Across the Counter

by Mary Burchell

  On returning to what she regarded as her own department, she discovered a subtle change in the atmosphere. The one or two customers were being attended to with an assiduous goodwill that had not been evident before, and she wondered amusedly if Miss Lester had already administered something between a warning and a pep talk.

  As soon as she reentered the office, however, she realized she had been flattering herself in supposing that she had anything to do with the change. The increased efficiency and alertness in the department was immediately explained by the fact that the good-looking assistant managing director was sitting there talking with Aileen Lester.

  He got up at once when Katherine entered. But Miss Lester remained seated—probably to show that she was on her own home ground here and that it was Katherine who was the (not very welcome) visitor.

  Paul Kendale in the office was a very different person from the man who had brought her sandwiches and coffee and listened to her sad story the previous evening. And although Katherine neither expected nor wished anything else, there was a momentary difficulty in making the readjustment.

  However, as he immediately began to ask her abrupt and searching questions about her morning’s investigation, a formal and businesslike atmosphere was very soon established. Aileen Lester made no attempt to withdraw during this conversation, and Katherine could not help being aware that Miss Lester’s special relationship with the Kendale family was being stressed for her benefit.

  If Paul Kendale noticed this, he gave no sign of doing so. To both the girls he was very much the assistant managing director and no personal note was struck at all. Until, that is to say, he rose once more to go. Then turning to Katherine he said, “So you’re beginning to find your way around and get to know people?”

  “Yes, indeed. Everyone is very kind and helpful,” Katherine declared diplomatically if not very truthfully, classing Miss Lester and Miss Falloden together in this general, unexceptional statement.

  “It’s easier to get to know people in a provincial store than in London, I think,” he agreed.

  “Oh, do you think so?” Miss Lester firmly entered the conversation at that point. “I think people tend to be more cliquey in a provincial city. You have to make it your business to get on with what you might call leading personalities or you can have a pretty thin time of it.” There was the very slightest pause, and Katherine had the impression that Paul Kendale was not particularly pleased with Miss Lester—either because of this faintly threatening comment or because of something that had happened before she herself had come into the room.

  Then he said, “Well, there will be a good opportunity for you to get to know people at the dance on Saturday. Has anyone told you about it?”

  “Miss Falloden in Costume Jewelry mentioned it.”

  “It’s usually quite a gay affair.”

  “One can’t very well go without a partner, though,” put in Aileen Lester regretfully. “I wonder if I could do anything for you there.”

  She looked pensive and deceptively helpful, and Katherine had the immediate conviction that any escort produced by Miss Lester would inexplicably fail her at the last minute.

  Once more she started to explain about her brother. But before she could get out more than two words, Paul Kendale spoke again with a cool deliberation that—Katherine felt oddly sure—was intended for the other girl as well as herself.

  To her own astonishment—and presumably Aileen Lester’s too—what he said was, “Perhaps, Miss Renner, you’ll allow me to solve that problem. May I take you to the Kendale Ball on Saturday?”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “To the Kendale Ball?” Katherine echoed Paul Kendale’s words in something between gratified surprise and diplomatic doubt. For while it would certainly be pleasant—not to say soothing to one’s shattered pride—to go to the ball as the partner of the assistant managing director, Katherine was not unaware of the complications involved. Particularly as she noted at this point a sultry silence in the general direction of Miss Lester.

  “It’s extremely kind of you,” she said a little hesitantly. “But surely at this late date you must already be committed to taking someone else?”

  “No.” Paul Kendale was agreeably positive about that. “I did hope to take someone, but she had second thoughts—” Katherine thought she heard a sharply indrawn breath from the other girl “—and so you would actually be doing me a special favor if you would come with me.”

  He smiled as he said that, and for the first time Katherine was fully aware of Paul Kendale’s charm. It was not by any means always in evidence—and possibly the more potent for that reason—but it was so completely turned upon her in that moment that she found herself saying without further hesitation. “Then in that case I shall be delighted to come with you. Thank you very much.”

  “Good. Then that’s settled.”

  And with a slight nod directed impartially to the two girls, he went off.

  For a minute after he had gone there was silence. Then Aileen Lester said flatly and coldly, “He was taking me, you know.”

  “Was he?” Katherine remained outwardly unperturbed. “Then you must be the girl who had second thoughts. Who is taking you instead?”

  “I haven’t really decided. I hadn’t actually turned down Paul. He only invited you to be mean to me.”

  Katherine took this unflattering statement as well as she could and merely said dryly, “What do you expect me to do about it?”

  “Nothing—since you’re not a friend of mine,” replied Aileen. And then she swept out, leaving Katherine wishing that it was not necessary to see quite so much of this uncomfortable young woman.

  The rest of the day passed rapidly enough for once she was absorbed in her work Katherine took little note of time. It was the evenings that were going to be difficult, she realized, as five-thirty drew near and another empty evening without Malcolm loomed ahead.

  But as she came out of the staff exit, Miss Falloden caught up with her and asked, “Where are you staying in Morringham?”

  Katherine told her and Miss Falloden made a slight face.

