The Flowering Thorn Page 2

  “Who with?”

  “Douglas Ford.”

  And a sudden spring of happiness warmed her heart.

  5

  All the way home in the taxi Lesley’s mind raced ahead, planning in ridiculous detail the employments of the next hour. To turn on the bath: to lay out shoes, frock, undergarments, stockings: to rub on the first and swiftly-to-be-removed layer of face-cream—all these would take at least a quarter of an hour. Then the bath itself, and after the bath another quarter of an hour, this time of complete relaxation, before beginning to dress; then the face, the hair: five minutes for the hands. There was time, but no time to lose; and with an odd feeling of crisis Lesley left her fare to be settled by the porter and stepped straight into the lift.

  On her outer door-mat, however, she had to pause and look for her latchkey. That ridiculous revolver was still stuffing up her bag, making everything very difficult to find; and with a final spurt of dislike for all men under thirty she reflected that she would probably now be liable to a heavy fine for being in unlicensed possession of firearms. Unless of course one got up very early in the morning and went and threw it into the Round Pond.…

  And pushing open the door, Lesley smiled. No doubt Douglas would know what to do with it; and in any case the story—very delicately hinted, no suspicion of giving a man away—ought at least to convey, to that rather preoccupied intelligence, certain … well, certain implications. ‘An absolute child, my dear, and being very silly about me.…’

  But the thing was spoiling her bag nevertheless, and weapon in hand, as though to face a burglar, Lesley went into her sitting-room and switched on the lights. But there was nothing stirring, not even a mouse; since from Beverley Court both mice and burglars were equally excluded by the board of management.

  CHAPTER TWO

  About five hours later, between midnight and the quarter, Douglas Ford stood up to go. The smoke of many cigarettes faintly blued the air, for they had returned, at Lesley’s suggestion, a little early.

  “I’ll come and show you the lift,” she said. “The doors are so ornamental that no one recognises it.”

  Douglas Ford laughed.

  “I know them of old. An Aunt of mine lives on the top floor. She says it’s just as good as a nursing-home, and much more convenient for the shops.” He laughed again, and for once, as he stood loosening his shoulders, Lesley took notice that her room was small. The bulk and solidity of men! A thought struck her, and she said,

  “In your Arctic kit—didn’t you look enormous?”

  “So the other fellows used to tell me. But out there there’s room.”

  He lifted his hand, as though suddenly interested in the size of it; then changing the gesture to one of farewell, took Lesley’s ungloved fingers and bade her good-night.

  “Don’t lose your way!” she said.

  When he was quite gone, and when the lights of his car had vanished from below the window, Lesley went slowly to her bedroom and looked in the glass.

  The image she sought there—so curiously, eagerly, as though for the first time—was tall, poised and precisely as slender as fashion required. Gown, gloves and single orchid were impeccably chosen, while the dark, smooth shingle, close as a silken scalp, set off a certain neat elegance of head and shoulders. A lady, one would say, of at least sufficient income, enjoying considerable taste, and not more than twenty-eight years old.

  Without the slightest warning, Lesley Frewen burst into tears.

  For a moment, while the sobs were still beyond control, her only desire was to fling herself down on the bed and bury her face in a pillow. But she was standing, as has been said, before a mirror, and the sight of the havoc therein—the disintegration, as it were, of so much elegance—acted at least as well as sal volatile. Swiftly as it had come, the storm passed over: Lesley dried her eyes, powdered her nose, and returning to the sitting-room sat down to consider the extraordinary phenomenon of her own tears.

  2

  Extraordinary indeed; for purely on her own social merits, and with an income which to many of her friends would have seemed microscopic, Lesley Frewen was universally admitted to lead an exceptionally full, varied and interesting life. She had as many dinner engagements, someone once said, as a young man about Town, and could be relied upon as neighbour for either ambassadors or poets. Music, art, the theatre (all modern) were absorbing interests. She was a foundation member of the Ballet Circle. Hostesses liked her, and occasionally asked her advice. A more fortunately situated young woman, in fact, it would have been hard to conceive: and to crown all, she had just been dining alone with Douglas Ford.

