Mine for a Day

by Mary Burchell

  “Maybe.” Leila refused to be ruffled. “But, as your mother herself said, at least we prepared her well for the shock. And we did act from well-intentioned motives, you know, Frances.”

  A sceptical silence greeted this. Then after a few minutes Frances went on picking her beans.

  “How long are you staying, then?” she enquired, a little pointedly.

  “Until Mrs. Morley goes into the nursing-home. A few days longer. I—I was asked to do so.” Leila wished she didn’t feel so shaken by this girl’s unfriendly air.

  “By Mother?

  “Yes.”

  “How about Simon? What had he to say?”

  “He—supported the invitation. He wanted me to stay.”

  Frances gave a short, disagreeable little laugh, and catching up her now filled basket she went off into the house, leaving Leila to look after her ruefully and reflect that she had not bettered her position much in that direction.

  There was nothing to do about it. You couldn’t counter unreason with reason.

  However, during the next few days, Leila found that Frances’s persistent enmity was not without its compensations. For one thing, Simon did not fail to notice it and resent it. And, in his anxiety to counterbalance it, he showed much more attention and personal friendliness to Leila than he might perhaps otherwise have done.

  Mrs. Morley could not have visitors for long or frequent periods, which left the other three very much dependent on each other’s company. And since Frances either would not or could not show cordiality to her brother, Leila found herself his natural companion during most of that weekend.

  She tried not to attach any real importance to this, but she could not help seeing that, the more he saw of her, the more he seemed to seek her company. And on the Sunday evening, when all their nerves were becoming a little frayed over the nearness of Mrs. Morley’s departure for the nursing home, he suddenly said, without any preamble:

  “You are wonderfully soothing and helpful company at a time of crisis, Leila. I don’t like to think what this weekend would have been like without you.”

  She tried not to colour and look as moved and delighted as she felt, and she hoped that the tone in which she said, “I’m so glad I was some help,” struck just the right note of kind and impersonal friendliness.

  “You will let me know, as soon as you have any definite news, won’t you?” she said earnestly.

  “Of course. I wish you were staying on here until the end of the week.”

  “I wish so, too, but it isn’t possible,” Leila told him firmly. For, with Mrs. Morley gone, and Simon himself away a good deal of the time, it was unthinkable that she should extend her stay, when Frances so obviously wished her gone.

  “I have your telephone number.” Simon fished out his diary, and verified Leila’s telephone number for the third time. “I don’t expect there’ll be any news by tomorrow night. They probably won’t operate until Tuesday,” he went on, though he had said that, too, to her at least once before.

  “But you will try to ring me on Tuesday evening?’”

  “Of course.”

  She could see herself, in the familiar room in her flat which she had not seen now for four or five weeks, holding the telephone receiver and listening to Simon. Knowing that he was speaking to her, herself—not just with a message to convey to Rosemary—not just with an enquiry about someone else—but speaking to her, telling her about his mother, because he knew that she shared in his hopes and his fears. It was going to be wonderful, and the thought of that took away something of the reluctance she felt in returning to the old, familiar life.

  The next day, Mrs. Morley’s departure was delayed until the afternoon, and Leila spent a good deal of the time with her. They talked very cheerfully of the future, as though it would be a shared future, and the last thing Mrs. Morley said to her was: “I hope to see a good deal of you, dear, once I am fully recovered.”

  Leila eagerly echoed that hope.

  Frances had accompanied her mother to the nursing-home, and Simon—quiet and at a loose end—said that he would drive Leila to the local station.

  “If you like, I will drive you right up to town,” he offered, as he lifted her case into the car.

  But Leila would not hear of that. She thought that Frances would need him—and have a right to him—when she came back from seeing her mother installed.

  So Simon came with her to the station, and while they waited for the train they walked slowly up and down the rather deserted platform.

  “Leila, I don’t know how to thank you for all you have done.”

  “It didn’t amount to much in the end,” she protested, with a smile. “We kept it up less than twenty-four hours, you know.”

