Classic Love: 7 Vintage Romances

by Dorothy Fletcher

  “Orange juice,” Eric said. “Gin.”

  “Um hum. What else?”

  “Creme de cacao, grenadine and limes.”

  “Not a bad mixture,” the man said. “Maybe I’ll put it on the drink list.”

  I thought of that white winter day, and afterward we had talked, for the first time, of marriage. “I just wish you and the kids got on better,” he said, frowning. “I mean for your sake. I see that wounded look on your face.”

  “I can handle all that,” I said. At that time I had been sure I could.

  “We’ll lick it,” he’d said, confidently. “It’s got to happen, right?”

  “A snap,” I said, sipping my Grinorco. “Between us we can lick the world. Correct me if I’m wrong.”

  “You’re not wrong; we can do it,” he said. “We have everything going for us.”

  “My sentiments exactly. Sloane and Stewart.”

  “Stewart and Sloane,” he amended. “Jeez, I just realized. You won’t even have to change your initials.”

  “Why do you suppose I latched on to you of all people?” I retorted. “With all my expensive Vuitton luggage I should change initials; are you kidding?”

  “You’re a kook.”

  Walking back to the East Side, in the quiet, white world of winter.

  I remembered him saying, after he had gotten me down and rubbed my face in the snow, “Your mascara’s running, you look awful, but I love you even when you have two black eyes.”

  So I didn’t say to Tony, “Don’t go.”

  I said instead, “See you some time tomorrow.”

  “It’s not at all late,” he interjected.

  “As a matter of fact, it’s rather too late. Good night, Tony.”

  So off he went. Maybe some day I’ll regret it, I thought.

  • • •

  What woke me was the slightest of sounds.

  Just the whisper of a sound … a faint rustling in the night, but in view of my hypertensive state, enough to pull me out of an easy sleep.

  I lay, scarcely awake, and listened.

  It was nothing, I finally told myself, and, turning over, closed my eyes again.

  I started to drift off.

  And then —

  A clear and distinct sound in the silence of the night.

  An unaccustomed sound. I had lived in that cottage for weeks, and now knew every quirk of its character: the shutter on the dinette window that had lost a hinge and therefore thudded on a windy night. The whirr of the refrigerator when the motor recharged. The eccentricities of house beams, which groaned softly when the weather changed from hot and damp to cool and dry.

  The sound was not inside the house.

  It came from outside, the part of the house that faced the road, where my car was parked. My bedroom was on the other side of the cottage, its windows the ones at which Tom threw his pebbles, and through which Anthony Cavendish had called to me on those nights when he had made his nocturnal visits. A window was open on the opposite side of the house, and my bedroom windows were open. This afforded cross ventilation, so that I would not have to use the wheezy air conditioner.

  And the sound had come through that other open window.

  For a long while there was utter silence.

  But I was by this time fully alerted, and listening with every nerve tense. I was lying on my back now, still and waiting. Waiting to know if my imagination was playing tricks on me, or if there really was someone outside.

  I could hear the ticking of my bedside clock. The seconds were crawling by like hours. And after a bit, a kind of paralysis set in. As I lay there, I began to feel without will; my eyes were wide open, and staring …

  It was because of the attack in the dark, in Caroline’s house. Otherwise it would have been simply a disturbance, unsettling but not terrifying. I realized, belatedly, that my reaction to that assault on the night of the storm was a delayed one, and that the full impact of it was just now hitting me. I hadn’t taken it in stride, after all … the shock had been dormant in me, but now, as I remembered that clout on my head, coming from nowhere, in the impenetrable dark, I began to shake, and I broke out in a cold sweat.

  There was someone outside the cottage …

  Then I was screaming.

  I had never had occasion to scream before. Nothing had ever happened to make me open my mouth and scream. But I discovered, all in a moment, that when danger lurks in the near distance, you scream, and thought has nothing to do with it.

