Mine for a Day (13 page)

The firm of Barraclough & Morley, of which she was now to be a member, consisted, Leila found, of three partners. The elder Barraclough was more concerned with the administrative side of the business nowadays, but he was a real power in the firm, and Leila was assured by her immediate colleagues, that first day, that “the old man was a bit of a terror.”

However, she was not likely to have very much to do with him personally, and everyone agreed that Mr. Morley was nice to work for. “A bit of a stickler for accuracy,” one of the girls said, with reminiscent ruefulness, “but fair, on the whole, and usually good-tempered.”

“He may be a bit sticky at the moment,” one of the others told her. “He was going to be married a week or two ago, and it didn’t come off, for some reason or other. So if he’s a bit grim and difficult, make allowances.”

Knowing that close connections with the “heads” are not apt to be popular in any office, Leila contented herself with saying that she had heard something of the sort. And then Simon’s bell rang, and she went into his room.

He looked up from his post and smiled at her as she came in.

“Settling down all right?” he enquired.

“Yes, thank you.”

She sat down, and looked friendly but official, for she did not want Simon to think that she intended to trade in any way on their relationship outside the office.

She thought—though she did not actually see him smile about it—that he was rather amused by her attitude. But evidently he approved it, too. For, without further comment, he began to dictate to her, as though she were simply his new secretary and nothing else at all.

At the end, he gave her one or two words of explanation about various aspects of her work, and dismissed her with a smile, and a friendly: “Come and see me about anything you don’t understand.”

This first morning, Leila was to find, set the key-note for her office relationship with Simon. He was a busy man—Barraclough & Morley was a flourishing firm—and in the office, first things came first.

He kept her informed of the very slow, but fairly steady, improvement in his mother’s health, but otherwise their relations were considerably more impersonal than they had been for some
time. Leila was quite satisfied that it should be so. For her, it was almost enough just to see him and work with him. It was true that, in theory, she had counted on this new situation to establish her in his mind—even perhaps in his heart—securely enough to count for something whenever Rosemary did attempt to come back into his life. But, judging from the happy and thankful letter she had received from Aunt Hester, there was certainly no immediate likelihood of Rosemary returning to London. And for the moment Leila was satisfied to enjoy a situation which was infinitely more delightful than any she would have dared to hope for a few weeks ago.

In the middle of her third week at the office, Simon said to her one morning, after he had finished dictating:

“When are you coming to see Mother? I think they will allow her an outside visitor or two now.”

“Why—any time!” Leila looked up from her notebook and smiled eagerly.

“How about tomorrow evening? We can both leave a little early, and I’ll drive you down. And perhaps, afterwards, you’ll come and have dinner with me.”

“That would be very nice.” She knew she sounded almost sedate, but that was better than showing the excitement and joy which she felt.

The next day, she paid the most careful attention to her work. If she had allowed her thoughts to move from it for any length of time, she knew that she would have found herself lost in a vague state of bliss about the coming evening, in which she might have made all sorts of mistakes.

As it was, she obviously worked so hard that, when she prepared to leave half an hour earlier than the others, one of her colleagues remarked:

“I don’t wonder Mr. Morley said you could go. You’ve done a day and a half’s work already.”

Leila smiled, and said something about having wanted to finish a special piece of work. Then she bade her colleagues good night, and went off, to find Simon waiting outside in his car.

It was a beautiful evening. One of those brief, nostalgic reminders of summer which do occasionally irradiate the autumn. They didn’t talk much at first—not until they were more or less free of the traffic—but they were so pleasantly at ease in each other’s company that neither felt the need for conversation.

Then he indicated one or two familiar points of interest on the way, and Leila said it was rather a long drive for him to do twice a day, and didn’t he ever think of having a place in town?

“Oh, but I have a small flat in town,” he assured her. “It’s just that, at the present time, I prefer to be near my family.”

“Yes—of course.”

“Besides—” He hesitated a moment. Then he gave a rather short laugh. “I haven’t felt much like going to my flat. I was going to take Rosemary there, you know.”

She felt her mouth go dry.

“Were you?”

“Um-hm. It’s no good being sentimental about these things, and I’ll get used to the idea, I suppose. But, just now, I feel the flat would seem singularly empty and—pointless.”

“I suppose—it would.”

There was a silence. Not a pleasant and easy silence this time. Then he said:

“I know I’m a fool to bother further about her. Only—I can’t help wishing I could have some news of her.”

“What sort—of news?” Leila wondered if he noticed that her voice was husky.

“Oh—any sort of news. I suppose your aunt hasn’t written to you since that unfortunate phone conversation? Or has she, Leila? I never thought of asking you before.
Has
Mrs. Lorne written to you at all about Rosemary?”

