“They would.” Susanna rolled off the bench and lay on her back in the uncut grass of the lawn. “They’d be glad to get rid of me. They never wanted me in the first place. I’m not their child, you know. I was left on their doorstep—the back one—on a wild December night.” She rolled on to her face and beat on the ground with her clenched fists. “How many, many times they’ve regretted their kind impulse to take me in!”
“Susanna!” Ben said, wondering, as he did occasionally, whether this was the right friend for Amy. “You know that isn’t true.”
“Of course it isn’t,” Amy said impatiently, “but she’s a foundling just now. Don’t spoil it. This evening—not now, because we’re going to help Mr Garrett collect the eggs before the taxi comes—I’m going to be the rich benefactress who rescues her from her cruel foster-parents and gives her the first real happiness she has ever known.”
Ben had always talked to Amy about the house by the railway, and they had watched it cheek to cheek from the train window whenever they travelled to Southampton together. The saga of the family who lived there had captured her fancy much as his, and on these trips to Glenn’s farmhouse, both the girls were avid for the glimpses of the house and the chance to observe some new detail, commonplace in itself, but fascinating when their imaginations had trimmed it.
Once they saw the son’s wife playing with a toppling baby outside the back door.
“She’s left her husband,” Amy declared. “I always said it wouldn’t last.” Mrs Bowstrom had been saying that about her niece.
“Nonsense,” Ben said. “She’s just there for the holidays. He has to stay in town, because of his work, but he comes down at weekends.”
“Let’s go to the farm next Saturday and see,” Susanna suggested.
“That wouldn’t prove a thing,” Amy said. “He’d be indoors. He’s the indoor type.”
“But we’d see his car in the trailer shed. There isn’t room for more than one in the garage,” said Ben, whom the years had made familiar with these details. “In any case, if she’d left him, he might be there, but not her. She’d be with her own parents.”
“In Guildford. It was a local match. Yes, I hadn’t thought of that. But perhaps,” said Amy, who wanted the drama of a broken marriage, “she likes his parents best, and they’ve taken her side.”
The daffodils were out in the corner of the garden where the tree-house was. Once they saw the mother picking them. She was wearing a tweed skirt, perfectly square, and what was either a riding coat or a man’s sports jacket. As the train went by above her, she straightened up to stare at it, the bunch of daffodils clutched awkwardly upside down in her hand like a club.
“She won’t arrange them, of course,” Amy said, as they all settled back into their seats with a sigh because it was over so quickly. “The younger daughter, the pretty one, will do that. She’s clever with her hands.”
“And artistic too,” Ben said. “She paints, and has a potter’s wheel in the bathroom. There’s nothing that girl can’t do.”
“Daddy’s in love with her,” Amy explained to Susanna, to the amused interest of a woman in the other corner of the carriage, who did not look as grand as her suitcase, which was stamped: “E. de la R. H.”. “Perhaps when we live at the farm, Daddy, we could get to know them somehow. It can’t be too far away. We could give a hunt ball, or something, and invite them, and then you can marry her, now that you———”
She coughed and looked down at her hands. Ben had told her that he was not going to marry Rose Kelly or ever see her again, and she had received the news in careful silence, and had never mentioned Rose since.
The woman in the corner, who had been smiling to herself in a comfortable way, got up and turned her smile to Ben. “I’m going to have lunch,” she said. “If you’re going to the dining-car, you’d better go now, because it fills up after the next stop. I know this line.”
“Oh, so do we,” Amy said. “But we never go to the dining-car. It’s too expensive. We’re going to have a picnic.”
“What fun,” the woman said. “I wish I could join you.” She went out into the corridor and slid the door shut with a nod and a smile.
“Ernestine de la Rue Harrison,” Amy said at once. “I wonder where she lives?”
Glenville Roberts was idle about starting work, and would conjure up any excuse to postpone sitting down at his desk with the mug of sharpened pencils and the scribbling-pad from which it was poor Priscilla’s lot to decipher and translate into type his vile handwriting; but once he had forced himself to start, he went at it like a demon.
