Down in the City (6 page)

It gave him no pleasure to see that he could shake Esther's assurance. Her pride was his pride, and it should be unassailable.

Later the same day he reverted to the subject of banks for contradictory reasons: to punish himself, and to prove to Esther that she was mistaken if she had imagined he was brusque or evasive. ‘Don't believe in them. Don't like them,' he declared. ‘Too interested in how you get your cash. You and me'll keep ours where they can't ask questions.'

‘Where?'

She smiled because he included her now, but instead of answering, he caught her and kissed her, and they stood afterwards, eyes locked together, their difference forgotten.

Wandering in from the balcony where she had been standing in the sun, Esther heard bumping, kicking noises at the front door and went to open it.

Stan was bent at the knees, leaning backwards under the weight he was carrying. His hat was falling off.

‘These flaming stairs,' he groaned. ‘Let me pass, pet.' He lurched through to the kitchen, where he dumped the big cardboard carton and other smaller boxes on the floor, and leaned back against the table, breathing heavily. He grinned at Esther and opened his arms. When he was holding her he was suddenly struck. ‘Did I say “flaming”? Is that allowed? Does David say it?'

Leaning against him, fixing his tie, Esther gave a smile and said no.

‘Then that's that!…Still, when you're carrying a couple of tons up those ruddy stairs…'

Together they stacked the bottled beer from the carton into the refrigerator. Squeezing the other parcels then, Stan strained his memory, gave a few preliminary growling ‘ers', and brought out, ‘Coffee, fillet steak, mushrooms, butter, biscuits, cheese, ice-cream, cigarettes, chocolates! What d'you think of that?' He was like a triumphant medium.

Esther exclaimed, ‘But I'd have done the shopping if I'd known we were staying in. You didn't tell me, Stan.'

He rocked on his thick rubber soles. ‘Don't tell you everything!'

The red-and-white curtains flapped out into the kitchen and were sucked back again to the window. The afternoon sunshine had slipped round from the balcony and streamed over the blue-tiled walls. A pile of dirty blue-and-white dishes was stacked on the draining board. In the bottom of the griller the golden fat from the steak had congealed and turned creamy. Liquid ice-cream dripped with ever-increasing slowness from the torn packet into a small pool in the sink. On the balcony, Esther and Stan were lying on padded bamboo chairs.

‘Bill's not a bad cove, but I don't like her,' he said.

‘She seemed nice.'

‘She just gets on my nerves or something, I don't know.' Stan dragged at his cigarette for the last time and ground the butt into a shagreen ashtray. ‘Still, pet, if you want to be friends, go ahead. You've got to have some company when I'm out.'

Esther yawned and reflected that three weeks ago someone called Esther Prescott had lived in that big stone house in Rose Bay. When she opened her eyes she could see—and she noticed almost everything she saw with fondness—her feet, Stan's feet, brick wall, blue sky.

Scratching his ear, Stan sat forward in his chair. ‘We're on to a good thing today, Est.'

‘Oh?'

He pulled his chair closer. ‘It's a kind of a tool. Fellow brought me the die this morning from the States.'

‘What does it do?'

‘Well, it's a bit technical. It's only one of the things we've got going just now, but I think it'll be the best. Now listen, pet,' he said, and paused until she sat up and looked at him, ‘I don't want you saying anything about this to anyone. These dies—there's some kind of damned stupid restriction. We just don't want any questions asked.'

‘Of course I won't say anything—there's nothing I could say. But—is it really illegal? Could you get into trouble?'

‘Me?' Stan prodded himself on the chest with a clenched fist. ‘Not likely!'

CHAPTER SIX

Though her heart beat a loud tattoo, Rachel Demster knocked softly on the door of the Maitlands' flat. She pulled at her shorts to straighten them, crossed her fingers behind her back, and waited.

After a minute Laura Maitland opened the door. ‘Oh, it's you, dear. Bill's just taken Anabel over to Auntie Barbie's. If it had been left to her, I know she'd much rather have gone down to the park with you.'

Rachel said, ‘Oh!' Her eyes clung despairingly to Laura's face.

‘Come in and have a glass of iced coffee,' Laura said briskly. ‘I'll let you pour it out, and then you can talk to me while I'm clearing up.'

