Bell Timson

by Marguerite Steen

  Her amused face, which had lost its stillness, was lifted to his.

  “Oh, how funny you are, Mr. Dick!” Her hand slipped into his arm. “I think it is one of the nicest things about you — you do such unexpected things. Fancy a man keeping scent!”

  He thought, I suppose one day I shall have to tell her about Cynthia. Unless Bell spared him the trouble? He was surprised by the degree of resentfulness the possibility roused in him.

  “Plenty of men buy scent, Kay — to give to ladies.”

  Jo turned her kind brown face quickly.

  “Do buy Kay some scent, Mr. Dick; she does so love it, and Mummy won’t let us use anything but lavender water until we leave school.” Kind Jo, who could never be happy without wanting to heap happiness on others. Both she and Richard were disconcerted by the effect of her words: by the flame of Kay’s face, by her quivering lips and brimming eyes as she snatched her hand from Richard’s arm.

  “How can you, Jo? When Mr. Dick buys scent he buys it for other — other people.”

  Richard felt his heart stop. He thought, My God. So this is it. Aloud he said:

  “Dear Kay, that isn’t true. I haven’t given anybody scent for years — by the way, perfume’s a prettier word.” (Make light of it, for the love of heaven.) “I promise I’ll get you some of this, if I can; but it may smell a little different, because this was opened a long while ago.”

  Her recovery was almost equally shocking in its swiftness; no child of fifteen, he thought, should have such instant power of self-control. He loved, although it hurt, the smile she gave him: the smile of a woman of forty, dragged up from the depths of bitter experience. Where did you learn that smile, Kay, which photographs itself with such heartbreaking fidelity on your small, childish mouth?

  “Then I expect it will smell just the same, by the time I use it, for I shan’t be leaving school yet awhile.” It was perfect in its dignity, in its denial of the self betrayed.

  “Thank you awfully!” said Jo as warmly as though the gift had been promised to her. “I dare say we can take out the stopper and have a sniff, Kay; or Mummy might let us put a drop on our pillows. Is it good for colds? Kay gets awful colds; it would be nice if she could use it.”

  Blessed Jo — borne on the breeze of her simplicity through every situation.

  It was Jo, he reflected later, who saved the luncheon party — which had not been a success, and he was annoyed because Emily was aware of it. Without Jo’s cheerful babble, without her antics with Flinders, it would have been something like a fiasco.

  It was not right to blame it on Kay. The child was quiet, certainly, but with a quiet deriving less from schoolgirl awkwardness than from a young, mysterious dignity: a dignity perhaps out of place in one of her age, but not therefore, surely, to be condemned? He found himself blaming Emily for misunderstanding it. Or had she? Had she felt, as he did, the faint ripple of female antagonism which is supposed to obtain in any gathering of women? The natural enmity of women was a cliché; poor Kay, to have her feminine heritage so early forced upon her! And by Emily — of whom, although the most feminine of women, Richard would have said she was free of the besetting weakness of her sex. Yet now and again he had caught her eyes brushing Kay with a glance of — consideration. It was not fair of Emily! A woman of her age had no right to put a child at a disadvantage.

  Yet — was the disadvantage all Kay’s? Ay, there was the rub — perhaps. That calm remoteness, familiar to those who knew her, was perhaps a little TOO much for a stranger to swallow. And what, after all, did Emily’s — disaffection (he could think of no other word) amount to? She had fussed and petted and played with Jo and been cool with Kay: that was all. In fairness to Emily, it was not easy for a childless woman of her age — his own — to strike the right note with a schoolgirl of fifteen; one swung between the Scylla of patronage and the Charybdis of that overfamiliarity which every child, of every age, resents as an infringement of its dignity. At least Emily had not foundered on the latter. A few tepid advances, as tepidly received, and mutual, though courteous, dismissal. Of course Jo was much easier; her oncoming disposition and amusingly literal approach to every subject, her positive establishment in the world of childhood, lent her an allure, from Emily’s point of view, which was easy enough to understand. Kay, in her chrysalid state, presented a problem which few of her own sex would be troubled to solve; yet Richard was disappointed. He had expected more of Emily.

