And now that the last fisherman was safely within the hotel, and the last fish scrutinized, the little group of people dispersed as quickly as clouds on a windy day, and went to their several baths.
Chapter 2
Mrs. Ruby Mumsby knotted a red spotted tie under the shirt collar of her blouse, as badly as only a woman could knot it, and, holding her breath, tucked the blouse down the top of the riding breeches which clung steadfastly to her too-protuberant stomach.
Her name was not Ruby, but she had chosen it in preference to her baptismal name of Gladys during her early theatrical days, because she thought it suited her better. Whether other people agreed with her depended entirely on their opinion of rubies. If they considered the stones blatant and gaudy in appearance, the suitability was at once obvious, for Mrs. Mumsby was blatant in manner and had a gaudy taste in dress. Her present appearance in such sportsmanlike attire was due to a desire to appear suitably dressed in the eyes of the men in the hotel who had come down for the fishing. The fact that she merely succeeded in looking obscene was the fault of her figure, and her mistaken idea, somewhat prevalent among women, that the feminine form, though discreetly restrained beneath evening gowns, should remain au naturel under sports clothes. As she dressed, her heavy, swelling breasts swayed slightly at every movement, and touched the hands which were busy about her wide waist.
Not a whit perturbed by the reflection which the rather specked mirror showed her, Mrs. Mumsby struggled into a suede golf jacket, assured by the tag at the back that it was O.O.S., added a knitted scarf of a particularly violent shade of mauve, and, since fish have a notoriously keen eye for bright colours, discarded a vivid green beret for one of more subdued hue, and pulled it at a roguish angle over her peroxided curls. She smoothed the lipstick on left wing of her mouth with a gentle finger, and surveyed the effect in her magnifying mirror with some pleasure.
And indeed, if she could have been a cameo all her life, she would have been a handsome and attractive woman, and might have inspired the exotic amours about which she so often dreamed, for it was not for nothing that she visited the most expensive beauty salons several times a year and submitted to blissful hours of face-slapping and beauty masques. But while her face responded to treatment, despite its natural tendency to plumpness, her body only expanded the more, and although what little aesthetic sense she possessed urged her to slimness by way of the Hay diet and the Women’s League of Health and Beauty, her love of food kept her fat.
She gave a sigh which developed into a chuckle as she surveyed herself in the long mirror of the wardrobe.
The trouble is that I don’t take myself seriously, she thought. Soft in more ways than one, that’s me. If I could only hate my figure enough, I’d give up luxuries, and half-starve myself on raw beetroot and wheat biscuits. But why bother? My figure hasn’t scared any man off yet, and if you’re made big, you’ll be big whatever you eat, that’s what I say.
Her annoyance was not unmixed with a sense of satisfaction.
She, at least, was a woman; a little too obviously perhaps, but you couldn’t have everything. She didn’t know what women were coming to these days. Just look at that saucy young piece, called Pussy, in the hotel at the present time – no chest, no hips, no bottom, nothing to satisfy a man. She often wondered whether the girls of today possessed the requisite female organs in their thin, elongated bodies, but presumably they did, since they occasionally produced children under the same circumstances as their fore-mothers had done.
For some reason the thought of children depressed her. She wondered whether she would ever become a mother again. It was a sad thing to lose a child, though some people might think her a hypocrite for saying so... But there, everything was going to be all right. She held all the trumps, and if she played her cards well, she was bound to get what she wanted. A little threat here, a few tears there, a firm hand and a charming smile, and the game would be hers. Then she would begin a new life with a new companion. It wouldn’t be easy to accomplish. She would have to be clever. But then she was – far cleverer than some people gave her credit for.
She gave a final pat to her beret, then, gathering together her fishing tackle and mackintosh, she went out of the room.
As she moved carefully down the wide, curved stairs, there was a sudden commotion in the hall, where Major Jeans was standing with the party of four Welshmen who had arrived early that morning from Cardiff for the end-of-season fishing.
“Hide, boys,” he hissed. “Here comes the Merry Widow!”
