Nobody Asked Me
Mary Burchell
Julian's words haunted Alison "your're only a schoolgirl," he'd saidl, and Alison knew he still considered her a child. Could she really mean so little to him? Somewhere under all the planning and preparations Alison had cherished a faint hope that her business-arrangement marriage with Julian would turn into the kind of relationship she'd always dreamed of. But now, with sickening certainty, she realized that Julian had never loved ehr. And Rosalie was free again, deternimed to win Julian back. Alison felt suddenly that there was no use fighting anymore.
Mary Burchell
Nobody Asked Me
CHAPTER I
ALISON EARLSTON lifted her suitcase down from the rack as the train drew into the clattering gloom of King’s Cross Station.
In one way, she was glad the journey was over, but she knew that the little shivers which were running down her spine now had nothing to do with the cold wind blowing in through the open window. They were just common or garden funk. She couldn’t disguise it from herself.
‘Leaving school represents a very serious step forward in your lives,’ Miss Graham had assured her fifteen senior scholars in a more-than-usually-solemn address the previous evening. ‘Probably much more serious than you yourselves realise at the moment.’
Fourteen scholars had wriggled a little, and privately thought it a rather stupid comment on the good times they intended to have. But the fifteenth-Alison-had stared at Miss Graham with her big brown eyes and thought without any conscious disrespect, ‘I bet I know a good deal more about the seriousness of my leaving than you ever will.’
For one could not imagine that Miss Graham-with her dignity and her authority-had ever known what it was to be a Poor Relation. And that, Alison knew, was her own unenviable position.
Not, of course, that anyone had ever used the expression in her hearing. In fact, anyone like Miss Graham was at considerable pains to throw a cloak of dignified geniality over the situation. But that didn’t deceive Alison. She had known once what it was to be loved and welcome, and she had no illusions now about the difference.
It didn’t do to think too much of that difference- although it was almost impossible to do otherwise just now, with the busy station scene bringing back the memory of so many homecomings. Mother smiling and eager, scanning each carriage with bright, enquiring eyes, until her ‘Alison darling!’ seemed to mark the real beginning of the holidays.
And Daddy, too-tall, much graver, but thrillingly attractive even to daughterly eyes-ready to greet her with the warm hug and kiss which told her how glad they were to have her home again.
Such dear familiar scenes, so reassuring in their constant repetition. Alison had always thought of them as going on for ever-or, at any rate, until the end of her schooldays, which seemed sufficiently like ‘for ever’ not to matter.
And then, just before her seventeenth birthday, tragedy had smashed its way into her life. Her parents had both been killed in a motor accident, and, when the first clouds of bewilderment had cleared, she had found that not only was she an orphan; she was an orphan without a peony to her name.
It seemed impossible that anyone so grave and responsible-looking as her father could have been an inveterate Stock Exchange gambler. But the state of his finances at his death, the gravity of the family lawyer, and the cool condemnation of Aunt Lydia, all went to support the inevitable conclusion.
He had gambled, recklessly. And, unfortunately, his death had come at a time when his fortunes were at their lowest ebb.
‘Criminal, of course,’ Aunt Lydia had said coldly, though without any real show of emotion. ‘But there is no satisfaction in reviling dead people. They can’t even answer one back.’
It was nearly three years now since she had summed up the situation thus, but, to the bewildered and grief-stricken Alison, those sentences had also summed up her aunt.
Until then Aunt Lydia had been something of an intriguing legend in her mind-something quite fabulously beautiful and quite fabulously rich.
Her first husband and Alison’s mother had been brother and sister, but he had died before Alison was born. She had often heard her mother describe how Aunt Lydia had come home to his family-an exquisitely lovely young widow with an exquisitely lovely little daughter, Rosalie.
‘She really was the most beautiful thing I ever saw Alison,’ her mother used to say. ‘Small and lightly built, with delicate features, red-gold hair, and violet eyes. Real violet; the kind you read about and never see.’
