Ice in the Bedroom (7 page)

'Yes, of course you're different. You're the real thing. You're what I've been hunting around for ever since I went to my first kindergarten. And all those girls you've mentioned had popped in and out of my life long before I met you. Oh, Sally darling, do get it into your loaf that you're the only damned thing in this damned world that matters a damn to me.'

In spite of herself Sally found herself wavering. She had planned to be firm and sensible, but it is not easy for a girl to remain firm and sensible when such melting words are proceeding from the lips of the only man she has ever really loved. And a disturbing, weakening thought had floated into her mind—to wit, that she herself had not the unimpeachable record which she was demanding from this opposite number of hers. She had never revealed the fact to him, for a girl likes to have her little secrets, but she, too, had had her experiences. There had been quite a troupe of Bills and Toms and Jimmys in her life before Frederick Widgeon had come into it, and what did they amount to now? They had gone with the wind, they meant nothing to her, she did not even send them Christmas cards. Could it be that the Misses Wix, Prenderby, Peasemarch, Vokes, Christopher, Pinfold and Watt-Watson ranked equally low in the estimation of Freddie Widgeon?

As she stood debating this point, a voice spoke in her rear.

'Hullo there, Widgeon.'

'Oh, hullo, Miss Yorke. Welcome to Valley Fields.'

'Welcome to Valley Fields, my foot. I'd like a word with you some time about Valley Fields and its grey squalor.'

'Any time that suits you.'

'That was a nice trick you played on me, was it not? Still we can go into that later. For your information, I'm inclined to take a lenient view.'

'Good show.'

'Now that I learn that it was love that drove you on. Love conquers all.'

'You betcher.'

'If you're in love, you're in love.'

'You never spoke a truer word.'

'Well,' said Leila Yorke, who was always direct in her methods and seldom beat about bushes, 'how's it coming? Have you kissed her?'

'Not yet'

'For heaven's sake! Are you man or mouse?'

'Well, you see, there's a snag. I'm not so dashed sure she wants me to. The thing's what Shoesmith would call sub judice.'

'Of course she wants you to.' '

You really feel that?'

'It's official.'

Freddie drew a deep breath. 'How's chances, Sally?'

'Pretty good, Freddie.'

'That's better. That's more the stuff. That's the sort of thing I like to hear,' said Leila Yorke, and wandered off, thinking what Mr. Cornelius would have called lovely thoughts. The situation reminded her a little of the getting-together of Claude Hallward and Cynthia Roseleigh in her Cupid, The Archer.

Woof!' said Freddie some moments later.

‘Oh, Freddie!' said Sally. I've been so miserable, Freddie.'

‘Me, too. Plunged in gloom.'

‘Do you really love me?'

‘Like billy-o.'

‘You'll always love me?'

‘Till the sands of the desert grow cold.'

‘Well, mind you do. When I'm married, I want my husband to stay put, not go flitting from flower to flower.'

‘That shall be attended to.'

‘I don't want you ever to speak to another girl.’

'I won't.'

And don't…’

'I know what you're going to say. You would prefer that I didn't kiss them. Right ho. Never again. It's just a mannerism.'

'Correct it.'

‘I will. I'll be like Johnny Shoesmith. He wouldn't kiss Helen of Troy if you brought her to him asleep on a chair with a sprig of mistletoe suspended over her. And now hop across that fence, and I'll show you round Peacehaven.'

Leila Yorke, meanwhile, after doing the setting-up exercises with which she always began the day, had gone back to her bedroom to dress. She had just completed her toilet when the front door bell rang. With a brief 'Oh, hell!', for this, she supposed, would be Mr. Cornelius paying a return date with another suitcaseful of books to be autographed, she went to answer it.

It was not Mr. Cornelius. It was a snappily dressed man of middle age with a frank, open face, and a lofty brow resembling Shakespeare's, who gazed at her with fine, candid eyes as if the sight of her had just made his day.

'Miss Leila Yorke?'

'Yes.’

'Good morning. Miss Yorke. This is a wonderful moment for me. I am one of your greatest admirers. That must be my excuse for this unceremonious call. Could I speak to you for a few minutes, if I am not interrupting your work? It would be a great privilege.'

