Mrs Blount had sunk down upon one of the hall chairs. She had a limp discouraged look, from her stringy sandy hair to her toed-in feet. She drooped on the upright chair and looked past Althea with pale watery eyes. She didn’t seem capable of having a violent enthusiasm about anything. She opened the lips which hardly showed in the general pallor of her face and said,
‘Oh, yes.’
Althea found herself saying in the voice she would have used to a child, ‘I’m sorry, but we really don’t intend to sell,’ and with that the drawing-room door opened and Mrs Graham stood there. There could have been no greater contrast to the sagging Mrs Blount. Mrs. Graham wore her invalidism in a very finished and elegant manner, from her beautifully arranged hair to the grey suède shoes which matched her dress. It is true that she wore a shawl, but it was a cloudy affair of pink and blue and lavender which threw up the delicate tints of her face and complimented the blue of her eyes.
‘Darling, I heard voices. Oh…’ she broke off.
Mr Blount advanced with his hand out.
‘Mrs Graham, permit me – I am Mr Blount, and this is Mrs Blount. We have an order to view, but there seems to be a misunderstanding. Miss Graham…’
Mrs Graham smiled graciously.
‘Oh, yes. I had a little chat with Mr Martin this morning, Thea darling. I ought to have told you, but it slipped my memory. I didn’t think he would be able to arrange anything so soon. Perhaps you will take them over the house.’ She turned a deprecating look upon Mr Blount. ‘I am not allowed to do the stairs more than once a day.’
Impossible to have a scene in front of two strangers. Althea took them over the house, Mr Blount talking all the time and Mrs Blount repeating in every room the same two words – ‘Very nice.’ When she had said it in four bedrooms, a bathroom, the dining-room, the drawing-room, and the kitchen, they went into the garden, where two bright borders and a strip of grass led up to a shrubbery and a summerhouse. The slope was really quite a steep one, so much so that Mrs Graham considered it beyond her. Althea’s conscience took her to task for the feeling of gratitude which this induced and she had no defence against it. The place was a refuge, and the house afforded her none. There was no room in it where she could turn a deaf ear to the sound of her mother’s high, sweet voice calling her, or to the tinkle of her summoning bell.
Mr Blount looked at everything. He obviously didn’t know a delphinium from a phlox, or a carnation from a marigold, but he admired them all. He admired the old summerhouse, which was really, as Mr Martin could have told him, what used to be called a gazebo and was a good deal older than the house. In the days when Grove Hill was really a hill with wooded slopes it had been contrived to afford an agreeable view of fields going down to the river. Since it held some of Althea’s most deeply hidden memories, she was glad to find that Mr Blount was not interested in it, passing it over with the remark that summerhouses were draughty, and that Mrs Blount had to be very careful about draughts.
When they were gone she went back up the garden and sat down in the gazebo.
FOUR
NICHOLAS CAREY CAME back to Grove Hill because he had left a lot of kit there and he supposed he had better go through it. If he had thought about it at all in the last few years, it was to imagine that Emmy Lester would have taken it with her when she moved, or failing that, would have thrown most of it away. But no, the letter which greeted him on arrival in England informed him that she had left the attic positively stuffed with his things. There was a good deal on the lines of ‘You know the Harrisons have bought the house – some distant cousins of mine – and Jack Harrison couldn’t have been kinder about my leaving everything just as it was. But I don’t know his wife Ella quite so well, and I think she would be glad if you could go down and just sort out what you want to keep. We haven’t much room here, but anything we can take in…’
Emmy came up before him as he read the letter – a kind, vague creature with a heart as soft as butter. But no fool… He fancied that in the reference to Ella Harrison the sense could be reversed. After meeting Ella he was to be quite sure of it. Emmy had seen right through her, and didn’t like what she saw.
There is always something strange about the return to a place which has once been very familiar. The you who lived there comes back out of the past. It is no longer you yourself, because you have gone on and left it behind. Its loves and likings, its sorrows and despairs, are no longer yours. The misty years have dimmed the memory of them and they can no longer give pleasure or pain. But when you go back in the flesh, walk the old streets, and see the old places, the mists have a tendency to wear thin. A snatch of verse came into his mind and whispered there:
‘Grey, grey mist
Over the old grey town,
A mist of years, a mist of tears,
Where ghosts go up and down –
And the ghosts they whisper thus and thus
Of the days when the world went well with us.’
The Harrisons had invited him to stay, and he had accepted. He told himself afterwards that Emmy’s letter ought to have warned him. He should have made it his business to be much too busy to come down except for the day. Ella Harrison was everything he disliked most in a woman, and poor old Jack couldn’t call his soul his own. He gathered that they had returned in the late spring from a cruise of the jazziest kind, and that every minute of it had been pure poison as far as Jack was concerned.
‘We had the most marvellous time!’ Ella said. ‘Such a gay lot of people! Maria Pastorella – the film star, you know – eyelashes about a yard long, and the most marvellous figure! And her latest husband, an enormously rich South American with a name nobody could pronounce, so we all called him Dada! Really – these South American men! The things he said! He rather singled me out, and I don’t think she liked it! We really had a wonderful time! I’m telling all our friends they ought to go!’ She called across to her husband on the other side of the room.
‘Jack, I believe the Grahams are going to sell their house and go off! Winifred is getting all excited! She says that man who came to see it has taken the biggest sort of fancy to it! He offered five thousand, and she turned it down, and now he says he’ll go to six!’ She came back to Nicholas.
‘By the way you knew them, didn’t you?’ Her voice became rather arch. ‘Rather well by all accounts!’ She gave the laugh he disliked so much. ‘There’s nothing quite so dead as one’s old affairs, is there? But the poor girl has just sat here gathering mould ever since! Not an attractive occupation! I expect she was quite good-looking when you knew her.’
Emboldened by a position behind the sheltering pages of The Times, and perhaps a little by the presence of another man, Jack Harrison said,
‘She is very good-looking now.’
Ella’s laugh was not quite as ringing as it had been a moment ago.
‘Really, Jack! What extraordinary creatures men are! I should have said she had let herself go completely – but there’s no accounting for tastes. Of course Winifred makes a perfect slave of her, but that’s their look-out.’
Nicholas said that he thought he had better start in on his stuff in the attic.
He was astonished at his own anger. It might have broken out once, but five years of some very odd places had taught him self-control. His temper could still flare up at a spark, but he could keep the blinds drawn and the shutters barred whilst he dealt with it. In some of those places the merest momentary failure to control himself could have meant instant and imminent danger. He had walked strange paths, watched strange rites, kept strange company.