He followed reluctantly, telling the cabby to wait. The shop was still open certainly but there were no other customers. At various counters yawning girls were folding lengths of material and draping dust-sheets over dummies. The girl at the millinery counter looked tired enough to drop, a very pale, red-haired woman, younger than Romayne, with hair parted in the middle and looped back over her ears. She wore a plain grey dress and was holding herself very straight, Giles noticed, but there was something about the turned-down mouth and drawn expression that suggested more than physical exhaustion. He saw another girl at the glove counter glance sourly across at them as a floor-walker, a paunched man with a mottled complexion and a walrus moustache, wiped the bored expression from his face and shot both cuffs. Romayne said, briskly, “The red gable bonnet in the window. How much is it?” and the pale girl said, with a strong Welsh accent, “I… I’m not sure, ma’am…”
He had a feeling of impending disaster. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the floor-walker glide forward and sensed extreme hostility in every girl within earshot, but the floor-walker said, sharply, “Then find out, Miss Davies! Don’t just stand there!” and the girl's tired eyes flashed as she said, still politely, “In the centre of the window, it is, Mr. Bryanston. Mean taking everything out to get at it…” But then under his stern gaze she faltered, but went on, after an imperceptible pause, “Just finished dressing the window, we have, and it's gone closing time.”
The floor-walker opened his mouth, presumably to roar his indignation, but Giles cut in, “Reserve it, whatever the price. If you really want it, that is,” Romayne snapped, “Of course I want it. I know my own mind, don’t I? And I want it now,” and to the girl, “Get it!”
It was like watching a fuse splutter the last few inches towards a powder barrel. He knew, somehow, that the Welsh shop assistant was going to erupt, that everyone in the shop was watching and waiting for the eruption, as though poised to dive for cover. He heard the floor-walker gibber, “Get it… get it, you hear? The customer wants it now… Get it!” But suddenly the girl braced herself, seeming, in a curious way, to absorb the dignity that everyone about her had lost. Her knuckles gleamed white on the scissors she was holding and she seemed to rock a little, as though on the point of making a leap. Her complexion turned a shade paler. In the hard light of the overhead lamps it seemed the colour of cheese.
“No!” she said. “No, I won’t get it! Sooner die, I would. Sooner die right here where I stand!”
Suddenly, for Giles, the images blurred and fused so that he had no more than an impression of several things happening simultaneously. The floor-walker raised his hands in supplication and the sound that emerged from him was not a roar but a squeak that might have been that of a child on whose foot somebody had trodden. At the same time Romayne swung round, moving towards the window, as though determined to help herself to the bonnet. The mousy-looking girl at the glove counter popped out from behind her barrier, grinning like an urchin who has just seen a barrel-organ monkey perform a somersault. Then the girl in grey let the scissors fall with a clatter and keeled right over, disappearing from sight behind the stacked counter.
Full awareness returned to him then and he grabbed Romayne by the shoulder, just as she had raised her hand to the catch that fastened the window backing. He spun her round, hissing, “Out! Out of here, before I cram the damned hat down your throat!” And then, to the floor-walker, “Look after her, you fool! Can’t you see she's ill? Hasn’t anybody got any damned sense…?” And without quite realising how it was accomplished, he whirled Romayne across the shop and through the door on to the crowded pavement, holding her tightly above the elbow while he lugged open the cab door and bundled her in so roughly that she pitched on her hands and knees in a flurry of skirts and petticoats. Seconds later he had followed her, shouting to the cabby to drive on, and by the time Romayne had scrambled to the seat they were crossing the Circus and the shop was a hundred yards behind them.
