Joy and Josephine (36 page)

But after his guests had gone, and three floors below the doors slammed and the cars revved up and left Mount Street to silence – what then?

Alexander had gone to bed. Rodney did not keep him up unless he were bringing someone home to supper after the theatre. Lady, the yellow Pekinese, had retired, too, on to her damask cushion and Rodney knew better than to wake her for company. He took some more brandy and sat in the arm-chair which knew his short-legged, unathletic figure like a glove. He looked at the radiogram and wondered whether it was worthwhile getting up to put on the Sibelius Second Symphony. It would mean getting up again in half an hour to turn over the eight records if he wanted to finish the symphony. He looked at the bookcase at least two yards away, and wished that he had chosen a book before he sat down. It was only half-past eleven and he never went to bed before the Empire clock under its glass dome tinkled half-past twelve. He ran his life to a strict time-table, thus
giving himself the illusion of having a full enough day to justify his existence.

At a quarter-past eight, Alexander waked him with tea, two Bath Olivers, and the
Daily Telegraph,
laid out his clothes, and ran his bath. At half-past eight, Rodney shaved, bathed, dressed as far as his waistcoat and put on a dressing-gown for breakfast. Over coffee, a boiled egg, two slices of toast and the marmalade which Rodney imagined was made especially for him, since the grocer sent it in unlabelled earthenware jars, he read his letters and skimmed the surface of
The Times.
Then Alexander brushed him off and sent him out with Lady to the Park. Back at the flat, he exchanged Lady for
The Times
and issued forth again to visit one or two shops or ‘little men’ who might be making or procuring something for him. The kind of shops and little men whom Rodney patronized, although they spoke of ‘the esteemed favour of your custom’, gave the impression that the esteem was due to them for consenting to oblige you. Then to the Club to finish
The Times,
a drink with someone there, and a taxi to keep one of the lunch appointments with which he assiduously filled his diary each week. Alexander did not like him to be in to lunch, except on Sundays, when if he were in town, Rodney always gave one of his little Sunday lunches, with Alexander’s famous Yorkshire pudding and sweet jam omelette.

After lunch, a deck-chair in the Park if fine, or an arm-chair in the Club if wet or cold. A picture gallery, an auction, the cinema, or a little shopping, and then it was time for tea at the flat, the evening paper, a drink, a bath and changing for whatever evening he had arranged for himself. A blank space in his diary or an engagement cancelled at the last minute filled him with horror. He would telephone everyone he knew, even those he did not much like, sooner than dine alone, with Alexander solicitous but subtly reproachful of his master as a social outcast. Bed at half-past twelve with an apple, for he still had nearly all his teeth, or if he were on a late party, half-past one or two at the latest. Rodney often left a night club, like Cinderella, because it was his bedtime. He was too old for youthful abandon, too young for middle-aged doggery. A party was
an item in his routine, never a delightfully reprehensible oblivion for which it was worth while paying the price next morning.

Work? But of course he went two or three times a week to the office of the family tobacco business which provided his income. He would read and dictate a few letters, sign anything he was given, and hang about rather wistfully for as long as he was allowed, talking to busy people, getting in the way, trying to make his brother Ned come out to lunch, warning him of gastric ulcers if he persisted in his beer and sandwich habit.

‘Another time, old boy,’ Ned would say, persuading him towards his bowler hat and umbrella, ‘and you really needn’t bother to come in again this week. Look in again next week in case anything comes up.’ Ned did not mind doing all the work of the business. He liked work, and he got on with it much better on his own. Rodney maintained the tone of the family, while Ned maintained its fortunes, and its posterity, for he had one son and two daughters, and a conscientious wife at Weybridge who would not rest until she had another son.

His brother’s family were also part of Rodney’s routine. Ned and Frances dined with him once a week on their cook’s night out, and on Sunday evenings Rodney went to Weybridge by hired car, which he preferred to the trouble of owning one. He took his nephew and nieces to the circus on Boxing Day, and to a box at the pantomime on New Year’s Eve.

