Читать книгу The Listening Eye - Dora Amy Elles - Страница 4

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Sally Foster had two rooms at the top of the first flight of stairs in the house that Ambrose Paine had left to his niece. One of the rooms looked to the front over the small square and the rather decayed-looking garden in the middle of it where the laurels and lilacs which had survived the war continued their struggle for existence. No bombs had fallen amongst them, but most of the windows in the Square had been shattered when a land-mine fell in the neighbouring thoroughfare. The houses were all about a hundred years old, and had been designed with basements and attics for a numerous staff. Nothing could be shabbier, more inconvenient, and less adapted to modern conditions. Ambrose Paine had always refused to move with the times, but Paulina had contrived a couple of extra bathrooms. Sally cooked on the latest baby gas stove, shared a sink with Paulina, and thought herself lucky. She had a job as secretary to Marigold Marchbanks, whose publishers confidently asserted that her sales ran into millions. In private life Marigold was Mrs Edward Potts, with a vague husband somewhere in the past and a couple of daughters, one of whom had just made her a grandmother. When she felt like it Marigold dictated to Sally from ten to half-past twelve. Added to which there was typing, checking of proofs, and fan mail. Sally answered the fan mail, and Marigold appended a flowing signature. It wasn’t a bad job at all, and with what her parents had left her Sally lived comfortably enough. On occasion she drove the car and they got out into the country.

Whilst Paulina Paine was trying to make up her mind what to say to her cousin Hilda Gaunt, Mrs Gaunt’s son Wilfrid was lounging in Sally’s most comfortable chair and hindering her. She had already told him so in no uncertain terms. There never was anything uncertain about Sally, from the bright chestnut of her hair, the bloom of her complexion, and the sparkle of her eyes, to the forthright manner in which she dealt with a time-wasting young man.

‘Look here, Wilfrid, I can’t do with you—not when I’m answering fan mail.’

‘Darling, you’ve said that before.’

The typewriter clicked.

‘And I shall go on saying it until you go.’

Wilfrid extended himself into what was practically a straight line. He was long and slim, and he had sleek dark hair.

‘You wouldn’t be so harsh.’

Sally laughed. Even when she was preparing to be harsh it was an uncommonly pleasant sound—one of those laughs that go with a kind heart and an even temper. She turned her brown eyes on him and said,

‘I can be fierce!’

Wilfrid produced a slightly supercilious smile.

‘Not with me, darling.’

‘And why not?’

‘You wouldn’t have the heart.’

She frowned, typed an exclamation mark in a perfectly uncalled for place, and said,

‘You’re wrecking this letter—and it’s rather a special one to a professor who has taken a cross-section of twenty-five of Marigold’s books and counted up how many times she has split an infinitive, so it simply won’t do for me to provoke him by making mistakes in my typing. Please do go away.’

He slid down another inch in the capacious chair, closed his eyes, and said,

‘I don’t feel strong enough. Besides I’m just working up to a proposal of marriage.’

Sally planted an asterisk in the middle of a sentence and took her hands off the typewriter.

‘You proposed to me yesterday.’

‘And the day before, and the day before that. I’m just wearing you down, darling.’

‘And how many times do I have to say no?’

‘I have no idea. You’ll get tired of it some day.’

‘Look here, Wilfrid——’

He waggled a hand at her.

‘Let us change the subject. I don’t feel strong enough to wrangle. Besides I’ve got a grievance. Against Paulina. Or does one say with? A grievance with—a grievance against—anyhow it’s still with or against your Aunt Paulina.’

Sally’s colour rose becomingly.

‘Wilfrid, she is not my aunt! She is your mother’s cousin, and that is all there is about it!’

He moved his head in a slight negative gesture.

‘I am not talking about cousins, I am talking about aunts. If a helpless girl finds shelter with an elderly female, the elderly female automatically becomes an aunt and is so addressed. It is what is known as a courtesy title. You would not be discourteous to Paulina? Anyhow this is no time for idle badinage. As I started out by saying, I have a Grievance, and I wish to enlist your support in getting it removed. Are you any good at sabotage?’

