‘I am.’ There was a note of grim determination in his voice which shook her. But she went on steadily, ‘A gala performance under Warrender?’
‘A gala performance under Warrender. Any objections?’
‘Laurence,’ she said, very quickly and breathlessly, ‘my father thinks he is going to sing that rôle. It—I don’t know what it will do to him if that too goes to a younger man.’
‘Your father?’ She almost hated him for the incredulous scorn in his voice. ‘At his age? Natalie, he’s mad even to think of it. He just couldn’t sustain it for the evening.’
‘Of course he could!’ she cried furiously. ‘Much, much better than you’ll ever do it. How dare you speak of him like that? As though—as though he’s finished. You’re jealous, that’s what you are! Jealous and brash and arrogant.’
‘I may be brash and arrogant,’ he said very coldly, ‘but jealous I am not. I have no need to be, of your father or anyone else. At his age——’
‘Stop sneering about his age! as though he’s dead but won’t lie down.’
‘You said it—not I,’ was the unforgivable retort he made. And then there was the most terrible and freezing silence.
If they had not turned into her street at that moment she thought she would have hit him and made him stop the car. She would have got out and walked—any distance—to escape from him. As it was, when they stopped outside the house, her rage was so nearly choking her that it was difficult to bring out even the minimum of words required. But rage also sustained her in her misery, so that her profile was proud and cold as she said, without looking at him,
‘I must thank you for a very pleasant drive and meal. But I must add that I never want to see you again.’
‘Is that your last word on it?’ He leaned over and opened the door of the car for her.
‘Yes, it is,’ Natalie said. And she got out and went into the house without a backward glance.
When she had closed the street door behind her she leaned against it, feeling sick and almost faint with the intensity of her rage and grief. She could almost hear her world falling around her in pieces. Not only because she had quarrelled irretrievably with Laurence—though that in itself had inflicted a wound which was already raw and throbbing—but because she could not bear that anyone, anyone, should say such cruel half-truths of her father.
It was true that he was past his first youth, that for the purposes of public information a few years were always taken off his age. It was beyond doubt that certain rôles were not now for him. But he remained the great artist, the finest tenor of them all. The man who could break or rejoice the hearts of his audience almost at will. There was no one like him. No one! And that absurd, arrogant, jealous Laurence Morven had spoken of him as though he were nothing but a worn-out old has-been who simply had not the grace to retire.
She went slowly into the study, the room which more than any other she associated with him, and she crouched down by the dying fire and told herself that she hated Laurence. That it served her right for being in some sort of way disloyal to her father.
She was still crouching there when her father came in, in excellent humour and looking magnificent in an evening cloak that would have made most men look ridiculous.
‘Why, Natalie!’ he put on the light. ‘What are you doing crouching there?’
‘I was cold,’ she muttered, and got to her feet.
He flung off his cloak with the same gesture he used when divesting himself of a stage costume. Rather the way Sir Walter Raleigh must have flung down his cloak before Queen Elizabeth, she thought with absurd irrelevance.
‘I gather it wasn’t exactly a successful evening,’ he said, not unkindly, and he came and sat down by the fire and efficiently poked it into some sort of blaze.
‘No.’ Just the monosyllable. Nothing else.
‘With Laurence Morven?’
She nodded.
‘My dear, I did warn you.’ He looked at her, still not unkindly, but with a touch of complacence in his glance which made her exclaim almost savagely,
‘At least it enabled me to find out a useful piece of information. He is going to sing the Paris Otello.’
The moment she had said it she was sorry, and she put out her hand as though to sustain him against the blow which she herself had given. She need not have bothered, however. He took the hand she put out, and his was strong and warm round her cold fingers.
‘Dear child, stop tormenting yourself about that,’ he said. ‘I am singing the Paris Otello. I’ve just been settling the details over dinner with Warrender.’