  Of recent years he had got in the habit of going to Emily for reassurance and sympathy, and today, for some reason, she had withheld both from him: almost giving him the impression that she disapproved ... of what? Surely she did not accuse him ... ? Not Emily — whom he and others had loved for her freedom from the cheap, pasquinading exigencies of her sex! To whom it gave no pleasure to give a dog a bad name, and who had been known to take the sting out of many a scandalous bonne bouche by her mere manner of utter indifference when it was related to her? Emily was not accusing him of ... His conscience, manlike, dodged the issue, took cover behind indignation. Irritably he picked up the calendar on his desk and wondered if, after all, he would go to Geneva.

  Chapter II

  DR. REMINGTON rinsed his hands, picked up a clean linen towel, and sauntered from the lavatory through the open door of his consulting room, continuing the conversation he had begun before going to wash. Even in the informality of shirt sleeves he presented the appearance of the successful Harley Street practitioner: tall, dark, clean-shaven, the type of doctor in request at dinner parties, having shed the slight pomposity of his earlier period with steadily increasing prestige. Just a little common; his critics exaggerated this defect, his admirers laughed it aside or — particularly in the case of women — cited it as a virtue.

  He stood, swaggering a little, conscious of his physique, which was excellent, pushing down cuticle with the tip of a scrupulously manicured nail, then tossing the towel aside and picking up the coat which was flung over the arm of a chair.

  “You’re as sound as a nut.” His hands, well shaped, pink with cleanliness, smoothed back the becoming gray wings of polished hair from temples to crown. “A touch of indigestion — probably caused by eating too fast. I’d have thought you’d have more sense!”

  He turned, on the quip, to glance at the short, compact figure of the woman who stood with her back to him, looking into a glass. The glass gave him the reflection of a square, high-boned face, a little haggard for the erect, plump body that belonged to it. Anaemic, of course; not badly, but just enough to account for the pale purplish tinge of the lips. Not a vestige of heart; organically the soundest specimen he had handled that day.

  She had got the jitters; one could see it behind her eyes — and, incidentally, there were a pair of eyes for you! A good many women would have built a reputation for beauty on eyes like those — Irish blue, with half an inch of dark eyelash to set them off, and brows above them straight and narrow as hyphens. Yet somehow on Bell they were not beautiful. There was something opaque and implacable about them; hard, watchful, profoundly skeptical, they gave no encouragement. That at least, as a man, was how he found it. Yet women, it seemed, saw them differently; several of his patients had surprised him by commenting on Mrs. Timson’s sympathy, her kindness and understanding. They said she “gave them confidence.” Good old Bell! She knew how to capitalize herself with her own sex! Yet on the heels of the ribald reflection it occurred to Remington, as he peered with some curiosity at the face in the mirror, that he was seeing Bell Timson’s eyes, for the first time, probably as her women patients saw them: as though a shutter of glass had fallen, as though she were thinking, Poor Bell! Poor Bell! What ailed the woman? Of all her kind, she was not one to go in for fancies.

  She turned in her quick, sturdy fashion; he saw she had a cigarette in her fingers. She stuck it between her narrowed lips, spun the wheel of her lighter with her thumb, inhaled, and puffed out a mouthful of smoke before answering him.

  “It’s your business to k
now. But I tell you, I feel — bloody.”

  “Smoking too much as well.”

  “Don’t be a damn fool. You can’t smoke when you’re on the job all day, like me.”

  She swore carelessly, like one indifferent to criticism — or, perhaps, immune from it. He was one of the few in whose company she allowed herself a certain coarse recklessness which circumstances obliged her usually to repress: letting him see she knew her position was too strong for it to affect their professional relationship — and if you couldn’t swear before your doctor, who could you swear before?

  “What’s shot you away, Bell?” He spoke kindly, as friend, not as doctor.