‘Now, Wilfrid——’

The hand flapped again.

‘Don’t hurry me. It weakens the system, depletes the energies, and makes me come all over a doodah. As you may have guessed, the grievance concerns the attic. Why should Paulina have allowed David Moray to intrude himself into her top floor? It has an excellent north light. If she was prepared to let it as a studio, why in the name of the tables of kindred and affinity should she let a stranger have it rather than her own cousin’s son?’

‘What on earth are the tables of kindred and affinity?’

Wilfrid opened his hazel eyes sufficiently to allow a reproachful glance to travel in her direction.

‘Ah—you weren’t brought up in the bosom of the Church like I was!’

‘No. What are they?’

‘A compendious list of all the people you mustn’t marry and no one in their senses would want to. In the Book of Common Prayer.’ He closed his eyes again and intoned, ‘“A Man may not marry his Grandmother—” But we digress. At least you do. I return to the point, which is Pressure to be brought on Paulina. By you.’

Sally’s eyes widened in the way which had in the past caused a good many young men to be emotionally disturbed.

‘My good Wilfrid, what has it got to do with me?’

‘You will be the agent for bringing pressure to bear. Paulina is fond of you—she eats out of your hand. If you were to burst into tears and say that life without me in the attic would be valueless, or words to that effect, she might be nerved to the point of giving David Moray the push.’

Sally said briefly, ‘It wouldn’t be.’

He drew himself up about an inch.

‘What do you mean, it wouldn’t be? What wouldn’t?’

‘Life. It wouldn’t be valueless. In fact quite the contrary. Why on earth should you try and turn David out?’

He looked at her maliciously.

‘Being a little stupid, aren’t you, darling. I’m coveting my neighbour’s studio. What I have is only a room, and a foul one at that. The stair smells of cabbage-water, and Mrs Hunable smells of drink. If I am laid low, nobody holds my stricken hand or smoothes my stricken brow. I would, in fact, be a good deal better off with Paulina. Added to which there are the sacred claims of relationship. An inspiring thought that we shall be under the same roof! Who was it who said, “If propinquity be the food of love, play on”?’

Sally was betrayed into a faint engaging giggle.

‘I suppose you mean Shakespeare—only I should think he would be a good deal surprised, because he didn’t say propinquity, he said music.’

‘He said such a lot of things,’ said Wilfrid in an exhausted voice. Then, sitting up another inch or two and brightening a little, ‘Consider what it would be to wake in the morning and think, “Wilfrid is only two floors up,” and to sink into slumber at night with the same beautiful thought! Only, of course, there might be times when I should be burning the midnight oil elsewhere.’

‘I can well believe it.’

‘Oh, I always get home in the end—sometimes a little the worse for wear, but no matter. And as already stated, Paulina would be there to soothe the anguished brow next day. Or you, my sweet!’

‘No.’

The word was pronounced in a peculiarly firm and resonant manner.

Wilfrid sighed deeply.

‘Not a womanly nature.’

Sally said ‘No’ again, and then spoilt the effect by a little gurgle of laughter. ‘Wilfrid, will you get out! I’ve got to concentrate on the professor, and then get on with a kind “No, I couldn’t possibly” letter to a woman who says she has written a novel, and she’s afraid her writing is dreadfully bad and she can’t afford to have it typed, but will Marigold read it? And that’s only a beginning, because there are three people who want autographs, and one who wants advice, and two that I’m saving up to the last who just say how grateful they are because Marigold has given them a lot of pleasure. So will you please get up and go away, because I’m not getting on, and I’ve got to if I don’t want to sit up half the night, which I don’t.’

‘Why don’t you?’ said Wilfrid in his laziest voice. ‘If you don’t sit up at night, when do you sit up? All my best ideas come to me then. No distractions, no interruptions. The mind just floating—not quite detached, but almost imperceptibly linked with the abstract. There is a rhythm, a sense of the imponderable, a kind of floating haze.’