  “Not very inspiring, is it?” she said sympathetically. Then a trifle diffidently but with real warmth she went on, “You wouldn’t care to come home with me, would you? I live with my mother and although it’s not the height of luxury it’s pleasant and homey and you’d be very welcome.”

  “Why, how good of you!” Katherine was both touched and attracted by the offer. “If you’re sure your mother wouldn’t mind a total stranger—”

  “Oh, no!” Miss Falloden laughed. “She isn’t that sort at all.”

  So Katherine went home with the young buyer from Costume Jewelry and from the moment she stepped inside the small, cheerful, welcoming house she knew it was a place where one would feel perennially at home. Over a meal that would not have disgraced the Grand she learned that Jane Falloden’s still good-looking mother had once been an actress.

  “Not first-rate, of course,” Mrs. Falloden explained with good-humored frankness. “I never made the West End, even as a stand-in. But either you have the temperament of a trouper or you haven’t. I have—and I loved touring. Then I met my husband, and when I married of course, I left the stage.”

  “Then he wasn’t an actor, too?” inquired Katherine, who was finding all this so much more interesting than dinner alone at the Bellevue.

  “Oh, no! He was a clergyman,” was the unexpected reply. “A perfectly sweet one,” Mrs. Falloden added with uninhibited warmth. “So good and kind and such a tolerant and understanding man. He used to say that stage people and clergymen have quite a lot in common. They both have to believe absolutely in what they are trying to put over, and if they can’t find a way of holding their audience they’d better pack up and do something else.”

  “Well—” Katherine laughed “—I suppose that’s right.”

  “Most things he said were right,” Mrs. Falloden declared simply. “He was the best Christian and the most amus
ing man I ever knew, in spite of wretched health.”

  “I was only twelve when he died,” said Jane Falloden, taking up the story, “but I still remember what fun it was having him for a father. We never had much money, either during his lifetime or afterward, but I must say both my parents knew a lot about the art of being happy.”

  “We’re talking too much about ourselves, dear,” her mother declared firmly. “Now it’s Miss Renner’s turn.” Katherine smiled, but this reminded her to tell Jane of her invitation to the Kendale Ball.

  “I say!” Jane looked genuinely impressed. “How did you manage to bypass Aileen Lester?”

  “You mean—” Katherine looked amused but curious “—that Paul Kendale is more or less her property?”

  “She thinks so,” amended Jane with nice exactitude.

  “Rightly or wrongly?”

  “My dear, your guess is as good as mine,” Jane said with a shrug. “I hope wrongly. I think he’s too good for her.”

  On the whole Katherine thought so, too. But tactfully, she refrained from pursuing the matter further, and after a moment Mrs. Falloden changed the subject by inquiring whether she intended to stay at the Bellevue all the time she was in Morringham.

  “Oh, no!” Katherine spoke with feeling. “Hotel bedrooms can be pretty dreary. I’ll have to get busy over the weekend and find somewhere else. In between going to the ball and visiting my own home,” she added as an afterthought.

  “Is your family too far away for you to live with them?”

  “Yes, I’m afraid so. I did consider it, but as they’re off the direct route, and there wouldn’t be anyone available to bring me in by car, it wouldn’t be practical.”'

  Jane made as though to speak, and at the same time her mother said, “Would you care to stay here? I sometimes take someone for q limited time. If I like them,” she added with candor.

  “Oh, Mrs. Falloden, I’d love it! Do you really mean it?” exclaimed Katherine.

  “If you like, the room I have to offer and find my terms satisfactory,” Mrs. Falloden said, smiling.,

  “I’m sure they’re satisfactory and that the room is lovely,” declared Katherine, convinced that it would be worth almost anything to exchange her present quarters for the charming atmosphere of the Falloden home.

  But Mrs. Falloden laughed and said that was no way to discuss business and that Katherine had better see the room first, as it was not very big.

  In fact, it was quite small. Probably not all that much bigger than the room she had at the Bellevue. But in charm and comfort it was palatial by comparison.

  Both the Fallodens seemed pleased and touched by her enthusiasm. And before she left to catch her bus back into town Katherine had come to mutually satisfactory terms with Mrs. Falloden and went away hugging the pleasant knowledge that she was to change her quarters the very next day.

  It was still not very late when she arrived back at her hotel and she decided to telephone her mother. With the pattern of life becoming so much more pleasant, even the tragedy of losing Malcolm seemed manageable, if no less agonizing. She thought she could now speak to her mother without betraying to her loving and experienced ears that something was wrong.

  The delighted surprise in her mother’s voice was heartwarming. And when Katherine explained that she was speaking not from London but from Morringham, she heard her mother call, “Arthur, it’s Katherine—and she’s in Morringham.” And almost immediately her father came to the telephone.

  He was a busy country doctor with a scattered practice, and more often than not he was not available when Katherine made her brief calls from London. But he was equally delighted to have a word with her on this occasion and wanted to know how soon they would be seeing her.

  “I’ll come for all of Sunday, father,” Katherine promised.

  “Not on Saturday? I thought Kendales closed on Saturday afternoons.”

  “They do. But they have a ball on Saturday night and I’m going.”

