A Winter's Child (45 page)

‘Good evening, Benedict. Very well, thank you.'

‘Splendid.'

And if it was not quite splendid it was simple enough since she had always found it far too easy to separate the stern and critical master of High Meadows from the man who had made love to her at Thornwick. What she no longer wished to do was to separate that mysterious and challenging lover from the straightforward sensualist who had talked bridge and seduction across the luncheon table to those beautiful bovine women.

She wished them well of one another, or at least as well as they deserved, which could not be much. Lois, and Edwina, and Elvira, the handsome, officious daughter of Councillor Red-fearn, who never failed to mention Benedict in a manner Claire recognized whenever she came to the Crown. And if Benedict was wasting himself, as she still sometimes believed, then it was not her concern. She had her own life to lead. And in the damp, unkempt wasteland of January and February when the hotel was quiet she had ample time, as she took stock of linen and silver and glassware, to turn the same scrutiny upon herself.

Euan and Benedict – and Paul – were gone. Kit remained. On New Year's Eve, dispirited, sick of her own indecision and the gross error she had just committed, feeling the need of a strong shoulder, a steady hand, she had welcomed Kit's arms around her, albeit in a public crowded place and would – or so it seemed to her now – have gone willingly upstairs with him to his wide, comfortable bed with its bolsters and double mattress and feather-filled quilts, to consummate what had been hovering between them for so long. But Arnold Crozier had required Kit's presence in the Tangerine Suite at a private New Year's Eve party, a rowdy affair of chorus girls, still in their pantomime costumes from the Princes Theatre, ‘flappers'wearing very little at all, a few mature ladies of local reputation, which Claire would not have attended even if she had been invited and to which Kit would have forbidden her to go.

‘I'll come round in the morning – if I may,' he'd said. ‘We could go out somewhere.'

But the next morning had brought Nola. Euan had gone off to Edinburgh, or at least had taken a northbound train, in the afternoon. Kit's own physique, after a night of keeping pace with spidery little Arnold Crozier, was by no means in the peak condition required for any significant act of consummation. The moment had not yet come.

Yet what, if anything, was he waiting for? One evening, not long afterwards, he told her. The Mayor of Faxby and his large, self-important little wife had dined at the Crown that February night, with a party of civic dignitaries, vying in size and self-esteem with one another, including the Mayor Elect, Councillor Redfearn, his new young wife and his handsome daughter, Elvira who, in view of her stepmother's youth and the advanced state of her pregnancy, had consented to be her father's mayoress. A great many compliments had been paid. The food. The wine. The service. The decor. All had found civic favour.

‘You've done us proud, Hardie,' the Mayor had grunted, choosing to forget his former and loudly-voiced opinion that in the ‘good old days'when a man could protect his standards in any way he chose, ‘sharp customers' like the Croziers and their dubious, jumped-up hirelings would have been ordered, none too politely, out of town.

‘You have made this place a credit to Faxby, Major,' murmured Elvira Redfearn, choosing also to forget
her
former view that the sordid little hotel be levelled to the ground to make way for a much-needed secondary school.

‘It must be great fun,' breathed her pretty little stepmother wistfully, having heard the strains of jazz music from the downstairs bar. Looking at her warmly, understanding exactly why girls like this with not much education and little else to rely on but big blue eyes and lemon yellow curls, chose to put up with these pompous, elderly husbands, Kit smiled his sympathy.

‘You have exquisite taste, Major.' Elvira – as Mayoress Elect – did not intend to be outdone, not by her father's fluffy, anxious, twenty-year old wife at any rate. And Kit, understanding this too, smiled at
her
– at once – in a fashion which adequately conveyed his appreciation of her well-groomed maturity.

The mayoral party would come again. There was a satisfying amount of hand-shaking and cigar offering in the lobby, the Mayoress and the Mayoress Elect both realizing simultaneously what an excellent idea it would be to meet one's friends – quite regularly in fact – in the rose pink lounge for tea: the wife of the Mayor Elect still glancing sadly in the direction of all that smoky, tantalizing,
youthful
jazz.

‘Major – it has been a pleasure.'