‘All right.' An uncertain smile appeared and deepened under the older woman's benevolent eye. Her air of dejection vanished, and she stalked into the kitchen with the air of one completely at home.

‘It's in the fridge, Rae. Pour out three glasses, would you, dear? Mrs Peterson is coming in soon.'

In the kitchen Rachel spoke in a low voice. ‘I know that Esther is coming down, Mrs Maitland. I know her quite well, too. She thinks I'm old enough to call people by their Christian names, even if you don't.'

She carried the glasses to the other room and then wandered to the bedroom door and leaned against the wall, silent and watching.

‘Well, I wonder what's the matter with you today, Rae?' Laura said, finishing her work and looking closely at the girl.

Rachel remained silent.

‘You're miserable and unhappy about something,' Laura pursued. ‘Come and sit down and tell me what it is.'

The girl stared sulkily at the raised pattern on the wallpaper, ran her forefinger over the swirls and dots.

‘Come on!' Laura gave her a little push in the direction of the sitting room.

When the Demsters had moved to Romney Court three years before, Rachel and Laura Maitland had gravitated together instinctively in a matter of days—Rachel with a need, Laura with a need to give.

A brief sketch of Rachel's history, told to her on the stairs by Pauline Demster, was enough to raise Laura to heights of pitying, indignant enthusiasm for the girl.

Rachel had lived with her childless aunt and uncle from the age of four, when her mother had died and her father gone to work in Hong Kong. He returned on leave every two or three years, but apart from the duration of these short visits Rachel was entirely in their charge. Pauline Demster said that she was a good-hearted little girl, perhaps a bit spoilt and moody sometimes…

Moody? Laura cherished her at once. ‘Really, Bill,' she said to her husband at this time, ‘they treat that girl, and take as much interest in her, as if she were a canary in a cage. She eats and sleeps, and that's that! It's shocking!'

With the first few words of understanding and interest, Rachel was caught. From that time she belonged to Laura, and all her considerable allegiance was Laura's. After the first weeks of intense sympathy, Laura gave her the place in her life that might have belonged to a younger sister whose guardian she had been appointed, and treated her in the humorous, deprecating way that young dependent things are treated. But she was always willing to listen and talk; she always wanted to understand and advise, and Rachel adored her for it.

‘Now, Rae, I can't help you if you won't tell me what's wrong, can I?' Laura concentrated her eyes on the girl's averted face. Her voice was thrilling with reason.

At last Rachel said reluctantly, ‘It's nothing in particular. That's the trouble.' She knew that Laura preferred a specific grievance on all but her very best days when she would analyse the indefinable miseries of heart and mind for hour on hour. ‘It's nothing,' she said again. ‘I just wish I was dead!'

‘Oh, darling,' Laura crooned tenderly, laughing a little, ‘don't say that.'

Her voice made Rachel cry, as she had known it would, and she watched the weeping girl with a curiously mingled expression of maternal compassion and clinical interest.

‘I really mean it,' Rachel said dully, when she had controlled her tears. ‘I just don't know what to do.'

‘One thing's certain,' Laura said decidedly: ‘you shouldn't mope about at home reading these deep books all the time. They're no good to you, Rae. They'd make anyone miserable.' Rachel looked at her sadly, feeling wise, knowing that today Laura saw her as a temperamental child who needed only—yes, here it was.

‘Why don't you get someone to go to the pictures with you?'

Rachel blew her nose and silently burned at the suggestion. It was a heavenly day. Company in the sun, company in the air, was what she wanted; conversations like the ones in books, laughter and affection, not Hollywood shadows in a dark, disinfectant-smelling, air-conditioned cinema.

Ah, Mrs Maitland. Laura. Where's your attention today? Not on me. Why don't you read my thoughts and tell me what to do to be happy, to be like you? You're all charm and heart and feeling, and because of that, as rare…more than mortal. Rachel sighed with love.

There was a knock at the door and Laura called, ‘Come in!' To Rachel she said, ‘It's Esther. Better wash your face and then come back and have your coffee.'

