The Dust That Falls from Dreams (26 page)

She indicated a blurred photograph in which a young woman in a wide hat was smiling shyly into the camera and waving with her right hand. ‘Whoever she is, she’s very sweet.’

Fairhead fell silent and started to tremble. He put his hand to his forehead and looked as though he were about to faint.

‘Are you all right?’ asked Rosie, looking at him with concern.

‘Did you take your camera to that séance?’ he asked.

‘My Box Brownie?’ said Christabel. ‘I take it everywhere in my bag, just in case something good comes up. Why?’

‘That’s my little sister,’ said Fairhead.

D
aniel found Ottilie alone in the middle of the drawing room. ‘My, this is strange, isn’t it?’ he said, waving his hand to indicate the absolute emptiness of the room.

‘It’s what we always do,’ said Ottilie. ‘It doesn’t matter how careful he is, the sweep always fills the room with horrid black dust and soot. Draping everything with sheets just doesn’t seem to be enough, so we always empty the rooms out completely. It’s funny what turns up sometimes. We found Papa’s magnifying glass under an armchair, and we have absolutely no idea how it got there all the way from his study.’

Daniel went to the window and clasped his hands together behind his back. He remembered vaulting over the wall, and smiled. ‘Ottie?’ he said.

‘Yes?’

‘Do you mind if I ask your advice?’

‘Advice? What advice could I possibly give you?’

‘Well, I find myself in a tricky spot.’

‘Do you? How irksome for you! But how can I help?’

‘It’s Rosie.’

‘Oh well, I suppose I might have known.’

‘Have I made it that obvious?’

‘It’s obvious to me and Christabel and Sophie. We’ve been gossiping about it for ages. You’ve been turning up just like Fairhead when he was after Sophie.’

They went into the conservatory, as if it gave them more privacy, and Daniel asked, ‘What do you think I should do?’

‘I think you should spend a very long time becoming friends with her before you even think of anything like a proposal. You should take her to the moving pictures, and smoking concerts, and art exhibitions, and if it’s freezing you must take her skating, and Mama taught her to play golf, so you might
get her interested in that again. You have hours and hours to get to know each other whilst you’re looking for balls in the rough.’

‘Two months? Do you think that two months would be enough?’

‘No, Daniel. A year at least.’

‘Oh God. A year? It seems unbearable. I’m on such tenterhooks.’

‘You love her that much?’

‘Absolutely smitten.’

‘Daniel, my dear, you do know all about Ashbridge?’

‘Well, of course. We were all Pals, weren’t we?’

‘Rosie is the kind of woman who only ever has one grand passion.’

‘Hmm, that’s not what I wanted to hear, really.’

Ottilie came over and tucked her arm through his, squeezing it reassuringly. She smiled up at him, her dark eyes rich with conspiracy.

‘You know, Ottie,’ said Daniel, ‘you’re a real little darling. If I had any sense I’d have fallen for you.’

‘Well, you know me. I’m a dark horse. My great passion was Archie. I expect you remember.’

‘Of course I do. And he had eyes only for Rosie.’

‘Don’t you think he might be a little upset if you were to marry her?’

‘But he hasn’t seen her for years! I doubt if he thinks of her once a month.’

Ottilie thought, and said, ‘Daniel, I do believe that if I had any sense, I’d fall for you too.’

‘You can be my sister,’ said Daniel. ‘I never had one, and I really wish I did. Boys with sisters are so lucky, don’t you think? Will you be my honorary sister?’

Ottilie stood on tiptoe and kissed him on the cheek. ‘Of course I’ll be your sister. And hope to be your sister-in-law. And I’d love it so much if you could make me an aunt. Fingers crossed.’

She held up her right hand with forefinger and middle finger crossed.

‘Yes, fingers crossed,’ repeated Daniel. ‘You really think it’ll take a year?’

Just then there was a sudden crash as a long pane of glass shattered,
throwing shards all over the conservatory, and a golf ball landed at Daniel’s feet.

‘Oh my goodness!’ exclaimed Ottilie, clutching her hand to her breast. ‘I’ve never had such a shock in my life!’

