The Shell Seekers (6 page)

"Olivia, Hank Spotswood here, we met at the Ridgeways'."

"Of course."

"I have a free hour or two. Any chance of lunch?"

"What, today?"

"Yeah, right now."

"Oh, I am sorry, I can't make it. My sister's coming up from the country and I'm having lunch with her. I'm already late, I should be on my way."

"Oh, that's too bad. Well, what about dinner this evening?"

His voice, remembered, filled in the details. Blue eyes. A pleasant, strong-featured, wholly American face. Dark suit, Brooks Brothers shirt with a button-down collar.

"I'd like that."

"Great. Where would you like to eat?"

For perhaps an instant she debated, and then made up her mind.

"Wouldn't you like, just for once, not to have to eat in a restaurant or an hotel?"

"What does that mean?"

"Come to my house, and I'll give you dinner."

"That would be great." He sounded surprised but by no means unenthusiastic. "But isn't that a chore for you?"

"No chore," she told him, smiling over the homely word. "Come about eight o'clock." She gave him the address and a simple direction or two in case he found himself a moronic taxi driver, and they said goodbye and she rang off.

Hank Spotswood. That was good. She smiled to herself, then looked at her watch, put Hank out of her mind, sprang to her feet, collected hat, coat, bag, and gloves, and stalked from the office to keep her luncheon date with Nancy.

Their venue was L'Escargot in Soho, where Olivia had booked a table. This was where she always came for business lunches, and she saw no reason to make any other arrangement, although she knew that Nancy would have been much more at home in Harvey Nichols, or someplace full of exhausted women resting their feet after a morning's shopping.

But L'Escargot it was, and Olivia was late, and Nancy was waiting for her, fatter than ever, in her heather wool sweater and skirt and a fur hat roughly the same colour as her faded fair curls, which made her look as though she had grown another head of hair. There she sat, a single female in a sea of business men, with her handbag on her lap and a large gin and tonic on the small table in front of her, and she appeared so ridiculously out of place that Olivia knew a pang of guilt, and as a result sounded more effusive than she felt.

"Oh, Nancy, I'm sorry, I'm terribly sorry, I got held up. Have you been waiting long?"

They did not kiss. They never kissed.

"It's all right."

"You've had a drink, anyway . . . you don't want another, do you? I booked a table for a quarter to one, and we don't want to lose it."

"Good afternoon, Miss Keeling."

"Oh, hello, Gerard. No, not a drink, thank you, we're a bit pushed for time."

"You have a table ordered?"

"Yes. A quarter to one. I'm afraid I'm a bit late."

"No matter—if you'd like to come through."

He led the way, but Olivia waited for Nancy to heave herself to her feet, gather up her bag and her magazine, and pull her sweater down over her considerable rump before she followed him. The restaurant was warm and packed and loud with mascu-line conversation. They were led to Olivia's usual table, in a far corner of the room, where after the customary obsequious ceremony, they were finally seated on a curved banquette, the table pushed back over their knees and the massive menus produced.

"A glass of sherry while you decide?"

'Terrier for me, please, Gerard . . . and for my sister . . ." She turned to Nancy. "You'd like some wine?"

"Yes, that would be very nice."

Olivia, ignoring the wine list, ordered a half bottle of the house white.

"Now, what do you want to eat?"

Nancy did not really know. The menu was terrifyingly large and all in French. Olivia knew that she could sit there all day, debating over it, so she made a few suggestions, and in the end Nancy agreed to consomm6 and then escalope of veal with mushrooms. Olivia ordered an omelette and a green salad and, with this settled and the waiter gone, "What sort of journey did you have up this morning?" she asked.

"Oh, very comfortable, really. I caught the nine-fifteen. It was a bit of a rush getting the children off to school, but I made it."

"How are the children?"

She tried to sound as though she were really interested, but Nancy knew that she was not and so did not, thankfully, expound on the subject.

