The Gazebo (5 page)

‘Well, your luck is out. There’s someone after it already.’

‘How do you know?’

‘The Grahams happen to be friends of mine. I don’t know that they want to sell. They’ve been offered seven thousand, and they’re not jumping at it.’

He gave an incredulous whistle.

‘Seven thousand? You’re kidding!’

‘Well, I’m not.’

‘Who’s the sucker?’

‘A man called Blount.’

His face changed so suddenly that she was startled. He said in a voice that was more like the snarling of an animal,

‘The dirty double-crossing swine!’

MISS MADISON WAS always extremely offended if anyone alluded to her establishment as a boarding-house. The word had drab associations. It suggested something inferior to an hotel. Miss Madison took Paying Guests. The term guest house was not unacceptable. It was her aim to provide cheerful surroundings, nourishing and appetizing food, and the amenities of home at a moderate charge. Since she was a very good cook, her rooms were seldom empty. Old Mr Peters had occupied one of them ever since his wife died ten years ago. He might be a disconsolate widower, but the Miss Pimms often remarked on how much younger and better he had looked since he had gone to live at Miss Madison’s.

Each of the rooms was furnished in a distinctive colour and was known by that name. Mr Peters had the Red Room. Old Mrs Bottomley, who had been there nearly as long as he had, occupied the Blue Room. She was in her middle eighties, and she had one of those fair downy complexions which seem to get fairer and downier as time goes on. She was a very nice old lady. She had blue eyes and fluffy white hair, and she really looked charming in her pale blue room. Mr and Mrs Blount were in the Pink Room, which was a pity, because poor Mrs Blount had no complexion at all, and the flowered carpet, the pink walls and curtains, and the twin beds with their rose-coloured bed-spreads, only made her look paler and plainer than ever. The pink was also very unfortunate as a background for her rather sparse sandy hair. Not that she herself was in the way of noticing such things as colour effects, but it afflicted Miss Madison who was. If another double room had been vacant, she would have pressed the Blounts to take it, though really when she came to think it over she didn’t know which of the other colours would have been any better. Yellow or green wouldn’t have been too bad with the hair, but she felt shaken when she considered what they might do to that pale flat face, those dull pale eyes. Miss Madison decided that it wasn’t worth worrying about. People who worried disseminated gloom. She considered cheerfulness to be a duty.

Mrs Blount sat in the easy chair in her pink bedroom with a gaily coloured magazine on her lap. It was one of those publications which announce themselves frankly as appealing to Woman with a capital W. It contained household hints, the kind of love story in which everything always comes right in the end, advice on dress, on health, on the conduct of your love-life, on how to manage your house, your children, your husband, together with answers to correspondents, and most important of all, how to be beautiful. Mrs Blount always read the love stories first. When the current serial left the heroine convinced that the tall fair man who had come into her life was unalterably attached to another, she could solace herself with the thought that if not next week, or the next, or the next after that, at any rate in the end it would all turn out to be a misunderstanding and the wedding-bells would ring. Sometimes the man was dark with flashing eyes. Sometimes instead of being handsome he had strong, rugged features. But it all came to the same in the end. He put his arms round the heroine and they kissed each other. Of course the people who wrote the story put it in much more complicated ways, but that was how Mrs Blount thought about it. She was a simple woman and a most unhappy one. It soothed this unhappiness to read about other people who were unhappy, and who got over it and lived happily ever after. It wasn’t that she thought it would happen to her, she just liked to read about it happening to other people. It was for the same reason that she read every word of the advice on beauty culture – ‘If your skin is inclined to be greasy – if you are getting a double chin – if there are any of those fine lines about your eyes – if you are inclined to lose weight, to put on weight – if your face is too long, too wide, too plump, too thin…’ There were ways in which you could put everything right, and she never got tired of reading about them. She didn’t get as far as imagining herself doing any of the things that were recommended. Never for an instant did she picture herself with wavy hair, a transfigured skin, eyebrows carefully shaped and darkened, eye-shadow, rouge, powder, and lipstick. She just liked to read about these things.

When she heard Mr Blount’s step on the stairs she pushed the magazine behind a cushion. He laughed at the stories and made unkind remarks about the letters from correspondents. They were people who had their troubles, and it wasn’t right to laugh at them. When he came into the room with a frown she knew at once that something had upset him. He shut the door behind him and said in an ugly voice,

‘Fred’s here.’

Mrs Blount’s pale mouth fell open, and he swore at her.

