The Treacherous Heart

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  ‘That’s good,’ Joe said without smiling. He sat down at her bedside and stared at the pillow behind her head. ‘Your Dad told me you were ill, so I thought I’d come and see you,’ he said with an effort.

  ‘Yes, Dad told me,’ she said.

  ‘You seemed all right yesterday,’ he said. ‘Chirpy, I thought.’ He sounded almost resentful, she thought, as if she had no right to be chirpy when she ought to be ill.

  ‘I think that was probably feverishness,’ she said. He nodded.

  ‘I was glad to see you chirpy,’ he went on as if she hadn’t spoken. ‘I worried about you.’

  ‘Did you, Joe?’

  ‘Yes, I did. I know it isn’t my business any more, but well, when you love someone, you can’t help feeling it is even if it isn’t, if you know what I mean.’

  ‘Yes, I know what you mean,’ Anne said, thinking of Michael. ‘But I rather thought you had other fish to fry now?’

  ‘How’s that?’ Joe seemed puzzled, and she didn’t want to bring the vet into the conversation; it would sound bitchy.

  ‘Forget it,’ she said. ‘Anyway, you don’t need to worry about me, Joe. I’m all right. Other than this cold.’

  ‘Are you?’ he asked significantly. ‘Because, you see, I was wondering about that bloke you’ve been going out with. I know it’s none of my business—’

  ‘People always say that when they’re about to make it so,’ Anne complained. Joe ignored the interruption.

  ‘But I just felt I ought to warn you about him.’

  ‘Oh, not again! These warnings are getting to be very monotonous,’ Anne said irritably.

  ‘Again? I never—’

  ‘You aren’t the first,’ Anne said grimly. ‘How this town loves a stranger! He’s done nothing worse than arrive here from another place, but already he’s been put down as the worst villain outside of Wormwood Scrubs. I wouldn’t be surprised if the police haven’t got a couple of plain-clothes men trailing him all day, waiting for him to commit a crime.’

  ‘I don’t know about that,’ Joe said, injured. ‘I wouldn’t say he was a criminal. I don’t know anything about him.’

  ‘Then why judge him?’ Anne snapped.

  ‘You don’t think I’d repeat gossip, do you?’ Joe said, affronted. Anne didn’t quite grasp the import of that, but she was too cross to wonder about it.

  ‘You may have had the best of motives, which I don’t doubt,’ she said, ‘but until the day I come to you to warn you about lady vets also new to the district, and doubtless very sinister silences sticking out from every sentence she utters, don’t come to me with warnings about city slickers taking me for a ride. I’ve been for a ride with him in several of his cars, and I intend to go on several more.’

  Joe was on his dignity now. He stood up, towering above her like a bronze and gold statue of a Greek god, beautiful and powerful and, at the moment, utterly infuriating.

  ‘I’m sorry I upset you,’ he said slowly. ‘I’d better go.’

  She didn’t reply, and after a moments hesitation he turned and left her. She flung herself over onto her side in petulant anger, and came up against his bunch of wilting bluebells, beautiful still even though they were dying. She turned away onto her other side and wept a few bitter tears. In a while Dad put his head round the door and said,

  ‘Oh, is Joe gone? I was just looking into ask if he wanted to have his tea with you.’

  ‘He had to go,’ Anne said dully. ‘He was busy.’

  ‘Oh, that’s a shame. Never mind, love. I’ll put a nice tea on a tray for you. Won’t be a sec.’

  And when he came in again, it was with a tray laid with a tray cloth that hadn’t been out of the linen cupboard since Mother died. And there was a brown boiled egg in her cockerel egg-cup, and thin bread and butter, and strawberry jam, and a cup of tea, all arranged nicely on the tray, and on the best china. The final touch was that one of the slices of bread had been cut, meticulously, into ‘soldiers’ for dipping into her egg. Anne managed to smile her gratitude at him, but as soon as he had departed, the tears rolled freely down her face. There was a quality to his kindness that nearly broke her heart.

  Anne woke the next morning with a very nasty sore throat, and Dad was worried enough about her to telephone for Dr Ross. He came about mid-morning when Anne was listening in a bored way to the radio and flicking over the pages of a detective novel.

