Letter To My Love

by Elizabeth Cadell

  “That time.”

  “Well, we must ask her brother; he’s very amusing.”

  “He’s dead.”

  “Is everybody dead?” Ettie asked resentfully.

  “Nearly everybody. And the invitations are not, in any case, anything to do with you or me,” said Netta. “Edwin has a wife, and it’s her place to arrange matters of that kind. All we can do is buy a few things for Claire to start her off in her new home.”

  She paused on the corner of the street to hail a taxi, and Ettie spoke to Claire in an undertone.

  “You see how it is, Claire? She forgets. I wanted to warn you. Half the time, she thinks that people are dead. Now she’s imagining that your mother has come back to life. I’m afraid she’s going to get a shock when she doesn’t see her at your wedding.”

  “I have a stepmother,” Claire said, helping her aunts into a taxi.

  “That isn’t at all the same thing,” Ettie said. “You must” — she paused and leaned forward and pointed—“Look, Netta—no, too late; we’ve gone past. That was Lily Maxwell. Now don’t tell me it wasn’t.”

  “It was not,” droned Netta, “Lily Maxwell.”

  “I suppose she’s dead, like all the others?”

  “She most certainly is.”

  “Well, I’m sorry to contradict you”—Ettie spoke triumphantly—“but this time you’re wrong. There she was, walking along as large as life. And with a flashy-looking man, as usual. Could I mistake her peculiar walk? You used to imitate it once.”

  “You probably saw her granddaughter. I’ve heard she’s like Lily.”

  “It’s going to be extremely awkward,” Ettie said angrily, “if when I greet somebody I know, I have to say: ‘Are you you, or are you your granddaughter?’ You really make unnecessary difficulties, Netta.”

  Claire was not, on the whole, sorry when her visit came to an end, but she was surprised and touched by her stepmother’s prompt and firm reminder of their agreement.

  “You said ten days and this is the tenth, Claire,” she said over the telephone. “I’ll be at the station to meet the five- eight.”

  She met the train, drove Claire to the house and presented her with an air of triumph to her father. Then she led her to the drawing-room for a talk.

  “Now,” she said. “What news? You look tired.”

  “The aunts,” Claire explained. “Never a dull moment. Can you tell me whether they’ve got all that energy because they were born with all the strength that my father didn’t have, or are they making up for all the quiet years they spent down here looking after him?”

  “Never mind your aunts. I want to hear about you.”

  “That won’t take long.” Claire abandoned the sofa and took her favourite window seat. “Nothing happened.”

  “But didn’t you go down there to—”

  “We were down there to work something out, and the way Grant worked it out was to take off my engagement ring and give me a week in which to decide whether I’ll marry him and go to Canada—or not.”

  There was a long silence.

  “Well,” her stepmother reminded her slowly at last, “you wanted him to make a decision.”

  “I did. And he made it.”

  “Will you…will you go?”

  “Yes. What else? You love a man, you get engaged to him, you agree to marry him. If he decides he can do his work better in Canada, all you can do is go there with him. They say it’s the country for the young and strong. And anyway, I always liked those pictures of Canadian children dressed like Eskimos.”

  Her stepmother looked at her. Claire, pale but composed, picked up a magazine, flicked the pages open idly and put it down again. Her eyes, raised to meet Mrs. Marston’s, held no expression whatsoever.

  “You don’t sound as though you enjoyed your weekend,” ventured her stepmother.

  “Enjoy? It isn’t exactly an enjoy-ish house. It was all quite interesting. There was this housekeeper called Mrs. Peel who loves Grant and will break her heart when he goes to Canada. Then there was Lotty, and a neighbouring farmer called Ronnie Pierce. Ronnie asked her to marry him and she said no, but as her hopes of going to live in France have been dashed, perhaps she’ll say yes. There was her nice little boy, and some animals, and a gardener. Mrs. Peel doesn’t know definitely what’s going to happen to her; Grant didn’t tell her. On the surface, it was all normal, if a bit gloomy; below the surface, there was . . . something. I’m not over-imaginative, but I felt it. Do I sound hysterical?”

