Dorothy Eden (25 page)

How still the house was! Even Timmy—where was Timmy? Julia looked round and saw that the cot which had stood beside her bed had vanished.

She had been too overcome with shock and Dove’s sedatives yesterday to think about Timmy. Someone else must have looked after him. But where was he now? Was he crying? Did he want her?

Julia thrust her feet into slippers and put on a warm dressing-gown. She was glad to have Timmy to think of. It meant that she spared no more than a glance for the wedding dress that Kate had spread over a chair last night. She went past it swiftly to the door. If everyone was still sound asleep, including Timmy, she would make the morning tea herself.

Then she would find Paul and he would tell her the reason for what had happened yesterday. He must tell her, because it was useless for him to pretend ignorance any longer.

With this calm resolution Julia turned the door knob and found that the door was locked.

At first she was merely annoyed. She had been much too helpless with drugs and exhaustion last night to require locking in her room. Whatever secret things might have been going on she could have taken no interest in them. She rattled the knob impatiently and called, “Is anyone awake? Come and open my door.”

From the rest of the house there was no sound.

The situation was absurd. Here she was, on her wedding day, locked in her room. Nice treatment, indeed. Julia began to grow angry. She knocked loudly on the door. Kate’s bedroom was the nearest. She couldn’t fail to hear that much noise in the still house. If she slept too soundly Paul, beyond her, must hear. He would be eagerly awake, looking to see if the weather were fine, and if they would be able to drive to the church.

“Do come, somebody!” she called. “Isn’t
anyone
awake?” Then, when there was no answer, she began to call “Lily! Can you hear me?”

The continued silence suddenly made her frantic. She beat on the door, shouting, “Why am I locked in? Paul! Paul!”

At last there was a faint sound. Julia stopped calling and listened intently. A faint, shuffling sound came nearer, a chuckling and a wheezing and a panting.

“It’s no use making all that noise, Julia. There’s no one here but me.”

It was Georgina’s chirruping voice, coming out in little high notes between the pants and chuckles.

“They’ve all gone, dear. There’s only us left. I’m going to write to Mrs. Bates and get her to come back. Then it will be like old times.”

Julia leaned against the door.

“Granny! Please open the door. Someone has locked me in.”

The shuffling came nearer. She could hear the old lady just at the other side of the door.

“Oh, my dear, I daren’t. Harry did that. He may have been having one of his jokes, but on the other hand he may have locked you in for a purpose. No, I daren’t let you out. He would be so cross if he came back.”

Julia curbed her impatience and her growing panic.

“Granny, don’t be silly! Harry isn’t here. If you won’t open the door, go and get Paul.”

There was a funny little, high, breathless sound from without. Julia realised that it was Georgina laughing.

“Paul! How can I? He’s dead.”

It was then that Julia’s knees grew weak and she felt as if she might fall. What was more, she could hear the old lady beginning to shuffle away leaving her still a prisoner.

“Granny! Please unlock the door!” she beseeched. “Or ask someone to come.”

“There’s no one here, dear. They’ve all gone away. Nita, Kate, Lily, Harry. All, all gone…” Her voice was a rising and falling sorrow. Soon she would begin her confused tales of long ago, her pointed face sunk in her shawls, her voice completely divorced from the present.

With rising panic Julia began to wonder if she were indeed telling the truth. The house was so still. It couldn’t be that everyone else was still sleeping.

She went to the window and opened it and looked down to the ground beneath. It was a long drop. Miss Carmichael had escaped with only a wrenched shoulder. She might not be so lucky. Anyway, there must be someone in the house. Where would they all have gone?

Even as Julia wondered she saw the fresh car tracks in the snow, winding from the front door to the overhung drive.

If they had been made last night they would have been frozen over by now. They were fresh, the earth churned up beneath the scattered snow. A car had gone away early this morning. Could the fantastic thing Georgina had suggested be true?

But Paul wouldn’t go away and leave her. At least not without telling her. Or had he tried to tell her last night when he had embraced her so violently? Suddenly Julia was remembering the woman’s voice with its ironic possessiveness, “Come along, darling!”