‘It sounds like drugs or drink,’ said Sally frankly.

‘There might be some flavour of alcohol. But not drugs, darling—they are lowering to the Moral Tone so conspicuous in my Work.’

‘I hadn’t noticed it.’

‘Dim-witted of you. However one can’t have everything, and your looks are pleasing. I did ask you to marry me? These things slip the memory. What is much more important at the moment is the matter of the outing or ousting of David Moray. You wouldn’t like to wake up in the morning and read in the paper that I have been driven to the violent elimination of Mrs Hunable. My nature is one of peace, but I have an exceptionally sensitive psyche—if that is what they call the thing that takes charge and nerves you to murder the people who have been annoying you. I don’t think it is, but no matter. What emerges is the horrid fact that I am being driven to desperation, and that if I can’t oust David and have Paulina’s attic, almost anything may happen at almost any moment. You will notice that I have now decided upon oust rather than out. It is more forcible and has a richer flavour.’

Sally was about to raise her voice in a final ‘Wilfrid, will you go!’ when there came a rapping on the door. She said ‘Come in!’ instead, and Mr David Moray walked into the room. He was a large, uncompromising young man of Scottish appearance, with blunt features and fair hair burnt to the colour of dry grass. His eyes were between blue and grey, and his eyebrows and lashes very fair and thick. He viewed Wilfrid with disfavour and addressed himself to Sally.

‘Are you busy?’

‘Frightfully.’

‘With him?’

Wilfrid said, ‘Yes,’ and Sally said, ‘No.’

David Moray frowned.

‘Because if you’re not, there was something I rather wanted to ask you about.’

Wilfrid pulled himself up a little farther in his chair.

‘Not another word. You wish to give up your attic, and you want somebody to break it to Paulina. Don’t worry—it doesn’t really need breaking at all. You want to give it up, I am ready and willing to take it. The whole thing is as good as done. Except for the mere physical transaction you have already moved out and I have moved in. Blood is thicker than water and a nod is as good as a wink to a blind horse. Paulina will be delighted. Sally walks on air.’

David looked at him bleakly.

‘If you know what you are talking about, nobody else does.’

Wilfrid’s tone became tinged with malice.

‘Sally and I do. The proverbial two hearts that beat as one. A stroke of the wand and we change over. I to Paulina’s attic, and you to my Mrs Hunable, now mine no more. I have bestowed her upon you freely. I will go and pack.’

Under a particularly menacing look from Sally, he rose, kissed his hand to her, turned a charming smile on David, and drifted out of the door, which he left open behind him.

David didn’t wait for his footsteps to die away. He gave the door a push with his shoulder, and derived some satisfaction from the fact that Wilfrid must have heard the resulting slam.

Sally raised her eyebrows.

‘It is my room,’ she said.

‘And my studio isn’t mine—is that it? Is there anything in what he was talking about, or was it just blethers?’

Sally Foster had a very charming dimple. It showed now as the corner of her mouth lifted.

‘It was just blethers. He doesn’t like his place, and he would like to come here. I should never get any work done if he did.’

David scowled.

‘Why do you let him bother you?’

‘Oh, well, there isn’t very much I can do about it—he just gets into a chair and sticks.’

‘You could tell him to go.’

‘David, darling, if you think that makes any difference you just don’t know our Wilfrid.’

There was an angry jerk in his voice as he said,

‘Don’t call me darling!’

‘But it doesn’t mean anything.’

He gave her a look of concentrated dislike and said,

‘That’s why.’

Sally said ‘Oh—’ on which he continued in the same forbidding strain.

‘I suppose you call him darling—too!’ The last word was ejected with considerable force.

Sally said, ‘Sometimes.’

‘And what have you left to say to the man you love, if all this frittering stuff has left you any feelings worth the name? Tell me that! And I will tell you that when I call a woman darling it will be because I’m thinking of her for my wife, and because she’s everything in the world to me and a bit over!’

