Nine Lives (Timeless Classics Collection)

by Ursula Bloom

  ‘Let me have it here. I’d like it,’ said Mary.

  She sat down and took off her hat realising that she was tired. Emily brought the kitten in. It was tabby and white much the same as the schizophrenic kitten which could change on the instant, and which she had noticed so closely that day in the town. She took it into her arms. It was warmly intimate, and she loved it.

  Holbeins was quickly redecorated. When Daniel employed people to work for him, he saw that they did that work well. The big drawing-room was papered pale yellow with enormous chrysanthemums crushing together on the walls, the dining room was cream with crimson curtains ‒ the best ‒ and the morning-room he converted into a sewing room for Mary and her mother, whilst the library was kept almost as it was.

  Upstairs he made a nursery wing, with its own bathroom, and with pretty curtains and soft mats for a baby to crawl on.

  Whilst all this was going on Mary and her mother went to stay in Brighton and it was July when they returned, to be met at the station by Daniel.

  They drove out of Eresham, crossing the river and turning right. As they climbed the hill the town died away; it faded into a light dribble of small houses, eventually drifting into warm fields with the corn growing highish, and the scarlet splotches of poppies showing. On the right rose a rather high tree-shaded bank, and people were sitting in the violet shadows, young lovers with their arms intertwined somewhat indelicately about one another. The distance was mystical with the heat haze, and on the crown of the hill they came to the straight road which ran for a quarter of a mile in a gentle incline, and now they could see the tall clumps of trees which surrounded the house.

  The carriage turned into the arc of freshly gravelled drive, and came to a standstill outside the portico, which looked unfamiliar in its new paint.

  ‘Here we are,’ said Daniel, excited as a child. He was the kind of man who is never happier than when launching a new project. Mary had not been the same, for impulse was alien to her, and she resented changed backgrounds, and was nervous and restrained against them.

  The hall looked a great deal larger now that it had been papered in cream, and the stairs had an expensive new red Turkey carpet on them, whilst tea was laid in the dining-room.

  Mrs. Clark was delighted with the metamorphosis of the place. She had not felt that Daniel could be so clever. She wandered from room to room; the charming drawing-room in that soft lemon yellow, with the pale grey carpet, and the bright chintzes. The sewing room with the soft blue trimmings, and upstairs the nursery wing, papered in a rosebud pattern, with one of the more expensive carpets and now only awaiting furniture of Mary’s choosing.

  ‘Oh Mary, aren’t you awfully pleased?’ she kept saying, ‘you ought to be very very happy over this,’ then because her daughter had gone silent again, sulky she supposed, she herself turned annoyed. It was so stupid of Mary when Daniel was being so good to her. So utterly silly!

  ‘She’s tired,’ her mother told Daniel, worried lest he should take offence, ‘the journey’s been too much for her, it would probably be better if she had her supper in bed.’

  ‘Oh no, Mother, I want to see it all.’

  ‘She was always the difficult one! Much more so than her sisters, they were good girls.’

  Mary pretended that she had not heard. ‘I just want to see the garden,’ she said.

  It was queer that morbid desire had come to her to see the shrubberies again, for she remembered the spot where that awful Mr. Wolbury had told her of the way he had killed that poor little girl! She supposed that all these curious moods were part of her pregnancy, for most certainly she had never been odd like this before, and now she could not conquer it.

  The three of them went into the garden. Then she saw the cat coming across the lawn, its tail erect behind it, and somehow the cat seemed to be the only intimate and lovely thing that there was in Holbeins.

  ‘Oh Tibbie, there you are. My Tibbie!’ she cried and caught the cat up in her arms.

  ‘You ought to rest,’ said Daniel, ‘why not do as your mother says?’

  She didn’t want to do it just because her mother HAD said it, but she dared not admit to that. All the time at Brighton her mother had been getting on her nerves. Now she did not want to go to the bedroom with an entirely new suite in satinwood. She had always loathed light-coloured woods, though of course Daniel did not know it. The thick carpet had poppies on it, (expensive of course, Daniel would never have been fobbed off with anything cheap), but somehow she disliked it intensely.

  She burst into tears.

