Читать книгу All for the Love of a Lady: A Col. Primrose Mystery - Leslie Ford - Страница 6

I recognized Julie Ross’s voice.

“Hello, angels, can we come in a minute? We didn’t know you’d got home till we saw you through the kitch——”

Julie came in through the front room door and stopped short, her face blank for an instant.

“Oh, hello, Grace. Hello, Randy. We thought it was Cass and Molly.”

The “we” consisted, besides herself, of one large, fat-faced untidy man with a lot of moist black hair, his pongee suit dripping wet, and a man with a long face, gray hair and a quick pair of slate-blue eyes who looked as if he’d stopped on the top step, taken a cool shower and stepped into a linen suit just off the ironing board. He looked, furthermore, as acutely embarrassed as he was cool. The large man did neither. He was very hot and not embarrassed in the least. He was almost a comic strip figure, I thought, he had such a waggish good humor about him. It wasn’t until I looked beyond the smile-crinkled bags around his eyes that I had the slightly uncomfortable feeling that if I had to meet one of them on a dark night, the other one would be safer.

Julie waved her hand toward them without looking around.

“—Do you know these people?”

“No,” Randy said. He added, “Do you? And who are they?”

“Don’t pay any attention to him, anybody,” Julie said. “The clean one’s Mr. Austin, and I can’t pronounce the other one’s name so it doesn’t matter. Anyway, it was Cass we wanted to see. Somebody said he was getting back tonight. I thought maybe he’d run into my sainted husband out in the wilds, and I thought I’d like to know whether he’s still alive or can I start looking around. I don’t suppose you’d like to give us a drink.”

“Have a cigarette,” Randy said. He pulled a moist unattractive pack out of his pocket. “Grace and I just decided alcohol makes you hotter and the hell with it. If you’ll just stick around a few minutes you can have the whole place to yourselves. We’re shoving off.”

“Oh, I see,” Julie said brightly. “You want us to stay. Sweetie, I’m sorry, but we’ve got to go. Fresh paint makes us break out. Tell Molly goodbye. Goodbye, Grace.”

The two gentlemen backed out, the immaculate Mr. Austin bowing politely and still more embarrassed, the large wet man with the unpronounceable name looking hotter and wetter and still more good-humored.

“Goodbye, Randy dear,” Julie called back. “If you ever have to make a crash landing I hope it’s in a nice field of poison ivy.”

I heard them close the gate. Randy stood looking at me.

“Now, how the hell did they know Cass was due in?” he asked grimly. “I know that big wet guy. Wait a minute—he signed my short snorter bill in Cairo a couple of years ago.”

He pulled out his wallet and held a tattered dollar bill under the light on the table.

“Here we are,” he said. “ ‘Lons Sondauer.’ ”

He looked at me again. “Where the devil could Julie have picked him up? He’s some kind of great big screwball—rich as a skunk.”

“Did he recognize you?”

He shook his head. “I don’t think so, I wasn’t in uniform then.—I’d like to know what this is all about, Grace. Julie isn’t turning an honest penny introducing the right people, is she?”

He grinned at me suddenly. “You may have gathered that Mrs. Ross gives me a pain.”

Molly was just coming down.

“Half a second,” she said. She went to the little panelled cupboard set in the wall in the back room and took out a bottle of Scotch. “I’d just like to . . . welcome the prodigal—if he happens to come back.”

She smiled quickly at us and went out into the hall and down to the dining room. In a minute she came back with a Waterford decanter with the usual silver chain and plaque around its neck. She put it down on the cocktail bar improvised from an old-fashioned washstand, and set Randy’s thermos tub beside it.

“There,” she said. “Let’s go before somebody else drops in.”

She looked at Randy for an instant. “You shouldn’t have been rude to Julie Ross. She hasn’t heard from Spud for months, and his family have practically told her they’ll take the kids and she can support herself. That’s one thing about Courtney, even if I do have to say it. Julie’d just about have been in the street if it hadn’t been for her.”

“She can afford it,” Randy said calmly.

“So can a lot of people, but they don’t.”

