Here Be Dragons Page 5

  “It looks just the same. The bloody P.G.s haven’t sloshed their paint all over our front-door. I’ve had a lovely time. I’ll take you out to meet some of my friends soon but first, I suppose, I must earn some money.” He paused.

  Nell’s cold hand was hanging at her side. Now she felt it gently lifted, John’s head came down to meet it, and it was softly kissed. She said not a word. Surprise drove out all other feelings.

  “Don’t do anything to yourself, will you? I like you as you are, except for your clothes, which are horrible. But I’ll tell you what to wear later. I’ll ring you up soon. Good-bye, Nello darling.”

  The front door opened and closed. She heard his footsteps, those unmistakable footsteps, going slowly, now—down into the street, and saw through the glass panels in the door his tall, dark shape receding. The footsteps died away.

  Nell went up to her room to put away her own outdoor clothes. She was still so surprised that it was an effort to remember what she had to do next, and she was conscious of nothing; not the chill of the neat shabby room, not the muffled roar of distant traffic going past in the High Street, not the glare of the unshaded light; she could feel nothing but this surprise, and the pressure of his lips on the back of her hand.

  “Nell? Don’t tell me that you are going to start mooning about, now. Do you want any supper? Surely not, after all that tea.” Her mother, who had come upstairs to find out if Martin Sely wanted a hot drink before going to sleep, looked in at the door.

  “No; I had a cake with John. Mother, what do you think? Aunt Peggy has found me a job.”

  “Oh?” Anna did not sound pleased. She came into the room and sat down on the bed. “What sort of a job?”

  “I don’t know. With a—some people called Akkro Products, Limited. The manager is a friend of hers. I start on Monday.”

  “On Monday! But I shall want you to help me here. I can’t get this place straight by myself—though it is so much smaller than Morley. I call it rather high-handed of your Aunt Peggy.”

  “Her secretary gave me this.” Nell handed her Gardis’s crumpled paper, and Anna studied it with an expression which, in one who did not come of an old Hampstead family, would have been accompanied by a sniff.

  “Tottenham Court Road. H’m. When I was a girl that wasn’t too bad; there were big furniture shops, and interesting people living in Fitzroy Street; but from what I saw from the taxi on Wednesday it seems to have gone right down. I think I must ring Peggy up.” But Nell interrupted her purposeful rising from the bed with—

  “Mother, it is five pounds a week and we … do need it.”

  “That’s Daddy’s business and mine, dear. I don’t think he would want you to take this job. You know he has never liked the idea of your working at all. In some ways, bless him, he’s very old-fashioned, and just now you know he mustn’t be upset or worried.”

  “But you wouldn’t mind my doing it, would you?”

  Anna stood at the door looking at the daughter for whom she had felt a slight, impatient contempt since Nell failed to distinguish herself academically at Claregates. A scholarship to one of the Universities, even to London, would have been so useful, and Anna, a constitutional storer-away of facts, failed to understand that other people might not find their acquisition so easy. What difficulty was there in memorizing figures or working out a theorem or writing a paper? Nell, poor child, was rather a disappointment.

  However, this evening she only looked rather forlorn, standing there in her old grey costume and her grey socks. She certainly was smaller and thinner than most girls of her age; she had not inherited the rosy colouring and curly hair of both her parents, and she was no beauty, although Anna had always admired the clear pale complexion that set off the light blue of her eyes; the blue of the ribbon called in Anna’s girlhood bébé. (Anna’s own complexion had been admired, before the garden and the chickens and the weather took their toll of it.) Perhaps it was the straight hair that made Nell look forlorn.

  “No, I shouldn’t mind,” she said, more gently than usual. “And we do need the money. (I can say these things to you, now that you’re nearly grown-up.) I’ve been really worried about money. Five pounds a week won’t go far in Hampstead; I’m appalled by the prices here; but it would be very useful—in fact, Nell, I think we shall have to let you do it. But I’m not sure about your qualifications. I expect you’ve forgotten most of your shorthand, haven’t you? (Don’t look so dismal, child.) I suppose that’s what they’ll want you to do?”

