Nine Lives (Timeless Classics Collection) Read online

  Lesley waited outside until the room was arranged. She was afraid of breaking down, because she was tensed up with the events of the day. When the room was fixed for Miss Everington then she could go back to her own, and howl like a child, yet when she got there, she couldn’t cry. Her father sent her up some lunch and some champagne, which was of help to her. At least it made her sleep through the afternoon, and it stopped the horror of the idea of being pitchforked into a marriage just because she had made a bad mistake. She wanted to draw back before it was too late, and prayed that it was not too late yet.

  She felt desperate.

  It was evening when she saw Richard. She had gone out into the arbour which stood at the far corner of the lawn; the garden was quite empty now, for the heat accrued with the late afternoon, and what little breeze there had been in the morning had now died down. Richard came to her, and she thought that somehow he looked different. She asked herself, does this have to happen to change the whole world? Is this one of the experiences that spoils life and causes everything to slip out of perspective? He came to her and stood in the doorway, lolling against the jamb made of wood, with the rustic grey bark still on it.

  ‘Well, this is a nice muck-up,’ he said.

  ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘It’s your father. As you know he was waiting up for us last night, and we were late enough, goodness only knows. I told you all along that he’d got my number! He caught me and he talked to me. He knew all about us, guessed it, I suppose. About what happened in the hut, I mean.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘He says we must be married at once. I ‒ I …’

  Quickly she said, ‘Well, that was what we decided on the Naze last night, didn’t we?’

  ‘I know, but last night isn’t today,’ and the horrible part was that was her own argument.

  ‘I know that. Good heavens, how well I know it! Richard, it has all been quite dreadful.’

  ‘It’s been dreadful for me, too. I can’t tell you the stink the old man kicked up. You might have told me that he was absolutely ruthless.’

  ‘He ‒ he’s a darling in lots of ways,’ and then she wiped away her tears. ‘I’m afraid none of this is the way I wanted to feel, about us, I mean.’

  ‘I know.’

  Nature hasn’t changed, she recalled her father saying that this morning, and the words alarmed her. ‘We can’t get married,’ she began.

  ‘If you ask me, we can’t get out of it. We’re being bundled into it at speed.’

  ‘Then if we’ve got to do it, let’s elope.’

  He looked at her, for the first time he was smiling, for eloping would be fun, and there was exciting adventure attached to it. ‘Could we?’ he asked.

  ‘Couldn’t you get a special licence, then we would do a bunk in your car. We could go anywhere you liked, get married at Thorpe-le-Soken, or Great Bentley, or one of those funny little villages, and come back at breakfast time.’

  ‘I didn’t get any breakfast today, did you?’

  ‘Not a taste,’ but he was still thinking of the fun of eloping, she knew it by the way that his eyes sparkled. ‘We’ll get through with this somehow,’ he said.

  ‘Could we? Could we be happy do you think?’

  ‘I have never thought of myself as the successful married man, but you never know, do you?’

  ‘No, you don’t.’

  At last she began to cry, her head buried on his shoulder, and he offering shy comfort, but his brow had that little knotted frown on it, and that in itself spelt perplexity. There must be some way out, somewhere away from the dynasty of her father, surely there was some escape, but where?

  Then she knew there was no way out.

  Chapter Five

  THE WIFE

  The special licence was obtained. Daniel having recovered from the first shock was aiding and abetting, and he had almost persuaded Lesley that she wished to marry Richard and her day of apprehension had been merely bridal jitters. One morning the party motored into central Essex, and she was married very quietly at a small church there. Afterwards they had a champagne lunch, and she and Richard shot across England in his car making for Dover.

  Tonight they’d be in France.

  ‘Well, Mrs. North, and how does it feel?’ he asked as they roared through Kent.

  ‘I feel nicely, thank you.’