Molly closed my front door behind Randy and came back into the sitting room. It used to open out onto a green lawn with masses of flowers in the borders against the brick wall. Now it opens onto something that has very little resemblance to the idea I had when calluses meant nothing, and I had a vision of a horn of plenty, with young carrots and stringless tender beans and tiny yellow squash rolling out of it onto my dinner table, with possibly a dewy basketful for the Old Ladies’ Home. That was when I was reading the front of the seed catalogue, and hadn’t bothered to look in the back, at the pictures of sprays and the price of rotenone and nicotine and copper sulphate, or even remotely suspected the infinity of various-legged things that make a leaf without holes chewed in it an unbelievable miracle. Still, the pungent smell of a ripe unpicked tomato has something that ambergris and all the perfumes of Arabia don’t have. I was sniffing it through the open window, hoping that the night’s invisible invasion would leave a few of them intact for the morning—not round and rosy like in the pictures but deformed and misshapen, poor things but mine own—when I heard Molly cross the room behind me.

I looked around. She’d gone over to the fireplace and was sitting in the wing chair, staring at some point a long ways past the blackened bricks in front of her, paying no attention to Sheila’s paw resting on her knee.

I haven’t said very much about what Molly Crane looks like, because it’s a little hard to say. It depends so much on what’s going on inside her. If she and Courtney Durbin were sitting side by side—which was beginning to appear increasingly unlikely—hardly anyone would look twice at her, because Courtney is a really beautiful woman. But if one did look twice, with a perceptive eye, he’d see there was something there. It’s an intangible quality, difficult to name. There’s not more than four years’ difference between her age and Courtney’s—twenty-two, and twenty-six or so—but in the terms other than years that make people seem younger or older there’s more difference than that. I suppose it’s the difference between having a gardener in to plant your radishes and doing it yourself, or having the maid walk the dog on a leash instead of taking him along to the corner store and letting him chase a cat if he wants to. I’d always thought of the quality of simplicity and gaiety Molly has as being something she’d never lose, no matter how old she gets, but I wasn’t so sure as she turned out of herself just then and looked around at me. She seemed to have come a long journey back from somewhere I’d never been, and to have aged a lot while she was there, in the same way that Courtney was older.

“I ought to go to bed,” she said abruptly. “But do you know what’s going to be the hardest part of all this to take?”

I shook my head.

“It’s all the people who’re going to be so kind to me to my face and then say ‘I told you so—these hit-and-run war marriages . . . none of them last.’ ”

She got up quickly, went over to the window and stood looking out a long time before she turned around again.

“—I know all the things Courtney’s been saying.”

It was an effort for her to keep her voice evenly controlled.

“Kind friends couldn’t wait to tell me. I’ve closed my ears and tried not to mind, because I knew very well I hadn’t thrown myself at him. I didn’t even know he was back when he called me up and asked if I’d have dinner that night. He said he was just off the plane, and I didn’t know he was calling from New York until he was late because the train was. I sort of figured Courtney was busy and he didn’t want to eat alone his first night back. Then bang in the middle of the ground beefsteak à la galloise he said, ‘I was going to send you this from Natal, a couple of months ago, but I thought you’d think I was crazy.’ ”

She stopped for a moment.

“I haven’t ever told anybody but Randy, because . . . well, I was so sure, you see. I thought, ‘Okay, let them talk—they just don’t know, and I do.’ Because it was a radio blank. It had the date and my name and address on it, and the pencil marks were blurred where it had been folded in his pocket. It said, ‘Molly, will you marry me as soon as I get back home? I’ve been wanting to ask you since the night I hope you remember too. My temperature’s normal. This is very serious, and the only important thing that’s ever happened to me.’—Just like that.”

“Did you remember the night he meant?” I asked.

“Of course. It wouldn’t sound very romantic to anybody else. There weren’t any magnolias in the moonlight, and I guess that’s one reason I didn’t question it was true. Or if I’d been beautiful, or had a lot of money . . .”

She moved her hands in a light gesture, dismissing that.

“It was just a game of checkers in the Abbotts’ game room, a few days before he left. Everybody else was playing bridge, and I didn’t have money enough to play for the stakes they do, so I didn’t want to cut in. Courtney said, ‘Cass, why don’t you play a game of checkers with the baby?’ So he did. We sat on the floor in front of the fire and had a wonderful time. At least I did. I was a little worried because I thought he was stuck with me and just being sweet because Courtney told him to—even when he let her go home with some people who live near her because we weren’t through with our game.”

She stopped abruptly. “It sounds silly, doesn’t it?”

“Not at all,” I said.

