Rose in Darkness

by Christianna Brand

  The man who had been at the cinema—was it only two nights ago?—who had said, ‘I enjoyed every minute of it,’ smiling down at her, restoring her gently to her balance, seeming almost reluctant at having to let her go. ‘Oh,’ she cried out, and all her heart lifted up towards him, ‘it’s you! It’s jou!’

  This time he did not immediately put her back on her feet: just stood there holding her, dropping the heavy bag on to the seat beside him, putting his free arm around her to hold her safe and steady, comforting her. ‘Stay quiet,’ he said. ‘You’re all right. You’re safe.’

  But the beating of their close hearts told them both, perhaps, that they were not quite so safe after all.

  The police had been dealt with, the hirsute lady in the loo described all over again, Charley hauled off to confirm yet once more that he had, he had, left the keys in the dashboard, that they really had been stolen and the car immobilised; and had been driven off to the garage in search of duplicates. The doctor had rather commandingly said that Miss Morne had better come back with him till she was ready to return to London and had tucked her into a large, ageing Rover which waited outside the pub, and driven her through Wren’s Hill, past the now immortal cinema and up the steep road to his house, perched on the summit. Nanny, who would have recognised Miss Sari Morne in one minute flat and known all the latest sensational news centring upon her name, had had her second bad night running, what with her toothache, and was taking an afternoon kip, Ena Mee being left in the care of an ancient charlady who knew nothing about film stars and only wondered vaguely, staring up at her, purblind, what the poor young lady had done to the top of her head. Tea and toast were prescribed and Sari shown upstairs for one of the famous wees, from which she returned feeling a new woman and indeed looking it. Phin was waiting for her in the hall. ‘Oughtn’t you to be whizzing round among your patients?’

  ‘No, I’ve been at it since half-past seven this morning when my first began her labour pains, and I think I’m entitled to a rest. I’ve rung the hospital; there’s nothing that can’t be coped with. Come through to the sitting room.’

  It was the sort of room the Eight Best Friends simply hated. ‘Bad Habitat’ Rufie would have called it. A couple of graceful bits of Regency, certainly, but all the rest totally out of tune and all so thought-out and self-conscious. Masses of pseudo-Chinese curtains covered with little people and pagodas and camels and things—no they couldn’t be Chinese, thought Sari, one didn’t have camels in China (or did one?—all that opium and stuff getting carried about)—well, Persian then, and even the bloody lampshade the right sort of lantern shape to fit in with wherever it was... In the midst of it all, a rather stout small girl stood regarding her without love and asked at last, as she sank into a pale brown, blown-up chair that seemed to go down and down for ever like a mushroom gone mad, ‘Why have you got orange moss on your head?’

  ‘I ate too much samphire in my youth,’ said Sari promptly.

  This explanation was apparently acceptable. Ena Meena however continued cagily: ‘Do you live in Grenwidge?’

  ‘No,’ said Sari. She was fond of the kiddywinx in the ordinary way but now all she wanted was to be alone with Phin Devigne and tell him... Tell him... She said somewhat balefully, ‘Why should I?’

  ‘Nanny rang up Mummy and said she thought you did. I could hear, from the landing.’

  ‘Oh did she?’ said Phin, thoughtfully. He looked, Sari thought, decidedly uncomfortable. ‘Well, you see now that she doesn’t.’

  He lived here—but evidently if Nanny wanted to speak to Mummy she had to ring up. Please God, please God, prayed Sari, make him be separated, make him be—available! Phin said carefully: ‘Her mother and I are divorced,’ and to the child, ‘There’s no one who lives in Greenwich, Ena Mee. We went for our picnic to Greenwich Park—just because it was nice there.’

  ‘But it wasn’t,’ said Ena Mee.

  ‘Well, I thought it was going to be. I don’t know anyone living there.’

  ‘Well, then, who did you give the message to?’ said Ena Mee. ‘You said it was a case.’

  ‘Oh, good heavens, you and Nanny are like a pair of Private Eyes. In fact it was a patient and he hadn’t waited in after all as I told you.’

  ‘You mean she hadn’t waited in.’

