It was at this point that Nell knew her mother loved her dearly and had learned how to show it. She said “Thank you, Mother,” as she took the cup, without looking at her. She was grateful, but just now she did not feel it.
“It sounds just like the little beast,” Lady Fairfax said vigorously. “Poor Nell. Kind little cousin.”
She stretched out a gracious caressing hand which the kind little cousin, wishing that her English relations had some of Georges’ French tact, pretended not to see. “So he isn’t in Paris, then?” Lady Fairfax went on.
“He may be. I didn’t stop to look,” Nell answered composedly, drinking her coffee.
“What did he say?” Charles asked. “When he spoke to you, I mean.”
“Just that he had run away to get out of his Medical and caught a chill that had suddenly got bad, and that he was in Paris, and gave me the address. Mother, is there a biscuit?”
“Probably he was only pretending to be there,” Martin, speaking for the first time, exclaimed.
There followed a cross-examination about the telephone call, and the general verdict that it was a clever fake carried out with the help of two or three of his tatty Bohemian friends.
Nell sat calmly smoking one of Georges’ packet of Gauloise, which he had given her as a parting present. The smell of it brought back everything she had seen and heard in Paris. One day when she was not burning with anger any more (if that day ever came) she would go back there to enjoy the place. It was difficult, now, to believe that she had been there in actuality; her pictures of houses and cafés and the roads of France all retained the soft, vivid clearness of a dream. Even Georges had the quaintness and logic of a dream figure. The room, now, was dreamlike too. Only her anger burned and burned and was real.
They were still talking about the telephone call. It seemed as if it were going to lead on to a kind of reminiscence-show of his various shady exploits; the people taken in, the acts of effrontery, the half-dishonest tricks and evasions and avoiding of responsibility, and, always, the condemnation of authority.
She sat there, smoking, and listening without thinking. She had been a fool not to see, from the first meeting, what he was.
But she had seen. Hadn’t she? Hadn’t she always known what he was? and refused to admit it because she loved him?
Well, now she did not love him any more.
Suddenly she felt so exhausted that she could not bear it. They were all exclaiming now; wondering where he was, talking about the police; wondering whether he would turn up tomorrow … shaking their heads …
Nell got carefully to her feet. Everything around her was as clear as if she were looking at it—as she felt she was—through a sheet of glass. She was about to ask them all to excuse her, because she really was rather tired, when Anna crossed the room, with a little murmur of wonder about who that could possibly be, to answer a soft but clear tap on the drawing-room door.
But even as she went, she made the reassuring comment that of course it must be Miss Lister; because no-one else could get into the house.
It was Miss Lister.
She was standing in the hall as if poised for flight from somewhere in Old Spain, wearing her thick ancient coat and a sort of black mantilla. She was apologetic. Disturbing them. Very naughty of her. But she wanted to see the girlie. Nell, was she there?
Anna scolded her briskly. It was nearly ten o’clock and pitch dark outside; she might have tripped and fallen coming up the path.
Yes, she knew it was naughty. But she must just see the girlie. It was important.
At that moment Nell came out into the hall.
She scarcely knew Miss Lister. She had seen her two or three times, but most of her knowledge of her existence and her habits had been gained from hearing Anna occasionally talk about her. Now she was in no mood to dally kindly with old ladies. She nodded a brisk, “Hullo, Miss Lister. I’m just off to bed,” and turned away towards the stairs.
Miss Lister said clearly, in a firm voice, “I want to speak to you a minute, dear.”
Nell thought, blast you, then. She did not get as far as wondering what about? Half-turning, with an impatient smile for the poor old thing and her completely unimportant troubles, she said quickly, “Oh—I’m sorry, Miss Lister, but couldn’t you possibly tell me tomorrow? I’m rather tired.”
A shake of the head.
“It’s important, dear.”
“I think you’d better, Nell,” Anna said, and over Miss Lister’s shoulder sent her a glance that said Better get it over.
Nell came quickly down the hall. One more effort. Well, one more, then. One more hardly counted, at the end of this day.
“Is it a secret?” she managed to ask, smiling.
Anna had withdrawn back into the drawing-room; and Nell was alone in the dimly-lit hall, looking down from her extra six inches of height on the little figure in the mantilla.
“Yes, it is, dear. But, trouble is, I don’t think it ought to be. You see, after seeing those splendid chaps of ours on the T.V. this afternoon—your mother kindly invited me in—(I will not call it the telly, I loathe that expression) I felt I wasn’t doing my duty to the dear little Queen. By keeping it a secret, I mean. So I thought I would tell his father. (He’s the right person to know, and such a nice face. Trustworthy. I’ve seen him on that soapflakes programme, I never can remember its name.) But then I thought, no. A Man. More likely to be wild with him, poor boy. And I do not like his mother’s face. Conceited. So as I know you’re a great friend of his, I decided to tell you.”
She stopped, and peeped up smiling into Nell’s face. It wore simply no expression at all. The dreamlike feeling had spread until it had covered the scheme of creation, and she was engulfed in it. She knew at once what Miss Lister was talking about, but she could neither feel nor speak.
The old voice sank to a whisper. A tiny cold claw came out and took masterful hold of Nell’s wrist.
