Starlight

by Stella Gibbons

  ‘Likes his little joke,’ she gabbled, ‘sounds funny I know but he calls himself something different every month, wonder what it’ll be this evening? Hullo, Mr Fisher!’ she called, when he was upon them, ‘what’s your name this evening? Here’s Mrs Pearson wants to put the electric light up your room and do it up for you – nice Christmas surprise for you, innit?’

  The old man had been going past the car and the group gathered about it without a glance, and this increased his champion’s annoyance. No point in upsetting people. Rude, too. No harm in just saying ‘good-evening’.

  However, he paused, and turned round. About his neck, slung from a piece of thick string, he carried a small tray woven of some kind of shining straw, and on it were grouped three or four little dolls, made of the same material, and decorated with gilt braid and coloured beads. He looked solemnly into the car, and leisurely too, as if considering its occupants, then said, turning to Gladys:

  ‘Good-evening, Miss Gladys.’ At the same time, he made a silent bow in the direction of Peggy, then a second more ceremonious one to the window of the car. But to the question he did not reply.

  ‘What’s your name this month, Mr Fisher?’ repeated Gladys. ‘I was just telling Mrs Pearson … This here lady is Mrs Pearson, you know, our new landlady.’

  ‘Thomas Browne, this month. During December this year, I am Thomas Browne. He wrote a beautiful book, very grandly written it was – A Physician’s Faith.’

  Gladys glanced at the audience, pleased that he should be showing himself in character.

  ‘Oh don’t talk about names –’ Mrs Pearson had fallen again into inexplicable agitation. ‘You must never play about with your name like that – names are … it’s very dangerous – you don’t understand –’ A torrent of near whispers poured out, in the dimness.

  ‘Mother, are you going in to see the house?’ Peggy interrupted, ‘because, if you aren’t, I must get over to Hampstead, she’s expecting me at nine.’

  ‘What, lovey?’ Mrs Pearson broke off, thrusting her face forward, ‘Oh … yes … of course … Mrs Corbett … I’d forgotten. Er’ – timidly to the chauffeur – ‘may we go to Hampstead, now, please … MacLeod House, Heathwood Avenue … no, Peggy, I won’t come in now, I’ll see it when it’s finished … have you seen my stair-carpet?’ to Gladys, ‘it’s so pretty. Pink and grey.’

  ‘Well I did just have a peep couldn’t resist it, ever so sweet, rolled up in the hall, I said to Annie I hope it don’t come up to our landing, what with our coal bucket and that tap, soon spoil it.’

  ‘But you’ll like to see it when it’s on the stairs, won’t you? I’m having your stairs done, too, you know, in your house as well.’ And then Mrs Pearson fully smiled. A girl of seventeen was suddenly looking out through the window. Or was it that Gladys had grown a little more accustomed to the unforgettable face?

  ‘I s’pose you’ll be letting those rooms on the ground floor, then?’ she blurted, on an impulse to relieve the anxiety she and Annie felt on this point.

  ‘Oh no … Peggy says the ceilings are down, and that must be put right of course. But I shan’t let them. Mr Pearson wants to use those rooms for store-rooms.’

  Her smile faded, and was replaced by an expression of gravity, as if, now, the talk had touched on a matter that was not a smiling one. Mr Pearson, and what he stored in the rooms, was important. ‘And in Lily Cottage … such a sweet name! … I’m going to have a bathroom … a good big one … and then’ – a luxurious small sigh – ‘my bedroom will be that room overlooking the yard at the back. It’s nice and quiet there, Peggy says.’

  While this talk was going on, Mr Fisher had turned away, with two more silent bows and a tiny lift of his ancient cap, and, having groped under layers of coats and waistcoat, produced from a hidden pocket a large old-fashioned key. He mounted the steps of Rose Cottage and inserted it in the door.

  ‘Mr Fisher! Mr Fisher! Don’t lock me out! Wait for me – if I haven’t forgotten my key again!’ Gladys lamented, having been occupied, during her conversation with Mrs Pearson, in a similar search among her own cardigans and scarves.

  The old man gently pushed open the door to its fullest extent, so that it rested against the inner wall, and, leaving it so, marched silently up the stairs just visible in the weak glow of the electric light. But that glow was brighter than it had been; it was thrown back, now, from walls of a dreamy rose-pink. The plaster whorls on the ceiling suggested the icing on some giant’s birthday cake.