Daniel went to the window, and saw Mr McCosh striding up the lawn with a golf club in his hand. ‘I think we’ve found the culprit,’ he said.

Hamilton McCosh hurried up the steps of the conservatory. ‘Damn it!’ he said. ‘So sorry. Must have given you a wee surprise! Anyone hurt?’

‘Daddy, aren’t you supposed to shout “Fore!”? And what on earth do you think you’re doing whacking golf balls at the house?’

Hamilton McCosh was abashed. ‘It’s my new golf ball,’ he explained. ‘I realised there was a need for a decent ball you can use for practice in the garden. It would have to weigh the same as the real thing, behave the same in flight, and travel about a quarter as far. I think that this one travels a little too far.’

‘I think it does, Daddy. But why did you have to whack it in this direction?’

‘Well, lassie, I didna want to hit it over the fence, did I? Imagine losing your prototype! I’ve only got the one.’

‘Is this one of your projects with Professor Smithells?’

‘It is indeed.’ McCosh looked at Daniel, and explained. ‘He’s a professor at the Victoria University. We came up with a good gas mask once.’ He held up the ball. ‘We’re going to call it the Gardenrite.’

‘Well, at present, Daddy, it seems to be the Gardenwrong.’

McCosh waved his hand to indicate the shattered glass. ‘Don’t tell your mother. I’ll get on to Beasley straight away, and with any luck she’ll never find out.’

‘Scout’s honour,’ said Ottilie, and Daniel handed the offending golf ball over to Mr McCosh.

‘Ah, thank you, Daniel. Very kind. We’d better get Millicent to come and clear up the mess. Did I tell you I’ve come up with a new golf club? It’s made of a telescopic steel tube so that it compresses down to almost nothing, and the head is adjustable, on a ratchet, so you can make the loft anything you like. Hey
presto, you only need one club! No more lugging round a bag of seven!’

‘It’s a brilliant idea,’ said Daniel cautiously. ‘But I rather like my bag of seven. Having lots of them is part of the fun. They each have their own character.’

McCosh’s face fell, and Daniel felt he should console him. ‘It would be marvellous for travel, though. And of course, I’m only a beginner. What are you going to call it?’

‘The McCosh Patent Universo.’

‘How it trips off the tongue,’ said Ottilie drily. Turning to Daniel, she said, ‘Daddy just invented a kind of bellows where you hold it in one hand and wind a handle with the other.’

‘Mmm,’ said Daniel. ‘Does it work better than the usual kind?’

‘Not at all,’ replied Mr McCosh, ‘but it looks very smart in dark green enamel, and you can fit the handle on either side, and the name is picked out in scarlet paint on the casing. People don’t buy things because they’re better, Daniel, they buy them for the novelty and because they look nice. Novelty’s the thing! Novelty and niceness!’

‘What are you going to call it?’

‘The McCosh Patent BlazoBrite Mechanical Bellows,’ said Ottilie, on her father’s behalf. ‘Another masterpiece of simplicity and economy. Bound to catch on.’

N
ow that the Snapshot League had been dissolved, Christabel was wondering what to do with her time. As with her sisters, the years of strenuous activity during the war had given her a taste for doing something useful and creative, and she could not envisage herself sitting at home in the drawing room, embroidering and making conversation until the right man turned up. Accordingly she devoted much time to looking in the Situations Vacant pages of newspapers and magazines. It was in one of these magazines that she found that there was an exhibition of war paintings being put on at a small gallery in Dulwich, not far from the school. It was well reviewed, but, since she could not persuade anyone else to accompany her, she went to see it on her own.

There were ten paintings occupying the whole of one wall, and they were very striking indeed. One was of two soldiers, one German and the other British, each with a cigarette in his mouth and a bandage about his forehead, sitting side by side and arm in arm against a low wall at a casualty clearing station. They were grinning and waving as if it were a holiday snap. Another picture showed an expanse of glutinous mud with a few broken trees and a smashed limber. Christabel was convinced that the artist had pounded real mud into the oil paint. Another showed a French officer standing smartly to attention in his red-and-blue uniform. His head, however, was a skull, depicted in the most extraordinary detail. Christabel shuddered. There was another, very like the famous Singer Sargent painting, that showed soldiers with bandages about their eyes, temporarily blinded by gas, each with a hand on the shoulder of the man in front. These soldiers were of all nations, however. There was a very lovely painting of a rifle, propped casually in the corner of a room, and another of a nurse at a table improvised out of ammunition boxes, slumped in exhaustion over a half-drunk cup of tea.

