“Oh, yes, I think he was,” Mrs. Hollyhead admitted. “And his mother adored him. She used to say, ‘One day my son will marry and settle down! ... The right girl will do everything for him, Holly, and he won’t want to wander anymore!’ ” Mrs. Hollyhead looked doubtful. “But, I don’t know about Miss Freer.... I mean, I don’t know whether his mother would think she was the right girl!”
The door was pushed open quite unexpectedly, and Sir Justin himself appeared. He glanced round the room, and then glanced at Susan, one dark eyebrow cocked.
“Don’t tell me you’ve changed your mind about the Dower House, and are thinking of occupying my mother’s old rooms?”
“No.” Susan put away the work-basket very carefully, as if it was something very fragile that had survived another age, and she didn’t want it damaged. “No, but I’m glad I’ve seen these rooms. Your mother must have been rather a simple person. She seems to have preferred simplicity to luxury.”
“Like you,” he said. Mrs. Hollyhead disappeared discreetly and left them alone together, and he sat down on the arm of a chair. “You’re the Sprigged Room type, not the White Room, or the Jade Room. They’re the fitting backgrounds for the Rosalies of this world—and their mothers, of course!” with great dryness.
“I’ve never seen the White room,” she said pensively. “I imagine I’d feel like a duck out of water if I ever had to spend a night in it.”
“You’re never likely to spend a night in it,” he told her, so curtly that she flushed. “The White Room is not for
_ 155
you!”
She bit her lip, and for some reason she felt such a sharp sensation of dismay that it all but overwhelmed her. Justin appeared not to notice the revealing pink in her cheeks, and remarked more casually:
“The nurseries are next door. Come and look at them.” She followed him, and she saw that his face had the old sardonic expression as he indicated the rocking-chair before the fire, and the well-worn rug.
“Believe it or not, but I used to spend hours on that rug, playing with soldiers. And at night nurse used to rock me in that chair! . . . She even heard me say my prayers, kneeling in front of her—that’s when my mother wasn’t available! My mother had a great weakness for hearing me say my prayers herself!”
“Perhaps she hoped you would always remember the times when you said them,” Susan heard herself reply, very quietly.
“And that in after days I would go on saying them, like the good little boy I once was!” His voice was harsh and mocking, and she didn’t like the ugly expression on his face. “But my children will no doubt do just what I did when I was young, and in this very room! We’re thinking of having the whole place redecorated, and Rosalie has suggested pastel hues! She knows someone who’s good at friezes. . . . You know the sort of thing—golliwogs and teddy-bears having picnics in blue-bell woods, and little boats rocking on miniature waves in the night-nursery! Rosalie thinks we ought to throw my mother’s rooms into the Nursery Suite so that the young Storrs can have ample room for expansion and growth!”
“Oh, no!” Susan said involuntarily. “Can’t they be left as they are?”
He smiled at her most unpleasantly and mockingly. “That’s for Rosalie to decide, isn’t it, my dear?” he said, and she turned away, feeling that she wanted to cry suddenly, because although he had kissed her and held her in his arms he could be quite brutal to her still. She made for the door, and the head of the stairs.
‘There’s nothing more to see up here, is there?” she said, in a muffled voice, and he agreed with her and followed. “Are you and Bruce making a date of it this week-end?” he asked, as they went down the stairs. “Dinner and a theatre, or something of the sort? You foregathered last week-end, didn’t you? You’ll soon be becoming quite necessary to one another!”
She said nothing, although it was true that she and Bruce had had a very pleasant evening when she was in London the previous week-end. He had obtained tickets for one of the latest and most successful musicals, and they had had supper afterwards. So far she had not dined with him, but they had lunched together, and he had accompanied her and Jennifer on shopping expeditions in connection with the Dower House. They had spent hours wandering round the soft-furnishing departments of places like Harrods and Peter Jones, and in antique-shops in the King’s Road, Chelsea. Jennifer had discovered a set of Rockingham—dinner and tea-service—that was only marred by one or two pieces being a little imperfect, and bought it and carried it home in triumph in a taxi, together with some wall-brackets for the dining-room, in one of these shops that fascinated the three of them. And Bruce had bought Susan a little silver-framed Venetian mirror for her bedroom which pleased her very much.