  ‘There ain’t no flies on the Lamb of God,’ said Sari. As usual after moments of stress, a heady exhilaration was beginning to build up in her. She asked: ‘Would Miss Edge of Sheffield happen to be fluent in French?’

  ‘Is she talking about me?’ said Ena Mee, acutely.

  Phin explained pacifically. ‘The lady’s only asking if you can talk French.’

  ‘No, of course I can’t,’ said Ena Mee crossly. ‘Why does she want to know?’

  ‘Because she has something she wants to tell your father,’ said Sari. ‘I suppose’, she said to Phin in her own perfectly accented French, ‘that we couldn’t just for a moment be free of this articulate dumpling of yours? She could run and have a further chat with Nanny about the lady who receives messages in Gren-widge of a Sunday morning.’

  ‘Yes, well... Ena Mee, darling, this lady is a patient and she has to talk to me. So trot along like a good girl and you and Daddy will have a lovely time together this evening.’

  ‘If she’s a patient, you can’t have an affair with her,’ said Ena Mee, all too evidently quoting. ‘The G.C.M. will be after you if you do.’

  ‘The G.M.C.,’ said Phin, automatically, ‘Now, Ena Mee, that’s enough. Run along, please.’

  ‘Sorry, love,’ said Sari, cursing herself for having alienated the child. ‘I hope we’ll meet again soon.’

  ‘Well, I hope we don’t,’ said Ena Mee, departing with a flounce.

  ‘Oh, dear—I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset her.’

  ‘I don’t think children ever like being—well, mocked at.’

  ‘I know, and I’m truly sorry; it was stupid. But I’m still a bit fraught. I always get this sort of reaction, I kind of do my nut for a bit and things come out before I mean to say them.’

  ‘You’ve had a bad shock,’ he said soberly, though he did not yet understand what the shock had been. It was true that he had been working since early morning. A swift glance through The Times had told him only briefly of the body found in the car; the press had not yet got going, no news had trickled through to him of recent events in the life of Famed Film Star, Sari Morne. She had said in the car simply that someone seemed to have followed her and her friend down from London, for the sole purpose of pinching their car keys...

  ‘Why take just the keys? After all, they’re not much use without the car.’

  ‘No, but similarly, the car’s not much use without the keys,’ she had said darkly. She had seemed badly upset by it, in a state of shock, and now, having dismissed the child, presumably wanted to talk about it. He prompted: ‘You wanted to tell me something?’

  She wanted to tell him that she was in love, had known it ever since that moment in the cinema—even through all the terror and horror of subsequent events, had never quite lost the little warm spark of it, that in that moment had been lighted in her empty heart: she wanted to tell him that she loved him. But now—stupid, stupid to have gone and teased the poor little kid! It had got on her nerves, that was all—so bossy and belligerent, with her Nanny-isms and all that yat about Greenwich. She had lost her head and now the precious moment was spoilt and gone. He was saying again, gently: ‘Something to tell me—?’ and she found herself answering, glancing coldly about her, ‘Only that I do think this is an awful room. That lady didn’t have much taste, did she?’

  ‘The lady has gone,’ he said briefly, hardly seeming to attend.

  ‘Well, I’d sort of worked that out,’ said Sari. She added: ‘And I was glad.’

  He looked at her sharply. He said: ‘I know you’ll think I’m mad, blurting it out like this—but I’ve fallen in love with you.’

  ‘Oh, darling!’ said Sari, joyfully. ‘Me too.’ />
  Charley, ringing up about the return home, accepted without rancour her explanation that she was leaving him flat; that Mr Devigne would put everything right with the police and then, if it got too late, would give her some dinner and drive her back. The Eight never questioned one another’s decisions, which were inclined to be arbitrary in the extreme. ‘All right, darling, I ring up and tell Rufie; better anyway with all newspaper men everywhere, if you are getting back in the dark.’

  So Ena Mee was destined after all not to have a lovely evening with Daddy. ‘We’d better clear out of here,’ said Phin. ‘Nanny will be appearing and the damn woman watches me like a hawk. She wants to take Ena Mee and go and live with my ex. and she’s always trying to catch me out in some sort of misdemeanour.’

  ‘Isn’t it right that a child should live with its mother?’

