Myra Carrol

by Noel Streatfeild

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  Noel Streatfeild

  MYRA CARROL

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  Contents

  PROLOGUE

  THE STORY

  EPILOGUE

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  Also by Noel Streatfeild

  and available from Bello

  The Whicharts

  Parson’s Nine

  A Shepherdess of Sheep

  It Pays to be Good

  Caroline England

  Luke

  The Winter is Past

  I Ordered a Table for Six

  Myra Carrol

  Grass in Piccadilly

  Mothering Sunday

  Aunt Clara

  Judith

  The Silent Speaker

  PROLOGUE

  THE OFFICE smelt of fug and a peculiarly revolting form of moth preventative. The three women bent over their desks had the stupid, strained look brought on by mildly enduring the fuel shortage and heavily enduring saying nothing about it. The van driver came in. She did not believe in reticence, as she took off her gloves she blew on her fingers. The eyes of the three other women rose, looking dimly shocked at this manifestation of slipping morale. There were a number of bundles of clothing on the floor. The van driver pushed one with her foot.

  “When I take these things to the nursery school this morning, I’ll look in on that Carrol woman at Palting and see if she’s turned out her barn yet.”

  Cold, fug and tasks which, however necessary to winning a war, seen in lower moments seemed fiddling, had left the women with little energy for interests outside their immediate duty, but Mrs. Carrol was to them all of outstanding interest. The three faces under hair grey, brown and mid-brown took on an inward speculating look.

  “She must have been simply lovely,” said Brown-hair, “and still is in a way.”

  Grey-hair smiled.

  “She must be forty, of course, and looks it, but real beauty never dies, it’s bone structure; hers is exquisite, that’s why she’ll be worth looking at as long as she lives.”

  Mid-mouse had not only no looks but a pale personality. She prevented herself from minding these things by remembering at frequent intervals that in the sight of God all people are equal. She had to remind herself of this with peculiar fervour every time she was near Myra Carrol, and had a sneaking hope that the same time she was reminding God too, as it was a point which she suspected heaven overlooked. Nothing seemed harder to bear in life than the existence of women whose charms were accepted as a matter of course by other women.

  “Beauty hasn’t done much for her. I mean, her husband’s very ordinary, though of course he’s going to be a peer. I suppose that was why.”

  Grey-hair tried hard to like and understand all her staff, but there were moments when she felt it would be nice if Mid-mouse gave her services to some other sphere.

  “We’ve only seen him since he’s been ill.”

  Mid-mouse never noticed inflections intended to repress her.

  “I don’t think she’s all that good-looking myself, and she looks every day of her age, and if she’s been so beautiful I should have thought she could have caught someone more interesting.”

  The distaste felt by the other three hung in the air like a fog. The van driver raised herself from sorting the bundles on the floor.

  “You do say filthy things. Of course, I’m not married and you three are, but I should have thought that caught was a pretty cheap word, and that it stands out a mile that Mrs. Carrol married for love, look at the way she slaves to make that man happy.”

  Brown-hair’s eyes were puzzled.

  “Why else would you marry except for love?”

  Grey-hair cupped her chin on her folded hands.

  “I think it’s lovely to see a woman like that. However much you were in love when you married, that kind of illness must be a shocking strain. She’s a real example of ‘for better, for worse.’”

  The door opened and a pilot officer came in. Brown-hair sprang up and flung herself at him. Had he got leave? How heavenly! The boy shook hands all round.

  “I hope,” he said to Grey-hair, “you aren’t awfully rushed and can spare her.”

  Grey-hair beamed at him.

  “We aren’t, and if we were, naturally she could be spared. As a matter of fact, you caught us gossiping.”

  He put his arm round his wife.

  “What about?”

  “Mrs. Carrol.”

  He raised an enquiring eyebrow.

  “What’s she been up to?”

  His wife leant against him.

  “Nothing. She’s going to turn out the barn.”