He said, in a voice that went some way towards expressing the terrible anger he felt for her, “That was unforgivable! That poor little devil was sick! Sick and exhausted! She’d been fifteen hours on her feet, serving spoiled little brats like you, and they aren’t allowed to sit on pain of the sack, do you realise that? My God, but I was ashamed for you! Right down in my stomach, you understand? How can you be so… so damned callous? How the hell would you like to stand there at the beck and call of every little bitch who fancied a hat, or a length of ribbon at this time of night? And for what, in God's name? I’ll tell you! I’ll tell you! Five shillings a week, and the mush they feed living-in girls at those places! Five shillings, and halfpenny in the pound spiffs if she's lucky. Less fines for ‘refusing.’ She's probably being fined now, the minute she comes out of her faint. Or sacked, more likely. Turned loose without a character, with a choice of starvation or domestic service and someone like you holding the whip over her…!”
She said in a strangled voice, “Have you quite finished? Have you done humiliating me?”
“Humiliating you! By God, I’d really like to humiliate you! I’d like to peel off your drawers and take the skin from your backside in front of them all, just to prove you weren’t God Almighty! This is the end, you understand? I can’t stand any more of this. Not another day! Not an hour!”
In the dark interior of the cab he felt her stiffen. She said nothing for a moment and then, relatively calmly, “You really mean that, Giles? It isn’t just another show of temper?”
“I mean it,” he said. “I’ll write to your father in the morning and you can sue me for breach of promise if you’ve a mind to.” And he turned away from her, gloomily watching the reflection of the gas globes on the railings of the palace as the cab moved at a trot into Buckingham Palace Road.
There were no more exchanges after that. They sat in silence until the cab pulled up outside her father's house and he handed her out. She went up the steps slowly and he stood watching her from the pavement but as she raised her hand to the knocker he called, “Wait!” and ran up beside her. She turned then so that he could see her face in the subdued glow of the porch light. She was very pale but her expression, so far as he could judge, was blank.
“Well, Giles?”
“It wouldn’t work. You must see that. We’re different, utterly different. We see everything differently. All we’d succeed in doing would be to make each other wretched. You see that, don’t you?”
“Yes,” she said slowly, “as things are, I do.”
“They can’t ever be any different.”
“You think not? Well, I don’t. What happened back there wasn’t as important as you make it sound. It was just that I didn’t think, that it never once occurred to me I was doing anything other than buying a hat.”
“But that's just it! You didn’t think and you won’t ever think. Maybe it wouldn’t matter to most men, but it matters to me. Things like that are important to me and if you haven’t realised that by now you never will. You’d be much better off with someone more like yourself, someone who could have laughed that awful scene off.” He paused. “I’m sorry. I’m desperately sorry for both of us. For your father, too, in a way.”
“Giles?”
“Well?”
“Suppose… suppose we ran off? Now. This minute. To Gretna Green, where we could be married at once, with nobody but ourselves. Or not even that. Somewhere abroad where we’d be by ourselves.”
“How would that solve anything?”
“But it would, I know it would. We’d be together all the time, we’d be lovers instead of showpieces for everyone we know, and it would make a difference. If we’d done that a long time ago this kind of thing wouldn’t have happened. I’d have belonged to you. I’d have felt settled and… different. Different inside, you see? It's terribly hard to explain but I know I’m right. I know it, you understand? I… I’d grow differently. I’d change into the kind of person you want, that you wouldn’t be ashamed of. Why can’t we do that f
irst and think about everything else afterwards?”
Her naïveté astounded him. That she could imagine, for a single moment, that intimacy and removal from all outside contacts would transform her magically into an entirely different person, seemed to him self-delusion amounting to hysteria. But he saw also that nothing he could say would persuade her that her thinking it was an illusion. He said, “No, Romayne. It wouldn’t change anything. All it would do is to upset a lot of people. I’ll write to your father tomorrow and make him understand somehow. You think about it quietly, and you’ll understand, too.”
He went down the steps and turned towards the palace, having no clear idea where he was going or where he would sleep since he had planned to spend the weekend at her home. It was an airless night, with the street lamps burning steadily and very little traffic about. He felt numb, no longer able to think clearly and logically. He found himself listening to the sound of his own footfalls on the flagstones, as if he was walking alone down an endless corridor in a poor light.
