Nine Lives (Timeless Classics Collection)

by Ursula Bloom

  The tears stopped and the chilliness was gradually leaving her body to be replaced by the first tingling glow of returning circulation. She was unaware of any physical disability because the sheer joy of so much beauty gave her this mental exhilaration which enchanted her, until now she had never realised that beauty could do this.

  Owen returned with the hot sweet tea served in thick cups, with lavish pink roses sprayed on them.

  ‘Drink it up,’ he said.

  She took hers aware that her cold hands were none too steady, and she had to grip the cup between the palms gulping down the contents. It fell in a cascade within her, warming as it went. Owen indicated the view beyond the window.

  ‘How does it make you feel? Indeed but it is fair, and beautiful.’

  ‘I think that it is wonderful.’

  ‘One day we must go to climb Cader Idris ‒ when you are older of course ‒ because in parts one must rope indeed, and one must buy proper clothes. Those shoes are silly on a mountain.’

  ‘They were all right till I got to the scree. It was the scree that was the trouble.’

  ‘We’ll go back in the train.’

  In the end they had to hurry, for the train was about to start, and going out into the bitter air again it seemed that Lesley almost shrivelled. She thought that the descent would never begin, for now the rock and scree shut out the exquisite view. They dropped down, but the cold persisted for what seemed to be an interminable time; Lesley got the feeling that she would never be warm again. Then suddenly ‒ just ahead of her ‒ she saw the scree edging into the first thin blades of grass, and beyond the patches where there were little flowers, specks of colour, life coming back. A sense of delicious warmth filled her.

  ‘Oh Owen, how beautiful it all looks!’

  ‘And you are warmer, too?’

  ‘Yes, yes, of course, much warmer.’

  She could feel her feet and her hands becoming really part of her body again, and she almost laughed for sheer joy. The train shuddered into the halt, and getting out of it, she held up her hands to the sun as one would to a fire. Looking up at the mountain, she wondered how it was that she had never appreciated that it would be so penetratingly cold.

  ‘I shall know for the next time,’ she said.

  Owen had driven over in the springless farm cart and had left the horse tied to the fence. It was a small horse, fat and comfortable, with a too-long white tail and a scrawny mane. She went on nibbling the grass. The cart was a dirty black, picked out with white and yellow, that had turned to a dingy grey; it smelt of straw and dung, for when they drove to market the animals went this way. The wheels had originally been a bright yellow but now they were faded and needed a wash-down, but even washing was curtailed on the farm, for there were other more important things always waiting to be done.

  Lesley climbed over the wheel hub up into the cart and sat down on the flattened cushion which was of leather peeling in a series of little hangnails. In this comfortable warmth she could be completely happy again, and she watched Owen as he swung himself up beside her, and wrenched off the sweater, cramming it under the seat amongst the dirt and the straw ends, but he did not care.

  ‘Off we go,’ he said to the mare, and she turned ambling towards the pass.

  It was enjoyable to be driving together like this; Lesley liked the feeling that Owen was near her, the soft scent of his body, and the flush on his cheeks.

  ‘How lovely it was on Snowdon,’ she said.

  ‘One day we’ll make Cadar Idris.’

  ‘I’d like that. But next time I shall have thick clothes. Ugh, I never thought that anything could be so cold!’

  ‘Mountains are always cold; wouldn’t do if they were women, indeed,’ and turning in his seat, he looked at her from under his lids with those rather closed-up Welsh eyes of his. The eyes were saying something which she did not understand, yet knew was exciting, and she realised that privately she was disturbed by it. There seemed to be no answer that she could make to an uncomfortable remark like that, yet uncomfortable for no reason. ‘Know what I mean?’ he asked.

  Owen was not in any mood she had previously known of his. She was on the defensive, and she laughed saying, ‘Yes, of course I know,’ but she didn’t.

  They were driving through the pass with the undulating lands on either side of them. On the right two sheep dogs were working a flock; she watched them scudding across the grass, crouching as they approached the sheep, turning the flock but never chasing them, just turning so that not one of the old ewes became alarmed.

  Owen took her hand. This isn’t right, she thought, yet knew that half of her wanted him to touch her, though the other half which was still childish, was afraid. She knew then that up in the mountain something had happened to her, and her green eyes narrowed. How glad she had been to see Owen waiting for her, how delighted! Now the world was changing again in the unbelievable manner, swirling around her in a rising tide; the touch of his hand against hers conveyed an impression that she did not understand, and as she gripped the pock-marked, frayed leather seat, that in itself was disturbing.

  He said, ‘Kiss me, Lesley,’ in a husky voice which was unreal.

  ‘I don’t want to kiss you.’

  ‘But indeed, I did come to get you down from Snowdon, when it is perverse you were, and would go up it all alone. I did come after you all that way, and you must know, I would not have so done if it had not been that I did care for you.’

  ‘How do you mean if you had not cared for me?’

  He made no answer, letting the pony get on with the drive herself, but he let the reins drop on his knees and lifting his arms, laid them around Lesley and drew her body close to his own, pressing her against him and kissing her tempestuously again and again. He was of the earth, and his passion was something primitive of the leaves, and the sky, and the ditches. Something which until now she had not realised existed and it dismayed her.