"All right."

"And George?"

"He's well, I think."

"And the dogs?" Olivia persevered.

"Fine . . ." Nancy started to say and then remembered. "One of them was sick this morning."

Olivia screwed up her face. "Don't tell me. Not until we've eaten."

The wine waiter appeared, with Olivia's Perrier and Nancy's half bottle. These were deftly opened and the wine poured. The man waited. Nancy remembered that she was meant to taste it, so she took a sip, pursed her lips professionally, and pronounced it delicious. The bottle was placed on the table and the wine waiter, expressionless, withdrew.

Olivia poured her own Perrier. "Don't you ever drink wine?" Nancy asked her.

"Not during business lunches."

Nancy raised her eyebrows, appearing almost arch. "Is this a business lunch?"

"Well, isn't it? Isn't that what we're here to do? Talk business about Mumma." The baby name as usual irritated Nancy. All three of Penelope's children called her by a different name. Noel addressed her as Ma. Nancy, for some years, had called her Mother, which she considered suitable to their ages and to Nancy's own station in life. Only Olivia—so hard-hearted and sophisticated in every other way—persisted with "Mumma." Nancy sometimes wondered if Olivia realized how ridiculous she sounded. "We'd better get on with it. I haven't got all day."

Her cool tones were the last straw. Nancy, who had travelled up from Gloucestershire for this meeting, who had wiped up dog's sick and cut her thumb on the Bonzo tin, somehow got her children to school and caught the train by the skin of her teeth, experienced a great surge of resentment.

I haven't got all day.

Why did Olivia have to be so brusque, so heartless, so un-feeling? Was there never to be an occasion when, cosily, they could talk as sisters without Olivia flaunting her busy career, as though Nancy's life, with its solid priorities of home, husband, and children, counted for nothing?

When they were small, it was Nancy who was the pretty one. Fair-haired, blue-eyed, with sweet ways, and (thanks to Granny Keeling) pretty clothes. It was Nancy who had attracted eyes, admiration, men. Olivia was brainy and ambitious, obsessed by books, exams, and academic achievement; but plain, Nancy reminded herself, so plain. Painfully tall and thin, flat-chested and bespectacled, she displayed an almost arrogant lack of interest in the opposite sex, relapsing into a disdainful silence whenever one of Nancy's boyfriends turned up, or disappearing up to her bedroom for a book.

And yet, she had her redeeming features. She would not have been her parents' daughter had she not been blessed with these. Her hair, which was very thick, was the colour and sheen of polished mahogany, and the dark eyes, inherited from their mother, glittered, like those of some bird's, with a sort of sar-donic intelligence.

So what had happened? The gangling, brilliant University student, the sister no man would dance with, had somehow, sometime, somewhere, transformed herself into this phenomenon, of Olivia at thirty-eight. This formidable career woman, this Editor of Venus.

Her appearance today was as uncompromising as ever. Ugly, even, but almost frighteningly chic. Deep-crowned black velour hat, voluminous black coat, cream silk shirt, gold chains and gold earrings, knuckle-duster rings on her hands. Her face was pale, her mouth very red; even her enormous black-rimmed spectacles she had somehow turned into an enviable accessory. Nancy was no fool. As she followed Olivia across the crowded restaurant to their table, she had sensed the frisson of masculine interest, seen the covert glances and the turned heads and known that they had not been turned for pretty her, but for Olivia.

Nancy had never guessed at the dark secrets of Olivia's life. Right up to that extraordinary happening, five years ago, she had honestly believed that her sister was either a virgin or totally sexless. (There was, of course, another and more sinister possibil-ity, which occurred to Nancy after ploughing her way dutifully through a biography of Vita Sackville-West, but this, she told herself, really didn't bear thinking about.)

