‘Mean wasn’t the word for her! Kept everything locked up and measured it out! I wouldn’t have stayed a day, only I hadn’t anywhere else to go. And then, there was Jack Harrison coming up to me on the front and asking me if I remembered him. He’d been at a party Anna Kressler threw, so I said of course I remembered him, and he said he’d never forgotten me and perhaps I’d dine with him.’ She laughed. ‘I’d have dined with the devil and been glad to! It didn’t take me long to see I could get him just where I wanted him. He’d come in for money from an old bachelor cousin, and – well, it was a chance I couldn’t afford to let slip, so I took him and here we are.’
‘All settled down and respectable?’
‘Oh, I’m not chancing my luck.’
But even as she said it she knew that the luck had gone sour on her. When you were down and out, your looks all gone to bits through being ill and Aunt Annie getting the last ounce out of you, Jack Harrison might have seemed like a godsend. All very well to say he hadn’t changed. That was just it – he hadn’t. Day after day, week after week, year after year, he went on being the little dull, grey man whom she had married. There had been plenty of money until lately, but he had begun to talk about cutting down expenses – selling the house, finding somewhere cheaper. He spoke of losses, and the way he went on about the income tax was enough to feed anyone up. In the old days you were tired, you were hungry, you tramped your shoes out looking for jobs, but you didn’t get bored.
She looked at Fred and thought about the times they had had together. There had been rows, but there had been other things as well. She thought about dancing all night, and the way men used to stare at her, and about making love and being made love to. And here was Fred looking at her the way he used to do. It didn’t mean a thing, but – why shouldn’t it? In the old days he never had a bean, but there seemed to be plenty of money in his pockets now, burning a hole there the way it does when you’ve never had much and it comes to you all of a sudden.
He laughed softly and said,
‘Oh, I’m a good boy now – safe as houses. And look here, this is where you can help me. You’d like to help an old friend, wouldn’t you, Ella?’
She flashed him a glance.
‘Provided it’s on the level.’
‘Of course it’s on the level! I want to settle down – buy a house and start a nice little business.’
‘What kind of a business?’
‘Haven’t made up my mind yet. Partnership in a going concern, I think. I’ll get the house first.’
‘And the wife?’ She looked at him between her darkened lashes.
He said lightly, ‘They might go together.’
‘And what do you mean by that?’
‘Oh, just my joke. The fact is I’ve got my eye on a place already. Used to see it when I was a kid and thought I’d like to live there some day. Never thought it’d come off, but you never know your luck – someone tipped me a winner and I made a packet. So it’s me for No. 1 Belview Road.’
Fancy his wanting to buy the Grahams’ house and settle down in Grove Hill. She could think of a dozen better ways of spending money than that. She could think of a dozen better ways of helping him to spend it.
She said with a dash of malice,
‘Well, your luck is out. There’s someone after it already.’
‘How do you know?’
‘The Grahams happen to be friends of mine. I don’t know that they want to sell. They’ve been offered seven thousand, and they’re not jumping at it.’
He gave an incredulous whistle.
‘Seven thousand? You’re kidding!’
‘Well, I’m not.’
‘Who’s the sucker?’
‘A man called Blount.’
His face changed so suddenly that she was startled. He said in a voice that was more like the snarling of an animal,
‘The dirty double-crossing swine!’
SIX
MISS MADISON WAS always extremely offended if anyone alluded to her establishment as a boarding-house. The word had drab associations. It suggested something inferior to an hotel. Miss Madison took Paying Guests. The term guest house was not unacceptable. It was her aim to provide cheerful surroundings, nourishing and appetizing food, and the amenities of home at a moderate charge. Since she was a very good cook, her rooms were seldom empty. Old Mr Peters had occupied one of them ever since his wife died ten years ago. He might be a disconsolate widower, but the Miss Pimms often remarked on how much younger and better he had looked since he had gone to live at Miss Madison’s.
Each of the rooms was furnished in a distinctive colour and was known by that name. Mr Peters had the Red Room. Old Mrs Bottomley, who had been there nearly as long as he had, occupied the Blue Room. She was in her middle eighties, and she had one of those fair downy complexions which seem to get fairer and downier as time goes on. She was a very nice old lady. She had blue eyes and fluffy white hair, and she really looked charming in her pale blue room. Mr and Mrs Blount were in the Pink Room, which was a pity, because poor Mrs Blount had no complexion at all, and the flowered carpet, the pink walls and curtains, and the twin beds with their rose-coloured bed-spreads, only made her look paler and plainer than ever. The pink was also very unfortunate as a background for her rather sparse sandy hair. Not that she herself was in the way of noticing such things as colour effects, but it afflicted Miss Madison who was. If another double room had been vacant, she would have pressed the Blounts to take it, though really when she came to think it over she didn’t know which of the other colours would have been any better. Yellow or green wouldn’t have been too bad with the hair, but she felt shaken when she considered what they might do to that pale flat face, those dull pale eyes. Miss Madison decided that it wasn’t worth worrying about. People who worried disseminated gloom. She considered cheerfulness to be a duty.
Mrs Blount sat in the easy chair in her pink bedroom with a gaily coloured magazine on her lap. It was one of those publications which announce themselves frankly as appealing to Woman with a capital W. It contained household hints, the kind of love story in which everything always comes right in the end, advice on dress, on health, on the conduct of your love-life, on how to manage your house, your children, your husband, together with answers to correspondents, and most important of all, how to be beautiful. Mrs Blount always read the love stories first. When the current serial left the heroine convinced that the tall fair man who had come into her life was unalterably attached to another, she could solace herself with the thought that if not next week, or the next, or the next after that, at any rate in the end it would all turn out to be a misunderstanding and the wedding-bells would ring. Sometimes the man was dark with flashing eyes. Sometimes instead of being handsome he had strong, rugged features. But it all came to the same in the end. He put his arms round the heroine and they kissed each other. Of course the people who wrote the story put it in much more complicated ways, but that was how Mrs Blount thought about it. She was a simple woman and a most unhappy one. It soothed this unhappiness to read about other people who were unhappy, and who got over it and lived happily ever after. It wasn’t that she thought it would happen to her, she just liked to read about it happening to other people. It was for the same reason that she read every word of the advice on beauty culture – ‘If your skin is inclined to be greasy – if you are getting a double chin – if there are any of those fine lines about your eyes – if you are inclined to lose weight, to put on weight – if your face is too long, too wide, too plump, too thin…’ There were ways in which you could put everything right, and she never got tired of reading about them. She didn’t get as far as imagining herself doing any of the things that were recommended. Never for an instant did she picture herself with wavy hair, a transfigured skin, eyebrows carefully shaped and darkened, eye-shadow, rouge, powder, and lipstick. She just liked to read about these things.