by Joan Aiken
“Hey there! Good morning!” he said sociably. “You’re an early caller, ain’t you? Well, well, I was in love myself once. Seems a long time ago now, though.”
A somewhat awkward silence fell; Val felt like screaming at both of them to get out and leave her to work in peace.
“I was goin’ to suggest that you and I go out presently and have a meal at some chophouse?” Nils said to Val, yawning again. “I daresay there are places where one can take a lady? Why don’t we go out all three? Are you game?” he said to Benet.
Val said, “Thank you, Nils, but I’m afraid I can’t. I’ve just been giving the same answer to Benet, who kindly invited me out to meet his cousins. I have to get this work delivered by twelve o’clock.” Rather pointedly she glanced up at the ormolu clock on the marble mantel.
“Oh, deuce take it—women—they’re always so cursedly full of their own affairs. They live in such a fuss and fluster!” Nils drawled good-humouredly. “Look at all this muddle—in the dining room, too. Where am I supposed to take my breakfast?” he said to Val, and to Benet, “Just you wait, my boy, till you’ve been married six years, like me; the varnish soon wears off, I can tell you.”
“Chloe will bring you some breakfast in the drawing room,” Val said, trying to choke down her irritation.
“Ne’mind, my dear—I’d as lief go out and stroll round town.” He said to Benet, “Why don’t you wait till I get myself dressed, and we’ll go together, if Valla don’t want to? You can show me a bit of the town, I daresay? I haven’t been here since I was a whippersnapper. I expect there’s places you could take me where it wouldn’t do to have Valla with us.”
“Another time I’ll be happy to show you round,” Benet replied, civilly but with a marked lack of enthusiasm in his tone. “Just at the moment, though, I have my cousins waiting for me in the carriage; I have delayed them too long already, I fear; I had better get back to them. Will you at least come and give them your explanation, my dear?” he said to Val.
She saw that she must and walked out reluctantly after him on to the porch. There were the Warren ladies, seated waiting in the brougham. Mrs. Warren wore black poplin trimmed with crimson velvet bands, and a huge black hat wreathed with crimson roses. Lottie was dressed in white; her small pale face looked anxiously out of a white-velvet cabriolet bonnet plumed with crystal-spangled feathers. Their gaze fastened rather blankly on Val; for a moment, she suspected, they thought she was the housemaid.
Val made her apologies stiffly and noticed an expression of hardly concealed satisfaction in Mrs. Warren’s face as she did so. But Charlotte looked truly disappointed.
“Oh, what a pity,” she said in a soft voice. “I had hoped to talk to you last night but there was never a chance—I would so much like to hear about your work, it must be so interesting.” And she smiled up at Val appealingly.
But the appeal was lost on Val.
“The main thing about my work is that it must be done to time and not thrown aside at anybody’s whim,” she said shortly and saw Charlotte wince as if she had been struck.
Making her adieux, Val turned toward the house and found Benet still beside her.
“I’m very sorry about our walk in the park, my dear,” he said, and she could tell from his low voice how true this was. “We must take it as soon as I get back. Two weeks without you is going to seem like an awfully long time.”
Inconvenienced by finding her throat tight with tears, Val could only nod dumbly.
“At any rate,” he added, pausing on the step and sounding more cheerful, “we shall have to see a lot of each other—almost too much, you may think—after I get back.”
“Why so?” she managed to articulate.
“The calls. We’ll be at it day after day for a couple of months.”
“Calls?”
“On all my aunts and cousins—you know, we have to do the whole round of family visits, formally announcing our engagement to each lot, and inviting them all individually to the wedding. It’s always done; I’m afraid we can’t avoid it. Mother’s making an alphabetical list, so nobody will be left out and have hurt feelings. At two a day, it’ll take us quite two months.”
“What about your work?” she said rather blankly.
“Oh—old Pendleton quite understands how it is—he’ll let me have the time off. He’s been through it himself. And, after all, he’s a cousin too! But that’s why I have to give in about this Boston business. Goodbye then, my dear.”