They grabbed their fishing bags and spare coats, and made a dive for their rods which were standing, ready for use, outside the front door.
“Well, tight lines!” they called over their shoulders.
“Bleeding hooks!” grinned the Major.
Chapter 3
By the time that Mrs. Mumsby had descended the last stair, the only person left in the hall was the girl whom she had so recently condemned in her thoughts.
Although she was in her early twenties, her figure had an immature appearance, her breasts, no larger than those of a heavyweight boxer’s, lacking the feminine curves so dear to Mrs. Mumsby’s heart. Her green eyes had the slumbrous look of a well-bred cat. Her beaked nose, small, dimpled chin, and mouth whose true shape could only be guessed at beneath a too-liberal application of greasy lipstick, did not make for prettiness, but certainly she was attractive, an air of painstaking grooming compensating for what her features lacked. Her hair was well-brushed and waved, and gathered into a neat roll in her neck, and at first sight this struck an incongruous note, until one realized that it served to counterbalance the prominence of her nose.
She sat in a fireside chair in front of an electric stove which simulated a coal fire, its hidden fan casting little flickers of light through the useless embers. One hand was thrust into the pocket of her man-tailored coat, and her legs, clad in chocolate-brown slacks, were stretched out in front of her.
She did not look up as Mrs. Mumsby approached, and, after a second’s hesitation, the widow passed behind her chair into the little office which led out of the hall.
A few minutes afterwards, the girl was vaguely conscious of the murmur of voices coming from the office, but they did not disturb her deep perusal of the large Manual of Sexual Psychology, which rested on her lap. Gradually, however, the voices increased in volume until she could not fail to take notice of what was being said, for few sounds are so penetrating as the raised voices of two angry women.
“I think you must have made a mistake, Mrs. Mumsby.”
“Mistake? Me? You know perfectly well, Mrs. Evans, that I never make mistakes. I tell you I left that bottle on my table when I went out fishing yesterday, and when I came back, half of it had gone.”
“I hope you’re not suggesting that I –”
“You know very well what I’m suggesting.” The girl could almost see Mrs. Mumsby standing against the counter in that rather barmaidish attitude of hers, her large breasts vibrating with anger. “I’m telling you that if a lady leaves a bottle of whisky in her bedroom, it’s your business to see that it’s not tampered with. If this is the result of my making friends with you and asking you into my room for a chat and a drink –”
“Mrs. Mumsby! If you’re not satisfied with this hotel, you know the remedy. I’m sure we shouldn’t like to keep you here against your will and it’s no pleasure to us to take your money if you’re dissatisfied.”
“If it occurs again I shall certainly leave, but let me remind you, Mrs. Evans, that if I do, you and that precious husband of yours won’t get a penny of my money!”
As Mrs. Mumsby stormed out of the office, the girl looked up. Her nonchalant attitude and her all-embracing glance seemed to be full of studied insolence, whereas in reality they merely expressed a supreme contentment with the world in general and with her own state in particular.
As if in reply to a challenge, Mrs. Mumsby sauntered towards the fire.
“I’ve just been g
iving Mrs. Evans a piece of my mind,” she said. ‘These hotel people are all the same. They get slack if you don’t keep them up to scratch. I live here all the year round, you know, except for two months in the South of France in the winter, and when there’s no one else in the hotel, they can’t do enough for me, but as soon as other people come, I have to go to the wall. I can’t stand that sort of thing.”
“I must say I don’t blame you,” replied the girl indifferently.
“Aren’t you fishing, today?”
“No, I never fish.”
“Isn’t your friend, Mr. Gunn, going out either?”
“Oh yes. He’s going out with Mr. Pindar.”
“Mr. Pindar. That’s the naval gentleman, isn’t it?”
The girl took a last puff at the Russian cigarette she was smoking and threw it carefully behind the fire.
“Is he? I’m sure I don’t know.”
Mrs. Mumsby looked arch.
