"There's been flooding before down there," David went on.
"Flooding?" she whispered, and her eyes looked frightened.
"Yes, miss. There were rowing boats out, taking food and supplies to people. The valleys were like regular rivers, floating with trees and dead beasts from off the farms. And you should have seen the roads! You couldn't get a wheel over them!"
Lygia shivered and her glance went to the front door, as though she looked beyond it to a dark road, stretching down to the enraged sea.
"Er, the doctor made good time, miss," David said, and as her eyes came to his face, he added, with a rather sly, knowing note in his voice: "He got back from Plymouth about twenty minutes ago. If you're wanting him, miss, I think he's in the drawing-room with Mrs. Chase."
He crossed the hall, like a tall, thin shadow, and passed through the baize door that led kitchenwards. As the sound of the closing door died away and only the ticking of the hall clock could be heard, and out there in the night the wild threshing of rain, Lygia became filled with the urge to escape upstairs, before Avery discovered her. There was such a lot to be said —and she couldn't say it all tonight! Not tonight!
She darted to the stairs and was running up them when, down in the hall, she heard a door open. There were footsteps, that halted in surprise. "Well," a voice said, "it's about time you showed up!"
Lygia stopped dead on the stairs. She slowly turned about and met Gerda's blue eyes. They travelled over Lygia's crumpled skirt and took in the fleece-lined windcheater that hung to the boyish hips and almost obscured the pointed face in its collar. "You look a mess!" she commented. "Where the devil have you been? You've missed dinner."
"I—I got caught in the rain." Lygia stood on the stairs above Gerda and her hands were so tightly clenched in the pockets of the wind-cheater, her fingernails were biting into her palms. She began to turn away from Gerda, in a hunted way. "I—I must go and change. It doesn't matter about dinner."
"Avery's back from his conference, you know."
"Yes, David told me."
"You had him worried—Avery, I mean." Gerda laughed, and then she stopped laughing and once again her eyes went over Lygia. In a voice that was suddenly deadly, she said: "That's a man's wind-cheater you have on! I believe it's Robert's! It is Robert's, isn't it?"
And Lygia, with no strength left in her tonight for further fighting, dumbly nodded her head.
Gerda's scarlet fingernails sank into the cream cloth of her skirt like bloodied claws. "You creeping little cat —you've been over at the cottage—for hours! Haven't you?"
Thunder snarled and roared, accompanying those staccato accusations, and Lygia drew back against the stair rail, thin and unnerved and a little sick. "W-we only had tea together, and—and it wasn't hours," she protested. "It wasn't hours, Gerda. You don't have to look at me like that!"
"I'd like to kill you! How dare you go slinking over there! How dare you!" The words rang ugly and loud round the hall, and they must have penetrated the doors of the drawing-room for, suddenly and sharply, they swung open and Avery was standing there, tall and stern.
"What's the matter, Gerda?" He stared across the hall at her, then his glance swung upwards, fixing upon Lygia.
The dark oak of the stairs framed her. Both the lighting and the shadow seemed caught in her long eyes and shadow beneath her cheekbones emphasized their high, fragile pitch. She looked unreal, without substance, like something the night and the storm had conjured.
"Where have you been, Lygia?" he asked.
"You might well ask that!" Gerda said to him. Her eyes were blazing with temper and she looked on the verge of leaping up the stairs after Lygia. She did, in fact, take a step towards the stairs and Avery caught at her arm. "What are you talking about?" he demanded.
"That—that whey-faced little cat up there," Gerda stormed, looking up the stairs, "has been with Robert. She's been over at the cottage all the afternoon. Ask her! Go on, ask her!"
An expression of quick distaste went across Avery's blond face; distaste occasioned both by what Gerda had said and the almost deranged way she had said it. "I hardly think that's possible, Gerda," he objected.
"I tell you—"
But he turned from her pointedly. "Won't you come down?" he said to Lygia.
