The Strange Waif

by Violet Winspear

  "Woodsy, haven't you got one kind word for me after all my weeks of absence?" He was grinning as he leant against the back of a long black couch, tapping a cigarette on his case.

  "Yes, maybe, after you've told me what's been happening to the dog. He's lost an eye, the poor darlin' has. It fair cut me to me quick to see that broth of a boy come lollopin' into me kitchen with one of his lovely eyes knocked out of him." Her hands went to her hips in a fighting attitude. "Now out with it, Robert Chase, what's been happening—why haven't you been lookin' after him properly?"

  "Mary Woods, I hate t'hear you've been cut to ye quick," Robert said, imitating her broad Irish accent for all he was worth.

  "Now don't you be puttin' me off, Robert Chase," she exploded. "Oi've me rights! Oi've earned 'em, after all the years it is Oi've cooked and cleaned for ye, and put up with the way ye make the bathroom like a swimmin'-pool. And servin' up daft little sausages on sticks to your smart girl-friends, and getting meself a ticket to hell by lying to 'em on the telephone—tellin' 'em you're out, when all the time you've been sittin' right here, in this house." She emphasized the last words by shaking her fist at him, and she put Lygia so much in mind of Maeve, when she used to lose her temper with Dad, that she wanted to laugh and cry together.

  "Sure, now you've a tongue like Katharine's," Robert informed Mrs. Woods, with a twinkle in his eye.

  "Oh, is she another of 'em, all slickered up like she never walked in a bit o' wind in her life, or took a proper sit in a chair? It's a funny taste you've got in women, Robert Chase! You've got better when it comes to choosin' dogs—and talkin' of dogs, how did my lamb get his hurt?"

  "He ran a thorn into his eye, Woodsy." Robert blew cigarette smoke towards the ceiling. "Miss Blair here— she's been a guest of my cousin's—went out for a stroll and found him. She rushed him home to Chase and we were able to get him to the vet's before an infection set in. It's a pity about the eye, but we might have lost him altogether."

  "The saints be praised!" Mrs. Woods stared at Lygia, and curiosity seemed to crackle out of her like electricity.

  "Miss Blair has come up to London to audition for a part in my new play, Woodsy," Robert explained. "She's an actress."

  "Is she now?" The snapping blue eyes went over Lygia. "I shouldn't have thought it."

  "And that's a compliment," Robert told Lygia, with a grin. "Woodsy believes that actors and actresses paint and strut for the devil's delight. She's often told me so."

  "It isn't a profession I'd put a daughter o' mine to," Mrs. Woods declared flatly. "I'd never sleep nights for worryin' about the poor girl. And d'ye know why?" She shook a finger at Robert. "When men and women mix as close and freely as actors and actresses do, they learn too much about each other and familiarity breeds contempt for the rules that make love a clean game. Women need to be respected and men need to think women secret things, and I don't see how it can be so when the women are divin' about in their flimsies and screamin' at one another in their dressing-rooms and the men are watching them do it."

  "You old cynic!" Robert accused.

  "Cynic yourself! Me own sister took to the profession and wound up with a man—if ye could call him that— who only thought fit to work when the mood took him. It was a rare bit o' luck for her when the churchyard took him. Now I'd better be seein' about getting lunch up. The pair of you must be starved."

  She bustled away, and Robert remained lounging against the black couch for a moment or two. His cigarette smoke made odd shapes in the air. Then he laughed quietly. "Woodsy's a rare character," he said. "I should have realized she'd get a shock, seeing Banker with that one eye." He had been gazing at the tiled floor, but now he glanced up, right into Lygia's eyes. "It was a bit of luck, wasn't it, that you went out that evening—for a stroll?"

  "Yes, I—I suppose it was."

  But she flushed uncontrollably at the way he had paused upon those last words, as though he knew that it had been he who had sent her running out into the misty night, filled with determination to leave Chase for ever.

  What would have happened, she wondered, if Banker had not hurt himself and she had not gone back to help him? Where would she be—now?

  Robert seemed to read her mind, for he said: "Yes, it's a fascinating game, isn't it, Lygia, speculating on all the 'ifs' in our lives? I wonder how many times we ask ourselves where we'd be if so and so hadn't happened? What we'd be if such and such hadn't happened?" He was smiling, more wistfully than cynically, as he came to her, put an arm about her shoulders and began to walk her towards the stairs. "D'you suppose we're given an answer to all our 'ifs' one day, Lygia?" he asked. "Or are we left in the dark?"

