The White Marriage Page 28

  It was Leandra’s attempt at a joke, as she jumped out of the cab and headed towards the telephone box on the corner of the street.

  Inside the box the smell of stale cigarettes was overpowering, and the myriad of messages and telephone numbers left written on every surface staggering in their design and complexity. For a second Leandra stared at the endless scribbles all written in different hands and different inks, and it came to her that put together they could make up a design that would be suitable for some mad wallpaper that would cause a sensation at any exhibition. Then, feeling vaguely dazed, because it was years since she had been in a telephone box, she took out the necessary money, and started to dial Gray’s number.

  Oh, please, please, let him be in for once, and not at his club!

  At long, long last the telephone was picked up, and not by his butler, but, miraculously, by Gray himself.

  As soon as she heard his mellifluous measured tones, Leandra knew that it was vital that she did not sound hurried, that she must sound mischievously interesting, diplomatically calming, sweetly determined, anything rather than how she felt – desperate.

  ‘Darlingest, I have some exciting news for us both!’ she began, and then thinking it better not to wait for a response from Gray, she continued quickly. ‘I have found our Little Puppy, and she is adorable, and waiting eagerly to see you.’

  Gray sounded incredulous, and even more so when he heard where his Little Puppy, his sometime fiancée, was working, and what was worse, sleeping.

  ‘I must say I do keep wondering what can her parents be thinking, allowing her to come to London, and then not even helping her to find proper lodgings. What can they be thinking?’

  Leandra was anxious to deflect any blame from the Little Puppy, to make sure that Gray realised that it was her parents’ fault that they had let loose an innocent creature upon the evil world.

  ‘I must see her.’

  ‘Of course you must see her, darlingest boy.’

  Gray was far from being a boy, but like all men who had long ago left their boyhood behind he loved being so addressed.

  ‘If you go to Madame Charles, in about an hour, she will just be finishing. She will be so thrilled to see you, I can’t tell you.’

  They finished the telephone call in the usual way, after which Leandra pushed her way out of the telephone box, finally leaning against the door for a few seconds, fighting both the panic the discovery of the Little Puppy had induced, and the almost overwhelming pain caused by her jealousy of Sunny.

  She climbed back into the taxi, and ordered the driver to take her home, sitting back in the seat with a dulled, flattened feeling. She had to face facts as they were. Dilke might well go bankrupt – at the moment the worst that had happened was that certain creditors had taken paintings, jewellery, and the blasted jade, thank God, in exchange for payment – but until she knew more she must only assume that this was merely the beginning, that pretty soon the remaining and quite substantial lease on their flat would have to be turned over to the bank for resale, and that would mean that she would finally be forced to put Maydown up for sale. This was obviously the number one fact. The second fact, and harder to face, was that Gray had quite obviously fallen in love with the Little Puppy. This should be a bonus, given her plan but, in fact, it could ruin everything. It all depended on the next few hours, when he and the Little Puppy would be reconciled, or would have re-met, she hoped, and he would charm her into realising that what he was offering would be a great deal more than any young man could ever offer her: a position in Society, wealth, clothes, motor cars, servants and a beautiful way of life.

  Leandra thought for a brief second.

  ‘Stop for a moment, please?’ she called to the taxi driver. ‘Stop here by this telephone box. I wish to make another urgent call.’

  The taxi driver sighed inwardly. You would honestly have thought that a woman like her would be able to wait to make her telephone calls. Nevertheless he stopped.

  Yet again Leandra found herself in an evil-smelling telephone box, and yet again reapplying herself to dropping yet more coins into yet another box – so humiliating, somehow – and dialling the number of Madame Charles’s famous establishment. She knew she could trust Madame to fall in line with what Leandra wanted. After all, Leandra had not yet paid her.

  *

  Sunny looked up from her work.

  ‘My dear, Miss Chantry? A gentleman has called for you. He is waiting outside in the square.’

  Sunny smiled, unable to keep the delight from her face. Hart must have slipped away from work early. He had warned her that he might.

  ‘If you don’t mind, tell him I will be down in a minute, Madame Charles. I must just finish this.’

