Friendly Young Ladies (8 page)

“Well, yes, I am in a way. As a matter of fact, I’m going to stay with my sister.” This verbal statement seemed to give the thing a new solidity. To prolong its comforting effect she added, “She lives at Mawley—on the river. Do you know it? I haven’t been there before.”

“Really, now? Why, yes, I know Mawley, in a manner of speaking. Not to get down there, but I’ve passed it in the steamer many a time, taking our Doris for a trip. Very nice and enjoyable at this time of the year, I should reckon, for those that like a quiet spot. The steamer doesn’t pull up thereabouts. A place always appears more interesting, I’ve noticed, when one’s carried past it.”

“I wonder if you could tell me. … You see, my sister isn’t expecting me by this particular train. She lives in a houseboat, on the river. Would there be a rowing-boat, or something, I could get to take me out to it?”

Something in her face made the man look paternal again. “Ah, you’ve no call to worry, miss; you won’t experience any difficulty like that. These so-called houseboats, they’re not what you might call afloat. More house than boat really, see what I mean. You pass them quite close on the steamer, and you can see they hitch right on to the bank, and there’s a little bridge runs up to them as easy as a garden path. Would your sister’s be on the south bank or the north, if I might ask?”

“I’m afraid I don’t know.” Feeling that this sounded very queer, she added, blushing, “I think my sister did tell me, but I’ve forgotten.”

“Why I was asking, the station will be on the north side, if I remember. But these places where both banks are lived on, they all have a ferry. Let me see, the post office will be shut, but it’s a small place, anyone will be bound to tell you which side to go.” He gathered his case and mackintosh together; with regret and the sense of impending loneliness, she noticed that the beat of the train was slowing. “Well, miss, this is where I get down, and Mawley’s the next stop. Pleased to have made your acquaintance. Our little talk’s passed the time very enjoyably, if I may take the liberty to say so. I trust you’ll have seasonable weather for your holiday.”

He jumped out, scanning the platform right and left till he was lost in the crowd. Doris, she supposed, would be at the station to meet him. His better half would be laying the supper by now. Liver and bacon, or a nice chop; with the other end of the table cleared for Doris’s books. She looked out of the window. The evening light was growing grey and mournful; sliding past into shadow, and broken now by hoardings and bunches of new villas, was the alien corn. The kind and fruitful landscape, in which she had no place, filled her with solitude more desolate than the solitude of the barren cliffs at home. The ruses of escape which had seemed so adventurous in the morning, exhilarated no longer; they were so many boats burned fatally behind her. Why had she not left herself a line of retreat? She might have invented a visit to a school friend, from which, at need, she could have returned in a few days and no one the wiser. She need not have posted the letter yet.

Misgivings which had never occurred to her before began to rise like the evening mists, as the train, and the hands of her watch, converged on the significant hour. Suppose Leo’s artist were a struggling genius, as yet unrecognized, and they had no spare room? What was the inside of a houseboat like? Did everyone sleep in bunks, one over the other? Intruding on an unmarried couple would be so much worse than on a married one. If she had only brought a hammock with her!

She perceived that the train was slowing down.

Yellow lights flared; a voice, thin and hoarse in the dusk, called “Maw-ley! Maw-ley!” Her heart seemed to be sliding down into a dark corner inside her.

It was quite a small station. The handful of people who alighted with her, hurried off with the speed of familiarity, leaving her, hampered by her baggage, aimless and forlorn. It came to her for the first time that she could have written to Leo, or even wired, to say that she was coming.

A porter came at last, to take her ticket and put her heavier bag in the cloakroom. “I’ll keep the small one.” Her voice sounded thin and apologetic in her own ears. “Could you tell me, please”—perhaps it would not do to ask for Miss Lane, perhaps she was calling herself something else, why did one only think of these things at the last moment?—“I’m going to one of the houseboats here.
The Lily Belle.
Could you tell, me, please, which side of the river it is?”

“Ah, the
Lily Belle
.” A smile became visible under the porter’s ragged moustache. She felt the trembling incredulity of the desert wanderer who sees at last, on the skyline, a fringe of palms. “You’ll need to take the ferry over to that. Straight down to the water, and then it’s twenty yards or so to your left. If you see the boat and no one there, you try the Green Lion, a little way along, and ask for Mr. Hicks.”

