The Other Miss Donne

by Jane Arbor

  But she had to believe he wasn’t; that he was concerned to ease an awkward situation for her—just for her. For to hope so did something for a third recurrence of that strange flash of rapport with Denise. For as she watched him turn the car and go—back to Frau Ehrens, she knew she must acknowledge the sensation for what it was.

  It was a jealousy she didn’t merely share at secondhand with Denise. It was an envy of Gerda Ehrens that was all her own.

  CHAPTER SIX

  For what was left of the day Carey moved, talked, listened and laughed as if, between its morning and evening, nothing had happened to tilt her private world.

  Outwardly she was the same Carey Donne as before—the Carey who had been intrigued by the pull of a man’s magnetism, yet going unwarned of where it was taking her until it had had its way with her, betraying her to a love which made her a hostage to fate, wanting to give more than would ever be asked of her; asking more than she would ever get.

  There were signs which she should have heeded ... examined. That need to prove her worth to Randal. That jealousy. That pride for him. That admission to Denise that she knew what it was to be defenceless to love. All these should have told her where she was heading before it was too late. Or was that fallible thinking? she wondered. Could you ever be saved from love, as from drowning or from a precipice, as long as the loved one lived and you did, and had to go on?

  And of course it was the outward Carey who would go on. People’s inner turmoil didn’t show to strangers, and who but near-strangers had she around her now?

  Now she understood only too well how Rosalie and Martin Quest had felt they had to be ruthless for love. But there had been two of them and there had been a way of escape open to them. Whereas she was alone and while she was pledged to finish Rosalie’s work for her, she had to stay where she was. For one thing, she dreaded the acid of Randal’s comments if she abandoned her contract before it had run its course. And though that would be the shrewd self-rescue thing to do, her conscience towards his trust in her barred the way. There would be a time for leaving the El Gara ... for leaving him to Gerda Ehrens, but unless the situation became quite untenable, that time was not yet.

  Meanwhile loving Randal unasked was a secret that was all her own. She had no confidante and could not seek one. It had to be enough to be part of his world, allowing no one to suspect what he meant to her. Could it be done? Denise hadn’t managed it. But she wasn’t Denise. It had to be done.

  The day became a restless, tortured night and almost the dawn of another day before Carey slept. But that day and all the days which followed it had their pattern of work and talk and leisure and problems; of people arriving in search of sun and colour, or rest, or escape from drab lives, or adventure or whatever reward they expected from a holiday, and the El Gara’s sophisticated achievement of most of it for them kept almost every hour of every day filled to its last minute. It kept time moving at an incredible pace.

  Once spurred to it, Denise promoted the craft shop with more real enthusiasm than Carey had thought her capable. One of the ornate Moorish arches of the foyer, leading to a corridor which was a ‘natural’ for a deep display gallery, was her choice of premises. Within twenty-four hours Randal had commissioned grille-gates of wrought iron to be erected across the archway and a couple of days later Denise had been in business.

  As Carey had suggested, the shop was open only for an hour or two every day, which left Denise free to scour the local sources of the stocks for which she had so sure a flair of choice. Her displays, she claimed, were in the best tradition of sparsity designed to whet the appetite—a length of richly hand-embroidered silk draped carelessly over a great stone floor-vase; just one pair of silver-embossed Moorish slippers; a huge circular tray in beaten copper as a backpiece to a hand-painted coffee service; a set of curved daggers, intricately chased, as a foil to the simplicity of carved wooden figures in the most basic of shapes.

  From its first opening the venture seemed to promise success and Denise—Carey thought there was no other word for the change in her—blossomed. She forgot to be blasé; her sharp tongue lost much of its sting. Her latent talents, put to work that she liked and did well, had brought her out from shadows which had been largely of her own making. In the course of weeks, if not almost of days, she seemed to grow up.

  She had given Carey no further hint of whatever had been her ‘idea’ for a new approach to Randal’s favour, and certainly she had little cause for his lack of attention to the new Denise. For now he issued curt orders to her less often than he consulted her and when her stock-buying tours took her further afield than Hassi Ain, he often went with her and they explored for ceramics and leathers and marqueterie together.

