The Brontes Went to Woolworths (14 page)

I believe Sheil is suspicious about Saffy. We have, at last, re-established him (he came to lunch last week, rather suddenly), but during that time of silence, after Yorkshire, I wonder? I rather think children sense death as cats and dogs do family departure.

That was partly why it was so important that Toddy should take to Sheil. He must love her for two . . . and at last, we had assembled the conditions; Mildred, mother, Sheil and me at the Toddingtons’ house, with Toddy expected home any minute. All as it had been a hundred times before . . . with myself in the strange
rôle
of guide. Literally, anything might happen. All I could reckon on in advance was the known attraction of Lady Toddington for
Sheil.

One of the difficulties is that Mildred has always tended to be the pawn in our game. Her creation was of necessity a more vague affair than Toddy’s. She formed piecemeal, and I think it possible that if we hadn’t known she existed we might never have created her at all. But we played fair. It took a year to get her into definite shape, and Sheil will have remembered that, and our early struggles with her hostess’s personality; would remember that in Skye she herself had put Lady Toddington’s age at eighty-four. Even Lady Toddington’s tea with us hadn’t been much help in materialising her, since, for the time, we were transformed into handers of cake to a visitor – our own familiar Mildred! And so, we had filed in after mother into the Toddington drawing-room. Sheil, in her elf-green frock, sat on a gilt chair, her little paws decorously folded, her eyes upon the door in a shameless waiting for Toddy that, mercifully, only we could interpret. It was the face seen in boxes before the entrance of the leading man. Mother, of course, was being social and brittle and what Katrine and I call Martinesque, and I handed Lady Toddington’s cups with my mind a chaos. It only occurred to me on our way home that the obvious thing would have been to have put that work on to Sheil.

‘Let me see, you have another girl, haven’t you?’ said Lady Toddington.

Sheil started. Inevitable, these jars. I couldn’t protect her against them. She has heard Toddy distantly squabbling with Katrine so often (‘Who is this lady? Introduce me, if you please’), and revelled in the way Katrine riles him, and I knew that everything poor Mildred said was liable to shatter something. Sheil will have to go through it. It’s the price of reality. Only, she is so young . . .

And reasonably soon, there was Toddy’s step on the stairs. He went the round of us, and then shook hands with Sheil very kindly, no jot of courtesy abated because she was her age, but she went white. I almost got up. His eye was on me. It was my unfair advantage. I balanced my cup, and somehow put my plate in safety. Inside me I was shouting, ‘Don’t you remember?
It’s Sheil
.’

Sir Herbert said, ‘Mildred, I’m going to ring for some more tea. Mine is a little cold; I’m afraid I was rather late,’ and Sheil caught my eye and considered the remark, her head on one side. I made the excuse of cakes the opportunity for leaning over her.

‘He’s got to
say
things. All by himself,’ I reminded under my breath, and the strained look on her face passed.

‘But – he’s being rather a
pompadour
,’ she whispered.

‘Then make the most of it. You know he “pomps.” Think of the scene he had with Katrine last week!’

Sheil laughed aloud. Lady Toddington put a plate down, abruptly, and Sir Herbert came over to us, swept off his pince-nez, at which gesture Sheil beamed.

‘I believe I have to thank a certain young lady for a bunch of violets. It was very sweet and kind of you.’

Sheil leant forward, earnestly. ‘Did you show them to Henry?’

‘Henry?’

‘She means Mr
, I’ve forgotten his name. Your Associate,’ I put in, helplessly.

‘Nicholls,’ prompted Sheil.

‘Mathewson. No. I don’t think I gave him the opportunity. A lady’s gift, you know . . . ’ ‘Katrine said he’d say you oughtn’t to accept them, and that I was a Very Strange Young Person. But Katrine isn’t interested in him. She doesn’t know what a dear he really is,’ Sheil explained.

‘He is a very charming fellow,’ admitted Sir Herbert.

‘Isn’t he!’ said Sheil. ‘It must be so more than wonderful for you to have him choose you your favourite lunch things. Is he very disappointed when you go out to the Garrick or the Athenelium?’

Sir Herbert suddenly shook. ‘I should think he’s thankful to be rid of me. I’m rather a terrific old party, you know.’

Sheil nodded. ‘You always say that.’

‘But I don’t lunch out very much.’ (Here I forgot my policeman
rôle
, and leant forward myself.) ‘Sometimes I just have a chop sent in to my room, but far more often I lunch in the Judges’ Mess. The ABC. does the catering.’

‘Yes,’ I answered, ‘cod and shrimp sauce, one-and-two the plate.’

Sheil beamed again. ‘The lambs’ tongues are one-and-two as well.
We
think they ought to be tenpence. But perhaps the Law tongues for the Judges are special and different.’

‘Dear me,’ responded Sir Herbert, ‘you’ve been reading the menu in the hall.’

‘Oh yes. Deirdre always tells us what you’ve had, only of course she thought the menu was only for barristers and people that it didn’t matter what they ate. You see, we never thought of
you
and boiled cod.’

