The Strange Waif

by Violet Winspear

  Toby's Parlour was down an alleyway facing the harbour, and as Robert pushed open the door of the saloon-bar noise gushed towards Lygia like a wave, lifting her on its gay buoyancy and carrying her forward into the laughing, shouting, singing crowd. She saw Gerda almost at once. She was banging away at the yellow keys of an ancient upright piano, her hair gleaming bright under the tarnished lamps that hung from blackened beams, the withering carnations, in the many lapels clustered about her, proclaiming the owners of the lapels as the wedding-party.

  Robert said drawlingly, his onyx eyes still fixed upon the wedding-party and Gerda: "What a happy, homely scene! Love in a saloon-bar, to the immortal strains of a Tin Pan Alley serenade, all wrapped up in a romantic vapour of beer and pickled onions."

  "Are you cynical about everything?" Lygia asked resentfully.

  He arched his eyebrows at her. "Perhaps everything I've so far seen has made me so," he replied.

  "And yet not so many minutes ago you were quoting Shelley," she reminded him. "You said that with him you could at least believe in the things which are nature's."

  "Am I to take it that all this is nature's?" he asked, swinging a scornful hand, indicating the dark runnels of spilled beer on the floor, the groups of loud-laughing fishermen, and the several bloated flies hovering above a plate of ham rolls on top of the piano Gerda was hammering. As Robert's beautiful, scorning hand fell back to his side, the arrogance of his thin face defied her to argue with him.

  At that moment Avery came manoeuvring his tall, tweed-clad figure through the crowd, a tray of drinks held above his blond head and his briar pipe growing from the side of his mouth like a natural attachment. "Lord, what a crush!" he exclaimed as he reached them. "I asked for Cointreau, but I'm sure I've been given something else."

  "As long as it isn't that putrid port." Robert took two of the tiny fluted glasses from the tray and handed one of them to Lygia. It wobbled in her fingers and she heard him laugh, half under his breath and not in a really amused way.

  "What an unsteady little hand," he mocked. "Don't go spilling the precious stuff, not after all the trouble Avery has had getting it. I say, Avery, it's a bit on the red side! Is it port?"

  "I shouldn't be at all surprised." Avery was glancing round him with a frown. "Is this place always so crowded?" he asked.

  "There's a wedding going on." Robert's tone of voice matched his sardonic face. "Toby's Parlour is quite a charming little den when there isn't a wedding going on. Gerda and I come here quite a lot; she likes sitting on those kegs they have up at the bar."

  At that moment Avery spotted Gerda at the pub's ancient upright and his briar pipe nearly fell out of his mouth. "It seems," his teeth took a firmer grip on the stem of his pipe, "it seems that my secretary really lets down her hair when she's with you, Bob. I've known Gerda for four years, we've worked very closely together one way and another, yet I should never have imagined that she could sit at an old piano in the saloon-bar of a pub and bang out the sentimental ditties people will sing at weddings."

  Robert shot a glance over his shoulder at Gerda, and Lygia saw a crease of amusement run up the dark cheek nearest to her. "Will you sing a sentimental ditty at my wedding, old man?" he drawled.

  Avery was looking at his cousin now as though he didn't quite know what to make of him. "You're not— talking seriously, are you, Bob?"

  "What do you think?" Robert asked.

  "I'm darned if I know. Gerda's beautiful; exceptionally beautiful. I should imagine she'd make the perfect wife, and hostess, for a successful actor."

  "There's a clinical lack of romance in that statement," Robert chided. "Is that all you think I am, an actor?"

  "Aren't you?" Avery's eyes had grown amused.

  "Damn it, I have to be!" For a moment Robert's dark eyes were fixed, staring ahead of him. Then he visibly shook himself free of that moment of brooding, immovable abstraction. "I think I'll take Gerda's drink to her," he said. "By the way, Avery, how much do I owe you for the drinks?"

  "Forget it. This is my treat. It's a long while since I've enjoyed the earthy atmosphere of a pub."

