Nine Lives (Timeless Classics Collection)

by Ursula Bloom

  ‘Perhaps you would like to take up some job? Dress Design, Interior Decoration, or something? I wouldn’t like to think of you living alone in London.’

  ‘Why not? I’m a widow, and old enough.’

  ‘I don’t think that you are old enough, or wise enough to see after yourself, I’m afraid.’

  He would think that!

  He had never let her forget the incident at Frinton, nor her own foolishness accentuated by his insistency, and he graded her with himself. ‘I have my own money and can live alone, if I wish.’

  ‘Lesley, what’s happening to us?’

  ‘You know perfectly well what’s happening. I’ve heard about you and Arabella Finch.’ She couldn’t resist letting fly that bullet, yet hated herself for it. He did not deny it. He sat there, his hands moving restlessly across the arms of his chair, and when he spoke, his voice was tense and deep.

  ‘There’s a good deal of me in you, although you don’t admit it, but I know that it’s there. It was that which drove you to behave as you did at Frinton, and probably that is why I am so worried on your behalf. You’re restless and dissatisfied, because ‒ let’s put it plainly ‒ for a woman there is no outlet for frustration. A man’s different. I’ve been a widower all these years, so I know. I’ve never re-married, because I knew you’d hate to see another woman at Holbeins.’

  ‘Yes, yes, I should.’

  ‘It wouldn’t work, but in spite of your scruples for my morals, you can’t expect to cut me off from everything, can you? I am entitled to something in life. I ‒ well, I’d be pretty difficult to live with if I denied myself everything.’

  She turned her eyes away. ‘I shall have to go away, because I seem to have lost myself. Daddy, you too. I want to find my real self again and be myself, because like this I’m miserable. I wonder if you’ll ever find me, or I find you again?’

  ‘I’ve never been lost, Lesley,’ he said humbly.

  ‘You seem to me to be lost,’ and then, ‘I shall buy a little house in London somewhere. I shall go away, and come home later when I’ve found myself, but for now I’ve got to go away.’

  He knew that she was right.

  ‘Very well,’ he agreed.

  Chapter Seven

  THE LIGHT OF LOVE

  It took some months to find the little house off Brompton Road, which was low and white with two rooms upstairs and a couple below. The window boxes were painted jade green and brimmed with the hot fire of scarlet geraniums in summer, and were darkly dusty with veronicas in winter. On either side of the door were tubs.

  The mews was cobbled, and at times it smelt of petrol and castor oil, and echoed with the noise of cars coming in and out, but one grew accustomed to all that. Behind the house there was a tiny yard where a huge chestnut sucked up all the goodness from the ground, whilst the leaves made a lovely pattern against the sky; green in springtime, when it was lit by blossomy candles in April, but bronze gold in autumn. It is for such absurd things that one buys a house; a jade door, a chestnut tree, pink-flecked cream on an April afternoon. These foolishnesses may not endure, but oh, how they sway the judgement!

  Just at first Lesley did not think that she could have existed here without the beauty of that large and generous tree. She was twenty-seven when she came to the cottage, after it had been put in order, which took far longer than she had ever thought possible. She had cut the cables that bound her, and was adrift on the main stream of her life.

  During the first summer it was fun. She had during the previous winter lived in a guest house, and the delight of getting her own place was an immense relief. She furnished the cottage with limed oak against pitch-pine walls. She had few pictures, handsome dark rugs and little of anything because the cluttered background galled her, and now she wanted something different. She had recognized already the fact that she was starved for life.

  In the twilight of early October evenings she walked into the park, and saw the dahlias die and the chrysanthemums born. She watched the riders and played with the idea of taking up riding herself, then dismissed it, because when one was alone, nothing really seemed to be worth while. Nothing at all.

  One day that changed.