He made as if to kiss her, but Val did not want to be kissed in front of the Warrens. She squeezed his hand and slipped swiftly back through the open door.
“Formal kind of a stiff fellow, ain’t he,” said Nils, who was standing in the hall. “Damned odd, all these social rigmaroles you have over here—just where you’d think things would be free and easy. I can quite see how you feel about it all. Still, he seems a decent cove enough, I don’t mind going out with him sometime. It’s as well he couldn’t just now though: I quite forgot, I’m cleaned out. Not quite up to trap to borrow from your future brother-in-law on your first meeting. I wonder whether you can let me have fifty dollars, my dear, just for now?”
“Fifty dollars?” she said vaguely.
“Yes—or seventy-five if you can spare it—I’ve several introductions which I hope will soon jolly up my finances but just at the moment I’m as clean as a cow’s whistle—had enough for my ticket on the boat and a few hands of cards on the way, and that was it. So I’d be greatly obliged—I need to prime the pump, don’t you know.”
“I’ll see what I have.”
She went to the bureau where she kept her money; meanwhile Nils rummaged discontentedly among the bottles in the sideboard, found the madeira, and poured himself a tumblerful.
“I’m afraid I’ve only forty-five dollars,” Val said. “Will that do?”
“Have to, won’t it?” he answered amiably, rolling up the bills and putting them in his dressing-gown pocket. “Thanks, Valla. I’ll do as much for you, some time.”
Val’s eye wandered back to the clock; she must fit in a call at her bank on the way back from the Inquirer, and before going on to Mrs. Allerton’s. Well, no walk in the park with Benet, that would save an hour.
“I know, I know, I’m keeping you from your work,” said Nils. “I can take a hint! I’ll make myself scarce. Got work to do myself, anyway. D’you know where I’ll find the offices of a rag called the Knuckle?”
“I’ve never heard of it, I’m afraid,” she said, surprised.
“No matter. Some cabman will know. I’ll see you later on.”
And with exaggerated care, finger on lip, he tiptoed from the room.
Instead of sensibly getting on with her work, Val laid her head down on the table and burst into tears.
And of course, exasperatingly Nils chose that moment to put his head back round the door.
“Can you tell me where’s the best place to—Hey!” he exclaimed, on a long, drawling note of astonishment. “Hey—what the devil’s all the row about?”
He came back into the room and stood, hands on hips, regarding her with comic wonder, his fair hair rumpled up like a jack-in-the-box. “What the deuce has upset you?” he repeated. “Not just because that fellow’s gone to Boston for two weeks? You ain’t so spoony that you can’t bear to part for a fortnight?” She shook her head miserably. “Wish I may die if I know what’s the matter! Was it something I did?”
The look in his large blue eyes was so naively anxious and puzzled that she had to laugh.
“No—no—I don’t know! I’m just tired, that’s all, after last night. And it’s all a bit too much for me. The thought of those calls! And I daresay I am disappointed to miss my walk with Benet in the p-park.” Her lip quivered again, childishly.
“Oh well, if that’s all it is—” he said. “Didn’t think a little thing like that would t
hrow you off your perch, a big handsome sensible gal like you! But still, if that’s all that needs mending, I’ll take you in the park. Hey? How about it? I’ll come and pick you up at your newspaper office—shall I? How’d that be? And then we’ll have a pleasant stroll and you can tell me all your troubles—if there’s any left—and I’ll tell you all mine. Just like old times it’ll be, hand in hand round the reservoir with our tops and hoops, you in your white-velvet bonnet with the pink and green trimmings, wanting to be carried piggyback. Well? What’s the answer?”
“Thank you, Nils. Yes. That will be pleasant.” She smiled faintly, blowing her nose, and he left again, waving a kiss from the doorway.
This time she settled resolutely to work and wrote fast and steadily, without pausing until she had finished.
