Mine for a Day

by Mary Burchell

  Presently she rolled over and buried her face in the pillow, so that by no stretch of possibility could Rosemary hear her when she began to cry.

  CHAPTER XI

  LEILA woke next morning with that sense of physical reluctance which always accompanies a mental desire to escape from life’s next problem. For a moment or two she lay there, wondering why she felt so loath to get up. Then she remembered, and for a panic-stricken fraction of time she told herself that she could never go back to work at Barraclough & Morley’s. That it was quite impossible that she should ever face Simon again.

  She rapidly canvassed several absurd possibilities. She might telephone and say she was ill. She could prolong the supposed illness and then give notice by post, without ever returning to the office.

  But presently common sense ruthlessly forced its way back into her planning. She knew that one could not run away from daily responsibilities like that. Apart from any question of business loyalties, if she turned her back on her present difficulties in that cowardly way, she would be just that much weaker next time she had to handle a crisis.

  Later, perhaps, she might make plans to leave. Any constant business connection between her and Simon might become embarrassing and unwelcome for him as well as her, and in that case she would have to find some way of relieving him of her presence.

  But at present there was only one reasonable thing to do. Get up and face another day as though nothing had shattered her world yesterday.

  Rosemary’s matter-of-fact attitude helped a little. It evidently never occurred to her that her cousin would leave her present employment because of what had happened. And steadied a little by this, Leila departed for the office, outwardly calm, if inwardly apprehensive.

  He sent for her almost as soon as she arrived, and she suffered some bad moments of agonized speculation as she walked from her room to his.

  But she need not have worried. He greeted her in his best official manner, and began to dictate almost immediately. His absence the previous day meant that there was an accumulation of letters to deal with now, and presently Leila found her heartbeats returning to normal, her breath coming in less shallow and agitated gasps, and her shorthand outlines assuming their normal degree of accuracy, instead of taking on—as they had in the first five minutes—a certain eccentric novelty of their own.

  When he had finished he gave her a few personal directions, but he looked at the papers on his desk rather than at her. Then he dismissed her and she found herself outside his room once more, thankful that the first and worst ordeal was past and telling herself that nothing would ever be so difficult again.

  During the next few days his attitude remained much the same, and she told herself that she was immensely relieved. The crisis—if crisis it could be called—had not entirely disrupted their relationship. The situation remained manageable. That was the most she could ask, wasn’t it? She must be thankful.

  But as the first acute misery and embarrassment began to recede, Leila became increasingly aware of a restlessness and sense of frustration.

  She had thought it would be enough to know that Simon did not dislike and despise her for what she had done. She had believed she could count herself lucky if she retained the right to work for him and if he showed no resentment at the continued association.

  She was wrong of course. No girl in love could satisfy herself for long with such meagre fare. Thankful though she might be for the small crumbs of comfort, the negative compensations, Leila began to realize that there was a subtle, but vital, change in her relationship with Simon.

  He was never anything but polite to her—but there was no warmth in his manner. He was reasonably considerate as an employer—but no more so than he would have been to any satisfactory employee. Her office life was free from anxieties—but it was also without those unexpected moments of rapture which working for Simon had meant for her.

  What more could she expect? she asked herself again and again. And each time her heart answered that though she could not expect more, she also could not help longing for more.

  To be with him and have none of those friendly touches of intimacy which had made life so lovely and adventurous—to see him daily and know that he had drawn an immovable barrier across the progress of their friendship—began to be something which she felt she could not bear.

  There was nothing she could logically resent. It was just that the situation between them had changed. Even if he were not secretly blaming or despising her for what she had done, the simple fact remained that Rosemary was once more on the scene. Rosemary was the girl he loved, and Rosemary was the girl with whom he was planning his future, to the natural exclusion of everyone else.

  Sometimes she felt she must throw aside all pride, and batter Rosemary with her desperate questions.

  What had they decided? Were they engaged again? Did they plan to get married, after all? And when?

  Rosemary—who could always be curiously secretive about her affairs, and perhaps felt towards her cousin some not unnatural distrust—volunteered no information of her own. She was very often out in the evenings, presumably with Simon. But though she would talk brightly about this play or that film which she had attended, she never said if she went alone or with what companion.

  Rosemary, reflected Leila with not unfriendly cynicism, was not a girl to attend a play or a film on her own.

  At last, when a whole long week had crept past like this, Leila gathered her courage for enquiry.

  “How long are you going to stay here, Rosemary?” she asked one evening, with rather more abruptness than she intended.

  Rosemary’s eyes opened to a reproachful extent.

  “You mean that you’ve had about enough of me?”

  “No. I don’t mean that at all,” said Leila, which was true, because she found some sort of comfort in Rosemary’s featherbrained, but undoubtedly cheerful, society. “But I suppose you have some sort of plans for the future. Do you mean to go home soon, or—?”

  “Oh, I’m not going home!” Rosemary was good-temperedly positive about that. “Not while Simon is in London.”

