by Joan Aiken
“I thought the idea was I should be with the children?”
“Well, that’s only for two months, rot it; plenty of time after that. Besides, they ain’t bad little things—you could take them out—in the park and so forth.”
“Well . . .” said Val, “I’ll think about it.”
Indeed she was tempted. To look after her niece and nephew, for two months, after all, would be an unimpeachable excuse for temporarily quitting her own predicament; nobody, not Mrs. Allerton or Mr. Dexter, no Chauncey or Babcock, would be able to find fault with that. Val did not particularly like children—had had little contact with any, in fact—but two months was not long, she could accommodate to them for that length of time.
“When do you go back?” she said.
“Next week.”
“Next week? I thought you were staying two or three weeks?”
“Not if it ain’t needful,” said Nils simply. “I’ve plenty of things to do back at home. And I daresay the old girls will be up in the boughs if I stay too long—think I’m taking out opera singers or something.”
“But if I came with you next week—I don’t know if Mr. Towers could spare me—Chum wouldn’t be back from Maryland—”
“Oh, you’ll find all these things can be arranged,” he said easily. “I’ll help—I’ll run errands for you—what’s a brother for, hang it?”
“And then,” said Val—it was the whole heart and body of her argument, really, the prime cause of her reluctance—“I’d not have a chance to see Benet again; he wouldn’t be back from Boston.”
She glanced at her watch; by now he would be sitting on the Boston train, with Mrs. Warren and Charlotte.
“So much the better,” said Nils callously. “It’ll be a shock to him when he gets back; make him sit up and realise what he stands to lose. Do come, Valla; we’ll give you a really rousing time in London before we go off. I’ll introduce you to Nuggie Clanreydon for a start, and he’s the most amazing fellow you ever met in your life. I swear there’s nobody like him.”
Val glanced at her brother, astonished; for a moment he looked quite unlike himself—or quite unlike any self that she had yet seen: with his face lifted to the wind, and a strange visionary gleam in his eye, he appeared to be remembering some experience whose nature she could not begin to guess at. Then he came back to earth and said, “Here—while I think of it—Kirstie gave me this to give you—been carrying it so long that it’s got a bit rubbed.”
He pulled from his waistcoat pocket a small piece of folded paper and handed it to Val, who unfolded it and stood still to read it.
The handwriting was shaky—either Kirstie had written it in haste, or her state of health was even worse than Nils had represented.
“Dear Val, if you do this I will bless you forever. I hope and pray that you will. I know the kind of person you are from your letters—I know I can trust you. The doctor says I need to go away. I know the children will be good with you, they have promised. Pieter can read now, he reads to Jannie. Be good to them—I know you will. Your loving sister, Kirstie.”
An hour later, sitting in Mrs. Allerton’s dark drawing room with its heavy red flock paper that effectively swallowed every scrap of light, Val was passionately envying Nils his freedom.
“Go calling on a pair of old tabbies? Not likely!” he said and strode blithely away down University Place. “I’ll see you later—we’ll dine somewhere before the theatre, hmm?”
The Allerton ladies, with a handsome mahogany worktable between them, were placidly stitching away at their tapestry: large pink cabbages, which formed, Val knew apprehensively, part of a set of twelve dining-room chair seats destined to be sat on by Benet and herself and their guests for the next thirty years; it was plain that only flood, fire, or some other act of God would be a sufficient cause for getting rid of them.
“Do you like the way your mother’s house is furnished, Benet?” Val had once cautiously inquired, and he had replied, without much interest, “Why, yes, it’s all right, I guess. Rather too many little tables to bump into, let’s not have so many in our house, shall we? But otherwise there’s nothing much wrong with it; the chairs are comfortable, that’s the main thing; and I have enough bookcases in my study; I think it’s rather affected and snobbish to be too particular about furnishings, don’t you? Can’t stand those de Kuypers, everlastingly importing cabinets from Italy and making such a precious fuss about Louis Quinze and Corinthian pilasters. Mother don’t like my smoking in the drawing room, though; I hope you won’t mind?”
