Ice in the Bedroom (11 page)

Tm worried about Joe.'

Sally knew who Joe was: Leila Yorke's mystery husband, who had passed into the discard some years previously. There had been occasional references to him during her tenure of office, the latest only yesterday, and she had often wondered what manner of man he had been. She always pictured him as a large, dominant character with keen eyes and a military moustache, for she could not imagine anything less hardy entering into matrimony with so formidable a woman. Yes, big and keen-eyed and strong and, of course, silent. He would have had to be that, married to someone as voluble as Miss Yorke.

'Oh, yes?' was all she found herself able to say. It was not the best of observations, but it seemed to encourage her companion to proceed.

'I saw him this afternoon.'

This time Sally's response was even briefer. She said 'Oh?'

'Yes,' said Leila Yorke, 'there he was. He looked just the same as he always did. Except,' she added, 'for a bald spot. I always told him his hair would go, if he didn't do daily hair-drill.'

Sally had no comment to make on the bald spot. She merely held her breath.

'Gave me a shock, seeing him suddenly like that.'

On the point of saying she didn't wonder, Sally checked herself. Silence, she felt, was best. There was something in all this a little reminiscent of a death-bed confession, and one does not interrupt death-bed confessions.

'Hadn't seen him for three years. He was still living with his mother then.'

Sally's interest deepened. So Joe had gone back to his mother, had he. This was, she knew, a common procedure with wives, but rarer with husbands. She found herself revising the mental picture she had made. A man like the Joe she had imagined would have taken his gun and gone off to the Rocky Mountains to shoot grizzly bears.

'That mother of his! Snakes!' said Miss Yorke unexpectedly.

'Snakes?' said Sally, surprised. She felt that a monosyllable would not break the spell, and she wanted to have this theme developed. She was convinced that the word had not been a mere exclamation. A strongly moved woman might ejaculate 'Great Snakes!' but surely - not 'Snakes!' alone.

'She kept them,' explained Miss Yorke. 'She was in vaudeville - Herpina, the Snake Queen - and she used them in her act. When,' she added with some bitterness, 'she could get bookings, which wasn't often.' She sighed. 'Did I ever tell you about my married life, Sally?'

'No, never. I knew you had been married, of course.'

'You'd have liked Joe. Everybody did. I loved him. His trouble was, he was so weak. Just a rabbit who couldn't say "Bo!" to a goose.'

Sally knew that the number of rabbits capable of saying 'Bo!' to geese is very limited, but she did not point this out. She was too busy making further revisions in the mental portrait.

'So when his mother, one of the times when she was "resting", suggested that she should come and live with us, he hadn't the nerve to tell her she wasn't wanted and that the little woman would throw a fit if she set foot across the threshold. He just said, "Fine!" And as he hadn't the nerve to tell me what he'd done, the first inkling I got of what was happening was when I came home all tired out from a heavy day at the office - I was a sob sister then on one of the evening papers - and found her in my favourite chair, swigging tea and fondling her snakes. A nice homecoming that was, and so I told Joe when I got him alone. He had the gall to say that he had thought she would be such nice company for me when he was away on tour.'

'Was he an actor?'

'Of a sort. He never got a part in the West End, but he did all right in the provinces, and he was always going off to play juvenile leads in Wolverhampton and Peebles and places of that kind. So Mother and snakes dug themselves into the woodwork, and that,' said Miss Yorke, again unexpectedly, 'was how I got my start.'

Sally blinked.

'How do you mean?'

'Perfectly simple. Everyone who's on a paper is always going to do a novel when he gets time, and I had often thought of having a bash at one, because if you're a sob sister, you accumulate a whole lot of material. This was where I saw my opportunity of buckling down to it. Instead of spending my evenings listening to Mother saying how big she had gone at the Royal, Wigan, and how it was only jealousy in high places that had kept her from working her act in London, I shut myself up in my room and wrote my first novel. It was Heather d the Hills. Ever read it?'

'Of course.'