  ‘Perhaps this wasn’t such a bad idea. You’ll hate settling down in Leicester, it’s the dullest place ever, but maybe later we could cut clear.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  Lesley had the elated feeling that anything was possible. Maybe after all, she hadn’t been such a fool to fall in with her father’s arrangements for her. It had been the shock that had made her silly, for shock could do that for you. They ripped their way through Canterbury, at a ridiculous speed, but she trusted his driving. Her whole life had changed on the one visit to Frinton, and she ought to feel romantically associated with the place, but somehow she never wanted to go there again.

  They crossed on a calm sea, but there was difficulty with the car, and it was later than they had anticipated when they left Calais on the unending road.

  ‘We’ll never make Paris tonight,’ said Richard, ‘better stop at some little place about halfway?’

  ‘Yes, that would be nice,’ for she was dead tired.

  ‘Right. We’ll stop at the first decent-looking spot we come to.’

  ‘Something countrified, I hope. Nothing big, and smart. I wouldn’t like that.’

  ‘I think I know the sort of place you want. I’m wanting the same thing.’

  The long straight road stretched on ahead boundaried by Lombardy poplars. It seemed to the girl that they went on for ever, and she came to the conclusion that she detested poplars. They weren’t like real trees, they were merely dark spears thrust up into the sky, round and tight, like corpses bound in a sail before being lowered over the side of the ship. She wished that she had not thought of that simile, but once having got it, it stuck in her mind.

  The road had no deviations, no turns to right or left, it just went on and on, dead flat, dead plain. About ten miles on they came to a large farm. It was a better farm than most in that part of the world, and Richard slowed down the car.

  ‘What about this?’

  ‘It doesn’t look too bad.’

  ‘I’ll go and see if they take paying guests. I’ll ask if they will be kind to honeymooners, toujours l’amour, you know.’

  He went inside and a Frenchman spoke to him with a strong Breton accent. He had no spare rooms, but his daughter, leastway Richard surmised it was his daughter, was interested.

  ‘You come from England, Monsieur?’

  ‘On my honeymoon.’

  ‘Then indeed we must find you somewhere; there is the barn.’

  He closed with the barn, and he and Lesley followed the girl across a cobbled courtyard with a high wall red and white with splotches of roses. Lesley knew that Richard was looking at the French girl, smallish, very slender, with ridiculous hips which seemed to have no body between them yet were voluptuous with it. She had beautiful legs! She had also a lot of black hair that clung to her head, and her eyes were penetrating like sloes, but with gay lights in them.

  They went into the barn which was a long, low building at the far end of the farm. Half of it was filled with hay which smelt sweetly, and about the beams there was that essence of clover and marguerite. But the other end was cleared, and two beds had been drawn under the window which opened outwards at the top like a stable door. It was very clean.

  ‘You want food?’ asked the girl.

  ‘You bet we do,’ said Richard.

  She took them to the kitchen, which smelt like a first class restaurant, and roof hams were hung tied up in smoky muslin to the ceiling, and great bundles of herbs looking like birches. It was a strange background to a wedding night, but neither of them cared.

  They ate from the bare scrubbed table, with napkins of sharply striped cotton in
vermilion and jade, lending a defiant flash of colour. There was soup and chicken in casserole, and afterwards there was a soft cheese, of a type they had never tasted before. The girl served it with the help of a stout maid, whose rough apron girded her hips which were like some ill-made haystack. There was wine in a tall thin bottle, and the glasses from which they drank looked as if they had been stolen from a château for they were vividly blue cut glass.

  Long after the meal was done, they sat on with exquisite coffee, and the window wide open on to the road where the Lombardy poplars stretched straight ahead. Lesley knew that Richard was watching the French girl, and she knew that it was absurd to feel angry about it. Her wedding night, too! Yet, when she came to think about it, perhaps this wasn’t her wedding night, that had been in the beach hut, with the delicate rose of the new day flushing the sky at the far point of Pole Barn Lane, and warming the morning with disillusion.

  Eventually they crossed the yard together and went into the barn. She did not mean to ask Richard about the French girl, she meant to hold her peace, yet she did ask him.

