“Monkey, when do you go back?” said Evelyn presently.
“To-morrow, I expect; but I’m not absolutely sure. Fact is—this is confidential, please—they’re offering me a job at the War Office. It’s not fixed up; but I’m going round there to-morrow, and then I’ll be able to let you know for certain. I don’t really expect I’ll get away till next day.”
For the rest of the way they talked of Don, of Lacy, of the chances of getting an unfurnished flat—in fact, of everything except Laydon. When they stopped in the quiet square, where two or three of the pleasant old houses had been modernized and turned into flats, Evelyn got out:
“Will you take her round? Same garage, just round the corner. Thanks awfully.”
She came round the car and stopped, standing silent for a while. Then she said,
“Monkey, who do you think he is?”
His brow wrinkled sharply as he threw her a quick, upward glance.
“Did you mean who, or which?”
It was too dark for him to see her face, but her voice thrilled with impatience.
“Monkey, don’t fence! Tell me!”
“I’m not fencing; I’m being cautious.”
“Don’t be cautious. I want the truth—what you really think.”
“I think——” He paused for so long that her foot tapped on the pavement. “My dear girl, it’s no good doing that. I think—well, what is there to think?”
“Do you think he’s Jack, or Jim?”
“I think he’s one of them. And if you don’t know which one, well, how in heaven’s name do you expect me to?”
“That’s what you really think?”
“That’s what I really think.”
Evelyn turned, went up the steps, and let herself into the house.
It was about an hour later that the telephone bell rang. Evelyn went into the dining-room, shut the door, took up the receiver, and said,
“Hullo!”
“Can I speak to Mrs Laydon?” The voice was a man’s voice, and Evelyn recognized it instantly. It was the voice which she had listened to in the library at Laydon Manor only that afternoon. It had sounded strangely to her there, without one kind, familiar tone; but now some trick of the wires altered it, raising the pitch and bringing out a quality which set memory quivering.
“Mrs Laydon speaking. Who is it?” She spoke with her hand pressed close against her cheek.
There was a noticeable pause. Then the voice, the familiar voice, answering her question with a single word:
“Laydon.”
Evelyn’s hand pressed closer. Laydon—yes, that’s what he was, just a surname, just—Laydon. A grandson for Sir Cotterell, and an heir for Laydon Manor—but for her, what? Husband—lover—friend—or nothing but an empty name? She held the receiver to her ear and would not speak. What had she got to say to a name? If there was anything behind the name, anyone with a need that she could meet, the next move did not lie with her. She heard Laydon say anxiously “Are you there?” and she heard herself say “Yes” with a sort of mechanical ease.
Then Laydon:
“I want to come and see you.”
She said “Yes” again.
“I must see you. You’ll let me? You went away so quickly.”
“Yes.”
“When may I come?”
“I don’t know.”
She heard the voice rise a little, eagerly.
“It’s too late to-night, I suppose?”
“Yes.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes.”
“To-morrow then?”
“Yes.”
A note of concern crossed the eagerness.
“You’re all right?”
“Oh, yes.”
“It was beastly for you this afternoon.” Tone as well as words were boyish.
Evelyn hung up the receiver with a quick jerk. She could bear no more. The voice did not belong to Laydon; it belonged to her memories, and it played on them, calling up the hopes and joys and tender anticipations of ten years ago. They were gone; they were dead and buried, and the past had closed down on them. It hurt most terribly to have them called into a mocking semblance of life again.
When Laydon came into the flat next morning it seemed to him that he had stepped out of winter into spring. He shut the door on greyness and a tearing north-east wind, and stood looking into a room which suggested sunshine even when the sun was hidden.
A small table had been pulled out into the middle of the floor, and standing on it was a large wooden tray covered with bunches of spring flowers—wood-violets, primroses, Lent lilies and bright blue squills. Evelyn stood just behind the table. She wore a green dress, and her hands were full of primroses.