  ‘That ends it,’ said her mother, ‘you go straight to bed, and have a good rest! You’ve been doing too much, my girl.’

  In the room with the satinwood suite, Mary cried herself to sleep.

  Mary knew that she wanted to see Minnie Sprockett. It was curious that Daniel bore no ill-will, he wasn’t that kind of man. The row was over as far as he was concerned, and if Miss Sprockett wished to come to his new home, then she was welcome. But Miss Sprockett did not quite feel that way. She had her pride, even if he hadn’t. Coldly, and formally she refused.

  Undoubtedly old Mrs. Clark was getting the best out of all of this. In her lifetime her pompous husband had overawed her, now she was free. She had grown tired of the nerve-fraying intimacy of the patients in the home, and was thankful to be able to sit back complacently.

  ‘Don’t pay any attention to Mary just now,’ she warned her son-in-law, ‘it’s the baby, and she will be quite all right later on.’

  ‘I know, but for the time being it is worrying.’

  ‘You mustn’t let it worry you! You’ve been a wonderful husband to her, and she’s a very lucky girl.’

  ‘I don’t think she ought to have that cat on the bed. I keep telling Emily about it, but I think she encourages her.’

  ‘I don’t suppose the cat’ll hurt.’

  ‘Don’t you? I don’t like them. Cats carry disease.’

  After a while the cat disappeared, nobody being able to trace it, but Job, the gardener looked odd whenever it was mentioned. Mary suspected what had occurred. Horrified she accused Daniel, who denied it, but she knew. She was sure. Now, the cat grew out of all perspective in her life. Nine lives, and it had not been able to save itself! Her cat had been destroyed, and it was her cat!

  I hate him, she thought.

  When October came and the leaves changed colour, Mary became whimsical. Her mother sided with Daniel against her, she could feel it all the time and resented it. Daniel was very good to Mrs. Clark, bringing her home things from the shop. With the coming of winter he brought the best woollens, knitting wools, embroideries, and all manner of little gifts, for by nature he was a generous man.

  He and his mother-in-law arranged the layette, Mary taking no interest, and they planned a name for the anticipated boy. Daniel Henry, after father and grandfather. They engaged the nurse, not a highly trained midwife but a kind person, who lived round the corner, the sort who was unlikely to make mischief in the home.

  Mary hardly noticed any of this.

  Now she knew that the child was alive. It stirred itself making her mother constantly aware of its presence. Subconsciously it must realise the rift between her parents, her father’s philanderings, the impulses, and restraints, the frustrations and also she already had knowledge of the cat who had not had nine lives, but had disappeared into a bucket in the stables.

  One evening Mary and her husband drew closer. They were talking over the fire in the dining-room. ‘Don’t get too worried, Mary dear,’ he said quite kindly, ‘it’ll soon be over now.’

  ‘Nine months is too long.’

  ‘Yes, I know, but one can’t alter that.’

  ‘It’s like nine lives.’

  ‘Like some cat.’

  ‘Yes, like some cat,’ and her eyes were worried. It seemed that the coming child had in a strange way devitalized her.

  ‘You poor little girl!’ he said, and kissed her. Once his kisses had thrilled her, for
she liked the pleasurable feeling of his lips against her cheek; but not now! Now nothing made her happy. She was alone and very sad.

  She wept on his shoulder.

  Emily told her about Arabella Finch’s child when it was born, and although she should not have listened, she did. It had been born alive, not stillborn like some children, yet when it was found it was dead, with the purple mark of a string round its tiny throat. Enquiries were being made, and Arabella Finch was in custody.

  ‘But that’s AWFUL,’ exclaimed Mary.

  Arabella maintained that the dead infant had never breathed, but had been born in the kitchen of the cottage and no one had been there to help. She argued that she had done nothing to him, nothing at all. This is what Daniel did, thought Mary, rather wildly, this was entirely his cruelty, and the poor girl must have suffered intolerably! But she said nothing.

  At all costs she had got to close up like a clam on this horrible suffocating sense of frustration. All men were bad; she did not realise that now she had arrived at the crossroads when she disliked them all. She tried to pretend that she had never read the newspaper, and so dismiss the story from her mind. But she could not dismiss it.