CHAPTER I
X

IT seemed to Leila at that dreadful moment that a chasm almost literally yawned at her feet.

Why had she never thought how simply—how almost inevitably—disaster could break over her? Why had she not foreseen that, as they became more intimate, Simon must quite naturally speak to her of Rosemary and even question her?

“Aunt Hester—did write to me—two or three days—after I returned to the flat.” Did she sound as jerky and unnatural to him as she did to herself? “She had—no news then. She begged me to let her know when—if I heard anything.”

“I see.” He smiled slightly. “She had decided to forgive you for your particular escapade?”

“Yes. Oh, yes.” She saw she might sidetrack him on that, and rushed on desperately into further speech. “Aunt Hester is essentially generous and understanding, you know. When she’d had time to think things over, she decide
d
that my intentions had been good, even if she still thought I ought to have taken her into my confidence. I think what annoyed her most of all was the idea that Miss Parker—the organist, who saw us together at the Junction should have brought her the news. And a very garbled version of the news at that.”

“Ye-es.” He frowned over that, though she had meant him to be amused. “I don’t know that I’ve been taking the tiresome Miss Parker quite seriously enough.
”

“I think Aunt Hester is capable of managing her, now that she has the facts,” Leila said hastily. The last thing she wanted was to have Simon transferring his attention to Durominster once more.

He smiled, half convinced.

“Well, I don’t want you ticketed as the girl who pinched her cousin’s
fiancé
,” he said.

“N-no. Naturally not,” Leila agreed, feeling very uncomfortable.

And then the subject lapsed, and Leila sat there, staring at the road ahead, and wondering how much further she had tied her own hands.

Suppose she made up her mind to be truthful now? Suppose she regarded this as the moment when she had secured enough of Simon’s friendship and attention to risk his knowing that Rosemary—in spite of all her foolishness and bad behaviour—was still free, and still interested in him?

How did one begin to make the disclosure? How, above all, did one explain why one had not made the disclosure before?

A sort of panic took hold of her. It was no longer a simple matter of timing. She was going to have to explain some very
curious behaviour on her own part. If—when—she did tell Simon the truth.

As they drove through the soft evening sunshine, she felt overwhelmed by the weight of her secret and suffocated by the tangle of her own deception. In that moment, she wanted nothing so much as to be free of it all. And, without even waiting to think how she was to do it, she said—timidly but urgently:

“Simon—”

“What, dear?”

He was negotiating a difficult corner, and the half-absent endearment which he threw at her came as naturally to him as the question.

But it effectually silenced Leila.

Never before had they been on terms when he might address her as “dear”. “My dear,” perhaps. That was a very different matter. One said “my dear” to almost anyone, and for a variety of reasons. But just to call her “dear” like that, almost as a matter of course, marked a stage in their relationship which took her breath away.

She no longer wished to unburden herself of any secret. She could not, of her own free will, spoil this extraordinary and enchanting situation. Her guilt and her anxiety counted as nothing now beside the surge of joy which overwhelmed her.

And so, when he glanced at her enquiringly, she found herself smiling casually and saying:

“Oh—nothing.”

He looked amused.

“Keeping your own secrets, eh?”

“No, no. It was nothing important.” Here she was, closing the door on the truth with her own hands, but she seemed hardly to be acting of her own volition. “I was wondering how much longer we were going to be, but I remember now—you said we should be there about half-past six.”

“Yes. Are you getting tired?” He sounded kind and even a little concerned, as though it really mattered to him that she might be tired.

“No,” she assured him. “I’m enjoying every minute of this drive.” Which was true, of course, if one left out the pangs of conscience which had assailed her from time to time.

He laughed softly, as though something about that pleased him a good deal.

“You have a great capacity for enjoying yourself, haven’t you, Leila?”

“Have I?” She smiled consideringly. “Yes—I suppose so. Though I’m inclined to worry unduly about things, too,” she added. And her tone was slightly defiant, because, at that moment, she was addressing Fate, rather than Simon.

He looked surprised and amused.

“I shouldn’t have said you were at all,” he declared.

“But—would you know me well enough to say?”

“Certainly! Didn’t we share a very worrying situation together? I thought you took all the fences very confidently on that occasion.”

“Oh—well, yes. If the situation is actually there to cope with, I suppose I manage reasonably well,” Leila conceded. “What I meant was that I—that I sometimes harrow myself about things which may never happen.”

“Don’t we all?” he said lightly.

“No. Rosemary never does—did,” exclaimed Leila, before she could stop herself. And then wondered how she could possibly have been so foolish as to reintroduce Rosemary into the conversation, and quite unnecessarily, too.

“Oh—Rosemary—
”
He seemed to consider his lost
fiancé
e in retrospect. “No, Rosemary didn’t worry about anything. She let other people do the worrying.” He smiled rather ruefully, which took any rancour out of what he was saying, but showed that, oddly enough, he had not many illusions about her.