As Laydon came forward, she let the flowers fall, and gave him a pale smile and a cold, wet hand. It was rather chilling—to look like spring and be so wintry cold to touch.
“You must have had an icy drive,” said Evelyn. “Aren’t these lovely?” She took up the primroses again and bent her face to them. “Jessica sent me a great box of them this morning.”
Laydon took the obvious opening:
“Who is Jessica?”
“Jessica Sunning. We share this flat. She’s an artist; she has a studio just round the corner. We’ve been here six—no, seven years. I think you’d like Jessica. She’s visiting her people in Devonshire just now; and when she’s there she always sends me heavenly flowers.”
Evelyn turned from him as she spoke, and went to the hearth. On the white mantel-shelf were half a dozen delicate china cups—turquoise blue, apple green, rose pink, primrose, blood red, and lilac. She put primroses into the lilac, and violets into the turquoise cup. Then she came back to the table for more flowers.
Laydon’s eyes followed her. She picked up a bunch of squills, talking all the time:
“Jessica has one real virtue—she always ties up flowers as she picks them. I’ve cried over the flowers some people send one, all mashed up and huddled together. Now Jessica never does that.”
She put the squills into the apple green cup and heard Laydon move behind her.
“Won’t you come and sit down?” he said. “I want to talk to you.”
Evelyn settled the little blue flowers before she turned. She came slowly back to the table and stood there, looking down at the Lent lilies, but not touching them.
“Won’t you sit down?” said Laydon again. “I want to talk to you—I think we must talk.”
Something in his voice came through Evelyn’s guard and pricked her to a change of mood. She stopped being afraid, and became very much mistress of herself and of the situation. They were set down to a strange game, she and Laydon and Sir Cotterell and the Abbotts; and she meant to pick up her hand and play it gallantly without counting the cost.
She sat down on the arm of a big chair, leaned one elbow on the back, and smiled, really smiled at Laydon for the first time.
“All right,” she said,—“talk.”
“I don’t know where to begin,” said Laydon, “except that I wanted to say how frightfully sorry I was about yesterday.” He came and sat down on the arm of the other big chair, quite close to her. “My hat! What a show! It was bad enough for me, but it must have been perfectly beastly for you.”
With the most extraordinary suddenness the relationship between them had changed. Constraint had gone. The need to save the situation was gone. Evelyn nodded and said,
“Thank goodness it’s over!”
“That’s one thing—however beastly things are, you don’t have to go through them twice. I expect we were all glad when yesterday was over Evelyn——”
Evelyn stopped him with a quick gesture, the colour bright in her face.
“Yes, I’m Evelyn—but what are you? I mean, what am I to call you? That’s the first thing we have to settle. What am I to call you?”
“I thought”—his voice was eager and confidential—“I thought perhaps you’d call me Anthony. You see, that’s what I�
��m calling myself.”
Evelyn said “Anthony” once or twice, frowning a little over it and hesitating, as if she did not find it easy to say.
“Why Anthony?”
Laydon did not answer for a moment.
“You’ve talked to Monkey—I don’t quite know how much you know.” He threw her a look that searched her face, and found it grave.
“I’ve read Anna Blum’s statement.”
He looked away from her, down at the brown and orange of the carpet. It was like fallen leaves, like a drift of fallen leaves. He saw the bare trees of a wintry forest, and the leaves that lay in drifts below.
“Amazing, isn’t it?” he said.
He had forgotten that they were talking about his name, but she recalled him to it.
“You were called Anton Blum. Is that why? Anton is Anthony of course. I should have thought——”
“What?”
“Well, I shouldn’t think you would want to be reminded—but I don’t know.”
“I don’t feel like that. There’s no other name I can call myself, and somehow I seem used to it. After all, if you’ve been called by a name for ten years, I suppose you do get used to it.”
Evelyn leaned a little nearer and said rather breathlessly,
“But do you remember it all? Don’t talk about it if you’d rather not. Perhaps you’d better not talk about it.”
