Dorothy Eden (8 page)

“This is the time when Lucy would come in to say goodnight to me. She would be going to a ball or a party, and she would stand there shining, and so young. She would tell me not to stay awake for her, but of course I always did. I would lie listening…”

And now Lucy was listening to them talking about her. Why did Cressida suddenly have that uncanny feeling? She fancied she could hear the soft footsteps, the stealthy swish of a silk dress at the door.

“Red roses were her favourite flowers,” Arabia continued dreamily. She almost always wore them. I put some in her hands at the end…”

“There’s someone at the door!” Cressida cried nervously.

Arabia started up. “I didn’t hear anything. Go and see who it is.”

Cressida went quickly, but she knew almost at once that there would be no one there. Nor was there, except round the curve of the stairs, Dawson blundering up on his too-large feet carrying a basket of vegetables. He gave his sideways look at her.

“I’ve brought the shopping up,” he said humbly.

Arabia called impatiently, “Put it in the kitchen, boy. I can’t stop to talk to you tonight. I have a guest.”

Dawson obediently disappeared into the kitchen, and then clattered off downstairs.

Arabia sighed. “That was a mistake I made,” she confessed, “letting that dreary little woman and her son come here. I like amusing people. But she caught me at a time when I was feeling soft-hearted. She has this bad throat, and she’s a widow. The boy’s brilliant, they say. Well he may be, with those looks. One has to have some compensations. Come and sit down again, dear. What were we saying before Dawson interrupted us?”

“About the red roses,” Cressida said. Suddenly she couldn’t sit down again. She wandered about, taut and restless.

“Yes,” Arabia murmured. “People to amuse me, or people to love me. That is what I expect out of life.”

“Arabia, where is Lucy’s grave?”

The question fell into a suddenly still room.

Then Arabia said in a harsh voice with which she had spoken to Dawson, “Why do you ask that?”

“Because I’d like to go and see it.” Cressida regretted her question. She had not expected it to distress Arabia so much. Did the old lady, with her make-believe of the room waiting for an occupant, shut out of her mind the fact that there was a grave?

Arabia suddenly began to pace up and down the room, wringing her hands. With her long brocade dress, slightly tarnished and a little grubby, and the rakish tiara, she looked like a slightly tipsy Lady Macbeth. But Lady Macbeth suggested guilt—it could not be guilt that made Arabia wring her hands and turned her face gaunt and ugly.

“You shouldn’t have asked that question,” she said at last, harshly. “It distresses me too much. You see, I could not bear to think of Lucy buried. So sweet and young. In the cold earth. Oh, no! So I had her cremated, and her ashes”—Arabia gave a harsh deep sob—“flung on the four winds. Her room upstairs, fresh with flowers—”

“Is really her grave,” Cressida whispered.

Arabia flung around. “Do not use that word, child! I cannot endure it. Oh, dear, why have we got so melancholy. Ahmed! Come here! Amuse me!” With a swift movement, she seized the sleeping parrot and flung it on to the cage of the stuffed one.

Ahmed immediately responded by squawking loudly and attacking the thin bars of the cage. Arabia, laughing now, urged him on.

“Go on! Get him! Wring his scruffy neck! Toss him on the floor! Get your claws into him!”

The pandemonium went on for several minutes. Ahmed biting at the cage bars with his vicious beak, giving his deafening squawks, and Arabia flapping her hands and shrieking with laughter. Then all at once Ahmed clambered on to the top of the cage, and subsided into his ruffled feathers. Arabia sighed deeply and straightened her tiara which had threatened to come completely adrift.

“That was amusing,” she said to Cressida, with her brilliant illuminating smile. “I adore noise. It reminds one that one is alive. It’s wonderful to be alive, isn’t it?”

“I—I think I must go now,” Cressida said.

“Oh, must you, my dear? I suppose you’re tired after your long day. Thank you for an enchanting evening.” She took Cressida’s hand in her own and began stroking it lightly. “You must come again very soon and we won’t speak of grief at all, we’ll have music, and laughter. I know what we will do. We’ll have a party, a house-warming for you. Mr. Moretti—can you endure his white eyebrows, my dear, like caterpillars—shall play the violin, and we may even entice Miss Glory to perform on the piano. And we’ll have some good food and wine—ah, that will be gay!” The old fingers moved on the palm of Cressida’s hand with their cool, dry touch. “You’re so like her, my dear, it’s unbelievable.”