  It was an outcome which held sadness for Michael. Little as he had ever possessed the Denise who had wreaked her caprice upon him, he had less still of the Denise who had stopped beating impotent wings and had flown out of his reach. Carey watched it happening and suffered for him. With him, too, but less so, because for her the growing closeness of Randal and Denise was a more bearable pain than his association with Gerda Ehrens, whether that was for love, or for the gain at which the gossips had hinted in her hearing, or for both. Strange, that losing a man to one woman rather than to another should make any difference to the fact of the loss!

  She was not to realise that she and Michael were not alone in watching and assessing the new scene until, one morning, there awaited her at the reception desk a peremptory summons to Gerda Ehren’s suite. She went up.

  Evidently her arrival followed hard upon Gerda’s order for her breakfast tray, for she was sipping coffee, propped against a froth of pillows, the fabulous gold hair a cloak for her moulded shoulders.

  ‘You wanted to see me, Frau Ehrens?’

  ‘Yes.’ Another sip or two of coffee, then Gerda flicked a finger against the edge of the bed table across her knees. ‘Take this thing away. I need a cigarette.’ After a moment’s pause she offered her case to Carey. ‘Will you?’

  ‘No, thank you.’ Carey slid aside the bed table and waited.

  ‘Sit down, please.’ Gerda’s tone made an order of the request, and she must have intercepted Carey’s slightly raised eyebrows as she obeyed, for she went on with more conciliation, ‘I sent for you. Miss Donne, because I want a co-operation from you which I hope I may get. But I must explain first what it is that I am asking, must I not?’

  ‘Please do,’ Carey invited.

  ‘Yes, well—first, a question. What do you know of the relationship between the girl Denise Corel and your employer, Randal Quest?’

  ‘Their relationship?’ Deliberately Carey misunderstood. ‘They are not related, Frau Ehrens.’

  ‘Ach!’ It was an irritable sound. ‘Of course I know that. What I am asking is—you have a certain intimacy with the girl; you seem to take your meals together—how far are you in her confidence, or even perhaps in his, as to his future plans with regard to her?’

  Taken aback by the sheer effrontery of the question, Carey shook her head. ‘I’m sorry, I’m not enough in the confidence of either of them to know,’ she said.

  ‘Nonsense. At least you must have formed some opinion of your own. Girls like you talk about such things, and it can hardly have escaped you that Randal is spending a considerable amount of his time with her lately?’

  ‘I understand Mr. Quest goes with her quite often on her buying expeditions for the shop.’

  ‘Exactly—necessarily spending long hours in her company. Does that say nothing at all to you, Miss Donne?’

  ‘Nothing that I would consider to be my business, Frau Ehrens.’

  ‘Tch! You sound like a well-trained servant, paid to notice nothing. But even mere employees like you use their eyes and their ears, as I am sure you have used yours. So now—assuming we are agreed on the obvious, that there is a growing intimacy between Randal and his ward, perhaps you will allow one has grounds for being disturbed?’

  ‘ “One” has?’ Care
y queried unhelpfully.

  ‘Very well. To be blunt, I have. As an intimate of Randal’s on more than one footing, I consider I have every reason to question an association which, within a matter of mere weeks, has changed beyond recognition. Why, the girl herself has changed—from a biddable hoyden into a woman. Don’t say you haven’t noticed that! Or that Randal isn’t aware of it too!’

  ‘And if I had noticed it,’ Carey said slowly, ‘I’d be very glad for her. She lacked poise before. But I’d also remind myself—if it were my affair, which it really isn’t—that, nominally at least, she is Mr. Quest’s ward; he, her guardian. That Denise isn’t yet eighteen and he, I believe, is in his mid-thirties, and—’

  ‘And so you would play the blind monkey, determined to see no evil?’ Gerda cut in. ‘Well, let me set your mind at rest on that. Nor do I see evil—at present—of any serious kind. But Randal Quest is a man, and even I don’t deceive myself that he has lived entirely without women. Given his opportunities, it would be rather remarkable if he did or does, and of course one hears talk. For instance, there was a young secretary girl—Jeanne Someone. No, I don’t recall her full name, but would you have known her?’