‘And did she look like a princess?’ Alison would prompt her with childish curiosity.
‘Well, yes, she did. I looked desperately ordinary beside her,’ Mother would confess ruefully. ‘And when you came along you looked a very ordinary brown-eyed poppet beside Rosalie.’
Alison never minded that, because it was all right being ordinary if Mother was ordinary too, and she liked to hear about her only relations, who sounded just like people out of a story-book.
Of course it had been inevitable that Aunt Lydia, with her red-gold hair and her violet eyes, should marry again. And she had. She’d married money-lots of it-when Alison was still a baby. The money was attached to someone called Theodore Leadburn. But, although Mother never actually put it into words, Alison always gathered that Uncle Theodore was of quite minor importance beside the money.
After that, it seemed, the meetings between Mother and Aunt Lydia became rapidly fewer. It was one thing to accept a home from her husband’s people when she was a penniless widow. It was quite a different matter to bother to keep up a connection with them when she had made a wealthy marriage.
There was never any actual break between them-nothing at all unpleasant-but Aunt Lydia was busy scaling golden heights, while Mother was busy being a perfectly ordinary person.
True, every Christmas Alison used to receive a very expensive-looking card, inscribed, ‘To dear Alison, with love from Cousin Rosalie,’ and she used to send back a not-so-expensive-looking card, inscribed, ‘To dear Rosalie, with love from Cousin Alison.’ But except for this annual outburst of affection, and an occasional letter from Aunt Lydia -on the Riviera or in Scotland or on a cruise-there was no communication between the families.
Once, when Alison was about nine, there had been a different sort of card-very beautifully printed and impressive-looking-to state the rather astounding fact that Aunt Lydia had had two more children at one and the same time -a girl and a boy.
Alison thought it was exciting. But Daddy said, ‘Good God, that was a bad slip,’ and Mother said, ‘Hush, dear. Not in front of Alison.’ Which, of course, had fixed it in Alison’s memory.
But not long after that even the letters and the Christmas cards had ceased, and Alison scarcely even thought about the existence of her rich but shadowy relations… Until the awful day when she realised that, but for them, she was utterly alone in the world.
Aunt Lydia -looking thirty, although Alison knew she must be about forty-two-came down to the school to interview her niece and Miss Graham.
Even in her grief and misery Alison felt some curiosity at the legendary Aunt Lydia appearing at last. It took only a minute to see that her mother had not exaggerated the description of her aunt’s beauty. And, as she looked into the cold loveliness of those violet eyes, Alison dimly sensed the meaning of her father’s remark about the arrival of the twins, years ago. There was nothing sympathetic or motherly about Aunt Lydia.
For all her fragile loveliness she was a woman of great decision, and she seemed to have Alison’s unfortunate situation at her admirably manicured finger-tips.
‘There’s not a penny, my dear, and we may as well face the fact,’ she assured the wincing Alison. ‘I don’t know what your parents intende
d you to do-?’ She paused for a moment to allow her niece to fill in an awkward gap.
‘I was to stay at school until I was eighteen,’ muttered Alison.
‘Much the best thing,’ agreed her aunt, with some relief, Alison saw. Evidently she was glad to hear that her niece was disposed of for another year. ‘In any case, eighteen is quite early to leave school these days. We may even find it better to leave you here a little longer.’
Alison wondered whether she ought to explain that by then she expected to have reached the head of the school, and that it would only be wasting Aunt Lydia ’s money if she were to go over a year’s ground a second time. But perhaps it would be better to leave that for discussion during future holidays. And, in any case, her aunt’s next words made it stingingly clear that none of her money was concerned.
‘It seems quite a sound school-educationally,’ she said a little disdainfully. ‘Anyway, it is expensive enough. However’-she shrugged-’your uncle says he is willing to pay the fees, so I suppose there is no more to be said.’