‘You——?’ she actually staggered a little. ‘But Laurence himself told me——’
‘He was just showing off,’ cut in her father calmly. ‘Deplorable behaviour, of course, but understandable in a young man of his type. He has ideas above his artistic station.’
‘He wasn’t showing off.’ Her voice was high and strained. ‘I questioned him and——’
‘He said categorically that he was singing Otello?’
‘Yes——’ Then she stopped suddenly and tried to recall if the word ‘Otello’ had been used. ‘No——’ she said huskily.
‘Well, which was it?’ Her father looked amused.
‘He said categorically that he was singing a new rôle in Paris—at a gala performance—under Warrender.’
‘He is—Don José in Carmen. Well suited to his age and gifts, I imagine. But now, alas, rather beyond my own particular capabilities.’
Chapter Four
‘It isn’t possible!’ Natalie’s voice dropped to a tragic whisper and in that moment she was speaking to herself rather than to her father. Then she added bewilderedly, ‘Do you mean that there are two galas?’
‘You could say that. It’s more or less a gala week, I believe. In honour of some visiting potentate or statesman or some such.’ Evidently potentates and statesmen ranked low in her father’s estimation and he had not bothered to inform himself on this point. ‘It might seem excessive in some places, but the French have a flair for this sort of thing. They can mount an occasion with magnificence but without vulgarity.’
Natalie was not really listening to what the French could do. She was recalling her own voice telling Laurence that he was brash and jealous, and that she had no wish to see him again.
‘But why all the secrecy?’ She snatched suddenly at another strand of the tangled story.
‘What secrecy?’ asked her father. ‘If you mean that I carefully preserved the confidence Anthea reposed in me——’
‘No, no!’ Natalie was almost maddened by his inability to see a situation from any standpoint but his own. ‘Laurence was so secretive too. That was largely why I thought—I feared—he might indeed be getting the role of Otello.’
‘Well, no doubt like everyone else he was warned not to talk too much before the public announcement was made. It is rather a special occasion, after all, and no one likes these things to go off at half-cock.’
‘So it’s Don José that he’s singing—for the first time.’ Again Natalie spoke half to herself.
‘Yes, I think we’ll let him have that.’ Her father laughed genially. ‘He’ll probably make a very good stab at it. And now you see you can stop worrying.’
‘Yes,’ said Natalie, and suppressed the hysterical laughter which rose in her throat at that.
She could stop worrying. She had taken her happiness—she knew that now—and broken it in pieces with her own hands. But she could stop worrying.
‘And,’ added her father, as he stood up and towered over her, ‘the day any young man of Laurence Morven’s pretensions takes the rôle of Otello from me, I am ready to retire.’
On this fine exit line, he took Natalie by the arm and, affectionately but irresistibly, propelled her towards the door.
‘Goodnight, my dear. You look tired. Sleep well, and don’t concern yourself with Laurence Morven. I doubt if he’s fated to make much impact on either of our lives.’
> She went to bed. But an hour later she was still wide awake, retracing the conversation of that evening and trying to see where and how she had jumped to such a tragically false conclusion. It was, she realised now, her own exaggerated fear which had led her to fog the issue. If his answer had meant nothing much to her one way or the other, she could have asked clearly and simply about the casting of Otello, without approaching the subject in such a roundabout way. It was an instinctive anxiety to hold off the final moment of unacceptable truth which had prompted her to use equivocal terms and talk about ‘the Paris gala’ and ‘a new rôle’. As for the apparently clinching detail that Warrender was conducting, no doubt he was conducting both performances.
‘Why wasn’t Laurence himself more specific?’ she thought unhappily.
But really, why should he be? She herself had set him firmly on the wrong line of thought. And she saw now—reluctantly but inescapably—why he had exclaimed in scornful astonishment at the idea of her father expecting to sing the rôle. No one, least of all her father himself, would think of casting him for Don José nowadays.
