“But Nigel, the pilchards left long before the tourists came,” protested Margaret. “It’s not a choice between the two, it’s tourists or ruin.”
“Well, I’d rather have ruin,” said Nigel obstinately. “There’s some dignity in poverty, even in starvation, but these products of the egalitarian society charging around the countryside, destroying, polluting, with no respect for private land…”
Rosemary began to talk of wreckers of the wild, lawless old days. Nigel interrupted her. Smiling at Jenny (she described it as leering to herself), he said, “Anyway, my dear, don’t think for a moment that I’m including you among the unwanted. I can see that you’re going to make a charming addition to our little society.” Embarrassed, Jenny muttered her thanks, but Nigel was already on his feet telling Rosemary that it was time to go. They re-encased themselves in their enormous sweaters and went out into the night.
“Naughty old Nigel,” said Margaret, closing the door behind them. “He is the most cantankerous old wretch when he’s in one of his moods. Never mind, you did very well, Jenny. I could see that they were both enchanted with you.” Jenny felt that this was the overstatement of the year.
They carried the glasses and coffee cups to the kitchen and added them to the rest of the washing up.
“I start work at ten,” said Margaret “I’m not really civilized till then; best avoided. So will you get up when you like and help yourself to breakfast? Everything’s here – coffee, tea, bacon, eggs, orange juice, toast, marmalade, fruit. Help yourself and eat it in here or in the dining room according to mood.”
3
A Warning
Despite a feeling of unease at the eerie presence of the half-house across the courtyard, Jenny slept well. Her waking thoughts were of Colin and she hurried out of bed in an effort to dispel them. It wasn’t raining, in fact a pale gleam of sunshine flickered uncertainly at her window. She dressed quickly, feeling cheerful about the future. As long as Margaret wasn’t too difficult or demanding about the secretarial side, this leap from the frying pan into the fire showed signs of turning out well.
She was still eating her breakfast in the kitchen when a plump woman with a fuzz of dark, graying hair let herself in at the back door. Both surprised, they inspected each other in silence. Then Jenny said, “Good morning. You must be Mrs. Gethin, I’m Jenny Maxwell, the new secretary.”
Mrs. Gethin gave a curious moan and continued her inspection looking Jenny up and down with sharp, darting eyes. “Oh my goodness,” she said in a depressed voice, “it never entered my head you’d be as young as this.”
“I’m twenty-two,” answered Jenny, slightly on the defensive.
“Well that’s no age, no age at all. I’d imagined an older lady altogether. Someone who’d seen a bit of the world and knew how to look after herself, not a little slip of a thing like you.”
“But look, I’m only here as secretary,” protested Jenny, “to type Mrs. Shaw’s book and deal with her letters. I don’t see what my age has got to do with it.”
“Well, all I know is that I wouldn’t have let my daughter work here at your age; not to sleep in especially. And there’s plenty in the village and roundabouts would tell you the same. It’s no place for young girls, Kilruthan, not with these goings on.”
“But what ‘goings on’?” asked Jenny, mystified.
“I can’t say no more,” said Mrs. Gethin exchanging her rubber boots for slippers. “If older people choose to go to the bad that’s their business, but I don’t like to see young ones led astray; that’s why I spoke.”
“But Mrs. Shaw seems so kind,” protested Jenny.
“There’s kindness and kindness,” said Mrs. Gethin darkly as she loaded herself with the vacuum cleaner, furniture polish and dusters.
Jenny finished her breakfast in a whirl of tormented thought. Did Margaret write pornography as well as historical novels? Was she an alcoholic? But this thing about sleeping in the house made her think that Mrs. Gethin’s bogey was sexual. Old-fashioned people had this mania that sex had to happen at night – all that being in by ten business. And if it was sex? Well, either Margaret Shaw was a lesbian or Nigel Forrest crept across and raped the unsuspecting.