Christabel became aware of someone standing next to her, looking at the same pictures. ‘What do you think?’ asked the stranger. Her voice was low and melodious, with a hint of an aristocratic drawl.

‘These are the best pictures in the whole exhibition,’ said Christabel. ‘They’ve got so much…’

‘Pathos?’

‘Well, I was thinking personality rather than pathos. Of course the pathos is very obvious. You’d have to be an idiot not to see that, but what I like is, well, they’re not at all conventional.’

‘The work of a truly individual artist?’

‘Absolutely. And technically they’re quite brilliant. Do you have any idea who it is?’ She leaned forward to read the signature. ‘Gaskell.’

‘I can introduce you if you like.’

‘Oh, would you? Is he here?’

The woman laughed, turned to face Christabel, and held out her hand. ‘Gaskell,’ she said.

Christabel looked at her in astonishment. She was extremely tall, with short black hair slicked back with pomade, and was dressed as a man in a tweed suit and brown brogues. In her left hand she carried a long holder with an unlit cigarette in it, and a monocle dangled on a cord from the buttonhole of her jacket.

‘Your eyes!’ exclaimed Christabel, and Gaskell laughed.

‘My best feature,’ she said, with an air of proud satisfaction. Her eyes were a rich and bright emerald green, and fixed on Christabel with a beautiful, sincere and humorous intensity. ‘Let’s go out and have a cup of tea and a piece of cake,’ she said.

They sat and chatted, and then went for a walk, getting on so well that they decided to go to the West End and see a play. In the interval Christabel found a telephone box and phoned home. It was answered by Rosie. ‘Where are you? We’ve been worried sick!’

‘Actually, I’m in the West End, and I’m going to stay in Kensington tonight.’

‘Kensington?’

‘I’ve made a new friend. She’s marvellous. You’ll really adore her. Anyway, I’m going to stay with her tonight. She says that her
flat is frightfully bohemian, and –’ She was interrupted by the bleeping of expiring time, and the last Rosie heard was ‘Gaskell, have you got another penny?’ before the telephone was cut off.

Gaskell’s rooms were really a fully functioning studio, with canvases propped up against chairs and walls, pots of paint lined up, and brushes decongealing in jars of turpentine. The smell was intoxicating. Gaskell had been using the walls to try out colours, and you would have had to look up to see that they had once been white. There was a marvellously vigorous multicoloured patch where she had been cleaning the excess oil from her brushes, with strong diagonal strokes that had built up into thick contours. There was a large new canvas, still at the charcoal stage, which was going to be of a dead horse.

The two women drank sherry out of teacups, ate anchovy-paste sandwiches straight off the table, and talked about photography. ‘I always take lots of photographs before I do a painting,’ said Gaskell. ‘Otherwise it’s terribly difficult to sketch things quickly enough, or get anyone to pose for long enough.’

‘The dead horse would have been easy,’ pointed out Christabel.

‘Very true, but that particular one has been dead for two years, and by now it would be quite a different thing to paint. I took lots of pictures of it. Of course, I had to make notes about the colours.’

‘Will you teach me how to take photographs artistically?’ asked Christabel. ‘I think it might be my vocation, but I have such a long way to go technically.’

‘Why don’t we do joint exhibitions?’ suggested Gaskell. ‘Photographs and paintings together would double the potential, I would think.’

‘I think you’d better wait and see if I’m any good,’ said Christabel.

They killed the bottle of sherry between them, and Gaskell fetched Christabel a glass of water, saying, ‘Better drink this, or you’ll have a head in the morning.’

That night Christabel lay wide awake in Gaskell’s bed, her head swimming with alcohol, and Gaskell tried to accommodate her long frame on a sofa, covered only by a rug. It seemed that they could not stop talking, no matter how they tried to get to sleep.
They had forgotten to stack up the grate, and it grew very cold. At two o’clock in the morning, Christabel said, ‘Aren’t you absolutely freezing?’