Nothing excused some of the things Laurence had said, of course, however much they might have been at cross-purposes on the actual rôle involved. For a moment she consoled herself with the belief that for that alone she would never have wished to have anything more to do with him. But it was a hollow argument. If she, in her touchy nervousness, had not confused things, he would never have had occasion to say what he had. The mistake would have been explained, and the evening would have ended happily.
Oh, how happily! There swept over her, like a warm tide, the full recollection of the joy shared in the earlier part of that evening. Why was it that one could never unsay the bitter things, but so easily obliterate the kinder, happier words that had illumined the scenes one treasured? Was he remembering any part of that lovely shared experience? or only recalling with scorn and rejection the way they had parted?
Perhaps he too was sorry that it had ended as it had. Suppose, if she telephoned and said she was sorry, might he not listen to her explanation?
No—not on the telephone. It was always difficult to handle an emotional issue on the telephone. If she saw him——
But how did one arrange to see someone one had dismissed with insult from one’s life? She had no idea where he lived, for one thing—though no doubt she could find that out from Mrs Pallerton. But the very idea of following him up to his hotel or apartment was unthinkable.
Then the Opera House? He must go there for rehearsals and to collect his mail. She could go to the stage door and ask, quite legitimately, if there were any mail for her father. At the same time she could ask casually about rehearsal times for Kit Marlowe. She would not actually hang about like some stage-struck fan—even in the dark she blushed at the thought—but there must surely be some way in which she could seem to run across him by chance. And then she would be able to explain about the complete misunderstanding and tell him how truly sorry she was.
Slowly her jangled nerves were quietening a little, and sleep was beginning to assert itself. In that half-conscious state, it seemed to her that she had found the perfect solution. And a moment or two later she was asleep.
Though she slept well, she woke to a sensation of anxiety and depression. And when full recollection swept back upon her, she wondered how she could possibly have supposed she could go to the Opera House and force some opportunity to speak to Laurence. What sort of pride had she got that she could even have entertained the idea?
But pride is a poor comforter when one is wretched and in the wrong. By the middle of the morning she had accepted her tenuous plan, and resolutely she left the house, summoned a taxi and drove to the bottom of Wellington Street. If she walked slowly up towards the Opera House she would give herself a few more minutes in which she might meet him.
Natalie had always had a certain degree of sympathy with the humbler admirers who drifted inconspicuously round the famous artists like her father. (He had too, to tell the truth, for in many ways he was a kindly man.) But never had she imagined herself emulating the rather naïve tactics by which they sought to make some slight contact with their chosen divinity.
How many before her—from the days of Caruso and Melba onwards—must have slowly perambulated up Wellington Street and Bow Street, past the shops and warehouses, hoping for that magic moment when the One who Mattered might appear on the horizon.
No one who mattered appeared on Natalie’s horizon, and presently she turned the corner into Floral Street and, still slowly, walked towards the stage door. Once inside there, she asked with an admirable degree of casualness if there was any post for her father. And—reassuring and pride-restoring detail—there was.
She took the two or three envelopes, glanced at them and asked, almost absently, ‘Is there any rehearsal on at the moment?’
‘Nothing onstage,’ was the reply. ‘Rehearsal for principals only in the crush bar, for this new opera Marlowe.’
She managed to make some intelligent comment on that and then, while she was wondering what else she could ask, the man at the stage-door said, free, gratis and for nothing, ‘It’ll be over at twelve-thirty, if you’re meeting someone.’
‘Oh, thank you.’ She smiled dazzlingly in her relief and gratitude, glanced at her watch, noting that it was ten minutes past twelve and, murmuring something about having a coffee, she tucked the letters into her handbag and turned away.
Down Bow Street and Wellington Street once more—and then she found a coffee bar and went in. It was already crowded with early lunchers and, by the time she had ordered and received her coffee, she was already anxious about her timing. So she gulped down half of the hot, rather tasteless liquid, paid hastily and went out into the street again.
