Dorothy Eden (8 page)

Suddenly she wondered overwhelmingly why she was here, in this fusty place, its atmosphere of doom only veneered with gaiety. Why had she come? Why had she not gone to the opera, or just had a respectable early night?

It had been because Johnnie was kind, and because he worked for Mrs. Dix, which somehow made them seem to be old friends.

She made herself smile and speak lightly. “Then tell me about yourself. You have a wife and children?”

“Not me. I’m a rover. I don’t like shackles. Well—depending on how decorative the shackles are. Do you know, you’re very attractive. How did Mrs. Dix come to let you travel alone? Normally she’s much more cautious.”

“I’m competent, usually.”

“I’m sure you are.”

“How long have you been working with Mrs. Dix?” Kate asked.

“Five, six years. I was a schoolmaster originally, but that got too dull. I’ve done these odd tutoring jobs. I took an American brat, pots of money, around the world. Once I was secretary to an oil magnate, but we didn’t hit it off very well. Still, this way one gets around.”

The man with the wax-like face was singing again, accompanied vigorously at the piano by the lady in the mauve dress. Kate pressed her hands to her eyes and longed for fresh air. It was only eleven o’clock. Would Johnnie be hurt if she suggested leaving so early? Later, one imagined, it would be impossible to breathe in here. More people were coming down the narrow stairs, and being seated in dusky corners. Madame, large and overpowering, in her sweeping black velvet, appeared to sing “Alouetta.” She was rolling her large eyes at Johnnie and he was appreciatively applauding. Kate wished she hadn’t drunk so much wine. How much? Not more than two glasses. How idiotic to get so fuzzy-headed on that. She waved away the waiter who would have refilled her glass, and leaned back in her chair. Madame’s voice, rich and deep, seemed to fill her head. It made it swell, made her vision a little imperfect so that the lights seemed to flicker, and Johnnie’s face, nodding in time to the music, seemed far away.

“Kate”—his voice was far away, too—“are you all right?”

“I’m rather tired,” she said. “I wonder if you’d mind—”

But she never finished her plea to leave, for at that moment, without warning, all the lights went out.

There was instantly a storm of voices and cries. A girl began to giggle irrepressibly. People blundered about. Madame’s voice, domineering and calm, sounded above everything.

“You will please sit still. A little accident in the fusebox—in one moment it will be fixed.”

“Kate, are you all right?” came Johnnie’s voice very close to her ear, and he felt for her hand.

Someone began striking matches, and faces appeared phantasmagorically and disappeared. They might have been the faces of the long-ago doomed, flung in here to rot slowly. Johnnie’s hand, holding hers so firmly, might have been that of a despairing fellow-prisoner. Madame suddenly appeared carrying a branched candlestick with the candles alight, and her face, large and white, floating behind it, seemed bloated and full of evil amusement.

Kate couldn’t breathe. She struggled to her feet.

“Sit down!” said Johnnie. “Lights in a minute.” But already she was making her way to the door. She tripped over a stool, and heard the grate of the table as Johnnie hurriedly pushed it back to follow her.

“Kate, don’t panic!”

“All is well, madame. The lights in one moment…”

The twisting stairway, as black as a pit, was just ahead of her. Determinedly Kate groped towards it. Uncertainly she negotiated a step. Oh, for the stars, the clean night air.

“Kate, you little idiot. Wait.”

Another step… And then the light shone in her face, blinding her. She moved sharply backwards and lost her balance. The other voice calling “Kate!” seemed to come out of a dream…

B
UT IT WAS NOT
a dream that she was in a taxi with Lucian. She opened her eyes slowly, because for some reason her head was aching intolerably, and saw his head silhouetted against the window.”

“Lucian!” she said cautiously.

He turned his head.

“Hullo,” he said coolly.

“You didn’t telephone.”

“I couldn’t earlier, and then when I did you’d gone out.”

Kate tried to sit upright. Pain stabbed her head.

“How did you know where?”

“The hotel porter told me. He heard the address you gave the taxi.”

“Did you follow us?”

“No.”

There seemed no retort to that flat, unexplanatory answer. Kate let another street or two slide by before she said, without particular interest, “Where’s Johnnie? Why am I with you?”