'Pure slush, but it was taken by Popgood and Grooly, and didn't do too badly, and they sent the sheets over to Singleton Brothers in New York, who turn out books like sausages and don't care how bad they are, so long as they run to eighty thousand words. They chucked it into the sausage machine and twiddled the handle and darned if it wasn't one of the biggest sellers they had that season. What's known as a sleeper. And they asked me to come to New York and lend a hand with the publicity, autograph copies in Department stores and all that. Well, Joe was still on tour with half a dozen more towns to play, and I thought I'd only be over there a few weeks, so I went. And of course the damned book was bought for pictures and I had to go out to Hollywood to work on it, and when I'd been there a couple of months I sent Joe five thousand dollars and told him this looked like being a long operation so he must come and join me. And what do you think?'

'What?'

'He wrote back thanking me for the five grand and saying he couldn't make it, as his mother didn't want him to leave her. Said she had palpitations or something. It made me so mad that I did what I can see now was the wrong thing. I said to myself, "All right, Joe, if you can do without me, I can do without you," and I stayed on in America six solid years. By that time I suppose we had both taken it for granted that the marriage was washed up.'

'You didn't get a divorce?'

'Never occurred to me. I'm a one-man woman. I wouldn't have wanted to marry anyone, after having Joe. I just let things drift. Three years ago I ran into him in the street and we talked for a while. I asked him if he was all right for money, and he said he was. He had written a play that was being taken on tour, he said, and I wished him luck and he wished me luck, and I asked after his mother and he said she was living with him and still had the snakes, and I said that was fine, and I came away and cried all night.'

It cost Sally an effort to break the silence which followed. Speech seemed intrusive.

'And you saw him again today?'

'Yes,' said Leila Yorke. 'He was one of the waiters at the luncheon.' Sally gasped.

'A waiter!'

'That's what I said. They always get in a lot of extra waiters for these affairs, and he was one of them.'

'But that must mean---‘

‘---that he's absolutely broke. Of course it does, and I've got to find him. But how the devil do you find an extra waiter in the whole of London?'

Inside the house, as they wrestled with this problem, the telephone began to ring.

'Answer it, will you, Sally,' said Leila Yorke wearily. 'If it's that man Cornelius, say I'm dead.'

'It's somebody from Time,' said Sally, returning. 'They want to interview you about your new book.'

'Tell them to go and…No, better not. Male or female?'

'Female.'

'All right, tell the pest she can come tomorrow at five,' said Leila Yorke. 'That gives me twenty-four hours. Perhaps by then she'll have been run over by a bus or something.'

13

TUESDAY began well for Freddie's cousin George. Leaning over the Nook-Peacehaven fence as the other fed his rabbits, he not only sold Mr. Cornelius two of the five-shilling tickets for the forthcoming concert in aid of the Policemen's Orphanage but received from him the information that Castlewood was now occupied by a famous female novelist, a piece of news that stirred him like a police whistle. All female novelists, he knew, were wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice, and he was convinced that if this one were to be properly approached, with just the right organ note in the voice, business could not fail to result. Before starting on his beat, accordingly, he gave his uniform a lick with the clothes brush, said 'Mi, mi,' once or twice to himself in an undertone and clumping over to Castlewood in his official boots rang the bell.

Sally opened the door to him, and he gazed at her with undisguised admiration. Being betrothed to a charming girl who was something secretarial in a shipping office, a Miss Jennifer Tibbett, he took, of course, only an academic interest in the appearance of such others of her sex as he encountered, but his eye was not dimmed and he was able to see that here was something rather special in the way of nymphery. He approved whole-heartedly of this exhibit's trim little figure, her slightly tiptilted nose, her copper-coloured hair and the blue eyes that gazed into his. The last-named seemed to him to be shining like twin stars, as he believed the expression was, and he was not mistaken in thinking so. Sally, while preparing breakfast for her employer, had been meditating on Freddie and how much she loved him, and thoughts of that nature always give the eyes a sparkle.

'Oh, hullo,' he said. 'I mean What ho. I mean Good morning.'

