“Not at all. The only thing is the night-watchman’s getting a bit edgy about the stage door. I’ll tell him you’ll shut it, Emma.”
“Yes, of course.”
“Well … Goodnight, Mr. Litton…”
Ben heaved himself to his feet. “I had thought of taking Emma to London with me to-night. You wouldn’t have any objections to that?”
“None at all,” said Tommy. “She’s been working like a slave for the past two weeks. Do her good to have a few days off.”
Emma said, “I don’t know why you ask Tommy, when you haven’t even asked me.”
“I don’t ask you things,” Ben said. “I tell you.”
Tommy laughed. He said, “In that case, I expect you’ll be going to the first night.”
Ben remained vague. “First night?”
Dryly, Emma enlightened him. “He means Christopher’s private view. On Wednesday.”
“So soon? I shall probably be back in Porthkerris by then. We shall have to see.”
“You should try and make it,” said Tommy. They shook hands. “It’s been splendid meeting you. And Emma … I’ll see you sometime…”
“Maybe next week if The Glass Door folds up…”
“It won’t,” said Tommy. “If what Christo did to Daisies on the Grass is anything to go by, it’ll run as long as The Mousetrap. Don’t forget to shut the door.”
He went away, downstairs; they heard his footsteps fade down the alley below the window, out into the street. Emma sighed, She said, “I think we should go. The night-watchman gets traumas if he thinks the place isn’t properly locked up. And that taxi driver of yours will either give up hope of ever seeing you again, or else die of old age.”
But Ben had once more settled himself into Tommy’s chair. “In a moment,” he said. “There’s just one more thing.” He tapped a fresh cigarette from the American packet. “I wanted to ask you about Robert Morrow.”
He had the most disconcertingly calm voice. It never changed or varied its inflections so that you were continuously being taken unawares. Every nerve in Emma’s body leapt in warning, but she only said, casually enough, “What about him?”
“I always had a … strong feeling about that young man.”
She tried being flippant. “You mean, apart from admiring the shape of his head.”
He ignored this. “I asked you once if you liked him, and you said, ‘I suppose so. I scarcely know him.’”
“What of it?”
“Do you know him any better now?”
“Well, yes, I suppose I do.”
“When he came to Brookford that time, he wasn’t simply visiting the theatre, was he? He came to see you.”
“He came to find me. That isn’t quite the same thing.”
“But he took the trouble to find you. I wonder why.”
“Perhaps he was prompted by the famous Bernstein sense of responsibility.”
“Stop fencing.”
“What do you want me to say?”
“I want you to tell me the truth. And to be honest with yourself.”
“What makes you think I haven’t?”
“Because a light has gone out of your eyes. Because I left you at Porthkerris, blooming and brown as a Gipsy. Because of the way you sit, the way you talk, the way you look.” He lit the cigarette then, broke the match, and dropped it meticulously into the ash-tray. “Perhaps you forget I’ve been watching people, dissecting their personalities, painting them, for more years than you’ve been alive. And it’s not Christopher who’s made you unhappy. You’ve as good as told me that yourself.”
“Perhaps it was you.”
“Rubbish? A father? Angry, maybe. Hurt and resentful. Never heart-broken. Tell me about Robert Morrow. What went wrong?”
The little room was suddenly unbearably stuffy. Emma got up and went to the window, and opened it wide, leaning her elbow on the sill, and breathing in great draughts of cool, rain-washed air.
She said, “I suppose I never bothered to understand what sort of a person he really was.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Well … meeting him, for the first time, the way I did. That started everything off on the wrong foot. I never thought of him as a person with a private life, and a private existence, and likes and dislikes … and lovers. He was just part of Bernstein’s, as Marcus is part of Bernstein’s. Simply there to look after us. To arrange exhibitions, and cash cheques and reserve hotel accommodation, and make sure that life, for the Littons, at least, runs on oiled wheels.” She turned to frown at her father, puzzled by her own revelation. “How could I have been so moronic?”
“You probably inherited it from me. What put an end to this happy illusion?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Things. He came down to Porthkerris to look at Pat Farnaby’s pictures, and he asked me to go out to Gollan with him, because he didn’t know the way. And it was raining, and very stormy, and he had a big thick sweater on, and we laughed about things. I don’t know, but it was nice. And we were going to have dinner together, but he … well … anyway, I had a headache, so I didn’t go after all. And then I came to Brookford to be with Christo, and I didn’t think about Robert Morrow any more until that evening when he came to the theatre. I was clearing the stage, and suddenly he spoke, just behind me, and I turned round and he was there. And he had this girl with him. She’s called Jane Marshall, and she’s an interior decorator, or something very talented. She’s pretty, and successful, and they seemed so much a couple. Do you know what I mean? Contained and self-sufficient and … together. And I felt as though someone had slammed a door in my face and left me out in the cold.”
She turned from the window then, and came back to the desk and sat on it, with her back to her father, and picked up a rubber band and began to play with it, snapping it like a catapult through her fingers.