4
Sunday passed and Monday. He said nothing of the quarrel to anyone, avoiding contact with all whom it was possible to avoid. When someone spoke to him he replied in monosyllables, pretending to be occupied with calls that took him away from home and Tybalt's countinghouse, where he had a small office of his own, used by George when he was about the place. On Tuesday he closeted himself here and made yet another attempt to set on paper to Sir Clive what had occurred, but the words seemed banal and stilted and finally he tossed the page into the wastepaper basket and went out towards London Bridge, threading his way through slow-moving traffic without any clear idea where he was going until he found himself outside the Law Courts. There was a cab rank here and he stood hesitating beside it. Suddenly the prospect of writing to Sir Clive seemed cowardly, and he said aloud, “God damn it, I’ll tell him to his face. It's mostly his fault she's like she is,” and he signalled a four-wheeler, giving the driver the address of Sir Clive's London office where he was likely to be at this hour of the day.
The silver-buttoned flunkey standing outside the revolving door recognised him and touched his rosetted beaver, saying that Sir Clive had returned from luncheon less than ten minutes ago and was almost surely in his office. Giles climbed the broad staircase to the heavy mahogany door that was the magnate's sanctum and around him, as he moved along the corridor, he could hear the muted hum of high-pressure enterprise: bells ringing, the heavy, hesitant clack-clack of Rycroft's new typewriter girls, an ambassadorial clerk treading softly to and fro carrying files and correspondence. He thought, bitterly, “All this, and the man can’t raise one daughter properly…” and without waiting to be announced he knocked on the door at the blind end of the corridor and walked inside.
His man was seated at an enormous desk on which everything was neatly arranged and even the pen tray looked as if it merited a private auction. Sir Clive raised his neat head and smiled, extending his hand across the desk and saying, genially, “Ah, I wondered when we should see you. I had almost made up my mind to write but I guessed you would call here or at Eaton Place. Sit down, sit down, my boy. That one is the most comfortable. Cigar? No, you can’t smoke them, can you? Help yourself from the box— Turkish, Russian, or Virginian. I have to cater for all tastes up here.”
It occurred to Giles then that he must know nothing of the broken engagement and this disconcerted him for a moment. But then he reasoned that it would be typical of Romayne to pretend it hadn’t happened, to say nothing about it until she was convinced he was not bluffing. He said, quietly, “Clearly Romayne hasn’t told you I broke our engagement, sir?” but the man did not even blink. “Haven’t seen the minx,” he said. “Haven’t set eyes on her since luncheon, Saturday. All I know is that she's gone off somewhere, and she hasn’t paid me the compliment of saying where. Have you any notion where she might be?”
For a moment Giles was too astonished to comment. He had always known Sir Clive Rycroft-Mostyn was an exceptionally cool customer, but this casual approach to his only child's abrupt disappearance was almost beyond comprehension. He said, falteringly, “Romayne isn’t at home? You say she's run off somewhere? When? When did she go?”
Sir Clive did not answer at once. He was occupied getting his cigar to draw. When it did he said, with a lift of his shoulder, “Couldn’t say for sure. Early on Sunday, probably.”
“Three days? Did you suppose she was with me? At Tryst, maybe?”
“Oh, dear no, I knew about your tiff, dear boy. She left this letter for you on her dressing table. It was sealed but one doesn’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to guess what's in it.”
He took a sealed envelope from his inside pocket and handed it across the desk. On it was written Giles's name in Romayne's childishly round hand, and as his fingers closed over it he felt the outline of his ring, a single sapphire mounted on a high shank. He thumbed open the envelope but there was nothing inside save the ring wrapped in a wisp of tissue paper. He stared down at it, saying, “You’re not worried about her? Where she is? What she could be doing?”
“Not in the least,” Sir Clive said. “Would you be, if she was your daughter?”
“Yes,” he said, slowly, “I would be. I’d be very worried indeed in the circumstances.”
