Return to Peyton Place (9 page)

“That'll cost you something, Leslie,” said Charles Partridge, who, some said, took better care of other people's money than he did of his own.

“Can you fix it up, Seth?” asked Leslie.

“Yes,” said Seth. “Not from here. I've got to go down to Manchester, day after tomorrow. I'll do it from there.”

“Now we'll see,” said Leslie, and smiled at his friends. “Now we'll see.”

When Leslie and Charles had left, Matthew Swain helped himself to another drink and then extended the bottle to Seth.

“What do you think about Leslie, Seth?” he asked. “Do you think he means what he says?”

Seth gazed at his friend. “Well, for Christ's sake, Matt, it was you telling me to shut up in the beginning when I didn't believe him. Now that he's got me convinced, you turn around and ask if I think he means what he says.”

Dr. Swain smiled. “I guess what I really was wondering was whether I believe him.”

“What is it, Matt?”

Matt made a gesture of self annoyance with his hand. “Oh, hell,” he said. “I guess I've known Leslie Harrington for too many years and I'm cursed with one of those long memories I'm always yapping at other people about. Don't pay any attention to me, Seth.”

“No, you don't,” cried Seth. “Don't pull that on me, you old bastard. Now what the hell are you driving at?”

Matt Swain looked down into his drink. “I keep remembering,” he said. “I keep remembering how Leslie never could stand to be beaten at anything. Not even when he was a kid.”

“But he did get beaten,” Seth said. “The worst beating a man could take, just about. He lost his son, Matt. His only son. It changed him, you know that. He's never been the same.”

“Like I said, Seth. Don't pay any attention to me. It's been a big day and I'm tired to the point of imagining things.”

But when Matthew Swain went to bed, he was wondering. Does the leopard change his spots, or does he merely camouflage himself by hiding behind something? Behind something that would fool even the most observant eye. Matt groaned aloud. Like Leslie, he was alone. Whether he groaned or roared with laughter, no one would be disturbed. Matt was haunted by nothing but loneliness, and he had decided he was too old to take the cure.

R
OBERTA
C
ARTER SAT
up in her bed so silently that the top sheet barely rustled against her nightgown. She looked across the narrow aisle that separated her bed from Harmon's and saw that he was well covered and sleeping soundly. In the dark, she stood up and fixed her pillows under her blankets so that if Harmon awoke and looked across to her bed it would appear that she was there, asleep. She left her slippers on the rug, just as they had been when she had taken them off, and she was very careful not to disturb the folds of her robe at the foot of the bed. Then she tiptoed across the room and out the door. The rest of her plans had been carefully made earlier in the evening and she had smiled to herself as she carried them out right under the very noses of the people concerned.

It had been a very good dinner that evening, she congratulated herself. Heavy enough to make Harmon feel full and rather logy afterward, but not heavy enough to make Ted and Jennifer feel anything but contented and well fed. Then there had been the sedative in Harmon's coffee, not enough to hurt him, of course, but just enough to make him say that he couldn't keep his eyes open a minute longer by nine o'clock.

“Well, now, dear,” Roberta had told him. “You just sit still one more minute and I'll go up and turn down the beds.”

“Oh, please let me help you, Mother,” said Jennifer, jumping up.

Roberta put a restraining hand on her shoulder. “Now, you just sit down and finish your coffee, dear,” she said. “I won't be a minute.”

“But I'd like to help you,” protested Jennifer.

Roberta was hard put to keep annoyance from showing on her face and in her voice. That was just one more thing about Jennifer, she thought. Always arguing over the simplest things. Ted had never been like that. The only time her boy had ever been pigheaded about anything was when he was younger and had a crush on Selena Cross. But he'd got over that and he'd never dug his heels in about anything since. Now it appeared that Jennifer, who had seemed so sweet and tractable when Ted had been courting her, had a little stubborn streak that could prove to be very annoying if it weren't curbed. But right now was not the time to be annoyed.

“All right, then.” Roberta smiled. “Why don't you and Ted go into the kitchen and make a pot of coffee? I'd love a fresh cup when I come down.”