  It was almost Christmas, and the shops had smudges of cotton wool supposed to represent snow stuck to their panes, and the tinsel was hanging in tawdry strings entwined with all that papery enchantment that the season produces. She had promised her father that she would return to Holbeins for Christmas, which after all is a family festival, and told herself that she would be very nice to him, for she felt a wound in her heart like the secret stab of regret. Daniel was good to her. He sent chickens from his own poultry yard, and flowers from the garden. He was thoughtful for her, and she could not dismiss him so easily from her mind, because he still was part of her.

  She walked into the park that morning in mid-December, with the frost in the air and the grass hemmed with silver. She walked sharply. There were riders in the Row, and people standing watching them, and then it was that Lesley saw the man who stood a little aloof. He was dressed in a countrified way, she knew instinctively that he came from the country, just as she knew that he meant something to her before she actually reached him.

  He was to play a part in her life; she was aware of that in the same way as one is aware of the details of nature. He is Welsh, she thought with that particular high formation of the cheek bones, the unruly dark hair, and the eyes that later become half closed with age. As he began walking towards her, she was reminded of another time, and recalled a fat little horse that had been tied to a fence, and both of them climbing into the cart which had driven them along Llanberis Pass.

  ‘Owen?’ she said. She’d know him anywhere.

  He stopped dead, recognizing her, even though she must have changed considerably, for then she had been rather an untidy girl in a cotton frock, and now she was smartly dressed in a grey squirrel coat with pearls at her throat, and in her ears.

  ‘Why, it’s Lesley?’

  ‘What on earth are you doing in London, Owen?’

  He looked prosperous, she noticed that at once, and he smiled encouragingly. He had done well on the farm which he had now bought entirely for himself, he said. He had come to London for the fat stock show, and had come into the park to see how people rode. He thought nothing of them and couldn’t imagine how they contrived to stay on, but they amused him. He was here for a week, going places, seeing shows and he had been lonely.

  ‘Me, too,’ she confessed.

  They were standing by the Achilles statue, silvered in the first sharp frost of December; already the snowdrops and the scillas that grow in the grass were beginning to poke their first incautious fingers through the earth, for the autumn had been mild. She remembered her father saying, ‘Spring always comes again,’ and wondered if spring were returning to her own heart now, at this very moment. Owen had been her first love; she might try to deny it to herself, but whatever she felt otherwise she knew that he HAD been her first love!

  She told him about the house and they went to see it before he took her out to lunch. He didn’t know much about the right places to dine or lunch, and she suggested it for him. They went to a pleasant restaurant where they could be quiet, for both of them wanted to talk.

  Now his Welsh accent had almost disappeared, and he admitted that he had made a great effort to cut it out, so that it had become merely a pretty lapse at times, no more.

  ‘I’ll call for you at seven,’ he promised, when he left her.

  She took infinite trouble about her frock, and pretended that she did not know why. She chose green, because it was the colour of her eyes and she set a little spray of blush orchids on her shoulder. She didn’t look like Wild Welsh Wales, she knew that, yet realised this was the way Owen wanted her to look.

  When they were driving in the taxi, he took her hand.

  ‘I want to know everything that has happened, Lesley?’ he said in that low tender voice.

  She told him abo
ut Richard. They had been two young people cheated into marriage, a marriage in which one of them had lost his life. It was horrible when you looked at it this way, and nowadays the self-pity had ceased, and she could be quite sorry for the poor young man who had died.

  Owen said, ‘Your father should have married again you know, that would have made everything so much easier.’

  ‘I daresay, but I should have hated it.’

  ‘You’d have been jealous for a time, but you’d have got over it, and found your own level. That was what you never found, your own level.’

  ‘I know.’ All the same the stepmother would have been the Cinderella calamity that she had always dreaded when she was a little child. No, she could never have tolerated that! She confessed that she hadn’t loved Richard. She had been foolish, but that was over and done with now, and the years straddling between had made it better.

  ‘I wonder that you stayed a widow so long?’

  She spoke the truth. ‘Fate, I suppose. And the fact that there has never been anybody else.’

  ‘Indeed? And why not? There’s myself?’

  ‘But remember, you had disappeared.’

  ‘Only for a time, and now it’s back again I am.’

