Dorothy Eden (10 page)

“Good old Tom. Salt of the earth. Name your fee, my dear child. But in the meantime, do sit still.”

Cressida looked across the table. She saw that Jeremy was rapidly sketching her on the back of the menu.

“I can’t resist it,” he said, without looking up. “I’m in love with your face. It’s like suddenly waking up to a spring day after ice and snow. It’s like finding the first daffodil. Please sit still. It isn’t late yet, and Mr. Mullins knows it’s me you’re out with. Of course I’ll pay you a fee, my darling Cressida. You have the most paintable face. I’m doing an illustration for a short story. It’s by a very famous writer who demands the best. He’d adore you, but I’ll never let him set eyes on you or I’ll lose you. The story is called ‘Death is a Red Rose’.”

That was the moment when Jeremy Winter stopped being a harmless, amusing, and always slightly impudent friend and became a stranger.

What did she know of him, after all? He lived in Dragon House, mysteriously in the basement. He had carried her in the other day, almost as if she were a fish caught in his net. He laughed at her and persistently made sketches of her and pretended to be engaged in currently saving her life. He gave her advice that seemed sincere. She thought he was a friend. And then suddenly he made a double-edged remark that could mean nothing or a good deal.

Did he know that Lucy’s favourite flowers had been red roses? Did he know that they were always sent to her before a ball or a party, and that she had been buried with a cluster of them in her hands? (Buried? But where was her grave?)

Did he know that already red roses suggested death to Cressida, and that now he had put her inner, strange, cold fear into words? Had he done it deliberately, or had that been a purely chance remark? He insisted afterwards that it was. He offered to show Cressida the manuscript with the title on it. His remark probably was quite innocent, but it gave Cressida a haunting dread that she could not dispel all day.

She went home that night resolved to spend another evening in Lucy’s quiet empty room sifting through the relics left there: the clothes, the silk stockings and dancing shoes, the girlish jewellery, the old snapshots and the diary. Surely she could remove this persistant feeling that it was by no ordinary means that Lucy had met her death—if she had met it at all.

It was true, as she had told Jeremy, that Lucy would not let her leave Dragon House. She had this extraordinary urge to seek out the whole of Lucy’s story. She was convinced now that Arabia was only telling her part of it, probably all that she knew. But a great deal had gone on in Lucy’s mind and perhaps in happenings concealed from her mother. And the strangest thing of all was that although it was now a long time ago, a quarter of a lifetime, it seemed as if it had been only yesterday. The house was still permeated with the tension that must have filled it during the last days of Lucy’s short life. That feeling was unexplainable, but everyone in the house had it, Cressida knew.

There was Mrs. Stanhope with her nervous jumpiness, Dawson with his mind morbidly fixed on murders, Mr. Moretti playing his persistently macabre music, Miss Glory too determinedly practical, Jeremy making his subtle double-edged remarks. And, most of all, Arabia, full of melodrama and exhibitionism, as if she were afraid to be quiet; as if something or someone would speak to her in the silence and what she heard would be unbearable.

Even Mr. Mullins, who did not live in Dragon House, had caught its peculiar tension, and spoke his gentle words of warning.

Yet that evening no one could have said there was any tension at all. The house was as quiet and well-bred as its exterior promised. Dawson tapped politely at Cressida’s door and proffered her the bread and vegetables he had brought for her on the way home.

“No more news about that murder. The police don’t find out much,” he said in a conversational voice, as if he were discussing the price of cabbages. He said his mother was well, and they both apologised for disturbing Cressida last night.

Cressida said lightly, “I may be disturbing you tonight, because I’m going up to Lucy’s room to work.”

“You’re writing her story?” Dawson said admiringly. “I’ll tell Ma.”

Later, Cressida, thinking that if everyone knew she were there no one would dare to play tricks on her, told Arabia also that she was going to be upstairs. Arabia gave a tremulous sigh, and nodded her head understandingly.

“Don’t let Lucy make you too sad, my dear. I’ve had enough sadness to pay for all my sins, but you’re too young to suffer.”

“Your sins?” Cressida queried.

Arabia had a flash of her colourful melodrama.