Impulsively Cressida leaned forward to kiss Arabia’s cheek.

“It would be nice to be gay,” she said.

Downstairs, in the haven of her own room, she regretted a little that she had not asked Arabia the reason for her macabre joke of the previous evening. (Had she been locked in Lucy’s room because the old lady had determined, in her obsessed mind, to get an occupant for it?) But a question such as that would probably have provoked an even more agitated outburst from Arabia, so perhaps it was best to pretend the thing had never happened. Arabia would answer a question just as it suited her to do, that was obvious. No Monty, she had said. But there had been a Monty, someone who did not fit into the pattern of Lucy’s gay innocent life.

Arabia was a devious old woman, but she was also kind and immensely lovable and very lonely. Cressida was now not without qualms as to the situation in which she was finding herself, but her ready sympathy and affection was all for Arabia. She had no intention of letting her slight, never-quite-quelled, undercurrent of apprehension drive her from Dragon House. Indeed, she could not have gone, for, more even than Arabia, Lucy was holding her. She had to look at that diary again, study every entry, find out what had led to Lucy’s death. It was almost as if Lucy were urging her to do this—was it to right some wrong?

Although it was late Cressida sat down to make notes.

“No Monty,” she wrote. “Only Larry, and other obviously harmless friends. Was Monty undesirable, a fortune-hunter or a ne’er do-well, or just socially inferior? Did he ever send Lucy red roses? (N.B. Must look in Lucy’s room for old snapshots, etc. Perhaps old letters—everything of hers was untouched, Arabia said.)

“No grave,” she went on. “Why was Arabia so distressed when I asked—”

Abruptly Cressida stopped and the pen fell from her hand as a shriek sounded upstairs.

It was a high involuntary scream, and instantly suppressed. A moment later there were running footsteps. They seemed to come down the stairs. They were very soft, as if someone were in stockinged feet.

After a moment of petrified terror Cressida pulled herself together. Someone was in trouble. She had to go and see who it was.

She was almost sure the scream had come from the rooms where Mrs. Stanhope and Dawson lived. Out in the hall she switched on all the lights she could find. Then, sure that there was no one lurking in the shadows, she ran up the stairs. At the top she had to stop to get her breath. Her heart, with haste and terror, was drumming uncontrollably.

“Don’t stop to be frightened,” she admonished herself, and tapped briskly at Mrs. Stanhope’s door. After a moment Dawson’s voice, breaking into an unexpectedly deep note, called, “Who’s there?”

“It’s me. Cressida Barclay. Is there anything wrong?”

The door opened slowly. Dawson, in his pyjamas, his shot stiff hair stuck on end, stood there, blinking. He hadn’t his glasses on and he looked suddenly childlike and scared.

“I thought I heard someone scream,” Cressida said. “I had to come up. Is your mother all right?”

Dawson looked shame-faced. “It was me,” he said. “Ma had a nightmare about that girl who was strangled and she came in and woke me up. I felt her hand on my face, and I yelled.”

Mrs. Stanhope, bundled into a wool dressing-gown, that almost obscured her so that one could see only the large glasses and her thin pointed nose, was suddenly saying in her apologetic gasping voice, “I’m so sorry we frightened you, Miss Barclay. I had a bad dream.”

“You shouldn’t have come in like that without making a sound,” Dawson complained. “It was me that got the fright.”

“That poor girl was on my mind,” Mrs. Stanhope whispered.

“I’m sorry I disturbed you,” Cressida apologised. “I guess I was uneasy, too, and when I heard the scream—”

“It happened so near here,” whispered Mrs. Stanhope. “You must let Dawson call for you at nights, Miss Barclay.”

“That’s very kind of you to suggest it, Mrs. Stanhope. But I’ll be all right. Really. Now you go back to bed and get some sleep. And didn’t your doctor say you shouldn’t talk so much?”

Mrs. Stanhope busily took her pad from her pocket, and wrote, “She was wearing a red rose.”

A ripple of fear went through Cressida. Red roses again. But a dead girl wearing a red rose could have no possible connection with Dragon House and a frightened little woman having a nightmare. They were just a recurring and slightly sinister theme.

“I’d give your mother a couple of aspirins,” Cressida said to Dawson.

He nodded importantly. “I have something more effective than aspirins. Come on, Ma, go back to bed.”