She went into the dining room and looked across the courtyard. She could lock her door or at least barricade it if there was no key, for there might well be underground passages connecting the two halves, perfectly innocent cellars probably joined them. As long as there wasn’t a secret passage opening in her room, she thought and felt a tingle of fear shoot down her spine. Oh, Mrs. Gethin, frightening people with vague warnings isn’t fair, Jenny thought. You should either tell them the whole truth or keep your mouth shut.
She went up to make her bed and found with relief that there was a sliding catch, which would lock the great brass door lock. She searched the walls for papered over doors or suspicious panels, but found nothing. Then she began to wonder if there was any sinister significance in the allotment of such a grand bedroom to the secretary and, having heard Margaret go downstairs, she decided to investigate the rest of the house.
Margaret’s room, which she inspected nervously from the doorway, was decidedly exotic: a huge bed, with a draped muslin canopy at the head, muslin-muffled windows and dressing table. The carpet was thick and white with a tiger skin for a hearth rug. The walls were shell-pink and the ceiling black with small gold stars. Jenny retreated with a giggle, wondering what Nigel Forrest had had to say about it. She found the other spare room at the opposite end of the passage, over the hall. It was even larger than her room and twin-bedded, so there was no sinister significance there. Well, that’s it, she thought, Margaret’s a lesbian, not the collar and tie sort, but a practicing one. That’s why she asked for my photograph and why she’s so friendly and admires my clothes. It was a relief really after the nameless fears Mrs. Gethin had conjured up. She felt that she could deal with it. Lock her door, explain that she wasn’t one and if Margaret still persisted, leave. After all, plenty of girls left male bosses for the same reason. She put on her coat. It was only twenty to ten, she would have a look at the garden.
The Mini was still there looking faithful and well-washed by the rain. She must ask Margaret if there was room for it in one of the outhouses. She walked the length of the wing and turned to look back at what should have been the front of the house. The wings looked odd, narrow and out of proportion and though the Forrests’ half was less eerie by day, it still had a depressing look of neglect. She wondered at Margaret living here and paying Nigel some fat rent. But it was certainly quiet, unless you objected to the songs of birds, and writers were supposed to need quiet.
Margaret had been enthusiastic about the view. She looked across the front lawn and the valley field but the moor had vanished, lost in a gray mist that merged with the gray sky. She crossed the lawn, climbed the wooden steps over the sunken fence and wandered down the field until she could see the flat, level stretch at the foot, cut through by the stream rushing, splashing and brimming, barely within its banks.
The grass was soaking wet, making her London shoes useless. Shivering a little and resolving to buy a huge sweater and a pair of rubber boots at the first opportunity, she went back to the house.
Margaret seemed reluctant to start work. She asked how Jenny had slept, continued a discussion on the day’s food with Mrs. Gethin, poured herself anothercup of coffee and then at last led the way to the writing room. They inspected the typewriter, found paper and carbons. They discussed spacing, words to the page, margins and chapter headings. Jenny was to work in the dining room. Margaret explained that she couldn’t dictate, she had to write everything, even business letters, out in longhand. The question was, could Jenny read it? She produced pages of loose leaf. The writing was large, exotic and spikey but it was consistent and fairly easy to decipher.
“Is this the book?” asked Jenny.
“Yes. And I do hope you’re going to like it; it’ll be such fun if you do. There you are.” She dum
ped everything in Jenny’s arms. “Don’t come near me until five to one. If you can’t make something out, leave a space.”
At first, Jenny typed briskly, anxious to create an impression of efficiency but, gradually, as the story unfolded, her brain began to act independently, wondering about her employer and this rather lurid fantasy. It was an incredible world of sinister villains, one with “a horribly misshapen body which told the world, if the world had been prepared to listen, of the equally misshapen spirit locked within.” Her young men were all brave and of “untiring strength” and variously insolent, brutal or masterful. One of the girls was “a gentle Dresden shepherdess” and the other “as dark and wild as a gypsy” she perpetually “blazed” with uncontrollable fury, passion or desire and sometimes all three, and wore a gown which seemed destined to be ripped and torn at every male encounter. So much passion and none of it lesbian, thought Jenny, and began to wonder about her diagnosis. Did people write about things as they found them or as they wished them to be? Could Margaret wish to live in the seventeenth century and be “almost mad with desire” for her unprincipled and hedonistic hero – yet have to live in the twentieth a reluctant lesbian? Jenny made three mistakes running, threw away a page in disgust and decided on a tea-break; Mrs. Gethin might tell her more.
