The New Moon with the Old (26 page)

Opening the door nearest to her she peered into a room from which shutters excluded the daylight; but she had left the front door open and enough light came in from the hall to show her this was the dining-room. She noticed a yellow oak sideboard inlayed with copper panels, an elaborately draped mantel border of peacock blue wool which clashed with the blue china above it, and a copper gaselier with pink globes over the table. The idea of champagne and caviar consumed under gaslight struck her as ludicrous.

She closed the door on the setting of Mr Rowley’s romantic suppers and opened the door opposite the front door. ‘The room she now entered was shuttered like the dining-room and much larger; the daylight she let in only made a bright path down its length, leaving much of it dim. But she could see it was a
drawing-room
, beflounced in silk and satin, with chiffon and lace on the many cushions and the ruched shades of the wrought-iron standard lamps. Colours were even uglier than in the hall and dining-room; the upholstery was of embossed tobacco velvet, the draperies a dark yellow. There was too much detail to take in quickly but one problem was instantly solved for her: this was where Mr Rowley had kept his photographs – dozens of them, mainly in heavy silver frames of tortured design. She would look at them when she had explored the rest of the house.

The only other door from the hall opened into a passage leading to the kitchen. She disliked kitchens even when they were pleasant, and one quick glance into this highly unpleasant one’s dim dankness sent her hurrying back to the daylight in the hall.

Now for the bedrooms – if she could see them. She was thankful to find, as she turned the bend of the little staircase, that there was a skylight above the square landing.

One bedroom door stood open. Through it could be seen a large double bed, canopied and side-curtained in some drab material suggestive of tapestry. Staring with distaste she had a vivid mental picture of Mr Rowley sitting up in his bed at the hotel, smilingly remembering this most depressing house. Her thoughts of Mr Rowley young and Mr Rowley old were a confusion of repulsion and pity, and it was, she vaguely knew, the thought of the young Mr Rowley which she found repulsive.

She would explore no further. On the landing was a circular red ottoman, buttoned and heavily fringed. She sat down on it under the skylight and tried to think clearly.

Why had Mr Charles sent her here? Obviously Mr Rowley must have told him of the talk about the house with the walled garden – which must have impressed the old gentleman far more than she’d realized; though she did remember his pleasure. But why had she to see the house? And why had Mr Charles told her to do a little quiet considering?

It then occurred to her he might mean to offer her the job of looking after the place. Certainly someone was looking after it now; it was scrupulously clean. She thought the cleanliness increased the ugliness; cobwebs might have been kinder, might have spun a merciful veil of romance. But nothing could have made that drably-curtained bed romantic. She looked at it again – and hastily looked away.

Should she go down and study the photographs? She found she had no desire to – nor, indeed, to do anything, even to move; though she did not at all care for being where she was, so close to that sinister bed. She no longer felt pleasurably enchanted but was weighed down, rendered inert, by depression which had in it an element of fear.

Her heart gave a leap. Surely that was the door in the garden wall opening – and closing? Footsteps now, on the flagged path …

Then, from the hall, Mr Charles called: ‘Clare, where are you?’

‘Here!’ Springing up, she answered him gladly, instantly released from inertia, depression and fear.

She saw him as she reached the bend of the stairs and stopped dead, looking down on him. He was standing under the brass gaselier, wearing a long dark coat which made him seem even taller than usual. For days she had been steadily improving his looks. Now she had again to accept his true ugliness. It didn’t make her any less glad to see him.

He was saying, ‘I’m sorry you’ve had to find your way around in this gloom. The woman who looks after this place should have opened the shutters. She always used to, when I wrote to say I was coming.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Clare. She came down the last stairs slowly, noting that he was not smiling. Her own smile faded.

‘We’ll have some more light.’ He went into the drawing-room and tried to open a shutter. Its small knob came off in his hand.

Clare, following him, told him not to bother. ‘I’m used to the gloom now. And this house would be even sadder by the full light of day. Why did you send me here?’

