Child Friday (13 page)

“You owe something to life, Dane,” she said sternly. “Old Mr. Carey’s gift came at the right time for you, but that
tim
e
is now passed.
You cannot shut yourself away from the world for ever. When I sent you Emily I thought
—
I hoped
—
”

“You hoped I might be tempted back to normality, is that it?”

“I had, perhaps, a false belief in her gifts for loving and giving. I’m not so foolish, at my age, to try and play Cupid, as you put it.”

He smiled across at her with affectionate understanding. “Friday’s child
...
” he murmured softly. “Yes, you didn’t do a bad job, Louisa. As you so rightly say, I went into this thing with my eyes open, but did Emily?”

“One presumes so. She’s not a child.”

“She was still a little raw, I think, from that old love
affair. I
caught her on the rebound, as they say.”

“Stuff and nonsense!” said Louisa crossly. “A love affair at that age means less than nothing. The young man was no good to her, anyway.”

“You know him?”

“I know
of
him. She took him too seriously, that’s all.”

“She told me she ran after him.”

“Very likely. It’s the sort of obvious mistake someone like Emily
would
make! Well, Dane, at least you can give her back her self-esteem. Who knows, she may do the same for you, one day.”

“Are you referring to Vanessa?” he asked calmly, and she looked annoyed.

“I had no desire, nor intention to refer to Vanessa,” she said tartly. “I had concluded that you had had the good sense to get over that by now.”

“Life has some queer twists,” he said softly. “She’s come back, you know.”

“Yes, I know. Does it make any difference?”

He smiled with faint irony.

“Vanessa must always make a difference—one way or another, mustn’t she?” he said cryptically, and he frowned with impatience.

“Dane—” she began, but Emily had come back into the room.

“Would you like to come upstairs?” she asked Miss Pink politely, and stood looking a little uncertainly from one to the other of them.

Bella ran to her master and lay down beside him on guard and Dane said, one hand idly pulling at the bitch’s ears:

“Yes, take Louisa up, my dear. We were approaching a quarrel.”

“Were you really—approaching a quarrel, I mean?” Emily asked as they went up the stairs together.

“No, of course not,” said Miss Pink impatiently. “Dane and I have always indulged in plain speaking. I’m a great deal older than he is, you know.”

“You—you won’t upset him, will you?” Emily ventured diffidently, opening the door of the prepared guest-room.

Louisa Pink tossed her belongings carelessly on to the bed and surveyed the old-fashioned room with amused eyes.

“Bless you, child, it takes more than a
m
iddle-aged spinster to upset Dane. What an incredible h
o
use! Brass cans of hot water in the basin and brass knobs on the bed! Has Dane altered nothing since Ben Carey’s time?”

“I don’t think so,” said Emily. “The house wasn’t strange to him if nothing was changed, you see. He can find his
w
ay about just as he used to as a boy.
”

Miss Pink took Emily’s face between her hands.

“You’ve grown quite pretty, Emily,” she said. “Someone’s made something of your hair at last, and if you still have a slightly lost look, it’s becoming. Are you happy?”

For a moment the long lashes rented in two curving crescents on Emily’s cheek, as if to hide her thoughts.

“I think so,” she replied gravely.
“I—
I’m
very lucky, of course. Will you come down to the library when you’ve unpacked, Miss Pink? We don’t change in the evenings.”

I
I
I

It was a week-end of wind and squalls. Emily was disappointed that the weather should keep them indoors, but Louisa said, stretching her well-shod feet comfortably to the blaze of a wood fire:

“Don’t worry about me, my dear. I’m not a country girl, and I welcomed any excuse to stay by a good fire. Were you wanting to show me the beauties of the countryside?”

“Well, the garden is nice,” said Emily apologetically. “Spring is nearly here and—well, perhaps you’re not interested in such things?”

“Not a bit,” said Louisa bluntly. “I like my comfort and I like to talk.”

It was, indeed, Emily discovered, impossible to stop her talking. Most of the week-end they sat over the library fire and Louisa regaled them with London gossip, amusing anecdotes of her employment bureau, and sudden plunges into their own affairs. Emily began to feel exhausted but Dane was amused, with die easy tolerance of old acquaintance, and Emily was surprised to find him so ready with repartee.

“It’s done him good having you here,” she said to Miss Pink as they toasted their toes before the library fire on the last afternoon.

“Well, my dear, I bring back old memories without any pain attached,” Louisa replied comfortably. “You will have gathered by now that Dane and I have known one another a long time. However one shuts oneself away, the past is always with us.”

“The past?”

“I meant Dane’s sort of past—when he was enthusiastic about his job, the sort of contracts he achieved—when he had his sight. He was very brilliant, you know.”

“And you had a part in it?”

“Only the sort of part a mother might have played—or an elder sister, perhaps. I was a background for him. He could come to my flat and relax and tell me all the wonderful plans he had for the future.”

“The accident must have been a terrible blow,” Emily said softly. “All those plans—all that enthusiasm. ... It doesn’t seem possible now, does it?”

“Not to you, perhaps, but
—
” Louisa frowned, puffing
away at her cigarette with thoughtful energy.
“Ben Carey’s unexpected legacy seemed a godsend at the time,” she said, then: “But I’m not sure—if he’d had to stand on his own feet—well, who’s to know, really?”

“Did you ever know a Miss Vanessa
Larne
?” asked Emily suddenly.

Miss Pink glanced at her uneasily.

“Oh, yes,” she said. “I gather she’s come back into your lives.”

“Dane told you?”

“No. She came to see me the other day. As usual, Vanessa got information out of me that I wasn’t really prepared to give.”

“Information?”

“How Dane had come to marry you, and so on.”