That was the pattern of Rodney Cope’s life, and if it did no particular good to anyone, it did nobody any harm. Although it had made him spoiled and egocentric, you could not help liking him, for he was invariably good tempered, and underneath the sybaritic layers with which the world and the flesh had padded him, was the core of a really kind man. He would help anyone who asked him, and he would have helped many more if he had not been too out of touch with the needy to understand who needed helping and how.

He was fond, though nervous, of Ned’s children, gave them costly birthday and Christmas presents and extravagant tips each term, and kept up his subscription to Lord’s not only
because of the Eton and Harrow match but to provide rover tickets for the boy.

He would have liked to see more of the children, if only he had known how to entertain them. When they came to the flat, they spent most of the time at the end of the passage with Alexander.

Sipping and smoking to-night and swinging a dangling pump, waiting in a vacuum of physical well-being for bedtime, Rodney did not know whether to be pleased or irritated when the bell rang. He liked people to drop in on their way home, but it was a long way to the front door.

Jo thought he was the butler. Titled people surely never answered the door themselves, and a baronet’s butler might easily be wearing a maroon velvet dinner jacket.

She was very tired. She had been wearing the same clothes for two days and two nights, both stockings were laddered and the white gloves in which she had been going out to dinner with Felix McOsterburg were too dirty to do more than waggle. She had left her hat somewhere between Bolt Bay and King’s Lynn, but she had done her hair and face in the train to London, and was able now to produce the voice with which she had dazzled the Moores.

‘May I speak to Sir Rodney Cope, please?’ She gave his name an intricate diphthong vowel.

‘I don’t see why not. Actually, you are.’

‘Oh, are you him?’ Jo was a little disappointed. Matron Tillings had talked of a young soldier, a wounded war hero. Even allowing for the passage of years, she had expected a more glamorous figure.

In the drawing-room, perching warily on a brocade chair, she studied him while he mixed a drink for them both at the Chinese lacquer cabinet which lit up when the doors opened to display a profusion of bottles and sparkling glass. She saw a man in the late forties, not stout, but fleshy with years of good food and drink that no exercise had whittled away. His head and his bland, small-pored face resembled an Easter Sunday breakfast egg painted to look human, with thinning, old-gold
hair carefully arranged over the top. His inadequate-looking feet and small fat white hands might have been paws, so soft and light were his tread and touch.

He sat down opposite Jo, but got up again to give her an ashtray, as she flicked cigarette ash on to the carpet after the habit of Denbigh Terrace, where stubs were ground out on the floor among the toast crusts and dogs’ bones.

Rodney hoped she would not stay long. She might be a girl who had come to complain to him of one of his friends, and he did not know how to talk to girls like that; they were too astute for him. She was shy now, and kept clearing her throat with a birdlike movement of her head, but he supposed that once she got started, her voice would be a high-pitched battering ram of grievances that would debilitate him into handing out notes in order to get rid of her.

But when she answered his vague conversational openings, although her accent was affected and the vowels atrocious, somewhere in her voice was a warmth and softness not usually found in the tinny London tones. She was decorative, too, with her square-chinned little face, whose pallor was not pasty but flower-like. Though smudged round with tired shadow, her eyes were a deep and brilliant blue, and her chestnut hair bright against the green brocade chair.

Rodney sighed and recrossed his legs. ‘Well,’ he prompted her, ‘and what can I do for you, young lady?’ She looked so much younger and more ingenuous than the women who usually sat in that chair that he felt like her elderly uncle.

Which then, by devious routes, she proceeded to tell him that he was.

‘I don’t know where to start, really,’ she began. ‘I hadn’t thought …’ She had been through so much since that first terrible revelation in her parents’ flat that it was hard to go back, to begin at the beginning with someone who knew nothing about it. The two days in which she had known the truth were like half a lifetime. She seemed to have been travelling about England for ages, driven here and there by her racking uncertainty, seeing no farther behind her than the end of her security, the toppling moment when she was suddenly not Jo
Abinger; seeing no farther ahead than the answer to her desperate question: ‘Who am I? Who am I?’

She had not paused. Even when she was still, her mind had raced on with the search, but now here was a pause. A barrier of passive luxury stood between her and the man to whom she had run without a second thought. Though Rodney smiled, he was unapproachable. His flat, though not half so smart and modern as Felix McOsterburg’s, was in some indefinable, disconcerting way, even grander.