  I was screaming while I scrambled out of bed and got into a robe, and I was still screaming as I plunged out of the bedroom doorway, and when the light went on in the living room and Tom Lestrange stood there with his hand on the switch I faced him screaming.

  Tom was in pajamas and a bathrobe, and he walked up to me, closed his eyes and winced, and then whammed me across the face.

  I stopped screaming.

  Tom said, “I’m sorry, but I had to do it, Jan.”

  I started talking rapidly. “There was someone outside,” I said jerkily, and turning, pointed. “Out there. I know every sound. It wasn’t inside the house, it was outside. I thought about what you said, Tom, and I’m not leaving. Even more so now. Because first I got hit on the head in the dark and now someone was outside the cottage. In the middle of the night. No one would dare harm me if Eric was here. But you’ve only to be alone and everyone gangs up on you. A woman, of course. No one takes on a man. It’s always a woman. They won’t get the best of me. They can all turn against me, but they won’t drive me away. This is my cottage, I’ve paid for it, and it’s mine and I’m staying put. Period and end of sentence.”

  I said, trembling with rage, “What if I hadn’t waked up? First a conk on the head … now what had been planned for me? Smothered with a pillow or something? Imagine the — ”

  “Jan, please, I don’t want to hit you again,” Tom said anxiously. “But you must stop. You know you’re hysterical. Please, Jan, can’t you stop?”

  “Why should I?” I cried wildly, and then Toussaint walked into the room through the door Tom had left open. Or rather, he was just suddenly there, as if he had appeared after having been blown into the room on a puff of smoke, the devil himself.

  He seemed to fill the room, his massive bulk looming in the doorway, his eyes — even at this hour of the night — concealed behind those dark glasses. He didn’t say anything, just stood there, in an expensive silk robe, probably from Alexander Shields, on Park Avenue.

  It was Tom who spoke. “Jan heard something,” he told the man. “She says it was outside, about over there.”

  Toussaint still said nothing, but he went out again, and I heard him tramping about outside. Then others came surging in through the open door, and I shivered in my thin robe, hating the fact that they had all heard my screams. I felt defenseless and mortified: the fear had retreated, and I was left with my defenses down.

  Garrison was the first there, in a satin-revered bathrobe of a rich maroon shade. There was a cigarette between his lips, and on his face a cold, questioning look.

  “Dad, I’m glad you’re here,” Tom said. “Jan was frightened by someone outside.”

  “Outside where?” Garry asked, in a clipped, chilly voice, and then Bobo showed up, closely followed by the Lester Lestranges, all in nightclothes.

  The only Lestranges who were absent were Caroline and Peter, but both their houses were so far distant from the cottage that it would have been difficult for my cries to have been heard that far away.

  Yet Toussaint was here …

  And Toussaint occupied the apartment above Caroline’s garage.

  He returned in a few minutes, and addressed himself to Garrison. He said, in his dark, sonorous voice, that he had found no sign of any intruder.

  “Anything out of the ordinary?” Garry asked. “Anything that would point to there having been someone loitering about out there?”

  “Nothing,” Toussaint said; then, shrugging those massive should
ers, he cast a quick, contemptuous glance at me, and walked out the door into the night.

  I willed myself back to control. I simply could not let these people, whose antipathy to me had finally revealed itself, see me vulnerable and quaking. I said that, whatever it had been, it was over, and please to go back to bed.

  “You don’t scream your head off about nothing,” Kathy protested, smoothing her sleep-rumpled hair.

  “No,” I agreed. “I thought there was something. But perhaps I was mistaken. I’m sorry about the disturbance.”

  Bobo, sleep puffs under her eyes, asked me if maybe I hadn’t had a bad dream. I said I didn’t think it was that, but since Toussaint had found nothing …

  “You can depend on Toussaint,” Lester said. “You see that he was here before all the rest of us. We’re wonderfully protected by him. We depend a great deal on Toussaint.”

