The Stratton Story Read online

  “Easily? You saw what happened last night, didn’t you? You saw Mrs. Stratton’s face? How far do things have to go before you forget you’re a godson and remember that you’re in charge of a woman who acts like—”

  “For God’s sake,” he ground out, “what harm do you imagine a poor old unhappy woman can do you?”

  “I’m not thinking of myself. I’m thinking of Mrs. Stratton.”

  “You weren’t thinking of Mrs. Stratton early this morning. Sir Hugo just raced you to the exit. When you saw what a stinking figure he made running out, you decided to stick it out. If you want to get your things and move over to the hotel now, then do. Nobody’ll stop you.”

  “I’ll stay at the cottage. I don’t think Mrs. Westerby is quite right in the head and you don’t think so either, but—” She stopped, struck by a sudden shaft of enlightenment. “That man!” she exclaimed.

  “What man?”

  “The man at the hotel. The man you know. He’s a doctor, isn’t he?”

  “He’s nothing of the kind.”

  “But you knew he was coming. You must have arranged . . . did you arrange for him to be at the hotel?”

  “No, I didn’t. It was his idea.”

  “Then I’m right. He’s a psychiatrist.”

  “He is not.”

  She scarcely heard him; she was following her own line of thought.

  “You expected to have trouble with Mrs. Westerby, and you undertook to keep an eye on her on the way out here, but you either arranged for reinforcements to be here, or you sent for them. Which?”

  He stared at her frowning, intent face and seemed to make up his mind.

  “If I tell you,” he asked slowly, “can you keep your mouth shut?”

  “I won’t make any trouble, if that’s what you mean? You don’t want his presence known, as they say in books?”

  “Not yet.”

  “All right. Who is he?”

  The answer was so totally unexpected that it took her breath away.

  “He’s my father,” Julian said.

  “Your . . . your father?” she said stupidly at last. “Yes.”

  “You sent for him?”

  “He wanted to come himself. I told him that I’d come out with her, and if on the way I came to the conclusion that I needed him, I’d get in touch with him.”

  “So you . . . got in touch?”

  “Yes.”

  “When?”

  “Yesterday, at that village. Just before dinner. I telephoned to his hotel in Paris.”

  “And . . . and asked him to come?”

  “Yes. He’d booked a room provisionally at the Chandon hotel; he only had to confirm it.”

  “And he’s here, and you don’t want her to know?”

  “It’s absolutely essential”—the gravity in his voice made her shiver—“it’s absolutely essential that you should keep what I’ve told you to yourself.”

  “Because the sight of her . . . her psychiatrist suddenly appearing would . . . would touch her off?”

  “Will you stop being melodramatic? I’ve told you already, my father is not a psychiatrist. He’s—”

  He stopped abruptly.

  “What is he?” Gail shouted in fury. “Go on—tell me. What is he?”

  “He is—he was—attached to the C.I.D.”

  When at last she found her voice, it sounded like someone else’s; someone who suffered from a terrified stammer.

  “S-S-Scotland Yard?” she managed at last.

  She saw the anger and exasperation drain out of his face. Something in her defenceless look touched him; perhaps he saw, for the first time, the extent of her involvement. His voice, when he spoke, was firm, but very gentle.

  “He is an old friend of Blanche’s,” he said slowly. “He loves her. He and my mother are her oldest, her greatest—sometimes I think her only friends. He has come out here to help her—that’s all. The message he left at the desk was to tell me that it would be better not to mention his arrival until he had had an opportunity of talking to me—alone. So I asked you to say nothing. Now do you feel better?”

  She tried to say that she felt much worse; instead, the strange voice asked a strange question.

  “If he’s from the C.I.D., if he came out here because you sent for him, then he must believe that there’s some kind of ... of serious trouble.”

  Julian took her hand and held it and spoke firmly.

  “He is here,” he said, “simply to ensure that no trouble occurs.”