  When he released her, she knew that nothing could ever be quite the same again after today, and yet she did not know why. The sound of the horse’s hoofs trotting along the road, the feel of the warm air, and even the sight of the two sheep dogs working the flock were not quite as they had been until now.

  She stared at everything with bemused eyes.

  Although Lesley did not know it yet, she had grown up.

  Chapter Four

  THE GIRL

  As Lesley grew older Daniel made ambitious plans. He enlarged Holbeins, and bought a grander car; he spread himself, for the shop was doing well and he had never spent too much, so that there was a handsome credit behind him. He had set his heart on one goal, which was that his daughter must make a brilliant match, something that would surprise everybody in Eresham. They discussed it together in the friendliest way, he and Lesley, and he would allude to her as ‘his little duchess’, when he was most pleased with her.

  Once he talked to her about Miss Sprockett. Lesley rather liked the old lady, saying that ‘she wasn’t a bad old stick’, then for no reason at all Daniel told her his story. Lesley was eighteen at the time, and she listened to the shocking slander that Miss Sprockett had put about Eresham on his behalf, and the action that he had taken.

  It never occurred to Lesley that the rumour could have been true. As a girl she had had some suspicions about her father, and the curious look which she had once seen on his face when he was talking to Miss Dixon, and the way he smirked at pretty girls, but she had with budding womanhood, dismissed such ideas, believing that the day that she had heard the maids talking their nonsense had been the bedrock of the trouble. She felt a little angry that he had been unkind to little Miss Sprockett who she had always felt was ‘rather a dear’, but perhaps Miss Sprockett had deserved it, and after that she did not go to tea there any more, gradually leaving off knowing her.

  Miss Sprockett guessed what had happened. Now she was wizened as a windfall apple undiscovered until October, and she was still very alert. She had always tried to be particularly
nice to Lesley for the sake of her mother, but she had found herself cold-shouldered.

  It’s that beastly man! she told herself.

  Lesley was studying languages. She was still doing lessons of sorts and she was rapidly developing. As a child she had not been singularly good-looking, in the last few years of adolescence new beauty had come to her. When she was twenty she was pretty, for it was those green eyes of hers that gave her the added charm in the paperish white disc of a face (for she had inherited her mother’s complexion) and those eyes were captivating. She was tall and willowy; where she got her figure from nobody knew. Her mother had been skinny, her father always too large, developing in the wrong places, and rather clumsily.

  Then one day, Lesley met the man.

  It was not a marquis as she had hoped, for she knew what her father expected of her, whilst she herself was amenable. She could not see that it was wrong to anticipate a ‘good marriage’ because she had been trained to think of this as a duty.

  ‘I’m going to be proud of my little duchess,’ her father had always said. ‘I’m going to see her a great lady, and she’ll go a long way, God bless her.’

  Lesley met Richard at Frinton.

  She had suffered a most ignominious attack of measles, when she was twenty, and somehow it had taken more out of her than she had thought. So much so that the doctor had suggested that she should spend a little time at the sea, and realising that Frinton had beautiful air, her father sent her with Miss Everington to stay at the hotel there.

  On arrival Lesley was not impressed. Yet the place grew on her, and she realised that there was a certain elegance about the green sward smoothly gracious, with the blue sea beyond and the Gunfleet past that. She liked the way the trees on the green sward were swayed by the prevailing wind; the countrified seclusion of it all, and the rose scent from the gardens.

  The first night she met Richard who was staying with some friend in Second Avenue, and came into the hotel to dance. She was sitting there with her coffee, when he made no demur about it, but came across to her and asked her, ‘Couldn’t we dance?’

  Miss Everington had always disapproved of people who did not get a proper introduction, and perhaps to annoy her old governess, and most certainly because she very much liked the look of Richard, Lesley danced with him almost all the evening. He was slender with a bronzed face, and he had keen hazel eyes. About twenty-four she would gather, maybe a shade more.

  He danced well, and imperiously so she found herself sliding forward with him compelling her, and for the first time in her life awakened to the realisation that there was something very pleasurable in the male command. They danced for the rest of the evening and Miss Everington, who had had toothache and went to bed with a glass of whisky for it, left them to do what they wished. It was one of those hot sweet nights, with jasmine, and nicotiana, and the heady pungency of roses everywhere.

  ‘Come down to the beach and bathe?’ Richard said.

  ‘What now? But it’s midnight.’

  ‘Well, and what of that? Everybody does it, and my friends have a hut there to which I hold the key. Come on. Let’s go down.’

  Lesley knew she shouldn’t do it, but that made the idea even more delightful. ‘All right, I’ll get my bathing things.’

  They walked across the green sward, which lay soft under their feet and the sound of the band in the hotel grew less. There were ships at sea, Lesley could see their lights moving along as they went down the path together, talking of matterless things! She could smell the scent of gorse mixed with the saltiness in the air. It was indeed a lovely night. The light dust and the small pebbles of the path slithered under their shoes, until they came to the hard concrete of the sea wall itself, and turned right where it ran low. The high sea wall was considered to be rather inferior, and the low one was the more select place to have a hut.

