At six o’clock Damien presented himself at the door, the thick, grey fog swirling in with him as she opened it. He looked rather pink and white, and carried a small, crushed bunch of flowers in a paper cornet. ‘Could I see Rosie, Mrs. Evans, please?’
For all he was such an ass, Matilda couldn’t help being fond of Damien Jones. He was a nice-looking boy, with a handsome, sullen face and forward-curling hair, and as long as he treated only his equals as Comrades and didn’t drag her up into it, she respected the honest idealism which drove him to improving a world in which he, himself, had not yet learned to live. ‘She is, Damien, dear, but I don’t know whether she’s see-able. I think she’s going out.’
‘Who with?’ said Damien, blurting it out before he could stop himself.
‘I don’t know, my dear. Go and wait in the office and I’ll call her.’ (Blast the boy!—with Melissa off duty, Emma half-undressed for bed, probably by now sailing her bedroom slippers in the bath, and the animals singing lustily for their supper …) But she toiled upstairs and called up to the attic that Damien was here and Rosie called back that Damien could go to hell and Matilda replied that Rosie could tell him so herself, then, because she was not going to, and went into the nursery. She heard Rosie thump down the little attic stair and duly lean over the banister and call out to Damien that he could go to hell. Damien apparently came out into the hall and said something in reply, for Rosie called back that she couldn’t, she was in her pants and bra, and that anyway, if she had been as fully dressed as an esquimo or an igloo or whoever those people were, she wouldn’t, so he might just as well fuss off because there was no point in his staying. He evidently hung about for a little while; just as Tilda, unable to bear the thought of his hurt young face, was about to abandon the baby once more and go down and administer comfort, the front door banged. Oh, well, she thought; I really didn’t have time! She dumped the baby in its cot, where it stood looking over the high railed side with a trembling lower lip; in its white woolly sleeping-bag, with its halo of red-gold hair, it looked as though it were about to enter a sack-race in some celestial school-sports. She caught it up and kissed it, besought it not to add to the complications of life by weeping, and hurried away, thankfully closing one door at least behind her. Emma gave a couple of dismal yells, changed her mind and broke, instead, into loud singing. Outside, the fog was like a blank grey face peering in through the window-panes. Pray heaven, she thought, that it means that Raoul will be late.
Thomas came in. He was bleary-eyed and coughing. ‘Tilda?’
‘In the kitchen, darling.’
Thomas appeared at the kitchen door. ‘Is he here yet?’
‘No, thank goodness. I’m praying he’ll be late. I’m not nearly ready.’
‘Perhaps he won’t come,’ said Thomas, hopefully. ‘The fog’s frightful. I almost thought I might have to leave the car.’
‘You’re not late, though.’
‘I skipped all but the positively dying. I’ll make a round of ’phone calls. Any messages?’ He drifted off towards the office and came back a moment later with a small piece of paper. ‘What’s this about Harrow Gardens?’
‘I don’t know, darling,’ said Tilda, straining potatoes, her head held back to protect her make-up from the clouds of steam. ‘Harrow Gardens?’
‘Yes, it looks as if I shall have to sweat out again—and in this fog. Oh, blast! “Ten weeks. D. and V. Three days.” Who took it?—Melissa, I suppose?’
‘I suppose so, but she’s out,’ said Matilda, pushing past his unyielding form to get at the cooker again. ‘Do move, sweetie, how can anybody get round you?’
‘What the hell does she mean, “Ten weeks. D. and V. Three days”?’
‘I suppose she means that a ten-weeks-old baby has had diarrhoea and vomiting for three days: what else? Thomas, I shall go mad if you don’t move, darling.’
‘Oh, hell!’ he said, looking savagely at the note on the paper and very slightly shifting his position to let her get past, immediately resuming it again. ‘I shall have to go.’
‘My poor pet,’ said Matilda absently, straining frozen peas.
‘Where on earth’s Harrow Gardens? Somewhere round the Harrow Road, I expect, miles from here, of course, and off any known map route, nobody to ask the way of, and the fog like a sort of veil of wet Jaeger corns all over one’s face.’ Cheered by this vivid metaphor, he went through to the drawing-room and crashed about among Matilda’s carefully arranged bottles, mixing himself a drink He came back with it in his hand. ‘When did this message come, do you know?’