  ‘Oh, how pretty!’ cried Mrs Pearson, peering out. ‘It really is a lovely colour, isn’t it, Peggy?’

  ‘I suppose so. Mother, we really must go.’

  ‘All right, dear. Please, George …’ to the driver.

  ‘Night, Mrs Pearson, night Peggy, night all!’ called Gladys, as the car began to move, then, recollecting some half-dozen questions, she began an interrogatory scream that died away as the car gathered speed and turned the corner.

  The Walk looked so dim, so lonely and deserted after it had gone, that she made haste to shut the front door and hurry up the stairs to the comfort of their own rooms, and Annie’s reassured cry. For she had, as usual, and certainly with more reason than she would have had twenty years ago, been anticipating murder.

  7

  ‘Because I may as well do that as anything else.’

  Peggy spoke in a controlled tone, keeping her eyes fixed on the shop-lined streets going by.

  ‘I don’t know why you won’t live with your old mum, dear,’ Mrs Pearson went on timidly, keeping her eyes on her daughter’s profile. ‘You can have anything you want, come and go when you please, be as free as air. I know it isn’t what most people call a nice neighbourhood but it’s a quiet street, very quiet, for London, and the house is going to be lovely. Why won’t you, dear?’

  In Peggy’s short lifetime, she had found no weapon stronger or more successful than silence: the simplest, easiest weapon and, usually the most neglected. She did not use it now, however, preferring to keep it for a more dangerous occasion:

  ‘It’s quieter up there – more like the country,’ she said.

  ‘Well, lovey, if you’re so fond of the country why did you ever leave Rattray’s?’

  ‘I was sick of it,’ said Peggy hardly, ‘dead sick.’

  ‘Well, then, dear –’ Mrs Pearson stopped, paused, and tried again. ‘It seems so funny, going off to live with some old lady you met on the front at Hove, instead of at home with your own mother.’

  ‘I’m … fond of the dogs. And she’s an old fool but she’ll let me do what I like.’

  ‘We all have to do that, it seems to me,’ Mrs Pearson said, sighing again; she had allowed the folds of the white scarf to slip from her head, and now looked more like any mother arguing with an unsatisfactory, much-loved daughter.

  The car had left the poor streets, and was climbing towards Hampstead. The lights of London below were hidden, but they threw up such a rich glare that the thick haze was rusty with it. Leaving shops and houses behind, the car sped along the highest part of the ridge, between dark leafless trees sunk on either side in the valleys. It swerved left, towards Branch Hill.

  ‘I only hope it works, dear, that’s all, and Dad and I won’t have you grumbling. Is there a riding-school on the Heath, love? You’d like to go on with your riding, wouldn’t you?’ Mrs Pearson breathed, keeping her eyes fixed on the long black eye-lashes, curved like scimitars, that lay on the olive cheek. ‘Peggy – there was someone there, wasn’t there? Tell me, darling. I know there was something that happened. I can feel it, and see the horses – beautiful wild things, so fierce! – but I want to hear all about it. I am your mother. Please, Peggy?’

  Now Peggy used her weapon. She neither moved nor spoke, keeping her eyes fixed on the road down which the car was running. It swung again to the left and stopped before a pair of tall wrought-iron gates standing open in a long barrier of glossy laurel and rhododendrons that shut away the outside world. All around were simi
lar walls of foliage, silence, mist, and big leafless trees.

  ‘Right up to the door?’ the chauffeur suddenly demanded, in an outraged voice, half turning and looking at the women contemptuously through the window.

  ‘Please, George … Mr Pearson did say … he wanted …’ said Mrs Pearson, and the man, muttering something, turned the car in at the gates.

  The shrubbery ended in a circular sweep of gravel before a handsome old house built of red brick, with a flight of steps leading up to the white pillars of a porch and a glass door. The most conspicuous feature of the place was a room built out over a lawn to the left, whose windows, through a screen of trees, overlooked the surprisingly abrupt drop of a near-by valley. It was filled with the motionless lights of a long main road, the moving ones of a procession of cars, and the house lights of a large, scattered suburb.

  The chauffeur stopped the engine and Peggy, alighting, grasped two large and heavy cases and lifted them without apparent effort.