  "Are you enjoying it?" An expression of irony came into Robert's eyes as they swept Avery's tweed-clad figure and took note of the way his arm shielded Lygia from the near-by jostlings of a pair of loud-laughing fishermen. For all his lean, hard, blond masculinity and his years in Harley Street, Avery was inherently a gentle person and a lover of country things, and Robert knew that he was hating all this noise and fumes boiling round him in Toby's Parlour. So he said, a trifle roughly: "Don't hang about in here, you two, if you're bored. I'll give your adieux to Gerda."

  As he turned away from them and shouldered his way through the crowd, Avery glanced down at Lygia. A smile just touched the edge of his mouth. "Well, shall we go?" he asked.

  She nodded, and they finished their drinks. But when they reached the door, Avery stood hesitant a moment. "I wonder if Bob and Gerda would like a lift?" he murmured. He glanced back towards the piano, his height enabling him to see over the forest of intervening heads, and Lygia heard him give a slight chuckle. "Bob's relieved Gerda at the piano," he said. "Lord, that's an old one he's playing!"

  The voices of the wedding guests rolled towards the door where Lygia and Avery were standing, and other, near-by voices took up the rollicking refrain:

  "Let him go, let him tarry,

  Let him sink or let him swim,

  He doesn't care for me,

  And I don't care for him.

  He can go and find another

  That I hope he will enjoy,

  For I'm going to marry

  A far nicer boy…"

  As the lights of Brinsham dwindled behind the car, Avery found he was humming that song Robert had played.

  "Bob's a darn puzzle!" he exclaimed suddenly. "Now why should he have that cynical little song on his mind, just after that allusion of his to a possible wedding of his own? Not," Avery gave a scoffing laugh, "that I'm taking much notice of him. It's true that Gerda is an extremely good-looking girl, but there must be dozens like her in Bob's theatrical life. They're toys to him— he doesn't marry any of them!"

  "Perhaps he's in love with Gerda?" Lygia suggested, quietly.

  "Love? Bob? Heaven knows! It's my personal opinion, however, that he isn't the type to make a woman happy, even one he might love. You're frightened of him, aren't you, my dear?" he added suddenly.

  "Frightened?" She shot a nervous little glance at Avery's profile, only dimly discernible in the dashboard light. "W-why should I be frightened?"

  "I—rather think I know," he replied thoughtfully. "I think Bob subconsciously reminds you of the person you're running away from. I believe he has done so all along, right from the first moment the two of you met at Chase!"

  The car came to a standstill and Lygia saw the stone steps of Chase, marked and grooved by time and the many Chase feet which had walked up and down them. She saw the dark glint of mullioned windows through scarves of ivy, and the wide sweep of the terrace. She remembered that day when Robert had taunted her and she had fallen upon the terrace, scattering parcels right and left.

  "You know I'm right, don't you, Lygia?" Avery took hold of her hands and her fingers were like small pieces of ice touching him. "Why else did you feel that he was someone to fear, that first time you met him? Why else did you say, 'something about him frightens me'? The answer's obvious, isn't it?"

  The pines whispered together, and Lygia watched a large bat swoop past the bright beam of the car lights. Yes, she thought, she had said that Robert frightened her. Those had been her very words, and she had meant them. Now, rather inexplicably, they bewildered her; she felt all that they might mean slipping away from her and all that remained was remembrance of the blank, lost darkness of his eyes tonight, when he had said to Avery, "Is that all you think I am, an actor?"

  "Avery," her cold fingers moved within his, restlessly, "I want to know something. I—I want you to tell me how Robert's mother
and father died."

  "I thought you knew, Lygia! It was a yachting accident out in the Bahamas." She heard the puzzled note in his voice and she knew that he was asking himself what possible connection there could be between the long-ago death of an aunt and uncle he had barely known and the circumstances attaching to her loss of memory. All the same, leaning moodily back in his seat, his face obscured by shadow, he resurrected that old family tragedy for her.

