‘Oh dear,’ he told Topsie. ‘Aunt Laura is worried.’
But almost immediately Piers heard a sound coming from his snug next door to the drawing room, the place where he kept his wireless, his papers, his farm bills, and his only other telephone.
For a second he thought it was the wireless playing, so sweet was the singing, but as he and Topsie strolled towards the source of the sound he realised it was nothing more than Trilby singing, and so he found himself quickening his pace until he arrived in the small, sunny room, sliding to a halt in front of Trilby’s stepladder.
‘No, no, shut your eyes.’ She ran across the room in her ballet-style shoes and covered his eyes. ‘No, shut your eyes,’ she repeated. ‘I haven’t quite finished yet. I wanted so much to surprise you.’
Standing in the middle of the room with Topsie leaning against his legs, and the smell of Trilby’s scent vaguely in the air, Piers sighed with gratitude for the day, the hour, and the moment, the matter of Aunt Laura and her obviously troubled state already quite forgotten.
He had a surprise for Trilby too. That was why he had gone to Wells, to come back with something to surprise her, something that he felt sure she would love.
‘Very well, now you can open them – open your eyes.’
He looked round and was duly, if unsurprisingly, and gratifyingly astonished. ‘Now, let me see,’ he teased her, looking round, ‘there’s something different here, isn’t there?’ A touchingly vulnerable look in her eyes told him not to go on being facetious. ‘It is really clever. My chairs, my curtains – everything is the same, only different. You know, you are really very clever, I can see why Aunt Laura dotes on you.’
‘I love this modern turquoise in informal rooms, don’t you? I mean for cushions and things.’
‘Absolutely, and I love you for doing all this.’
Piers caught her up in his arms and kissed her, because one glance told him that everything, books, bills, farming ledger, was where he wanted it, in other words still where it had been, but everything was smarter, tidier.
‘I found this rug, would you believe, in one of the barns?’
‘Of course.’ Piers assumed his most pompous expression, and proceeded to speak in a sermonising vicar’s voice. ‘It is a well known fact that where there are barns in the country there will, necessarily, be found to be furniture. Sometimes even the odd, usually very odd family portrait, sometimes the most valuable rugs, and sometimes even a Ming vase which the cowman has found to be most useful for keeping his various treasured instruments out of harm’s way – gelding irons, calving scissors, docking knife, they will all have inevitably found their way, you may be sure, into the old Ming vase standing in the corner of the feed room.’
‘Ugh, don’t go on, I shall probably faint into a heap.’
‘Now it’s my turn to tell you to shut your eyes.’
Piers disappeared towards the hall, returning a minute or so later with a large parcel which he placed in Trilby’s hands. He could not wait to see her face when she undid the parcel. It had taken him for ever to find, and when he had, he just knew that it was going to be the perfect present for her.
‘All right, you can open your eyes now.’
Trilby stared at the parcel, smiling, but without understanding why she found her heart sinking.
‘Go on, open it.’
She nodded obediently and putting it on the old chintz sofa she cut the string with Piers’s pocket knife and tore off the brown paper.
The box was large and white, quite large enough, in fact quite vast enough, to contain anything. She lifted the lid hoping against hope that it would be velvet for curtains, or silk for a bedroom, because it was quite obviously heavy, but it was not. It was pink, and it was tulle, and it was a dress.
‘I took your measurements from your cotton dress upstairs,’ Piers told her proudly. ‘And there are shoes to match.’ He peered into the box. ‘Shoes. Look,’ he repeated. He put them on the floor, and, taking the dress out of its tissue paper, he held it against her. ‘I don’t think you can do better than redheads in pink, my uncle, Aunt Laura’s husband, always said.’ Piers sighed with satisfaction. ‘It is just – so – good. So good. I say, you are going to be stunning in this.’
Trilby nodded, wordlessly, and then, to their mutual horror, tears started to fall down her face. Piers’ face paled. He had searched and searched, telephoned to shops all over the place, and at last, in Wells of all places, he had found her the perfect dress, and now – she was crying.