But all the time, something fidgeted at the back of her mind, some small idea, just out of reach in the obscurity, that chimed, that echoed, that reminded her of something else. A likeness, a similarity, a kindred feeling. With what? What could it be? Her brother’s remark about tops and hoops and piggybacks had set it off.
Fancy his remembering that white-velvet bonnet. It had been her best, her very best and favourite for years and years: white velvet, quilted over with strips of pink-and-green plaid.
As she scribbled the last sentences and her name, she thought, I was unkind to Lottie. Poor little thing. But how could one have a serious conversation with such a silly little babyish creature? Still, I shouldn’t have snubbed her; it was bad manners. I could see that Benet didn’t like it.
Bother him! He shouldn’t have dragged me out on the porch in my dusty old dress.
As she hastily blocked her pages together and called to Chloe to look out for a cab, Val was still ransacking her mind for that teasing connection. “Hand in hand round the reservoir with our hoops.”
Then, as she ran down the steps, buttoning her cloak with one hand, clutching muff and papers and umbrella with the other, it suddenly came to her.
Those cards from her mother in London addressed to “Dearest little Valla,” signed, “hundreds of kisses, your loving Mother”—those curiously unreal cards, assuming a closeness that had never existed.
She had never walked in the park hand in hand with Nils; he had never spun tops with her or bowled hoops, or carried her piggyback. He had flatly refused to accompany her on such babyish airings; from the very first he had declared that walking in Central Park with one’s small sister was only fit for muffs or milksops. Nils had always gone off with his own friends.
Nils did, however, turn up at the Inquirer offices, as he had promised, to take his sister to the park. He turned up early, in fact, half an hour before she had said she would be ready, and occupied the time until she was free by strolling round the office and, with his usual talent for bypassing barriers, making himself so generally agreeable that she saw her stock was rising with all her colleagues for having such a brother and felt quite ashamed of her previous, rather uncharitable thoughts about him. After all, people could have mistaken memories, couldn’t they? And it was all so long ago.
“What a charming person your brother is, isn’t he?” whispered Henrietta DeJong, who had recently been promoted to the fashion page after years of running the New England love stories. “Doesn’t he look exactly like the hero of The Mother’s Reward—Silas Sawyer, do you remember? The plain, fair, good young man who loved Thankful Page for seventeen installments in silence and finally got her when it was too late and she was dying of consumption?”
Val, scribbling corrections in the margin of a proof, suppressed a smile. Even after a mere twelve hours’ reacquaintance Nils did not, to her sisterly eye, at all resemble the pure-hearted lovelorn young swain in question.
“He isn’t my idea of a farmer,” she said. “He works on a newspaper himself, as a matter of fact.”
“Does he?” Henrietta glanced wistfully across the room to where Nils was deep in conversation with Henge Gruber, the feature-page editor.
While Val was in the editor’s office, submitting her final corrections, Nils evidently made good use of his time, for she emerged to hear him promising Gruber an article on English country houses with knowledgeable sidelights on the owners.
And when Ted Towers, the editor, strolled out for a few minutes to have a word with his senior assistant, Nils murmured in his sister’s ear, “Introduce me, there’s an angel.”
Not best pleased, she did so; but she was bound to admit that his behaviour with Ted was perfectly unassuming and correct; he said some polite things about the Inquirer, compared it with the Morning Post, and then turned the talk to a comparison of English and American politics; after a few minutes Val said that she was ready to go and steered her brother away.
“It never hurts,” he said cheerfully as they gained the street.
“What doesn’t?”
“Having a friend or two. Making oneself known.”
“You are certainly expert at it,” she remarked rather tartly.
He turned to look down at her, his long fair hair blowing out. He was hatless, as usual. “My dear Valla, if you haven’t learned yet that you can’t get on in journalism without plenty of push and selling yourself at the highest possible value—then you never will get on at it. Though you don’t seem to be doing at all badly, for a girl,” he added kindly. “I was talking to several people and reading some of your stuff on the spike, while you were in that fellow’s office; they seem to think highly of you. And you’ve not a bad way of expressing yourself, by any means.”
