Lucien closed the door and leant against it. His eyes, travelling round the room slowly, passed over the three gilt chairs, the table in the window crowded with azaleas in gilt pots and baskets, and the Empire mirror that reflected nothing but wall and ceiling, and came to rest on the small, mournful countenance of Miss Bell.
“You’re upset about something. What’s happened?”
“Nothing. Really, Mr. Marley, it isn’t anything. I mean, it’s nothing.”
“But you’ve been crying.” And, noticing that her little nose was pink and shining, he added kindly, “I always think women are so wonderful the way they manage to go on looking terribly nice after they’ve been crying hard. When I used to cry, as a small child, I was exactly like a boiled gooseberry for hours afterwards.”
“Oh, Mr. Marley! Did you cry when you were a little boy?”
“Frequently,” said Lucien gravely and untruthfully, and then quickly made his point. “For very much the same reason as yours, I expect.” —
“I don’t think I know what you mean.”
“Is my mother very angry?”
“She — oh, not at all. It was just — I expect you’ll think me terribly silly.”
Lucien rather expected so, too, but he looked sympathetically at Miss Bell, who was small and showed soft curves under her neat, closely fitting, dark-blue frock.
“It was only that I asked for the afternoon and evening off to-morrow, and Mrs. Fitzmaurice said, ‘No,’ and — and wasn’t very pleased with me for asking.”
“Wasn’t she? What a shame! And why,” said Lucien rather abstractedly, his eyes following the curve downwards of Miss Bell’s soft white neck, “why did you want to-morrow afternoon and evening off?”
“My — my friend wanted to take me out. He doesn’t often come to town. He’ll be awfully disappointed too.”
“Naturally, he will.”
“But I oughtn’t to go on like this. You’ll think I’m quite a goose,” said Miss Bell with sudden brightness. “I do think it was nice of you to bother about me, really I do.”
She looked up at him with a little smile as she spoke, and Lucien perceived that already her grief was assuaged by the faint hope that her employer’s son was about to make love to her.
Well, it was his own doing — to do the little thing justice, she hadn’t put herself in the way.
Lucien smiled down at her and tentatively put an arm round her shoulders.
“You mustn’t,” said Miss Bell unconvincingly.
Lucien bent his head and kissed her.
At this unfortunate moment the door flew open before Clarissa, who had rushed into the room almost before they heard the sound of the handle turning.
Lucien straightened himself, and Miss Bell, by an incoherent movement for which her muscles were responsible, independent of her mind — which had entirely ceased to function — threw herself into the chair in front of the writing-table, in which no one except Clarissa ever sat at all.
“Get up!” said Mrs. Fitzmaurice. “I told you I wanted to take those papers with me this afternoon, and you let me go without them. I had to come back — and God knows I’m late enough as it is. You can take a month’s notice, Miss Bell.” She tore through the papers on her writing-table, scattering everything about, snatching at what she wanted.
“I shan’t want you here this afternoon. Go now, and take the work with you.”
“Mrs. Fitzmaurice, I”
“I said Go now.”
Miss Bell, fumbling and shaking, too much terrified to cry, went.
Lucien, having opened the door for her, turned to confront his mother, and such was the habit of years, that he felt nearly as much frightened as Miss Bell had looked.
His mother’s large, light, scornful eyes met his. He saw without surprise that she was furious.
“I didn’t know that my son was a cad. Of all the rotten, dam’ silly, low-down things to do....” Her voice cracked in her throat from the intensity of her feelings.
“I’m sorry, mother. It was a silly impulse, that’s all; don’t think there’s anything in it — and it really wasn’t her fault in any way.”
“Kindly be quiet. I can’t stay and talk to you now. I’m absolutely rushed off my feet as it is. My God, to think the doctor told me that my life absolutely depended on my taking things easy and not worrying...!”
