Arthur & George

Jean would – God willing – be able to bear his children. Who would visit Touie then? He shook his head to clear away this thought. There was no point anticipating future guilt. You must act according to your best principles, and then deal with what came later on its own terms.
    Even so, back at Undershaw – back in Touie’s empty house – he found himself drawn to her bedroom. He had given no instructions for it to be rearranged or redecorated – how could he? So there was the bed on which she had died at three o’clock in the morning with the scent of violets in the air and her fragile hand resting in his great clumsy paw. Mary and Kingsley sitting in exhausted and frightened politeness. Touie raising herself with almost her last breath and telling Mary to take care of Kingsley … Sighing, Arthur crossed to the window. Ten years ago he had chosen this room for her as having the best view, down into the garden and the private narrowing valley where the woods converged. Her bedroom, her sick-room, her death-room – he had always tried to make it as pleasant and as painless as he could.
    That is what he had told himself – told himself and others so often that he had ended up believing it. Had he always been fooling himself? For this was the very room where, a few weeks before her death, Touie had told their daughter that her father would marry again. When Mary reported the conversation, he had tried to make light of the matter – a foolish decision, he now realized. He should have taken the opportunity to praise Touie, and also to prepare the ground; instead he had been panicked into jocularity and asked something like, ‘Did she have any particular candidate in mind?’ To which Mary had said, ‘Father!’ And there was no doubting the disapproval with which that word had been pronounced.
    He continued looking out of the bedroom window, down past the neglected tennis ground to the valley which once, in a moment of whimsy, he had found reminiscent of a German folk tale. Now it looked no more than the part of Surrey that it was. He could hardly reopen the conversation with Mary. But one thing was certain: if Touie knew, then he was destroyed. If Touie knew and Mary knew, then he was doubly destroyed. If Touie knew, then Hornung was right. If Touie knew, then the Mam was wrong. If Touie knew, then he had played the grossest hypocrite with Connie and shamefully manipulated old Mrs Hawkins. If Touie knew, then his whole concept of honourable behaviour was a sham. On the wold above Masongill, he had said to the Mam that honour and dishonour lay so close to one another that it was hard to tell them apart, and the Mam had replied that this was what made honour so important. What if he had been paddling in dishonour the whole time, fooling himself yet nobody else? What if the world took him for a common adulterer – and even though he was not, he might as well have been? What if Hornung had been right and there was no difference between guilt and innocence?
    He sat heavily on the bed and thought of those illicit journeys to Yorkshire: how he and Jean would arrive by different trains, and leave by different ones, so that they could pretend to innocence. Ingleton was two hundred and fifty miles from Hindhead; there they were safe. But he had confused safety with honour. Over the years, it must have become perfectly plain to everyone. What were English villages but vortices of gossip? However Jean might be chaperoned, however clearly he and Jean never stayed under the same roof, here was the famous Arthur Conan Doyle, who married in the parish church, striding over wold and fell with another woman at his side.
    And then there was Waller. All that time, in his blithe smugness, he had never asked himself what Waller made of it all. The Mam had approved his course of action, and this had been sufficient. It did not matter what Waller thought. And Waller, being a smooth and easy fellow, had never been crude. He had behaved as if he entirely believed whatever story was put in front of him. The Leckies being old friends of the Doyles; the Mam having always been fond of the Leckie girl. Waller had never said more nor less than common courtesy and common prudence enjoined. He did not try to put Arthur off his golf swing with some comment about Jean Leckie being a handsome young woman. But Waller would have seen the subterfuge immediately. Perhaps – God forbid – he had discussed it with the Mam behind Arthur’s back.