But Mrs. Gethin made it plain that she had no intention of saying another word. She was whipping cream and she whipped on with redoubled energy and maximum noise. Jenny took her tea and retreated to the dining room. Richard, the young lord who’d been robbed of his birthright by the wet nurse who’d substituted her own bastard, was engaged in a savage fight with the Lord Nicholas (the substitute) “whose dark, sultry eyes burned with lust, love of power, and black hate for his fellow men.” It was exhausting stuff to type, thought Jenny, but more fun than Mr. Kearsley’s lost water filters. It took her mind off Colin too, though hardly off lust, she thought with a small giggle.
At one o’clock, Margaret reappeared, vivacious and excitable from successful creation. “I’ve left them on the Bath road,” she said triumphantly. “Anne Lynsdale cradling the wounded Richard in her arms, near swooning at the sight of the slow stream of blood from his arm. None of that family can stand the sight of blood.”
“Poor Richard, who did it?” asked Jenny.
“The poor boy thinks it was Nicholas,” answered Margaret, her voice treacly with love, “but really – no, I won’t tell you; it would spoil it. You must type on.”
They lunched on omelettes, fruit and coffee; Mrs. Gethin’s more elaborate efforts were for supper. Then, when Jenny suggested a return to work, Margaret Shaw cried out in horror. “Never in the afternoon,” she said. “An hour or two after tea, perhaps, but in the afternoons we sally forth. Today Ermeporth awaits us, the Cavendishes expect us. They, especially Robert, are longing to see you.”
They were to go in Margaret’s car. Low, powerful, rakish and mustard color, it was, thought Jenny, another of Margaret’s flamboyances. She could have driven in a coach and four or in a sleigh pulled by three black horses hung with bells and enjoyed them in just the same way. Her driving was horrifying. She swept backward from the garage, narrowly missing the Mini, and roared up the drive. Jenny, fastening her seat belt, prayed that the Forrests wouldn’t emerge from their drive at the same moment. As she hurtled along the narrow, bank-sheltered roads, driving with the determination of a knight thundering into battle, and more dangerous by far, thought Jenny, than any number of the hated tourists, Margaret Shaw explained about the Cavendishes.
“Robert’s a painter. He’s led a very checkered life, poor Robert has, but Mavis, his second wife and an American, is very rich indeed and keeps him in suitable splendor, which is a bit of luck because the poor dear is no great shakes as an artist. They both have children of their first marriage – huge, unsatisfactory teenagers, who come for holidays. And Mavis, who has unlimited energy and administrative ability, runs a hotel on the cliffs near Looe. It’s perfectly horrible, but Americans love it; she knows exactly what they like.”
They were on the main road now and Margaret’s driving seemed less hair-raising. Jenny looked about her enjoying the countryside; Margaret’s company was quite restful in its way, she thought. Half the time no comment or answer was needed, she seemed self-generating, able to stimulate and recharge herself, or was she just drunk with words?
“Of course Mavis has been over here so long she’s almost completely anglicized. And I must say she’s very good to Robert and turns the blindest of blind eyes to all his goings on; that’s what a full life of your own does for you. My advice to all young women, Jenny, is don’t sit about expecting some young man or husband to make life perfect for you; everyone is responsible—”
She interrupted herself with a dramatic cry. “The sea! The sea! Does it take you that way, the first sight of it? Do you remember, as a child, all the excitement of watching for it? And then at last the supreme moment and the age-old cry. It was Xenophon’s, you know, four hundred and something B.C. and it’s still ringing through the world; that’s history for you.”