Had the person who had been writing the letters got him after all? The last letter had said
I don’t want to hurt you.
There had been pity in Lily’s face yesterday, also in Dove’s. Lily had gone away, Georgina said. Had Dove, too? And what about her husband, and Davey? What about the vague white shape in Davey’s cottage?

Julia ran back to the door.

“Granny!” she called. “Let me out! I want to get your breakfast. You’ll want your hot chocolate. Please come and open the door.”

From far-off came the old lady’s preoccupied voice. “Mrs. Bates will do that when she comes. Don’t worry, dear. You stay there. Harry wouldn’t want me to let you out.”

Harry! Was it he who had driven them all away? Was she in this great house with only a crazy old woman to protect her from a man who pretended to be dead?

No, she mustn’t think that way. She had to keep calm. Presently she would think of a way out of this mess. She would wave a towel from her window and perhaps Dove or Tom Robinson would see it. Or Davey, if he had returned. But she didn’t think she wanted to see Davey. He was deep in this thing, or he would not have had that shape with the hands locked in his cottage yesterday.

Davey! He had known too much from the start. He had written her that beautiful sensitive letter. He had waited curiously for her arrival. All the time he must have been laughing at her, or worse.

But why had Paul gone away and left her?

He couldn’t have gone far. Presently he would come back and explain the whole thing. She had only to sit down quietly and listen for his footsteps on the stairs. Once before she had waited with nervous anticipation behind a closed door for footsteps. When the door had opened she had tumbled stupidly into Davey Macauley’s arms. This time she would not be so impulsive. She would make sure it was Paul who came before she ran to the door.

But the person who came, something was telling her, would be the person who had written all those poison-pen letters, the person who had said
I don’t want to hurt you, but if you attempt to marry Paul tomorrow I shall have to…

Supposing it was the unknown Harry who came…

Paul is dead, old Georgina had said. Julia clenched her fingers. The situation was so
silly.
There was nothing to panic about. She just had to wait.

It was mid-morning, and she was at the stage where she was considering trying to break down the door by beating at it with a chair when the sound of a car in the drive took her to the window. She was just in time to see the car disappear on its way round to the front door. She hadn’t been able to catch a glimpse of who drove it or of how many people were in it.

A few minutes later there were footsteps through the house, heavy measured ones that went deliberately from room to room.

Julia wanted to call out, but suddenly she found she could not make a sound. She leaned against the end of the bed, listening and trembling. She had dressed long since in the tweed suit in which she had travelled. She had also, in her acute uneasiness, taken all her bags out of the wardrobe and hastily repacked her clothes. Only the wedding dress hung in its frozen purity over the back of the chair where Kate had spread it last night.

Now she was surrounded with bags, and if it were Paul beginning to climb the stairs he was going to look at her in hurt amazement. She couldn’t think it was Paul approaching. It was Harry, Harry!

The footsteps hesitated at her door. The handle was tried. Julia strove to say, “Unlock the door—please!” Her voice remained a panic-stricken whisper.

However, as if she had spoken aloud, the lock turned. Suddenly, as if the intruder could exercise no more patience, the door was swung swiftly open, and it was Davey regarding her, Davey in leather greatcoat and thigh boots, his face drawn with exhaustion so that his eyes were more tilted, more mocking than ever.

He took in at a glance Julia dressed for travelling with all the baggage about her. He said crisply, “You won’t want all that. Just the bag you bought in Timaru, and that cotton nightgown.”

And then the most extraordinary thing happened. All her frozen blood melted and ran warm and glowing through her veins.

“Yes, Davey,” she said meekly, unsurprisedly.

A
FTERWARDS SHE REMEMBERED THAT
that wonderful blossoming in her body had begun before he had kissed her. The kiss was part of it, but even with no caress at all she would have been full of that heavenly mute happiness.

“Do you love me?” he asked.

“Yes, Davey,” she said again.

She put her fingers on his face, and moved them down the scored lines of fatigue, over his eyelids, his lips. She knew now that this face had always delighted her and that she had made herself deliberately blind and indifferent to it.

Who was he? What did it matter?

“I don’t know who you are,” she said dreamily. “You may have another name. You may have another life. But you still have this face, this body, this personality. What does it matter who you are? You’re yourself.”

“That could not have been better said.” He kissed her again. “You’re wonderful. But we’ll talk more when I’ve fed you. You must be starving.”