No reference was made to his service at High Meadows, although he had held hats and gloves and evening cloaks, opened doors, drawn out chairs in the past for all of them and-by each and every one – had been ceremoniously ignored.

Who remembers the face of a butler? He had been Christopher Hardie then, of course, having acquired the name ‘Kit'only later, in the officers' mess. Was Christopher Hardie forgotten? Kit remembered him.

Claire came to join him on the front steps as the Redfearns and the Greenwoods were driven away.

‘One of these days,' he said to her, ruefully smiling, ‘I'll stop feeling like the son of a daily cook.'

‘And what does
he
feel like?'

‘Ridiculously pleased with himself when an old goat like Arthur Redfearn pats him on the head.'

‘Arthur Redfearn can't hold a candle to you, Kit,' said Claire, meaning it.

‘I know.'

‘Well then?'

He laughed. ‘Knowing is one thing. As I said – one of these days I'll start to feel it.'

She received a postcard from Whitby towards the end of February with no message, just Euan's name scrawled across the back. Seven weeks and he had got no further than that; a lovely old fishing port, as she well remembered, but bitterly cold, surely, at this season, and shrouded so often in a fine, damp mist from the sea.

‘Why worry about him?' said Nola. ‘Why worry about anything?'

Nola had made up her mind, this year, not to take life too seriously. What could one really say about life, after all, except that it was short and uncertain? So it may just as well be merry. Yet her decision to be carefree and obsessively light-hearted had to be postponed after a day or so, due to what she chose to announce as the breakdown of her health. She had caught a severe chill over the New Year – the lousy weather in Manchester, and Nanette Crozier's meanness about her fuel bills – from which she had been slow to recover. She had stayed in bed for the first two weeks of January, her bedroom like an oven, shivering and burning, drinking whisky for her throat, brandy for her chest, gin to make a change and scandalize Miriam. And she had not really felt well since. She could not get herself going somehow these winter mornings. More and more she felt herself succumbing to a dangerous attitude – oh yes, she knew the danger – that since she had no specific reason to get out of bed, why bother at all? And when she did, she was lethargic, uneasy, had lost her appetite, could not make up her mind whether to sit down or go out and stand in the rain.

‘I am having a mental collapse,' she told Claire. ‘You will oblige me by making a list of all the most expensive asylums in the district. When the time comes I would like to be in a position to select the one which will cost my husband the most money. I am also suffering from chronic indigestion. Could Miriam be trying to poison me, I wonder?'

‘Either that,' agreed Claire obligingly, ‘or alcohol.'

‘My dear – I am just a poor invalid drowning my sorrows.'

Early in February a slight improvement occurred, Nola looking almost as usual, swinging her red fox furs, her Egyptian head swathed once again in layers of striped chiffon, gold chains and chains of amber beads around her long neck, long legs in green silk stockings casually suspended from a bar stool, entertained Claire and Kit, her cousin Arnold Crozier, Mac-Allister the barman who heard and often repeated everything with the details of her latest find, a schoolmaster no less, not from those unfrocked monasteries where they taught Greek and Latin and arrogance to the sons of gentlemen but a real teacher, a man who, having fought for his own education, was fighting now to extend the privilege to everybody.

‘A man of the people,' said Kit, the familiar blue twinkle in his eye. ‘You've had one of those before, Nola.'

‘No, darling,' she told him earnestly, ‘he is nothing like you. He is not like anybody else at all.'

Sculpture was over. Education had begun. And then, swiftly and suddenly, it too had ended.

‘What happened to the schoolmaster?' asked Claire.

‘What schoolmaster?' Nola, who had just walked into the flat, looked around as if she had, in fact, mislaid something and then walked out again.

‘What's the matter with Nola?' asked Kit. ‘She was in and out of here three or four times yesterday looking – well, looking like a lost soul if you could apply that to Nola – beneath the paint and the furs and the clever remarks, I mean.'

Yes, increasingly Claire could apply that description to Nola.

‘I suppose she's drinking too much.'

She was.

