Enough to Kill a Horse (5 page)

Some hopes and a slight apprehension had been roused by the thought of Laura Greenslade’s coming. But now, because of the mood that Jean was in, the apprehension suddenly dominated all other feelings. For some strange reason, she looked at the face in the photograph with dread, with a distinct feeling that it was malign and dangerous. But as she continued to look at it, the feeling faded, and Jean became convinced that it had been communicated to her by Fanny.

Handing the photograph back, Jean replied, ‘I can’t honestly say I see anything peculiar about it. But this awfully posed sort of affair never tells one anything.’

‘No, it doesn’t, does it?’ Fanny said gratefully. ‘I expect it’s just that I’m scared stiff about the whole business. But won’t it be awful for us all if we don’t like her?’

‘It always seems to me you like almost everybody,’ Jean said. She noticed that characteristically Fanny had not expected to be given any explanations of her visit, but had plunged straight into the discussion of her own affairs.

‘Anyway, I’m putting on quite a show for her,’ Fanny said.

‘So Colin told me.’ The sound of a car stopping outside made Jean turn her head to the window. ‘There’s Basil,’ she said.

‘Yes, he telephoned he’d be down this afternoon.’ Getting up, Fanny gave herself a glance in the old mirror. ‘God, how my hair needs cutting,’ she said, frowning. ‘I’ll have to get it done before Saturday. I’m making my special lobster things, of course.’

She went to meet her husband.

As he came in he put his hands on her shoulders and kissed her, then seeing Jean, held out his hand to her. Basil Lynam was never casual in his behaviour, he never omitted greetings, never failed to rise to his feet at the right moment or to open doors.

He was fifty-three, a slight, grey-haired man of medium height, a reader in genetics at one of the London colleges. Because Fanny insisted on living so deep in the country that he could not possibly travel daily to his work, he spent only weekends and odd days in his home. Though he was often pitied for this he never complained about it, saying that in fact it helped him to get a lot of work done. He was very much wrapped up in his work and though he was singularly gentle and in some ways perceptive in his dealings with people, his real interest in them seldom seemed to go deep. For friends he appeared satisfied with those that Fanny made for him. His face was narrow and dark, with bright very youthful eyes, full of a curious innocence.

It was typical of him that though he knew Jean far less intimately than Fanny did, he should notice at once that she had something on her mind. But he did not refer to it until after she had gone. Then, sitting by the fire, while Fanny poured out the tea that she had made, he said, ‘What’s Jean’s trouble today? The usual one?’

Fanny’s forehead wrinkled. ‘Had she a trouble?’ she said. ‘We were talking about Laura. And I was thinking about the Poulter man too. Clare’s coming down, by the way. I wonder why she wants so much to meet the man. It isn’t at all like her.’

‘Jean isn’t happy,’ Basil went on.

‘Of course not.’ Fanny said. ‘She’s too much in love with Colin to be happy. He’s in love with her too, but that doesn’t help. She can never stop worrying about him.’

‘Is that what you do when you’re in love?’ Basil asked with one of his bright, innocent glances at his wife.

‘Well, that girl’s got everything she can possibly want,’ Fanny said, ‘a handsome, adoring husband, a baby, money – and yet she can’t stop worrying.’

‘I’d worry too, if I’d got everything I wanted,’ Basil said musingly. ‘Any moment could bring such terrible disaster.’

‘That’s what some moments do anyway,’ Fanny said. ‘It’s in the nature of things. But Jean’s just the worrying type. She ought to have married someone like you, who’s good at calming people down. And Colin ought to have married someone like me, because we understand each other. And – and Kit, damn it, ought to have married Susan!’ She jolted her teacup, spilling some tea on the clean tray-cloth that she had brought out in honour of her husband’s presence. ‘I’ll never say this to anybody but you, darling, but I know I’m going to
hate
Laura.’

‘You aren’t,’ Basil said equably. ‘As I remember her, she was a quite pleasant and normal young woman. Once we’ve got used to her – ’

‘Not normal!’ Fanny exclaimed. ‘You said so yourself.’

‘I did?’ Basil said in a tone of astonishment.

‘You did. You said there was something peculiar about her.’

