There was a reading lamp at his side and the rest of the room was in darkness. She had nearly reached him before he glanced up and saw her, stepping like a ghost out from the shadows, her silvery blonde hair almost luminous.
“Lulu!” he exclaimed. “I didn’t hear you.”
“I had to come down and talk to you,” she said.
“I thought you were tired,” he answered.
It seemed to her that she was dragging him almost reluctantly away from his book. She glanced down to see what it was and saw it was entitled Country Houses of England and that on the open page there was a picture of Queen’s Folly.
Almost despite herself her voice sharpened as she said,
“Are you still thinking of that tiresome girl?”
“Need we talk of her anymore?” he enquired.
“No, because it bores me,” Lulu said. “At the same time, I still think you owe me an apology for behaving as you did. Don’t think I was deceived for one moment into believing that there was anything serious between you – you and that stupid little red-haired idiot.
“Can you imagine anything so ridiculous as her changing her name? Either way she is of no consequence. Could it matter to anyone whether it was Milbank or Milborne?”
“I have asked you not to say anything about that for the moment,” Dart said irritably. “You wouldn’t have known if you hadn’t met her brother while she was packing.”
“He’s a nice specimen at any rate,” Lulu said spitefully. “Stammering and stuttering as he talked to me. How I hate shy men.”
“I shouldn’t imagine you’ve met many.”
Shutting up his book, Dart walked across to the hearth to switch on the standard lamp on the other side of it.
“Let’s talk of something else,” Lulu said suddenly. “Dart, are you really going back to America as soon as you said?”
“I think so,” he answered. “I had meant to stay until the end of the summer. I have changed my mind.”
“Why?”
“Oh, various reasons,” he replied elusively. “I seem to have got myself into a bit of a tangle. If I disappear, people may forget.”
“There’s no need to disappear,” Lulu said. “And, as for forgetting, people won’t forget what you do, Dart, but they’ll always forgive you. Get the Press here and say you made a blurb over that Milbank woman. Tell them it was a joke, a practical joke on me if you like. And tell them we are going to be married when I finish my film.”
“That will be making things worse instead of better,” Dart said. “Because you know quite well, Lulu, that it isn’t true.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because you know that we are not going to get married – now or ever. I am fond of you and I think you’re fond of me. But we are not in the least suited to each other. When I marry anyone, it is going to be for keeps.”
He smiled at the word, almost as if he dragged it out of his childhood memories. A word that meant something important, an eternity in a boy’s measurement of time.
“But, Dart!” Lulu insisted earnestly. “You haven’t really thought of what it would mean if we married each other. We could be happy, very happy. I like what you like and we could have a great deal of fun together and I needn’t really do more than one film a year now.
“The rest of the time we could go where you wanted to go – Buenos Aires, California, New York, even London and Paris. It wouldn’t matter so long as we were together.”
Dart Huron walked across to the sofa where Lulu was seated and sat down beside her.
“Listen, Lulu!” he said. “You’ve got to be sensible about this. You know as well as I do there was never intended to be a serious ending to our love affair. You came into my life when I had just made a fool of myself over Beatrice Watton. I confess to you what I have never confessed to anyone else – that I never asked her to marry me, she asked me.
“And because I was desperately sorry for her at that moment I couldn’t refuse outright. I was a coward, if you like. I evaded the issue, thinking that I would write to her after I had left the house or somehow make things not sound so brutal.
“Before I knew what happened she had announced to all her friends at that party that we were engaged.
“The Press were there and there was absolutely nothing I could do about it without giving her what was, to all intents and purposes, a slap in the face from which she might never have recovered.
“She is a neurotic creature, as you know, and so I did nothing until you came into my life and showed me what might have been a cad’s way out, but which was, in fact, a comparatively easy one.”
Dart paused for a moment and looked down at Lulu’s fingers, which were curled round his.
“One day,” he said quietly, “you will meet someone who will make you really happy. I’m not the right person, I know that. You are very sweet and very lovable, Lulu, but I don’t love you as I want to love the woman I marry and I don’t believe, in your heart of hearts, that you love me.
“Wait!” he said quickly, as she tried to speak. “You think you do, but that’s only because I am perhaps the first thing in your life that you haven’t managed to possess, utterly and completely, at the moment that you wanted to possess it. Admit that’s the truth.”
“It’s a lie.” Lulu said hotly. “I love you as I’ve never loved any man before. I love you not because I can’t get you, but simply because I know we were made for each other.”
“I wish I could think that too,” Dart said quietly. “But I can’t. You see, Lulu, there are lots of things about you that I don’t really like and I don’t understand. Your attitude, for instance, towards your grandmother.”
Lulu snatched her hand away from his.
“What do you mean, my attitude towards my grandmother?” she enquired sharply.
“What I say,” he replied. “I was thinking about that poor old woman. Do you know what the doctor said when he signed the death certificate?”
“What did he say?” Lulu asked almost defiantly.
