Janet frowned.
‘There wouldn’t be any business side, only Hugo forgot to sign my cheque, and as he is probably well off the map by now, there is no saying when I can get hold of him. You can lend me ten pounds.’
‘Darling, you can’t live on ten pounds!’
Janet laughed.
‘You don’t know what you can do till you try. Only this time I’m not trying. I shall have a fortnight nice and free in Ford House, and I’ve got something in the savings bank. With your ten pounds, I shall get through, even if Hugo doesn’t communicate – and he probably will, because he’ll want to know if there’s anything about his play. I ought to be going.’
Star put out a hand and caught at her.
‘Not yet. I always feel safe when you are somewhere about. I don’t mean with me, but when I know I can just ring you up and say come along and you’ll come, like I did tonight. And when I think of being right over on the other side of the Atlantic I get a horrid kind of shivery feeling, as if there was a lump of ice right down inside me and it wouldn’t melt. You don’t think it could be a presentiment, do you?’
‘How could it!’
Star said weakly,
‘I don’t know – nobody does. But people have them. One of my Rutherford great-aunts had one. She was going on a pleasure trip, I don’t remember where, and just as she was going to step on board she had a most dreadful cold feeling and she couldn’t do it. So she didn’t. And everyone else was drowned. That was her portrait in Uncle Archie’s study, in a little lace cap and one of those Victorian shawls. She married an astronomer, and they went to live in the south of England. So it just goes to show, doesn’t it?’
Janet let this go by. She had known Star for so many years that she did not expect her to be logical. She said cheerfully,
‘Well, you needn’t go if you don’t want to – need you? You can always send Jimmy Du Parc a cable to tell him you’ve got cold feet and he can give Jean Pomeroy your part. It’s perfectly simple.’
Star pinched hard.
‘I’d rather die!’ she said. ‘And you don’t believe in presentiments, do you?’
‘I don’t know. What I do know is that you can’t have it both ways. If you want this part you’ll have to go to New York for it. It isn’t going to come to you.’
‘It’s a marvellous part! I should be right on the top of my own particular wave! Janet, I’ve got to do it! And as long as you are with Stella I shall know that it’ll be perfectly all right. You do think it will be all right, don’t you?’
‘I can’t see why not.’
‘No – I’m just being silly. I do hate going on journeys. Not when I’m actually doing them – that’s rather fun – but the night before. It’s like looking from a nice bright lighted room and not wanting to go out into the dark.’
Janet laughed.
‘You are not very likely to find it dark in New York!’ she said.
When she had gone, Star picked up the telephone receiver and dialled quickly. The voice that answered was as familiar to her as her own.
‘Ninian – it’s Star.’
‘It would be!’
‘I’ve rung you up three times, and you’ve always been out!’
‘I do go out!’
‘Ninian, I’ve just had Janet here-’
‘Epoch-making intelligence!’
‘That idiot Edna has let Nanny go off on holiday somewhere on the continent.’
‘That bourne from which no traveller returns!’
‘Oh, she’ll return all right, but not for a fortnight – and I’m off to New York.’
‘I know you are. I’m coming to see you off.’
‘Well, you wouldn’t be if it wasn’t for Janet. I couldn’t go away and leave Stella without somebody.’
‘Well, I should have said Ford House was rather overstocked with women.’
‘I wouldn’t leave Stella with one of them! What I rang up to say was that Janet is going down to look after her.’
There was something of a pause. Then Ninian Rutherford said,
‘Why?’
‘Why what?’
‘Why ring me up?’
‘I thought you might like to know.’
He said in his most charming voice,
‘Darling, I don’t give a damn, and you can put that in your pipe and smoke it!’ Star gave an exasperated sigh and hung up.
Chapter Seven
Janet went down to Ford House next day. She sat in the train to Ledbury, and something kept telling her that she was running into trouble, and that she was a fool to be doing it. Staying in town would have meant bread and margarine with a sprinkling of cheese and an occasional herring washed down with cups of weak tea, but it might have been preferable to a fortnight with Star’s relations. She didn’t know them, and they didn’t know her. When she thought about them she got the sort of feeling you have when you open the door at the top of steps going down into a cellar. There was a place like that in the Rutherfords ’ house at Darnach. The door was in the passage outside the kitchen. When you opened it there were steps that disappeared into the darkness, and a cold air came up that was tinged with mould. Going down to Ford House felt like that.
Janet took herself quite severely to task about the feeling. She did have that sort of feeling sometimes, and when she had it she blamed a Highland grandmother. Three-quarters of her derived from Lowland Scots who made common sense and a firm adherence to principle their rule of life, but the Highland grandmother was not always to be silenced. Ninian had once declared that she would be unbearable without her – ‘Too “dull” and good, for human nature’s daily food’.
She pushed Ninian out of her mind and shut the door on him. Since she had been doing this for nearly two years, it ought by now to have been easy, but push and shut as she would, there was always something that got left behind or that came seeping back – the way he looked when his eyes laughed at her, the black look of his anger, his quick jerking frown. She supposed they would stop hurting in the end, but at the moment the end was quite a long way off.
At Ledbury she took a taxi, and was driven three miles along country lanes to Ford village. There was a green, a general shop, a church, a garage with a petrol pump, and the entrance to Ford House – tall stone pillars with no gates between them, a squat-looking lodge to one side, and a long unweeded drive stretching away between trees and overgrown bushes.
They emerged upon a gravel sweep. Janet got out, and the driver rang the bell. Nobody came for quite a long time. The bell was an electric one. Janet had begun to think it must be out of order, when the door was opened by a girl in a washed-out cotton dress. She had pale, prominent eyes and she poked with her head, but her voice sounded amiable as she said,
‘Oh, are you Miss Johnstone? I didn’t hear the bell with all the noise that’s going on. That Stella – I never heard a child scream like it in my life! She’s been something dreadful ever since Nanny went. I only hope you’ll be able to do something with her. Slapping’s no good, for I’ve tried. Nothing to hurt her of course, but sometimes it stops them – only not her. All she does is carry right on till you don’t know whether you’re on your head or your feet.’
While she spoke the driver dropped Janet’s suit-case on the step, pocketed his fare, and drove away.
Janet walked into the hall. Someone was certainly screaming, but just where the sound came from, she could not be sure.
‘There!’ said the girl. ‘Did you ever hear anything like it!’
‘Where is she?’ said Janet quickly.
But the words were hardly spoken before they were answered by Stella herself. A door at the back of the hall was pushed open and a screaming child ran out. And then in an instant halfway across the floor she stopped dead, stared at Janet’s suit-case, at Janet herself, and said,
‘Who are you?’
Janet went to meet her.