  “We hope,” the van driver put in. “She’s promised to for weeks. Amongst other things she’s looking for a high-chair and what-not for you.”

  Brown-hair was shy of mention of her future offspring. Not so her husband.

  “Good. She’s a grand woman. She’ll do anything for anybody, and with a husband like that she’s got enough on her hands, God knows.”

  Mid-mouse pursed her lips.

  “None of us can tell what crosses we all bear. Some of us may have very heavy ones of which we never complain.”

  He looked entertained.

  “If you mean Mrs. Carrol makes a song and dance about her troubles, it’s not true. I take a bet no one in this room has ever heard her speak about herself at all.”

  There was a moment’s silence while they turned over his words.

  Myra Carrol, thought Grey-hair, living at Palting as a war arrangement, a sick husband and a boy flying; entertaining, willing to do anything she could, but very seldom seen. A curious woman, once seen never forgotten. She gripped the imagination. There had been gossip when she first came, but obviously it was all lies.

  “They all make a fuss of her because of her looks,” thought Mid-mouse, “and they’re not much now she’s getting on. Anyway, beauty’s only skin deep. Of course she’s got charm, but I never trust that myself. I shouldn’t wonder, for all she seems so respectable, that she’s got a story, that sort of way she has, often means something queer.”

  Brown-hair remembered a day when she had met Myra Carrol shopping. Myra had an air as if she found everything funny, but her words were kind. “You look pale, my dear.” Then evidently she had read the answer on her face. “A baby, is it? Are you pleased?” Brown-hair had not supposed anybody would not be pleased at having a baby and said so. Myra Carrol did not answer for a moment and then said: “How gloriously normal you and your husband are. It’s a great advantage.” Then she had squeezed her arm, and murmuring something about her petrol ration had got into her car and driven off.

  The van driver was thinking of her last talk to Mrs. Carrol about her barn. She had made, she thought, a good appeal for old linoleum, and the kitchen table and the hundred and one other things needed in the area. Mrs. Carrol had listened very seriously but with a smile at the back of her eyes. “I know,” she said, “it’s awful of me. Were you ever afraid of bears in a cupboard under the stairs?” The van driver had been puzzled. “What on earth are you talking about?” Mrs. Carrol had laughed. “I’m an idiot, of course, you wouldn’t know about bears either under the stairs or anywhere else.” Then she had promised once more that one day soon she would turn out the barn.

  The airman remembered a day about a year before. He was on leave and had been driving to fetch the rations, and had met Mrs. Carrol out walking, and had offered her a lift. She had looked, he had noticed, most ghastly ill. They had talked about his wife. They had talked of the weather, of food and everything except whatever it was she
was thinking about. When she got out of the car she had apologised. She was afraid she was rather distrait but she had just had bad news, at least, last night. He had stammered and said he hoped it wasn’t a death. He remembered Myra Carrol’s face quite clearly as if he still saw it, and heard her voice. “Death! Oh, no. Death is not by any means the worst thing that can happen. If you boys in the Air Force let yourselves think, which I dare say in these times you hardly ever do, you must have arrived at that interesting fact.” The car had moved then and she had said, “Happy landings.”

  “Well,” said the van driver, “I’ll be off and call on the lady, and I won’t leave her until I see her actually into the barn.”

  Brown-hair was half out of the door.

  “Give her my love.”

  “And mine,” said the airman.

  Grey-hair bent over a bundle of papers.

  “Tell her from me how much our hopes are centred on that barn.”

  Mid-mouse noisily put a piece of paper in the typewriter.

  “Enough time has been wasted on Mrs. Carrol for one morning.”

  Grey-hair sighed at the thought of the smallness of the office and the probable duration of the war during which proximity to Mid-mouse must be endured, but her voice, though reproving, was gentle.

  “And no one would be more surprised at time wasted on thinking about her than Mrs. Carrol.”