‘Oh, that,’ Basil said. ‘Yes, you’re perfectly right, as it happens. I do connect her vaguely with something odd … It’ll come back to me suddenly, I expect, unless I’m mistaken about it. It could have been somebody else.’

‘But what
was
it?’ Fanny demanded. ‘What was the matter with her? What had she done?’

‘Done?’ Basil said. ‘I don’t think she’d done anything.’ The flickering light of the flames was reflected in his eyes, and his thin, dark face reddened with the heat as he bent towards the fire to push one of the logs farther back on the hearth.

Clare Forwood saw nothing peculiar about Laura Greenslade when she called for her at ten o’clock on the following Saturday morning.

To Clare this was a matter for regret. With the peculiarities of people she felt at home, but normality, or that quality which she thought of as normality, without ever quite believing in its existence, frightened her out of her wits.

Seeing a slim, dark, well-tailored young woman, quietly self-assured in manner, come down the stairs to meet her, Clare felt on the defensive, inferior and vulnerable, and would have liked to turn tail immediately and hurry back to the safety of her Hampstead flat.

She was in a highly nervous state that morning, and was bitterly regretting the impulse that had made her ask Fanny Lynam to arrange a meeting for her with Sir Peter Poulter. At the time of asking her, Clare had not thought seriously that Fanny would really do anything about her request. But Fanny was unpredictable. She made promises easily, and could usually be safely trusted to forget them. Yet now and again she insisted on overcoming all obstacles and carrying out some promise to the last letter. To Clare, who in fact intensely disliked any interference with the solitary routine of her life, whatever she might occasionally say to the contrary, this was a very dangerous characteristic. In anyone but Fanny, whom she had known for over thirty years of her life, she would probably not have tolerated it.

They had met first as students in a dramatic school. That Clare should ever have thought of the stage as a career now seemed wholly fantastic to herself. Probably if her mother had not been an actress and expected it of her, she would never have attempted it. Yet her friends remembered that she had had a certain talent. She had also had one or two difficult love affairs, resulting in nervous calamity for all concerned. But fortunately she had been rescued from this existence by bad health and a small private income. In increasing solitariness, keeping only a few old friends whom she consented to see at longer and longer intervals, and very seldom making even a new acquaintance, she had developed her greater talent, acquiring, to her own deep astonishment, considerable fame.

In appearance she was rather like an underpaid governess, with an odd, scared gentility about her, though inward-looking, brooding eyes, under untidy grey eyebrows and a heavy brow, gave her face a formidable character of which she was quite unaware. She thought of herself as being merely plain and colourless and it would have surprised her to know that Laura Greenslade, coming down the stairs, had no difficulty at all in identifying the small, shabby woman waiting for her in the hall as the distinguished novelist.

Clare flushed when Laura addressed her, was monosyllabic and awkwardly excitable. Laura was the type of woman who at a first encounter always roused in her upsetting emotions of contempt and envy. She thought of women like her as models for suburban housewives, figures stepping straight out of the women’s magazines, equipped with beauty, poise, and unerring dress-sense and no emotional problems that could not be solved forever in five thousand words.

Also, for reasons that Clare had arduously but never quite successfully analysed, she expected this type of woman to be antagonistic to herself, so that, at the first pleasant and friendly remark from such a one, she felt, after a shock of disbelief, a glow of gratitude and pleasure. While the second feeling lasted, Clare was liable to discover unusual intelligence, true charm and grace of spirit in the person.

The third stage came when Clare began to notice some comforting human failing in this exquisite creation of her own fantasy, and suddenly forgetting her fears, quickly allowed herself to become bored by her as a human being, though sometimes sharply interested in her as a specimen.

She reached the third stage this morning after about an hour’s driving in her small 1935 Morris. She always drove slowly, with erratic over-caution. Laura had appeared to be admirably indifferent to the hazards of it, talking quietly and delightfully about the pleasure that she had taken in reading Clare’s books, and except that Laura’s face and voice were somewhat expressionless, Clare had been able to perceive no fault in her of any kind. And that expressionlessness, after all, was proper to her type. That oval face with its regular features and creaseless skin was not meant to have its smooth planes disturbed by the lights and shadows of strong feeling. The mouth, small and full-lipped with perfect teeth, the china-blue eyes, the dark hair pulled back from the face with a sleek severity, fashionable at the moment, should not be marred, Clare had thought, by animation. Yet presently, and in spite of an almost obstinate desire in herself not to notice it, Clare had had to recognize that feeling had crept into the face and the voice, also that it was precisely the kind of feeling which most roused her often unscrupulous, almost brutal curiosity. It was feeling, that is to say, which she knew that Laura had not intended to betray.

