Читать книгу False to Any Man - Leslie Ford - Страница 8

It had started to snow again as I drove slowly back home along the Memorial Highway. Across the dark stretches of the Potomac, Washington lay like a star-spangled city in fairyland. The white dome of the Capitol and the tall shaft of the Monument with its red cyclops eye shone through the flurrying snow, fabulous beacons of light. I crossed the river under the shadow of Arlington, drove around the Lincoln Memorial with the dim heroic figure of the great emancipator seated in the lighted sanctuary, and turned down the river again toward Georgetown.

I was too troubled to notice the dirty sidings and belching smokestacks that always strike me after I leave the parkway and turn up 30th Street toward home. I couldn’t get Karen’s smile, and that victorious so-that’s-that gesture with her open palms, and the passionate justice of Jeremy’s voice, out of my mind. I unlocked the door and let myself in, and went along toward the sitting room. Downstairs I could hear Lilac banging pots and pans, and wondered what had happened now—the sounds of the kitchen being the perfect barometer of the state of our small nation. And in the living room door I stopped abruptly.

Jeremy Candler was sitting hunched together on the ottoman in front of the fire, her little pointed face as pale as old ivory under her mop of burnished hair.

“Hello,” I said.

“Hello. I hope you don’t mind my barging in this way. Lilac says you’re not having anybody in tonight.”

She turned quickly to the fire and started poking it, but not before I saw the trembling collapse around her red mouth, and the blinding flash of tears in her autumn-streaked eyes.

“I think it’s swell,” I said. “Let me put my things up. I’ll be down directly.”

I knew she wouldn’t want me to see her cry, so I changed into a house coat and pottered about, as Miss Doyle said, for a few minutes. When I came down she was still pale and still hunched together on the ottoman, but quite composed.

“It’s snowing again,” I remarked.

“That’s why I didn’t want to drive out to Alexandria,” she said. “My tires are frightfully smooth. I thought maybe you’d lend me some pajamas and let me stay all night. I’ve got to be at the office early in the morning.”

It was far from me to say “My lamb, you’re telling the most frightful story.” I said:

“I’m delighted. I can even give you a toothbrush I got at a one-cent sale yesterday.”

“You really don’t mind?”

“Really.”

“Then I’ll call up . . . home.”

She got up unsteadily, sat down in the end of the sofa and picked up the phone. After a moment she said, “William—this is me. Tell . . . my father I’m staying all night with a friend in Washington. Oh, I’m fine. Be sure to lock the side door, won’t you? Goodbye.”

She sat there staring into the fire. I picked up the paper and looked through it. Finally, as if she recognized that neither of us was acting quite normally, she said, “I’ve got sort of . . . of a headache, so don’t mind if I’m . . . I’m stupid, will you?”

“You’d probably like to go to bed early,” I said. “You’ll find some non-lethal sleeping pills in the bathroom, if you’d like one.”

Just then the phone on the low table at the end of the sofa rang. I picked it up. A man’s voice that I didn’t recognize said, “Is Miss Candler there, please?”

I glanced at Jerry. The quick fear that leaped into her eyes and the sharp panicky shake of her head really alarmed me, but I said in a quite normal voice, “Sorry. Would you like to leave a message?”

“No, thanks,” the voice said. I put the phone down.

“Was it . . . my father?” Jeremy whispered.

I felt the sting of perfectly reflex tears in my own eyes—she so obviously hoped it was. I shook my head. “I’d have recognized his voice,” I said, and added my younger son’s “And how!” to myself. I don’t think I could mistake that firm utterly impersonal tone in a thousand years.

“Maybe it was Sandy,” she said tentatively.

“You do want one of them to care where you’ve got to, you poor baby,” I thought.

“But you’d know his voice too, wouldn’t you?”

She was trying desperately to sound as if it didn’t matter, and fortunately just then Lilac’s black moonflower countenance appeared in the dining room door.

“Dinner’s served, madam,” she announced. She always goes slightly formal after she’s lighted my great-aunt Deborah’s Georgian candelabra, and she always drops it as instantly as she did now.

“Miss Jerry, Ah ain’ goin’ take that plate till you eat every las’ moufful of you’ dinnah. You heah what Ah’m sayin’? You’ll go outa here an’ get pneumonia.”

I watched the child choke down the rest of her creamed spinach, blinking back tears of perfectly unreasoning gratitude for somebody to care what she did. I sat there wondering how I’d ever been deluded into believing she was grown up and enormously efficient and direct when she was nothing but a hurt heart-hungry little girl. It would take Lilac, with the mother-instinct of her race, to know and understand that.

After dinner she didn’t go upstairs. She simply sat in front of the fire, staring into it. She didn’t move when the doorbell rang. I don’t think she even heard it, or anything—not until Lilac’s voice came from the hall: “Ah don’ know if she’s in or not.”

