Bell Timson

by Marguerite Steen

  “It sounds as if no one is in ... Ah, here’s ... This is Lady Emily Hope speaking. Could I have a word with Mrs. Timson?” Richard’s nerves had driven him to the other end of the room, where he stood with his hands in his pockets, staring out of the window. The noise of the traffic below drowned the murmur of Emily’s voice on the telephone, but he heard the faint ping of the ben as she replaced the receiver.

  She was coming toward him; he was too stupefied to notice the deep concern on her face, but he started as she laid her hand on his arm.

  “Well?”

  “She is still away — in Hampshire. Dick, Kay is very ill. They think it may be meningitis.”

  PART III - Bell Timson

  Chapter I

  IT SEEMS a long time since I said anything about Mrs. Carpenter; she was my first Mayfair patient, and we had kept in touch, one way or another, for seven or eight years. Not that massage did her any good; you can’t get results when you’re up against three square meals a day, about a gallon of liquor, a couple of pounds of De Bry’s chocolates, and no exercise. She weighed round about thirteen stone — although I’d persuaded her to have colonics. But massage was her hobby; she would lie there yapping happily, while I pummelled her about — and sometimes she wouldn’t be in a mood for pummeling, and we’d just sit and gossip. She had taken something more than a liking, it was a real affection for me, and I think I know why: I was her kind, not only in ideas but in background. She had been a country butcher’s daughter, she confided to me once; then she got into the chorus at Drury Lane, then she married Mr. Carpenter — who, by the way, had gone off with another woman, but he didn’t seem to want her to divorce him, and of course she was much too lazy to bother about it for herself. He had made her a splendid settlement, which she had nearly doubled by clever investments; she was, in fact, one of the richest women I ever knew.

  To be perfectly candid, the society she had got into since her marriage was a bit above her, and with me she felt she was down to sweet earth. If I’d been a woman of no principles I could have made a living out of Mrs. Carpenter, but beyond charging her for every minute of the time I spent with her (which I was obliged to do, or I would have been seriously out of pocket), I never had an unlawful penny out of her. I think she appreciated that, and it helped to build her confidence in me. She gave me some beautiful presents, and she had taken a proper fancy to Jo, whom she met one day when we both happened to be shopping at Jackson’s; she sent her a pedigreed spaniel puppy, which of course won Jo’s heart completely — she was as mad on animals as Laura and I were at her age.

  The only thing Mrs. Carpenter suffered from was boredom, and it must have been sheer boredom that led her to stage a nervous breakdown and get ordered abroad for a change.

  “Goodness me!” I said when she suggested my going with her. “You don’t suppose I can leave my work and come gadding oft on the continent with you?”

  “Remington says it’s that or a nursing home,” sniffed Mrs. Carpenter. She was having a bad attack of self-pity, and her face looked like a great wet strawberry, for she had been crying for hours. But she saw the look in my eye and caught me a smack on my bottom as I was bending over her. “You needn’t think you’re going to get me into that racket shop of yours either. Honest to God! Lizzie Minton says it ran her into more than a hundred a week. It’s a bit thick, you know, Tim, considering she’s one of Remington’s oldest patients.”

  “I suppose she didn’t mention she’d got one of the oldest sets of adhesions either?” I retorted: for Remmy and I were both proud of our job on Lady Minton. “She’d not seen her toes for ten years, and I heard her giving her maid hell the other day for a spot of grease on one of her slippers.”

  That was the way to talk to Mrs. Carpenter; she started to laugh.

  “All right, all right. But look here: I may be a very rich woman, but I’m not going to be cheated into bluing my money on things I get no fun out of. I’ve got the villa at St.-Jean-de-Luz and a houseful of servants eating their heads off: and why should they? I haven’t been out there since before the war; come on, let’s go, you and me —”

  I shook my head.

  “Can’t be done. Why don’t you make up a nice house party and spend a couple of months enjoying yourself, instead of moping about town?”

  She gave me a funny sort of look and hiccupped a sob out of herself before replying.