  "Not in the dark!" she said quickly, and she felt the tightening of his arm, as though he too disliked the dark.

  He didn't remove his arm from around her as they walked up the stairs and when they reached the dining-room, he turned to look down at her. "I think, Lygia, that I'm going to enjoy having you for a stage daughter," he said. Then he removed her hat and tossed it to a chair, and he stood holding her a little away from him, examining her as he might one of those dolls or goblets he had downstairs. "We should look rather convincing together, too," he decided. "We're both dark and bony and not in the least pretty." A grin came to his mouth. "You must have been a funny little thing when you were a kid, Lygia. I bet you had a fringe!"

  "And a ponytail," she said, standing quietly before him, with his hands on her shoulders. "Dad hated the ponytail and he cut it off one Saturday morning, while Maeve was out shopping. When she got home she was so mad at what he'd done, she chased him round the room with a Vienna loaf—and she hit him with it, too."

  Then Lygia's mouth began to shake, and quite suddenly she was overwhelmed by the old, sad, funny memories which she had very nearly lost. She turned from Robert, hiding her shaking mouth and her streaming tears behind her hands. "I m-miss them so— I want them!" The words broke from her; prisoners that escaped, though she tried to hold them back. "I—I can't s-seem to bear it that they're gone—both g-gone!"

  "Hush, don't cry!" Quite unexpectedly, and very gently, he drew her close against him. "You've good memories of them, Lygia, and while you have those you have very real treasures, you know. You have their smiles and their love and their courage. Don't you know that there are people who would give their very souls to possess such legacies?"

  She lay there against him, catching her breath, feeling the material of his jacket against her wet cheek. He had never spoken like this before, so gravely, so sincerely—so revealingly.

  Smiles! Love! Courage!

  Those were not his legacies! Those were not his memories! His memories were of two people who remembered his existence now and again and visited him at school or at Chase. His legacies were turbulence and discontent and tragedy…

  "Now no more tears," he said. "Woodsy will think I've been bullying you and I'm in her bad books already, remember. Do you want a handkerchief?"

  "No-no, I think I've got one." She searched in her pocket and found one, and while she dried her eyes Robert went to a table where there were decanters and glasses and poured a couple of sherries. When he turned with the drinks, the old sardonic mask was back on his face, but now she had seen behind the mask for a brief moment and she felt that the tears she had just shed had been a little for him, too. For the boy who had not been able to cry and say: "I can't seem to bear it that they're gone—both gone!" There had been no tears in him, because there had been only fears in him!

  He had been reared at Chase. He had seen himself grow more and more like that fateful Zoffany portrait in the drawing-room. Each personal action and inclination had probably been suspect in his own eyes from the time his grandmother had called him to her and told him that his parents had been drowned. She would have called it an accident, but there had been newspapers to call it something else; the eyes of boys at school to look at him with uncertainty and speculation; throwback tendencies in him to send him in secret to the drawing-room, t
o study that portrait of Adam Chase and to wonder tormentedly about himself.

  His Chase blood had gradually become an obsession with him, and yet he stood before her in this moment, smiling a little as he held out a sherry to her, and revealing in every nervously-slender line of him, every haughty bone, that he also had his mother's Spanish blood.

  Had he never wondered, never thought, that he might take after his mother far more than he took after his father—or Adam Chase?

  On Wednesday evening Robert told her that he had arranged an appointment with Fenton Laye for the following afternoon, so she took a bus into the West End Thursday morning and spent nearly nine pounds of her precious little store of money on a new dress and a particularly sheer pair of nylon stockings. It wouldn't do, she thought, to go to Fenton Laye's house with a run in one of her stockings.

  All the way back to Mrs. Perry's, her heart was thumping with apprehension at the thought of that coming visit. Fenton Laye might think her totally unsuitable for his play, despite Robert's reassurances, for there was no denying the fact that she was entirely without any West End experience and surely, when Britain's most eminent playwright-producer put on a play, especially one of his own, he ensured that the members of his cast brought the maximum of talent, efficiency and experience to their various roles?