The classic example of an ambitious and clever woman, Olivia had apparently been absorbed by her career, which had steadily advanced until she was finally made Features Editor of Venus, the intelligent, up-market magazine for women, on which she had worked for seven years. Her name figured on the flagstaff page; from time to time her photograph appeared in its pages, illustrating some article, and once, answering questions in a family show, she had been on television.

And then, with everything going for her, in mid-stream of life, as it were, Olivia took that unexpected and uncharacteristic step. She went on holiday to Ibiza, met a man called Cosmo Hamilton, and never came home. At least, she did finally come back, but not until after she had spent a year out there living with him. The first her editor knew of it was a formal letter, sent from Ibiza, handing in her resignation. When the mind-boggling news filtered through, via their mother, Nancy had at first refused to believe it. She told herself that it was all too shocking; but it was, in fact, because in some obscure way, she felt that Olivia had stolen a march on her.

She could not wait to tell George, to have him dumbfounded as she had been, but his reaction took her quite unawares.

"Interesting" was all he said.

"You don't seem very surprised."

"I'm not."

She frowned. "George, it's Olivia we're talking about."

"Certainly it's Olivia." He looked at his wife's bewildered face and almost laughed. "Nancy, you surely don't imagine that Olivia has lived like a good little nun all her life? That secretive girl with her flat in London and her evasive ways. If you believed that, you're a bigger fool than I thought."

Nancy felt tears sting the back of her eyes. "But . . . but, I thought ..."

"What did you think?"

"Oh, George, she's so unattractive."

"No," George told her. "No, Nancy, she is not unattractive."

"But I thought you didn't like her."

"I don't," said George, and opened his newspaper, thus putting an end to the discussion.

It was unlike George to expound so forcefully on any sub-ject. It was also unlike him to be so perceptive but, with hindsight and a good deal of mulling over this new turn of events, Nancy finally decided that he was probably right about Olivia. Once she had come to terms with the situation, she did not find it hard to turn it to her own advantage. Being able to boast of such a dashing relation seemed to Nancy both glamorous and sophisticated —like an old Noel Coward play—and provided one glossed over the living-in-sin bit, Olivia and Cosmo Hamilton provided quite a good conversation stopper at dinner parties. "Olivia, you know, my clever sister, it's too romantic. She's thrown everything up for love. Living in Ibiza now ... the most beautiful house." Her imagination raced ahead to other delightful, and hopefully free, possibilities. "Perhaps next summer George and I and the children will join her for a few weeks. It depends on the Pony Club events, though, doesn't it? We mothers are slaves to the Pony Club."

But although Olivia asked their mother to go and stay and Penelope accepted with delight and spent more than a month with her and Cosmo, no such invitation ever came the way of the Chamberlains, and for this Nancy had never forgiven her sister.

The restaurant was very warm. Nancy felt, all at once, far too hot. She wished she had worn a blouse instead of a sweater, but she couldn't take the sweater off, so instead she took another cool mouthful of wine. Despite the warmth she realized that her hands were trembling.

Beside her, Olivia said, "Have you seen Mumma?"

"Oh, yes." She set down her glass. "I went to see her in hospital."

"How was she?"

"Very well, considering."

"Are they certain it was a heart attack?"

"Oh, yes. They had her in intensive care for a day or two. And then they put her in a ward and then she discharged herself and went home."

"The doctor can't have liked that very much."

"No, he was annoyed. That's why he rang me, and that's when he told me that she shouldn't live alone."

"Have you considered a second opinion?"

Nancy bridled. "Olivia, he's a very good doctor."

"A country GP."

"He would be very offended . . ."

"Rubbish. I consider there is no point in doing anything about a companion or a housekeeper until she's seen a consul-tant."

"You know she'd never see a consultant."

"Then let her be. Why should she have some dim woman foisted on her if she wants to live on her own? She's got nice Mrs. Plackett coming in three mornings a week, and I'm sure the people in the village will all rally round and keep an eye on her. After all, she's lived there for five years now, and everyone knows her."