  “A little. What was it you felt?”

  “Perhaps it was what I saw. What would you say if (a) you heard that people might be able to understand why Mrs. Tennant changed her will if only they could find out something about the letter that upset her so much the morning she died and (b) you overheard two people arguing about a lost letter and (c) you saw a man at somebody else’s desk, going through papers that didn’t belong to him, looking for what you can only presume is a letter? Wouldn’t you be inclined to say that ‘b’ plus ‘c’ equalled ‘a’?”

  “It seems a reasonable theory. Who was arguing, and who was looking?”

  “Richard Tennant and his sister were arguing, and Richard Tennant was looking.”

  “You saw him?”

  “Yes.”

  “Didn’t you say anything?”

  “Yes, I did. He told me that the letter his sister had lost was nothing to do with the will. And you’ll be surprised to know that I believe him. Did you remember where you’d heard his name?”

  “Yes, I remembered,” said Mrs. Marston.

  The tone—quiet but charged with uneasy meaning—sent the colour from Claire’s cheeks.

  “Where?” she asked. “You thought he had some connection with—”

  “—with a patient in the hospital. He has.”

  “Tell me.”

  “She’s very old,” Mrs. Marston said. “She was brought to us at the end of February—she was found lying in the road some distance from the cottage she lives in in Hurston, just outside Gisborough. It’s only a small village, but they knew very little about her—she had kept, as they say, herself to herself. The people who found her — tradespeople in the village—thought she was on her way to a public telephone box, but before she got there, she had a stroke. When I first saw her, she was unconscious. As far as we could see, there wasn’t much hope for her. She recovered a little, and then showed extraordinary agitation until her handbag was brought to her. There was a little money in it, and a paper with a name on it: Richard Tennant. She was in obvious terror; she clung to the handbag and became dangerously excited when anybody attempted to touch it. It wasn’t possible to know for certain whether Richard Tennant was responsible for the terror she showed — but we took no chances. Orders were given that he was in no circumstances to be admitted.”

  “Who is she?”

  “The people who brought her in said that her name was Remington. Miss Remington. That’s all they knew; she had, they said, made no friends there and had never talked about herself.”

  “There’s an old nurse…”

  “Did you say anything about a patient in the hospital?”

  “I asked them if they knew anybody there. Richard said he didn’t.” She paused. “I can see I’ve been too sheltered. Somebody ought to have kept me in touch. I ought to have known about mothers with violent tempers who make spiteful Wills. Somebody ought to have taught me how to know when people were lying, and what to do when I found a man creeping round looking for a letter. Somebody ought to have shown me how to take a grasp on life, and then I might have been able to decide whether Richard Tennant was harmless—or not. I should have known whether to believe him, or to recognize him for a cheat and a liar. It’s hard to believe you can still like a man when you’ve seen him doing what I saw him do. I don’t know for certain that he’s not crooked or even dangerous. All I know is that after all these months with Grant, he seemed to me to have the one quality I’ve looked for in Grant and never fou
nd: strength. You could lean on him — if he wasn’t a liar and a cheat. You couldn’t lean on Grant.”

  “Claire . . . you mustn’t confuse weakness with sickness. Grant could have a sick mind.”

  “That’s what Richard said he had. Mean or tricky or dangerous, you meet, in that house, Richard at every turn. Some of them hate him and some of them like him, but all of them, without exception, depend on him. Grant can talk of giving up the house and going to Canada—but if Richard wanted to keep him here, he could keep him. If I went to Richard now and said: 'Help me to change Grant’s mind’ he could do it. If he wanted to. Even before he came through my bedroom window that first night, you could feel him in that house, like a pulse, like a drum-beat. Richard, Richard, Richard. And now you tell me that an old woman in hospital mustn’t see him because she’s frightened. She’s—” she stopped and fixed wide, blank eyes on her stepmother. “But . . . but if she’s in terror, what’s she in terror of?”