‘Perhaps I didn’t ought to have come, Sir Rodney,’ she said, ‘but I never thought twice about it. You see – ’ She leaned forward, to shock him into awareness of her,
‘I’ve been to Bolt House!’
She stressed the words as if they were a code between fellow-spies.

‘Bolt House … Bolt House?’ Rodney wrinkled his sloping tract of forehead. ‘What does that imply? Elucidate.’

‘Pardon?’

‘Explain yourself.’

‘Well.’ Jo took a deep breath. ‘You remember twenty years ago, and the babies, and the fire, and your sister’s baby which you thought was dead?’

‘So she was dead,’ he said. ‘Poor little rat. I saw her. Bolt House? Of course, that’s why the name was familiar. But what’s it got to do with you? How do you know about it?’

Jo watched him closely. ‘What would you say if that baby wasn’t dead at all?’

‘She was. I saw her.’ He made the face he used for corked champagne.

‘Well, but
if?’

‘Oh my God.’ Rodney shaded his eyes. ‘Must I answer riddles at this time of night?’ He had a clear, precise voice, the kind in which modern actors speak Restoration comedy: slightly falsetto, unstressed, the R’s trilled, a trace of a lisp, all mute aspirates sounded. Jo had thought him affected at first, but she was already getting used to his voice. It fitted him and his surroundings.

Rodney was getting used to Jo’s voice too. Neither she nor her voice fitted her surroundings, and yet in a striking way, she
gave a touch of movement and colour that improved them. Women like Sheena, all pastel undertones and cat-like stillness blended too well with the room, so that the silver-grey and green décor, designed round the Corot silver birches, became too important, having no competition. With this copper-haired, vividly common girl, the room retreated to its proper status as a background for personality.

Gradually, with many false starts and repetitions and back-to-front incidents, Jo got her story out. She twisted her legs round the chair and pulled at one side of her hair, forgetting to put on an act in her desire to convince him. She did not have to exaggerate, as she usually did when telling any story. The truth of this one was fantastic enough. It was like a nursery tale of the princess brought up among swineherds. It was like a fairy story.

When she had finished, he blew out his cheeks, which made him look like an overfed baby. ‘Lord,’ he said, ‘I don’t know what to think.’ He got up to get them both another drink.

‘You
don’t know what to think!’ cried Jo who, having talked so much was feeling more at home with him. ‘How would you feel if you were me and suddenly found that you weren’t who you thought you were? I know now, though, thanks to that funny old bird in Lynn, and none too soon, either. I’ll never forgive my mother – at least who I thought was my mother – for not telling me.’

‘Perhaps she did it for the best,’ suggested Rodney, turning from the cocktail cabinet. ‘She was afraid it might inhibit you.’

‘It never prohibited me from feeling anything but a misfit in the home she raised me in,’ said Jo belligerently. ‘I see why she never told, because she’d done this about pretending your baby was hers and was afraid it would all come out. I can’t think how you were soft enough to let them get away with it. Couldn’t you see which was your kid?’

‘No, because they were so – My God, I can see them now – quite nauseating. Sorry, my dear, of course one was you, wasn’t it?’ Jo nodded. ‘They told me Joy was dead – well, it was appallingly sad, but for the best in a way, as her parents were dead and no one really wanted the poor little beggar. My mother
was ill then. She never recovered you know; she died fifteen years ago, and the other grandmother wasn’t co-operative because she’d never got on with Rose – my sister.’

‘My mother,’ put in Jo, who was going to miss no opportunity of ramming home her point.

Rodney sucked at his lower lip. ‘I suppose so,’ he said, ‘though the idea takes a bit of getting used to. All this talk about foundlings and crucifixes and cheating – I can’t see what your mother was up to.’

‘Can’t you see? Oh, you are
slow!’
Jo beat the heels of her hands together, the fingers clasped. ‘Because she wanted a baby, specially a well-born baby, though why, when she was only going to raise it in the Porto – ’

‘The
what?’

‘The Porto. The Lane, they call it. It’s a long slum, full of markets and dead cats and pubs people are sick outside, Saturday nights. You don’t mean you’ve never heard of it?’