She sat by the window and began to watch the traffic. She had only seen his grey Velox once but she fancied she would recognize it again. Every three or four minutes she got up and went to examine her meal, which clearly was not going to improve if it were left much longer. At one-thirty she felt angry, at two she grew anxious. She left the food where it was and went downstairs and out. There was a telephone box down the next street, but it was occupied and a man was waiting. She walked back to the door of his place and ran up to see if he had come while she was away. Then she went down again and back to the telephone. After a five-minute wait she was able to use it.
The hospital was not helpful and seemed to know nothing about him. Eventually they told her that G. Vosper had been discharged this morning and had left about eleven.
Back to the flat. The food was drying and cooling. She tried to eat something but had no appetite. She drank two glasses of wine. At three-thirty she threw all the food in the waste bin and washed up. At four-thirty she went home, wondering if there would be some message left there.
There was no message and he did not come.
Having heard nothing at all from the Law Society, Angell rang up the secretary, who had forwarded Lord Vosper’s complaint to him. The secretary said that he had written to Lord Vosper informing him that the matter he had raised was not one on which the Law Society could take any action. In relief at this – though perhaps he should have known better than to feel anxiety – Angell reluctantly admitted Jonathan Whittaker, thirty-two years old and a bright young man of law, to an extra 5 per cent of the profits of the firm, such percentage to be debited from the senior partner’s share.
The deal for the purchase of Merrick House and its accompanying lands finally went through. The Minister of Housing at Question Time stated that every consideration should be given to objectors and objections raised against the South Suffolk Development Scheme. Replying to a supplementary question he assured his questioner that every possible care would be taken to preserve the beauty and the country amenities of the villages involved.
The furniture and all the furnishings of Merrick House still belonged to Lord Vosper, and through Hollis a suggestion came that it would be more convenient to auction the contents on the premises than to have them brought to London. Land Increments Ltd could afford to be magnanimous and agreed that all facilities should be provided to enable the sale to take place provided this occurred before the 31st March. The sale was fixed for the 21st and 22nd March and was to be widely advertised.
Pearl daily expected some note or letter or even a visit from Godfrey. On the following Monday she went again to his room and let herself in. Some of the things had gone from his wardrobe but there was no sign of his having slept there. The half-used bottle of wine was where she had left it, the tea towel folded on the chair back, the dustpan and brush unmoved, the salt and pepper on the table. When she got home she looked up Jude Davis’s telephone number and rang him. She gave her name as Hazel Boynton.
‘Godfrey’s out of town, Miss Boynton. I can’t tell you where he is because he didn’t leave an address, but I did suggest he should take a holiday after him being beaten by the Japanese champion, like. I expect he’ll be back in a week or so and looking us up.’
‘He was supposed to go back to the hospital to have his stitches out, and also for attention to his nose. Did he do that?’
‘I would think so, but I expect you could check with the hospital. I haven’t seen him since the Thursday after the fight. I’ve been very busy and rather poorly myself – so I have left it to him to look after these things.’
‘I thought you might have been concerned about his health and whether he was recovering after the fight.’
There was a pause, and the voice at the other end hardened. ‘We do what we can, Miss – er – Boynton. Godfrey Vosper is not the easiest person to control, as perhaps you know. Even a manager can only advise.’
‘And make money out of getting him beaten,’ said Pearl, and hung up, breathing hard. It was a foolish thing to say, but it had come out.
Birman made his weekly report to Angell over the telephone.
‘He’s definitely not in London. He left hospital last Monday morning, picked up his car off a parking lot and drove to his room in Battersea. He was there only about ten minutes and then he left again. He came back a couple of days later and stayed about two hours; but he hasn’t been back since then. A young woman called on the Monday after he left and stayed four hours. Part of the time she was in his room because my man saw her at the window. But we don’t know who she was. Quite obviously my prediction about Brown has come true. He’s off for a holiday, or maybe visiting his family, if he’s got one. We also checked with the Davis gym, but no one has seen him there. No one was expecting him there – yet.’
Angell grunted. ‘Couldn’t your man have followed him? For all we know he may be staying round the corner.’
‘He could have followed him but I didn’t know you wanted that sort of coverage. And think it out, old man. If Brown is in London he isn’t paying to hire somewhere else and letting his own bed-sitter go to waste. It doesn’t make sense.’
‘Ah,’ said Angell. ‘ Perhaps you are right. But tell your man to continue to check, will you, and let me know as soon as he returns.’
After two weeks Pearl tried his room again and then went to find the gym Godfrey had often spoken of off Cranbourne Street. She found Pat Prince there and, stared at curiously by rough young men in track suits or boxing shorts, she put her questions. Prince was more forthcoming than Davis but the substance of his answers was the same.
It was lunch time and she ate at a restaurant in St Martin’s Lane. While she was having lunch a good-looking man of about thirty with an Italian accent came to sit at her table and tried to pick her up. She froze him off instantly, instinctively, and left as soon as she could, leaving him looking hurt.