  “I’m not looking dismal, Mother.” Nell’s tone stopped just short of irritability. “I was thinking that I haven’t any clothes. And I’m sure these socks are wrong. I’ve been looking at people this evening, and no-one wears them except foreign-looking girls.”

  “Well, we certainly can’t afford to buy you any new clothes. And what’s the matter with the socks? They’ll wear for ever. I haven’t decided to let you do the job at all, yet, I must consult Daddy, of course, but if you do—surely no-one wears elaborate clothes in an office?”

  “No …” Nell’s tone expressed doubt; she was prepared to bet on no-one’s wearing hand-knitted grey socks either. The youthful secretaries and receptionists pictured in Vogue, smuggled into Claregates by Elizabeth Prideaux, were not elaborately dressed, yet Nell possessed not a single garment remotely in the same style.

  “I wish you would consult Daddy tonight, Mother. I want to telephone Akkro Products early tomorrow morning and tell them I’ll be there at nine on Monday.”

  “You’re going too fast, Nell. I can’t disturb him tonight; he’s just settling down. Besides—”

  “Oh—!”

  The exclamation was not despairing or passionate. It was merely impatient, and before Anna could protest, Nell had darted out of the room and across the landing. Anna heard her tap on her father’s door; it opened, and she went in and shut it behind her.

  “Really!” said Anna, aloud. She was considerably taken aback. She stood there, looking round the bedroom whose tidiness was in such contrast to the rest of the house, feeling annoyed and very surprised, but not so angry as she felt that she should be. She had always known that Nell possessed a quick temper and a strong will, and she had always insisted on Nell’s controlling the one while she herself mastered the other. Any rudeness, any defiance or disobedience, had been curbed, during Nell’s childhood, by her brusque heavy hand, and Claregates (Anna had always presumed) had finished the training that home-life had begun. One of the results of this method was that Anna had also begun to despise Nell, aged nearly twenty, for not asserting herself. She did not know this, but it was so, and now there mingled with her annoyance a reluctant—satisfaction.

  She had a dim sensation as if one of the responsibilities, those many responsibilities of her married life which had begun by fascinating her by their novelty, and the ease with which she had accepted and dealt with them, and ended by overwhelming her selfhood, had begun to remove itself. A burden had lifted; only slightly, but it had. Yet the novelty of Nell’s defying her for the first time in nearly twenty years added another note of strangeness to her disturbed, idle, upset mood. Had she not felt herself surrounded by the familiar roads and trees and houses of Hampstead, spread all around her outside in the foggy night, she would have been—unhappy?

  She suddenly shrugged, switched off Nell’s light, and went downstairs.

  “Daddy? I’m sorry to disturb you but it’s important. Aunt Peggy has got me a job, doing typing and shorthand with a firm in Tottenham Court Road. It’s five pounds a week and I start on Monday. You don’t mind, do you?”

  The shabby room was illuminated only by a dim bedside lamp. The carpet had not yet been laid and was rolled up near the window, and pictures were stacked against the walls, while the rest of the furniture stood about unarranged. In the midst of it, Martin Sely’s red face under his grey, almost white, hair looked out from an untidy bed covered with shabby bedclothes. A book lay face downwards on the counterpane.

  Nel
l stood looking at him, standing slightly beyond the ring of light.

  “I see. And now will you repeat that all over again, please? Slowly.”

  While she was doing so, with a touch of red in her cheeks, he lay with his head turned sideways and his eyelids lowered, apparently listening. But he was not really listening; he had heard the first time; he was experiencing that shame which, now his constant companion, sometimes seemed to him like an actual malevolent spirit; one of those about whom he used to read in the Bible, without a second thought as to its nature and powers.

  “Nevermore!” When he and Peggy were young, they used to laugh at that stagey old poem of Poe’s, but now the reiteration, because he knew what it meant, seemed to him not funny but terrible. The sober joy of duty done, the cheerful acceptance of God’s good, if mysterious, world … Nevermore. Easy sleep—Nevermore. Calm waking—Nevermore. The comfortable words and the good cheer and the peace that passeth understanding—Nevermore, Nevermore. And he was ashamed, too, of having spoken like that to his Nell, who would never set the Thames on fire but who was a good child. (The innocent small joys of family life—Nevermore.) And now, thanks to him, she had to go out as a typist.