  She heard her father say, “The child says she’s going to a ball on Saturday. I didn’t know they had balls in Morringham.” Then to Katherine, “Your mother says what ball and who is taking you?”

  “It’s the store’s annual ball,” Katherine explained. “And ... well, Paul Kendale is taking me.”

  “You don’t say!” Even her father sounded impressed, in a parental sort of way.

  And then her mother took the receiver again and said, “Darling, how exciting! I didn’t know you even knew the Kendales.”

  “Well, I met Paul Kendale in the course of business—and he asked me.”

  “Very sensible of him,” commented her mother, who had a proper pride in her children, if rather few illusions about them. “Have you met his sister yet?”

  “No,” said Katherine, suddenly unable to add anything to that.

  “Well, I suppose you will at the ball. She has just become engaged. There was a photograph of her in today’s Morringham Mirror—such a pretty girl. The fellow she’s marrying is very good-looking too. A tiny bit of the fortune hunter about him, I thought. But it’s difficult to tell from newspaper photographs.” Katherine said it was. Then she asked hastily about her elder brother, Martin, who was junior house surgeon at the hospital in Corham, and about Gwendoline, who was in her first year of training as a nurse there. At this point a lot of deep breathing and a suppressed giggle told her that the twins, Charles and Charlotte, were listening in on the telephone extension upstairs.

  She heard her mother say, “Put down that receiver and go back to bed at once! You children know perfectly well you’re not supposed to listen to other people’s conversation.”

  “Oh, mother, let me say hello to them!” cried Katherine, for she adored her ten-year-old brother and sister.

  But the receiver had already been hastily replaced, and Mrs. Renner laughed and told Katherine she would have to wait until Sunday.

  “Have a good time on Saturday, dear. We shall expect a full account on Sunday,” her mother declared before she hung up. And as Katherine replaced her receiver she thought how good it was to be near one’s loving, interested family once more.

  She wished her mother had not made that odd observation about Malcolm. But then—she was quite right—newspaper photographs often gave a wrong impression of people.

  For the next two days Katherine was very fully occupied. At the store there was a great deal to study; facts had to be collated and schemes worked out. While in her personal life there was the transfer to be made to the Fallodens’ home.

  In a sense there was little time to linger over the disaster that had so completely changed her life. But always at the back of her mind—and often at the front, too—there was a perpetual sense of less and pain.

  The worst time was when she woke up in the morning. And the very fact that she now woke in a charming room to an instinctive sense of well-being made it all the more unbearable when her spirits plummeted with the fresh realization that never, never, never again would she share either pleasures or troubles with Malcolm. It was a misery that had to be faced every morning, and every morning reaccepted.

  On the Friday afternoon, Katherine was sitting in what Aileen Lester undoubtedly considered her office when in came Miss Lester herself, accompanied by a lovely fair-haired girl whom Katherine immediately recognized as the girl who had been photographed with Malcolm at the inaugural dinner.

  As she pushed aside the departmental returns that she had been studying, she felt her heart begin to beat uncomfortably fast, and it was really no surprise to her when Miss Lester said, “This is Miss Kendale. She would like to meet you.”

  Perhaps it was as good a way as any of achieving the first inevitable meeting with the girl who had supplanted her. But Katherine felt that her smile must be stiff and her handshake limp as she somehow contrived to bring out the conventional words necessary to the occasion.

  Geraldine Kendale was a lively, charming creature, evidently used to being liked and to having her own way.
She smiled at Katherine with frank, not unfriendly curiosity, and almost immediately launched into the real purpose of her visit.

  “You must come to dinner with us tomorrow before the ball, Miss Renner,” she said a little as though stating a decision rather than issuing an invitation. “Paul seemed to have some idea that you might feel shy among strangers and prefer to dine quietly with him at some hotel. But that’s ridiculous, of course.

  “There’ll only be about a dozen of us. Myself and my fiancé—whom you know anyway, I hear—Paul and you, my father and an old crony or two of his, and then Aileen and Jeremy Peel, one of the directors. All quite informal. You will come, won’t you?”

  There was no question of refusing—though Katherine silently paid tribute to Paul Kendale’s efforts to save her from the ordeal of having to watch Malcolm and her rival together at an intimate party. With only the faintest pause first, she heard herself accepting the invitation gracefully. And then Aileen Lester said thoughtfully, “I don’t know why Paul thought you would be shy. You don’t strike me as at all a shy person, Miss Renner.”

  “No? Well, it was kind of him to consider the possibility. What time would you like me to come, Miss Kendale?”

  “Six-thirty? We’ll dine at seven. Although the ball starts at eight, we usually don’t get there until it’s well under way. I’m so glad you’re coming. It will be nice for you to meet Malcolm again, won’t it?”

  Katherine said it would. And then Geraldine Kendale went away, once more escorted by Miss Lester, who evidently considered the Kendale family very much her property.

  Left alone, Katherine leaned her head on her hand for a moment. If only there had been a way of avoiding this invitation! To have to watch Malcolm dancing with another girl, among hundreds at a ball, was going to be bad enough. But to have to sit with him—perhaps opposite him—at an intimate dinner party while he paid all the loving attention necessary to his new fiancée would be almost unbearable.