Dorothy Eden (50 page)

That word was his mother’s. She saw dramatic possibilities in everything, and her curiosity was unbelievable. If it had been Mr. Lucas, the butcher (a man whose soul was wrapped up in slabs of meat), moving up to the ramshackle old house on the hilltop Henrietta would have said he was planning to keep women. Or if it were the newspaper boy she would say he was running a gambling saloon. She had the type of mind that had to embroider everything. So one could expect that with a couple like the Mildmays who did have a certain air of mystery, Henrietta’s imagination would run riot.

Much as he would have liked to, Dougal knew it was no use trying to keep secret the fact that the Hilltop was taken. Henrietta spent the greater part of her day at her upstairs sitting-room window which overlooked the road running up to the Hilltop, and she saw everyone who came and went. She also noticed instantly the lights were switched on in the empty windows of the big house, and this precipitated the lengthy enquiry that Dougal had known was inevitable.

“Dougal! Ethel!” Her penetrating voice had come excitedly down the stairs. “Come quickly. I think there must be burglars at the Hilltop.”

Dougal didn’t shout from the bottom of the stairs because he knew it was useless. His mother was slightly deaf. He came up to the picturesque untidy room with its embarrassing collection of photographs of himself at various sizes, its comfortable chairs (his mother was a large woman and liked comfort), its book-lined walls that held every type of book from Hans Andersen to the Decameron, and its superb view of the tussocky hill that leaned its golden bosom against the apple green sunset sky.

All the long windows of the old white two-winged house on the crest of the hill were lighted.

“No, Mother,” said Dougal, “what burglars would be stupid enough to put all the lights on?”

“Then who is it up there?” Henrietta demanded. “Should we notify the police?”

“The new owners would hardly appreciate that.”

“Who?”

“The new owners,” Dougal shouted.

Henrietta looked at him with her prominent indignant eyes. It seemed to Dougal that indignation was their most frequent expression and that he was the reason for it.

“Dougal, you didn’t tell me that the Hilltop was sold.”

“The sale was only finalised last week, Mother.”

“Last week! Seven whole days ago. You make me live in ignorance of what is going on under my very nose.”

Dougal moved his hands resignedly. It was useless to point out to Henrietta that the first essential when one followed the profession of law was discretion. His father, in thirty years, had not been able to convince her of that, so how could he whom she had always expected to come to her with everything. His mother was an incurable gossip and like all gossips she liked to be first among her friends with new tidbits. She found it humiliating to hear from others what her own son had known, professionally, for some time.

But he admitted that he could have told her the Hilltop was sold. There would have been no harm in that.

“I’m sorry, Mother. The transaction wasn’t completed until today. The Mildmays are moving in at once. Or rather Simon Mildmay’s fiancée is. They’re being married in a few days.”

Henrietta sat down, spreading out her wide lap. Her broad, plain, highly-coloured face was full of charm and benignity.

“A wedding! How exciting! Now, Dougal, be sweet and tell me about these people.”

He wasn’t very good at describing people. On the other hand, if Henrietta had seen the two of them come into his office she would have known how to make him see them: the tall rather stout man with small puffy blue eyes, pink skin and plump hands, and the woman who must have been in her early thirties, but who was as small and slim as a half-grown girl, with a pointed sharp-boned face and a great rope of hair the colour of champagne. It was only the faint lines at the corners of her eyes, or perhaps the eyes themselves, shrewd, intelligent, a greenish grey, that indicated her real age.

But he wasn’t possessed of the ability to make Henrietta see them, nor to describe the interest they roused in him. In the first place Simon Mildmay seemed an unlikely type of man for a woman like Iris Matthews to fall in love with. His hair was thinned well back from his pink fleshy forehead, his constant smile was amiable but had a vacuity that should have been disturbing to an intelligent woman. Iris didn’t look as if she lacked intelligence. But Simon adored her, his adoration was so obvious that it was almost embarrassing to an onlooker, and Dougal guessed that Iris would enjoy that. At odd moments he had caught a queer hungry look about her as if once she had been starved and was in constant fear of it happening again. That might have explained her reason for being so excited about marrying Simon, about buying that big old house that no one yet had successfully run as a guest house. They were possessions. Again, his intuition told him that Iris would like possessions.

