Faster! Faster! (17 page)

The words Ice, Doctor, Incontrovertible Fact, and Absolute Nonsense rang through the room.

In vain did Frances speak about American icecreams and Sal talk of skating. These red herrings were of no avail.

Copper became more and more angry and Mrs Peel more and more hurt and offended.

From iced water they proceeded to other, less impersonal topics. Mrs Peel, in a lady-like way, reminded her son-in-law of mistakes that he had made at the bridge-table, and of errors of judgment as to the investment of money. Copper retaliated with indignant references to the utter inadequacy of the water-supply at Arling as originally installed by the Peels.

In angry distress Mrs Peel rose to her feet.

“Say what you please about me, Copper, if you can't control your dislike of me, but at least let the sacred memory of the dead be safe from insult.”

“My God, as if I meant———”

“Mother, dear———”

Claudia went to her afflicted parent and led her gently out of the room.

“Copper, you really are an owl,” Sal remarked as the door closed.

“She likes a scene,” said Copper impenitently. “Besides, it's such nonsense. Every sane person knows that ice, in moderation, is
not
unwholesome.”

Although it seemed to Sylvia that the evening would never end, at last she was in her own room, and had flung off her clothes and slipped into her flowered cotton pyjamas and heel-less green slippers.

She brushed her auburn hair with her stiff-bristled brush
until it shone like silk and stood out round her head in a halo.

She hoped ardently that Andrew would think she looked pretty and attractive.

Then her breath caught in her throat with a kind of sob.

As if it mattered—as if it mattered!

One wanted to look pretty and be admired by ordinary people—people who didn't matter.

Andrew was different.

Sylvia knelt down by the bed and hid her face against it. She was not praying consciously, but some fire of inarticulate rapture and gratitude consumed her. Life was wonderful—it was incredible—it
couldn't
be like this always. To be so happy, to love so intensely, was an unendurable ecstasy.

She crouched on the floor, trying to achieve a return to sanity.

Suddenly the clock on the landing outside chimed a single stroke.

It was half-past eleven.

Sylvia sprang to her feet and stood listening.

She knew that her father had not yet gone to bed, but he was in the library downstairs.

She opened her door softly.

Round the corner of the landing was the twisted staircase that led to the attics of Taffy and Maurice. On either side of her were closed doors. A thin line of light beneath one of them revealed that Sal Oliver was still awake. The others were in darkness.

Sylvia moved swiftly and noiselessly down the familiar passage, and down the two shallow steps
that led to the schoolroom. Groping her way in the darkness, she switched on the reading-lamp at the far end of the room and stood waiting.

Quarrendon's approach, when it came, was far from noiseless.

Sylvia heard his door open cautiously, his foot creak upon the boards, and then his slow, careful approach.

A spasm of laughter seized her, born of sheer nervous excitement.

She stood pressed against the wall, her hands raised to her mouth, stifling her laughter.

The cautious, clumsy step came nearer, stumbled, and then halted altogether.

To Sylvia's horror she heard the click of a handle slowly turned.

Was Grandmama coming out of her room, or was Andrew opening the wrong door?

She dared not move.

Then came the sound of a door closing.

An instant later she sprang forward, opened the door that she had purposely left unlatched, and drew Quarrendon into the schoolroom, closing the door noiselessly behind them.

“What
did
you do?”

“I opened the wrong door,” groaned Quarrendon. “I lost my bearings, and I couldn't remember if you'd said the one on the right or the left. But the second I'd turned the handle I knew it was wrong. It felt unfamiliar, and I could hear someone asleep—breathing.”

“Grandmama,” Sylvia gurgled. “Do you think she heard you?”

“I didn't wait to find out. But I shouldn't imagine so.”

“She'll suppose she's had a dream. Oh, Andrew!”

“Oh, my Sylvia!”

“I thought the evening would never, never come to an end.”

Time was, no longer.

At a quarter-past twelve Copper Winsloe woke from dozing on the library sofa, said “Come on, Betsy, time to go to bed,” and moved slowly and heavily upstairs, turning out the lights as he went.

