The Chinese Shawl (8 page)

“Then it’s most unsafe.”

“Oh, he won’t do anything now—he was all in. All right, Aunt Agnes, I’ll put it away.”

She went out by the door to the octagon room, and through it to her own sitting-room.

Laura thought, “She’s very, very brave. I ought to admire her, but I can’t. That poor creature had been her husband, and she doesn’t care—she doesn’t care a bit.”

Petra, beside her, hummed under her breath:

“Then to Sylvia let us sing,

For Sylvia is excelling—”

Her cheeks were scarlet and her eyes brightly mutinous. Alistair was saying, “Where she’s so marvellous—” And then Tanis was back again, and Agnes Fane broke in in her deep voice.

“What have you done with it?”

“Put it in my bureau, darling.”

Laura undressed and got into bed. It had been the longest day she had ever known. She seemed to have travelled a thousand miles from the Laura Fane who had come up to town to stay with Cousin Sophy and see her solicitor, not much more than forty-eight hours ago. That there were other longer days ahead waiting to drag out interminable hours of anxiety and pain, she fortunately did not know. She had had a deliciously hot bath, she was relaxed and warm. The thought of Carey was like something shining in her heart.

She was about to stretch out her hand and switch off the bed-side light, when there was a knock at the door and Tanis Lyle came in. With a brief, “I thought you wouldn’t be asleep yet,” she crossed to the foot of the bed and stood there in a long black dressing-gown over pale green pyjamas. They were the sort of pyjamas which suggested the bedroom scene in a West End play. Laura, who had never imagined that they existed in private life, gazed at them entranced. The dressing-gown was also very intriguing—a tailored garment of heavy, dull silk with a gold and green curlicue on the pocket which was probably intended to be a monogram.

She said, “What is it, Tanis?” and Tanis Lyle came round the bed-post and sat down with her back against it.

“Just a talk,” she said. “There’s always such a crowd, and I want to talk to you about Aunt Agnes and the house. She’s mad keen to buy it—you know that.”

Laura sat up straight against her pillows. She really did feel that this was the last straw. It was bad enough to have quasi-parental pressure brought to bear upon her by Mr. Metcalfe in his office, and to have Cousin Agnes being pathetic in the drawing-room about wanting to see Tanis’s children grow up at the Priory, but to be pursued at midnight and cornered in bed when you couldn’t possibly get away was really the limit. Her eyes brightened and her colour rose as she said,

“Yes, I know she wants to buy it—but I don’t think it’s any good talking about it, because I haven’t made up my mind. You can’t do a thing like that in a hurry. I’ve got to think first.”

“And talk it over—oh, not with me, but shall we say with Carey Desborough.”

There was certainly no beating about the bush with Tanis. Whatever the situation might be, she was right in the middle of it. In a way it made things easier, because you knew where you were.

Laura kept a steady look and said,

“Why do you say that?”

“It’s true, isn’t it?”

“What makes you think so, Tanis?”

Tanis laughed.

“You needn’t fence, my dear. For the moment, and for what it’s worth, Carey seems to have fallen for you. It won’t last—his affairs never do—but here and now he’s gone in off the deep end, and you won’t get me to believe that he hasn’t told you so.”

Laura had turned rather pale. She said,

“I’m not trying to make you believe anything.”

Tanis swung a bare foot from which the soft black slipper had fallen.

“Well, that being that, suppose we get down to brass tacks. As I was saying, Carey has certainly told you that he has fallen for you, but I don’t suppose it has occurred to him to tell you that he has quite a big income. Old Desborough was in iron and steel. There used to be pots of money, and I believe it’s still quite a tidy sum—in fact our Carey is a catch. It’s one of the things he’s modest about, so I don’t suppose he’s mentioned it.”

Laura said, “No.” She had a bewildered, driven feeling.

“In fact, you were prepared to love him for himself alone. Too romantic! What a pity he’s engaged to me.”

Laura said nothing. Her eyes spoke for her. Wide and indignant, they gave Tanis the lie. And Tanis laughed.

“My dear, do you really believe every word he says? Anyhow the point is that if I say we are engaged, everyone will believe me, and the aunts will swear to it. If Carey backs out, there will be the most awful stink, and your name, my dear, will be simply and utterly mud. I don’t think you’re stupid, so you can probably see that for yourself. You come in from outside, you smash up my engagement just as your mother smashed Aunt Agnes’s, and what do you expect—that people will receive you with open arms? All right, you just go ahead and try! Only don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

“Tanis!”

Tanis bent down to retrieve her shoe, soft and black like the coat, with the same green and gold monogram. She slipped it on and turned a sudden smile on Laura.

“Don’t go up in smoke. There’s a way out—if you’ll take it.”

For a moment Laura had been angrier than she had ever been in her life before. Now suddenly she was cool. She thought, “She did that on purpose—she wanted to make me angry. Why?” She got the answer to her own question— “You don’t think when you’re angry. She’s got something up her sleeve. She doesn’t want me to have time to think.” She said,

“I don’t know what you mean.”