She walked for quite a while, embarrassed and slightly angry and slightly amused. Of course she was not unaccustomed to approaches, and she was used to being able to brush them off and forget them in a couple of minutes. This time for some reason it went a little deeper, as if the protective varnish she had developed had for once been dented. She thought perhaps it was because he was a handsome man and, after his own lights, good-mannered. She allowed herself to speculate what would have happened if she had been a different sort of woman, and what it would be like to be a different sort of woman. Would she have ended the afternoon taking tea at the Ritz or in some bedsitter in Bayswater? And would it have given her pleasure and release or merely a fleeting satisfaction and a renewal of the empty need?
It was all speculation, which she would never allow to become reality because it was against her nature to do so. But it was a little surprising to herself that the speculation, with all its detailed and possible developments, should linger so long in her mind after she had tried to dismiss it.
Imagination for her now had so very much more factual experience to build on than it had in the past.
Chapter Ten
Mr Friedel was an infrequent correspondent and a rare caller, but she had a letter from him that afternoon telling her that Rachel had gone into hospital for the removal of a cyst in her back and would be gone a week. She showed the letter to Wilfred and said coldly:
‘I think I’ll go and spend a week at home. Dad says they have this woman but she’s only afternoons, and getting everyone off to school must be a nightmare to him.’
Angell looked at her out of suspicious bloodshot eyes. Was this some trick to meet Godfrey? But she no longer, alas, needed an excuse. He could not stop her walking out at any time.
‘And who will look after me?’ he asked, conscious that physically he felt very frail this morning. He had had some pain during the night and feared it might be gall stones.
‘Well, Mrs Jamieson comes in.’
‘She doesn’t cook.’
‘You could eat at your club.’
The indiffer
ence to his welfare was plain in her voice and he winced. She had no heart, no thought for him any more. It was the harshness of youth, almost more like a daughter casting off her own father. He would have preferred enmity to this cold non-interest. His marriage was lost.
And yet she only said a week. Perhaps she would come back.
‘When would you want to go?’
‘If I’m to be any use I should go soon. Tomorrow.’
So Pearl returned to her old haunts, and Wilfred went to stay at the Hanover Club. It was better, he thought, than sampling the loneliness that might soon become permanently his. He buried himself in work at the office and in bridge at the club. He had a remarkable run of luck, so that in five evenings he made £40, even at the very moderate stakes allowed by the club. Twice, leaving the office after dark, he hailed a taxi instead of walking for a bus.
On the Friday he went down with Francis Hone and Simon Portugal to look over the land in Suffolk they had bought. Sir Francis was anxious to buy other small properties in the vicinity, even at the now inflated prices, as the development plan seemed to be even larger than they had at first supposed.
Going home, Pearl realized, was the ideal temporary solution. It would give her time to breathe, to draw back from events, to reflect. And Rachel’s illness was the ideal excuse because she could return without comment. It was with a marvellous sense of release that she shut the door of 26 Cadogan Mews and made for Selsdon.
Mr Friedel welcomed her gratefully, with open arms, allowing for once the warmth of his Jewish blood to overflow the restraints of his adopted country. She fitted in quickly, easily, back into her old life, slept in her old bedroom.
She found she was able to buy them lots of things she had never before been able to afford: fillet steaks, farm eggs, Devon butter, peaches and oranges, cartons of fresh cream, a Stilton for Mr Friedel and some hock, new football boots for the boys. It was all enormously enjoyable on that level; she was like a rich aunt come to stay. One morning after being back five days she woke early just as it was coming light and almost believed that nothing in the last year had ever happened and that she was a girl living at home again.
It was not difficult to believe: it had all been an unpleasant dream; you rubbed your eyes and you woke. She lay for a long time thinking about it. In spite of everything, in spite of the bitter disappointments of the year, the frustrations and the harsh experiences, would it be a welcome thought, to know that she was a girl living at home again?
She looked around the room that had been hers for so long. She looked at the walnut veneer dressing table with the wing mirrors, one of which would not move because the hinge was sprained. She looked at the chest of drawers with the glass top and the tall, too narrow wardrobe with the tall, too narrow doors so that coat-hangers had to be turned to hang diagonally in it. She looked at the two thin Wilton rugs that Mr Friedel had bought second-hand in a sale, on top of the brown inlaid linoleum, and at the wicker chair that she had painted white and which needed repainting. The rose pink patterned candlewick bedspread, the pink striped cotton curtains already letting in the day, the bedside light with the plastic shade. She had always instinctively wanted something better than these, yet in her life in this house had taken them for granted. Now they all looked terrible. Even the district looked grey and conventional, isolated from the centre of life, the houses regimented and small, the people in them dull suburbanites.
Her marriage to Wilfred, with all its drawbacks, had lifted her out of this milieu. Settling back into it, if she ever had to, would be like trying to put a plant back into its restricted seed bed.
