's going to be built," said Ellie. "It's going to be built, isn't it?"
"If God or the devil wills it," said Santonix. "It doesn't depend on me."
"You're not any - any better?" I asked doubtfully.