Sally said, ‘Oh—’ again. Afterwards she thought of quite a lot of things she might have said, but at the time nothing came out but that ‘Oh—’ Because something hurt her at her heart and there was a pricking behind her eyes. It didn’t get quite as far as anything you could call a tear, but it did impart a softness and a brightness which were quite extraordinarily becoming.

Mr Moray may have felt himself slipping. He may have felt that he had been harsh, he may have decided that he had gone far enough. He stopped looking at her as if he might be about to proceed to violence, allowed his features to relax, and dismissed the subject.

‘That will be enough about that. If I’m not interrupting you—’

The fan mail might not have existed. That was the bother about David, when he was there, Sally found it quite dreadfully difficult to remember things like being a secretary or having work to do. Afterwards she would kick herself and work overtime to make up, but for the moment she couldn’t have cared less about the professor and his split infinitives, or the other people who were waiting for autographs and advice. She said quickly,

‘Oh, no. This is just Marigold’s fan mail.’

‘Well then, I came down to talk to you. About that picture of mine. The Listener—it’s all right about its being sold. I went round to the gallery and met the man who was enquiring about it, and he asked what I wanted for it, so I said two hundred, and when I heard myself say it I thought I’d gone out of my mind. But he just nodded and said that was all right, and he liked it very much, and I’d got a future before me.’

‘Oh, David!’

It was naturally meat and drink to have Sally looking at him like that, but he kept his head.

‘His name is Bellingdon, and Masters—you know, the Art Gallery people—they say he has one of the best private collections in the south, and when he buys any new stuff it means that other people are likely to be interested too. Anyhow there it is, marked “Sold” and the cheque in my pocket, so I thought it would be a good plan if we were to go out and celebrate.’

The faint stirring of a usually competent sense of duty prompted Sally to say, ‘I oughtn’t to.’

‘Why oughtn’t you?’

She threw a reluctant glance at the typewriter.

‘Work.’

He picked up the letters, pulled up a chair, and straddled it.

‘I’ll dictate them to you. I suppose they just want tactful answers.’

Sally gave her delightful laugh.

‘And you would be so good at that!’

‘Oh, I can be tactful when I choose. It’s mostly waste of time, when it’s not plain insincerity.’ He used the back of the chair to prop the professor’s letter and regarded it with a gloomy eye. ‘What this man wants is to be told to go and boil his head. If he’s got the sort that can be bothered to read twenty-five of Marigold’s novels, it’s all it’s fit for. I’d like to tell him so.’

Sally said, ‘We can’t!’ She very nearly said ‘darling’ again, but stopped in time. She typed rapidly:

‘How nice of you to have read so many of my books. I am so grateful to you for your kind interest. I think it is wonderful of you to spare the time.

Yours sincerely,’

She left a space for the signature, withdrew the sheet, and read it aloud.

David relaxed into a grin.

‘That’s a good score! He sends her a ticking-off, and you’ve turned it into a compliment. I’d like to see his face when he gets it. He’ll be foaming.’

Sally said,

‘I hope so. And now I really have got to be tactful with a woman who wants Marigold to read a book she’s written on odd bits of paper and things.’

‘Is she going to read it?’

‘Nobody could! I shall have to pack it up and send it back, and I really think I had better just say straight out that Marigold can’t undertake to read manuscripts, and that no publisher will look at anything unless it’s typed. You know, I really can’t think how they managed in the old days. I’ve seen manuscript pages of Scott, and Dickens, and people like that—photographs of them, that is—and I just can’t think how anyone read them.’

‘You had better be quite firm about it.’

‘Oh, I will.’

They were not getting along very fast, but time didn’t seem to matter any more. They talked about the letters, and all the nice ones got such warm answers that Marigold’s stock went up appreciably.

When they were nearly through, Sally suddenly stopped typing and said,

‘Did you say that man’s name was Bellingdon?’

He nodded.