  “But you were prepared to go through with it for as long as was needed. I don’t think I realized until afterwards how much I had asked you to do. I was so crazy after—Rosemary’s going, and so unable to think of anything but how to save Mother from shock, that I took it for granted I only had to ask you and you would agree to anything. I’m ashamed now to think how little I considered you.”

  “Don’t think any more about it.” She put her hand on his arm for a moment and, though she could feel nothing more than the roughness of his coat-sleeve, the contact gave her pleasure. “You were very kind to me, and as I say, it lasted only a very short while.”

  “It wasn’t only for that that I was trying to thank you,” he said slowly. “Afterwards—after we told Mother the real state of affairs, I mean—you were so sweet and helpful and—I suppose the word is ‘strong.’ You gave one such a feeling of security and support, Leila. I know it meant a lot to Mother. And I’ll never be able to tell you what it meant to me.”

  She watched the plume of smoke from her approaching train, and wished that this moment could go on for ever.

  She said gently and unemotionally: “I’m so glad. Please don’t exaggerate, though.” And she thought: “Darling, I’m so happy I could sing!”

  The train drew into the station, and he handed her and her case into an empty compartment.

  “When shall I see you?” he said, just as the whistle blew.

  She wished there had been time to make some show of considering that—some decent interval which might suggest that she had not thought of any future meeting until he put the idea into her head. But there was no time. So she cried, eagerly and joyously:

  “We’ll discuss it when you telephone me. It will be lovely to meet some time. Good-bye, Simon.”

  “Good-bye, my dear. And thank you for everything.”

  The train was moving now. She waved a friendly hand, and subsided into a corner seat. She would be seeing him again. He wanted to see her again.

  The train was a slow one, and it was early evening by the time Leila reached London. But nothing could disturb the happy tranquillity of her mood. She took a taxi to her flat, determined to deposit her luggage and then go out for a meal, since it was too late to buy any provisions for home catering.

  As she entered the building, she thought: “It’s rather nice to be home, after all. I wonder if Simon would like to come and have dinner here with me one night?”

  As she started to go up the one flight of stairs to her flat, someone called her by name and, turning, she saw the housekeeper had come out of her doorway.

  “Oh, Miss Lorne,” she said, “I’m glad to see you back. Was it all right to let the young lady into your place? I hesitated, because I didn’t know her. But she seemed to know all about you and said you were expecting her.”

  “A young lady—” repeated Leila. And then something seemed to warn her to make no fuss about this. “Oh, how long did she stay?”

  “She’s there now, Miss Lorne. She came only an hour or so ago.”

  “I see.” A peculiar chill of apprehension crept over Leila, and she ran upstairs as fast as her case would allow.

  Her hand was quite steady as she put her key in the door, but she was trembling a little as she set down
her case in the hall and went over to the open door of her small sitting-room.

  Everything was quiet there, almost completely undisturbed. Only, beside the electric fire which glowed cosily, Rosemary lay asleep in a chair, her hair tumbled over the cushion, and an expression of exhaustion on her unnaturally pale face.

  CHAPTER VI

  FOR almost a whole minute Leila stood and regarded her sleeping cousin. So innocent, so weary, so harmless Rosemary looked, lying there. But she represented such a threat to Leila’s newborn happiness that she was literally afraid to go forward and wake her cousin, for fear of what Rosemary might tell her.

  It was much less than a week since Rosemary had stolen away in the early dawn, with the avowed intention of linking her life with Jeremy’s in defiance of all family wishes or advice. If the plan had worked out as it should, surely she would not have sought out Leila—or anyone else—so soon?

  And, if the plan had not gone well, why was she here?

  Suddenly, Leila knew that she passionately wanted that particular plan to have gone well. She wanted Rosemary’s desertion of Simon to be a completed thing. She didn’t want her to turn up again. She had voluntarily relinquished her place in Simon’s life, hadn’t she?