  He slowly lifted his eyelids and looked at her. The thought of having to make a decision confronted him awfully. He could feel his will becoming lax, and melting as he lay. He controlled an impulse to let his lips part in a silly, trembling smile.

  “Yes … well … I suppose it’s very kind of your aunt … but I’ve never wanted you to take a ‘job’, you know. There’s always been plenty to do at home, hasn’t there … but of course … this house is so much smaller than the—the vicarage at Morley, isn’t it … what does Mother say about it … you’ve told her, of course … does she think it would be a good idea?”

  His deep voice had once given fitting expression to an unusually robust constitution, but now it was so quiet that it seemed to rumble in his chest, suggesting the image of a sea exhausted on the morrow of some titanic storm, while the notes of emphasis, interrogation, approval or warning were almost lacking. It seemed to be an effort to him to speak at all.

  “Yes, I know, Daddy.” Nell made no attempt to deal separately with his comments, “but you see it’s the money. It is five pounds … and I have told Mother, and she says it would be useful.” She was feeling slightly impatient. First Mother, and now Daddy. Caution and secrecy and fuss. They had hardly any money; very well; why not admit it? and be thankful that she had the chance of earning some.

  “It isn’t only a question of £. s. d., Nell; these things have to be considered from other angles, you know—from every angle, in fact. What kind of people will you meet in this work? Will they be …”

  The word Christians died upon his tongue. What was he?

  He knew that he was only prolonging the discussion because he did not want to give way; to appear weak; to let his daughter see how much he wanted that five pounds a week. To be sure of two hundred and sixty a year! (less tax, of course, less tax. Say two hundred a year). What a relief to know that there was something coming regularly into the house besides Anna’s fluctuating hundred and twenty! He would have to swallow his pride and let the child do it, and later on, when he was better, he would get a job himself—address envelopes, become a crossing-sweeper (poor Martin’s idea of Honest Work, like his ideas about everything else, was out-of-date).

  “Ordinary people, I suppose,” Nell said a little loudly and for the second time. She wished that he would give her a kiss and say that the money would be very useful and wish her luck. She was not looking forward to Monday. An office had always sounded, to her, the dullest place on earth.

  “Well, dear, you will have to be careful, you know. There are some strange kinds of people in London nowadays … does your aunt know this man, the manager, really well? … I wish she had consulted us first …”

  “She’s so busy, Daddy.” A composite picture of Gardis; her aunt’s painted fingernails, the pink typewriter and the mirror-glass ceiling appeared in Nell’s fancy, displacing for a moment the face which had lingered there since the shutting of the front door. “She really hardly has time for anything … ordinary.”

  “No … I suppose not.” (Two husbands. And he had gathered from his sister that she still kept in touch with the first one. Peggy. Lady Fairfax the Television Star. Queer girl, queer people.) “It was kind of her … I hope you thanked her.” The colourless mumbling voice sounded tired and his fingers moved towards his book … “Yes, well, I suppose you may do it … try it for a week, anyway, and we’ll see how you get on.” He did not look at her as he spoke, but took up his detective story.

  Nell made herself say, “Thank you, Daddy.” Then she kissed him and darted out of the room. She liked darting: it had been an effort to her to loiter along in step with John that evening. John! As she skimmed downstairs she glanced at the white telephone in the hall, which was to her now the most interesting object in the house.

  “He says I may, Mother,” she announced to Anna, standing surrounded by crates and straw and boxes with a book held up very close to her face under the shadeless glare of the drawing-room light. “I say, hadn’t we better get this a bit straight? Supposing someone came?”

  “No-one will.” Anna came reluctantly out of Chateaubriand, “but I suppose we may as well. Aren’t you tired, dear? It’s been such a long day.”

  Nell, glancing at her in surprise, said truthfully that she was not, and for an hour they worked on the room, Nell taking the chance, while she darted round, of telling her mother about old Miss Lister, and Charles Gaunt’s possible designs on the top-floor flat.

