Dorothy Eden (4 page)

A word about the other people in the house. A funny little woman like an owl who thrust a note “You’re too late!” into my hand as I arrived, isn’t something out of a melodrama. She has the rooms upstairs, and she has some kind of throat trouble that means she can’t speak above a whisper. She carries a pad and pencil with her all the time. When she wrote that message she thought the flat had been let, as someone had come earlier in the day. She lives with her son Dawson who is fifteen, is tall and thin and wears glasses, and isn’t at all attractive. But I never did like precocious-looking children.

Miss Glory, a sea captain’s daughter, lives in the ballroom and does the cleaning, and the other tenant on the ground floor is a violinist who plays in a night-club orchestra. His name is Vincent Moretti, and he has very light-coloured hair and eyebrows, so that he has almost a naked look. He flirts with Miss Glory, but I don’t think he is really in love with her. She is flat and brown, like a piece of cardboard. But he makes jokes with her and she giggles. Obviously she adores him. His tastes in music is rather macabre, but I expect he gets tired of playing dance music all night. So I will just have to endure elegies and laments during the day.

That is all, except Jeremy Winter who catches burglars in the basement. He is a commercial artist, and he is very self-assured and not at all my type.

Arabia has promised to tell me all of Lucy’s story, and this is going to give me the material for the long serious work that I have always wanted to do. It is so sweet and sad. There is this lovely young girl, full of gaiety and charm, going to balls, having lots of admirers, petted and pampered by her mother, wearing exquisite clothes, always laughing, and then suddenly falling sick and dying. Invitations to dances and parties were coming in after she was dead. They dressed her in new ball gown and pinned on a corsage of flowers as if she were really going to a ball. Then Arabia kept her room exactly as it was when she died, with invitation cards and photographs on the dressing-table, her bed turned down, her night gown and slippers put out. Just as if she were going to be back from a party at any moment.

Arabia says I am to go in this room whenever I feel like it, and look at anything I want to. I am not being morbid. It is just that Lucy’s life runs through this house like a remembered perfume, or a snatch of song.

My love and a thousand kisses.

Your Cressida.”

I
N THE MIDDLE OF THE
night Cressida woke. Already she had slept only from exhaustion. Her excitement was stirring just beneath her consciousness, and the two hours’ sleep that took away the acuteness of her tiredness brought intense awareness of her whereabouts back.

She lay for a little while listening to the quiet house. The music and the footsteps had ceased. First there had been Vincent Moretti’s violin, as he had practised in his room at the back of the house before leaving for the night club from which he did not return until almost dawn. There had been some giggling in the passage as he stopped to chat to Miss Glory, and then, as if cheered by Mr. Moretti’s passing remarks, a rollicking polka had come from the ballroom. That would be Miss Glory performing on the grand piano.

When the music stopped there had been the sound of Mimosa’s miaows as he prowled about the staircase. He was an uncommonly vociferous cat.

Later the front door had banged, and swift, firm footsteps had gone down the hall and towards the basement stairs. That was Jeremy coming in. Cressida had wondered idly if he had been taking a girl out, but if so he had left her very early. She was not interested in Jeremy Winter’s night life, she told herself drowsily. She was only grateful to him for picking her up off the street and carrying her inside. Otherwise she would have run away from Dragon House and never have known about this pretty flat that Arabia was so delighted for her to have. It was unbelievable luck. It would be no hardship to spend most of her spare time with Arabia, who was so fascinating and interesting a person anyway, and to be rewarded with a delightful flat as well was too good to be true.

Arabia had said that after the last tenant had departed she had redone the rooms in preparation for the arrival of a young girl. The paint was gay and fresh, the chintzes new, the carpets a warm, deep red. The bedroom had been done in yellow because that had been Lucy’s favourite colour. But it had not been a deliberate copy of Lucy’s room on the top floor of the house. Lucy was not to steal all the new Cressida Lucy’s personality.

Had Cressida felt a faint shiver of apprehension at that remark of Arabia’s? Of course she had not. She was herself, and not even required to play a part.

