Dorothy Eden (2 page)

It might still be a dream, of course. She sometimes had very vivid dreams. Once she had even walked downstairs in her sleep, and when her mother had told Tom the next morning he, quite unperturbed, had said comfortably, “I won’t let her do that when we’re married.”

Tom! Now she remembered. She had run away!

She sat up in a flurry, and the room swam. It was a large room with a raftered ceiling, rather sparsely furnished, but with a fire burning cheerfully. The largest piece of furniture was a desk. It was extremely littered with papers and on one side of it, on top of the scattered papers, sat a square and dour-looking yellow cat. Behind it was the young man. He had his head bent and seemed to be sketching.

He was real, Cressida told herself. He was not only not Tom, who until recently had dominated her life, but was not in the least like Tom, having rather shaggy black hair that hung forward over his brow, a bony jawline and a drawing-board.

What on earth would Tom say if he knew that she had been sleeping, however innocently, on the couch in the room of a complete stranger? Moreover, a stranger who was not, apparently, the least interested in her. Indeed, he was proceeding with his work as if she were either a piece of furniture or not there at all.

It was becoming increasingly evident to Cressida that she was there and that she had a very odd and rather unpleasant feeling in her stomach.

“Hi!” she said feebly.

The young man’s head shot up, displaying a face as bony as the jawline, with slightly crooked black brows and very bright eyes.

“Well, there,” he said triumphantly, “I knew you weren’t dead. But just keep still a moment longer, will you.”

“Keep still!” Cressida repeated bewilderedly. But before her muzzy mind could work that out she was aware that she was clutching something in one hand. It was a crumbled piece of paper. She spread it out and read what was written on it in large scrawling writing. It said briefly,
“You’re too late!”

Then she began to remember. The little woman in the very large horn-rimmed glasses, whose fingers kept constantly and mysteriously pointing to her mouth, flitted across her vision like a noonday owl. She remembered the piece of paper being thrust in her hand, and her mingled relief and despair on reading the words. She had had a curiously urgent desire to get out of the house, and yet where was she to go? The slippery marble steps had stretches before her, the big door with its shining dragon knocker had banged behind her. She had had the most curious feeling that the silent little woman in the too large glasses had enjoyed banging the door. And that had fitted in with her intuition that she should never have come into the house, anyway. But it was her tiredness that had made her slip.

She remembered seeing the shine of rain on the steps as she fell. And that was all.

Sudden urgent curiosity stirred life in her. She sat up straight and said imperiously.

“Do, for heaven’s sake, stop what you are doing and tell me where I am.”

The yellow cat turned its head and gave her an incurious stare out of champagne-coloured eyes. The man, after a last deliberate movement of his pencil, looked up and smiled. One of his eyebrows lifted a little higher than the other. His face, when he smiled, went into deep lines, but his eyes had a twinkling brightness that seemed amused at her and her plight.

“At the moment you’re on my couch,” he said. “Ten minutes ago you were lying at the foot of the front steps. It was raining so I brought you in.”

“Thank you,” said Cressida inadequately. Now she was beginning to feel sundry aches and bruises. There seemed to be a painful lump on the back of her head. And her stomach felt definitely peculiar.

Presently, since the young man seemed to be staring at her so pointedly, she said diffidently, “You didn’t think a doctor was necessary?”

“You didn’t seem to have broken anything. I thought I’d wait a little while and see.” He got up and came over to her in a leisurely manner. He was very tall. “Do you feel all right now?”

“Y-es,” Cressida said uncertainly. Her head was beginning to ache furiously, and her inside—“I think there’s nothing that—”

“A small spot of brandy won’t cure,” her host pronounced.

He disappeared at once, and Cressida heard glasses clinking in the adjoining room. The cat on the desk stood up, stretched himself, and, for all his bulk, gave a surprisingly light spring on to the couch. There he rubbed his head ingratiatingly against Cressida’s hand, and began to purr.

Cressida permitted herself a tremulous smile. Here was someone who was friendly and unmysterious, anyway. The young man, coming back with a tray, smiled too, and said, “Oh, that’s splendid. Mimosa is extremely fussy about his friends. Now Arabia he won’t allow to touch him.”

“Arabia? Who’s he?”