The subject being one that he considered too sacred to be discussed with cousins, especially cousins who, he knew from experience, had a tendency to greet, his tales of love with uncouth guffaws, Freddie had not mentioned Sally to George. He shrank from having his idyll soiled by ribald criticism, and something told him that ribald was what George would inevitably be if informed that he, Freddie, had found the real thing at last. Intimate with the last of the Widgeons since their kindergarten days, George knew how volatile were his affections. It had, indeed, though Sally was not aware of it, been he who at that cocktail party had uttered those words about Piccadilly Circus and Hyde Park Corner which she had found so disturbing.

All that George knew of Sally, therefore, was what he had learned from Mr. Cornelius - to wit, that Miss Yorke in her descent on Valley Fields had been accompanied by a secretary. A rather attractive girl, the house agent had said, and to George, drinking her in, this seemed an understatement of the first water. She was, in his opinion, a Grade A pippin, and he could see Freddie, if and when he made her acquaintance, straightening his tie, shooting his cuffs and, like the horse to which allusion was made earlier, saying, 'Ha, ha' among the trumpets.

'I say,' he proceeded, 'do take a lenient view of this unwarrantable intrusion, as I've sometimes heard it called. I live next door, and I thought it would be neighbourly if I looked in and passed the time of day.'

'Oh?' Sally's smile was of such a calibre that, if he had not been armoured by his great love for Miss Tibbett, it would have gone through him like a bullet through blancmange. As it was, it made him totter for a moment. 'You're Freddie's cousin, the policeman. He was telling me about you.'

George was conscious of a feeling of awed respect for his kinsman's enterprise. He had always known that he was a quick worker, never letting the grass grow beneath his feet in his dealings with the young and beautiful, but in not only introducing himself to but in getting to be on such familiar terms with a girl who hadn't been around for more than about twenty-four hours he had, in George's opinion, excelled himself. 'Freddie' already! ‘Quick service, that. Why, in his own case it had been a matter of three weeks before he had got past the surname stage. It was a gift, of course, and Freddie had it and he hadn't.

'That's right,' he said. 'Great chap, Freddie. Always reminds me of one of those fellows who bound on stage with a racquet at the beginning of a play and say, "Tennis, anyone?" '

Sally stiffened.

'He isn't in the least like that.'

She spoke coldly, and George saw that he had said the wrong thing. He hastened to correct himself.

'I only meant he's not a beefy bird like me, but slim and graceful and all that.'

'Yes, you're right there.'

'Svelte, shall we call him?'

'If you like.'

'Fine,' said George, relieved. 'We pencil Freddie in as svelte. And now, for I shall have to be popping off in a moment to discourage the local crime wave, could I have a word with Miss Leila Yorke?'

'She's breakfasting in bed. Can I give her a message?'

George fingered his chin.

'Well, it might work that way,' he said dubiously, 'but I had hoped to come face to face with her and give her the old personality, if you understand what I mean. You see, I'm trying to sell tickets for the annual concert in aid of the Policemen's Orphanage, to be held at the Oddfellows Hall in Ogilvy Street next month, and my chances of success are always much brighter if I can get hold of the prospect by the coat button and give him - or as in this case, her - all that stuff about supporting a charitable organization which is not only most deserving in itself but is connected with a body of men to whom - or she - as a householder will be the first to admit that he or she owes the safety of his or her person and the tranquillity of his or her home - in other words, to cut a long story short and get right down to the nub, the police. There's a lot more of it, but you will have got the idea.'

'Yes. I've got it. Did you think all that up by yourself?'

'Good Lord, no. It's written out for us by the big shots, and we memorize it. All over Valley Fields and adjoining suburbs at this moment a hundred flatties are intoning it in the ears of the rate-paying public'

'It must sound heavenly. Will it be a good concert?'

'Sensational.'

'How much are the tickets?'

'They vary. The five-shilling ones are five shillings, the half-crown ones half a crown, the two-shilling ones---'

'Two shillings?'

'You guessed it right off,' said George, regarding her with an increase of his previous admiration, as if stunned by this blending of brains and beauty. ‘And the shilling ones are a shilling and the sixpenny ones sixpence. The last named, those at a tanner, I don't recommend very highly, because all they draw is standing-room. They are traditionally reserved for the canaille and the underprivileged, the poor slobs who can't afford anything better.'