Neither of them had told him anything of their background. They had merely appointed him to put through the transfer of the Hilltop, and to prove the will of the old aunt, Laura Mildmay, who had died in Auckland three weeks ago. He had no personal interest in the two of them—though he had a suspicion that that would be forced on him by the mere fact that they were going to be neighbours, and that his womenfolk possessed this insatiable curiosity.

Then of course there was the question of the other beneficiary under the will, the girl still in England. He hadn’t agreed that there was any necessity to send for her until he began to discover the size of the estate. Even then there was no actual need for her to make the long journey. But her coming was a family matter and not one that called for his professional advice.

Knowing of old the uselessness of trying to withhold any information from Henrietta if she really intended to have it, that first night that the windows were lighted in the Hilltop house Dougal told her the facts he knew—that Iris Matthews had been a companion and later a nurse to old Miss Mildmay and that Simon, the old lady’s nephew and executor, had come out from England and fallen in love with Iris. Now that Miss Mildmay was dead they had both decided they would like to stay permanently in New Zealand, using Simon’s legacy to buy the old guest house on Scarborough Hill. And lastly that they had sent for an English cousin, the other beneficiary under the will, to come for their wedding.

“How old is this girl and what does she do?” Henrietta asked.

“I understand she does journalism.”

“Fine! We can talk about Fleet Street.”

“You sound as if you’re going to know her personally, Mother,” Dougal said resignedly.

“Of course I am. One must be neighbourly. In any case, you may marry her.”

“Mother! These fantastic conclusions you come to!” But he was used to it. Henrietta had had him married to every female under forty who had set foot on Scarborough Hill during the last ten years. As if three women in his life were not enough!

Henrietta didn’t have a spyglass, which was her one concession to decent behaviour. But her own two eyes, mild and benevolent, could see an awful long way. The day after Simon Mildmay had taken possession of the Hilltop Henrietta reported excitedly that there were guests there already.

“How odd,” she said. “Even before they’re married, and they’ve hardly any staff either. Only that skinny little woman called Bella and her son. Anyway, I don’t think it’s very wise of them to be living up there together before they’re married. I’m not narrow-minded, but other people are.”

“Now Mother,” Dougal remonstrated, “you know very well that Simon’s not living up there. He’s staying at an hotel down in Sumner. And who,” he added, “are the guests?”

“I don’t know that. I just see a light burning half the night in the wing they said they weren’t using until it was renovated. Iris doesn’t sleep in that wing, and neither does Bella nor her son. Ethel found that out. And if Simon isn’t living there he might just as well be. They say he keeps those little parrot things, budgerigars, and that he’s infatuated with them. I think they’re a blind.”

“A blind, Mother?”

“Yes. To make him seem more simple than he is. No normal man would be crazy about birds. He’s going to be fat. I don’t trust fat men. They laugh in their bellies and you never know what they’re thinking.”

It was true that you didn’t know what Simon Mildmay was thinking, but it was probably because he wasn’t thinking at all. Dougal discounted ninety per cent of his mother’s sensational statements. But he was a little mystified about the light in the unused wing which he himself began to notice burnt every night.

Then there was the mild surprise of discovering the value of Laura Mildmay’s New Zealand estate, and after that the letter from Antonia Webb saying that she was arriving.

But the women were nearly driving him mad.

“Now, Dougal, put that nice tie on that I gave you for Christmas. You never wear the ties I give you,” Henrietta complained as he left the breakfast table that morning.

Dougal thought distastefully of the tie which was one of his mother’s typical choices, too bright a blue with a design of yellow and green squiggling things that looked like fish. It was the sort of tie that a fellow like Simon Mildmay who kept birds should wear.

“I’m keeping that for special occasions,” he shouted.

“This is a special occasion, dear.”

And Ethel, carrying dishes from the breakfast table, turned in the doorway to give him the fat companionable giggle that came from somewhere deep down beneath her broad bosom.

“Ethel gets sillier every day,” Henrietta sighed, as she went out. “If that girl would make one intelligent remark I’d sing psalms.”