  The bus rounded a bend into St. Mark's Rise, and Lygia, clutching the parcel that contained her new dress and stockings, ran down the steps to the platform. She leapt off the bus outside the big Gothic church that gave this long, upwinding road its name and walked abstractedly to Mrs. Perry's house.

  She didn't talk much over lunch, and Mrs. Perry, once in show-business herself and wise in the ways of pre-audition nerves, didn't press her into conversation. But she did suggest a short lie-down before Lygia got herself ready to go to Fenton Laye's. "You'll feel fresh as a flower, then, and all nice and ready when Mr. Chase calls for you," she wound up.

  Lygia stood on the hearth, gazing at herself in the mirror over the fireplace. She rumpled her dark, short hair with nervous hands. "I don't look much like a flower," she objected. "I'm terribly plain, I think. I'm all bones and—and shadows. Oh hell!" She pulled a disgruntled face at her reflection. "Why couldn't I have looked like Maeve—or my father? They were both so— so striking." Then she shrugged and turned away from the mirror and Mrs. Perry smiled at her as she piled plates on to a tray.

  "Now you stop worryin' about ye face"—and it was a sure sign that Mrs. Perry was moved, for she had relapsed into the brogue which her years as a chorus-girl and her married life with a Cockney had rather spoiled. " 'Tis a fetchin' kind of face ye have, an' that's the truth."

  "Fetching!" Lygia broke into a giggle as she followed Mrs. Perry out to the kitchen with the tablecloth and the cruet. "Well, I only hope Fenton Laye thinks so. I don't quite know what I'll do if I don't get this job."

  "Och, away with ye! Mr. Chase has connections from one end of Shaftesbury Avenue to the other; he'll find other work for ye."

  But Lygia stood biting her lip and looking just a little bit despondent. "I couldn't go on being a responsibility to him, Mrs. Perry," she said. "I couldn't go on intruding into his life. He's an important person in the theatre world and he has important friends. I—I hadn't quite realized that, until I met some of them the other day." She took a wet plate from Mrs. Perry and dried it. "I felt sort of raw and unfinished, sitting there among them, and very aware that I'm only a rep actress."

  "There's many a star today has come out of rep," Mrs. Perry declared stoutly. "And as for the importance of Mr. Chase's fine feathered friends—well, m'dearie, it is all fine feathers, you know."

  "I still found them overpowering—and a little frightening," Lygia said, and she couldn't suppress the slight shiver that went through her.

  "H'm—" Mrs. Perry whisked a steel-wool pad round a saucepan and cast a thoughtful sideglance at Lygia— "is Mr. Chase so frightenin' now? It's always seemed to me that he takes life and his friends as a sort of joke. Am I wrong, after all, think you?"

  "A—joke?" Lygia stood with a gravy-boat in one hand and a dish-wiper in the other. "Perhaps—but not a funny one, Mrs. Perry."

  "You don't think he's a happy man, then? Well, Oi've heard Mally say it. 'Tis a wife he needs, that's always her cry. But for all that, I can't see my Mally takin' orders from one of them magazine-cover women of his. Now give that dish-wiper to me and you run upstairs and rest yourself. What time is Mr. Chase comin' over?"

  "About five o'clock. But I don't need to rest, Mrs. Perry!"

  "Sure, now, it won't do you any harm. Rest yourself until four, then I'll come up and give you a hand fixin' all them little buttons down the back of ye new dress."

  "All right, then." Lygia wandered to the door, where she turned to smile at her landlady. "You're very kind to me, Mrs. Perry—and I love your Irish brogue. It reminds me of Maeve, my mother."

  "Och, away with ye!" said Mrs. Perry not unpleased. " 'Tis the blarney you've got in ye, as well as the real Irish eyes."

  It was gone five before the doorbell rang, and Lygia, already in her coat, went hurrying along the narrow hallway. "Hullo!" she smiled at Robert. "I was beginning to think you weren't coming."

  "Lygia—" He stepped into the hallway, and when she saw the gravity of his face her smile died away.

  "What's the matter?" Alarm sharpened her voice. "You look upset—worried."