And now, the crucial few minutes! Her heart seemed to be beating right up in her throat, and had she been climbing Mount Everest she could not have found the slope of the road more breathtaking. For a few useful moments she stood and stared into a shop window, but presently there was no way of pretending, even to herself, that she could simulate further interest in the dusty artificial flowers displayed there.
She walked on, and was almost at the front of the Opera House when he came round the corner.
But he was not alone. Somehow, she had never thought of that possibility. Minna Kolney, radiating smiling energy and a great satisfaction with life, walked beside him. Fortunately for Natalie, she turned her head away at that moment, to summon a cruising taxi on the other side of the road.
But he saw her all right. Natalie knew that to the bottom of her soul. He even looked straight at her for a freezing couple of seconds. Then he took Minna possessively by the arm and shepherded her across the road to the waiting taxi. And a moment later they had both entered it and driven off.
Natalie was left standing there, every other emotion crushed and stunned by a sense of humiliation and disappointment like nothing else she had ever known.
Presently she too hailed a passing taxi and was driven home. And all the way she was telling herself that it served her right, it served her right—it served her right! Dignity, pride, even decent self-respect had all been sacrificed. And for what? A glance of scornful rejection which made any further effort at peace-making totally ridiculous.
The following few weeks were very unhappy ones for Natalie, but she believed that she hid that fact from her father. At least she immersed herself once more in his affairs, and tried not to let anything else in her life matter.
There were one or two meetings with Wendy, and Natalie gave an excellent display of intense and pleasurable interest in the plans for the autumn wedding. She discussed Wendy’s dress—and, indeed, her own dress—as though these things absorbed her total attention. And even when there was a passing reference to Wendy’s famous cousin, she contrived to show the exact degree of interest required. No more and no less.
At one point she did manage to make herself ask—though without showing the apprehe
nsion she felt—‘Will Laurence be coming to the wedding?’
‘I shouldn’t think so,’ was Wendy’s reply. ‘I imagine he’ll be back in Canada by then, and I could hardly expect him to come back specially for the occasion.’
Yes, of course—he would be going back to Canada some time, and then the Atlantic Ocean would lie between them. Natalie almost wished that were already the case, for the humiliation which dogged her incessantly would somehow be a little less if he were thousands of miles away.
She tried to tell herself that she was no longer interested in anything which happened to him. But after the first night of Kit Marlowe she read every newspaper review, and felt an illogical warmth at her heart because they were uniformly good. It was nothing to do with her, of course, but she would have hated it if he had been a failure. So, by the same token, she was entitled to rejoice at his tremendous success.
Both from her own point of view and his, she felt she could manage to say something to her father on this vexed topic. And so she remarked, in as natural a tone as she could produce, ‘I see the critics speak well of Laurence Morven’s Kit Marlowe.’
‘Which critics?’ inquired her father.
‘Well, all of them, really.’
‘Hm—not a good sign. There are some critics whose censure is more gratifying than anyone else’s praise.’
‘For instance?’ asked Natalie, curbing her irritation with some difficulty.
Her father named one or two.
‘But they’ve almost invariably praised you,’ Natalie reminded him.
‘That,’ said her father, ‘is different.’ And she saw that to him it really was.
‘Do you want to go and hear this performance?’ he inquired after a moment. ‘If so——’
‘No!’ She spoke more emphatically than she would have wished. But her father seemed to find her reply perfectly acceptable, and the subject was dropped. In any case, preparations for the Paris visit were now beginning to take precedence over everything else.
‘I’m glad I’m coming,’ Charles Drury told her. ‘I persuaded your father that it was absolutely vital he should have his secretary with him. It wasn’t really, of course, but his Otello is still one of the few great experiences in life, so far as I’m concerned. I wasn’t going to miss it for the sake of a few white lies.’
Elusive Harmony (The Warrender Saga Book 10) Page 7