“So if you’ll come with me, dear. Won’t take a jiffy … only we must be rather quiet, because I’m supposed to be out watering my bulbs. Naughty, I’m afraid. Shirking.”
Nell pulled back from the pressure of her hand long enough to open the drawing-room door and call to them in a voice flat with fatigue, “Come down to Miss Lister’s in about five minutes, will you.” Then she shut it, and allowed herself to be led along the hall.
They went carefully down the iron staircase leading from the verandah; under the leafless twin sycamores, and along the dark path covered in dim rustling leaves. Between the black houses Nell could see necklaces and brooches of light lying far below on black velvet. But she was not reminded of an earlier view of Paris at night because by now she was completely caught up in the dream; she did remember, however, to move more slowly than was natural to her so that her guide might be less likely to trip over in haste. They went down between Anna’s flower-beds, still in the disarray of early autumn, towards the light burning faintly in Miss Lister’s cottage.
I don’t know why I came, Nell thought, as Miss Lister with a touch of drama, stealthily but expansively flung wide the door and waved her into the dimly-lit entry. There was no reason for turning back now. What was going to happen would not hurt her. In a dream, nothing could hurt.
She followed Miss Lister down a narrow dark passage, and they stopped before a closed door whose shape was outlined with a thread of gold light. The old lady turned to her, mouthing something; Nell could not distinguish what she was saying, but she thought that it might be an apology; some kind of an excuse, or something of that sort. People did sometimes think it necessary to excuse themselves for betraying other people.
“All right; yes;” she said impatiently, nodding, and then Miss Lister began cautiously to open the door.
Nell, standing rigidly in the shadow, saw first a strip of floor, covered in dust, and then the curved leg of an ancient sofa, and then a brown shoe which she recognized. The long graceful body reclining at length on the sofa was breathlessly still; his big
hand had stopped caressing the cat lying on his chest as the door began to open. But he must, without looking fully at her, have known at once who was there, for almost immediately his hand resumed the calm, steady stroking of the yellow back.
The cat, alarmed, began to struggle, and John said crossly without looking up:
“Do be careful, Nello. You’re frightening Dandy.”
She turned, and pushed her way, without speaking, through the four people who were now crowding into the cottage. She went back to the house and upstairs to her room and locked the door.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
FAIR WIND FROM JAMAICA
THE EL HACIENDA ESPRESSO Bar, he thought petulantly as he climbed the High Street in the teeth of the winter wind, laden with the tediously and unnecessarily large mass of gear which the Army insisted upon one’s toting around with one almost wherever one went, might have been especially designed to make someone coming home on leave for Christmas, especially someone who had neither written to someone else, nor been written to by them, for three months, feel thoroughly out of things, forgotten, and neglected.
Occupying the best site in the High Street, Uncle James’s present was decorated with the usual strings of onions and travel posters and bamboo fences and chianti bottles, and its customers borrowed glamour from its rich pink lighting. As he lingered, looking in, he thought that it was like an annoying scene from a musical comedy; Elizabeth Prideaux darting about in twin set and pearls with the cake trolley and smiling at the customers; and the red-head with the hard and pretty face (he presumed that this must be Pat, from Akkro products), waiting swiftly from table to table, and, sitting raised slightly above the others at the amusing cash-desk covered in Caribbean straw hats—Nell.
He was a little surprised to find how well he remembered the long delicate nose, sharing the honours of indicating her character with the delicate long mouth. During the three months that the Army had been failing to soften in the least his supple and obstinate determination to remain himself, she had neither bloomed nor wilted; grown prettier or plainer; she had changed in only one way and that had nothing to do with her looks. Her hair was still his favourite kind and hanging straightly and smoothly, and, without seeming to, her eyes still saw most of what was going on.
The way in which she had changed was that she had become chic; that dress might have been worn by a French-woman.
But he recalled that she had been on the way to becoming chic when he had thrown her down. She seemed to have got up again.
Telling himself that El Hacienda was a smart and vulgar place, and knowing that the verdict was very largely rendered false by spite, he turned away. He was not going in to drink their coffee, not he. It was pleasant to see Nell unaltered, and if he were in the mood he would look in there tomorrow and make her tell him all about the acquiring, equipping and opening of their coffee-bar. It would be tedious to listen to, but they must be established, he and Nell, in their former friendship. She was among the few things, he knew now, that he was going to need, a little, for the rest of his life.
He set off slowly, dragging his luggage after him, for Arkwood Road. Between the dark houses he could now see the city sparkling in her evening lights; if he had known how greatly Nell was in fact altered, would it have checked a little the pleasure he now experienced at the sight; as if wings were unfolding in his breast?
There was a long time yet, he reflected as he went on up the hill, to be reluctantly cared for by his cousin Nell. Even if the room with its rag of black carpet and its threat of witnessing a death like Chatterton’s were not more than fifteen years away, that was still a long time when one was not yet nineteen. And Nell, judging by his past knowledge of her at least, was faithful and forgiving.
He strode on up the hill pulling his bundles after him: to charm someone.
THE END
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Copyright © Stella Gibbons 1956
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Here Be Dragons Page 38
