Seven Dials (21 page)

‘Well, you know where I am if you need me,’ she said, and signalled at the bored waitress in the corner for her bill. ‘But meanwhile, the best advice I can give you is to talk to Harry as soon as you can. Whatever has happened between you, and however stupid he’s been lately, he’s still Harry. He used to be a good caring sort of chap, and somewhere inside he still is. Talk to him, and you might be able to sort it out -’

But Lee shook her head stubbornly, and despite Letty’s attempts over the next fifteen minutes to persuade her, she was adamant. She was going to walk out of her marriage with all the dignity she could and that meant without saying anything to Harry.

Which means, Letty told herself grimly as she went stumping back to the rehearsal rooms, I’ll have to talk to him myself. Wretched Harry, she thought furiously, remembering that golden afternoon more than a dozen years ago when she had stood in a Golders Green garden at their wedding, watching the adoration that hung between them as rich and as sensuous as the roses that had clustered on the bushes all round them,
wretched
Harry to hurt her so! By God, but he’s a fool. And somehow I’ve got to try to get him back to his senses in time. If it isn’t too late already.

‘Oh, my God, but I wish Letty were here,’ Peter said beneath his breath and looked rather helplessly from one to the other of them not knowing what to do.

If he’d had any inkling of what the problem was when Brin had phoned the rehearsal room and asked him to bring Katy to his flat, he would, frankly, have found a way to duck out of it. He was getting slowly better - there was no comparison between the way he had been before Christmas when Letty had first scooped him up and set him to work and how he felt now - but he was still frail, and he knew it. Over the weeks of rehearsal he had learned the importance of pacing himself both physically and emotionally. Now he regularly walked all round Kensington Gardens in the evenings, whatever the weather, and was eating heartily but he made sure that he lived as peaceful and ordered a life as possible, avoiding any attempts to pull him into social affairs, only going out sometimes to eat a meal in a restaurant with Katy when she could persuade him. To get involved like this with someone else’s distress was more painful; it made him feel shaky, made the old veils of fear seem to come creeping back into his mind and that was something he couldn’t possibly allow to happen.

‘I’ll try to see if I can find her,’ he said now, and began to move towards the door, edging away a little gingerly and ashamed of himself for doing so. ‘She ought to be here.’

‘She told me yesterday she wouldn’t be back at Albany until late tonight,’ Brin said shortly, from the depths of his big armchair. ‘She said she wasn’t going to tell me where she was or who she was with because she wasn’t to be bothered. Important family business, she said -’

‘This is important family business too,’ Katy burst out, sitting upright on the sofa on to which she had thrown herself full length to weep. ‘How much more important could it
possibly be?’

She began to cry again, not pretty tears of the sort she could shed on stage at command, but real tears, ugly ones which reddened her nose and distorted her face so that she no longer looked like a girl but very much a woman, and one who was beginning to age rather quickly at that. ‘Oh, God, Brin, how could you not have told me how bad it was! If I’d have realized I’d have gone like a shot -’

‘I told you, damn it!’ Brin shouted. ‘Don’t blame me because you just didn’t want to know. I feel bad enough about not going up myself and not telling Letty either, but how was I to know he was so ill? Sophie always fusses a lot - I thought she was just making dramas - how was I to know?’

‘When did it happen?’ Katy said, and rubbed her face to dry it, but the tears still flowed, roughening her eyelids and making them swell. ‘Would there have been time to get there?’

‘The telegram’s over there,’ Brin said and indicated the table. ‘It doesn’t say much.’

‘Read it to me, Peter,’ Katy said. ‘I can’t see clearly - please read it to me.’

Unwillingly Peter picked up the flimsy piece of paper and smoothed it.

‘Father died six a.m.,’ he read, his voice flat and expressionless. ‘Tried phone you, no answer, call at once. Sophie.’

‘Have you called her?’ Katy said, turning to Brin and he nodded, still sitting slumped in his armchair.

‘I called her,’ he said, and now there were tears in his voice too. ‘She was -’ he stopped, choking a little.