  “Me? Nothing. I’m not shot away.” She gave herself a shake and laughed shortly. “I’m sorry for wasting your time at the end of your day, Remmy; I just happened to be passing, and I felt so hellfire awful I thought I’d drop in. Silly old cow!” she apostrophized herself on a chuckle. “A good whisky and soda and I’ll be right as rain.”

  “That’s easily managed.” He opened a cabinet. “Say when — it’s Haig; that suit you?”

  “Grand. But look here, weren’t you going out?”

  He shook his head, bringing her a liberal glass.

  “I was dining with Prince Sigorsky ...” These names came easily now; time was he would have slurred, or bestowed on them an exaggerated carelessness. In fact so innocent of making an effect was he that he missed the ribaldry of Bell’s left eyelid. “But I had a telephone message; it’s off. Where are you going tonight?”

  “Me? Good gracious me, home — as usual. I’ve got the girls, you know; they’re back for the holidays. And between ourselves,” said Bell, “I believe that’s what’s getting me down. Partly.”

  “Something’s getting you clown. What you want, you know, ‘s a holiday,” he told her. For once she did nor contradict him — a bad sign, he thought, in Bell.

  “It’s a bit tough,” she admitted, “when you’ve finished your day’s work, having to start in and be the parent, instead of getting into an old dressing gown and slopping round comfortably until you go to bed.”

  “Well, aren’t they old enough to grasp that by now?” He had mixed a glass for himself and, strolling to the door, switched off all the lights except the reading lamp on his desk.

  “No.” The monosyllable was Bell all over: short, with an upward inflection — definite as the tap of a hammer. She sat in the chair his nod indicated. “No. I’ve started doing things in a certain way, and I’ve got to carry on with it. But, by the Lord Harry! I’ll be thankful when the pair of them have grown up and I don’t have to keep on setting an example!”

  “How’s Kathleen?”

  “I’ll be sending her along to you in a day or two. Healthier, I think, on the whole; but as thin as a lath and the color of that paper. She’s following her father’s side; we were always a ruddyfaced lot.”

  “Growing?”

  “Heavens, like a beanstalk! I tell her she’s always got her nose in a book, and now there’s some nonsense about wanting to stop on at school an extra year. I don’t know what to make of it. When we were girls we were as anxious to shoot out of school as peas out of a pod!”

  “She’s probably in love with one of the teachers; that’s usually at the back of it, if girls don’t want to leave school.”

  “Uh — is it! If there’s any funny business of that sort,” said Bell indignantly, “I’ll have her away this term!”

  “Pooh! Intellectual lesbianism (it seldom gets beyond that in girls’ schools) is only a phase of development. Freud —”

  “You can leave Freud out of it. I’ve had two girls and brought them up without Freud; and in my opinion he was just a dirty old man who couldn’t do anything and tried to make up for it on paper.”

  “Have it your own way.” Experience had shown the unwisdom of arguing with Bell. “Well, are you going to let her stay on?” “After next year? Of course I’m not. I’ve nearly ruined myself with school fees in the last seven years, and Miss Kathleen can just make up her mind to a year at home before she goes to the art school.”

  “Art school? Has she got a gift that way?” It was the first time, in his recollection, there had been any talk of an art school.

  “Oh, nothing brilliant” — Bell was offhand, as she usually became when the accomplishment of her children was in question — “but the art mistress says there’s something there — and — the fact is, Remmy, and you’re bound to agree with me: Kathleen will never be strong enough to take up any job that means living away from home.” She glared at him as though daring him to disagree with her.

  “I wouldn’t say that.” After all, one was bound to protest when words were put into one’s mouth, especially when they did not particularly agree with one’s opinions. “The general physique often hardens considerably when they are into their twenties.”

  “All right, let it harden.” Her mouth set obstinately. “When she’s through her course at the art school she can do her posters or fashion drawings or whatever it is at home. I know my young woman! And I’m going to keep her under my eye until somebody comes along to take on the job for me.”

  “Well ...” He glanced at his watch. “You know your own business best. Look here; why don’t you come and have a bite with me, round the corner?”

