“You couldn’t have tucked her up and climbed over your balcony?”
“I could, but it seemed ungrateful. She was giving me such a wonderful trip.”
“Couldn’t you have gone with someone younger?”
“No.”
“Not allowed?”
“I suppose I could have argued and got my own way. My father and my mother weren’t tyrants or warders; they were simply out of date, that’s all. It’s easy to say I should have got away, but they were my parents, and I loved them and leaving home meant leaving for good, because it meant deciding I couldn’t lead their life; it meant discarding it and them. Outwardly, on that trip, I was a rather awkward, shy English girl dogged by an ancient relation—but it was the happiest time I ever spent.”
“Except after dinner.”
“Yes. But that wasn’t active rebellion. I couldn’t dance in those days, and I was dead tired after doing so much all day, and it wasn’t really difficult to see all the gay young couples going off into the night without me.”
“Didn’t anyone ever try to storm the citadel?”
She laughed.
“Once or twice.”
“Who were they?”
“One was a . . . well, does it matter? It wasn’t a question of storming; all they had to do was to sit through Aunt Ettie’s stories about horse buses. It became a sort of test. When I saw you this morning, carried away into her world, I was grateful to you, because so few people fall under the spell. It is a spell. I love them both and I can’t bear to see them …going.”
“How,” he asked after a time, “did Grant make the grade?”
“Through his letters from Canada. I liked him before he went, and I loved him when he came back. It was as simple as that.”
“Did he talk much about his home?”
“He talked about the house, but not about the people in it. Didn’t you, incidentally, come to talk about Grant?”
He drove into a small clearing on the side of the road, switched off the engine and turned to face her.
“Yes, I did,” he said, and she saw that he had dropped his light manner. “Mrs. Peel is coming up to London tomorrow—or Grant’s going down there—I’m not sure which. Anyway, they’re going to meet. He’s going to make the house over to her.”
It was a shock, and she sat still, absorbing it.
“No comment?” he asked at last.
“It’s his house.”
“When you marry him, it’ll be yours too. He’s running out on it, but perhaps his—your—children will want it. It’s a valuable property, and it’ll go on increasing in value; I don’t know whether you know how much land goes with it, but it’s plenty. To let Mrs. Peel have it for life is one thing; to hand the thing over entirely is sheer madness. You’ve got to do something.”
“It isn’t mine until we’re married. We won’t be married by tomorrow. Does Mrs. Peel know what he intends to do?”
“Yes. He wrote to her.”
“She might refuse.”
“Why should she refuse? If Grant were staying in this country, she probably would; she loves him like a son and she wouldn’t take his house from him, even if he wasn’t going to live in it. But with Grant gone, who’s left?”
“Lotty and Paul.”
“Lotty’s going to marry Ronnie Pierce. And don’t ask me if she loves him, because the answer would probably be no, and we’d proceed to a quarrel about my having pushed her into a loveless marriage. Lotty loved once. She fell in love in a way that I don’t think she’ll fall in love again—but what happier fate could a woman in her position have than being looked after for the rest of her life by a man as decent and as clean and as straight as Ronnie Pierce? What better background could there be for young Paul? He and Ronnie get on, and will continue to get on. There ought to be more children—there will be more children. Would you rather see her turning Ronnie down and waiting for her next grand passion?”
“She was brought up in France. She wanted to go back there.”
“The one thing she needs—don’t I know?—is roots. We’ve never had them, Lotty and I. My father was an expatriate and so am I. Lotty would like to be, but there’s nothing for her to go back to and she’ll be safe all her life with Ronnie. So that takes care of Lotty, and brings us back to Grant. If you don’t go up and see him today, he’ll sign the house away tomorrow. As I see it, there’s no reason why he shouldn’t hand it over to Mrs. Peel for her lifetime, just as it stands. If she cleared out the junk, there’d be room to make it into a quiet little country hotel; she likes housework and she’s a good manager, and she’d probably make a success of it as a business venture. But as a complete and final handover—no.”
“Not even,” Claire asked, “if it was a case of…of exorcising?”
He said nothing for a time.
“I forgot one thing,” he told her at last, “and that was that you disliked the house. I forgot that you wouldn’t mind seeing it go. And I forgot something else: your probable views on money and property. Your father’s rich, isn’t he?”
“Fairly.”
“I’m glad its fairly; there are families who couldn’t claim that they came by it that way. The only daughter of a rich father—how can I expect to make you see it my way? Your mind doesn’t run on finance—but mine does. Grant has no right to hand over something his mother left him, simply to smooth out a temporary tangle in his mind. That kind of cure turns out in the end to be worse than the disease. One morning, he’ll wake up and realize what he’s done.”
“Mrs. Peel could leave it back to him in her Will.”
“That’s what she’s probably planning. She has no children, so back it can go when she’s dead—she thinks. But if she hasn’t children, she has relations—fairly close ones. They’re not rich; in fact, they’re poor. A valuable property like this one will bring them a-running to sun themselves in the glow of the gold. However decent they may be and probably are, it’s a thousand to one, ten thousand to one that in the twenty years more she’ll doubtless live, Grant will have faded out and left deserving brothers and sisters in his place. Now do you see?”