‘You needn’t make yourself more of a damned idiot than you are! I said, “Fred’s here!” You can understand as much as that, can’t you?’

She said, ‘Yes, Sid.’

He stared at her angrily.

‘We’ve been too long about it, and that’s a fact! Might have made a difference if you’d played up a bit! You’re supposed to be dead set on the house, aren’t you? But I take you to see it, and what do you do – just sit about like a bundle of old clothes and say, “Very nice!”.’

‘What did you want me to say?’ The words came slow and dead.

He swore again.

‘I ought to have left you at home, and that’s the fact! I ought to have known it wasn’t any good expecting you to play up! You are supposed to be so keen on that house that I shan’t get any peace until I’ve bought it! You’re supposed to want it so badly that I’ve got to go on raising the price until they are willing to sell, and when I take you there you sound just about as keen as a cat would be for a ducking! I tell you I could have twisted your neck! And what’s the result – what’s the result, I ask you! Fred, I tell you – Fred turning up here with money in his pocket and bidding me up! Fred who hadn’t two sixpences to rub against each other and came to me to put up the money! And now what? He’s had a lucky win, and here he is, in the market against me and bidding me up! In a wicked temper about it too, that’s what he is! Says I double-crossed him! When he hadn’t got twopence to put up himself – not twopence! And now he says he’ll blow the gaff if I don’t take him in! After bidding me up too! The dirty spite of it!’ Mrs Blount sat on the chair and looked at him. She never knew anything about his business – he never told her anything. Only every now and then when something had put him out he would talk like he was doing now. He never explained anything, and she didn’t want him to. She didn’t want to know about his business. Sometimes at night when she couldn’t sleep it would come to her that if she ever did get to know about it anything might happen. Anything dreadful. She just sat there and went on looking at him. When he used that voice to her she was too frightened to do anything else. She would have liked to look away, but she was afraid even to do that. He wasn’t tall, but he was broad. He had a red face, and eyes that were too light for it. People thought him a jolly-looking man. There was a frightening strength in his arms and his big coarse hands. She had married him because nobody else had asked her, and it didn’t take her long to find out that he had married her because of the house her Uncle George had left her and the thousand pounds in the post office savings bank.

He stumped over to the window and came back again.

‘Now look here!’ he said. ‘If you run into Fred, you don’t know anything – see? Not anything at all! If he asks you what I’m doing bidding for the house, you don’t know! You can look as much like an idiot as you want to and you don’t know anything at all! It would be just like Fred to catch you alone and try and get things out of you! You just shake your head and say you don’t know a thing! You can say I never talk to you about business, and that’s gospel truth! Have you got that?’

She said, ‘Yes, Sid.’

‘All right, don’t you forget it!’

He stumped out of the room and shut the door behind him carefully, not banging it, because he was the kind husband who was always so considerate to a trying wife.

Miss Moxon was coming out of the Green Room, followed by her friend, Mrs Doyle. She was tall and thin. Mrs Doyle was as round as a dumpling but full of energy. She undertook shopping for people who were abroad. She also met school-children and saw them across London. In the intervals she wrote innumerable letters to her married sons and daughters, who were scattered round the world in both directions from China to Peru. Miss Moxon only did cross-word puzzles, but she did them very slowly and they sufficed. They stopped and spoke to Mr Blount and asked him if Mrs Blount was feeling any better. When he shook his head regretfully, they commiserated with him, and thought what a good husband he was.

On the other side of the door Mrs Blount heard their voices. She knew what they were saying, because it was just what everybody said. They were sorry for her because they were kind, but they were much more sorry for Sid having such a poor thing of a wife.

When the footsteps and the voices had quite gone away she got her magazine out from under the cushion and began to read about how to renovate a woollen dress which had got the moth in it. You did it by cutting the sleeves short and making patch-pockets out of the pieces you cut away. It didn’t say what would happen if the mothholes were where they couldn’t be covered by pockets. The moths had been terrible two years ago. She had forgotten to put moth-ball with her combinations, and they had come out full of holes.

She passed to a recipe for getting stains out of marble.

MRS GRAHAM’S STATE of mind was becoming very much confused. On the one hand it was desirable that Althea should be paying more attention to her appearance, having regard to the fact that no one is going to believe you are under forty yourself if you have a daughter who might be thirty-five. But on the other hand it was impossible to help connecting the change with Nicholas Carey’s undesired return. When anyone had been away for five years you really don’t expect them to turn up again. Not that he was likely to take the slightest interest in Thea after all this time. She had always thought that French proverb about coming back to your first loves very silly – just a jingle for the sake of the rhyme.