  THE STORY

  MYRA CARROL, with much straining, opened the doors of the barn. It was said to be dry, but a fusty smell hit her nostrils. She had wrapped herself in all the wool she possessed and had put on her Glastonbury boots, yet even so she shivered; it was pleasant to get in out of the wind, but the chill in the barn was of that type which seems to have weight.

  The barn had electric light. Myra switched it on. Two cobwebby globes shone wanly. The light showed the barn to be crammed; packing cases, pieces of furniture bound in sacking, and a mass of what on the removers’ lists had been entered as “Miscellaneous”.

  Myra looked at a paper in her hand. There, neatly typed, were the pressing needs of the office. It struck her, as often before, what queer things were required to win a war. Why, she marvelled, did anybody want “Towel-horses (as many as possible)”? In peace time nobody asked for even one towel-horse. Why “tin baths or large tubs”? Nobody had owned tin baths since the beginning of the century, and what were they wanted for now? Then her wandering eye caught, not only something she knew she had, but something she thought she could find. “A rocking-horse or anything like that for that new wartime nursery.”

  Myra sang, “A rocking-horse for that new wartime nursery,” to the tune of “Oh, God our help in ages past.” She had learnt that if you sing you think less, not to mention that you give to those who listen the idea that you are gay, or at least, though she frequently misused hymn tunes, spiritually minded. Either desirable as helping to disguise the truth. A woman singing about her chores could not be a woman who had lost the capacity to feel, whose heart was as dead as yesterday’s cinder.

  “A rocking-horse for that new wartime nursery.” It did not fit the tune well, the “for that” and “wartime” had to be scurried over. She took her torch out of her pocket and peered between two crates. There was something at the back there. She squeezed between them and felt the shape under the sacking. No, it was not the rocking-horse. She squeezed further, she was most uncomfortably squashed but she was able to lift the sacking in one place. It was something of metal, iron apparently, black, and then, as her fingers rubbed its edge, she knew it. The years disappeared. The nursery guard. Black bars that held her away from the leaping scarlet and gold land of lanes, mountains, goblin faces and beckoning fingers. In front of that guard she could remember a furry rug, herself in frilled muslin and coral beads, and almost breathless voices saying: “Oh, isn’t she lovely!”

  “Isn’t she lovely!” The words might have been spoken out loud. They had an astringent effect on Myra. Her babyhood faded. That phrase which had dominated her life brought her straight back to the barn. She forced her way through the crates and, by climbing over some boxes, reached the other end of the guard, and pulling and pushing dragged it into the open. The wartime nursery could have it or, if not wanted for that, it should be salvage. As she pulled, she remembered showing the guard to the monthly nurse who had come to relieve her of John. The monthly nurse seldom attended lesser confinements than those of the wives of dukes; she had only come to Myra because her face was so famous that talk about her would brighten the lyings-in of the highly born, and even of royalty, for the next year or two. The nurse had looked at the guard and her face had curled with disdain. “Really!” she had thought, “the way these plebeian women go on!” A fender like that and worse was, of course, quite in place in the nurseries of the great, but you did expect every modern convenience in the homes of the upper middle, in fact who else were modern conveniences for? John had never seen the old fire guard. If it came to that, it was many years before he had seen a coal fire. He and the other two had been brought up electrically. Heat, water, cooking and all. They had a fire guard, of course, a nice glittering chromium-plated affair. Myra had never wondered where the old guard had got to, for she had not missed it. Nurse had not liked too much visiting in her nursery, and Myra, blown about on the phrase “isn’t she lovely!”, had allowed herself not to be bothered.

  Myra cleared a space for her finds. She stood the fire guard in it, and went off with her torch. She hummed “I’ve found the old fire guard” to the tune of “Over the Sea to Sky.” The picture was stacked with a lot more junk against a clothes’ basket. It fell forward. Myra picked it up. It was of an angel dressed in voluminous scarlet robes, industriously practising on her harp. Obviously harp playing had not been her earthly vocation, for there was the anxious strained look on her face of the poor musician hoping not to let down the orchestra, and still less to catch the ear of the conductor.

