She Came Back (8 page)

Pelham Trent was, as Mr. Codrington had called him, a very pleasant fellow. Lyndall Armitage certainly found him so. He dropped in as often as he could at Lilla Jocelyn’s flat, and Lilla was delighted to see him come. As she said to Milly Armitage, “They are just friends. At least, that’s all it is with her—I’m not so sure about him. But it’s exactly what she wants just now—someone to take her out and make her feel she matters.”

Lyn went out with Pelham Trent. She found him a most agreeable companion and the best of hosts. It was better than sitting at home and feeling as if your world had come to an end. When you felt like that, the thing to do was to get into somebody else’s world as quickly as you could. It was her world which had crashed—hers and Philip’s. Perhaps Anne’s too. But Pelham Trent’s world kept its steady orbit. It was a safe, cheerful world in which you could laugh and have a good time—dance, see a film, a play, or a cabaret, and put off for as long as possible the return to the cold, shattered place where your own warm world had been.

They did not always go out. Sometimes they stayed in Lilla’s charming drawing-room and talked. Sometimes he played to them. Those rather square hands of his with the strong, blunt fingers were quite extraordinarily agile on the keys of the Steinway baby grand. He would sit there playing one thing after another whilst the two girls listened. When the time came to say good-night he would hold Lyndall’s hand for a moment and say, “Did you like it?” Sometimes she would say, “Yes,” and sometimes she would only look, because when she felt deeply she never found it at all easy to translate her feelings into words. Except with Philip, who nearly always knew what she was thinking, and so, because no words were needed, they came quite easily.

Music let her into a world which was neither hers nor Pelham Trent’s, though his playing was the gate through which she entered it. It was a world where feeling and emotion were sublimated until they possessed nothing except beauty, where sorrow spent itself in music and loss was solaced. She came back from this world rested and refreshed.

After all Milly Armitage did not stay on at Jocelyn’s Holt. It was not in her to refuse what Philip asked, but she had never responded to any of her sister-in-law Cotty Armitage’s not infrequent appeals with more alacrity. Cotty enjoyed poor health. For twenty-five years or so she had had recurring attacks to which no doctor had ever been able to give a name. They involved the maximum of trouble to her family with the minimum of discomfort to herself. She had worn a husband into his grave, two daughters into matrimony, and the third to the brink of a breakdown. It was when Olive appeared likely to go over this brink that Cotty took up pen and paper and invited her dearest Milly to visit them. And Milly, incurably soft-hearted, invariably went.

“Of course what she really wants is for someone to pour a hogshead of cold water over her.”

“Then why don’t you?” said Lilla, with whom she was lunching on her way through London.

“Couldn’t lift it, my dear. But someone ought to. Every time I go there I make up my mind to tell her she’s a selfish slave-driver, and that Olive is simply going down the drain, but I don’t do it.”

“Why don’t you?”

“Olive wouldn’t thank me, for one thing. That’s the awful part of that kind of slave-driving—in the worst cases the victim doesn’t even want to be free. Olive’s like that. You know, Lyndall only just got away in time. She was two years with Cotty after her father and mother died. They were killed together in a motor accident when she was nine and it nearly did her in. She’s sensitive, you know—no armour-plating. Things aren’t awfully easy for people like that. You’re an angel to have her, Lilla.”

“I love having her, Aunt Milly.”

Milly Armitage crumbled her bread in a wasteful manner. Lord Woolton would not have approved, nor would Milly herself if she had noticed what she was doing, but she did not. She wanted to say something to Lilla, but she didn’t know how to set about it. She could be warm, generous, and endlessly kind, but she couldn’t be tactful. She sat there in her baggy mustard tweeds with her hair rather wild and her hat at a rollicking angle and crumbled her bread.

Lilla, in a yellow jumper and a short brown skirt, had that air of having just come out of a bandbox which seems to be the birthright of American women. Her dark curls shone. Everything about her was just right both for herself and the occasion. There was a perfect ordered elegance which appeared as natural as it is in a hummingbird or a flower. Through it all, like the scent of the flower and the song of the bird, there came that friendly warmth which was all her own. She laughed a little now.

