He smiled at her a little whimsically.
“You and your building up! I honestly believe you enjoy looking after invalids, Alison.” He had stopped calling her Mrs. Fairlie days ago. “Why didn’t you take up nursing professionally?” he enquired curiously. “You’d have made a first-class nurse.”
She concentrated all her attention on the fire.
“I don’t know that I enjoy nursing all that much,” she admitted, while the firelight played over her. “However, it does seem that I’ve had rather a lot of experience...”
“For your age,” he said quietly.
She glanced at him.
“A lot of young women have to nurse sick husbands,” she said defensively. “And children,” she added.
“But you haven’t got any children—of your own.”
“No.”
“However, you probably will have one day.” His tone sounded conversational. The doctor had agreed that he could smoke a pipe, and he stuffed tobacco into the bowl of it.
Alison averted her face.
“Tell me about your Miss Prim,” she said. “She sounds delightful.”
He laughed suddenly, as if he was genuinely amused but was unable to share the secret of his amusement with her.
“She is delightful,” he agreed. “She’s a peach, a poppet ... but not, I’m afraid, a very good secretary. She forgets, and she makes mistakes. But I overlook it because I don’t think I could get on without her.”
“I see,” Alison said.
Once again his eyes surveyed her whimsically. “Before I leave here and you have the satisfaction of writing me off as good as new once more I’ll get you to give her lunch, and perhaps put her up for a night before we return to London,” he said. “You will then be able to decide for yourself whether she’s as delightful as she sounds.”
“Of course,” Alison agreed. She was fairly certain Miss Prim would be more delightful even than she sounded on the telephone, and astonishingly she found that she wasn’t altogether looking forward to the visit of Miss Prim. “She—she seemed to think you ought to stay on here at Leydon for another week or fortnight,” she told him. “And as you’ve still got rather a nasty cough, and London in November is hardly an ideal place for someone recovering from a bronchial infection, don’t you think it would be a good idea if you did stay on here for that length of time?” she suggested. “Dr. Geddes was talking about your spending the rest of the winter abroad. What do you think of that?”
“Rubbish,” he said softly. “I decline even to contemplate going abroad.”
“Yorkshire is rather bracing, but the air is pure. Do you like the idea of staying on at the Hall?”
“With you putting yourself out to look after me? That’s not very fair, is it?”
“Margaret and Jenny have been coming up every day from the village, and they’re a great help,” she admitted. “Mrs. Davenport is really enjoying herself looking after you, so I’m far from doing everything for you myself. And then, of course, there are the girls,” by whom she meant Marianne and Jessamy. “Everyone is eager to help.”
“Why?” he enquired innocently, as if it struck him as strange that anyone should enjoy looking after him.
Alison smiled a small, inscrutable smile. But she made no attempt to enlighten him. He was probably conceited enough, she thought ... and then wondered, as her grey eyes travelled over him, whether indeed that was the case, or whether she was actually wronging him.
He met her eyes with a tiny smile in his own.
“I feel sure I’m an awful burden thrust upon you, Alison ... and everyone else. But if it’s a question of payment, everyone will be well paid,” rather more drily, “before I leave here,” he added.
Suddenly, and almost breathlessly, she assured him:
“No one has looked after you just for payment. Jenny and Margaret could get other jobs, but they like coming here.”
“And Mrs. Davenport, you say, enjoys looking after me,” as if he doubted it.
“She enjoys it so much that her husband is complaining because she’s hardly ever at home.”
His eyebrows arched.
“But Marianne, surely, doesn’t enjoy answering imperious summonses on my bell?”
“I think she does.”
“And Jessamy?” with a new, intriguing note of softness.
“Jessamy is like a dog curling up outside your room. She has been very anxious.”
His eyebrows went higher, but he smiled. “She is quite an angelic child,” he murmured. “One day before I leave here I want to talk to you about Jessamy.”
“Then you will stay on here until you’re really better?”
He regarded her thoughtfully.