Tanis nodded.

“Not yet. But you will—I’m going to tell you. If you and Carey mean business you’re in a jam, and I’m the only person who can get you out of it. As it happens, I don’t mind doing a deal. You and Carey want my help. If I go to the aunts and tell them that Carey and I made up our minds months ago that we’d hate being married to each other, there won’t be any stink. They won’t like it, but they’ll have to lump it. Well, I’m prepared to do that if you’ll do something for me.”

Laura thought, “What’s coming? What’s she going to say? I don’t like it. What am I going to say?” For the moment she said nothing, only kept her eyes on Tanis, sitting straight up against the white pillows in her pink night-dress.

“You don’t ask what it is? Well, it’s this Priory business. You can have Carey if—”

“If I sell the Priory to Cousin Agnes.”

Tanis leaned back. Her eyes were wide and smiling. Her lips smiled too. She said in a gracious, easy voice,

“Oh, no, my dear—it’s not that way at all. You can have Carey if you promise not to sell.”

It was so unexpected that Laura’s rising anger just fell down flat. Astonishment left her with nothing to say but a primitive, childish,

“What?”

Tanis was smilingly pleased to explain.

“I don’t want Aunt Agnes to buy the Priory. I’d much rather have the twelve thousand pounds.”

Laura said “Oh—” She thought, “I’m behaving as if I was half-witted. I suppose she knows what she’s driving at. She can do the talking herself.” She waited with an air of grave expectancy which exasperated Tanis to the very quick of her bones.

“Well?” she said a little sharply. “Is it a deal?”

Laura shook her head.

“I want to know why.”

Tanis laughed.

“Cards on the table? All right—I don’t mind. But I should think it was fairly obvious. The aunts want me to settle down. They want to bring the brat here and bring him up at the Priory—”

Laura said, “What brat?”

“Didn’t you know that Jeff and I had produced one? That’s what gave the show away. Rotten luck, wasn’t it? Well, anyhow there he is, up in the north with Jeff’s sister who is married to some ghastly parson. I haven’t seen him since he was about a month old, but Aunt Agnes keeps in touch. She’s getting keener and keener about the wretched brat—I believe she thinks he’s like your father. That’s why she’s dead set on my marrying Carey. You see, it’s all right for Mrs. Desborough to have a son by a former marriage, but when it comes to Miss Lyle and her little boy, Aunt Agnes mercifully blanches. So I’ve been able to stave it all off up to date, but if she bought the Priory she’d never rest until she got Bill here and me married to someone, just to put us on the County map. You don’t know what she’s like when she’s set on anything. I’ve a pretty good will of my own, but I’m simply not in Aunt Agnes’s class. Besides she’s got the whip hand of me over the money. She knows perfectly well that if it comes to the pinch I won’t risk being cut out of her will.”

Laura went on looking at her. She was horrified, fascinated, and intensely interested. Her face showed only a grave attention. It would have given Tanis a lot of pleasure to smack it. It was not civilization that restrained her, but a determination to get her own way. Laura, slapped, would certainly prove recalcitrant. She therefore exercised considerable self-control, and after a silence which Laura showed no signs of breaking returned to the charge.

“Well, there you are—if she can’t have the Priory, she’ll let up on getting me married and having the brat. Is it a deal?”

Even then Laura did not speak at once. She continued to look thoughtful. At last she said,

“I don’t like it, Tanis.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t like any of it—going behind Cousin Agnes’s back, and—and—making a bargain. I don’t like it.”

Tanis got to her feet. The movement was a graceful one— all her movements were graceful—but it came a thought too quickly upon Laura’s words. She said,

“Squeamish—aren’t you. Better think it over. If you sell you’ll get twelve thousand pounds and you won’t get Carey—unless you’d like to steal him and take the consequences like your mother did. If you don’t sell, even the aunts can’t say very much, for after all the darned place does belong to you, and I’ll smooth out the Carey business. Think it over. I’m going to bed.”

Laura lay awake a long time in the dark. There was a high wind moving outside. The casement which she had set open creaked. She could see the shape of the window where she had drawn the curtain back. The wind and that faint creaking sound ran like an accompaniment below her thoughts and kept them moving to an odd reluctant rhythm. Carey—the Priory—Tanis—the child who was somewhere up in the north—Lilian and Oliver—the little boy who was like Oliver—Agnes Fane, with her heart set on him—threads shifting, tangling, lacing and interlacing… Only one way with a tangle—cut it out and start all over again. Drifting into her thoughts the phrase, read somewhere or heard—“Atropos with the shears.”… The drift went on and took her into sleep.

She dreamed she was walking with Carey in the ruined church. The air was dark. Someone was crying. They went among the fallen stones towards the broken altar at the east end. It was their marriage, but she wasn’t dressed as a bride. She was wearing her black lace dress and the Chinese shawl. It was very cold. She put out her hand to find Carey, and he wasn’t there. She was alone with that desolate weeping—

She woke, shuddering, and it was a long time before she slept again.