Roberta went upstairs, humming to herself, and turned down the beds in her room. Then she went down the long hall to the room that had always been Ted's and which he now shared with Jennifer whenever the two of them came to Peyton Place for the weekend. That had been another of Jennifer's ideas. Roberta had wanted “the children,” as she called Ted and Jennifer, to use the large guest room next to her room, but Jennifer had turned stubborn again.

“But, dear,” Roberta had said, “that old room of Ted's is way down at the end of the hall, and the bathroom is at this end. It just won't do, dear. You'll be much more comfortable right here next to me.”

“That's sweet of you, Mother,” said Jennifer, “but really, we'd rather use Ted's old room. Wouldn't we, Ted?”

“Doesn't matter to me,” said Ted.

He did not see the sudden glare that his wife gave him, but Roberta did.

“Well, it matters to me,” said Jennifer with a pretty pout. “I like your old room. It has so much of you in it, and I like to think of you as a little boy, sleeping there.”

Ted put his arm around her. “Anything you say, darling.” He smiled.

Roberta had made up the bed in Ted's old room, but right then she had begun to wonder just what it was that Jennifer had to hide that she wanted to be stuck off in a corner somewhere in a house with her own inlaws.

She's talking about me! The thought had come to Roberta in a flash, like a divine sign from Heaven. She's talking about me! Trying to turn my boy against me!

Well, as Roberta put it to herself, she'd never been one to let herself be undermined without fighting back. But she couldn't begin to fight until she knew what she was up against. And it did not take her long to find a way.

Roberta smiled to herself as she turned back the blankets on the big double bed in Ted's old room. She spread an extra quilt across the foot of the bed, and then she went very quietly to the room next door. It was a small room, containing a bed, dresser and one chair, and had originally been used as a maid's room when old Dr. Quimby, Roberta's first husband, had been alive. In later years, Roberta had used it as a place to store extra blankets and dishes and other odds and ends which a family accumulates over the years.

Harmon Carter and Ted would have been surprised indeed to see the narrow bed freshly made up and to find the hot-air grate open. It was a good-sized grate, fully twelve inches square, and Roberta had examined it carefully from both rooms. When it was dark in the storage room, no one could possibly tell, without getting down on all fours under Ted's bed, that the lever had been moved and that the squares in the grate were now open. Roberta had occupied the bed in the storage room every time Jennifer and Ted came to Peyton Place to visit. In six months she had heard many things. She knew that Ted had nothing to say about the apartment that he and Jennifer rented in Cambridge. It was a lovely apartment, large and sunny. Roberta had seen it herself, but Ted was not comfortable there because Jennifer's father paid the rent.

“Damn it, it makes me feel kept,” said Ted.

“What would you have us do?” demanded Jennifer. “Would you move me into some furnished room and support me on what you could earn as a part-time soda jerk or gas station attendant?”

“Lots of guys work their way through,” said Ted. “A little work never killed anybody. I've always worked.”

“What if you fell down on your grades?” asked Jennifer. “Daddy's firm doesn't take in people who got bad grades at law school. Not that they object to a nice, gentlemanly ‘C' once in a while, but they don't like men who make a habit of getting marks like that. Oh, darling,” she said, her voice dreamy and gentle now, “someday it's going to be Burbank, Burrell, Archibald and Carter. Won't that be wonderful? Won't it make a little pride swallowing now worth while?”

“Burbank, Burrell, Archibald and Carter,” said Ted. “Yes, darling. It'll make everything worth while.”

Roberta was pleased when she heard that from her side of the grate. Her Ted had never been a small thinker and he wasn't going to become one now. And it wasn't as if the Burbanks did everything for the children. She and Harmon sent them a nice check every week. There had been a few bad moments, too, during Roberta's eavesdropping. Once, Jennifer had questioned Ted about Selena Cross.

“Were you in love with her?” asked Jennifer.

Roberta held her breath as Ted hesitated. “No,” he said at last, and Roberta let out a silent sigh. “We went around together a few times, but that's all.”

“Is she pretty?”

“She's all right.”

“Is she prettier than I?”

“Sweetheart, no one in the world is prettier than you.”