“Johnnie was decent enough to bow to my prior claim. Besides, he realized by then that you didn’t like that particular place.”

“In the dark it seemed haunted. I had to get out. I just had to.” Her voice shook, as she remembered that claustrophobic horror, with the disembodied faces floating in the intermittent match-light.

“Did I behave very stupidly?” she asked, with shame.

“You gave your head a nasty bang on the stone steps. You seem to have a talent for getting into trouble.”

“You frightened me, with that torch. It was you, wasn’t it?”

“Coming to your rescue,” he said in his detached way.

“But there wasn’t really anything happening, was there? You didn’t have to rescue me?”

“From a case of claustrophobia, yes. Your friend Johnnie’s ideas for a gay evening didn’t work out so well, did they?”

“Johnnie’s all right,” she said defensively. “It wasn’t like going out with a stranger. He works for Mrs. Dix, too. She told him to look after me. And I really was feeling a little morbid. I kept thinking about Francesca. I thought I saw her this afternoon.”

“That’s absurd. Your aeroplane ticket has arrived, they told me at the desk. So catch that plane in the morning.”

“I suppose so.”

They had reached the hotel. Lucian paid the taxi-driver and helped her out. The soft night air swept about her face, reviving her. She wished vaguely that Lucian were not so cool and detached. He had been interested enough to find out where she had gone that evening, but only as a self-imposed duty. His manner remained aloof and rather chilling. If she were a trouble to him she wished he would go.

“Good-night, Lucian. Thank you for bringing me home.”

“Better now?”

She nodded. “It was only fresh air I needed.”

“And stop worrying about that child.”

“I will when I know definitely where she is. I still keep thinking—”

“She’s all right,” he said impatiently.

“But you couldn’t know that, could you? You don’t even believe she exists.”

He looked at her in the calculating way that was becoming a little repellent.

“Lock your door tonight,” he added obscurely. “And catch that plane in the morning.”

He was already going. She thought, for a dizzy moment, that all this had been imaginary.

“Why must I lock my door?”

“Foreign hotels! Here’s your handbag.”

“Oh, I’d forgotten it. I left it in that place.”

“Yes, we found it. You need looking after, you see. All right now?”

“Yes, thank you.”

“Take some aspirins. They’ll fix your head. I’ll see you in London, perhaps. Goodbye…”

When she reached her room the telephone was ringing. She picked it up dubiously.

“Kate? Is that you?” It was Johnnie’s hearty voice, untouched by either resentment or worry.

“Yes, it’s me. Where are you?”

“I’m still at this dump. The lights are working now. Sorry you seemed to get a scare. Why did you?”

“I don’t know. I must be susceptible to atmosphere.” She was, of course. She remembered her desolate feelings of the afternoon in the Luxembourg Gardens, the garden of the queens, with their lonely stone faces, and then the strange shivery feeling that was almost fear which had swept over her when she had thought she heard Francesca calling to her at the Eiffel Tower. Then that dungeon-like room, where one still seemed to hear doomed voices… No, she was no person to cover with a veneer of gaiety the irretrievably lost and forsaken.

“Well, too bad. Rather a flop, the whole thing, eh?”

“Lucian came,” she said feebly.

“You’re telling me. You fell and knocked your head on the stone steps, and this character just swept me aside, saying he had the prior claim. You were his girl. Are you his girl?”

Kate remembered Lucian’s cool, detached manner, and thought of William waiting in London, and sighed.

“I’m not anybody’s girl.”

“If I’d known that I wouldn’t have behaved so decently! Well, can’t be helped now. I’ll see you on the plane in the morning. Just wanted to know you got home safely. So long, my dear.”

The aeroplane ticket was in an envelope on her dressing-table. Kate looked at it thoughtfully. Then she picked up her handbag to count the money she had. It was a large bag. Previously to this evening there had been plenty of room to stuff even Francesca’s doll into it. But before going out she had tossed the doll into her suitcase so that the bag would not bulge quite so inelegantly. Her stepmother had given her this bag a year ago, when she had been making the move to London. She had said that at a pinch it would serve for an overnight bag. It was a beautiful quality antelope, lined with silk. Kate valued it very much. In consequence it distressed her now, when she opened it, to see that the lining had got torn. There was quite a large slit in it.

