Bargain Wife

by Mary Burchell

  ‘All right.’ Sonia gave her a quick, rare kiss. ‘You can go mad with a clear conscience. I’ll see you have your old document, signed, sealed, and everything else. I’ll send it from the very first place where we stop long enough.’

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE next thirty-six hours developed into a hectic rush of arranging, rearranging, shopping, and trying on of bewilderingly beautiful clothes. Sonia’s future husband seemed to set no limit to the amount of money he was willing to spend on her, and Sonia, as she said, saw no reason why she should not gratify that particular wish of his to the furthest limits.

  Tina was not quite sure whether she herself was more scandalised or amused to see the amount of cold cash which Sonia had already contrived to extract from her admirer.

  Over breakfast she produced a wad of notes and slapped them down triumphantly beside her plate.

  ‘First dividend,’ she informed Tina with a smile.

  And when Tina said a little dryly, ‘Quick work, isn’t it?’ Sonia simply opened her big brown eyes very wide and protested:

  ‘Oh, but why? If he wants to marry me, I suppose he wants me to do him credit at the wedding. And if he wants me to do him credit at the wedding, I suppose he knows there’s only one person who can provide the cash. And if he is going to provide it, where’s the sense in wasting time?’

  ‘It sounds very simple, put that way,’ Tina agreed with a smile. ‘Is that how you argued it to him?’

  But Sonia shook her head.

  ‘Oh no. I believe in starting as I’m going on,’ she explained crisply, ‘I just came straight to the point and said, “It’ll take a heap of money to, make me look the part,” and he reached for his pocket-book at once. He knew what I meant.’

  Tina wondered how he could have failed to do so.

  Sonia, she noticed, extracted considerable malicious pleasure from the consternation of Louis, their employer, when she announced her immediate resignation and offered no explanation other than that she was getting married.

  When Tina in her turn and rather more timidly tendered her month’s notice, Louis regarded her with those uncomfortably penetrating light eyes of his, which never altered their expression even when he smiled.

  ‘Another wedding?’ he inquired cynically.

  ‘No,’ Tina said. ‘No, I’m going back home.’

  ‘To England?’

  ‘Yes, to England.’

  Sonia’s marriage—unlike anything Tina had ever thought a wedding should be came as a strange climax to a strange couple of days. The short, unromantic ceremony at City Hall made Tina somehow oddly embarrassed. And not all her painfully acquired sophistication was equal to the strain of watching unmoved while Sonia took on the role of an old man’s darling without so much as a nicker of her mascaraed eyelashes.

  However, Tina’s reflections were of no importance, of course, and certainly there was no question but that Sonia herself was completely satisfied. She looked radiant, and already adopted towards her elderly bridegroom an air of smiling confidence which showed she had no misgivings about how she intended to play her new role.

  Later, at the superb champagne luncheon which they all three shared at Manhattan’s most exclusive hotel, she accepted the luxurious surroundings, the homage of the head waiter, the extravagant devotion of her new husband, as though she had been used to these things all her life. No one, seeing her now, reflected Tina admiringly, could dream that she was nothing but an unsuccessful musician, used to cooking her own inadequate meals in a poky Brooklyn apartment.

  Determined that Tina should share as many of the new thrills as possible, Sonia insisted that she came down with them to the airport in the shining, streamlined Cadillac.

  ‘Merton can drive you back to town after we’re gone,’ she added casually, as though giving her orders to a chauffeur who had always been part of her daily routine.

  ‘Thank you,’ murmured Tina a little inadequately she felt, and for the first time it was really borne in on her that this was ‘goodbye’ to Sonia. For eighteen months they had shared almost every detail of their everyday life, and now they were most unlikely ever to see each other again.

  Sonia, unable to think of anything but the excitement of her new existence, was not wasting any sentimental regrets, Tina knew. But she herself happy though she was at the thought of her journey to England could not see the links snapping without a tightening of her throat. Aloud she said:

  ‘Perhaps you’ll come to Europe some day, Sonia.’