  ‘Living the life of Riley, aren’t you?’ he said cheerfully. ‘What wouldn’t I give for a day or two in bed?’

  ‘You can have it,’ she croaked, ‘whatever it is.’

  ‘Laryngitis,’ he said briskly. ‘Soon cure that. I’ll give your Dad a prescription for some penicillin. The old Wonder Drug, you know. That’ll have you on your feet right as ninepence in no time at all.’

  ‘How long is no time at all?’ Anne enquired, having known him nearly all her life.

  ‘You’ll be back to work on Monday. I should take the rest of the week off. I know that throat of yours. Stay in bed for a couple of days, and then just rest. I’ll give the prescription to your Dad, and he can run it down to Moore’s. I’d take it myself, but I’m going the other way. Cheerio, then, Anne – keep your pecker up.’

  Dad obligingly phoned the news through to Anne’s bosses, and went down to Moore’s on his bike with the prescription. Anne was not too worried by the sore throat or the accompanying symptoms, nor even by missing a week at work, but she was afraid she was going to be driven mad with boredom. She was very glad therefore to get a visitor at lunch time.

  ‘I’ve given up my entire lunch break to come and soothe your bed of pain,’ Wendy said, gusting into the bedroom on a cloud of perfume and sitting on the side of the bed. ‘Isn’t that kind of me?’

  ‘Very kind,’ Anne agreed as best she could.

  ‘My God that sounds terrible! What is it you’ve got? I hope it’s not catching,’ Wendy said, and without obliging Anne to reply, went on, ‘I telephoned you at work today, or rather tried to, but of course you weren’t there. Old Wetdrawers said that your Dad had just that moment phoned to say you were on your deathbed and not likely to be back at work until the millennium, so I had this idea of incredible nobility and generosity.’ She struck her chest proudly. ‘I get these attacks from time to time. It’s in my nature.’

  ‘Who drove you down here?’

  ‘Who did what?’ Wendy said, sounding incredulous and hurt. Anne smiled.

  ‘You wouldn’t have come if you’d had to use the bus,’ she croaked.

  ‘There’s gratitude for you! Heap someone up with kindness, and they spit in your eye! Well, it was Roberto actually,’ she said modestly. Anne made who’s Roberto noises, and she went on, ‘He’s the new waiter in the Italian restaurant. His name’s Robert actually – he isn’t Italian, of course, just looks it. He’s from Blandford. He worked in a Wimpey bar there, and this is a step up for him, so he’s practising the accent in case he can get a job in an Italian restaurant in London. That’s his ambition. So I call him Roberto, because he says it helps him if he thinks Italian, and you can’t think Italian if someone’s tugging your elbow and calling you Bob all the time.’

  She paused for breath. ‘And he calls me Lucia – you know, like in the song Santa Loochee-a – because he says there’s absolutely nothing you can do with Wendy in Italian. You can’t even say it with an Italian accent.’

  ‘Where’s Roberto now? Why didn’t you bring him in?’

  ‘He’s gone back to town. He’ll come and collect me later,’ Wendy said. ‘You’ll never guess who I saw last night.’

  ‘Whom.’

  ‘Whom I saw, last night, in Roberto’s restaurant.’

  ‘Were you eating there? How expensive of you.’

  ‘Oh, no, I wasn’t eating there. I was waiting for Roberto to come off duty, and I peeped out through the service hatch and right over in the corner at a table with a candle I saw …’

  Anne’s memory conjured up a vivid picture of that night in Wey
mouth, the little table with the candle and Michael reaching across to take her hand.

  ‘… your Mr M. F. Conrad, in person, noshing in style on the best the menu can offer. Though the most expensive thing on the menu’s only £2.50, which can’t compare with some of the places he must have been. I’ll bet when he took you to Weymouth it cost more than that. Still, this isn’t Weymouth, and it’s a lot better than taking her to the Forum Caff for egg and chips, like old Joe did with you.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Who who?’

  ‘Who was M. F. Conrad buying dinner for in the Italian restaurant?’ Anne asked carefully. Wendy shrugged indifferently.

  ‘Oh I don’t know. Some girl or other. She looked Italian, though judging by my experience with Roberto, that probably means she comes from Winterbourne Zelstone and talks like something off the Archers.’

