Sixty Days to Live (2 page)

‘I should be bored to tears doing nothing all day.’

‘But you wouldn’t be doing nothing,’ he persisted. ‘I’ve made enough to take things easy now, and we could travel. You’d like that, wouldn’t you? There’s the house in London. And we’d have another in the country; a big place where we could entertain. Think what fun it would be for you, with your artistic flair, to furnish and decorate it. Besides, you could do an immense amount of good with my money. I’ve been too busy to think of other people while I’ve been making it, but you must have lots of pet schemes you’d like to foster; and if running a
couple of big houses, with frequent trips abroad, isn’t enough, you’d find plenty to occupy you in really worth-while charities.’

‘You think I’m a much nicer person than I really am. Actually, I’m extremely selfish and rather lazy.’

He looked her straight in the eyes. ‘That’s just one of your poses, Lavina, and if you stick on in the film game, it may become a permanent part of your nature. Instead, you’re going to marry me and remain your own sweet self, and I suggest that as a first step you should introduce me to your people.’

‘I’ve never confessed to having any.’

‘True. You always pose as a “mystery woman”, but I’ll bet you’ve got some relatives tucked away somewhere. Of course, if they gave you a rotten deal, we’ll leave it at that; but the chances are that they follow your career through the papers with tremendous pride, so it would be the decent thing to do just to go and see them before you get married.’

‘As a matter of fact, they’re very fond of me. But you might not like them.’

‘Does that matter?’ He smiled suddenly and his brown eyes twinkled. ‘I’m not suggesting that they should come and live with us.’

‘I’m afraid the squalor of my old home would quite appal you.’

‘So the glamorous Lavina Leigh was dragged up in a slum?’ he said meditatively. ‘I find that surprising. You’re an aristocrat to your finger-tips; but then, perhaps you’re a love child.’

‘No. I’m as certain as one can ever be that I’m not, but remember, it’s marvellous what the film people can do when they groom a girl for stardom.’

‘Voice, hair, beauty culture, deportment, clothes, I grant you,’ he nodded, ‘but they couldn’t have given you those long, slender hands, your narrow wrists and ankles; or that princess-look that’s so marked in all your features. The fact that you’re a thoroughbred is stamped all over you. But, anyhow, what’s it matter where you came from? My father was a foreman-mechanic and, if I wore the only old school tie that I’m entitled to, no one would know it outside Bradford. Are your people very poor, Lavina?’

‘They struggle on, somehow, but they never quite know how they’re going to keep the roof over their heads.’

‘In that case I’d like to arrange to make things a bit easier for them in the future.’

Lavina laughed readily at every jest and was almost always smiling, either at something someone had said or at her secret thoughts, but now her eyes took on a serious expression as she said:

‘You’re a nice person, Sam, aren’t you?’

‘No. I’m hard as nails but it happens that I love you, so I’d like to do things for anybody with whom you’re connected. Do your people live in London?’

‘No.’

‘In the provinces, then?’

‘No. In these days I suppose you’d almost call it a suburb.’

‘Whereabouts?’

‘Well, if you
must
know, I’m a farmer’s daughter and I spent most of my childhood in the country. But Surrey has been so built-over now that you can hardly call it country any longer.’

‘D’you ever go and see them?’

‘No. I haven’t been home for three years, because Mother’s dead and I quarrelled with Father about going on the films.’

‘Then it’s quite time that you made it up with him.’

Lavina half-closed her eyes as she drew upon her cigarette. Then she nodded slowly. ‘Perhaps you’re right, Sam. My father adores me really and I’ve been thinking rather a lot about him lately. Mind, I still haven’t said that I’m going to marry you, but if you like I’ll write and say that I’m prepared to bury the hatchet and ask if I can take you down there next week-end.’

On the following Saturday afternoon Sir Samuel Curry drove down into Surrey with Lavina beside him. When they had passed Dorking, with its outcrop of modern, jerry-built houses, she directed him as he swung the powerful coupé through narrow, twisting lanes towards the little village of Stapleton.

The previous night she had told him that he was to pack a bag, as her father had written that he would be glad if she and her friend would stay the week-end.