That same night, in the downstairs bar, she became so drunk that Polly, who never liked Nola to trespass on what she considered her territory, went off in a huff, taking a half dozen young men with her, while Claire commandeered Nola's car keys and drove her home.

She came back to the hotel the next afternoon at teatime, looking sallow, brittle, utterly worn out, refusing offers of cakes and sandwiches with a disgusted shake of the head.

‘I'd just throw it up, darling. And Kit wouldn't like that. One must have regard for his powder-room carpet.'

‘I don't suppose you've seen a doctor?'

‘No I haven't.'

‘I'll come with you if you like.'

She shrugged, looking, Claire suddenly felt, like a sketch, a caricature of her nonchalant, free and easy self.

‘That's very decent of you, Claire.'

‘All right. Any time. Today?'

‘No.' It was a sharply ejaculated command. And looking at her keenly, Claire saw a fear she recognized, just a glimmer but enough to tell her where and how often she had seen it before.

‘Nola? You know what's wrong with you, don't you?'

There was an instant burst of laughter, one long, green silk leg thrown rakishly over the other.

‘Of course I do. It's Miriam, my love, and her slow poison. She wants rid of me so Benedict can marry Elvira Redfearn. She wants to be mother-in-law to the Mayoress. I shall give you a letter, to be opened after my death, incriminating them both. Anyway – I've got to be off now – I'm meeting someone.'

‘Look – just chuck him whoever he happens to be. He can wait can't he?' Perhaps a doctor could not.

Nola, with a bold swirling of red fur, got to her feet. ‘My word – what an impetuous creature you are. Thanks, Claire – but no. Not today. There's this man, you see … Somebody
rather
special.'

‘Oh-Nola. Not again.'

And looking down at her Nola chuckled and gave a racy, impudent, reassuringly familiar wink.

‘Again. The love of my life, darling – again. So I have to hurry. Don't worry about me, Claire. You know what they say about the bad penny. And I'm such a nuisance, aren't I, to certain of my kith and kin that it stands to reason that nothing could happen to me. I'll let you have that letter, by the way.'

What letter? Claire remembered only how ill Nola looked, beneath the paint and the furs and the clever remarks. Ill and scared.

‘Kit, did you see Nola just now?'

‘Yes,' he said, looking puzzled. ‘She kissed me – I mean really kissed me. Came stalking into the office and just –. She hasn't done that – well, you remember when. Then she took off at speed. Do you know where?'

‘She said to meet a man.'

He shrugged, shook his head. ‘I don't know. She couldn't be eloping could she? Or going off to drown herself?'

‘Kit!'

‘Look – I'm just going round the back. She parks her car in the alley and the chances are she hasn't got the damned thing started yet.'

But there was no sign of her in the street.

Claire left the hotel towards the end of the afternoon, taking her dinner home with her in a covered basket, having reserved the evening for washing her hair, writing to Euan who had finally sent her an address, plucking her eyebrows, giving herself a manicure and then going to bed early with a glass of brandy – to keep out the cold – and a book.

Such evenings of comfortable solitude were, from time to time, most welcome but if she felt a twinge of displeasure at the sound of her doorbell such a tame emotion was instantly obliterated by the first shock of seeing Nola. For if she had looked ill and scared before, she was plainly terrified now.

But not broken, of course, still ready to make fun of herself – and
it
– if she could, in the hope that a surfeit of clever remarks might cover it up, or even – did she still have any hope? – send it away. Whatever it might be.

‘Sit down,' said Claire.

‘I think I will.'

‘You look terrible, Nola.'

‘Yes. It's a guilty conscience, my dear – nothing worse than that. But one doesn't die of guilt. Does one?'

Claire had never been too sure of that.

‘Are you going to tell me?'

A nervous smile flickered on and off Nola's face and then back again like the smile of a mechanical doll, her lips dry and swollen as if she had bitten them, her face quite grey. Her eyes, her whole expression, her whole mind – Claire knew it – saturated with fear, her precious nonchalance just a few rags and tatters to clutch around her.

‘Oh yes – I've come to confess, since confession eases the soul. Isn't that what they say? I'm pregnant, Claire. Isn't that rich? Isn't that a lark?'