Starlight (9 page)

The pause that followed was so tiny that it escaped notice by the mother and son. He’ll be easy, Peggy thought.

‘Did your driver know the way up here? Some of those chaps haven’t a clue, especially in the newer firms … who did you go to?’ Arnold Corbett asked.

‘Some firm near Euston, I forget its name,’ Peggy lied. ‘Yes, he was very good. No trouble at all.’

‘It’s quite dicey, mind you,’ Arnold went on, warming to his interesting subject, ‘I’ve known even experienced taxi-merchants drive round here for ten minutes or more looking for the place, and of course you can never get one if you should happen to want one. If my car’s out of order I know what to expect. Ages on the phone and then nothing doing … you may be lucky between theatre-time and midnight, of course, but … overpopulation’s the trouble, everywhere,’ he ended gloomily.

‘Where is your nearest rank … just in case I want one on my “evening out” – if I’m to have an evening out?’ Peggy asked, half-turning, with serpentine grace, to Mrs Corbett, knowing how her profile must be silhouetted against the long pale sweep of the curtains.

‘Of course you will, dear – what an idea! (Arnold, did you hear that?) I shall just mention it a few days beforehand if I
should
happen to want your company in the evenings … and there is the dogs’ run, of course, but Arnold often does that. We dine at seven,’ Mrs Corbett went on, ‘because the servants like a long evening –’

‘I’ll say they do,’ her son put in.

‘Now you mustn’t give Peggy a wrong impression, Arnold. I know the poor old dears can be trying …’

‘Why you don’t get three or four foreigners over I don’t know. You’d have no difficulty.’

‘I know that. It isn’t that and you know it.’ She turned to Peggy. ‘All of them – the cook and my parlourmaid and the houseman, and the chauffeur, even my “daily”, have been with me since my husband’s time. They are all getting old, now (like me) but that’s no reason why I should turn them out, and have a lot of Italians in the house. They were all with us in the old days.’

Her eyes turned towards the handsome curve of the bay window, curtained from pelmet to shining floor with fawn satin embroidered in wreaths of flowers. ‘Nearly fifty years ago. Hendon was famous for its flying-fields then, and Golders Green – that was a village. The Garden City was just being built.’

‘Beastly hole.’ Arnold held out his cigarette case to Peggy, who smiled and shook her head.

‘It was pretty in those days – all the little new houses, and artistic young people just starting life. Of course, our friends were different; they were in the flying set, but just beginning too. Oh, I can’t
tell
you how
exciting
it all was,’ she ended, with an animation in her voice which, to her, conveyed all the glamour lingering in her mind’s eye and in her heart: while the feeble sounds, muted by age, conveyed to Peggy just nothing.

She kept her luminous and long-shaped eyes, wherein two stars always burned, fixed upon her employer’s face as if she were interested, while behind them a long yawn stretched itself out.

‘One evening a week or so I have friends to dinner. Bridge most afternoons, with my three old pals from down the road (you’ll meet them). Most evenings after dinner we watch television. Bed by half-past ten, usually.’

‘A thrilling programme,’ muttered Arnold, ‘so now you know the worst, Miss Pearson.’

‘I like a quiet life,’ Peggy answered in the same unruffled tone. ‘I’ve lived mostly in the country, you know.’

‘Bores me stiff, the country, I must say. Give me town every time.’ Arnold’s dull blue eyes were fixed on her face.

‘He’s a naughty boy, isn’t he, doggies? He likes the bright lights,’ said Mrs Corbett cheerfully, touching the nearest plump back with the toe of her black velvet shoe, ‘a naughty, naughty, naughty boy.’ Bee, disturbed, moved pettishly away. ‘Well now,’ Mrs Corbett went on to Peggy, ‘I’m sure you’d like to see your room, wouldn’t you.’ She began to struggle from her chair. ‘Oh dear – can you give me an arm, please. I get so stiff.’

Peggy complied, with considerable inward dislike of the contact with soft old fat, black georgette, and gilt jewellery.

‘I had it done over for you,’ Mrs Corbett confided, as all three slowly mounted the stairs. ‘The last companion I had stuck religious pictures all over the walls (I’m funny in that way, I cannot bear churchy people) and it used to depress me so much … when she left, I thought, aha, new wallpaper! No, boys,’ to the dogs, who had followed them, ‘
not
in Peggy’s room.’