“If it won’t complicate things for you. That first day I arrived here ... I realise I was a bit inconsiderate. I exposed you to a biting wind on the roof-top, and it’s you who should have gone down with a bad bout of ’flu, or whatever it was I’ve had. Mr. Minty found it hard to forgive me for my treatment of you that day.” He smiled reminiscently. “Old Minty may strike you as a bit of a dried-up stick, but he’s basically intensely human. I had no idea when I brought him here that he looks upon you as an ill-used but thoroughly admirable young woman ... indeed, I think you ought to know that he’s quite an admirer. A confirmed bachelor, of course, but an admirer just the same.”
She was genuinely surprised. It had never even occurred to her that the Leydons’ solicitor was capable of admiring anyone. And then she realised that the whimsical look was back on his face, and she spoke hastily:
“I hope you won’t get the wrong idea, Mr. Leydon, if I make a suggestion—” despite an invitation to call him Charles she had not so far taken advantage of it. “I know that this room is not really a very comfortable room, and if you’re going to stay on here you’ll need somewhere to sit and have your meals. The library is far too big to be heated adequately, and that of course goes for the dining-room. Without central heating I don’t honestly think it would be safe for you to consider living in the main part of the house, not even for a short time. You have just been very ill, and we can’t risk your being ill again—”
“So?” he enquired, as if she already had him intrigued.
She rushed on impulsively:
“My flat isn’t large enough to ask you to—to stay with us. But there are rooms in the corridor communicating with the south tower that could be converted to your use. It wouldn’t take long to get them ready, and it would be no trouble at all. Mrs. Davenport and I, between us, could soon have them ready for you—”
“I’ve no doubt.” He sounded cynically amused. “You would indulge in one of your marathon spring-cleans and take over the job of furniture removers in order to ensure my comfort. I shall begin to believe, soon, that you like polishing furniture—”
“I do!”
His glance flickered over her in a strangely inscrutable manner.
“What else do you like? Cooking for a man who can do nothing but sit about all day and bore himself as much as everyone else? Washing and ironing, perhaps? You’ll be offering to do my mending next!”
She sat back on her heels and her attractive mouth curved upwards pleasingly at the corners.
“I’ve already sewn on a button for you,” she admitted, dimpling. “But your clothes are in such excellent condition that they won’t require any mending for ages yet. And by the time they do I expect you’ll discard them. But I’m certainly prepared to undertake your laundry while you’re here—I’ve an excellent washing-machine that does the job for me. And if you move into the rooms I have in mind for you I can cook for you in my own kitchen, and that will be far more convenient than preparing meals in that enormous kitchen where I cooked dinner for you on the night that Mr. Minty dined with you. So you see, I’m really thinking of myself as much as you when I say I really think you ought to make the move.”
He lay back in his chair and shut his eyes.
“I don’t believe you ever think of yourself,” he said, “so you needn’t trot that one out.”
She assured him that she frequently thought of herself.
Without opening his eyes he uttered a sceptical sound.
“When do you want me to move?”
“As soon as the rooms are ready for you. As soon as there’s no danger of your taking cold in them, and they’re properly aired and heated.”
“You women and your airing! I remember my mother had a mania for airing things!” He opened his eyes, and although his expression was difficult to read there was a darkness and a shadowiness in the grey depths that indicated he was growing tired. “If you make me too comfortable here at Leydon you’ll have me on your hands at Christmas! I usually go to my sister at Christmas, but this year I’ll probably dump myself on you!”
“That,” she replied, feeling curiously attracted by the prospect, “is all right by me. And after all, why shouldn’t you spend Christmas in your own home? ... Your family home!”
“Very touching, I’m sure,” he commented, sounding vaguely irritated. “But if I’m here for Christmas Prim will have to spend Christmas here, too. She hasn’t many friends or relatives, and I couldn’t cast her adrift at the festive season. And I wouldn’t,” he added firmly.
“Of course she must come here,” Alison heard herself say with simulated enthusiasm, but she was beginning to wish she knew exactly what Miss Prim looked like. It was becoming important to her to know what she looked like ... and, indeed, what sort of a person she actually was, apart from being Charles Leydon’s secretary.
