Collected Works of E M Delafield

by E M Delafield

  He looked no older, although it was ten years since she had seen him last.

  “How nice to see you again! And you haven’t changed in the very least. Sit down, and let’s be comfy and chat till Reggie comes in. I heard about you last night, of course, from my Sophie.”

  “Fitzmaurice’s daughter?”

  Idiot! Clarissa gave him one of her straightest looks.

  “Yes — our girl. I want you to see her.” She’d already decided that. “I’m going to be quite frank and straightforward with you, Cliffy. I may still call you that? Good! I suppose the Lacquerriéres want to hear about Sophie?”

  “Naturally.”

  “Not in the least naturally. They turned her over to me, lock, stock and barrel, when she was an inconvenient child of ten years old, and as I’m sure you’ll remember, I told you at the time that I was either to have absolute control over her — or none at all. Well — it’s been absolute. I’m going to tell you quite candidly that I’ve done simply everything for her. She’s been my own child as completely as my Lucien has. It’s been very difficult for me too. When I got her she was just old enough to have learnt every single thing she shouldn’t and nothing that she should. And it’s been the very devil pulling her into shape. But I’ve done it. The child owes everything in the world to me and she knows it. I’ve got her complete confidence and she adores me and, frankly, Cliffy — so she ought.”

  Little Montgomery continued to look at her solemnly through his double eyeglasses. At last he spoke.

  “A rather — peculiar — thing has happened. The Princesse de Candi-Laquerriére has recently won a — a lawsuit that has kept her in France, I may say, for years. She proposes now to pay a visit to England.”

  Clarissa raised her shaven eyebrows.

  “Well?”

  “The Princesse wants to take a house in Somersetshire where she once lived as a child. I — I told her that it would be better to ascertain your views — and Fitzmaurice’s — in regard to his daughter, but as you are so very seldom at Mardale, and as the Princesse and her daughter do not care about going out, it seems very unlikely that there would be any meeting.”

  He paused, and carefully looked away from her.

  “The other daughter, Aldegonde, died abroad some years ago, as you know.”

  “Otherwise they would hardly come and settle at my gates, I suppose,” commented Mrs. Fitzmaurice drily. “Though, really, nowadays these situations are constantly occurring. Americans think nothing of them, why should we? I may as well tell you at once that if Sophie meets these relations of hers, I’m perfectly prepared to let her behave as she would to anybody else.”

  With inward amusement she perceived that beads of damp had gathered on the temples of the Princesse’s emissary.

  “I perfectly understand,” he said formally. “I — we — felt it was right to get your views in advance. In point of fact, it seems extremely improbable that — anything in the nature of a meeting will ever take place. The Princesse is not apt to — to remain very long in one place, and the house she has in mind is only to be let furnished for a year. You only spend a very few weeks every summer at Mardale, I believe?”

  “Usually. It may be different this year. I’ve not yet definitely arranged our plans,” said Clarissa. For all her alleged outspokenness, there ran through her a streak of rather vulgar secretiveness that she sometimes referred to as inherited business instinct.

  “You must come and see us, Cliffy, at Mardale. I’m going to have some parties there, for my Sophie and her brother — that is, if we’re there long enough.”

  “Her — ?”

  “You haven’t forgotten my boy, Lucien?”

  “Oh — no.”

  “He’s come down from Oxford for a couple of days, and goes back this afternoon. I want you to see him.”

  “I’m sorry,” Cliffe Montgomery stood up. “I really must be going. I — I shall hope to meet your son some other time.”

  She let him take his departure, forgetting that she had said he must wait and see his old friend Reggie. Then she summoned Lucien, and told him it was time he started.

  “Good-bye, darling. Behave yourself. Remember, I’m going to forget what’s happened, and it’s up to you to show me that I can trust you in future.”

  “Good-bye, mother.”

  He bent his fair head and just touched her face with his lips.

  “See you at Mardale.”

  “Is your bag down?”