  ‘Oh, of course,’ Sonia agreed cheerfully.

  ‘I make the trip every year,’ interjected her husband at this moment, and Tina reflected that it was almost the only sentence he had addressed to her even in this oblique fashion. Evidently he had less than no interest in his young wife’s one-time associates.

  However, it seemed that Sonia had not counted in vain on his extending his generosity to cover Tina’s needs. For when the hurried goodbyes were said while it seemed to Tina that the impatient hum of the waiting plane added the last touch of fantasy to the scene she thrust a thick envelope into Tina’s hand.

  ‘There you are, honey. Call it the bridegroom’s present to his bridesmaid, if you like. It’ll buy your ticket to England and I hope you enjoy yourself when you settle there.’

  ‘Oh, Sonia! Dear, dear Sonia—thank you.’

  Tina wanted to say much more. She felt that all the words in the world were not enough to describe her relief and gratitude. But anyway, there was no time to say them now. Sonia was hugging her with unwonted warmth and they were kissing each other goodbye, while Cyrus Manton looked on rather sombrely, as though he grudged this slight display of affection on his wife’s part, even though it was directed to such a harmless recipient as Tina.

  ‘I’ll send you that letter the very first moment I have,’ Sonia promised. “We’re stopping off at Miami for a day or two, and I’ll do it then. Goodbye.’

  ‘Goodbye, Sonia. And thank you for everything.’

  No millionairess by birth could have accepted the thanks more charmingly as her due, and as Sonia followed her husband to the plane, Tina thought:

  ‘She’s stepping right into her new life word-perfect from the beginning.’

  It seemed only a matter of seconds then before the doors of the plane were shut and the machine was roaring across the field, clumsily at first and then incredibly gracefully as it gathered speed.

  She waved, because that seemed the right thing to do, and no doubt Sonia could see her for a few moments from the window. But almost immediately the plane became a distant speck against the clouds, and the voice of Cyrus Manton’s chauffeur Sonia’s chauffeur was saying respectfully behind her:

  ‘Where did you want me to take you, miss?’

  During the drive back to town Tina decided not to go back to the empty apartment. She would stay up in town—have a meal before going home. She could afford it now.

  She could afford in allow herself a few luxuries. Nothing stupidly extravagant, of course, just something to mark the difference between the sordid struggle of yesterday and the brightness of tomorrow.

  She hardly minded the usual discomforts and annoyances of the nightclub that evening. Louis was in a specially trying mood possibly because the hastily acquired substitute for Sonia was anything but satisfactory. But Tina felt impervious to irritation. In a little while she would in England.

  When she was changing to go home, she felt very sharply the realisation that Sonia was gone from her life. It would be quiet and lonely in the Brooklyn apartment, and she hoped with genuine fervour that it would not be long before hey arrangements for her journey could be completed.

  As she came out of the back exit from the club, the thunderstorm which had been threatening for days broke in sudden fury. Lightning flashed overhead, and the rain was driven in long, piercing spearheads down the narrow street which seemed now like a dark canyon, sunk between the tall buildings on either side.

  With an exclamation Tina stepped
back again into the doorway, sheltering from the first heavy downpour. It would not last long like this. She would wait for a few minutes before running for her subway station.

  As she stood there she idly watched the newspaper man at the opposite corner, sheltering under his streaming tarpaulin, already doing a brisk trade in the morning’s papers.

  At that moment a damp, flapping placard flattened itself out against the newspaper stall, and Tina read, with a sort of horrid fascination which printed every word on her mind:

  ‘WALL STREET MAGNATE DIES IN PLANE CRASH.’

  Without thinking now of the rain she dashed across the road. Her fingers trembled so much that she could hardly find the money to pay for the damp paper which she snatched from the man’s hand.

  But she scarcely needed to read the words which ran across two columns of the front page. She was fatalistically aware of them almost before she saw them:

  ‘Cyrus Manton perishes in blazing plane ... No survivors ... Several passengers still unidentified...’

