I left the bus at the stop beyond Notting Hill Station and made inquiries in a shop. Then I found Drayford Gardens, a long and depressing row of four-story Victorian houses, stucco-fronted, Ionic-pillared and as grim as a city cemetery. Number twenty-one was divided into flats and on the plate beside the bell push there was no card bearing the name of Mrs. Gayelorde-Sutton. I took potluck and pressed the bell of Apartment Number Three.
A middle-aged woman with peroxided hair opened the door and I told her that I was a clerk with an urgent message from a firm of solicitors for a lady living in one of the flats but that I had unfortunately forgotten which number.
“What’s she like?” the woman asked, affably enough.
I described Mrs. Gayelorde-Sutton as accurately as I could.
“Oh, that’ll be the smart one who doesn’t go out,” she said. “Top floor, and a bloody long climb!”
I thanked the woman and followed her up six flights of stairs. On the third landing she pointed and I climbed two more flights, arriving on the floor that had been occupied by the maids when the house was occupied by prosperous Victorians. The landing was uncarpeted and there were two doors, divided by a strip of peeling plaster. I chose the door that had an empty milk bottle outside. Beyond it I could hear a faint whirring sound, like the pleasant drone of a sewing machine. The sound ceased the moment I knocked.
“Who is it?” called a voice, after a lengthy pause.
“A clerk, with a message from Messrs. Lammett & Fellowes, the solicitors, ma’am,” I called back.
“Wait a minute!”
I waited, my heart pounding like a steam hammer, not only from the exertion of climbing all those stairs but from the prospect of seeing Diana again.
The door opened and there stood Mrs. Gayelorde-Sutton, as trim and elegant as she had been when I had last seen her in the West End. Apart from that, however, she had changed a good deal. Her drawn expression reminded me of somebody listening from the dock to evidence on the second day of a tedious trial.
For a long moment we stared at one another. Then, as I detected a movement to slam the door shut, I said:
“I really have got something for you from the solicitors, Mrs. Gayelorde-Sutton! I’ve just come from them, how else would I have the address?”
She considered this, her greenish eyes regarding me curiously but with none of their customary arrogance.
“You had better come in,” she said, quietly, and stood aside.
The apartment was small, dark and low-ceilinged. What furniture there was reminded me of the pieces she had once bought at Uncle Luke’s Mart. A one-bar electric fire was burning and under a single-shaded bulb stood a Singer sewing machine; around it were crumpled folds of material. It seemed almost obscene to discover Mrs. Gayelorde-Sutton in a setting like this, and I had a curious feeling that I was dreaming and had interrupted a game of Heronslea charades. It was as though at any moment all the lights would come on, and people would laugh, clap and call out the word that she was acting out on her sewing machine. Then, against all probability, I felt a rush of warmth for her, such as I had not experienced for her husband when he had patted my shoulder and used my Christian name. There was something about her in this shoddy setting that suggested enormous dignity, a dignity that had always escaped her when she was high-heeling across the parquet floors of Heronslea, or climbing in and out of her vast, black Bentley during shopping expeditions in Whinmouth. Behind the dignity there was something else, humility, and a kind of dogged courage in the way she moved around the room, clearing materials from the one easy chair and lifting her hand toward it indicating that I should be seated. The simple gesture humbled me as I had never been humbled by her in her lady-of-the-manor days.
“You’re looking for Emerald, I imagine?”
Something else struck me as hopelessly irrational. The monstrous affectation had gone from her voice. She spoke like a normal person, tired perhaps but politely patient. There was no hint of tightly corseted vowels and tortured consonants. It was “Emerald,” not “Air-m’-lde”; it was plain, simple “I,” not “Aies.”
“Yes,” I said, struggling madly to adjust myself to this complete stranger, “I got your address by a trick but please don’t let that worry you. I’ll give you my word of honor now that I’ll forget it the moment I walk out of here!”
She pushed materials from the sewing-machine chair and sat down, resting her hands on her lap. I noticed that the fingers were long and tapering like Diana’s and also that they were ringless. Even her wedding ring was missing.
“She isn’t here, I’m afraid. Did you think she would be?”
“I hoped that she would be. Do you know where she is?”
She thought a moment and her eyes avoided mine. “How long is it since you saw her?”
I spoke briefly of what had taken place between us on the day before the crash and how we had put up banns to marry a few days after Diana’s coming-of-age. I mentioned the circumstances in which we had heard of the disaster, and of our parting at Whinford Station. She listened carefully to every word I uttered.
“Emerald’s abroad now,” she said, when I had finished.
“In Nice?”
“No, not in Nice.”
“Then where? Or do you still think I’ve no right to know?”
“Yes,” she said, quietly, “of course you have that right, Mr. Leigh, and I intend to tell you if you’ll tell me something first. Exactly what did the solicitor say about Emerald?”
“He didn’t say anything about her,” I said, with a good deal of surprise, for her approach was so unlike all I recalled of Mrs. Gayelorde-Sutton that I had to keep reminding myself that I was addressing the right person. “I told you, I got this address by a trick, a quick bit of snooping over the desk.”
