The Scarlet Thread (12 page)

He murmured, and she bent down to kiss him. For a moment his arms locked around her neck.

“Mum?” It was a sleepy whisper.

“Yes, darling. Go to sleep. Good night.”

“Night.” He had drifted away immediately.

She watched him, half lit from the open door.

I wonder where he is
, she thought.
I wonder what he'd think of you. He's probably forgotten all about us. Men don't mourn. Only fools of women like me do that
. She closed the door firmly and went to her own room.

She found a flat, a top-floor walk-up, in Chelsea. It was meanly furnished, but it was the most she could afford. In the evenings she found herself looking at the pictures of Charlie that lined her bedroom wall. She hoped he wasn't too lonely staying with his grandparents. She almost gave up and went home during the first month.

Her job at the medical supplies firm in Wigmore Street was interesting. She liked people and was popular with her co-workers. But London was cold and unwelcoming. Her neighbors in the converted house muttered good morning and hurried by; every evening she came back to the empty flat. In desperation, she began going to the local cinema alone, or taking long walks along the Embankment.

The weekends at Haywards Heath were overshadowed by the journey back on Sunday evening and the wrench of leaving Charlie behind. He had his father's deep black eyes, and they filled with tears when she kissed him goodbye. Joy Drummond didn't make it any easier.

“You've got thin,” she declared, examining Angela on her second visit home. “And you look so tired. I bet you're not eating properly.”

“Mother, I'm fine. I have a very good lunch, and I cook for myself in the evenings.”

Joy ignored her signal to stop and went on relentlessly. “Cook for yourself? Good Lord, haven't you made any friends? Don't tell me you sit there night after night on your own!” She sighed and said, “I don't know why you want to do this, dear. I really don't. We all miss you, especially Charlie—don't you, darling? Why on earth don't you drop the idea and come home?”

Angela kept her temper. Her mother meant well; that was the trouble.
I can't get angry and tell her to please shut up, but any minute she's going to have Charlie in tears
.

She said in a too loud voice, “I love my job and I'm very happy. Now Charlie and I are going for a walk before lunch. Come on, darling.”

Mrs. Drummond looked after them and sighed again. She had a habit of talking out loud when she was alone. “What a fool of a girl,” she said. “Turning down someone like Jim, who's so fond of her … going off to London to live by herself. Don't tell me she likes it. She looks perfectly miserable.”

She was still expressing these thoughts aloud when she went inside to see if her husband wanted anything. He was leading a very quiet life since his heart attack. He had mellowed. He missed his daughter and worried about her, but unlike his wife, he never put his feelings into more than a very few words.

“How does Angela seem?” he asked.

“Who knows? She's gone off for a walk with Charlie. Do her good after that awful London air. I can't breathe when I go up there.”

“You haven't been to London for three years,” he remarked.

“I couldn't breathe then,” she retorted. “I wish she'd be sensible. She's so obstinate, that's the trouble.”

“Takes after me,” Hugh Drummond suggested. “I think she's done the right thing. If she's not going to marry Jim, she's got to make a new life for herself. We won't last forever. Leave her alone, Joy. Let her work it out for herself.”

“Oh, I will, I will. I was just talking, that's all. It'll be worse when Charlie goes away to school this fall.”

“It'll be better,” her husband countered. “Now what's for lunch?”

It had been a long and busy day. Angela was tired. A niggling headache was just beginning. It was almost time to go home, but a long solitary evening in the impersonal flat had never seemed less appealing. She told herself not to be childish and finished filing her papers. An early night wouldn't do her any harm. The trouble was, there were so many early nights. Then the door to her office opened. She looked up. It was a girl named Judy from the accounting department. They'd had morning coffee together once or twice. She was popular and breezy, and there was a jauntiness about her that brought Christine suddenly to Angela's mind.

“You finished, Angela?”

“Yes, nearly. I've just got to put this lot away.”

“We're going round the corner to the pub. Why don't you come along?”