On the landing, to his astonishment, a figure advanced to meet him.

It was Mrs Peel in a wadded grey silk dressing-gown, with a little piece of lace draped round her head and a book in her hand.

“I don't wish to disturb anybody,” said Mrs Peel, “but I'd fallen asleep when I suddenly awoke, and as I awoke something flashed into my mind. It really was most curious. Almost as though something had woken me on purpose. This little book, Copper———”

She held it out to him.

“Page 252,” said Mrs Peel. “There is an article, by a medical man, on the injurious effects of drinking iced water. I haven't read it, or even thought of it, for years. But I awoke—suddenly and abruptly—a thing I never do—as though a voice had called me—and remembered this.”

A solemn triumph sounded in her tones.

Dazed, Copper took the book.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Dr. Pepper's
Scientific Dieting in the Home.
Old-fashioned now, of course, but thoroughly sound in all essentials, that I
do
know. You mustn't think me obstinate,” said Mrs Peel—not very reasonably, Copper felt—“but I really do wish you'd read what Dr. Pepper says. I think it will convince you.”

“Do you?” said Copper. His ill-humour had left him. “Well, p'raps it will. Anyhow, I'll have a look. Iced water isn't any great catch in this country, I suppose.”

Mrs Peel met generosity with generosity.

“Americans certainly do
over-do
it,” she admitted. “Though I must say, in those terrible overheated rooms one can perhaps understand it. Oh dear, I feel it must be very late.”

“It is.”

“Well, good-night Copper. I hope …”

Mrs Peel's hope trailed away indeterminately, but it was evidently of a conciliatory nature.

“Yes, that's all right,” her son-in-law responded. “Let me see you to your room.”

He followed her along the passage.

Suddenly she stopped dead, nearly causing him to walk straight into her, and muttered sepulchrally.

“What?”
said Copper.

“There's somebody in the schoolroom. I distinctly heard a man.”

“How do you know it was a man?”

“I mean a burglar,” Mrs Peel said.

Copper shook his head. He snapped his finger and thumb and Betsy hurried eagerly up.

“She'd have spotted a burglar long ago,” he explained. “But nobody's got any business up there at this hour.”

He strode up to the door of the schoolroom and threw it open.

The little reading-lamp on the desk at the far end of the room was turned on, and showed him Sylvia, leaning back in the old, shabby wicker armchair.

Quarrendon was on his feet facing the door.

“What the devil———” began Copper.

He swung round very quickly—but not quickly enough. Mrs Peel was at his elbow.

“I'm sorry,” Quarrendon said. “I'm afraid I've disturbed the whole house. I was in search of a book, and blundered into the wrong room. I'm extraordinarily stupid at finding my way about.”

“I see,” said his host grimly. “Well, your room is the one on the left, at the end of the passage.” He jerked his head in an odd, backward gesture, as though inviting Quarrendon to return there without delay.

Sylvia rose, looking frail and childish in her thin pyjama-suit.

“I heard a noise———” she began valiantly.

“Not even a dressing-gown,” moaned Mrs Peel.

Copper eyed his daughter strangely.

“You'd better clear off to bed, hadn't you?” he enquired, with none of his wonted irritability.

Sylvia threw him a surprised, grateful look.

“I'm going at once,” she said. “Good-night.”

Her smile was half relieved and half mischievous. They heard her flying down the passage.

Mrs Peel, standing aside, clutched her thick dressing-gown more closely round her.

“I had better leave you,” she said gravely to her son-in-law. Her eye avoided the figure of Quarrendon—who, however, still wore his proper complement of clothing.

“We'd better all leave each other,” Copper said, stifling a yawn. “It'll be morning before we get any sleep, at this rate.”

Mrs Peel, seeming a little bit disappointed that there was to be no scene after all, bowed in a stately fashion and moved away.

Quarrendon immediately went out, and Copper Winsloe extinguished the light.

Always an early riser, Claudia was in the rain-washed garden just before eight on the morning after the storm.