  She saw him across the dinner table lit by a pink-shaded lamp, with crystal trimming that reflected the light in little quiverings of silver. She realised that he could set her tingling in the way that Richard had originally done, the way that should make her feel ashamed. She hoped that she wasn’t going to be silly. Nature had an extraordinary habit of taking the lead, and once that happened, you could never control yourself, and hold back. It was wrong, but what was the answer?

  He said, ‘I’m glad you told me about Richard, glad that you got that out of your system, for it probably helped a lot.’

  ‘It did.’

  They went on to a musical show, one of those with a great deal of intimate dialogue, something musical, the matterless kind that was a pleasant narcotic to the senses, lulling, and hinting at an unreal security. Sitting in her stall beside Owen, Lesley knew that the old restlessness was consuming her again, so that she was being absurd. It was, she felt, something of a miracle that they had met. He held her hand, and she remembered how warm and tender that same hand had been on the top of Snowdon, and even the words he had used when they were driving back along the beautifully warm pass, when he had kissed her. They supped later at the Ivy, with sentimental tunes still running through their heads, and the words were immaterial. How exquisite had been the music, how delicious the fanciful atmosphere of the show.

  ‘I’ll see you home,’ said Owen.

  The fire was almost out in the cottage and there were foie gras sandwiches and drinks standing on the side. Lesley had already had too much champagne, but she had to admit that it made her happy. The room was warm, and the polar bear rug sprawled out before the low fire looked inviting. She knelt down on it.

  ‘Well, Owen, all this is extraordinary. You and I meeting again. You never married?’

  ‘I’m not the marrying sort.’

  Anyway that’s fair enough, she thought, in case I get ideas about him! In case I want marriage. That’s given me the clue, and it is nice of him. ‘I shan’t ever marry again.’

  ‘You will,’ he said, ‘but first you’ll have to find your real self.’

  ‘You’re right, Owen, I got lost!’

  ‘Only because you were afraid.’

  ‘In a way, yes.’

  ‘You simply mustn’t be afraid any more. You need experience. Take what life offers you, the cat always does.’

  ‘Why did you say that?’

  ‘Because you’ve got cats’ eyes.’ He drew her to him and kissed her, not hurrying. She sat between his knees on the floor, and although she could feel herself being drawn out into the quick mid-channel of life, she did not attempt to stay herself.

  ‘Owen, what’s the matter with me?’

  ‘Indeed nothing that cannot be put right.’

  ‘I’m going to regret all this.’

  ‘Indeed, no, not ever. Not for a moment, cariad anwyl.’

  She didn’t regret it.

  The whole of the week was unbelievable. Owen was with her most of the time, and she kept offering excuses to herself, because he had been her first love. This moment, she told herself, is the only moment that matters, and then that thought was surpassed by another one. What shall I do when Owen returns to Wales, and leaves me alone? He can’t, after this? Surely he cannot go away?

  ‘Owen, you’re not going back?’

  ‘But what would happen to my farm indeed, if I did not go back?’

  ‘You ‒ you’ve got me now?’

  ‘I told you I wasn’t the marrying kind.’ There it was again, and perhaps she shouldn’t have said that.

  ‘Neither am I, but I love you.’

  He shook his head. ‘Not really. You will never love anyone save someone much older than yourself. You have lived too long with an older man ‒ your father ‒ and I would be too young for you.’

  ‘I don’t like old men. They have coughs,’ she said it, and almost believed it, then from a sudden accruing loneliness. ‘Don’t leave me, Owen.’

  ‘Lesley bach, I MUST.’

  ‘You’ll come back?’ She was pleading with him, cheapening herself, and she knew it was idiocy, but perhaps he understood how she felt.

  ‘Yes, I’ll come back. I need you too, you know, don’t forget that.’

  On the last evening she was wretched. She had the curious sensation that her grasp on life was slipping, and that she had never touched the real thing. He asked her what was the matter, and when she told him, said she should get a job.

  ‘You should, Lesley; have you no friend who would let you go into business with him and learn? You like colour, you like backgrounds, what about art?’

