The Strange Waif

by Violet Winspear

  Swiftly, striding long and hard through the rain, he carried her back to the cottage and kicked the door shut behind them. When they had re-entered the warmth of the sitting-room, he dropped her to her feet. "Come on," he said curtly, "what are you and who are you?" His hands shook her and rain dripped from her hair and ran like tears down her cheeks. "Some little travelling actress, I take it?"

  She nodded, and knew her awakening from her amnesia as a nightmare rather than the relief she had prayed for. A travelling actress! Yes, oh yes! Always travelling—with Edward, her father, until he had died of pleurisy in that hospital in Yarmouth, eight months ago.

  Oh yes, she knew it all now, and the knowledge was dry and tragic in her eyes as she lifted them to the dark contempt of Robert's face.

  "I suppose you're going to say that you've miraculously recovered your memory?" he sneered. "Well, don't say it to me, because I'm not in the market for any more lies. I'm not the soft fool you talked to an hour ago. I'll never be that kind of a fool again, with you!"

  She couldn't answer him.

  She couldn't even shed tears that all the magic and the enchantment of the last hour had fled out of her life as though they had never been. "Loveliness is moments, fleeting moments, like thistledown on the wind," her father had once said to her. "You try to take hold of the loveliness, to have it secure within your hand for ever, but it scatters and goes to nothing almost in the moment that you glimpse it and are aware of it."

  He had, at that time, been talking about her mother; little, lovely Maeve, as he had always called her. Little, lovely, Irish Maeve, who had believed in him as an actor and as a man, and who had courageously borne with him the many disappointments which had dogged his acting life.

  As a young man Edward Blair had shown promise as an actor, flashes of brilliance, much charm, but the iron door into the theatre-land of London doesn't yield to every hand that tries it, and though Edward had tried it, often, blazing with hope, there had always seemed to be some obstacle in his way. The weary bulk of this manager saying: "Oh, go back to repertory, lad, or get yourself a waiter's job—handsome faces are four a penny." Or the cynical rejection of another manager because, having to keep a young wife and a young child upon repertory earnings, Edward had begun to 'sound' repertory.

  And then, inevitably perhaps, merging all the persisting shadows into one great shadow, there had come to Edward the death of Maeve, and with no gallant little Maeve to prod him on any more, and to refire his lagging spirit each time he came face to face with cold rejection or the downright prejudice his too-handsome face seemed to arouse, Edward's ambitions sank right down and he no longer fought the idea that he was a second-rate actor, whose feet were not meant to walk the boards of a West End theatre. Into repertory he had been born and doubtless, now, he would die with its chains still holding his ankles.

  But not Lygia!

  Quite soon, when she began to show dramatic promise, he made up his mind on that. They would both work hard (in rep, of course; what else was there?); they would both work hard and save hard and then she could have a couple of years at the Royal Academy. He'd never had that, and it helped; Oh, yes, it helped! It was a layer of polish over the raw finish of the repertory product—and it impressed West End managers; Edward was quite certain that it impressed them.

  Yes, Lygia would impress one of them, one day. She would achieve the stardom he had been denied and that would compensate a little for Maeve's death, his own endless disappointments, and the down-grinding heel of everlasting poverty.

  But Edward had never fully recovered from his loss of Maeve and when he had fallen a victim to pleurisy, that time in Yarmouth, he hadn't fought very hard for his life. He had died holding Lygia's hand, looking quietly beyond her shoulder and smiling a little, as though at someone who stood there, waiting for him.

  Lygia, eighteen at that time, had known nothing else but repertory, so she played in repertory. But now it was all a lonely treadmill, her young, sensitive spirit growing more and more to revolt against this life which had surely killed her parents. The endless 'digs', that never, never compensated for a real home. The tired, overdone plays. The hope, that was never a real hope, of achieving the stardom that only came to the very few.

