Nine Lives (Timeless Classics Collection) Page 4

  There was no more to it than that.

  Miss Dixon passed through the door which led into the next shop, lately Daniel had bought the adjacent shop and had turned it into a big showroom for coats and millinery, and she disappeared.

  He came back to the child.

  They went over the way to Mrs. Thorne’s restaurant as usual, and sat down behind the curtained recess with the well-spread cheap tables, and the engravings on the walls in their pale walnut frames.

  ‘You’re very quiet, Lesley,’ he said.

  ‘I was thinking about Miss Dixon.’

  Surprised, he said, ‘What on earth were you thinking about her?’

  ‘It was the way you looked,’ and she said it casually, as though there were no more to it than that.

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ he told her, almost sharply.

  But she loved him!

  He was the pivot on which her whole world spun, and nobody and nothing could approach him. She always waited for his return, sometimes sitting by the gate with her dolls till she heard the sound of the car approaching. She admired him intensely, almost dotingly, and therefore it made it all the worse when at ten years old, Lesley recognized the truth and shrank from it.

  She learnt of the passionate side of Daniel’s nature, and became savagely jealous of any interloping influence, in particular the feminine one. She would never know when she first sensed the truth, but guessed it might have been that first day with Miss Dixon in the shop, though that had passed out of her mind into the sub-conscious, and was for the time being effaced.

  Then she discovered.

  It was the summer’s day when she took her dolls out, and from the garden heard the maids talking over the kitchen sink.

  ‘He’s fast,’ somebody said. ‘Have you heard the talk about young Arabella Finch with him? Why everybody knows about that, I’ve heard that one poor girl did time for him. That was ages ago, but she killed the baby or something. Shocking, wasn’t it? Then there was that stuck-up piece he had with the millinery, oh, that was an affair, too! There are lots more that we don’t know about, I bet, because he was born like that.’

  The child pricked up her ears.

  She knew they were talking about her father, and did this mean the awful calamity which she dreaded most? The dire phantom which pursued her in her anxious moments? Cinderella had had a stepmother, and they were always wicked, for the fairy stories proved that! What would she do if he married again?

  That had been her nurses’ threat in the nursery if ever she was troublesome. ‘If you’re a naughty girl, your father will marry again, and then you’ll have a new ma! Then you’ll know all about it my word!’

  The mere mention of that terrified her. Now she had heard the servants talking and she was afraid. She pored over it in her mind, and it was much later, one evening when her father had come home early and was having his tea, that she asked him.

  ‘Daddy, I want to ask you something. Are you going to marry Violet Hawkes?’

  He looked at her.

  This morning there had been some considerable difficulty for him for apparently Miss Violet Hawkes had got hold of the same idea, and it wasn’t the way that he was thinking about her. Violet was another of those poorish girls who give themselves airs.

  She wanted to go on the stage, although her mother was a laundress, and her father had died carting some coal when drunk, and slipping on a frosty road had been run over by his own cart. Girls born in that station of life, and then aspiring to the stage could hardly expect to be taken at more than their face values, Daniel had explained quite ruthlessly.

  She had come to the shop, and had told him that he was cruel. He had had difficulty and had had to show her out, the most awkward part being that whilst he was doing this, he ran into Miss Sprockett, who went very red, and pretended not to see him.

  The difficult part was that Daniel wanted Violet Hawkes. He was a strong virile man with no intention of re-marriage, for one wife had been trouble enough, he told himself, and he had been annoyed that the girl should anticipate any permanent tie with him. There had been nothing but a few kisses, caresses, but no real love. Now here was his ten-year-old daughter asking him questions about it.

  ‘And who’s been talking to you?’ he asked.

  She had not the wit to cover her informer. ‘I heard the maids talking when I was sitting on the lawn.’

  ‘The hell they were!’

  She looked at him. He didn’t know from whom Lesley had got those eyes, certainly neither he nor Mary had them. They were beautiful narrowing, and expanding, or merely slanting. The pupils appeared to occupy almost the entire eye.