  ‘You kept looking at that girl.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘You kept looking at her, and it wasn’t very nice for me.’

  ‘Oh, hell!’ He threw off his coat and went over to the window that opened like the top half of a stable door; he rumpled his hair with his hands.

  Lesley slipped off her frock, and her scanty underwear and wrapped a printed silk dressing-gown around her. She could feel her lithe body rippled under it, a straight young body like a cat’s; like a Lombardy poplar, perhaps, with never an ounce of superfluous fat to increase waist or thighs. She was proudly conscious of her beauty, and mad that Richard stood with his back to her, staring out into the night.

  ‘Richard, do be nice to me?’

  ‘Well, you were the one who started it, by being so stupidly jealous. Of course girls interest me, besides she’s got good legs.’

  ‘You shouldn’t notice such things on your wedding night.’

  ‘Damn it all, you know me. I always notice things.’ Originally that had been his charm. Once she had been immensely attracted to the fact that she had triumphed over competition and had won him for herself. She got into bed with an overdone casualness and lit a cigarette, aware that her hand shook.

  ‘You’re a married man now, Richard.’

  ‘That makes little difference to my powers of observation. The girl has good legs, and I refuse to be married and done for.’

  ‘I didn’t put it that way.’

  ‘You inferred it, my silly sweet.’

  He had turned and was looking at her with little real warmth. It couldn’t be that already they were quarrelling? Alarmed, she drew back and watched him as he got into the other bed, elaborately arranging the clothes over his body.

  ‘Damn it, who puts out the light?’

  ‘I do.’ She had spirit, and got out of bed to snuff the candle with the metal snuffers which lay in a tin plate beside it. The tallowish smell pervaded the place, almost threatening to choke her. Then she got back into bed. ‘Goodnight,’ she said tersely, so angry that her voice throbbed.

  Half an hour later the mood melted; she began to cry from sheer disappointment over life. It was then that she felt his arms around her, but it was half an hour too late, and whatever anybody said, Lesley knew it.

  They drove on through the heat next day.

  Richard behaved well about the girl that morning, pretending that she had no legs, and anyway he didn’t look at her. He fondled Lesley and became solicitous for her. When they got out into the country again side by side in the car, she had the feeling that things were not too bad.

  They skirted Paris, for they wanted to get to the sea. There was no point in delaying now, and Paris in hot weather was like a frying-pan.

  It was very hot going through the Rhone valley, which seemed unending. The little belts of trees which broke the impact of the high gales in spring and autumn, now stood completely still in smudgy groups against the sky line. The grass was burnt brown by the savagery of the summer sun. One could hardly breathe. They spent the nights at farms and hostelries that they passed, and she always felt uncontrollably tired from the air. The journey was too long, and already she was sick of it!

  At their last stop, with the Alpes Maritimes already on the horizon, Richard got a touch of the sun.

  ‘Its madness to drive without a hat,’ she said.

  It was in the bedroom of a small hotel in a provincial town, an overdressed room, with plaster cupids, with Cluny lace, and taffeta on the beds.

  ‘I don’t want any food, the pain’s awful.’

  ‘Have some of my aspirin?’

  She got it out of her bag, and brought him some water in a tooth glass from the side. As she did so, she wondered if the water was safe to drink.

  ‘Try this?’ she said.

  Richard drank it down and lay there tossing, obviously in great pain; then he was very sick.

  Lesley was most disturbed, for it would be awful if Richard was going to be ill, and she knew that she didn’t love him well enough to nurse him if he was sick. Sometimes she wondered if she really loved him at all? In a way it had been fun getting married, fun coming out here with him, but she liked passion, or didn’t she? She couldn’t even be sure of that, and she surveyed him contemptuously with her green eyes.

  She went downstairs and asked Madame if she knew of a doctor. Madame was large, with a firm high French bust, and a whale-boned waist. Madame did know of a docteur and telephoned immediately. The doctor when he arrived was small and middle-aged, Lesley would have called him old, but he handled the malady with complete placidity, being entirely used to it. It was merely the sun and a very good thing that Richard had been sick. He would not be able to continue on his journey for a couple of days and he prescribed for him, giving him a shot of something which sent him into a deep sleep.

