The Quiet Heart (5 page)

He had plans for Leydon Hall, she felt certain of that. They might even be plans that would shock and disturb her, affecting her own life, and the lives of Marianne, Jessamy and Lorne. That morning he had talked about pulling the house down and building a township. She had no real fear that he would do anything like that, because the operation would be too vast and local permission would most certainly not be granted, even if he found a number of backers.

But there were other things he could do with Leydon Hall. There were quite a number of things. He could sell it, put it on the market for use as an institution of some sort, such as a school. Dependent upon a wild flight of imagination it could become an hotel—a luxury hotel. The situation was all in favour of an hotel, but the alterations would be expensive. However, Charles Leydon was reputed to be an extremely wealthy man, and he was also an architect. It would probably give him an immense amount of pleasure to destroy Leydon as it stood and rebuild it along lines that would appeal to modern tastes.

There was one other thing he could do with Leydon ... He could convert it into flats. That, too, would call for his architectural skill. It would be like the answer to a challenge if he could combine the charm of the old with all the up-to-the-minute advantages and amenities of the new.

The one thing she was sure he would not do was preserve it as it was as an historic monument, and he certainly would not live in it.

She knew, in her heart, that whatever he planned to do it would mean that she would have to give up her flat, and that would mean a new life altogether for her. A life from which she shrank, although it could have advantages for the girls. She didn’t know...

She was contemplating the dregs of the coffee in her cup when the bell that was intended to summon her to the presence jangled discordantly just outside the door. She sat very still for a moment, and it jangled again. Then she rose, took a quick look at herself in a small mirror beside the dresser, and made for the door.

She tapped on the door of the library, received permission to enter, and found Mr. Leydon the only occupant of the shabby, book-lined room that smelled of musty bindings and burning apple logs. Mr. Minty had apparently taken his departure and his client was stretched comfortably in one of the deepest of the leather chairs, and he had plainly been examining some of the books on the shelves, for he held one of them in his hands.

“Sit down, Mrs. Fairlie.” He did not rise when she entered, but he nodded at the chair facing him—the one vacated recently by the solicitor. “Would you like something to drink? There’s some sherry over there in that corner cupboard.”

“No, thank you.”

“Would you like some brandy?”

“I’ve never drunk brandy in my life.”

“There always has to be a first time.” There were spare glasses on the tray because she had not been certain whether he wanted ordinary liqueur glasses or the big, bulbous ones out of which cognac is usually drunk. He and Mr. Minty had made use of the bulbous ones, and that left a couple of unused small ones on the tray. Before she could prevent him he lifted one and poured a very small quantity of brandy into it. “Sip it,” he advised. “Inhale the bouquet. Tell yourself that it’s nectar. In a way it is.” Alison accepted the glass but regarded the contents dubiously. On an empty stomach, and with her senses reeling with tiredness and her back and legs aching with weariness, the effect was unpredictable ... But he was watching her intently on the other side of the fire, and he was plainly under the impression that his hospitality was something to be appreciated. She took her first sip while his strangely quiet grey eyes more or less compelled her, and then she felt a trickle of inner warmth that was much more pleasing than his approving nod.

“Did you have dinner yourself?”

“I ... wasn’t very hungry.”

“Meaning you skipped dinner, and possibly lunch. Tell me about yourself, Mrs. Fairlie,” he commanded. “Fill in the gaps in the information I have already received about you. You have lived here for about five years, isn’t that so?”

“Yes. My husband was a friend of the late Sir Francis, and he allowed him to occupy the flat where we still live.”

“Your husband was, I believe, a professor of dead languages. Did he teach?”

“No, he was writing a book. It took him a long time. He wasn’t very strong ... She sent him a covert glance. “He was a very studious man, one who lived almost entirely in the past. The present had no appeal for him.”

“Indeed?” Once again his eyebrows ascended. “But he had three daughters, and presumably he was married before he married you. One cannot say that his interest in life was entirely academic.”

The brandy was warming her, and the glow was spreading. But his manner of making an observation there was no disputing filled her with embarrassment. She endeavoured to explain.

“My—my husband wasn’t really the sort of man who found marriage very much to his taste. His first was a failure, and his wife died. When I married him it was because it seemed the only thing to do, and actually it worked out. My father was a financier who got into trouble and—and shot himself...” She licked her lips. “I advertised for a job under an assumed name, and Roger—my husband—answered it. He wanted someone to teach music to his little girls, and to look after Jessamy. He had a flat in London at that time. After I’d been with them for six months he suggested that we married, because otherwise the situation was rather odd. I’d grown very fond of the girls by that time, and I agreed. It—it wasn’t altogether a—a normal marriage...”

