Friendly Young Ladies (9 page)

Leo stood still. Even her smile, for a moment, did not alter. Her slim firm body seemed to grow compact and set. At last she said, slowly, “My God.”

The fair girl, Helen, had come up beside her. All her movements were slight and evenly poised; Elsie had not seen her approach, only found that she was there, quiet and unsurprised, looking not at her but at Leo, with a watchfulness that might have been critical if it had not contained also something protective.

Leo appeared to rouse herself. Speaking like someone whose words are moving a beat or two behind her thoughts, she said, “You’re Elsie. I can’t take it in. You were just a little nipper when I went away.”

“I’m nearly eighteen now.” She did not feel it. She was back again in the room which was still the nursery, watching Leo from the hearthrug, wondering what she was thinking about, and being afraid to ask.

“Who sent you here?” Her eyes and voice had the same sudden wariness that Elsie remembered when she had been guarding her queer unexpected privacies at home. Why hadn’t one known, Elsie thought, that it would be like this? All her expectations were like dreams which startle by their futility when one wakes in the morning. This had always been the inevitable thing. Her mouth felt suddenly dry.

“Nobody. I just came.”

“Is Mother ill?”

“No. I—”

The fair girl put out a cool-looking hand, and touched Leo’s arm.

“There’s a table in the corner. Let’s go and sit there.” She gave Elsie a gentle unrevealing smile and added, “I expect you’re tired.”

“That’s old Bloxon’s place. He’ll be outraged.” Leo’s voice was suddenly light and easy again. “Oh, well, we can move if he comes.” They went over to a round marble-topped table with two empty pint mugs and an ash-tray advertising whisky. Leo said, “I may as well bring our drinks along. What’ll you have, Elsie?”

“I don’t think I—”

“You can have a soft one, you know, if you like. Ginger-beer?”

“Lemonade, please.” Leo went back towards the bar. As she reached it, Elsie heard someone in the group of dart-players say, “Just going to throw sides for another, Miss Lane,” and Leo answer, “Sorry, I’m afraid we’re out for tonight. Don’t wait for me, Joe, it doesn’t look as if I’d make it.” A new voice, not of the kind Elsie would have associated with the company, said, “Too bad. O.K.”

“Have you travelled far today?” Elsie found Helen’s grey, reflective eyes on her face.

“I have, rather. I took a bus to Newquay and went on from there.”

“But my dear, that’s the width of England. You must be worn out. You’re putting up for the night with us, of course.” Elsie swallowed; but the moment was deferred. “Leo’s often told me about you.” She said it kindly and charmingly; it was something quite unconscious in her voice which made Elsie feel like an old school chum being made welcome into someone else’s family.

She said, trying to make bright and natural conversation, “You and Leo have known each other a long time, I expect.”

“About seven years. We’ve lived together for the last five.” One might have supposed that accounting to people for the way that their nearest relatives had spent the last five years were the most natural thing in the world. To Elsie, used to the violently oscillating emotional barometer at home, her composure was almost frightening. She was quite plainly dressed, in a dull leaf-green that set off the pale gold of her silky hair; not a very new frock, but, covert glances discovered, beautifully made, and fitting perfectly the pretty rounded figure under it. Elsie’s own brown Sunday marocain, which she had worn to make an impression, felt suddenly shiny, loose and tight in the wrong places, and the lace collar somehow redundant. But Helen herself seemed quite unaware of comparisons. One felt that she rarely disapproved; and that her approval was a trophy almost beyond ambition. Already, shyly and secretly, Elsie longed for it.

“As a matter of fact,” she began, feeling her heart getting in the way of her breathing. But her voice trailed off, because Helen had looked away from her, smiling. Leo had come back.

She set down her tin tray of glasses, pulled up a chair, and crossed her arms on the marble edge of the table. She was smiling too; only her long brown hands, clasping her elbows, had a separate tension of their own. Helen took the glasses from the tray, and distributed them round the table.

“Well,” said Leo, “cheers.” She looked at Elsie, and then at Helen, over the top of her glass; the look was less like a greeting than a fencer’s salute.

