To Dream Again

by To Dream Again (retail) (epub)

  Still fully dressed Mercy sat on the bed and wept. Then, when the tears would come no more she stared dryeyed at the ceiling until she knew every crack and blemish in its surface. Time meant nothing to her; neither did hunger nor thirst. How long she would have remained in such a state there was no knowing if Miss Herriot had not appointed herself guardian. It was the governess who helped her to undress and get into bed, who brought her hot water-bottles and tea, who spoke to her in soothing whispers. Mercy had no idea how much the older woman knew or guessed, but she was grateful to her.

  Peter did not share her bed that night; he slept on the narrow cot-bed in his dressing-room. He could not have slept much, though, for more than once, during the long wakeful hours, Mercy heard his footsteps approach the adjoining door into the bedroom; then he seemed to think better of it and go away.

  It took every ounce of Mercy’s willpower to get out of bed the next morning. It would have been so much easier to cower under the bedclothes trying to pretend yesterday had never happened. Then common sense prevailed; she accepted she would have found out about Peter and Marie-Jeanne sooner or later. It was the housemaid, Amelie, who brought her tea and hot water. Mercy did not ask the whereabouts of Marie-Jeanne.

  Peter was eating breakfast when she entered the dining-room. He jumped to his feet.

  ‘Are you feeling better?’ he asked anxiously.

  ‘I feel perfectly all right,’ she replied.

  She might have been talking to a perfect stranger, and he flinched at the coldness of her tone. Although she had no appetite Mercy took a small portion of breakfast from the serving-dish: anything to try and recapture normality. But the first bite of toast turned to dust in her mouth and she occupied her time cutting her bacon into smaller and smaller pieces.

  The meal finished and the day begun, she found no relief from her misery. It hung about her like a painful aura. Studying was out of the question. Peter suggested they drive out along the coast, but none of it registered with Mercy. That night, when he tried to enter her bedroom, she just stood there and looked at him. No words were needed, the expression in her eyes was enough. Peter turned back into his dressing-room.

  It went on like this for days, then a week, then two, then a whole month, with Peter trying every way he knew to reach her, without success.

  ‘What do you want?’ he cried in eventual desperation.

  But she couldn’t answer him. That was the trouble – she did not know.

  Deep down, she still loved him but had lost her trust in him, and that hurt. Peter’s notion that his dalliance, as he called it, did not involve her was bewildering and distressing. She missed him, though. She missed his physical presence in the large feather-bed, his warmth, the comfortable contact with his body as he lay beside her. Gradually her loneliness for him grew harder to bear than her pain, so that one night, when Peter entered the bedroom as usual, she did not turn away from him as she had done so often of late. Instead she moved over to her side of the bed.

  Instantly Peter was beside her, his arms pulling her closer, and whispering almost incoherently, ‘Oh, my darling! Oh, my darling!’ over and over again.

  To her surprise Mercy saw there were tears in his eyes: proof, if she needed it, that the last few weeks had been as hellish for him as they had for her. There was no withstanding this evidence of his love for her and she melted against him, crying a little, too, and whispering her love for him between urgent kisses.

  Their marriage had teetered on its foundations, and recovered. They were happy once again, and both of them tried to put their trauma behind them. Life was not quite as blissful as it had been before, perhaps – the spectre of Marie-Jeanne still hung over them – but it was happy none the less.

  The incident seemed to mark the end of a phase in their lives. Next morning a letter arrived from Agnes. In her narrow, authoritative copperplate she told them it was time they came home. Anyone else might have suggested such a move, or asked if it were convenient. Agnes merely ordered them. Mercy did not mind, they would have had to return to England soon, anyway, for her suspicions had been confirmed. She was pregnant.

  Chapter Six

  ‘That should have been you, you danged fool!’ snapped Arthur indignantly, as the under-housekeeper bore off a smug Barty to serve in the hotel workers’ dining room.

  ‘Why?’ demanded Joey. ‘I’m happy as I am.’

  ‘Happy are you? You enjoy standing here, day in, day out, up to your elbows in God knows what?’

  ‘There are worse jobs.’

  ‘Yes, and there are lots a jolly sight better. You don’t want to stay down here too long, otherwise you’ll never get away. You should be upstairs where the paying customers are – where the money’s to be made.’