Sam was immensely intrigued to see what Lavina’s home would be like and had been visualising some tumbledown old farmhouse; so he was considerably surprised when she checked him at a pair of great iron gates flanked by stone pillars, set in a wall that hemmed in a belt of woodland.

True, the iron gates, which stood open, were rusty and one of the stone lions holding shields, which crowned the pillars, had lost its head. But, quite obviously, it was the entrance to a big estate.

‘Where’s this?’ he asked.

‘Stapleton Court.’

‘Has your father got the home farm here, then?’

She smiled. ‘I suppose you’d call it that, as it’s the only one that’s left to us.’

He pulled up the car a couple of hundred yards along the drive and turned to look at her. ‘D’you mean, Lavina, that Stapleton Court’s your home?’

‘Yes. And I don’t think I told you that my real name is Stapleton, did I? My family has lived here for centuries.’

‘You little devil,’ he laughed. ‘You led me to suppose that your father was just a poor farmer.’

‘But he is, Sam. We had money once, lots of it, and owned miles of country hereabouts; but a Stapleton, in Regency times, gambled nearly everything we had away, racing cockroaches and things. Now, farming doesn’t pay any longer and the family’s on
its beam-ends. You may have noticed that the Lodge is empty and the drive all overgrown. Of course, I pulled your leg a little bit, just for fun, but Daddy really is most desperately poor.’

‘Well, perhaps we could rectify that.’ He smiled as he let the clutch in again. ‘Buy the place and let it to him for a peppercorn, or something.’

She quickly shook her head. ‘For goodness’ sake don’t try to. He’s as proud as Lucifer and determined to die here rather than sell the place, even if the roof literally falls in. He wouldn’t accept a loan from one of his own relatives, so please don’t even mention the word money.’

A quarter of a mile farther on they swept round the curve of a broad lake, beyond which lay a square, red brick Georgian house of moderate size.

There was no butler to receive them but Gervaise Stapleton came out himself with his brother, Oliver, who was also down for the week-end, and Lavina’s elder sister, Margery.

Although Gervaise Stapleton had not seen his errant favourite daughter for just over three years, he greeted her as naturally as though they had only parted the day before. He was a tall, white-haired man nearing sixty, with the same aristocratic features as Lavina and the same magnetic personality.

Her Uncle Oliver was a less distinguished and more untidy replica of his elder brother. The best part of his life had been spent in the Royal Observatory at Greenwich and his stooping shoulders were the result of the countless hours he had spent poring over abstruse astronomical calculations.

Margery Stapleton was three years older than Lavina and seemed to have just missed all the qualities which made Lavina such an outstanding beauty. Her limbs were sturdier, her hair light-brown instead of natural gold, her mouth even smaller and a little thin; her nose more beaked and so too prominent in her otherwise handsome face.

It was soon clear to Sam Curry that only one portion of the house was occupied; but the bedroom to which his host showed him had a cheerful wood fire burning in its grate.

‘We live very simply here, as Lavina will certainly have told you before she asked you down, so I fear you’ll have to unpack and fend for yourself,’ was Gervaise Stapleton’s only reference to his lack of servants.

‘I’m used to that,’ Sam lied cheerfully. It was twenty years since he had done anything but use his brain and give orders to others, but his age, his arrogance and his habit of taking it for granted that every service should be performed for him seemed to have unaccountably disappeared from the moment he had entered the half-derelict Georgian mansion.

He felt almost a boy again and that it would have been more natural to accept a five-bob tip from Lavina’s father than to offer him financial assistance. There was a strange, compelling dignity about the tall white-haired figure, although Gervaise Stapleton was not the least stiff and his smiling blue eyes showed whence his younger daughter had got her sense of humour.

On coming downstairs Sam found the family assembled in the library; a long, book-lined room furnished with an assortment of pieces from a dozen different periods, but all mellowed by time, so that nothing jarred. Gervaise loved his books and so had chosen it as the living-room when economy had compelled him to close up the others.

As soon as he had a chance to talk to Margery, Sam discovered that she was as different mentally from Lavina as she was physically. The beautiful Lavina could be hard, but that was a sort of protective armour, whereas Margery’s hardness was a natural quality and, clearly, she was jealous of her younger sister.

