He took out a little gold pencil and found paper on the desk.
“Now let’s see,” began Anna earnestly, knitting her brows. “Who is there?”
Absorbed, she gave her whole mind to considering the question.
3
To the infinite horror of Mrs Peel, it was Sal Oliver who appeared in person, in response to an appeal made that morning to London Universal Services.
“This is very good of you,” said Mrs Peel in disgusted accents, “but I’m afraid I only wanted an inventory made, before letting my flat.”
“I know. We quite understood that. But I do sometimes do this kind of thing myself,” Sal answered gently.
To the ears of Mrs Peel she only sounded a shade less self-assured and objectionable than usual.
“I can help you, of course,” she observed grudgingly. “The silver is listed already, and most of the linen. It will only need checking. Won’t you take your things off in my room?”
“Thank you very much.”
When Sal came back, wearing an overall and without her hat, they did not at once begin work.
Mrs Peel stood poised above a small table covered with a piece of green baize, on which were ranged small bundles of tea-spoons and the like, grouped round an enormous fish-slice that looked as though it had never left the retirement of its old-fashioned case lined with red velvet.
She fixed her pale, prominent eyes on Sal, and patted her pompadour with the familiar gesture.
“Do sit down. How are things going at the office?”
“Not too badly,” Sal said. “I think sooner or later we shall have to get somebody else in, but not just yet. It won’t be very easy to find the right person.”
“It would be impossible,” said Mrs Peel jealously, “ever to find anyone to replace my daughter. Naturally, I know she left everything in order, and of course you’d worked with her for years and knew her methods — but if ever there was anybody who seemed to be indispensable — —”
She broke off and unseeingly fingered one of the little piles of silver.
“I don’t mean we could ever possibly replace Claudia at the office. She built up the whole business from the beginning, and carried all the responsibility. I only thought, later on, of trying to find someone who could run things when I have to be away, and undertake some of the literary work. We’ve no one, now, who can do that. All the stuff we get has to be put out, except just routine typing.”
Mrs Peel was not interested in the details of the office administration. She only wanted to hear that Claudia was missed.
“Are those two girls still with you?”
“Miss Frayle and Miss Collier? Oh yes. And Mrs Ingatestone. Claudia had a marvellous knack of getting hold of thoroughly good workers. I think she attracted them somehow.”
“She worked too hard,” said Mrs Peel sombrely. “I shall always feel that she worked herself to death. If she hadn’t been so determined not to spare herself — —”
Mrs Peel paused, shook her head, and applied a handkerchief to her eyes.
After a moment she spoke again.
“I hear that Copper thinks Arling is sold. The agents have had a definite offer.”
“I hope it’s a good one.”
“Whatever it is, I hope he’ll take it. None of us could ever bear to live there again,” said Mrs Peel vehemently. “And I don’t know that any of the children ever had very much feeling for the place. It was Claudia who kept it all together. Oh dear!”
Her voice faltered — failed — died away altogether.
Sal Oliver picked up a dessert-spoon, looked at it very intently, and observed:
“Copper’s job seems to be turning out very satisfactorily.”
“So far as one can tell, yes. I’ve not been up to see them yet. Perhaps when I get back from Italy. Yes,” said Mrs Peel. At the mention of her forthcoming journey, she recovered her equilibrium. There was, she felt, a very great deal to be done, and nobody excepting herself could possibly do it properly.
“Now,” she began, “about the inventory. I’ve let this flat to a lady and her daughter. No children, I said, and no dogs. She’s the widow of a naval man, I believe, and the daughter is unmarried. About nineteen. But so long as there are no wet rims of cocktail glasses left about on the furniture.”
“Quite,” said Sal Oliver.
“I have some lists here,” said Mrs Peel. From a small bag she took a key, unlocked with it a drawer, took out more keys, unlocked more drawers, and finally achieved possession of several sheets of notepaper of different colours and sizes closely covered with not very legible writing.
“Having been by myself so long I’ve learnt to be very business-like,” she said rather severely, for she felt no certainty that Sal would appreciate this. “I’ve had to be. Now, about the silver I’m leaving. The canteen, which was a wedding present when I married, I’m taking to the bank. I’ve put a tick against it on the list. We need not do anything about the canteen.”
“Is all this silver, or is some of it electroplate?” Sal enquired. “Had I better separate them?”
“It’s all on the lists,” Mrs Peel repeated. “ ‘Lowestoft ware ‘ — oh dear! that must be the china. But I know the list is somewhere amongst these. …”
She rustled and fumbled and ejaculated, lost to all excepting the urgency of the present.
4
Frances Ladislaw had travelled down to Eastbourne for the express purpose of taking Maurice out to tea.
He thought that it was very kind of her. He was pleased to be going out, to get away from the school, and above all to miss a compulsory game of football.
When the parlour-maid summoned him to the drawing-room he got up eagerly.
Suddenly he remembered.
When he’d been sent for to the drawing-room before, it had always been to find his mother there. But it wouldn’t ever be her any more.
Everything was quite different now.
Quite slowly he followed the maid down the passage and almost unwillingly knocked at the door.