“It’s time you went back to bed,” she said, rising hurriedly from the rug because all at once he looked quite alarmingly exhausted. In the whole of her life she had never felt her heart wrung as it was by the sight of his wan, tired face and hollow eyes.
She started to take herself to task for allowing him to stay up too long.
CHAPTER VI
TWO days later Leydon removed to the fresh set of rooms that had been prepared for him. While she was helping Mrs. Davenport get these ready for him Alison was amazed at herself because she hadn’t thought of this particular suite in the first place. And if she only had thought of it in the first place he might not have caught a chill ... for the temperature of his bedroom on the first night that he slept in it had been near to freezing.
And it was her fault that his fire had died down and he had retired to an icy bed. If only she hadn’t fallen asleep in the library his fire would have been kept up for him, and certainly his hot-water bottles would have been renewed.
She had such a guilty feeling about that night when she fell asleep in front of the library fire that she more or less attributed to herself Leydon’s sharp attack of illness. The fact that he himself had behaved with a complete lack of consideration towards herself did little to ease her conscience, and since his illness the first impression she had formed of him had become so blurred that she was inclined to suspect herself also of hasty judgement. The Charles Leydon who lay in bed and was so meekly submissive whenever she ordered him to take his medicine or swallow his nourishment while she looked on to make absolutely certain he did that very thing was so different from the Charles Leydon whose coldness and forbidding appearance had chilled her to the heart had so little in common that she simply couldn’t believe she had been right in her earlier judgement.
No man could change as much as Leydon had changed simply because he was ill and be as unpleasant as she had once felt fully convinced the new owner of Leydon Hall was and would continue to be.
She had expected endless tussles with him, and now she all but had him eating out of her hand.
Of course, there was always the possibility that he would change back again when he was well. And she had not yet had his plans for the Hall outlined to her in full ... With a further sensation of guilt she recollected that he had been about to outline them to her when she fell asleep.
No doubt, in time, she would hear what they were, when he was well enough to re-introduce that clipped, concise note into his voice, and wear an expression of aloof detachment that at the moment seemed beyond him.
She and Mrs. Davenport enjoyed themselves far more getting the fresh set of rooms ready than they had done opening up the main dining room and the library. The new rooms were in a corridor that connected with Alison’s own flat, and from her point of view it would simplify matters tenfold when it came to the preparation and serving of meals. Apart from that the rooms themselves were pleasant, with an outlook over sloping lawns to the park, and of quite reasonable size by comparison with the vast dimensions of most of the rooms in the main house.
Alison robbed one or two of the principal rooms of some of their more attractive knick-knacks to brighten the suite she was getting ready for Leydon; and in addition she deprived her own bookshelves of books to provide him with some light reading. The books in the library were, almost without exception, impressive tomes mouldering between disintegrating leather or vellum bindings, and hardly the kind of reading someone recovering from a nasty bout of illness would feel tempted to take up in order to gain diversion.
It was true that Leydon, as an architect, might relish the few books dealing with architecture that were to be found in the library. But not at the moment, Alison decided. At the moment he looked as if he needed to be taken right out of himself and cheered up as much as possible. For there was no doubt about it, the severity of his indisposition, and the suddenness with which it had come upon him, had affected his morale to a certain extent.
He who had gone through most of his life despising weakness had suddenly discovered that he was vulnerable himself—indeed, judging by his slowly disappearing haggard appearance, extremely vulnerable.
Once he was installed in the sitting-room of his new suite, looking slightly more like himself because he was dressed and had taken great trouble with his shaving and the way his tie was knotted, he asked Alison if he could have a word with Jessamy. He had been thinking a great deal about Jessamy during his illness, he said, and he wanted to get to know her better. He wanted to talk to her, in fact.