But usually it was Susan and Jennifer who scoured the shops, buying linen and plate, china and glass, and anything that caught their eyes, and which they felt they could afford. An architect had been sent down to the Dower House by Justin Storr, and the various improvements and alterations he had suggested were already being carried out. They had been given to understand that they could take over the tenancy of the house in a matter of weeks, and Jennifer at least was thrilled by the news. The days were growing longer and brighter and warmer, and she saw herself settling in with Susan somewhere about the middle of June, and throwing a house-warming party for the few special friends they each possessed, and who would willingly make a brief escape from London to hear nightingales singing in a wood at the bottom of the garden.
Susan wasn’t as impatient to move into the Dower House as Jennifer. There were moments when she wondered what weakness it was that had possessed her when she had allowed herself to be talked into signing the agreement; but there were other moments when she knew very well what the weakness was. Jennifer alone could not have persuaded her against her will, but Justin had overridden her will, and the lease had been signed. She should have been strong, and recognised that the situation might well become impossible once she was Justin’s tenant, living within sight and sound of his own windows, and at the mercy of his discretion every time he decided to call on her.
He was not like any other man she had ever met, and his set of values was not like any other man’s set of values. Of that she felt quite sure. The way he had behaved to her in the beginning should have warned her to keep well away from him, but like the moth that is attracted to the lamplight, or the candle flame, she kept fluttering back. Deliberately, it sometimes seemed to her, she was playing with a danger that was very real, asking for her wings to be singed, for she had discovered within herself a degree of vulnerability that was alarming. Until the last few weeks she had sailed through her life without any emotional entanglements, or even a very strong desire for romance. Romance was for the “howling beauties,” the girls who attracted a man violently, and at once.... She was Sir Adrian’s “Miss Mouse,” and since she didn’t want anything mediocre, romance would probably pass her by. She had been prepared to look for her satisfaction in life in all sorts of things, until Sir Adrian’s nephew had shattered the illusion by kissing her.
It had burst into a thousand fragments, and now she couldn’t even catch sight of him in the distance without feeling a violent leaping of her pulses, and an almost frightening lift to her heart. He was another woman’s property, and yet she longed for the moments when he would cross her path, and when he would say something to her—even if it was coloured by derision. She was beginning to believe that derision was a cloak he used very frequently to conceal his moods and his thoughts, and perhaps even his desires. He had probably started to make use of it in his boyhood, which must have been a little lonely, and not an entirely natural boyhood, with a mother who adored him, and no father to guide him, and the habit had lingered on.
Perhaps when he was happily married he would discard it, and become mellowed and softened. But, somehow, Susan doubted it. For the marriage he contemplated was not the marriage his mother had looked forward to for him. . . . Susan began to be so increasingly certain of th
is that she didn’t know whether she was more afraid for his future, and the death of happiness which might one day recoil on him, or appalled by the thought of the extraordinarily bleak future which, all at once, stretched ahead of herself.
And with every week that passed, plans for the Storr-Freer marriage went ahead. Mrs. Freer really got her teeth into things once a most satisfactory cheque had been extracted from her future son-in-law, and before the end of March the actual wedding date had been fixed. By mid-April wedding-presents were coming in in a thin trickle, and by the middle of May they were pouring in. The little house in Hill Street, which Mrs. Freer had managed to keep on after her husband’s death, began to contain so much silver and crystal and porcelain, in addition to jewellery and the more personal presents which a lot of the happy pair’s relatives thought fit to bestow on them, that Mrs. Freer began to think seriously of employing a private detective to keep a watchful eye on them. And when the month of moonlight and roses—for it was to be a June wedding— drew really near, she did employ such a man to mingle unobtrusively with the guests when they were invited to gaze hungrily at the magnificent display which overflowed into all the downstairs rooms of the little house.
