Nine Lives (Timeless Classics Collection) Read online

  Inside it was pleasant, decorated with late-Victorian tendencies, organdi curtains and wire flower baskets from which smilax and geraniums drooped. She met several artists who were friends of Judy’s, and this was where she met a passing friend who often looked in to Malcolm’s office. His name was Bernard something-or-other, she couldn’t remember Bernard what.

  She realised that he was drunk. He sat over a small table, his hand round a glass of whisky and staring at it as though he resented the fact that he took it. In a way Lesley felt sorry for him, and worried that James and Judy were not yet here. She sat down beside Bernard at the table, and he looked at her without interest across the glass.

  ‘Why do you take it if you loathe it?’ she asked.

  ‘God only knows. Once it helped me; it used to cheer me up and make life fun, but it doesn’t work that way any longer. I still have faith in it, though. I still hope.’

  ‘Give it a miss.’

  ‘I would if I could, but I go shaky if I leave it off, and that’s frightful.’

  ‘Couldn’t a doctor help you?’

  ‘Can they ever help anyone when it comes to it? They give you some beastly treatment by injection, each of which makes you sick within a minute, and it’s hell! At the end of the week you may be T.T., but oh boy, what a week it is.’

  ‘Wouldn’t it be worth one dreadful week to be better for years?’

  ‘Yes, if I could be quite sure that it would work out that way. Most of us go back on it after a bit, because frankly, men like me are not worth saving.’ A grin crossed his face; he had one of those delightfully ugly faces that she had secretly admired all her life; it was cut sharply like a hatchet, with a rugged slot for a mouth, too big and broad, yet with a certain schoolboy humour about it that was amusing. She knew that the ugliness fascinated her even though he was drunk.

  ‘You need some decent woman to prop you up.’

  ‘You’d do it well.’

  ‘Would I?’ She played with the idea of doing it, possibly because she was crazy, yet it would be something in life to feel that at least she had saved somebody from the worst side of his nature.

  ‘Tell me about yourself?’ he asked.

  Lesley never liked talking about herself, because she found it difficult to remain remote and detached when it came to the frank confession. She glossed over the fragile outline of her personal life, telling him nothing, and anyway she wasn’t sure that he even heard a word, but she had stopped him ordering another double. He told her a little about himself. It was a fantastic story and she realised that none of it was true. One day he may tell me the truth, she thought.

  They stayed late, and the other two never turned up. He fell asleep, his face lying pressed against the table, much in the way that soldiers sleep during a war. She got the impression that at some time something dreadful must have happened to him to make him act this way. He was a tired man, worn out by his own vehemence. A sensitive man she knew, but emotionally spent. She left him sitting there asleep, and she went home. She did not really know why she gave him a second thought, but she did.

  One day …

  At Eresham Daniel had been desperately lonely. He had been seriously hurt when his ‘little duchess’ had wished to leave him because he had never thought of separation, save in the circumstances of her marriage, which after all, was a normal and natural state. But Lesley had sickened of life through his own fault he knew, and that made it a great deal harder to bear.

  He blamed himself, but philandering was part of his make-up, and he couldn’t stop it. A pair of bright eyes or a neat ankle ignited a spark within him and suddenly he lost control.

  He had always thought that his daughter would understand him in the way parents frequently do mislead themselves, for although the parent almost always understands the child, very few children ever understand their parents. That is the nature of things. She had gone, and he loved her too much with the very best that was in him, to make any attempt to stay her. He only wanted her permanent happiness, believing that he personally had outlived his usefulness in this direction.

  He had been to blame in so many ways, his affairs, and her marriage for instance, but in life there is no going back. Yesterday is irrevocably dead, as dead as the yesterday which was ten thousand years its predecessor.

  He lived doggedly on.

  Emily saw after him at Holbeins, but she was getting crotchety, and the house had lost much of its comfortable atmosphere. He tried to plunge himself into an orgy of busines, and rearrangement of the shop, but that had changed too. Undoubtedly life was not what it once had been. Yet at the same time he was a rich man living at his ease, and today there was hardly anything he could not do if he wished. All the plums he had once thought were such rich but forbidden fruit had dropped into his lap; only happiness still eluded him.

  That was when he met Lady Helen Vere.

  She was thirty-eight to his sixty, left badly off in a rather meagre little house, situated just outside Eresham. She had dark hair and intelligent eyes, and the lovely natural colour of a sea shell’s flush. He had observed that her account at the shop was pitifully small and one day they met. She had ordered a blouse, when it arrived the assistant had made a mistake in the price quoted. Helen brought it back, and Daniel came down to speak to her.

  ‘Something wrong?’

  ‘No, it’s beautiful, but it costs too much. I thought it would be less.’

  Nervously Helen glanced at the girl who served her. ‘It-it was meant to be less …’ she murmured.

  ‘Then that is the price. Please wrap it up.’

  She tried to stop him of course, but he insisted. Her gentleness was delightful and she had charm. They walked to the door, and he found they were mutually interested in rock gardens. He sent her plants for hers; she visited his. She expressed amazement that he should allow men to work in the garden for him when it would so amuse him to do it himself.