‘Darling, I tell you I don’t know anything about it; but if Melissa took it, it must have been before one, because she wasn’t on duty after that.’
‘Well, I think I ought to eat something now and do my ’phone calls and go. If I hang about for this French chap of yours, it’ll be a couple of hours before I see the child.’
‘If it’s had its D. and V. for three days, would that make much difference?’
‘It might,’ he said. ‘Anyway, they must be getting worried, waiting all this time. No telephone number of course, so I can’t ring them up. And no name. Trust Melissa!’
‘Harrow Gardens off the Harrow Road doesn’t sound very private-telephoney,’ said Matilda.
Rosie’s voice called softly on the stairs in an unwontedly melodious pipe. ‘Tilda! Anyone here yet?’
‘No, come on down,’ called Matilda. She added, warningly, however, ‘Only Thomas.’
Rosie appeared in the kitchen doorway. She looked excessively smart in a gay little hat and bright scarlet coat and a pair of very high heels held on by a sliver of sole and a couple of thin leather straps. ‘Well, hallo and good-bye, chaps. I’m off.’
‘What, in this fog?’ said Thomas. ‘Where to?’
‘Just—out,’ said Rosie, shrugging.
‘Aren’t you staying in to see this wonderful Frenchman?’
‘No, thanks very much,’ said Rosie. ‘I’m not.’
Thomas raised his eyebrows. ‘Aren’t you? Why?’
‘Oh, lor’,’ said Rosie, impatiently. ‘Because I don’t want to, that’s why.’
‘As it’s my hand he’s coming to hold, why should she?’ said Tilda quickly. ‘Look, you two, how do you think anyone can cook a dinner in a kitchen this size with three people milling around in it? Rosie, if you’re going out, darling, go; and Thomas, you’d better have something on a plate now, because he’ll be here any minute and then it’ll be sauve qui peut, as far as I’m concerned.’
Rosie started off with alacrity but Thomas, unusually persistent, followed her out into the hall. ‘It doesn’t seem very polite.’
‘Well, I can’t help it if I’ve got an appointment, Thomas.’
‘You did know this man in Geneva?’
‘Yes, I knew him,’ acknowledged Rosie, reluctantly.
‘But not very well?’
‘If you want to know, I knew him a great deal too well,’ said Rosie, bursting out with it, irritably. ‘Now may I go, please, as I happen to have an appointment and I’m late for it already.’ Tilda heard the bang of the front door as she flounced off down the steps. Thomas opened it again to call out after her: was it she who had taken this message about a case in Harrow Gardens? Her denials floated back to them, muffled already by the fog. There was a rattle as she struggled with the little gate. The faint clip-clop of her high heels whispered of her uncertain progress through the impenetrable grey. Thomas wandered back into the kitchen looking thoughtfully into the glass in his hand, apparently not much edified by what he saw there. Matilda, glancing anxiously at his face, served some food from the saucepans on to a plate with a great banging of spoons against china, and put it on a corner of the kitchen table. ‘Eat this, darling, and I’ll just run upstairs and take Gran hers.’ Mrs. Evans usually ate with the rest of the family but she was too unpredictable a member to be trusted when there were guests. This evening, anyway, she was mourning her lost virtue, and refused all food and
drink. ‘Sand, sand, sand!’ she said to Matilda, looking about her close-carpeted room with a delirious brightness in her eyes. ‘Nothing but sand! I don’t think I shall ever see anything again, Matilda, my dear, but all these wastes and wastes of golden sand; and not so much as a camel galloping towards me with my Sheik aboard!’
‘Aboard?’ said Matilda.
‘The Ship of the Desert,’ said Mrs. Evans, fixing her with an eye that dared her to say, Here, Gran—come off it!
‘Well, darling, try and eat your supper. It’s very special, all hashed up by me out of Tante Marie, for my Frenchman.’
‘Frenchman? What Frenchman?’
‘Granny, I told you this morning—a man I used to know in Geneva.’
‘What’s he coming here for?’ said Mrs. Evans, sharply. ‘From Geneva.’