‘You don’t like it?’
‘No, I do, I do. It is just so kind of you.’ She put up her arms and kissed him. ‘So, so kind!’
Later he said, ‘You don’t have to wear it if you don’t feel like it, but on Saturday, I thought we could have a party.’ Seeing her face fall, he added, ‘Just the two of us, that kind of party, you know? We can put candles all over the back garden, and you know, I always think, a dress like this – well, as soon as I saw it, I thought that’s a dress to wear outside, on one of our special evenings. You know I really can’t wait to dance with you, wearing that. We will tear up the lawn together – me Fred Astaire, you Ginger Rogers.’ He pounded his chest, gorilla-style.
‘It’ll ruin these shoes. Dancing outside, it will ruin them.’
Piers nodded happily. ‘You bet.’
‘What is the party for?’
Piers sighed this time. ‘Trilby, Trilby – how can you be like that?’ he asked her reproachfully. ‘How can you? There is never a good reason for a really good party, not a really special party. A good party is always only for two, and it must never, ever be for any other reason than love and laughter, or there is no point.’
But first they had to prepare the food.
Trilby made vol au vents, and fried chicken legs, and Piers made mayonnaise which seemed to take hours and hours, but was well worth it once it was done.
Trilby stood back. ‘I can’t wait for dinner,’ she said longingly, surveying their efforts.
‘You’ve really changed, do you know that? When I knew you in London you only picked at your food.’
‘I don’t think that’s true.’
‘It is.’
Piers looked at her. He had green eyes, not blue, and on such a sunny evening as this it seemed to Trilby, momentarily, that he looked a little as if he had come from the woods, a mythical figure who might even have pipes to play which would make her dance too fast until she dropped, or follow him into the deep darkness of the forest from where she would never return.
‘You are really the Piper at the Gates of Dawn, aren’t you?’ she said. ‘That’s who you are.’
He looked at her. ‘I might be.’
A few minutes later, after washing up rather too quickly, they were making love, and not long after that running a bath, and each washing the other’s hair, laughing and talking, when the front doorbell rang.
Trilby, who was still in the bath, her hair clinging damply to her head, busy squeezing a large sponge over a body that she noticed with surprise was already turning brown, bit by little bit, stopped and looked up at Piers.
‘I’ll go.’ Piers wrapped a large, rough white bath towel around his waist and went downstairs. He opened the front door to discover Mabel standing in the old stone porch.
‘Mr Piers.’ She looked momentarily embarrassed. ‘Mr Piers, I thought I ought to call, well, that is, I am here to tell you that I find I shall be unable to come back to work on account – on account of the gallivanting.’
‘I gathered that, Mabel.’
‘I did not want too much water to flow under the bridge without coming and telling you that it is on account of my conscience and nothing else that I am not returning.’
‘Good, Mabel, so now that is off your chest—’
‘Which it is, it is off of my chest now—’
‘Good—’ Piers went to shut the door. ‘Now if you don’t mind I am feeling a trifle cold in only my towel.’
‘But whil
e I am here,’ Mabel put a large foot in the door, and wedged it firmly, her face still sticking through the opening, ‘while I am still here, I thought you would like to see this what was left in the dustbin and found by Harold, Mr Piers. It might be of some considerable interest to you, I thought.’
Piers took the proffered bottle, looked at it, and then promptly gave it back to her.
‘I don’t need this, Mabel, not yet anyway, as you can see.’ He touched his hair briefly. ‘No doubt quite soon, however, if you go on pestering me like this, so, if you don’t mind, perhaps you would like to go?’ He shut the door and locked it, loudly and firmly.
‘What was that?’ Trilby too was now out of the bathroom wrapped only in a towel.
Piers shook his head, and picking up his dressing gown from the bed he said, ‘Oh, nothing, just Mabel suddenly being a pest.’
‘Oh.’
Piers stopped by the bathroom door and told Trilby about the bottle and they both started to laugh.
‘In the country,’ Piers said, eventually, ‘to dye your hair is as much as to declare that you are a prostitute.’
