Dorothy Eden (26 page)

T
HE TELEPHONE RANG JUST AS
Harriet came in. It was curious that, even now, after nearly two years, her heart still gave a small excited leap at that sound. Joe had always announced his return this way. The urgent shrill of the bell had become a symbol to her. So that now there was always that split second transformation from joy to a disciplined despair before she could pick up the receiver and speak.

At this moment she was exhausted after a long and particularly trying rehearsal. She wanted to put her feet up and have a long cool drink at her side. All the way home she had day dreamed about such a felicitous state of affairs, the children in bed, the flat tidy, a pleasant girl in the kitchen getting the evening meal. And then, of course, came the forbidden part of the dream, the familiar step at the door, the so-longed-for voice.

Some day, Harriet told herself, she would really sit down and cry for Joe. She would no longer blink back tears on buses, in restaurants, at the door of her flat, inhabited only by children and servants. Some day, when there was time and privacy. In the meantime, one must go on. Answer the telephone now, since Nannie Brown did not appear to be going to do so.

Letting her bag and gloves fall on the hall table, Harriet picked up the receiver. A high girlish voice said,

“Is that Mrs. Lacey?”

“Yes, this is Mrs. Lacey.”

“I’m ringing about the job you advertised, looking after your ki—I mean, children.”

Harriet winced. The cheerful Cockney voice was not part of her dream of the ideal nursemaid. Arabella was just learning to speak and one did not particularly want her first vowels distorted. On the other hand, the owner of this blithe voice sounded young and full of vitality. Hadn’t she resolved to have no more middle-aged or elderly women who could not cope with Jamie’s irrepressible energy? Harriet glanced over her shoulder into the living room and saw its depressing state of untidiness, toys littering the carpet, cushions mussed, one of Arabella’s discarded crusts on the piano, Arabella’s outdoor clothes flung on a chair. Repeatedly she had told Nannie Brown to keep the children and their clutter in the nursery, but the woman had said feebly that Jamie always insisted he liked this room better, and Mrs. Lacey knew very well that her son was impossible to manage. Even as Harriet rapidly reflected on all this, Nannie Brown, dressed in hat and coat, appeared, her elderly face puckered and obstinate.

“Just a minute,” Harriet said quickly into the telephone. She listened to Nannie Brown’s urgent voice.

“I’m on my way home, Mrs. Lacey. I can’t stand any more. If I’ve told Jamie once I’ve told him a dozen times he’s to stay in the flat, but one might as well speak to that chair!”

“Where is he now?”

“I really cannot say. He might be with Mr. Palmer, or he might be with that dreadful old woman in the basement. I won’t be responsible for him any longer. Some tragedy will happen to him and I’ll be to blame. I can’t stand it, Mrs. Lacey. I’m not young enough, and even if I were, that child—” The woman shrugged helplessly and made for the door.

“Arabella?” Harriet asked.

“Oh, she’s in bed asleep. She’s all right. If it was only her I wouldn’t be leaving you.”

Harriet looked at Nannie Brown’s elderly, prim and disapproving face, and wondered briefly how she had ever come to engage the woman. Of course, it had been the old story, the difficulty of getting anyone at all. Suddenly, the cheerful young voice on the telephone seemed full of promise.

“Don’t worry, Nannie. I quite understand,” she said swiftly. “You get away home. I’ll find Jamie and cope.”

The door closed behind Nannie Brown, and Harriet spoke crisply into the receiver. “I’m so sorry to keep you waiting. Now will you tell me your name and how old you are.”

“I’m Millie Green, and I’m nineteen.”

“Have you had any experience in looking after children?”

“Not out at work, but I’ve got six brothers and sisters at home.”

The girl giggled, and Harriet winced again. Then she thought of Nannie Brown, too old and ineffectual, and of the difficulty of getting any answers at all to advertisements for domestic help.

“I think you’d better come and see me, Millie. Where are you?”

“I’m in Kensington, Mrs. Lacey.”

“That’s fine. Then perhaps you could come in, say, half an hour?”

“Yes, I can do that.”

“That’s excellent. Flat 14 on the top floor. In half an hour.”

Harriet sighed as she put the telephone down. The girl sounded young, lively, good-humored. Apart from her Cockney voice and her habit of giggling, she might be an ideal nursemaid. One should not have this depressed feeling of failure before one had even seen the girl.