“No?” he said, and waited for her to continue.

“I mean,” struggling with a blush and an absurd sensation of sleepiness that was creeping over her, “we were good friends, but nothing more! I nursed him when he was ill, and I promised to look after the girls—always! Of course I’ll keep my promise. I—we—we’re great friends.”

There was no doubt about it, the brandy fumes were mounting to her head. She looked down rather stupidly into her empty glass, and she felt him take it from her and set it on the tray. She smiled sleepily.

“It’s the warmth of the fire ... and I haven’t really s-sat down to-day! This is the first time I’ve ever sat here in the library of Leydon—”

“Why did you come and live at Leydon?”

“Because Roger lost his money ... or nearly all of it! He bought some shares.”

“What happened to them?”

She made a little gesture with her hands.

“Knowing what happened to your father, couldn’t you have advised him against it?”

“I did, but he wouldn’t listen.”

“I see. And after that you came here?”

“Yes.”

“Did you like the late Sir Francis?”

“He was very kind.”

“You acted as a kind of caretaker here?”

She nodded.

“In the summer I—I showed people round...
”
She wished he wouldn’t keep trying to drag information out of her, but would simply let her lie back there comfortably and close her eyes. Her eyelids felt weighted with lead. It was becoming increasingly difficult to form words. “I—I made cakes and things and s-served teas ... sometimes lunches—”

“And Sir Francis paid you to act the part of caretaker for him?”

“Oh, no, he—he knew Roger wouldn’t like that. But he let us live here—cheaply.”

“Have you an agreement?”

“Oh, no, nothing like that.”

“Do you realise you may not be able to go on living here?”

She sent him an imploring look. This was too much for her to grasp, too much for her to cope with.

In any case, it no longer seemed to matter. The only thing that mattered was that this inquisition should cease, and that he would have the common humanity to let her close her eyes—just for an instant.

Half an hour later she was still asleep, and he hadn’t made a move. Then he noticed that the fire was getting low, and already, as a result, the room seemed to be growing chill. Alison, in her enormous chair, looked small by comparison, and although her golden hair looked bright against the dark red velvet of the cushion that supported her head her small oval face, by comparison with her gay blue overall, looked pale and pinched.

He got up suddenly, taking an extraordinary amount of care not to disturb her, and made up the fire.

CHAPTER IV

Alison awakened in her own room next morning with a sensation that something was very far from right. As she lay striving to clear her brain and to think what it was memory asserted itself, and she received a shock.

She could recall a hand on her arm, shaking her ... not particularly gently, but at the same time not ungently. The room was dark, except for feeble firelight, and someone who appeared enormous in that distorting twilight bent over her and spoke to her urgently.

“You’ll have to go upstairs to bed, Mrs. Fairlie. There’s no more fuel, and I can’t keep the fire going any longer. It’s cold, and you’ll catch a chill ... we’ll both catch a chill! I’m sorry, because you were sleeping so peacefully.”

Alison struggled up, but she was too confused to be aware of having done anything outrageous. That was to come later, when she was more alert. All she could do was stammer something that sounded like:

“Did I fall asleep? How silly! What time is it? You should have wakened me!”

“I hadn’t the heart to waken you, and it’s two o’clock.”

“
Two o’clock
?”
She gasped at him, and then she sprang to her feet in horror.

“Mr. Leydon, I’m terribly sorry! I—I don’t understand how it happened...
”
She started groping for the electric light switch, but he reached it ahead of her. As the light flashed on she became aware of her dishevelled appearance—that is to say, she couldn’t see herself, but she knew her coil of hair had come undone and a pale gold strand was dangling in front of her eyes. She thrust it aside with her hand, and became aware of her crumpled overall.

Two o’clock, and he looked rather grim, although his eyes were quite expressionless. She received the distinct impression that he wasn’t so much annoyed as disconcerted by the brightness of the light himself. He put a hand up to his chin and felt it.

“I’m beginning to need a shave! Perhaps I’d better have one before I go to bed. In fact, I don’t think I’ll go to bed at all.”

“Don’t be silly.” She didn’t know how she dared say it to him, but she did. There was an absurd intimacy in the atmosphere, both standing blinking at one another out of slightly bleary eyes, and he definitely did need a shave. His chin was clothed in dark and noticeable stubble. “Of course you must go to bed, but I’ll renew your hot-water bottles before you do. The ones that are in your bed now will be stone cold. I’ll slip out to the kitchen—”

“You’ll do nothing of the kind.” He, too, could be firm despite the hour. “If my bottles are cold they can stay cold. In any case, I don’t like hot-water bottles. Now, which way do you go?”

