Yet he was not unhappy. His work, work that he took very seriously, absorbed him from dawn until dusk, and often far into the night compiling reports on claims and missing freight, all manner of occurrences relating to employees who had suffered some injury, or gone down with a prolonged illness that entitled them to payments from the provident funds. But at night, and particularly when he was in Bryn Lovell's beat in the Mountain Square, his thoughts would return to her in a way that caused an ache under the heart. Then he would seek to cure it by concentrating on the happier memories of their association, some incident that recalled her ringing laugh, her scrambling response to some proposal he put forward, or the memory of what it was like to hold her close and inhale the scent of her hair.
He never once thought of her as dead, or even very far away and out of reach. She was always just over the horizon, waiting to be rediscovered and perhaps— who knew?—reclaimed and reassured. For he understood now that if he lived to be a hundred, and she led him a nonstop dance to the moon, he could never put her from him altogether and take some other woman for a mate. He could never begin all over again from that first impulsive kiss she had given him as a reward for her “rescue” at Aberglaslyn.
The heat wave had continued all through June and into the first days of July, day after day of brassy, blazing sunshine, with the sun moving at a snail's pace across the cobalt sky, with hardly a trailer of cloud and no breath of wind until dusk. Fugitive eddies would slip between the cliffs of warehouses and many-storied dwellings of the England the money-men had ravaged, a land that was left after the contents of fifty thousand corporation dustcarts had been emptied on the once-green farmlands and coppices of the north.
The heat hung over the Polygon like a greasy dosshouse blanket, discouraging movement, stifling creative endeavour, so that all who could dozed through it and a majority who could not counted the seconds until sunset brought about some amelioration of the stench of Catesby's beat, whither he had gone to follow up a report concerning the shipment of a marine engine off-loaded at Fleetwood and now, it appeared, missing some vital parts.
Giles had never previously visited this particular stretch of the Lancashire coast but had heard about it from Catesby, who had watched Blackpool emerge from its fishing-village chrysalis to become the gaudy butterfly it was today. When his work at Fleetwood was done he moved down to the holiday centre, expecting to find a larger, noisier edition of Southend or Margate. But he noted at once that it had an identity of its own, with its formal esplanade, its fleets of sighing trams, and its teeming beaches and uniform rows of drab, red-brick houses where bathing costumes and towels hung from windowsills, the banners of a beaten army awaiting the terms of the enemy.
He stood at a junction of roads named after half-forgotten victories won in the old Colonel's heyday, wondering why so many sought recreation in such a labyrinth of brick, asphalt, and cast-iron. Crowds jostled him and he was wondering what a painter like Frith, the first man to find subject matter in such a scene, would make of this spectacle, when suddenly his eye recorded the approach of a panting dog that came slouching across the esplanade, seeking a way between the feet of a hundred idlers, most of whom were absorbed in demolishing yellow liquid that dripped from cones of ice cream, dispensed by a stall-holder a few yards nearer the junction.
With one part of his mind he recognised the dog instantly, but with another he rejected the coincidence as monstrous. For a moment he dithered, bracing his palms against the baking brick façade of a boardinghouse that occupied the corner site.
The dog was her black Labrador, Prune. There was absolutely no doubt about this for, although he acknowledged that one black Labrador looked much like another, Prune had a singular personality. He had always been an overtly fatuous dog, with the temperament of a crafty but lazy clown, and his habitual expression, Giles always thought, was that of a canine police informer trading on counterfeit affability and equally counterfeit stupidity. He had a lumbering, half-hesitant walk, as though it was his business to pretend he wasn’t going anywhere special. Indeed, the only occasion he showed animation was when Romayne rattled his feeding bowl on the kitchen floor of their holiday home at Beddgelert. In all kinds of ways Prune was a unique dog and Giles soon learned to come to terms with his uniqueness, for it explained Romayne's devotion to her pet.