  Madame Charles nodded. She had no idea why Mrs Fortescue had rung and asked her to let Sunny off work early, but she was not such a fool that she could not put two and two together. First the call, and then hardly any time later, round comes a soigné gentleman to call on the young Miss Chantry. Frankly she had no idea of what kind of private life Miss Chantry might like to enjoy, but she thought it impertinent, in view of the fact that Hart was her godson, and clearly what they nowadays called ‘dotty’ about Miss Chantry – not to mention the fact that he had taken the trouble to find work with his godmother for Miss Chantry – that both Mrs Fortescue and the young lady in question had thought it reasonable to have her meet another gentleman at her premises. But, if life in occupied France had taught her one thing, and one thing alone, it was to mind her own business and not ask questions, either of herself, or others. As far as she was concerned, Hart would have to take his chance. She only hoped that his heart would not be broken by this enchanting young seamstress, but she feared that it might.

  ‘Gray?’

  Sunny looked more than surprised; she looked shocked.

  Gray leaned forward and, taking her in his arms, he kissed her for the first time on the lips.

  Sunny drew back, almost openly appalled, but he seemed oblivious.

  ‘Darling little one, I thought I would never find you again.’

  He flagged down a taxi and guided her into it, before she could say any more.

  ‘This is wonderful – you here in London, finding you. I am the happiest man on earth.’

  Sunny stared at Gray. It was too late to tell him that she had thought he was Hart. Too late to say anything, at any rate for the moment. After all she was meant to be engaged to him. She sat back in the taxi, staring ahead of her as he took her hand and kissed it, not letting it go.

  Sunny left her hand in his while trying to think. She would have to tell Gray about Hart. She did not have to tell Hart about Gray. She had already done that, but she would have to tell Gray that she could no longer be engaged to him, that he must no longer consider her to be his fiancée.

  They arrived at his flat without more than a desultory exchange of words, Sunny feeling increasingly confused, increasingly panicked.

  ‘Mr Wyndham?’ Gray’s butler murmured, giving the young woman he had ushered into the elegant hall a surprised look. ‘Mr Wyndham Senior is in the drawing room, already arrived, a little earlier than expected, as is his way.’

  He gave Gray a familiarly old-fashioned look, the ‘I am marking your card’ look, and for once Gray could feel only grateful for it.

  ‘My father, of course. How delighted he will be to see you with me, Sunny. I sometimes think if he was younger, he would marry you himself.’

  Sunny’s heart sank even further. Oh, for heaven’s sake, whatever next? First Gray turning up unexpectedly, then his father. She remembered Hart was meant to be coming to collect her, and hoped that Madame Charles would explain. She resolved to telephone him as soon as she could, once the embarrassment of drinks with both the Wyndhams had worn off, and she could find some excuse to leave – for leave she must, if only to find Hart and to escape the whole atmosphere of this very grown-up flat, with its heavy furniture and thick velvet curtains, which she was finding oppre
ssive to a degree. She didn’t know why, but she felt that at any minute the drawing-room ceiling would start to lower itself and finally suffocate her.

  ‘Are you all right, my dear?’

  ‘I wonder if I might have a glass of cold water?’

  Sunny sat back in the chair, sipping the water, surrounded by anxious male faces.

  ‘I am so sorry, so awfully sorry. I think I must have done too much close work today.’

  ‘What does she mean by that? What has she been doing to feel unwell?’ Father looked towards his son, accusingly, of course.

  ‘She has been sewing.’ Gray looked embarrassed. Sewing suddenly seemed the sort of thing no nice young girl should do.

  ‘What has she been sewing?’

  ‘Oh, it was just a little job she thought to take—’

  ‘She must stop it at once. You can’t have your future wife working! What can you be thinking?’

  ‘It was just un petit divertissement, Father.’

  ‘Very diverting I am sure – it has worn her to a thread paper.’ Mr Wyndham leaned towards Sunny. ‘No more work for you, young lady. This brute here is quite rich enough to keep half a dozen wives.’ He looked up once more at Gray. ‘Look at how pale she is. It must not go on, it really must not.’

  Gray took one of Sunny’s hands in his and patted it.