  Frightened and angry, Leila found herself posing and answering a dozen questions, while she watched Rosemary’s sleeping face.

  She tried to tell herself that it was for Simon she was anxious—that he had suffered enough, and that any doubts now about Rosemary’s attitude would make him wretched and unsettled. But she knew quite well that the overwhelming emotion which was gripping her at the moment was plain, unadulterated fear that Rosemary’s presence must deprive her of her dawning friendship and intimacy with Simon.

  And then quite suddenly, as though she had sensed Leila was there, Rosemary sighed, opened her eyes and sat up.

  “Oh, Leila! I’m so glad to see you!” The moment her eyes were open she lost something of the pathos with which sleep had invested her. “I didn’t know what I was going to do, if you didn’t turn up.”

  No apology, no explanation. Just an exclamation of thankfulness that Leila’s actions had not run counter to her own planning after all.

  “You seem to have managed quite well up to now,” Leila heard herself say, in a more guarded tone than she usually used to her cousin. “What made you tell Mrs. Boothby I was expecting you?”

  “Who? Oh, the housekeeper? Well, she wouldn’t have let me in if I hadn’t, would she?” Rosemary said naively.

  “No,” agreed Leila dryly, “I suppose she wouldn’t.”

  Rosemary glanced at her quickly.

  “Leila, you aren’t angry that I came to you, are you?”

  Leila tossed off her hat, sat down opposite her cousin, and regarded her.

  “I’m not angry that you came to me, if you needed some—some sort of refuge,” she said. “But you can’t expect me to remain absolutely unmoved, Rosemary, by the tremendous upheaval you made in all our lives.”

  “But it didn’t really affect you very much, did it?”

  For a moment, Leila thought her cousin’s query was one of pure stupidity or pure impudence. Then she saw suddenly that, of course, from Rosemary’s point of view, she herself was very much a side character in this drama.

  “You—assigned me a rather uncomfortable role in it, yourself,” Leila pointed out.

  “Yes—I know. I’m sorry about that. But what else could I do. Leila?”

  Leila drew a deep breath. But she knew it was impossible even to begin to explain to Rosemary. So instead she asked quite quietly: “What brought you here, Rosemary? What has happened?”

  As though she were recalled to unpleasant reality, Rosemary stirred sharply in her chair, and her expression changed.

  “Everything went wrong,” she said harshly and comprehensively. “Absolutely everything. Leila, haven’t you anything to eat in the place? I’m—I’m hungry.”

  Leila was not completely certain if that catch in her voice were genuine distress and an indication of literal hunger, or whether it had been put in to complete an artistic whole. But she had to give Rosemary the benefit of the doubt because, after all, she was genuinely fond of her, and the habit of indulgence dies hard.

  “Dear, there isn’t much, because I’ve been away for weeks, as you know—”

  “Have you only just come from Durominster, then?”

  “N-no.” Leila faltered before the interruption. “I’ve been—staying somewhere else. But I’ll tell you about that. The point is that I haven’t been home in between. I think we’d better go out for a meal. I was going to, anyway, and—”

  “I haven’t any money,” Rosemary said baldly.

  “It’s all right. I have.” Leila’s tone was almost curt, because, somehow, that one unadorned statement was horribly revealing and moved her indescribably.

  “There’s a small restaurant, less than five minutes from here.” Leila spoke still in a very matter-of-fact tone, because she did not want Rosemary to know how moved she was. “We’ll go there now. And afterwards you can tell me everything. I mean, whatever you want to tell me.”

  Rosemary drew a long sigh. But it was a sigh of relief. Then she stood up and smiled at her cousin.

  “Oh, it’s lovely to have you around again, Leila,” she said quite sincerely. “You’re so practical and—and understanding.”