‘So, no more Mabel?’
‘Oh, don’t worry about Mabel, or Harold, they get like this every so often. Once they didn’t come to the house for a week because I used their lawn-mower on a Sunday. It all blows over. Now come on, time to get dressed.’
To appear at the top of some set of stairs and stun the audience below with your glamour and your beauty is always gratifying, but to be dressed by the man who loves you, slowly, carefully, and with love, to see yourself mirrored in his eyes, must be, it seemed to Piers, for a woman to know true sensuality.
‘Why are you trembling?’
‘I – er, I – have never been dressed by a man before. And you? Why are you trembling?’
‘Because I have never dressed a woman before. Before, other women, they always sent me away, never wanted me to see them making themselves up, or . . .’ he kissed each of Trilby’s feet before slowly pulling up the new nylon stockings he had bought for her, snapping her suspenders to the frail and precious nylon tops, ‘or pulling on their stockings. If I could only tell you how I feel about each part of you, but I can’t, so I am dressing each part instead.’
‘Piers. I can’t lie to you—’
He was holding the dress up, still on its hanger.
‘I am not trembling for the same reason as you.’ Trilby’s teeth had started to chatter. ‘In fact I am trembling for quite a different reason.’
‘You’re cold—’ He walked towards her with the dress.
‘No.’ She backed away from him down the room. ‘No, I am trembling because – because I am so afraid.’
Piers frowned. ‘You are afraid of – of what are you afraid?’
‘I am afraid of you doing this, to me, it’s giving me a sort of claustrophobia, or a vertigo, I can’t explain properly. I just know that I’m – I am afraid of wearing a dress like this, and shoes like those.’ She pointed at them, still in their smart box. ‘I am so frightened, but because I love you – I know, I mean I know I must wear them, for your sake, for your sake I must wear them.’
‘You must?’ Piers stared at her, astonished, and Trilby realised at that moment just how utterly nice Piers must be, for he did not say, as other men would, ‘Do you realise how much this dress cost?’ or ‘Do you realise how difficult it was to find this dress?’ He just stood holding up the dress, and laughed, before going on to say quietly, ‘That is why I love you, Trilby. I know now, why I love you, even if I didn’t know before. It is because only you can have a fit about a beautiful new dress!’
‘It’s not that I don’t love it. It’s beautiful and it’s – it’s everything that I want, but I feel it’s something else too, a sort of binding thing, and I don’t want to be bound, not to anything, not ever again.’
‘Tell you what, Trilby.’ Piers put the dress on the bed and kneeling on the floor beside her he put his hands around hers. ‘Tell you what,’ he said again, ‘put on the dress only if you want, put on the shoes only if you want, put on what you would like. If you want to come to our party wearing only your underwear that is perfectly fine too. Everyone must feel happy in their clothes at a party, really, everyone. I know because my mother once sent me to a party wearing a grey shirt, and I never recovered from the embarrassment. I should hate anyone else to feel as I did that day. So. I’ll leave it to you.’
Piers’s reward was that Trilby flung her arms around his neck and hugged him, and in the event she came downstairs in the short, pink, silk tulle dress, her new Titian hair combed out in a more formal way.
Piers, on the other hand, as if to demonstrate his point in full, namely that each of them should choose to wear exactly what they wished, waited for her at the bottom of the stairs wearing his late uncle’s old, faded maroon smoking jacket and a silk shirt and no tie or cravat, while on his legs he wore knee breeches and white stockings. The whole outfit was completed by a pair of faded tennis shoes, and his second reward was to see Trilby bursting into fits of laughter.
Finally they both sat down, side by side on the bare wooden stairs, unable to stop laughing at the success of it all.
As for Trilby, she went barefoot that night so that Piers promptly dubbed her ‘Henny Penny’ because he said she was just like the hen in Beatrix Potter who lost her stockings and went ‘barefoot, barefoot’. They dined and danced, not this time to the sound of the wireless hung precariously outside the bedroom window, but to an old wind-up gramophone that Piers had found and put under the apple tree. It did not matter that most of the records were old seventy-eights from before the war, they danced to them, round and round the apple tree and under the stars, until finally they crept up to bed, leaving the dishes and the glasses spread about the lawn, and Mabel and Harold with all their suspicions thoroughly confirmed.