  “Yes,” I said, holding on to the last shreds of my pride and patience. “He was here on the double, which is very reassuring. Please go back to bed now, though. There will be no more screaming. Thanks very much for — ”

  Bobo, with a broad, friendly smile, turned to me. “How about my staying with you for the rest of the night? I’m a quiet sleeper; I won’t bother you. And the bed’s a wide one. We’ll have a nice breakfast in the morning. I’ll make hotcakes.”

  “I wouldn’t think of it, but it’s lovely of you. You’re a nice person, Bobo.”

  “I don’t like seeing you scared,” she said.

  “It’s all right. Really, it’s all right.”

  I watched them trooping out, a retinue trailing Garry. Tom said, lingering, “I could stay, Jan.”

  “Thanks, thanks, but no, love,” I said, and then I was alone again, feeling awful, feeling angry, embarrassed, helpless in the face of their family solidarity and more than ever an intruder in their lives. I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep any more that night, and I made myself some coffee, thought about hitting the bottle, decided against it and tried to read.

  But between me and the page a face kept appearing. Garrison Lestrange’s face.

  The cigarette between his lips. And he hadn’t looked as if he had been awakened out of a sound sleep. There were no sleep puffs under his eyes … he might have just ended a business day, and come home for his evening martini.

  He hadn’t looked like a man who had turned over, in his sleep, and sluggishly oozed out of bed because someone was screaming.

  The rest of them had … except for Toussaint.

  But I didn’t dwell on Toussaint. Once I would have. But not now. I was preoccupied with Garrison Lestrange, with his tirade earlier in the day, his fight with Caroline. About me. The opportunist.

  And young Tom’s saying, “We used to go to Bordeaux for the summer … or the Riviera … some place like that. But things are tight these days. Dad says we have to tighten our belts.”

  A terrible coldness came over me. Suppose something really were to happen to me? Something lethal, for example. A paper or two would note that a young editor had come to grief while vacationing in the Hamptons. The dead woman was strangled by an intruder.

  There would be no onus on the Lestranges. It would be a little publicity for them. “We feel very badly about it … she was a fine girl, had a cheerful personality.”

  When dawn broke, I watched it from the living room. Then, as the colors surged into the magnificence of strong pinks and crimsons, and the splendid hues rayed over the earth and the sea, I opened the back door and went outside to the patio. I sat there smoking, generally a tabu before breakfast, but I inhaled greedily, thankful for the light, and the disappearance of the darkness.

  Every day is a new beginning … every morn is the world made new …

  Then, in my weary state, clumsy from lack of sleep, I got up and bumped into the barbecue grill, nearly overturning it, and, while righting it, I saw that something which had been there before — which was always there, and belonged there — was not there now.

  The can of lighting fluid was missing.

  I canvassed the patio, but the container was nowhere to be seen. On a hunch, and with ripples of chill stippling my skin, I walked around to the side of the house. I looked around under the window from which I had heard the sound in the night; after the Lestranges had left, I had closed it. I would never leave it open again at night, cross ventilation or no. From now on it would be locked, like the others.

  My car stood nearby … and then I saw it.

  It was on the far side of the Triumph. There it was, the stout can of lighting fluid, its cap off.

  I bent down to it, and the sharp smell of kerosene shot into my nostrils, bringing at once the recollection of many steaks and flatfish broiled on the barbecue.

  There was the can of lighting fluid … and something else.

  I drew in my breath.

  The something else was a box of stick matches. My stick matches. EAGLE MATCHES.

  The box was half empty. I had been running out of matches. But there were enough matches in the box still. Enough to —

  I straightened up, and felt the blood rush to my head. I was mesmerized by the lighting fluid, and that box of matches.

  There were enough matches … more than enough … to ignite the fluid had it been splashed over my car. Enough to make a merry blaze.

  And now I knew it hadn’t been my imagination. Or a bad dream. There had been someone outside the cottage last night … and whoever it was had meant to cinder my car … as a final warning.

  And if I didn’t take heed … then the cottage? With me inside it?