  ‘What, serving suet pud to the commis and the housemaids?’

  ‘That’s only the beginning, you idiot. From there you can go anywhere – the coffee room, the ladies’ dining room, the banqueting room – they’re the places where you get the tips, not down here sloshing about in dishwater.’

  ‘Well, it’s Barty on the ladder of success this time. He was here before me, after all.’

  ‘Maybe, but you’ve got twice as much about you. You could really get on, if you’d only bother. You take a leaf out of that oily little squirt’s book. Didn’t you hear him? “Yes, ma’am. No, ma’am. I’ll do anything you say, ma’am.” You’re bright. You could look quite spry if you’d smarten yourself up. And you can talk posh when you want. I’ve heard you! You’d be just the sort they’d like to serve the rich old biddies their tea and toasted muffins.’

  ‘You sound just like my sister,’ laughed Joey. ‘She was always on at me to improve myself.’

  ‘She was right, make no mistake about it. Otherwise you’ll end up like me, washing up after other people for a living, nothing to look forward to but the workhouse when I can’t manage that.’

  ‘How come you didn’t do better for yourself, then?’ asked Joey. ‘You must have been a likely lad in your day.’

  ‘I was. Like a fool I threw away every opportunity I had.’ For a moment there was genuine regret in Arthur’s voice, tinged with bitterness. Then he swiftly returned to his normal bantering tone and said, ‘Besides, my feet weren’t up to it. Always let me down, have my feet.’

  Arthur had given Joey something to think about. Did he want to go on washing up for the rest of his days? At the moment he didn’t mind it, but he realized that it was because of Arthur’s company. If it had been Arthur who had left for upstairs instead of Barty the job would swiftly have deteriorated into drudgery.

  ‘All right,’ he said at last.

  ‘All right what?’

  ‘I’ll do as you say. I’ll follow the example of my wise old professor and make an effort to rise as high in the hotel industry as he didn’t.’

  ‘We’ll have less of the cheek, unless you want a swipe round the earhole,’ said Arthur. Then he grinned. ‘But I’m glad you listened to what I said. Take anything that comes along, son, just so’s you get out of here.’

  Joey grinned back. It was strange how Arthur’s advice was so close to Mercy’s, both of them urging him to get on. It made him think that maybe he did have prospects. All it needed was some effort from him and a bit of luck.

  Thoughts of Mercy set him wondering about her. When he had first come to the Devonshire Hall he had asked Arthur if he had heard of a well-to-do family called the Lisburnes.

  ‘No, they aren’t on my visiting list,’ he had said. ‘But you can always look them up in the Torquay Directory. It regularly publishes lists of all the nobs and where they live. Why d’you want to know, anyway?’

  ‘They’re relations,’ replied Joey. ‘I’m thinking of calling.’

  ‘Oh, my, lucky them!’ Arthur had raised an eyebrow and not believed a word.

  It had been easy enough to find an old copy of the Torquay Directory. ‘Mr Peter Lisburne, Mrs Agnes Lisburne – the Villa Dorata, Meadfoot’, it had said. There was no me
ntion of Mercy. Nevertheless, when he had a free hour Joey would often take the cliff path and look down on the villa. He could never get over its size and its opulence. In her last letter, Mercy had explained that she was severing all ties with them. He had felt indignant at first, and hurt, thinking she had abandoned them. But when the postal orders started coming regularly from a local solicitor he guessed she had not had any option. She had mentioned going abroad for a while, even so, he was quite convinced that she would return to Torquay. When she did Joey wanted to make sure she would be proud of him. It was not a sudden decision on his part, merely a growing feeling that one day he would really be worthy of visiting a sister who lived in a house like the Villa Dorata.

  In the meantime his first chance of self-improvement arrived. It was not much of an upward step, just being a porter, but at least he had a glimpse of the glittering life above stairs. As he lifted expensive pieces of luggage in and out of the gleaming limousines, under the zealous gaze of menservants and uniformed chauffeurs, he knew that Arthur had been right; if he wanted to make his fortune he had to get among the wealthy clientele – and soon!