‘I’m not going to the funeral,’ Katy said loudly and sat straight up. ‘I can’t bear funerals. I want to remember Pa the way he was last time I saw him, not in a bloody box and all those damned Haworth people staring and - I shan’t go -’ Her voice rose to a wail. ‘I shan’t go, I shan’t -’

‘She says she doesn’t want us to come up. It’ll - if we’d been there in time to see him it’d be different, she said, but as we couldn’t get there, it’ll be better if there’s just a quiet funeral - and - they’ll all gossip horribly if we turn up now.’

There was a little silence and then Katy said, ‘Oh, Brin, we’ve been awful.’

‘I know. Bastards. But - I just didn’t believe Sophie. She makes such -’

‘No she doesn’t,’ Katy said, and her voice became shrill again. ‘We’re just kidding ourselves. She expects us to behave right and we never do. And when she said Pa was very ill and we ought to go up we should have listened to her.’

‘Well, we didn’t, did we?’ Brin shouted. ‘We chose to stay here, all right? And now she says she doesn’t want us to come to the funeral because we’d be an embarrassment. If the villagers thought we were in London and could have got there before he died, well - it’d make it miserable for her and for George and John. She’s told people we were away at the time Pa got ill and she couldn’t get a message to us and -’ He got to his feet and began to prowl around the room. ‘So there it is. She’s sorting everything out and says we’re not to worry. She sends her love.’

Katy began to cry again and after a moment Peter went over and sat down beside her and took her hand and she turned and clung to him, weeping even more bitterly.

‘I feel such a beast, Peter - It’s not that I don’t care - I do - it’s just that I hate illness and death. It was bad enough when Mother died and - I just couldn’t get away fast enough. So I couldn’t bear to go to Haworth when Sophie sent for us. I just couldn’t, so I pretended to myself it was nothing to worry about and just refused to think about it and now I hate myself for it, I hate myself -’

‘No sense in that,’ Peter said, trying to sound as practical as he could, modelling himself on Letty. ‘No sense at all. I made myself ill fretting over what I should have done and didn’t and hating myself for it. Don’t do it. Whatever happened, you can’t unhappen it. Live with it, and promise yourself you’ll be better next time -’

‘There won’t be a next time.’ Katy drew a big shuddering breath. ‘There’s no one else but us, now, us and Sophie. George and John are both married and got children so it’s all right for them. They’ve got other people to think about. But we, we’re just ourselves. And - oh, hell!” And she pulled away from Peter and went to the door. ‘I’m going to wash my face,’ she said and disappeared and Peter looked after her and bit his lip, trying to decide what to do.

‘Thanks for bringing her home,’ Brin said. ‘I suppose I should have just come round and fetched her, but I felt so - oh, hell and damnation!’ And he went over to the window and
stood there banging his fist rhythmically on the frame as he stared out into the street below.

That he was deeply distressed there could be no doubt; Peter had found him a rather difficult person to work with, polite and friendly enough but lacking any depth that would have made it possible for him to forge any sort of real friendship, but now there was no shallowness about him. He was grieving and wracked with guilt, and from all Peter could gather, a justifiable one. There was nothing anyone could do to help him cope with that.

‘I’ll try to find Letty,’ he said now, getting to his feet a little awkwardly. ‘You’ll want to be left alone, I imagine. But Letty will want to know and I’ll send her as soon as I can. He was her brother, wasn’t he?’

‘Yes,’ Brin said, still staring out of the window. ‘Her brother and my father. They weren’t very close, but still, her brother -’

‘Yes,’ Peter said and went to the door. ‘Tell Katy how sorry I am. I - I’ll see you both when you’re ready to - well, goodbye, Brin. My sympathy -’ And gratefully he escaped into the street.

In spite of all the death he had seen, all the grief he had shared, he found each episode of bereavement as painful as though it had been the first he had encountered. The only thing to do, he decided, was to go to Albany. If Letty wasn’t there he’d wait for her. Then he could hand over to her the responsibility for the two people sitting there in that little flat and hating themselves and each other, and go back to being quiet and peaceful and dealing with his own pain. I’ve had quite enough of that, he told himself defensively as he began to walk down Shaftesbury Avenue towards Piccadilly Circus; I’m entitled to try to escape other people’s misery as much as I can, surely. But he wasn’t really convinced by his own arguments.

