Ice in the Bedroom (6 page)

As she sat trying to relax, the front door bell rang. She went to answer it, and found on the step a venerable figure almost completely concealed behind a long white beard. He was carrying a large suitcase and a bundle of papers, and she wondered for a moment if he had come to stay.

'Good morning,' said this bearded pard.

'Good morning,' said Sally.

'My name is Cornelius. Can I see Miss Yorke?'

'She's in bed.'

'Not ill?' said Mr. Cornelius, blenching.

'Oh, no, just having breakfast.'

'And thinking lovely thoughts,' said Mr. Cornelius, reassured. 'Does she keep a pad and pencil by her bedside?'

'Not that I know of.'

'She should. The lightest of her meditations ought to be preserved. I have thirty-two of her books here,' said Mr. Cornelius, indicating the suitcase. 'I was hoping that she would autograph them.'

'I'm sure she will. If you will leave them…'

Thank you, Miss - '

'Foster. I'm Miss Yorke's secretary.'

'What a privilege!'

'Yes.'

'She must be a delightful woman.'

'Yes, very.'

'Her books have always been an inspiration to me, and not only to me but to the little literary society we have here which meets every second Thursday. I was wondering if Miss Yorke could be persuaded to come and talk to us this week.'

'I'm terribly sorry, but I don't think she would be able to manage it. She's just planning out a new novel, and of course that takes up all her time.'

'I quite understand. Then I will just leave the Sunday papers for her. I thought she might care to see them.'

'How awfully kind of you, Mr. Cornelius. I know she'll want the Sunday papers.'

'They are rather difficult to obtain in Valley Fields. They are not delivered, and one has to go to a tobacconist's near the station. I always get Mr. Widgeon's for him. He lives at Peacehaven next door, and one likes to be neighbourly. Good-bye, Miss Foster,' said Mr. Cornelius, and with a courtly waggle of his beard melted away.

His parting words had made Sally jump. For an instant she had thought she had heard him say 'Mr. Widgeon'. Then she knew that she must have been mistaken. Coincidences are all very well - in her novels Leila Yorke went in for them rather largely - but there is a limit. It was absurd to suppose that by pure accident she had come to live next door to the man she had resolved never to see again. A simple explanation suggested itself. Owing to his obiter dicta having to be filtered through a zareba of white hair, it was not always easy to catch exactly what Mr. Cornelius said. No doubt the name had been Williams or Wilson or possibly Wigham. It was with restored equanimity that she started to go and see how Miss Yorke was getting on with her breakfast, and met her coming down the stairs in a pink dressing gown.

There was a frown on Leila Yorke's brow, as if she had temporarily suspended the thinking of lovely thoughts and had turned to others of an inferior grade.

'You look peeved,' said Sally, noting this.

Tm feeling peeved,' said Miss Yorke. 'What was that bell I heard?'

'That was the County starting to call. A Mr. Cornelius. I don't know who he is.'

'He's the house agent. Keeps rabbits.'

'Oh, does he? Well, he likes to be neighbourly, so he brought you the Sunday papers.'

'Bless him. Just what I wanted.'

'And thirty-two of your books, to be autographed.'

'Curse him. May his rabbits get myx-whatever-it-is.'

‘And he wants you to give a little talk to his literary society which meets every second Thursday.'

'Oh, hell!'

'Keep calm. I got you out of it. I told him you were thinking out a new novel.'

Leila Yorke snorted bitterly.

'You did, did you? Then you wantonly deceived the poor man. How can I think out a George Gissing novel in surroundings like these? I always thought the suburbs were miles and miles of ghastly little semi-detached houses full of worn-out women ironing shirts and haggard men with coughs wondering where the rent was coming from, and look at this joint we've fetched up in. A palace, no less.'

'Would you say that?'

'Well, it's got a summerhouse and two bird-baths and an aspidistra in the drawing-room, not to mention a reproduction of Millais' Huguenot and a china mug with "A present From Bognor Regis" on it in pink sea shells, which I'll bet they haven't got at Windsor Castle. I ought to have known it. That young hound was pulling my leg.'

'What young hound?'