  Chapter 9

  Gail had lunch at the cottage with Julian and Mrs. Westerby. The food was well cooked and well served—but she could not eat it. She wanted desperately to be quiet, to think; if Julian’s eyes had not been on her, anxious and—she thought—apprehensive, she would have left the table and gone up to her bedroom and locked herself in; her mind was in confusion and each moment in Mrs. Westerby’s presence made the confusion worse.

  The small, shrewd eyes came to rest on her at last, and Mrs. Westerby spoke with motherly solicitude.

  “Gail, you’re looking very white—and you’re not eating. Have you got a headache?”

  Gail grasped the lifeline.

  “Yes. Yes, I have. Would you mind if I went upstairs to lie down for a little while?”

  “Mind? My dear child, I’m a selfish monster for not having seen how exhausted you were. All those miles of driving, half of them over mountainous roads—and here I’ve been talking about the old days and failing in my duty as a hostess. Would you like me to go up with you?”

  “No. Oh no,” Gail said with more haste than tact. “I’ll just rest for a little while.”

  “Have you got aspirins?”

  “Yes, thank you.”

  “I’ve got a special headache mixture which I make up myself. Julian shall take it up to you,” Mrs. Westerby promised.

  When Julian knocked, she was lying on the bed as she had thrown herself down, hands crossed behind her head, her eyes closed. He came in with a glass half filled with a cloudy white liquid. She opened her eyes and looked at it with a face screwed up in distaste.

  “What’s that?’’ she asked.

  He sat down on the edge of the bed, looking at her with a half-smile.

  “Poison,” he said, putting the glass on the table. “Didn’t you hear? She makes it up herself. You drink it down and that’s the end of you.”

  “If you think talking like that is going to make me feel any better—”

  “If this doesn’t finish you off, she’s instructed me to carry you to the Moonlight Watch and cast you down on to the rocks below.” He opened his hands and snapped them shut in imitation of Mrs. Westerby’s crocodile-jaw action. “And now that you know the worst, how about pulling yourself together and getting up and coming for a long walk with me to cure this attack of liver, caused by driving too long without proper exercise?”

  “All I want is to be left alone.”

  “To brood?”

  “To clear my head. It’s going round.”

  “It shouldn’t be going round; you’ve over-wound it. The only way to cure your malady is to clear your mind of all the rubbish that’s accumulated there during the past few hours. You’ve cluttered up your brain with a lot of highly-seasoned and entirely erroneous ideas. If you’ll close your eyes and relax completely, I shall help you to throw out the debris.”

  She closed her eyes and wished it were as easy to close her mind. Julian’s voice seemed to come from far away.

  “My godmother,” he said, “is old, and lonely, and unhappy. She lived for years with a beloved brother; when he married, she had a store of affection which she longed to pour out on his wife and even perhaps—though this wasn’t likely—on his children.

  “You’ve seen Mrs. Stratton. She is good-looking, charming in a quiet, rather delicate way, and she has taste and experience and a love of beautiful things . . . and beautiful people. The first meeting with her sister-in-law must have been an unpleasant shock to them both
; there was no common ground after all—and Blanche’s dreams were at an end. From then on, there was no place for her in her brother’s life.

  “But she loved him, and she was afraid of losing him, and so she kept trying. And the harder she tried, of course, the more oddly she behaved and the more Mrs. Stratton withdrew—and then Blanche went too far, and defeated her own ends. And then Mrs. Stratton became rich, and remembered a cottage in France in which she owned some furniture which was probably very valuable and which would look well in the nice new house she was proposing to buy. And she arranged to come out and meet Blanche here.

  “Blanche had been in a bad state of nerves ever since Edward’s death. My mother thought that this visit would turn her mind from the past to the future. I didn’t agree - but I came along as driver to one part of the expedition. To you, my godmother is an ugly, awkward old woman with a loud voice; to my parents, she’s an old and valued friend; to me, she’s a warm-hearted, open-handed, affectionate, amusing and entirely lovable godmother. I love her —it’s as simple as that. I wouldn’t have come out here with her if I hadn’t loved her, and if I hadn’t . . . trusted her.”