  ‘No, of course it won’t, Father. It was just a bit of fun, for the experience of it. You know young girls.’

  ‘Sewing is never fun, Gray. Women only sew if they are unhappy, bored, poor, or in a nunnery, and that is a fact. Your mother always avoided sewing. It ruins the eyes and makes the sides of your fingers hard. So enough of this nonsense of sewing, please.’

  Sunny closed her eyes. The two men hovering over her, the butler hovering behind her, Gray patting her hand all the time. It seemed that she would never make good her escape. Worst of all, she felt so unwell, her heart still racing, that the telephone call to Hart that she had to make was impossible. She opened her eyes and then quickly shut them again, realising that it was no good wishing the room, the men, the flat away somewhere over a rainbow, any rainbow, no good hoping that when she reopened them she would find herself in her new all-white room back at the lodging house, downstairs the sound of jazz being played, upstairs Arietta and she getting ready for the evening, nothing more interesting on the horizon than having to iron one of her new circular skirts.

  Sam peered round the door at Hart.

  ‘For why the absence from our nightly musical set-to in the sitting room?’ he asked, puzzled. ‘Has all desire to fracture the ears of the neighbours fled?’

  Hart remained on his bed staring at the ceiling, silent, his eyes unmoving, while Sam noted that he had changed from ‘civvies’, as his work clothes – dark striped suit, white shirt, dark tie – were known to all his friends, into ‘cool’ – polo-necked jumper, American jeans, very, very hip boots, also from America.

  ‘Has there been some biznai about which one needs to know, some unknown evil wrought in one’s heavenly absence at the heavenly workplace known as the studio?’ Sam persisted.

  Silence remained the order of the day. It was such a silence that Sam, having plumped for facetiousness, now changed his manner to one of smooth concern, doing his best to imitate his Uncle Randy.

  ‘I say, old boy, is something pushing you towards the window-ledge, something of which one should be cognisant?’

  At last Hart turned his dark handsome head towards his old school friend, and Sam was embarrassed to see that he looked much as he had done after he had said goodbye to his dog at the start of term, eyes full of despair, mouth tightly buttoned, throat working a little overtime.

  ‘She is seeing someone else, Sam.’

  Sam frowned. He knew that the reference to ‘she’ must mean Sunny Chantry, and that being so, he must now tread with the feet of the sanctified, be as stalky as he had ever been.

  He reached back in time to an Uncle Randy-ism. ‘What evidence does one have for this, old boy?’

  Hart cleared his throat. ‘I went to meet her this afternoon. Went a bit early—’

  ‘That can prove to be quite a bish with les girls, Harty, truly. I should have warned you. “Never surprise a lady” is what Uncle Randy wrote in my confirmation Bible. It didn’t go down very well with Mr Vicar, I can tell you, but I have always adhered to the advice, as one should, coming as it did from a godfather and uncle.’

  ‘We had lunch together, we walked in the park, I came back to collect her as arranged, and OK, it was a bit early – but, but did she need to do that.’

  Sam was relieved to see that Hart was now sitting on the edge of the bed staring at his feet, and that the tone of his voice had gone from despair to anger.

  ‘What did she do?’

  ‘Kissed this chap in the middle of the street, before fleeing in a taxi with him.’

  Sam sat down beside Hart on the bed, and the bed, being of a great age, promptly hit the floor, but neither of them moved. Women, as they both knew, could be fickle, but this was taking the biscuit, surely? To meet Hart and lunch and walk in the park with him (hand-holding de rigueur) to arrange to re-meet, and then to skip off with Another. It didn’t seem possible that Sunny could have done such a thing. She had, after all, right from the first, appealed as the beautiful young girl of everyone’s dreams.

  ‘Is Miss Chantry La Belle Dame Sans Any Mercy, do you imagine, Harty?’

  Hart stared ahead of him. ‘I think she must be,’ he offered finally.

  ‘I think she must be too,’ Sam agreed, his thoughts straying to Arietta. If Sunny Chantry was her best friend, was he going to discover that Arietta was cut from the same cloth? There was very little he could do to stop his heart from sinking, and his mouth going vaguely dry at just the thought. He was in love with Arietta, more than he had ever been in love with anyone, and the thought of turning up at Beetle’s, albeit a trifle early, and discovering her kissing someone else made him feel – well, there was only one word to describe it – ill, very ill; if not totally nauseous.