“Why don’t you just say it, Aunt Milly, without bothering how?”

Milly Armitage’s frown relaxed. A wide rueful smile showed her excellent teeth.

“I might as well, mightn’t I? I can’t see any good in beating about the bush myself, but people seem to expect it somehow. My mother always said I just blurted things out, and so I do. If they’re pleasant, what’s the good of wrapping them up? And if they’re not, well, it’s a good thing to get them off your chest and out of the way. So there it is—Philip and Anne are coming up to town. It’s too much for him going up and down every day. He said so at dinner one evening, and Anne went up to town next day and took a flat. If you ask me, that wasn’t at all what he meant, but he couldn’t very well say anything. She did it in the most tactful way of course. Not being built that way myself, I don’t awfully admire people being tactful—there’s something soapy about it. You know— voice well kept down—gentle—hesitating. She hoped he’d be pleased. She’d been thinking what a bore that going up and down would be in the winter, and when she heard of this flat it seemed too good a chance to lose. They wouldn’t hold it open—someone else was after it—all that kind of thing.” She screwed up her face in an apologetic way. “There—I’ve no business to talk about her like that, have I? But I never did like her, and I never shall.”

Lilla sat with her chin in her hand looking across the table, her puzzled brown eyes just touched with a smile.

“Why don’t you like her, Aunt Milly?”

“I don’t know—-I just don’t. She’s a disaster for Philip— she always was—but they might have shaken down together if there hadn’t been this break. But when a man has just begun to realize that he’s made the wrong marriage, and then for three and a half years he thinks he’s got free of it, what do you imagine he’s going to feel like when he finds he’s up to his neck in it again. Even without his having got so fond of Lyn.”

“Is he fond of Lyn?” The brown eyes were very deeply troubled.

Milly Armitage nodded.

“I suppose that’s one of the things I oughtn’t to say. But it’s true. And there wasn’t anything wrong about it until Anne turned up. Lyn is just right for him, and he is just right for her. What do you suppose he is feeling like? I tell you I’m glad to be getting away to Cotty, and I can’t put it stronger than that. You see, the worst part of it is that they’re both trying quite desperately hard—I’ve never seen people trying harder. Anne is trying to get him back by being all the things she was never meant to be. It gives me pins and needles all over to watch her being gentle, and considerate, and tactful, and Philip being controlled and polite. He feels he’s got to make up for not having recognized her at first, but it’s all against the grain. If they’d snap at each other, or have a good red-hot, tearing row, it would be a relief—but they just go on trying.”

“It sounds horrid,” said Lilla in a distressed voice.

Milly Armitage made the face which she had been forbidden to make when she was ten years old. It made her look quite extraordinarily like a frog, and conveyed better than any number of words the discomfort of the Jocelyn ménage. Then she said,

“It’s going to be very hard on Lyn having them in town. She is devoted to Anne—at least she was. I don’t know how much of it’s left now, but she’ll think she ought to be, and it will tear her to pieces. They’re bound to meet. I don’t think Anne knows anything—I don’t think it would occur to her. She thinks about Lyn as she was before the war—just a little school-girl who had a crush on her. And Lyn won’t give anything away. She’ll make herself go and see Anne and be friends with her because she’ll think that’s the right thing to do, and if she feels a thing is right she’ll do it. She’s got no armour—she’ll get horribly hurt. And I can’t bear her to be hurt—that’s why I’m saying all this.”

“Yes?”

Milly Armitage put out her hand impulsively.

“That’s why I was so glad to hear about Pelham Trent. I don’t mean that I want anything serious to come of it—he’s a bit old for her.”

“He doesn’t seem old.”

“About thirty-seven, I should say. But that doesn’t matter. It’s a perfect godsend to have someone to admire her, to take her about, to take up her time. I don’t suppose anything will come of it, but she likes him, and he’ll help to tide her over a bit of bad going.”

The conversation ended as it had begun, with Pelham Trent.