  Fie stopped. Gail spoke without opening her eyes.

  “You mean that even though you’re here to be a sort of watch-dog, and your father’s here to be a second watchdog, you trust her not to make trouble?”

  “Quite so. But it didn’t occur to me—until we talked in the car before lunch—that the affair would look so very different from your angle. If it had occurred to me, I would have talked to you frankly at the very beginning.”

  She opened her eyes.

  “When was the very beginning?”

  “The evening I drove you back to town from your brother-in-law’s farm. I think I would have said something then — but you said that you liked Blanche and so I decided to leave it. I thought you’d got beyond her odd exterior, got to understand her somehow-but I was wrong. You liked her simply because she had behaved normally; when she gave signs of being not so normal, you were quite ready to believe she was crazy. And so she was, to misread maps on our way down to Bordeaux, to delay me so that we’d be round about there when you and Mrs. Stratton arrived. She was crazy when she gave way to an impulse and tampered with those signs and got us all caught in the inn. So I can’t really blame you for imagining things. If I hadn’t known Blanche so well and so long, I might have imagined things too. I had an advantage. You didn’t know her at all, and so you had a bad night and decided to give up. And my father’s arrival was the last straw. I hoped it would make you feel safe—but I can see it didn’t. You now imagine the very worst. And I don’t suppose anything I’ve been saying now has had any effect whatsoever.”

  “If you mean do I feel more in the picture—”

  “Well?”

  “Then no. I don’t. But I never wanted to be. You told me to mind my own business, and that’s just what I was trying to do when I decided to get out and let Sir Hugo have Mrs. Stratton to himself. He got out first—and the reasons for his going weren’t the ones he stated in his farewell note. He thought there was something fishy and he didn’t bother to stop and find out what it was. It sounds silly to say he was scared, but he was. And so would I be now, in spite of all your speeches, if . . .”

  He waited.

  “If what?”

  “If you weren’t here.”

  “I’m glad to hear you say so. Would any other man give you the same feeling of confidence, or do I have some special merit as a bodyguard?”

  “You’re bigger than most.”

  “Anything else?”

  “You don’t fuss much. You’re quiet and sort of steady.”

  “Big, unfussy, quiet, steady. What other qualities do you look out for in a man?”

  “Rather more response to feminine attraction than you’ve shown to date.”

  “You can’t get response from a big, unfussy, quiet, steady man until he’s had a chance to size up the attraction.”

  She was genuinely surprised.

  “You mean it didn’t hit you straight off?”

  “Not too hard.” He smiled. “There are so many pretty girls. You meet them everywhere. There has to be a good deal more.”

  “There is. Can’t you see?”

  “I was talking about inner qualities.”

  “Such as?”

  “Gentleness and kindness and tenderness and faithfulness.”

  “You ought to meet our Miss Teller, who’s bringing out a dictionary of out-of-date words. Did that date you missed have all those—what was the word?—qualities?”

  “She was only for an evening.”

  “I see. You’re on the look-out for ever-and-ever?”

  “Aren’t you?”

  “Not exactly on the look-out. Once I marry a man, I’ll see to it that it’s for ever-and-ever.”

  “It won’t be unless you employ the method you were using just now—making certain that the basic structure is solid. What’s the use of charm and looks if they’re not based on bigness and quietness and unfussiness and steadiness? That’s stage one. Once you’ve got the solid qualities, you can—”

  ‘‘Can what?”

  “You can go ahead with confidence. Like this.” He moved closer and gathered her to him and held her. “This is stage two.”

  He kissed her. She was so unresponsive that he released her and held her away from him to read her expression.

  “Well?” he asked.

  “Don’t go away,” she begged. “Hold me —please.”

  He held her once more, but when he sought her lips, she drew away.

  “No, don’t kiss me again —not yet. Not till my head’s cleared.”