It had not seemed to Elsie in any way remarkable that her sister had not offered her a kiss of welcome. The Chinese-shawled Leonora in the dream-studio had done so indeed, but from Leo in the flesh it would have been an embarrassing surprise. Elsie could not remember having ever seen her kiss anyone, except the ritual good night to their mother at bed-time. She took a quick deep drink, and set her glass down.

“Now,” she said, “where do you want to begin?”

Her face and her attitude, leaning forward a little over the table between them, the groups of men behind, reminded Elsie of something, in a film or a play. Her romantic mind was always apt at such comparisons. Presently she thought of it; it was like a young captain, an adventurer in a rebel force, sitting in his headquarters and receiving an envoy with an ultimatum. It was a moment of which Elsie felt the dramatic possibilities; but she felt them like an onlooker. It was so different from all that she had planned; she had written herself no script for this. Baldly and flatly, looking down at the glass of lemonade in front of her, she said, “Well, you see, I was wondering—I mean, if you’ve got room—if I could stay with you for a little while. I’ve done like you did, I’ve run away from home.”

Leo drew a long breath. Her hands relaxed; she sat back in her chair. A little line smoothed itself out from between her brows.

“Good Lord; why ever didn’t you say so. Is that all? I thought you’d come to ask me to go back there.”

Everything seemed, to Elsie, to have come to a standstill. She had come two hundred miles; she was here; and she was very tired. That was all.

“No,” she said. “I just ran away.”

Helen had been sitting still, watching both of them out of her level grey eyes.

“Does anyone know you’re here?” she asked quietly.

“No. I said I was just going to Newquay.”

Helen too seemed to relax; though it was so impalpable a motion that it was only as if the quality of her repose had changed. She said, her soft voice suddenly warm and kind, “Leo, she’s travelled all the way from Newquay today.”

“Since this morning?” Everything felt different. Leo’s smile was friendly and concerned. Her eyes had lost their wariness. She put a thin brown hand on Elsie’s and gave it a quick pressure, awkward, like a shy boy’s. “You must be half dead. Come straight back with us now and get a hot meal inside you. You can talk about it in the morning. Is that all the stuff you’ve brought?”

“No, I’ve got a case at the station.” Elsie remembered her lemonade, and drank it. She had not realized till then how thirsty she was.

“Leave it till tomorrow. Drink up, Helen; here’s old Bloxon, taking umbrage.” A tiny little old man with a satchel of newspapers was, Elsie saw, eyeing their table with disfavour and suspicion. Helen raised her glass, and lowered the rest of the contents with what seemed to Elsie incredible smoothness and grace. They went out, into a cool, blue twilight, Leo lifting a hand in greeting, or good-bye, to someone by the bar as they left.

The little ruffles of wind from the water passed, coolly and sweetly, across her face. A stray gull flew overhead and balanced for a moment, with a thin evening cry which seemed different from the strong voices of the gulls at home. She became conscious of her hat, because the wind tugged at it, because the train had given her the beginning of a headache, and because the heads of the others were bare. But she clung to the brim; it would have seemed odd to remove it now. Leo and Helen walked on either side of her towards the ferry. She supposed that Mr. Hicks would have started another drink, but it was so pleasant here that she did not care.

“This is ours,” said Leo. A small dinghy, very tubby and old, was tied near the ferry-boat. Leo took a neat cat-like jump from the high stone quay, landing squarely in the middle. “It’s all right, just get in anyhow, you couldn’t upset her.” She steadied the boat with a hand on the mooring-ring, and handed Elsie down with the other.

They set off across the wide, darkening stream, Helen steering in the stern, her fair hair blowing back from her face, looking, as she had looked in the bar, incongruously right. The thick stubby oars dipped smoothly, seeming light to Leo’s measured pull. There was nothing incongruous about her; the boat and the river seemed like extensions of herself. She looked simple, happy, and, thought Elsie with a half-resenting wistfulness, like the younger sister of the two. It still seemed unnatural to find herself the taller. She tried to think of conversation, but could not feel that it was important, and was content to answer the others when they asked about her journey and the way she had come. She took off her hat, because after all, this seemed not to matter either, and enjoyed the cool hands of the wind stroking her forehead. The lights of the bank they had left began to recede, honey and amber against the deepening blue. Two or three hundred yards down the river was a little island, full of willow-trees, with a low wooden building at the nearer end. She thought what a picturesque, but inconvenient, place it would be to live in, and wondered who did.