  Having personalised the issue that was tormenting his friend, Sam realised that all facetiousness must now be abandoned and he must get down to hard facts.

  ‘What kind of man was she kissing?’

  The expression on Hart’s face was one of despair and he allowed it to be.

  ‘A tall chap,’ he said, after a small pause. ‘Really quite tall, dark-haired, tanned, handsome, dressed to the tens, absolutely pukka, not a whisker out of place.’

  ‘I never trust those kinds of men,’ Sam announced with some feeling. ‘I always think they’re hiding something behind their immaculate exteriors – hearts of ice, minds like flints. You can be too well dressed, you know.’

  ‘Not something you have ever suffered from,’ Hart said, looking at Sam’s paint-bespattered clothes with sudden humour.

  Sam nodded, unsmiling. ‘It’s like exaggerated good manners, people who open doors too widely, and are always pulling out ladies’ chairs halfway across the room, and whisking silk handkerchiefs out of their pockets at the slightest opportunity. I always think they’re spies myself. Uncle Randy told me you could always tell a spy during the war because they talked English too beautifully.’

  ‘Something else you have never suffered from …’

  But Sam was warming to his theme, as well as feeling better about Hart, because Hart was now being a trifle rude, attempting the odd bon mot, which must mean he was feeling more cheerful.

  ‘Very well, old boy,’ Sam continued. ‘I think I have now identified the spy in our midst, the rogue in the pack, the too-well-dressed chap that you spotted this afternoon. He is, he must be, none other than Miss Chantry’s fiancé.’

  If Sam imagined that he had produced the rabbit from the hat, the truth was that he was right. He had produced a dear little white bunny from the hat, the light catching its frightened eyes as the ghastly conjuror flourished the wretched creature.

  ‘You must be right,’
Hart agreed, after a moment. ‘Of course. The tall Adonis in the perfect suiting must be the present incumbent in her love life.’

  ‘She did warn you, old thing.’

  ‘Yes,’ Hart agreed, ‘she did warn me, but I never thought, not for an instant, that she would go off with him again. I thought, I imagined, that what we were beginning to have together must obliterate everything else, that any minute now she must be going to give in to my far superior charms and put the fiancé back into the file marked “Past mistakes”.’

  Sam stood up, wiping his increasingly warm hands down his jeans.

  ‘Look, old boy,’ he said, starting to walk up and down. ‘Look, I know it’s a bit of a shock to you – more than a bit, obviously – but I think we must be cool about it. First of all, who is to say she was kissing him?’

  Hart too stood up, lighting a cigarette and pulling on it too quickly.

  ‘I saw him, Sam,’ he said in a dead voice. ‘I saw him.’

  ‘Exactly.’ Sam turned, pointing a finger at him. ‘You saw him, Dr Watson. That is exactly what I mean, that is what Sherlock Holmes here is on about: you saw him kissing her!’

  Hart paused in his perambulations, smoking too fast, walking up and down, giving every impression that he was an anxious father awaiting the arrival of his first baby.

  ‘You mean to say, Holmes,’ he said, warmth returning to his voice. ‘You mean to say that she might not have wanted him to kiss her?’

  ‘I mean exactly that. It happened to me once, at Cambridge. Came out of the door into the street, and this popsy straight off the morning train, the Popsy Express, ran up to me, flung her arms round me and gave me the old mouth-to-mouth, and for no better reason than she had taken a fancy to me the previous weekend at an informal party by the river where there had been a number of bottles sunk and a great deal of shoving and splashing in the river. I tell you, it played havoc with my sex life for the next week. The lady in my life walked out on me – well, she ran actually – and would not return until proof positive of my innocence had been established. Not that it made much difference in the long run,’ he finished, looking nostalgic. ‘The bitch ended up running off with my tutor, and they now live in married bliss on a Greek island, which is really, really too much to take, really it is, because I have always firmly held to the opinion that if someone is going to break your heart, they must end up badly. It is the rule, and rules must not be broken.’