  “Because I’m sick of feeding people and giving them a good time and having them sneer at me behind my back. I know plenty of people at Biarritz and round there; we’ll get our parties and bridge and people in for cocktails every day — oh, we shan’t want for company when it gets round that the bars open at Les Óleandres!” I was sorry to hear her speak so bitterly; ii was not like Mrs. Carpenter. “Timmy, do come with me,” she begged. “I want my massage, and I’m so miserable, and you’re the only real friend I’ve got.

  As I worked over the great hunches of flesh at the base of her neck I was doing some thinking.

  As usual, I had the girls on my mind. I’d had a nice packet of trouble with Kathleen at the end of her last term at school. They thought it was meningitis, but I got the best man down from town, and he diagnosed the whole thing as some form of neurasthenia. There had been some other nonsense too; Mr. Somervell had come into it, but I am not going to start about that. I took it seriously and worked myself into a state, until Lady Emily came down and had a talk with me. That was a great relief; one hates to think ill of friends. But we decided the friendship had better stop for a while, until Kathleen was old enough to have sense, and although I felt annoyed at having to break off a friendship which meant a good deal in my life, for the sake of a piece of schoolgirl silliness, I agreed with Lady Emily it was the only thing to do in the circumstances. As a matter of fact I blamed the school for the whole business; Katie had got lessons on the brain, and her poor little head was quite turned for a while. They wanted me to try psychoanalysis, but I wasn’t having anything to do with quackery of that kind.

  While I was in the throes of all this George found me the house I had been wanting, in Sutton. It was modern and bright, with a nice piece of garden, and a cornfield at the back, so we were not built in. I had not time to do more than throw the furniture into it; Mrs. Thesiger — now Lady Solness — let me off the remainder of my Plymouth Street lease; I think she was glad to, for she popped some of her own friends into it and charged them double what she was charging me. The new house had belonged to some people from the Lake District, who called it Silverdale; rather a pretty name, I thought. I bought a kind of divan-hammock thing for the garden, and when Kathleen got over her illness (we had her in bed nearly four months), she spent most of the day lying out of doors. Poor Katie; she was good. Never complained or argued about anything, and the way she seemed to cling to me was pathetic; as if I was the one thing in her life. But I was terribly worried about the way she did not seem to get back her spirits, even in Jo’s holidays. Jo was my comfort at that time; she made herself into a little slave for her sister, and her good humor and liveliness were like sunbeams about the house. And of course she was mad about her spaniel, which she christened Beech, because he was a golden cocker: the prettiest thing, with his fringed paws and long, silken ears. We all loved Beech — Kathleen as well; from the very first he was just like another human member of the family.

  “Well, what about it, Tim?” Mrs. Carpenter was asking. I must have been silent for nearly five minutes.

  I pulled myself up, with my loins aching from that beastly bed on which Mrs. Carpenter would have her treatment, though I had told her repeatedly it was not fair to ask anybody to do deep massage on such a thing, and she could just as well have got one of the hospital kind and had it in her dressing room, or somewhere else, if she did not care for the look of it in her own rooms.

  “I’ll come” — I looked her straight in the eye — “if I can fetch the girls as well, and my housekeeper, who looks after Kathleen since she’s been ill. I’ll want our expenses,
for the four of us — and of course my usual fees.” It was a fine piece of impudence, but I knew she wanted me and that money wasn’t anything to her. She had always said she “would like to do something for me,” and now I was giving her the chance. To her credit, she took it. She did look astonished for a minute — as well she might, at my coolness — then her mouth (she had rather a pretty mouth) curled up at the corners.

  “You old pirate! Fetch the whole zoo if you like.” She blew her nose, stopped blubbering, and looked quite happy. “We’ll leave on Monday.” It was Friday when she spoke.