  “In the car. I’m just going to say good-bye to Sophie.”

  “Why isn’t she down here?” Clarissa’s hand was on the bell.

  “She’s putting a stitch in a glove for me, like a dutiful sister.”

  He dashed upstairs, two steps at a time. Clarissa, her gaze alert, looked after him.

  The long whirr-rr of the telephone-bell sounded from her writing-table. With an exclamation of annoyance, she turned away and went downstairs to her little study on the ground floor.

  In the room that had once been their schoolroom, and was now used by Sophie as a sitting-room, Lucien found her.

  She held out a worn leather motoring-glove with a smile.

  “Here you are!”

  “Thank you, darling. I’ve not got much time — Clarissa would have called me before this if the telephone-bell hadn’t mercifully rung just as I told her that you were mending my glove like the dutiful sister that you are.”

  “Am I?”

  “Neither one nor the other, my sweet. Thank God! But we can let Clarissa think so, as long as it keeps her quiet.”

  “Lucien” — Sophie slipped her hand into his, and he held it fast, smiling down at her. “Don’t you think the whole summer at Mardale will be heavenly?”

  “Perfectly wonderful. We’re going for walks, and rides — just you and I together — and—”

  “Lu — cien!”

  The boy and girl exchanged a look.

  “I knew that would happen. She’ll be up here directly if I don’t go. Don’t come down, sweet.”

  “Write often — and I will too.”

  “Of course. Don’t let Clarissa bully you — and think of the summer we’re going to have!”

  She lifted her face to his and he kissed her soft cheek.

  “Lucien, hurry up!” came peremptorily from the landing below.

  Lucien went.

  Sophie, whose colour had risen slightly, stood still in the middle of the room until the distant sound of the front-door shutting reached her ears. Then she went across to the window and looked down into the street below until she caught a glimpse of the long, low, scarlet-painted car just turning the corner, its blunt nose headed for Piccadilly.

  V

  “ANARAJAPURAH”

  MONTGOMERY, from Berkeley Square, proceeded to the obscure Kensington hotel in which he was to meet Alberta de Candi-Laquerriere.

  She greeted him with a telegram from the Princesse:

  “Have taken Anarajapurah furnished for one year stop tell Cliffe stop writing you long letter to-night full particulars stop all my love darling mother.”

  In ten years the Princesse had not altered, and many of her characteristics seemed to have become intensified.

  She still wrote immense cables and telegrams where post cards would have sufficed; she still appeared unable to refrain from excessive endearments that unbearably exasperated Alberta; and she was still capable of suddenly taking decisive steps, such as the renting of a house, after giving her solemn assurance to do nothing of the kind until Cliffe, or Alberta, or her lawyer, as the case might be, should have sanctioned it.

  Cliffe looked at Alberta, dismayed rather than surprised.

  “That’s the house in Somersetshire that was to be let furnished and that we were to look at for her?”

  “Yes,” said Alberta. “Why ‘Anarajapurah’?”

  Why, indeed? A dim idea, in which he saw nothing humorous, that it was like the Princesse to find a house with so unique and impossible a name, crossed Montgom
ery’s harassed mind.

  “There seems very little point now in saying that I’ve seen Clarissa Fitzmaurice. As I thought, they’re very little at Mardale; and she seems to have no objection to the idea of Sophie’s meeting her own mother’s relations.”

  “Then I might have spoken to her at the dance last night?”

  “I imagine that Clarissa would be entirely incapable of appreciating the scruples that made you not speak to her,” returned Montgomery sententiously.

  Alberta pushed her hair away from her forehead.

  She looked more like other people by daylight, especially in the black-and-white knitted silk that had replaced the orange velvet, and it was greatly to the advantage of her appearance that her gaunt neck and arms and prominent collar-bones should be covered up.

  When she smiled the inevitable suggestion of a slight absurdity, induced by her exaggeratedly tragic expression, disappeared and gave way to the impression of acute intelligence that lay beneath. Even at her best, it would have been difficult to believe that Alberta was not more than forty years of age.

