Patricia Wentworth - She Came Back

She stood there waiting for the assistant to turn round. But she didn’t turn round. One of the women was explaining just what sort of setting-lotion she wanted, and every time it was possible to get in a word edgeways the buxom girl said they hadn’t got it, but that something else would do just as well, in fact very much better. Lyndall could see that it was likely to go on for ages. On the spur of the moment she walked across the shop and through the curtained archway on the other side of which the cubicles for hairdressing and manicure would be found. If Anne was having her hair done, that was where she would be. It wouldn’t take a moment to find out. She could always say she was looking for a friend.

As soon as she was through the archway she could hear the swish of running water. The cubicles had curtains, not doors. It was quite easy to look through the curtains. A fat woman with a red neck-a thin one with her head over the basin-a little dark girl having a manicure-a permanent wave-another manicure. Not a sign of Anne, not a sign of the fur coat. After all, it had got to be somewhere.

At the end of the passage between the cubicles was another of those looking-glass doors. She saw her own reflection coming to meet her like a doppelgänger-Lyn Armitage in a grey tweed coat and skirt and a dark red hat, looking scared. It was frightfully stupid to put yourself in the wrong by looking scared. If you were doing something which made you feel not quite so sure of yourself as you would like to be, that was the time to put your chin in the air and look as if you had bought the earth and paid cash down for it.

She pushed the door as she had pushed the other one, and came into a small square space with a wooden stair running steeply up on the left, a door on the right, and another straight ahead. It was dark after the brightly lighted shop, and it was cold after the warm, steamy heat of the passage between the cubicles. There was a damp, mouldy smell. Quite evidently these were back premises with no allurements for customers. Anne wouldn’t be here. And as the thought went through her mind, she heard Anne Jocelyn’s voice.

It frightened her, she couldn’t think why. It was only the voice, no words, but she wasn’t sure-no, she wasn’t sure about its being Anne’s voice. If she hadn’t been thinking about Anne just at that moment, perhaps she would never have thought of its being her voice. She took a hesitating step forward. Now that her eyes were getting accustomed to the changed light, she could see that the door in front of her was not quite shut. It wasn’t open, but it hadn’t latched when it was closed. Some doors are very tiresome like that-they latch and spring open again, or they close and do not latch.

Lyndall put her hand on the panel of the door. She had no design in doing this; it was neither thought nor planned. She saw her hand come up and move the door. It moved quite easily. There was a line of light all down the edge of it like a thin gold wire. She heard the voice which was like Anne’s voice say, “You might just as well let me write to Nellie Collins. She’s quite harmless.” A man’s voice said in a carrying whisper, “That is not for you to say.”

Lyndall took her hand away from the door and turned round. Her heart had begun to beat with suffocating violence. She felt ashamed and inexplicably frightened. If she let herself move quickly, panic might take hold of her. She must get away. She must move quickly, but she mustn’t make any noise. She was very near to feeling that she couldn’t move at all.

Warmth and scented steam met her between the cubicles. She passed the curtained archway, and found the scene in the shop unchanged-the two women by the counter, the babble of voices, the assistant, with her back still turned, shifting bottles. She passed out into the street and shut the door behind her. No one had seen her come or go.

Pelham Trent was, as Mr. Codrington had called him, a very pleasant fellow. Lyndall Armitage certainly found him so. He dropped in as often as he could at Lilla Jocelyn’s flat, and Lilla was delighted to see him come. As she said to Milly Armitage, “They are just friends. At least, that’s all it is with her-I’m not so sure about him. But it’s exactly what she wants just now-someone to take her out and make her feel she matters.”

Lyn went out with Pelham Trent. She found him a most agreeable companion and the best of hosts. It was better than sitting at home and feeling as if your world had come to an end. When you felt like that, the thing to do was to get into somebody else’s world as quickly as you could. It was her world which had crashed-hers and Philip’s. Perhaps Anne’s too. But Pelham Trent’s world kept its steady orbit. It was a safe, cheerful world in which you could laugh and have a good time-dance, see a film, a play, or a cabaret, and put off for as long as possible the return to the cold, shattered place where your own warm world had been.

They did not always go out. Sometimes they stayed in Lilla’s charming drawing-room and talked. Sometimes he played to them. Those rather square hands of his with the strong, blunt fingers were quite extraordinarily agile on the keys of the Steinway baby grand. He would sit there playing one thing after another whilst the two girls listened. When the time came to say good-night he would hold Lyndall’s hand for a moment and say, “Did you like it?” Sometimes she would say, “Yes,” and sometimes she would only look, because when she felt deeply she never found it at all easy to translate her feelings into words. Except with Philip, who nearly always knew what she was thinking, and so, because no words were needed, they came quite easily.

Music let her into a world which was neither hers nor Pelham Trent’s, though his playing was the gate through which she entered it. It was a world where feeling and emotion were sublimated until they possessed nothing except beauty, where sorrow spent itself in music and loss was solaced. She came back from this world rested and refreshed.

After all Milly Armitage did not stay on at Jocelyn’s Holt. It was not in her to refuse what Philip asked, but she had never responded to any of her sister-in-law Cotty Armitage’s not infrequent appeals with more alacrity. Cotty enjoyed poor health. For twenty-five years or so she had had recurring attacks to which no doctor had ever been able to give a name. They involved the maximum of trouble to her family with the minimum of discomfort to herself. She had worn a husband into his grave, two daughters into matrimony, and the third to the brink of a breakdown. It was when Olive appeared likely to go over this brink that Cotty took up pen and paper and invited her dearest Milly to visit them. And Milly, incurably soft-hearted, invariably went.

“Of course what she really wants is for someone to pour a hogshead of cold water over her.”

“Then why don’t you?” said Lilla, with whom she was lunching on her way through London.

“Couldn’t lift it, my dear. But someone ought to. Every time I go there I make up my mind to tell her she’s a selfish slave-driver, and that Olive is simply going down the drain, but I don’t do it.”

“Why don’t you?”

“Olive wouldn’t thank me, for one thing. That’s the awful part of that kind of slave-driving-in the worst cases the victim doesn’t even want to be free. Olive’s like that. You know, Lyndall only just got away in time. She was two years with Cotty after her father and mother died. They were killed together in a motor accident when she was nine and it nearly did her in. She’s sensitive, you know-no armour-plating. Things aren’t awfully easy for people like that. You’re an angel to have her, Lilla.”

“I love having her, Aunt Milly.”