  “No, we won’t,” I told her. “I’ve got to square Remmy and Alice first.” Not that I thought they would make much trouble; it had been arranged Alice was to take her holiday in June or July, and I mine in August, to fit in with school holidays; but Alice had not yet made her plans, and I felt sure she would not mind the changeover. And of course I had to get Jo home from the Towers, because this all took place in the middle of the summer term; but I did not mean to stand for any argument from Miss Maitland. As a matter of fact I had considered removing Jo after Kathleen’s trouble; but there were so many other things to worry about, and I felt I could trust Jo not to bullied into doing more work than she felt like.

  I expected the children to go crazy, but Kathleen took me by surprise.

  “Oh, Mummy, please, I’d much rather stop at home with Susan!” she begged.

  I guessed her illness had made her feel she could not face up to strange places and people, so I just put this quietly aside, remembering the times when every other word was about going abroad and seeing foreign countries and hearing people talk French and whether it sounded like the French they spoke at school! Children are just little weathercocks; every fresh wind blows them a different way.

  “Wait till you see the blue sea and the mimosa Mr. Somervell used to talk about,” I told her. Kathleen closed her eyes and shivered, and I realized what a fool I was to mention Mr. Somervell, for it must make her feel self-conscious, though we’d talked things thoroughly out, and I had told her we all understood it was just part of her illness and nobody would ever give it a thought again.

  She had failed her examination, by the way. Of course she did. More fool me, ever to let her take it. And the next thing, if you please, Jo came rambling home at Easter, babbling about having to take School Certificate if she meant to be a vet! I soon knocked that notion on the head.

  “None of that, my girl! We’ve had enough School Certificate in this family to last us our lifetimes.”

  It didn’t weigh on Jo of course; nothing ever did. She just grinned at me with her mouth full of toffee and said, “That’s all right, Mummy; I can always be a kennel maid.” I thought, All right, she can if she wants to. She had as much of an instinct for animals as her grandfather had.

  I may as well say here that before we had been a fortnight at St.-Jean-de-Luz Kathleen had got over her fancy, and she and Jo were never off the shore: pedaling those water bicycles and riding rubber horses and throwing each other those big striped balls which Susan bought them at the little shop behind the Casino. As a matter of fact this was only one of several things that did not turn out exactly as I had expected.

  Les Óleandres, Mrs. Carpenter’s villa, could not have been lovelier — although it was more like a small palace than my idea (then) of a villa. Coming to it at the end of the long journey (everything as smooth as oil, for we had a courier, and Mrs. Carpenters maid and Susan had a compartment to themselves) was almost like a fairy tale. It stood on a hillside, in the middle of a grove of trees, with a palm avenue leading up to it; we got there when it was almost dark, in a big white car driven by the French chauffeur, Michel, which met us at a station with the funny name of Les Negresses. There was a terrace from which you looked across the sea and could see lights of other villas prickling the hill, farther down. It was my first time abroad, and I was enraptured, and expected Kathleen to be the same; but whether the journey had been too much for her, or she was shy among all the foreign surroundings, she would hardly look at anything and only wanted to go to bed. I thought it was a good idea for both of them, so I packed them off with Susan, and Mrs. Carpenter kindly arranged for trays to be sent to their rooms. I did feel upset when I went up to say good night and found Kathleen crying into her pillow as if her heart would break, but I put it down to excitement and to her weakness after her illness, and felt sure things would be all right in the morning.

  Dinner that night was like something out of a book. The dining room, to start with, reminded me of photographs in Harper’s Bazaar: all white, even the carpets, with an oval table of green glass. The candles were black, each one placed in a small separate ring of water lilies: a very pretty, exotic effect, I thought it, though Mrs. Carpenter kept catching her sleeves in them and cursing. “We won’t have these damn things again!” She spoke to the man who was waiting on us in French, and I saw he was put out and guessed he had spent a lot of time in arranging them. So when dinner was over and we were leaving the dining room I pointed at them and tried out my first bit of French. “Très joli,” I said, having got Kathleen to help me brush up a sentence or two. The man fairly beamed. “Madame est très aimable” he said, and I felt I was getting on-landing a compliment the first time I opened my mouth in a foreign language!