He had to, because he always left until the last minute any articles that had been commissioned. As the deadline approached, Glenn would utter an oath, take a stiff whisky and plunge into a fury of high-pressure creation, yelling at intervals for Ben to bring him nourishment, for he would not let Priscilla or Mrs Bowstrom into the room when he was working.
Sometimes he would hear the call to arms late in the evening, and he would turn any guests out of the house and sit up in a silk dressing-gown which the Very Dear Friend had sent him from Sulka in New York, writing far into the night.
He expected Ben to stay up as long as he did, or to get out of bed every time he shouted for coffee and sandwiches. One day, Ben bought a thermos flask, and the next time Glenn started to attack his scribbling-pad at eleven o’clock at night, he made a great pile of sandwiches with Glenn’s special low-calorie bread, wrapped them in a plastic bag, filled the thermos with hot coffee and put the tray without a word on the corner of Glenn’s wide, chaotic desk.
Glenn stabbed at the end of a sentence, made a huge black question-mark, and crossed the whole thing out in the same movement. Straightening the silk-clad hump of his shoulders, he looked at the tray and then looked up at Ben.
“What’s this?” he asked. “Are you going out, or something? Don’t tell me you’re on with that Kelly bit again.”
“You know I’m not. Rose and I are through. She has a South American singer now. I saw a picture of him carrying the mink.”
“Poor sod. You were well out of that. I hope you’ve picked something a bit higher grade this time.”
“There’s no one. I’m not going out, Glenn. I’m going upstairs to bed.”
“And you don’t intend to get out of it. I see.” Glenn nodded at the tray. “Very ingenious. What’s in the sandwiches?”
“Ham and chicken.”
“Delicious.” He spoke so pleasantly that Ben was taken by surprise and caught the sandwiches full on the side of his face when Glenn threw them at him. “All right. Now pick them up.”
“I’ll be damned if I do.” Ben knocked some crumbs down from behind his ear to join the mess of bread and meat on the floor.
“Then you’ll have to make me some more.” Glenn picked up his pencil. “And when I ask for them, not just whenever it suits you to bring them.”
His heavy head looked threatening, but Ben clenched his fists along the sides of his legs and held his ground, and said: “What the hell do you think I am?”
“What the hell do you think I pay you for?” Glenn’s eyes flickered downwards for a moment to Ben’s hands to see if the crazy fool was going to hit him.
“God knows,” Ben said. “You could live without me, but you asked me to come.”
“And you jumped at it. I suppose now you’re going to tell me that you wish you’d stayed at the cafeteria.”
“Perhaps. At least no one ever threw food at me there.”
Glenn flung down his pencil, breaking the point, dumped his elbows on the desk and ran his hands through his thick, untidy hair. “Come off it,” he groaned. “If you’re going to be dignified, it’s the last straw. I should have known better than to take on a brasshat—however tarnished. But I’m giving the orders now. You can get the hell out of here into the kitchen and make some more sandwiches, and then you can get the encyclopaedia and look up some dates on the Industrial Revolution. I’m going to need them before I�
��m through with this thing.”
“Yessir.” Ben knocked his heels to attention.
“I’m not laughing. And you can take that away and heave it.” Glenn jerked his head at the thermos. “Those things make coffee taste as if it came out of a sewer,”
Satisfied that he had put Ben in his place, he chose another pencil and began to write again, his cramped hand pushing the lead deep into the paper. Ben paused behind his back with the thermos, wondering whether he should hit him on the head with it. He probably would not even feel it through all that hair. Ben went out, his shoulders and neck and face hot and tingling with rage.
It was the first battle between him and Glenn, but by God, it was going to be the last. For two pins he would have woken Amy and walked out of the house; but Amy was ill with ‘flu and could not be moved. That was the way life was. There was always something like a child’s temperature or a flat tyre to spoil your big gestures.
The next morning, Ben kept out of the way, but Glenn sought him out and asked him: “Did you throw away that thermos?”