“Yes, I see. What do you expect me to do—go to Grant’s flat this evening and tell him all this?”
“You’ve got to.”
“Aren’t you the one he’s always listened to?”
“This time, he won’t. I talked myself out last night. In the end, I dried up—not only because I’d argued myself to a standstill, but also because I realized that this thing is—has become—pathological. You can’t reach him any more by appealing to his sense—all that’s left is to put it on a lower level and appeal to his senses, and that’s where you come in.”
“Thank you.”
“You won’t be so proud when your children ask you why you let their father throw away forty thousand pounds. My God! I hated Mrs. Tennant, but at this moment, I feel sorry for her. If Grant casts out a devil by giving away her house, he’ll most surely raise a ghost—her ghost. She’ll walk, that I’ll swear. She’ll—Why—” he broke off to ask, “are you looking at me with so puzzled an air?”
“Are you really so fond of Grant?”
He stared out at the quiet, narrow country road.
“It must be a father complex,” he said. “I can’t tell you what a hell of a shock it was to come back to England and find him in the state he’s in. I knew, of course, that to a certain depth, there was softness—but I didn’t know it went so deep. I’d always seen him give in to his mother up to a certain point—but after that, and especially in my case, he’d take up a position from which she couldn’t shift him. But now…”
“He said he felt different in Canada—freer, stronger. Why can’t you let him go back there in peace?”
“I will—if only he doesn’t charge himself forty thousand pounds for the pleasure of going. You won’t do anything?”
“No. In a way,” she said slowly, “I agree with everything you’ve said—but to stop Grant from signing away th
e house is something I can’t do. He may regret it one day, but we all have to do things we regret. Mrs. Tennant wouldn’t have liked it, but Mrs. Peel served her well in that house, and perhaps it’s a kind of justice that she should have it. I’m sorry I can’t turn myself into a more forceful character, and go up there and make Grant see what you call reason. Certainly I couldn’t do it in the way you suggested—if I didn’t mistake what you said.”
“I asked you to—”
“—make love to him, to bring him to a state in which he’d sign—or not sign—anything. Even if I wanted to, which I don’t, I couldn’t do it. I haven’t got the . . . the equipment, for one thing.”
“Haven’t you?” He spoke absently, his eyes on her face. With a gentle forefinger, he traced its lines. “No equipment? You’ve got more than equipment. You’ve got weapons here you’ve never used. You’ve got charm and beauty, and a grace and a remoteness that so few, so very few women have now. For a whole Englishman, I think you’re too remote; a whole Englishman would never reach you. But I’m only half an Englishman and I ... I could reach you. I could find my way through the cool, shady approaches to the warm, the sunlit places. Claire”—he cupped her face in his hands and spoke softly—“I could. I could…”
She was in his arms. For timeless seconds, he held her and she lay unresisting against him. A warmth, a fire spread slowly through her body; through it she heard his voice murmuring her name.
And then she was abruptly released. She turned to look at him, and he spoke in a low, even voice.
“All right; you needn’t say anything,’’ he said. “You don’t have to put it into words. I’m a . . . I’m anything you like to call me. You’re going to marry my best friend and I take you out and make love to you. I mention him with affection, and then I tell you that I love you. I get you alone and lay unsanctified hands on you. I’m sorry. No, I’m not sorry. My only regret is losing sight, for a few moments, of Grant.”
He started the engine. Beside him, Claire clenched her hands tightly together in her lap and struggled back to sanity. There was a mist before her eyes, and her heart was thudding violently; it was difficult to breathe. But to her infinite relief, she realized, moment by moment, that she could find her way back to her course by means of a well-defined chart. Grant. Wedding. Canada. House. Wedding. Grant. The channel was clearly marked. If she did not follow it, she would be lost indeed.
Grant. Wedding. Canada.
“Please,” she heard him say, “don’t be angry.”
With a last great effort, she found her voice.
“Why not?”
She sounded, to her infinite relief, cool, composed.
“Well, be angry—but be forgiving, too. And remember that you were in my mind for a long time before I met you. I liked you. You were a girl who’d seen below Grant’s surface deficiencies; you didn’t wait for him to become eloquent or knight-in-armour. You loved him.”
“Yes, I loved him.”
But not any more, her heart cried. Not any more, not any more ...
Grant. Wedding. Canada.
“After lunch—which we’re going to have looking on to a calm blue sea — what would you like to do?” he asked.
“I’d like to go home.”
“Then you shall go home. And Grant will have the papers drawn up ready for signing tomorrow.”
“And perhaps when the house has gone, his devil will go and he’ll be happy. Are you going to talk to him about it again?”
“No. Not any more.”
They lunched at a quiet table and looked out at the sea, and nothing more was said of the house.
“What would you like to talk about?” Richard asked. “Food? Plays? Films?”
She made an effort.
“France. Do you like it better than England?”
“If you mean do I feel like a Frenchman—no. But, like my mother, I seem to need international society—many races, many tongues. Paris offers more of it than London.”