  Other people were bathing from their huts, gramophones and the wirelesses were playing. It gave Lesley a certain sense of assurance. Richard brought out the key and unlocked the door of a big double hut with a balcony, and as they entered it, she found that it had the strangely closed-in scent of all beach huts, of damp clothes, of sand, of Crustacea and food, all combined.

  As Lesley peered into the dimness she felt nervous.

  ‘You undress in there, and I’ll get fixed up on the balcony. In the dark nobody’ll see,’ he explained.

  She went into the hut and undressed, slipping out of her expensive clothes, for her father ordered nothing but the best for her, and pulling on her bathing dress. When she came out on to the balcony, Richard was waiting for her.

  She had the feeling that they were new people, and she had the same emotion she had absorbed as she had climbed up the early heights of Snowdon when she was sixteen, and much later that day when she had driven through the pass with Owen, and he had kissed her.

  They slipped over the sea wall, and she felt the loose sand warm against her feet. They came to the chillier firm sand, etched in scrolls and scallops by the tide, and still moist from the waves. She never knew when, hand in hand, they plunged into the sea itself, for the night was as warm as that.

  Side by side they swam in the water into the pathway of pure gold that the moon made. It was a most stimulating experience as much so as the mountain. She was a woman and was uplifted by the thought! She was completely happy as she swam with the man she had met only tonight, amongst the little waves, and the yellow reflection of the drowned stars.

  ‘We mustn’t stay too long,’ he said, and they went back as they had come, hand in hand up the beach. ‘When you’ve dressed I’ll light the stove, and we’ll have coffee. I brought some eggs with me to fry. That’s always fun!’

  She dressed clumsily, her fingers colder than she had realised, for it is never easy dressing again, and her body was sticky. Finally she was ready.

  ‘Richard!’ she called.

  He came into the hut shivering slightly, wearing only shirt and trousers, but he looked very nice, she thought. He lit the stove, and there was the dreadful scent of meths permeating in a gush, so that she went outside, lit a cigarette, and sat there on the step of the balcony smoking it, whilst he got on with the cooking. It was a heavenly moonlight night, and at last she was getting warm again, and glowing in a comforting way.

  Presently Richard appeared with his coat on, and two cups of coffee in his hands.

  ‘I think this is all right, anyway it warms you up, and it’s fun sitting talking.’

  ‘Yes of course.’ They sat down side by side. ‘You know I can’t think what Miss Everington is going to say about this when she wakes up to the fact of what we are doing.’

  ‘She was the old girl with you?’

  ‘Yes. Once she was my governess, and when I was ill my father got her to promise to bring me here.’

  ‘And she sticks like a leech?’

  ‘Well, I’ve managed to get away, haven’t I?’

  ‘We can’t expect that toothache of hers to go on for ever. Maybe tomorrow she’ll find a handy dentist, and get the thing stopped.’

  ‘Knowing Miss Everington, maybe she won’t! She isn’t too fond of dentists, they give her the jitters, so I bet she goes on until she’s at screeching point! Usually she does.’

  ‘And what can we plan for tomorrow? I could take you over to Flatford in my car. Have you ever been to Flatford?’

  ‘No, is it nice?’

  ‘It’s Constable’s country.’

  Lesley knew nothing of pictures, and thought it might be wiser to let that one go. ‘All right, I’d like to come.’

  ‘I’ll call for you round about two,’ and then, ‘Tell me something about yourself?’

  ‘I’ve got nothing to tell. You see little happens to me. My mother died when I was born, and I live with my father in the Midlands.’

  ‘He’s nice?’

  ‘He’s quite wonderful!’ she said, and there was adoration in her voice.

  ‘That must be a pleasant change, because I ca
n’t stick my father, he is the end! He is a bit of a bind at all times, always interfering with my life. My mother died when I was a kid. We’re in textiles.’

  She said, ‘Are you?’ uninterestedly, for curiously enough none of that background mattered. Already she was beginning to think of him as being quite different from any other young man she had met, and the thought of his being in textiles was hardly encouraging.

  After a while he glanced at her. ‘You’re pretty unresponsive, aren’t you?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘All right.’ That was when he kissed her, and something of her father rose in her, for he kissed her in a way that was entirely different. He drew her to him, gently at first, his arms growing stronger, and whereas for a moment his lips were tender, slowly they commanded her. She lifted her arms and put them about him. They sat on the step of the balcony locked together in the moonlight, and when he released her, it was for a moment to say nothing; then very quietly, almost meditatively, he remarked, ‘I’ve never seen anyone with pure green eyes before; they’re like a cat’s. Just like a cat’s.’

  ‘That’s a pretty beastly thing to say.’

  ‘Why? Cats’ eyes are beautiful, and they are valuable too. People pay the devil of a lot of money for cats’ eyes, you know,’ and he kissed her again.

  ‘I ‒ I suppose I’m rather like a cat in lots of ways.’

  ‘But not catty, I hope.’

  ‘No, I’m not particularly catty, but I ‒ well, I have some of the cat habits.’