CHAPTER VIII
CHRISTMAS came and went, and still Charles Leydon and his secretary remained at Leydon Hall. Miss Prim settled down without fuss or difficulty, and after the first fortnight became as much a part of the furnishings as the four-poster bed she occupied.
She obviously understood Leydon as no one else, apparently, understood him, and his extreme masculinity in no way oppressed her. She had plainly become accustomed to being called Prim and summoned at all hours to take down letters or listen to complaints, advise, cajole, soothe or handle him in such a skilful manner that he had no real knowledge he was being handled.
He had said that Miss Prim was not a good secretary, but Alison very quickly arrived at the conclusion she was entirely the right kind of secretary for him. Anyone else—even she herself—would have resented being treated sometimes as if she was of no more importance than a stick of furniture, and at others commended upon her work as if she was a normally intractable child who had unexpectedly done the right thing for once.
This didn’t mean that Charles wasn’t, in his way, quite fond of Rosalind Prim. Indeed, on the night of her arrival he wanted to be assured that she was being accommodated with as much comfort as he was himself, and he made it clear that she was to have all her meals with him, and when she worked in the library a big fire was to be maintained, and under no circumstances was she to be permitted to suffer as he had suffered when he first arrived at the Hall.
She confided to Alison that he paid her an extremely generous salary, and was not really as difficult an employer as he seemed.
After she arrived at Leydon he divided his day into two parts, one for resting and obeying doctor’s orders in, the other for working as if he was suddenly possessed. Miss Prim had brought all the books and the materials connected with his work that he wanted with her... and the ones that she was unable to carry arrived by road service. Soon the library began to look as if it was the natural background of an extremely busy man’s life, and anyone apart from Miss Prim who entered it received scant encouragement to remain.
Everyone, that is, with the exception of Jessamy. She, it soon became apparent, was welcome at all times.
Shortly before Christmas Leydon had announced that he must pay a visit to London, and that he would be away two nights. Alison, who never quite forgot how ill he had so recently been, attempted to dissuade him, just in case he should run into a typical London fog while he was there, but he more or less ignored any suggestion that he was not completely fit again Besides, he informed her, he wanted to do some Christmas shopping.
Jessamy was in the room with them at the time that he made this admission, and she looked across the room at him swiftly and her eyes brightened. Leydon bent forward and played with the ends of her hair—she was sitting on her usual footstool at his feet-—and ran one finger caressingly down the smooth side of her cheek.
“It’s highly important that I do my shopping in good time, isn’t it, chicken?” he said softly. “You and I know the reason why!”
Jessamy flushed delicately, but Alison looked startled.
“You are not ... Please, Mr. Leydon,” she began afresh, “you are not still encouraging Jessamy in that ridiculous notion she has about possessing a car of her own?”
Charles’s eyes mocked her almost cruelly.
“What a spoilsport you are, Alison,” he complained, while his long index finger continued to fondle Jessamy’s cheek. “Perhaps if you were unable to walk properly you’d be glad to possess a car of your own ... and not one that your tough sisters could borrow, and which your stepmother also needed at times. So far as I can make out Jessamy just doesn’t get a look-in with that Mini of yours, and that being the case how do you suppose she is ever going to learn to drive?”
“I don’t want Jessamy to learn to drive,” Alison stated, her heart hammering because she knew that he would deliberately choose to misunderstand her.
He did.
His eyebrows ascended.
‘You don’t want her to have any of the pleasures of life, although she is nineteen years old?”
“Of—of course!” Alison was slightly shocked because even Jessamy herself appeared to be regarding her as if she was some form of slightly inhuman monster. “But I—” And then she decided there was little point in trying to explain.
She looked upon Jessamy as her ewe lamb. She couldn’t bear the thought of having her exposed to any danger, or have her attempt to do something that was beyond her. Besides, they couldn’t possibly afford a car for her, and nothing
—nothing
would induce her to allow Charles Leydon to pay for one for her.