  “Of losing something she had with her,” said Mrs. Marston.

  “But you said . . . you said she only had a handbag and a little money and a piece of paper.”

  “She had something else too,” Mrs. Marston said quietly.

  “Well, what?”

  Mrs. Marston hesitated.

  “She had a letter,” she said slowly at last.

  Chapter 6

  The next morning, Richard Tennant called at the house.

  He arrived unheralded. Mrs. Marston and Claire were standing on the balcony outside Mr. Marston’s room, looking at the sunshine and deciding that it was not going to last, when they saw the car coming up the drive.

  “Who?” Mrs. Marston asked.

  Claire told her.

  “Why?” was her stepmother’s next question.

  “I suppose because Grant sent him—either with a message, or to see how I was getting on.”

  Mrs. Marston studied the tall figure getting out of the car.

  “He doesn’t look,” she said, “like a man who would go through anybody else’s correspondence. But you said you saw him.”

  “He doesn’t look like a man who’d frighten old women. But you said that’s what the hospital’s expecting him to do. Will you come down with me?”

  Mrs. Marston, after a moment’s consideration, said that she would follow in a few minutes.

  “By which time,” she added, “you’ll have found out what he wants.”

  Claire opened the door of the drawing-room and went in. He swung round as she entered, and by a shake of the head refused the offer of a chair.

  “This can’t, perhaps, be classed as a friendly visit,” he said. “I came to find out what you’d done to Grant.”

  Claire frowned.

  “I did exactly as he asked me to,” she said. “I took time to consider his proposal to marry him and live permanently in Canada.”

  He stared at her in silence for a time. Then:

  “Look, will you come out and lunch somewhere with me?” he asked. “We can find a roadhouse or something. I’ve got to talk to you.”

  “You could talk here,” she pointed out.

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because in the first place, this isn’t a house anybody could quarrel in.”

  “If you’re asking me to go out solely in order to—”

  “I want to try and talk some sense into you, if I can. Not an easy thing to do, especially under your own roof and in these surroundings.”

  “What’s wrong with these surroundings?”

  “They’re charming. So charming that they disarm.”

  “Good. Then we’ll stay here and talk.”

  He was about to speak when the door opened to admit Mrs. Marston. Neither she nor Richard, after Claire’s brief presentation of him, spoke; the scrutiny they gave one another was frank and keen, but at the end of it, Claire could not have told what the verdict of either had been.

  “Richard,” she told her stepmother, “wants to argue about Grant, but says this house isn’t conducive to quarrelling.”

  “You’re quite right,” Mrs. Marston told him. “It isn’t. But must you quarrel?”

  “I’ve certain things to say to Claire, and I suggested saying them over lunch. Will you ask her to come out with me?”

  Mrs. Marston’s calm, sensible eyes rested on him.

  “If you promise not to say anything to upset her,” she said at last, “perhaps it would be better if you both went out. My husband doesn’t receive visitors; he keeps to his own room, and I don’t think I’d care to spend the morning acting as referee between you and Claire.”

  “I didn’t know until last night,” Richard said, “what a mess she and Grant were in.”

  “Mess?” came in surprise from Claire.

  “I hadn’t,” Richard went on to her stepmother, “seen him or heard of him. Or heard from him. I imagined that he and Claire were deep in plans for their wedding. Last night, he rang me up—I was down at Spenders—and told me he hadn’t seen Claire and was considering going to Canada—which is pure madness.”

  There was a pause.

  “Is it,” Mrs. Marston asked tentatively, “anything to do with you?”

  “Yes, it is. Partly because I’ve got an interfering nature and can’t bear seeing people making a mess of their lives, and partly because for some years I’ve adopted, rightly or wrongly, a kind of protective attitude towards Grant. The thing has to be discussed, but what I tried to tell Claire, before you came in, was that this house has an atmosphere—a gentle, feminine, please-lower-your-voices air. I think I tip-toed through the hall. It’s a beautiful house, but I’m not in a beautiful mood.”

