Dorothy Eden (18 page)

Her gaze swept the table challengingly. Mr. Moretti got swiftly to his feet and made a small graceful bow.

“Madam, you are magnificent. You look like a heathen goddess.”

Arabia smiled with appreciative delight.

“Exactly the kind of thing the sheik used to say. We must dance later. You dance almost as well as a gigolo I once met in Singapore, and that is no small compliment. Ah, life is full of beginnings and endings. And then beginnings again.”

“And the food’s getting cold,” Miss Glory said tartly.

“In a moment we’ll decide that. Let’s first pour the wine. Jeremy, fill everyone’s glass. And then I have a toast to give you.”

Jeremy obediently filled everyone’s glass with the rose-coloured wine, and then Arabia, at the head of the table, stood and raised her glass.

Cressida had a moment’s swift apprehension. What was the old lady, glittering and quite quite mad, going to say? Was she going to drink to dead Lucy? Could one raise one’s glass and drink to a ghost?

But Arabia’s face had grown curiously gentle and happy and almost humble. She said in her warm, husky voice,

“To the spring. Let us drink to the return of spring.”

And in that moment all her apparent madness seemed like sanity. She was suddenly the most beautiful person in the room.

After that, the party proceeded as well as any party could with such oddly assorted guests. The food was eaten and the wine drunk, then the table cleared and pushed back and Miss Glory commanded to go to the piano and play a waltz. But Miss Glory, after a few opening bars, suddenly began to sing, “
’Tis the last rose of summer, blooming alone…”

“We can’t dance to that,” Arabia said impatiently.

Mr. Moretti lifted his slender graceful hand.

“I beg you, dear lady. Just a moment. This is my favourite song.”

Was it imagination that his gaze slid down to the rose at Cressida’s breast? Cressida could not be sure. Neither could she be sure that Mrs. Stanhope and Dawson were not suddenly staring pointedly at the flower she had recklessly decided to wear. Arabia, it was certain was. For the first time she was aware of the nature of Cressida’s ornament, and her eyes abruptly took on their hooded secret look.

“A red rose,” she whispered. “My dear child—”

“All its lovely companions,”
sang Miss Glory in her thin high voice,
“are faded and gone…”

“But since you sent them to me—” Cressida began bewilderedly.

“Sent them to you!” Arabia’s eyelids lifted momentarily, then dropped once more over her too-revealing eyes. Had that been triumph in them—or fear? “My dear child, why should I do such a thing?
Her
flowers, when you know that I have decided once and for always to put her out of my mind. Oh, for heaven’s sake, Miss Glory, stop that funereal song! This is a party.”

Miss Glory’s hands fell with a crash on to the keys. Arabia slipped her arm possessively round Cressida. Her old arrogant head was lifted high. “If someone,” she began in her rich resonant voice, “has thought it amusing, or even kind and sentimental, to send Cressida what were once my daughter’s favourite flowers, I would like them to know that that kind of thing no longer meets with my approval. I have spent nearly twenty years of my life grieving for my daughter, and that has been long enough. I told you that life is full of beginnings. Tonight you see one more. I have a new daughter, I am a magician, a conjurer. I have brought back the spring. This is the new Cressida Lucy. She is young and gay and very, very kind, and she has charmed away my sorrow.”

She really is mad, Cressida was telling herself. The thin old arm round her waist gripped with surprising tightness, and the hard stones of the ornate bracelets and rings pressed into her flesh. Yet her dominating sensation, as always, was one of helpless admiration and love for the extraordinary, warm-hearted, unpredictable old creature. She could not hurt her. No, no matter what happened, she could not bring back that look of hopeless grief into Arabia’s eyes.

“So I’ll bore you no more with my tales of Lucy. She is buried now, deep in her grave. She is resigned at last to death.”

It was absurd and melodramatic, and no one was shedding tears for a girl so long dead who no one except her bewitched old mother knew. Yet a curious, hypnotised silence had fallen over the room. When Arabia announced, with a sudden brittle gaiety, that everyone must be kind to Cressida or when she became their new landlady, as she would one day, she might turn them all out and keep only cats, it was almost a relief to hear the tinkle of glass and see that Mrs. Stanhope had spilt wine down the front of her dress.

Arabia gave her great peal of laughter.