“Of course I’ve sinned. Gloriously. Fine big shocking sins. Never mean sordid ones. I remember that night in Khartoum—no, never mind now, your ears are too young and pretty.” She leaned forward to pat Cressida’s cheek. “I wasn’t bad, dear, only high-spirited. Oh, a little bad, too.” She gave her ravishing smile, her tired old eyes suddenly glowing with unquenchable life. “They would all fall in love with me, you know. It was quite embarrassing and inconvenient at times. You will find the same thing happen to you, now you’ve escaped from your watchdog in the country.”

“Did Lucy?” Cressida asked involuntarily.

Age fell over Arabia’s face like a mask. The light in her eyes died.

“My darling little girl didn’t live long enough. But they would have. Yes, they would have. Now run along and look at her things. They’ll talk to you better than I can.”

Miss Glory had overheard her conversation with Arabia, because she slid past them on the stairs, her long face contorted in a meaningful wink. Jeremy had known at lunch-time of her intentions. There was only Mr. Moretti left, and he didn’t really matter because he would be away at his night-club. As it happened, Cressida met him in the hall just as he was leaving.

It was the first time she had met him since their preliminary introduction.

He was dressed in evening clothes, and looked plump and dapper. But with his pale eyes, his thick light eyebrows and lashes, he had a curiously faceless look. His teeth, too, were very small so that when he smiled his mouth made a dark cavern. He was almost comical, and certainly not the kind of man who would cause tremors in any feminine breast other than Miss Glory’s flat ardent one. Except for his voice. One had to make that exception, for it was oddly pleasant and persuasive.

Now he said, “Good evening, Miss Barclay. Please tell me at once if my violin disturbs you.”

“It really doesn’t, Mr. Moretti. I’m out all day and you’re out all night, almost. Only I wonder why you have a taste for such sad music.”

“Ah, yes, indeed. I’m afraid that’s a natural reaction after playing dance music all night. From the rumba to the requiem. That’s how it is.”

He gave his wide, dark-mouthed smile, his thick lashes hiding his eyes. He bowed gallantly, and was gone. He’s just like somebody kept in a dark room and gone pallid, Cressida was thinking, when she realised that Miss Glory was watching her from the end of the hall.

Miss Glory was in love with that poor little unnatural product of night life, she realised. Suddenly she was both sorry and sympathetic and envious. It must be wonderful to be in love with someone like that, so that you got infinite pleasure out of every glimpse of him, out of every nuance of his voice. And it didn’t matter whether he looked like a king or a caterpillar. At the same moment she knew that she was not really in love with Tom. Standing there in Arabia’s marble-floored hall she knew drearily that she had never been in love nor known its glory and despair.

How could she write Lucy’s story, which she knew instinctively was one of deep romantic love, when she had never been in love herself?

Absorbed in this sudden disturbing revelation, Cressida did not remember Mr. Moretti’s words until she was in Lucy’s room, and looking with her now familiar distaste at the waiting bed, the fresh flowers, the carefully-laid-out nightgown. From the rumba to the requiem, he had said.

And he had been talking of Lucy. Of that she was convinced.

Had it been a chance remark, cleverly significant but meaning nothing more than its aptness? Or had he some personal knowledge of Lucy? Did he know how her little feet, scarcely stopped dancing, had come to their premature quiescence?

It had been a very short illness, Arabia had said.

What doctor had Lucy had, what minister summoned hastily to her bedside, what gravedigger, what grave?

Cressida turned to pick up the innocent and unrevealing diary. Suddenly she looked more closely at it. Why, a number of pages had been removed from the middle of it. The date on which the last entry had been made was the third of April, and the next page showed the tenth of July. Three whole months were missing. What had happened in those months? What revealing entries had Lucy made that someone had considered better destroyed?

Cressida, trembling with excitement, was going to rush down to Arabia. But suddenly she paused. She could already visualise the hooded look coming over Arabia’s eyes, she could hear the haughty old voice saying, “And why, pray, should I destroy anything my darling child wrote? Those are the blank days after her death that I couldn’t bear to live through. So I destroyed the empty pages.” She knew with certainly that Arabia- would make some explanation like that, just as she denied the existence of Lucy’s grave.