  About eleven o’clock they decided that the room now looked what they called presentable, although Anna shook her head over their mild late-Edwardian possessions displayed against peacock-green walls. Then she went up to bed. But long after twelve, Nell was sitting in her room, copying n hooks and shun hooks and revising dots and vowels and abbreviations, with an expression on her face as cross as it was dogged.

  CHAPTER THREE

  THEY WERE BOTH BREATHING FLAME

  ABOUT A QUARTER to nine the next morning, having bolted her breakfast and made her bed and taken up her father his tray, she was banging away on the ancient Remington while her mother took a prolonged preliminary survey of the garden, when the front-door bell rang.

  Nell said damn, shook back her hair, and flew out into the hall. The pale face floated more clearly before her mind’s eye. Supposing—? But no; he would have attracted her attention in some way through the open window. Front-door approaches were not his line at all.

  “Oh—good-morning,” said the handsome, grey-faced, elegantly-dressed man who stood on the doorstep, “I expect you’re Nell, aren’t you? We’ve never met but I recognized you from … Peggy’s description … I’m terribly sorry to disturb you at this ungodly hour but the fact is we’re going to be fellow-tenants. I’ve got the flat at the very top of the house,” and as he said it he began, so unobtrusively that only someone on the alert would have noticed, to incline himself over the threshhold.

  So here he was. Aunt Peggy had been alarmingly right. This was the face last seen by Nell under a coating of fish-scales, and what on earth was she going to do about it?

  “Oh … how stupid of me. My name is Gaunt, Charles Gaunt,” he added. This time as he said it he looked round—for now, Nell could not imagine how, he was standing in the hall—for somewhere to put his dark hat and dark walking-stick and pale gloves, but there was nowhere, unless he cared to hang the one and rest the other upon the enormous reproduction of Rosa Bonheur’s The Horse Fair leaning against the terracotta wall.

  “Rather chi-chi taste the Palmer-Groves had, don’t you agree?” he said pleasantly and glanced past Nell into the drawing-room. It seemed to her apprehensive eye that he was already in it. Where, if this went on, would he end up? In the top flat, of course. She did not look at the telephone but all her thoughts were upon it. How—how to warn Aunt Peggy?


  Mr. Gaunt was now looking up the stairs.

  “Do come in, won’t you,” said Nell, leading the way into the drawing-room. He followed, but rather slowly, while she wondered what to do. “Er—I expect you would like to see my mother.” (Mother. That was the idea. Get Mother; shut them in the drawing-room; creep to the telephone … )

  “Oh, please don’t bother. I expect she’s very busy … I really only came to ‘take possession’.”

  He laughed. That is, his mouth opened and his teeth showed. His yellow eyes looked dull and miserable and cross. “I know my way about the house, you know; I used to live here.” The Gaunts, father and son, seemed determined to assert their claims over Arkwood Road, thought Nell. The situation was difficult, but she was not an ex-parson’s daughter for nothing. She dealt with him as she would have done with some tiresome morning caller at the vicarage.

  “Oh, but I know she would like to see you,” she said firmly, and was flying out of the room when a slow step sounded outside and Anna’s face looked round the door, all enquiry at seeing so much masculine elegance decorating the drawing-room at this hour in the morning.

  “Oh, here is my mother,” trying not to sound thankful, “Mother, you know—Mr. Gaunt—don’t you?”

  “Of course. How nice to see you again,” Anna said, regarding him with that amused interest with which the well-bred but unfashionable contemplate those connected however remotely with the arts; Nell wondered if it might also be caused by a memory of fish-scales, “and how nice of you to call. I was just inspecting the garden. We only moved in two days ago and I have scarcely looked at it yet.”

  “My dear Anna, it isn’t nice of me at all and this is a terrible hour to invade a fellow-creature’s house but the fact is I’ve come to ‘take possession’ of the top flat. I—”

  “Oh,” said Anna. It was a sound charged with meaning as she said it; with lips made round and such a distinct note of doubt that he stopped, in full spate, and looked at her cautiously.