‘I’ll explain later. Sit down. How are you?’ He was smiling now but his tone lacked warmth. ‘I trust Nurse Brown has been kind to you?’

‘Perfectly kind but very unforthcoming. Did you tell her not to talk to me? I mean about you and Mr Rowley?’

He returned her direct gaze. ‘I did. She probably overheard part of my quarrel with him. I don’t think she’d have told you
but it seemed wiser to give her a general warning. I hardly fancied your hearing the details from her.’

Clare nodded understandingly. ‘You mean you’d rather tell me yourself you were going to, that night, only you couldn’t come and see me. Will you tell me now?’

‘Not yet, anyway.’ He was silent for a few seconds, then spoke as if determined to be businesslike. ‘Well, now: you do realize what this house was? My grandfather told you about it.’

‘Hardly that,’ said Clare. ‘Though … yes, I did guess he was remembering some real house. But I thought it was somewhere abroad – not here in London. How long is it since he lived here?’

‘I doubt if he ever actually lived here.’

‘Well, visited.’

‘His last visit was three years ago. Up till then, over a very long period, he paid a yearly visit, and after his sight began to fail I always accompanied him. But I first came here long before that, when I was sixteen and considered old enough to know the details of his highly disreputable life. I felt something of a dog, particularly as he more or less told me, “Go thou and do likewise,” and shortly provided the occasion. Of course, the heyday of his visits here was in the eighteen-nineties. I suspect that was the kind of visit you were inquiring about.’

‘It was, really. Tell me about his lady.’

‘Her name was legion. She was usually an actress.’

Clare looked around. ‘I suppose there are photographs?’

‘Not dating from the nineties. He destroyed them all when the last lady was installed, in 1900. There are plenty of her – this was his favourite. That extremely ugly frame is solid gold and the stones set in it are rubies.’

Sitting in the shaft of daylight from the open front door, she had no difficulty in seeing the photograph he handed to her. It was of a young woman with a fair, frizzy fringe, a longish face with a heavy jaw, and a cruelly treated figure; a
large bust was pushed up nearly to her shoulders and massive hips sprang out below a pinched waist.

‘Well?’ said Mr Charles. ‘Do you see the resemblance to yourself?’

She looked at him in surprise. ‘But I couldn’t be less like her, surely?’

‘Don’t be too anxious to disclaim the likeness; she was considered a beauty.’ His tone hardened. ‘My dear Clare, you have fair hair and blue eyes as she had. That was enough for an almost blind old man – anyway, it was after you told him you wished to be a king’s mistress. She, too, had that laudable ambition.’

‘How extraordinary,’ said Clare. “Though it’s not so very, really. Several girls at school with me fancied the idea; we used to pick our kings. But it must have seemed a great coincidence to Mr Rowley. No wonder he was amused.’

‘Not amused. Enchanted – and completely deceived. He believed you meant what you said and of course he had no idea you knew all about him. I was a fraction suspicious from the … and so ashamed of myself for it.’

She was obviously being accused of something – but what? ‘I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about,’ she said with hauteur.

‘Please stop pretending, Clare. You knew perfectly well that my grandfather had been a king.’

Indignation almost swamped her astonishment. ‘I did
not
know! How could I? Nurse Brown didn’t tell me.’

‘Nurse Brown doesn’t know. But the woman who sent you for the job does; her mother supplied my grandfather with servants when he first came to London. I called on Miss Gifford this morning and she admitted she’d told Miss … the woman you speak of as Jane.’

‘That may be, but Jane didn’t mention it to me. As if I would have said what I did if I’d known he’d been a king! You must think me crude!’

‘That’s not a word I should ever apply to you. I thought you a very clever little schemer, just trying to ingratiate yourself. Do you swear—?’ He broke off. ‘But I’ve no right to ask that. I can see you’re telling the truth. My dear, I apologize most abjectly.’

Her indignation melted. ‘You don’t have to, really. I can understand why you thought what you did. But you might have asked me, instead of going to Miss Gifford.’ She looked at him with mild reproach.