  "It was an accident which needn't have happened from all accounts, Lygia. There was a tropical storm brewing at the time, and when Bob's father insisted on taking the yacht out two of the crew refused point blank to board it, assuring him that he was committing suicide. He took no notice. He took the yacht out and hit a reef in the storm and capsized. He and Carmelita were drowned, but by a freakish piece of luck the four members of the crew who did stay aboard were saved. These men, at the inquest, all agreed that there was no reasoning with Stephen Chase that day; they revealed that he and his wife had indulged in one of their frequent quarrels a couple of hours before he decided to take the yacht out." Avery paused for a moment; when he resumed his story, the note of moodiness in his voice had deepened. "The four men all agreed that though the Chases frequently quarrelled, never before had any of them heard Carmelita threaten to leave her husband. 'I cannot, any more, live with a devil,' she said to him. 'You make only a hell for me. I would be better dead.' "

  "And he?" Lygia whispered. "What did he say?"

  Avery stirred, there in the shadows, and Lygia felt the tightening of his fingers about hers. "What did Stephen say? Well, according to those four survivors, and there never seemed any reason to doubt the combined evidence they gave at the inquest, he said he quite agreed with her—she would be better dead!"

  Again a large bat blundered towards the lights of the car, for all the world like a large moth dipping its wings in flame, and as Lygia watched it, the thought came to her that Carmelita Chase had died as a moth dies, destroyed by the very thing it cannot resist.

  "The story, a-about the accident, I suppose it got into the newspapers?" she said.

  "Yes. It was bound to. Stephen Chase was too well-known a playboy. And then, of course, Carmelita had been a well-known dancer before her marriage. She was very beautiful. I saw her here at Chase a couple of times. She was dusky and passionate-looking, like an exotic flower. I remember I was terribly cut up when I heard she was dead. It didn't seem feasible to my twelve-year-old mind that anything so living and lovely could suddenly be inanimate. Like a suddenly broken toy. Or a rose on a stone path, lying asprawl its own petals." Avery drew a sigh. And then he said, in a low voice: "I only hope Gerda knows what she's doing, for I'm very much afraid that in our family history has a curious way of repeating itself."

  CHAPTER FIVE

  A kind of autumnal trance brooded over Chase. The last flickerings of a red-gold sunshine had died out of the sky and twilight, like a grey chiffon, was beginning to settle down over the house.

  Lygia sat on the terrace-wall and the gathering shadows emphasized her youthful aloneness. She was, in fact, so quietly, so immovably blended with the wall that she might have been posing for an invisible portrait painter.

  It was Wednesday. Tomorrow morning Avery was going to Plymouth for the day. A medical conference was being held there and Avery was eager to meet Max Yentis, the well-known Canadian osteopath. Mrs. Chase had revealed to Lygia last night that Avery had been asked to speak at the conference on his own curative findings with regard to rheumatism.

  All at once the ring of high heels sounded on the pavement of the terrace and Lygia stirred out of her immobility. She turned her head and saw Gerda coming towards her. She was holding a lighted cigarette in her right hand and as she drew closer to Lygia, she flicked the ash to the terrace-pavement and the movement was sharp, almost angry.

  "God, am I glad to be out of that library!" she exclaimed. "It's a beastly room to work in. I wish Avery would follow my advice and have that dark old panelling painted a nice blossomy white. Perhaps he'll listen to you, Lygia," she concluded, laughing slightly.

  A tiny fly had settled on Lygia's arm and she carefully blew it away. "I think the panelling's nice as it is," she said. "I should imagine it must be several hundred years old."

  "Everything about this place is old—old!" Once again Gerda flicked ash to the terrace-pavement and Lygia was uncomfortably aware of the blue, mascaraed eyes slipping over her, assessing her, wondering about her. And then she said to Lygia: "What are your plans, your future plans? Do they include Avery by any chance?"

  In an instant Lygia's face had lost its reflective look of enjoyment in the autumnal beauty of darkening sky, tenuous pines, and gracious old house. Her face grew shuttered. "How can I make plans, think of the future, when I know nothing about my past?" she asked.

  "Then tell me something else—" Gerda stared at her through the gathering shadows—"Were you running away from Chase that evening Banker got hurt?"

  "W-why should you think that?" Lygia made her eyes meet Gerda's. "I came back."