Angela hesitated. They were all younger than she was.

“Come on,” she urged. “There's a crowd of us going.”

“I'd love to,” Angela said. “I won't be a minute.”

She didn't even notice that her headache had gone. The pub was smoky, full of noise and people, and cheery. She had a gin and tonic and found herself saying how difficult it was to make friends in London.

Judy, sinking her second gin and orange, agreed heartily.

“Oh, you can drop dead in London and nobody'll even notice. I come from a small town on the south coast, and I nearly died for the first few months up here. But you've got to get out and help yourself. That's what I found. No good waiting for the neighbors to knock on your door, because they won't. Knock on theirs first and say, Hey, here I am, come in and have a drink or something. That's what you have to do.”

Angela was enjoying herself. People drifted in and out, and most seemed to know each other. She discovered that it was a regular hangout for the younger staff in the office.

“We call ourselves the PPCs,” one young man told her, balancing a pint of beer in one hand and waving a cigarette about with the other. He was pleasantly tight, and so, Angela realized, was she.

“PPC? What's that?”

“Professional pub crawlers! We crawl from this pub to the next pub till we can't crawl any further.”

She thought it was the funniest thing she'd heard in years.

It was a great meeting place, that pub. There was an easy comradeship about pub life in London that she would never have found in the country. Friendships were struck up and continued beyond the confines of what was known as the Medics Arms. Nobody even knew its proper name. There were no barriers of class or age. The Harley Street specialist stood elbow-to-elbow with the antique dealers and shop assistants and Angela's tipsy friend who worked in the surgical appliances department. She was asked out to dinner, to the theater. She took Judy's advice and gave parties in her tiny flat.

An earnest young radiologist with a practice in Welbeck Street started taking her out regularly. Once he knew she was a doctor's daughter, he began to talk of marriage.

There were other, less happy memories of those early years in London.

Charlie, coming back from his first half term at Melville Hall and saying, “Mum, can I have a picture of you and Dad? The other boys have pictures.”

And the sad lie she'd told him. “You can have one of me, darling. But I haven't any pictures of your father. He was killed so soon, you see.”

Her mother dying unexpectedly from cancer, so quickly and with such little warning that Angela couldn't believe it had happened. Her father, looking very old indeed after the funeral, refusing to let her give up her job and look after him.

“Don't be a damn fool, Angela. Things are going well for you. You're happy up there. I've had a good run for my money, and I'm all right. Old Mrs. P. can look after me, and you pop down when you can. I'll miss your mother, though,” and he had devastated Angela by bursting into tears.

Happy memories, sad memories, and always the joy of her son to enrich what was good and compensate for what was not. He was thirteen and just going to public school, very tall, better-looking than his father, with something of the Drummonds in him after all. He had become the light of his grandfather's life. There were photographs on the mantel of Charlie playing in the school first eleven, Charlie in the rugger team as a winger, even disguised in a fencing mask, posing with another little boy for the Melville Hall magazine. Hugh Drummond turned up at every Sports Day, prize-giving and school concert.
What a lot he's given to Charlie
, Angela thought.
And what a lot Charlie's given to him. My son has the father he needed, and Dad's got a son to make up for the one he lost in the war
.

The Wigmore Street job had led to better things. Having taken a secretarial course and gained a diploma, she became the assistant to the medical director of a large private health insurance company.

She'd heard about the vacancy from a friend, one of many she had now. If she spent an evening alone, it was from choice. The attic flat in Chelsea was replaced by a smart apartment hotel in Sloane Avenue, with a restaurant and maid service. It provided total privacy for a woman living alone if she wanted it. And sometimes she did. She had many men friends but only two lovers in the five years since she'd come to London. She had not been in love with either of them. There was no commitment beyond a mutual attraction and compatibility. When marriage was mentioned, Angela was firm. She wasn't interested. Charlie didn't need a stepfather just as he started adolescence. It sounded reasonable. The truth was something else. She faced that truth sometimes in the loneliest hour of the night, when the clock by her bedside pointed to four and she knew sleep wouldn't come. It didn't happen often, but when it did, she admitted that her love for Steven Falconi had not died. It would one day; it must. But not yet. Perhaps never, because her son was his living reminder.