9

Sunday, with the marts of trade closed and no chance of going out and doing a little shopping, was always a dullish day for Dolly Molloy, and after the departure of Soapy for Castlewood she had found the time pass slowly. She did her nails, tried her hair a different way, changed her stockings three times and experimented with a new lipstick, formerly the property of a leading department store, but she was unable altogether to dispel ennui, and it was with relief that as the hour approached when one would be thinking about a bite of lunch she heard a key turning in the door.

'I thought you were never coming, honey,' she cried happily, bounding up to greet the warrior back from the front.

But her happiness was short-lived. One glance as he came into the room was enough to tell her that here was not a man bringing the good news from Ghent to Aix but one who had a tale of failure to relate. There was a cloud on Soapy's brow, and his eyes were sombre. His whole appearance conveyed the suggestion that in the not distant past he had undergone some spiritual experience which he had found disturbing. Only too plainly he was in the grip of that grief - void, dark and drear, which finds no natural outlet, no relief, in word or sigh or tear - which in the early eighteen-hundreds had depressed the poet Coleridge.

He sank into a chair and wiped his forehead with a silk handkerchief which his helpmeet had picked up at Harrod's one afternoon last winter and given him for Christmas.

'Gosh!' he said in a voice that might well have come from a tomb.

Dolly was a good wife. Though quivering with curiosity and burning to ask questions, she knew that first things must come first. Some quarter of an hour ago Room Service had deposited on a side table a tray containing ice and glasses, and she hurried to a cupboard and extracted from it gin, vermouth and a shaker. A musical tinkling broke the silence that had fallen on the room, and presently Soapy, after he had had one quick and had got started on another rather slower, gave evidence of being sufficiently restored to be able to render his report.

Dolly, observing these improved conditions, felt that the need for restraint was past and that questions were now in order.

'What happened. Soapy? Did you go there? Did you see her? What's she like?'

Soapy winced. The question had touched an exposed nerve. As had been the case with Freddie Widgeon, he had expected to find in Leila Yorke a frail little wisp of a thing who would be corn before his sickle, and right from the start her personality had intimidated him. He had found those bright, piercing blue eyes of hers particularly disturbing, and later, when she had produced that shot-gun…He shivered at the recollection. He was a man not easy to disconcert - if you make your living selling stock in derelict oil wells, you learn to present a confident, even a brassy, face to the world - but Leila Yorke had done it.

'She's a tough egg,' he said, drying his forehead again. 'You remember Soup Slattery?'

'Of course.' That eminent safe-blower had been one of their intimate circle in the old Chicago days. 'But what's Soup got to do with it?'

'She's a little like him. Better-looking, of course, but that same way of giving you the cold, glassy eye that Soup has when you're playing poker with him and he's got the idea that it's not all according to Hoyle. Those eyes of hers sort of go through you and come out on the other side. Moment I saw her, I knew it wasn't going to be easy, but I never dreamed things were going to turn out the way they did. No, sir, it never occurred to me.'

Nothing is more irritating to a woman of impatient habit, wanting to get the news headlines quick, than to try to obtain them from a man who seems intent on speaking in riddles, and a less affectionate wife than Dolly might well at this point have endeavoured to accelerate her husband by striking him with the cocktail shaker. It is to her credit that she confined herself to words.

'What way? How do you mean? What happened?’

 Soapy marshalled his thoughts. He had finished that second martini now, and was feeling calmer. The knowledge that seven miles separated him from Leila Yorke had done much to restore his composure. And he was reminding himself, as Dolly had reminded him yesterday, that you can't win 'em all. It was a comforting reflection. He was not entirely his old hearty self as he began his story, but he had shaken off that dizzy feeling which comes to the man who pays a social call and suddenly finds his hostess jabbing a shot-gun into his diaphragm.

Well, sir, I got to Castlewood and rang the bell. The front door bell. I rang it. Yes, sir, I rang the front door bell.'

Though accustomed to her loved one's always deliberate methods as a raconteur, Dolly could not repress a sharp yelp of exasperation. She needed her lunch, and it looked as though this was going to take some time.

