The New Moon with the Old (9 page)

Deflated, Merry ordered a couple.

While waiting for them, she sustained a shock. Staring at her from the looking-glass behind the counter was a very
different girl from the one seen in Daurene’s discreetly lit cubicle. By the crude light of day the copper cap was … well, very highly burnished copper. However, it still pleased her; what did not was her face. Mavis still lingered blue of eyelid, plastered with powder and flaunting a lipstick which gave the impression that her mouth had been dyed with her hair. Abandoning teenage conversation as a dead loss, Merry hurried to the Ladies’ Room and did what she could to improve matters, which wasn’t much; a complete cleansing was needed and a new, very tactful make-up. Copper cap undoubtedly called for discretion.

The sandwiches proved to be stodgy but she wolfed them down, drank a glass of milk, paid her bill and asked the way to the station. Only ten minutes walk, she was thankful to hear – though what she was going to do for two hours she couldn’t imagine, burdened as she was with her suitcase.

The High Street was now crowded with shoppers. Wandering along, she remembered her first impression of it. How changed everything was now! The shops still looked bright but their brightness was normal; gone was that
early-morning
clarity of vision. For a few moments she regretted it, tried to hold it in the mind’s eye. Then she began
window-shopping
. There were so many things she needed as a grown-up but she didn’t dare spend any money – not after Daurene’s little bill.

It was only one o’clock when she reached the end of the High Street and came to a small, cobbled square; a market square undoubtedly, but there was no market today. She was attracted by a porticoed, eighteenth-century building, on the upper storey of which were incised the words ‘Assembly Rooms’. Inspection showed that the place was now used as Auction Rooms. A poster announcing a sale had a strip pasted over it saying ‘On View Today’. The doors stood open revealing a large collection of second-hand furniture. Well,
to go in would pass the time – and one could find something to sit on.

Never could she have believed that so many hideous things could be gathered together under one roof. As well as deplorable furniture there were pictures and pottery, bundles of bedding, carpets, draperies, old gas-stoves and oil-stoves. She began to play a game; she would win it if she could find one thing she would have accepted as a gift. Absurdly – and though she knew it was absurd she felt it quite strongly – failing to win would be unlucky.

There must be something! Looking up at the gallery which tan round the room she saw a table loaded with books. Surely among so many … But it was still no good. She read title after title. Sermons, books about chemistry, mathematics, agriculture … Well, she would walk right round the gallery.

And in a corner she found it: a rosewood sofa, upholstered in faded moss-green brocade. She wouldn’t have paid for it but as a gift – yes, she could consider the game won. Gratefully, she sat down.

Still nearly an hour to waste, even if she got to the station early. She leaned back and put her feet up. This was the kind of one-ended sofa that invalids in old novels spent so much time on. How quiet this place was! She had seen only one person, a man working in an office.

Strange to think of people dancing here – poor Assembly Rooms, now filled with junk. Antique furniture was romantic; junk just depressing. But would junk turn into antiques in, say, a hundred years? No, not most of the junk here – for one thing, it wouldn’t last long enough; as well as being hideous it was badly made. But this was a pleasant little sofa. She wondered if it had belonged to people who came to dances here, girls in Jane Austen dresses, or crinolines. What would they think of her thick white sweater, her short, boldly checked skirt? Then and now … fascinating to think about.

Sliding lower on the sofa she stretched her long legs and lay looking up at the delicate mouldings of the ceillng. ‘Don’t go to sleep,’ she warned herself. No fear of that now; she had never felt more wide awake. Surprising, that, when she remembered she had only had that tiny cat-nap in the barn in – how long? She had awakened at eight o’clock yesterday morning, nearly thirty hours ago. She had got out of bed then a mousy-haired schoolgirl and now … It was kind of fate to bring her to Daurene; the morning had been more than well spent. And soon, soon – in not much more than three hours – she would be in London.

How dark it was … she must have forgotten to draw back the curtains before getting into bed. She reached for the switch of her bedside light, failed to find it, failed to find the bedside table, almost overbalanced—

Then it began, the rushing return of memory in a turmoil of bewilderment and fear. She sat bolt upright and swung her legs over the side of the sofa; then restrained herself, grabbing the edge of the sofa as if on a raft from which the waves of surrounding darkness might dislodge her. She must keep still, control herself, think.

Now that she was sitting up, the darkness wasn’t so absolute. She could see the pale shapes of round-topped windows, along the gallery; and at the far end, two slightly brighter windows which must look onto the lights of the market square. People would be there. She would attract their attention, break a window if necessary. She felt in her coat pocket for her torch. As her hand closed on it, a church clock began to strike.