“And this is Ermeporth?” asked Jenny looking down on a townscape of steep streets and tumbling roofs, on clustered masts in the harbor, on the estuary, yellow sand with only one rapid rivulet still running in pursuit of the vanished tide, out, between the two great, green points.
The Cavendish house seemed to have been burrowed out of a general confusion of gray stone cottages which, linked by indecisive alleys and haphazard flights of steps, clung to the hillside apparently relying on each other for mutual support. It was reached by the narrowest of streets and owned a walled yard in which a third car could be squeezed with difficulty. The entrance was from this yard and Margaret led the way up a flight of worn stone steps to the first floor. From outside, the building looked humble, at one with its neighbors, but once through the door it presented another world. The entire first floor of two cottages had been knocked into one large, light room with all its windows opening on a balcony, looking out over the town and the estuary to the sea. The room was brilliant with orange and sapphire blue and the rounded, molded lines of the expensive avant-garde furniture gave it a space-age look. It was not a room that could be left unremarked, or taken for granted. Jenny began to admire and knew at once that she had done the right thing. The Cavendishes, obviously delighted, displayed all the less apparent charms and amenities. They produced photographs of the cottages before the transformation and told her of the many problems they had had to overcome.
Mavis Cavendish was thin and eager, the remnant of her accent lending a pleasant individuality to her voice. She had graying hair, fringed in front and then gathered back into a knot. She wore glasses with long out-of-fashion harlequin frames. Her clothes were dun-colored and dull. She seemed to have lavished all her care and love of color on the cottage and lost interest in her own appearance. Robert looked equally out of place. He was dressed in seagoing clothes: a huge navy blue sweater, jeans and rubber boots which gave an erroneous impression of size, strength and the rugged life. His broad face was an attractive mixture of tanned good looks and the early signs of dissipation. More interesting than a young man’s face, thought Jenny. His dark, curly hair showed traces of gray. There was something about him, a magnetism, a presence, she thought, dragging her attention back to Mavis who was talking about her hotel.
“You know how it is with a home, well multiply that by sixty and you’ll get some idea of what can go wrong with a hotel. The plumbing! I wish to goodness someone would sit down and invent a new, simplified, modem method of carrying water around a house. Really – with all those stopcocks and ballcocks and stuffing boxes to go wrong – the system’s archaic. I don’t believe they’ve changed a thing since the Romans. But the staff is the worst problem of all; they’re so temperamental. Now last year in August, the height of the season, the chef, who’d been drinking, chased the assistant cook all around the kitchen, brandishing a butcher’s knife and screaming his head off. Well, they were ha
ving an affair so it was more or less a private quarrel, but the silly girl fell down the cellar steps and sprained her ankle and one of the kitchen porters turned knight errant and fought the chef, and the assistant manager who tried to separate them got a smack on the jaw and his glasses broken. Then they sent for met Of course the girl and the porter had to go, you can’t afford to fire a chef in August, they’re practically an extinct species at that time of year. And now at the start of this season the chief barman’s wife has left him and he’s going around with a face as long as a lighthouse, which isn’t going to make the bar a very cheerful place.”
The Cavendishes changed over. “Margaret says that you’re a sweetie, that you believe in free will and that I’m to amuse you,” Robert told Jenny. “She says you’re to be taken sailing the moment the weather improves. She’s afraid you’ll find it dull down here and go scuttling back to London. Will you?”
“It’s not been dull so far,” Jenny answered uncertainly, “but I haven’t been here long enough to tell how I’ll fit in. But I’ve a car and a friend who lives in Penzance and I love the look of Ermeporth.”
“Well that’s not bad for a start,” said Robert. “And what do you think of your neighbors the Forrests?”
“They seem very kind,” said Jenny doubtfully. Could one discuss one’s employer’s friends with one’s employer’s friends in safety?
A Place With Two Faces Page 3