  * * *

  The baby in the lace-trimmed basinet was crimson-faced with anger. His small fists beat the air, his pink-gummed mouth formed an O of outrage as he yelled his fury.

  ‘Goodness me, what a noise!’ Laughing, Mercy picked him up and held him close. He smelled warm, of milk and wet and good baby-soap. He was soaking, as she had expected; she knew it was not the discomfort which caused his outcry but boredom, for the noise stopped immediately. In his scant three months of existence John Peter Francis Lisburne had learned how to get his own way.

  ‘Such a wicked boy, you are,’ she whispered, her lips close to his plump cheek. ‘The wickedest boy from here to Plymouth, and the noisiest. I don’t know what we are going to do with you.’

  The baby, lolling his head against her shoulder, seemed remarkably unmoved by her pronouncement. Secure in the knowledge of his mother’s true sentiments – that he was the most perfect baby ever created – he merely gave a satisfying burp and proceeded to dribble over her velvet-clad shoulder.

  Mercy laughed with delight.

  Behind her the nursery door opened. She did not need to turn round to know who had entered; the brisk step and rustle of starched linen told it all.

  ‘Mrs Peter! Is something wrong?’ Nanny’s voice indicated that she knew full well it was not.

  ‘He was crying, so I came in. He’s very wet…’ To her ears her voice sounded nervous and apologetic.

  ‘There’s really no need for you to attend to him. He’d have taken no harm for a minute or two.’ Already Nanny had somehow inserted herself between Mercy and the baby and was unpinning his napkin with rather more energy than was necessary.

  ‘He was crying.’

  ‘Babies do! He was only exercising his little lungs, you know. I left him for just a moment. I was fully aware of what he was doing.’

  ‘I wasn’t suggesting—’

  ‘In my experience it’s not a good idea to pick up Baby the moment he makes a sound. We mustn’t make a rod for our own backs, must we?’ Nanny turned and cooed down at the child. ‘We’re becoming quite the little tyrant, aren’t we? We think we’ve got everyone at our beck and call like poor Mama. But Nanny knows better!’

  Mercy gritted her teeth at the blatant smugness of the woman. ‘I merely came into the nursery to see him,’ she said.

  ‘Of course, Mrs Peter. But we must think of what’s best for Baby, mustn’t we? It will do him no good to get over-excited by being picked up and played with too often.’

  ‘Are you suggesting I should not come in to see my own son?’

  ‘Good gracious, no, Mrs Peter! I wouldn’t presume to say such a thing! You are always welcome in the nursery, you know that. Perhaps you would like to come and see Baby have his bath this evening. He does enjoy it so.’

  To see him have his bath! Not to bath him herself! Not to play with him! Not to fondle her own baby!

  Mercy took a deep breath to calm her rising temper. She had already had several altercations with Nanny, who was of the old school – starched through to the soul. It had done no good. Nanny had been hired by Agnes and answered only to her. Mercy knew better than to appeal to her mother-in-law. Agnes Lisburne regarded the baby as one more being to be dominated – and one more weapon to use against her.

  Nanny West was certainly conscientious and efficient. In her care the baby would be well looked after. The trouble was it was a job Mercy wanted to do herself, she had had plenty of experience caring for Joey and for William. But the combined forces of Agnes and Nanny fought against her.

  Just as Mercy was about to make one more bid to gain control of her baby Nanny remarked, ‘If you’ll pardon me for asking, Mrs Peter – isn’t today Mrs Lisburne’s at-home?’

  Taken by surprise Mercy replied, ‘Yes, why?’

  ‘It’s just that, if you’ll excuse the liberty, ma’am, there is rather a nasty stain on your left shoulder, and with company coming in half an hour…’

  Mercy twisted her head and saw that the blue velvet of her gown was indeed badly marked where the baby had dribbled. She was in no fit state to receive visitors.

  ‘Thank you, Nanny. I’d better go and change.’ She sighed with resignation, knowing the battle for the nursery would have to wait.

  Every Thursday afternoon Agnes Lisburne was at home between the hours of 3 and 5 pm, a fact that she had printed neatly across the corners of her visiting cards. How Mercy hated those two hours! To be compelled to sit under the scrutiny of her mother-in-law’s friends and acquaintances was agony to her. She submitted to it simply because it was part of the price of being accepted by Society. She knew that for her to be absent, or even late, would give Agnes ample scope for vicious comment. Not that she minded for herself, it was always Peter who got the backlash.