Miss Nellie Collins settled herself in the corner of an empty third-class carriage..She hoped someone else would get in— someone nice. She never really cared about travelling in an empty carriage, because of course there was always the chance of someone getting in who was not really nice. When she was a little girl she had heard a story about a lunatic who got into a train with a friend of her Aunt Chrissie and made her eat carrots and turnips all the way from Swindon to Bristol. Her Aunt Chrissie’s friend had a very severe nervous breakdown after this experience, and though it had happened at least fifty years ago, and this local train from Blackheath to Waterloo stopped much too frequently to give a lunatic any real scope, Miss Nellie preferred to be on the safe side. She sat up very straight in her best coat and skirt, her Sunday hat, and the fur necktie which she kept for great occasions because it was beginning to shed a little, and you couldn’t tell how long it would have to last with fur the dreadful price it was now. The coat and skirt was of rather a bright shade of blue, because when Nellie Collins was young someone had told her that she ought to dress to match her eyes. He had married somebody else, but she remained perseveringly attached to the colour. Her hat, it was true, was black. She had been brought up to consider a black hat ladylike, but it boasted a blue ribbon which didn’t quite match the coat and skirt, and a little bunch of flowers which did. Under the rather wide brim her hair stuck out in a faded frizz which had once been the colour of corn, but was now as old and dusty-looking as August stubble. When she was a girl she had had one of those apple-blossom complexions, but there was nothing left of it now. Only her eyes were still astonishingly blue.

Just as she was beginning to think that no one was going to get in, some half dozen people came past the porter who was inspecting tickets. Two of them were men. They walked straight across the platform and into the nearest compartment. Miss Collins heaved a sigh of relief. She thought they had a jovial appearance, and that one of them was not quite steady upon his feet. There remained a heavily built woman with two children, and a small upright figure in a black cloth jacket with a fur collar which had seen better days.

The family party followed the two men into the train, but the little woman in the dowdy coat came on. Miss Collins hoped very much that she would get in with her. She even loosened the catch of the door and allowed something that was almost a smile to relax her features. And all at once there was the door opening, and just as the train began to move, the lady in black got in and settled herself in the opposite corner. As she did so she met Miss Collins’ sympathetic gaze and heard her say, “Oh dear, you very nearly missed the train!”

The lady who had got in was Miss Maud Silver. Her original occupation had been that of a governess, and she still looked the part, but for a good many years now her neat professional card had carried in one corner the words Private Investigations. It was part of her business to be a good mixer. She owed no small measure of her success to the fact that people found her astonishingly easy to talk to. She neither repelled by stiffness nor alarmed by gush. If there is a middle way between these two extremes, it could be said that she pursued it equably. She now produced a mild but friendly response and remarked that it was always very annoying to miss a train—“but my watch is out of order, and I had to depend upon my niece’s dining-room clock, which is not, I am afraid, quite as reliable as she gave me to understand.”

This was exactly the kind of opening which Miss Collins could be trusted not to neglect.

“You have been staying with a niece? How very pleasant.”

Miss Silver shook her head. She was wearing a pre-war black felt hat, but the ribbon had been renewed, and the bunch of pansies had only done one winter.

“Not visiting,” she said. “I came down to lunch, and I should have been very sorry to miss this train, as I have a tea engagement in London.”

Miss Collins gazed at her with envy. Lunch with a niece, and then a tea engagement—how gay it sounded!

“How very pleasant,” she repeated. “I have often thought how nice it would be to have nieces to go and see, but there was only my sister and myself in our family, and neither of us married.”

Miss Silver coughed.

“Marriage can be a very happy state, but it can also be a very unhappy one.”

“But it must be very nice to have nieces. Not such a responsibility as children, if you know what I mean, but near enough to make you feel you’ve got something of your own.”

Miss Silver’s smile was restrained. If it had been her niece Ethel Burkett whom she had been visiting, she would have responded rather more warmly, but she had always inclined to the belief that Gladys was spoiled, and her visit today had done nothing to alter this opinion. Younger than Ethel and a good deal prettier, she was also considerably better off, having married a widower twice her age with an excellent practice as a solicitor. She could not, of course, say so to a stranger, but in the privacy of her own thoughts Miss Silver did not consider Gladys a great deal more dependable than her dining-room clock. And she had allowed herself to be patronizing about Ethel and Ethel’s husband, who was a bank manager, and Ethel’s children, to whom Miss Silver was deeply attached. She opened her handbag now and took out the sensible grey stocking she was knitting for Johnny Burkett.