‘It-it’s very kind of him,’ murmured Alison unhappily, and thought how queer it was that her aunt spoke exactly as though Uncle Theodore and his decisions had nothing whatever to do with her.
‘Yes, it is kind of him,’ agreed Aunt Lydia, pressing her lips together. And she listened with cold detachment while Alison stammered out some message of thanks to be conveyed to the unknown Uncle Theodore.
But if Alison imagined that future holidays would yield an opportunity of more friendly discussion, she was entirely mistaken. Her future holidays were spent alone-at school.
After the loving interest that her parents had always taken in her, it came as a terrible shock to discover that her holidays, and how she spent them, were of less than no importance to the people who were now acting as her reluctant guardians.
It was useless for Miss Graham to talk of her aunt’s many calls on her time. Alison knew-and she knew that Miss Graham knew too-the plain fact was that she was entirely unwanted.
After that, she was not surprised that her eighteenth birthday brought no decision about her leaving school.
For nearly two years longer she had the humiliating experience of lingering in the top class, pretending that she was passionately anxious to put in extra study.
Miss Graham-who was perhaps more understanding than Alison supposed-eased things slightly by giving her small tasks in connection with the younger girls, supervising their homework and so on. It somehow implied that she was something in the nature of a student-teacher, and one or two of the staff treated her as though she were a little more than an ordinary scholar.
It soothed the humiliating smart a little. ‘But it’s awful,’ thought Alison, ‘being here without any sort of label. Everyone’s labelled in a school, and if you haven’t one it’s as though there’s something wrong with you. I’m not a pupil or a teacher or even a student-teacher, really.’
And then, because she had a certain sense of humour, even at her own expense, Alison thought with a rueful little grin, ‘Well, I suppose my label really is "The Permanent Poor Relation".’
But it hurt all the same.
Then, just as people were beginning to say, ‘Why, you’ll be twenty next birthday, won’t you, Alison?’ Aunt Lydia wrote to say that she had ‘better leave at the end of the present term, and come home here until we decide what it is best to do with you.’
Alison had an uncomfortable suspicion that, even then, it had taken a firm and tactful letter from Miss Graham to move her aunt.
However, this at least was a step forward-’a very serious step,’ as Miss Graham had said-and so something like relief as well as dread had gone with Alison on her long journey to London.
Now that she was here-looking round the crowded platform and feeling that she was the only person in the whole of King’s Cross who was not being met-she realised that the dread was distinctly getting the upper hand.
Of course, she knew her way about London from previous holidays, and she was quite capable of looking after herself; but it did seem a little callous of her aunt to have sent no one at all to meet her.
‘Taxi, miss?’ enquired a porter, whose solicitous air owed its origin partly to his hope of a tip and partly to the fact that even porters are sometimes sentimental creatures at heart, and he had noticed that Alison’s brown velvet hat and Alison’s brown velvet eyes were exactly the same shade.
‘Yes, please.’ It seemed the only thing to do, although she was very conscious of the small amount of money in her thin little purse.
He collected her shabby trunk from the luggage van, took her case, and found her a taxi. And Alison had no idea that it was the sweetness of her smile which made up for the smallness of her tip.
As she drove through the streets, she found her thoughts turning more and more to those happy far-off days when she used to come home to the delighted, affectionate greetings of her mother and father.
There seemed to be something so strange and melancholy about sitting all alone in a taxi, gazing out at the crowded streets, and trying to assure oneself that one was home from school for the last time.
Alison was uneasily aware of the fact that there was very little suggestion of ‘home’ about this particular return, and she sat on the extreme edge of the seat, her hands clasped nervously together, her eyes taking in the scene outside, but none of it really reaching her consciousness.
‘Of course, I am nothing to them,’ she told herself earnestly, trying to find excuses for the chilly absence of any greeting. ‘It would be silly to expect them to show delight at having me thrust on them.’
But her reason told her that there was a good deal of difference between ‘showing delight’ and ignoring someone altogether. And, by the time the taxi drew to a standstill, her heart was beginning to beat in heavy, uncomfortable thuds.