‘I’ll say good-night, mother, if you’ll excuse me,’ said Arnold, pausing surrounded by dogs, on the threshold, ‘there’s something I want to watch on ITV – good-night, Miss Pearson,’ and, instructing the dogs to leave him alone, he went off down the corridor.

‘He has his own, in his den,’ Mrs Corbett said, opening a door on a perfect specimen of a hotel bedroom, characterless even to incredibility in brown and beige, ‘then if there’s something on BBC 2 or ITV he wants to watch, he can watch it while I have
my
little party with BBC 1 in the drawing-room. Are you a keen looker-in?’

‘I like the animal programmes,’ Peggy answered, this time without lying.

‘Oh –
dear
Michaela and Armand – so do I.’ Peggy did not think it necessary to add that this was not what she meant.

‘I hope you’ll like the pictures.’ Mrs Corbett moved with her waddling walk across the room. ‘I chose them myself when I had the room re-done. At Harrods. (They have a lovely picture gallery there, I expect you know it?) I’m afraid I’m not at all artistic. (My husband, bless him, used to say, “Cora’s a fool but she is good-tempered.”) But I flatter myself I
do
know what I like.’

They had paused in front of a boat rushing along over a foaming summer sea. There was enough in the idealized scene to move Peggy’s heart with a sudden agony of desire: the overheated room’s walls seemed to fall apart, and all the splendour and smell of the ocean drove in.

‘I … that’s …’ She could not bring the words out, and stood in silence, trembling with longing, and with rage at herself.

Mrs Corbett, as was usual with Mrs Corbett, had noticed nothing.

‘And this,’ she said, before some white Irish cottages under a violet mountain, ‘I love that, don’t you?’

‘I … don’t know which I like best. They’re both … I like this one, too.’ It was a path leading through autumn woods, hung with those leaves that suggest golden coins. Peggy would not let herself shut her eyes on a memory of Sussex downs.

‘There! they’ll remind you of the country.’ Mrs Corbett, after a last pleased glance round, retreated to the door. ‘It’s so nice to have you here, dear, and I’m sure we shall all get on well together … no, boys, you mustn’t stay here, come with Mother. Dee!
Not
on beddies, you know that’s not allowed.’

‘Let them stay, please, I don’t mind. If you like, I’ll come down when I’ve unpacked and take them for their run, shall I?’

‘Will you really? Aren’t you tired? But I don’t expect you are, you’re so young. One forgets … How old are you, my dear?’

‘Twenty-two.’

‘Are you really? Only twenty-two. Well, it’s a long time since I was twenty-two … I’ll leave them with you, then. The lead is hanging in the hall, by the front door.’ Mrs Corbett at last got herself out of the room. Peggy’s first action was to cross the room and jerk apart the curtains veiling the windows. She pushed the casements back and, gasping, leaned out into the night.

A slight damp wind blew into her face, bringing the scent of dead leaves and wet bark. From the dark screen of trees, behind which the valley lights glittered, an owl hooted on a soft wavering note. She shuddered, shut the windows quickly and dragged the curtains across them. Then she turned to her unpacking.

When she ran downstairs half an hour later, she wore a white raincoat, and on her head one of the scarves, usually made of cotton printed in some brilliant uncommon design, which she affected in the winter. Her suits and her greatcoat had been, for some years, of a dark tweed, flecked with violet or yellow. She gave out an impression of dark skies and winter starlight.

She put her head round the door of the great drawing-room with a grand-daughterly air; Mrs Corbett was watching the television lackadaisically.

‘I’m going to take them for their run now,’ Peggy called, interrupting the noises and actions on the little blue screen that presumably were occupying her employer’s attention.

‘Oh all right, dear, thank you.’ Mrs Corbett glanced round and smiled and yawned, ‘Really, this isn’t very thrilling, I think I shall go to bed.’

A man smashed his fist into another’s face, there was a brisk outbreak of screams from an ugly girl, and Peggy shut the door on the entertainment.