  Daniel became aware of the sense of pleasure she could give him; it was not the elation of a physical delight which the other women in his life had for a brief period used at their enchantment, it was more than that. Much more.

  Eventually she told her story.

  Her father was a penniless peer, and she had been brought up in a castle that was wickedly isolated, and in parts most insanitary and decrepit. She and her brothers and sisters had paddled in a moat that smelt of sewage, and gave one of them typhoid. They had worked a portcullis grown cranky and peeling, but it had all been great fun. Her education had been casual, and she had had but one season, in which she had married a young man who although he had no money, had big ideas.

  When he had died, that had been the end of an epoch.

  Helen scraped along, but she often longed for the old comfortable world, where as a child everything had seemed to be far easier, although they had been hard-up. The mirage of childhood still lay before her eyes, and she dreamt of its castles and moats, its portcullises and emotions.

  They became friends.

  Daniel knew that he held back because he was thinking of Lesley, but now as he became increasingly attracted to Helen, he knew that his life had been marred, not made, when his only child had been born. He had dedicated himself entirely to her, to the obliteration of all else, save a few matterless affairs, which had meant nothing really. He had stepped towards her, and when she had grown-up she had stepped away from him.

  ‘The new generation marches on ahead,’ said Helen.

  ‘I know. I have been rather a fool in trying to march with it.’

  ‘You can’t do it, Daniel.’

  She was dining with him, and all the time he felt that Emily disapproved, for she made clicking noises with her tongue, which irritated him. Helen was saying that she thought it was a good thing that Lesley had gone to live in London, and he knew that he winced at the thought. Had they parted? He had kept on hoping that when his daughter found London dead sea fruit, she would return, and become once more the motif of his life. He could not conc
eive a future without her.

  ‘Oh Daniel you should think of yourself,’ said Helen.

  ‘I feel so horribly alone.’

  ‘But why stay alone?’

  He saw her down the vista of the refectory table which had replaced the one he had bought for Mary. He had had the room panelled in pitch pine and today it looked modern, and that in a sense had changed him too. Backgrounds do that. Helen’s eyes were darkly bright; her cheeks flushed. It wasn’t the very good claret that he had chosen, it was that she cared for him. This was one of those women with whom he could not suggest a liaison ‒ she would never have tolerated such a relationship ‒ besides today his feelings had changed so much, that he would not have offered it.

  For a second he felt his throat constricting, remembering his little duchess who had made the wrong marriage, and he wondered what would happen now if he ‒ not Lesley ‒ married the wrong person. He was not intrigued by Helen’s title; it was queer but his early snobbishness had melted in view of the fact that today all classes seemed to be equal. This time he was falling in love with the woman herself.

  ‘You’re very good to me,’ he murmured, and from outside he could hear a branch of the rose, which having broken loose in the autumnal gale, tapped like a tom-tom against the window pane. ‘I love you,’ he told her simply.

  ‘I know that I love you,’ she answered.

  Bernard went into a nursing home and received treatment, and Lesley visited him every day.

  ‘You’re mad,’ said Malcolm, when she told him about it, ‘why hang round that drunken so-and-so? I believe it must be true that some women like drunks. To me he’s repulsive, and he’ll never be cured, so don’t you think it?’

  It might be true, but he ought to have a chance. He was courageous about it, and the cure was frankly awful, she could never have gone through it herself she knew.

  The days slipped into mid-winter and past. When Bernard came out of the home he went down to Brighton, and wrote Lesley long letters telling her that he was existing on milk and ginger ale, and felt worlds better for it, all of which he owed to her excellent influence over him.

  Judy who had been quieter recently, said that she was going away to a friend for the new year, and Lesley occupied with a series of posters for a brewery, did not notice much what was going on. She wanted to get this job, and the brewery seemed to be more interested than anyone else lately.

  Judy wrote and asked for her things to be sent down to St. Ives, because she had gone to see James. She explained she hadn’t liked to give particulars before, but had just had to say any old thing to cover what was an elopement, for she and James were having a ‘perfectly heavenly affair’.

  Lesley read the letter and recognized the kiss of Judas! She hated to think that it must have been going on all through the summer and that neither of them had had the decency to admit the truth. She was very fond of James, she cried for sheer disappointment in the ways of humanity and she knew that she felt terrible.

  Bernard walked in just as she had got rid of Carter Paterson’s van with all Judy’s belongings. ‘Something up?’ he asked, and she told him.

  He took her out for a walk but she couldn’t forget it. The rushes were stiff silver spears, and the sky heavy with rime behind the black mantillas of the trees with the sun falling like a giant cannon ball of fire. The air was invigorating and she felt better for it. Just as she got back into the house, she heard the telephone ring, and it was Daniel. ‘That you, Lesley?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’ve been ringing you all the afternoon.’

  ‘I was in the park with Bernard.’

  ‘Who’s Bernard?’

  ‘You wouldn’t know; he is one of my newer friends.’