  ‘Isn’t that heavy for you?’ Mrs Pearson almost whispered, and Peggy shook her head impatiently, as she opened the door of the car. The chauffeur merely sat, ignoring them both. Peggy set the cases down, shut the door and put her head in at the window.

  ‘Good-bye, mother – au revoir, rather. I’ll write in a day or two. When do you move in?’

  ‘Oh, soon. Soon, I expect. I don’t know – Dad will see to everything. Good-bye, my lovey, take care of yourself.’

  ‘Bye-bye,’ said Peggy, making a little face that was teasing and almost affectionate, then turned away.

  Mrs Pearson sat still for a moment, watching her walk easily up the steps, with a case in each hand, towards the glass door between the pillars. Then, starting, as if out of some painful dream, she leant forward and said to the chauffeur, ‘Could we go home now, George, please?’ and at the timid request he started the engine and drove away.

  Peggy put down the cases, and rang the bell.

  The freshness of the white paint and the soft brilliance of MacLeod House’s brass pleased her.

  She did not usually look for such things, liking, as she did, the open air and solitary places above all else, but the atmosphere of solid comfort backed by a considerable amount of money, was soothing. She felt that in MacLeod House an absorbing grief could be indulged without any interruptions from the world outside; the tears could burn themselves dry in sullen peace.

  The door opened, and a small old man in a white jacket looked out at her inimicably.

  ‘I’m Miss Pearson. Good-evening,’ said Peggy, whose first encounter with a houseman this was. She did not smile and neither did Hobbs.

  ‘Good-evening, miss. Mrs Corbett is expecting you. Will you come this way, please.’

  She followed him across a hall that was in fact a large and lofty room, panelled in white, carpeted with old rugs in soft blues and browns and pinks, and having, under an arch and some white fretted wood vaguely Oriental in suggestion, a staircase leading up to a gallery running round the interior of the house. Peggy’s eye lingered on the carpets. Yes; they were the real thing. She could remember having seen, as a child, that particular kind of rug being woven – ‘in the sloms of Tashkent’, she thought.

  ‘Miss Pearson,’ said the houseman, opening a door.

  The room seemed as large as Saint James’s Parish Hall, it was the one built out over the great lawn, the one overlooking Hendon in its valley; and the warm scented air struck Peggy’s face, already too hot, with that sensation of deliberate insult that most people experience on feeling a draught.

  Two people were islanded in the midst of its splendours of green walls and tasselled cushions and paintings of flowers; a stout old white-haired woman in a black dress, and a middle-aged man who was standing by the mantelpiece. He had an air of wanting to rest his arm along it, had not the procession of dogs, modelled in china and of every breed, that walked along it, prevented him. The two were watching television.

  Four black pugs, all, at the first glance identical, sprang up at Peggy’s entrance, and began to leap about, bark and caress her, sniffing at her ankles and jumping against her skirt.

  ‘There you are, my dear,’ said Mrs Corbett, smiling and pleased, ‘punctual to the minute (Arnold, turn that thing off, please). Down, boys, down; you know Peggy, now. Don’t make a fuss.’

  Peggy dropped composedly on one knee and began to caress the pugs, keeping her eyes on Mrs Corbett.

  ‘It’s lovely to see them again,’ she said, and then her glance just moved, with the smallest effect, to the man.

  ‘Oh yes, of course – you don’t know my son – that was the fortnight you were in New York, Arnold, you remember – while I was at Hove, I mean, staying with Vera – my son, Arnold, Miss Pearson. Get Peggy a drink, Arnold. Peggy, what will you have, dear?’

  Slight smiles and inclinations of the two heads, the sleek dark one and the one that was balding. He studied her, with a morose look that was just short of rudeness, as she knelt beside the dogs, and, having heard her clear little ‘Cinzano, please,’ busied himself with filling a glass.

  ‘How did you come?’ Mrs Corbett went on comfortably while her blue eyes fixed themselves eagerly on Peggy’s face, ‘you did say you haven’t a car, didn’t you? and we’re so cut off here, if you’ve no car …’

  ‘It was quite easy. I hired one.’

  ‘So much more reliable than taxis … very sensible … Now do lie down, boys,’ to the dogs, ‘we don’t want you fidgeting about.’