‘On revient toujours

A ses premiers amours!’

In her experience once a man went away he stayed away. All the same she hoped they wouldn’t meet. Thea might be upset, and when she was upset it made a very depressing atmosphere in the house. Really the best thing would be to sell the house to this Mr Blount who seemed to want it so badly. They could store the furniture and be off on their cruise before the cold weather set in. She wondered whether he would rise beyond seven thousand. If he did, it would be madness to refuse, and Thea would be kept much too busy to have any time to spare for Nicholas Carey.

She continued in this frame of mind until the afternoon of Mrs Justice’s cocktail party. By an irony of fate it was Ella Harrison who disturbed it. Making her way to the comfortable chair which Mrs Graham had managed to secure, she sat down on the arm of it and embarked upon a kind of running commentary.

‘What a crowd! I see the three Miss Pimms are here. I thought they never went anywhere together, but as Sophy Justice married a connexion of theirs I suppose they felt bound to show up. Mabel’s been wearing that blue dress ever since we came to Grove Hill, and whatever induced her to buy it in the first instance I can’t imagine! But none of them have got any taste!’

‘She had it for Sophy’s wedding five years ago.’

Mrs Graham spoke with the complacency induced by the fact that her own dress was quite new. It was of a soft shade of blue with a matching coatee, and it had really cost her more than she was justified in spending, but if they sold the house she could take it off the price and it wouldn’t be noticed. She would, in fact, have got it for practically nothing.

Mrs Harrison said,

‘It looks like it! It must always have been pretty awful anyhow. Where’s Thea? You don’t mean to say she hasn’t come! I’ve brought Nicholas Carey, you know. I wonder whether they will have anything to say to each other! He’s staying with us to clear up all that mess in the attic. He left it with Emmy Lester, and she left it with us, and goodness knows I shall be glad to get rid of it! Why, there is Thea over there by the window talking to Nettie Pimm! My dear, what has she done to herself – I never saw such a change! If I hadn’t known that green dress of hers I really don’t suppose I should have recognized her! You know, Winifred, if you take her away on a cruise looking like that she’ll be getting off with someone and you’ll be left lamenting!’ There was a certain edge on the words.

Mrs Graham’s delicate eyebrows drew together in a frown.

‘What a ridiculous thing to say!’

‘Not at all! Of course I don’t say the men you meet are always serious, but there would be plenty of fun and games. I know I’d go off again tomorrow if I could! But there isn’t much chance of that the way Jack keeps harping on about how much it cost, and the losses he’s been having. Why, to hear him you’d think he expected me to sit down in Grove Hill and economize for the rest of my life! What a hope! You know, I always say one might just as well be dead as dull. That cruise was fun. I haven’t enjoyed anything so much for years. I only wish I had your chance of doing it all over again!’

Mrs Graham looked away.

‘I don’t know that I should care about it.’

Ella Harrison had a moment of exasperation.

What a weathercock Winifred Graham was! She had been keen enough to go on this cruise when she thought she might pick up a man for herself, but the minute anyone suggested that there might be a chance in it for Thea she was off again.

Ella took a look at her own interest in the matter. Fred wanted the house, and she would be doing him a good turn if she got the Grahams to sell. She couldn’t think why he wanted it, but she meant to find out. She was seeing Fred every day – meeting him casually for coffee, going to the cinema with him in the evenings. If he wasn’t falling for her all over again, he was putting on a pretty good act. She knew just what a piece of folly it would be if she let herself fall for him. He was up to something – she knew him well enough to know that. You couldn’t trust him an inch – she knew that too. She oughtn’t to have any truck with him, and that was a fact. Even as the thought was in her mind she knew that she was just as much of a fool about him as she had ever been in the past, and that if he wanted the Grahams off the map she would go all out to help him.

These thoughts were all in her mind as she answered Mrs Graham.

‘My dear, you’d love it! And you’d have no end of admiration. Men always fall for the fragile type! And there’ll be plenty of them! Why shouldn’t Thea have her share? I’ll say that for her, she pays for a bit of brightening up!’

As an exponent of the art of brightness Ella Harrison could certainly speak with authority.

Everything about her appeared to glitter, from the brassy hair, the eyes set off by long black lashes, the teeth which were so much in evidence that she seemed to be advertising somebody’s dentifrice, to the diamond studs in her ears, the dazzling sunburst at her shoulder, and the valuable rings which flashed with every movement of her hands.

