‘Good-bye, good-bye.’ Almost helpless with laughter, Miss Tillings pumped her hand. ‘Oh, wait till I tell the staff about this! You’ve been thinking all this time you must be mad! Oh, it’s a scream – oh, ha-ha-ha!’ She stood in the doorway, shaking like a jolly jelly, laughing at Jo as Bill Edwards rattled her cautiously down the drive, and the idiot in his pen laughed too, mimicking her. This was something he could understand.
At intervals during her journeyings, Jo wondered what they would be thinking at Denbigh Terrace and at the Grand Metropolitan. If she lost her job through not turning up to-day, it would not matter. She was not going back there anyway. She was not Jo Abinger; she wanted nothing of her old life. She must start again, that was the only hope, but how could she? Where should she start, not knowing who she was? She was in a vacuum. She was nobody.
It seemed that Miss Loscoe’s sister was the only person who could help her. If it had not been for that, she would never have gone near her, for she dreaded that she might ask some question that would recreate the horror in the basement flat.
Miss Lily Loscoe lived in two rooms over a King’s Lynn tea-shop, which was convenient, since she could send down for cakes and scones if she had visitors. She gave Jo tea in a room crammed with the collected knick-knacks of her life. There was a glass-fronted cupboard full of china houses and souvenirs of seaside resorts. Harness brasses flanked the fireplace and the mantelpiece was all over vases and piggy-banks and pipe-cleaner dolls. The wallpaper was mercifully hidden by photographs, mostly of groups of nursing staff, or single nurses with the sun on their teeth, their long skirts blowing and their legs and feet very black and large. Two bookshelves were devoted almost entirely to nursing text books, for the halcyon years in hospital had been the best of Miss Loscoe’s life. Now that she was too old to nurse, she had nothing except the idyll of her sister, with which she bored anyone in King’s Lynn who would bother with her, much as Dot Loscoe had once bored people with her.
It was a shock to her to hear who Jo was. Her memory had never been good, and at first, she did not remember the name or the story of the church porch. But when Jo reminded her of the fire, she sat up, quivering and agitated.
‘Let’s have tea,’ she cried, clinging to something safe. ‘Let’s have tea first before we uncover all these old, forgotten things.’ She knew that she had been very upset about that baby for years – something about some trouble she had got into, wasn’t it? She had long ago forgotten; all she knew was that the memory still rankled, and called to mind some injustice.
So: ‘Let’s have tea!’ she cried, and went downstairs to see Miss Rosa about seed cake.
Jo shrugged her shoulders. She was so tired by now, and she had waited so long to hear the truth that she could wait another ten minutes while Miss Loscoe boiled the kettle and got the best tea-set out of the glass cabinet. The rattle of china made her realize that she was hungry. She had not had much to eat since – when was it? – two days ago, when she had had tea in the hell’s kitchen at Denbigh Terrace before changing to go out with Felix. She had had quite a lot to drink. That whisky at Felix’s flat had been the first of many with which she had buoyed herself up on her travels. She had never been into a bar alone before, but she had grown up years in these two days. She had been in and out of more trains, taxis, hotels, and station buffets than ever before in her life.
Over the seed cake, Miss Loscoe, afraid of the past, prattled of the bulbs coming up in the Municipal Park across the road, and how fortunate she was to have it so near, since her feet were ‘silly’ and her legs ‘stupid’.
‘Miss Loscoe.’ Jo put down her cup when at last she could stand it no longer. ‘I’m sorry, but you must tell me. I must know who I am.’
‘What do you mean?’ Lily Loscoe shied away. ‘How should I know? No one knew. You were a foundling, if you’ll pardon the word. Why should you think I know more than anyone else? Why have you come here?’
‘Miss Tillings said you were always talking as if there had been some funny business about me, as if you knew something.’
‘I?’ shrilled Miss Loscoe. ‘I know nothing.’
‘What about this then?’ Jo showed her the cross. ‘Do you know what B.C. stands for, is that it?’