A shadow fell across the water; the gunwale of the dinghy bumped against a matting fender. She saw, above her, a long wooden railing with flaking white paint, and a gap in the middle of it to which the boat had come. Helen jumped out, and helped Elsie after her on to a platform which gave a little to the water under their feet. They had arrived; it was one of the boats whose unlit windows had misgiven her on the way to the Green Lion. There was still light enough to see its outline; a hull curved bow and stern, like a Noah’s Ark, a buxom figurehead breasting up-river; a long low structure full of windows, with a shorter, newer-looking tier above, and, running round the flat roof, a turned railing which might have belonged to the older part before. It was all white paint, rather blistered and shabby; but the shabbiness had a look of affection rather than neglect, like that of much-used toys. Between the lower windows was some sort of crest or device painted over like the rest.

“I’ll just take the boat round,” said Leo. “Go in and get off your things.”

There were two glass doors in the middle, which had stood open so widely that they had only seemed like a gap in the wall. Helen went in ahead of her, and switched on a light. It was, after all, very like a room on land, except for its shape, long and narrow, the windows either side, and the lockers that ran all round so that the lower three feet of the walls was all cupboard-room. Elsie was vaguely surprised to find the furniture quite solid and comfortable; deep armchairs and a wide couch, covered in a soft faded red which matched the curtains and looked warm against the maize-coloured walls and ceiling; a firm-looking table, and, she noticed gratefully when Helen switched it on, a big electric fire (she had thought everything would be done with paraffin). Even the usual offices, to which Helen considerately led her at once, were quite remarkably usual. Through a half-open sliding door, she glimpsed a tiny, compact kitchen-galley, with shelves of butter-coloured china, a sink, and an electric stove. She said, wonderingly, when they got back to the living-room again, “It’s just like a house.”

“Well, I suppose it is one. They only move once in a lifetime or so. Things are only different on ships because of the way they pitch about. Did you think there’d be bunks, and portholes, and everything screwed to the floor? You get that on a launch, of course. They go to sea. We’re going to buy a launch one day, when our ship comes in.” She went to one of the lockers, and took out cutlery and a yellow and white cloth.

Elsie, her scramble to help waved aside, sat down on the couch and picked up a couple of magazines which were lying there. One was
The Aeroplane
, and the other was
Vogue
. Hastily rejecting the first, she stared at the quelling elegancies of the second, while half her mind watched Helen moving about the table, and the other, freed for a moment from the jostle of new impressions, was delivered over to a chaos of speculation. It had seemed so impossible, when she saw Leo at last, that she could have been other than she was, that only now Elsie began to remember how little it squared with what she had known before. Perhaps, she thought, their parents had made a terrible mistake. Perhaps they had accused Leo falsely, driving her by the injustice to run away. Or perhaps Leo had pretended as an excuse to go; but Leo had never, she remembered, pretended things very much, only, when it suited her, refused to talk about them. She wondered whether Leo would ever tell her, and knew that she would never have the courage to ask.

The place looked, above all things, permanent, settled, a home, not prosperous perhaps but secure. One couldn’t live here, thought Elsie, and work all day in, for instance, an office. Leo had never had any money of her own; she had never even saved, except by fits and starts which ended in a burst of spending. She couldn’t have left home with much more than twenty pounds. Was it possible—could it be that she was being Kept by a Man after all? The thought of it, suddenly terrifying because it did not go with a beautiful stranger in a Chinese shawl, but with Leo who was here, brought her back full circle to Peter. She shut her eyes, trying to see him. She remembered that she was within a few miles of him; perhaps another hour, perhaps less, in the train. She had even forgotten that.

A warm, delicious smell began to creep in from the galley. Scrambled eggs; her stomach seemed to reach out and embrace it. Just then, Leo put her head in through the door; Elsie realized that she must have been in the galley some minutes, having come in by another way. She gave Elsie a quick, cheerful grin, just as she might have done years ago when things were going quietly at home.