  But Lesley couldn’t sleep at all.

  She sat up for a long time, staring out of the window across the valley with the Alpes Maritime beyond. There was an almost inconceivable sense of space, and never had she seen the sky so domed, like an enormous cup sprinkled with the pale light of stars. The fir woods rose in waves of dark shadow, climbing up to the mountains’ foot. There was the sound of a man laughing, and of a girl singing in one. For them life was at its beginning ‒ she could feel it ‒ for herself, she had the morbid feeling that it was at an end.

  She shouldn’t have married! She should have had the courage to tell her father that she couldn’t go through with it. After all, she had done no more than he had ‒ and often enough ‒ for had she not heard the maids talking, knowing how the scandal ran through Eresham. And that had hurt.

  But she loved her father all the same; she relied on him, and felt that he knew what was right (and what was wrong), and for that reason she had done what he wished, not querying his wiser judgement.

  Everything had been too confusing, for in the beginning she HAD loved Richard, then from that very moment everything had gone wrong.

  Lesley did not know why she had changed, nor how! It was one of those things that happen in life, there was no answer to it.

  Into the courtyard of the hotel with its banks of roses hanging in sweet clusters and ghostly in the starshine, she saw a cat coming. It walked daintily, its tail erect, and picking its way with care. It was one of those lean French cats, not hurrying. It moved across the shadows and the starlight, and its own shadow was grotesquely elongated so that it became out of all proportion. The cat, thought Lesley, has the morals of the courtesans at Charles’s court, yet she also has the daintiness of a ballet dancer!

  She could not see the cat any more, but she had the feeling that the little beast would go right through life that way. Picking her own path. Not swerving. There was a lesson in that! If Lesley had picked her own path … If …

  Next day Richard was considerably better, but weak from the pain that he had suffered and he lay
in a darkened room, but rose at early evening insisting on coming down.

  He looked pale, and his eyes had a far-away tensed appearance still reflecting pain. Lesley was ashamed that she could be so nauseated by him when he was ill, aware that it disclosed some quite horrid streak in herself, and yet she did not know what to do about it. She was being unnatural with him, yet couldn’t help it.

  They started early, before the heat of the third morning so that they should be up in the mountains before the midday sun as the doctor had suggested. They began to climb, with the enveloping forests on either side, and the golden eagles in the sky above. The air was wonderful, stimulating Lesley as Snowdon had done, and now she couldn’t believe that this had been a mistake for she was happy.

  They lunched at a small hotel, sitting in a shady patio eating lunch from a scrubbed table. There were yellow apricots, and warm peaches and grapes in a wooden bowl. There was chicken salad, and they drank vin rose with it. A fir tree cast a comforting shadow over them, and there was a blue medallion set into a wall, with a crude picture of a Madonna suckling a Child. A fountain cascaded beneath it. It was all pretty, of the Italian school, and quite enchanting, so different from Eresham that it appealed to her.

  They felt that they were lovers again.

  Emotions came and went. There ought to have been no episode at Frinton, she told herself, it was that which had spoilt everything. Once she had thought of chastity as being an old-fashioned relic, but it was no old-fashioned relic, it was the amulet hung about the throat of the beloved to protect their love. It was pleasant sitting here with all their lives sprawling before them, and scarcely this was the real beginning.

  ‘I hope it isn’t going to be hot as hell on the Riviera,’ Richard said, ‘because after this, we start dropping down to it.’

  ‘You’ll have to be careful. Never go out at midday. The doctor was most insistent about that.’

  ‘He was a nice old fool, if you like it. What did he think I came out here for? To stop in bed?’

  ‘Anyway he got you better.’

  ‘Only because I’d brought it all up by the time he got round to me. The root of the trouble had gone. I’d have been right as rain without him, anyway.’