She was quite sure it had not been like that before she had gone out that evening. She remembered suddenly, and with a queer, distressed feeling, Lucian saying, “You forgot your bag. We found it.”

But what, in the interval before finding it, had happened?

Forcing herself to remain calm and to think, Kate searched the contents. Her passport was there, also her wallet which seemed to contain the amount of money it should. Her cosmetics were untouched, and the keys to her flat were still there. Nothing seemed to have gone. Nothing at all. Yet the lining was carefully and unobtrusively slit, as if someone had been looking for something.

It must have happened during that frightening few minutes when the lights were out. Johnnie had been sitting beside her holding her hand. He could not have held her hand and searched her bag at the same time.

It could not have been Johnnie.

But there were sundry odd people in that place. Who knew whether the lights going out had been accidental? Perhaps it was a trick that happened regularly.

But nothing had gone from her bag. No one had stolen anything, even money, which would have been quite safe and untraceable.

There had been the very short period, of course, when she had panicked and knocked herself out in the dark on the stone steps. As Lucian’s torch shone in her face…

It was Lucian, apparently, who had got her into a taxi and gathered up her belongings. There would have been plenty of opportunity for him to search her bag. Plenty, indeed.

But why on earth should he? And why should he have told her to lock her door?

Abruptly the ache returned to her temples. Something was going on. Something very strange. Francesca’s disappearance, the menu card that had vanished from her room while she was having her bath (because it had Lucian’s face sketched on it, she realized, with sudden clarity), and now the queer happenings of this evening, that could have been caused by her own behaviour. Or her behaviour could have fitted in very nicely indeed with someone’s schemes…

In a daze, Kate walked to the door and turned the key in the lock. But it was with a perfectly clear purpose that she dialled the number of the airways office.

When the clerk answered she said, “Please cancel my ticket for flight 61 in the morning. Miss Kate Tempest. No, I won’t be travelling by a later plane. I’m crossing by ferry. Thank you. Good-night.”

After that she had to telephone for train and steamer departure times. She would have to be at the Gare du Nord at 9 a.m., the clerk told her. But that was easy. That was the train Lucian would probably be catching, and she would be able to ask him why her handbag had been so thoroughly searched, and what he had hoped to find. She could also look for Francesca.

Something told her that the steamer she caught at Calais tomorrow would also be the steamer on which Francesca travelled to England.

For now she no longer believed that the child had been taken back to Rome. It was not so simple as that. How could it be when these mysterious things were happening to her? If her head were not aching so acutely she might have been able to think of a reason for her foolish imaginings. But just now she couldn’t.

In the morning, when she had slept, she would be able to cope.

W
HEN MRS. DIX WAS
worried she found that her passion for chocolates, even the richest and creamiest, was not satisfying in itself. But with a dash of brandy the recipe was perfect, and she could face anything.

After Miss Squires had left for her country cottage last evening she had been alone in her over-heated, over-decorated upstairs flat, and there was no one to whom she could talk. Not that she could talk to Miss Squires very much. It wasn’t wise. But at least Miss Squires knew about that poor girl in Paris, bewildered and alone. Except for the strange Englishman she had mentioned, and who was he? That was the worrying question.

Miss Squires had had the utmost faith in the girl’s discretion and level-headedness, in spite of her seeming a little too attractive and lively to be over-supplied with the more mundane qualities. But Miss Squires, least of anybody, had expected this particular contretemps.

Long after Miss Squires had gone home Mrs. Dix kept having small nips of brandy interspersed with chocolates. At midnight she got out the last gift her husband had given her, a rather heavy, antique gold pendant, and clasped it around her neck, and wept a little.

Then, still sitting in her chair, a rotund little figure looking strangely young and vulnerable, she fell asleep. She slept until the first light was coming through the windows, and spasmodic footsteps and cars starting up sounded without. Then she woke with a start. The lights were still burning and she didn’t at first realize it was morning. She poured another brandy and drank it quickly. Then she lifted the telephone and asked for the Hôtel Imperial in Paris.