She counted the strokes carefully – and astoundedly, as the count increased. Ten, eleven, twelve! She had slept over ten hours. She raged at herself. But there was no time for that now. Snapping the torch on, she made her way along the crowded gallery to the front windows.

The little cobbled square was entirely deserted, the shops shuttered, the windows above them dark. By the light of one
of the small, old street-lamps she read a signboard on which was painted: J. Birdswell, Seedsman, Established 1760. It seemed to her that the square must have looked much the same when J. Birdswell first set up in business except that the lights inside the old lamps were now electric – and as she noticed this, they all went out.

But surely if she screamed loud enough someone would hear? Perhaps a policeman would patrol the square. She pulled herself up. A policeman was the last person she wanted to meet. And why take it for granted she was irrevocably locked in? Surely she would be able to open some door or some window?

Should she go back to the sofa for her suitcase and handbag? No, they would hamper her. She would get them when she had found some way of escape.

Carefully, she lit herself down the staircase, the foot of which was near to the large front doors. Well, of course they were locked on the outside – she had expected this – and the tall windows that flanked them were unopenable and also barred. She threaded her way along one side of the huge room. All the windows were barred. At last she came to a door which opened. But it only admitted her to a dilapidated cloakroom. Her torch, after shining along a row of pegs, was reflected in the gilt-framed pier-glass above the fire-place. She turned the light on herself and saw her face floating in the darkness … frightening; no more of that.

Exploring further, she saw a marble-topped wash basin; also, through an open door, a mahogany-surrounded lavatory of most antiquated design – but it still worked, she was glad to find. And the cold tap of the basin obliged with a stream of water which issued from the mouth of a china lion’s head. She wondered if the water would be fit to drink and risked a little, from the palm of her hand.

Now she would go on looking for some way out, though where she would go when she got out, she couldn’t imagine.
There would be some hotel but it would be dosed by now. She could bang on the door – but they might refuse to take her in. Why not stay just where she was?

Could she bear it, all the long hours of the night? ‘You will bear what you have to bear,’ she told herself sternly. ‘And serve you damn well right for falling asleep.’ Yes, of course she would stay here. She would go back to her suitcase and have a meal of biscuits and chocolate. And she would take an alarm clock with her; she had noticed several amidst a welter of old saucepans.

Returning to the rosewood sofa had a feeling of
homecoming
. She sat down and experimented with the alarm clock, hastily snapping it off as soon as she had proved it worked. Only a few minutes before, she had longed to draw attention to her plight; now she was determined not to. She used her torch very guardedly and, after finding her biscuits and chocolate, snapped it off. The windows along the gallery seemed lighter now; she guessed that a moon had risen, though no moonlight shone in on her.

She could dimly see the gallery railing. It reminded her of the gallery at Dome House. Not much more than
twenty-four
hours ago, she had stood there taking a last look down. She felt years and years older now, but that was an illusion and a dangerous one. In her letter to Richard she had said: ‘I am older, in myself, than any of you know.’ Was she not, rather, younger than she herself knew? Twice she had fallen asleep on duty and panicked on waking up. She had checked the second panic, but—

An inner voice, her own but weightier, kind but extremely firm, addressed her: ‘It is normal that anyone of your age should need plenty of sleep. You should have known that and been on guard. And there will be other things to be on guard about because you are still so young. Remember, however mentally grown-up you may feel, physically you are only
fourteen and a half. You must learn to think of yourself as an adult in charge of a child.’

The voice ceased – because she was so impressed with its last words. Brilliant! Undoubtedly, she was unusually intelligent – and was she not, at the moment, behaving most shrewdly, turning disaster to advantage, saving the expense of a night at a hotel? And what admirable forethought, to have found an alarm clock and set it for seven a.m.

She also praised herself for not being afraid, in this place of dim shapes and musty smells. She would rather like to see a ghost – or would she? A tremor in her solar plexus warned her to think of something else. And an attractive topic had suggested itself through comparing her mental and physical ages. She would explore it after settling down to sleep – if sleep she could, after all those hours of it.

She made a pillow of some sweaters and covered herself with her dressing gown. A clock struck one.

This question of her age: in one respect she was in advance of it physically as well as mentally – very much in advance, compared with Betty. True, Betty had been attracted by a locum tenens who had replaced the Vicar for a month, but she had refused to imagine being kissed by him. Even Clare, tumed twenty-one, had only admitted (under
cross-examination
) to having imagined being kissed by Charles II – or rather, she’d tried to and failed; Clare could read imaginatively but couldn’t imagine anything all on her own. Merry was apt to imagine being kissed by every attractive man she met, saw on the stage or on television – and by some quite revolting men, too. (The revulsion was part of the exercise in imagination.) At no time had anyone kissed her amorously; but imagination, thank goodness, didn’t have to wait on experience.