They were groping their way across the hall, because the electric light switches were far apart. It was a somewhat ghostly, eerie experience in a centuries-old house, but Alison was too accustomed to it to feel nervous. Besides, she had the tall, silent shape of Mr. Leydon at her elbow.

“I’ll go up the main staircase and along the connecting corridor. You go in the opposite direction.”

“I’ll find my way.”

But when she realised he was disappearing down the wrong corridor when they reached the top of the stairs she flew after him and put him right.

“Your room is the fourth door from the end of the gallery. This way!”

By this time he was feeling irritated, and he scowled at her.

“I could have found it myself. Get yourself to bed!” he growled.

But she still insisted on opening the door of his room, and was perturbed because his fire was practically out. All her careful preparations, and now he was to go to bed in the cold after
all!

That was in the early hours of the morning. Now, at eight o’clock—and she was further startled to discover it was so late, because she always rose at a quarter to seven in order to make certain Lorne had a proper breakfast before catching her school bus to Murchester—it all came back to her, and she wondered how she was going to face Mr. Leydon in the broad light of day.

In the kitchen of the flat Marianne was sitting at the table with a cup of coffee in front of her. She was smoking one of her stepmother’s cigarettes and looking as if the evening before had been anything but a success. Indeed, Alison had seldom seen her more depressed.

“What’s happened?” she asked, as she rushed in adjusting the front of her neat grey dress. “Didn’t you have a good time last night?”

Marianne shook her head.

“Ron and I quarrelled,” she admitted. “It was serious,” she added briefly.

Alison glanced at her. There were dark circles under her eyes. She even had a mildly dissipated air.

“Have you had any breakfast?” she asked.

Marianne shook her head.

“I couldn’t face breakfast after last night.”

“Why? What did you do?”

“Oh, we dined at the usual place, and then we went on to the dance and had a few drinks—”

“What sort of drinks?” sharply.

“Vodka and lemon.” Marianne glanced up at her mockingly. “You should try it some time, Ali ... It really gives you a new view of life. For the time being, of course. This morning, I’ll admit, I feel as if I’ve got a bit of a hangover.”

“I think that’s a horrible thing for a girl of your age to say,” Alison commented.

Marianne mocked her.

“Look who’s talking! Anyone would think you were in your thirties, at least. You’ll have to start growing up yourself, Alison, and then you won’t be so shocked at everything I do.”

“I’m not shocked, I—”

But Jessamy came creeping in from the corridor, and she looked a trifle mysterious.

“I’ve been listening outside his door, and he’s not making a sound!” she told them. “I was going to take him a tray of tea if I heard any movements—”

Alison was shocked again.

“
You’ll
take him a tray of tea? You won’t do anything of the kind,” she ordered Jessamy. “What do you think a man like Charles Leydon would think of a girl like you creeping into his room with a tea-tray while he’s still in bed? For one thing, we don’t even know that he likes early tea, and for another—”

“He was terribly nice to me last night,” Jessamy recalled reminiscently. There was a kind of glow on her face.

Alison looked at her. Instead of her usual wool jumper and slacks she was wearing the new dress that Alison herself had bought for her only a week or so before. It was a slim rose-red model with touches of velvet about it, and she had looped a velvet Alice band across the front of her pale forehead and fastened it under her jetty hair at the back. She looked like a rose-red sprite with appealing eyes.

“I think he’s t-terribly nice, don’t you?” she said, and it was the first time for years she had stuttered.

Marianne looked amazed.

“Nice? He treated me last night as if I—as if I was the parlourmaid going out for the evening. I’m not going to find it easy to overlook it, I can tell you!”

Alison was preparing a tray. It was true Leydon might have fixed ideas about tea in the early morning—not that it was so very early, anyway—and prefer coffee, or even nothing at all, but she couldn’t just enter his room with nothing in her hands. It would be embarrassing enough coming face to face with him in that bleak, cold bedchamber after last night.

Before she left the kitchen she made certain that Lorne had had some breakfast. But all she had had, apparently, was a bowl of cornflakes. Cornflakes! And this morning the temperature was down several degrees.

If only she hadn’t overslept!

Outside Leydon’s door, in the silent corridor, she knocked. But there was no answer. She knocked again, still without result, and then pushed open the door. At first she could see nothing, because the heavy velvet curtains were still dragged across the windows, and there wasn’t a spark of fire on the grate. She set down her tray cautiously on a table just inside the door, and then groped her way across the room to the nearest window. Leydon might resent having a light flashed in his face, and in any case the bedside lamp had been used before he got into bed, and therefore the switch by the door produced no results.