'You know him. Widgeon. You brought him along to see me, and we got along like a couple of sailors on shore leave. We split a bottle of the best and got kidding back and forth about his uncle Rodney and Johnny Shoesmith and what have you, and in a weak moment I confided in him about this novel of squalor I'm trying to write, and he told me that if I wanted a place where I could absorb squalor by the gallon, I ought to come to Valley Fields. He said if I played my cards right, I could get this Castlewood house, and like a chump I told him to phone Cornelius and fix it up. And here I am, stuck in a luxury suburb about as inspirational as Las Vegas. For all the grey atmosphere I'm likely to find here, I might just as well have stayed where I was. Shows how unsafe it is ever to trust anybody in a solicitor's office. Twisters, all of them.'

Twice during these remarks, as the perfidy of Frederick Widgeon was made clearer and clearer to her, Sally had gasped - the first time like a Pekinese choking on a bone of a size more suitable to a bloodhound, the second time like another Pekinese choking on another bone of similar dimensions. She was stunned by this revelation of the Machiavellian depths to which the male sex can descend when it puts its mind to it, and Leila Yorke looked at her oddly, puzzled by the expression on her face.

'Why,' she asked, 'have you turned vermilion?'

'I haven't.'

'Pardon me. You look like a startled beetroot. This means something. Good Lord!' said Leila Yorke, inspired. 'I see it all. Widgeon loves you, and he talked me into taking this house so that he could be next door to you and in a position to tickle you across the fence. Shows character and enterprise that. I see a bright future for the boy. if only I don't murder him for letting me in for this Valley Fields jaunt. Yes, we have established that important point, I think. Love has wound its silken fetters about Widgeon.'

If Sally had been a character in one of Leila Yorke's books, she would have ground her teeth. Not knowing how to, she sniffed.

'It would be odd if it hadn't,' she said bitterly. He loves every girl he meets.'

'Is that so?' said Leila Yorke, interested. 'I knew a man once who had the same tendency. He was a chartered accountant, and all chartered accountants have hearts as big as hotels. You think they're engrossed in auditing the half-yearly balance sheet of Miggs, Montagu and Murgatroyd, general importers, and all the time they're writing notes to blondes saying, "Tomorrow, one-thirty, same place." I wouldn't let that worry you. It doesn't amount to anything. Men are like that.'

‘I don't want a man like that.'

'You want Widgeon, whatever he's like. I've been watching you with a motherly eye for some time, and I've noted all the symptoms - the faraway, stuffed frog look, the dreamy manner, the quick jump like a rising trout when spoken to suddenly. My good child, you're crazy about him, and if you've any sense, you'll tell him so and sign him up. I'm a lot older than you, and I'll give a piece of advice. If you love a man, never be such an ass as to let him go. I'm telling you this as one who knows, because that's what I did, and I've never stopped regretting it. Were you engaged?'

'Yes.'

'Broke it off?'

'Yes.'

‘I was married. Much worse, because it hurts more that way. You've so much more to remember. But a broken engagement's nothing. You can stick it together again in a couple of minutes, and if you'll take my advice, you'll attend to it right away. You'll probably find him in his garden, rolling the lawn or whatever they do in these parts on a Sunday morning. Pick up your feet, kid, and go and tell him what you really think of him.'

‘I will,' said Sally, and set forth with that resolve firmly fixed in her mind. She was breathing flame softly through the nostrils.

8

FREDDIE was not rolling the lawn when she came out into the garden, he was seated in the shade of the one tree that Peacehaven possessed, reading the Sunday paper which Mr. Cornelius had so kindly brought him, and Sally, reaching the fence, paused. The problem of how to attract his attention had presented itself. 'Hi!' seemed lacking in dignity. 'Hoy!’ had the same defect. And 'Freddie!' was much too friendly. What she would really have liked, of course, would have been to throw a brick at him, but the grounds of Castlewood, though parklike, were unfortunately lacking in bricks. She compromised by saying, 'Good morning,' in a voice that lowered the balmy temperature of the summer day by several degrees Fahrenheit, and he looked up with a start and having looked up sat for an instant spellbound, the picture of a young man in flannels and an Eton Ramblers blazer who is momentarily unable to believe his eyes. Then, rising acrobatically, he hurried to the fence.

'Sally!' he gasped. 'Is it really you?'

'Yes,' said Sally, and once more the temperature dropped noticeably. A snail that was passing at the time huddled back into its shell with the feeling that there was quite a nip in the air these mornings, and would have slapped its ribs, if it had had any.