  ‘I couldn’t let Ena Mee go,’ said Phin. ‘My wife... Well, she can’t help it, she’s psychopathic, that’s all; but they’re terrible people for children to depend upon.’

  ‘What makes a psychopath?’

  ‘Well, they have—no love. They turn only inwards. They just don’t relate to other people, they look through a glass darkly and see their own reflections and nothing more.’

  ‘That’s not very nice for them either?’

  ‘No, it isn’t. They’re lonely people, terribly alone; all by themselves with their mirror-images. I think they’re always trying to be like other people, to feel things like other people do, to care for other people, and they’re bewildered and sometimes frightened because they can’t. That’s Ena, my wife. She can’t help it, she just can’t feel anything about anybody, or feel anything towards anybody—except herself.’

  ‘But you loved her once?’ said Sari.

  ‘Lots of people love Ena—for a little while.’ He helped her into her coat and they went out to the car. ‘We’ll do something very shocking. We’ll go to my consulting rooms. I don’t use them on Monday afternoons; no secretaries or anyone there.’

  ‘Goodness,’ said Sari with blissful simplicity. ‘I’ve never made love before, on a consulting room couch.’

  If this was not entirely true of Phineas Devigne, he failed to break out into any welter of confession. Not that Sari would have complained. The past was the past.

  The past was the past; but today was today and in his arms the lonely, ever-seeking heart found peace and security at last and—surely—for ever. The shifting circle of the Eight Best Friends had supported her for so long—so fond, so close-knit, and yet a thing of fantasy, after all, a ring of bean-shoots growing in a saucer of water that had no deep roots striking down into solid ground. Its essential had been, perhaps, that its members were people alone—let anyone forge close ties elsewhere, and unconsciously, he drifted away from the group, unconsciously was allowed to go, was edged out. That the ring had centred upon Sari had been more or less fortuitous: her flat was large and uninhibited by difficult neighbours, she had often more money and always more leisure than the rest, and of late, together with Rufie, had offered a more positive core than the others, each on his own, might do. But now...

  But now she was close, close in his arms; and safe in his love, poured out to him all her heart. Things she had never told anyone, she told him now. The aeroplane crash, the falling, falling; the crying out for her mother and father; the brave hands snatching her back from the flames, the hateful aunt, cold and unsympathetic; the years of enslavement on a pilgrimage about Europe in the restless search for health. ‘She was madly neurotic, one awful hydro after another with me stuck in boarding schools—and foreign boarding schools, mind you!—for a few weeks or a few months and then dragged away and off to another one, while she gagged down more waters or wallowed in more mud. And of course in the end, poor thing, it killed her!’ And the funeral and the meeting with Solon and the film ê

  ‘You were so marvellous! I remember it so well, though it’s...’ He broke off and said a bit hurriedly, ‘Well, of course, you know. That’s where we—’

  ‘Caught fire,’ said Sari, and indeed all her heart was aflame.

  Evening had come. He telephoned home and spoke first to Ena Mee and then to Nanny. ‘I’ve explained to Ena Mee, Nanny—I’ve got this difficult case and I think it may take a long time. Ena Mee understands.’ Nanny, having heard from Ena Mee all about the orange-moss lady, also understood perfectly. ‘So something special for supper and I’ll give her a treat tomorrow, promise, promise, to make up.’ There was a lovely little, rather chichi pub that Sari had passed between Wren’s Hill and London, called the Heavenly Angel, but he seemed oddly resistant to the idea of going there and they went to some other place he’d heard of. She didn’t care, she’d have gone to supper with him in hell... Only more of a sort of grill room there, she supposed. ‘Devilled bones—’

  ‘Soul Lucifer—’

  ‘Crime Brûlée—’

  ‘Open up a bottle of the Graves, Alphonse!’

  ‘Or you could always take the table d’hôte—’

  But it was a dull place, really; a rather ordinary little place, only splashed with the golden joy of his presence there with her. Of his own past, he said very little: what was there to tell? The clever young man with a great potential, falling too soon for the wiles of a siren, accepting something less than a little patience might have promised him: not waiting for a consultancy in one of the great teaching hospitals, settling for less distinction and earlier profit, so as to establish a home for importunate Ena, to be filled with Bad Habitat. Long after disillusionment had set in, he had, to provide himself with a life-line to cling to, blackmailed her into reluctant production of Ena Mee; whereafter she had pursued her conduct of endless affairs, all abruptly concluded by the gentlemen, to her continuing astonishment—until at last Ronald had appeared on the scene and the final divorce. ‘And you?’