“Of course,” said Miss Collins, “in a way it’s a responsibility bringing up children, whether they’re your own relations or not. There was a little girl my sister and I brought up, and if she were alive I might be going up to see her— very much as if she were my niece, as you might say.”

Miss Silver looked discreetly sympathetic.

“She died?”

“I suppose she did.” Miss Collins’ tone was a hesitant one. A little flush came up on to her cheekbones. “You see, my sister and I had a very refined little business—I have it still— fancy work, with a few toys and calendars at Christmas. We had the whole house, and when my mother died we let off the first floor—very nice quiet people with a little girl between three and four—no trouble at all. And we got fond of the child—you know how it is. And when Mrs. Joyce died—well, what could we do? We couldn’t turn poor Mr. Joyce out— really quite crushed he was. And it came, as you may say, to our bringing Annie up. I suppose people talked, but Carrie was a good bit older than me, and after all—well, you’ve got to be human, haven’t you? And there wasn’t any of his grand relations came bothering about him when he was left like that.”

Miss Silver’s needles clicked, the stocking revolved at a great rate. Her eyes had an attentive expression. When Miss Collins paused she was encouraged to proceed by a sympathetic “Dear me!”

“Never came near him,” said Nellie Collins with emphasis. “Always talking about them, he was, because, you see, if his father had done the right thing by his mother, he’d have been a baronet with a fine estate instead of a clerk in a shipping-office, and you’d have thought those that came in for it instead of him would have taken a bit of interest—but not they. Twelve years he had our first floor, and believe it or not, no one ever came near him—not in the way of a relation, if you know what I mean, and not until the breath was out of his body.”

“Someone came down after his death?”

Miss Collins tossed her head.

“A cousin she said she was.”

Miss Silver gave her slight cough.

“Miss Theresa Jocelyn, I presume.”

“Oh!” said Miss Collins with a kind of gasp. “Oh! I never said—I’m sure I never dreamed—”

Miss Silver smiled.

“You mentioned the name of Joyce, and you called the little girl Annie. You must forgive me if I could not help putting two and two together. The papers have been full of Lady Jocelyn’s return after being mourned as dead for three and a half years, and the fact that the person buried in her name was an illegitimate connection of the family who had been adopted by Miss Theresa Jocelyn, and whose name was Annie Joyce.”

Miss Collins was very much taken aback.

“I’m sure I would never have said a word if I’d thought— the name must have just slipped out. I wouldn’t have had it happen for the world—after I’d passed my word and all!”

“After you had passed your word?”

Miss Collins nodded.

“To the gentleman that rang me up and made the appointment for Lady Jocelyn. He didn’t say who he was, and I’ve been wondering if it was Sir Philip—because of course you read about baronets, but I’ve never spoken to one that I know of, unless it was him.”

Miss Silver was giving her the most flattering attention.

“Pray, what did he say?”

“Well, you see, I wrote to Lady Jocelyn—I hope you don’t think it was pushing of me—”

“I am sure you would never be pushing.”

Miss Collins nodded in a gratified manner.

“Well, I thought I had a right to, after bringing Annie up.”

“What did you say?”

“I wrote and told her who I was, and I said I’d like to come and see her if she’d let me, because of hearing anything there was to hear about poor Annie, and of course I was looking for an answer and wondering what she would say. And then there was this gentleman ringing up. I had the telephone put in when my sister was ill, and the lady who has the first floor now pays half of it, so it isn’t such a great expense, and ever since Carrie died I won’t say it hasn’t been company, knowing you can ring a friend up if you want to. So I put the telephone number on the top of my letter, and he rang up like I told you. But he didn’t give any name—only said Lady Jocelyn would see me, and would I be under the clock at Waterloo Station at a quarter to four and hold a newspaper in my left hand so that she would recognize me.”