“Thank you,” said Elsie, in a tone which she hoped would not reveal too obviously that she had never entered a public-house in her life. Gripping her little night-case and her handbag, she went out into the street, shivering a little in the cool air, and tasting its unfamiliar tang; smells of weed, water, live mud and rotting wood, with a whiff now and again of fresh paint, shavings, and varnish, for a little boat-building yard ended the street at the water’s edge.

The evening sky was luminous and unclouded, and the ruffled Thames reflected it; broad shivering gleams came and went over the water, as if a huge invisible wing had swooped and passed. A straight row of poplars grew on the further shore. Before she had noticed the houseboats below them, her eye was caught by the reflected lights lying along the water, and wriggling like little snakes as the gusts went by.

There were several of them strung out at irregular intervals, but it was growing too dark to see detail so far away. Some of them had no lights at all. Her heart sank as a conviction grew in her that it was to one of these that she would be ferried in vain. What would the boatman think? There was his boat, deserted too. A family of swans glided past it, father and mother with all sail set magnificently to the breeze, their grey woolly cygnets like bumboats round a couple of crack clippers.

Elsie looked unhappily to right and left. Her eye was caught almost at once by the frosted windows, lavishly lit, of the Green Lion. She approached them with dragging steps. Pubs are few in North Cornwall, and local residents of any social standing, if they drink at all, do so in hotels. Drawing upon literature, Elsie envisaged beer-soaked sawdust, on which she would stand, the butt of tipsy revellers, like the Quaker lady in
The Everlasting Mercy.
She stood still for a moment, thought about Peter, and pushed open the swing door.

Thick waves of tobacco-smoke met her, and a loud, deep burr of conversation. The place, as she had feared, was full of men: middle-aged men leaning against the bar, in earnest confabulation; old men sitting in a row against the wall, looking solemnly at the mugs in front of them; younger men round a dart-board, encouraging one another in mysterious terms. The noise continued, indifferently, around her. She had half-expected it to break off, while everyone turned to stare at her in insolent curiosity; but this was nearly as bad. She would have to go up to the bar, and the barman would think she had come to ask for beer. Practically anyone in the room might, as far as appearances went, have been Mr. Hicks.

The group round the dart-board was re-shaping. She noticed with surprise, but little reassurance, a pretty fair-haired girl in the middle of it. She was trimly dressed and looked respectable; but in a place like this, with five men, Elsie knew better than that.

Gripping her case like a defensive weapon, she went up to the bar. The barman, listening sympathetically to a little man who was saying, “You wouldn’t never know you was a ’uman being, according to them,” took no notice of her at all.

The fair girl took a dart, poised it easily, and threw. There were noises of approbation; exaggerated, Elsie thought, seeing she had only hit the very outside ring of the target; but she was popular, no doubt. A slim, dark-haired youth in a fisherman’s jersey came up and thumped her on the back, before going over to the bar to order drinks. The barman attended to him at once. Elsie waited, resentfully, while six half-pints were drawn, and the players, whose game was apparently over, went into a huddle around them. Now someone else was coming up with a mug. Nerved by desperation, she leaned over the bar and said, tremulously, “Please, is Mr. Hicks here?”

The barman gave her a half-glance over his shoulder, remarked into the thick of the dart-players, “Eh, Foxy, lady for you,” and turned to the next customer. Elsie watched, crimson with shame, a rufous little man detach himself from the group and approach her. To her relief, he ignored the barman’s equivocal introduction and said immediately,” Wanting the ferry, miss?”

“Oh, yes, please. I hope—I mean, I’m sorry to disturb you.”

Mr. Hicks made a deprecatory noise and, reaching for his glass, emptied it down without taking breath. She added, to cover the interval, “I want to go to one of the houseboats on the other side.
The Lily Belle
, it’s called.”

Mr. Hicks scratched his head. As the glass came down, she saw the dreaded answer shaping itself on his lips. When he had wiped them and his moustache, it came.

“I can take you, miss. But you won’t find no one on board of her, not now.”