The flat was empty now, except for Arabella tucked in her cot in the nursery and smiling with uncritical affection as Harriet went in. To this child of hers Harriet always felt a vague unexplainable guilt. Was it because Joe had died before he knew of her conception? Arabella’s chief beauty, beyond her baby chubbiness, was her head of red-gold curls. Harriet’s own hair in its new baby-fine state. Joe had always hoped that one day they would have a daughter with Harriet’s hair, and now the daughter was here, but Joe didn’t know, and had never known. Somehow it had seemed to deprive Arabella of an identity. She was like a guest who had arrived embarrassingly late for a party. Harriet adored her, and yet felt guilty. It was a curious thing.

“Hello, darling,” she said brightly. “Time you were asleep.”

Arabella cooed contentedly. Harriet saw, propped on the table, one of Mrs. Blunt’s cryptic notes. These notes were usually scattered prominently about the flat, and were obviously written as the thoughts came into Mrs. Blunt’s head. This one read, “Arabella sick on carpet, it won’t come out.”

Harriet saw the depressing stain, and sighed again. What had made Arabella sick? Why hadn’t Nannie Brown told her, or coped in time? This spasmodic housekeeping, picking up where Mrs. Blunt and a succession of nannies left off, could not go on indefinitely. But what other prospect was there?

Perhaps this girl Millie—Harriet’s thoughts broke off as the telephone rang again.

A frantic chuckling greeted her as she answered it. Finally Jamie’s voice emerged, “It’s me, Mummy. Guess where I am.”

“Wherever you are,” Harriet said sternly, “you’re to come home this minute. I thought Nannie forbade you to leave the flat.”

“Oh, her!” said Jamie, with scorn. Then he added excitedly, “Mummy, I rang you all by myself. Flynn said I could.”

“Flynn! Oh, Jamie! Didn’t I tell you you were not to go worrying Mr. Palmer.”

“I don’t worry him,” said Jamie. “I help him. He needs a sekkertery.”

“So you are busy at the typewriter!” Harriet said scathingly. “Jamie, I insist—”

It was no use insisting anything, for she heard Jamie saying in his shrill, uninhibited voice, “Over there, Flynn. Over there!” and the receiver crashed heedlessly down.

She would have to go and get him. It was not fair of Flynn Palmer to allow
him
to stay when he knew she disapproved. Flynn always said that Jamie was not a nuisance, and he liked his company occasionally, which must have been true. For Flynn did not bother to disguise either hostility or dislike if he felt them. Becoming blind, with tragic suddenness, seemed to have removed any inhibitions he might once have had about behavior, and now he was pleasant, distantly polite, prickly, or downright rude, as his mood dictated

Harriet liked him best when he was rude. At least then he was honest and one knew where one stood. She was sorry for him, desperately sorry for him. He was only thirty, and his blindness had deprived him of a career as one of the most promising young politicians. But there were other ways of living in darkness. Flynn Palmer still had a great deal: a comfortable income, a faithful and competent man-servant, his deep interest in music and literature, and plenty of friends, particularly good-looking young women, particularly Zoe.

It was a pity one did not like Zoe. She had been remarkably faithful to Flynn, because she was a very attractive girl, and could not lack admirers. But it was now nearly two years since the accident that had killed Joe and left Flynn with his eyesight permanently affected, and during that time Zoe had stood by him loyally and possessively. Possessively? That was not a kind word. But there was no other with which to describe Zoe’s air of ownership of Ryan, his flat, his work, and his manservant Jones.

It seemed certain that they would eventually marry. Harriet did not know why this fact worried her. Flynn had been merely a chance acquaintance of Joe’s. It had been one of those quirks of fate that that night in Boston they had both been at the same party, and Flynn, discovering that they were staying at the same hotel, had offered Joe a lift home. Joe was to have flown back to England the next day. Instead, in the accident that had been the fault of a reckless cab driver, Joe lay dead and Flynn seriously injured.

It could have happened to anybody. But Flynn, with his tortured conscience, had sought out Harriet when he at last returned to England and tried to make what amends he could.

Harriet had tried often to forget that meeting. It had been such a desperate failure. She had been so rigid with grief about Joe, so determined not to break down in front of this stranger whose own face was tightly controlled and somehow anonymous behind the dark glasses, that she must have seemed unfriendly and antagonistic. She had not meant to be. But the whole thing had been such anguish, and she had wished that Flynn’s conscience had not brought him to her.