  The picture hung in the Devonshire schoolroom and there, at the schoolroom table, sat Miss Fogetty. Teaching, perhaps more than any other profession, should be taken up because the teacher desires above everything else to teach. Connie Fogetty belonged to that large class of teachers who teach because there has not been the money and, more important, the personal driving power, to carry them into the profession they would have chosen. Connie Fogetty had wanted to be a doctor, but she had not wanted violently enough. Her father, a parson, was poor, and in a muddled-thinking way did not really approve of professions for women. If women must work, he liked it to be at something which was clearly only a fill-time between the schoolroom and marriage. Connie Fogetty had been sent to a school endowed to help the daughters of poor clergy. The endowment was insufficient, which necessitated low living, for which the school attempted to atone by high thinking. Connie could have won scholarships, did in fact win one, which would have been the first step to her medical training, but she threw it up, unable to face the effort. It would have been a long effort, against poverty of the making-do sort, and the even more soul-destroying home atmosphere of lack of understanding. To avoid mental friction, she snatched at a sudden offer and accepted a post as governess. Before she left school she had a talk with her headmistress. This headmistress had in her veins the germ of greatness; it had never been given nourishment and lay dormant. She was of the type to go for her beliefs unfalteringly, to be stoned or to face a firing squad. As it happened, her belief was in learning. She believed every mind had the right to be trained to think, and having learnt this art, of being free to think along what lines it would. Since she worked in the scholastic world, and more especially in a school where the pupils came from an income level which meant a sacrifice to have them educated, she naturally had no one with whom to argue, far less to stone her. Born at a different date she might have been canonized. She had no idea she hankered after martyrdom, but like any other deprived of their proper outlet, she was conscious of frustration.

  Connie
came to her headmistress expecting praise for her well-conducted school days, for her scholarship nobly renounced in favour of immediate help for her home, for a career tossed aside with a sweet smile and stiff upper lip. It was odd that she could so utterly have misread the mind of her headmistress. What she received was a positive cascade of scalding words. Belief, even a misfounded belief, in the purity of your motives, can act as a mackintosh to scalding words; the headmistress’s seemed to act so with Connie. Her words apparently slid off, but this was only in effect; actually every sentence remained in Connie’s subconsciousness, unlooked at, unthought of, not even turned over, until years later they were brought to mind for Myra, and found to have rooted and become a part of her being.

  “Sit down, Constance.” (Nicknames were not used.) The headmistress was wearing a fawn dress, of no known fashion but fitting as if she had been melted and poured into it. A fine wired net held up her chin. Pince-nez were on her nose. Her hair, neat enough to make everyone who came in front of her fumble to tidy their own, was rolled off her face. Before she spoke, she seemed to collect not only herself but her whole body. “You wished to be a doctor, I think.”

  Connie sorted her face muscles and pulled them into lines of humility.

  “Yes.”

  Then it came, like a crack of lightning across an apparently serene sky. Connie was told that she had disgraced all that the school stood for. Not because she had given up her scholarship, not because she had thrown up her chosen profession, but because she did these things from mental laziness, she was drifting, there was no clear thinking about her actions. She heard of how many muddled, incompetent lives were lived because they were without aim, how many people meandered through their threescore years and ten saying “if.” “I would have done so-and-so if . . . ” The word freedom had been so dinned into Connie during her school life that she was almost deaf to it, but spoken in the tone used on that last interview it was different. “You have started badly, Constance, but you are still free. You have a good mind when you like to use it. All lives are full of crossroads such as the one you have just passed. You have not stopped, you have not looked, you have let your feet guide you. Never let that happen again. Whatever road you take, however wrong it may appear to others, let it be selected as the result of your free unbiased thought.”