‘Lucius Bellingdon. Why?’

‘Because I was at school with his daughter. And I’ve just remembered there was something about him in the paper—no, it wasn’t a paper, it was a magazine—an article about who had the most valuable jewels—you know the kind of thing. And it said he had given his wife a most wonderful necklace which is either supposed to be the one Marie Antoinette had and there was all that fuss about it because she didn’t really order it, or else it’s a copy which was made when the original was broken up.’

David produced a frown.

‘I haven’t the slightest idea what you are talking about.’

‘Nonsense—you must have! Everyone knows about the Affair of the Diamond Necklace. It was one of the things that brought on the French Revolution, and I don’t remember all the ins and outs about it, but it was part of a plot by a woman called Lamotte to get hold of a lot of valuable diamonds which the King’s jeweller had tried to sell him to make a necklace for the Queen, only she wouldn’t let him and said much better spend the money on a battleship. And I really do think it’s a shame that everyone remembers the silly story about her saying if the people hadn’t got enough bread to eat why didn’t they eat cake, but practically no one remembers about the battleship. Anyhow, when she wouldn’t have the necklace, the Lamotte woman persuaded Cardinal Rohan that the Queen had changed her mind, and that she really wanted it. There were a lot of forged letters which he thought were from Marie Antoinette saying she wanted him to put the matter in hand, but there mustn’t be any talk about it. Lamotte and her husband got a girl called Oliva to dress up as the Queen and give the Cardinal a secret audience in the palace gardens after dark. You wouldn’t have thought they would have dared, or that he would be such a fool as to be taken in, but he was. And then when M. Lamotte had got away with the necklace, the jeweller sent in the bill to the Queen and the whole thing came out. There was the most colossal row. Marie Antoinette said she didn’t know anything about any of it, but a lot of people didn’t believe her, and it did the Royal Family a great deal of harm.’

David had his impatient look.

‘And what has it got to do with Bellingdon?’

‘I told you—he gave the necklace to his wife. At least some people say it’s that one and some people say it isn’t, because the real one disappeared, or was broken up, or something. But if it isn’t the same it’s exactly like it and it’s worth goodness knows what. There was a picture of it, all festoons of diamonds looped up with big ones, and the woman who was writing about it said Mrs Bellingdon had never worn it because of the war, and then she got ill and died. But Mr Bellingdon is letting his daughter have it to wear at a ball he is giving at the Luxe next month. It’s a fancy dress ball, and she is going to go as Marie Antoinette. I told you we were at school together. She was a bit older, and of course even a year makes a lot of difference when it comes right in the middle of your teens, but she knows one of Marigold’s daughters and I’ve run across her a good bit lately. She got married a year or two ago, but he was killed motor-racing. I can’t say I think being Marie Antoinette with a lot of diamonds is really her line. Only I suppose most girls would rather jump at the chance. Diamonds do seem to go to people’s heads.’

David Moray frowned.

‘I can’t imagine why you should take an interest in this sort of thing.’

The dimple came out again.

‘Well, I do. You know, David, I’ll tell you something—just for your own good. If you ever come across a woman who isn’t interested in the sort of odds and ends that you feel all haughty and despising about, she’ll be one of the earnest ones who’ll want to run you and everything else in sight, and you’ll get so bored with her that you’ll probably end by doing her in. Because you know what it would amount to—it wouldn’t leave you anything to feel superior about, and you would hate that like poison.’

She found him looking at her in rather an odd kind of way. If it had occurred to him that there was something in what she said, he would certainly not give her the satisfaction of admitting it, and then all at once he was saying,

‘Well, I’m not denying that’s a point of view. I wouldn’t say a woman was any the worse for taking an interest in what you might call the frivolities always provided the solid stuff is there underneath—like having a good sound cake under the icing. For instance, you mightn’t have noticed it but I’ve a sense of humour myself, only I make it my business to keep it in its place.’ He reached across for the last two letters. ‘It’s time we were getting on,’ he said.