Jessamy said breathlessly:
“How do you know that Mr. Leydon hasn’t got a lot of very private shopping that he wishes to do in London?”
Alison, feeling as if the wind had been taken out of her sails, agreed that this might well be so. And while she did so Leydon watched her, and the warm firelight flickered on the panelled walls of his sitting-room, and outside the wintry dusk settled down over the park.
It was so deliciously cosy and comfortable and, somehow, intimate within that the whole atmosphere should have quivered with peace and contentment ... instead of which it bristled with something very close to determined hostility. Leydon owed a lot to Alison, and every day he owed more to her because of the very comfort with which she surrounded him so lavishly, and yet his eyes as they rested on her were barely friendly. They were cool, and a trifle bleak, as they had been when she first knew him. The fact that she was not as she was when she first knew him, and her hair was a charming cap that emphasised the delicate beauty of her face, and she had ceased to wear prim white collars and even, on occasion, wore trinkets instead, apparently meant nothing to him. He had not even commented on her changed appearance, and after a few days during which she made use of her new beauty outfit she gave up and contented herself as in the past with a light dusting of face powder and the lightest—and usually rather hurried—application of lipstick.
Her eye-shadow and her mascara were thrust to the back of her dressing-table drawer, and Marianne during one of her frequent rummages of her stepmother’s drawers came upon them and borrowed them without so much as asking Alison’s leave. Indeed, Alison didn’t even notice that they had gone ... and she wouldn’t have bothered had she made the discovery.
Now Charles Leydon looked at her as if he found her whole appearance quite the opposite of inspiring and echoed Jessamy’s words almost coldly.
“Yes, I probably do have a certain amount of strictly private Christmas shopping that I wish to attend to,” he said, and then lay back in his chair as if he was suddenly either acutely tired or acutely bored. Even Jessamy looked at him a trifle anxiously, and Alison felt she had blundered badly.
She said something, hurriedly, about having something in the oven that she must attend to, and withdrew to her kitchen. When she served dinner to him and Miss Prim later he was in the same withdrawn mood, and did not unbend until the following morning ... and even then it was only a partial unbending.
Miss Prim accompanied him to London, and they expected to be away for a couple of nights at least. Alison pictured Charles arriving at his flat—which she understood was in one of the most exclusive blocks devoted to bachelor flats—and the atmosphere of restrained luxury that would engulf him the moment he set foot inside his own front door. As it was a service flat he would be well looked after and there would be no question of meals being haphazardly served, or gone without because he did not possess a housekeeper. All he had to do, apparently, was to lift a telephone receiver and even if he wished to entertain a party of friends the necessary constituents would be produced simply as a result of ordering them over the telephone.
Miss Prim had explained the way he lived to Alison, and to the girl who had to cope with ovens and tradespeople and uncertain help from the village it all seemed beautifully simple.
She thought of the man she had nursed entering his flat with a sigh of relief because it contained all the things that ensured him the very maximum amount of comfort, and it was a place where he could be completely at his ease. If he wanted to go out for the evening a gentleman’s gentleman would arrive to valet him; if he wanted to give a dinner-party a correctly attired manservant would arrive with the foodstuffs.
If he wanted to be alone he could be completely alone.
Alison remembered that Miss Prim had said something about a near engagement a couple of years before, and she wondered what had happened to prevent the engagement ever becoming an established fact. Apparently the young woman was still interested, and that seemed to underline the obvious fact that Sir Charles Leydon—possibly not merely for his good looks and charm alone—was regarded as quite a catch in the marriage market, and in any case the frequent brusqueness of his attitude did not appear to repel the opposite sex.
Not seriously, at any rate. Marianne was sufficient proof of that.