More in the hope of convincing her that I was on her side than with any ulterior motive, I handed her Gayelorde-Sutton’s letter. “I was given this by Mr. Fellowes,” I said and waited while she read the note.
Her expression did not change but I noticed that her hands trembled slightly.
“What did Mr. Fellowes say about this?” she asked, in the same gentle voice.
“He pretended he had lost his glasses,” I told her, and her lips twitched. It was not a smile but it was the nearest approach to one she had ever given in my presence.
“Well, that’s very nice for you, Mr. Leigh,” she said, returning the note, “but you don’t have to marry her in order to keep the money, do you?”
“I haven’t the slightest intention of keeping it!” I said, gruffly. “Diana tried to bully me into taking over a Heronslea farm but I turned that down, and this money either belongs to you or the creditors, it certainly doesn’t belong to me!”
“That’s rather silly,” she said. “I should hang on to it now that you have been clever enough to get it out of the lawyers’ clutches.”
“Well, I’m not keeping it,” I said, slightly nettled. “I’m leaving it here, and if you don’t want it, put it back in the kitty and ensure that the creditors get 5/ld in the pound. Now are you going to tell me where Diana is?”
“Diana—Emerald is married,” she said. “She was married last Monday, to Yves de Royden, a Frenoh boy she had known for a very long time.”
“Married—you said?”
What meager light there was in that cheerless little flat seemed to fade, so that the erect figure of Mrs. Gayelorde-Sutton, seen sideways at the sewing machine, became blurred. The shock was very great. It was as though someone had stolen up unseen and struck me a savage blow across the chest, and the illusion was so vivid that I put out my hands to avoid a second attack. The indistinct shadow in front of me rose from her chair and as she passed in front of me my vision cleared and there was Mrs. Gayelorde-Sutton, standing close beside me, her hand on my shoulder.
“Just sit still a moment,” she said, “I’m making some coffee.”
Even in the extreme stress of the moment I noticed that her voice was excessively gen
tle. It had never occurred to me that she might have a pleasing voice, for her natural speech had always been smothered under that stupid accent. Now the recollection of her accent was like remembering the voice of a silver-toned contralto whose talent is being rendered grotesque by a botched accompaniment. I fixed my mind on this curious inconsistency while she bustled about in the adjoining room, turning on the gas and rattling cups and saucers.
In what seemed to be a moment she returned carrying a tray on which were cups, a coffeepot and a plate of chocolate biscuits. She cleared the table, swinging the heavy sewing machine to the ground as though it had weighed a couple of pounds instead of at least thirty.
Gradually the shock of her information about Diana became absorbed in a kind of competition that was engaging part of my brain, a crazy game of trying to relate the two Mrs. Gayelorde-Suttons, the one I remembered and had loathed and the one now moving about in front of me, doing things that I associated with Aunt Thirza and the housewives in the steep streets behind Whinmouth quay. It was like trying to place ball bearings in little holes under the glass of one of those tiresome tricks found in Christmas crackers. Every time I resolved the two personalities into a unit they slipped away, dodging one another and shooting off at a tangent. Presently I could bear it no longer.
“Why are you here? What are you doing in a place like this?” I asked her. “How is it that you aren’t with Diana and what in God’s name made her go off like that?”
“Which question would you like answered first?” she said—and this tune she really did smile. Her smile reminded me of Diana’s when she was making a special effort to appear patient.
“How do you come to be in this kind of house and living by yourself?”
“It was the best I could find at short notice,” she said. “I shall be moving on very shortly, at least I will if I’m any good!”
“Any good at what, Mrs. Gayelorde-Sutton?”
“Dressmaking and dress designing,” she said. “I’m even enjoying it in a way. Wasn’t there once an emperor who became tired of ruling and retired to a monastery to make clocks?”
She had no more power to surprise me now and the weight of misery began to press down again. Diana married! Diana gone forever! Diana the wife of that narrow-faced youth who had once greeted us in a cinema foyer at Marble Arch, and afterwards whisked us to Victoria Station in his glittering sports car! She had hardly ever mentioned Yves since that far-off day. She had seemed absolutely resolved to share the cottage under Teasel Wood and ride out beside me over Foxhayes on eternal summer mornings.
Suddenly Mrs. Gayelorde-Sutton spoke again:
“How well did you know Emerald, Mr. Leigh?”
“I thought I knew her better than anyone on earth,” I muttered.
She nodded. “I wouldn’t go as far as that but I thought I knew her reasonably well. I knew that she was wild, willful, reckless, utterly unreliable, selfish, greedy, disloyal … I knew all that! What I didn’t know was that she was such a pitiful little coward, even a worse coward than her father!”
“Are you trying to say that she married because she was afraid to stay in England after what happened?”