'Get on, get on! I didn't think you blew a bugle.'

This puzzled Soapy. Except when he was selling oil stock, his mind always moved rather slowly.

"Bugle?'

'Get on.'

'Why would I blow a bugle?'

'Skip it. Let it go.'

‘I didn't have a bugle. Where would I get a bugle?'

‘I said skip it. Do concentrate, honey. We left our hero ringing at the door. What happened then?’

‘'She opened it.'

‘She did?'

‘Yes.'

'Hasn't she a maid?'

'Didn't seem to have.'

'No help at all?'

'Not that I could see. Why?'

'Oh, nothing. I was just thinking.'

The thought that had floated into Dolly's mind was that if the garrison of Castlewood was so sparsely manned, it might be possible to drop in one evening with a sandbag and do something constructive. She had always been a woman who liked the direct approach. But Soapy's next words showed this to be but an idle dream.

'All she's got is a secretary and a shot-gun.'

'A shot-gun?’

'That's right. One of those sporting guns it looked like.'

Dolly did not often touch her hair when she had done it to her liking, but she clasped it now with both hands. She was finding her mate's story difficult to follow. The shot-gun motif perplexed her particularly.

'Tell me the whole thing right from the beginning,' she said, reckless of the fact that this might involve another description of how he rang the doorbell.

Soapy asked if there was a dividend. There was, and he drank it gratefully. Then, as if inspired, he plunged into his narrative without more delay.

'Well, like I say, she opened the door, and there we were. "Miss Leila Yorke?" I said. "That's me, brother," she said. "You'll forgive me for butting in like this, Miss Yorke," I said, "but I am one of your greatest admirers. Can I talk to you for a moment?" I said, and then I went into my spiel. It was a swell spiel. If I say it myself, I was good.'

'I'll bet you were.'

'The line I took was that I was one of these rugged millionaires who'd made my money in oil, and I sketched out for her the sort of conditions you live in when you're starting out after oil - the barren scenery, the wooden shacks, the companionship of rough and uneducated men, the absence of anything that gives a shot in the arm to a guy's cultural side. I gave all that a big build-up.'

'I can just hear you.'

' "For years," I said, "I went along like that, starved for intellectual sustenance, and it was getting so that my soul was withering like a faded leaf in the Fall, when one day I happened on a tattered copy of one of her books."'

'Did she ask you which one?'

'Sure she did, and having looked her up in Who's Who, I was able to tell her. It was one of the early ones. I said it kind of seemed to open a new world to me, and as soon as I was able to raise the money from my meagre earnings I bought the whole lot and read them over and over, each time learning something fresh from them. I said I owed her more than I could ever repay.'

'That must have tickled her.'

'You'd have thought so, but it was just then that I noticed she was looking at me in that odd, Soup Slattery kind of way, sort of narrowing her eyes as if there was something about my face she didn't like.'

'If she didn't like your face, she must be cuckoo. It's a swell face.'

'Well, I've always got by with it, but that was the way she was looking. "So you feel you owe me a lot, do you?" she said, and I said, "I do indeed," and she said, "That's just how I feel."'

'Kind of conceited,' said Dolly disapprovingly.

'That's how it struck me. These authors, I said to myself. Still, I didn't hold it against her, because I knew they were all that way. I went into my sales talk. I said money was no object to me, and I wanted to buy this house of hers, no matter what it cost, and keep it as a sort of shrine. I wasn't sure, I said, if I wouldn't have it taken down and shipped over to America and set up on my big estate in Virginia. Like William Randolph Hearst used to do.'

'But Castlewood doesn't belong to her. She's only renting it, same as we did.'

'Yes, I knew that, of course, but I was just leading up to the big moment. She told me the place belonged to Keggs and he was in Singapore or somewhere on his round-the-world cruise, and I said well, that was too bad, because I'd set my heart on getting it and this was going to be a great disappointment to my friends on the other side, who were all great admirers of hers, same as me. "But you won't mind me just rambling about and taking a look at this shrine where you live and work?" I said, and was starting to head for the bedroom when she said, "Excuse me."'

'Went to powder her nose?'