In part, Val agreed with Benet; she too disliked aesthetic snobbery; but she did find the Allerton drawing room oppressive. Family portraits in heavy gold frames peered gloomily and severely down from the red walls; the subjects had a tendency to point an admonishing finger toward thick books or terrestrial globes, or to the sky, as if they exhorted: time is short, work apace. The dozens of small tables held lustre pots of immortelles—real flowers were seldom seen since Delia suffered from hay fever—silver-framed photographs, little silver nicknacks, and more thick volumes—views of Rome and the Rhine, Turner’s Rivers of France, McDougall’s Waterfalls of Scotland, Smith’s Châteaux of the Loire. Why are rivers so respectable? Val wondered fleetingly and frivolously. Wholly uninterested in and suspicious of art, the Allerton ladies reserved their esteem for landscapes, and if the landscapes had running water in them, so much the better. Perhaps it was somehow connected with hygiene, Val decided, and wondered how many servant hours each day it took to maintain the drawing room in its state of aseptic dustlessness and order. No window was ever opened; no breath of the outside world was allowed to enter. In summer, striped awnings held the sun at bay; in winter, massive velvet draperies excluded snow and storm.
“And now, dear,” said Mrs. Allerton, who had been in a state as near nervousness for the last ten minutes as her placid disposition would permit, embarking on abortive, distrait snippets of conversation, and then discarding them like unwanted shreds of embroidery silk, “Now, dear, there’s just one—oh dear, here’s Parker with the tea, perhaps I should—Delia, dear, will you pour out, I expect dear Valla would like a cup—it’s always so difficult saying this kind of—thank you, my darling, just put it here, I will have a sip the minute I have finished this petal—you see, Valla dear, Benet’s grandmother—though of course she very much admires the way you tackle your life so bravely and splendidly—what was that, Delia? Yes, a small piece of cake, thank you, my darling—well, as I expect you saw, Valla dear, old Mrs. Allerton has very decided views.”
“What is it that she doesn’t like about me?” said Val, sitting very straight and upright.
“Oh, nothing, nothing of that kind at all!” Benet’s mother was terribly flustered; her two little fat white hands flew up distractedly like butterflies. “No, no, she likes you, my dear, very much—of course she does—it is just that she cannot approve of your living alone the way you do—”
“Except that Miss Chumley is there too?” Val pointed out with restraint.
“Oh well—some person like that of course, Grandma Allerton would hardly—you see, in this family we do always—Benet’s fiancée isn’t just like any—if only your dear father were alive, I’m sure he would understand—it’s not as if it were a case of—”
Unhelped by Val, who remained silently observing her during this recital, Mrs. Allerton distressfully proceeded, “So just before she went back to Bridgewater this morning she called on Cousin Amy Chauncey, who has sent round this letter for you—”
The letter from Cousin Amy was written in a thin spidery hand on paper stiff as whalebone, and the style had something of whalebone about it too; it invited Miss Montgomery to remove herself and her effects without delay from Twenty-third Street to Gramercy Park, where due to the departure of the family governess, the four girls’ education now being completed, there was a vacant bedroom which Miss Montgomery would b
e welcome to avail herself of until the date of her wedding to dear Benet; and in the meantime Mrs. Chauncey would be happy to give Miss Montgomery the benefit of her advice and experience in all the realms where a young lady, lacking a family and mentors of her own, could derive profit from listening to the words of somebody well versed in the ways of society.
In other words, I’m to be completely made over, thought Val.
“Very kind of Mrs. Chauncey,” she contented herself with saying, but a scarlet spot stood out on her pale cheek; Mrs. Allerton observed this with dismay.
“It isn’t that Mrs. Allerton—well, you know, dear, she—it was just little things—like your dress—and the fact that—”
“I’ll write a reply to Mrs. Chauncey as soon as I get home,” Val said calmly, though her heart was hammering with rage.
“Oh, do, dear, that is perfectly—I’m sure you will really find Cousin Amy very very—she knows all the little ways of—and the girls, too, of course, dear, sweet creatures—you will soon feel at home there I am quite—and Benet will be so relieved—”
“You misunderstand me, Mrs. Allerton. I shall write to Mrs. Chauncey declining her kind offer.”