  She kept thinking of the small body with the ugly purple mark where a bootlace had been impitted round its neck. She kept thinking of Arabella Finch in the soulless misery of prison. When the time came the girl got a sentence of two years imprisonment, and it seemed all wrong that poor Arabella should be shut away from the sunlight, and the flowers, and the blue brightness of the sky, because she had been seduced, and a merciless fate had forced this tragedy in on her! Mary’s morbid mind went round and round in circles.

  Everything was becoming too much.

  She pretended that she felt ill, and must rest in bed as much as she could, but there she missed the cat. Tibbie had had such a small furry face, and wise eyes, even if they did turn malignant on the instant. Mary had loved the soft pretty paws in which those claws were sheathed, but not always. Sometimes they came out. Sometimes they destroyed.

  Christmas came and went. There had been some apprehension lest the baby should arrive in the middle of the Christmas dinner and spoil it, but the baby did not arrive then. They ate their unstinted food fare and Boxing Day came and went; now the year was passing to its close. With festivities. With rejoicing. With the sharp report of crackers, and the crumple of gaudy-coloured papers; with the colourful chains, the holly and the mistletoe.

  Just after tea on the last day of that year, Mary felt her whole body become shatteringly disturbed as though galvanized for action. The nurse was already in the house, effacing herself; she was an amiable woman who did not hurry, for after all, why should she? First babies always took their time, said she. Mary had every comfort. Her mother was solicitous enough, and she liked old Dr. Hennekey.

  She lay in the big old room which had been prepared for the event, and which was beautifully furnished, even if she hated the lightness of the satinwood suite, and the rose-coloured eiderdown which always seemed to bunch itself about her. The pains intensified, the times between them diminishing, so that she lay tossing like a ship which sinks despairingly into the trough of a wave, yet rises again, only to meet the next one.

  In the distance she heard the bells pealing to welcome the new year, for Eresham had a fine peal, and prided itself on the proficiency of the ringers. It seemed that she went down into a valley far deeper than any of those which had preceded it, and coming up, and out of it, she found herself submerged in a darkness through which she could not hope to fight her way.

  ‘It’s a girl,’ said the doctor encouragingly, ‘a lovely little girl!’

  She did not reply for she did not understand. She knew now that she did not wish to go on, because life, the man and the child all conspired against her. She heard people stirring beside her, and their voices begging her to rouse herself. She heard other sounds, the rushing of water in an insurgent tide, and the occupied buzzing of bees, as though two strangely inconsistent worlds merged within herself and mingled.

  An hour later, Mary Saunders died.

  Chapter Two

  THE CHILD

  Curiously enough nobody had even thought of the baby being a girl. It is strange how in this, the biggest fifty-fifty chance in the world, nobody ever does contemplate the sex which is not desired. Daniel hardly knew what to say, Mrs. Clark muttered, ‘Oh dear,’ to herself, and then ‘It’ll be a boy next time,’ but within a few minutes everybody was aware of the fact that there would not be a next time.

  Dr. Hennekey came down into the dining-room and told Daniel that his wife was dead. He looked at his mother-in-law, who sat there her finger nails interlaced, clicking them in and out of one another as she always did when she was nervous. That in itself maddened him, yet now, in the extreme horror of the moment, he was not even aware of it. She looked at him, her eyes like those of some small disturbed rodent from behind her thick glasses. When she spoke it was to ask about the child.

  ‘The baby’s all right?’

  ‘Perfectly all right. It’s a girl.’

  Everything was topsy-turvy. So sure of a son, Daniel had a daughter; so sure of his wife, he now was a widower. Then the doctor left him alone with his mother-in-law, for a time unable to say anything, then the woman went upstairs to see the baby. He followed her. In the dressing-room he saw the nurse sitting before the fire with the new baby in her lap. She was small, new-looking, and red. She had a quantity of hair, much darker in tone than either his or his wife’s had been. Though when he came to think about it, the baby was rather like himself, that was if she was like anything at all, and he rather questioned that. There was something feline about her features, the small puckered mouth, and the slant of her eyes. Oh yes, quite feline!

  Outside the bells still rang in the new year.

