The Piper's Tune (52 page)

‘I'm not bothered by Sylvie Calder now,' Lindsay said. ‘To tell you the truth, Forbes, I'm not even particularly “bothered” by you. As for Harry and Philip, I'm not abandoning them. Odd as it may seem, I love them very much and I certainly won't be leaving them for long. As soon as I've consulted a lawyer…'

‘Lawyer? Divorce, do you mean?'

‘Until we're legally divorced, how can you possibly marry Sylvie?'

‘Oh, no, no, Lindsay, that's the last thing I want.'

‘What
do
you want, Forbes?'

‘I want
you,
darling. I want
you.
Here. With me.'

‘As it was before?'

‘Yes, exactly as it was before.'

Lindsay allowed his answer to hang in silence for a moment then she separated herself from him with a shrug of the shoulder.

‘That's what I thought,' she said.

She lifted the portmanteau and tugged open the bedroom door. She swung the bag into her arms and hurried downstairs.

He pursued her.

She heard his breathless shout of ‘Lindsay, Lindsay,' change to an urgent whisper. ‘Lindsay, for God's sake, Lindsay, listen to me, talk to me,' then she was in the hallway, heading for the front door. A strip of light at the bottom of the parlour door indicated that Papa and Eleanor were probably listening. She resisted the temptation to call out goodbye. She felt jubilant and determined and, at one and the same time, bleak and melancholy. She made it to the door and pulled it open before Forbes snared her with an arm about her waist.

It was, she realised, in danger of degenerating into farce, his conniving nature and appealing charm reduced to bullying. He raised his fist. It hovered turnip-shaped and pale above her face. Forbes's face, white too, was twisted less by rage than frustration. He still could not believe that she would defy him, would leave against his will.

She clutched the portmanteau firmly, prepared to drive the edge up into his stomach, to sacrifice her dignity too just to be free of him.

Abruptly, he released her.

She followed her husband's gaze, looked down the steep steps to the pavement's edge where a motorised taxi-cab waited, engine puttering, big boggle-eyed headlamps flickering.

Geoffrey was in uniform, looking very neat and self-contained, one foot on the bottom step and a hand on the railing. As she came down the steps towards him he held out his hand, and she took it. He relieved her of the portmanteau and, without so much as a glance at Forbes, ushered her across the pavement and into the taxi-cab.

He climbed in beside her and closed the door.

‘Are you all right?' he asked.

‘I'm fine,' said Lindsay. ‘Really, I'm fine.'

‘Where to now, sir?' the cabby enquired.

‘The Central Hotel,' said Geoffrey.

*   *   *

From the top step Forbes watched the taxi-cab gather speed. He was still convinced it would only swing once around the park before it returned and Lindsay would come back into the house and tell it him that it had all been a dreadful mistake and beg his forgiveness. The cab, however, did not loop around the park. It went on across the top of Fingleton Street, swept away along the long curve of Brunswick Crescent and swiftly passed out of sight.

Forbes did not move. He remained stock-still on the top step.

He was still sure that the boggle-eyed headlamps would reappear at any moment and the vehicle return.

Then he heard his father-in-law say, ‘She's gone, Forbes. Can't you see that she's gone?'

He swung round. Arthur Franklin and the Runciman woman were observing him from within the hallway. There was no breath of wind in the streets yet Forbes felt as if he were being sucked into the hallway on a great wild rush of air. Arthur reached out to him. He thrust his father-in-law aside and, staggering from wall to wall, blundered towards the staircase.

He fell to his knees.

Lifting his head, he peered into the gloom of the upper floors.

He opened his mouth and howled: ‘Mam. Mammy, help me.'

And a moment later, still struggling into their dressing-gowns, his mother and sisters came tumbling down the stairs.

*   *   *

Bludgeoned by sea air and exhaustion, Tom fell asleep as soon as his head touched the pillow. He slept for the best part of two hours and did not stir when Cissie crept in beside him, drew back the top blanket and adjusted the sheets.

For once, she did not put her arms about him and hold him close. She lay on her back, listening to his snores. She had left the curtains parted and the blind raised to let in whatever air there was and she could make out a shaft of moonlight lying like cool water across the foot of the bed.