“Anyway, he took me home, because he lived out this way. We shook hands at the door and said good night. He started away and then he came back and said ‘Let’s smoke one cigarette before I go.’ So we sat on the porch and smoked a cigarette. Then he got up and said good night again. You know that funny smile of his? Well, the next day I was having lunch with Aunt downtown and I ran into Courtney waiting in the lounge. I don’t know what I said, but she laughed and said, ‘Darling, don’t tell me you’re like all the rest of them? He’ll be here in a minute. I’ll have to tell him he’s done it again.’ I realized then he’d just been making fun of me. He didn’t even look around the restaurant.”

She hesitated again.

“But he said she never told him I was there,” she went on. “But that doesn’t matter. I was so unhappy I could have died. I didn’t want him to think I was a fool, so I went to Virginia with Aunt, and when I got back he was gone. He’d been calling me up at the house, but I told the maid not to tell anybody where I was. Then that’s all I heard from him, except that he sent me a dollar and a half box of checkers from a toy shop in New York before he left—and a book of rules, because I don’t play checkers very well.”

She looked at me anxiously.

“Does this bore you sick?” she demanded. “It’s all so simple . . .”

I shook my head.

“No, it doesn’t, if you want to talk about it,” I said.

“Well, I do, somehow,” she said simply. “Anyway, that night at dinner we talked for hours, until they closed the restaurant, and then we walked home in the rain and talked after two o’clock. I guess nobody had ever really made love to me before, except Randy, and he doesn’t count, and it all went to my head. He seemed to mean it. He was going away again, and . . . oh, I don’t know. Time seemed too important, and it took five days to get a license here, so we went to Virginia, and they got the blood tests through in a couple of hours and we were married. He said he wanted it that way. He was sure if I was. He didn’t want to go away without knowing completely that I belonged to him. It was all so quick . . . but I didn’t have any doubts at all. And in the last four months I’ve tried not to let any creep in when I’d hear . . .”

She turned her head away quickly.

“We had just four days together, but . . . but I guess that was enough. I . . . oh, I can’t bear it, Grace. I can’t, I can’t! I loved him so much! And now I hate him! I hate him! Oh, why did he have to——”

I went over to her and drew her down by me on the sofa.

“Stop it, Molly!” I said sharply. “Stop it right now. You’re just being a fool, a complete absolute fool. Cass knew you a long time before he played checkers with you, so it isn’t as if he’d run into you on a street corner and married you because he had a free Saturday night. You’ve certainly heard from him since he’s been away, and——”

She shook her head quickly.

“But I haven’t. He told me I wouldn’t, because nobody was supposed to know where he was. A couple of times people came through and brought me a message, but all he ever said was for me to brush up on my checkers and he was all right. But I didn’t mind that . . . but if he could let Courtney know . . .”

“Look, Molly,” I said. “I’m going to the phone and call him now.”

She was on her feet in an instant, her eyes blazing, her face pale, her fists tightly clenched at her sides.

“No you’re not!” she cried. “If you do, I’ll go somewhere else. You don’t understand! I was right—in the very beginning I was right. He was making fun of me. Courtney knew it. Then he got down in the jungles and it looked different, and that’s why he thought he was in love with me. It’s Courtney he really loves—he always has. And she loves him. And I know it, and I hate them both!”

I got up.

“You go to bed,” I said firmly. “Tomorrow you can decide what you’re going to do——”

“I’ve decided already.”

She was perfectly calm again.

“In fact, I’ve not only decided what I’m going to do—I’ve already done it. You may think it’s awful, but I’m going to show them both I can be just as cold-blooded as they are. You haven’t any idea what I’ve put up with from people around here the last four months.”

Her eyes were blazing again suddenly, and as yellow as a topaz.

I managed a smile.

“Nobody’s likely to think you’re particularly cold-blooded, angel,” I said. “So go to bed, and go to sleep.”

In the doorway she turned back.

“I’m sorry, Grace,” she said. “I haven’t any right forcing my troubles on you and then acting this way. If you’d rather I’d go——”

“All I want you to do is go to bed,” I said. “You’re welcome to stay. There’s a key in the top drawer of the desk over there, and you can come and go as you please. But do try to use your head. After all, Cass isn’t responsible for what Courtney——”

I stopped. Sheila, lying on her stomach on the cool hearth bricks, gave a low growl and got to her feet. That usually meant someone coming up the front steps. I hadn’t heard anyone, and I couldn’t now, but she growled again, the hair on her back rising a little as she went through the dining room toward the front door.