Jessamy, who was not expecting the summons, was thrown into a state bordering on actual excitement when she heard of the invalid’s request. If it had been Marianne she could have understood it ... Marianne was the acknowledged beauty of the family, and although she and Leydon did not, in the beginning, appear to have made a tremendously favourable impression on one another, in the days that had followed they had quite obviously altered those earlier unfavourable impressions. Marianne nowadays was quite happy to run her feet off for the baronet who declined to make use of his title ... and she had actually refused invitations to local dinners and dances because, if she accepted them, it would involve her absenting herself from the Hall for somewhat lengthy periods.
She told Alison that she wanted to be on hand to help her ... but Alison, who received very little practical help from her, was not deceived. Marianne had sent her latest boyfriend packing because she had suddenly ceased to have the smallest interest in him, and a trifling quarrel that could have been easily patched up if she had wished had been allowed to become an open rift.
For the first time for many months she stayed at home in the evenings, washed her own hair because she had suddenly decided that simple styles became her—Alison always washed her own hair—and switched from buying popular records for her record player to reasonably highbrow excerpts from the classics because Charles Leydon was now known to prefer Brahms and Beethoven to the latest pop idol ... which would not have surprised Marianne when she first met him, and now merely affected her with a generous desire to combat any suggestion that he was ‘square.’
Alison was distinctly ‘square,’ according to Marianne, Jessamy was inclined—perhaps as the result of her lame foot and the fact that she could not dance—to squarishness, and Lorne, if she proceeded along her present path, would be very square indeed when she went up to University, which it was almost certain she would.
So it was left to Marianne to be the natural one in the family, and all at once mere naturalness struck her as a trifle dull. A man like Charles Leydon, who was an expert at one particular subject, naturally liked his conversations to be conducted on intelligent lines. So, in addition to playing Chopin on the drawing-room piano—a thing she hadn’t done since she was seventeen—and listening raptly to the Emperor Concerto, she took to reading Chekhov in addition to trying to catch up on some of the more advanced modern writers, taking out an extra subscription at the Public Library, and thus hoped to attune her mind to quiet and thoughtful discussion with Leydon, who had a weakness for Chekhov although it was not known yet whether he thought much of advanced modern writers.
Jessamy, on the other hand, did nothing to prepare herself for discussions with Leydon, and her excitement was strongly tempered by nervousness when the moment arrived for her to present herself at his sitting-room door and knock on it timidly.
Alison had lent her a soft blue twin set that she had bought for herself, and it did wonders for Jessamy’s dark eyes and delicate skin when she was finally dressed and ready for the interview. As always, she wore an Alice band—soft blue to match the twin set—and her best accordion-pleated skirt. She did her nails with one of Marianne’s less striking nail varnishes, and wore lipstick for the first time in her life.
She dabbed scent behind her ears, and sprayed her hair with lacquer. Alison, when she realised that she was ready for the ordeal that was also to be something of a pleasure—a strange pleasure for someone as shy and retiring and conscious of her handicap as Jessamy—was a little startled by the attempt the girl had made to make the most of her appearance, and by no means certain that the perfume she had dabbed behind her ears was the right kind of perfume for a nineteen-year-old.
But she refrained from mentioning her doubt because Jessamy was plainly strangely keyed up, and she had been known to indulge in fits of hysteria before this. All Alison said, as she accompanied her into the corridor where Leydon’s rooms were situated, was, “Don’t be afraid, because he doesn’t bite, you know! We may have received the impression that he does when he first came here, but—”
“I know, I know.” Jessamy, who had come to a halt outside the sitting-room door, and taken a very deep breath, answered impatiently, but cautiously. “
You
may have received that impression, but I never did! Right from the first I thought him—I thought him...”
“Yes?” Alison queried, glancing at her expectantly.
Jessamy drew another deep breath.
“Oh, nothing,” she answered. “Except that I thought him—”
“Come in!” a deep, warm baritone voice called from within.
And Alison watched her stepdaughter enter.
Alison made her way back to her well-fitted kitchen in the south tower, and she decided to make a batch of cakes for tea. As she broke the eggs into a basin and creamed the fat she wondered, with a tiny frown between her brows, what it was that Jessamy had tried to say before that command to enter his room had come from the lordly occupant of it himself. There had been an expression on her face that was quite revealing ... Alison herself had no doubt that the nineteen-year-old had been struggling for a suitable word to adequately describe the man she was about to visit.