  And Lygia knew now, standing in Robert Chase's cottage, that she had tried to jump off her lonely treadmill by forgetting it, by shutting a door on it, and the culminating moment of her misery had been that evening in Torquay, when she had run from the little theatre wearing the gilt slippers that belonged to the play, her lips smarting from George Downham's kisses…

  Downham! She shuddered, remembering the man, big and heavy and padding into the dressing-room that evening like some animal on the prowl.

  He had done it a couple of times before, because there were ten minutes following her final appearance in the play when all the other members of the cast were on stage. But always before he had just talked, trying to persuade her to have supper with him. Or he had argued with her over the way she seemed to turn into a puppet during that final scene of hers in Ring and Slippers. This time he hadn't talked to her about having supper with him, neither had he argued with her about the play, he had just laughed and said that he had come to the conclusion that she needed warming up, and before she had managed to elude his surprisingly agile body his great, heavy arms had dragged her close to him and his great, heavy mouth had closed on hers like a hot trap.

  Ugh! Again Lygia shuddered, the horror of that moment crowding back to torment her—the forcing arms and mouth, then the animal shout he had given when, in desperation, she had resorted to an escapist trick her father had taught her, especially for occasions like this. As Downham had doubled over, stamping the dressing-room floor in his pain, she had darted past him and fled the theatre.

  Downham had come into the dressing-room before she had had time to change out of the slippers that belonged to the play, so she had still been wearing them when she had boarded, in a blind panic, a bus that had been standing outside the theatre…

  Bleakly she gazed into Robert's eyes and she said: "My name is Blair. I ran away from the repertory company, but I didn't know I was running away. It was the last night of the play; the following day we were moving on to Bournemouth. Subconsciously, I suppose, I had been running away for a long time, probably from the time I lost my father, eight months ago, but that night — that night in Torquay, I began to run in reality. And I know now that I ran from the theatre and got on a bus that was standing outside. I know now that I gave the conductor all the money I had in my pocket and that it brought me as far as Brinsham. I—I must have dropped my bus ticket as I got off the bus and—and after that I just walked and walked—"

  She pushed a shaking hand through her wet hair and suddenly she swayed, no colour in her face but the drowning violet of her eyes, no resistance in her body as Robert caught hold of her. He lifted her without gentleness and put her into an armchair. He held the arms of the chair and as he looked down into her face, his lips were as colourless as hers and rapier thin and sharp. The words he spoke seemed to come to Lygia from a long way off. "I'd put you out now," he said, "and say to the devil with you, but being no angel myself, I'm in no position to judge you."

  "You don't believe me?" she whispered.

  He just laughed, with all his old derision. "Do you really expect me to believe that anybody could vanish from their job, just like that!"—he snapped his fingers —"with no one making enquiries? What about your director? He'd be the first person to make enquiries. I mean—a theatrical company! They can't just pick up actresses anywhere and train them, not when they're putting on a play they've had to rehearse for several weeks."

  "You're wrong!" she broke in tiredly. "George Downham wouldn't have made enquiries about me. W—we'd quarrelled." She pushed a hand through her damp, tumbled hair and her eyes, briefly meeting Robert's, were dark and bleak with trouble. "I've an idea he told the rest of the company I'd quitted. They'd believe him, I think. Several of them kne
w I wasn't happy, working with him."

  "But what about your digs—your lodgings?" Robert demanded. "Your landlady must have thought it a bit odd when you didn't turn up to collect your things— and to pay your room rent."

  "Oh—well—" She floundered badly. Now she had something to tell him which even the most credulous mind might think fantastic; and he hadn't a credulous mind, least of all where she was concerned.

  "I—I didn't go to the same boarding-house as the rest of the company. I didn't go to their digs," she said. "I didn't want to be near George Downham, you see. I took a room over a cafe, n-near the Rotunda Funhouse. It was quite a nice—anyway, the people there were quite nice to me." Her voice had risen defensively, as the voice of a witness might, when the evidence begins to verge on the incredible and the members of the jury are not looking very sympathetic. She almost swallowed her next words, she spoke them so hurriedly. "I think the proprietor was dealing in s-stolen stuff. I'm sure of it! Lorries used to stop there late at night. I think he was dealing in—in cigarettes, and packets of sugar, and tins of ham. You know, things like that. In those circumstances, he'd hardly want the police nosing about the place. He'd hardly report me as missing—would he?"

