Friendly Young Ladies (7 page)

Last year’s birthday had been just like all the others back to the beginning of time. Leo’s absence had never showed very much. There had only been the small unopened parcel, and the fact that when she had been about to say, “Look, Mother, you’ve forgotten one,” something or other had prevented her.

Elsie went over to the window, and looked out. Leo had suddenly become confusingly vivid, an intruding presence before which Leonora began to grow somewhat cloudy and to dislimn in her mind’s eye. She pushed the memories away. It was Leonora who would prove her to Peter, whom she had promised him to find. Until she had found her, she would be ashamed to write to him again. Decision stiffened her. She walked straight back across the room to the dressing-table, and opened the china box with the Morris rose pattern on the lid. From among the gilt safety-pins and dress-clips inside it she took the little key, bright with much handling, of her mother’s locked, left-hand drawer.

The worn lock opened smoothly. The drawer exhaled its familiar smell, the same since her earliest years, of mystery and romance; a mixture of violet, sandalwood, feathers, eau-de-cologne, and paper, mixed with an indefinable smell that was simply the smell of time. In front of it were the things she had always seen quickly as it opened and shut; the blue leather jewel-case and the two velvet jewellers’ boxes, an oval one for a necklace, an oblong one for a brooch; behind them a tissue parcel, with a torn place in it through which a cluster of pink silk rosebuds showed. Beside this was a fan of flat pink ostrich feathers with mother-of-pearl sticks and, here and there amid the soft down, little scattered silver sequins. Elsie could not resist opening it and watching it wave and glitter; this at any rate could not be very wrong, for she had been allowed to take it out sometimes for a treat. The fan and the rosebuds had always been tangible proof of the glamour with which Mrs. Lane invested the nostalgic stories of her girlhood; the very sight of it evoked kid gloves above the elbow, programmes with gilt edges and tiny silk-tasselled pencils, ruched flounces swaying to the “Merry Widow” waltz.

Underneath it was another tissue parcel. This, Elsie knew, contained the real lace from her mother’s wedding dress. Just beside it lay the wedding prayer book, ivory with a gold cross. It did not seem strange to her to find these objects cherished. Her mother loved weddings, and had often described her own with undimmed delight, as a thing in itself, detached from causes and consequences, like presentation at court. However bitterly she might be lamenting her lot at the time, she never pronounced the words “old maid” without pity and patronage. Elsie thought all this quite natural; she had for years planned her own wedding in minute detail, down to the bridesmaids’ gifts.

She pulled the drawer open a little wider, and saw that the whole back third of it was filled with papers. Her heart quailed. Every one of these dozens of envelopes must contain something very private—or why keep them here?—and to go through them all would not only be a dreadful and shocking thing to do; it would take the rest of the day. The thought of it made her look at her watch in panic, to find that only five minutes had gone since she entered the room. She stared, helplessly, at the neat piles. At least she could rule out the ones on the right. She had often been shown them; they were her mother’s shares. They brought in about fifteen pounds a year, but once they had brought in twenty, and her mother had bought her a silver brush set. She could hardly bear to think of this now. When she had begun to have a career, she decided, she would give her mother a diamond watch.

The next bundle was immensely thick, and tied with pink satin ribbon. The writing at the top looked somehow familiar, like a neater and more flowing version of one she knew. Suddenly she realized that it was her father’s. A prickling sensation, like fear but not quite like, came at the back of her neck. She had sometimes meditated, in a vague bewilderment, that the ivory prayer book and the Maltese lace must have been preceded by some relationship rather different from the one which had conditioned her life since she could remember; but to see, within reach of her hand, this wad of concrete evidence was different. The tidy packet was like a door leading into darkness which both drew and repelled her. The topmost envelope, she saw, had been slit along the edge; it would be possible to peep inside without doing more than slide the ribbon. Even while the thought appalled her, she found herself with the packet in her hand, separating the edges. In the fair, elegant script which, she remembered, her father still used on his professional drawings, she could just see the words, “My own little darling.”