Seeing the crucifix brought it all back. Miss Loscoe remembered now what had rankled. She clapped her hands to her head, the grey, woolly wreck of the once famous red hair. She saw it all. She felt again her shame at having forgotten to label the babies, the terror of the fire, and the humiliating things Mrs Jessop had said to her. She saw now with conviction what at the time she had only thought she saw; Mrs Abinger deliberately placing the cross on the live baby to prove it hers, thus subjecting Nurse Loscoe to the torment of having to tell that young Society man that his niece was dead.
Things had never been the same at Bolt House after that. Mrs Jessop had always held it against her. She had treated her as less than the dust, especially after her interview with the Society baby’s grandmother. It was Miss Loscoe’s private opinion that Mrs Jessop had been quite sorry when she retired, and left her without a whipping boy.
Often and often after the night of the fire, she had chided herself for not speaking up about what she had seen Mrs Abinger do. But having kept her mouth shut in the first place, it was impossible to open it now that the incident was over in all but memory. It was all Mrs Abinger’s fault, and now as one thing after another came back to her over the tea-table with Jo, her resentment of the injustice came back too, stronger than ever, exaggerated by the years.
At last she could get her own back. At last she could tell. She told Jo everything.
She told it in such a muddled way that at first Jo could not understand. She made her go over and over it, until it began to dawn on her that she might be that other baby. She might be a rich girl, of titled family!
She began to be angry. How dared her mother play a trick like that?
‘Robbing me of my birthright, that’s what it amounts to, doesn’t it?’ She leaned forward, and Miss Loscoe leaned forward too, and they eagerly mingled their protests at the injustice of it all. The more they talked, the more certain Jo became that she was that other baby. No wonder her mother had never told her she was not their child. No wonder Jo had always felt restless at home, and known herself too good for the life they wanted her to lead. Small wonder that a grocer’s shop in the Portobello Road irked the soul of a baronet's niece!
After a little more encouragement and two more cups of tea, Miss Loscoe made a great effort and remembered his name. Jo got up at once.
‘I must go,’ she said. ‘I’ve got a train to catch.’
‘Oh, what a shame, just when we were getting on so well together. I thought you’d stay for a bit of supper, and we could go for a stroll in the Park. It doesn’t shut until eight.’ Miss Loscoe was cast down. She did not get many visitors.
She tried to detain Jo at the top of the stairs. ’Your mother is a friend of my sister’s,’ she said. ’Do you ever see Dot? She’s alone now, since Mother died. I’ve often tried to prevail on her to come here, but she always was a loyal Londoner, was Dot. It’s quite a time since I’ve heard from her. How is she?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Jo wildly. ‘Don’t ask me. I haven’t seen her. I must go. Good-bye. Thanks ever so and all that. Goodbye.’
She ran down the stairs, and Miss Loscoe stood at the top and called after her: ’Give her my love if you see her, don’t forget. Tell her to stir her stumps and write. Wait – wait! I’ll give you a note …’
Jo did not stop. She closed her ears. She would not think of Miss Loscoe dead among the furniture in the basement. She need not. Let someone else tell her sister. It was no affair of Jo’s.
The people sipping and nibbling at the little low tables looked up in surprise as she rushed through the tea-room, banged the street door and ran past the window towards the station.
She was in a hurry. She was off to London to see Sir Rodney Cope, Bart.
Part
Two: Joy
1
It had been a satisfactory evening. A civilized evening; the kind of thing to hold on to in these slipping, barbaric times when men went out to dinner in the suits they had worn all day, and people talked of war.
The dinner had been perfect, although there had, of course, been too much salt in the soup. But this incorrigible kink of Alexander’s gave him a certain cachet, a handmade individuality, like a flaw in a priceless piece of glass. The salt in Alexander’s soups had come to be almost a spécialité de la maison. As Rodney could not cure it, he exploited it, and forestalled criticism by calling attention to it as a deliberate thirst-promoter for the good wine that was to follow.