  "You're asking me to believe you stayed in that kind of place, all on your own?" Robert demanded.

  A diffident little smile crept to her eyes and then crept away again. "I've been on my own since my father died, you know," she said, "and I much preferred that rather dubious cafe proprietor to—to our director. In any case, when you've been in repertory most of your life, and travelling from town to town, you put a clean bed and a dry ceiling a long way ahead of your landlord's honesty. My father taught me to do it, though I don't think he could always have done it himself. He was subject to pleurisy, you see, and last year he suffered a particularly severe attack and he died. W-we were in Yarmouth at the time."

  There was a long moment of silence, then, and the ticking of the watch on Robert's wrist seemed like a loud, audible beating of someone's heart. And a couple of logs fell together in the fireplace, like worn-out children falling into one another's arms in sleep.

  "I see," Robert said at last, and he watched her with a curious expression. "I must say you make it all sound very credible."

  "Credible?" Her glance was tiredly questioning, even rather cynical. "The truth should sound credible, shouldn't it?"

  Then she shivered and he put a hand upon her jumper. It was damp from the rain she had run through. He said to her: "I'd better get you out of these things before you land me with the trouble of having to nurse you through a bout of pneumonia." His glance ran over her and she supposed, vaguely, that he was thinking she might have inherited her father's weak lungs. "Dare I trust you down here on your own, while I fetch you a dressing-gown?" he asked.

  She didn't answer him, encompassed by misery and the sound of rain, knowing quite well that she would go out into the rain again, if he left her alone. The rain wasn't colder than his voice, or the night darker and more impenetrable than his eyes.

  "You prefer pneumonia to me, eh?" He laughed without amusement, and then he swung her up out of the armchair and carried her from the sitting-room and up the narrow, winding stairs, ducking his head to avoid the low lintel of a room at the head of the stairs. Here he dropped her to her feet and she heard the impatient rasp of a match and saw a lamp leap into brightness on a big walnut dressing-chest. There seemed to be a draught and the long flame swayed and dipped like a dancer, casting shadows up the white walls of the room and across the white counterpane of the big bed.

  "Get out of that wet jumper and skirt and put this on," Robert said, tossing a camel-hair dressing-gown across the bed to her. But her hands were wooden things and the gown fell in a heap to the floor. She groped for it and quite suddenly she was blinded by tears and helplessly crying, her face pressed to the cool counterpane of Robert's bed.

  "Oh God, why are you crying?" He strode round the bed to her and pulled her to her feet. "You're wet enough without tears, surely?"

  "You're hard—cruel—" Her tears shone in the lamplight, and he handled her as he might a defeated child, tearing down the zip of her skirt and jerking her jumper over her head.

  "Don't forget to add that I have the remorseless face of a Spanish Inquisitor," he drawled, and as he tossed her jumper to the bed she came awake to the fact that he was coolly undressing her. She tried to pull away from him, but even as she was pulling away, her skirt was falling to her feet and she was standing thin and defenceless before him in her white slip. She felt his hands upon her arms and she remembered his kiss— and she thought of George Downham. A shudder she just couldn't stop went through her.

  He felt it and now he took hold of her chin and lifted her face to him. The rather bitter smile that made him look so much like the long-dead Adam Chase went across his face. "Stop quaking like a small jelly," he said in his crispest tones, "I'm not your one-time touring company director! It doesn't give me any pleasure, you know, to feel lips under mine that can't stop trembling with fear. D'you think I'm all stone?" Now his eyes, gazing down into hers, were half quizzical, half irritated. "You needn't fear a recurrence of that display of mine downstairs."

  He bent and picked up his dressing-gown and put it into her hands. "Put that on," he said, "then come downstairs. I'll see about drying your jumper and skirt off, you can't go home to Chase in wet things."

  He left her then, taking the jumper and skirt with him. She heard him running down the stairs and Banker gave a bark as he entered the sitting-room.