The discovery dismayed Leila, for at the back of her mind had always been the idea that he had had some idealized notion of her. She had indulged in the hope—unworthy, perhaps, but understandable in the circumstances—that, after having been forced to see Rosemary as she was, he might come to feel very differently about her. Now it came home to her that perhaps Simon had always known Rosemary for what she was and had loved her that way. He would not have been the first man to love a girl for her charming irresponsibility and her capacity for taking life lightly.

In silence Leila digested that unwelcome thought. And in silence they drove the last two or three miles of the journey.

“Here we are,” he said at last, as they turned into the drive of what looked like a pleasant country house. And Leila roused herself and prepared to look smiling and cheerful as befitted a visitor to the
s
ick.

After the regular favourable reports she had had of Mrs. Morley, Leila was a good deal shocked to find her painfully weak and languid. Her brilliant eyes still looked lively and the smile she gave Leila was full of affection, but it was obvious that her small amount of strength was maintained with difficulty and she was not able to say more than a few words to them.

Leila saw that Simon was pleased and happy about her condition, and she guessed that he and Frances had grown so used to the idea that they might have lost her at the time of the operation that
a
ny signs of her holding her own gave them a feeling of optimism.

She herself found it difficult to share that feeling, but she naturally kept every hint of that to herself. And, when she was leaving, she kissed Mrs. Morley and said:

“I hope I shall soon be able to come for longer visits.”

“Yes, dear. Simon will bring you. I’m so glad you are at the office with him—and seeing a lot of him.”

“Mother thinks you are good for me.” Simon smiled indulgently. But whether the indulgence was for his mother or a little bit for herself as well, Leila was not quite sure.

Anyway, she replied quite gaily:

“He is taking me out to dinner now. I’ll look after him well for you.”

“That’s a good child.” Mrs. Morley’s glance lingered on her with genuine fondness. And, in addition, Leila was impressed again by the light of lively, almost humorous, intelligence in her eyes, although she herself looked pale and terribly still.

When they were outside once more, Leila said:

“She’s a wonderful woman. If spirit can do anything, she will pull through all right.”

“How do you think she looks?” he asked earnestly.

“On the whole—pretty well. But it’s going to take a long time to get her strength up to anything really reliable, isn’t it, Simon?”

“I’m afraid so.” He handed her into the car and came round to the driving seat. Then, as he turned the car in a rather deliberate half-circle and headed down the drive once more, he added, with equal deliberation: “There’s just one advantage in not having married Rosemary, after all, and that is that I’m available to go and see Mother every day. I think it makes a lot of difference to her.”

“I am sure it does. You’re very close, you two, aren’t you?” Leila said.

“Very. My father died a good many years ago, you know, and that naturally made us more—dependent on each other. More important to each other, I suppose.
”

“Then I can’t understand—” She stopped, and he looked enquiring.

“What can’t you understand?”

“Well, it isn’t my business. But I’m surprised that you didn’t take Rosemary to see her during the months of your engagement.”

He frowned.

“She was not very keen to put herself out to that extent,” he replied curtly. And Leila saw that this at any rate had been a lack in Rosemary towards which he felt no indulgence.

Illogically enough, her instinct for making excuses on Rosemary’s behalf immediately asserted itself.

“She just didn’t realize how charming your mother is, or I’m sure she would have come.”

“She could hardly realize it without coming first,” returned Simon dryly.

“Well”—Leila smiled quizzically—“as it happened, it was fortunate that she never did visit your home. Otherwise we could not have put our plan into practice. And, though I know it served no very useful purpose in the end, I wouldn’t have missed that experience.”

“Good heavens, nor would I!” he declared, with amused fervour, his good temper entirely restored. “I should never have known you so well if it hadn’t been for that.”

She smiled again, but she said nothing. And after a moment, as though he thought that needed amplification, he added:

“And that’s another thing I wouldn’t have missed for anything.”

“Thank you, Simon.” Her smile remained self-possessed and friendly, though she was keenly aware that there was a deeper shade of significance in his tone when he said that. An unself-conscious significance of which she thought he was unaware himself. “I, too, am very glad that we had the opportunity of knowing each other so well. Even back in Durominster I used to think sometimes that you must be a nice person to know well. But of course you were just my cousin’s
fiancé
there.”

“Was that really how you thought of me?”
He was obviously intrigued.

“Occasionally.” She experienced a sort of heady excitement over the secret pleasure of stating the truth as a half-laughing admission which was apparently not meant to be taken at all seriously.

“I never really took you in very much in Durominster,” he confessed with candour. “I mean—I thought Rosemary had a very nice cousin, and left it at that.”