Yes, a pleasant evening. It had been worth producing the 1865 brandy for Kenneth. He had drunk it in silence. Dorrie, as usual, had talked fast and wittily enough for both of them. Charming people. And Sheena, with her mother-of-pearl hair and voice as soft as the draping of her mysterious purple-grape dress … Sheena. He might have dallied with her once. She would still be willing, but Rodney had neither the desire nor the energy for that kind of thing. He had all he wanted without that.
They had teased him to-night about his persistent bachelorhood. ‘A waste of this perfect flat. With your mania for detail, can’t you see it needs a woman to complete the picture, to give it the right smell?’
‘I’d rather have gardenias,’ he had said, stretching a hand to the bowl on the table, not quite touching the flowers for fear of browning them. ‘And she might want my bedroom. Besides, she’d upset Alexander.’
Dorrie had screwed up her beautiful short-sighted eyes at him and said: ‘Roddie, I believe you’re neuter. Everyone knows you’re really not a pansy, whatever they say, but apart from your elegant little abortive affair with Alice Cahill, I’ve never known you lust after a woman. What do you lust after?’
He had winced. ‘Must one lust? Must one strive after the coarser sensations? I’m perfectly happy with what I’ve got. My wants are simple and few.’
Watching him padding softly about the room, turning the Meissen boy and girl towards each other, patting a cushion, straightening a print a fraction of an inch, Dorrie had said: ‘Yes darling, I really believe you are content,’ but she had added: ‘Poor Roddie.’
When they were going, Sheena had murmured at him out of the musky aura in which she moved: ‘Don’t be lonely, Roddie dear.’
Lonely? How could he be lonely with so many friends? How could anyone be lonely in this flat? Only the destitute, waiting for death on packing-cases in tallow-lit basements were lonely. People said that money could not buy happiness. Rodney Cope spent most of his waking hours, and his sleeping ones as well if you count the unconscious influence of silk-smooth linen and a bed like a cloud, proving to himself that it could.
But after his guests had gone, and three floors below the doors slammed and the cars revved up and left Mount Street to silence – what then?
Alexander had gone to bed. Rodney did not keep him up unless he were bringing someone home to supper after the theatre. Lady, the yellow Pekinese, had retired, too, on to her damask cushion and Rodney knew better than to wake her for company. He took some more brandy and sat in the arm-chair which knew his short-legged, unathletic figure like a glove. He looked at the radiogram and wondered whether it was worthwhile getting up to put on the Sibelius Second Symphony. It would mean getting up again in half an hour to turn over the eight records if he wanted to finish the symphony. He looked at the bookcase at least two yards away, and wished that he had chosen a book before he sat down. It was only half-past eleven and he never went to bed before the Empire clock under its glass dome tinkled half-past twelve. He ran his life to a strict time-table, thus giving himself the illusion of having a full enough day to justify his existence.
At a quarter-past eight, Alexander waked him with tea, two Bath Olivers, and the Daily Telegraph, laid out his clothes, and ran his bath. At half-past eight, Rodney shaved, bathed, dressed as far as his waistcoat and put on a dressing-gown for breakfast. Over coffee, a boiled egg, two slices of toast and the marmalade which Rodney imagined was made especially for him, since the grocer sent it in unlabelled earthenware jars, he read his letters and skimmed the surface of The Times. Then Alexander brushed him off and sent him out with Lady to the Park. Back at the flat, he exchanged Lady for The Times and issued forth again to visit one or two shops or ‘little men’ who might be making or procuring something for him. The kind of shops and little men whom Rodney patronized, although they spoke of ‘the esteemed favour of your custom’, gave the impression that the esteem was due to them for consenting to oblige you. Then to the Club to finish The Times, a drink with someone there, and a taxi to keep one of the lunch appointments with which he assiduously filled his diary each week. Alexander did not like him to be in to lunch, except on Sundays, when if he were in town, Rodney always gave one of his little Sunday lunches, with Alexander’s famous Yorkshire pudding and sweet jam omelette.