Rachel rushed into the bathroom, long-legged, gawky, feeling better but unsolved. She splashed her face with cold water and dried it. She gazed levelly at herself in the mirror. How dramatic can you get? she asked. And the cold eyes said: Being dramatic, talking out, crying, seeing myself, knowing it, doesn't mean it isn't real. It is.

Laura and Esther looked up when she went back.

‘Hello, Rachel,' Esther said gently, and the girl smiled at her, calmed by her unemotional serenity.

Laura offered Esther a cigarette, lit it, and took one herself. They all drank iced coffee from tall frosted glasses and talked about clothes.

When that subject came to an end Laura smiled. ‘Rae and I were just talking about happiness when you came in.'

Esther, glancing at Rachel, doubted the wisdom of recalling their conversation, whatever it had been. She looked rather vague and discouraging, but Laura, leaning back in her chair, said, ‘Happiness,' again, as if she intended to go on.

In her slow deep voice she said, ‘I think the greatest happiness a woman can know is to lie in the arms of the man she loves. I believe I am very lucky. I am happy in every possible way.' Her arms rested voluptuously along the sides of the chair.

To Esther, with Rachel there, her face chalky, this seemed unanswerable. She frowned slightly at Laura to make her stop, but she would not notice.

‘Of course,' she went on, with a sudden smile to Rachel, ‘I could tell Esther things I wouldn't tell you.' Her manner was mischievous, teasing. Then something made her say, ‘But even though you never marry, Rae, you can still have a good life.'

Rachel said goodbye to the vision of her true love and resigned herself to spinsterhood.

Esther screwed her cigarette flat into an ashtray. She was sorry she had come this morning, but since she was here she thought she would try to rescue Rachel as soon as a pause made it possible.

‘Take Cassie Roberts—you know, that friend of mine,' Laura was saying. ‘She's very contented, though she's never married. She has a good job, and her girl friends, and she goes out with them to the pictures…' Her voice ended on a high, unfinished note, as if many more examples of single happiness were to follow.

Rachel pushed the pile of the carpet backwards and smoothed it flat again. Her red Roman sandals hung loosely from her thin feet. She half sighed, half hiccupped now and then, holding her white handkerchief pensively pressed to her short upper lip, her eyelids down.

There was a silence and Esther stood up and smoothed her skirt. ‘I'm sure Rachel will be all right,' she said temperately. ‘I'm going to take her off this minute, if you don't mind, Laura. You'll walk down to the harbour with me, won't you?' She turned to the girl.

Laura ushered them to the door. ‘She'd love to. And I have masses to do before Bill comes back. We're going down to the beach as soon as we've had something to eat.' She smiled at Rachel with exasperated affection. ‘Cheer up, baby.'

Rachel looked at her and felt the tears begin to rise again. How heavenly Mrs Maitland was! ‘Yes,' she said with difficulty, and flew downstairs, followed by Laura's benign laugh.

When Esther came a moment later they walked along the burning, tree-lined street, turned a corner, trailed down a flight of stone steps to the park by the edge of the harbour. There they sank onto the pale grass in the shade of a tree.

‘Gosh!' Rachel said, still thinking of Laura.

Esther took off her sunglasses. ‘Don't take it to heart, Rachel—what Laura said. Her manner is…she sometimes says more than she means.'

Rachel's heart crawled with indignation at hearing Laura defamed even so slightly. At the same time her spirits rose. She pulled at a shrivelled weed. ‘Then wasn't she right?'

‘About some things, perhaps. In a way. You'll see how it is yourself before very long.' She was at a loss how to go on. She had felt so little of what Rachel was now experiencing. ‘Just try not to worry about the future,' she said; ‘everything works out in the end of its own accord.'

‘I just have to wait?'

‘I think so.'

They sat silent, side by side, Rachel rebellious and unhappy. She scowled when she saw a group of laughing teenage boys and girls walking down the gravel path, through the open space in the wall and along the jetty to the small sailing boats which were moored at the end. They jostled and joked and called to one another in high, ringing voices; they were like some carefree opera chorus or a flock of brilliant, rowdy parrots. Contempt and envy vied for place in Rachel's feelings. She looked away from them to the dark blue harbour. She hated the colour of the water: it was not a colour at all. If she were to scoop a handful up, the watery blueness would remain behind. It was as spurious as life itself—second-rate.