She gave a short laugh and dashed out of the room. Lucien heard the front door slam violently behind her. He drew a long breath or two and went to look for Miss Bell, but was relieved when he could not find her.
There wasn’t anything to be done, he felt sure. The wretched Miss Bell would have to lose her job — but she’d probably get another one easily enough. He wished he could do something for her, since it was he who was to blame, but of course he couldn’t. Sophie would have to find out what happened to her and tell him. She would hear all about it from Clarissa — was probably hearing at this moment. He pictured to himself Sophie’s concerned little face, her occasional small ejaculations, pitched in the key required by Clarissa’s outraged feelings, whilst all the time her mind remained quite independent and abstracted, probably dismissing the whole episode for the triviality that it really was.
He left the house, determined not to return to it until it should be time to dress for the dance to which he was to escort Sophie.
It was after ten o’clock when Lucien, having gone to his bedroom without meeting anyone, entered Clarissa’s lacquer-panelled drawing-room.
Only Sophie was there, working something in green silk that she held in an embroidery-frame on her knee.
“Where’s Clarissa?”
“She and daddy have gone to the theatre. We had dinner early.”
“Good heavens, I forgot all about that. Have you been alone all the evening?”
“Since eight o’clock.”
“I’d have come much earlier if I’d only remembered. I say, Sophie, have you heard?”
She nodded.
“Clarissa was raging, I suppose?”
“She was, rather.”
“It was the most infernal bad luck,” said Lucien meditatively. “What on earth made her come back like that?”
“She forgot the papers for her committee meeting or Miss Bell forgot to give them to her: I wanted to go in for her, but she wouldn’t let me, and when she came out again I thought at first that she’d been angry with Miss Bell and was still going on about it — you know. But then she told me.
“I was certain she would. What a storm in a tea-cup! She’s sacked the girl.”
“She told me.”
“Get in touch with her, Sophie, like a darling, and find out if she’s all right. Gets another job and all that.”
“Yes, all right, Lucien.”
“Thank you.”
Sophie lifted her eyes from her embroidery and asked gently:
“You don’t really like her, do you?”
“Good heavens, no. But she’d been crying, and I hadn’t got anything better to do. It was just an impulse.”
“That’s what I thought.”
“I suppose I shall have to go through a scene with Clarissa,” said Lucien disconsolately. “What a bore it all is! I wouldn’t mind if she was really horrified, but half of it’s put on.”
“No,” said Sophie. “Surely it isn’t exactly put on. She really was livid when she came out. But, of course, the reason she’s angry isn’t the reason she thinks she is. Really, it’s because she can’t bear anything that means you’re grown up and independent of her, with impulses that she can’t foresee.”
“We’re all pretty well under her thumb, aren’t we?”
“You’ll get away, Lucien. A man can.”
“So will you. You’ll get married.”
“Yes,” said Sophie placidly.
He sat down on the arm of her chair and touched the spreading tulle flounces of her mauve-and-silver frock.
“That’s pretty.”
“Isn’t it? Mummie got it of
f the peg, quite cheaply.”
“There you are! You don’t even choose your own frocks, you see.”
“Well, after all, she pays for them. It’s her money, not daddy’s.”
“She doesn’t let any of us forget it either.”
“No,” Sophie agreed, without bitterness. “She doesn’t, ever. Do you know, Lucien, when I first came to Mardale, when I was tiny, she told me how I belonged to her more than to daddy, because it was her money that made him able to have me with him. He hadn’t, before.”
“Sophie — how much do you remember ‘before’?”
“Oh, quite a lot. I remember my grandmother best, and a black cat called Carruthers.”
“My dear — Carruthers? It couldn’t have been.”
“It was. I don’t know why, though. And I remember an Englishman called Cliffe Montgomery, who was usually there, and some of the queer places we lived in, and, of course, all the different schools.”
“I remember your coming to Mardale, and Clarissa saying you were my little sister.”
“She told me you were my big brother.”
“Were you pleased?”