  The most striking thing about the dining room was the wrought-iron gates that went right across one end of it; I had never seen anything like them inside a house before. They might have been park gates, all burnished up. Through them you went down several shallow steps into the salon, which was on the level of the terrace — another white room, all over big satin divans with a fountain in the middle. Mr. Carpenter had brought her here for her honeymoon, she told me, and gave her the whole place as one of her wedding presents. I remembered Harry’s wedding present to me: a string of pearls which he said had belonged to his grandmother. I really believed his tale about their being a family heirloom, until I tried to pawn them! I couldn’t help laughing; it was so like Harry to have pulled a fast one on me, even on our wedding day.

  Knowing Mrs. Carpenter, I guessed (rightly, as it turned out) that we should not be having many evenings to ourselves. I was glad to see her already quite recovered from her depression, the size of a captive balloon in her white chiffon dinner dress, but as happy as a lark — having forgotten all her bitterness about the people who sponged on her in London, and prepared — I knew all the signs — to have a good time. I felt very gay myself; I was having no expenses, the first really carefree holiday I had had since the children were born, and it cheered me to think of the good it would do Kathleen and the fun they would both have, here at the villa, and by the sea with Susan.

  Well, I was a little disappointed, in the morning, to find we were quite a distance from the sea. Les Óleandres was not really at St.-Jean-de-Luz, as I had understood from Mrs. Carpenter, but about a third of the way between it and Biarritz. To get to the sea we had either to get the autobus which passed the gates of the drive or take the car, a privilege I should not have cared often to claim. There was, however, a very swell swimming pool in the grounds, so they would not be deprived of their fun in the water.

  At the end of three or four days, however, I realized I would have to make a change. As I had expected, we were inundated with visitors. Mrs. Carpenter spent the whole of the morning after our arrival on the telephone, cars started arriving, and, instead of just the four of us, twenty-two sat down to lunch. The swimming pool was crowded out for the rest of the afternoon, and, although the girls seemed popular enough, I thought I had better get them out of the way. This was only the beginning; more people turned up for cocktails, and I heard Mrs. Carpenter telling her maid to put out her black gown with the strass design on the corsage, as we would be going to Biarritz after dinner. To cut a long story short, for the rest of the time I was there, there were never less than half a dozen cars parked on the sweep in front of the terrace, and sometimes the drive looked like a Mall for a royal garden p
arty.

  We all choose our own friends, and I got on very well with Mrs. Carpenters; but there is no denying they were a flash lot. Real rastacouères — a word I learned later — and bad hats, some of them; particularly the women. They were all Mme. This and La Duchesse de That and the Princess of What-have-you; but I bet they would have been put to it if any of them had had to produce their marriage lines; or, if they happened to have them, that the names on them would not have been the ones that Gaston, Mrs. Carpenters butler, called out from the top of the drawing-room stairs. It was no business of mine; I agreed with Mrs. Carpenter that they were a very amusing lot, much more fun than the London set, and they were certainly the smartest crowd I had ever found myself among in my life. They were all either very good-looking or ugly in the way foreign women turn into something much more exciting than beauty; and their clothes were dazzling.

  They spent their time harmlessly enough: mainly in gambling — you would have thought they got enough of that, as we were at the Casino practically every night; and of course the amount of liquor they put down would have raised the level of the Atlantic if it had all been drained down the hill! I suspected that one or two of them went in for drugs, but that was their affair. They needed something to keep them going at the pace they had started.

  But a day or two after all this blew up I happened to be at my window, which overlooked the swimming pool, and I saw some goings on that didn’t exactly please me, with Kathleen and Jo shrieking and splashing in the middle of it all. I had already had to speak once or twice, about people slipping the children cocktails on the sly, and I had actually caught Kathleen smoking a cigarette, in a style that showed it was not the first by a long way. She always picked up things like a little parrot, and I saw her putting on a sophisticated manner and several times laughing at jokes which I knew she could not possibly understand; but other people thought she did, of course, and I caught some amused looks that were not very flattering, either to me or to Kathleen.