  She said, ‘Am I to have a stepmother?’

  ‘Good Lord, no.’

  ‘Never?’

  ‘Never,’ he said, and meant it.

  ‘On the Bible?’

  ‘Most certainly on the Bible.’

  She thrilled with emotion, for she knew that her hero could not lie. Complacently she went on eating bread-and-butter, and finishing it asked for a piece of cake. He cut it for her.

  ‘Now you take that out into the garden to eat,’ he suggested.

  She knew that he wanted to be rid of her, but did not question it, and took the cake outside. She sat down on a moss bank where the hermit bees were busy. The blue anemones were still blooming against the grass in their cerulean colour. She sang softly to herself.

  Presently she saw Tom bringing the car round to the front door, and the two maids came out, and behind them there was luggage. She could not believe it and stared at them, then realised that they were being sent away. They had done something dreadful, for unless you did something dreadful, you couldn’t be dismissed like that.

  It didn’t worry her at the time, and it never occurred to her that it might be something to do with Violet Hawkes, she merely slipped into the dining-room whilst all the fuss was going on, and cut herself another piece of cake, rather afraid of being caught, and she hid it in a somewhat soiled handkerchief.

  She bore it back to the moss bank and sat there eating it, until she felt so sick that she didn’t know what to do. It was a very rich plum cake and it lay like a rock inside her. The plum cake was much more important that Violet Hawkes, or the departing maids.

  At that moment the cake was the most important thing in Lesley’s life.

  Chapter Three

  THE ADOLESCENT

  Daniel had meant to send Lesley to a good boarding-school, but in the end he changed his mind. He found that he preferred a governess to come to Holbeins for her, and then she could go in to the High School for dancing lessons, and learn music from a visiting music master who had letters after his name.

  Lesley went into the teens, and she was sixteen when her grandmother became ill. Mrs. Clark had for some time been distressed by violent bilious attacks which had laid her low for more and more days at a time, and she had felt too ill to do much. The truth was that for some years now she had suffered from an acute disease of the liver, which Dr. Hennekey had failed to diagnose, and ultimately this killed her.

  She was ill for a comparatively short time, but during this period Daniel sent his daughter away. He felt that she was too young to have her brightness dimmed by the proximity of death, and sent her to Wales to stay with Miss Everington, her governess.

  Miss Everington had a married sister who lived in Snowdonia, and who had offered to put governess and pupil up for a time. It was a long journey, but to Lesley a great experience, and when they got to Snowdonia itself, and the final part of the journey was undertaken in a tired old taxicab, she was delighted.

  They came through Llanberis Pass, and she had never seen a mountain before; she had thought it was merely a hill, only of course bigger, now for the first time she realised the personality and the atmosphere which goes with a mountain.

  It wasn’t just that they were high, it was the romance, the mysticism, and the strange and enduring stimulation which clung about them.

  ‘I must cl
imb up there, I must, I must,’ she said excitedly.

  ‘Now don’t you start fussing,’ said Miss Everington, who was forty-five and did not care for climbing, since the time as a girl when she had had to spend the night extremely coldly on Cadar Idris, due to a sudden descent of cloud.

  Lesley was being introduced to beauty. She recognized that there had been nothing like it in her life before this. The taxi came to a standstill outside the rather grim stone house, with its remorseless slate roof, but the garden which surrounded it was cerise with Dorothy Perkins’ roses, and the tall late irises were still in bloom in those colours which paint a garden with such a sudden burst of late Spring exuberance.

  Mrs. Wilks, Miss Everington’s married sister, was a somewhat sour replica of Miss Everington herself. Her husband was very Welsh-looking, with a round little face that had a puckish look, and with deep-set dark eyes that twinkled. He had grown stout so that now both nose and chin telescoped together, and when he spoke it was with a strong Welsh accent. But Lesley, just sixteen, noticed that they gave her a good tea, and she was of the age which appreciates a good tea.