The next few days were, to put it mild’ y, difficult. Once Letty had come back to Albany, rather grim around the mouth, and been told what had happened, he had thought his responsibility to the younger Lacklands had been discharged, and had gone back to work, grateful to be busy and trying not to think about them. But it wasn’t easy, even though he was over-loaded
with details to look after in Brin’s absence - whatever else Brin was, he was a hard-working man who had been a genuine assistant - and by the following Friday he was on the verge of exhaustion, both from actual work and from the way many of his own distressing feelings about death seemed to have been remobilized by what had happened to Brin and Katy.

He knew he was getting short-tempered and difficult to deal with; he saw the occasional startled expressions on the actors’ faces when he snapped at them, or seemed slow to understand what was said to him, or explained something badly, and fear began to rise in him. Had his recovery from last year’s awfulness been just a flash in the pan? Was he going to get ill again? For a while he contemplated giving up the job of director and going cap in hand to his brother Max to ask him to take care of him. He had managed to avoid that when he had first returned from Belsen, but now, because an old man who had been full of years and had a good and tranquil life had died peacefully in his bed, in his own home, he was like this. It made no sense.

It was on Friday afternoon, when he was trying to understand what Daniel had done to restructure the first half of the show in such a way that they could get in an extra number that had been offered to them by one of the better known dancers from Sadler’s Wells, when his head was aching and it seemed to him that everything anyone said to him came to his ears through layers of thick mush, that Brin came back to work.

The door opened and there he was, with Letty standing just behind him. Peter was filled with a sudden sense of deep gratitude at the sight of her; she had been away for so many days, it seemed, almost a lifetime, and there she was, foursquare and solid, looking at him with that wonderfully familiar sardonic twist to her lips, and when she glanced at him some of the mist that had filled his mind seemed to melt and drift away.

‘Letty,’ he said, getting to his feet a little clumsily. ‘And Brin. I’m glad to see you both -’

Letty was shocked. It was as though the past weeks of progress with Peter had never happened. There he stood as gaunt and as remote as he had been the day she had first gone to see him in Leinster Terrace and though he was properly
dressed, there was once more that slightly ill-kempt look about him. He hadn’t shaved today and the shadows seemed to hollow his cheeks even more. She saw the look of relief on Daniel’s face at the sight of her too, and the way he lifted his brows expressively at Peter’s back and she bit her lip. She had no right to forget that Peter still needed support and help. To have left him for so long without so much as a message had been unforgivable.

‘Peter,’ she said and came into the room. ‘I should have called you. I’m sorry. I went to Haworth for my brother’s funeral and -’ She turned then and stepped aside so that the person who was standing behind her could come in. ‘I’ve brought my other niece back with me. She’s a dear girl and she’s decided to take care of Brin. Says he needs a housekeeper, so here she is.’

She smiled then as Brin scowled. ‘He, of course, doesn’t think so, but Sophie does, and so do I. Anyway, it’s time she came to London and saw a little of metropolitan life. Sophie, my dear, this is Peter. I’ve told you all about him.’

It was extraordinary how unlike Katy she was, and yet at the same time there could be no mistaking the fact that they were sisters. It was as though Sophie were a monochrome version of highly coloured Katy; where Katy’s skin was rich peaches and cream, Sophie’s was somewhat sallow; where Katy’s hair curled wildly in entrancing tendrils, Sophie’s sat neatly on her head in restrained waves. Katy’s eyes spoke volumes of wickedness, while Sophie looked tranquilly at her world without seeming to show any special interest in what she saw. Katy’s vivacity was in Sophie a dullness. But, Peter found himself thinking, it was a restful dullness and he managed a smile and found himself rubbing his stubbled cheeks with an embarrassed hand, not wanting to be seen by those cool eyes to look so dishevelled.

‘How do you do?’ he murmured after a little pause, and Letty looked at him sharply, concerned to hear that hesitation again, but his eyes were clear and he was looking at Sophie with interest rather than with that opaque stare she had found so worrying.

‘I’m very well, thank you,’ Sophie said and her slight Yorkshire accent made her voice sound a little flat. ‘I hope you are.’

‘Er, yes,’ Peter said and then he blinked and added, ‘I’m so sorry to hear of your loss.’

‘Yes,’ Sophie said collectedly. ‘It was very unfortunate. Aunt Letty -’ And she turned towards her.