Tom's snoring ceased.

He turned on an elbow and then on to his back. He eased his hands out from under the sheet and placed them cautiously behind his head.

Looking up, Cissie could make out his profile in the half-darkness, etched by a glimmer of moonlight. She heard him sigh a shuddering sigh and knew that he was wide awake and that sleep would not easily return to his busy, bothered brain.

‘Can't you sleep, Tom?'

‘No.' He paused. ‘I will have to do something about it, you know. I can't just pretend that nothing's happened. I'll have to take care of her now.'

Cissie eased herself against him, gently laid an arm across his stomach and drew herself supportively against his flank.

‘I know, dear,' she said. ‘I know.'

*   *   *

The Central Hotel by the railway station in the heart of the city was busy even at that late hour. Last trains from the south had recently arrived and porters and receptionists were attending to weary travellers, checking them in and escorting them to their rooms. There was still activity in the kitchens and in the huge ground-floor dining-room waiters were briskly setting up for breakfast.

Geoffrey had been fortunate to obtain a room on short notice. August was a prime month for tourist traffic and Glasgow a popular staging post for the Highlands where, in a few days' time, the grouse-shooting season would begin. He guided Lindsay to the oak-fronted desk in the foyer and waited politely while a colonel type, with waxed moustaches and a tweed suit so new that it creaked, fussed over security for his guns. Behind him, sheltering among potted palms, his lady loitered; no Rosie O'Grady this but a woman of such elegant and affected ennui that she could be nothing but his wife. She studied Geoffrey with a cold predatory gaze for a moment, then, meeting Lindsay's eye, smirked knowingly.

Lindsay felt her cheeks grow hot. She was used to hotels, to mixing with wealthy and sophisticated people but there was something in the woman's vulpine smile that brought home the magnitude of what she had done. She had cut herself off from respectability, from the tangible securities of marriage. She had run off with a man who was not her husband and was here, at midnight, in a hotel with him. She had no idea how the lady knew that Geoffrey and she were not husband and wife, but know she did, as surely as if she, Lindsay, had been branded on the forehead with a scarlet letter or sported the tattered red shawl of a woman of the streets.

She took Geoffrey's arm and hung on to him while he confirmed the telephone booking with a balding, middle-aged clerk.

‘How long will madam being staying, sir?' the clerk asked.

The question caught Geoffrey off guard. He turned to Lindsay and raised an enquiring eyebrow.

Lindsay heard herself say, ‘Three nights, possibly longer.'

‘Is that suitable?' Geoffrey said.

‘That is suitable, sir,' said the clerk.

He presented the register, swivelled it round towards Lindsay, pointed out the pen and ink-stand.

Geoffrey took a half pace backward and allowed Lindsay to sign her name and, in the space allotted for address, simply ‘Brunswick Park'. The clerk did not bat an eyelid. He blotted the entry assiduously and simultaneously raised a hand and snapped his fingers. A bell-boy came running out of nowhere and wrested Lindsay's portmanteau from Geoffrey's grasp.

‘One-o-seven,' the clerk said. ‘Will madam be requiring breakfast to be served in her room?'

‘I'll – no, I'll come down, thank you.'

‘Very good, madam,' said the clerk. ‘Very good,' and with a jerk of the head indicated to the bell-boy that he should make himself scarce until the lady was ready to be escorted upstairs.

Many men of her acquaintance had mistresses. Aunt Lilias could probably rhyme them off. Some, indeed, were famous for flouting convention; others so discreet that no one, not even Aunt Lilias, could be sure if gossip about them was true or false. Whispers would soon accumulate around her name. It was unrealistic to suppose that her desertion would remain secret for long. There would be no core to it, no substance, of course, no validity to the rumours that Geoffrey Paget and she had become shameless lovers and that Forbes, poor Forbes, was the partner who had been wronged.

Had it been like this for Forbes and Sylvie Calder, she wondered; like this, without the awkwardness? Had they spent many nights together in hotel beds before Forbes had set the girl up in a place of her own? Forbes had often been ‘out of town' on shipyard business. She tried to recall episodes and incidents that might give her husband's duplicity shape and form, something to bolster her flagging confidence and ease her guilt; but Forbes seemed far, far away and Sylvie, in Lindsay's thoughts, hardly existed at all.