“Well, I don’t know either, if it comes to that. It’s just my idea, you know. It couldn’t be right, of course, or he’d be more than plain Mr., but he looks so much like a sailor, don’t you think? You can always tell.”
The girl yawned.
“Can you?” she asked in her bored voice. “Perhaps you know more about sailors than I do.”
Mrs. Mumsby eyed her sharply to see whether this remark was double-edged, but her thirst for scandal overcame her doubts, and she went on:
“It’s his profile and his eyes. Naval officers always have such handsome profiles, and their eyes have that far-away look, through gazing over the seas. So romantic, I think.”
The girl had met naval officers at sherry parties, and secretly thought that splicing the mainbrace had more to do with that far-away look than the sea.
“All men in love have that romantic look in their eyes,” she replied in the full experience of her eight years of adolescence. “He’s obviously terribly in love with his wife. Mrs. Evans says that they’re on their honeymoon, and she seems to have a way of smelling out a honeymoon couple.”
“Mrs. Evans!” exclaimed Mrs. Mumsby. “What does she know about it? What does she know about any of us, if it comes to that? Exactly what we tell her and nothing more. Well, she may think that they’re honeymooning, but it’s my belief that the pair of them are not married at all!”
But the girl’s patience was exhausted. She liked the Pindars.
“You’re nothing but a mischief-making old cat!” she exclaimed.
Mrs. Mumsby’s anger was not modified by the truth of this statement. Her eyes blazed at the girl, and for a second she could not speak.
“If I were your mother,” she said at length, “I should take you across my knee and spank you.”
“Grandmother, you mean,” said the girl sweetly. “Here’s the ghillie with your lunch. You’d better be quick and go out, or you’ll miss all the men.”
Mrs. Mumsby choked back with difficulty the first words which rose to her lips, and when she spoke her voice was hoarse with anger.
“That’s a typical remark,” she said. “You modern girls can think of nothing except men, and you imagine that all other women are like you. All you think and talk and read about is sex, sex, sex. Look at the book you’re reading now! I’ve heard you and that boy-friend of yours telling each other filthy stories – of course we all know what both of you are here for. You don’t know what platonic friendship is. I can go out for a day on the lake, have my lunch with any man I see, come in with my fish, and have a drink at the bar with any of them, without expecting to be treated like a woman. But you, with all your aping men’s clothes and habits, you couldn’t sit in a boat with a man without trying to vamp him. And that’s your idea, I suppose, of sport.”
‘‘Vive le sport,” cried the girl.
Mrs. Mumsby gave up the unequal contest, and stamped out of the hotel, followed by the grinning ghillie.
The girl looked down at her hands and found to her surprise that they were trembling.
“What have you been doing to the Merry Widow?” inquired a soft voice, and at the sound of it, the girl gathered her body together and jumped to her feet.
“Oh, hallo, Mrs. Pindar,” she said. “Come and sit down.”
The newcomer was one of those rare women whom everyone thought beautiful. Her hair was the colour of heather honey, her eyes amber, and her complexion sun-kissed. She was tall and large-boned, and her every movement was graceful. She seemed to glow when she moved, and her entrance into any company was habitually greeted with the silence of admiration. Her voice was soft, her manner charming, and she was, above all, entirely free from self-consciousness or self-admiration. She might have been any age between twenty-five and forty, and there was about her the unmistakable aura of a woman who loves and is loved. She was dressed in perfectly cut, hand-spun tweeds, an Italian scarf, and Henry Heath hat; her shoes were hand-made. A platinum wedding-ring, very new and bright, gleamed on her left hand; she wore no other jewellery.
“I won’t sit down, thanks,” she said. “I promised to meet Miss Haddox at the corner of the lake road, but I think I’ll let Mrs. Mumsby get ahead first. Your mother is supposed to be coming too. Do you know where she is?”
The girl shook her head.
“I haven’t seen her since eight o’clock,” she said, “when she came and ticked me off for ordering breakfast in bed. She says I’m too young for that sort of thing. Such rot! I never can see why you should have to wait until you’re sixty before people give you your breakfast in bed.”