Three months of missing pages and a missing grave. Now her instinct that here was an absorbing story was proving correct. In a fever of excitement Cressida began opening drawers, unfolding gloves, stockings, handkerchiefs, silk underwear. Momentarily she forgot that they belonged to a dead girl. Somewhere here among Lucy’s things there must be more clues to those lost months.

The sweet heavy scent of dried roses filled the room. The house was utterly still. Then, slipped down at the back of the bottom drawer, she found the letter.

It wasn’t a letter at all. It was just a beginning. It said “Darling, darling, darling…” and then there was no more.

Cressida groped feverishly in the gap at the back of the drawer. Her fingers touched on something soft. She drew it out. It was a hand-knitted baby’s glove.

She couldn’t stay up there alone. Suddenly the room was uncanny with its untold story. She had to know the truth. Arabia was the only person to tell it to her. Clutching the scrap of knitting she ran down the stairs and tapped on Arabia’s door.

Arabia called eagerly, “Is that you, Cressida? I’m in bed, but do come in, my darling, and kiss me goodnight. It’s so kind of you to think of an old lady.”

Sitting up in the big four-poster, Arabia had lost her majestic posture and looked much more frail and defenceless. The bones protruded at the base of her neck, her thin wrists emerged fragilely from the cuffs of her woolly bed jacket. Now she looked mortal indeed, and no longer indestructible. Even her smile glimmered in a childlike way as she lifted her face to be kissed.

Was she really as gentle and helpless as this, Cressida wondered, or was she just a consummate actress?

“That’s what Lucy used to do,” she said in her soft satisfied voice. “She would creep in to see if I were awake when she came home at night, and if I were she’d stop and talk about the ball and the people. Just here, she would sit.” Arabia patted the side of the bed invitingly. “She never looked tired, always so fresh and sparkling. She was one of those people on whom a dress never crushed, or flowers never died.”

In fact, thought Cressida with sudden bleak conviction, she was a dream creature who with her death had become invested with an impossibly angelic purity. She clutched the baby’s glove, and felt like an assassin.

“I found things in Lucy’s room tonight,” she said.

“You did?” Was Arabia’s attention suddenly more than a smiling politeness? “But of course you would. Those darling relics—”

“This,” said Cressida flatly, holding up the ridiculously miniature garment.

“But—why it’s a baby’s glove!”

The heavy lids dropped abruptly over the suddenly aware eyes. The old face was closed. It was all ridges and shadows, a sculptured face telling nothing.

“Lucy must have been knitting it for one of her friends.” Arabia’s voice was too glib. “She knitted very well. I used to wonder where she got her talent. Me, I couldn’t—”

Cressida cut into the half-finished sentence.

“Arabia, why do you lie to me? You’ve been very kind and sweet and I do appreciate that, but I don’t appreciate being lied to when there’s absolutely no need. Lucy should be nothing to me, a girl I never knew, and dead nearly twenty years. It shouldn’t matter to me if this glove was being knitted for her own baby or not. But you liken me to Lucy all the time, and therefore I must know the truth. It makes me feel foolish not to, and I waste my sympathies.”

The hooded lids were raised now, the eyes dark and shocked. There was no doubt whatever about their shock. In that minute Arabia had changed from her role of a sad resigned mother to that of a frightened old woman.

“This was for Lucy’s own baby, wasn’t it?” Cressida insisted.

“I—don’t know.”

Cressida began to lose her patience. Ever since finding the glove and that beginning of a letter that was also, somehow a cry for help, she had been conscious of an almost unbearable tension. Why didn’t people tell her the truth? It was imperative that she should know it, and this not from curiosity but because Arabia had invested her with the dead Lucy’s role, and she had to know what it had been. She could not endure a lie.

“Arabia!” She tried to speak gently. “You must know. Lucy was your own daughter. You loved her. You must know whether or not she was going to have a baby.”

“Oh, no, no!” Arabia burst out harshly.

Instinctively Cressida knew that in that moment Arabia was not speaking to her but to some torturing image in her own mind. But now at least she was no longer acting so there might be a chance of getting the truth. Momentarily without remorse, Cressida pursued her questioning.

“Arabia, is Lucy really dead?”

Then Arabia came to life. She jerked upright, her eyes blazing, her face rigid with suffering.