Nevertheless, as she lay in the dark, she kept thinking about that room at the top of the house, in its petrified state of awaiting the return of its owner from a ball.

She fell asleep thinking of it, and when she awoke it was still in her mind, compellingly. The turned-down bed, the little feathery slippers set demurely on the floor, the strewn and discarded jewellery on the dressing-table—nothing valuable: a young girl’s seed pearls, a clip shaped like a bird, a comb studded with brilliants.

Arabia had taken her up there and had said she was to go up at any time she liked. No one else ever went there. Cressida could use Lucy’s little walnut writing-table if she liked. Anything in that room was for her use.

There was nothing morbid about it, Arabia said. It was a sweet and happy room that made Lucy still alive. “She’s just terribly late coming home,” she said.

Arabia, standing there in her long formal dinner gown, the incongruous tiara perched rakishly on her white hair, was, indeed, a stranger figure than any charming little ghost coming home late from a ball. Cressida had known then that she had to write it. It might not have any great depth or drama, but it was so human, so charming, so pitiful. The young girl dancing her way unknowingly to death.

She wanted to sit in that room alone, to imagine herself into the dead Lucy, and then to write.

There had been a diary lying on the writing desk. As Cressida awoke in the middle of the night she was suddenly seeing that diary, tantalisingly unread. What was in it? No secrets, or it would not be there so innocently. But perhaps one would be able to read between the lines. Being Arabia’s daughter, Lucy could not lack colour.

Cressida sat up in bed. The excitement, mounting tumultuously within her, would not let her sleep again. All at once she knew that she must go up to Lucy’s room now, in the middle of the night, and learn her secrets.

As Tom constantly deplored, Cressida always acted on impulse. After all, it was impulse (and Tom’s unendurable stubbornness) that had brought her to Dragon House and this rich untapped stream of material. She had the urge to explore that room upstairs at once, so she would do so.

Putting on her dressing-gown and slippers she set cautiously forth.

The marble steps that led to the front door of Dragon House continued in a broad imposing staircase to the first floor, where Arabia strewed her possessions in profusion through the large rooms overlooking the street, and the little dumb woman, Mrs. Stanhope, and her son Dawson, occupied the two smaller rooms at the back.

The top floor, which was semi-attic, had all been Lucy’s. Two of the rooms were filled to overflowing with more of Arabia’s vast and miscellaneous collection of furniture and outlandish trophies. The long low-ceilinged room at the back, with the balcony overlooking the narrow garden, was Lucy’s bedroom.

The marble steps stopped at the first floor. After that the steps were wooden, and covered with a thin dusty carpet. Cressida’s footsteps sounded through the carpet, and the stairs were inclined to creak. She went very quietly because she didn’t want to disturb anyone. She had to pass directly by Mrs. Stanhope’s door, but she felt that, even disturbed, that timid little woman with the whispering voice wouldn’t venture out. Neither would the gangling boy Dawson who had thrust out a bony hand to her when Arabia had introduced them, and afterwards had eyed her furtively, as if suspicious of her sudden arrival.

Cressida, who liked almost everybody, found it difficult to like Dawson because he seemed such a shy plain boy. But she was sorry for him, having to live this rather unnatural life with his voiceless little mother, and sorrier still for Mrs. Stanhope who seemed as nervous as a caught bird. She would be nice to those two, as well as to Arabia.

After all, what would it cost her, she who suddenly had so much?

Life was so exciting. Cressida was reflecting on that as she groped her way up the last few steps, and went along the passage to Lucy’s room. Then, as she softly opened the door and switched on the light, pity overcame her once more.

Why did Arabia torment herself with this room that looked so lived in? There were even fresh flowers on the dressing table. Cressida stopped to look again at the photograph of Lucy taken at her coming of age. The young face had nothing of Arabia’s hawk-like arrogance in it. It was soft and round, with its smiling mouth and halo of fine fair hair. The eyes were far-off, almost empty, as if dwelling on scenes far different from a photographer’s studio. In the loosely clasped hands was a small bouquet of roses. Red roses had been Lucy’s favourite flowers, Arabia had said.