“What circumstances?” But then, carefully, “You don’t have to tell me if you prefer not.”
“I came here to tell you. We had a particularly bad quarrel. It doesn’t matter what it was about. I don’t think that would interest you in the least, but it was one of many and this finally decided me. I told her if we went ahead with the wedding we should only succeed in making one another miserable. And in disappointing you, too. So I broke it off, outside your house, about midnight on Saturday. I told her I’d write to you but it seemed a shabby thing to do after all the kindness you’ve shown me, and the fact that I was going to work for you.”
For the first time the man looked concerned. “So you’ve decided to welsh on that, too?”
“Welsh on it?” He fumbled for one of his own cigarettes but made a bad job of lighting it so that Sir Clive pushed matches in his direction. He said, taking the cigarette from his mouth, “How could I work for you in the circumstances? You must see that isn’t possible. She could bring a breach of promise action against me if she wished. I’ve no kind of defence, for it wasn’t a mutual decision. She wanted me to run off to Gretna Green on the spot, without telling you or anyone else. She seemed to think marriage would transform her into somebody quite different.”
“Now that's quite original,” Sir Clive said. “It's generally a case of the lady making up her mind to transform us.”
Quite suddenly Giles had difficulty in restraining an impulse to walk round the desk and do something positive. Hit Caesar over the head with his ebony ruler, for instance. Or empty a bottle of green ink down his shirt front. Anything to bring home to the man his personal involvement in the situation. He said, between his teeth, “This isn’t a joke, Sir Clive. Hasn’t it occurred to you that she might—well—that something awful might have happened to her running off like that? Without a note or message. In the middle of the night?”
“Indeed it hasn’t. She took a change of clothes and that dog of hers. Jilted brides don’t clutter themselves to that extent if they have it in mind to jump off Westminster Bridge.”
In a way it was a relief. He had no idea at all, if one ruled out North Wales, where she could have gone or why, but there was logic in her father's assumption. She was extremely attached to Prune, the floppy black Labrador that had trotted at her heels ever since he had known her. It seemed likely, in the circumstances, that she had returned to the Beddgelert holiday home, perhaps in the hope that he would pursue her there. Sir Clive seemed to guess his line of thought.
“I wired Wales this morning,” he said, offhandedly. “Not because I’m bothered to any great extent, but because I thought it likely you might want to know. She isn’t there at the moment. If she turns up there will y
ou go after her?”
“No, sir. I’ve made my decision and I think she understands that.”
“I see. Well, then, where does that leave us? With an obligation to put a cancellation notice in The Times I suppose. And I understand a few of the invitations have gone out, so I daresay your people will want some kind of explanation. But let's take all that as read, eh? So far as I’m concerned the arrangement between ourselves still stands. I don’t make important decisions of that kind as lightly as my daughter. I still say you’re the right man for that job.”
“I told you it was I who broke the engagement, Sir Clive.”
“Oh, I daresay, technically.”
“I don’t think I follow you there, sir.”
Suddenly Sir Clive pushed back his chair and stood up, moving clear of the desk and over to the window, where he planted his feet with his back to Giles, puffing thoughtfully at his cigar. He said, finally, “How much did she admit of earlier pranks, Swann? Did she ever mention, say, a stable lad called Gilpin? Or a music teacher called Bellocq?”
“She mentioned someone called Gilpin once. She said he thrashed her with a riding-crop, for riding a dangerous horse when you lived in Hampshire.”
“And the foreign chap, Bellocq? Or a young manservant called Dodge?”
“No, sir. And she only mentioned Gilpin in passing.”
“How did his name come up?”
“I took your advice and gave her a spanking after she took a crazy risk when we were rowing on the canal. She didn’t resent it. As a matter of fact, she admitted she had acted stupidly and apologised.”
“I see. And since?”
“ We never had a cross word until late Saturday night. Then, to my mind at least, she behaved outrageously in a shop in Oxford Street, and it came to me that we were hopelessly incompatible.”
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