Next morning Tanis took her round the house. There were a great many rooms, a few of which were permanently unused, and others only in occasional use as guest-rooms. The north wing besides accommodating a staff of five also found place for two families of evacuees. Each family had a large room fitted with bunks as a dormitory, and a smaller one which they could use as they liked. There was a bathroom at their disposal upstairs, and a bathroom and a kitchen below.

Laura met Mrs. Judd, small and wiry, coping cheerfully with communal life in the country and controlling an aged grandmother and four lively children with brisk efficiency. She also met Mrs. Slade, a limp person with a mother-in-law, three children and a flapper sister. The mother-in-law was bedridden but dynamic, the flapper sister as pert as they come, the children spoiled and vociferous. Mrs. Slade, whose husband was at sea, yearned for Rotherhithe with its crowded, noisy streets, and confided in all and sundry that if it came to a choice between being bombed and having to do another winter in the country, she was going back and she didn’t care who knew it.

Tanis was not disposed to linger. She took Laura down the back stairs, remarking, “You won’t want to see the kitchen and all that sort of thing,” and led the way back to the hall.

“You’ve seen the dining-room. Aunt Agnes has a sort of office in this room opposite. She only uses it for business. You can look in if you like—she won’t be there. It’s all filing cabinets and things like that. Too bleak.”

They went through the hall to the drawing-room.

“You can see the view now, such as it is. It’s quite good in the summer when the roses are out, but it’s grim at present.”

The three west windows looked upon a paved terrace which ran the whole width of the house. Beyond were rose-beds, dark against clipped green turf. Beyond the beds there was a wide green lawn with a magnificent cedar, the whole enclosed by a yew hedge, tall and black, with arches cut in it here and there. It was not the best of days for seeing a garden. The wind had dropped. The sky was grey. A mist obscured the distant view.

Laura moved on to the south window from which she and Carey had looked last night. The west wall of the Priory church ran level with the inner wall of the drawing-room, and the terrace turned the corner to meet it, forming rather a charming little courtyard. Pressed into the angle between the church and the house, and partly built into the latter, was the octagon tower running up to a pepper-pot roof topped by a weathercock. The ruin, seen in the daylight, was very picturesque. The stone traceries of the rose window had by some miracle remained intact. A yellow jasmine bloomed against the wall. Across the tower a great camellia spread its shining emerald leaves. It was thick with bud. Near the middle of the bush a half-expanded flower shone like a scarlet jewel. Laura was enchanted. The place was an enchanted place. If she could only have been there alone—

She turned reluctantly from the window and followed Tanis to the door through which Miss Fane had made her entrance the night before. Open, it disclosed an empty room with a polished floor, whose octagon shape showed only on the side towards the church, the right-hand side being flattened off to take the lift. On the left two archaic lancet windows flanked by straight crimson curtains looked into the church, and between them, partly concealed by the velvet folds, was a stout oak door with a heavy iron lock and hinges.

Tanis pushed aside the curtains, turned a portentous key, and pulled the door towards her. It opened without a sound. Somehow Laura had expected the hinges to groan and the key to grate in the lock, but there wasn’t a sound. She was to remember that afterwards.

She moved, and found herself at the top of eight or nine steps leading down into the church. Immediately she had the feeling that she had seen this place before. Only there was something wrong about it. She ought to be standing down there on the rough grass looking up at the steps. It came to her that she had dreamed about standing at the bottom of the steps, and that the dream had frightened her.

Tanis was saying, “The drop to the church is a bit of a surprise, isn’t it? But the house is built up on a plinth to make room for cellars underneath. The seventeenth century was great on cellars.”

As she spoke, the telephone bell rang. She stepped back and went through the door which had faced them as they came from the drawing-room, leaving it open behind her. Laura caught a glimpse of pale, unusual panelling and sea-green curtains—windows looking to the front of the house and into the church. She stood where she was, not liking to follow, and heard Tanis say in a warm, pleased voice,

“Oh, Tim—it’s you!”

She moved towards the drawing-room, but before she could reach the door Tanis was speaking again.

“Oh, yes, you’re going to see me. Come over and dance tonight. We’ve got a houseful… Yes, of course I mean Sylvia too. Better come to dinner. I expect the food will go round, and if it’s rabbit you won’t know, because Mrs. Dean camouflages it till nobody can swear they’re not eating pheasant or anything else she likes to call it. Actually, I believe, we’ve really got pheasant, so now you can just keep guessing… Well, you’ll be over at eight?… That will be divine. Love to Sylvia.”

She rang off, and found Laura in the drawing-room.

“How tactful! But I never talk compromising secrets with the door open. That was Tim Madison. He and Sylvia are dining, and we’ll dance afterwards. He’s Navy—waiting for a board to pass him fit for sea again after being bombed or torpedoed or something. He’s practically all right again. Irish, and the most perfect partner.”

“And Sylvia?”

Tanis shrugged.

“His wife. That’s the trouble with sailors—they will marry.”

“Don’t you like her?”

Tanis laughed with genuine amusement.

“I should adore anyone Tim had married.”