She was suddenly very, very tired.

She longed for Geoffrey to go now, to leave her to sleep alone and unafraid in a big, not quite dark room as she had done when she was a child.

It was not that she did not love Geoffrey or that she wasn't grateful for what he had done for her. She was wary of the situation that she had created, however, of the burden of temptation and weight of responsibility that she had placed on Geoffrey's shoulders.

For a moment, a hideous moment, she even began to question Geoffrey's integrity and wonder if perhaps he was just another seducer, more sinister and subtle and devious than other men, but just like them, just like Forbes.

‘I – I must go up, Geoffrey,' she said.

‘Of course.'

He kissed her cheek briefly, touched her arm, stepped back.

The colonel and his predatory wife had gone but Lindsay could still recall the penetration of that vulpine glance, so cynical and sophisticated.

‘At what time will you breakfast?' Geoffrey said.

‘Eight thirty,' Lindsay answered.

‘And then what will you do?'

She hadn't thought of that, hadn't faced up to the long formless days that would follow her desertion, days in which others would make the running and she, the instigator, the renegade, would be robbed of volition and, by her own actions, would spin off into a kind of limbo.

‘I'll join you for breakfast, if I may,' Geoffrey said.

‘Don't you have to report to someone? I mean – the trials?'

‘One of the advantages of my position is that I am answerable to no one this side of Trafalgar Square.' Though she did not quite believe him, Lindsay was comforted. He said, ‘Rest if you can. I'll see you in the morning.'

‘Geoffrey,' she said. ‘Thank you. Thank you with all my heart.'

‘No need for thanks,' he said gruffly. ‘No need at all.'

Then, after giving the desk clerk an ostentatious salute that the fellow would surely remember, he stepped out through the polished swing doors and left Lindsay to follow the bell-boy up the carpeted staircase to her room.

*   *   *

After an hour of argument, recrimination and what passed for debate, it seemed that Forbes could not have cared less what became of Sylvie Calder or of his wife. He had been beaten down by the clamour around him, defeated by sheer exhaustion and rendered numb by the several nips of whisky that his sisters had pressed upon him for therapeutic purposes. Perhaps his sisters' treatment had been the right one, for the red roaring rage that had possessed him after Lindsay had left with Geoffrey Paget had burned itself out completely and he sprawled in the room's only armchair, all undone, listening with brooding indifference to the pointless conversations that ebbed and flowed about him.

‘It was your plan, was it not?' his mother was saying. ‘All part of your plan to be rid of us. Well, Arthur, I'll tell you this, you'll not be getting rid of us so easily as all that.'

‘How,' Eleanor Runciman said, ‘could it be Mr Arthur's “plan” when none of us knew until this afternoon what your precious son had been up to behind everyone's back?'

‘I really can't understand what she's doing here, Mam,' said Blossom. ‘She ain't no kin to any of us.'

‘Shouldn't be allowed to open her mouth,' said Winn.

‘I've more right to be here than you have, miss,' Eleanor said. ‘If Mr Arthur asks me to make myself scarce then I will, but I am not dancing to your tune, oh no. I have raised Lindsay since she was—'

‘Yes, yes, yes, we've heard all that before,' Winn interrupted. ‘But nothing you have to say is going to help my brother get his wife back.'

‘Might I be pointing out, Arthur,' Kay said, ‘that it wasn't you who brought Forbes here. It was Pappy, rest his soul, and he wouldn't have let any of this happen if he'd still been alive.'

‘I don't see how Pappy could have prevented it,' Arthur said, ‘any more than I could have prevented it. I mean to say, Pappy couldn't stop you, you and your sister, running off with your lovers thirty-odd years ago.'

‘I knew, I
knew
it would come down to that,' Kay screeched. ‘You still blame me for what happened to your wife, don't you?'

‘Don't be ridiculous, Kay,' Arthur said. ‘I am merely drawing an analogy. If you pause to consider…'

‘Pause to consider what?' Kay said. ‘Whatever I did was done for poor Helen. She was dying, and we all knew it. Everyone, it seems, except you. Besides, I didn't abandon husband and children to sneak off with some sailor.'