“No, that had nothing whatever to do with it. She was afraid of being poor, of having no money for all the things she’s had lavished on her since she was a child, and it’s hard for me to understand that. You see, I enjoyed having money, nobody more so, but I’m not in the least frightened of being without it. It was a challenge to be well off but is an even more exciting challenge to sell clothes and jewelry in order to provide a float to keep one’s head above water while making a fresh start. You’ve always had to struggle, so perhaps you can understand, Mr. Leigh?”
I understood it well enough, but what I failed to understand was why the sale of her personal effects had not brought in sufficient money to give her a far more promising start than the one she appeared to be making. Her jewelry alone must have realized thousands of pounds. I was so curious that I mentioned this.
“No money or shares,” she said, almost gaily, “but I only kept two hundred pounds from my sale of furs and jewelry. The main sum went in last-minute efforts to stave off the crash—I had several weeks’ warning of it, you see—and what didn’t was handed over. I’ve been all kinds of a fool in my time, Mr. Leigh, but I’m not a thief. These wretched people are entitled to every penny they can get, surely you see that?”
What do we know about anyone? I had always thought of Diana as a strong, inflexible person, someone who would ride out any storm and shout defiance into the wind. I had always thought of Mrs. Gayelorde-Sutton as a vapid, futile creature, with no more honesty in her soul than there was in her accent. The sheer impact of her character now helped me to hold Diana at bay for a few moments and I said, “You say you’ll be moving on. What kind of plans have you got, and where do you hope this dressmaking will lead?”
“To a nice little one-woman business, I hope,” she said, brightly. “I’ve an idea that I might open eventually in the Market Square, in Whinford. They need a place down there, and I daresay I should attract the curious and afterwards keep them as satisfied customers.”
“Tell me,” I went on, “did Diana know about the crash in advance?”
“I think she had her suspicions after her father turned down an increase in allowance and said no to a settlement.”
“What settlement was that?”
“She wrote asking for a lump sum settlement in event of her marrying. My husband was hard pressed at the time and told her he could promise nothing definite at the moment.”
Other certainties were creeping out of the mental fog of the last few weeks. I realized now what had been in Diana’s mind when she had tried so hard to bulldoze me into taking the farm. Obviously she had banked on cadging a sizable lump sum from her father and using it to stock the place, at the same time getting all the renovations done free by the Heronslea maintenance staff. An unpleasant picture of our marriage, as she had seen it, began to emerge—Diana continuing to lead the life of a county belle, with myself as man-about-the-place and a proven bedfellow. She had never intended that I should become a real farmer, just a stallion, partly for use and partly for local window dressing. It was not a very flattering picture and it made me grind my teeth with rage and humiliation.
“Does she love this French boy?” I burst out, slamming down my half-empty coffee cup so hard that the liquid splashed the table.
“Love him? God bless my soul, does she have to? His family owns a tire factory! They’re three times as wealthy as we were in our palmiest days.”
She stood up, took a duster from the mantel shelf and carefully wiped away the coffee splash. Suddenly she stopped wiping and stood leaning on her hands, her back to me.
“One other thing, John”—she used my Christian name far less self-consciously than her husband had used it—“and you don’t have to tell me this if you’d rather not—were you and Emerald lovers?”
“Yes,” I admitted, “on three improbable occasions and each a long time after the occasion you believed us to be, Mrs. Sutton!”
She straightened up and turned to me. “That makes it worse,” she said, “because now that we’ve met you don’t have to tell me that the initiative came from her. Frankly I always suspected her of being a sensual little baggage!”
My own thoughts about Diana were bitter enough but I did not want to listen to her mother’s observations on the subject. I stood up to leave.
“Thank you for being so frank, Mrs. Sutton,” I said, and held out my hand. “If you do open a shop in our part of the world, then I hope you’ll let me know. I’ve got friends down there and I daresay I could pull a few strings with the local press. That usually helps with a new business.”
“Yes,” she said, pleasantly, “I might even take you up on that, John. I should like to see you again anyway, so perhaps you’ll leave your address?”
I scribbled the name and phone number of the cottage on the back of one of her husb
and’s envelopes and passed it to her.
“Teasel Wood Cottage. It’s a pretty name,” she mused.
“It’s a pig in a poke,” I said and started down the first of the eight flights of stairs.
3.
I suppose I should have learned something important from that interview, something of lasting value and not simply the bare fact of Diana’s betrayal and a few of the reasons behind her scheming of the last few weeks. I could have learned, for instance, the right way to take a beating and to face life, bleak as it was, with dignity and courage, but Mrs. Gayelorde-Sutton had more guts in her great toe than I had in my hulking body and I was soon launched on a spring tide of self-pity and alcohol, much as Grandfather Leigh had launched himself two generations ago. It was no fault of mine that I did not end like Grandfather, dead and drunk over Nun’s Head.
I suppose it was putting an unnecessary strain on myself to go back to Sennacharib and live a Crusoe life in the cottage all that summer. My sole companion during the days was Old Fred, Uncle Mark’s lugubrious stableman, and apart from him I had few human contacts. Uncle Luke and Aunt Thirza came up there at first but I behaved very churlishly toward them and soon they stopped coming, as did the odd visitor from Whinmouth and Shepherdshey.
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