Dart rose to his feet and moved away from the sofa.
“He said,” he replied, “that while it was undoubtedly a case of heart failure, which is the reason for most deaths, what she had really died of was malnutrition.”
There was a sudden silence in the room.
“Yes, malnutrition,” Dart went on after a moment. “Have you ever thought of the meals that we eat here, Lulu? Those luncheons and dinners we shared on the ship coming over? That night in New York when we had a mound of caviar at fifteen dollars a portion because you said you felt wild and Russian?”
“You are talking like a communist,” Lulu said. “If we hadn’t eaten caviar in New York but had chosen bread and cheese, it wouldn’t have given my grandmother in Putney any more food. Besides, she had plenty of money, I saw to that. If she didn’t eat, it was because she didn’t want to.”
“That isn’t true,” Dart said. “If she didn’t eat, it was because she couldn’t get the food. The people where she was living wouldn’t take it to her. As you well know, she wasn’t capable of going and getting it for herself.”
“You’ve only heard that from the Milbank woman, interfering and spying into my business,” Lulu exploded in a fury. “But, of course, you are prepared to believe her instead of me. I’m not to have a word of thanks or gratitude for all I’ve done for my family. They were quite prepared to take all the money I sent them and then write complaining letters to say that they never saw me. With the best will in the world one can’t be in two places at once. Either one’s earning the money in order to be able to send it home or one’s at home starving with the rest of the wasters who can’t make a penny piece themselves.”
She was spitting out the words in a fury, her voice sharpening and having, as always when she was incensed, an almost Cockney twang to it.
It was then she realised that Dart was just watching and listening to her. She knew what he was thinking. She had not become experienced in men all
these years without knowing when they were no longer captivated and she no longer held them spellbound.
Her voice died away. Quite suddenly she was frightened.
She rose from the sofa and moved across towards him.
“Dart, Dart,” she whispered. “Why are we quarrelling like this? I came down to tell you that I love you. Help me to forget that there has ever been anything except understanding between us. I love you. You know I love you. Kiss me. Hold me close. I want to be in your arms.”
She was touching him and her head was thrown back so that she could look up into his eyes. But his arms did not go round her. There was an expression on his face which she knew only too well as he said,
“It’s late, Lulu. I think it’s time you went to bed.”
“Dart, how can you do this to me?” she cried passionately. “Don’t send me away. Don’t be angry with me. I’ll do anything you like, say anything you like, admit I was wrong, if you wish. But don’t send me away from you, not now, not tonight.”
She beat with her hands against his chest. Still he made no movement to hold her to him.
Lulu stepped back from him.
“What has happened to you?” she asked. “Why are you like this? I meant something to you once. Have you forgotten those nights as we crossed the Atlantic? Have you forgotten what we felt for each other? What has happened? What has changed you?”
She stared at him a little wildly.
“I love – you,” she sighed and her voice broke on the words.
She moved away from him to where a great bowl of flowers reaching high above her head and stretching out at the sides until it practically covered the table it stood on and was picked out by the light from the lamps.
She stood for a moment with her back to him, her hands, with their pointed red nails, going out to touch first one blossom and then another.
“Roses,” she said softly at length. “And carnations. They are so English and perhaps my favourite flowers. Will you put them on my grave, I wonder?”
“What are you talking about?” Dart asked roughly.
In answer Lulu drew the revolver from the deep pocket of her negligée.
“I am talking about death, Dart,” she said. “You don’t imagine that I want to live if you no longer want me?”
She raised the pistol in her hand as she spoke and held it against her temple. She made a very dramatic and very lovely picture as she stood there, her head haloed by the flowers behind her.
There was a faint twist to Dart’s lips as he remarked,
“A splendid curtain to the second act, Lulu. But not entirely convincing.”
“I mean it,” she said resolutely in a low voice.
“No, you don’t,” he answered. “You know as well as I do that you are far too lovely and far too shrewd, if you will forgive me saying so, to die by your own hand. You have everything before you, Lulu. You are at the top of your profession, you are a world-famous figure, you are a very rich woman and you are still young. What more could anybody ask of life?”
“I love you,” she persisted. “If you will not marry me, I shall kill myself here and now.”
“That would be very messy, wouldn’t it?” Dart said. “And you wouldn’t even look pretty lying in a crumpled heap with blood all over your face and a nasty hole where your eyes ought to be. And suppose you merely wounded yourself. What would happen then? Your scarred and damaged face will hardly be a box office draw, even if you were still called Lulu Carlo.”
Lulu lowered the revolver.
“You think you are talking me out of it,” she said. “But you are mistaken. As I told you, I intend to kill myself unless you marry me.”
“Do you think we should be happy if I did?”
“Yes, we would,” Lulu snapped. “You can’t get out of it that way. You know we should be happy. We have been happy these last weeks, haven’t we? Deliriously happy until, yes, until that woman came, looking down her nose, disapproving of everything here and interfering. A prying bitch if ever there was one.”