  “In that case,” Mrs. Marston told Claire, “I think you’d better take him away. Put on a coat—it’s going to be cold and wet.”

  Claire, without speaking, went out of the room and came back wearing a raincoat. They said good-bye to Mrs. Marston, who watched them driving away with an expression on her face that Claire could not interpret.

  “Now,” Richard said, as they came out into the road. “Where would there be a decent restaurant?”

  “Let’s go to Brighton,” she said. “I’m in a Brighton mood.”

  “No. Not Brighton. Somewhere quiet.”

  She directed him, and they drove for some time in silence. He had come to talk of Grant, and she supposed that soon he would begin to talk of him, and she wondered what he would say if she told him that since Grant had left her at her aunt’s house on Monday morning, she had scarcely given him a thought. To think of him was to find herself edging once more towards problems, and she felt that there had been problems enough. He had made his decision, and so had she, and thinking was an unsettling process. All she had to do was wait. Grant would come back, would put on her ring again, would marry her and take her to Canada.

  The restaurant was an old building set in pleasant gardens. The dining-room opened on to a wide terrace, but the cold driving rain that had begun to fall mocked the array of tables and the gay umbrellas. The bar was overcrowded and noisy, and after glancing into its smoke-laden interior, Richard took Claire’s arm and directed her towards the dining-room. They were given a good table and handed menus as large as fire-screens; Richard, disappearing behind his, gave his whole attention to food and later, behind a wine list, to drink. Then he lit a cigarette, put his arms on the table and studied his companion at leisure.

  “Don’t you ever smoke?” he asked.

  “No. I tried it and didn’t like it. That wasn’t what you brought me out to talk about?”

  “Not altogether. It’s just part of the process of finding out what sort of woman you are.”

  “You ought to know by now. The passive type. I could have taken Grant in hand, managed him, pushed him around— instead of which, I didn’t do anything. I’m still doing it. He took my ring off and said I wasn’t to wear it until I’d decided whether I wanted to go to Canada with him or not, but as it seemed to me that the decision had to be his ..
.”

  “Didn’t you argue with him at all?”

  “No, I didn’t. I’m sick of arguing. If you’re interested, I’m also sick of Grant’s hesitations. It was a relief to hear him saying something definite for a change.”

  “And just so long as it’s definite, you don’t mind whether it’s right for you both—or wrong?”

  “Perhaps,” said Claire, “you don’t—in spite of the impression I gathered from Mrs. Peel—really know very much about women. Roughly, they divide into two kinds: the kind that like bossing their husbands, and the kind that don’t. I’m sorry if I give you the idea that I’m spineless, but Grant seems to like me that way.”

  “When I first saw you—remember that I was looking at you purely as a suitable wife for Grant—I was very happy, not to say uplifted.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You looked a little passionless, but that wasn’t my affair; that was for Grant to sort out. You were beautiful, which meant that he must be longing to marry you quickly. You looked intelligent, which I thought meant that you understood what you’d taken on. Next day, I discovered that you didn’t—and I also discovered that Grant was sunk in a sort of stupor of misery. I think I hoped, when we talked about him in the garden, that you’d treat me as a sort of one-man advisory bureau. I thought you’d understand that, whether you liked me or not, whether you thought the matter had anything to do with me or not, I was the only person in Grant’s life who had ever succeeded in breaking through his protective shell. It had grown round him all his life because he must have known, always—unconsciously, subconsciously—that his mother’s good qualities were all skin deep, and that below them—just below—was a slumbering tiger. He grew up in fear. Not, of course, fear of physical violence, but fear of scenes, of un-obvious but implacable opposition; of mean, shifty tricks to get her own way. Mrs. Peel knew all about it—especially towards the end, when the mask was slipping. You reminded me that she was dead, but I have to remind you that she’s still with Grant. He needed support and protection, in her lifetime, and he still needs it. And when you let Grant send you away, let him make the wrong decisions, you’re not giving it to him. You may tell yourself that you’re just accepting his decision; to me, it looks very much as though you’d run out on him.”