“And they came back to the flat, for a beer or a coffee or something, and everything was hideous, and Robert and I had a horrible row, and he just walked out without saying goodbye and took Jane Marshall with him. And drove back to London, and, one imagines…” she tried desperately to keep her voice light, “… lived happily ever after. Anyway, I haven’t seen him since.”
“Is that why you wouldn’t let Christopher tell him that you were on your own?”
“Yes.”
“Is he in love with this girl?”
“Christo thought he was. Christo thought she was gorgeous. He said that if Robert didn’t marry her, he ought to have his head examined.”
“And what was the row about?”
Emma could scarcely remember. In retrospect, it jarred as painfully as a gramophone record, played backwards, at full pitch. An exchange of shouted words, meaningless, hurtful, regretted.
“Oh, everything. You. And not answering your letter. And Christo. I think he imagines Christo and I are madly in love, but by the time we’d got round to that I was so angry I didn’t bother to disillusion him.”
“Perhaps that was a mistake.”
“Yes, perhaps it was.”
“Do you want to stay here, at Brookford?”
“There’s nowhere else to go.”
“There’s Porthkerris.”
Emma turned to smile down at him. “With you? At the cottage?”
“Why not?”
“A thousand reasons. Running home to Daddy never solved anything. Besides, you can’t run away from the inside of your own head.”
* * *
He was on his way at last, and the self-delusion and the restlessness of the past six weeks were over. The Alvis—like a homebound hunter—streamed west, out over the Hammersmith fly-over and onto the M.4. Robert settled her permanently in the fast outer lane, and kept her speedometer prudently, carefully down to seventy, for the frustration, at this stage, of being stopped by a police patrol would be almost more than he could bear. As he approached London Airport, the first rumble of thunder broke the heavy, quiet air, and he stopped in at the first lay-by and put
up the hood. He was only just in time. As he moved out into the road again, the sullen evening erupted like a volcano. The wind, with staggering abruptness, swept up from the west, bearing towering black thunderheads before it, and when the rain came it was a positive explosion of water, sheets of it, like a monsoon downpour, against which the windscreen-wipers could scarcely compete. In seconds, the surface of the road was awash, reflecting the livid streaks of forked lightning which split the sky.
It occurred to him that perhaps it would be wise to stop, and wait until the worst of the storm was over, by now his sense of relief at doing what he had for weeks been subconsciously wanting to do, was stronger than any ideas of caution. So he went on, and the huge cambered curve of the motorway pouted up towards him, and roared beneath his wheels, and was flung away in a wave of water; already a thing of the past; rejected and forgotten, along with his own feeble uncertainties.
He found the theatre closed. By the light of the street lamp, he was able to read the posters. A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM. Unlit, deserted, the place looked gloomy as the Mission Hall it had once been. The door was barred and bolted; all the windows dark.
He got out of the car. It was cooler now, and he reached into the back seat and took out a sweater that had been lying there since the Bosham week-end, and pulled it on over his shirt. He slammed the door shut, and then saw the solitary taxi, waiting at the pavement’s edge, the driver slumped over his wheel. He might have been dead.
“Is there anyone in there?”
“Must be, Guv-nor. I’m waiting for a fare.”
Robert walked down the pavement, as far as the narrow lane, down which, so long ago, Emma and Christopher had come, walking like lovers, with their arms about each other. On this side of the sombre building a first-floor window blazed with uncurtained light. He went down the shadowed alley, tripped over a dustbin, found an open door. Inside, a flight of stone stairs led upwards, illuminated palely from a light which burned on the first-floor landing. He was assailed by the stale theatre smell of grease-paint, oil-paint, musty velvet. From above came the murmur of voices and he went upstairs, towards it, and found the short passage, and the door marked PRODUCER’S OFFICE, ajar, and edged with bright light.
He pushed the door open and the voices ceased abruptly, and he found himself on the threshold of a tiny, crowded office, looking down into the astonished faces of Ben and Emma Litton.
Emma sat on the desk, with her back to her father, facing Robert. She wore a short dress, cut simply as an overall, and her long legs were bare and brown. The room was so small that as he stood there in the doorway, he was only an arm’s length from her. If he wanted he could reach out and touch her. He thought that she had never looked so beautiful.
His relief and pleasure at seeing Emma was so great that the unexpectedness of Ben Litton’s appearance became insignificant. Ben himself was equally unsurprised. He simply raised his dark eyebrows and said:
“Well, bless my soul, see who’s turned up now.”
Robert put his hands in his pockets, and said, “I thought…”
Ben held up a hand. “I know. You thought I was in America. Well, I’m not; I’m in Brookford. And the sooner I get out of the place and back to London, the better.”
“But when did you…?”
But Ben was stubbing out his cigarette, standing up, ruthlessly interrupting. “You didn’t by any chance notice a taxi-cab at the front of the theatre, did you?”
“Yes, I did. The driver looked as though he had become fossilised to the wheel.”
“Poor fellow. I must go and put his mind at rest.”
“I’ve got my car,” said Robert. “If you like I’ll drive you back to London.”
“Even better. I can pay the man off.” Emma had not moved. Now, Ben edged his way around the desk, and Robert stood aside to let him out of the door.
“By the way, Robert, Emma’s coming too. Will you have room for her?”