  ‘She wants to climb,’ said Miss Everington, almost as though it was something derogatory.

  Both the sisters were averse to the idea, though Mr. Wilks was inclined to side with Lesley against them. ‘Have you not some proper boots, indeed?’ he said, ‘and clothes also, you’ve not? It comes down cold on the mountains.’

  Lesley had made up her mind that whatever they said she would climb, and a week later she asked if she could walk into Llanberis to do some shopping. They said she could. The truth of the matter was that the sisters were glad of the chance to chatter and they had much to discuss; the child could come to no harm they felt. In Llanberis she discovered the way up Snowdon itself, eyeing it with interest, and knowing that it made her heart beat more quickly.

  From the conversation which went on around her she learnt that mountains had grim hearts, and were not easily assailable; they looked to be smooth from the valley, serene too, but higher up the greenness thinned, and the air grew cold with a knife-blade thrust through it. Then the scree began.

  ‘What is scree?’ she asked, and they laughed thinking that she was trying to be funny. How could she know? Then she stopped asking questions, annoyed that they laughed at her; she’d find out for herself. That was the sure way to success, and this way she’d learn everything.

  The boy at the adjacent farm warned her about it. He was nineteen, big and loose-limbed, with a lock of dark shaggy hair on his brow, and quiet eyes like the sheep dogs that he trained. Next summer he hoped to take them into Harlech for the trials, if there were to be trials there, but sometimes they were further afield, what would you? If he hadn’t trained them all his life he would never have learnt the job, he told her. He had a young fresh face and an aesthetic profile, so that she knew in some strange way, right down in the heart of herself, he had the capacity to excite her.

  ‘Don’t go near mountains,’ he warned her, ‘indeed they are not good for you. Very bad they are, and cruel.’

  Such a lot of nonsense, she thought, for she had much of her father’s obstinacy, so she went.

  She chose a brilliant spring day when everybody was busy, because it was the churning which always set them all into a flutter. She walked up the early slopes of Snowdon with the long loping strides of some young animal, amused to find it all so easy. The grass was thick and springy, and small flowers starred it in glowing clusters, clovers, coltsfoot and harebells. She walked on it until the grass thinned, and became more sparse, and she now realised that her spirit felt uplifted, as though she were no longer her real self. Excited. Stimulated. Vitality seemed to throb through her and made itself felt.

  Looking down on the view, the village and the valley seemed already to be a long way off, for she had come a good deal further than she had expected, and it gave her the delicious feeling of a conqueror. But looking up she knew that Snowdon itself was towering above her, and was still as far off as ever it had been. The air went to her head and perhaps for the first time she knew that she had become a little drunk with it, but pleasantly so.

  Climbing up and not finding it fatiguing, because she was so elated, that she did not even have to struggle for a foothold, it seemed that she was born again. In the valley she had been a child, but here she became a woman; she was wise; she knew things and she loved life.

  She came to the halfway hut, a dark wooden splotch against the last of the thin green grass, and already she had the impression that the invigorating air was a shade colder, maybe a good deal colder than it had been in the enclosed valley, where the hot day was burning, and the flowers fading in the heat.

  She stopped at the hut.

  A friendly-looking man brought her coffee and a large bun, and she had a tremendous appetite as she ate it. She sat on the plank seat outside the pleasant hut, and she kicked off her shoes as she talked to him.

  ‘You won’t be going up to the top indeed?’ he asked her.

  Lesley spoke of it lightly as though she were accustomed to climbing and the thought of going to the top was a mere detail. Of course she would go there. At this moment there was something defiantly young about her, she had in fact developed; but her eyes were childish, softly green in her flushed face, and her brown-yellow hair ‒ darkening with the years ‒ was tied back from her face in a bow on the nape of her neck.

  ‘It isn’t safe for a young lady alone indeed, what would you?’ he asked her.

  ‘I’ll be all right. I’ll keep to the path. There is a path up, isn’t there?’

