The Glass Lake (59 page)

         

“I could go to the pictures with you this weekend if you liked, Emmet…”

“Thanks, Anna, but no.”

“Are you sulking?”

“Absolutely not. Remember I said I wouldn't sulk. You said you and I were to be friends, that's what I'm doing.” His smile was bright.

“Well, friends go to the pictures,” Anna complained.

“That's what I said to you, but you said no, it would interfere with what there was between you and Stevie.” Again his glance was innocent.

“Yes, but as it happens Stevie is not going to be here this weekend. He's got to go to Dublin on business.”

Emmet smiled warmly. Kit had begun to do her stuff for him. “But he'll be back of course,” he said in false consolation.

“Yes of course he'll be back,” Anna snapped. “But I thought that since…”

“You weren't asking me to come just because you were at a loose end suddenly?” Emmet shook his head in disbelief. “We're friends, you and I. That wouldn't be the action of a friend. Just using somebody.”

She turned and walked away very fast.

         

“I could get all the things in that bag back to the garage for you, Francis.” Sister Madeleine was being helpful.

“I don't want to give them back, Sister.” He clutched his bag tightly.

“But it would be for the best.” Her voice was gentle.

“They're mine now. They're all I have to help me get away and make a new life.”

“If we gave them back then they might stop looking for you, and you wouldn't have to live up in the tree house…” Her voice trailed away. She knew when she was talking to someone who wasn't listening.

“It's all I have,” he said again, and held the bag close to him.

“What are we going to do with you?” she asked the air around her.

“You said you'd look after me.” He was plaintive now.

“I know I did, and I will.” Sister Madeleine felt less confident than she usually did.

It had always been right to do the things she had done in the past. There had not been a moment of doubt about any of these.

But recently…perhaps she had not been right to save the little blind kitten. Or to keep this mentally ill man here for so long living in her tree house. Should she have just tended his arm that first night and sent a message so that he could be taken into custody? But for Sister Madeleine any uncertainty was impossible. She had to believe in what she was doing and that it was for the best, otherwise her life had no center.

“Very well, I won't force you obviously,” she said.

“Will you still be nice to me?” He had the mind of a child.

“Yes, of course I will.” She dipped a metal mug into the pot over the fire and gave him soup. “Will you want to go and look around…for a new life?” she asked him.

“Yes I will, soon,” he said.

“Perhaps I should cut your hair for you, make you look more…” Sister Madeleine paused. What was the word she was looking for? “Normal”? “Noncriminal”?

But he nodded eagerly. “Please Sister, that would be good.”

She tied a cloth around his neck as if she were running a barber's shop and trimmed his hair, his eyebrows, and his beard. He looked far less frightening, far more ordinary, nearly normal in fact.

“When you go out, Francis, if they see you with that bag they still might put two and two together.”

“I could leave it here, Sister, for a bit.”

“You'll be back, then?”

“Well, I will. I'll come back and tell you when I get settled. I think I'll just take the money.”

“Francis, might you not be better to…?”

“I'll trust you, Sister, like you trusted me. You were never afraid of me, I'd not be afraid of you either.”

She gave him her hand even though her heart was troubled.

“That's right, Francis, you can trust me. In a world full of people you don't know about you can rely on me.” And she was rewarded by the big and foolish smile of a slow child. A child in a big, strong man's body.

“I wish we had a car,” Louis grumbled as they were getting dressed.

“Let's get one, then.”

“Easy to say.” He spent a time fixing his tie.

“Easy to do. We haven't bought a house, we've no mortgage, no children. What are we saving for?”

“We're not saving much,” he said.

Which in Louis's case was true. But he didn't know how carefully Lena put away money. How her account in the Building Society was mounting, how shares in Millar's were increasing every year.

“Well, let's see how much you could afford a month,” Lena began.

“Not much.”

“I'll see if I can raise a deposit. You know, get it a bit as a perk from my work.”

“Could you?” Louis looked at her, his eyes were alight.

For a man so clever at deceiving, at attracting people, and knowing what a customer in a hotel might want, he was remarkably innocent and naive about other things. It didn't even occur to him to inquire why Mr. Millar might give her a car allowance since she lived five minutes away from her job and went there on foot every morning.

“Yes, it's a possibility, isn't it,” he agreed.

“So this is the last time we head out for the Home Counties by train,” she laughed.

“I love you, Lena,” he said, and came across to kiss her as she sat at a smaller mirror in a poorer light, fixing her earrings. He hadn't noticed that there was new color in her hair, but he did think she looked well.

Grace's salon had come up trumps again.

The taxi driver at the station said he knew the road. “That's where the nobs live,” he said.

“Great,” Louis said. “We wouldn't want to be going anywhere downmarket.” He had such an infectious way with him.

The driver, in his shabby coat and his nicotine-stained fingers, who would never be allowed inside the gates of these houses unless he was driving a taxi, seemed pleased and enthusiastic. That was Louis all over, he made other people glad that he was around.

James Williams was divorced, Lena knew. But he had a friend, a lady who had great designs on being the next Mrs. Williams, Louis had said.

“Will she?” Lena had wanted to know.

“No, I think he's too clever for that.” Louis had smiled.

Lena smiled too. How innocent of Louis to admit to her that a clever man avoided marriage, commitment of any kind. As if she didn't know already that this was his view.