  "Yes, you came back, didn't you?" The red eye of Gerda's cigarette swung to her mouth, glowed brightly, then dimmed. "Who was it you couldn't keep away from—Robert or Avery?" She smiled thinly, as she heard Lygia catch her breath. "You ran off, then you came back, bringing the dog. You looked like hell when I saw you in the hall that night. You looked as though you'd been stabbed in the eye yourself."

  "Naturally I was upset!" Lygia gasped. "No one likes to see an animal in pain!"

  Gerda greeted this with a small, unamused laugh. "Especially Robert's animal, eh? Well, let me tell you something, Robert might have been grateful to you that night for doing what you did, lugging that great gold brute back to the house, but don't go making the mistake of thinking anything could come of a momentary flash of gratitude. Your waif-on-the-moor brand of attraction could never appeal to him."

  "I—I don't want to appeal to him!" Lygia almost fell off the terrace-wall in her indignation, and then she stood so braced against it, she might have been trying to thrust her thin, fey body right through the grey stone. "How can you say such a thing?—we both know he dislikes me. You were in the drawing-room that night; you heard the things he said to me."

  "And what things did he say to you on Saturday night?" Gerda asked deliberately. And when Lygia made no reply, Gerda stepped closer to the terrace-wall and the mimosa perfume she was wearing came in a soft wave towards Lygia. "Look here, let's get something straight. You've got Avery all nicely landed on your waif's bait and he's the biggest catch there is around these parts, but I'm damned if you're going to collect Robert as a side-meal. God knows what it is you've got, but I'm warning you not to put it on the end of a line for Robert to come nibbling at… and if you think I sound crude, let me warn you that I can also act crude."

  And in that moment there was no doubting Gerda's assertion; her mouth, which could look so provocative, was now a thin scarlet line, and her blue eyes openly hated Lygia. "I suppose," she went on, "you think I didn't notice the way you were fluttering your long eyelashes at Robert on Saturday night? Well, I did notice, and if you think that when he takes the bait he's satisfied with Avery's gentlemanly hand-holdings and polite conversations, you can start thinking again. Robert's made of rather different stuff from Avery—the word 'no' doesn't belong in his vocabulary. You could keep on saying it till the cows come home, but," she laughed significantly, "he just doesn't listen, my dear."

  She lifted a hand to her gold chignon, the gesture gracefully studied, releasing mimosa perfume from her body again and showing the lush shapeliness of her figure. "Of course, you do realize that I'm speaking from experience, don't you?" she drawled. "You do realize that I have—er—prior claims and that I'm justified in resenting this interest of yours in Robert?"

  "I—I have no interest!" Lygia denied, and she backed away from Gerda, sickened by the things the other girl had said, and the way she underlined them by flaunting the perfections of her body.
"I only want to remember who I am and to get back to—to the place I've come from."

  "The moors?" Gerda mocked. "You came from the moors, didn't you?"

  The wind whispered in the pines and Lygia knew a loneliness that was pain. Gerda spoke of the moors with irony, but what if they held the secret to her lost self? What if there, among those brooding slopes, where the curlews cried over the heather, her lost yesterdays waited to be reclaimed by her?

  And then, within the house, the deep brass of the dressing-gong echoed out and the butt of Gerda's cigarette made a curve over the terrace-wall. "Funny, the way you turned up here," she drawled. "When you come to think of it, it was like a scene out of a play— the wind crying across the moors and you in those theatrical slippers. How long have you been here now? Over a month, surely? Funny—" again that word, huskily emphasized—"that nobody has kicked up a hue and cry about your disappearance, leaving you on Avery's hands like a stray package."

  Those words stayed with Lygia, haunting her at the dinner-table and following her into the drawing-room. Gerda, after borrowing the key to Avery's smaller car, had hurried from the house. "Off to see Robert, I gather?" Mrs. Chase grunted.

  Avery closed the drawing-room doors and stood with his back to them. He smiled as he inclined his head in agreement.

  "I don't want Robert married to that girl. She's pretty but she's limited," Mrs. Chase snapped.

  "She didn't say anything about knocking up the Brinsham Registrar and getting hitched," Avery laughed. He strolled round the tapestry couch and switched on the portable wireless. As dance music flooded into the room, he unexpectedly stretched his hands towards Lygia. "I wonder if you dance—want to try?" he asked.