  Yes, indeed to goodness there was a path up, he agreed and she would turn dizzy! She would find it very cold, and it would be wiser to return. She felt amused as she sat there with the dark sun-warmed timbers of the halfway hut behind her, and the comfortable bun filling her, for she had discovered that she was very hungry.

  She was not concerned for Miss Everington’s anxiety, for she had left a note explaining where she was, and they mustn’t be worried if she was late. Finishing a second bun she took money from the small purse which was fitted into her bag, a present from her father for her birthday.

  Then she went on.

  It was curious now that a blight seemed to have come over the day, and for the first time she realised she was approaching the actual mountain itself. She was leaving the grass behind her, and going higher so that it was quite soon she came to the scree. The warmth had disappeared, and with it that sense of invigoration; there was no flower perfume left nor the sweet taste of sunshine in the mouth, for the sun was obscured by a cloud, now on the bare face of the mountain it was very cold indeed.

  Against the black scree her shoes kept slipping back, and as fast as she went determinedly forward, she was back again where she had been only the moment before. It was exhausting, even for her with her youthful vitality, and she was annoyed by the set-back, a trifle perplexed, but she plodded on.

  The path narrowed, curving round, and there was one part where she knew that she dared not look down, lest she should turn dizzy as the man at the halfway house had said. Whereas at some moments she found it all confusing to her mind, at other times everything was so startlingly clear as to be unreal, but she was resolved to go on.

  The cold was the worst thing, for the air had veritably become the knife that plunged down into the chest every time that she tried to breathe. Her hands were blue, and appeared to be swelling a little, or was that her fancy? Her feet were lead. It had been madness to come in these silly shoes, but she had never expected that it would be like this.

  She had visualised mountain climbing as being like shinning up the trees in the garden at Holbeins, where the green branches made luxuriant beds, with the scent of the sap, or of the resinous arms of spruce and fir filling the nostrils. In trees one got that sense of elation which mounted as one went higher, but apparently climbing mountains was not the same thing. The sense of elation dimmed as you went higher.

  It wa
s almost depressing. After she had reached the scree it diminished quite rapidly, and now her heart was making noises, she became conscious of its presence for the first time in her life, and she was so cold that she could hardly breathe.

  But she went on.

  At the summit the first person whom she saw was Owen Jones, the boy from the neighbouring farm, who was standing there apparently waiting for her.

  ‘They gave me your note,’ he said, ‘and I did come to find you indeed. What a little fool you are in those shoes, you could not, could you?’ He wore a big sweater right up to his throat like a fisherman’s, and an overcoat. He had come in the train which had puffed its way to the summit only ten minutes before Lesley had clawed her path to it, almost on all-fours. He took her arm to push her towards the restaurant. ‘Better have lots of tea, very hot,’ he suggested.

  She began to cry.

  She had been so very glad to see him that now, when she knew that she was safe, the blessed relief gave vent to tears. He set her down at a corner table, and went over to the counter to fetch the tea. The whole place seemed to be blissfully warm after the penetrating cold outside. It did not hurt to breathe, and although her body was still a clumsy lump, for the first time she got the idea that the lump had vitality somewhere in it. Her hair had blown untidily about her face, for although in the valley there had been no wind, up here it was a raging and besetting hurricane. Drying her eyes she tried to straighten her hair with her blue hands and found them inadequate. Then she looked out of the window beside her.

  It was at that moment that the sense of infinity came to her, for the sun had crept out again. Wales lay beneath her, a vista of tranquil valleys and calm passes, zig-zagged by white roads. The view was cupped by the bluest sea that she had ever seen, and she could mark the tiny chalky lines scribbled on the water where the wind flecked it. Ireland lay beyond, a smudge of hyacinth, and her delighted eyes ran the full length of it, knowing all the time that its beauty delighted her senses in a new but a most satisfying way. Higher to the right, she saw a cobalt and amethyst haze which was the Isle of Man, and the whole vista gave her a curious sense of power that she knew she had never possessed before.