It was Friday, the day he always came, if (so she safeguarded it) he was
to come at all. They had left it that way in the beginning, that it
should be open to him to come or not to come. They had not even settled
that it should be Fridays, but it always was, the week-end being the
only time when he could get away; the only time, he had explained to
Agatha Verrall, when getting away excited no remark. He had to, or he
would have broken down. Agatha called it getting away "from things"; but
she knew that there was only one thing, his wife Bella.
To be wedded to a mass of furious and malignant nerves (which was all
that poor Bella was now) simply meant destruction to a man like Rodney
Lanyon. Rodney's own nerves were not as strong as they had been, after
ten years of Bella's. It had been understood for long enough (understood
even by Bella) that if he couldn't have his weekends he was done for; he
couldn't possibly have stood the torment and the strain of her.
Of course, she didn't know he spent the greater part of them with Agatha
Verrall. It was not to be desired that she should know. Her obtuseness
helped them. Even in her younger and saner days she had failed,
persistently, to realise any profound and poignant thing that touched
him; so by the mercy of heaven she had never realised Agatha Verrall.
She used to say that she had never seen anything _in_ Agatha, which
amounted, as he once told her, to not seeing Agatha at all. Still less
could she have compassed any vision of the tie--the extraordinary,
intangible, immaterial tie that held them.
Sometimes, at the last moment, his escape to Agatha would prove
impossible; so they had left it further that he was to send her no
forewarning; he was to come when and as he could. He could always get a
room in the village inn or at the Farm near by, and in Agatha's house he
would find his place ready for him, the place which had become his
refuge, his place of peace.
There was no need to prepare her. She was never not prepared. It was as
if by her preparedness, by the absence of preliminaries, of adjustments
and arrangements, he was always there, lodged in the innermost chamber.
She had set herself apart; she had swept herself bare and scoured
herself clean for him. Clean she had to be; clean from the desire that
he should come; clean, above all, from the thought, the knowledge she
now had, that she could make him come.