  Leila swallowed.

  “You mean that you—enjoy your opportunities of seeing him so often?”

  Rosemary gave her a shrewd and rather comical glance.

  “Now, look here, Leila, I’m not talking over the situation between Simon and me with you. I don’t want you upsetting things again and—”

  “Rosemary!” Leila flushed deeply. “You didn’t think that was why I asked?”

  “It might have been,” Rosemary countered with composure, “and I’m not sure that I’d blame you, in the circumstances.. But it’s enough if I say the obvious—that the situation is a trifle delicate, and that I don’t intend to have it complicated, intentionally or unintentionally, by anyone else. No offence meant, darling, but a girl has to look out for herself. You should appreciate that,” she added, with a touch of friendly malice.

  Leila was silent. She wished she had never asked. She had put herself in a false position, and she had given Rosemary a chance to reduce the whole thing to a cheap and faintly ridiculous level.

  Also she had obtained no real information.

  But Rosemary was the only person she could ask. With Simon she had nothing but the barest official conversation. Even to enquire about his mother had become impossible. When she was not with him she would assure herself that she would ask him next time. She even worked out the exact wording. But, when it came to the point, the cool, impersonal atmosphere between them was such that she could not make herself say the pleasant, unexceptional words which she had so carefully thought out beforehand. She could as soon have asked Mr. Barraclough how his wife was—if he had one.

  From one day to the next—almost from one hour to the next—Simon and she had become virtually strangers.

  And then, towards the end of the second week, something for which she had given up hoping happened. He addressed her by her first name once more. Until n
ow he had managed, most skilfully, not to address her personally at all. But as she gathered up her papers and turned to go, at the end of a long session of dictation, he said:

  “Oh, Leila—”

  “Yes?” She turned back quickly towards his desk.

  “My mother was asking after you yesterday evening. She is very anxious to see you. Do you think you could find time to come down with me one evening?”

  “Why—why; of course. I’d—love to.” She tried not to stammer in her eagerness and relief, but she was unable to keep her voice entirely steady.

  “When could you come?”

  “Oh—any time. I mean—whenever it suits you.” She must not sound too eager and accommodating. Only she could not bear to put this wonderful plan in jeopardy.

  “This evening would be too short notice, I suppose?”

  “No. No, certainly not. There’s no reason—I could telephone and say I would be late—”

  “I don’t want to put you out in any way”—he was completely formal even over this—“but she has not been so well this week—”

  “Oh, I’m sorry!”

  “—and we’re anxious to indulge her in every way.”

  “Yes, of course. I’ll be pleased to come. I—I’ve been wanting to ask how she was.”

  He made no comment on that, and the remark hung rather foolishly in the silence until Leila felt herself blush, because, after all, there had been nothing to prevent her asking, except her own absurd self-consciousness.

  “If you can be ready about half-past five,” he said, “I’ll run you down by car.”

  “I’ll be ready,” she promised, and escaped into the corridor and to the indulgence of her own rapturous relief.

  She walked slowly because she must not have this air of radiant happiness about her when she rejoined her colleagues. She must remember that he had simply asked her to come and see his mother because she—unknowing of the changed circumstances—had made the request. There was nothing significant about it—nothing for her to rejoice over.

  But however she might admonish herself, Leila was unable to quell her rising tide of happiness and, in spite of all her efforts to look composed, one of the girls looked up as she came in and said: “Hello! Someone left you a fortune?”

  “No.” Leila laughed and flushed. “Why do you ask?”

  “You look rather as though you’ve been gazing into a golden future.”

  The others glanced up then, and added some laughing comment and enquiry.

  “Oh, I—just had rather a nice compliment or two on my work,” Leila fibbed hastily.

  “From Mr. Morley?”

  “Ye-es.”

  “You’re quite a favourite of his, aren’t you?” one of the other girls said carelessly.

  “Oh, no!” She just bit back the addition, “not now.”

  “He’s nice to work for,” remarked the first girl judicially. “I can’t imagine why that girl he was going to marry turned him down.”

  “Perhaps,” Leila said slowly, “she regretted it afterwards.”

  “Wouldn’t be much good if she did.”

  “How do you mean?” Leila swung round quickly.

  “Oh, he’s proud, you know, in his way. I don’t think any girl who had made a fool of him would get a second chance.”

  Leila was silent. Did he consider that she, too, had made a fool of him?

  “Perhaps you’re right,” she said at last. Then she sat down at her desk and began to work feverishly. She intended to be ready at five-thirty, if she had to work all through her lunch-time to be so.

  It seemed a long day, but a day which had hope at the end. For the first time for nearly two weeks, she felt she was working towards something. Until Simon had made this one half-friendly gesture, each hour had seemed like the last one and each day like the last day—and none of them had meant anything.

  Now, when she glanced at the clock, she thought: “In four hours—in three hours—in two hours—I shall be with him. We shall be together in the car, just the two of us. It’s impossible that this should not make a difference.”