He saw the dog meandering towards him and he identified it in a flash. Prune's presence meant Romayne's, and for a few seconds he was so startled and so confused that he remained stock still, eyes riveted to Prune as the crowd drifted this way and that, buffeting and bewildering him in the blinding heat of the afternoon.
Then, simultaneously, three things happened. A German band struck up a mazurka. Prune found an exit through the mainstream of pedestrians and moved into Talavera Road, that ran at right angles to the sea-front. And Romayne, in hot pursuit, passed within yards of him as he stood under the white signboard of The Balmoral.
Had it not been for the dog he would have had some difficulty in recognising her. Less than eighteen months had passed since he turned his back on her outside her father's town house in Eaton Place but the interval might have been years, so changed was her appearance. In those days she had a rosy complexion, subdued by a light tan, the result of all those months running wild in the mountains. Her glance, and her gait too, had animation and her wide, full-lipped mouth was either laughing or petulant, so that it was always possible to judge her mood by looking for puckers at the corners. The young woman crossing the road in pursuit of the dog was nothing like the lively girl he remembered so vividly and with so much affection, despite their bitter parting. Her shoulders were bowed and she was much thinner about the face. Her complexion was pale, with no sign of pinkness or tan but a pallor that suggested she had spent the intervening months indoors. Her expression was neither gay, mischievous, nor sulky. It was what he would have described as wooden, reminding him sharply of his sister Stella's depression when she was between husbands, and the memory of this, as much as the shock of seeing the deterioration, aroused in him a sharp pang of compassion. His instinct was to call out to her, to put his arm about her and comfort her in some way, but the German band's eruption prevented any such gesture. The moment the brass began to blare, the tempo of everyone about him changed, idlers converging on the bandstand from all sides so that he was swept halfway across the esplanade. Before he could extricate himself and regain the junction she had disappeared.
He went tearing down the street and was just in time to see her and Prune pass through an iron gate, giving access to one of the featureless houses some way down on the left-hand side. When he drew level with it he saw that it was a boardinghouse, with dingy lace curtains and an immense aspidistra occupying the central bay of the room facing the street. By then he had checked the impulse to hail her, reasoning that any reunion would be best achieved in private. The boardinghouse had a “Full” notice on a grubby card set in the fanlight.
He stood there riding out the shock, aware of a dampness under his arms and at his temples that was not caused by the glare of the sun or the airlessness of the street. And then, before he could collect his thoughts, she came out again, walking swiftly, turning inland towards the main shopping centre and disappearing in a matter of seconds around the first corner.
There was no immediate urgency. He knew now where she lived and could make some kind of attempt to examine his emotions, and discover how they related to the prospect of presenting himself and perhaps making a fresh start with a girl who looked, for all the world, a complete stranger to the Romayne of Beddgelert and Eaton Place. He sauntered back to the sea-front, entered a crowded cafe, and ordered a pot of tea, surprised to discover that his heart was still hammering at his ribs, and that the entire scene of the town at the height of what was apparently a Wakes Week had a curious insubstantiality, as though it was the backdrop of a dream. He noticed tiny, inconsequential actions that had no meaning and seemed to be performed by automata. A blowsy woman giving change. A
tired waitress swaying under the weight of a pyramid of dirty crockery. A middle-aged man in a tilted boater laughing and showing gold-plugged teeth and pink gums. He thought, desperately, “What the devil am I doing here drinking stewed tea now that I’ve found her? How could I leave here without knowing how she was and whether she has been able to put me out of mind, in a way I’ve never been able to do with her…?” At last he jumped up, paid his bill, and almost ran from the cafe to the house in Talavera Road. Without giving himself time to reflect, he pulled the bell-chain that set off a discordant jangle somewhere at the far end of the passage.
