Dorothy Eden (25 page)

“I must do something for the boy,” she said. “He showed decency, and courage, too, at the end. A good school, a profession. What do you say, Cressida?”

Cressida replied eagerly, “Yes, you must do that. And really, Arabia, I don’t want your money. I never did. I only let you think so because I didn’t want to hurt your feelings.”

“Bless you!” said the old lady. “Bless you, child. Let me tell you a secret. Most of my jewels are false. And this house is mortgaged. It was the influence of the sheik, really. He encouraged me to be extravagant. I played ducks and drakes with my fortune. But, oh, I had a fine time. A most exciting and glamorous time. Life was never dull then. Why,” she said, her eyes opening to their brilliant warmth, “life isn’t dull now. Oh, but yes, I see it is. You two want to be alone. Very well, be alone. I’ll leave you. After all, I have Ahmed and Miss Glory. And the boy. Yes, the boy. I must do something for him…”

She went out, her tall body erect, her face suddenly full of eagerness and interest. She was a wonderful, a remarkable old woman, but at the moment neither Cressida nor Jeremy was thinking of her or her dignified exit.

“What about Tom?” Jeremy demanded.

“Oh!” Cressida cried guiltily. “Oh, how awful! I’ve forgotten to read Tom’s letter. And I’ve had it ever since yesterday morning.”

Jeremy began to smile, his brow lifting towards his hairline.

“Must you now?”

“Oh, yes, I must. It’s so rude not to. Poor Tom. He’ll think I don’t care.”

“And do you?”

Cressida frowned perplexedly. “Jeremy! Please don’t confuse me. I—I don’t know. We don’t like the same things. I—I ran away from that awful bed. It had a headboard like a tombstone. Let me at least read his letter.”

She took it from the mantelpiece and tore it open. Jeremy began to fidget about the room. He did not for one moment intend to let her forget his presence. Mimosa came in and began to cry for attention, his tail fluffed, his golden eyes all guile. Jeremy swung him into his arms, and listened for the deep appreciative purr.

“Shall we go to Paris? Shall we leave unresponsive girls with dull fiancés in the country to look after themselves?”

“Oh!” cried Cressida. “Oh! The wretch! Why, he can’t be faithful even for a week. Oh, I’d never have believed it!”

Jeremy snatched the letter from her. He read,
“I can’t help feeling, Cress, that I am going to grow very fond of Mary Madden. She and I have a great deal in common—”

Jeremy tossed the letter into the air and gave a great shout of laughter. “Good old Tom! Salt of the earth Tom!”

“Jeremy, you don’t care a bit that I’m slighted!”

“Slighted, did you say?” He had her in his arms and was kissing her in a way she had never been kissed before. “Is this slighting you? Or this? Oh, Cressida Lucy, I’ve adored you ever since you tumbled down Arabia’s front steps practically into my arms. Don’t you love me, too? Don’t you give me all that love you’ve never given Tom? Cressida, listen to me! I’m asking you a question.”

She did love him, of course. She had known she was going to fall in love with him from the moment she had opened her eyes that day and seen his bright gaze on her. And what was more, everyone else had known, even gentle Mr. Mullins who had been so perturbed about her friendship with Arabia because of Arabia’s tragic history, but whose loyalty had forbidden him to speak of it.

Jeremy, however, was altogether too confident. He deserved to go through a little suspense. She did not mean to answer him for a little. But all at once she had a thought, a joke to share, and she could not prevent her face dimpling with happiness that here was someone with whom to share jokes all her life.

“Jeremy!” she said naughtily. “Let’s send Tom a Victorian what-not for a wedding present. He’ll adore it!”

O
N THAT DAY LIFE
had been going on apparently as usual in the red-brick block of flats situated attractively in a quiet London square. Obviously it was only people with good incomes who could afford to live there, and enjoy the view from their windows of the winter-gray trees in the gardens, the mists growing blue over the lime-green lawns, and the rows of pastel-colored houses opposite.