A pale, cold November sun found its way into the room. It was fighting desperately to dissipate the mist that hung about the tops of the trees outside.

Alison looked towards the bed. Leydon was not asleep, but he appeared to have lost his voice.

“Got a bit of a throat,” he croaked.

Alison instantly forgot that she had no real right to do anything of the kind and felt his forehead, and the bristly sides of his face. They were burning, and she realised that he was in a high fever. His eyes, that she had thought so colourless the day before, were brilliant as diamonds between his thick black eyelashes. They were so bright that they alarmed her, and the fact that he also looked resentful did not affect her at all.

“This room has felt like an iceberg all night,” he croaked. “I haven’t been warm for a moment. Do you think you could put a hot brick in the bed, or something of the sort?”

“I’ll bring you a couple of hot-water bottles.”

“No.” Instantly he sat upright in bed, and she could see that he was wearing sheer silk pyjamas. “I don’t like hot-water bottles. They leak.”

“These won’t.”

She didn’t stop to argue, but after hastily pouring him a cup of tea and placing it beside his bed she flew off to her own kitchen to fill the hot bottles. While engaged in this operation she issued her orders to Marianne, and to Jessamy.

“Ring Dr. Geddes and ask him to come at once,” she instructed Jessamy. “And you, Marianne, must collect me some firewood as quickly as possible. I’ll have to get his fire lighted, and in the meantime I’ll have the electric fire from your bedroom, Jessamy. It’s more powerful than mine, and I think there’s a point in Mr. Leydon’s room, although I’m not absolutely sure.”

The girls gaped at her.

“Is he really ill?” Marianne demanded.

“I think he’s got a raging temperature. His bedroom’s like ice.”

“Serves him right,” Marianne returned unfeelingly. “He shouldn’t have kept you up amongst the chimney-pots for so long yesterday. You’re the one who should have a raging temperature ... and I expect poor old Minty’s got one, too. I thought he looked half dead when you brought him down from the roof.”

“Please hurry and get the firewood,” Alison ordered impatiently.

Marianne looked mutinous.

“You don’t mean I’m to go outside and collect some, do you?” she demanded. “I’m not a forester! Anyway, where do you keep it?”

“In the cupboard under the stairs, of course.” Alison actually snapped at her. “There’s a supply already chopped.”

“Oh, well, in that case...”

But although Jessamy flew to the telephone, Marianne took her time over collecting the wood. Jessamy came hurrying back from the main hall to report that Dr. Geddes, who had most fortunately been caught at his house before setting out for his surgery, was as good as on his way, and in the meantime they were to keep the patient warm. Warm! Alison felt slightly frantic. How on earth were they to do that in the main part of the house ... a house without any kind of central heating?

When she returned to Leydon’s room he was looking rather more glassy-eyed than before. He had subsided beneath the blankets, and hadn’t touched his tea. Alison, who had had plenty of experience of sick nursing looking after her husband, slid one of the bottles expertly in between the sheets near the foot of the bed, and the other she gave to Leydon to hug. He clutched at it gratefully, despite his avowed aversion to rubber hot-water bottles.

The next thing she did was to plug in the electric fire that Jessamy handed cautiously round the door, and then she produced a thermometer and inserted it in Leydon’s unwilling mouth. In a threadbare voice he spluttered:

“I don’t need this thing!”

“Be quiet!” she ordered.

When she looked at the thermometer all her worst fears were realised. Leydon’s temperature was very nearly a hundred and four.

Dr. Geddes arrived a quarter of an hour later. He seemed surprised when he was conducted up to one of the main bedrooms in the principal part of the house, and then instantly became interested when he heard that it was Charles Leydon himself who appeared to be very much under the weather.

“Sir Charles?” he said. “Oh, I shall enjoy meeting him. We’ve all been wondering in the village when we were going to see him.”

“Please don’t call him Sir Charles,” Alison begged, following him up the stairs. “He prefers to be known as Mr. Leydon! And I think it would be better if you didn’t let him know if he’s really rather ill.”

“Why?” He paused and looked at her. “A nervous type?”

“Not in the ordinary sense, but I suspect he might be the kind to worry over himself, as he’s probably very fit most of the time.”

“Ah, I get you!” The doctor looked as if he understood perfectly. “A bit of a he-man with a tendency to make much of a cut finger! Well, it’s common. The stronger a man is physically the more he dislikes being ill.”

And the first thing he did when he entered the sickroom was to greet the patient by his rightful name.

“Well, this is a pleasure, Sir Charles!” he said.

Later, he took Alison aside and warned her that the situation was fairly serious. He had prescribed the usual drugs, but he thought a nurse might be necessary, certainly a night nurse.