Susan received such an invitation, but only by accident, and because she happened to collide with Mrs. Freer one afternoon when the two of them were shopping in the Army & Navy Stores. Susan remembered Mrs. Freer as an over-anxious, sharp-featured little woman with a lavender rinse to her grey hair, and exceedingly smart clothes; but to-day the over-anxious look had vanished, and she was beaming, and expansive, and very friendly.
She asked Susan to have a cup of tea with her in the restaurant and then insisted on carrying her back with her to Hill Street to inspect the presents. Rosalie was having fittings at her dressmaker, and after that she and Justin were paying a call in Bond Street to choose the bride’s present for the bridegroom. The bridegroom’s gift to his bride-to-be already lay on a bed of velvet on a side table in the dining-room, and when Susan saw it for the first time she felt a little stunned by the beauty of it. A diamond necklace, matching earrings, and a bracelet all sparkling like blue fire in the dimness of the room, and resting on the cream-coloured velvet as if they were already adorning the cream-coloured throat, and ears, and arm of Rosalie.
Mrs. Freer touched them gently, obviously loving them so much that she no doubt stole into this room very often during the twenty-four hours for the sheer pleasure and satisfaction of gazing at them.
“Perfect, aren’t they?” she said. “Quite faultless, of course! And between you and me, my dear—” speaking intimately to Susan—“fabulously expensive!”
She led the way round the room.
“And this specially-equipped dressing-case is also a present from Justin to my daughter! You’ll notice that the fittings are all of solid gold, and Rosalie’s initials—her new initials, of course; the ones that will be hers as soon as she is married—are picked out with diamonds! It was her own idea.”
Susan gazed at them—R. F. S. (for Rosalie Felicity Storr)—and suddenly such a profound feeling of dismay clamped down on her that she was afraid it must show in her face. She hardly knew what she was saying or doing as she turned away and pretended to be overcome by admiration for a set of silver rose bowls, and fortunately at that moment a peal at the front door bell took Mrs. Freer hastening away, for, as she explained, it was the maid’s afternoon off. Susan went on round the room, quietly examining the wedding-presents—although, in actual fact, not seeing any of them—and when the door opened behind her she was so certain it was Mrs. Freer that she didn’t interrupt her inspection, or glance over her shoulder.
Not until a voice with a kind of booming clarity about it announced that they might as well be in some kind of a department-store.
“There’s everything here but the kitchen stove! . . . But I suppose young people nowadays don’t bother about kitchen stoves! Why should they. . . ? When nearly everything edible comes out of tins! And a girl like Rosalie isn’t likely to poke her nose into her kitchen when she finally owns one!”
Susan wheeled, and the owner of the brightest pair of eyes she had ever seen in her life stared back at her. She was a little old lady who stood leaning on a slender ebony cane, and although her style of dressing was a little too young for her age she was a commanding figure. She put back the tiny eye-veil that made her little lavender toque seem slightly skittish, and the rings blazed on her fingers, through fine nylon gloves, as she did so. Her complexion had a rose-leaf quality about it, although she must long ago have turned seventy, and it was quite obvious that she used both rouge and mascara. Possibly it was the latter that emphasised the uncanny brilliance of her eyes.
“You don’t know me, my dear?” she said, as she limped forward to inspect the presents. “I’m Rosalie’s grandmother, Constance Freer—‘Lovely Lady Connie’ they used to call me once, but those days are past!” She poked with a gloved finger at a gleaming set of cocktail-shakers. “Too many of these things about nowadays! In my time, when we gave a party, we left it to the butler to serve drinks, and they weren’t the vile concoctions you get handed out to you in this enlightened age!”
Susan murmured something that proved she was a little taken aback, and Lady Freer established herself on a chair and studied her.
