The Strange Waif

by Violet Winspear

  Then Banker whimpered and pushed his head against her, as though her alarm communicated itself to him, and she sank back on to the carpet. "Oh, Banker, what am I to do?" she whispered. "I thought it was the moors that called me—but was it the moors? Was it the moors?"

  CHAPTER SIX

  Lygia, being a young thing who had spent several hours that day in the wild, sweet, open air of Devon moorland, grew hungry the moment the smell of grilled mushrooms came drifting along the passage from the kitchen, and she and Robert ate their meal at a gatelegged table he brought out from a cupboard under the cottage's narrow, winding stairs.

  The omelette was crisp and light and delicious, and when Lygia questioned Robert as to the source of his expertness as a cook, he merely shrugged his shoulders and said that most bachelors seemed to collect an odd assortment of accomplishments, probably in much the same way as some women collected odd bits and pieces of bric-a-brac.

  Then, smiling slightly, he came round to her side and poured straw-flasked Chianti into the glass beside her plate. "I must play the correct host, mustn't I?" he murmured. "I don't want my motives misconstrued."

  Her glance lifted to his face, very dark above the black wool of the high-necked sweater he was wearing, and she thought of what Avery had said about him, that he subconsciously reminded her of the person, or the situation, she was running away from. Her violet eyes raced wildly over his dark face and though no sudden cloud-dispelling light broke through the obscurity of her amnesia, she was aware, all at once, of a disturbing conviction that Avery was right. From their first meeting at Chase, Avery had said, she had subconsciously associated Robert with what it was she was running away from. And he frightened her because all along, subconsciously, she had known that something about him could jog her memory and bring her back out of the cul-de-sac of her amnesia, the refuge she had fled into to escape remembrance of—what?

  "You thought I had an ulterior motive of some sort in inviting you back here to tea, didn't you?" Robert said.

  "Didn't you?" She rubbed nervously at the smear of sauce beside her mouth.

  "Yes," he replied simply, "I was feeling lonely."

  "Oh!"

  "Oh?" he mocked, making his own eyes go wide. "Don't you believe that I'm ever afflicted in that very human way?"

  He spoke ironically, but Lygia, daring his eyes, saw a look in them that was almost diffident and she realized that this sort of admission was rare from him. His loneliness, as a rule, was his secret; that he had unexpectedly let her into his secret touched her. She gave him a quick, if rather shy smile. "I do believe that you can be almost as nice as Avery when you like," she said.

  "My dear," now a wry amusement flickered on his mouth, "I don't think we'll go into the debatable question of my 'niceness'. I'm not nice." He strolled back to his seat and sat down, and Lygia, after giving him a quick look, picked up her Chianti glass. He watched her take a sip at the Chianti and not quite like its lip-ruffling dryness, and noticed the adolescent thinness of her arms; the way her young skin collected shadows that seemed in their turn to collect lavender from her eyes.

  "You strange child!" he exclaimed. "I've been viciously unkind to you on several occasions—why didn't you tell me to go to the devil when I invited you back here to tea?"

  For a moment her fork stood in the air, a piece of crisp mushroom impaled on its prongs. Then she half smiled. "I didn't think of it, to tell you the truth," she said. "But would you have gone, if I had thought of it and said it?"

  He put back his black head at this and laughed out loud, his teeth, neat like Avery's, showing very white against his swarthiness.

  Rain lashed the cottage windows, but it was warm and cosy, here in the cottage, and all at once Robert was talking about a dozen and one things. The stage and people he had acted with. Paris in the spring and the blossom bursting into flower on the chestnut trees. The millionaire family he had once stayed with, out in Florida, who had a resident orchestra to play to their guests as they swam about in the lavish swimming pool; and half a dozen flunkeys walking about with trays of such snacks as quail stuffed with pate de foie gras; delicious, tiny, hard-boiled gulls' eggs; and caviare on toast.

  "I loved it all for about a week," he drawled. "And then it began to occur to me that civilization after all had worked this hard only to re-create the Bacchanalian extravagances of the Courts of Nero. The courts of the first Elizabeth would appeal to me immensely, but all those oiled bodies, and all that mad, mad music while you digested quail and foie gras, only made me feel— strangled." He drank Chianti and reached for cheese, and Lygia, watching him, thought what exceptionally beautiful hands he had for a man.