“No, I don’t mind. I think I’d like to—if you’ll let me—if it doesn’t bore you.”
Evelyn shook her head.
“No, it doesn’t bore me,” she said in an odd, still voice. Then she smiled rather beautifully, and Laydon’s heart cried out in him.
“I remember like one remembers a dream”—he wasn’t looking at her now—“You know how it is. You have a dream, and then you wake up and it’s gone. You see all the everyday things, and you get up, and there’s a frightful lot to do. And you don’t think about the dream until something reminds you. Perhaps it’s some rotten little thing, and you don’t know why it reminds you; but it does, and all of a sudden you can look into your own mind and see the dream there, frightfully clear and distinct.” His right hand opened and shut twice, sharply. “I’m making a most awful bungle of it; but I can’t put it any better.”
“You mean when you first woke up—came to yourself—out there in Cologne, you didn’t remember much about all the time you were Anton Blum; but now you do remember—is that what you mean?”
“Yes, something like that. Not all the time, you know, but by fits and starts—if anything reminds me. Just now, for instance——” He paused, hesitated, and let the words come with a rush—“Just now I remembered the forest frightfully plainly. It was like seeing it—the leaves, you know,—rather a jolly colour——” He broke off and looked at her. “You don’t think it sounds—mad?”
Her eyes were very kind.
“I think it sounds as if your memory was coming back and—and steadying down. It will come back.”
“I wonder,” said Anthony Laydon.
The big chair slid back on its castors as he jumped up and went over to the window. He had known that it would be hard; but it was being harder than he had reckoned. It was bad enough to play the stranger, to watch her, pale and controlled, with a sheet of ice between them; but with the ice gone, and Evelyn just Evelyn, looking at him with lovely kindness, it was unbearable. Thought, will, and resolution melted in him and flowed out towards her.
He stood at the window, holding back a rush of words. If he could no longer hold his thought, he could at least forbid it utterance. Only a fool would hazard everything now. Wait—wait as he had planned to wait. Give her time—give her time, you fool! Don’t rush her. You’ve got ten years to bridge somehow.
He heard Evelyn’s voice:
“What is Anna Blum like? I wondered so much when I read her statement; and I thought perhaps you could tell me. You remember her, I suppose?”
He turned, leaning against the window frame.
“Anna—yes, I remember, of course.” He frowned. “It’s pretty well all Anna, you know—just a long dream going on, and on; and Tante Anna always there. She was frightfully good to me. That’s a thing I’ve got to see about, you know. I’ve asked Monkey to find out. I mean, what she did for me must have leaked out by now, and I’ve got to make sure that she’s not suffering for it in any way. Monkey can find out quietly. She—it rather appals me to feel under such a terrific obligation. I don’t quite know what to do.”
“You’ll find a way.”
“Yes, I must.”
There was a pause. Laydon didn’t want a pause; the moment there was silence, all those things he must not say clamoured in him again. He spoke quickly, brusquely:
“Don’t you want to know what happened after you went away yesterday?”
“Yes, of course. I had to go.” Her voice dropped a little, and her colour changed. “What did happen?”
“Oh, a scene with the Abbotts. My grandfather didn’t let ’em down any too gently, I’m afraid; and after all I bar Cotty, but my coming back like this is a bit rough on him, I must say. I think my grandfather’ll have to do something about it—and I think he will too. But just at present”—he laughed—“just at present, I’m not at all sure that the feeling that he’s scored off Cotty isn’t stronger than the feeling that he’s got one of us back.”
“I can’t stand the Abbotts,” said Evelyn, frankly. “But I’m sorry for them. If Sophy wasn’t a cat, I’d be sorrier still.”
“I thought she was an absolutely poisonous female. Where did Cotty pick her up?”
Evelyn broke into a gurgle of laughter.
“She was a Mendip-ffollinton.”
“What’s that?”
Her eyes danced; there was a dimple in her cheek. All the ice was gone.
“If she and Cotty could only hear you! She’s a Mendip-ffollinton. They spell it with two little ‘f’s’—and there’s never, never, never been a title in the family.”