  The curtains at the diamond-paned casements of the bedroom moved restlessly on their rings and the draught played again with the flame of the lamp and touched Lygia's uncovered shoulders and arms like cold fingers. She shivered and fumbled her way into the dressing-gown. It was miles too big for her, of course, and she gathered its folds into a bundle in front of her and stood regarding her reflection in a mirror upon the dressing-chest.

  "Home to Chase?" she thought. "But Chase isn't my home—I haven't got a home!"

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  An hour later, when the rain suddenly eased and stopped, Robert took Lygia back to Chase by way of the Brinsham road. They walked briskly, for there was a wind blowing straight in from the sea and Lygia couldn't help feeling grateful for the hot cocoa Robert had made her drink before they had left the cottage, and the fleece of the wind-cheater he had lent her. She pulled the collar to her ears and listened to Banker, snuffling his nose in the wet leaves that bespattered the road.

  Robert suddenly broke the silence between them. "What will you do now?" he asked.

  "Why, the only thing I can do," she replied. "I shall go back to repertory."

  "Back to rep, eh?" She couldn't see his face in the enshrouding darkness, but she couldn't help wondering whether he smiled in that satirical way of his when he said next: "Is it really the only thing you can do? Avery might have other plans for you — had you thought of that?"

  "No, I hadn't thought of it!" She shot a resentful side-glance at him. "I—I'm not some sort of a gold-digger, though you seem determined to think I am, Mr. Chase."

  "Mr. Chase?" he echoed mockingly, and the wind blew the smoke of his cigarette into her face. "You called me Robert when you ran out of my arms into the rain."

  "I'm sorry!" she retorted, with something of his own irony, though she felt her cheeks glow with a warmth not entirely imparted by the fleece of his wind-cheater.

  To have been in his arms, even in a moment of anger, established a personal awareness of him that was disquieting. In that embrace she'd felt the forceful, driving beat of his heart against her and the recollection made her feel strangely naked, as though, now, he must know every line and bone that composed her.

  "Why are you sorry, because you ran away?"

  "No!" The laughter in his voice made her speak disgustedly. "You know very well what I mean!"

  "That only in circumstances very dire do you find yourself able to use my first name—i
s that what you mean?"

  "Yes."

  "So I'd have to kiss you again to wring my first name from you?"

  She didn't answer him, and he laughed. "Oh, don't worry, Lygia, I shan't kiss you again." He stopped walking, for they had come in sight of Chase; its lights glowed through the pines. "I'll leave you here," he said. "You won't meet any bogeys this close to home."

  "Thank you for bringing me."

  "You're welcome, Lygia." Already he was moving away from her, calling to Banker, who was nosing about among the pines. His hand lifted in farewell— she saw the red flash his cigarette made—then quite soon the damp darkness had swallowed his tall figure. She began to walk towards Chase, huddling down into the wind-cheater as some cold spots of rain spattered her face. She would have to leave the coat at Chase for Robert to collect, she thought.

  It had begun to rain again in earnest. The big drops splashed loud on the terrace of Chase and the dark sky above the pines was sheared open by thin steel blades of sudden lightning. Thunder snarled, like a dangerous animal on the prowl.

  "This has been brewing all day, miss. The clouds were fairly riding out towers this afternoon," the butler ventured, in his unsmiling, rather funereal way as Lygia walked past him into the hall and he closed the front door.

  "Yes—it's going to be a real storm," she said, and she looked about her; the hall seemed enormous and overpowering tonight. The oak seemed darker. The eyes looking forth from the family portraits seemed extra guarded. The doors of the various rooms seemed to be closed on her.

  "Yes, a nasty one, miss; a real West Country storm," David said, his head slightly cocked on one side as he listened to the shrill, rising wind. "We're on high ground up here, luckily, but anything below moorland level is menaced when the sea starts to boil over that sea-wall down in Brinsham." His shoulders lifted significantly and Lygia remembered that straggling, clumsy old wall, bearded with seaweed and deeply scarred where the sea had worn into it and carried some of it away.