The newspaper was folded neatly beside her. Miss Silver’s eyes went to it for a moment and then returned to Miss Collins’ face. She was really showing the most gratifying attention.

“And of course, as I told him, that wasn’t necessary at all, because if Lady Jocelyn is anything nearly as like poor Annie as she must be for Sir Philip to have made a mistake between them, why, I should recognize her the very first minute she came in sight. And he said, ‘Oh, would you?’ and I said, ‘Indeed I would, because one of the papers had a picture of Lady Jocelyn, and I’d have known it anywhere.’ From the likeness to Annie, you know—the very same identical features, and that’s a thing that doesn’t change. Right from the time I took her over when she was five years old Annie had those features. You know, some little girls, they change a lot—fat one year and thin the next, so that you’d hardly know them. But not Annie—features, that’s what she’d got, and features don’t change. And Lady Jocelyn’s got them too. So I said to the gentleman, ‘Well, I’ll carry that paper, though it isn’t necessary, because I’d know her anywhere.’ ”

Miss Silver continued to gaze in that interested manner.

“What did he say to that?”

Nellie Collins leaned forward. She was enjoying herself. Her life was a lonely one. She missed Carrie very much. Mrs. Smithers who occupied her first-floor rooms had always got plenty to say, but she never wanted to listen. She had eight children, all married and in different parts of the world, so that the steady stream of family news never ran dry—births, illnesses, engagements, accidents, promotions, fatalities, christenings, funerals, fortunate and unfortunate occurrences, prizes won at school, the total wreck of a business, a son-in-law’s disastrous pre-occupation with a strip-tease artist—there was never any end to it, and Nellie sometimes found it a little daunting. It was balm to pour out her own tale to this quiet, interested lady who seemed to desire nothing better than to listen.

The train had already stopped more than once, but no one had entered the compartment. She leaned forward in a confidential manner and said,

“Well, he asked me whether the picture was a lot like Annie, and I said yes it was. And he said did I think I’d have known the two of them apart—that is, Lady Jocelyn and Annie, you know—and I said not in a picture, I mightn’t, but if I was to see either of them I’d know fast enough. He said, ‘How?’ and I said, ‘Well, that’s telling!’ So he laughed and said, ‘Well, you can tell Lady Jocelyn when you see her.’ A very pleasant gentleman he sounded, and I wondered if it was Sir Philip. Do you think it could have been?”

Miss Silver coughed.

“I really could not say.”

It would have pleased Nellie Collins to be encouraged in the idea that she had spoken to a baronet. She felt a little disappointed, and went on talking to make up for it.

“I thought it might have been. Perhaps I could ask Lady Jocelyn when I see her. Do you think I could do that?”

“Oh, yes.”

“I think it must have been really, because of his asking me whether I had told anyone I had written, and asking me not to tell anyone I was coming up to meet her. He said they had had a dreadful time with reporters. That sounds as if it might have been Sir Philip—doesn’t it?”

The grey stocking revolved briskly. Miss Silver said,

“Yes.”

“So of course I promised I wouldn’t say a word to anyone, and I haven’t—not even to Mrs. Smithers. That’s the lady I’ve got in my first-floor rooms now—the same the Joyces used to have. She’s all right, but you can’t get from it she’s a talker, and things do get round.”

“They do indeed. I think you were very wise not to talk about it.” Miss Silver coughed. “You said just now that you were quite sure you could always have told Annie Joyce from Lady Jocelyn. Did you mean, I wonder, that there was some distinguishing mark—something that would identify Miss Joyce beyond a doubt?”

Nellie Collins moved her head in a way that might have been meant for a nod if it had ever got so far. Whatever it was, she checked it, pursed up her lips, and sat back. After a moment she said,

“I didn’t say anything about that.”

“Oh, no—of course not. I was only thinking how difficult a positive identification might be. The papers have been very discreet, but it seems to me that the family were not immediately convinced that it was Lady Jocelyn who had returned to them. In that case any special knowledge which you possessed might be very important.”