It seemed to Cressida that their perfume was in the room, and all at once it made her think of death. She had to repress a shiver as she crossed to the writing-table and took up the diary which lay open at the last page, as if waiting for the next entry. The writing was neat and feminine. The last words were, tragically, “Dinner with Larry tonight and we talked about the wedding. Almost everything arranged now. Tomorrow must order the flowers.”

And that was all. The flowers had had to be ordered, indeed. But they had not been flowers for a wedding.

Cressida turned back the pages and read the light-hearted comments of a gay and popular girl. Dinners, dances, trips on the river, shopping, fittings for dresses, references to young men, Larry’s name, of course, figuring predominantly. Only one entry had been scratched out. Cressida had to peer close to decipher it. Was it “Saw Monty tonight”? Who was Monty and why had his name been scratched out? The diary, which covered six months, bore no other reference to him. Was he too unimportant to be worthy of a permanent record, or had his behaviour been so unpleasant that Lucy had decided to forget it?

Apart from that one cryptic entry the diary told no secrets at all. Cressida put if down, resolving to ask Arabia tomorrow about the mysterious Monty.

Her curiosity took her to the wardrobe, and she began fingering the dresses hanging within. They were twenty years old, a pre-war style, but their prettiness and expensiveness were still apparent. She took out a ball dress in filmy green tulle, and was holding it against her when she heard the faint sound at the door. Or had it been a sound?

As she listened there was nothing more. The pretty room, with its rose-shaded light, remained petrified, waiting for the return of its owner.

But suddenly Cressida had lost her taste for being there. All at once she felt morbid and lonely and sad. She had a sudden longing for Tom, and his solid, kindly face and reassuring smile. It was foolish of her to have come up here in the middle of the night. If she lingered, perhaps even her first unfounded fears about Dragon House would come back.

She would hurry back to bed, and the sanity that a sound sleep would bring.

She paused at the door to switch out the light, then turned the knob and found that the door was locked!

It couldn’t be! After a moment, in which all her apprehensive fear invaded her so that she was abruptly shivering, she switched on the light again and examined the door calmly. The lock must have caught. With a little manipulation it would open.

But it did not open. It really was locked. Cressida remembered now the faint sound she had heard. It must have been someone turning the key—someone who had crept silently up the stairs, knowing she was there.

This was absurd, of course. What possible satisfaction could anyone get from locking her in a dead girl’s room? It must be a mistake.

But Cressida, remembering the furtive sound at the door, knew soberly that it was not a mistake. Someone, either mischievously or maliciously, had decided to lock her into Lucy’s room.

It was not a joke to be appreciated, and she did not intend to take it calmly. She began, without hesitation, to bang on the door and call out,

“Whoever is out there—come and open this door! I don’t intend to stay here all night. Come along please!”

Then she waited. There was no sound. It might have been that she was the only person in the whole house. Here she stood in this charming petrified room, the only thing alive…

Impatiently, and trying to control her panic, Cressida banged on the door again. Then she tried rapping with her heel on the floor, but the thick carpet muffled this sound. She went to the window and threw it open, and stepped on the narrow balcony with its elaborate wrought-iron railing intertwined into the shape of the vine leaves. It was a long way down to the narrow strip of garden. Leaning over, she could see that all the windows of the house were dark. No one on this side kept a solitary vigil, chuckling at the thought of the girl locked in the room upstairs. What lights would be showing on the other side? Arabia’s? Miss Glory’s, from her lonely splendour in the ballroom? Perhaps Jeremy Winter’s, but they, deep in the basement, would not show.

The room directly under this was one of Arabia’s. At this time Arabia would be in her bedroom, sleeping, no doubt, and probably deaf to any calls. Next to her rooms were those of Mrs. Stanhope and Dawson, but they too might possibly be out of earshot and sound asleep.

There was someone awake, of course. That was the person who had crept up the stairs and locked her in. It suddenly occurred to Cressida that what she was doing was probably exactly what that person had hoped for and, in a nasty sadistic way, was enjoying. Probably whoever it was liked to scare a girl and hoped she would presently have hysterics.