“Not a bit,” said Sophie, laughing. “I’d always wanted a sister, not a brother. Besides, of course, I knew you couldn’t be.”
“That was Clarissa all over, thinking that we should both accept a thing just because she said it. What a mercy she never said we were to be friends — we should probably have quarrelled all through the holidays if she had.”
“We shall quarrel now,” Sophie observed serenely, “if you don’t take me to the Sampfords. I shan’t get a single partner.”
“Keep every third dance for me, will you, and one at the end?”
“All right.”
She stood up, shaking out the silvery folds of her frock. There was a spurious Victorianism about its long, frilled skirt and close-fitting bodice that accorded well with the unwaved smoothness of her little gilt head and the twist of pale hair resting on the nape of her neck. Her eyebrows, plucked and artificially darkened, showed a thin, wide-apart crescent on her white, candid forehead above her innocent grey eyes. Her nose was straight and short, her mouth as childlike as her eyes beneath its application of bright scarlet. It was a lovely mouth, especially when she smiled.
“You look extraordinarily pretty,” said Lucien.
“Tell me afterwards how many of your partners tell you so too.”
“It would be more to the point if I told Clarissa,” Sophie observed. “She is getting seriously disturbed, as I dare say you noticed this morning, because nobody proposes to me.”
“Nobody?”
“Nobody at all. She’s afraid I haven’t got sex appeal. Lucien, are you ready?”
“Quite.”
They went downstairs. Sophie donned a heavy Chinese shawl of brilliant blue, and Clarissa’s second chauffeur, in Clarissa’s small closed car, drove them to the Sampfords’ house.
As Sophie had surmised, they were very late and the dances that she had promised to Lucien were not disputed by anyone else. They were together most of the evening, Lucien finding his customary satisfaction in dancing with a partner whose step accorded so well with his, although her head was only on a level with his shoulder, and whose conversation was invariably responsive to his mood of the moment. When he fetched her for the dance that they had decided should be their last one, she spoke to him in a low tone of amused surprise.
“Lucien, such a queer coincidence has happened. That man I spoke to you about this evening — Cliffe Montgomery — he’s here.”
“And Carruthers, the cat? Is he here too?”
“No, no. It’s quite true. There he is, talking to the tall woman in orange.”
Lucien’s glance followed hers. He saw a small, neat gentleman just on the far side of middle-age, an air of weariness on his brow, an expression at once anxious and alert in his earnest gaze at present fixed upon Sophie Fitzmaurice. Despite this preoccupation he was listening to the lady in orange, bending and swaying above him like an immensely tall, thin reed, and talking in low, rapid tones with an occasional gesture of her long, gloved hands. There was far more that was remarkable in her appearance than in his, for she had draped her gaunt angularity in a tawny velvet dress that accentuated the yellowish tinge of her dark skin, whilst it caught up the colour of her large, over-prominent eyes, rimmed with heavy shadows. Coils of black hair encircled her long, narrow head, and drooped on either side of her face. Only a close inspection could have revealed the fact that the bony structure beneath that drawn and discoloured skin was beautiful, for the first impression received was one of slack, disconsolate intelligence — critical, rather than constructive, in quality — and of a discontent masking itself as tragedy.
“In Heaven’s name, who’s the Cassandra?” Lucien murmured.
“I don’t know, but I think — I think it’s my Aunt Alberta.”
Lucien ejaculated profanely.
“Alberta de Candi-Laquerriere — my mother’s sister.”
“But why do you think so? It’s a dreadful thought. Did the Carruthers person say so?”
“Montgomery? No, but he asked me if I remembered her, and when I said no, he looked terribly worried. Besides, now I see her, I think I do remember her. At least, I certainly remember my mother, and I think she was rather like that.”
“Sophie, let’s go home. You don’t want to make sure, do you?”
“Not frightfully. They gave me up, and I don’t suppose they want me. Besides, I shall see Mr. Montgomery again. He’s coming to call.”