  Anne felt dizzy, though Wendy didn’t at first notice and went on prattling gaily about nothing in particular. Anne found her heart hammering in a most peculiar way. She tried to tell herself that it was nothing, that Wendy was mistaken, but she knew that wasn’t true. Wendy couldn’t possibly mistake Michael, she had stared at him too often for that. It must be true: and all the warnings she had been given had been given in vain. He was the kind of man who always had several girls on a string, and if one failed him, another took her place. She had been warned about him almost from the beginning, but she had still foolishly, foolhardily, gone ahead and fallen in love with him. Never love a stranger, they had all said in their various ways, even poor Joe, who had no reason to feel kindly about her.

  He had presumably discovered that she was ill, and, far from hurrying to see her, as Wendy had, and dear, kind Joe, had immediately set about fixing himself up with someone else to take her place. Anne felt rather sick at the thought of her own feelings for him, and the fool she might have made of herself, and as she closed her eyes against the rush of nausea, Wendy at last noticed there was something wrong.

  ‘Here, you don’t look quite the thing,’ she said anxiously. ‘You’ve gone all pale – are you all right, Anne? Shall I call your Dad?’ She took Anne’s hand and patted it anxiously, and Anne closed her fingers round the comforting grasp and shook her head.

  ‘No, it’s nothing. I’m all right. I’ll be all right in a minute. It’s just—’ She opened her eyes and looked at Wendy who, for all her pretended insensitivity must have read something of the trouble in Anne’s expression.

  ‘Listen, you’re not upset about you-know-who, are you? Listen, Anne, you mustn’t take anything like that to heart. You know what those kind of fellers are. They mean every word of what they say when they’re saying it. It’s just that they say it ten times a week to ten different girls. You didn’t take it seriously, now, did you? Tell your old Aunty Wendy you don’t mind it? He can’t help it, poor soul, it’s just the way he is. I’m the same myself, never could settle for one flower when there’s so many to flit round.’

  She sounded really anxious, and Anne tried to smile and shook her head again.

  ‘No, no, it’s nothing like that,’ she said, but even as she said it the tears began to seep out from her eyes, and they both knew she was lying.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  After that, she could hardly expect a visit from Michael, and she told herself that she did not expect it. Why then, when her father announced a visitor for her on Friday, did her heart leap so treacherously?

  ‘I was passing, so I thought I’d drop in and see you,’ said the doctor. ‘You don’t look as well as I expected. Not up yet?’

  ‘Oh, I’m all right,’ she said listlessly. ‘I’m just being lazy I suppose.’

  ‘Well you certainly sound better as far as the voice goes. I expect it’s the penicillin making you droopy. Let’s see the throat. Hmm. Yes, well that seems to have cleared itself up, doesn’t it? Keep taking the tablets until they’re all gone anyway, just to make sure.’

  ‘Yes, I will,’ Anne said.

  ‘You sound in the dumps,’ Dr Ross said sternly. ‘I’m all for taking it easy when the patient benefits from it, but in your case I’d say you were feeling a wee bit too sorry for yourself. I think you should get up, get dressed and go for a nice walk. It’s a lovely day.’

  ‘Nowhere to go,’ Anne said childishly. There’s nothing worse than being talked to briskly when you’re feeling sunk in the depths of gloom.

  ‘You can go and have a look at a little cottage I’ve seen for sale across at Little Hotham. That’s only half a mile by the fields. I thought it would just do nicely for you and your Dad.’

  ‘Why for us?’ Anne asked, pricking up her ears with interest.

  ‘I had it from Moore. Apparently your father was talking to him when he took the prescription in, about the business of British Rail turfing you out. He reckoned – your Dad, that is – that if he could find an alternative place to that bungalow that wasn’t too expensive, he might be able to persuade them to buy it for him instead.’

  ‘That sounds like a possible plan,’ Anne said without too much hope. ‘Where is this place?’

  ‘It more or less faces the railway line, just beyond the triple bridge, you know where I mean, where that big house with the tall chimney is. You can’t see the cottage until you’re right up to it because of the hedges round the big house, but from the cottage you can see the railway line perfectly.’

