Have His Carcase

‘I will tell you all about it. I came here last January. I had been very ill and the doctor said I needed a mild climate, and I was so tired of the Riviera. I thought I’d try Wilvercombe just for a change. I came here. It really is a very nice’ hotel, you know, and I’d been here once before with Lady Hartlepool — but she died last year, you know. The very first night T was here, Paul came over and asked me to dance. We seemed to be drawn together. From the moment our eyes met, we knew we had found one another. He was lonely, too. We danced together every night. We went for long drives together and he told me all about’ his sad life. We were both exiles in our own way.’

‘Oh yes — he came from Russia.’

‘Yes, as a tiny boy. Poor little soul. He was really a prince, you know but he never liked to say too much about that Just a hint here and there. He felt it very much, being reduced to being a professional dancer. I told him — when we got to know one another better — that he was a prince in my heart now, and he said that that was better to him than an Imperial crown, poor boy. He loved me terribly. He quite frightened me sometimes. Russians are so passionate, you know.’

‘Of course, of course,’ said Harriet. ‘You didn’t, have any misunderstanding or anything that might have led him—?’

‘Oh, no!’ We were too marvellously at one together. We danced together that last night, and he whispered to me that there was a great’ and wonderful change coming into his life. He was all eagerness and excitement. He used to get terribly excited over the least little thing, of course but this was a real, big excitement and happiness. He danced so wonderfully that night. He told me it was because his heart was so full of joy that he felt as if he was, dancing on air. He said: “I may have to go away tomorrow — but ‘I can’t tell you yet where or why.” I didn’t ask him anything more, because that would have spoilt it, but naturally I knew what he meant. He had been getting the licence, and we should be married in a fortnight after that’

‘Where were you going to be married?’

‘In London. In church, of course, because I think a registrar’s office is, so depressing. Don’t you? Of course he’d have to go and stay in the parish — that was what he meant by going away. We didn’t want anybody here to know,our secret beforehand, because there might have been unkind talk. You see, I’m a little bit older than he was, and people say such horrid things. I was a little worried about it myself, but Paul always said, “It is the heart that counts, Little Flower”—he called me that, because my name is Flora — such a dreadful name, I can’t think how, my poor dear parents came to choose it—“It is the heart that counts, and your heart is just seventeen.” It was beautiful of him, but quite, true. I felt seventeen when I was with him

Harriet murmured something: inaudible. This conversation was dreadful to her. It was nauseating, pitiful, artificial yet horribly real; grotesquely comic and worse than tragic. She wanted to stop it at all costs, and she wanted at all costs to go on and disentangle the few threads of fact from the gaudy tangle of absurdity.

‘He had never loved anybody till he met me,’ went on Mrs Weldon. ‘There is something so fresh and scared in a young man’s first love. One feels — well, almost reverent. He was jealous of my former marriage, but I told him he need not be. I was such a child when I married John Weldon, far too young to realise what love meant. I was utterly unawakened — till I met Paul. There had been other men, I don’t say there hadn’t, who wanted to marry me (I was left a widow very early), but they meant nothing to me — nothing at all. “The heart of a girl with the experience of a woman” that was Paul’s lovely way of putting it.. And it was true, my dear, indeed it was.’

‘I’m sure it was,’ said Harriet, trying to put conviction into her tone.

‘Paul — he was so handsome and so graceful — if you could have seen him as he was! And he was very modest and not the least bit spoilt, though all the women ran after him. He was afraid, to speak to me for a long time — to tell me how he felt about me, I mean. As a matter of fact, I had to take the first step, or he never would have dared to speak, though it was quite obvious how he felt. In fact, though we got engaged in February, he suggested putting the wedding off till June. He felt — so sweet and thoughtful of him — that

we ought to wait and try to overcome my son’s opposition. Of course, Paul’s position made him very sensitive. You see, I’m rather well off, and of course, he hadn’t a penny, poor boy, and he always refused to take any presents from me before we were married. He’d had to make his own way all alone, because those horrible Bolsheviks didn’t leave him anything.’

‘Who looked after him when he first came to England?’