  “All this because mother can remember that she once picked primroses in a Somersetshire lane when she was five years old!”

  “I know. This is the very house.”

  “But it’s absurd,” said Alberta — with resignation, however, for she would not be obliged to go to the house in Somersetshire unless she wished to do so. She led a nomadic, erratic existence, sometimes paying visits amongst her innumerable relations, sometimes undertaking the performance of some unspecified “work” that usually concerned social welfare.

  “As she has taken the house it’s waste of time for us to go and look at it.”

  “Quite waste of time — and of money. I need not really have come over here at all. I could have come later with her and Catiche,” Alberta pointed out.

  Cliffe Montgomery was silent. He knew that the frail and temporary structure of mutual forbearance that hung, like a delicate bridge, between Alberta and the Princesse would not have withstood the strain of an additional week together.

  Alberta, who knew it too, sighed and shrugged her shoulders.

  “And what about the move?” she inquired. “Shall I go and help, or will you?”

  “We don’t yet know when it’s to be.”

  Alberta smiled slightly.

  “Oh yes, we do. Immediately. You know that her moves always take place immediately.”

  Cliffe’s attempt at a responsive smile was but a wintry gleam.

  “We shall get her letter the day after to-morrow at latest.”

  Experience of the Princesse’s methods might have led Cliffe to add that probably more telegrams would reach them before the letter, but he had already come as near to spoken criticism as he ever permitted himself to come and said nothing more.

  “Sophie Fitzmaurice is pretty, isn’t she?”

  “Very.”

  “She’s not in the least like Aldegonde, or any of the Laquerriéres.”

  “Not in the least. She’s not like Fitzmaurice either.”

  “Oh poor little thing!” ejaculated Sophie’s aunt. “I wonder if we shall see her again. They don’t spend much time at Mardale.”

  “I believe not. Alberta,” said Cliffe Montgomery, “I think I had better go and look at that house. We know nothing about it except what the house-agents have written and what your mother remembers.”

  “I have never heard her say that she remembered anything, except that there were primroses in the lanes, and a picture on the stairs of a girl’s head against a gold background that she used to admire.”

  “Yes. When she was five years old. She told me about the picture too. But there are other things, more important. I had better go.”

  “Very well,” Alberta agreed.

  She did not offer to accompany him, and he went alone to Somersetshire two days later by train.

  Although it was late in the spring, the country looked cold, sodden and uninviting. Occasional white curls of mist floated above the red of the ploughed fields. A thatched roof showed here and there, but isolated red brick cottages, topped with glistening slates, predominated.

  An old, noisy and battered taxi had been sent by the owner of the house to meet him, and in it he was driven, through incredibly muddy lanes, to the village, of which “Anarajapurah” appeared to be the principal house.

  It stood, perched on a small hill, about a mile away from the village, and Cliffe saw with relief that it was not as bad as its name. It was, in fact, more like a small country-house than the villa that he had expected. It was a white house, cob-built, with a slate roof, and stood enclosed in cob walls. Double doors, bearing vestiges of red paint, opened on to a square yard built round with outhouses and stables. Higher up the hill, a white gate stood, also wide open, leading from the lane up a very short gravel incline bordered with flowering shrubs. The house itself, although without any particular distinction, might be, he judged, some two hundred years old, and was not without a certain home-like, characteristically English, charm. Beech-trees stood quite close to it, and a rough paddock lay beyond the garden.

  Cliffe Montgomery, in his neat, light overcoat, his felt hat and his expensive brown boots, got out of his taxi and told the driver to wait.

  The door of the house stood wide open, and after ringing a bell that jangled, he looked into “Anarajapurah’s” square hall. It had a red, blue and yellow tiled floor, only covered here and there with worn rugs that he judged to be Indian. The walls were painted blue, and the stair carpet was blue.