  "Avery's been on the phone. Gran's had a heart attack and he wants me to get home to Chase as soon as I possibly can. Lygia," he swung the door shut behind him and the hallway light showed her the drawn look about his nostrils and the way the lines at the sides of his eyes seemed suddenly deeper etched, "Avery said something else. He said would I bring you."

  "Me?" Her lashes blinked troubledly at him. "Why, Robert?"

  "He said Gran keeps asking for you."

  After that there were several minutes of confusion in the house. Lygia raced upstairs to throw some clothing into her suitcase. Robert got on to the phone, first to Paddington Station to ask the time of the next train to Torquay, then to the nearest taxi rank. And Mrs. Perry bustled about cutting sandwiches for them and filling a Thermos flask with plenty of hot tea.

  "Our train leaves Paddington at six-ten," Robert said, as Lygia came downstairs with her suitcase. He pushed back his cuff and looked at his watch. "It's now five-twenty, so if that damned taxi doesn't take too long getting here, we should just about make it."

  "We'll make it, Robert, don't worry." Quite unselfconsciously she squeezed one of his hands and felt curiously more mature than he in this moment.

  The journey seemed endless, despite the fact that this was a through train and they had none of those long halts that tear the nerves to shreds when you're overwhelmingly anxious to get somewhere. It grew cold, too, as it grew late, and Lygia didn't object when Robert drew her inside the warm folds of his overcoat and held his arm about her. "I'm glad you wanted to come," he said. "This would have been a damnable journey if I'd had to do it alone."

  "You love her very much, don't you?" Lygia said, and she lay there against his shoulder, feeling that she imparted comfort as well as drew it.

  "Yes—I love her." His arm tightened about her. "It's been the only real, warm, honest love I've ever known. She's been my parents, my friend and my mentor. I'll miss her like hell, if this is it!"

  "Did Avery intimate that it might be?"

  "Yes. He didn't beat about the bush. She has diabetes and she's over eighty."

  "I didn't think she looked terribly well when I said goodbye to her, last Friday."

  "She gave you this, didn't she?" Robert's hand lightly fondled the little sea-horse that lay against the soft gooseberry-green wool of her dress she had bought that morning. "He's pretty. The new dress is pretty, too. Did you buy it specially for our visit to Fenton Laye?"

  She nodded.

  "Are you very disappointed—about not going?"

  "No, Robert," she said, and it was true. She had quite for
gotten all about their appointment and the play; they had shrunk to insignificant proportions beside this trouble that now faced Robert. His grandmother had a place in his life which no one else could ever fill… not Gerda… or any of the other sleek lovelies he knew.

  It was well past midnight when they reached Chase.

  They had missed the last bus into Brinsham, but Robert had managed to hire a rather rackety car. It fumed and fussed all the way up the winding road out of Brinsham, and it finally bumped in against the steps of Chase with a spurt of fumes from the exhaust that seemed like a breath of relief. Avery, who had probably been listening for them, came to the door before they even pulled the bell.

  "How's Gran?" Robert demanded at once.

  "Holding her own, Bob, that's about all I can say." Avery pressed his arm and they went across the hall and into the drawing-room, where a big wood fire burned, throwing cheery sparks up the chimney.

  Lygia walked to the fire and stood warming her hands as Robert and Avery talked of their grandmother. It was strange, she thought, to be here again. She had felt that it would be like coming home, but instead, rather bewilderingly, Chase had become only a large, grand, rather dark house she had once dwelt in for a while.

  "You must both be hungry," Avery said. "Ellen has prepared some supper for you. I'll get her to bring it in." He pulled the fireside bell that connected with the kitchen, and now, for the first time, he looked directly at Lygia. "It was good of you to come," he said to her. "Gran seems to have something on her mind, which she feels she must say to you, personally, otherwise I shouldn't have asked Bob to drag you back here. I hope the train journey hasn't tired you too much?"

  "No, I'm all right, thank you." He spoke so formally that it was slightly embarrassing, and she looked away from him as she tossed off her hat and unbuckled the belt of her raincoat.

  Robert lit a cigarette, and his eyes brooded darkly through the wreathing smoke as he watched Avery approach Lygia and take her raincoat from her. The gooseberry-green dress gave her a new willowy grace that was strangely startling. It was as though, he thought, she had suddenly taken leave to grow up and become a woman in front of their eyes.