“She. And you’ll meet her presently if you stay. By the way, my name is Jeremy Winter.”

“Mine’s Cressida Barclay.”

“Ah-h-h!” The exclamation was long-drawn-out and interested. “So that explains it.”

“Explains what?”

“Why you came here. You’re answering Arabia’s crazy advertisement.”

“I was,” Cressida said confusedly. “But I didn’t really mean to. I got scared when I saw the house.”

“So you ran away and fell down the steps. Drink this, and tell me about it.”

Cressida looked at the brandy doubtfully. She didn’t want to admit that if she drank it she would probably be sick. She knew now what was wrong with her stomach. She hadn’t had anything to eat for quite a long time. Well, perhaps the brandy would do her good. At least it might make her feel more optimistic about the future.

Recklessly she took the glass from Jeremy Winter and swallowed the contents.

As was to be expected, the room swam again, but this time in rather a pleasant way. The firelight seemed to get mixed up with the brightness of Jeremy’s eyes, and Mimosa’s hair shone like sunlight. The sunlight and the firelight got into her stomach, too. They made it feel much better.

“I’m not going back,” she pronounced definitely.

“Good for you.”

“Tom would be so superior.”

“I suppose he would.”

Cressida blinked a little at the agreeable, unsurprised voice. She was beginning to feel very hazy indeed.

“Do you know Tom?”

“Not your Tom. But I know superior types. Are you married to him?”

“Oh no. We’re only engaged. We’re going to be married on the twelfth of June in 1957.”

“A long-term plan?” Jeremy put down his glass and picked up a pipe. “Do you mind if I smoke?”

“Not in the least.” Pipe smoke, drifting fragrantly about, would add to this pleasant illusory sensation. “Tom’s very cautious,” she said.

“I gather he must be. How old is he?”

“Thirty, but I’m only twenty-two. He says twenty-four is a better age for me to marry, and by that time, of course, he’ll have paid for the house and furniture. We bought a bedroom suite the other day.”

“Did you?”

“Yes. In oak. Tom liked it.”

“And you?”

“I ran away,” Cressida said simply.

The room was a warm darkness studded here and there with light. She was dimly aware of one of Jeremy Winter’s eyebrows lifting startlingly. She knew that he was laughing but politely, inside himself. He wouldn’t have laughed, she told herself grimly, if he had been her, and had seen the bedroom suite, heavy and dark and solid, seeming to weigh her down like a nightmare. She couldn’t have explained to anybody, even to herself, the panic that had filled her, as if all the years ahead with Tom had pressed themselves into one suffocating moment.

“I love Tom,” she heard herself saying carefully, “but it’s a great pity that we have dissimilar tastes. He really belongs to the Victorian period, he likes solid things that last forever, and I—”

“And you?”

“I could imagine all my babies being born in that awful great bed.” Cressida was very hot now, and a little lightheaded. Mimosa curled up at her side, and settled down with a heavy purr of contentment. Jeremy, at the side of the couch, continued to laugh silently at her. She was in a dream, but at least it was not the dream that she was suffocating in that bed with Tom, with curtains drawn round it, as in the days of their great-grandparents, and a stuffy breathless darkness round them.

“I like pretty things,” she said. “Fragile things. I know they don’t last and they’re extravagant, but who wants things to last forever? I like to buy flowers, and I like to give money to beggars. I like mending old china, and I like Dresden cupids. I can’t cook and I’m not practical, but Tom doesn’t mind that. He says I’ll learn. This time he has to learn.”

“To cook?” Jeremy enquired politely.

“That he can’t change me completely. A little, perhaps. But not completely. I’m not going back until then.”

“Tom, if you will allow me to say so, doesn’t sound like the learning kind.”

Cressida smiled, suddenly tender about Tom and his stubbornness.

“Oh, yes, he will be. He loves me too much not to be.” She lay back, remembering Tom’s kisses, trying in retrospect to invest them with all the tenderness and passion that she dreamed about. Suddenly her brief optimism and lightheartedness left her, and she wanted to cry because they had quarreled so irretrievably, and now, although she was in this mess, her pride would not allow her to go back. It was a desperate situation.

“You aren’t Tom’s type,” she heard Jeremy Winter, who after all was a complete stranger and could have no way of knowing her or Tom, saying.