Mrs. Allerton’s mouth dropped open; her hands were suspended in mid-air.
“In fact I am setting sail for England next week with my brother; his wife is not at all well, and I have promised to go over and be with them for some months, perhaps a year,” Val heard herself saying.
The house was silent when Val returned to it. No sign of Nils. She was disappointed—she had been longing to describe to him the expressions of utter disapproval and astonishment with which the Allerton ladies had greeted her bombshell.
“They could hardly have been more appalled if I had announced that I was going off to the sultan’s harem in Constantinople,” she had imagined herself saying to Nils—but she consoled herself by thinking that he must be back very soon if they were to dine before the theatre. Meantime she could have a leisurely bath and put on a more suitable dress. Her grey poplin would do.
She was fastening its dozens of tiny buttons when she saw the note on her dressing table.
“Dear Valla”—in Nils’ scrawled handwriting—“very sorry couldn’t stay but had news of crisis from Kirstie and must dash back if I can get today’s boat to Southampton. Pity about our theatre party but I’ll take you to Covent Garden instead! It is grand that you are coming—can’t wait to tell Kirstie and see her face of joy. Cable which boat you are taking—I’ll meet you at Southampton. Make it next week if you can. N.”
Val could not make it next week. But sixteen days later, by dint of frantic work-filled days and many hasty arrangements, she was on the ocean. Benet was still detained in Boston; she had not seen him again.
Chapter 3
“Look, cheer up, that’s the Isle of Wight,” Val said to her companion.
“I couldn’t cheer up if you told me it was the Isle of Elysium,” he replied gloomily, dragging down the ear flaps of his traveling cap and sinking his head as far as it would go into his fur collar. He ignored the fog-shrouded, tree-girt, greenish wedge sliding by on their starboard bow, and added, “This has been without exception the most wretched trip of my life.”
“Never mind, it will soon be over. A sailor told me that we should berth by four o’clock.”
“It can’t be too soon for me. If it hadn’t been for you, Miss Montgomery, I doubt if I should have survived.”
“Oh, come, Mr. Cusack! The ship’s doctor would have pulled you through. They have their pride, after all.”
It had certainly been a wretched trip, though, she was obliged to acknowledge. Autumn gales had dogged them all the way; the ship had suffered several mishaps, first boiler trouble, then screw trouble, and the passage had taken six days longer than expected. Although disappointed not to have the company of Nils on the trip, Val had several times reflected that in the circumstances she was possibly better on her own; she had vague recollections from childhood of Nils’ inability to put up with any kind of sickness or discomfort; he might have proved a difficult fellow passenger. As it was she had shared a cabin with three older ladies who all took to their bunks as a matter of course on the first sign of bad weather and remained there throughout the voyage. Val had left them to the ministrations of the stewardess and spent her time mainly up on deck, wrapped in all the warmest garments she had brought with her. She was not precisely ill herself, though queasy a good deal of the time, but her spirits were as low as they could be; miserably uncertain as to whether she had made the right decision, homesick, missing Benet acutely, attacked, now, too, by considerable doubts as to the candour and reliability of Nils; she huddled against a pile of coiled rope, hour after hour, watching the heaving grey turtleback seas slide by, wondering dismally if she had made a horrible mistake.
“When did Nils go off, Chloe? Did he get a cable? What made him decide to leave?” she had asked.
“I never saw him get no cable, nor no letter either, Miss Val. He jes’ came straight back at four o’clock, packed up his things, an’ ask me to call him a cab.”
The curl of Chloe’s lip suggested that Nils had given her nothing for her trouble—and he had also forgotten to pay Val the rest of the money she had lent him; what he had tucked into her muff outside the Inquirer office proved to be only twenty dollars.
Still, perhaps he had had a cable from Kirstie addressed to the Knuckle office; or perhaps he had met someone he knew, who had brought tidings . . . It was useless to speculate, Val knew; she went on speculating. Her low state of mind was aggravated by hunger; she found it impossible to enter the stuffy, steamy dining room with its smells of greasy food and tobacco smoke.