It transpired that she ran the house and looked after her father with only the help of a woman in the kitchen and a farm hand who laid the fires, cleaned the shoes and did the other heavy work each morning. She made an unnecessary parade of busying herself and mildly sarcastic remarks about Lavina’s proverbial laziness.

But Lavina, lolling in a big armchair, refused to be drawn and watched her sister with a faintly cynical smile as the older girl went off to lay the table for supper.

To his own surprise, Sam found himself offering to help and he could cheerfully have smacked Lavina for the openly derisive grin with which she favoured him; but Gervaise Stapleton would not hear of his guest lifting a finger and had just produced some remarkably fine Madeira in a dust-encrusted bottle.

‘We have unfortunately used up all our old sherry,’ he explained, ‘but I trust you will find this a passable substitute.
Luckily, I still have a few bins of it. My grandfather laid it down.’

Sam made a rapid calculation. The dark golden nectar had been bottled in the 1840’s or early ‘50’s at the latest, then. He sipped it and found it marvellous.

A newcomer entered at that moment; a good-looking, fair man aged about thirty, in well worn tweeds; whom Gervaise introduced as ‘our neighbour, Derek Burroughs’.

With a quick nod to Sam, Burroughs walked straight over to Lavina, took both her hands and smiled down into her face.

‘So you’re back at last,’ he murmured. ‘I was beginning to think you’d completely forgotten us.’

‘I could never do that, Derek,’ she smiled up at him.

Sam Curry’s mouth tightened. The fellow was in love with her. That was as clear as if he had said so, and it looked as if she had tender memories of him. For the first time that evening Sam felt himself as Sir Samuel,
and his age—getting on for fifty. He didn’t like the thought of this solid, good-looking ghost that had suddenly arisen out of Lavina’s past but he comforted himself quickly. Burroughs was evidently a gentleman-farmer—a country bumpkin with little brain and probably less money. What if he had had an affair with Lavina in the past? Surely he could not hope to attract the sophisticated woman she had now become. Still, Sam admitted to himself, he would have given a good few of his thousands to be Derek Burroughs’s age again or even to have his figure.

‘Do you think I’ve changed much, Derek?’ Lavina was asking.

‘You’re still the same Lavina underneath,’ he replied slowly, ‘but on the surface—well, you’re a bit startling, aren’t you?’

‘D’you mean my make-up?’

‘Yes. All that black stuff round your eyes makes them look smaller and somehow it doesn’t seem to go with your fair complexion. I suppose it’s all right in a film star but the simple folk round here would take you for—for …’

Oliver Stapleton had been quietly working at a desk in a corner of the room. He turned, and raising his horn-rimmed spectacles, looked across at Lavina under them. ‘Go on, say it, Derek,’ he urged with a dry chuckle. ‘A scarlet woman. That’s the classic expression, isn’t it? She’s remained quite a nice girl really, but she’s still very young.’

Lavina sat up with a jerk. ‘Uncle Oliver, you’re a beast!’ she laughed. ‘Perhaps I have got a bit much on for the country but I’m so used to it.’

Sam Curry cut into the conversation with smooth tact and was rewarded by a little look of gratitude from Lavina which made his heart beat faster.

At dinner they waited upon themselves. The meal was simple but good, and over it the Stapletons and Derek Burroughs talked mainly of old times and friends whom Sam did not know, which left him rather out of it, although Gervaise Stapleton took pains to draw him into the conversation at every opportunity.

Afterwards they sat in the library again and Lavina told her family something of the joys and pitfalls that she had met with during her three years in the studios.

At half-past eleven Derek Burroughs reluctantly broke up the party as he had a sick mare that he wanted to look at before he turned in; but on leaving he said that he would be over again first thing in the morning and it was agreed that he and Lavina should go for a ride together.

Margery, Lavina and Sam went up to bed, leaving the two older men together. Oliver had a great pile of logarithm books and other astronomical impedimenta on the desk in the far corner of the room; and he settled down to do an hour’s work before going to bed. But Gervaise Stapleton was, for him, unusually restless. After reading a few pages of his book, he threw it down and addressed his brother.

‘Well, what do you make of her, Oliver?’

The tall, untidy astronomer pushed his spectacles up on his forehead and turned in his chair. ‘Make of whom?’ he asked, vaguely.