Although a few yards away the traffic in High Street roared past, the sounds were muted here, and everything seemed leisurely, tradesmen’s vans pulling up and uniformed delivery men getting out, a milk cart going past with a gentle tingling of the bell around the horse’s neck, a laborer sweeping up leaves in the gutter, and, of course, the coming and going of tenants from the flats, some expensively fur coated, a great many with small pampered dogs on leashes, the occasional nanny pushing a shiny black perambulator, and the occasional charwoman, with shabby coat and string bag, departing after her morning’s work.

It would seem that in these quiet surroundings life was comparatively smooth and pleasant for the tenants of Manchester Court. But, as always, that was a fallacy. The human element, the small private longings, the lonelinesses, the impotence against fate, was no more in subjection here than in the poorest tenement area.

There was the young widow, Harriet Lacey, who was having another domestic crisis. Nannie Brown was leaving because, in her own words, she “could not do with Jamie’s naughtiness any longer,” and Harriet had the prospect of finding yet another woman, kind and reliable, with whom to leave Jamie and the baby Arabella while she went to rehearsals, and later to evening and matinee performances. This filled her with despair. What was she doing wrong with Jamie and why was he being so naughty? He missed his father of course. At first she had known his wild intractable moods were a subconscious protest over the fact that his father had mysteriously disappeared, and at the time there had been no way of explaining to a three-year-old why he would never come back. But Joe had been dead nearly two years now. Instead of passing, Jamie’s naughtiness had become a habit. And lately, much to the disapproval of Nannie Brown, he had formed strange friendships, not only with the blind man in the flat immediately beneath Harriet’s flat, but with that strange old woman, Mrs. Helps, mother of the flats porter, who lived in the basement and made wigs.

Sometimes life with two young children and a career to which she obstinately clung seemed to Harriet to be too complicated…

Nor was life easy for Flynn Palmer. He had partially accustomed himself to his blindness. In a physical sense, at least, he was able to cope, and day by day things were becoming simpler. But the hard core of bitterness and refusal to resign himself to such an enormous handicap remained. He was no longer suicidal. Instead, he gave vent to his feelings by lashing out at everyone who annoyed him, or seemed even more stupid than the average human being. That idiot girl who had made a forlorn attempt to be his secretary had been one of them. Her grating voice, with its attempt at gentility, had driven him mad, and when, in this voice, she had read aloud some of the more tender passages in his great-grandfather’s letters he had torn his hair and cried out in rage. It was not surprising she had told him that she just couldn’t work for him, she had tried, she was that sorry for him, but he was quite impossible.

After her departure the flat had seemed heavenly quiet. But the fact remained that now he had no one to help him with his work, and his great-grandfather’s letters, that goldmine of literary treasure onto which he had stumbled when sorting out an accumulation of family possessions shortly before the accident that had caused his blindness, were going to remain unedited. Unless he found another secretary, of course, and at present he shrank from such a task. To be sure, both Zoe and Jones were helpful in trying to find someone. But Zoe admired brisk overpowering efficiency, and Jones’s taste in women was not his most reliable quality. He was inclined to dwell lingeringly on their physical appearance, until Flynn had to remind him acidly that it was no use his getting a secretary for her looks since he wouldn’t see them anyway. Whereupon Jones exclaimed, ‘Oh, sir!’ in a shocked, remorseful voice, and the hot rage rose in Flynn because of the man’s obvious pity.

Pity, pity, pity… He would not tolerate it. Its slimy softness had lapped over
him
ever since his accident. From doctors, nurses, relations, servants, and, most intolerably of all, from young attractive women. It seemed inescapable.

When he was able to do more for himself, he would live alone, like a hermit. Or perhaps he would allow the occasional visits from that odd, forthright, stubborn little boy, Jamie, who treated him as an equal, and never questioned his disability. So long, of course, as Harriet, his mother, another pitier, kept away…