  His eye instinctively sought for the picture with the gold background, but he could not see it. On the whole, he felt that he liked the house. The Princesse, he knew already, would like it, for she liked any place that was connected with her recollections of the past.

  An unsophisticated-looking maid, pulling down her sleeves as she came, conducted him to a room opening out of the hall.

  This, at least, was charming — long and low, with two windows facing south, a log fire burning on an open hearth, carpet and curtains and chintzes all fading from orange to a dim, yellowish rose-colour, and a general prevalence of walnut furniture, comfortably unconfined to any particular period. Gazing round, as he was accustomed to do, with the eyes of the Princesse, Cliffe also instantly noted that there were many books in the room, and a black cat sitting on a window-seat.

  “I’ll call Miss Silver, sir,” said the maid.

  Miss Silver did not keep him waiting. She was elderly, distinguished, dressed in tweeds that unconsciously pleased him because they were shabby, and hung crookedly on her slender figure, and crowned with a quantity of lovely wavy grey hair.

  She invited him to lunch, and the taxi was dismissed, with instructions to return in time for the three o’clock train.

  It relieved Cliffe Montgomery that Miss Silver expressed no surprise, either at the precipitancy with which the Princesse had become the tenant of “Anarajapurah”, or at his own unaccredited ambassadorship.

  She showed him the house, and suggested that they should see the garden after lunch.

  She replied to all the questions that he had conscientiously put down on a list, and only asked one in return.

  “Does the Princesse de Candi-Laquerriere, by any chance, like cats?”

  “She is devoted to them.”

  “Then do you think that she would allow me to leave mine with the house? You see, I’m going abroad, and of course I can’t take Tarzan, and although I could probably leave him with friends, he wouldn’t stay. You know what cats are like—”

  “Yes,” said Cliffe, with an involuntary recollection of Carruthers, the longest-lived and the most distinguished of the Princesse’s pets. “Yes, I know.”

  To his own surprise, he found himself telling Miss Silver about Carruthers. He did not, he admitted, think very much of cats himself, but Carruthers had had a certain personality....

  Miss Silver was sympathetic. He liked her more and more, and found himself wishing that she
, as well as her cat, was to remain with the house.

  It appeared, however, that she had recently come into a small legacy, and that this would enable her to go to Germany for a year and hear good music. It was, she said, the thing that she cared most about.

  “Isn’t Radow — the violinist — a connection of the Princesse de Candi-Laquerriere?”

  “Her son-in-law. He was the husband of her younger daughter, who died of pneumonia in Paris several years ago. Do you know him?”

  “I have heard him play, and once I was introduced to him after a concert.”

  Nothing had ever convinced, or ever would convince, Cliffe Montgomery that to be related to a musical genius was anything but a misfortune, but in spite of himself he was gratified that so charming and distinguished a person as Miss Silver should acknowledge the acquaintance of Raoul Radow, Aldegonde’s second husband.

  It was, he admitted, some time since they had heard anything of Radow.

  The topic, almost inevitably, led him on to speak of the Fitzmaurices. Miss Silver said that she had not met them. She inquired whether the Princesse would wish to be called upon by “Anarajapurah’s” neighbours.

  “Miss Fish and her friend Miss Olivia King are the nearest. They live in a delightful cottage only half a mile down the road, and I have always seen a great deal of them. Miss King is the novelist — Olivia King.”

  Montgomery, who knew little about novelists, and thought them only one degree better than professional violinists, made the customary sounds of civility. He said that the Princesse would certainly wish to know her neighbours, although she herself seldom went out.

  “Our show place, of course, is the Abbey, about five miles away. Some people called Parkinson have bought it quite recently. It’s a lovely old house, and the garden is wonderful. Does the Princesse care about gardens?”

  “Only in theory,” said Montgomery gravely. He was well aware that the Princesse liked flowers, especially if they were brightly coloured ones, but that she never willingly consented to move far enough from the fireside to go and look at them out of doors.