‘I wouldn’t say I’m toasting,’ replied Gaskell.

‘Come and get in with me and we’ll keep each other warm,’ said Christabel.

‘I’m not sure…well…I mean…’

‘Oh, come on, it’ll be like being at school again. And I often cuddle up to my sisters when it’s cold.

‘Isn’t this nice?’ said Christabel happily, as they matched contours, and began to warm up deliciously.

‘You smell just like a puppy,’ said Gaskell, putting her arm over Christabel, and tucking up.

A
fter a few weeks had passed, the AC Six was still in the driveway, and Mr and Mrs McCosh were beginning to find it a nuisance.

‘Why doesn’t that fellow come and get the damned thing?’ Mr McCosh demanded frequently.

‘In case Daniel’s here and gives him another thrashing,’ said Ottilie. ‘I wouldn’t come back if I were him.’

‘He’s probably too ashamed,’ said Rosie. ‘I would be.’

‘He might be in prison,’ said Christabel. ‘He’s a murderer, if you think about it.’

‘A manslaughterer, at the very least,’ said Mr McCosh. ‘I hope he’s sewing up mailbags for many years to come. But what are we going to do about the damned AC? The hackney carriages can’t get round the crescent and have to drop us off outside in the road.’

‘It is too humiliating to be dropped outside in the road,’ said Mrs McCosh. ‘Just imagine if Their Majesties were to come by, and had to be dropped in the road. It would be too mortifying.’

‘Or the Shah of Persia,’ said Ottilie.

‘Indeed,’ concurred Mrs McCosh.

‘Or the Maharaja of Morvi,’ said Christabel.

‘Or the Grand Panjandrum of Mysorebaksyde,’ said Mr McCosh.

‘Thank you, that’s quite enough,’ said Mrs McCosh. ‘What does one have to do to be taken seriously? What are we going to do about the horseless carriage?’

‘One of us should go to the police station and try to find out what’s going on,’ suggested Rosie. ‘We can ask the police to sort it out.’

‘Your idea,’ said Ottilie. ‘You do it.’

‘I’ll do it if you come with me,’ said Rosie.

The two sisters walked to the police station and found a sergeant
at the desk, who was not at all interested. ‘Once it’s been there for ten years, I think I’m right in saying that it’s yours,’ he said, ‘but I might have made it up. Better ask a lawyer.’

‘Can’t you give us the man’s name and address?’ asked Rosie. ‘Or ask someone from the station nearest to his house to go and see him and ask him to dispose of it?’

‘I’ll see what I can do, miss’ said the policeman wearily. As the British police, then as now, measure out their lives by the intervals between cups of tea, he resolved to deal with the matter at a quarter past eleven.

Thus it was that one week later Constable Dusty Miller arrived at the house and presented Rosie with a handwritten message stating that the gentleman concerned had jumped bail and apparently absconded abroad in a Vickers Vimy. Furthermore, he had been fined £600 during the war for hoarding. ‘He was an all-round nasty piece of work,’ concluded the constable.

‘Gracious me, what shall we do with the car, then?’ asked Rosie.

‘If I were you, I’d just use it, miss. I don’t think ’e’s coming back.’ E’s probably sipping gin in Rangoon. I’d get it insured, though.’

‘Hmm,’ said Rosie doubtfully. ‘Oh well, thank you so much, Constable, and do call in at the kitchen. I’m sure Cookie will give you a cup of tea.’

‘Thank you very much, miss, that’s very kind, miss.’ This was something he had been intending to do anyway, but it was certainly congenial to have permission. ‘How are you getting on with the cat, miss?’

‘He’s always climbing the curtains. It drives my mother mad. Then he reverses down with great difficulty. He’s growing terribly quickly.’

‘Ah, a curtain climber. Fluff mostly stops us writing our reports. She likes to sit on the paper and play with the pens. She knocked over a pot of ink last week. And she turned over the milk jug.’

‘We were going to find a home for Caractacus,’ said Rosie, ‘but I don’t think we will.’

‘Well, that’s the trouble with cats, miss,’ said the constable wisely.