Mrs. Stanhope nodded meekly. The high collar of her dressing-gown, which she had clutched closely round her, slipped a little as she returned the writing pad to her pocket, and Cressida caught a glimpse of the mark on her cheek.

“Why, you’re hurt!” she exclaimed.

Dawson giggled. “She bumped into the door on her way in to me. Drunk, that’s what she was. Weren’t you, Ma?”

With which bizarre humour he bundled his mother back into the room. Cressida turned slowly away, remembering the soft footsteps she had heard. They could have been Mrs. Stanhope’s, who, on bare feet, had run blindly in the dark into her son’s room. Or they could have been those of an intruder who had struck Mrs. Stanhope and made Dawson scream.

No, that was an unlikely explanation. For why should the two conceal so frightening a happening? They must be telling the truth.

But as she reached the room once more Cressida had a peculiar thought. Dawson’s voice now had the depth of a man’s. It only occasionally wobbled into falsetto. Could he have screamed on so high a note? And why had he looked so scared?

W
HEN CRESSIDA HAD GONE
Arabia suddenly could not bear to be alone. She put her finger on the bell and held it there until Miss Glory came panting up the stairs.

“For Lord’s sake, what now, madam?” Miss Glory stood flat and uncompromising in the doorway.

“Are you having an affair with Moretti?” Arabia dropped the question with complete aplomb.

“Madam!” Miss Glory was suddenly seven feet tall, standing there rigid with outrage.

“Oh, too bad!” Arabia sighed. “It would have been diverting. For me as well as you. Life can be so deadly dull.”

“It isn’t dull for you now, madam. You’ve got the girl.”

“What do you know about that?” Arabia demanded icily.

“Well, I know you’re trying to do something unhealthy. Bringing back the dead might be one way of making life less dull, but, if I may say so, it isn’t fair to that nice young girl.”

“And why isn’t it fair to her? She has a good flat, very cheap, she likes me—I know that, because she is naturally honest and easy to read—and I promise you she shall not suffer.”

“How can you promise that?” Miss Glory muttered. “She’ll have her head turned. She has to go home to her boyfriend in the country some time. How can she do that if you’ve pampered her too much here?”

“You forget, Miss Glory, that she may not be the type to live happily in the country with a dull young man. In fact, I am sure she isn’t. Apart from anything else, look at the future unhappiness I may be saving her.”

“Madam, you wouldn’t come between man and wife!”

“Wait until they are man and wife, Miss Glory. And speaking of that,” Arabia’s dark, liquid eyes were full of pleasurable malice, “if you are not having an affair with Moretti, have you asked him his intentions?”

Miss Glory tossed her head and sniffed loudly. She did not deign to answer.

“Although he’s the sort I’d imagine to have a wife somewhere. Probably deserted, poor thing.”

“Madam, you must excuse me, but I can’t stand here listening to that sort of talk.”

Arabia gave her rich chuckle.

“Sorry, Miss Glory. I’m teasing you. Your Moretti is amusing, and any sin can be forgiven for that. But I don’t think you ought to trust him too far.”

“Who’s talking about trusting anybody?” Miss Glory had relaxed enough to converse again, although her voice was still prickly with offence. “Of course I don’t trust Moretti. A violinist in a night-club, and with all those pretty girls—though what they look like by daylight is another thing. I can be seen first thing in the morning, unprinked, and little do I care. He knows where he is with me.”

“Yes. Go on,” urged Arabia, full of interest.

Miss Glory realised she was committing herself farther than she had meant to. She took refuge in dignity once more.

“If you just had me up here to talk about Moretti, madam, I’ll ask to be excused.”

“No, no, don’t go, Miss Glory. I want to talk about a party I’m going to have for Cressida. A house-warming.”

“What, just us ones in the house, madam?”

“Why not? This is where she belongs. Plenty of good food and wine and music. I want you to ask Moretti to play, and of course yourself—”

“I expect you’re hinting that I’ll be more use in the kitchen.”

“Well, I must admit you cook duckling in the most delectable way. That sauce tonight, and the cold consommé, and the delicious strawberry mousse—”

“Thank you, madam,” Miss Glory said with dignity. Suddenly she relaxed and her thin face ceased in a triumphant smile. “I’d like to see those night-club girls roast a duckling like that. When are you planning to have the party, madam?”

“I think on Thursday evening.”

“Then if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got plenty of time to work out the menu without doing so at this hour.”