'But this is the most extraordinary thing that ever happened,' said Freddie. 'It takes the breath away. What are those things they have in deserts? I don't mean Foreign Legions. Mirages, that's the word. When I looked up and saw you standing there, I thought it was a mirage.'

'Oh?'

'Well, I mean; you can't say it isn't remarkable that I should look up and see you standing there. It…how shall I put it?...it took the breath away.'

'Oh?'

There is something about the monosyllable 'Oh?', when uttered in a cold, level voice by the girl he loves, that makes the most intrepid man uneasy. Freddie had been gifted by Nature with much of the gall of an Army mule, but even he lost a little of his animation. However, he persevered.

'Don't tell me you've come to live at Castlewood?'

It was practically impossible for Sally to look colder and prouder than she had been doing since the start of this interview, but she did her best.

'Do you need to be told?'

'Eh?'

'I've heard the whole story from Miss Yorke.'

Freddie gulped. This, an inner voice was whispering, was not so good.

'The whole story?''

'Yes.'

'She spilled the beans?'

'She did.'

'You know all?'

'I do.'

'Then in that case,' said Freddie, suddenly brightening as a man will when he has found a good talking point, 'perhaps you'll get it into your nut how much I love you. I will conceal nothing from you.'

'You won't have the chance.'

'I did lure the Yorke here, and I'd do it again. I'd lure a thousand Yorkes here. It was imperative to have you within easy talking distance so that I could plead my cause and get you to stop being a little fathead.'

'I am not a fathead.'

'Pardon me. You appear to be under the impression that my love isn't sincere and whole-hearted and all that sort of thing. Therefore you stand revealed as a fathead.'

'And you stand revealed as a cross between a flitting butterfly and a Mormon elder,' said Sally with spirit. 'You and Brigham Young, a pair.'

This silenced Freddie for a moment, but he continued to persevere.

'I beg your pardon?'

'You make love to every girl you meet.'

'It's a lie.'

'It is not a lie.'

'It is a lie, and actionable, too, I shouldn't wonder. I must ask Shoesmith. Really, to come here flinging around these wild and unwarrantable accusations…'

'Unwarrantable, did you say?'

'That was the word I used.'

'Oh? Well, how about Drusilla Wix?'

'Eh?'

'And Dahlia Prenderby and Mavis Peasemarch and Vanessa Vokes and Helen Christopher and Dora Pinfold and Hildegarde Watt-Watson?'

This rain of names plainly shook Freddie. He seemed to shrink within his Eton Ramblers blazer in much the same way as the recent snail had shrunk within its shell, and, like the snail, he had the momentary illusion that Valley Fields was in the grip of a cold wave. In a voice that gave the impression that he had tried to swallow something large and sharp, which had lodged in his windpipe, he said:

'Oh, those?'

'Yes, those.'

'Who told you about them?'

'Mr. Prosser.'

'Oofy?'

'I told you he came to see Miss Yorke one day. I showed him round the place and we got talking and your name came up and he said you were always in love with every girl you met and proved it by supplying details. Those were the only names he mentioned, but I have no doubt he could have added hundreds more.'

Freddie, was stunned. He stammered as he spoke. He had seldom been so shocked.

'Oofy! A fellow I've practically nursed in my bosom! If that's his idea of being a staunch pal, then all I can say is that it isn't mine.'

'He was merely passing on information which is generally known to all the young thugs of your acquaintance. It is common knowledge that if all the girls you've loved were placed end to end, they would reach from Piccadilly Circus to Hyde Park Corner.'

It seemed to Freddie that Castlewood, a solidly built house, though of course, as in the case of most suburban houses, it was unsafe to treat it roughly by leaning against the walls or anything like that, was doing an Ouled Nails stomach dance. With a strong effort he mastered an inclination to swoon where he stood. He found speech and movement, and not even Mr. Molloy, when selling oil stock, could have waved his arms more vigorously.

'But, dash it, don't you understand that those were just boyish fancies? You're different.'

'Oh?' said Sally, and if ever an 'Oh?' nearly came out as 'Ho!', this one did.

Freddie continued to act like an emotional octopus. The speed at which his arms were gyrating almost deceived the eye.