Laydon laughed too—laughed with his eyes as well as with his lips.
“Are they proud of that?”
“Frightfully. Dukes are dirt, and Marquises are mud compared with the Mendip-ffollintons. Some day, if you and Sophy are ever on speaking terms, she’ll explain to you just how vulgar it is to be a baronet. I’m beyond the pale altogether because I wear short skirts and shingle my hair. She wears a net. All the female Mendip-ffollintons wear nets, and little waists, and bushy skirts—it’s part of the family tradition.”
Laydon had stopped laughing. His eyebrows drew together, and he said abruptly:
“Why did you cut your hair?”
His eyes accused her, and she met them with a challenging spark in her own.
“Why, because I’m not a Mendip-ffollinton. We don’t have hair now, you know—except in front.” She put up a hand and touched the thick waves above her brow and the little curls that hid her ears. “It’s simply not done. You’ve no idea how comfortable it is. If we ever go back to hair, we shall be fools.”
As she talked, she felt a dangerous moment pass. Laydon came forward.
“Aren’t you going to put the rest of your flowers in water?” he asked in the restrained voice which she had heard in the library at Laydon Manor.
They put the Lent lilies into a copper lustre jug, and he told her that Sir Cotterell had already altered his will:
“He insisted on doing it then and there, though Gregory tried to make him wait.”
“I don’t see why he should wait. I think he was quite right to do it at once.” She put the jug on the top of the piano, and turning, leaned on the key-board.
“He’s been awfully generous in every way. I thought I’d like to tell you. He’s opening an account for me under my present name, and—in fact he’s being so generous that I rather wish he wouldn’t.”
Evelyn looked at him gravely and directly.
“What are you going to do?” she asked.
If he hesitated, it was only for a moment.
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“I had a long talk with him and Uncle Henry last night. I want to study up-to-date farming and estate management. Jim was going to, you know; and I’m quite sure it’s the only way to keep things going. Uncle Henry is awfully keen about it, but my grandfather—well, you know what he is—what most of the men of his generation are. There’s a good deal of the ‘What was good enough for me and my father and all my great-grandfathers ought to be good enough for this generation. Then they get a bit off their chests about Socialism and the country going to the dogs. We talked him round, and he doesn’t really mind. I thought I’d take a fortnight or so to look round, and then start in. I’m most horribly at sea, you know, about everything. I’ve got ten years to fill in.” He gave a short laugh. “Talk about being knocked out of time! I’ve been knocked out of ten years of it—clean out.” His tone was so harshly bitter that Evelyn’s heart contracted. And then, all at once, he was saying lightly—“Have you got a tape-map? There’s an address I want to look out—someone I’ve got to go and see.”
When she had brought him the map, he spread it on the floor, shifted the table, and bent over it, saying the two numbers over once or twice just under his breath, Evelyn watched the rough, clumsy hands with the broken nails. As she watched them, her heart full of pity and trouble, he looked up unexpectedly and broke into a schoolboy grin:
“Beastly, aren’t they?” he said cheerfully. Then he folded up the map and stood up, “Thanks awfully—and thanks for letting me come. I must get along now.”
Evelyn put her hand in his, and felt a dreadfully strong grip which suddenly relaxed. As he went out of the door, she spoke to his back:
“Good-bye—Tony. I’ve decided to call you Tony.”
XIV
When the door had shut behind Laydon, Evelyn turned thoughtfully back into the room. She went first to the window, and stood there looking out. Grey houses; a stretch of grey, wet pavement; and a patch of wet, grey sky.
She saw Laydon come into view, walking with a quick, swinging step. When he had passed out of sight, she took away the tray that had held the flowers, and set the little table back against the wall. Then she took up the tape-indicator map to put it away. And as she did so, a scrap of paper dropped from it and fell to the floor. She picked it up, and saw a name and an address scrawled big across it:
The Amazing Chance Page 9