  A good many women would envy her that. Elissa, for example, who had first introduced them, and then a little regretted it; and for the length of a cigarette Lesley sat by the fire and thought of Douglas. He was exactly—she admitted it without disguise—the sort of man she liked and admired. Although little over thirty, he had already made a name for himself in scientific exploration: was universally expected to go on to even greater triumphs of pure research: and had in addition a sophisticated and delightful sense of humour that exactly matched her own. Nor was it the only quality they shared. Golf and the French cinema, skating, bridge and D. H. Lawrence—the list of their common tastes was endless. And he admired her looks, thought her extremely intelligent; would ask her opinion on current affairs.…

  “Then what was it?” cried Lesley aloud; and so at last admitted what still seemed almost impossible, that the evening had been a failure.

  They had dined, they had laughed and talked, in every mirror she had watched herself looking her best: and yet, for want of some tiny, ultimate pinch of happiness, the whole evening had been flawed.

  Thus, step by step, she approached the heart of her black mood, the reason for those unreasonable tears; and presently, for the bitter reward of her courage, the last turn straightened to the centre and there was no more looking aside.

  She had wanted Douglas Ford to make love to her, and he had not been sufficiently attracted.

  There had been a moment, perhaps ten minutes ago, when leaning forward for a last cigarette she had deliberately displayed, with an exaggerated turn, the smooth contour of her delicately-rouged cheek. If he had kissed it, she would have said—what?—‘My dear Douglas!’—very lightly, more amused than rebuking; and she would not have drawn back.

  An angry shame burned at her centre. To have so offered herself, to have been so refused! That the offer had passed unnoticed, that the refusal had been unwitting, she could and did believe; but the bitterness was not thereby lessened. Beside it nothing else mattered: in all her life at that moment, nothing else even existed. And having thus stumbled on the ultimate truth, Lesley remembered her generation and lit a cigarette.

  It was true. Away from Douglas, nothing was real. That afternoon a man had tried to kill himself for love of her, and it had been no more than an incident at a party. Nothing was real, not even death. And this had been so, moreover, as she now suddenly and strangely realised, for far longer in time than their brief acquaintance. Before ever they met, the truth had been there. She had glimpsed it, now and then, in a wakeful dawn, a solitary midnight. But always in the morning the waiting had begun again: the waiting that was her purpose and occupation, her present and her future.

  ‘So that’s what I have been doing all these years,’ thought Lesley. ‘Waiting.…’

  There was now, however, nothing more to wait for. There was nothing to want, because nothing had substance.

  “Substance!” said Lesley aloud.

  And so with the spoken word an old phrase came to her—so old, indeed, that her wondering eyes had first deciphered it under the frontispiece of a child’s reader: Thus by grasping at a shadow, the foolish dog has lost the substance too. A foolish dog indeed! Fat and curly, Lesley remembered, and of the same curious breed that produced Good Dog Tray. A rather humiliating comparison.

  Suddenly, on a table at her side, the telephone was ringing. In an i
diotic flutter—‘Lesley, have you gone to bed yet? No, Douglas, why?—Then can I come and fetch you? I’ve just met some people who are going on to Claridges—’ She reached out and silenced it.

  “Lesley darling—”

  It was Bryan. He had evidently not thrown himself from the balcony.

  “Yes, what is it?”

  There was a slight pause, and Lesley hoped that he was not about to pull the trigger of a revolver in order to let her hear the shot.

  “Listen, Lesley—”

  “Well?”

  “Would it be an awful nuisance if I came round and used your gramophone for an hour or two?”

  “It would,” said Lesley. “It’s a quarter past one, and I’m just going to bed.”

  Again the pause, this time enlivened by a faint murmur of voices at the other end of the line. He seemed to be consulting somebody: when he spoke again it was in a tone of exquisite reason.