  ‘You’d laugh if you saw my painting.’

  ‘There was a chap who spent a couple of summers at Llanrust, a Scotchman, Malcolm Ford was the name, he does commercial art, Christmas cards and packing, that stuff! I could ’phone him on your behalf. I don’t think he would have forgotten me.’

  ‘You won’t explain about us?’

  ‘You’re not ashamed?’

  ‘A little.’

  ‘You’ll never get anywhere in life if you are ashamed of what you do. Carve your own path and don’t care. I’ll get in touch with Malcolm, because that might be a start for you.’

  She didn’t want to start, she only wanted him, and sentimentally she spoke along those lines. ‘Once you were a boy driving a dirty cart, a boy with uncouth hands, and a cowlick on your forehead …’

  ‘Do you still find my hands uncouth?’

  ‘No,’ she said, quite sharply. ‘No. You realise that I don’t.’

  A week later, after a letter from the firm she visited Malcolm Ford, commercial artist. The office was in Henrietta Street, empty for the afternoon, but likely to crowds again when the ‘garden’ got busy. She was shown into a large bare room, the windows pointed and small, the ceiling appearing to come down like a clamp upon her. The place reeked with tangy tobacco, and it made her mouth taste bitter. On an easel was a half finished poster which had power, she knew that instantly, but had not the time to examine it before Malcolm Ford came in.

  At a glance Lesley could not tell if he was old or young, but he had mild grey granite eyes, and a reddish beard with a lot of thick hair which he constantly pushed back from a domed brow, although he was not actually bald, he gave that appearance because the brow was so high. He was tall, with vivid chestnut trousers and a crimson shirt tied by a huge pale blue scarf that he wore, loosely twisted about his neck. He’s nice, she thought, the sort of man who would never do anybody a bad turn.

  ‘You’re Mrs. North?’ he said.

  ‘Owen sent me along. I ‒ I wondered if …’

  ‘Sit down.’ He indicated a sugar box to which a piece of American cloth had been indifferently nailed. ‘Tell me about yourself? You smoke
?’

  ‘No, thanks.’ The air was making her feel quite sick, and he must have realised it, for he went to one of the windows and wrenched it open.

  ‘Is that better?’

  ‘Oh thank you so much. Smoke does something to me, it’s an allergy I suppose, but it’s hell.’

  ‘Couldn’t we make a bargain then? You come here and help me, Owen was insistent that you’d be a big help, and he ‒ he’s fond of you. I’d like to teach you.’

  ‘I’d like to learn.’

  He smiled and the smile was encouraging. ‘I can’t pay you an awful lot, and I’ll keep you hours over time, is that all right?’

  ‘Quite. There’s nobody waiting for me at home, and I want to learn.’

  ‘Then that’s the answer.’ His eyes were appraising her, he liked the way that she moved, as though her bones were not set in restraining sockets, but completely free and supple. ‘Monday?’ he said.

  ‘Monday,’ she agreed.

  She started on Monday.

  On the first day she panicked, for Malcolm was notoriously careless, never knowing where anything was, and saying ‘Fetch me this,’ or ‘that,’ and giving the wrong direction as to its vicinity. He made Lesley edgy.

  He had all sorts of women who rang him up, and he couldn’t grasp that Lesley was as yet new, and did not realise that Winifred should be coerced away, whilst Betty had the direct no, and he must get rid of Muriel at all costs. It was confusing.

  She didn’t care for Malcolm too much, but when you got beneath the surface there was an astonishing difference in him. Brains did not intrigue him, which irritated her. She had been hard on her father for this, and he was like her father in many ways, and he set her wondering if all the world was promiscuous at heart, and if so, didn’t it spoil everything? She was a cat biting her own tail and screeching when it hurt.

  She wrote and told James Stevens all about it, and he did not reply. She went to Holbeins for Christmas, knowing that when she returned there would be a heaped-up pile of letters on the mat, and expecting James’s to be amongst them. But there was nothing from him when she got back, only a rather belated Noel in pale blue on a powdering of silver stars from Cap Roche.