“It costs extra in a hotel,” remarked Mrs. Pindar practically.
“So it does. Of course I never thought of that, and we do rather have to count the sixpences. But why couldn’t Mother say so instead of saying I’m too young? That’s just like her. She never will say things straight out.”
Mrs. Pindar smiled.
“Perhaps you won’t like it when she does,” she said. “Perhaps not. Mrs. Mumsby didn’t like the truth.”
“What did you say to her?”
The girl laughed, and offered her cigarette-case.
“Oh, I was baiting her a bit,” admitted the girl. “She accused me of immoral behaviour with the boy-friend, and I let her have it good and proper. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black! Why, she’d ran after anything in trousers, old or young. All the men in the hotel are scared to be left alone with her, and then she has the cheek to turn round and accuse me!”
“It’s because she envies you,” replied Mrs. Pindar. “When I see the two of you side by side, I can sympathize with her, poor woman. It must be pretty awful to have a figure like that. I always think she would look rather handsome if she dressed in darker clothes, and dieted a bit.”
“Her face is all right,” said the girl, “although that make-up of hers is too blue. It’s her foul mind I don’t like. A minute ago she was telling me some rigmarole about your husband being a naval officer, and said she didn’t believe you were married.”
“Oh!”
The girl stooped to pick up the cigarette which Mrs. Pindar had just dropped, and did not trouble to consider whether the exclamation was one of surprise or indignation.
“I shouldn’t take her too seriously,” she said, turning with the cigarette in her hand. But, to her amazement, she found that Mrs. Pindar was already on her way to the front door.
The girl stood gazing after her for a moment. Then she shrugged her shoulders, threw away the half-smoked butt, and settled herself philosophically in her former position in front of the fire.
Chapter 4
She was aroused by two heavy hands which grasped her shoulders and levered the chair on which she was sitting almost to the floor, so that her thin legs assumed a perpendicular position which might have proved embarrassing if she had been wearing skirts.
“Let me go, you low hound!” she screamed, kicking as hectically as any elderly spinster defending her honour. “Piggy, let me go!”
One of her hands clutched wildly at the
vast bulk of the man behind her, found his armpit, and began to tickle.
“Stop it, you little devil!” he yelled. “Blast you, Pussy, stop it! I shall let you fall!”
“Put me back, then.”
An armistice having been declared by mutual unspoken consent, the girl’s chair was raised until it stood once again squarely on all four legs. The girl jumped up and hurled herself at her companion, and they indulged in a rough-and- tumble, from which they both emerged, tousled and panting, and grinned at each other in the perfect understanding of their joint forty-five years.
The boy crossed his fingers.
“Now, pax, Pussy,” he said. “There’s someone coming. If you start on me again, I’ll murder you.”
The girl looked at him admiringly.
“Kiss Pussy, then,” she coaxed, holding up her half-open mouth, luscious with lipstick.
Piggy Gunn complied without hesitation, then stepped back, and with the automatic habit of long use, pulled a handkerchief from his breast pocket, and wiped his reddened mouth.
He had a long, large body, on which his legs and arms seemed to be strung as loosely as those on an anatomic skeleton, so that when he waved an arm about, as he frequently did when talking, you almost expected it to detach itself and fly over your head. His hair was light brown, and his features so regular that his face was a difficult one to remember among the similar indeterminate features of the hosts of young men in their twenties today. His eyes were hazel, flecked with brown, and the flesh around them was so crinkled that he appeared to have eyelids both below and above them. Like the girl, he wore brown slacks, sports shirt, pullover and checked jacket; but in addition he had scattered around the hall the innumerable and rather shapeless cardigans and mackintoshes so essential for late autumn wear on the lake. Near his feet a fishing bag spilled fly and cast-boxes.
The girl looked at him critically, pulled at his green tie patterned with beer tankards, fished a lipstick out of her hand-bag, and began to repair the damage to her lips. She barely finished before she caught a glimpse of a familiar face in the mirror of her jewelled flapjack.
Bleeding Hooks Page 2
