Part 145

Then, all of a sudden she flagged; she was overcome by an intolerable fatigue and depression. Brodrick was worried, but he kept his anxiety to himself. He was afraid now of doing or saying the wrong thing.

One Saturday evening Jinny came to him in his study. She carried the dreadfully familiar pile of bills and tradesmen's books.

"Is it those horrible accounts?" he said.

She was so sick, so white and harassed, so piteously humble, that he knew. She had got them all wrong again.

"I did try to keep them," she said.

"Don't try. Leave the damned things alone."

"I have left them," she wailed. "And look at them."

He looked. A child, he thought, could have kept them straight. They were absurdly simple. But out of their simplicity, their limpid, facile, elementary innocence, Jinny had wrought fantasies, marvels of confusion, of intricate complexity.

That was bad enough. But it was nothing to the disorder of what Jinny called her own little affairs. There seemed at first to be no relation between Jinny's proved takings and the sums that Jinny was aware of as having passed into her hands. And then Brodrick found the cheques at the back of a drawer, where they had lain for many months; forgotten, Brodrick said, as if they had never been.

"I'm dreadful," said Jinny.

"You are. What on earth did you do before you married me?"

"George Tanqueray helped me."

He frowned.

"Well, you can leave it to me now," he said.

"It takes it out of me more than all the books I ever wrote."

That touched him, and he smiled in spite of himself.

"If," said she, "we only had a housekeeper."

"A housekeeper?"

"It's a housekeeper you want."

She put her face to his, brushing his cheek with a shy and fugitive caress.

"You really ought," she said, "to have married Gertrude."

"You've told me that several times already."

"She wouldn't have plagued you night and day."

He owned it.

"Isn't it rather a pity that she ever left?"

"Why, what else could the poor woman do?"

"Stay, of course."

He had never thought of that solution; he would, if he had been asked, have judged it unthinkable.