“I don’t think I know you, either, my dear! My daughter-in-law isn’t here to introduce us—someone telephoned just as I arrived, and she’s coping with some problem in connection with the wedding—so you’d better let me know your name. If it’s as pretty as you are I fancy I’ll like it!”
Susan told her, “Susan Willowfield.”
“Willowfield? Well, you’re as slim as a willow, so that’s all right! And I used to know some Willowfields.... They lived in Norfolk, and I stayed in the house many times when I was a girl. The old boy was a rip and got through what was left of the family fortune, and everything was sold up and the family dispersed. Dicky Willowfield was my first love.... I was sixteen at the time, and he was seventeen!”
“My grandfather,” Susan said, not with any pride, but with a good deal of amazement.
“Well, upon my soul! . . .” Lady Freer looked even more amazed. “And we’ve never met before! What a world it is! All the wrong people claiming one’s attention, and none of the right ones! ...” She indicated another chair with her stick. “Bring it up and sit beside me, and we’ll have a really good talk. Tell me about Dicky . . . What happened to him?”
“He went to New Zealand for a time, and then came home and married. He never had very much money, and my father became a vet.”
“Nothing wrong with that!” the old lady exclaimed. “Always thought I’d like to have more to do with animals myself, especially dogs and horses. The only horses my husband ever really looked in the face were the ones who were incurably bad starters on a race track, and he passed on the weakness to our only son. However, we were reasonably happy together, and you can’t have everything.
. . . Perhaps if I’d married Dicky I might have had just a little bit more, and I’m not referring to worldly wealth, of course!”
She continued to ask Susan questions about the various members of her family, and the way they had all managed to survive, or had ceased to survive. She was genuinely keenly interested, and she was concerned when the girl explained to her that she hadn’t any near relatives left. And, bit by bit, she extracted from Susan the story of her recent good fortune, and the peculiar stipulation made by Adrian Storr in his will. She confessed that she had heard something about a young woman whom Justin regarded as an infliction, but that she should be Dicky Willowfield’s granddaughter was astounding.
“I can’t believe it!” she said. “And yet, of course, I knew there was something about you when I first spoke to you!” She gave a little crow of delight. “Just wait until I see Justin, and I’ll give him a piece of my mind for daring to look upon a young woman who might very easily be my own grand-daughter as an infliction!” And then, more cur
iously: “Was he very rude to you, my dear? I know he can be shockingly rude when he feels like it.”
Susan smiled very faintly.
“He was rather rude.”
“Which means he was downright objectionable! And, of course, you detest him? Any woman would!”
But Susan shook her head.
“No,—no, I don’t detest him!”
Lady Freer gazed at her very closely, and with interest.
“What do you think about this forthcoming marriage of his, to my grand-daughter, Rosalie? You could have knocked me down with a feather when I heard she had really and truly hooked him at last! The girl’s as pretty as paint, of course, but what else has she got to keep a man like Justin? She’ll look nice at the head of his table, and if they have children she’ll probably turn out to be quite a good mother. . . . But a man like Justin wasn’t born to give dinner-parties, and I can’t imagine him a devoted parent! Amongst other things, of course, he probably could be. . . . But what ‘other things’ will he have when he marries Rosalie? Tell me that, my dear!”
Susan stared at her, fascinated by the strange brightness of her eyes, and a little dismayed by the insistence of her tone. What “other things” would Justin have when he married Rosalie? He had never displayed any symptoms of being in love with her! ... He treated her with an amused air, obviously admired her, had no doubt already decided that she would look nice at the head of his table. But a man who could kiss another woman as he had kissed her, Susan, was not even on the outer fringes of true love
“Well?” Lady Freer said, softly, and Susan felt her colour spreading wildly, and the memory of Justin’s kisses made it quite impossible for her to answer Lady Freer.
The old lady posed another question.
“Do you think they’ll be happy?”
Susan answered this with extreme awkwardness.
“How would I know, Lady Freer? I don’t know either of them very well.”
Dangerous Love Page 9