Roberta had listened shamelessly as her son made love to his wife and once she had almost felt sorry for him. Jennifer seemed to be awfully wishy-washy about sex, and sometimes she had sounded frightened and it had taken Ted hours to calm her and then arouse her gently so that she let him take her. It hadn't been that way with Harmon and her, Roberta remembered, smiling in the dark. But then, too much sex wasn't good for a man who had to keep his mind on his books. Luckily, Harmon had never been a student. In six months Roberta had heard the children making love only three times, and after each time, Ted had been pale and shaky the next day. Yes, thought Roberta, it was a good thing that Jennifer was a little frigid.

Never once, in all the time that Roberta Carter had spied on her son and his wife, did she feel shame or remorse. Ted was her son, her only son, and she had a right to see that everything went well for him. If he was disturbed about anything, she wanted to know. And if his wife should try to turn him away from his mother, she had a right to know that, too. It did not matter to Roberta that in six months' time she had never heard Jennifer make a single derogatory remark about her. The girl might, in the future. Just because she hadn't until now was no reason to suppose that she never would.

“My!” exclaimed Roberta, coming into the living room and giving an exaggerated shiver, “it's going to be another cold night. Still snowing, too. Our windows won't be open much tonight, I can tell you that.”

“Ours will,” said Jennifer and laughed. “I'm married to the biggest fresh-air enthusiast in captivity.”

Harmon yawned. “Warm or cold,” he said, “bed's going to feel good to me.”

Roberta put up her cheek to be kissed. “I'll be up shortly, dear,” she said.

When she did go upstairs it was ten o'clock and Ted and Jennifer were playing backgammon in front of the fire, and at ten-thirty, when she crept down the hall toward the storage room, she could hear their voices coming faintly up the stairwell. Roberta Carter locked the storage room door behind her and got silently under the warm blankets in the narrow bed. It was quarter to twelve when she heard Ted snap on the lights in the room next door.

Jennifer Burbank Carter was twenty-two years old and never once, in the six months of her marriage, had she undressed in front of her husband.

“It's not nice,” she had told him with finality.

Jennifer had always lived in an environment where everything was Nice. There had been Burbanks in Boston for almost as long as there had been Cabots and Lowells, and the standards of behavior in Jennifer's family had not changed in over two hundred years. A lady did not make an exhibition of herself, ever.

Once, when Jennifer was twelve, she had gone shopping with her mother and in one of the stores they had seen a girl with bright, blond hair and a swollen-looking, red mouth. The girl was chewing gum and looking at costume jewelry and she had a pair of enormous, hard-looking breasts under a very tight sweater. Jennifer had stopped and stared at the girl until her mother noticed. Mrs. Burbank's face got very red and she almost shook Jennifer when she took her arm.

“I've never seen such a display of vulgarity in my life!” said Mrs. Burbank. “Remember, Jennifer. Women who have to use their bodies to create an impression are vulgarians of the cheapest, crudest sort.”

“But, Mother—”

“Don't argue, Jennifer. You know I'm right. As you grow older, you'll realize it even more.”

For a long time after that, Jennifer thought of her body only as something to be kept clean, covered and hidden. As she grew older she was measured by her mother's dressmaker and in due time she found a dozen satin and lace brassières in a box on the foot of her bed. Later, there had been wispy panty girdles to be worn on dress-up occasions, but there had never been any discussion of any sort on the subject of underwear between Jennifer and her mother.

When Jennifer was sixteen years old and in her last year at a very fine girls' school just outside of Boston, she roomed with a girl named Anne Harvey. Anne was a year older than Jennifer, and her father was head of the largest brokerage house in the state of Massachusetts. Anne was a big, muscular girl but so full of good humor that the other girls at school never teased her about her looks. They admired her and made her captain of the volley-ball team and president of the student council, and every one of them wanted to be “Anne's best friend.” But Anne chose Jennifer Burbank.

The two of them were inseparable. They went everywhere together and were thought of as a team, but Jennifer never could manage to feel secure in her relationship with Anne. There was too much competition, she thought, and was very, very careful never to offend Anne because Anne had a hundred little ways of letting her know that the school was full of girls who'd give their eye teeth to be in Jennifer's place.