  “Because — I’ve told you. I’ve got to go home.”

  “Nonsense. There’s — what d’you call her — Susan. Ring up and say you’ll be down later; we won’t be more than an hour. As a matter of fact” — he hesitated, frowned, and appeared to make up his mind before continuing — “there’s something I want to talk to you about.”

  He caught her look, at once sharp, cautious, and alert. The woman’s as quick as a weasel! One would swear she knew what I wanted her for — a thing which, as he knew, was impossible. “There’s the telephone; I’ll order the car while you fix it up.” When he returned to the room she still had the receiver pressed to her ear; the lamplight, slanting sideways, lit the fur of her up-turned collar and the line of her profile: rather a good profile, thought Remington; finer than one would expect from her full face. But it was the voice which halted him: not the short, hard voice to which he was accustomed, but another voice, warm, deep, confidence-inspiring, maternal — the voice of a Bell Timson he admitted he did not know. He was faintly amused to notice that even the enunciation was different — careful: more refined, yet without affectation.

  “Ask Susan to give you your suppers, and tell Jo I’ll come up and see her when I come in. And listen: see she takes her paraffin. No, I’m not going to be late, and I’ve got something for you when I come home. Be a good girl, my deary, and help Susan to wash up if she wants you to — I have had my dinner, tell her. That’s right; good-by for now, deary.”

  “Round the corner —” proved to be a small restaurant where Remington was known and where they were shown at once to a corner table. The banal, rose-colored lighting of the table lamp flattered Bell; as she flung back the fur collar of her coat he noted with approval the neat V neck of her dark gown and the single string of pearls — cultured, no doubt — that spanned the thick, wholesome column of her throat. A comfortable woman; a woman without illusions, self-contained, who, in her self-containment, made no demands on a man. He had never flirted with or made love to Bell, not as a matter of professional virtue — one could have quite an amusing time within the bounds of discretion — but because (she would have been surprised to know it) he laid a certain value on her nonchalant, casual friendship. He could go elsewhere for emotionalism or for physical satisfaction, and it would have seemed to him a pity to have introduced such issues into a relationship which brought both of them an easy pleasure. Yet she was comely and friendly enough to make one realize that she must, at various times in her life, have roused amorous designs in a good many men, to whom her downright common sense and rather coarse fiber would appeal.

  They had reached the savory before any mention was made of his purpose in bringing her
hither. Bell was a good companion, there was no denying it; her robust jokes, her shrewd, earthy comments on people and situations were refreshing, took him back to medical student days and to the haphazard good-fellowship of the little cottage hospital where he had begun his career. In those days — it piqued him to remember — he might well have married a girl like Bell: perhaps Bell herself ... well. He had staked on money, breeding, and a West End practice. If he had married Bell it might not have been Harley Street; but she would have seen to it he was a good doctor.

  He told the waiter to leave the brandy on the table, took a cigar out of his case, and was restoring the latter to his pocket when she held out her hand.

  “Hi! Do you want all those to yourself?”

  “What? Have you taken to them?” Much amused, he passed her the case. She helped herself and looked at the band before removing it.

  “When I get the chance ... Corona; that’s all right. I sometimes fancy a Henry Clay.”

  “Let me pierce it for you.”

  But when he held the match toward her she took it from his hand. He watched her, smiling broadly.

  “Who on earth taught you to do that?”

  She passed the flame lightly up and down the leaf, which darkened as she spun it between the fingers of her left hand.

  “Somebody I know. There you are! I’ve taught you something.”

  He drew several times on his own cigar before speaking.

  “Do you see anything of Logan these days?”

  Her quick, sly glance caught him through the smoke.

  “Now and again. I haven’t much time for seeing people.”

  “You haven’t fallen out, have you, you two?”

  “Why should we?” Her voice told him she was on guard.

  “You’ve got most of Logan’s patients, haven’t you?”

  “Well” — she shrugged her shoulders — “that’s her lookout. They could have gone back to her if they wanted. I couldn’t order them back, could I?”