  "Will you have some cheese, Lygia?" Robert invited.

  But the cheese looked strong, so she had a piece of apple-pie. The pie, he said, had been presented to him by the good woman from Brinsham who came to do his cleaning. "She's a nice soul, but she can't stop worrying because I'm living here all alone." He grinned. "I wonder what she'd say if I wasn't living here alone?"

  By now Lygia had ceased to be surprised each time she laughed at something he said. She laughed now and licked sugar from her forefinger.

  She was learning, in this hour, that he could charm as easily as he could hurt, and because she was possessed of that species of sensitivity which some people call a 'thin skin', she fell beneath the spell of the magic he could weave as quickly as she had fallen a victim to the pain he could inflict.

  With each tick of the wall clock she became softer in her growing relaxation, less and less angular and fear-sharpened. A sense of enchantment had stolen over her, and each object in this charming room seemed to add to the enchantment. There was Banker, who had swiftly gobbled his own tea, stretched golden in the glow of the elm-wood fire. There was the muted gleam of brass and pewter against the white plaster walls; the flickering of shadows among the black rafters overhead. There was, along with all this, a sense of suspended time; a sense of mutual desire between Lygia and Robert that this hour might never end; a mutual fear, perhaps, that the next hour might hold something that would shatter their pleasure in this suspended hour of enchantment they had so unexpectedly found together.

  But the world spins and the clock ticks and both of them heard the sigh that was in Robert's voice when he finally said: "Well, Lygia, have you enjoyed my cooking and my hospitality?"

  She smiled across the table at him and indicated her empty plate. "I was hungrier than I thought."

  "Oh, our moorland air is renowned for exciting the appetite. Come to glorious Devon and get fat as butter! That's why I came."

  "Oh, you!" Her violet eyes took in his dark leanness. "You wouldn't look at all right with apple cheeks and a paunch—and just think of the awful shock to all your fans!"

  "My fans—my swooning thousands!" He laughed and stretched himself with the slow, lazy grace of a cat. "I have got a shock in store for them, incidentally. I play a father in my next play—that is if we manage to find a suitable ingénue. They're the devil! They're either fluffy, like four-year-olds, with breakfast egg still clinging round their rosebud mouths, or they're in their thirties and hard as slate. I'm damned if I'll be the progenitor of something thirty, pretending to be half that!"

  "Then it will be an eggy, fluffy rosebud?" Lygia laughed, and couldn't for the life of her imagine him as the father of an eggy, fluffy rosebud kind of girl.

  "It will be nothing at all if we don't find the right type," he retorted. "I've an offer to go to New York if this British play peters out and I shall probably take it."

  "Haven't you ever made a film?" Lygia asked.

  "No! The devil take the cinema! I've done a couple of television stints—they're quick, soon over—but six to eight weeks in a film studio would drive me round the bend."

  She smiled at his impatience and fondled Banker as he came to the side of the table. He came to her left side and it was her left hand which lay on the thick gold coat. The ring mark had faded completely from her third finger,
she noticed, and for a strange, swimming second she almost seemed to know why she had worn a ring on that finger. Then, when she tried to grasp that knowledge, to make it tangible, it swam away again. Rather dazedly she glanced up at Robert and perhaps because the thought of the ring was associated in her mind with Chase House, she said: "Your lovely tea has so filled me up, I shan't want a scrap of dinner when I get back to Chase."

  "Ah, Chase!" He turned his head and looked at the clock. Lygia looked as well and her mouth made an O of quick dismay. "They'll have started dinner by the time I get back!" she gasped. "What should I do? Do you think Avery will be back from Plymouth yet?"

  "I should hardly think so." Robert lay back in his chair and sipped Chianti. A sardonic smile flickered on his lips. "Does he worry about you, then?"

  "A—a little." A flush dyed her throat and her cheeks at that smile of his and all at once the enchantment of the last hour was running away fast, like the last pinch of sand in an hour-glass; like the last bright ray the vanishing sun leaves behind in the sky. She shivered, as with cold, as she realized that the old antagonisms could not be wiped out in an hour. The very mention of Avery's name reawakened consciousness of them. They burned again, like wounds when a soporific drug begins to wear off. "It—it's his way, you must know that," she said, in a stumbling voice. "He feels responsible for me."

