James Hilton: Collected Novels (86 page)

“She’s just a patient of mine—she broke her wrist.”

“Is she a
lady?”

David wondered, not so much whether she was or not, as whether Jessica would think her one or not. At length he said: “Oh yes, I should say she is.”

“Living by herself?”

“Yes.”

“What sort of family?”

“She hasn’t any.”

“Of course not, silly, if she lives by herself. I meant what kind of family does she come from?”

“I don’t know—I really don’t know much about her affairs.”

“Is she well off?”

“Oh no, on the contrary—in fact—”

“In fact, you’ve already decided not to send her a bill—I thought as much!”

“No, no—I was going to say that she’s quite poorly off—at the moment she’s trying to find work.”

“She wants a job, then? I suppose she’s presentable in appearance?”

“Presentable?”

“Oh, you wouldn’t notice, would you? You never do notice the most obvious things about people. What I’m really wondering is if she’d come here to help with Gerald.”

“You mean to
live
here?”

“Why not, if she wants something to do?”

“Well…”

“You don’t think she’d come?”

“I don’t know…I hadn’t ever thought about it.”

“My dear David, you never think of anything. Give me her address and I’ll write to her.”

“The address…ah, let me see now—I think I can remember it—it’s the Salway Private Hotel, Beach Street.”

“Her name first, stupid—I can’t write without knowing that, can I?”

“Krafft—Leni Krafft.”

“Goodness—it sounds foreign.”

“Oh yes, I forgot to tell you—she
is
foreign—and she doesn’t speak much English.”

“Oh, really now? She’s not a Hottentot, by any chance, or a wild woman from Borneo? You’re always so vague about these things.”

“She’s German.”

“Well, that’s all right. At any rate it might have been worse. The Murdochs always had German governesses. What made her leave Germany?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, I shall write to her, anyhow. I suppose she can understand a letter written in plain English?”

“Oh yes.”

So Leni got a letter written in plain English. It offered her the job of looking after Gerald at a salary of sixty pounds a year if she proved satisfactory after a trial.

Leni came to Calderbury in March. “You’d better meet the train,” said Jessica, “since you’re the one who knows her”; and David said all right, he would if he got through his visits in time; otherwise Susan would have to do the recognizing as best she could. But it happened that he did finish in time, though it was dusk when he reached the station. The station-master nodded as he climbed to the platform.

“Evening, doctor. Off on your travels ?”

“No. I’m just meeting somebody.”

“Train’s late to-night. Only just left the junction. Twenty minutes yet if you’ve anything else to do.”

“No, thanks, I don’t think I have. I’ll just walk up and down.”

“Well, it’s good exercise, they say.”

A laugh—silence—his own footsteps thudding softly on the wooden planks—chimes from the Cathedral—a quarter to five. And as he walked he began to think, really for the first time in his life, about Leni. She was coming to Calderbury. She was coming to live in his house. It was odd the way these things happened.

He watched the darkness fill the sky and absorb the lights of Calderbury into a faint glow over the roof tops. He heard five chimes from the Cathedral, the last stroke blown a little sad by a wind that suddenly veered. Then, with a whang of wire and a small answering clatter, the signal fell. The train emerged from the cutting across the river, clanked over the iron bridge, and came streaking through the water meadows like a familiar friendly ghost. Whereat Calderbury’s one porter held himself ready for the improbable event of any one requiring his services. “G’d evening, doctor.”

They talked for a moment about the porter’s little girl, who had been ill and was now recovering.

The train was in.

“Shall I take ’is luggage, sir?”

“Whose luggage?”

“Your friend’s. Thought you was meeting a friend.”

“Oh yes…but…it’s a lady. I don’t know whether she’ll have any luggage. Well, maybe she will… Yes, take it down!”

She was already stepping out of the train, carrying a suitcase and a wicker basket.

“Leni!”

“Oh, du kleine doktor!”

