Джорджетт Хейер - Penhallow

He cleared his throat, and began to draw patterns on the blotter with one of the pencils scattered over the table. “Well, but after all, Faith!” he said. “Clay must do something, mustn’t he? You’ll have him living at home, too, if he comes to me. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

Her eyes filled with tears. “If everything were different! Not as things are. He hates it at home. He doesn’t get on with Adam, and his stepbrothers are horrid to him. They don’t understand how anyone can be more sensitive than themselves. I’ve suffered from their absolute unfeelingness all my life, and I’m determined Clay shan’t be sacrificed as I was!”

The conversation seemed to Clifford to be soaring towards an elevated plane which he, a plain man, could not aspire to. He said in a soothing way: “Well, if he finds he doesn’t like law, after he’s given it a fair trial, we shall have to think of something else.”

“If you think that Adam would ever let him leave the firm, once he’d got him into it, you don’t know him!” exclaimed Faith.

“Well, well, a great many things may happen to alter circumstances, after all! Really, Faith, I don’t think you need...”

“You mean Adam might die,” she said. “He won’t. I know he won’t. He’ll go on for years and years, making us all miserable! Look at his grandfather! He lived to be over eighty, and had all sorts of things the matter with him.”

“Really, Faith!” expostulated Clifford, quite shocked.

She burst into tears. “Oh, I know I ought not to say so, even to you, but if you only knew what I have to put up with, Cliff, you wouldn’t be surprised at my having reached the end of my tether! I could bear it while Clay was safe from Adam’s tyranny, but if he’s to be forced into doing something he doesn’t want to do, and kept down here at the back of beyond, when he’d rather be in London, I simply can’t go on!”

He began to feel very uncomfortable, and wondered how much of this interview was audible to the clerk and the boy in the outer office. Faith’s sobs had, he thought, it peculiarly penetrative quality. He made sympathetic noises in his throat, and was glad to see her making an effort to calm herself.

““Taking him away from college, too, for no reason!” choked Faith, applying her handkerchief to her reddened eyes. “It’s so unfair!”

“Yes, well, I do feel that that is perhaps a mistake,” agreed Clifford, perceiving in this circumstance a means of pacifying, if only temporarily, his unwelcome visitor. “I’ll tell you what, Faith: I’ll have a talk with Uncle Adam, and see if I can get him to let Clay finish his three years at Cambridge. You never know: something might happen between now and then to make Uncle alter his mind.”

“He won’t,” Faith replied wretchedly, but in quieter accents. “I don’t suppose he’ll even listen to you.”

Clifford felt quite sure that he wouldn’t, but naturally did not say this. Instead, he looked at his watch, discovered, with artless surprise, that it was already one o’clock, and suggested, with a return of his usual hearty manner, that Faith should postpone her return to Trevellin until the afternoon, and should take luncheon with himself, and his wife, Rosamund. “Rosamund,” he said mendaciously, “would never forgive me if I let you go home without seeing her. Besides, you haven’t seen the kiddies for I don’t know how long! We can talk it over after lunch. It’s a pity Uncle won’t have the telephone installed at Trevellin, but I daresay they won’t worry if you don’t turn up to lunch, will they?”

“No one at Trevellin would miss me if I never turned up again,” said Faith tragically, opening her compact, and beginning to powder her nose. “But I don’t see why I should inflict myself on Rosamund, only that it’s like being let out of prison, to get away from Trevellin for a bit.

“Now, now, now!” said Clifford, rising and patting her clumsily on the shoulder. “It isn’t as bad as that, Faith. I’ll tell you what: I’ve got one or two things to see to before I leave the office. You trot off to the house, and have a chat with Rosamund. I’ll join you in a few minutes. Perhaps I shall have thought of something,” he added hopefully.

She was not very fond of Rosamund, whom she considered to be a cold, unsympathetic young woman, but being in that state of mind when it was imperative to her to unburden herself to as many people as possible, she accepted his invitation, and went out again to reenter the ponderous landaulette. The under-gardener received her order to drive to the Laurels with evident gratification; and in a few moments the landaulette was once again in motion.

The Laurels, a square Georgian house, was situated on the outskirts of the town, so that by the time Faith had walked up its well-kept front path Clifford had been able to warn his wife by telephone of the trial in store for her. Rosamund, who thought Faith the least objectionable member of the Penhallow family, received the tidings with her usual calm, issued a few necessary orders to her domestic staff, and was ready to receive her guest when Faith set her finger to the electric bell-push.

A neat house-parlourmaid (so unlike the servants at Trevellin!) admitted Faith into a square, white-painted hall, and conducted her across it to the drawing-room at the back of the house. This was a comfortable apartment overlooking the garden, and was furnished in a somewhat characterless but agreeable style, which included well-sprung chairs; a plain pile carpet of neutral hue; a low tea-table of burr-walnut; oxidised fire-irons dangling from a stand in one corner of a hearth lined with glazed tiles; a swollen floor cushion, shaped like a cottage-loaf, and covered with the same flowered cretonne which provided loose-covers for the chairs, and the sofa, and for the curtains hanging in the bay window. The pictures on the walls, which were all framed alike, were inoffensive, and gave a general air of quiet decoration to the room without attracting any particular attention to themselves. One or two illustrated papers were piled neatly on a long, cane-seated stool placed in front of the fireplace; and several books bearing the label of a local lending library stood upon a semi-circular table by the wall, maintained in an upright position by a pair of book-rests fashioned in the shape of china dogs. Everything in the room was new, and well-kept. The pictures were arranged symmetrically; no single piece of furniture had been placed in such a position that it was not balanced by another, similar, piece; nothing had been chosen to go into the room which did not match its surroundings. There was no dust anywhere to be seen; there were no thin patches on the carpet; no priceless rugs flung down with an entire disregard for jarring colours; no jumble of ornaments on the mantelpiece; no sagging springs to any of the chairs; no discordant note introduced by the juxtaposition of a Victorian chiffonier with a Chippendale ladder-back chair. Rosamund had no Victorian furniture in her house. Similarly, she had no Chippendale chairs either, although her dining-room was furnished with a set of very good replicas.

Faith, to whom the queer, distorted beauty of Trevellin made no appeal, liked the room, and envied Rosamund her possession of a clean, compact house, full of labour-saving devices and seemly, unambitious suites of furniture. She considered, looking round the room, with its nicely graduated tones of blending browns and yellows, that Rosamund had an eye for colour, and thought that if she had stood in Rosamund’s shoes she could have achieved very much the same pleasing result.

Her hostess came into the room while she was still taking stock of her surroundings. Rosamund Hastings was a handsome woman with a somewhat chilly pair of blue eyes, and a quantity of fashionably waved fair hair. She was dressed suitably in a well-cut suit of grey flannel, with a canary shirt, and low-heeled shoes over very good quality silk stockings. She was five years younger than Faith, but was possessed of more assurance than Faith would ever own. She was a good, if a rather frigid wife; an excellent mother; a competent housekeeper; and an attentive hostess, who never forgot to order sherry from the wine-merchant, nor to offer her guests Indian as well as China tea.