When he returned from his short visit to London Leydon was looking a little tired and jaded, but according to Miss Prim it was not as a result of any wild excesses while he was staying at his flat. He had given her his word that he would retire to bed early, and that he would limit his activities to reasonable ones during the daytime. He said nothing about doing any shopping, and Alison no longer had the courage to make personal enquiries concerning the way in which he had spent his time in London. A short time ago—only, she realised, a few days ago—she would have done so, without fear of being badly snubbed. But since her suggestion that he might be planning to go shopping on Jessamy’s account while he was in London, and his somewhat arrogant reception of the suggestion, their relationship seemed to have reverted to very much the sort of relationship it had been when he first arrived at Leydon.
He walked into her kitchen after his return from London and warned her that she could expect certain additions to her store-cupboard—quite considerable additions, as it turned out—within a matter of days. And he had also arranged for a supply of wines and spirits and luxuries and delicacies associated with Christmas to arrive at the same time. A big London store had received an order from him for a few minor conveniences in which the Hall was lacking, such as an angle-poise lamp for his desk in the library, another specially constructed lamp for his bedside table, a deep wing chair for his sitting-room, and some heating appliances which should do rather more to combat any sudden fall in the temperature than the existing ones were capable of doing.
Somewhat curtly he informed her that, in addition to the heating appliances, he had arranged for partial central heating to be installed at Leydon. The major portion of the house would not benefit by it, but her rooms would, and so would the rooms he had taken over as his own.
“You’ll probably find quite a difference when the thing is working,” he said.
Alison, somewhat taken aback, stared at him.
“Then ... then does that mean you expect to spend quite a lot of your time here at Leydon in the future?” she asked.
He shrugged his shoulders.
“I expect to be here quite a lot, yes.”
“You—you find that it’s possible to work here?”
“I shall do some work here, but of course my headquarters will still have to be London. And it doesn’t necessarily mean that my plans for Leydon are entirely changed.”
“I see,” she said.
He gazed at her as if something about her irritated him. He started pacing up and down her kitchen, and then he returned to her.
“I shall probably spend most of the summer here at Leydon, and that is why I have decided to carry out a certain amount of restorative work here. The place has its charms—or will have in summer—and there’s no reason why a section of it shouldn’t be completely sealed off from the rest, thereby providing me with a manageable country house. I shall need a country house in the future ... nothing unwieldy, but large enough to house my friends and enable a growing family to breathe comfortably. The air here is so excellent that that is one reason why I have decided to begin to send out roots ... the kind of thing my forefathers did!”
Alison found it quite impossible to frame words for a moment. Then she heard herself say in a voice which she strove to make sound merely interested, although it was quite impossible for her to conceal her surprise:
“You—you don’t mean that you are planning to—”
“Marry?” He smiled at her casually. “Don’t most men marry at some time or other in their lives?”
She answered with slight huskiness:
“Of course.”
“And when a normal man marries he expects to acquire a family in the fullness of time.” Once more he started walking up and down her kitchen, and paused to admire a batch of tartlets that were cooling on a wire tray and were intended for his dinner table that evening. “I say, these look good! Mind if I sample one?”
Alison nodded permission, and he consumed two tartlets under her eyes. Then he dusted his fingers fastidiously and wiped them on his immaculate cambric handkerchief.
“Never listen to anyone who so much as hints you’re not the world’s best cook, Alison,” he advised her coolly.
Blindly she fixed her eyes on the tray of tartlets, and felt as if she would choke. But not on tartlets ... only because of them.
“By the way”—Restlessly he continued his pacing—“while I was in London I seized the opportunity to look up my orthopaedic friend. It so happens he’s on a visit to this country, and I was able to have a word with him about Jessamy.” Alison’s dull eyes became riveted on his face. “From what I told him he was quite hopeful he could do something for your stepdaughter, although it may take time. He suggests that in the new year I, or you, take her to Austria, and he’ll try out his treatment. He’s a remarkable man, with many successes to his name, and I have every hope that he’ll work the oracle in Jessamy’s case.”