Would Frances be standing near the fire talking to Mr Richards, just as Mother used to do? “Come in!”
Mr Richards was not in the room at all, nor was there anyone standing by the fire. Indeed, although it was a cold day, the long window was wide open. He saw Frances just outside it and felt terribly shy, remembering that he hadn’t seen her since the dreadful thing had happened.
To his surprise and relief he was spared having to greet her.
“Maurice! Come and look at this,” she called — just as though they’d only parted half an hour ago.
His curiosity awakened, Maurice ran out and joined her on the path outside.
Frances was gazing intently through a pair of field-glasses.
“I brought them down with me to try,” she explained, “and it’s wonderful what a long way you can see on a clear day like this. Wouldn’t you like to look?”
Maurice would like to very much indeed, and they spent quite a long time adjusting the focus, and gazing at the distant sea and other points of interest.
Then Frances proposed going somewhere for tea.
Maurice hesitated.
“I don’t think we’ll go anywhere very near the school,” said Frances. “Wouldn’t it be more interesting to find somewhere quite new? I’ve got a car outside, you know.”
“But won’t it tire you to do any more driving, if you’ve come all the way from London?” Maurice asked.
Mother had always taken him to one of the places in Eastbourne, or to her hotel.
“But I’m not driving myself,” Frances explained. “It’s a hired car and the man can drive us anywhere we like. I thought we might try Jevington or Pevensey.”
“Won’t it be too expensive?” he asked.
“Not for this once,” Frances assured him. “I’m having one last fling this week, before I go into a very tiny flat I’ve found in Bloomsbury where I’m going to live very cheaply indeed.”
“Is
it anywhere near the office?”
“Not very. But I’m going there sometimes, to do a little work for them when they want me.”
“Yes,” said Maurice gravely.
He wondered what the office was like now, without his mother who had managed it all.
Arling, he knew, was horrible without her. He was very, very glad that they were not going back there any more but to live in the new house near Daddy’s work.
By and by, in the car, he asked Frances whether she’d seen it.
Not yet, she said, but Sylvia and Daddy had suggested that she might go there at Easter.
“I do hope you will,” said Maurice.
“That’s very nice of you. I should like to, very much. And I’m hoping that when I’ve got into my flat you’ll come and spend a day or two with me in London some time. We could go to the Tower of London, or anything you specially wanted to see.”
“Thank you very much,” said Maurice gratefully. “I’d like that. There’s one thing I do frightfully want to see, although as a matter of fact I’ve seen it twice already.”
“What is it?”
“Well, it’s a thing at Madame Tussaud’s. I’m afraid it’s in the Chamber of Horrors, but you wouldn’t have to come inside if you didn’t want to. It’s a thing they keep behind a curtain, and it’s marked For Adults Only, but I’ve looked behind the curtain each time. There’s nothing to stop one.”
“Is it something very dreadful?”
“Oh,” said Maurice, “it’s marvellous. The body of a person with a hook stuck right through them, twirling very slowly round and round at the end of a rope.”
“Very well,” said Frances. “You shall go and see it if you want to, and I’ll wait outside. Now, what about finding somewhere for tea?”
They found a very nice tea-shop, and spent an agreeable forty minutes there.
It wasn’t really a bit like anything Maurice had ever done before because Frances talked to him, a lot of the time, about his father, and said that Daddy was rather lonely and they must do all they could to cheer him up. Could Maurice think of some hobby that Daddy might care about, and perhaps share?
Maurice, although slightly startled by the idea, promised to try and think of something before the Easter holidays. He began to wish that Frances would say something about his mother. She was so nice and sensible, and it seemed dreadful that they shouldn’t ever mention Mother, just as if they’d forgotten her altogether. The thought made Maurice feel so miserable that he had great difficulty in not beginning to cry, and he found it impossible to go on talking.
Then when they were in the car again Frances suddenly began to tell him some rather amusing things about when she was a little girl, and then about what she’d done at school. And her two friends, Claudia and Anna, came into that all the time. Somehow, although one knew quite well it was Mother and Aunt Anna, calling them by their names made them seem like people in a story, and yet at the same time took away that awful feeling of not being able to speak about her. So that Maurice laughed, when the adventures were funny ones, and felt happier again.
“When you were a little girl,” he abruptly enquired, “did you have a father and a mother?”
“Till I was seventeen. Then my father, of whom I was very fond, died after a week’s illness. So you see,” said Frances gently, “I do know a little bit what it’s like, although in some ways I think things make one more unhappy when one’s very young — your sort of age — than they do later on, perhaps.”
“Why?”
“Because older people know that grief passes, in time. It isn’t that one forgets, but just that one gets more used to it. And of course,” said Frances, looking out of the window all the time, “that’s what the people, the ones who’ve died, would like, isn’t it? They wouldn’t want one to be unhappy.”
“No,” said Maurice in a choked voice.
Frances, still not looking round, said:
“You know, I was very fond of Claudia. So I’d like it if we could sometimes talk about her, you and I. Just when you feel like it, you know.”
Then she went on at once to something quite different, and didn’t seem to notice it when Maurice had to hunt for a handkerchief.