“Stop! You are not to talk like that. Do you hear me?”
There was anger in Dart’s voice now, an anger that seemed to vibrate across the room between them. And, when he had spoken, where was a sudden silence.
Then, wide-eyed and in a voice as loud as his, Lulu said,
“And why shouldn’t I? Because you are in love with her! Is that the truth? Is that the meaning behind all this? The reason for your sudden coldness to me? You are in love with her! Yes, that’s it. I tell you, you love her! You love her!”
“And if I do?”
Dart’s question seemed to come as if startled from his lips and there was the sound of a scream that was drowned by the noise of an explosion.
The sound of a shot reverberated round the room.
It was followed by another – and yet another.
Chapter 13
Aria woke and could not for the moment remember where she was.
Then, in the light seeping through the thin curtains that covered her window, she saw the outline of her bedroom at Queen’s Folly.
Even then she could not comprehend that she was at home.
Then gradually her eyes took in the threadbare silk on the walls, the unfaded patch where the picture had once hung, the cheap wooden furniture that replaced the walnut and rosewood with which the room had once been furnished and the plain unframed mirror that stood on the dressing table.
Yes, she was home and sleeping again with only the ghosts of the past glories to remind her how beautiful the house had once been.
“I am at home,” she said aloud, as she rubbed the sleep from her tired eyes.
It had been dawn before she slept. The hours had passed slowly as she had tossed and turned in her narrow bed.
Repeating and re-repeating in her mind the conversations that had taken place in the past weeks and remembering all too vividly, as she tried to thrust it from her, that moment of madness when Dart Huron had rained wild passionate kisses on her lips and neck.
As if she would escape from her own thoughts, she sprang out of bed and, drawing back the curtains, stood for a moment looking out over the unkempt garden. In the distance she heard a tractor starting up and knew that Charles would already be at work.
Then she began to dress herself.
Last night had been easier than she had anticipated because Betty Tetley had been there and Charles, with his usual instinctive reserve, would not speak of family matters in front of a stranger.
But Aria knew that he was suspicious of what had occurred at Summerhill.
He was not so obtuse or taken up with his own concerns as not to realise that someone like Aria did not become engaged to be married under a wrong name or forget to tell the man she was engaged to anything about herself.
As they motored back to Queen’s Folly, he asked,
“Are you going to tell me about it?”
She had known exactly what he meant and she answered quietly,
“Not at the moment.”
He nodded his head as if he had expected that particular answer from her.
“Have you ever known me to lie to you?” Aria enquired, a sudden sharpness in her tone.
“No,” he replied. “And that is why I don’t want you to begin now. But if I can help you, I am here.”
The sudden tenderness made the tears start to her eyes. This was a Charles she did not know, a brother who was not evading his responsibilities, but assuming them.
They had said little during that drive home and, only as they turned down the drive at Queen’s Folly and saw the house, breathing in its warm, red beauty, with its peaking gables and chimney pots silhouetted against the sky, did Aria regret that she had not unburdened her heart.
Then it was too late and she could only put her hand and lay it for a moment on Charles’ knee.
“Thank you,” she said softly and she knew by the smile he gave her that he understood.
But however easy it might be to
speak calmly to Charles, to tell him that she had no explanation to make, to try and tell herself that everything was over and done with, she could not prevent or control the chaotic tumult of her mind.
She was miserable with a kind of aching inner misery that she had never known before. She could not quite understand it or explain it to herself. She wanted to be glad that she had come away from Summerhill, glad that she had escaped from the whole unsavoury and unpleasant setup.
But instead she could not feel anything but an abject depression.
She kept hearing Dart’s voice, kept seeing his face as he had looked at her that last moment at the bottom of the stairs. And then, for some unaccountable reason, she wanted to cry.
She dressed quickly, feeling a sudden urge to be outside the house, to busy herself by making acquaintance with all the familiar objects which she had left such a very short time ago, but which seemed, somehow, to have become nearly strangers to her.
Almost automatically she put on her old tweed skirt and a jumper that had faded through age and Nanny’s constant washing. She combed her hair and avoided looking in the mirror.
She had a fleeting impression of a very white face, with eyes underlined by purple shadows, of a mouth that drooped wistfully at the corners and then she had turned away and run down the stairs.
Nanny was in the kitchen, but old though she was, her ears were sharp.
She heard Aria come into the sitting room and called out,
“Your eggs will be ready in a moment, dearie. There’s a letter on the table. The postman’s just been.”
“A letter for me?” Aria enquired in surprise.
She wondered who had written, but one glance at the envelope, with its bold rather characteristic handwriting, sent the blood rushing into her cheeks. She picked it up and knew that her hand was trembling.
He had written to her – why?
As she slit open the flap of the envelope, she knew the answer. Inside was one sheet of writing paper folded over a cheque. For a moment the words written on the paper seemed to swim before Aria’s eyes.
Then her vision cleared and she read,
Love Forbidden Page 21