After lunch, a deck-chair in the Park if fine, or an arm-chair in the Club if wet or cold. A picture gallery, an auction, the cinema, or a little shopping, and then it was time for tea at the flat, the evening paper, a drink, a bath and changing for whatever evening he had arranged for himself. A blank space in his diary or an engagement cancelled at the last minute filled him with horror. He would telephone everyone he knew, even those he did not much like, sooner than dine alone, with Alexander solicitous but subtly reproachful of his master as a social outcast. Bed at half-past twelve with an apple, for he still had nearly all his teeth, or if he were on a late party, half-past one or two at the latest. Rodney often left a night club, like Cinderella, because it was his bedtime. He was too old for youthful abandon, too young for middle-aged doggery. A party was an item in his routine, never a delightfully reprehensible oblivion for which it was worth while paying the price next morning.
Work? But of course he went two or three times a week to the office of the family tobacco business which provided his income. He would read and dictate a few letters, sign anything he was given, and hang about rather wistfully for as long as he was allowed, talking to busy people, getting in the way, trying to make his brother Ned come out to lunch, warning him of gastric ulcers if he persisted in his beer and sandwich habit.
‘Another time, old boy,’ Ned would say, persuading him towards his bowler hat and umbrella, ‘and you really needn’t bother to come in again this week. Look in again next week in case anything comes up.’ Ned did not mind doing all the work of the business. He liked work, and he got on with it much better on his own. Rodney maintained the tone of the family, while Ned maintained its fortunes, and its posterity, for he had one son and two daughters, and a conscientious wife at Weybridge who would not rest until she had another son.
His brother’s family were also part of Rodney’s routine. Ned and Frances dined with him once a week on their cook’s night out, and on Sunday evenings Rodney went to Weybridge by hired car, which he preferred to the trouble of owning one. He took his nephew and nieces to the circus on Boxing Day, and to a box at the pantomime on New Year’s Eve.
That was the pattern of Rodney Cope’s life, and if it did no particular good to anyone, it did nobody any harm. Although it had made him spoiled and egocentric, you could not help liking him, for he was invariably good tempered, and underneath the sybaritic layers with which the world and the flesh had padded him, was the core of a really kind man. He would help anyone who asked him, and he would have helped many more if he had not been too out of touch with the needy to understand who needed helping and how.
He was fond, though nervous, of Ned’s children, gave them costly birthday and Christmas presents and extravagant tips each term, and kept up his subscription to Lord’s not only because of the Eton and Harrow match but to provide rover tickets for the boy.
He would have liked to see more of the children, if only he had known how to entertain them. When they came to the flat, they spent most of the time at the end
of the passage with Alexander.
Sipping and smoking to-night and swinging a dangling pump, waiting in a vacuum of physical well-being for bedtime, Rodney did not know whether to be pleased or irritated when the bell rang. He liked people to drop in on their way home, but it was a long way to the front door.
Jo thought he was the butler. Titled people surely never answered the door themselves, and a baronet’s butler might easily be wearing a maroon velvet dinner jacket.
She was very tired. She had been wearing the same clothes for two days and two nights, both stockings were laddered and the white gloves in which she had been going out to dinner with Felix McOsterburg were too dirty to do more than waggle. She had left her hat somewhere between Bolt Bay and King’s Lynn, but she had done her hair and face in the train to London, and was able now to produce the voice with which she had dazzled the Moores.
‘May I speak to Sir Rodney Cope, please?’ She gave his name an intricate diphthong vowel.
‘I don’t see why not. Actually, you are.’
‘Oh, are you him?’ Jo was a little disappointed. Matron Tillings had talked of a young soldier, a wounded war hero. Even allowing for the passage of years, she had expected a more glamorous figure.
In the drawing-room, perching warily on a brocade chair, she studied him while he mixed a drink for them both at the Chinese lacquer cabinet which lit up when the doors opened to display a profusion of bottles and sparkling glass. She saw a man in the late forties, not stout, but fleshy with years of good food and drink that no exercise had whittled away. His head and his bland, small-pored face resembled an Easter Sunday breakfast egg painted to look human, with thinning, old-gold hair carefully arranged over the top. His inadequate-looking feet and small fat white hands might have been paws, so soft and light were his tread and touch.
Joy and Josephine Page 28