When she left him at the gates of the school, Frances asked whether he would like to keep the field-glasses.
“I’d love to,” Maurice said, “only how shall I get them back to you?”
“I think you might keep them till the holidays, and give them to me when I come to stay.”
“May I use them?” said Maurice, awed. “I’ll be most frightfully careful. Thank you very much.”
He felt pleased and excited at the thought of displaying the field-glasses and allowing one or two of his special friends to look through them.
Frances said goodbye to him, gave him a kiss and a box of sweets, and assured him that she had enjoyed their afternoon very much.
“Perhaps we could do it again next term,” she suggested.
“Oh yes, please,” said Maurice eagerly.
He went into the changing-room feeling happier than he had felt for a very long while. A kind of tightness, that had held him in its grip, seemed to have gone.
“Hallo, fool,” said a contemporary amiably.
“Fool yourself,” Maurice returned. “Have a sweet?”
5
“I’ll have one bunch of single daffodils, and one of jonquils please,” said Sylvia.
She paid for the flowers, and carried them home.
It was quite a nice little house, she thought as she went up the three brick steps that led to it. And the garden might be made pretty. There was a walnut-tree, and a rather unconvincing little pergola. Beyond the split-chestnut fencing lay a rough field, and the nearest slate roof was at least a quarter of a mile away.
It was a great deal better than Paris, to Sylvia’s way of thinking.
She went into the tiny pantry and chose a bowl from the cupboard, then carefully cut the stalks of her flowers and began to arrange them.
Her face was serious and absorbed. Some indefinable change had passed over her so that, although she was still pretty, the soft, child-like radiance of a few months earlier had left her altogether. She had also grown noticeably thinner.
When the flowers were done, Sylvia carried the bowl into the sitting-room. It was an ordinary, small room in which some of the furniture from Arling was just beginning to look at home.
The wireless stood in a corner. Sylvia switched it on, listened for a moment to the kind, explanatory tones of an uncle describing elephant life in the jungle, and then turned it off again.
She looked at her watch.
Half-past five.
At least an hour before her father would be home.
I could go and help Nelly in the kitchen, thought Sylvia, or do my accounts, or write to Taffy. But she did none of these things. Instead she sat in an armchair, holding some mending in her lap, but putting in scarcely any stitches.
She felt very old and responsible.
It would always, she supposed, be like this now. Ordering father’s meals, and running the house as economically as possible, and meeting new people — who were very kind, but never seemed quite real — and trying to plan ahead for Maurice’s holidays.
That was one thing. Maurice was very easily made happy. He only wanted the wireless, and books, and a little grown-up conversation. Much easier than Taffy. All the same, one missed Taffy terribly.
Only everything’s so absolutely different now, thought Sylvia.
She wondered, as she had very often wondered, whether if her mother hadn’t been killed they would have left Arling just the same and come to live up here, near Daddy’s job.
It was marvellous that he should have got a job — and such a good one. And the people had been very nice, and found him this little house, and agreed that he should move into it at once instead of going on living at the club.
It’s queer, she thought, how I always said I’d really rather stay at h
ome than go and work somewhere. Though I never imagined it would be like this. Just Father and me.
He was very kind nowadays, and scarcely ever impatient. He said Sylvia was a splendid manager. She supposed that he said it to encourage her, for she never remembered hearing him praise her mother, who had been so wonderful.
Sylvia lost herself in remembrances that, to her faithful heart, would never be anything but dear and beautiful.
The ringing of the electric bell at the front door roused her.
The postman, with the second delivery.
“All right, Nelly! I’ll go,” called Sylvia.
She took two letters from the postman’s hands and hoped vaguely that one of them might be from Frances Ladislaw to say that she would come and stay with them for Easter. Frances was always nice, and Father liked her, and Mother had been fond of her.
Sure enough, one of the letters was addressed to her father in Frances’s sloping Edwardian hand that looked to Sylvia’s eyes so old-fashioned.
She glanced at the other and saw that it was addressed to herself and that it was from Andrew Quarrendon.
The colour flooded her face.
She heard from him sometimes although not often, and the letters never failed to stir her profoundly.
She had not seen him since he had left Arling, in the dawn of an August morning that seemed separated by a whole lifetime from the present.
Sylvia went slowly back to the sitting-room and moved unconsciously towards the desk that had been her mother’s. Standing beside it, she very carefully slit open the envelope with a paper-knife, drew out the letter and read it.
It was very short — much shorter than usual.
For the first time, Andrew Quarrendon asked her to see him. Knowing in what that would probably end, he said — would she meet him one day very soon in London? The letter finished with the words: “I love you.”
Sylvia, dazed, read them over and over again. She knew that she wanted to see him again, to hear his slow, modulated voice, to feel his arms round her, more than anything else in the world.
She thought of her mother.
But of course, Sylvia told herself, she’d have understood. She wouldn’t want one to go on always being lonely and unhappy. She’d have said, surely, that the time had come when Sylvia should make her own decision. How often one had heard Mother use that very phrase!
Collected Works of E M Delafield Page 446