She pushed the packet back into its place, as if it had scorched her. Without being clearly aware of any thought or emotion, she felt tears rushing into her eyes. Scarcely knowing what she did, she straightened the ribbon, wanting nothing in the world but to get the drawer shut, the key back in its box, and herself away. She had already begun to slide the drawer inward when, with eyes almost too blurred to see it, she noticed a little packet, loosely wrapped in brown paper, which had slipped down between the pink silk rosebuds and the shares. She knew with instant certainty that it was what she had come for. Now she had it, she only cared for it as a kind of partial justification.

The packet contained a silk-covered box which came open as she unwrapped it, revealing a little carved button of white and green jade made into a brooch. She would certainly have noticed that if her mother had ever worn it, it was so unlike all her other things. But where was the letter? Perhaps it had been destroyed; perhaps, even, there had never been one. Then she saw that it had come away with the wrapper, like a white lining.

It was quite short, only a sentence. She could have read it in one glance, but, keeping the promise she had made to herself, folded it so that it showed only the signature and the heading. The writing was not as she had imagined it, flowing and delicate, but awkward and firm, with the carelessness that comes of having held a pen too long to treat it tenderly. With a sudden contraction of fear, she knew that her dreams had changed into something real. Over a date which was that of the day before her mother’s birthday, she read, at last, the strange unexpected address.

S
ITTING, AS SHE HAD
been taught, in a corner with her back to the engine, Elsie watched the big rounded trees and smooth hills of the Home Counties hump and swell and recede, listening to the wheels of the train playing the “Soldiers’ Chorus” from
Faust
. “Ta ra-ta-ta-
ta
, ta ra-ta-ta-
ta
, ta
ra
-ta-ta-ta.” Her watch told her that she was within half an hour of her station. She told herself, firmly and frequently, that she was eager to arrive.

She had kept the address for a week, telling herself that she had decided, but doing nothing, while resolution cooled. Then she had said to herself, in excuse, that she was waiting for a sign, while, within her, two conflicting consciences applauded and accused. On the tenth night, the sign had come. She had been in bed, and already growing sleepy, when her mother had come to her room. There had been, of course, a scene downstairs. It had all been, externally, like a dozen other nights; her own leaden, inarticulate efforts to be adequate, the very phrases of her mother’s complaint: but beneath it had been different, a secret taking of the auspices. Every phrase had swung her, forward and back, till almost the last. Her mother had said—and it had seemed new, because it was months since she had last heard it, before anything had begun—“If I hadn’t had to make a home for my children, my life would have been very different.” Elsie had known that it was the sign.

It was she, after all, who had imprisoned her parents, the last chain after Leo had gone. She had the power, not only to seize her destiny, but to set them free. She could almost hear Peter’s voice, pronouncing the words. It did not tell her precisely what use her mother, at close on fifty, would make of her unforeseen liberation; but then, Elsie was equally unsure what she would make of her own. She had a dim vision of some comfortable and charming lady, encountered in a manner not precisely defined, inviting Mrs. Lane to share her home; where, after a few adventurous and successful years ending in marriage, Elsie would join her to be forgiven and thanked, even bringing, perhaps, Leonora and her R.A. for a grand reconciliation scene. As for her father, the freedom from domestic strife might set loose his talents for who knew what creative energy. He might end by designing a cathedral. In the sleepless excitement of that night’s planning, dream had succeeded dream with opium-eating vividness; and the escape had seemed dreamlike and effortless too, the suitcase smuggled out of the house before anyone was astir, and hidden in the bushes up the lane, the lie about spending the day with Phyllis and shopping in Newquay, the letter, containing high sentiments but no clues, handed to the porter at Exeter to post. Then the day-long journey, the longest of her life, with the lovely detachment of all journeys, the sense of suspension between the world before and the world behind, the magical certainty that from the hour marked “depart” to the hour marked “arrive” nothing would be demanded of one, nothing would happen except the smooth scene-shifting of the line.