  “But listen, darling, it really is rather important. I’ve a man here who’s just come back from Bulgaria with some amazing records of folk-music, and I’ve broken my sound-box. They’ve never been heard in England before, and—”

  “Well, I don’t suppose anyone else will hear them before morning,” said Lesley tartly. She did not really wish him dead, but a slight resentment at his being still alive inevitably coloured her feelings.

  “Darling, don’t be so beastly! If you like we’ll come and get your sound-box—Lesley! I say, don’t ring off! Lesley—!”

  But the receiver was already clicked down on his yammering: clicked down too on the sound of Lesley’s voice. A rather odd sound, like an ejaculation.…

  “Love!” said Lesley, contemptuously.

  And in that instant, as though resentful Love had heard and come to wound her, there slipped into her mind, already bodied in words, a strange and dreadful notion. She thought,

  ‘Perhaps I am not a woman that men do love.’

  She thought,

  ‘There are women like that. Attractive women.… And if that is so, and if … that is what I have been waiting for, what am I to do now?’

  The intricate, daily patchwork was still there to work at, the innumerable dovetailing fragments still lay ready to hand: but it now seemed to her, and for the first time, that her work had no pattern.

  “I want something new,” said Lesley aloud.

  On the table at her side lay a tiny pocket-book, bound in black silk and stuffed a month ahead with every variety of familiar engagement. Automatically she picked it up and began fluttering the leaves. To-morrow—to-morrow promised the rather rare event of tea out at Cheam with her aunt Mrs. Bassington.

  CHAPTER THREE

  “It really is a problem,” said Lady Chrome, thoughtfully helping herself to a piece of chocolate cake.

  “My dear, I dream about it at nights!” wailed Mrs. Bassington; and all three—Mrs. Bassington, Lady Chrome, and Lesley by the fireplace—turned with one accord to take a look at the problem himself, who was seated very comfortably on a wolverine rug and playing with a box of bricks. The game was a simple one, consisting merely in building the eight blocks into a tower and then knocking them down again; but the problem played it for all he was worth. He fell upon the tower, destroyed it, razed it to the ground: the blocks rolled far and wide, farther than the cake-stand: one would never have guessed, to look at him, what a problem he was.

  “It will have to be an orphanage, of course,” murmured Mrs. Bassington, “but I suppose even that involves some financial consideration. I mean one can hardly leave him outside Dr. Barnardo’s.…”

  She looked genuinely worried, poor woman: and indeed had every right to. Exactly a month earlier, and after reading a very moving article on the plight of the unmarried mother, she had engaged as companion a young Scotswoman with a four-year-old boy. (That Nora Craigie afterwards turned out to be a genuine widow, with her marriage lines in her trunk, is neither here nor there: it was the intention which counted, and which, in Mrs. Bassington’s eyes, deserved a better reward.) The Scotswoman proved charming, capable, and as grateful as could be wished: unfortunately she also suffered from heart trouble. This disability she managed to conceal, however, until about fifteen minutes before dying of it; and it was the deception, the slyness of it, which Mrs. Bassington now professed herself unable to forgive. Or at any rate, it was something one could decently complain of, and what with all the trouble of the funeral and the worry of the future, she felt she must either complain or burst.

  “When I’d treated her really like—like my own daughter!” cried Mrs. Bassington.

  From the other side of the cake-stand Lesley heard her unmoved. She was feeling, for these two flabby and bleating old women, an almost homicidal dislike. The mood of the previous evening was still upon her; she wanted to hurt, to shock, to take her revenge.

  “But are there no relatives at all?” marvelled Lady Chrome. “Not even a grandmother?”

  “My dear!” Mrs. Bassington threw up her hands in despair. “We’ve advertised in things like ‘John Bull.’ I even made them put ‘something to their advantage,’ because after all there are the effects as well. And not a single debt—I will say that much for her. But both she and her husband I know were orphans, because she told me so herself, and in these cases it’s always the grandparents who come forward.” She broke off, breathless with so much emotion. It was all even worse than she had thought.