  Three of them flopped back and resumed their doze, but the fourth remained on his hind legs, paws resting on Peggy’s arm and eyes fixed steadily on her face.

  ‘What is it, then, Dee?’ she asked him, letting the caressing note sound in her voice that came as rarely as her smile. She made a tiny grimace at his haughty black mask, then looked across at Mrs Corbett and briefly laughed. Dee turned away his head, hurt.

  ‘You remember which is which!’ her employer cried, delighted, ‘do you know, Arnold, I got chatting to Peggy on the front at Hove – you remember, I told you – and she could tell which of our boys was which the second time we met! You know,’ to Peggy, ‘that was what really decided me to ask you to come here – that, and your being a dog-lover like myself. I knew you understood them, you see. It’s no use … I can teach these foreign girls everything, but I cannot teach them to look after the dogs properly. They won’t love them. I always say it takes an English person to love a dog.’

  ‘You don’t look English, though, somehow,’ Arnold said clumsily, ‘so … dark.’

  ‘Well, I am,’ Peggy said equably.

  The pause that followed was so tiny that it escaped notice by the mother and son. He’ll be easy, Peggy thought.

  ‘Did your driver know the way up here? Some of those chaps haven’t a clue, especially in the newer firms … who did you go to?’ Arnold Corbett asked.

  ‘Some firm near Euston, I forget its name,’ Peggy lied. ‘Yes, he was very good. No trouble at all.’

  ‘It’s quite dicey, mind you,’ Arnold went on, warming to his interesting subject, ‘I’ve known even experienced taxi-merchants drive round here for ten minutes or more looking for the place, and of course you can never get one if you should happen to want one. If my car’s out of order I know what to expect. Ages on the phone and then nothing doing … you may be lucky between theatre-time and midnight, of course, but … overpopulation’s the trouble, everywhere,’ he ended gloomily.

  ‘Where is your nearest rank … just in case I want one on my “evening out” – if I’m to have an evening out?’ Peggy asked, half-turning, with serpentine grace, to Mrs Corbett, knowing how her profile must be silhouetted against the long pale sweep of the curtains.

  ‘Of course you will, dear – what an idea! (Arnold, did you hear that?) I shall just mention it a few days beforehand if I should happen to want your company in the evenings … and there is the dogs’ run, of course, but Arnold often does that. We dine at seven,’ Mrs Corbett went on, ‘because the
servants like a long evening –’

  ‘I’ll say they do,’ her son put in.

  ‘Now you mustn’t give Peggy a wrong impression, Arnold. I know the poor old dears can be trying …’

  ‘Why you don’t get three or four foreigners over I don’t know. You’d have no difficulty.’

  ‘I know that. It isn’t that and you know it.’ She turned to Peggy. ‘All of them – the cook and my parlourmaid and the houseman, and the chauffeur, even my “daily”, have been with me since my husband’s time. They are all getting old, now (like me) but that’s no reason why I should turn them out, and have a lot of Italians in the house. They were all with us in the old days.’

  Her eyes turned towards the handsome curve of the bay window, curtained from pelmet to shining floor with fawn satin embroidered in wreaths of flowers. ‘Nearly fifty years ago. Hendon was famous for its flying-fields then, and Golders Green – that was a village. The Garden City was just being built.’

  ‘Beastly hole.’ Arnold held out his cigarette case to Peggy, who smiled and shook her head.

  ‘It was pretty in those days – all the little new houses, and artistic young people just starting life. Of course, our friends were different; they were in the flying set, but just beginning too. Oh, I can’t tell you how exciting it all was,’ she ended, with an animation in her voice which, to her, conveyed all the glamour lingering in her mind’s eye and in her heart: while the feeble sounds, muted by age, conveyed to Peggy just nothing.

  She kept her luminous and long-shaped eyes, wherein two stars always burned, fixed upon her employer’s face as if she were interested, while behind them a long yawn stretched itself out.

  ‘One evening a week or so I have friends to dinner. Bridge most afternoons, with my three old pals from down the road (you’ll meet them). Most evenings after dinner we watch television. Bed by half-past ten, usually.’

  ‘A thrilling programme,’ muttered Arnold, ‘so now you know the worst, Miss Pearson.’

  ‘I like a quiet life,’ Peggy answered in the same unruffled tone. ‘I’ve lived mostly in the country, you know.’