Free The Doll by Daphne du Maurier Page A

slammed behind him.
    ‘But that’s not what I meant,’ he thought, ‘that’s not what I meant at all.’

Frustration
    A fter he had been engaged to her for seven years he felt that it was impossible to wait for her any longer. Human endurance had been tested to the limit. For seven years he had held her hand by the stile in the field, and it was beginning to pall at last.
    It seemed to him that there must be more in life than these things.
    He admitted that time had been when the simple fact of looking at her from a distance had ensured him weeks of fever and excitement, when the mere process of brushing against her on a tennis court had caused a state of nervous prostration.
    Such follies belonged to the distant past. He was twenty-four now instead of eighteen. In the irony of his soul he wondered what Napoleon would have done if someone had offered him a box of tin soldiers; it occurred to him that Suzanne Lenglen in her day would have protested had she been compelled to play battledore and shuttlecock.
    He was earnest, he was desperate, he was very much in love.
    Saying good-night to her at half-past nine in the evening was a modern equivalent to the appalling tortures of the Spanish Inquisition. At these moments his legs twisted themselves inside out, his fingers clutched at the air, and his tongue got caught up in his uvula.
    A low moaning noise rose in his throat, and he wanted to creep up a wall. Marriage seemed to be the one solution . . . Scarlet in the face, his hands clenched and his jaw set, he made his declaration to her father.
    ‘Sir,’ he began, ‘I can’t stand this any longer; I must get married.’
    The father looked him up and down.
    ‘I can well believe it,’ he said; ‘but it has got nothing to do with me. Personally, for a boy of your type, I put my faith in long engagements. You’ve been engaged for seven years. Why not draw up a contract for another seven?’
    ‘Sir – we can’t wait any longer. When we look at each other, we feel—’
    The older man interrupted him brutally.
    ‘I’m not at all interested in what you feel. Can you support a wife?’
    ‘No – yes – at least. I will find a job.’
    ‘Is there anything you can do?’
    ‘I can tinker about with cars.’
    ‘I see. Is that enough to make her happy?’
    ‘I sort of . . .’
    ‘You expect to make a girl happy when you’ve no money, no job, no qualifications, and the only thing you know how to handle is a spanner.’
    ‘Sir, I—’
    ‘Splendid. I’ll say no more. My daughter is twenty-four; she can do as she likes. I’ll pay for your wedding; but neither of you get a penny from me afterwards. You can work. I have a feeling your marriage will be a success.’
    ‘Sir, may I – can I – I . . .’
    ‘Yes, you can clear out.’
    The wedding was good, as weddings go. There were church bells, white dresses, veils, orange blossom, and the ‘Voice that Breathed o’er Eden’.
    The bridegroom tripped over his feet, fumbled with the ring, forgot his lines, and looked at his bride as though she were a lump of chocolate and he were a Pekinese.
    There were champagne, speeches and tears; the afternoon ended up with a cloud of confetti and somebody’s old shoe. The bride and bridegroom left with nothing but five pounds, a couple of suitcases and a borrowed Austin Seven.
    Their one stick of furniture was a tent.
    ‘My darling,’ he told her, ‘I cannot afford to take you to a seaside hotel, not even for a weekend. We must sleep under the stars.’
    His bride was more practical than he.
    ‘We will motor to London in a borrowed car,’ she said, ‘and there we will find rooms and a job. But I must have a honeymoon first. Let’s spend it in the tent I used as a Girl Guide.’
    It seemed to him that this was the most romantic idea that had ever penetrated the human mind.
    He gurgled strangely and waved his hands.
    ‘A pig-sty with you would be Paradise,’ he said, ‘but to think of you in a tent . . .’
    ‘There