The air was fresh and clear and full of the scents of the country, intensified by the heavy rain.

She stood on the gravelled space outside the front door and looked round, remembering—as she so often did—her own childhood and early youth. It was as a setting for those past selves that she still, invariably, saw Arling.

What a long way she'd travelled since then!

Claudia was thinking of it as Copper came out of the house and joined her.

She turned to him smiling.

“Isn't it lovely?”

“That rain's done good,” he assented, “though it's knocked things about a bit. I say, have you seen your mother yet?”

“No. Is anything the matter?”

“Nothing's the matter, but she's certain to pitch you a long yarn about having found that ass Quarrendon fooling about in the schoolroom last night.”

“In the schoolroom?”

“With Sylvia,” explained her husband. “Silly little fool, there she was, sitting about in her pyjamas, asking for trouble. I must say, girls do some funny things nowadays.”

Claudia's frame of mind as she listened was a strangely complicated one. Intuition and common sense alike told her that there was no question here of a vulgar attempt at seduction. Yet she was both astonished and angered that her husband should so evidently take this same view. She found such perspicacity, in Copper, disconcertingly unexpected.

She assumed a gravity almost portentous.

“Copper, I don't understand. What, exactly, do you mean?”

“Exactly what I said,” he returned impatiently. “I heard someone in the schoolroom at about half-past twelve last night, and went in, and there was Master Quarrendon striking an attitude in the middle of the room, and Sylvia sprawling about
in her pyjamas. I told you I thought he'd fallen for her.”

“But it's—it's undignified, and cheap, and hateful, to have her meeting him like that in the middle of the night. And a man of his age———”

“He ought to know better,” Copper assented, “but there's nothing
in
it, I'll take my oath. I mean, people do these things nowadays don't they, and it doesn't mean a hoot. Damned bad form of course, but then what can you expect of a chap like Quarrendon?”

“It's unnecessary. It's ugly,” said Claudia with decision. “It's not like Sylvia.”

“Girls are all alike, aren't they? I suppose you'd better blow her up, hadn't you?”

“You don't understand. But I'll talk to her—and to him too.”

“Isn't that making too much of it? He can't mean anything serious. I expect the sort of girls he's accustomed to go and sit in men's rooms half the night, jabbering away, and nobody thinks anything of it.”

Copper's tolerance, as unexpected as it was unprecedented, exasperated Claudia almost beyond her powers of self-command.

She stood for a moment stock-still, breathing hard. When she did speak, she had made her voice unusually gentle and restrained.

“You said something about Mother. How does she come into it?”

“That's just sheer dam' bad luck. She was hanging about upstairs wanting to show me some rotten little book or other where she'd found some nonsense
about iced water. So I escorted her back to her bedroom door and she suddenly said there were burglars in the schoolroom and naturally we looked to see. I hustled her off to bed pretty quick, but as you may suppose, she was all ready to believe the worst. She's probably looked up the address of a home for illegitimate kids by this time.”

“Don't, Copper.”

“It's no good being tragic and high-falutin' about it, Claudia. We're not living in the old days-now, and if you stuff up your children with a lot of modern ideas about freedom and living their lives their own way, what can you expect? Especially if you ask chaps like this one to come and stay.”

In a curious way, Copper's reversion to his habitual ungraciousness and habit of blaming his wife however unreasonably for everything that displeased him, helped Claudia to regain her balance,

“I agree with you,” she said in level tones, “that there's nothing in it except that he's obviously attracted, and Sylvia, I suppose, flattered. What would have been called in our day a violent flirtation. (Not that it could ever have taken that form.) I'm sorry Mother knows about any of it.”

“She'll make fearfully heavy weather, I suppose.”

“I'll talk to her.”

“Well, if Quarrendon has any sense he'll clear off to-day. Otherwise, things'll be a bit awkward. But you'd better make Sylvia understand that as long as she lives at home she's got to behave herself. I know there's nothing
wrong
about it, but
there's no sense in making herself cheap.”