“I am, too. So must Granny be.”

“Not Granny. She’s in the kitchen delving into cupboards.”

“But how did she get down the stairs?” Julia exclaimed. “Slid down the banisters, I imagine. If you ask me, she’s an extremely shrewd old lady.”

Sure enough, Georgina came creeping out of the larder, an inquisitive, white mouse caught in a cupboard. Her little pointed face was pink with excitement.

“That Lily!” she said. “The food! The wicked waste! There’s enough in there for a wedding breakfast.”

“That’s exactly what it was for,” Julia said mildly.

“A wedding! Guests coming here? Oh, what fun! I must go and dress.”

She began to shuffle out of the room, clutching her shawls, nodding her old head in pleasurable anticipation, and Julia had a momentary vision of the old lady receiving the wedding guests, a fantastic figure peculiarly in keeping with this great old dilapidated house.

“Granny, you can’t manage the stairs.” Georgina turned, and for a moment her eyes were full of a conspiratorial naughtiness.

“Oh yes, I can, if I take them slowly. But there was no need to tell Harry that. A great big fellow like him could easily carry a small person like me.”

Davey had filled the kettle and set a match to the fire that had been left set in the grate.

“That will boil in a few minutes,” he said. “Didn’t I tell you she was a shrewd old woman?”

“She said Paul was dead,” Julia said in sudden apprehension.

“So he is.”

“Dead!”

Davey took a letter from his pocket.

“This is what I went to Tekapo to get. I rode over yesterday morning, but on the way back my horse tumbled in a ditch and broke its leg. I walked for eight miles to Doctor Brown’s. But then I was done myself, and had to spend the night. The doctor lent me his car this morning. I knew you would be all right until today, but I had to get back before you left for the church.”

“Paul dead!” Julia whispered again. She was trying to think intelligently.

“This letter is from the Army department,” Davey said. “I couldn’t easily trace Harry Blaine because he lived in Australia. So I decided to trace Paul. And this is the answer. Paul Blaine was killed in Italy in the last year of the war. That would be a few months after you met him in England.”

Julia sat down slowly. “Then who would I have been marrying?”

“Harry, of course.”

“Harry!
But he was Nita’s husband!”

“Exactly.”

It took a little while to realise all that that astonishing fact meant. Davey didn’t allow Julia to brood over it. He said briskly:

“Harry Blaine is a very charming and unscrupulous person. We were both taken in by his charm. I can give you no excuse for my gullibility except, perhaps, my subconscious desire for a good story. But you were completely at his mercy.”

Julia murmured, “Harry! The ghost of the house! I suspected everyone except Paul. Even you.” Sharply she said, “Who are you anyway?”

“Ah, well.” Davey’s mobile brows rose almost into his hair. “That’s simple enough. I was born David Macauley Wicksteed. When I grew up I became a rather successful writer. Lately I’ve found that success is a distinct embarrassment. So I planned this pleasant anonymity.”

“David Wicksteed!” Julia exclaimed. “But he’s awfully well known.”

“Davey to you, please.”

Julia was conscious again of the warmth and the well-being filling her. She had to be flippant, or cry with the startling joy of it all.

“If that was a sample of your work I found on your desk one day I can’t think how you became famous.”

Davey said with some smugness, “You fell in love with the man who wrote it.”

“Ah yes. But you’ve seen what a gullible person I am.” Then they were both laughing and the shock and unacknowledged horror of the moment of discovery of Harry’s identity was past.

The kettle had begun to boil, and Davey made tea. When they were drinking it he began quietly and systematically to tell the story.

“I met Harry—or, as I thought, Paul Blaine—by chance. He offered me a job here, and knowing that I was a writer of sorts he then asked me if I would write a love letter for him to a girl in England. We’d been drinking together, and he’d told me just enough to make me feel I was on the track of a good story. He said it had to be a letter this girl couldn’t resist because it was most important that she agree to marry him. Well—” his eyes rested on Julia with serious tenderness, “you may not believe this, but something came into me as I wrote that letter. I kept saying to myself, this is the kind of letter I would like to write to the girl I love one day, and then, this
is
the girl I love. That feeling was quite uncanny, and overwhelming.”