‘Well, he wants to see me, that’s all.’
‘I shall come down,’ said Mrs. Evans, scrambling up off the sofa which earlier in the day had carried her so bravely in her vain dash across the burning sands, and beginning to hunt through her wardrobe for an appropriate change of dress.
‘No, you can’t,’ said Matilda, a little too quickly. ‘He—well, he wants to see me alone, Gran. He wants to talk to me.’
‘How can he see you alone? What about Thomas; and Rosie?’
‘Rosie’s gone out to avoid him, and Thomas has to go on a case. Darling, do eat your supper. You must keep up your strength, you know,’ said Tilda, resorting to a rather low trick, ‘if you’ve got any more dashing about the desert to do.’
‘Not much use dashing once they’ve caught up with you,’ said Granny, shaking her head. ‘And he caught up with me all right.’ She smiled reminiscently, but after a while her thin old hands shook so that the knife and fork clattered against her plate. ‘Tell him I won’t see him any more,’ she said. ‘Never again! He has broken his English Lily, he has deserted her for another and left her there, weeping among the golden sands; but let him beware, for Madonna Lily is a Tiger Lily now.’ She declaimed it again, more dramatically, in a high, cracked voice. ‘Let him beware—Madonna Lily is a Tiger Lily now!’ And she put her knife and fork together and lifted a lid to see what there was for a pud. ‘These Frenchified Arabs are always the worst,’ she said.
Thomas was still making telephone calls when Tilda got back downstairs, jotting down appointments for the morrow in his little book, advising, explaining, insisting or soothing, as he spoke to homes where he would have “dropped in” if the fog had not been so bad. ‘Your boy friend’s late.’
It was getting on for eight. ‘That sounds like a taxi now.’
‘I’ll go into the kitchen,’ said Thomas, ‘and nip out when you’ve got him into the drawing-room. I don’t want to see him.’
Really, thought Tilda, if poor Raoul knew how many people in this house did not want to see him, his self-esteem, which was ordinarily considerable, would suffer a mortal blow. She called out from the front door, directing him up the unfamiliar steps; she could not see him until he was almost inside the door and upon her, a large bouquet wrapped in cellophane held carefully in his gloved hand (she thought of Damien’s poor, squashed little bunch of flowers and felt a pang of affection for his clumsy old Englishness).
‘Mathilde! At last I am here. Did you despair? Very sorry to be late, but you British are so generous with your fogs, you assure us that you have them only occasionally but every time a poor foreigner arrives in London, you kindly lay one at his feet like a red carpet; or shall we say a grey carpet …?’ He kissed her hand and handed her the bouquet followed by a selection of hideous woollen mufflers unwound from his neck as he anxiously sniffed and cleared his throat, testing for incipient signs of le rheum. She hung up his belted overcoat, which had apparently been run up out of some mottled underfelting, predominantly green, and hung the scarves over the radiator. ‘It was terribly good of you to have made the effort at all. I really thought that you wouldn’t risk starting out.’
‘By the Ritzotel it is not so bad,’ said Raoul. He kindly explained to the Londoner born and bred that this was because the Ritzotel was quite close to Saint James Park and that London fogs were always less dense near an open space. ‘But from the Marble Arch down to this Maida Vale—phoo!’
‘Well, come into the drawing-room and get warm,’ said Matilda, feeling more and more large and English-rosey beneath his uncompromisingly appraising gaze. Not that he was so excessively beautiful himself. He was a tall man; the face that under the influence of the fairy lights in the trees at Carouge had seemed pale and interesting and rather sad, was really just a long, sallow, blandly self-satisfied face, with bright, dark eyes and a little black moustache; his hair was black too and rather fuzzy—at the back, the head sloped away, leaving a round bald patch, very clean and yet covered with infinitesimal little black dots as though the hairs had not so much fallen out as come to the surface of the scalp and just stopped growing, in despair. Really, she thought, he is not very attractive when you get him home, as it were; and she felt thankful now that Thomas would not be meeting him. Thomas would refer to him for ever as that frightful Raoul of yours, and she did not want a too constant reminder that her beautiful memories had turned out rather shame-making delusions after all.