There was no anger in the voice he used to her, but the squared base to his jaw, and the way he planted one foot upon the bottom stair, made him seem masterful and not to be denied, and this so increased Lygia's nervousness that as she went to obey him, to go down to him, one of her muddied brogues skidded sideways on the well waxed stairs, and she fell against the stair rail. A little hurt cry broke from her, for she had hit the side of her left eye, and the next moment Avery had leapt the few stairs that separated them and with concern was lifting her to her feet.
"I'm sorry, Lygia—"
"It's all right." Embarrassed, she tried to pull free of his hands. "It isn't anything."
"But, my dear, your face is marked!" He examined the little mark. His, touch was feather-light, but at the same time there was an unmistakable hint of possessive-ness, almost of intimacy, in the way his fingers touched her, and this, in front of Gerda, was more than Lygia could bear. She gave a desperate little twist and broke free of Avery. She ran down the stairs. She had no positive idea where she was going, but when she suddenly ran into a silver blade of lightning, thrusting through one of the hall windows, she pulled up sharply.
Mrs. Chase faced her from the doorway of the drawing-room. The jetty eyes, behind the gold-rimmed spectacles, held humour tinged with enquiry and Lygia knew at once that the old lady had heard what Gerda had said about Robert and the cottage.
"You're not going out into the storm, are you?" she asked dryly.
Lygia stood before her, putting Mrs. Chase in mind of a field creature, run to the end of its strength and desperately in need of a place where it might crouch with its wounds. "Come in here by the fire," Mrs. Chase ordered. "You look like a frozen thing."
"Yes—I am cold." Lygia walked to the fire and stood there dully. The flames leapt, curling round the logs, and Lygia's body grew taut and waiting as mimosa perfume sweetened the air and Gerda came into the room, followed by Avery. "I caught her creeping into the house like some damn sneak-thief," Gerda was saying. "She's been to the cottage all right, and you'll notice she picked a time when you wouldn't be at home."
And Lygia, gazing down into the fire, found herself suddenly irritated by all this fuss. She had been to the cottage. She had eaten a meal with Robert. He had kissed her, it was true, but in anger, not in passion…
"Well, Lygia," Avery was watching her; she could feel his eyes like a touch, "have you been to the cottage?"
"Yes." She spoke tiredly.
"And what happened?" he asked, and she caught her breath at the question, and at the sudden white stains of temper that flared up the sides of his well-shaped nose. This was the first time she had seen him in a temper and, like that cynical little smile he had smiled at his grandmother the other evening, it brought to him a look of Robert, despite his much lighter colouring.
"We had tea together," Lygia said quietly. "He was quite kind—"
"Kind? Bob? I don't believe it! You've never got on with him," Avery said sharply. "What on earth did you—what did you talk about?"
"I think we talked about the theatre mostly."
"Good lord! What do you know about the theatre?"
This was her cue and her heart seemed to come into her throat, just as it always did, she remembered now, in that infinitesimal moment before she walked out before a theatre audience. "I know quite a bit, Avery," she said. "At least, about the repertory theatre. You see—my memory has come back and I know now that I've been in repertory most of my life."
Room sounds, small sounds, seemed to explode in the aftermath of that bombshell of Lygia's. A hiss of surprise came from Gerda. The logs in the fireplace crackled loudly, and the tapestry couch gave a creak as Mrs. Chase leant forward, the r
ims of her spectacles catching the light as she peered hard and sharp at Lygia.
"You're an—actress?" Avery exclaimed.
"Yes," she said, and she knew that because of Robert, Avery did not like her revelation. An actress! He had said the word as though he pushed something obnoxious away from him.
"I—see." His glance swept her from head to foot. "Well, you'd better tell us all about it, hadn't you?"
Her hands had begun to shake, so she pushed them deep into the pockets of Robert's wind-cheater and she stood in a defensive attitude, there on the Aubusson rug, with her hair untidily tumbled and that bruise beside her eye showing darkly. Her words came like stumbling footsteps in the dark as she told these three people what had to be told, and perhaps it was inevitable that towards the close of her recital, Avery should say to her, again in that cold, stranger's voice: "So that mark on your finger came from a stage wedding ring, eh?"