  Daniel did not re-marry, and his mother-in-law stayed on to keep house for him and see after the child. Lesley was not pretty. At fifteen months she had a mass of browning soft curly hair, for the dark tone had rubbed away, and her eyes had changed from the weakness of kitten-blue, to a vivid green. Her father did not know when he had seen such a pair of green eyes, like the weed a receding sea leaves on the sands, like a grass field in March, and very like Tibbie, the small tabby cat who had lain on poor Mary’s bed and had finally been disposed of, by Job, at Daniel’s orders.

  The child’s quietness alarmed her father; he did not want her to be passive like her mother had been, and disliked any thought of another silent creature who was merely a shadow in the background of his life; he desired Lesley to be a personality.

  Ultimately he made friends with her.

  He returned home, to find his mother-in-law in bed with a sick headache, and the child presented herself to him. She had the new black kitten in her arms ‒ she adored cats ‒ and she looked at him calmly, and said, ‘It’s me.’

  ‘You shouldn’t say “It’s me”,’ he told her, ‘you should say, “It’s Lesley”.’

  She looked at him haughtily. ‘Lesley Mary Saunders,’ she corrected him, proud of having learnt it for it had taken her some time.

  ‘That’s it. Lesley Mary Saunders.’ He picked her up and perched her on his knee. ‘Would you like to come driving with me this afternoon? I’m going into Addington.’ (which was a large town in the opposite direction from Eresham.)

  ‘Please?’ she said.

  She went back to the nursery and was put into a new pink silk frock smocked with blue, to justify the honour of going out driving with her father. She had new shoes, and a little pink bonnet which topped the brown curls, and downstairs she went.

  In the portico, Tiddles, the new kitten was sunning himself in the hot July sunshine, perched on scrawny haunches, one leg stuck up stiffly like a pole, washing himself laboriously with a rasping pink tongue. ‘Take Tiddles too?’ she asked.

  ‘Whatever for?’ asked Daniel.

  ‘’Cos Tiddles is me, and I’m Tiddles,’ she explained but over-earnestly.

/>   ‘Oh, well, that may be so, but one thing is certain . You are not taking Tiddles with us this afternoon.’

  He lifted her into the car by his side, and they drove off into the town. He was proud of her, he had to admit; she might not have real beauty, but most certainly she had personality and that certain charm. He bought her a doll, beautifully dressed, with pearly teeth and real eyelashes. It was a jointed doll; one pulled a string and it said ‘Mamma’, and was entrancing. The child examined it carefully, satisfying herself that she really wanted it before her father paid for it; it had a pink silk frock, and a feathered hat. Under the silk frock was a chemise made of gauze and it had kid shoes with silver paper buckles.

  They drove back with the doll held closely in the child’s arms, and time and again Daniel looked out of the corner of his eye at her and approved. She was an attractive child. He held her closely as they parted at the portico, for even if she weren’t a boy, she was a little dear, and your daughter WAS your daughter all her life. Bless her, he thought, for now he realised that all his ambitions lay centred in this child. It did not matter that Mary had died. Nothing mattered if he had the child.

  After that, they went out frequently together.

  Lesley was five when she first became aware of things in her life which might be different from other people’s lives. Emily put it to the daily woman who came in to work. ‘Miss Lesley’s noticing things,’ and clicked her teeth in disapproval.

  It began the day when she went to see her father in the shop. When they went in on a shopping expedition she often did this, and he would take her out to the cafe just round the corner and give her cake and milk there. This day he was not quite ready and she had to wait for him. It was a long time before she saw him.

  He had been talking to Miss Dixon, who supervised the millinery department. Miss Dixon was smallish, and had touches of attractive white lace at the collar and cuffs of her dark frock. She had a triangle of a face, and yellow hair. There was nothing beautiful about Miss Dixon, save her large violet eyes, which were quite lovely, but there was something about the way that she came out of Daniel’s office, and walked down the shop at his side, a certain self-confidence that the child recognized. As though she had said to herself, ‘Here-I-am-and-I-own-it’. Daniel was a pace behind her, looking at Miss Dixon with that funny little twist of a smile at the corner of his mouth, his bold eyes twinkling. He also walked with confidence, as though this was a much more exciting moment than most people thought.