Now, in half an hour, it would be over. The sun was dipping below the moving horizon. When she got there, it would be almost dark. At the thought of it her dreams grew formless and thin, and a chilly twilight spread over them too. She pulled her coat closer round her, and thought of Peter. Him, at least, she had not imagined.

Above her head on the rack was her large suitcase, beside her on the seat a small one with things for the night; tightly clutched in her lap, her handbag, containing more money than she had ever carried before, nearly five pounds left from her money-box after paying her fare, and the three pounds which, she had found, was all the Post Office had been prepared to part with at short notice. Besides this formidable sum, most of it in notes, was her savings-book entitling her, after due warning, to fourteen pounds ten shillings more. She thought with envy of the canvas belts with which seasoned travellers were said to secure their valuables next the skin.

Opposite her sat a stout man in a navy suit and bowler, smoking a miniature cigar. He had given her the only bad moment of the trip by boarding the carriage at a panting run, just as they left Reading. Her mother had warned her most carefully against men who employed this technique. They did it, after having marked down a woman sitting alone, in order to make sure that it would be too late for her to change her compartment. It was a local train too, with no rescuing corridor. Clammy with panic, and pretending to look fixedly out of the window, she watched him out of the tail of her eye open an attaché case and take out typewritten matter, which he proceeded to mark heavily in pencil. The lid of the case was raised towards her, so that anything might have been inside it still; chloroform, for instance, on a handkerchief, a weapon which played a most important part in her mother’s cautionary tales.

Five minutes later, her worst suspicions were confirmed. They were passing the blank wall of an embankment, and, reflected in the window, she could see that he was looking at her fixedly, and groping in the case at the same time. She shot a lightning glance at the communication cord above her head. Once he had seized her, she would not be able to reach it. But what if she pulled it in time, and when the guard came he pretended to be perfectly innocent? She would have to pay five pounds for its improper use: which would leave her with only half the price of a second pull.

“Excuse me,” said the man.

Elsie turned, with the rigid compulsion of a bird fascinated by a serpent. He was bringing his hand out of the case, and in it was something wrapped in a white cloth. She did not even look at the communication cord. It was too late now; it would only accelerate his spring.

“You’ll pardon a liberty, I hope, miss. But being there’s no tea-car on this train, it crossed my mind if you’d care to help me out with these sandwiches.” He unfolded the wrapping and displayed them, a thick, juicy pile, the top half filled with sardine and the bottom half with egg. Could one drug sardines, and if drugged, did they smell so good? “My better half puts them up for me,” he added apologetically. “Can’t bear to think of me missing my tea. Fact is, if I get a good filling meal at midday, like what I had at Oxford today, they spoil my appetite for my supper, and that upsets her. But she’ll have me on the carpet just the same, if she finds any left.”

“Thank you,” said Elsie, “very much.”

The sandwiches were moist and delicious, most comforting to a stomach frugally sustained since morning with odd cups of tea and buns in railway refreshment rooms. The man lent her the
Daily Mail
, and she responded with
John o’ London
, which she had bought because she had felt it would be a cultured object to have with her on arrival. Her spirits mounted. Here she was, mature and sophisticated, emerging triumphant from a situation fraught with danger, conversing with a strange man on a train, and honour intact. She felt ready to cope with anything, even her destination. Her travelling companion eyed her paternally, between respectful glances at a potted life of George Sand. She reminded him of his own girl at the local high school, but it would have been a bit of a liberty to tell her so.

“Well,” he said, glancing at his watch, “mine’s the next station.” He folded
John o’ London
with a certain alacrity. “Much obliged for the loan of your magazine. Very interesting. I see you’re like my daughter. She’d appreciate a good intellectual paper like this. I must draw her attention to it.”

“Do please take her this one, if she’d like it. I’ve quite finished it, really.”

“Well, that’s very kind, I’m sure. This’ll keep our Doris quiet for the rest of the evening. Doris is the brains of our family. Even in her holiday time she can’t keep away from her books. You’ll be on holiday yourself, I shouldn’t be surprised?”