The landlady took her time answering. When she appeared she was a stringy woman in her fifties, wearing a plain dress of bombazine, hung about with a variety of heavy, jangling accessories that included jet earrings and pince-nez glasses slung on a gun-metal chain. Her irritable expression faded when she had had a chance to look him up and down. She said, “I’m sorry, sir. I’ve nothing, not even a share-up. It's Wakes Week, you see—Rochdale an’ Burnley. You’d think they’d plan it better, wouldn’t you? The on’y thing I can suggest is…”
But he said, touching his hat, “It wasn’t a room, ma’am. I wondered if I could talk to you a moment about one of your guests.”
At once the woman's eyes narrowed, indicating hostility and she said, crisply, “Police?”
“No, no… nothing like that. It's just that I thought I recognised someone I knew, an old friend. My name is Swann—here's my card—and the person I’m referring to is a young lady, Miss Rycroft.”
She took the card and studied it carefully.
“Swann, the removal people?”
“Yes.”
The woman moistened her lips. “A Miss Rycroft, you said?”
“Yes.”
“No one here by that name.”
“But I saw her come in here. She had a dog, a black Labrador.”
The woman's expression changed again. She smiled and for some reason looked relieved as she returned his card. “Oh, her! She's not called Rycroft, or not so far as I know. You mean Miss Mostyn.”
“She might use that name. It was her mother's. Look, could I come in? It's important and I… I’ve an important message for her. I’ve got to see her as soon as she comes back.”
“She won’t be back, not until Sunday between chapel services. She doesn’t stay here. Just the dog.”
“The dog?”
“Come inside. It's rude to keep a gentleman like you on the doorstep. I’m sorry, it's just that I’m fair clemmed up this week and don’t know which way to turn,” and she led him into a passage that smelled strongly of linoleum and boiled cabbage, motioning him into the room with the drab curtains and the aspidistra.
“Take a seat. Over there's the most comfortable,” and she indicated a leather armchair, the only one in a room stuffed with furniture and bric-a-brac, a place that was obviously off limits to boarders, for it had a fusty, unused smell. A dozen or so studio portraits of relatives, framed in fumed oak, crowded the walls, and assorted ornaments, dominated by a blue and gold Staffordshire group of Victoria and Albert in Highland dress, stood on the draped mantelshelf.
“Look, I don’t want to seem inquisitive but I’m thinking I’ve a duty to a girl who pays me seven shillings a week to board a dog and never gave me the least trouble. If you know her, and you saw her come in an hour since, why didn’t you step up and say how-do-you-do?”
His experience handling diffident and evasive clerks and employees’ dependants came into play. He said, sizing her up, “I really don’t see why I shouldn’t confide in you, Mrs.…?”
“Rawson,” she said. “I’m a widow. That's Rawson up there,” and she waved a heavily ringed hand at a pop-eyed man in a Derby hat standing half-sideways and glaring down at them, his hand on a plaster pedestal in a manner that implied he had just discovered the North Pole and was proud of it.
“Miss Rycroft… Mostyn and I were engaged to be married until the spring of last year. We quarrelled and she ran away when I broke it off. I don’t think even her father knows where she is or what she's doing. I haven’t set eyes on her since. Nobody has, and naturally I feel responsible.”
She said, her eyes meeting his with bafflement but intense curiosity. “That card you gave me. Is the gaffer o’ that great concern a relation of yours?”
“My father. I work for him.”
“Your father! Good grief!”
“Why should you be so surprised, Mrs. Rawson?”
“Why shouldn’t I? That lass works as a pay-desk clerk at Birley and Cookson's, the drapers. My guess is she gets under fifteen shillings a week, plus board. Why is she at a place like that if she's the kind of girl who hobnobbed with young gentlemen of your standing?”
“Romayne works in a draper's?”
“Aye, and a sorry place it is from all I’m told. None o’ those living-in cribs are what you’d call home from home, but yon Birley's a real slavedriver, for all his chapel-going. I wouldn’t work there, not unless I had to, I can tell you that, Mr. Swann. It's no business of mine, of course, but if there are no hard feelings, and you were once that friendly, get her a place where she can live out and feed up. Slops, Birley feeds ’em, and she's proof of it. She's not so bonnie as when she first came here.”