  “If only,” mused Lady Chrome hopelessly, “you could get someone to adopt him! After all, dear, he—he’s quite a nice child.”

  “Or why not advertise him too?” suggested Lesley. ‘Boy, four years: healthy, ginger hair, no incumbrances: nominal to good home.’ It sounds rather attractive.”

  And turning again in the direction of the rug, she suddenly saw that she had spoken no more than the truth. There really was something rather attractive about him, something to do, perhaps, with his complete imperviousness to all but the matter in hand. Far overhead, remote as the Fates, three irrelevant women babbled or were silent: they had no bearing on his game, so he took no notice of them. Bang! went his fist, crash! went the tower; and all was ready to start again. Once he sat down heavily on an unexpected brick: frequently on the bare parquet floor: but even as he rubbed, the other hand was always busy at rebuilding. With a growing fascination, Lesley watched.

  “A place in Essex,” murmured Lady Chrome vaguely, “run in connection with some church or other.…”

  Orphanages again! From all one heard, the food was now quite decent; but it would be rather wasteful if all that crowing, relishing energy, that bundle of clean and vigorous life, were simply to be forced, along with a hundred other inferior bundles, into the one most convenient mould! For comparing him with the other children (admittedly few) of her acquaintance, Lesley had little doubt that the Problem, as raw material, was of exceptional quality. His game, for example, was an equal mixture of joyful pugnacity and careful construction. At the constant bumps to his behind he displayed a natural concern, but no resentment. And it was probably an optical illusion, but he seemed to be growing as one looked at him.

  ‘Maternal pride—it really is understandable,’ thought Lesley curiously. And yet, and yet—a child of that age was a woman’s full-time job. He had to be washed, fed, exercised and instructed from about eight in the morning till about seven at night. After that, she supposed, one could go out to dinner in the usual way: but what about getting the hair waved? There was a place in Bond Street where they took charge of dogs, even Alsatians, but nothing was said about small boys.… And then there would be his hair to get cut, and a thousand other things as well. Yes, a full-time job if there ever was one, though probably not quite such a martyrdom as women were apt to make out: for was there really any reason why from seven o’clock onwards life should not go on precisely as before? Any full-time job, on such terms, would lose half its terrors: then why not this one in particular? Moreover, there was something—what was it?—something so extremely real about it.
It was worth doing; and suddenly, idly, chiefly from a desire to upset someone, Lesley heard herself say,

  “Don’t bother about that advertisement, Aunt. I think I’ll adopt him myself.”

  2

  Almost before the words were out of her mouth, in a split second of perfect lucidity, Lesley Frewen had realised two things. The first was that she had not the least desire to adopt a child; the second, that the child had heard her.

  Though without comprehending. Comprehension—of those two swift phrases—how could she even for an instant have imagined it possible? It was only that, like a dog at a familiar voice, he had suddenly raised his head and fixed her with a long expectant gaze.… And all at once there flickered through her brain something she had heard from Douglas Ford: that a dog takes his orders less from the actual words than from the compulsive thought behind them.

  “But, my dear!” It was Lady Chrome who first found her tongue, leaning purple with emotion above her own stately bust. “But my dear, you must be crazy!”

  “Rather foolish, dear child, and not really very amusing,” corroborated Aunt Alice.

  Both these opinions coinciding exactly with her own, the only rational course was obviously to submit and pass the cake: and in the company of any two persons less purple and authoritative, Lesley would no doubt have done so. But the pop-eyed stupidity of Lady Chrome, the complacent imperviousness of Mrs. Bassington, had already produced their usual unfortunate effect; and raising her beautiful eyebrows, Lesley said provocatively,

  “It would be such a new experience.…”

  Lady Chrome released a long breath.

  “But—but you don’t even like children!’

  “Not in the least,” agreed Lesley. “That’s why it would be new.”

  “In any case, the idea is impossible,” cut in Mrs. Bassington decisively.

  Her niece, however, was not so easily to be intimidated.