She poured him out a sherry. Upstairs, the baby slept, lying like a pearl in the oyster shell of its soft, white, woolly shawl. In the kitchen, Thomas listened to hear that all was quiet, before slipping through the hall and out to his car. In his empty surgery, Dr. Ted Edwards glanced at the clock, glanced at the telephone-pad which had written on it, ‘Rosie—eight o’clock’, glanced across anxiously at the fog-muffled window and returned to his perusal of the B.M.J. In the house in Kilburn, Damien Jones sat restlessly with two enthusiastic but non-English-speaking Austrian refugees, one vaguely sexed Welsh intellectual and five assorted adolescents of non-British origin, and thought bitterly that when one had made such terrific sacrifices to be present at the Meeting oneself, it was a bit thick that so few should brave a bit of a fog to turn up; and out in the bit of a fog, Melissa paced like a tigress baulked of its prey, up and down, up and down, up and down.… Upstairs on her sofa in the house in Maida Vale, old Mrs. Evans sat quietly nursing her arthritic right arm, staring into the fire and thinking of many, many things; and in a fog-dimmed telephone booth not fifty yards away, Rosie came up for air and coughed a bit with the fog and was caught and held again, close in a young man’s arms. Zero hour minus—X. In the long, white, firelit drawing-room, the victim bowed and smiled and reeled off his devoirs before the serious work of the evening should begin; within the radius of one fogbound mile, were these seven people, one of whom was very shortly going to murder him.
CHAPTER FIVE
A T nine o’clock, Edward was still sitting by the surgery fire but he was no longer reading the Medical Journal. When the bell rang, he jumped to his feet and almost ran to the door. ‘Rosie! My dear girl, where on earth have you been?’
‘I got held up,’ said Rosie vaguely, coming in out of the dank grey fog in her gay red coat and her funny little hat, all lit with youth and freshness and vitality and—had he but known it, poor man—by a new and secret joy.
He led her into the sitting-room and lit the gas for her and drew the curtains and lifted the cat off the chair. ‘I’ve been worried to death about you; I thought you’d got lost in the fog or fallen into the canal or something. Frightful visions have been flashing through my mind; I didn’t like to go out and look for you in case, meanwhile, you turned up and couldn’t get in. I kept telling myself you hadn’t started out, because of the fog.’
‘It’s frantic,’ said Rosie. ‘Like walking through grey cotton wool.’ She pulled off her gloves and threw them on the table, took off her little hat and ran her fingers through her bright, fair hair. ‘Why didn’t you ring up?’
‘My dear Rosie!—after the fuss you made about not saying you were coming here?’
‘Oh, well, that was only for Tilda,’ said Rosie, comforta
bly. ‘I had to pretend you were a proper date, or she’d never have let me come out, just for the sake of avoiding Raoul.’
So that puts me where I belong, thought Tedward, ruefully: not even a sufficient excuse to Matilda for going out into a fog! (Dear Tilda!—would she have understood, if he had ever dared to confide in her, the secret sickness that night and day was eating away his heart?) He stood warming the broad seat of his trousers before the fire, praying like any adolescent calf-lover that Rosie would kiss him before she sat down—just one of the sexless pecks, cheek banged against cheek, that now and again she so meaninglessly bestowed upon dear, fat old Tedward, who had family doctored her since before she was born. But she did not. She flung herself into the armchair, curled up her long legs to make a lap for the dispossessed cat, and said could she possibly have a cup of coffee or something?—she hadn’t eaten anything since lunch (except tea), and jolly little then because the family had all been at their worst and too awful.… While he made it on the kitchen stove, his housekeeper being away on one of her periodic visits to a sister conveniently neurotic, she yelled through the intervening doors a few cheerful commentaries on the awfulness of families in general, culminating in a vivid account of Granny’s latest adventure with the Sheik of Araby. ‘Tilda says it’s some film star, Rupert Valentino or something, but I’ve never heard of him. Anyway, he seems to have given dear old Gran the time of her life, ackcherly, so God bless him whoever he is!’
He came back with the tray of tea things and a plate of biscuits and cakes. ‘I hope this’ll do? I don’t know what else I could raise. The old girl’s away, as usual. Do you think it’s enough?’
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