She struggled up.

“How can you possibly say that? You don’t know either of us. After all we ought to know whether we are each other’s type or not. We’ve known each other for fifteen years.”

“The cradle to the grave?” That eyebrow was up at its irritating angle. “Very well, you’re made for each other, but in the meantime you’re here in my room. What is Tom going to say about that?”

“Oh, he mustn’t know!”

“Well, I don’t propose to tell him. What about you?”

“I won’t tell him either, and now I must go.”

She got safely to her feet in one quick movement. The yellow cat, at being disturbed, gave a grumble of protest. Cressida said, “He’s a very spoilt cat,” and sat shakily down. “You’ve made me drunk,” she accused.

She was aware of his hand supporting her. The room spun crazily. She wanted to laugh and ended by crying. It was all so humiliating, and so different from what she had expected on her sanguine departure from home three days ago.

“You can’t go yet, Cressida. I want to draw you. I’ve only just begun.” He stood over her, dominating her as Tom had done, but in a different way. She was tired of being dominated by men. She would do as she herself wished, for once. If her ridiculously weak legs would let her.

“You have just the face I have been looking for,” Jeremy Winter was saying thoughtfully. “It’s full of innocence, and yet it has sophistication and intelligence. An intriguing combination for a twenty-two-year-old. I’d like to rearrange your hair slightly. But we can do that at the next sitting.”

“The next sitting!” Cressida gasped.

“Tomorrow, if you like. When you’re feeling stronger.”

“But—but where am I to stay?”

“In Arabia’s flat, of course. You’re just the person she has been looking for. I know. My dear child, of course you couldn’t sleep with Tom in that horrible bed.”

“W-what?”

“At least, not until he’s learnt his lesson. And I shall have great pleasure in helping you teach it to him. I promise you.” The dark, bright eyes twinkled, the eyebrow raised startlingly.

Cressida blinked. She said. “Mim—Mimosa! What a ridiculous name for a cat.”

“Mimosa, I might tell you, is a celebrity. He appears in fifteen different advertisements and is the star in a comic strip. So he has cultivated a temperament. What would you like to eat?”

“To eat?”

“I rather think that is your immediate concern. When did you last eat?”

“Yesterday. I think it was yesterday. About six o’clock. I had a ham roll and a glass of milk. I didn’t think I could get so hungry again so quickly. You see, the trouble was that when I left home I hadn’t much money, and money goes awfully quickly in London. And I thought it would be much easier than it is to get a job. I’m sure I could sell things. I do know quite a lot about antiques. But nobody—” Her lip quivered. She tried to make the dark shadow of yesterday and the day before leave her mind. “One thing, I was determined I wasn’t going to let Tom know.”

“Naturally.”

“And then this morning I gave my last sixpence to a beggar. Well, he was blind, and I at least could see.”

She looked at Jeremy defensively. She expected him to pity her illogical soft-heartedness, but he merely nodded, as if he had known she was going to confess to a thing like that.

“So then, although I’d come before to this house, and been frightened somehow and gone away—that advertisement was a little odd, after all, and one should be careful of those things—I knew I’d either have to come back here or send for Tom. And I decided at least I could see what happened here. No one was going to eat me, after all.”

“Not even Mimosa,” said Jeremy. “Why were you frightened?”

“I don’t know. I had the most curious feeling, as if I were someone else, and something awful would happen to me. I actually ran down the street. But today I came back, and the woman with the glasses said it was too late. And I slipped on the steps as I was leaving, and that’s all I remember.”

“Do you like bacon and eggs?” Jeremy asked practically. “Of course, I’ll pay you for the sittings, and Arabia will be delighted—why, here she is now!”

And that was when Cressida had the odd feeling of the net, both fascinating and frightening, closing round her.

She heard the rich delighted voice behind her.

“Why, Jeremy, you naughty boy! You’ve got a woman here!”

“That serves you right for coming in without knocking. Mrs. Bolton, I want you to meet a friend of mine, Miss Cressida Barclay.”

“Cress—” The deep voice died away in astonished pleasure and disbelief. “But I thought—you mean, she actually came!”

“She’s here,” Jeremy said briefly.