They didn’t know what else to say to each other at first. There was the business of handing over the luggage, surrendering her ticket, passing the barrier with the small crowd from the train. People who knew David kept up a chorus of good-evenings. On the way down the steps to the street level he said: “Gerald’s looking forward to your arrival.”

Leni exclaimed in German: “I couldn’t believe I was really coming!”

“It was Jessie’s idea—I don’t know why I never thought of it myself.”

The porter, walking ahead, pricked up his ears. Afterwards he reported: “They didn’t talk much, but when the doctor said something she answered in some foreign lingo and ’e seemed to understand it all right from the way he smiled back at ’er…”

L
ENI SETTLED DOWN AT
the house in Shawgate and Gerald was happy. It was miraculous, the success she had in calming the boy’s nervousness and brightening his moods whenever they darkened; she could do it as well as David, and, of course, the trouble had always been that David had so little time for doing it. Now, instead of Jessica’s rigid discipline of scoldings and repetitions, Leni imposed her more elastic sway; and Jessica, freed from an irksome duty, seemed satisfied. David was satisfied too. After the first surprise of Leni’s presence he regarded it with sudden simplicity. It was his mission far more to mend what was wrong than to question what was right, and her position in his household soon appeared to him as unarguably right as a flower or the morning mail delivery. For just as he had a childlike inquisitiveness on the surface, so he was apt to seem incurious when he knew people better, not from any lack of interest, but because of his complete acceptance of them as they were. And if someone had suggested that there was anything odd in a German ex-stage dancer becoming his son’s governess, he would first of all have had to recollect that she
was
a German ex-stage dancer, and then have answered, with complete sincerity, that it was no odder than anything else. He wasn’t bothered, for instance, by any mystery there might be about her name and past; it did not seem to matter to him since he called her Leni and liked her. He called everyone by their first names.

Gradually her wrist became stronger and one afternoon, when Jessica was out, David heard her playing the piano. It was more from the surgical than the musical angle that he viewed this experiment; he wished to see how far the fracture had impaired her finger movements. To his considerable surprise she began to play rather well, and things he had never heard before; they weren’t his kind of music, anyway. Then he put in front of her a Mozart Sonata, thinking he might give himself the pleasure of hearing it; but she shook her head. “I can’t read it,” she told him.

“What? You can’t read music?”

“Only very slowly.”

“Then how do you learn all these things?”

“Mostly from ear.”

“You mean you’ve never been
taught
music?”

She shook her head a third time.

“Well, it’s very remarkable. You certainly ought to have training.”

“May I practise while I am here?”

“Why, certainly. You’ll find a lot of classical stuff in the cabinet—my own tastes.”

“You play the piano?”

“The violin—but not much. What time does a doctor have?”

And he went away to his daily duties, vaguely wondering whether he should introduce her to Jaggers, the Cathedral organist, or to Yule, the Cathedral choirmaster, and let them share his discovery. Perhaps they might even give her lessons. And perhaps at the musical party he usually gave once a year he might ask her to play something. That wouldn’t be a bad idea at all.

After that, and mostly during the afternoons when Jessica was out, Leni played the piano in the drawing-room. He didn’t realize what she was doing until one day, by accident, he came in and heard her playing the piano part of the Kreutzer Sonata. He stood outside the drawing-room door and listened till she had finished. Then he entered.“But you learned that from music?”

“It was very slow and difficult for me to pick out the notes, but when I had done that, then I knew it from memory. I’ve been practising a lot lately.”

“Fine. But I still think you ought to have some proper training.”

Smilingly he walked away, again registering an intention of talking to Jaggers or Yule about her. But at the back of his mind in such a matter there was always the thought of Jessica; she might not approve—one could never prophesy her attitude. After fifteen years of married life he had acquired an intense reluctance to make decisions of any kind outside his own immediate professional territory; only by such reluctance was he insulated against the kind of conflict in which, because it would so intensely bore him, he could not fight to any advantage.

So he did not actually mention Leni to Jaggers or Yule or, indeed, to anyone; but he went on thinking he ought to do, and
must
do, and perhaps would do so, one of those days.