“What exactly do you do?”
“Figures. Not human figures—the one-two-three sort. My mother hoped I’d be artistic, and so I am. I’m an artist with figures. Where other figure-men use their heads, I use a kind of instinct. I’m a figure-wonder. Which is a pity, in a way, because they send me here and there, far and wide, to expose poor devils who’ve been filching the firm’s profits. I don’t have to go through the books; I simply open them, look, and point. As I said, an artist. Sometimes I long to take the malefactors aside and explain just how they could have done it without detection—or without such rapid detection. As the cops are called, I find myself saying the old piece about there-but-for-the-grace-of-God; if my nature hadn’t been so upright, what might I not have performed in the way of artistic embezzlement?”
“Where do you live? I mean, whereabouts in Paris?”
“If you left the Louvre and took the most direct line to the Seine, plunged in and swam across, I’d be waiting for you on my little flower-decked balcony. I live in, and eat out. They still eat much better over there than they do over here. They also enjoy themselves more. There’s a sort of inner spring of happiness that bubbles up in the French and not in the English. The English enjoy specific things like comfort, or money, or luxury, or travel—but in my humble and probably erroneous opinion, it’s only the cockney who really enjoys himself as opposed to enjoying something outside himself.”
She knew that he was talking to prevent himself from thinking. Some saving instinct made her able to adopt his own light tones. The brief episode by the roadside was fading . . . Not until they were near her home did he speak once more of Grant.
“Did you try,” he asked, “to keep him in England?”
“There was no question of trying. He put it to me as a fact: he was going. All I had to do was decide whether I wanted to leave England and go with him. I don’t want to leave England—but I do want to go with him.”
She listened to the faint echo of the words, and was proud of the calm finality with which they were spoken. She seemed to herself to have become two people with two voices that disagreed violently—but only one of the voices was audible.
He did not come into the house. She stood on the drive and watched him get into the car.
“Thank you,” she said, “for the lunch—and for other things.”
“Such as—?”
“Trying to make things right for Grant. Are you going back to London?”
“I might.” He paused before starting the engine. “There was something I wanted to ask your stepmother—but your aunts arrived this morning and”—he nodded towards the Daimler—“they’re still here. It was something about the hospital.”
“What about the hospital?”
“Well, the most damnable thing. They wouldn’t let me in. I went to see old Corinne, and a slip of a nurse asked me what my name was, and then said nothing doing. Could you ask your stepmother to ring up and tell them that I’d like to see the poor old girl before I go back to France?”
“I’ll tell her.”
A letter. An old woman with a letter. A frightened old woman . . .
He was watching her with a frown.
“Look—what’s behind this?” he asked. “If she’s ill, I ought to see her. If she’s dying, she’d like to see me. But yesterday, in this house, when I mentioned going to see her, there was . . . something. You and your stepmother both. I thought it was my imagination until I got to the hospital. If there’s any reason for keeping me out, I ought to know it. She’s without close relations in this country and she was with Lotty and myself all my life. If you don’t know why nobody can get in, I’ll come into the house and wait while your stepmother rings up and asks them.”
His hand was on the door. Claire spoke slowly.
“You won’t be allowed in to see her,” she said, “because they think she’s . . . they have reason to believe she’s frightened of you.”
She saw a look of stupefaction come over his face—and then he gave a short, de
risive laugh.
“Frightened? Rot! Old Corinne—frightened of me? If she is, her brain’s given way and I’d like to see the doctors about it. Can’t your stepmother arrange it?”
“There’s a…a letter.”
He stared at her uncomprehendingly.
“There’s a what?”
“She’s got a letter.”
“Who has?”
“Corinne.”
“Corinne ... a letter? Are you trying to say—”
“She was brought to the hospital. She’d had a stroke. She’s recovering, but all they know is that she’s hidden a letter and your name seems to send her into a state of terror. So they won’t let you in.”
“They will let me in.” He spoke calmly, but there was the beginning of uneasiness in his eyes. He stared at Claire, and she saw the uneasiness turn to something like fear. But he said nothing. Without a word of farewell, he started the car and drove swiftly away, and she turned and went up to her room.
To be alone—to think. But it was better, she found at once, not to think; it was better not to be alone. She would do better to go downstairs and talk to her aunts. She could help her stepmother—and help herself.
She regretted her decision when she saw her stepmother’s clear-seeing gaze on her. She hadn’t had a nurse’s training for nothing, Claire realized. She could obviously see the cracks on the surface; one could only hope she couldn’t see anything below the surface.
It seemed many hours before the Daimler was brought round and Netta and Ettie were settled in it. It bore them away, as it had brought them, with slow dignity, and Claire turned to her stepmother.
“Tired?” she asked.
“No. You must always remember that I had a long, hard training. Come inside”—she led Claire into the house—“and tell me what’s the matter with you. Something’s upset you. Was it Richard?”
“Yes and no. But just before he was going away, he told me that he’d tried to get into the hospital to see his old nurse—and hadn’t succeeded.”
Letter To My Love Page 11
