Читать книгу Eternity Ring - Dora Amy Elles - Страница 3

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Maggie Bell stretched out a hand and picked up the telephone receiver. It was a thin, bony hand with jutting knuckles and it moved with a jerk. Maggie did everything in jerks. She was twenty-nine years old, but she had not grown or developed very much since she had had what was always alluded to with some family pride as her “accident.” A car had knocked her down in the village street when she was twelve.

She lay all day on a couch drawn up to the window in the room over Mr. Bisset’s Grocery Stores. That was what Mr. Bisset called his shop, but actually it sold a great many things that could not possibly be classed as groceries. The term might of course be stretched to cover the liquorice bootlaces, a sweet now extinct in many parts of England and concocted by Mrs. Bisset from a family recipe, but it could not apply to the mohair or leather varieties which hung from hooks on either side of the entrance. Onions, tomatoes, apples, pears, and nuts in season were of course quite in order, but a row of cotton overalls and a pile of strong boots, lads’ and men’s, could only be accounted for by the fact that Deeping was a village and that Mr. Bisset’s “Grocery Stores” was in fact its general shop.

On a good day Maggie could look from the window above the entrance and check up on nearly everyone in Deeping. Most of them would wave a hand and give her a “Good-morning!” or a “Hullo, Maggie!” Mrs. Abbott from Abbottsleigh never missed. She’d wave her hand and smile, and Colonel Abbott would look up and nod, but if it was Miss Cicely she’d come running up the stairs with a book or a magazine and stay a little. Maggie read a great deal. You had to do something, lying there all day. That was the way she put it to herself, having grown up in circles where reading was synonymous with idleness.

Miss Cicely brought her real nice books, and not the improving kind neither. Maggie had a sharp eye for being improved, and an impenetrable armour against it. She liked the age-old success story—the barefoot boy who sells papers in the streets and becomes a millionaire, the girl who starts so plain that nobody will look at her and ends up a raving beauty or a duchess. She liked a good murder, with all the corpse’s friends and enemies suspected in turn. She liked travel books with people crossing rope bridges or wading in swamps where snakes, crocodiles, lions, tigers, and enormous apes might at any moment burst upon the view.

Abbottsleigh was a treasure-house. Mrs. Abbott had been known to remark that she possessed a larger library of rubbish than any other woman in England—“so reposeful after two lots of war literature to say nothing of the papers—so dreadfully up-to-date, if you know what I mean.”

Maggie didn’t read all the time. She could sew when she was propped up, but she couldn’t keep on at it. Her mother was the village dressmaker, so of course anything Maggie could do was a help. Buttons and buttonholes, hooks and eyes, and all the odd finishings—these were her share of the work, done in a series of jerks but quite neatly. Mrs. Bell was clever and got quite a lot of custom from the big houses round. She had got through the war on turning and making over the ransackings of old laid-away things which had certainly never expected to be haled from their seclusion. Her proudest moment, and Maggie’s, was when Mrs. Abbott brought her old Lady Evelyn Abbott’s wedding-dress to see what could be done with it for Miss Cicely. “Because of course you simply can’t get stuff like that now, and Cicely has a fancy for it. I shouldn’t have wanted to get married in my grandmother’s wedding-dress myself, but there’s been rather a fashion for that sort of thing, and of course it is lovely stuff.”

The folds of deep creamy satin had filled the room. That was the long Court train with roses worked on it in pearls, but the dress was plain, to show off the flounce of Brussels point which draped it. Maggie had never seen anything so lovely in her life. It made her tremble to think of touching it. Pity about Miss Cicely being a little brown thing. Funny too. There was the Colonel, a handsome upstanding gentleman, and Mrs. Abbott not what you’d call a beauty but what Mrs. Bell called a fine woman that showed her clothes off, and there was Miss Cicely a little bit of a brown thing with big eyes and nothing much else. And all that beautiful cream satin for her wedding-dress. Well, it hadn’t brought her luck. There she was, back at Abbottsleigh, and Mr. Grant Hathaway at Deepside, and talk of a divorce. Nobody knew what had gone wrong between them—three months married and a split like that. Even Maggie didn’t know what it was all about, and Maggie knew most things, because when she wasn’t sewing or reading she was listening in on the telephone.

Deeping possessed that invaluable source of private information, a party line. The dozen or so houses with telephones had this line in common. Anyone who chose could listen to a neighbour’s conversation by merely lifting the receiver. This should have made everyone very careful, but familiarity breeds indifference if not contempt. It is difficult to divest oneself of the illusion of privacy when one is using one’s own telephone in one’s own private room. Maggie knew all the best times for listening and she managed to collect a good deal of information about a good many people, but she never found out why Cicely Hathaway had left her husband. The nearest she ever came to it was the evening when she lifted her receiver and heard Grant Hathaway say, “Cicely—”

There was no answer for such a long time that Maggie wondered if there was going to be any answer at all. Then a little cold voice said,

“What is it?”

Maggie was listening passionately, her bony hand clutching the receiver, her long, sharp nose quivering at the tip. She heard Grant Hathaway say,

“We can’t go on like this. I want to see you.”

“No.”

“Cicely!”

“I have nothing to say to you, and you have nothing to say to me.”

“That’s just where you happen to be wrong. I’ve got plenty to say to you.”

There was another of those long pauses. Then Cicely Hathaway said,

“Nothing I want to hear.”

“Cis—don’t be a fool!”

Cicely Hathaway said a very odd thing. She said,

“A fool and his money are soon parted. You can have it.”

And hard on that a slam which shook the whole party line. It was Mr. Grant who had banged down the receiver, because when the tremor on the line had died Maggie could hear Miss Cicely catch her breath a mile away at Abbottsleigh. Then she hung up too.

That looked as if the quarrel had something to do with money. Well, Miss Cicely had plenty, left her direct by old Lady Evelyn after she had quarrelled with everyone else in the family. And Mr. Grant hadn’t any at all, as everybody knew—only the big place and his farming experiments which hadn’t begun to pay but he was quite sure they were going to.

Maggie thought dispassionately that Miss Cicely was cutting off her nose to spite her face. If a man married a rich wife he expected to get something out of it, didn’t he? And whatever the rights of it were, there he was good-looking enough to turn any girl’s head, and there was Miss Cicely, just a little brown thing, and if she didn’t take care, somebody else would get him.

Maggie put the receiver to her ear and heard a woman’s voice say with what she thought was a funny accent,

“Mr. Hathaway—I wish to speak to Mr. Hathaway.”