“No.” Ben did not commit his face either to sullenness or friendship. “I kept it for our picnics at the farm.”
“Good. I’ve changed my mind. I may use it at night after all. You’re planning to ask for your cards this morning, I suppose.”
“I was.” If Ben had heard from the Industrial Employment Analysts that his application form had been approved, he had been going to tell Glenn what he could do with his job. But there had been nothing for him in the morning mail.
“Hang on till tomorrow,” Glenn said. “I want you to come down to the film studio with me. We’re having a story conference on this war film they want to do, and there’s a chance I can get you the job of technical adviser on the naval side.”
Glenn went out to lunch and came home with a mammoth box of chocolates for Amy and a silver cigarette lighter for her father. Ben would not take it, but Glenn dropped it into his pocket and said: “It’s your birthday present. I didn’t give you one.”
“I haven’t had a birthday.”
“You must have had one last year. Everybody does.” He continued to be very friendly towards Ben, and Ben thawed out to the conclusion that Glenn had only thrown things at him because he had been disturbed while he was working. Priscilla told him that he had once thrown an inkwell at her when she had interrupted his work, even though it was to tell him that the boiler chimney was on fire.
The story conference was not held the next day and Ben never went to the film studio, since the war film was shelved because of objections from the War Office, but Ben and Amy stayed on in Hampstead. Amy was very happy, and Ben waited, with slightly less than his usual optimism, for something to turn up, and thought that she might as well stay happy until it did.
* Chapter 12 *
Glenville Roberts received many letters: from fans and amateur critics and cranks, from people who wanted something, and people who did not know what they wanted, but wrote just the same, querulously, as if the misdirection of their lives were vaguely Glenn’s fault.
The choicer letters were answered by Glenn, dictating to Priscilla. Ben answered the others, for Priscilla was not allowed to compose. Ben dealt with the eccentrics and the beggars and the pests and the people who wanted Glenn to read their manuscripts, or wanted to sell him their life stories as material for a book.
One of the biggest pests was a girl called Esther Lovelace, who wrote about twice a week, crying: “Oh, Mr. Roberts, I must see you. It’s urgent. Please let me come and see you. You will never regret it.”
Ben fobbed her off. He had to answer her letters, because the girl sounded so unbalanced that Glenn was afraid that she might commit suicide if he ignored her completely, and he might be involved at the inquest. There had been a case like that once, and because of the man’s reputation, no one had believed that he had never laid eyes or hands on the dead woman.
One Friday, Glenn was working furiously against time to finish his Sunday article. He had known the subject all week, but he never wrote it until the last minute, and Ben had to take it to the newspaper office, since it was always too late to post it. Ben had already answered the telephone three times to the impatient Features Editor, and finally he went in to Glenn to tell him that a messenger from the newspaper had roared up the street on a motor bicycle and was waiting in the hall.
“Tell the bastard to go away. Or give him a beer, or something.”
“He doesn’t want anything, and he’s been told not to leave here without the copy. He’s sitting in the hall with a crash helmet in his lap.”
Glenn groaned. “How anyone is expected to write under these conditions. … Get out of here, Ben. Bring me some coffee. No, make it a whisky. Tell Nellie to stop that infernal vacuum cleaner. Tell Amy to stop playing the piano. Don’t they care if I go insane?”
By the time the article was finished, Amy and the cleaning woman were sulking, because they could not find anything to do that did not make Glenn shout for quiet, Mrs Bowstrom was angry because the lunch was spoiled, and the messenger had made several scratches in the polished wood of the hall floor by scraping his boots backwards and forwards. Priscilla was in tears because Glenn had flustered her into putting a carbon into the typewriter the wrong way round, and she had had to type the last page again with Glenn standing over her and swearing.
Everyone was upset, including the messenger, who had missed his lunch-hour. As Ben shut the front door behind him, Glenn came out of his room, with his hair on end and the top button of his trousers undone, and a girl in a green knitted cap came out of the little washroom under the curving stairs.