But on the third day of the trip she had come across somebody in even worse case than herself: a tall, limp man in an astrakhan coat and cap, who seemed to be almost on the point of death from cold and sickness; Val had grabbed the skirts of his coat just as he appeared to be about to faint and pitch head first over the rail. She had summoned a steward and told him to take the man to his cabin.
“No—no—can’t stand it down there—” gasped the sufferer, opening bloodshot brown eyes. “Must—stay—fresh air—” So, instead, Val had ordered the steward to bring up beef tea and brandy, and when the sick man—his name was Cusack, she learned from the steward—had taken a little of each, and was able, shivering, to climb onto his feet, she had walked him unremittingly round and round the deck, despite his groans and protests and demands to be left alone to die. At first he eyed Val with the utmost dislike and suffered her ministrations in silent hostility, but by the end of several days they had struck up a kind of relationship, based largely on noncommunication, as they paced unspeaking, hour after freezing hour, round the wet, cold, and cluttered deck, or shared beef tea and champagne in some semisheltered corner.
Mr. Cusack paid for the champagne.
“Better for the liver man brandy,” he remarked with his usual brevity, throwing an empty Moët bottle over the side. Val gathered that he was rich. “What the deuce is the good of all one’s cash if it can’t save one from this kind of pitch-and-toss?” he remarked once, bitterly, as the ship clambered among waves the size of ten-storey houses. “Some day they’ll have flying machines that will cross the Atlantic in twelve hours. But I’ll be six foot under by then.”
He certainly did not seem like a man who expected to live to a ripe old age. He was an extraordinary-looking individual—tall, cadaverously thin under all his wraps, hollow-cheeked, always shivering despite the fur-lined garments which seemed wholly ineffectual in protecting him from the chill sea air. Val found it quite hard to make a guess at his age; sometimes, drawn with cold, scowling with wretchedness, he could have been in his fifties, while at other moments, when a passing spark of interest in some external event lit up his expression, he might have passed for no more than thirty-eight or -nine. His hair, under the heavy fur trave
ling cap, was a dark Irish blue-black, and he had a big bony nose and forehead to match. His mouth was large, thin, mobile, and usually curved downward in utter disgust at his circumstances.
Val occasionally felt inclined to tease him, but forbore, because she was not certain whether seasickness was all that afflicted him, or if he suffered from some other more deep-seated complaint. His pallor at times was almost green. He had traveled widely in the tropics, she gathered. “Learned not to touch brandy when I was in India,” he had remarked once; she wondered if he might have picked up some tropical disease when he was in that continent.
They had exchanged virtually no personal information. He knew that she was traveling to England to stay with her brother; she, that he was Irish-born of Scottish descent, that he lived in Edinburgh, and was traveling on to Scotland by sea.
“Mad thing to do,” he morosely remarked. “And as for Edinburgh—might as well live in the northwest passage.”
“I should think it is a little cold after India,” Val remarked moderately, and earned a sharp, ironic glance. They walked on, falling into another of their prolonged, but not unfriendly, silences.
Their ship’s arrival in the Solent had called out of him the only personal remark he had made on the whole trip.
“I don’t think,” he had observed dispassionately, looking with gloom at the grey, damp Hampshire coast, “I don’t think that I have ever before spent ten days with a woman who did not ask me a single question.”
“Then I had better not begin now,” said Val.
She spoke rather absently. She was beginning to be consumed by a stupid anxiety—anxiety? at times it felt more like terror—about this whole English venture. Had Nils received her cable? Would he be there to meet her? Of course he would. Why should he not? He had promised. Promised? Would he be bound by his promise? But if he were not there? Then what was to stop her catching the boat train and traveling up to London by herself? She had been to England before, she had traveled by herself before. But she had not then arrived feeling so physically and emotionally depleted, at the end of such an uncomfortable and exhausting trip, after making a difficult and upsetting personal decision. Passionately she longed for Nils to be there on the dock, and Kirstie too; for a warm, loving family welcome.