The accumulated weight of the day’s alarms and excursion seemed to descend on Elsie in one sickening heap. She was at the end of her journey, desolate and benighted, surrounded by drunkards in a public bar.

Hopelessly, she forced out the words, “Are they away?”

With an air of solid patience, Mr. Hicks replaced on the mahogany his prematurely vacant glass.

“They’re ’ere,” he said.

Elsie’s mind seemed to stop. It had come to the end of what it could deal with. Nerveless and blank, she watched Mr. Hicks edge his way along the bar and tap the fair girl on the shoulder.

“Young lady along ’ere, Miss Vaughan. Asking for
Lily Belle.”

The fair girl turned round. She had a clear, pale skin, dark-grey eyes, and the air of one permanently interested but rarely surprised. She was not, Elsie noticed, made up as crudely as her milieu had led one to expect. Following the line of Mr. Hicks’s thumb, she looked at Elsie with kindly vagueness, looked again, and touched the arm of the dark-haired boy in the fisherman’s jersey; whose back view, the only one Elsie had so far seen, revealed little but a pleasant carriage and the fact that he wore his hair rather effeminately long.

“Look a minute. I think this must be someone for you.”

The boy turned round: and in one moment there fell from Elsie not only the events of the day, but those of the last eight years also. For a glance was enough to show her that Leo had hardly changed at all.

S
HE STOOD WITH AN
elbow propped on the bar, drawing her brows together in the way Elsie remembered she had always had when puzzled or in doubt. Nothing was strange about her except to discover that she was not, as Elsie had always pictured her from the remembered angle of childhood, very tall; not even as tall as Elsie herself. All that had happened was that she had got, now, the trousers she had wanted at home and never been allowed to wear (it had been almost the only thing on which her parents had invariably agreed). Her skin was the same clear brown; the upward slant of brows and cheekbones was, perhaps, a little more noticeable than before; her eyes looked, as always, more ready to discover than to reveal, only one felt that now they had discovered rather more, and revealed rather less. A quiet-toned lipstick defined, but did not alter, the long curve of her mouth; her hair was tidier, it looked cared for, competently if intermittently; but, as always, a loose strand was finding its way down across her left temple. As Elsie looked, she pushed it back again with exactly the old flick of the hand.

She had not seen Elsie yet, for her eyes, though once they had seemed to pass over her, were still searching the room, in every direction, now, except the right one. After a moment or two she said, over her shoulder, “Keep an eye on my beer for me, Joe,” and strolled forward; the conversation continuing behind her, without the change of key which is usually observable when the last of the female element leaves.

“Where are they?” she asked the fair girl. “Waiting outside?”

“No. There. Over by Foxy.” The fair girl’s voice was gentle, with the discretion that suggests kindness rather than the conventions; Elsie only heard it because the surrounding noises happened to sink.

Leo looked again. Surely, Elsie thought, she must see her now. She felt the remembered, faint uneasiness at the leisured approach of the light-brown eyes; eyes just the colour of Italian vermouth, though this was not a comparison which Elsie was qualified to make. They met Elsie’s squarely; but still nothing happened. She only looked back again, enquiringly, at the fair girl, who shook her head. Leo paused for a moment, then walked up, one hand in her trouser pocket, a cigarette in the other.

“Hullo,” she said, and smiled.

Elsie remembered only her laugh. The smile seemed to shut her off, like a wall of glass. It reminded one, at last, that she was a grown-up person. There seemed nothing at all to say.

Presently she added, in the same pleasant boyish voice, “Helen said you were looking for me.”

It was like being a ghost, tapping with insubstantial fingers at a window-pane; like a ghost, one wanted to speak and nothing came. At last she said, as if she too had been talking to a stranger:

“Don’t you know who I am?”

“Why, yes.” She was still smiling, friendly, indifferent, at ease. Elsie felt, rather than saw, her attention stray for a moment to the talk in the group behind her. “I mean, of course, I remember meeting you quite well. In London, wasn’t it? I’m terribly sorry to be so dim, but just for the moment I can’t lay hold of your name.”

Like a ghost who, achieving speech, finds words strange and rusty on the tongue, Elsie listened to her own thin voice saying, “I’m Elsie. Elsie Lane. Your sister. Don’t you remember me?”