She had been falling in love since the age of nine and had recently been in love with three men at once: two famous
actors and a waiter at a hotel in Ipswich. And nowadays her imagination went beyond merely kissing men; she considered the implications of going to bed with them, though hampered by being none too sure what the implications were, having found Weary Willy’s biology lecture so dull that she had (a) not listened carefully and (b) discounted much of what she heard. No doubt the rough outline was correct but as to the details … well, Weary Willy’s knowledge was likely to be purely academic.

And sex couldn’t really be dull or it wouldn’t be so popular. Anyway, Merry
felt
it wasn’t dull – and the still remaining veil of mystery made it all the more exciting. And one could hardly be a great actress unless one had a passionate temperament. She was sure she could count on one; the question was, just how soon should one make use of it, in practice as well as in imagination? Not before she was seventeen, she had decided – but that was when she hadn’t expected to be let loose in the world until she was seventeen. Now that she intended to live as an adult …

But she had promised Richard she would return unblemished (provided she wasn’t hounded) so she must indeed consider herself as an adult in charge of a child, particularly when she sought interviews with the two famous actors she was in love with. (She waved a mental goodbye to the Ipswich waiter; he’d never been more than a poor third.)

A clock struck two. The sofa now seemed very hard. She was restless and thirsty and her teeth felt guilty of biscuits. The alarm clock, close to her ear, ticked noisily. Obviously she wasn’t going to sleep another wink …

She woke soon after eight, without benefit of the alarm clock, which had not fulfilled its promise. Looking over the gallery rail, she saw that the front doors of the building were still closed. They would be open at nine, she guessed, and she must be ready to rush out and catch the nine-twenty train mentioned by Daurene. Swiftly she re-packed her suitcase
and carried it down to the cloakroom – which, by the light of day, was even more dilapidated than she’d realized, but reasonably clean. Having brushed her teeth and washed, drying herself on handkerchiefs, she studied her face.

How much younger she looked without make-up! She put on a tactful amount, carefully considering it in juxtaposition to her hair, which still delighted her. She spent a long time combing it and admiring it in the misty old pier-glass. Suddenly she heard sounds in the auction room. Opening the door a crack, she saw that a man was now sitting in the office. The front doors stood open but how was she to reach them unseen?

Her best plan would be to crawl. She stuffed her sponge-bag and damp handkerchiefs into her suitcase, closed it and laid it down flat; then, on her knees, she opened the door wider. If only the man would not look round! For three or four yards she had no cover whatever. Crawling, she pushed the suitcase in front of her as fast as she could … thank heaven, she was now behind a row of wardrobes … now sideboards … now a dangerously low settee … now three blessedly high-backed chairs … nearly at the doors now but no cover worthy of the name … She sprang up, bruised of knee, grabbed the suitcase and ran without looking back – and as she dashed between the pillars of the portico she heard the alarm clock, left beside the rosewood sofa, going off at last at the top of its very loud voice.

Treacherous of it – still, it might have done worse by her; perhaps it had been bottling itself up until she was free, as she certainly was now. But a clock was striking nine – and she had forgotten which way the station was. Frantically she looked round for someone to ask.

It was then that she saw, across the square, in front of J. Birdswell, Seedsman, a large glittering bus which, unlike the bus she had boarded yesterday, stated where it was going. A splendidly clear sign on the front said
LONDON
.

A bus would take longer than a train, but the bus was there and she was sure of catching it – or was she? It was already almost full and the driver was at the wheel. She started to run – oh, heavens, it was moving! Then the driver saw her, slowed down and waved reassuringly. Another minute and she was on.

Unlike local buses, this one had no conductor. Merry paid her fare to the driver, then sank into a seat. She had just time for one look back at the Assembly Rooms. She would always remember them and this town. She was glad she still didn’t know the town’s name; she wished it to remain a mystery town, anyway for the present. It would be fun to come here again quite by accident, when driving through Suffolk; perhaps she’d find out the name then. And perhaps she’d die so famous that Posterity, reading about last night in her journal, would put a plaque on the Assembly Rooms saying ‘Merry le Jeune slept here’.

Sad they never put plaques up while one was living.

Now the bus was out of the town and gathering speed. She was going to get very hungry and she’d finished her biscuits and chocolate. Perhaps she could pick up some more on the way, and she’d have a real meal at the end of the journey, before finding a cheap hotel or bed-sitting-room. Anyway, hunger didn’t matter – nothing mattered now, because now nothing could stop her getting to London.