The skilfully applied complexion and startling lipstick achieved emphasis from a clinging garment of royal blue, the colour being repeated by a twist of tulle and a jewelled clasp in the hair. She had felt a good deal pleased with herself when she came down the stairs at Grove Hill House to where Nicholas Carey was waiting in the hall. He stood and watched her, and seemed quite unable to look away. It gave her the feeling that she was on the stage again. There was nothing like a staircase for an entrance. She would have been gratified to know that a somewhat similar idea had presented itself to Nicholas, though she might have been offended if she had guessed that he was summing her up with stage directions: ‘A Blare of Trumpets. Enter the Barbaric Queen!’

Althea, looking across the intervening crowd, wondered for the hundredth time or so how her mother could stand the woman. She could put up with her being vulgar and overdressed, but when it came to her pushing this frightful idea of a cruise and selling the house it was just too much. In the last resort, of course, she would be driven into playing her own trump card. The house was hers and it couldn’t be sold without her consent, only she hoped – very much she hoped – that she wouldn’t have to say so.

Nicholas Carey, in the far corner of the room where the massive figure of Mrs Justice practically screened him from view, saw Althea’s face change. He had been watching her whilst Mrs Justice told him all about Sophy’s wedding which he ought not to have missed and then went on to impart the latest particulars about her husband, her elder boy, her second boy, her girl, and last but most important of all, her twins. ‘One of each, and regular little dumplings, she says. And oh, my dear boy, they’ve all got red hair and she glories in it – though between you and me, I do think there’s some chance of its darkening as they get older. At present, she says, it’s just pure carrots. Of course it’s a cheerful colour, and they are a very cheerful family.’

He said, ‘Sophy always was cheerful.’ She rolled on to speak to someone else, and he continued to look at Althea. She had on a green dress. Not linen like the one in the photograph, but it altered the colour of her eyes in the same way. Ella Harrison had tried to make him believe that she had changed, but what took hold of him now was a sense of how little five years had done to make any difference in the familiarity of her every movement, every look. He had shut her image away and locked the door on it and walked in strange exciting paths, and at the end of it all he had come home to find that nothing had changed. The locked place was open and empty. Althea was just across the room from him, and he might never have been away. She turned her head and their eyes met.

It was a most curious experience. It was like waking up and finding that something horrible had never happened. He saw a flush come to Althea’s face quick and bright, and he saw it fade and leave a patch of colour on either cheek. She had put it on so carefully that no one could have told it was not her natural bloom until everything in her failed and left it visible. She began to make her way towards the door.

She had known all along that Nicholas might be there. And so would the Miss Pimms have known, and all the other people who knew about her and Nicholas, and who would all be deeply interested to see them meet again. It was going to be a really absorbing moment for Grove Hill, and there had been times when she felt as if she couldn’t face it, but they passed, because there was something that she could face even less. If it came to seeing him in a crowd or not seeing him at all, there wasn’t really any choice to be made. He wouldn’t come and see her – not after the way they had parted five years ago. Now he was back for an hour or two, a day or two. If she didn’t see him in this little space of time she would never see him again. She stopped reasoning about it. If you are very thirsty in a desert and there is water within your reach, you don’t reason about it and say, ‘It will be worse afterwards,’ you snatch and drink.

But when she looked across the room and saw him and he looked at her, she couldn’t go through with it. She didn’t know what was happening, or what was going to happen. She only knew that it couldn’t happen here under all these curious eyes. The long unnatural control of years was cracking, she must get out of the room before it broke. She threaded her way between people all shouting at each other without very much chance of making themselves heard. She didn’t look at Nicholas again. She heard Ella Harrison’s metallic laugh, and quite suddenly in a momentary lull a girl’s voice said, ‘and his nose was as cold as ice!’ And then she was at the door. There was a fat man leaning against it. He seemed to have had a good many cocktails and to need support. She was wondering how she was going to get past him, when she heard Nicholas say, ‘Just a minute, old chap, we want to get out.’ A hand came over her shoulder. The fat man was eased along the wall, the door opened, and she found herself in the passage. Nicholas said, ‘Quick!’ and ran her along with an arm about her shoulders to the little room which used to be Sophy’s. With the door shut on them, he let go of her and stood back. They didn’t speak, they looked at each other. In the end he said, ‘Well?’ and she said, ‘Where have you been?’