The dogs ran joyfully along the road under the quiet trees. No footfall but her own, no droning rush of any car; the lamps burned like veiled crystals in the mist, drops fell heavily from the iron-coloured branches as if the trees wept for their brothers in the country’s menaced woodlands. It was not country, but it was better than shops and streets. Peggy thought that a few months at MacLeod House would ‘do’.

The ‘home’ to which Mrs Pearson had begged, rather than ordered, the driver to return was a tall, seedy old private hotel in the neighbourhood of Euston, whose back premises overlooked a vast area of demolition and rebuilding. It was kept by the man and his wife, acquaintances of Thomas Pearson’s in the secretive, hidden underworld of petty crime in which the latter had lived for years; the removal of the brick and mortar screens protecting the proprietors from the public eye had filled them with an uneasiness expressing itself in a surly manner, and they were talking of selling out and taking themselves off to a similar place in Brighton.

Having parked the car, the man George stalked ahead of Mrs Pearson across the pavement to the hotel entrance, leaving her to push her way through the swing door unaided.

‘All right, are you, dear? You look all in,’ said Mrs George, a stout woman wearing a short black dress glittering with gilt threads, coming out of the reception desk as Mrs Pearson slowly approached.

‘I’m tired, Marie, and so cold. I nearly die every time I have to say good-bye to Peggy.’

‘Now don’t be like that, Nora, she’s only gone to Hampstead,’ Mrs George soothed.

‘It’s four or five miles away,’ Mrs Pearson said dolefully.

‘Well, what’s that! Really Nora, be your age … now come on upstairs, I’ve got a gorgeous fire for you and you need a drink.’

She steered her friend’s drooping form up the stairs; carefully, but with a manner that suggested that of one who humours a mental case rather than affection.

The room she led her into had a superb coal fire blazing illegally and royally in the bow-shaped grate, below a wide marble mantel-piece yellowed by smoke and marked by many deep stains from cigarette butts. Thick red curtains shut away the desolation outside, with its suggestion of lunar craters and civilization’s collapse.

The man George was already seated by the fire, on a giant sofa. Beside him, but at its far end, sat another man; short, dark, leaning back and listening in silence to a stream of complaint the other was uttering. He gave the impression of being farther away from his companion than the few feet between them, and he was smiling.

He sat up, as the two women entered, saying, ‘Nora, you’re late, and you look cold, you’re frozen, come here, sit down, warm yourself, for God’s sake.’ Rising, he bustled about, settling her nearest the fire and arranging cushions at her back. The Georges exchanged a sneering furtive smile.

Mrs Pearson crouched forward to the blaze, holding out hands of a skeletal fragility, with nails painted rose colour, to the flames. She kept her eyes fixed dreamily on their red and yellow dance, what was going on in the room appearing to drift past her unheeded.

‘Christ!’ exclaimed George, who had been sipping from one of the glasses filled by his wife at a table in the corner, ‘what’s in this, for God’s sake?’

‘Something Tom here dreamed up,’ she said, ‘I don’t know … he mixed it just before you came in … what is in it, Tom?’ turning to the dark man.

‘Powder. A very strong powder. Not like you usually get. Special, from an Indian friend of mine who keeps a little shop,’ said Thomas Pearson, smiling.

‘One of your little shops, I s’pose.’ George was still sipping, with an expression of gross satisfaction growing on his face. ‘There’s a bit more than the old curry powder in
this
, I bet.’ He laughed, looking sideways at his tormentor and master. The hope of escaping, somehow, from the load of debt that bound him to Pearson and of in some way destroying the knowledge that Pearson had of his past life, grew fainter with every day that passed.

‘You do talk a lot of bloody rubbish, George,’ his wife put in uneasily, ‘here, Nora, do you good.’ She held out a steaming glass.

Thomas Pearson caught his wife’s wrist gently before she could take it. ‘Not for you, Nora, too strong. I mix you a special.’ He went across to the table.

He had begun to put on flesh young, and now his small features were sunk in fat and he carried a belly. But his eyes were beautiful, dark and almond-shaped like those of his daughter and having in them a sparkle resembling the reflection of a star in dark water. His nose and mouth were finely curved and hinted at voluptuousness and one could feel in him the strength of a rib of steel. But one also felt that this was a man who could be made weak, and destroyed, by one passion.