  When it was at last time for her to go and join him, she wished that she had had some warning of this the previous day. She would have worn that misty blue suit which he had once said he liked. A little discontentedly, she stared at herself in the office mirror, and wondered why she had ever bought—much less worn—this tailored navy blue coat which made her look a little severe. Or was it just that she was frightened and, in her effort to hide the fact, she achieved a touch of hardness?

  She put on her hat, and then she took it off again and ran her hand through her soft bright hair. She looked less formal like that. Maybe she would go without it.

  Leila tossed her hat back into her locker. At that moment it meant nothing to her unless it could make her look endearing to Simon. And, taking her gloves and her handbag, she went out of the office.

  He was already waiting for her in the car, and as she came along the pavement towards him he leant forward and opened the door for her.

  “I’m sorry! Am I late?”

  She had not intended to sound breathless and apologetic, and he must have thought her attitude a little overdone, because he raised his eyebrows slightly as he said:

  “No. Not at all. I was five minutes early myself.”

  She slid into the seat beside him, aware, as she had never been before, of a faint self-consciousness in sharing this intimate nearness with him.

  “I mustn’t be silly,” she told herself anxiously. “It ought to be easier, not more difficult, to talk like this. I mustn’t be self-conscious. Oh, please God, don’t let me be self-conscious, or I shall spoil everything!”

  He started the car and, in a voice which at least sounded cool and self-possessed, she managed to say:

  “Tell me about your mother. What is the latest news of her?”

  “Not too good.” He frowned. “As you know, the trouble all along has been the difficulty of maintaining her strength. The operation, as such, was completely successful. But she hasn’t rallied anything like as quickly as we had hoped.”

  “But she has such a wonderful spirit. It’s that which keeps her going more than anything else,” Leila said earnestly.

  She had forgotten now about being self-conscious. She was too deeply and genuinely concerned about Mrs. Morley to think about anything else.

  “Yes, that’s true. That’s why her mental and—emotional state has so much to do with her rate of recovery. During the last week she seems to have—fretted is the word, I suppose.” He hesitated a moment. Then he said, as though from duty rather than from inclination: “She asked several times about you.”

  “About me! What did she ask about me?”

  “Oh—how you were, when you were coming to see her, and so on.”

  “Did you—tell her anything?”

  “I told her you were well, of course, and that I was sure you would be coming to see her quite soon.”

  “No. I didn’t mean that.”

  There was a silence.

  “I didn’t speak about the scene in the office, if you meant that,” he said at last.

  “I see.” Leila gripped her hands together in her lap. “Does she know about—Rosemary?”

  “No.”

  They drove on in silence once more. And immediately she began to wish she had been more specific. Why had she not said something challenging, like, “Does she know you and Rosemary are engaged again?”

  Then he would have had to give an answer which would have shown her the real situation.

  “Does she know about Rosemary?” could have covered everything she feared, or nothing at all significant.

  When she felt the silence had gone on as long as it should, she tried again.

  “Did you know Rosemary was staying with me?” she asked, trying to make that sound casual, and as though the very name Rosemary did not evoke uneasy recollections.

  “Yes. I knew.”

  She thought he s
et his mouth rather hard. But whether in disapproval of Rosemary’s choice of lodging, or as an indication that the subject was a forbidden one, she was not quite sure.

  Presently he pointed out a famous beauty spot to her, and she brightened and said:

  “Yes, you mentioned it the first time we drove down, but we had passed it before you thought to draw my attention to it. You said then that you would—you would remember next time we came this way.”

  “Well—I remembered next time we came this way,” he said, and for a moment he turned his head and smiled full at her.

  Her breath caught in her throat. She managed to smile back at him, but she knew it was a ridiculously scared and yet relieved smile. Not the smile of a sensible, self-possessed person who had taken ruthless—and rather inexcusable—decisions and acted on them.

  But she could not help it. She was so happy to have him smile at her again that nothing else mattered. Not the necessity of preserving appearances, nor of considering her pride, nor anything else.

  He had referred to their previous drive together, and smiled at her as though they shared a valued recollection.

  “I—I was beginning to think there wouldn’t be a next time,” she heard herself say.

  “Were you? But didn’t you remember that my mother specifically said she wanted to see you?”

  “Ye-es. But—after what had happened—”

  He swung the car past an awkward bend in the road before he commented on that.

  “It’s only children who take up the ‘I’ll never speak to you again’ attitude, Leila,” he said lightly. “I suppose most friends”—her heart warmed indescribably—“and even acquaintances”—deadly chill set in—“have unfortunate disagreements at some time or another. One can’t govern all future actions by them.”

  “No. Of course not.” Her voice was smaller than she could have wished, and she sounded so subdued that he laughed and asked: “Isn’t the olive branch acceptable?”

  “Oh, yes, of course.”

  “What is it, then?”