‘Again I apologize. Owing to… certain circumstances connected with my grandfather’s death I’ve been mentally confused these last days. And forgive me if I don’t talk about that – for the moment.’

She nodded sympathetically and chose questions he could hardly mind answering. ‘When was he a king? And of what country?’

‘It no longer exists as a separate entity and I doubt if its old name would mean anything to you …’

It didn’t, nor did what he said about its location. Geography was one of her many weak subjects and she was always apt to confuse the Balkans with the Baltic. But she was fascinated to hear that he had once visited his grandfather’s palace as an ordinary tourist. ‘The architecture’s delightful but the furniture and decorations are beyond belief, not unlike what you see here but on a mammoth scale. Everything had been brought over from England. He’d been educated here and always spent much time here, particularly after his wife died. He was in London when he got slung off his throne – that was in 1903. He’d anticipated it and transferred vast sums of money; also brought my eight-year-old father with him. They both became British subjects.’

‘Then “Rowley” was just an incognito?’

‘Chosen to please the lady of that photograph. She said it was a nickname given to a great favourite of hers, Charles II.’

‘
Old
Rowley,’ said Clare, knowledgeably. ‘After a stallion in the royal stables.’

‘Good God, did they teach you that at school?’

She laughed. ‘No, I picked it up from a novel. Oh dear, I actually mentioned Charles to Mr Rowley.’

‘So he told me. And you can imagine how it pleased him as he liked to believe he had Stuart blood. I have my doubts about that but he did, when young, have a look of Charles II.’

He handed her a photograph of a dark young man in full Coronation regalia, then took from a cabinet a miniature of Charles II. ‘There’s a grim, dissolute face,’ he said as he handed her the miniature.

Again she laughed. ‘But he’s absolutely sweet. I’ve always adored him. This is like the portrait I have in my bedroom – oh, just a postcard.’ She found the young Mr Rowley disappointing. His crown was on at a very comic angle and he had a bristling moustache. Still, the resemblance was there; and it now occurred to her that— She took a quick look at Mr Charles and visualized his heavy features framed by the wig in the miniature. Delighted with the result, she opened her mouth to say his own resemblance was far stronger; then, remembering he had called the miniatured face grim and dissolute, said instead: ‘What happened to the lady? I suppose she’s dead now?’

‘She died only a couple of years after my grandfather settled in England. She was, by the way, a well-educated girl of good family, quite unlike most of his lady friends. He cared for her very deeply.’

‘And always remained faithful to her memory?’

‘In his fashion. He kept this house as a shrine. No other woman was ever installed here.’

‘But there were other women?’

‘My dear Clare! He was only in his early thirties. There were dozens of other women, right up to the time when
his health and his sight began to fail. That was when I first joined him at the hotel. I can’t remember a time when he didn’t live there, except during the war years when I got him to go into the country.’

‘Was there no one but you to look after him?’

‘Not since he needed looking after,’ said Mr Charles. He had been moving about restlessly; now he sat, and turned to her as if asking for understanding. ‘I can’t tell you what a problem it’s been, Clare. When I was a boy he was my idol. There was something magnificent about him, a sort of aura of kingship. And he was immensely generous to me – and to everyone else he had any dealings with. He just poured money out, especially on his ladies – their flats, allowances, settlements; even
his
fortune couldn’t stand up to it for ever. Luckily I’d money of my own, left to me by my mother, and was able to go into business soon after the war was over. I’ve been fortunate. So he never needed to know the true state of his finances.’

‘Then he wasn’t rich? It was all your money?’

‘I wonder why I told you all that?’ said Mr Charles gloomily. ‘I’m probably patting myself on the back for treating him well – trying to get rid of the guilt of causing his death. Do you remember warning me I should be sorry?’

‘But I didn’t mean …! Of course you didn’t cause his death! When a man’s ninety—’

He interrupted her. ‘When a man’s ninety, one should humour him – as I had done for years, God knows. Well, let’s not talk about it.’