Raising her brows at this, she contented herself with a nod of acknowledgment, and was turning up a flight of steps when he stopped her.
“Hey—where are you flyin’ off to now? I thought we were going to the Central Park.”
“It’s my bank—I’m just going to get some money.”
“Oh,” he said, “you don’t have to do that; I can pay you back that forty dollars—right here, on the nail.” Slightly to her surprise he pulled out a fistful of bills from his pocket and stuffed them into her muff. “Had a very successful lunch,” he explained gaily. “Fixed up with the Knuckle to sell them my stuff at an excellent rate and handed over two articles on the spot, so, all in all, the day’s not gone too badly. I’ll take you out somewhere tonight, shall I? What shall we do—Wallack’s Theatre? I believe they have something by Ibsen. Would you like that? Or there’s La Dame aux Camélias?”
“Thank you Nils; I’d like to go out with you,” she said, touched and somewhat startled at this sudden transition from poverty to affluence. “But we’d never get into the Dame aux Camélias. I’d like to go to the Ibsen, though.”
“Thought that would be the sort of gloomy stuff that’s just your ticket; I daresay it’s all about women leavin’ home and making things uncomfortable for everyone,” said Nils, grinning. He hailed a cab and told the driver to take them to the park. As they rode up Fifth Avenue, “Nils,” said Val, “do tell me now, exactly, what you are doing over here?”
“Visiting you, of course, my dearest Sis! Going to give you a good time!”
“No, but seriously? It seems quite, a professional trip?”
“Half and half,” said Nils. “Always mix business with pleasure. That’s how I have arranged my life, and I find it works out very well indeed. Pleasant visits to congenial hosts—write about ‘em—everyone wants to read about ‘em—everyone wants to be read about; so—everybody pleased. And I’m paid for doing what I enjoy.”
“Did you come to America to arrange about those articles with the Knuckle? What is the Knuckle, anyway?”
“Oh,” he said vaguely, “it’s a kind of a men’s magazine that gets read in bars and clubs and—and barbers’ shops and so forth. Not very high-class but its politics are quite radical, which ought to please you. And they don’t pay badly.”
“Why didn’t you just write to them from England?”
/> “A personal visit is worth twenty letters,” he said. “Supposing I write and tell ‘em what I can do—how do they know I’m telling the truth? Suppose I send ‘em a sample of my stuff—what’s to prevent ‘em pirating it? That’s done all the time. But if I appear in person and make a good impression—d’you see?”
“What kind of articles are you selling them? Are they political?”
“No, they’re just a series of pen portraits of well-known society personalities; same kind of thing that I’ve been doing in London, only longer.”
“English personalities?”
“Certainly.”
He paid off the driver and they alighted and strolled out of Fifty-ninth Street into the Mall, which was full of sauntering couples enjoying the late-summer sunshine.
“But who over here wants to read about English personalities?”
“Plenty of people, so long as what’s written is lively and spicy enough! What they want is intimate details—whose bedroom is next to whom, in those big houseparties, and whose brougham is seen outside whose house late at night, and whose parents are convicts out in Van Dieman’s Land, and who wins and loses in the baccarat games, all that kind of thing, which, luckily, I’m in an excellent position to provide.”
Val glanced sideways at her half-brother. Strolling along with a smile on his long, good-natured, absurd face, his hands in his pockets, his untidy fair hair rising in a crest from his hatless head, he looked harmless and innocent as a newly fledged duckling. But was he really so?
“Have you written the articles already?”
“Some of ‘em. I brought over a few samples to show and they’ve snapped ‘em up. That’s why I’m so flush.” He slapped his pockets cheerfully.
“But what will the people themselves say? The ones that you have written about? Do they know? Will they mind?”
“To begin with, how will they ever know? The Knuckle doesn’t come out in England.”