  They were dead. Sonia and that old man who was going to give her everything she wanted were dead. All that bright, demanding Sonia had got out of that opportunity she thought so marvellous was limitless anticipation.

  Swaying backwards and forwards with the motion of the subway train, Tina tried to fix her thoughts on first one and then another aspect of the situation, but it seemed as though her thoughts, too, swayed backwards and forwards, refusing to attach themselves for more than a minute to any one thing.

  More by chance than anything else she noticed that she had arrived at her station, and got out of the train just before it started to move again. On the short walk to the apartment she was still thinking:

  ‘Sonia is gone ... But you didn’t ever expect to see her again anyway ... No, but that’s different. She’s dead. That’s different.... But there was going to be half the world between you in a week or two. You’re going home to England and—’

  With a start that really made her feel physically ill, Tina suddenly arrived at the most frightful realisation of all. She couldn’t go home to England now, after all. Her wonderful chance was gone too. She had the price of her ticket in her bag, it was true, but there was nothing and no one waiting for her the other side. Not a thing. Not a prospect—not a penny. At one time she would have hoped eagerly for the best and taken the risk. But the years of sickening, futile searching for jobs had sapped her confidence. She couldn’t go back now. Her chance was gone.

  She didn’t sit down when she got in. She walked up and down the strangely silent and empty room.

  It can’t be true. It simply can’t be true,’ she kept on selling herself. ‘Sonia meant me to have that money—that chance. With all her heart she meant it. It’s lying there in some bank, or some lawyer’s safe waiting for me to claim it that thousand pounds that means everything. There must be some way—’

  Suddenly she stopped in her walk, her eyes wide and dark in her unusually pale face, her whole air suggestive of someone who was listening.

  Like a voice from the past so really and tragically the past now Sonia’s words seemed to sound again:

  ‘You can have my old passport to establish your identity. Go home to England, Tina, and take that with you. You’ll find it in that drawer over there.’

  Slowly, as though not moving quite of her own volition, Tina crossed the room and pulled open a drawer.

  It was there just as Sonia had said the passport back to all that mattered. Fascinatedly she turned the pages and looked at the photograph. Not much like Sonia sufficiently unlike for one to be able to look at it without a pang of memory.

  If she did her hair that way the superficial likeness would be much more striking.

  Then the description. Hair blonde. Eyes brown. Height five feet four. It fitted.

  ‘It’s a criminal offence, of course,’ Tina murmured aloud but absently, as though that part of the idea hardly interested her.

  Specimen signature. Sonia’s round, schoolgirlish handwriting would not be difficult to copy. With a little practice—

  Sitting down at the table, Tina took out her fountain-pen. Slowly at first and with care, then gradually with more confidence and natural speed she wrote one name over and over again.

  Sonia Frayne. Sonia Frayne. Sonia Frayne.

  It was unusually late when Tina woke the next morning, and she lay there in bed for a few moments wondering why she felt depressed, yet excited. Then the overwhelming consciousness that she was alone in the room reminded her, in one tremendous rush, of all that had happened last night.

  Raising herself on her elbow, she glanced round the room, rather as though she imagined she must see Sonia asleep in the other bed very bright and concrete, a living refutation of the fantastic imaginings of the last few hours.

  But there was no Sonia. The other bed remained somewhat aggressively in the ‘chair’ state pushed against the wall. And far the most significant and, in a way, frightening thing in the room was the untidy jumble of paper on the table, sheet after sheet of which had been covered with a copy of Sonia’s handwriting.

  Jumping out of bed, Tina swept the sheets together. There was nowhere where she could burn them, and yet the very thought of their being sent down the rubbish-chute intact a dreadful and significant witness against her made her swallow nervously.

  Already, she supposed with a sort of fascinated dismay, she was a criminal covering her tracks.