“Don’t be so nervous, my dear. Cressida, I can assure you, is much too kind-hearted to hurt anyone at all. She won’t turn you out.”

Mrs. Stanhope, her face highly flushed, mopped nervously at her dress.

“Dawson bumped me,” she whispered. “So clumsy.”

Dawson, embarrassed, held his bony elbows closely against his sides. “Sorry, Ma,” he muttered.

“I must go and change. Excuse me.” The bird-like whispering ceased as Mrs. Stanhope hurried from the room.

And Mr. Moretti waltzed into the middle of the floor, his pale eyes half-closed, his wide smile spreading emptily.

“In five minutes I must leave. Dance with me first, dear lady.”

Miss Glory turned, with enthusiasm, to the piano, and began to play vigorously. Arabia swam, glittering, into Mr. Moretti’s arms, and Jeremy who had lounged silently in the background for some time took Cressida’s arm and said, “I think I am strong enough to dance.”

She moved across the floor as if in a dream.

“Jeremy, I think everyone is mad.
Who
sent me the roses?”

“Arabia has periods of convenient amnesia,” he said.

“But why? Why be so absolutely sweet to me, and then behind my back play these horrid unamusing tricks?”

“Because, as I’ve suggested before, you remind her too much of Lucy. Sometimes she likes this, but occasionally, in little isolated black moments, she hates and resents you because you are alive and Lucy is dead.”

“Jeremy, do you really believe all that?”

He nodded his head, but she could see the disbelief in his eyes. He looked suddenly older, his face all lines and shadows.

“Jeremy, you’re not well yet. You shouldn’t be here. After all, only yesterday you were running a high temperature.”

He gave her his mocking smile.

“Sweet lady, I would get off my deathbed to look after you.”

“After me! But—then do you think—” The cold was coming nearer again. Everything was menacing—Miss Glory’s tripping music, Mr. Moretti’s smoothly moving figure, a neat black backdrop for Arabia’s glitter, Dawson lounging in the doorway.

“Someone here may not particularly care for the thought of your becoming Arabia’s heiress,” Jeremy said in his low casual voice. “Someone may think you are a usurper.”

“Of course,” Cressida breathed. “How dumb I am.”

“Beautiful but dumb.”

“But no one here has any claim on Arabia. Lodgers in a house surely do not expect to inherit their landlady’s fortune.”

“And what about you?”

“Yes, I know I’m a lodger, but the difference is I don’t want this money. I don’t
want
to be Arabia’s heiress. The thought appals me. But how can I hurt her feelings? It makes her so happy. And I’ve told you before, I don’t need to keep the money.”

“If you live to receive it,” Jeremy commented dryly.

“Jeremy, you don’t think—you mean that death notice and the in memoriam are serious warnings. But—”

Not heeding the horror in her voice, Jeremy went on calmly,

“Miss Glory has been here the longest. She has endured Arabia’s bullying and her eccentric behaviour for several years, and she isn’t a servant, mind you. On Arabia’s death she would be homeless. Moretti, apart from you, has been here the least time. He seems harmless enough, but he’s a type with whom a little extra money would not go amiss. He probably has dreams of opening his own establishment. Do you notice the way Arabia laps up his old-world-courtesy act?”

“He flirts with Miss Glory,” Cressida said breathlessly. “It could be that the two of them are plotting. All that mournful music he plays could be his perverted sense of humour.”

“That has only started since you came,” Jeremy said.

“Oh! Has it really! like the—the other things.”

Cressida’s fascinated attention was now on Mr. Moretti, with his straw-pale hair, his pink face bent courteously to Arabia, his smooth sophisticated dancing. But Jeremy went on with his calm analysis.

“The Stanhopes have been here three months. The woman is as nervous as a rabbit. She seems scared stiff of Arabia, but she’s determined to stay here for some reason. It might only be that Arabia never charges a high rent, or it might be for a much more secret reason. Have you noticed the way Dawson hangs around Arabia, asking to do things for her and acting like a little well-trodden-down worm?”

“But Arabia can’t endure him,” Cressida said.

“How true. But what fond mother realises that other people might dislike her precious offspring? It could be that Mrs. Stanhope visualised her son becoming in- dispensable to a lonely old woman—until you arrived and upset her plans.”

“She told me that day that the room was let! Did she do it deliberately?”