  I was quietly methodical. I might be half out of my mind with terror, rage, disbelief and a kind of weird disorientation, but I was in control. There was a drain a few yards away, a small grill for excess water to filter off, and I poured the lighting fluid down that drain. Then I walked over to Garrison Lestrange’s house and placed the empty can on his front steps. It was a kind of message. I know what you tried to do, here’s the evidence.

  After that I lit the matches, one by one, until the last of them had expired. And then I went inside again and got into bed. I slept until noon, when the phone rang. It was Caroline; Tom had told her about the night’s events.

  “Come over immediately,” she said grimly. “I want to get to the bottom of this thing.”

  24.

  Of course there was no way to “get to the bottom of this thing.” I knew, anyway. It had to be Garry who had meant to burn up my car. But I couldn’t tell Caroline that. Caroline was trying to get her strength back, and I would certainly do nothing to impede her recovery. I knew that, when nighttime came, it would be hard going for me, alone in that cottage. But I would not go to sleep there without all the lights burning now. And I couldn’t imagine anyone, with my house blazing with light, trying to sneak up on me — too many of the others were too nearby.

  I was going to stay. It had become a kind of challenge and my Irish was up. I had begun to live on my nerve and my own resources. I was fighting back.

  But I thought, some holiday. Caroline having a stroke, and someone trying to do me in. And Eric leaving me in the lurch.

  That night, alone and with every nerve taut, I went to bed with every light in the place ablaze. Sleep was never more distant. I closed my eyes and light filtered through my shut lids. I opened them and squinted into the glare. Just the same, I told myself, there’s nothing to be nervous about, because all the lights are on; no one would dare.

  But still I couldn’t sleep.

  I did doze once, but woke almost instantly, starting in my sleep. What’s that? I asked myself; I heard the sound of my own voice in the quiet of the country night, and groaned. I really needed rest.

  If I had any sense I’d go home.

  But going home meant something unconscionable. Giving up and going home meant home without Eric. Why didn’t he come back to me? I asked myself, and tears filmed my eyes.

  Then I started, suddenly, in the bed, my heart thudding. I’d heard a slig
ht sound. Just a small sound … but I was awake, and I’d heard it.

  I lay, stiff and quiet, and listened.

  Nothing.

  Well, I was upset, I told myself. So upset that I thought I’d heard a sound.

  I turned to the other side, smoothed the pillow, and closed my eyes.

  Then it came again. I tensed. I had heard something!

  I grew cold, and lay poised for flight. So, even with the lights on, I was in danger.

  I sprang out of bed and flew to the window. Someone was out there … I knew it … and someone wanted to —

  Then I saw him. Quiet, moving stealthily, nearing the window. A dark shadow. I stifled a scream … this time I would bolt out of the house. There would be no more shrieking. This time I would race for Caroline’s house. No one was going to take me by surprise in the dark.

  Moonlight lit the area. In seconds, my fright was gone. It was Tony. It was only Tony. There he stood, watching my window, hesitant and perhaps thinking it over. In spite of what I had said, he had sought me out again. He hadn’t given up.

  I put myself in his place. In his place I probably would have done the same thing. I was still fair game. And why not?

  Eric hadn’t made an appearance. Eric was, for all intents and purposes, out of the picture.

  So why not?

  A sense of assurance, of sweet security, came over me. I was not alone. The others were sleeping, not caring about me, some of them loathing me, some — or one — wanting me frightened … perhaps frightened to death.

  But Tony Cavendish was an outlander like me. He too was not wanted. He too was in alien corn, and he was here, he wanted me.

  To the Lestranges, I was an undesirable, a threat.

  But not to Tony.

  I leaned out the window.

  “Why are you here?” I asked.

  He stood stock still.

  “I thought I told you not to do this again, Tony.”

  Then I heard his voice.

  “Did I wake you, then?”

  “No. You didn’t wake me. I couldn’t sleep. Obviously, neither could you. Just the same — ”

  “Let’s go down to the beach.”

  “What I want to do is sleep for a hundred hours.”