  Hurrying into her dressing-room Mercy found her maid there, putting away clean lingerie.

  ‘Oh, Stafford, look what’s happened! I’ll have to change!’

  ‘Of course, Madam. Will your cream cashmere do? I’ve just pressed it.’

  Already the maid was nimbly unhooking her dress.

  ‘It will do splendidly. It’s such a nuisance! I never remember to put something over myself when I pick up the baby.’

  ‘Never mind, madam. I’ll soon sponge it out.’

  ‘It’s extra work for you.’

  ‘Five minutes, no more. I know if I had a baby as lovely as Master John I’d get nothing done all day for playing with him.’

  Stafford allowed herself the ghost of a sigh for what might have been. Gaunt, sallow of skin and middle-aged, she bore no resemblance to Marie-Jeanne other than in her skill. Her previous situation had been with an octogenarian; and, if in choosing her, Agnes had hoped to buy another ally among the servants she had failed. Stafford was delighted to have someone young and beautiful to dress, after a lifetime spent encasing aged bodies in out-dated bombasine. A heart overflowing with love was locked in her bony chest and it had had no outlet until she entered Mercy’s service. Now she poured adoration indiscriminately upon Mercy, Peter, and the baby – though not on Agnes. Stafford had been in service too long not to recognize a dictator when she saw one. She helped Mercy into the afternoon gown of fine creamy cashmere, and redressed her hair, with an air of unquenchable goodwill.

  ‘And the amber earrings, perhaps, Madam? There, perfection!’

  ‘You don’t think I look too young in this?’ Even now Mercy was never quite confident about her appearance.

  ‘Not a bit of it. The dress couldn’t be better, it’s just right for your colouring.’ Stafford held the door open for her and added in a confidential tone, ‘You’ll put every other lady in the shade, Madam. You mark my words.’

  Mercy gave her a grateful smile as she passed. Stafford watched her go along the corridor. To look as beautiful as Mrs Peter and still be so unsure of herself… but then, with her background�
�� Here Stafford stopped.

  She was so loyal to Mercy that she would not even think gossip.

  Agnes was already in the drawing-room when Mercy entered and she looked pointedly at the small French clock upon the mantelpiece. Although there was still five minutes to go before the most punctual of her guests would arrive her face registered disapproval.

  ‘I suppose one must not expect young people to be prompt these days,’ remarked Agnes. ‘They do not show the consideration for others that was prevalent when I was a girl.’

  ‘I was detained at the last moment,’ said Mercy calmly.

  ‘What could have been more important than showing courtesy to one’s guests?’ Then Agnes added, ‘I am surprised that you have changed out of your blue velvet, especially after I commented upon how suitable it was for the occasion.’

  ‘A slight mishap,’ muttered Mercy. No doubt Nanny would supply full details of the incident to Agnes.

  Agnes, with her talent for spotting other people’s weaknesses, had long ago discovered that to attack her daughter-in-law personally was ineffectual, for Mercy had been reared in a far harder school than most of her victims. The best method to discomfort her was to threaten other, weaker vessels.

  Miss Herriot had been her most recent pawn. The promise of Agnes’s influence to gain a good post for the faithful governess had been the price of Mercy’s continued obedience.

  ‘I hope the mishap was not on account of your maid’s deficiencies?’ Agnes demanded.

  Mercy had barely time to declare, ‘Certainly not!’ before the first guests were announced.

  As she helped the guests to tea and chatted to them politely, like a diligent daughter of the house, Mercy longed for the at-home to be over. True, there were fewer callers now than when she had first arrived at the Villa Dorata, when as Peter’s new wife she had been a nine days’ wonder. It had been hinted, at Agnes’s instigation, that Peter and she had been married abroad. But it had taken Torquay society no time at all to smell a mystery. Suddenly, finding out the truth about the new Mrs Lisburne was adding piquancy to tea-tables all over the town, and the drawing-room at the Villa Dorata had held twice its usual number every Thursday.