  Carey felt her blood chill. ‘Jeanne-Marie Coppard? No,’ she said.

  ‘No? Well, it seems she gained the wrong ideas from Randal’s being a little kind to her and she had to go. It even occurs to me that he may have noticed you in much the same way, Miss Donne, though I am sure you would be sensible enough to discount, say, the snatched kiss or caress in a corner as the pieces of mere agreeable research which, in any man of virility, is all they are. From your employer to you, you wouldn’t promise yourself anything from them, I know. But this association with Denise Corel is another thing again. As I say, I think it has not gone far. But the most worldly of men can be flattered by a young girl’s Schwarmerei—you understand the word, Miss Donne?’

  ‘Hero-worship? Yes.’

  ‘Exactly. A tiresome addiction of schoolgirls. But whether it is only this between them, or something more disturbing, or even less so—this is where I need your help. In short, to find out.’

  For a moment Carey was speechless, wondering whether the quality which Michael had called ‘crust’ could possibly go further. Then she said. ‘I see. Or rather, no, I’m afraid I don’t, Frau Ehrens. For you don’t really suppose, do you, that you can commission me to spy on the personal affairs of Mr. Quest and his ward? And if you are indeed as intimate with him as you claim, couldn’t you yourself ask him what you want to know?’

  The light blue eyes widened. ‘Ask him? You can’t be serious! My dear Miss Donne, if you had any experience at all, you would know that for a woman to question a man as to his relations with another woman are tactics of the most disastrous kind. And what little do I want of you, after all? To listen with rather more purpose than hitherto; to chat, with some point to your talk, with your young friend, and to report to me anything you are able to learn. And naturally I would make it worth your while.’

  ‘In other words, you’re bribing me?’ Carey stood and moved towards the door. ‘No, I’m sorry, Frau Ehrens. And I’m afraid the only promise you can look for from me is that the fact of our having had this talk won’t go any further.’

  A shrug answered that. ‘And if it did, I should deny it—my words against yours.’ Gerda Ehrens stretched elaborately, then made a steeple of her fingers and regarded Carey with some calculation above them.

  ‘A pity, really, that you force me to find out for myself. My methods could be more crude than yours need be. But there is no help for it,’ she murmured. ‘I haven’t the slightest intention of tolerating Denise Corel as a kind of understudy to me, nor even, if that’s all there is to her, as a dependent poor relation to whom Randal has permanent obligations. I will not have her as a hanger-on. And I did mention, didn’t I, that the advantages he hopes for from me were twofold?’

  ‘Your actual words were—“On more than one footing,” I think,’ said Carey with assumed indifference.

  ‘As you say. If I decide to allow Randal to woo me successfully, he stands to gain financially. He will have money to spare for any project he cares to name, and I should have no objection to his paying off our young friend by way of a dowry or backing for a business scheme, as long as he shrugs her off personally. Which is something you might care to tell her in the course of the little talks I suggest.’

  ‘Talks which, I have already said, I have no intention of having with Denise Corel,’ said Carey firmly. She opened the door. ‘So, if you have nothing more pertinent to my job to discuss, Frau Ehrens, may I go?’

  ‘Of course. Though you might do well to remember that you, as Randal’s mere underling and she as his dependent protégée, are rather specially—er—vulnerable. And so—a pity for either of you to make unnecessary enemies, wouldn’t you say?’ Gerda purred as Carey, not trusting herself to reply, closed the door behind her.

  Out on the corridor she felt weak all over. Her wrists were trembling and her legs shook and if she had to speak, she felt that her voice might come cracked, out of control.

  The utter poison of the woman! The calculation that had gone to her measurement of Denise’s possible threat to herself! The coldblooded decision to deal with it! The sheer arrogance of her attempted bribery; her obnoxious purse-pride and, far from least where Carey was concerned, her claim of tolerance of any philanderings on Randal’s part, so long as he confined his amatory exploration to his inferiors—to the Jeanne-Marie Coppards or the Carey Donnes who happened to be handy—Oh!