  Robert sat silent and the room seemed full of the sudden hiss of a log in the fireplace, the noise it made as it broke open and red sparks gushed into the black cavern of the chimney. Banker stirred and lifted his head from his paws. He had been lying by Lygia's right boot, but now he trotted round the table and put his head on Robert's knee. Robert stroked him absently. "You like Avery, don't you, Lygia?" he said at last.

  "Yes." Her fingers played a little nervously with the stem of her wine glass and the dark red Chianti caught the light. "He has such a kind heart that it's impossible not to like him and to want him to succeed in what he's doing. I mean, he's given up so much, his practice in London, so many of his friends and his pastimes. If he achieves a success with his formula it will mean everything to him; he feels his need to put an end to pain so deeply." Lygia's violet eyes were soft now in their sheaths of white, outward-slanting lids and heavy, dense lashes. She, too, in this moment, looked as though the need to alleviate pain was the most important thing in life and Robert, the cynic, found it impossible to laugh at her. Somewhat hurriedly he pushed back his chair and got to his feet. "You don't like that Chianti, do you?" he said. "I'll make some coffee."

  He went to a cupboard in a recess beside the fireplace and began to hunt for cups and saucers. As he brought them to the table, Lygia gave an exclamation of delight and picked up one of the cups. "Why, how lovely!" Her fingers caressed the quaint relief-work encircling the cup. "They seem much too nice to drink out of."

  "The set is genuine cameo-ware. It used to belong to Gran." He, too, picked up one of the cups and it looked very small and delicate held in his long fingers. "I don't know why she gave it to me, unless she had the sentimental idea that I might think of her each time I used it."

  "No, that wasn't the reason," Lygia said at once. "She knows you have an innate appreciation of beautiful things. She once told me so."

  "Did she?" His raised his black eyebrows at Lygia in a rather startled manner. "Do you and Gran often talk about me?" Then, with a careless laugh, he shrugged his shoulders. "Oh, well, she couldn't have told you anything you haven't already guessed for yourself. You know that I'm damnably self-willed, don't you, Lygia?"

  She met his satirical eyes and though she could not deny his self-will, either to him or to herself, she did know that quite suddenly she was excusing it to a certain extent. He carried an old curse, peculiar to the Chases, and Mrs. Chase had said that he fought that curse, and hid it, as much as was possible. Therefore Lygia had to excuse that invisible birthmark, just as she would have excused a visible one, and to know in this moment, as she watched his dark face, an urge to touch his face in gentleness and to ease from it that expression of satirical unrest.

  A little moment of tension built up between them, and the drumming of rain beyond the cottage windows seemed to grow away from them and the proportions of the room to grow smaller. Lygia jumped sharply, when Robert swung on his heel and made for the door. "I'm going to make that coffee," he said, and he went from the room.

  The room was quiet then, and the drumming of rain and the threshing of wind had gone right away to the edges of Lygia's consciousness. She was no longer aware of the world outside the walls of this little stone cottage. No longer aware of Chase, and almost like a dreamer, from whom there are no fears and no barriers, she began to wander about this room that was Robert's, touching with the very tips of her fingers the things which were his.

  A little jade goddess, translucent and enigmatic; and a porcelain girl with flowers in her lap. A brass engraving on the wall; and the lacy doors of the long, lovely cabinet. In a little while she curled herself down on a leather pouffe and took one of his playscripts from a side-table.

  When Robert came back into the room, he smiled to see Lygia perched atop that circular puff of leather, like some elfin thing perched atop a toadstool, her fey eyes collecting darting points of light from the fire, and her cheeks reflecting the shadows of her dusky lashes. "What have you got there?" he enquired. "Is it the script of Storm My Heritage!"

  "Yes." Just the one word, but something about the way she said it made him look round at her rather puzzledly as he poured milk into the coffee cups. "Doesn't that title appeal to you?" he asked. "It's flamboyant, I know, but the British play-going public likes a touch of flamboyance, surprisingly enough."