“On you?”
“On mummie, of course.”
“I wonder if he knows what he’s in for?”
“He said he knew her years ago, and daddy too. Of course, I know when it was; it was at the time of the divorce. He was always with us, off and on, and he must have been mixed up in it all.”
“We all have different ways of enjoying ourselves,” said Lucien gloomily. “Shall we go now, dear?”
She nodded, and they made their good-byes. There was little conversation between them until Lucien had opened the door of the house in Berkeley Square, and they stood side by side for a moment in the hall.
Sophie pointed to a sheet of note-paper on the table against the wall. On it was written, in Clarissa’s black, angular script:
“Sophie is to come to my room for some hot milk directly you get in.”
Lucien made a derisive grimace and crumpled the paper up in his hand. Sophie smiled up at him.
“Are you going to tell her about Carruthers and the Cassandra?”
“Not to-night. I shall have to to-morrow.”
“To-morrow she’ll be putting me through the hoop. Well, I shall be back at Oxford in two days.”
“And Mardale for the Long Vacation!”
“I know. Isn’t it wonderful? We’ll have a marvellous summer, Sophie.”
There was the sound of a door opening upstairs. “Good night,” whispered Lucien hastily, and gently kissed her cheek.
He stood looking after her as she sped upstairs to Clarissa.
IV
FIVE INTERVIEWS
“BRING me my writing-pad and the hand-glass — and another pillow, and send Miss Bell here. I didn’t say my writing-pad, you fool, I said my engagement-block.”
Clarissa Fitzmaurice snatched among the things that her maid brought, flung them about, and lit another cigarette.
She was in a very bad temper. When the telephone-bell rang, she cursed it before leaning out of her bed to take up the receiver.
“Hallo — Yes, it is, speaking. Lady Sampford? Tell her I’m waiting.”
Clarissa did not waste the two minutes that elapsed while Lady Sampford’s butler presumably summoned her to the telephone. She turned to her maid again.
“What are you waiting for? Send Miss Bell to me, I said. And say that Miss Sophie isn’t to go out till I’ve seen her. I’ll send for her when I’m ready. Is that you, Dorothy? My dear, I hear your dance was
too marvellous.”
Miss Bell, entering her employer’s bedroom, was faintly reassured at the sound of her laughter, rippling amiably down the telephone.
She stood at the foot of the early Empire bed, not looking beyond the gold-thread embroideries of the dazzling Indian bedspread flung across the foot of it.
Mrs. Fitzmaurice was talking so gaily, in such a spirit of ready agreement with everything that was, apparently, being said at the other end.... But Miss Bell had been her secretary for nearly a year. She had experienced many times the rapidity with which Mrs. Fitzmaurice could assume a mood and discard it. That deliberate variability was, indeed, what made her so terrifying, Miss Bell thought. When she wanted to be angry, she’d make herself angry — and Miss Bell felt very certain that her employer would want to be angry this morning.
Her certainty was only too soon confirmed. Clarissa banged the receiver down again, after a final cooing murmur, and turned sharply round.
“Now then,” she said. Her voice was not loud — on the contrary — but there was a knife-like edge to every syllable.
“You’ve got a month’s notice, Miss Bell. I told you that yesterday. What I didn’t tell you, because I was in a tearing hurry, was what I think of your behaviour. Not morally. I don’t care anything about your morals, and I’m not conventional. But I — your employer — trusted you, and this is the way you repay me.”
“Oh, Mrs. Fitzmaurice—”
“Shut up! I’m speaking. I’ve not only treated you fairly, Miss Bell, but I’ve treated you generously. You’ve had presents from me — heaps and heaps of them. I paid your doctor’s bill once, and I sent your mother to the sea after she’d been ill — and you show your gratitude by carrying on in my house, with my son, as if you were in a dirty, third-rate boarding-house.”
Collected Works of E M Delafield Page 323