‘Yes, do let’s,’ said Clare firmly. ‘I’m sure you’ll feel better if you do. Besides, I terribly want to know. I was somehow involved in it, wasn’t I? What went wrong?’

‘For the first time in my life I opposed what he wanted without even a hint of tactful deception. He was pathetically easy to deceive; one only had to temporize, do a bit of
inventing … I knew exactly how to handle him. But that night of all nights I stonewalled him completely. It seemed unthinkable not to. You see, my dear, he was absolutely determined I should persuade you to become my mistress.’

Her main reaction was one of pleasure, and though she felt she mustn’t show this she wasn’t going to pretend she was shocked. So she said quite lightly: ‘Goodness, how awful for you! Though I’m sure he meant it kindly. Couldn’t you just have said you’d think it over?’

Mr Charles was looking at her in surprise. ‘How remarkably well you’ve taken that disclosure. Of course I ought to have done just what you suggest. Though he wouldn’t have left it at that.’

‘If he’d lived, perhaps we could have pretended … well, to be interested in each other.’

‘That flashed through my head when I decided to tell you what the trouble was. And on my part it wouldn’t have been pretence, as I’m sure you know. But it wouldn’t have satisfied him for long. He was obsessed by his delightful plan for us.’

‘I can see why,’ said Clare. ‘He thought he’d … somehow have a share in it. I suppose it’d have been a way of re-living his youth.’

‘And that idea doesn’t appal you?’

‘No, why should it?’

‘Well, I’ve always thought women have stronger stomachs than men,’ sald Mr Charles.

She looked puzzled. ‘It’s true I do have a very strong stomach but …’

‘Oh, my dear child!’ He laughed, then became serious again. ‘Don’t you really understand what he had in mind? You ought to, knowing how he’d made you talk to him, tried to live vicariously in your life. It was a sort of mental vampirism, due to the frustrations of old age.’

She said, after a second: ‘I do understand what you mean. Nurse Brown said he expected you to … tell him all the details of your life. But what had he to live on but the lives of others? And he must have known he hadn’t much time left. That’s why he tried to rush you into doing what he wanted.’

‘It was indeed,’ said Mr Charles. ‘When he sent for me again – just before I telephoned you, remember? – he told me he’d awakened from his afternoon nap with a premonition of death. He asked me at least to see that, after his death, you were provided for financially. That I could willingly promise. And I also said that, if he’d be a little patient, I’d consider asking you what
you
felt about his wishes for us. By then I had the idea of some sort of a conspiracy with you. He said: “And if I die suddenly?” I said in that case I’d promise to ask you.’

She gave herself no time to think about this before saying, ‘But that was marvellous. You did humour him. So you can’t possibly blame yourself for his death.’

‘It was my high-handed treatment of him earlier that did the damage; he was extremely distressed. I shall always blame myself for that.’

‘Nonsense,’ said Clare briskly. ‘He’d already had his premonition. You might as well blame
me
, for just happening.’

‘I did blame you – for trying to intrigue him. No doubt I let myself suspect you in an effort to get rid of my own guilt.’

She said reflectively, ‘I shall let myself believe that; then I shan’t worry about your having such a wrong idea of me. Did you send me to this sad place as a punishment?’

‘I wonder. No, I don’t think so. But I did want you to get the implications of this house. And it seemed a good setting for … a scene which isn’t now going to be played here.’ He smiled at her. ‘It would have been suitable for the girl I mistook you for but not for the girl you are.’

‘Then you shouldn’t have mentioned it,’ said Clare. ‘Now I want to know what it was.’

‘Well, you probably will, eventually – in less depressing surroundings. Though I really don’t know, now …’ He frowned and shook his head. ‘I almost wish you were the girl I mistook you for. Of course, I should like you less but even that would make it easier. My dear, you’re looking as enigmatic as the Mona Lisa and considerably prettier. Am I right in thinking you guess what I was planning to ask you?’