"Yes, Avery." She gazed down at her brogues, deep in the pile of the Aubusson rug, and her colourless skin bloomed with a sudden, rather desperate pink as she remembered her second evening here at Chase, when Avery had held her hand so tightly and looked so concerned about that ring mark on the third finger of her left hand.
"We take it, then," Avery went on, "that this fellow —did you say his name was Downham?—thought, or wanted to think, that you had left the company on account of that—that scene in the dressing-room, hence his failure to report your disappearance to the police?"
"Yes. He was that type." She bit her lip. "He wouldn't want the rest of the company to know—well, that I had objected to his a-attentions. I imagine, when I didn't turn up at the railway station the following morning, he told the company I had quitted."
Avery brooded on this. "Of course," he said, after a moment or two, "it was inevitable that you'd regain your memory, but I can't help thinking it rather ironical that this should have happened at Bob's cottage. I mean, knowing the attitude he has chosen to adopt all along about your amnesia." Avery watched her, with eyes that were suddenly clinical and detached; eyes that undoubtedly belonged to the dark, impeccable suiting he wore tonight, revealing a new Avery, and yet an old one; showing her the Harley Street consultant, clever, distant, and wrapped in gravity.
"Disturbed emotions trigger off these hysterical conditions of the mind," he said, his voice as clinically detached as his eyes, "and the culminating point of the condition is usually reached when the act which caused the trouble is repeated. Tell me, Lygia, did Bob try to make love to you?"
"Really, Avery," Mrs. Chase shifted restlessly on the tapestry couch, twitching her black skirt with a hand on which the great ruby seemed extra sombre tonight, "I don't think there's any need for an inquisition. The main thing is that the child is now herself again, never mind what might have triggered it off!" She looked at Lygia. "What are your plans, child? Will you go back to Torquay and gather up the threads, as it were?"
"Yes, Mrs. Chase, I am going back." Lygia was grateful for the old lady's show of sympathy; it made up a little for Avery's unexpected lack of it. It helped her to say to him: "I shall go in the morning, if you don't mind putting me up for one more night?"
"I've never minded putting you up, Lygia, you know that. And all this—tonight—" he gestured clumsily— "it alters nothing. You don't have to go."
"All—this—tonight?" These were the only words she had heard and she echoed them in a dull way, while thunder rattled the terrace-doors and several clots of wet soot showered down the chimney into the fire, breaking into a smoke that stung the nostrils. "You mean, I suppose, my visit to Robert's cottage and what you evidently think took place there?" A quick, half-exasperated sigh escaped from her and she pushed the dark hair back from her eyes in a way that was wearily adult and yet at the same time childishly sad. "Would it be any use my saying that Robert and I have not seduced one another?" she asked.
"Lygia!"
"Oh, don't look at me like that!" she cried back. "I'm not a child, saying a naughty word. I'm just putting into words what you're thinking, that's all." Then she was running past him to the drawing-room doors and when he moved, as though to go after her, his grandmother caught at his arm. Thunder rolled low over the house and the curtains at the terrace-doors ballooned out, as though giving entrance to something unseen, then they re-settled and Lygia could be heard running across the hall to the stairs.
"Yes, let the child go," Mrs. Chase said. "Let her go for now—if you love her."
Avery ran a restless hand over his blond hair and his eyes weren't clinical now. They were baffled and very male as he stared at the doors through which Lygia had fled, leaving them half-open behind her. "Love?" he said. "What the devil is love?"
"It's believing in people when they're least to be believed in," his grandmother told him simply.
"But, Gran," he regarded the lined old face below his in an angry, helpless way, "see it my way! She lost her memory because a man made love to her — she regains it at Bob's cottage! Why, in God's name, did she go there, when all along he's been as hostile and suspicious as—as some darn dog awaiting his opportunity to bite her?"