  ‘It sounds ideal,’ Anne said with a laugh.

  ‘It is a nice little place,’ the doctor said. ‘It’s been modernised – one of my new patients bought it and did it up, but he didn’t like the idea of an outside toilet, even though it is a proper mains-drain flushing job. So he moved. It’s on the market now, and I dare say it wouldn’t be too expensive. The only thing I wonder is if you’d find it a bit small for the two of you. My patient was a widower and not likely to remarry. Lived there with his dog and was snug as a bug in a rug, but you and your Dad might find it a thought too snug. I don’t know.’

  ‘Have you told Dad about it?’

  ‘I told him. He said he’d go and have a look, but he sounded a bit gloomy about it. Just like you did before I told you. See how much more cheerful you are now you’re thinking of someone else and not yourself.’

  ‘You’re always right,’ Anne said. ‘Don’t you get sick of it?’

  ‘How could I? It’s my job to be right. Anyway. I must get on now – I’ve been gassing to you long enough. Get out and get some fresh air, and don’t be moping around in your room. Cheerio for now.’

  In the end, Anne and her father both went to see the cottage after lunch. Dad on his bike with Anne on the crossbar. ‘We can walk back,’ he said, ‘if you feel you need the exercise.’

  It was a dear little cottage, a real Dorset cottage, cob-ended and newly thatched, with the thatch decorations of the local man. Each thatcher decorated his roofs in his own style so that everyone knew who had done them and the Winton man was one of the old Dorset Catholic families, and always decorated the centre of the ridge with a stylised plaited cross. The cottage had been whitewashed, and the window frames painted smart black, bold against the white stone. The garden was rather overgrown, as could be expected, and was sweet with honeysuckle that rioted everywhere and attracted the bees for miles around. They couldn’t get into the cottage, of course, but they walked through to the back garden, and found it in better order, having been dug for vegetables before the owner left it. The toilet was discreetly tucked away down a side path and again decorated with honeysuckle, and there was a damson tree in the middle of the small lawn.

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ Anne said enthusiastically. ‘Really, I can’t imagine why anyone would want to leave it, outside loo or no outside loo.’

  ‘Mm,’ Dad said non-committally, but taking a glance at him, Anne saw that he loved it, that it was the kind of place he would have chosen if he had limitless choice. It was built for him, absolutely, it would fit round him like his own body now fitted round his heart. The only thing was, as the doctor had s
aid, that it was very small. It was so small it was like a dolls’ house, and standing in the garden in the front one could touch the bottom of the upstairs window.

  ‘I wonder if we can get permission to view it,’ she mused. She had been inside a similar cottage before, and thought that it would probably have one room downstairs and two tiny ones upstairs. The kitchen was housed in a single-storey extension at the back, and the bath would be a tin one, stood on the kitchen floor when needed and filled with kettles. As doctor said, really a bit too small for her and Dad.

  ‘Too small,’ Dad said as if echoing her thoughts, but she heard the sigh in his voice as he said it.

  ‘No harm in going to have a look at it, anyway,’ Anne said.

  ‘No, no harm.’

  ‘After all, you never know,’ Anne said. She said it only vaguely to cheer him up without meaning anything, but his expression brightened at once and he said more cheerfully,

  ‘No, you never know. After all …’

  After all, he meant, you might still marry Joe. After all, Anne added for herself he did come and visit you on your sickbed, which was more than that fancy chap from London did, for all his money and big cars. She knew the lines off by heart, having said them all to herself in preparation. Not that Dad would say them aloud unless she provoked him, but she knew he was thinking them, and that was almost as bad.

  On Friday night Anne was watching the television and half-heartedly repairing a pair of tights when there was a knock on the door. She was startled for a moment, and then, dredging up from the depths of her subconscious memory the sound of a car, she thought it was probably Joe come to visit her again. She jumped up, eager for company, and not at all sorry to see Joe again, even after their last meeting. After all, he had been proved right, hadn’t he? And he’d only meant it for the best at the time.

  She opened the front door (Dad was across at the station) and at once her heart gave such a lurch that she thought she would literally faint. She clutched the door-knob until her fingers went white, and stared at him without being able to speak for a moment.