  ‘No chance of your coming down for the week-end?’

  She looked across at Bernard. ‘None,’ she said.

  ‘I’d got something to tell you, dear, something I’d rather tell, than write, or telephone it.’

  She didn’t know how it was that she guessed something but it struck her immediately. ‘If it’s another affair …’ she began.

  ‘It’s a serious one.’

  ‘How?’ Her heart had started turning over with apprehension; she always knew when she reached a milestone in her life, for she saw its stark whiteness just ahead.

  ‘I told you about Helen Vere? I ‒ I’ve been very lonely, my little duchess …’

  ‘You’re not thinking of getting married?’

  ‘As a matter of fact, I am.’

  She let the telephone fall; he had a right to marry of course, and what he said was true, because he must have been dismally alone. But for some reason she hated this. ‘Steady there,’ said Bernard.

  ‘Judy’s gone off with James, now my father’s getting married.’

  ‘Damn it all, does it matter? Who cares if your father married?’

  ‘I care most dreadfully. I love him. We’ve been everything to one another, and I’ve always done it.’

  The telephone rang again and Bernard answered saying Lesley wasn’t well, and he’d ring back later. He never did. Lesley lay sobbing in the chair, and he tried confusedly to comfort her. ‘You’re grown up now, you don’t live at home, it won’t affect you,’ he urged.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Think about me?’ he suggested and suddenly he pressed her mouth hard not caring if it hurt. She lifted her arms and drew him to her, praying to forget all else. She needed someone so much.

  ‘Help me?’ she begged.

  Daniel and Helen married quietly, and for the time being left Lesley alone. With Helen, Daniel was happier than he had ever been before, and with her the desire to philander, died. In London Lesley had thrown her bonnet over life’s windmill and now she did not care. She lived with Bernard. The worst side of her nature seemed to come uppermost, and although Malcolm told her that her work had gone off in consequence, she did not care. Of course Bernard wasn’t cured. He met the old friends, he got into the old routine. He wasn’t the millionth man who could be saved, and when he sobered up he only asked for a hair of the dog that bit him.

  ‘We’ll be going right down the hill again this way,’ Lesley warned him.

  ‘Well, it’s so dull going up the hill. Anyway those damned doctors prophesied this, so let them be right for once.’

  She hated everything that was happening and swung round in a vicious whirlpool from which there seemed to be no escape. Then one evening life opened a door. The telephone rang, and going to it she heard a man’s voice at the other end. A kinder voice, an older voice, like her father’s.

  ‘It’s Edgar Fergusson. I wonder if you’ve forgotten me, and if you haven’t could you lunch with me tomorrow?’

  Her mind ricocheted back to a room at Cap Roche, and herself staring at the man with the grey hair and eyes, who had come to tell her about Richard. ‘I’d love it,’ she said.

  Lunch was the nicest thing that had happened for some time. Edgar was even nicer than she had remembered him, and now she couldn’t believe that she had allowed herself to drift in the ebb tide of a broken life. He asked after her father, and she told him. They went to the theatre that night, and she told him nothing about Bernard, because a feeling of distaste had come to her. Bernard was not there when she returned, and she locked her bedroom door. Early next morning she found him in a drunken stupor on the sitting-room sofa, still in his clothes. He had been very sick. She saw him as he really was, and was revolted by him. She supposed meeting Edgar Fergusson again had changed her whole perspective, and she saw herself amazed at the whirlpool into which she had been eddying. She must have been crazy.

  She must be rid of Bernard, and because she did not know how to cope with the situation she ’phoned Malcolm who came round in a taxicab for which he insisted she should pay. He sobered Bernard up, then told him he would have to get out. Bernard insisted that Lesley had encouraged him, that he’d take cyanide and make both of them look damned silly! He sat staring with somnolent foggy eyes, whilst
Malcolm packed his things and then took him round to a cheap shake-down, he knew. Lesley might not like Malcolm, but she had to admit that he had behaved awfully well.

  ‘And let this be a lesson to you, my girl, to stop giving away your cheap favours,’ he said.

  She knew it was the end of another epoch.

  For a week she and Edgar dined together in the leisurely pleasant way that she had almost forgotten. He wanted her to go to Cap Roche for a holiday. ‘I’d love it,’ she said.

  ‘You’ve got to get over your father’s marriage, and I think you will. If you had loved him as much as you say, I doubt if you would have condemned him to loneliness.’

  ‘I’m a jealous nature …’ She stared at him across the luxurious dining-table, the restaurant half empty. ‘I’m glad you are here,’ she added with eager thankfulness.

  All the others had been unimportant, but she had needed each of them to find this out. They were young, and their youth was brittle, and changeable. James, who had gone off with Judy; Bernard, who was detestable; Malcolm who really never cared for anybody but himself; and Owen, first love and dear for that reason, but quite unavailing.

  ‘Please when can I come out to Cap Roche?’ she asked.

  He looked at her with smiling eyes. ‘You can come next week, as my wife,’ he said.

  Chapter Eight

  THE SECOND WIFE