"There's such a thing as curiosity, you know." Mrs. Chase spoke thoughtfully. Then that sardonic dryness of hers came into her voice. "I'm a bit ancient now, it's true, but I haven't quite forgotten what it's like to be a young girl. Girls are incurable kittens, Avery. They love to poke their noses into other people's baskets, especially when those baskets are deep and dark and possibly hiding a few mysterious secrets. Well, our young Lygia has presumably poked her nose and had it nipped. Robert wouldn't do more than nip—a kitten." Mrs. Chase glanced sideways at Gerda and a rather malicious glint came into her jetty eyes. "I think we might safely say that he does draw the line at seducing teenagers."
Gerda gazed back at the old lady through her painted lashes and there flared between these two the hostility of women who love the same man for very different reasons. Then Gerda erupted. "Are you implying that I've let Robert seduce me?" she demanded angrily.
"My dear girl," Mrs. Chase regarded Gerda with Robert's own onyx stare, "you're the one who's fond of implying that. Though why you should want to beats me. In my young days we kept such private stuff to ourselves—to be taken out and looked at in privacy, as it were."
"I—I don't know when I've implied any such thing," Gerda blustered. "Good lord, just because I go over to his cottage—"
"Just so!" Mrs. Chase's eyes were suddenly bright with the triumph of someone who has aimed for a certain goal and scored a direct hit. "Just so, my girl! Yet you were quick to accuse that child upstairs of prostituting herself just because she went over to Robert's cottage. Why, Gerda?" Mrs. Chase almost smiled. "Did you think she might have had more appeal for him—in that way?"
"Oh, I'm not standing here listening to this!" Gerda began to turn away. "You think you can insult people with impunity, Mrs. Chase."
"I'm not the only one, Gerda! I consider it insulting of you to think a grandson of mine would sink low enough to take advantage of a mere child. I should think, as you profess to love Robert, that you might know him—a little. He can be a rogue, but he isn't a knave. He isn't that, whatever else he is, my girl!"
And now, looking suddenly tired, Mrs. Chase gathered a large fold of rustling black skirt into her hand. "Have some supper, Avery, you've had a long drive," she said, and then she walked slowly, but not without a ghost of straight-backed Victorian dignity, from the big room.
Now the thunder had rolled away into the distance and only intermittently did lightning intrude into the darkness of Lygia's bedroom. The rain, too, had lost its earlier ferocity; it no longer lashed the windows and walls of the house, but gurgled into the roof gutters with a slowly diminishing rhythm.
Lygia lay listening to it, and though the altered rhythm quietened her heart, she found she couldn't relax. She was mentally and physically exhausted by all that had happened in the last few hours, but it was the kind of exhaustion which brings restlessness rather tha
n the desire for sleep. She felt she would have given anything to see morning's light come through the windows, banishing this awful night for ever.
She knew her name now. She knew from where she had wandered. Yet there was no comfort in the knowledge, for she had no one to go back to.
Yes, it was back to repertory… there was nothing else.
It was back to Torquay first thing in the morning, to the cafe where she hoped her suitcase, holding her few wordly possessions, still awaited collection. Her Post Office savings book was in that suitcase, and though it had been well dug into, especially in the last eight months, it still held just over twenty pounds. To Lygia, right now, those twenty pounds seemed like a fortune, despite the fact that by the time she redeemed her suitcase, which the cafe proprietor was probably holding in lieu of the four weeks' room rent she owed, she would be left with about sixteen pounds and a few shillings. Still, sixteen pounds were not to be sneezed at; they represented a mite of independence, and food and board until she found work—and they waited for her, she profoundly hoped, at Fred's Cafe.
She stared at the faint outlines of her bedroom windows. There was no more thunder and the night air that blew in past the curtains was damp and earthy. If the holiday season had just been started instead of coming to its close, she might have got herself a job in one of the many restaurants in Torquay. The managements of these places, she reasoned, were surely less concerned with qualifications and capabilities when they were pushed for help, but she doubted whether there was employment in one of them, at this end of the year, for an out-of-work repertory actress, well used to delivering lines, it was true, but quite unused to delivering dinners.
The Strange Waif Page 11