The voice I’d heard on the phone said, “Tell her I’d like to see her. I don’t want to bother her, but——

“Ah’ll see,” Lilac said.

I glanced at Jerry. She’d straightened up, her lips parted a little, a faint flush that may have been from the fire or the food Lilac had made her eat on her high pale cheekbones. She looked blankly at me. Then Lilac was in the door, and just behind her, towering considerably over her grey kinky head, were the lean dark face and blue Irish eyes of young Roger Doyle.

“This gennaman wants to see Miss Jerry,” Lilac said.

Since he was already in the room, I thought, there wasn’t much anybody could do about it. I got up.

“Come in, Roger,” I said.

Jeremy had turned away. Only the top of her burnished head with the firelight on it was visible, but I’d seen her little jaw tighten and the sudden smoldering embers in her eyes as she remembered, I suppose, that there was something about the young man in the door she didn’t like. Which was certainly not the impression I’d got when she first heard his voice.

Roger Doyle could only see the molten-red-gold top of her head, and then the smoldering yellow gold-flecked eyes as she turned around. His face tightened.

“I thought I’d come and see if you wouldn’t like to go home, Jerry,” he said stiffly.

“Thanks—I’m staying all night with Grace.”

He stood there, baffled and rapidly secreting adrenalin—or whatever it is people do when they start getting mad as hops in spite of all their will to keep cool and dispassionate.

“As a matter of fact, you’re just being a blasted idiot,” he blurted out angrily.

Which is a bad way to pour oil on the troubled waters, especially if they have red hair.

Jeremy Candler straightened up, her eyes blazing.

“Oh, am I?”

Roger Doyle groaned. “Oh Lord, Jerry, can’t you see what you’re doing? Why don’t you let her have the filthy stock?”

I got up.

“If you two don’t mind,” I said, “I’ve got to see the man who does dogs.”

But Jerry’s hand flashed out and held mine. “No, don’t go, Grace! Somebody’s got to stick by me!”

Roger Doyle’s face went a shade darker. He started to speak, but Jerry was quicker.

“If your father had kept it, or sold it to anybody but my father, it wouldn’t have been given back!” she cried. “It’s all very well for you to say ‘Let her have the filthy stock,’ but you haven’t got a brother to look out for because there’s nobody else to do it, and your father hasn’t been paying her bills for thirteen years the way mine has! You’ve never heard of ‘the solemn obligation of friendship,’ and if you made a promise and found you’d drawn a dud you wouldn’t hesitate five minutes to toss it in the river!”

She stopped just long enough to catch her breath, but not long enough for Roger to catch his, or me mine, I’m afraid.

“You don’t know what it is having bills pile up, and staying awake all night trying to decide whether to pay for the coal or take Billy out of school and then have your father send Karen the money because the poor child’s got in debt again!”

Her eyes were like shooting stars. She was really lovely—a whole blazing shaft of fire. Poor Roger Doyle stood staring at her, utterly transfixed.

“I didn’t mind—not very much—when she was going to school, but I do now. She’s just as able to get a job as millions of other girls. Even then she’s got no right to want that stock back now. It still doesn’t pay as much as she gets from Father. And why has she waited till now? She’s known it was paying again for over a year. Why has she suddenly made up her mind it belongs to her? She’s got no right to it, and she knows it, and you know it too! I know you’re in love with her—why don’t you marry her? Then she wouldn’t care whether she got the filthy stock or not! Or do you want her and it too? Oh, I hate you, Roger Doyle!”

He stood there grimly for a moment, his lean jaw working, his blue eyes smoldering under his dark brows drawn together ominously. Then I put my hand over my mouth to keep from screaming as he took two swift steps toward her, and dropped it again when I saw he wasn’t going to strike her. He’d caught her in his arms, her clenched little fists pinioned to her sides, and was pressing his lips passionately to hers, and to her hair, and her eyes. Then just as suddenly he held her off a little ways from him, his hands still holding her arms tight to her sides, his blue eyes looking down at her shocked upturned face.

“Don’t be a fool, Jerry. It’s you I love. Don’t you know it . . . haven’t you known the last five years?”

His voice sounded—and his face looked—exactly as if he were about to wring her neck.

Then he let her go abruptly.

“Only keep your shirt on, Jerry. Just a few more days—then I’ll tell you about it.”

He picked up his hat and was gone, without—as Lilac says—saying goodbye or good morning. I heard the front door bang and hurrying feet scrunching the dry snow.

Jeremy Candler stood there, utterly and completely demolished, and dropped onto the ottoman, her mouth and eyes wide open, staring at the door where he’d gone, her pale face crimson.

“Dear me,” I said.

She moistened her lips.

“He . . . must be out of his mind!” she gasped at last.

“Definitely, I should say,” I replied. “If you don’t mind, I’m going to bed. Lilac will turn out the lights.”