Money was not a problem. Her salary was generous, and surprisingly, her mother had left her everything. It wasn't riches, but it provided an income and a little capital when she needed it. “To my beloved Daughter, Angela Frances Lawrence,” the will had read.

Hugh Drummond's explanation had been typically down-to-earth. “Of course she left everything to you. I don't need anything; I'm quite all right. We talked about it, and she said you were the one who'd benefit most. And the boy, of course. Quite right.”

She wore her mother's engagement ring, a little sapphire with two diamonds on either side, and the Sicilian wedding ring she'd worn around her neck at the Palermo hospital. Falconi's ring. She was Falconi's wife so long as she wore that ring. And Charlie had a dead hero for a father.

Her son was fifteen when she decided to change her job and take him away for a holiday. Her relationship with her boss had reached an impasse. She didn't want to start an affair with him, and the only solution was to leave. It was the end of August, and they were together at Haywards Heath in the old house, with her father and a decrepit Mrs. P. going through the same routine they had followed for forty years.

“When do you start your new job?” he asked her.

They were sitting out in the garden, her father underneath a big, colored garden umbrella that hadn't been used often enough to fade. It was hot that year, and the doctor didn't like the sun. Charlie was lying on his back, holding a book in the air.

“End of September,” she replied. “Charlie, you can't read like that. Why don't you sit on a chair?”

“Don't nag, Mum,” was the response. “I like reading lying down. Don't I, Grandpa?”

“Used to like it myself,” Hugh Drummond agreed. “Pity you had to leave that job,” he said to Angela. “I suppose it's a good thing to move on.”

“I think so.” She wouldn't have dreamed of telling him the real reason. “It'll be interesting, and I'll travel. That's what really appealed to me, even if it is less money.”

“Never thought you'd be a businesswoman,” her father said.

“I'm not,” she insisted. “I just smooth the edges for the business
man
. I'm a good organizer. I enjoy it.”

The job was a complete break from her last position. She was to be the secretary and personal assistant to the head of a small but dynamic advertising firm. And no personal problem likely there. Her boss was David Wickham, the senior partner. He was not interested in women; he lived with his associate. David had the flair and the older man the money. Angela thought they were both cultivated, pleasant and amusing. “Working for us,” Wickham had told her, “won't be easy, Mrs. Lawrence, but I promise you it will be fun.”

She looked down at her son, still obstinately reading with the book high above his head, and smiled. He was going through a lanky stage, and the first round of serious exams was approaching next term.

She said suddenly, “Charlie, I've been thinking. I could do with a holiday. Somewhere abroad. What do you think? Shall we go away somewhere?”

He rolled over and sat up, bright with expectation. “What a super idea! Where shall we go?”

“How about France? Lots of sunshine.” Seeing his face, she said, “Wouldn't you like that? Or would you be bored?”

“Oh, I wouldn't be bored, Mum. I'll go to France if you want to.”

“That's not the point,” Angela said. “Look, darling, it's a holiday for both of us. Where would
you
like to go? Come on—you say.”

He hesitated for a moment. “Well, I'd really like to go to America. I know it'd cost too much money, but Jordan went there when his sister got married. They went to New York, and he said it was the most
super
place. He never stopped going on about it. I suppose we couldn't go there, could we? Just for a week?”

“New York,” she heard her father say. “What on earth do you want to go there for? All those frightful bloody skyscrapers? What's wrong with France? You'd get lots of swimming and tennis.”

“It's the skyscrapers I want to see,” his grandson insisted. “The Empire State, Rockefeller Center. Jordan climbed right up into the Statue of Liberty's head!”