And she had been unable to think of a suitable word. Perhaps, given another second or so, she would have done so. Then she might well have said that, right from the beginning, she had thought Charles Leydon ‘wonderful.’ And wonderful was a very revealing word, especially when a girl like Jessamy used it.
But what puzzled Alison was why, from the first, Leydon had unbent to Jessamy. A basically hard man—whatever illness might have made of him, and would continue to make of him until he was completely fit again—was the last person she would have suspected capable of being affected by the timidity and the poignancy of Jessamy, with her enormous, doe-like eyes, and her generally ethereal appearance.
But he was. She herself had seen the look that had flashed into his eyes as soon as she introduced Jessamy. And his attitude to Jessamy had not changed since. It was the attitude of a man who went hunting with a falcon on his wrist and suddenly came upon a small, broken bird in his path ... and took it home to look after it.
When she had made her cakes, she set a tea-tray for Leydon, and waited for Jessamy to return to the kitchen before taking it in. But the electric clock on the wall informed her that it was half-past four, and still Jessamy was cosily closeted with the invalid. At a quarter to five Leydon’s bell rang.
When she entered his sitting-room she found Jessamy sitting, quite literally, at his feet, on a footstool, and Leydon—looking intensely interesting with his pallor and his sleek black hair and well-cut features—lying back in his chair and looking so relaxed that his expression was almost peaceful. There was a kind of languid contentment in his eyes, a strikingly gentle expression round his mouth, and even his square jaw had a softened look.
When Alison entered the room he looked up at her languidly, while Jessamy, a faintly guilty expression in her eyes, surveyed her stepmother apologetically. Apologetically and smugly.
“Oh, Alison.” Leydon spoke without anything in the nature of apology in his voice. “When you bring my tea will you put an extra cup on the tray for Jessamy? She and I have discovered that we like talking to one another, and we’ve an amazing amount in common. We both think animals should not be confined in zoos, and people who live in delightful rural areas such as this have an unfair advantage over the unfortunates who live in towns. Something, we’re agreed, should be done about them.”
“The people who live in towns or the people who live in rural areas?” Alison enquired, a little stiffly.
Leydon smiled up at her whimsically.
“Do you need to ask? Don’t you remember that the subject was raised between us on the first day I came here, while we were visiting the roof? You thought the town-dwellers should be encouraged to visit places like this and pay half a crown a time for the privilege of travelling all the way back to the towns ... I thought it would be better if they were encouraged to stay, and places like this were either pulled down or converted into flats for their needs. In that way we could all share the benefits of the countryside.”
“Except that the countryside would soon cease to be the countryside if everybody lived there,” Alison retorted with something like heat.
“True.” But he was still smiling lazily. “However, the boot can’t be on the same foot all the time, can it? Progress would cease to be progress if that was permitted indefinitely. Jessamy agrees with me.”
Alison swallowed something in her throat. She had the curious sensation that he was deliberately trying to provoke her ... attacking her on a subject that he knew to be a kind of fetish with her. Or was this simply his method of reminding her that he had plans for Leydon Hall? ... plans which he had not yet had an opportunity to discuss with her!
Jessamy, seeing Alison biting her lip, looked mildly uncomfortable. But, with that look in her great dark eyes, and obviously under the influence—very much under the influence, Alison would have said—of the man lounging gracefully in the deep armchair, she would have agreed with anything and everything he said, even if it was an outrageous suggestion he put forward to turn Leydon into a kind of outdoor zoo or an institution for old people.
To Alison there was something slightly indecent about the naked admiration in her eyes, and the humble appreciation she didn’t attempt to conceal because she was being noticed.
“Are you quite sure you wouldn’t rather have your tea alone?” Alison suggested, with a return of her stiffness ... and by this time it was slightly ramrod stiffness. “I mean, Jessamy is inclined to chatter, and you probably don’t feel up to it—”