  But she didn't seem to be listening to him. The play-script was held tight in her hands, and her eyes were fixed upon the printed name beneath the script's title. Quite suddenly she said: "Fenton Layne… I know that name… he wrote Ring and Slippers!"

  Robert, in the act of pouring coffee into those cameo-ware cups she had admired with so much delight, looked up sharply at this and a little wave of coffee slapped from the rim of the coffee jug and made a puddle on the table.

  "Such a curious play," Lygia murmured.

  "What would you know about it?" Robert demanded.

  "The critics have never liked it, have they?" She was talking almost to herself, unaware of the narrowing of Robert's watching eyes, the way his knuckles were whitening as he gripped the handle of the coffee jug. "It's that third act, of course," Lygia went on, "where the second wife walks out, right in the middle of the act, and doesn't reappear. I could never really 'feel' that moment. I always wanted to commit an act of rebellion, there and then on stage, insist that no woman would run from the ghost of a first wife, not if she loved her husband enough. All through the month we played Ring and Slippers in Torquay, before finishing up on that Wednesday evening so we'd be able to keep our date in Bournemouth, I just couldn't like the part, or 'feel' myself into it. I—I—"

  Now her voice faltered and she put the back of her right hand against her mouth, in a curious, repelled gesture. Then she pulled her hand across her mouth, as though cleansing it. "I had a ghastly row with our director—a ghastly row—but you can't let people down, and I had promised Lois Grey I'd stand in for her until her mother was better and she was able to rejoin the company—"

  "The company?" The words jumped at Lygia and dazedly she looked up from the script and the room was full of Robert's eyes. The whole world was Robert's eyes as he slowly came across that room to her, and then he said, in a voice so cold that all her thin whiteness flinched from it: "Go on, Lygia, let's hear some more. This is all very interesting. The idea of Bournemouth didn't appeal, eh, and you'd had a row with your director—what, did he give you the sack?"

  "No!" The word broke from her and the script fell with a crumpling sound from her shaking hands.

  "What did he do then?"

  "He didn't do anything—"

  "Oh, yes, he did!" Now Robert had caught hold of one
of her wrists and inevitably, so inevitably, his strength far in excess of hers, he was pulling her up from the pouffe and into the tall, dark anger of him. His anger and his darkness made shadow about her, and then his arms were about her and he was saying against her mouth: "Is this what he did, you little cheat, after you'd drowned him in those fantastic eyes of yours and then left him to flounder? Is this what he did?" And now everything was shadow and there was nothing alive in the world but Robert's mouth on hers and somewhere the voice of his grandmother telling her that he was a pagan. "A pagan, child," she said, "and pagans have no code. This is at once their fascination and their danger; their glory and their devil. They love to live, these people, but they don't care a snap of the fingers about dying. They very rarely love, and when they hate, they hate with every drop of blood in them…"

  "Robert—don't hate me!" Lygia cried out, and the next moment she had eluded his arms and was racing wildly to the door. Blindly he sprang after her, wanting to punish her for the last hour. For the innocence in her eyes, and the way she had said: "I do believe that you can be almost as nice as Avery…" As nice as Avery! Nice and gullible and taken in by her! Well, he wasn't Avery!

  "Damnation!" The word broke from him as he went stumbling headlong over Lygia's pouffe. And Banker added to the tumult by leaping forward with an excited bark, as though to join in a game. "We're not playing, old man—believe me!" Robert got to his feet and he kicked the pouffe out of his way as though it were a tennis ball. It thumped against the table… that circular puff of leather… on which she had perched like some elfin thing…

  By the time Robert reached the front door of the cottage, Lygia was fleeing wildly away into the rain and darkness. Leaves were heaped in wet mounds in the coppice, sliding under her shoes, and that minute's grace, which Robert's fall had allowed her, could not save her from him here in this labyrinth of trees which he knew so much better than she did. Gnarled, whip-like branches conspired with him to entrap her, snatching at her clothing and her hair as she ran, and it was one of these, catching her hair, that brought her up short. Immediately Robert's arms had come out of the darkness and he was lifting her soaking thinness to him, right off the ground.