If life was complicated at present for Harriet and Flynn, it had never been simple for the old lady, Mrs. Helps, who lived in the basement flat, and kept house for her tall, good-looking son, Fred, who was doing his first steady job for a long time as porter of the flats. It was so wonderful to be in a nice place of her own after the makeshift rooms in which she had lived during what she called Fred’s wild life. Now at last she had plenty of room for her wigs and her dummy heads. She had also kept her clients, in spite of her many shifts and the shame of that year while Fred was in prison. But now it seemed Fred intended to go straight. He was proud of his smart, dark green uniform which he put on in the afternoons; he liked opening the door with a flourish to people coming in, and smiling at the pretty well-groomed women. He even, he told his mother, intended to look seriously for a girl to marry, which probably would mean that the old lady, with her macabre luggage, would have to move again. But she was not worrying about that so long as Fred settled down. She was so afraid that in spite of the comfort here, and the owner of the flats not minding that she plied her strange trade in the basement, there would be too much temptation for Fred. Seeing other people with plenty roused some meanness in him, and he had to say, “Mine, too.” But perhaps he had grown out of that phase. His good sense would tell him not to risk losing a job like this. In the meantime she kept out of sight as much as possible, because Fred told her to. It was not that he was ashamed of her exactly, but she was chronically untidy, and Fred’s good-humored remonstrances made no difference. On her the neatest dress seemed to become vague and shapeless, and she was much attached to an old gray woolen scarf without which she always caught bronchitis. Also her preoccupation with other people’s hair left her with no particular interest in her own.

So she sat all day in her dark room, rather like a large gray spider, her thin fingers cleverly shaping gray, black and auburn strands of hair, her background the faceless dummies standing or lying like so many dismembered heads, in odd corners of the room.

If only Fred would go straight, and find himself a nice girl…

Jones, too, Flynn’s neat, quiet and nicely-spoken man-servant, had his personal troubles, or rather one trouble, his wife Nell, who had been an invalid for nearly ten years. He had to do a job where he could be home at nights. During the day he engaged a nurse-companion, but apart from being unable to afford to have anyone living in, there was no room in the tiny flat anyway. Since Nell’s illness he had had a series of jobs, barkeeper, shop assistant, hotel porter, and finally this one as valet to the blind man, Flynn Palmer.

To date, it was the best job he had had. The pay was good, the hours regular, he could get home to Nell punctually at seven each evening, and years of caring for his wife had made him patient and understanding, which was necessary in working for Mr. Palmer, with his sudden violent tempers.

Really, Jones told himself, things were not too bad at present. Life was not exciting and full of promise as he had once thought, it was merely a rather dreary matter of building bridges from one trouble to the next. But one managed.

There was one other person who was ill at ease that evening. That was the girl, rather plump, with long, thick light brown hair and china blue eyes who walked past Manchester Court looking at it contemplatively.

Millie longed to work in the West End. This square, with its spacious gardens, its balconied houses, its air of ease and luxury, impressed her favorably. She had meant to get a job in a shop, of course. Actually, she would have liked that best. But stronger than her desire to sell expensive perfumes or expensive artificial jewelry was her desire to get away from the overcrowded house in Bethnal Green. And all those kids. Her own brothers and sisters, certainly, but giving a girl no privacy nor realizing she wanted it. And Mum and Dad looking over every boyfriend she brought home, and making caustic comments. No, her idea was a life of her own, and the best way to start acquiring that was to get a living-in job in some nice West End house or flat. After that, well—Millie flicked her heavy locks and tossed her head. A girl only had to have a chance, hadn’t she?

She hadn’t actually looked after other people’s kids before, but there was nothing she didn’t know about kids, and she liked them well enough. She could play with them or be firm as the occasion demanded. It might be rather fun wheeling one of those posh prams with fringed hoods into Kensington Gardens and making acquaintances. It was no trouble to Millie, friendly and gregarious, to become acquainted with people. It had been a good idea to come over and take a look at this place before answering the advertisement She was shrewd in that way. She looked before she leaped. Of course, the mother of the two children, “a boy of five and a baby of fifteen months,” the advertisement had said, might be one of these rich idle fault-finding types. But she liked the look of the square and the block of flats. There was no harm in taking a look at this Mrs. Lacey, also.

Though what Mum would say when she knew Millie was leaving home was another thing.

Millie giggled and tossed her hair again. Really, at eighteen, it was more than time she asserted herself. She would say she was nineteen…

Resolutely she walked to the telephone box in the square.

That was the first of the series of telephone calls to Harriet’s flat that was to become first an excitement, then a slowly mounting horror…