The wintry smile was very kind. ‘My dear, I assure you I eat the most ordinary things.’

‘Mother says you do, but it’s wonderfully difficult to believe.’ Here the maid came in with the tea, and Sheil concentrated upon her. ‘She’s not very like Henderson,’ she mused, ‘but that doesn’t matter a terrible lot.’ Ming waddled in, but to her, forewarned, he was so much dog with no element of surprise. Sir Herbert asked her ‘if she had some pet?’ and the formal, familiar phrasing, together with his outrageous ignorance of Crellie, caused in both of us a Freudian ‘conflict,’ and I thought it was probably time to steer the conversation from anything unfortunate. Sheil, in her present state, was capable of describing his habits after a full meal . . .

‘Yes. Crellie. A wire-haired terrier,’ I replied, and at this insane description Sheil looked reproachful. She put a little paw on his knee. ‘Does Ming do anything interesting?’

‘No,’ answered Sir Herbert, promptly.

‘We thought perhaps he wouldn’t, though Katrine said she was certain he tooled leather, or hammered on copper. It’s Bottles we really love, you know.’

‘Bottles? Bottles of what, pray?’

‘Your Bottles. The fox-terrier. Does he still go for walks with you round the Square after dinner?’

I waited and let them have it out. There was nothing else to do. It had to come, sooner or later.

Sir Herbert put his hand over hers. ‘Aren’t you confusing me with someone else, dear?’ Sheil’s eyes hardened, and he looked anxiously at me. I urgently sent him his cue, and he seemed to recognise an SOS.

‘Bottles . . . m’m . . . what a delightful name for a dog! I feel I have missed a lot in not having a Bottles. And what does Crellie – is it? do?’

‘Oh, nothing,’ answered Sheil distantly.

‘He’s rather High Church,’ I said, recklessly, ‘and after he was the Pope, he used to take the services at St Albans, Teddington, though it never quite came down to confessions.’

Sir Herbert made one of his Bench faces, and then shook again.

‘A Dominican,’ he suggested, ‘a watchdog of the Lord. Well . . . I can conceive that to confess to a terrier would be better than silence, if one loved the beast.’

‘I don’t want to be rude, but I couldn’t confess to Ming,’ Sheil piped.

‘Whyever not?’ asked Lady Toddington, who was busy conducting a temporary vacuum with mother. ‘He’s a temple dog!’

‘Bravo, Mildred!’ answered Sir Herbert, dryly, and her face grew pink.

‘Well – he is!’

‘And don’t say “whyever,”’ I murmured, not daring to catch anybody’s eye.

‘Well, what I always think is: there’s nothing like a dog for company,’ announced Lady Toddington, and at this I hastily looked out of the window and dragged Sheil to it as well. ‘A man with a funny hat,’ I quavered aloud, giving her a hard pinch, and we surveyed the empty street and went on laughing. But Sir Herbert joined us. ‘I see no such person,’ he remarked austerely. ‘He’s gone,’ I answered firmly.

‘And aren’t you coming to talk to me, Sheil?’ asked Lady Toddington.

Sheil went at once. I’m always so thankful that ‘in spite of all temptations’ she isn’t a little drawing-room beast. Meanwhile, much as I love her, I had got Toddy to myself.

14

It was very difficult to believe that he was so near to one that one could touch him. All the others have been so diversely inaccessible. And, for the first time, there were p’s and q’s to be remembered, and one’s age telling against
one.

‘My very dear child’ . . . he’d said that so often and written it, in his letters. And now I was, I suppose, Miss Carne.

And then I looked him in the eye, and saw that I wasn’t doomed to that. Something was coming.

He said, ‘Did I hurt your sister’s feelings about the dogs?’ ‘It’s too long to explain. But we forgot you didn’t know about Crellie and Bottles.’

‘We?’

‘Yes. She forgot more than I did, of course. But I’m in it, too.’

He absently swung his pince-nez. ‘A game?’

‘Let’s call it that.’

‘It sounds full of possibilities. A game . . . m’m . . . and I didn’t play nicely. One would like to please her. What a singularly attractive small person it is! But why she is interested in me is really baffling.’

‘You mean: “To-day, I gave the mother of an unwanted baby penal servitude for throwing it over Blackfriars Bridge, and yesterday I sent a man to the gallows.”’

‘Entirely so.’

‘But, don’t you see that that doesn’t matter to us! It’s part of your business
’ ‘But when, so to speak, is my business not my business? When, as it were, does Mathewson presiding over my lunches come in? And the dog
’ ‘
Crellie!

’ ‘I was alluding to Bottles,’ he countered brusquely, and I laughed in his face, ‘Where do they fit in?’

‘All the time. One can’t always tell when. They just happen.’

‘How did you know that I am attached to Mathewson?’ ‘That grew. But it was also plausible, wasn’t it? And it was all my idea,’ I added proudly.

‘Ah . . . ’ and Sir Herbert thrust his head forward and scanned me with those tired, kind, brown eyes. ‘Tell me, what else do I do?’