“She could have, indeed. What chance had bespectacled Dawson if he had to complete both with you and the ever-present legend of Lucy?”

“They keep talking of murder,” Cressida whispered. “But they wouldn’t do anything. They wouldn’t have the courage for anything but little mean underhand things.”

“And that brings us’ to me,” Jeremy went on. “The mysterious dweller in the basement, the sinister kidnapper of pretty girls—no, pretty isn’t the word for you—you’re credulous and idiotically soft-hearted, and you deserve everything that is going to happen to you, but some day I will get that look of yours on to canvas, that look of listening to fairy stories and songs.”

“Jeremy! We’re talking about you! Were you planning to be Arabia’s heir, before I arrived? After all, you lived in the basement on the idiotic pretext of catching burglars—”

“And I have no money, and I take what I want, unscrupulously, even if it belongs to another man.”

His arms tightened round her. Arabia’s voice suddenly boomed across the room.

“Are you two making love? Jeremy, come and dance with me. Vincent has to go now.”

“Yes, I’m devastated,” said Mr. Moretti, in his exaggerated way. He bent to kiss Arabia’s hand. “This has been an enchanting party, dear lady. But now back to the inferno.”

“Where you belong,” Arabia said comfortably. “He has a slight look of the devil about him, hasn’t he? That bleached hair and singed eyebrows. From too much heat, no doubt.”

She gave her rich peal of laughter, and turned tirelessly to Jeremy to begin another dance.

But at that moment Mrs. Stanhope re-entered the room. She had changed from the mousy-grey dress into the equally drab brown wool that she usually wore in the afternoons. Her only concession to the party was a rather girlish locket of seed pearls which was probably one of her few treasures from her youth. She came into the room fingering it in her nervous way, and whispering apologies for her disappearance.

“So clumsy of me with the wine.”

Since no one else spoke and Arabia appeared to be staring at her with her hooded look, as if to mask contempt, Cressida said kindly, “What a pretty locket.”

Mrs. Stanhope fiddled for her pencil and pad and wrote in her quick, eager way, as if afraid that if she did not hurry she would again be left out of the conversation.

“My mother gave it to me on my eighteenth birthday.”

“How nice,” Cressida murmured.

The party had suddenly gone dead. Mr. Moretti had gone, the music had stopped, and Arabia was full of her hooded contempt for the mousy little woman who was inadvertently getting all the attention, first with the’ spilled wine and now with her girlish scrap of jewellery.

Mimosa’s sudden wail somewhere in the hall was almost as if it had been a rehearsed diversion. There was a pounding and bumping, and more anguished wails from the cat as apparently he fled down to the basement.

Cressida, who had been nearest to the door, was at the head of the basement stairs first. She didn’t know who came after her, but she did wonder fleetingly why suddenly, only one dim light burned in the hall, at the far end, and the basement stairs were in darkness. Mimosa! Someone was doing something to him! Last night it had been some dubious food, now—what was causing him to squawk like that?

There were confused voices behind her. She groped for the light switch at the head of the stairs. Jeremy’s voice called, “Cressida!” And then, in the darkness, someone bumped into her and she fell.

It was not a bad fall. She had clutched at the stair rail, and that had prevented her from rolling to the bottom of the steep stone steps. She had wrenched her knee slightly, and it felt as if someone had clutched at her throat. And now there were arms about her tightly, and someone was kissing her.

Light flooded on. It was Jeremy who held her, so tightly that she could scarcely breath. Had he pushed her and then regretted it? The thought flashed through her mind and vanished.

Jeremy’s face was too stripped of its mocking mask. If was too thin and anxious, and her lips were still warm from his kiss.

Why had he suddenly kissed her? There was no time to think of that. “Mimosa!” she said.

“Cressida! Are you all right?” That was Miss Glory’s voice from the top of the stairs. It was harsh and hard, as if she had had a very great fright. Looking up Cressida saw Mrs. Stanhope, also, peering fearfully through the big glasses, and a moment later there was Dawson, carrying Mimosa, who struggled violently, but who otherwise, appeared safe and unhurt.

There was no sign of Arabia.

Cressida got to her feet. “I’m all right,” she said, laughing. “Why are you all looking so worried? I only slipped in the dark. Dawson, is Mimosa all right?”

Jeremy took the cat from Dawson and examined him. Mimosa still struggled wildly, all his claws extended.