Her uncle and aunt had chosen to have their town house in one of the quieter and more dignified squares just behind Knightsbridge. Alison thought the solid exterior suggested Uncle Theodore’s bank balance rather than Aunt Lydia ’s beauty and elegance. But, the moment the door was opened, the glimpse of the hall beyond conjured up the picture of her aunt.
The servant seemed surprised at her appearance.
‘I’m Miss Earlston-Mrs. Lead burn’s niece,’ Alison explained. ‘I think she is expecting me.’
‘I don’t think Mrs. Leadburn expected you until Thursday, miss,’ the servant said. ‘But she is in, if you’d like to see her.’
‘What else did she expect me to do?’ thought Alison, coming into the hall. She felt extraordinarily uncomfortable. It was bad enough to have to present yourself before unfriendly relatives when they were expecting you. It was ten times worse when they were not.
She found she was gritting her teeth painfully hard as the maid showed her into a long, light room, with a respectful murmur of, ‘Miss Earlston has arrived, madam.’
‘Alison!’
Her aunt (looking not a day older than before) got up from a chair by the window and came forward.
‘But, my dear, I didn’t expect you until Thursday.’ Her frown was quite slight, but it somehow conveyed to Alison that she was extremely annoyed and put out. It was not an encouraging greeting from her nearest relation after two years’ silence.
‘Didn’t Miss Graham write to you?’ Alison asked timidly.
‘Oh, yes, she wrote to me.’ Aunt Lydia sounded faintly scornful. ‘These schoolmistresses seem to think one has nothing to do but read letters and write them in return. But I am sure she said you were coming on Thursday, not Tuesday.’
‘Oh,’ Alison felt very much like a chicken that had come out of its shell too soon and now didn’t know how to get back.
Her aunt turned away to a desk and ran through some papers, while Alison stood there wondering what she was expected to do or say. It wasn’t as though there were anywhere else she could go-not anywhere in the world. For a moment she felt panic-stricken.
‘Yes,
here we are.’ Her aunt picked up a letter with an air of aggrieved triumph. ‘I knew I was right. Thursday.’ She held out the letter.
The typed lines suddenly blurred before Alison’s eyes.-She blinked quickly and managed to force back the tears. At nearly twenty, one didn’t weep openly.
‘Yes. I’m-terribly sorry,’ she said a little huskily. ‘Miss Graham’s secretary is a bit careless. I suppose she must have typed the wrong day.’
‘Well, of course, one doesn’t want to be unreasonable, but one does feel one has the right to expect a certain amount of accuracy about things like dates,’ Aunt Lydia said plaintively, with an air of fastening full responsibility on Alison. ‘It’s most terribly inconvenient, and I don’t know what I’m going to do with you.’
‘She speaks as though this were a three-roomed cottage,’ thought Alison. She felt desperately, sickeningly forlorn. It was really rather ridiculous to pretend that one inconspicuous niece made such a difference in this enormous house.
‘Well, sit down, child, now you’re here. Did you have a good journey?’ And then, before Alison could reply, she added, ‘Now, what am I going to do with you? You see, I have two very busy days in front of me, and I think I’m just going to have to ask you to make yourself quite scarce for the time being.’
‘Yes. I don’t mind. Really, I don’t mind.’ Alison was eager to make up for her resentment of a minute ago.
Her aunt smiled slightly but without a trace of warmth. ‘Like one of those electric fires that look like burning logs,’ thought Alison angrily, ‘and then when you hold out your hands to them there’s no heat at all.’
‘You had better have your tea in the schoolroom with Theo and Audrey,’ said Aunt Lydia thoughtfully. ‘Then there is your unpacking to do, and it won’t hurt you a bit to go to bed early to-night. In fact, the rest will do you good after your long journey.’
‘Are Theo and Audrey the twins?’ Alison asked.
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