The accident had not been his fault. It had been fate. It had been meant that at twenty-six she was to be a widow expecting a child which would have no father. At that time she had not told Flynn about the expected baby. And later that was to be still another intangible hostility between them. Because Flynn, who blamed himself for depriving her of a husband, had somehow decided that he had an indirect responsibility for her and her children.

That was how she had come to live at Manchester Court.

Joe’s parents had not approved of his marriage to an English girl. They had had someone lined up for him in Boston, and it had come as a deep shock to them when he had met and married Harriet all in the space of a few weeks. They had not come to the wedding in London. They had made the excuse that Joe’s father, an eminent Boston lawyer, had an important case he could not leave, and his mother was not strong enough to make long journeys alone. But Harriet had known that they were bitterly disappointed, and even her subsequent meeting with them could not break down their hostility.

After Joe’s death they had naturally drawn a little closer. They had insisted on making an ample allowance to Harriet and the children, but Harriet, unable to forget the unhappiness they had caused Joe and herself in their brief marriage, refused to use the money for herself. The children, yes. They had a right to it. She would see that they had a good home, and later went to good schools. But for herself, she would be independent. She went back to her career as an actress, with its bitter-sweet memories of her first meeting with Joe after a show one night when he had waited for her at the stage door.

There was no tall, pleasantly ugly young American waiting at stage doors for her now. Instead, in her life, there was a blind man, Flynn Palmer, who persisted in trying to make amends for a quirk of fate, and had recently enabled her to rent the attractive flat on the top floor of the block in which he had lived for a long time.

The flat, after her trying for months to find the right one, was pure bliss. She had not been so sure about wanting to live as a neighbor of Flynn’s.

But this, too, had been better than she had expected, for Flynn did not encroach on her life. He seemed to be making courageous efforts to adapt himself to his new life, Zoe was constantly with him, and he was unexpectedly tolerant about Jamie’s uninhibited visits. The accident was fading into the past, and they were just people, with their own particular problems and small happinesses, living in the same building. One was neighborly, that was all. Flynn had Zoe, with her pert sophisticated prettiness, to care for him. Harriet had her children and her work. Sometimes, lately, it had even been a little difficult to conjure up Joe’s face out of the empty air…

Looking up at the clock, Harriet made frantic efforts to tidy the flat. This new girl, Millie Green, might be exactly right, and she didn’t want her put off by untidy rooms and an atmosphere of haphazard housekeeping. In the kitchen she found another of Mrs. Blunt’s notes. “It’s time the curtains were sent to the laundry. Shall I do this?” Harriet picked up a pencil and scrawled “Yes.” Mrs. Blunt was a treasure. Her plain, kind face was as round as a full moon, rosy and smiling; her prominent, pale blue eyes missed nothing but were uncritical. If Millie did seem a little young, one would know Mrs. Blunt was there a good part of the day to keep an eye on her.

When, a little later, the doorbell rang and the girl, rather plump, with profuse blonde hair, stood there, Harriet hesitated almost imperceptibly before asking her to come in.

She would put her into a uniform, she thought quickly, as she noticed the girl’s exaggeratedly long bulky sweater, her too tight skirt, and her high-heeled open-toe shoes. She would also persuade her, diplomatically, to have her hair cut shorter.

Apart from that, the girl smiled in a friendly way, and her eyes were very bright, as if she were excited. She looked kind and pleasant. Those were the important characteristics with children.

“Come in, Millie,” she said, leading the way into the now tidy living room. “Sit down. Tell me about yourself. Where is your home, and do you feel happy about taking a living-in position?”

Millie said breathlessly that she lived in Bethnal Green and the house was far too small for their big family. It would be lovely to have a room of her own and live in the West End. Yes, she was good with children, although she didn’t stand too much nonsense.

“I’m afraid you’ll find my little boy a bit of handful,” Harriet said wryly. That was a definite understatement, but time enough to find that out when she had met Jamie and decided to like him. If one liked him his extreme naughtiness was not so upsetting. It would not drive one to hysteria as it had done Nannie Brown. But one could not expect everyone’s heart to melt with tenderness at the sight of Jamie’s ugly, obstinate little face, just because it bore such a resemblance to the photograph of the man on Harriet’s dressing table.