“But I think she knew that I came here as his secretary, and someone to look after Alice.”

Louisa looked uncomfortable.

“Yes, of course, but she put two and two together,
and made it five. Have a care with Vanessa, Emily—she can be dangerous, and Dane was very much in love with her at one time. She, rather more than his accident, has made him what he is today.”

“Yes,” said Emily, shielding her face from the hidden warmth of the fire. . “I shouldn’t have married him, really.”

“Because you think Vanessa still wants him?” Louisa’s cheeks were unbecomingly flushed, and she leaned forward urgently in her chair. “Listen, Emily, if Vanessa hadn’t learned too late about that inheritance of Dane’s, she wouldn’t be back now. She was in love with him, five years ago, but if he had had money at the time of the accident, I don’t think she would have left him.”

“But that’s horrible!” Emily exclaimed.

“Yes,”
said Louisa grimly. “It was horrible. Don’t let her start things all over again. Don’t
let
her, Emily.”

“How can I stop her?” asked Emily sadly. “She’s so lovely and I—well, you know why Dane married me.”

Miss Pink studied the pale, delicate face in the firelight and saw there a different strain to the strain of anxiety for the immediate future, to which she was used
.

“I think you’re in love with Dane,” she said softly, and Emily’s eyes, clear and wide with their heavy, unblinking lashes, met hers for a moment

“I should have foreseen this,” she said angrily. “Perhaps, in a sense, I did. It was my gamble, my trump card.”

“You, surely, couldn’t have imagined it would have made any difference to him,” Emily said gently.

“Why not? Isn’t that what he needs—someone to love him as he is—not as he was?”

“Perhaps, but I can’t compete with the past.”

“Nonsense!” Louisa exclaimed. “The past is false. If Dane were to lose his money, you would hear no more of Vanessa
Larne
. Emily, I think I should tell you. When Vanessa came to see me the other day, I—I talked too much. I hinted at that old affair of yours with Tim Lonnegan— perhaps to justify my own part in the proceedings.”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Emily. “That was all over long ago. It was, I expect as you’ve always told me, Miss Pink, just calf-love.”

“But the point is, Vanessa knows him.
”

“Well, how can that matter now?”

“I don’t know, but—oh, for heaven’s sake, child, grow up! In Vanessa
Larne
, you’re dealing out of your class. If you
want to keep Dane, fight for him—don’t give the enemy a loophole.”

The wind whistled round the house, a lonely, solitary sound. Emily cocked her head to listen, struck by a new desolation.

“You can’t fight what isn’t there,” she said forlornly. “You can’t keep what has never been yours. A marriage like
mine
has bounds and limits. When you are your husband’s guest and no more, your hands are tied, aren’t they?”

Louisa threw her cigarette end into the fire.

“Lord, why was I ever party to this?” she exclaimed.

“Party to what?” Dane’s voice asked with interest from the door. As usual, Emily had not heard him coming, and she started guiltily as he came into the room and felt his way to a chair.

“Nothing that concerns you,” Louisa said brusquely. “You shouldn’t go creeping about like that, Dane, it’s unnerving.”

“I’m sorry,” he said mildly. “The wind, no doubt, drowned the sound of my footsteps. Is Emily blushing?”

“Why, for heaven’s sake, should the poor child be blushing?” demanded Louisa, watching with exasperation the color staining Emily’s cheeks.

“I don’t know, but I think she suffers that way. Has Louisa been embarrassing you, Emily?” He felt for, his pipe and his matches. Bella, who had followed him into the room, laid her head on his knee and gazed up at him with soulful eyes.

“Not at all,” said Emily with admirable composure. “I’ll go and see about tea.”

“Such an easy let out for the mistress of the house, I always think,” observed Dane, gr
innin
g in Louisa’s dire
c
tion as Emily closed the door.

“Dane, you can be impossible!” Louisa scolded. “Your Emily has certain admirable qualities which I hadn’t appreciated when I sent her to you.”

“Indeed? Well, I’m duly grateful to you, Louisa.”

“I should hope so! You cut a most romantic figure incidentally, with your watch-dog gazing up at you with drooling adoration.”

“How cross you sound, Louisa,” said Dane, pushing Bella away. “Have you and Emily not been getting on?”

“On the contrary,” said Miss Pink crisply. “We have been getting on very well, though she, like you, needs a little sense knocked into her. Is she to play Man Friday to your Crusoe for ever?” She saw his face close suddenly into the familiar rather weary mask and added hastily: “I’m not trespassing, my dear. You needn’t adopt that shuttered look.”

“The blind are necessarily shuttered,” he said coldly, and she saw him suddenly with Emily’s eyes.

Miss Pink left on Tuesday morning and Dane surprised Emily by electing to come into Plymouth with them.

“We’ll have lunch at the Grand,” he said, as if it was the most ordinary occurrence in the world. He would not, however, come on to the platform to see Louisa off and they left him sitting in the car.

“I hope it hasn’t been dull for you,” Emily said with anxious politeness, and Miss Pink’s worldly-wise eyes were a little critical.

“Not dull, dear child, instructive,” she said. “You’ve dressed yourself with great care for your lunch date with your blind husband. It’s nice to be able to buy pretty things, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” said Emily, “but Vanessa chose all my clothes.”

Louisa frowned.

“Beware the Greeks, Emily,” she said, but Emily smiled her curving smile of great trust and innocence.

“Oh, but the gifts weren’t hers,” she said gently. “Dane paid.”

“Naturally Dane paid. Really, Emily, you can be very irritating sometimes!”

“I’m sorry. Perhaps you read too much into things.”

“Perhaps I do. Well, my dear, run up to town and see me if you ever feel inclined, or want advice. My flat is at your disposal just as it’s always been at Dane’s.”