The chance to learn something about someone else’s secrets without their knowing that she was doing so was to Clare like the scent of blood to a bloodhound. Unconsciously, her posture became more relaxed. Her shyness left her.

‘Yes,’ she had just said in reply to Laura’s last remark, ‘I’ve known Fanny for most of my life. I have a very great affection for her.’

‘So has Kit,’ Laura had said. ‘He’s always telling me about what a wonderful person she is. She’s warm-hearted and generous and sincere. I’m longing to meet her.’

But that, Clare had known at once, had been a lie. Or at least, it had not been quite, absolutely, undeniably true. Laura was at least a little bit afraid of meeting Fanny. Afraid, that was it.

Secret fears and hatreds were the subject of nearly all Clare’s writing. They were the only emotions of which she had any deep understanding.

Laura was going on, ‘She’s been almost like Kit’s mother, hasn’t she? I wonder why she never had any children of her own.’

‘Her first marriage wasn’t conducive to it,’ Clare said, ‘and by the time she married Basil, she was past it.’

‘I expect she’ll miss Kit terribly then when he leaves her,’ Laura said.

To this at first Clare made no reply. She thought it over, remembering what Fanny had said to her a few days before on the telephone about dividing the house.

At last she said, ‘Then you’re going to live in London, are you?’

‘I expect so,’ Laura said. ‘I’ll have to keep my work going at least until Kit’s established himself, and it’s the best place for me to be. And it’ll be the best place for Kit too, I think.’

‘What is he planning to do?’

‘He wants to get into advertising.’

‘Now that surprises me,’ Clare said. ‘I thought he liked to work with his hands.’

‘He’ll go on with that as a hobby, naturally.’

‘But you don’t think there’s much of a living in it?’

‘Do you?’

‘I suppose not – in this day and age.’

‘It isn’t as if he’s outstandingly gifted at it either,’ Laura said. ‘He isn’t an artist of any kind, he’s just a reasonably good carpenter. And I believe he’s got a flare in the other direction. That’s the side of the antique business that’s really interested him, the buying and selling.’

‘And you think you can get him floated in London, even though he’s had so little experience?’ Clare said.

‘Oh yes, I know lots of people,’ Laura answered carelessly.

Clare said no more just then. Having recognized the fear in Laura, she had become capable of recognizing other qualities, instead of stopping short at her well-finished appearance. She could recognize now a great strength of will in the girl, maintained by a clear knowledge of what she wanted. Clare herself had an immense fund of determination, but was aware of confusion in the way she directed it. Laura, she realized, had thought clearly and was probably prepared to act ruthlessly. She knew she might have a fight on her hands for the possession of Kit, was a little apprehensive, but had admitted her fear to herself and made up her mind to have victory on her own terms.

Clare felt sorry for Fanny, who never thought clearly about anything. Yet quite likely, Laura’s way was the best way for all of them, particularly for Kit. On this point Clare was careful to avoid forming an opinion.

Laura and Fanny met, a little later, with exclamations of delight. Basil also, shaking Laura’s hand, expressed great pleasure at meeting her again after so many years.

‘Then you remember me, Dr Lynam?’ Laura said with surprise, seeming to be very pleased by this.

‘He’s just pretending to, my dear,’ Fanny said cheerfully. ‘He’s got the worst memory in the world.’

She had dressed for the occasion with more care than usual, in a dress of large black and white checks, high-heeled red slippers, and a pair of long, gold, antique Spanish earrings. Outrageous as this might have been on her heavy, uncorseted body and with her hair as ungroomed as ever, in an odd, raffish way, of which she had never quite lost the secret, it had a kind of smartness.

‘Not at all,’ Basil said primly. ‘I remember you perfectly.’

Kit, looking excited and shy, though determined to show neither feeling, made a great fuss of Clare. He might almost have had no interest in Laura at all. Smiling at it, she exchanged an understanding glance with Fanny. The two of them went upstairs together to the room that had been made ready for Laura.