“How do you do?” She held out her hand to Glenn. “I’m Esther Lovelace.”
Glenn did not shake hands. “Why did you let her come here?” he asked Ben.
“Oh, he didn’t.” The girl, who was small and plump, with a ladder in her stocking and strawberry lipstick smudged on her teeth, stood herself right in front of Glenn and looked up at him adoringly. “The man on the motor cycle let me in. I’d been watching from the garden of the empty house across the road. I often do that, to see you come out or go in.” She giggled. “But suddenly today seemed like my lucky day—funny, on a Friday, when you think of it—so I knocked on the door and the man let me in and I hid in the w.c.”
“There’s a public convenience a hundred yards away.” Glenn turned to go up the stairs, but she skipped before him and stood on the bottom step, blocking his way with one hand on the wall and the other on the banister.
“You are awful, Mr Roberts.” She giggled again. She had a simpering, freckled face with a sharp nose and swimmy brown eyes set too close together. “I came to see you. Your letters have been so kind.”
Glenn glanced back and made a face at Ben.
“I can understand why you wouldn’t give me an appointment to see you. You’re afraid of your power over women. So am I.” Her hand on the banister trembled. “But I came just the same, and so here I am, and now I’ve seen you in the flesh.”
“How do you like me?” Glenn became aware that the top of his trousers was unfastened, but did not bother to do anything about it. Once he had undone the button and let his stomach go, it was quite a struggle to do it up.
“I’m in love with you,” Esther Lovelace said. “You know that.”
“Get her out of here, Ben.” Glenn pushed her aside quite roughly and went up the stairs.
Miss Lovelace stepped down into the hall like a sleepwalker, with her eyes swooning into space. “He touched me,” she whispered. “He touched me for the first time. I shall never forget this moment.”
She went out of the house without protest, and Ben saw her swaying away down the street, veering from side to side of the pavement. At the corner, she stepped off the kerb without looking, unaware of the car which swerved and hooted and almost killed her.
“Good thing if it had,” Glenn said, as they discussed her over lunch. “Crazy woman. If you ever let her in here again, Be
n, I’ll shoot you. Amy, you remember that too. Don’t ever open the door to a girl who looks like a lovesick ant-eater. If she telephones, I’m dead, or gone to Australia.”
“I don’t think she’ll come again,” Ben said. “She’s had her moment.”
“She will,” Amy said, without looking up from her food, “and Glenn will see her.”
“I will not.”
“I bet you do. It’s terribly flattering to have someone madly in love with you like that. You are a bit flattered, aren’t you?”
“Precocious brat.” Glenn made a face at her. “I am not.”
But he was, and he did see Esther Lovelace again. One afternoon when Ben had been out, he came in to find the green knitted cap and the limp fawn coat lying on a chair in the hall. The drawing-room door was shut.
Ben shrugged his shoulders and went upstairs. Presently the front door banged, and looking out of the window, he saw Esther Lovelace tacking away down the street on her cider-bottle legs.
When Amy and Susanna came in from school, they ran upstairs to find him. “Who’s been here?” they asked. “Glenn’s asleep on the sofa in the drawing-room, and he’s got pink lipstick on his face.”
Esther Lovelace did not come to the house again. She did not telephone, and there were no more letters. When Ben asked Glenville how he had managed to discard her, Glenn smiled in a foxy way and said: “It’s easy if you know how. Don’t forget I’ve had plenty of practice in shaking off infatuated women.”
“You haven’t managed to shake off Clara,” Ben said. “She still wants to marry you.”
Clara had given him permission to say this if the occasion arose. She was a twice-divorced woman who had never been beautiful, even when she was on the right side of forty, and her pride, she said, had disappeared along with her second husband.
“Clara has her uses,” Glenn said. “All women do.” Priscilla came into the room at that moment, and he made a tigerish face at her. She dropped her pencil and sat down with a bump and began to flutter through the leaves of her note-pad in a panic.
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