  The little place where she took her cousin had high-backed wooden seats which shut one in with an illusion of complete privacy, and Leila had expected that, as soon as they were seated and had chosen their meal, Rosemary would launch into her story. But either she welcomed the chance of postponing what she had to say or else she was genuinely famished. So Leila controlled her anxious curiosity—or perhaps she pandered to her own fear of hearing the truth—and it was not until they were sitting over their coffee that she brought herself to say:

  “Aren’t you going to explain now, Rosemary?”

  “Yes.” Rosemary leaned forward and traced a pattern on the cloth. But it was not an embarrassed movement, Leila thought. Just a reflective one. And her voice was almost unemotional as she said: “I left Jeremy. I never want to see him again.”

  Softly Leila drew a deep breath.

  “Do you mean—you didn’t marry him, or—”

  “Oh, no.” Rosemary had already passed so far beyond the state of mind in which she had thought of marrying Jeremy that she was genuinely surprised to find that anyone still thought of the situation in those terms. “Oh, no, I didn’t marry him. Thank goodness.”

  “But—in that case—” Leila was surprised that she could feel faintly embarrassed with anyone she knew so well as Rosemary. “In that case—what did you do?”

  “Oh, I didn’t live with him, either, if that’s what you mean,” Rosemary explained with candour. “I’m not that sort of girl, Leila. Surely you know that.”

  Leila was tempted to say that she sometimes wondered just what sort of girl Rosemary was. She repeated instead, rather patiently: “What did you do then? What happened?”

  “We quarrelled almost immediately. Over that very question. It seemed there were some formalities—we couldn’t get married right away—and Jeremy wanted us to set up together without waiting. I wouldn’t, and he was wild about it. He even said it was a waste of money for me to be living in an hotel when I could live at his flat. And that was the first thing that made me think, because I don’t like a man who turns mean and thinks of money when he’s supposed to be madly in love with you, do you?”

  “No,” said Leila, because she saw she was expected to say something.

  “He had to give in, of course, and I went to an hotel that first night. But it wasn’t even a very good hotel, and it made me think again that he was—stingy.”

  “But couldn’t you choose—and pay for—your own hotel, Rosemary? It would have been more—satisfactory, in the circumstances. Surely you had money of your own? What has happened to it?”

  “Oh, that was another thin
g that made difficulties! You know, I never had a bank-book of my own. Daddy didn’t approve, for some reason or other. All my money was in the Post Office. And in the hurry and excitement I forgot to take my Post Office book. So there I was with only about a couple of pounds. Jeremy was quite nasty and unreasonable about that, too.”

  Leila felt her lips twitch, and the humorous idea crossed her mind that Rosemary must be a maddening person with whom to run away. Particularly if, as seemed to be the case with this Jeremy, love was not unmixed with self-interest.

  “Well, go on,” she said, as one might urge a child.

  “There isn’t very much more to tell, Leila. We met the next day, of course, and other days, too. But we always seemed to quarrel afresh. He kept on pressing me to come to his flat, and I wouldn’t of course. And there we were.”

  Leila thought, not without malice, that she wished she could have seen Rosemary’s simple, mulish obstinacy pitted against the wiles of what was evidently an accomplished bounder.

  “Then suddenly he told me that he was going away on tour, and that, if I didn’t come too, that was the end. And I saw then that he hadn’t really intended to marry me at all. Or, if so, he didn’t mind much when we did it. Because he must have known all along that he was going on tour, and that wouldn’t have given us long enough to establish residence and get married. Then I was mad, Leila. Much, much madder than he had ever been. Because I realized that he’d deceived me, and no one likes to be deceived. Least of all when one—one’s loved someone.”

  “That’s true,” agreed Leila, without much expression. “When did this happen, Rosemary? And what did you do?”

  “It happened yesterday. And I told him exactly what I thought of him and that he needn’t ever come near me again. And he went away and didn’t come near me again. Then this morning, when I knew he wasn’t coming back, I realized that I couldn’t go on living at the hotel. I didn’t dare even have breakfast. But even then the bill was more than all the money I had, and I left my watch as a sort of surety, and came here, hoping you’d be home.”