  Raging, rehearsing too late all the retorts she longed to have made and hadn’t, Carey at last went on her way, thankfully back to the mundane problems which were the everyday of her work. With them, comparative calm took over from impotent anger. Later still she was able to look at the irony which had put herself and Denise on the same side against a common enemy—an unthought-of outcome only a few weeks ago.

  It was from Michael that Carey heard that a party was to be given for Denise’s eighteenth birthday. It was to take place in Randal’s suite, with Denise choosing her guests—a late after-dinner affair on the eve of the day, at which Denise, who happened to know she had been born a few minutes after midnight, planned to cut her birthday cake as the hour struck.

  The time made it possible for Carey to be there if Denise invited her, and she was pleased when Denise did with an offhand, ‘You’ll come, of course. Randal says you needn’t be on duty that evening after ten, and by the time we want to use the Florian lounge for dancing, any of the people who haven’t gone to bed can join us.’

  Michael, at the receiving end of a similar laconic invitation, willingly took over the task of issuing all the others on Denise’s behalf, mostly to some of the younger people staying in the hotel and a few friends from Tangier and the European villas round about. As he was working on it one morning he showed the list to Carey.

  ‘One name conspicuous by its absence,’ he pointed out wryly. ‘Though what’s the betting Randal won’t let her get away with that?’

  Carey scanned the list. ‘You mean Frau Ehrens?’

  ‘Who else?’

  ‘You think she will be there all the same?’

  ‘Well, don’t you?’ Michael countered, frowning at a name which was on the list. ‘This Calvin type, Carey— how come Denise is getting mixed up with him? What does he want with her, do you suppose?’

  ‘Auden Calvin? I don’t know.’

  ‘But you must have noticed he seems to be cultivating her lately? At the pool, and in the shop—he’s practically part of the decor there!’

  Carey had noticed, though she had thought it was Denise, on the growing tide of her self-confidence, who had first encouraged Auden Calvin’s attentions, not that he had set about pursuing her. But as this was a tart criticism of his idol which she knew Michael would not take, Carey said instead, ‘Yes, they do seem to be getting friendly, and I wish they wouldn’t. Because I don’t like the man, do you?’
r />   ‘Like him!’ Michael’s echo sufficiently expressed his reaction to Auden Calvin. He went on worriedly, ‘I can only think that she is young enough to be flattered by a man of his age, though why she can’t see that she is lovely enough in her own right to get almost any man she wants, the dear only knows! Look how Randal has begun to take her seriously! Why, for pity’s sake, does she need to add a zombie outsider like Calvin to the scalps she could get? Has got—mine, for one. As if she didn’t know,’ he concluded in glum afterthought as he began to type an invitation to the next name on Denise’s list.

  And as it she didn’t know just what she was about with this studied flirtation with Auden Calvin, was Carey’s sudden illuminating thought as she left him. For she had just remembered Denise’s hint about an ‘idea’ which she hadn’t expanded, and which Carey hadn’t been curious to explore until now.

  But now it took shape, ominous shape, in her thoughts. She could be wrong. She hoped she was. But supposing it was Denise’s reading of the strategy which Carey herself had advised? Supposing Denise had decided to show Randal that she was adult enough, had charm enough, to attract a man like Auden Calvin, then she was in for sore trouble with Randal, was Carey’s guess. From his mention of the rule he had made for Denise, he wasn’t likely to approve of the association at all, and then Denise was going to feel the full humiliating effect of his authority. What a tangle it all was! Carey felt as if she were in the wings, watching a play in which she had no part, yet in which, for love of one of the principals, she was as deeply involved as if she had. She wondered if Michael felt so too—in love with Denise, yet with about as little power over the play’s action as Carey herself had; onlookers, both of them, no more.

  Michael’s guess was to prove right. Though Gerda Ehrens came late to Denise’s party, she was there, in a shimmering ankle-length dress of spring green, high to the throat, above which the rich gold of her hair was that of an exotic amber lily. She saluted Denise with a false kiss on the cheek, murmured, ‘Ah, the birthday girl! Are you going to feel much more grown-up from now on?’, slipped a white-wrapped small parcel into her hand and moved away to join a group of men which included Randal.