  ‘Well, there was Aldo.’ And she told him about Aldo, son of the magnificent Grand Duke Lorenzo, of San Juan el Pirata, and his heir. ‘I suppose it all went to my head. We were both only kids. But I think now... I think that Aldo was one of those people you were talking about—like your Ena. It was just like you said—one could love him very much—for a little while. And very soon, he didn’t love me at all. But meanwhile, we’d gone off secretly and got married.’ And because it was Phin, because it was ‘for ever’—she forced herself to talk about the ring.

  The great diamond betrothal ring of the Grand Ducal family of San Juan el Pirata. ‘Probably loot left over from the original old pirate who seized the island; but anyway, ap-solutely priceless. And they’re still pretty feudal over there, they seem to think that without this wretched ring, a marriage is more or less illegal.’ There were extra jewels that slotted into the original as the marriage got weaving, ‘Rubies for the espousal, a good woman is above and all that, and then a vast great emerald for the first boy and a ditto sapphire for the first girl and then minor emeralds and sapphires all down along the line—what the thing must have looked like by the time they had a large family,’ said Sari, ‘I simply can’t imagine. But the first bits were pretty terrific.’

  ‘He did give it to you then?’

  ‘Well—he got hold of it. He went home to get permission to marry me: he must have been mad because nowadays despite the piratical background, they’re too twin-set-and-pearls for words—he’d just escaped from Eton or Winchester or some- where and was supposed to be nose-to-grindstone, finishing his education in Rome; but of course he wasn’t even bending over, he met a girl who was working on the picture, she’s a great, great chum of mine these days—you’ll meet her; terrifically fat, she is, but in those days quite the sylph, and, anyway, she brought him to the studio and that’s where he met me. But of course they were hardly about to let him marry some little film starlet, and he’s petrified of his father; he never got around to asking. He just quietly abstracted the ring from his mother’s trinket box which seems to be about the size of the average house, and skipped off back to me in Rome. I didn’
t realise it then,’ said Sari, ‘but I think it was then that they began to follow me.’

  ‘His parents?’

  ‘I think they put their Mafia on to us. The Red Mafia, it’s called, even in Italy. I think they’ve been dogging me ever since.’

  ‘That’s why—this business of the car keys this afternoon—?’

  ‘Yes, well, after poor Vi—’ But a waiter interrupted then, putting dishes on the table and, already regretting marring their happiness by so horrific a subject, she returned to the earlier subject. ‘So then, complete with ring, we were married, and I must say, I did play the studio up; and to be fair, I really thought that once the film was finished, it was finished. But then in about five minutes flat, I’d found Aldo out—and what you said today does so much explain it—and he just went off back to San Juan and left me on my poor little tod. But the company had had it, and I never made a picture again—just my one poor little film.’

  ‘You were wonderful. Look how you’re still remembered!’

  ‘Well, I think that’s what Etho feels. I’m sure he’d like to get me back working, but they still refuse to take me. And I’m under contract; I can’t work anywhere else.’

  ‘Etho—?’

  ‘Oh, you’ll meet him too; he’s the first, the best—founder member, really, of the Eight Best Friends, him and Sofy. I think he was told to get me back to England and set me on my feet again; they didn’t want a lot of talk, I suppose, and then people realising what a lot of stand-in work had been done on the picture. Like that poor Carole Lombard after she died—back views, huge hats and all that.’

  ‘And Aldo?’

  ‘Cleared out, and then a secret letter, saying they hadn’t discovered the loss of the ring and to send it back to him. He seemed to think a registered envelope would do nicely but I didn’t happen to have one by me at the time and I just didn’t answer. So nothing happened until this engagement and they must have discovered it was missing, and they sussed out my solicitor but I just told him to tell them I hadn’t got it and I had no idea where it was, Aldo was the last to have had it...