  Then she determinedly forced herself to see things in more reasonable proportion. She was not being a criminal. She was carrying out the very thing which Sonia wanted done. There was no one to suffer by it. An irregular way of managing things, of course, but not morally a crime. In fact—’

  But, all the same, those papers must be destroyed.

  Taking them to the small sink in the kitchen, she put a match to them, watched them burn, and washed the ashes down the drain. Then she collected her newspaper from the letter-box, and over her scanty breakfast she read again the details of the dramatic accident.

  There was no doubt, it seemed, about Cyrus Manton himself having been on the plane. His seat had been booked several days ago.

  ‘I expect,’ thought Tina, ‘it was the idea of going away that made him finally ask Sonia to go with him. And her ticket would be taken at the last minute, of course, because he wouldn’t know until then that she was really going.’

  A famous film star, it was now known, had also been a passenger, and that was enough in itself to throw the unnamed and unknown occupants completely in the shade. They were classed together with tragic indifference as ‘three, if not four, other passengers, whose identity is as yet unknown.’

  ‘As yet,’ Tina reminded herself warningly. ‘Anything may come out yet. The chauffeur may know more than I supposed and talk. Someone at the register office may scent a news story.’ Though she remembered now, for the first time, how nervous and uncertain the official who had performed the brief ceremony had been. She had thought at the time, ‘New to the job, poor thing,’ and Sonia had been faintly annoyed because he obviously had no idea that the elderly bridegroom was a person of some importance.

  But there were so many pitfalls to last night’s half-formed project that, by now, the whole thing seemed quite impossible to carry out. She need not agitate herself so much about whether her idea were criminal or not. She was extremely unlikely ever to have the chance of testing it.

  In a way, that was almost a relief, she thought. Then she remembered, with a desperate, angry feeling of frustration, that if she could not carry it out, her way of escape was closed. No return to England for her. Just Louis and the club and New York for what seemed like ever and ever and ever.

  It was a very sober and thoughtful Tina who joined the other members of the group for rehearsal that morning, and it seemed uncanny to her that no one no one mentioned the momentous fact that Sonia was dead.

  How could they, of course? since they had no idea of the fact. And yet it seemed impossible tha
t this thing should have happened and none of her associates know the fact. Anxious though she was to keep a check on her own tongue, Tina found herself, more than once, on the very verge of saying something which would have betrayed what she now regarded as her guilty knowledge.

  And when Louis mentioned Sonia quite casually, it was all she could do not to betray her extreme agitation. To be sure, his inquiry was conventional enough. Just a slightly sneering:

  ‘Has our bright and beautiful Sonia departed on her wedding trip yet?’

  ‘Yes,’ Tina said carefully, trying not to think of herself waving goodbye to Sonia not twenty-four hours ago. ‘Yes, she went off yesterday.’

  ‘Was she going far?’ Louis was not really interested, beyond a casual curiosity, and even as he spoke, he was turning over sheets of music. But Tina passed the tip of her tongue over her dry lips, because this was the moment for her first lie, if she were to tell it.

  ‘Out West somewhere, I think.’ She was amazed to hear how her own casual tone matched Louis’s. ‘But you know how secretive Sonia could be. She didn’t talk much to me about it.’

  ‘Did you see the husband?’ Louis was frankly curious, though not, of course, in the slightest degree suspicious.

  He had no reason to be.

  ‘Yes.’ Tina gave the truthful reply unthinkingly, though the next moment she wished she had denied all knowledge of him. It would have been much the safest thing.

  ‘What was he like?’ Louis glanced up from the music he was examining.

  ‘Oh a good deal older than she was. But I should say he had plenty of money to spend on her, and was willing to spend it.’

  Louis laughed cynically again.

  ‘Just suit our little Sonia,’ he remarked. ‘A gold-digger born and bred. And a gold-digger she’ll be until the day she dies.’

  Tina said nothing. She turned away. But she felt that Sonia’s epitaph had unquestionably been spoken.