The boys when they came home at night seemed not only noisy but common; their attitudes were wrong, they sniggered at what was unamusing, they laughed too long at small jokes, their accents had a south London whine. Julia, grown pert and two inches in a year, was worse. Even her father seemed to have changed, shrunk, become less impressive. For him she felt a greater affection because of this. In spite of their good relations before, she had always been slightly in awe of this slow-speaking, bearded, important little man. Now she was on equal terms with him and love welled up in her. She was more than once on the point of confiding in him, but she knew that she would find no understanding in him of her case. She found little understanding of it in herself. If she were a snob, and feeling the way she did that could hardly be denied, Little God represented someone whom it would be impossible to love or to marry or to go and live with. Yet there were times when she ached for him, longed for his vitality, his crudeness, his hardness, his male dominance, his near cruelty. It was endless weeks now since they had been together. Only twice since Lady Vosper’s death. He had changed, changed towards her. Sometimes she felt she could hardly go on without him.
The problem had no solution, or none that she could see. Each alternative was distasteful to her and none was better than the others.
Rachel eventually came out of hospital, looking thinner and a poor colour. Pearl hoped it was only a cyst. She stayed four days extra to see her step-mother safely installed and then had to make the choice either to return to Cadogan Mews or begin to explain to her family why she was not returning. Nine days was as much as one could respectably absent oneself.
She left, but before going back she called at Godfrey’s room. No one was there. All that had been added was another layer of dust.
Mrs Jamieson was in the house when she got to Cadogan Mews, and everything here was looking bright and well-cared-for. For twenty minutes she wandered round the house looking at the pictures and the furniture, then she changed into a new outfit she had bought in the January sales and went out. The weather for early March was balmy, the icy winds had gone and a pale sunlight filtered through the tall trees of Cadogan Place, promising spring. She thought, in a week or two the daffodils will be out.
She walked down Sloane Street, stopping here and there to look at attractive window displays. Then she went into Peter Jones and wandered through department after department. She had opened an account some months ago, but she did not really intend to spend any money today. It was a form of pleasure walking among the fine linen and the glass, the elegant garden furniture, the Italian trays and chairs, the sunshades, the hats, the dresses, the underwear, the lamps, the bedspreads, the rich carpets, the chandeliers. It all smelt and looked good. It was the way a lady spent an afternoon. She was the client, not the assistant; she was young and rather beautiful and people looked at her. Men looked at her. Some looked at her face, some looked at her legs, but not many were without admiration.
She thought of ringing up Veronica Portugal but by now it was too late. In the lengthening shades of the afternoon she walked back to Cadogan Mews.
Wilfred was there before her. It looked as if he had left Mrs Jamieson instructions to ring him, for quite clearly he had cut his day at the office short. The meeting was strained and without any obvious improvement on their parting; but they had tea together and he tried to be friendly and interested about Rachel. He was obviously relieved that she had come back at all, and for a while her power and influence over him gave her pleasure. She saw that if she stayed – though staying permanently was almost unthinkable – she would have an ascendancy over him that she had never had before. The fact that she had been unfaithful had somehow got overlooked by him in his determination to keep her. He was fighting, in his own way and in the only way open to him; he was fighting Godfrey’s influence and still hoping against hope that he would win. Their marriage and the earlier relationship of rich solicitor and poor shop-girl, was still too close to be entirely forgotten by her, and she could not help but be astonished at the change and get a certain not very nice satisfaction out of it.
Tea ended with an exchange of information and at least without obvious enmity. But when he had gone upstairs a weight of depression fell on her. In spite of all this, in spite of what she came back to and what material gain she might have from it, coming home to him had become a return to the gilded cage.
On the Friday Wilfred mentioned the sale at Merrick House which was to take place in two weeks’ time. The first viewing day would be Monday the 17th, and all the previous week the auctioneer would be in itemizing the stuff to be sold. This week-end, therefore, would be the last chance of a private look at the contents without interference from anyone, and as he now had his own key he thought of going down tomorrow. Would Pearl like to come? Pearl listlessly agreed. She had nothing better to do, and the thought of seeing inside the house where Godfrey had lived with Lady Vosper interested her.
On the way down on the Saturday, seeking common ground, Angell mentioned the few things he thought might interest him: he gathered that most of the furniture and paintings were junk; they hadn’t bothered to go in when they were down last week. It hadn’t even been decided yet what to do with the house; it was of little architectural merit and Sir Francis wanted to bring the bulldozers in. But it had sentimental connections for the neighbourhood, and so as not to offend the locals it probably would be left for a time as it was. Wilfred’s real interest was in some Persian rugs he had heard were there, and a natural tendency to like snooping round old houses to see if he could pick up a bargain. Though his discoveries had never been sensational, he was always hoping that one day he would find an undiscovered Claude or Chardin or Canaletto in a neglected attic.
The fine spring-like weather of earlier in the week was over, and it was a grey day with flecks of rain constant but solitary in the wind, and heavy cloud drifting over the land. In their hired car they made good time and were there by eleven-thirty. They drove up the pebbly drive and Angell told the chauffeur, a little man called Heath, to be back at 12.45. They would lunch on the way home. When the car had gone they did not immediately go in, but Angell stood on the steps telling Pearl of the development plans.
Angell, Pearl and Little God Page 38