But one of those days, a July day, David returned to Calderbury after his weekly visit to Sandmouth. There had been showers during the afternoon, but by evening the sky had totally cleared, and as he walked from the railway station the towers of the Cathedral seemed to exude a memory of both sunshine and rain. It was very beautiful at such a time, especially the view over the town, the mist rising above roofs, a hint of human cosiness in all that huddle of buildings. As David crossed the Close a lamplighter stopped near by, his face upturned to the glow he made.

“Good night, doctor.”

“Good night, Ben.”

Suddenly, walking on towards Shawgate, he met Leni. “Why—” he began, as if he had not seen her for years. She stopped, smiling but silent. “Taking a walk?” he said.

“Just for a while.”

There came into the air a murmur that might have been anything or nothing till one realized what it was.

“Choir practice,” she said, answering his thought. “I have heard it before.”

“Do you often take a turn round here, then?”

“Take a turn? What is that?”

He put it into German for her, and then a curious line of her mouth, lit by the merging of twilight and lamplight, gave him an impression of mishap that made him add: “Is anything the matter?”

She answered, in German also: “Mrs. Newcome has told .me I must go.”

“What?”

“Yes.”

“Must
go?
But where?”

“Away.”

“But why—why on earth—should she say that?”

“She said she can’t afford to have me.”

“But that’s absurd. We can afford it perfectly well.”

“She said not.”

A silence fell on them both, and into it, making an interruption, came the voice of a passer-by: “G’night, doctor.”

“Good night,” answered David, not knowing, never knowing indeed, who the other was. Then he turned to Leni. “I really don’t understand it. I must see what Jessica has to say.”

Without the suggestion made or accepted they walked together down Shawgate, saying little else. Leni walked so quietly at his side, asking no questions that he could not answer, not bothering him, not making any fuss. Absurd to say one couldn’t afford such rare and priceless negations. Lamplight caught her face as she glanced sideways to cross streets, and he noticed, till it began to preoccupy him, the look of calmness that matched perfectly with her silence. Even her despair had held that same calmness. And suddenly he remembered the dressing room where she had tried to end her life, the Pier where they had walked that night, the already mounting total of their experience. Absurd that now, after so much, she should go. He must talk to Jessica as soon as he had the chance, though he realized, even in making that decision, how little he cared to ask Jessica anything. It wasn’t that he was really afraid of her, or that there was truth in Calderbury’s popular notion that she ruled him with a rod of iron. He wasn’t; she couldn’t. It was rather that his own will to do what he liked in his own house had been worn into a shrug of the shoulders that yielded, by nonchalance, all that could never have been claimed by force. Furthermore, Jessica was so efficient that it was easy to let her encroach to the very rampart of self-preservation; and that rampart, for David, was the door of the surgery.

Jessica was writing invitations when he found her later in the drawing-room. The engraved cards, filled in with handwritten names, lay spread out on the writing desk beside her—“Dr. and Mrs. Newcome request the pleasure of…”

“Jessie,” he began, breathlessly and without preamble. “What’s all this about getting rid of Leni?”

Jessica faced him with her thin, well-chiseled face, faced him also with her no-nonsense personality at full strength.

“Yes, it’s quite true. I told her she couldn’t stay.”

“But why?”

“I had my reasons, I assure you.”

“But it’s absurd to say we can’t afford her wage! She’s well worth it—Gerald likes her enormously—”

“That was only the reason I gave
her.
It wasn’t the
real
reason.”

“What was that?”

“Do you really need me to tell you?” Her voice sharpened to the pitch in which, at meetings of this or that, she usually called some errant speaker to order. “Has it ever occurred to you that people aren’t always what they seem? I was far too trusting to take that girl without the usual inquiries, but I was relying—foolishly, no doubt—on your own assurance. I might have guessed how little you really knew of her. And I must say, too, that I didn’t
take
to her, even from the first.”

Jessica was like that. She had a way of finding that she didn’t like people and then of saying that she never had liked them—thus imputing clairvoyance to herself and vaguely sinister attributes to her victims.