  “What’s your head got to do with it?”

  “It’s going round. How did this start?”

  “It’s been going on since we met. We’ve just identified it, that’s all. Now can I kiss you?”

  She gave a happy sigh.

  “Yes. And then tell me about stage three.”

  They had left Mrs. Westerby’s headache remedy untouched on the table, and gone out for what Julian called real exercise.

  But even real exercise, scrambling up precipitous slopes and sliding down again, did not restore them to calm. They came back to the cottage hand in hand, and Gail went up to her room to change, but sat instead at the window, gazing out at the view but seeing only a rapturous future which began with a month’s notice to the Beetham Brothers.

  When she went downstairs for dinner, she found nobody in the drawing-room. Julian’s car was no longer parked beside her own on the drive, but after ten minutes spent in gazing out of the window wondering miserably where he had gone, she heard him returning. A short while later, he walked into the room holding an armful of bottles. Before putting them down, he bent and laid a long kiss on her lips.

  “Went over to the hotel for drinks,” he explained. “Must lay in a stock for celebration.” He glanced round. “Blanche not down?”

  “Not yet.”

  “What’ll you drink?”

  He was pouring it out when the caretaker’s wife came in to say that Madame begged to be excused; she was tired and wished to stay in her room.

  A slight crease of worry appeared on Julian’s forehead. He put down the glasses.

  “I’ll go up and see her,” he said.

  After a short interval, he returned, and Gail saw that he was looking satisfied.

  “She just wants to be quiet,” he announced. “She doesn’t want to go to bed; she’s going to have a light meal in her room and then she thinks she might take a short stroll along the ghost walk.”

  “Let’s go with her. Did you say anything—”

  “—about us? No. It didn’t seem a good moment. I tried to see my father while I was at the hotel, but he’d gone out - to do a bit of climbing, they said. At his age! I’ll go over when we’ve eaten, and have a chat with him and bring him back here-then he can meet you, and we’ll spring the news. What time do you want to start i
n the morning?”

  “Dawn.”

  “Dawn?”

  “Dawn. And dawn, in my family, means dawn and not yawning and saying it’s absurd to start so early.”

  “Don’t imagine I’m thinking of myself. Not for a minute. I’m merely wondering if the staff will be—”

  “We don’t stop for coffee. We have it on the way. I think breakfast on the way is much more fun. You’ll see.”

  “All right. Dawn it is,” he said without enthusiasm. “Shall I order a picnic lunch?”

  “No. I will. You’ll ask for pate and all the rest of it. All we want is bread and cheese and a bottle of wine.”

  “A dawn start without coffee, and bread and cheese. The March of the Spartans. I’m going to enjoy being married to you.” He paused and spoke in a more serious tone. “I’m glad you’re going. I’m glad you’re getting back to base. We shouldn’t have let you come. If I haven’t said thank you, take it as read.”

  The caretaker’s wife opened the door and announced that dinner was ready. They followed her into the dining-room.

  “Fish soufflée, veal hammered out for frying, and green salad,” Julian said as they went.

  “How do you know?”

  “I came in through the kitchen. I wanted to choose the wine.”

  There was not much conversation during the meal. Julian was content to combine the twin pleasures of eating and gazing at her, and Gail was in a silent mood. Now that the time for leaving had come, she could look back with surprise and shame at the fears she had entertained-and exhibited. It was humiliating to discover that she had less poise than she had claimed. She had always assumed that she would keep her head in any emergency; there had been no emergency, but she had come near to losing her head.

  “Are you brooding again?” Julian asked.

  “Yes. I’ve discovered I’m not the intrepid type I prided myself on being. When I look back on all this, the only hope I’ll have of boosting my pride is to remember that you went through some pretty uneasy moments too.”

  “But then, I never set myself up as a hero,” he pointed out. “I could give you a list of my phobias, beginning with fast drivers, steep ski slopes, rearing horses, oversexed women and flying cockroaches.”