‘He’s well,’ said Hilary. “He writes when he’s allowed to. She’s gone to see him today. I shall hear when I get back.’
As she spoke, she had stopped seeing the woman or remembering her. Her eyes dazzled and her heart was so full of trouble that there was no room for anything else. Geoff in prison for life – Marion struggling through one of those terrible visits which took every ounce of strength and courage out of her… She couldn’t bear it. Geoff, who had been so terribly full of life, and Marion, who loved him and had to go on living in a world which believed he was a murderer and had shut him up out of harm’s way… What was the good of saying, ‘I can’t bear it,’ when it was going on, and must go on, and you had to bear it, whether you wanted to or not?
A man came down the corridor and pushed at the sliding door. Hilary got up, and he stood aside to let her pass. She went as far down the corridor as she could and stood there looking out at the trees and fields and hedges going by in the mist.
CHAPTER TWO
You look dreadfully tired,’ said Hilary.
‘Do I?’ said Marion Grey indifferently.
‘You do – and cold. And the soup’s good – it truly is. It was all jelly till I hotted it, but if you don’t drink it quickly it won’t stay hot, and lukewarm things are frightful.’ Hilary’s voice was softly urgent.
Marion shivered, took a mouthful or two of the soup, and then put down the spoon. It was as if she had roused from her thoughts for a moment and then sunk back into them again. She was still in her outdoor things – the brown tweed coat which she had had in her trousseau, and the brown wool beret which Aunt Emmeline had crocheted for her. The coat was getting very shabby now, but anything that Marion wore took the lines of her long graceful body. She was much, much too thin, but if she walked about in her bones she would still be graceful. With her dark hair damp from the fog, the beret pushed back, the grey eyes fixed in a daze of grief and fatigue, she had still the distinction which heightens beauty and survives it.