“When was that, Mrs. Rawson?”
“Getting on for a year now. Early autumn of last year. She showed up with a chit from Mrs. Corbie—she's next door but one, and shuts between seasons. Wanted somewhere to leave that dog and offered me a shilling a day, if you please. I thought it was daft and I still do, with her earning next to nothing, but she's attached to the old rascal and I know how it is. I had my cat Sam fifteen years before he got run over by the watercart. I never cared to get another after that.”
“But when does she ever see the dog, Mrs. Rawson?”
“When? Twice a week. On her half-day, which is today, Thursday. After three-thirty, that is. Trust that skinflint to hold ’em to the minimum. And Sundays, after chapel, same as I said. All Birley's girls have to attend his chapel or they’re turned off, make no mistake.”
“Has she ever talked to you, told you about herself?”
“Precious little. She's a strange lass. Offered her many a feed, I have, but when she's accepted she's only pecked at it. Never seen her smile either. Not that she's got much to smile about down at Birley and Cookson's.” She hesitated again. “I don’t know as I should be telling you all this. She's never let on, as we say up here, and keeps herself to herself. She did tell me she had a hard time getting a billet, having no experience or character, but she's ladylike and that’ll be why Birley took her. He's got a good class of trade, you see, so it pays him to be particular!”
His mind juggled clumsily with the factors in the woman's story as Mrs. Rawson ran on, outwardly with a show of reluctance but inwardly with a relish that was rooted, no doubt, in her burning curiosity concerning someone who would pay half her weekly wage to board a dog she saw twice a week. On the face of it the situation seemed monstrous, a girl with a millionaire father hiring herself out to a tight-fisted bully for fifteen shillings a week, and submitting to all the humiliations that attended servitude at any of these establishments. His mind returned to that tongue-lashing he had given her in the cab, the last evening they spent together. She had admitted then to knowing nothing of the conditions under which most people were required to work and had seemed, on reflection, quite shocked by his brutal summary. There would be difficulties getting a situation without a trade and without references, but she could have managed better than this, even if she was determined not to apply to her father. She could have been a governess or a companion, and the sale of her jewellery and clothes would have kept her in comfort for a long time. There was something here that he did not understand, and he had an uncomfortable certainty that it related, in some way, to him and to her father's wealth. He said, suddenly, “Look here, Mrs. Rawson, I think she's doing this out of pique. I mean to talk her round and send he
r back home. If I succeed could she stop here overnight? I’d gladly pay you a sovereign.”
“A sovereign? Nay, lad, there's no call to do that, for she’ll have to bed down on cushions in here.” She smiled a tired but knowing smile. “Aye, if I can help out I will. You’ve come looking for her, haven’t you?”
“I’ve been looking for her for sixteen months, Mrs. Rawson. Although I don’t think I was really aware of it until today. Since it's her half-day where would I likely find her?”
“I can tell you that. At her quarters, for where else could she go on her money? It's a big place, five minutes from the tram terminus. You can’t miss it. The staff entrance is at the side. A good view of the gasworks, she told me once. But even then she said it with a straight face.”
He thanked her and left. The heat was beginning to go from the day but the air was stale and full of dust, rising from the baking pavements like vapour over a marsh. He found the place easily enough and went down a cul-de-sac between high brick walls. A door marked “Employees only—private” stood ajar, and he passed through to find himself at the foot of an iron staircase, giving access to narrow corridors. It reminded him uncomfortably of a prison he had visited at Knutsford recently whilst seeking information from a former employee. Even on an evening such as this there was a bleakness about the place, and it struck him that it must be a cheerless lodging in winter. A persistent sound came from a room on the ground-floor, the soft, uncertain plucking of a banjo, played by an earnest amateur. The banjoist was trying to play the air of “Allan Water” and the melancholy song seemed to Giles a perfect accompaniment for the setting. He knocked and the music stopped at once. Hesitant steps approached the door that opened a few inches and a youth about nineteen stared at him through the chink.
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