“But of course.”
In the doorway, they eyed each other. Then Ben gave a satisfied nod. “Splendid,” he said. “I’ll wait outside for you both.”
* * *
“Did you know he was coming?”
Emma shook her head.
“Did it have anything to do with the letter Christopher wrote to him?”
Emma nodded.
“He flew back, to-day, from the States, to make sure you were all right?”
Emma nodded again, her eyes shining. “He’d been in Mexico with Melissa. But he came straight here. Even Marcus doesn’t know he’s in the country. He didn’t even go to London. He took a taxi from the airport to Brookford. And he wasn’t angry about Christopher, and he says if I want I can go back to Porthkerris with him.”
“And are you?”
“Oh, Robert, I can’t go on, all my life, making the same mistakes. And it was Hester’s mistake, too. We both wanted Ben to conform to our ideas of a nice reliable husband, and a kind domestic father. And it was as realistic as trying to cage a panther. And when you came to think of it, how dull caged panthers are! Besides, Ben isn’t my problem any longer. He’s Melissa’s.”
Robert said, “So what price now, coming at the bottom of a long list of priorities?”
Emma made a face at him. “You know, Ben once said that you had a noble head, and that you should grow a beard and then he would paint you. But if I tried to paint you it would be with a great big balloon coming out of your mouth with I TOLD YOU SO written on it.”
“I never said that to anyone in the whole of my life. And I certainly didn’t come all the way down here tonight to say it.”
“What did you come to say?”
“That if I’d known you were on your own, I’d have been here weeks ago. That if I can get two seats for Christo’s first night, I want you to come with me. That I’m sorry about shouting at you, that last time I was here.”
“I shouted too.”
“I hate having rows with you, but in some extraordinary way, being away from you is a thousand times worse. I kept telling myself that it was simply something that was over, and best forgotten. But all the time you were never out of the back of my mind. Jane knew. She told me this evening, she’d known all along.”
“Jane…?”
“I’m ashamed to say I’ve been running Jane round in demented circles trying to keep myself from squaring up to the horrible truth.”
“But it was because of Jane that I made Christopher promise not to ring you up. I thought…”
“And it was because of Christopher that I didn’t come back to Brookford.”
“You thought we were having an affair, didn’t you?”
“Wasn’t that what I was meant to think?”
“But you silly man, Christopher’s my brother.”
Robert took her head between his hands, and put his thumbs beneath her chin and turned her face up to his. Just before he kissed her, he said, “And how the hell was I supposed to know that?”
* * *
When they got back to the car, there was no sign of Ben, but he had left a message for them, tucked between the windscreen wiper and the wind-shield. “Like a parking ticket,” said Emma.
It was an unconventional letter, written on a sheet of cartridge paper torn from Ben’s sketch book, and headed by two thumb-nail sketches—two profiles turned to face each other. There was no mistaking her own determined chin and Robert’s formidable nose.
“It’s us. It’s for both of us. Read it aloud.”
Robert did so. “The cabby seemed morose at the thought of returning to London on his own, so I decided to accompany him. I shall be at Claridges, but would prefer not to be disturbed before noon to-morrow.”
“But if I’m not to go to Claridges before noon, where am I meant to go?”
“You’re meant to come home with me. To Milton Gardens.”
“But I haven’t any things. I haven’t even got a toothbrush.”
“I will buy you a toothbrush,” said Robert, and kissed her, an
d then went on reading the letter. “By then I should have caught up on my sleep and had time to cool the champagne, and will be ready to celebrate anything you may have to tell me.”
“The wily old brute! He knew, all along.”
“My love, and God bless you both. Ben.”
After a little, Emma said, “Is that all?”
“Not quite.” He handed her the letter and Emma saw, beneath Ben’s signature, a third little drawing. A wing of white hair, a brown face, a pair of dark and cruelly observant eyes.
“Self-portrait,” said Robert. “Ben Litton by Ben Litton. It must be unique. One day, we might sell it for thousands of pounds.”
My love and God bless you both.
“I shan’t ever want to sell it,” said Emma.
“Nor I. Come on, my darling, it’s time to go home.”
Read all of Rosamunde Pilcher’s wonderful novels
The Shell Seekers
The Carousel
Voices in Summer
The Blue Bedroom and Other Stories
September
Flowers in the Rain and Other Stories
Coming Home
Wild Mountain Thyme
Under Gemini
Sleeping Tiger
The Empty House
The End of Summer
Snow in April
The Day of the Storm
Another View
Winter Solstice
ENTER THE ENCHANTING WORLD OF ROSAMUNDE PILCHER …
PRAISE FOR COMING HOME …
“Rosamunde Pilcher’s most satisfying story since The Shell Seekers.”
—Chicago Tribune
“Captivating … The best sort of book to come home to … Readers will undoubtedly hope Pilcher comes home to the typewriter again soon.”
—New York Daily News
… FOR SEPTEMBER …
“A dance of life!”
—Philadelphia Inquirer
“Her characters inhabit your daily life … [a] rich story to get lost in … the sort of novel so many seek to imitate and fail. I’d call Pilcher a Jane Austen for our time.”
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