James Williams was delighted to see them. A kiss on each cheek for Lena. “You look younger every day.”

“You're too kind.”

“No, I mean it. Come in, come in and meet everyone…Laura, come here and meet Lena Gray.”

Laura was hard as nails. Shiny red lipstick, shiny metallic black hair, a satin blouse with a sheen and a tight black shiny skirt. Her shoes were patent-leather high heels. She looked as if she had been polished and burnished. “The famous Mrs. Gray,” she said, looking Lena up and down.

“Ah no, it's my husband who's the famous one in the hotel business.”

“James always brings your name into the conversation…if I didn't know better I'd think he fancied you…”

James Williams had turned to welcome Louis.

Lena looked at Laura long and hard. “But you know better.”

“Oh I know better.” She paused. Her eyes flickered over toward Louis and away again. Lena thought she was going to say that she realized Lena had a very fanciable man of her own. But she wasn't looking at it from that point of view. “I know better, because if James had fancied you he'd have done something about it.”

“And what's your second name, Laura?”

“Why on earth do you ask?” Laura looked at her as if Lena had committed the greatest social faux pas of all time.

But Lena had not been idle in her years of dealing with people through Millar's Agency. She was not easily put down. “Because it wasn't given to me,” she said in the coolest tones possible.

Their eyes held each other.

“Evans,” she said eventually.

Did James Williams sense the mood? Or was it by pure coincidence that he turned and placed an arm on each of their shoulders. “Now let me take my two favorite ladies to meet the rest of the guests.”

Lena didn't look at Laura, but she knew that in this unexpected and unimportant battle that had suddenly flamed up she, Lena, had most definitely won.

They had never been to a party like this before, but Lena knew how it was going to turn out. She could see from the outset the two women who would vie for Louis's attention. And she knew now which would win.

Let them fight it out. Let him ply one with plates of tiny cocktail sausages on colored sticks, let him fill the other's glass. Let him laugh, delighted, into both their eager faces. That was part of the fun. This was probably the only fun.

Lena pretended the party was a conference. She told the stockbrokers and their wives that she worked in an employment agency. She refused to give business cards; it was a party in someone's house. But she did say the name Millar's so often that nobody would have forgotten it. She advised them about their daughters, their mature, unmarried, own hopeless office staff, none of whom could spell “sincerely” or “faithfully” so all letters had to end simply “yours.”

And as she moved talking animatedly but not stridently she knew people were interested in her. A groomed, handsome woman in charge of her own life, unaware or possibly indifferent to the fact that her handsome husband was being overtly flirtatious with two of the other guests. And Lena knew that the eyes of James Williams were on her all night.

And that Laura Evans who might never be Laura Williams was drinking far too much and far too quickly. Already there was a stain down the shiny cream satin blouse, a stain that looked ugly and out of character with the elegant woman who should have been acting as a hostess for James tonight.

It was only when everyone had gone that Laura seemed to remember any hostess duties. “Better clear up all this mess,” she grumbled, staggering toward a table with glasses on it.

“Leave it, Laura. It'll all be done.”

“I don't mind. I do stay here. I don't want the place looking like bedlam.” She looked at Lena to make sure the part about staying here wasn't lost.

“Yes, well. Everyone's staying here…” James was easy. “Let's have a last drink and a postmortem.”

But Laura was having none of it. She lurched toward the glasses and missed her footing then fell, spilling dregs of wine and splintering some of them on the floor.

“Now will you leave it, Laura.” James was exasperated, as you might be with a small child, but not angry.

“I'll pick them up, let me.”

“Maybe it'd be better to wait for the daylight,” Lena suggested mildly. “Easier to see all the little bits of glass then, than in the artificial light.”

“I can see perfectly well,” Laura said, and fell, cutting herself on both palms on the broken glass.

Lena took her to the kitchen and silently picked the particles of glass from Laura's hands. Then she dabbed the cuts with TCP. “There, you're fine now,” she said eventually.

“Stop being so bloody patronizing,” Laura said.

“She means thank you very much,” James said.

“I meant stop being so bloody patronizing,” Laura said.

“Those look very slight, but they can sting a lot,” Lena said, referring to the marks on Laura's hands.

“You're a proper pain in the arse,” Laura said, flouncing to the door. “No wonder he never made a move on you, Lena Gray. You were too po-faced. You'd have frozen him out of it.”

“Good night, Laura,” James Williams said coldly.

They sat by the fire the three of them. They talked about the party, the neighbors, the things people had said about
Room at the Top
. Some had thought it very vulgar, others had said it was realistic about England at last. They talked about Cliff Richard and Yves Saint Laurent. “Would many of the guests have met either of them?” Louis asked his boss respectfully.

Lena knew that Louis realized, just as she did herself, that nobody visiting this house had ever been within an ass's roar of either Cliff Richard, or Yves Saint Laurent, who had shortened skirts again. But she said nothing. It was part of Louis's charm to look innocent and vulnerable when it mattered.

What she found a little uneasy-making was the way James Williams caught her eye. It was as if he understood not only the crassness of Laura Evans, who would, after tonight, never become Mrs. Laura Williams, but also the naiveté of Louis Gray, who would never in a million years be as smart as his wife, Lena.

It was an awkward moment. Lena let her glance fall to the floor. “Well, do you think…?” Louis suggested.

“You must be exhausted, James…how lovely to have met all your friends,” Lena said.