“Then dismiss her,” said Dougal.

“Because she giggles? That would be hardly fair. And she is a wonderful cook.”

Henrietta had been saying that for five years. Dougal knew that as long as Ethel wanted to stay she would stay. But he tried to imagine bringing a girl home to dinner and having Ethel give her breathy chuckle down his back with each course she served.

He went to his room and put on a sober pinspot tie he had chosen for himself. He smoothed his thick unruly fair hair and looked at his fair-skinned face in the mirror. It was tidy and unmemorable, he thought. Once a girl had told him his smile was the sweetest she had ever seen. That had embarrassed him. He had thought she was a little drunk. She had had red hair and he hadn’t taken out a red-headed girl since.

He knew exactly the kind of girl he wanted to marry. She was to be small and dark-haired with a calm face and hands that she kept still. She was to be pleasant to look at and intelligent and quiet. In a word, she was to be completely opposite to the women who surrounded him: his big, happy, restless, inquisitive mother with her voice that she pitched high enough to reach her own deaf ears, giggling Ethel, sharp-faced, sharp-voiced Miss Fox at the office who seemed to him all staccato, like the sound her flying fingers made on the typewriter keys. A quiet, soft, restful woman his wife would be.

In the meantime there was the appointment to be kept at the airport, for the purpose of telling the English girl what facts he was permitted to about her inheritance.

At Harewood, while he waited on the windy airstrip for the plane to come nosing down, he had the faintest stirring of excitement. The girl’s voice over the phone this morning had sounded jittery, as if she were a nervous type not fit to be travelling alone, but it had had a nice quality. Supposing by some miracle she should be quiet-faced, dark-eyed, the kind of girl who got uncomfortably into his dreams.

But, no. It was too much to hope for, he realized, when he saw the girl step out of the plane, and he knew by instinct that she was Antonia Webb.

She was carrying her hat in her hand and as she came down the steps the wind immediately caught her hair and swept it up in a shining mass. It was a subtle shade of red, dark, polished, more the colour of rosewood. But red, nevertheless. And of course she would have the kind of thin, animated, clear-skinned face that went with it, and the tall, small-waisted body. She was the kind of girl most men would admire, Dougal realised at once. But not him. She wasn’t his type. His small stirring of excitement died. He had a vague sense of disappointment. She was just another client and, he sensed, probably a troublesome one, for a girl with that kind of face wasn’t going to care to be left in the dark about anything.

He went towards her, holding out a polite hand.

“Miss Webb?” he enquired.

She smiled. Her face did have animation. It lit up. Inwardly he sighed. She was going to be the awkward type, not meek, not accepting. Well, Simon Mildmay could deal with that.

“Yes. You’re Mr. Conroy, aren’t you. How nice of you to meet me.”

“Not at all. Your cousin thought it was a good idea. We have to have a chat at some stage.”

“Yes, of course.” Suddenly she caught his arm. “Look, do you see that man? Oh, he’s gone inside now.”

“Who? Where?” Dougal looked round bewilderingly. “Is he a friend of yours?”

“Oh, no. He just sat behind me in the plane. He seemed to be watching me. You know that feeling of eyes boring into your back.”

Dougal looked gloomily at her dark shining head. Some men did admire that shade of hair.

The girl looked at him with her eyes suddenly too intelligent.

“I guess that does sound fanciful. But he was watching me. When we landed at Paraparamu he followed me into the cafeteria, and sat at a table opposite. Not only that, but he seemed to be laughing at me. Inside himself. As if he knew something that I didn’t and it was amusing.”

“Did he speak to you?”

“No.”

“Bit slow, wasn’t he?” Dougal observed. “Shall we get your bags?”

The girl had flushed. Her voice became stiff.

“I’m not that kind of person, Mr. Conroy.”

“What kind?” Dougal asked rather indifferently, leading the way over to the luggage trolley.

“The kind who is always expecting to be picked up,” she snapped.

He looked at her in mortification.

“Oh, I’m sorry, Miss Webb. I didn’t mean that at all. But that isn’t to say someone might not want to—to form an acquaintance with you. Now which are your bags? I have my car here.”