Except, as Piers had predicted, when they went down the next morning they found that for some reason best known to herself, Mabel had cleared up all the dishes on the lawn, washed them up, and left their breakfast laid and ready to be cooked.
On the table propped against the blue and white teapot there was a note: I will come in to make the tea. MB.
Trilby picked it up and showed it to Piers, who hardly glanced at it.
‘Mabel gives in her notice for religious reasons at least once a week,’ he said airily, flinging some bacon into a frying pan. ‘It’s a hobby with the Burlaps, you’ll find.’
Trilby put the note back on the table feeling absurdly envious. Piers it seemed had everything. A beautiful house, people who looked after him, a healthy outdoor life; everything that anyone sane would long for, Piers already had. She on the other hand sensed that she had only a few weeks.
Chapter Nine
When Lewis read the short note Trilby left for him on the mantelpiece of her bedroom he felt only relief that he was not still employing a maid for her. He had always hated the servants to know too much of his life, and while it was true that they always did know something of what was happening to him, to his certain knowledge none of them had yet known everything.
He took the letter to his own room and burned it. He did this at a terrified, panic-struck speed. It was as if he had murdered Trilby, not simply driven her away. And this despite the fact that her letter had stated that it was her fault, not his. I should never have married you. It’s my fault, not yours.
Those words made Lewis more angry than ever. He found himself staring at them until, if his eyes had been a magnifying glass and his soul the rays of the sun, the sentences would have been burned out of the paper on which they were so carefully written in Trilby’s sloping Italianate handwriting with its beautiful loops and tails.
Once he had calmed himself a little, which took a great deal of pacing up and down with his teeth grinding with fury and his fists clenching and reclenching themselves, he sank down on his own bed, his mind searching, coldly as always, for the best way to handle this piece of news.
The way forward came to him after many minutes. He would handle Trilby’s desertion, her betrayal (for that was how he was gradually coming to see it), in exactly the same way that he would handle any piece of news: he would sit and consider what to do. He would not be panicked, as he had just been panicked into a furious, angry reaction, he would sit and consider this news, Trilby’s news, as if it was just any news, as if it was an item brought to his attention by one of his staff. He would try to be detached. He must remain calm.
After a while he cleared his throat, and, wiping his palms on a white silk handkerchief, he picked up the telephone by his bedside and ordered David Micklethwaite to come round to the house as soon as possible. He made sure that his voice was calm and controlled, because you never quite knew who would listen in, and newspaper staff were not only trained to pick up every nuance, every possibility that might turn into the smallest scrap of news, they were adept at it. As Lewis knew all too well, rumour was the coursing blood of Fleet Street feeding the sinews of fact.
Micklethwaite sounded surprised, and as if he was particularly busy, and therefore more than a little reluctant to leave his desk, which was a good cover, Lewis thought. Naturally, however, because it was Lewis who was asking for him, he agreed to come round as soon as possible. Lewis, of course, made it clear that he wanted to see Micklethwaite on a matter of some urgency, but not of a personal urgency; that could wait until he saw Micklethwaite in person.
‘Come into the garden.’
They always talked in the garden, no matter what the weather; it was the only place where they could guarantee each other total security. Micklethwaite therefore followed Lewis past the perfectly planted early summer borders to the middle of the large expanse of lawn that made up the greater part of Lewis’s London garden.
On the drive over, Micklethwaite had tried to pre-empt what it was that Lewis needed to tell him. He imagined that Lewis, as sometimes happened, must have become excited about some new piece of scandal, wanted to confide in him some government failure, or give him the true version of a spicy story concerning royalty and an actress, or even just an actress. He was therefore wholly unprepared for the look on Lewis’s face when he turned round to confront him for the first time.
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